Domain: avclub.com
Stories and comments across the archive that link to avclub.com.
Comments · 63
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The Onion has been at this for a while
The Onion has a feature called Random Rules. They take a celebrity type person and put their MP3 player on random. Then have the person being interviewed discusses what happens to come up on their player.
It's actually a pretty good feature. I especially liked the one with Gerald Casale.
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Can anyone enlighten me ...This may be a little off topic, but there is another case of one guy "ripping off" someone else's song that has me intrigued to this day:
There is this rap-musician, who goes by the name of "Schoolly D". He took a bit of Jimmy Page / Led Zeppelin's "Kashmir" (the essential bit, to be precise) and made a new song out of it, "Signifying Rapper" , a tongue-not-so-much-in cheek story about a "rapper" and a "pimp"; loud, dirty social commentary.
The song was used by Director Abel Ferrara in his film "Bad Lieutenant", it accompanied some crucial scenes and became an integral part of Ferrara's work (quite some social commentary in itself).
Page/Zeppelin, having not been asked for permision, eventually decided to sue, and Ferrara/Schoolly D (unwilling or unable to fight a major legal battle) removed "Signifying Rapper" from any subsequent releases of the film (e.g.: you can't get the "original" version on DVD).
What I'd like to know: Would Ferrara/Schoolly D have had a leg to stand on, had they chosen to fight this case ("1st Amendment" or somesuch)? And if not - why not?
a.c.
P.S.: Half a decade later the song turns up again (or at least that crucial bit) --- in/for Roland Emmerich's "Godzilla", re-interpreted, heavily re-mixed (and probably well-paid for) by one "Puff Daddy"... so apparently there weren't even any artistic qualms about the re-appropriation of the song in a pop/rap/hiphop-context. Abel Ferrara had some choice words to say about the incident in an interview:
"Oh, yeah. I'll strangle that cocksucker Jimmy Page. As if every fucking lick that guy ever played didn't come off a Robert Johnson album. "Signifying Rapper" was out for five years, and there wasn't a problem. Then the film had already been out for two years and they start bitching about it. And these pricks, when their attorneys are on the job, our guys are afraid to come out of their office. You're not gonna fight their fucking warriors, you know what I mean? Can you imagine, this was down at a federal court in New York, with a 70-year-old judge, and they're playing Schoolly D and Led Zeppelin to the guy? It cost Schoolly like $50,000. It was a nightmare. And meanwhile, "Signifying Rapper" is 50 million times better than "Kashmir" ever thought of being. And then, this prick [Page] turns around with Puff Daddy and redoes it for the Godzilla soundtrack. Here's Puff Daddy, where every other song this boy sang was King Of New York this and King Of New York that. And I would never even fucking think of suing these guys. Why sue? You should be happy that somebody is paying homage to your work."
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Also...
The review at the Onion AV Club gave it a D.
As to the protest, I would like to remind you that Christianity does not have a monopoly on obnoxious advocates trying to ram the prejudices of their worldview down everybody's throat.
Thank you and good night.
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According to The Onion AV Club
the gameplay really sucks anyway, so maybe the game will do more harm to the cause they are trying to promote than good....
At any rate, didn't a parody of a game similiar in mechanics to this appear on the Simpsons like 10 years ago? -
Re:Futurama Flavored Humor
Sixth Question: What made you want to do voice acting as a profession? It must not be very glamorous if the only way a fan could recognize you is by your voice, why'd you choose it?
From Billy West's interview with The Onion:
You know, it's like they treat [voice actors] like we're not actors. I went to the première of Space Jam at [Grauman's] Chinese Theatre--big première, red carpet, everything. Me and the voice people got invited to the little theatre; there's two of them there, the big Chinese theatre, and then there was a smaller one next to it. We weren't invited to the big place, and so my friend Bob Bergen, who does Porky Pig an awful lot, called them up and said, "Hey, what gives? We're featured in this movie." She said, "Oh you mean the party at the big Chinese theatre? Oh, that's for the actors." I'd like to find out what little cement-head said that.
So yeah, "it must not be very glamorous" is the understatement of the week. -
Re:Doesn't work
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The Colbert Report on D&D Online
A week or two ago I was watching the Colbert Report (a spin-off of the Daily Show), and was highly amused by a little fireside chat by Colbert about the release of Dungeons & Dragons Online. Here's a transcript (and video):
Earlier this week marked the introduction of Dungeons and Dragons: Storm Reach a new on-line version of the popular swords and sorcery game. I myself played a lot of the D and D way back when. Actually I once met Len Lakofka at Gen Con Ten.
[pause] Anybody?
[applause]
I'll never forget when I lost *Faraneeth, my level 21 Lawful Good Paladin. Heh. I know, that's redundant. He was on a campaign searching for Tenser, wizard of the Circle of Light, on rout from the *Shel-du-mar valley to the *Filronian Peninsula. He got cornered by a Displacer Beast and a Mind Flayer and he failed to save against Psionic attack. See, he'd already lost a lot of hit points battling a Beholder and the cleric in the party couldn't regenerate enough hit points with his Heal Light Wounds spell. All in all a sad day in *Badabascore.
