Mod Post: Off-Topic Tuesday

[icon_uk]

In the comments to these weekly posts (and only these posts), it's your chance to go as off topic as you like. Talk about non-comics stuff, thread derail, and just generally chat among yourselves.

A Happy Chinese Lunar New Year to all, welcome to the Year of the Rat.

To those in areas of the world at risk from the new corona-virus, stay safe and stay well.

Holocaust Memorial Day was yesterday, and celebrated the 75 anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp by the Russian Army. Over 150 still living survivors met together and, with a dignity that never fails to inspire awe, spoke of their experiences in a world with a rising tide of anti-Semitism. (with thanks to leahandillyana for that link)

Well, this will be the last Off-Topic Tuesday I will post before the UK offficially leaves the EU on Friday, a fact that depresses, angers and disgusts me in equal measure.

And we're already heading into our firstlikely trade dispute with our bestest friends ever, the USA, over the use of Huawei technology. Whatever decision is made, SOMEONE is going to be pissed off.

And the Trump Impeachment trial might take another twist if John Bolton is called as a witness, but as with many things invovled in this, who can tell anymore?

Sports fans around the world mourned the loss of basketball legend, Kobe Bryant, though mentions of the controversy surrounding a sexual assault claim made back in 2003 have caused some backlash.

An unexpected argument has broken out in Nepal, due to how the Chinese Government has chosen to depict the Yeti in an advertising campaign.

Mew reports suggest that Paramount and Hasbro are considering two new Transformers movies, one would be Beast Wars (If they can make that work then consider me intrigued, especially as it would mean no humans) and the other would be another movie set in the universe as Bumblebee, though not necessarily a direct sequel,

"Star Trek: Picard" debuted on Amazon Prime and set up some fascinating plotlines from the get go, the collapse of the Romulan Empire following a super-nova for one, and a major plotpoint basically taken from Blade Runner and Battlestar Galactica (new version) about synthetic lifeforms and how they possibly link to Data. Sir Patrick Stewart is a fine form as an elderly Picard.

And saving the best for last, Doctor Who delivered an absolute hum-dinger of an episode with more twists and turns than a snake with convulsions... In case people haven't seen it and haven't yet been spoiled by the resulting social media furore, I'll post my opinions in a response to this thread rather than here as I'd hate to spoil anything for someone casually scrolling down.

Comments

[tripodeca113]

Doctor Who was good. Hooray. (I’m talking about the Nikola Tesla one, possibly the next one has messed it up again).

Moffatt and Gatnis’s Dracula show got real fucking stupid.

Exciting Star Wars news! There was a new trailer for The Clone Wars season seven. Finally the epic conclusion we’ve been waiting for.
Also Star Wars Resistance ended forever. Kylo Ren finally showed up.

I ordered the Steven Universe DVD boxset. Now I can finally watch it again.

I’ve finished watching Inside No 9. Can anyone recommend any good anthology shows?

[deh_tommy]

There’s always The Twilight Zone, if you’ve never seen that before.

[icon_uk]

Black Mirror?

Nightmares and Dreamscapes?

And yes, The Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits have their clunker episodes, but can be excellent.

[leahandillyana]

TVN translated Marian Turski's moving speech for the anniversary: https://tvn24.pl/tvn24-news-in-english/auschwitz-survivor-marian-turski-delivers-powerful-address-during-liberation-75th-anniversary-3452664
I'm pissed that the "Everybody hates England" meme is trending on American social media. You are no better. It seems to me like a shallow attempt to be woke.
My sleeping cycle has completely broken down, every day I am active and sleep at different hours, and the clinic I usually go to doesn't pick that damn phone.

[icon_uk]

Ah, thank you for that link, I'll add it to the main post.

I haven't seen that meme yet, but I'm sure it'll crop up sooner or later.

[janegray]

So I finally played The Stanley Parable, a game the entire gaming community has been praising to high heaven for years as an amazing masterpiece and pinnacle of indie creativity.

And... I don't get it. At all.

It sucks! It's like a boring, derivative, neutered knock off of Portal! Literally the only good thing was the smooth voice of the narrator, but he might as well have been reading a grocery list.

I thought maybe I just got a crappy playthrough, so I tried again and again, making different choices and getting different ending, but they all were unsatisfying. What gives? Why have gamers decided they love it so much? I'm baffled.

[werehawk]

I kind of feel like this about Watchmen. Everyone loves it, my brother raves about, it wins awards. But I watch the first episode and did not like it at all. Derivative and boring. What’s up with that? Maybe it’s iust me.

