u/Aidan-346

This isn’t a complaint, I’m just used to the Madden style where you can kinda dial up easy quick hitters when you really want to. I‘m used to receivers getting free releases, out routes and curls against soft zone/cover 2 being automatic, drag routes, in-cuts being where you can live at times, and in general working short/middle stuff to keep the chains moving and have a high completion percentage and be rewarded for it. In 2K5 I find it to be almost the opposite, I have to scratch and claw to complete 50% of my passes, can’t really dial up any layups, drags and stuff like that are nearly un-callable, and when I try to go to short passes it’s just really sloppy. Posts and corners are really the only things I can hit kinda consistently and even then it’s 50/50 on whether they’re gonna drop it at times.

I like the style of this game, I’ve just yet to consistently crack the code on offense and want to be better at it.

I had an overbite in elementary and middle school, nothing super bad but noticeable at times, it was mainly due to poor oral posture as a result of childhood stress/trauma causing slouching etc. I I have naturally strong cheekbones/features overall, the dentist always talked about how my teeth had great spacing. Around 8th-early 9th grade I was just starting to come into my own and grow into them, I had started having better oral posture and the overbite was on the verge of being sorted out naturally, I looked confident, had a strong almost square jaw in my Freshman yearbook photo.

But in the middle of my 9th grade year my mom finally put braces on me for the overbite after years of the dentist begging her to. I thought at the time it was gonna do nothing but help me. I didn’t realize at the time that poor oral posture caused the overbite, I never learned/was told how important it was. The braces and appliances made me recess my tongue and made all that worse/back to what it was before, and what was supposed to be a 2 year process turned into 3 and a half years of them shoving my top/front teeth together and back into my face. Now I’m 21 and I have a gummy smile, a palate and lower jaw that looks too small for my cheeks, and I feel like theres not enough room in my mouth for my tongue.

I lost my lower retainer a while back and my mom couldn’t afford to get me a new one, I had started to figure out better oral posture and the more I practiced that the worse my face looked with my top retainer in so I just abandoned it and tried to hope everything expanded back towards where it was as much as possible. Its helped some, I nasal breathe now and look fine to most people, but now I have pretty bad body dysmorphia and can see the damaged potential when I look at myself now compared to pictures pre-braces. At times I feel so frustrated and like I was robbed without realizing it. Sorry for the long post but I feel like I can’t tell people who helped spend a bunch of money on it all of this and don’t wanna guilt trip my mom about something she can’t do anything about now.

Pretty much all the NFL ones look bad now, same with the NBA for the most part, ones that aren’t designed just for TVs don’t look good on TV. This trend of narrow, fat/blocky, and a third of the way off the bottom of the center of the screen sucks and has this effect kinda like closed captions where you can’t look away from it. NBC’s new NFL one is really the only one thats kinda elegant and looks nice and unique in my opinion.

I miss the band across the top of the screen or even the one that was well integrated into the bottom of the screen (think late 2000’s-2010s NFL on NBC) , it was there and clear but didn’t just draw your eyes to it constantly like this new wave of scorebugs we’ve seen in recent years.

Everyone pretty much knows JR was great, probably the greatest. The more I see Monday Nitro-era WCW stuff though, the more I realize just how much JR helped get the WWF product over on TV during the Monday Night wars compared to WCW. WCW even when they were hot and were having great moments, their commentary could just never really sell it that well outside of Bobby Heenan‘s color commentary. Bischoff was actually pretty solid and had his moments, but then after that Tony Schiavone’s play by play comes off as just really forced to me and kinda hard to listen to at times, right when their product was at its hottest and really needed that icing on the cake/cherry on top on TV.

Then you go watch WWF programming from that era and you realize just how far ahead they were in that department, and how big of a difference it made in how their product came across on TV. Imagine JR and Lawler commentating Sting Army ambushing the NWO (Real Sting taking off mask to reveal real Sting makeup moment), and then try to imagine Schiavone/Tenay/Rhodes commentating the first two Hell In A Cells. A lot of other factors were why Vince won out and WCW imploded, but this was one thing WWF always had going for it even when it was losing in the ratings. WCW’s commentators sounding borderline miserable at times did their programming absolutely no favors, especially when you had JR on the other channel making everything from start to finish feel like the greatest thing you’ve ever seen on television, even when WWF had its misses on booking/programing etc.

