Contentious C

Fantastic idea, let's have the Albert Haynesworth Redux. Oy vey. That said, we had a glut at WR anyway with Edelman returning (unless Gronk retires).

Not to mention, have you seen the kids who live in Baltimore? Camden Yards will be heroin-encrusted rubble by June.

That's like going to a one-star Michelin rated restaurant, ordering the prime rib, and saying, "This isn't rare enough. Can you just take this back and give me 18 cases of ice cream sandwiches topped with gummy bears instead"? Having that opinion of DD is understandable - I've seen people bash the side characters and their jokiness, the fact that DD is doing the GreenArrow/Batman-only-Red-and-Blind-and-Marvel act, that the characterization of Elektra is all wrong, etc. Not that I agree with them, but I understand them. I can understand other criticisms, too. IF & Defenders were written wholly around the premise of "Danny is a moron", the plots made no sense, the character arcs made even less sense, the fight scenes were by-and-large an embarrassment; these are not criticisms you can level at DD to the same degree. You may think it sucks but there's no world where it sucked more than the other 2 shows.

You're a strange person.

I couldn't play Witcher 1, the combat was so bad, so they're not wrong. And I say this having gone to bat for Morrowind a few posts up. I suppose I should at least give 2 a try, since the story is relevant to 3...but I'm expecting more of the same.

Hmmm... I own, but have not played, most of the Just Cause & Far Cry series, and I suspect those probably could earn themselves a spot if I ever played them. And I've never played any of the Rockstar games, aside from about 10 hours of LA Noire, which made me want to never play it again. For my own rankings, given the other stuff that's on here...do we count Tomb Raider? I suppose I wouldn't, since it's not strictly open (where you can go where you want from the beginning), but it probably blows a lot of these out of the water as a gaming experience. Otherwise, there are a lot of factors that go into how I feel about these things, and no one game has them all - not even close, really. So I'll just mention the 'winners' for each of those feelings and why they're successful. - "Pick up, put down, lather rinse repeat" - Fallout 3. By the end game, it's fantastically broken, but man, sometimes it's just fun to go to some location you haven't seen before, blow some shit up, own a Deathclaw or 5, and move on. It has replayability and ease and fun by the bucketloads. And the story is better than 4. - "I think I know it, and then I find I don't know it" - Skyrim. I have probably 1600 hours in this and about 12 different characters, but each and every single time I play it, I learn something I didn't know on the prior playthrough. The last time it was learning the non-violent option for solving the Gildergreen quest. Always something. - "I wish I could be in this world" - LoZ: Breath of the Wild. As much as I've dumped on it in the other thread, it just feels...inviting. Like when you glide into some empty area and just look at everything around you, there's a sensation of peace to it all. I'm not sure too many games outside of the LoZ series could pull this off. Ocarina of Time might actually be better at this, but feels more restricted and restricting. - "This owns my soul" - Morrowind. Forget the bugs, forget the worst combat system in the history of combat or systems, forget the lack of voice acting, forget the age of it. This did deep horror better than any other game I've seen, especially given the plotlines of both Oblivion & Skyrim since. Vvardenfell is such a massively creepy, unsettling, weird fucking place, and when you do totally basic stuff like PICK UP A BOOK AND READ there are just more and more layers of weird and insane and mind-warping waiting for you. There's a huge part of me that wants to set aside the awfulness of the way the game handles to play it again...and then the part of me that's scared shitless of every square inch of that island says, "No." Anything that puts most or all of these into one container would probably be my favorite game of all time.

I think what I liked most about this is that it just felt like a TV show, where the comic-book aspects take something of a back seat. Sure, powers may be at the root of the worst things here, but these are all people so fundamentally broken that they'd make other, equally self-destructive choices without any help (and frequently do, as we routinely see in flashbacks). Still don't feel like Marvel TV has got its groove back since the double decker shit sandwich of IF and Defenders, though.

Jesus H... Lou Thesz must've installed Minnesota's rims.

I only made it through episode 4 of JJ S2, and I'm digging the morally gray character development so far. But there was a part of me that was thinking, "You know, this really needs a knock-down drag-out right about now" and WHAM out of left field, there it is. Interested to catch the rest this weekend.

