Ben Edlund himself pointed out that "Spooon!" was not introduced until several issues into the comic, nor did it appear into the cartoon during the first few episodes (season 2, IIRC).
Why should anybody expect the gag to be pounded out during the first 6 episodes of the live show?
All these fucking fanboys whining about how it's not the same as the dumbed-down cartoon make me want to puke. The original books WERE the tick. All else (Tick issues by other authors, the cartoon series, the live show, the toys, etc.) are merely Ben Edlund's well-deserved opportunity to pay off his college loans.
Personally, I thought the cartoon was okay, if a little shallow... and the live series started out kind of weak in the pilot episode but found its legs quickly and was easilly better than 90% of the shit that gets passed on as comedy these days.
All of those artists made millions of dollars, and the success of their future efforts are nearly guaranteed, thanks to the fame the record labels built for them. Don Henly could release an album of his favorite polkas, played on a nose-flute and backed up by somebody making fart sounds with his hands, and it would go at least gold if his name was on the cover.
The problem is, if Shakira wants to be the Next Britney Spears, she needs a label to push MTV airplay, push all the local radio stations, get her on Pepsi commercials, get "entertainment news" shows to talk about her as a "hot, rising star", get the magazines teens read to put her pictures everywhere, etc.
Without the vast sphere of corporate influence wielded by record labels, it is impossible to become a pop star. Always has been. For every charismatic singer, there are thousands more just as good who will never make a cent, because they don't have somebody like Sony or Disney cramming their music into everybody's ears.
A VC firm simply isn't big enough to compete with that.
By contrats, today women and men meet, date, then marry, and most of the people they meet work in similar professions and therefore have similar interests and if those interests are determined genetically, similar genes. It's like a mild, remote form of inbreeding. More often than not techies marry techies, teachers marry teachers, scientists marry scientists, lawyers marry lawyers, etc.
As Peter Selers said in "Murder By Death"...
"Interesting theory. Just one small problem... Is Stupid!"
As I think through the dozens of married couples I know, not one of them share a common profession. Techies marry social workers, veteranarians, and CPA's all the time.
Once in a great while, people who work together get married, but most people still meet their mates at campus gatherings, in bars, at church, through mutual friends, etc.
As for your second theory about radiation issues... It is remarkably irresponsible of you to call it a "theory" when you have no scientific evidence to support it. What you have is a hypothisis... and a crackpot one at that.
I know there are a lot more Aspys (as we call ourselves) out there un-diagnosed who don't know that there is a clinical term for what they are - intelligent social misfits.
Okay, first of all, "we"? I bet there are thousands of Asperger Syndrome cases out there who don't call themselves "Aspys". Nobody elected you as their spokesman.
On to my main point...
If you want to meet "intelligent social misfits", it ain't hard. Just go to your local Sci-Fi convention and you will see oodles of them.
Personally, I think it is silly to deal with a syndrome that Bill Gates and many other multi-millionares "suffer" from as if it were a pathology that needs to be treated. There's probably at least as many "Aspys" out there as there are gays (with a remarkable ammount of overlap, if an informal poll at a typical sci-fi convention is anything to go on), and look at the stink the gays put up about being listed in the Merck manual as a psychological condition. It's like some people are in just as much of a rush to be classified as abnormal as gays have been to avoid it. Stop thinking of your lack of social skills as a disease, and just try to follow the advice of more socially clued-in people on things like hygene and politeness. Most people will just think of you as "kind of smart, but kind of quirky". Is that so bad?
Parents: If you kid has Asperger's Syndrome, he will probably get picked on a lot while growing up, he might blow up your shed with his junior chemestry set, and he might never marry, but he also might someday buy you your dream home with the profits from his Death Ray invention. Accept your little freak for who he is, and get on with life. Nothing is wrong.
One of the things that made EQ so popular was its modest hardware requiremets. I knew one guy who had most of his familly playing at once, by using several systems that were otherwise lying around the house unused. Now, all but his main workstation have been rendered useless for the purposess of playing EQ, so if his familly wants to play together, he must first buy several new PC's.
For my own part, I refuse to put one red cent into my old Win95 game machine. Any money I have for hardware is going into my server closet, and I can't be bothered with any game that I can't play on an old junky K6-333. I'm cancelling my EQ account today.
$100 a month, even Aussie dollars, is kind of expensive by US standards.
No, mobile phones cost slighly less per month than Satelite TV. However, since using a land line is practically free here, we would rather spend our money on seeing BBC World broadcasts and Buffy reruns on FX than on the ability to be annoyed by our boss everywhere we go.
