Gormongous

It's Lost in Translation for me. The "I'm not a feminist, I'm a humanist" thing really bothers me, not only because it typically means agreement with feminists but desire to avoid the ire of misogynists (or agreement with misogynists but desire to avoid the ire of feminists), but because it's a word that already means something else. Unless you're a fourteenth- or fifteenth-century Italian or German who believes that human knowledge is better served by analysis of the works of man, especially those of classical Greece and Rome, than faith in the works of God, you're using the wrong word to describe yourself. If you mean to say that you believe in the fundamental equality of men and women both in theory and in practice, as well as the destruction of social and cultural structures that prevent said equality, we have a word for that: feminist. Have the courage to identify with what you actually believe, even if it means using a word with which you have negative associations. Every time some says "I'm a humanist," I want to make and post these faces in response:

Yeah, the final schedule seemed to assume that you either still lived in Dallas or were rich enough to fly out for a totally random weekend picked three weeks in advance. I'm curious how that worked out for them. The Friday night events were in the park across the street from the school and the Saturday night events are at some massive warehouse converted into a bar out in Garland. It seems really low-rent.

She's trying to bait me into a big rant about how The Big Bang Theory is about superficial geek fanservice while Lucky Star is about genuine otaku fanservice, but I will not be tempted. Your plan fails, tegan!

And K-On! is Friends? I don't know where to fit Lucky Star in that framework. It's always gotten a lot of undeserved hate for being the crossover point of Key-style moe into slice-of-life comedy. I like it a lot, but unlike Azumanga, it's definitely aware that the people watching it are twenty-something guys and the people being watched are high-school girls.

I respect their perspective, I just don't think it needs to be universally accommodated. There's room for spoiler-heavy shows and spoiler-free shows, but I don't really understand why the latter are overwhelmingly the default in all forms of discourse, especially when so inconsistently applied. I mean, the Thumbs spoiled the hell out of Desert Golfing, a game that relies on newness and discovery for most of its appeal, but no one seem to care and instead I got to hear Sean's perspective on appreciating it purely as an exercise in craft. I'd like more of that.

I don't know, being really leery of spoilers sounds a lot like complaining about knowing a few things in advance from one of several thousand works one might consume over a decade or so, which seems odd to me. I don't see why the expectation not to talk about anything substantive in something being discussed is reasonable but the expectation to avoid discussion of things one doesn't want spoiled is not. This is just my opinion, and I know it's unfair by a large amount, but bending over backwards to accommodate one specific way of enjoying media, among dozens of others and often to their detriment, is something I have difficulty understanding in its current ubiquity.

My ten-year high school reunion is tonight. The organizers were totally incompetent, so even if I'd found the time and money to attend, I wouldn't have had the chance to make the trip home. Still, it bums me out. My five-year college reunion this summer was a blast and, even though I have much less in common with my high school classmates, I could have seen the same happening there. Oh well, I'll have a pity party instead.

I'd say there is zero sexualization of female bodies in Azumanga Daioh, beyond the background sexualization that's just the patriarchy. The waifu stuff is from a single character who exists explicitly and exclusively to parody and criticize the willingness of certain adults to fetishize high school girls. If you were to cut him completely out of the six hundred-minute running time of the series, you would still have something like five hundred and eight four minutes remaining.

I don't know, the militant policing of spoilers has become a genuine issue in almost all of the cultural discourse I follow. The fact that nothing substantive is able be said about most media works, not at least without putting the breaks on the conversation and debating whether it's worth spoiling even basic details, is something that bothers me every time I encounter it. How many times have the Thumbs started to get something going about a game, only to stop and spend three solid minutes asking themselves if they should spoil stuff, or put their discussion off to another day that never comes? It honestly bugs the hell out of me to be listening to two smart people talk about a movie or game and then pull back to a comical degree once they realize they're in spoiler territory. "Oh! That thing on the train... Uh, it's good. It's really good, I'll just say that." I don't know, great? Why is the actual thing a spoiler but not how I'm going to feel about it, anyway? Generally speaking, I wish that people would approach the recorded or written discussion of any work with the full expectation that the topic discussed will probably be spoiled. It's one thing not to get pissed that your friend blew the end to Lucky Number Sleven (the last time something got really spoiled for me without warning) out of nowhere and another to listen to a podcast explicitly about Alien: Isolation while still not wanting to hear any specifics.

TotalBiscuit's review (the first I've ever watched, still don't see his appeal) and a half-dozen written reviews from people I know and trust have told me that this game is doomed to be a massive disappointment for me. Every single one of them mentions the extreme systemic and mechanical overlap with Civilization V, the lack of any substantive improvements in the presentation or interface, and the incredibly bland nature of the factions and the tech. Possibly owing to his agreement with 2K (okay, that's not fair, but whatever), TB spent a long time pointing out that even if Beyond Earth is only on the level of a Civilization mod, some mods like Fall from Heaven 2 are quite impressive and that's not something to overlook. Sure, that's true, but Fall from Heaven 2 was free and appears to have innovated more than Beyond Earth did. I just can't pay fifty dollars for a reskin of Civilization V that gets rid of all the theme that made me stick with that game even when it was broken as hell, especially if what replaces it is real-world madlibs and empty technobabble. I don't know if I can pay any money for it.

