Gormongous

I don't know about you not knowing, but over and over the McElroys (Griffin in particular) have asked people to be patient as they worked things out, especially with regards to The Adventure Zone. Under those circumstances, reacting with dismissiveness or hostility to more knowledgeable people giving them advice, even over Twitter, does seem like the textbook definition of arrogance. "We're not sure what works, but we're fine with messing up until we figure it out and we don't want anyone's help" was the refrain of TAZ during the entire time that I was listening to it. When they let Jonah Ray speak for several minutes on My Brother, My Brother, and Me about how great he thinks their Seeso series is, but can't be bothered to give the time of day to anyone non-famous who tries to address their admitted ignorance on certain matters, I don't think I'm being an outrageously entitled fan for shooting them some side-eye. This seems to be the problem with a lot of podcasts that suddenly make it big: I like My Favorite Murder a lot, but I hate it when I hear Karen bullshit on some topic about which she has no clue, knowing that she'll jokingly-but-not-jokingly flame people on Twitter for correcting her in the next episode, or when Georgia audibly gets near tears when the audience at a live show corrects her pronunciation of some random township. Like, it's an important life skill to handle being wrong with grace. I know that I've had to work on it hard. I don't think famous or successful people should get a free pass when I don't give myself one. Also, the full text of Justin's half-drunken brag was: Again, that seems to go way beyond brotherly pride to the textbook definition of arrogance, for me. Oh, Time Magazine hadn't heard of (or doesn't care about) your D&D podcast, so its opinion is bunk? I love Justin, but I'd feel embarrassed saying shit like that, even were I trashed.

To piggyback off of that fundamental truth, Travis' new podcast The Kind Rewind is four episodes in and it's really good. It's just Travis and his wife Teresa watching old TV shows and movies, then talking about what they liked and didn't like, especially compared to what they thought as kids. They just finished going through the first season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and now they're going to do ET: The Extraterrestrial and then the first season of Cheers. It's really warm and genuine, and Travis' passion for talking about media shines through even as he says some pretty dopey things and defends Xander waaaay more than Xander deserves to be defended. I'm rewatching Buffy right now and that made the past few episodes really enjoyable, but I like the vibe enough to follow them into stuff that I'm not rewatching and don't really care about.

I'm now beginning to wonder if photic sneezing is also accompanied by a nonstandard brain configuration that makes photic sneezers take excessive pleasure in the act of sneezing...

I do think that, whether or not there's arrogance in the mix, there's a general sense with entertainers that, once you've "made it," you've got this thing figured out and you don't need to lean into it because it's working out fine. There's no drive to excel more than they personally want to excel, which means that there's a lot of variable quality.

We have a bunch of t-shirts with a "spirit animal" theme to them coming out next week at my work, and I've spent literal hours trying to keep as much appropriative content out of the copy as possible. The shirts themselves are a lost cause, because my boss thinks that the concept of a spirit animal is cute and fun and harmless, but I'm doing my best everywhere else.

I've been following the news for the DLC and, while I'm concerned that it might make a wonderfully simple but involved game a bit too overcomplicated, I'm happy for more content. Renowned Explorers is a delight and I still boot it up from time to time to have a RPG/strategy-lite adventure that lasts almost exactly an hour.

I mostly know Andy Daly because he voiced the One True King of Ooo on Adventure Time.

My school district's gifted and talented program had a creative writing competition that I entered every year. My most successful entry was my sixth- or seventh-grade attempt, which was the plot to the pilot of Star Trek: Voyager stripped of all its sci-fi trappings and written in rhyming verse as a Greek-style tragedy, titled "The Few Intrepid." Even at the time of writing, I remember finding it painfully pompous and turgid, but I didn't have a concept of editing or revising at that point in my life, so I just turned in all eight single-spaced pages (I just checked, in my memory it was twenty-five or twenty-six pages at least) and they gave me the runner-up award, in what I presume was an effort to make me give up and go away. Oof.

Yeah, that's Voices of a Distant Star. It has some nice moments, especially the genesis of Shinkai's twin fixations on long-distance communication and travel, but it's mostly interesting to me as one of anime's few truly auteur works. It was written, directed, animated, and voiced by Shinkai himself, all on his G4. It shows, in a bad way, but it's still worth watching. Actually, my hope is that the success of Your Name helps Shinkai's early stuff (She and Her Cat, Voices of a Distant Star, The Place Promised in Our Early Days) become as available as Children who Chase Lost Voices and Garden of Words have always been.

