Gormongous

Finished Little Witch Academia. I'm probably being too hard on it, but I thought the shift from "episodic Saturday Morning Cartoon format" to "light seinen drama" in the second cour of the show was clumsy enough to make me watch the final few episodes with some real side-eye. I appreciated the increasing character development that was a byproduct of the shift a lot: Diana, Constanze, Lotte, and even Ursula get some quality time with Akko, whose bumbling earnestness forces them all to either step up or reveal some vulnerability. Lotte's episode especially is excellent, possibly the best in the series, but they're all good. Unfortunately, the nebulous threat to magic, the mustache-twirling villain, and the rather arbitrary resolution are not. Honestly, my best guess is that Yoshinari You, while a talented short-form director, doesn't really have the juice for or the interest in going for an old-school two-cour anime series, and Shimada Michiru, while an old hand at the scenario business, didn't really have the material to force him to it. I don't know, it's whatever. 7/10. Like I said earlier, I'm watching Turn A Gundam on a whim right now, having only ever watched War in the Pocket and parts of the movie versions of the original series, and I've actually been blown away by how inventive, daring, and weird it is. Granted, Turn A is notoriously the dark horse of the franchise, being set in a WW1-era Earth that's getting invaded by moon people, but it's still such a good time and so sure of itself that it's hard not to get swept along. I'm beginning to wonder if all Gundam is like this?

I got The Witcher 3 during midweek madness a month or two ago, and it's been everything good that I've heard about for years now. I'm really excited to keep playing and I'm well over twenty hours in, which is an exceedingly pleasant surprise given the difficulties I've been having falling into games lately.

Yeah, it's also worth pointing out that people in the 1920s nostalgic about the not-so-distant pass were being nostalgic for the Gilded Age, probably the most brutal period of economic and social unrest and inequality in American history until the present day. Like with the fifties, the post-WW1 economic boom allowed for a lot of nostalgia for terrible times from the comfort of wealth and security. EDIT: And Jake pointed it out, like, five seconds later. That'll learn me to post before finishing the podcast episode!

That's the plan! Since we're recording more regularly, timeliness becomes more of an issue. I keep meaning to post stuff here. I watched Love Lab and it was fine. ACCA ended up being a disappointment to me. Little Witch Academia has finally gotten good but I think it's taken too long and I find the villain to be risibly obvious anyway. I'm watching my first series-length Gundam, Turn A Gundam, and it's weirdly amazing? Although I got to a cross-dressing confusion episode last week and I haven't watched it since. I really wish I hadn't committed to another fifty-episode series after the bloated letdown that was Eureka Seven, because I'm really jonesing to finish up the last two sequels to Crest of the Stars, which are as good as Legend of Galactic Heroes in terms of surprisingly humanistic anime space opera but seem to be vastly underrated compared to it.

I guess why I built on your comment is because, in my opinion, the movie is over-faithful to the comics in terms of aesthetics, while changing or de-emphasizing the comics' reasons behind those aesthetics, and that makes the movie as a whole feel superficial, whether considered on its own or as an adaptation.

To build on those criticisms, I also think that Scott Pilgrim vs. the World is either a misunderstanding or betrayal of the themes of the comics. In those, Scott's refusal to own his past, especially mistakes, is contrasted and complicated by the way that he is steeped in nostalgia and references about the pop-culture media of his childhood. Honestly, I think it's impossible for a two-hour film not to fall short when adapting a six-volume comic, although the final fight with Gideon could probably have been cut down from its twenty-five minute slog, but the way that this specific movie sidelines the development of its characters and themes to more thoroughly recreate the nerd culture aesthetics of its source comics makes anyone's dislike of it understandable to me.

I thought this episode wasn't bad, although I haven't had the time with Endless Space 2 to have developed a more matured opinion, but I definitely agree that review episodes on 3MA are weak in general and weakest when they're trying to be a deep dive on a just-released strategy game. At best, they tend to be a spoken equivalents to the plethora of written reviews out there, which doesn't play to the podcast's strengths, and at their worst they're bitch sessions about the little frustrations of a newly released game and miss the forest for the trees. The exemplar of the latter, for me, is the XCOM 2 episode where Rob and Dave came into the episode very cranky about the seven or eight hours that they'd spent in the game and ready to write off entire systems that they didn't understand as under-designed and inferior to the first XCOM, a game that they clearly hadn't played in at least a year and bore minimal resemblance to their recollections. They bagged on the game for an hour and never came back to it. I don't listen to every episode of 3MA anymore, but when I do tune in, it's for considered analysis, and not hot takes and gamer rage. I know it's a huge ask for the panel to put in dozens of hours for every game that gets discussed, but even a little more critical distance than just a week after release, with most panelists barely able to get through one campaign, would improve matters noticeably.

As referenced on the previous page, he made transphobic and anti-identitarian comments two months ago, so I doubt he's changed at all. He just has a game coming out and is willing to make a "sorry you were offended" apology to make people feel okay about buying it.

Jake, if you sent the robot far back enough in time that deviation from Catholic Church doctrine wouldn't be cause for immediate destruction, it would be too far back to be remotely intelligible to any possible listener (and, also, possibly too far back for the concept of a sacral Christian priesthood with specific powers derogated to it by the divine to be intelligible, either). There is probably a period of time in the seventeenth century where the robot would be doctrinally nonthreatening, linguistically comprehensible, and technologically impressive to the average European, but it'd be hard to hit. Even then, by the fifteenth century, there were decades of stories about brazen heads, prototypical robots built by medieval luminaries like Albertus Magnus or Roger Bacon and powered by "natural" (as opposed to supernatural, either holy or hellish) magic, so it's possible that even your average European of any era might roll their eyes at the robot and proclaim it an interesting but not particularly impressive manifestation of magic.

