hyzmarca wrote:Its magical psychic powers. You can have any explination for magical psychic powers, because magic.
Well no, you can't. You have to have a magic explanation. Watch me write several completely stupid explanations for magic psychic powers that no one would ever buy.
1) A young man develops psychic powers because he has hands.
2) A young women discovers magic psychic powers when she sees a non magical dog.
3) And old man late in life develops psychic powers because cellphones give people magic psychic powers.
See, all of that is bullshit, and no one would buy it. Because it is not internally consistent, since everyone has a cellphone, hands, and has seen a dog, but not everyone has magic psychic powers. So goes using 100% of the brain. Because everyone does that.
The rest of the trailer looked rather lame (for the 30 seconds until I terminated it) so I am not inclined to break out my extra-strength suspenders of disbelief. Besides, I've already decided to make my principled stand on the sole basis of the hatred of that meme and never watch it.
hyzmarca wrote:Its magical psychic powers. You can have any explination for magical psychic powers, because magic.
Except no, you can't. There are an infinite set of viable explanations but they aren't all viable. You can't have any explanation. Now see, if they'd said it was magic drugs, that is actually okay. But you can't say "Doing 100 sit-ups and running 10km each day will make you more powerful than superman." (one-punch excluded) There are like, an infinite multitude of ways they could hand-wave it and they chose a stupid meme that needs to die like a dingo in a nursery.
I am stuck between the hope that there will be backlash at the stupidity of the 10% brainpower meme that it can finally be put to bed forever, and the more likely reality that this will just kick up the dirt again and perpetuate it onto further generations.
Right. Defiance. I don't know what the general opinion of the show is, but I find it entertaining enough. Even if it's uncomfortable to watch with my conservative parents...
Anyway, this happened last week, but I was reminded of it this week- white-face.
For those who don't know the show, basically aliens left their solar system because some other race/murderous robots (I'm fuzzy) chased them out, and came around to Earth looking for a place to crash. I think their scans actually told them the place was clear, but, well, it wasn't. Big war, died down eventually, now humans and aliens live together in (mostly) peace. There's something like nine types, and one of them are hyper-religious patriarchals and literally white skinned, their called the Castathans. Oh, and they're super sexually-liberal, as long as the man is in charge. The families bathe together, men legitimately have mistresses, all of that. To me, it seems like a bit of an arab-pastiche, culture-wise.
So of course humans make themselves up as casti and go out to night clubs. And the human character married to a young, more liberal minded casti did this shit, to "better understand his culture."
Fucking really? Sigh.
Last edited by Prak on Fri Aug 01, 2014 6:31 am, edited 1 time in total.
Cuz apparently I gotta break this down for you dense motherfuckers- I'm trans feminine nonbinary. My pronouns are they/them.
Winnah wrote:No, No. 'Prak' is actually a Thri Kreen impersonating a human and roleplaying himself as a D&D character. All hail our hidden insect overlords.
FrankTrollman wrote:In Soviet Russia, cosmic horror is the default state.
You should gain sanity for finding out that the problems of a region are because there are fucking monsters there.
I recently finished reading The Forever War. And while it was overall a decent piece of hippy-era sci-fi, I don't think I've read a book where the ending invalidates the whole point of the work that strongly since the book of Job.
"But transportation issues are social-justice issues. The toll of bad transit policies and worse infrastructure—trains and buses that don’t run well and badly serve low-income neighborhoods, vehicular traffic that pollutes the environment and endangers the lives of cyclists and pedestrians—is borne disproportionately by black and brown communities."
Josh Kablack wrote:Your freedom to make rulings up on the fly is in direct conflict with my freedom to interact with an internally consistent narrative. Your freedom to run/play a game without needing to understand a complex rule system is in direct conflict with my freedom to play a character whose abilities and flaws function as I intended within that ruleset. Your freedom to add and change rules in the middle of the game is in direct conflict with my ability to understand that rules system before I decided whether or not to join your game.
In short, your entire post is dismissive of not merely my intelligence, but my agency. And I don't mean agency as a player within one of your games, I mean my agency as a person. You do not want me to be informed when I make the fundamental decisions of deciding whether to join your game or buying your rules system.
It ends with HF concluding that 'being civilized' is worthless and that he should once again take to the road, where true happiness and freedom can be found, and he does.
How does that contradict the rest of the work?
"Most men are of no more use in their lives but as machines for turning food into excrement." - Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci
I ran into something like that in the anime Casshern Sins.
Basically the first half of the series is about how the world got messed up, but people are making the most of it even without the immortality they used to have. In the last few episodes, it's revealed that immortality is totally possible again. Those last few episodes just kind of say immortality is wrong without doing anything to justify it, the non-immortal characters refuse to become immortal, and the immortal title character walks off into the sunset never to be seen again. Viewers are seriously expected to believe the last-episode reveal that one character is the first robot designed to grow old and die is a good thing.
