Well, there’s a difference between knowing what Transformers are and thinking they’re cool, and actually following the absurdly elaborate mythos associated with the premise with any regularity. And just as great a difference between that last thing I said and being a hardcore fan. It’s a sliding scale.
I’m sure most people can tell you who Megatron and Optimus Prime and a handful other notables are, even if they (like myself) didn’t even know Transformers were alien life forms until the previews for the movie came out, and generally have difficulty wrapping their mind around the idea that a series originally invented to sell toys that a not insignificant percentage of kids would’ve wanted even if there weren’t a cartoon has such an absurdly elaborate mythos in the first place.
Sounds a bit like a sliding logarithmic scale.
A slide rule.
Must be why so many transformer fans are Computers.
OK, that was pretty weak. I’ll see myself out.
I’d say the difference between Walkyverse Joe and Dumbiverse Joe is the sliding time scale. Transformers were probably a much bigger thing back then, and met the niche of ‘Joe’s nerdy secret’. In this ‘verse, his nerdy secret is probably something else.
Considering Willis’ buffer, I wonder if he didn’t know what was going to happen with Tailgate when he wrote this, or if this was in reaction to that happening, or if he’s so one with the Transformers franchise by this point that his soul is part of the Allspark and he just sensed it somehow.
Had to be buried underground for like 6 months with radiation to cure him of something but some asshole came along and murdered the doctor overseeing the treatment and set the timer to 6 million years.
That is the logical conclusion of the pressing-all-the-numbers-in-the-elevator prank, and it’s super petty but also super intriguing and now I might have to get into transformers.
It’s also extremely tragic in context. Massive spoilers!
When we first met Tailgate, he had spent 6 million years underground, drifting in and out of a coma, not realizing how much time was passing as he slowly made his escape.
At first he claims to have been a badass bomb disposal expert before his accidental burial, but it eventually is revealed he was responsible for WASTE disposal…and he only came online 2 weeks before he was buried, and no one even noticed he was gone. He’s basically a child.
He grows closer and closer to his roommate Cyclonus, but then it turns out that all the time he spent underground was wreaking havoc on his body, and he had developed was was basically robot cancer and was going to die soon, despite having barely lived. 6 million years old, and his happiest moment was just having a movie night with some friends.
Even though he’s dying, he performs a heroic act that saves half the Cybertronian race, and Cyclonus manages to cure him. But despite the fact that they clearly have feelings for each other, Cyclonus is so emotionally crippled that he can’t spit it out, and Tailgate starts seeing another bot named Getaway who is much more affectionate.
But it turns out Getaway is just using him, hoping to get him to attempt to assassinate Megatron (a good guy at this point), and get killed in the process. Cyclonus realizes this and prevents it from going down at the last moment, but is nearly killed himself, and the grief of seeing him gunned down unlocks some sort of mutation Tailgate had undergone in his millions of years underground, which gives him super strength.
He uses these abilities to help save the day once more, and it seems him and Cyclonus are finally able to admit their feelings for each other, but there’s a problem; Cyclonus keeps turning up beaten all to hell for some reason. Turns out Tailgate’s powers are causing him to have some sort of fits in his sleep, and he keeps nearly killing himself. Cyclonus keeps having to subdue him, and getting the crap knocked out of him in the process. He hasn’t told Tailgate this is happening. His frenemy Whirl does tell Tailgate in secret, however.
Realizing he’s been hurting the bot he loves, Tailgate pretends he no longer has feelings for Cyclonus so he’ll leave on a mission. Cyclonus believes him and departs. But Tailgate is so desperate to be with him that he has a doctor formulate a way to remove his powers; 6 months in an underground chamber flooded with radiation. Tailgate agrees to this, but a Decepticon with a grudge against him named Fangry kills the doctor and resets the timer to 6 million years.
We last saw poor Tailgate where we first met him. Buried alive.
Not to mention Megatron’s change of allegiance…
(Now that I think of it you’d probably need to explain most of the idwverse just to get a rough idea of why he did it)
And Tailgate is the sweetest, kindest, most adorable bot in the…well, in that entire universe (there are a few that come close, but nobody does cuteybot like Tailgate)…which makes it even more of a kick in the teeth.
There’s a reason why Transformers: MTMTE won comic of the year not too long ago. It’s basically Dr. Who / Red Dwarf in space with robots. If you’re not reading it, start with Death of Optimus Prime, then move on to MTMTE #1 and go forward from there.
wait, have i misunderstood this? does transformers have gay robots? do i have to start reading this comic now? are they using the term “bury your gays” quite literally here?
Depends on who you ask. There’s a certain type of fanboy who will swear up and down that it doesn’t count, because they’re robots and so none of them are actually male. The fact some some of them also go by female pronouns and are clearly woman-shaped is ignored.
But yeah, gay robots. The most prominent couple is Chromedome and Rewind, who are just the sweetest damn thing ever. Seriously, their relationship is the best. Lost Light also just revealed that two of their new female characters are not only a couple, but also used to identify as male, before deciding that female made more sense to them. So they are transgendered lesbians.
There are many, many gay robots. Not all of them are healthy, and several end badly, but there’s a bunch.
Off the top of my head, for the guys, we have Tailgate/Cyclonus, Knockout/Breakdown, Rewind/Chromedome, and Blast Off/Onslaught.
On the girl side, there’s Anode/Lug, and Dustup/Jetstream who have major roles, and there are a couple couples who’ve had minor appearances (some of Nautica’s friends, a pair of guards on Carcer).
In this universe, Cybertron is all-male (save for a few like Anode and Lug who go offworld and discover that female fits them better, or Arcee, who…is complicated and was rather unfortunate until a few minor retcons), so any het pairings are going to be from the Colonies…but even among the colonials, the same-gender pairings outnumber the mixed gender ones, at least among the main cast.
I feel like it would be both. It definitely would be very noisy
I can only imagine the paint scratches and dents they’d have afterwards, especially if they like it rough. I suspect the official lore may not have addressed such matters
Depends on if they’re going for plug-n-play or not, and if so, how rough they like it. Might not need to be any banging or clanging involved at all. :3
I’m really surprised that until now I haven’t really put much thought into the potential mechanical / structural problems that would need to be overcome in order for vehicle-sized robots to do sex to each other
Aren’t some transformers city or even planet-sized? Do they even HAVE genitals with which to smush someone? What do said genitals look like? Clearly they must be internal, since none of them seem to wear pants, and yet I’ve NEVER seem Optimus Prime’s dong.
…I may need to see one of Amber’s fanfics. I have too many questions now
One big pet peeve is that Kishimoto sometimes doesn’t know what to do with the interesting characters he has introduced because they all must be less powerful/interesting than the Main Protagonist™ and his boyfriend main rival, so he ends up throwing to the side characters that have been established to be more intelligent or more powerful than both. Neji’s death and Shikamaru’s small role in the final arc are prominent examples. Heck I think that by the final arc the only character that got showtime that he deserved was Killer Bee.
But my BIGGEST peeve is how Kishimoto’s sexism shows through his writing. All good women get married and have babies and STOP BEING NINJAS, and somehow this is their happy ending even though many of these women have worked their entire lives to be capable fighters. Literally the only one that escapes this fate is Tsunade and I think it’s only because her canon age is 50 so he decided she was too old to get married or something.
But it’s so infuriating! The first one to fall into this was Kurenai, who out of nowhere was married to Asuma and pregnant with his child. Like, ok, that’s believable because we don’t see her or her relationships that often. But after this is announced we NEVER see her fight as a ninja again, she essentially retires at age 30 to be a stay-at-home mom even though she’s a widow!
And the trend continues at the end of the series: literally every single female character from the main cast becomes a mother and we see in Boruto that they’re all housewifes. Fudcking SAKURA becomes a houswife, the girl that trained to be both a tank fighter and a healer; arguably one of the most dangerous ninjas in the army. But nuts to that, she needs to make dinner for a husband that might or might not come home. She lost all her self esteem when she gave birth I guess.
Oh yeah and she got married to a man that she had a crush on when she was 12, she apparently loved all the years even though he clearly became a villain and an abusive jerkhole and tried to murder her more than once. But she liked him when they were kids so happy ending I guess!
Tenten also was the only one who was still shown to still be involved with the ninja lifestyle as an adult, but she was also shown to be alone??? Because otherwise she probably would’ve been married off to Neji
it’s not very ninja either. but what really annoys me is she still acts like sasuke is her “husband”, even though they hadn’t seen each other since she gave birth. 😛 he’s more of a sperm donor than a father.
and aNOTHER THING
why did Orochimaru become a good guy?? how can anybody trust him?? did they all collectively forget he did illegal human experimentation and he’s a WAR CRIMINAL?
I personally think Part One was kinda rushed, like: you introduce all these interesting characters, build a skeletal structure of a ‘friendship’ between Naruto and Sasuke and then just timeskip three years and I’m supposed to believe they had a deep abiding connection, and care about all this development the other characters had offscreen?
I would have liked a few more arcs between the Zabuza Arc and the Chunin Exam Arc. Really fleshed out the characters and developed Naruto and Sasuke’s relationship beyond unbalanced antagonistic rivalry with underlying hints of a deeper friendship.
I liked the designs of Shippuden but I wasn’t invested in the characters. After a couple of arcs it devolved into flashy fight scenes with characters pulling NEW POWERFUL POWER TM trump cards every other move.
I really like the concept of Naruto but I would’ve preferred more character/world building, and more intelligent fights, winning not because of ultimate attacks but because they used abilities we already know about in new and interesting ways. It escalated too fast.
I did like the callback of the Harem no Jutsu though.
And then Shippuden felt like it had to add a bunch of ‘Naruto and Saskue as Kids’ flashbacks to justify all the stuff Naruto and Sasuke would say about how they were friends and rivals and ect. I kept feeling like I must’ve missed several chapters of Part 1. Why didn’t Naruto bring up this memory before if it’s So Important to understanding his relationship with Sasuke?
That’s pretty much why Shikamaru’s fights were the most interesting ones: they were about tactical application of the resources he had at his disposal not just pulling a new super move out of his ass.
Should we ask specific questions or just about the end in general? What did you think of NaruHina? (I stopped following it by the time it got into Shippuden, but I know some of what happens.)
NaruHina is the worst because Hinata deserves better, including being more fleshed out as a character. Sacrificing herself for the boy she has a crush but doesn’t notice her barely counts as character development.
How did they get married if he never even said the words “I like you” to her in the entire series?
But the worst part is that Naruto is literally obsessed with Sasuke, even as adults and doesn’t pay attention to her. Their relationship is only slightly above SasuSaku because Naruto never tried to kill Hinata and at least he seems to be around the house SOME of the time
I am tempted to ask if only because I also want to have my say about the ending of Naruto (mine is a short opinion, I promise) so what do you think about the ending of naruto?
