Gormongous

I envy all of you, even though I'm not the biggest fan of reading about others' dreams. Almost every one of my dreams is about getting in contact with someone to whom I haven't spoken for a decade or so. I wake up, all excited to get in touch again, and then I remember no, Liza still won't talk to me after six years. Oh well.

My only problem with Papers, Please is that it reveals in me the potential to be an inhumanly dogmatic and uncaring bureaucrat. It's like the Hotline Miami of paperwork sims.

In my experience, having grown up with a few people who remind me of Mike, this is how people who are prone to tempers and outbursts (that is, most people who self-identify as "jerks" or "assholes") learn to apologize. They tend to cause so much of a fuss when they disagree with someone or do something wrong that simply apologizing for said fuss is enough, without addressing what caused it. It takes a lot of time and patience to learn how to engage the injured party in a way that is respectful, salutary, and definitive. I think that's probably a different battle that doesn't need to be fought here right now, though.

You said "August." It was great. No really, great. Also, I loved this cast, a lot of good discussion, but you guys seriously need to chill out with the worries about repeating yourselves from past episodes. Repetition is inevitable, but as it stands, we're getting repetition of your worries about repetition, which is always less interesting than what you were worried about repeating. Just let the conversation flow! EDIT: Oops, guess I've made my constructive criticism into a trend!

I can lend you one.

Okay look, I'll lay out my own thought process here. He talks and talks about "mistakes" and "regret," which mean jack. I regret all sorts of good things and don't regret all sorts of bad things I've done. But "sorry" is not one of the nine hundred words he uses there. "Apologize" is, three times, but only in reference to how he's already apologized about stuff. Whatever your writing skills, it takes some work not to say "sorry" even once and not to use "apologize" without qualifiers in an apology about how you're sorry. On the other hand, he reaffirms two contentious points, that taking down the Dickwolves merch was a mistake and that he'll keep being "honest," whatever that means. There is zero admission of anything besides that Penny Arcade has caused some serious hurt over the past few years, which is great that Mike sees it now but certainly not what you look for in an apology from someone who's spent years needlessly antagonizing his critics. Basically, what SecretAsianMan and Sententia said. It's "I'm sorry you are upset about it," not "I'm sorry I did it." That is reason enough for me to feel concern.

Wow, I didn't even put that together. In his apology for his comment at PAX, he reiterates his comment as stated at PAX unchanged. I was of the opinion that the apology was generally a positive step, but now I need to have another think about it.

Yeah, it's a much better apology than the last, though it's still more "mistakes were made" than "I made a mistake." I just hope it sticks more than that last one, with its promise not to bring this stuff up anymore.

Specifics are done after 26:10 or so. Like Latrine said, they continue to talk about endings in general for five more minutes after that, some of which discussion conveys a general positive/negative impression of the ending to The Last of Us in particular.

He says he's sorry that people got upset, not that he made them upset. In fact, he has a whole paragraph explaining that he's a mean bastard at heart and therefore can't really help what he says. He doesn't apologize for that, just says it upsets him too. His apology is genuine in that I believe he means every word. I don't mean to minimize that. It's just that none of the words are there that should be in an apology for arguing at length that trans women aren't women.

I'm trying really, really hard not to ignore the entirety of your post because of this sentence. I might need some help.

The thing is, you can't tell by how they look. Whether you know it or not, it's almost certain that you know a woman who has been raped. You probably also know a man who has raped. We just don't talk about it, because that's how the world works right now, but the insistence I'm suddenly seeing everywhere that we focus on the positives of PAX sounds like saying "I'm alright, Jack." I know it isn't, especially with you being here in this thread and doing a great job of engaging everyone, but still.

I totally get that and I'm behind it. I just think it's residual guilt from us forcing SgtWhistlebotom to play more Harvest Moon a couple months back. I'm way more prone to keep playing a bad game because I want to believe in its goodness than to quit a good game because I can't find anything to like, so that's always my biggest worry here.

