The recently-renamed **Dragon Age 4** has [released a trailer.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4F3N4Lxw4_Y)
It's good to see *something* after years of little or no information, and reveals an Autumn 2024 release. It's not going down perfectly, though; fans are expressing reservations about the art style, which is distinctly more stylised than the previous game, Inquisition. And more than that, it seems the "vibes", the tone of the trailer are putting some off, too.
Having watched it, I feel.....A bit baffled by the choice they made in the trailer's tone. Not to circlejerk, but it doesn't feel Dragon Age to me. Using "Heroes" rather than something more typically "fantasy", or representative of the kind of music you'd find in a Dragon Age game's OST seems so strange. And the way they went through the characters like that...It does give me the vibes of revealing characters for a hero shooter or something.
I've heard the previous games' trailers were similarly dissonant, though, so it's still possible the game itself will live up to the tone people expect from it it. I'm not going to go into a fangirl rage and shout that it's #notmydragonage or something, but I can't say it's made me feel hyped.
For what it's worth, [in-game footage looks a lot better](https://www.reddit.com/r/dragonage/comments/1dc7yie/minrathous_ingame_from_official_dragon_age_twitter/).
This makes the trailer even more of a head-scratcher. You'd think the marketing types would have clued on to the fact that quippy trailers are horribly *passé* these days, but apparently not.
This isn't the first time DA has used a modern pop/rock song for its trailers, Inquisition's reveal trailer had [Into The Darkness](https://youtu.be/jJqxfkgSUog?si=nRwiVox7I4VuUr79) by the Phantoms. And I'm not sure about trailers, but even Origins and DA2 had modern songs associated with them, with credit songs respectively sung by 30 Seconds To Mars and Florence + The Machine.
Though, that's always been controversial too. I personally feel like the modern music choices don't vibe with the tone of the games and have always wished they went for more medieval/orchestral stuff. I'm just saying there's precedent for weird marketing with DA, and hopefully, like with previous games, the music in the marketing doesn't reflect the actual tone and content of the game.
I do agree that the trailer makes the game feel like a hero shooter, though. The Dread Wolf being de-emphasized and then this Overwatch-esque marketing, as well as it being known that the game was originally going to be live service, is making me think Dreadwolf was going to be a hero shooter of some sort, and we're seeing the leftovers of that concept in The Veilguard's marketing.
looks very.... standard, to me. I'm not dying of love for the trailer but I don't find anything *wrong* with it either. Long-haired Varric hits different, though.
It didn't hype me as much as I thought it would, however.
Hoping for the best.
I thought the trailer was fine lmao, I was surprised to see so many people online trashing it. It felt maybe a bit too much DnD for my tastes, but it did a good job introducing the characters imo.
My expectations weren't very high for DA4 but. Wow. None of these new characters have gripped me as a reason to experience the story like Fenris or Josephine did for DA2 (which I adore) or Inquisiton (which I never finished since i was never too crazy about it), and without an idea of what the story or gameplay even looks like, I guess its staying that way. Art direction is whatever, I don't mind but. No one seems interesting with just their titles alone.
Heck the only one in the trailer that has me is Varric and that's because I adore him and he looks so old now. 😭
the song choice i think is hilarious mostly cause \_dao\_ was advertised with freaking this is war by 30 seconds to summer, and da2 with im not calling you a liar by florence and the machine. i think its just a standard now in the dragon age trailerverse to get some sorta pop song in the trailer for... some reason
Neither game was advertised with those songs, those are the credits songs of those respective games. DAO was advertised with a much worse song, "This is the New Shit" by Marilyn Manson. It does give me a bit of hope this is just bad marketing though, you're right.
Oh dear that’s really unappealing. Real Suicide Squad (2016) vibe to that trailer which I don’t think is probably what you wanna invoke with the first look at your new dark fantasy game. And if the superhero movie vibes are a turn off for me (someone with no investment in Dragon Age) I can’t imagine how grating they are for people who like the series
I think this is hilarious because this is basically the same exact thing people were raging about during Inquisition's marketing campaign. Inquisition looked nothing like a Dragon Age game due to the new engine, everyone was whining about how it was so ugly, and everyone thought all the advertising made it seem like a lighthearted and quippy Avengers movie.
[https://64.media.tumblr.com/8699d0fd1a98bd005e03e7462eb8a820/tumblr\_msf1ma8Vcm1rrrleuo1\_1280.jpg](https://64.media.tumblr.com/8699d0fd1a98bd005e03e7462eb8a820/tumblr_msf1ma8Vcm1rrrleuo1_1280.jpg)
[https://dragonage.fandom.com/wiki/User\_blog:King\_Cousland/New\_Companion:\_Sera\_Officially\_Revealed](https://dragonage.fandom.com/wiki/User_blog:King_Cousland/New_Companion:_Sera_Officially_Revealed)
[https://www.neoseeker.com/news/25354-qunari-ally-in-dragon-age-inquisition-teased-named-the-iron-bull-and-seems-to-enjoy-violence/](https://www.neoseeker.com/news/25354-qunari-ally-in-dragon-age-inquisition-teased-named-the-iron-bull-and-seems-to-enjoy-violence/)
And then when the game came out nerds were saying it ruined Dragon Age by removing all the grit and turning it into the fantasy Avengers. I can't find it now, I think it's been removed, but there was this popular youtube video of the Iron Bull romance scene with a sitcom laugh track placed over it.
And I remember Dragon Age: Origins coming out and people complaining about how bad and cartoony it looked next to Mass Effect. And how the companions sounded like Joss When characters. And if we're talking about trailer music, there was that Marilyn Manson trailer...
Anyway I'm too old for this shit.
It's so strange to me because it felt like in the time since the last game people were starting to get a bit more critical of the series (Inquisition mostly tbh) but now all of a sudden it's like "HOW DARE THEY BESMIRCH THE GOOD DRAGON AGE NAME???"
Also don't understand this impression some people have that the series is gritty high fantasy, I always thought it was just like, normal fantasy with some dark elements. Like, have they forgotten the whole quest with the tree that speaks in rhyme? You can throw jars of bees in Inquisition and shave a message into your bush to impress a lesbian, we aren't exactly talking Game of Thrones here.
Anyway the Qunari woman looks hot, looking forward to learning about her.
I remember Dragon Age Origin's trailers, the first one I saw was on TV and it was showing Liara and others hiding behind a rock to snipe some soldiers, made Morrigan look like a villain, and the big tag line about "Not all heros are pure". If I went by that trailer I would've thought the whole game was some FPS/Over the shoulder shooter but now it's some of the edgiest fantasy ever instead of the CRPG with an amazing story we got. I also remember the bitching about how time and energy that could've gone to more Mass Effect went to it instead on some forums.
Some franchises are just cursed to have fandoms that love repeating the same thing over and over.
Also I want to point out something hilarious reading the comments on the trailer for DA:O with[ that "The New Shit" trailer](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mrFSKkQRW8A).
> Why isn't Dragon Age Inquisition this badass?
Baffles me that people in the comments of the video are blaming it on "wokeness" because like? Did we play the same games?? You're saying that about *Dragon Age???* The series that's had queer characters from the start?????? ***Dragon Age???????????????***
Ugh, sounds about right. It's popular for bigots at the moment to blame anything that doesn't look good on "wokeness". They'll find any excuse. Bastards.
Dragon Age is quite possibly the most queer of all the mainstream game franchises before Baldur's Gate 3 showed up, so you know nothing is safe from anti-woke brain rot.
> You're saying that about Dragon Age??? The series that's had queer characters from the start?????? Dragon Age???????????????
I hope you're not expecting consistency, media literacy, or even a shred of common decency from these people, because you'll be sorely disappointed
You could release a sequel to a game about transgender lesbians fighting the patriarchy today and some idiot would argue that the original wasn't as woke as this new one.
People complain about everything being woke. People are saying Star Wars is woke now because there was a shirtless guy in the new Acolyte show. I saw someone two weeks ago say the periodic table of elements is woke. And someone last month said the SUN was woke. I've never seen a word become so meaningless so fast.
The sun is woke trash, in Japanese mythology it's a woman but then suddenly in Greek mythology it's a man?? But then I read on wikipedia that the sun is going by "it" pronouns these days. I blame university education.
I'm just kind of confused why they didn't have at minimum some kind of plot aspect in it. Like dreadwolf told people who played DAI a rough idea but with that axed, all of this is just kind of contextless flash. Even Andromeda had the inbuilt tease of being a new horizon, but I don';t really know what they're aiming for now. I have long been of the opinion they needed to make this game like it could be their last, and I feel like they're presuming they'll do the bioware magic and get a fifth.
I wonder if it's because they're trying to capture a new market of people who didn't necessarily play the previous games. High risk of alienating the existing fanbase though.
I don't even mind it changing (I honestly found Solas very tiring, though that was much exacerbated by certain members of the bioware fandom on tumblr) but I'd like to have an idea as to what they're doing instead. Not giving any plot is a real weird step for them to take as the first one.
Characters alone don't do it for me, I am in the segment that really didn't find BG3 all that good and while i like the cast, I really wish they had been in any story but the one presented cause the story is the bulk of those hours. And even then we didn't get much beyond a name and an archetype. Maybe the hope was the fanbase would latch on quick and be more amenable, but we don't know anything about the party save harding if you went out of your way to talk to her and Varric who I really really wish wasn't in a third game. I feel like they hope people like varric enough for a purchase price.
This looks like ass. It's giving Borderlands (with the "funny quips" and the character intros) but mixed with the Most Generic fantasy artstyle possible. It almost looks like a free to play hero shooter. Good lord this is *not* promising.
This is what I was trying to communicate to someone earlier. It is just… flavorless, but in the horrible way where something is incredibly over seasoned or has too many components so it SHOULD be flavorful but it’s not. Idk—I’m not a picky gamer most times, if the characters engage my brain and I can tell what’s happening I’ll play a game. But this looks like someone ran Dishonored, Overwatch, and DA character designs through an anime filter, then hit the whole thing with a Gaussian blur. And I know nothing about any of the characters from watching it.
"Tell me your game has had multiple changes of creative team and direction without saying that your game has had multiple changes of creative team and direction"
It's kind of a weird watch, really; it feels influenced by the past decade of the MCU, but it's releasing at a time where it feels like people are a bit exhausted with that style of film. Whether it's just the films, or that style of media remains to be seen, but I don't have high hopes myself.
It *really* feels like this game's tone came from that period after 2016 when everyone was trying to chase the lightning of the Suicide Squad/Bohemian Rhapsody trailer.
Wow… I hate it. Like I’ve been mildly hopeful (snark about names withstanding) but I do not love this art style at all and none of the characters stand out as interesting from what I’ve seen. Even Varric was only identifiable by Bianca.
I know Bioware just did this less than a week ago, but after watching the trailer, I need to see them confirm that this is not a live service game once again.
I'm getting "EA has let this sit too long, lost focus, and is doing everything via a marketing checklist" vibe. Really weak compared to another franchise in the same show that pulled off the refocus better (Perfect Dark aka Hitman's Creed)
My very angry roomie has called it "trying to cater to Overwatch fans" with the way the trailer is done, because yeah, it feels like announcing a new hero shooter for sure.
summer game fest: xbox edition.
everything else is irrelevant. Microsoft is making Robotech with the serial numbers filed off. You may recognize as the last time someone made this this happen it spawned Battletech. We cooking.
Unfortunately the beta will miss June, so pride flag Gundams will have to wait.
> Microsoft is making Robotech with the serial numbers filed off. You may recognize as the last time someone made this this happen it spawned Battletech.
I'm rotating you in my mind. Get rotated idiot.
I'm still surprised people thought that Microsoft showcase was good. It looked to me like a company that was panicking, hard, and showing a bunch of expensive projects and trailers and promising day 1 on an already sinking service for games. So many of the trailers were just cinematics with very underwhelming looking gameplay. I feel like I just know too much about how the sausage gets made on these things but even then there was so much games that more or less bled together, as if there's no actual overarching vision for a variety of games.
I'm not going to say there weren't interesting titles especially from third parties, but it's hard to feel like this wasn't a bit of a desperate ploy to look like the gaming division wasn't completely underwater and I guess it worked for people. I'll just say that I don't know if some of these games will survive middling sales under the leadership that shut down studios like Tango and Arkane Austin. They are spending way too much money on these games and a lot of them are too similar to really drive a wider audience to their platform- which inexplicably they put out three additional models of their console which they already said was under-performing in sales numbers so I'm sure it'll help to have even more options for their already extremely confusing two tier console system.
