Main Menu
Menu

Show posts

This section allows you to view all posts made by this member. Note that you can only see posts made in areas you currently have access to.

Show posts Menu

Messages - Professor Bear

#781
If King's Landing hadn't been hoarding Wildfire in those children's hospitals, the collateral damage would have been much lower, but you fire tactical long range arrows into sovereign territory like Cersi did and you will be met with a proportionate response - unless you dragon-hating leftists are going to seriously argue that Daenerys isn't entitled to defend herself.  It's hardly Daenerys' fault that so many people in King's Landing were brainwashed by Cersi into getting in the way of that dragon, but then they don't value life like we do and they see dying as an acceptable cost to making the only legitimate democracy in Westeros look bad.
#782
Film & TV / Re: Avengers: Endgame Spoiler Thread
10 May, 2019, 12:25:36 PM
Taking your argument to its logical conclusion, did half of the jizz disappear from men's balls leaving them with one scrote full of ash?
#783
Film & TV / Re: Avengers: Endgame Spoiler Thread
10 May, 2019, 01:06:51 AM
Finally saw it, and enjoyed it as much as I enjoyed the other MCU movies.

First takeaway: Cap sat with his thumb up his hole on 911.  This to me says he thought America deserved it.
Second takeaway: Cap has made out with an immediate family member, so if nothing else they kept leaning into the Back To The Future references.
Third takeaway: nothing you do to the past matters because timey wimey stuff, and now that we have established this, Captain America it is very important you return the stones to their exact time and place in history because of causality and uhhhh stuff.
Four: Cap says "shit" now?  Wat.
#784
Off Topic / Re: The Political Thread
09 May, 2019, 02:21:58 PM
Wikileaks has definately doxxed people over the years, but wasn't it the Guardian that was responsible for the doxxing during their collaboration with Assange?  They were in a rush to get their story out and didn't vet security information, causing the still-ongoing animosity between it and Wikileaks - the paper was recently caught fabricating a story about a meeting between Assange and Trump aide Paul Manaforte, so I think we can assume the honeymoon is over.

Quote from: The Legendary Shark on 09 May, 2019, 10:07:28 AMThere's just something about Assange and Wikileaks that feels a bit off to me. It's just my gut talking, I can't put my finger on anything specific.

Well he's possibly a rapist so I don't really know that you have to think too hard about why you find him off, and I stopped following Wikileaks on Twitter because they kept posting autoplaying footage of atrocities that seemed more about self-promotion than raising awareness, though they've also doxxed the personal information of rape victims since then for some reason or other.
#785
Off Topic / Re: The Political Thread
08 May, 2019, 04:10:12 PM
Everyone I've seen who has defended Assange has done so with qualifiers, even the patron saint of sensibles John Oliver.  I have seen literally one person argue Assange was a force for good, and that person was George "It doesn't count if she's asleep" Galloway.    How Assange is treated is not about Assange, it is about what we tolerate being done in our name and it's just as much a yardstick of our ongoing descent as everything else.

Quote from: TordelBack on 08 May, 2019, 10:00:14 AM"subtlety may deceive you, integrity never will",  etc

Ah I'm an old fashioned snob, me, I like Shakespeare for the poncy quotes.  "The quality of mercy is not strained - it blesseth him that gives and him that takes."
#786
Off Topic / Re: The Political Thread
08 May, 2019, 01:54:56 PM
Does this mean Chelsea Manning deserves to be held without trial and tortured for showing solidarity with Assange?  I mean, if he's bad then she shouldn't be helping him.

Quote from: The Legendary Shark on 07 May, 2019, 06:41:06 PMIt's not that we were past caring, it's that we voted people who only cared for themselves into power in the hope they'd do our caring for us.