I like that they seemed to be exploring various characters at the start, and not just focusing on the main three (although it’s now clear who those will be). I was cringing a *lot* at Sakura though – once again she seems to have been fucked over by japanese gender roles. I *hope* that *maybe* that won’t happen to Sarada too?
and at the moment I’m finding it a little ridiculous that they’re somehow fighting on the same level as these blood mist psychos? (iirc the last episode was sarada vs lightning girl)
No argument from me on Majora’s Mask, with the caveat that I haven’t played Breath yet. (Or skyward sword, but everything I’ve heard says that one’s not worth it.)
Don’t play Breath if you’re not a fan of open world in general. I mean, it does open world pretty well, but it’s still open world; and that wore me down in the end. As in, I stopped playing before doing the final boss.
There is something to be said for making your game world smaller and more focused. I’d rather play Skyward Sword again than finish Breath; because while the former certainly has its flaws, it’s at least not trying to kill your spirit through endless repetition and grinding.
FF 6, I have no real opinion on, because I never got to play it way back when, as it wasn’t officially released in Norway. Hardly any JRPGs were, before the Playstation era.
I do have an opinion on the PS1 “port” they made, and the opinion is that that particular port was rubbish, in that they actually managed to make the battle screen loading times even longer (I checked against an emulator). The port being that crappy, I couldn’t manage to play the game for long. Pity.
Seven is the FF game I probably dislike the most. Bad translation didn’t help, but the story was a random mess, told in such an unconvincing way that I lost complete interest in it. I was sadder when some of the characters in FF 2* died than when [supposedly major character] died in 7.
*Talking original FF 2; which at least got a decent PS1 port, and thus was playable. It had some really great music too.
I myself greatly prefer Breath of the Wild over Skyward Sword, because BotW went back to formula and tried to figure out which parts made it interesting.
I especially appreciated the absence of hand-holding. It lets you figure out how you want to do things, and doesn’t beat you over the head with tutorials. Like Fi. I liked her character and design, but hated her for how often she literally stopped gameplay to tell you really basic information that most players wouldn’t need. At least with Navi and Midna there would just be a little icon that appeared to let you know that they had something like that to tell you.
BotW also managed to introduce a bunch of new characters that I really liked. If they don’t include Urbosa or that tiny professor lady in future games, I will be very disappointed. And Hestu was a vast improvement over Tingle, who clearly would’ve been used instead for previous games. Prince Sidon was just generally a fun character, too.
Hell, even some of the background NPCs were kinda interesting, if only design-wise. There’s this one random Hylian lady in the Gerudo Village that says like 3 things to you, but I desperately NEED backstory. There’s couple of the random adventurers you come across that I wished had more to say as well.
Skyward Sword was still enjoyable, but I enjoyed BotW much more. I want them to keep taking chances with big changes like that.
I just wish that those things you said about BotW had been almost all of the game. As it is, it’s only a relatively small part of it, compared to all the other things, most of which feels mostly meaningless.
Like, Majora’s Mask had a whole bunch of interesting characters too. Lots of them. With their own stories and backstories and problems.
And unlike Breath, whenever I helped them out, it felt like I personally helped somebody. A lot of the people giving quests in BotW are… Well, literally just quest givers. They give me a quest, I do it, I check off the mark on my quest list. Then I could not care less of a damn about them afterwards.
It also did not hurt that I would do a lot of really different things in MM to help out; anything from playing music for tiny chicks to crushing a lamp by making a rolling jump to defeating giant eels by carefully swimming around their attacks and then jolt them.
Breath gave me more than my share of “just kill monsters” quests, fitting for an MMORPG game. After a while, many of these quests became completely void of having any personality and uniqueness altogether. And even those that were unique became a bit lost in the sea.
6 is my favorite of the 2D era, though I can definitely see why you’d be soured to it by the port. I played the SNES version in the US, complete with the Paint glitches (holy carp those things will wipe out your save files) and Ted Woolsey translations. Despite all that, characters had distinctive personalities while, stat-wise, they could be significantly customized without ever being the same set of stats with different skins, the story never made me feel lost by introducing random elements, the second half of the game was very free and open… yeah, I could go on for a while.
For some reason, people have a lot of love for 7. I’m guessing it’s the first one a lot of them ever played. I think it’s got its weaknesses, including a story that you have to play through twice for it to make sense and even then it’s weakly presented. I prefer 9. Between 9 and 6, I prefer 6, but I almost think of them as belonging to different categories rather than competing with each other.
will you challenge me to a duel if I say that I hate Majora’s Mask because the time limit gives me anxiety and I think Ocarina of time is clearly superior? :p
perhaps the biggest disappointment in the series was the payoff of Naruto becoming Hokage.
At the beginning of the series he set his goal of being Hokage because he was a neglected kid starved for attention. The possible good outcomes are: he becomes Hokage through his hard work and determination OR he makes really good friends with everyone, makes his own family and then becoming Hokage is not about forcing people to like him and be his friend because he’s an authority figure (imagine becoming president so people will be your friend).
The author tried to combine the two with very mixed results. Naruto IS friendly and he DOES build friendships with others through respect and empathy. The best example of this was his friendship with Gaara, at the time the only other jinchūriki child. They bonded because of their shared trauma of being ostracized and abused as children for being the vessels of the Tailed Beasts, it was an excellent and very emotional moment!
But over time the series devolved into “people love Naruto and follow him because he’s just GREAT” without him making ANY effort to connect with people. The final arc is a war where an entire nation follows Naruto into battle because he’s great and powerful and they all love him, even though at the beginning of the series he was literally the most hated child in his village. It just didn’t feel like a natural progression.
Also making him the most powerful of the jinchūriki deflates the whole point of him working hard. He’s NATURALLY incredibly powerful, he’s arguably one of the most powerful people in that entire world even when he was a child. the only thing he has to work hard at is controlling and harnessing his power. Again this is better shown in the early arcs of him training with Kakashi and Jiraiya and later this falls off the wayside, especially after Jiraiya’s death.
I think the power creep in Naruto also greatly disappointed me. The initial growth of Naruto going from being one of the worst ninjas to being a fairly competent ninja was good! When it became that Naruto and Sasuke were, essentially, the two most powerful ninjas on the entire planet that could beat a ninja god???? Uhh
At that point it’s like. Why would anyone else even bother?
One time my dad, who read the first few books but never finished the series, ask me a question about something in Harry Potter. I can’t remember the question now, but I do remember that I talked for over half an hour. Teared up at one point.
Luckily my dad was actually willing to listen to my nerd shit. That’s always encouraging.
I also infodump about things I’m not particularly passionate about but just happen to know about sometimes. Like once my roommates were talking and one was like, “Why is the drinking age 21?” And I was in another room at this point, but my senses, like, honed in on this question, so I got up, walked into the room they were talking in, and was like, “Well, let me tell you about some things…”
my prediction: joe played with transformers as a kid, but left them behind once he started thinking of them as nerd junk, and now he and amber are gonna bond over em
Me as FUCK. Literally, when I was a kid you could not get me to shut UP about whatever story (TV show, book, etc) I had fixated on currently. My violin teacher used to bribe me to practice by agreeing to listen to me. She was the actual best.
Even these days it’s an actual conscious effort not to do that when I’m on a new thing (lately, it’s been Star vs the Forces of Evil so, like, really not super socially acceptable for a grownass adult to be infodumping about a kids’ cartoon). Luckily I have a very tolerant friend group who’ll let me go all panel 5-6.
I have a large sized shoe box of dice I’ve been accumulating since 1976. Really, I found my original super-soft 20 sided dice just recently. The ones you had to take a crayon and fill in the numbers so you could read them.
Plus 4 dice bags full of other dice that I actually use for stuff.
ooh, thanks, that’s one of the shows I’ve been meaning to watch but haven’t hunted down a source yet… oh, or I did, put it on my google wishlist and then forgot to buy it 🙂 … but I’ve started rewatching ds9 (which I never actually finished) so maybe I don’t need other shows until I’ve gotten to at least season 2 of that. 🙂
Steven Universe is another I’m really into. The worldbuilding is similar, which is what drew me to both, and the conclusion I’ve reached is that they’re the inverse of each other. Steven fills a role that’s traditionally reserved for female characters–sensitive, caring, nurturing, emotional. Star fills a role that’s traditionally reserved for male heroes–Let’s Just Stop Talking And Stab It Already. Or, shoot magical narwhals at it, as the case may be. They also have an opposite number (Connie and Marco, respectively) that rejects the traditional roles associated with their gender.
…and this is why we don’t let Shiro talk about things, haha.
No, keep talking please. Steven Universe is currently my no.1 western cartoon series of all time, and no one I know in real life watches it. I’ve recommended it to any of my co-workers who seemed even remotely likely to watch it.
Only one of my co-workers has seen any episodes of it, and he’s kinda… toxic. All about the oppression of the white male by feminists, SJWs, etc. The other day he freaked out about a woman with a mustache. Like became physically ill, and ‘this is disgusting.’
I’ve gotten one of my coworkers (and her boyfriend and her son) into it! That was really exciting.
I can’t waaaaaaaait for new episodes! All these new gem characters being revealed, and space pirate Lars, and I’m just really excited to find out where they’re going with it.
Pearls are status symbols which means they are associated with status. That is to say I’m not entirely sure Peridot would outrank Pearl on Homeworld except for the whole rebel thing. Also I think Pink Pearl might both have the sway to cover up the nature of Pink Diamonds death (something Zircon thinks only a diamond could have) and still be below suspicion.
Eyeball and (our) Peridot both had idle fantasies of great service to Homeworld, and being rewarded with their “own Pearl” IIRC.
Pearls are higher status that Peridots, but the Pearls are basically made to be beautiful trophies for their owners. The whole trope of Fantastic Caste System is there in spades.
And don’t get me started on the commentary on…colonialism is the best comparison I guess, but they’ve done that thing where they sub in a fantasy race for POC, which isn’t ideal but I guess Disney Channel gonna Disney Channel, and anyway for kids it’s not a bad gentle shove in the direction of wokeness that’s gonna be like “OHHHHHHH” in a few years when they look back
I’ll gladly second Shiro on this. So much to love about everything to do with this series… just dip down and push through the lot of ’em all at once before new stuff arrives ;D
Aaaaaaa it’s so close!! All the trailers and teasers they’ve been releasing have been giving me life. I am cautiously in love with Eclipsa as she appears to be the embodiment of “[character] no” “[character] YES” –[character]
This is mirroring Joyce’s experience with the Episcopal church earlier – she’s prepared to be a little uncomfortable, thinks she is ready for it, but is then inundated with so much new stuff and she is SO NOT READY for it and shuts down.
And now, same thing happening to Joe. They are developing, growing in parallel.
Hell, both sides of this are my relationship. We both get into a thing and then have to tell the other ALL ABOUT IT. We’ve accepted that we’re just going to be nerding back and forth until we die.
The thing that would make it hard for me in Joe’s position right now is that I’m not sure how emotionally invested Amber is being or is displaying. Just in panel 4 she doesn’t seem particularly into it, though I can imagine she gets more engaged as she talks. If she’s just doing it without interest of her own showing, I may have a reaction like Joe’s. If people are really into what they’re talking about and I can tell that they’re excited or otherwise emotional about what they’re talking about, I can listen to people talk about just about anything– unless it’s, like, hateful of course.
I bet it was something she was thinking about when Joe came up.
And it doesn’t have to be TEAR UP emotional. It’s probably just something she was INTENSELY THINKING ABOUT. Personally I, when I get to talk about something like this, don’t really inject EMOTION into my voice, just a lot of intonatino of the ‘make this sound interesting’ and ‘highlight the important parts’ sort.
I’d say you can tell how engaged Amber is just by the speed at which words tumble out of her mouth. I cannot talk like that about something I’m not currently engaged with, not without preparation like re-acquainting myself with the source material (or someone else’s ramblings about it l o l)
For those who relate to Amber here (which I do as well): just know that I, personally, love listening to people talk about things they care about, things they get invested in, even if I know very little or nothing about the topic. I’m sure other people are like this as well. It’s not stupid or annoying to care about something, and it’s not wrong to share what you care about with people.
I have a lot of those thoughts myself around talking about my interests, so I just wanted to put that out there, that even when you might start feeling like, “Oh god, why am I still talking, shut up, shut up, shut up,” the person you’re talking to may still want to hear what you have to say.
Very good point — some of us totally dig it. Just check in from time to time and make sure they wouldn’t prefer a subject change yet, and you’ll be fine. ^^
(I guess check in every four minutes? I bet there’s somebody in here with Asperger’s who has become an expert on consciously regulating it.)
Me too. One of my favorite things is Unwinnable, which is mainly articles about video games, which I never play and probably never will, but they sound so interesting.
Honestly, I never really mind it, even if I can’t follow what the other person is talking about. If somebody is really excited about a subject, I just end up enjoying their enthusiasm
Or I did, until the stupid migraine landed on that part of my brain. 😛 i have to stop people a lot now, especially if there’s complex topics I used to know something about. But, eh, things are improving bit by bit, I’m hoping to reduce meds again tomorrow 🙂
… and now I might have killed this thread. Talk about pain tends to make things awkward. :/
🙂 well, I have my new prescription and I’ve adjusted my pill planner, so, we’ll see over the next few days… withdrawal can be nasty with this one, but I’m taking it much slower this time. I really hope I’m right about needing less of it 🙂 soooo looking forward to having less weakness and dizziness.
Joe’s best friend is Danny; while I’m pretty confident Amber’s power level is higher than Danny’s, you’d think Joe would be mentally prepared for this.
Then again, his typical response to Danny saying stuff he doesn’t care about is to tune it out, so maybe this face is him realizing that treating people like humans means not doing that?
Forgive me Father, for I have sinned.
Recite 4 Hail Marys, and listen to Amber talk about Transformers for an hour.
Couldn’t I just get 200 years in Purgatory instead?
Packed and all eyes turned in,
No-one to help get this transformer nerd away
From me, my sanity’s receding,
Burger in my hand, wish i never chose to sit down there
Cause who says redemption is fine?
Leaving behind all my old habits that i might
Replace if i tried on this long ride,
Looking deep inside but I don’t wanna look
So deep inside yet
At the meta level, this strip is where nerd self-validation and nerd self-deprecation take each other on, head-to-head and mano-a-mano. My own personal headcanon is that validation will eventually win because dammit, it has to. But in the short term, Soggies may rule.
You are the person I rely on for making a positive, lighthearted comment that makes me laugh. You have this knack for writing these little things that could (and in some cases should) be the actual alt-text lines.
So I guess that for a bloody dirty Swede, you’re OK.
This comic is many things. It is dramatic, it is endearing, it is loopsidedly orange in a good way, but it is also funny. I like to reflect that.
“I don’t know how you are, but if you as a Swede is brave enough to get on a raft with five Norwegians, you are made of the right stuff.” Thor Heyerdahl to Bengt Danielsson
At least Joe asked for it in this case, it’s much worse when someone notices something and starts asking questions and now I have to explain it without sounding like a serial killer.
Co-worker: “Is that some kind of puzzle connect game you’re playing?”
Me: “Yeah, I guess you could say that.”
Co-worker: “What game is that? I’ve never seen it before.”
Me: “Well, it’s not actually a game itself, it’s for a game. It’s the Path of Exile character planner, I’m planning out what character I’m going to play.”
Co-worker: “So you can’t even play your dumb computer game without planning it out ahead of time on another dumb computer game? Just tell me you’re not making spreadsheets.”
Me: “…..maybe?”
Co-worker: “Wow, how you don’t have a girlfriend is just a mystery the world will never solve, isn’t it?”
The skill tree being more fun than the game itself, due to what I’d call “the hack n’ slash effect”: Countless possibilities, only a handful viable builds in the end XD
At its core the problem is that the mechanics are tied to the flavor, and are also constructed to function like a traditional game. In order for a roleplaying game to not fall into that trap while still retaining some semblance of balance, either there must be an explicitly-delineated method for generating arbitrary mechanically-consistent flavor or the details must be abstracted away entirely.
You joke, but I once had an actual job where we had to deal with questions like this. We did radon testing for new foundations, and our manager decided it was a great idea to include material with the results explaining the uranium decay chain. In rural Kansas/Missouri. People would literally call us up with material from Answers in Genesis and question the possibility of our test results. At least my manager also fielded these calls, I have no idea how one would even start to deal with that.
If this was animated, the last two panels would have the audience hear Amber from Joe’s perspective. Dolly zoom on Joe to give us that nice Vertigo effect, as Amber’s voice starts fading into metallic reverb and gradually becomes that tinnitus ear ringing sound.
Oh Joe, I love the effort you’re making but you’re definitely diving into a rabbit hole way too quickly here. Us nerds are intimidating folk when we get going, you need to ease into the waters (that’s how the tiny little hooks in the water latch on and drag you under)
Do not mention the name “Tolkien” near me, or i will make your face look like Joe’s in the final panel in only 30 seconds. Say the name “Melkor”, and I’ll do it in 20.
(I’ve read the LOTR books about 22 times each [The Hobbit included], and The Silmarillion about 8 times. So there isn’t much from that universe you could throw at me that I’m not already familiar with.)
Eh. I consider the works of Christopher Tolkien to be like the works of Brian Herbert on the Dune series. It can be interesting to read, but I take it with grains of salt.
They’re not at all like Brian Herbert’s stuff.
They’re a scholarly exploration of the development of the story and the world using his father’s early versions and notes. Not further stories in the same setting, whether based on notes or not. Absolutely fascinating if you’re interested in the process of that development, but not at all light reading.
Some insights into the nature and history of Middle-Earth that didn’t make it into the appendices or the Silmarillion, especially in the last few volumes, which cover when he was working on the end of LotRs and after.
I think I actually gave up during some of Frank’s later stuff.
Dune is a classic. Children and God Emperor were interesting. Everything after that (as far as I read) was forgettable.
Understandable. I definitely enjoyed first 3 books the most. I’ve read the original 6 at least 3 times, but I can barely recall more than a handful of plot points from the later 3.
The Machine Crusade / Butlerian Jihad / Battle of Corrin trilogy are definitely the best ones by Brian Herbert in my opinion, though I at least somewhat enjoyed them all.
But then again, I at one point somehow had the time and energy to read the first 6 books multiple times. Same with the Silmarillion and Lord of the Rings.
But Joe doesn’t know the distinction between nerd and geek.
Now, Amber probably does, but she’s also both; in that she’s an excellent programmer, -and- she geeks out about things like Transformers and video games.
And while she’s normally very not good at social clues, years of exposure to people that don’t know this distinction, she’s learned to understand whether someone wants her to nerd out or to geek out.
A nerd is somebody who voluntarily studies ANY subject at length because they’re passionate about it. Even if it’s sports (although sports nerds are less inclinedto identify themselves as such)
But EvolutionistX seems to be committed to some more particular meaning of “nerd”, judging from the linked blog talking about stereotypes and the relation of IQ to promiscuity.
I don’t think a consensus was ever reached on whether “nerd” and “geek” meant “studious academic obsessive” and “enthusiastic pop culture obsessive,” or vice versa.
Regardless, neither term is an insult so much as a badge of honor, so the distinction isn’t all that important.
For your own good, do not mention original Warcraft lore around me. I’ll make an early grave feel preferable to having to sit and listen to my uncontrollable rants.
I’ve played through both W3 games and a little bit of W1 (and like 2 hours of WoW but that’s not related to lore lol).
I don’t know lore beyond that.
Please educate me *u*
He never was a horrible person, he has some maturity issues (and personal issues) mixed in with some poor role models and, like a lot of characters here, gets held to higher standard than probably most of us could match
This page reminds me of a story I heard from a professor at the university I attend about a friend of his who got a visit by a pair of door-to-door missionaries who asked if he wanted to talk about Jesus. So he invited them inside and told them to sit down in the living room while he went to the kitchen to prepare some coffee.
What the two of course were not aware of was that he had just recently finished his exams in theology and received his licence to become a practioning priest. So when he returned from the kitchen he sat down and proceeded to tell them EVERYTHING he knew about Jesus until they couldn’t take it anymore.
I appreciate Joe trying to treat Amber like a person here but I also wonder if this is still a bit Patrriarchy-ish, with him basically demanding that she talk with him to help satisfy his emotional need. Maybe it’s for the best in this case, because Amber happens to need that too, but still a bit problematic? Baby steps, though, this is progress for Joe.
He started out demanding attention for his needs, but caught himself, changed direction and made it about her. And this is wonderful! It may be by accident, but Joe is doing the best possible thing for Amber, better than even Sierra did: he’s bringing out everything about her that is not stabby, that has nothing at all to do with stabbing. She had reduced herself to stabby girl, and that’s not just her brain doing that, it’s everyone else reacting to her only in terms of stabbing. Even if it’s “stabbing was good” (Joyce, Dina) or “you can choose not to stab” (Ruth), they all see only the stabbing, nothing else about her. Except Ethan, but he’s too bound up with the initial trauma to lead her out of it.
Now Joe is inviting her, giving her space, to speak as a nerd, and boom! This is Amber being Amber: Amber loves, she loves passionately, loves Transformers, loves comics and games, loves Ethan, and gives herself without reservation to what she loves. This is her center, not violence, and she needs that to be seen.
