Lurker > ParanoidObsessive

GanglyKhan posted...

Yeah, but watch any other religion try to decorate their room for a different holiday and the heads would fucking roll.

You say that, but I'd honestly say the reverse is true in a lot of places. Especially on both coasts.

Because the moment you make an official statement that menorahs or dreidels are banned or point out that Kwanzaa was entirely made up out of whole cloth in the 60s by a militant black nationalist so maybe people shouldn't celebrate it, you're straight up going to be branded an intolerant bigot and a racist and have your ass hounded right out of a job. But it's easy to discourage things like Christmas or Easter just by pointing out that it's exclusionary or that public institutions shouldn't really be supporting any non-secular holidays because arglebargle church and state.

Sterilizing Christianity out of American culture is pretty much becoming standard practice (again, especially on the coasts). You can argue that "Winter Holidays" or "Spring Break" are more inclusive than Christmas or Easter (and they absolutely are), and that people who flip their shit at store cashiers that say "Happy Holidays" instead of "Merry Christmas" are overreacting (they kind of are), but I'd argue the only places you're going to see where every other religious observance is outright banned are places where Christmas is off the table as well - namely, places that refused to acknowledge that ANY holidays exist out of terrified fear of playing any sort of favorites and having some irate asshole come after them because of our current culture of constant outrage.

Yes, I'm sure there are places in the US where people look at you funny if you don't toe the traditional line and think and act the "proper" way, of which Christianity may be a significant part *cough*The South*cough*, but as per my usual refrain, if it bothers you so much, why the fuck do you live in those places in the first place? There are plenty of places in the same country that are better in pretty much every way, and if you absolutely hate where you are, it isn't THAT hard to move when you're young and don't have tons of attachments and responsibility weighing you down.



DPsx7 posted...

F'ed if you do, F'ed if you don't. I say just offend as many people as possible, it's a them problem anyway.

Well, it does technically become your problem when they ALL conspire to get your ass fired, and you're living in a local dumpster.

Though technically, I suppose once you're homeless you no longer have to worry about offending people, so it might be considered a successful life-strategy in the long run if that's all you care about.


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NeoSioType posted...

Reminder that the Great Pyramids are over 4,000 years old

One of my favorite little statistics is the fact that Cleopatra was actually born closer to our current time than she was to the creation of the Great Pyramid. And that will continue to be true for about another 400+ years or so.


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minervo posted...

Post your memes :P

That would be the opposite of making the Internet great.


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BlazeAndBlade posted...

probably gonna be a bigger disappointment than DA:I

Came in to make a comment like this, but you beat me to it.

BioWare is pretty much dead at this point, there's just a gangrenous corpse walking around wearing its skin.


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WastelandCowboy posted...

Kevman510 posted...

These "I'm a grown adult so I don't get presents" comments are really sad. You don't have any family or a girlfriend or anyone that would get you a present?

We do, but most of us just go out and buy whatever we want. I mean, I'd love to get a new car, but I'm sure as hell not going to ask my family for it.

That's sort of why I told people not to get me anything years ago. It essentially creates an awkward situation where I'm being punished more than rewarded in any meaningful way.

When I want something, I buy it. So someone getting me a gift either has to get me something I don't actually want (which means I won't enjoy the gift, and will likely wind up getting rid of it somehow), or they have to get me something I DO want, but then tell me they got it so I go go out and buy it myself, at which point all they're really "giving" me is a forced waiting period before I can have the thing I want.

This is the point where people usually say things like "But sentimental gifts!" or "It's supposed to be the thought that counts!", but I've never really felt like you need tangible gifts to show sentimentality anyway, and I actually dislike the idea that birthdays or Christmas are the only time you can show affect to a person, so I'd rather give useful gifts to friends and family just whenever if I see something specific I know they'll want, and not feel compelled to buy them things solely because pop culture says I have to.

(It also doesn't help that I don't celebrate Christmas at all, so I have zero interest in gifts related to it.)

Sometime around when I was 20 or so my stance basically became "My gift to you is the money you save by not buying me a gift, and your gift to me is the same in reverse. As adults saving time, money, and stress is actually the best possible gift any of us can give to one another."

I still occasionally get presents for my friends' kids because they're still young and Christmas is still an important thing to them, but I tend to think that birthdays and Christmas should mostly be for kids and adults should grow out of it as a "WAAAH, I WANT PRESENTS!" sort of holiday.


