Making a line plot worksheet
Celebrity Cleavage
2014.10.09 21:30 jarakacha Celebrity Cleavage
If they're famous and have a great cleavage, they're here.
2018.10.15 08:38 Beep_Beep_Lettuce24 top 10 epic anime battles
OKBR but for anime and manga. habe u hear of oh saka?
2011.11.11 18:42 Zlor For gamers behind the times
A gaming sub free from the news, hype and drama that surround current releases, catering instead to gamers who wait at least 12 months after release to play a game. Whether it's price, waiting for bugs/issues to be patched, DLC to be released, don't meet the system requirements, or just haven't had the time to keep up with the latest releases.
2024.05.29 03:16 ImpossibleEvan The DailyGames national anthem [1]
Today lines of a national anthem will be written. The top comment will be added as the next line but try to make it rhyme and stay consistent!
I am still working on the other 5 series ATM, I got in a pretty gnarly crash head first into a gate and movement isn't the easiest thing.
submitted by ImpossibleEvan to dailygames [link] [comments]
I am still working on the other 5 series ATM, I got in a pretty gnarly crash head first into a gate and movement isn't the easiest thing.
2024.05.29 03:14 MrsLadyZedd Wild Things (1998)
MLZ MAP (Score): 78.47 / Zedd MAP (Score): 69.10 / Score Gap: 9.37
We purchased this limited edition 4k on Arrow some time ago and finally brought it out this Memorial Day weekend.
While I know we had seen it a loooong time ago, probably a Blockbuster rental, because I am a huge Neve Campbell fan and have been since Party of Five. It did not really ring too much of a bell as we started to watch.
Roger Ebert described this film as “lurid trash”…”a softcore sex film, a soap opera and a B-grade noir” and he’s not wrong. The setting was absolutely gorgeous. When we first saw the film I had not been to Florida, nor had I put in my 14 years of living in South East Texas, where you can peel the summer air off starting in May all the way through November. The line between the haves and the have-nots is not one you cross, not back in 1998, and not now.
Kelly Van Ryan has everything she could ever want. Suzie Toller is a delinquent. They both go to school where the guidance counselor, handsome and young Sam Lambardo, works. They get into a bit of a mess, the three of them, and what exactly happened, and why it happened, remains unclear.
Detective Ray Duquette and his partner, Gloria Perez investigate the situation and try to figure out who did what to whom. The story twists, turns, and goes so many directions that by the end, you are still wondering if something else will end up coming to light.
The acting was not great, especially on the parts of the supporting cast. It was alternatively soap-opera over dramatic to as wooden as a puppet.
Filmed at Ransom Everglades High School in Coconut Grove, Miami, due to the school's architecture and scenic setting. The film also captured the natural splendor in Bill Baggs Cape Florida State Park in Key Biscayne and Oleta River State Park. The clarity and color that comes through in the 4k makes it worth the cost of the limited edition, for sure.
Zedd and I discussed the film and he noted that it was clear that the actors obviously knew what they were filming was a bit of a cinematic joke, but that they approached it with a lightness and sense of humor that is difficult to find these days, no one was taking themselves too seriously.
I agree, a teacher doing what Lombardo was accused of doing would probably not be the subject of a sexy film these days. Certainly not one with a threesome, nor so much nudity of “teen girls” in a mainstream, big release like this.
Without giving too much away, the film is fast-paced, beautifully filmed, and worth a watch. We are not by any means talking cinematic masterpiece, it’s definitely a fun way to spend an afternoon.
Zedd and I have a rule that if we add a film to the collection that has a theatrical and an extended (director’s, unrated, etc.) edition, that we watch the theatrical cut first. So we are looking forward to watching the “unrated” version later this summer, as this sure as heck feels like a hot, sultry, late summer film.
Meanwhile, after a Memorial Day weekend that included heat indexes of 116 degrees, Zedd and I will continue to Movie On through our own “hibernation period” here in South East Texas, from just about May to November, we really lean on our movie collection as it becomes entirely inhospitable outside. Peel off the air, indeed!
(If you enjoyed this, or any of my recent reviews, come check us out at 500 Movies or Bust, we’d love to see ya!)
submitted by MrsLadyZedd to moviereviews [link] [comments]
We purchased this limited edition 4k on Arrow some time ago and finally brought it out this Memorial Day weekend.
While I know we had seen it a loooong time ago, probably a Blockbuster rental, because I am a huge Neve Campbell fan and have been since Party of Five. It did not really ring too much of a bell as we started to watch.
Roger Ebert described this film as “lurid trash”…”a softcore sex film, a soap opera and a B-grade noir” and he’s not wrong. The setting was absolutely gorgeous. When we first saw the film I had not been to Florida, nor had I put in my 14 years of living in South East Texas, where you can peel the summer air off starting in May all the way through November. The line between the haves and the have-nots is not one you cross, not back in 1998, and not now.
Kelly Van Ryan has everything she could ever want. Suzie Toller is a delinquent. They both go to school where the guidance counselor, handsome and young Sam Lambardo, works. They get into a bit of a mess, the three of them, and what exactly happened, and why it happened, remains unclear.
Detective Ray Duquette and his partner, Gloria Perez investigate the situation and try to figure out who did what to whom. The story twists, turns, and goes so many directions that by the end, you are still wondering if something else will end up coming to light.
The acting was not great, especially on the parts of the supporting cast. It was alternatively soap-opera over dramatic to as wooden as a puppet.
Filmed at Ransom Everglades High School in Coconut Grove, Miami, due to the school's architecture and scenic setting. The film also captured the natural splendor in Bill Baggs Cape Florida State Park in Key Biscayne and Oleta River State Park. The clarity and color that comes through in the 4k makes it worth the cost of the limited edition, for sure.
Zedd and I discussed the film and he noted that it was clear that the actors obviously knew what they were filming was a bit of a cinematic joke, but that they approached it with a lightness and sense of humor that is difficult to find these days, no one was taking themselves too seriously.
I agree, a teacher doing what Lombardo was accused of doing would probably not be the subject of a sexy film these days. Certainly not one with a threesome, nor so much nudity of “teen girls” in a mainstream, big release like this.
Without giving too much away, the film is fast-paced, beautifully filmed, and worth a watch. We are not by any means talking cinematic masterpiece, it’s definitely a fun way to spend an afternoon.
Zedd and I have a rule that if we add a film to the collection that has a theatrical and an extended (director’s, unrated, etc.) edition, that we watch the theatrical cut first. So we are looking forward to watching the “unrated” version later this summer, as this sure as heck feels like a hot, sultry, late summer film.
Meanwhile, after a Memorial Day weekend that included heat indexes of 116 degrees, Zedd and I will continue to Movie On through our own “hibernation period” here in South East Texas, from just about May to November, we really lean on our movie collection as it becomes entirely inhospitable outside. Peel off the air, indeed!
(If you enjoyed this, or any of my recent reviews, come check us out at 500 Movies or Bust, we’d love to see ya!)
2024.05.29 03:14 redlight886 February 1998 PLAYBOY Interview with Conan O'Brien [additional content]
PLAYBOY Interview With Conan O'Brien Interview by Kevin Cook For Playboy Magazine February 1998
A candid conversation with the preppie prince of "Late Night" about his rocky start, his show's secret one-day cancellation and how David Letterman saved the day.
He was polite. He was funny. He gave us a communicable disease.
At 34 Conan O'Brien is hotter than the fever he was running when we met in his private domain above the "Late Night" sound stage. A gangly freckle-faced ex-high school geek he is "one of TV's hottest properties" according to "People" magazine. The host of "Late Night With Conan O'Brien" has become his generation's king of comedy.
Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown. Congested too, but O'Brien has far more to worry about than his head cold. A perfectionist who broods over one bad minute in an otherwise perfect hour of TV, he worries he might be anhedonic, "I have trouble with success," he says, "I was raised to believe that if something good happens something bad is coming." Sure things look good now "Rolling Stone" calls "Late Night" "the hottest comedy show on TV." Ratings are better than ever, particularly among 18- to 34-year-olds, the viewers advertisers crave.
But O'Brien only works harder. Despite his illness he taped two shows in 26 hours on three hours' sleep. He smoothly interviewed Elton John then burst into coughing fits during commercials. Later in his crammed corner office overlooking Manhattan traffic Conan the Cool gulped Dayquil gel caps. He coughed spewing microbes.
"Sorry, sorry," he said. Of course O'Brien can't complain. He came seriously close to falling to being banished behind the scenes as just another failed talk show host.
At his first "Late Night" press conference he corrected a reporter who called him a relative unknown, "Sir I am a complete unknown," he said. That line got a laugh, but soon O'Brien looked doomed. His September 13, 1993 debut began with O'Brien in his dressing room preparing to hang himself only to be interrupted by the start of his show. Before long his career was hanging by a thread. Ratings were terrible. Critics hated the show. Tom Shales of "The Washington Post" called it as "lifeless and messy as roadkill." Shales said O'Brien should quit.
Network officials held urgent meetings discussing the Conan O'Brien debacle. Should they fire him? How should they explain their mistake?
In the end of course he turned it around. The network hung with him long enough for the ratings to improve and the host of the cooler-than-ever "Late Night" now defines comedy's cutting edge just as Letterman did ten years ago.
Even Shales loves "Late Night" these days. He calls O'Brien's turnaround "one of the most amazing transformations in television history."
O'Brien was born on April 18, 1963 in Brookline, Massachusetts. His father, a doctor, is a professor at Harvard Medical School. His mother, a lawyer, is a partner at an elite Boston Law firm. Conan, the third of six children became a lector at church and a misfit at school. Tall and goofy, bedeviled with acne, he tried to impress girls with jokes. That plan usually bombed, but O'Brien eventually found his niche at Harvard where he won the presidency of the "Harvard Lampoon" in 1983 and again in 1984 - the first two-time "Lampoon" president since humorist Robert Benchley held the honor 85 years ago.
After graduating magna cum laude with a double major in literature and American history he turned pro. Writing for HBO's "Not Necessarily The News." O'Brien was earning $100,000 a year before his 24th birthday. But writing was never enough.
He honed his performance skills with the Groundlings, a Los Angeles improv group. There he worked with his onetime girlfriend Lisa Kudrow, now starring on "Friends." But Conan was not such a standout. In 1988 he landed a job at "Saturday Night Live" - but as a writer, not as on-air talent. In almost four years on the show O'Brien made only fleeting appearances, usually as a crowd member or security guard. His writing was more memorable. He wrote (or co-wrote) Tom hanks' "Mr Short-Term Memory" skits as well as the "pump you up" infosatire of Hanz and Franz and the nude beach sketch in which Matthew Broderick and "SNL" members played nudists admiring one another's penises. With dozens of mentions of the word that hit was the most penis-heavy moment in TV history. It helped O'Brien win an Emmy for comedy writing.
In 1991 he quit "SNL" and moved on to "The Simpsons" where he worked for two years. His urge to perform came out in wall-bouncing antics in writers' meetings. "Conan makes you fall out of your chair" said "Simpsons" creator Matt Groening. O'Brien's yen to act out was so strong that he spurned Fox's reported seven-figure offer to continue as a writer. He was driving for the spotlight.
By then David Letterman had announced he was turning shin - leaving NBC taking his ton-rated act to CBS. Suddenly NBC was up a creek without a host. The network turned to Lorne Michaels, O'Brien's "Saturday Night Live" boss. Michaels enlisted Conan's help in the host search planning to use him in a behind-the-scenes job. But when Garry Shandling, Dana Carvey and almost every other star turned down the chore of following Letterman, Michaels finally listened to Conan's crazy suggestion, "Let me do it!" Michaels persuaded the network to entrust it's 12:30 slot which Letterman had turned into a gold mine to an untested wiseass from Harvard.
O'Brien was working on one of his last "Simpsons" episodes when he got the news. He turned "paler than usual," Groening recalled. The Conan moseyed back to where the other writers were working, "I'll come back with the Homer Simspon joke later. I have to go replace Letterman," he said.
NBC executives now get credit for their foresight during those dark days of 1993 and 1994. They snared the axe and now reap the multimillion-dollar spoils of that decision. In fact, the story is not so simple. We sent Contributing Editor Kevin Cook to unravel the tale of O'Brien's survival, which he tells here for the first time. Cook reports:
"His office is chock-full of significa. There's a three-foot plastic pickle the Letterman staff left behind in 1993 - perhaps to suggest what a predicament he was in. There's a copy of Jack Paar's 'I Kid You Not' and a coffee-table book called 'Saturday Night Live: The First 20 Years.' His bulletin board features letters from fans such as John Watters and Bob Dole and an 8" x 10" glossy of Andy Richter with the inscription: "To Conan - Your bitter jealousy warms my black heart. Love and Kisses Andy."
"Of course it's all for show. From the photos of kitch icons Adam West and Robert Stack to the framed Stan Laurel autograph, from the deathbed painting of Abraham Lincoln, to the ironic star taped to Conan's door - they're all clever signals that tell a visitor how to view the star. Lincoln was his collegiate preoccupation: stardom is his occupation. Somewhere between the two I hoped to find the real O'Brien.
"As a Playboy reader he wanted to give me a better-than-average interview. I wanted something more - a definitive look at the guy who may end up being the Johnny Carson of his generation."
"Here's hoping we succeeded. If not I carried his germs 3000 miles and infected dozens of Californians for no good reason.
O'Brien: Yes, this is how to do a Playboy Interview -- completely tanked on cold medicine. I'll pick it up and read, "Yes, I'm gay."
Playboy: We could talk another time. O'Brien: (coughing) No, it's OK. I memorized Dennis Rodman's answers. Can I use them?
Playboy: You sound really sick. Do you ever take a day off? O'Brien: No. The age of talk show hosts taking days off is over. Johnny Carson could go to Africa when he was the only game in town -- "See you in two weeks!" But nobody does that now. I will give you a million dollars on the first day Jay takes off for illness.
Playboy: Do you ever slow down and enjoy your success? O'Brien: If anything, the pace is picking up. Restaurateurs insist on giving me a table even if I'm only passing by, so I'm eating nine meals a night. Women stop me on the street and hand me their phone numbers.
Playboy: So you have groupies? O'Brien: Oh yes. And other fans. Drifters. Prisoners. Insomniacs. Cab Drivers, who must watch a lot of late night TV, seem to love me lately. They keep saying, "You will not pay, you will not pay, you make me happy!"
Playboy: How happy did your new contract make you? O'Brien: Terrified. The network said, "We're all set for five years." I said, "Shut up, shut up! I can't think that far ahead." Tonight, for instance, I do my jokes, then interview Elton John and Tim Meadows. We finished taping about 6:30. By 6:45 my memory was erased and my only thought was, Tomorrow: John Tesh. And I started to obsess about John Tesh. Sad, don't you think?
Playboy: Not too sad. You got off to a rocky start but now you're so hot that People magazine recently said, "that was then, this is wow." O'Brien: I try not to pay much attention. Since I ignored the critics who said I should shoot myself in the head with a German Luger, it would be cheating to tear out nice reviews now and rub them all over my body, giggling. Though I have thought about it.
Playboy: Tell us about your trademark gag. You interview a photo of Bill Clinton or some other celeb, and a pair of superimposed lips provide outrageous answers. O'Brien: We call it the Clutch Cargo bit, after that terrible old cartoon series. They saved money on animation by superimposing real lips on the cartoons. I wanted to do topical jokes in a cartoony way -- not just Conan doing quips at a desk. TV is visual; I want things to look funny. But we're not Saturday Night Live; we couldn't spend $100,000 on it. Hence, the cheap, cheesy lips, You'd be surprised how many people we fool.
Playboy: Viewers believe that's really the president yelling, "Yee-haw! Who's got a joint?" O'Brien: It's strange. You may know intellectually that Clinton doesn't talk like Foghorn Leghorn. Ninety-eight percent of your brain knows the president wouldn't say, "Whoa Conan get a load of that girl!" But there are a few brain cells that aren't sure. When Bob Dole was running for president we had him doing a past-life regression: "My cave, get away." And then back further, "Must form flippers to crawl on to rocky soil," he says. There may be people out there who believe that Bob Dole was the first amphibian.
Playboy: Do you ever go too far? O'Brien: The fun is in going too far. It's a nice device because you get Bill Clinton to do the nastiest Bill Clinton jokes. We'll have Clinton making fart noises while I say "Sir! Please!"
Playboy: Are you enjoying your job now, with your new success? O'Brien: Well, there are surprises. I hate surprises. Like most comics, I'm a control freak. But I am learning that the show works best when things are out of control. Tonight I ask Elton John if he likes being neighbors with Joan Collins. He says he isn't neighbors with Joan Collins. He lives next door to Tina Turner. So I panic -- huge mistake! But Elton saves the day. "Joan Collins, Tina Turner, it doesn't matter. Either way I could borrow a wig," he says. Huge laugh, all because I fucked up. Later he surprised me by blurting out that he's hung like a horse. The camera cuts to me shaking my head: That crazy Elton. What can I do? Of course, I'm delighted that he went too far.
Playboy: That "What can I do?" look resembles a classic take of Jack Benny's. O'Brien: There's an old saying in literature: "Good poets borrow; great poets steal." I think T.S. Eliot stole it from Ezra Pound. Comics steal, too. Constantly. When I watched Johnny Carson, I noticed that he got a few takes from Benny and Bob Hope. When a comedy writer told me how much Woody Allen had borrowed from Hope, I thought, What? They're nothing alike. Then I went back and watched Son of Paleface, and there's Hope, the nervous city guy backing up on his heels, wringing his hands and saying, "Sorry, I'll just be moving along." Now look at early Woody Allen. You see big authority figures and Woody nervously saying, "Look, I'll just be on my way." Of course Woody made it his own, but he must have watched and loved Bob Hope.
