Lurker > ParanoidObsessive

I like YongYea, though you're going to get a lot of the same stuff from him that you get from Sterling, just with more professionalism and less of the comedic aspects.

There are probably a few others, but a lot of them are more specialized, and kind of depend on what sort of games you're actually interested in. Like, for example, I kind of like Total Biscuit, but he's like 90% focused on PC games exclusively, so most of what he says isn't all that applicable to my worldview.


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shadowsword87 posted...

Never heard of it, never played it, never met anyone who has played it.

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A Tesla in every garage!


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minervo posted...

Dragon Age Inquisition vs Witcher 3

One is a good game.

The other is Dragon Age: Inquisition.


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Millard Fillmore

http://www.amazon.com/Remarkable-Millard-Fillmore-Unbelievable-Forgotten/dp/0307339629



knivesX2004 posted...

Scloud posted...

People who say Donald Trump must be kidding me.

They're just trolls.
Just ignore them.

To be fair, the topic asks who your favorite President is, not who you think was objectively best or the most productive or accepted by the nation as a whole. And whether out of morbid amusement by his hijinks, or because you love how he tends to piss off a very specific sort of person the most (which may be a specific sort of person you also dislike), or just because you hate the system as a whole and are hoping he eventually burns the whole fucking thing down, there are plenty of valid reasons why someone my see him as their favorite.

Hell, even "because I loved his WrestleMania appearances" would be a valid reason if you don't really care all that much about previous Presidents (or actively dislike a lot of the more recent ones).

I mean, fuck, Clinton was a terrible President yet tons of 90s kids only ever see him as "that guy who seemed like he'd be a cool dude to go have drinks with" and use that to justify why they consider him the bestest President evar, so the standard we've already set for ourselves is pretty damned low.


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Poking in for a quick bit - I should probably be around more often soon, as I'm starting to get a bit more free time back again. But just wanted to ask a question (mainly for Shadow, but really for anyone if it applies):

Has anyone played/is anyone aware of Legacy of Dragonholt? I just sort of became aware of it, and I find the premise interesting. But I'd also like to hear what other people have to say about it if they've got first-hand experience.


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The real problem is that all of the old nostalgia skins are from v9, which was from like 2004 and earlier.

To this day I still say that v11 looked the best (with some of the functionality from v12 and later admittedly being worthwhile as well), and I would absolutely love it if someone designed a skin from that era, but pretty much everyone with technical talent stopped giving a single shit about this site years ago (and I include the people actually running this site in that statement), so that's never going to happen.

Instead, I'm mostly just parked on a slightly custom version of v13 that I always sort of slightly resent.


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A friend of mine had a job just out of high school, where he was pretty much convinced he was actually working for the Russian Mafia.

At the time, the secretary there was a Russian redhead who was apparently like 9/10 or even 10/10 super-hot, but who was also apparently a Grade-A turbo c***.

This has shaped at least some of my perception of Russian women since then.


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Chelle wasn't even that attractive if you subtract the fact that it was a guy posting and just base it on the actual girl in the pictures.

And honestly, PotD has probably had about a dozen other female posters who were actually female who were way more attractive. Granted, none of them post here anymore, but then again, neither does "Chelle".


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Zeus posted...

Not many states have that. His state certainly doesn't, neither does mine. Plus even in common law marriage states, you can file for an exemption.

It also usually hinges on a couple legally living together. Technically speaking, you could theoretically continue to live in separate residences and just "date" without triggering most of the usual common law flags.

The government generally doesn't care (except in cases where one half of the couple makes it an issue by pursuing legal grounds ex post facto to claim common law marriage in a bid to seize assets), because by staying officially separate you're both accepting the tax "penalty" for being single, and assuming the burden of having trouble sharing the same insurance benefits. A LOT of things in the US are essentially skewed to reward marriage and punish long-term singlehood.



pionear posted...

Well, I think this guy is just a rarity...I guess it's mutual for both of them (like Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell)

I always made it a point while dating to lay it out very early in a relationship that I had absolutely no desire to ever get married or have kids, and if the woman I was with at the time ever saw either of those things being part of her future, she might be better off finding someone who shared her interest rather than staying with me with the idea that she'd "change" me or otherwise badger me into it. Especially since I'm an incredibly stubborn motherfucker, and that kind of pressure would probably just make me even more opposed to the idea.

But you'd be kind of surprised how many women you can meet who have absolutely no interest in having kids or getting married. Moreso these days than ever before, most likely, but I honestly rarely brought it up to anyone who was adamantly offended by the idea or who acted like it was a total dealbreaker. As long as your open and up-front about it, you may find more women who are receptive to the idea than you'd expect (especially in an era when women are being raised to have interests and careers and lives of their own outside of just being babymakers and some man's property).

I've probably known at least a half-dozen different women who felt really strongly about never having kids and who never really cared about the whole idea of marriage (especially because a lot of the appeal of the idea of marriage is family-oriented, which goes away when you don't want kids), and a couple of those also live with long-term boyfriends they're probably never going to marry. It's not like I found the one-in-a-million catch who would tolerate my crazy eccentricities and would have been a forever alone if I'd failed to lock her down.


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OhhhJa posted...

Ogurisama posted...

It fits the definition of a cult more then a religion

There's really no difference between the two

As the old saying goes, the only difference between a cult and a religion is how many followers believe in it.


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I'd mostly react with horror that I was somehow tricked or brainwashed into marriage when I loathe the entire institution and have sworn never to marry anyone, ever, under any circumstances.

