SuperOz
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Posts
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Joined
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Time Traveller.
But I'm stuck in one time period....damn chameleon circuit is working on my TARDIS...it could be anywhere! Or anything!
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I own a lot of the original run, but this is still a great piece of art, and easily the best run on Thor ever.
And the final passage from the final comic goes thusly, spoken by Thor on a splash page:
Look out, you giants and trolls! Beware, you denizens of the depths and dwellers in the fortresses of evil! Gird up thy loins, you harbingers of death and destruction!
Let those in direst need lift up their voices that I may hear them!
The God of Thunder is loose and woe to those who would harry the innocent and the weak! For they shall have a champion!
So be it!
And gleaming in the sunlight, the MIGHTY THOR soars across the sky like bright star.
May his hammer ever strike in the cause of justice.
SO SAY WE ALL.
One of the greatest runs in all of comicdom bar none.
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That is one of the great wins of Youtube ever. Remember that story from last year where the little girl was told 'Star Wars isn't for girls?' This is the ultimate answer.
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I've even seen the animated gifs talking about that. But everyone seems to forget that Sauron had the Ringwraiths on the fly about the place and just by looking at them flying overhead would cause the Eagles, the Ringbearer and anyone else to just want to give up on the spot. I think too many people think of Sauron in his tower as just a big glowing lighthouse.
He can see to just about anywhere in Middle-Earth, can dispatch the Ringwraiths (who can also fly) and has armies at his disposal with siege weaponry. It's not as easy as we'd like to think.
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Quote:Oh, I kind of disagree about the portrayal of elves in LotR, simply because yes, they are being held to a different standard, but the only reason men are lower down the scale is because they brought about their own downfall. And when you weigh in that the novels are set during a period when it's Men who are going to have the dominion of Middle-Earth, and only one man, and one man who embodies the very best of humanity who can lead them, I find that speaks profoundly about the human experience. We can rise above the worst of our natures and embrace the best. We can forgive, we can inspire. And given the alternative I've seen in the history of this planet in the last one hundred years especially with the rise of the Third Reich...I know which one I think I want to influence me.Originally Posted by TrueGentleman
While I appreciate the ennobling quality that high fantasy can offer, sometimes I'm concerned that in featuring elves and wizards so prominently, it may instead distract us from what we're capable of precisely as human beings. Stepping outside our shortcomings through the imagination to create fantasy races with idealized qualities can place virtues and vices in sharp contrast, but this can also overshadow the complexities of human existence.
The obvious expample is of course Tolkein's obsession with elves over portraying recognizably human characters - the Eldar virtually embody perfection in contrast to the stiffly rendered race of Men. It took Sean Bean to add some recognizable depth to the character of Boromir in Lord of the Rings, so there are high hopes he can do the same for Martin's epic.
Perhaps King Lear and Richard III should be avoided on those grounds, but such is the tragic point of view, where the bad end unhappily and the good unluckily - and the final body count is rather high.
You did mention the recent examples of Libya, Egypt, Iran, to say nothing of the headlines of, well, the past decade. I suspect that in this context, some portion of the viewing audience just can't engage with uncomplicated escapism and unquestioned idealism any more. The Lord of the Rings movies' success came at the beginning of the decade, after all.
For the record, I think Dexter is a profoundly intellectually dishonest show, despite individual actors' performances in its favor. In adapting a series of thrillers, it's trying to have its cake and eat it too when attempting to portray a pure sociopath as a vigilante - a fantasy of a very different nature. It's also impeded from real growth by the success of its formula, which it now is struggling to find variations on since Showtime can't afford let one of its best-rated shows come up with a concluding arc. This is the kind of trap that A Game of Thrones will at least avoid if it manages to stick to the one-season-per-book schedule.
The difficulty in studying history, apart from its natural resistance to dramatic conventions, is the real-world baggage we inevitably bring to topics, no matter how far removed. (It's surprising, say, how bitter the French are about Azincourt and Waterloo.) Fantasy can supply a little distance for analagous topics it wishes to explore.
On the contrary, you're raising some interesting issues that at least part of Game of Throne's potential audience will no doubt share, to say nothing of the mainstream audience.
