Not sure which trope you mean, @Sparks, but none of the ones present, I think, were used in a way that makes me cringe. Everything was so cohesive, augh.
Being vague to avoid spoilers; naming the trope here would give away what happens.
The trope use itself didn't make me cringe, though. The story was well done! It's just the fact that this trope happens often enough that it is a trope in the first place that annoys me.
@surreality said in Good TV:
@Sparks ^ YES, ALSO THAT. I love that song because I'm an 80s nerd.
All the crying, forever.
Much respect for how beautifully they pulled that scene off (while also pulling my heart out using a peach, so thanks for that), and I can see why they did this from a narrative standpoint. But at the same time I'm also a bit upset that we're dealing with this particular trope on a TV series yet again.
@Coin I just... augh. AUGH.
(Also, great. Now every time I hear "Take On Me" I'm going to associate it with this.)
@Misadventure said in Dead Celebrities 2019:
Well, crap. I would like to formally request that SF/fantasy authors who I respect and whose work I enjoy please stop dying for at least a month or two.
@Thenomain said in Good or New Movies Review:
@Runescryer said in Good or New Movies Review:
https://heroichollywood.com/star-wars-knights-of-the-old-republic/
Below the article was a picture of Aflac and the following leading statement:
Ben Affleck is officially out as Batman and it's a pretty sad day.
But is it? Is it really a sad day? Is it not instead a relief for Ben as well as the rest of us?
Due to that "picture of Aflac" typo, I'm now imagining the Aflac duck as Batman.
So, thanks for that mental image.
@Rucket said in Dead Celebrities 2019:
@Kanye-Qwest said in Dead Celebrities 2019:
Obligatory 'Do not donate your money to the Catholic church, one of the richest entities in the world. Donate to rebuild the churches in St Landry Parish if the destruction of churches makes you sad:
100%. Besides I think some really rich dude already said he was going to drop 100 million euro for Notre Dame. So helping out these churches who were part of some asshole's hate-filled rampage is better, imo.
They've apparently already raised âŹ700M for repairs and rebuilding, âŹ500M of that from three people. Various companies have pledged big chunks of money also; I won't be surprised if my employer's parent company (the largest engineering/R&D company in France) ends up pitching in a pile of cash as well.
So I think Notre Dame's restoration is going to be financially fine; they don't need our donations. Whereas I suspect the St. Landry Parish churches need the money much more.
I've shed plenty of tears over the fire at Notre Dame because it pains me to see a part of our history damaged or destroyed; I haven't been able to cry over the St. Landry Parish churches because I am too angry for tears. I feel like the latter situation is a better place to put my money if I want to make a difference in someone else's life.
@surreality â I know I've mentioned it on MSB before, but if you haven't tried aimovig I highly recommend it. That stuff has been life-changing for me. I used to have incredibly frequent and severe migraines and that medication has nearly eradicated them.
The only complaints I have are pretty minor: first, it's a once a month injection and I'm not super fond of jabbing a needle into my leg each month, and second, the dose wears off about 3 or 4 days before I'm supposed to do my next injection, so the last couple of days before a dose are rough because the headaches come back as bad as ever.
But otherwise, I am now generally a functional human being. Which is a thing my friends can attest was somewhat of a trial to fake consistently before the aimovig.
Bonus: if your insurance won't cover it, the manufacturer has their own one year "aimovig ally" program where they'll completely cover the costs of the meds for one year.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0GLbwkfhYZk
Hello yes please I would like to subscribe to your newsletter.
"Single-player story-driven RPG" already has my interest; setting it a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away merely seals the deal for a Star Wars fangirl.
I probably shouldn't get my hopes too high, but... Star Wars. I can't help it; give me a lightsaber and my good judgment goes out the window.
@Arkandel said in RL things I love:
@Sparks I can understand customer-facing businesses having all kinds of dress codes because it probably does impact their bottom line.
But if you are going to have a bunch of nerds locked up somewhere they only see each other (if they are socially brave to make eye contact) then what's the point? Formalize some common sense rules about hygiene and whatnot, done.
To be fair, we do have a few common-sense dress code guidelines that apply specifically to the engineering lab. But they're all truly common sense guidelines, as in "you don't want to burn your clothing while soldering, maybe don't wear anything loose and flowy" or "maybe don't wear a loose wrap if you don't really want to have probably-flammable cloth hanging in the direct path of an industrial laser when you lean over to turn it on" or "if you wear sandals in the lab and drop heavy equipment on your foot, on your own headâor toesâbe it", etc.
In other words, they're all meant to prevent things like injury, death, or setting the lab on fire.
@Auspice said in Real World Peeves, Disgruntlement, and Irks.:
@Sparks said in Real World Peeves, Disgruntlement, and Irks.:
Finding a comfortable, durable bra is like finding a unicorn.
Sadly, I have not caught any unicorns recently.
Curvy Kate's Daily Dream bra is the winner for me. I'm waiting for some spare money and a sale to buy a new one, in fact.
I actually have one of those; it's the most comfortable of my current bras. Maybe it's just time to replace it, though.
@Too-Old-For-This said in RL things I love:
Most of the companies I've worked for have trended between business casual and just whatever I feel like. Only one was business professional and man was I glad to get away from that one! The stuffy atmosphere was just UGH.
At one point, I briefly worked in a bank writing in-house data analysis software. I literally sat in an windowless office where we would never see anyone but our co-workers, and yet I was expected to dress as though I was going to be at an international summit. Skirt-suit, fancy shoes, etc.
I did not stay there long.
Where I am now, we can wear whatever the heck we want. One of our senior mechanical engineersâwho does a lot of client-facing workâdyes her hair bright neon pink. One of the senior firmware engineers routinely wears rainbow leggings, shorts, and a t-shirt to work, and no one really looks at him twice.
I'm client-facing enough that I still try to dress semi-professionally (jeans and a nice blouse or sweater, nice shoes, etc.) when I know I have face-to-face client meetings. But when I know I don't? Hair back in a sloppy ponytail and wearing jeans, a Star Wars or Captain Marvel shirt (or something equally geeky; I may have a TeeTurtle problem serious enough that I should seek intervention), and sneakers.
So much better than the bank.
Finding a comfortable, durable bra is like finding a unicorn.
Sadly, I have not caught any unicorns recently.
Since there's a handy obituary to link to now: Vonda N. McIntyre, early science fiction writer and founder of the Clarion West writing workshop, passed away last Monday.
This obituary doesn't begin to capture her, though.
It doesn't talk about how she helped to found a ebook publishing collective for authors, the Book View Café, and how that was one of her proudest achievements.
It doesn't talk much about how she would take aspiring writers under her wing and introduce them around her network; quite a few ended up at tea with Ursula K. LeGuin, or hanging out with Greg Bear, or having dinner with George R.R. Martin, or on speakerphone with Harlan Ellison because Vonda introduced them.
It doesn't talk about her sense of humor and pranks; one of her favorites was convincing a lot of people on a pre-Internet discussion panel that they'd all missed a great (non-existent) science fiction miniseries on TV because it had just been poorly advertised and scheduled badly.
It doesn't talk about her other crafts, like how she would crochet little fractal 'sea creatures' and give friends the ones she thought suited them.
No obituary ever really truly gives a full picture of the person it memorializes. This one at least gives a partial idea of what she was like.
@Ghost said in RL things I love:
@Auspice I went FWC because it got me the most time around Shohreh Aghdashloo's voice acting.
Her voice is magical.
I have been reading The Expanse since around the time the second book came out. All the characters had unique voices in my head as I read, including Chrisjen Avasarala.
And after the TV adaptation started, when the next book came out and I started reading? I just heard Shohreh Aghdashloo instead. I literally cannot even remember what voice I used to mentally hear for Avasarala; it has been completely supplanted and I can envision no other. That did not happen with any other character.
