Gormongous

I was really enjoying this series after you recommended it, but now he's gotten to the ninth one and all he's doing is raging about plot holes for well over an hour. I was actually feeling a bit sorry for how much of a neckbeard I had him pegged as before I started, but this validates me a bit too much...

Yeah. Some blogger spun it as, "To cope with the evil wrought by mysticism and superstition, Rust turns to mysticism and superstition," which I almost like, but I know it wasn't the writer's intent, not that that matters. Anyway, for me, it's a weak ending, but it doesn't ruin what the show was for me, and it is this guy's first show, after all. Maybe the next season, which has been teased to be starring actual women, will impress through and through.

I love this podcast for being a compendium of Sean's various stress responses. In general, Sean has the best stress dreams, if I recall correctly from other episodes.

On a more serious note, I'm becoming very intrigued by Paradox's willingness to bring down the hammer on third-party grand strategy titles under their brand (Magna Mundi is the big example, although Ubik is clearly insane), especially considering the troubles they're having with EU4 development themselves (the Conquest of Paradise DLC being barely functional, announcing more DLC before it's even out). I suspect if Paradox wasn't Paradox, it'd be getting a stern talking-to from Paradox. It ain't the patch-and-pray days, but still...

I'd say it's worth five bucks, if you've got it sitting around during a Steam sale. It presents a very convincing case for the near-impossible challenges of the next century, but if you're the kind of person who needs any modicum of success to enjoy a game, you'll despise it utterly.

Take this shit to the riddles thread, y'all.

The game Fate of the World has me sure in a way the anxious young Gormongous never was that we're all doomed by peak oil and our own stupidity. The sad thing is, I would be deeply confused, because I recognize you more by that avatar than by your username or your face, which you've posted elsewhere. If you ever were anyone or anything but Urkel, I'd be hella confused every time you posted.

I do want to say, I am very interested in a game that has you play a character who is morally compromised and who, through your complicity in his or her actions, makes you question your supposedly neutral and impartial position as the theoretical audience of a work, like SpecOps: The Line but in a way that actually hangs together. I think a truly compelling "bad guy" protagonist is something games have yet to explore in full but is also something truly interesting. That said, I don't think a psycho Jack Nicholson expy is the best way to go about such a thing, although it might be the best way for a GTA game, which are always a little bit at cross purposes anyway, to go about such a thing. I don't know, I'm really just not compelled by a game forcing you to do terrible things, then whipping out a mirror and saying, "Look at what a terrible person you are!" If there's some artistic message about agency, about complicity, about pragmatism, about morality, then great, sign me up. If it's just about making the player feel like a bad person for playing a video game about bad people, I've already got French extremist horror for that. Not that I'll ever, ever watch Martyrs or Inside again. Actually, Martyrs is quite good, but only ever once.

I think you're boiling it down too much, Thrik. There is a huge difference for me, in terms of my comfort level, between watching a torture or a rape scene in a movie, for whatever reason, and being forced to torture or rape someone in a video game, usually for no good reason to me as a player, so that a video game writer can tell their story the way they want. There's a level of complicitness that really highlights the limited nature of video game interactivity, because a writer can (and usually does) demand that I adopt (or at least imitate) a certain moral character through my play if I want to advance the story. You could almost say that they need my help to tell their story, no matter what my feelings toward the story are. A movie doesn't stop playing if I become uncomfortable or disgusted with a scene. I can skip ahead in a book if it's too much. With a video game, the rape or torture stops happening if I stop doing it, but the game won't move on until I do it to satisfaction. I don't think anyone is a bad person or morally compromised for playing those questionable sections in GTA V without qualms, but it takes no effort at all for me to see how people's lines are being uniquely crossed by them.

Endnotes vs. footnotes is usually the decision of the editor, to be honest. All the professors I know who have published popular histories have had to fight for footnotes, often unsuccessfully, because there's a perception in the publishing community that people will get scared off if they see tiny text at the bottom of every page instead of hidden in the back of the book. It's an ugly thing.

Says you. The tubes of LED lighting crisscrossing my computer's innards perform a very vital but unfortunately quite secret function that I can't share with you or anyone.

