No Stupid Questions

I have a tangentially related thing. I got big into steampunk decades ago when it was still young. Back then, it was a maker culture, a loosely defined idea of cogs and boilers that gave you a fun little world to practice your craft in. It wasn't just form, it was function. Hammering brass to make functional goggles, learning the Victorian techniques to whalebone corsets, clockwork to accomplish something we only do now with variable controllers.

Now I look for my people and I find a rusting husk of I knew. Gone are the color and texture, replaced by brown on brown in cotton and leather. Where once gears and cogs were carved to spin and move, now they serve only to be glued to cheap accessories. The gleaming promises of brass and copper and steel, userped by soulless luster of plastics.

We should Never have let the world in.

As much as I enjoyed Firefly, the universe created was going to get very complicated and bad if it had been let to develop for the next few years.

They are going to have to explain a lot to justify that Confederate veterans deserved to be the heroes and I don't think that Joss Whedon was up to that task.

• Given how Serenity turned out, firefly's cancellation was probably for the best, making the reavers the intentional by-product of alliance experiments completely destroyed the nuances of the factions in the war of independence.

• Inuyasha ran out of ideas 10-15 tankobon in, and Takahashi just kept milking it for the money.

• Every fandom that accepts the "x is for everyone" motto is accepting enshittification and casualization with open arms. Air and water are for everyone, even bread has people who dislike it, for something to be unique it necessarily will have haters. The right word is anyone.

• Archer had a bit of a dip when Adam Reed left the writing team but it recovered and had one of the best endings possible for a series that long lived.

Community (2009): Annie was the (2nd) ass crack bandit and Abed took Troys cracking with a shocking amount of grace.

Stargate needed to develop a way to allow Earth to know about the galaxy. It might have even been an interesting way to spin off the show.

There is no way that the US government could hide the SG teams' budget over years and that the US military wouldn't have deployed off world technology during GWAT. Fuck, imagine the US Military deploying Zat guns to Iraq.

All the major character replacements on MASH were better than the characters they replaced. It's not that I don't like Burns and Blake, but Winchester and Potter were just so much more interesting. Trapper John was kind of a rapey creep even for the time, so there's no question BJ was the winner there. Honestly as much as I love Radar, even Klinger taking over his position was an improvement. There was only so much more they could do with his Beaver Cleaver Goes to War shtick.

Well, it was revived and I refuse to watch the revival, but for Tiny Toons Adventures ( revived as something like Toons Looniversity or something like that IIRC ), I rather strongly dislike how they removed Elmira and made Babs and Buster siblings.

I'm especially not for the Babs and Buster change because if that's cannon to the original show by proxy of the reboot, that would make any moment where Babs and Buster have feelings for each other or the maybe episode or 2 where they go on a date have an extremely incestuous vibe.

As for Elmira, I love how over the top she is as an example of how not to be a pet owner. Or how not to babysit in the case of the one episode where she babysits for a no name, single episode family. Or how in the Spring Break special she gets either government or military help to capture Buster by giving them Harrison Ford, IIRC, with him trapped in a cage.

I'm still salty that the season 2 ending cliffhanger of The Sarah Connor Chronicles never got to go anywhere.

That Blake's 7 fandom was materially better before the show aired in the States. They had gone through the painful sorting out of characters and characteristics and relationships and were developing these really interesting themes of psychological trauma and manipulation that they were beginning to explore - it was really interesting and the themes were fascinating. Them the show aired in the States, they went wild over Avon and all the stories and themes starting revolving around him. I don't mind him as a character; I do mind his character taking over all of fandom. It's sort of like if all the Harry Potter stories suddenly and inexplicably became Ron-centric; it's not necessarily wrong, but it's weird and people who liked other characters got left out in the cold, and some of us still resent that.

As an aside, when Blake's 7 fandom split up, that too was fascinating. As was usual in those days, there was a pro-slash contingent and an anti-slash contingent. When B7 fandom split up, all of the pro-slash fans went into Robin of Sherwood fandom, and all the anti-slash fans went into The Professionals fandom. The problem being that RoS was almost exclusively gen and Pros was almost exclusively slash. It was very weird.

What else? That the second season of War of the Worlds should've been an entirely different series: the people who loved season 1 were never going to like season 2; and people who had tuned in and disliked the series during season 1 weren't going to Even try season 2.

That Krycek became such a big character on The X-Files due to one woman who saw his potential and kept talking about it to her friends, many of whom were popular/prolific fannish authors and artists. She convinced some of them (there was incredulity and resistance at first) but it gathered steam, Chris Carter was flummoxed but rolled with it, and here we are.

