BobbyBesar
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Posts posted by BobbyBesar
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Kind of sad that she's pretty much in her underwear, though.
For some reason, that bothers me less than the enormous (and enormously impractical) stiletto heels she's wearing. You can't really tell from that group shot, but it's clearer in some of these on-set photos.
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I think I mentioned before how Mad Men can feel both subtle and obvious at the same time. One example is Don wearing identities: Hobart cajoles Don into introducing himself: "I'm Don Draper from McCann Erickson". While it isn't actually his next line (he speaks to Betty and to dream-Cooper in between), the next time we see him saying his name, he's introducing himself using a different identity (and then tries on another one as a collection agent for good measure). As an audience, we're expected to know that this is of course simply part of what Don does, but the craft of the parallelism is so good.
That's part of the reason I'll miss Mad Men. The craft is so good that everything feel obvious, until you realize that most other shows don't actually do that kind of thing.
For some reason, during Peggy's badass walkthrough at the end, I also thought of Sally and the Moon Landing. We've seen Sally try on different identities several times recently. Here, we see Don's "other daughter" Peggy trying on a new identity of her own.
Also, I think that the comments about Diana being insufficiently drawn are accurate, but I don't blame the actress. I think it's entirely intentional in that she's meant to be an amorphous entity that can Don project his own needs onto. She isn't supposed to feel enigmatic to the audience, because there's no mystery: it's supposed to be clear that Don is simply looking for something that isn't there.
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Just some random thoughts:
- The AV Club agrees with Chris that the roller-skating is a callback to the fake scooter ad ploy.
- That AV club review also has a lot that's good to say about the meeting Don walks out of, including the "turn it up a notch" that makes Don realize he's no longer special, and the perversion of his pitch technique into something dull and lifeless.
- You talked about the interior design of the McCann office, but to me it felt almost identical to the old Sterling-Cooper offices back from season one.
- I sincerely hope that Peggy is successful in busting balls and taking names, but Hobart did have an ominous line to Joan in their showdown. When mentioning that Peggy was a Copy Chief and had lots of men calling a lady their boss, he said something along the lines of "I'm not sure how long that is going to continue either".
- I also though for a moment that Don was going directly to Miller for some kind of end-around.
Also, give the female copywriters some respect for their wordplay: the explicitly non-feminist ladies' night drinks were "Not awareness raising, strictly awareness lowering" *drinking gesture*.
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Other than that, Parks & Rec is a gem. I thought season 7 was very weak though. 30 Rock is amazing.
Now that I think about it, the majority of comedies I watch/love are woman led shows.
I know a lot of people love Broad City. It just didn't click with me.
Have you watched Welcome To Sweden? I think it's fantastic, but it got buried amid NBC's flight from comedy.
It's stars Greg Poehler (Amy's brother) and I think was produced by Amy Poehler. It also guest-stars Amy Poehler and Aubrey Plaza playing "Amy Poehler" and "Aubrey Plaza", who are basically just Leslie Knope and April. It's a little different in tone from Poehler's other stuff, but I think it still has the same rapid-fire pacing and the same essential optimism.
It's funded in part by a Swedish interest (TV station or tourism board or something), so they already got another season.
"I love your normal face."
Looks like it's all available on NBC.com:
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Totally, and any non-ridiculous person reacts to it how Pete (initially) did.
I loved Pete's mid-line pivot in that scene. He's like "this is absurd!" and you think, "yeah, that guys' a jackass!" and then Pete follows up with "we were following the King's orders!" and you're like "...ooooooohhhh, Pete's objection is only superficially the same as a normal person's objection."
There are people to whom that kind of thing did (and still does) matter. The whole storyline trades on Pete's family being those kinds of people, and then Pete reminds you: I'm also one of those people.
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Catching up on the podcasts, and I wanted to comment on Don writing the forecast.
Don shits on Chaough and Peggy's ambitions in part because there's no urgency to them. Don only really functions in an emergency. He only feels alive when he's actually _fighting_. Just climbing isn't enough. (It reminds me of this one
about a tiger and a strawberry). Peggy and Ted are fat and happy, and want to become fatter and happier. That's the difference. It's no coincidence that Don mentions that he was always worried about whether he would exist next year. That's the kind of struggle that he needs.We see this more clearly in the next episode, as the McCann buyout comes home to roost and Don remembers how to be alive, if only briefly.
