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Everything posted by Bjorn

  1. I think part of the beauty of Twin Peaks is the very humanity of the characters that allows for them to be contradictory and truthful and self-deceiving in very honestly presented ways. Bobby can totally believe and feel pain that he feels manipulated into selling drugs because of Laura. But the truth of his emotion doesn't mean that this isn't where he would have ended up anyways, or that his actions aren't also still self serving and he's offloading responsibility for his own decisions and actions onto his girlfriend. Or that Laura could feel manipulated into having developed a drug habit because of her boyfriend introducing her to them, even while she's also responsible for her own decisions. Humans are contradictory messes when it comes to contemplating the roles and responsibilities of their own actions and others in regards to their lives. But Laura is a character, because of her own fear and self-loathing, who tends to assign herself responsibility for things around her (even to blaming herself for her own abuse, something common with abuse victims) while other characters, in a very human way, try to offload the responsibility their actions. Which might also be some fans want to do the same.
  2. I'm not that far in the diary yet, about halfway through it. I have a lot of thoughts about the diary and its exploration of shame, abuse, rebellion, fear and how those guide and shape people. But they aren't things I'm particularly interested in getting into in a public forum. From what I've read so far, I think Jennifer captured some themes and experiences that I've never seen tackled in quite this way (which may be more a reflection of my general reading choices than anything). The venn diagram of natural teen sexuality and rebellion and then behavior influenced by trauma/abuse is something that is very messy and personal, but rarely explored in a believable way for as common as it is in our society.
  3. I went back and rewatched the scene from FWWM. It is quite believable that Laura could see the beer being drugged, the angle is right. The Bobby stuff just isn't that cut and dried to me, it's very messy and both of them are using one another. Bobby was already partying with Leo and involved in drugs to some degree before Laura. He introduces Laura to Leo and that whole crowd (Secret Diary). He gives her cocaine for the first time (Secret Diary). He was already multiple steps down that path, and there's not a lot of evidence he would have deviated from it with or without Laura. Laura is manipulating him at times, sure. But he's also feeding her drugs and manipulating her that way and getting things he wants. Laura is a teenager who *thinks* she's a master manipulator, it's part of the internal framework she's built to view herself. But that doesn't make the framework true to the outside world. She's wrong. She's a teenager. Overestimating their ability is what they do. I'm not arguing that Laura's an angel, but I do think people want to offload other people's sins and bad actions onto her in ways that aren't particularly fair to the character.
  4. Penny Dreadful (TV series)

    The weird thing about it is that it vacillates wildly between handling issues around sex, gender and race in interesting and compelling ways, and then will turn around and just indulge in the absolute worst racial stereotypes like a pig rolling around in shit. And then there's the rather persistent religious overtones, of doing god's work to thwart evil while also showing just what a shit and terrible lot humanity has been left by god. And I cannot tell if there is any intentionallity to that at all. By the end I was kind of half rooting for the forces of darkness, because they were at least honest about wanting to destroy the world, while the forces of good just wanted a world full of slaves and misery where they could plug their ears and cover their eyes and pretend they weren't every bit as terrible as what they were fighting. And then the ending is...something. Spoilering I guess in case people are watching it or will watch it.
  5. E3 2017

    The original BG&E is one of only a handful of games I've played through entirely multiple times. The characters and world are some of the most charming ever made. I'm a sucker for most games with photography as a mechanic. I love that thematically you're an underground journalist trying to topple a government through exposure rather than being a super soldier. The actual melee combat is pretty meh, sure. But then, there's a bunch more to do in the game than whack monsters with a stick.
  6. Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain

    I got around to finishing the "True Ending" mission last night. The only thing of significance left to do is the Quiet mission that wraps up her storyline. Thoughts on the "True Ending"
  7. This...this summary is really messed up? It's off-loading a lot of responsibility onto Laura for other characters decisions and actions. My read of Bobby is that he was already dealing drugs, and that's why Laura started dating him, was to get free drugs. It's crappy, but not evil and Bobby is doing an excellent job of making bad decisions all on his own (and him and Mike are both shown to have some pretty awful controlling and abusive behavior in regards to their girlfriends). Bobby doesn't kill anyone for Laura. He shoots a dirty cop dead when that cop tries to double cross him as part of a drug deal. A drug deal he set up. I assume the Donna thing you're referencing is coming from the FWWM other bar scene. Laura argues with Donna about stepping foot into Laura's other world, tries to talk her out of it, finally allows it, and then has a total freakout when she realizes that Donna's too fucked up to be consenting to what's happening. It's literally the opposite of what you described. Who does Laura recruit into prostitution? It's the manager of Horne's Department Store who actively recruits young women who work in the store into being sex workers at One Eyed Jacks. She did jobs with other sex workers, but all of those are women who are already doing that kind of work. There seems to be this trend to want to take the sins of a bunch of other people around town and ascribe them to Laura (this thread isn't the only place I've seen it). She wasn't evil. She wasn't pure. She was human, a broken, flawed human trying to find ways to cope and get by in the world. She absolutely judged herself harshly, but that's such a reflection of the pain and shame she had around things that were wildly out of her control. Edited to add: Laura, like many young women, was very well aware that she was heavily idealized by many people in town, including people like Donna and James. Part of separating herself from them wasn't about corrupting them, it was about fearing their disappointment if they ever found out too much about her.
  8. How many teenagers have bad attitudes and get manipulative with people in their lives? It hardly takes BOB to explain that.
  9. E3 2017

    So pc gamers are confirmed garbage.
  10. After a conversation with the lady this morning, I've been thinking about the relationship of TP and family. Revisiting TP after 25 years is kind of like spending a lot of time with family that you haven't seen much since you were a kid. They've aged, changed, and also as an adult you're seeing things that were present before that you were blind to. Family is a big deal in not just within the fiction of TP, but in its creation. Both Lynch and Frost have each had 2 family members involved in its creation at some point, I think? tldr: Twin Peaks is your weird uncle who you loved as a kid but makes you kind of uncomfortable as an adult because you can see things now that you couldn't before.
  11. Yeah, I'm honestly surprised at the level of conclusion jumping that happens after every episode. Like, I think collectively we're batting about .150 on actually being right about anything in the show so far, and most of the stuff we've been wrong on has ended up being delightful anyways (like the golden shovels). I'm certainly not ready to declare that the show is about cosmic good and evil from what is still a pretty ambiguous episode.
  12. I had a similar reaction to that, particularly waiting for something else to happen to the egg or another frogbug to come out of it.
  13. Yes, Laura's "badness" is born almost entirely from trauma caused by Leland/BOB, and at the end of the day is self destructive rather than harmful to others. And her badness is functionally just 1) has sex and 2) does drugs, both as an escape mechanism from the horrible abuse she's suffered. In the grand scale of badness, it's barely bad at all both in comparison to others evil in the show and in the context of her own life. The immediate dominant response about her seems to be that she's intended to be the foil to BOB, but what I'm more afraid is that she was released as a trap to catch him, a woman designed to perfectly attract his insatiable desire. Which...ugh...idk, I'm not sure what's worse. That her lot in life was accident, or inevitable.
  14. Something I could stop thinking about during the atomic portion of the episode is how much it felt like an abstracted Twilight Zone or Outer Limits episode. All the way down to the design of the Woodsmen and the feel of the Convenience Store as a set. Throw in an ominous narrator to give some explanation, and it's almost a ready made lost Outer Limits.
  15. Beyond Good and Evil 2

    I swear that Ancel and Ubisoft are the biggest trolls in gaming, just casually mentioning BG&E every once in awhile to remind us they haven't completely forgotten it exists.
  16. Beyond Good and Evil 2

    I'd be okay with an Oddworld style approach to BG&E. Different types of games set in the same world and keeping certain tone and thematic elements.
  17. Beyond Good and Evil 2

    And a doggo.
  18. Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain

    I used Cheat Engine last night to knock out a bunch of research instantly. I realized that between the increasing amount of resources and time, I was likely to be done with this before being able to research all the stuff (not counting the gold, online only resource stuff, which is like weeks of research and crazy amounts of resources). The economy for research is just kinda fucked, it really pushes you towards having to do FOB invasions to even possibly have enough money to pay for everything, since a lot of the top tier stuff runs upwards of a million GMP to research. I don't really want to burn a bunch of hours doing invasions just to get the resources and money to play around the top tier of weapons for a little bit.
  19. Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain

    I never played Peacewalker, so I can't really speak to it, but otherwise I pretty much agree with everything you've said Syn. Pretty much every character is awful, and they only get more awful as the game goes on (barring Quiet and maybe Code Talker). As for my spoilered part, I've finished Mission 35 and done a number of the Priority side ops (there are a lot more Priority ops in the back half than there are in the front half). Once you cross over to Chapter 2, you start getting 3 missions at a time, 2 are entirely optional remixes of earlier missions and one is a new mission. I think 35 is just the second of the new missions. But I'm not sure what all is triggering new cutscenes, as some are definitely just happening from my completing side ops. On the Skull Face car ride, it struck me as an attempt to recapture the Snake Eater ladder climb from 3, but was just kind of dumb, because instead of just being this thing that happens, it follows the massive exposition dump from Skeletor. Which feels like that dump only needed to happen because most of the plot is hidden away in cassette tapes, which are very easy to skip. idk, I laughed at the car ride because it was ridiculous, but not because it was ridiculous in a good way. There's stuff about Kaz and Ocelot that bug me a lot. Like, Ocelot doesn't even feel like he should be in the game. He should play a foil to Kaz's paranoia, but that only happens a couple of times and most of the time he seems totes willing to go along with it. But I'm guessing some of their behavior is explained by what I'm presuming is the true/secret ending, which I'm just guessing at, but I'd be shocked if I'm wrong. Also, Huey is a completely garbage character. Everything about him is the worst forever. That seems to be the kind of defining thing with MGSV characters, it just makes them all worse than they've ever been. Maybe that fits with Kojima's generally "war is terrible and makes everything and everyone terrible" themes, but generally the games have had more kindness for the main cast.
  20. Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain

    Yeah, I actually like her humming as well. I really didn't think this game could have made me hate it more in terms of how it handles women, but I keep being consistently proven wrong. Big ole list of spoiled gripes since gerbil might not yet be to some of these. It's really hard for me to think of any game that I've loved as mechanically as this one, and despised for its dumb as fuck plot and character handling. And I even think some of the plot is good and interesting in terms of Metal Gear bullshit! Just so much bad stuff draped off it.
  21. Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain

    Hahaha, holy shit that video's good. That first fucking kill I was not ready for. I knew you could use air drops like that, but I hadn't ever messed with it. This game is so good when you feel like you're lording it up. I used the box transfer stations to put myself into the middle of a base to do a side op of extracting one soldier. Summoned in a sand storm, took out like five guys, extracted the guy I wanted, shot out some lights, and box transferred back out right as the storm was ending. It's probably been the single most lordy mclord moment I've had. Edited to add: Weather Modification is hilarious inside the fiction of the Metal Gear. Like, there's nukes, mechs and designer diseases all threatening to destroy mankind, but oh, hey, this one mercenary force has somehow figured out how to make the weather do its bidding. No big deal.
  22. Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain

    Haha, I really can't wait for you to get through Mission 31, I wanna talk about how dumb the overall story is in this, but I won't worry about spoilering a bunch of stuff, I'll just wait until you get there. It's really amazing how good the gameplay is, and how good some of the individual plot moments are, but man is the overall plot definitely Metal Gear. Oh, and as for animals and Side Ops, you can still use your cages on side ops, just leave using a helicopter. If I'm close to a helicopter spot, I take the time to extract that way and drop cages. If I'm not very close at all a helicopter spot, then I just bail through the pause menu and don't worry about it. Sadly resupply drops don't let you drop more than 8 cages
  23. E3 2017

    That BG&E2 trailer was fantastic. If it wasn't Ancel helming it, I'd have a lot more cynicism or concern than I do. AFAIK, he directed both Rayman Origins and Legends (not just like his name on it or something), and that gives me a lot of confidence that he can go back to the well of something years later and still make magic.
  24. Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain

    One thing on animals, particularly the cage ones, is just to deploy all 8 (at max rank) every single time you're going to load up on a chopper or finish an mission. It doesn't seem to work by jumping straight to the chopper from the pause menu, but the other two ways it does. I think I'm at 80 percent on the animals list now, and I haven't farmed or tried at all to get anything. Just doing that every mission, sometimes all 8 dumped right under the chopper, has got me that far. So, are you to Mission 25 yet? I hit it tonight, and one thing I'll suggest is that it might be good if you've got a good couple of hours to play when you hit it. A series of events plays out after it that strongly encourages you to play through the next several missions in a row. I just played an hour later than I had intended because I wanted to power through it. Spoilering the rest in case you haven't got there yet: