Drifter

So you're deleting entire birthday threads now like they never existed... that's a little D-baggy... not sure who's being the more passive aggressive here... something to think about... so much for reminiscing... less and less left...

Found this video very charming

Harlan Ellison, Award-Winning Speculative Fiction And TV Writer, Dead At 84 This is another one that hurts. One of the Greatest Sci-fi writers ever... it's hard to say anything about the guy without selling him short. He seemed to be everywhere, worked with everyone and had his fingers in everything. A man of immense vision and a massive pain in the ass. "Contentious" doesn't even come close, to hear even his admirers describe him, but many, including myself, still found him endearing. Beloved for his work, There was lot. It seemed that at every pivotal moment in the development of the scifi/fantasy genre he was there and now that he's gone, the future doesn't seem as full as it should be.

Hey, I have all 3 Batman vs. Predator series in individual first run print and graphic novel form... and they all made as much sense if not more than most of the 'official' films. I don't expect there to be a 'canon' to this franchise.

yeah, it's not like the creators ever described their efforts as 'a spiritual journey' and encouraged people to make an emotional commitment to the whole franchise... that sounded way to snarky and bitter... how about: What's to get upset about? When did the Aliens and Predator franchises ever pretend to make sense? They try and crank that crazy-dial to 11 every chance they get. Hell, we're just one massive space-fleet battle away from the sci-fi insanity trifecta with these films.

You know, I find this attitude rather bizarre for a bunch of convention-goers.

Well, academically, it kinda is important: an actual cultural milestone. Star Wars literally jump-started modern fandom. There were always authors and series with cult followings, Asimov, Tolkien, etc. but it was the commercial success of Star Trek that brought them into the forefront of popular culture. Heck, it wasn't until after the success of the first film that Roddenberry was able to convince studios that the torch-bearers of Star Trek were a viable market and was able to engineer a resurgence. Star Wars is the template and artists, writers and media conglomerates have been trying to emulate that success ever since. It's all rather quite fascinating. At work now, I'll get back to baytor in a bit. It's a good trope, if you don't have the time a good short example you should be able to Youtube, Babylon 5 Season 4 finale The Deconstruction of Falling Stars one of the vignettes with two monks discussing things is a good portrayal of the premise and theme.

It's guaranteed to make bank ...though personally I would still like to see Spidey kick around the afterlife with two dumbass rockers in tow

That's the brilliance of replacing them with the cat and dogs. Homeward Bound: The Incredible Journey 40 million on a 1993 budget with a 87% on rotten tomatoes. A similar return on today's budget and It's guaranteed box-office gold!

Spider-man's Bogus Journey Home There, I fixed it, happy now? Trade-in the two dumbass musicians and give him a fucking Cat and two Dogs as sidekicks and it's a guaranteed moneymaker.

I suppose I say I kinda do and don't give a fuck about this new series. I both want to and I can't, which makes me sad. This new series wants to be Star Wars so bad that it's clubbed it over the head and is wearing it's face in some sick pantomime. I do give a fuck over how I don't feel I give a fuck when I feel I want to give a fuck. Like I've been denied giving a fuck and am very unhappy about being blue-balled. I don't give enough of a fuck that I feel I should. A diet fuck, all the feels, half the cares. At this point, I'm just in it to improve my communications skills. Can I properly convey the delicate balance and irony of distasteful disappointment and retributive indifference? Even if the 'splitting of the fandom' was unintentional, their response of "We've created division and strife amongst the fanbase, therefore we must be creating powerful art. We're gritty, grr!" is as off-putting as it is tone-deaf and not a great sign for the future of this franchise. I admit I was overzealous in pointing this out, but who doesn't love to get to say "I fucking called it?" Several properties since the release of The Last Jedi have had lackluster performances, while there have been no reviews for the second season of Forces of Destiny and Resistance hasn't premiered yet, I do know several game expansions have not performed well, even in the face of improved quality. Reasons why are varied and hard to pin down, but while the over-saturation of the franchise or fucking EA may be a primary driver, I will also point out the mass psychology of the fanbase, and how many of the more die-hard fans that were the targets of these products have vocally expressed recently feeling burned by the powers-that-be and that, that may be playing a larger part in the drop off in interest than many care to admit. I am also familiar with the tropes of how the protagonists need to be beaten low for them to have a larger triumph later and I have no issue in The Las Jedi being the second darker entry into the new series. What I have been questioning all along is the choice of the writers to not base the premise of these films - as shown in the previous film The Force Awakens and now doubled-down on by The Last Jedi - not to base the premise and setting on the ending of Return of the Jedi. The actions and consequences, trials and tribulations, the entire meaning of the first trilogy has been rendered so moot by this new series that if you kept absolutely everything the same and just changed the names of a few characters you could have set these new movies hundreds or thousands of years after the first films and it would have made just as much sense, probably more. I also have no doubt that the director was in some way making a dig at his detractors, but in this day and age... what happens if the fans raise enough money? Also, the mere fact that such a thing like this exists in the first place says a lot. I however, don't believe, as you've intimated, that it is because a bunch of homophobes and misogynists are pissed. You seem focused on the obnoxious minority of Dude-bros, Bigots, and Space-Nazi wannabees and equating any criticism of these new films with approval of the shit they say. Not so. And I too have been concerned for some time that the evil empire has been undergoing some kind of PR image rehabilitation, where they're literally genocidal, there are defenders of the dark side, and how 'a different point of view' has been co-opted from justifying semantic interpretations to deliberately misinterpreting facts with no regards to morality and principles. This is why I dislike all that bullshit about 'Gray Morality' and 'Balance' which are all well and good, but when you start giving cover to a bunch of homicidal, gay-bashing, sexist, xenophobic fascists, you've done fucked up. As for 'deeper meaning' I'm just generally upset that either unintentional or by design, I have been presented with a benign but annoying choice over something that I took great joy in; and that it has been so poorly handled that I'm actually putting undue effort into resolving a rather pathetic internal conflict over the premise of a fucking film series. Why is this important at all? For me, it's simply because something I've enjoyed when I was young, a fictional story that entertained me and portrayed virtues that I admire, has been dealt a disservice. For others, who fucking knows; the need for myth is a powerful instinct and anything that inspires it's own religion shouldn't be dismissed outright, though I am loathed to equate New Age Jedi-ism with Scientology. There it is. And you're still being an ass about it. I should make a essay thesis on the nature of fandom.

