Back on the old forum, I often talked about my experiences working for Kmart (which merged with Sears in 2005, the merger being the brainchild of chairman Eddie Lampert, a Wall Street hedge fund manager with no previous retail experience that, after one person after another vacated the CEO position, decided to become the CEO himself), the pressure from management to sign customers up for the Sears credit card and the all-important Shop Your Way Rewards card, and other crap, and I supplemented these personal accounts with info from news articles about the company at large, which was doing poorly.

A lot of people, even back then, expected the company to go out of business soon. Well, it's still around but probably not for much longer (for real, this time). This pair of articles illustrates just how far that the company and the individual stores have fallen:

From the workers: http://www.msn.com/en-us/money/topstories/sears-workers-reveal-why-the-company-is-bleeding-cash/ar-AAiaq4S?li=BBnbfcL&ocid=UP97DHP

From the customers: http://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/it-was-a-ghost-town-shoppers-reveal-why-theyve-abandoned-sears-and-kmart/ar-AAiKhLa?li=BBnbfcL&ocid=UP97DHP

TNG/DS9 for me. ENT was okay, but I wasn't really interested in them going backwards. Same with the upcoming Discovery. (Loved the ENT shout-outs in the new film, though.) Voyager was so-so but ultimately completely pointless. I really wasn't interested in the Delta Quadrant. It really was a superfluous series.

As for TOS, I...don't care for it. I watched the entire series on Netflix recently (as well as the rest of the franchise). TOS just doesn't do it for me, and I believe it's because of the 1960s look and melodramatic music, because I like most of the TOS movies just fine (except 1 and 5, of course). If TOS had been produced in the 1980s or 1990s, I might like it better.

Also, TOS, early TNG, and most of VOY were planet-of-the-week stuff, which I hate. These stories have no impact on anything, because the ship is off to its next adventure next week. This was an outdated form of storytelling. Even ENT did this from 2001 to 2003 until they finally realized they had to do something that mattered, hence the Xindi arc in season 3 and the various short arcs in season 4.

The reboot films are fine. I enjoyed them. I just wouldn't have done them, because "alternate version of the past" is not where I wanted the franchise to go (see ENT). I wanted them to pick up in the late 24th century or even skip ahead to the 25th.

Discovery's gonna be a 13-episode story arc. We'll see how that goes. I'm glad that they're not doing a full season, though. It means less filler.

Quote from: DeCarlo Rules on September 08, 2016, 07:19:56 AM
Dilton seems very interested, in a non-scientific sort of way. 

Well, hey, he's dated Cheryl. She probably showed him the goods (this is, after all, the girl that wanted to go topless on the beach), and now he wants see how his friends measure up.

Quote from: SAGG on September 07, 2016, 11:21:27 PM
B & V Comics Annual #224....

Ah, okay, I remember that. That was a while ago. B&V aren't even angry; they're HAPPY - as if they're each anticipating seeing the other naked.

Quote from: SAGG on September 07, 2016, 06:22:59 PM
How about the recent B&V digest cover where Betty and Ronica show up at the beach in the same bikini, see each other, then demand to each to take off their bikini "RIGHT NOW"!, all the time while the boys are watching them with grins (leering ones?)...

I just looked through the recent B&V and B&V Friends digest covers at Grand Comics Database and don't see anything like that.

The new review is up: the Filmation Sabrina segment, "Hiccups".

I remember, on some days, all of the classes were shortened, so we'd finish early, because the rest of the school day was taken up by something that everyone had to be present for, regardless of whether they liked it or not. For example, a Tae-Kwon-Do show in the school auditorium (I remember one routine set to "Bad to the Bone", and my friend, sitting next to me, said "Oh, God"), a concert by some nobodies singing popular songs (a "reward", I guess; I think this was in middle school, because "U Can't Touch This" was big), or, Goddess forbid, a pep rally. I hated pep rallies. I just sat in the bleachers and had to endure a dimly-lit, noisy environment. At least, my friend was smart enough to have one of his parents pick him up early (which probably wasn't "allowed", but whatever). Do school still do crap like this?

Any forum members currently of high school age or that have kids of high school age, what's high school like today? Is it much different than when I attended in the early-to-mid-1990s? I mean I know I hear about things like active shooter drills (even at my old high school). Do they still have bomb threats (I'm guessing yes) that causes everyone to have to evacuate and stand around and socialize until the all-clear is given?

I had homeroom, 7 periods of around 50 minutes each, a lunch (half-hour, I think), and 5 minutes between each of those to get from one place to another. There was a warning bell followed by the tardy bell. Toward the end of high school, they started experimenting with "block days", where we'd have four longer classes on a particular day at the expense of excluding the other three. What are the school days like today?

School ran from around 7:55 AM to 3:05 PM, and the bus ride each way was over an hour, due to the large number of stops and trips down side streets to pick everyone up. These would take longer if a student or students causes problems on the bus, resulting in the driver pulling over and calling the "base" over the radio to talk about it, which resulted in a collective groan from all of the students. Also, if we got too loud, the overhead lights would come on, meaning shut up. Any school bus stories to share?

Do students still carry textbooks, or are they assigned tablets?

What about taking notes? In a notebook or typed? Or audio-recorded?

Are hand-written papers still sometimes required, or can everything be printed?

Tests and quizzes: paper or computer?

Are scantron sheets and No. 2 pencils still used?

Anything else that might be a "thing" at school nowadays that I might be completely unaware of?

Quote from: Oldiesmann on August 24, 2016, 12:53:07 PM

Cheryl is GORGEOUS here! And not only that but very, very pretty and likeable.

Another new review is up. This time, I'm taking a look at the Filmation cartoons, specifically the first segment of the first episode.

Quote from: The Downloader on August 31, 2016, 02:20:27 AM

Quote from: Tuxedo Mark on August 30, 2016, 02:15:48 PM

Quote from: The Downloader on August 30, 2016, 01:16:58 PM
I Did October's so it is not listed.

Where is it?

http://www.archiefans.com/all-about-archie/octobernovember-2016-archie-comics-solicits-(super-hype)/msg5684/#msg5684

Thanks.

Incidentally, in the October solicits, Archie Comics touts a "new" story written by Tom DeFalco and written by Pat and Tim Kennedy and a "brand new" story written by Paul Kupperberg and drawn by the Kennedys:

http://archiecomics.com/october-2016-solicitations/

Quote from: DeCarlo Rules on August 30, 2016, 03:10:04 PM
When I spoke to Dan Parent a couple of weeks ago, he confirmed that he is indeed the only artist left doing new classic Archie stories for ACP. The stories described in solicitations as "lead" (but not as "new") may either have appeared somewhere before, or been completed some time ago and were part of an inventory of stories that haven't appeared elsewhere prior to their recent digest appearances.

So, at Grand Comics Database, if a story is credited solely to Dan Parent in a recent digest, and it doesn't have a reprint note, it's probably new, right?

Quote from: The Downloader on August 30, 2016, 01:16:58 PM
I Did October's so it is not listed.

Where is it?

After reading the new release announcements (by the way, where's October's?), I'm confused. Some stories are advertised as "new", but others are advertised as "lead" (which probably means it's just the first old story in the digest).

Would someone please list the new stories in the digests, going back however many years that they've had credits on every story? (Before that, it was simple; new stories had credits; reprints didn't.)

Thanks. I actually have all of those episodes listed. However, I have "Up at the Bat" and "Computerized Moose" as part of "The Archie Comedy Hour".