Lurker > mrmallard

I think it's a real problem when people say that Shinji is trans.

Like, her name is D.Va now!

Except for all the rapists in positions of power, no issue at all.

[LFAQs-redacted-quote]

There are British colonies who were taken over as recently as 1954.

There are a lot of factors, but my understanding is that the first woman prime minister sent police in on horseback to violently assault the working class for striking for better conditions. Things seem to have calmed down somewhat after her reign, with John Major being such a moderate step down that political spoof show Spitting Image lost a lot of its luster after Milk Snatcher got booted, but the general uptick in right-wing ideology, particularly anti-inmigrant and anti-queer viewpoints, brought extremist sacks of shit to the forefront like Theresa May, Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage. This led to Brexit, which fucked Britain so hard in the ass that they were paying more money for food items that had to be downgraded specifically for the UK, and has led to economic crisis after economic crisis as the conservatives spend hundreds of millions of pounds commemorating dead royals as the value of their currency continues to bottom instead of feeding their people before the country goes into default.

Fucking power move. Holy shit.

Good for them

ROBANN_88 posted...

are the sequels good?

afaik, LiS2 didn't do numbers. Totally unrelated cast and story. I didn't play it because I never had an 8th gen gaming machine until the Switch.

True Colours is apparently really good. I'm gonna buy it for myself this Christmas.

Also re: the original game, if you're on the fence try listening to some of the music. Santa Monica Dream by Angus and Julia Stone, In My Life by Amanda Palmer and Obstacles by Syd Matters are very Life-is-Strange-core.

ZannoL posted...

Is Life Is Strange a good game?

I've always been intrigued.

It depends on how much you like those slow, telltale-style adventure games. Life is Strange is unique in that it has a time rewind mechanic, so you solve puzzles and like get extra scenes by rewinding time and trying multiple things to get to the next area.

It's a very homey game. The soundtrack is very chill indie-sounding music like Angus and Julia Stone and a very chill song by Amanda Palmer, it's very character focused, there's a mystery about a disappeared lover and the game goes in a very interesting direction from episode to episode. I like it a lot.

Didn't it just come out on all major platforms? I would absolutely recommend giving it a go.

gdi, I need to learn how to read x_x

Carlbertomfg posted...

Ahhh yes. The classic fallout 2 strategy.

Oh shit. Gotta play Fallout 2 now I guess

I won't say which one you should definitely start playing, but Dark Cloud, Jak and Daxter 1 and Ratchet and Clank 3 are all very, very good games and should be some of your top priorities imo.

As for what games to get out of that list:

MGS2 and 3 are fantastic. 3 is a spy pastiche set in the 60's that's extremely odd but played fairly straight, it's honestly a masterpiece for the story alone. Make sure you get the Subsistence version though, because the original game has a bad camera.

Final Fantasy X is good, X-2 has great gameplay but a divisive story with a much different tone. I'd either wait a while to get into these, or play the remasters for better quality and more content.

GTA3 is significantly aged nowadays, but I liked it. San Andreas is probably pretty aged too, but that game is a masterpiece.

Shadow of the Colossus has a GOAT remake on PS4, and a much more playable PS3 port. The PS2 version is amazing, but the framerate can drop significantly past sub-30fps.

God Hand is stiff and janky, and the humor is gonna be hit or miss. It's worth a go though, the fighting is very customisable and there's a ton of stuff outside of the main gameplay stages to do. This should be a mid-priority pick-up imo.

God of War 1 is okay. God of War 2 fucks severely. Hard recommend.

Persona 3 is a great game, I actually played FES just last year. Persona 4 has a fantastic reputation, I'm looking forward to playing it on Switch. These are some of the biggest cult classic releases on PS2, if you can afford them I would absolutely recommend them.

He was later charged with a seperate charge of child endangerment, after kidnapping a child in the 80's to get his hands on a treasure map to a sunken ship off the coast of California. He was foiled by a talking skateboard at the time, but considering his continued danger to others, prosecutors decided that now would be the best time to charge him and get him behind bars.

