Timewaster's Guide Archive

My reply was based on the 'live-action' stipulation.  If you include anime, then my favorites are Evangelion and Boogiepop Phantom.  Cowboy Beebop is really good, but I'd say a tier below my favorites.

By the way, I've seen the first few eps of Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex - I really liked it.  Its action oriented, not contemplative like the film, but that works better for a TV show anyway (I really like the film, but I still haven't made up my mind about whether it was exceptionally intelligent or not).

For Your Malice, by Lamb of God
then
Helheim by Therion (gotta love opera metal)

Hidden tracks don't bother me much unless they are preceeded by a lot of dead space on the same track as some other song.  I like to play my CDs on random and repeat, so hate to have to pay attention and skip after the end of a song, or listen to 15 mins of silence.  They aren't so bad when the hidden track is placed right after another song (like System of a Down did on Toxicity - I forget what the actual track was called).  Also, bands seem to think that because its a hidden track it doesn't have to be at all enjoyable.  This would be somewhat true except that they tend to attach them to other songs - and thereby ruin them.  There are a lot of songs that would be on my playlists but aren't because of hidden tracks.

well, there's no rule that says you have to write your books in order.

Yeah, with most authors I would agree with you, but in this case I can't.  He is already angering huge numbers of fans with this perpetual series, that is never getting anywhere close to ending.  Yet he keeps promising that he will end it soon, and on top of that hes publishing a trilogy (I believe) of sequals (remember, WOT started as a trilogy I believe).  And hes writing slower and slower.

I don't really mind that the books are becoming more and more about a group of main characters rather than just one.  What bothers me is that  a) nothing is happening, and b) the prologues.  Each book they grow, become less and less about anything that is happening in the books, and more about introducing new chars and plot strands that are unnecessary (and that he swears he had planned on all along).  Even more annoyingly, he doesn't bother to mention a lot of these at all in the rest of the book.  It is one thing to add a new plot strand in a book if it is important to the book, but there are no reason for them.  Was anyone else annoyed that he added another famous general in the last books prologue, and then added him in to a few random discussions about the 'best generals in the world' just to make it seem like everyone had known about him all along?

Sorry about the rant.  I fall into the "I'm never going to buy another hardback from this man again, but I'll get the series in paperback and read them" category (but not the prequals).

I was at a con a few years ago, along with my gaming group (we lived near a reasonably large con).  Three of my groupmembers and I all joined the same game, a low/mid-level D&D dungeon crawl (this was before 3e).  There were two or three other PCs who we didn't know in the game as well.

Anyway, we start going through the dungeon, being very cautios, having the thief check for traps etc.  After a few fights we get to a fork in the tunnel, and there is a demon statue at the point of the fork.  Our thief checks for traps . . . nada.  Our fighters start to move down one path of the fork, but I stop them (I'm playing a Wizard, I think I was level 7 at the time - the highest in the party) and say something along the lines of:

"Wait, we should make sure that this thing won't animate behind us.  It would really suck to be caught between an animate statue and whatever we have to fight down that tunnel.  If it can animate, we should attack it now, so we can deal with itself.  And if it is just a statue, then nothing happens, and we can just keep going, right?"

After a bit of debate, everyone agrees with me, everyone gets set, and our fighter throws an axe at it.

Now, what we didn't know was, the DM that we were playing with at the con normally ran a very high level campaign set in hell, and she had just taken her favorite personally created demons and added them to the dungeon we were in as statues on a whim.  We were never meant to fight them.

So, when we attack the demon, our DM just bursts out laughing (it was made for fighting parties of approximately 16-18th level).  The demon animates, and proceeds to tear through the party.  Its killing more than one PC per round, and everyone is running around wildly like headless chickens trying to get away (and all of my friends are yelling at me for being an idiot).  For some reason (I think my DM was a bit generous) I had a book of infinite spells on me, and used one of them to teleport away with whatever was left of the party.  Of course, I was using a spell that was much higher level than I was normally allowed to, and so I took a lot of damage, and I believe I went permanantly insane.