Mod Post: Off-Topic Tuesday
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scans_dailyIn the comments to these weekly posts (and only these posts), it's your chance to go as off topic as you like.
Talk about non-comics stuff, thread derail, and just generally chat among yourselves.
The intent of these posts is to chat and have some fun and, sure, vent a little as required. Reasoned debate is fine, as always, but if you have to ask if something is going over the line, think carefully before posting please.
Normal board rules about conduct and behaviour still apply, of course.
It's been suggested that, if discussing spoilers for recent media events, it might be advisable to consider using the rot13 method to prevent other members seeing spoilers in passing.
The world situation is the world situation. If you're following the news, you know it as much as I do, if you're not, then there are better sources than scans_daily. But please, no doomscrolling, for your own sake.
Canada seems to have re-elected it's incumbent Prime Minister, perhaps helped by a bizarre post from POTUS 47, suggesting that everyone vote for him and make Canada the 51st State, which went about as well as you might imagine.
"The Well" was another cracking Doctor Who episode, amping up the creepy tension at every opportunity, a superb performance from Rose Ayling-Ellis and anything else would be a spoiler so I'll keep quiet.
Andor Season 2 launched with a three episode drop which seems... excessive perhaps, but appears to have been well received. I've still to finish season 1 (though I will) so I can't judge.
In my "Working my way down through the extensive piles of books I accumulate" I've finally hit the "Arsène Lupin, Gentleman Thief" collection and am LOVING it. I know I've read a few over the years, but not his first adventure, and how can you NOT immediately warm to a gentleman rogue who steals only from the wealthy, does no violence, and is introduced in the first three pages as the man who "one night, after breaking into Baron Schormann's, had gone away empty handed, leaving his visiting card, with these words added in pencil I shall return when your things are genuine." ?
And in the world of vaguely unsettling... all right, VERY unsettling adverts, may I present the new offerings from Scotland's soft drink Irn-Bru - for their limited run "Nessie Nectar" and "Unicorn Tears". If you choose to watch them, that's on you!
Talk about non-comics stuff, thread derail, and just generally chat among yourselves.
The intent of these posts is to chat and have some fun and, sure, vent a little as required. Reasoned debate is fine, as always, but if you have to ask if something is going over the line, think carefully before posting please.
Normal board rules about conduct and behaviour still apply, of course.
It's been suggested that, if discussing spoilers for recent media events, it might be advisable to consider using the rot13 method to prevent other members seeing spoilers in passing.
The world situation is the world situation. If you're following the news, you know it as much as I do, if you're not, then there are better sources than scans_daily. But please, no doomscrolling, for your own sake.
Canada seems to have re-elected it's incumbent Prime Minister, perhaps helped by a bizarre post from POTUS 47, suggesting that everyone vote for him and make Canada the 51st State, which went about as well as you might imagine.
"The Well" was another cracking Doctor Who episode, amping up the creepy tension at every opportunity, a superb performance from Rose Ayling-Ellis and anything else would be a spoiler so I'll keep quiet.
Andor Season 2 launched with a three episode drop which seems... excessive perhaps, but appears to have been well received. I've still to finish season 1 (though I will) so I can't judge.
In my "Working my way down through the extensive piles of books I accumulate" I've finally hit the "Arsène Lupin, Gentleman Thief" collection and am LOVING it. I know I've read a few over the years, but not his first adventure, and how can you NOT immediately warm to a gentleman rogue who steals only from the wealthy, does no violence, and is introduced in the first three pages as the man who "one night, after breaking into Baron Schormann's, had gone away empty handed, leaving his visiting card, with these words added in pencil I shall return when your things are genuine." ?
And in the world of vaguely unsettling... all right, VERY unsettling adverts, may I present the new offerings from Scotland's soft drink Irn-Bru - for their limited run "Nessie Nectar" and "Unicorn Tears". If you choose to watch them, that's on you!
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Date: 2025-04-29 10:22 am (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2025-04-29 11:36 am (UTC)Wait the Slitheen prime minter said the aliens have weapons of mass destruction. This is satire on the War on Terror.
Then the Slitheen's plan to sell the charred remains of Earth as cheap starship fuel must be commentary on the oil wars!
This satire on the Iraq War has a lot of zany music in it.
'Alien Hoax' says the headline. sure let's say Big Ben was fake, but 10 Downing Street got blown up with a missile. The Prime Minister died! ah well
so Rose ditches her distraught mother after a year away so she can go on more adventures....
The local film society couldn't get the scheduled film so they decided to take advantage of the Pope's death and show Concalve early.
That was a good film. Had a lot of intrigue
In a second hand bookshop I found:
The Longbow Hunters: I believe this is the story that reinvented Green Arrow by making him socially conscious. Either that or it gave him a beard
Age of Bronze volume one: I hope the fact I know very little about Greek mythology doesn't hinder this grounded retelling of the Trojan war (or the fact the series has managed to release one issue every six years since 2012)
Well I decided to watch the Twilight Zone Movie.
yes Planet of The Apes! Wow it really is a classic and has a lot of layers to it.
