Lurker > mrmallard

Or if nothing else, the seventh generation of consoles?

It feels like they put just as much effort into General Knoxx as they did into the main game. It laid the groundwork for Borderlands 2 by furthering a tonal shift towards comedy. It's the biggest DLC by a country mile, with an in-depth combat arena and a raid boss. It has two new vehicles, they upped the value of loot with the new Crimson Lance chests, and they introduced a series mainstay in Athena while fleshing out Moxxi and bringing her into the game world.

As far as DLC goes, The Secret Armory of General Knoxx stands out to me as a high-quality, good value product that adds value to the original product and improves its standing. I'm not saying it's got as much going as like an Age of Empires expansion pack or Neverwinter Nights campaign or whatever sacred cows people like to defer to. I am saying that this DLC is up there with some of the best expansion material ever released for a video game, if only for the seventh generation of consoles.

I moved onto Ziggy Stardust, which is the earliest album of his I played on repeat. The great thing about Ziggy Stardust is that a lot of the publically released demos rival the quality of the album versions.

Like I overplayed the Lady Stardust and Hang Onto Yourself demos as a teenager, and now I prefer them infinitely to the album versions. The Lady Stardust demo sounds like a rip-roaring drunken singalong, while the Hang Onto Yourself demo isn't so sharp and cut-throat. I can't find the latter, but here's the former:

https://youtu.be/tfjj5WmgTNE

The biggest surprise is realising how much I've grown in regards to my musical taste, because I'm finding a lot of gold in the surrounding tracks of his early albums. Space Oddity and Hunky Dory have way more folk-rock cred than I was expecting.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/4/2/7/AAbh80AADRk7.jpg

Man I wasn't even that drunk when I wrote this, lol.

But yeah, Robert Reed and Karen Carpenter are the two celebrities who always make me sad when I think about them.

NeonOctopus posted...

I think what's even funnier is some people who preordered it in some random country actually got the game unlocked and downloaded by mistake. So they get to play Advance Wars while the rest of the world doesnt.

Those Switches are gonna get sold for like $1500

For what it's worth, if Re-Boot Camp never comes out, it's going to be really fucking funny.

man I actually really like Ridge Racer. I wish they'd make a new one.

ch)

Robert Reed is one of the celebrities who makes me feel the most sad, right alongside Karen Carpenter. He lived a tragic life that ended too soon.

He's remembered fondly as Mike Brady, the dad on the Brady Bunch alongside Florence Henderson as the mum. He was a classically trained actor, and he resented his role on the Brady Bunch - he thought it was beneath him, and it caused a lot of tension between him and the top brass.

Sherwood Schwartz, who produced the show, said that Reed would have altercations with him where he disagreed with the script and would demand they follow a different path. Real prima donna shit - but Schwartz said that when tensions had cooled off, Reed's suggestions ended up improving the show. Whenever he went off, he tended to be right and the staff would use his suggestions to make the show better. The last episode of the Brady Bunch, where the oldest son uses the wrong shampoo and dyes his hair orange, famously didn't feature Reed because he thought the concept was shitty.

Exacerbating this was the fact that Robert Reed was gay.

The Brady Bunch was produced in the late 60's through to the mid-70's. Reed's sexuality wouldn't have just sunk his own career, it would have ended the show as a whole because the stigma of hiring a gay man as a wholesome all-American father would be enough to sink the show. Apparently his sexuality was apparent, and his frustration with the role was exacerbated by his struggle to assimilate. But nobody commented on it - they were professionals who were there to do a job.

Despite his bitterness over the saccharine garbage that he viewed the Brady Bunch as, and his numerous clashes with the producers, one place where his unhappiness didn't spill into was his relationships with the cast. Specifically, his relationship with the children - he would take them out for barbeques and to see the great outdoors, and to this day the Brady Bunch cast remembers Robert Reed fondly.