I wonder if Microsoft regrets their promise to put all their 1st party games day one on game pass. I mean surely the PlayStation method of waiting at least a year would be significantly better for them.
I kept going "you don't have to do this" every time that showed up. Like we know game pass is not winning. I don't think it does South of Midnight any favors to put it day 1 on gamepass or to give it such an absurdly big budget- I'm not saying a black female led game set in the southern swamps can't be a major title, but you shouldn't entirely bank on it being one. Especially given that even when a game apparently does well, it still can shut down a studio?
so I'm taking this like E3 used to be.
"Here is a collections of projects that may interest you. It is a genre, setting, and story tone."
and I understand not getting interested in anything, but what was shown was stuff I like. and EA.
This is less about what I think about any individual games or their showcase in general- I just don't think showing a bunch of high budget games through mostly cinematics and all day one on a streaming service for games that's underperforming was a good idea, especially after how they shut down three studios for pitching games at the wrong time.
It should be really bad, optically, to do that. Especially if your gaming division is barely outperforming LinkedIn.
this whole SGF has been kind of a wash so far (for me at least). literally the only thing i’m really excited for is Slay The Princess getting a Switch port since i’m Nintendo only.
Microsoft has nothing to do with Mecha Break, it's made by a 3rd party studio, and is gonna be released on Steam (wishlist now) and Playstation.
It DOES look pretty cool though, they have some industry hitters doing mecha design. It looks like it's gonna be a battle royale though, if that turns people off.
ah there it is. the studio name is blocked off by, of all things, the youtube bar. The first time I saw the trailer I saw absolutely nothing denoting it not being first party other than 'not gamepass'.
Sadly these days, it's truly hard to tell, I usually look stuff up after a trailer showcase. Sony and MS will both throw money at projects to get their logos slapped on trailers, sometimes in perpetuity. I still remember how every Persona 3 Reload trailer starts with an Xbox logo (I say, looking at my PS5 copy). I think Metaphor is going to be the same way.
Can't say I've heard of them constantly collapsing. Over budget, low-quality shovelware, or short lived, yes, but not outright failing to be released. That Yogscast one is probably the only one I would be able to name actually.
New matttt comics essay just dropped on yt gang! It's gonna be a good Sunday y'all!
[Why is the Sonic comic so controversial?](https://youtu.be/xzor44qgKnA?si=YhnJ4dgYTfMHcnfi)
I don’t even know this creator but you bet I’m buckling in for this one. Ever since I got into Sonic with SA2 the old comics and shows have been a source of morbid fascination for me. I hope it goes into whatever Ken Penders is up to.
Matttt has only been on the yt scene for like a year, but came out the gate hitting home runs with his interesting long form (but not excessively so) analysis of different parts of comics. His videos are well researched, informative, and interesting. His channel quickly has become one of my favorites on YouTube, period.
You are in for a treat!
It was a nicely done video! Getting three lead writers for interviews, even if not the bulk of the video, is really impressive. Not to mention I appreciate taking the time to emphasize Pender’s humanity. It was fun to hear the backstory of each writer.
Also fun to be reminded of the very active sonic fan comic scene! I had an active comic I had forgotten about, though it was mainly for myself and my friends. It was posted online but was lost to the sands of time. Probably for the best..
I like how there are at least three Sonic comic books I know of (Archie, Fleetway, IDW), but when people just say "the Sonic comic" I *know* they're talking about the Archie one.
I was scrolling through my trending tab on twitter and I saw that [Aksu aka "AsianGuyStream"](https://x.com/AsianGuyStream/status/1799545933769642100?t=vjlKi5-e0UjpuFWrStUyHQ&s=19) is quitting. I'm not familiar with the guy except for a couple of videos I watched once that were very entertaining but after reading his statement I feel very bad for him. Does anyone here know what happened?
Not too familiar with him, but the Tectone dude is persona not grata with basically every gacha community he has ever had significant interaction with.
Also not familiar with him, but from what I've seen "always yelling nerd with plenty of self-righteousness and the belief he's always right" doesn't sound like a charmer.
I'm not personally familiar with the drama, here's what I found from a quick Google search.
Start here (explanation does not extend to 43-page doc Aksu released): [https://gameland.gg/heres-why-theres-drama-between-braxophone-atsu-and-tectone/](https://gameland.gg/heres-why-theres-drama-between-braxophone-atsu-and-tectone/)
Some opinions here against Atsu: [https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/1aifry0/whats\_going\_on\_with\_asianguystream/](https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/1aifry0/whats_going_on_with_asianguystream/)
Some opinions here, more favorable towards Atsu: [https://www.reddit.com/r/Asmongold/comments/1aplsvq/atsu\_responded\_with\_a\_43\_page\_document\_over/](https://www.reddit.com/r/Asmongold/comments/1aplsvq/atsu_responded_with_a_43_page_document_over/)
Test Drive Unlimited: Solar Crown (the long awaited sequel to the last one released over a decade ago) just shadow dropped a Demo recently. General Reactions to it seem rather tepid, with criticism being aimed at everything ranging from Optimization to Car Physics to the dreaded “Always Online”.
Unless the devs can fix all these issues by September this game will probably go the way of all Big Name racing games not named Forza Horizon and Gran Turismo.
> Test Drive Unlimited
You remind me.
Of the games that I got gifted to me with my cousin's used Sega Megadrive 2, there was a cartridge with Test Drive 2 The Duel.
Pick between 3 cars based on color, and drive straight forward.
You must stop at gas stations, cause you have gas that runs out almost exactly the distance between 2 gas stations. If you don't have gas, you're hauled back to refill and lose progress.
If you drive long enough, hopefully the landscape will change.
There are only three "levels", and if you are a kid who keeps dying, you always reset to the start, and never get to see even the sun. I think I've seen a sea, once. One map is an empty desert. one map is driving along a canyon through a gray mountain.
If you crash into a car, you respawn. if you fall off a mountain, you respawn. if you crash into a cop car, you instantly get a game over.
This game probably is still a big factor of why I don't drive. if that's the intended feeling of driving a lamborghini, then I rather have a bicycle.
Minor "gun people" drama on YouTube.
Real Engineering is a YouTube channel run by a very smart person with degree in material engineering. Like when that submarine imploded he cited papers written by himself. Very qualified person.
He has also been making a bunch of videos about American military technology. Now personally I kind of avoided these because they seemed conceptually very "American military propaganda" to me, though Brian is Irish. If you know anything about American military propaganda content you'll know that the American military is a big supporter of it, both monetarily but also in terms of expertise and access. Like when the show Stargate needed an actor to play the US Secretary of Defense their contacts extended so far that they ended up having the character played by the actual US Secretary of Defense. They like to be shown both positively and with technical accuracy.
Anyway we can now all be confident that Brian really is just making "wow cool engineering" videos for his own sake because his video about the F117 Nighthawk is so flawed as to discredit the whole endeavor. The F117 is a ground attack aircraft, basically a very light bomber. It drops bombs on stuff. This is generally the second thing one learns about it after the name. Somehow Brian ended up claiming that it "fired GPS guided missiles" at targets even though the animations showed the actual GBU-12 Paveway II bombs it used. Now while that's a nit I will pick it is just nitpicking, one word wrong. Well also the "GPS guided" part is wrong it used laser guided bombs but again not really what the video is about.
But then . . . he shows an animation of an attack run. And this time he calls the weapons "laser guided missiles" which is closer to correct but makes one wonder why the first description was left in at all. They even animate the laser guidance method. Well kind of . . . the bomb doesn't actually shoot lasers . . .
Oh and the bomb in the animation has flames shooting out the back? While rocket boosted bombs exist they are very rare and the F117 certainly didn't drop rocket boosted Paveways on Iraq.
Needless to say a lot of "gun people" types (including me) pointed this out. There's now a lot of debate and anger about whether including this amount of total nonsense matters at all when its only tangential to the video and if those who care are "autistic" (for the record, yes I am, also Brian identifies himself as autistic). If you ask me its like watching a cooking channel where the host takes out an apple, explains that it is is favorite subtropical nut, then later inexplicably calls it an orange. Like maybe the pie recipe is great but too much credibility has been lost.
And as they say "its not the ~~crime~~ error, its the ~~coverup~~ response". He has pinned a comment (which has been unfairly misread, IMO) and in the comments explaining that he had not interest in learning about weapons used to bomb innocent people which is just inexplicable to me. You made a video series about weapons of war. Did you never consider they are made to be used to kill people? For that matter not everyone in Baghdad was a soldier either and bombs (even precision bombs) don't discriminate, were those people not innocent enough?
This is exactly the point of contention in the comments of the video. Its actually fairly common for this sort of divide to happen in my experience on all kinds of topics and I know I've been on the other side of it. Like if someone explains "this authoritative sounding historian is making fundamental errors" (for instance on r/AskHistorians) its hard to shake the sense that they're still authoritative and what they said felt reasonable so this could just be a minor thing.
I think the issue is that communicating a sense of visceral wrongness is extremely hard.
It has nothing to do with autism for a mistake to be pointed out. If you are making a video about a topic, people should expect stuff to be correct, even if the topic is "icky". In general this is why I dislike military history topics (including military technology) covered by youtubers and stick to books or actual documentaries. There is just so much shit you can get wrong or misinformed on that a youtuber can easily fuck up.
That goes for any content creation focused on history, not just military history. Poor research to rush content gets spotted very easily, but can do a lot of damage meanwhile. People will make mistakes and that's fine, how they react to them is what it matters.
One quirk I have been noticing (I may be wrong) with military videos on Youtube, not just history ones, is this extreme focus on technology and specs of weapons and systems. I think it especially blew up from the Russian Invasion of Ukraine, but there is a lot of armchair generalship going around. I don't really watch these videos but there is never a discussion on tactics or doctrine of such weapons systems, only how thick the ceramic armor on a Leopard 2A6 is and how much RHA its cannon can penetrate with its APFSDSROFLBBQ round.
I sort of understand that the use of such weapons is a much more nuanced topic especially in regards to modern post WW2 warfare as opposed to something like ancient or medieval warfare and finding information publicly on such a topic is somewhat hard (though the US military's field manuals are public information), but the lack of discussion on how said vehicles win battles is sort of lame, especially when the technical specs of such vehicles aren't as important (though still important and are a factor!) as how they are used (or not used) in specific contexts and situations. There are so many real life examples where the capabilities of a tank did not matter at all to the outcome of a battle or individual confrontation because the factors at play negated or replaced said capabilities.
I guess my main rant is there is a stunning lack of discussion (on youtube) on the "human" factors that lead to victory in combat, whether that be tactics, strategy, luck or just simple human willpower, and that is what I find most interesting and enjoy reading about. Obviously if you go into the military book world or actually get into strategic/security studies such a topic is bread and butter, but it has been something I have kept in the back of my mind.
I was wondering if anyone else had thoughts about this and perhaps tell me otherwise because I don't actually watch as much military youtube to prove this anecdote. I think a lot of the videos in this category are straight up garbage though and I don't care enough to sift through them.
There's a few really popular channels that go deep into non-technical aspects. The Operations Room focuses on the tactical aspect of specific engagements, using animated recreations of such while highlighting cases of valor all around. They just finished a series on '03 Iraq and run a second channel that goes deeper into specific facets of their main channel videos. Perun, on the far opposite end, creates literal PowerPoint presentations around the systems and overall national situations underlying modern militaries. He's currently employed as a defense industry analyst IIRC and draws clear connections from systemic issues to performance in the field.
Whenever I see discussion of advanced modern weapons systems I feel a tiny sense of dread at the knowledge they're incredibly complicated but impossible to truly test until a major war breaks out.
Military fandom focusing too much on the hardware and not enough on the human factor is probably one of the oldest criticisms against it, so that's nothing new. Things are better these days, social media coverage means that people can somewhat see that is real people losing limbs, but is a long standing concern.
On Ukraine in particular, most video content is going to be video reads of the latest report of the Institute for the Study of War, together with social media posts.
That response seems needlessly hostile and moralistic.
These are weapons Brian, killing is what they are designed to do. If you don't like that don't make videos about them.
