Gormongous

Yeah, I've found it really powerful because it seems so fundamentally honest and true. Even though I didn't grow up in poor environs, some of my mother's side of the family were clannish farmers in Nebraska and Iowa and my dad's side were a generation from white trash out of central Texas, so I was around a lot of people who remind me of McLemore and the people with whom he surrounded himself. My grandmother had a tenant in the duplex she owned whose son and grandsons probably hung out in whatever equivalent of Black Sheep, Inc. there was in southern Oklahoma. They always brought a weird mix of fresh game and cheap store-bought junk to Thanksgiving, and then I'd get to watch the son get to work on a cut of turkey or deer with his five-odd teeth. I miss them. Anyway... Yeah, Shittown is a wonderful work of storytelling and a testament to the depth and breadth of the human experience.

I'm on Android, so the options are a bit more limited in terms of an app. As far as I can tell, there are three solid options on Android: Mixology, which is an uncurated database of thousands of cocktails and is largely unusable in my experience; Liquor Cabinet, which shares most of the functionality of the apps Chris recommended but is overproduced and glitchy; and MyBar, which comes with only a hundred or so cocktails, too many of which are party drinks like Alien Brain Freeze or whatever, but had the most solid system of the three for adding ingredients and cocktails between the three, so I stuck with it. If you're willing to read instead of swipe, I can't recommend Ted Haigh's Vintage Spirits and Forgotten Cocktails enough, which is now thirteen years old and far from the cutting edge but was one of the foundational books of the vintage cocktail revival. It gives a little history behind each drink, including its evolution over the years, and usually recommends substitutions if you don't want to spend the next year tracking down that bottle of Amer Picon. It also rarely asks you to infuse your liquors or make exotic syrups, which is something that bugged me with the books from Death & Co. and PDT. If you want to get even closer to the metal, facsimiles of the Savoy and Waldorf cocktail guides, from the twenties and thirties, are available for cheap on Amazon, too. But all of that is stuff that I found after the fact. I mostly built my shopping list of ten bottles to start out my bar from three websites: "The Nine-Bottle Bar" series from Kitchn, "How to Build a Strong Home Bar" by Scout Magazine, and the recommendations at 12bottlebar.com. They've all got strengths and weaknesses: Kitchn snubs vodka for no real reason and favors citrus flavors in drinks over bitter or spicy, 12bottlebar.com has terrible taste in gin and vodka (I laugh every time at Gordon's being their budget gin and Absolut being their budget vodka) as well as speciously pushing genever, and Scout Magazine, being Canadian and also written by an active bartender, has rarefied and sometimes weird tastes that don't always make for good advice. Still, I ended up getting Tito's Handmade Vodka, George Dickel Rye Whiskey, Plymouth Gin, Paul Masson Grande Amber VSOP, Flor de Caña Extra Dry (which I later replaced with a bottle of El Dorado), Lazzaroni Maraschino Liqueur (which I'm planning to replace with Luxardo), Luxardo Triple Sec (which I'm planning to replace with Pierre Ferrand), and Martini & Rossi Extra Dry and Noilly Prat Red Vermouth (I got these mixed up, Noilly Prat is best for cheap French vermouth and Martini for Italian, although I'm fonder of Noilly's red than I probably should be) for just over $200. With that spread, you're able to make most classic cocktails, given the requisite bitters and mixers, so you can rest on your laurels there or start buying more bottles to make cocktails that share the flavor profile of your existing favorites.

I mean, it's not outrageously presumptuous for me to have an opinion on a publicly released piece of media, is it? Are you really suggesting that I should keep it to myself if I think that there are problems with it that caused me to stop listening? If Griffin and his players really aren't interested in feedback, especially constructive feedback from people with more experience in roleplaying, then they could probably save a lot of time by not having to record and edit their game into a podcast. However, they do, and as a work of entertainment, it's clearly lacking for some. Also, there are multiple instances where someone on the podcast isn't enjoying themselves. The players (especially Justin, but sometimes Clint and even Travis) get frustrated with Griffin pushing them along or shutting down their ideas, and Griffin gets frustrated with the players fucking around and not taking his story or NPCs seriously. It's not like I'm shitting on the unadulterated joy of strangers, I'm saying that Griffin (and the players) have some weaknesses at the root of those frustrations that could be improved with something other than fulsome praise.