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I used to love how he would do narration on every episode of Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends back when I was a kid.




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If you haven't done the main story missions yet, the game will automatically force him into your party in Diamond City after you investigate a house there.

If not, just go to all of your settlements and look around. He'll hang out near dog houses if there are any (like in Sanctuary). Which is why I usually delete any existing dog houses in settlements, then put one house directly outside of wherever I'm using as my base with all the crafting tools and such.


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All of my consoles other than my 360 and PS4 are underutilized, since I never really use them.

I've considered hooking my old Xbox up to play a couple games that aren't backwards compatible to the 360, but I haven't gotten around to it. And my PS2 is actually hooked up, but I haven't played anything on it for about a decade.

I also still have my PS1 somewhere. And a GBA SP that I barely ever used somewhere as well.

And I also still have this:

http://www.decodesystems.com/games/galaxy_ii-s.jpg


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darkknight109 posted...

The US hegemony has been slowly dying for ~20 years now. Bill Clinton was really the last president to use America's strengths - both hard and soft - effectively on the international stage.

I'd argue that even he was part of the decline.

Reagan was arguably the last real effective big-stick swinging President. Bush Sr has the success (for certain definitions of the term "success") in the Gulf War to his credit, but his administration is at least potentially responsible for the problem in the first place (ie, our ambassador refused to take a hardline position on Iraq's troop build-up before the invasion, which Iraq took as tacit approval - had we voiced our opposition in advance it's possible they would have had to preempt the invasion entirely). And he had at least a couple of other diplomatic gaffes that weakened the US politically and militarily.

Clinton on the other hand was more or less directly responsible for the cutbacks in intelligence spending that helped turn 9/11 into a clusterfuck, and outright refused custody of Bin Laden when Saudi Arabia arrested him after the bombing of the USS Cole and offered him to us. Almost every foreign policy decision he made - especially in his second term - was wrong. He basically helped create a number of problems that the governments after him were never really able to cope with.

People remember Clinton's term as being positive mainly because it paralleled the strong economic success of the 90s, but Clinton had almost nothing to do with that. Nearly everything worthwhile that happened during his Presidency were things he was smart enough to avoid interfering with, while most of the things he took active interest in had a net negative effect overall.

Arguably the US was strongest on the world stage both economically and politically when we had a singular enemy to point at to bolster coalition support from our allies. But with the fall of the USSR we lost that bogeyman, and we've never really been able to successfully shift that focus, whether to China or against the more nebulous threat of terrorism or anyone else. And with the strengthening of European ties via the EU, the pushback against US hegemony was pretty much inevitable.


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The Wave Master posted...

Has anyone watched the new season of Doctor Who?

I cannot tell if it's bad, good, or average because of the sexist hatred and rhetoric I see in every discussion. (I cannot believe the doctor is a woman, and random period jokes. The internet is not very optimistic, understanding, or forgiving.)

I gave up on it completely because Moffat's run disillusioned me so much it broke my 40-year long love of the show and left me not caring what happens.

At this point I don't really care if she's a woman or not. I just don't think the show is worth caring about any more.


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ernieforss posted...

Mead posted...

It wouldnt surprise me at all to learn that he was in fact a gay man

I thought he and the whore mary were a thing (not the virigin mary.. the other mary that slept around)

A common line of thought is that she wasn't a whore, she was his wife. It wasn't until later that Christian writers who had a vested interest in minimizing his life as a man to emphasize his life as some sort of divine magical being decided to rewrite her narrative to demonize her and minimize her importance.

The early Church spent a few hundred years fighting over whether Jesus was a man or a god in man form or a god who just looked like a man, and whether or not he was the literal son of god or a manifestation of god or some sort of complicated multifaceted avatar of god that simultaneously coexisted with the other aspects of god, to the point where people were pretty much ready to kill over different interpretations. So once one faction basically won the argument, there was a vested interested in eliminating any evidence that supported any position but your own.

It's actually one of the theories why there's currently no physical evidence that Jesus existed (that we know of) - because in the centuries that followed, especially after Rome converted, there was ample opportunity for them to find and destroy any evidence that existed. Because it might have supported the idea that Jesus was just a man who firmly considered himself a Jew, and rather than coming forward to present an entirely new religious philosophy in his own name he just claimed to be a descendant of King David who was thus rightful heir to the Jewish kingdom on Earth, who encouraged resistance to Roman rule (for which they killed him as a political rebel).

