Lurker > ParanoidObsessive

Kana posted...

It's pretty easy to boycott something when you can't get it in the first place

This, more or less.

A boycott won't actually matter if they're not planning to make enough for all the people who want one anyway, because it will sell out regardless.


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Kungfu Kenobi posted...

ParanoidObsessive posted...

And now it's time to ask the key question in all this:

Do transsexuals count?

No, that would be a woman's penis.

A lot of people would disagree with you, though.


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TheCyborgNinja posted...

Who's the girl with the huge hands that looks like she's from a shitty '70s rock band?

Ms. Marvel.


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And now it's time to ask the key question in all this:

Do transsexuals count?


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Lil69Leo posted...

Greek and Roman are basically identical. Romans took Greek and changed names and added to it.

The Romans had their own mythology, but it was a lot more simplistic, and most of it sort of fell by the wayside once they started to absorb the Greek worldview. Most of what we think of as Roman mythology is just Greek with the serial numbers filed off.

That being said, Romans would occasionally interpret the stories in slightly different ways, because their culture inherently valued different things and saw the world in a different light from the original Greeks. In a way, it's very similar to how modern culture tends to interpret those stories in our own way, because we're looking at them through a different lens as well. While the Roman "Mars" is basically just the Greek "Ares", the Romans viewed him a lot differently than the Greeks did. Sometimes the fusion of two pre-existing figures would result in a god very different from how the Greeks would have seen them.

(Incidentally, the same thing happened in reverse with Egyptian myth - a lot of what we know about it today isn't necessarily what the Egyptians themselves would have believed originally, as much as it is a syncretic hybrid of original Egyptian with the mythos of the Greeks... nearly every name we think of when we think Egyptian gods is actually the Greek version of their names)

To throw even more of a monkey wrench into things, though, there's also Etruscan mythology to consider, which was closely related to the original Latin/Roman, but had its own distinctions and variations. As well as the fact that Greek myth occasionally borrowed elements from outside cultures as well, like absorbing Cybele from eastern lands.


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Zeus posted...

I've always gotten a chuckle from McFarlane's hypocritical douchebaggery.

"WAAAH! Marvel is oppressing me by saying my art is work-for-hire and not entirely my own property. Creators rights! I'mma go form my own company!"

"WAAAH! These writers I hired to write my comic book for me are saying their story and characters are entirely their own property, and not mine! Fuck those guys! They knew going in it was work-for-hire!"

At the time I never really cared about most of the behind-the-scenes nonsense, though - I mostly just hated Image because most of their comics were incoherent messes or just kind of stupid (not entirely surprising a company entirely run by artists). It also didn't really help that half of them seemed to have a hard time ever getting their books released on schedule (not entirely surprising a company entirely run by artists).

Back at that point I mostly had way more hope for the future of comics when it came to Valiant, except that went downhill as well pretty damned fast once they fired Jim Shooter.

The 90s were a dark, blighted time.


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The Cult of Persona-lity


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MICHALECOLE posted...

Wow you're SO smart

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fvbuGqYzc4Y&t=0m26s


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GanonsSpirit posted...

Tactless =/= Sarcastic

Sarcasm =/= what 90% of the Internet thinks is sarcasm, either.


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fettster777 posted...

Not even Grant Morrison's Doom Patrol?

I loathe Morrison's work, so no.

In fact, given the choice between Morrison's Doom Patrol and Morrison's X-Men runs, I'd choose a painful root canal over either.

I know a lot of comic fanboys love to suck his dick, and I've even acknowledge he's capable of writing good stories (even if nearly everything he does is pretentious as fuck and mired in either pseudo-philosophical wankery or continuity-blind nostalgia wankery), but most of his work leaves me really cold. And his work on established franchises (X-Men, Batman, etc) tend to be some of his worst work (ie, he works best when writing original characters, or existing characters that literally no one else gives a single shit about).


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Entity13 posted...

In other news, I'm looking again at my main bookcase and wondering what I should get to fill some of the empty space in the first two shelves. I'm open to suggestions regarding authors whose surnames start with either letter A-G.

Asimov's a given. Stephen R. Donaldson is my go-to #1 fantasy recommendation when I'm not recommending Roger Zelazny. Piers Anthony is pretty much fantasy with training wheels, while David Eddings is one step up from that before you graduate into actual, more robust writing. And there's always the Dark is Rising books by Susan Cooper, which is sort of like Harry Potter, except 20 years earlier and for literate people. Terry Brooks is an option if you want something Tolkien-esque but a bit lighter, though you may want to stick to the original Shannara trilogy and maybe the second series of four, and steer clear of the 30 or so blatant cash-in books he's written since then (on the other hand, you could always check out his Landover novels as well).

