Sitting on a cob web eyeing minnows with bad intent. Water running down his setae greasy palpae smearing mandibles. Floating in the cold lake Watching as the silly tadpoles run. Feeding on a dead duck spitting out pieces of his broken web. Aqualung!
But I'm finding myself really, really uninterested in what's coming out. These AAA titles get so caught up in the extraneous BS that they forget to put a fun game in there. And so many overblown, uninteresting stories! A minimal storyline can be fine but the more involved it is, the better it had be. A big story that's stupid is worse than a minimal story that's good because the poorness is staring you in the face. An actor might not be a song and dance guy. If he doesn't do a routine in the film, you won't miss it. But if he tries to do a Fred Astaire scene and falls woefully short, now your attention is drawn to how awful it is. Do it right or leave it out. You make a big, stupid story be front and center and it's awful then it's just ruining the whole experience. You have to spend all this time paying attention to how it sucks.
And sadly even if the story is interesting the gameplay itself just isn't any fun. Poor controls make it feel like more of a chore than something that becomes engrossingly fun.
I think it's blockbuster syndrome. The more splosions in a movie, generally the worse the plot. The more money thrown at a AAA title, the more focus-grouped and pedestrian the results will be. Smaller titles still take chances. That's when they get bought up by the big boys and turned into zombie franchises.
There are some exceptions. I still think GTAIV was very impressive. But that's a very rare bird.
expecting quality from the movie, you ask too much
on
X-Men: First Class
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
The problem is that the source material is pretty dire to begin with.
Comic books are the classic case of remembering things as better than they were. Any commercial entertainment is about making money but the good stuff can also fit art in there. Comics have always been about making money. Yes, you can get art in some of the short run books or occasionally some good runs on major titles but these characters are the bread and butter of the comic companies. This is a business. And you don't risk the franchise by taking risks. So you do boring, predictable storylines. You have giant crossover events that promise everything will change but the biggest constant is your continued disappointment at being jerked around.
I never had the money to get into comics but I've always been a scifi dork. The Battlestar Galactica I half-remembered from my youth is nothing like what actually aired. It was so much better. And Buck Rogers, I never remembered it being so tragically disco. And a lot of Trek is truly, spectacularly awful. My standards were increasing as TNG aired so I never properly appreciated the cringe factor of the early episodes until rewatching them.
It's possible to accidentally make a really good comic book movie. The first Iron Man was good and shouldn't have been. The producers admitted they spent more time on the visuals than the plot. All the best lines were ad-libbed by Downey. And the second one proved how big of a fluke the first one was by being as awful as it deserved to be.
The two Nolan Batman movies were better than we had any right to expect, especially given the direction the series had gone previously. I don't know what dark bargains were struck to keep studio intervention out of the process but damn, those were some good movies.
The problem with a comic book movie is a director's hands are going to be tied more often than not. The movie's getting made because a deal's been inked and there's money to be made. That's as opposed to the reverse of the process where producers are championing an idea and are selling it to the studio on the premise it'll make money. Sometimes the distinction's hard to see but it all boils down to a question of whether the director's doing it for the vision or the paycheck.
While the studio doesn't give a shit about anything other than making money, the real question is whether the creative team does. Witness "Pirates of the Caribbean: It's a Paycheck" or "Transformers 3: Michael Bay Needs Another Diamond-Encrusted Buttplug." You can't tell me anyone on those projects is is feeling the love. Contrast that with Lord of the Rings. Yeah, the studio couldn't give a shit about Tolkien or hobbits but they at least got out of the way of people who did. Then they fucked 'em on the percentage afterwards but at least not before the movies were made.
So yeah, X-Men. How could this have possibly been a good movie? Keep the dream alive because god knows it can't fend for itself.
They made a serious error in judgement on the effect mutilating a child would have. My guess is they thought it would inspire fear, they were very very wrong.
Psychology is a funny thing. That kind of terror repression scares people into submitting right up to the point it scares them into rebelling. I think it works on a base, emotional level that defies any kind of rational consideration. It's like when the reporter is talking to someone who just did something crazy to save someone else, they'll say "I don't know why I did it, I wasn't thinking at all. I just saw and did and was through it before my mind caught up."
The Libya thing surprises me. I thought we saw the collapse of Qdaffy coming and it just stopped in mid-collapse. It's like watching a failed demolition where the building defiantly stops collapsing halfway through.
I bet a lot of the high-level people who defected thought they were safely jumping on the bandwagon and now it's months later and where's this revolution we've been hearing about?
Except you can't reboot a universe like Doctor Who, because they did not reboot the universe.
The new series that started a few years back is the exact same universe that Doctor Who has always been in. Every previous generation (including Paul McGann's 8th Doctor who only had one on-screen outing) is still there, and the entire prior history of The Doctor remains.
Technically you could do the same thing with the existing comics, new generations of classic characters. That's not a new idea. The Phantom is passed father to son for umpty dozen generations. A few times they've done that like with villains taking up the gimmick of predecessors. This would also mean that you could do a decent story arc. This is the story of Joe who is the Blue Bastard. Now his story is over. Dick is now the new Blue Bastard. And that would also make the one-of-a-kind characters more special. There's only ever been one Red Bastard. None came before and none will come after.
Only problem, comics are a business. They're not going to retire teats that might still have some milk left in 'em.
Despite being a geek, I've never really followed comic books. Mainly it's been because of cheesedick writing. It's the worst of television (too many hands) mixed with the worst of desperate fan-service for dollars.
Marvel spawned a whole new universe for new readers, Ultimate something or other. That's running in parallel with their existing titles. I have no idea how successful that was.
The problem of a long-running strip is that the characters are stuck in a time warp even while the world moves on around them. Archie is always going to be in a 1950's America that never really existed even as computers and cell phones are dropped in. (or at least that's how it looks at the checkout line. That Archie is even still published is in and of itself a time warp.)
The sad truth of the matter is most of the comic backstories suck to begin with. Too many writers, too much crap. There's not much worth salvaging. And seriously, how many worthwhile stories are there to tell with a given character? The only way to keep it fresh would be to keep getting new takes. Bring a writer on, have him tell his take, move on to the next guy. We see that happen with retellings of classic stories, why not with classic characters? But the problem is that the publishers aren't telling stories, they're moving product. The core consumer they're targeting wants the same old shit, boring and predictable, just like McDonalds. Roided out muscled dudes, pneumatic-titted heroines, and Frank Miller pseudo-grittiness. Bah.
The only comics I've seen that were any good were limited runs. (limited could mean numbers of years.) But they had a beginning, middle, and end. Something like Sandman was decent. But these lurching, undead, zombie titles that just keep going and going without doing anything new, just the same old boring, dependable shit... Ugh. I've watched too much Star Trek, I don't need to go find something new to be disappointed by.
Selective breeding cannot create traits that do not already exist in the gene stock. When you insert a completely novel gene there's a much greater chance for unpredictable results.
GM crops are a good thing, but they shouldn't be treated just like selective breeding. They should undergo safety testing as rigorous as pharmaceuticals.
I put it like this: selective breeding is like editing a database through the program's interface. GM is like directly editing the tables by hand. I know which one the vendor will support and which one they won't. I know which one I won't touch. GM bypasses all the checks and balances that should be aborting bad gene mixes.
Something about that song never made any sense to me. If it's a gleaming alloy air car, why does a bridge bother it, one lane or otherwise? Couldn't it just hover right on over?
I can't really justify spending $10 to $12 on a novel, especially when it's just going to eat up space at home. So my choices are a) do an inter-library loan which saves me money and clutter and does nothing for the author or b) buy the book for a buck.
