Native Jovian

It makes me sad when artists whose work I enjoy turn out to be crazy, douchebags, or both. George R. R. Martin is a fantasy author. He writes A Song of Ice and Fire, a really awesome low fantasy series. (Low fantasy being the cynical and gritty counterpart to idealistic and black-and-white high fantasy like Lord of the Rings.) Except that the man must hate his job, because the amount of actual writing he seems to do is minuscule. For the most recent book in the series, he apparently wrote so much that his publisher asked him to split it into two separate books. Okay, fine. So he said he'd release the first half, add a bit to the second half, and then release the second half as the next book in the series. That was three years ago. Still no second half. He's stopped even updating his website, claiming (in essence) that it's out when it's out and we should just shut the hell up and wait rather than bugging him. Oh, and when Bush was first elected, he took a year off "to mourn for the country". Asshole. Also, Ben Stein. Ben Stein is awesome, right? Not so much: turns out that the guy is a militant biblical literalist. Like serious hardcore "teaching evolution in public schools is evil" sort of thing. Which makes me sad, because it de-awesomifies him entirely.

I can't read the article (firewalled here) but two Earthbound songs I remember off the top of my head are the drug store music (When I'm Sixty-Four) and the game over music (Livin' on the Edge).

Isn't Mudkip like a fish-frog-thing? I don't even think they can get rabies. That said, reality has never stopped anyone from drawing cool shit before, so I say go for it.

???characters characters characters

Characters that inspired apathy rather than empathy? A plot that moved with all the speed of a tectonic plate? A non-ending that basically says "GO PLAY THE GAMES NOW KTHX"? Really, it's easier to list the things they did right: I liked the art style a lot, the music was absolutely perfect, and the story (excepting the ending) was interesting and original (when they finally got around to telling it, at least). There was a lot of good stuff there, but it was so buried under poor execution of characterization and poor pacing that most of it never had a chance to shine. Honestly the only reason I kept watching is because the art and the music were so good -- just seeing/hearing it was enjoyable enough to offset the frustration of simultaneously not giving a shit about the characters and wanting to know what the hell was going on.

A collection of short stories by various (like, 25) fantasy authors, called The Living Dead. I'm actually rather disappointed -- I've read like 10 or so of the stories so far, and only one of them even remotely resembled the classic shambling apocalypse. Most of them have been more along the line of ghost stories -- ie someone comes back to life in order to correct some injustice in their life (usually the manner of their death). Most of them were even capable of thinking and talking, rather than being mindless brain-eating machines. Very disappointing on the whole. Although I must say that the best story so far was about technozombies (ie, zombies revived by some scientific/technological process, rather than magic or voodoo or a virus or whatever) who fell in love with any small bright/shiny objects they saw. The preferred method of zombie wrangling was to show a Koosh ball to the horde and then throw it in the direction you wanted them to go. They'd all run after it but shambling and zombie-like, so you'd just have to beat them there and you could repeat the process indefinitely. There was also some really blatant stupid social commentary (the plotline revolved around a politician trying to use zombies of people killed in a terrorist attack to drum up support for a war against the terrorists, only to be thwarted when the zombies told everyone that dying was bad and they'd rather that no one else was killed, not even the terrorists), but it was the zombies-fascinated-by-bright-shiny-objects that amused the hell out of me. Also I've run out of stuff to read recently, and I read almost nothing but scifi and fantasy, so JadeAuto you better be right about those being the best ever or I shall be very disappointed.

Best of both worlds! Oh wait I don't have a mic screw all of you.

itt relyance is wise

There could be any number of reasons why he'd do this to himself. They all come down to the fact that for whatever reason (it's not actually as done as we've been lead to believe, or he wasn't pleased with the overall quality, or he just got sick of it and decided to stop regardless of everything else) he doesn't want to do it anymore, and it's a lot easier to be a victim than to be a quitter. If he gets slapped with a C&D letter, he gets to be the virtuous fan being oppressed by big bad Squenix. If he just stops and refuses to finish/release the project, then he's a loser who talked the talk but couldn't walk the walk... and might end up running into resistance from other project members who DO want it finish/released, as well. Not saying that that's what's going on (I don't know Zeality or the situation well enough to judge), but that's WHY he might fake a C&D letter instead of just abandoning the project.

