Gormongous

Yeah, I agree. When I watched the prelude to the first episode, I thought I knew exactly the type of arc the anime was going to follow. And then it didn't! But mostly in a bad way. And now it's on the arc I thought I knew, a few episodes behind schedule, but I'm glad it's leveled out anyway.

The different shows have different balances of warmth and interaction. Having gone backward in time from Voyager, which was like a huge dysfunctional family, it was refreshing to have Deep Space 9's "band of brothers" feel and then Next Generation's academic conference feel. I don't even know what I'd call the wackiness of TOS.

I think it's because you guys made the mistake of going to war with the English in the mid-seventeenth century, then they went on to rule half the world. Even giving them one of your own for a king didn't fix it.

SCHOOL SUUUCKS

Hey, I didn't say you had to feel guilty. That's all on you. It's just nice to know, right? Knowledge is power and all that.

Well, the nice thing about history is that you don't have to believe it. It'll just repeat itself until you do. And now that I'm looking, the Oxford English Dictionary itself says that, while "Dutch oven" was originally meant to signify the origin of the appliance, it shifted during nineteenth-century tensions with German immigrants in America to mean an oven for someone too poor or too cheap to buy a real stove. This happened a lot in the past, see "Scotch tape," and is probably still happening now with Muslims or whatever, but I'm lucky enough to be insulated from the latter. Anyway, "Life" thread, right?

Whatever man, "Dutch courage" has half a million hits on Google, it's not obscure. But hey, if people are forgetting them, it's probably for the best. "Dutch uncle" has gone from being a mixed compliment to almost entirely pejorative in my lifetime, so it ought to just die out. Anyway, I think the Dutch oven, as in the home appliance, comes from the late eighteenth century, while I can only really trace it as a flatulence prank back to the eighties. There are implications of cheapness, rusticity, and simplicity to the term "Dutch" with the oven though, the same way we call it "Scotch tape" because Scottish and Irish immigrants were what people were worried about in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.

Considering the level of derogatory slang referring to the Dutch (well, to the Germans too, but that etymology's lost), I'd believe it. Seriously though, Dutch courage, Dutch wife, Dutch uncle, Dutch oven, going Dutch... Lots of leftover racism left in American English, to the surprise of no one. EDIT: Oh man, Wiktionary has so many more. I recognize "Dutch auction" (an auction that starts high and goes down until someone pays up) and "Dutch comfort" (the pleasure of knowing your bad situation could be worse), but "in Dutch" (in trouble or disfavor), "Dutch gold" (brass), "Dutch pink" (blood), "Dutch reckoning" (a bill of sale intended to confuse and cheat), and "Dutch treat" (a present or trip for which the recipient must pay) are all news to me. What a wonderful way of immortalizing the simplicity, greed, violence, and stupidity of our Continental brethren!

Does Metacritic index hardware reviews? That would be heinous. It's especially confusing, because there are plenty of numbers that do help you decide whether or not to get the PS4: price point, game library, technical specs, and so on. Synthesizing those into a milquetoast 7.5/10 seems almost parodic.

You're going to have to share that prize, buddy.

The last Dune game I played, House Atreides rode an alliance of convenience with the Emperor to victory. Harkonnen/Guild and Bene Gesserit/Fremen axes sprang up around the same time, but they were so busy positioning themselves to betray each other that no one noticed that me and my ally failing to do the same. It's such a crazy game. I wish there were a way to keep the playtime down, but the design's just so volatile, I wouldn't want to mess with it much. Resistance is great, too. I forget what your issues with Battlestar are, but Resistance: Avalon is pretty much just speed-BSG. It's especially good if members of your group are prone to nursing grudges, because the games are over so fast that the hurt doesn't have time to sink in like it does with Battlestar.

I remember the day when I realized that the impossible scale of a game was killing my love for it. It was the day I became an old man.

Yeah, no one dislikes King of Tokyo. It's like an inkblot test: people who prefer randomness focus on the chaos, people who prefer planning focus on the strategy. Everyone wins! But one person wins more than others. The other guaranteed hits in my closet are Galaxy Trucker (the "failure is fun" entry in the board game space), Resistance: Avalon (so fast and lean than even people who hate traitor mechanics have a good time), Pandemic (the most cooperative of my co-op games), and Love Letter (fast, easy to teach, and chess-like in elegance). Love Letter has especially proved to be a great opener. If there were any justice, people would be playing it or Tichu instead of Uno and Skip-Bo.