I'm planning to comb my list of anime I've watched this weekend for characters who are super-sexy cheesecake but totally in service to the story, honest. I'm not anticipating any issues finding some.

They never come down, they just watch more series. Maybe try Azumanga Daioh or Daily Lives of High School Boys if you want more of the same?

You have to register and have a posting history, I think, which is not particularly hard to get (or borrow). There's probably a term for the "fig leaf" backstory for sexy female characters, but I went through the tropes tagged "sexuality" and didn't find one, so if it does exist (and you're right that it probably does) it has an obscure and hard-to-find name. "Boob Backstory" is so much better.

Is there a term for a situation where a torturous in-universe explanation is created almost exclusively to justify what anyone can see is just the male gaze (or something just as uncomplicated and base)? I'm not asking as a criticism of you, Bjorn, but these kinds of explanations are appearing a lot lately with the current social climate of games and I wish there were a way to call a spade a spade.

Well, the rules are quite clear that the colonizer can play it however they want. All players are able to invent and play subsidiary characters, like friends and allies, so particularly talented colonizer could play multiple nations trying to seduce the colonized if it interested them. The rules are even more clear that it's simple for the colonizer to win, so any good colonizer (ugh, gross accident of word choice) is going to want to complicate things to have fun and what I've just suggested is not a big jump from that. Still, it's a game about the brutal destruction of a native culture by outsiders, so it's difficult to make it about anything else. I would like to hear your efforts to turn the rules into something less hopeless or at least more interesting for the colonized, so do share them here if you decide to try it.

I mean, there's GoodGames.us, which is still going. There's no editorial content on the site, only partial coverage of gaming news, and no listing on Metacritic, so the only reason anyone would visit the site is if they enjoyed the reviews, which are almost all either colorless or bilious depending on the writer. Even the most popular reviews after the ones posted during launch only have a dozen comments on them. Nothing differentiates it from any other third-tier gaming site except its oddly pointed mission statement.

I don't see why you couldn't have two colonizers with two different kinds of tokens, so that the colonized could play them off each other and take sides, but the two issues I see are 1) two colonizers weakens the "us vs. them" mentality of the system by making it possible for two of the colonized who have assimilated to be opposed to each other rather than the colonized who have not assimilated, and 2) it would be possible for there to be scenes involving both colonizers but none of the colonized and I'm not sure how that'd be handled mechanically in terms of Enforcement, Judgment, and Indifference. Would there be different sets of rules? What happens when one colonizer breaks the other colonizer's rules, or when one of the colonized breaks one set of rules but not the other? Would it be mechanically possible for one of the colonized to Run Amok after losing all their their tokens with one colonizer, even though they'd been keeping and gaining tokens with the other? It's an interesting set of problems, especially if you want to preserve the power of the original game.

It would be nice, but how would they prevent 8chan and Reddit from tearing the hashtag to pieces as a perceived attempt by #GamerGate's ubiquitous enemies to divide the movement? There have been attempts in the past, like #GamerEthics, that have been actively poisoned by people who seek only to keep the ranks closed.

The original version of the game from 1999 is also on GOG for six bucks. Most of the differences between the PC and mobile ports are in terms of interface (like the ability to plant different ratios of wheat, barley, and rye and the format of the Heroquest menu). I own both, plus the CD version from way back. I'd also just point out that King of Dragon Pass is a full-fledged PC game with potentially massive playtime ported in its entirety to mobile, so if anything's worth a ten-spot, this is it. Okay, I'm done.

It first appears in the 1970s, so it makes sense that it's a contraction of "dippy" and "shit."

Even though the "High School Girls Are Funky" segment is the best part of that show.

Nichijou is awesome and you become awesome by watching Nichijou.

Since Chris and Nick both liked 80 Days so much, I'm going to try again to push King of Dragon Pass as another amazing story-based game on iOS. Basically, it's 80 Days meets Crusader Kings 2, where you play the chieftain of a small Iron-Age clan trying to survive and unite with its neighbors to form a tribe and then a kingdom. Even the short campaign's a bit longer than 80 Days, but it does the same thing of having discrete decisions lead to long and surprising chains of events, in a setting that's packed full of quality writing. It's easily one of my top five games of all time (and maybe a better "historical" game even than Crusader Kings 2). Nick, you would especially like it because it's a game where being righteous is often more important than being right.

I like Another a lot.

Yeah, I tried to rewatch Lexx four years ago, I think, and it was terrible enough to drop after two seasons. What was most upsetting was that the overarching plot, with His Divine Shadow, was quite good, as was the undead assassin guy, but they'd throw anything and everything under the bus for more sex jokes. It's important to remember that, despite the concentration of good sci-fi on TV in the nineties, not all sci-fi on TV in the nineties was good.