The princess books by Jim Hines weren't terrible reading. Steven Brust is pretty popular as well. I've heard good things about Robert Asprin, though I've never read him myself outside of a couple of short story collections.

Poul Anderson's more sci-fi, but I read a bunch of his stuff when I went through my long-ago time travel fiction phase.

Marion Zimmer Bradley is kind of an acquired taste (and I think she's somewhat "love it or hate it"), but I have a soft-spot in my heart for the "Shadow's Gate" series, and Mists of Avalon is one of those keystone books in the fantasy genre.

Jack Chalker is more sci-fi than fantasy, but he does blur the lines a bit. And I've always been a pretty big fan of his Four Lords of the Diamond series.

And then there's always L. Sprague de Camp and Philip Jose Farmer, who are both older classic writers of the field, though their work might be a harder slog for people today.

And that's mainly just what I either own and am looking at on my own fiction shelves now, or remember having read via my library.

In retrospect, I think a sizeable chunk of my fantasy collection falls somewhere between A and G. The two major exceptions to that are Fred Saberhagen and Roger Zelazny. Oh, and Terry Prachett.



shadowsword87 posted...

Of course The Dresden Files byJim Butcher isn't... good writing. But it's good enjoyable trash.

My literal first awareness of him was when one of my online friends years ago basically described his books to me as "Sort of like someone wrote shitty White Wolf fanfiction and somehow got it published."



shadowsword87 posted...

Man, I like a mostly scifi stuff, sorry fantasy isn't my thing.

I tend to be the reverse, but here's an appropriate Twitter post from the previously-mentioned Steven Brust:

"No belief in a distinction between science fiction and fantasy can withstand an encounter with Zelazny."



shadowsword87 posted...

I tried to read The Hero With a Thousand Faces, I couldn't get passed the love for Freud, in unashamed love for him.

I'd say it's less Freud, and more that he has a pretty massive hard-on for Jung. Though Jung was Freud's protege, so a lot of Freud does tend to rub off on Jung (even if he went in radically different directions and they wound up influences radically different schools of thought).

Interestingly enough, both are also relatively discredited in modern psychology, though Freud's influence is still hugely strong on layman pop psychology while Jung casts a huge shadow over a lot of New Age bullshit philosophy (and the pseudo-science Myers-Briggs test).

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The Wave Master posted...

I feel horrible for feeling the same way the writers do about Peter Parker.

He isn't a happy character, he is a tragic character, he should suffer.

Peter Parker is primarily driven by guilt. The guilt of loss and failure compel him. He can't and shouldn't have victory without first experiencing loss.

That actually raises an interesting question, though. SHOULD it be that Peter has to suffer through loss to experience victory, or is it more the case that every moment of happiness or victory should immediately be followed by painful loss?

Because I'd say the former can actually make for interesting characters, and is at the root of a lot of "hero's journey"-esque story arcs, but the latter is more the way people tend to write Peter. He is literally not allowed to be happy, ever. The stronger a given moment of joy, and the longer it lasts, the worse it's going to be when everything blows up in his face.

And that can be kind of depressing. A character who suffers greatly but ultimately overcomes adversity is an interesting character. A character who is literally doomed to suffer eternally with no respite or hope of redemption or ultimate success is a character I don't really want to read about, ever.

(And which may go a long way towards why I pretty much NEVER identified with or ever really liked Spider-Man even at the height of my comic obsession).

I wouldn't even necessarily say that's a TRAGIC character, as tragic characters tend to have ultimately doomed endings, but usually aren't one long string of tantalizing success jerked away at the last moment, leaving a life of constant, nonstop boots to the gut.

I might even say that interpretation of Spider-Man is FAR darker than even Batman at his very worst, because even in the bleakest versions of Batman where he's pretty much miserable his entire life from the moment his parents die until his own death, it's still really only one WHAM moment followed by the consequences of that moment. And often, Batman's way less bleak than that, because he's always had a lot of little lights in the greater darkness.



Zeus posted...

Flash's mom died and he doesn't mope the entire fucking time.

To be fair, he did shatter the entire universe to try and save her.


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Raganork10 posted...

Y'know, I was kinda happy when RLM made the original Nerd Crew podcast episodes, but I was expecting it to last several episodes and then die off. They made their point already. Now they've made a fourth episode and it's beyond beating a dead horse at this point, and has crossed over into I'm not gonna watch this territory.

I stopped watching them somewhere in the middle of the first one.

I always sort of saw it as being a bit too petty and a little bitter, mixed with the sort of smug superiority that always sort of makes me want to punch someone's teeth in. It also doesn't really help that it feels like they're painting a very wide brush across segments of a cultural group that doesn't necessarily deserve it (ie, judging an entire type of genre fan by the worst stereotypes of the group). Which is kind of funny, because you'd think two huge Star Trek nerds would actually be kind of aware of that sort of thing. Hell, you could even throw Jay into that, because he's a huge horror fan, and that's another fanbase that tends to have a lot of negative stereotypes attached.

