Moments when a piece of entertainment completely lost you.

[virgil]

Been watching this anime, Ajin, my wife suggested. It's about the discovery and rise of mutants who all have the power of automatically being hit with true resurrection when they die. Physically indistinguishable from normal humans, even by each other, until they die and in a couple seconds get fully healed. The power only activates at death; so you can poison them, break their legs, put them in a coma, and they'll respond like a normal human until the moment they die and then instantly be back to their fully healed selves.

The part that's getting me is how dumb the setting's scientists are.

A pharmaceutical company uses the one they have for testing. Even were you to get past any ethics committee with your flimsy excuse of them not having any rights because they're not human, you can't do jack with them for medical research. The immortals are stupid rare, 47 had been discovered over the span of 15 years, so your sample size alone invalidates any meaningful results. You don't even generally have a control group because of how rare they are. And nobody knows how their powers work, so you can't even fully support any results you do get because of that mystery factor until you then start testing on normal humans, which makes them superfluous. At the absolute best, you might be able to use them for exploratory research.

They're also given to automotive companies. I don't see how any established car company can afford to rent the one immortal in the country instead of just continuing to use the money in their budget for crash test dummies.

The short bits of research they did show was equally stupid. In one instance, they just strapped an immortal to a chair and had a scientist stand two meters back with a pistol for a few dozen headshots. What kind of meaningful data do you get out of that; people die when they are killed? Yup, immortals come back from the first head shot just like the 27th identical head shot? They don't even seem to be trying out forensics research by varying the ballistic profile and looking at blood splatters. The other 'experiment' I saw just seemed to be "how fast can we get the heart/pain monitor to beep with surgical tools without killing him," which is even more unjustifiable.

[Kaelik]

They're also given to automotive companies. I don't see how any established car company can afford to rent the one immortal in the country instead of just continuing to use the money in their budget for crash test dummies.

Even dumber, that's net worse. Crash test dummies have sensors for god sake, you get less information from crashing real people.

[hyzmarca]

Been watching this anime, Ajin, my wife suggested. It's about the discovery and rise of mutants who all have the power of automatically being hit with true resurrection when they die. Physically indistinguishable from normal humans, even by each other, until they die and in a couple seconds get fully healed. The power only activates at death; so you can poison them, break their legs, put them in a coma, and they'll respond like a normal human until the moment they die and then instantly be back to their fully healed selves.

The part that's getting me is how dumb the setting's scientists are.

A pharmaceutical company uses the one they have for testing. Even were you to get past any ethics committee with your flimsy excuse of them not having any rights because they're not human, you can't do jack with them for medical research. The immortals are stupid rare, 47 had been discovered over the span of 15 years, so your sample size alone invalidates any meaningful results. You don't even generally have a control group because of how rare they are. And nobody knows how their powers work, so you can't even fully support any results you do get because of that mystery factor until you then start testing on normal humans, which makes them superfluous. At the absolute best, you might be able to use them for exploratory research.

They're also given to automotive companies. I don't see how any established car company can afford to rent the one immortal in the country instead of just continuing to use the money in their budget for crash test dummies.

The short bits of research they did show was equally stupid. In one instance, they just strapped an immortal to a chair and had a scientist stand two meters back with a pistol for a few dozen headshots. What kind of meaningful data do you get out of that; people die when they are killed? Yup, immortals come back from the first head shot just like the 27th identical head shot? They don't even seem to be trying out forensics research by varying the ballistic profile and looking at blood splatters. The other 'experiment' I saw just seemed to be "how fast can we get the heart/pain monitor to beep with surgical tools without killing him," which is even more unjustifiable.

It's not terribly unrealistic. Mengele did a lot of very stupid experiments and only mannaged to get usable hypothermia data by sheer luck.

