TheOtherTed

I wanted to say Zardoz, but then I searched the soundtrack on Youtube only to discover that the starting theme is a vocal version of my favorite Beethoven piece that gets slowly eaten by mid-70s synth. Never caught that before, but then I hadn't discovered classical music when I saw the flick. Honestly not sure how I feel about it either. It seems to fit the movie well enough, but I'm not sure I'd call that an endorsement. In any case, some of you may enjoy it, so here it is: The worst part is this actually makes me want to watch the movie again. Does that make it good? So conflicted.

I was going to post this in the "Fallen out of use?" thread, but realized it might be better to start a new, tangential thread. On live, I played a Kinetics / Archery defender for longer than anyone should. It got to the point where I'd become immediately angry when I logged on as the character, because I fully anticipated a session of constant annoyance. This story isn't about those annoyances. It's about a moment, late in my Kin career, that made me laugh out loud, literally, and kept me grinning like the idiot I am for a full 10 minutes. I was reminded of it in the FOOU? thread. Thanks (or blame) to @dtjunkie for dredging up the memory. It happened in that annoying room where there's a stairway going up on the left, and an open area on the right. The stairway leads to a kitchenette, and beyond it there's a balcony, plus a gangway that leads to the next corridor. It's an ambush room, basically - if you try to engage the baddies on the bottom floor, the guys on the balcony will join the party, and vice-versa. Our team came in from the other side (the gangway side), so I figured we were safe if we were careful. Someone wasn't careful. Someone never is. We were playing on near-max difficulty, and we weren't exactly an optimal team, so we were immediately overwhelmed with red+ mobs. The tank was dipping fast into yellow, I was dipping into orange (I had this crazy thing about wanting the benefit of my own heals and buffs), at least one character was deep red. I hit Transfusion, but, unknown to me, our Something / Storm controller hit Gale a split second before me. As a result, my beautiful green healing aura went flying off the gangway, healing exactly no-one, and taking every last mob with it for good measure. I couldn't help but laugh. To the team's credit, they all jumped down from the gangway immediately, though to this day I have no idea if they knew Transfusion would be ready soon enough, or if they were just hepped up on Speed Boost. In any case, we prevailed. So let's hear it - your funny, frustrating, dramatic, or devastating war stories!

I'm going to sidestep your initial request, @Druscaelan, as people have pretty much already covered the bases. My tip for you is that once you feel comfortable with one archetype (and power set combo), branch out a bit. Play a completely different AT that you would otherwise have ignored (e.g., if you're drawn to DPS, consider trying a Controller or Defender). Related to this, if you start out as a solo player (as many of us do), make yourself join a team by the time you hit level 20. My reason for this is that you can learn a lot about your preferred AT by choosing something else and critically watching other players of that AT. In my case, I learned a surprising amount about Scrappers (my first AT) by playing a Controller, and I learned the basics of tanking by keeping Tankers alive as a Defender (or at least trying to). Another tip, which will go against all popular opinion, is to avoid DFB. Completely. Sure, you'll get some shinies and an easy ride to 20, but you won't learn (or re-learn) what you need to know. If you're not badging, the "TF" isn't worth the capital T or capital F. It's a cake-walk. If you are badging, it's like herding cats. Hyper, spastic, over-caffeinated cats with massive backpacks full of "oh, gee, sorry about that" but lacking the self-control to mean it. You'll learn more playing solo and increasing your own difficulty rating bit by bit.

This isn't an answer, but a random musing. I couldn't help but think that this younger Spock's facial twitches looked like they came straight out of "Operation Annihilate." One of them "member berries," as the kids say. Unfortunately, I couldn't find a clip of the scene in question, so I could be imagining it.

No joke - that, and the phrase "where are the heals?", have caused me to bail TFs. I even considered doing a scientific study to measure the drop in the average team's IQ when they pick up a Kin defender.

*shivers with the effort of not flying into a Kin rage*

In terms of the game itself, I pretty much checked around the time MoP was released. If I was addicted to anything, it was the forums. Cesspit though they were, they offered random quirky goofiness on tap. Lately, though, that seems to have dried up, as if the very notion of "humor" had been surgically excised from everyone's mind. Ah, well. What's done is done. Though now I'm wondering how the Eve Online forums are doing... How is that not a costume piece in game already?

With Mace, you can wield a pipe wrench. Honestly not sure why that isn't FOTM.

...and I feel free again! The game, and even moreso the player base, have finally exceeded my tolerance for weirdness. I felt like it was just a matter of time before the alien brain slugs that seem to have infested everyone associated with WoW would catch up with me. Here, at least, I'm safe. Right? ...right?

I just remembered another movie, and I'm thoroughly embarrassed that I'd forgotten about it. "Big Man Japan." It starts as a comedic riff on Kaiju flicks, but its central theme is both deep and sad. I won't say much more because it's one of those movies where different people take away different things.

De-italicize Iowa and drop the last sentence, and I could believe it's Kirk. As confident and swaggering as he could be, he also had a way of muddling through awkwardness by trying to ignore it. It's subtle, but it's there; the movie "The Voyage Home" is full of it. Not to harp on this as the curmudgeon that I definitely am, but I watched the reboot movies (even the gods-awful "Into Darkness") almost exclusively because Chris Pine and Karl Urban did a great job capturing the mannerisms of their characters. They did their homework, and it showed, and so I stayed to watch. I'm not seeing that here. Instead, I'm hit in the face with the nonsensical line "I'm from space." It would have been funnier and more Kirk-like if La'an had gently guided him through the door, with Kirk doing his best not to look embarrassed. This one little scene is telling me that the actor isn't playing Kirk, and the writers aren't writing Kirk. Thus, I can't help but ask the question that's too often been asked, "who is this show for?" Anyway, exiting rant mode.