Playboy: Who are your role models? O'Brien: Carson. Woody Allen. SCTV. Peter Sellers. When Peter Sellers died I felt such a loss, thinking, There won't be anymore of that. There's some Steve Martin in my false bravado with female guests: "Why, hel-lo there!" And I won't deny having some Letterman in my bones.
Playboy: You were surprise as Letterman's successor. At first you seemed like the wrong choice. O'Brien: I didn't get ratings. That doesn't mean I didn't get laughs. Yes, I had a giant pompadour and I looked like a rockabilly freak. I was too excited, pushed too hard, and people said, "That guy isn't a polished performer." Fine! But it isn't my goal to be Joe Handsomehead cool, smooth talk show host. Late Night with Conan O'Brien is supposed to be a work in progress, and now that we've had some success there's a danger of our getting too polished and morphing into something smoothly professional. Which would suck.
Do you know why I wanted this show? Because Late Night with David Letterman played with the rules and it looked like fun. Here was a place where people did risky comedy every night for millions of people. We had to keep this thing alive. There should be a place on a big network where people are still messing around.
Playboy: How bad were your early days on the show? O'Brien: Bad. Dave left here under a cloud: his fans and the media were angry with NBC. Then NBC picks a guy with crazy hair and a weird name. And the world says, "Harvard? Those guys are assholes." I sincerely hope that the winter of December 1993, our first winter, was the worst time I will ever have. I'd go out to do the warm up and the back two rows of seats would be empty. That's hard to look at. I would tell a joke and then hear someone whisper, "Who's he? Where's Dave?"
Playboy: You had trouble getting guests. O'Brien: Bob Denver canceled on us. We shot a test show with Al Lewis of The Munsters. We did the clutch cargo thing with a photo of Herman Munster. Unfortunately, Fred Gwynne, who played Herman, had recently died, and Al Lewis kept pointing at the screen, saying, "You're dead! I was at your funeral!"
Playboy: For months you got worried notes from network executives. What did they say? O'Brien: They were worried. The fact that Lorne Michaels was involved bought me some time. But Lorne had turned to me at the start and said, "OK, Conan. What do you want to do?" Now television critics were after me and the network was starting to realize what a risk I was. Suggestions came fast and furious. I kept the note that said, "Why don't you just die?"
Playboy: Did they suggest ways to be funnier? O'Brien: They were more specific and tactical. The network gets very specific data. Say there was a drop in ratings between 12:44 and 12:48 when I was talking to Jon Bon Jovi. I'll be told, "Don't ever talk to him again" Or they'll want me to tease viewers into staying with us: "You should tease that -- say, 'We'll have nudity coming up next!'"
Playboy: You did come close to being cancelled. O'Brien: We were cancelled.
Playboy: Really? You have never admitted that. O'Brien: This is the first time I've talked about it. When I had been on for about a year, there was a meeting at the network. They decided to cancel my show. They said, "It's cancelled." Next day they realized they had nothing to put in the 12:30 slot, so we got a reprieve.
Playboy: Were you worried sick? O'Brien: I went into denial. I tried hard not to think, Yes, I'm bad on the air and my show has none of the things a TV show needs to survive. We had no ratings. No critics in our corner. Advertisers didn't like us. Affiliates wanted to drop us. Sometimes I'd meet a programming director from a local station where we had no rating at all. The guy would show me a printout with no number for Late Night's rating, just a hash mark or pound sign. I didn't dare think about that when I went out to do the show.
Playboy: Are you defending denial? O'Brien: How else does anyone get through a terrible experience? The odds were against me. Rationally, I didn't have much chance. Denial was my only friend. When I look back on the first year, it's like a scene from an old war movie: Ordinary guy gets thrown into combat, somehow beats impossible odds, staggers to safety. His buddy say, "You could have been killed!" The guy stops and thinks. "Could have been killed?" he says. His eyes cross and he faints.
Playboy: How did you dodge the bullet? O'Brien: There were people at NBC who stood up for me. I will always be indebted to Don Ohlmeyer, who stuck to his guns. Don said, "We chose this guy. We should stick with him unless we get a better plan." He was brutally honest. He came to me and said, "Give me about a 15 percent bump in the ratings and you'll stay on the air. If not, we're going to move on."
Playboy: Ohlmeyer started his career in the sports division. O'Brien: Exactly, his take was, "You're on our team." Of course, it wasn't exactly rational of Don to hope I'd be 15 percent funnier. It was like telling a farmer, "It better rain this week or we'll take your farm away."
Playboy: What did you say to Ohlmeyer? O'Brien: There wasn't time. I had to go out and do a monologue. But I will always be indebted to Don because he told me the truth. Wait a minute -- you have tricked me into talking lovingly about an NBC executive. Let me say that there were others who were beneath contempt -- executives who wouldn't know a good show if it swam up their asses and lit a campfire.
Playboy: Finally the ratings went your way. Hard work rewarded? O'Brien: Well, I also paid off the Nielsen people. That was $140,000 well spent.
Playboy: Ohlmeyer plus bribery saved you? O'Brien: There was something else. Just when everyone was kicking the crap out of the show, Letterman defended me.
Playboy: Letterman had signed off on NBC saying, "I don't really know Conan O'Brien, but I heard he killed someone." O'Brien: Then I pick up the paper and he's saying he thinks I am going to make it. "They do some interesting, innovative stuff over there," he says. "I think Conan will prevail." And then he came on as a guest. Remember, this was when we were at our nadir. There was no Machiavellian reason for David Letterman, who at the time was the biggest thing in show business, to be on my show.
Playboy: Why did he do it? O'Brien: I'm still not sure. Maybe out of a sense of honor. Fair play. And it woke me up. It made me think. Hey, we have a real fucking television show here.
Of six or seven pivotal points in my short history here, that was the first and maybe the biggest. I wouldn't be sitting here -- I probably wouldn't even exist today -- if he hadn't done our show.
Playboy: The Late Night wars were hardly noted for friendly gestures. O'Brien: How little you understand. Jay, Dave and I pal around all the time. We often ride a bicycle built for three up to the country. "Nice job with Fran Drescher!" "Thanks, pal. You weren't so bad with John Tesh." We sleep in triple-decker bunk beds and snore in unison like the Three Stooges.
Playboy: You talk more about Letterman than your NBC teammate Leno. O'Brien: I hate the "Leno or Letterman, who's better?" question. I can tell you that Jay has been great to me. He calls me occasionally.
Playboy: To say what? O'Brien: (Doing Leno's voice) "Hey, liked that bit you did last night." Or he'll say he saw we got a good rating. I call him at work, too. It can be a strange conversation because we're so different. Jay, for instance, really loves cars. He's got antique cars with kerosene lanterns, cars that run on peat moss. He'll be telling me about some classic car he has, made entirely of brass and leather, and I'll say, "Yeah, man, I got the Taurus with the vinyl." One thing we have in common is bad guests. There are certain actors, celebrities with nothing to say, who move through the talk show world wreaking havoc. They lay waste to Dave's town and Jay's town, then head my way.
Playboy: You must be getting some good guests. Your ratings have shown a marked improvement. O'Brien: Remember, when you're on at 12:30 the Nielsens are based on 80 people. My ratings drop if one person has a head cold and goes to bed early.
Playboy: Actually, you're seen by about 3 million people a night. Your ratings would be even higher if college dorms weren't excluded from the Nielsens. How many points does that cost you? O'Brien: I told you I'm an idiot. Now I have to do math too?
Playboy: Do you still get suggestions from NBC executives? O'Brien: Not as many. The number of notes you get is inversely proportional to your ratings.
Playboy: What keeps you motivated? O'Brien: Superstition. We have a stagehand, Bobby Bowman, who holds up the curtain when I run out for the monologue. He is the last person I see before the show starts, and I have to make him laugh before I go out. It started with mild jabs: "Bobby, you're drunk again." Bobby laughs, "Heehee."" Then it was, "Still having trouble with the wife, Bobby?" But after hundreds of shows, you find yourself running out of lines. It's gotten to where I do crass things at the last second. I'll put his hand on my ass and yell, "You fucking pervert!" Or drop to my knees and say, "Come on, Bobby, I'll give you a blow job!"
"Ha-ha. Conan, you're crazy," he says. But even that stuff wears off. Soon, I'll be making the writers work late to give me new jokes for Bobby.
Playboy: Did you plan to be a talk show host or did you fall into the job? O'Brien: I was an Irish Catholic kid from St. Ignatius parish in Brookline, outside of Boston. And that meant: Don't call attention to yourself. Don't ask for too much when the pie comes around. Don't get a girl pregnant and fuck up your life.
Playboy: Were you an alter boy? O'Brien: I wanted to be an alter boy, but the priest at St. Ignatius said, "No, no. You're good on your feet, kid," and made me a lector. A scripture reader at Mass. He was the one who spotted my talent.
Playboy: What did you think of sex in those days? O'Brien: I was sexually repressed. At 16 I still thought human reproduction was by mitosis.
Playboy: How did you get over your sexual repression? O'Brien: Who says I got over it? My leg has been jiggling this whole time.
Playboy: What were you like in high school? O'Brien: Like a crane galumphing down the hall. A crane with weird hair, bad skin and Clearasil. Big enough for basketball but lousy at it. My older brothers were better. I would compensate by running around the court doing comedy, saying, "Look out, this player has a drug addiction. He's incredibly egotistical."
I was an asshole at home, too. My little brother Justin loved playing cops and robbers, but I kept tying him up with bureaucratic bullshit. When he'd catch me, I'd say, "I get to call my lawyer." Then it was, "OK, Justin, we're at trial and you've been charged with illegal arrest. Fill out these forms in triplicate." Justin was eight; he hated all the lawsuits and countersuits. He just cried.
Playboy: Were you a class clown? O'Brien: Never. I was never someone who walked into a room full of strangers and started telling jokes. You had to get to know me before I could make you laugh. The same thing happened with Late Night. I needed to get the right rhythm with Andy and Max and the audience.
Playboy: So how did you finally learn about sex? O'Brien: My parents gave me a book, but it was useless. At the crucial moment, all it showed was a man and a woman with the bed covers pulled up to their chins. I tried to find out more from friends, but it didn't help. One childhood friend told me it was like parking a car in a garage. I kept worrying about poisonous fumes. What if the fumes build up? Should you shut off the engine?
Playboy: For all your talk about being repressed, you can be rowdy on the air. O'Brien: The show is my escape valve. When I tear off my shirt and gyrate my pelvis like Robert Plant, feigning orgasm into the microphone, that shows how repressed I am -- a guy who wants to push his sex at the lens but can only do it as a joke.
Playboy: Aren't you tempted to live it up? O'Brien: I always imagined that if I were a TV star I would live the way I pictured Johnny Carson living. Carousing, stepping out of a limo wearing a velvet ascot with a model on my arm. Now that I have the TV show, I drive up to Connecticut on the weekends and tool around in my car. I could probably join a free-sex cult, smoke crack between orgies and drive sports cars into swimming pools, and my Catholic guilt would still be there, throbbing like a toothache. Be careful. If something good happens, something bad is on the way.
Playboy: Yet you don't mind licking the supermodels. O'Brien: At one point a few of them lived in my building, women who are so beautiful they almost look weird, like aliens. To me, a woman who has a certain approachable amount of beauty becomes almost funny. It's the same with male supermodels. They look like big puppets. So while I admire their beauty I probably won't be "romantically linked" with a model. I'd catch my reflection in a ballroom mirror and break up laughing.
Playboy: The horny Roy Orbison growl you use on gorgeous guests sounds real enough -- O'Brien: Oh, I've been doing that shit since high school. It just never worked before.
Playboy: Your father is a doctor, your mother an attorney. What do they think of their son the comedian? O'Brien: My dad was the one who told me denial was a virtue. "Denial is how people get through horrible things," he said. He also cut out a newspaper article in which I said I was making money off something for which I should probably be treated. So true, he thought. But when I got an Emmy for helping write Saturday Night Live, my parents put it on the mantel next to the crucifix. Here's Jesus looking over, saying, "Wow, I saved mankind from sin, but I wish I had an Emmy."
Playboy: Ever been in therapy? O'Brien: Yes. I don't trust it. I have told therapists that I don't particularly want to feel good. "Repression and fear, that's my fuel." But the therapists said that I had nothing to worry about. "Don't worry Conan you will always be plenty fucked up."
Playboy: When a female guest comes out, how do you know whether to shake her hand or kiss her? Is that rehearsed O'Brien: No, and it's awkward. If you go to shake her hand and her head starts coming right at you, you have to change strategy fast. I have thought about using the show to make women kiss me, but that would probably creep out the people at home. I decided not to kiss Elton John.
Playboy: Do you get all fired up if Cindy Crawford or Rebecca Romijn does the show? O'Brien: I like making women laugh. Always have, ever since I discovered you can get girls' attention by acting like an ass. That's one of the joys of the show -- I'm working my eyebrows and going grrr and she's laughing, the audience is laughing. It's all a big put-on and I'm thinking. This is great. Here is a beautiful woman who has no choice but to put up with this shit.
But it's not always put on. Sometimes they flirt back. Sometimes there's a bit of chemistry. That happened with Jennifer Connelly of The Rocketeer.
Playboy: One guest, Jill Hennessy, took off her pants for you. Then you removed yours. Even Penn and Teller took off their pants. O'Brien: Something comes over me. It happened with Rebecca Romijn -- I was practically climbing her. Those are the times when Andy and the audience seem to disappear and it's just me and this lovely woman sitting there flirting. I keep expecting a waiter to say, "More wine, Monsieur?"
Playboy: Would you lick the wine bottle? O'Brien: It's true, there's a lot of licking on the show. I have licked guests. I have licked Andy. Comedy professionals will read this and say, "Great work, Conan. Impressive." But I have learned that if you lick a guest, people laugh. If I pick this shoe off the floor, examine it, Hmmm, and then lick it, people laugh. I learned this lesson on The Simpsons, where I was the writer who was forever trying to entertain the other writers. I still try desperately to make our writers laugh, which is probably a sign of sickness since they work for me now. Licking is one of those things that look funny.
Playboy: Johnny Carson never licked Ed McMahon. O'Brien: We are much more physical and more stupid than the old Tonight Show. Even in our offices before the show there's always some writer acting out a scene crashing his head through my door. A behind-the-scenes look at our show might frighten people.
Playboy: One night you showed a doctored photo of Craig T. Nelson having sex with Jerry Van Dyke. Did they complain about it? O'Brien: I haven't heard from them. Of course I'm blessed not to be a part of the celebrity pond. I have a television show in New York, an NBC outpost. I don't run with or even run into many Hollywood people.
Playboy: You also announced that Tori Spelling has a penis. O'Brien: I did not. Polly the Peacock said that.
Playboy: Another character you use to say the outrageous stuff. O'Brien: Polly is not popular with the network.
Playboy: You mock Fabio, too. O'Brien: If he sues me, it'll be the best thing that ever happened. A publicity bonanza: Courtroom sketches of Fabio with his man-boobs quivering, shaking his fist, and me shouting at him across the courtroom. I'm not afraid of Fabio. He knows where to find me. I'm saying it right here for the record: Fabio, let's get it on.
Playboy: Ever have a run-in with an angry celeb? O'Brien: I did a Kelsey Grammar joke a few years ago, something about his interesting lifestyle, then heard through the network that he was upset. He had appeared on my show and expected some support. At this point my intellect says, "Kelsey Grammar is a public figure. I was in the right." Then I saw him in an airport. Kelsey didn't see me at first: I could have kept walking. But there he was, eating a cruller in the airport lounge. I thought I should go over. I said hello and then said, "Kelsey, I'm sorry if I upset you." And he was glad. He looked relieved. He said, "Oh, that's OK." We both felt better.
....See my other post with the last third of the interview
submitted by redlight886 to conan [link] [comments]
A candid conversation with the preppie prince of "Late Night" about his rocky start, his show's secret one-day cancellation and how David Letterman saved the day.
He was polite. He was funny. He gave us a communicable disease.
At 34 Conan O'Brien is hotter than the fever he was running when we met in his private domain above the "Late Night" sound stage. A gangly freckle-faced ex-high school geek he is "one of TV's hottest properties" according to "People" magazine. The host of "Late Night With Conan O'Brien" has become his generation's king of comedy.
Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown. Congested too, but O'Brien has far more to worry about than his head cold. A perfectionist who broods over one bad minute in an otherwise perfect hour of TV, he worries he might be anhedonic, "I have trouble with success," he says, "I was raised to believe that if something good happens something bad is coming." Sure things look good now "Rolling Stone" calls "Late Night" "the hottest comedy show on TV." Ratings are better than ever, particularly among 18- to 34-year-olds, the viewers advertisers crave.
But O'Brien only works harder. Despite his illness he taped two shows in 26 hours on three hours' sleep. He smoothly interviewed Elton John then burst into coughing fits during commercials. Later in his crammed corner office overlooking Manhattan traffic Conan the Cool gulped Dayquil gel caps. He coughed spewing microbes.
"Sorry, sorry," he said. Of course O'Brien can't complain. He came seriously close to falling to being banished behind the scenes as just another failed talk show host.
At his first "Late Night" press conference he corrected a reporter who called him a relative unknown, "Sir I am a complete unknown," he said. That line got a laugh, but soon O'Brien looked doomed. His September 13, 1993 debut began with O'Brien in his dressing room preparing to hang himself only to be interrupted by the start of his show. Before long his career was hanging by a thread. Ratings were terrible. Critics hated the show. Tom Shales of "The Washington Post" called it as "lifeless and messy as roadkill." Shales said O'Brien should quit.
Network officials held urgent meetings discussing the Conan O'Brien debacle. Should they fire him? How should they explain their mistake?
In the end of course he turned it around. The network hung with him long enough for the ratings to improve and the host of the cooler-than-ever "Late Night" now defines comedy's cutting edge just as Letterman did ten years ago.
Even Shales loves "Late Night" these days. He calls O'Brien's turnaround "one of the most amazing transformations in television history."
