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Alhazred posted:
It's more nihilistic than that. The Swarm isn't going to bother wiping out humanity unless humanity attacks. Otherwise it's going to sit back and do Swarm stuff as usual while humanity dies on a time scale that's a while for us but nothing on a universal level. It implies that all intelligent life eventually snuffs itself out, which is why it only grows a thinkin' bug to tell potential invaders how screwed they are. And in the meantime it's going to breed Swarm/human hybrids that may be used as anti-human defense and, whether they're used for that or humans die on their own, will eventually be the only remnants of humanity left in the universe.
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May 21, 2022 17:18
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Vanderdeath posted:Eh, I wouldn't. In the short stories, the Investors (those aliens) are the only species with superluminal travel and maintain an absolute death grip monopoly on it. It's been a little while since I read that collection but I seen to recall that the relationship between Humanity and the Investors to be seen as perfunctory at best. It's why the final thing the Investor says to Afriel mirrors what Swarm says; they're both manipulating Humanity for their own goals. So they're like the Spacing Guild? What are they getting from humanity in exchange?
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May 21, 2022 17:59
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Panfilo posted:So they're like the Spacing Guild? What are they getting from humanity in exchange? anime
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May 21, 2022 18:16
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This show will remain dead to me until they do two seasons in a row adapting only stories by women
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May 21, 2022 19:23
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Ok, I was bored and against my better judgement I've watched this. Tl;dr: just watch Jibaro and skip the rest. Three Robots - still the same cliched snarky robots, but at least a slight improvement on the previous ones I think, at least they're maybe kinda trying to say something this time around. Also appreciated them making fun of dipshit techbros. But then they squandered that goodwill with a stupid ending. Overall meh/forgettable Bad Travelling - if you spend even a minute thinking about the premise and story it's completely stupid. Also some really noticeable unnecesary slapstic cliches - guy gulping when about to die, guy dropping knife from mouth. And also it's just another iteration on 'bunch of guys fight a monster'. Forgettable. The Very Pulse of the Machine - this one I wanted to like the most, seemed like they had an interesting idea, but ultimately it was communicated badly. Halfway through they just have a voice awkwardly tell you what's going on. Very awkward pacing. "That hole... it's like a highway into her mind" lmao c'mon. Cool concept but barely does anything with it. Night of the Mini Dead - stupid waste of time Kill Team Kill - oh cool a millionth iteration of 'army guys shoot at thing'. This one was doubly weird, because if you're not doing mind-melting CG, and you're also not doing a decent story, then what's even the point? I mean, the traditional animation in this is still very nice and fluid, but why go with this generic poo poo? Made it only halfway and it's only 10 minutes long Swarm - ok wow, first one I would consider good. No immediately stupid elements, it even has a theme. By the standards of this series that's already a lot. Nice. Mason's Rats - back to dumb quirky rooty tooty shooty poo poo In Vaulted Halls Entombed - loving soldiers again, end me. delta zero three gently caress off. also it's a cthulhu ripoff, how original. also your lipsynch is poo poo Jibaro - Ok folks, we might have a second good one. Still suffers a bit from the 'soldiers encounter thing' syndrome, but it's so gorgeous and stylish that I'm willing to forgive it this one time. Might be the best one out of the entire series actually.
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May 21, 2022 22:38
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On average better than season 2. I dont mind the lack of meaningful story so much, but it should at least have a interesting theme or atmosphere. The Very Pulse of the Machine and Jibaro has both in spades. So those are my number 1 and 2. The Swarm too to a degree but the stupidity of the humans annoyed me too much. Would however love to see a sequel set 300 hence when another hot shot wants to do some frontier science. Mini Dead was at least chuckleworthy. I liked Bad Traveling, it was a cool little story and it looked good to my eyes. The rest was meh. Three Robots was just boring preaching: You have to be very good to make "tell not show" the premise for your story. They did not pull it off. Soldier stories were honestly boring to me and blended together. Least favorite for me was Mason`s rat because of the stupid and frankly offensive ending.
