Gormongous

Which is craaazy, because St. Louis has the most strong, proud, and active black community I've ever seen. It's obviously a problem coming from so many angles that there's just not a single solution to be had.

"Do you crave authority but fear accountability? Do you want to force your social and political views on everyone else with the threat (or use) of violence?"

I finished Dream of the Red Chamber about a month ago, after spending four months reading it. Honestly, I've been wanting to write something on here, but have been putting it off because it is by far better than any more prestigious book I've read and more prestigious than any better book I've read. Does that make sense? It's three thousand pages covering between three and five years (I didn't do the best job keeping track) in the slow decline of an aristocratic Chinese family, with a cast of characters in the hundreds. I read a chapter a night and it was the best long-term experience to which I've committed myself since my first year of grad school. It's just so full of small moments and incidental details that I learned all of the characters more intimately than many of my friends, so that for weeks after I was meeting people and thinking, "Oh, she is definitely a You San-jie," or "He is like a happier Jia Lian." For a third of a year, it became a second life I lived before bed and it was magical. I've resigned myself to being unable to sell this book (or rather five books, if you go with the excellent Hawkes-Minford translation) to anyone, which is maybe for the best when it's such a long book where so little happens. Still, it was a good enough experience that the apocryphal ending thrown together in the penultimate chapter did exactly nothing to change my warm feelings for the entire experience.

I think we all know each other well enough to know that you're asking these questions in good faith. Since they've already provoked interesting answers that have gotten a lot out of me, there's no reason to silence yourself. I just wish I had more to add to this conversation, but everyone's doing so well.

That's a great article. Great sense of history, great sense of how it is to live in the South even today. I'm in the Midtown neighborhood of St. Louis, ten miles south-southeast of Ferguson, and the effects of the killing and the riots are chilling both in their presence and absence. It's quiet around here and traffic is as normal, but there's barely anyone on the streets, certainly no people of color. The air feels a bit thick, too.

I think we are going to disagree. I don't really know what a "weak meaning" would look like. I think there are weakened aesthetics and weakened intelligibility, but both of those are situational and subjective. Like I said, is there a language where meaning has been weakened systemically enough that people encounter difficulty communicating? Is that really a danger we should be looking out for? I agree emphatically with you that "We're growing the IP for our franchise" is ugly and inelegant to the extreme, but I don't think its meaning is necessarily weak, if I understand what you mean by "weak." I also agree that "unconsidered usage" can result in such ugliness and inelegance, but I don't agree that it's necessarily a force for bad or good, beyond said aesthetics. It's just a thing that happens. Unconsidered usage is how "silly" changed from meaning "happy" to "blessed" to "innocent" to "harmless" to "pathetic" and finally to "foolish." None of these concepts were weakened by a shift in a word denoting them, not has "silly" become less useful as a word over this thousand-year history.

Maybe frame them just in terms of how you feel then, rather than also in terms of their totalizing effect on language as a whole? There's a big difference between "This usage is annoying to me" and "This usage is bad for language," even though the former sometimes assumes the latter. I suppose I failed to mark that distinction clearly myself.

Nah, they removed almost all title creation restrictions with patch 2.0, so now having multiple empires is now no longer a game of trying to cheat out marriages. But yeah, Munster is not the strongest start, but you usually get enough stability to get at least two kingdoms, which is the tipping point for difficulty if you're smart about succession laws and same-culture same-religion vassals. After that point, the only limiting factor is the availability of holy wars and your own patience for micro. I think most experienced CK2 players have one game where they pushed hard for a world conquest, but it's so easy to game the systems once you understand them completely that most of that most tend to set "historical" or just plain interesting goals instead.

