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.

The intent of these posts is to chat and have some fun and, sure, vent a little as required. Reasoned debate is fine, as always, but if you have to ask if something is going over the line, think carefully before posting please.

Normal board rules about conduct and behaviour still apply, of course.

It's been suggested that, if discussing spoilers for recent media events, it might be advisable to consider using the rot13 method to prevent other members seeing spoilers in passing.

The world situation is the world situation. If you're following the news, you know it as much as I do, if you're not, then there are better sources than me.

The scale of the current flooding in Pakistan nearly beggars belief.

The US has announced a plan for Student Debt Relief.

The trailer for "Weird": The Al Yakkovic Story dropped and may just qualify as the first parody biopic.

Star Trek Lower Decks Season 3 arrived and, funny as it was, it still failed to make me actually like Mariner that much, since her desperation that things wouldn't work out WAS at odds with Starfleet protocols, which had a fairly decent record onsuch things, and she just came across as brattish (yet again).

The Discovery/HBO cancellations farrago has sort of backfired, as their plan to save $3 billion has been slightly offset by them losing $20 billion of market cap. Honestly, I'm not sure I know what market cap means, but it does not sound like sound business practice.

So we have two Pinocchio films coming out this year... interesting. This may be the one time Disney Edit: is taking advantage of CGI to ensure their version in the live action looks identical to the one in the original aniamtion, but that just makes it creepier looking I think

Comments

[owlbrigade1]

At least with Lower Decks, it seems the showrunners have finally realised that having what is essentially a trust fund baby as their lead character was not working. Hopefully they'll stick to that.

[scelestus]

Agreed. It worked for a bit, but I'm glad to see they're moving on from it.

[zachbeacon]

At least once a day for the past week a shady Amazon seller has been emailing me asking that I remove a negative review in exchange for a gift card. Amazon has done absolutely nothing about them even after I reported them.

Have mostly been watching Adam Ruins Everything.

Attempted to watch the last Fantastic Beasts movie while I still have HBO Max but I think I’m okay with not finishing this series. I’m not going to pretend the movies were ever good but I enjoyed the spectacle of the fantasy creatures brought to life. Unfortunately – like a lot of modern tv and movies trying to hide bad effects – it’s often so dark that you have to watch it at night to see anything.

After an underwhelming pilot, She-Hulk finally gets to the point in the second episode. This series really seems like it has pacing problems. I mean, even now that they’ve established a premise, it still ends on a cliffhanger. Sure, I know real life courts move slowly but both the comic it draws from (Slott’s run) and the show that inspired it (Ally McBeal) usually did a case per issue/episode. I was prepared to compare this to Hawkeye (decent enough but mostly I’d rather read the comic again) but the more I think about it the more I worry its going to be Jessica Jones season one (good but far too slow). The Ched reveal was pretty funny though.

The Rise of the TMNT movie is pretty good. This property always has to balance the silly and the serious and it doesn’t work for me if it goes too far in either direction; the main series tended to go too far into the silly. If I have one complaint it’s that Leo becoming leader when Raph is captured does seem roughly equivalent to waiting a season or more for a superhero to wear their costume…but really that’s more fixing something in the show than a failure of the movie. I get WHY you wouldn’t want to start Leo off as the leader but ultimately the “Leonardo is boring” crowd is just as wrong as the “Cyclops is boring” people.

While I object to its existence on a lot of levels, the Superman and the Authority comic is pretty fun. Maybe I’m just starved for new Morrison Superman comics.

[mastermahan]

So we have two Pinocchio films coming out this year... interesting. This may be the one time Disney

I assume you were going to finish that with something like "Disney's version is worse than the Netflix flix". I'm sure Tom Hanks will make a great Geppetto, and it will probably be fine but inessential like Disney's live-action remakes tend to be.

But the Netflix version is from Guillermo del Toro. That means it will be interesting and gorgeous at a bare minimum.

I'll try to get some friends to mark the occasion by watching Roberto Benigni's Pinocchio, in which the boy puppet is visibly 50-years-old and balding. It's probably the closest we'll ever get to a Tingle movie.

[icon_uk]

Oh, thanks for noting that!

I think I was going to say, "Disney is taking advantage of CGI to ensure their version in the live action looks identical to the one in the original aniamtion, but that just makes it creepier looking I think."

Honestly, parts of the original Pinocchio terrified me as a kid, notably the transformations, and presumed fate, of the kids at the carnival scene. I wonder if the new movie will even BEGIN to compete with that?

[stubbleupdate]

What about the Paulie Shore movie?

[lissa_quon]

2023 also gets us "Lies of P" which is...some sort of Pinnochio releated video game that - just looks like Bloodborne with a little wooden boy.

