Bjorn
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Posts posted by Bjorn
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That is a bummer, I didn't realize he had taken it down. The internet has a bit less joy in it now.
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Out of curiosity, do you guys know it was an Thumbs forum member who made that Objective Reviews site? It seems like that was very close to the time that Danielle joined the cast, so it could have been an easy thing to miss.
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Life
in Idle Banter
A bit of that. Sometimes I also feel like posting about something here but it involves someone else too personally to be fair to post publicly, so I refrain in that case too.
I really don't care about oversharing about myself, but when it involves other people, that's the thing that keeps me from talking too openly about some topics.
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Rudolph?
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"Who is the Witness?"
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Is something which cannot die truly alive?
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Well, if your complaints didn't come off as the Grinch, I wouldn't have said that.
One of your complaints was literally that the villain going to the subway once ruined your immersion in the show. I don't know how to treat that like a sincere criticism. It feels like trolling. Like, you cannot imagine a reason that the villain might have gone to the subway? Because traveling in New York is sometimes faster by subway even if you have a chauffeur? Because he was retracing Jones steps because he was a stalker and she uses the subway? Because he followed the guy in the purple jacket into the subway to take his jacket? I really don't see how that, of all things, is something worthy of criticism or immersion breaking.
Edited to add: And that complaint is pretty much why I said you were looking for excuses not to like the show, because it comes off as that silly to me.
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That was why it bothered me so much that Jessica wouldn't kill him, her plan had an obvious hole in it, and the plot just didn't address that at all. What, are we supposed to believe that no one involved in the plan noticed this problem?
Also, Jessica's strong enough to kill people? Then what was up with the scene where they kidnap Kilgrave, his thugs come after them, Jessica fights them, and she loses because they keep getting up and fighting after she hits them? She fought like every human-level martial artist in movies.
Heck, when they realized they were being tracked and risked losing Kilgrave, none of them even considered going to plan B: kill him before he gets away.
Unspoilered for Gormongous: That episode was just a matryoshka of bad decisions that felt like the writers forcing the characters to act suboptimally to avoid them winning before the season was over. It sounds like you are bothered by the exact same things as me, do not watch this show.
Edited to add some spoilery thoughts on why I didn't like Kilgrave as a character:
Kilgrave himself didn't unnerve me because he too suffered from the same "the writers are forcing him to be an idiot" problem, which made him hard to take seriously. At one point they were talking with the Kilgrave Victims Support Group (that he would carelessly leave so much evidence already strains credulity), and my immersion shattered when a guy said that Kilgrave approached him on the subway and made the guy give him his jacket. "Wait" I thought, "why is Kilgrave on the subway? Why doesn't he have a chauffeur?" It seems like a socially omnipotent mind controller should never be stuck taking the subway.
Little things like that added up to create a picture of a villain whose actions advanced the goals of the plot rather than the supposed goals of the character. He wasn't a chilling sociopath, he was at best, an RPG character taking the Chaotic Evil option for the lulz, and at worst not a character at all but a walking plot device with "villain" written on his forehead.
For instance, other than to enable the plot where Jessica finds him and almost succeeds at kidnapping him, why is he getting photos of Jessica delivered to him in person? Has he heard of email? Hell, the U.S. Postal Service? Anything would be both more secure and more convenient than attending an in-person meeting.
Dude. Some of your criticisms come off as simply not wanting to like this show, and looking for excuses. Like, sure, there are plot holes. Whatever, plot holes happen, bug some people more than others. Depends on the show and the hole how much they bug me. But almost all the rest of your criticisms are baseless, easily explained or so common in super hero stories if this is the kind of thing that bugs you, I can't imagine why you would bother watching any show with super heroes in it. I'm pretty sure I could counter-point each one, or demonstrate how it was decently explained in story what something needed to happen. But it's late, so I'll only hit two of them.
Like, in non-spoiler territory, why can Jessica fight ordinary men without murdering them? Because she can pull her punches. Like Superman, Luke Cage, half the X-men, Spiderman, the Flash, Thor, Iron Man and on and on and on. Every single comic hero with super strength or super speed has the same problem. Jones has extra reason to pull her punches when the people she's fighting are tools of Kilgrave, and she's pretty bound and determined not to be forced to murder people, anyone, but doubly so when it involves people he's drug into their fight. So she pulls her punches to save their lives, and pays for it.
