Main Menu

Things that went over your head...

Started by ming, 09 January, 2012, 11:00:01 AM

Previous topic - Next topic

TordelBack

Quote from: Dash Decent on 15 November, 2013, 04:10:59 PMThough having said that, I can remember being in high school and finding out my brother thought a gazebo was some kind of animal!

An oldie but a goldie:


Dash Decent

That's quite appropriate as it came up when he was playing one of the Infocom Zork adventures at the time.
- By Appointment -
Hero to Michael Carroll

"... rank amateurism and bad jokes." - JohnW.

hippynumber1

It's taken me until episode 6 of 'Masters of Sex' to realise it's a play on his surname!  :-[

Cactus

I've only just got the joke in the title of the 'Cheap Thrills' thread.  :-[
I'm a tucker hot seat trucker and I'm voking cheerio, ten-ten!

A.Cow

I loved the references to Skelmersdale (a.k.a. Skem) in this year's Strontium Dog stories.

It got me wondering whether John Wagner threw it in as a bit of a hidden gag for those-in-the-know.  (Skem is frequently compared with Milton Keynes -- the main ghetto in SD -- due to an excessive number of roundabouts & copious concrete.  Also, although rather more tenuous, some of the surrounding communities consider Skem to be a yer-sister-is-also-yer-mother kind of place, i.e. full of genetic mutations.)

Frank


The Second Robot War heats up in The Doomsday Scenario, and Dredd's creator provides the definitive in-story statement of authorial purpose:



As far as Dredd epics are concerned, it does have to be Wagner. He did the same thing, with only slightly more subtlety, in Strontium Dog the other week. Editorial made a similar gag with the cover for the Dredd story where The Flying Dutchman showed up in MC1.


Frank


Incidental details like this (The Switch, prog 369) are the reason why everyone now has to think very carefully about plot contrivances which may add any new information about Justice Department and the city, or contradict the established mythos:



It must have been great in the old days, when you could just type stuff like all judges enter the Academy at age five, or write yourself out of a corner by inventing something like the above, and not have to worry about the repercussions that might have for stories you or someone else might want to tell in 30 years time. Has some clever bugger - most likely Michael Carroll - ever used this incidental detail as a plot point in a story?



Frank





No, Castillo, that really doesn't make much sense at all. Vitus implanted thoughts in the lawgiver's mind? No wonder McGruder gave you such a hard time.



TordelBack

Tut!  Plenty of Psis in Dredd's world have been shown to have the specific ability to fool or fog sensors and computers, including Dance.   Castillo's just showing interdepartmental awareness.

As to me, I've just this morning realised that Moore's old pen name Curt Vile is a pun on magus-approved composer Kurt Weill, of LoEG: Century fame.  Given that I've read a half-dozen biographies of Moore where it was almost certainly mentioned, that's a bit sad.

Frank

Quote from: TordelBack on 08 March, 2014, 08:44:11 AM
Plenty of Psis in Dredd's world have been shown to have the specific ability to fool or fog sensors and computers, including Dance.

Oh aye, but psychic abilities in Dredd World are usually very specific indeed; judges specialise as empaths and precogs, and if a perp they encounter is a telekinetic (for example) they aren't usually depicted as being able to predict the future (for another example) as well. Anderson does a whole lot of new age crap, but that's mostly an extension of her abilities as a telepath.

I don't doubt that telekinesis can encompass the ability to change zeros to ones, but Vitus Dance has a particularly broad skill set (pyrokinesis, telepathy, telekinesis, and precognition) which puts Anderson to shame. No wonder he thought he was the Messiah. It's certainly not a deal-breaker, but if Dance's abilities had been a little better defined and more specific, I think Doomsday and the stories leading up to it would have felt like more of a coherent piece.

Doomsday and The Cal Files are both concerned with the manipulation of information and people, and if there had been an explicit equivalence drawn between the way Dance rearranges the sequences of the DNA in his victims' bodies, and the sensors of the gun, it would have supported the themes of a story about an entirely digital villain. A hitman with the ability to influence information systems and technology would be a better fit for Narcos than a Cursed Earth mutie and his scorpions *.


* my idea that the compound Narcos's cyber-assassin would use to enhance his abilities should be digitalis, rather than scorpion venom, is probably best kept between us

The Corinthian

The end of Revere Book II. By the time this came around, I'd largely forgotten all the stuff about leaps of faith and ritual rebirth in the original series. So I assumed that [spoiler]when Revere chucked himself off the car park roof then he was definitely dead and[/spoiler] the story was over for good.

I was pretty surprised when it came back for Book Three.

Tombo

Something I've only just (i.e. this afternoon) realised: Armoured Gideon - Armageddon

Frank


The name badge of CJ Volt's personal protection officer in Mark Millar's voodoo assassin nonsense, The Big Hit (prog 1030):


JayzusB.Christ

I don't remember that one at all. Probably for the best.  There was a Judge Gordon Rennie in Millar's Anderson text story, though
"Men will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest"