Gormongous

I used to do that with Charter, but they recently changed their policy to require a modem rented from there. If they detect a modem that's not the one they've sent you, which I guess they're doing through the MAC address you're required to register, they terminate your service as a violation of contract. It's ugly and gross. I also have to ask to speak to a "retention specialist" every year when my contract expires and my entry-level cable internet doubles to sixty dollars for thirty megabits. I have always gotten it with them for much less, but Charter recently "did away with contracts", which is supposedly pro-consumer but really means they have no obligation to keep giving you the package and deal you agreed upon. Instead, once a year, I have to inform the customer service rep that I'm cancelling their service if I can't get a better deal until he actually believes me enough to connect me to a retention specialist, who are the only people with any sort of bargaining power at Charter. Once connected, they are usually extremely friendly, helpful, and practical, willing to negotiate a price I can pay to keep me on as a customer. It's a sick and twisted process, for sure. I'll never forget when my internet went out for an entire week the first year I was in St. Louis and Charter tech support actually told me it was because I was running Windows XP instead of upgrading to Vista. I blew my top like I never have before, to which the rep offered me six months of free cable TV service for my trouble. I'd still have to keep paying for the non-functional internet, though. I told her where she could stuff it, though I'm not proud of doing so. If there were any alternative to them, I'd be there.

No worries! You can clearly see my opinion evolving as I was pressed on this, so I appreciate the part you and JonCole have played in it.

I love when Chris said that he had the instinctual reaction to Danielle as suddenly a different person when she spoke with her accent, because I had just been reading about the Capgras delusion at work. Basically, we learn who people are in two ways: through their physical traits observable to us and through their past actions remembered by us. One links to the other in our brain, causing recognition. There are several types of mental illnesses, called "delusional misidentification syndromes", that disconnect the two processes, making obviously familiar people and places appear somehow unrecognizable anyway because their physical traits don't connect to any memories in the brain. The same thing can be accomplished temporarily in healthy people through a substantial physical alteration of a person, like a drastic haircut, a major disfigurement, or, say, the adoption of a hitherto unheard accent. The pathways that our brain is used to using to associate the physical presence of someone with our memories of them are suddenly useless and the brain has to scramble a bit to rig together new ones. So yeah, awesome moment for an awesome accent.

If she feels it wasn't sexist, then it wasn't sexist. I might find it sexist, but I am not the target of the act. Oppression might be systemic and impersonal from a theoretical standpoint, but as a day-to-day reality, a subjective approach is the only one that's consistent and tolerable to me. I know it might not satisfy others the same way.

Okay, basic misunderstandings aside, I'm really uncomfortable telling a woman that anything they're experiencing isn't sexist, just like I'm uncomfortable telling a person of color that anything they're experiencing isn't racist. We can construct hypothetical situations that paint the subjectivity of sexism as untenable, but in practice it's usually rather straightforward. Assuming a woman has a husband is sexist, unless and until the assumer clarifies with specific knowledge of the woman. If he clarifies by informing her that the majority of women are married and therefore it's a reasonable assumption for him to make, then it's still sexist. Actually, the idea that the legitimacy of oppression could ever be ascertained by a majority consensus potentially independent of the victim makes me incredibly uncomfortable. Didn't we all just get squicked out by the "women against feminism" tumblr? For my part, if a woman tells me something's sexist, I'm going to believe her that it's sexist, because what do I know as a man with privilege, and apologize if it's something that's my fault.

It happens just about every time there are multiple academics in a room and they aren't all of the same gender. The best was when one guy explained for about thirty minutes to one girl about what significance her dissertation had for the field and she had to respond that he'd gotten the focus of her dissertation wrong, the research he assumed it was going to do had already been done, and in fact her actual dissertation was about something different that argued against the significance he had described. It was very awkward, of course, but I loved how brave she was in being so forthright. Well, the thing is that a woman really doesn't have to assume that a man is being sexist to her. If she feels like the victim of a sexist act, she is the victim of the sexist act, regardless of others' intentions. Sexism is an entirely subjective act and does not require conscious commission. "Mansplain" started out as a word to describe the sort of unintentionally sexist thing that is done to women all the time, to create a conceptual space for this behavior so it can be called out and marginalized. I feel like one of the biggest stumbling blocks in combating sexism and racism and LGBTQ-phobia is the recurrent conviction that, if the victim just saw their situation from the perspective of the perpetrator, they'd reconsider their own feelings accordingly. Personally, I'm no stranger to being a shitty person by accident, but it seems like a lot of other people are really invested in the agency of their good intentions. I don't know.

