The Testing Chat III: The Time of Great Chatting

[Veef]

they can lift rocks as if they were foam props

[Darksi4190]

LOLewoks aside, Yes the Empire would take losses due to incompetence in a war with the Gundam universe, they'd take losses due to incompetence in a war with just about anyone. A bit of incompetence goes with the territory of being an evil dictatorship in a Sci-Fi franchise.

But if Gundam has taught me anything, it's that the less competent force with vastly superior numbers and resources always wins in the end.

[Big Orangutan]

I think that's part of the fact that they're conscious of being a bit of an echo chamber since the darker years of the Bush admin. One could make an argument for Bush back in 2003, but as time went on it got harder and harder. People got chased off, and the last few got too scared to voice their opinions, except for those who basically became forum "pets" with wacky niches.

Aside from the little Stuart tribe that emerged for a while, the loss of people to combat meant the slow decline of N&P into obsolescence. Today you could probably fold it back into OT.

The small gene pool of posters and opinions, overseen by dead handed and overly opinionated moderators, is also why the History subforum has wound up in abject failure (that too might as well be folded back into off topic).

Here's something I whipped up just now.

Posts per day at SDN, average for each year of operation, and further by quarter.

Code: Select all

2002 Jul 02 - 2003 Jul 02	1640
Jul 2-Oct 2	865
Oct 2-Jan 2	1,758
Jan 2-Apr 2	1,945
Apr 2-Jul 2	2,085

2003 Jul 02 - 2004 Jul 02	1485
Jul 2-Oct 2	1,592
Oct 2-Jan 2	1,456
Jan 2-Apr 2	1,499
Apr 2-Jul 2	1,476

2004 Jul 02 - 2005 Jul 02	1502
Jul 2-Oct 2	1,374
Oct 2-Jan 2	1,474
Jan 2-Apr 2	1,531
Apr 2-Jul 2	1,709

2005 Jul 02 - 2006 Jul 02	1254
Jul 2-Oct 2	1,332
Oct 2-Jan 2	1,108
Jan 2-Apr 2	1,323
Apr 2-Jul 2	1,328

2006 Jul 02 - 2007 Jul 02	976
Jul 2-Oct 2	1,039
Oct 2-Jan 2	1,033
Jan 2-Apr 2	948
Apr 2-Jul 2	939

2007 Jul 02 - 2008 Jul 02	872
Jul 2-Oct 2	887
Oct 2-Jan 2	839
Jan 2-Apr 2	887
Apr 2-Jul 2	919

2008 Jul 02 - 2009 Jul 02	808
Jul 2-Oct 2	899
Oct 2-Jan 2	887
Jan 2-Apr 2	835
Apr 2-Jul 2	660

2009 Jul 02 - 2010 Jul 02	642
Jul 2-Oct 2	601
Oct 2-Jan 2	702
Jan 2-Apr 2	590
Apr 2-Jul 2	706

2010 Jul 02 - 2011 Jul 02	505
Jul 2-Oct 2	610
Oct 2-Jan 2	505
Jan 2-Apr 2	471
Apr 2-Jul 2	465

2011 Jul 02 - 2012 Jul 02	429
Jul 2-Oct 2	482
Oct 2-Jan 2	436
Jan 2-Apr 2	460
Apr 2-Jul 2	357


2012 Jul 02 - 2013 Feb 10	274
Jul 2-Oct 2	299
Oct 2-Jan 2	267
Jan 2-Feb 10	259

Yikes, SD.Net has really imploded in the last couple of years, hasn't it?

[xon]

Revenge of the Sith really didn't do TEO any favours. Within 6 month to a year of it's release there is a >40% drop in posting activity.

[Darksi4190]

Which is weird because I remember at the time pretty much everyone liked it. Opinions have certainly shifted over the years and now most people say they hate it, but the initial reaction was very positive.

[Oxymoron]

I wonder if we'll see the inverse reaction for Episode 7.

[Darksi4190]

I wonder if the board will even survive to see the new trilogy. I mean it's basically on life-support right now. The new trilogy might breathe some life back into the place if it can hang on until then, I mean just look at the explosion of discussion in PSW after the announcement.

[Big Orangutan]

I don't think The Revenge of the Sith is a widely disliked movie and I find it relatively good, but it was the final capstone on Lucas' SW for better or worse and it wasn't worth bothering to discuss SW any further. And it is going back nearly eight years already.

American/Canadian made TV sci-fi isn't doing great these days and struggling in the last couple of years, that could be a factor for decreasing interest in SD.Net, but UK made science fiction for the TV is still going strong (Doctor Who is gaining more viewers on BBC America, Primeval on ITV may have ended but it led to a Canadian spin-off, with Being Human and Misfits still rolling along).

