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Roy's girlfriend is so dumb. "Let's give tens of thousands of gold to the bloodthirsty leader of a literal den of thieves for the express purpose of res-ing his mooks. All this with no oversight." What a great idea.
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Feb 2, 2015 18:34
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| # ? May 25, 2024 23:10 |
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Most of you have been reading OOTS longer than me, yet are still able to be surprised when Rich starts each book with a bunch of exposition and a meandering subplot unrelated to the main quest, despite it happening like six times now 
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Feb 2, 2015 20:28
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Not surprised, just disappointed. If you're going to recap plot points at the start of a new book, at least try to hide it a bit. This is Bozzok and Grubwiggler standing in a room, repeating things they already know to each other for a whole page, with no plot development and only the most token joke right at the end. Rich is probably just getting it all out of the way as fast as he can, which I guess is fair, but we really only needed a fraction of the information presented here and there had to be more organic ways to get it across during the course of the story. All you really need is to see Grubwiggler standing next to Bozzok to put together that Bozzok must've revived the golem-maker who then made Crystal. Dolash fucked around with this message at 21:13 on Feb 2, 2015 |
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Feb 2, 2015 21:10
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It's probably because I've watched too Terminator too many times recently, but Bozzok's description of the Crystal Golem's single-mindedness cracked me up.
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Feb 2, 2015 21:17
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Dolash posted:All you really need is to see Grubwiggler standing next to Bozzok to put together that Bozzok must've revived the golem-maker who then made Crystal.
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Feb 2, 2015 21:47
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"That was one of her sloppy mistakes!" "Is that why you requested I retain her self-awareness? Because she's so skilled?" is such an incredible non-sequitur. And didn't Haley explicitly not give Bozzok her money? This is one of those times where everything would make more sense without the exposition.
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Feb 2, 2015 22:56
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I think the idea is that Bozzok is still considering Haley's backpayment of dues as the conclusion to their little spat (even if he has to retrieve it from her corpse,) and all the expense he is currently incurring will get washed away by that incoming windfall.
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Feb 2, 2015 22:58
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Carrasco posted:"That was one of her sloppy mistakes!" "Is that why you requested I retain her self-awareness? Because she's so skilled?" is such an incredible non-sequitur. And didn't Haley explicitly not give Bozzok her money? Being skilled and having good judgement are not the same thing. Presumably he kept the muscle memory, but he's in charge of the decision making.
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Feb 2, 2015 23:51
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Carrasco posted:"That was one of her sloppy mistakes!" "Is that why you requested I retain her self-awareness? Because she's so skilled?" is such an incredible non-sequitur. And didn't Haley explicitly not give Bozzok her money? Grubwiggler was responding to Bozzok talking about "a waste of talent"
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Feb 2, 2015 23:51
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Taciturn Tactician posted:"a waste of talent" I thought this was referring to Grubwiggler himself, and that the dialogue was just lovely. 
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Feb 3, 2015 01:44
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Ursine Asylum posted:I thought this was referring to Grubwiggler himself, and that the dialogue was just lovely. It was, and Grubwiggler made the leap to "if you had me rez'd with consciousness to not waste my talent, perhaps that is also the reason for bringing Crystal back with consciousness."
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Feb 3, 2015 02:40
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Taciturn Tactician posted:It was, and Grubwiggler made the leap to "if you had me rez'd with consciousness to not waste my talent, perhaps that is also the reason for bringing Crystal back with consciousness." It's a p average strip but he needs to do laborious butt-covering exposition to head off all the spergy second-guessing of his rules knowledge. For instance there are two different type of 'bringing back': crystal was made into an expensive golem with consciousness, grub wiggler was cheaply raised from the dead.
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Feb 3, 2015 04:26
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rotinaj posted:This isn't really the place for it, but is Brandon Sanderson seen as a poo poo writer? His name keeps popping up in places, and I've been wondering if he's at all decent at it. Didn't mean to make it sound like it was a slight to his skill, the dude literally wrote the first draft of a novella on a Trans-Pacific flight to Japan. I was just making a joke about these ponderous fantasy epics only being completed once the author dies and replaced with someone that actually churns out books.
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Feb 4, 2015 05:55
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Macdeo Lurjtux posted:Didn't mean to make it sound like it was a slight to his skill, the dude literally wrote the first draft of a novella on a Trans-Pacific flight to Japan. I was just making a joke about these ponderous fantasy epics only being completed once the author dies and replaced with someone that actually churns out books. To be fair about that as well, Sanderson writes a lot each day as a challenge to himself, and his first drafts are literally "Jack does some awesome fighting stuff and wins the fight and runs to the next room." style of writing. His first drafts are extremely bare bones and garbage prose, which is easy as hell to crank out. It's the rewrites where the descriptors come in. Plus a flight to Japan isn't exactly short.