Phone use is not an idicator of advanced technology. In 1920, maybe, but not today.
Re:$3000 is the INITIAL mass produced version.
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Actually, he said he was hoping for "a consumer model" to cost about $3000 in a year or so... meaning that the "consumer" Segway will be somehow even less impressive than this absurd product.
And this is better than my decked-out 2.8-liter Audi A4 HOW?
Living proof that Anonymous Cowards should always be allowed on Slasdot. With one rhetorical question this guy said everything that needs to be said about the Segway. Bravo.
Solution for pedestrians!
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I've already worked it out:
If you are walking down a sidewalk and pestered by somebody on a Segway...
1. Stay in front of it to block it for a second or two.
2. Reach over the bars and yank out the key card.
3. Run like hell.
They will never catch you, because you are in good shape from walking and they are not. They will be stuck on the sidewalk with a $3000 push-cart. It's the perfect crime.
Re:It's a damn scooter
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His faulty math does not alter the fact that a person in any kind of decent shape can travel at 18 MPH on a good touring bicycle. Why spend 3 grand on this contraption, when a $500-$1000 bike gets you there quicker and requires no recharge?
Are you aware of that the north/south length of Norway is the same as the distance from the north of Denmark to the south of Italy?
And yet it's still to small to park Ameica's cars on it.
The reason why most American's don't have cell phones is not lack of availability. We have dozens of digital network providers fighting for the chance to put a shiny new motorolla in our hands. It's because our land lines are so fantastically cheap to use (per minute charges: zero) that nobody wants to bother with the cost of a mobile phone unless they absolutely, positively need it... and most people don't.
But I'm assuming Wil can't predict the future, and Robert was "stronger" up til then. He tried to vote off the strongest link at that point.
Not exactly... Picardo was the "strongest link" in the previous round, but Burton was kicking serious ass for the entire night. It's been a few hours now since I saw it, but I don't recall that he missed very many questions at all.
Her "bitch" act is grating and shrill, and adds nothing to the tension of the show... instead it distracts from it.
And that wink she does at the end of the show to hint to the audience "it's all in good fun" is just creepy.
The Star Trek one is the first episode I have bothered to sit through since the first time I saw it. I would watch it more, because it is a fun concept for a game show, except she annoys the hell out of me.
I think that the dramatic tention that the show's format seems to be trying to cultivate would be much higher if the host was very calm and sympathetic. If I were producing the show, I would offer the job to Peter Faulk (of "Columbo" fame).
Then at some point
the Tick stopped being funny. Man Eating Cow, Karma Tornado, all the spin-offs besides Paul The Samurai were terrible from the beginning. I
never could figure out why this was.
Two words: Ben Edlund.
He created the tick, along with the 12 brilliant original issues.
Then, he started developping the cartoon series, and didn't have time. (His pace for the last few issues was agonizingly slow to begin with.)
So New England Comics, to keep up with the demand, created two spin-offs and started a new Tick series, all with different writers. Some of it was okay, but none of it really measured up to the original, or even succeeded in capturing the tone of Edlund's writing.
Edlund went on to do a lot of writing on the cartoon, and later created the new series. He has not done a Tick comic since issue 12 was released in May of 1993.
People like you who think that any depiction of anything other then fluffy puppy dogs on TV is inappropriate are continuing
the work of the terrorists!
Ah-ha! So that's where all that anthrax is coming from! Come on, guys, let's get him!
Seriously, the shrill tone of people saying "don't change anything about our cynical, shallow culture or the terrorists will have won," are really getting on my nerves. If you want to defeat terrorism, you do what our government is doing: Find where they are hiding and turn each of them into a fine red spray. Repeat process until you run out of hostile targets.
I promise you that bin Laden does not give a flying fuck about what jokes Ellen came up with durring the Emmy Awards. The Al Quida network never had the goal of making sure there were fewer irreverent jokes about NYC on late night talk shows.
So no, changing our culture does not mean the terrorists won. It means that we are responding to a crisis with an understandable measure of caution and seriousness. Pulling all western presense out of the Middle East and dissolving the state of Israel... now that would mean the terrorists won.
How did your straw-grasping guesswork get modded up as "informative"!?
It is common knowledge to those who followed the development of the series that the new Tick show can only re-use characters from the original comic book. The characters made for the cartoon series (like Die Fledermaus and American Maid) can't be used. Ben Edlund obviously liked the dynamic of the characters, so he created similar ones with different names. Mystery solved.
But your theory about how they feared that a prime time audience would lack the sophistication of saturday morning cartoon watchers was certainly amusing.
