karobit

The Don Bluth discussion at the end reminded me of an Onion AV Club comment I read years ago that I loved so much I had to save it on my livejournal. It was a long time ago, okay? -- From the comments of The Onion A/V Club's review of the DVD release of The Secret of NIMH. ( http://www.avclub.com/review/the-secret-of-nimh-7719 ) Don Bluth hates the world by Emily Dickinson Bluth's worlds are dominated by darkness and chaos. Desperate self-sacrifice is the standard heroic action. The visuals tend to be dark and cluttered. The voices often seem like people passing through on their way to something else - this is not an insult, the voice acting could be fairly called Altmanesque. I think the Bluth film I would consider to be the apotheosis of his art is Land Before Time. The world is falling apart for no reason, there is no villain, the children have no support, no relief, and no reasonable hope. The Great Valley sounds completely ludicrous, and I don't think it's a stretch to read the ending as being same happy ending as The Little Matchstick Girl. Special mention must be made of Rock-a-Doodle, in which a rooster is Elvis and Jesus, and the Devil hates the American family farm. I wouldn't want to meet Don Bluth, or at least, not if I were the only one in the room with him. It's that combination of grim spirituality and inability to resist the comic stylings of Dom Deluise and Charles Nelson Reilly. We can thank the dark gods that Bluth was never able to afford Robin Williams... 12:26 AM Fri July 6, 2007 -- TLDR: please Bluthcast

A new entry in Things I Am Inexplicably Pleased By: Chris using the term "hooch."

I really enjoyed the discussion about how Twitter/Internet/etc solidifies our gut reaction to media. For years I've been afflicted with this curse where I will publicly (to friends, customers, strangers on a livejournal) dislike an album or whatever and then immediately flip-flop on it. It doesn't even matter how much time passes before I make my opinion known, just somehow the act of expressing that opinion activates my troll glands and all of a sudden I'm tapping my feet. It's total bullshit and it has led to me basically never wanting to express my opinion on anything. As if anyone even cares that I've changed my mind! Anyways, horray for anxiety! Thanks for a good cast, Thumbs. PS this pheonomena will probably rear it's head again as I've told a co-worker how much Kerbal doesn't sound interesting to me and now after listening to you guys talk about it, it sounds dope as hell. In this case I'll just blame my co-worker for making it sound like balls.

Ahhh! See, that's what I wanted when I went to play it, but then my pride. My priiiiiiiiiiiiiide Man. What a thing.

I'm glad that Chris talked about the end of Journey because the end of my play-through has stuck with me as much as it sounds like his has. I had spent most of the game without encountering many other players (or, at least, noticing them, since the credit list seemed to show many more than I had seen). The first time I heard the chirps, I had that warm feeling of camaraderie, but by later stages my interactions with others had grown sour and resentful. I started to feel (probably due to the length of time since the game's release) that I was being carried through the game. The puzzles in Journey aren't real head-scratchers, but every time beefstain_x420x reached a marker before I did, I would feel stupidly cheated. I would slightly roll my eyes every time some long-scarved dingle showed up, leaping over my schlubby butt, and I wondered why the developers made me have to play with these jerks. Then, the end. (As an aside here, I can't figure out how I feel about the story cinematics in Journey. I want to consider myself smart enough to understand what they were trying to impart through the act of playing the game itself, because the last time you see the glyphs light up on the wall and you and the white-robed apparition look at each other knowing what the future holds for you, I felt weighed down by the heavy handedness of it. But maybe, without it, I would have reached the snowy mountain screaming "Bullshit!" at the screen.) At the very end, after being without a partner for quite some time, I reached my destination and took a single step before I heard a chirp. "Great," I thought, "another guy to show me up." I ran ahead into the crevice in an attempt to not have another moment stolen from me, but as I walked further I got apprehensive. I slowed up to let my buddy join, and he came onto my screen, but stopped just short behind me. I tried beckoning him closer, so we could walk together, but he refused. In the end, as the camera swung behind me, cutting him out of the frame, I had to walk through alone, and I was actually sort of frightened.