[tripodeca113]

Read some more of the Cassandra Cain Batgirl . I like how she's an unstoppable fighting machine, but also a very moral character. It's an interesting dynamic.

One story bugged me. Apparently Gotham City has brought back the death penalty for the first time in decades. Is it for the Joker? Some other supervillain? No it's some guy who killed a person. Gotham is a strange town.

Finished watching Inside No 9 season seven. It had four good episodes, one okay, and one which was well put together but it was pretty obvious what movie they were homaging and therefore how the story was going to end.
I may not watch season eight.

Hooray! My bootleg DVD of Arcane arrived. The only thing I know about League of Legends, is that's it's a video game.

Read the latest volume of Blacksad. It's the start of a four volume story, and the last two don't have a set release date. Hope I don't have to wait four years for a conclusion.

[deh_tommy]

You don’t need to know anything about League of Legends to watch Arcane, thankfully. Heck, it’s probably better if you go in blind because (from what I can tell) League’s lore confusingly changes on a whim and has gone through, like, two reboots at this point.

[zachbeacon]

Now I'm regretting having ordered the new Blacksad last week. I was already on the fence when I thought it was a two parter but the second part has been available digitally for a while so I figure it wouldn't be too long before it got a physical US conclusion.

[iamrman]

Yes, I love the Cassandra Cain Batgirl series!

[leahandillyana]

About Pakistan – it’s crucial to help local nongovermental organisations that can send relief where it is needed the most. Big international orgs, at best, are slow to work and waste money on bureaucracy, and at worst side with homicidal regimes and send literal trash as “relief” – avoid Red Crescent at any cost for this reason. You can find some selected trustworthy charities at thelifeyoucansave.org or givewell.org. (Note: for me, both were very unhelpful)

A really troublesome news is that a case in Virginia to be heard today could possibly reintroduce wholesale ban on certain books: https://slate.com/culture/2022/08/book-banning-republicans-gender-queer-obscenity-supreme-court.html As far as I understand, in the USA an adult could legally buy, own and sell any book, and the two books put on obscenity trial, while definitely adult in nature, do not pose danger to the public. In fact, one of them is an excellent autobiographical comic book I’ve written about before, Gender Queer by Maia Kobabe. What is obscenity anyways?

I’ve read Cindirella is Dead by Kalynn Bayron. I adore the Polish edition of the book – unlike most books published nowadays, which only have high praises from whomever they could take praise from, this book has an old school plot description summing up about first third of the book. I also find it to be a rare example of an atheist fantasy – while in-story the question of existence or nonexistence of god or gods is never discussed, the metanarrative is explicit about the in-universe holy text being a lie made by the person of the top of their society, which is easy to extrapolate into real life context by the young reader. Good story overall, looking forward to seeing more books of the author’s translated.

[deh_tommy]

Is there a difference between Red Cross and Red Crescent or are they one and the same?

[huntleyhaverstock]

"Market cap" means the total monetary value of every share of a company listed on the public markets. So if Company X has 100,000 shares outstanding, and each share is worth $2, it has a market cap of $200,000.

When market cap drops, it means a lot more people want to sell shares than buy them. Investors have lost confidence -- perhaps only temporarily! -- in the company's future. Keep in mind that especially in the short term, investors aren't always rational.

WBD is an interesting case. Technically, Discovery -- which has listed shares for trading on the public stock market since early 2009 -- bought WB, so you can actually go back and look at its track record before the merger. Right now, it's trading at some of the lowest prices it's seen since shortly after it went public. Shares kinda peaked in 2014, and from then through 2021, they meandered around between $20 and $40 a share. That suggests investors thought the company was, eh, fine, and it'd do OK, but they didn't see anything special in its future. (Ideally, you want the value of a stock you buy to keep rising, even if its slow but steady, over time.)

In mid-2021, Discovery announced that they were buying WB. Shares skyrocketed to $72. Hilariously, if you look at the stock chart, you can see shares immediately nosedive down from that point, like the steepest rollercoaster you ever saw. Think Gob Bluth going, "I've made a huge mistake."

You'd think that after the merger, with a massive pile of super valuable media assets (and, to be fair, an equally vast pile of debt that it took on to buy them), WBD shares might have risen, or at least leveled off. But nope! WBD is down more than the overall market (which is not doing great what with, you know, everything), and far more than Disney, just for the sake of comparison. Last I checked, it had fallen about 2/3rds as much so far this year as Netflix -- and Netflix had actual subscriber losses to fuel that panic? WBD's wounds are entirely self-inflicted.

It's entirely possible that the stock market is overreacting with WBD. It does that A LOT. But especially from here, I think it'll take WBD a lot of hard work and luck to get back past those previous highs in the $40s anytime soon. Especially with Zaslav and his League of Mediocre Pasty Executives in charge.

