TurboPubx-16

Inspired by the backlash to this episode, I feel encouraged to say that y'all are drinking the Prestige Television Kool-Aid . If I come off as aggressive, just understand that I feel like I'm in the out-group for my generation's supposed "golden age of media". On the podcast and on this forum I am reading some incredibly strong assumptions about media that I just plain don't agree with. I am genuinely confused by what the zeitgeist deems "good media" in 2017, and the current discourse around TV is very off-putting to me. Twin Peaks has been my return to watching a TV after a long hiatus, and the podcast and this forum have usually been an oasis from the typical discourse that occurs these days... except when it comes to this episode. I just need to let out some pent-up steam I think. Totally agree! I won't go as far as to say that "plot progression is the probably lowest form of entertainment" but there is definitely this view that a story in 2017 must have set ups and payoffs akin to loading and firing a piece of artillery; a TV show *must* oil up the chamber, slide in a ten pound shell, calculate the trajectory, wench up the cannon to the correct angle, fire the payload with an ear-shattering explosion, all in perfect military-style precision, over and over again. The warheads *must* strike their targets directly and the camera will swoop around and terrible "classical" music will play. Why is this good? This attitude about TV totally dominates any conversation that's had and I can't stand it. A big point of is confusion is "wasted time." How people convinced themselves that watching some TV is a waste a time and other TV isn't, based on a show's ability to cleanly set-up and payoff plot points is mind-boggling to me. Not liking a scene or and episode of a TV show is fine, but when the given reason is "it was a waste of time" I don't understand what you're saying. This idea that later on second viewing a previously bad scene can be retroactively rehabilitated into a good scene is completely bizarre to me. Yes, things can be augmented on rewatch, but turning a bad scene into a good one? I feel like people have real reasons for not liking certain scenes, but they're dodging those reasons when they bring up "wasted time". Richard Horne's attack on his grandmother is an excellent example of this. No one is saying why it's bad, in fact on the podcast you guys call it powerful and effective, to paraphrase, right? But people are saying that it's needless or a waste of time. Jake also says that there isn't any context to the scene to make it "meaningful". Every bit of context to Richard's actions is laid out: - He hates/is awful to women: the bar scene where he assaults the young woman - He is not just dealing drugs, he is a user himself: I called this in his introductory bar scene and people didn't agree with me - Despite being the grandchild of the richest man in town, he is not living the high-life: look at the vehicles he drives. For guy like him this must be excruciating. - He is on full tilt: the coin trick Big Time Drug Dealer fucks up his head, and insults his pride, and a high and emotional Richard runs down the kid - To cover up the hit and run he bribes Chad and kills the witness. This is officially a Crime Spree. - Kinda hard to deliver on his end of the deal he made with the Big Time Drug Dealer now, isn't it? Talk about being screwed. He needs to get out of town, and fast. So when he shows up to get money from his grandma, it's totally the expected thing to do. To my sensibilities it is the perfect scene at the perfect time in the show. The juxtapositions are potent, the depravity and cruelty are palatable. It raises questions about how Audrey, someone who has a good head on her shoulders and unlimited resources, could have raised a kid like this. In a show with so much magic and dream sequences, the scene felt like it could have been grabbed directly out of a true crime novel. No punches are pulled, nothing is left unsaid. So I strongly contend that the scene contains meaning. But even without any of that: how could a later scene provide meaning to this sequence, unless there is already something there? "It's a waste of time" is one of those phrases that seems to have incredible explanatory power, but in fact doesn't do anything to tell me why you didn't like something. "I don't know why I'm watching this" ; "I want another scene to *fix* this broken one." Not being in the "in-group", I am totally lost as to what you mean here. I haven't seen Breaking Bad, Mad Men, Game of Thrones, or any other of these wildly popular and respected TV shows. I tried watching an episode of BBC Sherlock and it was so incredibly up its own ass I couldn't handle it (it's a show about a camera crew worshiping a narcissist, as far as I can tell). I feel totally out of the loop on current tastes and bewildered by what people consider good entertainment these days Maybe I should sit down and watch these shows, but the way the discourse around TV has changed since these shows came to prominence has severely turned me off watching any TV at all. Somewhere between "X-Files and Lost didn't end well" and "We are in the golden age of TV" I got off the TV train and from what I see I don't want to get back on. Genuinely, I love it when this happens. What you call problems I call strengths. What you call alienating I call welcoming. It's so rare to find someone that agrees that X is X and Y is Y but we apply opposite qualitative judgments to it. If I could be an extreme asshole for a moment, just the mention of fan edits makes me cringe into a little ball "Let's take our media and make it like the other media, so in the end everything is exactly the same and easier to digest." I just imagine people clutching a dozen Harry Potter books whenever they post to Reddit, struggling to type out messages without dropping their store-bought identity on the floor. By the way, the show has had a consistent one episode featuring Dougie = one day of Dougie's life timeline, so it hasn't been three or four weeks between Dougie's encounter with Ike. Part of Janie E's function on the show is seemingly establishing what happened "yesterday" in each episode that Dougie is in. A perfect example for why I don't want to leave this world just yet, and also, what it means to have a "good scene" in my view. Stanton is playing a humble tune on his guitar and it's ruined by the drugged-out millennials. He's bringing beauty to an ugly place but it's dashed by things out of his control. It's a strong juxtaposition. It's a well made scene. It's effortlessly charming and then pungently revolting. It calls back to his role in Fire Walk With Me, the only guy who could brew good coffee in the fucked-up anti-Twin Peaks. Oh, yes, it calls back to something, but it's not a stupid #$@* pay off. I could never see these characters or location again and be happy. Ok, that's enough confused ranting for today I thought about this a few weeks ago and decided that it would be very good. Let Cooper regain his full mental faculties only in the last five minutes. Let him do something heroic, give a thumbs up, and let him leave and join Laura in the White Lodge. A single tear rolls down Gordon Cole's eye. Roll credits. I want this is because so much of what makes Cooper great are his scenes with Michael Ontkean's Sherrif Truman. Of course, Ontkean is a lousy actor, but their chemistry was so incredible it was the major thing that defined Cooper for me. He also has great chemistry with Cole, Albert, and Audrey, but Harry is the one .

