Gormongous

An acquaintance who does immigration law in Minnesota posted on Facebook about how the vast majority of the administration's planned actions against sanctuary cities is extremely unconstitutional (withholding federal funds for unrelated transgressions of federal law) and will have no problem being struck down in court, but when the Trump administration is doing so many unconstitutional things it's hard to have the time, money, and manpower to challenge them all in a timely fashion. It's the Peter Thiel v. Gawker model of governance, in a way.

The resistance of the general public to the idea of feathered dinosaurs has always reminded me of the resistance of the general public to the idea of buildings and statues in ancient Greece and Rome being painted in bright primary colors. Historians have known about this, literally for decades, but I've given up on ever seeing it reflected in any modern media. People just think it's too ugly! I think that there are two semi-contradictory reasons for that reaction. First, people expect the past to be dignified, because it was a simpler and more grounded time. In the modern era, that means muted colors, clean lines, and a general lack of ornament. Second, people expect the past to resemble the present, because one leads to the other. That means that, on a fundamental level, their buildings should look like our buildings and their lizards should look like our lizards. I understand where both of these impulses come from, but I've always been a big fan of advancing the weirdness and inaccessibility of the past, so it'd be really great to see a talented artist or filmmaker tackle feathered dinosaurs or a painted Rome.

I've always thought that Idle Thumbs is about the intense, discursive, and irreverent exploration of topics, more than about video games. If you guys never talk about games again, I don't know about that, but broadening the palette is great, in my eyes.

Great post, Zeus. And hey, good to see you!

I think the alternate fire is a charge shot that's strong enough to be a one-hit kill for your average enemy, too?

Yeah, I was a little frustrated to discover, near the end of my first run through DS3, that the Hollowslayer Greatsword is essentially the Claymore but with more damage until quite late in its upgrade path. Still, that's a boon for others who don't have a love affair with the latter of those two weapons!

Finished WWW.Working!! and the finale didn't fail to disappoint even my basement-level expectations. This is just my opinion, but if the central thrust of your romantic subplot involves a nearly-grown character being unaware not only of the link between kissing and dating, but the link between love and dating, then it's time to go back to the drawing board. Same if the resolution of your love triangle involves one character just... getting over it one day, for no reason, and giving up, without ever really making a move. The lender/debtor romance and the spooky girl romance were fine, but the show spent more than half of its running time on this rude girl who wants to become better at cooking out of spite and this bland guy who puts up with her because reasons, so that's what I'm basing most of my judgment on. Honestly, it's unbelievable that the source material comes from the same author as the Working!! manga.

I've said it before, but I feel sorry for the designer who was charged with creating a health system to replace Estus. Estus is genius for how it enforces a mix of conservatism and risk-taking on the player. Attempts to modify and iterate on that system in DS2 and DS3 definitely weakened it, but replacing it with a health-drop system that requires grinding in case of catastrophic failure is... an unfortunate step backwards.

Well, thus ends the first time ever that I've watched multiple shows throughout the season in which they air. March Comes in Like a Lion will continue for another cour, but it already impresses for its mature plotting, a definite improvement over the manga author's previous work Honey & Clover, and its exploration of young genius that puts me in mind of Your Lie in April, only directed by Akiyuki Shinbo and animated by Shaft. WWW.Working!! is the closest to actual dreck that I'm watching. I'm still a couple episodes out from the end, since I'm following it through a fansub group rather than streaming, but it's been abundantly clear since the second or third episode that you just can't capture the magic of Working!! by choosing another restaurant with a different cast of implausibly dysfunctional people. It doesn't help that the main couple has awful chemistry, since the idea is that she hates cooking but keeps trying because he doesn't believe in her, even though her food makes him sick, is just... not funny and more than a little dumb. If people finish Working!! and want more of the same, I'd direct them to watch Servant x Service and then, if they must, watch Working!! again before turning to this lifeless, derivative spinoff. Keijo!!!!!!!! stayed true to its premise all the way through, and I couldn't be happier. If you're so starved for sexual images and phrases that literally anything will do, I can imagine watching it for titillation, but the show's really about reducing the rhythms of the shounen formula and the presentation of sexualized fan service to nonsense through semantic satiation, the better to provide raw entertainment. It works! By the end, I wasn't even seeing the boobs and butts, just following a series of fights as ridiculous as those in Jojo's Bizarre Adventure but with the sexual tension made explicit. Really, my only complaint is that Xebec clearly blew out their budget in the previous few episodes, so that the finale is largely pans over stills, computerized distortion of stills, and low-tweening animation that struggles to stay on model. I had actually been thinking, while watching the penultimate episode, that Xebec was punching above its weight in terms of visuals, and now I see why. It's a shame they couldn't hold back a little and have a few visually average episodes rather than several visually stunning episodes and one miserable one. Ah well! Finally, I finished Fune wo Amu last night. This is a odd one, about a small group of people working on a dictionary over the course of a dozen or so years at a mid-size publisher. I picked it up because I like procedural plots in anime and because the manga author who wrote Shouwa Genroku Rakugo Shinjuu worked on it (although he did not write it, as I had initially thought), and... well, overall it was good. I learned a lot about the process of assembling lists of words and transforming them into a dictionary, as well as the specific pressures of doing so at a Japanese publisher that receives no public funding for it, and I would have been satisfied, except that the finale implied that I was supposed to have read a lot of that process as an allegory for the characters making connections and pursuing their dreams, which wasn't quite there. The main character, Majime, is a shy man who struggles with his awkwardness, and there's the implication at the end that his work on the dictionary helped him to overcome it by learning how to communicate better... only Majime is well-spoken from the first episode and his awkwardness comes almost entirely from a lack of self-awareness in social situations, physical clumsiness, and a general cluelessness, which no increase and refinement of vocabulary should be able to fix. There are plenty of stylized scenes making it explicit that people are separated by a sea of misunderstandings and that dictionaries, made of words, are the ships with which we cross them, but it's a clear example of telling and not showing, just as much as Majime's inexplicably offscreen romance of his landlady's granddaughter. Similarly, Majime talks at the end about having butted heads with Nishioka, a salaryman at the publisher who's just there for a paycheck in the beginning but gradually learns the value of the dictionary and therefore his coworkers, but they basically never butted heads. Nishioka starts out thinking that Majime is a weird word-obsessed dork, but there's no reconciliation of opposing principles, he just stops thinking that on his own once he gets to know Majime better. Don't get me wrong, I wish that Fune wo Amu were a character study of people learning to speak their hearts, as well as a nitty-gritty depiction of making a dictionary, but it can't be, not in only eleven episodes, and it actually made the final episode less enjoyable for the show to return to dwelling so much on those half-baked themes. That's it, happy holidays!

