majestic

Browsing through my MP3 collection. Heh. Trips down memory lane, the bane of my sleep since... well since I've been old enough to travel memory lane.

If we set that in the Kelvin timeline it could still be directed by Baybrams, would have younger actors and a Trek 'verse that fits much better with the description. See... things come together anyway. (Also, why does the Kindle edition of that book cost 19€ on Amazon?)

On one hand Rise of Skywalker was the only Star Wars film of the new trilogy I wasn't bored at some point. On the other that was achieved by cramming three movies worth of stuff happening into an incoherent mess that I only enjoyed so well because The Last Jedi killed the past for me. What we really need is a Star Wars / Transformers crossover directed by Michael "Jar Jar" Baybrams.

Become? Bolsonaro never was anything but a stain on the human race. He's in good company, they seem to be very abundant these days.

Eh, does that link in all honesty compare monomyth based stories like Star Wars to epic poems and works of literature featuring a classical tragic hero (point in case, Hamlet) to make a point that classical literature never was about good versus evil before the rise of nationalism? Not only is that painting a varied and long subject with immense history in extremely broad strokes it is also flawed, I think, because that central conflict was always there, just not externalized as much, and the differences especially when compared to traditional folklore can also be attributed to the duality of good and evil as separate entities as taught by Abrahamic religion (instead of being an internal conflict beholden to divine will, i.e. fate as it was for classical Greek drama and epic poetry). Of course Hector would never stop being Trojan as much as Achilles would always be Greek. As playthings of the gods they simply had no choice. How would Darth Vader be possible in such a framework? That concept would be ridiculous to the people of the time as much as the concept of the gods controlling and playing with humanity is (well should be) to us if applied to the real world. Homer would scoff at Darth Vader changing sides? Yes, probably. Because were Star Wars a classical Greek epic, the force would be a capital "Force" and thus (a) "God" and the conlcusion of the conflict fated. Or if it were a Greek drama Luke would probably vanquish Vader, be utterly destroyed by Palpatine and then Zeus would lower himself down from the heavens to set right the wrongs. Deus ex machina was a staple of Greek drama. Today it's considered bad form (this has also something do to with how pervasive the concept of fate is in culture, no?). Back to your point I'd also argue that the term literary ficiton is somewhat arbitrary. Literary fiction is, essentially, what the literary academia decides that it is (not that academic consensus is a bad thing, it just takes a while to be formed). Go back a century and you'll have people arguing that Jane Austen wrote romance pulp and will never be considered literary fiction in much in the same way that students of the liberal arts these days argue that fantasy fiction or video games will never be true art and worthy of study. The concept alone seems ridiculous, a tenured professor at Oxford teaching Classical games of the 90ies? Bad literature is bad, but fantasy fiction isn't the only genre that has a lot of terrible books. I'll never get tired of bringing it up but the absolutely worst novels of the past few years were firmly in the housewife porn and romance genre and born of ascended fan fiction. Please, go and read Anna Todd's After series and then come back and argue that R.A. Salvatore writes bad Forgotten Realm novels. I mean he does, but it's by far not the worst you could come across.

Well I don't like spam! Edit: Technically not true. I enjoy canned meat every now and then, though we of course don't have spam, just something very similar.

Spam spam spam spam spam...

But... but... Aliens!

He stated often enough that he only writes at home. Which, understandably, led fans to be extremely miffed every time he blogged about not being at home.

But flying pigs already exist. Duke Nukem Forever came out. Therefore, pigs can fly. On the other hand, that does not imply that flying pigs have wings. They could levitate via anti-gravity or have jet engine anuses.

In their Star Trek: Into Darkness Half in the Bag Jay speculated that Kurtzman, et al. simply put the cart before the horse by first coming up with scenes they really want to have, then writing them and afterwards playing connect the dots with a disjointed overarching plot that makes no sense. And Into Darkness was a two hour standard action movie. The most baffling thing is that after Trek 2009, Into Darkness and Star Trek Discovery they really thought Kurtzman could do this? Yeah, he got replaced, sure, but which buffoon thought it was a good idea to give him even more Trek to do?

Accusing the financial sector of being greedy and only interested in profit at the detriment of everyone and everything else is also a reputation they worked very hard for, and it is neither entirely undeserved, nor is it going to change for as long as people can get filthy rich by jacking up food and basic needs prices for financial gains. Look at food futures, like 3% of them actually lead to food being bought. Which inversely means 97% of the entire business is only there to make sure you rake in some sweet, sweet money at the expense of starving people. Are you honestly going to pretend that this is for the good of everyone and not simple, pure greed? What's next, accusing Nestle of being a collection of philantropists?

Gromnir's post in the Coronavirus thread reminded me of an old joke. An engineer, a physicist and a mathematician are staying at a hotel. One night there's a fire. The engineer gets up, picks up the nearest fire extinguisher and quells the flames. The physicist does a few quick calculations, then jumps ouf of the window and into the hotel pool. The mathematician wakes up, sees the fire, says "on that's solvable" and goes back to bed.

