121

Technology & Information / Re: Uber

« on: January 29, 2017, 12:46:35 AM »

In my city Lyft has like three times the drivers, and treats the drivers better. So while I prefer Lyft, both Uber and Lyft are miles better than taxis.

122

Arts & Entertainment / Re: Official Sports Thread

« on: January 28, 2017, 06:21:38 AM »

Who you accusing of what, son?

I'm just saying there's a reason we're seeing athletes play at this level into their 30's for the first time in history.

Steroids are a helluva drug.

I heard that Teddy is out next year and may be done forever.

There's no real new info, just a Bleacher Report reporter rehashing old info. But yeah, pretty fucked.

At least we got Bradford. He's pretty cool.

123

Arts & Entertainment / Re: Official Sports Thread

« on: January 27, 2017, 11:43:48 PM »

Steroids are a helluva drug.

124

Arts & Entertainment / Re: Official Sports Thread

« on: January 24, 2017, 08:12:32 PM »

My goodness. The two best teams are very apparent. However, this has been the worst NFL playoffs that I've ever seen.

For real. Absolute garbage games.

#TeamDirtyBirds

125

Arts & Entertainment / Re: Official Sports Thread

« on: January 17, 2017, 02:49:30 AM »

But Brady is a better game manager. I give Brady the edge over Rodgers

Brady also has more experience and depth in his system no?

Debatable. The Patriots have changed their offensive system a lot more than the Packers.

Also, #TeamDirtyBirds

126

Arts & Entertainment / Re: Official Sports Thread

« on: December 21, 2016, 04:06:36 PM »

Team on the left.

Wrong.

Very wrong.

127

Arts & Entertainment / Re: Official Sports Thread

« on: December 15, 2016, 09:50:53 PM »

Who you got?

128

Technology & Information / Re: The Flat Earth Society official IRC chat

« on: December 15, 2016, 09:36:32 PM »

With all the kickings on whims and this stuff, I genuinely can't tell if the IRC has any rules at all. Can we basically just kick and ban anyone we feel like? Like...can I just permaban Rushy or beardo or something

It's Parsifal's personal playground. You can do whatever you want unless he doesn't like it, in which case you can't do that.

I tried banning him but he won't let me.

129

Arts & Entertainment / Re: Official Sports Thread

« on: December 02, 2016, 07:19:11 AM »

Gronk is dead.

130

Arts & Entertainment / Re: Now Playing (the Video Game Version)

« on: December 01, 2016, 06:18:29 PM »

I'm on that Battlefield 1 hype, hit me up if you wanna play.

131

Arts & Entertainment / Re: Official Sports Thread

« on: November 26, 2016, 07:32:06 PM »

I love how the Vikings manage to fuck up at the end of every game. How do you throw a pick in a tie game... Smh. . Also reading my last post, no idea what I was saying

everything sucks and fuck you

132

Technology & Information / Re: The Flat Earth Society official IRC chat

« on: November 13, 2016, 06:26:39 PM »

We really need more active ops there.  It's an absolute disaster when lolwut shows up with nobody there to kickban him and spams the channel to hell, which is currently happening.

I mean this will mostly just result in you getting kicked more, but w/e

133

Arts & Entertainment / Re: Just Watched

« on: October 31, 2016, 01:42:08 PM »

Ghostbusters (Paul Feig, 2016)

As possibly the most controversial member of this forum, I feel as though it is my duty to review the most controversial movie of the year.  First, a few notes on the politics of the situation:

• The furious backlash to this movie was absolutely predominantly sexist in nature.  I don't believe that even half of the people ranting about it were anything more than casual fans of the original film beforehand.
• No, the backlash did not begin when that abysmal trailer was released.  It began long before then, when it was revealed that the movie would star women.
• If the real grievance was that they were remaking a beloved geek property, then where was the backlash to the remakes of Total Recall and RoboCop?  Both of those movies were far more beloved by the "reddit demographic," so to speak, than Ghostbusters, being super-violent, R-rated, manly action films, and their remakes had shitty trailers leading to lousy films with toothless PG-13 ratings.  I don't recall the Internet going up in arms about them.
• None of the vitriol from Paul Feig and the cast regarding the backlash was directed at Ghostbusters fans in general.  They made it very clear they were talking about the assholes bombarding the Internet with misogynistic commentary.
• Getting another movie with the original cast was never, ever going to happen.  Bill Murray had made it very clear on multiple occasions that he had no interest in ever making another one, no matter how much money they dangled in front of him.
• Speaking of Murray, no, Sony did not threaten to sue him to get him to appear in the film.  That idea was mentioned in an email from December 2013, long before the form of the movie they eventually went with was in production.
• And speaking of Sony, the conspiracy theory the Internet has come up with about how Sony drummed up all the controversy by deleting all the non-sexist comments on the trailer and it was their plan from the start to turn it into a political football is just insane, and I've lost a lot of respect for Red Letter Media for diving into that well so eagerly.  I mean, Sony is a shitty studio, no argument there, but to think that they have nothing better to do than try to shape a narrative about an upcoming movie by spending what would have to have been thousands of hours on fucking YouTube, manipulating the comments there?  Is that really so much easier to believe than the fact that there are a lot of sexist people on the Internet?

