Lurker > ParanoidObsessive

Zeus posted...

Plus they did this:

I prefer this one:




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

streamofthesky posted...

WTF, MSNBC is taking moderation cues from gamefaqs now?!

To be fair, if you're going to live by the Far Left sword, you should probably die by the Far Left sword as well.

Now all we need are some rape allegations to bring down the Young Turks.


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To be fair, I've thought Al Franken was a walking piece of shit for 30+ years now, regardless of anything he's actually been accused of or that was proven about him.


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"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
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Zeus posted...

I like Gambit, but was never a Cable guy (or a Cable Man!). Honestly surprised to hear your rancor for Gambit, given that he has a neat design and power. (Cable I completely understand.)

I didn't like him because he kind of felt like lazy writing. It's like, "Okay, kids like Wolverine, but we only have one Wolverine, and even Wolverine is sort of tamer now, so we have to make more bad boy characters with mysterious pasts so they can be surrogate Wolverines." Cable sort of fell into that same category, only with lots of guns and pouches because Liefeld.

It also didn't help that I was annoyed by the way they handled the whole Gambit/Rogue relationship, because it made pretty much zero sense at the time (or mostly since). Rogue hooking up with Magneto made more sense, and even that was sort of weird/squickish. It made Gambit feel almost like he was being presented as someone's Mary Sue fanfic character (and, seeing what sort of characters Jim Lee introduced once they started Image, I'm kind of even more convinced of that, just like I can make some fairly educated guesses as to why Psylocke was magically turned into a Japanese ninja for absolutely no sane or rational reason).

I probably would have liked Gambit better if they'd stuck with the original intention and had him revealed as an undercover bad guy who was essentially infiltrating the X-Men on behalf of Mr. Sinister, but the combination of 90s kids gushing over him and Claremont getting the boot sort of put the kibosh on that.

Then again, I was already starting to grow disillusioned with Marvel as a whole by that point, and switching more and more over to Valiant (which was fantastic, at least until they shit-canned Jim Shooter), so it's also possible that at least some of my resentment for characters like Gambit and Cable was rooted in the fact that they were the tangible symbol of Marvel turning into something I honestly didn't like or respect any more, simply by virtue of being in the wrong place at the wrong time (and on that note, I never liked Venom as a character, either)
.


Zeus posted...

Hooray for Anthem Sports finally backing down because of costs. It was a dick move anyway.

Well, that was sort of the point. The idea was to punish the guys who were leaving and prevent them from doing the thing that made them popular, as sort of a warning to other guys on the roster - basically, if you stay here until you get popular enough to go somewhere better, we're going to fuck you, so just stay here and play ball.

The problem is, it backfired - it basically painted them as a company that workers weren't going to want to come work for, especially when the indies were thriving in a way they hadn't for decades, and the perception was that performers could retain creative freedom AND make more money working the indie scene than they could for a company that barely had TV presence and was borderline bankrupt 9/10ths of the time.

The irony, of course, is that Impact/Anthem wasn't doing anything that the WWF/WWE hadn't done for 20+ years (see also, the Dudley Boys). But we're kind of used to the WWE being assholes by this point. This was Impact's opportunity to win people over by being the better man, and in the end, lost those same people by being assholes.



Zeus posted...

Kinda makes sense.

Which is the weirdest thing of all, because since when did anything behind the scenes in wrestling ever make sense? It always seems to come across like a carny show being run by lunatics and con artists.


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"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
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LanHikari10 posted...

This topic lacks some 80s music.

Oh, I can handle that.

This may be the most productive thing any mod on this site has ever done. I applaud you, good sirrah.



SmokeMassTree posted...

Explain why when I marked those spoilers as spoilers nothing was done about it

Probably because whatever mod saw your mark disagreed with your interpretation about it being blatantly moddable spoilers.

If simply marking a post automatically got it deleted, half the current posters on PotD would probably be banned right now.


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"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
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bulbinking posted...

From what I can understand she didn't want to do a shoot with a male actor who did homosexual movies in the past, and was chastised by the porn community.

The worst part is, that isn't even necessarily a homophobia issue. It's kind of been established fact for years that the straight porn industry and the gay porn industry tend to have different standards for condom use and AIDS testing, meaning that the mainstream porn industry used to be VERY restrictive about actors having done gay porn.

Not too long ago, male actors were actively banned or generally blacklisted if someone found out they'd done gay porn, and it's a bias that usually gets stronger every time there's an AIDS scare in the industry (ie, every few years). It had nothing to do with the guy or who he'd been fucking (ie, NOT simply "homophobia"), and everything to do with the perception that the gay porn industry had disease-testing standards that were far more lax than what the mainstream was comfortable with (because they actually, factually were).