[Omegonthesane]

Been watching this anime, Ajin, my wife suggested. It's about the discovery and rise of mutants who all have the power of automatically being hit with true resurrection when they die. Physically indistinguishable from normal humans, even by each other, until they die and in a couple seconds get fully healed. The power only activates at death; so you can poison them, break their legs, put them in a coma, and they'll respond like a normal human until the moment they die and then instantly be back to their fully healed selves.

The part that's getting me is how dumb the setting's scientists are.

A pharmaceutical company uses the one they have for testing. Even were you to get past any ethics committee with your flimsy excuse of them not having any rights because they're not human, you can't do jack with them for medical research. The immortals are stupid rare, 47 had been discovered over the span of 15 years, so your sample size alone invalidates any meaningful results. You don't even generally have a control group because of how rare they are. And nobody knows how their powers work, so you can't even fully support any results you do get because of that mystery factor until you then start testing on normal humans, which makes them superfluous. At the absolute best, you might be able to use them for exploratory research.

They're also given to automotive companies. I don't see how any established car company can afford to rent the one immortal in the country instead of just continuing to use the money in their budget for crash test dummies.

The short bits of research they did show was equally stupid. In one instance, they just strapped an immortal to a chair and had a scientist stand two meters back with a pistol for a few dozen headshots. What kind of meaningful data do you get out of that; people die when they are killed? Yup, immortals come back from the first head shot just like the 27th identical head shot? They don't even seem to be trying out forensics research by varying the ballistic profile and looking at blood splatters. The other 'experiment' I saw just seemed to be "how fast can we get the heart/pain monitor to beep with surgical tools without killing him," which is even more unjustifiable.

It's not terribly unrealistic. Mengele did a lot of very stupid experiments and only mannaged to get usable hypothermia data by sheer luck.

Mengele is not most scientists, and the complaint appeared to apply to "most scientists" in the setting.

[hyzmarca]

Been watching this anime, Ajin, my wife suggested. It's about the discovery and rise of mutants who all have the power of automatically being hit with true resurrection when they die. Physically indistinguishable from normal humans, even by each other, until they die and in a couple seconds get fully healed. The power only activates at death; so you can poison them, break their legs, put them in a coma, and they'll respond like a normal human until the moment they die and then instantly be back to their fully healed selves.

The part that's getting me is how dumb the setting's scientists are.

A pharmaceutical company uses the one they have for testing. Even were you to get past any ethics committee with your flimsy excuse of them not having any rights because they're not human, you can't do jack with them for medical research. The immortals are stupid rare, 47 had been discovered over the span of 15 years, so your sample size alone invalidates any meaningful results. You don't even generally have a control group because of how rare they are. And nobody knows how their powers work, so you can't even fully support any results you do get because of that mystery factor until you then start testing on normal humans, which makes them superfluous. At the absolute best, you might be able to use them for exploratory research.

They're also given to automotive companies. I don't see how any established car company can afford to rent the one immortal in the country instead of just continuing to use the money in their budget for crash test dummies.

The short bits of research they did show was equally stupid. In one instance, they just strapped an immortal to a chair and had a scientist stand two meters back with a pistol for a few dozen headshots. What kind of meaningful data do you get out of that; people die when they are killed? Yup, immortals come back from the first head shot just like the 27th identical head shot? They don't even seem to be trying out forensics research by varying the ballistic profile and looking at blood splatters. The other 'experiment' I saw just seemed to be "how fast can we get the heart/pain monitor to beep with surgical tools without killing him," which is even more unjustifiable.

It's not terribly unrealistic. Mengele did a lot of very stupid experiments and only mannaged to get usable hypothermia data by sheer luck.

Mengele is not most scientists, and the complaint appeared to apply to "most scientists" in the setting.

Give people absolute power over someone and they can get quite sadistic. Sometimes you don't brutally torture people because you think it'll get useful information. Sometimes you do it just for fun.

Actually, you usually do it just for fun.

[Prak]

Ok, not the entertainment itself, but...