It also really makes them look like (the) hyprocrites (they are) in a post-Snowden world. Please let us spy on you, not China. Polemic? Perhaps, but as you've so wonderfully stated the US has worked hard for the past 20 years on that dim view of them the world's slowly adapting. See that's the point, for as long as you're on the inside that statement rings true. When you're outside, though, it's the Obama drone program that blows up your wedding. It's US funded terrorism that gets you beheaded, shot, mutilated or blown apart. It's the sudden removal of support that sees all your hard work wiped away by a Turkish invasion. It's NSA spying pervading even the most intimate parts of your life. It's China that's selling you cheap knockoff products. Unless you're in Tibet, Taiwan or Hong Kong you're much more likely to accidentially catch a stray freedom cluster bomb than be spirited away to some gulag by the CCP. We also really don't need to discuss how the US has done more good than harm before BruceVC comes and has an aneurysm, and how even with the likes of Trump, Obama and Bush the US is vastly preferable to the dystopian nightmare that is China. Going back to having a foreign policy that reflects that would be a appreciated though, and also much cheaper, something I know you're agreeing with (for different reasons, perhaps, but it's an agreement nonetheless). I'm also very much in favor of making ourselves as indepdendent of the US and China as possible, even if it takes some doing and costs money, who knows, perhaps Covid-19 will finally give us a push in the right direction. I'm also with you on that we shouldn't kowtow before dictators and wannabes (which at the time includes The Donald(tm)).

The controls really do take some time getting used to, especially if you're coming from Celeste or Hollow Knight, but once I got used to the momentum Ori seems to have when running and jumping they became serviceable. Except for the charge jump system, that remained awkward for the entire run, but that's also the last and least used ability you'll get, so it's a minor one.

We're not really getting a Star Trek Picard Re:View of the final two episodes. It seems like Rich really doesn't want to talk about it. He's baaaaaaaaaaack! Mike must have really hated the ending.

Played and finished Ori and the Blind Forest. Well that was fun, if a bit short.

I haven't seen today's episode yet, but up until last week's I enjoyed this season of Better Call Saul more than the previous ones. It showed that while you can set a show to the backdrop of forgone conclusions there's still a place for drama, tension and good fun. The ongoing hostility between Lalo and Gus is kept to its barest necessary minimum (and in itself utterly boring unless you haven't seen Breaking Bad yet) for the rest of the drug story to work while the Mesa Verde stuff was good fun - just please stop with the Jimmy does something montages. They're getting a bit old. But Jimmy being threatened is boring, and a full episode with him and Mike hiking through the desert? Nah, count me out. Jonathan Bank's age also has beomce a huge crack in my suspension of disbelief.

Well here's something for the thread: Dark Souls doesn't have subtle but awesome storytelling. It's set in an interesting world where mysterious events that you can piece together from observation and lore happened possibly so far in the past that they almost don't matter any more. But an actual plot that the game itself tells? In that regards it is as servicable and perfunctory as Mass Effect 2 or Dragon Age: Origins were, perhaps even less so as you need to superimpose your own motivation and drive as a player over your character's.

Ah, yes, that's the one I was thinking of. But I read that is set after the Battle of Terra, not the events before. Looks like I mixed them up a little. I played the WC Saga prologue and thought it was pretty awesome. Gotta give it a go at some point.

Wasn't that a Freespace 2 total conversion mod once? Or was that a completely different fan project attempting to tell the same storyline?

Everspace is an arcade shooter dressed up as space sim and while you can do some very perfunctory trading it's really just there to gather crafting materials to build new equipment and consumables. It's very beautiful and you can explore interesting locations for a while but you have a time limit per sector that manifests itself as a fleet of giant killer warships that follow you wherever you go, wanting nothing more than to blast your behind to a thousand pieces, and you'll be constantly harrassed by ships, missile silos and defense drones. It also has permadeath with unlockable ships and ship upgrades. It's a great game but it's very much the opposite of chill. It's also fairly difficult, even on "easy".

For a more serious reply, Joe's both an author and avid gamer, and unlike most people reviewing games he plays on a god tier level of skill. And sometimes without him realizing it that comes across as strangely disconnected from the reality of most gamers, a trifle arrogant, or both perhaps. Like his Furi review, where he shows the game stats of his first playthrough and goes all "I was pretty bad there, I died 84 times in total" and casually says things like "overall I thought Hollow Knight was too easy". He also really makes the best April Fools jokes on YouTube. Heh.

Moar food! Homemade cookies (my mother's uncle is 80 and bored while having to stay home, so he's baking sweets... all the time): Pork with zucchini. Home made sweet bread And lastly, some zander with parsleyed potatoes:

Finally found the time and inclination to grind out that final skill point in Sekiro. Last two achievements down. So that's that. Onwards to something else. I could go back to wrap up the final achievements of Cuphead. Edit: Well that was the wrong thread, how did we end up discussing played games here?