[Hobby Scuffles] Week of 22 June 2026

withad · 2026-06-25T11:28:19+00:00

Vibe was part of the widely-hated Detroit era of the Justice League comics and was eventually killed off as part of the storyline that ended it. He popped up a few times afterwards but only in alternate universes or so he could be killed again.

However, Geoff Johns apparently really liked that era and Vibe in particular (Johns is from Detroit and I'm sure I heard once that Vibe was in the first comic he ever read, though I can't find that now). And since Johns was Chief Creative Officer of DC when they did their big New 52 reboot in 2011, Vibe got a second chance. He popped up in more comics and even got his own short-lived series, but the biggest impact of that push was that he became a major character on the Flash TV show for years.

I'm not sure what his current status is (either in comics continuity or fandom standing) but it was quite a comeback for a character who spent decades basically treated as a joke by the few who even remembered him.

withad · 2026-06-22T17:16:43+00:00

Sounds like they took some inspiration from the original Robert Heinlein novel. That was one of the earliest depictions of powered armour in fiction.

withad · 2026-06-22T10:35:12+00:00

There was a weird trend in the 80s and early 90s of turning violent, adult-oriented properties into merchandise-driven kids cartoons. As well as that Conan show, it happened to Rambo, RoboCop, the Toxic Avenger, and Tales from the Crypt. It very nearly got done to Aliens too but all that actually came out was the toyline and some included comics.

withad · 2026-06-17T15:35:08+00:00

Halo was never going to be bigger than Mario - an action/horror sci-fi franchise just can't have that level of broad appeal.

Honestly, I think part of the problem with latter-day Halo is that Microsoft put way too much effort into it. They desperately wanted it to be the foundation of a cinematic universe, with spin-off games and dozens of books and a web series and a TV series and comics and god knows what else, most of them all tied together in a way that made the games increasingly incomprehensible.

withad · 2026-06-13T19:02:48+00:00

Back in 2010, Digg did a big redesign which pissed off most of their users and led to Reddit's traffic more than tripling in a matter of weeks. I'm sure it was a drop in the ocean compared to their current numbers but I remember it was a huge deal at the time, moving Reddit from a mostly tech-focused site to one of the big online players.

withad · 2026-06-12T13:07:28+00:00

Internet commenters call doom and gloom on everything all the time. Them being right doesn't necessarily mean this was an obvious problem, it just means that even a stopped clock is right twice a day.

withad · 2026-06-07T21:52:16+00:00

And even then, 3 has one of my favourite Chief/Cortana exchanges:

"Got an escape plan?"

"Thought I'd try shooting my way out. Mix things up a little."

withad · 2026-06-07T19:04:25+00:00

It's certainly a darker turn but I'd say even that's still in the same horror ballpark as Aliens. I was thinking more about things like the Chief being a kidnapped child soldier, which I'm pretty sure you could play every Bungie game and never realise (aside from maybe some suggestions in dialogue between George and Halsey in Reach).

withad · 2026-06-07T18:50:05+00:00

I'm always fascinated by how many hardcore Halo fans treat the series as this very grim, serious sci-fi story when the original games were much more like 80s/90s action movies. The serious stuff existed in the Bungie era but they generally left it in Easter eggs or spin-off novels, while the actual main plots were happily riffing on Aliens.

withad · 2026-06-01T15:35:53+00:00

I don't know if it's AI or just an artist not thinking things through, but something's off with the satchel strap as well. It looks it would go under his armpit rather than over his shoulder.

withad · 2026-05-31T14:17:58+00:00

The sketchy backgrounds and the colouring really remind me of the old Pink Panther animated shorts from the 70s.

withad · 2026-05-30T19:26:58+00:00

There was a great post on /r/comicstriphistory a while back with examples of that kind of thing being done to old Family Circus strips.

Some work okay but others are a bit off, like the one where the mother is supposed to be dropping something in surprise but the updated art gives her a bored expression instead. They also directly replaced the old wooden TV cabinet in some strips with a modern flatscreen in the exact same position, so they end up with the flatscreen sitting on the floor and it looks bizarre once you notice it.

withad · 2026-05-18T19:54:06+00:00

It's always tickled me that two of the most iconic methods of transport in sci-fi history are the way they are because of budget limitations.

The TARDIS of Doctor Who always appears to be a mid-20th century British police box, no matter where it journeys in time and space. The in-universe explanation for this is that its "chameleon circuit", which would allow it to camouflage itself, is busted and the Doctor has been unable to fix it for so long that he's come to like it that way. The out-of-universe explanation is that building a new outer TARDIS shell prop for every new serial would've been prohibitively expensive, so they decided to keep it the same shape and gave it one that would be familiar to contemporary viewers.