There was a tendency back then - which is unfortunately coming back into vogue now - to portray gay men as predators and rapists and pedophiles and shit. That's compounded by the amount of sexual abuse in Hollywood, with a lot of it occuring on these saccharine family-type sitcoms. An Australian sitcom about a nuclear family was tarnished decades after it had ended because the dad of that show was raping and molesting the youngest member of the cast who played his daughter. The guy from that Christian sitcom, who played Bruce Matheson in It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, admitted to molestation years after the fact. It's rampant and fucked up.

But to this day, the cast have nothing but positive things to say about Robert Reed. One of the actresses, I think the girl who played the youngest daughter Cindy, said that her parents were going through a bitter divorce and that Robert Reed became a surrogate father figure to her during those formulative years. For all of his unhappiness, he never took it out on the children.

Reed lived a private and conservative life. To this day, there's not much record of his personal life outside of his career. But it was a couple weeks before his passing that he called Florence Henderson - someone he had stayed close to, as well as the children in the show - to tell them about his fatal prognosis and sexuality.

Reed had contracted colon cancer. Years after his death, the fact that such a famous gay man had died of ass cancer was something of a punchline; I remember my dad making fun of it when I was younger. He was on his death bed when he called Henderson and asked her to tell the rest of the cast.

But he also disclosed his sexuality for the first time. And like I said, his sexuality was an open secret on the show. But it had never been public knowledge, and he asked Florence Henderson to tell the public when he died.

I'm permanently distraught about Robert Reed. Was he loved in his final days? Did he have people to take care of him, did he know love in the years before his passing?

While he was alive, was Robert Reed happy?

From what I can tell - no.

And it hurts my fucking heart. Because for all the weight he had to carry, all of the shame of being known as the clean-cut, all-American superdad Michael Brady, was a tremendous source of shame for him. He didn't have a partner watching over him during his final days - he died in pain, his only support being his television family from thirty years ago.

He deserved better. He deserved love and care and understanding. All he got was a legacy of being a gay man who died of ass cancer.

He could have been the biggest piece of shit on Earth and taken it out on the people around him. But he cared for the Brady cast like they were his own family. He was always in touch with them, up until the day he died. Nobody had a bad word to say to him, not even the head producer who clashed with Reed so often. And he died in agony, alone.

I will always remember Robert Reed and the life he endured. I wish only for care and understanding for this man, even thirty years after his passing. To be a total fucking hack and paraphrase a line from an Elton John song: if one in ten could ever be that brave, I would never hate again.

Please understand I'm saying this with respect, but honestly this Tamzin Merchant lady looks like she could sell the Danaerys character as the product of generations of inbreeding and a perchant for genocidal madness.

SamsungGearS2 posted...

That was his brother.

In the Vin Diesel "family" sense, or in the sense that the same guy nutted inside the same woman twice

Gobstoppers12 posted...

why did I think Warwick Davis died a while back what the fuck

I think there was a death hoax. I thought he was dead too.

Don't politicize Deez nuts. It's a tragedy.

Boo

Boo Brutai

Boooooo

If you have police officers on your payroll for the explicit purpose of defending your school against an active shooter, who will evacuate the school and refuse to act while people ask them why they're not going to stop an active shooter - why the fuck are you even paying armed law enforcement to defend your school?

Genuinely, what is their role if not to put their lives on the line to stop children from being murdered on mass? If they can't even be spurred on by a concerned public to do their jobs, why are they getting paid?

Country music is relative.

I hate bro country. I hate country music about shitting in your britches and growing potatoes. But there's a point where country music and folk music share a common sound, and they speak truth to power.

Nowadays, that's relegated to "outlaw country" because anything short of slobbering over the concept of law and order is disruptive and beholden to an era of lawless and irresponsible music. That, or it's relegated to a staggeringly more leftie interpretation of folk music.