Being afraid that your co-star might have AIDS and not know it (or know it but lie about it) would be both a business AND a health decision on the part of an actress, and I could absolutely see one refusing to work with an actor if she was afraid in any way that he wouldn't be safe. In exactly the same way that I could see an actress refusing to work with an actor if she'd heard he was a regular heroin user, or even in a broader sense, if she'd heard that a given actor was extremely rough/abusive or have terrible hygiene issues.


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"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
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Clouddffvii posted...

Should we blame the "straight" community for killing, torturing and bullying gay individuals across the world daily?

I've known at least a few gay people who absolutely think that way, so it's not as if you're proposing anything all that outrageous. You usually hear it from the same subset who refer to every straight person as a "breeder" in the most disgusted tone of voice they can possibly muster.

But like it or not, that's the entire point of the vocal minority. No, they don't represent their entire demographic, but when they're the ones shouting the loudest and effectively presenting themselves as the archetypal embodiment of whatever label they self-identify with, it's not entirely surprising or unjustified when people start seeing people who identify with the same label in that light.

It's not all that different from how the term "feminism" became so associated with the viewpoints of some of the most batshit insane radical feminists that plenty of women refuse to refer to themselves as feminists any more, even if they strongly support equal rights and other civil rights issues for women. In the digital age this has become even more prevalent, as countless groups that advocate for black rights, against government corruption or wealth inequality, or whatever cause wind up being demonized about 30 seconds after their group gets its own hashtag.

The traditional answer to this is that the "good ones" basically have to step up and start shouting louder, or at least shouting down the negative elements of their own group. Because otherwise, you're seen as condoning the behavior at worst or simply ignoring it at best, which usually gets you lumped in with the bad seeds as "part of the problem".


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"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
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NightMareBunny posted...

do you think making a japanese property more american is the worst thing to do?

Not really, any more than I throw a shitfit when the Japanese steal ideas from Norse mythology or Christianity and misuse them in their own stories.

That being said, I DID find it annoying when they made a Forbidden Kingdom movie and shoehorned an annoying white teen dude into the lead role, but that's not quite the same thing.



NightMareBunny posted...

also the name "Light" i have never heard before in the united states

To be fair, there's at least one book from the 1990s where the main character's name is Truth and her sister's name is Light. But it makes sense in context because their dad is a hippie wizard.


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"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
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I feel like parody is pretty much pointless in this day and age.

Most people will take it at face value anyway without understanding the actual intent, and when it comes to the people who DO understand what your point is, the people it's directed at will easily ignore or never see it, while the who agree with your point-of-view don't need to be convinced in the first place (and tend to come across as being kind of shitty when they revel in parody humor involving the subject).

Satire is dead, and we killed it.


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"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
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VeeVees posted...

jonsushi posted...

VeeVees posted...

I will never buy a book with a sticker slapped on.

What if it's discount sticker? :)

No

To be fair, Barnes & Noble sale stickers peel off really easily without damaging the cover or leaving behind glue residue.

That was always a pet peeve of mine as well, especially back when I was buying RPG books and most places would slap price tag stickers on the books that it would take like 5-10 minutes to fully rub off all the glue.


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"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
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Lokarin posted...

That is a very good one

To be fair, I'm probably the only person on PotD who was going to take your question seriously in the first place.

That being said, there's a fair amount of stuff in the Tanakh/Old Testament (minus the Torah) that is generally verifiable via real-world historical archeology and research, especially for the post-Nehemiah period. Take the supernatural aspects out and you probably get a fairly accurate view of what Hebrew culture was at the time, including some historical events.

Anything earlier than that (again, ie, the Torah/first five books of the Old Testament or so) tends to be harder to verify (or seems outright contradicted by historical texts in other regions), and most of the New Testament seems to be mostly bullshit made up by people writing under pseudonyms decades or centuries after the time they were claiming to be describing, but there's a good chunk in the middle that seems to have definite historical/anthropological value.


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"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
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SmokeMassTree posted...

There is an expiration date on spoilers

By the literal rules of this site, no there isn't.

You can still be modded for spoiling things that happened in books written thousands of years ago.



knivesX2004 posted...

What the hell did you expect would be in this topic?

He expected to find people he could troll. And he found them.


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"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
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SunWuKung420 posted...

Always blaming the hippies when it's the greedy.

You're assuming those are two different things.


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"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
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Firewood18 posted...

My ADHD kid will spend hours making a character then only play the game through the intro, then never play it again.