I’ve seen it not get ranked very highly by many, but I loved it and it really sealed me falling in love with the show after being hooked on season 1 when I watched it for the first time in 2020.

.It was a little scaled up from season 1, but still largely had that original grounded feel

.The priority was still on the core group’s character arcs, while having some purposeful new characters who were integrated well and had appropriate amounts of screen time

.It hit on all the right notes perfectly in my opinion, packed a genuine emotional punch, stakes felt high, and still had the cute comedic moments but they weren’t so dialed up/formulated for social media buzz. I was so genuinely interested and rooting for the group in the hospital for example when the demos were breaking in, it had such high feel good moments that felt earned, while still keeping that “the monster might still be under the bed” element.

.“The Lost Sister” gets a lot of heat which I can understand, but I really enjoyed seeing El get out of town a bit and learn about herself away from Hopper/Mike etc for just one episode. It helped build anticipation for what was happening at the lab, and seeing her choose to not kill a man with a family/children, then choosing the people she loves back in Hawkins at the end rather than revenge on other people was really cool and felt like a genuine step for her.

.The Halloween time of year and theme just fits perfectly

. Will was being prioritized and emotionally explored, as well as El and all the core group really as I mentioned earlier

.The score is awesome, the moment when El opens the door and returns comes to mind

I just have such a soft spot for this season and always will.

I know I’m late to this discussion and it’s been ran under the bus plenty by now, but anytime I see stuff from Season 5, I get a couple feelings that I can’t shake. One of which is that they took the “safe route” on a lot of really interesting ideas and potential outcomes. I don’t think it was ever intended to be this Sopranos/Breaking Bad-esque adults-only thing where there aren‘t happy endings and it’s all very consequential in a realistic way, but it felt like they tried to ride the fence on it being that, yet also being this fun thing where it all turns out fine in the end and it ended up being worse than if they just picked one or the other.

The Wheelers’ house incident getting so violent and dark so early just for everything to be fine without really getting addressed, the Will/Mike dynamic getting teased as this mutual multi-layered thing for years just to copout on it as much as possible in the end, the Henry/Will dynamic and history being set-up for years but then kinda avoided until the finale and wrapped up with the somewhat generic “it wasn’t your fault was it Henry”, as well as other stuff you could throw in there. It was sort of like they set up all these really interesting and serious questions but then realized they weren’t gonna be able to properly answer/address them in an incredibly popular with kids/teens Netflix show.

The other feeling is that the second half of the show’s run was just really hurt by COVID delays, Season 4 made up for it with of long episodes, but Season 5 tried to go back to the original episode/season lengths after another three year wait and it just felt like I missed out on season 4.5 and as people have speculated, maybe a lot of stuff got cut. I really think the final season in particular would have been better had they been able to stay on the pace they were on with the first three seasons, and potentially not had to cover so much ground.

People referring to vaccines exclusively as “Jabs” constantly as a way to disavow them is one of the more silly things I see on social media. Something about the way they go out of their way to say it instead of any other word for it makes me laugh because I don’t think I had ever heard a vaccine get referred to as a jab pre-COVID.

Forgive me for bringing this up, I’m super deep into the offseason lol, but I’ve always wondered what a Pats Packers Super Bowl 42 would have looked like, and how much more likely NE would have won had NYG not made it out of Lambeau. The build up/hype for that team vs pre-dick pic pre-welfare scam Favre trying to take them down potentially in his last game would have been insane to begin with lol.

Let me start this off by saying: I’m an Earnhardt fan from a family of Earnhardt fans, I don't think he should be forgotten or not brought up at all, the Amazon documentary and stories we hear on the Dale Jr Download are great…

But my goodness, it makes me cringe sometimes how we have to bring him up in every damn commercial, every other pre-race show, in every other question we ask Jeff Gordon/Mark Martin/Darrell Waltrip etc, every day on social media, and every documentary on the sport. I understand he’s still so popular and the first name a lot of people know in the sport, but I wish the industry showed a little more security sometimes in it’s current drivers, and other past drivers’ own marketability and in how cool their own stories are, rather than having to go back to the Big E well so much. Other sports like the NBA for example don’t have this need to go ”Remember Joe Montana?” to sell the sport and get engagement so much.

