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I've not played yet- is it very different from normal CAH?

First, I want to say that I really enjoyed those footnotes and writing the Escher Room in your control prompt; those were nice touches. I can't help but feel like a lot of Alantha's dialogue in your creative prompt was swearing, though; after a few lines I was wondering what else I'd see of her besides "short-tempered with a colorful Irish vocabulary."

As for the Undertale fics you're looking at... hoo boy, those sound awful. I look forward to seeing a mission on them, if/when you do get Permission. I also liked the art you have of Alantha.

Good luck on your Permission request!

I didn't notice how much I've repeated myself in this post until I reread it - I have no idea how I didn't catch this before. Apologies for the writing fail.

Well, here goes nothing...

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1d0hCmDiBEyrLwFhI22k4pk-HSnlHIqBeo9vSwNo8DwE/edit?usp=sharing

Many thanks to twistedwindowpane, Quincy Jones, and Tomash for beta reading!

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1IzTd2dXFXj96b-ZikhWSjKJcOoJ7aTiV6CXsvVQXtEo/edit?usp=sharing
After looking at some of the suggestions, I wrote a second draft. If anyone has more suggestions, I'd love to hear them!

My best friend and I have a long-standing tradition of my liveblogging absolutely terrible movies for them and both of us laughing our butts off at how bad they are. I have a lot of love for cheesy, badly written and made B-movies and I think I can safely call myself a connoisseur at this point, because I've seen quite a number of them.

Which is why I thought we bad movie lovers could discuss our favorites in this thread - the kind of stuff you enjoy not despite, but because it is bad. Let me go first with some of my faves.

1. Rock 'N' Roll Nightmare

Starring Canadian heavy metal singer/bodybuilder Jon Mikl Thor, this movie starts off as a standard, slightly boring bad 80s horror movie about a rock band moving into a haunted house to write new music and getting killed off one by one by the monsters within. There's plenty of 80s hair metal, some uncomfortable sex scenes, the occasional rubber monster, a character with the worst Australian accent I've ever heard, hokey acting, and so forth. However, the last 15 or so minutes take a breakneck turn from the standard horror movie plot into complete bat**** insanity - without spoiling anything, let me tell you that the first time I watched this movie in its entirety, I spent the last 15 minutes nonstop howling with laughter. I was genuinely in tears.

This movie is so obscure I couldn't even find a trailer for it, but do enjoy this out-of-context gif from it: https://halloweenshindig.files.wordpress.com/2014/08/tumblrnaw7d9ewjb1rlct23o1400.gif

2. Bridge of Dragons

One of my favorite B-movie directors' early efforts, everything you need to know about this movie can be summed up in this one scene (which I swear actually happens exactly like this in the movie). Mild abuse warning for a woman getting slapped pretty hard.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KuztZtqpqmg

Do enjoy the slo-mo action scene set to Gregorian chanting, and the fact that the bad guys not only wear Nazi regalia (despite the movie being set in a fictional country with zero ties to any real-life nation), but they label every single one of their vehicles with the number 666. Yes - it's THAT kind of movie.

3. KISS Meets the Phantom of the Park

KISS being one of my favorite bands despite their insanely problematic... everything (we all have our guilty pleasures), I've seen this movie like five times and kept dying laughing at it. The production history alone is essay material - to give you the short version, the band hated the script and each other, none of them had the slightest idea about acting, some of them didn't even show up at times (Peter Criss' dialogue is dubbed by a voice actor because he refused to rerecord his lines after filming), and basically everything about this movie is a huge, beautiful, hot mess. The story is about KISS (who in this movie are playing their onstage personas/superpowered beings) fighting a mad scientist who makes robots out of people in an amusement park, but the writing, acting, special effects... heck, EVERYTHING fail can only truly be appreciated if you see it for yourself. So do enjoy this scene.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dus7hHb0Je8

I could tell you about many more gloriously bad movies I've seen during my career as a movie buff, but these are the ones I love the most - besides, of course, such classics as Birdemic and The Room.

What are your favorite terrible movies?

Minh, I don't think anyone on the Board is against someone criticising something they love.
What Scape, Nesh, Delta, me and probably other people at this point DO have a problem with is your style of criticism, which is often very aggressive and insult-laden. And we've been through this discussion SO many times, Minh - it does feel good to rant about something you hate, I'm sure we've all done it, but we here at the PPC consider it very poor form to just straight up badmouth everything you don't like. I'm sure you would have been able to voice your opinions about Jodie Whittaker without insulting her appearance, or about the writing of Doctor Who without calling people "toxic" and "Tumblrites". I don't care about the show one way or another, and even I find your remarks a wee bit too much, pal.
As for your frequent comments about politics creeping into entertainment - dude, entertainment and politics have always been intertwined. Just think about all the lantern-jawed American action heroes facing off against evil Russians in 80s movies (to bring up something I myself enjoy - and yes, I do enjoy cheesy 80s movies while still recognizing their huge flaws); or about Star Trek The Original Series' incredibly morale-heavy storylines.
In my experience, usually when people complain about politics creeping into entertainment, it is because they don't agree with the message.

