Gormongous

The DART light rail is very good (or was when I lived there) but not very extensive, because most of the middle- to upper-class neighborhoods see it only as a means for transporting vagrants into their precious little gated communities. Still, it's pretty good for getting to and from downtown. The buses are alright, I guess. They'll get you where you need to go, but not quickly or efficiently. I'd say that they're fine for "I don't want to drive today," but not for "I don't want to drive ever."

I think those are a bit aggressive, most places seem to think that 50" is best viewed from two to four meters away. Still, I think it's best if you see it in action. Is there any big-box store nearby you can go to that just lets you look at the products we're talking about?

Nothing!

Yeah, this is what I always hear from people who try and get a projector solution for their home theater. For $1000, you could get the 50" Panasonic ST60 plasma, which is the newer version of what I bought a few years back and what other people here have used. If size is what you're looking for, a projector is going to be the most cost-efficient option, no matter the price. But it sounds like it's not just size that you're looking for? Maybe you could rank the different aspects of a home theater experience in the order that they matter to you and see which solution answer the most of them.

"Force" feels a bit Weberian to me. Maybe the threat of harm, instead? Many subtler forms of what I would consider coercion invoke some kind of harm that does not always reside in and originate from the coercer.

Yeah, you'll need a license and car, if you get the job and move there. No one walks anywhere in Texas, period. No one really even goes outside much at all, except during the balmy forty-degree winters. But rent's cheap if you're not living in Uptown or something, so you can afford those hefty electric bills for A/C.

Speaking as someone teaching a lot of incoming college freshman, the Holocaust is understood by them more as "something bad that happened to the Jews, maybe?" At least in America, most primary- and secondary-education teachers seem to be uncomfortable devoting many of their classes to the horrors of Hitler's Third Reich, so by the time their students get to me, it's already been internalized as a bad thing we all don't really talk about, at best something like great-great-great-granddad owning slaves and fighting for the Confederacy. I don't have trouble believing that, given a generation for these kids to become teachers themselves, the Holocaust will come to be discussed in completely different terms. But this is off-topic for the podcast itself.

Cool, congratulations in advance! I lived in Dallas the first two decades of my life. If you need any advice at all, it's probably the place I know best on this earth. First tip: no one's actually from Dallas proper. It's going to be one of the suburbs that make up the rest of the city, Grapevine Mills or Garland or something.

According to the rubrics I used buying my TV, anything larger than 85" is going to be wasted at that distance. Even 85" is pushing it a bit. As for your other question, projector images are extremely dependent on the material onto which you're projecting and the light situation in the room. Honestly, it's more vulnerable than either a plasma or an LCD to those issues, plus you'll be paying pretty much the same as a real TV for a nice one, so I don't know if I'd recommend getting one. Plasma has the best image, at least in terms of response and color profile, but LCD can have a "cleaner" look that performs better in adverse lighting conditions. I'd just recommend going to your local big-box electronics store and making a list of what speaks to you, then going home to research.

If we're just trading in opinions (and not the actual merits of Bissell's writing) it's my opinion that your attitude towards criticism is crass and narrow-minded. It seems as though games, if not all forms of media, are the just sum of their parts to you and therefore discussing the experience of enjoying them in anything less that utterly concrete terms of pleasure or displeasure is sophistry. Needless to say, I disagree with you and I don't doubt many others here do as well. The last thing I need, as a living and thinking being, is another "ten out of ten stars, a great time for all" consumer review that applies the same standards of analysis to games as to a vacuum cleaner or a ride at Six Flags.

I totally get you. Ben Browder will always be John Crichton from Farscape and it's super weird seeing him in anything else sci-fi. The fact that they make fun of that in Stargate at least once is even weirder.

Considering that he wrote an important and impressive chapter in his book about his long and problematic relationship with Grand Theft Auto IV, I'm pretty sure Tom Bissell isn't just dogging for ad money. This is a weird accusation that gets thrown at all of gaming criticism's best and most controversial writers. It feels immature, to say the least.

