kingmob

Good to see you again, KM

Dropped in to say Hi and throw my support behind this show, didn't think I'd dig it but I'm loving the style, story, and characters as much as I ever enjoyed the Vertigo book.

How did you feel about the explanation for Ezekiel and his tiger?

Negan finding his new 'vacation home' had me in stitches. And, I like him tons more after seeing how he handled Spencer's proposition - Rick's got guts.

Last time I felt this much excitement buying a monthly was Hellblazer back during Mike Carey's run with the regenerating Nergal arc, the Hell's Soap Opera bit.

John and slinker, you want it to pick up some, but do you remember the pace Kirkman was going at before this TV writers room experience? Woodbury went on forever, and they walked for a long time before arriving outside Washington. Personally, I was bored to tears in the arc where Carl lost half his face, more of the same, I said. This is the exact pace and level of crazy I have been hoping for since the pre-Woodbury days, and I've been reading since the start.

I grab my comics on the way home from work Wednesdays, and lately, and when I have a new TWD I feel like a kid in a candy store. Love this book. Kirkman's dialog has improved considerably and the panels are framed much more like TV shots. LOVE IT.

Last ish, as I finished my second J, drank the last gulp of my PopShop pineapple soda and chuckled through the letters pages, I thought it was high time to visit you all. I said to myself that they will be bitching and moaning, and damn but I was right!

I hadn't been aware of AHS until a few weeks ago and enjoyed the first season well enough, but good god if the Asylum isn't the creepiest shit I've seen on television ever. As a fan of horror flicks I've always taken 'scary' TV with a grain of pity considering how their hands are tied with the toned downed nature of the medium, AHS has taught me not to judge so quick.

I may be the only one, and I'm not a granny fetishist, but Jessica Lange (in both seasons) really does it for me. I had a crush on her as a wee lad since my parents let me see the seventies King Kong, loved her voice and eyes and hair... Sister Jude with red under the habit can give me a paddlin' any day.

Anyone think the aliens are the real deal with our woman flayer? Is the serial killer in the present day the same guy we see in '64? Great treatment of sixties lesbians keeping their relationship under wraps. The mad scientist is creeptastic. And the exorcism - as an ardent atheist, I've never gotten a chill from religious scares, like the film the Exorcist (though the Omen trilogy did get to me a tiny bit), but this exorcism totally worked for me and made me give up guessing what horrors are real and which are red herrings for this season.

I love my Sons as a soap opera of sorts, doesn't compare to the real art (Breaking Bad) in my books. Then I see this weeks premiere, holy god damn baby Jesus that was fantastic. Tiggs vs Pope was the highlight of the show but at least half a dozen dialog intensive scenes had my full attention, even Clay in the bedroom with Gemma was as good as I've ever seen them.

A few qq that Opie wasn't more high profile and doesn't look to be for the next few episodes.

This will hold me over nicely week-to-week until Walking Dead returns mid October

I was out having a smoke with some colleagues not one week ago, prattling on about my TF2 heroics slaughtering and taunting teenagers, and these colleagues wanted to talk about World of Tanks instead. I thought it was a web based coffee break type game, but I just googled the site and it looks like a F2P download. Care to make a sales pitch for it, Av?

Hi right back at you, I decided to make my posts semi-annual :P

John, I also loved the Walking Dead games - just bought the pack last week and tore through them in 3 days, could have gone faster but I forced myself to only play one episode a day. The second was my favorite, felt like a perfect fit for the WD universe. I don't mind the light gameplay as I am there for the great story, Lee is compelling and the supporting cast is stellar.

The Secret World was an awesome experience for me, I played casually and made it to the end of the storyline, completing most of the main and side missions at my leisure. I felt the graphics were lush and immersive, couldn't ask for more, but as I said before, my only other MMO has been LOTRO which is ancient (Second Age technology :P ) so I don't know what GW2 and such look like. Combat was certainly lackluster but, like the Walking Dead, I'm there for the story and not for action. I have Team Fortress 2 when I want adrenaline. Since I'm not an end-game grinder, I've pretty much backed off from the TSW, but I think I'll leave my sub active for a few months to show my support for what I consider a brave and top tier product.

Got my 360 modded and burned a few titles, but don't touch the thing. I think I'm cured of console gaming!