I loved this episode. Kyle Maclachlan has a rockin' bod. My only issue is the Tom Sizemore plotline (Anthony, the bad insurance agent) getting incorporated in with the Casino Brothers plotline. It feels like the world is contracting so Frost and Lynch can kill two birds with one stone. It's like the show is saying, keep track of these ten things, and then a big scooper comes and clumps a few of them together. When Lynch is emotional Cole or spiritual Cole he's excellent, but when he's exposition Cole he's really flat. I think going into all the details of Richard Horne is good for the show. He's a young man who has quickly gone from petty drug dealer to having an all-out crime spree. As a total Audrey devotee it creates a conflict with how I view her as well. I just hope the "explanation" isn't that Richard is literally the offspring of an evil spirit/doppelganger. Throughout season 2 I was utterly convinced that there would be a climatic scene where Nadine would use her mutant strength to lift a car or punch a lodge demon or something. There's gotta be a reason for all of these unwatchable scenes!, I cried. Still crying.

In writing this post I've realized that I think the opposite, that is; adding Good vs Evil cosmic lore does indeed make it shitty and overly reductive to the character's stories. In addition, I think it's a lazy and boring trope. I'm not saying that this is definitely what is happening here. I'm not passing judgement on The Return before I've seen it all. I actually enjoyed the episode. I'm just a bit worried, is all. Two other works come to my mind: Lost and Persona (Shin Megami Tensai). The narrative concerns realistic characters with realistic, if extreme, conflicts. These characters are taken from their regular lives and thrown into a magical world. The regular world and the magical world intertwine in mysterious ways that tickle the viewer's imagination and make for excellent discourse. Then, the big reveal: behind the curtain are none other than the forces of Good and Evil! "Woah, that's so rad!" I say to myself. Then after an hour I realize it sucks. It sucks because cosmic forces Good and Evil are boring and pat. They lack depth, and are largely derived from rudimentary religious traditions*. Traumatic experiences should be faced head-on with compassion and honesty. Putting them in a "greater context" of a cosmic struggle is patting us on the head and saying, "There is a bigger picture here, it is terrible what happened to Laura but larger forces are at work." To me, Laura's abuse is the picture. Bob as a living-and-breathing metaphor for the darkness inside Leland gives us insight into the overwhelming terror a victim of abuse faces. Having a character like Cooper explore evil through metaphoric dreams is cool. Having our heroes fail to stop Bob because they lack spiritual maturity is powerful stuff. If what we're supposed to think is that, (deep sigh), Laura is not a normal human being, but a creation of the White Lodge to counter Bob, then for my experience it's fair to say that this removes meaning from the story we were told. From a perspective of Lore, which in a lot of ways is the garmonbozia that fans of media need to sustain themselves, the Cosmic Battle is the ultimate trope. The murder of a small-town American teen is the A-Plot for our entire universe. Every moment in history can be connected to it, so whatever the writer is interested in can be shoe-horned in. Nothing is insignificant, not even the crumbs left over from a slice of delicious cherry pie, because the fate of the universe is at stake. It brings up (insufferably boring) questions about the Powers and Abilities of the cosmic beings that we can use to fill out fan wikis. The story can end with an epic anime-style battle. Lost spoilers: I really hope they keep that kind of thing to an absolute minimum. Frost and Lynch have been so creative in the past, there's no need to use this trope either. They've already spent capital on, "Oh my god, look at how this character has changed in 25 years!" without actual re-investment (yet), so if they do the Star Wars prequel thing too... *Not trying to offend anyone:

