Gormongous

What exactly is culture outside of the attitudes and ideas expressed in various forms? You keep writing as though art and media are byproducts of culture, but in the main they are culture. They're both cause and effect, because culture is self-referential and self-perpetuating. Attempting to intercept and divert the cycle here is as valid as attempting to do the same in some other way. Also, we don't censor people for having harmful ideas, which would be thought crimes, unless those ideas are shown to lead directly to harmful acts against a given group of people, in which case they're hate speech and then are censored currently. Not to mention, it isn't even a given in our culture today that sexism is really that bad, so I doubt this is a useful line of argument for us. Finally, I posted three links to academic articles about sexism and video games, albeit in America, that I found after just ninety seconds of googling. It's more or less proven that there is a strong correlation between consumption of sexist media and expression of sexist attitudes. Of course, you could say that sexist media is entirely self-selected, so only sexist people consume it, but that runs counter to my personal experience of media. It seems much more likely, although not scientifically provable without a massive number of studies and meta-studies, that it's a two-way street, like the cycle mentioned above, in which case the best way to address sexism in culture and society is to have a strong criticism of sexist works and sexist attitudes.

Poe's Law strikes again!

Well, there are a lot of problems with the seiyuu cast of Haruhi. Hirano Aya also has a benign tumor on her throat that caused her to stop taking new roles for a year, right before the sex scandal and Lantis' dismissal, and Goto Yuko has the autoimmune thing that's slowed her down a lot in recent years. Still, I've always seen most people agree that those are just justifications for shelving a franchise that is no longer "ongoing" in novel form despite being unfinished and having seven more volumes left to adapt. And no, Haruhi's not the main character in The Disappearance of Yuki Nagato-chan, but she's still a character. She has a role in every major plot point of the manga through volume thirty-four and appears onscreen as much as, say, Kyon's little sister does in the original series. Maybe that's enough of a difference for the fans not to rage or for the seiyuu to be changed, but I don't know. I think it really is just transitioning from source material on indefinite hiatus to source material that's still getting published, albeit ironically on a much slower basis since the announcement of the anime adaptation.

Yeah, I tend to agree with Problem Machine. Art in particular and media in general are important vehicles for the expression and transmission of culture, in addition to being products of it. One doesn't trump the other. If they don't have the power to shape people's thinking at all, then I'm not really sure I understand their function as cultural objects. But yeah, agree to disagree.

I don't think that video games cause school shootings or anything, but I believe quite strongly that the ubiquity of violence in video games is central in building a world and a worldview where a protest about a cop shooting a black teenager is met with more cops pointing more guns in people's faces. They help to build a world in which the "correct" response to ISIS is a bombing campaign. People don't see other people on the news or on the streets doing stupid sexist, racist, or violent things and call a spade a spade in a large part because they've played tons of video games and watched tons of movies and read tons of news articles where attitudes of acceptance and quiescence towards such things are depicted as the normal and rational response. I don't know how I can make the difference any more clear than saying that I believe violent video games help to create a world in which violence is more acceptable, but they do not directly cause violence thoughts or behaviors. I am saying the same thing with sexism.

It's an exceptionally bad political cartoon, even beyond the subject matter, because it doesn't actually depict views of the opposing side, even in caricature, and gives the reader no reason why one position is correct and the other is incorrect, besides the art just coloring one as evil and the other as good. Why can't Nintendo help? Does he even care? He says he cares but he's not doing anything. Maybe he doesn't care, in which case the green meanies are right. It's hard to tell.

Googling just a little bit brings up a bunch of peer-reviewed psychology and sociology studies, including "SeX-Box: Exposure to Sexist Video Games Predicts Benevolent Sexism," "Video Game Characters and the Socialization of Gender Roles: Young People’s Perceptions Mirror Sexist Media Depictions," and "An Examination of Violence and Gender Role Portrayals in Video Games: Implications for Gender Socialization and Aggressive Behavior." There are references in all of them to multiple other modern studies with similar conclusions, namely that there is a very strong correlation between sexist depictions in video games and sexist attitudes in people that play them. All studies acknowledge that it might simply be that just sexist people play games containing sexism, but also that a causal link is more likely than such a rigidly self-selecting group. Syn, for what you're saying, I don't think video games can make someone sexist. That's not what anyone's concerned about. The issue is that sexism in video games encourages and reinforces sexist thoughts and actions in the people that play them because they present a holistic and engrossing world in which that sexism is commonplace, normal, and acceptable. If virtually all the games we played only depicted people of color as lazy, stupid, and lawless, it probably wouldn't change most people's core beliefs about real-life people of color, but it does acclimate them to a world in which that specific belief exists and is valid. It might not cause someone to heckle a person of color on the street, but it might cause them to ignore, accept, or balk at heckling or other such racism when it does occur. It might make them less hesitant to say the wrong thing or to hurt somebody. Video games regularly depict worlds that are extraordinarily idealized in terms of personal power and agency, but somehow we always have to bow to "reality" when it comes to depiction of women, queers, and people of color. I don't know, it's just gross.