Her voice is just sooooo good.
@Ghost said in RL things I love:
I'm high fiving myself right now about as much as I did as the time a guy said that voltage was running high by about 4 watts and I told him he's gotta turn down 4 wat.
...I want to borrow this one to share in the electrical engineering lab here at work.
@saosmash said in General Video Game Thread:
@Testament Wow I love both of those DLCs, that's a hard call for me.
Seriously. Just go ahead and ask people which of their children is their favorite, why don't you.
Another who was born to nerdhood here. It was definitely a collaborative effort to nurture it, though.
My maternal grandmother loved fantasy; when I was little, every summer either she and my grandfather would come to Seattle to visit us, or I would go to Philadelphia to visit them. Every summer we read another Oz book (or two) together; the summer she had laryngitis and she couldn't read to me, little-me worked hard to read the book to her instead because the tradition was that important to me. She was a physicist, chemist, and engineer, and the one who got me interested in computers and my start in programming. (She's also where I get much of my life philosophy from; nerdiness aside, she was absolutely the single biggest influence on my personality.)
My dad is a science fiction fan; when he realized I was reading way ahead of my grade level, he gave me Downbelow Station and The Pride of Chanur to read (C.J. Cherryh is one of his favorite authors, even still today). From there I went to get more Cherryh books (the Faded Sun trilogy) from the library and stumbled into Clarke, Asimov, Silverberg, and other old classics they had on the shelves.
As I kept reading voraciously, I started to give dad recommendations in return. When that happened, dad set aside a shelf in the house where we would collect science fiction and fantasy books which we both agreed were true classics; all my life, that shelf has been slowly filling as we read something and both agree it should be added. The first thing we added was dad's beloved Downbelow Station; the second, which I nominated, was Vonda N. McIntyre's Dreamsnake.
(...which I'm suddenly finding leaves me on the verge of tears to write. Years later I met Vonda and she became a friend, a mentor who took meâand many othersâunder her wing. For fifteen years she's been someone who I could turn to for advice about writing, or life, or even just to swap book recommendations. She also pulled me into a lot of activities, and I owe no small part of the offline fandom aspect of my present-day nerdiness to her. But I stupidly let myself get wrapped up in work and other things over the past year or so, letting our lunch dates become much more infrequent. It always felt like there would be more time later, until suddenly there wasn't any left at all, and her death this past Monday is still a fresh wound. Treasure the time you have with the people you care about, folks; it is not limitless. But I digress.)
My mother was not a huge science fiction and fantasy reader, but she was a Star Trek devotee; she pulled the rest of the family into watching The Next Generation every week with her, and from there I fell into the X-Files, Space: Above and Beyond (it was a great show shut up), and Babylon 5.
My maternal uncle was also a huge science fiction fan, and when he saw that I was reading classic science fiction, he introduced me to his frankly intimidating collection of old issues of Astounding, Amazing Stories, and Asimov's stored at my grandparents' house; I only ever worked through a tiny fraction of them when I'd visit Philly, but he's why I still have a (digital) subscription to Asimov's today. He also introduced me to Dan Simmons' Hyperion Chronicles, one of his favorite series. And, relevant to this forum, he was a D&D fan and introduced little-me to the idea of roleplaying.
My maternal aunt, meanwhile, is an enormous Tolkien fan; she is how I was introduced to the tapestry of stories in Arda. First the Hobbit, the the Lord of the Rings, and finally the Silmarillion
It wasn't just my family either, of course. My friend who lived across the street from me introduced me to Star Blazers, thus showing me that animated shows could have actual narrative arcs instead of being purely episodic. And little-me's best friend had a Nintendo; pleading to go visit even so I could just watch him play, if not play myself, was my first introduction to games. (And arguably, I suppose, to the concept of Twitch.)
So, yeah; my nerdiness was a team effort.
@Sparks said in General Video Game Thread:
I enjoy the DA games greatly, but there's little question which BioWare franchise truly owns my heart.
