I dunno. I grew up on He-Man, Transformers and G.I. Joe, and I think I turned out OK. I suppose I also grew up on Labyrinth, The Dark Crystal, and The Neverending Story, which may have been just as formative in my nerdiness and are leagues ahead of those first three in terms of quality.
I grew up on all of those exact same things and I’m not a nerd, so it’s basically a crapshoot anyhoot.
It’s funny. I’m definitely a nerd and neuro-something-or-other, and I have really good friends who are into all this stuff, Linux, Terry Pratchett etc - all of it - but I absolutely bounced off this smug nerd culture and grind my teeth if a group all start yelling “Ni!” or make me listen to the “hilarious” Portal song. Possibly I’m just trying too hard to be an arch, diffident outsider, this is my tribe, and I’m just the tribe jerk.
I feel you. I often hate things because too many people annoy me by liking them too much but ya know that’s nebulous and stupid. As I’ve gotten older I’ve just kinda stopped letting that happen and try to give things a chance
This is the ritual to create a Tom Scott.
I would recommend introducin the son to a literal lemon in real life prior to playing Portal 2.
… probably goes the same for a p0taTo.
Make sure it’s not a lemon party.
That’s why you introduce LOTR before Portal 2 -
PO-TAY-TOES: Boil 'em, Mash 'em, Stick 'em in a stew.
Needs more BattleBots.
Robot Wars.
…grant imahara should’ve been cast as reed richards… =(
you don’t need to try so hard, just don’t let him have weird ideas about gender and hope he befriends at least one girl. that’ll be enough. all these idiots need is a female friend going “don’t be an idiot that’s not how things work”.
Or a sister, or any woman who has the standing to tell you “your teeth are blotchy and your breath is bad, that’s why people won’t kiss you, go to the dentist”
I always wonder where are the mothers of these shitty young men?
Like.
If I even thought of going into a misogynistic phase during my younger years, my mother would have put me in my place, yanno?
Are anglo mothers less sprited than latin american mothers?
It’s easy to imagine them however you want. Truth is a lot of those incels probably come across as normal on the surface and have a normal life and are just depressed people looking for something to blame
They’re at home, suffering their husbands abuse while their son learns to be just like Dad.
Oof. Hard to read/think about. But I’m pretty sure that’s what’s happening.
My kid won’t experience that (at least from their parents), thankfully. But we’re doing our best to instill an open mind and acceptance for our child.
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We won the lottery on this. Had twins, 1 boy 1 girl at birth. They’re too young to know if they’re gonna be friends, enemies, (probably both?)
Throwing Discworld into the mix
My son wants to “game” like most other kids at his class. So I got an old laptop, installed linux mint on it with dosbox. He loves lemmings, the incredible machine 2 and rollercoaster tycoon
Worms/Scorched Earth/Liero (pixel physics!)
That era had so many good Gorilla clones.
I fear that he won’t get many friends this way
Mainstream might be boring but it’s an easy way to connect with people
That’s the trouble with gamers these days, they’re only in it for the friendship. Fucking posers.
This was the argument I used in high school when I wanted an Xbox 360. My parents were super reluctant given the cost, and then I told them I have nothing to talk about with friends in the hallways and I’m left out of conversations (I was). They reconsidered and eventually folded, and I was very appreciative
Column A, Column B
The trick is to introduce your kid to your taste in gaming while they’re young
And then when they are in their tweens and want to game online with their mates, you set them up for it (with proper supervision and such, of course)
And they WILL develop their own taste in gaming – But they will have some common ground with you still.
… It worked for me and my dad (avid PC gamer, mostly plays strategy games and management sims though) anyway. Years later I convinced him to get Civ V and he completely destroyed me in it.
You have a diploma in personality development manipulation haha
I didn’t get many friends the old fashioned way and I turned out fine in the end.
maybe you could have had an even better life had it happened
Unlikely. The reason I didn’t have many friends is simply because I didn’t get along with them: my interests were not their interests. It’s much more fulfilling to find people who align with and elevate you than to seek popular approval.
If you had access to the same things as them you could have had the same interests?
No, because my interests were “reading books” and “knowing things” and I had very little patience for people who did not understand the basic rules to a game on first explanation, for example. That’s still true but it’s much easier to select your peer group as an adult.