Bravo, Joe. I hope he figures out he did something great here.
“…unless you are fully prepared and eager for the actual infodump that’s coming”
I WISH I could find someone to talk Sailor Moon with me (to me) (at me) (whatever)
It could really use a heavy dose of editing, however. The premise and worldbuilding are excellent, the writing is mostly solid but you can tell it was rushed and needs some tuning. Most importantly someone needs have a go at the plot with a chainsaw, a hammer and chisel, and a scalpel, in that order. It really meanders in places and many parts, even though they may have been well written and otherwise interesting, leave you wondering what the point of having them was since they don’t add anything to the plot.
YOU ARE THE DEVIL
Okay, maybe I’m exaggerating, but… I get kind of annoyed by the category of people who think that their opinion on how something is ‘too much’ and ‘needs to be cut down’ is objective and no people find it to be valuable. Like the folks who think Tom Bombadil added nothing to LotR. I AM READY TO FIGHT YOU ON THAT PARTICULAR POINT DONT TRY ME I HAVE A RANT ARMED AND READY
Sure, Worm could use some serious editing. In particular, the timeskip could REALLY use some fleshing out. We end up having characters talk about how Taylor acted during that time, but SHOW DON’T TELL. Give us side stories, give us mini-arcs, give us some episodic shit that shows us Taylor’s personal growth and development during that time!
This is part of the general problem with the ‘HURRY THE PLOT UP’ approach, I think. Well, maybe not problem per se – you look for different things than I do in fiction, and that’s fair. But Worm is about characterization and worldbuilding much more than it is about ‘plot’, there ISN’T that much of a plot as a series of arcs (the endgame conflict is not even introduced in the first act, for example)… and it’s not a negative. I’m glad to have found something that works like that. Let me, and people like me, have it.
Tom Bombadil added humor and provided some resources that were very useful later in the story. And he contributed a lot to the overall lighter feel of Fellowship as compared to Two Towers and Return of the King, I think. And by Fellowship feeling lighter, the grim bits of TT and RotK felt grimmer. Also, fun needs no excuse.
That said, if your contention is that Tom Bombadil should have been included in the movies, we may have to have that fight.
I long for companionship of someone with whom I can nerd over Star Trek/Battlestar Galactica/Babylon 5/My Little Pony. Don’t tell me one of these things is not like the other, B5 does too belong on the list!
Panel 6: Tried to explain premise of Steven Universe to my wife, got exactly that look. She said “You actually like watchin’ this stuff?” (Me, no joke pretending not to be wounded) “Yes.”
I still have trouble with the concept of starting anywhere other than the beginning. it feels so *wrong* and *icky*.
(and right now I’m trying not to get too upset over losing nearly half an episode on today’s ds9 dvd. it’s incredible how much these dvds have been damaged by just sitting in a box for ~5 years. 🙁
…FML. the next episode broke things so bad I had to reboot windows to get the dvd to do anything. maybe I should try poking the thing from linux and see if it can at least fail more gracefully. 🙁
for now… time to take out my anger on some pixellated alien bandits.
I just like starting with Alone Together for three reasons:
1. It works as a standalone with relatively little introduction (except maybe a bit of background on who the gems are).
2. It’s the highest concept the show gets; if you don’t like Alone Together, you won’t like the show, and vice versa.
3. *shakes fist, hisses* KEVIN!
I have started for one of my friends with showing Mr Greg. I guess it only works for people who like musical episodes, and people who like lesbians, but it worked for my specific target audience :>
I think I agree with Alone Together, unless you care about spoilers. The whole fusion thing isn’t revealed until a good way into season 1, so…
I don’t think it really matters. While there’s a lot of good stories after beast wars, it’s not required reading, and most of the fandom won’t care (much)
Wow you are very good at coming up with terrible things to say
First of all, due to the non-Euclidean shape of spacetime, the phrase “what goes on inside black holes” doesn’t actually make sense, since from a topological perspective t
a lot of nerds are arrogant as fuck. they’ve carved out their own little niche where they get to be the all-knowing authority that can sneer at everyone else for their ignorance.
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is that a glazed-over look or “I have met my match” look
well, I thought joe *liked* transformers… right?
That was Walkyverse Joe. This Joe, I don’t think we’ve seen him show any interest.
…. maybe this is how he GETS interested.
But he’s interested in a toy-building, engineer way. I think handing him a toy would be a far far better bet.
We Cybertronians have yet to infect his mind, but give us time, he is ready for the conversion…
I foresee this resulting in him discovering there’s an ironic, negative end to his rating scale that has nothing to do with a person’s equipment.
Because, of course there is.
Well, there’s a difference between knowing what Transformers are and thinking they’re cool, and actually following the absurdly elaborate mythos associated with the premise with any regularity. And just as great a difference between that last thing I said and being a hardcore fan. It’s a sliding scale.
I’m sure most people can tell you who Megatron and Optimus Prime and a handful other notables are, even if they (like myself) didn’t even know Transformers were alien life forms until the previews for the movie came out, and generally have difficulty wrapping their mind around the idea that a series originally invented to sell toys that a not insignificant percentage of kids would’ve wanted even if there weren’t a cartoon has such an absurdly elaborate mythos in the first place.
Sounds a bit like a sliding logarithmic scale.
A slide rule.
Must be why so many transformer fans are Computers.
OK, that was pretty weak. I’ll see myself out.
I’d say the difference between Walkyverse Joe and Dumbiverse Joe is the sliding time scale. Transformers were probably a much bigger thing back then, and met the niche of ‘Joe’s nerdy secret’. In this ‘verse, his nerdy secret is probably something else.
He probably likes a cartoon or movies or something without much depth to the Transformers, not deep paragraphs of Cybertronian lore.
It’s an “I’ve made a huge mistake” look.
It could also be a “why is this actually arousing (hurhurhur) my interest? this is non-optimal.”
-Prime
It looks like Dina’s sensory overload face.
Considering Willis’ buffer, I wonder if he didn’t know what was going to happen with Tailgate when he wrote this, or if this was in reaction to that happening, or if he’s so one with the Transformers franchise by this point that his soul is part of the Allspark and he just sensed it somehow.
It had recently happened.
Is there a transformer named Tailgate? IS THERE!? ARE WE SURE!?
I don’t follow Transformers fandom, but now I’m curious: what happened with Tailgate?
Had to be buried underground for like 6 months with radiation to cure him of something but some asshole came along and murdered the doctor overseeing the treatment and set the timer to 6 million years.
That is the logical conclusion of the pressing-all-the-numbers-in-the-elevator prank, and it’s super petty but also super intriguing and now I might have to get into transformers.
It’s also extremely tragic in context. Massive spoilers!
When we first met Tailgate, he had spent 6 million years underground, drifting in and out of a coma, not realizing how much time was passing as he slowly made his escape.
At first he claims to have been a badass bomb disposal expert before his accidental burial, but it eventually is revealed he was responsible for WASTE disposal…and he only came online 2 weeks before he was buried, and no one even noticed he was gone. He’s basically a child.
He grows closer and closer to his roommate Cyclonus, but then it turns out that all the time he spent underground was wreaking havoc on his body, and he had developed was was basically robot cancer and was going to die soon, despite having barely lived. 6 million years old, and his happiest moment was just having a movie night with some friends.
Even though he’s dying, he performs a heroic act that saves half the Cybertronian race, and Cyclonus manages to cure him. But despite the fact that they clearly have feelings for each other, Cyclonus is so emotionally crippled that he can’t spit it out, and Tailgate starts seeing another bot named Getaway who is much more affectionate.
But it turns out Getaway is just using him, hoping to get him to attempt to assassinate Megatron (a good guy at this point), and get killed in the process. Cyclonus realizes this and prevents it from going down at the last moment, but is nearly killed himself, and the grief of seeing him gunned down unlocks some sort of mutation Tailgate had undergone in his millions of years underground, which gives him super strength.
He uses these abilities to help save the day once more, and it seems him and Cyclonus are finally able to admit their feelings for each other, but there’s a problem; Cyclonus keeps turning up beaten all to hell for some reason. Turns out Tailgate’s powers are causing him to have some sort of fits in his sleep, and he keeps nearly killing himself. Cyclonus keeps having to subdue him, and getting the crap knocked out of him in the process. He hasn’t told Tailgate this is happening. His frenemy Whirl does tell Tailgate in secret, however.
Realizing he’s been hurting the bot he loves, Tailgate pretends he no longer has feelings for Cyclonus so he’ll leave on a mission. Cyclonus believes him and departs. But Tailgate is so desperate to be with him that he has a doctor formulate a way to remove his powers; 6 months in an underground chamber flooded with radiation. Tailgate agrees to this, but a Decepticon with a grudge against him named Fangry kills the doctor and resets the timer to 6 million years.
We last saw poor Tailgate where we first met him. Buried alive.
holy fuck
This is amazing.
Thank you so much for the stunning story of this character.
w…t….f…..?
:____(
Oh, and this is just ONE character. Wait’ll you see what happens to the rest of the cast
@adjudicus
Yeah, I would explain exactly what Whirl’s deal is, but the history lesson alone would take like 20 posts.
@Doctor Who
Not to mention Megatron’s change of allegiance…
(Now that I think of it you’d probably need to explain most of the idwverse just to get a rough idea of why he did it)
And Tailgate is the sweetest, kindest, most adorable bot in the…well, in that entire universe (there are a few that come close, but nobody does cuteybot like Tailgate)…which makes it even more of a kick in the teeth.
Is there a point where Breaking the Cutie becomes just outright torture porn? ‘Cause I think that MTMTE passed it a while back.
Thanks for explaining!
I guess I see now why Amber relates to him.
So, this is a shaggy dog story for Transformers, then?
There’s a reason why Transformers: MTMTE won comic of the year not too long ago. It’s basically Dr. Who / Red Dwarf in space with robots. If you’re not reading it, start with Death of Optimus Prime, then move on to MTMTE #1 and go forward from there.
wait, have i misunderstood this? does transformers have gay robots? do i have to start reading this comic now? are they using the term “bury your gays” quite literally here?
Depends on who you ask. There’s a certain type of fanboy who will swear up and down that it doesn’t count, because they’re robots and so none of them are actually male. The fact some some of them also go by female pronouns and are clearly woman-shaped is ignored.
But yeah, gay robots. The most prominent couple is Chromedome and Rewind, who are just the sweetest damn thing ever. Seriously, their relationship is the best. Lost Light also just revealed that two of their new female characters are not only a couple, but also used to identify as male, before deciding that female made more sense to them. So they are transgendered lesbians.
There are many, many gay robots. Not all of them are healthy, and several end badly, but there’s a bunch.
