Seel and the very intentionally similar Spheal feels like the definition of “So glad I grew up with this, but da** this is better”
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Post your searing hot takes
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i knew my goat adeleine would come in to defend seaking. funney fish time!!!
I like Seaking because it's free experience for whatever Electric type I'm using in a given playthrough.
"Seaking isn't iconic" people itt really do be forgetting the Fuck Yeah Seaking meme
This meme is older than many forum members.
ALSO Seel is awesome it's in Pokémon Puzzle Challenge, the single best Pokémon spinoff in existence. No Gen 1 Pokémon featured in that can possibly be the worst. AND it gets that game's godlike Mahogany Town remix which is one of the best songs on the Game Boy Color so it gets even more elevation
This meme is older than many forum members.
ALSO Seel is awesome it's in Pokémon Puzzle Challenge, the single best Pokémon spinoff in existence. No Gen 1 Pokémon featured in that can possibly be the worst. AND it gets that game's godlike Mahogany Town remix which is one of the best songs on the Game Boy Color so it gets even more elevation
In general TMs had the issue of giving the player batshit insane TMs right out of the gate. While return is the obvious choice I'd also like to give credit to SM/USUM's pre-totem brick break TM (literally found in the same room as the totem fight lol) which is also a perfectly usable move on the traded hawlucha that carries you through the first like half of the game (even more so in speedruns)
The First Order is my favorite faction from the mainline numbered Star Wars movies. I desperately wish I had some celebral explanation available to you, that I could say I have deeply dissected the sequel trilogy and discovered some hidden meat none of the countless angry Youtube deep dives ever figured out. But here's the honest truth: The closest I've come to experiencing any of the movies is playing the latest Lego Star Wars game and in that format and not having any real deep personal connection with the broader franchise I am much more capable of appreciating the First Order's cool aesthetic flourishes than 99% of fans.
I like how the new stormtrooper designs look. I think the Sith Troopers and some other designs I have no context for look rad as fuck. "Starkiller Base" is a badass name and it looks rad as fuck. Captain Phasma looks and sounds rad as fuck (evil armored woman! my favorite).
Exegol is the pinnacle of this. When you're just exploring it as a hub world in a videogame and don't have to think about or be personally affected by how Rise of Skywalker is a narrative kamikaze attack it's substantially more likely your reaction will be "Oh wow a dark planet in the most hidden, wretched reaches of the galaxy where Sith cultists work around the clock to make abominable clones and resurrect dear leader sheev? Wow that's metal as hell. Look at all these gnarly dark sci-fi machines and ominous statues this kicks ass".
This is literally all that's backing this stupid-ass take of mine. I'd call it "hype moments and aura" but it's honestly worse than that, it's more like "hype design sheets and aura". It was enough for me to buy and read the novel Shadow of the Sith, which does some fun things with the Exegol mythos. Solid book, go read it sometime!
I like how the new stormtrooper designs look. I think the Sith Troopers and some other designs I have no context for look rad as fuck. "Starkiller Base" is a badass name and it looks rad as fuck. Captain Phasma looks and sounds rad as fuck (evil armored woman! my favorite).
Exegol is the pinnacle of this. When you're just exploring it as a hub world in a videogame and don't have to think about or be personally affected by how Rise of Skywalker is a narrative kamikaze attack it's substantially more likely your reaction will be "Oh wow a dark planet in the most hidden, wretched reaches of the galaxy where Sith cultists work around the clock to make abominable clones and resurrect dear leader sheev? Wow that's metal as hell. Look at all these gnarly dark sci-fi machines and ominous statues this kicks ass".
This is literally all that's backing this stupid-ass take of mine. I'd call it "hype moments and aura" but it's honestly worse than that, it's more like "hype design sheets and aura". It was enough for me to buy and read the novel Shadow of the Sith, which does some fun things with the Exegol mythos. Solid book, go read it sometime!
Time for another late night Pokémon hot take. Well, maybe it’s closer to mild rather than searing hot, but knowing how much I tend to glaze the Johto region in my spare time away from Smogon, this take could be seen as a two-for-one special. That’s because I really don’t think the Johto region has that many poorly designed Pokémon for what they were designed for and are trying to accomplish. Almost all of Johto’s Pokémon, probably as much as any other region aside from maybe Unova, and even then that’s only because Black & White 1 forced you into using new Pokémon during the main story meaning the developers had to actually try more than usual.