I'd keep fucking them, though, because I don't actually care about the concept of incest, and for 99.99% of human history, anything more distant than first cousins wasn't even incest anyway.


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I also know Tolkien existed, but that doesn't mean that Middle Earth was ever a real place/time period.



And to be completely fair, we know plenty of other religious leaders who existed (and we have tangible proof or at least documented evidence of such), so that wouldn't even be a point of contention anyway


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Mead posted...

What exactly makes you so sure he is innocent? Because you feel bad for him?

This is a Zikten topic. I assume it's like looking into a mirror for him.


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I'm also not reading the story, because that site is a massive shitheap of poor coding and shitty "journalism".

But I feel like ignorance should be a prosecutable offense, so if you're stupid enough to flip off a cop and then be surprised/indignant when consequences occur, you probably deserve multiple tickets. And possibly a nightstick enema.


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Would depend on how he broke up with her, and if he was planning to try and get back together with her after he'd got the screwing around out of his system.

I'd probably also factor in the state of his relationship before the opportunity to get some strange popped up in the first place - if you're in a miserable relationship and your girlfriend is a massive bitch, taking the opportunity to escape that mess in favor of hooking up with someone else is way more understandable than if you're in a relationship with a sweet, loving, compromising girl who usually lets you get your way, and you're really only dumping her because some easy chick with bigger tits decided to spread her legs for you.


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shadowsword87 posted...

Have mods finally started caring about CE people coming here?

People probably started marking them.

In the old days, any topic with "Hi, I'm from [insert other board here]" as a title or in the initial post generally got modded pretty quickly for "board invasion" (even if it really wasn't much of an "invasion", per se), mainly because that shit could get ugly really quick, and it was always in everyone's best interests to clamp down on it ASAP.

I think enforcement of that grew more and more lax over the last few years mainly because board invasions sort of died out as a thing as most users just sort of stopped caring, but it never really stopped being a thing in the ToS.

If a spate of those sorts of topics started riling up PotDers, it wouldn't take much effort for even just a few people to start marking them all, pushing them right up the queue to the top, where they'd get (rightly) modded in a "fair, next" sort of scenario. You don't really need an active mod deliberately patrolling the board for that - we've sort of demonstrated in the past that we're very, very good at getting topics deleted when they sort of annoy us on a PotD group identity sort of level (or when the user in question is just hated by like 80% of the board and everyone is actively looking to torpedo them).


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I've been in a serious relationship with the same woman for almost 20 years now, and I still won't propose to her. So the odds of me proposing to someone I just met a week ago are pretty damned minuscule


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Zeus posted...

Otherwise it's not like they didn't heavily push Rusev in the past. He's no Zack Ryder.

They really didn't, though. They kind of half-ass pushed him as generic heel/comedy act early on, then started pushing him more seriously as an upper midcarder for a bit, but then they smacked him back down with multiple jobs to punish him for the whole issue they had over him and Lana getting married (just like they punished Ambrose and Renee Young later - the WWE can be incredibly petty assholes about that sort of thing). He's never really had a sustained run where the company clearly sees him as a top guy with the potential to generate fan interest (either as a heel or a face). Even the brand split - which theoretically opened up more top spots for guys to fill - completely failed to give him an opportunity to really excel.

But that's not the problem regardless. The problem is that the WWE seems to actively de-push people for getting themselves over when they're not officially scripted to "get over".

Rusev's not the only one who seems to suffer from that (nor was Zack Ryder). They seem to do it to almost anyone who manages to get over on their own, using social media or other "unofficial" methods (even including Talking Smack when it was a thing). Basically, unless the booking crew and writing staff officially deem you to be the next big main event draw, they don't want you getting in the way of their planned agenda.

The irony of course being that "the guy" they've officially anointed to be the future #1 face of the company keeps getting repeatedly shat on by the fans, more and more so with every attempt they make to push him to the moon. In the old days, the WWE/WWF (and honestly, most other companies and territories that have ever existed in the industry) would absolutely listen to the fan reaction and push the guy they clearly want to be #1 while abandoning the guy they clearly dislike, but whether it's the lack of competition, Vince becoming more and more stubborn in his old age, or Stephanie and HHH having disdain for the fans, the company line has basically become "THERE CAN BE NO DEVIATION FROM THE MASTER PLAN. ALL RESISTANCE MUST BE CRUSHED."

And when a charming, charismatic wrestler that's not supposed to get out of the midcard starts winning fans over by being funny or awesome or badass (you know, like Austin, the Rock, Mick Foley, or even DX as a group did), that's a dangerous thing - because it makes the less talented, poorly-written lead you've chosen to be your star look bad, and just reinforced the crowd's dislike. So to protect your investment, you basically wind up sacrificing what could have been a far better opportunity. All because pride won't allow you to accept that the fans should actually have some say in who gets pushed and who doesn't.

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Zeus posted...

Well, excluding Asuka's boring undefeated streak.

You find it boring, but it's probably worth noting that she's only been on the Raw roster for about three months, and yet she's basically the second-most over woman on the brand and probably the third-most over in the company as a whole.

And when she was in NXT, that same type of booking basically made her the most popular woman the brand had.

Booking a wrestler as an unbeatable unstoppable force just tends to work. It's basically how Hogan and the Ultimate Warrior got over in the 80s, it's how Goldberg got over in the 90s (to the point where he still generates huge nostalgia pops, in spite of how badly he was handled in the 00s), and it's basically how they got Braun over in the last year or so (which is why it was especially telling why he lost a bit of heat when he got beat by Brock, and they had to rebuild him a bit from there by having him flip garbage trucks and pulling down rigging).

