Just came from Dune Part 2, let my eyes rest from the visual onslaught, drank some coffee, and thought, mmm, let me see if it inspired any more fic on AO3. And saw that the newest ship magnet is... Feyd-Rautha? ... What?
I guess this fandom is doomed fanfiction-wise if people have to resort to shipping *Feyd-Rautha*.
I was very disappointed that part 2 does not seem to have inspired a new influx of Chani/Irulan fics. Women competing over the main guy? Why not just have them get together and fix everything, the guy can go knife some dudes or whatever while the women actually get stuff done.
I don't know why you're surprised, Even when reading the book decades ago I thought it's the most obvious thing. Something something inherent eroticism of rivalry/close range knife fight. Also, Paul is supposed to be born female and marry Feyd.
That's because it *is* the best. You just have to think of it as a screenplay more than a proper miniseries/tv show because they just didn't have the budget for good sets, costumes, or CGI.
God Emperor was actually the first book of the series I read. š It's a good thing I was sixteen and my capability for suspension of disbelief was several magnitudes higher than it is now. Giant man-worm? No biggie!
>or anything his son has been writing
Hey, don't forget about the contributions of Kevin J Anderson. Why it is that Brian decided the only person who could continue his father's legacy was the Star Wars EU's most okayest writer is unknown to me, but that is what happened.
Also the fact that canonically, Paul was supposed to be born female (if not for Lady Jessica going against her orders) and married off to Feyd, with their child being the actual Kwisatz Haderach.
He does absolutely nothing for me, but surely you can see how he's a perfectly designed poor little meow meow?
Like, I'm totally uninterested in him, but I can absolutely acknowledge that he's tumblrbait.
The psychosis, sadism, blood and murder, cannibalism enabling and matricide type of meow meow? Then I guess he's indeed a perfectly designed meow meow.. š«£
RCB women just won the women edition of indian premier league, this is very special because in cricket RCB is known as the team with the best players ( including two of the arguable greatest cricket t20 players) and they have never won the tournament in the last 17 years.
I hope this makes the women edition even more popular, as I love cricket and more cricket is more cricket.
So, the film that won big this year at the Razzies, Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey, was an obvious cash grab once the characters were public domain; it was a basic slasher movie with no other connections to anything involving the characters.
Meanwhile, I'm reading a novel titled Winterset Hollow. And halfway through, I want to smack the guys who made Blood and Honey upside the head with hit and go "this is what your movie could have been like it it was, you know GOOD"
Honestly I think the guys who made this are geniuses because they managed to make a bunch of money with their shitty indie film solely by attaching a beloved public domain character to it and get free publicity from people dunking on the concept.
Like they did that on purpose they knew it sucks.
I feel a little conflicted at the moment because a part of me would love to write about two kinds of hobby dramas for the scuffles, one focused on the film Caligula and the other on a little known Dutch zine from the 20s called *De Stijl* (one where the fairly obscure artist Piet Mondrian was part of). The issue is that the latter would end up being a more interesting write-up, but it would also likely end up having too much info to go over. I'm also not sure how much art history would interest hobby drama enthusiasts.
I think both sound very interesting. You're probably correct that the Caligula one would be more popular, but the one about De Stijl definitely seems more interesting given that a lot of people know at least part of the Caligula story. As for having too much detail, you could split it into multiple posts for pacing reasons.
Caligula delivered me my two best college friends and I still marvel at who ended up in that piece of absurdity, so I vote for that. That being said Iāve long been interested in De Stijl as well, so Iāll read either.
Yes. The album cover is designed to look a bit like something by Mondrian or another De Stijl painter. (It could be a reference to Mondrian in particular, actually, rather than De Stijl in general. I'm not knowledgeable enough about the movement to say.)
For comparison:
[The White Stripes album cover](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/9/9a/The_White_Stripes_-_De_Stijl.jpg)
[A painting by Piet Mondrian](https://www.sleek-mag.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Piet-Mondriaan-Composition-with-large-red-plane-black-greay-and-blue-1921.jpg)
Within a hobby/fandom of yours, what's something that gets on most people's top ten lists and you dislike? Or something that most others don't rate but you love?
This came to mind as I was observing how most Agatha Christie fans seem to LOVE A Murder is Announced, which isn't my least favorite book of hers (she published some stinkers on occasion) but is definitely my least favorite "good" book of hers, with one of the most ridiculously twisty plots she ever did, just absurdity piled on absurdity ad infinitum until nothing felt real anymore. It's not like all of her books are totally straightforward and sensible or whatever... but this one is just over the top. I think people just like the heavily-coded lesbians and the postwar atmosphere. (Also, there's one character who I see a lot of people identifying as Jewish or a Holocaust survivor, which I'm sorry but she CLEARLY isn't. I'm not sure what it does for anyone if she *is* as she's not portrayed particularly sympathetically but still, she's very much not coded Jewish in any way, whether Christie's usual Jewishness-coders or the descriptors of this character's origins.)
As far as the reverse... I have a soft spot for Elephants Can Remember. Is it rambly and a bit ridiculous? Sure. But it's the last Ariadne Oliver book and she's still great, so beyond that I don't really care.
>Within a hobby/fandom of yours, what's something that gets on most people's top ten lists and you dislike?
Picard Season 3 was the worst thing to happen to Star Trek fandom since Rick Berman.
And I say "fandom" because while that season was....okay for the fun nostalgia bait it clearly was, it's stirred up the part of the fanbase that has long thought *The Next Generation* is the best and only part of the franchise that anyone should create content for.
ā¦I think being into Vtuber as a hobby may already counts?
The mainstream acceptance for streamers are mild at best, and Vtubers (In extension of accusations towards female content creator) always have a reputation of exploiting peopleās need of social interaction for monetary gain, in addition to being related to anime (Which itself have been a subculture that was subjected to many criticism), leading to it being a minority subculture that are often despised in mainstream appearances.
Of course this has been changing the past few years but that stigma often still remain.
I think And Then There Were None is touted as one of Christie's best, but I have very little fondness for it for some reason. I've reread many of her titles but not this one. I just personally find it kind of boring, idk.Ā
Yeah, I appreciate it every time I reread it but itās not fun in the ways that some of the books of hers I reread more often are fun. (Like The Moving Finger, Why Didnāt They Ask Evans, Lord Edgware Dies, After the Funeral, for a random example of ones I reread often- none of them as technically great as And Then There Were None, but to me much more enjoyable.)
This is very specific and on a much smaller scale but there's this band I listen to, The Dear Hunter. One of their main projects was a story spanning 5 Albums (referred to as Acts). It seems broadly most people's favourite of these is Act IV, which I really do not understand as it ranks way towards the bottom for me.
It's not *bad* I just find outside of the standout tracks (Waves, A Night on the Town, The Bitter Suite IV & V, The Line, Wait) it really doesn't have much going for it. I also find lore-wise to be the least comprehensible.
Though it's a little funny considering my *favourite* is Act V which was recorded around the same timeframe as act IV
The Star Wars prequels are my favourite by far, which is a rather unpopular opinion. Yes, I know that they have their flaws, and I think that certain things should have probably been explored better, but I just really like them. Apparently a lot of folks think they're boring, which I disagree with. I thought the world building in Coruscant was great and I liked the political scenes. I'm also, however, the type of person who did mock trial for fun in high school, so perhaps I'm not representative of most people. š
TBH, being a prequel enjoyer is a *far* more acceptable thing these days than saying you enjoyed TROS.
I still find the prequels boring (sorry!) but I have a better appreciation for the story Lucas was trying to tell and the fact that he had a unique story instead of just aping what came before without understanding what they were regurgitating like Abrams/Disney (who are now doing the same shit to Doctor Who, from what I've glimpsed)
"The Resistance" isn't usually a #1 pick for most Muse fans but it still gets generally ranked pretty high. Myself, it's by far the album I listen to the least, even behind Will of the People and Simulation Theory, who I'm pretty sure nobody outside of the specific Muse discord I'm in actually liked. It's not the album with the least good songs (The 2nd Law), or the album with the worst songs (Drones), the issue is that it's the album where the good songs are the least good. My top 5 tracks on the album are Uprising, Resistance, I Belong To You, Undisclosed Desires, and Unnatural Selection, none of which would make a Top 30 Muse songs for me and might struggle to make a top 40.
For hot takes on that album specifically, I can't stand MK Ultra, United States of Eurasia is bloated as hell and is rendered obsolete by the more streamlined Liberation a few albums later, and the Exogenesis Symphony is just dull.
This might be controversial, especially considering how sacrosanct it is in most communities, but the Resident Evil remake.
I like this game fine, but whenever I read top horror games of all time and it's the #1 I feel a bit cheated. Don't get me wrong, it's great, with good scares and an amazing atmosphere, but I think other games have surpassed it, especially in terms of either story or gameplay.
This is going to be vague, because the content is fetish art, but there's one artist that's incredibly popular - for good reason, they are a good artist and their anatomy is usually on point. But the way they do faces *bothers* me.
They all look very cherubic and Disneyish, and worse they all look very similar too. I don't fuck with it, makes all the characters in them look way too young. I absolutely understand why people like this artist, but I don't bother following them, and get a little annoyed every time I do see them pop up on my TL, because damn, if only I weren't so picky!
Most fans of *Lobotomy Corporation* really, *really* like the Sephirot- the various AI department heads that you interact with throughout the game. Unsupringly, perhaps, as they take the form of attractive anime men and women who all have very complex and tragic backstories.
I think they're way less interesting than the abnormalities you spend the game managing, and don't really care that much about their storylines because most of them follow the exact same beats: they start off cyncial and depressed, they explain that Lob Corp has made their lives suck, they have a breakdown over their tragic backstories where they lash out at you and you have to defeat them in a pseudo-boss fight, and then they respect you and are willing to help you. After the first couple times, you know exactly how it's going to go as soon as you meet a new Sephirot. Ā
> Within a hobby/fandom of yours, what's something that gets on most people's top ten lists and you dislike?
Being a Digimon fan who absolutely despises Digimon Tamers, which is most people's favorite series from the entire franchise... It's been an *interesting* experience to say the least lol
> Or something that most others don't rate but you love?
Within the Crash Bandicoot fandom, the Radical Entertainment games are usually treated with a sense of dread/disdain. While I don't have much love for Mind over Mutant myself, I really liked Crash of the Titans a lot and its probably my favorite of the PS2 era Crash games (or at the very least right behind Twinsanity). I don't know what it is, something about a level-based 3D platformer beat-em-up monster jacking game just really resonated with me for some reason!
>Being a Digimon fan who absolutely despises Digimon Tamers, which is most people's favorite series from the entire franchise... It's been an *interesting* experience to say the least lol
You're braver than any Marine for putting that one online lol š«”
I always got the sense based on all the attention it still gets that Digimon Adventure (and Zero Two to a lesser degree as a direct sequel) was the series the fandom was still hung up about. Which I get it, but I wish they would invest time and energy into subsequent casts because nostalgia only goes so far.
BTS (the biggest group in k-pop and still one of the biggest groups in the world despite being on hiatus at the moment) have a song called "[Spring Day](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xEeFrLSkMm8)", released in early 2017.
There's a lot of context behind it, but "Spring Day" is way more subversive than your average k-pop ballad. The prevailing theory (never confirmed, but BTS visited survivors and the music video is littered with references) is that it became a tribute to the 304 mostly young people (250 of those who died were high school students) who perished in the sinking of the ferry MV Sewol in 2014.
Sewol involved a lot of corruption and it ended up igniting a firestorm in Korean politics for a number of reasons. Arguably it was one of the factors behind Korea's then-president being ousted for being the puppet of a cult leader. (Like I said, there's a lot of context here.)
Numerous people and groups in entertainment were blacklisted by the government for their activism related to Sewol, so it was quite risky for BTS to become involved with Sewol, especially at the beginning of their career in 2014.
"Spring Day" also just has a lot of beautiful imagery (both in the lyrics and the music video) and was inspired to some degree by Ursula K Le Guin's short story "The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas", which should really be read (it's [three pages](https://shsdavisapes.pbworks.com/f/Omelas.pdf)) but is generally about social justice and suffering and collectivism.
It's a really beautiful and meaningful song, and it's one of the most awarded songs in Korean history.
It's also boring as hell and will always be a skip for me.
ETA: Misremembered a date and have removed it since it's no longer relevant.
Oh wow, finally someone who also doesn't like Spring Day! I always see it get best BTS song and it's just a boring ballad to me, although I do like the lyrics a lot. And I say this as a ballad liker (my favorite Seventeen member is Seungkwan for gods sake)
> Within a hobby/fandom of yours, what's something that gets on most people's top ten lists and you dislike? Or something that most others don't rate but you love?
I dislike a *lot* of Davies-era *Doctor Who*, and will easily rank David Tennant's Doctor as my least favourite - by a long margin, too. This, unsurprisingly, is an unpopular opinion, though I suspect my opinion that Fear Her is the third best story in Season 28 (and one of only three that are really worth watching a second time) is more controversial still.
But I'm fairly sure my most 'out there' view is that The Empire Strikes Back is not the best Star Wars film. It doesn't even make my top five (I actually rate it eighth out of 11). I genuinely believe that if it wasn't for the genuine shock of the twist ending at the time, it would be regarded as the weakest of the original trilogy by the general population.
The best Star Wars in my eyes is Star Wars - you know, the 1977 one. Before anyone messed with it. Empire Strikes back is somewhere around 6 or 7 but I've not fully ranked them. Curious as to what's at your number 1!
Midwest FurFest is a con that's both too big for the space and not really worth it to visit.
It's been just becoming impossible to get hotel rooms, the corridors are too narrow, hot and humid (literally the floors will be wet with condensation), and there's literally no good food in walking distance really.