Notice how I said “almost”, though. There are a very small, select handful of Johto Pokémon I dislike, actually, and seeing that Johto’s up there with Ranger’s Oblivia, the Orre region, and the core series’s Hoenn, Unova, and Alola as one of my top favorite regions in Pokémon period- in fact if it wasn’t for Oblivia Johto might actually take the top spot entirely- I’ve often given some thought to what I think my least favorite Pokémon from my favorite selection is, similarly to how I’ve also given thought to what Pokémon I like from regions I dislike noticeably moreor in Galar’s case, regions I actively mock and ridicule on a weekly basis but that’s beside the point. And over the last year or so, I think I’ve settled on Smeargle as my pick for my least favorite Johto Pokémon, at least for now.
My word, they missed the ball with this one. Smeargle’s most prominent… anything in the Pokémon franchise has arguably been the amount of controversy it’s caused in multiplayer battle settings alongside other controversial staples like Ninjask and the occasional Mythical Pokémon (specifically DPP Jirachi and USUM Magearna in their respective OU metas), and while competitive play wasn’t nearly as popular back in Gen 2’s heyday as it is nowadays with the Internet and VGC both being a mainstream thing, Smeargle in its most optimized form(s) missed the point of the Pokémon in question maybe more than any other Pokémon because of how poorly thought out this thing is.
Let’s look at Smeargle step by step. At first glance, Smeargle’s one of the more unique ideas of a gimmick Pokémon we saw during the first handful of generations. The idea of something being super weak statistically being balanced out by the promise of endless customization isn’t unique to Pokémon as a franchise at all, though, and because the setting of Pokémon battles requires you the player to think about stats just as much as Types and, you know, the moves you’re using, that promise that Smeargle can do anything like a sort of “diet Mew” for the lower tiers gets completely lost in translation since almost every Smeargle set you’re going to see ends up using almost the same collection of the most broken status moves in the game almost every single time. Smeargle is a Pokémon meant to represent the creativity of the medium of art, and I don’t know about you, but there’s not much of that theme shown off when this thing’s spamming the daylights out of Spore (and Dark Void prior to the nerf), entry hazards, Baton Pass… you get the picture. But at the same time, what else is it supposed to do? This thing is a pure Normal-Type that doesn’t get much use outside of its Abilities outside of its non-Moody choices, and its attacking stats were purposely made so low to help “balance” this Pokémon out. I almost wonder if Smeargle having better attacking stats would have made this thing more balanced and varied than what we ended up with!
Visually, Smeargle isn’t very strong either, I’m afraid. It definitely looks like a generic Normal-Type especially in its 3D model, and while I like what they were going for with the paintbrush tail and the sort of “painter’s hat” it’s got going on with the body and head shapes, nothing here really sticks out to me as saying “this is a creature meant to inspire the versatility of the Normal-Type’s adaptability” either. To Smeargle’s credit, I do think some of these issues are in part because it was designed with the Game Boy Color’s hardware in mind- Johto Pokémon and the Shiny versions of them tend to stick out in a “memorable yet unremarkable” way, and thanks to hardware limitations they wouldn’t have been able to do anything such as, say, have Smeargle use different colors of paint for different things, for example. The color choices Smeargle does end up with feel plain and almost a little bit boring especially compared to what other Normal-Types before and especially after it would receive, and when Pokémon did finally transition to 3D, the fact that the move Sketch doesn’t make use of Smeargle’s anatomy at all similar to the infamous Blastoise cannons situation and instead just lazily has that animation with the pencil or whatever felt like the final nail in the coffin that was laid to rest early as 1999-2000.
Ultimately, Smeargle feels like a slap in the face to me and makes me feel genuine pity for artists and creative workers around the world. In such a fast paced, busy world, creativity and art should be encouraged and recognized, but it all gets ignored a lot of the time in favor of what’s the most minimalist and practical for the situation at hand. Smeargle’s abject failure to represent its own design philosophy is extremely ironic when you consider the cynical corporate nature of companies like The Pokémon Company, Game Freak, and even Nintendo themselves. There are a lot of creative people that work for them and infinitely more that like to work on things like fanfiction, fan art, fan games, et cetera. But how often do these people get to actually display their craft in fear of getting shunned by the community or, in an employee’s case, risking losing their job because some corporate CEO dirtbag doesn’t appreciate the creative arts? It makes you think, doesn’t it? That’s why Smeargle is my least favorite Johto Pokémon. This gets more depressing the more I think about it.
