Bloodporne

9 minutes ago, Nokra said:

I wasn't intending to read more than just this one classic; I just realized that I had never read anything from Wilde before and wanted to rectify this since he's a classic. But after reading the description of that book on Wikipedia it does sound interesting. I'll add it to the list. Thank you! 

 

 

Like I said, it's a hefty chunk to read nowadays considering it was written in 1820. Imagine the absolute gulf of culture and writing norms between that and what we're used to now. In that sense, it takes some patience but the prose, story and atmosphere are fucking brilliant if you like Gothic atmosphere. 

One of my favorite books overall actually. Writing out the title alone makes me mentally jizz just a tiny bit already. 

PS: I also love Umberto Eco if you've never read him. The Name Of The Rose  and Foucault's Pendulum are great novels. Name... is like a Sherlock Holmes novel set in a medieval Italian monastery, who can resist this?

32 minutes ago, Nokra said:

What did you think? At this point I'm around 100 pages in and still enjoying it, though relatively little is happening.  Wilde certainly has a way with words. 

I personally love Wilde and appreciate his decadent rants. I've read the book several times since my teen years. 

Are you on a classic Gothicism type kick or just reading it in general? If you're interested in this general era, I'd highly, highly recommend Melmoth The Wanderer. It's a brilliant albeit challenging read. 

19 hours ago, Moa said:

This feels more like LOST than the "one long movie" format, at least the first few episodes do.  So far, each episode feels like it has a self-contained story that follows the perspective of one of the principal characters and slowly advances the overall narrative. Each episode has a fairly hard start and stop that plays into a larger arc.

 

As a general trend, I love the "one long movie" format for shows, but I hate that so many of them are hedging for a season 2. It is understandable from the business perspective, but I also feel like the practice undermined what is otherwise one of my favorite shows of all time. 

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Dark

 

That tangent aside, I also read the introduction to House of Leaves yesterday and am thoroughly enjoying scaring myself this October.

Actually, you're probably right about that thinking back on it with what you typed in mind. I feel like I have a bit of a skewed view on that possibly since I was sick that weekend and literally watched 8 episodes basically in a row in one day. 

I haven't seen Lost or Dark actually. I do fucking love Twin Peaks though!

Regarding the season 2 thing, I fully agree. Maybe a rare opinion but I thought Stranger Things' second season for example was completely unnecessary and I believe the overall 'world' would've been a more powerful experience without it. 

On 10/17/2018 at 10:50 AM, Nokra said:

I finally started on The Picture of Dorian Gray, @CastlevaniaNut18. I'm only about 30 pages in so far but enjoying it.

 

Interestingly enough, I just re-read it and came in here to post that. 

Had some trouble with my sweetheart's Pa 
One of her brothers was a bad outlaw 
I wrote a letter to my Uncle Spud And 
I rode away on the balls of a Tennessee Stud 
On the balls of a Tennessee Stud 
The Tennessee Stud's sack was long and lean 
The color of the sun and his cock was green 
He had the skin and he had the blood 
There never was a sack like on the Tennessee Stud

RIP Johnny

*See avatar for answer

1 hour ago, SFLUFAN said:

I make an exception to that for sex workers.

Stop talking shit about my mother. 

On 10/16/2018 at 5:53 AM, Bacon said:

@SFLUFAN Not a sphinx but ya kno

Shit, it's Michael Jackson including his nose situation had he lived a few years longer. Egypt being full of wise prophets confirmed.

I love semantics games like nobody being "forced" to work hard, yet you know that 100% you're passive aggressively back into a corner until you do it on "on your own accord". Give me a fucking break. Anyone with any work experience at all knows the drill. 

"I'm not saying you have to, but your coworker who has fifty mortgages, three kids in private school and ten cars and absolutely can't say no is doing it so it'll look really bad on your review if you don't do exactly as he does despite not having his manufactured problems." Have experienced this gem of peer pressure as well. 

In short: Lying, damage-controlling, pocket-stuffing president of a company is being a lying, damage-controlling, pocket-stuffing president of a company. Cool story, Houser. 

11 hours ago, Moa said:

Adult Luke is unreasonably handsome for the adult version of his child actor and also for a heroin addict.

 

Also, Episode 3 and 4 felt much stronger than the first two.

I think many of these 'limited' type of shows, if that's what this is and I assume so, are going more the way of a long-format film rather than traditional TV show format. Not to excuse the show if you're not being hooked of course, but I've been thinking this for some time with other shows and this one really felt like a long film to me. 

I started playing Final Doom PSX last night.

Also recently finished Castlevania III.

On 10/2/2018 at 10:19 AM, ManUtdRedDevils said:

Take that shit out and use it. It’s got to be better than Tomb Raider!

That's what she said!

Richard Matheson's Hell House is a great, albeit much more potboiler-ish, haunted house novel as well. Nowhere near the quality of Hill House but I still love it as there really aren't that many good haunted house stories out there despite it being such a seeming cliche. 

2 minutes ago, Jose said:

Might have just been me, but I thought the actor that played Steven was absolutely terrible. He was an important character too, so that was mildly disappointing.

I can see that but I also think his put-on, distant air happened to work really well for the character which was emotionally closed-off and trying hard to go for that stilted WASP-y life. His wife was similarly stiff.

1 minute ago, CastlevaniaNut18 said:

All I'm saying is if you read at all and you like the show, you should read the book, too. 

Well...I do have to agree 100% on that. Especially if you like Session 9.

