#this game is beating the shit ot of me i cant stop thinking about it...

[dende-che-ti-offende]

the new sibling

[popculturebuffet]

Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck Restrospective: The Raider of the Copper Hill! “You Got Rich Son”

Hello all you happy people! And welcome back to my retrospective of the Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck! It’s been far too long, almost three months since we last checked in with Scrooge and frankly I feel i’ve been spacing these entries out too much for this one and for the retrospectives that aren’t paid for in general. So expect at least one McDuck adventure a month till I finish, possibly two when I can swing it like this month. 

Now i’m done beating myself up, when we last left off a younger more naive, more optimistic and less experienced Scooge took up a career as a cowboy for  Cattle Baron, gained his first sidekick in the form of his Horse Hortense, and took out some cattle thieves with the help of Teddy Fucking Roosevelt. 

This chapter marks the end of the story’s first act. The first act is about a younger and far nicer Scrooge: still onrey and still a cheapskate, but still a good kid and far more outwardly friendly and welcoming, a far cry from the bitter untrusting man we come to know. This chapter is one of the reasons why, as Scrooge learns a hard lesson about wealth and success, the sacrifices one needs to make for family and about sticking your hand in a lightbulb while it’s plugged in. So join me under the cut as Scrooge meets another valuable mentor, one of his greatest enemies, and about 50 feet of barbed wire. 

We begin with the end of Scrooge’s time as a ranch hand and cowpunch. With homesteaders moving in and dividing up the land, Murdo simply dosen’t have the space for cattle baroning anymore and has to let Scrooge go and head back to texas. We do get a great bit of Scrooge wrapped in barbed wire, having gone to cut some down so Murdo could move the herd out. 

So with his Job done and parting on good terms with his old boss, Scrooge sets up his own homestead on some land near the Anaconda Silver Mine, trying to make it as a prospector, starting on the path that would eventually lead him to riches.. in about a decade and a half.

 So Scrooge bemoans his rotten luck over Dinner with a stranger, Marcus Daly owner of said mine... who just.. randomly sat down to have dinner with a 17 year old. 

Marcus belays his own woes: While Scrooge has failed at what he tried to do, having gotten into both steamboating and cattle punching too late to go anywhere with either, Daly has a silver mine that’s full of copper: decent amoutns of it but still not what his investors wanted. 

Both however find their fortunes reverse in an instant in the weirdest way possible. The light goes out at their table and Scrooge tries to adjust it only to electcute himself. To his shock...

He finds out it’s running on electricty, which is starting to become widespread.. and requires vast amounts of copper wiring. Scrooge is back in the game but finds trouble getting equipment as the local seller naturally is a jackass who jacks up the price. Scrooge instead sells the gold teeth his dad gave him to the nearest gentleman after talking him into it. . And i’ts not even the weirdest transaction i’ve seen this week. 

For the record those weird things are the guy on the left’s skinflakes, his power is to make naked golems of himself out of his dandruff and skin flakes and what have you, while the guy on the right is paying for a mutant with a star for a head. So yeah a scottish cowboy selling his ancestor’s dentures to pay for mining gear is refelshingly tame after all of this. 

So we get the comic equivleant of a montage as Scrooge starts his work at prospecting, making a portable homesteader shack as a miner owns any land he lives on, and moving around to try and find it, but he runs into a problem: with his last two careers he had mentors to help him learn what to do: Pothole taught him riverboating and Murdo helped him learn to ride the trails. Here he has no one and while you can self teach a lot of things prospecting isn’t one of them. 

He end sup finding one though as a rich gentleman asking about the mine happens to wander by: Howard D. Rockerduck. If that names sounds familiar it should as he’s indeed the father of exactly who your thinking of and we meet a young 10 or so year old john who asks him to stop dealing with a grubby workman. We also find out whose responsible for him turning out ot be such a piece of work as his mother’s response to his father telling him “I used to be a grubby workman is well... word’s cant’ do this amount of classist bulslhit justice. 

Seriously his unnamed wife is so odious it hurts. And how the fuck did an honest, kind man like Howard end up with this bitch? It’ sbaffled me every time i’ve read this: did he marry for money? is he a gold digger? go down gold dig get down? Is she just THAT good in bed? Did he just make a horrible mistake one night? Did she lie to him about who she was? Was she replaced by a skrull? I have questions no duck comic has properly explained.. and if they have please tell me.  Also it does tickle me we’re getting a bit with a duck named howard though sadly he wears a top hat instead of a nice little bowler. And if you don’t know who howard the duck is.. shame on you. And if you’ve seen the movie.. my deepest sympathies. 