I'm talking about the small press stuff here. If we're talking about a mainstream author, it really doesn't feel like my financial contribution matters for squat. I don't feel like I'm supporting a local business going to a McDonalds even if it's owned by a local franchisee. I go to a local diner, I feel like my contribution is more noticed. Same goes with the small press stuff. I listen to the Weird Things podcast and one of the hosts put out a novella on Kindle for a buck. I bought it. Hell, it's just like buying a candybar from a band kid, they get a donation and you still get something back. Win-win.
Publishing has little interest in small press and midlist authors. I'm really interested in seeing if the reduced overhead allows niche writers to flourish.
How do you add additional capacity like that? If the drive could always read the higher density disks, why didn't they use them in the first place? Surely it's not that the manufacturing process is more expensive and they only just now figured out how to make it affordable.
Is there any grain of truth to this or is it pure BS cover for the piracy stuff?
Yup. And the whole thing matches perfectly. I mean, let's compare the symptoms of zombification and religiousness:
Aggressive behaviour towards people with brains? Yup. Mindless repetition of the same utterances? Yup. Congregation with other diseased? Yup.
My friend, I guess you're on the right track here.
I'm getting downmodded like I said something bad about Apple. And considering that article talking about how people are literally having a religious experience in their brains when looking at Apple products... lol
Right, because his modding you down is totally the equivalent of an 'attack', thereby proving your point with some kind of twisted internet atheist troll logic. If anything, you should have been modded Flamebait or Troll, as your response to your moderation gives a pretty good indication that was the intent of the post..
It was really just a try for an easy laugh. I could have just as easily substituted Faux News, politics, football, or mosh pits. Religion seemed broadest and funniest but I think your reply beats my OP hands down. I'd mod you +5 funny if I had the points.:)
Monster Talk had the author of the Zombie Autopsies on for a fun chat about zombies. Monster Talk (podcast) is a skeptic's look at the science of cryptids and popular monsters. Their position is they love the monsters and the stories even if they don't believe in them and use the premise as a means of going into the science. Talk of the Loch Ness monster leads to plesiosaurs, their evolutionary history, and all the reasons there couldn't possibly be a breeding population surviving in the lake.
I didn't know about the Zombie Autopsies until I heard this show and I plan on checking it out. Hopefully it'll be the best bit of Zombie fiction since World War Z.
Would we end up with less celebrities in the world or would the selection pressure only serve to bring us attention whores who are more prolific, neurotic, and annoying?
As an atheist myself (and a relatively "strong" one at that - I consider the concept of religion to be toxic), I wouldn't be surprised to see the same reaction in rabid Linux users, or rabid Windows users (although admittedly they're a lot harder to find).
As an internet troll myself (and a relatively "strong" one at that) I wouldn't be surprised to see the same reaction in atheists when they see a picture of Dawkins, a smug and self-satisfied French existential movie or a first edition of Origin of the Species.
You realise that my train of thought brought about by that post just made me lose The Game, right? I'd have hit that with a +1, just because I know I'll have the rhyme in my mind with every post of yours I read.
My last sig had a similar effect.
"You know that cat Oedipus is one bad mother-" "Shut your mouth!" "I'm just talkin' 'bout Oedipus!" "We can dig it!"
You have to build positive karma to earn downmod points. Still limit how much they can be employed but require positive contributions to earn the ability to downmod. Too often we see sockpuppet accounts downmod unpopular opinions or mark them as troll simply because they disagree. There's no disincentive if these sockpuppet accounts accrue modpoints simply by sitting around.
Completely unrelated and altogether offtopic, but it's been bothering me for years. Literally.
So, what the heck is your sig supposed to mean? It looks like a bunch of Dune-related vocabulary lumped together with an intent that escapes me, and it's been driving me nuts. (For relatively low values thereof.)
With a knick-knack, paddy whack, Give a dog a bone, This old man came rolling home.
Slashdot Mirror
I have an Onion Pulitzer in my pants.
Don't you have therapy you're supposed to be going to, Mr. Congressman?
Lock Tony Stark in a cave with nothing more than a forge and some scrap iron and he'll invent a power armor combat suit with freakin' lasers.