Dude, you can keep posting it, but that's not what anyone's been saying here. The problem most people have is that corporate-owned studios have never done layoffs by having one of the founders and current boss post a long letter praising the studio's past and present before stating that only fifteen other people are going to be part of its future, all because he's ready for a change. Fairly or unfairly, it attaches to him some if not all of the onus, especially by framing (what by now is obviously) a financial decision in terms of his own creative desires. If a former Lucasarts boss now at Disney published a long letter about how he wants to do something new, therefore seven hundred layoffs, there'd be some hypocrisy here. But no, no one's done that. No one's ever done that in recent memory, expect for Levine, so people are questioning (and in most cases, not outright asserting) whether he is incompetent or selfish because he chose that role for himself. He made himself the figurehead of Take Two's layoff decision, it's a natural consequence. No one made him write that letter (and like I said a dozen posts ago, if someone did, I'd be sincerely curious to know how that went down).

I'm sure I'm falling for something here, but isn't your math just wrong? Three people spent nine dollars, which equals twenty-seven dollars, that is, twenty-five dollars for the pizza plus a two-dollar tip.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentence_diagram In short, it's a really terrible pedagogical device from the early days of "visual learning" that was supposed to help children see how the different parts of speech/language relate and interact independent from English's often fickle word order. Of course, they went about it by creating a fairly arcane set of symbols and syntaxes that has no other possible function than to be used to diagram sentences, which puts it even beyond calculus in terms of "when will I ever use this" complaints. My teachers used it once, to teach the difference between independent and subordinate clauses, and never again. I associate it so closely with mid-century American elementary education, probably because that's the only context in which it makes sense, so I don't know if there was ever the same in, say, Nedderplattdeutschsprache.

He (cylde) | could diagram | sentences | \ just \ all \ his

- You can fix a broken back by having an old Syrian man punch you really hard. - Listening to Bane talk was like reading this without highlighting it. - Being really strong means nothing if getting one of your little mouth-nozzles broken totally incapacitates you. - Morgan Freeman's character was a hilarious coward and the movie thought we wouldn't notice.

I really enjoy the idea of the hyphen as a replacement for a space when the semantic connection between two words is stronger than usual, kind of like a semicolon instead of a period for sentences, but no one I know would be on board with that.

No, it is bookkeeper (or bookkeeping).

I know the answer, but I have no riddles of my own to ask nor anyone I'd pass if off to, so I'm keeping mum.

I read this and was going to bring up Eiken, but then you did! Full points for today.

I meant "unwelcome" more that i) the imagined dude who loves fan service is not going to love the teacher's pink nova crotch, and ii) all of the other characters are grossed out and pissed off when he tries to flash them his panties. The reaction of "no one wants to see that shit" by both the audience and the characters is great, because it feels like a more genuine reaction to something that we've otherwise been socialized to accept and even expect. I ought to go to bed and not respond to the rest of your post, Twig, but I do feel really confused about High School of the Dead. It always looks so glamorous and fun in AMV Hell clips, even though even my most douchey "friends" say it's a piece of shit. I'm glad you liked The Wallflower at least, Tanu!

The best part of Shinryaku! Ika Musume is definitely the three nerds from MIT and their terrible American accents. It's funny, because I don't like the archetypes they embody in any other comedy anime I've seen, that is, the Greek chorus of idiots, who come in with an idea or invention that promptly blows up in their face, usually and mostly to cover for tone shifts in the main skit. But seriously, I love how they say everything DESU. Kind of like how the excessive "fan service" of the homeroom teacher in KILL la KILL is hilarious because it's unwelcome and runs counter to genre expectations, the crass caricature of Americans just works in Squid Girl. Now I'm watching JoJo's Bizarre Adventure and finding it really frustrating, which means I can't stop watching it as if I'm in love with it. It's an uncomfortable place to be. Fuck, it's Aniplex? They have made exactly one good Blu-ray, the limited-edition Baccano! set, and I own nothing else from them, because they do shit like charge five hundred bucks for Gurren Lagann and Durarara!!

Ever since it broke, I've enjoyed the odd disconnect of that line. "We aren't terribly money-motivated, so we'll be paying you less of our money." It's like my mom not buying me cookies because she was on a diet.

Rahaharawrahahahah