There were only two points in favour of the "immortality is evil" moral. First, most of the mooks trying to gain immortality were clearly evil because they flat-out murdered other robots for spare parts. Second, the person that actually could make people immortal seemed to pick and choose who she actually gave immortality to and tossed most robots that went to see her back into the scrap pile. However, it's entirely possible that she literally couldn't save everyone and the pile of discarded pilgrims were all beyond saving anyway (or at least too costly to save given the number of others in line).
DSMatticus wrote:I sort my leisure activities into a neat and manageable categorized hierarchy, then ignore it and dick around on the internet.
rampaging-poet wrote:I ran into something like that in the anime Casshern Sins.
Basically the first half of the series is about how the world got messed up, but people are making the most of it even without the immortality they used to have. In the last few episodes, it's revealed that immortality is totally possible again. Those last few episodes just kind of say immortality is wrong without doing anything to justify it, the non-immortal characters refuse to become immortal, and the immortal title character walks off into the sunset never to be seen again. Viewers are seriously expected to believe the last-episode reveal that one character is the first robot designed to grow old and die is a good thing.
There were only two points in favour of the "immortality is evil" moral. First, most of the mooks trying to gain immortality were clearly evil because they flat-out murdered other robots for spare parts. Second, the person that actually could make people immortal seemed to pick and choose who she actually gave immortality to and tossed most robots that went to see her back into the scrap pile. However, it's entirely possible that she literally couldn't save everyone and the pile of discarded pilgrims were all beyond saving anyway (or at least too costly to save given the number of others in line).
Yeah, stories where X (Magic, immortality, technology) are evil, and the moral of the story is you should avoid them, but there is no evidence anywhere in the actual story that X is actually evil and should be avoided are a dime a dozen.
What made this one stand out to me was that it had a perfectly valid moral before the last few episodes. It would have been a much better story if it went with its original themes instead of tacking an unjustified second moral on at the end.
DSMatticus wrote:I sort my leisure activities into a neat and manageable categorized hierarchy, then ignore it and dick around on the internet.
Book of Job: Sometimes, Yahweh will torment believers due to a bet with Satan and not due to any act of the believer themselves. . Faith is its own reward and one should not look for external rewards. Ending:
Once Job realizes that he is thrice blessed and Yahweh multiplies his herds and grants him great material wealth. That's so backwards it makes most people forget that the actual explanation Yahweh gives for being a dick is "Because Hippopotamus" (Job 40:15).
The Forever War: One of the biggest psychological tolls of war on individuals is the fact that they can never go home again. Non-military society changes so fast that soldiers face acute future shock attempting to reintegrate into peacetime society. Behaviors that were once normal will come to be labelled deviant. Thus soldiers always lose the home they are fighting for, and the time spent fighting leads to quirks which isolate them from the newer culture. Ending
After it's revealed that the whole millennium long war was a misunderstanding backed up by a need for economic stimulus and peace has been achieved, the protagonist gets a happy ending as a bunch of soldiers recreate 1990s earth on a frontier world, and his girlfriend didn't really die centuries ago. Also, one of the characters from the era of mandatory homosexuality and test-tube only reproduction decides to tag along and convert to hetero.
"But transportation issues are social-justice issues. The toll of bad transit policies and worse infrastructure—trains and buses that don’t run well and badly serve low-income neighborhoods, vehicular traffic that pollutes the environment and endangers the lives of cyclists and pedestrians—is borne disproportionately by black and brown communities."
I just saw Guardians of the Galaxy with some friends. I want my two hours back. Ladies and gentlemen, please do not see this movie. The writing, plotting, characterisation and worldbuilding are so inane and poorly done that no amount of flashy graphics can do anything but annoy you. This decade finally has its Jar Jar Binks but in this film he's the leading man.
It's weird that the film pissed me off this much, but I may have been spoiled recently by having watched mainly good, well thought-out films.
That's weird. I really liked GotG. It wasn't brilliant or super interesting, but it was fun, funny, and the heroes were charming. Also, I found the degree to which they could express emotions on the faces of the tree and the raccoon to be pretty impressive.
Out beyond the hull, mucoid strings of non-baryonic matter streamed past like Christ's blood in the firmament.
The writing, plotting, characterisation and worldbuilding are so inane and poorly done that no amount of flashy graphics can do anything but annoy you.
Maybe I'm foolishly defending a film I haven't seen for relatively little good reason, but your criticism just smacks of crazy over invested fan boy freak out and you will need to try a very different tact to convince me not to see this film.
Last edited by PhoneLobster on Sun Aug 03, 2014 4:13 am, edited 2 times in total.
Phonelobster's Self Proclaimed Greatest Hits Collection : (no really, they are awesome)
Occluded Sun wrote:It ends with HF concluding that 'being civilized' is worthless and that he should once again take to the road, where true happiness and freedom can be found, and he does.
How does that contradict the rest of the work?
I don't really know how you read Huckleberry Finn and got that. It's not an ode to vagabondry, it's just social commentary on how shitty "civilized" people are told from the perspective of a handful of people who, through no fault of their own, are victim to said shittiness. Finn does leave at the end, but the thing you should take away from that is not how great life on the road is but how poorly decent people fit into the society Twain is criticizing.
