Dressed up as Carmen Sandiego for Office Halloween. Then, in costume, crossed London and much countryside to board a yacht by moonlight, and spent today sailing out at sea to another marina.
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Dressed up as Carmen Sandiego for Office Halloween. Then, in costume, crossed London and much countryside to board a yacht by moonlight, and spent today sailing out at sea to another marina.
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ALL HAIL MICHELLE GOMEZ
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! She is just delightful, whoever she's playing, to be honest. Just look at that expression. That's the best damn expression.
! But then Sue White was my favourite from Green Wing. I like the kind of characters she ends up playing.
! As for the episode itself…
! 1) This is another good example of why the mass press interest, especially in the UK where the show is institutional, publicising any slight spoiler can harm the show. Sure, they didn't bust the Missy reveal, but we all suspected that since August. The Cyberreveal would have been far more interesting in terms of surprise, especially given the teardrop design warnings. But hey, I guess you can't keep the lid on filming in London.
! 2) Moffat gonna Moffat. I still don't like how he writes female characters. Missy has some of the bad aspects of River's writing, for example. This isn't his worst example by any means but you can tell this was a Moffat episode, and you're going to get the polarised reactions that come with that.
! 3) That said, haters hating because the Master being a woman is 'anti-tradition' and/or 'PC gone mad' can STFU. Or rather, watch when the show doesn't implode. I daresay they wouldn't risk having a female Doctor for a while longer yet, but this is a clever way to both do that and address it, and one I hoped Moffat might take when Capaldi was announced.
! 4) Watch crematoriums now have a publicity crisis. Heavens, that was a dark little line, and a bit uncomfortable given we're at the anniversary of my partner's death.
! 5) They could always team up with Apple. BBC must have got permission for that, right?
Looking at the forecast, it looks like GAMES ARE ART
http://33.media.tumblr.com/fd288145ea816bd672a9f69f66826cfc/tumblr_nebms6XKMX1qffq28o1_1280.jpg
I don't think we're going to top this post for the rest of this thread.
Friends of mine at the Gamecity convention are just getting doxxed left right and centre, apparently just for being people in the games industry at a gaming event. One has had to explain the whole mess to his father, whose address was apparently linked to on GG threads.
It's a form of terrorism, no?
@Purple:
Woah slow down I didn't understand any of that.
What pochi and Silence have said. I tried saying something similar myself before, but it started getting really really angry - after what has happened to some friends with this, I pretty much write off anyone who is earnestly defending Gamergate because I don't feel I can trust them. And eventually I just decided to post a skeleton instead because I'm beginning to doubt anyone who really identifies with GG will stop now and so what's the point anymore.
Turn out the lights on Gamergate.
The poo thing isn't really a valid comparison though because that's just grossout humour. It's not really tapping into existing discrimination at all.
Whatever. I'm just really disappointed. We can do without reinforcement for the harmful stereotype that trans women are more likely to be rapists than raped themselves.
Since I've not seen it mentioned…
The island 'Rubeck' could be a reference to the German city of Lübeck, which was the capital of the Hanseatic League in the middle ages, a hugely powerful and wealthy collection of city states. I'm not sure if there'll be anything other than the name to it though...Minion's name and architecture don't seem to match up at all.
The thing that people seem to be missing is
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Okay, Mathieson can stay.
Seriously though, that was a really weird one. A good one, but still really weird. I'll save the more specific comments for when the US have caught up though.
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I know people are saying 'classic style' but the aesthetic of that one felt very RTD to me.
It's like the whole show refreshed itself when Eleven regenerated.
I snubbed Paul Cornell by accident earlier this year. He was at a con and sitting in the lobby chatting with some folk at 2am. I was really tired and wanted to get to my bed so when the person I was with stopped to start chatting to this apparent stranger (I was sleepy, so didn't recognise him), I walked slowly towards the doors to get my friend to come with (since I needed them to get back into our room). So yeah, they were all "Hi Paul" and I was all "BED IS CALLING LEAVE THIS RANDOM MAN". Mortified in hindsight.
Well, you know, Roger Ebert may have been on to something in his Team America review.
"Like a cocky teenager who's had a couple of drinks before the party, [Matt and Trey] don't have a plan for who they want to offend, only an intention to be as offensive as possible."
I think they honestly view themselves as equal opportunity offenders. Which would be fine in a world where everyone is treated equally, but that's not the case. And I don't even think that's true anymore…South Park hasn't been about being as rude as possible since its earlier seasons.
Eh. That wasn't particularly funny - the Wacky Races segment was a great idea done dully - and I am massively disappointed that a week after they covered trans stuff and didn't screw it up, they go and throw in a cheap throwaway trans gag like that. Guess they don't give a damn after all.