O'Brien was born on April 18, 1963 in Brookline, Massachusetts. His father, a doctor, is a professor at Harvard Medical School. His mother, a lawyer, is a partner at an elite Boston Law firm. Conan, the third of six children became a lector at church and a misfit at school. Tall and goofy, bedeviled with acne, he tried to impress girls with jokes. That plan usually bombed, but O'Brien eventually found his niche at Harvard where he won the presidency of the "Harvard Lampoon" in 1983 and again in 1984 - the first two-time "Lampoon" president since humorist Robert Benchley held the honor 85 years ago.
After graduating magna cum laude with a double major in literature and American history he turned pro. Writing for HBO's "Not Necessarily The News." O'Brien was earning $100,000 a year before his 24th birthday. But writing was never enough.
He honed his performance skills with the Groundlings, a Los Angeles improv group. There he worked with his onetime girlfriend Lisa Kudrow, now starring on "Friends." But Conan was not such a standout. In 1988 he landed a job at "Saturday Night Live" - but as a writer, not as on-air talent. In almost four years on the show O'Brien made only fleeting appearances, usually as a crowd member or security guard. His writing was more memorable. He wrote (or co-wrote) Tom hanks' "Mr Short-Term Memory" skits as well as the "pump you up" infosatire of Hanz and Franz and the nude beach sketch in which Matthew Broderick and "SNL" members played nudists admiring one another's penises. With dozens of mentions of the word that hit was the most penis-heavy moment in TV history. It helped O'Brien win an Emmy for comedy writing.
In 1991 he quit "SNL" and moved on to "The Simpsons" where he worked for two years. His urge to perform came out in wall-bouncing antics in writers' meetings. "Conan makes you fall out of your chair" said "Simpsons" creator Matt Groening. O'Brien's yen to act out was so strong that he spurned Fox's reported seven-figure offer to continue as a writer. He was driving for the spotlight.
By then David Letterman had announced he was turning shin - leaving NBC taking his ton-rated act to CBS. Suddenly NBC was up a creek without a host. The network turned to Lorne Michaels, O'Brien's "Saturday Night Live" boss. Michaels enlisted Conan's help in the host search planning to use him in a behind-the-scenes job. But when Garry Shandling, Dana Carvey and almost every other star turned down the chore of following Letterman, Michaels finally listened to Conan's crazy suggestion, "Let me do it!" Michaels persuaded the network to entrust it's 12:30 slot which Letterman had turned into a gold mine to an untested wiseass from Harvard.
O'Brien was working on one of his last "Simpsons" episodes when he got the news. He turned "paler than usual," Groening recalled. The Conan moseyed back to where the other writers were working, "I'll come back with the Homer Simspon joke later. I have to go replace Letterman," he said.
NBC executives now get credit for their foresight during those dark days of 1993 and 1994. They snared the axe and now reap the multimillion-dollar spoils of that decision. In fact, the story is not so simple. We sent Contributing Editor Kevin Cook to unravel the tale of O'Brien's survival, which he tells here for the first time. Cook reports:
"His office is chock-full of significa. There's a three-foot plastic pickle the Letterman staff left behind in 1993 - perhaps to suggest what a predicament he was in. There's a copy of Jack Paar's 'I Kid You Not' and a coffee-table book called 'Saturday Night Live: The First 20 Years.' His bulletin board features letters from fans such as John Watters and Bob Dole and an 8" x 10" glossy of Andy Richter with the inscription: "To Conan - Your bitter jealousy warms my black heart. Love and Kisses Andy."
"Of course it's all for show. From the photos of kitch icons Adam West and Robert Stack to the framed Stan Laurel autograph, from the deathbed painting of Abraham Lincoln, to the ironic star taped to Conan's door - they're all clever signals that tell a visitor how to view the star. Lincoln was his collegiate preoccupation: stardom is his occupation. Somewhere between the two I hoped to find the real O'Brien.
"As a Playboy reader he wanted to give me a better-than-average interview. I wanted something more - a definitive look at the guy who may end up being the Johnny Carson of his generation."
"Here's hoping we succeeded. If not I carried his germs 3000 miles and infected dozens of Californians for no good reason.
O'Brien: Yes, this is how to do a Playboy Interview -- completely tanked on cold medicine. I'll pick it up and read, "Yes, I'm gay."
Playboy: We could talk another time. O'Brien: (coughing) No, it's OK. I memorized Dennis Rodman's answers. Can I use them?
Playboy: You sound really sick. Do you ever take a day off? O'Brien: No. The age of talk show hosts taking days off is over. Johnny Carson could go to Africa when he was the only game in town -- "See you in two weeks!" But nobody does that now. I will give you a million dollars on the first day Jay takes off for illness.
Playboy: Do you ever slow down and enjoy your success? O'Brien: If anything, the pace is picking up. Restaurateurs insist on giving me a table even if I'm only passing by, so I'm eating nine meals a night. Women stop me on the street and hand me their phone numbers.
Playboy: So you have groupies? O'Brien: Oh yes. And other fans. Drifters. Prisoners. Insomniacs. Cab Drivers, who must watch a lot of late night TV, seem to love me lately. They keep saying, "You will not pay, you will not pay, you make me happy!"
Playboy: How happy did your new contract make you? O'Brien: Terrified. The network said, "We're all set for five years." I said, "Shut up, shut up! I can't think that far ahead." Tonight, for instance, I do my jokes, then interview Elton John and Tim Meadows. We finished taping about 6:30. By 6:45 my memory was erased and my only thought was, Tomorrow: John Tesh. And I started to obsess about John Tesh. Sad, don't you think?
Playboy: Not too sad. You got off to a rocky start but now you're so hot that People magazine recently said, "that was then, this is wow." O'Brien: I try not to pay much attention. Since I ignored the critics who said I should shoot myself in the head with a German Luger, it would be cheating to tear out nice reviews now and rub them all over my body, giggling. Though I have thought about it.
Playboy: Tell us about your trademark gag. You interview a photo of Bill Clinton or some other celeb, and a pair of superimposed lips provide outrageous answers. O'Brien: We call it the Clutch Cargo bit, after that terrible old cartoon series. They saved money on animation by superimposing real lips on the cartoons. I wanted to do topical jokes in a cartoony way -- not just Conan doing quips at a desk. TV is visual; I want things to look funny. But we're not Saturday Night Live; we couldn't spend $100,000 on it. Hence, the cheap, cheesy lips, You'd be surprised how many people we fool.
Playboy: Viewers believe that's really the president yelling, "Yee-haw! Who's got a joint?" O'Brien: It's strange. You may know intellectually that Clinton doesn't talk like Foghorn Leghorn. Ninety-eight percent of your brain knows the president wouldn't say, "Whoa Conan get a load of that girl!" But there are a few brain cells that aren't sure. When Bob Dole was running for president we had him doing a past-life regression: "My cave, get away." And then back further, "Must form flippers to crawl on to rocky soil," he says. There may be people out there who believe that Bob Dole was the first amphibian.
Playboy: Do you ever go too far? O'Brien: The fun is in going too far. It's a nice device because you get Bill Clinton to do the nastiest Bill Clinton jokes. We'll have Clinton making fart noises while I say "Sir! Please!"
Playboy: Are you enjoying your job now, with your new success? O'Brien: Well, there are surprises. I hate surprises. Like most comics, I'm a control freak. But I am learning that the show works best when things are out of control. Tonight I ask Elton John if he likes being neighbors with Joan Collins. He says he isn't neighbors with Joan Collins. He lives next door to Tina Turner. So I panic -- huge mistake! But Elton saves the day. "Joan Collins, Tina Turner, it doesn't matter. Either way I could borrow a wig," he says. Huge laugh, all because I fucked up. Later he surprised me by blurting out that he's hung like a horse. The camera cuts to me shaking my head: That crazy Elton. What can I do? Of course, I'm delighted that he went too far.
Playboy: That "What can I do?" look resembles a classic take of Jack Benny's. O'Brien: There's an old saying in literature: "Good poets borrow; great poets steal." I think T.S. Eliot stole it from Ezra Pound. Comics steal, too. Constantly. When I watched Johnny Carson, I noticed that he got a few takes from Benny and Bob Hope. When a comedy writer told me how much Woody Allen had borrowed from Hope, I thought, What? They're nothing alike. Then I went back and watched Son of Paleface, and there's Hope, the nervous city guy backing up on his heels, wringing his hands and saying, "Sorry, I'll just be moving along." Now look at early Woody Allen. You see big authority figures and Woody nervously saying, "Look, I'll just be on my way." Of course Woody made it his own, but he must have watched and loved Bob Hope.
Playboy: Who are your role models? O'Brien: Carson. Woody Allen. SCTV. Peter Sellers. When Peter Sellers died I felt such a loss, thinking, There won't be anymore of that. There's some Steve Martin in my false bravado with female guests: "Why, hel-lo there!" And I won't deny having some Letterman in my bones.
Playboy: You were surprise as Letterman's successor. At first you seemed like the wrong choice. O'Brien: I didn't get ratings. That doesn't mean I didn't get laughs. Yes, I had a giant pompadour and I looked like a rockabilly freak. I was too excited, pushed too hard, and people said, "That guy isn't a polished performer." Fine! But it isn't my goal to be Joe Handsomehead cool, smooth talk show host. Late Night with Conan O'Brien is supposed to be a work in progress, and now that we've had some success there's a danger of our getting too polished and morphing into something smoothly professional. Which would suck.
Do you know why I wanted this show? Because Late Night with David Letterman played with the rules and it looked like fun. Here was a place where people did risky comedy every night for millions of people. We had to keep this thing alive. There should be a place on a big network where people are still messing around.
Playboy: How bad were your early days on the show? O'Brien: Bad. Dave left here under a cloud: his fans and the media were angry with NBC. Then NBC picks a guy with crazy hair and a weird name. And the world says, "Harvard? Those guys are assholes." I sincerely hope that the winter of December 1993, our first winter, was the worst time I will ever have. I'd go out to do the warm up and the back two rows of seats would be empty. That's hard to look at. I would tell a joke and then hear someone whisper, "Who's he? Where's Dave?"
Playboy: You had trouble getting guests. O'Brien: Bob Denver canceled on us. We shot a test show with Al Lewis of The Munsters. We did the clutch cargo thing with a photo of Herman Munster. Unfortunately, Fred Gwynne, who played Herman, had recently died, and Al Lewis kept pointing at the screen, saying, "You're dead! I was at your funeral!"
Playboy: For months you got worried notes from network executives. What did they say? O'Brien: They were worried. The fact that Lorne Michaels was involved bought me some time. But Lorne had turned to me at the start and said, "OK, Conan. What do you want to do?" Now television critics were after me and the network was starting to realize what a risk I was. Suggestions came fast and furious. I kept the note that said, "Why don't you just die?"
Playboy: Did they suggest ways to be funnier? O'Brien: They were more specific and tactical. The network gets very specific data. Say there was a drop in ratings between 12:44 and 12:48 when I was talking to Jon Bon Jovi. I'll be told, "Don't ever talk to him again" Or they'll want me to tease viewers into staying with us: "You should tease that -- say, 'We'll have nudity coming up next!'"
Playboy: You did come close to being cancelled. O'Brien: We were cancelled.
Playboy: Really? You have never admitted that. O'Brien: This is the first time I've talked about it. When I had been on for about a year, there was a meeting at the network. They decided to cancel my show. They said, "It's cancelled." Next day they realized they had nothing to put in the 12:30 slot, so we got a reprieve.
Playboy: Were you worried sick? O'Brien: I went into denial. I tried hard not to think, Yes, I'm bad on the air and my show has none of the things a TV show needs to survive. We had no ratings. No critics in our corner. Advertisers didn't like us. Affiliates wanted to drop us. Sometimes I'd meet a programming director from a local station where we had no rating at all. The guy would show me a printout with no number for Late Night's rating, just a hash mark or pound sign. I didn't dare think about that when I went out to do the show.
Playboy: Are you defending denial? O'Brien: How else does anyone get through a terrible experience? The odds were against me. Rationally, I didn't have much chance. Denial was my only friend. When I look back on the first year, it's like a scene from an old war movie: Ordinary guy gets thrown into combat, somehow beats impossible odds, staggers to safety. His buddy say, "You could have been killed!" The guy stops and thinks. "Could have been killed?" he says. His eyes cross and he faints.
Playboy: How did you dodge the bullet? O'Brien: There were people at NBC who stood up for me. I will always be indebted to Don Ohlmeyer, who stuck to his guns. Don said, "We chose this guy. We should stick with him unless we get a better plan." He was brutally honest. He came to me and said, "Give me about a 15 percent bump in the ratings and you'll stay on the air. If not, we're going to move on."
Playboy: Ohlmeyer started his career in the sports division. O'Brien: Exactly, his take was, "You're on our team." Of course, it wasn't exactly rational of Don to hope I'd be 15 percent funnier. It was like telling a farmer, "It better rain this week or we'll take your farm away."
Playboy: What did you say to Ohlmeyer? O'Brien: There wasn't time. I had to go out and do a monologue. But I will always be indebted to Don because he told me the truth. Wait a minute -- you have tricked me into talking lovingly about an NBC executive. Let me say that there were others who were beneath contempt -- executives who wouldn't know a good show if it swam up their asses and lit a campfire.
Playboy: Finally the ratings went your way. Hard work rewarded? O'Brien: Well, I also paid off the Nielsen people. That was $140,000 well spent.
Playboy: Ohlmeyer plus bribery saved you? O'Brien: There was something else. Just when everyone was kicking the crap out of the show, Letterman defended me.
Playboy: Letterman had signed off on NBC saying, "I don't really know Conan O'Brien, but I heard he killed someone." O'Brien: Then I pick up the paper and he's saying he thinks I am going to make it. "They do some interesting, innovative stuff over there," he says. "I think Conan will prevail." And then he came on as a guest. Remember, this was when we were at our nadir. There was no Machiavellian reason for David Letterman, who at the time was the biggest thing in show business, to be on my show.
Playboy: Why did he do it? O'Brien: I'm still not sure. Maybe out of a sense of honor. Fair play. And it woke me up. It made me think. Hey, we have a real fucking television show here.
Of six or seven pivotal points in my short history here, that was the first and maybe the biggest. I wouldn't be sitting here -- I probably wouldn't even exist today -- if he hadn't done our show.
Playboy: The Late Night wars were hardly noted for friendly gestures. O'Brien: How little you understand. Jay, Dave and I pal around all the time. We often ride a bicycle built for three up to the country. "Nice job with Fran Drescher!" "Thanks, pal. You weren't so bad with John Tesh." We sleep in triple-decker bunk beds and snore in unison like the Three Stooges.
Playboy: You talk more about Letterman than your NBC teammate Leno. O'Brien: I hate the "Leno or Letterman, who's better?" question. I can tell you that Jay has been great to me. He calls me occasionally.
Playboy: To say what? O'Brien: (Doing Leno's voice) "Hey, liked that bit you did last night." Or he'll say he saw we got a good rating. I call him at work, too. It can be a strange conversation because we're so different. Jay, for instance, really loves cars. He's got antique cars with kerosene lanterns, cars that run on peat moss. He'll be telling me about some classic car he has, made entirely of brass and leather, and I'll say, "Yeah, man, I got the Taurus with the vinyl." One thing we have in common is bad guests. There are certain actors, celebrities with nothing to say, who move through the talk show world wreaking havoc. They lay waste to Dave's town and Jay's town, then head my way.
Playboy: You must be getting some good guests. Your ratings have shown a marked improvement. O'Brien: Remember, when you're on at 12:30 the Nielsens are based on 80 people. My ratings drop if one person has a head cold and goes to bed early.
Playboy: Actually, you're seen by about 3 million people a night. Your ratings would be even higher if college dorms weren't excluded from the Nielsens. How many points does that cost you? O'Brien: I told you I'm an idiot. Now I have to do math too?
Playboy: Do you still get suggestions from NBC executives? O'Brien: Not as many. The number of notes you get is inversely proportional to your ratings.
Playboy: What keeps you motivated? O'Brien: Superstition. We have a stagehand, Bobby Bowman, who holds up the curtain when I run out for the monologue. He is the last person I see before the show starts, and I have to make him laugh before I go out. It started with mild jabs: "Bobby, you're drunk again." Bobby laughs, "Heehee."" Then it was, "Still having trouble with the wife, Bobby?" But after hundreds of shows, you find yourself running out of lines. It's gotten to where I do crass things at the last second. I'll put his hand on my ass and yell, "You fucking pervert!" Or drop to my knees and say, "Come on, Bobby, I'll give you a blow job!"
"Ha-ha. Conan, you're crazy," he says. But even that stuff wears off. Soon, I'll be making the writers work late to give me new jokes for Bobby.
Playboy: Did you plan to be a talk show host or did you fall into the job? O'Brien: I was an Irish Catholic kid from St. Ignatius parish in Brookline, outside of Boston. And that meant: Don't call attention to yourself. Don't ask for too much when the pie comes around. Don't get a girl pregnant and fuck up your life.
Playboy: Were you an alter boy? O'Brien: I wanted to be an alter boy, but the priest at St. Ignatius said, "No, no. You're good on your feet, kid," and made me a lector. A scripture reader at Mass. He was the one who spotted my talent.
Playboy: What did you think of sex in those days? O'Brien: I was sexually repressed. At 16 I still thought human reproduction was by mitosis.
Playboy: How did you get over your sexual repression? O'Brien: Who says I got over it? My leg has been jiggling this whole time.
Playboy: What were you like in high school? O'Brien: Like a crane galumphing down the hall. A crane with weird hair, bad skin and Clearasil. Big enough for basketball but lousy at it. My older brothers were better. I would compensate by running around the court doing comedy, saying, "Look out, this player has a drug addiction. He's incredibly egotistical."