I suppose technically it's not "new" TV since the first chunk came out in 2015, but I've been watching The Frankenstein Chronicles and, whew, is it fucking boring. Glad I can go home and binge S2 of Jessica Jones instead.

Counting Crows (their first album anyway). I win. And I lose. Hell, in college I went to a concert that was them and Live co-headlining. I think I'd projectile vomit my intestines through my tear ducts if I had to relive that now.

"Almost"?

QFFT. Well, technically whats-his-face was Hellfire, too, but it's not like he was ever anything other than a side character.

I agree with this, too! I remember at the time that I merely 'liked' Cap 1 coming out of the theater, but I couldn't shake the feeling that what I'd just watched was an overlong advertisement for the first Avengers movie. Since then, with the gaudy spectacle of Avengers 1 in the rearview mirror, the emotional core of Cap 1 stands out so much more. Everyone hits their notes just right in it, the love story just crushes me every time, and it's even disappointing to me that Hugo Weaving has such a bug up his ass about having been Red Skull (because if there were one villain you could bring back who'd find some way to dick over Thanos when it mattered most...). Of all the movies they've done, Cap 1 has easily aged the best. It aged so well, in fact, that DC stole it and called it Wonder Woman!

Huh. I'm necro'ing this bad boy because, well, I'm a terrible person. I'm surprised the only Booker winner I've read is The English Patient - in equal parts because I haven't read some of the other "name" ones on the list like Midnight's Children or The Remains of the Day despite meaning to read them, and also because I'm surprised THAT won a Booker prize. I enjoyed it a great deal, but if I had to list the best books I've read from the last 25-30 years, I'm not sure I'd even remember it. And I've read, like, 20 non-scifi/fantasy books that have come out in my lifetime. The Pulitzers are the same old "stuff they showed us in school" everyone else has named...but the only one off that entire list I'd go back and re-read at the drop of a hat is All the King's Men. Mostly I bumped this because Ishiguro won the last Nobel, and I was surprised to find he did it off of, what, 6 novels? That said, the film versions of Remains and Never Let Me Go are two of the most heart-wrenching works I've ever seen, so I finally bought myself a copy of the latter to read and see what they left out of the film. I suspect I'll want to jump off a building by the end. Or perhaps in the middle, I don't know.

I think Guardians 1 is simply an easy movie to like: it's the highly approachable and familiar trope of the Ragtag Bunch Becomes a Family. It was also (relatively) out of left field in terms of quality, so there's a certain aspect of having caught lightning in a bottle there that, if people were expecting it to get reproduced in the second movie, then that's a "them" problem and not a "people who produced Guardians 2" problem. Guardians 2 is, frankly, a more difficult movie to pull off as well as they did. It isn't about a group coming together as a family. It's about them already being a family, and hey, well, families can suck. Sometimes a lot. A Hell of a lot of the time, the people who are supposed to help you get through are the ones who hold you back - or worse. I think if your focus on the film is on how their respective "families" have screwed up - and yet also redeemed - nearly all these characters, you see how it's going to hold up well over time. Maybe better than the first. There are still things that bug the crap out of me about both movies, primarily revolving around the fact that Gamora is not 1% as interesting as she ought to be, but I have to agree with the director, who gave the entire Internet a massive eye-roll when the first things coming out of the gate about 2 were "Oh, it's not as good as the first". I feel sorry for people who live in that world of list-making and binary thinking; so missing the point.

Has he figured out how to spell 'definitely' in the intervening years? Guessing not.

Middle school social studies! That isn't going to do any lasting damage to anyone, no siree Bob!

Hah. I finally finished up all the memories myself yesterday. The real achievement of the weekend, though, was finally taking down a Guardian Stalker. I was Korok hunting and saw one of the ones lurking near the mountains north of Kakariko and I just said, "Fuck it". I didn't realize before you could chop the legs off, though that makes a lot of sense. After I beat one...I just started beating every goddamned one I could find. Nothing scares me anymore. ExceptLynelsFuckThoseGuysIRunSoSoSoFarAwayEvenThoughIHaveKilton'sMaskIsItStillBehindMe. Completing the memories really does add something to the story. I guess I'm still spoiled on games with, you know, real voice acting and an overall lack of cutscenes, but it helps a lot. Getting to see someone so pointed inward finally rise up hit me right in the feels. And is it just me, or does it seem like they might have modeled Zelda a little bit after Holly Taylor (who plays Paige on The Americans)? Or maybe it's just that Holly Taylor looks rather elfin in the first place.

Ensemble would be a good award, and I've also felt there should be a Most Outstanding award for individuals to cover a body of work over a calendar year. So someone like RDJ in 2008 (Iron Man & Tropic Thunder) would win, while someone like Sandra Bullock in 2009 would not, since you probably shouldn't have a year where you win an Oscar & a Razzie if you really deserve the Oscar. This would have also cleared Winslet & Dicaprio off the "haven't won" list long before they got there, among others.

Yeah, driving the Beltway this morning, when I couldn't be arsed to check my work email first, was a fun experience. Tree branches were just flying into the road and exploding in front of me. And then I get to work and it says, "NIH is closed, you're not supposed to be here!" Hey, fuck, great. May as well get a bunch of crap done anyway. #postdocblues

I dunno, I could empathize with Zelda in a lot of those situations. I'm not sure I would handle being someone's cats-paw any better when I was a teenager. Then again, I'm the kind of guy who feels like the hero in the Bible is Judas, so what do I know? After my Boko-Bowling incident, I found a few Youtube videos showing it, and one of them showed a scene not dissimilar to what you're describing (though I think the person used Daruk's special ability to light everything on fire). The level of chaos was pretty funny.

I also dig how it very clearly shows you the Rockets were already up by TWENTY-ONE before that. Would you like a little wound with that salt?

Two upgrades and the Climber's Bandana. The way I've done it was to get on the bluffs in Zora territory that overlook the main section of the Citadel, glide in to the east/southeast near the lower Guardian patrol, then kite along the very edge of the zone (between the gray stone-paved section and the cliff edge) until an opening appears to climb straight up the nearest corner of the lower building (where the Moblin/Bokoblin are). From there, it's a pretty quick climb up the side to just below the tower, clear the jokers in the surrounding area, climb that little shepherd's hook-shaped bit, then glide over. I wonder if the people suggesting Magnesis or some other weird crap even did proper recon first.

I got about 80 shrines in, then decided to punt the game I was running and start a new one, with a little more focus on doing the Korok seeds, Fairy Fountains, side quests, dealing with the starter zone in a more orderly fashion, and getting to a few key areas (like Rito) sooner rather than later. There's just no way around how disappointing the Divine Beasts feel. I can still recall from being a kid that level of almost-nice frustration as you cling by your fingertips to a dungeon that's more or less owning you, and that feeling like you just skated by it by the thinnest of margins felt a little like stealing something. It was nice. I felt like OoT & LttP had times that were like that, when you didn't do things in the right order and bit off a little more than you could chew. This...this has none of that. At all. Even getting to all the treasure chests within a Beast (at least for the 2 I've done so far) is a cakewalk. And yet the alternative is running towards the Castle and having some techno-spider blast you into molecules. The lack of in-between, or the sense that the progress being made in the game is truly getting you there incrementally, is a serious shortcoming. I also just don't need the puzzles that are there. They aren't clever, they aren't challenging, and it isn't merely because I'm an adult and I can look things up on the Internet. It's that, if I wanted to play some of these games, I'd go eat at Cracker Barrel and do the exact same puzzles there. It's dull. I'd almost rather have more strength tests (or more varied ones) than some of the puzzle bullshit. *** Having said all this, I did have one of my best experiences in 30+ years of gaming a few nights ago, the second time I climbed Akkala Tower (which is also way, way easier than people made it out to be). I snuck up the (I think) southeasternmost corner onto the Citadel Ruins, where a Moblin & a Bokoblin look over the edge and oink at who-knows-what. And just behind them is the only weapon in sight, a spear. Donned my stealth gear, snuck up and tucked the spear into my inventory and then jumped out at them. Me: "Haha! You don't have any weapons! Have at you!" Moblin: "Haha, yes I do!" and the bastard PICKS UP HIS BUDDY and lawn-darts him at me. I had to pause the game and laugh for a minute straight before going back to kick their asses.