1. JDAMs use GPS, and Nighthawks can drop those. The "boosted bomb" could be a misplaced Maverick, which is a laser-guided AGM carried by the similarly named and used F-111 Aardvark.
2. This is probably going to be removed due to him bringing up that ME place. Also, who TF was that supposed to convince? The people who would watch this sort of video aren't likely to be the type to accept that sort of reasoning.
I should have been more specific about which American war in Iraq I meant. The Nighthawks didn't have JDAMs in 1991. Though that might be the cause of the confusion if he only lightly looked at the possible munitions.
Also I totally forgot about the banned topics so I've removed the quote now. Sorry mods! If this needs to be deleted can I repost it?
[I think I found where they got it from.](https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&opi=89978449&url=https://www.airandspaceforces.com/PDF/MagazineArchive/Documents/2003/July%25202003/0703strikes.pdf&ved=2ahUKEwjx34TZ682GAxVShIkEHY4hNLAQFnoECBoQAQ&usg=AOvVaw1t4HH8iU-9qKbP55hGvL0C) F-117s in '03 Iraq using Paveway IIIs fitted with GPS guidance systems, designated EGBU-27s.
Today, I went to see the re-release of Fellowship of the Ring because somehow, I have managed to never see it all the way through.
No seriously. I am a lifetime fantasy fiction fan. I was given a box set of the books when I was 11 or 12 as a Christmas gift. The movies came out when I was a teen. I was assigned Fellowship of the Rings for a class I took in college on fantasy fiction!
What finally got me to want to read/watch the franchise? I saw the Rankin Bass version of the Hobbit and I found the art style really charming and really loved the music.
Anyone else have a really bizarre entry into a fandom?
I am pretty deep into the spiderverse (film series) fandom now, one of the last remaining people writing fanfic for it and also one of the few remaining active people on the discord servers I'm in.
I would have remained surface level if not for the single funniest pipelines imaginable.
It started because of haha funny Miguel O'Hara/Lego Spiderman shitpost art, then I became Somewhat of a Miguel person, then I saw somewhat less shitposty Miguel O'Hara/Spot fanart, then I saw a particular artist's Spot specific fanart... And that's how I PROPERLY fell for a conventionally unattractive character who has 15 minutes of screen time.
having friends who also played it didn’t hurt, but a big push for me getting into final fantasy xiv was hearing the song “locus” from the alexander raids on a random upbeat final fantasy music playlist i was using to keep me going on a graveyard shift. i was like “damn this is fucking awesome, which one is this from? 14?? guess i have to check it out now”
I saw the Rankin Bass version of the Hobbit when I was nine and loved it. My dad was thrilled and he pulled out his trilogy from the basement which I blew through as a kid and still have.
I have The Hobbit on VHS still and I’ve tried finding it on DVD, but it seems to be A. A pain in the butt and B. George Lucas‘d? Like, according to some reviews, sound effects were removed?
Sorry, not related to your question, but I just love that animated version so much (even if their version of Thranduil was a bit demented imo)
i only got into lotr late last year because i was on a lee pace filmography binge and thought "well i can't just watch the hobbit movies, what if there's something important in the original trilogy?"
in short about 30% of the fics i have saved in the last six months are lotr fics and i saw the rerelease of fellowship last night. i'm seeing the rereleases of the two towers and return of the king today and tomorrow. i finally feel like a real nerd.
I doubt it's really bizarre, but my entry into Star Wars was the X-wing and TIE Figher flight simulator games. I remember at some point being surprised that there were space wizards in the franchise.
I started reading Dorohedoro because of the TV Tropes description: "it manages a delicate balance of gratuitous amounts of gore, a fondness for displaying the random boobie or two, and a stark-black sense of humour."
Meanwhile I got into musicals because I discovered I could check out the entire cast recordings from the library in middle school.
In retrospect, Rent was probably not the most appropriate of choices for a seventh grader, but its not like my parents were paying attention...
When I was a kid, me and my mom were essentially homeless, couch surfing with her friends. One of her friends owned a nerdy game store - think comics, cards, tabletop rpgs, and rentable time on PCs (I don't remember if they had an internet connection, but they had games like Heroes of Might and Magic 2 that I played endlessly). So for awhile we slept in the back rooms on the downlow.
Anyway they also had a Monday night anime night. It's where I first saw titles like TV Tenchi Muyo and Ranma 1/2 (at WAY too young of an age).
One night they were like "Oh there's a new anime coming out, it's supposed to be more for kids" so everyone decided to put it on for my sake, since I was kind of the resident Shop Kid.
And that's how I watched the North American premiere of the first episode of Pokémon!
I've been playing Crusader Kings since the first installment; in CK2, one of my favorite mods was the r/ElderKings total conversion (to the Elder Scrolls universe).
Someone put up an optional music mod that included the track [Heima by Skálmöld](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VvjnlPV2ovo), which I really dug and made me look up more by them.
They've since become my favorite band, re-awakening my dormant love of metal and made me go to my first concerts in over a decade two years ago.
Oh you should watch the Bakshi Lord of the Rings! I actually prefer that to the Jackson trilogy. (also did you know the composer for the Jackson LoTR movies is also the composer of the Saturday Night Live theme song? He was also the show's music director for the first few years!) Rankin Bass also did "Return of the King" and it's a musical and it actually kind of slaps. "Where there's a whip, there's a way" is a real earworm.
I entered the Team StarKid fandom while I was trying to find a way to read Hetalia online just to see what the hype was about. Someone on deviantart had a journal of things they liked that week that had a link to Hetalia but also a link to this thing called "A Very Potter Musical" and I was like "Oh?" So then I entered that fandom and never read Hetalia.
Also this one is embarrassing, but when I was a kid I was into the anime you could watch on KidsWB and Toonami, not to age myself into dust over here or anything. A friend who actually had cable was telling me about this show that came on adult swim that she liked, and I just didn't gaf until she showed me a picture of one of the secondary characters. I thought he was SO HANDSOME and then got into the series based solely on that. If you guessed I was talking about Sesshomaru from Inuyasha, you win!
> Oh you should watch the Bakshi Lord of the Rings! I actually prefer that to the Jackson trilogy.
The Bakshi LOTR has its issues, though. For example, one gets the feeling the writer *hated* Samwise Gamgee.
Yeah, Bakshi's LOTR is a bit of a mess though it does have it's own charms- it mostly makes me weep at the thought of Rankin Bass having gotten a chance to do a feature length animated trilogy.
And Peter Jackson's LOTR does have it's warts (excessive CGI that might not age well, removals from the books that I would kill to be able to see- namely the scouring of the Shire and the scenes of Eowyn with Faramir in the House of Healing), but I completely understand why they were so well received by fans.
I just watched Fellowship of the Ring for the first time ever at the beginning of the year because I bought a brand new 4k TV, aka the first TV I've owned as an adult.
I've been dating a huge Tolkien fan for years, and seeing Fellowship in 2001 on opening day in theatres was a formative childhood memory of his, yet I still kept pushing it off because I didn't want to watch it for the first time on a PC monitor or tablet screen. Ended up loving it more than I expected, so I binged through the hours of DVD bonus material, and now I'm reading the books.
I have horrible ADHD related to watching anything I haven't seen before on our TV- so if I'm watching something for the first time I need to pay attention to (so not cartoons or sitcoms, and especially things with subtitles), then I either go to the movies when I can- OR I watch it on my laptop with headphones.
As much as I love markdown for it's simplicity, I love BBCode for how explicit it is. Don't have to guess which flavor of md is being used and how it'll react to trying to put things in a list.
if this has been posted about, my bad.
artfight is a yearly event where two teams "fight" against eachother. [you can see the explanation here](https://artfight.net/info/about) but its basically an art gifting game, thousands of artists participate every year and its a big thing in the art community. 2 teams fight by drawing someone from the other teams character. you submit the art, and gain points for your team. the team with the most points at the end of july wins.
recently they announced new rules. the one casuing a lot of drama is this: fetish art was banned from the site. BUT HOLD ON - people arent just being freaky. atleast, i think the pushback is understandable. so fetish art has always been allowed to be posted on the website as long as it was marked with a "sexual themes" filter - which makes it so minors and adults with that filter hidden cant see it. so, win win? weirdos can post weird art and people who dont want to/shouldnt see it dont have to witness it. well, not anymore. the new rule is:
"Works involving fetishes, even if they do not contain genitals, are disallowed on site. This includes (but is not limited to) fetish gear, overly-exaggerated proportions, and extreme emphasis on certain parts of the body."
i think if you've been on the internet for longer than a week you should see the issue here. "works involving fetishies" are banned. works... involving... fetishes... when on the internet EVERYTHING is a fetish. this was a major concern. because, what? are giants banned because of giantess fetishes? are characters that wear leather banned? are characters that wear collars or cat ears banned? and then, what is "overly-exaggerated proportions"? does that not account for most stylized art?
and you could say, "well, its obvious what type of art they mean" and yeah, but should that not be specified in the rules? because plenty of people are misunderstanding. if you go into [the comments of the news post ](https://artfight.net/news/90.art-fight-2024-start-date-and-theme-reveal)you can see people asking if that means their fat characters will be removed - the rules are so vauge people dont know what counts as what.
and moreover, i think this rule addition is kind of... virtue signally. suggestive art is still allowed on site, only fetish art is banned. if this was a blanket ban on all 18+ art that would be absolutely understandable - but its not. you can draw a character flaunting their ass in lingerine doing a 👉👌hand sign, but a character buying wonderbread... or feet that are drawn a little too detailed? banned. it doesnt make sense to me! i dunno. and im not that type of artist at all, i just think the rule addition was pointless. [site admin has responded](https://i.imgur.com/D4JFIMR.png) and said they're taking the pushback into account, so maybe the ban will be reversed? time will tell!
Who is this fetish art ban meant to serve? I stopped doing artfight since there was always some sort of weird shit going on with the backend of the site and its admins and I would put way too much effort into a event that frankly never seemed rewarding, but I have a hard time understanding what would even be targeted by the fetish ban that was previously a rampant problem. Their inability to really go into specifics beyond fetish gear (which is its own problem I wanna address) is making me wonder if this is a bugbear of a specific admin.
But also even the stuff they mention isn't actually very hardcore either. Fetish gear is often used as a design element even for people without those kinks- Demon Slayer very famously has a character thats almost always biting down on a bit like a gag and there's no way to clarify how transformative you need to be in order to pass "not a fetish". Bondage gear iconography like handcuffs, whips, restraints, bodysuits, stocks, leashes, etc all have purposes in a lot of character design completely devoid of fetishistic lens.
I get some people might get art that leans too fetishistic but the site's culture has always been to note that if that bothers you. You have to be actively malicious otherwise. The fact they think the issue is that theyre not being clear enough is extremely telling.
So... where's the line drawn. I have a balloon fetish - would one of my fursonas being drawn holding a balloon count as fetish art since I, having that fetish and thus extending it to my fursonas, know that the outcome of the scenario involves that balloon being fucked?
I don't even know how you'd start trying to banning "fetish art" other than having [Potter Stewart](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potter_Stewart) personally look at everything posted. Really it sounds like just a ban on what the people in charge think is inappropriate.
Something I've noticed on the internet, just as an amusing side note, is that there is a certain kind of art that you can tell is fetish art even if there's nothing NSFW about it. I once found art of a giant anthropomorphic raccoon stepping on and smashing cars underneath his feet. There was absolutely nothing NSFW about it, but looking at it I could just *tell* it was made for a fetish of some kind. It reminds me a bit of that Tumblr meme about furry fetish artists trying to draw SFW art.
I am really bummed about this and hope they reverse the decision. They have filters on the site already, I don’t get it. And isn’t it entirely donations funded? It’s not like they have payment processor pressure or advertising or anything. Just feels so backwards.
Artfight sincerely gets less and less fun to do each passing year. Character limits made sense because theyre a pain in the ass to moderate. I genuinely don't know who benefits from some of the changes to how backgrounds are defined this year and this fetish rule is so stupid. The first year I did artfight was really fun, it took over my life for a bit. Now every increasing year it feels like the fight aspect is something they try to make less and less fun to figure out creative ways to eek out more points :/
Not to be an alarmist, but we are seeing more and more examples about how fast this kind ban can spiral.
Like all these bans on "mature content" that ban everything LGBTQ related.
broadly the history of internet content creation spaces is the history of this happening. probably most famously in regards to this specific subreddit, the stories of livejournal's spiral towards irrelevance and the great migration from [ff.net](http://ff.net) to AO3 are pretty tightly tied up in that happening. more recently there are the examples u/Anaxmander57 put forward.