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May 21, 2022 23:35
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The Ones You Should Watch Jibaro: Its always disappointing to me that most studios don't take LDR as an excuse to go buckwild with their animation and stories. Jibaro does and in doing so blows every other short in the entire series out of the water. If you only watch one, make it this one. Bad Traveling: Feels like a longer piece that had to get compressed a little too much to fit into its time slot. Still decent. I liked the realistic-but-stylized art style. That, along with the plot, reminded me a lot of the Dishonored games. The Very Pulse of the Machine: A good art style carries a ho-hum story. Felt most reminiscent of "Ice" and "Fish Night" from the previous seasons. Cute, But Skippable Night of the Mini Dead: The epitome of this category. Just a few cute vignettes of a zombie apocalypse from a different style. Only lasts five minutes. Mason's Rats: Nothing too surprising, but executed well. Again, just a fun little short. Kill Team Kill: This one doesn't pull off its goofy parody as well as it thinks it does, but I found myself enjoying it by the end. Three Robots 2 Furious: Literally forgot about this one till I was editing this post, but its not bad enough to go in the bad category. Just extremely whatever. Insanely Bad, Do Not Watch In Vaulted Halls Entombed: Even my tremendous weakness for Lovecraft stuff couldn't save this one. The realistic CGI military stories are always some of the worst ones in this series, stop making them!!! Swarm: I do not know what the point of this short was. It consists of explaining the plot, a boring action sequence, and explaining the plot again. It ends right as something might actually happen. Absolute garbage, in competition with The Dump and The Drowned Giant for the worst short in the series. 1stGear fucked around with this message at 23:43 on May 21, 2022 |
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May 21, 2022 23:36
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I think if they are going with the "military encounters weird poo poo" maybe stop trying to reinvent the wheel and do something fun with it, like have a contiguous plot done by different studios and have it go in different fun directions, because as is it feels derivative and taking the safe approach just turns off audiences.
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May 22, 2022 00:21
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Night of the Mini Dead is a cute five minutes, and you are haters and nerds. The one that caught me was In Vaulted Halls Entombed, and not because it was good, because it wasn't. "Troops Fight Cthulhu" is a lazy genre, and this is lazy even by those standards. But as a proof of concept for further blending live-action with CGI, it's interesting. You can spot the seams, and the execution is frequently clumsy, but the potential is obviously there. I'd be interested to see how far they can push this sort of thing. General Battuta posted:This show will remain dead to me until they do two seasons in a row adapting only stories by women I remain strongly of the opinion that you should just write a loving episode for this already. Christ, be a buddy.
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May 22, 2022 01:20
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i don't know why i keep watching this garbage. night of the mini dead was fine. jibaro is beautiful, even if the editing was pretty annoying at times – it's elevated above the rest by virtue of not having embarrassing video game dialogue. fincher's one had such a thin story, i groaned when i checked the time and it was only half done. how do you manage to whiff the 'creeping dread' part of a story about sacrificing people one-by-one to a crab monster lol.
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May 22, 2022 02:44
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I guess I'm the only one that didn't care for Jibaro and I had really liked The Witness. It just didn't make much sense to me, the whole thing was just these characters screaming and cartwheeling around. It wasn't clear why the "siren" was doing any of it. She was protecting the lake? But they didn't seem to be after anything in the lake anyway.
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May 22, 2022 05:17
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I think it was supposed to be a fountain of youth thing seeing as she came back to life when exposed to the blood and the conquistador was able to hear.
muscles like this! fucked around with this message at 06:27 on May 22, 2022 |
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May 22, 2022 06:02
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I think I enjoyed The Very Pulse of the Machine the most. Bad Travelling/Jibaro were runners-up for me. The rest were all forgettable but I enjoyed the animation in all of them even the boring military ones.