I was an asshole at home, too. My little brother Justin loved playing cops and robbers, but I kept tying him up with bureaucratic bullshit. When he'd catch me, I'd say, "I get to call my lawyer." Then it was, "OK, Justin, we're at trial and you've been charged with illegal arrest. Fill out these forms in triplicate." Justin was eight; he hated all the lawsuits and countersuits. He just cried.
Playboy: Were you a class clown? O'Brien: Never. I was never someone who walked into a room full of strangers and started telling jokes. You had to get to know me before I could make you laugh. The same thing happened with Late Night. I needed to get the right rhythm with Andy and Max and the audience.
Playboy: So how did you finally learn about sex? O'Brien: My parents gave me a book, but it was useless. At the crucial moment, all it showed was a man and a woman with the bed covers pulled up to their chins. I tried to find out more from friends, but it didn't help. One childhood friend told me it was like parking a car in a garage. I kept worrying about poisonous fumes. What if the fumes build up? Should you shut off the engine?
Playboy: For all your talk about being repressed, you can be rowdy on the air. O'Brien: The show is my escape valve. When I tear off my shirt and gyrate my pelvis like Robert Plant, feigning orgasm into the microphone, that shows how repressed I am -- a guy who wants to push his sex at the lens but can only do it as a joke.
Playboy: Aren't you tempted to live it up? O'Brien: I always imagined that if I were a TV star I would live the way I pictured Johnny Carson living. Carousing, stepping out of a limo wearing a velvet ascot with a model on my arm. Now that I have the TV show, I drive up to Connecticut on the weekends and tool around in my car. I could probably join a free-sex cult, smoke crack between orgies and drive sports cars into swimming pools, and my Catholic guilt would still be there, throbbing like a toothache. Be careful. If something good happens, something bad is on the way.
Playboy: Yet you don't mind licking the supermodels. O'Brien: At one point a few of them lived in my building, women who are so beautiful they almost look weird, like aliens. To me, a woman who has a certain approachable amount of beauty becomes almost funny. It's the same with male supermodels. They look like big puppets. So while I admire their beauty I probably won't be "romantically linked" with a model. I'd catch my reflection in a ballroom mirror and break up laughing.
Playboy: The horny Roy Orbison growl you use on gorgeous guests sounds real enough -- O'Brien: Oh, I've been doing that shit since high school. It just never worked before.
Playboy: Your father is a doctor, your mother an attorney. What do they think of their son the comedian? O'Brien: My dad was the one who told me denial was a virtue. "Denial is how people get through horrible things," he said. He also cut out a newspaper article in which I said I was making money off something for which I should probably be treated. So true, he thought. But when I got an Emmy for helping write Saturday Night Live, my parents put it on the mantel next to the crucifix. Here's Jesus looking over, saying, "Wow, I saved mankind from sin, but I wish I had an Emmy."
Playboy: Ever been in therapy? O'Brien: Yes. I don't trust it. I have told therapists that I don't particularly want to feel good. "Repression and fear, that's my fuel." But the therapists said that I had nothing to worry about. "Don't worry Conan you will always be plenty fucked up."
Playboy: When a female guest comes out, how do you know whether to shake her hand or kiss her? Is that rehearsed O'Brien: No, and it's awkward. If you go to shake her hand and her head starts coming right at you, you have to change strategy fast. I have thought about using the show to make women kiss me, but that would probably creep out the people at home. I decided not to kiss Elton John.
Playboy: Do you get all fired up if Cindy Crawford or Rebecca Romijn does the show? O'Brien: I like making women laugh. Always have, ever since I discovered you can get girls' attention by acting like an ass. That's one of the joys of the show -- I'm working my eyebrows and going grrr and she's laughing, the audience is laughing. It's all a big put-on and I'm thinking. This is great. Here is a beautiful woman who has no choice but to put up with this shit.
But it's not always put on. Sometimes they flirt back. Sometimes there's a bit of chemistry. That happened with Jennifer Connelly of The Rocketeer.
Playboy: One guest, Jill Hennessy, took off her pants for you. Then you removed yours. Even Penn and Teller took off their pants. O'Brien: Something comes over me. It happened with Rebecca Romijn -- I was practically climbing her. Those are the times when Andy and the audience seem to disappear and it's just me and this lovely woman sitting there flirting. I keep expecting a waiter to say, "More wine, Monsieur?"
Playboy: Would you lick the wine bottle? O'Brien: It's true, there's a lot of licking on the show. I have licked guests. I have licked Andy. Comedy professionals will read this and say, "Great work, Conan. Impressive." But I have learned that if you lick a guest, people laugh. If I pick this shoe off the floor, examine it, Hmmm, and then lick it, people laugh. I learned this lesson on The Simpsons, where I was the writer who was forever trying to entertain the other writers. I still try desperately to make our writers laugh, which is probably a sign of sickness since they work for me now. Licking is one of those things that look funny.
Playboy: Johnny Carson never licked Ed McMahon. O'Brien: We are much more physical and more stupid than the old Tonight Show. Even in our offices before the show there's always some writer acting out a scene crashing his head through my door. A behind-the-scenes look at our show might frighten people.
Playboy: One night you showed a doctored photo of Craig T. Nelson having sex with Jerry Van Dyke. Did they complain about it? O'Brien: I haven't heard from them. Of course I'm blessed not to be a part of the celebrity pond. I have a television show in New York, an NBC outpost. I don't run with or even run into many Hollywood people.
Playboy: You also announced that Tori Spelling has a penis. O'Brien: I did not. Polly the Peacock said that.
Playboy: Another character you use to say the outrageous stuff. O'Brien: Polly is not popular with the network.
Playboy: You mock Fabio, too. O'Brien: If he sues me, it'll be the best thing that ever happened. A publicity bonanza: Courtroom sketches of Fabio with his man-boobs quivering, shaking his fist, and me shouting at him across the courtroom. I'm not afraid of Fabio. He knows where to find me. I'm saying it right here for the record: Fabio, let's get it on.
Playboy: Ever have a run-in with an angry celeb? O'Brien: I did a Kelsey Grammar joke a few years ago, something about his interesting lifestyle, then heard through the network that he was upset. He had appeared on my show and expected some support. At this point my intellect says, "Kelsey Grammar is a public figure. I was in the right." Then I saw him in an airport. Kelsey didn't see me at first: I could have kept walking. But there he was, eating a cruller in the airport lounge. I thought I should go over. I said hello and then said, "Kelsey, I'm sorry if I upset you." And he was glad. He looked relieved. He said, "Oh, that's OK." We both felt better.
....See my other post with the last third of the interview
2024.05.29 03:14 scary_godmother Someone explain this "Merrily" lyric to me?
I feel like I'm being stupid/misreading the line, but this exchange in "Old Friends" has never made sense to me:
[FRANK] Old friends don't make demands on you—
[CHARLEY] Should make demands on you—
[FRANK] Well, don't make demands you can't meet
[CHARLEY] Well, what's the point of demands you can meet?
What does that last line mean? Why would you make a demand of someone if you think they can't meet that demand? Frank's "Don't make demands you can't meet" makes logical sense to me as an argument, but Charley's rebuttal is confusing. Unless he's calling a "demand" more like a goal? Like, "challenge yourself to something hard, don't set easily-attainable goals"? But that doesn't make sense in the context of the argument in the scene. Probably I'm over thinking, lol.
(And sidebar, if you need to refresh your memory of the song, here's the absolutely delightful performance they gave of it on Colbert!)
submitted by scary_godmother to Broadway [link] [comments]
[FRANK] Old friends don't make demands on you—
[CHARLEY] Should make demands on you—
[FRANK] Well, don't make demands you can't meet
[CHARLEY] Well, what's the point of demands you can meet?
What does that last line mean? Why would you make a demand of someone if you think they can't meet that demand? Frank's "Don't make demands you can't meet" makes logical sense to me as an argument, but Charley's rebuttal is confusing. Unless he's calling a "demand" more like a goal? Like, "challenge yourself to something hard, don't set easily-attainable goals"? But that doesn't make sense in the context of the argument in the scene. Probably I'm over thinking, lol.
(And sidebar, if you need to refresh your memory of the song, here's the absolutely delightful performance they gave of it on Colbert!)
2024.05.29 03:13 Any-Eggplant-1029 27F [F4M] #USA/Anywhere Let's vibe and see where it takes us
Hey I'm jumping back into the dating world again, ready for a fresh start. Hoping to get lucky this time (cross-fingers) I'm all about meaningful conversations, someone who can match my energy and be a little flirty (because I am lol). Looking for someone who can vibe with me and make me feel special and wanted. Let's share our best moments in life and hopefully create one soon. Send me your best punch line, let's see if we click!
submitted by Any-Eggplant-1029 to ForeverAloneDating [link] [comments]
2024.05.29 03:13 MrsLadyZedd I watched Wild Things (1998)
MLZ MAP (Score): 78.47 / Zedd MAP (Score): 69.10 / Score Gap: 9.37
We purchased this limited edition 4k on Arrow some time ago and finally brought it out this Memorial Day weekend.
While I know we had seen it a loooong time ago, probably a Blockbuster rental, because I am a huge Neve Campbell fan and have been since Party of Five. It did not really ring too much of a bell as we started to watch.
Roger Ebert described this film as “lurid trash”…”a softcore sex film, a soap opera and a B-grade noir” and he’s not wrong. The setting was absolutely gorgeous. When we first saw the film I had not been to Florida, nor had I put in my 14 years of living in South East Texas, where you can peel the summer air off starting in May all the way through November. The line between the haves and the have-nots is not one you cross, not back in 1998, and not now.
Kelly Van Ryan has everything she could ever want. Suzie Toller is a delinquent. They both go to school where the guidance counselor, handsome and young Sam Lambardo, works. They get into a bit of a mess, the three of them, and what exactly happened, and why it happened, remains unclear.
Detective Ray Duquette and his partner, Gloria Perez investigate the situation and try to figure out who did what to whom. The story twists, turns, and goes so many directions that by the end, you are still wondering if something else will end up coming to light.
The acting was not great, especially on the parts of the supporting cast. It was alternatively soap-opera over dramatic to as wooden as a puppet.
Filmed at Ransom Everglades High School in Coconut Grove, Miami, due to the school's architecture and scenic setting. The film also captured the natural splendor in Bill Baggs Cape Florida State Park in Key Biscayne and Oleta River State Park. The clarity and color that comes through in the 4k makes it worth the cost of the limited edition, for sure.
Zedd and I discussed the film and he noted that it was clear that the actors obviously knew what they were filming was a bit of a cinematic joke, but that they approached it with a lightness and sense of humor that is difficult to find these days, no one was taking themselves too seriously.
I agree, a teacher doing what Lombardo was accused of doing would probably not be the subject of a sexy film these days. Certainly not one with a threesome, nor so much nudity of “teen girls” in a mainstream, big release like this.
Without giving too much away, the film is fast-paced, beautifully filmed, and worth a watch. We are not by any means talking cinematic masterpiece, it’s definitely a fun way to spend an afternoon.
Zedd and I have a rule that if we add a film to the collection that has a theatrical and an extended (director’s, unrated, etc.) edition, that we watch the theatrical cut first. So we are looking forward to watching the “unrated” version later this summer, as this sure as heck feels like a hot, sultry, late summer film.
Meanwhile, after a Memorial Day weekend that included heat indexes of 116 degrees, Zedd and I will continue to Movie On through our own “hibernation period” here in South East Texas, from just about May to November, we really lean on our movie collection as it becomes entirely inhospitable outside. Peel off the air, indeed!
(If you enjoyed this, or any of my recent reviews, come check us out at 500 Movies or Bust, we’d love to see ya!)
submitted by MrsLadyZedd to iwatchedanoldmovie [link] [comments]
We purchased this limited edition 4k on Arrow some time ago and finally brought it out this Memorial Day weekend.
While I know we had seen it a loooong time ago, probably a Blockbuster rental, because I am a huge Neve Campbell fan and have been since Party of Five. It did not really ring too much of a bell as we started to watch.
Roger Ebert described this film as “lurid trash”…”a softcore sex film, a soap opera and a B-grade noir” and he’s not wrong. The setting was absolutely gorgeous. When we first saw the film I had not been to Florida, nor had I put in my 14 years of living in South East Texas, where you can peel the summer air off starting in May all the way through November. The line between the haves and the have-nots is not one you cross, not back in 1998, and not now.
Kelly Van Ryan has everything she could ever want. Suzie Toller is a delinquent. They both go to school where the guidance counselor, handsome and young Sam Lambardo, works. They get into a bit of a mess, the three of them, and what exactly happened, and why it happened, remains unclear.
Detective Ray Duquette and his partner, Gloria Perez investigate the situation and try to figure out who did what to whom. The story twists, turns, and goes so many directions that by the end, you are still wondering if something else will end up coming to light.
The acting was not great, especially on the parts of the supporting cast. It was alternatively soap-opera over dramatic to as wooden as a puppet.
Filmed at Ransom Everglades High School in Coconut Grove, Miami, due to the school's architecture and scenic setting. The film also captured the natural splendor in Bill Baggs Cape Florida State Park in Key Biscayne and Oleta River State Park. The clarity and color that comes through in the 4k makes it worth the cost of the limited edition, for sure.
Zedd and I discussed the film and he noted that it was clear that the actors obviously knew what they were filming was a bit of a cinematic joke, but that they approached it with a lightness and sense of humor that is difficult to find these days, no one was taking themselves too seriously.
I agree, a teacher doing what Lombardo was accused of doing would probably not be the subject of a sexy film these days. Certainly not one with a threesome, nor so much nudity of “teen girls” in a mainstream, big release like this.
Without giving too much away, the film is fast-paced, beautifully filmed, and worth a watch. We are not by any means talking cinematic masterpiece, it’s definitely a fun way to spend an afternoon.
Zedd and I have a rule that if we add a film to the collection that has a theatrical and an extended (director’s, unrated, etc.) edition, that we watch the theatrical cut first. So we are looking forward to watching the “unrated” version later this summer, as this sure as heck feels like a hot, sultry, late summer film.
Meanwhile, after a Memorial Day weekend that included heat indexes of 116 degrees, Zedd and I will continue to Movie On through our own “hibernation period” here in South East Texas, from just about May to November, we really lean on our movie collection as it becomes entirely inhospitable outside. Peel off the air, indeed!
(If you enjoyed this, or any of my recent reviews, come check us out at 500 Movies or Bust, we’d love to see ya!)
2024.05.29 03:11 TechSupp047 What exactly are the steps of diagnosis? Does it actually change anything?
When I was a kid, my school forced my parents to make me see a psychiatrist. I remember the visit, we played with some toys and I think I looked at some cards, and at the end of the visit, the doctor said, "Well, it could be ADHD or it could be that she's four years old." I didn't receive a diagnosis, but I did end up going back to school and was told I couldn't bring toys with me anymore, and that I shouldn't chew my hair or hide under my desk when I got over-excited.
It was constant after that doctor's visit. It was this idea of being wrong and not belonging and why can't you be normal? Then one day, something broke, and I just withdrew from everything. I went from having an extensive vocabulary and being social to just....not.
And they were happy with that.
Regardless, I was always the odd one out. I couldn't make friends (still can't, really), can't quite fit into the rhythm of everyone else. I'm always like one half-step off from getting it. And even when I read the articles and put in the work, I still can't get myself to be like them. I feel like I'm hiding the fact that I'm an alien or something.
So now, I'm hearing more and more about how women are being diagnosed years later because their symptoms didn't line up to what we thought autism was. And I hear their stories and it's all like "Yep, that's my brand." And all the things I thought were just odd things I do all started to make sense.
What are the steps to getting diagnosed as an adult? What does it actually change? Should I bother with this? I don't really need the validation. I've gotten so good at normal that the weird even almost seems like I'm doing it on purpose now for laughs. Would it really matter?
submitted by TechSupp047 to AutismInWomen [link] [comments]
It was constant after that doctor's visit. It was this idea of being wrong and not belonging and why can't you be normal? Then one day, something broke, and I just withdrew from everything. I went from having an extensive vocabulary and being social to just....not.
And they were happy with that.
Regardless, I was always the odd one out. I couldn't make friends (still can't, really), can't quite fit into the rhythm of everyone else. I'm always like one half-step off from getting it. And even when I read the articles and put in the work, I still can't get myself to be like them. I feel like I'm hiding the fact that I'm an alien or something.
So now, I'm hearing more and more about how women are being diagnosed years later because their symptoms didn't line up to what we thought autism was. And I hear their stories and it's all like "Yep, that's my brand." And all the things I thought were just odd things I do all started to make sense.
What are the steps to getting diagnosed as an adult? What does it actually change? Should I bother with this? I don't really need the validation. I've gotten so good at normal that the weird even almost seems like I'm doing it on purpose now for laughs. Would it really matter?
2024.05.29 03:11 rohan_spibo Update: Bloons TD 6 v43.0 - Update Notes!
Update: Bloons TD 6 v43.0 - Update Notes!
Available now for most platforms please restart your storefront or be patient if it does not appear for you, these updates can take some time to be rolled out to every region due to how the storefronts are set up.
Update Video: https://youtu.be/97SrSDiSNfk
While we have been working to increase this niche with many new maps, Juggernaut’s functions sub-optimally for the majority of current maps in the game as the knockback doesn’t scale well without good rebound opportunities; to help with this we’re increasing their knockback force slightly with even more emphasis on the less-favored crosspath. We are slightly reducing the cost of Super Monkey Fan Club to overall improve the value of taking multiple to maintain higher uptime
Boomerang base price is being slightly reduced, already a decent start in many cases though this seemed enough to make slight game start changes and price it differently to other towers. The main attack for MOAB Domination has been scaled up as overall it is a good upgrade but the pierce on this main attack was previously unchanged from the T3. Glaive Lord’s main thrown attacks will now be able to bounce back again and hit the same target multiple times, this can be a very powerful effect so there is a cooldown on how frequently any single Bloon can be re-targeted.