Omg the Incredible Machine!!! Where can I play it, its been so long!
I think the copyright expired and you can just download it for free, maybe its even on the internet archive. I got mine from abandonware or something like that.
Gotta get Jill of the Jungle on that bad boy
I don’t like being so seen.
I’m not
deadextinct yet!I’m making a note here: Huge success
And the music of Weird Al
Click a picture of the little guy each and every day to show them later how things were when they were growing up. You can use something like DD-DigitalDiary Otherwise these memories will be lost forever. And it has better privacy than all other google slop
Also i would suggest Audiobooks. Lots o them available for Free. In Youtube or Pitrats software. To learn how to act and live in life
Don’t forget futurama and star trek
Star Trek is a difficult one. The oldest stuff is very dated, even TNG has some things that are very weird for a modern audience. But, some of the modern stuff is basically unwatchable.
Yea there’s some dated episodes but there’s also measure of a man, past tense and a bunch of others that still absolutely slap
Yeah, there are some amazing episodes. TOS also has some amazing episodes. Offhand, I can’t think of anything since DS9 / Voyager that was that good. There were definitely some fun episodes, but nothing that I kept thinking about for a long time after they aired, like say Picard’s living an entire life in The Inner Light.
((Also funny about The Inner Light, is that I can’t think of that episode without thinking of the really awkward way that they had Patrick Stewart pretend to play the flute by having someone lie on the floor out of camera and pretend that his arms were Patrick Stewart’s arms.))
Specifically Star Trek: Elite Force and Futurama (Video Game)
Hey, not extinct! There are dozens of us
Also don’t forget MST3K and Lord of the Rings!
Its never to early to read The Hobbit to get someone a lifelong addiction to the LoTR. I was trying for in-utero but my wife was not interested.
Cosmos (the original)
Connections with James Burke
Secret Life of Machines
All of David MacAulay’s books
Man, Connections was such a good show. I gotta rewatch that sometime.
The way things work is one of my favourite books. I still have the copy I got as a kid!
Connections 1 and 2. Maybe not 3.
Yeah, that one wasn’t nearly as good
Lotr is overrated, there i said it
Perhaps define “overrated” first or else I am not following your point.
If you want to put a little note saying ‘the movies are overrated’ sure, we can have a debate about that. Fantasy films really aren’t for everyone, and adapting LotR is definitely not an easy task.
If you genuinely mean the books as well, idk what to tell you. The history of the fantasy genre after LotR proves you’re wrong.
Modern fantasy owners might be standing on the shoulders of giants, but to extend the metaphor, it means their heads are higher than those giants.
LOTR could be overrated as a piece of fantasy writing for a modern audience, even if it is absolutely key to establishing the modern fantasy genre. For me, LOTR was good, but it was unsatisfying in some ways. Like, Gandalf and Saruman were obviously powerful “wizards”, but what is it that they could do? How did their powers work? And there were characters like Tom Bombadil who were confusing and had me flipping pages.
I greatly respect Tolkien’s work. But, unlike some more modern authors, I don’t devour everything he wrote. For example, I absolutely couldn’t read the Silmarillion.
So, yeah, I can see how someone would say that LOTR is overrated, even if it was key to establishing an entire genre.
I think that’s a lot like saying modern orchestral music stands on the shoulders of classical composers but that isn’t really accurate, is it? Moonlight Sonata is Moonlight Sonata. Many classic compositions are still utilized in modern media.
There’s a difference with being disastisfied with certain aspects of a story and that story being overrated. Gandalf and Saruman’s powers being vague was the point. Tom Bombadil is such a minor portion of the Shire, is that even something relevant to the narrative as a whole? Fantasy, specifically, has evolved over time through the introduction of power systems sure — does that make them inherently better than LotR?
Not every book is for every person. You simply cannot deny the level of effort that went into creating LotR on Tolkien’s part, nor that it is held in very high regard to this day. The books simply are not overrated.
Harry Potter, though, absolutely. 100% overrated.
Classical music is a bit different because it’s effectively frozen in time. They’re not introducing new instruments. They’re not using amplification for the most part. It’s like doing the same Shakespeare plays over and over again.
