Blarghagh

Saw the Hobbit again. For all it's faults, this movie entertains the hell out of me. Now working again!

Haha, is that what you think the orc army sideplot is leading towards? Reminds me of a conversation I had with someone this week who explained that some plot-important characters were too important to die while others were surely goners. Unless Peter Jackson completely changes everything, he has never been so wrong. (See what I did there?)

It's much more action oriented than the previous film and doesn't have the long hour of exposition, but a lot of it seems to serve no purpose. Otherwise it's mostly more of the same.

Congratulations on the new job Wals. Got the first batch of intern evaluations back and they were overwhelmingly positive. Also beginning pre-production on my next project and getting really excited about it - almost all of the next half year will be developing and setting up a good production pipeline for a CG cartoon. Yay, I get to post something positive in this topic!

I have. It's becoming a pretty good DK clone but it's not far enough along to see how well it'll work out - thus far it lacks the charming black humor that the original had though not for lack of trying. It takes itself a little too seriously and most of the creature designs are played straight (and the only one that's a bit DK type silly is getting a huge backlash in their forums so doesn't seem to be lasting long - a serious case of "the community doesn't get it"). The gameplay is about the same as DK with some more depth to it so far, so that's good.

Resurrection is an interesting one. Whedon wrote the script and he the one thing he's always said about it is he's amazed at how they followed so much of what he wrote, but emphasised all of the wrong parts which left it coming across as wildly different to how he wrote it. Something along the lines of "Technically, they followed the script. But in reality, it was completely wrong." I do like a lot of what they did in Resurrection. They showed the Aliens as more capable and intelligent than previous movies. The scene where the Aliens kill one of their own to use its acid blood to create an escape is practically ripped straight from my favorite scene in the comics/novels. If you look closely you can kindof see the beginnings of Firefly in the mercenary crew. But yeah, the treatment of the material was all wrong, in part due to the budget (major budget cuts in the middle of production led to every possible corner being cut to even get it finished) and in part due to the director not having the right vision. I like Jeunet but whoever thought he was the right fit for this particular project needs to get their head examined. Resurrection, honestly, had good ideas but it was woefully done. Currently trying to read House of Leaves again. I don't know what it is about this book, but it gets under my skin like nothing else. I couldn't finish it last time I tried. EDIT: Wofully instead of woefully? Maybe I need to get MY head examined.

The last Irish person I spoke to didn't understand my reference to potatoes, I'm pretty sure they have no clue what happened in those centuries.

Obyknven.

Yeah the copyright status of the whole Cthulhu Mythos is a clusterhump.

Yeah, you hit the nail right on the head.

Well, I can't speak for anybody else, but the games I tend to watch are games that create a certain kind of response. People being terrified in Amnesia: The Dark Descent, people screaming in rage at Dark Souls or people doing creative things I didn't even know possible in MineCraft. It also helps that a lot of the Let's Players I watched are funny people.

That also means some loser reported him for that. Those should be the people targeted. I doubt that - I assume it's the ridiculous copyright bots. They pick up things really fast.

That idea is calling out for a game.

Fair enough. Like I said, it's going off-topic, but I think it's telling that the link you gave to explain clockpunk starts with: Which is to say the classification is unneccesary and superfluous. They also do not serve their purpose very well because, as you agreed, most people won't even know what it means except for those in the know. Besides that, they are treated as settings or genres when they are only look & feel classifications. Whereas "science fiction" tells you the type of thing it is, going "no it's not, it's cybergoth" just clouds the issue by pointing out outlying design elements instead of the core of what something is. So to me these classifications are incredibly problematic and limiting - because selling something as a steampunk setting limits you to things with the steampunk aesthetic, whereas telling a fantasy story with steampunk elements, for example, will be much more interesting.

Dammit, past the edit point: A Let's Player I watch got a copyright strike because he sang two lines of Breakfast at Tiffany's during a boring stretch to fill the time. That's, uh, pretty ridiculous.