Chicken Fried is fine. What's with the weird fucking troop worship at the end though? You wouldn't hear motherfuckers like Gram Parsons doing shit like that.

https://youtu.be/1PytxPaU6k4

Kinda hate that the only way we can relate this sort of information is by coaching it in fandom terms.

The galactic empire were fascists. The Prequel's politics were informed by the Bush administration in Revenge of the Sith, but the original trilogy - down to the footsoldiers being called "stormtroopers" - is informed by the second world war.

God forbid you call any part of Star Wars antifascist though. That's critical race theory.

TommyG663513 posted...

The take that, "we should prosecute the parents with RICO charges" is in fact an absurd take.

For buying their child weapons they used to commit mass-murder?

Fuck you.

TommyG663513 posted...

There are just endless bad takes of "this definitely would have prevented this." Or "we should do this in response to this." And none of it ever really makes sense.

Sure, because what about these shootings make sense?

When people heard about Sandy Hook, their first response wasn't "well we should think about the societal and constitutional impact of this shooting, as bad as it is we should consider every possible angle relating to personal freedom to make sure no-one's right to purchase a firearm is impeded". It was "holy fucking shit, kindergarteners were murdered while learning how to read".

You know what kind of shithead shifted the conversation to the second amendment and the freedom of any mouth-breather to own a weapon of mass-murder?

It was Alex Jones. His fanatical insistence that Sandy Hook was a false flag operation emboldened some of the shittiest people alive. A parent of a Sandy Hook victim dedicated his life to trying to educate truthers about what actually happened, and he ended up giving up.

Why?

Because one of the most fanatical truthers asked him to exhume the corpse of his child to prove they were shot to death.

Maybe that initial shocked reaction to Sandy Hook would have been a better reaction than "the only way to stop one bad guy with a gun is one good guy with a gun". Look at the "good guys" who refused to enter the building at the cost of their own lives while 21 other defenseless people lost theirs. They were hired to defend that school, and they failed.

Talk about these bad faith takes about how X or Y would have prevented this shooting, but there are legitimate grievances and ideas about how to prevent more preventable murder that America hasn't taken, because a handful of weapon lobbyists and right-wing fuckheads would rather any dumb fuck with a pulse be able to spend their money on a weapon than they would rather the civilian population of America - schoolchildren or working adult - be save from being shot to death.

You, your partner, your family and your children are more at risk of being shot to death than at any point in history because the people who control the laws about your safety believe more in selling weapons and ammo than your right to live in a safe and free environment.

Topic title is true, we live in the same country. Watch yourself, motherfucker

Jokes aside, I hope you're doing okay tonight TC. We all have our ways of coping so don't take this as like a way to shut down the way you feel, but fwiw I really like seeing you post and whatever has you feeling bad, I hope you know there's a lot of love in the world directed at you in opposition to that.

What kinda music do you like, TC?

Bowie has since passed away, and Dylan is still alive.

How fucking weird is it when your idols and your colleagues outlive your glowing praise for them?

https://youtu.be/KCt1TSY0uwM

I had a moment where I wondered if I was getting old the other day. There was an upbeat cover of If You Could Read My Mind by Gordon Lightfoot, set to a dancey club beat. And after hearing songs like Rasputin and Land Down Under get really grating club covers, this was a step too far and I had the most boomer reaction.

Like I don't get how such an earnest and direct song about heartbreak can be turned into an upbeat club banger. I don't get what people get out of that.

https://youtu.be/v5tr_L31StI

I also just remembered Carolina in my Mind by James Taylor. Lot of lonely folk ballads tonight. idk whether this version has a preamble, but the version of the song in this video is fan-fucking-tastic.

https://youtu.be/67343pHUW5o

Ubisoft sure doesn't.

What do you think they're trying to do with the Critical Race Theory fearmongering?

Glug glug, chums. I'm steering into drinking a little bit so I can unwind better.