While Howard laments wanting to horsewhip his son, this was a century ago with change mind you standards were different and also John sucks. Howard crticizes Scrooge’s techqniue after introducing himself, and Scrooge and him get into a bit of a tizzy, with Howard offering to teach him for two cents.. but the hostility quickly desolves hours later as Scrooge realizes Howard was right and he’d been doing things completely wrong and the thrill of hard honest work again has washed away any ego driven competiviness. 

I”ll get more into Howard in a second but he does eventually strike copper, and while the vein is full it’s also thin. But Howard has one final trick and takes Scroogey for an ore test. I tried to find more on this but just found a lot of ways to do it yourself and what not. I”m now really intrigued how they did this and found the content of minerals. I know it’s a dull subject but i’m curious how they did it with the technology of the time. Did they just use acids like I found? If so how’d they get them? I do say this is one of the great qualities of Rosa’s works: he makes you want to learn more about history. I looked up more about TR after the last chapter and now I want to know how the hell metallurgy worked in the late 1800′s. 

We then get an intresting interacton as Scrooge.. warmly greets the townsfolk and vice versa.. yes the same Scrooge who as an adult would be introduced proclaming...

Is warm, optimistic and wholeheartedly belieives...

As you can probably tell by Howard’s reaction and what Scrooge becomes.. this story’s all about shattering that notion and is the first of two to shatter the poor kid’s trust in people and make him into the bitter old sod we know. 

The sample comes back 55% positive... which leaves Howard rushing to get Scrooge to a court house. As it turns out there’s an old, very real for the time, mining law called the Law of Apex: whoever owns the land closest to where an ore vein is on the surface owns the whole thing... so legally Scrogoe owns the ENTIRE ANACONDA COPPER MINE, which at this point as detailed in the time skip has gone from struggling to utterly thriving and sucessful. Whoever owns the land at the time the Judge rules it gets the mine.. and Scrooge’s friends, who seconds ago were concerned about him being dragged into court.. are now all scrambling to take his fortune, something Howard dosen’t seem at all suprised about. 

But while this may be a kinder, more naive Scrooge McDuck, it’s still SCROOGE MCDUCK. His response is to cut a nearbye power wire and swing it tarzan style over to hortense and ride her back ahead of the mob... with the electric wire slapping her rear and causing her to go extra fast.. and also quit. So Scrooge stands alone but manages to take out some of the ruffians with his shack while John and the Judge rush to the site. As for Scrooge well... you want to see what a McDuck family beserker rage against an ENTIRE angry mob of opportunistic assholes look like? 

And this isn’t even the most badass thing Scrooge will do this series. Or even in the next few issues. That’s how awesome this series is: fighting an angry mob SOLO with simply his pure rage and whatever he can grab and throw. And he WINS. He’s exausted and passes out, falling out of the sky on his final opponent.. but he took out what was at the LEAST 50 men, and ONLY passed out because one of them threw dynamite in his out house.. and even THAT didn’t kill him or put him out, simply casuing him to land on said dynamite throwing idiot and wins. 

We find out Rockerduck actually was one of the mine’s owners but helped Scrooge anyway: he has more than enough money and all it’s going to do in the end is go to a greedy brat. Marcus Daly shows up and while he’ll get the law overturned eventually, he still has to shut down while that happens and finds the right officials to bribe. And this is the 1800s... you gotta go by train to do your bribes. You can’t just do that shit over email and hidden bank accounts. Daly offers him 10,000.. but given what Scrooge could earn even before he got his mine back, Scrooge turns it down. 

However this victory is bittersweet as Scrooge warmly greets his friends.. only for one to cuss him out and the other to tell him to get loss. We then get one of my faviorite exchanges in this story.

This whole Panel is a masterwork. The sheer INNOCENCE on Scrooge’s face, almost looking like Donald, desperately wondering what he did, when as Howard points out.. he did nothing wrong. He simply got successful and they resent him for it. 