Still, kinda cool in a low-rent A-Team way.
Sitting on a cob web
eyeing minnows with bad intent.
Water running down his setae
greasy palpae smearing mandibles.
Floating in the cold lake
Watching as the silly tadpoles run.
Feeding on a dead duck
spitting out pieces of his broken web.
Aqualung!
Hardly a renaissance man... ...unless he's also good at painting, sculpture and anal sex.
He knows it's better to give than receive.
But I'm finding myself really, really uninterested in what's coming out. These AAA titles get so caught up in the extraneous BS that they forget to put a fun game in there. And so many overblown, uninteresting stories! A minimal storyline can be fine but the more involved it is, the better it had be. A big story that's stupid is worse than a minimal story that's good because the poorness is staring you in the face. An actor might not be a song and dance guy. If he doesn't do a routine in the film, you won't miss it. But if he tries to do a Fred Astaire scene and falls woefully short, now your attention is drawn to how awful it is. Do it right or leave it out. You make a big, stupid story be front and center and it's awful then it's just ruining the whole experience. You have to spend all this time paying attention to how it sucks.
And sadly even if the story is interesting the gameplay itself just isn't any fun. Poor controls make it feel like more of a chore than something that becomes engrossingly fun.
I think it's blockbuster syndrome. The more splosions in a movie, generally the worse the plot. The more money thrown at a AAA title, the more focus-grouped and pedestrian the results will be. Smaller titles still take chances. That's when they get bought up by the big boys and turned into zombie franchises.
There are some exceptions. I still think GTAIV was very impressive. But that's a very rare bird.
The problem is that the source material is pretty dire to begin with.
Comic books are the classic case of remembering things as better than they were. Any commercial entertainment is about making money but the good stuff can also fit art in there. Comics have always been about making money. Yes, you can get art in some of the short run books or occasionally some good runs on major titles but these characters are the bread and butter of the comic companies. This is a business. And you don't risk the franchise by taking risks. So you do boring, predictable storylines. You have giant crossover events that promise everything will change but the biggest constant is your continued disappointment at being jerked around.
I never had the money to get into comics but I've always been a scifi dork. The Battlestar Galactica I half-remembered from my youth is nothing like what actually aired. It was so much better. And Buck Rogers, I never remembered it being so tragically disco. And a lot of Trek is truly, spectacularly awful. My standards were increasing as TNG aired so I never properly appreciated the cringe factor of the early episodes until rewatching them.
It's possible to accidentally make a really good comic book movie. The first Iron Man was good and shouldn't have been. The producers admitted they spent more time on the visuals than the plot. All the best lines were ad-libbed by Downey. And the second one proved how big of a fluke the first one was by being as awful as it deserved to be.
The two Nolan Batman movies were better than we had any right to expect, especially given the direction the series had gone previously. I don't know what dark bargains were struck to keep studio intervention out of the process but damn, those were some good movies.
The problem with a comic book movie is a director's hands are going to be tied more often than not. The movie's getting made because a deal's been inked and there's money to be made. That's as opposed to the reverse of the process where producers are championing an idea and are selling it to the studio on the premise it'll make money. Sometimes the distinction's hard to see but it all boils down to a question of whether the director's doing it for the vision or the paycheck.
While the studio doesn't give a shit about anything other than making money, the real question is whether the creative team does. Witness "Pirates of the Caribbean: It's a Paycheck" or "Transformers 3: Michael Bay Needs Another Diamond-Encrusted Buttplug." You can't tell me anyone on those projects is is feeling the love. Contrast that with Lord of the Rings. Yeah, the studio couldn't give a shit about Tolkien or hobbits but they at least got out of the way of people who did. Then they fucked 'em on the percentage afterwards but at least not before the movies were made.
So yeah, X-Men. How could this have possibly been a good movie? Keep the dream alive because god knows it can't fend for itself.
