Gormongous

Ugh, what a damning article, and all the comments for it are, "I haven't seen evidence of this harassment so it probably doesn't exist." Honestly, I have no faith in their ability to see evidence of harassment when it's obvious they didn't even read the article. Really, bonus points go to the guy who tries to refute the year-old ban from another site line by line, with every single defense being some variation of "He's rude and confrontation, but he has a reason for it, so he's not a bully." You know what a guy who's rude and confrontational but always has a reason for it is? A slightly smarter-than-average bully. Never read the comments.

My music player app on my phone has a podcast plugin. It scans the media files I download for a bunch of different signs that they are podcasts and puts them in a special class with cool features if they are. Unfortunately, in practice, the only reliable way to get the plugin to flag podcasts is to put "podcast" as the genre, which almost no one does. I'm not really complaining, because what other piece of software actually uses the "genre" section of an ID3 tag, but for some reason, I deeply resent people who release their podcasts with "blues" as the genre. Without any conscious judgment on my part, I find it pretentious on an entirely different level from people who give their podcast's genre as "comedy" or "talk radio" or "podblaaah". And there are multiple people who've had the same "clever" idea. "Oh, I know! We aren't recording a conversation for online consumption. We're singing the spoken-word blues!" In one case, it's the only field of the ID3 tag with any information in it. Well, you know what? Fuck you, dude. I still miss the weird crying tree guy, but then again I don't like change.

Yay! Thanks, NinjaSquirrel, I finally get all references from those two. I wanted to post this great Eva gender-swap I saw years ago, but I can't find it and have since learned that all gender-swaps are secretly terrible. Still, worth posting the least terrible one: If nothing else, it's a good illustration of the original principle:

Oddly enough, almost every medieval battle cry is "[Location of fief] and the [name of animal representing fief]!" or "For the [animal] of [location]!" It's ridiculous to read contemporary accounts of the Fourth Crusade attacking Constantinople and have the authors patiently write out, "And then they charged forward against the Greeks, crying 'Montferrat and the lion!' and 'The lion of Flanders!' and 'Picardy and the lion!' and 'For the lion of Champagne!'" Lots of lions.

"Si femina credat quendam misogyniam esse, misogyniam est." It's too long for a motto, isn't it? Unless you had a really fucking huge shield with like three boar heads looking out at different angles. Also, ten points from Gryffindor for making me sweat for five minutes trying to think of how to translate a certain type of discrimination into a language without the concept of discrimination at all, before I just decided to borrow a preexisting Greek word. I then spent another five minute trying to decide whether the "quendam" is necessary. Still haven't decided that, yet.

When I had a girlfriend, I did it this way, and now I use the same techniques on friend's significant others. I've been gradually building my collection out with games that are low on rules density, high on interaction intensity, and dependent on social relationships. The lattermost is something I'm mostly shit at, but the thrill of getting new people interested makes it worth it. So far, I've got King of Tokyo, Love Letter, Resistance: Avalon, Ladies & Gentlemen, and now One Night Ultimate Werewolf. Once I've got them interested in those games, I can use the concepts they've learned to sell games that are higher density and lower intensity, like Pandemic, Galaxy Trucker, and Firefly: the Board Game. I've used this method to step people who tell me at first that they hate board games up to playing Battlestar Galactica and Arkham Horror, although it depends on your ability to organize multiple game nights to make it happen.

There was a great publisher's motto I came across while doing my summer job at the Rare Book Room here: "percussum quod tercussum." It means something like "stabbed through because stabbed thrice." I think it's funny nonsense, but my classicist friend got really flustered when he read it, because tercutio isn't a real verb. Latin pranks! I've always been a lover of translating odd shit into the aptest Latin possible. Give me a sentiment and I'll translate it, and probably put some jokes to myself in it, too.

Yeah, it felt like one of those anime that just didn't have the time to give the manga its due. Maybe if it had the full season, but (undeserving) failures like Nichijou mean that comedies only get a half-season now, unless they're based on 4-koma with cute girls. Anyway, I'll put it on my manga list that I never make any progress on. The forty-odd volumes of Claymore have been sitting there for four years now.

Dude, I already said, I caught the anime. It's got pictures, words, and sound. Why would I settle for anything less now?