It's basically a joke that was funny in the first couple minutes of the first one because, hey, it's referential, but it's sort of gone through the other side to not really being funny anymore, because now it just sort of feels a bit vindictive, almost. It's more mockery for the sake of being an asshole than it is for the sake of humor.

I understand why they're doing them, though. The first couple got more views than most of the videos they make that don't have Plinkett talking about Star Wars in them, and they kind of enjoy making them (or at least Mike does - and Rich mostly just gets blindsided by jokes Mike has set up while not letting him in on the punchline). And there's an active part of their fanbase that basically starts pestering them about when they're making the next one 30 seconds after the last one goes up (watch some of the PreRec live streams, you'll actually hear people bring it up in the chat, with Rich's usual answer being "Whenever Mike wants to do one").

I fully expect them to make at least a few more before they (or the audience) gets bored with it, but I'll probably just keep skipping them all.



shadowsword87 posted...

I mean, I'm still enjoying it because I like watching other people get made fun of >_>

Ironically, and at risk of contradicting my usual persona, I've never really been a huge fan of that style of humor. I rarely find it all that funny when I'm watching something where it feels like someone is opening and maliciously making fun of someone very specific, or even just a particular type of person in general.

A lot of times, if a particular comedy act, routine, or movie sort of boils down to "Hey, come and laugh at these people", it turns me off really, really fast. It's part of the reason why I loathed Dumb and Dumber when it came out (in spite of apparently being the only one).

I don't mind as much if the mocking feels more playful or lighthearted, or seems like it's coming from a place of laughing "with" someone rather than "at" them, but when something feels meanspirited I don't find it funny as much as I just sort of see the person doing it as an asshole.

I also feel like that sort of reaction has actually gotten stronger for me as I get older - I probably wouldn't have been as fussy about that sort of thing when I was younger, especially when I was more of an asshole myself.


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When the company originally debuted, I hated pretty much everything other than Marc Silvestri's Cyber Force, and even that was kind of an incoherent mess. So I've always been kind of biased against Spawn, even after McFarlane broke down and hired actual writers to write it for him (and then fucked those writers over and got sued for it).


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Muscles posted...

but they introduced some great characters

I'd say "name one", but then you'd name a bunch of lame or terrible characters, and I'd have to come back to point out that none of the characters you named are actually worthwhile in any real way, and we'd just have to agree to disagree anyway (but you'd still be wrong).

About the only good things to come out of the prequels at all are Mr. Plinkett and Jar-Jar the Sith Lord. But the last one doesn't count for the same reason Indoctrination Theory doesn't save the ending of Mass Effect 3. "Your story was so terrible the fans had to create false alternative interpretations and offbeat theories to make it palatable" isn't really glowing praise.


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I actually pre-date Star Wars by a few months, so theoretically yes.


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Zikten posted...

to be fair, there is much in Marvel that is a direct ripoff of DC.

Also to be fair, there's a lot of DC that is ripping off Marvel, and parts of both that are ripping off other comic companies or other media entirely.

For instance, it's not like most of the illiterate people today would even remotely be aware of this, but Green Lantern is basically a straight-up rip-off of the Lensman series (which DC openly acknowledge when they named one of their Green Lantern characters Arisia, which is the name of one of the planets in Lensman). Batman is basically Zorro, Superman was blatantly based on a pulp story written a few years earlier called Gladiator (and nearly every superhero comic you've ever read exists solely because Superman established the genre), Thor is coming straight out of real world mythology (with a weird Kirby twist), the original version of the Flash is pretty literally just the god Hermes wearing colorful long-johns, Green Arrow is straight-up Errol Flynn Robin Hood with a modern day twist, and so on.

And then there's stranger things like Swamp Thing/Man-Thing, where both companies basically created near-identical characters at almost the exact same time with no real evidence that either company was aware of the other's plans in advance. Or the twisty incestuous spiral you get when you consider that X-Men was probably a rip-off of Doom Patrol, which was in turn sort of a blatant attempt to make a Fantastic Four-ish sort of team, which was itself incredibly similar to the Challengers of the Unknown (which was also created by Jack Kirby), which in turn was sort of a Doc Savage/pulp adventure rip-off itself. Or the 437 different Captain America-esque comic characters that all popped up around the same time because the zeitgeist of the era was perfect for them.

People who whine about either company stealing from each other (or anyone else) are sort of missing the forest for the trees - very little entertainment these days is all that "original" (name a popular story or comic you enjoy, and I can probably name at least five things it's stealing its ideas from). And if the homage/affectionate parody/rip-off is interesting in its own right, who the fuck cares?

