Dervish

Tribes

Shy said
Alright Black team, we need something to collect that water so we have drinks.

We can probably fuck up a tree and make a bucket. Or we go find a White Man and flay him and use his skin as a water flask.

The Blackest God demands it.

~Majora's Mask: Oathkeeper's Dawn~

Captain Jenno said
Rousing rabble elsewhere!

FIEND!

~Majora's Mask: Oathkeeper's Dawn~

It be mighty quiet in hur. Where are you rabble rousers?

Trends in Entertainment, or Why Do We Eat this Crap Up?

There's something we're all doing that we claim to hate worse than Kim Jong Un's hair stylist and despite a rather vocal outcry to stop it, it continues going on full steam ahead like an Intercontinental Ballistic Missile of Bullshit that we're clearly still throwing ourselves at like One Direction Groupies.

I am of course referring to the current trends in entertainment media and why we as a society are tea bagging the concept of original content.

This whole thread kind of came up as something I wanted to discuss after reading about how that Divergent movie, yet another hastily shoveled together young adult novel adapted movie about a Mary Sue teenager who apparently is super important to stop some great evil and blah blah blah. In this case, Divergent is about some dystopia that segregates and sorts teenagers based on emotional profiles and the protagonist doesn't fit into their system so is in threat of extermination or something and falls into the clutches of a resistance that wants to overthrow the government and of course she falls in love with the hunky leader who decides she's also worth getting smitten for for whatever reason.

In short, a story we've all heard a variation of approximately 100 times in the past five years. Examples include City of Bones, Harry Potter, The Golden Compass, Twilight, Ender's Game, Percy Jackson, Warm Bodies, Beautiful Creatures, and so on

Lately, there's been a really big push from movie companies to produce and shovel out Young Adult novel adaptations like they're going out of style, as they really want to cash in on the trend that Harry Potter started and completely knocked out of the park. Twilight was the next big thing to ride Harry's Broomstick, and it did really well because of pop culture's love affair with supernatural things (especially vampires), which you'll notice is becoming a massive thing for not only movies, but several TV series (Supernatural, Vampire Diaries, Once Upon a Time, True Blood, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and so on) have popped up over the past couple decades that have done insanely well for themselves. With a few exceptions, a lot of those shows involving vampires and the like are usually steamy romance dramas that completely ignore the fact that vampires are supposed to be horrific murder machines, not sexy young adults with ample assets and a labido that would exhaust Ron Jeremy. People really love the idea of hot corpses screwing each other while acting angsty, as it turns out.

The reason I single out Divergent is because Lionsgate just announced that they're going to split the last book in that series into two parts, just like Harry Potter and Twilight did, as well as The Hunger Games is planning on doing. I can't speak for Twilight, having not read it for hopefully obvious reasons, so I can't speculate of whether or not the last book had enough content to really justify turning into two novels, but in the case of Harry Potter I thought it was a fairly sound decision. In Divergent's case, I haven't read it either but I have a strong suspicion that they're simply just trying to milk as much money out of the franchise as possible, tapping into this overdone YA novel movie genre to bleed people's pockets instead of feeling like the story was one that was truly worth adapting into a film. In the case of novel adaptations like Harry Potter and The Lord of the Rings, those movies are clearly made out of love for the subject matter and their massive budgets, very elaborate props and costumes, casting choices, and just about every facet of the movies are made to be as faithful to the books at they can. They feel like they existed because the people who made them genuinely wanted to bring those words to life. Even the Hunger Games, I found, was a labour of love that while I have no doubt was riding the success of the previously mentioned novel adaptations, the producers looked at making it as faithful as they could while putting no small amount of time, effort, and resources into getting right. Movies like that, I find, are pretty alright in my book.

However, for every successful franchise that understands that a successful movie adaptation depends on more than just the rights to a novel, there's a graveyard of attempts that make you wonder if they were made for any reason other than to try and cash in on the trends. Outside of Divergent, which I'll stop curb stomping for a while, other recent attempts included Ender's Game (which depresses me; my all time favorite book did not deserve a hastily rushed film adaptation that cut out almost everything that made it such a great story), The Golden Compass (another book series that I was REALLY surprised at how much I enjoyed and made me think), City of Bones, Percy Jackson, Spiderwick Chronicles (pretty sure the last three were trying to cash off of Harry Potter's fantasy elements), Beautiful Creatures (Twilight 2.0, from the previews), and so on. Most of those bombed at the box office, with a few exceptions, and I have no doubt if they were successful the producers would have tried to green light the remaining books in their respective series. It's like they tried to pump out a movie with the same clothes at the book but none of the soul that made them respective hits among readers. This is... unfortunate.