No, I'm definately past caring.  Whatever comes next, we deserve it.
#787
Off Topic / Re: The Political Thread
07 May, 2019, 06:25:15 PM
If someone in the future is reading this - possibly some form of cockroach tasked with deciphering the language of the people of the corpse pits - and are wondering why we didn't even bother commenting on the fact that the fourth estate failed so badly in its duty that its responsibilities were assumed by Pamela Anderson: it's not that we didn't notice, it's just that we were past caring.
#788
Books & Comics / Re: Survivors
05 May, 2019, 06:47:40 PM
Revisionist Tankies?  Unpossible.
#789
Other Reviews / Re: Last Comic Read
05 May, 2019, 06:02:14 PM
Tch.  Should have done "The CRUNCH?  More like THE CRINGE."
#790
Other Reviews / Re: Last Comic Read
05 May, 2019, 05:58:29 PM
From 1979 - the year everyone in the UK jinxed it by saying "thank God this decade is over, at least the next one can't get any worse" - comes The Crunch #1-9.
The Crunch is, I suppose, best described as a DC Thompson version of Tornado - not quite as brutal as Action or as blatantly sci-fi as 2000ad, it's still got its moments here and there, and even the letters pages are worth a gander for the well-meaning agony aunt advice which was likely progressive for the time but is nowadays probably referred to as pure "Yer Dad".  I especially liked the readers' opinions which were sometimes brutal in their appraisal of the work, like the kid who took the time to pen a rant against one of the strip artists' ability (or not) with likenesses, which is definitely very open and candid for a letters page, but just made me think that it was a dick move by the editor to publish it, and completely at odds with the warm, encouraging environment I've been led to believe DC Thompson was.
As a twooth fan of many years, I should naturally gravitate towards the Running Man trappings of ARENA*, a dystopian tale about a journalist fitted-up by the government and forced to fight to the death in televised gladiatorial matches - if only for the blatantly gratuitous multi-bear rampage through the terrified audience - but the sensationalist claptrap of the rest of the book is often far more entertaining, be it the not-as-racist-as-I-expected exploits of Native American bounty hunter Bear Paw Jay aka The Mantracker which reminded me a lot of the later One Eyed Jack stories, or the "IT WILL ALWAYS BE TOO SOON" approach of name-first-story-later fodder like Hitler Lives! (an ex-Nazi searches for Hitler through post-war Germany) or Who Killed Cassidy? (two journalists punch their way through an investigation into the conspiracy surrounding the assassination of US president Jack F Cassidy).  I can't say I'm a big fan of The Walking Bombs (an evil Irish scientist develops a device which turns people's hearts into nuclear bombs), and there's probably some Opinions to be expressed about the not-even-subtext of Clancy And The Man (a white cop gets a black partner who isn't allowed a gun - their first meeting has him kicking the (undercover) black guy in the face while exclaiming "have some "SOLE" music, Man!"), and the whole thing is rounded out with The Kyser Experiment (an evil British scientist creates footballing supermen, for not-yet apparent reasons), a footy story that flip-flops between genres and is just a sequence of daffy twists and its lead character thinking "Blimey!" a lot.  Lots of articles about cutting-edge science or adventurers of the day that I can look up on my phone and see if they ever amounted to much, and there were a surprising number of people who ended up getting decapitated in the course of doing something they arguably shouldn't, although some have ended up growing old and fat and inventing their own line of skis for use on sand.  Okay.
Mostly it's just old-school and I shall decline to infer bad intentions to the racial stuff and simply call it a bit cringe, but yeah, I quite enjoyed this and think I'll spring for a job lot of the full run the next time I see one on Ebay, as I'd quite like to see how a lot of this nonsense pans out.

* Bear Alley Books brought out a collected edition of the ARENA strips in the last few years, now sadly out of print but worth tracking down if you're a fan of 2000ad tales of a similar vintage.
#791
Games / Re: Last game played...
30 April, 2019, 06:27:00 PM
Quote from: JamesC on 30 April, 2019, 12:21:03 PM
I like my games to be FUN and quickly get annoyed by silly mechanics that get in the way. I never even liked the 'search' mechanic in the first place to be honest. What's the point? Just have the items pop up and run into them to pick them up - as long as the weapon doesn't auto-swap it works fine.