Probably the strangest thing for me is just how far "conflict of interest" has drifted from its original meaning in a handful of weeks, into realms of specificity and hostility that no human being could possibly handle. It's basically become the new "biased," in terms of being a more sophisticated word for "doesn't agree with me," yet somehow even more bizarre because it's usually correct if misguided to accuse someone of bias, but to accuse the owner of a private website — one that is not in any way, shape, or form associated with journalistic, legal, or medical enterprise — of a "conflict of interest" for dating the employee of another private website is... I don't know. There's no connection with reality. The internet's just been smeared with a new buzzword.

I think the entire thought process represented by your repeated edits is why I like Trigun still.

With games like that, it's hard to be sure that they land the right way with the group. I've got a similarly "problematic" game that my group loves, Ladies & Gentlemen, where players divide into husband-and-wife teams of Victorian aristocrats. The "male" players earn the money that the "female" players spend on clothes, with the best outfit winning the game, but they can't communicate to each other about the amount of money or the value of the clothes, so it encourages the sort of tongue-in-cheek roleplaying where the husband calls the wife a frivolous girl who's out to waste his money and the wife tells the husband that he doesn't love her if he doesn't buy her this handbag. It's a huge laugh all around, especially if you have everyone play the opposite gender, but it just takes one person who's not feeling it, which is totally valid, for the game to fall flat. Unrelatedly, it also just takes one real-life couple who decide the game is proof of the strength of their relationship, which is less valid, for the game to fall flat. I think that games influencing violent attitudes and behaviors in the people who play them is also a problem, but I think there are at least two distinctions from sexism in games that stand out to me. The first is that there is such an obvious and egregious epidemic of misogyny among gamers, shown most recently by the shit surrounding #GamerGate, that it's hard not to see some kind of correlation with sexist themes and motifs in the games they play. We don't have quite the same thing with violence, not on such a wide scale, although the tendency of gamers' misogyny to manifest itself in death threats and abuse shows that they are related problems. The second is one that I'm not entirely sure on, but would like discussed more. You can't argue that violence is most inessential to games. A substantial majority involve combat and the military. Even if you disagree with those being the dominant settings and themes of the games being made, violence still has a place in them. It's more a matter of what's fitting, which some developers do fail to consider properly. But what game is actually about sexism? There's almost never a fictional or mechanical justification for sexist attitudes and behaviors in gaming, but it's still as endemic to games as violence. I believe that sends a message and normalizes those behaviors in a way that a set of ideas and actions with an in-game justification would not.

I mean, the issue is that it's the choice between it being made to break in a certain way and it not breaking at all. I'd rather have the former than the latter, but Paradox definitely disagrees. It just bothers me, because it's another instance where a game gives an unreasonable and unenjoyable amount of player agency over component systems. Historically, states in the medieval period did experienced a dramatic upswing as territory and centralization increased, but they also experienced an equally dramatic downturn in both when they transcended certain geographic and ethnic boundaries. As the simulation currently stands, only the first half of that bell curve is modeled. There have been mods that have experimented with vassal opinion maluses like "empire too big, feeling ignored" or "too many other vassals, feeling jealous" or "different culture group than top-level title, feeling restive," with limitations on how high crown authority can be raised based on the ratio of direct vassals and higher-level titles held, and with various tweaks to how empire-tier titles are created and inherited, like requiring approval of religious head or of some majority of vassals. Paradox has repeatedly stated that they aren't interested in such solutions because empires being powerful is the game working as intended, but then they quietly implement nerfs to the largest in-game empire in the history of Crusader Kings 2 and introduce a mechanic that, rather than being a soft limit, is a flat time-based hard limit, so really I don't know what's going on. It seems like Paradox is really hostile to adopting mechanics that everyone's mods are using for a couple of years, after which they get folded into the game.

