u/Ok_Contact7721

I've heard a lot of speculation on the motives of the guilty party.
I don't know that Parker's Razor applies here just yet. I don't want to default to South Park Logic.

I'm half ass convinced by that first ransom note it's a bureaucrat from either Tucson, or Prima County, or a neighboring city, like Phoenix? Did he take her to California or Nevada?
12 hours seems like a hell of a drive.

The note reads like something an administrator would write, and sets the times in an administrative way.
I didn't think Bitcoin operated like normal banks, I didn't know the crypto currency people kept the tradition of a system wide pause on Saturdays and Sundays.

My interpretation of that first ransom note points toward an occupation.

Why wouldn't he accept the money on Saturday or Sunday?
If he was an administrator, or involved in banking or county clerk shit, he's going to model his worldview on that system.

He wanted to be paid in Bitcoin.

Active Bitcoin and emerging technology communities across Arizona host regular local meetups, social hours, and educational workshops in the Phoenix and Tucson metro areas.

Major Bitcoin & Crypto Groups in Arizona, there seem to be groups that might have a good chunk of suspects.

With these networks alone, barring how many people involved remain anonymous, you have a Chinese Buffet of suspects.

Bitcoin runs 365/24/7, there's no reason for him to not accept money on Sunday.

"We will be holding her for a maximum of 7 days. You will need to send bitcoin in the amount of $4 million USD before 5PM on Thursday the 5th. If payment is not received, the ransom will be increased to 6 million USD which will need to be paid by 5PM on Monday the 9th. Once payment is received to the bitcoin address below she will be released within 12 hours of deposit to a safe drop off location back in Tucson. If payment is not received by the last deadline on Monday the 9th at 5PM, she will be killed."

5pm (when most city services and banks shut down.)
Here are the hours for the Tucson Municipal Court.

Friday 8 AM–4:30 PM
Saturday Closed
Sunday Closed
Monday 8 AM–4:30 PM
Tuesday 8 AM–4:30 PM
Wednesday 8 AM–4:30 PM
Thursday 8 AM–4:30 PM

The Second Ransom Note has a very haunting passage,
"She's buried in nature", it haunts me that phrase, it's almost religious sounding, or at the very least Pagan sounding.

“Guthrie Family,
We did not fully grasp the seriousness of her physical condition. We never intended to hurt
her, that was not our intention. She perished shortly after she was taken. We believe it was
heart related. She is buried in nature now. Nothing you could have done could have changed
the outcome. We want your family to know this and hope you all can find peace. We are truly
sorry.”

If this is a legit note, the perpetrator obviously isn't in the 99th percentile of IQ.
But he can write things that sound vaguely like official statements.

There's another Bureaucrat type quality to this note, and honestly, it would have to be a dumb official to assume an 84 year old woman, was the picture of health.
It's almost like a cop putting a knee on a man's neck and expecting him to breathe anyway.

This looks like someone in a nearby County, City or State department, did this.
They probably have an average, or below average intelligence.
They could either be Christian or Pagan.
They follow traditional banking rules, and are likely novices to the Crypto Currency Community.
They might be computer literate enough to run Microsoft office, and do emails.
They don't strike me as someone who has been doing crypto for very long.

His department or personal schedule means he gets Friday-Sunday as his off days.
What departments in that region be they any government or banks have off days from Friday-Sunday?
Does he or did he work 4, 10 hour shifts?

While it never stopped Chris, I don't want to draw these abominations, but I've got 3 new Sonichu type characters. A friend of mine has dubbed these Chan Alternates.

