Heretic

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On Jun 17, 2019:

  • Heretic replied to "Explain Your Avatar" at 05:00 pm

  • Back when the Pirates were relevant in the mid-2010s, Andrew McCutchen was a big part of that and Starling Marte was a star in the making. Currently, Cutch is with the Phillies and out for the year with an ACL injury and Marte has pretty much settled into "good but not great", but I'm a lazy, lazy man who hasn't bothered to change it. Maybe I will someday, but today is not that day. And tomorrow won't be, either.

    Which takes us to Wednesday — the day EVERYTHING always gets done on this site.

On Jun 15, 2019:

  • Heretic replied to "GOAT adult cartoon series" at 11:58 am

  • I grew up on the classic Simpsons, loving the first 10-11 seasons and then tolerating it for 4-5 more before gradually stopping watching it. So I'd put them #1 and South Park at #2. Really dug SP, but I don't think any show of that sort had that "make sure I see it" aspect of the Simpsons. Well, really seasons 3-to-11 or so, as the first two just seemed to be like regular shows with cartoon characters and they really found their zaniness in the third season, at least with consistency.

On Jun 14, 2019:

  • Heretic replied to "2020 Presidential Election thread" at 01:02 pm
  • posted by CenterBHSFan

    Also, Grandpa Commie said that he thinks people would be "delighted" to pay more taxes.

    wat

    Who?! Who would be delighted to pay more taxes? 

    If I know one thing, it's that my hand is not raised at this point in time.

On Jun 13, 2019:

  • Heretic replied to "Most Hated Team(s)" at 12:53 pm
  • posted by like_that

    I'm losing my fastball.  

    Yeah, both that and missing out on how Classy's, uh, "argument?" in that post comes down to "I personally don't do that stuff, but people in your fanbase do, so I'm claiming moral superiority over the entire fanbase!!!" which is right up there with the worst arguments in site history.

    I mean, I personally don't feel the urge to start fights with fans of other teams or use derogatory (ie: racial, sexual, etc.) terms to describe other fans or athletes on their teams, but there are fans in every fanbase that do so, including my own, so it'd be pure weaksauce to criticize another team's fans based solely on what I would or wouldn't do.

On Jun 11, 2019:

  • Heretic replied to "Most Hated Team(s)" at 06:35 pm

  • Guess I should add Cowboys and Lakers to my list, simply for being those media darling teams that get tons of love regardless of how mediocre they've been over the past forever. To use Dallas as an example, if any of our NFL teams had the exact same seasons on a win-loss level as they've had, it's a guarantee that we wouldn't be catching our team either in prime time or the 4 p.m. national slot virtually every single week. But (a) they do and (b) it's likely one of their former players will be in the booth announcing the game because when a team gets pimped to the country every fucking year, any remotely good player becomes the sort of household name that networks want serving as their color guy, assuming they have any aptitude for that sort of on-the-fly speaking.

    Meanwhile, in reality, both teams are a former great in their field that's now not much more than a relic propped up by networks to disguise the fact they're just another team that doesn't stand out from the pack in any way other than coverage (or ownership/management blundering, as both of them have been more prolific than most in that front in recent years, with a senile drunk running everything with the Cowboys and the Lakers just being a hilarious shitshow that's amazingly fun to pay attention to now because you don't know what wacky fuck-up is coming up next).

  • Heretic replied to "David Ortiz Shot During Attempted Robbery" at 06:22 pm
  • posted by Ironman92

    Some talk about Ortiz having an affair with a drug lord’s gf

    I'd say "BALLIN'!!!!" to this, but, uh, yeah, the whole "getting shot" thing kind of takes away from the accomplishment, if true.

  • Heretic replied to "Are our days numbered?" at 04:08 pm

  • I'll miss how everyone properly uses the quote feature without ever messing up.

  • Heretic replied to "Most Hated Team(s)" at 03:06 pm

  • I pretty much hate Boston teams in about everything. The definition of the sort of obnoxious fan alternating between over-the-top praise of their teams and over-the-top faux-outrage whenever ANYONE doesn't share their feelings. As a Steeler fan, the Pats are the most hated because of the playoff losses over the years, but I just hate all of them. They've replaced New York fans as most obnoxious for me. Mainly because with about every NY franchise other than the Yankees ranging from mediocre to "what a fucking trainwreck", a good percentage of them have fallen into that self-hating "I'm a fan, but..." rut that I like seeing them in.