In many ways, Ted Chaough has always functioned as a foil for Don. Here, I think we're seeing, as we have several times before, how somebody who doesn't have Don's essential existential uncertainty behaves. This is consistent with Ted's previous actions from last season where he threatened to scuttle the acquisition. He didn't want to be constantly fighting anymore.
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I don't think any of us here would be against preservation, except maybe those "hipsters" would make a belt buckle out of a rare NES game because irony? (Seriously, I can't even fathom how the term hipster even works)
I can't see how you'd make that work. Maybe with a Genesis cartridge, though.
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I think the phenomenon of ascribing arbitrary "deep" meanings to abstract games is an unfortunate side effect of the way people talk about games.
Most conversation about games is essentially "mechanically illiterate", because that's the thing that is unique to games and hasn't really had a chance to develop a critical grammar. To this day, when the average person says "I have a game idea", it's almost always a narrative or thematic concept rather than a mechanical one. Very rarely would you hear a prospective game designer say "I have a game idea...there are red and blue dots and based on the number of dots visible to one dot, it has a number assigned to it..." (Working game designers are fairly likely to speak in those terms, but that's a different population from the standard critical / consumer apparatus.)
To make matters worse, people have been in such a hurry to make games "meaningful" in an artistic sense that rather than let this grammar evolve naturally, they try to enforce critical conversations cribbed from other media, ones which focus of theme or narrative content.
I think we're still a ways off from your game-playing layman being able to think critically about the interaction of mechanics in and of themselves, and also a ways off from designers consistently having the confidence to give those designs an opportunity to stand alone.
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"Stop struggling. You've won."
I'm so tickled by Chaough this season. He's found happiness as a faceless middle management drone. His face when he found out that he would get his pharmaceutical was amazing.
One weird minor thing: in 2 shots where we saw the 5 former partners, we also saw 3 lights in the same shot (in the boardroom, 3 lamps overhead, and in the closing shot of people walking away from the partners after the announcement, 3 conspicuous globe lights). I assume they represented the 3 absent partners (Lane, Cooper, Cutler), but it's kind of weird that Cutler isn't dead.
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Did you know Steam is selling censored hentai games? I was almost to afraid to look, but *eden is a censored "hentai" game. When I found out I was curious if I could notice the censorship, there was a death scene where someone was stabbed several times and the blood was removed... I don't get the point, but oh, well.
There's probably an interesting story or two to be told about the censored-hentai game industry. I played a censored version of Knights of Xentar years and years ago.
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Please, you expect me to believe that a tazer can stop a negro hopped up on cocaine out to rape white women?*
*This was, essentially, a real argument back in early 1900s, and was part of the reason the NYPD decided to increase the caliber of their service weapons.
“Murder and Insanity Increasing Among Lower Class Blacks Because They Have Taken to ‘Sniffing’ Since Deprived by Whiskey Prohibition.”:
[Cocaine] produces several other conditions that make the “fiend” a peculiarily dangerous criminal. One of these conditions is a temporary immunity to shock — a resistance to the “knock down,” effects of fatal wounds. Bullets fired into vital parts that would drop a sane man in his tracks, fail to check the “fiend.”
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I know that outrage over the Sad Puppies fiasco hasn't gained much traction here, and that's totally okay, but the most famous person on the slate, Jim Butcher, finally tweeted something resembling his opinion on it and it's... well, it's what you expect from a more populist author who occasionally makes missteps in areas of social justice but generally just keeps his head down: https://twitter.com/longshotauthor/status/588441394806591488
The increasingly ubiquitous stance that opinions are bad and everyone should strive not to have any, unless they're benignly consumerist, is really upsetting to me.
Incidentally, On The Media did a segment about the Hugos / Sad Puppies this week that's a quick primer if anybody wasn't entirely clear on what it is.
http://www.onthemedia.org/story/hugo-awards-sad-puppy-edition/
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This week: Don is everybody's Cool Dad! Don's existential crisis is EVERYONE'S existential crisis.
It's not that Don isn't working at work per se, he's just...middle management now. And so he has the archetypal middle management problem ("More to think about, but less to do"). I loved Don's scene with Ted Chaugh. What interesting here is that all along we've been shown that Don is Sisyphus: he's only really happy when he has a problem to solve. But there are no more problems. He's fat and happy and safe, and there's only 4 episodes left. He's learned enough that it's possible that this time he won't just create a problem for himself as he's done in the past, but it's not clear that he knows how to just be. That, I suspect, is the conflict we'll be seeing in the remainder of the series.