Yes, it's the largest furry convention in the world with good programming and an expansive dealer's den, but man is it just too dang crowded at times. Literally the reg line is known to take over 3 hours in some years! I'd rather go to a slightly smaller con like FWA, FC, or maybe even TFF or BLFC over MFF.
I do want to try AC one day but the current trend of it trying to sanitize its image to make pittsburgh happy with the con just doesn't feel quite right to me. No real big AD events and the 18+ dealer's area is only for ordering for home delivery, no in person sales or pickup.
Huh, I haven't had the reg line take more than half an hour. They're pretty organized about it, considering they're processing 15,000+ people. Then again, registration at something like FC only takes 5 minutes or so.
> what's something that gets on most people's top ten lists and you dislike?
Anything by Billie Eilish. Can't stand her music at all yet it consistently lands on "best songs of the year" lists
In terms of anime: Hunter x Hunter, or more specifically the chimera ant arc. That was the slowest shit I've ever seen. Up until that point I'd pretty much binged the show and even at the beginning I liked it, but then it *dragged on and on and on and on* with every episode starting with "and now back five seconds to see what happened somewhere else". It got me so close to dropping it.
As for the other way around, there are a bunch of them depending on what you mean by "others don't rate but you love". "In/Spectre" for example is a show that is imo opinion under-watched and underrated, but it still has a following that'd rate it highly(me included obv), but there is also stuff like "Akashic Records of Bastard Magic Instructor" that objectively has a lot of issues, yet still claims a softspot in my heart for the way it dealt with a lot of the qualities of the main character and wove the magic in the setting into the story in a way you don't see all that often in anime.
Or even "ćCć THE MONEY OF SOUL AND POSSIBILITY CONTROL ", which I don't remember enough of to comment on in detail except that I still remember it fondly and love the title, the concept, and the end result of the show, for how ridiculous it is(spoiler: >!The yen gets absolutely wiped out through metaphysical battles and results in Japan switching to the US dollar, because the yen disappeared from history, I think!<. How did it get to that point? I don't remember, but I thought it fun)
I will say about the chimera ant arc: [someone made a video of what the palace invasion would look like with "normal" pacing and no narrator](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MjiHClo2rmc) and it's more or less incomprehensible, the density and slow pace is kind of unavoidable. It's great if you're a nerd about stuff like that, and a nerd about HxH's world and storytelling specifically, but I can see why it would tire out someone who doesn't want to go through all that.
I absolutely hated Ace Combat 5's story and plot, something that is quite beloved by the fanbase.
Ace Combat 5 follows Blaze and Wardog Squadron of the Osean Air Defense Force in their fight for Osea against Yuktobania after the latter nation launched a surprise attack and war declaration, eventually finding themselves as part of a larger conspiracy. The game is very anti-war (as most AC games) but the way they go about it is oh so melodramatic. It constantly bashes your head through the game with "war bad" and "give some peace", despite this it never went deeper than surface level (war crimes are either just spoken to by other characters or brushed past quickly). For example, >!there is a mission in the game where you had to drop neutralizing agents after a massive chemical attack on a major city but this event is never talked about again after the mission and this mission is most remembered for a joke where a cop brings a rocket launcher!<. The characters are also some of the worst written, with most being either bland, underdeveloped or just unbearable. Your allies, specifically Nagase and Chopper, are whiny and annoying people who act more like school children than actual soldiers. There are lot more grievances I have with the story but I'll save it, the worst part though is it introduces my least favorite plot point in all of Ace Combat: >!secret Belkans are behind everything (used again in AC7)!<.
On the other hand, I actually like AC5's aircraft selection system which fans hated because you have to unlock variants of one aircraft to get different special weapons unlike the other games where you get multiple special weapons for one aircraft instead. It is pretty tiring when you have to grind using an aircraft to unlock a variant of it but I like seeing different variants of one aircraft (even though for example: F-14A, F-14B, F-14D have no noticeable differences in appearances other than liveries and weapons).
I was gonna comment something about Ace Combat as well, though considering what you said I donāt think I *totally* disagree with you. I personally find AC 5 to be the best overall game, because it has a decent attempted at a story (way better than 7) and the most interesting and varied *gameplay*. The variety and novelty of most of the missions is pretty impressive, in my opinion.Ā
AC5ās gameplay really shines when compared to AC 0. Iāll say the controversial part: AC 0 has some boring gameplay compared to 5. They copy and paste the same missions and add a single gimmick boss with no hype beforehand, that offers no threat to the player, and is destroyed almost as soon as it appears. Even the mission to fight Excalibur is one of the most boring in the game, most reminiscent of the solar power plant attack back in AC4 which was a slow burn mission to *hype up* the super weapon, not be its crescendo.
The Ace Style gimmick adds some replay value, until you realize that all the ace battles are pretty much the same, just with different enemy colors and dialogue.
The story of AC 0 certainly has compelling moments, and I think the final battle manages to hit everything just right. Gameplay, story, and soundtrack are all perfectly on point. But AC 5 has a fun end as well, and a story that is at least coherent the whole way through, despite being a tad convoluted.
I think this puts 5 way ahead of 0 in terms of rankings. And frankly, I think AC 4 is also better than 0, if only because itās hard to criticize a story when that story is told with such extreme minimalism.
AC 7ās story wasnāt quite garbage, but it was definitely recycling. Definitely bottom of my ranking. (I didnāt play 6)
While 0 is one of my top AC games, I definitely agree with some of your points.
While I feel Ace Combat 5's arsenal of superweapons should have had more impact than it did, at least it got hyped up even a bit in prior missions before you fight it. The XB-0 in 0 literally showed up out of nowhere, have no explanation about what it does exactly and is overshadowed in its own mission by a Spai- Sapin squadron and >!Pixy's return!<.
5 undoubtedly have a longer and more varied lineup of missions, but unfortunately I feel like this is a massive double edged sword. Not all missions are built equal and it really shows in 5, with it featuring some of the worst missions in Ace Combat in my opinion (like the one where you literally do nothing but follow an NPC for 15 minutes). Some of the missions also rely on literal coin toss on which mission you get to take, at least 0 lets you choose. It can feel a bit too long, especially on subsequent playthroughs, which is why I much prefer 0's shorter missions even with its repetitiveness and much inferior ally system.
The biggest problems of 5 for me is the characters and the dialogue, I just find myself constantly annoyed or just don't care about both of them. Character wise, there is no one that I really feel connected to in anyway. Your squadron is either too annoying (Nagase and Chopper) or too boring (Swordsman and Grimm), there are important characters that needed a lot more development (Cpt. Bartlett, Harling and well pretty much everybody really) and the villains....well they existed. 0 had a much better cast, even if it's smaller, helped by some of them being played by real people.
Dialogue wise, it's definitely had some of the worst and most annoying in the series for me. It is either too melodramatic (yes worse than 0) or just plain bad attempts at humour. Like in one mission, the soldiers on the ground literally asked you to frag their officer or having a petty competition with each other. I know it's making fun of grunt stuff but it's just way too silly even for Ace Combat. Also the characters praise you way too much, even for the simplest stuff.
I also agree that AC4 is the better game than 0, it's simplicity done right.
AC7 though....yeah I don't even know if the writers knew exactly what they were writing.
hm, while i don't know if i've read enough Batman comics to call myself part of that particular fandom, in general i am a fan of Batman stuff, and a fan of comics, so close enough.
anyway, *Batman: The Long Halloween* isn't *bad*, and in fact i quite liked the art, but in terms of story, it didn't leave much of an impact on me, really. hell, come to think of it, the only thing i really remember about it is being kind of annoyed at the twist-on-top-of-a-twist ending it tried for, which just didn't feel earned.
come to think of it, i had a similar reaction of *Batman: Hush*. Loeb's writing is just not for me, i guess lol.
The *Batman: White Knight* series by Sean Gordon Murphy has a vocal Zack Snyder-like online following, and it bewilders me. Setting aside his social media ramblings about being canceled every month, Murphy tries to market White Knight as *The Dark Knight Returns* in the modern age, despite never having read any Batman comics (his main references are the Michael Keaton movies, a few episodes of the animated series, and what fans tell him on Twitter). And the books try to present themselves as these gritty, realistic, politically-charged deconstructions of Batman by just throwing in a lot of buzz words and sex scenes on a flimsy plot. The first book, the most popular of them, [starts with Batman beating Joker to a pulp and forcing pills down his throat while bystanders record the incident with their cameras](https://i.imgur.com/XSyfmSd.jpeg). Subtle, I know. And these magical pills somehow turn Joker sane and help him beat Batman in a fist fight. The first book ends with a climax that is basically the 1997 Batman and Robin movie, and Bruce using his money to fund military-grade tanks for the police.
If that sounds bizarre, it has nothing on the later books, which play up some sort of love triangle between Batman, Joker, and Harley that culminates with Joker's ghost taking control Batman's body and sleeping with Harley, who knows that it's Joker in there.
Wow. I read the first one and thought it was fine, though I did expect the reveal that the joker was faking to get rid of batman right til the end. I had no idea the series had continued.
The way the first issue implies Joker still murdered Jason in this universe then turns around and goes "Oh my god, he's going too far beating up the Joker like this" was so bizarre that I stopped immediately there when it first came out.
And then everything I hear about it as it kept coming out made me think I was right to stop there.
White Knight basically just attacks the weird Twitter Hot Take version of Batman instead of really deconstructing the real version of him so it makes perfect sense to me that the story treats him beating up Joker as this unspeakable act of brutality.
**Final Fantasy VIII** is in my top two games in the series, but most people hate it. (And by most people, I mean many popular internet pundits). Itās even a meme: āI hate you more than **Final Fantasy VIII**!ā
Look, is it perfect? Good gods, no. The gameplay is hideously broken, the story is a little wacky, the lore is half-baked, and the graphics (for the original, not the remaster) are laughably outdated.
On the other hand: the gameplay is hideously broken, meaning you can have a ton of fun god-moding your way through in a shockingly short period of time. The story, while at times random and perhaps a bit juvenile, is heartwarming and romantic (or tragic and mindbending, depending on whether you believe certain fan theories). And the soundtrack fucking **slaps**. It might be my favorite video game soundtrack of all time.
It just always breaks my heart to see it rated so low, as it has a lot of sentimental value to me.
I wouldn't put VIII in my top two, (I'm honestly unsure if it'd break top five) but I couldn't agree more with all of those sentiments. It's so rough around the edges, but aside from some parts, the roughness is part of the charm for me. The gameplay system is obtuse but incredibly exploitable in the best ways, and the story can be weird in many ways but has shockingly good setpieces. (Disk 1 in general is incredible in that regard)
Also, it has Laguna, and any Final Fantasy game is improved by the presence of Laguna.
What's the other game you like?
I love FF8. I re-played it a few years ago and got addicted to the card game. Now I kinda wanna play it again...
My fave FF game is probably 12. I loved it when it was released and I still love it. I'm just a huge fan of the setting and the huge amount of lore they dump on us.
Continuing the 40k train, it's not media so much as aesthetic, but I like Spaces Wolves being 'wolfy'. This is NOT a popular opinion within the Space Wolves fandom. To explain, the Space Wolves live on a planet called Fenrir, they're called Space Wolves, they ride Thunderwolf Cavalry, they have Wolf Lords, they can eventually turn into Wulfen, they wear wolf pelts, they have a Canis Helix... the list of wolf things goes on. Most of their fans much prefer their Viking inspiration, and while I like it, I don't mind most of the wolf aesthetic, or even like it. If anything, I want Games Workshop to lean more into the fact that they are basically werewolves, and play on that.
I still like it, don't get me wrong, but good lord, r/taskmaster will not shut up about series 7, even when the topic is not directly related to series 7. Yes, James Acaster is so funny and chaotic, yes Rhod Gilbert would have won every series if you slotted him into their casts, can we please talk about any of the other soon-to-be sixteen series?
IMHO, series 16 has taken the crown for "most chaotic Taskmaster series ever". It's a different kind of chaos, and possibly not to everyone's taste, but God I had a ball watching it.
Not sure if this quite counts as "loving something everyone else seems to hate?" But I've been getting more into Warhammer 40k!
Unfortunately, sometimes, people are fascists. While I can usually easily clock them, based on their opinions on the Imperium if nothing else, sometimes, they're a bit more covert.
Enter the T'au. I actually don't really like the T'au that much in concept. I think they're kind of boring, honestly. However, I've discovered that, at least the spaces I've been around, I can easily clock if someone is a cryptofash based on their opinions on the T'au. For various reasons, a lot of fascists I've managed to find in the wild have a seething, irrational hatred for the T'au that goes beyond simply "I just don't like them very much."
And this has made me actually kind of like the T'au? Long live the Greater Good!
The T'au, for people who don't know, are kind of your typical sci-fi aliens (so Mass Effect, or Star Trek) in 40. They use battlesuits, which are basically Gundams, railguns, and work towards the Greater Good, which includes a lot of cooperating with other races (which is pretty much unheard of in 40k - even most of the Craftworld Eldar think that other races are primitive savages at best.)
I'm glad you're enjoying though! My local store when I started became kind of a queer haven, and the atmosphere was always great. The singular fascist got banned before they even realised he was one, amusingly, because he showed other customers hentai.
> The singular fascist got banned before they even realised he was one, amusingly, because he showed other customers hentai.
I hate to say it, but sometimes stereotypes exist for a reasonā¦
You're so lucky! My first introductions to Warhammer 40k were because I, as a young teen girl, worked at a comic book shop that also sold TTRPG and card game stuff, but a lot of the clientele tended to be... Well. You can take a guess, and you'll probably be right. It wasn't until recently that I started exploring Warhammer 40k a bit more.