My nephew and I both played through the intro to Destiny multiple times because the creator wouldn't let you rotate your character.

We'd play through the intro (an hour or so long) to get to the Tower, where your character finally takes off their helmet for the first time and you can see their face from all angles, only to decide we didn't like how their hairstyle looked from behind, so we'd scrap the character entirely and start over again.

I think I did that like a dozen times, all told.


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

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"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
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Zeus posted...

Wait, has Woken Matt become a thing on television now?

Yes.

Matt filed a claim on the "Broken" gimmick, and because of how legal stuff works, Impact would have had to step up and file an objection and then be willing to fight him in open court over it. But Impact is basically hemorrhaging money, so they openly admitted they're not going to bother.

So, for all intents and purposes, Matt owns the "Broken" gimmick now.

He's going to use "Woken" Matt Hardy in the WWE though, because apparently he worked out a deal with Vince where it will essentially be the same character, but the WWE can trademark and sell merch based on it, and if he ever leaves, he can still go back to being "Broken" in the indies or in other promotions.

It's pretty much the best-case scenario in terms of how the rights are going to be handled. So now all we have to do is wait and see how the WWE manages to fuck the gimmick up with poor writing and not supporting Matt's vision.

(That being said, supposedly Vince is currently strongly behind Matt having creative freedom to do what he wants with it, so a combination of TV time and doing his own thing online might still keep him strongly over. As long as the creative department doesn't resent him for it and constantly book him in bullshit angles, and as long as Vince doesn't sour on the idea eventually, it could be good.)


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"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
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Zeus posted...

Bit behind the 8-ball on this one, but just saw the trailer for X-Men: The New Mutants and... wtf?

The opening seemed generic X-Men shit but then it suddenly goes horror (and not very subtly, given the line where they claim that it's a haunted house rather than a hospital). Really not sure how to feel about that. Sure, I like horror and a lot of superhero movies have been getting stale but... wtf?

They're trying to do the Demon Bear storyline:

http://marvel.wikia.com/wiki/Demon_Bear_(Earth-616)

No idea how close it's going to be to the actual comic story, but I assume they're going to go for an angle where you're led to suspect it's tied to Illyana and her demony magic side, only to have the twist be that it was Dani all along.

Early New Mutants was pretty dark. It could potentially work as a horror franchise if done right (though whether or not it WILL be done right is another question entirely).

Though this may all be moot, if the deal Disney and Fox have been discussing actually goes through, because if it does all of the X-Men rights will revert back to Marvel anyway, and odds are everything will get rebooted one way or another.


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"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
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Smiffwilm posted...

Where's Spike? All I see is a picture of Angel and Randy Giles.

http://www.reactiongifs.com/r/2012/08/well_done_sir.gif


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"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
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Probably about 2-3 hours.

Around 1 hour (give or take a bit) might be standard for me, because I always take a long time on character creation, though the more options a game gives me to play with, the longer it takes.

But I always need the perfect name for every character I make, and I have been known to sit around for hours just thinking about names before I even start character creation, because until I have a name I can't click "finished" on character creation no matter how much time and effort I put into it.

I'd rather delay starting a game for days until I think of a good name than start and just sit in the creator for hours and hours and hours.


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"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
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The problem with both is that they're multifaceted. Giles is a reserved bumbling British librarian with an extremely dark past, whereas Wesley starts out sort of inexperienced and inept but grows into a radically different person (ie, way more grizzled and sexy than he is in that picture).

By the end of their respective arcs, Wesley is way sexier. If you take both of them at face value when they first appear, Giles is.

Plus, there's also this (for those who didn't already know):




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"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
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Zeus posted...

Pfff, I enjoyed a lot of the 90s X-Men. It was when they introduced Omega Red, one of my fave X-Men rogues and fighting game characters (even if I'm mediocre with him... granted, he wasn't a top-tier character anyway).

I was always of the mindset that characters like Cable and Gambit represent some of the worst aspects of where the comics were going at the time, and the fact that 90s kids latched onto them so hard and turned them into popular and enduring characters is one of the many, many, many reasons why I have such little respect for 90s kids.

That being said, the writing on most Marvel comics definitely took a dramatic downturn in the 90s, not just the X-titles. Basically squeezing Claremont out to replace him with Jim Lee (who left almost immediately to form Image anyway - which itself became the textbook for everything wrote with 90s comics) left the X-titles somewhat rudderless, and weaker writers helmed titles that relied on too many tropes of the era.

There's a reason why the comic fan community used to use the phrase "God protect the children of today from the 90s".

(And then, of course, 2010s DC went and hired most of the people responsible for the 90s, and SURPRISE! the New 52 turned out to be mostly shit.)



