syntheticgerbil

Hmm, I'm methodically going through Simpsons Season 8 on DVD and have been listening to a lot of the commentary but I suppose I don't have anything to really say. The animation is nearly completely soulless, stiff, and stale at this point, but the writing is still overall great. I recently finished the episode with Seymour and Krabapple getting together and I remember it as being a bad episode when it was actually quite good. I really loved the Krapabble focused episode many seasons ago as well though, which the commentary admitted they were somewhat coming off the heels of.

Hah, I really wish Nicki Minaj would do less, so much less, but yeah she's right.

No, I get that, but there's purposefully bad camp acting and there's really bad acting. Almost everyone on the show falls into the former category except for James. Judging by his imdb, I'd guess the movie and TV industry agrees.

I've often had pet rats and I give up trying to convince most of the population that they are great. I had gerbils as a kid because I wasn't allowed mice or rats. Well gerbils are idiots and fucking suck and all they do is chew on stuff, bite you, and make a lot of noise and get out and eaten by my god damn cat. Mice suck too because they are just the useless versions of rats, incredibly stupid and good food for snakes only. Hamsters, okay fine, whatever, sometimes they are fucking mean though especially the dwarf ones. And Guinea pigs and chinchillas might as well not have brains. It's like the small rodents as pets market is all based on getting creatures that just aren't rats, because rats are icky. Except rats are the smartest rodent you could buy (except if the place sells squirrels, but yesh they will flip out) and extremely easy to socialize and train. They also tend to be calm, relatively clean, and low maintenance.

Why are they clay or CG mock clay?

God that actor who plays James is just terrible at his job. I think his shitty acting ability is what ultimately made me quit the series Season 2 after finding out about the killer. Whiny fucking caveman looking expressionless jock on a motorcycle.

Are the old school San Francisco residents all really big fans of Full House? Do they look down upon those who make fun of the exploits of Danny Tanner and Uncle Dave Coulier?

Christ, those faces are the worst thing.

Gah! I don't have any money to give but I really want these guys to make their goal. Looks like a dream project for them. This stuff feels more like Otomo than Moebius to me though, less fantastical and more technical. That said Katsuihiro Otomo was greatly influenced by Moebius (but isn't everyone?).

Please send me fruit! I don't give a shit about customs!

I love watching raccoons! I don't ever really see them invade our yard though. Just once at a place I used to live there was one eating a bunch of loquats from the tree off the ground for about thirty minutes and I just sat there in awe. Also once we went camping at Tyler State Park and there were raccoons constantly watching our camp ground up close and stealing food like feet away from us. They were not afraid at all and were being complete jerks. I tried chasing them with campfire logs to scare them, like I was going to whack them, but they would just back up and then return to stare at us after I give up. That was a pretty notable camping experience though. EDIT: All this raccoon talk needs a picture:

I would probably get a 3DS XL at some point if I didn't feel obligated to take it everywhere because of Streetpass nonsense. Otherwise, it's a no go.

Wild animals who teleport.

Yeah has everyone not been referencing this cartoon for the last two pages? That's what I thought it was about. Oh well. I'm gonna post a weird good news thing thing, my wife with an opossum: I was letting our dogs out late at night a few weeks ago and one caught this little thing and shook it, it was already still before I scared it off. I thought it was a humongous rat at first, but it was a very young opossum. It's mouth was wide open so I figured it was really dead. It wasn't until I went upstairs to bother my wife about it until I realized it might be playing dead. So I had her go check it out and then tell me what I should do if it is dead, like toss it in the trash or get it tested or something in case of rabies or infection to the biting dog. She's a lead vet tech at a local vet hospital so I pretty just consult her on everything now. She thought it was dead too though because she picked it up and it was excreting tons of stuff out of it's anus and it seemed like rigor mortis set in. She put it in a little container since it was faintly breathing and we just started reading on in the internet about opossums playing dead. Apparently they really do play dead to an extreme degree, not like just flopping over for a bit until the animal goes away. Like opossums will stay in a catatonic state for hours, will secrete nasty liquid from it's glands to make it smell like a diseased carcass, and go completely stiff and have its eyes roll back. We put it in a nice dark cat bag with a blanket because we were sure it wasn't dead, went to sleep, woke up and saw it seemed fine and alive, and my wife took it to work to make sure the dog didn't injure it at all. It was fine, no bite marks and was weirdly nice. She came home and was just holding it like it was her new pet and then I held it for a bit and it didn't seem like it was interested in being vicious. Then we let it go in the backyard again and I hope it's safe out there. So opossums are really fucking good at tricking predators, like I am super impressed seeing this first hand. Also apparently they aren't aggressive and will avoid conflict. I guess I assumed they were aggressive because at my parents house growing up they used to invade our backyard for catfood and we had a large territorial killer cat who would fight them off, so it was always just these awful noises at night when it was most likely just the cat being the aggressor. Oh and you don't have to be afraid of rabies with an opossum because their temperature as marsupials is a few degrees lower than the usual mammal so they can't contract it in most cases (there's still a sliver of a chance). Anyway, it was ugly and it was cute! GOODNEWS!