Define "cheaper." I have a Panasonic ST30 that I love except for the heat and the buzz, both of which no one else has been able to notice, so I'm just special. it's full 1080p and a great piece of hardware, but it was a steal for $900. I don't think you can expect anything cheaper.

Fan buzz is that his Stargate: Atlantis character was supposed to be brought back if the series got renewed, but it didn't, so they made a new role for him on Stargate: Universe. It seems a little silly, but maybe they did like working with him?

In an attempt to discourage Zeusthecat from filling every forum thread with stories about his wang, I'm starting this one, where we talk about how messed up our bodies are. So ever since my senior year of college, I've had this thing where I cough up a bunch of hard white matter every once in a while. I figured it was a scab that just wasn't healing, since saliva can bleach them white. I've had a long history of oral surgery and all. Anyway, a couple of months ago, I finally googled it and found out I had a tonsillolith. It was pretty straightforward to flick out with my nail, once I knew what I was looking for, and to gargle in order to keep it from reforming, but it is quite easily the grossest thing my body has ever produced. I obsess about it maybe a bit too much.

This is pretty cool on the face of it, but I really hope that Valve is more militant on the defense of their hardware standard than, say, Intel was with the ultrabook. That was supposed to save the Windows laptop, but everyone ended up trying to exploit the standard's prestige while making them on the cheap.

I admit I still find this a little hard to wrap my head around. Is something innocuous like environmentalism morally untenable to you because there have been and are a few eco-terrorists out there blowing stuff up? And I assume you don't vote in any elections unless there's a candidate you agree with a hundred percent, otherwise how can they represent you?

Okay, that's good enough for me. The premise still leaves me a little cold, but I should know better after a decade of watching anime. They actually add in the hardcore stuff gradually as the series goes on. I was also prepared to be bitterly disappointed in the lack of true gunji fanservice, but they're just trying not to overwhelm people who tuned in for the cute girls and nothing else. By the end of the show, they've described three of the major revisions for the Panzer IV and discussed the merits of the Sherman M4A1 vs. the "standard" M4. It's made by people who really care about tanks. And if that's not serious enough, they also made a series of OVAs (Yukari's Tank Corner) that are basically ten-minute history lectures on the tanks used in a given episode. It's the most in-depth thing on tanks that I've watched since the History Channel became the Ghosts & Aliens Channel.

Yeah, agreed.

I'm actually fascinated by your DIY saga, Twig. I used to open up my computer for service checks pretty much every day I got home from class for almost six months after I built it, but that got old fast. Still, I think it's cool to discover how much you know and what can be put towards solving problems, Anyway, theories? Something, maybe just heat, could have warped the fan housing for the card until it interfered with fan operation. Since those fans are made to operate as close to zero resistance as possible, that might have been enough to jam it.

The problems with any movement that traffics in criticism of the people it means to help are many. I don't really need to reference anything specific, but I'm reminded of the 1972 purge of the United Red Army in Japan, in which twelve members out of thirty hiding away in the mountains were executed for various failures to live up to Communist ideals. Many feminists criticizing women for any traditionalism they show are usually second-wave masquerading as third-wave and, like you say, see the feminist cause as a matter of confrontation and overthrow. The goal of feminism is not to make all women men or to make all men women, but to allow anyone to be anything with equal treatment for all. It's easy to get invested in the respects where that is least well realized, I imagine.

I think the fact that I broke it off instead of her would be more of a stumbling block. Her favorite threat during our many fights was that she would cut me out of her life, but then I was the one who did it in the end, for which I'm sure I'll never be forgiven. Anyway, thanks for all the kind words, guys. I'll give it a few more days, spend some time around good people, and the feelings will fade again. I just wanted to indulge myself for a bit. My college reunion is in May, I might run into her then, and maybe I'll have something cordial to say, if she's willing to hear it.

Nah, it was a good one. It's just kinda sobering to think that talking about feminism on the internet is pretty much the ultimate example of cross-talk.

I really hope it's something like this:

"I'd be a proponent of civil rights if only they didn't make it sound like everyone who disagreed with them was a racist."