This has been a hard paragraph for me to write as I want to tread carefully. People do have good reasons to scorn the rich or celebrtiies sometimes. Some rich people or those in the media are genuinely terrible. Jeff Bezos, Tucker Carlson, Mel Gibson, Louie CK, Joss Whedon and even someone as low on the totem pole as Doug Walker is odious. And of course we all can think of one odious example of rich bastard i’d rather not think of, especially when thinking of John D Rockerduck and what he’l lbecome as an adult that i’m not giving a pleasure of the name drop but came to mind. 

But even for good people becoming succesful puts up a barrier between you and other people: Fans of yours will admire you or write fanfic or what have about you without even knowing you, i’ve been on that side, and some people will hate you just because without valid reason, especially in this day and age. Success breeds resentment and even people you trusted and loved can sometimes turn on you. It’s the double eged sword of achieving your dreams: You get what you wanted but you often loose what you had. 

And it was no diffrent two centuries ago, with Scrooge’s friends only being friendly as long as it suited them, turning on him first to steal his chance at glory and then to scorn him for daring to achieve it. Some people.. are only there for you as long as your not above them. And sometimes you can be happy. Look at Tom Hanks, who has a lovely family and a long and storied career. Or Linkara, a youtuber who has been at this for over a decade, has tons of fans, a loving wife with her own succesful channel, and just recently got contacted by his childhood heroes. You CAN be happy and successful.. it’s just very hard to make it that far. 

One of the central points of life and times is that’s often not the case: You can get what you want but it comes at a cost. And it’s how you pay that price that will determine how happy you are. Another central point intertwined with it is it’s not the journey but the destination, and i’ts how Scrooge takes that journey that ultimately leads him where he ends up good and bad. And we get an all to telling all too foreboding hint in how he takes everyone he knew for at least a year turning on him overnight. 

When faced with his first real loss on this Journey that wasn’t material.. he dosen’t care. He has his money and riches and that’s enough. And as we’ll see that attitude will cost him greatly. Howard is irate for a moment, hoping he wasn’t wrong in trusting Scrooge.. and indeed, for now, turns out to have placed his faith in the right person as Scrooge gets a telegram: his family needs him. And while he could stay, turn his back on them, and earn MILLIONS.. he tells Howard  to tell the owner he’s taking the deal. For now when given the choice between his family and his fortune, SCrooge will choose them. Sadly.. that won’t hold true forever. 

With this being the end of his time in the story, as he has a still insufferable John buy him a horsewhip for horrific but darkly funny reasons, as John brags about how rich his father is not realizing he’s buying his own whupping tool, i’d like to touch on Howard D Rockerduck and how amazing he is. Rosa managed to pack a throughly interesting, throughly engaging character into only 8 pages. While Rockerduck DID show up earlier in of ducks dimes and destinys, he wasn’t really fleshed out or named and only showed up for one page so still 9 pages total. 

But in those we see a kind and noble man whose easily what Scrooge COULD have been, kind, noble, generous, hardworking and willing to give up money to help people. He’s a good man.. but even he’s seen the sacrifice Money brings. He’s clearly lost friends, lost a sense of peace, and married the wrong Woman, whose poisoned his children into a spoiled brat who will only grown into an even more spoield adult in both continuities.. if raised quite a bit earlier in the 2017 cartoon as he was made scrooge’s contemporary there rather than a child, but semeantics. Point is Howard hismelf isn’t wholly satisfied with his success.. and that’s what he and Scrooge will forever have in common, with Scrooge, likely as a result of meeting the Rockerducks, fearing an indadiquate inheritor and someone squandering what he worked hard for. Though his reasons for not taking up a wife as we’ll see eventually, if outside the main 12 part story but I intend to cover the subchapters in their own time, aren’t entirely motivated by avoiding goldigging but a broken hard and his own stubborness. 

For now though we bid Howard and america adue. Scrooge however for once ends an occupation with less bitterness. Unlike his last two ventures where he made it out with only enough to get to the next one here he made it out ahead: he now has a decent suit, likely bought for him by Howard given he hasn’t cashed the check yet, I know this as it’s a major plot point for next time, 10,000 dollars.. and experince. He may of not gotten all the money he was due on this venture, but he learned more valuable skills and he feels with a land like america, the next opportunity to earn some dough is just waiting for him to get back. And as the chapter ends he muses that maybe the country could use a symbol of this countries boundless opportunity...