EDIT: I certainly did cite Lord of the Rings a great deal here, but mainly because it remains the gold standard of fantasy adaptations in film, in both fidelity and mainstream success, not because I regard it as the best fantasy series.
I personally think Viggo Mortenson did more to be a human character than Bean, because his Aragorn was conflicted (unlike the novels) and uncertain. He was cheerful, likeable, wise, passionate, and yet could make the hardest of decisions and felt deeply any losses he had. It seems unfortunate that there's this current tendency to look to the more 'normal' of us (and in forty-three years, I've yet to find a definition of the word that fits anyone I know), as if the best of our ideals can't be done. That's not idealism, that's a goal to aspire to.
As far as Lear and Richard III is concerned, I've studied and like them both. But that's the thing...even those are dramatisations of real events, and we know simply because of dramatic license that even Game of Thrones abides by those conventions. Martin presumably could choose not to kill off a given character, but because he does, it's a dramatic license he builds into the story. And I write this with surprise now noting that the major thing I know about the story is just that. He writes a cast of interesting characters and then kills them. Not that the world is well described or alluring...or that there are moments I would be touched or heartened by. As I type this, there's a documentary on, complete with dramatic music and voiceovers talking about the story of Mary, Queen of Scots. And it's enthralling. Like I said before, I think any story pales in comparison to the real world.
When you say the audience can't take escapism or unquestioned idealism, is that to say that they are jaded or lacking any sense of hope? Because it sounds to me like the real world has been so terrible that that's what we'd seek in our entertainment, which by its definition is escapism. It's what we do, we escape from the real world for a while. I think I would feel very sad if I felt I couldn't just step away for a while to somewhere else, and think a set of ideals or some morals are good ones that I don't have to think about because I know they're good ones. I think it's when perhaps you do have to question your idealism it's because you inherently know there's something wrong with it.
The questions you raise over Dexter are ones I totally agree with, but I think you'll find Game of Thrones won't escape things. Absolutely no work of fiction survives intact to another medium, and this won't be any different. Peoples familiar with this story won't recognise some things, and will wonder why some things and parts of the story aren't there at all. Look at our prior point of Lord of the Rings and you can see in the movies how much had to be stripped away and altered to make it work for a broad audience. Even with the author on board this project, I can guarantee you there'll be things followers of the books will object to. It's the nature of the beast. And HBO brought us the magnificent Rome and it barely managed two seasons in the end. Stories are one things, budgets are another.
If the story can't grab the mainstream audience, you may only ever get one or two seasons. And at very worst, not even one. So I don't know what variety the story can offer, but modern audiences have tremendously bad attention spans. I'd expect a lot more action and such (look at Spartacus and now Camelot, prime examples of how to 'sex up' stories...getting a second season approved before the pilot of the first is what producers kill for) in place of anything considered 'slow' or 'unnecessary'.
Lastly, I agree we bring baggage to our history, but we also bring it to fantasy for those very same reasons you cite. What's Martin doing after all if not taking what we know and writing what he wanted to see happen?
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That's a loss to filmmaking generally. I liked a great number of his films and he had a lightness of touch that I admired a great deal.
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fans self....
Mr. Takei.....oh my.
And I'm straight......
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I appreciate the comments as to why some of you consider this series worth watching or reading the books.
However, I kind of like fantasy tropes, so long as they're not overdone. I like magic, I like dragons. I like a story that says 'hey, you're in this fantastic setting where fantastic things happen.' In other words, not the real world. I don't mind if I see people do extraordinary things, because that's what we're capable of as human beings.
As for the realistic motivations, I see those every day. I'm watching power, greed, lust selfishness, justice, family, revenge and stupidity just in Libya alone. I saw them in Egypt, I've seen them in Iran. The point of this story as people seem to keep pointing out is to see who's going to survive and being double-bluffed by the story.
As a prior person pointed out, it's like Shakespeare. I personally would find such a story profoundly depressing, because from my basic impressions it seems like you play a waiting game to see just who dies next.
I don't really understand why the 'shades of grey' and 'realism' have become so appealing lately. Are we just jaded as audiences? Do people actually not want to see good people doing good things because...it's the right thing to do? And I'll explain that by saying I don't think that as a motivation is not realistic, because most people I know in my experience want to do just that. Most people I know are essentially decent human beings who in some cases I call my friends.
