Gormongous

I am so hesitant to spend a rope, but so willing to spend a bomb. Does that seem right to you?

Ugh... In addition to the museum-quality instance of gaslighting on display, I think Mr. Adams could use some time reading up on the Dunning-Kruger effect.

"Clark... Sometimes, in order to protect yourself, you have to let dozens of small children die. And that's okay." Yeah, real hero material there.

Ergo Proxy is a strange beast, but I've always had some fondness for it. It's also one of the few shows where I have a set of the fansubs still burned somewhere while owning the official release, because Shinsen's work is vastly superior to what Geneon did. At the end of each episode, they have multiple pages of text explaining all the important references and a lot of the incidental ones. It looks like this Tumblr has screencaps of them all, if you can wade through all the posts of (totally justified) Re-L love.

Well, I just found out for myself that "the black market" is not just a fanciful way of talking about the shopkeepers, so I'm doing something right.

I can't wait until I get past the point where I choke unexpectedly at random points and just run into spikes. To be fair, this time it was because I was carrying a gold-pooping monkey and he pooped on the spikes I was running over and the sound/image confused me so I let go of the right trigger... Yeah, no. I'll get better.

Okay, so I was rereading one of the Culture novels because Iain M. Banks is dead. In these books, the titular space-faring civilization has a military that is called "Contact." You know, because that's really what a military does. Part of Contact is an intelligence and covert ops division that is called "Special Circumstances." At one point, someone disappears and everyone is told that they can't attend because of special circumstances. It is literally the best thing ever. But euphemisms are a big part of how I talk in daily life, too. With half a mind, they add color to any given concept or action. I tell people all the time that I'm going to "hit the high notes" or something and only decide after the fact what that's a euphemism for. Is anyone else like this? It might be mostly a Southern thing in the US, but I don't know how it is in the rest of the world.

It's weird how that game just blew up and then blew out with the Thumbs. I feel like Sean and Jake not really digging it didn't help much, but that's probably not the reason.

That reminds me! For years after playing Baldur's Gate II, I had dreams that random but actual games coming out were secretly Baldur's Gate III. I remember Praetorians, the 2003 Rome-themed RTS, being the most egregious of these falsehoods.

I bought a small card game on Amazon from a third-party seller a month ago. It still hasn't arrived. The tracking information says that the shipping label has been created but has not been used on a package. I have now exchanged six emails with the seller about the complete and utter absence of the product for which I have paid, with them responding each time, "Oops, sorry! I'll look into it and get back to you later." It is embarrassing how well those words have worked at propitiating me, although I also have to credit Amazon's foreboding "File a Claim" process.

So KILL la KILL is really just about battle-stripper schoolgirls with the superpower of shamelessness? I... I wish I wasn't watching this show. There are so many other better shows it could have been.

Right? Let me tell a story. So one evening, when I was about twice as drunk as I currently am right now, I came home to play a game of Crusader Kings II. The only save I had to load was a pretty precarious one; I was the descendant of Herbert, count of Vermandois, the last (bastard) male-line Carolingian alive. About four generations removed, I was king of France and Brittany, well on my way to becoming king of Aragon, Navarre, and Burgundy as well. So I booted up the game and started playing. I enjoy the experience of playing Crusader Kings II normally, but this time it was different. It was better. I was like motherfucking Bach playing the most insane fugue in the world. At one time, I was at war with Castile, England, and the Holy Roman Empire, holding them off just effortlessly. I remember thinking to myself, "Man, I may be drunk, but this is easy!" Somehow I quit and fell asleep. I didn't black out, I just don't remember. I guess I felt it was unnecessary enough even to care at the time. But when I booted up the game the next day and loaded my save, I found a disaster waiting for me. I'd lost all of Navarre and Aragon somehow, with Burgundy currently on the table in a war I was losing badly to the Holy Roman Empire. I was outnumbered three to one! How did I think I was winning? How drunk was I? To date, this is the only "bad" experience I've had with alcohol, but man, was it memorable.

Kiss those cold, pale lips.

Poké Floats 2!

Sure, but more wrong than viewing double-tall cutscenes on two screens angled at a hundred and twenty degrees to each other?

Because it's Latin for "spit out." A lot of fancier English words come from Latin or French euphemisms. Yeah, racists and sexists aside, it's odd when people rail against the "having an opinion" crowd, because the latter have given us some of the best novel usages in our magnificent bastard tongue.

Yeah, in terms of how I sound while playing Spelunky, only three days old, Nick Breckon provides a better experience of baby rage and all that.

The battle royale or my favorite dead forum? I was on a school computer for the former, I hope I can find it again.

Right? I also love that, etymologically, there is no word or phrase in English for vomiting that is not a euphemism. They are either euphemisms for the action ("throw up," "spit up," "vomit") or for the onomatopoeia ("barf," "puke").

I think he means "the same width" when he says "the same size." The lower screen on the 2DS is a couple millimeters narrower than the upper, which for some people (myself included) looks just dreadful.

At the far end of the internet, on a forum dead for nine years, I found a thread where people were roleplaying different characters from Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast novels fighting in a multi-day battle royale. There were several hundred posts before they got bored and quit. The internet is a strange, strange place. Actually, of all the detritus that the worldwide web throws up, dead forums may be my favorite. If they haven't been overtaken and buried in spam, they're a living record for the decline and fall of a society in miniature. Invariably, there's a final stand among a dozen members for some months, until life takes out one of them and then they all break. It's remarkable. Sometimes I go check out the old ClanBOB forums, since they were one of the first forums of which I was even aware. They've been at that final "brown dwarf" stage for a couple years now, just heartbreaking.

That's what I mean. I just use it for peeing or something. It's fun!

I think any game where you have to act out shounen anime in your living room as best as you can and then the Kinect lies to you about how well you did with an impressive animation of Kenshiro from Fist of the North Star punching a guy ten thousand times like you tried to do... (wheeze)... would be a good game.

I think we have a new rating system! Seriously though, I really like this show. It reminds me of the time before most of the Thumbs had jobs in the industry and were less shy about playing inside baseball. Not that they don't at all anymore, but hearing Sean elaborate on the feeling of writing his characters was really gratifying.

No please, let's get into which academic discipline is most worthwhile on a micro and on a macro level. If we can make it to the point where we're pulling cost-benefit analyses of being an English major vs. being a math major, that would be the best. Then we can all pull out our dicks and wave them around like crazy! Girls can use a tube sock or something, I don't know.