Gormongous

Yeah, I don't doubt that there was someone in Ubisoft in charge of making a list of secrets that NPCs could have and someone else in Ubisoft in charge of designing a distraction mechanic, but they never once talked about it (or even crossed paths). It's just unfortunate, because 1) being trans* shouldn't be something of which to be ashamed, and 2) even if it were, we have articles like this one, where a reporter helped drive a woman to suicide by writing a story about how she was a "fake" doctor and a "fake" woman.

Isn't how these things are often done, with an artist just pulling a picture off of Google Image Search to base a design around? It's sloppy, but I know I've seen plenty of mysterious lookalikes, though rarely so uncanny and obvious.

The Infinity Engine system is hardly perfect, but I have to say that there is an option in the those games to pause automatically every "round" of combat. I tried it the second time I played through Baldur's Gate II, but didn't last until the end of the first-act dungeon before turning it back off. You have no idea how heavily the game's pacing is tuned to let multiple rounds run by until you have to hit spacebar to advance the clock six seconds every time. All told, it's surprising how much better real-time with pause works in the Infinity Engine as opposed to even its contemporaries like, say, Fallout: Tactics, which had an unplayable mess of a "real-time" mode that required you to pause more than if you just set it to "turn-based".

Is that a recent development? After the 2011 hard drive shortage from the Thailand floods, I knew quite a few people online who made good money buying up external drives, trashing the enclosures, and selling the bare drives for 150% or 200% markup.

You're the thread creator, you can rename it whatever you want. "Batman: Arkham Ugly" gets my vote.

Either someone found an unopened case somewhere or Honneamise is reprinting it, because I found a copy of the remastered Gunbuster OVA and I'm over the moon about it!

I'm not an expert, thank heavens, but I think the distinction for an "incel" is a man who resents women for denying him sex and affection, but does not see it as part of the systemic oppression of all men (MRA) and does not believe that there are hidden ways to game the system (PUA). It's a more personal identity, but still political because it is so misogynist. Yeah, that's why I've been trying to focus on a multitude of causes whenever I talk about it with people. MRA/PUA culture didn't cause this shooting any more than Islam caused 9/11, but it's still important that we see how the violent fringes of these ideologies can interact with other factors to create extremely dangerous situations for certain types of people. I cringe a little bit at people who are highlighting the MRA/PUA angle, but for many it looks to be an important object lesson in the potential consequences of tolerating "harmless" misogyny in today's society. It does pose a huge potential threat, albeit only when mixed with something else just as bad, in this case our culture's poor handling of mental health and wellbeing. Also, and this is just an aside, I think there's a desire by many to have the headline be "UCSB shooting by mentally ill misogynist" instead of "UCSB shooting by mentally ill man", if only because, horrifically, the latter has become common enough to the point of being forgettable.

I actually deeply dislike Wikipedia as a teacher and a scholar. Beyond the questionable utility of encyclopedias as endpoints for research, it teaches people that anybody with a little time on their hands can be as much of a scholar as someone who devotes their life to it and that the only standard of scholarly viability is whether it can be found printed in a book somewhere. It encourages a democratization of academic knowledge, one that I think was and is happening without it, in a way that is superficial and reductive, and I can't really envision where it'll end up. Anyway, I fought those battles years ago, I just did now to please my friend, so I made the edits and now I'll go back to using it only on occasion to double-check dates in footnotes.

For me, the determining factor would be if the majority of those descriptors are dark and dirty secrets or just random factoids. Most of the non-ethnic, non-religious, non-sexual ones that I've seen talked about are the former, like "writes vampire fanfiction", so I'd also like to see a list. Having "homosexual" in the same bucket as "addicted to torture porn" does put my spine up, too.

I haven't read the Dresden Files books, only watched the show, but I think this statement is universally true. I remember reading an interview in The Otaku Encyclopedia where one of the anonymous organizers of Comiket, when explaining why people make doujin, said that people can only really fall in love with an imperfect work with gaps and cracks into which they can see and insert themselves. I think his exact words were something like, "An American in Paris is a perfect movie, but nobody writes fanfiction about it. People want to love something with problems, something they can improve. That's why we exist."

Yeah, I'd literally just finished watching when I posted that. I realize now there's no way it will stick, but nevertheless I agree with you about the shift in tone. It's going from a show where the deck is stacked against good to a show where good never had a chance at all, which I don't know if I like as much. Fargo the movie had a sense that, as insane as everything in it was, there was still an underlying logic that would make everything hang together, if only you could see the whole picture at once and grasp it. I don't know if the show's aping that and failing or if it's outright mistaken it for mean-spiritedness.

I was going to post something about how it's Fargo and not Game of Thrones that wins the "dark and stressful but always worth it" award among the TV shows I'm watching, but the latest episode left me incredibly cold, no pun intended.

Yeah, I agree completely. That's why I hate that the general public and the media are as obsessed as they seem to be about finding an ultimate cause and leaving it at that. Rodger might have found some reason to shoot up a university campus no matter what, because he was a very sick and hateful individual, but it doesn't change the fact that PUA/MRA culture was there to give him the reason that he actually did find. Not all ideologies are created equal in the type of worldview they encourage, so it's clearly a smoking gun here, but more attention needs to be paid to how PUA/MRA stuff interacts with mental illness, internet anonymity, and gun culture, because Rodger stood at the intersection of all those and made a series of decisions that most never do.