Zeus posted...

ParanoidObsessive posted...

or magically undoing marriages

May the same happen to Quesada's marriage!

Considering he basically created a sort of Mary Sue girlfriend for Peter and named her after his own daughter (Carlie), and then forced her on Peter to mostly get him away from MJ, you might take at least some vicarious pleasure in the fact that a later writer had her get sprayed in the face with Goblin formula, so she's basically kind of deformed now, and then she was "put on a bus" and sent out of the comic for the foreseeable future.

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I don't care about either of those.

Soul Calibur as a franchise lost me around IV, and I've never given a single shit about Bayonetta.


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helIy posted...

every life matters

No life really matters.

We'll all be dead eventually, and once enough time has passed, no one will ever remember that we were ever here.


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shadowsword87 posted...

Yeah, when in the first 20 pages or so, the author says that human language was created as a way to gossip, I knew I was in for a ride.

By the end, it turns into what seems like a marketing campaign for transhumanism, so it's right up your alley. :-D


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"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
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You do it because you have to.

This is arguably the "Great Lie" of the modern age.

Most people bust their humps because they feel like they need to in order to survive. Couples wind up sending both spouses to work because they feel like they need a double income to pay for their lifestyle. There is a perception that, no matter what you have now, it is not enough, and that you need to work harder to achieve more.

But realistically, most of the things we consider "necessities" today really aren't, and lots of people, even in lower-income tiers, would be astonished to find how much money they start to have available if they started cutting some of those things out of their life.

But our entire society is geared to marketing everything to us as "MUST OWN" because our economy is built on consumerism, and if people in general stopped buying stuff, the entire house of cards would collapse. It's why, no matter how often people complain about Christmas becoming too commercial, the bulk of people still rush out to try and get Black Friday deals or buy stuff for everyone they've ever met in their life. It's why candy companies basically rely on Halloween sales for massive profit. It's why pretty much every holiday we have, no matter how minor, is basically just becoming an excuse for sales.



SunWuKung420 posted...

Considering that the free love movement is more about loving everyone and not just yourself (aka, don't be a narcissist), you're way off base and completely wrong.

What it claimed to be about, what it was originally about, what people interpreted it as, and how it was often implemented in practice are all different things.

Even people who were hippies during that era will freely admit that lots of people only ascribed to the ideology because it gave them an excuse to get high and fuck without repercussions (or to dodge societal expectations or responsibilities they didn't want to fulfill). And it absolutely evolved over time into the mentalities of the 1970s (the "me" decade) and 1980s (where "Greed is Good").

The hippies certainly didn't invent the concept of "individuality at the expense of society" (realistically most of modern Western/Eurocentric culture is rooted in it), but they definitely helped fuel its strong upsurge in the US over the last few decades.


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"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
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Pull out my copy of Bill Cosby Himself and ask him to autograph it for me.


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"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
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helIy posted...

lex Luther is just batman if he were a villain

In some ways Lex is technically the better person of the two. Lex's ideology (admittedly fueled by his own egotism and pride) is that humans are better than aliens and freaks. Batman's ideology is that someone murdered his parents decades ago, so now he has to go around beating the shit out of people. On some level, every single thug he beats up is just an echo of Joe Chill. Every single punch he throws is the punch he wishes he could have thrown that fateful night.

And if anything, Batman is WAY more cynical than Lex is. As far as we know, Lex never sits around thinking up contingency plans to murder his friends and loved ones if they ever go "bad".

Plus, Lex is a member of the Justice League at the moment, so he's technically a hero himself.



EvilMegas posted...

Lex Luthor is the embodiment of greed, batman is the embodiment of justice

Not really. Lex is more the embodiment of ego, while Batman is the embodiment of vengeance.

The thing to keep in mind about Batman is that he literally breaks the law with every single thing he does. He views himself as above the law in nearly every way, and his one concession to "justice" is his "I won't kill" rule (and even that could be more pragmatism than justice - ie, cops are far more likely to try and arrest a vigilante who kills than one who doesn't).

Like I alluded to above, Batman isn't a man dedicated to justice and upholding the law. He's a scared child lashing out because his parents are dead. In a way, he's reliving that night over and over again in his mind every time he puts the suit on, and every villain he beats the shit out of is a surrogate for the one person he can never really get revenge on.

Yes, he JUSTIFIES it in his own mind as "I have to make sure that no one else ever suffers the way I did" (which also isn't "justice" as a motivation, by the way), but ultimately, it's not about those people, or about protecting or defending or upholding the law. It's about little Bruce. It's ALWAYS been about little Bruce.



ernieforss posted...

did you read Mark Millar's Nemesis.

