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Timby posted:Yeah, I think this is a big part of Pixar's slide into mediocrity. Lasseter absolutely had his blind spots (see his absurd love of the Cars franchise, for example), but he has a brilliant creative mind and a sixth sense for knowing what works and what doesn't. Don't get me wrong, he is a creepy-rear end son of a bitch and he has no place working in Hollywood and gently caress Skydance for hiring him, but we're now seeing post-Lasseter Disney Animation and Pixar output and the studios are very clearly still looking for a firm hand at the rudder. Wasn't one of the issues with Lasseter (though a much smaller problem than his sexual harassment, of course) was that he was an aggressive credit thief? I seem to recall hearing that all of "his" ideas for Cars were demonstrably someone else's, and Lasseter just "loved" it because it was a billion dollar merchandising opportunity he could slap the Pixar Seal of Good Movies onto.
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Mar 9, 2020 02:16
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I dunno, going from a quirky self-promotion blog to an open exploration of your failed marriage framed in the context of being a butcher... if nothing else, I admire her swinging so far in the opposite direction of what her fans probably expected.
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Jul 26, 2020 17:03
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mycot posted:I still feel really bad for that one woman who basically became the Most Hated Person On the Internet for saying video games should have a story only mode. If she's the person I'm thinking of, it's doubly crazy because she was pointing out that so many people basically played Mass Effect and other Bioware games as light novels interrupted by annoying shooting sections. People who play Mass Effect to shoot aliens can easily just mash through dialogue and skip cutscenes, but people who are interested in the other half have no option to just "skip combat" and get to the dialog choices. They're both ways of skipping the gameplay you don't like to focus on the gameplay you do! 8one6 posted:What exactly would you loose if the developers made the game more accessible by offering a map you, personally, could choose to not use? I think there's artistic value that could be had in game devs leaning on the desire to have a map in players. Mapping translates geographical space (which is usually the real enemy of video games as you cross from left to right or across the world) into something reduced and controllable. There's definitely an emotional response to realizing that this-place-and-that-place are connected that loses its punch if you can just check a map and see the connection instead of recognizing landmarks, and you can do some subtle environmental storytelling with it—Dark Souls 1 is built on a Divine Comedy-esque design with the Inferno at the base of a mountain and Olympus at the top, but the whole paradigm's a lie—there's no gods in heaven and the real "base" that the mountain's built on is and endless, tranquil lake of ash, the remnants of the previous race the gods killed to take control of the world. Dark Souls 2 does a lot with impossible geography (you take an elevator up from a windmill to a massive iron fortress) and actually has a more decorative map as an artistic, rather than gameplay, touch to emphasize how strange space is in Drangleic. It... doesn't work as well as the previous game, but I see where they're coming from. But much like how subtitles draws the eye to the bottom of the screen, away from what the cinematographer wants you to look at, just because there's artistic value that's lost with accessibility doesn't mean that it's outweighed by the benefits of accessibility.
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Nov 2, 2020 17:54
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Snowman_McK posted:Fair point. But, when their images are discussed, you don't focus on the killing. That gets glossed over or ignored. Kitchener stopped being a guy who built concentration camps and became the hero who went down with the ship, with the story being that he was still directing rescue efforts as it sank. More absurdly, some accounts from the time painted him as a King Arthur figure, sleeping beneath the waves for when britain needs him again. It's rarer that the acts of horrifying violence are the glorified part. I think this is a pretty ahistorical take. Bragging about your martial valor as you slaughter the foreigner is old as poo poo, and the ways in which your brave soldiers humiliated and destroyed the enemy is a whole tradition. Romans marched parades of captured slaves through the city, showing off the treasures looted from their temples. The Book of Judges, in the Old Testament, contains verses that are just "So and so killed six hundred Philistines with a spear. He was a savior of Israel." The Song of Roland has verses about how the Franks gloriously butchered fleeing Muslims as they cried out to Muhammad. La Marseillaise has a verse about watering the fields of France with foreigner blood. British adventure novels from the late 19th took such grisly satisfaction in the superiority of the Maxim Gun as it mowed down "savages" that modern historical analysis thinks its strategic impact was actually pretty overblown. Hell, I just read a thread in this forum discussing how comics legend Jack Kirby (admittedly, American, but from a "good war") would brag about how he killed 4 Nazis every chance he got. Like, if you want to say that there's a particular sociopathy related to how we cover Seal Team Six and the glorification of brutal violence, that's a solid, sensible argument, but to claim it's somehow a novelty feels like you're going on a pretty shaky claim Especially because the concept of a "war crime" is something that's varied a lot over time, and even today there's a bunch of arbitrary qualifiers towards which ones "count" as bad. Contrast how Americans feel about Seal Team 6 (killing the badguys woo!) and Trump's Blackwater pardons (an unpopular and morally gross decision) or the border concentration camps, where it wasn't something people cared about until they started releasing audio of kids crying, and then it became something Trump had to actually back down on. Every empire has arbitrary lines about which war crimes are awesome demonstrations of our power and their weakness and which war crimes are too ugly for the ordinary folk to stomach.
