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Post by sunofdarkchild on Apr 20, 2024 15:09:19 GMT -5
There's a whole subculture of 'AI Star Wars' on Youtube now. That seems to be referencing another channel that has the 'Anakin's thesis' Saga where Anakin did his Jedi thesis on the 'Tragedy of Darth Plageius the Wise.'
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Post by sunofdarkchild on Apr 14, 2024 12:34:45 GMT -5
I just beat an old Star Trek game for the first time, Bridge Commander. Unfortunately, the manual firing function stopped working properly for me after a few missions. It would just turn off at random and I'd be left a sitting duck for a few seconds until I reenabled it. It also stopped allowing me to turn on quantum torpedoes even though the Sovereign was supposed to be fully equipped with them. As a result I was forced to jut let the tactical officer do all the shooting. He could fire quantums whenever the forward launcher was lined up, even if I couldn't, so even with AI control he would take out the bad guys a lot faster than I could with just the puny photon torpedoes. I had a lot of problems with the game, from a mission-critical station not spawning until I installed a mod to fix it to many crashes. I know it's a 20-plus year old game, but I really wish it functioned like it was supposed to.
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Post by sunofdarkchild on Apr 12, 2024 10:35:35 GMT -5
Supposedly, a big part of the reason Superman was killed was because they scrapped plans for him and Lois to marry at the time. The Lois and Clark tv show was being planned, and the decision was made to push off the wedding until it would happen in the show so as to have synergy between the comics the show. In place of the wedding they had a funeral. Chris and I were just discussing this on the previous page. I've heard this rumor a number of times, and it just doesn't add up for me. The show was still in the planning stages and the entire premise was the romantic tension between Lois and Clark, so how were they already planning for a wedding episode in a show that wasn't even been greenlit yet and certainly wasn't going to have the couple marry in its first season? It would be pretty bold to assume it would be picked up AND renewed for a second season before the pilot had even been filmed. That is what Jerry Ordway says at 22 minutes here where he goes into detail on how the decision to kill Superman was made. I don't see any reason to think he's lying.
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Post by sunofdarkchild on Apr 11, 2024 8:41:44 GMT -5
Supposedly, a big part of the reason Superman was killed was because they scrapped plans for him and Lois to marry at the time. The Lois and Clark tv show was being planned, and the decision was made to push off the wedding until it would happen in the show so as to have synergy between the comics the show. In place of the wedding they had a funeral.
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Post by sunofdarkchild on Apr 11, 2024 8:35:19 GMT -5
Xavier came back years and years ago as Marvel prepared to launch Hickman's Krakoa era.
Magneto was killed 2 years ago and was just brought back to life now in full health, despite him explicitly saying he wanted to stay dead when he was killed. Marvel is preparing another relaunch this summer - in the previews for the relaunch he is in a hover chair, but we don't know how or why yet as there are plenty of issues to go until this Krakoa era ends.
Scott and Jean are still married, though she's currently dead again and about to come back again.
The school was left abandoned and taken over by a race of alien robots during the Krakoa era.
Moira was retconned into having been a mutant all along with the power to go back in time and live out her life again from birth every time she dies. Her murder by mistake was retconned to have been a golem created to fool Mystique and allow Moira to go undercover for many years as Charles and Magneto prepared to build Krakoa. It was again retconned into Moira hating mutants all along and her powers were taken away. After this she turned herself into a cyborg and joined Orchis, the lastest group attempting to commit mutant genocide. It's assumed the current story ending Krakoa will create yet another retcon since Xavier is trying to figure out how to go back in time to prevent Moira's actions from causing a clone of Mr. Sinister from becoming a galaxy-devouring super-intelligence.
Banshee has been killed and brought back several times. At one point Moira killed him, removed his skin, and wore said skin as a disguise. He got better after that.
Beast went from being a guy who made mistakes and couldn't deal with them during the Bendis era to a full-on villain in recent years, committing genocide, turning Wolverine into his slave, and a laundry list of other atrocities. The Hank McCoy of the last 40 years was just killed in the X-Force finale and a younger version of him from the 80s was resurrected to take his place so he can be a hero again.