The downside is that you have to feed those sorts of pushes by sacrificing other wrestlers, but if the alternative is a bland 50-50 booking style where everyone "gets their win back" after every loss, then nobody is getting over anyway.

It's similar to their current perception that "titles don't matter, they're just props" (a statement that shows a profound lack of understanding of what a prop actually IS and what purpose it is supposed to serve narratively) - Road Dogg basically summed up their point of view by saying flat out that "wins and loses don't actually matter". But they do. Because wins are absolutely what helps convince the audience to care about and cheer for a wrestler, while constantly jobbing is the best way to convince the audience to stop caring about that wrestler entirely (just ask Dolph Ziggler).



Zeus posted...

Matt Hardy is *exactly* the kind of wrestler who got over huge at another company and who they brought in as a result. If not for that stupid lawsuit, he may have been a main event guy. After all, WWE's comedy writers would *love* a chance to do goofy shit there.

At this point, that's not even remotely Matt's problem. The lawsuit is over, he's got the rights on lock, and can pretty much be broken whenever he wants (and "woken" in the WWE itself just for merch rights and future-proofing), and they're still fucking him up left, right, and center.

He's the perfect example of the modern WWE's desperate reliance on a team of writers who don't actually seem to be very good at their jobs, at the expense of wrestlers with natural charisma and the ability to get themselves over, who are told to shut up, stop improvising, and just read the lines they're given (which is why so many of them sound so wooden and unnatural in promos these days). The way he's being written in his feud with Bray seems to capture exactly none of the things that got him over as broken in the first place. It feels like there isn't a single writer in their conference room that actually understands what fans liked about Final Deletion and the gimmick as a whole, so they're focused on superficial stuff like Matt laughing, and you can clearly see crowd interest in Matt slowly dying with every passing week.

Bringing in Borash could theoretically help, but I don't see them actually giving him any power or influence in any meaningful way that would change things, so I doubt it will. My crystal ball outlook is that they basically just keep wasting Matt until his contract runs out and he goes back to doing RoH or New Japan shows, resparking fan interest once he can actually start writing his own stuff again.


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yutterh posted...

Season 2 felt rushed and it was obviously rushed when I looked into why it was the last season.

If I remember correctly, the problem was that the producers were under the impression that they were going to get four seasons, and then when the show got cancelled, they basically took a ton of stuff that was supposed to happen in the last two seasons and crammed it into the second, so you wind up with what is basically three seasons worth of plot all at once.

It's definitely jarring, and kind of mars the show as a whole, but it was a pretty good series in spite of that.


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TheOrangeMisfit posted...

So don't fix it. Who cares what your car looks like as long as it works?

To be fair, if your car looks like a total shitheap, it can actually increase the odds that police will pull you over for minor infractions they might otherwise have let you get away with.


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Dynalo posted...

I got tired of constantly running out of space and just threw a 2TB drive into my PS4.

I always dither about doing that. On the one hand, I'm kind of a data hoarder and I don't like deleting old game installs out of my hard drive even if I haven't played them in like forever, but on the other hand I'm a lazy procrastinator and can't muster up the energy or motivation to actually care enough to buy a hard drive.

I'll probably get pushed into doing it if GTA:O and ESO keep getting bigger and bigger updates to the point where they eventually can't co-exist on the same stock hard drive, but until then I can still sort of juggle the games I'm actively using without too much trouble.


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My PS4 has told me to clear memory space for updates for other games before, only to have it take up a much smaller amount than the space I already had empty and available. It's happened for at least a couple different games for me.

The PS4 is finnicky that way.


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The Wave Master posted...

I wish WWE would get back to using managers, versus throwing people in a stupid tag team, or a failed stable.

Vince hates managers, tag teams, and factions - so you probably won't see any of that actual "getting wrestlers over" nonsense until after he's dead (or totally gone and running the new XFL) and Trips takes over.

Of course, it also doesn't help that the WWE has convinced themselves that 50-50 booking doesn't kill momentum and is somehow the best possible way to push their talent in spite of the fact that they haven't really gotten anyone over using it in the last 10+ years or so.

It's very telling that the most over people in their company are all people who got over somewhere else and they brought the buzz in with them (or otherwise pushed themselves in the eyes of the fans).

It's even more telling that most of the talent that manages to get itself over without being the "approved" designated star get jobbed out and de-pushed into oblivion (hello there Rusev and Matt Hardy, my condolences! Zack Ryder has tissues for you if you need to have a good cry).


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Oh, and to answer the actual topic question, I haven't decided yet if I'm going to watch the game, because none of my friends are doing a full-on party this year, so if I watch at all it will just be my one buddy and I hanging out and watching with our significant others.

But I dislike both the Iggles (they're one of my team's rivals) and the Patriots (because they're my sister-in-law's team, and I always enjoy rooting against the teams of all of my family members), and I'm still coming off a fairly long cold which means I won't drink, so I don't know if I really feel like hanging out and watching the game (and no matter how often people parrot the idea, the commercials haven't really been worth watching for almost 20 years now).

I might just chill at home and watch hours and hours worth of Puppy Bowl.


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Zikten posted...

there is like a Turkey Bowl or something on Thanksgiving.

It's not a "Turkey Bowl".