Its always the same 4-5 races too (1995/99 Bristol, 1996 Rockingham, 2000 Talladega, 1998 Daytona) where he either won a plate race or ran into someone on a short track that gets shown/brought up too and it unintentionally does a disservice to how good/interesting he was as a driver when its always just “He could see the air and he would wreck his mama to win a race”. This whole thing has gotten way worse too now that the sport is less popular than it was 15 years ago and has less household names currently driving. Sorry for the long rant but this has gotten on my nerves more and more recently.

I picked it up for the PS2 in GameStop in their “retro” section for 5 bucks and boy what a steal. Playing this game, then going back to playing a friend as well as the CPU on Madden 26 really puts in perspective how downright garbage EA football gameplay is, particularly on the Frostbite engine. On 2K you get rewarded for using real football logic, for example if you have a good QB and you wanna fire a hole shot into cover 2, or try to lay one out in front of a receiver with leverage headed toward the pylon you can do it, maybe he catches it maybe you miss it, but the receiver won’t get Moss’ed by every freaking CB/Safety.

The thing that probably drives me crazy the most when I play Madden particularly on offense is there’s this annoying shifting meta year to year of some position groups (linebackers for example) being terrible while another (DBs) is wayy too good to compensate. On 2K everything feels balanced, CPU has logic and follows assignments, every game feels different. The defense can actually play well naturally without this ying-yang of “on-ball” defense being cartoonishly good to compensate for “off-ball” defense being crap, no scripted screwups on 3rd-4th down or in 2 minute drills to manipulate games either.

Sorry for the rambling, but man it’s really nice to play a much more sim focused football game for the first time. Madden 11 on the PS3/Xbox 360 has always been the peak of EA gameplay for me, but 2K’s gameplay even makes that look like crap especially considering 2K5’s console generation/hardware to work with. I’m more impressed than I thought I was gonna be even after seeing all the praise over the years.

As a kid who was always told I was too small/too weak/too slow etc, Tom was the absolute man to me and I loved how he played and went about his business (and as a guy in his early 20s with that inner kid still in me), this retirement version of him is hard to watch. Too famous and involved in too many ventures to really say anything other than the occasional opinion on the state of the game, face full of fillers, walking down runways in clothes he can’t walk straight in, this overdone “I am a serious public speaker“ voice, shilling for Pizza Hut and Nestle/Keebler cookies or whatever in Walmart after all the TB12 method stuff and steadfast health beliefs that got him made fun of years ago, always at these kinda weird/silly Michael Rubin events etc.

I know he’s a megastar and this is the kinda shit you gotta expect with a megastar but man I feel like there’s still that really cool guy you hear about in there somewhere that he won‘t let himself show to the public. I’m not sure if this stuff is just a result of him getting too famous, the price of chasing perfection everywhere so hard for so long, or if maybe the divorce stuff kinda pushed him over the edge in some areas, or if he’s deep down just kind of a weird guy with too much money. Either way I hate that it’s turned out this way because I really hoped that it wouldn’t once the cleats got hung up.

I know the whole long ass mediocre promos thing with Triple H has always been a meme but my goodness, I did not realize how God-awful of a promo he was at times and how his post-DX gimmick would have been better if they didn’t let him really talk. Some of this stuff from when he was working programs with Rock/Austin etc would have gotten feces thrown at him if he wasn’t at the top of the card and/or didn’t have that look. He had a great career and I understand why he ended up in good positions and why he got over but I didn’t realize quite how much it was in-spite of his charisma because a lot of his attitude era stuff is just “big dopey looking guy standing next to Shawn Michaels while Shawn slurs words at people”, “Haha funny DX guy”, and “Guy who works with the guy that draws the money who’s talking too damn much”.

This is gonna sound really silly to notice, but Dale Jr‘s voice changed at some point around 2010-2012, before then it was way lower, less expressive, more drawl-ish and throaty, after then it’s more like it is today, higher, more enunciated, more twang-ey and nasally. I wonder if it was Speech Class? Improved mental state? Quittng smoking? This is probably the most neurodivergent thing I’ve ever talked about or put any thought into.