Thrik

Jesus christ I can't wait to get home.

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I love how you've done the 3D visualisations in the scenes for this!

I wouldn't agree with that, I thought the series did a pretty good job of opening the window into The Punisher and revealing why he has the mentality that he does. It was made clear exactly why he was killing these people and what they did to earn their death sentences, and honestly it was very difficult to disagree with his motivation — which was one of the central points of the season, contrasting with Daredevil's approach of never killing anybody no matter what the circumstances (which he was forced to reconsider). Edit: One thing I just remembered is that if you only watched scenes involving The Punisher himself you might have missed out on a lot of the context because it's through Karen and her investigation into his former life that a lot of his story is told. For example, she's the one who uncovers what set his broken life into motion, explores his old family home, etc.

Looks like the PS4.5 is definitely happening: http://kotaku.com/more-details-emerge-on-ps4-5-which-reportedly-wont-get-1771708549 I'm not sure how I feel about this. On the one hand if I were to get a 4K TV (which my next one in the next year or so will likely be) it would be nice to have a console that can support it, because the PS4 doesn't have a chance. But I don't like the idea of games being fractured so that they basically run in a lesser mode on the original PS4. Part of me kind of can't believe it, because Sony has always been so good at long-term support of its systems. They've said any PS4.5 games must also run on PS4s, so there's the possibility that they'll force developers to keep performance/graphics equivalent on both — only using the extra power to faciliate 4K and/or VR, which both demand a lot more power than the PS4 can really handle. I guess that another factor is that Nintendo looks like it's going to be releasing a new console this year or next, which could be very powerful indeed. Maybe this is Sony starting to react to what could be a really disruptive move, because if Nintendo were to have a substantially more powerful console and strong developer support they could really stir the pot. It's all getting really interesting, that's for sure. Especially with PCs now devolving to be more console-like and powered via a central platform like Steam.

I'm just completely put off playing games at launch these days, even on console. Always performance/bug issues.

I'd love to see more of The Punisher but I'm not convinced a show that's purely his will happen. Netflix is clearly OK with its heroes being killers but The Punisher takes it to the extreme — he's effective but arguably out of control. I think it's more likely he'll appear in another character's series again. It's unclear which way it'll go from the rumours AFAIK. Holy shit was season two of Daredevil good overall though, just finished it tonight. Admittedly I was expecting a slightly more intense fight scene in the finale, but it was still a satisfying conclusion and there's a lot of excellent material for season three. I also enjoyed the increasing number of characters, locations, and references from Jessica Jones. Presumably these series are all going to get more and more intertwined. Netflix is sitting on serious gold with this TV universe. Really looking forward to Luke Cage. We've already seen him go through a lot in Jessica Jones so it'll be really interesting to see where they take him in his own series. There weren't really any clues about that from what I saw.

Looks interesting, because it's a spin-off film I wasn't expecting much of this but it does look good. I expect it'll be much less laden with flashy epic set pieces like the main series and will focus more on telling a strong story. It'll also be cool to see an actual return to some of the more classic stuff. I noticed they brought back the old stormtroopers (if you didn't notice they're quite a bit different in The Force Awakens)...

Sorry, I missed this before. Topics that've been inactive for three years are archived but they can be unarchived if you really want that. Let me know the address and I can do it. Edit: I've decided to disable archiving as it was only in place for performance reasons, but the newer software is much more efficient. A background task is running to return the threads to regular status. This means it'll also (with time) be possible to search those threads as archived threads weren't included in results.

The gore in episode nine. Jesus!

Weirdly the Dark Souls 3 hype has made me want to play The Witcher 3 so I bought that today haha. Now I just need to read a good (but succinct) story catch-up.

I just watched episode seven and I can quite confidently say I've enjoyed this more than the first season so far. They've really nailed the pacing and it doesn't have as linear a 'taking down the bad guy' narrative like before, more twisting and complexity involved. Also the action is ridiculously well executed as always. Episode six really made me think of Deus Ex: Human Revolution for some reason. I think it was the music and sneaking around the big high-tech building. Makes me want to dig it out and play it.