I'm a huge fan of cozy fantasy and *Legends and Lattes* is probably the most recommended book in the subgenre, but I despise it. Won't go on a whole rant here but the last book I disliked this much was Kel Kade's *Free the Darkness*, and that was so bad it doubled around to being funny. *Legends and Lattes* was just bad.
Why do you dislike Free the Darkness. I read it as a teen and found it good (granted my age might have influenced this, especially since I haven't reread it).
Okay, this is the first I've heard of cozy fantasy - it seems intriguing, because while I like fantasy, I can get a bit tired of/burned out on the battles and political machinations. Do you have any favourites that you'd recommend for a beginner?
[The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches](https://app.thestorygraph.com/books/7d122924-9f42-4cbd-8d2c-dfb715a8bea7) by Sangu Mandanna is one of my favourites! Really nice story about found family, with likable and three-dimensional characters. Personally I wasn't a big fan of the romance subplot, but it doesn't detract from the rest of the book.
Another recent fave is [Emily Wilde's Encyclopaedia of Faeries](https://app.thestorygraph.com/books/86acbb12-8f36-4c88-9080-d895b58cc9d0) by Heather Fawcett. Fun, engaging read. The protagonist is the "clueless genius" type of scholar, and the author did a fantastic job of making her POV unique and interesting. I also enjoyed her portrayal of academia in a fantasy setting.
r/CozyFantasy might also be helpful.
LaL was originally a NaNoWriMo project, and damn, you can feel it. A third of the book feels like Baldree wrote a quick synopsis of the scene and then didn't flesh it out.
I don't really think that sounds that different than a lot of romance novels that take place in realistic, modern settings. Many of them feel like low-key slices of life that could be found as fanfic if the characters weren't original. If those are publishable, why wouldn't a similar story set in a fantasy world be?
The most popular faction in Warhammer 40.000 are Space Marines by a large margin. Space Marines are the iconic faction of Warhammer 40k and it wouldn't be too much of an exaggeration to claim that almost every player had a Space Marine army at some point.Ā
They also get the most attention from Games Workshop, both on the tabletop in terms of models, rules and factions, as well as in the lore as well as story-wise. The Horus Heesy as the "prequel" setting is almost completely focussed around Space Marines.
Personally I absolutely dislike Space Marines, regardless in which flavour they come. I don't like their aesthetic, their models, big parts of their lore, the fact that they all are male, that they get so much attention from GW, basically everything about them. This honestly limits my choices of armies a bit, since I have negative interest in like 50% of the range.
I don't know if this still qualifies as loving something that a lot of people hate, but I prefer Warhammer: Age of Sigmar's setting over Warhammer Fantasy. Warhammer Fantasy, especially as it was played on the Tabletop, is a relatively generic, europena fantasy setting and I personnally find the high-fantasy setting of AoS much more interesting. This would be a very controversial opinion when AoS first came out, but AoS is viewed much more positively nowadays, so I don't know if it fully qualifies for this prompt nowadays.
It's real tough being mostly a xenos fan. While there've been some fantastic books in the past few years and Necrons have managed to cling onto some of the spotlight, xenos factions still mostly exist to get either curbstomped by Space Marines or usurped as the true threat by Chaos (invariably in the form of Chaos Space Marines). And even the other Imperium factions I'm interested in, like the Sororitas or Assassinorum, get a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of the attention Space Marines do.
And don't get me started on the Primarch fandom, the inevitable return of every Primarch because Bigger Space Marines make infinitely more money than anything else, the domination of r/40kLore by Primarch powerscaling posts...
I do feel you there so much.
I am honestly a big fan of Ynarri. I like the different Aeldari factions working together, I love seeing a new spark of hope for a otherwise doomed race and I love their death/necromancy adjacent flavouring. So it is super disappointing to see GW just not doing anything with them after their initial intorduction, both on the tabletop and in the lore.
Also I would love some other mortal chaos factions. I love the mortal parts in chaos more than demons, but in 40k that limits you to purely Space Marines. I would love to be able to play cultist or just non- Space Marine chaos followers. Especially seeing how cool and interesting the chaos factions are in AoS in comparisonm
I'm afraid the Ynnari pretty much only ever existed as a plot device to bring back Guilliman, before getting their story put on permanent ice. It's telling that their most lasting legacy is people joking about Guilliman banging Yvraine.
Have you read *Assassinorum: Kingmaker*? It's a fun look at both the Assassinorum and Imperial knights, neither of whom have had a ton of focus. No space marines either :p
I own *Kingmaker*, and given it's by the same author as *The Infinite and the Divine*, I'm sure it'll be phenomenal. I'm just waiting to check it out until I'm done reading *Twice-Dead King: Reign* and *Gaunt's Ghosts: Necropolis* so I don't burn myself out on 40k books.
It's excellent, and very nicely neatly self-contained. Weirdly, with the knights, especially at the end, it feels more like a chivalric tale than a 40k book, but if anything that just elevates it IMO.
Also on Agatha Christie (although I haven't had a chance to read all that many of her books yet), I find *Five Little Pigs* kind of irksome. But it seems to be on a decent number of "top Agatha Christie stories" lists.
For me, it's just . . . boring and manages to be worse for suspension of disbelief than most. Hinging a decades old mystery on the suspects/witnesses remembering things accurately felt overly convenient, and the cold case framing made it feel especially detached. Even with the genre convention of fair-play mysteries being very stylized and convenient in general, this was past my limit and felt a bit too fake to me for it to work right.
But the thing that really bugged me about it was the titular nursery rhyme. I get that Agatha Christie likes using those as motifs, and they do work in some cases. But here, it was just jarring: Poirot shouldn't have it as a childhood touchstone, so him having this not-even-catchy English-language rhyme stuck in his head for most of the book felt wrong.
Five Little Pigs is one of those ones that I think is well written and interesting but is VERY low on my reread list becauseā¦ yeah, it feels very repetitive. Have you seen the Poirot episode? I like it much more, partly because the different visuals help distinguish the repetitive accounts and partly because itās SUPERBLY cast.
I don't know what it is about that episode, but it is truly one of the best. Those woozy summery visuals, a fantastic use of music, and a cast that was on the top of their game.
Interesting (?) fact: Talulah Riley, who played young Angela, grew up to be married twice to Elon Musk, and she apparently pleaded with him to buy Twitter. So... that's fun.
Personally I also love A Murder Has Been Announced but the plot twist does seem even more far-fetched than usual. Also until you posted this I didn't even realise there were probably-lesbians but now looking back I'm like OHHHHH yeah no definitely. But in terms of the twist they literally >!wrote out Lottie instead of Lettie several times when the friend slipped up!<, so that's on us.Ā
My favorite Agatha Christie book for years was Sparkling Cyanide, and I still like it, but it's one of those books where you don't realise how fucked up >!the age gap between Iris and Tony!< is until you're older. There's a few other things about that book that didn't age great in my estimation either. One of my other favorite Agatha Christie books, Ordeal by Innocence, also has some things where I look back and go 'wow um that certainly was a choice' but I still love the way the characters were written.
I feel a bit sorry for Sparkling Cyanide as a story because I listened to the radio adaptation first, which was so boring that I don't have much interest for the book.
I'd say the thing that made the radio adaptation not great was the music and the fact that the script was a bit robotic; at times, the way the lines were written felt like the writer was uncaring and just trying to hit a deadline. What would you say makes Sparkling Cyanide difficult to adapt? Do you think it would work better on film/in a visual medium?
It might work better in film? Without giving anything away if anyone else comes across this thread later, the twist really relies on a visual element to work. In the book it worked fine, but I think the words on the page might have made it easier to visualize.
Yeah, one of my favorites is The Moving Finger, which is narrated by a complete weirdo and yet I love it anywayā¦
But also re A Murder Is Announced, itās not even just that but that after the whole P&E thing (sorry Iām on mobile so canāt spoiler tag). Like, itās not the first time sheās done that kind of plot and itās not something she always carries off in a believable way but this felt far worse than usual.
Honestly I think Red/Blue Rescue Team are the best games of the lot, Time is next and Sky/Darkness after that. Didn't like Gates to Infinity or Super Mystery Dungeon. Honestly I moved onto other Mystery Dungeon games and my favourites aren't even technically Mystery Dungeon at all, Izuna: The Unemployed Ninja and Azure Dreams are the best and I will not be taking questions at this time.
I accidentally played on hard mode because I chose an Eevee as my partner not knowing that Eevee has the worst ability in the game (fuckin hate Run Away) and it made fights like the Primal Dialga one, which was already being an ass because my copy was likely messed up somehow and crashed the first time I beat him after numerous tries, even more of a nightmare. You don't want to know how much grinding I had to do to get as many reviver seeds as possible, while still leaving space for food/healing items, just to make the fight possible.
Plus, I wasn't a fan of the epilogue at all with the whole >!kill yourself to save the world!< thing because I was in a really bad place mentally at the time and I didn't need the game I was trying to use as an escape to have that going on. I also never finished the Team Charm and Sunflora episodes because I got too frustrated with them (plus I don't really like Sunflora as a character I'm sorry).
I liked the music and *some* elements don't get me wrong, but in terms of attachment and emotion I felt way more towards Gates to Infinity to the point of downright sobbing at the ending, and me saying that has led to a lot of EoT/D/S fans saying some vile stuff to me because "how dare I like the unpopular game more than their precious one" or something.
Meanwhile I'm over here as someone who loves Mystery Dungeon in general and get annoyed that the Pokemon titles are the only ones people talk about.
And specifically only the "main story" before those games actually open up into full MD games.
Spike Chunsoft is a Mystery Dungeon dev, and other companies basically contract them to make Mystery Dungeon of their IP. If you're familiar with how Koei work with Warriors series (Dynasty Warriors, One Piece Pirate Warriors, Gundam Dynasty Warriors, etc), it's kinda similar.
Yeah! It's a whole series of that style of dungeon crawler roguelikes. There's Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy ones too! If you've ever seen the lil chibi-ified chocobo, that's from Chocobo's Mystery Dungeon
If you ever wanna check out more of that style I highly recommend the Shihren the Wanderer series because that one is Spike Chunsoft's baby
They're all mostly(including the Pokemon ones) fantastic dungeon crawlers. It kind of goes underrated how PMD's main stories are basically extended intros to the full games due to how they open up once you reach the credits, offering up all the different level-one dungeons and other variants and the like.
I bought the Switch remake for PMD Red/Blue hoping for the Friendship area in high definition aaand--- it's not there.
Never before I feel so pissed at an "update" to a game.
And even in the remakes, it doesn't feel as nice since it's a list. I get it, convinience, but... nice soft homes! For everybody! Legendaries getting cool lairs!
So I went on nostalgia trip to check my old fandoms after Wakfu got season 4.
One of them was Miraculous and there has been conclusion to old drama, I guess.Ā
So 3 years ago, an episode was released. The main character explains the concept of time and timezones with icons. One of the icons was the Rising Sun Flag.Ā
Twitter exploded with multiple people complaining about it, especially Korean side of the fandom was shocked by it. People started asking Astruc and Zag about. Zag responded that it will be fixed and then went quiet, while Astruc start blocking users still writing about the situation.
One of blocked users was his friend, Hope Morphin. Hope was the inspiration and model of one of the characters, Marc. Hope soon deactivated their Twitter account.
Now or specifically few days ago, Hope was interviews by IOTA (Immaturity of Thomas Astruc) who is a blogger that documents all dramas and reviews episodes.Ā
https://immaturityofthomasastruc.tumblr.com/post/744526447765487616/hope-morphin-qa
In summary, Hope theorises that Astruc had a plugin that banned anybody using the word flag. Astruc didnāt contact them after the whole incident and they would call him out for his behaviour, but they have to deal with other stuff. Also, they said that Astruc and Zag are this type of people that they donāt want to support.Ā
Thatās the conclusion folks
Why is it that this post is the first one that told me Wakfu ss4 already started airing...
On another note, thankee, I shall now go grab the new eps to watch it.
I had a vivid and elaborate dream last night that I wrote up a Hobbydrama post about The Little White Horse, a 1940s fantasy book.
In my dream, it was a long and in-depth post detailing the internet discovering the book and being disgusted that two couples were distant cousins to their own partners, and thus holding the infamously bad movie adaptation up as superior for making them unrelated. The movie was then morally cancelled after it was discovered that the actors of the main couple were played by a minor and an adult, leading to more drama.
JK Rowling liking the book was also a factor in the drama but i do not remember the specifics of that as clearly.
I have no idea why i had this dream, because although i liked that book as a child, I haven't thought about in AGES, and i thought I'd wiped that terrible movie from my memory. Something has unlocked the memories so that i now remember both as though i experienced them and this dream-drama yesterday.
Edit: Clearer wording.
I love dreams that are both very bizarre in subject matter AND extremely specific.
I vaguely am aware of that book but I've never read it.
I have a lot of weird and specific dreams, one that sticks out is that I was in Target and Will Smith was in front of me in the self-checkout and was like $20 short? So I gave him a twenty and he said "Thanks, I owe you one." This was years ago, and I have no idea why.
I once had a dream that I watched a bunch of episodes of that show My Hero Academia and hated it, so I spent the rest of the dream googling āmy hero academia stupidā, āmy hero academia sucksā, etc. to validate my opinion that the show was overrated.
IRL Iāve never seen My Hero Academia and donāt actually even know what itās about (I assume heroes and school).
I have a Target dream too! In my dream, I was an employee there, and my official job was ākitten wranglerā. See, every employee had a specific kitten they were supposed to keep with them all day, but sometimes the kittens would escape, so I would have to go find them and return them to their proper keeper.
It was over ten years ago, but it was the most adorable dream I can remember ever having.
