The Gaming Den

Posted: **Sun Jul 23, 2017 2:22 pm**

tussock wrote:Tanks break all the time. They're carried around on trucks on roads, because most of them can't get from A to B without breaking any other way. Tracked vehicles in general are prone to breaking down, but tanks are also extremely heavy and extremely powerful to the point of easily snapping steel components if used incorrectly.

Such is the price of protecting your mobile gun crew from common infantry weapons.

A month late but I didn't see this garbage until now. Tanks aren't the delicate flowers you make them out to be.

They get terrible mileage, are slower than trucks, aren't exactly comfortable to drive long distance, and will tear up asphalt pavement worse than my cats do to the couch. That you want to avoid putting unnecessary miles on something that costs 100x the transport carrying it is only a small part of the calculus.

Given their widespread use in the Iraq wars and lack of complaints about tanks breaking like whiny bitches, I am going to assume you are either full of crap, or more charitably, that older ww2 tanks suffered your described afflictions much much more than modern ones which do not.

Posted: **Sun Jul 23, 2017 5:30 pm**

erik wrote:
tussock wrote:Tanks break all the time. They're carried around on trucks on roads, because most of them can't get from A to B without breaking any other way. Tracked vehicles in general are prone to breaking down, but tanks are also extremely heavy and extremely powerful to the point of easily snapping steel components if used incorrectly.

Such is the price of protecting your mobile gun crew from common infantry weapons.
A month late but I didn't see this garbage until now. Tanks aren't the delicate flowers you make them out to be.

They get terrible mileage, are slower than trucks, aren't exactly comfortable to drive long distance, and will tear up asphalt pavement worse than my cats do to the couch. That you want to avoid putting unnecessary miles on something that costs 100x the transport carrying it is only a small part of the calculus.

Given their widespread use in the Iraq wars and lack of complaints about tanks breaking like whiny bitches, I am going to assume you are either full of crap, or more charitably, that older ww2 tanks suffered your described afflictions much much more than modern ones which do not.

World War II tanks are substantially worse than modern tanks in that regard.

But in both cases, they get regular maintenance. The army does, in fact, have teams of guys who do nothing but perform maintenance on tanks. It's not like the average consumer vehicle that might get an oil change once a year if the owner remembers.

Posted: **Sun Jul 23, 2017 7:42 pm**

hyzmarca wrote:It's not like the average consumer vehicle that might get an oil change once a year if the owner remembers.

You should update your car data banks. My car - a 2014 - tells me when it needs the oil changed, and it's about once a year (it's turning out to be about every 9,000 miles, so I suppose there'll eventually come a year when it needs two).

Posted: **Wed Aug 23, 2017 5:04 am**

Is Jon Jones getting busted for things even news anymore?

Posted: **Thu Aug 24, 2017 5:01 am**

Way back when, Frank said the following about the movie Sicario:

Frank wrote: Sicario. Everything that happens after the "main character" sees the rubber band in her hotel room.

Really seemed like they didn't have a third act. Like, at all. The main character who we've seen having near bullet time reflexes becomes a whiny crazy person who never accomplishes anything again. Also she points guns at people and punches people who she has no intention of fighting, let alone killing. She's a total loose cannon for no damn reason. She's whining about procedure not being followed or something, but what the hell procedures is she supposed to be upholding? What line is she supposed to be even trying to draw at that point?

The movie has a strong first act. Very strong. And the second act is mostly just establishing that you understand how super fucked the cartel war in Juarez is. And um... they sort of run out of plot at that point? Like, I have no idea why the main character even goes to the tunnel in the first place, since she apparently had no intention of actually doing anything to help or prevent anything from happening. And having a temper tantrum in the middle of the fucking desert next to a bunch of black ops people who no longer need her alive... I genuinely don't understand why or how she was even supposed to get back alive after that.

Nothing really happens. There's no character development. The back end of the movie is replaced with the main character flapping her arms and going "Waaaah!" in a totally unprofessional and dangerously insane fashion.

Not impressed.

-Username17

Everything he sez is totally correct. If you are desperately looking for something to attack, you can say that the second and third acts contain a few visually striking scenes, conveyed by either drones, night, or infrared vision. But that is pretty much it.

Posted: **Thu Aug 24, 2017 5:26 pm**

Wonder Woman is heinous war propaganda about peace being a trick to hide WMDs

Posted: **Thu Aug 24, 2017 8:44 pm**

Um... what?

Posted: **Fri Aug 25, 2017 6:44 am**

"Beyond the Wall" (S07E06). Season 7 is generally poorly written, but episode six is just terrible.

Posted: **Fri Aug 25, 2017 8:25 am**

OgreBattle wrote:Wonder Woman is heinous war propaganda about peace being a trick to hide WMDs

I get where you're getting that from, but I think you're reading a bit much into things...

Posted: **Sat Sep 30, 2017 3:28 am**

Star Trek: Discovery. Just watch the first two episodes...sigh, just disappointing. Decent fight choreography though. This is not worth getting CBS All Access to watch.

Posted: **Sun Oct 29, 2017 4:47 pm**

Dear Stranger Things Season 2:

As a resident of Pittsburgh within the 1980s, I have to ask how exactly do you get perfect period appropriate cop cars yet manage to screw up both basic mapping and the skyline for the time period within your first minute?