I had some Rekorderlig ciders last week, and today I found 500ml bottles of it. The strawberry-lime cider is so fucking good, it tastes like the white part at the top of a strawberry - a bit tart, and savory enough to offset the tangy sweetness of the rest of the strawberry.

Hasn't this final season been going on for the past three years?

This is one reason I support euthanasia.

It's insane to me that we can look at a person die a prolonged death of a cause they will never recover from, even as they tell everyone around them that they don't want to die as a decrepit husk with no control over their bodies or minds, and go "iT's A sLiPpErY sLoPe!! SaNcTiTy Of LiFe!!!".

Better end of life care? Agree completely. Not going to happen while we keep nurses and other healthcare professionals on minimum wage, but it's an admirable ideal. One day, we're all going to die. Wouldn't we want the best care as we face the total shutdown of our elderly bodies and our own impending brain-death? Or shit, if we were going to die in agonizing pain, wouldn't you want the best standard of care to deliver you from that?

But that goes hand in hand with euthanasia. Because it's one thing to face death with humble dignity. It's another to die a degrading death robbed of dignity from a disease you begged your family not to let you die from. It's torture. Watching a person shit themselves in bed until they die, when they told you time and time again that they would genuinely rather be dead before reaching that point - it's fucking harrowing to think about.

We need better end of life care. But we also need to respect the wishes and rights of those who are about to lose all bodily autonomy, and see that fate as a worse alternative to death.

Life is Strange 1 is really good, and True Colors is meant to be really good as well. 2 didn't seem to do numbers.

They're only small games, but the Subsurface games are pretty good. They're dialogue tree games by the same devs as Thomas Was Alone, I've played Subsurface Circular and I really enjoyed it.

Night in the Woods is an absolute must-play as well. It's about 6 hours long, very character-focused and very atmospheric and poignant.

Like, Blacklist Redemption was bad for future tech stuff too, but the shiny silver tech scanners and stuff didn't make their way back into The Blacklist. Some goofy shit did, but nothing like this.

I pay $13 a month for OSRS. I'd probaby be pissed if they hiked up the price like that.

It's a season 7 episode where the Blacklister is Dr. Lewis Powell. He's an AI pioneer with ALS, and he's been making deepfakes to kill off other AI researchers despite being wheelchair-bound and on a respirator.

I want to make a few points.

First of all, this show has always had goofy moments and magical realism for the sake of a memorable and kinda fucked up viewing experience. The Blacklist has its roots in schlocky action media and conspiracy thrillers, and as juicy as the plotline has been getting, the show has always felt like it's bordering on trash TV. There's an episode where a woman kidnaps disabled children, taking them into the woods to live in a forest community until their 13th birthday where they're drugged and thrown down a well to be eaten by carnivorous butterflies. You have to understand - I have a high threshold for this shit. I expect the show to have twists and turns at a breakneck pace, and to be shocking for the sake of being shocking.

Secondly, this is the first season to be impacted by COVID restrictions. They had to animate the season finale in CG, and not just the vehicles and the action sequences - they animate the characters and have them dub their lines. This has really affected the quality of the show, which has a habit of being very "big" - big setpieces, big crowds of extras. Episodes, like "Kuwait", are very obviously reliant on green screens - and it does hurt the quality of the show. So there's already a big downturn in episode quality. It comes with being an ongoing property affected by the pandemic. I get it, and I'm not wholly unsympathetic.

This episode is too schlocky and unbelievable, and I don't think its problems stem from COVID-era production. It is a plot development that feels insulting and cheap, even for the seventh season of a conspiracy thriller action show on a cable network. It is beyond the pale.

So the FBI break into the criminal's apartment when he's not responsive, and they see him at his computer where he's been calling hitmen and plotting his grand scheme. Except plot twist, he's been dead for a few days.

The REAL murderer is an AI.

Not an "algorithm", not a deep web thing. A fully sentient, autonomous AI, that's killing people and destroying AI research because Powell was afraid of the Singularity and the AI decided to send AI research back decades to delay the Singularity. That includes wiping itself as well.

