Lurker > ParanoidObsessive

Pretty sure if you watched you'd just be annoyed afterward that you'd wasted your time.

The_Wave_Master posted...

I'm sorry but why?

To be fair, the trailers for that movie made it look better than most of DC's actual mainline movies.

Granted, that's a low bar these days...

Lokarin posted...

I wish we got something similar with Amano... nothing looks like the watercolours and promo art in the actual Final Fantasy games, although ff6 comes close some times

I think the closest I know off the top of my head was Kartia. But that wasn't all that much more, because that was a PS1 game compared to the early NES/SNES Final Fantasy games.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kartia:_The_Word_of_Fate

I've never been able to appreciate Akira Toriyama's art.

It's actually discouraged me from playing games that I might otherwise have played, like the later Dragon Quest games (his art style was less obvious in the earlier games, when they were using NES graphics, but the newer games make it very on-model and very visibly his work).

marthalies posted...

How big are your pills if 2 is a handful?

That was movie Laurence Fishburne.

When real life Laurence Fishburne shows up at your house, it looks more like this:

https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-xAw0Rs7XIJQ/U_JK0eHYy0I/AAAAAAAAbAE/oPC5nSnA3mc/s1600/handful%2Bof%2Bmedications.jpg

Laurence Fishburne knows how to party.

That's why they added this scene to the second movie:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nie4HCJEpwI

It was clearly a glitch in the Matrix.

Laurence Fishburne is going to show up tomorrow with a handful of pills.

shadowsword87 posted...

Spend money on places that actually care about their customers.

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Count_Drachma posted...

That's a natural part of the mainstreaming process, though. Gotta "broaden the appeal" until it appeals to nobody, and then things tank.

I'll concede this. Though I think it also goes beyond just that.

I like the one theory I've heard, which basically boils down to the idea that most of the younger writers today (and by that I mostly mean people under 40-50 or so) are the kids who grew up as complete and total narcissists who have never really had any interesting life experiences, and who have only ever really consumed pop culture (as opposed to anything more meaningful or artistic). So you're basically left with people who have no interesting stories to tell, who can only fake creativity by regurgitating pop culture they grew up with, and who can't write characters who are anything other than thinly-veiled versions of themselves. They're post-postmodernists who can't write stories that resonate with anyone other than themselves, not helped by their habit of inserting their personal politics into everything (in an annoyingly preachy way rather than an interesting or engaging way).

Then you plug those people into a system that has grown "too big to fail" and which can't afford to reward creativity, but which has to exploit existing properties and nostalgia to survive. Where the people making the money decisions are completely disconnected from the actual work, and more or less incapable of understanding it.

The end result is a lot of soulless "content" that is neither art nor entertainment. The inevitable end result of pop culture eating itself, fueled by a Hollywood machine that has grown out of control and can no longer properly function.

It's why the rare jewels you still see now and then all seem to come from smaller studios or artists outside of the massive corporate machine. Or even from alternate distribution models like YouTube. Creativity still exists, but it's rarer, and it has a harder time getting to the audience.

The current system rewards and encourages mediocrity, while discouraging innovation. It's not entirely surprising that we're getting what we're getting. And that most older franchises and IPs are basically becoming zombified versions of themselves without soul, meaning, or purpose.

Which raises the scary question of what the creators of a few decades from now are going to look like, having grown up in this time and absorbed most of their creative expectations from the dreck that's out now.

MeatiestMeatus posted...

fwiw when I go back and watch Ren & Stimpy now, which I loved as a kid, a lot of it doesn't appeal to me any more

Even at the time I found Ren & Stimpy to be mostly shit.

It's like, in your memory you remember it being good, but you're mostly only remembering the first few episodes. Most of the best jokes I still remember today are literally from the first six episodes or so. After you get past the first season, the show becomes incredibly uneven, and a lot of the humor falls flat. I remember having my "Man, this is really starting to suck now" moment in the middle of the second season, and things just kept getting worse from there.

Kricfalusi's surrealist humor worked best when he was still limited in what he could do - as the show succeeded and he had more room to push the envelope, most of the jokes stopped being funny. And then after he got booted off the show (after season 2), things kind of went too far in the opposite direction, and it mostly just became bland and pointless. The show had like 90 episodes across 5 seasons - and maybe a dozen or so of those episodes at best were actually worth watching.

