I’m rewatching inuyasha and have no one to talk to about the fact that Kagura should have lived and by doing so the entire Sessh/Rin weirdness could have been completely avoided. Like I have trouble picturing Kagura pregnant but that doesn’t mean it couldn’t happen and half the time in fairy tales of all locales the kids pop out of the dad’s migraine or some shit and honestly they’d also make amazing godparents (or whatever the equivalent is) to a half dozen adopted mortals and their bloodlines. I’m mad about it and commenting on ao3 fics for this fandom is like screaming into the void.
I have a tangentially related thing. I got big into steampunk decades ago when it was still young. Back then, it was a maker culture, a loosely defined idea of cogs and boilers that gave you a fun little world to practice your craft in. It wasn’t just form, it was function. Hammering brass to make functional goggles, learning the Victorian techniques to whalebone corsets, clockwork to accomplish something we only do now with variable controllers.
Now I look for my people and I find a rusting husk of I knew. Gone are the color and texture, replaced by brown on brown in cotton and leather. Where once gears and cogs were carved to spin and move, now they serve only to be glued to cheap accessories. The gleaming promises of brass and copper and steel, userped by soulless luster of plastics.
We should Never have let the world in.
Relevant song: Just Glue Some Gears On It and Call It Steampunk
I’ll have to listen to this after work, but I already feel at home in the comments.
Came to share this
No that’s valid tbh. Genres are 100% a part of fandom. I always admired the steampunk aesthetic but never had the resources to get into it. I’ve loved the bits that overlap with stuff like stardust though!
I’m much the same. When I got into it, the brass goggles forum required you to hand make and chare your goggles to be a full member. By the time I had the skill to do that, the forum had died and the fandom was a tag on Etsy for dropshippers.
Maybe you could help a new generation learn the value of intentional steampunk :) bring some of the passion back to the hobby, as it sounds like many just accept it as presented. Share it as a “when I got into this, we made this shit” and how you did it. I might be wrong, but I’m weirdly confident you’ll eventually find a cross section of steampunks that would be interested in the creative element
It’s not quite the same as you describe, but I do carry the tenets of that old steampunk to my modern crafts. Right now I’m making an electric hurdy gurdy cello out of a broken guitar, a kitchen mixer, and 3d printed models of my own construction. If steampunk taught me anything it’s that anything worth doing is worth overdoing.
I don’t know what it says about me that I already knew what a hurdy gurdy was lol
That you either passionately love or viscerally hate droning instruments.
I love that you didn’t give up the complex creations. Unlike the other commenter I have no idea what a hurdy gurdy is, but I can appreciate the value of overmaking stuff. Glad to hear that you didn’t let the capitalisation of steampunk kill your passion 😊
Oh you are in for a treat! it’s an antique instrument with a very distinctive sound.
-
Given how Serenity turned out, firefly’s cancellation was probably for the best, making the reavers the intentional by-product of alliance experiments completely destroyed the nuances of the factions in the war of independence.
-
Inuyasha ran out of ideas 10-15 tankobon in, and Takahashi just kept milking it for the money.
-
Every fandom that accepts the “x is for everyone” motto is accepting enshittification and casualization with open arms. Air and water are for everyone, even bread has people who dislike it, for something to be unique it necessarily will have haters. The right word is anyone.
-
Archer had a bit of a dip when Adam Reed left the writing team but it recovered and had one of the best endings possible for a series that long lived.
making the reavers the intentional by-product of alliance experiments
They were the accidental by-products, so I think some nuance is still there for the factions, although still clearly the browncoats were in the right …
Right, I should’ve said “accidental byproduct of non-consensual experimentation on the population” but yeah, still beyond the pale.
I’ve just started rewatching Archer from the beginning. I loved it at the time, and I agree that it ended very well.
I hope Reed takes some time to contemplate another project to get passionate about, because I loved both Archer and Frisky Dingo.
One of the writers of Freely (maybe Tim Minear?) did a blog post many moons ago where he outlined what some unresolved plot threads were and future episodes. You’re right that it was better off being cancelled. Even Nathan Fillion has said that the reason it’s so beloved is That it never had the opportunity to become bad.
Let me give you the example that stood out to me. Remember in the pilot where Inara gets out a syringe when she hears about Reavers being nearby? Everybody assumed she was going to kill herself. Nope. There was going to be an episode where they got boarded by Reavers and Inara was left alone with them. The crew move heaven and Earth to get back on board and when they do they find Inara barely alive, surrounded by hundreds of dead Reavers. The syringe was full of a Companion drug which kills anybody who has sex with you. So Inara killed then all by letting them rape her.
Mal would have been sweet and tender during her recovery, and that is what would have brought them together.
Probably for the best that one never got made.
Honestly the idea itself, as insane and barely disguised a fetish as it is, isn’t even that bad, to me.
It’s the planned aftermath that is pretty horrendous?
The idea that they would need that for their relationship to evolve in a positive direction when they’re already basically a couple by Shindig is genuinely sad, if they wanted that grim a story beat they should probably place it after they’re already an established couple and Mal has gotten over his shit about companions, then there’s some good meat on the bone in terms of character dynamics to explore.
-
Community (2009): Annie was the (2nd) ass crack bandit and Abed took Troys cracking with a shocking amount of grace.