No one should ever read anything Mark Millar writes.


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"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
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dainkinkaide posted...

Think of how it must have felt for the people of Kiribati prior to 1994. Half of the island group was on the opposite side of the International Date Line.

Did they change that?

I remember hearing about that place in the 1980s, but I haven't thought about it in decades.


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"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
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Four times in my life, I've known the details of a relatively significant news story by being close enough to it in real life to have first-hand information, before it was picked up by local or global news sources.

EVERY SINGLE ONE of those times, the eventual news report that came of it was entirely inaccurate. And I don't mean "Oh, they got some of the names or details wrong" inaccurate, I mean "changing the entire fucking meaning of events" inaccurate. Like a sack full of bullshit that bore no real resemblance to what actually happened, and which painted people involved in an entirely different light from what they were actually like.

In none of those cases was any sort of retraction or apology issued after the fact - the information was simply misreported and then they moved on to the next breaking story (ie, the same way the news made it sound like we were all going to die from the bird flu, then never mentioned it again once they realized it was a non-story).

Most news has become poorly-researched sensationalist garbage at best and deliberately skewed propaganda by people with a political agenda at worst. This isn't new (see also, "yellow journalism"), but it sure as fuck isn't "news" either.



mastermix3000 posted...

Be honest, what news source really tries to be accurate rather than quick to report now?

This is the real problem. The 24-news cycle and the desperate rush to be the first site to get a scoop means a lot of things get reported without any real degree of fact-checking, because making sure your story is actually TRUE takes too long.

That, combined with most major news sources just getting their news from AP and Reuters means that, if the first link in the news chain gets a story wrong, EVERY subsequent source is going to get it wrong, and then you get the really shitty phenomenon of people believing a story because they heard it from a dozen different places, not realizing that all of those places got the story from the same place, and that original place was reporting misinformation.

The worst part is, in the rush to be first, and to only focus on the ratings-driving stories, most news has become sensationalist as fuck, and never offer retractions for their own fuck-ups. That would waste time that could be better spent rushing out the next sensationalist news story in a desperate bid to get ratings (or clicks on your site).

Not that retractions would even help, since there've been psychological studies that prove retractions mostly just reinforce the original accusation in human brains anyway (which is why mudslinging politicians are perfectly happy to slander an opponent and then issue a retraction later, because most people will only remember the accusation, not the correction). But it means that people have basically had their entire lives ruined by a news station desperate for a slight uptick in ratings, who couldn't be bothered to verify whether or not what they were reporting was even true.

This isn't really new, though. This has been a thing for more than a decade (and probably quite a while before that as well). We've just reached a point where there are SO MANY sources of information now (and we've become so much more cynical as a culture in the last few decades), we can more effectively detect the bullshit for what it is.


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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michmash#World_War_I


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My favorite is Link to the Past.

My least favorite is Ocarina of Time, partly because it led to the new style of Zelda games which I've never liked, and which basically killed my interest in the franchise forever (in the same way Mario 64 killed my decade-long interest in Mario games), and partly because it's vastly overhyped by children of the 90s to the point where it gets annoying as fuck sometimes.


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Lokarin posted...

...I remember when people liked things

I thought it was overrated and overpraised mediocrity then, if that helps you feel more cynical about the past.


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I'm more annoyed when they reprint an old book and use pictures from the movie for the cover.

I remember them doing that for the LotR books back when the movies first came out, and it irritated me.


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funkyfritter posted...

It's also the go-to answer for people who tried the series and didn't like it.

Or people who liked the series at the time but didn't like the look of that particular game.

Or those of us who were huge fans of the series at the time, but who couldn't play FFV because it was Japan-only, and then by the time it finally got a US translation it either seemed too primitive and not enticing enough to bother, or by that time we stopped caring about FF in general.

That was a huge problem with trying to play games like FFII, FFIII, and FFV in later ports - by that point you'd already played far better FF games (and better non-FF RPGs), so odds were that you'd never be able to appreciate them as much as you might have if you'd played them at first release.

For games like FFIV and FFVI it's easier to go back and play them again if you're buoyed by what's left of your original nostalgia for the games, but FFV suffers from probably being the least interesting of the three AND lacking that nostalgia. About the only worthwhile thing it does is the job system, and by the time we got the US release, the job system had already been done better in FF Tactics.


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"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
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It's a mediocre game that seems incredible to people who've never actually played a good RPG. It mostly coasts by on having vast areas to explore, as long as you don't look long or hard enough to realize that most of the things you can do in all of those places are shallow as fuck and not really all that worthwhile. Almost every single thing it does, another game does far, far better.