It's sort of like The Simpsons in that respect. Almost everything I remember enjoying from the Simpsons comes from episodes from the first 8 seasons or so. And even at the time I started feeling like the show was getting worse somewhere in the 7th season (and looking back with hindsight, I'd say the slow rot kind of started even earlier). Who Shot Mr. Burns? might actually have been the shark-jumping moment, though there were still good episodes after that (even if they started to become more and more rare).

The_Wave_Master posted...

Don't hit women. I shouldn't even have to say that to anyone, ever, but people need to be told the obvious from time to time.

https://youtu.be/imZWJTWIlDM?t=15



The_Wave_Master posted...

I admit that I'm an old man, but I do not care for SpongeBob Square Pants.

I do not care for his antics.

Who else is brave enough to admit this truth?

I was 22 when the show started, so I've never found it anything other than vaguely annoying.

My niece and nephew used to watch it all the time as kids, so that didn't help.

I don't hate the fact that it exists or anything, but like with most stuff made for kids post-2000 or so, I generally just ignore it completely.

Count_Drachma posted...

and the fact geekery is on the decline as people made the mistake of mainstreaming it.

I'd argue that the problem isn't that it was mainstreamed. The problem is what they did with it afterwards.

I think I'm at the point now where nearly every single geeky interest I had for the first 30+ years of my life is now something I utterly loathe and have completely cut out of my life entirely. Shitty people ruined it all because most entertainment industries have been taken over by post-postmodern narcissists who are no longer capable of saying anything worth hearing, let alone anything profound or interesting.

A friend of mine who barely games asked me if I'd gotten BG3 yet, and I was kind of surprised that a) he even knew it existed, and b) that he knew it was the sort of thing I'd probably get eventually.

I thought maybe he was asking because he wanted to ask me to co-op through it, but no. In his own words, he's still in the middle of trying to beat every Halo on Legendary, and by the time he's done GTAVI will probably be out so he has no time. Fucking casual.

The_Wave_Master posted...

I also got into a Book Face debate over whether or not Superman can break vibranium.

My thought is that he's Suoerman and can do anything that the writer wants him to do. (Basically plot armor) Plus, Vibranium has been shattered before, namely by someone on Clark's level, The Cosmic Complainer.

Weigh in with your thoughts.

Vibranium isn't that strong, lots of people can break it.

Now adamantium, on the other hand...

Yellow posted...

Wasn't there some guy named ""questionmarkitus"" a long time ago?

Or was he just a PO alt?

Not me.

I'm generally pretty open about my alts. The CynicalZealot account is obvious, and the PotD_Senate, Supreme Court, Executioner, and Professor accounts were all just made for context-specific jokes. That's pretty much it.

Of course, there is my one secret female alt that I've never revealed and occasionally taunt people about, but I'm never going to admit which one that is. And to be fair I don't really use it at this point, so it's probably not a mystery that can ever be solved.



ReturnOfFa posted...

For some reason I'm remembering The_Wave_Master as Orion's 2nd account? I think I've just been high for too long.

Wave is Oreon's brother (or Oreon is Wave's brother, depending on your point of view).

There was a conspiracy theory for a bit that Wave and Oreon were secretly the same person. Just like there've been conspiracy theories about how Zang and Moonjay were secretly the same person. Any time you get two people who claim to know each other in real life and be connected in some way, you're always going to get people assuming it's just one asshole with multiple gimmick accounts being weird (and to be fair, on PotD, it usually is).

adjl posted...

And that obsession is idiotically blind to the reality of the numbers involved in this matter.

Oh, I don't disagree with you.

But the problem is, in life, what's actually true rarely matters when compared to what people perceive as true. Which is part of why emotional arguments are almost always more effective than rational ones.

Humans are feeling creatures who actually figured out how to think, but we don't do all that well with the thinking a lot of the time.

Blightzkrieg posted...

Can we as a society stop it with the whole underwear thing

You're either wearing clothes or you're not, anything further is just hotdogging

I don't know about you, but my wedding tackle needs extra layers just to hold the monster down. No one wants him rampaging across the countryside.

Zareth posted...

I thought the executive producer (singular) was always the owner of the production company. I've never heard of multiple executive producers.