    With Boston out of the way....

    MLB: Cubs, Cardinals

    NFL: Ravens (Bengals were here also, but now that they've fallen off from thinking they're good because they're actually reaching the lofty grounds of "first round of playoffs" to accepting they're pretty much trash, they're almost impossible to even notice).

    NHL: Capitols (repeated seasons of really intense playoff series with the winner usually going on to win it all does create good hate!)

    NBA: N/A -- don't care enough to really "love" or "hate" any team, although I agree with the obnoxious nature of Golden State. But I think for me, it's more a thing where I hate certain players (like Harden) due to their play style and so I tend to dislike the teams they play for, but then swing to another emotion when they're gone. Like with Houston, I dislike them now because of Harden, but in the 90s, I liked them because I was a Hakeem fan.

    College: Clemson (something about Dabo really makes me want to start punching stuff). Michigan's fallen to be kind of like where the Browns have been with me for a few years, where it's not worth the energy to hate them because the rivalry success hasn't been there for some time, but with both, things can change with 1-2 games going the wrong way at the wrong time. I find that the teams I tend to save the hate for are rivals (either pure rivals or recent-time playoff rivals) who've had success whomever I'm cheering for. But Michigan still is pretty easy to dislike due to the combination of being a quality team most years and Harbaugh pretty regularly giving off this weird asshole sort of vibe.

On Jun 7, 2019:

On May 27, 2019:

On May 26, 2019:

  • Heretic replied to "2019 Pittsburgh Pirates --- everyone else in the division is in drive, we're in neutral" at 10:47 am

  • Life as a Pirates fan:

    1. The team got a rare national TV game yesterday on Fox against the Dodgers. I was happy.

    2. The game was rain-delayed for two hours, so Fox moved to another game — with the fucking "always on TV" Cardinals against the Braves.

    3. When the delay ended, Fox just stayed with that game until it ended and then quickly went to their 10 p.m. news.

    4. Meanwhile, the team actually made Ryu look human, but couldn't really capitalize since they were leaving guys on base like crazy in the early innings. And then their starting pitcher imploded in the fifth and a 2-2 tie wound up a 7-2 loss.

    In short, a let-down in every way possible. And there I was, after a long week of work, actually happy to be at home on Saturday to watch the damn game, lol.

  • Heretic replied to "Rays vs Tribe (series thread)" at 10:43 am
  • posted by vball10set

    Has there ever been anyone more prone to hyperbole than Underwood? If you were only listening to him and not watching the game, you'd think every damn ball hit to the outfield was going yard-lol

    Lol, I've noticed that before. He'll get his super-excited voice on, yelling that "IT'S GOING BACK!!!" and then it'll be this routine fly ball that isn't even that close to the warning track.

  • Heretic replied to "NBA '18/'19 Season" at 10:41 am
  • posted by friendfromlowry

    I won’t enjoy Golden State winning the title but on the plus side maybe Drake will shut the fuck up

    Drake's presence in the finals has set the stage to have me surprisingly wanting Golden State to win. This is a weird feeling.

On May 25, 2019:

  • Heretic replied to "2019 Pittsburgh Pirates --- everyone else in the division is in drive, we're in neutral" at 11:32 am

  • Due to having injury issues with the starting pitching and no fucking depth (Keller is one of the team's top prospects, but has only started to get success at AAA; Brubaker is probably the current best AAA pitcher, but I think has been out injured for a bit; the rest at that level are more or less organizational depth or not ready for the bigs), the team has been going with bullpen games.

    The first one worked out well. The opener went two shutout innings and the rest of the pen followed suit for a good win. Since then, they did two bullpen games over the past week and the openers combined for 8 runs in 1 inning, including shitty Feliz' shitty 1/3 inning/5 run outing yesterday. Uhhhhh...back to the drawing board?

On May 22, 2019:

  • Heretic replied to "What's outraging you today?" at 10:54 am

  • I'm used to seeing people post something in the wrong thread, particularly on the Pro Sports forum, but negging something due to thinking you were on a different thread than you actually were might be a first-time thing!

    Damn, good thing OTrap wasn't more pro-active or virtually every single post on every single page of this one might have a neg (or new neg) attached to it!