TheOnionKnight posted...

I've never seen Shock Treatment since I'd always heard it was worse than Rocky Horror, but this thread is convincing me to check it out. Might watch it sometime this week.

Cool, hope you like it. I like most of the songs in this movie, there's a really synthetic 80's sound to them. I would say that the movie isn't as good as Rocky Horror, so bear with it, but if you can get over the recasting of Brad and Janet and enjoy the music for the most part it's an okay watch. Also, frankly, Patricia Quinn is smoking hot in it.

yeah ngl this shit is for the nichest of niche folks. Will bump again once I wake up bc I worked hard on it.

Lvaneede posted...

I recently learned that my 18 niece is bi and also asexual. I saw she had pride flags up in her bedroom and I asked about it. Im not sure how that works, maybe romantic attraction to either?

Im pretty sure Im aromantic.

Asexuality is a spectrum in itself, it can range from sex-repulsed to "people don't really do it for me, and the act of sex is whatever, but I don't mind doing it as a bonding thing". There's also gray aces/aros, where only a small amount of people who tick just the right boxes activate their sex drives/romantic feelings - like an "only you" sort of thing. Even then, what I've said is a bit of an oversimplification. Asexuality is different for everyone.

Your niece could also be attracted to men and women romantically, but have no desire to have sex with either gender. So like biromantic asexual.

remember when the Oscars gave out an NFT of Chadwick Boseman's face with a 3D render they stole from the person who made it, and then when they could have given him a posthumous Oscar for Da 5 Bloods or just any sort of posthumous award at all, they snubbed him?

I wouldn't plow Elvira, she seems happy in her 20+ year lesbian relationship.

Robot2600 posted...

Life is Strange is one giant queerbait. Still a good game.

I wouldn't quite say LiS is a queerbait game. There's the option to kiss Chloe at the end, and she reciprocates your feelings. The ending where you're driving away from Arcadia Bay can either be friendly or romantic depending on that. I think there's also an option when you're dancing to punk music in Chloe's room that you can go for a kiss too, though idk if that one actually goes through.

Now granted, LiS WAS going to be queerbait. Apparently DONTNOD had just written them as close, quippy former friends with no romantic intentions on Max's part. The Chloe/Max pairing basically ruling over the game's fandom with an iron fist is what got the devs to reconsider, especially since Chloe was already a lesbian and it would offer a different route for players to go down instead of just Warren, which is a great choice for player agency.

DONTNOD were also not hitting the sales figures Square Enix wanted, so if they fucked up the relationship, LiS was going to come and go faster than a Taco Bell fart - even with the positive PR of Chloe/Max, they were under by a fair bit, during an era where Tomb Raider selling 3 million copies for Squeenix was a disappointment for them.

I wouldn't call LiS a queerbait game, though I'm down to hear why it might be.

Medussa posted...

you lost me. original run story?

So I just googled it, and it's not that the Vashta Nerada are trees, but that the reason they're so aggressive in Silence in the Library and the other episode is because the books in that library were made from the forests they lived in.

So less trees, and more microscopic silverfish who lived in trees that got cut down .

The background music reminds me a bit of DanganRonpa 1.

Also, https://youtu.be/anOApXWUS4I

Medussa posted...

A god walks into a franchise

He asks the franchisees "can you make me one with everything?"

I've always liked the music, even if the movie isn't quite as ubiquitous and beloved as Rocky Horror. The fuckin ska song at the start of the song, while corny, sounds awesome. Outside of like two songs, I really enjoy the more synthetic 80's vibe of this soundtrack.

But as I was watching last night, it became clear how much it was trying to spoof fascism? Like of course it's taking on the rampant commercialisation of the eighties and trash TV, it's all a bit on the nose, but the main bad guy in this movie, Farley Flavors, is a fascist. It's the story of how a corrupt corporate head cultivates the fantasy of the ideal American life, calling back to the "golden age" of the 60's, to whip people up into a nationalistic fervour and take advantage of them for his own greed.

