Mike is awesome but again, I'm so nervy about turning minor characters into like... more major ones. Mike is great in BrBa as a supporting character and his granddaughter backstory was nice but how much "Mike being a hitman" can we take? Like I said, still gonna watch. I just have reservations.
Anthems for a Seventeen-Year-Old Girl by Broken Social Scene Used to be one of the rotten ones and I liked you for that, Now you're all gone, got your makeup on and you're not coming back.
I'm well, yourself?
I'm so undecided on the show, I love Breaking Bad but I can't see an entire series being given to what is mostly a comic relief character. Still planning to watch it eventually, though.
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The real lesson you all should be taking from this snow is that you should move to Long Island, where snow hits us but not hard enough to destroy **** or interrupt life. Just kidding, it sucks here.
Maleficent went apeshit in Sleeping Beauty mostly because she wasn't invited to Aurora's Christening and felt that was bad manners. If that isn't some badass villain camp, I don't know what is. I love it.
Regardless of how you feel about scoring reviews, this really doesn't read to me as 'dropping' review scores at all. They're simply using a different scale, with three levels. One could easily translate them numerically into a 1/3 for Avoid, 2/3 for Recommend, and 3/3 for Essential. As @Patman 's quote addresses, scores do have their place (despite my issues with how it's written). However, they obviously should not be cited or trusted on the mere basis of the number -- if anything, a 7/10 at a site like IGN is different than a 35/40 from Famitsu. The industry is really controlled by these arbitrary review scores and I'm not okay with that... ... but so far I haven't seen any sites replace them or innovate in a meaningful way. But then, I also don't read reviews often and am not up on the major sites' scoring systems. In fact, IGN, which is the juggernaut of the "x out of ten" review system, names their numbers: 10.0: Masterpiece 9.0 - 9.9: Amazing 8.0 - 8.9: Great 7.0 - 7.9: Good ... and so on I don't see how Eurogamer's choice is any different than this, other than that they're obfuscating the numbers now. A lot of people looking for review scores just want a tl;dr version and are judging a game based solely on the number. That won't change by simply changing numbers to words or vice-versa. I'm a reader so I'll always want to read the review to hear why they gave it the score they did -- what they liked and what they didn't -- and that's the same whether there's a review score or not. What we really need to do is remove this idea that so many gamers hold that a game review score is an objective quantification of the game's value. Reviews are subjective because they are based on opinion, and the scores are therefore also subjectively and often arbitrarily determined. This issue is, after all, what caused mass outrage after Polygon down-rated Bayonetta 2 for exploiting women. Eurogamer is (unjustifiably) patting themselves on the back for addressing issues with gaming journalism. Good news about reviewing retail copies, though.
Given their insistence that the decision was made to redirect efforts towards their other IPs, I'm hopeful this means BioWare employees are just being shuffled around and not laid off. And hell, anything that gets the next Mass Effect in my hands sooner I'm okay with.
I like the comparison to Lucius Malfoy (not just because I'm an HP fan)! After Kingdom Hearts, at least, I think Maleficent is a mostly self-serving character. She has her own, individual interests and motivations that she's loyal to and darkness is her tool of choice, but I ultimately think she's loyal first to herself and then to the darkness. That's very similar to the Malfoys, who align themselves with Voldemort as their interests overlap, but when that changes, they're going to follow first their loyalty to themselves and their families. I don't think she's setting her sights on some higher purpose, like Xehanort, and that sort of removes her as the main villain.