All the major character replacements on MASH were better than the characters they replaced. It’s not that I don’t like Burns and Blake, but Winchester and Potter were just so much more interesting. Trapper John was kind of a rapey creep even for the time, so there’s no question BJ was the winner there. Honestly as much as I love Radar, even Klinger taking over his position was an improvement. There was only so much more they could do with his Beaver Cleaver Goes to War shtick.
I agree wholeheartedly. I like the original characters enough, they fill their purpose. I’m a little sad when the changeover happens, but quickly fall in love with the new ones. A very well done show, infinitely re-watchable, in my family’s opinion. We grew up watching it, and we all rewatch it every other year or so.
In fact, I’m due for a rewatch right about now.
Maybe a Quake movie can succeed where the Doom movies failed. Make Alan Ritchson Ranger and put Nine Inch Nails on the soundtrack. I could see Guillermo del Toro having a field day with it.
I’ll watch anything Alan Ritchson does. Dude is totally underrated as an actor just because he’s big and muscular. People act like he’s just a modern Sylvester stalone, but dudes got range and a great comedic ability. Sometimes overblown and blatant (blue mountain state, playdate) and sometimes subtle (titans, reacher), but he always hits the mark.
Zombies ate my neighbors needs a revival. A comical survival/horror game with a system that isn’t so convoluted and complicated that it’s limiting. Why do no survival games come with a usable tutorial to tell you how to do things in the game? It always just throws you into the game with 47 menus and you’re supposed to sus it out before dying.
I blame Minecraft for the lack of tutorials in survival games. Notch never added one before the game got popular enough to generate clones.
Mario is better than sonic as both a game to play and as a mascot
By extension it follows logically that if youre Sega instead of Nintendo I hate you and everything you stand for.
From the perspective of not having a dog in this fight that is an unhinged level of fucks to give about this and in the context of this thread I love that for you.
Intellectually I dont care any more and I understand its fucked from the beginning, but I was just old enough to engage in tribalism when it was kicking off and apparently its a permanent feature now.
To be clear, if I did have a dog in this fight, it would be the supertux games.
How’s this for an “I’m getting old” moment: sonic 1 was released on the Genesis in 1991. Sonic Adventure 2 Battle was released on the GameCube in 2001. Sonic has been on Nintendo consoles for over twice the time he’s been a Sega exclusive.
Sonic sucks.
The guy is supposed to “go fast” but the levels are absolute nonsense that inhibit your ability to “go fast”, and then once you play the game enough (which you shouldn’t) to memorize the levels (what a waste of brain matter) and “go fast”, the game ends quickly because you “went fast”.
Fundamentally terrible games. People who like sonic are weirdos.
I’m rewatching a Fullmetal Alchemist Brotherhood for the first time since I think it came out I guess. There’s two things that are striking me. One they all just stand around while bad things happen a lot, but I guess that’s just Anime. The other thing is I have no idea it was so long. It’s too long. I guess I remember it being like you know 28 episodes or something. This show is stretching so much. It should have been shorter.
edit Oh and one more thing, where are all the Alchemists? In a show called Fullmetal Alchemist outside of the first few episodes there aren’t any. It’s weird there’s not more running around.
I have some very hot takes about the efficacy of the Sailor Scouts given exactly how much Tuxedo Mask does. This is why my ex-wife and kid, who only wanted to enjoy a magical girl show, stopped watching Sailor Moon around me (it had a good three or four beginning to end rewatches before that though).
I have some very hot takes about the efficacy of the Sailor Scouts given exactly how much Tuxedo Mask does.
How much he does? He throws a flower and talks.
There are so many times where the Scouts would straight-up die and/or Negaverse cronies would win the day if he didn’t show up, throw a flower and talk. Enough times to the point where I wondered “Hey, wtf is the message here exactly?”
The message is “we need a deus ex machina right about here.”
Yes, but in a show with major themes about women’s empowerment it’s a weird device to lean on that much.
Mine is that John and Vriska should have ended up together. I fucking stan spiderbreath. iykyk
I do not know, but (genuinely) thank you for sharing.
Nah, I think Vriska/Tavros is a much better pair
Nooo Tavros deserves better tbh.
We need a continuation of High-school of the Dead
Gaming specific:
MMO’s were exponentially better when the co tent was more difficult, and things took a longer time to acquire. When WoW catered to the chronically casual- it became the industry standard to ship each game with a built-in “I win” button.
Basically, games like DAoC, Asheron’s Call, and EverQuest walked so the modern games could fall.
Agreed, I modern MMOs feel like they’re designed around a fast track to max level which leaves the game seeming more like a MOBA with a grind gate. We’ve completely lost the journey in favour of rushing to the destination.
Now at the same time runescape was grindy as fuck in a very unfun way but with all our modern advances surely we can make a progression that is long while having moment to moment gameplay thats fun in its own right? Warframe and Atlyss both manage this (though Atlyss is fairly short the gameplay would be fun even if xp requirements scaled 10 fold)
The third season of Forever Knight completely ruined the show.
Shmups are fun and should be revived as a genre. I’ve been saying for years that Nintendo should make Star Fox into a 2D scrolling shooter.
Though playing Megabonk earlier today made me realize that it and other clones of Vampire Survivors are like shmups in many ways. You gain powerups that you lose when you die, you have little to do other than move, and maneuvering around the level is a big part of the gameplay.
Beetleborgs was better than Power Rangers.