If there were a Beethoven today, he probably wouldn’t be composing classical music. He’d be doing popular music of some kind. In fact, the historical record suggests he would have been a keyboardist in a rock band.
For music, a better example might be Jimi Hendrix. He was an amazing musician and his approach completely shaped modern rock music. But, while his music was influential, are his songs the best rock songs of all time? I don’t think so, because other people have built on what he did and have taken it further.
Tom Bombadil is such a minor portion of the Shire, is that even something relevant to the narrative as a whole?
No, and that’s why a better author (or their editor) would have removed it.
Fantasy, specifically, has evolved over time through the introduction of power systems sure — does that make them inherently better than LotR?
Yes. Not just because of their “power systems”, but because the authors have used some of the ideas that Tolkien introduced, and told better stories with them, or introduced better characters. Or, because they lack some of Tolkien’s key weaknesses, like they’re able to write interesting 3-dimensional female characters. IMO the heavy lifting that Tolkien did is to introduce a world filled with all these various kinds of creatures that we all take for granted now: elves, dwarves, ents, orcs, etc.
He was probably the greatest fantasy writer of his time. But, he’s “of his time”. He unconsciously brings all kinds of biases and baggage into his writing that a reader in the 1950s wouldn’t even notice, but that become more apparent 75ish years later.
You simply cannot deny the level of effort that went into creating LotR on Tolkien’s part
Nor can you deny the amount of effort that went into The Room but that doesn’t mean it’s a great movie. LotR is a great book, but it’s not because Tolkien put a certain amount of effort into it.
But, is it overrated? There are 2 ways something can be overrated. Something can be bad and rated as being ok, and so it’s overrated. Or something can be good but rated as being the best in the world and so it’s overrated. I think LotR is in the second category as a fantasy story. As a foundation for fantasy literature, I don’t think it’s overrated because it introduced so many things that we just take for granted today. But merely as a book, looking at it through modern eyes, it is probably overrated. I think it’s great, but it’s no longer the best fantasy book ever written.
Even if you dislike the story, its impact on the fantasy genre is hard to argue against. I personally dislike the series too, but I refuse to call it overrated because it influences basically every aspect of modern fantasy writing.
Having a massive influence is just proof of it being overrated, imagine how much more creative stories would be if everything didn’t have to force in elves and dwarves and goblins
My point wasn’t that fantasy needs elves, but rather that when a fantasy setting does include elves, you likely have a rough expectation of what kind of stereotype they’ll fit. That stereotype is the influence I’m talking about.
The “elves are old, somber, magical, close with nature, tall and thin, magically graceful, pale, have pointy ears, have delicate swooping architecture and designs, etc” stereotype is what you’d likely expect from elves if they get brought up in fantasy… And that stereotype is largely influenced by LOTR. A setting can still be fantasy without elves, but including elves in your story will have the reader automatically setting certain expectations about how those elves will fit into your world. You as the writer can choose to conform to (or rebel against) those expectations, but there’s no denying that the expectation exists, and is heavily influenced by LOTR.
I really loved Pratchett’s take on the elves, come to think of it.
I agree. I enjoy it, but I’m not desperate for more. (I feel the same about the original Star Wars as well)
Youre very welcome to hold your incorrect opinion but please do not try to ruin other peoples fun. You could also tell us why you have your still very wrong opinion
Perhaps they also fell asleep during the movies. I certainly know I did.
hey, falling asleep during LOTR is part of the fun
I don’t need to justify my comment to you. I said what I said and now a bunch of yall are acting like the sistine chapel roof is collapsing. It’s mediocre at best, 12 hours of dudes larping like dorks
God lotr fans are insufferable.
A 40k fan dissing LotR fans, who could have predicted?
They’re the same picture, they’re just tsundere for Tolkien-san (we know they’re an anime fan too)
Says a 40k fan.
At the very least the LotR fandom isn’t infested with Nazi’s that fail to understand the very basic themes of 40k.
Doesn’t like my thing huh, you NAZI.
i guess i was wrong, lotr fanboys seem really chill and level headed.
Have to say I agree.
Doesn’t matter, it’s not on the list for quality. It’s an important piece.
BOOOOOOOOO
This is what I mean when I say I’m teaching my kids Python