...as attested to by the fact that my housemate is now listening to the Mass Effect soundtrack while she writes, and hearing that distinctive music is giving me a little dopamine hit of happiness that very other video game soundtracksâas much as I might love themâcan inspire in quite the same way.
@Thenomain said in General Video Game Thread:
And I know in saying this I'm going to summon Ganymede telling me that I'm wrong, but we haven't taken the time to work out why the other feels so strongly about this. Or rather, why I feel so strongly and understanding how Gany can imagine the opposite.
So... at this point I like DA2 more than Origins, honestly. But I didn't enjoy my first playthrough of 2 very much at all.
That first time I went with what would have been called a Paragon path in a Mass Effect game and the result felt... really bland. I couldn't emotionally engage with the game that much, and without that investment in the story or characters I just found myself focusing on all the cut corners (Every cavern is the same! Enemies just drop inexplicably from the sky!) and places where you could see paint hastily slapped onto things.
Then I played it a second time, this time choosing all the snarky options (I think this was because when I commented I hadn't liked the game much, @Roz lectured me that I had "played it wrong" and insisted I try again without choosing the "boring" dialogue options)... and that time the game felt more alive. Instead of a sort of stiff storyline I wasn't able to engage with, I ended up with basically this ridiculous fantasy version of a buddy tale. You had this snarky loser who gathered all these misfits around her and sort of made a family, and they all just kind of blundered around following her lead and more or less caused trouble around the city. It was not a deep storyline by any real standardâand it certainly didn't try to paint a grand, sweeping taleâbut it let the characters shine. Over the course of that playthrough I came to care about pretty much all the companions in a way I hadn't the first time. (Except Anders. You are absolutely 100% correct that he was badly handled in DA2.)
At that point it became clear the game had really been built around the characters rather than a sweeping narrative. It's more like an anthology of various tales about this weird little family Hawke's put together, and how they just sort of blunder through all the notable events of Kirkwall. There's not a lot of games out there which are really character-focused in that manner, where the story is there only to serve the characters rather than the other way around.
My perception of the game was further improved after someone pointed out that technically the entire story is being narrated by Varric, who is relating it to Cassandra. Varric is not a reliable narrator (to put it mildly) so you can approach the game as being not what actually happened so much as how Cassandra is envisioning things based on Varric's (not necessarily wholly accurate) narration.
"We were outnumbered; there were five of them who tried to attack us!"
enemies fall from sky
"Only five? Surely the companions of the Hero of Kirkwall could easily deal with such a paltry threat."
"Ah... did I say five? I meant twelve!"
additional enemies fall from sky
And the caverns are because Varric can't be arsed to actually describe individual caverns after the first one, so Cassandra just keeps envisioning them the same way each time. Things like that.
That said, I still liked Inquisition better than DA2 (sorry, Roz) because I cared about the companions plus I also had a storyline with more moments of 'payoff', and a game which wasâdespite Frostbiteâclearly more finished in a lot of ways. I felt like I was getting my cake and my ice cream, rather than just one or the other.
Sure, my love for the Inquisition companions wasn't as absolute as with that second playthrough of DA2; I wasn't as attached to them, and there were some I could honestly have just ignored entirely if I wasn't being completionist. (I admit I was not that invested in Cole's story, for instance, despite having read the tie-in novel specifically about him.)
I will also confess that my fondness for Inquisition is almost certainly influenced by the fact that it was really the first game where I got serious about my screenshot shenanigans.
At any rate, based on my own wildly differing experiences on two different DA2 playthroughsâand the change in my own opinion of the game after the second oneâI can completely understand why people have such polarized opinions of it.
@Ganymede said in RL things I love:
@Sparks said in RL things I love:
(yeah, okay, so I write fanfic of a French parkour superhero romance cartoon; everyone needs a side hobby)
⊠CyberSix?
Nope, @moth nailed it. Miraculous: Les Adventures de Ladybug et Chat Noir. That ridiculous series has become my no-stress happy place over the past two and a half years or so, and I love it.
