• BodyBySisyphus [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    3 months ago

    nerd Comic book nerd: “Look, right here on page 52 of the August 1983 issue of Captain America World Crisis Hjorkajork Invasion (third in of the 52-issue series), it shows Cap wearing the Indivisibility Ring on his MIDDLE finger, not his RING finger; the canon reason for that is probably the injury he sustained fighting the Chartreuse Calavera in Alternate Universe Capitano Mexico’s Foiled Fiesta, spring of '78. Cap took a burritorang straight to his hand that would definitely have left him with some recurring tendonitis. Your HAVE TO move the ring, IT’S A CRITICAL CALLBACK that HINTS AT Capitano Mexico’s possible return from the Null Zone!”

    lt-dbyf-dubois Comic book illustrator: “Dude, '83, huh? Yeah, that was definitely before I dried out. Probably an absinthe year, I think. I put the ring on his middle finger, huh? Sheee-it, go figure.”

    • UlyssesT [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      3 months ago

      Just imagine how hard the resident feeemale has to go out of her way to not be “bossy” or “frigid” or the like while dodging (or even giving in) to whatever creepy shit is happening around her, constantly endangering her job because her superiors may decide that she isn’t a “team player” or whatever. marx-doomer

      • robinnist@hexbear.net
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        3 months ago

        That may be so, but it also had some pretty egregious fanservice with the inclusion of OT characters even when it made no sense.

  • hypercracker@hexbear.net
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    3 months ago

    it is 2024 and fandoms have more power than industrial unionism. the Fandom Relations Act of 2026 will make it illegal to use media to challenge any conceptions whatsoever

    • Findom_DeLuise [she/her, they/them]@hexbear.net
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      3 months ago

      If Trump wins, he’s going to die shortly after being inaugurated and JD Vance is going to fuck all of the furniture in the Oval Office. Then he will dissolve the Department of Labor and replace it with the Department of Fandoms.

    • Frank [he/him, he/him]@hexbear.net
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      3 months ago

      How to usher in a brave new era of art and theater

      • ai “art”

      • al “writers”

      • fund one season direct to netflix with no intention of finishing the story

      • hire showrunners (i don’t know what a showrunner is but every time i hear the term it’s associated with some travesty of storytelling so i assume it’s bad"

      • focus group everything around the loudest, angriest frothingfash assholes you can assemble in a room

      • REgon [they/them]@hexbear.net
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        3 months ago

        Think of a showrunner as the lead editor on a newspaper. They’re not the one writing all the stories, but they’re the one who is supposed to make the whole greater than the sum of its’ parts

    • UlyssesT [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      3 months ago

      They will be less political and pander even more directly to hogs! This coincides so amazingly well with LLM treat printers that are already removing artists from art! so-true

  • SorosFootSoldier [he/him, they/them]@hexbear.net
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    3 months ago

    Imagining a room full of sweaty dinguses telling some suit “don’t put women in the game, but if you do make them hot, but not hot like a super model, no they can’t look like real women, it’s gotta be hot like a Bratz doll, y-yeah and big ol’ titties too, the smaller the boobs the more WOKE it is and WOKE is BAD.” smuglord

  • HiImThomasPynchon [des/pair, it/its]@hexbear.net
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    3 months ago

    All four images look practically the same to me. Turns out what fans of each individual franchise wants is for none of them to be distinguishable from the others.

    Phyrexians starting to look almost too on-the-nose.

  • Frank [he/him, he/him]@hexbear.net
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    3 months ago

    Ahhhhhhhhhh i am going to keep screaming ahhhhhhhhh

    This is 100% a result of gamergate teaching frothingfash that they can use harassment, doxxing, and outright terrorism. Fuckers just pulled it on Helldivers and ruined my beautiful space fascism simulator.

    And now these losers and going to proactively capitulate to actual, literal mob violence for some fucking reason. Good luck, dorks. Those hate campaigns aren’t about getting what you want, they’re about the joy of wielding power and hurting people.