Final Thoughts for the Raider of the Copper Hill:

This chapter is one of my favorites. It’s nicely paced, something Rosa himself admits was often a struggle as he had to cover years at a time, has a wonderful new mentor for Scrooge, and sets up a lot of the tragedy to come in the last act beautifully. It’s a nice closer for our first act, showing Scrooge has come out of his first trip to america wiser, more experinced and more hopeful, but at heart still the same kind and noble kid he left Glasgow as. The next act is about the change of that boy into a man, how he will finally find his fortune after some more adventures.. and how the last viestges of his kindess and optimisim towards others die at the hands of a certain fake scotish gentleman. 

Next Life And Times: As is tradition for this series act openers, Scrooge returns home.. and just in time to get his castle back, fight a duel and go to heaven and back. So an average McDuck tuesday then. 

If you liked this review follow for more. And if you liked it a lot join my patreon so I can keep making these and hit my stretch goals. Even at just the 2 dollar level you get access to my discord and your pick of shorts whenever I do a series of them and with Goofy and Donald’s birthdays being the next ones to be celebrated you can’t pick a better time. patreon.com/popculturebuffet See you at the next rainbow. 

[dangerouschopshopfire-blog]

MARCH MADNESS, META-GAMING AND HOW TO DOMINATE YOUR OFFICE POOL

Ah yes, its that time of year again, the time all the sports “fans” in the U.S. tune in to watch un-paid college “athletes” compete in probably the most exhilarating tournament in U.S. sports. Here is the problem though, most people who make and play in paid for bracket leagues have literally watched little to no CBB this season. Likely most of you reading this fall into that category and are stuck listening to limp dicks on ESPN all making crazy prediction about upsets every year which usually leads to you not winning anything. Well this topic has long been written about but still every year 99% of my bracket competitors make the same mistakes (even I’m guilty of it) so lets fix the leaks in your bracket process.

  THE PERFECT BRACKET: 

THIS DOES NOT EXIST. As we all know the odds of a perfect bracket are … well… astronomical and even with hundreds of millions of brackets made each year we rarely see more than 30 perfect brackets online going into the Elite Eight…So what is the first mistake we all are guilty of you ask…That would be chasing perfection. There just isn’t a strong reason to try because that’s how your bracket ends up with only 10 correct picks in the first round and your national champion knocked out by the Elite Eight. You need to pick smarter, in fact the Powergaming strategy (that is the strategy that maximizes your chances of winning) is to simply pick no upsets. Now this isn’t fun I get that but honestly what is more fun than winning especially winning money and bragging rights. Don’t be like the Joe the office guy who thinks the 15 seeds are gonna upset the 2s this year, just be smarter.

  DIFFERENTIATION:

 The best way to make your bracket every year meta-game style is to simply pick very few upsets. Differentiation should be made in the first round with 8/9 and 10/7 upset picks. These shouldn’t even be considered upset especially 8/9 when the 9 seed has actually won more matchups than the 8 seed since the tourney expanded to 64 teams. Again picking few upsets is boring but statistically A LOT better than picking that 12 seed to beat that 5 seed and watching as the 5 costs into the sweat 16 and puts you at a pretty rough deficit. This year differentiation may be a little easier than usual as Wichita State draws an egregious 10 seed. Pretty much every pundit or person with a mildly functioning dog brain believes this to be the heisting of the century. WS will be an overwhelming favorite in their first matchup but then will draw Kentucky. This line will certainly be the make or break for a lot of (good) brackets, as UCLA will certainly be next in line for whoever wins this matchup. So to recap being different doesn’t mean picking 11/12/13/14/15/16 seed upsets it means picking smart seed upsets and letting other bracket players saw off their leg with their titanic Nostradamus upset picks which will lose them a ton of points if wrong but likely only get them an extra point or 2 if right.

  What makes an upset??

 Simply put most mid-major teams are not built to compete in the tournament but the usual stacks stick out in most upsets. (This is for the more “adventurous” of bracket makes)