Man, that email about Trespasser could have been written by me. I was also a fourteen-year-old kid obsessed with Jurassic Park who read a rapturous preview of Trespasser in PC Gamer and totally bought into the idea of a "digital sequel" to The Lost World, a movie about which I was still digesting feelings of disappointment and was hoping would be redeemed. The game I got, as opposed to the game I expected, still had plenty of things that I liked: the dinosaurs looked great at the time, even if they stumbled around like drunken, landlocked dolphins; the guns also looked great, because fully modeled guns that could be handled and inspected from every angle were a total novelty; and the narration by Attenborough was like nothing I'd heard in a game before or since. Still, it was a hot mess that I wasn't able to play to completion, as much as I desperately wanted to. Near the end of the town section, a loading glitch caused a plot-critical "staircase" of boxes to slide off each other (damn frictionless physics system) and I didn't have a save far enough back to reset it. I tried a few cheats, restarted, and gave up. Watching Research Indicates' fact-filled Let's Play of the game gave me the closure I needed there, I can't recommend it enough.

Trying to take feedback in stride instead of defensively maintaining that their way is the only way it could possibly work is probably a good first step, but I don't have a podcast, so I can't say for sure. In all seriousness, I don't think anyone's criticizing the story as a story, although I might have a few things to say about Griffin's love of hiding information from his players and springing twist after twist. I think it's more that we're trying to keep perspective on Griffin's achievements as a DM and storyteller. The way that he has trained his players, especially Travis, to try to read his mind rather than to come up with their own solutions (which would probably involve Railsplitter or the Glutton's Fork) really bums me out, as do the people who seem to think that Griffin's railroad-heavy, lore-obsessed way of running a game is the way to run D&D. For all of the cool things in the podcast, Griffin still has a lot of growing to do as a DM and calling him a "genius storyteller" is not going to help him do that.

God, this seems to happen in every family situation where a parent gets dementia or Alzheimers: my mother's mother, my ex's grandparents, and a couple of my friends, just in the last decade. In all those cases, it was one "independently minded" friend or family member who decided that everyone else was fucking up the situation and tried to seize the reins through power of attorney, but this sounds somewhat more sinister. Sympathies, but I'm glad that the community as a whole has an outpouring of support for you and your mother.

Fair enough, although I could take a shot at Rothfuss' maturity here, haha. The wild tone swings between the school days, the cataclysmic backstory, and the grim scenes with "adult" Kvothe do point to a book that was written over a long period of time and not fully revised. Rothfuss did have an editor for publication, but the only feedback we know about that she gave him was to ask for more filler: he padded the first book out with 60,000 more words at her behest.

This makes me laugh every time I read it and is also really unfortunate and in bad taste.

Sounds intensely rough, Bjorn. Be well, hope it turns out right!

Ronan Wills, who has an excellent teardown of the book on his blog, argues in his wrap-up review that Rothfuss should be taken literally when he says that he's been kicking around ideas for this book since his teens, because there's clearly different strata from different points in Rothfuss' life suggesting that he kept adding to and rewriting drafts of the book as new fantasy influences entered his life. There's stuff at the wizard school that smacks of a smart teen who's just read Harry Potter, there's the worldbuilding and lore that waft of someone in college who's getting into Wheel of Time, and there's the grimdark frame story that's clearly a full-grown adult trying to drum up interest in his manuscript and has taken Game of Thrones as a model for success.

Chris, you are 100% right about the Hammond narration. It slew me as an eleven-year-old and it hasn't lost any of its power since. The reason that Minnie Driver's character responds to Hammond sometimes is that the quotes are from Hammond's autobiography, which had been published recently and which Driver's character was reading prior to the plane crash... or something like that.

I had a generally nice but uncritical dude at my work practically fight to the death for the honor of Passengers on the basis that it wasn't so terrible that it burned down his house and killed his cat. I have no idea why some people are sometimes willing to stake their claim on the right for movies to be boring and shitty without criticism.