Yeah, I just can't get into Beyond Earth like I can get into SMAC. It feels like a total-conversion mod for Civilization V and that keeps me from digging into the systems the same way as with SMAC. Different strokes, I suppose! I also admit, I see the two leads for Beyond Earth as real lightweights in the fiction department, probably unfairly. I just remember that they gave interviews with RPS and PC Gamer that trumpeted their fictional influences and they were... underwhelming. Clarke, Asimov, Dune, Sagan, and... "the classics." It was purely marketing, I think, but if they'd really tucked into Kim Stanley Robinson or something, I think it would have given them a better basis for adapting Civ 5 to a different fiction.

My honest belief with how Beyond Earth went wrong is that it was systems-first rather than fiction-first design. They looked at Civilization V and asked themselves, "What would it take to translate this game into a sci-fi setting?" rather than looking at their fictional influences and asking themselves, "How would these work in a 4X game?" Accordingly, much of Beyond Earth feels like the bare minimum done to port Civ 5's systems to a new setting: personality-free factions, uninspired and interchangeable tech, bland and obscure wonders, meaningless endgame... I wholeheartedly agree with the part of dwcole78's post, at least, where he says that sci-fi and fantasy aren't genres that excuse you from building good and interesting fiction into your design. Way too many games in the past decade or so have had this impressionistic pastiche of pop-culture sci-fi, usually blockbuster movies but occasionally making nods to the "golden age" of sci-fi literature. I was honestly surprised that Paradox's Stellaris referenced Iain M. Banks in a recent patch, but then their fans have been making that connection for more than a year. Their next patch is named after Douglas Adams, which feels more like they've run out of serious sci-fi authors with name recognition than anything else. I would die of shock to have a game reference Vernor Vinge... except for Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, which did just that.

Yeah, that's been a concern that's been dogging me, too.

One of the more interesting ideas presented in Nicholas Nassir Taleb's The Black Swan is that historical events with drastic consequences have those drastic consequences because the events were viewed as outside the realm of possibility. If you went back in time and devoted your life to passing regulations to install reinforced doors on all aircraft worldwide, in order to stop 9/11, there'd be one of two outcomes: either you'd succeed and be remembered as the person who wasted millions of dollars to prevent a scenario that never came to pass, or you'd be ignored because you were proposing something ridiculous and known as that quirky Cassa. Future events only become possible in the public mindshare when they've already happened in the past, so it's impossible to predict, let alone prevent, anything truly unexpected. Anyway, that "tooth worm" myth seems to be mostly peddled as ubiquitous by dentists trying to show how far we've come from the Dark Ages (this is a tragically common thing, in my experience). I'd never heard of it before Nick talked about it, but it looks like it appears intermittently in works of oral medicine throughout the Middle Ages: the Anglo-Saxon folk remedies of the tenth-century Lacnunga, Gilbertus Anglicus' Compendium Medicinae from the thirteenth century, the fourteenth-century Chirurgia Magna of Guy de Chauliac. Many of these authors are just reproducing or adapting passages from classical Roman work by Pliny and Dioscorides (and contemporary Arabic sources do the same). However, the same medieval texts also reference the use of smoked herbs as painkillers, disinfectant powders for cavities, and even rudimentary fillings made from a paste of gall nuts, pig grease, mastic, myrrh, sulfur, camphor, beeswax, arsenic, and asafoetida. So really, it depended whether your local dentist preferred the authority of literature or experience, among many other things that make finding a good dentist a crapshoot even today. Also, as a final note, the biggest threat to dental health in the Middle Ages, at least if you weren't a noble, was eating coarse-ground "black bread" full of husks and grit that'd wear down your teeth over the years... especially since the vast majority of bread eaten by medieval people was stale by at least a day, if not three or four, because it was being used as trenchers for eating. They'd be softened up by the juices of whatever food was on them, but not by much!