I know I'm asking the impossible, but I wish there were some kind of regulatory structure in place that controlled the use of Latin by non-specialists in works of popular media. Even just a basic test that required an explanation for why "Manus Dei" is more meaningful than "Hand of God" would satisfy me...

Thanks, everyone. I've been through enough breaks and breakups to know that there will be a point, an unspecified amount of time down the line, where either I will be back together with her or I will be okay with not being with her, but it's really not feasible for me to do much more than just keep my head above the water right now. Yeah, the fact that she's actually getting help is encouraging, but her behavior towards me since the break has only intermittently reflected that. Overall, it feels like it's been a slow retreat from warmth and friendliness and, while it's less painful than being frozen out entirely, it's still causing me a high degree of distress. I think she knows, but I'm not sure she understands. In our latest conversation on the phone, a few days ago, I did say basically everything that I posted above, except for the part about how it's shitty to break things off with someone who's unemployed when they supported you through a similarly lengthy job search the previous year, because it would accomplish less than nothing to point that out to her. Her response was... I don't know, I guess it was kind of her on paper, but I didn't find it very comforting. She reiterated that she loves me very much and that she wants me to be happy, and she's willing to do literally anything for me, short of getting back together. On that latter point, she said that she honestly doesn't know what's going to happen with us, but that she doesn't feel close to reconciling with me right now, because it doesn't seem like I've made much progress on getting work or going to counseling, and that she needs time, possibly a lot of time, anyway. After some back and forth, I settled on asking her if we could just go back to talking on a daily basis, even about dumb stuff like her dog or work, and she agreed, saying that she'd been wanting to text me more the past few weeks but had been holding back. That's been the last I've heard from her, so fuck if I know what's going on there. I've been trying not to let myself fall into the delusion that, if I find a job and leave her alone, I'll be getting a surprise visit on Valentine's Day or our anniversary, but it's hard, because that delusion gives me happiness when it's in scant supply.

Bummer post, so I'll spoiler it. I just need somewhere to vent.

See, this is a classic example of magical thinking. You're told that Donald Trump is a businessman, and he appears to be wealthy, so obviously he's a great deal-maker, right? That's how businessmen get wealthy. Well... no, not really. Not only did Trump inherit a notable portion of his wealth from his father, both as a "loan" and as part of his estate, and not only would he be richer today if he'd just taken his entire inheritance and invested it in index funds in 1988, but almost all of Trump's successes come from business practices that are about gaming the rules and screwing over people who can't fight back, not "making deals." He used equity-for-debt swaps to avoid declaring the "income" of cancelled casino debt so that he could take it as hundreds of millions of dollars of deductions instead. He stiffed hundreds of small business owners because he knew they lacked the means to sue him for payment owed. Six of his businesses have declared bankruptcy over the past twenty years, with dozens more qualifying for the less legalistic terminology of "failures," and even Snopes admits that this marks him a perfectly average businessman. His best successes come from giving other people his money or his name to use, and the latter was in the process of being abandoned by Trump himself as little as two months ago. Even when we move to Trump's campaign, what we see are efforts to line his pockets by using his own businesses for campaign "to an unprecedented degree" and filling his cabinet with ground-floor supporters, high-rolling donors, and fellow millionaires from the far right, a total repudiation of his promise to heal a divided nation. If we lay aside the evidence that already exists for how Trump plans to conduct the international affairs of the United States (bringing your daughter to a meeting with the hyper-traditionalist Japanese PM and trying to use diplomatic recognition of Taiwan as a bargaining chip with China are both rookie moves in the eyes of literally anyone in the know), how does the Donald Trump who we know from the above actions behave on the world stage? Will he squander America's wealth and diplomatic cachet in an attempt to make his mark? Will he claim that international rules don't apply to him because they don't benefit him? Will he leave smaller countries like Ireland or Poland to twist because it's more profitable for him to ignore their plights? Will he let the US, the world's largest economy, declare bankruptcy... which he's already floated as an option? Will he just use the presidency to enrich himself and reward his minions? Please, Athis, tell me, because I don't see a deal-maker here. I see a scam artist who uses and abuses people. Where are the deals? If what you're saying here is that you want Trump to be a great deal-maker because it confirms your gut instinct about him, that's fine, I suppose. People are allowed to believe whatever they want. However, if your only proof of Trump's deal-making acumen is that he's rich and he got elected president, buoyed by your weirdly blinkered optimism, then you're basically making the argument that anyone who gets elected president is going to be a good president, because they were wealthy and savvy enough to get elected. No one is obligated to take such a position seriously, and it's not because they don't "like" it.