Hell, even if we accept the idea that X-Men was 100% copied from the Doom Patrol, I can also safely say there has never been a single moment in the entire history of the universe when I'd actually want to read a Doom Patrol comic or see a Doom Patrol movie rather than an X-Men one. If a "copy" does what it intends to do better than the "original" it's based on, then it's by definition the better product. And cross-pollination of ideas can absolutely lead to better products being created by everyone.


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Mead posted...

Genis-Vell, the version of Captain Marvel that is batshit crazy

Unfortunately he is super dead in the current canon

I prefer Phyla. I've been saying for years Marvel should drop Carol Danvers in favor of Phyla or Monica Rambeau for their planned Captain Marvel movie, because either of them are more interesting than dull-as-dishwater Carol, while simultaneously ticking off even more of the Diversity Checklist for maximum progressive points.

Either that or go full-on camp nonsense with Mar-Vell and Rick Jones swapping places with the Nega-Bands, because "Ehh, fuck it."


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FrozenBananas posted...

People who aren't from around here say I have a Boston accent

How often do you say "wicked" and drop your Rs?


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Gamechamp3k posted...

Everybody has an accent, the only question is if their accent is noticeably different to those around them.

Came in to say this.



usui88 posted...

The world revolves around America and unless you're not from the northeast, Midwest, or south you have one. Common knowledge.

Speaking as someone from the Northeast, a hell of a lot of people here absolutely have an accent.

Even the type of speech most Americans think of as having NO accent (aka "standard" American) is actually a Midwest accent. It was just normalized by the media in the same way that baseline "Received Pronunciation" in England is basically an East Midlands accent.


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I found this comment from Ron Frenz kind of amusing:

"One way to look at it is the best way to write a Spider-Man story is to make a list of all the shittiest things that can happen to a human being, then you eliminate all the things that other writers have already done, and what is left are some story ideas."

As much as "Parker Luck" is actually a thing in the comics, and it's sort of become memetic that literally nothing good can ever happen to Peter, ever, because the universe itself kind of hates him, it's funny to hear writers literally admitting that they actually wrote stories with that idea in mind.


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Did you use Tutu or something else? I know there were multiple mods to run BGI in BGII's engine, but I haven't kept up with the mod scene in like forever.

Definitely awesome games, though.


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If that weirds you out, try this on for size:




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green dragon posted...

I'm 100% positive i've heard "of the world" at the end of the song.

No, you're just misremembering the earlier part of the song. The song has always had a fairly abrupt ending in both the album and video versions. You're transposing the earlier part of the song to the end because it actually makes it sound more natural, because we're more used to songs having neater, more symmetrical endings. You're autocorrecting the song, and in the process, ruining your own memory of past events.

Human memory is incredibly shit in general, and your brain lies to you constantly. It's pathetically easy to trick people into thinking they remember something that never actually happened. Multiple studies have been done where psychologists can absolutely convince you that you saw or heard something 20 minutes ago that didn't even remotely happen, and there are multiple different ways it can be done.

It's part of why eyewitness testimony in court cases is always relatively suspect - because even when people think they're telling the truth, their interpretation of events may be entirely wrong, and they can misremember all sorts of details and effectively lie about what they saw without even meaning to.

It has nothing to do with multiple parallel universes constantly intersecting and overlapping, it has to do with the fact that the human brain is a deceptive, lazy piece of shit.


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The Wave Master posted...

I could day the same thing about Final Fantasy XIV, when it compares to wrestling, but I won't.

I was thinking it. I wasn't going to SAY it, but I was definitely thinking it.

The way I've always seen the Geek topics is that everyone basically talks about whatever they want while everyone else can pick and choose what to reply to. Only stark mad crazy people are going to relate to EVERY topic someone brings up here. If we take an occasional tangent into a subject that some people aren't really interested in, they're always welcome to throw their own discussion out into the pile.

So I tend not to complain when someone brings up something I don't even remotely care about, and they're free to do the same when I spend 14 posts in a row talking about comic books or British sci-fi or tabletop RPGs or whatever.

I mean, I know I'm super-awesome and all, but no one's obligated to read everything I write (though there WILL be a test later). And that's part of why I do the line-by-line separate quoting for each point I'm referencing in my posts - someone can easily read whatever I'm quoting and have a pretty good idea what I'm responding to, and thus know if it's worth their time to read the 37 paragraphs following the quotebox. If you're not interested in obscure 14th century poets, you're probably not interested in hearing my opinions about them, either.

But as long as at least one person is interested, I'll generally be willing to hold the conversation.


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disctray1 posted...

everyone voting no is lying, obviously.

I remember it the right way, if only because I actually remember the context of the scene, rather than just going around spouting random memetic nonsense I've heard other people say third-hand.

"Obi-Wan never told you what happened to your father..."

"He told me enough! He told me YOU killed him!"

"No. -I- am your father."

Most of the people who misquote it are people who've never actually seen Empire, saw it once a long time ago and just vaguely remember it, or who heard multiple people misquote it long before they saw the actual movie.

But I saw Empire when I was 6 years old, and the World Wide Web wouldn't exist to ruin everything pop culture related for another decade or so. And I watched Empire A LOT as a kid.

There are quite a few movies from that era I can quote, word-for-word, beginning to end, without missing a single line. Transformers, Clue, the animated Lord of the Rings - I memorized a lot of useless trivia through constant repetition as a kid.

In a time when cable only had 36 channels, there were only like 10 hours of kid's programming tops on TV in any given week, and all you had was an Atari 2600 and a VCR, there wasn't all that much competing media to distract you from watching a favorite movie 100+ times.


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wwinterj25 posted...

Ergh. I've accepted that the days of the old Linkin Park are gone.

After the Internet spent years shitting on old Linkin Park, I don't blame them for wanting to maybe experiment and change up their sound.

Not to mention that most bands tend to mellow out when they get older anyway, just as part of the natural order of things.


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I only eat sandwiches on kaiser rolls or Italian rolls.


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And now I'm listening to this one:




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RCtheWSBC posted...

and why didn't he post it

He was too busy masturbating.


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I've never walked out of a movie I paid to see, because I usually refuse to pay for movies in the first place unless I have a pretty good idea what to expect.

I did almost walk out of a movie that I got in to see for free, but I still mostly forced myself to stay and just resent everyone involved with making it.



Smallville posted...

i think some theaters may not give you you're money back if you say it was a terrible movie

That's why you don't ask for your money back, you just sneak into a different theater and watch a different movie instead.

That's assuming you're at a multiplex, of course, but at this point I'm not sure there's a lot of single-screen theaters left anywhere anyway.


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Just seeing the title of this topic led me to go listen to this on Youtube:




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SkynyrdRocker posted...

Yeah the gun ownership rates per person in the US are thrown off by people like this.

That's always been the case. Because most people are stupid and don't know how statistics work, they hear things like "There's statistically one gun for every person in the US", and think everyone in the US owns a gun, when it's more like actual gun collectors may only be 1 person out of every 100, but they also own 20-100 guns apiece.

Very few people who own a gun only own ONE gun. Whether it's someone who just owns a gun for defense but maybe has 2-3 different types for variety, or hunters who own different guns for different types of hunting or sport shooting, or straight-up collectors who own a shitton of guns but keep them on display and pristine and haven't fired a single one in decades. Those stronger concentrations even out over the entire population until the average is misleading (a fact deliberately misused by most people with agendas and unintentionally misunderstood by everyone else because most people suck at statistical analysis).

But that's true of pretty much everything, though. Guns themselves aren't really unique in that respect, they're just more of a sore spot because people love to fight over them (usually without even remotely understanding the topic they're so passionate about, because most hot-button topics in politics and sociology are fueled by blatant stupidity).


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I think I still have at least a few of them in my basement.


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VeeVees posted...

She's the defense minister. You think she's going to be young?

Based on all of the anime and JRPGs I've seen in my life, I just assume everyone running Japan's government and military are all in their teens or early 20s, and that anyone who is over 25 is immediately forced to retire and become a Buddhist monk.


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Zeus posted...

Back when Cornette was with the company, Dunn wouldn't have had those deep ties... I think. I'm not sure when the incident happened.

Dunn's dad was actually one of Vince Sr's employees, and Kevin himself worked for the company almost from the very beginning of Vince Jr's reign (supposedly, the two Vinces actually promised Kevin's dad that Kevin would have a job for life with the company because of how highly they valued his dad's loyalty). On top of which, he's pretty much responsible for every single TV product most people today think of when they think WWF/WWE, and Vince has always considered him an important part of the company's success (and he's profited from that position - Dunn's probably made more money working for the company than anyone not named McMahon). Part of why he has so much influence NOW is because of how long he's been one of Vince's go-to guys, and how much Vince sees him as part of the reason why the WWF/WWE managed to get where it is today.

Vince was friendly with him long before he ever met Cornette - in fact, Vince would have known Dunn for more than a decade before the first time he ever MET Cornette, let alone when Cornette was actually invited to be part of the inner circle working on booking and talent relation stuff (which is when the incident in question would have happened).

Kevin Dunn's always been woven deep into the fabric of the company. It's part of why, as much as smart marks shit on him these days or how badly he gets along with Triple H, he's almost certainly never getting fired until he dies/retires, or until Vince drops dead.


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Much like Poker, most of the skill involved is in knowing the odds, and knowing when it's better to keep a die and when to reroll it.

Poker has the added level of complexity once you introduce betting and bluffing, but at the root of things both games are mechanically similar.


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It's been mentioned in the other thread discussing it, but it seems pretty obvious the reason they're discontinuing the NES Classic is because they want people buying older games via the Virtual Console on the Switch instead. That's coming out soon, and they obviously want to push adoption of their new mutant baby as hard as they can.


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FrozenBananas posted...

Wait...what? Temple of Doom took place a year before Raiders of the Lost Ark?

I'm actually kind of surprised there are people who DON'T know this.

Though not super-surprised, I suppose, because I can see why people would think a sequel film would happen after the film preceding it, especially if they're not paying close attention or it's been a while since they've actually watched it.

But still. I can't remember a time when I didn't know that, and I was like 7 the first time I watched them.



FrozenBananas posted...

Also:

Raiders > Crystal Skull > Last Crusade > Temple of Doom.

Come at me!

I won't come at you, I'm just going to shake my head sadly and silently pity you.



Entity13 posted...

If I remember correctly, they decided to call it a prequel after the third film was made, because the first and third both take place during the WWII era, whereas Indiana isn't dealing with the Nazis in the second film

Nope.

When you watch the first two films, they both tell you right away (right after the opening credits end) where and when they're set. Raiders tells you it's "South America, 1936" before you even see Indy's face, and Temple of Doom tells you it's "Shanghai, 1935" right after the musical number ends (which is also right about the point you see Indy for the first time). Temple of Doom was openly established as a prequel before it was ever released. It wasn't an after the fact justification (and originally, Indy wasn't supposed to fight Nazis every movie anyway - they only went back to them in the third movie because of how badly the second one was received without them).

As to WHY they decided to do it that way, I'm not entirely sure. I've never heard anyone ever talk about why they made that choice (though I'm sure it was probably mentioned in interviews and could probably be found online if someone looked for it). It might even be mentioned in one of the DVD commentary tracks - I actually own all three movies (yes, that's right, all three movies) and could probably give them a watch and see if they mention anything along those lines.


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Most people who know anything about comics know about Image.

Most of those same people likely also know about IDW and Dynamite, and probably know about Valiant.

Most people who don't know anything about comics probably don't know about Image, but those are also the people who barely know anything about Marvel or DC either, except what they see in the movies, so they really don't matter all that much anyway.


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Mead posted...

If they are smart they'll offer the same package digitally on the switch

They'll offer all the same games individually at higher prices. They'll also likely double-dip, and people who bought games on previous versions of the Virtual Console will have to buy them again.

But while that seems like good business sense, it ignores the fact that a lot of people who would have bought an NES Classic for purely nostalgia purposes have no interest in owning a Switch, and won't buy one just to access the Virtual Console. While nostalgia is very potent for cheaper spur-of-the-moment purchases on a whim, it tends to fail when a lot of time, effort, and money is required to scratch the same itch.

A lot of people willing to pay for $60 for 30 or so NES games (out of which there's maybe a dozen you actually care about, if that) aren't going to be willing to pay $400+ for those same games.



jsb0714 posted...

A lot of people pretending to give a shit about this.

To be fair, I don't give a shit about the NES Classic, but I WAS waiting to see if they eventually came out with an SNES Classic, because that might actually have games worth playing. But odds are we won't be seeing one, and discontinuing the NES Classic just sort of reinforces that.

That being said, you don't have to really want to buy one to still think Nintendo is being incredibly stupid about how they handle their marketing and production, because they've been fucking up for decades now. Their only real saving grace is dominance in the handheld market and the ability to produce underpowered hardware at a net gain - without that, they likely would have gone the way of Sega years ago.


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Gamechamp3k posted...

Sticks on top is the absolute best possible placement

It really isn't.

Maybe if you're one of the "pro" players who always seem to hold controllers in odd ways to maximize button efficiency, but for the majority of players that's never going to be an issue.



Gamechamp3k posted...

since lopsided seems to have won the stick placement war. :<

As much as some people complain about it, it tends to be the best design when in-game controls are almost always pure movement on the left thumb with the right thumb alternating between looking around and action buttons. It's much easier to move your thumb up to hit a button and back down to look around than it is the reverse.

On the left side you COULD just put the two sticks parallel (ie, the left stick is on the bottom of the controller), but the standard state of play for most games is with your thumbs on the left stick and the right buttons for a majority of time, which makes the "lopsided" stick placement the one that actually keeps your thumbs in a more natural state most of the time.