[locuatico]

If I were to guess, two fronts:

First of all, the game came out during the "walking Simulator" craze. That is, games boasted a lack of actual gameplay as a feature and many people defended on the basis that it was seeking to be more "artistic" or "tell a a story" than in being a game. by "telling a story" I mean go around looking for journal entries or whatever and piece together the story from there.
I wont' go into too much detail, But I will say that Stanley Parable was one of the better ones by a combination of clever use of map layou, witty dialogue from the narrator and good humor (or to put it another way, if you don't like the dialogue and the humor, the game is painfully dull)

Second, the game came at a point when the idea of "branching stories, multiple ending, Player Choice (Not in the "Microtransactions are OPTIONAL" sense.)" as game buzzwords was starting to show up and it was considered a must have (this was like one year before Telltale's The Walking Dead and when Bioware's name wasn't a laughingstock).
So at the time when the game was released, everyone loved it because they felt it was a great example of a game with multiple endings and trying to find all of them.
Of course, Stanley Parable was partially a commentary/parody of this idea of the player "really" having a choice, since the common theme within the game is that all of your choices were actually programmed by someone and even the narrator is nothing more than following a script.
This is more clearly dictated with the female narrator.

[mesmiranda]

I liked it. I thought it was funny and interesting and had some moments of pathos.

[icon_uk]

SPOILERS for "Fugutive of the Judoon" follow. Scroll past quickly if you don't want to see them.

Well, after last season, which was accused, with some accuracy, of being rather "safe" and old school (Neither of which are bad things of course), Chris Chibnall's mid-season episode did the exact opposite and changed a LOT... and I mean a LOT.

In an episode which managed to be both good in it's own right, and genuinely momentous in terms of impact, writers Vinay Patel and Chris Chibnall reintroduced Captain Jack Harkness in all his cheesy glory, to the complete shock of pretty much every viewer. But just when we thought THAT was going to be the big surprise, they made it look like chicken feed by introducing a whole new Doctor!! The collective impact of jaws hitting the floor probably registered on the Richter scale!

And what a Doctor! Played with confidence and aplomb by Jo Martin, we now have our first Doctor played by a person of colour!

Hiding on Earth having used a Chameleon Arch (See "Human Nature" and "Utopia") and unaware of her true identity, "Ruth" was a perfectly pleasant amiable human, with a slightly dodgy husband. Eventually it's revealed that she is not human and is being hunted by the Judoon, and then we get to the moment where her memories return and she becomes the Doctor (And in that moment, you could hear Doctor Who fans around the world going "Is she the Rani? Or Susan? Or Romana? Or a new Missy Or possibly a future Doctor?"

The trouble being that she has no memory of being the 13th Doctor ("And how did I end up like that, all rainbows and trousers that don't reach?") and the 13th Doctor has no memory of ever being her ("I've never been anything like you. Trust me, I'd remember, especially that shirt.") so one of them MUST be wrong. (And boy, it's always fun to see different Doctor's insulting each other's style!)

"Ruth" is a very different Doctor though, a lot harder and colder (or so it seems. Her reaching for a gun as soon as her memory returns feels off, even when we eventually discover why.

The evidence, such as it is, points to "Ruth" being from the Doctor's past (Her TARDIS console room is very retro, she doesn't know what a sonic screwdriver is and her Gallifrey has never been destroyed, never mind twice) but there's no room in the Doctor's past for her... or is there? She might be from between the 2nd and 3rd Doctor (We know the 2nd worked some fairly dirty jobs for the Time Lords before his exile) or she might hint at being from even a regeneration before the 1st, which would open up a LOT of questions. (Or she might be from another universe/timeline completely, but that seems a very easy cop-out.)

It's genuinely exciting to have no clue as to what's going on, but since I really doubt we've seen the last of Doctor Ruth (no sex therapist jokes please) I hope the answers live up to the questions.

Oh, and in other good Who news, Jodie Whittaker has confirmed that she will return for at least one more season as the Doctor! :)

[an_idol_mind]

I would say that Ruth's TARDIS remaining as a police box points to her being post-Hartnell, but I suppose there could be an explanation shoehorned in there somehow.

I feel like she might be between the 2nd and 3rd Doctor, but that still leaves the question of the regeneration limit (which I wish the rebooted show had just quietly dropped). But it would be pretty easy to say that the Time Lords gave her a secret extra regeneration...or that the previous count was inaccurate because the 10th Doctor counted as only one regeneration (not two) after all.

