Moonlight

[Moonlight]

The portal device in Only the Good just kind of…appeared.

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I know those old layouts like the back of my hand, and I didn’t mind. The majority of the game is new content, and it’s good stuff.

Tying this into Red Dwarf, I’m currently writing and producing a Sonic parody in which Tails is heavily influenced by Rimmer. He’s deeply resentful of being stuck in the sidekick position, power hungry, ignores his real talents in favor obsessing over what he doesn’t have, and hates that an airhead like Sonic is allowed to get all the praise while he (thinks he) does all the work.

Or maybe _I_ am just kind of like Rimmer. That would probably explain why I like writing the character type so much.

[Moonlight]

As a longtime fan from childhood, I’ve obviously been waiting quite a while for a new Sonic game that wasn’t one of those tedious “Hold A-to-Win” boosting-based Modern Sonic ones they’ve been making for the past decade. Of course, it took hiring talent from the fanbase to make that happen, because SEGA has long ago lost its heart and soul and is just struggling in vain to replicate past games without any kind of understanding or insight on what made them fun to play.

Mania is well so designed it’s actually making me spot flaws in my beloved Sonic 3 & Knuckles that never occurred to me before; to name a more harmless example, how boring a level Angel Island is. I always considered Sonic 2 to have the unequivocally best level design of the Genesis trilogy (Sonic & Knuckles is literally Sonic 3 Part 2, not a fourth game), but Mania beats it out not only in what made it good but with a design complexity the Genesis could never have achieved on its meager double digit kBs of RAM.

The bosses are wholly more clever than anything from the original Genesis games, with the vast majority requiring you to figure out the gimmick/work out a way to indirectly attack Eggman’s robot. You can’t just jump on him easy peasy 8 times the way you can in practically all the old bosses. They’re great, and an actual challenge at times.

I could go on forever about what I love about Mania.

Mania is the real Sonic Generations, and the Sonic game we all should’ve gotten on the Saturn in 1996. God help me, I love the new Sonic game, but before Mania was announced I never thought I’d say those words again.

The best level design in Mania came from the original levels/new sections of old levels, so all SEGA have to do to top this is do what Christian “Taxman” Whitehead knew to do from the very beginning: just make a wholly new 2D Sonic game, all original levels and elements. You finally know for sure it’ll work, you don’t need to keep rehashing levels and other stuff from the past as a crutch any more.

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If the release is the same content, you could fit the whole thing on one disc and cut the production cost in half while charging the same price (or higher) for it. This is making sense now.

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There has to be some sort of difference in the releases for this to make financial sense. DVDs work in Blu-Ray players, so I don’t understand why anyone would be rushing to buy a Blu-Ray. Even if they present the program in a higher bit rate than on the DVDs, that’s only something a miserable pretentious cunt of a videophile like me would care about.

The best I can come up with is perhaps the original DVDs are out of print in Japan, and they feel a Blu-Ray rerelease would be more commercially successful than a reprint of the DVD.

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Of course, the most important thing a Remastered VIII could do is replace those awful mop heads with proper CGI Dibbley wigs.

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Perhaps holograms have the sickness and symptoms etc that they have when their back up discs are made.
That would explain why McIntyre looks so pale and dying at his funeral.

Isn’t looking pale kind of Series I’s thing?

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So…do we know if this is actually happening? It just seems like a really weird thing to do for a show shot on video tape where a full series already fits on a single DVD.

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There’s seriously never been a Marooned one? :o

Because there’s only so many variations of “This is the best episode of Red Dwarf” and “That bit’s brilliant” you can go through before you run out things to say.

Personally I’m more interested in seeing VII and VIII filled out, along with the eventual XI commentaries.

[Moonlight]

doesn’t he also shit himself in Demons and Angels?
they mention in it that he’s been “using his uniform as a temporary latrine”

I also always took that as hyperbole.

Regardless, I don’t think either Rob and Doug expected this joke to be under scrutiny by anal-retentive nerds 30 years down the line.

[Moonlight]

Now let’s turn this into a 5,000 reply debate about whether or not holograms can shit themselves or if it’s just another shocking example of the writers eschewing logic for cheap laughs, shall we?

