tegan

It's literally the entire plot of the movie. The Earl de Darkwood's been kidnapping aliens for centuries, disguising them as humans, and brainwashing them; all so that he can sacrifice them after they become award-winners, which will give him control of the universe for some reason. The aliens shown in this sequence are probably supposed to be stand-ins for a young Mozart, Jimi Hendrix, Ella Fitzgerald, Janis Joplin and Robert Plant.

Fuck, NOW I realize what it reminds me of!

Would it help if you saw it from the side?

I'm playing through Cave Story with a few self-imposed rulesets now that I've beaten it for the first time. Normal difficulty on both, and I'm going for every health pickup, but I've added a couple of condiitons: 1) Best ending (save Curly, get the Booster 2.0, run the Bloodstained Sanctuary, fight Ballos) 2) no machine gun (using the Spur in my regular file and the Snake in my Curly Story file) 3) in my Curly Story file, no rocket launcher until I hit the Bloodstained Sanctuary Tough, but actually maybe easier than my first completed run, so far.

Wait, is this like the Daft Punk anime where all of history's greatest musicians were aliens?

As far as deus ex machina go, one that pays off on a silly joke made almost twenty years prior is pretty good.

So here's a thought: Huey, Dewie, and Louie are among the few characters in the major Disney canon to age. Like how around the turn of the millennium they all looked like some variant of Jonathan Taylor-Thomas. So what if this new series had them aged up to the point where they essentially become a trio of Nathan Drakes? ...Fuck, Nathan Drake sounds exactly like the kind of stupid bird pun name that a Ducktales character would have.

1) you're misinterpreting me, because that's exactly what I'm saying. Nobody wants you to refer to all people as "ze," just the ones who want it. What made me object to griddlelol's post was that he made every indication that he wouldn't use it if someone to whom it applied asked for it. 2) yeah, I feel real fuckin' bad for straight people. I've definitely never been in a situation where I've had to hold my tongue for fear of violence like that at all, for sure. Protip: the "I'm an ally, so it's hard for me too and you should be fucking grateful for it" approach is not a good approach. Next tell me something about "not all men."

Oh right. That one too then. And there's probably a bunch of direct-to-DVD TV movies or something.

The only animated Disney films I can think of in which both parents of the protagonist are confirmed to be alive throughout the entire movie are 101 Dalmations, Peter Pan, Mulan, Tangled, The Incredibles, and Brave (and Mary Poppins if you want to count that). Killing them off is a convenient way to keep them out of the protagonist's hair so that they can grow and learn lessons for themselves without having their parents willingly abandon them. It's a lazily overused trope.

Probably! The important thing is that it gets Muntz out of the way without making any of the characters responsible for his death, which is why so many Disney villains die by falling.

I'm sure you'd do an absolutely fantastic job of being supportive by immediately refusing to use their preferred pronouns. I only use home-grown free-range organic words, not any of these crazy newfangled words cooked up in a lab. Seriously, it is hilariously easy to get straight peeps to use bullshit made-up words to describe things, but suddenly it gets fucking crazy when trans or genderqueer people get involved. Like, people will pretty much unquestionably indulge in people like Ben Haggerty or Stephani Germanata's desire to be called things like "Macklemore" and "Lady Gaga". In the case of this forum specifically, we're mostly willing to adopt idiotic-sounding descriptors like "metroidvania" or "roguelite" if it fills a void in language that makes it more conducive to the needs of our discussion, which is exactly what gender-neutral pronouns do. I get that "ze" and other gender-neutral pronouns sound silly, but I guarantee you're not setting a new precedent for stupid shit you're willing to say when you adopt them. Agreeing to use them in the unlikely hypothetical situation where it would make someone more comfortable is literally the least you can possibly do to support that person.

I usually do Metal > Wood > Bubble > Air > Flash > Crash > Quick > Heat. If nothing else, do Metal Man first, just because his weapon is absurdly overpowered an he's not at all difficult to fight. In other news, Japanese Club Nintendo is going out with a bang, it seems.

There's a lot of really interesting stuff on the Up Blu-Ray about the intentions and the process behind it. Muntz is basically kept alive and relatively spry by sheer tenacity; he refuses to die until he finds the bird. The original ending had him get lost in the labyrinth of the "twisty rocks," with the implication that he'll be obsessively hunting shadows in the mist forever. Another ending had him get caught on more balloons at the end and, instead of falling to his death, he just floated away screaming, never to be seen again.* I have a hard time watching it now because it's so disjointed and doesn't make a cohesive whole, but I recognize that most individual scenes from Up are all pretty great and admire their original aspirations. *he's still the billionth Disney villain to fall to his death, but this would have been the second instance of one dying by falling up.

They are part of Best Film! There have only ever been three nominees: Beauty and the Beast (which came so close to winning that they added the "Best Animated Film" category so that they wouldn't have to associate with the riffraff), Up, and Toy Story 3.

I'm making gradual steps away from job hunting in Moncton* toward apartment hunting in Halifax. I was listening to the most recent Danswers earlier and someone wrote in with my exact problem: They like living where they do now, but they feel the urge to move on. The Dans helped me realize that I think it's worth taking the plunge and moving, even if I'm not really sure how things will work out. I also found out that my one good friend in Moncton is moving to Germany in May, so it's not like there's much of a reason to stick around. Besides, there are way more jobs and better resources for LGBT people. Any advice? I've been gradually moving further between each apartment each time I've moved, but this is my first trans-provincial deal and I dunno what I have to sort out legally first. *Must be bilingual! Must be able to lift fifty pounds! Must provide own transportation! Lowest minimum wage in the country! EVERYTHING IS CALL CENTERS!

Huge thanks to whichever Thumb is responsible for plugging me on the Thumbs twitter last week. Here's a few things I did as a result of it: The queue is currently empty, so keep 'em coming!

Headline: "DC Comics Announces New Diverse Lineup to 'Make Room for More Types of Storytelling, More Fans'.” I appreciate the efforts that Marvel (and now DC apparently) have been going for, even if they don't fix that I find most of their work fundamentally crummy. I'm definitely sick of the two steps forward, one step back approach, though.

I posted about this last year a little; most of the Oscar judges were extremely dismissive and insulting toward the animated candidates, though thankfully most of the ones that were abstained from voting. Even so, it's still hardly beneficial for the most prolific award for animation to be decided by people whose attitudes toward the medium seem to vary from indifference to disdain.

Protip: Learn how to use Melia. She's the hardest character to master and the only one that the AI doesn't do a particularly good job with, and you basically need to be able to use her for a late-game boss that's only vulnerable to Ether attacks. I got stuck there and decided that it was too late to either learn the character or grind for XP, and ended up stopping because of it.

Don't forget that Tales of Phantasia port! Hoo boy, what a port.

Song of the Sea?

This is a terrible idea with a Thumbs-approved name.