Gormongous

"Calamity Ganon" just makes me think of Ganon dressed up in Old West garb and shootin' off a pair of pistols.

I knew before I looked what the picture of Benny Russell would be. Great job! Also, I'm pretty sure I know what his message is.

And that reminds me that English also has "high noon," a leftover from the imprecision of pre-modern timekeeping, where there was a meaningful distinction to be made between "noon" (roughly midday) and "high noon" (the exact moment of midday). Same with "time" and "high time." And then you've got "high school" shifting from a school for advanced studies to a school for older (and hence taller) kids and "high road" shifting from the popular or more-frequented road to the road you ride on your high horse... I'm beginning to feel that English has a complicated relationship with the word "high"...

Yeah, I didn't think you were actually confused about the meaning of "high concept," I just think your brain probably got stuck on "high concept" the way that brains often do, where they're looking to describe something and they just pull something from the "already used word" buffer. That said, I do think it's damaged the word's meaning in wider society to coexist in a cultural space with "high art," "high brow," "high class," and so on. It also doesn't help that "high concept" already seems to be DOA for many, judging from the first hundred Google results being mostly pinched-brow corrections from "industry insiders" (and then other "insiders" correcting them with brows even more pinched). To actually say something meaningful, I genuinely think the process by which words or phrases become their own antonyms is interesting (the term for such a thing is apparently "contronym," but that mixes Latin and Greek in a gross way, so nah): sometimes it's social pressure from under- or overuse ("silly" is a classic example), sometimes it's because of other words that look related but are not (poor "bemused" and "nonplussed"), and sometimes the world just changes around the word instead of vice versa (the Italian word "alto" inherited its dual meaning of "high/deep" from classical Latin but now has weird ambiguities like "alta mare" meaning the high seas and not the deep sea). Yep!

Not conflation, just contamination that pushes "high concept" to mean something more than a succinct, clear, and engaging premise. In response to a listener writing an email about a dream about writing an email about a dream about evil robots replacing humans and infiltrating their attic, which they knew to be a video game because their three-year-old could read, Jake said, "That is the most high-concept dream of all time!" And then he describes a very convoluted dream of his own where he was snatched into a helicopter by giant claws, which he also begins by describing as "high concept." Also, I'm hugely regretting the teasing of my initial post now.

Hey, you guys love to make fun of "literally" being used to mean "figuratively," I figured you'd be receptive to other flip-flops in meaning. Sorry, don't feel bad! The lexical contamination of "high concept" by "high brow" is apparently a pet peeve of mine.

Aaah, Jake, stop using "high concept" to denote a highly complicated or sophisticated concept when it literally means the opposite of that! That is all.

I liked it a lot, but more like Children of (X-)Men, am I right?

I get the feeling that inXile either doesn't have a supervising editor or has an extremely permissive one, because Wasteland 2 also had a huge problem with inconsistent reactions by the same characters to surprising or absurd things.

I was actually just about to come in and recommend "Far Beyond the Stars." The premise, that a black starship captain can't possibly be reality and has to be the fantasy of a struggling black writer in 1950s New York, is an incredibly pointed jab at all the people who claimed that Brooks was a weak or divisive choice to lead Deep Space 9. Also, in general, DS9 has a lot to say about race and gender, albeit behind the facade of idealistic sci-fi, than virtually any other TV show in the nineties, and it's fascinating to rewatch it today looking for that sort of thing (while acknowledging that it fails a lot, for a variety of reasons).

1. Inside Llewyn Davis 2. The Big Lebowski 3. A Serious Man 4. Miller's Crossing 5. Fargo 6. O Brother, Where Art Thou? 7. Barton Fink 8. True Grit 9. No Country for Old Men 10. Burn After Reading 11. Raising Arizona 12. Blood Simple 13. Hail, Caesar! 14. The Hudsucker Proxy 15. The Man Who Wasn't There 16. The Ladykillers 17. Intolerable Cruelty Writing that out was much easier than expected, which doesn't exactly mean that it was easy.

I could see a multiverse version of me that doesn't like Jaws for a chance intersection of a few undesirable elements... but that version of me definitely isn't me, Jaws rules.

Nick's fear of boring his viewers is understandable but completely off-target, at least for me. I don't care if something wild is happening every second of a stream, but I do care, deeply, about watching someone who's having fun with a game and making progress. Believe it or not, watching Nick eat shit in boss fights over and over, while gradually getting bitter and frustrated, is infinitely more tedious than watching him chill out, grind a bit when necessary, and explore the environment. Maybe Nick always runs everywhere in every game and that's just how he plays, like Chris jumping on everything, but if it's a matter of choice, I hope he gets to a place where he trusts in his own presence and in the content of the game itself to carry the stream without there having to always be an outrageous boss wrecking shit onscreen.