Basically, the story of Shock Treatment is that Denton's local TV affiliate, DTV, is purchased - or at least sponsored to the point of becoming a corporate mouthpiece - by a McDonald's spoof called Farley Flavors' Fabulous Fast Food. This is to enact a convoluted plan involving Brad and Janet Majors from the Rocky Horror Picture Show, but the broader goals of this corporate sponsorship are far more wide-reaching and sinister.

The most obvious, on the nose sign of this is that the Farley Flavors company logo is five F's arranged in a circle, which is clearly meant to evoke Nazi imagery - think of that Always Sunny episode, I think the second Chardee MacDennis episode, where Frank hoists a flag with four Fs on it.

Another giveaway is the heavy focus on deep-seated, ingrained symbols of Americana like the idyllic "house with a white picket fence", worshipping the American flag and using its colour scheme to sell products through evoking nationalistic fervour, and the stereotypical 60's ideal of the nuclear family while also explicitly validating bigotry and xenophobia as cornerstones of the American identity. Janet's father is a pawn to peddle Farley's fascist values to the masses, using his hatred of Mexicans and queer people to pander to Denton's TV-viewing public.

There's a focus on pure white and blinding red in DTV's set design, with very little blue in the sets of DTV's programming. The only time that blue comes to the forefront are when everyone goes to sleep - there is very little reprieve from very stark, very draining colour schemes in the sets. When Farley enacts his plan to sell his fascism as "mental health for the state", he appears at a podium with a towering, monochromatic picture of himself behind him. His plan of selling Janet's image as the wholesome girl next door is riddled with hypocrisy, selling her instead as sex appeal while never once letting go of that "girl next door" messaging - the hypocrisy is the point, but the lie also speaks to the state of America's perceived idyllic values that his campaign is promoting.

And Farley is the head of a massive corporation. He's not a politician. He uses the financial force of his business to brute-force his intended messaging through the media, and at the end of the movie he's a fascist figurehead who has all of Denton in straitjackets while he and his collaborators sit at the heart of it all, with no regard for anyone else's prosperity but their own.

There's a greater plot there involving Brad and Janet - mostly Janet - but the broader story of the movie is about these political machinations, leading to the Farley Flavors corporation instilling all of Denton with pride in the company and a great backlash directed at who Farley deems as "the other", leading to "the other" being imprisoned and all of Denton losing their freedom at Farley's behest while he parties.

This theming isn't perfect, and at points it's on the nose to the point of detriment. But I found that my first rewatch of Shock Treatment in years was a lot more prescient than I was expecting, because the whole thing had echoes of Trump and the growing fanaticism of the far-right.

Shock Treatment isn't just a surface-level critique of the excess of the eighties, of the era's growing consumerism and lowbrow, disposable entertainment. It definitely has shades of that, but as shaky as it all was, I found a pretty solid through-line that I didn't fully get when I watched it years ago. Shock Treatment has always been a satirization of fascism, and it's pretty interesting that it came from the machinations of an evil corporation who's sided with someone who's strongly implied to be an actual, card-carrying Nazi from back in the day, and his team of fixers who help to make Farley's fascist goals a reality through their manipulation of Janet and their supposed "mental health" regime consisting of drugs, false imprisonment and pure, petty greed on their part.

Medussa posted...

and the one with the trees. and the other one with the trees.

But the two-parter with the trees was pretty good back in the day.

Medussa posted...

i know i'm in the minority here, but i actually kinda like this one. the monster was just way too cute to hate.

I saw a video comparing the Tsuranga Conundrum with another episode from RTD's run, don't remember which one, but it made a solid point that the episode was a lot less dynamic in the Chibnall era and the Tauranga Conundrum was mostly just corridors instead of shots of the ship and stuff.