[icon_uk]

Thanks for that, I feel more edumacated than I were!

[lissa_quon]

Not much going on here. I'm dealing with some hilarious depression. Also a friend of mine got covid, I had met them in person shortly before so I'm still unsure if I have it, or just really bad allergies. I'm trying to keep from wandering around and spreading it if I do. Most of the time I'm fine and then BAM random mucus and coughing for ages.

Also started watching the X-Files with a friend. I'd never seen it before, when I was younger I was too chickenshit to watch it. Now I'm just laughing hysterically as we get "but what if Bigfoot - but titties." Its a delight.

Haven't watched Sandman yet but the fandom reaction to it is a delight. I liked the comic series and still was hit by a mack truck at the ending. But even as a 14 yr old with bad taste I was like "Yea Dream is attractive but - that'd be a BAD IDEA". So watching him become everyone's woobie and little meow meow is amazing. Also I never really thought much of him and Hobb, and the fandom has made them lovers. 600 yr burn baby. Amazing. Delightful. Chef kiss.

[zachbeacon]

Remember before 2020 when we thought the hypochondriacs were the weird ones?

Anyway, I hope you and your friend get well soon.


"Bigfoot but titties" sounds like something that is almost certainly on Agent Mulder's hard drive.

I mean, at least Dream and Hob have been in the same room together a half dozen times. That makes them a lot more stable than some fan ships.

I know Dream's failed relationships are a big part of the story but I think any sane mortal should be terrified of getting involved with any of the Endless*. Except for maybe the artist formerly known as Destruction ... he seems cool.

*Yes, even Death. Sure she's the nice one but Dream made it pretty clear the occultists were lucky to grab him and not her. Beware the nice ones.

[numeronone]

It's not just the two Pinocchio films - within the last year there was a terrible straight-to-DVD version with Pauly Shore in the title role and there's an upcoming "Dark Souls But For Robots And Your Character Is Sexy Grownup Pinocchio" video game, Lies of P.

I wonder if this is all a coincidence or if there's been an anniversary recently or somethin'

[lissa_quon]

Yea I was wondering. I cynically thought some copyright or something ran out - but it's BEEN out for ages. So Yea I got nothing.

[mindsweeper]

I liked the trailer for Weird a lot. The parents telling him to stop being himself and give up doing what he loves hits a little too close to home, but I still laughed.

Only Murders in the Building wrapped. I liked this season, not as much as Season 1 but I am looking forward to season 3. They have a stunt casting obsession that's excessive. I guess Steve Martin can do that. V qba'g guvax vg jnf cbffvoyr gb svther bhg gur zheqrere guvf frnfba. Vg jnf rnfl gb thrff Zvpunry Enccncbeg'f vaibyirzrag (V qvq sebz gur zvahgr ur pnyyrq gur oybttref gbtrgure), ohg abg gur cevznel znfgrezvaq.

[cygnia]

Taking a break from Talos Principle -- I've got 5 red sigils left to get, but three of the puzzles involve dealing with blasted proximity mines and my eye-hand coordination in my old age ain't the greatest.

So, I've started Chicken Police.

[jkcarrier]

Talos Principle is definitely a game that benefits from taking long breaks. Grinding through very similar puzzles over and over again wore me down (and yes, those freaking mines resetting your progress every time you step wrong doesn't help). By the end, I just wanted it to be over. It's probably the first time I've thought that a game I mostly enjoyed was just too darn long.

[iamrman]

Nothing really to report comocs wise because I am off on my holly-bobs. Hetting there was a poece of piss. There was a pretty long line to check in our case, but they passed us through fairly sharpish. Security was no trouble at all. I was surprised at how quiet it was. It was easy going when we landed in Spain too. They just waved us through. It is almost as if British media is full of scaremongering talking about flight cancellations and the government wasnt us to stay home and spend money in Britain.

I was particularly pleased with myself being the first one on board the plane. Suck it, priority boarding!

The first night we went to a tapas place my parents went to in May and were raving about. Rightly so as it was good. I had magra con tomate (pork in tomato sauce) and mini cachopo (breaded spices of beef with cheese). I also made the mistake the mistake of ordering goat's cheese on toast. It was far too much!

Last night we took the tourist train in to Los Alcazares itself. We are at what we call 'the Old Hotel'. I'm sure it has a proper bame, but I can never remember it. I had magra con tomate again, but this time I had a singular portion of breaded brie alongside.

It is my turn to choose, but I am undecided where I want to go. I am torn between a place we have been before in Rods, the next village over, or the Tipsy Thistle, a place in the touristy part of Los Alcazares where we have never been before.

[onsokumaru]

Met two friends from middle school after something like 30 years.
That what nice.
Reminded me how I was one of the top students back then. They both did longer studies than me, are way more cultured and have a richer life.
That was nice.