I honestly wish Penny Arcade would do a better job of spinning off PAX as its own thing. That would solve a lot of problems here. I mean, it's already technically its own thing, right? But you still have Gabe and Tycho appearing as guests of honor to the audience's cheers, so it feels like a having-and-eating situation.

Nah, we're failing to make this thread a place of acceptance and support for someone's choice to quit a video game. Life's too short to eat your brussel sprouts. EDIT: And to contribute to this thread myself, I'm already thinking of quitting Total War: Rome II. Quite frankly, this game is an embarrassment from a company that's been making more or less the same damn game for fifteen years. Some changes -- the systems for provinces, factions, and the limited armies/navies -- are actually pretty clever, but they're stuck in a game that has so many basic discoverability and usability failures that make it seem like a normal person didn't get a say on how it was being made after the first design meeting. For example, generals have three stats: Authority, Zeal, and Cunning. Good luck finding which does what! The stats themselves are only displayed in one spot, despite a half-dozen other menus involving your generals, and even there the associated tooltip is a master class in vagueness. "Helps with influence and morale. Protects against authority-based intrigue." Brain farts like these are pretty much everywhere. Generals gain Gravitas over time, which somehow affects their Influence and leads to them turning traitor, but I don't know how, because the tooltips just gives the Dictionary.com definition of "gravitas" and "influence." Thanks, Creative Assembly. I know what "gravitas" is. I have a passion for Roman history and culture, that's why I bought your game. What else? Certain settlements can only build certain buildings, don't know why. I guess I shouldn't expect them to just tell me, not when something like the public order/happiness breakdown is hidden three clicks away from the main campaign map. I think I finally understand how to build up settlements the way I want, but only after wasting twenty or thirty thousand gold building stuff I didn't want because the building browser has been hidden away in that awful "Total War Encyclopedia" that Creative Assembly introduced in Shogun 2 and refuses to drop. And yet I'm still outproducing all the other AI factions, who focus their economy on pumping out one- or two-regiment stacks to wander the map despite being limited to a half-dozen stacks this time around. I mean, it's a good time like every Total War game. The battles look great, although the UI is way too busy and there are still some ugly surprises. The campaign map is even more beautiful, and consistently so, as long as you're just clicking stuff around to watch it go. But I've played every single Total War game and I've never felt as lost or as put off as with Rome II. I hate to say it, but it actually compares unfavorably to Europa Universalis IV in terms of ease-of-use. At least with the latter, I can hover my cursor over whatever I don't understand and I'll get a tooltip telling me exactly what it does. I doubt they'll fix something basic like the UI in patches, but I still think I'm going to leave it be for a month or so, just in case.

The interface isn't horrible, just a bit clumsy, and you can totally get around it by just writing down the Kim and Smith family trees on a piece of paper. As for "not relying on surprises," maybe so. You can also watch Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers without watching Fellowship of the Ring first and enjoy yourself, but that doesn't mean it's the best experience of the narrative that ties both together.

It's just Sam Caitlin. He's always been the weakest of Breaking Bad's writers.

Yeah, it boggles the mind that, when you're a dude who's done some pretty questionable things decency-wise the past few years, what you really regret is the time you almost backed down from a fight with some rape survivors. The thing is, Penny Arcade is perfectly happy to censor themselves when legal action is threatened. When they got a takedown notice from American Greetings in 2003, the Strawberry Shortcake comic went down faster than lightning and received no further comment. So I feel like what we're getting here is that Penny Arcade are really just bullies, plain and simple. If you can scare or hurt them, they'll listen to you. If you can't, then fuck you, they do what they want. Also, how is taking down an offensive shirt the inflammatory action here? Basically, what feelthedarkness said.

Okay, so this is a bit of a Hail Mary, but wouldn't it be cool if everyone who's been learning Crusader Kings II because of the stream joined up in a big multiplayer game with a few old hands? We could all play together, so if anything nightmarish or confusing happened, we'd all be there to see and give each other advice. Really, is there any interest in a multiplayer game of Crusader Kings II, friendly or not?

