Kal-El814

This is actually part of the issue as well. Despite there definitely being improvements in many areas and the aesthetic being distinct from both ES and FO games, this still very much FEELS like one of those games most of the time in a mechanical sense. You move like you do in other BGS games, inventory / weight management is largely the same, dialog is, companion management is, sneaking is, etc. But BGS also seem to want the player to interact with the world in a meaningfully different way than they're used to. Again, it just FEELS like a hedge almost constantly. Maybe if this is someone's first BGS game they wouldn't pick up on this, but as someone that's played all of them other than FO76... it feels like one of those games but it's out of sync with the experience of playing. Not to make a direct game comparison but one of the reasons Breath of the Wild or Tears of the Kingdom work to the extent they do is that while they have a lot of the aesthetics and trappings of Zelda games, they're obviously very different mechanically; they are very obviously and meaningfully designed around those differences. And while people still chafe because of their expectations sometimes (the "where are the dungeons" observations, for example) the way those games are built mandate that the broader expectations are different and so the player's expectations are modified as a result. Again, Starfield just doesn't go hard enough in any one of its directions

Aside from the gameplay being just sorta fine and the writing being pretty bad, I think the main issue with Starfeild's approach to a universe is that it's just so segmented that it pulls you out of itself too often. It makes absolutely no sense that there are a bunch of towns in Skyrim that have more cops than civilians, that you can walk across the continent in something like 3 calendar days, that Nazeem busts your balls for never getting to the Cloud District of a "city" that is 300 paces wide, etc. because the game gives you enough shit to do at almost all times that you either don't notice or you're too distracted to care. Starfield segments off so much shit while also making the planets themselves generally pretty boring. Yes that "makes sense" but nobody is coming to BGS games for that shit, nobody cares that setting off a mini nuke doesn't affect corrugated aluminum fencing, they just want to see shit go boom or BOOSH a dragon priest off a fucking cliff and then reload once you realize you can't find his corpse to loot. Make a real space sim or make Skyrim in spaaaaaaaace but hedging like they did is the actual issue because we just ended up with the worst of both worlds.

Shocking that something with the acronym AI ended up sucking shit and being a scam @legend

If by "too different" he means "worse than" then well spotted, Todd. I feel understood.

Well that was really quite good. EDIT - I didn't see I basically cribbed @CayceG comment word for word, @Commissar SFLUFAN I commit myself to the posting gulag

I personally don't have a problem with "slow parts" in movies; they're often my favorite parts in the moves I like that have them. To wit, I think the scenes with Pitt just driving around or the movie/show within a movie in Once Upon are probably my favorite parts. I don't know that the time spent with Robbie pays off in the same way. That's not a knock on her at all, I just don't think it serves the overall interest of the movie as well as that other stuff. Yeah, I know. To be honest I haven't watched Django in such a long time that I don't really recall how I feel about its editing. I thiiiiiink I thought the ending dragged? I can't remember. Hateful 8 I've only seen once somehow, I should check that out again. Regardless it's a fine line for me personally and I don't think that "I'm right" or whatever when it comes to movie length and editing broadly. D2ne is long but never felt like it (aside from maybe one scene or two that feel less unnecessary now that we know there's a sequel coming for sure), I for the most part enjoy the extended LotR movies more than the original cuts, etc. And I don't think that Once Upon is long for the sake of being long, like Justice League or something. I get what QT is going for here, I just don't think it lands. Anyway I've been thinking about the end of this, and I don't know exactly how to feel. It's... weird to see women have the everliving shit beaten our of them and then burned to death. I dunno if this makes me a cuck or a snowflake or whatever, but it lands differently. Yeah it's the Manson family, fuck them and all that. I don't think QT shouldn't have gone there or anything, it's just a lot. I need to think about it more.

In my case specifically, I bought the house we're in now in 2019 and refi'd twice so my rate is <3%. I did a "traditional" 20% down, 30 year fixed. My house has appreciated in value by $250K+ since we bought it. I could afford it comfortably then, I couldn't really do that now between both increases. But I could still afford *a* home, for sure. But broadly, yes, I agree that the middle class is in trouble.

