New Testingstan

What about Stark's endless caustic diatribes in the gaming subforum?

lets get into a Stark debate! that always ends well.

I did lol at people's 'G&C is sooo dead' shtick. Y'all want to discuss games. Go start a thread.

Hey, BO, what's up with the double negations ?

Big Orangutan wrote:when Palpatine ordered the on the spot execution of Count Dooku (a guy who not exactly didn't have it coming).

The execution of Count Dooku in ROTS is something that I think fits into the movie thematically, but could've been done so much better if Lucas had just come up with the idea and then hired people who actually knew how to write and direct a scene to work enacting it.

Bakustra wrote: Return of the Jedi features the first revelation that the Jedi weren't perfect, and the ending basically says that the Jedi were wrong about the Force. It's the first element of things that would later crop up in the prequels.

Well to be imperfect is very human.

I don't like the way the Prequels attribute most of their imperfections to some wizard makin' their brains all fuzzy though.

Big Orangutan wrote:

Bakustra wrote:
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

What about Stark's endless caustic diatribes in the gaming subforum?

what about them?

Phongn wrote: 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.

Stas and Shep weren't no trouble, but Thanas' elitism and heavy handedness was one major factor for History currently being a discussion wasteland and minefield.

i don't think this is necessarily the case somehow

Veef wrote:

Bakustra wrote: Return of the Jedi features the first revelation that the Jedi weren't perfect, and the ending basically says that the Jedi were wrong about the Force. It's the first element of things that would later crop up in the prequels.

Well to be imperfect is very human.

I don't like the way the Prequels attribute most of their imperfections to some wizard makin' their brains all fuzzy though.

this is basically the jedi bullshitting to cover up the fact that they're idiots, looking at the overall context of the films.

magic princess wrote:

Infinity Biscuit wrote:Hinting at it seems at least as bad as saying it outright, though, since now everyone here probably assumes something worse than what it actually was :L

Yet this is the very lifeblood of the excitement of a Beltway Bandit: Getting invited to Fox News to drop just enough hints about something to skirt around your Top Secret clearance and make all the professional officers angry at the spirit-but-not-letter violations of the talking head getting paid 300 USD an hour to tell Lockheed we need a 5 billion dollar programme for Mach 5 underwater rocket torpedoes.

Obviously I choose the wrong profession, should have been a legalised thief.

So WEG. I like that they actually have the Imperial Army as existing, instead of All Stormtroopers All The Time like...98% of the EU?

Wait, do you mean the Empire is supposed to have troops that aren't clad in these impractical white carapaces ?

Yes. Stormtroopers are supposed to be the Elite Troops, while the Imperial Army is, well, the regular army you'd expect to find.

If I remember the sourcebooks right, they basically look like General Veers in ESB when he was in the AT-AT and those AT-ST drivers from ROTJ also would be similar if you added the Veers body armor to them.

I've always felt Stormtroopers were more like the Republican Guard, and about as effective.

Republican Guard ?

Well, they're more like a corp of bodyguards : a bit like a militarized Secret Service, with a number of ceremonial roles.

magic princess wrote:I've always felt Stormtroopers were more like the Republican Guard, and about as effective.

That's an interesting thought, haven't considered it before. Given their usual performance as essentially disposable mooks in the movies and (most of) the EU, it fits rather well I think.

But yeah, the EU builds them up as the Elite of the Elite but most authors used them pretty much everywhere as generic Imperial troops. I think Zahn is the only real exception to this.

Oxymoron wrote:Republican Guard ?

Well, they're more like a corp of bodyguards : a bit like a militarized Secret Service, with a number of ceremonial roles.

No, more like this Republican Guard.

Yeah, Republican Guard in the Arab Dictator "I am so paranoid I need two rival complete full-sized armies to play off each other, one that is professional and one that is nominally elite but actually chosen entirely for loyalty from among my homeboys who have no prior experience" sense. Why couldn't I successfully finish that sentence in one edit instead of three? Ah well.

What's the difference with the SS ? The fact nominally they aren't working for The Party but for the Dictator instead ?