I get what you're getting at, but feminism is not an oath to always be proselytizing, so I'm loathe to take away any word that helps women deal with the more or less constant frustration of, say, having their own research explained to them at a party by a man who thinks he's getting in their pants by doing so. Sure, some dudes might be turned off from listening by the use of something as blunt and ugly as "mansplain" to describe their actions, but if the margin between them being sexist or not is how well their feelings are respected by a feminist's choice of words, I don't feel like they're going to be terribly strong allies anyway. Of course, there are always exceptions, but... I don't know. I think about tone arguments more than anything else these days, which is not the best feeling in the world to have.

Wait, so are you saying that all the team barks are just the same one dude's voice, no matter who you've brought along? That sounds pretty awful all its own.

I've got one better: make a fake account for a (possibly fictional) sister of Olly, put yourself in a relationship with her, and then introduce yourself to Olly as his future brother-in-law.

That one, The Silver Spike, is a spinoff and doesn't actually have any bearing on the plots of the other books, so you could have skipped it. Me, I like Glen Cook. He has a very distinct feel and knows how to make a viewpoint character fun to ride along with.

Last night I saw Sean reading this thread. Obviously he's part of the problem.

To be fair, it's not Tumblr itself, because that would probably have a better chance of success. It's just a segment of fans who wanted to have a convention about... nothing, really. The significant other of a friend from college was head of convention security for DashCon, which is unsurprising given what I know of his weird need for attention and authority, and he has been burning up my Facebook page with angry, defensive accusations about how the people who wanted to have fun had fun and the people who didn't didn't and anyone who wants to talk bad about DashCon or any con should organize and host their own con first to be able to criticize but they won't because they know how hard it is so shut up. Well, I can't post it on Facebook, because there's no way it's worth it, but I've been lead tech on three annual academic conferences and the Medieval Academy of America conference a few years back, so I can talk and say that I know what sort of conference/convention comes from a lack of money and a lack of competence. That's what I see right here. All the good intentions and hard work in the world can't save a conference from not having enough funds or enough experience to know how to use them.

It's actually rather good, though it suffers from the typical problems of a book by two authors with different styles.

It's really great to hear someone else bringing out all of my defenses of Dragon Age 2 before I do. I always say that it's a really ambitious and interesting game that happens to fail in a lot of ways, but also that the discussion space for gaming doesn't really have a space for good games with problems unless they're Obvious Masterpieces Tragically Crippled by Bugs.

When I read the books, I thought it was an open secret or something and was really confused when it was later treated as one of the major revelations.

I felt this way about the first twenty episodes of Urusei Yatsura, which was all that I watched. Flatly put, there is no reason for Lum to be interested in Ataru, besides the confusion that sets up the premise of the show, because Ataru is relentlessly cruel to her and to everyone else as well. The show really thinks that we ought to care sincerely about Ataru's so-called "bad luck" in having a beautiful alien want to marry him, denying him the purely hypothetical to creep on his shrewish girlfriend, if we can even call Shinobu that, but it's a terrible premise and I can't believe it lasted a hundred and ninety-five episodes. I think I just don't get Takahashi Rumiko.

I think it's worth watching. It's got a dark medieval veneer that holds up really well, and the action's really good. Plus it's all beefy chicks swinging huge swords, which is great. Like NinjaSquirrel said, though, the ending is terrible. They basically ran up to the end of the manga that had been written and slapped together a cliffhanger that resolves absolutely nothing. The manga suffers no such drop in quality, since it didn't need to improvise any sort of conclusion.

Unlike different British English accents, there's very little cultural or regional pride tied up in the different American English accents, so virtually everyone who has one of the latter is trying their best to minimize it, if only subconsciously. I've given myself a fairly clear Midlands American English accent, but I can and do revert back into my Texan drawl, which really is only mildly there, and if I bother to use the full dialect, at least the parts of it I bothered to learn, I can make myself pretty incomprehensible to the several Brits in my department. I worked so damn hard in grade school and junior high to lose my accent, because My Fair Lady taught me that sounding like you were from someplace different made people look at you askance, and it's served me well in all my occupations, but I really wish I'd spent the time to be able to speak more like where I come from, since that's something in which I've gradually grown a bit of pride as I've aged.

So, did you watch and hate Michael Rapaport in Justified, too?