I agree completely with examining our use of language in order to challenge institutional power structures, but that's very different from discussing how anyone uses "grok." It feels like you've got issues with three separate modes of language in this post alone: Intentional repetition of buzzwords, especially corporate, for connotative rather than denotative purposes, which is very much worth discussing, because language is a way that control is exerted over culture. Ever since you brought it up in the cast a year or so ago, I've been more careful myself to use "franchise" and "IP" because those are top-down prescriptions intended to affect how ideas are understood in a way that benefits large multinational companies. Potential for in-group jargon to be unnecessarily confusing or exclusionary, which is also worth discussing but has less that can really come out of it. We can agree that it's often annoying, but so what? If they're understood by the people whom they want to understand them, why should they change? I certainly don't want to tell anyone how to talk, not when it doesn't actually affect me or my own command of language. Natural semantic drift and wear, the commentary on which rarely turns out to be anything besides old-guard grumbling. You can read hundreds of literary tracts over the millennia, especially from the eighteenth and nineteenth century in England, complaining that words don't mean what they used to mean or that they lack depth that they used to have. Sure, words wear out, but when they do, people stop using them or start using them differently. It's a natural process that can't be stopped, so what are we accomplishing with a discussion of it besides pointing the motes in other people's eyes? To group all three of these under a distaste for non-professional jargon strains the meaning of that word, not that I'm specifically complaining about that. That's how some definitions can be anti-intellectual and others can be elitist, because no one's conception of language in the ideal is going to be totally consistent, not even Samuel Johnson's. I mostly just dislike hand-wringing from people who fear that language is being "ruined" by something. If that were even possible, surely there'd be at least one language out of the six thousand five hundred out there in which it is impossible to communicate anything but the most basic concepts because most of their words have been made "dead" by rote use, but there isn't, because language is as durable and innovative as its speakers. I feel as much as anyone the pain of having a word you like get ground into another meaning (or alternately have a word you find irritating or imprecise become popular), but beyond being careful about our own individual usage, one way or another, there's not much that's terribly useful about policing someone else. That said, feel free to say whatever is annoying. "Squee" is certainly annoying.

That's not the special province of jargon. A lot of higher-level vocabulary, the kind used by some of our greatest writers, is too specialized and opaque to mean anything except to people with extensive education. I don't really follow how it's less expressive for meaning to be less than entirely accessible. Reading what I've typed, I guess it is worth acknowledging that someone who only used five-dollar words would be annoying like a person who only used jargon, but I don't see an inherent problem with either unless the person's a dick about it.

I was referring more just to other people in this thread saying we should use "internalize" instead of "grok," when both are fairly jargony elaborations on "understand." Personally, I feel that, in the absence of outright proof that jargon's use is meant as exclusionary, it's best not to disparage it, because that goes hand-in-hand with anti-intellectualism too often. Really, it's mostly that I see people in other forums slam words like "privilege" for being pointless jargon, using the same arguments as would-be language police.

Why do we even have "really" as a word? "Very" means the exact same thing. Don't even get me started on "actually." I don't quite get why we can't have multiple words for the same concept, if only for aesthetic purposes. I mean, one word for one idea is nice in theory, but ugly any pedantic in practice.

My honest feeling is that their intention was exactly as you say, but in trying to make the polar opposite of ol' reliable Clem, they accidentally made a little girl suffering from some spectrum of mental illness. It's something I feel they should have at least been more aware of, especially considering the amount of hate she got for the traits they gave her.

It's a fair question, but it's also one that could be used to excuse every single writing choice and in a way that totally absolves the creators from the perceived nature of their creations. In the end, I don't think it adds much to the discussion, but then neither do my anecdotes, so... Besides, you could shelter the fuck out of Clementine in the first game and it didn't turn her into a catatonic mess. This is a discrete decision by Telltale and I think it's worth unpacking all its possible interpretations.

I find it really upsetting that my apartment's handyman treating me dismissively about my leaky toilet today is bothering me more than the apocalyptic shit going down a few miles away in Ferguson over the shooting of Michael Brown.

The Walking Dead wiki flatly says that Sarah appears to suffer from a mental disorder and lists multiple instances of panic attacks and shutting down. It may be, as you say, that Telltale didn't intend to make a disabled character, but that's certainly what it looks like they did from the evidence I see. Not to bring in anecdotes, but I know of no "sheltered" people who behave like Sarah unless there is also some kind of disability present. Saying that a person with an anxiety disorder or autism spectrum is "annoying" and "useless" is exactly the sort of low-grade ableism that the gaming community is far too prone to perpetrate as it is. Unfortunate, but true.

I think you've described the reasons for which the zombie craze is doomed eventually to die out. I agree completely about the show and liked the games specifically for their more human touches. I like zombie fiction that reveals the universality of human bonds rather than celebrating the grim calculus of survival, but I don't like being reminded that both don't look kindly on people who are too different.

No, you aren't. JonCole says it's not black and white. You're saying that it is, just in the other direction. Personally, I think that, if a developer chooses to create a minority or disabled character and chooses to put them in a situation where they will be the object of criticism or hatred, then they should take responsibility for championing the right of that character to exist, even against the opinions of their own fanbase. I find it distasteful, to the point of implicit ableism, to go along with toxic comments like Miller's for the sake of a better and more convivial interview. I can't say I wouldn't have done the same, but it's something I'm aware of and working on. I hope those two are doing the same, at least. I think there's room to disagree on this, but that is my opinion.

I'm not sure either of you guys read the whole post? It's saying that two developers from Telltale expressed joy and anticipation when asked about their feelings on killing off a disabled character who they called "not normal" and "useless". Like one of the Tumblr responses said, "so post-apocalyptic stories continue to be an outlet for shitty manbaby fanboys and their huge boners for eugenics and violent hatred for people who arent Normal? luv it." That's the problem here, not whether or not it was okay to kill a given character off. It's one thing to have the black friend die in your movie, it's another to say in an interview that you were looking forward to killing him off because of who he was.

I don't mean to sound dismissive, but I've tried writing this post three times and can't shake the tone, so I'll just apologize at the beginning. I have literally no understanding of why people keep saying that Ronan's motivations were unclear. It's not just here I've heard it, but also in professional reviews. And yet, the first time we see him, he says right out that he finds the peace treaty between the Kree and Xandar to be unacceptable after a thousand years of bloodshed, so he'll keep fighting the war on his own in order to force the hands of both governments. It's a very straightforward motivation, but not one that lacked explanation or plausibility for me. Thanos, on the other hand, is a pointless wrinkle in the movie's script and I wish the "overall Marvel Cinematic Universe plot" didn't demand that he appear for thirty seconds total to grumble and prove himself irrelevant.

I agree about the excellence of this episode, particularly the need for more games that take place within the context of a given event rather than being expressly about that event. Speaking of The Guns of August, I've mentioned elsewhere on the forums that another of Tuchman's books, A Distant Mirror, would be a good inspiration for a game that takes place after the beginning of the Hundred Years War, as the outbreak of the Black Death approaches. There really is need for games that don't consider history to be solely high politics with occasional cameos from the "big" names, for sure.

Looking at my shelf, at least Sentai and Viz still do. I don't know Viz's deal, but Sentai's dubs are mostly passable, if often unevenly cast, and certainly aren't as homogeneously uninteresting as FUNi.

Yeah, I'm not so much happy that FUNimation licensed the titles, as that FUNimation licensed the titles. Given my druthers, I'd rather have NISA, Sentai, or even Discotek with their mitts on the flagship Bandai licenses, but given a chance for The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya to be cheap enough for my friends to buy again, I'll be satisfied. And speaking of dubs, tell me about it! People were floating a redo of the original movie dub with the TV show cast, but FUNi shot it down right away, saying that a redub wasn't in the scope of the twenty-fifth anniversary project and, even if it were, they wouldn't hire outside actors for it. I almost like that FUNi is swinging us back from that brief period of time where dubs weren't so bad to the good old days when a small stable of talentless actors did everything in one take.

I think the rescue of what are probably Bandai's biggest licenses is a big deal, even if it's not by the best company. Worse comes to worst, the FUNimation versions drive down the price of the original Bandai releases, like they did the Geneon ones, and in the case of Ghost in the Shell, it's a big deal for someone, I'm not sure who, to walk back from his statement that 2.0 is the new and only version.

Exciting news on the license front! FUNimation copped to rescuing most of the remaining all-star titles from the corpse of Bandai, including Cowboy Bebop, the entire Haruhi franchise minus Disappearance for some reason, and Lucky Star. There have already been four different versions of Cowboy Bebop announced, with two separate special editions, but since there's no concomitant remaster happening in Japan like with Lain, we can rest assured that they won't be worth the extra scratch. Anyway, they're all landing in December, the same time that Discotek's Jin-Roh: The Wolf Brigade Blu-ray will finally hit shelves. There are also rumors now that the delay for Evangelion 3.33 was actually an Anno-mandated redo of the dub, which is almost certainly garbage, but some of those rumors put the re-revised release date as the end of 2014 or the beginning of 2015, the year of the Angel invasion! A man can hope. Really, the big deal for me is that FUNi grabbed the license for the first two episodes of Ghost in the Shell: Arise. Why not all four, I ask? Probably because IG wants to hold them over a barrel for the other two, like GAINAX tried to do with ADV for the End of Evangelion movie, leading to the lovely situation today where no one's entirely sure where the rights to the Platinum remaster are so everything's fucked forever. Anyway, I don't care so much about the frankly underwhelming OVA itself, but that FUNi's seen fit to cross-promote by releasing the remaster of the original Ghost in the Shell that was out in Japan sometime a while back. Not the atrocious 2.0 treatment that put a orange filter over everything to match Innocence and redid all the hand-drawn effects with bargain-bin CGI, the actual 1995 movie, for twenty-five bucks MSRP! Already in, all the way.