It also doesn't help that the legitimate lines of descent would have stayed in Jerusalem or the same general area, so any direct evidence of him or his siblings or his potential wife and children and the actual Jewish sect he theoretically founded (which would have been run by his brother James and Peter, NOT Paul) would have been pretty much annihilated 40 years later when Vespasian and Titus burned Jerusalem, or 50 years after that when Rome leveled Jerusalem and the Jewish diaspora started.

Christianity as it currently exists basically stems from the leadership of a man who never met Jesus at any point in his life, only knew his teaching second or third-hand, and which mostly succeeded because the only direct opposition to it was wiped out in the first hundred years or so.


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GanglyKhan posted...

The U.S couldn't just go in and level the country. They would have been in and out in weeks if it was total war.

It mainly couldn't BE a total war scenario because, even beyond the PR considerations, there was a fear that significant operations could invite direct Chinese or even Soviet retaliation. Instead, pretty much everyone involved was forced to tiptoe around and the US became mired in a defensive war (which ran counter to the actual strengths and training of the US military). Even once operations turned more offensive, there still wasn't really a concerted push to actually invade North Vietnam. Most operations were meant to defend southern territory, which in turn put the US on the back foot from word one.

But even using more conventional methods the US potentially could have won a war of attrition there over the long term. It was rising anti-war sentiment at home that eventually made victory untenable.

Most people don't really realize that the Tet Offensive (ie, the thing that really swung anti-war sentiment in the US into overdrive, creating the impression that the war was unwinnable and the US was sacrificing lives for nothing) was actually a major failure for the north, and it was a huge hit on their morale. One that was reverse once they realized that American resolve was wavering as well, and suddenly a realistic end to combat was in sight if they could simply outlast American morale at home. Tet was a military failure, but a PR victory - and it was pretty much the final nail in the coffin of the US having a chance of victory.

Had the US treated Vietnam less like Korea and more like Japan in terms of military strategy, we'd very likely be living in a very different world right now.


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POST-Trump?

You speak as if the Glorious God-Emperor is ever going to stop ruling over us all with his munificent lordliness!


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This topic is problematic!


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RT First bullshittery means I have no idea what you're talking about.


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Mead posted...

Its more that why even have a discussion about their attractiveness

The vid has nothing to do with that

I don't even think it's so much the idea of discussing with someone about how you find the women in it attractive, as much as the idea of specifically bringing the video HERE to exclusively talk about how cute they all are.

That implies a level of obsession that crosses over into creepy.


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It's not explicitly stated or clearly shown in the movie, but I left with the impression that people didn't actually leave piles of dust after they poofed, as much as the dust sort of dispersed into the wind and then ceased to exist, leaving nothing behind at all.

Also, kind of spoilers.


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minervo posted...

Catholics believe sainthood is achieved through suffering. Protestants, through praise. Catholics believe in sacrifice, Protestants in joy.

The Protestant sects that believe in sainthood tend to view the requirements for sainthood being almost entirely the same as Catholics do (minus the specific organizational body dedicated to confirming saints). So that statement is also incorrect.

(And none of this even getting into other religions that technically have "saints", like Buddhism.)

For someone who has openly admitted to not being a member of the religions we're discussing, you certainly seem to be making a lot of definitive claims about faiths you clearly don't understand very well.


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Actress, because I actually consider referring to female actors as actors to be MORE sexist.

"Actress" only has negative connotations because sexism equates the female version of the archetype as being inherently inferior to the male (under the assumption that, all things being equal, the female will always be inferior to the male). By refusing to use the gendered terminology, you're essentially conceding the point and saying the only way to validate yourself is to use the same term males use. It is implicitly accepting that the valid female term is somehow shameful.

The better solution is to own "actress" and strive to make it the equal of (if not better than) the corresponding male term. Be proud, and don't let other people's perceptions taint terminology. Pull the word back up, rather than throwing it away.

It's also kind of ironic that the same period where feminists were pushing the idea that terms like actress or stewardess were sexist and should be done away with was around the same time a lot of feminists were "taking back" the word "bitch" and using it as a term for female empowerment. Which is kind of counter-intuitive double standards at work.


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PaddysPub posted...

Jack White does it better

I'd argue that Jack White does neither of those two things better. And I'd probably add songwriting to that list as well.

About the only thing Jack White did better than Phil Collins was successfully pretending that his wife was his sister for some inexplicable reason.


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minervo posted...

I'm not a protestant so I don't agree with the religion whatsoever, but martyrdom is purely a Catholic thing.

No it isn't.

Martyrdom is distinct from the concept of saints and achieving sainthood via martyrdom.

And even then, there are branches of Christianity that technically count as Protestant that acknowledge saints anyway.


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green dragon posted...

If someone said "matter can be destroyed to create energy", I wouldn't say that they're wrong

I would, because they would literally be 100% wrong.



green dragon posted...

but I would know what they meant since most people aren't science people.

Arguably, that's even more reason to be precise about terminology when you're discussing actual science concepts (as opposed to regular, everyday life and general layman stuff).

Laziness when it comes to describing concepts is at least part of why stupid people believe so many stupid things. At least half the problems when people argue over stuff like climate change is because we lack universal operational definitions, leading to ridiculous amounts of confusion and flawed thinking.


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minervo posted...

Lokarin posted...

minervo posted...

Then why do Protestant pastors marry and have kids?

Because pastors aren't Jesus?

Pastors are supposed to be Christ's representatives on earth.

Being someone's representative doesn't mean you have to deliberately mirror every facet of their lives.

This is the same reason why we don't nail every pastor to a cross when they turn 33.


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green dragon posted...

Semantics. Matter can be destroyed to create energy.

It's not semantics, the words literally mean different things.

Energy can be transformed into matter, and matter can be transformed into energy, but the equation remains balanced and the overall amount remains stable in a closed system.

Destruction implies that the thing in question completely ceases to exist, which is not the case. Creation implies that the thing in question appears out of nothingness, which is not the case.

Either creation or destruction would alter the amount of matter/energy present in a given system, whereas transformation maintains a steady amount.

As far as we know, literally all of the matter and energy that exists in the universe has existed since the beginning of time, and literally nothing new has come into being or ceased to be past the initial moment. What's here now has always been here, merely in different forms.


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Smarkil posted...

I'm on firefox now. I've also been using bing lately which I'm actually finding to be better than Google anymore. I feel like the Google results for searches have been shitty for a couple of years now. Bing for some reason seems to be doing better.

I kept using Yahoo over Google for years, because every single time I compared results between the two Yahoo consistently gave me better or more accurate/useful results every single time. But I've noticed the search dynamics of it have changed over the last year or two, and Yahoo is noticeably worse than it used to be.

I have no idea why both search engines got worse, but I suspect it might be deliberate, and might be financially motivated in some way.


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rogerskg1979 posted...

The Incredible Hulk was a good movie.

It really wasn't.

It was relatively mediocre, and hurt by Edward Norton being a weak lead.



rogerskg1979 posted...

Nobody cared about it at the time simply because it was the 2nd movie in the MCU so the MCU was not yet a household name

But by that logic, how did Iron Man succeed in spite of being the first movie in the MCU, with a character with less brand recognition than the Hulk?

It's almost as if a good movie can succeed on its own, while weaker movies can't.



rogerskg1979 posted...

and people's memories were still fresh on the Ang Lee Hulk movie which did suck.

It arguably wasn't even THAT bad of a movie, as much as it was over-stylized (which isn't what people wanted from a comic book action movie) and explored aspects of the Hulk's personality that people didn't want to see (in spite of them being established ideas for more than 20+ years at that point in the comics).

Basically, most people went in expecting something like the old Hulk TV show and with a ton of "Hulk smash!"ing, and pouted when they got something that was trying to be slightly more intellectual.

The Incredible Hulk tried to dial back on that, but wound up being bad and disliked in other ways. Which is a large part of why the interpretation of the character in The Avengers tried to boil the character back to its most basic elements (and succeeded by doing so).


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darcandkharg31 posted...

It's all make believe anyways, it's like asking who's stronger? Super-Man or Ant-Man, it can't be proven!

Superman is objectively stronger.

That's not necessarily the same as "Who would win in a fight?", but both have numerical values attached to their strength levels, so we can easily compare them.