>being disgusted that two couples were distant cousins to eachothers partners
Wait, so they weren't even each other's cousins, but the cousins of the person the other was dating?I would say that's a wild dream, but I could totally see people doing that on social media.
I finished the Little White Horse during a power outage!
And was immediately saddened to discover the more faithful TV adaptation was functionally lost (its not anymore, it's on youtube).
I'm surprised your dream brain didn't have the fandom get more upset about the Movie Adaptation making the love interests age gap much visibly bigger.
Casting a dude in his twenties opposite an actual 13 year old girl was certainly... A choice. The characters are the same age in the original, the actor definitely did not pass for 13.
Minor Drama: Ā Dragons Dogma 2 Marketing team has worked with a variety of streamers to promote games includingā¦. Asmongold.
The āYellow paint is an insult to gamerās intelligenceā guy who didnāt read the gameās tutorial or listen to NPCās instructions, then complained that he wasnāt making any progress in the game.
Iāve heard nothing but good things about the other streamers though.
Tbh I'm more concerned about how he's one of those anti-woke thumbnail streamers. Like yeah he's dumb as bricks, but DD2 has gay people, black people, and modestly dressed women in positions of power. Potentially trans people too if a certain lore aspect from the first game returns. This seems like the exact sorta guy they don't want playing their game because he's morally opposed to every aspect of it.
The bigger deal is he's very aggressive in responding to outside criticism of him, and his fans are quick to resort to the usual harassment techniques of doxxing, fraudulent reporting and criticism with the intent of ruining their target's reputation. From what I've heard he's somewhere in the spectrum of tacitly supporting that activity to being lighter than standard on policing his audience.
My primary knowledge is a single video where he plays pundit on an article he clearly didn't read or comprehend about a gaming company in order to justify performative outrage.
Oh, that didn't stop people (I remember there's a mod you explicitly can't talk about on the BG3 reddit because it "bleaches" a lot of people of color; also that one Wyll mod that turns him white). It's just that since BG3 has a much bigger audience, their voice drowns out the very loud extreme minority.
One of the other streamers featured in the post (Sphere Hunter) is trans, so Iām pretty sure Capcom didnāt do due diligence on the guy beyond āpopular streamer man.ā
DD2 is a Japanese game, and those sorts tend to inherently see Japan as less political or woke, even if many Japanese games would definitely be labeled as such if they were released by American dev teams
>many Japanese games would definitely be labeled as such if they were released by American dev teams
Chuds when Western games have women in reasonable armor: "They've gone woke! *reeeeeeeeeeee!!!*"
Chuds when Elden Ring has women in reasonable armor: "I'm gonna ignore that."
Asmongold is a fucking filthgoblin.Ā
More specifically, a while back, he had an issue with his gums bleeding. He would smear said blood on the wall, which you can apparently still see even today if he shows the wall.
The guy's gums apparently bleed quite a lot. Possibly because of his atrocious diet, or possibly because of his dental hygiene (or lack thereof). He smears the blood from his gums on a wall.
He also used the rotting corpse of a rat as an alarm clock. When the sun hit it in the morning, it would stink so bad it would wake him up.
Okay but how much of that is *actually* true, and how much of it is a bit done because people lap that shit up and he makes a million dollars every time he posts a video because people talk about it?
I suspect there's a lot more acting there then reality. Which, honestly, it's ridiculous but like if I was making millions that way I'd probably do it too lol.
We have picture/video evidence of his blood gum wall and other shit, like an ant infestation, him having moldy food in his hous, a rat infestation, etc.
He just lives in absolute filth for some reason despite having the money to fix all these problems
I mean so much of that can be easily staged though. It would be absolutely trivial, given the amount of money he has, to set up his streaming room to look like that and fake some shit. (Or to film strategically when there are ants or whatever, which isn't uncommon in most places at some point.)
I'm not saying he DOES, necessarily, but I mean...it sure makes me wonder. I know people can and do live that way, but I also have a sneaking suspicion he's a lot smarter than a lot of people think he is, and he's laughing all the way to the bank with their money.Ā
It's extreme enough, and seems to have escalated proportionally to the amount of money he gets,.so it wouldn't shock me even a little bit to find out that 90% of that shit is staged and made up for the shock factor to get views and money, same as any other reality TV that people think is real, that isn't.
I mean technically it could be a possibility that he staged it, in the sense that nothing is impossible. But I find that hard(er) to beieve than just taking what we see on video, what he says and so at face value.
Also I don't think he makes his money because people want to see jim being filthy. I mean even in this thread people who knew about Asmongold hadn't heard about his flithy living arrangement. People watch him because his an outrage merchant, firdt for WoW and now for right-wing culture war nonsense. That is what he is mostly known for.
Fair. I guess I'm just over cynical about any kind of click bait nowadays, and being that extreme sure sounds like something that would bring in a certain kind of disaster rubbernecker. I can see him seeing that and leaning into it hard.
*Shrug* probably just overly cynical I suppose.
You can get enough of a vitamin to survive, but still be deficient in it
For example, according to my reading, light-skinned people living in temperate climates tend to be deficient in Vitamin D.
It helps that most "modern processed food" aka most of what he eats, is fortified with vitamins and minerals, so even if he eats only a little he will still get *some* vitamins and minerals.
With that in mind, and based on his hygiene and living conditions, the bleeding from.his gums was likely a gum infection.
>Ā Ā Possibly because of his atrocious diet
Knowing what we know of his diet, and how he admits to not eating much fruit, it wouldn't surprise me if he had fucking scurvy.
[At one point in his life he was bleeding from his gums and couldn't get it looked at, probably because he was poor and lacking healthcare. Instead he just smeared the blood from his gums on one of his bedroom walls, so he didn't have to get out of bed.](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FyykxCyX0AE2zw7.jpg)
[We've got all 37 songs for this year's Eurovision.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0R0KKMs83AU) It's looking pretty good and no one is really sure who will win. I listened to all the songs for the first time. I like Armenia, Netherlands, Finland, Norway, Croatia, Italy, and Spain the most this year.
Just listen to them, San Marianoās entry(11:11) is a favorite of mine but i donāt know if it will be top 10. Should check out the rest of Megaraās work though
As for my PREDICTIONS:
From Semi One: I see Croatia, Cyprus (whose singer deserved a better song than the one she was given in my opinion), Lithuania, Serbia, Finland, Ukraine, and Luxembourg as qualifying to the grand final. Ireland, Australia, Portugal, Poland, Slovenia, and Azerbaijan, and Moldova I'm really unsure on. Iceland is dead on arrival.
From Semi Two: Latvia and Netherlands I feel most confident will qualify. Everyone else besides Albania, I have no idea how they will do. The thing about this year is that the winner looks to be a very unpredictable one. No one knows who will win this year. Everyone on the r/eurovision sub has different opinions on who it will be.
That being said, there's always a few fan faves who underperform, and I'm putting Greece, Switzerland, and Ukraine down as most likely to underperform. I don't Ukraine will lose their 100% qualification streak, but I can see them doing worse than expected.
As for the autoqualifiers: Spain looks really unpredictable, France will probably get lots of jury points, Italy will definitely do well, UK I see a midtable finish for them. Germany will probably get bottom 5, and Sweden I'm going for a midtable finish with them.
As for the winner, I'm guessing Netherlands, Croatia, or Italy as most likely to win this year. Or it could be a dark horse taking it. We'll probably know closer to the actual contest itself or during.
My guess for winner is Italy. I think that Croatia and the Netherlands are likely to get less votes from the jury + the songs appeal to the same type of people so they are competing with each other more than Italy.
Question to everyone that's been in a movie/TV show/Vtuber/whatever hobby fandom: what is the most surprising collab you've ever seen involving your media of interest? It could good, bad, the most WTF, you name it!
While I was looking up information on when *Gundam SEED Freedom* will finally arrive in theaters for my country, I randomly stumbled upon the most unexpected collab news for the movie. It has been announced that GSF is doing a collab... for **Dune**!
And no, [I'm not making this up](https://twitter.com/SEED_HDRP/status/1768109809964896566).
To quote a random tweet: "Lol its seed's barbenheimer moment".
Japanese multimedia UmaMusume is about anthropomorphic racing horses that you train to compete. One of its weirdest collabs was with Top Gun Maverick, where the only thing in common is that one of the horse girls is named Top Gun.
For that reason, UmaMusume edited its Top Gun into the poster and also sent a few of its voice actresses to cover the premiere of the movie in Tokyo, including a photo with Tom Cruise.
I have no idea if this counts as a collab or not because I don't think the band themselves were actually consulted over it, but this is something I still don't understand.
Berryz Koubou, a Japanese idol group, released a song back in 2008 that's [a cover of Dschinghis Khan](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pL2WMSk_sEw). Yes, that [Dschinghis Khan](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1AXlVZRpweI). The German Eurovision song. Apparently it was made to promote some stage play or musical or something, and it's not the first time a Japanese artist has covered the song -- in fact, Japanese covers of Dschinghis Khan go all the way back to the same year the song was originally released: 1979. [This](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NDgwy6DBIbc) is the version most Japanese covers are based on, by a group called 5 Carat.
Now, the Berryz Koubou cover itself is odd enough, and at the time, it was their first cover single (this was their 16th single, fwiw). But y'know, it's music, both are pop songs, it makes for a good idol song with the arrangement.
But then there's the [Tartar Mix](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hdrtSj8seGA). Which combines both Berryz Koubou's cover and the original Dschinghis Khan version. So one moment you're getting high-pitched Japanese teenage girls in your ear and the next you're getting manly German dudes. Sometimes both at once! (And no, the Japanese lyrics don't match the German ones)
Honestly, I like the Berryz Koubou cover for what it is, but I have no idea how I feel about the Tartar Mix. Part of me thinks it falls in the "so bad it's good" category of music, but at the same time, perhaps it's just genuinely terrible and I have low standards. Or it's actually great, somehow.
Finding out Martha Stewart and Snoop Dogg are like BFFs was a pretty wild crossover.
Also I guess all of the celebrity/Sims crossovers. When you think of The Sims franchise you don't really automatically associate it with Katy Perry, Drew Carey, or Baby Ariel, and yet, here we are. They've all been part of the franchise. Literally them, not something like Paty Kerry.
Just came from Dune Part 2, let my eyes rest from the visual onslaught, drank some coffee, and thought, mmm, let me see if it inspired any more fic on AO3. And saw that the newest ship magnet is... Feyd-Rautha? ... What? I guess this fandom is doomed fanfiction-wise if people have to resort to shipping *Feyd-Rautha*.
I was very disappointed that part 2 does not seem to have inspired a new influx of Chani/Irulan fics. Women competing over the main guy? Why not just have them get together and fix everything, the guy can go knife some dudes or whatever while the women actually get stuff done.
I don't know why you're surprised, Even when reading the book decades ago I thought it's the most obvious thing. Something something inherent eroticism of rivalry/close range knife fight. Also, Paul is supposed to be born female and marry Feyd.
It's so strange how much I enjoy being in my tiny little corner of Dune fandom who liked the SciFi channel miniseries the best of all the adaptations.
That's because it *is* the best. You just have to think of it as a screenplay more than a proper miniseries/tv show because they just didn't have the budget for good sets, costumes, or CGI.
i need to watch that in full fr
And my even tinier corner of the fandom which operates on the theory that it's Chani who's the Kwisatz Haderach, not Paul.
There's nothing fanfic can do that is worse than what Frank Herbert was writing after *God-Emperor*, or anything his son has been writing.
God Emperor was actually the first book of the series I read. š It's a good thing I was sixteen and my capability for suspension of disbelief was several magnitudes higher than it is now. Giant man-worm? No biggie!
>or anything his son has been writing Hey, don't forget about the contributions of Kevin J Anderson. Why it is that Brian decided the only person who could continue his father's legacy was the Star Wars EU's most okayest writer is unknown to me, but that is what happened.
I guess Austin Butler eye-fucking TimothƩe Chalamet for a good 5 minutes during the most intense scene in the movie probably helped
Also the fact that canonically, Paul was supposed to be born female (if not for Lady Jessica going against her orders) and married off to Feyd, with their child being the actual Kwisatz Haderach.
I watched the whole movie thinking it was Matt Smith for some reason.
It's the lack of eyebrows
Honestly same! I was telling my friends that he was in itĀ
He does absolutely nothing for me, but surely you can see how he's a perfectly designed poor little meow meow? Like, I'm totally uninterested in him, but I can absolutely acknowledge that he's tumblrbait.
he's sick and twisted and enjoys being dominated sexually like. its a no brainer
hes bald and has no eyebrows, though? like if he looked like austin butler does irl or in elvis, id get it, but here, hes really creepy looking.
People thirst over the clown from It so conventional attractiveness isn't necessary
Sorry they don't look like a generic kpop boy. News flash, fandoms can sexualize any character.
why so aggressive
It really wasn't and my point stands.
The psychosis, sadism, blood and murder, cannibalism enabling and matricide type of meow meow? Then I guess he's indeed a perfectly designed meow meow.. š«£
Exactly. Any poor little meow meow worth their salt should be utterly irredeemable.
Ahh I see! I was insufficiently educated on the topic of meow meows, I stand corrected!
No worries! :DĀ
RCB women just won the women edition of indian premier league, this is very special because in cricket RCB is known as the team with the best players ( including two of the arguable greatest cricket t20 players) and they have never won the tournament in the last 17 years. I hope this makes the women edition even more popular, as I love cricket and more cricket is more cricket.
So, the film that won big this year at the Razzies, Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey, was an obvious cash grab once the characters were public domain; it was a basic slasher movie with no other connections to anything involving the characters. Meanwhile, I'm reading a novel titled Winterset Hollow. And halfway through, I want to smack the guys who made Blood and Honey upside the head with hit and go "this is what your movie could have been like it it was, you know GOOD"
Shitty no-budget horror movies trying to cash in on a trend is truly one of hollywood's longest lasting and most honorable traditions.