On May 21, 2019:

  • Heretic replied to "Game of Thrones Final Season Discussion Thread" at 08:58 pm

  • Overall, I wouldn't say the final episode sucked and that the petition fans are likely big ol' bitches whenever anything entertainment-related doesn't completely cater to their whims.

    I would say that the final episode would likely be more satisfying in a situation where you're binging the show than in a situation where you're watching one episode at a time, week by week, like we were all doing with the final season. I mean, when you think about it, the first half of the show was basically the conclusion to last week's episode with the immediate aftermath of Dany going Mad Queen playing out AND THEN the second half of it was basically all the surviving main characters (and a couple throw-ins) discussing what needs to be done going forward.

    So, you could say that as an 80ish-minute episode of an overall great show, it was kind of anticlimactic because the big event happened at roughly the midway point and everything afterwards was just talking where any potential situation was defused with no tension (after committing all sorts of war crimes, Gray Worm and Unsullied leave peacefully after Jon is exiled north and Tyrion, uh, gets his Hand position back under the new king AND Bronn simply shows up having gotten everything he ever wanted and more. As a single stand-alone episode of a show, it started out explosive and finished in a somewhat dull manner, but as the conclusion of a rare show I actually got invested in, I'd say it was satisfying. It just took me a little while to come to that conclusion because it was an episode that ended slowly WITHOUT setting up another season, as previous seasons' final episodes (which often were far slower and talky than the action-packed next-to-last were) did.

On May 18, 2019:

On May 17, 2019:

  • Heretic replied to "2020 Presidential Election thread" at 04:23 pm

  • Don't forget: 6. Actually be able to hold your own against him in public speaking.

    Dude tore through everyone because he had no issues with mocking, belittling and so on; while they all seemed confused as hell as to how they should react, allowing him to look like the tough, decisive candidate. He'd go on rampages while Cruz, Bush, Rubio, Hillary, etc. just had this deer in the headlights look and only could respond in lame-ass ways, like Hillary's commercial broadcasting shit Trump had said while showing small kids looking shocked.

  • Heretic replied to "Game of Thrones Final Season Discussion Thread" at 03:02 pm
  • posted by gut

    Might be why it was so important to remove his rings.  Though presumably the kitchen girl already has the poison, and she might still carry out that plot even though Varys is dead (he did give her that big speech about "the greater the risk, the greater the reward").

    Or maybe Bran wargs into Drogon, does a barrel roll, and Dany falls to her death.

    Speaking of Varys, I was kind of thinking about your post from after the fourth episode where you mentioned the focus on Missandei at the end. To me that was one of those things, where as a pure narrative, the focus on her made sense (one of Dany's closest people getting slaughtered after she already lost Jorah and a dragon, adding to her "goin' crazy" descent), but as pure TV, it fell kind of short because on air, Dany/Missandei really didn't share a ton of screen time. Just going off the top of my head, the only memorable scene with the two was probably the first one, where Missandei was being all diplomatic to Dany while translating all the insulting dialogue that Unsullied master was dishing out. But overall, I'd say what I remember her most for were (1) the hilariously awkward joke-telling scene with her, Grey Worm and Tyrion and (2) her and Grey Worm getting closer.

    And I think the whole "Varys betraying Dany" is kind of the same thing, except even more shaky when it comes to what we watched.

    First, the sixth season ended with Varys recruiting Olenna Tyrell (old women whose entire family was wiped out by Cersei and the city's Wildfire stock) and the Sand Snakes (crazy bitches looking to kill people because Oberyn got killed in a fucking fair fight to the death). He specifically alluded to how they should join with Dany because of vengeance (with the words "Fire and Blood").

    And then, other than maybe killing the Tarlys due to not bending the knee, Dany didn't really do anything overly Mad Queen-like in the seventh season and fought with the North against the Army of the Dead, losing a dragon and a trusted advisor/friend in the process AND THEN lost another dragon and trusted advisor/friend the instant they started moving on Kings Landing.

    And suddenly, Varys is all like, "We gotta push this chick out because she WANTS power and Jon Snow doesn't, so that means he's a better choice!". Dude's supposed to be this super-clever behind-the-scenes chessmaster and he wound up coming off like this emotionally clumsy dolt who switches sides on the spur of the moment for flimsy reasons.

    Kind of like how the Missandrei/Dany relationship got shorted a bit over the duration of the show, I think Varys' misgivings and how they grew about Dany also grew, as he went from on her side to wanting her dead seemingly over the course of days.