I'm having a weird moment thanks to some incidental genealogy. A friend had just finished S-Town, and I was telling her how my family history, especially on my father's side, reminds me of Bibb County and its denizens. On whim, I tried to double-check where my grandfather was born, but all I brought up was the divorce record for my parents on some random genealogy site... which listed their date of marriage as 1979, four or five years earlier than I'd always thought it was. I confirmed it with the county records, but I'll spoiler the rest because it's both personal and boring. Sorry for oversharing. It's just been a bee in my bonnet today, and I thought someone might get a laugh of recognition out of it.

Also, even with the return of Robot Fear, this is one of the best episodes you guys have done, equal with The Ghost and the Goblin. Chris' effortless Empire Strikes Back reference at the end would seal it even if the rest were a mess. Keep it up!

We exist in a world where funding for the sciences (and the arts and humanities, for that matter) depends on getting rich, bored laypeople (or, worse, bored bureaucrats) excited about your research, so I think a lot of scientists and academics get stuck in a permanent "Think of all the awesome things that this could mean" mode.

It's definitely one area of game design where abstraction is routinely rejected in favor of over-detailed verisimilitude. It always baffled me how the developers of Civilization V defended their black box-style diplomacy by saying that, in real life, you don't know exactly what people are thinking... ignoring that they were making a game where, unlike in real life, the "people" are immortal nation-spirits with a fine-grained control over every aspect of society.

I not only saw it, I played it! It was weirdly hot at the con. Some of the people with whom I played liked it a lot, but I was a little lukewarm myself. Part of it was that I lost, and badly at that, but part of it felt like the design of the game itself. Doing well in Potion Explosion is mostly about pulling a marble from the tray in such a way that marbles of the same color come into contact with each other and you get to pick them up as well, Tetris-like. You use the potions that you complete with those marbles to change the makeup of the tray, in order to get more marbles when it comes time to pull one. I thought the basic puzzle was interesting, but if you guess wrong for your two starting potions or can't get the right one in the draft, you're just going to fall further behind as other players use their potions to get marbles to complete potions to use them to get marbles, and so on. Your only real option for catching is to wait for the other players to make mistakes or get unlucky, too. It may be that I was just unfortunate enough to be playing at the wrong level: with more seriousness, I'd probably have the knowledge and experience to minimize the snowballing of other players, and with more casualness, I'd have had more fun just watching the other players pull off ridiculous combinations. Still, it didn't really grab me, as it stood. My go-to short games are still Skull and Codenames.

I would credit the idea that Waypoint moderation has limited resources, except their #1 new rule on the forums is that people should flag anything they find bothersome or uncomfortable as a first rather than a last resort. I haven't been mod staff on a forum for over a decade, but I imagine the volume of work, having to go to every flagged post and make a judgment call, is exponentially higher than in most other forums, especially since Waypoint moderation seems to be relying on a smell test rather than on explicit rules for acceptable and unacceptable content. In general, I understand the desire to make the forums a safe space, but I find all of the rules to make the community seem very closed off and unwelcoming. When you say in your own forum rules that you want everyone to feel like their voices are being heard, but also tell them that they're likely to get at least a few warnings and locked threads in their time on the forums, so it's important for them to consider if their voice is needed in a given conversation, well...

I finally managed to play Inis at a local board game convention and it was great. Economical, fun, beautiful art. I also played Tyrants of the Underdark and liked it more than I thought for a hybrid area-control/deck-building game? Lots of good games available these days.

Once we're on iTunes, I'll get us a Facebook page and start running our Twitter more sanely. It'll be good, I promise.

I like the one attempt to extend the "painkiller" theme with "overdose," but then there are two quasi-religious subtitles and one "black" because black is the new black.

At least with Lucas, I could understand the gradual decline in quality and vision as a would-be auteur running out of juice. Lucas wrote the drafts for all the prequel trilogies himself, at the very least. Scott just gets scripts written by four or six different people handed to him and, as I've heard it, lets his cinematographer and other creative leads do all the work for him. Lucas does the same, preferring to be "executive director" of a bunch of underlings from his chair in the back, but Scott seems to have it worse: total creative control and minimal interest in making a technically competent movie.

"Spicy" can stay as long as Jake continues to express comical disgust at its existence. They're two sides of the same coin.

I'm not recommending that you watch another movie from a director you dislike, but Enemy is far and away my favorite of Villeneuve's work. It's not really about nice people either, so... yeah. Super down on the existence of this movie, though. I just think of Harrison Ford's t-shirt and jeans costume and it makes me feel totally enervated.

I'm not much for "kung fu" movies, but my cinephile friend and I discovered The Boxer's Omen four or five years ago and it remains one of the most interesting things I've watched with him. It just has such an extremely meticulous and intensely absurd sense of reality, it's impossible not to get sucked in a little. The Shaw Brothers are so hit and miss for me, but when they hit do they hit.

I think one of the goals of GOG Galaxy was getting users to have larger libraries with GOG and have more inherent loyalty to GOG thereby. It hasn't really worked yet, I think, partially because loyalty to a digital games service seems to be an odd mix of library size, friend circle, friend features, and perceived company evilness. GOG seem like really nice people, but no one seems to use them use them, so... Valve's still the default, at least for me.

I first got an electric toothbrush four years ago and it took me almost six months to figure out that I didn't need to return it for randomly and briefly losing power every half-minute or so. I looked and it only mentions the purpose for the pulsing deep in the tiny quadruple-folded manual, so I don't feel bad.