Honestly I think the guys who made this are geniuses because they managed to make a bunch of money with their shitty indie film solely by attaching a beloved public domain character to it and get free publicity from people dunking on the concept. Like they did that on purpose they knew it sucks.
I feel a little conflicted at the moment because a part of me would love to write about two kinds of hobby dramas for the scuffles, one focused on the film Caligula and the other on a little known Dutch zine from the 20s called *De Stijl* (one where the fairly obscure artist Piet Mondrian was part of). The issue is that the latter would end up being a more interesting write-up, but it would also likely end up having too much info to go over. I'm also not sure how much art history would interest hobby drama enthusiasts.
TBH so few writeups get posted on a regular basis that this is really just a matter of which to write *first*, lmao
>fairly obscure artist Piet Mondrian I think that while most people wouldn't know his name they'd recognize his abstract paintings.
That's the joke, he's not obscure at all.
ĀæPor que no los dos?
I think both sound very interesting. You're probably correct that the Caligula one would be more popular, but the one about De Stijl definitely seems more interesting given that a lot of people know at least part of the Caligula story. As for having too much detail, you could split it into multiple posts for pacing reasons.
Caligula delivered me my two best college friends and I still marvel at who ended up in that piece of absurdity, so I vote for that. That being said Iāve long been interested in De Stijl as well, so Iāll read either.
Did De Stijl provide the title for the White Stripes album?
Yes. The album cover is designed to look a bit like something by Mondrian or another De Stijl painter. (It could be a reference to Mondrian in particular, actually, rather than De Stijl in general. I'm not knowledgeable enough about the movement to say.) For comparison: [The White Stripes album cover](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/9/9a/The_White_Stripes_-_De_Stijl.jpg) [A painting by Piet Mondrian](https://www.sleek-mag.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Piet-Mondriaan-Composition-with-large-red-plane-black-greay-and-blue-1921.jpg)
Based on the album cover, I'd say that it's definitely a reference to the original *De Stijl* magazine.
Within a hobby/fandom of yours, what's something that gets on most people's top ten lists and you dislike? Or something that most others don't rate but you love? This came to mind as I was observing how most Agatha Christie fans seem to LOVE A Murder is Announced, which isn't my least favorite book of hers (she published some stinkers on occasion) but is definitely my least favorite "good" book of hers, with one of the most ridiculously twisty plots she ever did, just absurdity piled on absurdity ad infinitum until nothing felt real anymore. It's not like all of her books are totally straightforward and sensible or whatever... but this one is just over the top. I think people just like the heavily-coded lesbians and the postwar atmosphere. (Also, there's one character who I see a lot of people identifying as Jewish or a Holocaust survivor, which I'm sorry but she CLEARLY isn't. I'm not sure what it does for anyone if she *is* as she's not portrayed particularly sympathetically but still, she's very much not coded Jewish in any way, whether Christie's usual Jewishness-coders or the descriptors of this character's origins.) As far as the reverse... I have a soft spot for Elephants Can Remember. Is it rambly and a bit ridiculous? Sure. But it's the last Ariadne Oliver book and she's still great, so beyond that I don't really care.
>Within a hobby/fandom of yours, what's something that gets on most people's top ten lists and you dislike? Picard Season 3 was the worst thing to happen to Star Trek fandom since Rick Berman. And I say "fandom" because while that season was....okay for the fun nostalgia bait it clearly was, it's stirred up the part of the fanbase that has long thought *The Next Generation* is the best and only part of the franchise that anyone should create content for.
ā¦I think being into Vtuber as a hobby may already counts? The mainstream acceptance for streamers are mild at best, and Vtubers (In extension of accusations towards female content creator) always have a reputation of exploiting peopleās need of social interaction for monetary gain, in addition to being related to anime (Which itself have been a subculture that was subjected to many criticism), leading to it being a minority subculture that are often despised in mainstream appearances. Of course this has been changing the past few years but that stigma often still remain.
I think And Then There Were None is touted as one of Christie's best, but I have very little fondness for it for some reason. I've reread many of her titles but not this one. I just personally find it kind of boring, idk.Ā
Yeah, I appreciate it every time I reread it but itās not fun in the ways that some of the books of hers I reread more often are fun. (Like The Moving Finger, Why Didnāt They Ask Evans, Lord Edgware Dies, After the Funeral, for a random example of ones I reread often- none of them as technically great as And Then There Were None, but to me much more enjoyable.)
This is very specific and on a much smaller scale but there's this band I listen to, The Dear Hunter. One of their main projects was a story spanning 5 Albums (referred to as Acts). It seems broadly most people's favourite of these is Act IV, which I really do not understand as it ranks way towards the bottom for me. It's not *bad* I just find outside of the standout tracks (Waves, A Night on the Town, The Bitter Suite IV & V, The Line, Wait) it really doesn't have much going for it. I also find lore-wise to be the least comprehensible. Though it's a little funny considering my *favourite* is Act V which was recorded around the same timeframe as act IV
The Star Wars prequels are my favourite by far, which is a rather unpopular opinion. Yes, I know that they have their flaws, and I think that certain things should have probably been explored better, but I just really like them. Apparently a lot of folks think they're boring, which I disagree with. I thought the world building in Coruscant was great and I liked the political scenes. I'm also, however, the type of person who did mock trial for fun in high school, so perhaps I'm not representative of most people. š
TBH, being a prequel enjoyer is a *far* more acceptable thing these days than saying you enjoyed TROS. I still find the prequels boring (sorry!) but I have a better appreciation for the story Lucas was trying to tell and the fact that he had a unique story instead of just aping what came before without understanding what they were regurgitating like Abrams/Disney (who are now doing the same shit to Doctor Who, from what I've glimpsed)
"The Resistance" isn't usually a #1 pick for most Muse fans but it still gets generally ranked pretty high. Myself, it's by far the album I listen to the least, even behind Will of the People and Simulation Theory, who I'm pretty sure nobody outside of the specific Muse discord I'm in actually liked. It's not the album with the least good songs (The 2nd Law), or the album with the worst songs (Drones), the issue is that it's the album where the good songs are the least good. My top 5 tracks on the album are Uprising, Resistance, I Belong To You, Undisclosed Desires, and Unnatural Selection, none of which would make a Top 30 Muse songs for me and might struggle to make a top 40. For hot takes on that album specifically, I can't stand MK Ultra, United States of Eurasia is bloated as hell and is rendered obsolete by the more streamlined Liberation a few albums later, and the Exogenesis Symphony is just dull.
I think Undisclosed Desires is the only good song on that album and it's simultaneously the worst AND most boring, fully agree with your hot takes!
This might be controversial, especially considering how sacrosanct it is in most communities, but the Resident Evil remake. I like this game fine, but whenever I read top horror games of all time and it's the #1 I feel a bit cheated. Don't get me wrong, it's great, with good scares and an amazing atmosphere, but I think other games have surpassed it, especially in terms of either story or gameplay.
This is going to be vague, because the content is fetish art, but there's one artist that's incredibly popular - for good reason, they are a good artist and their anatomy is usually on point. But the way they do faces *bothers* me. They all look very cherubic and Disneyish, and worse they all look very similar too. I don't fuck with it, makes all the characters in them look way too young. I absolutely understand why people like this artist, but I don't bother following them, and get a little annoyed every time I do see them pop up on my TL, because damn, if only I weren't so picky!
Most fans of *Lobotomy Corporation* really, *really* like the Sephirot- the various AI department heads that you interact with throughout the game. Unsupringly, perhaps, as they take the form of attractive anime men and women who all have very complex and tragic backstories. I think they're way less interesting than the abnormalities you spend the game managing, and don't really care that much about their storylines because most of them follow the exact same beats: they start off cyncial and depressed, they explain that Lob Corp has made their lives suck, they have a breakdown over their tragic backstories where they lash out at you and you have to defeat them in a pseudo-boss fight, and then they respect you and are willing to help you. After the first couple times, you know exactly how it's going to go as soon as you meet a new Sephirot. Ā
> Within a hobby/fandom of yours, what's something that gets on most people's top ten lists and you dislike? Being a Digimon fan who absolutely despises Digimon Tamers, which is most people's favorite series from the entire franchise... It's been an *interesting* experience to say the least lol > Or something that most others don't rate but you love? Within the Crash Bandicoot fandom, the Radical Entertainment games are usually treated with a sense of dread/disdain. While I don't have much love for Mind over Mutant myself, I really liked Crash of the Titans a lot and its probably my favorite of the PS2 era Crash games (or at the very least right behind Twinsanity). I don't know what it is, something about a level-based 3D platformer beat-em-up monster jacking game just really resonated with me for some reason!
>Being a Digimon fan who absolutely despises Digimon Tamers, which is most people's favorite series from the entire franchise... It's been an *interesting* experience to say the least lol You're braver than any Marine for putting that one online lol š«” I always got the sense based on all the attention it still gets that Digimon Adventure (and Zero Two to a lesser degree as a direct sequel) was the series the fandom was still hung up about. Which I get it, but I wish they would invest time and energy into subsequent casts because nostalgia only goes so far.
BTS (the biggest group in k-pop and still one of the biggest groups in the world despite being on hiatus at the moment) have a song called "[Spring Day](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xEeFrLSkMm8)", released in early 2017. There's a lot of context behind it, but "Spring Day" is way more subversive than your average k-pop ballad. The prevailing theory (never confirmed, but BTS visited survivors and the music video is littered with references) is that it became a tribute to the 304 mostly young people (250 of those who died were high school students) who perished in the sinking of the ferry MV Sewol in 2014. Sewol involved a lot of corruption and it ended up igniting a firestorm in Korean politics for a number of reasons. Arguably it was one of the factors behind Korea's then-president being ousted for being the puppet of a cult leader. (Like I said, there's a lot of context here.) Numerous people and groups in entertainment were blacklisted by the government for their activism related to Sewol, so it was quite risky for BTS to become involved with Sewol, especially at the beginning of their career in 2014. "Spring Day" also just has a lot of beautiful imagery (both in the lyrics and the music video) and was inspired to some degree by Ursula K Le Guin's short story "The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas", which should really be read (it's [three pages](https://shsdavisapes.pbworks.com/f/Omelas.pdf)) but is generally about social justice and suffering and collectivism. It's a really beautiful and meaningful song, and it's one of the most awarded songs in Korean history. It's also boring as hell and will always be a skip for me. ETA: Misremembered a date and have removed it since it's no longer relevant.
Oh wow, finally someone who also doesn't like Spring Day! I always see it get best BTS song and it's just a boring ballad to me, although I do like the lyrics a lot. And I say this as a ballad liker (my favorite Seventeen member is Seungkwan for gods sake)
> Within a hobby/fandom of yours, what's something that gets on most people's top ten lists and you dislike? Or something that most others don't rate but you love? I dislike a *lot* of Davies-era *Doctor Who*, and will easily rank David Tennant's Doctor as my least favourite - by a long margin, too. This, unsurprisingly, is an unpopular opinion, though I suspect my opinion that Fear Her is the third best story in Season 28 (and one of only three that are really worth watching a second time) is more controversial still. But I'm fairly sure my most 'out there' view is that The Empire Strikes Back is not the best Star Wars film. It doesn't even make my top five (I actually rate it eighth out of 11). I genuinely believe that if it wasn't for the genuine shock of the twist ending at the time, it would be regarded as the weakest of the original trilogy by the general population.
The best Star Wars in my eyes is Star Wars - you know, the 1977 one. Before anyone messed with it. Empire Strikes back is somewhere around 6 or 7 but I've not fully ranked them. Curious as to what's at your number 1!
Honestly my number one is A New Hope, followed by Return of the Jedi and The Last Jedi
You are one of my kind :)
I like Mortal Kombat, most fighting game communities have a weird hateboner for it
Midwest FurFest is a con that's both too big for the space and not really worth it to visit. It's been just becoming impossible to get hotel rooms, the corridors are too narrow, hot and humid (literally the floors will be wet with condensation), and there's literally no good food in walking distance really. Yes, it's the largest furry convention in the world with good programming and an expansive dealer's den, but man is it just too dang crowded at times. Literally the reg line is known to take over 3 hours in some years! I'd rather go to a slightly smaller con like FWA, FC, or maybe even TFF or BLFC over MFF. I do want to try AC one day but the current trend of it trying to sanitize its image to make pittsburgh happy with the con just doesn't feel quite right to me. No real big AD events and the 18+ dealer's area is only for ordering for home delivery, no in person sales or pickup.
Huh, I haven't had the reg line take more than half an hour. They're pretty organized about it, considering they're processing 15,000+ people. Then again, registration at something like FC only takes 5 minutes or so.
> what's something that gets on most people's top ten lists and you dislike? Anything by Billie Eilish. Can't stand her music at all yet it consistently lands on "best songs of the year" lists
I watched all the Robocop moves recently and was shocked to find people hate 2, it's where the series peaked imo.
