brucoe

I have all sorts of mixed thoughts on textbooks and education based on my own growing up experiences that I don't think I'll ever get beyond. When I was going through elementary school and then middle school, there was a HUGE fight in our school district concerning our history textbook because the "new" textbook had seven chapters that were added to the curriculum. There were school board arguments that went on for years over this issue until one side managed to win, and the "new" textbook was put into the mandatory curriculum.

That's all great and good, except when it came to being in that class that was teaching the subject of history. Our history teacher actually assigned all chapters BUT the seven chapters that were added to the curriculum. For years, that became how they taught it.

And for spoiler warning (which I only discovered because once my mom found out what had happened, she made me read the unassigned chapters), the stricken chapters were all about the Native American experience. Basically, the argument in our school district (in Southern California, so it wasn't like this was in some Missouri district no one had ever heard about) was that they didn't want this "outside" information being taught to our young students. If you didn't seek out the information yourself, you were pretty much taught that John Wayne and a bunch of cowboys had civilized the heathens to make America what it is today.

Yeah, it's anecdotal, but add up those anecdotal incidents, and you get a lot of what makes up our crappy education in this country.

Loved the show. I also need to see the third season.

One of the things I loved about working for Maxis (and then EA) was I was often assigned to games that were about to move out of pre-alpha, so they would want me to find how to best totally screw up the game from within. Quite often, I would find a completely different goal to achieve than what the original design of the game was meant to be. And I was often assigned this task to games from other studios (they'd hire us to do this based on our history of massively breaking others' games in this process), and it was so much fun. Once you figured out what the original engine for the game was designed to do, the amount of fun you could have within the game itself was fascinating. I remember running anti-star destroyer missions within Tie Fighter because one of the unspoken rules of the game was that without the initial star destroyer present, the whole game couldn't move forward (so we'd figure out ways to destroy the central star destroyer and see what anarchy happened after). They even "fixed" the game so that destroying that star destroyer was impossible, yet one of our senior testers, a pilot named Bill who passed away just a month ago, spent a month nonstop running strafing runs on the star destroyer before he managed to blow it up. They had to actually add a readme file to the game because of him that stated something to the effect: "If you destroy the star destroyer, the game may not be able to be completed."

14 hours ago, dualhunter said:

 

Icewind Dale is more combat focused so less reading.

My problem with Icewind Dale isn't the gameplay itself (it's actually a lot of fun), but that it's designed to be handled by people who are exploring tactics. In that guise, it's a bit fun, but as always, I begin to focus on a strategic level of handling combat, and in a very short time, I'm way overpowered and basically smashing through practically everything.

I have a hard time getting past his war crimes of creating a race of sentinels to kill all of the friendly and innocent mutants who only wanted to live in peace.

The problem I perceive is that the US, Western Europe and Russia have never figured out a way to move beyond the Cold War, even though the Cold War's purpose was completely gone by 1989. We literally have an entire defense industry that is based on the threat of a world conflict that was somewhat real in the 1970s but not so much after. Instead of slowly eliminating it and moving to post-Cold War technologies, we continue to make bigger and better arms that serve that old purpose, forcing pretty much every other actor to do the same thing, even though there's no purpose behind it. What it will eventually lead to is a conflict where some old, hardened generals are going to see the usefulness of using such stuff because someone else thought it would be a deterrence if we field it, and then someone else fielded there, and then as usual, the people with the least to lose will make the decisions for the people who have everything to lose.

A lot of those are great choices. I'd add The Snyder Cut to the list as it is most definitely over 3 hours (pretty sure it's about 4 hours), and I personally really love the movie.

I kind of hope the story picks up a bit. Right now, it feels like Geriatric Bounty Hunter In Retirement as Daimyo. The thing about Boba Fett was that he was always supposed to be a complete badass, and even though we only got like twenty seconds of him in actual footage before he becomes monster meat, people still loved the idea that he was some uber bounty hunter that stood proudly before Darth Vader. With Mando, we got an actual bad ass who did badass things. I was kind of hoping we'd be getting that with Boba Fett.

7 minutes ago, Derek said:

Is it a pain in the ass to cancel. I.E. do they tie you into a 12 month contract or anything? I haven't read up on it.

I get it through my cable provider. I've had HBO for years, and I called my cable company, and they just gave me the access so that I've had HBO Max from the day they started it.

3 minutes ago, Derek said:

Peacemaker has me really thinking about HBO Max. I opened up the app menu on my TV and it showed a picture of him with a 2 dollar off sale.

Such a fun show.

I tend to subscribe to all of them because I'm too lazy to try to figure out what's on what service. But that actually has become a problem because now I have so much choice of programming that I never know what's on because I don't go surfing through the services to see what's being offered.

On 1/14/2022 at 6:07 AM, Komusha said:

The opening credits are an all timer.

 

Check out this show. It's great.

Usually, I watch the opening credits to a show once and then skip through it every time after. With Peacemaker, I watch the opening number each time and enjoy it just as much.

On 1/14/2022 at 11:28 AM, johnny said:

is eagly the best boy? yes he is 

At first, I thought Eagly was going to be one of those jokes that just gets old, but the more he's on screen, the more I like him.

10 hours ago, Spork3245 said:

Also: lol at Bat Mite being DCEU canon

Yep, I was practically falling out of my chair laughing at this whole exchange. It was one of those moments I didn't know I needed.

21 hours ago, TheLeon said:

I squealed when 

  Hide contents

David Cross

popped up. Like, he’s not such a big star that I thought “how did they get him?” It was just a fun surprise. 

Yeah, same here. When he first appeared, I was thinking, "that can't be him, right?" And the more he was on screen, the more I realized it was him and was happy.