I wonder if Dougie's fame will spread on the Internet and Hawk will find him in a Vine or something. I really enjoyed this episode. I laughed out loud several times. Favourite bit: Gordon: BUT YOU'LL GO WITH ME? Albert: Say please. Gordon: WHAT? Albert: You heard me. Gordon: [...] Please. There's also the really dark stuff, like the implication that Bad Coop assaulted Audrey and Diane. If we accept that Leland is at least partially responsible for abusing Laura then I think we have to accept that even our beloved Coop has a dark side. Bob is doesn't feed off anything that isn't there already, I think.

You can like something and still dislike things about it! I really like Twin Peaks, but I think the whole Spike thing was awful. You nailed it. A: "We want a character who is complete nonsense and shockingly violent, who do we cast?" B: "I think the audience would respond strongly to a little person because little people are weir-" C [a sane person]: "Guys, seriously, what the fuck are we doing here." You could totally make the argument that using a little person play TMFAP is insensitive, and like all tropes, lazy. When a "different" kind of actor only shows up in your work to portray a "weird" character, you're being lazy and exploitative. Spike is worse than TMFAP because he isn't simply weird and off-putting, he is weird and off-putting and a mindless butcher of human beings. It was totally ineffective for me because we've seen professional hitmen on the show, and criminals who spend time conspiring murders, and in comparison Spike is just "lol random". He charges into the building with an awl, kills everyone he sees, and leaves soaked in blood. Seems like his plan is easily defeated by: someone with a gun; someone who could overpower him; encountering two people at once; a video camera; a witness hiding in a closet, etc. My other issue is that Twin Peaks has so many outs for how Spike can exist in this universe. He could be blessed with uncanny luck. He could literally be a magical construct. He could just be another wacky guy in this kooky world of irreverent characters! Yup, I think it's pretty normal to mature out of depictions of meaningless violence. It was sometime after Bioshock Infinite that I decided that games where you murder hundreds of human beings with headshots were not my thing anymore. I also have less tolerance for seeing men randomly kill women in brutal detail. There's a big difference between establishing an abusive relationship that turns violent (Laura and Leland, Shelly and Leo), and having a man grind an awl in a woman's stomach for shock value or humor or whatever they were going for, devoid of meaning and consequence. I think you're right about the box shrinking. I put that other bullet point in square brackets because I was just having a bit of fun and speculating. Indeed, the plan to kill Dougie was already in motion, but something has changed because Spike has been called in, and I'm confident that Bad Coop's phone call is what has made that change.