So I'm at a Rocky Horror shadow cast. It's Disney their, and being presented by a theatre troupe that does burlesque acts preshow.

... There are multiple children here...

Multiple people brought children. To Rocky Horror. With burlesque.

[sendaz]

https://techcrunch.com/2016/07/11/pokem ... -missouri/

There is always somebody.....

[Josh_Kablack]

Been reading Wizard's First Rule. Just got to the explanation of how the Confessors' magical power works. Said explanation is so bad that I think I'm giving up on the book.

I read enough cheesey fantasy that I can stomach the "how horrible it is to be cursed with this awesomeness". I can totally tolerate how piss poor the prior parts of the book were at remembering that this is an "always on" power....with the always on drawback bought off as a seperate power that has some sort of Costs End / Concentration limitation.

I cannot get my head around how "always on" is seriously considered a drawback by anyone in the book, when said power explicitly has a measurable and consistant recharge time. It also explicitly works on animals. So a sane author would have realized that after about 8 pages of an angsty X-Men origin story, the first Confessor would have decided to be a rancher, and whenever the "always on" bit was likely to become a problem, she would have unleashed her accursed awesomeness against the cow/sheep/pig/rabbit that was going to be tonight's dinner and gotten on with her life being normal whenever she wanted to be.

Then the book really pisses me off as the explaination throws really implausible social constructs, casual sexism and a wholely unessecary tradition of infanticide atop that in a bloody piss-poor attempt to explain how the Confessors' magic powah fits into the world of the book.

[hyzmarca]

Ok, not the entertainment itself, but...

So I'm at a Rocky Horror shadow cast. It's Disney their, and being presented by a theatre troupe that does burlesque acts preshow.

... There are multiple children here...

Multiple people brought children. To Rocky Horror. With burlesque.

Well, it is Disney, and Rocky Horror is a classic, and parents these days are a lot more progressive.

[Longes]

Been watching this anime, Ajin, my wife suggested. It's about the discovery and rise of mutants who all have the power of automatically being hit with true resurrection when they die. Physically indistinguishable from normal humans, even by each other, until they die and in a couple seconds get fully healed. The power only activates at death; so you can poison them, break their legs, put them in a coma, and they'll respond like a normal human until the moment they die and then instantly be back to their fully healed selves.

The part that's getting me is how dumb the setting's scientists are.

A pharmaceutical company uses the one they have for testing. Even were you to get past any ethics committee with your flimsy excuse of them not having any rights because they're not human, you can't do jack with them for medical research. The immortals are stupid rare, 47 had been discovered over the span of 15 years, so your sample size alone invalidates any meaningful results. You don't even generally have a control group because of how rare they are. And nobody knows how their powers work, so you can't even fully support any results you do get because of that mystery factor until you then start testing on normal humans, which makes them superfluous. At the absolute best, you might be able to use them for exploratory research.

They're also given to automotive companies. I don't see how any established car company can afford to rent the one immortal in the country instead of just continuing to use the money in their budget for crash test dummies.

The short bits of research they did show was equally stupid. In one instance, they just strapped an immortal to a chair and had a scientist stand two meters back with a pistol for a few dozen headshots. What kind of meaningful data do you get out of that; people die when they are killed? Yup, immortals come back from the first head shot just like the 27th identical head shot? They don't even seem to be trying out forensics research by varying the ballistic profile and looking at blood splatters. The other 'experiment' I saw just seemed to be "how fast can we get the heart/pain monitor to beep with surgical tools without killing him," which is even more unjustifiable.

The only thing I really liked about Aijn is that the villain gets creative with his powers.

At one point the villain (who is an Aijn) want to get past the protagonist's defenses into a fortified structure. So he cuts off his hand and mails it to the protagonist. Once the protagonist got the package the villain kills himself and reforms from his largest remaining part - the hand.

