Gormongous

Man, Twig, come on. The system is modeled on "own your shit," which is something the internet doesn't really know how to do, period. Still, the fact that the default stance is denial when this sort of thing comes up is what really bothers me. If I say, "Hey, that thing you made uses a lot of what seems to be racist imagery," the response shouldn't be, "Nope, I'm not racist, hence I'm incapable of doing racist things," nor should it be, "We've leveraged a plethora of focus-tested consumer feedback in order to determine that this is the optimal art for our game, but thank you for your time." It shouldn't be my job, as a conscientious consumer of art, to decide whether or not this particular battle is one worth fighting, let alone decide how to phrase my criticism so it doesn't hurt someone's fee-fees. Let the people who make this stuff own their shit. I own what I say about it.

From my experience living the "dream" of working at a large, corporate bookstore, it's mostly just that the job repeatedly introduces you to the sort of people you'd never think (and wouldn't want to think) would buy books. The introverts and bookworms you think of as regular customers never talk to you, while the soccer mom who thinks you're Google, the paranoid schizophrenic who wants a book without certain secret pages removed, and the old man who uses returns to treat the store like a library all talk to you constantly.

Yeah, these sort of things are frequently cyclical. One of the best things about Analogue: A Hate Story and Hate Plus were that they taught me about something similar in Korea, where a relatively progressive culture had its clock turned back a thousand years in order to bring back "the old ways" that were better and also happened to exclude women and indeed most of society from any role in things. I think it's really important to know not only that others have tried to make "progress" before us, but also that they mostly failed.

Twig, I understand your frustration to some extent, but Bjorn's right. All the women in this game are dead, helpless, or evil. Are all the men in this game dead, helpless, or evil? Are all the men in any game dead, helpless, or evil? It's a legitimate thing to be frustrated about, even if you're more frustrated by his frustration.

Yeah, if the AI has any sort of CB on you, it will hate you no matter what. If the math shows that it is stronger than you, it will declare war. Opinion scores and so on are much more like guidelines than in Crusader Kings 2. Sweden had cores on you and you weakened yourself by releasing them, so of course they attacked. Incidentally, this sort of hard-math AI-driven wargame design is exactly why I've fallen so out of love with EU4 myself. I hope it works out better for you!

No worries! I do feel silly about how much IRC confuses/scares me. Since webchat seems to be working now, I might take some time to sign on tonight after I finish yelling at my ISP about upping my bill by fifty percent.

Boo, Lu.

Is anyone else watching True Detective? It's probably the most powerful thing HBO's put out in almost a decade, by my reckoning, and it's only halfway done.

IRC always makes me feel like a dumb. It looks like there's an occasional bug with the webchat applet that keeps it from working when linked. Maybe tomorrow night, when I'm marathon-grading.

Well, it's pretty obvious to me. Big fat lips framing big yellow (or gold) teeth, wild hair that covers almost everything but beady and mismatched eyes... I mean, the imagery's there, especially if you compare it to the white dude, who has normal lips, groomed facial hair, and eyes that belong on a human being. Despite the caricatured style, he's still quite handsome, as opposed to the grotesqueness of the lady and the black dude. It's almost like two different studios made them.

There's a revolution of limited-animation shorts lately. Teekyuu is the really big one, but they and their contemporaries are making two-minute "episodes" that are getting "not anime" hate like Gone Home or Dear Esther is getting "not a game" hate. You can also look at a few basement auteurs like Shinkai Makoto, although his budgets have ballooned after his first movie. Actually, come to think of it, I've been rewatching Berserk for the first time in almost a decade, mostly because a friend was curious. With my more experienced eye, it's painfully obvious that OLM has no money. More or less every other shot is a tracking still, although they draw blood on top of most to give some "movement" to them. Maybe it gets better once money from Pokémon started rolling in, but I think the first half of the series fits your criteria perfectly.

There's several funny things here. First, Kumin (probably the best character right now, which is saying something when she's always asleep) and Dekomori (who needs to go drink bleach) are anime-original characters, so there's absolutely zero risk in giving them more development. They could move away or die or anything and it wouldn't affect the arc of the anime, really. I mean, the fourth episode actually does explore Dekomori's crush on the cheerleader girl, which made it bearable in theory, but it was really bearable more because we didn't have to deal with the two awful main characters at all. Not a good sign. Also, the "OC lass" you mention is actually not OC, but rather the linchpin of the second light novel, otherwise you're absolutely right. I may have said it before in this thread, but her thing is that she's Yuuta's childhood friend and hugs him occasionally, which we're meant to see as an immediate and insurmountable threat to his inhumanly chaste relationship with Rikka. It drove one bit of character development in the second episode (Rikka agreeing to hold hands with Yuuta sometimes, but only under the usual fantasy-driven bullshit requirements), but otherwise is being played only for laughs when What's-Her-Face gets excited about positive developments in Yuuta's life and gives him a hug, then we cut to Rikka tearing up and going, "Uguuu..." Laughter, applause, next scene. It's seriously the tightest holding pattern I've ever seen in the hundreds of anime I've watched, which feels silly since the source material isn't that stellar anyway. I really don't know why I'm watching it, except that... no, there's no good reason. Also, I liked the "Endless Eight" arc. It may have been excessive, but it was trying to do something artful. This is just KyoAni wanting the revenue from a second season of Chuu2Koi but being scared of alienating the author/fans of the source material, so making million-dollar filler instead. I get a little sick just thinking about it like that.

