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Messages - Professor Bear

#796
Off Topic / Re: The Political Thread
25 April, 2019, 10:57:11 PM
Sharky: extra points for thematically-appropriate usage of an image containing milk.
Tjm: minus points for linking to the Express.

"Within twenty-four hours, Change UK racked up more racism scandals than the Brexit Party" - The Hard Center Is Racist.
#797
Off Topic / Re: The Political Thread
25 April, 2019, 05:37:55 PM
"Ignore"?  That's the one selling point of almond milk, the worst - but most sexy - of all non-dairy products.

Apropos of nothing, almond milk and dairy milk are banned in my local school for allergy-related reasons.  It's getting so you can't even send your kids to school with things that will kill other kids anymore.
#798
Off Topic / Re: The Political Thread
25 April, 2019, 12:50:42 PM
Quote from: Something Fishy on 25 April, 2019, 11:35:40 AM
Been away from the discussions but my overall take on everything.. Brexit, climate change etc .. we're all fucked.  There's no will to do the right thing and there never will be.   Taken me a long time to accept there really is nothing we can do except our own little things and that they really won't change anything.

Seems to me if someone didn't want things to change, that's the attitude they'd want people to have.  We like to tell ourselves we're helpless to change things because we mistakenly believe that this also makes us blameless.

If everybody does nothing, we really are fucked.  Yes, it will take more than no longer using plastic straws to repair the damage done to our environment, but that is a start and if you can manage that much, you can do something else.  Work your way up, but don't do nothing, don't just hide away from the problem, if only because the Tories have told us they won't let you.
Today you stop using straws or buying milk from animal sources, but tomorrow you could be driving a van full of explosives into Parliament or whatever the next logical step is after ethical consumerism.  Baby steps.
#799
Books & Comics / Re: Whats everyone reading?
24 April, 2019, 09:06:33 PM
Jinty: The Land of No Tears and The Human Zoo.
Land of No Tears' arsehole lead character is an instant classic, being born with a gammy leg and milking it for all it's worth until the day she's given corrective surgery and does a Buck Rogers, waking up in a nightmarish future world where girls who are less than perfect for any reason - overweight, wearing glasses, having a bald spot - have to live like the house elves in Harry Potter, waiting on "the alpha girls" hand and foot.  I gather these kinds of stories where young heroes lost all agency and were trapped in oppressive systems were pretty popular with readers of girls' UK comics, but I just kept wondering why the lead character didn't put broken glass in the mean girl's food, or stab her while she was asleep.  The hysterics and melodrama are very entertaining while they last, though the wrap-up - if not terribly rushed - still feels a bit unsatisfying, and the story's attitude towards physical disability is really strange.
While I have seen the Human Zoo's promise of a story "where they treat girls like animals!" many times before, I have to say the videos on Pornhub were way off on how this scenario might play out.  I am not sure the science in this holds up to scrutiny, and I'm a bit confused how an alien race that uses computers to store and access information doesn't know how a written language works, but the story is fun while it lasts and some of the alien dad's comments about "human" animals were funny.  At this stage, a satisfying ending would be a break from tradition, but stories have to wrap up at some point.
The reproduction is really patchy, but there's nothing as egregious as the Misty Vol. 3 colour pages, it's just the odd page isn't as crisp as it could be.  The book weighs in at over 100 pages of strip, so there's plenty of reading in it, but it might be best for younger readers.
#800
Books & Comics / Re: Whats everyone reading?
23 April, 2019, 08:51:41 PM
Misty Volume 3: Wolf Girl and other stories - as ever, the art's fantastic, but this is probably the least of the Misty volumes released thus far, as the sudden climax to the main story just as it's getting interesting may be a great reminder of what a relentless meat grinder UK comics were in terms of content, but it's also terribly unsatisfying for someone who's reading the collected edition of the story in the here and now.*  The lead character just seems melodramatic and it's almost like she has some kind of what we would now recognise as Asbergers, consciously and compulsively acting out subconscious knowledge of her past (as a babby, she is reared briefly in the wild by a recently-bereaved she-wolf) to a ludicrous degree, and the wilderness survival chapters and the episodes where she's going crackers and none of her mates can understand feel too much like two entirely different stories that I find equally interesting separately, but together just don't pay off.
The rest of the book is made up of a bunch of werewolf or werewolf-adjacent short stories of variable quality, and (seamless segway) speaking of variable quality, this has to be some of the shoddiest reproduction I've seen in any of these books to date.  The colour pages are absolutely dreadful, for some reason reproduced entirely rather than the linework lifted and the colours reapplied digitally, which clearly isn't beyond the technical skills of the repro team as they do just that with an image from one of the worst pages in the book and then use it in cleaned-up form as a framing/credits page for one of the stories.  What really grates is that they haven't even cleaned up the lettering, which can be blurry and borderline-unreadable in places.
Probably the first missable entry in this series for me, though it had odd moments of enjoyable silliness.