[Sigil]

Been reading Wizard's First Rule. Just got to the explanation of how the Confessors' magical power works. Said explanation is so bad that I think I'm giving up on the book.

I read enough cheesey fantasy that I can stomach the "how horrible it is to be cursed with this awesomeness". I can totally tolerate how piss poor the prior parts of the book were at remembering that this is an "always on" power....with the always on drawback bought off as a seperate power that has some sort of Costs End / Concentration limitation.

I cannot get my head around how "always on" is seriously considered a drawback by anyone in the book, when said power explicitly has a measurable and consistant recharge time. It also explicitly works on animals. So a sane author would have realized that after about 8 pages of an angsty X-Men origin story, the first Confessor would have decided to be a rancher, and whenever the "always on" bit was likely to become a problem, she would have unleashed her accursed awesomeness against the cow/sheep/pig/rabbit that was going to be tonight's dinner and gotten on with her life being normal whenever she wanted to be.

Then the book really pisses me off as the explaination throws really implausible social constructs, casual sexism and a wholely unessecary tradition of infanticide atop that in a bloody piss-poor attempt to explain how the Confessors' magic powah fits into the world of the book.

Quitting the series now would be the wise choice, unless you really want to read about the main character getting captured and tortured by masochist/sadist rape/torture lesbians. Then teaching those rape/torture lesbians the meaning of love by being so good at being tortured, so they promise to only be his torture lesbians.

[Kaelik]

Quitting the series now would be the wise choice, unless you really want to read about the main character getting captured and tortured by masochist/sadist rape/torture lesbians. Then teaching those rape/torture lesbians the meaning of love by being so good at being tortured, so they promise to only be his torture lesbians.

Wholly shit that's terrible.

[hyzmarca]

Quitting the series now would be the wise choice, unless you really want to read about the main character getting captured and tortured by masochist/sadist rape/torture lesbians. Then teaching those rape/torture lesbians the meaning of love by being so good at being tortured, so they promise to only be his torture lesbians.

Wholly shit that's terrible.

Then there is the part where he slaughters pacifist war protesters who were "armed only with their hatred of moral clarity."


Really, it's a crowd of unarmed pacifists shouting anti-war slogans and he runs straight into them and starts decapitating people and it's presented as an objectively good and heroic thing.

[Maxus]

Been reading Wizard's First Rule. Just got to the explanation of how the Confessors' magical power works. Said explanation is so bad that I think I'm giving up on the book.

I read enough cheesey fantasy that I can stomach the "how horrible it is to be cursed with this awesomeness". I can totally tolerate how piss poor the prior parts of the book were at remembering that this is an "always on" power....with the always on drawback bought off as a seperate power that has some sort of Costs End / Concentration limitation.

I cannot get my head around how "always on" is seriously considered a drawback by anyone in the book, when said power explicitly has a measurable and consistant recharge time. It also explicitly works on animals. So a sane author would have realized that after about 8 pages of an angsty X-Men origin story, the first Confessor would have decided to be a rancher, and whenever the "always on" bit was likely to become a problem, she would have unleashed her accursed awesomeness against the cow/sheep/pig/rabbit that was going to be tonight's dinner and gotten on with her life being normal whenever she wanted to be.

Then the book really pisses me off as the explaination throws really implausible social constructs, casual sexism and a wholely unessecary tradition of infanticide atop that in a bloody piss-poor attempt to explain how the Confessors' magic powah fits into the world of the book.

Quitting the series now would be the wise choice, unless you really want to read about the main character getting captured and tortured by masochist/sadist rape/torture lesbians. Then teaching those rape/torture lesbians the meaning of love by being so good at being tortured, so they promise to only be his torture lesbians.

This website will tell you about all you need to know about Goodkind and his works. http://sandstormreviews.blogspot.com/20 ... odies.html

[Sigil]

Reading that sandstorm review, I realize I made a slightly inaccurate statement, they weren't torture/rape lesbians, they were torture/rape bisexual nuns. Wouldn't want to slander the guy, gotta be accurate.