On the next episode, you'll get to find out what Pokémon I finally pick to be my concensus favorite from my objective least favorite region, basically making it the polar opposite of this post. I hate Galar and especially its games noticeably more than I hate Smeargle, so that should be a real fun one…
Notice how I said “almost”, though. There are a very small, select handful of Johto Pokémon I dislike, actually, and seeing that Johto’s up there with Ranger’s Oblivia, the Orre region, and the core series’s Hoenn, Unova, and Alola as one of my top favorite regions in Pokémon period- in fact if it wasn’t for Oblivia Johto might actually take the top spot entirely- I’ve often given some thought to what I think my least favorite Pokémon from my favorite selection is, similarly to how I’ve also given thought to what Pokémon I like from regions I dislike noticeably more
My word, they missed the ball with this one. Smeargle’s most prominent… anything in the Pokémon franchise has arguably been the amount of controversy it’s caused in multiplayer battle settings alongside other controversial staples like Ninjask and the occasional Mythical Pokémon (specifically DPP Jirachi and USUM Magearna in their respective OU metas), and while competitive play wasn’t nearly as popular back in Gen 2’s heyday as it is nowadays with the Internet and VGC both being a mainstream thing, Smeargle in its most optimized form(s) missed the point of the Pokémon in question maybe more than any other Pokémon because of how poorly thought out this thing is.
Let’s look at Smeargle step by step. At first glance, Smeargle’s one of the more unique ideas of a gimmick Pokémon we saw during the first handful of generations. The idea of something being super weak statistically being balanced out by the promise of endless customization isn’t unique to Pokémon as a franchise at all, though, and because the setting of Pokémon battles requires you the player to think about stats just as much as Types and, you know, the moves you’re using, that promise that Smeargle can do anything like a sort of “diet Mew” for the lower tiers gets completely lost in translation since almost every Smeargle set you’re going to see ends up using almost the same collection of the most broken status moves in the game almost every single time. Smeargle is a Pokémon meant to represent the creativity of the medium of art, and I don’t know about you, but there’s not much of that theme shown off when this thing’s spamming the daylights out of Spore (and Dark Void prior to the nerf), entry hazards, Baton Pass… you get the picture. But at the same time, what else is it supposed to do? This thing is a pure Normal-Type that doesn’t get much use outside of its Abilities outside of its non-Moody choices, and its attacking stats were purposely made so low to help “balance” this Pokémon out. I almost wonder if Smeargle having better attacking stats would have made this thing more balanced and varied than what we ended up with!
Visually, Smeargle isn’t very strong either, I’m afraid. It definitely looks like a generic Normal-Type especially in its 3D model, and while I like what they were going for with the paintbrush tail and the sort of “painter’s hat” it’s got going on with the body and head shapes, nothing here really sticks out to me as saying “this is a creature meant to inspire the versatility of the Normal-Type’s adaptability” either. To Smeargle’s credit, I do think some of these issues are in part because it was designed with the Game Boy Color’s hardware in mind- Johto Pokémon and the Shiny versions of them tend to stick out in a “memorable yet unremarkable” way, and thanks to hardware limitations they wouldn’t have been able to do anything such as, say, have Smeargle use different colors of paint for different things, for example. The color choices Smeargle does end up with feel plain and almost a little bit boring especially compared to what other Normal-Types before and especially after it would receive, and when Pokémon did finally transition to 3D, the fact that the move Sketch doesn’t make use of Smeargle’s anatomy at all similar to the infamous Blastoise cannons situation and instead just lazily has that animation with the pencil or whatever felt like the final nail in the coffin that was laid to rest early as 1999-2000.
Ultimately, Smeargle feels like a slap in the face to me and makes me feel genuine pity for artists and creative workers around the world. In such a fast paced, busy world, creativity and art should be encouraged and recognized, but it all gets ignored a lot of the time in favor of what’s the most minimalist and practical for the situation at hand. Smeargle’s abject failure to represent its own design philosophy is extremely ironic when you consider the cynical corporate nature of companies like The Pokémon Company, Game Freak, and even Nintendo themselves. There are a lot of creative people that work for them and infinitely more that like to work on things like fanfiction, fan art, fan games, et cetera. But how often do these people get to actually display their craft in fear of getting shunned by the community or, in an employee’s case, risking losing their job because some corporate CEO dirtbag doesn’t appreciate the creative arts? It makes you think, doesn’t it? That’s why Smeargle is my least favorite Johto Pokémon. This gets more depressing the more I think about it.