I hear you on the "Walt explaining things" bit. I think the writers buy into Walt's own bullshit about himself and his world by the end, which makes the show somewhat less as a whole for not staying at least one step ahead of him.

Historically speaking, the scenario of one form of a medium entirely replacing another only happens over many centuries and only once the advantages for one entirely replaces the advantages for the other. Until the past fifty years or so, which have experienced huge leaps in technology and a corporate-fueled culture of competition, it was much more natural for them to coexist and serve different audiences and markets. That's why scrolls and codices stayed around forever even after traditionally bound books were popularized. Digital and physical media are so different that there's almost no overlap to allow them to replace each other, not until the technology itself changes and probably changes the meaning of "media" with it. The attempt to identify a tipping point anyway is so incredibly inane that the act itself kinda pisses me off.

Oh, I agree. EA is fooling itself something bad to think that the target market for game subscriptions, let alone publisher-specific game subscriptions, is anything other than core gamers who know when they're getting swindled, in the words of Henroid.

I think suits still hope (maybe rightly) that a lot of people don't know the difference between a publisher and a developer. Even these days, I still hear people talk about how excited they are for the next game from EA, as if that means anything.

I don't remember where, but I did read that these free games pick up a lot of DLC sales, more so than people who buy them at full price.

EA really seems to love giving out "free" games that their numbers must tell them everyone already has. I wonder whom they think they're fooling, or if it's just to get a headline containing the words "EA" and "free games".

Yeah, I guess there should be made a distinction between a character motivated by redemption and a story driven by that motivation. I deeply dislike comedies about awful people who get humanized and redeemed in the end, so there must be a difference between the two.

I love stories about redemption, especially ones deconstructing it. Almost all of my favorites have a protagonist seeking redemption that they can never have because they have to forgive themselves for their act first and that involves acknowledging the reasons they had originally for doing it. Instead, they make the version of themselves who committed the act into someone else and become a new person in expiation, and it's just so poignant the way people try to change like that. A lot of Iain M. Banks' Culture novels are about this sort of thing, come to think of it.

I think we've confirmed that shitty people can like good things, I guess.

I distinctly remember you struggling in an early episode to keep Chris and Nick from saying the words "donkey cock country" together all at once. It was clearly a losing battle, so I was always curious why you fought it anyway. I guess I know now, because you knew it was the end of you as a respectable person.

How about you tap the skills of your local forum's resident Latin expert? The first one's not bad, but "venio" doesn't have the same sense of drawing near in time that "come" does in English. "Hiems venit" sounds to me like "Winter's coming over." Maybe better "hiems appropinquat," if anything. My bad, everyone. Latin is my best skill but one that no one cares about.

Not to dissuade you, but Ascension is a lot less charming in physical form. There's a lot of really fiddly upkeep that made the game much less enjoyable for me, to the point that I was shocked to hear the popularity of the iPad port, until I saw how it did away with it all.

It's unworthy, but my first impulse has been to post this on every single form of social media to which I have access. What a read, though. It's a rare manifesto that bites me like this.

I sell about a dozen items every year, mostly board games, and I have that restriction. I'm not even sure how to get rid of it. It's certainly a huge burden if you're selling on margin.

Side note: DDRJake, the Paradox forum member whose theoretically impossible Ryukyu world-conquest AAR was the inciting incident for a lot of the more questionable design decisions in post-release Europa Universalis IV, has started another world conquest as Ryukyu. It's actually quite interesting to watch and read, because according to him, one of the best if not the best EU4 player in the world, most of Paradox's mechanics introduced to fix exploits have instead led to exploits that are even more cheesy and less fun than what was replaced. If nothing else, it's an impressive refutation of "negative" design, the goal of which is simply to prevent certain player behaviors. High point so far: protectorates don't get coalitions, so DDRJake forces the Knights, a diplomatically isolated OPM, to make him their protectorate so he can conquer all of East Asia in a handful of decades with no retaliation whatsoever.

Yeah, the "optimal" combination of Lion Mage, Straid, and Hexers is unspeakably ugly, plus there's no real point optimizing for casting speed since the Blue Tearstone +2 is theorized to max it out. It's an interesting design choice, because I do remember in the first Dark Souls liking the look of the Eastern set but finding its weight/defense ratio too bad to wear. That hasn't happened yet in Dark Souls 2, even though I just put my first point in Vitality at SL 140.