Gormongous

Front-pocket wallet is total dweeb mode. Front left, phone. Front right, keys. Back left, wallet. Back right, handkerchief.

I have been getting a big kick lately out of referring to any piece of boring but persistent drama in my life as "the King's Great Matter." History jokes!

Man, you don't get to say that and not post it.

I had no idea. Is this mentioned on this week's Quarter to Three podcast or something? I would give in a second if I had more than a hundred dollars in my bank account. Tom Chick is one of the best and most unique voices in games journalism.

I've definitely seen this sort of thing. There's a class of landlord that think they just buy a space and then various people will pay good money to fix it up and maintain it for you (while coincidentally living in it)

Maybe it was a phone survey and the people who said no just thought they were getting the "Is your refrigerator running?" prank pulled on them.

Having trained yourself to live poor is a mixed bag. Yeah, being thrifty is good in most situations, but a hesitance surrounding money is becoming a bit of a disadvantage for me professionally, in addition to being a drag on my mental health. You can't get to be known as the person who's tight or cheap, even in some social situations.

I think this is part of why people keep saying that a lot of the proponents of #GamerGate are teenagers. They show enough maturity to be fully aware of their own motivations for doing things, but not the maturity to understand other motivations than their own, so they just impart their own motivations to everyone regardless of actual differences in words and actions. The police reports are fake, the doxxing is fake, the victims are fishing for sympathy, their supporters are fishing for sex, and the entire social justice movement just wants to destroy everything that everyone loves... because that's what most members of #GamerGate would be thinking, saying, and doing in that situation. That's what most of them are doing.

Come on, don't you remember when Kickstarter first got popular and it was wall-to-wall scams because there was no code of ethics yet? Everyone's entitled to as much graft as they can get until things settle down.

Maybe it's not academic criticism, in terms of its depth and presentation, but it's academic-style criticism, much closer to it than the usual YouTube video about games. I am also against Sarkeesian turning Tropes vs. Women into a Sexism 101 course, because it dramatically widens the scope of her argument when most other criticisms of her work are already about a lack of specifics on any given point. There is an enormous amount of material out there on sexism in modern media. If someone is left unsatisfied by Sarkeesian's already-ample synopses of various cultural processes, it takes them literally ten seconds to find out more somewhere else. But that's not why this criticism is being made by most people, is it? It's the argument that context is what makes problematic shit acceptable, which misses the point of these videos in a big way.

At least for me, the issue is entirely about publishing problematic and offensive art without promoting it or profiting from it. It's not about censorship, it's about endorsing terrible stuff by investing money in and making money off of it being available (or alternately, peddling a kind of post-racial utopia in which making such a thing available doesn't have any negative connotations, so long as there's a disclaimer beforehand).

The thing for me is, very little academic criticism bothers with that extreme level of trans-media historicism. It's just not a priority, because context is not typically the most germane or useful part of criticism. In all my years writing research papers on Shakespeare in undergrad, never did I come across a article that engaged in contextualization of Shakespeare's works alongside contemporary works in a historical and cultural context as its central argument, even when new historicism was the article's mode. I'm not even going to go into the death of the author, either. The fact that someone can be criticized for choosing not to engage in a massive secondary project of dubious worth (because what does comparing video game sexism with sexism in other media really tell us about anything besides the ubiquity of sexism) makes me feel that those fans of video games who desire it just aren't ready for their chosen medium to be taken seriously.

I'm probably going to lose interest in writing this post before I even finish it, but something of a crisis has been building vis-à-vis my dating life. It's not that I'm having issues getting involved with people. I'm just having issues getting involved with people I like. It seems like every girl I want to date has one thing or another keeping her from dating me, but I have plenty of other girls who want to date me for whom I feel nothing. It feels so entitled to complain about it, but it is grinding me down something fierce. In all seriousness, it would be easier for me if no one were interested in me, because that would mean something external and concrete that might respond to direct action. But if I'm just attracting the wrong kind of person, I don't really know what to do about that. For people who care about specific details:

Yeah, I understand the spirit in which it was written, but there is a lot of really odd appealing to the center that resonates a bit much with everything I'm tired of hearing being said. Is the opposite of a saint really a misogynist? Is that a fair either/or proposition? Then what exactly do we call the people who spent weeks vocally fantasizing about harm being done to Sarkeesian and Quinn?

I really don't know anything about Song of the South besides "Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah" and racism, despite having actually watched it some years ago. If I revise my statement to racism being the predominant reason for most of the abiding interest in a seventy-year-old movie that saw little financial and critical success, would you be less inclined to quibble? Interestingly enough, Disney has never released the film in full in the United States, so whatever merits it may or may nothave, Disney doesn't seem interested in making money off of it, so there's that.

I want real Photoshop skills so very bad right now... Surely there's a screencap someone can edit?

Funny. My car, which I bought in Hurst, has these plates and I hate them like nothing else:

Are these the new Texas plates? I like them a lot more than the black-and-white ones with no graphics that I currently have.

I've never seen it, but they appear to be almost exactly the same. They even have practically the same user rating, within 0.1 points, on MyAnimeList and AniDB. Flip a coin, I guess.