I couldn't shake the notion that everything had been tailored to replicate online multiplayer game mechanics - the most noticeable being that you can't use the pause menus or inventories to craft things, you have to do it "in-game" via a fiddly wheel - but I also forgot to mention the incredibly long loading times not just when the game initialises, but when a cut-scene starts, and then there are long loading times within the cut scene itself as it loads up different areas of the game map in which the cut-scene/flashbacks take place, and while you can skip some of the cut-scenes, you can't skip others, and there are often sections where you have to follow other characters around while they talk to you, or sections on rails where you can only move the camera around while characters talk to you.  After one such scene, I was in the middle of a large settlement area with only one way out that I couldn't actually find on the game map, so I just had to drive around this fiddly area for ages running out of petrol for my bike.
I get the feeling this might be very playable if they overhaul it based on player feedback, but as it is, I can't go near it again until some of its most egregious faults are addressed in a patch (it is also occasionally very buggy).  It currently just feels like a game made entirely of rough edges.
#792
Games / Re: Last game played...
30 April, 2019, 11:06:20 AM
Days Gone is like if Assassin's Creed: Origins and The Last Of Us had a baby but without the good controls and if all the text was too tiny to read and important tutorial instructions on how to deal with impassable in-game barriers only appeared onscreen for about three seconds before disappearing forever, not even being stored in one of the menus somewhere, which are accessed in a stupid "swipe up/down/left/right one the touch pad for maps/inventory/story/skills" thing that I hate and quickly realised was also unnecessary.
This is what happens when games eat themselves - everything is swiped from somewhere else, but not as good as where it's been nicked from, which isn't so bad when you're talking about something like the shitty photo mode, but the controls - geez, did I miss a memo about all games abandoning the idea of just hitting a button once to do something so now instead you have to hold down the button and then wait and see if your character does the interaction animation?  It was a minor irritation in Assassin's Creed: Odyssey, but here it's really fucking annoying, and contributes to a sense of unresponsive controls.  Another niggle is when you're near two different things which both use the same button to interact with: most commonly this will be a recently-killed enemy you can search for ammo or scrap and who was carrying a weapon that is almost certainly inferior to the one you're carrying, so instead of searching him for items you end up swapping one of your useful primary weapons for an inferior one - and this happens all the time in the game, would it have killed them to let you pick up weapons and items with different buttons?  You use the X button for absolutely nothing as it is during combat.  The "survival wheel" is also juuuust annoyingly imprecise enough to make selecting some things really annoying, and while you swap to some items permanently, other items you only swap to them for one use, particularly the rock you use to attract/distract enemies.  Setting objects on the ground also seems to be impossible, so you have to throw things to stop carrying them, which is great in a game with stealth mechanics.
Also: the stealth mechanics are not very good.
I frustration-quit this after a few days, as all it did was remind me that I never finished the much-better Assassin's Creed: Odyssey.
#793
Film & TV / Re: Game of Thrones: the last series
29 April, 2019, 11:29:57 PM
I thought it dragged on a bit, especially a lot of the cat and mouse bits at the end ([spoiler]fair enough Jon can't past the dragon, but why doesn't it just move forward and squish him?  It waits for him to keep poking his head out and then it just goes "argh" at him.  Likewise Arya for some reason doing a replay of the terrible slasher/horror roles her actress has been lumbered with over the years by hiding from zombies in an old house again.[/spoiler]).  But I enjoyed it so it doesn't matter.
#794
Film & TV / Re: New 'Salem's Lot' Movie
28 April, 2019, 03:08:22 PM
I am so old I can remember when the future had new stuff in it.
#795
Off Topic / Re: The Political Thread
26 April, 2019, 12:52:33 PM
I'd quite like to know where I can find this left wing echo chamber bubble everyone keeps talking about, as it sounds quite nice.