Must we really assume that he literally shit himself, considering it sounds just like the kind of hyperbole the show makes use of all the time?

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“This is an episode of Red Dwarf.”

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How visually distinctive did it feel from XI? Does it still have the general blue wash to the lighting, or have they changed that around?

I’ve always felt altering the color tone of the lighting from XI’s blue would be the coolest way to make XII look very visually distinct.

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It’ll probably look very nice, if nothing else.

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I’m going to be watching the first episode with friends at some point so we can loudly comment on why it doesn’t work. BUT, if it turns out to actually be a fun show that just had a shit trailer, then we can just enjoy the show. As much as I’m expecting the whole pilot episode to feel like that trailer comedy-wise, I wouldn’t be that surprised if FOX just took the dumbest jokes to advertise the series with. Plus, pilots are often super broad on purpose, because that’s more likely to get sold to a network. Then once they have a show, the creators are free to be more sophisticated.

Really depends on how much the actual day-to-day writing of the show is handled by MacFarlane. He most likely wrote the pilot or was one of multiple writers, but I can believe that other writers could make this show into something good even if it doesn’t start out that way. I feel like he has the right ideas for how to do a Star Trek-style show, and better understands what Star Trek is supposed to be than the Kelvin films have, but I just don’t think he’s remotely the right person to write the actual scripts.

I want this to turn out to be good, because sci-fi comedy is an under-utilized genre. But I’m not expecting anything particularly clever out of the pilot even if the show finds its feet in coming episodes.

[Moonlight]

And the marbles gag?

The way to do that joke is to have him under-react to learning he’s been eating marbles or start choking in an over the top manner, not spit them out like a normal person. It still wouldn’t be funny, but it’d feel less of a hackneyed non-joke.

[Moonlight]

Family Guy is the laziest lump of shit on television. Which, obviously, is saying something.

I’m glad somebody else said it, because I was still afraid to go there in case I offended somebody.

For someone who doesn’t like him, I think I’m relatively well-versed in his output, as his shows always aired around other things I wanted to watch.

A friend of mine very deliberately finds supposedly well regarded Family Guy episodes and forces me to watch them so we can tear them apart. “PTV” is supposed to be a “classic” but was ungodly awful, and the episode genuinely felt like they started with a series of random gags and tried to build a story that gave them an excuse to use them all. The so-called satire on censorship really annoyed me, because they seemed to be very genuinely trying to make a point that the FCC’s censorship was preventing them from doing sophisticated comedy about adult topics – but then every time they’d resort to the cheapest, filthiest middle school bathroom humor to illustrate what the FCC wants to take away.

This show is literally aimed at fourteen year olds. I refuse to believe its genuinely targeted at an adult audience, unless that audience is stoned.

[Moonlight]

Oh, I definitely respect MacFarlane as a voice artist. In fact he narrated the preface for this audiobook I’m listening to and I kind of wish he was doing the whole thing. He’s got a very good voice.

I just don’t think he should be allowed near a script.

[Moonlight]

There’s jokes that fall flat, and there’s jokes that make me think “What intelligent adult could possibly find this funny?” Seth MacFarlane’s work consistently falls into the latter category for me. Even ignoring that, his shows tend to lack even coherent storytelling, instead having plots driven by randomness. I’m convinced any English professor worth his salt would tear you a new one for writing something as narratively lazy as his shows tend to be. Structurally, they remind me of the shit I wrote when I was like ten; stories that can be summarized as “This happened, then this other thing happened, and then we forget about all of it because then THIS unrelated thing happened!”

The satire is at best glaringly obvious and not remotely subtle, at its worst horrifically backwards and offensive in its treatment of serious issues. The “parodies” usually just consist of the most basic Baby’s First Fourth Wall trope subversions (which they helpfully explain to the audience), or taking a famous characters and making them talk about poop or masturbation. It astounds me when people defend his stuff as “smart” or “sophisticated” when it’s some of the most hackneyed comedy I’ve ever seen. As an aspiring comedy writer myself it legitimately makes me angry to see him make a quadrillion dollars forging a media empire off his garbage writing while millions of people praise it as sophisticated and claim I “just don’t get it”.