So that's Red/Blue/Yellow for the original Gameboy, Gold/Silver/...Crystal? for (???), Ruby/Sapphire/Emerald? for GBA, and then Diamond/Pearl/Platinum for DS, right? LG/FR was for GBA too, and now they're redoing Gold/Silver for DS? (Honestly I'm only going into this because I'm stuck at my desk at work with nothing to do.)

How many freaking generations of Pokemon games are there now, anyway? I remember red/blue/yellow for the original Gameboy, and there's Ruby/Sapphire for the GBA, and there was... diamond/pearl for DS, wasn't it? I've completely lost track of what the hell is going on in the franchise. Hell, I've owned a copy of Sapphire for years and I haven't touched it. Which is odd, actually, because I honestly really liked Blue back in the day when I played it for the first time.

Woo! Thanks for the replies, that's all useful information. I suppose that I'll pick up Infection next time I see it around somewhere and if I like it, I'll see where it all goes from there. I didn't actually know that there were two different game series before reading this thread -- what's the deal with the second one? Is it basically the same thing as the first one but set later in the timeline and with different characters, or is there any actual mechanical/gameplay difference between them?

Sure, I'd take one too.

Did Zeality go Spram-style crazy or something? I remember him from years and years ago and he seemed pretty cool. I admittedly don't remember him being crazily obsessed with CT, though...

Hey guys. Stop liking this movie. It's bad. Srsly, really bad. Stop enjoying it. Enjoying it is wrong because it's so bad. Why haven't you stopped liking it even when I've explained to you how bad it is?

When we played that map a week (or two?) ago the server shit itself too. Didn't have anything to do with getting kills (I was dominating as a sniper), but it's worth mentioning. Whole server crashed (not individual copies of TF2 like Garian seems to be saying). Maybe there's something wrong with the map, or our server specifically doesn't like it for some reason?

I remember watching .hack//sign back in high school. The music was brilliant, but it suffered terribly from glacial pacing. I found myself rooting for Sora, bastard though he was, only because he was damn near the only one who actually did anything (even if it was only fucking wtih B.T.... which is actually a pretty cool thing in and of itself, but I digress). I watched Legend of the Twilight Bracelet and found it much more entertaining than Sign, primarily due to the fact that it didn't take itself seriously at all (while the super-serious "THIS IS ART GODDAMNIT" feel of Sign was its biggest flaw after the pacing, in my opinion). Other than those two, I haven't played/read/watched/whatever anything of the series. So, a few questions: 1) What's the actual sequence of events? I know it goes Sign -> Games -> Legend, but there's also a bunch of other crap in the series too. Lyrai's list just confuses me. How many games are there, actually? Is it just one series of games, or are there different branches to it like there are different anime? 2) How independent are the games? Can you pick up any given .hack game and start playing it, or will you be hopelessly confused unless you play everything in order from start to finish? 3) How good are the games, really? I've heard that the gameplay is good but the story is crap, that the gameplay is crap but the story is interesting, and everything in between. Is there more to it than just random dungeon crawls with emails and stuff in between? The most fun part of an RPG, at least for me, is exploring the setting and getting to know the world and the people in it. If the games are just like "a forest area! now a castle-dungeon! then a cave-dungeon followed by a mountain area!" as the anime seems to consist of, it seems like it'd get really old really quick. 4) When you're talking about reading stuff (Lyrai mentions like four different things to be read) are you talking about manga or actual novels? I've never been able to get into manga, but if they're novels I'd give it a shot.

Armor Piercing? Advanced Placement? Associated Press?

Man, other people have cool dreams about midget game developers trying to kill them. I just dream about zombies.

Don't forget the popcorn and soda. You'll literally be watching as much or more than you're playing.

Guitar Hero. [/thread]

Then you must be a zombie.

More than three full days with no sleep? Not even sketchy semiconscious half-sleep? I'm pretty sure you'd die. Literally.

Yes. I seriously don't know why Zeta is treated as the Holy Grail of Gundam. It's literally painful to watch. Best part of the series was the very end when everyone died and Kamille got Newtype mindraped into a rambling man-child. Then they had to go and fix him in ZZ. *grumble grumble*