Basically, for decades now, the league has scheduled the two games for that given week for the Cowboys (and whoever their opponents are) and the Lions (and whoever their opponents are) to take place on Thursday (ie, Thanksgiving) instead of Sunday or Monday. Those are the football games most Americans are watching on Thanksgiving - with one being the earlier game, and the other being the later game, so there's football on for most of the day after the multiple Thanksgiving parades (always THE one in New York, occasionally the one in Chicago, sometimes one in California/Florida/Hawaii or other places, depending on which channel gets the rights to which parade) finish earlier in the day.

The reasons why it's always the Cowboys and Lions (in spite of the fact that lots of people hate the Cowboys, and the Lions usually suck) goes back to even before I was born, but it basically boils down to the fact that they were both relatively popular and competitive teams when they first came up with the idea, and then TRADITION sort of locked them into place in perpetuity.

Recently (about 10 years ago, that's recently to old people like me), the league added a third game to the mix, with different teams each year, mostly to shut up everyone who wasn't the Cowboys or Lions, because a lot of the other teams wanted a piece of the lucrative TV revenue pie.

Plus, there are usually college games happening for people who care about that sort of thing, but 99% of the time, when people talk about football on Thanksgiving they mean the NFL games (and the window around New Years' is when most of the college Bowl games happen, so that's more college's iconic holiday).


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Metal_Mario99 posted...

Boy, everyone in this thread sure hates a winner, don't they? I guess the Green Goblin was right.

To be fair, it's easy to hate a team that has been repeatedly caught cheating to win, and even when they're playing "fair" are still one of the "richest" teams in the entire league (part of why the Cowboys get a lot of hate as well - and both the Patriots and the Cowboys also eat a bit of backlash from the BS "America's Team" PR reputations the teams have).

It's sort of the same reason why the two most hated baseball teams are the Yankees and the Red Sox, regardless of whether or not they're winning. It's not so much whether or not you win or lose, as much as it is HOW you win or lose.


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LinkPizza posted...

I don't think he's that new...

No one on this board is new. Literally every single poster here has either been here since 2011, or is someone who has been here since 2011 but is pretending to be new by hiding behind a new, blatant alt account.


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supergamer19 posted...

not even downtown

I'm starting to detect the source of your problems.


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Ashley Graham has never really been fat enough to fall into the usual sort of classification BBW was meant to define.

The fact that they always push her that way actually probably has a net negative effect on female self-esteem, because it comes across like saying that any woman who is even slightly larger than waifish is automatically a fatso, even if in some cases we're willing to act like they're acceptably attractive. But actual fat people are still 100% uggos, obviously.


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Zikten posted...

Ultimate was fucked up.

A lot of the Ultimate universe was just Mark Millar doing his usual "Look at how edgelord I can be!" shtick. It's part of why you got the whole "Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch are fucking, and everyone else is perfectly fine with it and give Cap crap over it because it's apparently only his old-fogey values that make him find incest kind of squicky" storyline for a bit.

It also doesn't really help that the other main voices of Ultimate Marvel were Bendis and Warren Ellis, who have sacksful of issues themselves. Basically, any time you've rolled your eyes at a comic storyline in the last 15 years or so, it was probably one of those three (or Morrison) who wrote it.


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The Wave Master posted...

Thanks for keeping the topic going. My wife and I have been really sick with the flu and resulting upper respiratory Infections.

I've had the flu for like 2 weeks now. Only just starting to get over it myself.

The first few days were the worst for me, though. Shivers, chills, threw up a few times, hacking cough that had me huffing Vicks vapo-rub, etc. After about day five it just sort of slowly morphed into normal cold symptoms.

Though I wasn't actually to sleep for the first ten days straight. I think the only reason I didn't start having psychotic hallucinations is because I was managing microsleeps (like little 30 second total blackout moments). It really sucks when you feel completely exhausted and sleepy to the point of not being able to keep your eyes open, but the moment you lay down in bed you just sort of lay there awake in silence for hours.


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LeetCheet posted...

She looks kinda young though.

Was going to say, she looks 12.

Then again, as I get older, everyone young starts looking too young to me. At this point it sort of feels like everyone younger than 25 is a toddler.


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Because something had to be first, and the Phoenicians decided to start with "alep". And then no one bothered to change it later (A and B seem relatively unchangeable, though a lot of the letters that follow have shifted around over the years - for example, with the third letter eventually splitting into C and G, while Z moved from 7th to last).


Related Fun Fact: a lot of people don't realize that the entire reason it's called the "alphabet" in the first place is from the first two letters of its Greek version, "Alpha Beta" (sort of the equivalent of when modern people refer to it as the "A-B-C's"). It's entirely possible that part of why A and B seem so absolutely locked in to their first and second positions is because we got into the habit of using them to refer to the whole group, so the idea of them being the primary letters became culturally ingrained (in the same way people who refer to the A-B-C's would probably find it incredibly odd to refer to them as the P-F-Z's instead).


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Zeus posted...

I thought you hated the term and concept of 90s kids, yet here you are using it >_>

You might be confusing me with someone else - I've never had a problem with the term or concept of "90s kids". In fact, I've argued that it's a far more accurate and meaningful demographic than trying to break down people into the old "Gen X/Gen Y/Millennial" categories, because those are more rooted in older generational cohorts, and I don't think those apply as well any more in the age of television-spurred pop culture and rapid turnover.