If you're interested in making cocktails at home but don't have a big budget for it, it's easier than you think to shop around for cheap versions of fancy liqueurs. Not knockoffs, not really, but less storied competitors to the "great" labels out there. For instance, a bottle of green Chartreuse costs at least $60, but Dolin Genepy des Alpes is quite similar (a little less bitter and vegetal) is less than $30. Even with more affordable aperitivi like Campari and Aperol, Luxardo makes Luxardo Bitters and Luxardo Apertivo that are five or six bucks cheaper and just as good. The best part is that—unless they're wine-based like Cocchi, Dubonnet, or vermouth—these liqueurs functionally last forever, with only a little crystallization, and make any liquor into a cocktail with a splash of soda and lime or lemon juice.

I've heard this a lot, but I think it's really a way for Rothfuss to have his Mary Sue cake and eat it, too. When I really and truly lost patience with the series was Felurian.

That's incredibly apt and true. Also, especially towards the eleventh century and onward, the general sense of history and human progress was the opposite of our modern positivism: things were better in the past, closer to the state of grace in Eden, and moral decay was seen as more significant than technological advancement. And, FYI, a petard is a small explosive charge set within a conical or rectangular plate of metal, used to breach walls or gates. You get hoisted with your own petard because it goes off prematurely and the blast flings your body in the air: in Shakespeare's time, whence the saying comes, the emphasis of "hoist" was on the direction of the motion and not the means.

The funny thing about the medieval mind (and the mind of the average human in general) is that they'd be much more likely to be impressed by the aspects of modern life that fit within their frame of reference: you wear purple, you have spices and perfumes freely available for use, you eat meat with every meal, you bathe more than once a week. By those standards, even members of the working class today live like minor nobility. A small box that shows strange pictures and plays music in foreign tongues? The tinker the next village over has one that does the same, albeit not nearly so small or so fine. They'd lack the context to appreciate what a colossal feat a smartphone is, at least insofar as what distinguishes it from the talking heads and levitating thrones that already littered the fictive landscape of the Middle Ages.

I am wildly excited for Annihilation. The director and the cast seem like such a great match. My only reservation is that Garland says that he wrote the ending without having read the other two books in the trilogy, although I've heard buzz that the endings end up broadly similar anyway.

If it helps, I went through a period in my twenties where I got panic attacks on planes and sometimes in cars, and it wasn't specifically a fear of either. It was a psychosomatic response to specific sensory input, something about the vibration when landing a plane or when suddenly braking a car that triggered it. I never understood it fully and it went away just a few years ago without any further treatment.

In the symbology of Japanese game shows, at least, O and X correspond to "correct" and "wrong," so it certainly doesn't seem apocryphal to me.

Hey! My friends and I were really into it, circa 2003-2004, but they started adding a lot of pay-to-play elements and we all fell off. It was pretty much a successor to Worms in my gaming diet, at the time.

Apparently, it was intentional. The American licensees knew that it was an unremarkable shmup in a market glutted with them and, since they only had control over the packaging and marketing, decided to make those as unique and ridiculous as possible. My favorite repository of bad NES, Genesis, and SNES box art, usually driven by American licensees not knowing what a game was about or knowing and trying to hide it because it was too Japanese, is an old gallery put together by Todd Ciolek, a former 1-Up and ANN writer. My favorite is, of course, Tagin' Dragon, but there's also a heavily airbrushed "street brawl" cover for a Streets of Rage knockoff called Streetsmart:

Man, the first fifteen minutes are packed full of vintage Idle Thumbs bits: Python-esque musical interludes over ranting, a Boost Bindburn, Twilight Princess guy, Chris being baffled Remo-style... It must be the Far Cry 2-ness of Breath of the Wild causing the throwback, but I love it!

Tom Chick gave it a very positive review: http://www.quartertothree.com/fp/2016/03/28/38636/

Yeah, I feel the same. I didn't pick up the Orange Box until a couple of years later, and all of my time with Team Fortress Classic just made me feel revolted by the "evolved" experience of TF2.