Gormongous

I didn't react as strongly as you, but my opinion is definitely unchanged that Krahulik doesn't really know how to make an apology. He uses them first as a way to explain and justify his actions, and only second (or not at all) as a way to acknowledge fault and make amends. It's nice for him to write such a thing, which at least is less defensive than his previous things, but I'm still going to wait and see with him.

A Disappearance of Yuki Nagato anime adaptation was briefly teased a couple weeks ago. I've spent a lot of time trying to pin down how I actually feel about it. Basically, I'm simultaneously: excited that I'll get to spend more time with Kyon, Haruhi, Mikuru, Koizumi, and even Yuki, who's turned into the most caricatured "shrinking violet waiting to be loved" in the spinoff, curious how they'll adapt the manga, which has a really uneven pacing between slice-of-life romance and parallel universe hijinks, and dreading the *!!moe~moe~kyun!!* that I know the show will be, even if they persuade KyoAni to make it.

Especially interesting, and I've been guilty of this, is when someone posts in "Recently Completed Games" to say that they finished a game and posted their thoughts in the game's own thread (or vice versa).

The thing is, that's happened to me quite often, but the guilt quickly wrecks my enjoyment of the game, within the space of a few weeks, so that it's never as bad an addiction as Chris has.

We could have a thread that's a compendium of all the most commonly repeated threads (video game music, etc.). And then we could make that into our forum, until it's turtles all the way down.

I feel like people who just want the most popular game to win GOTY.cx already have a ranking. It's called the annual sales chart. They just need to come to grips with that.

Yeah, me too. When I was growing up, we lived near the Trinity River floodplain, so my neighborhood was crisscrossed with similar drains. One time, my friend and I followed one for like two hours as it passed through dense forest and then emptied alongside a massive field where the abandoned pylons for a five-rail interchange stood. It's the closest I've ever gotten to a Bethesda game in real life (and probably the reason I keep playing them, even though they aren't my thing).

This is a pretty easy call for me, because I'm boring and overly practical. I enjoy sleep too much to give it up (like Hemingway said, life has the tendency to fall apart when I'm awake) and breathing would have a lot of downsides. On the other hand, it'd be pretty nice to only want and/or need to eat when I felt like it. Saves money, too!

So I'm days late to this, but Chris' nocturnal relationship with his phone (first the alarm, now hallucinated spyware) is really the best thing.

It's working!

"There are many guards in the castle."

I wish I could play the Europa Universalis that Rob is playing, where the decisions are interesting and the game knows how to push back. Instead, at least for me and others to whom I've talked, it's yet another Paradox game where the really important mechanics (aggressive expansion, warscore, diplomatic attitudes) are hidden and have only one response, which is playing the historical "sandbox" the way Paradox wants you. EU4 has really been the biggest reversal for me this year. Total War: Rome II was a more abject failure of design, but EU4 went from my favorite game of the year to one I don't intend to touch again at least until the summer, if at all. Paradox made a beautiful and transparent design, which proved to have a few major exploits, and because of them Paradox decided that they'd rather make a difficult game than a fun one, which would be fine, except the result was boring rather than either. Now we have a game where the historical expansion of the Ottomans is literally impossible and after 1750 every war is a world war. It's almost enough to send me howling back to EU3's bland malleability.

Having just watched the first six episodes... Wow, yeah. Also, again to agree with Dium a month late, Bolin makes me laugh but he's an idiot made of random. Mako's struggles with dishonesty are more interesting and relatable, but they're hamstrung by his relationship to Korra, who apparently made it through the first season having learned absolutely nothing about herself as the Avatar or as a person. Tween demographic, indeed.

Yeah, Kyoto Animation was the studio that got rich off of Haruhi and K-On!. But there aren't many more Haruhi novels coming and Nichijou was a huge commercial failure, so KyoAni seems to have become a lot more risk-adverse, mostly by focusing on in-house stuff like Tamako Market and novels/manga from unaffiliated authors and artists. Hyouka was good, but nothing else really has been since Nichijou. Chuu2Koi especially was a paint-by-numbers affair. They also drummed out their best director after four episodes of Lucky Star and haven't really had a taste for artistic types since. I don't know, right now I'm trying to avoid their stuff until someone else vets it for me. Bummer that's not happening with Kyoukai no Kanata. Uh, good anime... Teekyuu is still really good, eh?

Chuunibyou Demo Koi ga Shitai!, which has all the same problems, was what convinced me that KyoAni just doesn't have it in them anymore. They've stopped giving their directors any free reign after Yamamoto Yutaka and they've stopped adapting licensed properties after the Haruhi Suzumiya novels dried up and the bottom fell out of Nichijou. It's sad. It's a studio that used to be on top and wants to be on top, but can't and won't make any of the risk to do it. The best we'll get from them anymore is Tamako Market, which is just custom-brewed sugar-water.

I have two episodes of KILL la KILL on my hard drive, but I can't watch them because my mom keeps walking in and some of this shit is more embarrassing than I realized. Instead, I finished the Valkyria Chronicles anime, which was... not good. It started out alright, as some sort of alterna-WWII story, but the "mission-based" structure of episodes and the quick establishment of "bosses" ruined it for me. It's just the video game plot, but animated! And man, nothing makes it clearer to me the low bar for video game storytelling than seeing it in an anime and thinking, "Why'd the antagonist suddenly go from sympathetic to insane, shoot all his subordinates, and fuse himself with a laser cannon? Ah, video games."

I had an ex to visit, with whom I've always had a close and happy relationship, but for the first time in almost a decade of knowing each other, our time together was a nonstarter of confused and/or absent emotions. Now my self-esteem's in the toilet and I fly out in twelve hours to go home and be a zombie while I work it all out. I've begun to have a nasty string of these incidents around the holidays. I don't know what I'm doing wrong.

I definitely agree that it's a bad thing for the standard response to be soldiering on and ignoring the hate, rather than calling it out or making there be consequences. One thing that the harassment campaign of the Depression Quest developer made me aware of is that "don't feed the trolls" is actually the rallying cry for acceptance of and conformity to such behavior. The question is, what developer bigger than one is going to risk losing fans in order to send the right message? I don't know.

I kinda ended up liking it? I mean, it was pure schadenfreude, but the fact that there was this tiny-to-the-point-of-invisible character arc in it kinda saved it from being just mean-spirited slice-of-life for me.

I think, if it were done carefully, it could introduce interesting scenarios where you pick and play otherwise sub-optimal characters with desirable traits in hopes of increasing their incidence in later generations. There's no way to "like" things on this forum, so I'm just quoting you too, Dewar.

Actually a misquote. The title actually was Nintendo offers Fullbright Company blank check to make "Blank Check" game.

To be completely fair, instead they might be shitting their pants about the evil girlfriend who used her vagina and her influence to get her pussy-whipped boyfriend hired. I think that the political philosophy of Karl Popper applies here. A tolerant society must be intolerant of intolerance, otherwise it consents to its own eradication.

The cognitive dissonance in some of the comments is truly stupefying: Guys, I just want to pretend that stuff like this doesn't exist anymore. But I can't, that would make me part of the problem.

Christmas is butt, the icon is boss.

Like I said.