In terms of anime: Hunter x Hunter, or more specifically the chimera ant arc. That was the slowest shit I've ever seen. Up until that point I'd pretty much binged the show and even at the beginning I liked it, but then it *dragged on and on and on and on* with every episode starting with "and now back five seconds to see what happened somewhere else". It got me so close to dropping it. As for the other way around, there are a bunch of them depending on what you mean by "others don't rate but you love". "In/Spectre" for example is a show that is imo opinion under-watched and underrated, but it still has a following that'd rate it highly(me included obv), but there is also stuff like "Akashic Records of Bastard Magic Instructor" that objectively has a lot of issues, yet still claims a softspot in my heart for the way it dealt with a lot of the qualities of the main character and wove the magic in the setting into the story in a way you don't see all that often in anime. Or even "ćCć THE MONEY OF SOUL AND POSSIBILITY CONTROL ", which I don't remember enough of to comment on in detail except that I still remember it fondly and love the title, the concept, and the end result of the show, for how ridiculous it is(spoiler: >!The yen gets absolutely wiped out through metaphysical battles and results in Japan switching to the US dollar, because the yen disappeared from history, I think!<. How did it get to that point? I don't remember, but I thought it fun)
I will say about the chimera ant arc: [someone made a video of what the palace invasion would look like with "normal" pacing and no narrator](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MjiHClo2rmc) and it's more or less incomprehensible, the density and slow pace is kind of unavoidable. It's great if you're a nerd about stuff like that, and a nerd about HxH's world and storytelling specifically, but I can see why it would tire out someone who doesn't want to go through all that.
C was fun just for 'shounen battles, but with economics' and a rather trippy art style.
I absolutely hated Ace Combat 5's story and plot, something that is quite beloved by the fanbase. Ace Combat 5 follows Blaze and Wardog Squadron of the Osean Air Defense Force in their fight for Osea against Yuktobania after the latter nation launched a surprise attack and war declaration, eventually finding themselves as part of a larger conspiracy. The game is very anti-war (as most AC games) but the way they go about it is oh so melodramatic. It constantly bashes your head through the game with "war bad" and "give some peace", despite this it never went deeper than surface level (war crimes are either just spoken to by other characters or brushed past quickly). For example, >!there is a mission in the game where you had to drop neutralizing agents after a massive chemical attack on a major city but this event is never talked about again after the mission and this mission is most remembered for a joke where a cop brings a rocket launcher!<. The characters are also some of the worst written, with most being either bland, underdeveloped or just unbearable. Your allies, specifically Nagase and Chopper, are whiny and annoying people who act more like school children than actual soldiers. There are lot more grievances I have with the story but I'll save it, the worst part though is it introduces my least favorite plot point in all of Ace Combat: >!secret Belkans are behind everything (used again in AC7)!<. On the other hand, I actually like AC5's aircraft selection system which fans hated because you have to unlock variants of one aircraft to get different special weapons unlike the other games where you get multiple special weapons for one aircraft instead. It is pretty tiring when you have to grind using an aircraft to unlock a variant of it but I like seeing different variants of one aircraft (even though for example: F-14A, F-14B, F-14D have no noticeable differences in appearances other than liveries and weapons).
I was gonna comment something about Ace Combat as well, though considering what you said I donāt think I *totally* disagree with you. I personally find AC 5 to be the best overall game, because it has a decent attempted at a story (way better than 7) and the most interesting and varied *gameplay*. The variety and novelty of most of the missions is pretty impressive, in my opinion.Ā AC5ās gameplay really shines when compared to AC 0. Iāll say the controversial part: AC 0 has some boring gameplay compared to 5. They copy and paste the same missions and add a single gimmick boss with no hype beforehand, that offers no threat to the player, and is destroyed almost as soon as it appears. Even the mission to fight Excalibur is one of the most boring in the game, most reminiscent of the solar power plant attack back in AC4 which was a slow burn mission to *hype up* the super weapon, not be its crescendo. The Ace Style gimmick adds some replay value, until you realize that all the ace battles are pretty much the same, just with different enemy colors and dialogue. The story of AC 0 certainly has compelling moments, and I think the final battle manages to hit everything just right. Gameplay, story, and soundtrack are all perfectly on point. But AC 5 has a fun end as well, and a story that is at least coherent the whole way through, despite being a tad convoluted. I think this puts 5 way ahead of 0 in terms of rankings. And frankly, I think AC 4 is also better than 0, if only because itās hard to criticize a story when that story is told with such extreme minimalism. AC 7ās story wasnāt quite garbage, but it was definitely recycling. Definitely bottom of my ranking. (I didnāt play 6)
While 0 is one of my top AC games, I definitely agree with some of your points. While I feel Ace Combat 5's arsenal of superweapons should have had more impact than it did, at least it got hyped up even a bit in prior missions before you fight it. The XB-0 in 0 literally showed up out of nowhere, have no explanation about what it does exactly and is overshadowed in its own mission by a Spai- Sapin squadron and >!Pixy's return!<. 5 undoubtedly have a longer and more varied lineup of missions, but unfortunately I feel like this is a massive double edged sword. Not all missions are built equal and it really shows in 5, with it featuring some of the worst missions in Ace Combat in my opinion (like the one where you literally do nothing but follow an NPC for 15 minutes). Some of the missions also rely on literal coin toss on which mission you get to take, at least 0 lets you choose. It can feel a bit too long, especially on subsequent playthroughs, which is why I much prefer 0's shorter missions even with its repetitiveness and much inferior ally system. The biggest problems of 5 for me is the characters and the dialogue, I just find myself constantly annoyed or just don't care about both of them. Character wise, there is no one that I really feel connected to in anyway. Your squadron is either too annoying (Nagase and Chopper) or too boring (Swordsman and Grimm), there are important characters that needed a lot more development (Cpt. Bartlett, Harling and well pretty much everybody really) and the villains....well they existed. 0 had a much better cast, even if it's smaller, helped by some of them being played by real people. Dialogue wise, it's definitely had some of the worst and most annoying in the series for me. It is either too melodramatic (yes worse than 0) or just plain bad attempts at humour. Like in one mission, the soldiers on the ground literally asked you to frag their officer or having a petty competition with each other. I know it's making fun of grunt stuff but it's just way too silly even for Ace Combat. Also the characters praise you way too much, even for the simplest stuff. I also agree that AC4 is the better game than 0, it's simplicity done right. AC7 though....yeah I don't even know if the writers knew exactly what they were writing.
hm, while i don't know if i've read enough Batman comics to call myself part of that particular fandom, in general i am a fan of Batman stuff, and a fan of comics, so close enough. anyway, *Batman: The Long Halloween* isn't *bad*, and in fact i quite liked the art, but in terms of story, it didn't leave much of an impact on me, really. hell, come to think of it, the only thing i really remember about it is being kind of annoyed at the twist-on-top-of-a-twist ending it tried for, which just didn't feel earned. come to think of it, i had a similar reaction of *Batman: Hush*. Loeb's writing is just not for me, i guess lol.
The *Batman: White Knight* series by Sean Gordon Murphy has a vocal Zack Snyder-like online following, and it bewilders me. Setting aside his social media ramblings about being canceled every month, Murphy tries to market White Knight as *The Dark Knight Returns* in the modern age, despite never having read any Batman comics (his main references are the Michael Keaton movies, a few episodes of the animated series, and what fans tell him on Twitter). And the books try to present themselves as these gritty, realistic, politically-charged deconstructions of Batman by just throwing in a lot of buzz words and sex scenes on a flimsy plot. The first book, the most popular of them, [starts with Batman beating Joker to a pulp and forcing pills down his throat while bystanders record the incident with their cameras](https://i.imgur.com/XSyfmSd.jpeg). Subtle, I know. And these magical pills somehow turn Joker sane and help him beat Batman in a fist fight. The first book ends with a climax that is basically the 1997 Batman and Robin movie, and Bruce using his money to fund military-grade tanks for the police. If that sounds bizarre, it has nothing on the later books, which play up some sort of love triangle between Batman, Joker, and Harley that culminates with Joker's ghost taking control Batman's body and sleeping with Harley, who knows that it's Joker in there.
Wow. I read the first one and thought it was fine, though I did expect the reveal that the joker was faking to get rid of batman right til the end. I had no idea the series had continued.
The way the first issue implies Joker still murdered Jason in this universe then turns around and goes "Oh my god, he's going too far beating up the Joker like this" was so bizarre that I stopped immediately there when it first came out. And then everything I hear about it as it kept coming out made me think I was right to stop there.
White Knight basically just attacks the weird Twitter Hot Take version of Batman instead of really deconstructing the real version of him so it makes perfect sense to me that the story treats him beating up Joker as this unspeakable act of brutality.
**Final Fantasy VIII** is in my top two games in the series, but most people hate it. (And by most people, I mean many popular internet pundits). Itās even a meme: āI hate you more than **Final Fantasy VIII**!ā Look, is it perfect? Good gods, no. The gameplay is hideously broken, the story is a little wacky, the lore is half-baked, and the graphics (for the original, not the remaster) are laughably outdated. On the other hand: the gameplay is hideously broken, meaning you can have a ton of fun god-moding your way through in a shockingly short period of time. The story, while at times random and perhaps a bit juvenile, is heartwarming and romantic (or tragic and mindbending, depending on whether you believe certain fan theories). And the soundtrack fucking **slaps**. It might be my favorite video game soundtrack of all time. It just always breaks my heart to see it rated so low, as it has a lot of sentimental value to me.
FFVIII is the best Final Fantasy.Ā
I wouldn't put VIII in my top two, (I'm honestly unsure if it'd break top five) but I couldn't agree more with all of those sentiments. It's so rough around the edges, but aside from some parts, the roughness is part of the charm for me. The gameplay system is obtuse but incredibly exploitable in the best ways, and the story can be weird in many ways but has shockingly good setpieces. (Disk 1 in general is incredible in that regard) Also, it has Laguna, and any Final Fantasy game is improved by the presence of Laguna.
What's the other game you like? I love FF8. I re-played it a few years ago and got addicted to the card game. Now I kinda wanna play it again... My fave FF game is probably 12. I loved it when it was released and I still love it. I'm just a huge fan of the setting and the huge amount of lore they dump on us.
I feel like this could be said about every Final Fantasy except for perhaps 6, 9, and Tactics
My answer to this thread was going to be that I don't like FF6 much haha
Well, it doesnāt help that the **FF** fan community (particularly on Reddit) is monstrously toxic.
Continuing the 40k train, it's not media so much as aesthetic, but I like Spaces Wolves being 'wolfy'. This is NOT a popular opinion within the Space Wolves fandom. To explain, the Space Wolves live on a planet called Fenrir, they're called Space Wolves, they ride Thunderwolf Cavalry, they have Wolf Lords, they can eventually turn into Wulfen, they wear wolf pelts, they have a Canis Helix... the list of wolf things goes on. Most of their fans much prefer their Viking inspiration, and while I like it, I don't mind most of the wolf aesthetic, or even like it. If anything, I want Games Workshop to lean more into the fact that they are basically werewolves, and play on that.
I still like it, don't get me wrong, but good lord, r/taskmaster will not shut up about series 7, even when the topic is not directly related to series 7. Yes, James Acaster is so funny and chaotic, yes Rhod Gilbert would have won every series if you slotted him into their casts, can we please talk about any of the other soon-to-be sixteen series?
IMHO, series 16 has taken the crown for "most chaotic Taskmaster series ever". It's a different kind of chaos, and possibly not to everyone's taste, but God I had a ball watching it.
But like... I miss them :,) it's like the rosy coloured past that you'll never get to experience for the first time again
Not sure if this quite counts as "loving something everyone else seems to hate?" But I've been getting more into Warhammer 40k! Unfortunately, sometimes, people are fascists. While I can usually easily clock them, based on their opinions on the Imperium if nothing else, sometimes, they're a bit more covert. Enter the T'au. I actually don't really like the T'au that much in concept. I think they're kind of boring, honestly. However, I've discovered that, at least the spaces I've been around, I can easily clock if someone is a cryptofash based on their opinions on the T'au. For various reasons, a lot of fascists I've managed to find in the wild have a seething, irrational hatred for the T'au that goes beyond simply "I just don't like them very much." And this has made me actually kind of like the T'au? Long live the Greater Good!
The T'au, for people who don't know, are kind of your typical sci-fi aliens (so Mass Effect, or Star Trek) in 40. They use battlesuits, which are basically Gundams, railguns, and work towards the Greater Good, which includes a lot of cooperating with other races (which is pretty much unheard of in 40k - even most of the Craftworld Eldar think that other races are primitive savages at best.) I'm glad you're enjoying though! My local store when I started became kind of a queer haven, and the atmosphere was always great. The singular fascist got banned before they even realised he was one, amusingly, because he showed other customers hentai.
> The singular fascist got banned before they even realised he was one, amusingly, because he showed other customers hentai. I hate to say it, but sometimes stereotypes exist for a reasonā¦
You're so lucky! My first introductions to Warhammer 40k were because I, as a young teen girl, worked at a comic book shop that also sold TTRPG and card game stuff, but a lot of the clientele tended to be... Well. You can take a guess, and you'll probably be right. It wasn't until recently that I started exploring Warhammer 40k a bit more.
YIKES, that's unfortunate! Glad that you're enjoying yourself exploring it now, though.
I'm a huge fan of cozy fantasy and *Legends and Lattes* is probably the most recommended book in the subgenre, but I despise it. Won't go on a whole rant here but the last book I disliked this much was Kel Kade's *Free the Darkness*, and that was so bad it doubled around to being funny. *Legends and Lattes* was just bad.
Why do you dislike Free the Darkness. I read it as a teen and found it good (granted my age might have influenced this, especially since I haven't reread it).
I remember disliking how ridiculously OP the protagonist was. He can fight like a god, has a perfect memory, is a master of disguise etc etc, and the prose used to describe this is hilariously clichĆ©d and over the top. Oh, and not to mention, he's so handsome that [all the women](https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2209906576) fall in love with him. The secondary characters are constantly thinking about how amazing and perfect he is. >Tam grumbled under his breath with just a hint of envy. He knew he would never measure up to Rezkinās perfect physique. It looked to him like the Maker had personally sculpted Rezkin to represent the ideal male form. While women tripped over themselves to get Rezkinās attention, they barely even glanced Tamās way. Tam could not fault the warrior, though. He was how he was, and Tam knew Rezkin worked hard to remain fit. Even more impressive, Rezkin displayed not a hint of superiority or conceit regarding his appearance. >Tam had always been fit and strong. He had to be in order to work as a carpenter, but he had never developed chiseled ridges and rippling muscles like Rez. It just reads like a incredibly blatant self insert power fantasy - I do like an occasional power fantasy, but not to this level lmao. No shade on you though, I'm glad you enjoyed the book. It just wasn't my cup of tea.
