Merus

I started to get a suspicion here, and IMDB confirms: Zoe Saldana is a massive nerd. So is Vin Diesel, famously, but I don't know how we went for so long without noticing that the star of Avatar, Star Trek and now this is quite possibly the queen of Hollywood geekdo-- oh wait I worked out why no-one's given her credit, nevermind.

I don't know how much discussion there could really be about Bravely Default given that Greg had started playing it and Jake and Sean hadn't. I mean, it's not really a surprise that a JRPG is sexist, and they're clearly casting around for fruitful topics of conversation and Laika the Wonder Dog was more engaging a topic than Bravely Default, so I don't see the absolutism that no-one is allowed to say that something is sexist or has problematic elements without immediately stopping to explain exactly what those are, in the same way that I don't expect anyone on the podcast to go into detail about why exactly they don't like the thing they're spending five minutes explaining they don't like. If they choose to, that's great, but it's much better if they pick topics on which they have something interesting to say than to demand that a specific opinion is always defended. (Bravely Default is hella sexist though, and they don't get a cookie for having a couple of good female characters) Actually hang on I think I have a bit of a problem with the idea that someone suggesting sexism is automatically a questionable opinion that needs to be elaborated on.

You are missing out on what is the highlight of that series because DKC2 is probably the best platformer on the system. Yes, counting the Mario games.

I think Donkey Kong is a good example; you replace that basic motivation (rescue Pauline) with another basic motivation that's more participatory (rescue banana horde). Instead of Mario rescuing Peach, Bowser could take the castle (and they've done that, lots of times, just with Peach inside). I am reminded of all the historical records we've recently discovered were incorrect because of unnoticed political biases. A lot of the warrior kings we'd found over the centuries were in fact warrior queens. No-one was visibly pushing an agenda when they were marked down as being kings because they had a sword and trappings of power, for the same reason that fish don't see water. Welcome to the Idle Forums, Chris Kasavin!

I think it probably matters more what she finds appealing about games. A lot of the problem with this kind of question is that it assumes that there's a hierarchy of approachability where Portal is either higher or lower on the list than Broken Age, when in reality they're not broadly comparable. Some people have trouble navigating in 3D space, while others have no problems with it. A friend of mine that I thought would really like Gone Home spent most of the conversation complaining about not being able to navigate and how the voiceovers aren't connected to anything she's doing. You really can't tell. I think it is also a little bullshit to have a 'gateway' game; optimise for finding a game that they'd like a lot first, hopefully without too much assumed knowledge, over a game that has obvious appeal. Yes, Portal has jokes, but if someone who does not play games is asking you for advice on games then they're likely interested enough to give it a fair shake. If your friend likes slower, story driven games, you could very easily point her towards some relatively accessible RPGs like Mass Effect. I'd go with Gone Home first, mostly to see if she navigates 3D space particularly well. There are also the Wadjet Eye adventure games, which are all very well done.

A friend of mine is this close to being done with Bravely Default because she basically hates all the characters, so counterpoint, there. Have you played the UbiArt Rayman games, Sean? They are super great. It really feels like basically everyone except Nintendo has decided that 3D platformers aren't worth the hassle when you can make a 2D platformer, get rid of lives and a rigid stage structure, make it gorgeous and just crank up the difficulty. The extended riff on Donkey Kong being in a few crazy ensembles as part of his George Clooney arc made me think someone was going to put two and two together and notice he's in Smash Brothers, which is exactly like the Ocean movies in that the core appeal is 'look at all these guys you love! And they're in the same scenes and interacting, this is crazy go nuts!'

I learnt something from that trailer, actually: the bit where they have the epic explosions and speedramping and serious faces set to Hooked on a Feeling takes basically all the sting out of the epic explosions and serious faces while still showing it. Apparently Guardians of the Galaxy isn't a big IP; if you wanted to make a movie about a big villain, though, you'd go to Thanos, and they're the ones who make the most sense as the heroes. This is kind of a sign that Marvel are running out of IP to turn into mostly-competent action films, while DC are struggling with Wonder Woman. (On the plus side, this does mean we might see a Deadpool movie. Having Deadpool assemble a team to steal Avengers 2 would be the most delightful thing.)

I don't even know if I should watch that video because I'm already on board and would like to see it all fresh. But then it's like getting to play some of it early!

I'm going to wait for a later version after they've put some polish in. This is clearly a beta.

Yeaaaaaaah, it's a spoiler. In Australia, we get it in April, guys, thanks. (I thought that was bullshit, especially since Animal Logic made the bloody thing, so I, uh, solved it the Australian/Caribbean way.)

I'd guess it's competing definitions. We used 'release candidate' for pretty much every project, and only referred to 'alpha' or 'beta' versions if they were given to internal or external customers pre-release. This is in Microsoft solution development, it may have peculiar to our company but given that there's at least three definitions in here I'm guessing everyone has their own ideas of what it means.

2K also own Rockstar. And they dealt with Team Bondi, which I think is an instructive place to look. 2K was interested in buying out Team Bondi and rebranding them Rockstar Australia or Rockstar South or something, to go with 2K Australia, but sussed out that Team Bondi wasn't functioning and decided not to invest. They seem to be more indulgent than most publishers are with their AAA teams, because they get people they think they can trust to do good work and give them essentially unlimited resources, but Team Bondi, then 2K Marin, then Irrational, probably soured that particular strategy. I think they've learnt that they can trust Rockstar to deliver, nevermind the atrocious conditions there, but that Rockstar's reliability isn't as reproduceable as they maybe hoped.

Avatar is odd in that it starts off as a competent kids' show and somewhere along the line becomes a great show. By mid-season 2 it's definitely a great show, but I wouldn't blame you for not being enthused to get to there.