Note how the shocking twist answers the movie's question about the nature of man, ties into Professor Cornelius efforts to learn the truth about ape history and re contextualizes the rest of the movie.
But the astronauts mission confuses me. If they were just going on an expedition to deep space and were meant to return to Earth centuries later with their research, sure that almost makes sense, but they talk about colonizing a planet. Which is weird since the crew only has four people.....
Ah well. It's not like the entire space race wasn't an elaborate pissing match.
Well over the last three week I've watched seven seasons of Archer. If your like me and watch Archer for the overarching story and character development I have some observations
Season one:
It's kind of odd watching it from the beginning and see showlong jokes and character elements being introduced (it takes five episodes for Kreiger to have dialogue. Ray first appears in episode eight. Pam starts off as a meek office worker, she gets her crude personality fairly quickly but she won't get her outgoing personal life until midway through season two).
I kind of expected the show to be the character's standing around bickering while the plot happened in another room, the story do have quite a lot of moving parts.
Anyway the ongoing plot is Cyril and Lana's relationship. Cyril cheats on her with Carol, who starts blackmailing him. Lana finds out and gets revenge with the Carol part just sort of petering out.
Well there's also Malory's decade long affair with the head of the KGB which leads to him trying to brainwash Archer into going to Russia once learns he's probably his father
Season two:
This season lacks an overarching plot, but does seem to want to flesh out the various characters and their backgrounds.
We start to see them give Archer a bit more emotional depth like his love of animals, him getting cancer, and showing that he's actually capable of caring about others.
season three:
This is were the shows attempts to have ongoing story arcs basically fall apart. Sure taken on it's own we have a fairly compressive 'Barry hates Archer and is now an evil cyborg. He kills Archer's fiance, and the man who is probably his father.Then Archer's dead fiance is rebuild as a cyborg but leaves him for Barry. Archer recklessly tries to fight Barry but gets beaten up. But then later he manges to outwit Barry'
But Barry talks about having a master plan to destroy Archer which is never mentioned again. Sure there's some potential explanations. He's an insane cyborg. He starts dating Katya who asks him to stop trying to kill Archer. I guess that makes sense, but you'd expect an evil cyborg becoming head of the KGB to have more of an impact.
Also after this the question of who's Archer's father gets dropped with no resolution. it wasn't all that interesting but spent a fair amount of screen time on it and I'm sure they could have done something else with it.
season four:
Lana considers her career and what she wants out of life.
Did they make Archer more of a stupid dick this season? He did do some pretty stupid things previously but it seems to be happening more often.
The Classic Era is over. Now the Gimmick seasons! (I feel like in a better world Archer would have had five seasons of spying and that would have been it. I don't know if it would have had a satisfying conclusions but it wouldn't have dragged on for years)
season five:
The gimmick is that their drug dealers! and the show is much more serialized!
Actually I thought they did a decent enough job introducing and developing the plot threads (well except for the third part of the Columbian adventure which had the awkward shift of them deciding to become international arms dealers).
The show's style of comedy means it's not as jarring shift as you might expect.
season six:
The gimmick is that everything's back to normal and there is no gimmick!
The story is about Archer adapting to being a father and rekindling his relationship with Lana while Cyril tries to sabotage their relationship.
It also has a capstone to a few long-running plot-threads which I appreciated.
season seven:
The gimmick is that they've moved to LA and become private detectives. They do actually make an effort to have the plots this season be more noir-esque (or at least like Magnum PI).
But it's also odd because it opens with a flash forward of Archer floating face down in a swimming pool, implying a season long investigation or mystery that led to this point, but while it does introduces involved the lead-up only happens in the final two episodes.
I did like the episode were Archer meets the rich bastards who bullied him back at boarding school, and how they made him the man he is today. He doesn't seem to learn anything, but at the end talks with Lana about sending their daughter to public school so she can have a better life than he did.
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Date: 2025-04-29 11:37 am (UTC)People seemed quite vocal about me doing an Egg Fu retrospective, and who am I to say no. You only have yourselves to blame.
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Date: 2025-04-29 07:04 pm (UTC)Just sometimes not able to think of naut to say. Meaningful or otherwise.
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Date: 2025-04-29 11:48 am (UTC)Yesterday, in one sitting I read Voltaire's Candide for the first time since high school (that's nearly forty years ago; get off my lawn etc.). The satire is as brutally funny as I recall but the pervasive antisemitism (lots of sleazy Jewish merchant stereotypes) was something I'd entirely forgotten and not particularly welcome given the global situation nowadays.
Having previously watched only a handful of Doctor Who episodes (all from the first revival series), I've decided to hunker down and watch as much of the show as has survived right from 1963 onward, mainly via Britbox. Wish me luck! 😁 (Also wow, the First Doctor was mean...)