Off the top of my head, for the guys, we have Tailgate/Cyclonus, Knockout/Breakdown, Rewind/Chromedome, and Blast Off/Onslaught.
On the girl side, there’s Anode/Lug, and Dustup/Jetstream who have major roles, and there are a couple couples who’ve had minor appearances (some of Nautica’s friends, a pair of guards on Carcer).
In this universe, Cybertron is all-male (save for a few like Anode and Lug who go offworld and discover that female fits them better, or Arcee, who…is complicated and was rather unfortunate until a few minor retcons), so any het pairings are going to be from the Colonies…but even among the colonials, the same-gender pairings outnumber the mixed gender ones, at least among the main cast.
Wait … the robots fall in love and couple up? How? Why?
The same reason they can fight and hate each other for 4 million years: they’re people
What happens to his boyfriend? And is anyone looking for him? There has to be records somewhere.
…….shit, you just made me sympathize with Transformers.
Check his TF wiki page. It’s funny.
If Joe survives this then him and Amber are officially friends for life, no matter if either of them want to be
I’m betting Joe goes to look this all up and gets hooked in spite of himself.
and thereby completes his transformation into walkyverse joe!
Give in to your wiki, and your journey towards the dork side shall be complete!
Come to the dork side. We have wookies.
I need this t-shirt.
I just made it up but I’m a thousand percent certain it exists.
And then gets into an edit war with Mike while Ethan looks on in confusion.
And arousal. Don’t forget the arousal.
And thus begins Joe’s induction into Transformers.
Joe: I’ve made mistakes. So many mistakes.
No no no, Amber. You need to talk Rule 34 Transformers if you want to keep Joe’s attention.
Well, Tailgate and Cyclonus get married….
She’ll get there. First he has to be introduced to the characters. THEN he’ll be ready to hear about her fanfic where they all bang
I can’t help thinking: When Transformers bang… they actually bang. Or maybe clang. Whaddya think? Bang or clang? Or both?
I feel like it would be both. It definitely would be very noisy
I can only imagine the paint scratches and dents they’d have afterwards, especially if they like it rough. I suspect the official lore may not have addressed such matters
Depends on if they’re going for plug-n-play or not, and if so, how rough they like it. Might not need to be any banging or clanging involved at all. :3
Almost certainly indistinguishable from a Michale Bay fight scene.
So, nobody can keep track of who’s doing what to whom, there’s a lot of explosions, and it’s often unclear just what was accomplished
Soooooo….indistinguishable in the same manner from the actions of Felix Domesticus, I take it.
I’m really surprised that until now I haven’t really put much thought into the potential mechanical / structural problems that would need to be overcome in order for vehicle-sized robots to do sex to each other
Aren’t some transformers city or even planet-sized? Do they even HAVE genitals with which to smush someone? What do said genitals look like? Clearly they must be internal, since none of them seem to wear pants, and yet I’ve NEVER seem Optimus Prime’s dong.
…I may need to see one of Amber’s fanfics. I have too many questions now
Ask me what I think about the ending of Naruto. Go ahead, ask 🙂
What do you think?
One big pet peeve is that Kishimoto sometimes doesn’t know what to do with the interesting characters he has introduced because they all must be less powerful/interesting than the Main Protagonist™ and his
boyfriendmain rival, so he ends up throwing to the side characters that have been established to be more intelligent or more powerful than both. Neji’s death and Shikamaru’s small role in the final arc are prominent examples. Heck I think that by the final arc the only character that got showtime that he deserved was Killer Bee.But my BIGGEST peeve is how Kishimoto’s sexism shows through his writing. All good women get married and have babies and STOP BEING NINJAS, and somehow this is their happy ending even though many of these women have worked their entire lives to be capable fighters. Literally the only one that escapes this fate is Tsunade and I think it’s only because her canon age is 50 so he decided she was too old to get married or something.
But it’s so infuriating! The first one to fall into this was Kurenai, who out of nowhere was married to Asuma and pregnant with his child. Like, ok, that’s believable because we don’t see her or her relationships that often. But after this is announced we NEVER see her fight as a ninja again, she essentially retires at age 30 to be a stay-at-home mom even though she’s a widow!
And the trend continues at the end of the series: literally every single female character from the main cast becomes a mother and we see in Boruto that they’re all housewifes. Fudcking SAKURA becomes a houswife, the girl that trained to be both a tank fighter and a healer; arguably one of the most dangerous ninjas in the army. But nuts to that, she needs to make dinner for a husband that might or might not come home. She lost all her self esteem when she gave birth I guess.
Oh yeah and she got married to a man that she had a crush on when she was 12, she apparently loved all the years even though he clearly became a villain and an abusive jerkhole and tried to murder her more than once. But she liked him when they were kids so happy ending I guess!
Tenten also was the only one who was still shown to still be involved with the ninja lifestyle as an adult, but she was also shown to be alone???
Because otherwise she probably would’ve been married off to NejiI thought Sakura ran a clinic? That’s not being a housewife.
it’s not very ninja either. but what really annoys me is she still acts like sasuke is her “husband”, even though they hadn’t seen each other since she gave birth. 😛 he’s more of a sperm donor than a father.
Well, sounds like I didn’t miss anything then. I watched two and a half episodes and figured it was not for me.
and aNOTHER THING
why did Orochimaru become a good guy?? how can anybody trust him?? did they all collectively forget he did illegal human experimentation and he’s a WAR CRIMINAL?
Tell me about the Narutos. I used to read the manga but stopped buying it…fairly early on, iirc.
I personally think Part One was kinda rushed, like: you introduce all these interesting characters, build a skeletal structure of a ‘friendship’ between Naruto and Sasuke and then just timeskip three years and I’m supposed to believe they had a deep abiding connection, and care about all this development the other characters had offscreen?
I would have liked a few more arcs between the Zabuza Arc and the Chunin Exam Arc. Really fleshed out the characters and developed Naruto and Sasuke’s relationship beyond unbalanced antagonistic rivalry with underlying hints of a deeper friendship.
I liked the designs of Shippuden but I wasn’t invested in the characters. After a couple of arcs it devolved into flashy fight scenes with characters pulling NEW POWERFUL POWER TM trump cards every other move.
I really like the concept of Naruto but I would’ve preferred more character/world building, and more intelligent fights, winning not because of ultimate attacks but because they used abilities we already know about in new and interesting ways. It escalated too fast.
I did like the callback of the Harem no Jutsu though.
And then Shippuden felt like it had to add a bunch of ‘Naruto and Saskue as Kids’ flashbacks to justify all the stuff Naruto and Sasuke would say about how they were friends and rivals and ect. I kept feeling like I must’ve missed several chapters of Part 1. Why didn’t Naruto bring up this memory before if it’s So Important to understanding his relationship with Sasuke?
That’s pretty much why Shikamaru’s fights were the most interesting ones: they were about tactical application of the resources he had at his disposal not just pulling a new super move out of his ass.
all of this! The first part was the strongest, but they rushed to end it for the sake of the weaker second part
…. it’s the letter ‘o’?
(I know nothing about your fandom, and yet I am objectively right in a way that no opinion can ever be. So THERE.)
*flees from the inevitable torches and pitchforks mob*
Should we ask specific questions or just about the end in general? What did you think of NaruHina? (I stopped following it by the time it got into Shippuden, but I know some of what happens.)
NaruHina is the worst because Hinata deserves better, including being more fleshed out as a character. Sacrificing herself for the boy she has a crush but doesn’t notice her barely counts as character development.
How did they get married if he never even said the words “I like you” to her in the entire series?
But the worst part is that Naruto is literally obsessed with Sasuke, even as adults and doesn’t pay attention to her. Their relationship is only slightly above SasuSaku because Naruto never tried to kill Hinata and at least he seems to be around the house SOME of the time
I am tempted to ask if only because I also want to have my say about the ending of Naruto (mine is a short opinion, I promise) so what do you think about the ending of naruto?
are we talking about the final fights, or the pre-wedding shenanigans?
What about the Boruto continuation? Either manga or anime version.
I like that they seemed to be exploring various characters at the start, and not just focusing on the main three (although it’s now clear who those will be). I was cringing a *lot* at Sakura though – once again she seems to have been fucked over by japanese gender roles. I *hope* that *maybe* that won’t happen to Sarada too?
and at the moment I’m finding it a little ridiculous that they’re somehow fighting on the same level as these blood mist psychos? (iirc the last episode was sarada vs lightning girl)
the only hope we have in Boruto is that Sarada will actually become Hokage (and that she’ll stop wearing platform heels)
Ask me about Kingdom Hearts or Final Fantasy or why Majora’s Mask is clearly the absolutely best of all TV console Zelda games of all times*.
*Haven’t owned a handheld, so cannot comment on those games. Odds are they’re not as good as MM anyway.
No argument from me on Majora’s Mask, with the caveat that I haven’t played Breath yet. (Or skyward sword, but everything I’ve heard says that one’s not worth it.)
But okay, asking about Final Fantasy. 6 or 7?
Don’t play Breath if you’re not a fan of open world in general. I mean, it does open world pretty well, but it’s still open world; and that wore me down in the end. As in, I stopped playing before doing the final boss.
There is something to be said for making your game world smaller and more focused. I’d rather play Skyward Sword again than finish Breath; because while the former certainly has its flaws, it’s at least not trying to kill your spirit through endless repetition and grinding.
FF 6, I have no real opinion on, because I never got to play it way back when, as it wasn’t officially released in Norway. Hardly any JRPGs were, before the Playstation era.
I do have an opinion on the PS1 “port” they made, and the opinion is that that particular port was rubbish, in that they actually managed to make the battle screen loading times even longer (I checked against an emulator). The port being that crappy, I couldn’t manage to play the game for long. Pity.
Seven is the FF game I probably dislike the most. Bad translation didn’t help, but the story was a random mess, told in such an unconvincing way that I lost complete interest in it. I was sadder when some of the characters in FF 2* died than when [supposedly major character] died in 7.
*Talking original FF 2; which at least got a decent PS1 port, and thus was playable. It had some really great music too.
I myself greatly prefer Breath of the Wild over Skyward Sword, because BotW went back to formula and tried to figure out which parts made it interesting.
I especially appreciated the absence of hand-holding. It lets you figure out how you want to do things, and doesn’t beat you over the head with tutorials. Like Fi. I liked her character and design, but hated her for how often she literally stopped gameplay to tell you really basic information that most players wouldn’t need. At least with Navi and Midna there would just be a little icon that appeared to let you know that they had something like that to tell you.
BotW also managed to introduce a bunch of new characters that I really liked. If they don’t include Urbosa or that tiny professor lady in future games, I will be very disappointed. And Hestu was a vast improvement over Tingle, who clearly would’ve been used instead for previous games. Prince Sidon was just generally a fun character, too.