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Post by sunofdarkchild on Apr 8, 2024 13:19:36 GMT -5
Godzilla X Kong was stupid but fun. The best way I can describe it is like if Final Wars was less stupid, had better special effects, and Don Frye was replaced by Kong.
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Post by sunofdarkchild on Apr 3, 2024 11:56:11 GMT -5
Here's an interesting parallel. In 2015, as Bendis's time on the X-Men comics was ending, he wrote an issue featuring a teamup between Magik and Kitty Pryde as best friends reunited saving a mutant child. In 2024, as the Krakoa era is ending, Gerry Duggan also wrote a 'best friends reunite to save mutant children' issue for Magik and Kitty. But the difference in quality is night and day.
In the Bendis issue, there's real emotion between the lead characters. The child they save is endearing. Bendis is able to back so much meaning into 3 words when Magik asks the child "how many sleeps" she was left alone on an island for. It's a great character-driven issue.
In Duggan's issue, there's no emotion, just mindless bloodshed and exposition. The kids they save get a panel and no lines, making it easy to miss the very fact that any kids were saved at all. The characters go around slaughtering their enemies, and when the plotline of nanites taking away Magik's powers is resolved there's no payoff to her getting her powers back. It's a checklist of plot points without any meat, intelligence, fun, or any of the qualities of an average comic, let alone a good one.
Uncanny X-Men #33 from Bendis is one of my favorite issues of all time. Duggan's X-Men #32 from last month is one of the worst comics I've ever read. What a drop in quality in the same kind of issue over 9 years.
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Post by sunofdarkchild on Apr 3, 2024 11:44:13 GMT -5
I tend to prefer getting more bang for my buck, both from the time it takes to read an issue and from the amount of story actually in the issue. The decompressed storytelling only works if it's used to put in more detail and character like the original Ultimate Spiderman. When all it does is stretch a 20-page story into a 60-page story, even in the trades it reads like a paper-thin mess.
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Post by sunofdarkchild on Mar 30, 2024 12:47:01 GMT -5
Growing up there were these 2 large boxes of Marvel comics my father had from the 80s that I was constantly going through, especially since these old comics were much better than the then-new comics I'd occasionally see in certain stores in the early 2000s. It's how I discovered stories like Iron Man's Armor Wars, the big Surtur story where Thor, Odin, and Loki team up, and of course Claremont's X-Men. Even as a little kid I thought the whole thing with Jean 'was never Phoenix' was stupid and I hated Cyclops for running out on his wife and baby. My dad stopped subscribing to Marvel in 1989, probably because our family had moved. As a result, he only had a couple of issues from the Inferno event, 1 from Uncanny, where Sinister reveals Maddelyn was a clone he created, one from X-Factor, and the final issue of the X-Terminators mini-series. So I knew that the character who had become my favorite from all of my dad's comics had been manipulated by the new big bad N'Astirh and had transformed into a red demon, but nothing more. I assumed that Magik got through this arc just fine and maybe the whole S'ym rebellion story was done with, because there was no way her story could possibly end before her promised rematch with Belasco. It would be like not having Voldemort appear at all in the final Harry Potter book and replacing him with some never-before-heard-of villain out of nowhere, or not having Darth Vader appear at all in Return of the Jedi.
When I reached the point where I needed my own computer to do schoolwork I discovered Uncannyxmen.net and was extremely disappointed in what actually happened and that she'd been deaged/replaced then and there and killed off less than 4 years later without so much as a 1-panel cameo from her arc-enemy. They really did the equivalent of replacing Voldemort or Darth Vader in the final story. It never occurred to me that Inferno could possibly the final Magik story, because Claremont had so clearly been building up to a final battle between her and Belasco. It was stated outright in both her origin story and the issue where she joined the New Mutants that Belasco was going to come back for on final showdown. To this day I cannot fathom how or why her story was just abandoned instead of paying off what Claremont had set up. I've since discovered that Louise Simonson forgot that Magik spared Belasco's life and thought she killed him - which is like forgetting that Luke threw away his lightsaber and thinking her chopped off Darth Vader's head - and that the new editor, Bob Harris, had a vendetta against everything magic-based in the X-line and wanted to get rid of Magik as quickly as possible and didn't care to check if Simonson was getting crucial details completely wrong or if her exit/death was well-handled or at all consistent with what Claremont had written.