@Rik and I got into an interesting conversation about this and I thought it'd be fun to pull out for all of us to speculate on! I'm very hopeful that Maleficent will play a big role in Kingdom Hearts 3, despite Master Xehanort almost definitely being the main baddie for the game. She's really just the quintessential Disney villain, to me, and that's something I noticed when I recently visited Disney World. For a lot of their shows (Fantasmic, the Castle shows, parades, etc.), Maleficent was featured prominently if not made out to be the main villain. Fantasmic in particular had a very KH-esque plot, when Maleficent conspires with other famous Disney villains to turn Mickey's dreams into a nightmare. She's bonkers and over-the-top and a really nice contrast to the pure evil of Xehanort. Kingdom Hearts 2 left Maleficent in a position to return, of course, and she clearly still has a role in the series after Coded. Let's not forget that she would have been left to rest after the first game if not for a fan vote bringing her back in Kingdom Hearts 2! Finally, I think the recent Angelina Jolie flick (which I've not seen yet but I know what it's about) could make Maleficent a more sympathetic character if sourced in Kingdom Hearts 3, and end in a potential team up between her and Sora & co. to take down Xehanort; sort of an "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" situation. So basically, I want to know if others are with us! Do you think Maleficent is done in the series (or, just as importantly, do you want her done in the series)? Or does she still have a role to play, and what sort of role will that be?
Aqua, no question. I think she has one of the most compelling and tragic stories as of right now, aside from Riku, but after Dream Drop Distance Riku's had a pretty happy ending (or at least, most of his darkness issues have been resolved, though I'm sure they'll crop up again in KH3). I suppose I'm just drawn to the self-sacrificing characters. Aqua is just a really powerful character -- she's an enormous badass of course ("My name is Master Aqua. Now return my friends' hearts or pay the price!"), I adore her fighting style as less brute force than other characters (Spellweaver man. Spellweaver), but she's also a phenomenally level-headed young woman with a big heart and strong morals. I especially like her major conflict in Birth by Sleep, where she has to choose between her friends and justice -- it's a conundrum and I think she deals with it really admirably. In my eyes, Birth by Sleep ended with the revelation that Aqua more or less ties together the story to that point (Dream Drop Distance of course added in a whole bunch of plot twists and turns :v). Aqua and Terra are also the best ship in the KHverse. Fight me. Okay, Sora and Kairi are pretty great too...
Whaddya Wanna Know by Cloud Nothings It's so hard to understand what you're talking to me about, It's so hard to understand what you want. What do you want to know? Whaddya wanna know? im really ****ed up over this song
Fixed! Some of our old BB Code is pretty janky. Going through and porting them all to our new system, cleaning them up in the process, is one of my next projects for the site. I should also really add a Fixed prefix, but I'll just go ahead and mark this as Implemented for now.
I used to make occasional vlogs about my life and enjoyed it. Honestly it'd be pretty fun to keep going, especially having done the podcast for a while now I think I'm better at talking like that -- as you're saying, it's definitely just a matter of doing it a lot and you get better. You get more comfortable and confident and develop a bit of a personality that you just sort of sink into when you begin. For vlogging, also, the nice thing is that you can just sort of sit down in front of a camera and talk. If you don't like how you said something, you can just keep going over it in different ways, with different tones, energy, etc., and then just edit it all together later. Obviously it's helpful to have a rough plan or script but you can use as many takes as you need. That's not the case with something like the podcast, where you're talking with others, and I try to avoid having to redub something later. Blogging is good for me because I enjoy writing and some forms of media or analysis are just more conducive to it, I think. I'd actually be interested in trying to turn one of my posts into a video; I just wrote one about Life is Strange and recorded my playthrough so it'd be pretty easy. Maybe I'll play around with that. Agree, though. If you're interested in doing something, just go for it. If you're discussing something you're passionate about, that's going to show through, and honestly it's a real confidence builder.
lmk when you do because I will for sure check it out
All in a day's work! Real talk, I used to just kind of keep quiet about all my thoughts about media because I was like "oh who really gives a ****." I've recently started blogging a bit and I'm finding it really rewarding. oh okay. I don't buy Nintendo things really so idk lol
If the person looking at you needs glasses, probably not that fast at all.
I think you should go for it if it's something you have a lot to say about. The beauty of music and books and art is that there's no 'true' interpretation -- even the artist's interpretation isn't the be-all-end-all. It's about what it means to the people and you should absolutely share that if it means a lot to you. You have unique perspectives and thoughts that are worth putting out there. I've been meaning to give American Idiot a re-listen. I was into Green Day as a kid but had kind of lost interest in them when American Idiot came out. Jesus of Suburbia rocked my playlists for a while, though.
