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      Welcome!   03/05/2016

      Welcome, everyone, to the new 910CMX Community Forums. I'm still working on getting them running, so things may change.  If you're a 910 Comic creator and need your forum recreated, let me know and I'll get on it right away.  I'll do my best to make this new place as fun as the last one!

The Old Hack

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Posts posted by The Old Hack

  2. Posted

    25 minutes ago, Cpt. Obvious said:

     One problem is that triggers are highly personal, so less common trigger subjects are easy to stumble on. When that happens I don't know anything better than take notes and try to avoid being an ass.

    We have that much in common, then. This is really all about being considerate, and for me at least that often involves a certain amount of trial and error. :/

    HarJIT reacted to this

  3. Posted

    2 hours ago, Scotty said:

    That's the thing about movies that are adapted from books or games, or even movies spun off TV shows. The people that have read, played or watched the source material will have higher expectations for what the movie will be like. 

    I had expectations of it not being UTTER GARBAGE that totally ignored the original characters and their relationships and more resembled an F-level superhero movie than a steampunk masterpiece that stayed true to the spirit of Jules Verne, Stoker and Rider Haggard. In the original, Mina was an amazing (normal) woman who shaped the entire team around her force of personality and iron will. In the movie, she was utterly bland and had been turned into a bollocking VAMPIRE to give her superpowers she did not need in the comic just to justify her presence. Moriarty -- yes, that Moriarty -- had just one defining trait: frantically fleeing as soon as the 'heroes' discovered his hiding place. This happened at least four times. I could eat the waste basket of a paper shredder and PUKE a better screenplay.

    CritterKeeper reacted to this

  5. Posted

    On 29 May 2016 at 3:35 AM, CritterKeeper said:

    So Bad It's Good is better than what he's put out lately....Who would have thought they could so thorougly ruin such a good graphic novel as League of Extraordinary Gentlemen?

    LXG was utter garbage. Somehow the movie makers managed to take everything good from the comic and replace it with complete codswallop. It was agonising to watch.

  11. Posted

    4 hours ago, InfiniteRemnant said:

    ...but that's true of ANY fandom. what makes here different?

    Dan does not object to fanfics posted elsewhere. He did object to having them posted here for legal reasons: that any fanfics overlapping with the actual plot would make him vulnerable to lawsuits claiming that he had plagiarised the fanfic in question.

  12. Posted

    9 hours ago, ijuin said:

    Well, having a moderator who cares about maintaining calm discussion (in the sense of "steer discussions back to civility when they start to stray", as opposed to "immediately shut down any discussion that starts producing flames") makes us want to maintain the environment as well. It's sort of like how when one is in a relatively well-maintained place, one is more likely to spontaneously pick up a random piece of litter and thus contribute to the cleanliness, as opposed to a place that is much more dirty. Basically, an inverse "broken window effect".

    This is something I have learned about moderating: it is, in essence, purely negative. It can restrict and shut down but it cannot on its own contribute or improve. Positive contributions all stem from the posters themselves. For that reason I try to exercise as much restraint as I can.

    I have more than once been criticised for moderating too aggressively or being too restrictive. I regret that but I must rely on my judgment and experience, imperfect and incomplete as they may be. I do not wish a return to the toxic state these forums once suffered from and if I see anything even resembling a step in that direction I intervene, preferably with a gentle nudge but with direct action if I have to.

    That being said, I repeat that the current positive state of the forums is to be credited to the posters here and I am glad to see people having such a good time. :)

    ProfessorTomoe, Ser Pentrose, Zorua and 2 others reacted to this

  13. Posted

    Trigger warnings and content notes are there to protect readers and users who may suffer from trauma related to the topic. The fact that certain people mock them or deliberately misuse them in an attempt to discredit them does not change that. I have friends who benefit from and appreciate properly applied content notes and I am convinced that if properly used, they add to the safety and comfort of vulnerable users.

    OzLionHeart, Matoyak, Ser Pentrose and 1 other reacted to this

  15. Posted

    On 25 May 2016 at 8:17 PM, hkmaly said:

    It's just that I would expect more arguments why the movie is bad, considering how strongly you reacted against it.

    I don't think this is relevant. The health resource is certainly good, maybe even vital, but not really important for the war.

    I have a lot more. But right now I don't feel like going into them. Stressed already and feeling no urge to make my mood worse.