Hell, even some of the background NPCs were kinda interesting, if only design-wise. There’s this one random Hylian lady in the Gerudo Village that says like 3 things to you, but I desperately NEED backstory. There’s couple of the random adventurers you come across that I wished had more to say as well.
Skyward Sword was still enjoyable, but I enjoyed BotW much more. I want them to keep taking chances with big changes like that.
I just wish that those things you said about BotW had been almost all of the game. As it is, it’s only a relatively small part of it, compared to all the other things, most of which feels mostly meaningless.
Like, Majora’s Mask had a whole bunch of interesting characters too. Lots of them. With their own stories and backstories and problems.
And unlike Breath, whenever I helped them out, it felt like I personally helped somebody. A lot of the people giving quests in BotW are… Well, literally just quest givers. They give me a quest, I do it, I check off the mark on my quest list. Then I could not care less of a damn about them afterwards.
It also did not hurt that I would do a lot of really different things in MM to help out; anything from playing music for tiny chicks to crushing a lamp by making a rolling jump to defeating giant eels by carefully swimming around their attacks and then jolt them.
Breath gave me more than my share of “just kill monsters” quests, fitting for an MMORPG game. After a while, many of these quests became completely void of having any personality and uniqueness altogether. And even those that were unique became a bit lost in the sea.
6 is my favorite of the 2D era, though I can definitely see why you’d be soured to it by the port. I played the SNES version in the US, complete with the Paint glitches (holy carp those things will wipe out your save files) and Ted Woolsey translations. Despite all that, characters had distinctive personalities while, stat-wise, they could be significantly customized without ever being the same set of stats with different skins, the story never made me feel lost by introducing random elements, the second half of the game was very free and open… yeah, I could go on for a while.
For some reason, people have a lot of love for 7. I’m guessing it’s the first one a lot of them ever played. I think it’s got its weaknesses, including a story that you have to play through twice for it to make sense and even then it’s weakly presented. I prefer 9. Between 9 and 6, I prefer 6, but I almost think of them as belonging to different categories rather than competing with each other.
will you challenge me to a duel if I say that I hate Majora’s Mask because the time limit gives me anxiety and I think Ocarina of time is clearly superior? :p
Duel? Pffft, do you really think me that immature?
No, We will simply throw you in Our imperial dungeon.
perhaps the biggest disappointment in the series was the payoff of Naruto becoming Hokage.
At the beginning of the series he set his goal of being Hokage because he was a neglected kid starved for attention. The possible good outcomes are: he becomes Hokage through his hard work and determination OR he makes really good friends with everyone, makes his own family and then becoming Hokage is not about forcing people to like him and be his friend because he’s an authority figure (imagine becoming president so people will be your friend).
The author tried to combine the two with very mixed results. Naruto IS friendly and he DOES build friendships with others through respect and empathy. The best example of this was his friendship with Gaara, at the time the only other jinchūriki child. They bonded because of their shared trauma of being ostracized and abused as children for being the vessels of the Tailed Beasts, it was an excellent and very emotional moment!
But over time the series devolved into “people love Naruto and follow him because he’s just GREAT” without him making ANY effort to connect with people. The final arc is a war where an entire nation follows Naruto into battle because he’s great and powerful and they all love him, even though at the beginning of the series he was literally the most hated child in his village. It just didn’t feel like a natural progression.
Also making him the most powerful of the jinchūriki deflates the whole point of him working hard. He’s NATURALLY incredibly powerful, he’s arguably one of the most powerful people in that entire world even when he was a child. the only thing he has to work hard at is controlling and harnessing his power. Again this is better shown in the early arcs of him training with Kakashi and Jiraiya and later this falls off the wayside, especially after Jiraiya’s death.
I think the power creep in Naruto also greatly disappointed me. The initial growth of Naruto going from being one of the worst ninjas to being a fairly competent ninja was good! When it became that Naruto and Sasuke were, essentially, the two most powerful ninjas on the entire planet that could beat a ninja god???? Uhh
At that point it’s like. Why would anyone else even bother?
Think of the ending of Naruto? That it came about 40 volumes too late.
Panel 5: I can do this! I will follow this to the best of my ability.
Panel 6: I’ve made a huge mistake.
Soundtrack for the final Frame:
Hello Darkness my old friend….
Hahaha, accurate comic is accurate
i recently met someone who can nerd like that about warcraft.
Ah, so you have met my son then?
Joe’s mind is being blown
The facet of Amber which is author stand-in is showing up, I take it.
This has CLEARLY been bothering Willis.
One time my dad, who read the first few books but never finished the series, ask me a question about something in Harry Potter. I can’t remember the question now, but I do remember that I talked for over half an hour. Teared up at one point.
Luckily my dad was actually willing to listen to my nerd shit. That’s always encouraging.
I also infodump about things I’m not particularly passionate about but just happen to know about sometimes. Like once my roommates were talking and one was like, “Why is the drinking age 21?” And I was in another room at this point, but my senses, like, honed in on this question, so I got up, walked into the room they were talking in, and was like, “Well, let me tell you about some things…”
I’ve never really bothered asking that question and am now kinda curious.
Please tell me some things.
Why must I wait longer to drink?
I imagine Yumi still typing away at a large wall of text.
that was a nice thing your dad did?
my prediction: joe played with transformers as a kid, but left them behind once he started thinking of them as nerd junk, and now he and amber are gonna bond over em
Or Joe played with Transformers as a kid but was, at best, only tangentially aware that there was any sort of story attached to them.
Me as FUCK. Literally, when I was a kid you could not get me to shut UP about whatever story (TV show, book, etc) I had fixated on currently. My violin teacher used to bribe me to practice by agreeing to listen to me. She was the actual best.
Even these days it’s an actual conscious effort not to do that when I’m on a new thing (lately, it’s been Star vs the Forces of Evil so, like, really not super socially acceptable for a grownass adult to be infodumping about a kids’ cartoon). Luckily I have a very tolerant friend group who’ll let me go all panel 5-6.
Oh, and D&D dice as well. I am amassing both physical dice and facts about them at an alarming rate.
I have a large sized shoe box of dice I’ve been accumulating since 1976. Really, I found my original super-soft 20 sided dice just recently. The ones you had to take a crayon and fill in the numbers so you could read them.
Plus 4 dice bags full of other dice that I actually use for stuff.
Facts about D&D dice? Or about D&D?
I mean, I’ve got plenty of dice and could geek out about D&D for hours, but I wouldn’t have much to say about the actual dice.
tell me facts about dice, because I didn’t know it was possible to amass lore ABOUT dice
ooh, thanks, that’s one of the shows I’ve been meaning to watch but haven’t hunted down a source yet… oh, or I did, put it on my google wishlist and then forgot to buy it 🙂 … but I’ve started rewatching ds9 (which I never actually finished) so maybe I don’t need other shows until I’ve gotten to at least season 2 of that. 🙂
It is SO GOOD. New episodes start November 6th so now’s a good time to get caught up!
I haven’t followed it the way I follow, say, Steven Universe, but from what I’ve seen it’s really engaging.
Steven Universe is another I’m really into. The worldbuilding is similar, which is what drew me to both, and the conclusion I’ve reached is that they’re the inverse of each other. Steven fills a role that’s traditionally reserved for female characters–sensitive, caring, nurturing, emotional. Star fills a role that’s traditionally reserved for male heroes–Let’s Just Stop Talking And Stab It Already. Or, shoot magical narwhals at it, as the case may be. They also have an opposite number (Connie and Marco, respectively) that rejects the traditional roles associated with their gender.
…and this is why we don’t let Shiro talk about things, haha.
No, keep talking please. Steven Universe is currently my no.1 western cartoon series of all time, and no one I know in real life watches it. I’ve recommended it to any of my co-workers who seemed even remotely likely to watch it.
Only one of my co-workers has seen any episodes of it, and he’s kinda… toxic. All about the oppression of the white male by feminists, SJWs, etc. The other day he freaked out about a woman with a mustache. Like became physically ill, and ‘this is disgusting.’
Needless to say SU isn’t his cup of tea.
I’ve gotten one of my coworkers (and her boyfriend and her son) into it! That was really exciting.
I can’t waaaaaaaait for new episodes! All these new gem characters being revealed, and space pirate Lars, and I’m just really excited to find out where they’re going with it.
Pearls are status symbols which means they are associated with status. That is to say I’m not entirely sure Peridot would outrank Pearl on Homeworld except for the whole rebel thing. Also I think Pink Pearl might both have the sway to cover up the nature of Pink Diamonds death (something Zircon thinks only a diamond could have) and still be below suspicion.
Eyeball and (our) Peridot both had idle fantasies of great service to Homeworld, and being rewarded with their “own Pearl” IIRC.
Pearls are higher status that Peridots, but the Pearls are basically made to be beautiful trophies for their owners. The whole trope of Fantastic Caste System is there in spades.
And don’t get me started on the commentary on…colonialism is the best comparison I guess, but they’ve done that thing where they sub in a fantasy race for POC, which isn’t ideal but I guess Disney Channel gonna Disney Channel, and anyway for kids it’s not a bad gentle shove in the direction of wokeness that’s gonna be like “OHHHHHHH” in a few years when they look back
I’ll gladly second Shiro on this. So much to love about everything to do with this series… just dip down and push through the lot of ’em all at once before new stuff arrives ;D
Aaaaaaa it’s so close!! All the trailers and teasers they’ve been releasing have been giving me life. I am cautiously in love with Eclipsa as she appears to be the embodiment of “[character] no” “[character] YES” –[character]
*eyes shrink further, disappear into soul*
Not just the eyes.
His whole being is retreating into an unseen dimension from panel 2, to 5, then 6. If there were three more panels he might disappear completely.
*le gasp* you’re right, I didn’t consider that.
…this is either Joe’s or Amber’s superpower, not sure which.
I’m just gonna leave this right here…
Joe: “I’ve made a horrible mistake…”
Wait, I see it now.
This is mirroring Joyce’s experience with the Episcopal church earlier – she’s prepared to be a little uncomfortable, thinks she is ready for it, but is then inundated with so much new stuff and she is SO NOT READY for it and shuts down.
And now, same thing happening to Joe. They are developing, growing in parallel.
Joe has chosen… poorly.
Joe finally passes the Joe-Del test with a female who isn’t Joyce.
Yet, it may be the last conversation he ever has.
The indoctrination has begun. This is how this universe’s Joe gets into Transformers.
woah nelly, I’ve been on both sides of this
Hell, both sides of this are my relationship. We both get into a thing and then have to tell the other ALL ABOUT IT. We’ve accepted that we’re just going to be nerding back and forth until we die.
