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  1. #751
    Ultimate Member Mister Mets's Avatar
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    This has been a bad week for musicians I've seen live.

    First, Leonard Cohen.

    http://www.rollingstone.com/music/pi...-songs-w449797

    Now, Leon Russell.

    Sincerely,
    Thomas Mets

  2. #752
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    New York magazine has an interesting spotlight on Rebirth, and what DC tried to do (largely successfully.)

    That bump was not to last. By the start of 2012, Marvel was back on top, and it stayed there. It wasn’t hard to see why. The new DC continuity was supposed to simplify things, but the company had tried to eat its cake and have it, too: They didn’t want to erase certain classic narrative elements from the past, and incorporating them into the new timeline made for some baffling contradictions. For example, the new version of Batman was a guy who’d only been operating for a few years … but somehow, he’d already died, come back from the dead, and worked with three different sidekicks. On top of that, some beloved characters were totally wiped away. Others were reimagined with new attitudes or backstories that eschewed much of what had made them cool. Sales were dismal and reviews were brutal. By mid-2015, the New 52 experiment had more or less failed.

    No one saw that more clearly than DC Comics co-publishers Dan DiDio and Jim Lee. Standing in the sun-drenched lobby of this year’s New York Comic-Con, DiDio recalled to me what it was like to be the public face of DC at that convention’s 2015 installment. “We were met at a couple of panels with a level of apathy that I hadn't seen for a very long time,” he said in his Noo Yawk basso profundo. “There was a disconnect with the fan base, more than we’d even perceived. It felt palpable. Nobody was really into the stories. We might've gone a little bit too far with some of the New 52 stories and lost the connective tissue that people really used to identify with our characters.”

    Shaken, DiDio and Lee flew back to DC’s Burbank headquarters after the October convention. Along with Johns — then DC Entertainment’s chief creative officer — Lee and DiDio hammered out a rescue plan for their titles. They initially thought they would launch a crossover story that used typically out-there comic-book logic to recapture old glory by grafting pre– and post–New 52 continuity together to make what would surely have been an even more complicated patchwork quilt of facts and events. But once they had it mapped out, they realized they were missing the point. What they needed wasn’t a cosmic shakeup — they’d already done that, and look at where it had gotten them. Though they still wanted to execute an attention-grabbing event, they decided to start small. The tactic was to hit upon what Lee refers to as “the most Platonic, idealistic version of each of these characters.”

    The trio decided to name their inchoate new plan Rebirth and, on January 22, Lee tweeted a picture of a mysterious blue curtain with that word projected on it. Readers didn’t know what was being teased — and, in a way, neither did the men in charge. The project was being built in piecemeal. Johns took the lead, becoming what Lee calls the “showrunner” for this malleable new plan. He wasn’t interested in ruling by editorial fiat, which was what he, Lee, and DiDio had often done when they issued marching orders for the New 52. Instead, Johns started calling up creators for the various existing DC titles and others who were already tapped to come aboard soon. One by one, he invited them to Burbank, not explaining what, exactly, they were coming there for.

    Green Arrow writer Benjamin Percy was summoned in January. “We sat down in a room together, and one wall of windows looks out on Burbank and on the other wall is a big whiteboard,” he recalled. “Geoff's like, 'Alright, what are the greatest Green Arrow stories ever told?’” Percy gave his answers. Then Johns told him to list all the recurring motifs and plot devices that make Green Arrow unique. And all the most important supporting characters. And the villains. The whiteboard filled. “It starts as kind of a spider-web cluster, and we build out from there,” Percy said. “We figure out, ‘Okay, if you have that, what would be the greatest Green Arrow story line we could tell?’”

    Some of the elements they came up with directly contradicted Green Arrow’s New 52 status quo — and, indeed, edicts that DC had given Percy in the past as a way of modernizing the character. “When I was writing the New 52, I was told, 'No goatee. No Black Canary,'” Percy says, referring to Green Arrow’s classic facial-hair style and superpowered love interest. “But two of the first things we put up on the board were: ‘goatee,’ ‘Black Canary.’” Percy would be free to bring those things back right away, previous rules be damned.