Is that a gun that shoots one steak knife? Why is he dressed like a biker Dracula? Why is he grinning? I have so many questions.

One of my favorite Nintendo rumors was the GameCube controller secret that people couldn't stop speculating about before launch. People went absolutely apeshit and it turned out to be the click at the end of the shoulder button press IIRC. Good stuff. Anyway why anyone would get genuinely excited about a Nintendo controller feature after HD rumble is beyond me.

Necro time! Finally saw this today. I think I really liked it? But I'm also worried that if / when I watch it again, I'll like the whole thing a lot less? The take that this is QT's go at directing stuff from various times that no longer are is obvious and he really succeeds in that regard. The performances are almost all great and the movie is never visually uninteresting. It's beautiful and for that alone it's worth watching and probably rewatching. But it's also indulgent to the point of pornographic in some respects as well. I know I'm the old man shaking his fist at clouds when it comes to movie length. Ironically I do enjoy long epics like Ben-Hur, The Ten Commandments, The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly, etc. But I feel like those luxuriate in their own spectacle. And while Once Upon does that in some respects there's still an awful lot of fluff here, too. Having a fictional Tate live and showing slice of life stuff with her is all well and good but there's just so much fucking padding. And as a director who's done his fair share of casting strong female leads, particularly in comparison to other male auteur contemporaries, it's a bit disappointing to see QT reduce Robbie to a generally quiet foot model while every other dude in the film gets to chew the shit out of every scene. Also not for nothing but it's fucking weird to have a movie come out in 2019 where one of the protagonists ascends into what is an obvious heavenly metaphor at the end... and it's Roman fucking Polanski's house. Just bananas. Anyway yeah, my thoughts are still half baked. But in general it's absolutely worth watching, parts of it are incredibly captivating. I just wish QT had a better editor.

I go back and forth on this. There are a lot of places where interest rates going as well as the cost of a home and it's very conceivable to me that people could be priced out of regions today that they weren't a few years ago. I'd agree that it's not super likely that someone went from being able to afford any house to not being able to afford any house. But if entire neighborhoods are out of bounds that weren't before it's more than just a distinction without a difference.

The Lion King is bad.

Better panel gaps than a Tesla honestly

Please stop making cars, we're dying

Again Seinfeld misses the point. Do I think JERRY SEINFEELD could do a joke about pulling homeless people in rickshaws on network television in 2024? YES ABSOLUTELY. Do I think he'd probably have to hear someone talk about whether or not it's okay to dunk on homeless people? Yeah, probably. But he could absolutely still do it and it's not like you need Seinfeld clout to pull it off. In the New Yorker article linked in that tweet he implies that Larry David is grandfathered in, and yeah he probably is. But the issues with saying things like "nobody can make X anymore" when X is almost always either Blazing Saddles or Tropic Thunder are that... those are exceptions. They wouldn't be the only examples people keep bringing up if there was some mythical era of "non-woke" comedies. And it also ignores that Tina Fey put people in blackface a BUNCH of times on 30 Rock pretty recently. So it always boils down to "nobody can do X anymore... other than those times I won't list where they definitely still happen" even if we're talking about exclusively network TV. And he almost certainly had to go through this bullshit back when he was making Seinfeld. Probably not a coincidence that nobody says the word "masturbate" during "The Bet." Probably not a coincidence that Elaine didn't come right out and say her sax playing boyfriend didn't eat her out. Was that PC culture run amok? I don't know, but probably not? Anyway these are all exercises in self snitchery. If you want to make jokes about homeless people on a network sitcom, go nuts. If you're not willing to do it because someone might give you a note about it, I dunno... maybe just shut the fuck up? EDIT - to be 100% clear, a couple of the times that someone was in blackface on 30 Rock were, charitably, commentary about blackface specifically. Still there was that one time where Jenna got done up in blackface to be Lynn Swann and Paul dressed as Natalie Portman from Black Swan so they could go to New Queer's Eve as "Two Black Swans." So... no commentary there, just Tina Fey thinking blackface is funny. And to take it away from network TV for a second, Jane Krakowski's entire character gag in Kimmy Schmidt is that she's actually Native American, she just looks white. Titus feels entitled to appropriate Japanese culture because he was a Geisha in a previous life. Maybe it's not actually wokeism, hmm.