Or old Donna coming back, if only for a bit, fixing that horrible ending.
Some day, when Mathieson is a showrunner.
Hell yes, now this I do have enthusiastic support for.
As for Mathieson as showrunner, let's see how Flatline holds up first.
I'm not a huge fan of Clara but I struggle to understand such strong pronounced dislike.
But then I'm in the total opposite boat to those of you who think she got worse post tDotD - to me, she was a cardboard cut-out character before with no real personality whom the writers had no idea how to handle. This series she's been much more like a real person with all that entails, and much more relatable and interesting as a result, even if she can be annoying at times.
I'm still holding out for a new Donna, mind. "Oi, spaceman!".
Just played through a copy of the demo, and it was fun enough. Still not massively eager to jump into the remakes though, much as I enjoyed Gen 3 - I will at some point, but there's nothing here that isn't so novel and important that I can't wait.
But then I've never been one for the metagame particularly, and that seems to be what the new Megas are catering for.
Yeah, this by itself is kinda nice. I didn't really feel like I was the butt of the joke, at least not in any of the stereotypical hurtful ways. This felt like something I could laugh along with.
Yes, and I did. Until Sharon made me cry. I swear I've listened to 'Push' about 20 times since the episode, even with its scatalogical subtext.
Also got a real kick over some people whining on Twitter and Reddit that they'd wanted the episode to go after the 'SJW crowd' and feel it went after them instead.
Whoa, did Captain Usopp just regenerate into Robby?
And Capaldi definitely made his own mark on this episode. The Jelly Baby cigarette case was his idea, for example, as was the Tom Baker impression during his golluming.
I just saw the episode. I heard about the continuity thing so I watched all 3 episodes of the season…
I.... wasn't offended by that... everybody seemed to be perfectly respectful and understanding of trans issues in the show now... at least verbally. A lot of people said a lot of things that were really WONDERFUL things that needed to be said. I practically cried when Sharon started talking.
But... one thing... and it really honestly didn't like, piss me off or make me hate the whole episode or curse the show or anything.... but it was kinda irksome that nobody who was actually in any way trans was depicted... instead you had Cartman and Randy, who both admitted to only using womens' bathrooms because they wanted to. The message at the end was almost kinda "Yeah, guys will pretend to be girls to get into womens' bathrooms, but just go with it"... I mean, for example, the Tourette's Syndrome episode actually showed the Tourette's was a real disease and that there are actually people struggling with it. This episode SAID there were real trans people really dealing with real issues... but our only representation was Cartman who was pretending, and Randy who... I don't even know what Randy was doing exactly.
I hope the continuity they're playing with here means this gets brought up again.
One saving grace I noticed. They never payed off the whole Wendy-Wendell situation... and if you notice, during Principal Victoria's speech at the end, where she declares the new Bathroom rules. It shows ALL the kids and they are ALL cheering... except Wendell, who is still dressed as Wendell... clearly not cheering with the rest.
MAYBE they'll keep continuity, and MAYBE Wendell is an actual thing now?
Totally with you on this one. I didn't really process this at first because I was too shocked by them by not being assholes like with the dolphin episodes, but yeah, it's the really big difference from the similarly-structured Tourette's episode. I did wonder from the continuity thing whether they were going to make a character properly trans, but I sort of doubt that they'd do it with Wendell, given how they were setting up the Stan/Wendy relationship plot again this season. And I took the lack-of-cheering thing to be because Wendy was only doing that to get one over on Cartman. But maybe I'll be proved wrong there.
But whoa, yeah, if a show as bro-y as South Park can change its tune so much over the course of a decade, that bodes well.
People over here are already panicking. Government has announced screening procedures at airports, even though behind closed doors they've basically admitted this is for political reasons more than actual health ones (so they can be seen to be doing something).
Unfortunately, I'm also hearing a lot of racism attached to this, given the outbreak is from West Africa.
Capaldi nailed it. That was a fantastic episode and a real showcase for the show. The aesthetics, the Doctor-Companion conflict, the Doctor being the Doctor again in such an undiluted way, a villain with an original terrifying concept (blink, breathe, move, none of it can help you in those 66 seconds), and such a fun supporting cast - strong performances and memorable characters all around, especially Quell. And Frank Skinner made an oddly adorable pseudo-Companion - his deadpan "ah, I'm clearly the Mummy, or maybe I was already looking into this" line is an absolute favourite, and not an attitude I can recall recent companions having (closest we got was Donna?).
I'd say "more please" but we have the same writer next week, so that's essentially what we'll get. If he does as well the second time (something Gaiman didn't manage) , I may have a new favourite show writer.
Woah woah woah, my disinterest in the new Final Fantasy made me miss out on some favorite FF9 character talk? Curse you Square Enix!
Obviously Adelbert Steiner is the only correct answer. All of them are great, but this isn't debatable.
Why you ask?
1. Position your cursor over this youtube video:
2. Left mouseclick
3. Close your eyes
And yes, Master Vivi is second. Because Steiner.
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Oh I don't know.
Know, I do not!
Plenty of the FFIX cast were a lot of fun!
So much fun were plenty of the FFIX cast!
Even the villains.
Especially the villains!
I have a lot of affection for that game still.
For that game, I still have so much love.
It holds up better than its contemporaries, even.
It even holds up better than VII!
What a surprise!
Surprising it is!
Oh god, our populist xenophobia party has its first MP and it's set up to get more. There's been a degree of panic amongst my friends over this, because this is a party entirely geared around 'we don't like foreigners' but dressed up to sound more respectable than the outright neo-Nazi parties. Their actual policies beyond 'REDUCE ALL IMMIGRATION' read like setting the clock back several decades - Farage has spoken out about restricting rights for people with HIV, is deeply opposed to same sex marriage, and supports such stupid measures as our current PM's plan to abandon the metric system (no, seriously).
I think Mr. Garison provide the necessary context with the word cis. It's just the word for non transgendered people. I'm not sure how the audience might feel but i feel like after his explanation, Cartman's use of the word as an insult seemed even more ridiculous and childish like everything else Cartman was trying to get away with.
I'm glad it came across that way then :)
"Feeling Good on a Wednesday" is stuck in my head now.
Yeah, Sharon's speech was really good.
I did dislike how they kind of equated 'cisgender' with being a criticism word. I mean, I can see how you'd think that, as probably the context you come across most often is in being told you don't get it, or you should shut up and listen, etc - then it's still relatively rare for cis people to actually refer to themselves as cis, but maybe we'll reach the point where it'll just be a thing. 'Cis' is more like 'straight' in that sense than the much more negative term 'breeders'. So wasn't entirely on board with Cartman's storyline.
But then they do the thing with Sharon and Randy as Lorde and the discrimination at his (her? I'm really not sure in this instance) workplace. And they sort of show how gender identity uncertainty can be a thing, even if I'm not entirely sure that was their intention. While some trans folk feel they've always known themselves to be trans, a lot of trans people spend a while in that uncertainty period first - 'am I? aren't I? I don't feel like X but does that mean I am Y?' and so on. Again, I'm not sure the nuance was intended given this is South Park, but yes, some truth in television there, even if Stan decides he's just who he seemed to be before.
Thank god they've moved on from the dolphin comparison thing since the last time they tackled this topic.
runs back into thread
BLOCKBUSTER. It's a Blockbuster! The whole thing is one giant pun!
runs out again
Yeah, I really do suspect the abortion parallels were unintended by the writing team, but it doesn't mean that the reading isn't still there. I guess it's just an unfortunate implication of the way they chose to present the dilemma - made perhaps more obvious by all three of the decision makers being women.
Also I still don't know of a single show that provokes such mixed reactions as Who. Almost every week seems to be a mix of people who loved it and those who hated it, and it's not even the same few each time.
@Panda:
Are you serious, this is a thing? That sounds amazing.
Granted my sole exposure to Knightmare is a riff Spoony did on it, but I am positive that I would have killed to be on that show as a kid.
Totally real. And amazing. This video gives some idea of what it was like.
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'Kill the Moon'
! I'm in two minds about this one.
! On the one hand, I loved it. The first half was seriously tense and very Alien in feel. Speaking of which, I'm adoring how alien Capaldi's Doctor is. Does feel like the goofy Matt Smith act has been dropped (for all its fun) and he's now being entirely honest, which is why it now feels you can't trust him as much. The feel and the pacing were both on form for me, and I am over the moon (ha ha…no? oh well) about Courtney Woods. Not only is she fantastic, but she feels very real - both in her desperate bravado fighting off spidergerm (does whatever a spidergerm does) and her admission that she is terrified. I've known many a girl like her. But not in mainstream sci-fi - especially over here. So to see a working class black girl who is basically told she has no future, and to take her to the Future is one of the best things the show has done in years. Certainly makes a change from last year's Clara - even if this year's Clara is much stronger, and her relationships with the Doctor and Danny are almost surprisingly powerful.