They made a serious error in judgement on the effect mutilating a child would have. My guess is they thought it would inspire fear, they were very very wrong.
Psychology is a funny thing. That kind of terror repression scares people into submitting right up to the point it scares them into rebelling. I think it works on a base, emotional level that defies any kind of rational consideration. It's like when the reporter is talking to someone who just did something crazy to save someone else, they'll say "I don't know why I did it, I wasn't thinking at all. I just saw and did and was through it before my mind caught up."
The Libya thing surprises me. I thought we saw the collapse of Qdaffy coming and it just stopped in mid-collapse. It's like watching a failed demolition where the building defiantly stops collapsing halfway through.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZwGE92upfQM
I bet a lot of the high-level people who defected thought they were safely jumping on the bandwagon and now it's months later and where's this revolution we've been hearing about?
Except you can't reboot a universe like Doctor Who, because they did not reboot the universe.
The new series that started a few years back is the exact same universe that Doctor Who has always been in. Every previous generation (including Paul McGann's 8th Doctor who only had one on-screen outing) is still there, and the entire prior history of The Doctor remains.
Technically you could do the same thing with the existing comics, new generations of classic characters. That's not a new idea. The Phantom is passed father to son for umpty dozen generations. A few times they've done that like with villains taking up the gimmick of predecessors. This would also mean that you could do a decent story arc. This is the story of Joe who is the Blue Bastard. Now his story is over. Dick is now the new Blue Bastard. And that would also make the one-of-a-kind characters more special. There's only ever been one Red Bastard. None came before and none will come after.
Only problem, comics are a business. They're not going to retire teats that might still have some milk left in 'em.
Despite being a geek, I've never really followed comic books. Mainly it's been because of cheesedick writing. It's the worst of television (too many hands) mixed with the worst of desperate fan-service for dollars.
Marvel spawned a whole new universe for new readers, Ultimate something or other. That's running in parallel with their existing titles. I have no idea how successful that was.
The problem of a long-running strip is that the characters are stuck in a time warp even while the world moves on around them. Archie is always going to be in a 1950's America that never really existed even as computers and cell phones are dropped in. (or at least that's how it looks at the checkout line. That Archie is even still published is in and of itself a time warp.)
The sad truth of the matter is most of the comic backstories suck to begin with. Too many writers, too much crap. There's not much worth salvaging. And seriously, how many worthwhile stories are there to tell with a given character? The only way to keep it fresh would be to keep getting new takes. Bring a writer on, have him tell his take, move on to the next guy. We see that happen with retellings of classic stories, why not with classic characters? But the problem is that the publishers aren't telling stories, they're moving product. The core consumer they're targeting wants the same old shit, boring and predictable, just like McDonalds. Roided out muscled dudes, pneumatic-titted heroines, and Frank Miller pseudo-grittiness. Bah.
The only comics I've seen that were any good were limited runs. (limited could mean numbers of years.) But they had a beginning, middle, and end. Something like Sandman was decent. But these lurching, undead, zombie titles that just keep going and going without doing anything new, just the same old boring, dependable shit... Ugh. I've watched too much Star Trek, I don't need to go find something new to be disappointed by.
Selective breeding cannot create traits that do not already exist in the gene stock. When you insert a completely novel gene there's a much greater chance for unpredictable results.
GM crops are a good thing, but they shouldn't be treated just like selective breeding. They should undergo safety testing as rigorous as pharmaceuticals.
I put it like this: selective breeding is like editing a database through the program's interface. GM is like directly editing the tables by hand. I know which one the vendor will support and which one they won't. I know which one I won't touch. GM bypasses all the checks and balances that should be aborting bad gene mixes.
Not official until we can build it in Civ.
Something about that song never made any sense to me. If it's a gleaming alloy air car, why does a bridge bother it, one lane or otherwise? Couldn't it just hover right on over?
I can't really justify spending $10 to $12 on a novel, especially when it's just going to eat up space at home. So my choices are a) do an inter-library loan which saves me money and clutter and does nothing for the author or b) buy the book for a buck.