[cygnia]

Me and a friend of mine are leaning towards "divergent timeline" that may tie into the "lone Cyberman" warning Jack gave. That, somehow, after "The Tenth Planet" (a Cyberman story), the First Doctor regenerated into Ruth instead of Troughton.

Besides the retro control room, she didn't know what the sonic was. The sonic appeared during "our" Second Doctor's tenure. Maybe Ruth got drafted/strongarmed by the Celestial Intervention Agency in this divergent timeline (not to be mistaken for the Divergent universe storyline from Big Finish, although if Ruth eventually regenerates into David Warner...).

Also Jack smooching Graham gave me all the happies.

[bruinsfan]

What if she's a later incarnation of the duplicate human(ish) Doctor from "Journey's End" who somehow made it back to the show's universe? That version of him was a lot more ruthless, and was given equipment to grow his own TARDIS. Maybe he wasn't so human as to be unable to regenerate after all, or built up enough artron energy from time traveling to regain the capability?

[long_silence]

I really liked the new Doctor

But I thought it was a bit weird how once she got her memories back she didn't mention Lee once. She just lost a Companion, and it was so sudden, and she didn't seem to react at all to the fact that he just gave his life for her.

[skjam]

Leg got infected again, so back on the antibiotics.

My parents finally gave up and just mailed my Christmas present. Some potholders and dishtowels.

Over at my blog, I look at an influential 70s manga that has massive amounts of homophobia as a characterization element: http://www.skjam.com/2020/01/26/manga-review-from-eroica-with-love-2/

[icon_uk]

Eroica is a new one to me.. how on earth did that last for quite THAT long?

[lissa_quon]

Glad you started with Eroica volume 2 - 1 is...not great. It's not even the same damn manga.

I enjoy the series - but yea its not "progressive" by today's standards. Though I think I've heard people say the CMX translation makes Klaus' epithets crueler than they should be.

But I still find it entertaining and as far as shonen ai goes/went - this was pretty decent. The odd couple will they won't they dynamic is at least not borderline toxic/abusive and theres no huge age gap.

[informationgeek]

I've finally been catching up on TV shows with my dad during my visit to Florida. I finally caught up on Season 2 and 3 of Stranger Things.

Season 2: Good time. A very slow burn of a show and the detour to Chicago felt off, but I really enjoyed it! Just absolutely chilling imagery with how nightmarish it got. Great finale as well

Season 3: Much faster pace and it made me on edge with how they were going to turn out. Lots of great bits and moments, but Will and Hopper felt off. Good start to a character arc with Will, but it was abandoned early on. Hopper just felt way too aggressive and angry throughout.



Also started binging Watchmen with my dad. Definitely enjoying it more than the actual comic itself, though I find myself more interested in the new characters than the old ones. Really like Looking Glass and his stuff.

[icon_uk]

Season 3 of Stranger Things was interesting, though I kept being distracted by how the Societ Union had managed to build such an OTT underground base without anyone noticing, and why they all wore Soviet Uniforms when they were presumably having to pass as Americans when not on duty

[scorntx]

Regarding the most recent episode of Doctor Who, first off:
FUCKING YES!
*ahem*
I was just expecting a slightly silly episode with Judoon Judooning everywhere, nothing serious.
Then there's Barrowman out of nowhere. Then we get Ruth.
(Y'know, I could've sworn at the moment the truth of Ruth came out, there was this sound, like a million racist heads exploding all at once...)

I'm thinking there's probably time-travel shenanigans a'transpiring (alternate reality, maybe? Or a double-bluff? A random Time Lord who's been convinced they're the Doctor? It'd be the exact sort of move those jerk Time Lords would do... or, she's a future version who's just really good at lying... hmm...)
But for the moment... black woman Doctor! Black woman Doctor!

And meanwhile, the episode was, sadly, a triumphant return to form for Yaz.
She almost, almost contributed to the plot.
(Mind, it's not like Ryan and Graham did much either.)


Regarding a Beast Wars movie...
It'd be nice if Hasbro actually acknowledged Beast Wars in any meaningful way for once.
(Remembering what a total bunch of nothing they did for its 20th anniversary.)
Buuut at the same time, pretty much every piece of post-Beast Wars story has, to put it mildly, been middling to crap, usually relying way too much on referencing G1 than just being Its Own Thing.
... with the exception of Beast Wars: Uprising, which was great.
(Even if that was also filled with G1 characters as well.)


And The Good Place ends on Friday.
Not really sure about the most recent episode.