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Feb 4, 2015 07:30
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I think that Sanderson pretty consistently churns out acceptable stuff. Mostly I get frustrated by his 'wow awesome' fight scenes and stuff. Sometimes it reads like Clancy mil-porn but with magic. Or like someone trying to recreate this cool scene he GM'd. Or textual anime. It's not bad just, you know, kinda empty.
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Feb 4, 2015 17:22
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the JJ posted:I think that Sanderson pretty consistently churns out acceptable stuff. Mostly I get frustrated by his 'wow awesome' fight scenes and stuff. Sometimes it reads like Clancy mil-porn but with magic. Or like someone trying to recreate this cool scene he GM'd. Or textual anime. It's not bad just, you know, kinda empty. Uhh, there is no worse feeling than being able to tell you read someones lovely D&D group's campaign notes turned into a novel. I once read a novel because the premise was an epic adventure from the POV of the evil guys and it was point for point the recap of an evil D&D campaign, just a string fairly obvious dungeon crawl, including the incredible dull death of a main character in a loving bar brawl.
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Feb 4, 2015 18:33
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This is going back a few strips (and a number of weeks), but I really liked Burlew on twitter taking fans to hand that were trying pretend or deny that Haley wasn't bi in wayss that were pretzel-bendingly evasive (read the bottom tweet first):
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Feb 6, 2015 14:20
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I read that top to bottom at first and was confused.the JJ posted:Mostly I get frustrated by his 'wow awesome' fight scenes and stuff. Sometimes it reads like Clancy mil-porn but with magic. This is actually Fate/Stay Night in a nutshell.
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Feb 6, 2015 20:15
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SirDippingSauce posted:This is going back a few strips (and a number of weeks), but I really liked Burlew on twitter taking fans to hand that were trying pretend or deny that Haley wasn't bi in wayss that were pretzel-bendingly evasive (read the bottom tweet first): What makes you think those tweets refer to Haley? IIRC the most she ever said re:sexuality was admitting some past Katy Perry songs, and you know, since it happened in ciphered speech you could hardly blame anyone for being unaware of it.
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Feb 6, 2015 21:23
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NihilCredo posted:What makes you think those tweets refer to Haley? 
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Feb 6, 2015 21:42
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Also: http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0382.html (middle panel at the bottom of first page)
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Feb 6, 2015 22:08
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Ooh, right. In theory I should be feeling dumb and forgetful now, but I'll just take the fact that I remembered the fan-made decyphering of a throwaway line from ~600 pages ago and yet had zero recollection of the third-to-last strip as further evidence that the comic has been pretty crazy weak of late.
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Feb 6, 2015 22:10
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I don't think the current chapters are any worse than the desert town chapters before V and Elan were kidnapped by the bounty hunters.
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Feb 6, 2015 22:14
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NihilCredo posted:What makes you think those tweets refer to Haley? Edit: to be fair, some of them may just be bigots. Not to imply the two are mutually exclusive. Nihilarian fucked around with this message at 22:23 on Feb 6, 2015 |
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Feb 6, 2015 22:21
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e X posted:I don't think the current chapters are any worse than the desert town chapters before V and Elan were kidnapped by the bounty hunters. Yeah, this is where I'm at with it. Every chapter starts this way, fairly slow with some minor conflict that snowballs into some huge over-arching plot. The only truly bad part of OOTS, at least for me, was when the whole party was split. Even that had some really great moments though, like V's soul splice and Belkar's curse being lifted.
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Feb 6, 2015 23:05
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V's Soul splice was the Apex of the strip. Nothing can beat that whole bit. Not saying the strip is going downhill, its just that for all the build up, and the sheer  of V's actions, and the resulting fight with Xyklon was just....amazing.
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Feb 6, 2015 23:07
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SOMETHING's different this time around, at least for me. In the past people would do this song and dance about how OOTS is going downhill blah blah blah and I'd just kind of roll my eyes and continue to enjoy the strip. "Still seems fine to me!" But not this time. Even I'M finally affected. Something feels off. It's felt off since the start of this book and for the life of me I can't articulate exactly why. All I've got is the train grinding to a halt in front of the crossing update pace or being annoyed that we're probably going to be dealing with "dur hur the party can't figure out Durkon's secret" for years. But that hardly feels like a "eureka" revelation. I can't remember when exactly I started reading, but I think it was sometime during Book #1, so it's not as though I ate through 800 strips in a day and suddenly had to wait for the rest (I never took breaks either.) NihilCredo posted:Ooh, right. You left out this far more obvious part of the ciphering though:  http://oots.wikia.com/wiki/My_Dinner_with_Elan "I kissed a girl once. OK, OK, more than once!" Going on a bit of a tangent, that strip actually made me realize I don't understand what happened with Haley's speech. So we all found out years ago that she snapped out of it by admitting she was in love with Elan. ..But she already tried that. In that strip I just linked. Repeatedly. So why did it only work later? Why was that even the solution to fixing her speech problem? I mean the cause of her loss of speech was traumatic treasure explosion, not anything that happened with Elan, specifically. Her reluctance to admit her feelings about him was an ongoing and unrelated problem.