For anyone who was able to try it out on that short window when it had an online community (or stragglers in my case), I bet the mechanics seemed much more fully formed. I remember playing multiplayer for the trophies there was a lot more to it than I had ever considered in the main game and I tried a few of the factions (I think I wrote a lot about it in whatever Brutal Legend thread is around here somewhere). It really just made me appreciate the game more, but it's a shame none of that really shines through in the main campaign. Mostly what I didn't like was having to traverse the game world while continuously glancing back at a map on my PC collecting random shit. There needed to be some kind of "detector" or way to home in on stuff. I realize there was a DLC that added a tool to help you find this stuff, but it only worked after beating the game, which is when you'd never need any of the upgrades they give you.

Man that Joystiq group never accepted me. On Serial, I was googling ahead to see if the guy is maybe let go because of new evidence found by Sarah Koenig, but no luck so far. In fact hardly anything has ever been written about the case outside of a few local archived stories. I wish there was a new episode every day because the suspense!

Well please and godspeed to you then.

Oh yeah, you go to Xibalba in Tomb Raider Underworld, but it's also Avalon and Valhalla at the same time, so only the outer shell of the tombs before you pierce the inner world is actually Mayan feeling.

I think it probably helps that there are two other strong female characters that balance out the crazy one. Also that cop banter, so dumb and great. I just kept waiting for every scene with the cops.

Oh uh, last month I finished Deponia and Wario Land 2. Maybe more games. I had played an ending of Wario Land 2 before as a kid, but not this extensively to the 100% factor. Such a brilliant game, except for the secret hard ass last level, but that is forgiven since it's just one. I like the exploration and secret finding so much more than regular Mario platformers and the Wario's altered states from him getting hurt by enemies is a great idea. Maybe I should just make a Wario thread one day after I finish some more, I kind of hate all of these catch all threads we do for games now around here like recently completed, 3DS, WiiU, etc. And Deponia I don't know what to say, I feel like I'd have to finish the other two to really get a grasp on the story as it ended with a cliffhanger and seems like Rufus was set on some sort of character arc. Too bad about 40% or more of the puzzles in the game were absolute crap.

I can't not read this in my mind and hear "Wars and Feces." Funny Sean seems to think adventure games of this style function only as unbelievable set pieces as my main problem with any other game that is story based, like RPG or action games is that you can instead deal with clones, people that just kind of wander on a set path, or people who are apparently never doing anything in their world. It takes me out of the believability even more and seems hard to do in an action game without some sort of nice budget just as much as an adventure. Although maybe I did not understand what type of game he was exactly talking about since he was saying David Cage types as part of it, which I don't really classify as the more traditional adventure game where characters have idle animations in their places and also function as set pieces. It can also be kind of obnoxious if the characters do run around but my only frame of reference for that is the old Revolution games Lure of the Temptress and Beneath a Steel Sky where people were possibly anywhere in the city and half of the game was spent tracking down the person you needed to talk to. Perhaps that has been done better since.

I think finding out about the guns alone are part of the trial and error. They just sort of come out of nowhere and you pretty much have to die to figure out their behavior.

Oh a part of this movie was filmed on Skellig Michael as I found out recently. I'm sure the tourism out there is going to boom.

That sentence is just so hard to follow like that. I think it's worse... when people like... to spam ellipses all... throughout their sentences... I think they are sociopaths when that happens. No one has ever taught that in the history of time!