That being said, I agree with you - the Tsuranga Conundrum, even as a pretty mid episode of the show, was one of the more watchable ones of series 11. I liked the P'Ting, and I think this was when I first started shipping Thasmin because it was yet another episode where - as flat as she was portrayed - the Doctor teamed up with Yaz to get to the bottom of things, and they had a part where the Doctor was protecting Yaz and I just realised how much Yaz had fallen into the default companion role because Ryan and Graham were always pairing up to advance their half-baked "granddad" arc.

And as horseshit as Arachnids in the UK was, that absolutely solidified my view of Thasmin as a romantic ship with Yaz's view of the Doctor at the end of the episode.

Love and Monsters isn't a great episode. It's not even particularly good. But upon reflection, I think I can genuinely say it has some bizarre... watchability, for the most part. The Doctor and Rose parts are hokey and rushed, the story as narrated by the central character is largely ineffective and goes nowhere, and the revelation of his girlfriend becoming a sentient piece of concrete is rightfully mocked as being bizarre and creepy.

I still think it's less horseshit than the Mind Virus episode that banks entirely on creepypasta cred, the episode with the "first non-binary Doctor Who character" who's a slow-witted clone bodyguard who the characters treat as subhuman, and arguably even Orphan 57. I genuinely don't think Love and Monsters is the nadir of the show that people paint it as, the show has sunk lower - but when it came out, it absolutely was the nadir of the revival, so I get it. At this point, it's a poorly handled curio and arguably the worst Doctor-lite episode of the show.

Also, the worst part about Fear Her is that the child actor isn't really up to snuff. I honestly think that episode isn't so bad, and it gave us Doctor Who at the Olympic Games which led to a big fan push at the actual 2012 Olympic Games. It's a low-stakes, low-budget story, but it's honestly inoffensive enough. Love and Monsters, I get the backlash. Fear Her, I don't know how people put it on the exact same level.

If we're talking about disappointing episodes of series 2 though, I would put forward the Idiot's Lantern, where the Doctor and Rose urge a young man to reconcile with his physically and emotionally abusive father because "he's your dad".

You mean that album I haven't heard a single song from?

She's fine, I like stuff like Getaway Car, but I legit haven't heard any of her newest music on the radio yet.

I remember a while back when Arin Hanson was on Tumblr, and people were messaging him asking him to come out as bisexual because it would mean so much to queer fans. This stems from the frequent honoeroticism he displays on Game Grumps. I don't even remember if he responded, but I remember the conversation getting so heated and the stakes of his sexuality getting so high that he never logged back on.

As far as he's shared, he's a hetero man who's had some gay experiences in a way that reinforce his attraction to women, because he's secure enough in his sexuality and his lack of attraction during those gay experiences to know definitively that he's attracted to women. But even if he was bi, trying to guilt someone into coming out is a shitty thing to do and there's no justification for it.

The most famous actor/actress in the world could be rampantly, 100%, all the way out queer behind closed doors, but they could display themselves as nothing but heterosexual in their public lives and in their career. At no point is anyone, from the most secluded hermit to the most well-known and influential person on earth, somehow honor-bound to disclose their sexuality for anyone else's benefit or comfort but their own.

This was a shitty thing that happened, and I hope this Kit guy ends up being okay.

Shut the fuck up Tails

Etna posted...

Making a joke at the expense of someone who was killed will get you modded

The intention was moreso to highlight how selfish and inept this cop was, but I did a really poor job of it and it does come off in poor taste. That's my bad, sorry.

Protect and Serve, more like Pizza and Swerve

Holy_Cloud105 posted...

I dunno, wanting to see MC again isn't so unreasonable. Everyone else just wanted to be an asshole about it. Aegis on the other hand is the reason MC's life is so fucked up but everyone loves the toaster for some reason.

It's not her fault. SEES and fuckin turtleneck mcgee were using untested weapons, a kid got caught in the crossfire. Aigis was a tool, and the latter half of the game is about her becoming a human. She has a very sweet character arc to the point that she is basically the main character by the end of the game - I love her.