I'm not asking Danielle to pull her punches. That would be ridiculous and unfair for me to ask. I'm asking her to stop beating a dead horse. You know those are different things. The Witness came out over a year ago and is largely not present in the cultural conversation anymore. Nevertheless, Danielle brings up how The Witness is pretentious and disappointing at least three times on Waypoint Podcast in the months of November and December 2016, then published an eight hundred-word critique of it on the website on December 31, then published another four hundred-word critique of it to go along with a three-minute video yesterday. The only coverage of The Witness on Waypoint is Danielle saying, over and over, the same things she was saying over a year ago on Idle Weekend, in episodes posted on January 29, February 6, February 12, and March 4. I'm not trying to silence anyone here and, if Danielle's opinion of The Witness happens to change for better or for worse, I'd like to hear about that. I just don't like seeing Danielle turning into the Cassandra of games journalism, trying to warn people that The Witness isn't a good game because of some frustrating moments and its "abhorrent worldview" and despairing that she's being ignored. She's not being ignored, people have different opinions and, after a certain point, repeating criticism like that is just yucking someone else's yum.

Believe me, I'm listening through Waypoint Radio, like I said, and Patrick doesn't compulsively gush about Dark Souls when it's mentioned in passing nearly as much as Danielle compulsively shits on The Witness... and that's saying something.

When you figure that out, let me know, Paradox!

Haha, it's more that I groan every time someone mentions The Witness on Waypoint Radio because I know Danielle's going to have to get in one jab, at least, about how it's a mean game for snobs. Sometimes she holds out for a couple minutes, but I'm in the forties in my listen-through and she hasn't managed to let it pass once yet.

Danielle's slow transformation into a content factory in miniature for grudgingly love/hate analyses of The Witness has been one of the oddest outcomes of her time at Waypoint. We have Why 'The Witness' is a Rewardingly Painful Exercise in Frustration and 'The Witness' is a Beautiful Game with a Shitty Attitude and 'The Witness' is the Worst Teacher's Pet, plus a rant every time it comes up on Waypoint Radio (and Idle Weekend before that) and more than one tweet where she recommends other people's analyses of the game but adds in her gripes lest people think that she likes The Witness or something...

"I hate liberals and love A Wrinkle in Time! Life is so unfair!"

They have a request thread, in which a few of their employees are fairly active, but they don't have any exposed process for getting new games on the service or acquiring licenses to distribute old games, I don't think.

I have to admit, I'm not crazy about the development of Stellaris. Releasing an interesting but empty-feeling game and then releasing a big roll-up patch full of features nine or twelve months after the game's release is not far from the kind of Paradox that released Crusader Kings: Deus Vult and Victoria: Revolutions, patches-as-paid-expansions to unfinished games that sponsored a few more rounds of development. Utopia is better, because most of the features are free, but I still feel hard done by Paradox for getting what is properly getting a year's loan from me while they made their game more feature-complete. I know that's not fair, but still.

That's fair, I didn't follow what happened to Cart Life or Hofmeier after it was removed from Steam. Still, I don't think that Cart Life is as much an example of the gaming community's antipathy towards indie games as it is an example of the gaming community's antipathy towards "unfinished" or "abandoned" games. Off the top of my head, Spacebase DF-9 and the original Left 4 Dead got plenty of hate for being those things, and only the former is even technically "indie."

Also, I've made fun of it for years and downloaded it as a joke, but I'm two-thirds through the All-Purpose Cultural Catgirl Nuku Nuku OVA and it's actually been flawlessly entertaining? It's like a non-sleazy Mahoromatic, pulled off with the dumb joy of a post-Akira anime that thought the most outrageous premise could sell if done right. Nuku Nuku is literally a cat given form as a teenage girl, and she works perfectly, but the real attraction is the antagonist, the jilted ex-wife and ex-employer of Nuku Nuku's creator. She's done with such a canny and sympathetic hand that it's impossible not to cheer for her, even though she rightly loses every confrontation, violent or peaceful. I could watch a dozen more episodes of the OVA, in addition to the four that I have watched and the two that I've yet to watch, and I'd be excited that there's both a TV series and a spiritual sequel... but the community is radically divided on the quality of them, so I can't let myself get excited. Then again, the community is radically divided on the quality of the OVA that I'm watching and loving right now, so who knows!

To be totally correct, Cart Life was and is actively updated by the developer, just not on Steam. Richard Hofmeier felt that it was too much work to keep the Steam version of his game updated, especially compared to the pay-to-download version on his personal website, and also had reservations about Steam as a venue, so he eventually abandoned the Steam version of his game and said as much. Customers complained, Valve investigated, and the game was taken off of Steam with Hofmeier's blessing, I believe.

Even in spaces where trolling and abuse are discouraged, it seems like people are desperately afraid of not being taken in good faith, often while assuming a lack of good faith in others. I don't really know how to foster that in a community. I only really found it when I came here.