Bloon Crush does its job locking down all movement in an area, but we feel it could see more damage to reduce the stall time without the balance really changing much. Bomb Blitz was recently refitted to a cheaper price range while proportionally keeping a similar power level for the cost, however seeing it now in this spot we feel keeping higher damage will give it the edge it needs to feel more impactful than spamming Recursives.
Tack is a very powerful base tower technically, but it is unable to achieve high uptime of that potential power in many early rounds, so some base cost is moving into the cheaper xx1 and xx2 upgrades to make it easier for other towers to start alongside the tack. Additionally, while we’ve held out on this change as there are strong use cases in prior upgrades, Blade Maelstrom lacks the single target punch to last late in Modern Bloons. While it is designed as a high pierce cleanup of low tier Bloons we want to try shifting some pierce to single target damage to feel good for longer.
Increased duration has limited use on upgrades that completely destroy targets anyway, so a better crosspath benefit is being added onto 401 glue puddles. Bloon Solver’s pierce is being reduced as it is over-overkill for how many Bloons you realistically see at once, but this reduction should not be noticed for most players. Glue Splatter stands out as weirdly expensive for T2, and is rarely even needed so we’re significantly cutting its price to bring it down to a more affordable range with less pierce, we hope this should make it more worth considering for splatter coverage over piercing. Now that Glue Storm is extremely good for damage type & debuff support we’re removing the bonus speed reduction that should otherwise require xx2 crosspath and lowering the duration of the Glue Storm. New Relentless Glue finally offers something quite powerful so cost is slightly increasing.
Lower tier Shrapnel crosspathing balance doesn’t feel great currently, so the damage crosspath benefits at T1 & T2 are improving. Even with the high damage per shot, Cripple MOAB still has low value outside of debuff capability, we feel that these shots pack enough of a punch now that they should do a little collateral damage - so lets do it! (we’ve also increased shrapnel pierce at this tier to not tip crosspath balance too far to one side).
Bloontonium Reactor’s unsubmerged damage is increasing to encourage unsubmerged possibilities. The bonus to Lead on Reactor currently doesn't apply to T5, so this bonus is being carried up and improved along with a small price reduction to Energizer as strategies using it have fallen somewhat in viability. Nautic Siege Core’s hero buff is being improved as currently this is an under-utilized part of the tower.
While buccaneer is technically already a very good starter tower for maps that happen to have ideal spots allowing it to attack in both directions we feel this situation isn’t common enough that the tower should be priced around that expectation - this reduced cost is added back to top and bottom T3 upgrades as they do not need the buff. As the paragon has exceptionally powerful scaling mechanics as well as being a paragon that continues to produce cash the XP Unlock requirement is increasing, this increase will not affect players who have already unlocked it.
Minor catchup changes to some parts have fallen out of line slightly due to balance changes for other parts of the Ace.
A lot of stats shuffled around here; this should keep the power level roughly similar overall but with proportionally more of that power coming from the seeking attacks, and less from micro aiming the faster firing frontal gun.
Overall Comanche cleanup and stats shuffle; with the goal of improving baseline non-buffed performance and making it less demanding of Geraldo’s Pickle for high damage.
Artillery Battery use has really exploded (!) and over the past few updates it has been sitting fairly steady in a great spot, the current power level feels good but we don’t want to create too big of a gap from the T3 yet so only a very slight cost increase. Blooncineration’s 025 crosspath currently works so much better with external buffs so we're tweaking the 205 crosspath to feel better in some situations.
Wizard has a weaker base tower so the base cost is going down in exchange for a small price increase to the cost to value ratio for the effective Arcane Mastery. As Fireball becomes very forgotten at higher tiers and is hard to even see at Dragon’s Breath, we’re improving the crosspath and adding even more projectiles at T3 for wider explosive coverage. As Shimmer is the slowest de-camo in the game it is important that it not miss when it does trigger, so pierce is greatly increased. Wizard Lord Phoenix’s Wall of Fire hasn’t had any meaningful upgrade progression, so its damage is being increased. Magus is one of the more in-depth Paragons to use effectively so having it as one of the cheapest to unlock didn't feel right, the unlock XP requirements for this and Ninja are being swapped around.
Super Monkey projectiles already travel most the map length so that total distance is being reduced and adding back via the range-focused middle crosspath. The recent Robo/Tech Terror nerfs had a larger impact on the Anti-Bloon, so it is seeing a larger compensatory price reduction. Legend of the Night’s special passive ability is being failsafe limited to 2 activations per round, per tower.
While a great early game option, Ninja generally struggles with dominant crosspathing choices and also has relatively poor base tower value. Without going into every single change, T3s onward remain relatively unchanged with a lot of prices below T3 being moved around from less favorable crosspaths into bettehigher tier upgrades. Ninja Paragon is very simple to use so unlock XP requirements for this and Wizard Paragon are swapping around so Ninja is the faster unlock. This increase will not affect players who have already unlocked it.
Passive life generation is being removed in favor of the active ability being the only source of life generation, this allows druid-focus strategies to no longer ‘accidentally’ heal their Vengeance buffs away. Heart of Vengeance itself has been allowed to remain overpowered for a long time since life loss is not always an option in different challenges/modes, but with newer competitive modes being added over time that do allow for this mechanic to be, overindulged, shall we say, it feels due for substantial rebalance.
Monkey Wall Street’s cost is being increased, but in return its special bonuses have been improved with more life generation and much more range for Banana collection.
Spike Storm is now exceptionally strong so the ability cooldown is increasing a small amount along with the T5 cost. This comes along with a crosspath rebalance granting more 042 lifespan. Long Life Spikes can start creating a nice buildup of spikes in advance but most of the time feels fairly meh as a stepping stone into Deadly Spikes, a little price here is being shifted up to improve standalone upgrade value.
Primary Expertise’s own attack is unreliable due partly to low bounce distance, so this is being increased. Base level Monkeyopolis continues to over perform, so the baseline cash generation is reducing.
While better than many options, base Engineer still takes a lot of available starting cash so the cost is reduced slightly and being moved back up into Cleansing Foam & Bloontrap; also with a reduction to Double Gun’s price to reflect the lower value of the base tower. Sentry placements are slightly changing to improve their reliability, and will now spawn closer to the track depending on how much range the sentry has. Sentry Champion, while strong with them, is lacking without high buff support so we’re trying out an increase to the sentry damage on it.
In going over our large list of price changes for Beast Handler’s lower tiers in 42 this change was received very positively, however we did not realize that in making this change we killed off all chance of dual-beast handlers being used as a round 1 starting option for under $650 in hard modes – So we gotta do that math all over again and convert it for difficulty, painful 😀 All T1 beast prices changed to allow 110 & 101 beast handler combos to be placed for under $650 in hard mode, all T2 & T3 prices shifted around to keep these same cost ratios.
Quincy’s Rapid Shot starts with an extremely short duration that slowly increases over levels, the difference between min and max is huge but it doesn’t feel too impactfully increased at any point through the leveling up process, so we are increasing the base duration and instead moving the buff up to max duration all into his Lv13 which currently doesn’t do much.
Gwendolin’s Heat it Up was recently reworked to allow for much more frequent triggering from attacks, however the 4.5s internal cooldown still limits it from being scaled up far so that internal cooldown is now also being reduced. Additionally, Heat it Up’s bonus buff to damage against Lead targets has been improved slightly so we can get more out of that niche.
Obyn isn’t necessarily the best support for every type of Druid to reach its highest DPS, but with his more easy reliable design it feels appropriate for him to solve Druid’s biggest weaknesses in a more laid back approach with:
Benjamin’s Cyber Security and Skimming levels have been swapped around so that the early game skimming cash snowball doesn’t come quite so soon, and Cyber Security can come in earlier where it will make a bigger impact proportionally to the lives being lost.
We’ll probably regret this, but the nerf made people very sad, and that is not a life goal 😢
Etienne's drones are prone to missing due to very low projectile speed, this speed is increasing a fair amount to help with this as drones already have an inability to directionally aim well.
Purple Popping is underwhelming with how late it comes online, so this is swapping around with level 11’s slightly faster pop speed.
Geraldo has been far too powerful for a while and all-round nerfs are coming to many outstanding aspects, however in return a little quality of life is coming with some more forgiving stock capacities and much more flexible Fertilizer; with the % benefit being reduced in return for improved replenish rate, maximum stock and the ability to now work on all Banana Farm types.
As Corvus’s power is still considerably top-heavy the mid game performance is being improved with buffs to underused spells, but also top-end power of his 2 most powerful level 20 spells is being reduced to lessen the pressure to ‘need’ to get this far.
Minor tweaks to Heartless which feels it has no competitive edge over most other Relics & Monkey Boost which overperforms on all available tiles.
Bloonarius
This is really just for fun, bringing increased variety of Bleed Bloons from higher tier Bloonarius
Rock Bloons in the higher tiers of Normal Dreadbloon are very outscaled, and so their health values are being increased.
In Elite mode Phayze’s speed bonus while shielded is being reduced by 5% across the board as it felt just a little too quick.
submitted by rohan_spibo to btd6 [link] [comments]
Available now for most platforms please restart your storefront or be patient if it does not appear for you, these updates can take some time to be rolled out to every region due to how the storefronts are set up.
Update Video: https://youtu.be/97SrSDiSNfk
Key New Features
- New Event, Boss Rush!
- We are so psyched to release this event! We have heard the many requests for more Team activities, and after testing some functionality in Quests, we are so happy to release a very different way to play as a Team. Thank you for your feedback and patience, and we truly hope you enjoy!
- Band together with allies to defend against the powerful Boss Rush threatening your Team. With multiple Boss threats looming on the horizon, you and your Team must work together to defend nearby islands from a variety of invaders!
- To assist in pushing back the threat players are outfitted with Relic Knowledge to leverage and a number of Revive Shields that will recover you from 0 lives! But be careful, Revives are limited and each time one is triggered the Boss will rush closer to the exit.
- These Bosses cannot be destroyed alone, so when defending any island your goal is to deal as much damage as you possibly can before they make it past. When your Team reaches enough combined total damage the island is successfully defended and you can progress to the next island, with a new Boss to defend against!
- Between islands some monkey types must stay behind to defend, but additional Relic Knowledge will be acquired to assist in the next challenge.
- Defend 5 islands, each with a fast paced Boss challenge against different Bosses out of the initial 3 available: Bloonarius, Dreadbloon & Phayze. (Vortex & Lych to be coming at a later date!).
- Immediately after defending an island, all Team members can claim the island rewards!
- For launch we are releasing with a pure Team focus without competitive leaderboards. This allows us to review balance and get feedback from players before making changes in future updates. Boss Rush has evolved to be much bigger than the minigame-like concept it was initially planned to be and we look forward to seeing all of your Teams defend their islands together!
- The Event Timer shows when the next Boss Rush will start - less than a day after launch.
- New Code Redemption System
- This new system will allow us to create gift packs that can be redeemed by anyone with the code for free in-game rewards, so keep an eye out for any codes we may share (or hide…) in future!
- Due to privacy requirements, certain platforms won’t be able to enter the codes directly in the game. Instead, you will need to visit a Ninja Kiwi website where you can log in to your LiNK account and redeem the code.
New Awesome
- New Hero Rosalia! (responds to Lia for short!)
- Jetpack Monkey joins the team! Try out Rosalia right away in her new trial quest! Rosalia is built to be a strong ‘set and forget’ hero who also happens to work well with a techbot. The ability to swap weapon to handle her own weaknesses exists for people who wish to play her as their sole DPS, but the power of both her weapons is balanced to scale up together at a fair rate so there's no reason not to pick a preferred weapon forever, and build the rest of your towers to cover any weakness left.
- Rosalia freely jumps around her large workshop area, attacking faster the more Bloons are nearby while swapping between a powerful single target laser & bouncing cluster grenades to deal with different threats!
- Enhanced special attacks for the 10th shot fired on either weapon, showering Bloons in a fog of explosions, or Shocking and pushing them back with powerful Plasma blasts
- Reduce all upgrade costs for Monkey Ace & Heli Pilot, plus one other friend!
- Lv3 Scatter Missile ability, to clean up Bloons with a barrage of powerful stuns
- Lv7 Hover ANYWHERE and gain the Flight Boost ability to temporarily pursue Bloons everywhere around the track and temporarily boost the flight speed of Aces & Helis
- Lv10 Kinetic Charge ability, which sticks MOAB-class Bloons with a charge that explodes after a short duration and amplifies this explosion based on the amount of damage that hits the target before the charge explodes. Focus fire!
- You could try this code: ROSALIAROCKS
- New Beginner Map Tinkerton
- Explore Rosalia’s workshop and help defend it against Bloon incursion! Who knew orange juice had so many uses?
- New Quests
- Tinkerer’s Tutorial: discover Rosalia’s strengths and weaknesses
- A Strange Bloonomaly: Dr. Monkey wants your help investigating some unusual Bloons
- New Trophy Store Items
- Heroes: Obyn Wolf Dance placement animation for Standard Obyn
- Monkeys: Boomer ‘Roo pet for the Boomerang Monkey
- Bloons: BAD Scarab skin
- Game & UI: Boomer and ‘Roo profile banner, Distinguished Gentlemonkey avatar
- Limited Time Trophy Store Item
- Druid of the Rainbow avatar
- New CT Team Store items
- Icons: Battle Monkey Icon
- Frames: Boss Rush Clouds Frame
Game Changes / Additions
- Map Editor Beach items
- It may be getting colder in New Zealand, but we know it’s getting back to beach weather for most of you!
- Beach water path x1
- Areas x2
- Stamps x3
- Props x22
- Map Editor ‘full path’ settings to modify how entire paths work
- Set paths to be alternating, sequential, or a specific pattern
- Map Editor ‘path node’ settings to modify small sections within a path
- Invulnerable MOABs: MOABs will not be targetable until the next node
- Invulnerable Bloons: Bloons will not be targetable until the next node
- All Bloon Speed: Speed modified by a set multiplier until the next node
- Scale Bloon: Bloons will increase in visual size until the next node
- Scale MOAB: MOABs will increase in visual size until the next node
- FPS is no longer capped by default, instead a 60 FPS limit can be enabled from the screen resolution menu
Bug Fixes & General Changes
- Endurance Roundset used in the Phayze One quest has been extended from 100 to 205 rounds, and now has naturally spawning Camo Bloons added
- David Vs Goliath achievement now works in Boss Challenge
- Resolved a crash that could occur when logging out
- Resolved a crash that could occur when exiting out of the received accolades menu too quickly after entering
- Resolved a case in which ‘login required’ could incorrectly display on arcade builds
- Unlocking a new hero should always select that new hero
- Resolved some UI overlap issues within Map Editor
- Resolved some minor visual issues with quests forcing hero level ups
- Map Editor vfx should no longer sometimes become locked to the player’s selection and block interaction / clicking on other items
- Resolved an issue that could sometimes fail to load the ‘My Teams’ button
- Resolved an issue where tower outlines would incorrectly misalign from the tower
- Improved resolution of the default App icon
- Restarting a game in the Content Browser should no longer render that run invalid for the ‘first winner’ slot
- The ‘messages’ page is now loaded by default when interacting with the My Team button
- Income modifiers used in challenge rules should correctly apply to all sources of income
Event bug fixes
- Team island props should once again animate when interacted with
- Game should no longer crash when in the Odyssey scene as the event ends
Map Specific Fixes
- Protect the Yacht quest map’s Boss Spawn Point art has been corrected
- Protect the Yacht quest map should no longer use the #ouch odyssey statue
Tower Specific Fixes
Tack Shooter- 5xx Inferno Ring’s fire aura is now visually disabled when VFX slider is set to 0%
- x3x Arctic Wind ice aura is now visually disabled when VFX slider is set to 0%
- x4x Glue Gunner can no longer debuff Dreadbloon in Primary Immune phase
- x5x Pre-Emptive Strike now works on Castle’s Revenge
- Resolved a crash that could occur when building a sub paragon as Vortex spawns.
- 3xx+ Monkey Sub aura no longer shrinks with the VFX slider, but is disabled at 0%
- 4xx Aircraft Carrier planes now have camo restored when Polyphemus Eye is opened
- xx4 Favored Trades no longer increases the sell value of towers in CHIMPS above $0
- Swapping to Lock in Place while moving should no longer visually jam the rotation
- Resolved a hypersonic automatic blink teleport attacks issue that never happened in a live build but is kinda fun to talk about, and honestly less hype than i’m making it out to sound anyway.
Hero Specific Fixes
Gwendolin- Lv4 Gwendolin's Heat It Up buff no longer fails to apply if the attack runs out of pierce
- Resolved a buggy visual that could occur when Heat It Up attacks too fast
- Etienne should no longer consume the ‘Box of Monkey’ Relic Knowledge
- Resolved a rare crash that could occur when using hotkeys
- Resolved an issue where Geraldo’s skin displayed the wrong portrait when viewing the full upgrades page
- Resolved a crash that could occur when sold at Lv2
- [Vision Pro] Gentlemonkey Geraldo skin should now show on the Monkey Tray
The combination of towers you are able to pass round 1 with can change quite a lot in any overall strategy, especially for more restrictive game modes, so for this update we have made an effort to open up new starter combinations with improvements to a number of initial placement towers.
Tower Balance
Dart MonkeyWhile we have been working to increase this niche with many new maps, Juggernaut’s functions sub-optimally for the majority of current maps in the game as the knockback doesn’t scale well without good rebound opportunities; to help with this we’re increasing their knockback force slightly with even more emphasis on the less-favored crosspath. We are slightly reducing the cost of Super Monkey Fan Club to overall improve the value of taking multiple to maintain higher uptime
- 4xx Juggernaut Knockback duration increased 0.1s > 0.15
- 402 Juggernaut Knockback to heavy targets 1.5 > 2.25
- 402 Juggernaut Knockback to light targets 3 > 4.5
- x4x Super Monkey Fan Club price reduced $8000 > 7500
Boomerang base price is being slightly reduced, already a decent start in many cases though this seemed enough to make slight game start changes and price it differently to other towers. The main attack for MOAB Domination has been scaled up as overall it is a good upgrade but the pierce on this main attack was previously unchanged from the T3. Glaive Lord’s main thrown attacks will now be able to bounce back again and hit the same target multiple times, this can be a very powerful effect so there is a cooldown on how frequently any single Bloon can be re-targeted.