I have encountered many people who "would rather focus on the positive" that is something like how good the new Zelda is than talk about the shitty things that Nintendo's done lately. It's not an overt argument that someone's making, it's an unwillingness to engage with the negatives of something they like.

There's been enough interest from Idle Thumbs forum members for us to start talking seriously about forming a podcast group about anime. This will be the thread for us to do that! Codicier made a good post in the Anime thread about the format he envisions for such a podcast. For the most part, I agree with it. That means the podcast might have: A structure divided between a "Whatcha Watchin'" free-talk segment and a one-show (or one-season) spotlight discussion. Shirobako has been suggested for the first "spotlight" anime because it just finished and people loved (and hated) it. One or two "main" hosts who wrangle people to fill up episode panels and provide continuity between episodes. I have been recommended for this position. A pool of people, unspecified in size, who are willing to come onto an episode and talk about what they've watched lately and the show being spotlighted. One or more editors willing to cut together multiple audio files recorded locally, possibly with a backup recording of the full Skype or Mumble conversation. Codicier and Coods have both volunteered for this position and I am willing to learn it, too. A webpage and hosting, I guess? I haven't really thought about this part at all. Is that it? I think that's it. Of course, all of the above is negotiable. Half the reason that I want to start an anime podcast is that none of the ones out there right now are any good. They either have a ridiculously rigid format or too much inside baseball to hold my attention. With the cool people I've met in this forum, I'd like to build something that is the exception to the rule, where smart discussions happen about a medium that I love. People who have expressed an interest in appearing on this podcast: Coods, N1njaSquirrel, Twig, Gormongous, Codicier, Roderick, Blambo... you? Seriously, this podcast will suck like all the rest if we just pack the panel full of know-it-alls who can tell Kawasumi Ayako from Noto Mamiko after a single spoken line. If you like anime and want to talk about it, chime in with your thoughts here! Also, urgently seeking better thread title (and possibly podcast title). PM me ASAP with ideas. Episode list: Key Frames Episode 00 - "Don't Feed the Dragon" Key Frames Episode 01 - "Gasbag and the Bomb Guy" Key Frames Episode 02 - "I Have No Coffee and I Must Scream" Key Frames Episode 03 - "It's a Doc-Eat-Dog World" Key Frames Episode 04 - "Taste the Rain" Key Frames Episode 05 - "Samurai Hacklash"

It's tacky for me to comment on the content of my own podcast, but that is a strong list of anime discussed. I'm proud that we hit all those titles in one show.

Again, I'm not saying that every person has to make a personal statement in every media work they create on every social issue. I'm saying that Giant Bomb is a media company, albeit one framed around individual personalities, that purports to cover the culture and content of gaming as a medium, and I don't see anything wrong with it feeling weird to people, including me, that they were and are eager to cover all sorts of "gaming culture" stuff, but not when that stuff crosses an arbitrary line into "politics" that usually means dealing with issues that deviate from the straight white male experience. It doesn't seem unreasonable, especially when the GB community is quick to let huge torrents of bile flow about anything related to "social justice" or "identity politics." It's clearly a dynamic that enables toxicity in that community.

I agree with the general thrust of what you're saying, but I also think there's a distinction worth making between a piece of media acknowledging that politics exist and it being "oops all politics," as well as a distinction between one's personal presentation of political issues, even in a piece of media with a public audience, and one's presentation as the face of an institution or community. I have no problem whatsoever with Idle Thumbs being "apolitical" in the sense that you guys don't seek out political topics, because it's just a group of friends talking about whatever interests them, but Giant Bomb is a media website with employees that concern themselves with the medium of gaming as a whole, from news to previews to reviews to criticism, and arguing for an "apolitical" presentation of that, even after the fashion of Idle Thumbs, seems faintly ludicrous—especially in a world post GamerGate, which many outfits tried to handle by not addressing it, to the massive detriment of their industry and readership. Expecting that a source of gaming news should be able to be free of political content feels like expecting that your local news channel should have politics-free daily news: not impossible (as the existence of human interest stories and puff pieces attests) but also not something that's particularly commendable. I guess what I'm saying is, I need my break from Trumpland as much as anyone, but it feels very peculiar to act as though a given form of media should be able to be free of political content no matter its purview (consider, for example, how "political" most scripted TV is) and shouldn't attract criticism of its shortcomings, especially when acknowledging the existence of queer people and people of color seems to count as "political" content for so many. Not that that's what I'm saying that you're saying, far from it, but if someone doesn't want to hear about politics in an industry where sexual harassment is still rampant and an online megastar just lost his sponsorship for making Holocaust jokes, I'm not sure that it's reasonable for them to be able to listen to a podcast from a website for video games journalism. Maybe they should read a book? I don't know.