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May 22, 2022 06:26
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The more I think about Swarm, the more I warm to it a bit. I still think it's one of the worst shorts, but the whole intelligence is not a survival trait is basically the commentary Three Robots was trying to make but with some actual subtlety and art. So still bad, but that elevates it a touch. Vaulted Halls can still suck it though. Are you going to do something interesting with your tiny swarming carnivores? Oh, no, just the exact same sequence of events as every other media with tiny swarming carnivores. Did Sarge shooting those two random silhouettes mean anything, maybe like some time loop fuckery with him and the woman? Nope, just killed two complete randos, accurate representation of the US invasion of Afghanistan I guess. Is your eldritch monstrosity something unique like they all should be in a post-Bloodborne world? Nah, literally just Big Daddy C once again. God, what a loving waste of time.
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May 22, 2022 06:35
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Aguirre, the Wrath of Gaga.
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May 22, 2022 06:49
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1. Bad Traveling - A surprisingly quality written, directed, and edited short. I will admit I there are some things in terms of the relationship between the protagonist and their crew I felt was a bit "off" but besides that the short was fantastic. Great concept, great acting, great everything. 2. Jibaro - Admittedly confusing in the beginning, but once you accept this is suppose to be disorienting it's great. It's very unique and the artstyle and tone makes it seem like it comes from a completely unique culture not from Europe, despite it taking place in a fictional Europe. I also really enjoyed how much the short communicated with no speech. ________ The above two are what I hoped this series would be from the get go. Great, unique, stories and animation that are crafted for adult eyes. Unfortunately pretty much the rest of the series misses this mark, thus there is quite a bit gap between 2 and 3. 3. Mason's Rats - It was fun. I did find it odd that the rats just like immediately made a truce because he killed the robot thing that was going to die anyway. This guy has been massacring them the entire time. 4. Kill Team Kill - What can I say? I'm a sucker for 2D animation. The animation had some great parts, and the crew was funny. However, I found the last second downer ending to be dumb. And the "America! gently caress YEAH!" parody got old fast. Titmouse can do better. _________________ The above I would rank as merely "above average". Like just interesting enough to have me watch it. Everything else below number 4 ranges from bad to mediocre at best. 5. Swarm - This gets points mostly for being unique. I liked the artstyle and graphics. The ending was also really good. 6. Three Robots: Exit Strategies - How bad is the second half of the list? These fuckers make a return and manage to be quite away from the bottom. I found the reveal of why the human species died out to be dumb (the robots rebelled!). Come to think of it, it makes little sense, why are they tasked to find out about humans anyway if it was a robot uprising. These characters ARE robots themselves! The never-ending "lol American right wing...get it?" jokes were also dumb. I did like the shoutout of that libertarian society that will be on a huge boat (that part is based on a real thing). Also the twist ending was dumb. 7. In the Vaulted Hills Entombed - Boring as poo poo until I realized "Holy cow they have gradually gotten smaller as the stairway steps are huge and the spider things are bigger than them! But for some reason the soldiers don't react to this. The Lovecraft stuff was cool at the end but very rushed, but it left a strong enough impression to keep it from last place. 8. Night of the Mini Dead - Unique animation style but outside of that it's completely forgettable. The beginning with the couple having sex everywhere was dumb and too "OW THE EDGE!" 9. The Very Pulse of the Machine - This gets last place because I have no idea what even happened. It was boring, just so loving boring. There is nothing worse than being boring, and I didn't find this "profound" at all. sb hermit posted:Then again, we never know precisely why the soldiers were there in the first place. Were they hunting the siren? Were they hunting her for the healing properties in her blood? They wanted all of the gold she was wearing. This is why the protagonist was carrying it all in a stash toward the end. Oxxidation posted:his conversation with the crab took place because, when asked to draw straws for the responsibility, the guy who drew the short straw hurled him into the brig with the rest of the crew's passive consent. from that point on he was probably less inclined to trust in their better natures So who got the short straw was suppose to go into the brig? I initially thought it was because the crew was afraid of the big guy, but apparently not since they literally drag him to his death a few minutes later. punk rebel ecks fucked around with this message at 08:45 on May 22, 2022 |
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May 22, 2022 08:42
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Yeah, they're Conquistadors who've been tasked by the Church to steal New World gold.punk rebel ecks posted:So who got the short straw was suppose to go into the brig? I initially thought it was because the crew was afraid of the big guy, but apparently not since they literally drag him to his death a few minutes later. The crew reprioritise once the main dude returns with knowledge of the creature and an apparent plan. The gun helps too. Open Source Idiom fucked around with this message at 09:36 on May 22, 2022 |
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May 22, 2022 09:32
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muscles like this! posted:I think it was supposed to be a fountain of youth thing seeing as she came back to life when exposed to the blood and the conquistador was able to hear. that was my guess as well. the apparent order of secretive monks on site wouldn't have been there in the service of a murderous golden lady, considering that she appears to kill anyone she sees the "protagonist" just shifted his priorities
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May 22, 2022 14:18
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Wait Jibaro was all CGI? That's... holy poo poo. I thought whoa they threw in this crazy live action short, kinda cheating but I guess it's stylized enough that it counts. I am officially old.