I haven't got a problem with human motivations because I have them myself. I think in an age where we have a series where a serial killer who kills bad people has become popular (and just consider that sentence a moment if you would), it's almost as if stories like Game of Thrones is like us eating our own proverbial serpent's tail.
I think there's so many great untold and bloody stories in our own history that again, it seems a little masochistic to then make up stories where we indulge the very urges that helped shape our history and read with pleasure as the characters fall to them.
I'm not going to heap criticism on Game of Thrones because I know so little about it. If you enjoy the series and what's in it, I think that's fantastic and more power to you. I say the same to anyone who enjoys anime or Power Rangers or Pokemon. Any issues I have is just what I've outlined above and it's not meant as a raging angry criticism of the story.
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I'm probably not going to watch this, given that I also haven't read the novels. I actually asked my SG today what it was about and someone said 'Do you know about the War of the Roses and the 100 year war?' And I said yes (I like my history) and was told 'it's like that, except the winters are longer and rocks fall on people and they die.'
I honestly find real-world history to be more intriguing because well...it actually happened for one thing...and I'm not sure how much of Game of Thrones I could handle before I started finding myself depressed because the same person who explained the books to me also said that there's honorable and good people, but hey, they don't last long. Not a good trait.
That was a ringing positive endorsement that kind of made up my mind. It's almost like we've become masochistic in our entertainment lately. If we're not seeing people screw each other over or be flawed and oh-so-terribly-human, then it's not good drama.
I'm all for realism, but so long as it's balanced.
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Oh, that's hillarious. Are we expecting the Rainbow Lanterns yet? I'm having trouble taking either DC or Marvel seriously anymore.
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Quote:Perhaps so, Arcana, but the point is that the progress we're supposed to be making has no other impact beyond these trials. The instant I come back out of them and do anything that's not close to level 50, the apparent progress I've made doesn't exist.Originally Posted by Arcanaville
Everything except Incarnate Shift works everywhere, inside or outside of the trials. Incarnate Shift is not a "theoretical level." The progress in the Incarnate system is not defined by combat level shifting. They even changed the name to signal that. What do they have to do at this point, change the mechanics so it doesn't use the combat modifier tables at all and replaces it with a complex numerical buff that takes an extra month to make and ends up doing the same thing?
The Incarnate "levels" are the slots. Every "incarnate level" works everywhere. The special combat modifier buff in the slots besides Alpha only work in the trials, so that the devs can make the trials have very high difficulty levels *but* unlike the LRSF before the players can work to earn power to overcome that difficulty. The numbers involved are simply too stupidly high to allow just that one tiny mechanic to work outside the trials.
You're correct there's a psychological effect going on here, but its not the one you're thinking of.
No other MMO I've ever played where I've seen the risk is worth the reward has denied me the reward after I've gotten it and used it in a setting outside of the original context.
If that's not counter-productive, I don't know what is. Give me a zone like the Shard and move them into the post-50 bracket and I wouldn't say anything at all. But this isn't happening.
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I've kind of been down this road before on other MMO's where raiding was just the expected thing; just look at any fantasy MMO and you'll know what I'm talking about. But it's a fundamental thing in any game design that players, when offered the choice, will take the path of least resistance. If you say the shiny is over there and you can go through a very difficult path and it has a learning curve and so on and you can experience this game content, OR you say you can do something less intensive and difficult, players will choose the second the majority of the time.
This isn't rocket science, this is known psychology. I'm not saying these Trials shouldn't exist, but the difference between this and other endgame scenarios are that you can take the rewards with you after you complete them. To have theoretical levels beyond 50 but they're unseen and in fact don't exist outside the Trials seems like counterproductive thinking to me. Revamp the Shadow Shard to be truly dangerous and requiring Incarnate powers to even go there, and I'll applaud you.
Give me Incarnate powers and then bottleneck me in such a way that the reward is significantly less than the risk and I'm going to question your judgement.