If anyone samples the MMO The Secret World, drop xKINGMOBx an in game mail and we can hook up. Other than dabbling in the F2P LotRO, I haven't touched an MMO since Ultima Online, but the Secret World was too interesting not to try. You start as either an Illuminati, Templar, or an Asian-themed Dragon foot soldier and proceed to land on a coastal Maine island near Freeport to check on a zombie outbreak for your cabal.

First major villain appears to be Loki and early dungeons include eating Peyote to spirit travel back a millenia to help the Wobajnacki indians in their fight against Mayan invaders with Viking heroes helping out. Next you head to Egypt where Horus himself is advancing the plot. Investigation missions, which involve no combat, include following Masonic imagery through a DaVinci style plot or translating morse code for drop co-ordinates, amazing time sinks with my limited gaming time.

And that's my semi annual post :P

Darryl may be coming to the comics: http://www.dailyblam.com/news/2012/02/28/the-walking-dead-creator-teases-daryl-dixons-comic-introduction

And since I've gone to all the trouble of posting, might as well throw in that I squeal with delight at each new episode and am amazed, even after following your opinions for many years now, that you have issues with this show!

<----- Is really scared of the dark before monsters start jumping out of his peripheral vision. So, thanks all the same about the Zombie recommendations, but must pass that up. :P

 

I wish this present patch of having a reasonable income might last, so I could try the LoTRs game though, sounds aces. I don't have my PS3 hooked up on line, can't figure out how to do it without being jumped on by the line-owner.

There are LOTR multiplayer games for consoles, but the on I refer to, with the word Online at the end, is PC only. And it's free.

Thanks for the warm welcome Avaunt :D

I play PC and from your posts it looks like you are console. I do have a 360 but I call it the Netflix console now, we rarely play games, despite it being hacked and games being pirate-able. The only two games I considered buying for it were Batman:Arkham City and the soon to come Mass Effect 3, but Steam has them both so I'll likely grab them there. The last game I burned was Fist of the North Star, a KOEI style fighter based on the post apocolyptic anime series. I liked it but don't recommend it to non-fans :/

Portal 2 is gorgeous. My gaming friends have been mad for Dark Souls lately, and I did pick up the Xbox Arcade version of Limbo.

I think dead Space 2 is available on any system and well worth 30 hours of your life, it is already in the cheap section methinks, Steam had it for $5 two weeks back, 9 bucks for the pair. Make sure to download both animated movies if you like Dead Space at all, they are fantastic bookends to the first game.

Over the years I find McMahon has similair gaming opinions to mine, which is why I was surprised that he liked Dead Island. Worst piece of crap I've laid down cash for in years. Horribly repetitive combat and scaling zombies = a chore to play. Why would an aging greek lifeguard send me across the resort for a fetch quest, then send me right on back upon my successful return? Could he not think things through and send me out once with a list? Why did I have to click twice for every item I looted, once to look in a container and then again to pick it up? Gorgeous landscapes do not a good game make.

Jaynova mentioned DDO from Turbine, have you checked out the Free to Play Tolkien MMO, Lord of the Rings Online? Fantastic. I haven't played an MMO since Ultima Online because I don't want my addictive personality to end my sex life prematurely, but damn if I didn't get the tingly's the first time I met Tom Bombadil and Aragorn, when I rode horseback into Rivendell the first time, when I took a screenshot on the shattered bridge in the First Hall of Moria, when I saved the Great Smials in Tuckburough with the help of the Brandybuck Hobbit clan. With new content creeping out semi-annually, they've just realesed Orthanc with the (supposedly) hardest instance in any MMO out there, the 6 man battle with Saruman. If you are investing any time in DDO, you may want to check this out. Be prepared for a 12 hour install if you have anything less than a 5 MB download net connection. I play on server Meneldor (named after one of the great eagles that flew Gandalf to the gates of Mordor), if anyone happens to roll a toon I can help a ton in-game if you go there.

Excellent lists, some great films here. A few things to add:

The Japanese are doing some amazing things with horror lately. An excellent introduction to their take on the genre would be Three Extremes,a trio of horror shorts by three top Japanese directors. I found it when checking out the rest of Takashi Miike who made a sweet crime/horror/gore fest called Ichi the Killer. I don't want to give anything away but Ichi is a lovable jackie Chan type assassin, except that he can only kill when aroused. Has some very Tarantino-esqe bits in it, watch for the tongue-katana-honour scene if you decide to check it out. Also, Three Extremes had a sequel with more shorts, if it catches your fancy.