    • GeorgeZBush [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      3 months ago

      Half-baked, depressed social theorizing time on my part.

      The way they’re all dropping any pretenses of being “progressive” in favor of catering to, like, frothing nerds just affirms the fact that culture is heading in an increasingly overt fascist direction. Sign of the times, I guess.

      • Frank [he/him, he/him]@hexbear.net
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        3 months ago

        Yup. Making capitulation to whoever can organize the most visible reactionary hate campaign your official policy isn’t going to lead anywhere good.

        • UlyssesT [he/him]@hexbear.net
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          3 months ago

          The 90s are coming back, aren’t they? We’re going to have “game of the year” appointees before the fucking games are even playable, and their advertising will be basically misanthropic “you are a loser, also buy our game, you loser” statements, and tacky porn. Again. rust-darkness

      • Frank [he/him, he/him]@hexbear.net
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        3 months ago

        I sincerely think Arrowhead panicked. The core team is only twenty people, they’ve had their heads down working on the game for years. Then a game that was intended to sell maybe a few hundred k units exploded, outsold most of the most popular games in history, and a niche comedy tactical shooter suddenly had a vast audience that… couldn’t figure out how to deal with a a fairly basic charging mini-boss and felt oppressed by anti-tank weapons.

        Despite having very good daily player numbers on steam I think the vast social media hate campaign, the endless tirades and histrionics on the main subreddit, and the outright harassment got to them and they basically just caved to the mob’s demands. It didn’t matter that they had a steady 25k players, all they were seeing was seething, unhinged anger from every direction.

        But hey, their 24 peak is went up to 35k as of this writing, so gutting everything that made their labor of love special and unique was probably totally worth it!

        • UlyssesT [he/him]@hexbear.net
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          3 months ago

          Are you telling me that the self-described epic freeze-gamer got especially mad at the game being too difficult this particular time?

          • Frank [he/him, he/him]@hexbear.net
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            3 months ago

            I absolutely cannot understand it. They added difficulty 10 specifically to be extremely challenging for people who wanted that… and then hordes of people… complained it was too hard? They didn’t say that, htey used words like “unfair” and “tedious” and “imbalanced”, but in the end they were complainging that the 10th and most challenging of 10 fairly granular difficulty modes was too hard for them and they demanded it be made drastically easier.

            They had ten difficulties to choose from, but they demanded to play on 10 and for 10 to be brought down to their level.

            The whole episode legitimately caused me to re-assess… uhh… there’s no not-arrogant way to say this, but my broad competencies compared to a normal person. I still can’t really grasp how people were unable to deal with chargers at all. “Clumsy armored enemy that charges you but is vulnerable from behind” is one of the simplest and oldest stock game bosses and it absoltuely, competely, utterly defeated the problem solving abilities of at minimum hundreds of thousands of people and I’m still struggling to fit that in to how I view the potential and limits of other people.

            • UlyssesT [he/him]@hexbear.net
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              3 months ago

              I’ve had heated arguments with Soulslike devotees that hate even the idea of difficulty options, but considering that this particular game has a voluntary difficulty setting right there on the proverbial tin, what the fuck? what-the-hell

              I enjoyed Vermintide 2 even while being not very great at the higher difficulties (helped having experienced companions in premades) but I knew what I was getting into, and yes, as a voluntary difficulty choice, things being really brutal and having to really strive to survive was indeed part of the fun.

              I think, ultimately, the most toxic of freeze-gamer want basically the impossible: they want to stand on a mighty gatekept hill of superiority with all the plebs/scrubs/npcs/noobs/whatever beneath them, but at the same time they don’t want to actually be challenged in a way that might humble them.

              • Frank [he/him, he/him]@hexbear.net
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                3 months ago

                I think a big chunk of it is; Normal people cannot cooperate with others.

                Like, Vermintide, Darktide? Pretty niche games where cooperation is both necessary and enforced by special disabler and assassin enemies.