On the next episode, you'll get to find out what Pokémon I finally pick to be my concensus favorite from my objective least favorite region, basically making it the polar opposite of this post. I hate Galar and especially its games noticeably more than I hate Smeargle, so that should be a real fun one…
I have to disagree. Maybe Smeargle isn't any good at representing visual art as a creative medium, but I find it works quite well at being a central focus for creative expression. As someone whose main creative medium is game mechanics, "just give me everything, even if it's not optimal" is a pretty decent first-order approximation. While I have a tendency to hang around with competitive-oriented groups because they tolerate the complexity I thrive on, it's far from the last word in terms of what creativity is valid. Even so, I still think there are some interesting picks for the Smeargle sets in-between the standard Sticky Web and Spore. Imprison/Transform in 1v1 stands out, but it's also the place for forgotten signature moves (both because the regular mon doesn't show up much, such as with Toxic Thread or Silk Trap, or because the mon is too busy with another role, as often seems to happen with Burning Bulwark in Singles). When it comes to doing very nonstandard things with the battle system, getting creative with it if you will, Smeargle is vital. I remember enjoying some puzzles on niche interactions a while back, and they would have been a nightmare to set up and test without it.Time for another late night Pokémon hot take. Well, maybe it’s closer to mild rather than searing hot, but knowing how much I tend to glaze the Johto region in my spare time away from Smogon, this take could be seen as a two-for-one special. That’s because I really don’t think the Johto region has that many poorly designed Pokémon for what they were designed for and are trying to accomplish. Almost all of Johto’s Pokémon, probably as much as any other region aside from maybe Unova, and even then that’s only because Black & White 1 forced you into using new Pokémon during the main story meaning the developers had to actually try more than usual.
Notice how I said “almost”, though. There are a very small, select handful of Johto Pokémon I dislike, actually, and seeing that Johto’s up there with Ranger’s Oblivia, the Orre region, and the core series’s Hoenn, Unova, and Alola as one of my top favorite regions in Pokémon period- in fact if it wasn’t for Oblivia Johto might actually take the top spot entirely- I’ve often given some thought to what I think my least favorite Pokémon from my favorite selection is, similarly to how I’ve also given thought to what Pokémon I like from regions I dislike noticeably moreor in Galar’s case, regions I actively mock and ridicule on a weekly basis but that’s beside the point. And over the last year or so, I think I’ve settled on Smeargle as my pick for my least favorite Johto Pokémon, at least for now.
My word, they missed the ball with this one. Smeargle’s most prominent… anything in the Pokémon franchise has arguably been the amount of controversy it’s caused in multiplayer battle settings alongside other controversial staples like Ninjask and the occasional Mythical Pokémon (specifically DPP Jirachi and USUM Magearna in their respective OU metas), and while competitive play wasn’t nearly as popular back in Gen 2’s heyday as it is nowadays with the Internet and VGC both being a mainstream thing, Smeargle in its most optimized form(s) missed the point of the Pokémon in question maybe more than any other Pokémon because of how poorly thought out this thing is.
Let’s look at Smeargle step by step. At first glance, Smeargle’s one of the more unique ideas of a gimmick Pokémon we saw during the first handful of generations. The idea of something being super weak statistically being balanced out by the promise of endless customization isn’t unique to Pokémon as a franchise at all, though, and because the setting of Pokémon battles requires you the player to think about stats just as much as Types and, you know, the moves you’re using, that promise that Smeargle can do anything like a sort of “diet Mew” for the lower tiers gets completely lost in translation since almost every Smeargle set you’re going to see ends up using almost the same collection of the most broken status moves in the game almost every single time. Smeargle is a Pokémon meant to represent the creativity of the medium of art, and I don’t know about you, but there’s not much of that theme shown off when this thing’s spamming the daylights out of Spore (and Dark Void prior to the nerf), entry hazards, Baton Pass… you get the picture. But at the same time, what else is it supposed to do? This thing is a pure Normal-Type that doesn’t get much use outside of its Abilities outside of its non-Moody choices, and its attacking stats were purposely made so low to help “balance” this Pokémon out. I almost wonder if Smeargle having better attacking stats would have made this thing more balanced and varied than what we ended up with!