I think Yukari's deal is partially dub-induced. Like you get characters who despair over a lost loved one and would sink to any low if it meant being with them again a whole lot in anime, and she is pretty explicitly avoiding SEES to avoid her trauma over the MC dying, only to be roped back in with the prospect of bringing him back to life. It does lead to her treating everyone like shit and pitting everyone against each other in a death battle, but that sort of desperation and anguish is a common enough anime trope that most people don't really fault.

Whereas American media doesn't really do that, at least not in the same way Japan does it. It's usually perceived as whiny and selfish, because nobody ever fully commits to the trope and sells the weight of that. I think that hurts the delivery, because rather than taking it over the top and selling Yukari's vulnerability and loss, the VA sounds like a disgruntled valley girl. Honestly, the scene where Aigis gets all the keys and Yukari tries to stop her redeemed Yukari's character arc in The Answer for me - but the dub was lacking compared to what the cutscene was trying to convey which is what got the gears turning.

Yukari is a very popular character in Japan, and apparently The Answer was fairly well-received over there. I think the actual storyline, the content, is fine because it highlights exactly how broken the MC's death left Yukari. Rather, I think what lets The Answer down is the dub performance stemming from inadequate direction and cultural differences. The mode itself is a bit tedious, but I honestly liked it way more than I thought I would based on its reputation.

MICHALECOLE posted...

Check out his Lucy in the sky with diamonds cover at your own risk

Also, he made a shitty disco album called Victim of Love. It is completely, unambiguously unforgivable in how terrible it is.

I love disco. This album is a fucking affront to disco.

It really is a masterpiece

Stallion_Prime posted...

I was making fun of the way you type lol

I was posting Mountain Goats lyrics

https://youtu.be/fI6MVrfnK2Y

The Phantasy Star remake was a budget game with cheapo graphics, made for a series of budget games. The Switch port is a pixel-perfect port with built-in guides and the option to play with FM sound.

I feel like we deify stuff like the PS2 ports of Phantasy Star because they sound awesome on paper, but most people don't realise it was a cheapo budget release that reviewed worse than the original because it was a soulless cash-grab that barely had any effort put into it. It's a neat curio, but it isn't the be-all end-all of Phantasy Star and the original game - flaws and all - stands out on its own.

Good taste TC

cool ky kiske combo

Tsukasa1891 posted...

Are you implying there's Lightning/Fang lesbian fanfiction that isn't futa?

There is absolutely Lightning/Fang lesbian fanfic that isn't futa.

[LFAQs-redacted-quote]

I feel like futa doesn't translate to the written medium as well as it does to the visual one.

Flauros posted...

Hey, don't judge

It's 4.30 am and nobody's up, guess it's time to read Lightning/Fang fanfiction until I fall asleep

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/8/7/6/AAbh80AAD1Fk.jpg
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/8/7/7/AAbh80AAD1Fl.jpg
You know what that is? Growth.

The_Wheelman1 posted...

That was it? Booo

cool ky kiske combo

pegusus123456 posted...

Additional counterpoint: Titans is such a garbage show that the skin colors of the characters would not even be in the top twenty issues.

The first season of Titans was way better than it had any right to be. "Redhead erasure" is a garbage meme, the lady playing Starfire was fine.

Gremlynn posted...

it's an extremely rare trait, with a history of extreme discrimination.

https://youtu.be/EY39fkmqKBM

https://youtu.be/JB41AR-sLFg

Stallion_Prime posted...

Why do speak for me that way?

And why do you try to break my spirit?

I think someone was mean to you when you were little, that's what I think. I think someone was mean to you.

Great topic, bupkis

Hell yeah, now you've just gotta shoot this baby out like a t-shirt cannon

Stallion_Prime posted...

Sucks* fixed your typo

Wow. Wish you for hit by a train >_>