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Feb 7, 2015 09:55
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She lost her speech in one traumatic experience, then regained it in another. In that strip she wasn't being sincere enough to herself for it to "count" as an admission.
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Feb 7, 2015 10:47
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nimby posted:She lost her speech in one traumatic experience, then regained it in another. In that strip she wasn't being sincere enough to herself for it to "count" as an admission.
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Feb 7, 2015 10:56
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Poison Mushroom posted:I'm pretty sure at one point her teenage mind self actually says exactly that, though I'd have to check.
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Feb 7, 2015 11:16
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Hmmm, Rachel is a girls name, right?
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Feb 7, 2015 11:29
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Zogundar posted:SOMETHING's different this time around, at least for me. He's been editing and releasing the latest compilation. It's pretty huge. I agree it's dragging, but talking about it dragging doesnt make it less draggy you feel me
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Feb 7, 2015 12:30
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sebmojo posted:He's been editing and releasing the latest compilation. It's pretty huge. I agree it's dragging, but talking about it dragging doesnt make it less draggy you feel me That may have been the case a while ago, but the editing was done a while ago, as in October. It was released in December and in fact is sitting on my shelf right now.
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Feb 7, 2015 15:18
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Zogundar posted:SOMETHING's different this time around, at least for me. I don't think anything is significantly different in terms of storytelling compared to the previous book, it's just a lot of changes hit at once and Rich is slower than ever. I actually think the pacing has been appropriate for the start of a new book. We've had the exposition beats, setting up the conflicts for this book, and then dropping a short term threat for the team to overcome. It's just that as a webcomic we should have been getting through the necessary bits about three times a week instead of once every two weeks which is really disruptive to the story's flow.
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Feb 7, 2015 18:38
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I guess I thought the start of the last book sucked too, so things will probably improve at some point.
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Feb 9, 2015 22:04
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Zogundar posted:SOMETHING's different this time around, at least for me. I could be wrong, but I think it's that the exposition is more blatant and--worst of all--played absolutely straight. A long time back, when Hinjo gave exposition while they were on the boats, it at least got lampshaded by Elan. The exposition in Girard's tomb also got lampshaded and made into a song. Here, we're just getting a lot of pre-emptive explanations, some of which probably wouldn't be necessary for an audience willing to just trust the author and go along for the ride, and it's the bland info-dumping that's mucking up an otherwise great comic.
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Feb 10, 2015 04:55
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He could be trying to condense again, like he did with that one MitD comic than me and some other people picked apart. Ironically that would only be making things worse though as he couldn't even fall back on a quality argument in that case.
Cliff Racer fucked around with this message at 06:51 on Feb 11, 2015 |
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Feb 10, 2015 05:01
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I remember years ago when I used to watch Linkara, a comic reviewer, and whenever he did plot events as these kind of reviewers got into the habit of doing his characters would always do these terrible bits of exposition where they'd go "I already tried doing X, Y, Z, and A and it didn't work", and I realized he'd started doing this horrifically clunky dialogue because he knew and got sick of sperging assholes who would nitpick everything down to the atom if he didn't, at the cost to his dialogue (however amateur it might be). That's the downside of works targeted to nerds. Nerds have no social skills, utterly obsessive interests, and many are smirking egotists who think finding an oversight (or a perceived one) means they're smarter and therefore better than the creator. You start getting into the habit of this kind of poo poo just because they'll be twice as aggravating otherwise.
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Feb 11, 2015 04:59
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Cornwind Evil posted:I remember years ago when I used to watch Linkara, a comic reviewer, and whenever he did plot events as these kind of reviewers got into the habit of doing his characters would always do these terrible bits of exposition where they'd go "I already tried doing X, Y, Z, and A and it didn't work", and I realized he'd started doing this horrifically clunky dialogue because he knew and got sick of sperging assholes who would nitpick everything down to the atom if he didn't, at the cost to his dialogue (however amateur it might be). Or, shocking I know, he might actually be aiming at a wider audience and thus feels the need to explain things for the benefit of more casually inclined geeks. Not to interrupt your self-loathing fueled rant or anything.
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Feb 11, 2015 15:14
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No, he's right. A lot of nerds seem to be under the impression that if they find a flaw in a narrative, it will give them a real-life Xbox Live achievement or something. It's really tiresome.
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