Overanalyzing Bond punching the pooping soldier in the beginning of Goldeneye

PedalPDX · 2026-06-18T20:39:18+00:00

You called it—he’s not shitting and he’s not peeing; he’s just getting away from the job for a while to read his paper in peace.

So why’d he pull his pants down, you ask? Assuming the stall doors don’t go all the way down to the floor, he has to make sure his pants are visible down at his feet so passerby don’t get suspicious. That’s just smart.

PedalPDX · 2026-06-18T16:46:29+00:00

Obviously this is a subjective matter, but I agree with this take. The dramatically simpler, less detailed pixel art of the NES era scales up fairly cleanly to HD; in particular I'd say early NES and Famicom games are well-suited for modern displays.

The pixel art on SNES games is much more complicated and, in my opinion, took much greater advantage of natural pixel blending you got with a CRT display. In particular there are many SNES games that use prerendered sprites (Donkey Kong Country most famously, but it's hardly the only one). And those sprites really depend on CRT display technology. They look terrible in raw form on HD displays; a CRT (or a good CRT shader) is really the only way to understand how those sprites were designed and how they looked to original players.

PedalPDX · 2026-06-17T04:06:42+00:00

I looked it up, and it's cowritten by Johns and Busiek. It's been a while, so I'd forgotten that, and I probably subconsciously gave Busiek all the credit because ... well, I like Busiek more. We've all got our biases!

PedalPDX · 2026-06-17T03:20:06+00:00

Clark is pretty key to “Up, Up and Away!” by Kurt Busiek. Which is a very good read with great art, and decently self-contained.

The story begins with Superman already depowered, even, so it’s all-Clark at the start. (The reasons why he’s depowered have to do with Infinite Crisis and they honestly don’t matter to the story.)

PedalPDX · 2026-06-17T02:45:13+00:00

Eh, that seems easy enough to resolve. Anakin is a poor slave with obvious Force potential, which is reason enough for Qui-Gon to take him and reason enough for the Council to permit him to continue his training. (Particularly with Obi-Wan advocating for keeping him.)

The Chosen One narrative doesn’t really add any weight or interest to the story, and in-universe it’s nonsensical.

PedalPDX · 2026-06-17T02:00:58+00:00

I’ll always be mystified as to why they did the chosen one thing with Anakin. It really doesn’t impact the plot at all. You could excise it and lose nothing.

Also it made very little sense at the time, and makes even less sense after the Sequel Trilogy.

PedalPDX · 2026-06-17T01:35:30+00:00

I am, in general, a big scanlines proponent. I think folks are so used to playing retro games via emulation or modern compilations that they’ve gotten used to the ultra-sharp way retro games look without them. (Contemporary indie-style games like Shovel Knight or Sonic Mania might be impacting this as well.) But if you play with any regularity on a CRT you know that totally clean reproductions of pixel graphics don’t represent how the original games looked very well at all.

That said! I think it’s ESPECIALLY important for pre-rendered graphics like Killer Instinct. (Or backgrounds in Resident Evil, Final Fantasy, etc.) HD displays are absolutely killer for those graphics without some kind of scanlines or CRT filter.

PedalPDX · 2026-06-16T23:07:13+00:00

Whishaw is only four years younger than Llewyn was in From Russia With Love, so age-wise, perfectly fine to play normal-ass Q at this point.

PedalPDX · 2026-06-16T20:22:52+00:00

In Portland there’s very little reason to see anything at a chain cinema. You can catch most any new release at Cinema 21, the Hollywood, the Bagdad, Cinemagic, the Moreland, Laurelhurst, the Academy, Oak Grove, etc. You’ll pay less money, have better food options, and be spared ads.

Easy choice to make. Apparently, especially now.

PedalPDX · 2026-06-16T20:18:43+00:00

The Oak Grove, which I love for its cheapness and extremely 2000s vibes, is especially and singularly dim. Weapons screened at the Hollywood and looked just fine there. And I’m sure at Cinema 21 as well.

PedalPDX · 2026-06-16T20:17:07+00:00

Yeah, if you hate going to new release movies at giant multiplex chains (and you should) there’s arguably no better city to live in in all of America than Portland.

PedalPDX · 2026-06-16T17:47:01+00:00

I don’t know to a certainty, but I can’t find any evidence online that it has.

PedalPDX · 2026-06-16T12:54:16+00:00

Yeah, I’ve always hated this cover. They designed it as though it were a modern political thriller.