 1. Centers are not a key component of the better-ranked team:

 This is a MAJOR KEY in almost every upset since 2000. Almost no Mid-Major has a serious center (because good centers are very rare) think of it like college kickers, most are just able to kick an XP and maybe a 35 yarder 80% of the time. Most mid major centers can compete vs. other mid major players but get totally destroyed on the boards and down low vs. better competition. Most teams with great centers don’t get upset because mid majors cant force them to go small (Like FGCU(15) did to Georgetown/ MTSU(15) played no center vs MSU last year…MSU played their C Deytona Davis 15 minutes before realizing he couldn’t keep up with the speed/ North Iowa(11) played their center ONE MINUTE in an OT game vs Texas last year who played their center 20 minutes…he only had 2 rebounds (pretty garbage center) and Georgia St. (14) only played their center one minute vs Baylor(3)). We want to target upsets by mid-majors who don’t rely on their center (FGCU for example) vs teams that have a mid major level center who cant keep up with pace (FSU centers are terrible Phil Coffer and Christ Koumadje are horrible centers / CK is only on the team cause he is 7’4+).  To put this in simple terms we don’t want to target a mid major with one big guy who typically plays nearly the whole game and racks up REB numbers but truly isn’t good (Eli Pepper for Lipscomb comes to mind / Also now I’m gonna get shit from their team for saying that…sorry guys beer is on me next time you’re in town)

 2. The worse team statistically outshoots the higher seeded team from three

 Now a lot of people think this means they go ballistic but usually that isn’t the case. Most upsets we see both teams make about the same amount of threes but the mid-major typically takes a fair amount fewer (4-8). Predicting this can be hard but a good reference point is to find the few high seeded teams with poor center play and look at their three point shooting numbers. Some teams take very few threes these teams could be forced to shoot a lot of shots they don’t usually take from behind the arc, anytime you can put a team in a unfamiliar position you have found an edge.

 3. Keep the rebounding numbers astronomically low (most upsets end with about 60 boards)

 This goes a lot with number one but going back to the three upsets above rebounding went as such

                            OffR           DefR          Total

FGCU(15)           7                29              36

Georgetown(2)   11              26              37

 MTSU(15)           10              18              28

MSU(2)               8                22              30

 UNI(11)               5                25              30

Texas(6)             11              21              32

 Outlier

Georgia St (3)     8                13              21      

Baylor (14)          11              28              39              21 Turnovers

 You should never expect the mid major team to win the battle (UAB vs Iowa St. is a hell of an outlier Tyler madison had 9 OREB in 14 minutes as a point guard….) but the lower the total the less likely they are to lose by a large margin. This is the least important stat but gives good insight, most upsets leave the total number of rebounds around 60 while you should expect the average game to have 70+ rebounds. If you can get a normal game pace that only has 60 rebounds it is more than likely to be a tight one, which only increases the chances of an upset.

 4: Mid-Majors who rely on only one player to carry all the load usually have no shot (SDSU : Nate Wolters) (Davidson : Steph Curry) Curry undoubtedly was unconscious on Davidsons Elite 8 run but we can all agree no other mid major player can go and drop 44 on Kansas as one of only two good players on a team. Remember Davidson with the same roster didn’t even make it to the tourney the following year and lost in the NIT round two to a terrible St. Mary’s team because everyone doubled Steph and forced his team to actually help. Same happened with Wolters vs Michigan in 2013 for SDSU.

 A lot of Mid-majors rely on one guy but few are as special as Curry is and that is the main point. Even garbage teams can figure out how to stop these one-man machines.

  Looking at an upset:

Lets revisit more of the FSU/FGCU matchup I talked about earlier. FSU is an excellent rebounding team and keeping them under 40 will be an extreme challenge for any mid-major. FGCU is always in the top 20% of teams in rebounding but players like John Isaac have potential to destroy them, keep him off the glass and they have all the makings to win. This game should have around 80 rebounds although FGCU is capable on the glass they should lose that battle pretty easily. FGCU certainly has some key components going for them in the center battle and FSU not being a great shooting team but their pace and ability to stop FSU on the boards is certainly questionable. The stars can certainly align but unless they keep Isaac to around 5 boards this upset likely won’t happen.

  Putting it all together:

So what does this all mean? It means a lot of stars need to align typically for a mid major to win which should go back to our first point…PICKING UPSETS IS A SUCKERS GAME. Teams are seeded how they are for obvious reasons and the selection committee watches a lot more CBB then we all do so sometimes you have to trust their judgment (except on Wichita St. that seed is just TURRIBLE). Above are great baselines to find potential upsets and find teams that’s are realistically over-rated later in the tourney (FSU has no chance as a 3 seed unless they keep facing shit rebounding teams or mid majors). For the most part though you should stick to the seeding, differentiate at the 8/9 and 10/7 and dominate your pool by doing the minimum.

 Good luck and happy picking :)

 There will be an in-depth upset guide tomorrow for all the first round games.

 More analysis here:

 http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/special/sports/ncaa-march-madness-bracket-guide/