Gormongous

I agree with you. The weird thing about scammers, whether or not they're legitimized by a company behind them, is that they justify their behavior through the conviction that everyone's pulling the same shit as them, just not as well. Yerli's repeated assertions that everyone was on board and that paying employees at all, even late, was generous of him makes him about as big of a scammer as I've seen. People keep citing language and cultural issues, but unless Turkish or German or whatever is missing words for key financial concepts or unless there's a twenty-first century culture that fails to differentiate between a family and a company, I'm not seeing it.

Because it was made by Mington.

I kind of hate the status of Prometheus in the Alien canon. Ridley Scott and company were so insistent that it's not a part of the universe, but gladly cashed in on the fact that it obviously is.

I have no problem with companion apps. One Night Ultimate Werewolf comes with one and it's maybe the best single part of the game. The main concern for me is them claiming that the app is necessary because it makes the game's AI more complex and unpredictable than would be possible with physical components. That just fails the smell test for me. I've seen and played a lot of solitaire board games with powerful and sophisticated card- and tracker-based AI processes, so for me to imagine that the XCOM game's AI is even more complicated is for me to imagine an AI that's out of proportion to the rest of the board game. If it's just marketing BS, that's one thing. I'd love to have an app that handles all the admin. But if it's somehow so complex that an app was the only option to make it happen, that stinks of FFG design bloat to me, on the order of the infamous Android, and I'm much less enthusiastic about that. Still, I'm optimistic on the whole, because right now it looks like a version of Pandemic with more moving parts and that'd just be great.

If you're lucky, maybe Jake will show up here and apologizing for apologizing. And yeah, it's funny how Latin numerical prefixes always trump Greek numerical prefixes. The box set refuses to take a stand, calling itself the Alien Anthology.

I see that http://uguu.moe/ and http://kyun.moe/ are not yet taken, be right back.

This is incredibly anecdotal, but I have several friends and acquaintances still really engaged with the Assassin's Creed series, and all of them are that way almost entirely because they like the abstract idea of being a historical assassin and believe that Ubisoft will get it right eventually if they keep buying games. Often, when I ask them about the Hitman series, they express surprise, because they thought Assassin's Creed was the only game in town.

Which would be great if they were interconnected, as in a full Google account allows Twitch plays to be automatically converted into and stored as YouTube videos permanently, but Google's not been as good as it used to be about making sure all its services actually talk with each other in sensible ways.

I don't have a response to the rest of your post, but it reminds me of the reasons why I love teaching, even though I'm not great with kids. Granted, my kids are eighteen or nineteen, but the relationships are largely the same. Anyway, the important question: It wasn't clear, that's for sure, although I have no idea how much of that was because it had flowed through the rarely-cleaned hallway into my apartment. Bleach now covers most of my bathroom floor. I'll do the entryway tomorrow. I borrowed a friend's fancy washing machine to clean all my towels and rugs. The only real problem that remains, besides the gross sense of invasion from having a neighbor's water flood my apartment, is that there's a distinct and unpleasant "old person" funk that's survived the vacuuming and bleaching. I've already got some money from my birthday coming up, so tomorrow may also be cause for a trip to Target to buy all the amber-scented candles I can carry. Sorry, mother, I told you it'd be for new shoes, but something came up!

I'll give you "Esophagus Sarcophagus," but "On Blade" is clearly a reference to De Lamina, the third-century Gallo-Roman treatise by Frontillian on metalworking.

Well, they have a big userbase problem, just not one acknowledged by them.

Senile next-door neighbor. She was basically sitting in the middle of her flooding apartment, babbling to herself and doing nothing, and I had to take over because it was spilling into the hall and my apartment.

St. Louis is actually a pretty good city for renting, mostly because it's not near anything important and there are no major industries attracting people. However, I live near a university, because I like to walk to my work, and so I'm subject to incredibly exploitative ways students are bilked of money by landlords. The vast majority of apartment buildings for a couple miles in any direction are $700 for a studio apartment that would otherwise be $450 and the few that aren't, like my dumpy little building, raise their rates by five to ten percent every year, with the assumption that students will finish their degrees and move out before their rent eventually equals that of a nicer place. Honestly, almost every multiple-building landlord I've ever had to deal with has been a morally bankrupt individual, through and through. I've actually repainted things and made repairs to this apartment, only to have those same things cited in my renewed lease as a reason for raising my rent.