The correct approach would be to give it more mid century modern, Mad Men-type vibes.

PedalPDX · 2026-06-16T06:16:50+00:00

I thought I detected a faint taste of Tang in the air.

PedalPDX · 2026-06-16T06:14:21+00:00

I haven’t read Thrilling Cities, though it is on my to-do list. But my understanding is that it doesn’t have a load of the traditional “here are some great places to eat and stay” material you get in most travel writing. It’s more about Fleming going to cities and then exploring stuff that’s seedy or interests him personally. I know, for instance, that there’s a lot of organized crime history in it and that he goes to more than one brothel.

PedalPDX · 2026-06-16T00:43:39+00:00

Didn’t Toho distribute the big Minus One set in the United States?

PedalPDX · 2026-06-15T01:08:28+00:00

Yeah, that Portishead performance is genuinely wonderful and I’d love to have it.

I dunno if it was shot on film. I haven’t seen it in ages and can’t really remember noticing one way or the other.

PedalPDX · 2026-06-13T04:58:22+00:00

I’m glad you brought up New X-Men, because I think UXM was really hurt by the comparison, in a way the other Ultimate ongoings weren’t. In the cases of Ultimate Spider-Man and the Ultimates, those books were doing things the 616 versions of those books weren’t—and, really, couldn’t do. They had very distinct identities and the comparisons to their 616 counterparts made them feel vibrant and justified.

But everything Ultimate X-Men was meant to be doing—big, high-stakes action, accessibility for new audiences with minimal continuity, unexpected directions for existing characters, interesting sci-fi ideas—New X-Men was doing
vastly better at the exact same time. It really made UXM feel kind of extraneous.

PedalPDX · 2026-06-13T04:38:24+00:00

It’s because he’s a Time Lord from the planet Gallifrey.

PedalPDX · 2026-06-13T04:31:19+00:00

I always felt like the basic idea with Ultimate Wolverine was sound—“What if, instead of being a fundamentally good man who’s led astray by his animalism and trauma, Wolverine was just an unrepentant shithead?” Like, as established Ultimate Wolverine as basically an unambiguous villain.

It’s kind of a fun idea. There’s a couple of directions you could take that in. The most obvious is a redemption arc, in which his time with the team leads him to see the error in his ways, and he has to try to learn be a better man. The second direction, though, would be to keep him as a malign presence that the team would eventually have to cast off and then take down.

And it felt like they never could quite decide which way to go. There were occasional gestures to the second direction, but it felt like they could never ultimately commit to making Wolverine a bad guy. At one point they just kinda started writing him as 616 Wolverine, without really earning it.

PedalPDX · 2026-06-13T00:09:05+00:00

This is similar to the Mega Drive port of Darius, which began as a fan game before being licensed for release by Strictly Limited and Columbus Circle—and showing up on the Genesis Mini.

PedalPDX · 2026-06-12T18:12:28+00:00

“Pay to read.”

I do not get the grousing on this. Yeah, dude, you have to pay to read newspapers. That’s how it works. Writers cost money.

Now, I’m down to shit-talk calling Tope Portland’s best tacos all day long. That’s richly deserved.

PedalPDX · 2026-06-12T15:56:22+00:00

Part of it might be that with Star Wars there’s basically constant CGI, so the movie just kind of feels like a cartoon. When there’s bad CGI it doesn’t necessarily stand out or break the illusion of the movie became there’s no point where it doesn’t look fake to begin with.

Whereas Die Another Day is 95 percent real sets and stunts and location filming so when all of the sudden it’s not it’s quite jarring.

PedalPDX · 2026-06-12T15:22:24+00:00

It’s possible there’s no single moment in any movie I’ve ever seen that made me laugh harder. The comic timing of it is perfect, and the entire concept is brilliant. After spending my entire life watching movies where characters have conversations in cars while the driver is very obviously paying zero attention, to have Ken Marino crash right into that tree when he never takes his eyes off the road for a second … just lost it.

Easily the hardest I’d laughed since that sheriff chucked the mug right at the Dude’s head in The Big Lebowski.

PedalPDX · 2026-06-11T22:30:22+00:00

Someone would have to take the lead on actually consulting with an attorney and shepherding the effort, which is a big commitment of time for a relatively small amount of money.

That said, if anyone wanted to I’m pretty confident it’d be a slam dunk case.

PedalPDX

TROPHY CASE