Breaking people into 20-year or 30-year generational groups worked well enough in the past when the pace of life and current events moved slower, but is far less useful in the modern world where worldview can entirely shift in the span of a single decade. At the moment defining people more as "80s kid/90s kid/00s kid/etc" seems to be a more effective breakdown (and in the future, we may have to granulate that even more down to, say, "early XX kid/late XX kid" if the pace of cultural shift grows even faster due to the Internet - conversely, the Internet and diversification of pop culture in general may render generational cohorts almost meaningless as every individual sort of grows up in their own self-selected bubble of awareness).

On the other hand, I DO shit on "90s kids" all the time in the sense that they seem to be the largest concentration of people active online in social media spaces, whereas almost all of my childhood nostalgia is rooted in the 80s. So every time someone goes "Ooooh, look, nostalgia!", I'm usually like "Ehh, fuck you, junior."



Zeus posted...

Did you also just skip the Fear Street series? Seems like you would have been *right* in that demo, considering it was aimed a bit older (overlooking that Stine generally shied from mature situations) and came out a bit sooner.

I feel like it wasn't as mainstream as Goosebumps became, so in turn it wasn't really as culturally ubiquitous, and thus, easier to miss. That, combined with the fact that I was never really into horror all that much (I went hard into fantasy pretty early and just never came back, at least were fiction is concerned), means it wasn't really on my radar until it was already too late for me to really appreciate it.

I feel like my "young horror phase" pretty much started and ended with this:

http://www.amazon.com/Still-More-Tales-Midnight-Hour/dp/0590420275
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tales_for_the_Midnight_Hour



Zeus posted...

Otherwise I'm not sure what CYOAs he wrote, although I'm guessing it was a knockoff series? I can't seem to find anything listed in his bibliography.

I said "CYOA-style" books. As in books that have the "make a choice and turn to page X" mechanic, but not necessarily books that were released under the actual CYOA brand.

There were literally hundreds of series that followed that model (which is why http://gamebooks.org exists to catalogue all of them), and I personally owned (and still own) books from dozens of different series (I have a bookcase with about 4 full shelves just devoted to them, and they were like 98% of my childhood book buying from age 9 to around 12).

In R.L. Stine's specific case, I literally listed links directly below that sentence that link to pretty much every book like that he wrote. Conversely, I could also have posted this:

http://gamebooks.org/Person/644

His brother and sister-and-law also used to write those kind of books as a pair around the same time:

http://gamebooks.org/Person/648


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"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
"POwned again." --- blight family

If anything, the one sweeping change that might actually improve the political morass that would be acceptable to a majority of the populace might be to outlaw political ads and campaign tours, in an attempt to minimize the influence of pure propaganda on elections, with each candidate being required to submit their credentials, qualifications, and official political stances to public scrutiny, so that people can intellectually evaluate and compare candidates without the existing PR spin machine turning the whole mess into a popularity contest more than a political race.

It would also, in theory, open candidacy up to potential candidates who can't afford to spend $80+ million on ad campaigns (or allow themselves to be bought and paid for by lobbiests and PACs who help pay for those campaigns), which might help break up the parade of terrible either/or choices we keep being asked to choose between.

The downside there is that rich candidates would still be able to propagandize by astroturfing online, with "supporters" stumping for them via social media and so on, so you'd probably be right back in the same boat.

Other "cures" would include breaking up the two-party system so every issue doesn't automatically become an either/or extremist vote, or altering the system to discourage "career" politicians in favor of successful private sector individuals who serve a term or two and then return to their former lives, but those also come with their own new unique problems as well.

Basically, the system is broken as fuck, but most proposed solutions either wouldn't work, or would cause a ton of new problems even if they fixed some of the old ones.


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"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
"POwned again." --- blight family

Zeus posted...

I've flipped back and forth on the issue of who should be allowed to have a say in government. In general, I think democratic societies would benefit from a bare minimum of a simple multiple-choice political literacy test so votes from people who know absolutely nothing about the candidates' policy and history can be excluded. The only drawback is that it would inevitably become politicized because, well, power likes keeping power.

It's also somewhat anathema in the US because of the use of similar poll tests and the like post-Civil War to repress black voters, so any suggestion of "requirements" to vote in the US almost always trigger a visceral negative response.

And to be fair, requirements WOULD disenfranchise a segment of the voter base (it would have to, considering that's the entire point of having those requirements), and it wouldn't be a random sampling (ie, the tests would almost certainly skew towards higher education levels and higher affluence, which goes right back to the idea of the lower class being discriminated against by "the rich", not to mention scenarios like with the SAT where the argument is that the questions skew culturally to older, whiter families and bias against more ethnic communities and newer immigrants). And then you'd almost certainly run into the problem of activist groups who are opposed to the idea of such poll tests going out of their way to steal or access poll questions in advance and distribute them digitally so voters could cheat their way to passing grades to get the vote, which opens up entirely different cans of worms.

As terrible as the current system is, it would be hard to do anything other than a representative government with universal democratic suffrage to elect representatives without a massive backlash in the current environment. If anything, we're more likely to swing the other way, what with so many cries from people to do away with the Electoral College (and most of those cries coming from people who don't actually understand the Electoral College, sort of ironically demonstrating the entire point of the Electoral College).



Zeus posted...

While the biggest problem with government is people -- both the voters and officials -- if people were competent, naturally industrious, and kind, we'd hardly need government at all.

As much as it became the "trendy Internet hipster/angsty teen" thing to quote/reference George Carlin for a while, his observation on the political system in still fairly apropos. "Garbage in, garbage out" is a fairly succinct analysis of why we always seem to wind up with terrible politicians and broken systems.