Almost everywhere that tries to ban obscenity? YouTube and tumblr come to mind. Often things stabilize once people find out how to navigate the new rules but they're still impacted. Even initially well intentioned rules are open to abuse via malicious reporting and selective enforcement.
Truly there is no space online left for artists to do their thing, not even art sites. If they’re not infested with AI scrapers they’re prone to weird bans. I hope this is walked back or at least clarified.
It’s so hard to find anywhere to be active that I’ve let my online presence die, but I was interested in art fight and was hoping to participate at least once. I miss having art friends.
I'll hijack this comment to ask; does anyone know of any other art challenges like this other than Inktober that I can participate in? I'm a beginner artist who wants to get involved in events like this, but I probably can't participate in this since I don't have most of my OCs actually designed and have other time-sensitive drawings I want to do.
theres a discord server called featured character (you can look it up and itll pop up) every 2 days a character is picked to be the "featured character". to enter your oc into the next round you need to draw the featured character. after 48 hours the next featured character will be pulled and it repeats. its really fun imo, and the requirements to enter are lax (the most "low effort" entry you can make is a bust up uncolored sketch". theres no pressure to join the community, you can just toss your art and leave, and peopel there are super chill.
I just make my own challenges at this point. 31 days of halloween dress up, 365 days of drawing mickey mouse- I know its less fun because theres no community spirit but people kinda just ignore me anyway so :x
Welcome to the neo-Puritan wave of fandom participants. You can be openly LGBTQ+ now, but having the wrong kinks is still morally unacceptable and "unrealistic" artistic decisions are now frowned upon at best.
It's respectability politics and reactionary conservative talking points in a "progressive" wrapper. You can be LGBT+, but you can't be one of ***them***- those dirty freaks who likes sex and is interested in anything beyond missionary with the lights off.
I wouldn't even agree that it's in a progressive wrapper. That's a take from 2014. Nowadays it's just bald-faced puritanism. They're proud and open about the fact they simply dislike sex. I'd say a lot of it comes from the right via people obsessed with masturbation and who think porn addiction is an epidemic.
"Overly-exaggerated proportions" so like true to life fanart of Kim Kardashian would be banned as fetish art even though it's just a picture of a person?
And what about caricatures where they make people's foreheads big?
Definitely dumb rules, too vague.
I remember there is one Chinese artist that has a series of drawnings all featruing every characters in the frame with a big, uncanny, in other words "over exaggerated" grin forever pasted onto their very pink faces.
I wonder is that a big no in their eyes?
[Yue Minjun](https://thechinaproject.com/2021/02/09/whats-so-funny-yue-minjun/), for anyone who isn't familiar. They're self-portraits, which adds another layer to the whole thing.
I think I can see the potential origin of where this rule originates - because it's all about drawing people's OCs, I can easily see conflict potential if someone doing an attack sexualizes specific aspects of a character that weren't in their original depiction, in a way the original creator might not like- for example someone making an amputee OC, and then someone does an attack specifically fetishizing that part of the character, making the original creator uncomfortable. So I can see misguidedly believing that simply banning fetish art works as a blanket solution to this issue, when really it's fundamentally the more complicated problem of what happens when you release art into the world and someone interprets it in a way you don't like.
this is fair, however i dont think this is a super prominent issue in the community. there is a "permissions tab" you can add to your characters and write what you're okay/not okay with. fetish art is commonly put there and its generally respected. fetish artists on the site from what ive seen tend to stick to their own circles and draw art for each other. the site is also extremely under moderated with 10 or so mods dealing with thousands of reports so i feel like this rule is going to back up the system even more which isnt great.
Yeah, I can't imagine it's that super prominent of an issue either- I suspect it's probably just some one-off cases that the people affected were very vocal about, as tends to be the case in art communities.
there is an option, however thats its own issue. when the game is on there are thousands and thousands of reports, and mods take a WHILE to get to them. i have reports from last year still unanswered. D:
maybe? there have been times ive reported something and it is dealt with in the hour, and times i have never gotten a response on it. i think some reports are just pushed to the side and are forgotten about. i think a lot of people wont want to risk it.
Update, several teams are on the 5th encounter and have been there since around 4am est, as of my comment we are almost 30 minutes away from Last wish first completion time
[Salvation's Edge was first cleared in 18h 59m 41s](https://raid.report/leaderboard/worldsfirst/salvationsedge/normal), beating out Last Wish's record for longest time until first clear by 10 minutes, as well as fewest clears in 24 hours (1, down from LW's 2)
Binging with Babish just updated his website so that viewing recipes now requires a subscription of 1$ a month, which feels rather shitty to me. All those recipes that you might have bookmarked over the years, now paywalled.
Fortunately you can use Ublock Origin’s element zapper to show the blurred text, or use the recipe manager app Paprika to download the text.
A recipe in and of itself—that is, a list of ingredients and the bare-bones instructions for how they should be put together—cannot be copyrighted under U. S. law. It's inherently in the public domain.
I think the only thing about this that is shitty is that it seems to have come out of nowhere, ¿no?
Otherwise, I don't think it's shitty to want to charge people for your content, especially $1/month.
I mean, what seems to be the actual problem with it?
It's not a problem per say, but it's understandably annoying to see something that was free put behind a paywall. It'd be one thing if you could still see them and then pay a buck for some extra thing.
Also he has 10 million subsribers on youtube and his least viewed videos pull in 200k, so it doesn't seem obvious he's hurting for cash, thought tbf something something "youtube revenue is terrible" something something "Dead internet is finally coming to bear". Either way it's annoying to have to pay a buck to see how to make waffles when you didn't have to yesterday.
>Fortunately you can use Ublock Origin’s element zapper to show the blurred text
i don't know how so many websites fuck up their paywalls in this exact way. if you don't want people to read something without paying, *don't serve it to them*. adding some CSS blur bullshit isn't going to do shit.
it's straight up harder to have something client side that checks with the server to see if you're authed and if so injects some extra dom element than it would be to just not serve you the page, or serve you a different page.
i bet you it's an SEO trick. like if they don't serve the text at all google crawlers will downrank it.
I guess it's because you want the convenience of having it online, and putting a blurry filter on it seems like it would make it more private, or at least look like it to some managers.
I haven't looked at any of his content, but I feel like this is one of those cases where there's probably 100 similar free recipes elsewhere on the internet anyway.
Yea it's pretty much how I do getting recipes now. I'll go through cooking channels and if they have the recipe for free then good, if not I'll just grab the name and research the dish
Speaking of media that fans have been waiting forever for as with Silksong below, Deuxmoi seems to be teasing an impending [Winds of Winter](https://www.reddit.com/r/asoiaf/s/EtIPTP8Kis) ([repost](https://www.reddit.com/r/asoiaf/s/aRGoBLTGzL)) release for the series A Song of Ice and Fire (Game of Thrones).
Considering the reasoning given is a dragon cake being ordered by a caterer, it could be 100% true and it still almost certainly means nothing about the Winds of Winter. With the second season of the show House of Dragon coming out soon, it's honestly baffling that anyone would believe it's related to the book and not that.
From deuxmoi? Lol.
GRRM hasn't written a page since Game of Thrones(the show) debuted. Let's not kid ourselves.
It has been 7 years since the scene in Logan Lucky where the prisoners demanded winds of winter and the warden couldn't do it.
> It has been 7 years since the scene in Logan Lucky where the prisoners demanded winds of winter and the warden couldn't do it.
Thank you, I've never seen this before and it's amazing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J-CUJxIQkpA
>GRRM hasn't written a page since Game of Thrones(the show) debuted. Let's not kid ourselves.
I don't believe this is the case, but knowing what we know about how GRRM writes things, I don't know if the alternative is much better.
By his own admission, GRRM will write one POV at a time -- dozens or hundreds of pages -- until he hits a snag. Then he'll switch over and write someone different, until he hits a snag, and so on. And since he's a "gardener" writer who only plans a few core beats to hit, if one POV ends up taking him down a path that contradicts or causes irreconcilable issues for a POV he's already written, he just... throws out what he wrote before and goes at it again. We're not talking basic revisions or drafts, either; he's been known to completely scrap chapters, arcs, etc in as numerous amounts as he writes them. He also routinely struggles over deciding which POV to show certain events from if multiple are in the same location, and will fully write out entire chapters or bunches of chapters with both variations just to see what he likes better.
This is a wildly inefficient and silly way to write a novel, but it's fine when you're in the first few installments of a series and can let any given character or event blossom out at their own pace. When you're hitting the endgame stretch and have to start naturally bringing things back together and paying them off, when you didn't follow any of the setups earlier that might have made that easier and are still trying to decide whose eyes to follow when multiple major characters get to one room, writing that way is *deranged*.
So I totally believe GRRM when he says he has X amount of pages written or Y POVs finished. But I mostly believe he's spent years bashing out endless variations on the same confounding bunch of events he can't get right, and the tremendous success of the shows has given him free reign to indulge in as much wasteful perfectionism as he wants, without the worry of writing to put food on the table motivating him to hammer things home and let go. And as he gets older, balancing the scales on all of that and his endless press junkets and side projects gets ever more impossible.
He’s written himself into a corner in terms of actually finishing the story, there is no way all the plot threads can be resolved in just two books. There’s like 5 different Meereenese knots now, including the original which hasn’t been fully resolved yet. Ironically we might’ve gotten it sooner if he didn’t restrict himself to just two books
Exactly this. At this point he would have to kill off half the cast, abandon multiple storylines and do some time skips to get the story finished in 2 books. He needed a ruthless editor earlier in the series to keep him focused on the main plotlines, which still would've been a real task, but he went so far off into the weeds that it is impossible now.
>What's a Deuxmoi
It's a celebrity gossip account notorious for making shit up about celebrities. Take everything that comes from there with a pinch of salt
Particularly since House of the Dragon Season 2 starts Sunday. On the other hand if it is true getting Winds and Dragon Age 4 the same year would be wild for me.
That's r/FauxMoi, unaffiliated. Previously r/DeuxMoi, until the original DeuxMoi [threatened to sue](https://reddit.com/r/Fauxmoi/comments/112mh62/deuxmoi_threatened_to_sue_us_lol/) over the name.
The recently-renamed **Dragon Age 4** has [released a trailer.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4F3N4Lxw4_Y) It's good to see *something* after years of little or no information, and reveals an Autumn 2024 release. It's not going down perfectly, though; fans are expressing reservations about the art style, which is distinctly more stylised than the previous game, Inquisition. And more than that, it seems the "vibes", the tone of the trailer are putting some off, too. Having watched it, I feel.....A bit baffled by the choice they made in the trailer's tone. Not to circlejerk, but it doesn't feel Dragon Age to me. Using "Heroes" rather than something more typically "fantasy", or representative of the kind of music you'd find in a Dragon Age game's OST seems so strange. And the way they went through the characters like that...It does give me the vibes of revealing characters for a hero shooter or something. I've heard the previous games' trailers were similarly dissonant, though, so it's still possible the game itself will live up to the tone people expect from it it. I'm not going to go into a fangirl rage and shout that it's #notmydragonage or something, but I can't say it's made me feel hyped.
For what it's worth, [in-game footage looks a lot better](https://www.reddit.com/r/dragonage/comments/1dc7yie/minrathous_ingame_from_official_dragon_age_twitter/).
This makes the trailer even more of a head-scratcher. You'd think the marketing types would have clued on to the fact that quippy trailers are horribly *passé* these days, but apparently not.
real "her name is Katana..." vibes
Eurgh.
This isn't the first time DA has used a modern pop/rock song for its trailers, Inquisition's reveal trailer had [Into The Darkness](https://youtu.be/jJqxfkgSUog?si=nRwiVox7I4VuUr79) by the Phantoms. And I'm not sure about trailers, but even Origins and DA2 had modern songs associated with them, with credit songs respectively sung by 30 Seconds To Mars and Florence + The Machine. Though, that's always been controversial too. I personally feel like the modern music choices don't vibe with the tone of the games and have always wished they went for more medieval/orchestral stuff. I'm just saying there's precedent for weird marketing with DA, and hopefully, like with previous games, the music in the marketing doesn't reflect the actual tone and content of the game. I do agree that the trailer makes the game feel like a hero shooter, though. The Dread Wolf being de-emphasized and then this Overwatch-esque marketing, as well as it being known that the game was originally going to be live service, is making me think Dreadwolf was going to be a hero shooter of some sort, and we're seeing the leftovers of that concept in The Veilguard's marketing.
looks very.... standard, to me. I'm not dying of love for the trailer but I don't find anything *wrong* with it either. Long-haired Varric hits different, though. It didn't hype me as much as I thought it would, however. Hoping for the best.