I have the psychological makeup where I have very little problem with any hardship so long as it is mostly my fault, so I can deal with being the idiot, just not with other idiots. The fact that, as far as I can tell from hindsight, her toilet started flooding a little after 2:00, but the first time anything was done about it was 3:30, when I practically forced my way into her apartment and then went downstairs to tell the manager myself, makes me so angry I feel faint. And yeah, a large patch of carpet is soaked, plus the bottom edge of the bathroom cabinet is warped and some of the entry hall's linoleum is now loose. I did my best with the wet vac after the "professionals" came by and did a ten-minute once-over. It's almost a good thing, if I don't die from black mold, because I've lived in this building for five years now and disliked every other minute without really having a compelling reason to move out. Now seeing that the monthly rent goes up twenty bucks every year and yet that it takes them two and a half hours to send a guy over with a key to turn off the water, when literally half of the second flood has half an inch of standing water, is something for me to keep in mind for next July...

My day started at three this morning when I noticed the front entry hall to my studio apartment was flooded. Six hours of barking orders and bailing into the sink later, I finally had everything under control enough to get a few hours of sleep. Of course, I was woken up by my next-door neighbor, a seventy-year-old woman who I met for the first time last night and is quite clearly mentally ill, arguing with someone that it wasn't her fault that her toilet overflowed. She had stuffed a couple rolls of toilet paper into the bowl, which had solved things. Because I was the one "fiddling with it" and "making a fuss," it's my fault there are six flooded apartments in need of a thorough vacuuming and mopping. It's moments like this one when, even though it's probably permanently outside of my means, I wish I could own a house where I could live without worrying about some idiot ruining all my stuff.

Honestly, I think it's the absence of a clear counterpart to the (wholly ineffectual but culturally definitive) counterculture movement of the sixties. Most older (and, like you said, therefore many younger) writers feel that, since they can't see students protesting on the streets like it's 1968 (except for Occupy Wall Street, which was discredited from the beginning among the majority for reasons I still don't fully apprehend), they're obviously doing nothing. And then there's just the age-old belief, which I've seen even in Rome during the second century BC, that today's youth are horribly and irredeemably morally corrupted, which is whatever.

This conversation at least makes me feel better that my text-to-speech rate on my phone is at the highest setting. I talk very fast unless I'm watching myself, which actually is a huge professional liability for me, and so I have no problem understanding other people talking fast, unless there's also some heavy dialect work going on.

Yeah, thanks for coming here to post that. I'd seen the corrections just hours after making my post. It really is like you say, an end to Ghibli by homogenization rather than through closure. It'll be harder and more costly to maintain Ghibli's distinctive in-house style, probably to the point of it largely disappearing, plus Miyazaki is going to stop making movies eventually, and when both of those trends combine it becomes no different than Production IG, which still makes great anime but is top-tier in a fairly generic way.

Yeah, I guess I've proven that the issue is not equivalence but the perception of equivalence.

Oh, I don't think anyone's saying that the Thumbs should go without advertising if the only alternatives are slightly uncomfortable ads. Like Clyde said, it's just interesting hearing their thought processes and everyone else's reactions. I find it interesting that I have literally no problem with Chris, Sean, Jake, or Nick reading an ad and then proceeding to talk about the game that the ad is for, which other people think would be gross, whereas an ad about any product that the Thumbs lack any experience or interest in is something I don't care about hearing at all. I hope this conversation can continue, basically.

But doesn't the lack of a physical infrastructure mean that there should be savings to pass to the consumer?

For what it's worth, almost all of my disquiet would be answered by one of the Thumbs spending an hour or two with the game, just so that the ad came in part from a place of experience. I trust you guys enough for me not to worry about blurring the line between content and advertisement, but I would like as much as possible of the podcast to be informed firsthand.

I agree. Every article I've read seems to express shock that studio leadership isn't being handed over to Goro Miyazaki or Hiromasa Yonebayashi, but neither of them have the chops or the experience to take over the most famous anime studio in the world, and it's not as much a given in Japan that a company, especially an artistic company, will keep going until it goes bankrupt sooner or later. Closure seems like the right decision, if Miyazaki's really setting down the... brush? Whatever.

But is it a sexy bloke?

For some reason, I've found it to be an easy thing to spoil. I think I did it in Movies/TV thread without realizing, because it seems like such a given thing that I don't even remember to which book it belongs. Joffrey is also really hateable, so there's some catharsis in letting that fact fly.