3 hours ago, Greatoneshere said:

 

I mean, you are coming in to an up to date thread for the final season of The Expanse after the episode has dropped. Why would you enter such a thread knowing that without having seen the episode first? We're obviously going to be openly talking about it, I'm not spoiler alerting each post I make in such a thread.

That's why I waited until I finished the last episode of Season 6 before reading this thread. I literally just finished the last episode as of ten minutes ago.

This series is probably one of my favorite in all of science fiction because it doesn't play "let's use the techno thingie to recalibrate the whatsihoosit" like Star Trek does all the time (even though I love Star Trek, nor does it use space magic to explain anything unless the space magic is speculative science that might or might not be actually possible. Every episode I've watched, I've held onto the edge of my seat because anything can happen, and anyone can die.

The magic space dogs thing still made no sense to me, but I suspect they're setting up Season 7.

10 hours ago, TheLeon said:

I want a PS5 and a new GPU for my PC, but at this point I’m going to stop looking entirely. I got a Series X, I’m happy with that, so I’ll put the time/money I would spend on those other things towards something else that might fill the emptiness in my life. 

Same here. I was willing to go with either a PS5 or an XBox Series X, but neither has been possible to obtain without scalping or sacrificing Gamora for Thanos, so now I'm just basically waiting out a huge upgrade for my PC and forget that consoles ever existed. Otherwise, I'm kind of stuck with my enhanced 2080 video card for now.

I just watched this on Disney Plus, and let me just preface my little review with "I might have to watch this again just to figure out if I liked it or not".

About a third through the movie, I sort of drifted off while watching it and then next thing I knew a whole lot of stuff was happening, and I honestly had zero idea what was going on. But even before I sort of faded during that first third, it really felt like there was nothing going on in this story, and then out of nowhere, it seemed like everything was going on (but way too much way too late).

There were definitely way too many people to follow in this first story of a group of people I'd never heard of before. That was a huge problem. It was a lot like if you went into End Game and had never heard of Iron Man or anyone else in the MCU before watching that movie. They do not do a good job of introducing characters in a way that you care about them enough to try to figure out which one is which, and which ones you should care about. At least with End Game, you had a library of movies you probably watched before getting to that point.

Part of the problem of what bothered me about the whole concept of the Eternals is that they're supposed to be basically gods, and they didn't seem all that much more impressive than the normal run of the mill heroes of the MCU. Ikaris, who was obviously supposed to be the royal bad ass of the movie, really felt like Homelander on quaaludes. 

And I agree with a lot of the critics that the movie didn't do a good job of explaining why they sat out the fight of End Game and practically every other conflict that's happened in Earth's history. Yeah, they addressed it, but that doesn't mean they satisfied the viewers in doing so.

One of the biggest problems I perceived in this movie is that it felt like it was trying to do fan service and forgetting (or neglecting) that a lot of the audience was going to be less informed about what was going on. There were constant references to "new" people that seemed to be designed around diehard fans that would go "Oh, wow, they're talking about Galactus" or some other lesser known entity in the Marvel universe, but for me, I just found myself staring at the screen, thinking, "is this something else I have to watch a Youtube video on easter eggs to figure out what they were talking about?"

I really wanted to like it more, as I love what the MCU has done with practically every movie and tv show before it, but again, I might have to watch it again and hope that my experience is different. I do have a couple of pym particles lying around the house, so maybe I can use those and go back and watch it again for the first time.

I, too, have been watching this show and waiting on that last episode for some time. It's a beautiful story all the way through and told in a way that shows masterful, conceptual writing where the story gets told by experiencing it in a constant sense of exposure to bits and pieces at a time. There are some great actors in the show (some you smile when you see them because they're MUCH BIGGER actors than you would have suspected would be in this series) and some of the unknowns, including the little girl who plays Kirsten as a child (another decent actress plays her as the adult) really blow you away with great performances.

The whole thing gives off vibes of The Walking Dead, Carnival, LOST and the Leftovers but remains solidly its own vehicle.

I started back at work today, and I'm a bit nervous, even though I have both vaccine shots and just received my booster a few days ago. I teach college in Texas and suspect that with how crappy people are about handling the virus, it's somewhat inevitable.

13 hours ago, skillzdadirecta said:

I've been asking Christians to explain this to me my whole life. I've never understood the whole trinity... I get The Father and The Son. But who the hell is The Holy Ghost?! I've asked that my whole life and no one has never asnswered it for me.

The Holy Ghost is Bob from Accounting. He gets forgotten a lot due to the nature of the corporate structure.

2 minutes ago, best3444 said:

 

? Play Guardians of the Galaxy...

Didn't really like it. It's made well, but really didn't like the combat. Really felt like I was just watching the game rather than contributing to it.

I bought Guardians of the Galaxy for PC and then Everspace (the first one). Kind of in that lull period of not having a game to play next, so might just sit out gaming for a short while until something awesome gets released.

17 hours ago, Jason said:

She was found not guilty on all charges that involved defrauding patients. The only charges that stuck were the ones about defrauding investors.

Of course. People don't matter. Profit does.

I started playing this yesterday, and while I'll admit the graphics are excellent, I'm not overwhelmed by the gameplay mechanics. Part of the problem stems from the exact same problem I had with Monster Hunter, in that in every battle I have, I honestly feel like I'm just mashing buttons and making absolutely no contribution whatsoever. And then I either win or lose based off of some kind of random factor that doesn't feel like it has anything to do with what I've done in the game on purpose. The dialogue is great. The pacing is excellent, but again, it feels like I'm just running along rails while the story is actually taking place around me. And that's not even a complaint. It's just a feeling I have throughout my entirety of playing the game so far.