1. GamBoomhauer (A combination of Gambit from X-men and Boomhaur from King of the Hill.) (A potential husband for MC, although initially he hates Brokeback Mountaint, but Gamboomhaur romances him by starting in Lonesome Dove.) Gamboomhauer is his fictional father's best friend, but he seduces the MC by sharing a beer with him in the alley. GamBoomhauer is a brony, who has a gameboy, and loves his gameboy.
2. AguMario (A combination of Agumon from Digimon, and Mario, he appears like Agumon, but wears the red shirt, and white cap, and white coveralls, while throwing fireballs from his palms.) AguMario calls him father.
3. RoKirby (A combination of Rogue from X-men and Kirby, and Gamboomhauer's love interest, with the power of absorption, mirroring and a vacuum cleaner.), I needed a Rosechu.
4. X-Device, the destined trainer of Agumario carries an X-Device, that's a combination of a Digivice, and an X-men communicator badge. (This also rests in the back of MC's AguMario Disco Medallion.)
5. The main character's goal is to Make America Great Again, by opposing his father, and has his own fictional city in City Skylines II (which he never plays.), in fact, it's literally a giant blank plot of land with a road through it, and only a conceptual design in his notebook, which the citizens get very frustrated about as they have to endure 3rd world living conditions in the harsh terrain he's chosen to build this city in. All because as the Mayor of this area, he won't fucking build the city, he wants a data center first, but Cities Skylines doesn't offer data centers. If any character in this space questions him, he (The main character) can banish them to across the road, where I'd draw inspiration from the Twilight Zone episode "It's a good life." Initially, there is a small suburb style trailer park, hence they can still drink beer in an alley.
6. The main character's dad is a combintation of Red Foreman, Cotton Hill, Hank Hill, Donald Trump, and J.D. Vance, and Palpatine. He's only watched Star Wars episode 7, and his dad may also be Bannondorf.
7. BannonDorf is a villain, and is a combination of Steve Bannon, and Gannondorf from Nintendo. (Also has Bowser's shell.) His main delivery of enforcement is a traditional Chris Chan Jerkop.
8. He's obsessed with a female celebrity that haunts the city, and imo, she should be a fictional female celebrity, that has a doppleganger in the Mary Lee Walsh analogue who wishes to stop her from getting laid. Let's take it to a level of Lynchian absurdity by making them soul buds from the same source kinda like a jellyfish, but the trolls birthed them as dopplegangers, IRL they're two separate people. (Who is the dreamer? We know who the dreamer is.) Think a little sprinkle of Mulholland Dr. and Eraserhead.
9. He's ignorant to the attrocities his right wing background ignores, and thus his love quest is blind patriotism.
10. He get shit on by trolls often on X, and calls it X-tremeJunkyard.com
11. Gamboomhauer, RoKirby, and MC become a throuple, with Augmario gong on his own Zelda/Mario inspired love quest. With the endgame to form a quintuple flesh horror of all 5 of them merged into one super being. A dash of Akira and Tetsuo.
12. We don't see the author IRL, often but at the age of 27, when he makes eggs, he pretty much uses all 37 spices in his mother's spice rack to produce eggs, which end up being 10 percent egg, and 90 percent seasonings. He basically wants to eat the spice rack.
13. Our other villain in the city is Barack Obama, who literally just wants walkable cities, and universal healthcare for his people, but to MC is an evil muslim Antichrist who has been frozen in a time crystal.
14. Our main character's favorite season of Digimon, is Digimon season 3, where he uses the power to merge with his Digimon, and operate it from the inside while "in the buff."
15. I'm aiming for a hillbilly Phillip Seymour Hoffman in a vintage European Barroque mansion of ideas, that have had pop culture trash and graffiti splattered all over the marble. This mansion sits at the end of a trailer park, and essentially the good townsfolk are almost like his serfs. This is a neofeudalism for idiots. Cwcville in this depiction sort of is a Synecdoche, New York, that will not start up and go through the motions it needs to go through to deliver the character to confront their eventual mortality, and madness.
16. Dylan Mulvaney in reality has fallen into obscurity in 2026, but is a mayoral candidate that our main character hates, Dylan Mulvaney should follow in the tradition of Billy Mays.

May god have mercy on my soul.

At this point, I believe, if Trump came out and announced he was evil.
Every Republican would dedicate themselves to the art of openly being a mustache twirling villain.

I'm curious, Disney offers the Simpsons in 4:3 in Disney+.
Since the X files remaster has a 4:3 version that's never seen the light of day, I wonder sometimes if Disney would give people the option to watch the 4:3 HD version for seasons 1-4 in a similar fashion to the way they offer "The Simpsons".

So I was trolling truth social, and got banned from there for asking a MAGA why Musk’s DOGE never audited the 40 trillion dollar national debt.
Lmao.🤣

You had a pristine oak floor, and decided to cover it in Vynil.

Looking at the contents on this disk, it's very reminiscent of that awful Predator BD that was plagued by DNR.
Or an infamous Maclunky.

