UnderDiscussion 97: No-Effort December Part One *explicit*

 UnderDiscussion  No Responses »
Dec 182012
 

This week on UnderDiscussion we just let the camera roll so to speak as we kick off No-Effort December. Unlike previous years, this year we’ll actually be putting episodes out in the last month of the year. All your favorite undergophers (and Brady) are here to discuss anything and everything.

This is also our Christmas episode. Sort of.

This week we discuss why Ed McMahon couldn’t run a major sports league, the star wars that might have been, an old shame, that a lot of sci-fi is really mostly just the “fi” part, an awesome superpower, plot holes of the Matrix, Total editorial control, who is Laurence Olivier, reminding you that Star Trek Voyager sucked, Tim tries to make a point about Farscape, States in order of suck, horrible sports team mascots, why tradition is never a good defense, a bad video game, Jean Claude van Damme, apparently there’s a soccer stadium in the kc area, Sporting KC’s unique memorabilia,  hockey playing horses, Adventure Time, and that you should listen to Law of the Geek.

We manage to stuff all of that into a stocking about 54 minutes long.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

A Short Rant

 General Roleplaying  No Responses »
Mar 262011
 

This response to a thread on the Piazo boards set me off.

And therein lies the biggest problem with the Monk… It requires magic boxing gloves and a bunch of other magic items to be viable at mid to high levels.

ALL the martial classes require magic items at mid to high levels to be “viable” (read: do lots of damage.) This is not a condition restricted to the monk. The game was built with the assumption that player characters will be acquiring magical gear that directly helps them against the ever tougher threats that they will face as they level up. It is a fundamental part of the game. The numbers in the Bestiary (and the monster manuals that came before it) assume that at increasing levels increasing magical gear will be present.

Brought to you by At&t

 Transmissions  3 Responses »
Mar 162011
 

So recently At&t announced that starting in May they would be implementing data caps on their DSL and Uverse accounts to “relieve congestion” on their network. I think this is complete BS, but because I am a lowly peon there’s little I can do about it. I care because the last time I moved I decided to cut the cord and rely exclusively on the internet for entertainment. This has been possible thanks mostly to Netflix and Youtube. Needless to say these use a lot of bandwidth. So I’m soon going to be forced with a choice: a) Stay with At&t and limit my usage b) Stay with At&t and suck up the charges or c) Switch to another ISP (in my area that happens to be Comcast) and deal with any issues that arise with them.

I’ve been honestly considering A and C.

Going with the first option would have a few downsides, the most obvious being changing my viewing habits to fit within the 150gb/month data cap. (I have DSL and I’m not about to reward them bu upgrading to Uverse.) That would suck, because I’ve gotten used to watching entire seasons of TV shows at a time and an entire season will put me really close to the cap, so that would have to go. I can see a few upsides. The first would be giving myself more time to do other things like read, write and walk. (The three W’s, well read doesn’t start with W, but it sounds good, just go with it.) I’ve actually got quite a backlog of books to read, due mostly to my habit of never leaving a book store without at least one new book. It’s a sickness, but it takes the place of drinking so what am I gonna’ do. I’ve also got a book to finish writting. Well, a draft to finish writting. I’ve been putting it off for two years now and I want it to get to the point that I’m ok showing it to my friends. It’s not going to get there if I’m watching TV (it got the way it is because of Murder, She Wrote so I’m not going to do that again.) Finally, I need to start the exercise routine back up, but I can’t seem to tare myself away from the boob tube (or in my case the man-boob tube.) Walking would also help with the reading (I can also chew gum at the same time!)

Option C is almost unthinkable to me, because I don’t want to go back to Comcast. They also have data caps. The cap is (slightly) more generous but they still exist. I’ve been toying with the idea of spending $70 a month on business class internet to avoid the caps. It’s not my favorite option, mostly because I’ve dealt with comcast in the past and didn’t want to deal with them again.

I hate that the telecom policies of the nation for the past few decades have allowed it to come to this. If it was possible for more competition to exist in an area they wouldn’t even think about this sort of thing. After writing all of this out I think I’m going to go with the first option.

Thanks for humoring me and reading this otherwise pointless venting rant.

Late to this party

 Reviews  No Responses »
Feb 032011
 

This post is sort of a review and sort of not. (it’s more “not” than “review.”) It’s about Stargate SGU, the successor show to the Stargate franchise. Yes, the one that was already canceled. Yes,  I know I’m a little late to this party, but this started as a forum post and I decided that it would work better as a blog post. So, on with the show…

I tried to like it (I’m a big SG! and Atlantis fan), I really, really did. I wanted this show to be just as good if not better than SG-1 or Atlantis, but it wasn’t. It wasn’t anywhere close. I watched SG-1 and Atlantis because they were fun escapism. Every week the team would beat incredible odds and save the galaxy from some evil, yet ultimately incompetent threat. I knew going in that SGU wasn’t the same sort of show, but that didn’t mean that it couldn’t be just as much fun. Sadly, I learned that yes it did mean that.

I gave the show a fair shot. I ignored all the names that were being thrown around (Battlegate Voyager, anyone?) and started with the pilot the same night as everyone else. I watched the whole thing and was dissapointed. It was dark, gritty, and I didn’t give a rat’s ass about any of the characters. Hoping against hope that it was just because the setup episode of almost all television sucks I tuned in for the next two episodes and again was left wanting.

I abandoned the show for a while but decided to try again mid season. When I tuned in again after the summer hiatus I still didn’t enjoy it. It still wasn’t fun wasn’t fun and I still didn’t give a damn about these people. So I gave up on the show. I wasn’t one of the people who rallied against it. I didn’t tweet about it constantly or demand that an old show be brought back. I simply stopped watching.

I figured that the “march to grimdark” had taken the franchise from me. I was no longer the target demographic. Today’s audiences want dark and gritty not light, and fun. Apparently I was also wrong about that. The show was canceled at the end of its second season. Turns out that I wasn’t the one who stopped watching.

So now there’s no new stargate on TV at all.  I don’t feel bad about it, because they were never going to bring back the stargate that I liked and I don’t think there’s any point to supporting a show that you don’t like just because its a spinnoff of a show you did like. There were other ideas that could have worked, but they chose to go with what they did and it failed them. Turns out that the highest rated shows on SYFY are the light and fun shows.

Who would have thought.

Or Lack Thereof

 Transmissions  1 Response »
Aug 292010
 

I find myself again driven to post by an annoyance.

So, for a personal project I’m trying to follow the RSS feeds of as many comic shops around the country as possible. The biggest resource for this is a website called “The Master List.” It’s basically just a huge listing of comic shops and their contact info. What’s nice about the site is that it gives the website for any shop that has one.

Looking at the websites for various websites (I’m through Colorado so far) I’ve noticed that comic shop websites fall into three categories: The professionally done (about 40% from what I can see), The amateur website (about 35% of what I’ve seen so far. This does not include those that use a CMS like WordPress), and those that want to pretend that they have a webpage but don’t. The pretend webpage has almost always been a myspace page.

Why do people think that is acceptable? Websites are cheap. I know. You’re reading this on a cheap webpage. A myspace page IS NOT A WEBPAGE! Not if you’re older that 14. Seriously, it takes like 5 minutes to have a wordpress siteup.

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