! And yes, the science was so hammy that I swear I heard it oink, but it felt almost beside the point given this is Doctor Who, and the rest of the stuff going on was good enough that you're just about willing to overlook how a newly-hatched creature can lay an egg bigger than itself, not to say anything about the planetary science.
! But I'm also feeling really kind of uncomfortable with the analogy being made by the central dilemma. Okay, so perhaps they really had no idea they were doing an abortion analogy, but it felt close enough that if they didn't, someone really should have told them (incidentally, this one had an all-male writing, directing and producing team). As such, it kind of felt a bit pro-life preachy towards the end, and having that show up in Who made me feel pretty uncomfortable.
! So I'd rate this as one of my favourite episodes of Who in ages, but only if the analogy being made, deliberately or not, is entirely overlooked.
@Cyan:
Countries making their own rules on what qualifies as human rights sounds like a totally logical and not-batshit idea.
Bingo.
The point of international human rights legislation is to provide a limit on what one country's national government can do in terms of a baseline for human rights. That's the whole point.
And seriously, look at what Cameron's lot have been doing in regards to disabled people to see what they'd do with a human rights carte blanche. I'm kind of terrified.
Are Britain and France in a race who can go batshit first?
We always did have that petty rivalry. But yeah, this would put us in the company of Belarus. A dictatorship. Woo.
You know what kind of governmental action sends SERIOUS ALARM BELLS?
How about planning to withdraw from international human rights legislation and replacing it with your own?
Because that's what our Prime Minister is proposing.
It doesn't even feel like a joke anymore that this current administration wants to be the New Victorian British Empire.
I look forward to going to the premiere of this film, squeezing into the last free seat, and disappearing along with the rest of the row.
The moths that blighted my life seem to be contained - not seen any new ones for over two weeks now. They're not gone, but the infested items are sealed away until I get the chance to deal with them. That's a huge relief, and between that and not having the hell commute anymore, I'm now able to have a life again, yay!
To mark this, I went up to Nottingham at the weekend and spent a few days with friends and family. Got some chips-in-gravy from the chip shop I used to visit during school lunch breaks ten years ago (they just don't taste the same down here), and went to Knightmare Live at a theatre where I once had a large part in a play running over a month.
Knightmare Live is a revived stage version of the classic UK D&D-like TV game Knightmare, which I'm going to struggle to explain here (I already tried with Foolio and he was all o_o at me in return). I'd definitely give it a look, but it won't have the same impact as it did on any of us who were around in the UK in the late 80s/early 90s. The stage show isn't the same, of course - it's an affectionate tribute but also warmly mocks the show and its quirks, and the contents reflect the fact that much of their audience are about 30, give or take a few years. You might just have to take my word for it, but it's by some way the funniest live comedy I have ever seen, as well as a huge nostalgia trip.
Also got to hear my 94-year old German grandfather (Opa) tell me about his past for a few hours. As a teen, he was forced to join the Hitler Youth, both in the East Prussian village he lived in, and the town he worked in. But he never attended any meetings. When pressed about this, he claimed in the village that he went in the town, and vice versa with the village for the town. So he got away with it for several years. He also originally learnt English as a PoW in the Carolinas in the late 40s when he realised the German-speaking American who arranged the PoWs' unofficial supplies was swindling them out of a load of dollars, so he taught himself English and cut out the middle man
@MDL:
Saw a dog get run over this morning. Not fun.
He'd escaped from his yard, and no one could convince him to stay off the road. The inevitable happened.
He's okay i think, just really shaken up. His owner was notified and he's been taken home.
I'm relieved that he survived, I was bracing myself for the worst reading that opening. I see more than enough roadkill on the way into work and back anyway (lots for England anyhow - I essentially work in the middle of a forest).
Quina was great, and not just because of the utterly broken Frog Drop. I love the whole concept of Blue Mages too - using an enemy's magic back against them. Some games did it better than others, mind.
I never did use Amarant much - came too late in the game for me, when I was too attached to Steiner as the big hitter. I always wished there were a way to Kuja into the party, oddly enough, even though I already knew this wouldn't be an Edea situation.
And weirdly, I've just remembered I once did a Zorn & Thorn show for a friend who loved those characters. Painted my face and then had a 5 minute conversation with myself. Ayup.
[hide]Actually, Kuja's motives were because Garland revealed that Kuja WASN'T a genome (like Zidane) and instead, was basically a homunculus with a very short life span (similar to that of Vivi and the Black Mages). Kuja acted out of unrelenting fear of death and basically felt that if he had to go, everyone is going down with him.