The thing that would make it hard for me in Joe’s position right now is that I’m not sure how emotionally invested Amber is being or is displaying. Just in panel 4 she doesn’t seem particularly into it, though I can imagine she gets more engaged as she talks. If she’s just doing it without interest of her own showing, I may have a reaction like Joe’s. If people are really into what they’re talking about and I can tell that they’re excited or otherwise emotional about what they’re talking about, I can listen to people talk about just about anything– unless it’s, like, hateful of course.
I bet it was something she was thinking about when Joe came up.
And it doesn’t have to be TEAR UP emotional. It’s probably just something she was INTENSELY THINKING ABOUT. Personally I, when I get to talk about something like this, don’t really inject EMOTION into my voice, just a lot of intonatino of the ‘make this sound interesting’ and ‘highlight the important parts’ sort.
I’d say you can tell how engaged Amber is just by the speed at which words tumble out of her mouth. I cannot talk like that about something I’m not currently engaged with, not without preparation like re-acquainting myself with the source material (or someone else’s ramblings about it l o l)
Someone: “Nice Star Wars shirt. What’s your favorite movie?”
Me: *really deep breath* [insert nerd vomit here]
Well, Joe did ask for this 🙂
In which I AM LITERALLY AMBER
Seems weird that you’d be using a Danny Grav, Amber.
:sees Willis coming with the Figurative/Literal Rage Bat
:does not want to get blood in his popcorn
:erects clear plexiglass screen
Is Joe going to be alright?
…She’s talking about MTMTE?!
OH YES AMBER TALK DIRTY TO ME
For those who relate to Amber here (which I do as well): just know that I, personally, love listening to people talk about things they care about, things they get invested in, even if I know very little or nothing about the topic. I’m sure other people are like this as well. It’s not stupid or annoying to care about something, and it’s not wrong to share what you care about with people.
I have a lot of those thoughts myself around talking about my interests, so I just wanted to put that out there, that even when you might start feeling like, “Oh god, why am I still talking, shut up, shut up, shut up,” the person you’re talking to may still want to hear what you have to say.
Very good point — some of us totally dig it. Just check in from time to time and make sure they wouldn’t prefer a subject change yet, and you’ll be fine. ^^
(I guess check in every four minutes? I bet there’s somebody in here with Asperger’s who has become an expert on consciously regulating it.)
Me too. One of my favorite things is Unwinnable, which is mainly articles about video games, which I never play and probably never will, but they sound so interesting.
Joe didn’t realize what “nerd the shit at me” really means until now.
My sympathies to Joe – my brother can nonstop nerd out over anime. It makes me grateful for earphones.
Honestly, I never really mind it, even if I can’t follow what the other person is talking about. If somebody is really excited about a subject, I just end up enjoying their enthusiasm
It’s a sometimes-food for me.
I just like learning things. 🙂
Or I did, until the stupid migraine landed on that part of my brain. 😛 i have to stop people a lot now, especially if there’s complex topics I used to know something about. But, eh, things are improving bit by bit, I’m hoping to reduce meds again tomorrow 🙂
… and now I might have killed this thread. Talk about pain tends to make things awkward. :/
Not awkward; hope the medicine reduction works well!
🙂 well, I have my new prescription and I’ve adjusted my pill planner, so, we’ll see over the next few days… withdrawal can be nasty with this one, but I’m taking it much slower this time. I really hope I’m right about needing less of it 🙂 soooo looking forward to having less weakness and dizziness.
I have no idea what you’re talking about. *closes six Chrome tabs of the Weekly Weebcast*
I care deeply and intensely about this tailgate debate and keep trying to read around Joe’s head, oops
…….update, I am now messaging this strip to all my friends and failing my willsave to not infodump at them about the thing in question, oops
The entire world should know about Tailgate. And Cyclonus. And Tailgate and Cyclonus.
Joe’s best friend is Danny; while I’m pretty confident Amber’s power level is higher than Danny’s, you’d think Joe would be mentally prepared for this.
Then again, his typical response to Danny saying stuff he doesn’t care about is to tune it out, so maybe this face is him realizing that treating people like humans means not doing that?
Personally I wouldn’t call this a punishment.
Somewhere, deep, deeeeep inside, Joe feels a longing for lots of glass fronted shelves and Hawaiian shirts.
Yay
<3
Forgive me Father, for I have sinned.
Recite 4 Hail Marys, and listen to Amber talk about Transformers for an hour.
Couldn’t I just get 200 years in Purgatory instead?
Packed and all eyes turned in,
No-one to help get this transformer nerd away
From me, my sanity’s receding,
Burger in my hand, wish i never chose to sit down there
Cause who says redemption is fine?
Leaving behind all my old habits that i might
Replace if i tried on this long ride,
Looking deep inside but I don’t wanna look
So deep inside yet
Hopefully someome,somewhere, understands what I’m referencing.
At the meta level, this strip is where nerd self-validation and nerd self-deprecation take each other on, head-to-head and mano-a-mano. My own personal headcanon is that validation will eventually win because dammit, it has to. But in the short term, Soggies may rule.
Pay attention, Joe. There will be a test later.
OK, Bagge, I clearly don’t say this enough:
You are the person I rely on for making a positive, lighthearted comment that makes me laugh. You have this knack for writing these little things that could (and in some cases should) be the actual alt-text lines.
So I guess that for a bloody dirty Swede, you’re OK.
This comic is many things. It is dramatic, it is endearing, it is loopsidedly orange in a good way, but it is also funny. I like to reflect that.
“I don’t know how you are, but if you as a Swede is brave enough to get on a raft with five Norwegians, you are made of the right stuff.” Thor Heyerdahl to Bengt Danielsson
“My son returns from a fancy East Coast college, and I’m horrified to find he’s a nerd.”
“It’s not a comedy.”
At least Joe asked for it in this case, it’s much worse when someone notices something and starts asking questions and now I have to explain it without sounding like a serial killer.
Co-worker: “Is that some kind of puzzle connect game you’re playing?”
Me: “Yeah, I guess you could say that.”
Co-worker: “What game is that? I’ve never seen it before.”
Me: “Well, it’s not actually a game itself, it’s for a game. It’s the Path of Exile character planner, I’m planning out what character I’m going to play.”
Co-worker: “So you can’t even play your dumb computer game without planning it out ahead of time on another dumb computer game? Just tell me you’re not making spreadsheets.”
Me: “…..maybe?”
Co-worker: “Wow, how you don’t have a girlfriend is just a mystery the world will never solve, isn’t it?”
The skill tree being more fun than the game itself, due to what I’d call “the hack n’ slash effect”: Countless possibilities, only a handful viable builds in the end XD
At its core the problem is that the mechanics are tied to the flavor, and are also constructed to function like a traditional game. In order for a roleplaying game to not fall into that trap while still retaining some semblance of balance, either there must be an explicitly-delineated method for generating arbitrary mechanically-consistent flavor or the details must be abstracted away entirely.
Wait wait wait! How can Tailgate be 6 million years old when the universe was only created 6,431 years ago?
You joke, but I once had an actual job where we had to deal with questions like this. We did radon testing for new foundations, and our manager decided it was a great idea to include material with the results explaining the uranium decay chain. In rural Kansas/Missouri. People would literally call us up with material from Answers in Genesis and question the possibility of our test results. At least my manager also fielded these calls, I have no idea how one would even start to deal with that.
Anybody ever asks me “WERE YOU THERE?” regarding evolution or the age of the earth, I’m gonna tell them yes, yes I was.
And when they say “You’re lying. That’s impossible”, you just ask “were you there?”
Wait isn’t that from Shortpacked?
‘Twas indeedy.
Tarmaniel, that is amazing. I am sad and laughing at the same time.
His mind is not ready.
This was a mistake.
If this was animated, the last two panels would have the audience hear Amber from Joe’s perspective. Dolly zoom on Joe to give us that nice Vertigo effect, as Amber’s voice starts fading into metallic reverb and gradually becomes that tinnitus ear ringing sound.
Oh Joe, I love the effort you’re making but you’re definitely diving into a rabbit hole way too quickly here. Us nerds are intimidating folk when we get going, you need to ease into the waters (that’s how the tiny little hooks in the water latch on and drag you under)
well I imagine it’s less weird since they know each other at least. If they were perfect strangers that’d be different
no i dont want that gravitar time to play avatar roulette
What’s wrong with Alex?
I mean, this is literally me, but with Star Wars.
id get the same reaction out of someone if i explained the gotg movies
Do not mention the name “Tolkien” near me, or i will make your face look like Joe’s in the final panel in only 30 seconds. Say the name “Melkor”, and I’ll do it in 20.
morgoth bauglir?
Tolkien. :p
(I’ve read the LOTR books about 22 times each [The Hobbit included], and The Silmarillion about 8 times. So there isn’t much from that universe you could throw at me that I’m not already familiar with.)
Ah, but have you dug through Chris Tolkein’s History of Middle-Earth? That’s the final stage of Tolkien geekdom. 🙂
isnt that like 12 books?
Eh. I consider the works of Christopher Tolkien to be like the works of Brian Herbert on the Dune series. It can be interesting to read, but I take it with grains of salt.
They’re not at all like Brian Herbert’s stuff.
They’re a scholarly exploration of the development of the story and the world using his father’s early versions and notes. Not further stories in the same setting, whether based on notes or not. Absolutely fascinating if you’re interested in the process of that development, but not at all light reading.
Some insights into the nature and history of Middle-Earth that didn’t make it into the appendices or the Silmarillion, especially in the last few volumes, which cover when he was working on the end of LotRs and after.
And yes, there are 12 volumes.
I actually LIKE Brian Herbert’s stuff, apart from the Chronicles of Dune trilogy that took place immediately before the first book.
The Machine Crusade and the other books that took place during the Butlerian Jihad and the ones that come after the original series are much better.
Though I agree that at least a couple of Christopher Tolkien’s books were a good read. At least for those few who made it through the Silmarillion
I think I actually gave up during some of Frank’s later stuff.
Dune is a classic. Children and God Emperor were interesting. Everything after that (as far as I read) was forgettable.
Make that “Messiah and Children” were interesting.
Understandable. I definitely enjoyed first 3 books the most. I’ve read the original 6 at least 3 times, but I can barely recall more than a handful of plot points from the later 3.
The Machine Crusade / Butlerian Jihad / Battle of Corrin trilogy are definitely the best ones by Brian Herbert in my opinion, though I at least somewhat enjoyed them all.
But then again, I at one point somehow had the time and energy to read the first 6 books multiple times. Same with the Silmarillion and Lord of the Rings.
You read the Silmarillion? Eight times? Voluntarily?
I don’t know whether I’m in awe or terror of your fortitude.
Eru Iluvatar?
Oh look it’s me talking about Marathon.