Justin's bootleg Strangelove accent is my favorite of all his accents, although his "quiet and British" accent gave it a run for its money in the same ep!

He also runs past everything, which is only a good strategy maybe half of the time!

I mean, hopefully he realized by the end that it's harder to run past everything in DS2. He kept getting trains of five or six guys, taking a wrong turn, and then getting mobbed to death.

I'm beginning to feel like I missed out, because I figured out on my own that I could tank it out behind the Black Knight Shield and then beat him in two tries. I did some parrying, but didn't really need to, so I didn't keep it up.

I agree. Also, I feel like DS2 changes the most of all the Dark Souls games and I don't think it'd be fun or interesting for Nick to be adapting to those changes while also dealing with the effects of the covenant.

Only Souls boss I've never beaten, not even solo, is the latter of those two. Over the course of eight hours spent trying, I got one hit away once and went for it. Unsuccessfully, of course. Else, I never even got close. In general, all the bosses in the DS2 DLC that were supposed to be "multiplayer" bosses are actually filled with the rank bullshit that many people think characterizes every Souls boss.

I also feel that DS2 was most prone to out-of-nowhere "fuck you" tricks with its bosses. DS3 and DS1 tended to be of a piece with boss design: most bosses were about learning the full moveset and then exploiting it, although DS3 bosses tended to have a larger moveset (or to have two moves that had an equal chance of triggering in a given situation) that made them slightly trickier the first few times but not appreciably harder overall.

I thought about introducing the distinction between "kohai" and "kun" in Japanese workplace honorifics, but I saw that no good would come of it. That's where I am, right now!

Come on, Twig. There are only two types of information: information that confirms your gut instinct about a given subject, and irrelevant nonsense.

An added wrinkle: much like the unexpected popularity of the Wizardry series in Japan prompting the specific tropes of the JRPG, one of the first Japanese-made adventure games, The Portopia Serial Murders released in 1983, basically created the concept of the "visual novel" and overshadowed other homegrown entries in the "adventure game" genre. Supposedly, the creator read about Western-style adventure games in a PC magazine and, wanting to introduce them to Japan, made his own in BASIC. In the game, you play a silent and unseen detective who interacts with the characters and environment by ordering his assistants to do things or answer questions. There are multiple ways to advance the case, making it technically nonlinear, but there's a single unchanging plot that is present no matter how you solve the case. All the aesthetic and mechanical features of The Portopia Serial Murders, either simplified or elaborated upon, are what established the concept of the "visual novel": first-person perspective, different routes to advance the same story, a low level of player interaction, a focus on conversation over environmental interaction, etc. It never got licensed in America, mostly because it's a very "adult" plot involving murder and drugs, but in Japan it's known across all ages and demographics. "Yasu is the culprit" is the Japanese version of "The butler did it."

What makes me sad is that there's such a Reddit/4chan-style undercurrent of "be a man and do it yourself" in Dark Souls fandom that people would prefer to quit when stuff gets too hard, rather than summon help into their game and not play the game "how it's meant to be played" as decreed by some assholes on the internet. Yeah, the rush of beating a seemingly impossible boss solo after hours of trying is really great, but all my most memorable moments in the Souls series, without exception, have been with other players, either inviting someone into my game and having them show me the ropes of a tricky area or boss, or going into someone else's game to get familiarity with an area or boss (and also some precious humanity, to boot). When Nick was streaming DS3, there were always two or three people in chat who'd throw literal tantrums if anyone suggested that Nick summon help and it was always so depressing for their weird entitlement to rule out one of the best parts of the game for me.

Yeah, the "outsider" thing fills me with pessimism, too. Expertise has been under siege for the past twenty years in American culture, but politics is the one profession where people have rejected expertise outright. You don't want an outsider doing your plumbing or defending you in court, but an outsider making your laws? Sure. It's gotten to the point where political expertise is synonymous with corruption, regardless of the politician's actual record.