Glad to be of help! Some impressions: This is a dumb thing to get upset about sometimes, but the problem with having so many known or semi-known actors is that when someone like Jeremy Davies shows up (Daniel Faraday from Lost), I get distracted to the point of frustration. The actor even makes the same dumb squinty face he used in all of his scene's in Lost. Having a little person be the utterly psychotic and mindless murderer, just a few episodes after patting yourself on the back for having a positive trans character in the 90s... I love Lynch's work, but why you gotta do stuff like this man? They guy made an entire movie about treating different and differently-abled people with respect. I've been listening to Lynch talk about getting ideas through Transcendental Meditation and staying true to those ideas as he develops them into films: "I was meditating and while I was transcending I got the idea of a midget grinding a shoemaker's awl into a woman's guts." I had the same idea when I was 14 and listening to Tool albums on repeat.

aeonofdiscord already posted the answer but I was in the middle of typing this reply so I'll still post it. Up until now, I think Frost & Lynch would have us believe that the people Dougie owed money to, and the people trying to kill Dougie, were one and the same. Or, at the very least, it was ambiguous. There were clues that they weren't the same people previously, namely, it wouldn't make sense to have assassins camp out with rifles and set car bombs over a $50,000. I'll try to run down the thread: - In Las Vegas, Patrick Fischler is asked by his assistant why he allows a very bad person to use him, to which he replies, "You'd better hope you never meet a man like him", to paraphrase. - Dougie escapes Rancho Rosa with Jade undetected by the hitmen - the hitman call Lorraine. She texts "Argent" to the device in Argentina, which shrinks into a marble or something. She is really upset. - [Bad Coop hacks into the dark web through the prison landline and alerts his dark army to begin the process of eliminating all of his enemies and breaking him out of prison] - Patrick Fischler is typing on his Thinkpad when he gets a red square, which tells him that there is an envelope in his safe. He retrieves the envelop and notices a dot on it, and his expression tells us, it's an important envelop. - Ike 'The Spike' Stadtler gets the envelop and... - Lorraine is on the phone talking about the car bomb ("Are there any bodies?") She hears a scream and gets super murdered. Doguie is next! Maybe Patrick Fishcler's days are also numbered?

It's great! Now-a-days the loose consensus is that Mullholland Drive is Lynch's best film. I'd definitely rate it in the top three with Eraserhead and Blue Velvet. I finally got around to watching Wild at Heart last night. If you are a Lynch fan but haven't seen Wild at Heart yet, I would say watch it for sure. That's all I'm going to say about it! It's a shocking scene, and the guy is complete and total creep, and then you remember, right, this happens all the time and people don't intervene and the victims freeze up. From the way extreme way Horne was talking to the young woman I'm inclined to believe he was on drugs. Lynch doesn't have a reputation for resolution, that's for sure. He understands very well that once the mystery is solved, it is no longer a mystery. For example, in this thread we are still talking about who killed Laura Palmer: was it Leland, was it Bob, was it Leland's doppelganger being influenced by Bob, is Bob just a metaphor for the darkness in every human, etc.

