Dreamcast 53: Ode to an Overhaul

In Podcasts by Rice Cube80 Comments

Berselius joined me tonight to talk some Cubs free agency (or at least we fantasized about spending all the Ricketts’ money) and we also built a relatively realistic dream team should Jed Hoyer remember how to be aggressive in building a good team we actually want to watch. Hopefully some signings happen soon after the Friday nontender deadline, lest the fans riot come Cubs Convention time.

If you have a moment, please rate this thing on Apple Podcasts.

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  2. Perkins

    dmick89:
    Perkins,

    I haven’t seen any SW since whatever the first prequel was called. So when I kept hearing about how great Andor was I asked manu if it’s something someone like me would get. Last thing I wanted to do was waste my time on something. I’m sure there’s a few things I’ve missed, but I love it. IMO it’s the best thing Disney has done in a long time.

    I’d also recommend checking out Rogue One – other than pacing, it shares many of Andor’s excellent qualities (e.g., morally grey good guys, focusing on regular people instead of Force sensitives) and takes place immediately before A New Hope. It’s my second favorite SW film after Empire Strikes Back. Also Cassian Andor is in it.

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  7. Author
    Rice Cube

    For the TL;DR (or didn’t listen) crowd, the Dream Team berselius and I came up with while drunk on power and money that wasn’t ours:

    1B – Abreu / Mervis
    2B – Nico Hoerner
    3B – Wisdom / Drury (?)
    SS – Correa / Turner
    C – Narvaez-Vazquez (1) Yan Gomes (2)
    LF – Happ
    CF – Bellinger/Kiermaier
    RF – Suzuki

    P Rodon/Verlander, Senga, Stroman, Steele, Wesneski, Hendricks
    RP In-house

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  8. Author
    Rice Cube

    Rice Cube:
    For the TL;DR (or didn’t listen) crowd, the Dream Team berselius and I came up with while drunk on power and money that wasn’t ours:

    1B – Abreu / Mervis
    2B – Nico Hoerner
    3B – Wisdom / Drury (?)
    SS – Correa / Turner
    C– Narvaez-Vazquez (1) Yan Gomes (2)
    LF – Happ
    CF – Bellinger/Kiermaier
    RF – Suzuki

    P Rodon/Verlander, Senga, Stroman, Steele, Wesneski, Hendricks
    RPIn-house

    I think we neglected to say this was more of an “I hope this is what Opening Day looks like” lineup because things might happen in trade/internal candidates emerging, but it’s a start.

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  9. berselius

    Rice Cube:
    Perkins,

    Rogue One is super well done and superior to any of the sequel trilogy

    Rogue One is definitely the best of the Disney era movies. I’ll still cape for TFA, but the rest of the new movies can die a slow death. I can respect what Rian Johnson *tried* to do with Last Jedi, but the movie was an unqualified mess.

    I love that most of the complaints about TFA was that it was too similar to New Hope. As if being compared to another great movie is a mark against you (dying laughing), especially after the mess that was the prequel trilogy.

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  10. berselius

    Perkins: o when I kept hearing about how great Andor was I asked manu if it’s something someone like me would get.

    Given how in the tank Mish was/is about GoT I would have got a second opinion (dying laughing). I regret talking up the books to everyone when the show first came out.

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  12. Wenningtons Gorilla Cock

    Rice Cube:
    For the TL;DR (or didn’t listen) crowd, the Dream Team berselius and I came up with while drunk on power and money that wasn’t ours:

    1B – Abreu / Mervis
    2B – Nico Hoerner
    3B – Wisdom / Drury (?)
    SS – Correa / Turner
    C– Narvaez-Vazquez (1) Yan Gomes (2)
    LF – Happ
    CF – Bellinger/Kiermaier
    RF – Suzuki

    P Rodon/Verlander, Senga, Stroman, Steele, Wesneski, Hendricks
    RPIn-house

    That’s one hell of a SS platoon (dying laughing)

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  16. berselius

    Rice Cube:
    Wenningtons Gorilla Cock,

    We were gonna move one of them to 3B because we weren’t keen on just using Patrick Wisdom despite how handsome and cool he is

    Maybe one of the rule changes that the Cubs snuck in for next year was to add an extra roster spot for a DH, i.e. Designated Handsome. He can mug for the cameras and stay away from the field of play (dying laughing).