    Writer after writer was invited to whiteboard meetings and found themselves surprised at how readily Johns gave up the existing set of rules. Batgirl and the Birds of Prey co-writers Julie and Shawna Benson were fans of classic stories where Batgirl became a hacker named Oracle; Johns told them to have Oracle be part of Batgirl’s past now, even though that stuff had been wiped away in the New 52. Supergirl had been a dangerous loose cannon in the New 52, but Supergirl writer Steve Orlando told Johns he’d always thought of her as being “about problem solving without necessarily meaning hitting someone in the face”; Johns told him he could have her act that way without any explanation of why her personality had shifted.

    Some decisions were top-down, such as replacing the youthful New 52 version of Superman with the older one from the previous continuity, and resurrecting Wally West. In all cases, the plan was to not waste too much narrative space on in-universe justifications. As their logic went, an improvement is an improvement, and it doesn’t matter much if you lay out in detail why the improvement happened. Flash writer Joshua Williamson told me he was getting into the weeds about why an idea might not work due to New 52 continuity, but “Geoff was like, ‘Just forget everything. Forget everything, none of that matters. None of it matters. What are you trying to say about this character?’”

    This was a subtly and mildly revolutionary approach to a superhero overhaul. There had been no shortage of reboots at DC and Marvel, all of them designed to short-circuit the whole operation through some apocalyptic, reality-shifting story line. More recently, Marvel has tended toward canceling batches of series and restarting them with new number-one issues to provide the illusion of change without actually altering anything. Rebirth was going to be something that sought the best of both worlds: There would be genuine change to the status quo, but most of it would happen without fanfare, and there would be no intrusive mega-crossover to disrupt stories that were already going fine.

    Readers and industry-watchers could be forgiven for not quite understanding all of that, given that it hadn’t been tried before. In February, DC laid out the list of Rebirth series, all but two of which were going to start with new number-one issues. (In a surprising move, DC reverted the long-running Action Comics and Detective Comics back to their pre-2011 numbering system, meaning they were now putting out issues numbered in the 900s). Some of the titles were old standbys, your Supermans and Batmans; some of them were intriguingly odd, like the tale of a Chinese Superman knockoff called New Super-Man and a series about the adventures of Batman and Superman's young children. Many of the books would come out twice a month, a departure from the standard monthly schedule of the comics industry. The company didn’t do a great job of explaining themselves — Lee and Johns both tweeted, “IT’S NOT A REBOOT,” but didn’t say what it was. “It’s not just an event,” Johns said in a promo video (below), “but an ongoing mission for us” — another stubbornly vague description.
    Sincerely,
    Thomas Mets

  3. #753

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    The Predator is a bad movie, and is really stupid. I had more confidence in liking it given the skilled craftsman behind it.
    TRUTH, JUSTICE, HOPE
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    Looks like I'll have to move past gameplay footage

  4. #754
    Ultimate Member Mister Mets's Avatar
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    I just learned that Zeb Wells has been married to Heidi Gardner of Saturday Night Live for nearly ten years. I didn't really know where else to write about it here. It seemed a little odd to try to find a "Who can write Peter and Mary Jane?" thread to point out that a former Spider-Man writer now has firsthand experience about being in a relationship with someone who is beautiful and famous.
    Sincerely,
    Thomas Mets

  5. #755
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    Quote Originally Posted by Mister Mets View Post
    I just learned that Zeb Wells has been married to Heidi Gardner of Saturday Night Live for nearly ten years. I didn't really know where else to write about it here.
    Gossip is fine, I guess. And you're the mod, mod.

    It seemed a little odd to try to find a "Who can write Peter and Mary Jane?" thread to point out that a former Spider-Man writer now has firsthand experience about being in a relationship with someone who is beautiful and famous.
    I think a writer with talent, skill, conviction, empathy and craft can write Peter and Mary Jane quite outside of anything in their personal lives. Peter met and knew Mary Jane before she became famous and the stuff about their relationship isn't really based on fame. It's based on substance that's common for every relationship -- trust, commitment, fear, love, worry, doubt.

