Enarr

You rent a shared apartment, and when you go in for the first time, the profile pic above is your new roomate

I, a single enigmatic male, would like you brave ant-things to help me create a maple syrup cartel that may never come to ruin.

That and help me conquer the army of cockroaches in my grandmother's kitchen.

Gotham City: Shadow of the Bat

I should have post up sometime in the next day or so.

Inkarnate's Music Discussion Thread

@Inkarnate

Eh, I guess I'll respect your opinion. But I am with you on that last note: I'm hoping for some now lively Jimmy Eat World stuff in the near future, too. Kinda hoping that Taylor Swift doesn't rub off on them too bad. Jim Adkins, the front man, has taken to describing JEW as a "guitar-driven rock band". I can't help but feel that there's a little dissonance between that description along with Integrity Blues and what I wish they would become again.

---

Can somebody introduce a punk fan to Hip-hop and it's various subgenres really quickly and savvily?

Nightrunner's Comic Book Discussion Thread

Scott Snyder's

So, here's the thing about my relationship with comic books, the first comic series I really read was Ultimate Spider-Man, which I started on with Volume 15 because I stumbled upon it at my library. Before that, I had spent my elementary school days on Wikipedia reading about Batman and Spider-Man. My first individual comic that I personally owned was a Looney Tunes comic, but the first one I picked up was Snyder/Tynion's Batman Annual 1. Afterward, I took all thirty of my dollars, being a thirteen year old, and paid for a year long subscription to Batman directly on DC's website. None of my issues ever arrived.

So I didn't really keep up reading Batman. I just read news articles and Wikipedia, trying to keep everything straight. But about a month ago, I set out to binge read Scott Snyder's entire 56 issue Batman run using my local library and the Internet.

It. Was. Epic.

Snyder dedicated his run to telling us what Gotham is. It's the very first topic that he addresses with the dark knight's opening soliloquy before Batman confuses the better part of his rogues gallery by beating them to a pulp with the assistance the clown prince of crime. There were several threads introduced in the debut issue that I wish had been returned to, like Dick Grayson's disguise or whatever had caused all of the city's supervillains to team up like The Justice League of Arkham.

Nonetheless, every single issue felt fresh and exciting. The creative team never missed a beat. Snyder's Batman packed as many surprises as Morrison's, but Snyder's Batman manager to cheat death again and again without every making me feel like he was a walking Deus Ex Machina magnet. Batman lost a fair amount of fights, even on his home turf. He was a man who could fight the Justice League and win, but he was also a man who made mistakes, both as a man and as a bat-god.

The post-crisis Batman had a quote that communicated having had five back up plans for any given operation, and five contingencies for each of those. The New 52's Batman is not so infallible. He's caught off guard on the regular, hanging on to dear life by the skin of his teeth. The Court of Owls mops the floor with The Batman. So does the Joker. The Riddler totally outsmarts him. Dr. Death nearly kills him. And Mr. Bloom...

Ironically, the series does not climax at Endgame, where the Joker's gloves come off and he finally kills the Batman. The series climaxes with Suoerheavy--Snyder's answer to the death of Superman. Batman dies before healing up physically and mentally (losing his formative trauma). Jim Gordon is legally christened as the new law-abiding Batman. Mr. Bloom turns Gotham into a cannibalistic warzone. And Bruce Wayne traumatizes himself again so that he can save the day.

It made my cry. When I read him surrendering the life that he wanted so that he can carry the suffering for everyone else, I was touched and remembered exactly what I love about Batman. Giving up your peace of mind so that you can act as a human shield. I wanted to scream it with him: "I won't give up again!"

As for characters he made

• Duke Thomas - The whole "Robin doesn't need a Batman" shtick got really old really fast. No me gusta.
• Harper Row - I love this girl and wish they found something they could use her for.
• Lincoln March - He could plausibily be Thomas Wayne junior, regardless of how adamant Bruce is that he isn't. Bruce's arrogance is a major theme in this run. I like the character as a villain.

So what is Gotham? Gotham is the piece of Batman that let's itself get ripped apart over and over so that others need not suffer. I like what Gordon said about Batman in Suoerheavy's conclusion. Batman isn't real. Batman fights our nightmares so that we can deal with our real problems by the light of day.

Inkarnate's Music Discussion Thread

Oooh. Yeah..

I was looking into buying Static Prevails on vinyl on their website and had been checking back every day for a while when the front page of their website was dominated by a fifteen second clip of a car driving down a road with the song "Get Right" playing in the background.

Jimmy Eat World is one of my favorite bands, period. But from the fifteen second clip, I knew that it felt unnatural. Get Right is slow and loud, but the writing isn't very clever, and none of the sounds feel very powerful in general. It sounds like something monstrous is lurking beneath the surface. Unfortunately, I feel that the something monstrous never presented itself.

That's Integrity Blues in a nutshell for me. It feels like it could have been a meditative epic. But it feels incomplete, like the high production value is meant to make up for the lack of theatricality. People are constantly saying that Integrity Blues is JEWs best album since Bleed American. I have a few contentions there. The biggest being that I think every single album that precedes Integrity Blues is superior.

Bleed American was far more cohesive than anything to come afterward. But Clarity and Futures are both far more thoughtful. Static Prevails has a raw edge that the band has never recaptured. Invented was more creative. Damaged was more mature without being a bore. The only album that I feel has the same overall creative direction was Chase This Light. Then you have Integrity Blues. I'm not saying Integrity Blues is objectively bad, but it does not live up to the grandeur I've associated with the rest of their discography.

You rent a shared apartment, and when you go in for the first time, the profile pic above is your new roomate

Yay. Think of the adventures we will have. Between my brilliance and your might, nothing can stop us there are a great deal of things that will be helpless before us.

Gotham City: Shadow of the Bat

<Snipped quote by Inkarnate>

Hai. That's a pickle.

"He imagined some heroes got their abilities through science"--not unreasonable, not specific, and still the same affect?

@Ruby

Incorporated. We good?

Nightrunner's Comic Book Discussion Thread

Hello. Recently @Inkarnate has opened a thread to extrapolate on various musical constructs amongst Guildmates. Though I don't know if there are many fans of actual comic books on this forum relatively speaking, I do know that there are in absolute terms.

As for what this thread is meant to discuss: Comic books of course. By that I mean that I hope we can have stimulating examinations of a various works creative process, production, reception, legacy and adaptations, to a certain extent. Superhero fans who have not read comic books are welcome to participate in the discussions so long as they bear in mind that enjoying derivative works are not the same thing as reading a comic book.

I also welcome examinations of various characters, fan theories, speculation for the future and personal appraisals of a given concepts or pieces merit, along with giving attention to less mainstream publishers/works. I would prefer that we avoid short, stream of thought posts that are too brief to communicate effectively. Try not to be redundant. And have fun. Rants are welcome, bigotry and feeble-mindedness are not.

Gotham City: Shadow of the Bat

<Snipped quote>
lwd.dol.state.nj.us/labor/wagehour/co…

@Inkarnate

I never said he had worked legally.

The Official Role-Player Guild Cemetery

@Sep was a good roleplayer who I regret bring too inconsistent about being present to sink into a long-running game with.