Interesting sig, and oddly appropriate for this discussion.

But I do like Calvin's version better:

"If life gives you a lemon, I say wing it right back and add some lemons of your own!"

Mmm. This is a tasty burger!

Suddenly it makes sense why so much animal cruelty exists. Apparently many people are stupid enough to think animals aren't intelligent.

I strongly suspect in these cases, the animals may actually be more intelligent than their keepers.

Wow. They're losing subs even faster than I thought they would.

That's already happened, and not just once.

That's why Blizzard has done nothing but go downhill the last decade, why they haven't released anything actually new, and why even their rehashes range from not that good to utter shite.

The first time it happened was while WoW was still in development. Yes, even as good as it was, WoW could have been better. That first time around, the people who left started ArenaNet. And despite having significantly less development time, the first Guild Wars was more polished than WoW ever was. Not sure where the rest of the top devs they lost have gone.

All true, except they started going downhill even before the merger. They did this to themselves. Activision may have accelerated it, but Blizzard certainly started their own downfall.

You realize that according to the list you just posted, the only good game Blizzard has released in 9 years is Starcraft 2.. right?

And from what I've read, most SC2 players would agree that it's not as good as the first one. Most veteran WoW players would agree that WoW's done nothing but get worse since Vanilla or TBC at the latest.

It's not a good track record for Blizzard in recent history, and their latest "milestone" has been one of their worst.

And which name was that?

Nighttime... daytime! Nighttime... daytime!

Completely agree. I'm one of the few people I know of that actually dislikes the LotR movies. I dislike The Hobbit movie even more.

There are reasons the soda may have been sub-par, but I suggest you re-read the GP post. He called the popcorn sub-par, but not the soda.

Yes, the late 90's were quite good. It's the last 5-10 years that have been awful. I can't name a single movie from the last 5 years that I'll still be talking about 15 years from now, like I do any of the ones you just listed.

I get your point, rose-collored glasses, etc. But I disagree. What really woke me up to how badly new movies have been sucking overall the last 5-8 years was rewatching the last two movies of the Matrix trilogy. I distinctly recall thinking them utter garbage the first time I watched them, about 10 years ago. Recently though when I rewatched them, they actually seemed pretty good. Then I realized that's because almost everything new I've seen recently is so awful. I can't think of a single new movie from the last 5 years that will stand the test of time like classic movies do.

I'd like to live like that too. Reality is, it's not possible for everyone to make a living doing exactly what they love. I, for example, love playing video games and tabletop games. As do hundreds of millions of other people on the earth. It may be possible for a very small percentage of us to make money by playing video games and/or tabletop games. For the rest of us, we actually have to get a job doing something we may not necessarily love. That's life. You don't get a free pass just because you work in entertainment.

Whether he's assuming that or not is completely irrelevant.

The correct assumption to make is that music artists are making music because they like to make music, not primarily to make money. Art is something that almost always suffers when money is the primary motivating factor. Not to mention the fact that music really is a pretty basic and easy art, (well, at least the stuff that's currently popular) and there's guaranteed to be a never-ending new supply for the foreseeable future.

We all have things that we spend a lot of time on because we like to do them, and I'm sure we'd all like to keep making *any* amount of money for posterity for the time invested. But that's not how reality works.

So GP is right. They're making as much as $5,000 a year for the simple act of uploading their music to Spotify. They should be pretty happy with that.

It takes exactly as much time, effort, and money as you want to put into it. And putting more of any of those things into it doesn't necessarily make it better. Most of the expensive contemporary pop music sounds like shit, and is easily surpassed by thousands of tracks indie artists give away for free.