With all that out of the way, it's time to talk about the movie itself.  It's bad.  Not as horrendous as the trailer made it out to be, but still pretty bad.  The best thing it has going for it is the cast, who put their all into making the movie work, and the few laughs I had were due entirely to their efforts.  But there's only so much that a talented comedian (comedienne?) can do to elevate weak material, and the jokes they're saddled with here are fucking lame.  They're shitcom-level bad, and that is not a comparison that I make lightly.  There are way too many jokes that just keep on going long after they stop being funny, too.  You can do that once or twice in a movie, and it's funny because it's unexpected to the audience, but here, they do it probably about a dozen times.  For example, there's a gag where Kristen Wiig's character, having been fired from her job, walks down the hallway carrying her things and awkwardly tries to make small talk with everyone she sees while trying to hide the fact that she's been fired.  That could be funny if it were just a few seconds establishing her embarrassment and lame attempts at saving face.  But it just keeps going on and on and on.  She awkwardly greets one former co-worker, who pointedly ignores her, then another, and another, and another.  Fucking cut already!  We get it!

The movie's special effects also deserve mention, because it's amazing how visuals as shitty as these could be so expensive.  I don't know what they were trying to go for with the look of these ghosts.  Did they want them to look funny?  Scary?  Visually unique?  Well, they're none of those.  They just look garish, and they're very poorly integrated with the rest of the movie.  It doesn't help that the film does a terrible job of hiding the fact that the cast clearly had no idea what it was that their characters were supposed to be seeing and interacting with.  The way they carry themselves when ghosts are supposed to be nearby, their expressions never changing in response to what the ghosts are doing, things like that give it away.  I get it; it's tough directing actors when you have a green screen and effects that are going to be added after the filming is complete.  Some directors just aren't suited to that sort of work, and Feig is clearly one of them.  He wasn't chosen to direct this because Sony thought he had a particular aptitude for Ghostbusters or big-budget blockbusters; he was chosen because they decided to go with a female cast.  Not that a different director would necessarily have made for much of an improvement, though.  Really, there was no need to try and make this a huge blockbuster with an enormous budget to begin with.  They could have toned down the effects heavily and aimed at a lower bar with a far more reasonable budget.  It's first and foremost a comedy, after all.  People watch it to laugh, not to see the thrilling battles and explosions.  Why bother going big and having to compete with all the capeshit out there?

On the notion of this movie receiving fairly positive reviews overall.  Do I think the gender controversy perhaps played a role in this, encouraging some critics to be kinder to the film than they ordinarily would have been?  Yes, actually.  Kind of like the opposite of Apocalypto, where critics bent over backwards to twist some sort of racist or fascist meaning out of the film to fit with the narrative that Mel Gibson was an evil Nazi who couldn't possibly have any genuine artistic talent.  I'm not mad about it, though.  For one thing, it's nobody's fault but the pre-release, pre-trailer haters that the movie ever became a political football to begin with.  For another, the shilling didn't do much good, as the movie underperformed at the box office.  And finally, the reaction on reddit when the positive reviews came in that fateful day was truly hilarious, far more so than I could have reasonably expected this movie to be.  So I guess the movie did entertain me well enough, in its own way.

tl;dr: idk, sexism or something

I've never seen the show, but just from reading the synopses on Wikipedia and articles like these, I can tell I'd hate it.  I kind of already hate it, actually.  It comes across as the smug ramblings of a hipster edgelord with nothing insightful to say.  Game shows are bad, mmkay?  Smartphones are bad, mmkay?

134

Technology & Information / Re: beardo is getting a new GPU

« on: October 30, 2016, 12:50:12 AM »

nViDi@

135

Arts & Entertainment / Re: Official Sports Thread

« on: October 29, 2016, 04:59:02 AM »

Malcolm butler is one of the best coroners in the game!!

one of the best coroners

coroners

136

Arts & Entertainment / Re: Just Watched

« on: October 29, 2016, 04:58:06 AM »

Oldboy (Park Chan-wook, 2003)

I have very mixed feelings on this movie.  Most elements of it work quite well.  The premise is fantastic.  The directing is sharp and tight.  The acting is excellent, especially from lead Choi Min-sik, whose role has minimal dialogue, and yet manages to communicate more character with just a shell-shocked look or a wicked smile than most actors could with a soliloquy.  The fight choreography is gritty, lo-fi badassery in its purest form, and the famous hallway fight scene is of course a marvel.

And then we get to the ending.  Fuck this ending.  The villain is ridiculous.  His grudge against the main character makes no sense.  And most annoyingly of all, his plan is far too absurd and convoluted for me to believe that it could all happen as flawlessly as it apparently does.  I am so sick of this stupid "Everything that happened was all part of my plan!" cliché.  BvS did it, Watchmen did it, Star Wars did it...it's not good writing!  You're not establishing that your villain is intelligent and methodical for somehow predicting every move the hero takes, you're establishing that they're apparently omniscient!  So, yeah, Oldboy has a really, really bad example of this, and it's maddening enough to almost ruin the whole movie.  Almost.  I enjoyed most of it, and I'm glad I saw it, but holy shit, it concludes on a lousy note.

I've never seen the show, but just from reading the synopses on Wikipedia and articles like these, I can tell I'd hate it.  I kind of already hate it, actually.  It comes across as the smug ramblings of a hipster edgelord with nothing insightful to say.  Game shows are bad, mmkay?  Smartphones are bad, mmkay?

137

Arts & Entertainment / Re: Official Sports Thread

« on: October 29, 2016, 04:54:57 AM »

something something defense wins championships

138

Arts & Entertainment / Re: Black Mirror

« on: October 29, 2016, 04:54:19 AM »

god damnit saddam you ruin everything

bamboozled again

139

Arts & Entertainment / Black Mirror

« on: October 29, 2016, 01:52:30 AM »

Shit's fire yo

140

Technology & Information / Re: beardo is getting a new GPU

« on: October 28, 2016, 03:00:33 AM »

I can't hear you over the sound of my high framerates and beautiful games.

That would be a reasonable response if I said there was no reason ever to buy Nvidia. What I actually said was that there are reasons not to buy Nvidia.

Yeah shit reasons for shitty PCs.