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Jan 21, 2021 03:39
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Snowman_McK posted:That's the argument I was making. I apologise for not being clearer. Obviously the glorification of martial valour isn't new, but the comfort modern american depictions have with parts of the battle that tend to get written out in a lot of history does seem unusual. You could say that the difference is asymmetrical warfare, but the Boer war was pretty asymmetrical, and contemporary praise of Kitchener doesn't emphasise how effectively the british were starving the South African populace to death. Perhaps its not so much ahistorical as, since we're seeing it play out in real time, we see the odder versions of this. For a separate example, when they dropped the MOAB a couple of years ago, the simple act of the bomb being dropped was the part emphasised, not what it did or whether it did anything. It would be like those colonial pulp books just talking about the machine gun firing without ever telling you if the bullets hit anything. Oh, no, 19th century Great Game stuff loved emphasizing that foreigners were dying, often in terror and helplessness as they got bloodily murdered. The bigger difference between 21st century America and 19th century England when it came to graphic joy in murdering foreigners come down to censorship making things more innuendo than direct "I shot him in the face." Thinking more about it, Medieval French songs like Roland were comically sadistic in their glee with violence against Muslims, as a way to emphasize that they were weaker and deserving of getting brutalized. Honestly, America's comparably restrained in their cultural attitude towards war crimes--Trump ran on killing family members and taking plunder and people generally took it as "unserious" and that it was just empty talk. Even his supporters took it as a bad thing they didn't try to justify like all his other horrible things. E. gently caress! I forgot Shakespeare! Heroic gore and being coasted in your foes blood is awesome, provided you're killing the right guys. Precambrian fucked around with this message at 04:33 on Jan 21, 2021 |
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Jan 21, 2021 04:29
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I recently discovered that there is an insane conspiracy theory that Benedict Cumberbatch isn't actually married, his kids are either adopted or nonexistent, and, for whatever reason, untangling this conspiracy is done with all the grave seriousness of investigating the JFK assassination. At first, I thought it was crazy Sherlock fans who think Cumberbatch must be gay to fit with their fanfiction, but no, it seems like they despise him and think he's doing it for sympathy? I have no idea. I might be tired of Cumberbatch and have no love for him as Dr. Strange, but holy poo poo do I enjoy utterly bizarre celebrity conspiracies being militantly shared on Twitter. e. should note, they obviously hate his wife as well, alleging she's a prostitute and having a lot of misogynistic attacks there, but the people I saw on Twitter were acting like Cumberbatch was some kind of devious schemer trying to trick the world into thinking he was married and had kids for... some reason. Precambrian fucked around with this message at 19:48 on Mar 17, 2021 |
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Mar 17, 2021 19:45
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I really like the idea of Lebron sitting down for a marketing meeting with a bunch of WB execs, and some marketing dept guy is explaining the ironic appeal of Space Jam to Millennials, like with the website, the Quad City DJs mashup, and how they can capitalize on it. Lebron flips through the packet and pauses on a page that catches his eye. He looks up and asks, "Wait, Charles Barkley made a Space Jam video game? How did Michael allow that to happen?" The marketing guy pauses for a moment, gathers his wits, and tries to explain Shut Up And Jam Gaiden to the last audience that could ever understand it. Double points if he had to explain that one of the characters is "Lebron James's octoroon grandson."
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Apr 7, 2021 17:47
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Cruella should just be Moby Dick but her white whale is Dalmatians.
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May 29, 2021 17:59
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