Gormongous

The only people with whom I'm getting matched are kitted out like crazy for PvP and waiting for me when I load, so I assume that it's more that everyone with a less than totally hardcore interest in Dark Souls PvP is playing Dark Souls II, leaving latecomers like me at the mercy of those too invested to move on. It make sense, I guess, but I had so much fun on Saturday, I was just surprised that last night and today were pretty quiet.

Fair enough. I had it worded much less strongly but then changed it because I'm a mess. I think I agree with you too, I really just mean more that it's nice to see an "antihero" who's a bit of a fuckup in Fargo.

I think I disagree pretty strongly, to be honest.

Hence the scare quotes. In the Fargo series, Lester Nygaard exhibits most of the same characteristics as Walter White, except that he's not inexplicably hyper-competent, so the antihero thing falls apart almost immediately, like it ought to do, rather than only at the end of several seasons, like it did in Breaking Bad.

Billy Bob Thornton is probably the best thing in the show so far. There's a few other hitmen that've been introduced and they're fine but I don't know them that well yet. Anyway, I hear you, Baron. I was skeptical, because the movie Fargo is so good, but the show isn't a retelling of it at all. It's just using the setting, the themes, and some of the characters to tell a lot more of a slow-burning story about murder and deceit in the frozen north. I can't find it, but there was a good article about how Lester Nygaard is the best deconstruction in years for the "empowering" Heisenberg-style antihero that's all the rage these days.

Anor Londo was amazing, even though I don't think I could have beaten Ornstein and Smough without Solaire. After a bit of cleanup using my new warp ability and upgrading the Silver Shield to +5 to replace my trusty Eagle Shield, I'm back in the Tomb of the Giants. Frustratingly, I've discovered that my strength-plus-shield build isn't really strong against the giant skeletons, whom I have a hard time killing unless I catch them off-guard with a fireball. Like everything in Dark Souls, I'm sure the answer is to be more patient and more careful. Also, I'm now around SL 70 and I pretty much never get summoned by the Forest Hunters anymore. The one time I did, there was a guy in Havel's Set waiting with two white phantoms. I just started running, but they caught me before long.

Kris Straub has got your back: To be fair, this sentence could be used to invalidate anyone's anxiety about any future thing or event. The Expanded Universe is a known quantity. It might be of uneven quality, like Wikipedia Brown says, but I think anyone who's invested any substantive amount of time and care in it is going to feel just a little anxious about having it deliberately set aside in favor of some unknown quantity, especially in a franchise that historically hasn't treated its fans kindly and with a director known for his divisive reboot of another franchise.

That sounds like it might be Hollywood apocrypha? Lucas has said in several interviews (enough to give the issue its own Wikipedia page) either that he changed his mind about whether Han should have shot first or that he'd always intended for Greedo to shoot first but wasn't able to show it clearly with the scene that was shot. Lucas has made multiple other changes that eliminate moral gray areas in his characters' actions, presumably without prompting by the MPAA, so I don't know why this one would be different, let alone why he'd lie about it repeatedly when the lie is already so ridiculous.

I didn't at the time, but I know people who did raise an eyebrow at the casting of Samuel L. Jackson, an actor famous for his violent and abrasive roles in R-rated movies, by George Lucas, a director known in his later years for making movies with his grandkids in mind. Of course, that was for the second movie and most savvy people, although again not me, could see that the first one had proven everything Larry Kasdan said about Lucas' weaknesses as a writer and director to be right, so we couldn't really expect much better.

In honor of the grading season:

I think what discomfited people is an announcement invalidating canon. It made me uncomfortable, just because it seems to devalue some stuff that I once loved, even though you're right that nothing's actually thrown out. I've been wondering the past few days what the relative advantages are about releasing such a statement versus just invalidating the canon with no warning when you make a new movie? I know the vast majority of people who like Star Trek consider the new movies to be the alternate-universe spinoff, but maybe Disney was hoping to skip that adjustment period?

If I remember, there are subtitles for all the plot-critical dialogue, but you lose the incidental and background chatter. It's a shame, but what can you do?

I was mostly speaking from the CBS News article "Japanese Women Shun the Pill", which I'd just read for other reasons, but googling "hormonal birth control in Japan" or "oral contraceptives in Japan" pulls up plenty of studies showing that barely more than one percent of Japanese women are on the pill (compared to well over a third of, say, British women) and that less than twenty percent would ever even consider it. Most of the studies cite concerns over base effectiveness, societal mores, external and internal side-effects, and environmental contamination as reasons Japanese women have for not using the pill, as opposed to mostly socioeconomic reasons among Western women. I guess I should have said that hormonal birth control use rather than just hormonal birth control is scarce in Japan, but I don't think I'm talking out of my ass. After all, it's something that's only been legal in that country since 1999, so it's not surprising that it's very rare and that there are still a ton of misconceptions surrounding it. I only offered it as an interesting juxtaposition, but if you have firsthand experience of reproductive rights in Japan, I'm incredibly interested in hearing more, although probably better in the Feminism thread than here.