Curious in its absence in a 6 year old thread would be Hannibal Lecter, Red Dragon is high on my list and Silence of the Lambs is Oscar territory. I avoid the third movie as the ending was changed to be more palatable to American audiences, sadly by Ridley Scott who I otherwise enjoy.

Psycho was great, the Devil's Rejects is one of my favorites, and Day of the Dead was the highmark for Romero IMHO. Misery for King, and The Thing is one of the best horror flicks of all time. I love Alien but do not think it has aged very well, special effects wise.

Longtime lurker input: if you are double fisting fireballs, a game breaking perk to buy on the destruction tree is the one that interupts enemies when you doublefist most destruction spells. Dragons, bosses, even the big finale are much easier, as this perk breaks any attack with each hit. If you time it right, nothing can hit you anymore, though you will likely run out of magic before the fight is over with this method. The name of the perk is Impact, I do believe, and the interuption effect is called a stagger. Being a mage would have been impossible without it.

And it didn't help that, in this instalment, both Peter & MJ came across as unappealing women.

Gold

As far as I know, it's an open-ended ongoing - Kirkman's said quite a few times that he'd be happy to keep writing it for years.

Kirkman said in an AMC interview that he hopes sales keep up so that he can write it well into the next decade so he can stay ahead of the TV serial, which is netting him shitloads of cash. No worries about this license gong belly up; adding you to his monthly sales will help keep him afloat and publishing :P

I read Walking Dead in trades as they come out, and somehow I only just picked Vol 8 up... I shit my pants, twice, and am very embarassed

I second that, GO SEE THIS MOVIE. Del Toro blows me away, this man oozes talent. The monsters were tops, the pacing excellent, the characters were fun, and the nachos were very tasty. I got extra cheese sauce.

Art Spiegelman invented Garbage Pail Kids? Jesus!

I live in New Brunswick, Canada, and we are the only English/French bi-lingual province on this side of the planet. They use Asterix in elementary school to trick us into liking reading French.

My interest in this thread is the result of wanting more Persepolis, Maus, Epileptic, and apparently Ordinary Victories type stuff. I'm certainly not looking to get into Asterix or TinTin again. TinTin, I found, was not only dull, but at times mildly offensive. All the secondary characters are foreigners, while the hero is a whitey. Some of the stories I vaguely remember from my youth were TinTin fighting Africans and Arabs. I was watching Apocalypse Now Redux and had a strange sensation of reading TinTin when Sheen was at the French Colonial settlement, don't ask me why. Cheap caricatures of non-whites in Tintin.

Next someone will suggest Babar and Rupert.

I googled Jason and that looks worth a try. I found a bibliography and there were a dozen or so books... I should get the Left Bank Gang?

Just finished the Zmobie (tee hee) Survival Guide. Easy bathroom reading, small easily digestable (tee hee) chunks (tee hee) for short stints to the loo.

I order Ordinary Victories. My Ragged Robin had read it and said it would be well worth my time; unfortunately, her reading was a library copy in another town so I can't just pilfer hers.

I recently read Epileptic and appreciate you suggesting it. Absolutely fabulous. In a bit of reverse engineering, I found this brief thread with the STH search feature, pity I hadn't read it until now. Thanks for the suggestion... I best go google your other European novels so as not to miss out

Has David B.'s Epileptic been discussed in this thread? Too many pages to sift through to find out.

Epileptic is one of the best books I've ever enjoyed in the comics medium. I'm putting it up there with Persepolis and Maus. I've scoured the internet for discussions of and references to it but aside from a few book reviews, nada. I expect more from STH's smarty-pants crowd and am thus confident that you've all read it and can point me to the page of this thread that has said discussion.

Such amazing art! And so lucid.

Changes have been made to the game - nothing stellar, but here it is nonetheless:

The dead are learning the priorities of besieged survivors, and are keeping near the doorways once inside a safehouse. While zombies are inside a building, they will lurchingly attempt to block anyone dragging barricade materials to its entrance, with variable success.

Survivors should watch their step when free running across the icy rubble of the city - falling from a ruined building now carries a risk of injury.

In the thin, cold air, the drifting miasma of rot and decay grows sharper and clearer. Zombies taking the deep breath of scent death are now given a visual representation of the surrounding city.