After their first failarious, stormtrooper-worthy exposures to combat, the Waffen SS were reformed into a disciplined, ruthless, and effective fighting force. Due to fears over coups being much more pronounced none of the Arab Republican Guards have seen that transformation.

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

The World of Tanks thread is still going strong.

I wonder if there's some deeper meaning behind that game gaining such traction on SDN rather than...well pretty much every other game that gets a few pages and then dies?

Granted it helps that it has absolutely no story, just shooting up other tanks, so there's no real end to it except maxing out all the tanks I guess. But you just keep going around shooting people like you normally would anyway.

no mecha scum

Fill in the blanks:

This!
Is!
Pod racing!

When people say thanas is heavy handed are they talking about how he'll roll into a thread about history topic, declare everyone wrong/stupid, then refuse to elaborate on anything before locking it

Losonti Tokash wrote:When people say thanas is heavy handed are they talking about how he'll roll into a thread about history topic, declare everyone wrong/stupid, then refuse to elaborate on anything before locking it

who knows w/ hipster dude, but i have to say that that's probably not as big of a problem as the only people wanting to talk about history being obsessed primarily with weapons systems. like, you take a look at the mesoamerican/ancient mediterranean + middle east threads on SA and they have a pretty wide range of chat about the civilizations. and, of course, there's a bunch of stuff that could easily be answered by telling people to read 1491 and 1493 or debt the first 5K years, or at least summarizing them. but somehow it never happens. i mean, it would be a pretty big problem if history actually had a wider posterbase, but as it is it almost looks more like mercykilling.

I picture Thanas looking like this



What do YOU think he looks like?

I thought of the CompForce being much more like Iraq's Republican Guard (ie. a relatively poorly trained but loyal, fanatical quasi-military group) with the Imperial Stormtroopers being much more similar to Roman legionaries (elite heavy infantrymen used everywhere) and the Imperial Army being more varied unit types operating the walkers and ground artillery, etc (with the Imperial Starfleet having their own beetle helmeted infantrymen serving similar roles onboard vessels or in their ground facilities).

Bakustra wrote:
what about them?

They were among the best examples of SD.Net's "This xxx video game/movie/TV show/book sucks and if you subjectively like it (or the opposite way around) you suck!" and this kind of thing became tiring to me.

i don't think this is necessarily the case somehow

How did History subforum become one of the struggling SD.Net's deader subforums then? I wouldn't say he was the main cause but he didn't help, despite his talent, and he shat things up. If the History forum should've been less about whimsical intellectual doodling and more about serious research and information sharing, maybe it should've been run more like a legitimate virtual classroom?

Veef wrote:

Bakustra wrote: Return of the Jedi features the first revelation that the Jedi weren't perfect, and the ending basically says that the Jedi were wrong about the Force. It's the first element of things that would later crop up in the prequels.

Well to be imperfect is very human.

I don't like the way the Prequels attribute most of their imperfections to some wizard makin' their brains all fuzzy though.

this is basically the jedi bullshitting to cover up the fact that they're idiots, looking at the overall context of the films.

Well I get the impression that this "darkening" of the Force (a natural occurrance that happens every so often and feels like a white noise descending upon the senses of Force users) was something that usefully co-incided with the institutional entropy rippling through the dying Old Republic, two events that get exploited by the Sith conspiracy. Dooku and his Seperatist movement seemed like a gigantic decoy to detract attention away from Palpatine and a pretext for the military build up. But Lucas' writing/directing was too workmanlike to convey it very well if that was what he intended.

You could call the Jedi idiots for not arresting/assassinating Palpatine much sooner but that seems to be the benefit of hindsight and when they could do it (without looking like paranoid idiots breaking the law) it was far too late.

I must say that The Return of the Jedi had better space battles than RotS, with RotS having better light sabre duels (though I liked Luke's meltdown). RotJ was about the overthrowing of a dictatorship and RotS was about the installation of the same said dictatorship, with Anakin playing a pivotal role in both events the two films covered.

timmy wrote:I picture Thanas looking like this



What do YOU think he looks like?

A BMW X3

Darksi4190 wrote:

F.J. Prefect, Esq wrote:

Darksi4190 wrote: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.