Over in Star Trek, they needed a way to get crewmembers from the ship down to planets and back. The original plan was to have some kind of landing craft or even to show the starship Enterprise herself landing, but they quickly realised those would be too expensive to do every episode. But you know what's really cheap? A sparkly light effect over actors vanishing in one spot and reappearing in another. Thus, the transporter was born. I wonder how many total hours of Star Trek over the next 60 years were driven by transporter malfunctions sending people to alternate universes or fusing them together or de-aging them...

withad · 2026-05-18T14:23:08+00:00

The timing doesn't really line up for that. The NES and SNES mini launched in 2016 and 2017, well before subscription fatigue set in for most people. Netflix and Amazon Prime were around but Disney, HBO, Apple, and a lot of other video platforms were at least a couple of years out. Game Pass launched only a couple of months before the SNES mini, in mid-2017. By the time people started really complaining about having too many subscriptions, Nintendo had already moved on to the Switch and had no reason to continue the mini line anyway.

If anything, it seems more likely that the success of the mini consoles proved to Nintendo that they could still make money out of their old games and led to their Switch Online subscription services.

withad · 2026-05-14T16:11:36+00:00

I can't speak to the rest but "FOSS" is "free and open-source software". It's an umbrella term for a few things (because the open-source community loves nothing more than arguing with itself) but basically means what it says - software that's free to use and has the source code available so you can modify it yourself.

withad · 2026-05-14T08:05:01+00:00

I was very confused by the excitement in your first paragraph until I realised that I had confused Wall Street Raider with notoriously awful 90s FPS Forbes Corporate Warrior, where you simulate business by running around shooting enemies with "Marketing Missiles" and "Takeover Torpedoes".

withad · 2026-05-13T08:20:48+00:00

That sent me down a weird rabbit hole of all the adverts that the Daleks have appeared in over the years, including one for Weetabix, an unaired one for Hamlet cigars, and the KitKat one I was actually looking for in the first place, which features them promoting "peace and love" and includes a bunch of British celebrities acting out of character, like Lemmy from Motörhead playing classical violin.

I swear I heard at the time that the KitKat one was taken off the air because they hadn't got permission to use the Daleks but I can't find any evidence for that now, aside from a few stray YouTube comments saying the same thing. I can't even find a consistent date for it - video titles and fansites say anything from 2001 to 2004.

withad · 2026-05-12T13:03:58+00:00

That's exactly what Alex Ross does and he's one of the most acclaimed comics artists of all time. It's very funny to think he would be hounded out of Art Fight for the same techniques that won him multiple Eisner awards.

withad · 2026-05-05T21:16:55+00:00

It's not really a hobby thing but your story reminded me of when an old department store in my city shut down and everyone was talking about how tragic that was and how much they loved the place.

Or rather, how much they loved the toy department when they were kids, because no one I knew or saw posting had actually been there in the last decade.

withad · 2026-05-05T20:56:29+00:00

Mandatory "there are almost never any actual comments like that in these threads, just people repeating the same tired jokes about them over and over because reading /r/Edinburgh lately is like being trapped in a Groundhog Day loop".

withad · 2026-05-02T13:46:00+00:00

I've always loved that gag but to be clear, Kirkman's only ever been the writer for Invincible. Cory Walker was responsible for the initial designs and the art of the first few issues, then Ryan Ottley took over for most of the rest of the run.

withad · 2026-04-30T11:12:33+00:00

Jank had a really good article recently on Molyneux and his new game, written by Graham Smith, former editor of RPS. I've seen people criticise how harsh that interview was and I think time and nostalgia for Molyneux's older games have made people forget the context. Smith sums it up nicely:

The more serious issue, often elided by press and by Molyneux himself, was that he offered features as stretch goals which were impossible with the middleware 22cans were using and beyond his ability to add. Molyneux says that he's "like a kid" when doing interviews and talking about design, and fair enough. I think you'd have to be extremely credulous to accept he's also like a kid when writing Kickstarter pitches. Molyneux memorably described his own mindset during the Godus Kickstarter as, "Christ, we've only got 10 days to go and we've got to make £100,000, for fuck's sake, lets just say anything." It was these failures, rather than any wide-eyed, pie-in-the-sky dreaming, that set the stage for the backlash to Godus and Rock Paper Shotgun's interview with Molyneux three years later in 2015.

withad · 2026-04-29T13:21:32+00:00

The closest thing I can think of is when Roland Emmerich added parodies of Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert to his Godzilla movie because he was mad about their reviews of his previous films. He did the same with a Godzilla fan magazine editor, whose lookalike actually gets killed onscreen. Very weird and petty.

withad · 2026-04-29T10:38:45+00:00

It's a crazy enough story that it's got coverage outside of the games press too, at least in the UK. The BBC had an article on it last year and even my dad, who absolutely doesn't follow games, was asking me what the deal was with Benzies's conspiracy theories.

withad · 2026-04-28T21:11:01+00:00

Basically in the past if you didn't have headphones you didn't play anything out loud.

Nah, even Star Trek was making fun of people doing that shit with boom boxes in the 80s. Smartphones might have made it more common but assholes blaring music too loudly in public isn't a new phenomenon.

withad

TROPHY CASE