I do not have high hopes for the man doing a Star Trek parody, especially not after how Family Guy-esque that trailer felt. I get that comedy doesn’t trailer well, but those aren’t just weak jokes; they’re pretty awful.

[Moonlight]

So, Star Trek with awful Family Guy jokes then?

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I’ve played almost all the way through Mania. It’s very fun and well put together, and basically what Sonic Generations _should_ have been. The little touches are great. I’m particularly amused by the way the fire shield interacts with the different levels.

Namely setting Oil Ocean Zone on fucking fire.

Now I just need XII.

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Who has time for Red Dwarf right now? Sonic Mania just came out. We haven’t had a good Sonic game in well over a decade.

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BACK TO EARTH WAS TERRIBLE BECAUSE THE AUDIENCE WASN’T LAUGHING.

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Is Kryten wearing a wig?

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What a charming man.

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Should Red Dwarf have continued after Spitting Image?

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I have to question whether or not there is a large percentage of people who are just laughing along with the studio audience when watching sitcoms and not actually at the jokes themselves.

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So, um…

What if Red Dwarf had started in 1887 instead of 1987, then?

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“Everybody’s Krytocracy”

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I stopped watching in Series II when they brought in that female crew to replace the GOOD characters.

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To be fair they came up with the idea that it was banned like four seasons in, and the pilot is really the only other time I remember them very explicitly mentioning Star Trek or having a cast member cameo.

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“Teleported” doesn’t remotely convey what was actually done here, but it fits better in a headline.

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You know how an early Brittas episode copied the “Lemming Sunday” routine almost word for word? Turns out it was in case Red Dwarf Series III was rendered unviewable by the production of future series and people still wanted to hear that joke.

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It is, but I’d enjoy a social media group where we could goof around and share images and the like. Unfortunately all Red Dwarf social media groups are just eight hundred people sharing the SMEG toaster per day and unironically espousing the opinion that you can’t be a true fan if you criticize the show in any way.

[Moonlight]

I feel like a lot of people who hate the new episodes with a passion would find many issues with the classic episodes they hold in highest regard if they could rewatch them brand new today. They saw those original episodes when they were young and completely uncritical, but watch these new ones for the first time much older, with profoundly high expectations and more refined tastes.

I just have to question when I see people who consider Series VIII to be on par with Series III-V, but complain that Series XI “doesn’t feel like Red Dwarf”. If Series VIII feels like classic Red Dwarf to you, then how could you consider something much closer in every respect to not? Or maybe you’d have exactly the same complaint about Series VIII if you hadn’t first seen it in 1999 as a teenager.

Really I’m just annoyed at the kinds of fans you see in social media groups. They’re either the type who claim their favorite episode is “all of them” or the type who unironically bitch that the new episodes are terrible because they don’t look 30 years old. I wish there was one filled with non-stupid people, but I gave up that search a while ago.

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How dare this show continue to exist and bring joy to its fans. Especially since in doing so it retroactively ruins the first six series for some reason that currently escapes me.

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The ship might not have been a pencil. Thank Christ we dodged that bullet.

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Oh wow, Iain Lee IS a cunt. See I never quite knew who he was, just that everyone here said he was a cunt. Seems that’s a very apt description.

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I’m an American. I don’t know your poncy British history where lynching isn’t legal up through the ’50s.

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Thanks to the new season of MST3K, I finally get those jokes. They featured both “The Land That Time Forgot” and “At the Earth’s Core”.

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“Rimmer, the only reason you hung around with those prats from the KKK is cuz you could never get a date.”

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For some reason a bunch of people were being chased down a enclosed path by a bunch of T-rexes. The details shifted and it became that this was the audience fresh from watching Pete Part 2, being chased by some sort of simulated dinosaurs after the filming was over.

I was running with them and got out, but I’m pretty sure somebody was eaten down there while I watched from a high vantage point outside the confines.

Keep your “still better than watching Pete Part 2” comments to yourself out of respect for those who died that fateful day.

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Matloff is under no illusion that his colleagues will be convinced, but he remains upbeat: “Shouldn’t we at least be checking? Maybe we can move panpsychism from philosophy to observational astrophysics.”