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green dragon posted...

lastly, matter can actually be created and destroyed.

No it can't. It can be transformed, but not created nor destroyed.


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Revelation34 posted...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interplay_Entertainment ?

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

A large portion of the original design team from Fallout formed Black Isle as a subsidiary of Interplay after the first game, and they were the ones who developed Fallout 2. When Interplay shit the bed financially they basically fired everyone in Black Isle (around the same time they sold the Fallout rights to Bethesda). A lot of the Black Isle people went on to form Obsidian (hence the name). Most of the creators who made Interplay's critically acclaimed games like Fallout or Planescape:Torment all wound up in Obsidian.

That was actually the reason asked Obsidian develop New Vegas in the first place - and Obsidian deliberately salvaged a lot of the setting backstory and characters out of the original Fallout 3 design document (ie, the version of Fallout 3 they were working on when before Black Isle was shut down and the game was cancelled). The original version of Fallout 3 - as it would have been published under Interplay years earlier - would have taken place about five years prior to when New Vegas was eventually set, and would have revolved heavily around the idea of the Legion and the first battle for Hoover Dam.

The directors of the original Fallout were Tim Cain and Feargus Urquhart - Feargus is literally the CEO of Obsidian and Tim Cain is a senior programmer there (which is why he worked on New Vegas but not Fallout 3 or 4). The directors of Fallout 2 were Tim Cain and Chris Avellone (mostly famous for being the head writer of Planescape:Torment). All three of them worked on New Vegas.

Tim Cain is also the head director for The Outer Worlds. And the other director (Leonard Boyarsky) was one of the other members of the core writing team of the original Fallout.

Basically, at this point, The Outer Worlds has more creator connections to Fallout than anything Bethesda's ever developed under the brand name.


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rogerskg1979 posted...

They won't have any problem recasting. They already recast Banner and Rhodes.

Both of whom were relatively minor at the time (Rhodey because he's a supporting character, Banner because the Hulk movie was kind of shit and no one cared).

But recasting characters like Cap or Tony would be nearly impossible to do without major backlash at this point, and they're smart enough to know it. So I don't foresee them ever recasting either. The more likely scenario is either killing them off or having them retire, then leaving the possibility open for them to show up again in the future if they feel like guest-starring again at some point.

In the comics, this is basically how the Avengers worked as a time almost from the beginning (the original team of Iron Man/Thor/Hulk/Ant-Man/Wasp eventually gave way to Cap/Hawkeye/Scarlet Witch/Quicksilver, and various members either joined or left over the years. But eventually, you start to run out of characters, especially if they decide to keep the X-characters separate (which they might, because they work better that way anyway).



rogerskg1979 posted...

A-list characters? A lot of the recently introduced characters are certainly not A-list.

GOTG was unknown to everyone but the most diehard comic readers prior to being introduced in the MCU.

(Heck, 20 years ago, Iron Man wasn't even that popular of a character outside the comic medium and look at him now.)

Yeah, but some of that was luck and some of it was brilliant casting - Iron Man likely wouldn't have done as well with anyone other than RDJ as Tony. But even Marvel isn't perfect when it comes to casting (again, see also the Hulk movie).

As for GotG, what helped there to some degree is that they ARE so obscure to non-comic fans (doubly so since it's the newer version of the team). And the fact that Chris Pratt is Chris Pratt, and they were willing to take a chance on using him in spite of pretty much everyone ever thinking he didn't look like an action hero (which he didn't, before a lot of trips to the gym). Rocket working (which he easily might not have) and Bautista having surprisingly effective comic timing also helped immensely. The movie easily could have failed if they'd cast different people, or used different characters (like the original version of the team).

Marvel's main asset is having one single man in charge of the entire vision of the line, and that man being a comic fan who actually understands the characters.

Which leads to...



rogerskg1979 posted...

Marvel has proven that they can turn unknown characters like Ant-Man and GOTG into successful movies, and they have no shortage of other unknown characters they can use. They are in no danger of running out of characters anytime soon.