That the main follow-on series for Highlander: the Series should've been The Methos Chronicles and that one's not even up for debate.

That the final episode of Miami Vice is a masterpiece, particularly with the echoes and parallels to the first episode - and that the show itself took a major downturn the moment they decided to kill off their comic relief characters. That having God in the final episode of Quantum Leap (the original) being played by an actor who was also in the first episode of the series made it much more interesting. That if you were ever interested in Space: 1999, the "Message from Moonbase Alpha" short has some really interesting implications.

That Space Rangers and Moon Over Miami were cut off entirely too early. That Quark is funny as hell for a science fiction fan of my generation, even if it's extremely dated now. Similarly, The Secret Adventures of Jules Verne was hella fun and should've lasted much longer (though Michael Praed's Shatner-esque line deliveries were exceptionally annoying at times!). That the Sonny Steel grave arc is majorly under-represented in Wiseguy fiction.

Almost certainly others, but those are the ones that came to mind.

Maybe a Quake movie can succeed where the Doom movies failed. Make Alan Ritchson Ranger and put Nine Inch Nails on the soundtrack. I could see Guillermo del Toro having a field day with it.

The Big Cheese was funded by the same organization that created the Samurai Pizza Cats to justify their outlandish R&D budget. Pizza Cat technology was sunk cost the moment it came up in the boardroom. They've just been sending good money after bad for years.

The Ellimist should have stepped in and cushioned Rachel's fall. She didn't deserve what she got.

I'm rewatching a Fullmetal Alchemist Brotherhood for the first time since I think it came out I guess. There's two things that are striking me. One they all just stand around while bad things happen a lot, but I guess that's just Anime. The other thing is I have no idea it was so long. It's too long. I guess I remember it being like you know 28 episodes or something. This show is stretching so much. It should have been shorter.

edit Oh and one more thing, where are all the Alchemists? In a show called Fullmetal Alchemist outside of the first few episodes there aren't any. It's weird there's not more running around.

supernatural fandom, wierd is a understatement after season 5. ive seen some of the cons they did, and if the ACTORS are even wierded out by the fans, they need help.

the angel wasnt suppose to have wierd relationship with the leads, like intimate one, but the fans got the writers to do it eventually.

I just heard there's going to be another Mega Man game. At this point I'm wondering if they have anything to contribute to modern platforming at all. By the time Shovel Knight came out new MM was already looking kind of tedious, and now compared to things like Gravity Circuit, what exactly is the point? Are we just going to reprise the gear system? Is there enough material in that for a whole game worth of new ideas?

Gaming specific:

MMO’s were exponentially better when the co tent was more difficult, and things took a longer time to acquire. When WoW catered to the chronically casual- it became the industry standard to ship each game with a built-in “I win” button.

Basically, games like DAoC, Asheron’s Call, and EverQuest walked so the modern games could fall.

Picard<<Sisko

Zombies ate my neighbors needs a revival. A comical survival/horror game with a system that isn't so convoluted and complicated that it's limiting. Why do no survival games come with a usable tutorial to tell you how to do things in the game? It always just throws you into the game with 47 menus and you're supposed to sus it out before dying.

Shmups are fun and should be revived as a genre. I've been saying for years that Nintendo should make Star Fox into a 2D scrolling shooter.

Though playing Megabonk earlier today made me realize that it and other clones of Vampire Survivors are like shmups in many ways. You gain powerups that you lose when you die, you have little to do other than move, and maneuvering around the level is a big part of the gameplay.

I have some very hot takes about the efficacy of the Sailor Scouts given exactly how much Tuxedo Mask does. This is why my ex-wife and kid, who only wanted to enjoy a magical girl show, stopped watching Sailor Moon around me (it had a good three or four beginning to end rewatches before that though).

I wished that the Lost Boys got their spin-off the Lost Girls, would've liked to have seen how that materialized. Unfortunately with Joel Schumacher dead, we'll never get to see that. Instead, we got awful direct-to-dvd sequels.

I'm a huge wheel of time nerd. While Mat's memories are clearly other men's memories that got trapped in the tower of Genji, I like to think that they were all HIS memories from different spinnings of the wheel. RJ says no, but it's my fan theory I won't let die

Mario is better than sonic as both a game to play and as a mascot

By extension it follows logically that if youre Sega instead of Nintendo I hate you and everything you stand for.

Mine is that John and Vriska should have ended up together. I fucking stan spiderbreath. iykyk