But I gave up D&D in 1984. My parents were concerned I was being possessed by demons. So one summer they sent me to an exorcism day camp. Eight weeks of sailing, casting out the devils within me and making lanyards did the trick. Oh, and I got a girlfriend.
Anyway, it is the end of an era. And as the cyber-elves and the e-wizards log onto the digital dungeon, I sadly place on my shelf these now obsolete polyhedral dice. The good news is with D&D now on the inter net, the social outcasts of today's junior high schools are relieved of the agony of any human contact.
Enjoy your magnificent isolation.
Don't forget to bathe.
There's definitely a good bit of that which had to have been written by somebody pretty familiar with D&D. I was pleased to find that Colbert himself actually played for a few years back in high school, as mentioned in this Onion AV Club interview:
AVC: You were into Dungeons & Dragons as a kid, were you not?
SC: Yeah, I really was. I started playing in seventh grade, 1977. And I played incessantly, 'til probably 1981--four years.
AVC: What's the appeal?
SC: It's a fantasy role-playing game. If you're familiar with the works of Tolkien or Stephen R. Donaldson or Poul Anderson or any of the guys who wrote really good fantasy stuff, those worlds stood up. It's an opportunity to assume a persona. Who really wants to be themselves when they're teenagers? And you get to be heroic and have adventures. And it's an incredibly fun game. They have arcane rules and complex societies and they're open-ended and limitless, kind of like life. For somebody who eventually became an actor, it was interesting to have done that for so many years, because acting is role-playing. You assume a character, and you have to stay in them over years, and you create histories, and you apply your powers. It's good improvisation with agreed rules before you go in.
On a tangential note, Colbert is the only person/source I can think of that successfully managed to predict 5/5 Oscar winners. Heck, he even got Crash. -
The Onion A.V. Club
The Onion's A.V. Club has very good game reviews. They don't take themselves too seriously, and they answer the only question I care about with a game - should I buy it?
They also have the extremely entertaining Games of Our Lives, which consists of very funny reviews of old games (20+ years in most cases) written by Wil Wheaton. -
The Onion A.V. Club
The Onion's A.V. Club has very good game reviews. They don't take themselves too seriously, and they answer the only question I care about with a game - should I buy it?
They also have the extremely entertaining Games of Our Lives, which consists of very funny reviews of old games (20+ years in most cases) written by Wil Wheaton. -
Voice acting my ass
They're blaming the cost of games on voice acting? That is the biggest load of crap ever becase that's like the once place they can hire good AND cheap actors to play the parts. However, instead of going that, developers are intent on paying big bucks to celebrities because they believe that it somhow legitimizes their game by having big name celebrities in the credits.
Billy West, a voice actor with the roles of Fry and Prof. Farnsworth from futurama to his credit, has an interesting article on The Onion - AV Club about how Hollywood pays people like Cameron Diaz 20 million for their voice in Shrek while overlooking the vetran voice actors in the industry. He makes a lot of good points about how good film actors don't make good voice actors and vice versa, since a voice actor has to learn to expression emotion without the use of his physical features, and how regular actors never really escape their own voice. He also has other interesting tibits about how voice actors typically help producers save money because they can do multiple different voices. I mean, would you guess that the same actor did the voices of Fry, Prof Farnsworth, Zapp Brannigan, and Zoidberg on Futurama?. Anyways, the point is that I don't buy the fact that the video game industry is all that interested in keeping prices low, because they could find cheaper means of production if they were truly interested in doing so. -
Re:Selling Gameplay Over Graphics
Dave McKean's Mirrormask comes to mind.
It's also worth pointing out (in favour of the grandparent's point) this clip from the Onion's interview with Neil Gaiman about the movie:
NG: [...] Once I started writing, we'd get into a load of arguments, and Dave was in the right, but I still didn't quite get it in terms of... He figured out how he could use his $4 million budget to make a movie, whereas I came from the school from which I have written my Hollywood scripts in the past, which is that realistic stuff is cheap and special-effects-y stuff is expensive.
AVC: And the entire movie is essentially a special effect.
NG: Right. I wanted to do a school scene, and Dave said, "We can't afford it. We'd have to have at least 10 kids, we'd have to have chaperones, a teacher, locations, this, that, and the other, and it will cost." And he'd see my expression and he'd say, "But look, if you wanted the world crumpling up like a piece of paper and turning into a flower, I can do that for nothing." So we had this very, very strange and testy series of days on the thing. And I think a lot of it was just a shock of discovering that this wasn't as easy and pleasant as everything else in our collaboration had ever been.
CGI is cheap these days in film. It will eventually become the same way in games, as well. It's just a matter of time. -
Similar piece at AVClub
AVClub article
AVClub is from the same guys who do The Onion
This interview also features Dave McKean.
Ryan Fenton -
Re:I have a good reason not to switch
Technically, you don't eat a dick unless you're a cannibal. I think the word you're looking for is "suck".
Further, you indicate that you had you dick sucked by a guy last night, yet are using the derogatory "faggot". Perhaps you are confused about your own sexuality. This isn't the best place to ask for help; I'd suggest Dan Savage over at Savage Love.
Keep trying, eventually you'll get the hang of trolling.