The other problem is one of familiarity - the more we tend to use certain button designs and placements, the more natural they become to us through use, and the harder it gets to adapt to alternate control schemes. When multiple consoles use the same layouts, and multiple generations of players grow accustomed to those layouts, it becomes harder and harder for them to switch to anything different, even if the different thing might be more efficient in some way (see also, why we're all still typing on QWERTY keyboards right now).

It's part of why I've always said that, no matter how often the PC Master Race whines about keyboard/mouse controls being more precise than controller controls (which is technically true), in practice someone who has spent 30+ years of their life using a controller almost exclusively is going to be FAR more awkward when switching to keyboard/mouse, and may never reach a point where their keyboard/mouse reflexes and reactions reach a point that is actually superior to their controller reflexes. While the technology itself might be superior, their experience with it actually makes it subjectively inferior.

Which ties into Nintendo's desire to innovate - as we've more or less settled in to what we all tend to consider the "basis" design of a controller that is standardized across multiple consoles and console generations, it gets harder for players to accept changes that are radically different from that baseline. Things like the Wiimote or Wii-U may intrigue at first due to their novelty, but novelty wears off and we all mostly drift back to the comfortable familiar.


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green dragon posted...

wiiu: gamepad was cool to me.

It was a lame tablet hammered into an oversized controller with poor stick placement, which was poorly supported by the software and mostly existed as even more of a gimmick than the Wiimote was, and ultimately helped kill the console.

And again, there was always a strong undercurrent of "I'd rather be using the Pro Controller" for a lot of people, which undermines it even further.



green dragon posted...

switch: I don't have one yet, but it is just an improved wii u gamepad.

Basically, which means it tends to fail in all the same ways as the Wii-U gamepad.

It's also not helped by the number of people who've said that the Joycons are kind of shit in purely hardware terms - a LOT of reviews for the Switch basically include a line or two about how you essentially NEED to buy the Pro Controller to make it worthwhile (a common phrasing is that the Switch is essentially a $370 console and not a $300 console, because of the extra ridiculous overpriced Pro Controller requirement).

But the Joycons also have extremely awkward button and stick placement (necessary to put the Joy cons on parity with each other in a multiplayer situation), fused with all of the worst aspects of the Wiimote (the motion controls, the two-piece issues of the Nuchuck, the awkward detection and connectivity issues). It's like the Wii and the Wii-U got together and had a baby, and that baby had Down Syndrome.

Ironically, the Pro Controller for the Switch is basically just the Xbox 360 design, so I'd be perfectly fine with it if not for the fact that pretty much everything else about the Switch is also a turn-off for me.


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green dragon posted...

If recent times being gamecube and up:

For me, "recent" is anything N64 and after, because I feel like that's when the market underwent a significant qualitative shift.

I generally tend to lump gaming into three periods, with 1-2 gen as the first part (along with the occasional pre-1st gen oddity or prototypes), 3-4 being the second, and now 4-8 being the "current" era.

And honestly, the N64 controller was one of the worst modern controllers I've ever used. I hated its design and how Nintendo tended to map functions to the various buttons. It plays a large part in why I generally disliked the N64 as a whole both system-wise and game-wise.



green dragon posted...

NGC: great controller. better than Xbox worse than (by not much) dual shock

For me it was easily the worst controller of its generation. Sure, it was better than the N64 (though that's damning with faint praise), but the button placement was awkward and needlessly iconoclastic which was a huge negative for me - especially when the PS1's original vanilla controller, the Dual Analog, and DualShock controllers had already existed for years with a far superior design (and which I'd gotten very used to using during the previous generation, when every game I wanted to play was on the PS1 and I was shunning the N64 like the plague).

I might be willing to give the edge to the GameCube controller over the awkwardness of the Xbox Duke (though even that is questionable, because as awkward as it was the Duke button placement was still better), but the S-controller was better in every possible way (and became the prototype for the next generation's 360 controller, which is still one of the best ever made in terms of pure design).

I might also be willing to concede the GameCube was better than the Dreamcast controller because of how clunky the Dreamcast controller was (mainly due to the space given over to pointless docking capability), but again, that's still a case where the button placement tends to override other factors for me.



green dragon posted...

wii : yeah, some people hate it, but even if you exclude motion controls (which I didn't mind), this is honestly the most comfortable controller. The wiimote and nunchuck fit in my hands well. the lack of buttons is a downer, but most of the games I have played didn't suffer because of it. I will say that i used the classic controller a lot. the CC was pretty uncomfortable but gives you access to a more standard way to play.