All of the stuff from the original Tick comic that Edlund drew, including Aurther, Chairface, "Spoon!", Ninja World, Paul the Samurai, The Civic Minded Five, The Chainsaw Vigilante etc... all of it, is fair game to be used.
The only stuff that they can't bring into the live show is the stuff that was created for the cartoon, like that lame-assed sewer guy who talked like Rainman.
No vital elements were lost. None. So take a deep breath, count to ten, and enjoy the new show for what it is.
Why do so many environmentalists think I want a car that only runs an hour a day?
I suppose if I never go anywhere except straight to the office and straight back, like every good socialist should, then it's the perfect car.
If I want to pick up my kids from school and take them to a ball game, or (heaven forbid) want to hitch up the bass boat and take the family fishing for the weekend, I am clearly Part Of The Problem to you people.
Here's an idea... let's keep making the cars people actually want better and more efficient.
Slashdot Mirror
Why should anybody expect the gag to be pounded out during the first 6 episodes of the live show?
All these fucking fanboys whining about how it's not the same as the dumbed-down cartoon make me want to puke. The original books WERE the tick. All else (Tick issues by other authors, the cartoon series, the live show, the toys, etc.) are merely Ben Edlund's well-deserved opportunity to pay off his college loans.
Personally, I thought the cartoon was okay, if a little shallow... and the live series started out kind of weak in the pilot episode but found its legs quickly and was easilly better than 90% of the shit that gets passed on as comedy these days.
Can I be screwed by the RIAA like that too?
Without the vast sphere of corporate influence wielded by record labels, it is impossible to become a pop star. Always has been. For every charismatic singer, there are thousands more just as good who will never make a cent, because they don't have somebody like Sony or Disney cramming their music into everybody's ears.
A VC firm simply isn't big enough to compete with that.
As Peter Selers said in "Murder By Death"...
As I think through the dozens of married couples I know, not one of them share a common profession. Techies marry social workers, veteranarians, and CPA's all the time.
Once in a great while, people who work together get married, but most people still meet their mates at campus gatherings, in bars, at church, through mutual friends, etc.
As for your second theory about radiation issues... It is remarkably irresponsible of you to call it a "theory" when you have no scientific evidence to support it. What you have is a hypothisis... and a crackpot one at that.
Okay, first of all, "we"? I bet there are thousands of Asperger Syndrome cases out there who don't call themselves "Aspys". Nobody elected you as their spokesman.
On to my main point...
If you want to meet "intelligent social misfits", it ain't hard. Just go to your local Sci-Fi convention and you will see oodles of them.
Personally, I think it is silly to deal with a syndrome that Bill Gates and many other multi-millionares "suffer" from as if it were a pathology that needs to be treated. There's probably at least as many "Aspys" out there as there are gays (with a remarkable ammount of overlap, if an informal poll at a typical sci-fi convention is anything to go on), and look at the stink the gays put up about being listed in the Merck manual as a psychological condition. It's like some people are in just as much of a rush to be classified as abnormal as gays have been to avoid it. Stop thinking of your lack of social skills as a disease, and just try to follow the advice of more socially clued-in people on things like hygene and politeness. Most people will just think of you as "kind of smart, but kind of quirky". Is that so bad?
Parents: If you kid has Asperger's Syndrome, he will probably get picked on a lot while growing up, he might blow up your shed with his junior chemestry set, and he might never marry, but he also might someday buy you your dream home with the profits from his Death Ray invention. Accept your little freak for who he is, and get on with life. Nothing is wrong.
Neither do operating systems.
For my own part, I refuse to put one red cent into my old Win95 game machine. Any money I have for hardware is going into my server closet, and I can't be bothered with any game that I can't play on an old junky K6-333. I'm cancelling my EQ account today.
Fuck you, Veriant Interactive.
No, mobile phones cost slighly less per month than Satelite TV. However, since using a land line is practically free here, we would rather spend our money on seeing BBC World broadcasts and Buffy reruns on FX than on the ability to be annoyed by our boss everywhere we go.
Phone use is not an idicator of advanced technology. In 1920, maybe, but not today.
Actually, he said he was hoping for "a consumer model" to cost about $3000 in a year or so... meaning that the "consumer" Segway will be somehow even less impressive than this absurd product.
Living proof that Anonymous Cowards should always be allowed on Slasdot. With one rhetorical question this guy said everything that needs to be said about the Segway. Bravo.
If you are walking down a sidewalk and pestered by somebody on a Segway...