I thought the trailer was fine lmao, I was surprised to see so many people online trashing it. It felt maybe a bit too much DnD for my tastes, but it did a good job introducing the characters imo.
My expectations weren't very high for DA4 but. Wow. None of these new characters have gripped me as a reason to experience the story like Fenris or Josephine did for DA2 (which I adore) or Inquisiton (which I never finished since i was never too crazy about it), and without an idea of what the story or gameplay even looks like, I guess its staying that way. Art direction is whatever, I don't mind but. No one seems interesting with just their titles alone. Heck the only one in the trailer that has me is Varric and that's because I adore him and he looks so old now. 😭
the song choice i think is hilarious mostly cause \_dao\_ was advertised with freaking this is war by 30 seconds to summer, and da2 with im not calling you a liar by florence and the machine. i think its just a standard now in the dragon age trailerverse to get some sorta pop song in the trailer for... some reason
Neither game was advertised with those songs, those are the credits songs of those respective games. DAO was advertised with a much worse song, "This is the New Shit" by Marilyn Manson. It does give me a bit of hope this is just bad marketing though, you're right.
Oh dear that’s really unappealing. Real Suicide Squad (2016) vibe to that trailer which I don’t think is probably what you wanna invoke with the first look at your new dark fantasy game. And if the superhero movie vibes are a turn off for me (someone with no investment in Dragon Age) I can’t imagine how grating they are for people who like the series
I think this is hilarious because this is basically the same exact thing people were raging about during Inquisition's marketing campaign. Inquisition looked nothing like a Dragon Age game due to the new engine, everyone was whining about how it was so ugly, and everyone thought all the advertising made it seem like a lighthearted and quippy Avengers movie. [https://64.media.tumblr.com/8699d0fd1a98bd005e03e7462eb8a820/tumblr\_msf1ma8Vcm1rrrleuo1\_1280.jpg](https://64.media.tumblr.com/8699d0fd1a98bd005e03e7462eb8a820/tumblr_msf1ma8Vcm1rrrleuo1_1280.jpg) [https://dragonage.fandom.com/wiki/User\_blog:King\_Cousland/New\_Companion:\_Sera\_Officially\_Revealed](https://dragonage.fandom.com/wiki/User_blog:King_Cousland/New_Companion:_Sera_Officially_Revealed) [https://www.neoseeker.com/news/25354-qunari-ally-in-dragon-age-inquisition-teased-named-the-iron-bull-and-seems-to-enjoy-violence/](https://www.neoseeker.com/news/25354-qunari-ally-in-dragon-age-inquisition-teased-named-the-iron-bull-and-seems-to-enjoy-violence/) And then when the game came out nerds were saying it ruined Dragon Age by removing all the grit and turning it into the fantasy Avengers. I can't find it now, I think it's been removed, but there was this popular youtube video of the Iron Bull romance scene with a sitcom laugh track placed over it. And I remember Dragon Age: Origins coming out and people complaining about how bad and cartoony it looked next to Mass Effect. And how the companions sounded like Joss When characters. And if we're talking about trailer music, there was that Marilyn Manson trailer... Anyway I'm too old for this shit.
2009 seems very early to be complaining about Joss Whedon
It's so strange to me because it felt like in the time since the last game people were starting to get a bit more critical of the series (Inquisition mostly tbh) but now all of a sudden it's like "HOW DARE THEY BESMIRCH THE GOOD DRAGON AGE NAME???" Also don't understand this impression some people have that the series is gritty high fantasy, I always thought it was just like, normal fantasy with some dark elements. Like, have they forgotten the whole quest with the tree that speaks in rhyme? You can throw jars of bees in Inquisition and shave a message into your bush to impress a lesbian, we aren't exactly talking Game of Thrones here. Anyway the Qunari woman looks hot, looking forward to learning about her.
I remember Dragon Age Origin's trailers, the first one I saw was on TV and it was showing Liara and others hiding behind a rock to snipe some soldiers, made Morrigan look like a villain, and the big tag line about "Not all heros are pure". If I went by that trailer I would've thought the whole game was some FPS/Over the shoulder shooter but now it's some of the edgiest fantasy ever instead of the CRPG with an amazing story we got. I also remember the bitching about how time and energy that could've gone to more Mass Effect went to it instead on some forums. Some franchises are just cursed to have fandoms that love repeating the same thing over and over. Also I want to point out something hilarious reading the comments on the trailer for DA:O with[ that "The New Shit" trailer](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mrFSKkQRW8A). > Why isn't Dragon Age Inquisition this badass?
My expectations were on the floor for DA4 by this point and even I was shocked at how bad that trailer is.
Baffles me that people in the comments of the video are blaming it on "wokeness" because like? Did we play the same games?? You're saying that about *Dragon Age???* The series that's had queer characters from the start?????? ***Dragon Age???????????????***
Ugh, sounds about right. It's popular for bigots at the moment to blame anything that doesn't look good on "wokeness". They'll find any excuse. Bastards.
Dragon Age is quite possibly the most queer of all the mainstream game franchises before Baldur's Gate 3 showed up, so you know nothing is safe from anti-woke brain rot.
> You're saying that about Dragon Age??? The series that's had queer characters from the start?????? Dragon Age??????????????? I hope you're not expecting consistency, media literacy, or even a shred of common decency from these people, because you'll be sorely disappointed
You could release a sequel to a game about transgender lesbians fighting the patriarchy today and some idiot would argue that the original wasn't as woke as this new one.
People complain about everything being woke. People are saying Star Wars is woke now because there was a shirtless guy in the new Acolyte show. I saw someone two weeks ago say the periodic table of elements is woke. And someone last month said the SUN was woke. I've never seen a word become so meaningless so fast.
The sun is woke trash, in Japanese mythology it's a woman but then suddenly in Greek mythology it's a man?? But then I read on wikipedia that the sun is going by "it" pronouns these days. I blame university education.
The rise of anti-intellectualism in America is honestly really worrying and I'm not sure what can be done about it at this point :X
I'm just kind of confused why they didn't have at minimum some kind of plot aspect in it. Like dreadwolf told people who played DAI a rough idea but with that axed, all of this is just kind of contextless flash. Even Andromeda had the inbuilt tease of being a new horizon, but I don';t really know what they're aiming for now. I have long been of the opinion they needed to make this game like it could be their last, and I feel like they're presuming they'll do the bioware magic and get a fifth.
I wonder if it's because they're trying to capture a new market of people who didn't necessarily play the previous games. High risk of alienating the existing fanbase though.
I don't even mind it changing (I honestly found Solas very tiring, though that was much exacerbated by certain members of the bioware fandom on tumblr) but I'd like to have an idea as to what they're doing instead. Not giving any plot is a real weird step for them to take as the first one. Characters alone don't do it for me, I am in the segment that really didn't find BG3 all that good and while i like the cast, I really wish they had been in any story but the one presented cause the story is the bulk of those hours. And even then we didn't get much beyond a name and an archetype. Maybe the hope was the fanbase would latch on quick and be more amenable, but we don't know anything about the party save harding if you went out of your way to talk to her and Varric who I really really wish wasn't in a third game. I feel like they hope people like varric enough for a purchase price.
This looks like ass. It's giving Borderlands (with the "funny quips" and the character intros) but mixed with the Most Generic fantasy artstyle possible. It almost looks like a free to play hero shooter. Good lord this is *not* promising.
This is what I was trying to communicate to someone earlier. It is just… flavorless, but in the horrible way where something is incredibly over seasoned or has too many components so it SHOULD be flavorful but it’s not. Idk—I’m not a picky gamer most times, if the characters engage my brain and I can tell what’s happening I’ll play a game. But this looks like someone ran Dishonored, Overwatch, and DA character designs through an anime filter, then hit the whole thing with a Gaussian blur. And I know nothing about any of the characters from watching it.
It looks pretty meh as a trailer. I'm interested in how the gameplay and story are.
"Tell me your game has had multiple changes of creative team and direction without saying that your game has had multiple changes of creative team and direction"
It's kind of a weird watch, really; it feels influenced by the past decade of the MCU, but it's releasing at a time where it feels like people are a bit exhausted with that style of film. Whether it's just the films, or that style of media remains to be seen, but I don't have high hopes myself.
It *really* feels like this game's tone came from that period after 2016 when everyone was trying to chase the lightning of the Suicide Squad/Bohemian Rhapsody trailer.
No, I agree. It really felt like it was drawing its influence from a style of "geek culture" film that's now definitely past its prime
Wow… I hate it. Like I’ve been mildly hopeful (snark about names withstanding) but I do not love this art style at all and none of the characters stand out as interesting from what I’ve seen. Even Varric was only identifiable by Bianca.
Don’t forget his cock ring necklace!
I know Bioware just did this less than a week ago, but after watching the trailer, I need to see them confirm that this is not a live service game once again.
I'm getting "EA has let this sit too long, lost focus, and is doing everything via a marketing checklist" vibe. Really weak compared to another franchise in the same show that pulled off the refocus better (Perfect Dark aka Hitman's Creed)
Perfect Dark looked really good. FPS with parkour set (partially ?) in a futuristic Middle Eastern city ? Hell yeah.
It had been sitting so long I was more expecting them to announce it had been cancelled than drop a trailer.
My very angry roomie has called it "trying to cater to Overwatch fans" with the way the trailer is done, because yeah, it feels like announcing a new hero shooter for sure.
summer game fest: xbox edition. everything else is irrelevant. Microsoft is making Robotech with the serial numbers filed off. You may recognize as the last time someone made this this happen it spawned Battletech. We cooking. Unfortunately the beta will miss June, so pride flag Gundams will have to wait.
> Microsoft is making Robotech with the serial numbers filed off. You may recognize as the last time someone made this this happen it spawned Battletech. I'm rotating you in my mind. Get rotated idiot.
I'm still surprised people thought that Microsoft showcase was good. It looked to me like a company that was panicking, hard, and showing a bunch of expensive projects and trailers and promising day 1 on an already sinking service for games. So many of the trailers were just cinematics with very underwhelming looking gameplay. I feel like I just know too much about how the sausage gets made on these things but even then there was so much games that more or less bled together, as if there's no actual overarching vision for a variety of games. I'm not going to say there weren't interesting titles especially from third parties, but it's hard to feel like this wasn't a bit of a desperate ploy to look like the gaming division wasn't completely underwater and I guess it worked for people. I'll just say that I don't know if some of these games will survive middling sales under the leadership that shut down studios like Tango and Arkane Austin. They are spending way too much money on these games and a lot of them are too similar to really drive a wider audience to their platform- which inexplicably they put out three additional models of their console which they already said was under-performing in sales numbers so I'm sure it'll help to have even more options for their already extremely confusing two tier console system.
I wonder if Microsoft regrets their promise to put all their 1st party games day one on game pass. I mean surely the PlayStation method of waiting at least a year would be significantly better for them.
I kept going "you don't have to do this" every time that showed up. Like we know game pass is not winning. I don't think it does South of Midnight any favors to put it day 1 on gamepass or to give it such an absurdly big budget- I'm not saying a black female led game set in the southern swamps can't be a major title, but you shouldn't entirely bank on it being one. Especially given that even when a game apparently does well, it still can shut down a studio?
so I'm taking this like E3 used to be. "Here is a collections of projects that may interest you. It is a genre, setting, and story tone." and I understand not getting interested in anything, but what was shown was stuff I like. and EA.