Do we know if the new Spider-man films are set before or after Infinity war? Well, if he's still dead by Thanos I would like to see Spider-man's Bogus Journey

Not sure if this going to work in this day and age. Just more privileged white people complaining about first-world problems. It's a catch-22 because to do otherwise will be seen as pandering. It just doesn't seem like a good time for it. In the age of president shithole, less seems funny. Also, since I didn't want to put it on The Handmaiden's Tale thread since I've never seen an episode, I'm sneaking it in here; I didn't title it, read it first before you flog me: Women Are Evil so did you actually read it?

I never said I owned it; we were all invited to participate and emotionally invest in this intellectual property and I feel burned by what has happened to it, so I'm done. And from the numbers coming off of the Solo film it would appear that I'm not alone in feeling this way. Sure, TLJ may have made 1.3 billion at the world wide box office, but it burned the franchise doing so. Future entries to the continuity have been suffering ever since and I don't expect things to get better for them for a while. True, it is with no small amount of satisfaction that I point out one of the most fundamental flaws with how things are being handled by the current owners of the franchise, their baffling logic about what's happened ("we created division and strife amongst the fanbase, we must be making powerful art! We're gritty, grr!"), and the consequences there of. And I ask, how are the two series, taken at face value, not antithetical in spirit to each other when presented as a singular continuity? How does the message of hope and promise of the ending of the first series align with the hopeless shit-world that is the setting of the new series? It really can't and so I've ceased to consider them such, they're each to be measured on the strength of their own merits and their own merits alone. And one of the things that has been discovered is that without emotional investment on the part of the audience, studios are not going to guarantee a very large monetary return on these films anymore. They can cry me a river for all I care. This is in the context of fictional characters filling the need for myth in modern culture. The characters need not so much be perfect as incorruptible. But that's not proven to be the case, which is where the internal conflict and disappointment comes in. If you forgive the grandiose metaphor; it is like if the Catholic Church of the Vatican (being the greater authority over Christendom) were to keep adding to the stories of Jesus Christ, to conflate doctrine with things that were never part of what was originally written. And worse, add things that some feel debase the spirit and message of the faith... well, some of the fans seem to have nailed about 95-these to the church door of Lucasfilm... so yeah, that metaphor was way, way too overblown but the underlying sentiment is similar when you reduce it to its base. I really don't care enough, and I actually had to look up who that was, I almost thought his name was that of one of the female actors that was in the news for being undeservedly harassed. That also made me realize how much I've really been put off by this whole slow dumpster fire. And here's another funny part. ‘Star Wars’ Director Cheers Fan Campaign To Remake His ‘Last Jedi’ Film So now toxic fandom has become me taking offense at being insulted and belittled for lamenting that I'm pissed-off at not giving a fuck anymore. That's almost a Koan.