It happens all the time:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_producer#Motion_pictures

Zareth posted...

I mean producers can also just be some guys the director was friends with who had nothing to do with the movie except maybe buying him a nice dinner once

That's also mainly executive producers.

The executive producer title is usually a way of acknowledging people who provided money and who are likely getting some form of compensation on the back end. Though EP credits can get handed out like candy because they don't actually mean much or do much.

The actual producer role requires a ton of work.

Lokarin posted...

Why does the Producer matter? They're just the wallet

That's not really true. You're thinking more of executive producers.

The actual producer gets to make a lot of production decisions (hence the name). They can easily shape the entire tone and of a film. They can approve scripts, decide who gets cast (or what sort of person they're looking to cast), decide who directs, decide who edits, decide where and when to shoot, decide how much money can be spent, and generally stamp their personal vision all over things.

Yes, they mainly handle the business aspects on a movie once filming starts, but they can still push for creative input as well. Hence Kevin Smith's famous story about Jon Peters wanting people to put giant spiders in his films (for some reason):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jon_Peters#Superman

Peters is actually a pretty good example of how a bad producer can utterly ruin even IPs that seem completely slam-dunk or otherwise perfect.

Zareth posted...

You're not fooling anyone, it's a fucking dollar. Just say it's $5, way quicker to write than $4.99.

Science has repeatedly shown that you are literally fooling everyone.

Even if only subconsciously, your brain absolutely processes $4.99 as a significantly better value than $5. The first number you read helps prime your perception.

There've been a lot of studies done on this. Which why it's so prevalent.



BoomerKuwanger posted...

There just shouldn't be pennies at all, some other countries have figured this out but America as usual is like eh whatever

The problem is you need to round off, and no one on either side of the deal wants to be the person who "loses" from the rounding I don't want to pay a few cents more on every single transaction, businesses don't want to lose a few cents on every transaction, and it's the government that's forced to eat the cost on making pennies so no one cares (even if, ultimately, our taxes are paying for it). Americans are probably one of the most economically/consumer-obsessed cultures on Earth, it's not a shock that we'd be the most resistant to that sort of change.

In theory digital commerce completely obviates the problem, but as long as people still want physical currency you'll always have the problem.

FrozenBananas posted...

you clearly didnt see the part where Squall and Rinoa go to Outer Space!

During the Eyes on Me scene, I rolled my eyes so hard I sprained my optic nerve.

I mean, I have a PC, and I loathe PC gaming.

It could be a lot worse though, honestly. At least Avi Arad has some good movies to his credit as producer. Even some quite recently. That's more than can be said for a lot of people in Hollywood today.

FrozenBananas posted...

Final Fantasy VII was my first thought lol. I think I cried harder in Final Fantasy VIII though

The only crying I did for FFVIII was when I realized how utterly terrible it was.

Lokarin posted...

Realistically, the reason sat.am cartoons SEEM worse is because they don't sell toys for them as prominently as they did in the 80s

They seem worse because they don't actually exist.

Sure, there are still cartoons that air on Saturday mornings. But that was never what "Saturday Morning Cartoons" as a concept meant. It was the fact that you'd have multi-hour blocks on every major network. Kids would actively look forward to getting up early every Saturday just to watch. You'd get excited every season when new shows would get introduced, and agonize over the occasional decision of which show to watch if two shows you wanted to see were on different channels at the same time. It was a pop cultural touchstone for about 30-40 years.

If you check out CBS, NBC, or ABC on a Saturday morning now it's bleak as fuck, and mostly faux-educational crap they throw into their most useless timeslots to bypass government regulations. And I don't think any child in the US has gotten up early on a Saturday to watch TV for like 20+ years now.

As a conceptual experience, "Saturday Morning Cartoons" are dead. Government regulation and 24-hour cable channels killed them.



Lokarin posted...

Ironically, this might be Disney's fault for making GOOD cartoons without having a slew of toys for them

Are we talking about the same Disney? The one that merchandises the ever living shit out of pretty much everything they've ever made?

And even besides that, toy sales still play a role in cartoons today (for the worse). Shows like Young Justice got cancelled because they didn't sell toys. Teen Titans got replaced by Teen Titans Go! because of the perception that aiming for a younger demographic would up the likelihood of them buying merch (same with the 2011 Thundercats reboot).