[Veef]

ROTS is a pretty muddled and mediocre movie overall. It's not even really worth revisiting unless you're trying to puzzle out the weird ass ending.

But I lost the will to live at that point.

[Bakustra]

Bah. You're just butthurt because Star Wars owns Gundam like a billion times over

Only if you close your eyes and imagine a different Star Wars to the one depicted on screen

Ok yeah, "a billion times over" is obvious hyperbole, but I have a hard time seeing any of the political entities in any of the Gundam universes surviving a war with the Galactic Empire.

Ok yeah, "a billion times over" is obvious hyperbole, but I have a hard time seeing any of the political entities in Southeast Asia surviving a war with the United States.

Ok yeah, "a billion times over" is obvious hyperbole, but I have a hard time seeing any of the Native American political entities surviving a war with the United States.

ROTS is a pretty muddled and mediocre movie overall. It's not even really worth revisiting unless you're trying to puzzle out the weird ass ending.

But I lost the will to live at that point.

the prequels are awesome because if anything they're even further to the left than the OT and george lucas is totally playing all of us with them and the special editions

[RogueIce]

What is your take then of the post-RotJ EU having the reborn democratic government of the New Republic pretty much be a constant failure and dying out within a single generation?

[evilsoup]

SW EU is shit

Ok yeah, "a billion times over" is obvious hyperbole, but I have a hard time seeing any of the Native American political entities surviving a war with the United States.

That's a terrible example, since the Native American groups that survive do so out of white guilt.

That said, a gundam vs the death star fight would be pretty rad

[Bakustra]

What is your take then of the post-RotJ EU having the reborn democratic government of the New Republic pretty much be a constant failure and dying out within a single generation?

the writers of the eu are a bunch of cinematically illiterate swine

and also reactionaries

literarily speaking, the basic problem star wars novels have as opposed to star trek or doctor who novels is that writing lower-keyed stories can't capture the essence of star wars very well, whereas it can happen with star trek or doctor who. meanwhile, 40k doesn't have any specific characters to focus on so it has a broader way to capture the essence. so this urge became dominant and every novel or subseries needed a major crisis (even the wraith squadron books do this), meaning that actually following through on the ending of star wars became impossible and things ended unhappily ever after.

this was exacerbated by the people who wrote it being largely ignorant of the political subtext, barring some of the WEG stuff (though they "got" the Empire far more than the Rebels).

meanwhile, lucas regularly suggests mundane expansions on the story (anakin got his scar from slipping in the bath, etc.), because he knows why this phenomenon is a bad one and his tin ear for dialogue and limited facilities with the physical act of direction don't extend to a complete art-blindness.

of course, if we wanted to go all-out political, the new republic, by replicating the liberalism of the old, doomed itself too failure because it betrayed its revolutionary ambitions. this still doesn't follow from the films, either!

SW EU is shit

Ok yeah, "a billion times over" is obvious hyperbole, but I have a hard time seeing any of the Native American political entities surviving a war with the United States.

That's a terrible example, since the Native American groups that survive do so out of white guilt.

That said, a gundam vs the death star fight would be pretty rad

the seminole, red cloud's war- there were native american groups that managed to win wars with the united states. so even against high-end ge figures, well...

[Big Orangutan]

It seems like EP 7 will erase the muddled, hit 'n miss sounding EU stories.

ROTS is a pretty muddled and mediocre movie overall. It's not even really worth revisiting unless you're trying to puzzle out the weird ass ending.

But I lost the will to live at that point.

It is third highest rated SW instalment after A New Hope and The Empire Strikes Back (but that's perhaps not saying much).

Things get panned waaay too heavily on SD.Net, just check out the vaguely lukewarm reaction to Skyfall a Bond movie that broke the billion dollar box office and collected a respectable amount of awards. And heated debates about NuWho have gone into more of a nosedive in the last four years than the show itself, IMHO of course.

[Bakustra]

it's also quite possible that skyfall is mediocre and nuwho is driven by a toxic ouroboros of nostalgia

but actually sdn tends to ignore stuff more than anything, especially when it comes to games

[Stofsk]

this was exacerbated by the people who wrote it being largely ignorant of the political subtext, barring some of the WEG stuff (though they "got" the Empire far more than the Rebels).

I wouldn't mind hearing more about this, as I never looked at the WEG stuff for the SW RPG.

[Bakustra]

this was exacerbated by the people who wrote it being largely ignorant of the political subtext, barring some of the WEG stuff (though they "got" the Empire far more than the Rebels).