Visually, Smeargle isn’t very strong either, I’m afraid. It definitely looks like a generic Normal-Type especially in its 3D model, and while I like what they were going for with the paintbrush tail and the sort of “painter’s hat” it’s got going on with the body and head shapes, nothing here really sticks out to me as saying “this is a creature meant to inspire the versatility of the Normal-Type’s adaptability” either. To Smeargle’s credit, I do think some of these issues are in part because it was designed with the Game Boy Color’s hardware in mind- Johto Pokémon and the Shiny versions of them tend to stick out in a “memorable yet unremarkable” way, and thanks to hardware limitations they wouldn’t have been able to do anything such as, say, have Smeargle use different colors of paint for different things, for example. The color choices Smeargle does end up with feel plain and almost a little bit boring especially compared to what other Normal-Types before and especially after it would receive, and when Pokémon did finally transition to 3D, the fact that the move Sketch doesn’t make use of Smeargle’s anatomy at all similar to the infamous Blastoise cannons situation and instead just lazily has that animation with the pencil or whatever felt like the final nail in the coffin that was laid to rest early as 1999-2000.
Ultimately, Smeargle feels like a slap in the face to me and makes me feel genuine pity for artists and creative workers around the world. In such a fast paced, busy world, creativity and art should be encouraged and recognized, but it all gets ignored a lot of the time in favor of what’s the most minimalist and practical for the situation at hand. Smeargle’s abject failure to represent its own design philosophy is extremely ironic when you consider the cynical corporate nature of companies like The Pokémon Company, Game Freak, and even Nintendo themselves. There are a lot of creative people that work for them and infinitely more that like to work on things like fanfiction, fan art, fan games, et cetera. But how often do these people get to actually display their craft in fear of getting shunned by the community or, in an employee’s case, risking losing their job because some corporate CEO dirtbag doesn’t appreciate the creative arts? It makes you think, doesn’t it? That’s why Smeargle is my least favorite Johto Pokémon. This gets more depressing the more I think about it.
On the next episode, you'll get to find out what Pokémon I finally pick to be my concensus favorite from my objective least favorite region, basically making it the polar opposite of this post. I hate Galar and especially its games noticeably more than I hate Smeargle, so that should be a real fun one…
To some extent, we have information as to what something Smeargle-like with real stats would look like as a result of CAP's Necturna, which was set up to have one slot that can be Sketched. Its top priority isn't any more diverse than Smeargle's (in that it's either Spore, Sticky Web, a really big attack, or setup) and its base moveset isn't used for anything particularly fancy either. But in fairness, it is designed wholly for competitive rather than to fool around with the mechanics or appeal to first-time casual players.
From a meta perspective, yeah the corporate world sucks for artists possibly a bit more than it sucks for everyone else. But I'm heartened by this community's existence. When the cutthroat competition over money decided that the near-infinite wonder Smeargle represents didn't need to be in Galar, we kept on using it regardless. Mostly for function-over-form teams, granted, but the space to be creative was still maintained despite GF being uncaring.
Disney does an awful job with Star Wars (damn what a hot take), but scrapping the old canon was honestly a good choice
There are many pieces of excellent stories that were written over the years, but it got extremely convoluted at a certain point and there was a lot of stupid shit, including most of the follow ups to the OT
The entire prophecy that the 6 movies have gone on about was kinda worthless due to the actually bad and important stuff happening after Palpy's death. The new galactic republic held up like 20 years or so, so no stability or anything was really there. A lot of people are ecstatic about Yuuzhan Vong today but weirdo bdsm chinese aliens coming along and being more important than anything that ever happened before was such a bullshit attempt of writers to make their stories more important than they actually are. The narrative of Palpy being potentially a hero also goes against anything that Lucas wanted the Empire to be. And you can't tell me that any of the characters in the follow ups were interesting, the children of the OTs MCs are extremely derivative
A lot of the worldbuilding was also so ass ngl. Every writer had their own deities and gods and take on the force which made the universe seem massively inconsistent. And every writer tried to establish something super important. It doesn't help that Lucas had a lot of Star Wars that extended far beyond the movies even before the first movie came out and never really communicated what something like the Whills are, which made things confusing from the start. And the power levels, there were dozens of planet busting weapons and some guy like Palpy can also bust planets somehow
I think Legends was at its best when it covered the Galaxy's past and showed all the similarities between our world and the Star Wars world. Something like feudal Jedi lords, or a human supremacist group that took over and forced the Jedi and Huth to work together, the Rakatan empire or most of the Sith species lore, also a lot of the philosophical force content with characters like Darth Scion or Kreia. All the follow up on the OT was bull and I overall think that scrapping the old content was long overdue