- Boomerang Monkey price reduced $325 > 315
- xx5 Moab Domination Main projectile pierce increased 18 > 54
- 205 Moab Domination Main projectile pierce increased 27 > 81
- 5xx Glaive Lord main attack can bounce back to the same target: cooldown 0.6s
Bloon Crush does its job locking down all movement in an area, but we feel it could see more damage to reduce the stall time without the balance really changing much. Bomb Blitz was recently refitted to a cheaper price range while proportionally keeping a similar power level for the cost, however seeing it now in this spot we feel keeping higher damage will give it the edge it needs to feel more impactful than spamming Recursives.
- 5xx Bloon Crush damage increased 12 > 24
- 502 Bloon Crush Frags damage increased 12 > 24
- 502 Bloon Crush Frags bonus damage to ceramic 12 > 0
- xx5 Bomb Blitz damage increased 3 > 5
Tack is a very powerful base tower technically, but it is unable to achieve high uptime of that potential power in many early rounds, so some base cost is moving into the cheaper xx1 and xx2 upgrades to make it easier for other towers to start alongside the tack. Additionally, while we’ve held out on this change as there are strong use cases in prior upgrades, Blade Maelstrom lacks the single target punch to last late in Modern Bloons. While it is designed as a high pierce cleanup of low tier Bloons we want to try shifting some pierce to single target damage to feel good for longer.
- Tack shooter price reduced $280 > 260
- xx1 More Tacks price increased $100 > 110
- xx2 Even More Tacks price increased $100 > 110
- x4x Blade Maelstrom damage increased 1 > 2
- x4x Blade Maelstrom pierce reduced from 200 > 100
- x5x Super Maelstrom damage unchanged
- x5x Super Maelstrom pierce reduced 500 > 300
Increased duration has limited use on upgrades that completely destroy targets anyway, so a better crosspath benefit is being added onto 401 glue puddles. Bloon Solver’s pierce is being reduced as it is over-overkill for how many Bloons you realistically see at once, but this reduction should not be noticed for most players. Glue Splatter stands out as weirdly expensive for T2, and is rarely even needed so we’re significantly cutting its price to bring it down to a more affordable range with less pierce, we hope this should make it more worth considering for splatter coverage over piercing. Now that Glue Storm is extremely good for damage type & debuff support we’re removing the bonus speed reduction that should otherwise require xx2 crosspath and lowering the duration of the Glue Storm. New Relentless Glue finally offers something quite powerful so cost is slightly increasing.
- 401 Stickier Glue allows track puddles to last +1 round
- 5xx The Bloon Solver pierce reduced 5 > 4
- x2x Glue Splatter price reduced $1450 > 970
- x2x Glue Splatter pierce buff reduced 3 > 2
- x5x Glue Storm ability ‘storm’ duration reduced 20s > 15
- x5x Glue Storm ability glue slow 75% > 50%
- 052 Glue Storm ability glue slow 90% > 75%
- xx4 Relentless Glue price increased 3000 > 3400
Lower tier Shrapnel crosspathing balance doesn’t feel great currently, so the damage crosspath benefits at T1 & T2 are improving. Even with the high damage per shot, Cripple MOAB still has low value outside of debuff capability, we feel that these shots pack enough of a punch now that they should do a little collateral damage - so lets do it! (we’ve also increased shrapnel pierce at this tier to not tip crosspath balance too far to one side).
- 120 Shrapnel Shot damage increased from 1 > 2
- 220 Shrapnel Shot damage increased from 2 > 3
- 320 Shrapnel Shot damage unchanged (4)
- 520 Cripple MOAB’s Shrapnel Shot pierce increased from 2 > 3
- 5xx Cripple MOAB now damages Bloons around the main target
- Radius 8
- Pierce 10
- Damage 28
Bloontonium Reactor’s unsubmerged damage is increasing to encourage unsubmerged possibilities. The bonus to Lead on Reactor currently doesn't apply to T5, so this bonus is being carried up and improved along with a small price reduction to Energizer as strategies using it have fallen somewhat in viability. Nautic Siege Core’s hero buff is being improved as currently this is an under-utilized part of the tower.
- 4xx Bloontonium Reactor dart & airburst damage 1 > 2
- 520 Energizer gains bonus damage to Lead +5 when submerged
- 502 Energizer price reduced $32,000 > 31,000
- Paragon Hero attack cooldown increase reduced 1.5x > 1.3
- Paragon Hero damage multiplier increased 4x > 5x
While buccaneer is technically already a very good starter tower for maps that happen to have ideal spots allowing it to attack in both directions we feel this situation isn’t common enough that the tower should be priced around that expectation - this reduced cost is added back to top and bottom T3 upgrades as they do not need the buff. As the paragon has exceptionally powerful scaling mechanics as well as being a paragon that continues to produce cash the XP Unlock requirement is increasing, this increase will not affect players who have already unlocked it.
- Buccaneer price reduced $500 > 400
- 300 Destroyer price increased 2950 > 3050
- 003 Merchantman price increased 2300 > 2400
- Navarch unlock XP increased 500,000 > 750,000
Minor catchup changes to some parts have fallen out of line slightly due to balance changes for other parts of the Ace.
- x1x Exploding Pineapple attack cooldown reduced 1.7s > 1.6s
- xx5 Flying Fortress radial dart damage increased from 3 > 6
A lot of stats shuffled around here; this should keep the power level roughly similar overall but with proportionally more of that power coming from the seeking attacks, and less from micro aiming the faster firing frontal gun.
- Seeking Radials projectile count increased 4 > 8
- Seeking Radials damage increased 200 > 300
- Seeking Radials boss bonus increased 200 > 300
- Non-seeking Radials projectile count reduced 16 > 12
- Non-seeking Radials damage increased 200 > 300
- Non-seeking Radials boss bonus increased 200 > 300
- Frontal Gun damage reduced 300 > 150
- Frontal Gun boss bonus reduced 300 > 150
Overall Comanche cleanup and stats shuffle; with the goal of improving baseline non-buffed performance and making it less demanding of Geraldo’s Pickle for high damage.
- x5x Special Poperations Marine can now be sold in CHIMPS
- xx4 Comanche Defense mini's attack rate 0.151848 > 0.228
- xx5 Comanche Commander mini heli dart damage increased 2 > 3
- xx4 Comanche Defense mini's missile damage 1 > 4
- xx4 Comanche Defense mini's missile pierce 80 > 60
- xx4 Comanche Defense mini's missile ceramic bonus increased 1 > 2
- xx4 Comanche Defense mini's missile moab bonus removed 2 > 0
- xx5 Comanche Commander mini's missile ceramic bonus increased 1 > 10
- xx5 Comanche Commander mini's missile moab bonus removed 8 > 0
Artillery Battery use has really exploded (!) and over the past few updates it has been sitting fairly steady in a great spot, the current power level feels good but we don’t want to create too big of a gap from the T3 yet so only a very slight cost increase. Blooncineration’s 025 crosspath currently works so much better with external buffs so we're tweaking the 205 crosspath to feel better in some situations.
- x4x Artillery Battery price increased $5500 > 5900
- 105 Blooncineration walls of fire pierce increased 25 > 36
- 205 Blooncineration walls of fire damage increased 2 > 3
Wizard has a weaker base tower so the base cost is going down in exchange for a small price increase to the cost to value ratio for the effective Arcane Mastery. As Fireball becomes very forgotten at higher tiers and is hard to even see at Dragon’s Breath, we’re improving the crosspath and adding even more projectiles at T3 for wider explosive coverage. As Shimmer is the slowest de-camo in the game it is important that it not miss when it does trigger, so pierce is greatly increased. Wizard Lord Phoenix’s Wall of Fire hasn’t had any meaningful upgrade progression, so its damage is being increased. Magus is one of the more in-depth Paragons to use effectively so having it as one of the cheapest to unlock didn't feel right, the unlock XP requirements for this and Ninja are being swapped around.
- Wizard price reduced $375 > 325
- 3xx Arcane Mastery price increased $1300 > 1400
- xx3 Shimmer pierce increased 200 > 500
- 210 Fireball crosspathed damage increased 1 > 2
- x3x Dragon's Breath fireball projectile count increased 1 > 3
- x3x Dragon's Breath fireball damage reduced 9 > 3
- x3x Dragon's Breath pierce reduced 4 > 3
- x5x Wizard Lord Phoenix wall of fire attack damage 3 > 5
- x5x Dragon's Breath fireball damage reduced from 27 > 9
- Wizard Paragon unlock cost increased from 500,000 > 1,000,000
Super Monkey projectiles already travel most the map length so that total distance is being reduced and adding back via the range-focused middle crosspath. The recent Robo/Tech Terror nerfs had a larger impact on the Anti-Bloon, so it is seeing a larger compensatory price reduction. Legend of the Night’s special passive ability is being failsafe limited to 2 activations per round, per tower.
- Supermonkey projectile speed reduced 280 > 200
- x2x Epic Range projectile speed bonus 25% > 75% (remains 350)
- x5x The Anti-Bloon upgrade cost reduced from $80,000 > 70,000
- xx5 Legend of the Night ability max uses per round: 2
While a great early game option, Ninja generally struggles with dominant crosspathing choices and also has relatively poor base tower value. Without going into every single change, T3s onward remain relatively unchanged with a lot of prices below T3 being moved around from less favorable crosspaths into bettehigher tier upgrades. Ninja Paragon is very simple to use so unlock XP requirements for this and Wizard Paragon are swapping around so Ninja is the faster unlock. This increase will not affect players who have already unlocked it.
- Ninja Monkey price reduced $500 > 400
- Ninja Monkey attack cooldown reduced from 0.7 > 0.62
- 1xx Ninja Monkey attack cooldown reduced 38% > 30 (all attacks)
- xx2 Caltrops attack cooldown reduced 4.4 > 3.9
- xx4 Sticky Bomb attack cooldown reduced 5 > 4.5
- 1xx Ninja Discipline price increased $300 > 350
- 3xx Double Shot price increased $850 > 900
- x1x Distraction price reduced $350 > 250
- x2x Counter Espionage price reduced $500 > 400
- x3x Shinobi Tactics price increased $900 > 1200
- xx1 Seeking Shuriken price increased $250 > 300
- xx2 Caltrops price increased $400 > 450
- Ninja Paragon unlock cost reduced 1,000,000 > 500,000
Passive life generation is being removed in favor of the active ability being the only source of life generation, this allows druid-focus strategies to no longer ‘accidentally’ heal their Vengeance buffs away. Heart of Vengeance itself has been allowed to remain overpowered for a long time since life loss is not always an option in different challenges/modes, but with newer competitive modes being added over time that do allow for this mechanic to be, overindulged, shall we say, it feels due for substantial rebalance.
- x4x Jungle's Bounty now generates 1 life per ability cast
- x4x Jungle's Bounty no longer passively generates 1 life per round
- x5x Spirit of the Forest no longer passively generates lives per round
- xx2 Heart of Vengeance lost lives maximum rate bonus reduced 100% > 50
Monkey Wall Street’s cost is being increased, but in return its special bonuses have been improved with more life generation and much more range for Banana collection.
- xx5 Monkey Wall Street price increased $60,000 > 70,000
- xx5 Monkey Wall Street range increased 60 > 75
- xx5 Monkey Wall Street lives per round increased 10 > 15
Spike Storm is now exceptionally strong so the ability cooldown is increasing a small amount along with the T5 cost. This comes along with a crosspath rebalance granting more 042 lifespan. Long Life Spikes can start creating a nice buildup of spikes in advance but most of the time feels fairly meh as a stepping stone into Deadly Spikes, a little price here is being shifted up to improve standalone upgrade value.
- x4x Spike Storm cooldown increased 45s > 50
- x4x Spike Storm ability spikes minimum duration reduced 10s > 9
- x4x Spike Storm ability spikes maximum duration reduced 13s > 11
- 041 Spike Storm duration bonus for ability spikes increased 50% > 100%
- x5x Spike Storm ability spikes duration remains at 18-22s
- x5x Carpet of Spikes price increased $40,000 > 42,000
- xx3 Long Life Spikes price reduced $1400 > 1300
- xx4 Deadly Spikes price increased $3500 > 3600
Primary Expertise’s own attack is unreliable due partly to low bounce distance, so this is being increased. Base level Monkeyopolis continues to over perform, so the baseline cash generation is reducing.
- 5xx Primary Expertise bounce distance increased 50 > 90
- xx5 Monkeyopolis base cash amount reduced $1250 > 1000
While better than many options, base Engineer still takes a lot of available starting cash so the cost is reduced slightly and being moved back up into Cleansing Foam & Bloontrap; also with a reduction to Double Gun’s price to reflect the lower value of the base tower. Sentry placements are slightly changing to improve their reliability, and will now spawn closer to the track depending on how much range the sentry has. Sentry Champion, while strong with them, is lacking without high buff support so we’re trying out an increase to the sentry damage on it.
- Engineer price reduced $400 > 350
- 1xx Sentries now spawn within 20% of their range to the track
- 5xx Sentry Champagne damage increased from 2 > 3
- x3x Cleansing Foam price increased $850 > 900
- x4x Overclock foam pierce 10 > 15
- xx3 Double Gun price reduced $500 > 450
- xx4 Bloontrap price increased $3500 > 3600
In going over our large list of price changes for Beast Handler’s lower tiers in 42 this change was received very positively, however we did not realize that in making this change we killed off all chance of dual-beast handlers being used as a round 1 starting option for under $650 in hard modes – So we gotta do that math all over again and convert it for difficulty, painful 😀 All T1 beast prices changed to allow 110 & 101 beast handler combos to be placed for under $650 in hard mode, all T2 & T3 prices shifted around to keep these same cost ratios.
- 1xx Piranha price reduced 170 > 160
- 2xx Barracutie price reduced 850 > 810
- 3xx Great White price reduced 2075 > 2010
- x1x Microraptor price reduced 195 > 175
- x2x Adasaurus price reduced 890 > 830
- x3x Velociraptor price reduced 2170 > 2065
- xx1 Gyrfalcon price reduced 210 > 190
- xx2 Horned Owl price reduced 940 > 860
- xx3 Golden Eagle price reduced 3150 > 2120
- 3xx Great White damage increased from 8 > 12
- 3xx Great White damage range increased from 16 > 24
- 1xx Piranha now spawn within 20% of their range to the track
- x1x Microraptor now spawn within 30% of their range to the track
- xx3 Golden Eagle pierce increased from 15 > 30
- xx3 Golden Eagle pierce range increased from 30 > 60
- xx3 Golden Eagle MOAB pierce penalty increased from 44 > 1089
- xx3 Golden Eagle attack cooldown range from 0.28679625 > 0.28
- xx4 Condor Unchanged by any above changes
- xx4 Giant Condor ceramic penalty reduced from 1 > 0
- xx4 Giant Condor BFB penalty reduced from 44 > 29
- Beast Handler move cooldown reduced from 3s > 2
Hero Balance
QuincyQuincy’s Rapid Shot starts with an extremely short duration that slowly increases over levels, the difference between min and max is huge but it doesn’t feel too impactfully increased at any point through the leveling up process, so we are increasing the base duration and instead moving the buff up to max duration all into his Lv13 which currently doesn’t do much.
- Quincy no longer gains 0.5s Rapid Shot duration per level
- Lv3 Rapid Shot duration increased 3.5s > 8
- Lv13 now also increases Rapid Shot duration 8.5s > 12
Gwendolin’s Heat it Up was recently reworked to allow for much more frequent triggering from attacks, however the 4.5s internal cooldown still limits it from being scaled up far so that internal cooldown is now also being reduced. Additionally, Heat it Up’s bonus buff to damage against Lead targets has been improved slightly so we can get more out of that niche.
- Lv4 Heat it Up minimum delay reduced from 4.5s > 1.5s
- Lv17 Heat it Up buff to Lead type increased from +1 > 2
Obyn isn’t necessarily the best support for every type of Druid to reach its highest DPS, but with his more easy reliable design it feels appropriate for him to solve Druid’s biggest weaknesses in a more laid back approach with:
- Lv8 ‘Nature’s Wrath’ additionally grants camo detection to Druids in radius
Benjamin’s Cyber Security and Skimming levels have been swapped around so that the early game skimming cash snowball doesn’t come quite so soon, and Cyber Security can come in earlier where it will make a bigger impact proportionally to the lives being lost.
- Swap the levels for Lv6 Cyber Security and Lv4 skimming
We’ll probably regret this, but the nerf made people very sad, and that is not a life goal 😢
- Lv18 Mega Mine cooldown 45s > 40
Etienne's drones are prone to missing due to very low projectile speed, this speed is increasing a fair amount to help with this as drones already have an inability to directionally aim well.
- Lv1 Faster projectile speed for all drones 150 > 250
Purple Popping is underwhelming with how late it comes online, so this is swapping around with level 11’s slightly faster pop speed.
- Lv11 (Faster Popping) & Lv13 (Purple Popping) swapped
Geraldo has been far too powerful for a while and all-round nerfs are coming to many outstanding aspects, however in return a little quality of life is coming with some more forgiving stock capacities and much more flexible Fertilizer; with the % benefit being reduced in return for improved replenish rate, maximum stock and the ability to now work on all Banana Farm types.