I'm talking about the small press stuff here. If we're talking about a mainstream author, it really doesn't feel like my financial contribution matters for squat. I don't feel like I'm supporting a local business going to a McDonalds even if it's owned by a local franchisee. I go to a local diner, I feel like my contribution is more noticed. Same goes with the small press stuff. I listen to the Weird Things podcast and one of the hosts put out a novella on Kindle for a buck. I bought it. Hell, it's just like buying a candybar from a band kid, they get a donation and you still get something back. Win-win.
Publishing has little interest in small press and midlist authors. I'm really interested in seeing if the reduced overhead allows niche writers to flourish.
How do you add additional capacity like that? If the drive could always read the higher density disks, why didn't they use them in the first place? Surely it's not that the manufacturing process is more expensive and they only just now figured out how to make it affordable.
Is there any grain of truth to this or is it pure BS cover for the piracy stuff?
Yup. And the whole thing matches perfectly. I mean, let's compare the symptoms of zombification and religiousness:
Aggressive behaviour towards people with brains? Yup.
Mindless repetition of the same utterances? Yup.
Congregation with other diseased? Yup.
My friend, I guess you're on the right track here.
I'm getting downmodded like I said something bad about Apple. And considering that article talking about how people are literally having a religious experience in their brains when looking at Apple products... lol
Right, because his modding you down is totally the equivalent of an 'attack', thereby proving your point with some kind of twisted internet atheist troll logic. If anything, you should have been modded Flamebait or Troll, as your response to your moderation gives a pretty good indication that was the intent of the post..
It was really just a try for an easy laugh. I could have just as easily substituted Faux News, politics, football, or mosh pits. Religion seemed broadest and funniest but I think your reply beats my OP hands down. I'd mod you +5 funny if I had the points. :)
Really? How many known diseases cause humans to turn and attack each other?
Usually we call it religion.
And my post was downmodded. Thank you for proving my point, believer! :)
Really? How many known diseases cause humans to turn and attack each other?
Usually we call it religion.
Monster Talk had the author of the Zombie Autopsies on for a fun chat about zombies. Monster Talk (podcast) is a skeptic's look at the science of cryptids and popular monsters. Their position is they love the monsters and the stories even if they don't believe in them and use the premise as a means of going into the science. Talk of the Loch Ness monster leads to plesiosaurs, their evolutionary history, and all the reasons there couldn't possibly be a breeding population surviving in the lake.
I didn't know about the Zombie Autopsies until I heard this show and I plan on checking it out. Hopefully it'll be the best bit of Zombie fiction since World War Z.
thezombieautopsies.com/
Would we end up with less celebrities in the world or would the selection pressure only serve to bring us attention whores who are more prolific, neurotic, and annoying?
As an atheist myself (and a relatively "strong" one at that - I consider the concept of religion to be toxic), I wouldn't be surprised to see the same reaction in rabid Linux users, or rabid Windows users (although admittedly they're a lot harder to find).
As an internet troll myself (and a relatively "strong" one at that) I wouldn't be surprised to see the same reaction in atheists when they see a picture of Dawkins, a smug and self-satisfied French existential movie or a first edition of Origin of the Species.
*ducks, runs*
My last sig had a similar effect.
"You know that cat Oedipus is one bad mother-"
"Shut your mouth!"
"I'm just talkin' 'bout Oedipus!"
"We can dig it!"
You have to build positive karma to earn downmod points. Still limit how much they can be employed but require positive contributions to earn the ability to downmod. Too often we see sockpuppet accounts downmod unpopular opinions or mark them as troll simply because they disagree. There's no disincentive if these sockpuppet accounts accrue modpoints simply by sitting around.
With a knick-knack, paddy whack,
Give a dog a bone,
This old man came rolling home.
Same someone thinks I was trolling. Curious to see who felt they were insulted by the comparison, Anonymous, Christians, or rock and rollers. :)