There's nothing wrong with playing it mostly as a time-waster or because you like the idea of exploring the map in-game, but don't believe the constant hype about it being a fantastic game going in, or you'll probably be disappointed. It's a C+ experience at best until you experience massive orgasms from seeing digital vistas and talking to a world full of cardboard cutout characters who all have one of maybe a dozen voices.


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"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
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Zeus posted...

kislev posted...

learnt their lesson about loot boxes and micro transactions

Unlikely.

No, no, they definitely learned a lesson. They learned to hide their evil slightly better next time.

It's the same lesson the government uses every time they push for a SOPA or anti-net neutrality sort of deal and people vocally push back. They just wait a while, then sneak it right back as something slightly more complex and obfuscated, until it eventually slips through and succeeds because people missed it, or because people got tired of caring.

Then, once you get it into place, it gets harder to fight back against, because it's way harder to make something go away than it is to stop it in the first place.


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"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
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AngryBlueOrange posted...

Why don't you make your character look anything like you when you create one?

Because I am literally never playing as "me".

Whether it's a game like Mass Effect where I'm explicitly someone else, or a game like Fallout or Skyrim where I don't have a specific identity in-game but still have a background that makes them very much not me, or even a game where there is literally no identity of any kind, never once in nearly 30 years worth of gaming (both video games AND tabletop RPGing) have I ever seen or played as a character in-game who I see as being ME.

But whether or not a character is "me" doesn't mean shit to me in terms of immersion, because even if I somehow visualized my character as me, it doesn't change the fact that -I- can't shoot fireballs, call down lightning, gun down aliens with machine guns, or any of the other thousand things you can do in video games. Any video game I ever play (and nearly every video game ever made) is by definition going to be about things I cannot or will never do, so that sort of immersion is out the door from second one anyway.

But I don't really need that level of immersion to care about characters or their story, either. I've played as tons of fictional characters who are absolutely distinct from me, and yet whose lives mean far more to me than actual living, breathing humans (who I rarely give much of a shit about at all).

Maybe if I was playing a photorealistic VR game with perfect tactile input on every level with intricately scripted AI dialogue that is like being inside the Matrix, I could play myself as a character and get something out of it, but as is, I really don't.



As a related aside, I'm currently playing South Park: Fractured But Whole as a redhead girl, when I am neither a redhead nor a girl. But then again, neither am I a fourth grader who lives in Colorado, nor a child who can power construction equipment or fly by the power of my own farts, so, you know, realism died a long, long time ago.


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

I don't really dislike or hate him, so that makes "literally everyone" a false statement.

"Almost everyone" would probably be acceptable, though.


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

It's a shame. Syndicate went out of its way to revitalize my waning interest in the series, to the point where I was more into it than any point since Ezio's games. Then Origins came along to hold my interest's head under water until the bubbles stopped coming up.

Combined with the microtransaction bullshittery, and I have zero motivation to ever play the game, let alone pay for it.


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

Baseketball


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

Zeus posted...

That said, science has shown that neanderthals' brains at the time were less developed in the areas associated with social interaction, etc, which means they'd be starting from a somewhat different place (although, if they continued to exist, they would have evolved over time)

The trick to that is that, for most of the timescale where the two species overlapped, homo sapiens was apparently ALSO less developed than modern expectations. The two species (which may actually only be two separate branches of the same species, according to some modern interpretations) coexisted for tens of thousands of years in relative equilibrium, which would have been more or less impossible if sapiens were significantly more advanced mentally than Neanderthals.

Generally speaking, what we think of as "modern" humans in terms of brain capacity and thought processes didn't exist prior to around 70000 years ago. At which point we sort of kick-started into overdrive, moved into Neanderthal regions and wiped them out and/or subsumed them, spread across vast areas that would previously have been inhospitable (ie, the upward drive into Siberia and ultimately over into North America), and started developing the techniques that allowed us to reach islands (and to island-hop our way to places like Australia).

If we're imagining a scenario in which Neanderthals could somehow survive and compete, it's not impossible to assume they could have undergone a similar shift, even if they didn't in the world as we know it. It's also possible they could have undergone said shift while sapiens didn't, and we wouldn't be here now.


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

shadowsword87 posted...

but you talked about the book that kicked off this idea

Sapiens?

It's actually a damned good book, by the way. And contrary to what the title might imply, it deals with a lot more than just early prehistoric man. I recommend it as a read/buy if you haven't already.



shadowsword87 posted...