I don't have a dog in this fight, but I will say I haven't seen you say progressive things as much as I've seen you slam female main characters and complain about people criticizing poor fragile white men. Your show does not match your tell.

Also, I will again make the point that criticizing a character is not the same as insulting the appearance of an actress' face. You did the latter. Learn the difference already; we are getting very sick of it.

~Neshomeh

"Voicing their opinions in a way directed to attack other people" is what a lot of your "criticism" has read as, to me. You've called things "highly-toxic views", people "tumblrites" and "entitled morons" - and that's just in the last couple pages of Board history.

It kinda feels like you're blasting anger and profanity, rather than actually giving meaningful criticism? And that's not going to make people want to interact with you, or feel good about this community at large.

After all, "never split the party!"

—doctorlit, patient

I like Jodie as the Doctor, but she had a really rough set of episodes to work with. The decision to only use writers (and directors?) who had never worked on the show before really bit them hard. There was way too much emphasis on 'non-interference' - both with historical events (remind me why Prem had to die alone, again? Or why the giant spider couldn't be rescued and taken to a high-oxygen planet?) and with her own companions. Ryan dumps the villain of 'Rosa' defenceless in the distant past, which is as good as murder, but the Doctor says nothing. She doesn't do a whole lot to stop the potential murder of Tim Shaw in the finale, either.

Oh, and that's not to mention that she directly murders the villain of 'Kerblam!' by setting off a roomful of bombs around him, and then sides with the soulless corporation and their murderous AI. I seem to recall her coming up with a plan in the special that consisted of 'what if we electrocute the Dalek to death', too.

Outside of the Doctor, it was clear they had no idea what to do with such a crowded TARDIS, either. I adore Yaz, but she spends most of the series doing pretty much nothing while Ryan and Graham work out their family drama. Which was fine, and not something that's really been done in the TARDIS before, but... why not just cast two companions, if you're only going to make use of two? They never needed three, though which two they made use of varied a bit.

Having a few bad episodes isn't unusual, and nothing in Thirteen's first season hit the depths of 'In the Forest of the Night' or (gulp) 'Kill the Moon', both from Twelve's first. But nor did they come anywhere near the heights of 'Time Heist' or 'Listen', and that's a real shame.

Still, Season 12 is coming next year, and hopefully they'll have found their feet by then, and will have a chance to let Jodie Whittaker and her companions gang? fam? I forget what she settled on - really shine.

hS

...I mean, we're all entitled to our own opinion right? In all honesty, I don't give a flying frak whether you like whatever I like, or hate it; whether you agree or disagree with me; or whether any of you think poorly of me for simply voicing my opinion on a topic of popular culture.

What I do care about is when people start voicing their opinions in a way directed to attack other people. Your tone was very aggressive there Scapegrace, and I'm not sure we need or want that. If you're at doubt, I will direct you to what you said here:

"It's not nice when someone craps all over something you enjoy, is it, Minh?"

I mean, that that sentence just bleeds aggression from the very spaces between the words. I don't think what I said warranted that, especially since I didn't mean any harm in the first place. There is no need to deliberately try and target me because I don't happen to like Jodie Whittaker. As I've said (and say it with me folks!) I'm entitled to my own opinion.

I apologise yet again for simply saying I don't like something. There are in fact many things I like. Battlestar Galactica. Firefly. Hell, I even like Inheritance for christ sake, and yes; I know what the general consensus on those books is around here.

But forgive me, for I am a critic. When I criticise something (for example, the abysmal writing of the current Doctor's tenure; which spends more time being woke as all hell than telling interesting stories that aren't frakking toxic) I criticise it because I used to love what is being criticised. I used to love Doctor Who. I used to love Star Trek. But when those shows fell into the hands of people who never cared about either franchise till it gave them the ability to spread their highly-toxic views (and remember that I'm progressive, but I do draw a line at the point where people start screaming "ALL MEN MUST DIE!!!", and somehow getting a job in the BBC writing department [to my knowledge, no one at the BBC is actually a Tumblrite, but I'd be shocked if anyone there didn't personally have that particular view]) at the expense of good writing, good characterisation, good stories...you kinda see where I'm coming from, right? Doctor Who is a kids show; or rather, it's a show for all ages. Last time I checked, family entertainment didn't usually involve criticising single fathers or straight white dudes, did it?