My experience: I watched the first two episodes as an uninterrupted super cut. After an hour and forty-five minutes of unrelenting tension and constant near sub-sonic noise, the music at the end was a totally divine release. Since the roadhouse is full of millennials it totally make sense to me that more sound was being made by a pre-recorded track than the musicians on stage, which is pretty normal in 2017 The band they had during the original run was also totally fake too, for example, Chris brought it up in an old episode that the singer has way too much reverb for it to sound anything like a live performance. Because so much we've seen before the end is obviously fake (digital effects, hacking the FBI, the decapitated corpse etc.) the ending needs that flavor too or it wouldn't give me that release, I think. Just like a modern concert, I buy into the experience of Twin Peaks, even if I know the artists are "cheating" at times. Indeed, the obviously fake aspect of Lynch's work is why I watch it. Anyway, I experienced these first two episodes as a Lynch film, so the music at the end was totally predictable and yet no less absolutely perfect for me, because it was a return to Blue Velvet: Minor spoilers for Blue Velvet, Mulholland Drive, Lost Highway and Inland Empire : Digital effects: love 'em. Way scarier and more evocative than million dollar Hollywood "realism". The first couple of times I watched a David Lynch movie they were jarring, but after that I came to expect and relish them. The only effect I didn't like, if I'm being totally honest, were the paintings of the human remains in South Dakota. The camera even zooms in on the first painting which only makes it look worse. Unlike the other effects, these remains aren't a ghost, a spirit, an aspect of a dream, etc., these are supposed to be actual human parts we're seeing here. I wish they had made something physical, but I know those can really suck too: (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OxN3-E5gv7I) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-cAyezzVHv4) (yes, that pathetic dummy in this big budget action film is supposed to be Dave Chappelle's character's actual corpse) (yes, in the 90s the actor who played Briggs was in literally everything) Sarah Palmer: despite self-medicating so heavily she really perks up when the TV shows... a lion biting its prey while also making out with it?! The two animals are locked in a kiss, basically... with one of them being force-ably held down and bleeding from the mouth. Consider me creeped-out to the max. Doubling down on James: wait, they doubled down on James when they kept him after the pilot. Tripling down on James: ...I guess that happened when they recorded that insufferable song. Ok, quadrupling down on James: no... that happened when he finally left on his motorcycle and got mixed up with whatever the hell happened with that plotline. Quintupling down on James: n o p l e a s e m a k e i t s t o p Hacking: along with a tape recorder that apparently wirelessly picks up and records landline conversations, and the black box that he uses to talk to (not) Jeffries, I think the laptop is also somehow magical. What you guys didn't mention on the podcast is that Bad Coop's laptop snows-up, flickers, warps, and distorts like it's a CRT display. I think Lynch and the rest of the production team know what a computer looks like and how it behaves, and I believe the phonyness is intentional and hints at it being supernatural, even if the people who make TV shows have a habit of making ridiculously fake computers for fun In any case, I don't need, and in fact would hate to get, any technical explanations for how any of his gadgets work. By the way, I was wondering if anyone could answer this for me: when law enforcement run prints through a database, does their computer screen really flash a bunch of faces? In this case I think the production team just did a stupid trope that all cop procedurals do. I wonder if small town police sheriffs reject software when it doesn't act like it does on TV, and in response developers have implemented the pointless feature of scrolling through twenty faces a second. Hold on... Bad Coop's laptop also scrolls through a million images as he downloads the information for the prison, another stupid trope... well, at this point I'm just revealed to be a total apologist for Lynch I guess . Ok, new explanation: Bad Coop accidentally hit F11 when he was browsing the FBI website on Chrome and he doesn't know how to fix it. Just imagine though, if every time you downloaded something, instead of a progress bar your entire display was taken up by flashing images and .txt fragments. That would be pretty rad imo.

Along these lines: the early scene with Jacoby spoke to me as, "We're digging up this ancient thing, gonna need A LOT of shovels." I also watched the first two episodes in a single uninterrupted format, but I'll try not to speak about part 2. Over and over again in the two-hour super cut, I kept saying to myself, "This is not season 3 of Twin Peaks, this is the sequel to Fire Walk With Me." I am very curious to see if the season turns into a soap opera/comedy in the middle. I love David Lynch films but I also find them to be exhausting; I don't think anyone on this earth believes 18 hours of Lynchian non-stop tension would work at all. I predict that the bulk of the season will skip between dead bodies, stories of love, and wacky nonsense; the finale will be another two hour film like this one. When the cops opened the principle's trunk and we see the large ice box, was anyone else chanting to themselves, "Se-vered head, se-vered head!" ? Instead we get a chicken nugget-sized piece of human, which turns out to be way worse D:

I have a couple of questions for y'all: 1) Does anyone here NOT spec an charisma/intelligence/wisdom character in these games? You buy this game for its writing, so it just seems obvious to me that you would choose to be great at conversation, perception, fixing things etc. 2) Does anyone play as an evil character in these games? Again, you want to play this game because it lets you engage in ideas, not because you want to accumulate virtual wealth and power. (Yes, I know you can role-play as a moron in the Fallout games. Seems like a joke that's funny for a few minutes that would be totally painful for an actual play-through) I spec'd my character for intelligence and non-combat skills, and not once have I failed to do whatever "smart guy" thing I wanted to do. I'm also totally rich and have equipment that makes me even better at being a know-it-all, but also I can utterly annihilating evil cannibals when I feel like it. My character is thus far the single most intelligent (and thus powerful) being in the universe, and also a very good person. Wait, am I good person? I think that good people make sacrifices to achieve their virtuous acts. What have I given up? One person offered a piece of information that she thinks I want, and a Baron promised he'd owe me a favour. I'm the love child between Stephen Hawking and Jesus Christ and people want me to do things for them for "information" and "favours"? I'm not really a good person, in fact, I'm an incredibly gifted person for whom virtuous acts are just as easy to perform as evil ones. Indeed, herding slaves and refugees back to their owners and persecutors sounds like a lot more work than just making everything right with Intimidation and Persuasion. I'm not really a smart guy either. I don't think about problems and come up with ways to solve them, it's more like I'm directly tapped into the wiki for this game. Looking at my options, it's not greedy vs kind vs evil vs lawful, it's stupid vs stupid vs OBVIOUS CHOICE vs stupid. Not actual spoilers/anger/frustration/crowd funding was a mistake/TWO YEARS LATE/getting old/loooooong Jake Rodkin fart sound: This one of those situations where the more I dissect a game the more I dislike it. Pillars of Eternity is a good game. Go play that.