There are many pieces of excellent stories that were written over the years, but it got extremely convoluted at a certain point and there was a lot of stupid shit, including most of the follow ups to the OT
The entire prophecy that the 6 movies have gone on about was kinda worthless due to the actually bad and important stuff happening after Palpy's death. The new galactic republic held up like 20 years or so, so no stability or anything was really there. A lot of people are ecstatic about Yuuzhan Vong today but weirdo bdsm chinese aliens coming along and being more important than anything that ever happened before was such a bullshit attempt of writers to make their stories more important than they actually are. The narrative of Palpy being potentially a hero also goes against anything that Lucas wanted the Empire to be. And you can't tell me that any of the characters in the follow ups were interesting, the children of the OTs MCs are extremely derivative
A lot of the worldbuilding was also so ass ngl. Every writer had their own deities and gods and take on the force which made the universe seem massively inconsistent. And every writer tried to establish something super important. It doesn't help that Lucas had a lot of Star Wars that extended far beyond the movies even before the first movie came out and never really communicated what something like the Whills are, which made things confusing from the start. And the power levels, there were dozens of planet busting weapons and some guy like Palpy can also bust planets somehow
I think Legends was at its best when it covered the Galaxy's past and showed all the similarities between our world and the Star Wars world. Something like feudal Jedi lords, or a human supremacist group that took over and forced the Jedi and Huth to work together, the Rakatan empire or most of the Sith species lore, also a lot of the philosophical force content with characters like Darth Scion or Kreia. All the follow up on the OT was bull and I overall think that scrapping the old content was long overdue
Honestly I think the entire concept of a big centralized "canon" has done far more harm to Star Wars than good and scrapping it would be a huge shot in the arm. Look at Marvel and DC and how they have survived for decades (damn near a century in the latter's case!) because they aren't enslaved to a single continuity and therefore have had infinitely more room to re-interpret their characters for new mediums and sensibilities over the decades, producing quality work to this day. Batman, Superman, Spider-man et al would've stagnated and withered away a long time ago if every single new story had to be crammed into the same chronology, not just due to limiting the good writers but also making it much harder to move on from the bad. When a big DC project has a controversial/disliked depiction of a fan-favorite character, it's usually no big deal because they can just try again from scratch next time. When a Star Wars project does the same it's catastrophic because now every future story is beholden to that black mark and has to tie into it. What if Logan was the sole, definitive, immovable "canon" endpoint for Wolverine? What if everything from videogames to comics to followup movies featuring Wolverine had to recognize that one movie and twist how they wrote him accordingly to feed into it? That's the real fundamental problem with stuff like TLJ Luke, not any of the particulars of the film itself.
If I were put in charge of Lucasfilm and couldn't outright move the series entirely to perpetual reboots and alternate continuities like Marvel/DC then the next best move would be to shift to a kind of tier system where the OT is the only piece of truly immovable canon and everything else is up for grabs based on whether the writer feels like tying into it. If If I had one author pitch to me a post-Rise of Skywalker Rey novel and another pitch me a continuation of the old Dark Horse Legacy comics, I would happily greenlight BOTH if I thought they had potential. Who cares anymore, let our creatives breathe free. Instead of "Legends" I would introduce a label called something like "Star Wars Essentials" which would be rereleases of all the most acclaimed media over the years, again with no regard for fitting into one another. An Andor Blu-ray box set, Knights of the Old Republic 1 + 2 remasters, the best books from both the pre and post-Disney eras, all with fun extras like exclusive behind the scenes footage, concept art and author interviews respectively.
If I were put in charge of Lucasfilm and couldn't outright move the series entirely to perpetual reboots and alternate continuities like Marvel/DC then the next best move would be to shift to a kind of tier system where the OT is the only piece of truly immovable canon and everything else is up for grabs based on whether the writer feels like tying into it. If If I had one author pitch to me a post-Rise of Skywalker Rey novel and another pitch me a continuation of the old Dark Horse Legacy comics, I would happily greenlight BOTH if I thought they had potential. Who cares anymore, let our creatives breathe free. Instead of "Legends" I would introduce a label called something like "Star Wars Essentials" which would be rereleases of all the most acclaimed media over the years, again with no regard for fitting into one another. An Andor Blu-ray box set, Knights of the Old Republic 1 + 2 remasters, the best books from both the pre and post-Disney eras, all with fun extras like exclusive behind the scenes footage, concept art and author interviews respectively.
Is "Star Wars is overhyped and honestly kinda dogshit and is only popular because the average moviegoer has about five functioning brain cells that space battles and laser swords manage to perfectly stimulate" even a hot take anymore? I'm making it either way.