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  21. Perkins

    berselius: Rogue One is definitely the best of the Disney era movies. I’ll still cape for TFA, but the rest of the new movies can die a slow death. I can respect what Rian Johnson *tried* to do with Last Jedi, but the movie was an unqualified mess.

    I love that most of the complaints about TFA was that it was too similar to New Hope. As if being compared to another great movie is a mark against you (dying laughing), especially after the mess that was the prequel trilogy.

    See I actually liked TLJ and have a fair amount of thoughts on it. On the whole I feel it’s the only one of the ST worth seeing more than once, though I have a lot of pointed feedback on how it could have told a tighter and more effective story.

    TFA was like eating a Cinnabon as an adult: a fun wave of initial nostalgia, followed by hollowness and regret. I think the complaints were less that it aped ANH than that it took no risks and recreated most of the plot. My initial reactions leaving the theater were, in order, “that was pretty fun,” followed by “that movie could have used at least a few minutes of political exposition,” followed by “Starkiller Base is the dumbest weapon I’ve ever seen, bar none.” I think I’d remember it more favorably if Rise of Skywalker hadn’t so spectacularly shit the bed. It was a decent enough intro movie to a trilogy.

    What kills me about the ST is that I actually liked the characters and the actors had obvious chemistry. The writing and overall execution were just so bad.

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  23. Perkins

    Rice Cube,

    Short answer: it doesn’t matter
    Long answer: it doesn’t matter, but also there’s Palpatine and cloning and cultists who are never given sufficient exposition.

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  24. andcounting

    Perkins,

    I don’t think, after the OT, the franchise could sustain itself and all the things a feature film needed to be. The original trilogy was really pretty simple. You could illustrate the whole story in crayon for a 5 year old. And the merchandising opportunities were like nothing seen before or since. Every film in each subsequent trilogy had to deliver on the merchandising to suit kids from the ages of 3 to 60, they had to cater to hardcore lifelong fans and an emerging audience, answer the backstory/future questions of the main characters, stick to canon, raise the bar of special effects, and tell a decent story with an attempt at a similar simplicity while also showing deference to the vast complexity of the expanded universe that had developed. Throw in the constraints of trying to include the original cast in the ST, and I just don’t think they ever had a prayer of making it truly great. I think they were all fun and enjoyable for what they were, elevated nostalgia. And the ST had some of the best acting in the franchise.

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  27. Perkins

    andcounting,

    What’s weird to me is how the ST and PT had such complementary flaws. ST had good acting and mostly good dialogue, but an atrocious story. The PT had a great story with awful dialogue and wooden acting. It’s wild. I still liked the PT better since it at least stuck the landing, but I’m not about to pretend it was very good overall.

    I appreciate TV as a medium for Star Wars since it doesn’t have to try to be epic all the time. I’ll take Andor and The Clone Wars (also Rebels) over at least half of the films.

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  29. dmick89

    berselius,

    Did you not like the series? I didn’t watch it when it came out since I was hoping I’d read the books first. When that didn’t happen I finally watched it a year or two ago. It definitely declined in its later years as most 8-season shows do, but I didn’t think it was as bad an ending as I had heard it was. Not great by any means, but whatever I guess. I finally did start reading ASOIAF. I started a few weeks ago after House of the Dragon season 1 ended. I read Fire and Blood and I’m about half way through book one of the main series.

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  31. Author
    Rice Cube

    CHAOS!

    *Elmo on fire dot gif*

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  32. Author
    Rice Cube

    Someone said to start taking screenshots of old tweets before the site crashes and burns, but I’m just too lazy to be bothered. We’ll always have our memories of Mr. Sugarpenis and Ken Rosenthal.

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  35. SK

    (dying laughing) i forgot there’s only ever one live thread. i posted this to nobody a few threads down

    Cubs were more (are?) more sustainable than other teams given the % of fans arriving via public transport and lack of parking lots enticing individual vehicles. But even if every visitor took the El to Wrigley for a season, it may not offset the owners’ personal footprints.

    phew. that’s enough posting for now.

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  36. Author
    Rice Cube

    SK,

    I will respond there but I suppose it would be good to have a forum or something, although active thread generally works. Only certain folks have access to the back end to see if/when new comments have been posted past the most recent 5ish on the sidebar so easy to forget that there were previous threads (dying laughing)

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  41. SK

    I like the solar energy panels on the grandstand roof idea. 1. that roof gets a lot of sun. 2. the rest of Wrigley looks so modernized and overhauled (from the outside anyway), there’s no longer any urge in this ancient curmudgeon to preserve it as an antique. Let Wrigley live another 100 years sustainably I say. (if the beach doesn’t reach Sheffield by then).