If a tribe of neanderthals somehow managed to survive into 400BC, what would they be like, compared to a society against more "modern" homo sapiens? What would they sound like? Would they even have a language? Would they have begun to have tools along with homo sapiens?

Would depend entirely on how and why they survived, I'd say.

If we're assuming they survived by being in a completely unreachable area that no homo sapien could reach in order to displace them (which would involve creative liberties with real world geography, because in actual history no such place really existed), then they could have existed unchanged, and would have been very much like the way they were in their heyday.

(This "isolation" scenario is how the last surviving "alternative" to homo sapiens seemed to survive until it's relatively "recent" end around 12000 BC or so - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_floresiensis )

Alternatively, we can assume a history where Neanderthals underwent a "cognitive revolution" in the same way homo sapiens did (some time around 70,000 BC or so) - early homo sapiens seems to have very distinct behavior differences from later, "modern" humans. If Neanderthals underwent the same shift, they might have been better able to compete (especially since they were stronger physically, and seemingly able to repel most homo sapien incursions prior to that point from what we can tell), and thus, survive much longer, possibly even to modern times.

(This "cognitive revolution" argument could actually work well in sci-fi with alien experimenters or precursor races who "uplift" primitive homo sapiens at that point, with the potential for Neanderthals to be uplifted in the same way.)

If we assume "moderized" Neanderthals who change enough to be able to survive and compete against homo sapiens, it's pretty much impossible to say what sort of behavior patterns they would have - they would be radically different, and could share or lack any given trait we normally associate with homo sapiens as long as it suits the needs of the author.

If we assume classic Neanderthals who survive unchanged in some way, it's hard to say what their behavior would be like at all, because we really don't know all that much about them at all. Contrary to popular assumptions about what cavemen were like in general, we know very little about Neanderthals. Almost every claim ever made about them has been disputed at one time or another. We can't even say if they had language as we understand it (though I would assume they almost certainly had some level of communication, because even modern primates do).

They would definitely possess simple tools, because we know actual Neanderthals did.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neanderthal_behavior

Also, this is a book you might want to consider looking into:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Down_in_the_Bottomlands

And, of course, there's also this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ugly_Little_Boy


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

Zeus posted...

Kind of an issue whenever you have never-ending series with no clear overarching story plans leading to a definite ending and everybody is allowed to have their own vision for characters.

That's part of why Marvel was so strong in the late 70s/early 80s - for a while, they actually DID have character growth. Peter Parker graduated high school and started dealing with adult issues. Reed Richards and Sue Storm had a kid. Chris Claremont was all about the idea of phasing out old X-Men characters in favor of new students every few years (which is why he married off Cyclops and essentially "retired" him). Iron Man became an alcoholic, recovered, had heart surgery to remove the pacemaker in his chest, Thor became an epic mythic storyline taking place over years worth of real time, and so on.

The idea that "STATUS QUO IS GOD" and that everything will eventually revert back to baseline, and no character will ever undergo meaningful growth or change really didn't start kicking in at Marvel until the later 80s (again, after they dumped Shooter), which is around the same time a lot of weaker writers started taking over titles written by giants of the industry, and rolling back most of their plots to be more like the comic they grew up liking (Thor and Spider-Man being particular victims of this), or trying to embrace the more "xtreme" mood of the era (the main downfall of the X-Men titles in the 90s). Then it kept getting worse, to the point now where it seems like there's an insane cosmic crossover happening every other month that will be forgotten 20 minutes after it's over, so literally nothing matters and nothing is worth caring about. It's barely worth getting interested in a title when a new, good writer comes along and starts telling interesting stories, because as soon as they leave the next guy is just going to ignore or retcon it all anyway.

If anything, the problem these days is the LACK of actual continuity, even as companies like Marvel and DC still pretend that they havecontinuity.

(And the fact that the industry has been hemorrhaging readers for years and is withering on the vine as the publishing arms keep trying to desperately stunt their way into grabbing new audiences is a reflection of that.)

These days strong continuity and story growth is usually only present in independent titles with a sole author, who can do what they want with characters without worry that the next writer is going to be brining characters back from the dead or magically undoing marriages and character development because they liked the old version of the character better. Unsurprisingly, those sorts of titles also seem to be the only titles comic fans or casuals actually CARE about these days (see also, The Walking Dead).


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

Zeus posted...

You mean "Nomad" was well-done or are you still talking about the Captain storyline?

Sorry, see how that could be read either way.

I meant "The Captain" and "The Commission" stuff in the 1980s storyline. The original Nomad story was in the 1970s, when I wasn't really reading comics, and looking back on it from farther on, it has a lot of hallmarks of the sort of 70s counterculture ideas that I was never really a fan of, so I didn't like it as much.