That was... a much shorter blog post than I expected. I thought he was going to criticize the entirety of using a traditional development model when developing an Early Access game, but instead it was just criticizing living in an expensive city while developing an Early Access game, which is... I don't know, fair enough, but not exactly cutting to the heart of all possible criticisms.

I probably shouldn't give suggestions because I went from Princess Jellyfish, which was great but way too short, to Honey & Clover, which I despise after three episodes and has thirty-seven more to go. Nisemonogatari and Chihayafuru are high on my list, but I probably will need to watch something as different from Honey & Clover as possible after it. Taisho Baseball Girls is good enough but really average in terms of... well, everything. It's more about moe and in-period jokes than sports, really. Chihayafuru is a better candidate than it if you want girls actually playing sports. I didn't know Crunchyroll streamed soft ecchi, but okay. That's cool. If the idea of a management-focused sports anime doesn't turn you off, there's Moshidora. I'm not going to look up the full title, because I know that pisses Tegan off, but it's about a high-school baseball manager who hates baseball and uses a book by Peter Drucker to coach team to the nationals. It's really short, but I hear it's really good, even if it's more about building and coaching a good team than the actual play of the game. Oh, the full title is Moshi Koukou Yakyuu no Joshi Manager ga Drucker no Management wo Yondara (What If a Female Manager of a High School Baseball Team Read Drucker's Management). That's cool, too.

They did a million-dollar kickstarter to have no ads on their site for a year. All the rewards were pointedly useless and typically described with a certain crudeness. Many people found it an abuse of Kickstarter.

Yeah, I know I've drifted quite a bit from my original point by now, but I really can't wrap my head around a a bunch of important people in the anime industry agreeing that the main light novel series is out of juice and that the smart choice is to spend millions to adapt one of several vastly inferior manga spinoffs instead (possibly with the same cast and crew). Franchises in Japan might appear to conform to Western experience in media sales, but they clearly play by very different rules sometimes. And just to harp a little bit more, The Disappearance of Yuki Nagato-chan is really not good at all. It reads like a slash doujin, in which Yuki has no personality because she's not an alien but is otherwise unchanged from the flat-affect bookworm of the main series. Of course, Kyon is incredibly kind and patient to everyone, which isn't even remotely like his character in the main series, yet he's inexplicably attracted to the inert and boring Yuki, upon whom he waits hand and foot alongside every other character from the main series. Not to mention there have been forty-one volumes of the manga to date, the characters have been dating for at least a year, and they have only ever held hands. They said," I love you," but only when Yuki had extremely convenient one-week amnesia from being hit by a car. If I'm making it sound like a second-rate soap opera involving the Haruhi characters, yeah... I have seen no one express any interest in watching this anime except to see more Haruhi, which makes me question the fact that the spinoff manga's being adapted even more. The only spinoff that would be weirder for them to adapt would be There Is No Haruhi in My Classroom, a light novel that takes place in the universe of the main series but absent all the established characters and plotlines. And like I said, I'm already committed to watching the whole thing and probably hating it, because the possibility that it will be as surprisingly good as The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya-chan is still somehow there.

I'm trying to be better about only asking questions when I actually want an answer, not just to call someone out in a particularly embarrassing way, so I'm glad you actually had something to give me. I'm especially glad because this is challenging my concept of what a culture is. According to that Wikipedia article, the Pirahã have very little of what I would consider a culture. They have no history, no religion, no social hierarchy, no art, no interest in economy and technology, and little interest in abstract thought, even extending to "basic" things like numbers or colors. The anthropological linguist who studies them believes that even their pronouns are a recent borrowing from another language. I certainly agree that they probably don't have art, but it almost seems to me that we could say just as certainly that they don't have a culture, beyond a shared ethnic and linguistic identity that seems entirely focused on survival skills. That sounds hella fuckin' racist too, because it's generally accepted that "culture" is a feature of all intelligent creatures, but... I don't know. Maybe it's like Peter Watts' Blindsight and it's only a feature of really self-indulgent ones, which just happen to be intelligent most of the time. I'm not sure how this relates to how culture can or cannot perpetuate sexist or violent attitudes, except to show how deeply our cultural pervades our perceptions and how spare a society looks if it has a noticeably less complex culture.

I am not aware of any cultures that do not also create art. Can you point them out to me? I mean, I know about cultures with art that fails to conform to nineteenth- and twentieth-century Western theorists' definitions, but the idea of a culture that has no impulse to create any music, literature, images, or objects is so bizarre as to be unbelievable to me. What form of culture could exist without any of these things? What would it even look like? Also, I'm not saying violence is perpetuated by violence in the media. I'm saying acceptance of violence is perpetuated by the media. Like I said before, there is a huge difference between "violent media caused Sandy Hook" and "violent media caused people to accept Sandy Hook as 'just something that happens.'" You can't say the latter isn't true at least in part, because who's still talking about Sandy Hook? Who's still talking about Elliot Rodger, for that matter? We've accepted and subliminated their effects with zero substantive change as a society. How else can violence be normalized and accepted like that in modern society, besides through mass communication creating (a mostly artificial) consensus on its relevance and application?