In my 12 hours of play, this game has been consistently good, but not once has it been great. None of the obstacles have presented any challenge thus far because it's so easy to restore your effort points. There has yet to be a difficult moral choice. Thus far, this hasn't been a game about making tough decisions, at all. Just like Wasteland 2, I'm just waiting for it to get to the great part, the transcending part, the part that will be memorable, the part where I have to choose between two things I like, the big reveal, the twist, fuck me, I don't think it's coming, is it?

I love the combat. I've spent time saving and reloading to figure out which abilities and enchantments work, and which ones are totally bogus. I've also spent time figuring out the nuts and bolts of the combat, eg. how hits are calculated and all that. I haven't been shy about spending a lot of money on big ticket items and I use potions and food when there is a tough battle. Here's a tip: My attitude to combat in RPGs goes something like this: I really like planning and building a team of combatants and seeing them roll over the enemy. It's not boring to me if the enemy falls to me easily, if I spent a lot of time carefully putting together my arsenal. Don't get me wrong, I pause a lot during combat and I relish those in-combat decisions that make or break an encounter, but what's really fun to me is reading the manual while on the toilet and figuring out the loop holes to a game's systems. . Like my favorite RPGs (Baldur's Gate, Final Fantasy V to name a couple), Pillars totally lets me do this. Wankery about my character:

That tree was a big deal for me. I love it when a developer isn't afraid to use their Mature rating early to convey just how serious a situation is, not with something necessarily violent or bloody, but just by showing the aftermath of some fucked up thing that happened. It's rarely done well, just look at 99% of Mature rated games. Obsidian did the same thing in Fall Out New Vegas: Another example is the film version of The Road:

Pepryi, you're right about the quests: Baldur's Gate always presented quests in such a way that mechanically you were fetching something but the circumstances made it interesting. There was always a twist, and then another, and by the time you finished the quest you could barely remember the Macguffin that got it started in the first place, but you did remember the characters you met and the places you visited along the way. Pillars of Eternity is the same way. I'm usually the first person to rail against "theme-park" RPGs but I feel like I earned my reputation with the people by sacrificing other rewards. Every leader in this game is a charlatan with an angry mob waiting to overthrow his or her rule so if my character ended up being the supreme emperor of this land I wouldn't even be mad. It would be great to trick these dumb peasants into making me their lord . I've been poop-socking this game hard (34 hours in). I could type forever but I'll just point out one thing about this game that's awesome. You get to use your main attributes, like might, resolve etc. in conversations. The game highly recommended might for my rogue, which is unusual. Usually dexterity is what a thief should focus on, but then again rogues are not exactly thieves, and might isn't exactly strength. Anyway, I found myself doing something I never do in these game: intimidation. "Brah, look at this chest, and tell me again how you're not going to open that door for me." I picked up a man by his throat, I ripped a necklace off a prostitute while covering her mouth, I even lifted a child above my head and threatened to body slam him if he didn't tell me a secret. Anyone who killed a couple of children in Dragon Age 1 knows that these actions were harsh, and it sucks that I had to do them, but I had really good reasons! That's not the good part though! After using your main attributes in conversations you might get a personally trait, like 'aggressive'. Just recently I told a crowd of people, hey, y'all know me, I'm that bastard who goes around fucking shit up. Instead of choosing an alignment at the beginning I've earned my character's morality through actions. My PC is a person shaped by the world of Pillars. It's also a personality that I never play as in these games because Obsidian is free from DnD's old cliches. You can see my character sheet here. My favourite part is at the end: Honest: 2; Deceptive: 2 .