I utterly loathe the motion controls, even aside from the fact that in early versions they weren't even as precise as they became later on. But ignoring the gimmick, the Wiimote is still kind of poorly designed (held straight on it's an abomination, held sideways it's just a shittier NES controller). When you throw in the Nunchuk it gets even worse, because that basically feels like someone decided to crossbreed an N64 controller with a PC mouse and wound up with the worst aspects of both in a combo that resulted in a two-piece controller (which is almost always more awkward than having a single mass).

It's not entirely surprising that this is the generation where "I only want to play games that support the GameCube Controller/Classic Controller/Pro Controller" became a common sentiment from a lot of people when it came to the Wii - a sentiment which was generally a negative when you consider that many of their core mainstream games didn't support it.

And comparing it to its direct competition, the 360 and PS3 controllers, it's easily the worst of its generation.
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RFC22 posted...

Fearns, president of Irvine, California-based TriPacific Capital Advisors, was returning from a conference in Hawaii and purchased a full-fare first-class ticket from Kauai to Los Angeles for $1,000. Fearns told Lazarus that he had already boarded and was awaiting takeoff when a United employee told him that he had to give up his seat for a higher-priority customer.

A president of a Company that deals with Asset securities had to give up his seat for a Higher Priority person? Who is more Higher priority than a Company President??

Probably someone who flies more, and thus has more airline miles and had "upgraded" to higher status.

The Prime Minister of Canada would technically be a lower-priority passenger than someone who cleans toilets at McDonalds if the McDonalds' janitor happens to fly with a particular airline more and has racked up more miles in a given time period (usually a year).


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Nintendo is pretty much my default answer for this question in recent times, but honestly, for their time periods, the NES and SNES controllers were probably the best of their respective generations.

And if we're talking overall across the entire span of gaming history, the NES and SNES don't even remotely come close to being the worst. Just in terms of button-placement and ergonomic design the N64 and GameCube were FAR worse than the NES and SNES designs, the Atari joysticks were generally kind of garbage, and the IntelliVision used to have a controller that would literally make your thumbs bleed (and I mean literally as in literally, not as a form of emphasis - the hard sharp plastic edge would cut your thumb open).

Dual Shock is probably the best controller design anyone's ever come up with by this point (though I have a personal preference for the Xbox S-controller/360 controller design because it's more comfortable than the Dual Shock in my giant adult hands).


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streamofthesky posted...

Both are chemical weapons. Cripes.

Except context is everything, and you're actually kind of wrong in this case.


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Muffinz0rz posted...

Still terrible, terrible service.

But United's stock is recovering nicely. Surprise surprise.

It's hard for people to get upset over poor airline service, when pretty much all airline service is terrible.


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Jen0125 posted...

how are you mature enough or adult enough to raise a kid but you can't handle your own affairs?

To be fair, you don't actually need to be mature OR an adult to have/raise a kid. Especially if you're one of the many, many people who are doing a somewhat piss-poor job of it.

But honestly, the entire concept of "adult" is blurred these days anyway. Legally speaking you're an adult at 18, but I can probably count on one hand the number of 18-year olds I've met in my life who I'd even remotely think of as being "adults" in terms of actual maturity or responsibility.

The Industrial Revolution was sociologically responsible for creating the entire concept of "teenager" as an intermediary phase between "child" and "adult". The modern Technological/Computer Revolution seems to turning the period between 18-25 or so into a new intermediary period of social immaturity and development prior to actual "adulthood".


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The Wave Master posted...

Yes, she doesn't understand that he is a lump with no charisma, his in ring talent is limited, and he couldn't cut a promo to save his life....but....hes tall, dark, and handsome so she wants him around for eye candy. Personally I have no use for him.

To be fair, Roman's actually fairly skilled in terms of pure wrestling. He's capable in the ring and has a strong enough grasp of ring psychology. Under other circumstances, he'd probably be pretty over.

The real problem is that lack of charisma, though. Whether it's simply because of how he's booked, because it's hard to really emote when you're reading the cold, dead script a bunch of Hollywood writers have shit out for you (a problem multiple wrestlers seem to have these days, and something which has only really become a problem in the last decade or so), or because he really is a completely uninteresting lump of meat, Roman comes across as having zero personality, and it hurts him, bad. It puts him less on par with people like Rock or Cena, and more in the camp of guys like Diesel or Test.

Which, honestly, might be the main reason WHY the WWE refuses to go the Rock route and turn him heel. Because they're fully aware that the Rock's entire career was based on his own innate personal charisma, and that his ability to be a despicable but interesting heel is what helped pave his way to the eventual face turn (a career path shared by Triple H himself), but they're also aware that Roman has the personality of a dead fish, and they're afraid that once they turn him heel, he'll never have the necessary charm, humor, or gravitas to actually win the crowd over in any way.

Though even then, you'd think they'd be more inclined to use him as a badass heel with nuclear heat than keep him as a lukewarm face the crowd will never really unite behind.


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