* As a counterpoint, I read Kids Rule OK online years ago and the sudden ending - while hilarious - was somehow absolutely spot-on.  I just couldn't conceive of a more apt wrap-up than the one that I read and which I did not even need explaining with any real-world context.
#801
Books & Comics / Re: Whats everyone reading?
22 April, 2019, 09:37:15 PM
I thought it was alright, but the technical manual/storytelling ratio put it into Tom Clancy territory for me.
#802
Books & Comics / Re: Whats everyone reading?
22 April, 2019, 08:04:18 PM
After the one thousand page snooze fest that was SevenEves, it was nice to dip back into vintage UK comics territory for the Rebellion trade collection of the entire run of Fran Of The Floods, a daffy and episodic adventure romp through an England struck by a waterpocalypse which inexplicably has a name that I am 100 per cent convinced was the writer deliberately thinking of a euphemism for lady troubles and then seeing if he could get paid for it - which sounds unlikely until you remember that Alan Grant and John Wagner basically invented British comics as we currently know them by shouting things they thought were funny at each other in the pub and then seeing if they could get someone to publish it.
The first bunch of episodes are the best, as everyone turns on each other while the environment collapses and the world goes to Hell with everyone apprehensive about the end definitely coming any day now - basically, Alan Davidson predicted the current state of affairs with uncanny accuracy.
A lot of the panels are very meme-friendly because of the dated melodrama of it all ("I'm the king of Glasgow!"), but what I found welcome was the uncritical use of faith in some of the final episodes.  God is seen as a good thing despite the terrible destruction he's just wreaked upon the world, but that's not dwelt upon, faith is a thing that people are allowed to indulge in order to cope with what's happened and they're allowed to do so in a way that more cynical comics wouldn't have countenanced.  OTOH the characters are also menaced by a shark (seriously, Glasgow is one really shitty city) and then saved by a passing dolphin, so...
Maybe goes off the boil a bit after the first half - there's a whole arc about a death village whose central conceit is that the doctor is so terrible at his job he doesn't know what scurvy is - but the opening third and the last leg are very enjoyable.  Phil Gascoine plays a blinder on the art throughout.
#803
I recall a Dredd story where an illegal sugar buy went sideways when the buyers tested the merchandise and found it had been "cut with Sweetex".
#804
Unhelpful if you've already watched the episode taking place after the short that originated the character, I imagine.

A quick perusal of the always-accurate Wikipedia reveals that the shorts were promised to have no bearing on the series, and Googling shows that their inclusion on Netflix was actually discovered by fans when they were uploaded after the series had already started, so Jim's experience probably won't be unique.
#805
Oh hey, that's cool, happy to be proved wrong there.  The last I heard the shorts were packaged separately while CBS tried to leverage more cash from investors, and people were complaining on Twitter they didn't know who the Queen character was as recently as yesterday.
#806
Shame anyone legitimately paying to watch Discovery in the UK via legal means is deliberately excluded from part of the story by CBS' Short Treks bullshit.
#807
Film & TV / Re: Star Wars Episode IX
17 April, 2019, 12:48:53 AM
Quote from: Professor Bear on 13 April, 2019, 12:16:26 PM
Quote from: hippynumber1 on 13 April, 2019, 07:57:48 AM
Ignoring everything else, that's a terrible title.

JJA strikes again.  Clearly the aim was something that evoked Return Of or Revenge Of so as predicted they're already rolling back from that whole "a clean break with the past" theme that ran through TLJ.

And so it goes.
#808
Quote from: Link Prime on 16 April, 2019, 03:18:23 PM
Quote from: Professor Bear on 16 April, 2019, 12:16:37 PM
they attempted those genocides and did those murders.

Steady on Prof, there might be a few Trekkies left.

If you think Trekkies don't like arguing about Trek, please allow me to welcome you to your first day on the internet.
#809
They didn't stop that genocide, they were prevented from carrying it out by an officer disobeying orders.  This is the literal opposite of doing the right thing.
I also consulted with the crew of Burnham's prison shuttle and the original Doctor and they agree with you that no-one on the crew did any murders so you win that one.
#810
Quote from: Theblazeuk on 16 April, 2019, 12:28:03 AMBut I still enjoyed and the crew of discovery are heroes, not war criminals as some have accused them of being.

They were only obeying orders when they attempted those genocides and did those murders.  Like heroes.