[Prak]

I think Sausage Party set a record for losing me. The first teaser trailer made it look sort of amusing, worth seeing at the cheap seats, at least.

The second trailer is fucking insufferable. Someone needs to stop Seth Rogen.

[Ancient History]

Someone needs to stop Seth Rogen.

I've been saying this for years.

[PhoneLobster]

Reading that sandstorm review, I realize I made a slightly inaccurate statement, they weren't torture/rape lesbians, they were torture/rape bisexual nuns. Wouldn't want to slander the guy, gotta be accurate.

As a general rule the vast majority of Goodkind female characters are S&M Nuns of some form to the point that the setting is actually overflowing with multiple orders and splinter factions of S&M Nuns.

And if you are looking for cringeworthy Goodkind moments if you can manage to read far enough you have to read through a lot of crazy shit to get to the point where the main character comes to a personal epiphany and humiliates the unbeatable ultimate enemy... by being misidentified and enslaved as some sort of homoerotic fantasy gridiron bloodsport slave, who wins really hard at sports ball through a dedication to nihilistic brutality stripping naked/close enough and smearing himself with blood and then that somehow leading to just suddenly deciding actually he just has always had the power to create an alternate universe with no magic and banish everyone with impure political beliefs there forever.

There were other moments that were... alarmingly close... to that cringeworthy (like that time he defeated a vast an evil communist nation, only later on suddenly not, by means of being an example of a dedicated paragon of small businessman in the local community) but that whole bloodbowl dues ex machina thing was... yeah...

[Blade]

Quitting the series now would be the wise choice, unless you really want to read about the main character getting captured and tortured by masochist/sadist rape/torture lesbians. Then teaching those rape/torture lesbians the meaning of love by being so good at being tortured, so they promise to only be his torture lesbians.

Sounds like a Richard Blade book.

[Hadanelith]

I managed to make it through 4 of the books before I just couldn't care any more. This was during my teenage years. Looking back now, holy shit is Goodkind TERRIBLE. The series is terrible, the plot is terrible, the main character is terrible, the love interest is terrible, the prose is...decent (though I hear it degenerates the further you go in the series), the world is terrible, everything is awful. Terry Goodkind is a miserable author, and I would have been much better served just re-reading Lord of the Rings. And so would anyone else contemplating reading the Sword of Truth series.

Fuck, even the Wheel of Time is better than this garbage.

[angelfromanotherpin]

I actually thought Wizard's First Rule wasn't too bad as grimderp fantasies go. Definitely not good, but with enough interesting ideas to carry you through to the end - I've recommended it to a number of people (with caveats) for various reasons. I only tried to read any more of the series after I heard how goofy it got, but I couldn't make it even when my motive was the camp value.

[PhoneLobster]

I rather liked the first one.

I thought it was a subtle piece of satire of fantasy tropes. I mean it had to be right? Because if it wasn't I mean... what else could it be other than that or unpublishable ravings?

I was so foolish and young.

[Maxus]

I actually thought Wizard's First Rule wasn't too bad as grimderp fantasies go. Definitely not good, but with enough interesting ideas to carry you through to the end - I've recommended it to a number of people (with caveats) for various reasons. I only tried to read any more of the series after I heard how goofy it got, but I couldn't make it even when my motive was the camp value.

One of the pieces you need to know about the man's mindset is that Goodkind objects to his stuff being labelled as fantasy rather than a deep philosophical novel. He insists it isn't fantasy.

[Josh_Kablack]

Well I knew it was going to be a libertarian quest when I saw that TOR had published it (in the 90s to boot).

[hyzmarca]

Well I knew it was going to be a libertarian quest when I saw that TOR had published it (in the 90s to boot).

It's an Objectivist quest, which is far, far worse than a libertarian one. Libertarianism at least makes some sense.