And in spoiler territory:
The photos had to be delivered to him in person so he could reconnect with Marcus each day, maintaining control of his spy through a combination of his mind control and drug addiction. I'm also not all that convinced that past a certain point he even wanted to hide from Jones all that much. Just enough to force her to find him, but not so much that it was impossible. Once he had leverage to likely stop her from using a sniper rifle to take him out (through Hope and other hostages, because she does have a hero complex), he didn't need to hide. He expected her to find him, it's one of the reasons he hired the thugs in the first place, because he knew she could incapacitate him (thanks to his spy). It's established, over and over, that Kilgrave has to reconnect with his slaves every 12 hours or have a more traditional method of getting them to do what he wants (money, blackmail, drugs). He is going to want to regularly reconnect with the spy he installed right next door to his obsession.
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I'd easily trade 1/7th of a small square of supreme/premium alfalfa for an indie video game, but I'm not sure I'm willing to give up two 9.4 inch plastic human skeleton models.
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I feel like this thread was created just to empower that joke.
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54 pounds of lead
Really? Hmm, I could probably find some use for that.
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Is.....is there cake?
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I'll just spoiler talk it up (sorry Gorm)
Definitely the moment where Hogarth frees Killgrave. She may be arrogant, but she's also not stupid. She knows what he's capable of and letting him out is insane.
I get why Jessica couldn't kill Kilgrave, but I don't remember Simpson or Trish putting up much of a fight over it and realistically, how are you gonna get a legit confession that's admissible out of that guy? A taped confession in some sort of torture cell will probably not hold up in court
And obviously if you put him in a courtroom he'll just talk his way out of it. Simpson especially should have talked some sense into her (or just ignored her and killed him himself...he's certainly got it in him). In general their plans never seemed very well thought out for characters that are otherwise pretty with it.The fight I didn't like is the Trish/Simpson/Jessica one. Jessica can still kill with one hit right? I know those pills give you an adrenaline boost or whatever, but he shouldn't be surviving being thrown through walls or whatever other crazy damage she deals in that fight. It just all seemed like too much.
Spoilers ho! (sorry also gorm)
Yeah, I can totally understand Hogarth being a breaking point for someone. Wasn't for me, but I can see that.
Simpson is being setup to most likely be Nuke, a cyborg super soldier with additional implants not just his drugs (like he's got a second heart to make him harder to kill and facilitate rapid blood flow to distribute oxygen and drugs faster). If it was just the drugs, I'd agree with you, but his ability to take the beating likely does make sense if they continue to develop him. That's also why he likely survived the explosion that his buddies died in. It's silly convenient that the cop sent to kill Trish randomly happens to be Nuke, but that kind of convenience is rampant in Marvel. Like running into the Nurse in the final two episodes.
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Kilgrave might be the most frightening super villain I've ever seen depicted in movie or television. He was unnerving to a spectacular degree. Oh, and I'm pretty sure the season 2 villain was already established, if you think about it. That's if S2 happens, apparently there's going to be a super group miniseries of the Netflix heroes as well, and the timing of that shoot may interfere with a Jones season 2 anytime in the near future.
I did feel like the show got very...heavy in the back third. But for me, it was more because that's when the really bad shit just started piling one on top of the other. Action wise, I was fine with that, you've got several characters who have established powers, and none of them had really been able to fully unholster those.
Spoilering some thoughts on the action.
The only real two set-piece fights are Cage v Jones, which was the only chance to show what each was capable of, mostly because if they had teed off on anyone else at full strength that person would be dead on the first blow (as had been demonstrated already). The other fight of Simpson v Jones/Trish was interesting to me because of the cooperative/tag team element of Jones and Trish putting him down. It allowed, in a different way, for Trish to show some things about herself that hadn't been demonstrated before.
Characters did things that seemed totally irrational just to keep the plot going (which itself got kinda nuts)
My characterization of this is mostly that I thought I saw solutions to problems that the characters didn't consider, and in some cases fairly obvious solutions. And a lack of paranoia at times. Like, fuck, the entire back half of the show should have had way more paranoia going on than was demonstrated. Paranoia was a completely rational response that people didn't use enough. At least two characters deal with some pretty heavy consequences because they should have been more paranoid given what they knew.
Beyond paranoia though, I'm trying to think about what actions I would have called irrational or out of character though. Simpson, maybe, but there are big loose, blank dangly threads about why he does some of what he does. Everyone else though I felt like the actions they took could be pretty easily forecast by their past behavior.
edited to add: Oh, unless you're talking about...