It's a great parallel to Vivi, who also goes through his fear of dying due to his short life span. Vivi got over it because he realized how much he treasured his friends and would rather have a wonderful time with them instead of drowning in the fear and doubt of the unknown.[/hide]
! In Kuja's case, unlike Vivi, he originally thought himself immoral. His breakdown (which rivals Sephiroth imo for the biggest BSOD in the series) was because of having mortality suddenly thrust upon him, so, y'know, destroying absolutely everything has a kind of logic to it in that position.
! Still feel sorry for him not getting to be the final boss though. Poor Kuja, forever upstaged by someone/something else.
I sincerely don't remember who is top left one.
Irene Adler from Sherlock, so not Who but still Modern Moffat.
Is first said Mac OS X, but then it says Mac OS 10.9.4 is vulnerable. Thankfully that's not my Mac OS.
A friend found it on her 10.9.5.
Remember Heartbleed?
This new Internet security exploit is worse.
ShellShock uses a rather alarming oversight in Bash that basically gives external users shell access, which essentially gives them control of the machine. Apache servers, on which a large part of the net sits, are vulnerable. So it's bad. Really bad. And disturbingly trivial.
http://www.troyhunt.com/2014/09/everything-you-need-to-know-about.html
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/sep/25/shellshock-bug-heartbleed
I wish.
Although, since you are in UK and personally know people who know people like Neil Gaiman…
I'm still trying to get our mutual friend to introduce us.
True story: my friend from university Writers' Circle was heading to Bristol once when the man in the seat next to her pulled out some papers and started reading them. She glanced over and it was a script for an unaired episode. She told me that it was about clockwork robots. And then sure enough…so I still wonder if she was next to Moffat (before he became famous (sort of)).
Plot twist: All spiders in Planet of Spiders are Clara in spider costume. Shocking unexpected scene at the end of Kill the Moon is her putting the costume on and flying to Metebelis 3.
Moffat thinks it's best scene of the season.
It's like we have a mole in the writing team or something.
Whoa, I kicked something off here. I'm not casting Square Enix into a fiery pit for having an all-male party this time - I was just responding to those who had been previously claiming that people had no right to feel disappointed about that fact.
I guess it does tie in to the less interesting character designs though. FFIX was obviously the pinnacle of that in the post-Nintendo era (VI before that) but FFX had Seymour, Lulu, Kimhari…I mean, FF was almost the Doctor Who of franchises, jumping all over the place in terms of aesthetic, atmosphere and genre mechanics, but still maintaining some consistency in terms of what made the series. Maybe we were just spoiled by a good run in the 90s, I dunno. Though I really loved FFXII, that was because of the open world aspects and mechanics, and not so much the plot or characters (though I love Dr Cid and Balthier).
If you're going to take the game aspects out of your game, you'd better at least have enough setting and story to distract from that fact. This is shaping up to be a disappointment if it fails on both grounds.
Though in my heart of hearts, I think I'm just wishing I could go back to the PSX era again and experience those games for the first time.
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my new word "BLANIME!"
Most important thing to come out of this thread.
@Cyan:
And yet despite this, despite Romani immigrating to the US and Canada and having no problems, despite the constant push to keeping the Holocaust in memory - Europe still insists on being horrible motherfuckers because of "their culture!!!" or "they don't assimilate!!!" or "they're all the same thieves and murderers!!!" while being selectively oblivious to the fact that it's that kind of thinking that led to over 12 million people dying in the worst ways possible.
Yup. It's awful but it's really commonplace. Even people who go protest racism against Afro-Caribbean people or South Asian people will happily complain about Romani - though they tend to get lumped in with Irish Travelers a lot in public perceptions.
A few of my friends were involved in trying to stop the events at Dale Farm a few years back.
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Remaining part of the EU is another big decision we'd like to have a say in. Like I mentioned to Supernova, it's looking likely that we'll end up with a coalition government consisting of the conservatives and the UK Independence party, who as the name suggests, would like to split the UK away from the EU.
They're fucking mental.
This is the exact kind of reason we want to be independent.
This situation really worries me. I know it's kind of a stereotype to talk about moving to a different country when a bad government come to power, but the current lot have done enough damage, having them mixed in with Farage's 'respectable' fascists would have me seriously considering fleeing up there.
And while there are some real problems with the EU, most Eurosceptics are motivated by badly-informed tabloid sensationalism like "EU wants us to stop flying English flags!!!". There's more than a whiff of xenophobia about the movement too.
There's a conspiracy that you played this summer and won again
I can neither confirm nor confirm that rumour.
My favourite Clara was the third Clara. I felt the second Clara was too grumpy to play the Clara, whilst the third Clara had me believing she was the Clara within her first episode.