At the same time, I've been feeling that they can't even do that reliably nowadays. The last time we actually got cool new ship designs that I might consider getting merch of front and center in a space battle was in TLJ and it had the one thing that's ever broken my casual scifi immersion.
star wars is kinda like the beatles where theres no unpopular opinion about it because its so big that every opinion out there has at least 1 million people agreeing with you. its bad, its good, its boring, star trek better star trek worse og trilogy better sequels bad sequels good- you get the gist
When I was a young lad I never found star wars super interesting. Albeit a huge part of that was just not being a fan of action movies but I blame it on my dad's complete lack of understanding of what "r-rated" means and being raised on comedy films probably not meant for an elementary school student. Even now that I'm a bigger fan of action movies I still find star wars to be an abject snoozefest ngl
reading this post to the tune of Welcome to the Black Parade
xkcd, at least in its current form, is similar to garfield for dorks.
I say this mostly with love, as a dork who had xkcd and garfield phases, but I also do just think its quality is overrated, at least these days.
It sometimes cooks, and even when it doesn't it can net a smile from me, but the jokes are often pretty basic and/or tortured. I don't think its tremendously good or high effort, or maybe he's trying real hard but running out of ideas and time, which like I get, he's busier now and has made a zillion of these. I value xkcd for what it has done, and even for what it actively does to an extent.
I'll go over some in the past month and explain why I think they're weak or strong.
Some I Think Are Not Great
"Lol pointless wifi connection on household device" has been done to death, and this one isn't particularly interesting among them. MoistCr1TiKaL did the seminal joke here with his Juicero vid 8 years ago.
This is just such basic observational humor. For most standard units, 1 of it is reasonable, but for capacitance, 1 of it isn't reasonable. It's fine I guess, but not really a knee slapper.
The basic premise here is how painful it is to have an inaccessible electronic device play an annoying name. Compare it to this past comic below with a similar pretence. This past comic has buildup / escalation, it uses the darkness and text sizes of the medium for storytelling, and it has a much more natural text flow that isn't just clogging a brick paragraph at the bottom. Also this past comic with better execution was 10 years ago.
If you're particularly convinced by the newer BOOP! comic having the source of the sound unknown, I'd compare it to this earlier comic, which hits that premise harder and more creatively. Particularly compare the generic "revenge" motive to "black hat guy goes after the chair of the skeptics society," which is both a punchline and a fun instance of black hat guy being their miserable self.
OK, entirely new comic time.
This punchline is very unearned to me. Like, "Archaea has finally started harming humans" kind of kills in isolation, but it's so stilted to have the girl be so esoterically aggro on archaea, and then for a fairly stale "they're also in the room but unnoticed" setup. Like this is just a cheap setup for the premise.
The joke is that you add one to things. Not a killer I think.
So much text. Gobs and gobs of text. And ammonium hydroxide being the most crucial ingredient for... statistical methodology... is just so forced. "How did this get on the list?????" Is not super funny when you're the one who put it on the list for no reason, besides setting up that reaction, in a no-stakes fictional webcomic.
All this text and forcing for a punchline of "good science means working a layer deeper what you actually would think the issue is," which as before, he already did much more snappily and deftly in the past. (I'm still not sure how much I like the comic below, I still think it's too cutesy and trying too hard to be counter-intuitive, but the delivery is definitely much stronger.)
Some I Think Are Good
This recent one also has a clumpy bottom text block... and I think it's great. The relatively straightforward visuals and text are used to help the joke land, deadpan delivering this blatant energy theft as if it was a perfectly normal energy solution. The text even mimics real descriptions of heating systems with the "cool in the summer and warm in the winter" phrasing to sell the delivery.
The only weakness I think is the phrase "covertly-installed", which weakens the "as if normal" deadpan delivery by revealing the (author's knowledge of) the antisociality behind this energy theft. Covert installation is, um, implied already, even when you remove the phrase. Let's just say that. In fact, I think this implication of covert installation is actively funnier than just saying "covertly installed" out loud.
This is a considerably stronger observational bit than the farad one to me. Here, he hammers in just how weird it is to have "modern" epochal nomenclature, showing 5 different periods that all somehow share this one issue. I view this fuller demonstration as considerably defter than selling the weirdness by having the oc's react alarmed. I'd balk at blaming historians for this nomenclature, but whatever.
This is fun. It starts in a pretty nerdy, text-heavy delivery typical of xkcd, and then cuts to something unexpected that both subverts the pure text of the initial delivery, and subverts its spirit too. And it's just fun and funny to imagine a cat jumping up at a plane to knock it out of the sky. I try not to be insatiably pretentious. A thing can just be silly and fun.
I say this mostly with love, as a dork who had xkcd and garfield phases, but I also do just think its quality is overrated, at least these days.