Browsing Wikipedia sometime around five in the morning yesterday, I found the first phantom person of my professional career! It's a classic case in historical Wikipedia bios of an editor copying down some early twentieth-century family trees made by some German nobleman as if they're gospel, even when they contradict each other and themselves. Remembering the last time I tried to make edits on a Wikipedia article to clean up and update scholarship and citations, which ended up with me fighting a long but losing war against a revert-happy editor with more time on their hands than I could ever have, I made a rueful remark on Facebook and left it at that, but then I ran into a friend tonight and he insisted, rather idealistically in my opinion, that I was obligated to make my case briefly on the relevant talk page. Well, I did, so here goes. Why am I not working on my dissertation, my article, or my Leeds presentation?

When you see a face in Batman's chest-knee-tumor, you have seven days to live before it comes for you, too.

I don't think I had a misogyny phase either. However, I did have a phase where I was pretty damn sure that I was unlovable and needed to make my peace with perpetual loneliness asap. A lot of that was characterized by self-hate that didn't really bear much distinction from just being angry at the world and everything in it. I think that's just growing up male, but it manifests itself differently in different people, sometimes barely noticeable but occasionally explosive and toxic.

Considering that Greece, Belgium, and Luxembourg have compulsory voting laws, albeit all barely enforced, those are incredibly low numbers for them, too.

It's funny that you call it DLC, because I remember F.E.A.R. Extraction Point as one of the last proper "expansion packs" I ever bought the old-fashioned way. Nothing else to add really, except that F.E.A.R. itself is a great game with only a few slow moments and overall the best gunplay from the traditional breed of shooter I've ever experienced.

I have no right following up such an excellent post by Syn, but I did think it was interesting in the comment thread for the video transcript that someone named Cthulhu's Intern has been reading Rodger's manifesto and made some remarks about an initially like-minded friend of his who took a different path. It's really sobering to me that he had a friend who turned away from him and the darkness he represented and that his family also recognized there was something wrong with him, but that there didn't seem to be anything those support networks, however small, could have done. Even getting laid wouldn't have changed anything, because he still wouldn't have been a happy individual and the hate would just have been directed elsewhere.

Yeah, I don't know. I feel more than a little sympathy for Ubisoft, even though "this is just the racism franchise now" is what I often find myself thinking anyway. The entire concept of the Far Cry series means that any game in it is going to attract more than its fair share of problematic if not outright racist elements. Because the premise is literally "a far cry from normal," they've got to show their primarily white, primarily Western, primarily male (assumed) audience something that will be exotic for them, which is inevitably going to be at best implicitly racist (yet another foreign locale full of unfamiliar sights and strange customs) and at worst explicitly racist (an East Asian who presents as white with bleached-blonde hair and a Western-style suit using a more traditionally dressed East Asian as part of his chair, like I said before). I know they're doing their best, if the amount of ink spilled by and about Jeffrey Yohalem is anything to tell, but it's still mostly a lost cause, because it's impossible to make a game that takes place within a foreign culture without including racist elements, if only just because there aren't any tools to talk about other cultures without comparative and hierarchical language that inevitably ascribes some level of value. So, after all that, I still want to say, the fact that the protagonist has a name that looks East Asian and the antagonist has an appearance that looks East Asian, not to mention that the leaked game synopsis appears to be about a civil war taking place in the Himalayas and not involving white people at all, is a remarkable step forward, even if Far Cry 4 completely fails in execution. I can't be more excited that a AAA game doesn't need a white face front and center to give people a reason to invest in its story. There can and will be other missteps, because that's how the world works, but the promise, as it appears right now, is great. My only wish is that they could have come up with box art that reflected rather than sensationalized that promise, but games are a business first and foremost, at least for Ubisoft, and I won't yet let my negative reaction toward the art outweigh my tentative interest in playing an East Asian dealing with other East Asians about East Asian problems, rather than another incarnation of Jason Brody's Wild Safari Cruise With Machine Guns. That's all I have to say about that.

I found them almost impossible until I realized that they always had the same button associated with the same action (blocking, punching, dodging) at which point I began to see the QTEs as more of an alternate gameplay mode with a different set of controls than the immersive cinematic interludes that I'm sure they were supposed to be.

That is definitely not any better. His torso is front-on while his limbs and head are at three-quarters. It's still painful to look at.

I don't even have the energy to argue this anymore. You're talking like people can't do unintentionally racist things, for instance by carelessly using "generally accepted imagery" in certain contexts without taking into account all possible interpretations. If we don't have that common ground, even after you've read all the intelligent and considered arguments of people other than me in this thread, then I don't know that we have anything to talk about. Really, I'm reminded of this fiasco from 2008 (except replacing the wartime propaganda poster with pictures like this one) and with the same arguments all over again. It's all just so exhausting.

As I understand it from the several articles, he was an active poster on PUAHate, a supposedly anti-PUA website that is actually just another PUA website full of anti-feminist hate. The video, of which I only read the transcript because life is too short and ugly already, is full of explicit PUA and MRA language about gynocracy and the need to punish people and assert himself as "alpha" thereby. It's really all distressing, not least because these websites gave him the tools to articulate his own entitlement as the failing of society, not him, and to conceptualize violence as the only solution, at the age of twenty-fucking-two. It's even more distressing to know that access to guns, MRA culture, and mental illness, along with a dozen other factors, certainly all played a role in this, but instead we have to wait and see which one the mainstream media narrative will choose as the thing that caused it all.

I only encounter them on occasion among my students, so I'm usually lulled into thinking they're all just confused young men who'll grow out of it. An incident like this tells me that, even if they are just confused, I should probably be more worried about the kind of answers that MRA culture and literature is giving them. What an awful thing to happen, I cannot even say enough.