Learning the history of the X-Men post-Claremont, of Marvel in general in the 90s and early 2000s, was just a huge disappointment. Spider-Man's Clone Saga and One More Day, The X-Men going back to crippled Xavier and field-leader Cyclops vs Magneto resetting all 3 characters and more to the 1970s, Iron Man's whole traitor arc. I couldn't believe how bad things had gotten so quickly after my father had stopped buying Marvel comics
Thankfully, by that point, Quest for Magik was already out and X-Infernus was right around the corner, and the whole story of Magik's return was the story Inferno should have been in the first place just by virtue of having Belasco present in any capacity whatsoever. It was great to see the mistakes of 20 years earlier be fixed in real-time, and without her return happening at that time when I needed something to overcome all that disappointment in everything Marvel and it being handled so well compared to 99% of comics resurrections, I certainly would not have bothered with Marvel comics at all in my teens or as an adult, and probably wouldn't have bothered with DC either.
So while I can nitpick Claremont's writing to death, my real problem is with the people who replaced him/kicked him out and came after. Basically, by the time I was born, Marvel had already gone to crap.
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Post by sunofdarkchild on Mar 29, 2024 10:41:33 GMT -5
The Sun Crusher was in the Jedi Academy Trilogy.
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Post by sunofdarkchild on Mar 29, 2024 8:12:30 GMT -5
I do get the sense that Claremont was declining in quality by the late 80s, but the reason he left was because Jim Lee and Bob Harris wanted to keep the X-Men stuck in the 70s, which while it paid off in the short term with the high sales of the early 90s, in the long run caused the entire franchise to stagnate by the mid-90s and throughout this millennium. They were determined to make the mistake of bringing Jean Grey back and regressing all of the original 5 X-Men so X-Factor could exist into the guiding policy of the entire X-Men brand. It was a lot like what Dragonball Z did when Goku was brought back at the end of the Buu Saga, going backwards, ruining characters because other characters are seen as more marketable even though the story has already moved past them, and stagnating the franchise as a result. The latest chapter of Dragonball Super basically finally returned the story to the point it had already reached more than 30 years ago after decades of doing the same boring thing over and over again. I don't really know how to define a decline in Claremont's quality, so to speak, because I began reading the X-Men after they'd died and were hiding out in Australia, but from what I can gleam, Claremont eventually reached the point where he was in an experimental phase. The book was selling so well that he could almost do anything he pleased especially when he was tight with the editors. For some fans that was the jumping off point but for others it was the starting point. To be perfectly honest, it sometimes annoys me when people talk about when they stopped reading Claremont's X-Men. You don't get a badge for where you jumped off. I'm sorry that I was nine years old and didn't know that Longshot wasn't that great. Personal feelings aside, when should Claremont have left and who should have taken over? Let's say Claremont leaves with issue #175, who takes over and what direction do they take? I wasn't born yet. To me the problem is not with Claremont so much as decisions that were forced on him. He very nearly quit when Jean was brought back, which would have seen him leave after issue 200. The entire Inferno event was the X-Men staff attempting to fix many of the problems created by that stupid decision, and the entire process caused him to hate Cyclops as a character. New Mutants became a million times worse the moment he left the book to do Excalibur and Louise Simonson took over, and his Excalibur was never as good as his New Mutants. As soon as he redeemed Magneto after a 50-issue arc editorial was already trying to undo all the character development he gave him so he could go back to being a 60s villain. By the end he was fighting with Lee and Harris over whether the X-Men should be allowed to evolve or be stuck forever in the 70s, and when he lost that fight and left X-Men completely stagnated. This was the period where Steve Englehart created clones of the Fantastic Four who acted just like they did in the early 60s and basically recreated their earliest stories almost word for word to spite the editors who were pressing him to have the stories be more like they used to be, and the editors didn't even realize he was just mocking them and loved it. Marvel was not a well-run company by that point, and nostalgia was valued above story and character.