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May 22, 2022 15:46
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Sneeing Emu posted:Wait Jibaro was all CGI? That's... holy poo poo. I thought whoa they threw in this crazy live action short, kinda cheating but I guess it's stylized enough that it counts. I am officially old. IIRC the artist uses a combination of CGI and 2D drawing for texture work. I could be wrong in that’s how it works but I do know they do something unique. The animation director/director also worked on Spider-Man: Into the Spiderverse.
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May 22, 2022 18:03
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swarm is a great story, but i don’t see why they thought it would be a compelling visual adaptation compared to the original jibaro was just beyond, but i kinda hate how it makes the show and other episodes look much better just by association, y’know? kliras fucked around with this message at 18:23 on May 22, 2022 |
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May 22, 2022 18:19
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punk rebel ecks posted:IIRC the artist uses a combination of CGI and 2D drawing for texture work. I could be wrong in that’s how it works but I do know they do something unique. The animation director/director also worked on Spider-Man: Into the Spiderverse. Yeah, that's mostly it. It's a unique combination of a very detailed/realistic lighting engine and highly stylized textures that are at least partially hand-drawn (like Deaf Guy's beard that is really just a squiggle). In addition to that it also uses some quite unique lighting setups, like the camera-mounted overexposed lights in the night scenes that give things an almost nature documentary look, and also a lot of variety in the focal lengths used to emphasize the characters' state of mind.
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May 22, 2022 18:33
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Ignoring the stories and looking at these just from a technical execution POV, my ranking would be: 1. Jibaro - Just stunning, by a country mile. I was trying to figure out who the actors were, where it was filmed, etc... and it's all CG. It blows me away because the lighting, physics, and animation were all flawless. The animation is beyond top notch. Of course they mo-capped real dancers, but the environmental animation was also flawless: the water, the trees, the horses interacting with the water. I'm surprised the credits list was relatively short. I couldn't take my eyes off it, I don't think I blinked once. 2. The Very Pulse of the Machine - Beautiful technical achievement; the psychedelic color scheme worked really well, it felt like a hi-res version of some 70s cartoons. They did a great job of converting 3D models/environment into a 2D style, which is tricky to do in a way that doesn't make the viewer realize they're watching faux-3D. It still kept that hand-drawn look. Even when she crashes through the water at the end, the churn and bubbles still kept in the style. 3. Bad Travelling - I was really impressed by the crab's lighting and animation; that mouth seemed truly visceral. The environmental effects were incredible, especially the fire. The sea water interacting with the ship was remarkable too. The only thing that seemed a bit lacking was the human's animation style; its was just off being real, and their skin texture looked a little bit like plasticine. But hey, maybe that was just a stylistic choice. The rest were well-executed technically, but nothing to write home about. If I was going to offer any notes, it would be: - Night of the Mini Dead: should have leaned more into the "home-made diorama" aspect of it; the humans/zombies should have moved in a more stop-motion way. - In Vaulted Halls Entombed: The human's eyes seemed pretty dead, not Polar Express dead, but PS3 cutscene dead. The creatures moved and swarmed in the pretty standard way they do in every movie... would it be so hard to do something stylistically different?