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  42. Author
    Rice Cube

    So between the drop on Wednesday night after berselius and I finished recording and now we have 10 total downloads of this podcast episode (a couple of those are probably from you guys listening or from my initial quality control). I think more regular content would drive interest/SEO/whatever so I’m cool if folks want to try more now that I figured out how to use my company’s Teams account for whenever we can’t do Zoom (dying laughing)

    In the old days before an adult sense of responsibility we used to do weekly pods and those would get dozens and even hundreds of downloads so it’s certainly worthwhile. Thanks to AC & BVS and berselius for hanging out for the past couple episodes, more are welcome, it’s a very short turnaround time to edit out the wacky sounds and pauses and make us sound less like idiots.

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  43. Author
    Rice Cube

    Threw this on Twitter which will probably survive the stupidity, but thought I’d solicit any expert (or otherwise) opinions from the jabronis

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  47. Author
    Rice Cube

    dmick89,

    I don’t have access to the OV feed, I apologize. I think last time berselius downloaded the mp3 off our Podbean and then threw it onto OV feed, we can do that in the future if you wish.

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  49. andcounting

    Rice Cube,

    If you had given me 1,000 guesses of who the longest-tenured Brewer was, I would have never guessed Brent Suter. And when I saw he was claimed by Colorado I assumed that meant the Avalanche.

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  54. berselius

    dmick89:
    berselius,

    Did you not like the series? I didn’t watch it when it came out since I was hoping I’d read the books first. When that didn’t happen I finally watched it a year or two ago. It definitely declined in its later years as most 8-season shows do, but I didn’t think it was as bad an ending as I had heard it was. Not great by any means, but whatever I guess. I finally did start reading ASOIAF. I started a few weeks ago after House of the Dragon season 1 ended. I read Fire and Blood and I’m about half way through book one of the main series.

    I never did finish watching the show. I thought they did a good job streamlining a lot of the bloat from the books in the early seasons, but I thought the back half of the show was an even bigger unorganized mess than the books were. I had mixed feelings about the two most ‘recent’ (in the OV sense) books but the show retroactively made me like them even less, and made me pessimistic about any future books that will probably never be published anyway. Kind of the exact opposite of how the Expanse tv show made me feel about the books (dying laughing).

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  55. berselius

    Perkins: See I actually liked TLJ and have a fair amount of thoughts on it. On the whole I feel it’s the only one of the ST worth seeing more than once, though I have a lot of pointed feedback on how it could have told a tighter and more effective story.

    TFA was like eating a Cinnabon as an adult: a fun wave of initial nostalgia, followed by hollowness and regret. I think the complaints were less that it aped ANH than that it took no risks and recreated most of the plot. My initial reactions leaving the theater were, in order, “that was pretty fun,” followed by “that movie could have used at least a few minutes of political exposition,” followed by “Starkiller Base is the dumbest weapon I’ve ever seen, bar none.” I think I’d remember it more favorably if Rise of Skywalker hadn’t so spectacularly shit the bed. It was a decent enough intro movie to a trilogy.

    What kills me about the ST is that I actually liked the characters and the actors had obvious chemistry. The writing and overall execution were just so bad.

    I can’t argue with you today.

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  56. berselius

    dmick89:
    Rice Cube,

    It doesn’t matter to me. Whatever works best and is the least amount of work for you guys. I don’t even know how to access the backend of the podcast or if I ever did. (dying laughing)

    As far as I know, the podcast feed just picks up mp3 files in any post with the ‘podcast’ category and pushes it to where it needs to go. I’ll try to take a look when I get home but it’s probably an easy fix.

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  57. berselius

    berselius: I can’t argue with you today.

    For real though – I don’t think that TFA was a Great Movie by any stretch – it was a dumb, fun adventure movie just like ANH. Given how up its ass Star Wars got in the prequel trilogy, I thought it was exactly what the franchise needed, and I thought it did a good job of introducing its new core characters and made me actually interested in following them further. Even Darth Emo, sort of. The rest of their decisions after that…eh.