Probably the worst offender in the movie category is the whole superhero genre that seemed to explode after Spider-Man and X-Men hit the scene and stole our hearts. Before they came out, Superhero Movies were pretty much box office kryptonite and no producer in the right mind would want to touch them. They weren't popular, they were nerdy, and they weren't stories worth telling, and most importantly, they wouldn't sell past a niche market. Now, several attempts were made in the past, some more successful than others, but on the whole, most of the ones made were cheap efforts made by people who earnestly wanted to make super hero movies on what little budget they could afford. I honestly feel bad for the guys. But fast forward to 2014, and just counting American-made superhero movies that came out since 2000, and excluding some movies that didn't get box offices releases, are obscure characters/ comics, or just weren't successful in the slightest, we have had a soul-crushing 54 movies in 14 years, and another 14 in production or soon to hit theaters. This, needless to say, is completely fucking insane and Marvel's going full bore to make a movie about even the most obscure, unpopular, and useless characters they have in their roster while featuring popular heroes multiple times (So far, Iron Man has showed up in released movies 4 times with another Avengers movie on tap, while Wolverine has shown up SIX times as Hugh Jackman with another three on tap!). I genuinely enjoyed the big-budget movies leading up to the Avengers, which was a concept completely unheard of at the time, which is having so many big super heroes who were in wildly successful movies in the same film. It was a fantastic movie, and it proved the concept worked. Now, they keep making more and more movies using those same characters because of the success of those movies in hopes they'll keep raking in more money per movie than most third world countries' GDPs. Iron Man 3 was a shitty movie if I ever saw one, Thor 2 was pretty much the same thing as the first one, and I don't even care to go see Captain America go through the same formula as every super hero movie ever (seriously, the characters, plot, set pieces, climax, and so on are almost all interchangeable. You know exactly what is going to happen going into it). They're bleeding the whole concept dry, and nobody seems to care. People are literally spending money on movies they've already seen before, expecting a different outcome. That's insanity. About the only draw is the insane CGI budgets and pretty eye candy.

I'm not even going to touch anything related to zombies; that's low hanging fruit if there ever was one.

When movies like Pacific Rim and The Lego Movie are perhaps some of the most original and fun movies to come out in the past several years, you know you're in the dark ages of cinema. For the record, I loved those movies.

Looking at shit like video games, I don't even have to explain what's screwed up about annual releases of Call of Duty and Assassin's Creed and the like; you're more or less buying the same game as last years, only with a different coat of paint... sometimes. On Metacritic, Call of Duty keeps getting pretty high score from the media, but the users are ripping it apart, accusing it of being recycled garbage and what's killing gaming (like Nickleback is to music, heyo!). People keep claiming they want original IPs, but original games are really having a hard time selling compared to the mountains of sequels. For the sake of brevity, and the fact that The Game Theorists cover this topic more comprehensively than I can, have a video.



For those of you who can't be bothered to watch that, this sums up the point nicely: The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, one of the most beloved and acclaimed games in history, moved 7.8 million units in its lifetime, while a single Mario Party sequel moved 8 million.

I could go on and on with examples across everything from music to books and so on so forth, but I want to get to the whys.

Honestly, I think a big part of why sequels and me-too releases and trends are what's always been the big sellers is partially because A) the producers have a giant budget and can market and distribute this stuff super effectively, B) It's like comfort food. If you're in the chip isle, people are more likely to pick a bag of stuff they know they like than try a flavour they haven't before because what if they don't like it, C) it's trendy to like popular things, and people don't like to be excluded,
(e.g. "Hey, have you seen Cars 7 yet?"
"Oh man! I went with all my friends! Owen Wilson is HILARIOUS! And Larry the Cable Guy, can you believe him?!"
"Hey, remember that scene where Lighting is like.."
"DUDE! SPOILERS! I'm going this weekend!"
"Hey, Joe, have you seen it yet?"
"Uh.. no?"
"..."
"..."
"...Get the fuck out of here, apostate.")

And so on. For as much as people like to claim they love original stuff, the numbers just don't add up. They just don't want to take a chance with their money on something they don't know if they're like, which is really, really too bad. Or they process to want something, or that they'd buy it, and when it's finally made after enough demand, they don't follow through. People keep buying Call of Duty because everyone else has it, including all their friends. Do you know how hard it is to get people to play Co-op for Transformers: War for Cybertron or get a good posse going in Red Dead Redemption when everyone and their dog is bugging me to play Call of Duty? The worst part about that is I can barely tell the difference between Modern Warfare 2 and Ghosts, they are almost identical games. It's one thing to have a series where it takes several years between installments (Half-Life, for instance), and it's quite another when they keep popping out the same game to try and keep sales high. The only reason I still like Assassin's Creed is because they somehow manage to rebuild these old cities and have entertaining, engaging characters and stories each year. I've played through every installment but only own the first game, Brotherhood, and Black Flag. I simply can't justify buying multiple copies of a game that has almost the same mechanics year after year (Black Flag being a big exception thanks to the excellent naval content). Point is, as much as I am rallying against the same old shit, I'm just as guilty of it as the rest of you.