Map Reference:

https://www.google.com/search?q=poplar+ ... e&ie=UTF-8

https://www.google.com/maps/place/Main+ ... 79.9564925

Skyline Reference:

http://www.post-gazette.com/.media/2/20 ... 5d5350.jpg

https://youtu.be/1_Qp6amEGLo?t=145

Posted: **Mon Oct 30, 2017 1:41 am**

Because period appropriate cop cars are a visual cue that people will react to, while maps and a picture perfect skyline generally aren't.

The intersection of people that watch ST, know and care about the layout of a shithole city 30 years ago is very small (if it's greater than 100, I'd be sincerely shocked). It affects the show not at all.

Posted: **Mon Oct 30, 2017 4:57 am**

One: Fuck you. 1980s Pittsburgh actually has a nationwide diaspora due to the Reaganomic collapse of the steel industry.

Two: Stranger Things is a highly detail-oriented show. In Season one, the board games on the basement shelf all matter as does the specific issue of Uncanny X-Men the kids reference in their bike race bet.

Posted: **Mon Oct 30, 2017 6:40 am**

So long as it is a dreary and cold enough place to create a bump in the suicide rate vs the national average, then I think they have captured Pittsburgh pretty well.

Posted: **Mon Oct 30, 2017 10:35 pm**

Josh_Kablack wrote:One: Fuck you. 1980s Pittsburgh actually has a nationwide diaspora due to the Reaganomic collapse of the steel industry.

Two: Stranger Things is a highly detail-oriented show. In Season one, the board games on the basement shelf all matter as does the specific issue of Uncanny X-Men the kids reference in their bike race bet.

It's a detail oriented show that couldn't fucking depict D&D right. They don't care about the details of the things they reference as much as they care the details of their story and the foreshadowing therein.

Posted: **Tue Oct 31, 2017 1:29 am**

Prak wrote: It's a detail oriented show that couldn't fucking depict D&D right. They don't care about the details of the things they reference as much as they care the details of their story and the foreshadowing therein.

In the show's defense, no one played D&D strictly by the book in the 80s. This is going to be even more prominent if the people playing are kids.

Posted: **Tue Oct 31, 2017 3:19 pm**

I started playing D&D at school when I was 12. It was exactly like in the show.

Posted: **Wed Nov 01, 2017 8:59 am**

I'm kind of glad I didn't start playing until high school....

Posted: **Wed Nov 01, 2017 12:35 pm**

Blicero wrote:In the show's defense, no one played D&D strictly by the book in the 80s. This is going to be even more prominent if the people playing are kids.

Having the kids roll a d20 for fireball is fine, house rules are totally a thing. Having them read an entirely show-original writeup for 'The Vale of Shadows' out of the Expert set is bad detail work. I don't think Basic D&D got into the planes until the Master set in '85. Seeing the Expert Set cover gets my nostalgia-boner up, but misrepresenting its contents negates that.

Unfortunately, I'm not aware of any prose from official products that would have done the trick of introducing the Upside-Down in '83. If you couldn't find a relevant Dragon article, I think the best they could have done would be to have the Vale come from a fictional local fanzine.

Posted: **Wed Nov 01, 2017 2:59 pm**

Starmaker wrote:I started playing D&D at school when I was 12. It was exactly like in the show.

This, a thousand times. Stranger Things gets mad props for showing how kids actually played D&D.

Posted: **Mon Nov 20, 2017 7:04 am**

Just saw Justice League. It was... fine. Ish. But, you cand definitely see Brett Ratner and Joss Whedon's groping hands. there are, like, three women (Diana, Lois, Martha) who have any part resembling a supporting role, and one of them is supposed to be a main character. The other women in the movie might as well have been particularly advanced defense systems for the Mcguffins.

But what I really noticed was...

this.

The logo for the production company that, well, produced it. It bears a certain resemblance to, well...

these.

Now, a cursory look up of Ratpac-Dune entertainment shows only asshole Brett Ratner and only-apparently-distantly-linked-to-Ailes James Packed. However, Steven Mnuchin was also a founder.

Yeah, that Mnuchin. The guy who executive produced Suicide Squad.

No, the Trump admin Secretary of the Treasury.

Well, I mean, they're the same guy.

Now, maybe it means fuck all, but... I do wonder what the Alt Right wants with shitty comic book movies.

Posted: **Mon Nov 20, 2017 7:12 am**

My guess is that alt-reich themes are incompatible with making a good movie.

It doesn't take a highly complicated theory to explain why a political movement might want to produce superhero movies. They're a way of spreading messages, like "you can call yourself the hero even if you make no visible effort to prevent the deaths of millions".

Posted: **Mon Nov 20, 2017 7:35 am**

Sounds about right. Also, note how the characters with the biggest effect on the combat are the white(passing) men, while the "jewish" kid just saves people, and the black guy's whole job is playing with a computer (more or less).

IE, "White men are men of action! Minorities aren't!"

Posted: **Mon Nov 20, 2017 1:21 pm**

If that were the case, more movies would be about the white man going out and conquering and less about the white man being attacked by non white men and needing to defend themselves.

Posted: **Mon Nov 20, 2017 4:45 pm**

There are many reason to complain about Justice League. I don't think racism against minorities is one of them. Racism against New Gods, sure.

We have an epic saga of war and family reduced to one asshole with an axe looking for some computers. New Genesis doesn't even get a mention. Plus they continue using the darker aesthetics from Man of Steel, instead of using Jack Kirby's designs, which is extremely disappointing.

Hell, they don't even have Dog Cavalry.

How the hell do you go from a guy in a green outfit riding a giant dog to this?

The Gaming Den

Moments when a piece of entertainment completely lost you.