Hogarth setting Kilgrave free. That one seems batshit crazy, but for someone as arrogant as Hogarth, who views herself as a master manipulator, I think it's believable she thought she could reach a deal with Kilgrave.
The other possibility is why didn't Jessica just kill Kilgrave earlier. I really don't think she had it in her to kill someone yet. Killing Cage's wife devastated her, like broke something inside her bad. I don't think she was capable of killing him until she did.
Eesh. I haven't had time to watch Jessica Jones myself, but the mere existence of this complaint makes me less like to find that time. Nothing turns me off of a show worse than characters acting against their best interests and motivations in order to keep the otherwise natural conclusion of the plot from happening prematurely. Sons of Anarchy had this in spades and, when the latest incarnation of it became the centerpiece of a season finale, I turned the show off and never looked back.
A subset of that issue is the refusal to kill off an antagonist who has naturally come to a position where it makes sense for them to be killed, either by the characters and by circumstances, because the writers want to keep them around for future plotlines. That's how The Walking Dead lost me. I guess I just have no patience for TV writers sacrificing the quality of a script in order to hedge their bets.
I don't want to spoil anything, but if you like the Marvel universe thingy at all, I'd rate Jones as a must watch element of it, for going against the grain of so many of the other stories in it.
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We finished up Jessica Jones last night, and it was really fucking good! Like, maybe the best action oriented TV show I've ever watched (I don't watch many, because I usually find them not that great).
Besides the content, one of the things that really impressed me with the show as the casting. This is a world full of people, and they're not all white and straight. Lots of one off or background characters are just people of color and/or women. Because why shouldn't a cop or a nurse be black. Why shouldn't the doctors be women. It's the argument that some people have made for years come to pass, that if a character doesn't need to be something specific, why not just bring some balance into casting instead of making 70 percent of your cast dudes, and most of them white.
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Best advice I've ever heard about reacting to that situation is to 1) convey suitable, simple condolences (it doesn't matter if any one person's words has an effect, hearing something kind in aggregate may help some people), and 2) if you want to do more, offer specific help that's within the bounds of the relationship. If it's a work colleague who is stuck in the hospital, ask if they've got anything in their desk they might need. Small time of your day, might be huge for them. If it's someone you're close too, offer to bring food, shovel snow from the driveway, vacuum their house, get the oil changed on their car if they may need to drive on short notice, etc. Ask yourself, what would you forget to do if you were in their shoes. If you're very close to the person (very old friend, close family), just do something they need. They may not even feel comfortable asking for help, even if they need it. But that's reserved for a few relationships.
Ultimately most people will turn down the help anyways. But communicating to them that you're willing to take specific action to help them can be a very powerful and helpful message whether it is needed or not.
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Ah, the key seemed to be to remove the s from https. Embedding doesn't like a secure link.
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I'm really glad I never noticed that.
Are there cats in dishonored? Dishonored seems like a game that should have cats.
And thinking about it, now I want the real Bioshock game. The one where cats and rats, at first pitted against one another as enemies, band together to overthrow humans by giving themselves super powers with plasmids. Working from the shadows, they sew fear, dissent and paranoia against their human overlords. Andrew Ryan believed Jack to be a puppet, unable and unwilling to open his eyes and see that he and Fontaine were the real puppets, dancing to the tune of cat utopia.
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I don't actually remember dead cats in the Bioshocks, is that really a thing?
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I still haven't changed mine from Christmas god knows how long ago.
We have Christmas threads for a reason, this is the wrong thread for all holiday related comments.
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Apple Cider, those are great!
Other than writing now and again, I am not the creative one in my house. The lady sure as hell is though. I had never heard of the art of paper quilling until she got into it this winter. She made a huge piece to give to our daughter for Christmas. I built the sturdy as hell shipping crate to get it there in one piece.
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Boiling Veins and Hammerhead are not mutations I often take (though Boiling Veins if picked up early would also help some in the junkyard where I've certainly taking unnecessary damage to fire at times). I'll try that!
Also, I have never, not a single time, seen the Jackhammer drop. Didn't even know it existed.
General Video Game Deals Thread
in Video Gaming
Posted
I played through it twice and still enjoyed it for the weirdness and fun of it, while having absolutely zero familiarity with the visual novel genre, romantic or not. I did not play through for all the endings, as I didn't find it engaging enough for that, but going and reading about the secret ending was quite enjoyable and wouldn't have made much sense if I hadn't played the game.