This is an AI upscale of the old 2k bluray transfer, with George Lucas style revisions, like Anamorphic Abrams style lens flares, and a beauty filter on Helena Bonham Carter's face.
IMO, the 4k bluray cult loves Star Wars: Special Edition, let's do that with all movies.

You can dismiss people for being Pixel Peepers.
But, AI upscaling, and revisionism is what ruined this release.
This isn't a pixel peeping issue, it's bigger.
This is "Fight Club: Special Edition", but at least Harmy has a new job to do.

They'll literally take any slop the studio serves to them and praise it.
Shaming Pixel Peepers is a nice way to deflect that Fincher made a lot of alterations to the image here that are far more damaging to the film's integrity, than a simple DNR or color grading issue.

While we're add it, why stop here though?
We could use "Tubthumping" by Chumbuwumba instead of "Where is my mind?"
I'd much prefer this version of Fight Club use "Tubthumping".
If you're going to ruin a remaster of a film, then shame people for noticing, go all out.
Have Jar Jar Binks join the fight club.
Maybe we can have Tyler Durden's force ghost at the end looking lovingly at the new couple, as the buildings go boom.
You could do so much here.
Why not just put a white box over the entire image, and call it a lens flare, and then people can enjoy the blinding audio experience.

Otherwise, I'll just stick to the 10th anniversary bluray, and consider this a bad AI upscale, because ultimately, that's all this release is.
A bad AI upscale with an HDR grade, and a bunch of really jarring alterations.
We must remove a ladder next to a palm tree, and do a bunch of other dumb shit to this image, to trick the audience into thinking this is a legitimate remaster.
He fixed decaying tiles, changed cars and colors of cars, scrubbed Helena Bonham Carter's skin of it's natural texture, added lens flares, upscaled an aging 2k master with Topaz, added JJ Abrams style lens flares.
He had to correct the aging wood paneling on the old house.
Why?
This is the most ridiculous thing I've ever seen.

I can see fixing camera equipment visible in a window's reflection.
I can see fixing the Blockbuster sign, and correcting the neon from red to blue.
I can see a few minor tweaks like that.
I can't see making it look like a modern sleek production on par with Fincher's more recent productions.
The use of faux film grain here is also jarring, he wanted it to look like an episode of mind hunter.
While the faux film grain hides careful DNR, Fincher found a new way to scrub texture from the film.
instead of scrubbing the grain completely, he just scrubbed flaws that added to the film, details and fidelity of the actors, sets, and scrubbed the image of elements that were captured. Why does the office of "The Narrator" need to be perfect, part of what made it work was the decay that was starting to set in.
Why scrub Marla Sanger's face? She's a chainsmoking alcoholic sex addict, her face is supposed to have a few zits.
She doesn't need to look like a CW sex doll's sillicone face.
All this is, is revisionism, that scrubs texture from the world, from the realism that Fincher was trying to capture in 1999.
This is morally wrong.
For no reason.
This is a revisionist version of the film.

Like, you could at least render a depth map, and render the image with faux Bokeh Just let the camera capture the ovals, that started out as spheres, to match the lens flares, and I'd have at least praised them trying to hide that they did that.
Which they didn't do.

All they had to do was scan and stabilize the negative, do a color grade, and release.
They didn't need to alter the natural image to this degree.

It wasn't shot anamorphically, anamorphic lens flares on spherical bokeh is boomer trash behavior.
That's what this release is.

As much as it sucks that these old 90s-2000s blockbusters weren't shot anamorphically.
From LOTR, to Pirates of the Carribean, these were shot spherically on Super 35mm film.
Why **** with the integrity of the image?
They need to be respected.
The Dollars Trilogy was shot in a similar fashion on techniscope, and no one decided to add lens flares to "The Dollars Trilogy".
It was shot spherically.
I don't know why this is considered shameful.

Screenshots to prove this
https://slow.pics/c/nblr63TV

He's got Hydrocephalus.
He can't walk in a straight line.
He's more erratic than usual.
He's sleeping a lot.
Sure these are common in any elderly person, but medically, he's got hydrocephally, and spinal fluid is leaking into his brain, which is causing increasingly erratic behavior, and his inability to walk in a straight line.
Eventually he won't be able to walk, give it a year to a year and a half.