Gormongous

Sorry, no more Latin nerdery. Japanese nerdery only!

The site is Karmaburn.com. I don't remember how I found it -- wait... no, I do. I was fascinated with Shirai Kuroko's old-woman voice in A Certain Scientific Railgun, so I googled "Kuroko old woman voice" and found a site with not only that phrase, but also so much more. I like Karmaburn because the guy has seen so much and has it organized by show, so if I want to find out his opinion on any given thing, I just have to click the links on either side of the front page. He watches more or less everything that's out and current, so I can use him to keep up, but he's also quick to drop stuff and to voice dissenting opinions, without being spiteful or contrary. Sometimes he stands up for garbage like Amangami SS, but always in an interesting way, and he's got a good ear for seiyuu, which is something I want to work on myself. In all, I like it.

I just finished Girls und Panzer and... well, I think it might have been the best show of 2012. Sure, you're not going to enjoy it unless you have somewhere inside you an innate appreciation of tank design and operation, at least aesthetically if not technically, but it also uses that appreciation to invest you more than you would think possible in the "cute girls doing cute things" framework that all the imitators of K-On! and Lucky Star have driven into the ground. I cheered during the last episode, guys. Cheered. Ugh. It's great, watch it. And it's good that I'm so taken with something, because I finally watched Haganai and was really let down. It felt like a quirky high school club comedy as written by committee, like The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya or something with no larger hook than the characters themselves. I was fed up after maybe six episodes of them sitting in their clubroom and bickering, but I rode it out, because that's who I am, and came out with a list of things that I liked unreservedly: Their faculty advisor, a ten-year-old nun named Maria, calls everything she doesn't like "poop." It's never not funny. The crass rich girl is really nervous and formal on the phone. It's charming. The fujoshi girl is mostly into robot sex, but occasionally makes passes at the male protagonist anyway, who always turns her down with this tolerant air. It's the best relationship dynamic in the show. The voice actress for Yukimura, I can't be bothered to look up her name, but her delivery is great. Everything else didn't really work for me. There's lots of harem and tsundere going on, maybe that's your thing, but I've found that I get sick of the former if there's an obvious "best girl" to choose and the latter if I can't tell it from abuse. Both are the case with Haganai. And the art's not even that good! Oh well. That's the weird tanuki-family thing, right? If you've got a moment, can you sell me on it? The only anime blog I follow (because it always has interesting opinions with which I usually disagree) has been really big on that and C3-Bu, but the latter has a much more comprehensible attraction to me.

Thread resurrection! I've begun to dabble in this game a bit over the past week, but it's hard to get into. It feels like the community is pretty toxic? Maybe it's just because I don't have anyone to play with.

Yeah, I'm under no illusions about it myself. If and when I try to reach out, I'm going to get shot down, maybe told something like, "Why are you calling me? Leave me alone." And you know, whatever. It's just the simplicity and clarity of these dreams that rattles me a little. They aren't even sexual, she just says that she misses me too.

Okay, remember how I said that all my dreams are about getting back in touch with people with whom I'm no longer on speaking terms? I've got a question to ask y'all, even though I know the answer. So I have dreams about this old college friend/flame of mine, let's call her Lily, at least once a week. Last year around October, after finishing my doctoral comps but before starting my dissertation, I'd gotten in touch with her by chance. We ended up reconnecting in a deep and heavy way. Talked every day for hours, you know the drill. Only problem was that she was (and probably still is) suffering from severe clinical depression, the kind that mostly manifested as self-hate directed at anyone and everyone around her. It took maybe three months for our friendship/relationship to self-destruct from fight after fight about how I secretly thought I was better than her and how I was tearing her down behind her back, which I didn't always handle with due patience. In the end, I was the one who broke off contact, unfriended her on Facebook, the works. The dreams started almost immediately. I honestly think that our relationship, brief though it was, was unworkable and maybe a little abusive. But I just had another dream last night about getting back in touch with Lily last night and woke up feeling amazing. So I should totally give her a call, right? EDIT: Sorry if this is TMI or ought to be in the "Life" thread. It's just been really confusing to have my subconscious consistently giving me such terrible advice for over six months.

You are me, osmosisch.

In the business, we call those "the Oppression Olympics." Only the patriarchy wins if we play.