The "creepy" thing from way back was that Betty gave Glen a lock her her hair. Glen and Betty's relationship has never been sexual, not really. Glen was obsessed with Betty in a sort of typically child-like way, but is weird enough not to grow out of it (or pretend he has). His interest in Sally wasn't dishonest in that regard, it's not that he's interested in Sally as a way to get to Betty, it's that he's legitimately interested in Sally, he's just interested in the parts that she inherited from Betty. He knows, because he's been told, that his interest in Betty in inappropriate because he's a child and she'd an adult, so he's basking in the glow of her reflected presence, as it were.
But now that he's an adult, that can change, right? That's what he thinks at least.
For Betty's part, Sally (and Sarah above) summarized it well at the end of the episode. There's no sexual attraction per se, Betty just can't help herself. She loves the attention, and again, while she knows it's inappropriate, she can't help herself. When it's so clear that somebody really worships you, it's hard to turn them away.
I was a tiny bit disappointed with the whatsisname getting fired bit. One of the things I absolutely delight in is that Mad Men consistently defies expectations built on standard screenwriting tropes. But the moment Don told his Lucky Strike story, you knew that the kid was going to use the wrong approach. While it got us where we wanted to be ("You're not even better, you're just handsome"), it was a bit of a letdown that the path to get there was so clear.
I am glad I don't see the "Next time on Mad Men" things anymore, they were so annoying and pointless.
P.S. Rodger now has the Octopus painting in his office!!!!!!
On the contrary, "Next Time on Mad Men" is the best. Somebody opens a door! Don is incredulous! Roger is angry! Peggy is unsatisfied! I actually want a supercut of all 7 seasons of them as a special feature on a BluRay or something.
Weiner is on the record as saying that he hates them, so they intentionally cut them to reveal as little information as possible. As a result, they're almost a dada-ist art piece masquerading as promotional material.
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I've received my Blu Ray discs of Star Trek TNG on April 2nd, so I'm binge watching these episodes until my head explodes. There's one, just one episode that has received an extended cut, and it's The Measure of A Man. As the tears started rolling, it dawned on me that this is it. This is the kind of story the Sad Puppies and gamergate are fighting against. Full to the brim with social issues that allow analogy to the present day, and that is what actually MAKES it great.
Yeah. The whole Sad Puppies thing is especially stupid, because they seem to have chosen as their battleground the one genre of fiction which is fundamentally diametrically opposed to their argument.
While everybody has their own opinion, my own personal definition of Science Fiction would be something along the lines of: fiction that explores the nature of what it means to be human, usually via interaction with the creations of humanity (i.e. technology).
It's the reason that I don't think Star Wars is really science fiction (it's space-fantasy).
I assume that the Sad Puppies define Science Fiction as "it has lasers and space and stuff". Which is the most juvenile, facile definition one can give.
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So, this isn't Weird fiction with a capital W, but it is probably weird fiction, and might appeal to the same people.
Has anybody read anything by Laszlo Krasznahorkai? They're bleak Hungarian post-modern things that have just started getting english translations. My wife read a couple and is convinced that she's the only person in the world who read and enjoyed them. (One was a library book, and she found 3 different bookmarks where previous people had given up.)
His most famous book, Satantango, was made into a 7 hour long film.
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Has the Parks and Rec Men's Rights Activists thing been posted in here?
I don't think I can embed this.
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Not directly related, but it may be of interest to people in this thread, so I'll just leave this here:
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One other thing though: I could easily see Shovel Knight becoming a regular in the speed-run circuit / AGDQ, because there's lots of different variable. Beat once, beat New Game+, no relics, 100% items, get all achievements , etc.
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Well, I don't just mean in the design (which is a little odd), I mean in the function within the game. i assume that they planned for the world-wanderers to exist, and just let the backers slot in design ideas. Was the Hat Baron backer-designed too? He fits into the world better than the others.
They just didn't really have an interesting function in terms of changing the layout of the map. Basically, you either beat them right away, or you poked them until they moved enough so that you could get past them to get to town / troupple pond and then you stocked up and then beat them.
I had no idea about the DLC. That's pretty cool, I'll probably play them if they're available on 3DS.
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Inevitably video game lore conversations always have to go back to Blizzard because they are clearly so in love with their own lore despite it all being so generic.
But yeah, DOTA 2 having lore is definitely the ultimate version of someone at a company kind of shrugging and saying, "well, I guess we should have lore because that's what you do?"
Yeah, but sometimes it give us awesome stuff like the absurd Magnus backstory. "Magnoceri"
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I played this fairly recently on the 3DS, and while I liked it a lot, I don't think I loved it.
I really liked the artistic direction. The ice level was fairly novel. The very clear references to Metal Man and Air Man, Castlevanias, etc. But I didn't really like the progression. Tackling the levels in different order didn't really seem to matter, since unlike Mega Man, beating one boss didn't really help you with the next one. (Or at least, it was clear that everything was designed such that it could be beaten without artifacts, so using them felt like a crutch). I almost never used the artifact abilities outside the treasure forest levels.
The best feeling level to me was the Hall of Ancestors or whatever, since it combined some puzzle solving with accessible but not repetitive level design (no checkpoints needed), and a nifty boss fight.
I was really disappointed by the New Game+. I was really expecting tweaked levels with different enemy layouts. Just making everything hit harder and live longer was not an interesting variation to me. It's the laziest possible implementation of a difficulty level. It did make me better at the game, particularly the NG+ boss rush), but that also kind of ended up with me just hoping I'd get a favorable draw order.
When all is said and done, I also did not care for the way they implemented the checkpointing system. It felt like the levels were very much tuned around the normal-mode checkpoints (specifically with regard to the insta-kill pits/spikes), and then they just removed some from the New Game+. The levels felt too long to play without all the checkpoints, and somehow too short with the checkpoints in there. Again, this didn't feel interesting to me. It just meant that when playing, I needed to repeat the room before the insta-kill room many, many times.
The world-map wanderers seemed a little off, too. For one, the Lobo-guy with the whip who appears first seemed harder to me than the later ones. And they didn't really seem to serve any purpose. They undermined the death system (it's trivially easy to recover loot bags when dying to them), and they didn't serve as a significant barrier to progress on the world map.
It's also in an uneasy sweet spot for me length/content wise. It isn't an elemental beat-in-a-sitting type challenge (like I would do with Mega Man 2). But it also isn't long enough to be a keep-plugging-away for secrets journey (Mega Man X).
It definitely did what it set out to do though.
Is there a "bad" ending where Shield Knight doesn't survive? Maybe if you don't catch her in the dream sequences? It's trivially easy to catch her, so I always did.
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I'm surprised sometimes at the quality of cards I see at Level 20 in the ladder. One person had ALL gold cards and a gold hero. I'm guessing they stopped playing for a few months so they got bumped down? Or maybe just started/quit enough games to be bumped way down the ladder so they could steamroll a bunch of games to get their dailys done?
That's a reasonable theory, although they could just be a mid-range player whose been in it for a while. If you're in the 12-14 range at the end of the month, you start at 20 the next month. That's approximately where I end up most months that I'm actively playing. The rank-resets are pretty compressed. Looking at a chart, you can't get above 16 with bonus stars
It seems to happen more at the beginning of the month, to the extent that I've basically taken to playing Arena or casual until about the 15th, then going back into the ladder once its well-sorted again.
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Is it peeled? If its whole heads, it may last a while. Garlic from my parents garden lasts longer than you'd expect. Using at my usual rate, I can use it all before it goes bad. I think a lot depends on the breed. They use a harder clove/spicier flavor than many commercial breeds, and I think it sprouts slower as a result.
Remember also that your store bought stuff had to be processed, shipped, and sot on the store shelf before getting to you, so it probably gives you a couple weeks on it even with the same product.
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So, does nobody go to the front page ever, or is everybody too polite to mention that "Severence" is spelled wrong?
Also, I never really read the opening theme as suicidal at all. I just took it as being sort of unmoored in the social and political upheaval of the era. After all, he doesn't jump, the world simply collapses around him.
The End of Mad Men: "Lost Horizon"
in The End of Mad Men Episodes
Posted
Ugh, yeah, you're probably right about "consciousness" rather than awareness. Well, the raising / lowering parallelism is what was fun about the line.
In either case, I can't really see where your read comes from. The entire conversation was about feminism, and "consciousness raising" was an active term used by feminist groups at the time, roughly mapping to what we would tend to call awareness today.