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  58. berselius

    Rice Cube:
    So between the drop on Wednesday night after berselius and I finished recording and now we have 10 total downloads of this podcast episode (a couple of those are probably from you guys listening or from my initial quality control). I think more regular content would drive interest/SEO/whatever so I’m cool if folks want to try more now that I figured out how to use my company’s Teams account for whenever we can’t do Zoom (dying laughing)

    In the old days before an adult sense of responsibility we used to do weekly pods and those would get dozens and even hundreds of downloads so it’s certainly worthwhile. Thanks to AC & BVS and berselius for hanging out for the past couple episodes, more are welcome, it’s a very short turnaround time to edit out the wacky sounds and pauses and make us sound less like idiots.

    Don’t feel obligated to only have us OVers on – feel free to record if you have other former regulars from the OG run of your pod and post them here. The more #content the merrier.

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  59. berselius

    berselius: I never did finish watching the show. I thought they did a good job streamlining a lot of the bloat from the books in the early seasons, but I thought the back half of the show was an even bigger unorganized mess than the books were. I had mixed feelings about the two most ‘recent’ (in the OV sense) books but the show retroactively made me like them even less, and made me pessimistic about any future books that will probably never be published anyway. Kind of the exact opposite of how the Expanse tv show made me feel about the books (dying laughing).

    The books/show just got too big. I used to be all-in on big epic world-building style book (and later tv) series like Game of Thrones, Wheel of Tedium, etc., but when I look back now most of the stuff that has stuck with me tends to focus on a small group of characters as a throughline. The Expanse did a great job of introducing a ton of extra POV characters that were mostly interesting but it was still the crew of the Roci that drove most of the narrative. In stuff like GoT or WoT you could have huge swathes (or even entire books) where you don’t even check in on the nominally main characters. Or add additional pointless main characters who are just around to witness things for plot purposes.

    I’d probably say The Expanse is my favorite / the best large book series out there that I’ve read, but by far the series I’ve read the most is the Honor Harrrington series, which has something like two dozen books published in its universe (dying laughing). And still kept the main line plot mostly interesting, despite having some of the same issues that the other series I mentioned above wrt things happening away from the core group of characters.

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  61. Perkins

    berselius: For real though – I don’t think that TFA was a Great Movie by any stretch – it was a dumb, fun adventure movie just like ANH. Given how up its ass Star Wars got in the prequel trilogy, I thought it was exactly what the franchise needed, and I thought it did a good job of introducing its new core characters and made me actually interested in following them further. Even Darth Emo, sort of. The rest of their decisions after that…eh.

    I think that’s fair. I initially liked it as a sort of reset from the clunky storytelling and shit dialogue of the PT, and was generally fine with it after TLJ (which I mostly enjoyed). I think TROS made it worse after the fact because that film made clear that, far from TFA’s being purposeful nostalgia to draw people in and then build on that in fresh ways, there wasn’t really a coherent plan and they basically expected member berries to be enough.

    I think the ST ended up being less than the sum of its parts, and I wonder how we’d feel about it had Trevorrow gotten to make his version of IX instead of pandering to angry white guys.

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  62. berselius

    Since I’m bored and rambling on about books, Robin Hobb’s various Farseer series books are also fantastic. I’m rereading (well, audiobooking) them for the first time in years and they still hold up, though the books involving the main character from the first few books (FitzChivalry) are better than the others. The series still has 4-5 of my favorite characters of all time across all media. I think I rec’d them here back when GoT got big and everyone was looking for recs for other stuff to scratch a similar itch (dying laughing).

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  67. Author
    Rice Cube

    The Cubs as usual will wait until the last minute as are most other teams so I’ll probably share some tweets and then write this up later on tonight once the dust settles

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  70. berselius

    dmick89:
    Anyone read The Grace of Kings by Ken Liu? i just got the book today.

    I haven’t but have heard good things. All I’ve read by him is his translations of the Three Body Problem books.

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  72. andcounting

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  75. Perkins

    berselius,

    Thrawn and a story about a fragmented Empire fighting a rising New Republic would have been infinitely more interesting than what we got.

    As to TROS, it’s basically two hours of watching JJ Abrams masturbate with Star Wars action figures. Easily the worst film in the saga, and insulting on multiple levels.

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  76. Author
    Rice Cube

    My brain isn’t working but I assume the others on the roster who aren’t on FA contracts are auto renewals so they weren’t announced because it was assumed

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