If I made a list of what I consider Marvel's best storylines (maybe top 10-20 or so), most of them would be from the early to mid 80s. That just feels like the most productive period to me, when they were properly balancing creativity and organization. After Jim Shooter got kicked out as Editor-in-Chief it feels like the entire company just started sliding into an "inmates running the asylum" sort of situation, combined with the downsides of a lot of older fanboy comic fans who fell in love with the comics in the 60s becoming writers (and writing at levels of quality approaching Internet fanfiction).

I always give Shooter a ton of credit, though. Partly because after he left Marvel he went on to create Valiant, which was fantastic early on (and which started sucking almost immediately after THEY leveraged him out), but partly because most of the artists and writers who talk the most shit about him seem to be massive assholes themselves.



Zeus posted...

I'm not sure anybody in the industry takes things like continuity all that seriously.

Probably because once you take continuity out of the equation these days, people stop reading.

You can get away with swapping in a new continuity (a la DC's endless reboots or Marvel creating the "Ultimate" line), and you can get good stuff out of standalone out-of-continuity stories (ie, stuff like Red Son), but it seems like most people tend to stop reading periodic release stories if they feel like there's no overarching storyline or continuity to hold it together. Doubly so if you start getting radically different interpretations of the same character in stories (ie, the reason why so many people hate DC's current version of Superman in the movies).

Or, to put it another way, if you give me the impression that no story you tell matters because none of them will ever impact any of the others, then why would I care about any story you tell?


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

I came in to say Laura Bailey. Not only do I love her voice, but she seems like an awesome person in real life. Every time I hear her I just want to snuggle with her.



TallTamryu posted...

Snuggletoof posted...

Maybe New Vegas? I feel like I know her from before then, though.

She's definitely in that. Veronica the brotherhood girl if I recall.

Veronica is Felicia Day.

Laura IS in New Vegas, but she mostly voices minor characters (I think the most major is the leader of the Followers of the Apocalypse in the fort (the one with the mohawk), whose name I can't quite remember right now (Julie, maybe?). But she also does the two main female voices in the Dead Money DLC as well .



Snuggletoof posted...

I feel like I know her from before then, though.

Laura's been around for almost 20 years at this point, and she's done a ton of stuff, both games, anime, and regular animation. The first game I ever heard/liked her in was Deus Ex: Invisible War, though I probably most associate her with Saints Row 3 and 4 these days.

For a lot of anime fans, the main role people knew her from for a while was as Lust in Fullmetal Alchemist.


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

Rockies posted...

I find the 'to have something on my shelf' argument for physical media dumb

I find most arguments that disagree with my personal worldview to be dumb as well.

Knee-jerk dismissing everyone who disagrees with you as being objectively wrong is part of what it means to be human.



But I prefer physical media, so by that same logic not only are you objectively wrong, but you're also a terrible person for feeling the way you do, and people like you are ruining the world for the rest of us.


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

Lokarin posted...

How do you not know Robert Munsch?

Probably because Seuss has written multiple books that are massive bestsellers that have entered the public pop culture consciousness to the point where even people who have never read a single book he's written know who he is pretty much by osmosis, while Munsch has apparently written a ton of books I have literally never heard of nor remember ever seeing in any bookstore, and is in no way anything resembling the sort of household name (regardless of how you feel about their actual writing) that Seuss is.

I sort of get the impression that any Munsch fans that DO exist are almost certainly 90s kids, though, which sort of biases me against him just from that alone. And from the whole "He's apparently not good enough to not be mostly obscure" thing.


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

When I read this topic's title, all I could think of was that someone finally figured out that Flynn from Tron hacked Encom and he was going to be prosecuted for it.

This topic is less interesting now.


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

Yellow posted...

YouTube and Google employ tits.

Do they actually employ anyone? It seems like most of their recent fuck-ups are rooted in the fact that they seem to use bots and algorithms to do most of their work and there aren't actually any real humans in the company.


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

JunkoEnoshima posted...

I don't see anything on his facebook that suggests that he died. His last post was on September 18th but there are no posts on his wall that I can see, unless the privacy settings or whatever make it so I can't see them.

To be fair, if someone died you probably wouldn't see anything on their Facebook page suggesting it - you'd just see a point where they suddenly stop posting and are never seen again.

The idea of having loved ones who come along and try to get your Facebook page turned into a memorial of some kind or who otherwise indicate on it that you're gone is still a relative rarity. Most people who die in the digital age are just going to end with an abrupt never-ending silence.

If anything, someone's last post being in September and then NOTHING since is exactly what I'd expect to see if someone died.


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