Lit Apropos of Nothing - ACKBAR IN CAPITALS - The Lit Forum Social Thread, v2.0.15

I'm getting my ass kicked by this sophisticated game. It's a fun kind of ass kicking, though. Looking forward to trying it again later.

 

If you have the money, mercs are great, as are retinues. They can give you a much-needed punch to win.

 

John Ostrander article on heroism and Doctor Who

I didn't realize he was a fan.

 

This discussion was brought to you by Crusader Kings II, a game that has made my public game conversations much funnier to outsiders.

But how good and spoilery is the GOT mod? I want to try it but not enough to spoil myself. I have now finished A Clash of Kings

Spoiler

(Daenerys how come your story is completely different and doesn't have Jorah Poirot even for a minute and I so dismissed the Bolton bastard because he was cut from the series and therefore the book physically kicked me in the end)

 

The GOT mod isn't very spoilery unless you play the AFFC scenario, which is very spoilery for ADWD. It has scenarios for pre-Aegon Seven Kingdoms, Aegon's Conquest, the Dance of Dragons (Targ civil war), The Blackfyre Rebellion, Dunk and Egg, Conquest of Dorne, Robert's Rebellion, the Greyjoy Rebellion, the War of the Five Kings, and A Feast for Crows.

I once won the War of the Five Kings as Robb. It was fantastic, and Bran became Prince-Consort of Dorne.

 

Cool. Perhaps it is a time to show that Renly is right. Are only the kings and high lords playable, or can I pick one of the lesser houses?

 

You can pick any landed noble. You can even play as a wildling or the Night's Watch. And if you play your cards right, you can even find a way to bring Daenerys over. I once married her as Littlefinger.

 

SOLD.

 

Oh, right, sometimes Young Griff shows up with the Mandalorians.

 

Started with Renly, got asked if I wanted to bend the knee before Stannis, I said no and died in mysterious circumstances. Darn.

 

Now I want to conquer the Seven Kingdoms as Joffrey.

Anyone have any suggestions for characters to play when still getting the hang of the game? I've been playing as Murchad of Munster, who I'd agree is a good starting character, except he's got a neighbor that rebels every other Thursday. I've heard Castille of Spain is fun, because a lot of his siblings run neighboring states, so lots of fun family drama.

 

Spain can be...complicated. And fratricidally difficult. Tutorial Ireland is the best place to practice.

 

I found Finland to be generally easy as well. Like Ireland no one is interested in it and so you can do your own thing. You can go to crusades with the king (without rising your own levies) and so get bonuses easily. Con is that (depending on the timeline placement) the King of Sweden owns a big chunk of territory around you and is not like to give them to you even with a clause (and going to war for them just gets your lower cheeks kicked).

 

Ostrander' defense is so... Ostrander. It sounds like when he was on this forum a few year back defending Gar Stazi's decision about what to do with Mon Cal/Dac. I remember there was a bit of a fight about that between him and a few other users... something along the lines of people arguing that Stazi was a jackass for making the decision to save x-number species A and y-number species B within a split second and purposely leaving so many Quarren behind. IIRC Ostrander's response was something like "Stazi doesn't have time to debate moral ambiguity. It's the Quarrens' fault, and if he hesitates to save them he'll be wasting the time he could be using to save the innocent. He's got to be confident whatever decision he makes is the right one and stick with it."

I won't say I totally agree, but it's genuine Ostrander.

 

So... I saw Star Trek Into Darkness yesterday. I think it was worth seeing and I mostly enjoyed it, but, avoiding spoilers, let's just say it is not making me look forward to the Sequel Trilogy.

It looks great. The special effects are top notch, as always. However, I found certain aspects of the cinematography very obnoxious. I'm not talking about lens flares---to be honest, I only noticed a handful of those. I mean shaky cam, quick jump cuts, camera sweeps from odd directions, Dutch angles, that effect where they try to pretend it was shot on a cheap home video camera with crappy auto-focus.

In action scenes the camera is always moving, and it's not moving with the focal point of the action, which is terribly distracting. I want to call it... Restless Camera Syndrome. It's not as egregious as, say, Transformers. But I found it annoying and I hope that doesn't carry over to Star Wars.

And then there are the in-jokes and fanboyish self-references. Many scenes contain dialog or situations that are "winking at the audience". The previous film had a lot of references to the Original Series---as well it should!---but they were more subtle and subdued. Some of them required you to be real Trekkie to understand (which, admittedly, I am not) .

These... were not subtle. Not quite TCW or KJA level referencing, but close. I have to assume that the script writer has a large role in this, so there is hope for the Sequel Trilogy. But I really, really, really hope that JJ Abrams can get the self-referentialism under control.

Also, there's a lot of plotholes and plot stupidity. But going into that would require spoilers, and I'm deliberately not going to use the board's useful [ spoilers ] tag, to illustrate my point.

 

A non-spoilery behind the scenes video of Tennant and Smith on the set of the 50th Anniversary special.



Sorry, Trip. Sounds like they're gonna be getting along.

Oh, and that final episode was a cracker, wasn't it? Though, really, I think the title should have been: "THE DOCTOR GOES TO MALACHOR V"

Yeah. The EU has only just got over the need to have Han or whoever he's with cracking a "Han shot first" gag. I'm not looking forward to seeing that play out all over again across the ST.

 

I am fully expecting:

• Han shot first jokes
• Metal bikini reference
• Wookiees ripping arms off
• Gungans being killed in unpleasant ways
• The Falcon to be destroyed
• "Yeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeesssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssss!" (haha see its funny cause characters said nooooooo in previous films get it get it)
• Capital ship battles where we never see the entire ****ing ships on screen, are completely composed of close-ups of explosions and crew members being sucked out into space, and which end in ~30 seconds.

Edit: This is what I mean. Imagine that one of those bodies is a Gungan for good measure.

 

yeah i was kinda baffled back when the first movie came out and everybody was all "oh wow this is just like a star wars movie". because it was basically not at all like a star wars movie.

@Uli idk they sounded like they were hiding something maybe? i can only hope =/

 

Just got back from STID myself. It was acceptable.