...Look. This show has had a blackmail file about the most powerful secret society on earth. It has had memory manipulation. There's an episode where a Blacklister is known for changing people's DNA - it's schlock all the way down.

And also? I love AI stories. I love stories about fully sentient, autonomous AI and the concept of digital personhood and all that shit.

But seeing The Blacklist, a show known far and wide for middle-aged James Spader in a fedora blowing away bad guys with a pistol, resort to a talking computer screen that commits assassinations and creates unparalleled deepfakes because it's a computer... Fuck, man. I won't say it's the LAST straw, not yet, but it's really fucking close. There's being unbelievable for the sake of being stylish, and there's being a hack. This episode of The Blacklist is a total hackjob. Fuck me sideways.

The worst part is that the previous worst episode of the series was a pointless clip show in season 2. It was in the first half of season 2 so it had a season and a half of clips to choose from. Most of it was a guy asking the main character "What happened next?" before she would explain the plotline of the first season and a half of the show. It was fucking terrible.

This episode was worse. Hands down. What a piece of shit.

So his savings went from $50,000 to $28,000?

It sucks, but he's gonna be fine. Dude can buy a secondhand car for a few thousand dollars like the rest of us, and he's not gonna get booted out on his ass because he has a job and his girlfriend probably contributes to their bills.

I can give him the barest amount of respect for not sinking his entire savings into crypto. That's the best I can do. Because even with his losses, he's gonna be fine.

Solution_45 posted...

age of empires 2

Rise of Nations is a contender too, but AoE2 is in a league of its own.

I agree to a point, I wish the game wasn't just stapled together at the end.

But it's been almost 7 years since MGS5 came out.

We got what we got, and we've gotten as much out of it as we can.

fr fr

My stance is as follows.

Is there a listed version of the game on an active storefront that gives the developers/publishers money? Prioritise that.

Is the game unavailable on all active storefronts, to the point that whether you bought a legitimate copy or not, neither the developers or publishers would ever see a cent of that transaction? I'm not going to complain if someone decides to download an illegal copy of the game. Literally no matter what you do, the institutions who own that game will never see your money again unless they release an updated version on an active storefront.

There's also the issue of archival. I bought Dragon Quest 1 on Switch - but it's a pretty shoddily thrown together phone port with subpar graphics and music. One day, people will want to go back to the NES, GBC or even MSX versions to see how they looked and sounded. I'm certainly curious about the different versions and their differences.

Those systems won't last forever, and as they get older people will get priced out of those versions of the game or won't have the means to run the hardware. Those versions should be preserved in some way so that comparison is possible.

Measures are in place to preserve the game in video form, but it's easy to preserve the actual game data for future players to experience. Those unique ports of the game are worth preserving and documenting for anyone who's interested in them - maybe you don't believe in preserving the actual game data due to issues of legality, but it's the best way to preserve it and allow it to function years into the future after it would otherwise fall into obsoletion.

Since the Switch port is currently live, compatible with modern technology and achievable to find in the wild? Prioritise the Switch port. Or shit, buy it on mobile. It's the same game. Interested in the history? There should be resources available for you to compare and contrast, whether it's images or videos. And one day? The NES, GBC and MSX ROMs should fall into the public domain, and they should be preserved for anyone to check out.

I had all of the third edition games up to Platinum. That one turned me off Pokemon, bolstered by how Black and White never got a Grey version.

You have famous duos like Hall and Oates, Simon and Garfunkel and even Elton John and Bernie Taupin. Sometimes one or both of them can break out on their own, other times it's a symbiotic relationship where both of the artists are needed to make something incredibly special. Not to devalue their solo work, but there's a magic in a great musical partnership, and without that mutual input, an artist's music can be like watching a movie without the dialogue.