Hormonal birth control is practically nonexistent in Japan. It's almost universally thought there that women who take the pill even for a little while will grow a mustache or go sterile. There's an order of magnitude more faith in and use of the rhythm method, believe it or not. So yeah, certain cultural norms can put some countries ahead of the global liberal vanguard in a few respects, but Japan seems mostly equivalent to the US in the late 1960s in terms of women's and LGBTQ lib.

I didn't like Sen's Fortress very much, probably because I died more to the terrain than to the enemies yet again. The four deaths from getting hit with swinging blades or rolling boulders each made me more frustrated than all the dozen-plus deaths from the Prowling Demons in the basement combined. I wonder why it bothers me so much more to die from the environment than to die from enemies. It's probably a control thing, like how I keep my shield up too much. I also joined the Forest Hunters covenant and had the best time ever. Every fight was tense and fun, even the ones where I died, except when I kept getting matched (like, four times in a row, plus intermittently beforehand) with some guy all in Havel's Armor with a Demon Great Machete who one-shotted me just like his namesake (no worries, we were both laughing by the end, I could tell). Also, I got a ton of souls and great loot from it. Are all the covenants this much fun? The only other one I've put much time into was the Chaos Servants, but I didn't have enough humanity to get very far.

Yeah, those are my thoughts, too. Despite being a huge weeaboo myself, I don't play barely any Japanese games, but when I played The Witcher 2, I had to switch it to Polish after a couple hours, because the timing just felt off with every scene, even though the voice actors were clearly talented and captured their characters well. I just don't think any already good work can be improved by a second director coming in and directing a group of actors to imitate the performances of a preexisting group of actors, you know? There are a couple of dubs that are better than their subs in anime (Ghost in the Shell: SAC and Fullmetal Alchemist), but it's a very special set of circumstances and generally I'd just rather play Metro 2033 and STALKER with goofy Russian voice acting than either goofy or serious English voice acting.

I just think there's a longer tradition of non-transgressive cross-dressing in general, like okama and all that. It may come from the theatre, but theatre is dying in Japan (and everywhere) so other mediums are better examples of it? I don't know.

Yeah, I wish I had more of a mind to flesh that out with you. Franz's sexuality is almost entirely peripheral to his character, except that it informs his sacrifice and death, which he himself calls the most significant acts of his life. It's complicated, more so than I really meant to say, of course.

Darkroot Garden/Basin is my favorite level of the game so far. Lush, beautiful, and full of interesting enemies. My only real-life friend who's played the game tells me to look forward to Anor Londo.

Always good to keep in mind. When we have visiting scholars from Europe in my department, they usually have just a vague sense of America's scale. One was adamant about renting a car to visit Chicago, Seattle, and the Grand Canyon. He was very skeptical when told that his plans would take a week at least, with most of it spent driving.

This bugs the fuck out of me these days. I watch plenty of slice-of-life shows, but I still hate all these prepubescent-looking teenage girls with fat little ankles running around like they're drowning in air. It's like moé staged a hostile takeover of the artists' brains. I dream of a day when a fictional character will simply be a woman or gay or a rape survivor because it's a part of their backstory and not because there's some crazy twist that requires it. I suspect that day will happen later in Japan, though. I can't think of an anime character I've seen in the past decade who has been both openly gay and not so flaming they're in danger of being immolated. D-don't be fooled, it's not like I enjoyed the show or anything, stupid!

Speaking as someone who's spent his whole life in what the East and West Coasts charmingly call "flyover country", I can add that the rest of the country also often bucks whatever parochial stereotype you're inclined to apply to it. It's much cheaper to fly from DFW or O'Hare to either Portland or Boston than it is to fly between the latter two, so many Midwesterners I know are quite well-traveled when compared to their more "cosmopolitan" countrymen. Also, not to hijack, but you've been to Greece, Doug? I spent the better part of a year there in college and am always eager to hear other people's reactions, since my own were so mixed. What were you there for and did you like it?

A controller peripheral is dirt cheap, a controller-cum-battery peripheral is not, and there'd be no visible features to distinguish them in the public eye? I don't know, it sounds like a good idea to me, too.

Ratatouille is the In Search of Lost Time of movies.