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May 22, 2022 19:58
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punk rebel ecks posted:7. In the Vaulted Hills Entombed - Boring as poo poo until I realized "Holy cow they have gradually gotten smaller as the stairway steps are huge and the spider things are bigger than them! But for some reason the soldiers don't react to this. The Lovecraft stuff was cool at the end but very rushed, but it left a strong enough impression to keep it from last place. I didn't even consider this possibility, but now I am thinking it would have been a great twist if they freed the Great Old One, and it turned out to be size of a mouse or something and got run over by a random car on its way to destroying civilization. Missed opportunity, IMO.
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May 22, 2022 20:14
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I liked that bit of irony with The Swarm in that the swarm itself was against humanity creating copies of its species to use for their own, but ended up doing the exact same thing with humans.
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May 22, 2022 23:22
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Panfilo posted:I guess I'm the only one that didn't care for Jibaro and I had really liked The Witness. It just didn't make much sense to me, the whole thing was just these characters screaming and cartwheeling around. It wasn't clear why the "siren" was doing any of it. She was protecting the lake? But they didn't seem to be after anything in the lake anyway. Huh? She was only 'awakened' once the deaf conquistador took a gold nugget out of the lake. (edit: on re-watching, it looked like it was specifically one of her golden scales, the same kind that he later rips off her) Jibaro was the clear stand out in my opinion, and I wish they would either use more original stories instead of adaptations, or at least get way more diverse in what they're adapting. Like no offense John Scalzi but how about giving someone else a chance once in a while? Pick more women writers, pick more non-American writers, pick more stories that aren't about soldiers. You can go so many places in sci fi, and it would help show off different animation studios too if they weren't so often doing similar stories. Useful Distraction fucked around with this message at 19:56 on May 23, 2022 |
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May 23, 2022 07:03
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Why would anyone create a myth about a ancient powerful creature laden in gold killing psychopathic conquistadors who want to take said gold and probably slip her the chorizo? And they don't speak the same language even. Seems unrealistic. Reminded me a lot of certain chapters in American Gods. Except she would have to die. Or an Elden Ring boss with an endless lake full of heavy armor marionettes. And the only way to find the lore is to examine a necklace. Or read the description of some spirit ashes.
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May 23, 2022 12:01
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Why would colonizers from thousands of miles away speak the same language as an ancient being in a completely different continent?
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May 23, 2022 16:29
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Sorry, I was projecting sarcasm toward a post a ways back , that was inner monologue. I beyond loved it, and lack of dialogue only made it better.
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May 23, 2022 16:36
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I don't know why people keep talking about conquistadores in Jibaro except that one (1) of the dudes wears a morion. That forest and lake looked completely temperate.
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May 23, 2022 18:19
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Jibaro is a Spanish word used by the conquistadors for the indigenous people encountered in Equador and Peru.
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May 23, 2022 18:40
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Macdeo Lurjtux posted:Jibaro is a Spanish word used by the conquistadors for the indigenous people encountered in Equador and Peru. Technically I think that’s Jivaro. Jibaro are Puerto Rican peasants/countryside folk? Which would gel somewhat with the conquistador aesthetic if this was taking place in PR.
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May 23, 2022 20:09
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As a secondary observation for In Vaulted Halls Entombed, I'd also like to express my appreciation for literally Cthulhu being housed in the side of a random, easily accessible hill in Afghanistan, a 15-minute walk from the entrance, like it's a Skyrim dungeon or something. There's certainly metaphorical qualities to be found there, but purely as a practical story beat it is top-notch A+ 100% funny as hell.