IMO every attempt at humor in that clip fell dead flat, and this alleged Kirk resembles Chandler from "Friends" rather than the OG Kirk.

Gotta love actors who own the role whatever the setbacks (and directors who give them room enough to do it). Possibly, but I also imagine that waddling around a set all day would not be easy on the feet. I wouldn't put it past a set crew in those days to slap paint on a couple of go-carts and present them to him as much for comfort as for fun. Total side note: My brain thinks of the 1960s as the "Silver Age" of TV, but having googled it, I find that "those who know" think the Silver Age is... well, now. And that the Golden Age was in the 1990s and early 2000s. Sorry, Jackie Gleason, but you've been de-throned.

I'm surprised to find myself typing this, but based on this one trailer, I'm tempted to sign up for HBO Max. Catch Joaquin Phoenix's "Joker," finally watch "Game of Thrones" (albeit with low expectations, but, hey, I need the nerd cred), and have "The Penguin" to look forward to. Nevertheless, it breaks my small, cold, fish-loving heart to know that we'll likely never hear anything like Burgess Meredith's signature Penguin laugh again.

How is DCUO these days? Last time I played, they had almost successfully "streamlined" all semblance of choice out of the game.

Easy Reader! I think he was my favorite character on the show. Just do yourself a favor - if you remember the character fondly, don't look him up on youtube.

REAL music for REAL gamers, right here... The Sims soundtrack - Jerry Martin, Marc Russo, and others

Forgive my ignorance of all things super-hero-ish, but I never realized this was an actual thing. I always thought it was a bit character created for a kid's show back in the 70's.

Peter Jackson's "Lord of the Rings" trilogy. I'd been disappointed by "The Phantom Menace" (midichlorians? really??) and given that Tolkien is difficult to do well on a good day, I had no hopes for Jackson's films. Years later, a friend of mine who is not only a Tolkien nerd, but has no reservations about bringing all his Naval training in cursewords to bear on anything that even remotely ticks him off, told me he really liked the movies. So I gave it a go. There were parts that bothered me to be sure, (e.g., everything Faramir, Aragorn's "death by warg" scene, and, in the extended version, Gandalf acting in very un-Gandalf ways at least twice), but by and large the changes Jackson made were reasonable adaptations. And while I didn't miss Bombadil (the aforementioned friend and I had long discussions about whether he was relevant to the original story at all), I was glad to hear Treebeard deliver one of his lines. In fact, it sounded better coming from a big shaggy walking tree than from Tommy B. Runner up would be "Glengarry Glenn Ross," a full production movie with only 5 simple settings (give or take) and a very "this isn't a movie, it's a play" vibe. To be honest, the street between the office and the local bar feels more like an actual character to me than many actual human-played characters in other films.

He needs a sidekick and/or an arch-enemy. Ooh, or an extradimensional crossover!

While I get why it's tempting to point to a guide, IMO it sort of spoils the fun of running a scripted instance for the first time. It's one thing to team with a group of players who know the instance and learning from them. It's quite another to "do your homework" and read a dry, second-person, "this is the only right way" sort of document about something you've never done. I can't speak for anyone else, but I learn best when I learn from other people, up until the point where I have the tools and experience to judge (or even write) such documents myself. I won't go into details, but I had a few experiences like the OP's on live - an almost identical experience with DFB, and other experiences with teams that flat-out failed in terms of leadership or teaching (and one SG group that was so in sync, so devastatingly efficient, and so eerily quiet that I swore I'd never team with them again). If the OP is willing to act as a DFB guide, I say more power to the OP. As a side note, I think the stakes in DFB are too high. The fights are too easy (unless you're badging), the rewards are too great, and it quicly took on an aspect of "all business no fun" even before the shutdown. Thus, too many people treat it like a 40-person WOW raid (maybe some exaggeration there), thus ruining its fun and its opportunity for bonding over shared experience.

I'm bad at following directions, so instead of throwing out tips, I threw together a couple of models instead. One is based on the female body, the other male. Unfortunately, "plain" is what I do best, so I tried creating models that might fit in the movies. Unfortunately, the female template is a bit... uh, problematic for an androgynous look. I tried a few different "Chest" types to see if I could obscure things a bit, and the following kind of sort of seemed to work - BodySuit Padded, Alpha, Buckled Leather, Chaos Leather, Enforcer, ExoProto, Justice, Omega, Overguard, Sinister (maybe), Tech Wired, Ulterior, and Vanguard. The example below uses BodySuit Padded, with the pattern of the same name selected. The chests seem to work best with black as the first color and some shade of grey as the second - flavor to suit. For hair, I dug around for "Switch-adjacent" hairstyles; the model below uses the Shag haricut. Gamine, Triptych, Styled, and Shimmer seem to work also. The male model is on the one hand easier to make androgynous - nearly every "smooth" or "armored" chest piece works. On the other hand, the textures on the male faces are almost all "tough guy" looks, with the possible exception of one of the "young" faces. I selected one almost at random. Also, I wasn't able to shrink down the monster hands. Maybe someone else knows a trick for that. The male model has the "Doofus" hair (don't laugh, I've used it), but Princeton, Parted, Genius, Surfer, Deceiver (maybe), Fabo, Hipster, Gusto, and Barbaric (very Keanu Reeves IMO), and Ponytail could work as well. Maybe some others. Forgive me for throwing the Cybertech Long jacket on these two. I'm a sucker for it. Trench coats should work just fine. Pseudo-Switch female.costume Pseudo-Switch male.costume

My young cynical self hated Uni with a passion. My old cynical self figures he was a sleeper agent for Venger.

Whoa - good call-out. I never would have made that connection, and I watched that show religiously as a kid. It does make me wonder who that first group at the 55 minute mark is, though...