I'm not completely sure that I understand. You want content to be created that pretends that there's a complete consensus of social opinion in society today, even though that's not the case by your own admission? What perspective is that content's invented consensus supposed to be written from and who is supposed to benefit from it? "Everything is fine, let's play video games" is an extremely aggressive political position, especially given the state of our society and the world.

No. Secularism and whiteness are inventions of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, projected onto the past. There were other ideological mechanisms for explaining society's failings, namely religion, but modern society is very good at taking religion to task for its evils and shortfalls. Rationalism and cultural hegemony, not so much.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bogue_(fish) Tragically, you pronounce each O separately, so the scientific name actually rhymes with "co-ops." Also, it's "bo" as in bovine and "ops" as in optics, so that's how you get "cow eye."

How Did We Get Into This Mess, a blog that examines discourse on the Middle Ages in today's pop culture, published a guest post that nails political commentators to the wall for their (often unconscious) attempts to describe Trump's thoroughly modern politico-nihilism as "medieval." Basically, Eric Weiskott argues that the post-Enlightenment West has a centuries-old problem in othering the real problems that come with modernity as the product of an ahistorically primitive and ignorant past. Calling Trump or slavery "medieval," when they are in fact entirely modern phenomena, is a time-honored means of excusing the secular culture of whiteness from the consequences of its ideology and actions. It's explosively good and I'll be keeping an eye out for Weiskott's book on the broader subject of the medieval/modern division of the past.

Yeah, that really sucks, SAM. Hopefully you can make an exit plan and don't feel too guilty about leaving, since it's been their decisions and not yours that pushed you to this point. My ex had a similar situation with her company, the year before last. Her company had a non-essential hiring freeze that was aggravated by a manager who was so afraid of disappointing people that he refused to interview new candidates, even when ordered to do so by the top brass. When she finally got out, for a company that paid her a full third more than her salary there, she was the last fully-trained member of the training department in a branch that was at forty percent of paper strength. The only other employees left under her manager were two off-site contractors who'd never been trained and whose work she'd been covering in addition to her own (at the manager's behest, because he didn't want to disappoint them) for almost a year. Clearly the place hasn't burned down, but I wonder what it's like to work there now. Do these companies just reach a point where it's a bunch of managers milling around?

It's worth pointing out that the Spartans did have an underclass whose job it was to oil them up, the serfs called "helots" that lived in Laconia and Messenia in the southern and western Peloponnese. A major factor in Sparta's development of a hyper-specialized warrior class was that Sparta needed all the manpower it could get to keep the large population of often-restive helots docile and producing food to feed the warrior class who kept them oppressed to produce food to feed the warrior class who kept them oppressed... Well, you get the idea. The military ethos of Sparta eventually became an end all its own, rather than merely a means to control more territory than a single city-state normally could, but the helots remained an Achilles' heel of the Spartans until Rome annexed them centuries later. The Spartans were formidable in battle, albeit not unbeatable, but why risk confronting them at all when you could just send a few ships to stir up the helots or even just keep the Spartan army in the field long enough that a helot revolt happened on its own? Spartan coming-of-age traditions that involved sending young men out to hunt helots for sport probably didn't help the situation, either. And oiling up wasn't just for looking good! In Mediterreanean cultures, where soap wasn't available or popular, one would bathe by dousing oneself in water, rubbing perfumed oil into one's skin, and then scraping off the dirt that the oil picked up with a strigil or a towel. I hear it works surprisingly well, although I've never tried it and my complexion is probably wrong for it... Anyway! The oil/soap divide in ancient Europe is almost as important as the wine/beer divide in medieval Europe, and both map fairly close to each other.

Yeah, I had the same reading for the show, but it worked infinitely less well for me. It felt like Lindelof was making this intensive drama about characters, which are generally well-realized in the actors' performances, but that he also couldn't help but keep the mystery and twists around as an escape hatch for the stakes that those characters had established. The Leftovers repeatedly sets up an impasse between two or more characters and then uses revelations that go nowhere to distract from or defuse it, and teases revelations that don't actually change the characters involved or are rendered meaningless by the season finale. The Leftovers has some great actors in Christopher Eccleston, Carrie Coon, Regina King, and others, and it has pretensions toward small-scale drama that is really powerful and meaningful, but it ultimately can't help chasing LOST's twists and Game of Thrones' and The Walking Dead's shockers and that makes it, if not bad TV, then frustratingly near-great TV. Apparently my opinion has mellowed out over time, I seem to be really angry and disappointed in this post-second season comment.