Yes, but Marvel is still picking characters they see potential in. They started the MCU with Iron Man and not, say, Speedball for a reason. Some characters have inherently less potential no matter who you cast or how good a script you write for them. They'll have WAAAY more trouble trying to win audiences over with characters like Swordsman, Doctor Druid, or Starfox than they will with someone like Tigra or Quasar. Meanwhile, characters like the Two-Gun Kid or Sersi are too hard to explain in a worthwhile way, while a character like Wonder Man would depend almost entirely on the script and costume design to either be cool or absolutely terrible.

Is Marvel on the verge of running out of characters? Obviously not. But the clusterfuck with the Inhumans shows that they can't always strike gold every single time. Even they can't salvage EVERY character concept.


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rogerskg1979 posted...

Yeah, you don't end a multi-billion dollar franchise "just because."

Plus they just got back the Fantastic Four and X-Men. Anyone who thinks the MCU is going to be ending anytime soon is just fooling themselves.

Depends.

The MCU will continue no matter what.

But at a certain point, if they start losing all the actors and don't feel comfortable recasting them, or they feel like they've run out of A-list characters, and especially if the revenue starts to dip, there's always the possibility they'll eventually reboot the entire thing and start over again. At which point, it's almost like an entirely different thing.

They'll still be making Marvel movies 10 years from now. But it's hard to say exactly what sort of movies they'll be.


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TallTamryu posted...

That evil guy from KOTOR 2 could suck the life out of an entire planet from many many miles away....

He didn't do it on purpose, though. He was more a barely self-aware walking wound in the Force than he was someone actively using the Dark Side to achieve his goals.

It's sort of implied both Nihilus and Sion welcome death when you kill them, because neither of them are strictly in control of their nature.


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I thought of this years ago. Coal is actually a valuable resource, and for most of human history getting coal to burn would be considered a good thing. So when and how did it become the archetypal "bad" thing that Santa gives to bad people?


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Zeus posted...

...although it's more realistic that way.

I don't really play games with magic and elves and 8-foot long swords and undead dragons and time travel for realism, though.



Zeus posted...

And, depending on what you do, it's possible to kill less important NPCs which either make some of the smaller (and non-radiant) quests either impossible to start or to finish.

I consider that far more negative than positive. Especially when the game's shit coding can result in dragon or vampire or giant attacks killing quest-giving NPCs when you have zero ability to do anything about it.

I get the appeal for some people to have your actions leave a lasting impact on the world, but when the only significant impact you can really make is denying yourself content as if the game is punishing you for being reckless or ruthless, then that's not really a selling point in any way to me.

And the fact that quest-crucial NPCs can't be killed almost makes it worse to me in some ways. Because they tend to be the only people I've ever really motivated enough to want to kill in the first place.

It's like the ability to get married in the Fable games. Sure, you CAN do it... but the game gives you almost no reason to CARE enough to want to do it. All the samey generic NPCs with about four different voices all sort of start to blur together to some degree after a while.



Zeus posted...

idk, it's actually pretty flavorful given that there's a tremendous amount of lore and many of the quests touch upon it

Almost none of that really means anything to YOU as the character in the game, though. It's more like "Man, a lot of interesting stuff happened in this world, in the past, when you weren't around. And if you're willing to sit around reading books about it, you can learn about it. YOU'RE mostly going to be doing a lot of stupid radiant fetch quests, though."

At that point, I'd almost just rather go read actual books. Most of which are much better written.



mooreandrew58 posted...

Bethesda rpgs are great for those who like to role play more than just what the game provides story wise. I come up with back stories for chars and habits/personalities I stick to unless given no other choice.

Oh, I agree. Like I said, I made something like seven different Couriers, and each had relatively distinct personalities, and for most of them I came up with a fair amount of backstory of what they were doing before the game started. For some, I came up with a LOT of backstory.

But while "Hey, you're a blank slate, make up your own story and personality" is a great thing, to some degree you have to give that character something to do that actually matters in some way, otherwise the whole thing just becomes a bit masturbatory. If I'm doing 90% of the work to come up with my personality and look and backstory and current story and after story, I'd almost be better off just writing my own stories or playing D&D or something.

And I acknowledge it's a difficult balance to strike. Skyrim is an example where I feel like the narrative is relatively weak, but the flip-side of that coin is Fallout 3 and Fallout 4, where I feel they go too far with telling you exactly who your character is an what they want, to the point where I feel locked in to someone else's story and stop caring. Bioware always seemed to be good at balancing leaving enough gaps for you to decide who your character is, while still giving you enough story to make it matter. Bethesda, not so much.