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Hm. With only a day to have that kind of authority, I think I'd have a sit-down meeting with the lead developers to clear up in a concrete fashion what's not going to be done in the game. There's always been talk on these forums about going back and revamping zones such as was done with Faultline, and I'm personally of the opinion there should be a semi-periodical review of zones just to see what's working and what isn't.
I'd get the mythical whiteboard to work. Let's put aside the next year's plans just for a moment (and I appreciate they're needed to help work out their budget and build times) and make some decisions.
If we're not going to revamp the starting zones (which to me is the logical place to start with the success of the Praetorian starting zones), then concretely say so and let the community know this is the case. If you want to say that the lessons learned from Going Rogue are going to go into a possible City of Heroes 2 down the track, say so! You don't have to confirm or deny such a game will be made, but don't be afraid to say if it was going to happen, what features you'd take into it.
This applies to pretty much everything from costumes to animations to TF's. If, and I do stress if it became noticeable that an issue could be addressed or redressed, then I'd order a short list of five to ten items that were within reason to be deployed across one or more issues, because I think that shows both faith and acknowledgement of the playerbase. It's when Paragon can't/won't do this is when people get really frustrated and angry, and maintaining what I think is one of the best player/developer relationships in MMO's should be a priority.
That's it. Nothing more. I have my wishlists, but I also accept a lot of what I want is restricted by the age of the game and those things cannot be done. Show me what can be, and let's roll with that.
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So, this Freem....is it carbon-neutral?
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Quote:I am a real Asgardian,Originally Posted by Cowman
Have him just tear the whole top off, Hulk Hogan style.
Fight for the rights of every man,
I am a real Asgardian,
Fight for your rights, lead with my right....
[kick-*** guitar riff]
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We live in the age of franchises, my friend. And trilogies. You may thank Uncle George for that....my understanding is that everyone bar Bridges was signed to two more movies, and that the story will from the end of Legacy.
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Quote:I could say that, but then I'd be disappointed I was only quoting....Originally Posted by Wolf Bait
Are you saying that city hall sits on a Nemesis plot?
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Last I heard, the current cast had signed for two sequels, so.....
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All of that is awesome, Wyll. I love the fact that she's taken on all the good aspects that you'd kind of expect of a girl who loves superhero stuff and her choice of the Flash is a great one (maybe you can direct her to Jesse Quick or XS as female speedsters? I don't know how aware she is or wants to be about gender types at ten). You really need to get a Captain Marvel t-shirt or something to match her.
Now, on that....I began a project for her about a year ago now...and it's still going, at a frustratingly difficult 96% done with one or two minor quibbles that derailed the entire thing, along with some real life dramas that saw all of that being put aside for the time being. It will be done, I promise you.
Great to hear from you and SF again....keep gettin' the bad guys!
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To answer the question...after the Time War, the Lord High President of Gallifrey....
...oh, right.
Paragon City building codes were written by Nemesis when they weren't looking. Therefore it's meant to be the most frustrating experience possible.
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Cool beans. Glad it's all good, though. Thank ya, Tex!
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Let's just make sure Alan Moore and Neal Adams don't cross paths, then.....but yeah, I think 'graduating' TG into being a superhero would be pretty cool. I've been trying to figure out just what she would be as an actual superhero.
I'm getting the impression of a Batmanesque type, but I dunno. How do you see her as an actual super character?
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Hm. I don't know what happened, but now it's showing green and ready to go.
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I got an error coming up saying there was no way to patch from the last version of the Test server to the current. It says that the patch servers might be updating?
I can't start Test otherwise and the error repeats. Trying to repair it gets the same message. Any ideas?
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I thought the plot twist was already in the story, really. Why does a man who's clearly out to protect his people (albeit as a dictator) suddenly decide he must outrightly destroy an alternate dimension to his?
Additionally to that, as others have posted, there was the psychic attack on Cole by Hamidon, a creature that's largely regarded as being an Incarnate themselves. In this case though, you have an Incarnate whose powers are psychic more than physical.
As to Prae Nemesis being involved...there's some supporting evidence to that as he's not seen in the opening chapter of the Alpha Slot arc and the Menders openly speak of him not being as he seems. If he is manipulating Praetorian Hamidon and by extension Praetorian Cole, it'd make sense as he was also responsible for agitating the Rikti into invading from another alternate dimension.....
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