I am enjoying how GW2 is handling its characters - right now, the 'iconic' characters, those that the main characters chiefly interact with in the storylines, would be a veritable Burger Kids' Club of diversity if they hadn't been introduced with an eye to how they're serving the story first. The only real kerfuffle is that two of the women are dating, but even then it seems like a minority because the more prevalent reaction is that putting Marjory, who acts like she's the star of a noir film, in discussions involving feelings and curtains and romance is hilarious. There is also a disabled girl, who has a battle robot and is a manipulative little shit.

Whoops! Wrong link, here's the correct one: http://www.dailydot.com/lifestyle/sfwa-sexism-sci-fi-nebulas-mary-kowal/ I think the characterisation is accurate; there's an undercurrent here that these people can't be holding real opinions.

What actually defines alpha and beta isn't the state of the product, but the testing pool you're using: alpha testers are people who are in the core demographic and will be relatively nice, who you use to confirm your vision and your design is working. Beta testers are closer to the general population, you don't care if they're mean, and they're finding bugs and breaking features. If you don't have a graduated testing pool, for instance if you are selling your unfinished game to all comers or are doing a pre-release weekend as a promotional exercise, then 'alpha' and 'beta' are basically self-defined milestones.

The only one in the movie, that one? Yeah, it's so, so good. I love the 'oh god what's going on here' feeling it's going for, like someone's lifted up a rock and all the beetles are scuttling. Fincher's version just pushes everything just a little further, everything's just a little tighter (even though it is a 2 1/2 hour long film). Everything's set up just a little better - Blomkvist is promised Wennerstrom to entice him to go to Hedestad, and the way Wennerstrom is dispatched and how Salander empties his accounts is handled much cleaner. (Though I preferred him committing suicide to being executed, I can imagine a sequel tying Zala to Wennerstrom's death.)

Noted science fiction author Peter Nuckbeard

My housemate has been on a Girl with the Dragon Tattoo kick because he now has time to read the books, so I watched the Swedish version and then the American version within about a week of each other. Yep, Fincher's version is pretty fucking fabulous. I like it more than the Swedish version, which I think mishandles Lisbeth a bit. The American version has Lisbeth interact with people more so her social inabilities come across better on screen, and the introductions to the characters are handled better. I also liked a couple of the Fincher additions, some of the smoothing out of the mystery and the cat they they added for Blomkvist, but rewatching it I was struck by how they handled Lisbeth's guardian and the old racist Vanger. They're both played as amicable people with monstrous expectations, who see their worldview as reasonable and honest. I understand Fincher is interested in doing the sequel if they work out what to do with the second one; the second book gets lost and ends poorly, and it sounds like they want to go a little further afield for their adaptation to try and make it better, which would be great.

So there's a big shitstorm brewing over in speculative fiction - basically the whole thing was kicked off by the trade organisation magazine putting a chainmail bikini warrior on its 200th issue, and an article inside about lady editors essentially ranking them on their attractiveness. The authors in question used their next column to complain about how unfairly they're being treated by 'anonymous' 'commentators' who want to 'censor' them. Naturally, this was a bad idea. It all blew up, there is a timeline here. So fast forward to recently and there's still discontent from the misogynist camp over the 'censorship' of the magazine, and a bunch of them were complaining about these people 'forcing their agenda' on people. They unfortunately had some difficulty with the idea that everything they said was public, and had then been published. Notable: Raymond Feist was one of the people involved, which would be a shame if I actually cared about any of his stuff (Magician was decent, but these days I'd probably point young nerds to a lot of other authors first); Hugo award winner Mary Robinette Kowal is painted as a hypocrite for being a feminist while wearing attractive clothing, and dismissed as no-one they need to know about. My favourite bit, and what seems to have made the whole thing into a massive shitstorm: one of the people involved, a man named Sean Fodera who is apparently a buyer for Macmillan, declared that he had been 'taken out of context' despite the article linking to his posts, that the article was 'libel' and that he planned on suing everyone who had linked to it. The Streisand Effect kicked in at that point.

This is exactly the kind of thing that I was thinking of, but didn't know US history well enough to know if there were any examples. I'm obviously not claiming that racism in the US was less of a problem then than it is now, but that the gains made then were erased in order to make it easier to perpetuate inequality later. I'm a little excited by the idea that this might be a thing, and I'm sure academics who study this area are well aware of it but I just kind of got there by speculation.

Also dolphin fucking, because I think most people were too traumatised to follow the links on goatse. One lead to a narrative about the practice of fucking dolphins. I wonder if part of a 'backlash' against a disenfranchised group having too much perceived power involves erasing the history of that group ever having power in the past. I'm reminded of the brouhaha I heard of over Once Upon A Time casting a black guy as Lancelot, when Lancelot is a French addition, and there was a ton of trade on the Mediterranean, to the point where Tunisians and Moroccans basically considered themselves part of Europe. We know that Middle Eastern scholars explored all over Africa, in which there were massive, wealthy kingdoms. But what kind of sparked this is a fairly typical comparison of LA Noire's treatment of women to a noir movie filmed in the 40s, combined with the knowledge that gender equality, as measured by gender ratios and average pay, is getting worse, and I'm wondering: is this what happens? Do the misogynists and racists start pushing back and ignoring that things used to be more balanced, and then a generation or so people forget it was ever like that?

Showed this to my housemate, who has a better understanding of metal; he points to the general amateurish nature of the video, film quality, lack of choreography, as suggesting lack of self-awareness, and then started ranting about a band he otherwise likes called Pain of Salvation that takes terrible pictures of themselves trying to look like a metal band. I'd gather that self-awareness is distributed in the population fairly typically, and like most things the people who have self-awareness are probably better at whatever they're doing.