I wouldn't mind hearing more about this, as I never looked at the WEG stuff for the SW RPG.

it's not all that much, but basically (it'd take me a while to dig out the respective sourcebooks) they realized the empire was straight-up fascist and ran with it. the party (unnamed AFAICR but i call it "the new order party" mentally) ran the COMission for the Preservation of the New ORder, COMPNOR, which maintained its own version of the SS/SA, CompForce, Gestapo, the Imperial Security Bureau (though they were hilariously incompetent and regularly got played by the rebels, imperial intelligence, and random hackers) and maintained political officers within the Imperial armed forces (borrowing a bit more from the NKVD commissariat). The armed forces hated this. In general, the Empire went loose on Core Worlds areas and cracked down hard everywhere else to keep the elites happy.

The Rebels, meanwhile, operated primarily as revolutionary cells and urban guerrillas from what i can recall, and they stood for equal rights for droids as well as for aliens (something that got dropped in the rest of the EU). I don't recall much and would have to dig out more.

I've actually pondered writing some sort of big dumb synthesis of this stuff plus older and some newer material as a source for roleplaying background, but I'm lazy and it'd probably not really see the light of day.

[Losonti Tokash]

Dammit baks I wanted to mention the Seminoles

Always saying shit that I want to and even saying it better

[phongn]

The small gene pool of posters and opinions, overseen by dead handed and overly opinionated moderators, is also why the History subforum has wound up in abject failure (that too might as well be folded back into off topic).

I don't think Thanas or Stas (or before, Shep) were that heavy-handed in History? It's just that there isn't all that much interest there. ADR's daily post-counts more less tells the story.

the writers of the eu are a bunch of cinematicallyilliterate swine

Fixed that for you.

literarily speaking, the basic problem star wars novels have as opposed to star trek or doctor who novels is that writing lower-keyed stories can't capture the essence of star wars very well, whereas it can happen with star trek or doctor who. meanwhile, 40k doesn't have any specific characters to focus on so it has a broader way to capture the essence. so this urge became dominant and every novel or subseries needed a major crisis (even the wraith squadron books do this), meaning that actually following through on the ending of star wars became impossible and things ended unhappily ever after.

You know, I never thought about that before but it should've been blindingly obvious. SW's greater themes are grand ones. I suppose it's also telling that Tales from <Wherever> weren't huge commercial successes while the mainline ones with the THREAT OF THE WEEK to OUR VALIANT HEROES were.

That said, I really do like the small-scale stories. The GFFA is vast and there's room for so much, there.

meanwhile, lucas regularly suggests mundane expansions on the story (anakin got his scar from slipping in the bath, etc.), because he knows why this phenomenon is a bad one and his tin ear for dialogue and limited facilities with the physical act of direction don't extend to a complete art-blindness.

He's got a good sense of theme and vision; he just can't execute on it.

it's not all that much, but basically (it'd take me a while to dig out the respective sourcebooks) they realized the empire was straight-up fascist and ran with it. the party (unnamed AFAICR but i call it "the new order party" mentally) ran the COMission for the Preservation of the New ORder, COMPNOR, which maintained its own version of the SS/SA, CompForce, Gestapo, the Imperial Security Bureau (though they were hilariously incompetent and regularly got played by the rebels, imperial intelligence, and random hackers) and maintained political officers within the Imperial armed forces (borrowing a bit more from the NKVD commissariat). The armed forces hated this. In general, the Empire went loose on Core Worlds areas and cracked down hard everywhere else to keep the elites happy.

The Rebels, meanwhile, operated primarily as revolutionary cells and urban guerrillas from what i can recall, and they stood for equal rights for droids as well as for aliens (something that got dropped in the rest of the EU). I don't recall much and would have to dig out more.

As the big totalitarian state, WEG almost had to write more about the Empire. They're the main foe and really big into conformity. The Rebellion's cell-based structure lends itself almost to an "anything goes" mentality: idealistic freedom fighters, terrorists wanting a cause, etc.

I've actually pondered writing some sort of big dumb synthesis of this stuff plus older and some newer material as a source for roleplaying background, but I'm lazy and it'd probably not really see the light of day.

You know Publius did this? He wrote a huge amount of material synthesizing damn near everything about the Empire. I have a link (and printable PDF somewhere) if you want it.

[Bakustra]

it would be inspired by publius but with more focus on stuff outside the government of the empire - eg rebel structures, independent terrorist organizations, clone wars revanchists, the criminal underground, etc. a link to the pdf might be nice though.

edit: "synthesize" in this case having its more obscure meaning of "making shit up", of course

double-edit: actually, i'd probably not even bother to synthesize the prequels and just write differing interpretations based on whether you want to include them or not.

[Veef]

It is third highest rated SW instalment after A New Hope and The Empire Strikes Back (but that's perhaps not saying much).