1. Stay in front of it to block it for a second or two.
2. Reach over the bars and yank out the key card.
3. Run like hell.
They will never catch you, because you are in good shape from walking and they are not. They will be stuck on the sidewalk with a $3000 push-cart. It's the perfect crime.
His faulty math does not alter the fact that a person in any kind of decent shape can travel at 18 MPH on a good touring bicycle. Why spend 3 grand on this contraption, when a $500-$1000 bike gets you there quicker and requires no recharge?
And yet it's still to small to park Ameica's cars on it.
The reason why most American's don't have cell phones is not lack of availability. We have dozens of digital network providers fighting for the chance to put a shiny new motorolla in our hands. It's because our land lines are so fantastically cheap to use (per minute charges: zero) that nobody wants to bother with the cost of a mobile phone unless they absolutely, positively need it... and most people don't.
Not exactly... Picardo was the "strongest link" in the previous round, but Burton was kicking serious ass for the entire night. It's been a few hours now since I saw it, but I don't recall that he missed very many questions at all.
And that wink she does at the end of the show to hint to the audience "it's all in good fun" is just creepy.
The Star Trek one is the first episode I have bothered to sit through since the first time I saw it. I would watch it more, because it is a fun concept for a game show, except she annoys the hell out of me.
I think that the dramatic tention that the show's format seems to be trying to cultivate would be much higher if the host was very calm and sympathetic. If I were producing the show, I would offer the job to Peter Faulk (of "Columbo" fame).
To each his own, I guess.
Unfortunately, too many /. readers have no idea that a comic called "Cerebus" even existed, let alone that it was one of Edlund's early influences.
I suspect that a lot of /.ers were still playing kickball when Cerebus was in its prime.
the Tick stopped being funny. Man Eating Cow, Karma Tornado, all the spin-offs besides Paul The Samurai were terrible from the beginning. I
never could figure out why this was.
Two words: Ben Edlund.
He created the tick, along with the 12 brilliant original issues.
Then, he started developping the cartoon series, and didn't have time. (His pace for the last few issues was agonizingly slow to begin with.)
So New England Comics, to keep up with the demand, created two spin-offs and started a new Tick series, all with different writers. Some of it was okay, but none of it really measured up to the original, or even succeeded in capturing the tone of Edlund's writing.
Edlund went on to do a lot of writing on the cartoon, and later created the new series. He has not done a Tick comic since issue 12 was released in May of 1993.
As opposed to all those male superheroes, who all have pot bellies, floppy man-boobs, and thinning hair?
the work of the terrorists!
Ah-ha! So that's where all that anthrax is coming from! Come on, guys, let's get him!
Seriously, the shrill tone of people saying "don't change anything about our cynical, shallow culture or the terrorists will have won," are really getting on my nerves. If you want to defeat terrorism, you do what our government is doing: Find where they are hiding and turn each of them into a fine red spray. Repeat process until you run out of hostile targets.
I promise you that bin Laden does not give a flying fuck about what jokes Ellen came up with durring the Emmy Awards. The Al Quida network never had the goal of making sure there were fewer irreverent jokes about NYC on late night talk shows.
So no, changing our culture does not mean the terrorists won. It means that we are responding to a crisis with an understandable measure of caution and seriousness. Pulling all western presense out of the Middle East and dissolving the state of Israel... now that would mean the terrorists won.
It is common knowledge to those who followed the development of the series that the new Tick show can only re-use characters from the original comic book. The characters made for the cartoon series (like Die Fledermaus and American Maid) can't be used. Ben Edlund obviously liked the dynamic of the characters, so he created similar ones with different names. Mystery solved.
But your theory about how they feared that a prime time audience would lack the sophistication of saturday morning cartoon watchers was certainly amusing.
The only stuff that they can't bring into the live show is the stuff that was created for the cartoon, like that lame-assed sewer guy who talked like Rainman.
No vital elements were lost. None. So take a deep breath, count to ten, and enjoy the new show for what it is.
I suppose if I never go anywhere except straight to the office and straight back, like every good socialist should, then it's the perfect car.
If I want to pick up my kids from school and take them to a ball game, or (heaven forbid) want to hitch up the bass boat and take the family fishing for the weekend, I am clearly Part Of The Problem to you people.
Here's an idea... let's keep making the cars people actually want better and more efficient.
NEWS FLASH! People Who Sell Hydrogen Think Fuel Cells Are A Good Idea!
No farms to build... no spawning units. Just tactics, blood, and mud. With good looking graphics and a fantasticly well-thought-out physics engine.
Myth has got to be one of the most underrated and overlooked battle games of the last few years.