    The reverse can be true...i.e. you can be married to someone famous and beautiful and that not have any impact on your writing. Stan Lee was by all accounts happily married to a woman who was quite important in his life and so on...yet from reading his works, it's clear that he wasn't really the best writer of women, and a pretty bad writer of relationships. Compare that to Jack Kirby, creator of Scott Free and Big Barda, based on his own marriage to Roz.

  6. #756
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    Quote Originally Posted by Revolutionary_Jack View Post
    Gossip is fine, I guess. And you're the mod, mod.



    I think a writer with talent, skill, conviction, empathy and craft can write Peter and Mary Jane quite outside of anything in their personal lives. Peter met and knew Mary Jane before she became famous and the stuff about their relationship isn't really based on fame. It's based on substance that's common for every relationship -- trust, commitment, fear, love, worry, doubt.

    The reverse can be true...i.e. you can be married to someone famous and beautiful and that not have any impact on your writing. Stan Lee was by all accounts happily married to a woman who was quite important in his life and so on...yet from reading his works, it's clear that he wasn't really the best writer of women, and a pretty bad writer of relationships. Compare that to Jack Kirby, creator of Scott Free and Big Barda, based on his own marriage to Roz.
    It's not gossip, since it's based on confirmed facts. There's no rumor here.

    Gardner didn't become famous until recently (she joined the cast of Satuday Night Live in 2017) so at the time he wrote Spider-Man comics, Zeb Wells didn't have the experience of being married to someone famous.
    Sincerely,
    Thomas Mets

  7. #757
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    Quote Originally Posted by Mister Mets View Post
    It's not gossip, since it's based on confirmed facts. There's no rumor here.

    Gardner didn't become famous until recently (she joined the cast of Satuday Night Live in 2017) so at the time he wrote Spider-Man comics, Zeb Wells didn't have the experience of being married to someone famous.
    I, for one, find this an interesting factoid. Certainly worthy of mention in an off-topic thread, at the very least. Thank you, Mister Mets. I do imagine that sort of experience would give a writer some interesting insights.

  8. #758

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    This thread is alive again, I never thought it would resurface after its last burial.

    Is anyone here a fan of Resident Evil games? I'm still waiting for a discount of the full package to be released, and wonder how many think the remake of RE2 is better than the original.
    TRUTH, JUSTICE, HOPE
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  9. #759
    Extraordinary Member Lukmendes's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Speed Force League Unlimited View Post
    This thread is alive again, I never thought it would resurface after its last burial.

    Is anyone here a fan of Resident Evil games? I'm still waiting for a discount of the full package to be released, and wonder how many think the remake of RE2 is better than the original.
    It's better than the original in the following ways:

    Tension, just about everything is more dangerous, zombies can be hard to avoid, and it takes a lot of bullets to kill them, they also chase you around, lickers are way more dangerous too, Mr. X also chases you around, you can hear his footsteps, and while he isn't really dangerous by himself, him and other enemies combined can be a problem.

    Writing, 'cause let's face it, RE2's writing was kinda eh in the dialogues, here it feels much more human, natural, specially Sherry, way better character here.

    Boss battles, for the most part, RE2's original bosses were for the most part, mediocre or just bad, the bosses couldn't approach you fast enough before you killed them, they actually had interesting movesets, but since killing them is so easy, why bother? Here they actually line long enough for you to have an actual fight, and they do have generally interesting mechanics.

    There's also cool stuff like zombies and Mr. X hearing your steps, so if you run, they may find you faster.

    And this is what's worse:

    OST, honestly there's like, 3 musics I remember in the game, the rest are pretty forgettable.

    A/B scenario, honestly, this kinda pissed me off, in the original, while A and B weren't too different, but it was enough, you got different cutscenes to reflect these different paths, and fought different bosses, in the remake, they share the same cutscenes, don't have exclusive bosses outside of G5, and the whole thing just doesn't make sense, basically what separates A/B is that you get a new handgun that uses different ammo, the handgun ammo you can get from powder is still the same one, but the ones you find are the new one's, so you have to decide between which you'll use, and Mr. X shows up earlier, and the final boss is G5.