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GanonsSpirit posted...

The Sorceress is the hottest character in the He-Man universe

Depends which version of it you're talking about.


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PaddysPub posted...

and thinking about how all the atoms in your body have existed since the beginning of time

We're all made of stars, maaaaaan.


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Cruddy_horse posted...

DirtBasedSoap posted...

what was the jab at Bethesda? I missed it.

I think it was "From the creators of the original Fallout"

"And the developers of Fallout: New Vegas"

Because alot of people think Obsidian did better Fallout games. I'm not sure if it was meant as a jab btu ti could be construed as one.

I read that as them pre-emptively dealing with the sort of assholes who are going to whine that this game looks like it's a Fallout rip-off, by pointing out that these are effectively the people who invented Fallout in the first place.

It definitely looks like someone mixed Fallout and Borderlands in a blender, though. And I am not complaining about that in any way.


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AllstarSniper32 posted...

My Sliver deck was Slivers from the Onslaught and Time Spiral blocks only. They also looked better cause they looked like Aliens instead of Predators. My only real goal with it was to have a 5 colored sliver deck. I think I took out all the blue only slivers though and the only sliver cards with blue in it is the Sliver Overlord.

A friend of mine used to play a starburst deck built around the Sliver Queen and Coalition Victory. I helped him with a few initial ideas when he was first making it, but then he just sort of ran with the idea and it became a terrifying thing.

He stopped using it when he got into a weird mood and started running strange equipment-based decks.


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FrozenBananas posted...

I thought I saw her in the trailer...she was in the dark but the figure looked like her

She was there, yes.


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Exorcism, apparently.


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Nichtcrawler X posted...

My dad likes to mention recording programmes of the radio from time to time, when reminiscing.

I occasionally fondly remember that this was once a thing:




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Kenneth_Writer posted...

Back in my day, 1GB seemed unrealistic. xD

I remember the Commodore PET booting up and saying it had ~16000 bytes of memory free (in other words, 16kb - which is about as much data that can be contained in four maxed out posts on this forum), and the idea of having a permanent "hard drive" to store data at all seemed kind of ridiculous. And we basically had to store data on audio cassettes or literally type programs we wanted to run in line-by-line every time we booted up the computer.


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Lokarin posted...

Also moral fabric not real

That's not true. I have a coat made out of it.


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You'd have to define "offense" and "support". Does offense mean a very narrow category of spells that blow stuff up or hurt people, or does any spell that theoretically harms someone else count? Does support only mean spells that would be considered "buffs" like extra speed or strength, or does it cover a wider range of powers that basically cover everything other than healing or attack?



Kyuubi4269 posted...

What about utility?

This is kind of the key to my question.

If I want a spell to magically unlock someone's door so I can break in and steal their stuff, does it count as offense because I'm technically harming them or "support" because it's basically a utility-type spell? What about a spell to create food, or purify water, or charm strangers, or erase memories, or generate illusions, or telekinetically move things across the room?


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Oops_All_Berrys posted...

I think most folks start green and then move onto more complicated decks

I don't know a single person in my circle of friends who play who started Green. A number of people started with White weenie horde decks, a couple others went with Black for undead and regeneration effects with minor direct damage, and a couple went Red and just blasted everything. And then there were the slightly more complicated decks by people who did their research before they started playing, and who came out of the gate playing combo decks - like my one friend who played Black/White hand denial or another who played Black/Red land destruction.

My first ever deck was White/Black Pestilence and pingers, and I used to call it the White Plague deck.

I can only remember two people who used Green at all - one played White/Green revolving around White flyers like the Serra Angels and using Green for life regain and buffing, while the other played Red/Green for a while and played it as a more spell-heavy deck (and the first time I played against them they killed me with a Channel/Fireball combo).


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I started out White/Black, and I've played White/Green and Black/Blue decks before, but my go-to deck for almost a decade was Black/Red.

My current two decks are White/Red and White/Black.

If I was going to make a mono-color deck it would almost certainly be Red, though, because I tend to play a very burn-based style. In fact, my Black/Red and White/Red decks don't actually have any creatures in them at all, if I remember correctly.


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Zeus posted...

Felicia Day was also a cosplay model.

This really isn't true in any way.