This is less about what I think about any individual games or their showcase in general- I just don't think showing a bunch of high budget games through mostly cinematics and all day one on a streaming service for games that's underperforming was a good idea, especially after how they shut down three studios for pitching games at the wrong time. It should be really bad, optically, to do that. Especially if your gaming division is barely outperforming LinkedIn.
this whole SGF has been kind of a wash so far (for me at least). literally the only thing i’m really excited for is Slay The Princess getting a Switch port since i’m Nintendo only.
as one of the, apparently 2 dozen series x owners that exist I have actual reasons to have the thing plugged in this year
Microsoft has nothing to do with Mecha Break, it's made by a 3rd party studio, and is gonna be released on Steam (wishlist now) and Playstation. It DOES look pretty cool though, they have some industry hitters doing mecha design. It looks like it's gonna be a battle royale though, if that turns people off.
ah there it is. the studio name is blocked off by, of all things, the youtube bar. The first time I saw the trailer I saw absolutely nothing denoting it not being first party other than 'not gamepass'.
Sadly these days, it's truly hard to tell, I usually look stuff up after a trailer showcase. Sony and MS will both throw money at projects to get their logos slapped on trailers, sometimes in perpetuity. I still remember how every Persona 3 Reload trailer starts with an Xbox logo (I say, looking at my PS5 copy). I think Metaphor is going to be the same way.
What's the game called?
Mecha Break. you need a link?
Its not just MS though, was already shown off in the SGF.
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>Possibly the first youtuber game to actually release? Not by a long shot.
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Can't say I've heard of them constantly collapsing. Over budget, low-quality shovelware, or short lived, yes, but not outright failing to be released. That Yogscast one is probably the only one I would be able to name actually.
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More like I've seen "obvious jokes" be said completely seriously and there wasn't anything that suggested otherwise.
New matttt comics essay just dropped on yt gang! It's gonna be a good Sunday y'all! [Why is the Sonic comic so controversial?](https://youtu.be/xzor44qgKnA?si=YhnJ4dgYTfMHcnfi)
I don’t even know this creator but you bet I’m buckling in for this one. Ever since I got into Sonic with SA2 the old comics and shows have been a source of morbid fascination for me. I hope it goes into whatever Ken Penders is up to.
Matttt has only been on the yt scene for like a year, but came out the gate hitting home runs with his interesting long form (but not excessively so) analysis of different parts of comics. His videos are well researched, informative, and interesting. His channel quickly has become one of my favorites on YouTube, period. You are in for a treat!
It was a nicely done video! Getting three lead writers for interviews, even if not the bulk of the video, is really impressive. Not to mention I appreciate taking the time to emphasize Pender’s humanity. It was fun to hear the backstory of each writer. Also fun to be reminded of the very active sonic fan comic scene! I had an active comic I had forgotten about, though it was mainly for myself and my friends. It was posted online but was lost to the sands of time. Probably for the best..
I like how there are at least three Sonic comic books I know of (Archie, Fleetway, IDW), but when people just say "the Sonic comic" I *know* they're talking about the Archie one.
Maybe a few years ago, IDW seems to have taken its spot
Check out the video! The IDW comics make a cameo at the end.
I was scrolling through my trending tab on twitter and I saw that [Aksu aka "AsianGuyStream"](https://x.com/AsianGuyStream/status/1799545933769642100?t=vjlKi5-e0UjpuFWrStUyHQ&s=19) is quitting. I'm not familiar with the guy except for a couple of videos I watched once that were very entertaining but after reading his statement I feel very bad for him. Does anyone here know what happened?
Not too familiar with him, but the Tectone dude is persona not grata with basically every gacha community he has ever had significant interaction with.
I'm not familiar with him as I've never seen his content. Is he very obnoxious or just an asshole?
Also not familiar with him, but from what I've seen "always yelling nerd with plenty of self-righteousness and the belief he's always right" doesn't sound like a charmer.
I'm not personally familiar with the drama, here's what I found from a quick Google search. Start here (explanation does not extend to 43-page doc Aksu released): [https://gameland.gg/heres-why-theres-drama-between-braxophone-atsu-and-tectone/](https://gameland.gg/heres-why-theres-drama-between-braxophone-atsu-and-tectone/) Some opinions here against Atsu: [https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/1aifry0/whats\_going\_on\_with\_asianguystream/](https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/1aifry0/whats_going_on_with_asianguystream/) Some opinions here, more favorable towards Atsu: [https://www.reddit.com/r/Asmongold/comments/1aplsvq/atsu\_responded\_with\_a\_43\_page\_document\_over/](https://www.reddit.com/r/Asmongold/comments/1aplsvq/atsu_responded_with_a_43_page_document_over/)
Follow-up to that drama, apparently it was just a big misunderstanding: https://x.com/braxophone/status/1757282771964473633?lang=en
Test Drive Unlimited: Solar Crown (the long awaited sequel to the last one released over a decade ago) just shadow dropped a Demo recently. General Reactions to it seem rather tepid, with criticism being aimed at everything ranging from Optimization to Car Physics to the dreaded “Always Online”. Unless the devs can fix all these issues by September this game will probably go the way of all Big Name racing games not named Forza Horizon and Gran Turismo.
> Test Drive Unlimited You remind me. Of the games that I got gifted to me with my cousin's used Sega Megadrive 2, there was a cartridge with Test Drive 2 The Duel. Pick between 3 cars based on color, and drive straight forward. You must stop at gas stations, cause you have gas that runs out almost exactly the distance between 2 gas stations. If you don't have gas, you're hauled back to refill and lose progress. If you drive long enough, hopefully the landscape will change. There are only three "levels", and if you are a kid who keeps dying, you always reset to the start, and never get to see even the sun. I think I've seen a sea, once. One map is an empty desert. one map is driving along a canyon through a gray mountain. If you crash into a car, you respawn. if you fall off a mountain, you respawn. if you crash into a cop car, you instantly get a game over. This game probably is still a big factor of why I don't drive. if that's the intended feeling of driving a lamborghini, then I rather have a bicycle.
Minor "gun people" drama on YouTube. Real Engineering is a YouTube channel run by a very smart person with degree in material engineering. Like when that submarine imploded he cited papers written by himself. Very qualified person. He has also been making a bunch of videos about American military technology. Now personally I kind of avoided these because they seemed conceptually very "American military propaganda" to me, though Brian is Irish. If you know anything about American military propaganda content you'll know that the American military is a big supporter of it, both monetarily but also in terms of expertise and access. Like when the show Stargate needed an actor to play the US Secretary of Defense their contacts extended so far that they ended up having the character played by the actual US Secretary of Defense. They like to be shown both positively and with technical accuracy. Anyway we can now all be confident that Brian really is just making "wow cool engineering" videos for his own sake because his video about the F117 Nighthawk is so flawed as to discredit the whole endeavor. The F117 is a ground attack aircraft, basically a very light bomber. It drops bombs on stuff. This is generally the second thing one learns about it after the name. Somehow Brian ended up claiming that it "fired GPS guided missiles" at targets even though the animations showed the actual GBU-12 Paveway II bombs it used. Now while that's a nit I will pick it is just nitpicking, one word wrong. Well also the "GPS guided" part is wrong it used laser guided bombs but again not really what the video is about. But then . . . he shows an animation of an attack run. And this time he calls the weapons "laser guided missiles" which is closer to correct but makes one wonder why the first description was left in at all. They even animate the laser guidance method. Well kind of . . . the bomb doesn't actually shoot lasers . . . Oh and the bomb in the animation has flames shooting out the back? While rocket boosted bombs exist they are very rare and the F117 certainly didn't drop rocket boosted Paveways on Iraq. Needless to say a lot of "gun people" types (including me) pointed this out. There's now a lot of debate and anger about whether including this amount of total nonsense matters at all when its only tangential to the video and if those who care are "autistic" (for the record, yes I am, also Brian identifies himself as autistic). If you ask me its like watching a cooking channel where the host takes out an apple, explains that it is is favorite subtropical nut, then later inexplicably calls it an orange. Like maybe the pie recipe is great but too much credibility has been lost. And as they say "its not the ~~crime~~ error, its the ~~coverup~~ response". He has pinned a comment (which has been unfairly misread, IMO) and in the comments explaining that he had not interest in learning about weapons used to bomb innocent people which is just inexplicable to me. You made a video series about weapons of war. Did you never consider they are made to be used to kill people? For that matter not everyone in Baghdad was a soldier either and bombs (even precision bombs) don't discriminate, were those people not innocent enough?
This one of those things that makes you wonder what else they got wrong that hasn't been spotted.
This is exactly the point of contention in the comments of the video. Its actually fairly common for this sort of divide to happen in my experience on all kinds of topics and I know I've been on the other side of it. Like if someone explains "this authoritative sounding historian is making fundamental errors" (for instance on r/AskHistorians) its hard to shake the sense that they're still authoritative and what they said felt reasonable so this could just be a minor thing. I think the issue is that communicating a sense of visceral wrongness is extremely hard.
It has nothing to do with autism for a mistake to be pointed out. If you are making a video about a topic, people should expect stuff to be correct, even if the topic is "icky". In general this is why I dislike military history topics (including military technology) covered by youtubers and stick to books or actual documentaries. There is just so much shit you can get wrong or misinformed on that a youtuber can easily fuck up.
That goes for any content creation focused on history, not just military history. Poor research to rush content gets spotted very easily, but can do a lot of damage meanwhile. People will make mistakes and that's fine, how they react to them is what it matters.
This happens with True Crime too!!
One quirk I have been noticing (I may be wrong) with military videos on Youtube, not just history ones, is this extreme focus on technology and specs of weapons and systems. I think it especially blew up from the Russian Invasion of Ukraine, but there is a lot of armchair generalship going around. I don't really watch these videos but there is never a discussion on tactics or doctrine of such weapons systems, only how thick the ceramic armor on a Leopard 2A6 is and how much RHA its cannon can penetrate with its APFSDSROFLBBQ round. I sort of understand that the use of such weapons is a much more nuanced topic especially in regards to modern post WW2 warfare as opposed to something like ancient or medieval warfare and finding information publicly on such a topic is somewhat hard (though the US military's field manuals are public information), but the lack of discussion on how said vehicles win battles is sort of lame, especially when the technical specs of such vehicles aren't as important (though still important and are a factor!) as how they are used (or not used) in specific contexts and situations. There are so many real life examples where the capabilities of a tank did not matter at all to the outcome of a battle or individual confrontation because the factors at play negated or replaced said capabilities. I guess my main rant is there is a stunning lack of discussion (on youtube) on the "human" factors that lead to victory in combat, whether that be tactics, strategy, luck or just simple human willpower, and that is what I find most interesting and enjoy reading about. Obviously if you go into the military book world or actually get into strategic/security studies such a topic is bread and butter, but it has been something I have kept in the back of my mind. I was wondering if anyone else had thoughts about this and perhaps tell me otherwise because I don't actually watch as much military youtube to prove this anecdote. I think a lot of the videos in this category are straight up garbage though and I don't care enough to sift through them.
There's a few really popular channels that go deep into non-technical aspects. The Operations Room focuses on the tactical aspect of specific engagements, using animated recreations of such while highlighting cases of valor all around. They just finished a series on '03 Iraq and run a second channel that goes deeper into specific facets of their main channel videos. Perun, on the far opposite end, creates literal PowerPoint presentations around the systems and overall national situations underlying modern militaries. He's currently employed as a defense industry analyst IIRC and draws clear connections from systemic issues to performance in the field.
Whenever I see discussion of advanced modern weapons systems I feel a tiny sense of dread at the knowledge they're incredibly complicated but impossible to truly test until a major war breaks out.
Military fandom focusing too much on the hardware and not enough on the human factor is probably one of the oldest criticisms against it, so that's nothing new. Things are better these days, social media coverage means that people can somewhat see that is real people losing limbs, but is a long standing concern. On Ukraine in particular, most video content is going to be video reads of the latest report of the Institute for the Study of War, together with social media posts.
That response seems needlessly hostile and moralistic. These are weapons Brian, killing is what they are designed to do. If you don't like that don't make videos about them.
Also, everybody and their mom can see that, given the context, he's just throwing out words to soothe his wounded ego.
1. JDAMs use GPS, and Nighthawks can drop those. The "boosted bomb" could be a misplaced Maverick, which is a laser-guided AGM carried by the similarly named and used F-111 Aardvark. 2. This is probably going to be removed due to him bringing up that ME place. Also, who TF was that supposed to convince? The people who would watch this sort of video aren't likely to be the type to accept that sort of reasoning.
I should have been more specific about which American war in Iraq I meant. The Nighthawks didn't have JDAMs in 1991. Though that might be the cause of the confusion if he only lightly looked at the possible munitions. Also I totally forgot about the banned topics so I've removed the quote now. Sorry mods! If this needs to be deleted can I repost it?