- Lv2 Action Figure price reduced $700 > 650
- Lv6 Worn Cape restock rate reduced 5 > 7
- Lv6 Worn Cape cape max stock increased 2 > 3
- Lv7 Blade Trap max stock increased 3 > 4
- Lv9 Fertilizer cash bonus reduced 25% > 20
- Lv9 Fertilizer max stock increased 2 > 4
- Lv9 Fertilizer rounds to replenish reduced 5 > 3
- Lv9 Fertilizer will now work on all Banana Farms
- Lv13 Shooty Turret v2 damage reduced 7 > 6
- Lv8 Gerry’s Fire duration reduced 10r > 5
- Lv16 Gerry’s Fire v2 duration remains 10r
- Lv11 Jar of Pickles bonus to fortified removed 1 > 0
- Lv16 Jar of Pickles bonus to fortified reduced 2 > 1
As Corvus’s power is still considerably top-heavy the mid game performance is being improved with buffs to underused spells, but also top-end power of his 2 most powerful level 20 spells is being reduced to lessen the pressure to ‘need’ to get this far.
- Lv1 Spear pierce increased from 3 > 4
- Lv3 Soul harvest cooldown 35s > 40s
- Lv5 Aggression initial mana cost 80 > 50
- Lv7 Malevolence tick rate 0.5s > 0.3s
- Lv14 Malevolence damage 3 > 5
- Lv20 Might damage 400 > 300
- Lv20 Overload damage 4000 > 3000
Minor tweaks to Heartless which feels it has no competitive edge over most other Relics & Monkey Boost which overperforms on all available tiles.
- Heartless now ‘disables’ Regrow Bloons: Regrow rate increased 150% > 10,050%
- Monkey Boost granted uses of the Monkey Boost power reduced 3 > 2
- Going the Distance now also provides Lifespan +30%
- Durable Shots no longer grants increased lifespan
- Durable Shots now grants towers increased pierce +25%
- Deep Heat now also allows all attacks to pop 'Frozen'
- Deep Heat now also grants Freezes longer duration +10%
- Deep Heat now also allows Freezes to last extra layers +1
Bloonarius
This is really just for fun, bringing increased variety of Bleed Bloons from higher tier Bloonarius
- Elite Tier 4: Bleed Bloons from 12 MOABs > 8 MOABs + 2 BFBs
- Elite Tier 5: Bleed Bloons from 8 DDTs > 6 DDTs + 2 fort ZOMGs
Rock Bloons in the higher tiers of Normal Dreadbloon are very outscaled, and so their health values are being increased.
- Normal Tier 4: Rock Bloon HP increased 5000 > 9000
- Normal Tier 5: Rock Bloon HP increased 12000 > 22500
In Elite mode Phayze’s speed bonus while shielded is being reduced by 5% across the board as it felt just a little too quick.
- Elite Tier 1 shielded speed bonus reduced from 50% > 45%
- Elite Tier 2 shielded speed bonus reduced from 55% > 50%
- Elite Tier 3 shielded speed bonus reduced from 60% > 55%
- Elite Tier 4 shielded speed bonus reduced from 65% > 60%
- Elite Tier 5 shielded speed bonus reduced from 70% > 65%
2024.05.29 03:10 gox- FEEDBACK on NEW Go X Scooters, e-Bikes, and Dragon Cars?!
Hey Reddit community,
We’ve got some exciting updates at Go X, and we’re eager to hear your thoughts! 🚀
We've been playing with some new designs and would love your feedback on them:
New Go X scooter Designs
Various Design Prototypes
New Floral Design
The Dragon
Dragons at Go X Partner Location in Waikiki
Dragon in the \"wild\"
Mahalo Nui Loa, The Go X Team
submitted by gox- to ElectricScooters [link] [comments]
We’ve got some exciting updates at Go X, and we’re eager to hear your thoughts! 🚀
Expanding Our Scooter Service in Hawaii 🌴
We're thrilled to announce that Go X is expanding to Hawaii Island and Maui this year! Following our success in Oahu, we’re bringing more eco-friendly and convenient scooters to the Hawaiian Islands. Have you used our scooters before, or are you excited to give them a try? We’d love to hear your thoughts on our expansion and how we can make your scooter experience even better.We've been playing with some new designs and would love your feedback on them:
New Go X scooter Designs
Various Design Prototypes
New Floral Design
Launching Go X e-Bikes 🚴♀️
We're excited to introduce our new line of e-Bikes! Designed for commuting and leisure, these e-Bikes feature a powerful 500w motor, removable battery, and manual throttle for an instant boost. They’re perfect for those looking to enjoy a smooth ride while reducing their carbon footprint. Have you ridden an e-Bike before? What features do you think are essential for a great e-Bike experience?Introducing the Go X Dragon Car 🚗
Meet the Dragon, our new electric vehicle designed for short urban trips. With speeds up to 75 mph and a range of over 120 miles per charge, the Dragon is efficient and sustainable. Currently available in Daytona Beach and Hawaii in limited quantities, we plan to expand to over 450 locations by the end of 2024. We’re testing different pricing models and exploring long-term rental options. What are your thoughts on electric vehicles for short trips? What features or pricing models would make you consider using the DragonThe Dragon
Dragons at Go X Partner Location in Waikiki
Dragon in the \"wild\"
We Value Your Feedback!
Your input is crucial as we continue to improve and expand our services. Please share your experiences, suggestions, and thoughts on:- Our scooter service and Hawaii expansion.
- The new e-Bikes.
- The Dragon electric vehicle and its features.
Mahalo Nui Loa, The Go X Team
2024.05.29 03:10 Pie_Man12 [GM4A]A new Reckoner’s story
Hello there! Today I decided to break out a plot I haven’t touched for a long time. This plot is set in the universe of the Reckoners book series. (Steelheart, Firefight, Calamity). Knowledge of the books or universe is NOT required, as I’m fully open to explain the setting to you! Some basic setup of the universe will be in the post for the sake of making my plot idea clearer.
The world of the Reckoners is a world where around 10 years ago Calamity arrived in the sky. The great big red star brought with it a strange new kind of human. Everyday humans would manifest powers that couldn’t be explained by science. They varied in strength, ranging from basic things like raw strength, to epic powers of such magnitude they could cause literal earthquakes. However they all shared two things, the title of an Epic, and a deep hatred of humanity. What was know as the United States soon collapsed into the fractured states. Towns and cities ruled over by tyrant Epics, killing most who got in their way or disagreed with them. The only people who stood up and took the fight to the Epics were the Reckoners. Normal humans who fought with information, guns, bare hands, and whatever they could use to bring down Epics. Dozens of epics have been killed by the Reckoners. However that’s only a small dent in the millions of known epics.
Now that a brief summary of what the setting is like I’ll give the plot idea for the RP as follows below.
As a newer recruit to the Reckoners you were sent on a mission with a small team to prove yourself. After bringing down a minor Epic. You’ve begun to be trusted and treated as a fully fledged member. Now your next task is to head to the former city of Seattle to establish a Reckoner foothold in the city. The city has changed immensely over the last year, with large trees and plants wrapping around the skyscrapers and structures. The former tyrant was overthrown by three Epics who rule the city together. Now as a Reckoner, you must do what all Reckoners do, kill epics in the city without being found out or killed. More information will be handed to you at the safe house. Good luck.
There’s the setup for the plot! Feel free to ask more questions. For the RP itself we’ll be transferring to Discord due to my personal preference. You can play as any kind of person! However you must be aa normal human in order to be a Reckoner. I’ll ask a few more questions once we start figuring out characters. They won’t be anything too complicated so don’t worry. Can’t wait to meet you Reckoner!
submitted by Pie_Man12 to RoleplayPartnerSearch [link] [comments]
The world of the Reckoners is a world where around 10 years ago Calamity arrived in the sky. The great big red star brought with it a strange new kind of human. Everyday humans would manifest powers that couldn’t be explained by science. They varied in strength, ranging from basic things like raw strength, to epic powers of such magnitude they could cause literal earthquakes. However they all shared two things, the title of an Epic, and a deep hatred of humanity. What was know as the United States soon collapsed into the fractured states. Towns and cities ruled over by tyrant Epics, killing most who got in their way or disagreed with them. The only people who stood up and took the fight to the Epics were the Reckoners. Normal humans who fought with information, guns, bare hands, and whatever they could use to bring down Epics. Dozens of epics have been killed by the Reckoners. However that’s only a small dent in the millions of known epics.
Now that a brief summary of what the setting is like I’ll give the plot idea for the RP as follows below.
As a newer recruit to the Reckoners you were sent on a mission with a small team to prove yourself. After bringing down a minor Epic. You’ve begun to be trusted and treated as a fully fledged member. Now your next task is to head to the former city of Seattle to establish a Reckoner foothold in the city. The city has changed immensely over the last year, with large trees and plants wrapping around the skyscrapers and structures. The former tyrant was overthrown by three Epics who rule the city together. Now as a Reckoner, you must do what all Reckoners do, kill epics in the city without being found out or killed. More information will be handed to you at the safe house. Good luck.
There’s the setup for the plot! Feel free to ask more questions. For the RP itself we’ll be transferring to Discord due to my personal preference. You can play as any kind of person! However you must be aa normal human in order to be a Reckoner. I’ll ask a few more questions once we start figuring out characters. They won’t be anything too complicated so don’t worry. Can’t wait to meet you Reckoner!
2024.05.29 03:10 notedeghost Mechanic shop replaced both front struts. On the bill, only one item is listed. "Parts $700. 0$ labor." This seems unusual to me. And then they found/created new problems.
For context, we found out that my dad's car had a damaged front strut spring, cracked and hanging off the bottom. The broken off piece, half a loop, was rattling around when the car hit bumps. The noise was gone after removing the broken piece but the strut needed to be replaced for obvious safety concerns. Brought it to a shop where both struts where replaced as a recommendation. The bill showed a single line of $700 parts. $0 labor. Besides the lack of itemization the car drove worse after the repair.
Our guess is that the shop likely damaged some components while replacing the struts but won't admit it directly. The least damning explanation is that they didn't even bother test driving the car after the repair. My dad had paid the bill and started driving away until he noticed the car was making new, much more concerning noises. He went back to complain and question what happened. The shop played it off at first and wanted to charge an additional $500 parts and labor to fix the new problem. After pointing out the fact the noises weren't there beforehand, they settled on only charging parts for $240. It had to be kept in the garage for the next day to fix the new problem... A problem which the shop likely caused but won't admit fault or even provide an itemized quote. Tomorrow we'll see if the situation gets worse. Another problem pops up or they decide to charge more since nothing is in writing. I wasn't involved directly but I wouldn't go back after this is over.
submitted by notedeghost to CarRepair [link] [comments]
Our guess is that the shop likely damaged some components while replacing the struts but won't admit it directly. The least damning explanation is that they didn't even bother test driving the car after the repair. My dad had paid the bill and started driving away until he noticed the car was making new, much more concerning noises. He went back to complain and question what happened. The shop played it off at first and wanted to charge an additional $500 parts and labor to fix the new problem. After pointing out the fact the noises weren't there beforehand, they settled on only charging parts for $240. It had to be kept in the garage for the next day to fix the new problem... A problem which the shop likely caused but won't admit fault or even provide an itemized quote. Tomorrow we'll see if the situation gets worse. Another problem pops up or they decide to charge more since nothing is in writing. I wasn't involved directly but I wouldn't go back after this is over.
2024.05.29 03:10 NekoMida Pattern Suggestions for Warm Toned Fabrics
 | (Black dots are the fabrics I currently possess.) I’m looking for a pattern that will really make the warm tones of these fabrics shine! I also have the yellow version of the purple leaf-like fabric all the way to the left. Any suggestions are welcome, as well as challenging patterns! I do have more fabric that matches tonally and will be acquiring more of Splendor (the pictured line) as soon as I’m able. submitted by NekoMida to quilting [link] [comments] |
2024.05.29 03:09 timtam26 (SWFFG) Adventures in a Galaxy Far, Far, Away [2-3 Players]
Hello everyone. A couple of friends of mine have expressed interest in a sci-fi game and I've decided to dig out one of my favorites: the Star Wars system by Fantasy Flight Games.
What makes this game interesting is its unique proprietary dice system. This video does a pretty good job of explaining it. How it works out is that there is never a chance where someone makes a roll and stone-cold nothing happens. Typically, you most often succeed or fail with something positive or negative extra happening. The narrative is always pushed towards some conclusion.
Now, about the system itself. The game is divided up into three different books: Age of Rebellion, Edge of the Empire, and Force & Destiny. Each book covers a different type of game and share the same base mechanics but puts their own slight spin on the game.
Age of Rebellion has the players acting as members of a rebellion cell basically during the original trilogy. You're responsible for taking the fight to the Empire wherever its influence may be. To frame it in terms of movies, this is more like Rogue One or the original trilogy.
Edge of the Empire is mainly concerned with the goings on in the Outer Rim. In this, the players are criminals, outlaws, or anyone that is just trying to get by in a place where the rule of law is enforced only by whoever has the most blasters in the room. Think something like The Mandalorian.
Force & Destiny, as you can probably guess, mainly involves force users. A F&D game could take place during the Great Sith War with the players being on the front lines or after the original trilogy where the PCs are hunting down the last remaining Siths that exist.
If any of this sounds interesting, feel free to DM me and let me know which one of the three books sounds most interesting to you.
submitted by timtam26 to pbp [link] [comments]
What makes this game interesting is its unique proprietary dice system. This video does a pretty good job of explaining it. How it works out is that there is never a chance where someone makes a roll and stone-cold nothing happens. Typically, you most often succeed or fail with something positive or negative extra happening. The narrative is always pushed towards some conclusion.
Now, about the system itself. The game is divided up into three different books: Age of Rebellion, Edge of the Empire, and Force & Destiny. Each book covers a different type of game and share the same base mechanics but puts their own slight spin on the game.
Age of Rebellion has the players acting as members of a rebellion cell basically during the original trilogy. You're responsible for taking the fight to the Empire wherever its influence may be. To frame it in terms of movies, this is more like Rogue One or the original trilogy.
Edge of the Empire is mainly concerned with the goings on in the Outer Rim. In this, the players are criminals, outlaws, or anyone that is just trying to get by in a place where the rule of law is enforced only by whoever has the most blasters in the room. Think something like The Mandalorian.
Force & Destiny, as you can probably guess, mainly involves force users. A F&D game could take place during the Great Sith War with the players being on the front lines or after the original trilogy where the PCs are hunting down the last remaining Siths that exist.
If any of this sounds interesting, feel free to DM me and let me know which one of the three books sounds most interesting to you.
2024.05.29 03:09 TemporaryPositive512 James/Mr. Sutton
I think the most unrealistic part of the show in my opinion is when James finds out about Lydia and Mr. Sutton. He doesn’t go to him first and confronts him that it’s messed up but instead goes to Ruby lol. He asks his sister later if he’s keeping his mouth shut but if that was my sister I’ll be mad at the older man. Idk I know it’s a plot point in the books…and I guess it makes sense since they’re twins and he’s not older. He’s not going to tell her what to do even though he doesn’t approve. In episode 5, he even kept making side comments about it.
submitted by TemporaryPositive512 to MaxtonHall [link] [comments]
2024.05.29 03:09 Natmanfr Back of print line error
 | Hi all! I’ve slowly got into 3D building over the last few months. One thing I’ve had a consistent issue with is an odd line zigzagging on the back of every print I have. Is this an issue with an overtight belt? I know the print quality isn’t the best but I’m working on making cleaner prints. This is the first print I noticed it on multiple areas in the back, such as the bones or stones holding up the skull. I’m using an Ender 3 and Ender PLA 1.75. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated! submitted by Natmanfr to 3Dprinting [link] [comments] |
2024.05.29 03:08 DevKevStev A minor issue with 4 Road ponegylphs intersecting lines
Added the spoiler tag for those who hasnt caught up.
Okay so as the title suggests, I saw a small problem with the 4 road poneglyphs intersecting lines. Of which, was said to reveal the location of the final island.
Long story short, its Zunisha. That elephant carries one of the Road poneglyphs, and as anyone already noticed, were going places. Coming and going (and lately, disappearing without a trace). If anyone would rely on the 4 road poneglyphs intersecting lines to determine the Final island location, shouldn’t Zunisha be staying put somewhere?
As important as the final island would be for a grand treasure’s final voyage, isn’t a bummer one of the important posts keeps moving about and making the final island location unreliable.
What are your thoughts?
(Pls forgive me if I missed something)
submitted by DevKevStev to OnePiece [link] [comments]
Okay so as the title suggests, I saw a small problem with the 4 road poneglyphs intersecting lines. Of which, was said to reveal the location of the final island.
Long story short, its Zunisha. That elephant carries one of the Road poneglyphs, and as anyone already noticed, were going places. Coming and going (and lately, disappearing without a trace). If anyone would rely on the 4 road poneglyphs intersecting lines to determine the Final island location, shouldn’t Zunisha be staying put somewhere?
As important as the final island would be for a grand treasure’s final voyage, isn’t a bummer one of the important posts keeps moving about and making the final island location unreliable.
What are your thoughts?
(Pls forgive me if I missed something)
2024.05.29 03:08 One_Attorney8557 Major
Hello, I’ll try and keep this as short and to the point as I can.
For the longest time now, I have been flip flopping between sequential art and animation. I am a freshman. The issue is that if I were to go to animation, it would have to be 2D. There is no convincing me to do 3D animation. I had to withdraw from my anim190 course this spring because of various roadblocks in my life having to do with mental health and a death in the family. I could not see myself getting anything more than a C in anim190 and I just figured it would be best to save my GPA and withdraw. That same quarter, I took life drawing, which made me realize how much I enjoyed drawing from life but also drawing the figure in general. I love rendering and finishing an art piece, I don’t really like just leaving it at a gesture. Which is what has strayed me away from animation. But I also love the idea of bringing drawings to life, and the hard work that goes into it. I’m the type of person who likes to work hard on something I love because then I feel satisfied.