Which is part of what makes actual democracy (not the fake smoke and mirrors representative democracy we currently have in the US, in spite of so many Americans not seemingly realizing that fact) such a hard sell when you seriously consider it. Even aside from the sort of arguments like about how democracy is essentially two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner, you're still expected flawed, broken, ignorant people to make decisions, and somehow have those decisions be the best possible decisions that can be made. Especially once mob mentality comes into play, and you effectively have large groups of people making emotional, visceral, peer-pressure-influenced decisions without any real understanding of the issue or its wider ramifications.

For all the corruption and incompetence of the current system, direct democracy would almost certainly be catastrophically worse.


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"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
"POwned again." --- blight family

CyborgSage00x0 posted...

Animorphs, baby.

Like most things that 90s kids still love and remember fondly, that came a bit too late for me to ever care. I was already in college by the time the first book came out, and already of legal drinking age by the time it got a TV show.

And speaking of things 90s kids are always nostalgic about...



Zeus posted...

Some of RL Stine's stuff is still fun as well (not his attempt at an adult novel, mind you), both in terms of his YA novels (although he *always* kept things very PG despite writing about high schoolers) and his children's works like Goosebumps.

I know I've brought it up before, but Goosebumps is another of those things that just sort of missed me. I was around 15 when the first book came out (and in college by the time they did the TV show), and by then I'd already stopped visiting the kids or "young adult" sections of bookstores entirely (I think I was already reading Roger Zelazny and Stephen Donaldson by that point, and I was definitely already reading Isaac Asimov and Fred Saberhagen).

To this day, when I think R.L. Stine my brain immediately goes to the Choose-Your-Own-Adventure style books he wrote in the 80s, of which I had (and still have - I've literally never sold or thrown out a book in my life) about 12:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R._L._Stine#Twist-a-plot
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R._L._Stine#Find_Your_Fate
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R._L._Stine#Wizards,_Warriors_and_You
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R._L._Stine#G.I._Joe:_Find_Your_Fate

In a related vein, whenever someone brings up "Are You Afraid of the Dark?", my brain basically goes "Nope, I was too old for that". Though with that one, if it had come out of a couple years earlier, it might have managed to catch me.

Same deal with Power Rangers - it was probably a couple years too late to really catch my attention.



WhiskeyDisk posted...

Hell, I'd almost put Shel Silverstein on that list too if we're being honest...

Ehh, if you look into Shel Silverstein's actual career and don't just equate him with "The Giving Tree" and nothing else, it's kind of hard to even CONSIDER him a children's writer (at least for me). At least in the sense that there's a difference between "person who has written at least one book for children" and "someone whose entire career is mostly based on writing multiple books for children."

He was kind of a Renaissance man who drew cartoons and wrote songs as well as wrote books, almost all of which was squarely aimed at adults (a lot of his comics were drawn for Playboy). And he basically had to be talked into writing kids' books in the first place, so it sort of feels like he was never all that defined by the idea.

Also, knowing that, it can give you even more insight into the stuff he DID write for kids, and you can read it with a more critical eye and wonder just how subversive he was deliberately being when he wrote it.


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"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
"POwned again." --- blight family

If I was a shitty peasant living in medieval times and a lunatic mutant with superpowers and carrying around an arsenal of weapons wandered by and murdered my cow, I probably wouldn't say or do anything about it either.


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"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
"POwned again." --- blight family

Babbit55 posted...

Or, you could say it was prevented to allow the actual populace the voice it should have in elections.

Based on what the Internet has spent the last 20 years repeatedly showing me, most of those people probably shouldn't have a voice. About anything. Ever.


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"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
"POwned again." --- blight family

Rango posted...

What year is this?

You say that as if this site hasn't been NintenFAQs for the last 15 years.

Nintendo always does better in polls here than it would almost anywhere else.


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"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
"POwned again." --- blight family

WhiskeyDisk posted...

Finally! Someone else that knows those books. I was starting to think my having read them as a kid was a Mandela Effect in the making since quite literally nobody else I've ever talked about books with for 30 years ever seemed to know what the hell I was talking about when I've brought them up.

I got them from a Scholastic book fair around the same time I got the entire Narnia series and the first few Bunnicula books.

I definitely liked the more occulty, mythological books in the series (ie, the ones with Will, Merriman, and Bran) more than I did the ones with the Drew kids, and The Dark is Rising itself was probably my favorite of the series (with Silver on the Tree a close second), but I did (and still do) like the series as a whole.

If memory serves, I think I came into them before I actually read Tolkien, but after I'd already fallen in love with Tolkien by way of the animated Lord of the Rings cartoon. So I was pretty much primed for fantasy but hadn't yet graduated up into purely adult-aimed works. It was also around the same time that I was transitioning from more vanilla CYOA books into gamebooks like Lone Wolf.

As an aside, I never really liked Narnia as much, though I did sort of like The Silver Chair and The Magician's Nephew.



WhiskeyDisk posted...

I was certainly not aware they'd made some sort of movie based on them but it wouldn't surprise me to hear it was terrible, even though those books seem exactly like the sort of thing that would translate well to film if the people adapting the screenplay actually read the source material and not a summary.

Never, ever, EVER attempt to look into its existence, no matter what. You might think that you want to know, even in a "can't look away from a car accident" sort of morbid way, but you don't. That dark abyss of torment was not meant for mortal eyes or souls to know.