I don't mean to offend you here, but cybergoth? Clockpunk? These things strike me as "look at me being a connoisseur with all the labels I have". Warhammer is space opera with horror undertones. Cybergoth? Really? While describing W40K as "space opera with horror undertones" strikes me as oversimplification (Of course, if you're not familiar with the setting beyond the Dawn of War/Space Marine/whatever games, your viewpoint is understandable - it doesn't make it any less wrong, however.) "Cybergoth" is a fairly self-explanatory term, and I really don't think it's more obscure than, say, dieselpunk (which, for some reason, appeared in the poll, while the lot broader "horror" label didn't *grumble grumble*). "Clockpunk" also exists, and its appeal (for me) stems mainly from its aesthetics, and the fact that it's close enough to steampunk that it can scratch the "we want an Arcanum sequel" itch of the fanbase, while being a step away from the "zomg steampunk EVERYTHING" trend of late (which has significantly reduced my interest in anything steam-related for the next few decades). I've never played any of the Warhammer 40K video games, I know it from the books. I also know these classifications exist, I just feel very strongly that they shouldn't. It's overcomplicated, compartmentalizing and exclusionary posturing. It's a bunch of rules that go "you can't use your imagination, you have to obey the rules of the setting as set down by this bunch of geeks here" which strikes me as completely missing the point of fiction in the first place. None of these things would have existed if the people making them cared at all about these ridiculous names. It's creatively stifling and pendantic bull designed to keep less "in-the-know" people out of your personal bubble of interest by making it exclusive. "Psh, I don't like fantasy, I like neoclassical tolkienism!" But yeah, that's off-topic and neither here nor there, so nevermind.

So apparently it's no longer allowed to post song covers or something?

Crevice is a good one and in a similar vein I submit orifice.

I don't mean to offend you here, but cybergoth? Clockpunk? These things strike me as "look at me being a connoisseur with all the labels I have". Warhammer is space opera with horror undertones. Cybergoth? Really?

I don't know what that means, but congratulations. I'm having trouble staying motivated to study in the evenings after work. Anyone have experience with beating post-work lack of energy leading to procrastination and how to beat it? I am aware I'm asking this on a game forum but it's worth a shot.

Life has no meaning or purpose other than to just be. Yes you can. Well, that's just, like, your opinion man...

Have a standard Tolkienesque fantasy world, let them tech up to steampunk, then apocalypse the hell out of it. Everyone's happy.

The journalism phrase "inquiring minds want to know" bothers me. It puts me in a frame of mind of spymasters or curious minds of creatures beyond our understanding.

Going to have to disagree there. They're literally trying to mortar the bricks of a story that was designed to be read as standalone chapters to kids into a cohesive whole, which is the only way a film of the Hobbit would ever have worked while keeping the content. See the Rankin Bass cartoon, which took the only other workable road of essentially skipping over everything because it is literally impossible to work it into a single narrative. In fact, many of the areas where the story of these movies completely grinds to a halt are classic sequences from the book like the troll encounter or rivendell (even the movie struggles to give them a reason to even go there) or the random spider attack. Adding expectations of modern audiences for what a story related to Lord of the Rings should be, and there is literally no other way to make these films, despite the approach having major flaws. It's what you get when you try to make a film out of a series of bedtime stories. To be completely fair, Tolkien himself tried to do this. He rewrote the Hobbit to be more in step with Lord of the Rings, but he stopped because it didn't feel like The Hobbit anymore. The movies had the opposite problem - if they had tried to make it as is, it wouldn't have felt like Lord of the Rings anymore, which is literally this series of movies' only selling point to anyone except Tolkien's "old-guard" hippie following. EDIT: Quote tunnel removed.

Loved it, thought it was better than Unexpected Journey. I'm taking these movies as a bad D&D campaign brought to life. Not a good adaptation of the book, but I don't care because I'm immensely entertained. If you're a Tolkien purist or care at all about the books, you should probably skip it. But personally, I thought Smaug alone was worth the ticket price. I'll never make a case for these movies being good, but I love them all the same. These are not going to hold up to a marathon viewing, though. Too many random encounters.