I can't find my Christian heresies/denominations flowchart, so have this instead: Dark Green are non-Christian, Light Green are non-Christian with Christian influence, Blue are proto-Christianities, Salmon are Jewish or have Jewish influence, Purple are Catholic/Orthodox, Pink are Catholic/Orthodox heresies, and Yellow are "alternate" Christianities that could have been Catholic/Orthodox. Ninety percent of the flowchart splits come from disagreement over the nature of Christ (whether he is partially or totally divine in substance, mind, and/or nature), with the rest coming from disagreement over the means of salvation (which, in part, also pertains to the life and mission of Christ). Christianity is hella forked.

Have you or anyone else here heard about Always Sometimes Monsters? I've only read a little bit of the coverage myself, but it fascinates me.

I am having delusions of a really in-depth discussion of Christology on this forum. Not possible, but still. Adoptionism and psilanthropism were condemned as Christian heresies in the First Council of Nicaea. According to every sect of Christianity today, Christ participates in the divinity of God partially if not totally.

Well, Plato argued that men and women definitely weren't equal, in part using horses as proof for it, but that it would be expedient in an ideal state to treat them as equal, just like it would be expedient to tell people that they had a bronze, silver, or golden soul to make them accept the caste system he proposed. There are a lot of things in The Republic that Plato might not have been too serious about. I think, historically speaking, it's been fairly common for (male) thinkers to say, "Even though women aren't equal to men for reason X, we should treat them as equal because of reason Y." This is all over early Christian writings especially, before some of the heavy Patristic hitters tilted the balance all Jerome-like. But I think it's a fairly new idea, especially from a macro perspective, to say that "we should treat women as equal to men, period," with no qualifiers.

Collaborative script-writing! Chris says something tautological as a segue, like that today is today, and asks if anyone has anything they want to talk about. Jake snickers nervously.

Nick's MMOGG ("massively multiplayer online god game," just say "mog" really slowly for full effect) already exists. It's called Archlord and it came out in 2006. I know this because it had maybe my favorite tagline for a review: "You probably shouldn't play Archlord." Suffice to say, it wasn't very good. Becoming the archlord required the backing of at least one of the huge guilds in the game and tons of grinding, so the joy of being a supreme being was undermined by the incredible fear that anyone could take it away if you upset or bored them. And wow, it's still going on, I guess? Free to play, of course.

And it is incredibly, unwatchably boring.

Yeah, despite whatever I may have said thus far, I think people have every right to get offended about whatever offends them and voice it if they so please, so long as they don't impinge on the right of others to get offended about whatever offends them. Maybe the conversation should end there, full stop.

I don't think any of the Thumbs are really into genre stuff, even super-smart genre stuff like LeGuin or the like. It bums me out, sometimes.

I guess, for me but maybe not for others, "offense" is simply internal or external action inspired by discomfort or upset, whether moral, sexual, physical, emotional, or social. Sometimes, one of my friends will have me watch a French extremist horror movie like Martyrs or Inside with them and I'll find myself wavering between passive discomfort and active offense from scene to scene. I can understand if this is a barrier that's not as permeable for other people, though.

I personally feel as though the line between discomfort and offense is drawn by courage and not by sense. I get uncomfortable instead of offended because I'm shy and introspective. A louder, prouder me would probably get offended instead of uncomfortable.

I love love love the idea that Pynchon took four years to write this book this time, not because he was concentrating on perfecting the prose, but because he was watching Dragonball Z.

Pretty much. Also, my manager really wanted to make corporate, which meant that he would have murdered me in front of my own family if it could have led to a customer giving positive feedback about him to the regional VP. In that light, I'm lucky that I got away with him just pretending to fire me. I really don't dwell too much on it now, if only because incidents like that one, once or twice a week, got me back to grad school and onto a career path that I love. Still, it really didn't help my misanthropy, between soccer moms dropping off their kids in the coffee shop before coming to scream at me in lieu of what actually made them upset and old men going into the back of the store to break the spines of the books they wanted so that they could demand to have them for half price.

Yeah, and it's also stupid that I find it uncomfortable being around other naked bodies when I am around my own naked body all the time, but that doesn't mean I'm going to move to a nudist colony or spend much time checking out the dong bros in Outlast.