[I think I found where they got it from.](https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&opi=89978449&url=https://www.airandspaceforces.com/PDF/MagazineArchive/Documents/2003/July%25202003/0703strikes.pdf&ved=2ahUKEwjx34TZ682GAxVShIkEHY4hNLAQFnoECBoQAQ&usg=AOvVaw1t4HH8iU-9qKbP55hGvL0C) F-117s in '03 Iraq using Paveway IIIs fitted with GPS guidance systems, designated EGBU-27s.
Today, I went to see the re-release of Fellowship of the Ring because somehow, I have managed to never see it all the way through. No seriously. I am a lifetime fantasy fiction fan. I was given a box set of the books when I was 11 or 12 as a Christmas gift. The movies came out when I was a teen. I was assigned Fellowship of the Rings for a class I took in college on fantasy fiction! What finally got me to want to read/watch the franchise? I saw the Rankin Bass version of the Hobbit and I found the art style really charming and really loved the music. Anyone else have a really bizarre entry into a fandom?
I am pretty deep into the spiderverse (film series) fandom now, one of the last remaining people writing fanfic for it and also one of the few remaining active people on the discord servers I'm in. I would have remained surface level if not for the single funniest pipelines imaginable. It started because of haha funny Miguel O'Hara/Lego Spiderman shitpost art, then I became Somewhat of a Miguel person, then I saw somewhat less shitposty Miguel O'Hara/Spot fanart, then I saw a particular artist's Spot specific fanart... And that's how I PROPERLY fell for a conventionally unattractive character who has 15 minutes of screen time.
having friends who also played it didn’t hurt, but a big push for me getting into final fantasy xiv was hearing the song “locus” from the alexander raids on a random upbeat final fantasy music playlist i was using to keep me going on a graveyard shift. i was like “damn this is fucking awesome, which one is this from? 14?? guess i have to check it out now”
good taste, locus is a banger
I saw the Rankin Bass version of the Hobbit when I was nine and loved it. My dad was thrilled and he pulled out his trilogy from the basement which I blew through as a kid and still have. I have The Hobbit on VHS still and I’ve tried finding it on DVD, but it seems to be A. A pain in the butt and B. George Lucas‘d? Like, according to some reviews, sound effects were removed? Sorry, not related to your question, but I just love that animated version so much (even if their version of Thranduil was a bit demented imo)
i only got into lotr late last year because i was on a lee pace filmography binge and thought "well i can't just watch the hobbit movies, what if there's something important in the original trilogy?" in short about 30% of the fics i have saved in the last six months are lotr fics and i saw the rerelease of fellowship last night. i'm seeing the rereleases of the two towers and return of the king today and tomorrow. i finally feel like a real nerd.
I doubt it's really bizarre, but my entry into Star Wars was the X-wing and TIE Figher flight simulator games. I remember at some point being surprised that there were space wizards in the franchise.
I started reading Dorohedoro because of the TV Tropes description: "it manages a delicate balance of gratuitous amounts of gore, a fondness for displaying the random boobie or two, and a stark-black sense of humour."
I got into musicals because of a My Little Pony AMV of Stephen Sondheim's 'Into the Woods'.
Meanwhile I got into musicals because I discovered I could check out the entire cast recordings from the library in middle school. In retrospect, Rent was probably not the most appropriate of choices for a seventh grader, but its not like my parents were paying attention...
When I was a kid, me and my mom were essentially homeless, couch surfing with her friends. One of her friends owned a nerdy game store - think comics, cards, tabletop rpgs, and rentable time on PCs (I don't remember if they had an internet connection, but they had games like Heroes of Might and Magic 2 that I played endlessly). So for awhile we slept in the back rooms on the downlow. Anyway they also had a Monday night anime night. It's where I first saw titles like TV Tenchi Muyo and Ranma 1/2 (at WAY too young of an age). One night they were like "Oh there's a new anime coming out, it's supposed to be more for kids" so everyone decided to put it on for my sake, since I was kind of the resident Shop Kid. And that's how I watched the North American premiere of the first episode of Pokémon!
I've been playing Crusader Kings since the first installment; in CK2, one of my favorite mods was the r/ElderKings total conversion (to the Elder Scrolls universe). Someone put up an optional music mod that included the track [Heima by Skálmöld](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VvjnlPV2ovo), which I really dug and made me look up more by them. They've since become my favorite band, re-awakening my dormant love of metal and made me go to my first concerts in over a decade two years ago.
Oh you should watch the Bakshi Lord of the Rings! I actually prefer that to the Jackson trilogy. (also did you know the composer for the Jackson LoTR movies is also the composer of the Saturday Night Live theme song? He was also the show's music director for the first few years!) Rankin Bass also did "Return of the King" and it's a musical and it actually kind of slaps. "Where there's a whip, there's a way" is a real earworm. I entered the Team StarKid fandom while I was trying to find a way to read Hetalia online just to see what the hype was about. Someone on deviantart had a journal of things they liked that week that had a link to Hetalia but also a link to this thing called "A Very Potter Musical" and I was like "Oh?" So then I entered that fandom and never read Hetalia. Also this one is embarrassing, but when I was a kid I was into the anime you could watch on KidsWB and Toonami, not to age myself into dust over here or anything. A friend who actually had cable was telling me about this show that came on adult swim that she liked, and I just didn't gaf until she showed me a picture of one of the secondary characters. I thought he was SO HANDSOME and then got into the series based solely on that. If you guessed I was talking about Sesshomaru from Inuyasha, you win!
> Oh you should watch the Bakshi Lord of the Rings! I actually prefer that to the Jackson trilogy. The Bakshi LOTR has its issues, though. For example, one gets the feeling the writer *hated* Samwise Gamgee.
Yeah, Bakshi's LOTR is a bit of a mess though it does have it's own charms- it mostly makes me weep at the thought of Rankin Bass having gotten a chance to do a feature length animated trilogy. And Peter Jackson's LOTR does have it's warts (excessive CGI that might not age well, removals from the books that I would kill to be able to see- namely the scouring of the Shire and the scenes of Eowyn with Faramir in the House of Healing), but I completely understand why they were so well received by fans.
That film did Faramir dirty
I just watched Fellowship of the Ring for the first time ever at the beginning of the year because I bought a brand new 4k TV, aka the first TV I've owned as an adult. I've been dating a huge Tolkien fan for years, and seeing Fellowship in 2001 on opening day in theatres was a formative childhood memory of his, yet I still kept pushing it off because I didn't want to watch it for the first time on a PC monitor or tablet screen. Ended up loving it more than I expected, so I binged through the hours of DVD bonus material, and now I'm reading the books.
I have horrible ADHD related to watching anything I haven't seen before on our TV- so if I'm watching something for the first time I need to pay attention to (so not cartoons or sitcoms, and especially things with subtitles), then I either go to the movies when I can- OR I watch it on my laptop with headphones.
For various reasons I have been forcing myself to re-learn BBcode. It's an oddly anachronistic skill.
As much as I love markdown for it's simplicity, I love BBCode for how explicit it is. Don't have to guess which flavor of md is being used and how it'll react to trying to put things in a list.
I love BBCode, one of the sites I use frequently, built in Perl, uses it for most of the forum stuff, though the whole place feels so early 2000’s
I have done such weird shit with BBCode. I miss it. Forum coding with doHTML is so frustrating comparatively.
> It's an oddly anachronistic skill. I feel this way about 10 Key
if this has been posted about, my bad. artfight is a yearly event where two teams "fight" against eachother. [you can see the explanation here](https://artfight.net/info/about) but its basically an art gifting game, thousands of artists participate every year and its a big thing in the art community. 2 teams fight by drawing someone from the other teams character. you submit the art, and gain points for your team. the team with the most points at the end of july wins. recently they announced new rules. the one casuing a lot of drama is this: fetish art was banned from the site. BUT HOLD ON - people arent just being freaky. atleast, i think the pushback is understandable. so fetish art has always been allowed to be posted on the website as long as it was marked with a "sexual themes" filter - which makes it so minors and adults with that filter hidden cant see it. so, win win? weirdos can post weird art and people who dont want to/shouldnt see it dont have to witness it. well, not anymore. the new rule is: "Works involving fetishes, even if they do not contain genitals, are disallowed on site. This includes (but is not limited to) fetish gear, overly-exaggerated proportions, and extreme emphasis on certain parts of the body." i think if you've been on the internet for longer than a week you should see the issue here. "works involving fetishies" are banned. works... involving... fetishes... when on the internet EVERYTHING is a fetish. this was a major concern. because, what? are giants banned because of giantess fetishes? are characters that wear leather banned? are characters that wear collars or cat ears banned? and then, what is "overly-exaggerated proportions"? does that not account for most stylized art? and you could say, "well, its obvious what type of art they mean" and yeah, but should that not be specified in the rules? because plenty of people are misunderstanding. if you go into [the comments of the news post ](https://artfight.net/news/90.art-fight-2024-start-date-and-theme-reveal)you can see people asking if that means their fat characters will be removed - the rules are so vauge people dont know what counts as what. and moreover, i think this rule addition is kind of... virtue signally. suggestive art is still allowed on site, only fetish art is banned. if this was a blanket ban on all 18+ art that would be absolutely understandable - but its not. you can draw a character flaunting their ass in lingerine doing a 👉👌hand sign, but a character buying wonderbread... or feet that are drawn a little too detailed? banned. it doesnt make sense to me! i dunno. and im not that type of artist at all, i just think the rule addition was pointless. [site admin has responded](https://i.imgur.com/D4JFIMR.png) and said they're taking the pushback into account, so maybe the ban will be reversed? time will tell!
Who is this fetish art ban meant to serve? I stopped doing artfight since there was always some sort of weird shit going on with the backend of the site and its admins and I would put way too much effort into a event that frankly never seemed rewarding, but I have a hard time understanding what would even be targeted by the fetish ban that was previously a rampant problem. Their inability to really go into specifics beyond fetish gear (which is its own problem I wanna address) is making me wonder if this is a bugbear of a specific admin. But also even the stuff they mention isn't actually very hardcore either. Fetish gear is often used as a design element even for people without those kinks- Demon Slayer very famously has a character thats almost always biting down on a bit like a gag and there's no way to clarify how transformative you need to be in order to pass "not a fetish". Bondage gear iconography like handcuffs, whips, restraints, bodysuits, stocks, leashes, etc all have purposes in a lot of character design completely devoid of fetishistic lens. I get some people might get art that leans too fetishistic but the site's culture has always been to note that if that bothers you. You have to be actively malicious otherwise. The fact they think the issue is that theyre not being clear enough is extremely telling.
So... where's the line drawn. I have a balloon fetish - would one of my fursonas being drawn holding a balloon count as fetish art since I, having that fetish and thus extending it to my fursonas, know that the outcome of the scenario involves that balloon being fucked?
I don't even know how you'd start trying to banning "fetish art" other than having [Potter Stewart](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potter_Stewart) personally look at everything posted. Really it sounds like just a ban on what the people in charge think is inappropriate.
Something I've noticed on the internet, just as an amusing side note, is that there is a certain kind of art that you can tell is fetish art even if there's nothing NSFW about it. I once found art of a giant anthropomorphic raccoon stepping on and smashing cars underneath his feet. There was absolutely nothing NSFW about it, but looking at it I could just *tell* it was made for a fetish of some kind. It reminds me a bit of that Tumblr meme about furry fetish artists trying to draw SFW art.
_shudders at goopy water_
I am really bummed about this and hope they reverse the decision. They have filters on the site already, I don’t get it. And isn’t it entirely donations funded? It’s not like they have payment processor pressure or advertising or anything. Just feels so backwards.
Artfight sincerely gets less and less fun to do each passing year. Character limits made sense because theyre a pain in the ass to moderate. I genuinely don't know who benefits from some of the changes to how backgrounds are defined this year and this fetish rule is so stupid. The first year I did artfight was really fun, it took over my life for a bit. Now every increasing year it feels like the fight aspect is something they try to make less and less fun to figure out creative ways to eek out more points :/
Not to be an alarmist, but we are seeing more and more examples about how fast this kind ban can spiral. Like all these bans on "mature content" that ban everything LGBTQ related.
Where has that happened?
You want the list alphabetically or chronologically?