>_>

<_<

>_>

For the record, it's actually worse than that trailer makes it seem (and that trailer makes it seem very, very bad).

Basically, after Harry Potter came out and was a success, studios started rushing to find the next young adult property they could cannibalize into a film series (see also, the main reason why The Hunger Games got greenlit, and why there are so many Hunger Games clones now), and someone found The Dark is Rising. And then, because film execs are 100% assholes who are actually incapable of understanding concepts like "art" or "joy", they decided they had to rewrite the entire thing into a localized and focus-tested nightmare mess (ie, what some execs had initially wanted to do with Harry Potter as well, and similar to the notorious original intention for how DiC was going to localize Sailor Moon back in the day), in which nearly every single role was utterly miscast, and terrible on almost every conceivable level. Like, it was the movie you'd make if someone asked you to create the fundamental, antimatter universal opposite of The Dark is Rising.

I saw it in a theater for free, and still almost walked out to demand my money back at least three times.

The movie is also the reason why I loathe Alexander Ludwig on a visceral, primal level, and assume literally any movie he is cast in must be terrible. Like a Dark Midas, everything he comes into contact with turns to shit.

I did not like the movie, is what I am saying, in case you didn't quite pick up on that.


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"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
"POwned again." --- blight family

Zeus posted...

More generally, expectations and preconceptions can be a bit of a double-edged sword. When I go into something expecting disappointment or dislike, I think I've sometimes been more receptive to appreciate certain elements. Likewise, the height of my expectations can have a tendency to exceed the quality of a work, resulting in a more critical eye.

Oh, I agree wholeheartedly. There are tons of movies and games I feel like I've enjoyed more because I expected them to be terrible (or because I didn't pay full price for them), while over-hype can absolutely doom a game by setting up expectations that can never be realistically met.

But I don't feel like that's something we can ever really avoid as humans, either, because it's kind of hardwired directly into how our brains evaluate the world. Even when people are like, "I am going to judge this thing without preconceptions," there is still some degree of bias involved, just based on prior experience and current perception. No human has ever gone into any situation as a complete blank slate that is entirely open to new experiences. Even newborns aren't that open.

That being said, yes, a person can TRY to minimize that bias by tempering their expectations, and that's a good thing to do to try and be open to new things, but ultimately whether or not we enjoy a given work or not might hinge entirely on whether or not we had a cold or indigestion the day we saw it, or if we view it through nostalgia-lenses.



Zeus posted...

He apparently wrote at least two. Unless you mean the one he wrote and directed?

I meant The Doctor's Wife, though I did realize that (in this topic, of all topics) someone might bring up the other one.

Nightmare in Silver struck me as a relatively mediocre and inoffensive episode at a time when I was already slowly growing disenfranchised with the series as a whole, so it doesn't really stick in my brain all that much. But The Doctor's Wife is the one that feels like it got tons of praise though, and is also the one I really kind of disliked on multiple levels, so it's the one that stands out for me way more (and thus, the one I tend to think of as being "HIS" episode, especially when I'm criticizing his work).


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"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
"POwned again." --- blight family

Zeus posted...

Speaking of things re-visited, I recently rewatched Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog which as good or better than I remembered. However, Dr. Horrible himself comes off as a much worse character this viewing since -- while we're supposed to feel badly about Hammer being with Penny because he doesn't truly appreciate her or share her outlook -- I was more cognizant of Horrible being EXACTLY the same, given that he only learned about the fro-yo from spying on her, he consistently lies just to agree with her, etc. On some level, this reading helps me appreciate the loser/dork dynamic of Dr. Horrible compared to Hammer's jock/bully role. While Horrible is more intelligent, he's certainly no better than Hammer in many regards.

So what you're saying is, he's Whedon's self-insert character.



Zeus posted...

As for me, while I can "understand" the principle, I also think it's flat-out stupid. There are a lot of works with terrible fanbases with which I want no association, but I still enjoy the work. Likewise, a creator's other activities usually don't turn me off their work because (for the most part, anyway) I can separate the creation from the creator. Granted, that's a little harder to do with actors and actresses when they have their usual appearance and mannerisms.

I think it's more an issue that, when you see something is appealing to a large group of terrible people, you almost can't help but wonder what aspect of the work is drawing those terrible people in, which in turn starts to make you more hyper-critical of the work, more aware of flaws you might otherwise have missed, and ultimately more likely to dislike or dismiss the work out of hand whereas you might otherwise have found it more inoffensive or mediocre. It's not rejecting the work because of the fanbase directly, but the fanbase indirectly makes you more aware of things that drive you away in and of themselves.

(Which is not to say that some people DON'T immediately knee-jerk reject things because of the fans, or the opinions/ideology of the writer/creator, but I don't think that's ALWAYS the motivating factor.)

And even on a more visceral level, humans can't necessarily help associating the actors from the activity. I didn't join the Gaming Guild in my college because most of the people in it were even more cringey-nerd than I was and it was almost physically uncomfortable to be around them, in spite of the fact that we shared multiple similar interests (video games, RPGs, CCGs, etc). In terms of a fandom, if the most vocal members of a fanbase are complete sperglords or neckbeard mouth-breathers, you may find yourself unconsciously pulling away from greater interaction with the overall community or property in general. Which in turn can easily influence your affection (or lack thereof) for the shared media (ie, you're more likely to love something you can share with others - hence the entire point of the geek topics! - while you might grow more disillusioned if you feel you almost sort of need to keep your interest hidden or simply have no one to discuss it with).