It's possible to sell shows based on art/writing over merch, but quality shows cost money, and merch is one of the major ways to offset that cost. So without merch sales you're likely to get a lot more corner-cutting from the cartoons you do get.

MeatiestMeatus posted...

Yes

http://images5.fanpop.com/image/photos/24500000/Dark-Claw-amalgam-comics-24570126-1024-768.jpg

AwesomeTurtwig posted...

NJ and visit me.

eating4fun posted...

Why NJ, I live there.

MrMelodramatic posted...

Legit down for this.

NJ sex orgy meet-up when?

Metalsonic66 posted...

Millennials were still watching when Saturday morning cartoons died.

See, that just proves it was your fault!

They didn't die while -I- was watching them!



JudgeMentok posted...

PO has been actively being wrong, especially whining about generational issues for a significant period of time now.

Well, of course you'd say that. Most people on this site are Millennials. And nobody likes to admit when they're wrong and terrible. It's human nature to always look for someone else to blame.



Mensis posted...

And you guys take the bait every time

Shhh.

I'm not sure cats even rank in the Top 5 of my Best Pets list.

Dogs are obviously #1.

Humans are #2.



FrozenBananas posted...

no youre not

No, he is. Just in the alternate sense of the word, as opposed to being apologetic.

Probably poor.

I always had trouble with abstract math in general (anything pre-algebra and up), mainly because in K-12 I had like maybe four worthwhile math teachers, while the rest were utter garbage who only still had jobs because tenure exists (one of the reasons why I'm hugely against the entire idea of tenure for teachers, or at least tenure without some form of periodic review).

Because math is THE subject where "building on what you've learned previously" is so damned important, it meant that every year I fell behind because of a shit teacher made every successive year harder.

I managed to make it to pre-calc levels in college (mainly because of multiple statistics classes for Psych), but I've always struggled a bit with the abstract side of math whenever I deal with it. Whereas I've always been pretty good at being able to handle more concrete math (addition/subtraction, multiplication/division, fractions/percents, etc) in my head on a moment's notice.

It even reflected in my SAT scores - I scored a 780/800 on my Verbal, but only 530/800 on Math.

What hurts though is that it's been decades since school for me. And while I still use concrete math fairly regularly (calculating discounts, tips, measurements, etc), abstract math doesn't come up as often in everyday life. So most of what I did manage to pick up has kind of atrophied (in the same way that I took 7 years of French in school, but if you dropped me in Paris today I couldn't even ask my way to the nearest bathroom).

kind9 posted...

A lot of people hate the hit & miss dice roll style combat. I always felt it added to the amazing sense of progression you get in Morrowind which is totally absent in Oblivion and Skyrim. You start off barely able to hit anything, run at a snail's pace, and can jump like only 4 inches off the ground, but by the endgame you're basically an unstoppable god who can jump around or fly around and one-hit kill anything.

Ehh, I think there's still a sense of progression in Skyrim. Sure, enemies will level with you so it's not necessarily as blatant as being a level 40 wargod just smearing level 1 scrubs across the landscape, but as time goes on and you level up skills and improve gear there's still a degree of improvement going on, to the point where early on you might be in serious danger from wolves and bandits, but eventually you'll just smash them into the dirt relatively easily.

Hejiru posted...

ok boomer

This would probably work better as an insult if Millennials actually understood what the word "Boomer" means.

See, that's something else you've all ruined! You ruin everything!

Nade_Duck posted...

sometimes i feel like i don't have a partner

It's hard to believe that there's nobody out there. It's hard to believe that you're all alone.

Story old as time.

BlackScythe0 posted...

I'd have to disagree with you on atmosphere. I remember exploring morrowind with wonder, while wandering through Oblivion with apathy.

I'd disagree. Personally I never really engaged with Morrowind's setting in any meaningful way because it was often too exotic. Oblivion being a bit more grounded made it easier to relate to. And that also took me out of most of the overall plot.

Though part of my apathy towards Morrowind is also because I really disliked the gameplay, which detracted from everything else.

But even when Morrowind is (sort of) revisited in Skyrim's DLC or Elder Scrolls Online, it always just sort of leaves me cold. It's never really resonated with me in the way some of the other provinces did.