Yeah! I think it might just be the reductive and subtractive nature of board games. You can only have a few things going on in a board game, unless you're making the next Arkham Horror, so a design team has to sit down and ask themselves, "What are the one or two things that this license is really about and how can we build a game around them?" That way, even the failures like Firefly (or War of the Ring, I'd argue) are interesting as hell. So very few licensed video games are designed like that, except maybe the Rocksteady Batman games, and I wish it were otherwise.

Oh, Merchants & Marauders is a better design, but for some reason it doesn't click the same for me. I think it's because A) direct combat between players, and more systems and more discrete systems make a more competitive game, which I really am not crazy about in pick-up-and-deliver games. If I get six players to the table, I'm pushing for Rex: Final Days of Empire (née Dune) or Imperial 2030, although lighter fare like King of Tokyo or Resistance: Avalon always trumps those two.

Yeah, but Battlestar Galactica is a functionally perfect design, while Firefly is at best a poor man's Merchants of Venus. God, I put so many hours into Talisman in high school, but you're right, it's not a very good game at all. It would never make it to my table now, not with its length, downtime, and endgame. But yeah, RISK-level randomness in an RPG makes for hilarious stuff.

I will settle for a good Dune game that isn't an RTS.

Maybe that's just the magic of the patriarchy! The teacher dude is hilarious, especially how it turns into a porn/music video whenever he's left alone with Ryuuko, but a female version would make me super uncomfortable. Oh wait, GAINAX already did that, it was the shotacon teacher from Mahoromatic and she was terrible. Actually, I think my favorite character is Mako, Ryuuko's friend. But I might just like dumb (as in lazy/stupid) characters in anime. They're the hardest to pull off, so I still find them really refreshing, wherever I do find them.

"You're a ghost driving a meat-coated skeleton made from stardust, what do you have to be scared of?" "I am afraid of meat coming off the skeleton." "A shockingly large amount of meat can be removed before the ghost is dislodged."

And the male nudity in the sports Deva transformation sequence! It's way more extreme than any of the females, probably because the censorship lets them, but still... That stuff can't play great in (much more homophobic) Japan.

I still can't tell if the gross stuff in KILL la KILL is taking a back seat, or if I've just gotten much better at ignoring it. This episode felt really good? But the pacing as a series whole is all over the place, I don't know if that's intentional. I think the things that let Ergo Proxy punch above its weight at the time were 1) Good character and production design, with more money on display than was usually the case for 2006; 2) Philosophical elements that were much more explicit about their origins and influences; and 3) An interesting female protagonist with real weight and strength. None of those things make it that original or impressive, especially the latter one since Seirei no Moribito came out the following year, but as a product of its time it was well above average.

It's got a somewhat unintuitive title: https://www.idlethumbs.net/forums/topic/6296-non-video-games/

I feel this way about Baudrillard. If anyone has a theory of history & culture to which I can subscribe, it's him, but I'm not too sharp on the particulars of his argument, let alone it can be actuated as something useful. I do think about hyperreality all the time, though.

I ought to go to the dentist. My insurance has dental, in theory, but I don't really understand the circumstances under which I have access to it. I should figure it out soon.

That was pretty much it. It made me totally inscrutable, but also totally boring, so I just got ignored for most of the game. It was not optimal. The new Firefly game made it to the table last weekend. I had written this game off altogether because it looked like a flabby and unoriginal pick-up-and-deliver system that's been wallpapered in meaningless nods to the show. And that's exactly what it was, but maybe I like the show more than I think I do, because the experience was amazing. In between the somewhat bland mechanical interactions, there's a great story being generated. One of my friends was hated by all his crew, but then they got eaten by Reavers, so his captain was floating around alone in a half-dead spaceship, then hired a new crew, but they hated him too. It was the best two hours of gameplay since my first round of Galaxy Trucker this summer. What other games have you all found with alchemy like this? It's the most exhilarating feeling!