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"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
"POwned again." --- blight family

Incidentally, I couldn't hyphenate "self aggrandizing" in that above post like I should have, because doing so trips GameFAQs' incredibly shitty autoflagging system for gay slurs. Which was incredibly annoying because it took me like four re-reads of what I wrote and then having to disassemble the entire post a piece at a time to figure out what was triggering it.

Of course, if the censor detector is sophisticated enough to look for hyphens between letters but too stupid to notice if you just use a space instead, that just underlines even more how stupid it actually is. Even beyond getting into the argument about whether or not you should have autobanned words in a system that already has optional censoring built in anyway.

It reminds me of how I never used to be able to use the word "fetishizing" in context, because all GameFAQs could see was the "shiz" in there, which was auto-banned as a bypass for "shit". Or how you'd occasionally get blocked because the letters at the end of one sentence and the beginning of the next might coincidentally form some word or another GameFAQs didn't like (even if there was punctuation and line spacing in-between), and then you'd have to spend time figuring out what the problem was, then rephrasing what you wrote to fix it.


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"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
"POwned again." --- blight family

WhiskeyDisk posted...

the man seemed very down to earth and humble to a fault given the praise being heaped upon him at the time and the bubble his core fandom had the power to create. Not at all what I'd expected. Certainly not the self absorbed ball of angst and brooding I'd anticipated under the false premise that The Lord Shaper was an author proxy. If anything, his self insertion character was Hob Gadling if I had to guess.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that he (at least as of just over 20 years ago) was certainly not a pretentious, navel gazing "artiste" despite it being easy to expect that of him.

Yeah, that's sort of what I meant. I've always sort of got the impression that, while he seems a bit of a proto-SJW and maybe a bit of a doormat, he also seems like a really genuinely nice guy who is intellectual but not self aggrandizing, nor so disconnected that he'd come across like a creepy weirdo. I could see socializing with him in ways I couldn't ever imagine myself ever wanting to talk to Alan Moore or Tim Burton.

A lot of British comic writers *cough*Moore*cough*Morrison*cough*Millar*cough* sort of come across like insufferable assholes, both in interviews and also in the context of their work. Gaiman's always seemed like a decent, relatively normal sort of person who happens to write weird, mythological shit.



shadowsword87 posted...

Hm, you seem to have all of his writing seen through the lens of Sandman.

To be fair, that's because I'm old, and because it (and related spin-offs like the Books of Magic, Death, Lucifer (by proxy), etc) was the bulk of his work when I first became aware of him. By the time he became a "literary writer", I'd already long since formed my opinions about him as a "comic writer" (whereas he was already pretty well established as a more serious writer by the time you would have become aware of him).

Yes, he's written a lot of stuff since, but my opinions of Sandman are always going to at least color my perception of his other work (and I'm apt to pick up on the similarities and tendencies that span his body of work as a whole). And it's kind of easiest to critique his style by referencing Sandman because that's also one of his more mainstream works (at least for people in a geek topic). Good Omens and American Gods are probably right up there, and Coraline and Stardust might follow close because of the movies, but I think a lot of his other stuff (including Mirror Mask and Neverwhere) are a bit more of a deep dive.



shadowsword87 posted...

Most of his books are children's books, a bit creepy, and then a bit weird meta-narrative, and then it's cool.

That's not really a plus for me, because I've never really connected with "children's" or "young adult" writing for decades. It's part of why I've never really liked Harry Potter, either.

That's also why I brought up Changeling earlier - they're both sort of in the same boat for me. Where it's like, "You have to recapture your sense of childhood wonder and whimsy to really appreciate this," and I'm like, "I didn't really have either one of those things even when I WAS a kid." I sort of leap-frogged from stuff like Monster at the End of the Book as a wee lil' one, to Choose Your Own Adventures and the like in elementary school, to Asimov and Tolkien and beyond before I'd even gone through puberty.

Honestly, about the only "young adult" books I have any fondness for at all at this point is probably the Dark is Rising series (which is part of why I loathed the abortion of a movie they based on it so very, very much). Most else I tend to disconnect from pretty quickly if I try and read it now.


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"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
"POwned again." --- blight family

I'd still take every single one of them over Squall.


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"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
"POwned again." --- blight family

Oh, and incidentally, a lot of the things I dislike about Gaiman's work (especially when it comes to Sandman) are the same sort of things I disliked about early White Wolf (in spite of the fact that I loved the setting in broad strokes).

When every second page in a Vampire book is quoting Bauhaus or Siouxsie and the Banshees while the Changeling book is constantly harping on the innocence and wonder of youth and making repeated Gaiman references, it sort of gets a bit grating after a while. The feeling of hipster-ish pretentiousness and art student angst is basically mixed directly into the ink they printed all of their books with.

Thankfully, the later releases sort of start to drop that mentality (which is probably a good thing, because if the entirety of White Wolf had stayed Anne Rich pastiche/hippie propaganda/childhood wonder squee that it started as, I probably wouldn't have fallen in love with it as much as I did once it settled the fuck down and started acting more like a game than an emo kid's high school poetry.


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"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
"POwned again." --- blight family

Also, to be fair to him, at the time of his initial popularity boom, when he was getting lumped in with Frank Miller and Alan Moore as THE "mature" writers, he always seemed like the least terrible of the three to me. Given the choice between the three, and being forced to be trapped in an elevator with one of them for a few hours, I'd probably pick Gaiman.


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"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
"POwned again." --- blight family