I mean, I personally think that line "Whatever walked there, walked alone." alone is worth it. I've read the book about three times total since it's such a quick read and that line already chills me to the bone immediately. 

There definitely is not even a potential book vs. movie debate here in regards to Hill House though. The book is a classic and chilling to the bone, period. This show simply takes the main 'character', the house, and builds a completely new world, characters, story and everything on it. It treats the original material like a folk tale to be expanded upon and ran with much like Bates Motel did with Psycho. 

PS: That actress that plays Nell is fucking great. 

9 minutes ago, Emblazon said:

Where do I insinuate that "scary" is in any way related to cheap/jump scares? Go watch my favorite horror film, Session 9, then get back to me on that.

I like Session 9 a lot as well. Very overlooked little film. I kind of think Caruso sucks as well but I was able to overlook him here, it's quality stuff. 

1 minute ago, Emblazon said:

 

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You could even go so far as to say the house itself isn't evil. It grants those who die within its confines immortality. The mom feared for her children, and the house interpreted that as the best way to protect them was keeping them there forever. And while the house did end up tricking Nell in the end, it did everything it could to show her what her end would be with the Bent-Neck Lady, then it showed her everything she was missing and could have again back at the house--there was nothing sinister about Nell's send-off, and it was one of the most touching, and gut-wrenching scenes in the entire show.

 

Very much agreed and I actually really liked that ending. I've seen it brought up as a negative here and there in online conversation, but I thought it made total sense with the overall tone and family aspect. The idea of something being simply 'indifferent' to a human viewpoint always chills me a bit. 

24 minutes ago, SimpleG said:

Well you fucking sold me on it.

Definitely give it more than one episode. It's very character and dialogue heavy. This and its general pace and core themes made me write that Gothic Horror line. Superficially, it's quite modern of course despite the house itself being indeed featured rather heavily as well, but its core themes of a haunted family, constantly looming doom and so on are total Gothic Horror in lieu of what I would call Hollywood Horror.

The dread and pervasive feeling of tragedy feel tangible exactly because you spend so much time with each member of the family instead of even a single player in its story being relegated to a prop for jump scares. A very welcome chance of pace that I didn't expect at all to be honest. 

That being said, I hope you enjoy the show as much as I did. It's not perfect and has some lulls and so on but I felt the great and heartfelt really outweighed any negatives. 

Currently reading M Train by Patti Smith and Baudolino by Umberto Eco.

51 minutes ago, Emblazon said:

Meh. Horror novels just aren't scary (to me). Besides, the 1999 film The Haunting (which was meh) seems to be more based on the novel than this show. Don't expect much similarity to the book, aside from some names. 

It's just a great piece of literature honestly. I don't know how much of a reader you are in general but it, and many other great Horror novels, doesn't deal in simple scariness as defined by Hollywood films and so on. The house and story are more of a backdrop for a tragedy about mental illness, loneliness and psychological horror more so than it outright attempting to go boo and make you jump.

That and well, Jackson's prose is a thing of beauty. 

10 hours ago, CastlevaniaNut18 said:

How many of you have actually read the book?

I love Shirley Jackson and the book in question is one of my favorites of all time. That opening paragraph is fucking amazing.

That being said, this show is a tasteful spin-off kind of like what Bates Motel was to Psycho. I thoroughly, thoroughly liked it having finished it on Sunday. To be honest, it really affected me. 

Anyone expecting some pure popcorn Horror will probably be sorely disappointed. At its core, it's more of an epic tragedy about a family's seemingly never-ending personal nightmare. It's dialogue-heavy, takes its time and relies more on pervasive mounting dread and a feeling of doom rather than what most modern shock-a-minute style Horror deals in. It's certainly not a perfect show but any inconsistency or fault really didn't matter to me ultimately, the big picture here was shockingly good as far as I'm concerned. 

It's more Gothic Horror in the classic sense I would even say as many of the original Gothic Horror stories tended to revolve around families plunged into darkness in some capacity. The quality of the dialogue in this is really commendable and a lot of times made the show for me.

I think I might sink my teeth into REmake for the 10th time or something tonight.

16 hours ago, best3444 said:

 

Why upgrade to a pro then? I understand there is a lil performance boost but not having the resolution bump seems like a waste...imo of course.

I did the same and definitely think it was worth it considering you're getting a brand-new game worth $60 with a bundle, new hardware, new controller and so on. My PS4 was several years old at the time I did my trade for the GoW Pro bundle and I already know I'll eventually get a 4K TV so seeing how much I've liked this console so far, it seemed like a no-brainer to invest in 'the future'. 

I did that Gamestop trade-in deal. 

PS: Congrats @Emblazon, have fun with RDR2!

Hotline Miami?

How can anyone not like that game

Late to the party, sorry.

On a related note, I'll be 34 next month and don't have a 4K TV for my sikk God Of War PS4 Pro. Imagine how fucking disgustingly peasanty I feel every time I boot that thing up and don't get to see that 4K resolution. 

15 minutes ago, number305 said:

I see from your analogy that you misunderstand the working environment.  This isn't an unforeseeable accident like a car wreck.  People can get different jobs... they can move...they can change careers.  I would not work regular 100 hour weeks.  I would quit and do something else if that was a regular expectation of me.  If others choose to keep their jobs that is their choice.  

 

If any of you think this is really evil and we need to stop companies from exploiting workers like this - then you better not be playing this game.  Because you will be fully informed and knowingly supporting this work environment if you buy it.  So lets see some true action put to your words.  No RDR2 for you.

Ironically, my current work hours won't allow me to play a game of its size which is why I already chose not to purchase it.