It sometimes cooks, and even when it doesn't it can net a smile from me, but the jokes are often pretty basic and/or tortured. I don't think its tremendously good or high effort, or maybe he's trying real hard but running out of ideas and time, which like I get, he's busier now and has made a zillion of these. I value xkcd for what it has done, and even for what it actively does to an extent.
I'll go over some in the past month and explain why I think they're weak or strong.
Some I Think Are Not Great
"Lol pointless wifi connection on household device" has been done to death, and this one isn't particularly interesting among them. MoistCr1TiKaL did the seminal joke here with his Juicero vid 8 years ago.
This is just such basic observational humor. For most standard units, 1 of it is reasonable, but for capacitance, 1 of it isn't reasonable. It's fine I guess, but not really a knee slapper.
The basic premise here is how painful it is to have an inaccessible electronic device play an annoying name. Compare it to this past comic below with a similar pretence. This past comic has buildup / escalation, it uses the darkness and text sizes of the medium for storytelling, and it has a much more natural text flow that isn't just clogging a brick paragraph at the bottom. Also this past comic with better execution was 10 years ago.
If you're particularly convinced by the newer BOOP! comic having the source of the sound unknown, I'd compare it to this earlier comic, which hits that premise harder and more creatively. Particularly compare the generic "revenge" motive to "black hat guy goes after the chair of the skeptics society," which is both a punchline and a fun instance of black hat guy being their miserable self.
OK, entirely new comic time.
This punchline is very unearned to me. Like, "Archaea has finally started harming humans" kind of kills in isolation, but it's so stilted to have the girl be so esoterically aggro on archaea, and then for a fairly stale "they're also in the room but unnoticed" setup. Like this is just a cheap setup for the premise.
The joke is that you add one to things. Not a killer I think.
So much text. Gobs and gobs of text. And ammonium hydroxide being the most crucial ingredient for... statistical methodology... is just so forced. "How did this get on the list?????" Is not super funny when you're the one who put it on the list for no reason, besides setting up that reaction, in a no-stakes fictional webcomic.
All this text and forcing for a punchline of "good science means working a layer deeper what you actually would think the issue is," which as before, he already did much more snappily and deftly in the past. (I'm still not sure how much I like the comic below, I still think it's too cutesy and trying too hard to be counter-intuitive, but the delivery is definitely much stronger.)
Some I Think Are Good
This recent one also has a clumpy bottom text block... and I think it's great. The relatively straightforward visuals and text are used to help the joke land, deadpan delivering this blatant energy theft as if it was a perfectly normal energy solution. The text even mimics real descriptions of heating systems with the "cool in the summer and warm in the winter" phrasing to sell the delivery.
The only weakness I think is the phrase "covertly-installed", which weakens the "as if normal" deadpan delivery by revealing the (author's knowledge of) the antisociality behind this energy theft. Covert installation is, um, implied already, even when you remove the phrase. Let's just say that. In fact, I think this implication of covert installation is actively funnier than just saying "covertly installed" out loud.
This is a considerably stronger observational bit than the farad one to me. Here, he hammers in just how weird it is to have "modern" epochal nomenclature, showing 5 different periods that all somehow share this one issue. I view this fuller demonstration as considerably defter than selling the weirdness by having the oc's react alarmed. I'd balk at blaming historians for this nomenclature, but whatever.
This is fun. It starts in a pretty nerdy, text-heavy delivery typical of xkcd, and then cuts to something unexpected that both subverts the pure text of the initial delivery, and subverts its spirit too. And it's just fun and funny to imagine a cat jumping up at a plane to knock it out of the sky. I try not to be insatiably pretentious. A thing can just be silly and fun.
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I've been beefing with Randall Munroe ever since I read this one, personally. I never have actively followed his new releases, opting instead to absorb his greatest hits via links elsewhere online, but it's not surprising to me that he's been hit-or-miss as of late.
I'll bite. I reflexively doubt that you have a well-founded opinion on the entirety of western literary academia that perfectly lines up with ragging on the countries communists don't like, culminating to rag most on the country communists like the least. Seems too serendipitous to be true. Is this a take coming from your own research and experience in the field? Is this a topic you did not know about but somebody convinced you on? If this is like, genuine informed commentary, I'd be interested to see more, but it reads like standard dunking on the most academia of the academias, with a sheen of societal justice in not criticizing the countries communists stand behind.
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I hate every fiber of my being that I agree with this.
the correct answer is that both ideas are bad
in other news, i think fairy should be weak to and resisted by the psychic type