    And Irons, while a lot of characters improved, Irons just got worse, in the original he's an ******* who went insane, thought he was infected and decided to **** over the police station so everyone dies with him, here? He's little more than Willian's puppet following his orders. Arguably I'd say Ada falls in this too somewhat, she feels too serious and dismissive, and she isn't usually like that.

    So overall as a game, it's better, but still worse than the original in a few ways.

    One thing I miss from the classic REs is to be able to dodge zombies, since they moved in erratic ways, you could position yourself to avoid them without wasting a single bullet, but zombies in this game are too dangerous for that to be a possibility for the most part.
    Last edited by Lukmendes; 10-24-2019 at 10:34 AM.

  10. #760
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    Quote Originally Posted by Mister Mets View Post
    It's not gossip, since it's based on confirmed facts. There's no rumor here.
    Well gossip refers to any discussion about the private lives of public figures (https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/gossip). It doesn't have to be rumor.

    Gardner didn't become famous until recently (she joined the cast of Satuday Night Live in 2017) so at the time he wrote Spider-Man comics, Zeb Wells didn't have the experience of being married to someone famous.
    So it doesn't truly have any bearing on Zeb Wells' work (since he didn't exactly write MJ much in his BND issues IIRC).

    Good for Mr. Wells though. I wonder if the Claremont MTU where SNL performers showed up comes up when they find common ground in their careers.

  11. #761

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    Quote Originally Posted by Lukmendes View Post
    It's better than the original in the following ways:

    Tension, just about everything is more dangerous, zombies can be hard to avoid, and it takes a lot of bullets to kill them, they also chase you around, lickers are way more dangerous too, Mr. X also chases you around, you can hear his footsteps, and while he isn't really dangerous by himself, him and other enemies combined can be a problem.

    Writing, 'cause let's face it, RE2's writing was kinda eh in the dialogues, here it feels much more human, natural, specially Sherry, way better character here.

    Boss battles, for the most part, RE2's original bosses were for the most part, mediocre or just bad, the bosses couldn't approach you fast enough before you killed them, they actually had interesting movesets, but since killing them is so easy, why bother? Here they actually line long enough for you to have an actual fight, and they do have generally interesting mechanics.

    There's also cool stuff like zombies and Mr. X hearing your steps, so if you run, they may find you faster.

    And this is what's worse:

    OST, honestly there's like, 3 musics I remember in the game, the rest are pretty forgettable.

    A/B scenario, honestly, this kinda pissed me off, in the original, while A and B weren't too different, but it was enough, you got different cutscenes to reflect these different paths, and fought different bosses, in the remake, they share the same cutscenes, don't have exclusive bosses outside of G5, and the whole thing just doesn't make sense, basically what separates A/B is that you get a new handgun that uses different ammo, the handgun ammo you can get from powder is still the same one, but the ones you find are the new one's, so you have to decide between which you'll use, and Mr. X shows up earlier, and the final boss is G5.

    And Irons, while a lot of characters improved, Irons just got worse, in the original he's an ******* who went insane, thought he was infected and decided to **** over the police station so everyone dies with him, here? He's little more than Willian's puppet following his orders. Arguably I'd say Ada falls in this too somewhat, she feels too serious and dismissive, and she isn't usually like that.

    So overall as a game, it's better, but still worse than the original in a few ways.

    One thing I miss from the classic REs is to be able to dodge zombies, since they moved in erratic ways, you could position yourself to avoid them without wasting a single bullet, but zombies in this game are too dangerous for that to be a possibility for the most part.
    These points to note don't seem to differ between reviewers and players. I guess I should embrace that the new game won't make me act like I don't need to replay the original.
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  12. #762
    Ultimate Member Mister Mets's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Revolutionary_Jack View Post
    Well gossip refers to any discussion about the private lives of public figures (https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/gossip). It doesn't have to be rumor.



    So it doesn't truly have any bearing on Zeb Wells' work (since he didn't exactly write MJ much in his BND issues IIRC).

    Good for Mr. Wells though. I wonder if the Claremont MTU where SNL performers showed up comes up when they find common ground in their careers.
    Google "gossip" and the definition is "casual or unconstrained conversation or reports about other people, typically involving details that are not confirmed as being true." Wikipedia refers to "idle talk" or "rumor."