Yeah, I feel the same about seeing Dallas on the screen. Even though I haven't lived there for half a decade, I still get really happy seeing it, even if there's a corner of my brain that's irritated that every single director has to make Dallas more Texan. I think the last movie that actually looked like Dallas was in North Texas as opposed to Hill Country was True Detective, but then that show had a lot of love for the South and the Gulf Coast.

I guess I take it for granted that you guys handle it so well. And you do handle it so well.

I am ridiculously going to wait until reviews come out to know if the game I kickstarted years ago is ready to play.

It broke my heart at the end of the podcast to hear Anita take as given that these forums would become a frothing sea of toxic shit because of her appearance on the podcast. And then my heart broke again to hear Sean try to reassure her but not really be able to articulate how it'd be different without discounting her experiences elsewhere.

Well, two things. First, Paradox is willing to use scripted events to force some historical events (the rise of Shia Islam, the emergence of melting-pot cultures, the Seljuk and Mongol invasions), but not others. It's not in the design philosophy of the new developers there, who seem to believe in abstract "balance" above all. Most of the event chains are actually quite fragile anyway. The Seljuks never appeared in my 867 Byzantium game, for instance, and Norse culture is still around in 1220. Second, I find their choice to depict the Abbasids as ahistorically weak and divided frustrating because it shows their obvious awareness of a fact that any person who's played more than a dozen hours of Crusader Kings 2 knows. Empires are impossibly stable. Once you get between twenty and thirty duke-level vassals, you will never get a rebellion again, because each vassal will be discouraged by the money, manpower, and prestige that the rest give you. Lobsters in a bucket, etc. It's ironically the opposite of how empires worked in the Middle Ages and Paradox has slowly begun to acknowledge it. They're even introducing a pair of mechanics in the Charlemagne DLC, a Centralization crown law and a Vassal Limit tech, in order to slow down growth before and after that tipping point, so it's really disappointing that in the same DLC they still have to fudge the historical setting so dramatically.

I think, after having thought for a while, that the sticking point for me is not that someone's reproducing art that is espouses offensive ideas, but that someone gets to make money off of it for the sole reason that it is offensive. I mean, sure, there's art that has remained famous and popular to this day despite its problematic elements, which has a different set of issues associated with its preservation and publication, but a lot of other stuff under consideration only really holds any interest because it is offensive. Whether or not it is something you ultimately decide to be worth it, there is definitely still an ethical question of choosing to profit from something that is only profitable because it offends people. Still, with the death of the archive as a public institution, it seems like there's nowhere for stuff like that to go, so someone probably has to choose to profit from it if it is to continue to exist at all.

Sadly, the only production houses that make "original" anime anymore are the ones big enough to have their own publisher for tie-in print media, thus big enough to be as risk-adverse with their "original" works as smaller companies are with their adaptations. It's a post-bubble industry, like everything else these days. I don't know, I'm probably too cynical. There are still guys like Shinkai Makoto out there, making movies and OVAs out of their own pockets using their own equipment. They just don't always jump the Pacific like whatever Crunchyroll turns its Sauron-like eye on. Does anyone have an opinion on Shinkai? Five Centimeters per Second is one of my favorite anime movies, but I kinda hate that all the other ones are the same basic story with a different setting...

Yeah... I mean, that's really it. The nature of the Japanese anime market, at least as the companies there perceive it, seems to be such that simply being an existing property with a successful sales history as a light novel, manga, or anime isn't enough for it to be adapted. There has to be ongoing growth potential in multiple simultaneous media to make it worth their while. For instance, and this is one of the most frustrating examples for me, even though The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya has at least three seasons' worth of material to be adapted from the light novels, there is literally no chance of any more anime being made, because Tanigawa Nagaru (who apparently created the execrable Bokusatsu Tenshi Dokuro-chan Desu, what the fuck) took forever to finish the last novel and isn't making any more for the foreseeable future. Clearly there's no point in making a sequel to one of the most commercially and critically successful anime of the past decade, because there's no possibility of a knock-on effect with music CDs or manga spinoffs. Wait, no... That's right. The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya line is dead because the author's on haitus, but the (somewhat crappy and very moe) manga spinoff The Disappearance of Yuki Nagato-chan is getting an anime adaptation in spring 2015, because that manga is currently running and will just go on forever thanks to shy protagonists and memory loss. So yeah, if you want to see everything interesting about those characters thrown out in favor of traditional shoujo dynamics, be sure to tune in! I know I will.

