Gormongous

I can't believe this question gets asked when I take a week-long trip to England for an academic conference. I also can't believe it took five posts for someone to recommend Berserk to a fan of Attack on Titan. Even Claymore would have been an acceptable substitute, if suboptimal. The rest of my picks have already been said. A fan of Trigun is going to want to watch Cowboy Bebop and maybe Outlaw Star. Fullmetal Alchemist or Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood is another easy recommendation, though I think the latter's more tightly written and you need that in a sixty-four episode series. I often think of the two seasons of Ghost in the Shell: Stand-Alone Complex as the perfect anime, because it's a consummately watchable police procedural, except in the future and with some decent philosophy/psychology woven in. I'm also going to risk the wrath of Tegan to say that you'll like Death Note, Zeus. It's a trashy and pulpy suspense thriller with a heavy supernatural label and the most scenery-chewing antihero ever. You can't help but have fun watching it. I also watched Porco Rosso for the first time last week and I just have to say that I'm stunned that I keep diving into the so-called "dregs" of Miyazaki's filmography and finding them all to be gems on par with at least Nausicaa. Also: I really don't mean to be glib, but there's these things called fansubs, you get them through torrents, and in most cases they're as good or better than the streaming offerings, though I only usually bother for unique translations rather than Crunchyroll edits.

Wait, really? They're willing to sell buckets and buckets of DVDs and books to U.S. citizens. My movie-buff friend is probably a better customer for them than any two Brits put together. I'm probably being naive here, but why should video games be any different?

I forgot about the respec option! That makes me feel a lot better about putting a point or two in a non-critical skill to test out the moveset of a new weapon.

I finished Stella Jogakuin Koutou-ka C³-bu a few days ago. What a weird one, eh? I wrote to a few friends about how it took the whole "girl discovers a hobby, makes a lot of friends, and becomes a better person" framework of most female-ensemble anime and turned it on its head, but couldn't resist a happy ending. Good, but not great, overall. And yeah, the reality-altering fantasies went nowhere and were just a goof for that episode. I'm not even remotely sorry for spoiling that snipe hunt.

Yeah, that's right where I went. I restarted after accidentally attacking Cale the Cartographer and have since realized my mistake. Having archers shoot at me while I'm jumping around is the worst, I'd maybe even have skipped it if I'd known. I'm determined to go for an agile magic-using fencer this time around. So far, the starting shortsword I got has been the best, but I just put a couple points in strength to be able to use the Heide Straight Sword and the Fire Longsword I've found. I haven't got to test them out much, but I feel like I should look up the break-points for stats in Dark Souls 2, because it sounds like the forty-point rule of thumb is no more.

Okay, I finally started and put two hours into this game. At moments, it feels as good or better than the first Dark Souls, but I would definitely have noticed and complained about the number of jumping "puzzles" and multi-enemy groups even if I hadn't read it here first. I got a good groove going for a little while, then got lost and stuck in a death loop around all the crazy scaffolding. Maybe I'll come back to it after my trip.

Wait, really? I thought there was an apology and a retraction... No, you're right. They apologized, but insisted they had good intentions and the torsos had already been made so they were going to ship them anyway.

A new anthropomorphized animal game for Danielle on Kickstarter, The Deer God.

At first, I thought your anecdote made no sense because there's no correlation between being a PUA and thinking Belinda is a silly-sounding name. But yeah, PUA stuff is real and bizarre. Having read most of The Game at the price of my immortal soul, there's no better way to summarize it than the argument that women are deterministic sex-machinery that will be forced to sleep with you, against their instincts and even their will, if you find the right combination of inputs. I am more than a little bit terrified of a worldview like that.

He used to be John Q. Video Games! He always seemed like such a nice boy...

Well, the issue was that I'd already crushed England. I'd revolted and taken a third of the kingdom with me, then helped a few more revolts that broke up their hold on the north and busted their crown authority to nothing. And then, a generation later, they had everything back together and were menacing me again. Nothing I couldn't beat, but jeez. An England that beats back William is a monster, thanks to elective succession and cultural unity, and I just need to remember to aid every revolt I can. Of course, that's all moot because the 2.1.6 hotfix broke my ironman cloud save, even though it'd survived the big 2.1.5 update. Is anyone else finding that crashes and compatibility errors are more common with cloud and ironman? It certainly seems like it to me.