Zeus posted...

At this point, she's geek-famous for being geek-famous.

I can't argue with this, though.

The Guild basically opened that door for her and she's exploited it for everything it's worth ever since.

At least she IS a geek, though. I don't mind attractive women (like Day or Morgan Webb) using geekdom as a path to success if they're actually sincere in their own geekdom. I just get annoyed by the ones who clearly don't give a shit and just use it as a means of working their way into "real" media because they know horny nerdboys are easy to exploit (*cough*Olivia Munn*cough*).


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His name was Stanley Lieber, but he used Stan Lee as his pen-name because it was seen as being kind of shameful to write comic books back when he started.

When they actually got popular, and Marvel succeeded on huge levels, and he basically started getting famous from them, he kind of embraced it and had his name legally changed to Stan Lee.

Jack Kirby apparently used to call him Stanley all the time, though, and Stan supposedly hated it.


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Zeus posted...

This is kinda my third time playing Skyrim, although the second time (starting on the ps3) really doesn't count because I quit relatively early.

My problem with Skyrim is that, while it has character customization, it's almost entirely shit, and you barely see your character face-on anyway. And then you're limited as hell when it comes to armor and clothing palettes. And then you start playing, and all of the quests are generic as fuck, and while you get to "choose" how you want to do lots of things, almost all of those choices wind up being relatively meaningless, because nothing really effects anything else and the writing is terminally bland.

It's the ultimate end-game of open world design - because they have no idea which quests you've done at any given point, or who you've spoken to, so every quest sort of has to be modular and disconnected from everything else. You can have quest threads (like the Mage College quests or the Thieves Guild quests), but for the most part almost nothing you do matters to anything else you do.

So it's sort of what I want, only in the most superficial and flavorless way possible.

I've actually done multiple runs through the game (to 100% it for achievements on both 360 and PS4), but I don't really have fond memories of any of my characters or their personalities, because none of it meant anything. Nor do I really give much of a shit about any of the NPCs or their issues, or otherwise fondly remember anything about the game. Unlike Mass Effect and Dragon Age, where my characters in different runs tend to have radically different personalities, and I find myself caring far more about them and their stories, and the people they meet, then I ever have in any game made by Bethesda.

The one exception to that rule sort of being New Vegas, but in that case it was barely Bethesda at all as much as it was Obsidian (aka what was left of Black Isle, aka the people who created Fallout in the first place and the only ones who apparently understand what made Fallout interesting in the first place). My Couriers encouraged me to come up with radically different and overly thought-out back stories, and each wound up doing things differently than the others not because I was in a "Well, I did this quest one way last time, this time I'll do it a different way to see how things turn out instead" mindset, but because I was literally in a "This is who this character is, and this is how they'd react in this situation, so this is how they're going to finish this mission because they couldn't possibly do anything different." That level of immersion has really succeeded when I hit the point where I'm willing to deliberately do sub-optimal or outright negative things because it's important to the characterization. I'm basically roleplaying, not rollplaying.

That's the same sort of problem I have with stuff like Conan Exiles or GTA Online, and why I'm kind of adverse to Red Dead Online (even though watching other people make characters and play the early missions in that is part of what prompted this mood in the first place). The customization looks relatively deep and interesting, but then there's little worthwhile or meaningful for your character to actually DO once you've made them (and then microtransaction grind makes the whole experience generally crap).


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Zeus posted...

After not getting a Switch or ps4 on Black Friday (still pissed about missing that rdr2 package), I started playing a new Skyrim game and it's been eating up a lot of my free time lately (interrupting some show binges). So, humorously enough, Pokemon Ultra SM is kinda suffering the same gate as Pokemon SM

I kind of want to play another game where you can make your own character and your choices can influence the narrative of the story, but I think I already own most of those types of games that I know about, and have played most of them a few too many times to be super-enthusiastic about doing it again.

I mean, knowing me, there'll come a time when I'll suddenly be in the mood to play Mass Effect or Dragon Age again, or even another Saints Row run, but for the moment I just sort of want to find a new game along those lines and play a new story with robust character creation and dialogue choices. Meh.

Assasin's Creed: Odyssey would probably fit the bill, but I'm still holding off on buying that for DLC reasons, and I'm still wary of people describing it as being a bit too grindy to encourage microtransaction BS.


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