You know, I'm actually trying to be thoughtful and serious here, fuck you. The filmmaking artist solicited the audience into making an emotional investment in his product, then enticed that audience into forming a perpetual fanbase in the hopes of eliciting more money out of them through marketing, merchandising and careful control over continuity and content; controlling the narrative in perpetuity. It was a noteworthy accomplishment. It created the very concept of the modern multi-media franchise property. There was nothing like it before; closest you had were Saturday morning cartoons about comic book characters, short-reel serials of toss-away adventure series with niche magazines that had sporadic publishing and maybe a one-off film from a popular series of novels. Nothing with this type of mainstream power. Something important was deliberately created and asked that we be a part of it. And yes, I did fall for it. The original trilogy really has become a cornerstone of modern western culture, the fictional characters and their stories filling the needs of mythology that our current civilization sorely lacks, and because they're fictional they can be incorruptible by the reality of their times, unlike our own history where any and all personal heroes throughout the ages are more than simply flawed but had aspects that were downright damning to our modern sensibilities. We make myth because there are no real perfect heroes. And now, something seems wrong. The veneer has cracked and we've watched as something that was thought to be forever having been unceremoniously, almost contemptibly, replaced - not just superseded. In this I'm starting to relate to the feelings of the voters in the rust belt in some way, though I dare say I'm not shooting myself in the foot, cutting off my nose to spite my face, nor trying to drag everyone down into misery with me; this is entertainment, not government after all. The advantages of the controlled narrative has been turned on itself. The new films are more of a remake than a continuation, and in choosing to do so, the previous mythology has been damaged by the powers that be. Though, admittedly, the original creator was also starting to fuck things up too. So, I'm done. I'm a whiney little dipshit who has become a self-flagellating martyr because I found meaning in a bullshit popcorn story of meaningless fluff, ascribing more importance to it than was appropriate, and now I'm bitching like a baby, not because it didn't turn out the way I wanted, but because of its mutually exclusive narrative mythologies. And don't try to defend it, they are mutually exclusive, and are so by design. So forgive the schadenfreude when I and those like me no longer chose to eat the shit-sandwich with a smile. Something important that had been made, has now been rendered less, due to what is being done now, because of its nature. I do feel that a disservice has been done. And I am not alone.

Gee; it's almost like the deliberate decision to divide the older fan base had led to the inevitable consequence of people picking and choosing what they like and shunning the rest. Looks like they can't guarantee the same levels of profitability from their spin off material after deliberately pissing off so many, boo fucking hoo. Even watching the original heroes get crushed would have been infinitely preferable to watching them just not matter in the grand scheme of things. ‘Star Wars’ Spinoffs Suspended After Tepid ‘Solo’ Box Office: Report

Doesn't make sense. I'm honestly not sure what they could change in a remake to make it... rewarding? Satisfying? Vindicating?. The problem I had was with the premise of the overall setting; they'd have to do a lot of shoehorning and retconing to fix that. How could you make it appealing to a loyal following; how do you somehow satisfactorily explain just how badly things became so screwed up to where everybody from the original trilogy had their lives utterly ruined and their spirits completely crushed to the point they all decided to just fuck off and still leave the fanbase feeling enriched and interconnected by their shared past experience of watching the first films or leave them feeling rewarded for their continued faith and devotion to the franchise? Maybe the story already exists in other media, but for the new series to pick up where it did with things the way they were... why even make it part of the franchise at all? Hell, a trilogy about the fall of the New Republic would have been infinitely better than what we were given, which was "back to square-one, nothing the original heroes did in the first films amounted to jack shit, enjoy as we abruptly kill these beloved characters off in uncharacteristic ways. Purposefully dividing a fanbase against itself means we've crated powerful art. We're so bold and gritty, grr."

I don't have netflix, I'm surprised at the number of shows that keeps me from watching.

I wonder what types of characters people are playing now too. In Pathfinder I'm running a straight up Bard rocking a composite longbow; in one 3.5 I've got a Rogue/Streetfighter with dual shortswords and in the other I got a greatsword wielding Cleric/Paladin/Warpriest. I rather like Pathfinder, it's a shored-up iteration of 3.5 that simultaneously keeps, and even expands, the versatility of 3.5 while simplifying many of the more convoluted rule-sets. And I was tickled to discover that they're still printing the 3.5 books after the way Wizard tried to strong-arm the abysmal 4th edition onto us. I hear mixed things about 5th edition, but I've no interest, I guess I've found my preferred system, so I guess I've become one of those clichés griping about 'old-school' and "back in my day." I swear, kids these days...

Anybody still into tabletop gaming nowadays and/or currently playing? I miss these threads where we get swap stories. I attend a Pathfinder and two 3.5 DnD campaigns at a local game store up here in RI, games alternating weekly; I play every Tuesday and Thursday night after work 7:00 -10:00. I guess I just needed to be out of the house.

what was the animated short?

This is suppose to be satire, right?