I think everyone here has agreed that it's a conversation worth having, whether or not they agree with all the minutiae of it. I don't know how much freedom the members of Giant bomb have to talk about their hiring decisions, but I would like their voices in that conversation, too. It's only the people who insist that the conversation shouldn't be had that are ridiculous at best and disgusting at worst. I'm always reminded of how Karl Popper wrote that tolerance must not tolerate intolerance to be truly tolerant.

I remember being sad when Danielle fell off of Jumping the Shark way back when. Actually, the whole way that No High Scores fell apart bums me out and makes me glad whenever I see people from it popping up elsewhere.

God, Nick is on fire this episode. What a treat! I have also had dreams where real-life friends have absolutely baffling dream-only nicknames or catchphrases and wish I could reverse-engineer them, if only to figure out how my brain works. Chris Remo => Chremo => Kemo => KeLo? The world may never know.

There's a little you can do, but probably nothing that will make an appreciable difference. For religion, make sure your religion has a high religious authority, usually by control of all the holy sites, and the others have a low, by complete extermination if possible. Make sure there are as many tiers of ruler possible over an unconverted area, because count, duke, king, and emperor will all use their court chaplain to convert. It'll be hard, but doable. Culture conversion, you're more or less hosed because there's no active mechanic and the MTTH is fifty years. Question though, doesn't the empire of India translate into Hindustan when ported to EU4? If not, can you form it immediately? Hindustan is a cultural union and all Indo-Aryan and Dravidian cultures count as "accepted" under it.

Well, nota bene that posting a Kickstarter for a "spiritual successor" to a game that already has at least three other spiritual successors in existence makes you a subject of scrutiny, I guess. I'm not saying I condone it, but I honestly don't know what West Games expected to be the response.

My first two months I ran my computer at the redline almost all the time and didn't even realize it. You get acclimated to a malfunctioning or underperforming computer way too fast, in my opinion.

Yeah, I didn't mean to say that it was fake, just that using publicly available stock photos, no matter how professional-looking, was a colossally stupid thing to do for a Kickstarter by a hitherto unheard-of team. There are a lot of little mistakes throughout the Kickstarter that have made it pretty easy for them to be attacked and discredited, which is unfortunate regardless.

I think we agree, but I just want to take issue with this really quick. Whether or not someone is "qualified", especially in the tech and tech-reporting industry, is a fucking mess that's tied up in people's unconscious expectations and biases. Studies have shown time and again that people will say they're choosing the most qualified person, but once they are pushed beyond a concrete numbers-based rubric, what they are actually choosing is the most familiar or most conventional person. I don't doubt that Giant Bomb just wanted to hire some more people who fit into the office culture, so however unwittingly, "thirty-something white dude who served at a major publication" was probably part of their definition for most qualified. Also, Christ. I just got home and read the links to Samantha Allen's and Maddy Myers' twitter feeds that JonCole posted. Never mind, maybe this is something to get mad about, if the other side reacts with such venom and bile to someone asking the simple question of why they didn't hire a woman.

I am still weirded out by the fact that multiple members of the dev team shown on the initial Kickstarter page, including lead Eugene Kim, were stock photos. Apparently, the taker of the stock photos lives in the Ukraine, which makes it possible that those members are still somehow who they say they are, but it's still bizarre that they'd do something that is so damn suspicious in an already suspicious Kickstarter...

I don't know about social change, but it would have been some kind of change just to add some female voices to the Giant Bomb. Because the gender (and social and racial) politics of this industry are so polarized, women (and queer and minority) writers almost always have a different perspective and that's something I want. I'm not angry, I'm not crucifying Giant Bomb, but I am disappointed, the way that your parents are disappointed when you're not all you can be. There's not much else for me to say besides that.

And one more hour-long special bundled with the DVDs in August!

Incidentally, one of the reasons that Inglourious Basterds didn't sit well with me.

RockPaperShotgun posted an interview with the narrative director of Far Cry 4. I'm equal parts intrigued and jaded about what's being said, especially with the assurances that Pagan Min will be a vivid, interesting, and lovable villain. The closest that they got to selling me on him was this: The comments are also pretty good. RPS now has a policy of disabling comments for the first thirty minutes an article has posted, which has seemed to make for longer and more considered responses, positive or negative, from people who've actually taken the time to read the article itself. Well... the first few comments, after which Nathan Grayson's "one-man war against Ubisoft" becomes the dominant topic of conversation just because he brought up how Ubisoft handles diversity.

So Steve is a phantom limb... like a ghost thumb?