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May 23, 2022 20:14
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Happy Noodle Boy posted:Technically I think that’s Jivaro. Jibaro are Puerto Rican peasants/countryside folk? Which would gel somewhat with the conquistador aesthetic if this was taking place in PR. Jivaro (or really Xivarro) was what they called themselves, Jibaro was the Spanish form of it. It became general use for a Puerto Rican farm movement that rejected the colonialism of the Spanish in the 19th century and moved in the the mountains to live self sufficiently inspired by the Jivaro who had told the Conquistadors to pound sand, and lived free from Spanish influence until the late 19th century.
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May 23, 2022 20:29
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POWELL CURES KIDS posted:a 15-minute walk from the entrance Yeah, it was a cakewalk. Nothing noteworthy happened during that little hike and everyone enjoyed it immensely from start to finish.
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May 23, 2022 22:10
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mcbexx posted:Yeah, it was a cakewalk. Nothing noteworthy happened during that little hike and everyone enjoyed it immensely from start to finish. It's 2.5 short tunnels filled with mean spiders, and then you're at the steps of an otherwise unguarded antediluvian temple wherein a nigh-omnipotent mind-shattering cosmic god is held barely in check. I'm not saying it's a saunter through the park, but a bunch of schmucks accidentally stumbling into the end of all things is definitely soft serve compared to what you might expect. To reiterate, I'm not knocking it at all; it's a goofy loving concept, but it's also why I feel a fair bit of affection towards an otherwise-disappointing episode. Just saying that, minus the aforesaid Death Spiders, it's taken me longer to find parking downtown than it took these dummies to get where they ended up. e: Also, vis-a-vis the plot/character development in Bad Travelling. The protagonist was at least partially making this poo poo up as he went along, and stalling for time against both the crab and the crew to assess what his options were. Apart from being understandably mistrustful of the sailors after they tried to feed him to the Lovecraft Crab, he needed to figure out how willing they'd be to cooperate in ensuring that the thanopod didn't horrifically massacre everybody on Phaiden Island. When everybody voted to just take the thing where it wanted to go, he (almost certainly correctly) assumed they'd be unwilling to help him unless coerced, hence the misdirect with the ballots (making everybody think they were the only ones to mark an X) and ultimately settling on his "blow the ship up" plan instead of making for the abandoned islands. Also: he probably wasn't feeling all that affectionate towards a group of people who tried to murder him and then set loose a monster on a bunch of unsuspecting civilians, and, I'd note, it didn't look like there was all that much room on the lifeboat, either.) In conclusion: the dude had a rough hand of cards to play, but I think he played them pretty well given the circumstances. The question of why none of the sailors just went for the lifeboat themselves probably comes down to the difficulty in doing that without alerting the others. POWELL CURES KIDS fucked around with this message at 23:10 on May 23, 2022 |
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May 23, 2022 22:48
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I laughed when they tried to shoot the spiders. Twice. It screamed "when presented with a problem that can't be solved with guns, trust Americans to try to solve it with guns." Might as well try to shoot a tsunami.
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May 23, 2022 23:04
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the "shoot horde of itty bitty monsters with machine guns, to no avail" is an old cliche and never gets any less stupid
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May 23, 2022 23:43
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I liked Bad Travelling the most, probably. Jibaro was incredible from a visual standpoint but the actual story didn't do much for me. Barring the obvious clichés at play in Vaulted Halls, I'm still just a sucker for this kind of Cthulhu poo poo. This story has been told many times before, but you never see them with such a lavish presentation. If they make more, and I don't think they will, cut down on the weirdly mean-spirited wacky dudebro poo poo. I love this series as a whole but I don't understand who they're trying to appeal to with that stuff.
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May 24, 2022 09:33
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Watching Bad Traveling i was like "hey wait that sure seems like a Prador, is that a fuckin Prador? " and then the credits come up and "based on a story by Neal Asher" anyhow if you liked that homicidal giant crab monster you should read some neal asher the thing on the boat was a very young adult of the species, the older ones are probably 3 times as big, missing legs, and will always be found on a very well armed spacecraft surrounded by many children
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May 24, 2022 17:15
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