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Post by sunofdarkchild on Mar 29, 2024 4:09:25 GMT -5
I do get the sense that Claremont was declining in quality by the late 80s, but the reason he left was because Jim Lee and Bob Harris wanted to keep the X-Men stuck in the 70s, which while it paid off in the short term with the high sales of the early 90s, in the long run caused the entire franchise to stagnate by the mid-90s and throughout this millennium. They were determined to make the mistake of bringing Jean Grey back and regressing all of the original 5 X-Men so X-Factor could exist into the guiding policy of the entire X-Men brand. It was a lot like what Dragonball Z did when Goku was brought back at the end of the Buu Saga, going backwards, ruining characters because other characters are seen as more marketable even though the story has already moved past them, and stagnating the franchise as a result. The latest chapter of Dragonball Super basically finally returned the story to the point it had already reached more than 30 years ago after decades of doing the same boring thing over and over again.
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Post by sunofdarkchild on Mar 29, 2024 3:56:50 GMT -5
My strongest memory of the Thrawn trilogy was this one time my father was looking for me and didn't realize I was sitting next to the bookcase in the basement reading Heir to the Empire instead of in my room playing with action figures. He got very frustrated that I wasn't upstairs because we had to drive somewhere, and when he finally found me he shouted, "You were READING?!" It was the first and only time I was yelled at for reading. He had most of the early EU stuff like the Thrawn books, Truce at Bakura, the Jedi Academy and Corellia trilogies, and my older sister had the Young Jedi Knights books that were probably the first Star Wars books I read, though it might have been the books with the 3-eyed guy who claimed to be Palpatine's son and Jabba's father wanting revenge on Leia. The current stories when I was really getting into the EU were the New Jedi Order books. I dropped the EU in high school not because of other interests but because the Legacy of the Force series was so awful and destroyed everything I had enjoyed about the EU.
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Post by sunofdarkchild on Mar 15, 2024 9:27:46 GMT -5
The current state is pretty dreadful. Krakoa had its flaws, but the way they're ending it has been terrible. Between the rushing, the way Orchis is treated as a joke despite supposedly being such a huge threat, and Gerry Duggan seemingly forgetting everything he ever learned about writing it's as bad now as the dark days of the pre-Krakoa years. There's a character called Orchis? That's nuts!!! Not a character. Orchis is the name of the organization that has been opposing Krakoa since the start and created Nimrod. They crashed the X-Men's big diplomatic party, killed a bunch of humans and mutants and pinned the blame on the X-Men, basically eliminated the nation of Krakoa in an instant, and are supposedly the big bads of the entire era. But when push comes to shove, they get slaughtered like chumps and are defined by their sheer stupidity more than anything. They got special Tony Stark-made sentinels that are immune to Magneto's powers and supposedly a million times more dangerous than any other sentinel, but it turns out they are easily defeated by poking a small hole in their heads and pouring a little water in the hole. It's amazing. There's this whole plot about how Orchis has infected Magik with nano-sentinels that block her powers and are slowly killing her, and instead of doing something awesome when they're removed and she gets all her powers back she just teleports some water into the sentinel's head and then nothing but serve as a taxi for Cyclops. And that's just one example of how boring Gerry Duggan's writing is in 2024. Every issue is as devoid of creativity and imagination of that scene from the last airbender movie where 6 earthbenders can't do more than throw a small rock any 1 of them could have just picked up and thrown. It's months of nothing but this.
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Post by sunofdarkchild on Mar 15, 2024 5:01:54 GMT -5
The current state is pretty dreadful. Krakoa had its flaws, but the way they're ending it has been terrible. Between the rushing, the way Orchis is treated as a joke despite supposedly being such a huge threat, and Gerry Duggan seemingly forgetting everything he ever learned about writing it's as bad now as the dark days of the pre-Krakoa years. It's been a long time since I've seen a writer fail so badly at action, character, dialogue, and plotting all at once as Duggan is doing in the main X-Men book and Fall of the House of X right now. I can't believe the same guy who wrote Savage Avengers is writing this crap.
I liked the Krakoa era as a whole, but it has been getting worse and worse as the years progressed, to the point I can't wait for the end anymore. Here's hoping the MacKay and Simone books are a return to form.
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