There's also been an announcement of a new Digimon series.
And it's a reboot of Adventure.
... yay?


Bought the DLC for Kingdom Hearts III.
Interesting stuff. Not a fan of the ludicrously hard bonus boss fights, though.
Definitely think Christopher Lloyd is a better casting choice for Xehanort than Rutger Hauer was.

[thezmage]

The “solution” put forward in last week’s Good Place just seemed too facile and not particularly well thought out. Gur fbyhgvba gb raahv vf fhvpvqr? I get that we don’t have an entire season to dedicate to this but still one episode is a little too fast.

[joetuss]

Hearing the Kobe news was a gut punch, but finding out his 13 year old daughter, and another young girl also died in that crash flattened me. Kobe, thank you for representing my era of sports. The way my dad would tell stories about Kareem, and Dr J, is the way I will continue to tell stories about you to my son. God bless you, and the other passengers, and may he also strengthen, and comfort your families.

[cyberghostface]

I feel sorry for his family, daughter especially and everyone else who died. But seeing people I respect revering Kobe when he raped and strangled a woman just rubs me the wrong way. Reminds me of all the filmmakers who support Roman Polanski.

[bruinsfan]

I was completely unaware of the rape accusation until it was mentioned in articles and comments about his death. Very sobering.

[deh_tommy]

Man, I wish I had half the enthusiasm you guys did regarding Doctor Who. The episode was alright for the most part (I liked the Judoon and the characters), but the Jack stuff went nowhere and I really, really, REALLY hope they’re not going where I think they’re going with Ruthless. Also, is that just me or does Tosin Cole seem kind of off this series? He seems to say everything in this samey low mumble cadence and doesn’t really react much to anything. I don’t mean any offence to him or anything, just something my family and I noticed.

The Rise of Skywalker’s one of those things like Final Crisis in that I love most of the ideas that has, but the execution is really rushed and so I leave the story feeling kind of empty.

Elections are coming up and I’m stumped as to who to vote for because, frankly, none of the parties seem particularly good (to me, at least).

[icon_uk]

The Jack stuff was definitely setup rather than ongoing plot, but it does build tension for the Cyberman we've already seen teased in trailers.

In terms of the election, if you don't like either, you vote for the one which can do least damage, and given the current US setup, I'm not really seeing it as being that difficult a choice.

[t209]

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/half-of-americans-think-impeachment-is-a-bad-use-of-congresss-time/?ex_cid=trump-approval
https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/impeachment-polls/?ex_cid=rrpromo
While it might be tempting to call people who disagree with you as "sheeple", just wanted to let you know that you might have to account for different thoughts.
What if someone think that Democrats only started impeachment because he touched Biden?
Or what if the trial will be futile due to Trump and Republicans (Well, remember that Nixon bailed, Clinton and Johnson had Democrats, not to mention their crimes--Clinton not being honest with his extramarital affairs and Johnson appeasing Confederate states even if it include scaling back freed slaves' guaranteed rights--not as serious to compare with Trump)?
While you can say, "but Trump is evil and stuff, it shouldn't be hard to convince"...ignoring Libertarians, "sticking to my anti-two party even if it means Trump wins" type voters (assuming if it include far-Right American Independent or "currently pseudo science" Green Party), people who refuse to accept that their "independent" candidates are crazy people (Jill Stein again), and people who would get upset about their favorite candidate losing and poo-pooing on the winning candidates that made them vindicative idiots in hindsight. You can chew, protest, or criticize me on that, but I just feel that "you should vote or bad things will happen" type statements on off-topic to be somewhat oversimplified and shallow than actual analysis.
https://www.youtube.com/user/Timcasts/videos (Then there is demographics that watched these videos, which seems credible anti-establishment despite the creator--Tim Pool--having contradictory, questionable views tendency to overreact, and unwilling to debate with the "left", even reasonable ones like Shawn.)
P.S.- It's good that the topic mentioned Brexit since Free-Trade and globalization tends to be "multi-spectrum" either as conservatives who hate foreigners or union-leftists who see it as "union-busing 2.0". I mean does anyone remember people complaining EU for being "cozying with big business and rich countries" or NAFTA as "exploiting Mexican poors/ screwing over American workers".

[deh_tommy]

joetuss is gone, the reason given as being “ This place is a haven for white people who pretend to care about non white people...like Seattle.”.

If you’re reading this, I’m sorry to see you go. I wish you all the best in luck and happiness.

[laughing_tree]

Ouch.

This makes me wonder about the demographics of scans_daily. The mods should do a survey.