(testing — let’s see if my Gravatar works)
This is the first time that I recall Amber speaking unequivocally with Willis’s voice!
I fell behind on Transformers a while ago; I need to get back to reading it.
That’s not “nerd.” Nerds are defined by their appreciation for maths and sciences, not children’s cartoons.
Isn’t that “geeks” you’re thinking of?
But Joe doesn’t know the distinction between nerd and geek.
Now, Amber probably does, but she’s also both; in that she’s an excellent programmer, -and- she geeks out about things like Transformers and video games.
And while she’s normally very not good at social clues, years of exposure to people that don’t know this distinction, she’s learned to understand whether someone wants her to nerd out or to geek out.
Bull. People use nerd to refer to both.
A nerd is somebody who voluntarily studies ANY subject at length because they’re passionate about it. Even if it’s sports (although sports nerds are less inclinedto identify themselves as such)
That gate doesn’t need to be guarded.
But EvolutionistX seems to be committed to some more particular meaning of “nerd”, judging from the linked blog talking about stereotypes and the relation of IQ to promiscuity.
Wait, you’re one of those people who thinks “nerd” has any actual meaning, aren’t you?
Nice gatekeeping. Very illustrative of another common nerd behavior.
I don’t think a consensus was ever reached on whether “nerd” and “geek” meant “studious academic obsessive” and “enthusiastic pop culture obsessive,” or vice versa.
Regardless, neither term is an insult so much as a badge of honor, so the distinction isn’t all that important.
I’m not sure what Joe’s face in that last panel means, exactly, but it’s either going to be very good or very bad.
Also, Amber is super cute in this strip.
Ok, maybe only basic nerd
Joe.exe has stopped working. xD
I’m honestly expecting Amber to start laughing, to hug Joe and congratulate him for getting a solid ‘You Tried’ gold star for effort.
For your own good, do not mention original Warcraft lore around me. I’ll make an early grave feel preferable to having to sit and listen to my uncontrollable rants.
I’ve played through both W3 games and a little bit of W1 (and like 2 hours of WoW but that’s not related to lore lol).
I don’t know lore beyond that.
Please educate me *u*
Wow, she turned into a podcast.
Last week: Joe is a horrible person, and deserves to be horribly treated as punishment for his crimes.
Today: NOT THIS HORRIBLE
This is like that form of torture where the victim is buried up to his neck in beach sand, and the tide just comes in and slowly drowns him?
Only with Transformers fic.
He never was a horrible person, he has some maturity issues (and personal issues) mixed in with some poor role models and, like a lot of characters here, gets held to higher standard than probably most of us could match
This page reminds me of a story I heard from a professor at the university I attend about a friend of his who got a visit by a pair of door-to-door missionaries who asked if he wanted to talk about Jesus. So he invited them inside and told them to sit down in the living room while he went to the kitchen to prepare some coffee.
What the two of course were not aware of was that he had just recently finished his exams in theology and received his licence to become a practioning priest. So when he returned from the kitchen he sat down and proceeded to tell them EVERYTHING he knew about Jesus until they couldn’t take it anymore.
Don’t ask me about my opinion on Game of Thrones if you happen like the show. It’s… unkind.
Well, for me it’s in slap dap in “meh” territory. So lay it on me.
C…can we get a version of this without Joe? I’ve been craving this sort of conversation but the corpses around me keep calling them ThunderMan robots.
I appreciate Joe trying to treat Amber like a person here but I also wonder if this is still a bit Patrriarchy-ish, with him basically demanding that she talk with him to help satisfy his emotional need. Maybe it’s for the best in this case, because Amber happens to need that too, but still a bit problematic? Baby steps, though, this is progress for Joe.
I’m looking back, and…Joe didn’t demand anything. Amber told him no, but then she quickly changed her mind.
He started out demanding attention for his needs, but caught himself, changed direction and made it about her. And this is wonderful! It may be by accident, but Joe is doing the best possible thing for Amber, better than even Sierra did: he’s bringing out everything about her that is not stabby, that has nothing at all to do with stabbing. She had reduced herself to stabby girl, and that’s not just her brain doing that, it’s everyone else reacting to her only in terms of stabbing. Even if it’s “stabbing was good” (Joyce, Dina) or “you can choose not to stab” (Ruth), they all see only the stabbing, nothing else about her. Except Ethan, but he’s too bound up with the initial trauma to lead her out of it.
Now Joe is inviting her, giving her space, to speak as a nerd, and boom! This is Amber being Amber: Amber loves, she loves passionately, loves Transformers, loves comics and games, loves Ethan, and gives herself without reservation to what she loves. This is her center, not violence, and she needs that to be seen.
Bravo, Joe. I hope he figures out he did something great here.
lollllll no
I mean, okay, to a degree? at first?
but THIS strip is him giving her permission to unlock the floodgates
I feel like the moral of the story is “If a nerd is self-aware enough not to talk about nerd shit to you, don’t question it.”
“…unless you are fully prepared and eager for the actual infodump that’s coming”
I WISH I could find someone to talk Sailor Moon with me (to me) (at me) (whatever)
The only reason I don’t ramble endlessly about Worm is that no one I know even knows it exists, so there’s no one to ask me about it.
Excellent series, in the middle of reading Pact at the moment.
It could really use a heavy dose of editing, however. The premise and worldbuilding are excellent, the writing is mostly solid but you can tell it was rushed and needs some tuning. Most importantly someone needs have a go at the plot with a chainsaw, a hammer and chisel, and a scalpel, in that order. It really meanders in places and many parts, even though they may have been well written and otherwise interesting, leave you wondering what the point of having them was since they don’t add anything to the plot.
YOU ARE THE DEVIL
Okay, maybe I’m exaggerating, but… I get kind of annoyed by the category of people who think that their opinion on how something is ‘too much’ and ‘needs to be cut down’ is objective and no people find it to be valuable. Like the folks who think Tom Bombadil added nothing to LotR. I AM READY TO FIGHT YOU ON THAT PARTICULAR POINT DONT TRY ME I HAVE A RANT ARMED AND READY
Sure, Worm could use some serious editing. In particular, the timeskip could REALLY use some fleshing out. We end up having characters talk about how Taylor acted during that time, but SHOW DON’T TELL. Give us side stories, give us mini-arcs, give us some episodic shit that shows us Taylor’s personal growth and development during that time!
This is part of the general problem with the ‘HURRY THE PLOT UP’ approach, I think. Well, maybe not problem per se – you look for different things than I do in fiction, and that’s fair. But Worm is about characterization and worldbuilding much more than it is about ‘plot’, there ISN’T that much of a plot as a series of arcs (the endgame conflict is not even introduced in the first act, for example)… and it’s not a negative. I’m glad to have found something that works like that. Let me, and people like me, have it.
Tom Bombadil added humor and provided some resources that were very useful later in the story. And he contributed a lot to the overall lighter feel of Fellowship as compared to Two Towers and Return of the King, I think. And by Fellowship feeling lighter, the grim bits of TT and RotK felt grimmer. Also, fun needs no excuse.
That said, if your contention is that Tom Bombadil should have been included in the movies, we may have to have that fight.
I long for companionship of someone with whom I can nerd over Star Trek/Battlestar Galactica/Babylon 5/My Little Pony. Don’t tell me one of these things is not like the other, B5 does too belong on the list!
Panel 6: Tried to explain premise of Steven Universe to my wife, got exactly that look. She said “You actually like watchin’ this stuff?” (Me, no joke pretending not to be wounded) “Yes.”
Spousal Ms Valdvin already likes animation, and loves Aimee Mann, and YA fiction, so my task was easier.
That said, here is a slightly-fictionalized account of Introducing my wife to Steven Universe.
Ugh. Trying this again:
https://valdvin.tumblr.com/post/159071871253/introducing-my-wife-to-steven-universe
That is awesome!
Spousal Vulcanodon likes Miyazaki films which is cool, but has not ventured much beyond.
Glad to be of service.
Also, people with more anime/manga chops than I say there’s a touch of Revolutionary Girl Utena and Dragon Ball Z in SU.
This is blasphemy, the best episode to start with is Alone Together
I still have trouble with the concept of starting anywhere other than the beginning. it feels so *wrong* and *icky*.
(and right now I’m trying not to get too upset over losing nearly half an episode on today’s ds9 dvd. it’s incredible how much these dvds have been damaged by just sitting in a box for ~5 years. 🙁
…FML. the next episode broke things so bad I had to reboot windows to get the dvd to do anything. maybe I should try poking the thing from linux and see if it can at least fail more gracefully. 🙁
for now… time to take out my anger on some pixellated alien bandits.
I just like starting with Alone Together for three reasons:
1. It works as a standalone with relatively little introduction (except maybe a bit of background on who the gems are).
2. It’s the highest concept the show gets; if you don’t like Alone Together, you won’t like the show, and vice versa.
3. *shakes fist, hisses* KEVIN!
I have started for one of my friends with showing Mr Greg. I guess it only works for people who like musical episodes, and people who like lesbians, but it worked for my specific target audience :>
I think I agree with Alone Together, unless you care about spoilers. The whole fusion thing isn’t revealed until a good way into season 1, so…
I started with Giant Woman as my wife is.a huge Aimee Mann fan. The others were vaguely in order.
You have no one to blame but yourself there
Me, but with Pokemon.
What’s in Amber’s glass in panel 4? Did she finish the chartreuse stuff and switch to milk?
One does not finish Chartreuse. It finishes you.
Never heard of it. Now I want to try it, just once.
Transformers: More Than Meets The Ear.
Get a bodybuilder to talk about body building and he will go on the same type of conversational roll, I assure you.
It is funny because in the Walkyverse Joe would already know all this.
Is it permissible to know nothing of Transformers beyond Beast Wars? Asking for a friend.
everything I know about them I learnt from either beast wars, or willis. 🙂
I don’t think it really matters. While there’s a lot of good stories after beast wars, it’s not required reading, and most of the fandom won’t care (much)
Yes, but it means you’re missing out on IDW’s More Than Meets the Eye series, which is a damned shame.
That isn’t nerding. This is nerding.
Do you know what goes on inside black holes? [runs on for hours]
There is really only one computer language worth knowing. Let me tell you how I contributed to designing it. [ditto]
Global Warming Denial is as good as over now that renewables are cheaper than coal. The real threat is Economics Denial. [etc.]
Wow you are very good at coming up with terrible things to say
First of all, due to the non-Euclidean shape of spacetime, the phrase “what goes on inside black holes” doesn’t actually make sense, since from a topological perspective t
that sounds more like “arrogance”. 😛
a lot of nerds are arrogant as fuck. they’ve carved out their own little niche where they get to be the all-knowing authority that can sneer at everyone else for their ignorance.
in conclusion: humans.
I’ve made a terrible mistake.