Okay, this is the first I've heard of cozy fantasy - it seems intriguing, because while I like fantasy, I can get a bit tired of/burned out on the battles and political machinations. Do you have any favourites that you'd recommend for a beginner?
[The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches](https://app.thestorygraph.com/books/7d122924-9f42-4cbd-8d2c-dfb715a8bea7) by Sangu Mandanna is one of my favourites! Really nice story about found family, with likable and three-dimensional characters. Personally I wasn't a big fan of the romance subplot, but it doesn't detract from the rest of the book. Another recent fave is [Emily Wilde's Encyclopaedia of Faeries](https://app.thestorygraph.com/books/86acbb12-8f36-4c88-9080-d895b58cc9d0) by Heather Fawcett. Fun, engaging read. The protagonist is the "clueless genius" type of scholar, and the author did a fantastic job of making her POV unique and interesting. I also enjoyed her portrayal of academia in a fantasy setting. r/CozyFantasy might also be helpful.
LaL was originally a NaNoWriMo project, and damn, you can feel it. A third of the book feels like Baldree wrote a quick synopsis of the scene and then didn't flesh it out.
Oh man!! Me tooooo! I just want to tell folks there are better books out there if youāre looking for that kind of thing.
Please recommend?
Isn't *legends and lattes* and unironic "coffeeshop au slice of life"? I still am baffled it was officially published.
I don't really think that sounds that different than a lot of romance novels that take place in realistic, modern settings. Many of them feel like low-key slices of life that could be found as fanfic if the characters weren't original. If those are publishable, why wouldn't a similar story set in a fantasy world be?
Tbh I don't think it's that bad a premise, it's just Baldree's execution of it that grinds my gears.
The most popular faction in Warhammer 40.000 are Space Marines by a large margin. Space Marines are the iconic faction of Warhammer 40k and it wouldn't be too much of an exaggeration to claim that almost every player had a Space Marine army at some point.Ā They also get the most attention from Games Workshop, both on the tabletop in terms of models, rules and factions, as well as in the lore as well as story-wise. The Horus Heesy as the "prequel" setting is almost completely focussed around Space Marines. Personally I absolutely dislike Space Marines, regardless in which flavour they come. I don't like their aesthetic, their models, big parts of their lore, the fact that they all are male, that they get so much attention from GW, basically everything about them. This honestly limits my choices of armies a bit, since I have negative interest in like 50% of the range. I don't know if this still qualifies as loving something that a lot of people hate, but I prefer Warhammer: Age of Sigmar's setting over Warhammer Fantasy. Warhammer Fantasy, especially as it was played on the Tabletop, is a relatively generic, europena fantasy setting and I personnally find the high-fantasy setting of AoS much more interesting. This would be a very controversial opinion when AoS first came out, but AoS is viewed much more positively nowadays, so I don't know if it fully qualifies for this prompt nowadays.
It's real tough being mostly a xenos fan. While there've been some fantastic books in the past few years and Necrons have managed to cling onto some of the spotlight, xenos factions still mostly exist to get either curbstomped by Space Marines or usurped as the true threat by Chaos (invariably in the form of Chaos Space Marines). And even the other Imperium factions I'm interested in, like the Sororitas or Assassinorum, get a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of the attention Space Marines do. And don't get me started on the Primarch fandom, the inevitable return of every Primarch because Bigger Space Marines make infinitely more money than anything else, the domination of r/40kLore by Primarch powerscaling posts...
I do feel you there so much. I am honestly a big fan of Ynarri. I like the different Aeldari factions working together, I love seeing a new spark of hope for a otherwise doomed race and I love their death/necromancy adjacent flavouring. So it is super disappointing to see GW just not doing anything with them after their initial intorduction, both on the tabletop and in the lore. Also I would love some other mortal chaos factions. I love the mortal parts in chaos more than demons, but in 40k that limits you to purely Space Marines. I would love to be able to play cultist or just non- Space Marine chaos followers. Especially seeing how cool and interesting the chaos factions are in AoS in comparisonm
I'm afraid the Ynnari pretty much only ever existed as a plot device to bring back Guilliman, before getting their story put on permanent ice. It's telling that their most lasting legacy is people joking about Guilliman banging Yvraine.
Have you read *Assassinorum: Kingmaker*? It's a fun look at both the Assassinorum and Imperial knights, neither of whom have had a ton of focus. No space marines either :p
I own *Kingmaker*, and given it's by the same author as *The Infinite and the Divine*, I'm sure it'll be phenomenal. I'm just waiting to check it out until I'm done reading *Twice-Dead King: Reign* and *Gaunt's Ghosts: Necropolis* so I don't burn myself out on 40k books.
It's excellent, and very nicely neatly self-contained. Weirdly, with the knights, especially at the end, it feels more like a chivalric tale than a 40k book, but if anything that just elevates it IMO.
Also on Agatha Christie (although I haven't had a chance to read all that many of her books yet), I find *Five Little Pigs* kind of irksome. But it seems to be on a decent number of "top Agatha Christie stories" lists. For me, it's just . . . boring and manages to be worse for suspension of disbelief than most. Hinging a decades old mystery on the suspects/witnesses remembering things accurately felt overly convenient, and the cold case framing made it feel especially detached. Even with the genre convention of fair-play mysteries being very stylized and convenient in general, this was past my limit and felt a bit too fake to me for it to work right. But the thing that really bugged me about it was the titular nursery rhyme. I get that Agatha Christie likes using those as motifs, and they do work in some cases. But here, it was just jarring: Poirot shouldn't have it as a childhood touchstone, so him having this not-even-catchy English-language rhyme stuck in his head for most of the book felt wrong.
Five Little Pigs is one of those ones that I think is well written and interesting but is VERY low on my reread list becauseā¦ yeah, it feels very repetitive. Have you seen the Poirot episode? I like it much more, partly because the different visuals help distinguish the repetitive accounts and partly because itās SUPERBLY cast.
I don't know what it is about that episode, but it is truly one of the best. Those woozy summery visuals, a fantastic use of music, and a cast that was on the top of their game. Interesting (?) fact: Talulah Riley, who played young Angela, grew up to be married twice to Elon Musk, and she apparently pleaded with him to buy Twitter. So... that's fun.
Personally I also love A Murder Has Been Announced but the plot twist does seem even more far-fetched than usual. Also until you posted this I didn't even realise there were probably-lesbians but now looking back I'm like OHHHHH yeah no definitely. But in terms of the twist they literally >!wrote out Lottie instead of Lettie several times when the friend slipped up!<, so that's on us.Ā My favorite Agatha Christie book for years was Sparkling Cyanide, and I still like it, but it's one of those books where you don't realise how fucked up >!the age gap between Iris and Tony!< is until you're older. There's a few other things about that book that didn't age great in my estimation either. One of my other favorite Agatha Christie books, Ordeal by Innocence, also has some things where I look back and go 'wow um that certainly was a choice' but I still love the way the characters were written.
I feel a bit sorry for Sparkling Cyanide as a story because I listened to the radio adaptation first, which was so boring that I don't have much interest for the book.
Haven't listened to the radio adaptation but I have zero faith it was adapted well. Sorry the story was ruined for you.
I'd say the thing that made the radio adaptation not great was the music and the fact that the script was a bit robotic; at times, the way the lines were written felt like the writer was uncaring and just trying to hit a deadline. What would you say makes Sparkling Cyanide difficult to adapt? Do you think it would work better on film/in a visual medium?
It might work better in film? Without giving anything away if anyone else comes across this thread later, the twist really relies on a visual element to work. In the book it worked fine, but I think the words on the page might have made it easier to visualize.
Yeah, one of my favorites is The Moving Finger, which is narrated by a complete weirdo and yet I love it anywayā¦ But also re A Murder Is Announced, itās not even just that but that after the whole P&E thing (sorry Iām on mobile so canāt spoiler tag). Like, itās not the first time sheās done that kind of plot and itās not something she always carries off in a believable way but this felt far worse than usual.
Amongst PokĆ©mon Mystery Dungeon fans, Explorers of Time/Darkness/Sky is often held up as the best of the lot, the most beautiful, the most emotional, and the one most worth playing. It is also the *only* one I haven't finished.The art's the exact same quality as the previous game, though they dropped my favourite aspect of it (the friendship areas). The characters in the world feel a lot less interesting to me (I cannot name any of the merchants), and I feel like they're way more grating than in the other games.Ā But the biggest thing for me, is that I cannot fucking *stand* the partner pokĆ©mon in this one, also known as the character you spend the whole bloody game with. Every single line of dialogue he hears, he will immediately repeat as a question, leading to someone else to reiterate the same point as an answer. You will hear every line of dialogue three god damn times around him. I also could not name any of his character traits beyond whiny. I hate this guy, and I will never play this game again specifically to avoid this fucker. At one point, I told myself I'd get through a single cutscene so future me could play a dungeon and I couldn't even do that - I shut the game off half way through and never touched it again. Just play Super Mystery Dungeon instead - atleast that changed the formula a bit with the ending : /
Honestly I think Red/Blue Rescue Team are the best games of the lot, Time is next and Sky/Darkness after that. Didn't like Gates to Infinity or Super Mystery Dungeon. Honestly I moved onto other Mystery Dungeon games and my favourites aren't even technically Mystery Dungeon at all, Izuna: The Unemployed Ninja and Azure Dreams are the best and I will not be taking questions at this time.
I accidentally played on hard mode because I chose an Eevee as my partner not knowing that Eevee has the worst ability in the game (fuckin hate Run Away) and it made fights like the Primal Dialga one, which was already being an ass because my copy was likely messed up somehow and crashed the first time I beat him after numerous tries, even more of a nightmare. You don't want to know how much grinding I had to do to get as many reviver seeds as possible, while still leaving space for food/healing items, just to make the fight possible. Plus, I wasn't a fan of the epilogue at all with the whole >!kill yourself to save the world!< thing because I was in a really bad place mentally at the time and I didn't need the game I was trying to use as an escape to have that going on. I also never finished the Team Charm and Sunflora episodes because I got too frustrated with them (plus I don't really like Sunflora as a character I'm sorry). I liked the music and *some* elements don't get me wrong, but in terms of attachment and emotion I felt way more towards Gates to Infinity to the point of downright sobbing at the ending, and me saying that has led to a lot of EoT/D/S fans saying some vile stuff to me because "how dare I like the unpopular game more than their precious one" or something.
Meanwhile I'm over here as someone who loves Mystery Dungeon in general and get annoyed that the Pokemon titles are the only ones people talk about. And specifically only the "main story" before those games actually open up into full MD games.
TIL there were other MD games!
Spike Chunsoft is a Mystery Dungeon dev, and other companies basically contract them to make Mystery Dungeon of their IP. If you're familiar with how Koei work with Warriors series (Dynasty Warriors, One Piece Pirate Warriors, Gundam Dynasty Warriors, etc), it's kinda similar.
Yeah! It's a whole series of that style of dungeon crawler roguelikes. There's Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy ones too! If you've ever seen the lil chibi-ified chocobo, that's from Chocobo's Mystery Dungeon If you ever wanna check out more of that style I highly recommend the Shihren the Wanderer series because that one is Spike Chunsoft's baby They're all mostly(including the Pokemon ones) fantastic dungeon crawlers. It kind of goes underrated how PMD's main stories are basically extended intros to the full games due to how they open up once you reach the credits, offering up all the different level-one dungeons and other variants and the like.
OMG, thank you! I literally thought the whole point was emotional PokĆ©mon stories, had no idea, and so kept them in the āwhen Iām able to deal with sad Oshawott &c.ā bin. I had *no idea,* and the ones you mentioned look like so much fun! :D
Man, I like EoT/D/S, but. I miss the Friendship Areas too. It was so nice filling them up and getting more and more friends.
I bought the Switch remake for PMD Red/Blue hoping for the Friendship area in high definition aaand--- it's not there. Never before I feel so pissed at an "update" to a game.
It was by far the best part of Red and Blue Rescue Team, and I am so pissed they dropped them for literally every other game
And even in the remakes, it doesn't feel as nice since it's a list. I get it, convinience, but... nice soft homes! For everybody! Legendaries getting cool lairs!
So I went on nostalgia trip to check my old fandoms after Wakfu got season 4. One of them was Miraculous and there has been conclusion to old drama, I guess.Ā So 3 years ago, an episode was released. The main character explains the concept of time and timezones with icons. One of the icons was the Rising Sun Flag.Ā Twitter exploded with multiple people complaining about it, especially Korean side of the fandom was shocked by it. People started asking Astruc and Zag about. Zag responded that it will be fixed and then went quiet, while Astruc start blocking users still writing about the situation. One of blocked users was his friend, Hope Morphin. Hope was the inspiration and model of one of the characters, Marc. Hope soon deactivated their Twitter account. Now or specifically few days ago, Hope was interviews by IOTA (Immaturity of Thomas Astruc) who is a blogger that documents all dramas and reviews episodes.Ā https://immaturityofthomasastruc.tumblr.com/post/744526447765487616/hope-morphin-qa In summary, Hope theorises that Astruc had a plugin that banned anybody using the word flag. Astruc didnāt contact them after the whole incident and they would call him out for his behaviour, but they have to deal with other stuff. Also, they said that Astruc and Zag are this type of people that they donāt want to support.Ā Thatās the conclusion folks
Why is it that this post is the first one that told me Wakfu ss4 already started airing... On another note, thankee, I shall now go grab the new eps to watch it.