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Date: 2025-04-29 01:53 pm (UTC)Went to Minicon Easter weekend. Bus rides were misery, but the Radishtree has remodeled and is under better management that welcomes fans. Had signed up too late to apply for panels, so had plenty of free time--a couple of people expressed surprise/disappointment I wasn't on panels.
Had a surprisingly bad experience when I went out to Dairy Queen for lunch--apparently it was all new workers who were overwhelmed and it took them three tries to get me a fish sandwich. Not three tries to get me an acceptable fish sandwich, but one that was fish at all.
But it is so good to see people I know and like and will tolerate talking to me.
Watching reruns of the Third Doctor, slowly.
Over at my blog, I look at an anime about someone trying to write a fix-it fic from inside the story. https://www.skjam.com/2025/04/29/anime-review-zenshu/
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Date: 2025-04-29 03:20 pm (UTC)Or to be more accurate, it's a mix between Godzilla, Ultraman and Super Sentai.
The setting is that in the 30s, Kaiju appeared from the sea and the Sentai were created to fight them. But the last Kaiju was killed in the 90s and since then, Sentai is no more than a job for young people who need to pay for college or don't have any skills other than throwing a punch.
They get missions like Uber drivers, but those missions are not about fighting monsters or evil organization: it's about being bouncers, or stopping drunk fights in the streets.
The story follow 5 young people living in the same apartment and being sentai from different reasons: paying for internship, paying hospital bills and college, stop being the perfect daughter, fuck the girl who wants to stop being the perfect daughter, and for one of them, proving that Kaiju still exist and be a hero instead of a loser.
There are no flashy fights for now, except in flashbacks, since the Kaiju don't exist anymore. And even in the flashbacks, those fights are portrayed in a more gruesome, realistic way than in tokusatsu.
It's more about the interactions between the 5 characters, their dreams, their flaws, their everyday lives, plus the nice bits of lore and world building that are droped here and there.
There will be 3 volumes. For now only vol 1 is done, and I have no idea what to expect, which is great. Will monsters come back or will the story keep being about growing pains? I don't know. Either way, if it's as good as vol 1, I'll happily read it.
I hope it'll be translated in english soon, so non french speaker can enjoy it as well.
The art is very good, with an incredible attention to details. It's in black and white, except for the sentai costumes, which is a nice idea.
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Date: 2025-05-05 07:54 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-04-29 04:21 pm (UTC)And yet they still sell out of the free samples by ten o'clock on the day.
A surge of business brought on by the day and it being a weekend when there's higher footfall, or them just not ordering enough? I think yes.
("Well why not just politely ask if there's a specific one you're after?" Okay, fine. I'll do that, once I get over my severe and crippling fear of asking strangers for stuff. But it's been several decades now, so that's not any time soon.)
Much fun with Amazon deliveries yesterday. Two parcels which go from a ten minute drive away to some ludicrously circuitous route around the next city over.
Sigh.
Got one of the Star Wars Epic Collections.
Yaddle's backstory.
Maul's lightsaber's backstory.
Angry turtles attack the Republic and try to attack the Jedi Temple.
Qui-Gon decapitates a head of state for eating peo- wait, WHAT?!
... yeah, he straight up decapitates someone. Qui-Gon does not mess around. But that's pretty extreme. And the story just sort of stops there, so no-one comments on that part.
First reviews from Thunderboltsasterisktrademark are coming in. They sound... good?
Very suspicious.
Watched the premier of Andor.
I'd forgotten how slow the pacing can get.
And, as usual, Mon "Funky Winkerbean" Motha's plot consists of pain, misery, failure, uselessness, castigation and humiliation.
Just let the poor woman have one, single, solid, unqualified success, you bastards.
(Mon's daughter sucks. She really sucks. And the idea that when Mon goes on the run she's probably going to be grabbed by the Empire isn't a consolation because even the most obnoxious teenaged brat doesn't deserve that.)
Not sure if the creatures at the end of the second episode being called "doodars" lessens from the grim, serious tone the series is going for, or enhances the mad, farcical one of Cassian's situation at that point.
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Date: 2025-04-29 04:46 pm (UTC)But overall, it's good, just not as sliced-bread-slaying as the entirety of the Internet keeps telling me it is.
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Date: 2025-04-29 06:59 pm (UTC)(I'm just waiting for K2, but guessing he probably won't show until towards or just at the very end.)
At least the dinner scene is supposed to be intentionally horrible and awkward, even without one of the parties being the member of an imperial propaganda machine.
(Egad! Her table manners! *swoon*)
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Date: 2025-04-30 04:52 pm (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2025-04-29 05:37 pm (UTC)Is anyone else hyperfixated on Mr. Ring-a-Ding? It’s times like this I especially miss when the old Character toy range was made for kids and not exclusively for collectors, they used to do figures for pretty much everyone and everything and I’d have snatched one of him up the first chance I’d get.
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Date: 2025-05-11 04:36 am (UTC)I am loving Doctor Who, and the stories are getting better.
Still trying to catch up on my reading list but I will get there.