                HD2, success also required cooperation, but it reached a massive audience and most of those people… just… don’t… communicate. They don’t ping, they don’t use chat, they don’t use voice. They don’t even passively stick together. I worked out, it actually makes things exponentially worse when you have players that don’t cooperate, because they trigger every patrol and spawn, they don’t cover or protect each other, the players aren’t making use of all their strats together. If you’re all together you’re rarely ever not going to have some gigantic bomb ready to go. BUt if it’s four people running off alone they’re gonna get overwhelmed even by minor threats. And since they don’t know how to cooperate they don’t know they have to cooperate, so when they get absolutely ruined by something that would be trivial for a squad working together they can only think that the game is being mean and punishing them.

                A

                • UlyssesT [he/him]@hexbear.net
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                  3 months ago

                  Mandatory cooperation games seem to have a sort of curse like that when they get popular enough. MOBAs with teams come to mind.

            • BurgerPunk [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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              3 months ago

              I absolutely cannot understand it.

              That’s because youre a fake gamer. Real gamers only play on the hardest difficulty, because they are the true elite. Only they are about to take on these difficult challenges that filthy causuals could never handle. So if the highest difficulty is too hard for a real freeze-gamer then its obviously unfair, poorly balanced, and badly implemented. Hope that helped smuglord

    • SkingradGuard [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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      3 months ago

      And now these losers and going to proactively capitulate to actual, literal mob violence for some fucking reason

      This one is extra funny because the chuds complain that the left are the ones doing “minority mob violence” to get what they want from society.

      Laughable chud delusions.

      • Frank [he/him, he/him]@hexbear.net
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        3 months ago

        Nah, in the last month the devs released a “Balance Patch” that fundamentally changes how the game works. The effectiveness of most weapons was dramatically increased while most enemies, especially the big ones, were massively nerfed. The game is not more of a conventional horde shooter than it is Helldivers 2.

  • UlyssesT [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    3 months ago

    The slop will pander harder and harder and the treat hogs will feel a sort of vague discontent and not quite be sure where it’s coming from because they can’t accept that they actually need to be challenged once in a while to get any sort of stimulation so the ennui will probably just get worse while “DEI” or whatever it’s called next is blamed all the same. marx-doomer

  • Poogona [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    3 months ago

    Horrible, just horrible

    Don’t make what the audience wants, show the audience that they actually want what you made

    • UlyssesT [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      3 months ago

      Don’t make what the audience wants, show the audience that they actually want what you made

      I’m certain that the consequences of pandering directly to ignorant toxic fans will not even satisfy those ignorant toxic fans. They won’t know what’s wrong but they’ll feel enough ennui to blame their usual suspects.

      • Poogona [he/him]@hexbear.net
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        3 months ago

        It’s why “treats” does work as a name for it, you can’t live on treats even when it’s all you want to eat

        • UlyssesT [he/him]@hexbear.net
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          3 months ago

          The most “hire fans” game project of recent years probably has to be “Subverse” which was a softcore porn game that had advertisements and marketing specifically intended to get freeze-gamergater hogs super excited for how nonpolitical that particular treat would be.

          The game was a dud. It delivered exactly what it promised, which just wasn’t interesting enough for the hogs because it lacked anything to make it stand out from what they were already jacking off to.

      • Frank [he/him, he/him]@hexbear.net
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        3 months ago

        Agreed. At this point it’s about the thrill of hatred and the power of the mob. They don’t want to be satisfied with good tv, they want to hate.

    • Frank [he/him, he/him]@hexbear.net
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      3 months ago

      Right? The customer is always wrong. If they knew how to make movies, write books, code games, tell stories, then they’d be doing that. But they don’t. All they know is consoom, dei, hate women, racism, hot chip, and lie.