It's interesting, because I remember reading a couple articles that an episode of Ghost in the Shell: SAC turned me onto, about how the transition of sidearms from revolvers to semiautomatics was the first and most important step in police militarization. The arguments for the transition have always been that semiautomatics are more modern, easier to operate, less prone to user error, and need reloading less often, but the article observed that revolvers, with their five- or six-shot capacity and lengthy reload time, force an interval that usually breaks a cop out of that "keep shooting until it stops moving" loop that seems hard-wired into humans. It also argued, and this seems true even though I have no evidence either way, that magazine capacity is a red herring and if a situation is not resolved in six bullets, twelve bullets isn't going to resolve it either.

I was actually embarrassed for a lot of the podcast because, having not been used to hearing Anita talk except in a presentational mode, she just sounded like a less ebullient Danielle to me. I had it figured out by the end, but I was miserable there for a bit.

Well, there really haven't been that many gains in dissent over the past thirty years. We're a little better at organizing it, but our methods are still the same, and the authorities have gotten a lot better at putting it down, or maybe just more inclined.

That's a little unfair. XCOM was an unprecedented and transformative design, despite its "inspiration." Now, if Firaxis were to announce and demo a Terror From the Deep sequel tomorrow that had a lot in common with the 2012's XCOM, you might be hearing the same complaints. If they want me to judge Beyond Earth on its own merits, I really wish they'd do a better job of demonstrating how they made decisions for it because they inform a holistic design and not because they worked well enough in the previous game. There are definitely cool things they've talked about, but to me, there's even more stuff that just seems unconsidered, from their creative influences to the blank starting map.

I'm watching what is supposedly the "best" Adachi Mitsuru sports anime, Cross Game, and it's pretty good. People warned me over and over that the first episode would make me want to quit, but maybe I'm just immune to childhood trauma in anime, because I barely noticed it and the rest of the anime, up to the twentieth episode where I am, is paced impeccably. Watching it, I have to remind myself that real baseball doesn't have this immaculately tuned sequence of highs and lows. I also just finished Kuragehime, which was great but so short! I think I've only watched one or two other anime that struggled so hard to fit basic plot and character elements into a half-cour structure. It was still a fully fun anime, but I felt like I was watching it at 1.5x speed. Thank heavens that shoujo plots tend to take kinder to abridgment than shounen and seinen plots, which are much more about the payoff at the end, but it still felt like it wanted to be at least sixteen if not twenty-four episodes. Who knows, maybe when the manga is finally finished, they'll make a sequel... but probably not. Also, best OP in a while: I also also finished Legend of Galactic Heroes, the longest OVA ever made at one hundred and ten episodes, and have virtually nothing to say that hasn't been said better elsewhere. Suffice enough, it's probably the biggest and best example of "pure" space opera in anime, and surprisingly well-written and well-paced for its vintage. Two space empires fighting a centuries-long war until two military geniuses come onto the scene sounds boring and formulaic as hell, but LoGH probably invented every single one of the tropes you've fooled yourself into believing you're tired of. And don't worry, if you love the show and hate to see it go, there are two spinoffs with episodes in the double digits and four movies. Christ, I'll never be completely done!

Okay, having listened, three things: I used to think it was this great piece of surreal serendipity that Danielle came out to her mother at Disney World, but now I'm apparently finding out that Danielle's family was just always at Disney World, so it was as likely to happen there as at the kitchen table. I wish the podcast had had more time to go into the problems of corporations as conservators and of preservation for profit. All three options (re-release it as is, release it bowlderized, or refuse to release it) seem intriguingly imperfect to me and I'm not really sure what my own opinion is, besides my "historian" opinion that is always, "Oh jeez, don't get rid of anything, you never know when you might need it again." If anyone actually knows what Farscape episodes from the first season can be skipped while preserving the series narrative, let me know, because it's my third time through the show with a friend and I'm still at a loss for which they could be. I made it through myself way back in 2008 by watching the show with the laptop on my lap while playing Mass Effect on the TV for the nth time, which most people can't really manage. If you were wondering, they synergized pretty well, if only because Crichton is a great antidote for Shepard and his/her ilk.