With that being said, I don’t know which one to take. On one hand, I adore making complete drawings and rendering out details, and my inspiration from the beginning has been Yusuke Murata. On the other, I like the fantasy of spending time drawing frames, working with other people to make a still image come to life.
Bottom line however, is that I want to tell a story. At my core, I am a storyteller, and I have too many ideas to just let them die. I will work on other people’s projects obviously and put just as much effort, but I want to have the highest chance to be able to make the impact that I want to make and tell my stories.
Any advice?
Another thing I wanted to ask is if it was in any way possible for an animation majosequential major to let me watch them work? I’d like to see what the assignments look like and how that plays out in scad. I’m in the Savannah campus.
submitted by One_Attorney8557 to scad [link] [comments]
For the longest time now, I have been flip flopping between sequential art and animation. I am a freshman. The issue is that if I were to go to animation, it would have to be 2D. There is no convincing me to do 3D animation. I had to withdraw from my anim190 course this spring because of various roadblocks in my life having to do with mental health and a death in the family. I could not see myself getting anything more than a C in anim190 and I just figured it would be best to save my GPA and withdraw. That same quarter, I took life drawing, which made me realize how much I enjoyed drawing from life but also drawing the figure in general. I love rendering and finishing an art piece, I don’t really like just leaving it at a gesture. Which is what has strayed me away from animation. But I also love the idea of bringing drawings to life, and the hard work that goes into it. I’m the type of person who likes to work hard on something I love because then I feel satisfied.
With that being said, I don’t know which one to take. On one hand, I adore making complete drawings and rendering out details, and my inspiration from the beginning has been Yusuke Murata. On the other, I like the fantasy of spending time drawing frames, working with other people to make a still image come to life.
Bottom line however, is that I want to tell a story. At my core, I am a storyteller, and I have too many ideas to just let them die. I will work on other people’s projects obviously and put just as much effort, but I want to have the highest chance to be able to make the impact that I want to make and tell my stories.
Any advice?
Another thing I wanted to ask is if it was in any way possible for an animation majosequential major to let me watch them work? I’d like to see what the assignments look like and how that plays out in scad. I’m in the Savannah campus.
2024.05.29 03:07 MrsLadyZedd Wild Things (1998)
2024-209 / MLZ MAP: 78.47 / Zedd MAP: 69.10 / Score Gap: 9.37
Wikipedia?wprov=sfti1) / IMDb / Official Trailer / Our Collection
We purchased this limited edition 4k on Arrow some time ago and finally brought it out this Memorial Day weekend.
While I know we had seen it a loooong time ago, probably a Blockbuster rental, because I am a huge Neve Campbell fan and have been since Party of Five. It did not really ring too much of a bell as we started to watch.
Roger Ebert described this film as “lurid trash”…”a softcore sex film, a soap opera and a B-grade noir” and he’s not wrong. The setting was absolutely gorgeous. When we first saw the film I had not been to Florida, nor had I put in my 14 years of living in South East Texas, where you can peel the summer air off starting in May all the way through November. The line between the haves and the have-nots is not one you cross, not back in 1998, and not now.
Kelly Van Ryan has everything she could ever want. Suzie Toller is a delinquent. They both go to school where the guidance counselor, handsome and young Sam Lambardo, works. They get into a bit of a mess, the three of them, and what exactly happened, and why it happened, remains unclear.
Detective Ray Duquette and his partner, Gloria Perez investigate the situation and try to figure out who did what to whom. The story twists, turns, and goes so many directions that by the end, you are still wondering if something else will end up coming to light.
The acting was not great, especially on the parts of the supporting cast. It was alternatively soap-opera over dramatic to as wooden as a puppet.
Filmed at Ransom Everglades High School in Coconut Grove, Miami, due to the school's architecture and scenic setting. The film also captured the natural splendor in Bill Baggs Cape Florida State Park in Key Biscayne and Oleta River State Park. The clarity and color that comes through in the 4k makes it worth the cost of the limited edition, for sure.
Zedd and I discussed the film and he noted that it was clear that the actors obviously knew what they were filming was a bit of a cinematic joke, but that they approached it with a lightness and sense of humor that is difficult to find these days, no one was taking themselves too seriously.
I agree, a teacher doing what Lombardo was accused of doing would probably not be the subject of a sexy film these days. Certainly not one with a threesome, nor so much nudity of “teen girls” in a mainstream, big release like this.
Without giving too much away, the film is fast-paced, beautifully filmed, and worth a watch. We are not by any means talking cinematic masterpiece, it’s definitely a fun way to spend an afternoon.
Zedd and I have a rule that if we add a film to the collection that has a theatrical and an extended (director’s, unrated, etc.) edition, that we watch the theatrical cut first. So we are looking forward to watching the “unrated” version later this summer, as this sure as heck feels like a hot, sultry, late summer film.
Meanwhile, after a Memorial Day weekend that included heat indexes of 116 degrees, Zedd and I will continue to Movie On through our own “hibernation period” here in South East Texas, from just about May to November, we really lean on our movie collection as it becomes entirely inhospitable outside. Peel off the air, indeed!
submitted by MrsLadyZedd to 500moviesorbust [link] [comments]
Wikipedia?wprov=sfti1) / IMDb / Official Trailer / Our Collection
We purchased this limited edition 4k on Arrow some time ago and finally brought it out this Memorial Day weekend.
While I know we had seen it a loooong time ago, probably a Blockbuster rental, because I am a huge Neve Campbell fan and have been since Party of Five. It did not really ring too much of a bell as we started to watch.
Roger Ebert described this film as “lurid trash”…”a softcore sex film, a soap opera and a B-grade noir” and he’s not wrong. The setting was absolutely gorgeous. When we first saw the film I had not been to Florida, nor had I put in my 14 years of living in South East Texas, where you can peel the summer air off starting in May all the way through November. The line between the haves and the have-nots is not one you cross, not back in 1998, and not now.
Kelly Van Ryan has everything she could ever want. Suzie Toller is a delinquent. They both go to school where the guidance counselor, handsome and young Sam Lambardo, works. They get into a bit of a mess, the three of them, and what exactly happened, and why it happened, remains unclear.
Detective Ray Duquette and his partner, Gloria Perez investigate the situation and try to figure out who did what to whom. The story twists, turns, and goes so many directions that by the end, you are still wondering if something else will end up coming to light.
The acting was not great, especially on the parts of the supporting cast. It was alternatively soap-opera over dramatic to as wooden as a puppet.
Filmed at Ransom Everglades High School in Coconut Grove, Miami, due to the school's architecture and scenic setting. The film also captured the natural splendor in Bill Baggs Cape Florida State Park in Key Biscayne and Oleta River State Park. The clarity and color that comes through in the 4k makes it worth the cost of the limited edition, for sure.
Zedd and I discussed the film and he noted that it was clear that the actors obviously knew what they were filming was a bit of a cinematic joke, but that they approached it with a lightness and sense of humor that is difficult to find these days, no one was taking themselves too seriously.
I agree, a teacher doing what Lombardo was accused of doing would probably not be the subject of a sexy film these days. Certainly not one with a threesome, nor so much nudity of “teen girls” in a mainstream, big release like this.
Without giving too much away, the film is fast-paced, beautifully filmed, and worth a watch. We are not by any means talking cinematic masterpiece, it’s definitely a fun way to spend an afternoon.
Zedd and I have a rule that if we add a film to the collection that has a theatrical and an extended (director’s, unrated, etc.) edition, that we watch the theatrical cut first. So we are looking forward to watching the “unrated” version later this summer, as this sure as heck feels like a hot, sultry, late summer film.
Meanwhile, after a Memorial Day weekend that included heat indexes of 116 degrees, Zedd and I will continue to Movie On through our own “hibernation period” here in South East Texas, from just about May to November, we really lean on our movie collection as it becomes entirely inhospitable outside. Peel off the air, indeed!
2024.05.29 03:07 TheRealDevonCalvin Batman and Wonder Woman?
So I really like the dynamic between Batman and Wonder Woman and I think it's interesting that the writers decided to make these two a romantic sub plot. Honestly I wish they had done more with it. Anyway I'm wondering if there is any actual comic exploration of this narrative? Like did it come out of nowhere or have Batman and Wonder woman had a romance before in the source material?
submitted by TheRealDevonCalvin to DCAU [link] [comments]
2024.05.29 03:06 alkie90210 I feel so selfish, but am I?
My partner and I (me, 43 and he's 41) have been together 3 years. We're struggling financially.
At the start of our relationship, we made a deal of sorts. I have a daughter from a previous marriage who I'm the primary parent for. I need to figure out how to get her to and from school, how to be sure I'm there for her at night, etc.
I got an entry level job at her school nearly 2 years ago. Since then, the school has been adding onto my plate: I'm running an after school program, I'm writing a curriculum that will be published with our state's educational website. I'm leading a summer educational program this year. I don't make great money, though. I just have a lot of responsibility.
The deal originally was that my partner would make the bulk of our income and I would supplement it however I could. He made $80k when we met. Since then he's been through at least 15 jobs and his resume has become worthless. He is constantly getting fired. He did not have this instability when we met. He'd been at the company we met at for 2 years and he was with his prior company for more than 10. After we moved in together, we resigned from the place that we worked and it's been difficult ever since. He works in retail (as did I earlier), so scheduling is all over the place and every job he has makes him unreliable to replace me as the "parent at home", not that he should be doing it anyway. He can no longer command store manager or executive level positions, he's chasing after shift supervisor roles at this point... and always faring poorly.
I feel like I'm holding up my half. I said I'd get a reasonable job. I might not make $50k like I used to, but I'd do my best as long as my daughter is in school without having to do nights or weekends. Instead I do 44 hours a week at the school. His income has steadily declined and, should he somehow remain at his current employer, I will outearn him by the fall (I'm in line for an 8% raise in August). His income is half of what it was and I can't even rely on it because he gets canned every 2 to 3 months and it takes him 6 weeks to get hired elsewhere.
I don't want to blame him for doing poorly but I'm not sure how to navigate it. We can't do ANYTHING, our credit is shot, our utilities are hanging on by a thread. He now does DoorDash on the side, but it's not real money. It's like $30, half of which goes into the gas tank on a 4 hour shift.
This is an odd position. Anyone been there?
submitted by alkie90210 to gayrelationships [link] [comments]
At the start of our relationship, we made a deal of sorts. I have a daughter from a previous marriage who I'm the primary parent for. I need to figure out how to get her to and from school, how to be sure I'm there for her at night, etc.
I got an entry level job at her school nearly 2 years ago. Since then, the school has been adding onto my plate: I'm running an after school program, I'm writing a curriculum that will be published with our state's educational website. I'm leading a summer educational program this year. I don't make great money, though. I just have a lot of responsibility.
The deal originally was that my partner would make the bulk of our income and I would supplement it however I could. He made $80k when we met. Since then he's been through at least 15 jobs and his resume has become worthless. He is constantly getting fired. He did not have this instability when we met. He'd been at the company we met at for 2 years and he was with his prior company for more than 10. After we moved in together, we resigned from the place that we worked and it's been difficult ever since. He works in retail (as did I earlier), so scheduling is all over the place and every job he has makes him unreliable to replace me as the "parent at home", not that he should be doing it anyway. He can no longer command store manager or executive level positions, he's chasing after shift supervisor roles at this point... and always faring poorly.
I feel like I'm holding up my half. I said I'd get a reasonable job. I might not make $50k like I used to, but I'd do my best as long as my daughter is in school without having to do nights or weekends. Instead I do 44 hours a week at the school. His income has steadily declined and, should he somehow remain at his current employer, I will outearn him by the fall (I'm in line for an 8% raise in August). His income is half of what it was and I can't even rely on it because he gets canned every 2 to 3 months and it takes him 6 weeks to get hired elsewhere.
I don't want to blame him for doing poorly but I'm not sure how to navigate it. We can't do ANYTHING, our credit is shot, our utilities are hanging on by a thread. He now does DoorDash on the side, but it's not real money. It's like $30, half of which goes into the gas tank on a 4 hour shift.
This is an odd position. Anyone been there?
2024.05.29 03:05 EndersGame_Reviewer Review: The Farseer Trilogy by Robin Hobb
Impressions of the Farseer Trilogy (4 stars)
Robin Hobb's "Farseer Trilogy" consists of these three titles:
At the outset, the elements of fantasy seem relatively minor, with the main fantastic elements being The Skill, an ability to communicate silently with others from a distance, and The Wit, an ability to link with the mind of an animal, which Fitz develops with a wolf named Nighteyes. As the stories progress, these elements play an increasingly larger role in the storyline, especially when the dragon beings known as Elderlings need to be roused to join in the battle for The Six Duchies, and the final stages of the last book are especially creative and wonderful.
Political machinations are a significant focus in the early stages, and the plot is often slow moving and somewhat laborious. At times I had to force myself to keep reading, and I found it best to read these books in long sittings so that I didn't lose track of things. Fortunately the pace really picked up in the final book of the series, when all the storylines started coming together. The overall story was concluded with a very satisfying finale, that made up for anything plodding about the earlier stages leading up to it. Some questions are left unanswered, but that's in part because Robin Hobb has left room for other novels that are set in the same world. As the series progresses, it also increases in length, with each book being longer than the previous one, the third novel of the series significantly outsizing the first book.
This series is more tame than some other fantasy, but at times there are sexual references. And while violence and gore are not staple elements of the plot, there are instances where it is present, and gushing blood is graphically described. I'm not sure what to make of the fact that the main characters being as flawed as they are, and at times they are weak and guilty of big mistakes. But this makes them very human, and those who enjoy a level of introspection and depth of character would probably appreciate this, although for me personally it isn't the main thing that I look for in fantasy.
On the whole there is a very clear delineation between characters that are good and that are evil, and characterization is one of the real strengths of this series. The plot populated with many memorable individuals like The Fool, Chade, Burrich, Molly, Kettricken, and many more. They aren't always loveable, and they are often enigmatic, but since we are seeing them through Fitz's eyes, that's exactly how they appear to him as well.
In many respects the setting and world of this series has a medieval feel, but I really appreciated Robin Hobb's fresh approach to the fantasy genre, and the way she worked with concepts like forging, skilling, and The Wit. While I personally tend to prefer novels that are more plot-driven, I did appreciate the strength of her characterization, and the concluding half of the final novel in the series was very satisfying and original, without resorting to a feel-good ending where everything turns out fine.
You do need to be ambitious before starting this series, and have a love for characterization, and patience with a story line that slowly progresses. But if you can last the ride and overlook some blemishes along the way (depending on your personal taste), these books might eventually captivate you. I certainly enjoyed my read.
submitted by EndersGame_Reviewer to Fantasy [link] [comments]
Robin Hobb's "Farseer Trilogy" consists of these three titles:
- Assassin's Apprentice (1995)
- Royal Assassin (1996)
- Assassin's Quest (1997)
At the outset, the elements of fantasy seem relatively minor, with the main fantastic elements being The Skill, an ability to communicate silently with others from a distance, and The Wit, an ability to link with the mind of an animal, which Fitz develops with a wolf named Nighteyes. As the stories progress, these elements play an increasingly larger role in the storyline, especially when the dragon beings known as Elderlings need to be roused to join in the battle for The Six Duchies, and the final stages of the last book are especially creative and wonderful.
Political machinations are a significant focus in the early stages, and the plot is often slow moving and somewhat laborious. At times I had to force myself to keep reading, and I found it best to read these books in long sittings so that I didn't lose track of things. Fortunately the pace really picked up in the final book of the series, when all the storylines started coming together. The overall story was concluded with a very satisfying finale, that made up for anything plodding about the earlier stages leading up to it. Some questions are left unanswered, but that's in part because Robin Hobb has left room for other novels that are set in the same world. As the series progresses, it also increases in length, with each book being longer than the previous one, the third novel of the series significantly outsizing the first book.
This series is more tame than some other fantasy, but at times there are sexual references. And while violence and gore are not staple elements of the plot, there are instances where it is present, and gushing blood is graphically described. I'm not sure what to make of the fact that the main characters being as flawed as they are, and at times they are weak and guilty of big mistakes. But this makes them very human, and those who enjoy a level of introspection and depth of character would probably appreciate this, although for me personally it isn't the main thing that I look for in fantasy.
On the whole there is a very clear delineation between characters that are good and that are evil, and characterization is one of the real strengths of this series. The plot populated with many memorable individuals like The Fool, Chade, Burrich, Molly, Kettricken, and many more. They aren't always loveable, and they are often enigmatic, but since we are seeing them through Fitz's eyes, that's exactly how they appear to him as well.
In many respects the setting and world of this series has a medieval feel, but I really appreciated Robin Hobb's fresh approach to the fantasy genre, and the way she worked with concepts like forging, skilling, and The Wit. While I personally tend to prefer novels that are more plot-driven, I did appreciate the strength of her characterization, and the concluding half of the final novel in the series was very satisfying and original, without resorting to a feel-good ending where everything turns out fine.
You do need to be ambitious before starting this series, and have a love for characterization, and patience with a story line that slowly progresses. But if you can last the ride and overlook some blemishes along the way (depending on your personal taste), these books might eventually captivate you. I certainly enjoyed my read.
2024.05.29 03:05 ERmovingadvice Shop/wood storage
 | When I moved and started setting up this shop the first thing I brought over was a TON of wood. For a year it has lined the shop walls and taken up too much space. Today I organized my firewood shed and organized/moved some of the wood. It opened up a lot of wall space for the primarily metal side of my shop. submitted by ERmovingadvice to woodworking [link] [comments] Last photo is a bunch of wood still in back corner of shop. I only have the middle of the shed available so I need to come up with a plan for using that for some storage. Maybe make some rollable racks? Wood I moved today: white oak, red oak, Myrtle wood (Oregon), thick ass madrone, mahogany, and a few other pieces Yet to move: even thicker slabs of madrone, live edge slabs, maple, Purple Heart, etc. Now to nurse my back with a beer. |