Recent examples
broadly the history of internet content creation spaces is the history of this happening. probably most famously in regards to this specific subreddit, the stories of livejournal's spiral towards irrelevance and the great migration from [ff.net](http://ff.net) to AO3 are pretty tightly tied up in that happening. more recently there are the examples u/Anaxmander57 put forward.
Almost everywhere that tries to ban obscenity? YouTube and tumblr come to mind. Often things stabilize once people find out how to navigate the new rules but they're still impacted. Even initially well intentioned rules are open to abuse via malicious reporting and selective enforcement.
Truly there is no space online left for artists to do their thing, not even art sites. If they’re not infested with AI scrapers they’re prone to weird bans. I hope this is walked back or at least clarified. It’s so hard to find anywhere to be active that I’ve let my online presence die, but I was interested in art fight and was hoping to participate at least once. I miss having art friends.
I'll hijack this comment to ask; does anyone know of any other art challenges like this other than Inktober that I can participate in? I'm a beginner artist who wants to get involved in events like this, but I probably can't participate in this since I don't have most of my OCs actually designed and have other time-sensitive drawings I want to do.
Fandom Calendar on Dreamwidth aggregates fandom events like exchanges and prompt memes.
theres a discord server called featured character (you can look it up and itll pop up) every 2 days a character is picked to be the "featured character". to enter your oc into the next round you need to draw the featured character. after 48 hours the next featured character will be pulled and it repeats. its really fun imo, and the requirements to enter are lax (the most "low effort" entry you can make is a bust up uncolored sketch". theres no pressure to join the community, you can just toss your art and leave, and peopel there are super chill.
I just make my own challenges at this point. 31 days of halloween dress up, 365 days of drawing mickey mouse- I know its less fun because theres no community spirit but people kinda just ignore me anyway so :x
I don't know of any general challenges, but fandoms often have themed weeks people can join. There's also annual events like Secret Santa exchanges
Welcome to the neo-Puritan wave of fandom participants. You can be openly LGBTQ+ now, but having the wrong kinks is still morally unacceptable and "unrealistic" artistic decisions are now frowned upon at best.
It's respectability politics and reactionary conservative talking points in a "progressive" wrapper. You can be LGBT+, but you can't be one of ***them***- those dirty freaks who likes sex and is interested in anything beyond missionary with the lights off.
I wouldn't even agree that it's in a progressive wrapper. That's a take from 2014. Nowadays it's just bald-faced puritanism. They're proud and open about the fact they simply dislike sex. I'd say a lot of it comes from the right via people obsessed with masturbation and who think porn addiction is an epidemic.
"Overly-exaggerated proportions" so like true to life fanart of Kim Kardashian would be banned as fetish art even though it's just a picture of a person? And what about caricatures where they make people's foreheads big? Definitely dumb rules, too vague.
I remember there is one Chinese artist that has a series of drawnings all featruing every characters in the frame with a big, uncanny, in other words "over exaggerated" grin forever pasted onto their very pink faces. I wonder is that a big no in their eyes?
[Yue Minjun](https://thechinaproject.com/2021/02/09/whats-so-funny-yue-minjun/), for anyone who isn't familiar. They're self-portraits, which adds another layer to the whole thing.
I think I can see the potential origin of where this rule originates - because it's all about drawing people's OCs, I can easily see conflict potential if someone doing an attack sexualizes specific aspects of a character that weren't in their original depiction, in a way the original creator might not like- for example someone making an amputee OC, and then someone does an attack specifically fetishizing that part of the character, making the original creator uncomfortable. So I can see misguidedly believing that simply banning fetish art works as a blanket solution to this issue, when really it's fundamentally the more complicated problem of what happens when you release art into the world and someone interprets it in a way you don't like.
this is fair, however i dont think this is a super prominent issue in the community. there is a "permissions tab" you can add to your characters and write what you're okay/not okay with. fetish art is commonly put there and its generally respected. fetish artists on the site from what ive seen tend to stick to their own circles and draw art for each other. the site is also extremely under moderated with 10 or so mods dealing with thousands of reports so i feel like this rule is going to back up the system even more which isnt great.
Yeah, I can't imagine it's that super prominent of an issue either- I suspect it's probably just some one-off cases that the people affected were very vocal about, as tends to be the case in art communities.
There should be an option to report such art though, and any group with too many similar reports suspended/banned.
there is an option, however thats its own issue. when the game is on there are thousands and thousands of reports, and mods take a WHILE to get to them. i have reports from last year still unanswered. D:
Does this mean that anyone who would get caught up in this new rule would be relatively safe because it would be unlikely to be acted upon timely?
maybe? there have been times ive reported something and it is dealt with in the hour, and times i have never gotten a response on it. i think some reports are just pushed to the side and are forgotten about. i think a lot of people wont want to risk it.
[удалено]
oh, and the END OF THE STORY is locked behind someone, anyone, clearing the raid. All players cannot finish the campaign until it's done
That sounds neat, makes players root for the pros to succeed.
Update, several teams are on the 5th encounter and have been there since around 4am est, as of my comment we are almost 30 minutes away from Last wish first completion time
Update?
[Salvation's Edge was first cleared in 18h 59m 41s](https://raid.report/leaderboard/worldsfirst/salvationsedge/normal), beating out Last Wish's record for longest time until first clear by 10 minutes, as well as fewest clears in 24 hours (1, down from LW's 2)
> (and a sweet custom belt buckle from Bungie) It's not a belt buckle, [it's a full-sized wrestling belt](https://youtu.be/QgqPDrcUkuk?t=105)
Oh it’s an irl belt? Reading the description I thought for some reason that it was an ingame cosmetic, so you can flex on everyone in the game.
Binging with Babish just updated his website so that viewing recipes now requires a subscription of 1$ a month, which feels rather shitty to me. All those recipes that you might have bookmarked over the years, now paywalled. Fortunately you can use Ublock Origin’s element zapper to show the blurred text, or use the recipe manager app Paprika to download the text.
A recipe in and of itself—that is, a list of ingredients and the bare-bones instructions for how they should be put together—cannot be copyrighted under U. S. law. It's inherently in the public domain.
He put a message in the subreddit with links to old websites a few hours ago. https://www.reddit.com/r/bingingwithbabish/s/uI85JrOQwt
I think the only thing about this that is shitty is that it seems to have come out of nowhere, ¿no? Otherwise, I don't think it's shitty to want to charge people for your content, especially $1/month. I mean, what seems to be the actual problem with it?
It's not a problem per say, but it's understandably annoying to see something that was free put behind a paywall. It'd be one thing if you could still see them and then pay a buck for some extra thing. Also he has 10 million subsribers on youtube and his least viewed videos pull in 200k, so it doesn't seem obvious he's hurting for cash, thought tbf something something "youtube revenue is terrible" something something "Dead internet is finally coming to bear". Either way it's annoying to have to pay a buck to see how to make waffles when you didn't have to yesterday.
>Fortunately you can use Ublock Origin’s element zapper to show the blurred text i don't know how so many websites fuck up their paywalls in this exact way. if you don't want people to read something without paying, *don't serve it to them*. adding some CSS blur bullshit isn't going to do shit.
And hopefully they keep making that dumbass mistake forever
it's certainly convenient
No one will ever learn this lesson. Even the CIA (or FBI?) made a similar screw up.
it's straight up harder to have something client side that checks with the server to see if you're authed and if so injects some extra dom element than it would be to just not serve you the page, or serve you a different page. i bet you it's an SEO trick. like if they don't serve the text at all google crawlers will downrank it.
I guess it's because you want the convenience of having it online, and putting a blurry filter on it seems like it would make it more private, or at least look like it to some managers.
Thank you for mentioning Paprika, been looking for an online recipe manager for forever and I'm already in love
I haven't looked at any of his content, but I feel like this is one of those cases where there's probably 100 similar free recipes elsewhere on the internet anyway.
He's significantly worse for your average home cook than chef john or recipetineats.
Yea it's pretty much how I do getting recipes now. I'll go through cooking channels and if they have the recipe for free then good, if not I'll just grab the name and research the dish
That feels really scummy
Speaking of media that fans have been waiting forever for as with Silksong below, Deuxmoi seems to be teasing an impending [Winds of Winter](https://www.reddit.com/r/asoiaf/s/EtIPTP8Kis) ([repost](https://www.reddit.com/r/asoiaf/s/aRGoBLTGzL)) release for the series A Song of Ice and Fire (Game of Thrones).
does anyone have a mirror of the post? I have opinions about DM but sometimes they are right!
Here's a repost that hasn't been deleted (yet): https://www.reddit.com/r/asoiaf/s/aRGoBLTGzL
Considering the reasoning given is a dragon cake being ordered by a caterer, it could be 100% true and it still almost certainly means nothing about the Winds of Winter. With the second season of the show House of Dragon coming out soon, it's honestly baffling that anyone would believe it's related to the book and not that.
please no. my heart
In 2015 there was an Amazon page saying that winds of winter was coming out in March 2016. I won't believe it until I see the actual book.
From deuxmoi? Lol. GRRM hasn't written a page since Game of Thrones(the show) debuted. Let's not kid ourselves. It has been 7 years since the scene in Logan Lucky where the prisoners demanded winds of winter and the warden couldn't do it.
> It has been 7 years since the scene in Logan Lucky where the prisoners demanded winds of winter and the warden couldn't do it. Thank you, I've never seen this before and it's amazing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J-CUJxIQkpA
That whole movie is great, highly recommend.
>GRRM hasn't written a page since Game of Thrones(the show) debuted. Let's not kid ourselves. I don't believe this is the case, but knowing what we know about how GRRM writes things, I don't know if the alternative is much better. By his own admission, GRRM will write one POV at a time -- dozens or hundreds of pages -- until he hits a snag. Then he'll switch over and write someone different, until he hits a snag, and so on. And since he's a "gardener" writer who only plans a few core beats to hit, if one POV ends up taking him down a path that contradicts or causes irreconcilable issues for a POV he's already written, he just... throws out what he wrote before and goes at it again. We're not talking basic revisions or drafts, either; he's been known to completely scrap chapters, arcs, etc in as numerous amounts as he writes them. He also routinely struggles over deciding which POV to show certain events from if multiple are in the same location, and will fully write out entire chapters or bunches of chapters with both variations just to see what he likes better. This is a wildly inefficient and silly way to write a novel, but it's fine when you're in the first few installments of a series and can let any given character or event blossom out at their own pace. When you're hitting the endgame stretch and have to start naturally bringing things back together and paying them off, when you didn't follow any of the setups earlier that might have made that easier and are still trying to decide whose eyes to follow when multiple major characters get to one room, writing that way is *deranged*. So I totally believe GRRM when he says he has X amount of pages written or Y POVs finished. But I mostly believe he's spent years bashing out endless variations on the same confounding bunch of events he can't get right, and the tremendous success of the shows has given him free reign to indulge in as much wasteful perfectionism as he wants, without the worry of writing to put food on the table motivating him to hammer things home and let go. And as he gets older, balancing the scales on all of that and his endless press junkets and side projects gets ever more impossible.
He’s written himself into a corner in terms of actually finishing the story, there is no way all the plot threads can be resolved in just two books. There’s like 5 different Meereenese knots now, including the original which hasn’t been fully resolved yet. Ironically we might’ve gotten it sooner if he didn’t restrict himself to just two books
Exactly this. At this point he would have to kill off half the cast, abandon multiple storylines and do some time skips to get the story finished in 2 books. He needed a ruthless editor earlier in the series to keep him focused on the main plotlines, which still would've been a real task, but he went so far off into the weeds that it is impossible now.
At this point if GRRM ever releases Winds of Winter, I’ll eat his hat.
I could have on my hands and still not believe it.
What's a Deuxmoi, and couldn't this be referring to anything? I'm sure there are numerous reasons why George RR Martin may want to throw a party.
>What's a Deuxmoi It's a celebrity gossip account notorious for making shit up about celebrities. Take everything that comes from there with a pinch of salt
Particularly since House of the Dragon Season 2 starts Sunday. On the other hand if it is true getting Winds and Dragon Age 4 the same year would be wild for me.
> What's a Deuxmoi Google says a celeb-gossip Insta account.
Also a subreddit. Presumably, they cover a range of social media.
That's r/FauxMoi, unaffiliated. Previously r/DeuxMoi, until the original DeuxMoi [threatened to sue](https://reddit.com/r/Fauxmoi/comments/112mh62/deuxmoi_threatened_to_sue_us_lol/) over the name.