Haha yeah it's incredible how good Netflix is for original content now. I've only just started beasting House of Cards season four which is a massive improvement on #3 already. I think that Better Call Saul is a weird exception in that it's not actually a Netflix exclusive, but is licensed to Netflix for the UK market — so it airs as it airs in the US. It's a bit like how Netflix US sometimes gets the exclusive rights to stuff from the BBC and ITV and they market those as 'Netflix Original' over there. I went into Jessica Jones not having any idea about her character and hadn't even heard of Luke Cage. It's best if you do that IMO because the show isn't actually that much about her power, but more about what was done to her in the past and its ongoing effects (which has a lot of parallels to real-life emotional abuse and sexual assault). The superpowers are kind of a way of making it easier to relate to. Anyway, the level of quality Netflix is putting into these shows is astonishing. Their TV universe is shaping up just as well as the linked M movie universe. It makes DC look really bad lol.

I think you should watch JJ first for maximum appreciation, as it also introduces Luke Cage who's getting his own Netflix series later in the year. I have no idea if he'll turn up in DD season two but it's possible. I think they're kind of meant to be watched in chronological order because I think if you were to watch Luke's show without having watched JJ you'd be missing out on a lot of backstory, because he's a major part of several episodes.

There are various notification settings here: https://www.mapcore.org/notifications/options/ I believe it also now prompts you to use your web browser's built in notification system if it supports it (e.g. Chrome). If you've enabled that then I assume the setting lies in your browser.

Just watched this and Jessica Jones. Like HP I was blown away by that one-take fight scene! I think overall Jessica's show was better and the subtle crossovers were cool. Really uncomfortable to watch at times though, jesus.

This number is purely determined by likes. It's your total number of liked posts, but it doesn't affect anything aside from allowing you to track how many of them you've received.

It is a bit sporadic, I assume it's down to the connection it makes in the background to look up names lagging. I have some maintenance updates to install shortly so I'll see if these provide any improvement. If not I'll file it as a recurring issue with the vendor to see if it can be addressed.

Came across an electronica/chill album I like. Really reminds me of Bonobo and Emancipator.

Been enjoying some more laid-back stuff today. OK maybe not so much the first one.

Hi everyone, Just in case anyone noticed a little discussion about this on Twitter and/or status feeds, I thought I'd clarify that we've recently been undergoing some changes to the site's structure. Things have slowed down a little, and I'll hold my hands up and say that this is largely because of myself having considerably less time than I have in previous years to keep things moving forward due to various personal things and other projects. While I've no intention of leaving after being part of this wonderful community for 15 years, wearing so many hats has become too much and I've become a little burnt out. MapCore staff have contributed a lot of time bringing you things like our contests and articles. However, in a bid to make it even easier for them to do so I've decided to move two staff who've been particularly productive during the last couple of years — FMPONE and Sprony— into a more prominent role so that I'm no longer a bottleneck when it comes to decision making and coming up with nice new things. As you'll see from the updated staff directory, this means that my site management role has now been split out and given to them, while for the foreseeable future I will remain on hand for coding, technical administration, and advice. Essentially, day-to-day decisions are now theirs to make. Both Shawn and Sprony know that we have a great formula here, and that anything going forward is all about enhancing and improving on what's been a great few years for the site. They've done superb work to make that happen and I have no doubt whatsoever that between them and backed up by our experienced and seasoned staff the site will continue to flourish. On that note, a number of new staff from the community have already been approached and will be brought on board to bring their vision of better and more frequent content to life. This is also a good time to point out that if you'd wish to write something, Shawn and Sprony will probably be delighted to hear from you! Hopefully everyone will be supportive of these changes so that the community can continue to grow and thrive. And hopefully I'll have more time to simply post on the forums now that I have less things to worry about.

I think it's safe to say that my body is ready for this. It's not going to be easy to equal or even surpass its magnificent predecessor though!

Sorry guys, it's been a pain in the ass but I just got through installing updates that look like they might relieve the speed issues. From what I can tell it's mainly been about caching issues with the software, a recurring theme since the new version came out. Nonetheless I've been testing out all kinds of server-related things but the server itself is very snappy. My hope is they finally figured it out now. I guess they didn't test enough with forums with 12 years of data like this one.

I've done some things which should hopefully speed things up, including just rebooting the server. I suspect something went wrong and started using more memory than it was meant to. If it isn't better let me know but it seems to be from my current machine. There are now some maintenance updates to install, so I'll (briefly) take the forums down to do those some evening soon. It looks like various bugs have been fixed including some caching performance stuff so that might help with whatever's causing this nonsense.

Very sad to hear that Mazy. Hope you're doing OK.