Your manga and comics knowledge is way higher than mine, and we stand toe-to-toe in the anime thread. That's all the information I need.

I'm late to the party on this, but I also feel like "Mary Sue" has to include not only extremely unrealistic competency but extremely unrealistic likability. A Mary Sue is universally loved, regardless of her actions, and has close positive relationships with most if not all major characters, none of which are explained by the in-world context of the work. I'd be much more likely to call something like Jar-Jar Binks, a useless, destructive, and annoying character that somehow is beloved by the rest of the Star Wars cast, a "Mary Sue" than call Commander Shepard one. People hate Shepard in the Mass Effect games. Granted, it's usually because they're jealous, irrational, or misinformed, all of which are kind of Mary Sue reasons, but the fact remains that inexplicable likability is as important if not more important to the definition.

It was really awkward until they played "Brimful of Asha", which is a song that can't go wrong.

Well, I got back from England last night, where I was at Leeds to give a paper at my first international conference. The paper was on the first day and went well. I probably had the strongest argument out of my fellow presenters, but I also had the guy who literally wrote the book on my topic in the audience and he took me to task for supplementing the points where we both agreed with some "conjecture" of my own. I think I held my ground, but it never looks good to have another expert say that you're seeing pink elephants. Whatever. I spent the rest of the week-long conference stealing food from the mess hall and listening to Germans argue about imitatio imperii. I got all my dinners except the first night paid for by senior professors and generally made myself out well, although I didn't do as much networking as I wanted. Then again, I never do! The last night was especially odd, given that there was a nightclub-style dance in the basement of the union. I asked a gorgeous Polish girl to dance, because I'd noticed her at several receptions but hadn't had an excuse to talk since she does Puritan stuff and I don't, but she insisted on inspecting my conference badge first, then we danced for like thirty minutes before she said she was leaving and walked over to the other side of the dance floor to dance with someone else. It's a good encapsulation of why I don't like nightclubs or danceclubs, but attractive goth girls are so rare in America that I couldn't help myself. Oh well, I had to get up at six in the morning the next day to make my flight anyway. It was probably the best annual conference to which I've been, which isn't saying much considering how small-time our local conference is and what a pile of garbage Kalamazoo is, but it cost an arm and a leg for what amounted to a CV entry and a couple of contact emails. Ah well, that's business! The summer's wide open for me now. I agree with Merus. Most of the really toxic vibes in my relationships have been from attempts at mind-reading. The best you can do is build a relationship that thrives on open communication and leave the rest to her. There's a very good possibility she admires your integrity and commitment, rather than resenting them.

I love that this conversation happened and that I wasn't around to mess it up. Tegan schools me all the time. She should go ahead of me, too.

Not only are games webs of systems, they are also layers of abstraction. It was really interesting to hear Jon brush up against that when talking about games and stories. Good game design seeks out abstraction and stuff like the Black Legend is a powerful abstraction, to have persisted for so long. It explains the difficulties of early contacts with the Americas, it explains Spain's "failure" to remain a world power despite its empire, and so on. It doesn't even matter that it's wrong and based from top to bottom on mischaracterizations at best and lies at worst, it simplifies a massive chunk of the world and its systems for certain games and therefore is hard to ignore. To bring up another example, a person named "pac" on the Paradox forums has been campaigning hard against what he calls Paradox's racist, elitist, and Eurocentric model of the early modern period in the Europa Universalis series. Being a medieval historian of the crusades and the Mediterranean, I thought he had some points but was overall exaggerating, before he convinced me to read a few critiques of the "European miracle" like those by J.M. Blaut. I just finished the last of these, Eight Eurocentric Historians, and now I almost can't bear to look at EU4, so thickly does it lay ahistorical, even nonsensical, advantages on Europe in order to simplify the events of the next four hundred years into something the game can pretend to simulate. It's not surprising that Paradox chose it to be that way; they've said outright that they do their research via Google and Wikipedia, and the Wiki article for the "European miracle" doesn't actually include any discussion of criticism or controversy. There's no context for them to question the entirety of Western historiography. Honestly, I feel that until developers start hiring historians to consult on their games, "video game history" will have as much meaning and quality as "video game writing" still sadly does right now. I hear you. I enjoy Dan Carlin for the proselytism, but I recognize in him a willingness always to prefer something interesting to something true, which is too familiar in me myself. His "Fall of the Roman Republic" series especially was more entertainment than fact.