    As to wartime importance, maybe. All I can say that wars have been lost or won by resource allocation. Paying a given resource too little attention may be as bad as too much. In this case it is clear that the approach was bungled.

  16. Posted

    19 minutes ago, hkmaly said:

    Yeah ... the writers decided who is supposed to be the good side, and then just made sure the bad side will be so bad noone will side with them. Except that this is so common you can't say every plot using this method is bad.

    No? I can call this particular device hoary, overused and lazy, as well as detrimental to any otherwise decent plot it may be applied to. Admittedly Insurrection is so bad that it all but blends in with the rest of all the crap.

  18. Posted

    1 hour ago, ijuin said:

    It's not so much "don't bother", I think, as it is "a few thousand lives are too small to justify killing an entire M-class planet that can normally support a billion or more people".

    Ah okay, but I still think the harvest method excuse is idiotic and contrived.

  22. Posted

    8 hours ago, Tobyc said:

    Actually, we'd never seen Dougherty before that movie.

    Firstly, nowhere in the movie are the Ba'ku presented as not wanting to share the planet. All they wanted was to not get kicked out of the small fraction of it they were actually using (and incidentally, I would argue that they have as much right to that fraction of the planet as the Federation do to any of their own colonies). As has been pointed out, it was the Federation who shot down the option of colonising elsewhere on the planet themselves, for the benefit of the Son'a.

    Secondly, harvesting the radiation like that would be a terrible plan as far as the Dominion war goes. It's not going to save people dying on captured planets, it's not going to save people after their starships have been destroyed in battle, and the relative few (out of the billions of projected casualties) who could be saved with the medicine aren't going to be any less vulnerable to dying the next time they're sent into the field.

    And even if I agreed with the rest of your assessment of the Ba'ku (and I'm really not seeing it myself), it still wouldn't excuse what the Federation were doing or the horrifying precedent they were setting (ie, essentially giving themselves the right to shut down any non-Federation colony, regardless of how long its been there, as long as its at that moment in "Federation space"), and I would still be firmly on Picard's side.

    I have already elsewhere posted what I thought of the moronic plot device of the harvesting method. This does not serve to improve the movie for me.

    Is your argument that if you can only save a few thousand lives, then you might as well not bother?

    I agree with you that if it is possible to share the planet, just let the Ba'Ku stay. My personal dislike of them is irrelevant in that case.

  23. Posted

    11 minutes ago, InfiniteRemnant said:

    the collection process would have ruined the planet's atmosphere. its not a question of others arriving, but of anyone who doesn't leave dying.

    Okay, this is a completely different gripe nothing to do with the locals -- given that we already know this is a unique resource not duplicated anywhere else in the known universe, why in the world use such a moronic kill-the-goose-that-lays-golden-eggs method instead of investing, say, a few years of research into finding a safer procedure that won't ruin the planet?

    Oh wait, I know why. Because if you did, the contrived and strawmanned 'ooooh we are so mean to the poor innocent locals' plot wouldn't work.

    InfiniteRemnant reacted to this

  24. Posted

    1 hour ago, CritterKeeper said:

    Haven't seen the movie but the one time, so I'm only going by what you say here.  And just based in your post above, your position sounds similar to the American expansionist sentiment that a group could only claim a territory to be theirs if they "improved" it by establishing a technological society upon it.  Any group, be it Natives or an Amish village, who wants to keep the territory around them in a more natural state is out of luck, another group can move in and establish mines and cities on the land they wanted to use as hunting grounds, gathering resources, and/or a buffer against the world -- because after all, they weren't doing anything with it.  If there's a resource on their lands (planet) that the bigger society wants, they should be free to take it.  They can't claim any bigger territory than what the bigger society thinks they have/need/deserve.

    Hm. I can see what you mean, but this situation is more complicated than a simple land grab. For one thing the rejuvenative resource is unique to the (known) universe. This is not like a group of forcibly relocated people settling on a gold mine. Gold exists naturally in many places on the Earth and its principal value is artificial. Imagine instead that this was the only possible source of antibiotics in the known universe and that a bunch of Scientologists discovered it before everybody else and then settled on it while keeping its secret to themselves. And justified it by saying that non-Scientologists did not deserve three times longer lives with perfect health throughout their lives. (I know, antibiotics do not work that way. The stuff on that planet did.)

    I admit that one reason I despise the Bu'Ka is how profoundly hypocritical and nonsensical their anti-tech religion or whatever is. Admittedly, this goes for their whole culture, which is so fake that it hurts my brain.