But Lago is undoubtably referring to the fact that their efforts to free Jim are pointless because Jim has been a free man the entire time. In Twain's case that is pretty clearly intentional, though. Making a moral statement through the actions of his characters and then rendering it all moot because the happy ending happened off camera and has nothing to do with any of them is exactly the sort of light-hearted cynicism for which he is famous.
The writing, plotting, characterisation and worldbuilding are so inane and poorly done that no amount of flashy graphics can do anything but annoy you.
Maybe I'm foolishly defending a film I haven't seen for relatively little good reason, but your criticism just smacks of crazy over invested fan boy freak out and you will need to try a very different tact to convince me not to see this film.
I will point out that Laertes quite dislikes D&D and really likes Ars Magica. This definitely speaks to his specific tastes, so it's quite likely that GotG just isn't his thing.
Cuz apparently I gotta break this down for you dense motherfuckers- I'm trans feminine nonbinary. My pronouns are they/them.
Winnah wrote:No, No. 'Prak' is actually a Thri Kreen impersonating a human and roleplaying himself as a D&D character. All hail our hidden insect overlords.
FrankTrollman wrote:In Soviet Russia, cosmic horror is the default state.
You should gain sanity for finding out that the problems of a region are because there are fucking monsters there.
I'm not a comic book person, really. (That is to say, I liked Sandman and Fables and Transmetropolitan, but conventional Marvel/DC stuff leaves me pretty cold.) As such, I wasn't the target market for it anyway. If you enjoyed it, then I don't have a problem with that: we all enjoy different things.
So yeah. That was an overreaction. I'm not actually sure why I'm so pissed off by it. It was just.... aargh. 170 million dollar movie, three bit writing. What a waste. They could have made Grand Budapest Hotel five and a half times over for that.
Last edited by Laertes on Sun Aug 03, 2014 2:54 pm, edited 2 times in total.
In TGD's opinion, which are the worst nationally syndicated newspaper comics?
I'm actually having some real trouble deciding. Even if I just keep it to a top three or even five. Like, in a lot of ways I want to say Apartment 3G is the worst all-around: awful writing, awful characters, awful artwork, awful pacing. But there are plenty of comics that manage to be just as or even more aggravating on a strip-by-strip basis. The last two weeks' Funky Winkerbean has been particularly insufferable, for instance. And while A3G is consistently worse than Marvin, Marvin manages to sink below it fairly frequently.
Also, I made a comment I made awhile back about how the Comics Curmudgeon has become a parody of itself by recycling the same lame gags. You know, forced faux awesome, aging Gen X hipster bitterness, and 'hahaha grimdark deconstruction of a funny comic' gags on the same 10-12 comics. Only difference I see is that Josh started adding Heathcliff to his stable.
Josh Kablack wrote:Your freedom to make rulings up on the fly is in direct conflict with my freedom to interact with an internally consistent narrative. Your freedom to run/play a game without needing to understand a complex rule system is in direct conflict with my freedom to play a character whose abilities and flaws function as I intended within that ruleset. Your freedom to add and change rules in the middle of the game is in direct conflict with my ability to understand that rules system before I decided whether or not to join your game.
In short, your entire post is dismissive of not merely my intelligence, but my agency. And I don't mean agency as a player within one of your games, I mean my agency as a person. You do not want me to be informed when I make the fundamental decisions of deciding whether to join your game or buying your rules system.
You mean there's another person on the Den who'll get my Transmet references?
Dean was right, it's Forever-Christmas.
On the note of GotG and Marvel/DC stuff- basically, you're just not a fan of Supers. Which is what Marvel and DC "specialize" in. I mean, all the comics you mention were DC titles under their Vertigo imprint, but they're very different things from Supers titles.
It's definitely a very specific thing, and it has it's own tropes and all that. And really, certain specific authors and runs aside, Supers comics aren't really known for the overall quality of their writing so much as they're known for their spectacles. I think that's changing somewhat, but it'll be a bit before the movies catch up to it.
Cuz apparently I gotta break this down for you dense motherfuckers- I'm trans feminine nonbinary. My pronouns are they/them.
Winnah wrote:No, No. 'Prak' is actually a Thri Kreen impersonating a human and roleplaying himself as a D&D character. All hail our hidden insect overlords.
FrankTrollman wrote:In Soviet Russia, cosmic horror is the default state.
You should gain sanity for finding out that the problems of a region are because there are fucking monsters there.
Prak_Anima wrote:So of course humans make themselves up as casti and go out to night clubs. And the human character married to a young, more liberal minded casti did this shit, to "better understand his culture."
Fucking really? Sigh.
That sounds like a very plausible thing for people to do. Not in good taste, or demonstrating insight, but there's never been a lack of people willing to do stupid tasteless things at a moment's notice.
You mean there's another person on the Den who'll get my Transmet references?
Dean was right, it's Forever-Christmas.
Dude, I love Transmetropolitan. I continue to make passing references to it in the background of my Shadowrun games (stuff like Durden Demolitions junk yard being a location for a Johnson meet)
Come see Sprockets & Serials
How do you confuse a barbarian?
Put a greatsword a maul and a greataxe in a room and ask them to take their pick