Scientists would look at stars behaving weirdly and work from out existing scientific knowledge in an attempt to determine the rules by which the star is behaving, and how they can be modeled and predicted reliably in advance.

This guy goes “Dude, like, what if stars have minds of their own? Like we’re all in one big beautiful cosmic neighborhood, ya dig?”

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I am a satisfied consumer of [PRODUCT]. [PRODUCT] changed my life. Everyone loves [PRODUCT]. except for complete and utter [BASTARDS].

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If there was a time where some fan-wanky ties to past episodes would be OK, it would be the potential final episode ever.

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I still think the walker Blue Midget reeks the most of “Let’s do this just because we can” out of any change in the Remastered. Even in Series VIII it was one of the most cartoonish elements, let alone crow-barred into the infinitely more restrained Series II.

I find it fair for someone to prefer the Remastered if they started on it, but if you always watched the originals then the Remastered changes feel jarringly at odds with the tone of the early series. Added Holly lines like the one about urine being caught cheating just feel totally out of place in early episodes, but right at home in those made around the time of the Remastered. Between that and bizarre additions like the Polymorph in the vents, every time I watch Remastered I feel like little pockets of Series VIII’s worst indulgences are somehow infecting earlier episodes.

I just cannot see the Remastered as its own product. I can only see it as Red Dwarf with bizarre, ill-fitting changes tacked in. Absolutely nothing the Remastered ever did has added to my enjoyment of an episode, they only serve to distract and/or annoy.

And I will argue to my grave that Red Dwarf’s original model effects look objectively better than the CGI of the Remastered. I won’t bash VII’s CGI because it’s the only way they could afford all the shots they needed, but the Remastered’s CGI is needless replacement of existing superior model shots. That’s wasting huge amounts of what microscopic budget they had on making something that looks way cheaper than what it’s replacing. I challenge even the most ardent defenders of the Remastered to look me in the eye and tell me the Remastered Bodyswap chase isn’t some of the worst spaceship effects you’ve ever seen on a TV show EVER.

Even with CG spaceships, they should have kept the Red Dwarf model shots and devoted all the time and effort on the CGI to Blue Midget and Starbug. The CGI Red Dwarf holds up incredibly poorly in close-ups, with much of the fine detail blatantly just flat textures instead of actual geometry. Add to that that complete lack of shadow, just flat omnidirectional lighting from all angles and CGI Red Dwarf doesn’t look remotely like a real, physical object. The harsh lighting and dark shadows of the Red Dwarf model shots are a huge part of what made them look so good, and the presence of actual light and shadow are why Series VIII’s CGI spaceship shots look so much better than VII’s and Remastered’s. Though the over-shininess of the Red Dwarf ship itself in VIII pretty much screams “I AM CHEAP CGI” just as much as a lack of any real lighting does.

You know, without the dozens of shots of Red Dwarf to render, they could’ve had the time to render things like Starbug with proper light and shadow, maybe even with higher resolution textures. The horrible pixelly textures are probably the worst thing about Remastered CGI, the biggest issue with the Red Dwarf ship besides the lack of lighting, and also blatantly visible every time a planet is seen in VII. Good thing VII didn’t have eighteen giant planets in every single space shot or those bad textures might’ve been extremely visible.

Why the fuck does every spacescape starting in the late ’90s need to have a billion planets and nebulas in it? Why does it always have to be so busy? I noticed XI got back in the habit of having a planet in basically every shot, but at least those planets actually looked good.

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Red Zeppelin.

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Oh shit, that was supposed to go in another topic but my browser fucked up and I went back to the wrong tab.

Presumably though, since that midsection was seen in a reshoot, XII might have it connected to the cockpit. Maybe because of the budget allocation they couldn’t afford the set as part of XI, but they could build it for XII. It’s not like any XI episodes needed the midsection except for Can of Worms, and they just built an upper deck for that. I can’t imagine they’d build the nicer set if they were only going to use it to reshoot that one scene from Can of Worms.

But that’s wild speculation trying to compensate for a massive fuckup on my part.

[Moonlight]

Red Zeppelin.

[Author]

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