May you have many more to come.

Oh, no, sorry, you've mentioned that you like The Orville, Seth Macfarlane's self-indulgent and entirely surface-level Trek extreme-quotation-marks parody that, like every other Macfarlane creative outpouring (and I use outlet here in the manner most commonly followed by "from the burst sewer main"), is about as funny as watching your favourite grandfather get fed slowly into an industrial sausage mincer.

It's not nice when someone craps all over something you enjoy, is it, Minh?

D'you think maybe you could stop doing it, Minh?

Looks like we've got a lot of folks who can be around for that then, so I'm making a heads up post that I'mpplanning to organize a round then.

In League With Dragons is the latest album by the Mountain Goats. Disclaimer, I haven't listened all the way through yet, but there are a few initial impressions.

Firstly, this is a good album. I bought it on vinyl, so I obviously like it. It continues the band's talent for quickly sketching a scene and characters and doing something interesting with them in three minutes or less. And there is a lot to like. I love the title track, a chronicle of an over-the-hill wizard waiting desperately for an unreliable draconic ally, to bits (and that fact that its mellow rhythms make it feel as melodically appropriate for my own half-draconic duo as it is lyrically inappropriate for them certainly doesn't hurt...).

But the phrase "And there is a lot to like" is a heck of a loaded one, and there's a reason I'm using it. This album is solid, but it's by no means as strong as The Sunset Tree.

Why? Cohesion.

The Sunset Tree doesn't exactly tell a story, not totally, but it more or less follows the arc of one. It explores not just a general theme but a very specific collection of events in the singer's life. That gives it a nearly unbeatable throughline. And a strong throughline of some sort, narrative, thematic, emotional, or otherwise, is the difference between a bunch of good songs and a great album. It's the difference between releasing Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band and Help! (not that Help! is bad, it's just not as strong a cohesive whole).

By the previous camp, In League with Dragons definitely hits closer to Help! than Sgt. Pepper. Only it doesn't have the distinction of being written and recorded by one of the most important rock bands in history. And it doesn't contain any absolute classic songs like Help!. Which sounds like an insult, but very songs stack up to "Yesterday" favorably on that front.

And it's actually worse than that. You see, In League With Dragons was supposed to a rock opera. Well, I say "supposed to." That's not true. What is true is that for a while it was planned as one, and I feel that damaged the album that we got. As it stands, maybe half to a third of the songs here sort-of-kind-of tell the story of a fantasy city under siege run by an ageing wizard king, and the other half is set in the modern(-ish) day, all connected to both each other and the other half of the album by a loose veneer of ageing and of falling heroes (maybe the album's working title of "Younger" would have been a better choice). And sure, we get a pretty dang good song about Ozzy Osbourne, and another about a pitcher for the Mets, but it just doesn't come together for me. Those themes could form a good throughline for a great album, but as it stands one half of the album also has this rock-opera thing going on, which ruins the balance because half the album feels a lot more cohesive than the rest. It's like the record's got a lump in it. 2112 also did this (half rock opera, half shorter songs), and it pulled it off, but 2112 had a rock opera on one side of the LP and a bunch of individual songs on the other. It felt like a rock opera with some extra pack-in singles that were there to fill space but weren't really part of the album. Here, those rock opera elements are still there but much less substantial and sort of scattered across the whole album in a way that was probably deliberate but doesn't feel deliberate.

So in short, this album is full of great songs but collectively has the consistency of lumpy oatmeal. Draw what conclusions you may.

1) Stick with the current weekend (no Nesh)
2) Move forward to this upcoming weekend (no Ix)
3) Push back to August 25th (everyone interested seems free, but that's also pretty far out)

Do people have thoughts here?

- Tomash

He'd be leagues better than Mrs Scronch-face anyway. I mean, seriously. Her only defining characteristic as the Doctor not ripped off from David Tennant or Matt Smith's interpretations is a constipated look where she screw up her face like she's trying really hard to push one out. Also, she can't emote; she spends more time criticising male characters than playing the Doctor, and they got rd of UNIT as a joke. About Brexit. Not cool, BBC.

Or anything that weekend; plans changed. Phooey.

~Neshomeh

I admire the writer's chapter uploading consistency/their determination, but "Supersonic" to describe a sun, let alone Thahit? Seriously?

That, at least, is a case of 'wrong word, understandable sentiment'.