Jim Steinman and Meat Loaf were one of the best musical duos ever, in the vein of Elton John and Bernie Taupin. Jim Steinman has this huge, bombastic sound and this overwrought melodramatic style, he's a genius when it comes to big theatrical musical numbers. But I hate to say it, but his voice is pretty weak.

But Meat Loaf matches that energy PERFECTLY. He sings loud and passionately, and he sells the atmosphere with melodrama dripping down his vocal cords. His voice is like a marbled cut of meat, veins of fat rippling through some of the most delicate and pure meat you'll ever have a chance of witnessing. Jim Steinman is the nervous system, the skeleton - but Meat Loaf is the flesh and the heart.

I'm going to use a song that I just found to illustrate my point, because it doesn't have as much baggage as other huge Meat Loaf hits and my point will hopefully come across a little better without that baggage.

This is a song called Left in the Dark, a bitter song about jealousy and infidelity. It's fucked up, the singer is climbing up the walls and demanding where his partner has been, saying that there's no lies on her body so take off your dress - it's toxic as fuck and aged like milk, but it's emotional and big and melodramatic.

This is Jim Steinman's version - it's 8 minutes long, listen through however long you want but I'd recommend trying to get halfway.

https://youtu.be/B6KBkiLr0mg

In my opinion, he's reaching really hard to hit the notes and sell the emotion of the track, but his voice is fragile and it wavers like it's going to break. That isn't bad necessarily, that in itself is a very emotional quality, but it's like the veneer of the song is paper thin and it's about to rip apart.

This is Meat Loaf's version:

https://youtu.be/X5g8PwUHF14

Meat Loaf's vocals make this song. He can sell the overwrought emotional turmoil and jealousy. He can sell the melodrama. I feel like he's gonna break, but that's a compliment to the veneer of the song, which is so much more filled out than in Jim Steinman's version.

It's so depressing because Jim Steinman and Meat Loaf hated each other for a lot of their careers. Bat out of Hell 1 and 2, GOAT albums where they were both on the same page and putting their best work together. But a lot of Meat Loaf's career involves covering Jim Steinman songs without his blessing, like It's All Coming Back To Me Now ("can you touch me like this, can you feel me like that" etc.).

And Meat Loaf needed Jim Steinman too. He was always at his best with Steinman's material behind him. Bat out of Hell 3 is historically a very mixed bag - Meat Loaf had dudes like Justin Hawkins working with him, people who do more theatrical hair/glam metal sort of songs, but it just doesn't fit. Meat Loaf needs an orchestra and a three act play, and his collaborators don't tend to come from that school of songwriting. Jim Steinman is in a class of his own, and Meat Loaf's best work was always with him.

They're both dead now, Steinman in 2021 and Meat Loaf the year after. And it stings knowing they didn't like each other for a lot of their careers. But I think it bears mentioning how great their music was. I'm not saying they're as influential or whatever as Hall and Oates or Simon and Garfunkel, or Elton John and Bernie Taupin. It's like comparing eating a really good cereal to having the best sex of your life. What I am saying is that all of those acts are in a league of their own, and I would submit Meat Loaf and Jim Steinman to another league to which they reigned as kings. Because when they put their skills together, they were at the height of their craft and they were fucking unstoppable.

spanky1 posted...

At this point I have 100% faith in Mission Impossible and Tom Cruise. Its one of the few good things to come out of Hollywood.

For real. It's a shame that anything Tom Cruise puts out is attached to Scientology, but fuck these movies are good.

I think the only bad MI movie was the second one. And of course it had to be the one set in Australia.

I also wanna share my favorite Instant Kill from Strive - Faust runs into his opponents with a wheelchair and the footrest smashes them in the shin, and every character has a unique face they pull in response.

https://youtu.be/SrdCX7hcfGQ

Dizzy has a similar one in Xrd where she fires a massive blast at the opponent, but it misses them by a hair and creates like a 100ft tall mushroom cloud in the background. Chipp's reaction to that one is the best.

More like Haggar's doodle amirite