    I didn't say it affected his earlier work, just that he now has firsthand experience on being in a relationship with someone famous. To add to that he probably has a relationship that matches Peter Parker's mostly closely, in that the woman he loved was ambitious and realized her ambitions, getting to a significant level of recognition, although there would still be challenges getting further (she wasn't promoted to the main cast until a month ago.)
    Sincerely,
    Thomas Mets

  13. #763
    Ultimate Member Mister Mets's Avatar
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    The Joker is a massive hit, $300,000,000 domestically and $900,000,000 worldwide on a budget below any recent major superhero film.

    https://www.forbes.com/sites/scottme.../#24fcc9817779

    What do you guys think about this?
    Sincerely,
    Thomas Mets

  14. #764
    Y'know. Pav's Avatar
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    I'm not sure I mentioned it here before, but earlier this yesr, my parents lost their house to a fire. One consequence was that I lost the comics from my childhood and even some more recent ones.

    Today I did a quick run-through of what I lost, and just off the top of my head (coupled with some quick Google searches) I easily listed 700 comics!

    I had the Clone Saga up through the first two years of the reboot, plus all of Brand New Day, not to mention Slingers, Spider-Girl, Sleepwalker, Darkhawk, Morbius, Marvel Vs. DC / Amalgam... plenty more...

    Here's hoping I'm able to replace much if what was lost.

    -Pav, who is going to a local con this weekend...
    You were Spider-Man then. You and Peter had agreed on it. But he came back right when you started feeling comfortable.
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  15. #765
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    Quote Originally Posted by Mister Mets View Post
    The Joker is a massive hit, $300,000,000 domestically and $900,000,000 worldwide on a budget below any recent major superhero film.

    https://www.forbes.com/sites/scottme.../#24fcc9817779

    What do you guys think about this?
    As a movie, I thought it was a little above average mostly for Joaquin Phoenix's performance. The actual plot and other stuff didn't interest me too much, and I think the ties to Batman hurt the movie more than helped it.

    But I am quite happy that Joker did well overall. Since now you can do other kinds of comics films, like a Doctor Doom movie and so on. Unlike Venom where Hardy's Eddie Brock was an anti-hero who fought a guy worse than him, Joker ends the movie as a villain. So it's by far the more radical film, more radical than Venom and even more than Deadpool. Not as radical as Logan, or as good as Logan of course.

    And again it just confirms how big of a character Joker is. Here's how every live-action movie featuring Joker has done:

    Batman 1989 [Unadjusted for Inflation] - Domestic : $251,348,343 / International : $160,208,482 / Worldwide: $411,556,825 [$1,560,313,276 Adjusted for Inflation]

    The Dark Knight - Domestic : $533,345,358 / International: $469,700,000 / Worldwide : $1,003,045,358

    Suicide Squad - Domestic :$325,100,054 / International: $421,746,840 / Worldwide: $746,846,894

    Joker 2019 - Domestic: $299,611,992 / International: $634,400,000 / Worldwide: $934,011,992

    Joker (2019) is distinguished by its far smaller budget than any other film. It does fall in with the trend of DC Movies lately not being as successful domestically as they are internationally, which is a departure from the Burton and Nolan days which captured the US Market better. Still this is remarkable in any case. Joker is heavily featured in the two most profitable Batman villains, a movie where he played a minor role in did pretty okay all things considering while a movie starring him was bigger than Justice League and a Batman-Superman team-up. So he is clearly the biggest comic book villain of them all, and the fact that Batman movies without him haven't exceeded the profits of movies with him is pretty interesting since Joker has arguably become the second most important character in Batman after Bruce Wayne, supplanting the likes of Robin, Alfred, Gordon and others who have a more organic claim to that.

    Overall, I think DC might become what Warner Bros' as a studio were in the 30s. During the 30s, WB was the studio of gritty crime dramas and real socially important stories to contrast against MGM (the biggest studio then) being a family friendly place. So now Disney is MGM while DC/WB are still Warner Bros. So they might be better doing small one-off arty takes on superhero which pushes the envelope. And of course Joker being R Rated and a big international success is interesting.

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