I have Cross Game sitting on my hard drive, but otherwise I tend to avoid sports anime myself. Anyway, I'm going to keep using this space to bitch about Chuu2Koi, which I would have dropped after the second episode were I sane. The fifth one is about a napping competition with another school. A NAPPING COMPETITION. And the worst thing about this utterly inane plot (more inane than that episode of Bleach where they have to bake a cake using their shinigami powers in order to keep a ghost chef from turning into a Hollow) is that the writers set it up in a way that rules out any sort of character development or consequences. Rikka just blurts out the challenge to the other school, even though it's been established five minutes before that she'll always back down from confrontation, but then it turns out the other school is full of napping savants(?) whom they still manage to beat after the standard anime pep talk about friendship. If the writers had had the courage (or the inclination) to make the show about Kumin, the senior who just sleeps all the time, we could have learned something about at least one character, instead of having another episode about how Rikka is a spaz and how the friends she inexplicably has band together to protect her from her own mistakes and restore the status quo. Imagine an episode where Kumin, with her passion for being asleep, is the driving force behind the napping competition, instead of Rikka's (inconsistently) big mouth! She challenges the other school, then makes the rest of the characters practice a brutal napping regimen that causes them to resent her, but when they show up, they blow the other team away thanks to Kumin's training and realize they had a pretty good time after all (and learned more about Kumin in the process). Now that's character development, even in the framework of an inane episode, but it'll never happen, since Chuu2Koi 2 is all about a friction-free group of "friends" among whom the only conflict is whether the two lovers will ever get the courage to hold each other's hand. Fuck this show, even K-On! has more drama.

I haven't had a chance to watch the stream, but just seeing the love in this thread has me glowing. Great job, everybody!

Actually, I think ignorance is often just what they're playing on. As this thread shows, "free-to-play" encompasses everything from superficial cosmetic DLC to pay-per-life throwbacks. Going into a F2P game, you don't know how much money you're going to spend -- let alone how much you're expected to spend -- which many games exploit by trying to convince you that this is the last purchase you'll have to make before the game really opens itself up to you. I think that this dynamic is what makes people like Chris and Sean throw up their hands when Card Hunter offers the "whole game" for $24.99, but has packages for several hundred dollars, too. Or you might mean that you know exactly that you're getting an exploitative experience, which I guess I agree with, but the rhetoric of free* seems to be really seductive anyway. * actually not free

Maybe I'm misreading your argument, but if you're saying that something subjectively perceived as good might as well be objectively good (because "objectively good" as an independent concept is a crock of shit, of course), then we disagree, because there are many cruel or exploitative things in this world that rely on the ignorance or bias of people in order to extract money from them. I don't know, if I sell flashy zircon rings or worthless junk bonds to people and they think they're buying diamonds or real estate, is no one being taken advantage of, because I get their money and they get their "value"?

For me, Whedon has the special distinction of being better known than other worse feminists, and worse than other better known feminists. I mean, does anyone remember last November, when he gave a speech at a grassroots advocacy fundraiser that was all about he'd invented a new word to replace "feminism" in the public discourse and to capture the imagination of the public at large? A brief synopsis from an acquaintance of mine sums it up best: http://misanthropology101.wordpress.com/2013/11/08/joss-whedons-latest-speech-on-feminism-was-horrible-heres-why/

Unlike Crusader Kings II, you really should play one of the recommended nations at a bookmark, because in Europa Universalis a nation is easier the bigger it is. As for the whole "play any nation in the world" thing, it's mostly a lie. European nations are interesting, Muslim nations can be interesting, everything else is garbage, and if you complain the Paradox forums will helpfully point out that it's Europa Universalis and not Mundus Universalis.

If you think Sisko's boring, you're obviously only around season three or so. The level of hammy, sassy unhingedness in Sisko's character is almost half of what makes the later seasons a delight.

Get ready for some epic thread necromancy. I was listening to this episode, because I'm trying to get a friend into Idle Thumbs and think that this one is one of the best, but I had a great realization when Chris was talking about Ubisoft's decision to make the Assassin's Creed games have a goofy sci-fi frame story, he asks why we can't just have a game about some dude in 1342. I agree, but for different reasons: 1342 is five years after the Hundred Years War began and five years before the Black Death began. What an amazing game that would be, like A Distant Mirror: The Video Game! I'm envisioning something like the potential video game they describe a few episodes later, about playing someone in Hiroshima the week before the atomic bomb was dropped. Why aren't there more history video games that operate on an intimate, personal level? Even Ezio's got to roll with popes to be worthy of his own game.

Weirdly, it also doesn't seem to require an audience, if the reports of many who've experienced the Internet Hate Machine are true. For every tweeted death threat there are half a dozen sent by email.

Monday is Hipster Sunday.

I think I agree. As I've said earlier, Voyager was my first Star Trek, so it took me too long to figure out that Janeway is probably the worst captain, combining Kirk's impulsiveness, Picard's high-handedness, and Sisko's rage with more than a few dysfunctions of her own. That said, Bob Picardo is a tremendous talent and it speaks to the intelligence of the writers that they recognized and exploited it in a non-obnoxious way throughout the series.

Please keep fighting the browser wars anew in this thread. Seriously, I'm not being sarcastic, I want to see the special Idle Thumbs version of this partisanship.

"Houston: Everyone's got to live somewhere!"