Began to watch Sandman. I'm 3 episodes in and while I kinda enjoy it, I was expecting more, after all the very positive critics I've read. Maybe I needed to read the comics first to fully enjoy the experiece.

Doron Dororon (one of the manga serialized in Shonen Jump) has been axed. It wasn't very original (basically a Demon Slayer-lite) and the art was not so good, but the characters were fun and I liked their interactions. Especially the "senpai" who always wanted everybody to prise him and to recognise how awesome, strong and nice he was (which he actually was, except for the lack of modesty)

Another Jump manga, Dandadan, is doing very well and will get an anime. Nerdish boy who believes in alien but not in spirits meets popular girl who believes in spirits, but not in alien, and both of them are proved wrong. The mix of great art (except the sameface disease), humour and good character interactions makes it one of my favorite reads of the week. The last chapters have been a great hommage to the robot anime genre, which was a good excuse to rewatch those nice old openings. (V, V, V, Victory! Combine 1, 2, 3!)

Latest chapters of My Hero Academia have been... Well, sometimes you have to recognise something is very well crafted, while at the same time you're hating the direction it takes. Let's just say I uttered the words "f... Gary Stu POS" quite often .
Oh, and a male character basically confessed his love toward another male character, and this time it's not the usual "two boys admitted friendship to each other, they must be gay" thing.

[zachbeacon]

Honestly, once you remove the bigoted bad-faith “critics” from the equation, I think the people who read the comic first are the hardest on the show.

Putting aside the comics and TV are very different* …of course, something made by a relatively inexperienced author 30 years ago is going to be changed if the author – who is now a master storyteller – wants to set it in the present. I thought it was a pretty faithful adaption but I’ve seen a lot of people complain that they changed too much and I’ve seen a handful say they didn’t change enough.

*Case in point; the story in issue 6 / episode 5 is really hard for me to get through but only one of them requires me to turn the page and keep reading.

I am pretty far behind on MHA and I’ve had so many huge spoilers revealed by random Twitter people.

(Assuming you're talking about what I think you're talking about ...the fandom's love for that character will always baffle me)

[llordllama]

I think the most exciting that's happened in the past week is I built a scarecrow (of a mime) as part of our village's annual harvest-time festivities. Yes, it is a bit rural. The only problem is - it's in the garage currently and every time I walk in there I jump 50 feet in the air when I spot it out of the corner of my eye. So, I guess the 'scare' part works. Going on last year's entries I've no hope of winning, but it was a fun project...although now I've more straw than I'll ever know what to do with.

I will not be quitting my day-job to take up 3D sculpture as a career though.

[scorntx]

In the spirit of the bank holiday weekend 'round these parts, people have been driving their cars / motorbikes around the neighbourhood in a loop for hours.
So every ten minutes there's the sound of someone gunning their engine.
For two days straight.
Urgh.

Went for a drive the other weekend and was amazed at what it's like outside the horrible heat zone.
There was green grass everywhere...

She-Hulk episode 2 shows once again that Damage Control suck.
They really suck.
And the idea they're just playing the US government for chumps while doing a runner with the money obviously can't work because that'd require them to be competent.

Reading about Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, kind of interested...
but after Disco I'm still very hesitant.

Managed to find a Terrorsaur at the local comic shop.
Sadly, he's got quality control issues. Which is upsetting.

Mildly funny thing I saw the other day was a 'review' (if it can be called that) of House of the Dragon which was basically "dragons are OP!"

Been growing some tomatoes lately.
Well, "growing". They seem to be doing that themselves.
Too much, in fact. They're growing like mad things and proving impossible to prop up, so they're crushing each other.
If only there was some way to stop this...

[cygnia]

Need tomato recipes?

[deh_tommy]

“This may be the one time Disney”

The one time Disney what? The one time Disney what!?

[zachbeacon]

Introduces their first gay character?

Tries to straddle the middle of a social issue while pissing everyone off?

Screws over the talent?

Puts out a mostly CGI "live action" remake of classic cartoon?

Lengthens copyright protections so they can keep the Mouse?

[zachbeacon]

Okay, so I just got the TMNT Cowabunga Collection today and it has a TON of digital extras.

Music tracks.
Manuals.
Box art.
Classic ads.
Production art.
Comic covers.
Animation stills.

Radical.

[skjam]

Centurylink went out for the third time this year. This accelerated my plan to switch to local provider US Internet. While the new equipment was not quite as plug and play as advertised, their repair guy came out in one day instead of a week.

[ladymidath]

I have just come back from a cruise so I am catching up on everything. I have started watching She-Hulk Attorney At Law, and so far I am loving it. I have also started watching an Australian series called After The Verdict.
I need to catch up with my reading though.