I don't really care about how high it's rated. It's an ending to a trilogy that was badly botched from day one. The fact that on its own it basically sums up everything they agonizingly drew out over the course of three films doesn't help. I think I said this before but ROTS being the only movie you really need for a prequel is kind of damning of how uninteresting the subject matter really was. It's just a mediocre action movie that happens to be about Darth Vader.

I know ROTJ has lost a lot of its luster in recent memory but at least it was a cap to something I could get invested in.

Like RLM said, Anakin is just a bad apple from the start so where is the hope in the story? There's no tragedy in a bad person being bad and suffering for it.

[Veef]

You know what's probably the biggest irony?

Obi-wan wasn't saying I LOVED YOU because he meant it.

He said I LOVED YOU because that's what people were thinking about Star Wars when the prequel thing was all over

We loved this shit and then it stopped.

Flailing away with hate filled eyes while on fire.

[Stofsk]

I don't know where RotS>RotJ even comes from. Jedi is twice the film Sith was. Saying it's the best of the PT is damning with faint praise.

In so many ways Jedi has Sith beat. The action is better, the context is better, the stakes are higher (The Rebels were fighting for survival in a win-or-you-die battle; what the fuck were the battledroids and Confederacy fighting for? Who even cares?), the climax of Jedi has actual emotional weight to it while everything about the final duel between Obi-wan and Anakin fell flat. About the one thing you can say that Jedi fucked up on was the Ewoks. But that's about it, and it's not even a real complaint IMO.

[magic princess]

The problem of course is that SD.net never quite knew what it was. If it wanted to be a successful message board, it should have not been so tied to ASVS culture. And if the original ASVS gang sort of wanted a private 2002-vintage place to just talk about random stuff, well, it's ended up horribly, because all the old people got sick and left except for a very few, and then there's nobody to talk to about anything at all.

The Imperial thing was kind of an exaggerated sort of pantomime, if you look through the early days of ASVS, through its whole run and up into the SD.net era, you see basically from my perspective that we were all sort of playing this outrageous game of self-insertion fanfic and collaborative storytelling. The fact that Shep wrote the first fanfiction ever on ASVS sort of set the tone for the rest of it, and I think people then weren't taking it so seriously, indeed, nothing was being taken very seriously on the group at all, no matter what it was. The changepoint for that was 9/11, when ASVS exploded with off-topic threads about the attacks on the WTC and Pentagon.

After that point the "real world" had been brought into the mix, and the sort of exaggerated mocking that was tied into the portrayal of the Empire as the natural conqueror of the UFP and a place where casual brutality was the norm and therefore something for us to play up, started to blur into these serious discussions. It did so because our personas on ASVS were as brutal fascists, and we did nothing on ASVS except post in the personas of brutal fascists. Now what happens when you bring real-world politics into that? It changes things pretty rapidly because you're still locked in that mindset, and the whole point of ASVS--this kind of ludicrous insane pantomime of the Empire, "fighting" the versus debates--blurred into the real world.

This meant among other things that while Mike, in creating the board, established an adherence to the democratic socialist method of organising society, he did so from the very first, as he put it, because of the ethical requirements of engineering to improve society, thus, basically, that engineering endorsed socialism. This created a kind of strict technocratic underlying presumption, because the personas of everyone posting in the early days who had clout and authority were tied up in this acting out of Imperial fascist violence. Mike may have given the marching orders in a leftist direction, but we executed them like the NKVD because ASVS was all about being collectively part of this self-mockingly brutal dictatorship.

Then the conservatives from the original group, and outright fascists, were driven out due to the real-world political disagreements. This, because they'd been with us so long, like Strowbridge and Graham Dice and Liet Kynes and John Boyd and so on, names still closer to my memory than everything that's happened since on SD.net, were all ruthlessly purged, which established the show-trial element, because everyone involved at that time period was still caught up in the presentation of ASVS. As more and more people joined the board without the slightest idea or interest in being part of a pantomime of a fascist dictatorship's military, this created severe conflicts with people who had been acting out those roles for years in that social circle and wanted the new members to toe the line and reinvigorate a community which should have never been taken seriously, from our perspective, so that we could continue what was more or less a play act, a mild RPG the entire time.

Instead what we got was a board culture where the rules had been written by people doing a Nazi panto and the actual function of the board had transformed into real-life discussions of liberal politics and science.

[Bakustra]

What genuinely fascinates me is all the minor internet celebrities that have posted on there- Lowtax (well, okay, major internet celebrity for one post), John Biles, the Lunar Archivist, a couple of other fanfic-posters, and so on. I mean, it's a tiny Star Wars fanboard!