His point is wrong and nobody winging in this thread would be proving him right even if he was correct.

Also maybe pick an example that’s more recent than 40 years ago Jesus Christ what a goober.

Even if he's talking about network television exclusively (he probably is) it's still a dumb fucking thing to say. All in the Family was initially passed on by ABC because they were wary of Archie Bunker being "a loveable bigot," The Mary Tyler Moore Show went through a bunch of drafts because of thoughts about the premise / material and its adjacency to Moore's turn on The Dick Van Dyke Show, is and was a feminist darling, and I dunno man including MASH on the list of sitcoms that people just kinda came home and watched that wasn't woke or whatever makes me think Seinfeld should be evaluated for a recent stroke. Also buddy, you're fucking Jerry Seinfeld. If this shit is that important to you fucking make a show? What network is going to turn him down? Even if he doesn't wanna do the work, be an EP on something? Seinfeld doesn't know hungry comics who "aren't PC" with a pitch for a sitcom? Eat my ass old man, get in a car with Louis CK and Chappelle then drive into the Hudson.

Maybe we were expecting too much from someone who thought it was a good idea to date a high schooler while he was in his late 30's. Who can say?

Link in BotW and TotK is probably more of his own character than he has been in any other Zelda game. Yeah there are response options so it's not like he has a "set" personality per se, but there's much more of a personality implied in a lot of your response options than there ever has been before. A low bar to be sure, but the notion that you can't rename him anymore and recovering his memories is a big part of the plot makes him less of an avatar to me. As for the list in the OP... Not having anyone from Planescape: Torment is fucking bananas. Cloud isn't even the most interesting character in his own game, so that's a choice Morrigan is probably the most interesting part of Dragon Age Origins and therefore the franchise, at this point, no beef there. Not a bad list per se, just an odd one.

Oh yea, I got you. His take on this isn't exactly new, but it still sucks. The broader issue with lamenting the lack of sitcoms is that comedy has never been more popular, it's just hyper targeted, algorithmically delivered, and provided constantly. It's not like a drama where a viewer generally needs longer storylines, decent acting, some kind of spectacle, etc., to be hooked. So i get that sitcoms are at the moment less popular than they have been in the past and as someone who created one of the all time best sitcoms, I can appreciate the perspective that the state of that medium kinda sucks at the moment. But to blame it on wokeism is just fucking stupid. It's disappointing that a generally intelligent and well informed person, someone who has certainly forgotten more about comedy / sitcoms than I will ever know, decides to open his mouth and just be glaringly wrong.

What a shock that an insanely rich septuagenarian has an absolutely shit opinion.

I actually played a GW game for the first time a few weeks ago and I have a Kill Team set from a few years back that I need to build and paint. I think GWs stranglehold on the hobby is annoying. But Louise is a delight.

White men have a normal reaction to Sydney Sweeney online challenge... difficulty: impossible

Only a little more left and there’s so many ways this could go. Still wild to me that the PT never really landed for me in a meaningful way and I think a lot of the worst indulgences of the franchise live in those movies (until Rise of Skywalker, at least), but The Clone Wars and The Bad Batch have ended up being so enjoyable. It’s also nice to see Filoni and the gang “learn” from some of the less good parts of The Clone Wars and to have a really solid, distilled show in The Bad Batch. I’m hoping for something that resembles a happy ending, or at least as much of one was would vibe with the series overall, but I’m not holding my breath. I suppose we’ll see. I should paint the squad up from Shatterpoint, the sculpts are quite good!