In response to “Boom! Headshot” from The Escapist Forum: If you are going to write an article about one of the most famous sayings on the internet maybe credit the man that made it as famous as it is. You are right about one thing as good as the show is I wouldnt have even seen it if it wasnt for that clip on youtube of Joel Gardiner playing “fpsdoug”. Just found your article to either be extremely biased or just written by a person that hasnt actually watched the series.
– Pegro
It’s not a PP encyclopedia, just an article; since when did it have to mention Doug?
I reckon Cale’s a better actor. Doug is a fairly one dimensional character that can be played for laughs more easily. I’ve noticed recently though that Cale is playing Jeremy brilliantly; the self-aware glances at the camera remind me of Ricky Gervais playing David Brent, and he is much more complicated as a character now. Doug, while funny, is a bit of a one-trick pony.
– Burld
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In response to “How to Bite the Head Off a Chicken” from The Escapist Forum: I think this is the crux of the problem for a majority of people, supply and demand in the labour market and fear of trying to strike your own path and failing. People have their obsessions and can’t find a way to make their knowledge and passion for a subject pay. There are people out there for whom work is not a necessity and can choose what they do without wondering where the rent money is coming from, but they are a minority.
It’s easy to have an obsession turned into a neglected hobby by the demands of the job that’s necessary to pay the rent, then later by a family that need their requirements prioritising over personal desires.
There’s an argument that says if you take the safer option you just didn’t want it badly enough, but I think that’s sometimes unfair, personal circumstances come into play. You’ll find plenty of advertised vacancies for desk workers of various flavours, far fewer positions exist for people who want to specialise in a small sub-section of the entertainment industry.
Most of the time you have to create a position, and it’s best to have evidence that there’s a product or expertise that people will pay for, before setting off down that road. The highs are higher, the lows are lower, everything gets more intense.
I wish you every success Colin, thanks for the article.
– usernamed
In a kamehameha contest, no-one wins.
– Spacelord
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In response to “This is the End” from The Escapist Forum: Yeah, there is a very real difference between “Nintendo hard” and “The devs stopped caring by level 3 hard”. My own personal minefield was the PC version of Land of the Dead: Road to Fiddler’s Green. It wasn’t so much that the game was “hard”- in fact, it was laughably easy- but that it was utterly repetitive and counterintuitive, not to mention that it had taken a promising franchise and premise and flushed them both right down the toilet. No self-respecting zombie game should allow five shots to a leg with a .22 rifle do the same damage as five shots to the head with a .22 rifle.
I slogged through it, yes, but I try to make a habit of not playing games that feel more like torture than recreation. Life is too short to play bad games.
– The Rogue Wolf
In response to “Silver Screen Button Mashing” from The Escapist Forum: As the lone gamer in my group of friends at college, whenever I talk about gaming I usually get blank stares and jokes about me being crazy. And then they discuss whatever was on TV. It’s been my experience that most avid TV viewers are seldom gamers and vice versa, so it’s a lot easier to make jokes about gamers rather than for gamers. More people can relate to laughing about their friend who plays video games because they just don’t care about gaming.
– Karisse
On topic of the article, I must say that I CANNOT stand the very concept of Big Bang Theory. Maybe it is because I go to RIT and know plenty of other geeks and nerds that aren’t the pocket-protector-buck-toothed-snorting-awkward-virgin stereotype, which is what the main characters of the show all are. I much prefer Spaced because Simon Pegg himself is an avid geek and gamer, and the shows and films he works on with Edgar Wright and co. shows it. I also enjoyed Chuck, because, even though they’ll get some details wrong, for the most part you can tell geeks are behind it. More to the point, while the main characters are all clearly geeks, they aren’t an outdated stereotype that plays us all out as being pathetic losers who can’t interact with “normal people”.
I also think Reign Over Me should have a special note here, as one of the film’s writers or producers (can’t recall which) wanted to make sure that the scenes where Adam Sandler’s character was gaming were accurate. They used Shadow of the Colossus to create a metaphor for Sandler’s character and what he was going through, so in one way it was being used artistically. Also, in the scene where Sandler is showing Don Cheadle’s character how to play, they didn’t have a script. Sandler had played the game a bit, so they basically just recorded the two playing and talking about the game as themselves. They even show a trailer where Sandler is like “now you wanna stab it in the wing”, and they show that exact boss from the game.
This is what needs to be done, instead of, say, Free Willy 3, where the kid is playing Star Fox on the SNES, fighting the boss at the end of the first level, and when he is told to shut off the game he says “but I’m almost at ten thousand points, mom!”. Anyone that grew up in the 90’s knows that isn’t how games worked anymore.
….as for what I was doing watching Free Willy 3, well, sometimes you get bored and put the TV on anything.
– ccesarano
In response to “Dungeons & Dragons Owns the Future” from The Escapist Forum: Clever comparison with Athenian tragedy. I think there’s a huge, unexplored territory lying just a bit further out, too: Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides composed what they composed, and gave birth not just to drama but also more or less to literature, because writing and reading were just barely coming in as a public thing at the time they were working, and the incredible advances offered by the new technology of writing just blew away the seemingly modest potential of oral composition.
To grasp what I think is the true ancient parallel (cf. http://livingepic.blogspot.com), you need to go back to Homeric epic, with its improvisatory character.
So perhaps it’s actually Gary and Dave who finally brought oral tradition back to us!
– TinPeregrinus