Anyways, what are your thoughts on this? Anyone else getting as tired of the same old shit month after month with no end in sight? We all fall victim to it, and it's a comfort food that is no longer fulfilling. It's a sad state of the world when all the money that companies earn, they still think it's not worth the risk to come up with new IPs and original ideas because we, as consumers, NEVER buy them. If you're one of the people who craves something original and new, let me ask you this; when's the last time you went to see a movie you've never heard of in the theater, or bought an Indie video game, or bought music from an artist you hadn't heard of before? When's the last time you took the risk on something new? What do you think of the current trends, and what are you guilty of indulging in?

TL;DR: Stop buying the same shit over and over again, try something new. I don't need to see 14 different Spider-Men in my lifetime.

1x1 RPs

xenon said
I've took part in and/or read half a dozen 1X1 RPs and none of them were what people are describing here. The two I read, were the longest lasting RP's I've seen on this site, with good plots, realistic and gradual world-building and amazing character development and relationship development.1X1 roleplays seem to be more successful than groups because it's harder to get a bunch of people who are all willing to write in sync and not give up when it gets difficult.Of the 1X1's I've took part in, the key to avoiding smut is to bring more factors into the story, not just your main character. Discuss things OOC, lace background plots in that make the planet turn, spend a little more effort on cameo/side characters. It's easy to avoid "meat pounding" or whatever lol

"Meat Pounding" is now my favorite slang term for smut.

Also, you are like a unicorn and doing what I wish moar of 1x1 was like. Good job!

"You're a Fake Geek!" and Sexism among Geeks/Nerds/Etc (us)

I am (painfully) aware that mileage may vary and experiences aren't rated by the ESRB and what have you, and I know how it can be sink or swim forbpeople. This is where the high school comparisons are apt; it was definitely a clique.

Although, I will say this, the people who are often the most popular there are the ones who proved they were intelligent and had some other factors going for them, like a certain brand of humour, impressive sarcasm, the ability to get along with most everyone, and so on. Mostly, it was an exercise of sticking it out until people got to know you without being an idiot or offensive. Once again, everyone has different experiences, and I don't dare presume to speak on your, or anyone else's, behalf on the matter.

But as for the intelligent discussion thing, I swear it has merit. You know I am capable of having a rational, mature discussion with people, so I wouldn't make stuff up. It's just one of those things that happened once a blue moon.

Anyways, you get the gist.

I also use past tense because I don't know WTF it is now.

1x1 RPs

Jorick said
Oh, you are giving too much credit. Waaaaaaay too much credit. Back on the old Guild, after Google ads were taken away due to them finding some objectionable content (it wasn't even a 1x1 smut thing, it was something old in the Spam section), a bunch of us went and searched for smut and so forth to bring to the attention of mods. Just between me and Elendra going smut hunting we must have found well over 100 blatant smut threads in the 1x1 section, plus tons of interest checks with really shady things (lists of kinks and explanations of some of them, for instance), and that's just what the mods hadn't already nuked in the past.There are many people who blatantly disregard the rules, or maybe never read them in the first place. It's true that almost all of the smut 1x1 interest checks I've seen in my time on RPG have said they want to do it via PM or off-site, but there are still plenty who don't care about or never read the rules, which causes things like what Brovo mentioned about people just assuming adult content is allowed.

The smut witch hunt was certainly one of last year's highlights, as was the aftermath of confused and angry people demanding to know what happened to their games. Good times!

I'll totally agree with Brovo saying a lot of 1x1 is embarrassingly lazy. Every time I go to look, there isn't a damn thing that interests me and almost all the interest checks are painfully generic pairings instead of actual plots. And man, if you're there not trolling for your brand of smut, there's virtually no games to meet your needs.

"You're a Fake Geek!" and Sexism among Geeks/Nerds/Etc (us)

Off topic, but Spam has been often a place where reasonable and intelligent discussions can and often did occur. I always saw it as a place to socialize without having to worry about being crude or playing nice with people; you can actually call them out on stupid shit. Plus, no stigma about going off topic in the off topic section.

Although, looking at it now, I can defintely see where people are coming from by comparing it to high school and other such immature places. I mainly stick around, hoping it gets better and some of the old mainstays return, but I'm starting to think they have the right idea by bowing out of going there.

I suppose I need to accept that like people, communities change, and not always for the better.

Anyways, back on topic. Didn't think that needed its own thread.

R.I.P. Ultimate Warrior

Jerkchicken said
First undertaker loses to Brock Lesnar of all people and then Ultimate warrior bites it. This displeases me in may ways

You do know that the Undertaker agreed to it so he can retire, right? He obviously respects Lestner enough to let him be the guy who "beat" him. He was try to do the same thing years ago with Triple H but they wouldn't let him.

And I don't even care for wrestling. It's the same thing as a sitcom with characters acting in roles for people's entertainment.

"You're a Fake Geek!" and Sexism among Geeks/Nerds/Etc (us)

Brovo said
... Dude, that's a pretty sexist statement right there. You nailed it. Gold star. Well done. Thanks for pointing out that it's a grey issue, not black and white. Wish more people held that opinion.I always found it equally amusing when a woman demands to be considered attractive for what she is--fat, or otherwise--then usually turns around and applies an unrealistic set of standards upon men to qualify for dating. Then wonders why they're forever alone with three cats.To clarify: Sexual standards does not always equate to sexism. A guy may find big breasted women in chainmail bikinis attractive and not be a sexist in the same manner that a woman may not want to date a guy who is short or obese. Or a bigot. This is just how humans work.If anything I'd say it's not so much a hatred of women in your example as it is a case of Peter Pan syndrome--not being able to grow up past their fantasies and escapisms and attacking anything that might threaten that, female, authority figure, or otherwise. They also tend to be the same kind of rabid fans you might find obsessing over sports, or fashion, or god knows what other thing we can obsess over in groups. You always have zealous extremists who attack anything that might threaten the image. That's more of a problem with extremism than it is specifically sexism, sexism in this case is just the byproduct of a flawed design.

That applies to both genders, me thinks. I've seen my fair share of repulsive men with such bad hygene that a sewer mutant would find them repugnant who want a girlfriend so badly, but their standards are so insanely high bar that it's impossible to achieve. When Jabba the Hutt wants a Swedish bikini model and won't settle for anything less, you're looking at a man who is single handedly keeping the tissue paper industry afloat with maxed out credit cards for a list of smutty websites with about six innuendos in the title and about 15 x's. Of course, the girls you mention are their own unique brand of awful, and I guarentee they have quoted that dumb fucking Merylin Monroe quote about if you can't handle her at her worst, you don't deserve her at her best like it's some kind of excuse for justifying shitty behaviour and standards. If I had a shot every time I saw that quote on Facebook, I would haved died from liver failure years ago.

And sure, everyone has sexual standards, what you're describing is no different than somebody not being sexually attracted to someone of another race. Doesn't make them racist, it just means they aren't attracted. It's also why there's fetishes people have of dragons fucking muscle cars, people wanting to be cooked alive and prepared like a meal, or fucking goats. Most people think that's goddamn weird, but somebody obviously finds it hot enough to make it known across the internet.

No, what I meant was the guys who actively discriminate against girls from participating in their hobbies and go out of their way to be dickbags about it to try and drive them off, be it a lard ass Cheeto breathing DM in a Dungeons & Dragons group who actively screws over a girl's character to a 13 year old Mountain Dew Butt Chugger who tells a girl on Call of Duty to get back in the kitchen to get him more Doritos because mom refuses to buy more until grocery day while insisting the girl isn't a real gamer and so on. It goes beyond a meek awkwardness where they feel something sacred is being defiled by the presence of vagina like a D20 filled El Dorodo being ransaked by bombshell Cortez and her Sexy Spaniards, which is still sexism, no matter how you cut it.

I mean, shit. The Taliban throwing acid in girls' faces for having the audacity to go to school is still sexist even if they think it's against their religion and culture to have woman have equal rights. While a mouth breathing girl bashing nerd isn't throwing acid at the chick who dared sit down at his wizard table (god, I hope not), he's still being sexist even if he's having the foundations of everything he's ever known and loved turned upside down by a maiden who rather swing a battle axe than be rescued from a tower while not dressed like a total skank. Just because he hasn't experienced this thing called women in his life and doesn't know any better doesn't mean you can justify him acting like a triple necked cocksucker towards a girl who dare show interest in his passion. It's like saying you can justify Bieber for being an insufferable little drunk driving dick because he's young and got too rich and famous too quickly, having never been told no since Usher summoned him from the depths of YouTube to terrorize the world like some kind of douchey looking Eldrich Horror.