      • Belly_Beanis [he/him]@hexbear.net
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        3 months ago

        G*mers aren’t good designers like…ever. Diablo 3 is my go-to example of a game where fans made it worse. A lot of the changes from Diablo 2 were things requested by people who were still playing D2 over a decade after the game came out. Then people who hadn’t played D2 since 2001 showed up, expecting some kind of religious experience, then got mad at a bunch of things because it didn’t match their childhood nostalgia.

        Anywho I’m just ranting but yeah if people were good at doing creative things they would be doing that instead of sending death threats 50 hours a week to people on social media.

        • Frank [he/him, he/him]@hexbear.net
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          3 months ago

          Yeah, but my point is most gamers, the vast majority, don’t know how games are made, they don’t know what the mechanics are, they don’t know why the mechanics are, or how they interact, or anything.

          My personal experience is D&D players who try to make the most broken optimized characters and never think about how that fits in to the campaign, the party, what work the dm has to do to balance the game around their broken character. They just see mathematically optimal character == best character because they either don’t know or don’t care how the game actually functions.

    • UlyssesT [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      3 months ago

      I tried watching Rings of Power. All of that budget, all of those resources, and it was so bland. I drifted out before the “prestige TV” torture focus really kicked in, at least.

      • sammer510 [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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        3 months ago

        RoP has many flaws that could probably be forgiven if it wasn’t just such a slog to get through. Screwing up the canon and characters and everything is one thing but at least make it good. Jackson’s films mess with the canon too but the original trilogy is still timeless because it was so well done

        • UlyssesT [he/him]@hexbear.net
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          3 months ago

          The whole (I’m not spoiler alerting this because this is such a garbage story that I don’t mind spoiling the surprise) “Sauron was just some dude that Galadriel randomly ran into after she jumped off the boat” thing was an amazing shark jump.

          lord-bezos-amused , like a lot of creativity-deprived techbros, is a very firm absolutist in Joseph Campell-like story cliches, so he had to have a “friend that becomes a traitor” moment because his own mandates said so.

          • sammer510 [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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            3 months ago

            That’s about when I stopped watching. So much wrong with that entire sequence. Lore wise, logic wise, story wise it was just so fuckin dumb. Galadriel is like Gil Galads great aunt she’s like 1000 years older than him and here he is like banishing her to Valinor which isn’t even a thing? “Auntie Galadriel, you’ve been bad, get on this boat and go to heaven and don’t come back”. Scolding her like a child when she is in fact older and more powerful? Canonically she would have a husband and CHILD at this point (both are absent from the show completely so I guess who cares) and Gil Galads like, get the fuck outta here, fuck your family I guess. And she meets Sauron in human form guy RANDOMLY FLOATING ON THE OCEAN because of course. Ugh.

            • UlyssesT [he/him]@hexbear.net
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              3 months ago

              lord-bezos-amused had an ironclad set of rules established for the writers that dogmatically obeyed what he called the recipe for an “epic” story, so Sauron had to be just some guy that Galadriel makes friends with and that friend betraaaaaays her.

          • Leon_Grotsky [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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            3 months ago

            Amazon ONLY has the rights to The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers, The Return of the King, and The Hobbit. They cannot use anything from The Silmarillion, The Unfinished Tales, The History of Middle Earth, etc. That’s why they had to take liberties with the canon.

            E) I saw somewhere Amazon acquired the rights to use some of the Silmarillion in April, dunno how exactly that shakes out, though.

              • Leon_Grotsky [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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                3 months ago

                I don’t know the whole story, but from what I understand the Tolkien estate signed an agreement with another party in the 60’s that had a clause (Matching Right) where if any further Tolkein IP film rights were available for purchase they would essentially have first dibs. The Tolkien estate are I guess piece-mealing stuff from those extended sources so Amazon can use it without opening up the properties for full rights purchasing.

                I’d love it if someone else had more or better info on this.

      • foxontherocks [undecided, undecided]@hexbear.net
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        3 months ago

        I wanted to like RoP because the costumers really put in work. The characters all look amazing. But yeah too boring. I wanted a lot more stinky hobbits and the big man and they kept jumping to storylines that had no gas.