The_Wave_Master posted...

and my brother in law died in a motorcycle accident like a mile from my house getting milk. Some girl on her phone just smoked him, and he died instantly.

This was pretty much what happened to my brother. Though in his case he was literally stopped at an intersection when the girl plowed into him. And he lingered for a while (and was in a medically-induced coma for a bit) before he died.

Shit definitely sucks.

Lokarin posted...

turkey is delicious

I've always found it too dry. I'd much rather just have chicken, or occasionally duck or goose.

There's no such thing as Saturday morning cartoons anymore. Millennials and the government ruined it, like they ruin everything.

Also, you act like that's a new thing:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gXastIhIuaY

Plenty of restaurants, so long as you make reservations way in advance.

A private chef, if you've got enough money.

Various convenience stores, if you're willing to settle:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=saHuQZcxjnM

Is it a game about two sexy brothers fighting monsters?

Zareth posted...

He has like 3 different male faces and 2 different female faces and that's it. Every character is a minor variation of them.

I mean, you've just described like 90% of anime.

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OnlySixFaces

Zareth posted...

Shoutout to that guy on my Steam friends list with 1993 hours in New Vegas

The real question is, is that 20 different 100-hour runs or like a single 2000-hour run?

I feel very differently about those two scenarios.

Don't hate the payer, hate the game.

The_Wave_Master posted...

It's good to know I'm Keith in Voltron. I could have been Pige or The Princess.

Let's be honest, nearly all of us wish we were Lance. But most of us are Pidge.



Idiot_Savant posted...

For what it's worth Zeus archived some of it on that board where he talks to himself like PandaMaster

Speaking of which, I should totally go post on my old board and talk to myself.

I've never played the games, but presumably they're a reference to this?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iga-ry%C5%AB

Maybe the Japanese fanbase just really loves them for some reason. Like Tingle.

Lokarin posted...

today has just too many 11s... it's Skyrim time

Imagine what it was like back in 2011!

Almost certainly Minecraft and Stardew Valley for me. Maybe a few other games, but I don't play on PC so I don't really have an easy way to check that sort of thing at a glance.

Maybe the Mass Effect games... if you assume the average run is somewhere around 80 hours or so, I've definitely done more than a dozen runs, so that would work out to 1000+ hours. Maybe Skyrim across every version.

Fallout: New Vegas might make the cut as well, runs are long in that and I've done quite a few, but I'm not sure if it was quite enough to pass the 1000 hour threshold.

Zareth posted...

And why would you name a character for a restaurant chain after an expression of disgust?

Because he was supposed to be a bad guy. Like the Hamburglar.

Hamburglar stole burgers, Grimace was supposed to steal milkshakes.

Also - and this is just supposition on my part - you could argue that people make a grimace when they get ice cream headaches, so that's like the evil side of milkshakes. So maybe that was the motivation for the name, because they couldn't think of a pun like with Hamburglar.

agesboy posted...

I don't think enough people exist still that like Morrowind over Oblivion or Skyrim for that to be a controversial opinion

Maybe PO

Nah, I loathe Morrowind. I used to be extremely vocal about it. Mentioned a few times how I traded my copy into GameStop for $1 and still felt like I got the better end of the deal.

Also, I don't think it's that most people today prefer Skyrim to Morrowind, I think it's that the vast majority of gamers have never played Morrowind.

Oblivion was really the first Elder Scrolls game to go mainstream, and Skyrim was the game where its popularity exploded. Morrowind was always sort of the "I liked them before they sold out" game for the digital hipsters. It was just accessible enough for people to know about it (which put it way ahead of Arena and Daggerfall), but still not fully mainstream yet so nerds could talk about how much better it was than Oblivion and Morrowind to try and get credit for being old-school.

The_Wave_Master posted...

I leave for a few years to get my legs amputated, and I come back to no Geek topics. This hurts my soul, if I still had one. My red head wife took mine a long time ago. I'm married now, and she supports my heathen life style u like you so called Geeks.

It's good to see some of you still here.

They were your topics. When you disappeared on us out of the blue, they just sort of died off.

It would be like trying to form Voltron without Keith and the Black Lion. It's just not gonna work. You've got to be there to activate the interlock and form the head.