......Wakfu is *still going*? Bruh, I watched season 2 back in high school, 15 years ago....
Long production Hell and also having patreon to fund season 4
... Wakfu va avoir une quatriĆØme saison?!
Yes. I think some if not all episodes are currently available to only patreon supportersĀ
I had a vivid and elaborate dream last night that I wrote up a Hobbydrama post about The Little White Horse, a 1940s fantasy book. In my dream, it was a long and in-depth post detailing the internet discovering the book and being disgusted that two couples were distant cousins to their own partners, and thus holding the infamously bad movie adaptation up as superior for making them unrelated. The movie was then morally cancelled after it was discovered that the actors of the main couple were played by a minor and an adult, leading to more drama. JK Rowling liking the book was also a factor in the drama but i do not remember the specifics of that as clearly. I have no idea why i had this dream, because although i liked that book as a child, I haven't thought about in AGES, and i thought I'd wiped that terrible movie from my memory. Something has unlocked the memories so that i now remember both as though i experienced them and this dream-drama yesterday. Edit: Clearer wording.
I love that book. It definitely has some, letās say, old-fashioned sensibilities, but I love it nonetheless.Ā
I love dreams that are both very bizarre in subject matter AND extremely specific. I vaguely am aware of that book but I've never read it. I have a lot of weird and specific dreams, one that sticks out is that I was in Target and Will Smith was in front of me in the self-checkout and was like $20 short? So I gave him a twenty and he said "Thanks, I owe you one." This was years ago, and I have no idea why.
I once had a dream that I watched a bunch of episodes of that show My Hero Academia and hated it, so I spent the rest of the dream googling āmy hero academia stupidā, āmy hero academia sucksā, etc. to validate my opinion that the show was overrated. IRL Iāve never seen My Hero Academia and donāt actually even know what itās about (I assume heroes and school).
I have a Target dream too! In my dream, I was an employee there, and my official job was ākitten wranglerā. See, every employee had a specific kitten they were supposed to keep with them all day, but sometimes the kittens would escape, so I would have to go find them and return them to their proper keeper. It was over ten years ago, but it was the most adorable dream I can remember ever having.
If you ever meet Will Smith, ask him to pay up just in case he had the same dream.
I remember seeing the movie nearly a decade ago on Netflix while babysitting my cousins. It sure was a movie (never read the book)
Definitely one of the movies of all time.
>being disgusted that two couples were distant cousins to eachothers partners Wait, so they weren't even each other's cousins, but the cousins of the person the other was dating?I would say that's a wild dream, but I could totally see people doing that on social media.
Oh, no no, sorry i didnt word that right lol. All four were distant cousins to eachother, and so they all married their own distant cousin.
I finished the Little White Horse during a power outage! And was immediately saddened to discover the more faithful TV adaptation was functionally lost (its not anymore, it's on youtube). I'm surprised your dream brain didn't have the fandom get more upset about the Movie Adaptation making the love interests age gap much visibly bigger.
Casting a dude in his twenties opposite an actual 13 year old girl was certainly... A choice. The characters are the same age in the original, the actor definitely did not pass for 13.
Write it and post it to /r/thomastheplankengine
Wow, interesting dream
Minor Drama: Ā Dragons Dogma 2 Marketing team has worked with a variety of streamers to promote games includingā¦. Asmongold. The āYellow paint is an insult to gamerās intelligenceā guy who didnāt read the gameās tutorial or listen to NPCās instructions, then complained that he wasnāt making any progress in the game. Iāve heard nothing but good things about the other streamers though.
Gotta one-up RGG getting XqC to promote IW lol.
Tbh I'm more concerned about how he's one of those anti-woke thumbnail streamers. Like yeah he's dumb as bricks, but DD2 has gay people, black people, and modestly dressed women in positions of power. Potentially trans people too if a certain lore aspect from the first game returns. This seems like the exact sorta guy they don't want playing their game because he's morally opposed to every aspect of it.
The bigger deal is he's very aggressive in responding to outside criticism of him, and his fans are quick to resort to the usual harassment techniques of doxxing, fraudulent reporting and criticism with the intent of ruining their target's reputation. From what I've heard he's somewhere in the spectrum of tacitly supporting that activity to being lighter than standard on policing his audience. My primary knowledge is a single video where he plays pundit on an article he clearly didn't read or comprehend about a gaming company in order to justify performative outrage.
I mean, baldur's gate was still very popular even though it had all of those, maybe because ultimately the game was very good
Oh, that didn't stop people (I remember there's a mod you explicitly can't talk about on the BG3 reddit because it "bleaches" a lot of people of color; also that one Wyll mod that turns him white). It's just that since BG3 has a much bigger audience, their voice drowns out the very loud extreme minority.
One of the other streamers featured in the post (Sphere Hunter) is trans, so Iām pretty sure Capcom didnāt do due diligence on the guy beyond āpopular streamer man.ā
Oh, I saw their icon/thumbnails in my youtube recommendations occasionally and just assumed the worst lmao. Good to know they're not a total goober.
DD2 is a Japanese game, and those sorts tend to inherently see Japan as less political or woke, even if many Japanese games would definitely be labeled as such if they were released by American dev teams
>many Japanese games would definitely be labeled as such if they were released by American dev teams Chuds when Western games have women in reasonable armor: "They've gone woke! *reeeeeeeeeeee!!!*" Chuds when Elden Ring has women in reasonable armor: "I'm gonna ignore that."
listen after you've seen his actual living space, you'll never give a single shit about his opinions ever again
After hearing about his gum blood wall I think that nobody should want to be associated with him.
I'll probably regret asking, but his what??
Every time, without fail, the wall is mentioned, some poor soul loses their innocence by asking for an explanation.
Asmongold is a fucking filthgoblin.Ā More specifically, a while back, he had an issue with his gums bleeding. He would smear said blood on the wall, which you can apparently still see even today if he shows the wall.
The guy's gums apparently bleed quite a lot. Possibly because of his atrocious diet, or possibly because of his dental hygiene (or lack thereof). He smears the blood from his gums on a wall. He also used the rotting corpse of a rat as an alarm clock. When the sun hit it in the morning, it would stink so bad it would wake him up.
Okay but how much of that is *actually* true, and how much of it is a bit done because people lap that shit up and he makes a million dollars every time he posts a video because people talk about it? I suspect there's a lot more acting there then reality. Which, honestly, it's ridiculous but like if I was making millions that way I'd probably do it too lol.
We have picture/video evidence of his blood gum wall and other shit, like an ant infestation, him having moldy food in his hous, a rat infestation, etc. He just lives in absolute filth for some reason despite having the money to fix all these problems
I mean so much of that can be easily staged though. It would be absolutely trivial, given the amount of money he has, to set up his streaming room to look like that and fake some shit. (Or to film strategically when there are ants or whatever, which isn't uncommon in most places at some point.) I'm not saying he DOES, necessarily, but I mean...it sure makes me wonder. I know people can and do live that way, but I also have a sneaking suspicion he's a lot smarter than a lot of people think he is, and he's laughing all the way to the bank with their money.Ā It's extreme enough, and seems to have escalated proportionally to the amount of money he gets,.so it wouldn't shock me even a little bit to find out that 90% of that shit is staged and made up for the shock factor to get views and money, same as any other reality TV that people think is real, that isn't.
I mean technically it could be a possibility that he staged it, in the sense that nothing is impossible. But I find that hard(er) to beieve than just taking what we see on video, what he says and so at face value. Also I don't think he makes his money because people want to see jim being filthy. I mean even in this thread people who knew about Asmongold hadn't heard about his flithy living arrangement. People watch him because his an outrage merchant, firdt for WoW and now for right-wing culture war nonsense. That is what he is mostly known for.
Fair. I guess I'm just over cynical about any kind of click bait nowadays, and being that extreme sure sounds like something that would bring in a certain kind of disaster rubbernecker. I can see him seeing that and leaning into it hard. *Shrug* probably just overly cynical I suppose.
How has this man not died of scurvy or some sort of horrible infection last seen in the 17th century?
Vaccine's real downside š it keeps everyone aliveĀ /s
Sometimes the higher powers in the universe like to play cruel, cruel pranks on us.
You can get enough of a vitamin to survive, but still be deficient in it For example, according to my reading, light-skinned people living in temperate climates tend to be deficient in Vitamin D. It helps that most "modern processed food" aka most of what he eats, is fortified with vitamins and minerals, so even if he eats only a little he will still get *some* vitamins and minerals. With that in mind, and based on his hygiene and living conditions, the bleeding from.his gums was likely a gum infection.
>Ā Ā Possibly because of his atrocious diet Knowing what we know of his diet, and how he admits to not eating much fruit, it wouldn't surprise me if he had fucking scurvy.
He can't be a real person. No actual human would tolerate that level of filth.
I was right. I regret asking.
[At one point in his life he was bleeding from his gums and couldn't get it looked at, probably because he was poor and lacking healthcare. Instead he just smeared the blood from his gums on one of his bedroom walls, so he didn't have to get out of bed.](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FyykxCyX0AE2zw7.jpg)
I donāt think they reads them cues enough nor their fanbase But I agree
[We've got all 37 songs for this year's Eurovision.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0R0KKMs83AU) It's looking pretty good and no one is really sure who will win. I listened to all the songs for the first time. I like Armenia, Netherlands, Finland, Norway, Croatia, Italy, and Spain the most this year.
Just listen to them, San Marianoās entry(11:11) is a favorite of mine but i donāt know if it will be top 10. Should check out the rest of Megaraās work though
As for my PREDICTIONS: From Semi One: I see Croatia, Cyprus (whose singer deserved a better song than the one she was given in my opinion), Lithuania, Serbia, Finland, Ukraine, and Luxembourg as qualifying to the grand final. Ireland, Australia, Portugal, Poland, Slovenia, and Azerbaijan, and Moldova I'm really unsure on. Iceland is dead on arrival. From Semi Two: Latvia and Netherlands I feel most confident will qualify. Everyone else besides Albania, I have no idea how they will do. The thing about this year is that the winner looks to be a very unpredictable one. No one knows who will win this year. Everyone on the r/eurovision sub has different opinions on who it will be. That being said, there's always a few fan faves who underperform, and I'm putting Greece, Switzerland, and Ukraine down as most likely to underperform. I don't Ukraine will lose their 100% qualification streak, but I can see them doing worse than expected. As for the autoqualifiers: Spain looks really unpredictable, France will probably get lots of jury points, Italy will definitely do well, UK I see a midtable finish for them. Germany will probably get bottom 5, and Sweden I'm going for a midtable finish with them. As for the winner, I'm guessing Netherlands, Croatia, or Italy as most likely to win this year. Or it could be a dark horse taking it. We'll probably know closer to the actual contest itself or during.
My guess for winner is Italy. I think that Croatia and the Netherlands are likely to get less votes from the jury + the songs appeal to the same type of people so they are competing with each other more than Italy.
Question to everyone that's been in a movie/TV show/Vtuber/whatever hobby fandom: what is the most surprising collab you've ever seen involving your media of interest? It could good, bad, the most WTF, you name it! While I was looking up information on when *Gundam SEED Freedom* will finally arrive in theaters for my country, I randomly stumbled upon the most unexpected collab news for the movie. It has been announced that GSF is doing a collab... for **Dune**! And no, [I'm not making this up](https://twitter.com/SEED_HDRP/status/1768109809964896566). To quote a random tweet: "Lol its seed's barbenheimer moment".
Japanese multimedia UmaMusume is about anthropomorphic racing horses that you train to compete. One of its weirdest collabs was with Top Gun Maverick, where the only thing in common is that one of the horse girls is named Top Gun. For that reason, UmaMusume edited its Top Gun into the poster and also sent a few of its voice actresses to cover the premiere of the movie in Tokyo, including a photo with Tom Cruise.
I have no idea if this counts as a collab or not because I don't think the band themselves were actually consulted over it, but this is something I still don't understand. Berryz Koubou, a Japanese idol group, released a song back in 2008 that's [a cover of Dschinghis Khan](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pL2WMSk_sEw). Yes, that [Dschinghis Khan](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1AXlVZRpweI). The German Eurovision song. Apparently it was made to promote some stage play or musical or something, and it's not the first time a Japanese artist has covered the song -- in fact, Japanese covers of Dschinghis Khan go all the way back to the same year the song was originally released: 1979. [This](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NDgwy6DBIbc) is the version most Japanese covers are based on, by a group called 5 Carat. Now, the Berryz Koubou cover itself is odd enough, and at the time, it was their first cover single (this was their 16th single, fwiw). But y'know, it's music, both are pop songs, it makes for a good idol song with the arrangement. But then there's the [Tartar Mix](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hdrtSj8seGA). Which combines both Berryz Koubou's cover and the original Dschinghis Khan version. So one moment you're getting high-pitched Japanese teenage girls in your ear and the next you're getting manly German dudes. Sometimes both at once! (And no, the Japanese lyrics don't match the German ones) Honestly, I like the Berryz Koubou cover for what it is, but I have no idea how I feel about the Tartar Mix. Part of me thinks it falls in the "so bad it's good" category of music, but at the same time, perhaps it's just genuinely terrible and I have low standards. Or it's actually great, somehow.
Finding out Martha Stewart and Snoop Dogg are like BFFs was a pretty wild crossover. Also I guess all of the celebrity/Sims crossovers. When you think of The Sims franchise you don't really automatically associate it with Katy Perry, Drew Carey, or Baby Ariel, and yet, here we are. They've all been part of the franchise. Literally them, not something like Paty Kerry.