For me, the worst part (besides the dude who shouts "bring them back" at the end) is hearing Khoo say that Penny Arcade's policy is now silence, in order to keep from engaging and therefore legitimizing any complaints about their business. If that were true, that'd be fine. I mean, not great, but fine. Whatever. The problem is that there really isn't silence. Every single one of these debacles has come from Gabe shooting his mouth off on Twitter. Every one. And God save the person who tells him to shut his trap. So their policy of silence isn't actually silence, instead it's a policy of spewing ignorant shit with alarming frequency for a grown-ass man, then hiding until the internet's goldfish memory forgets. And Gabe brings Dickwolves up again two years later at PAX. Silence, my ass.

Yeah, I don't even know what to say... Thus far, most people have thought that it's just Gabe's bullying problem, but now Khoo's backed him up on stage, which kind of puts the lie to him being the angel of Gabe and Tycho's better natures. If Penny Arcade wants to market itself only to insular and reactionary white male gamers, that's their prerogative, but that segment hasn't included me or anyone I know for a long, long time.

I don't know if I'd recommend that. All the twists of Analogue are repeatedly and openly spoiled by Hate Plus, not to mention that the main plot assumes your knowledge of the previous game when explaining events.

I generally prefer literal translations with notes, if only because of my academic background. I'd rather learn how a joke was funny in the original Japanese than be told a different joke that I likely already know in English. Nothing bugs me more than the philosophy of fansub groups like gg or Commie, who reedit whole swaths of Joshiraku and Bakemonogatari in order to make work jokes that they came up with themselves, rather than just translate and explain what's actually being said. That said, I think that Oh! Edo Rocket's official dub is probably the best of the alternatives. The show is fast-paced, with the comedy depending on flow and fluency, so they change it if there's a good English equivalent, but give notes in edge cases. A lot of the stuff that breaks the fourth wall involves internet lingo and memes,but someone in the FUNimation office must have known a scary lot about both 2channel and 4chan, to hear the dub script tell. And then, at a few points, they do wholesale reinterpretation, mostly with stuff like calling the policeman "Hatchobori," which has a really complicated history that's wholly unrelated to the humor of the nickname and impossible to translate anyway, so they just use "pig" instead and leave the explaining to a DVD extra. I don't know if it supersedes the Japanese language track like only a rare few dubs do, but it's certainly worth a listen, which I can't say for most others.

I played one more game before Total War: Rome II comes out and steals me away. I used the converter to take the 867 start from Crusader Kings II and make it the 1444 start. I played as Wessex and had a fun fifty years unifying the British Isles against Scotland and Tara. After that, I gobbled up all the islands in the Atlantic and started pushing colonization in North America hard. I feel like I've seen the heart of this game after three full-length playthroughs. As far as I can tell, there are three phases: first, acquiring territory and building infrastructure until you have a strong and stable nation; second, using colonization, trade, or both to blow out your monthly income; and third, boredom because money isn't actually that important in Europa Universalis IV, unless you don't have any. I've played the first phase in innumerable strategy games, but the second still feels really fresh to me. Now that I understand how trade works, with the longest possible path between origin and destination, the process of optimizing it is really satisfying. By the end of the game, I had all of North America under my control, so trade goods flowed up the Mississippi and through the Great Lakes to Chesapeake Bay, then joined with the trade from Hudson Bay to cross the Atlantic, before my fleet of ships came to safeguard it from Denmark as it made its way to London. If I'd had a hundred more years, I could have brought Central America and the Caribbean under my control, adding three more stops to the trade and probably topping out my income around six hundred ducats a year. That's a marvelous brass ring to reach for, if I do say so. But I am going to take a break, and not just because of Rome II. The third phase I mentioned has me convinced that there is something seriously wrong with how Monarch Points work. Simply put, it's the illusion of choice. You think that you get to decide whether to use, say, your Administration Points for coring, for buildings, for stability, for ideas, or for tech. And yeah, to a point. But there is a correct path, and that's to spend as little as possible on everything but tech. Everything else is a dead end in that it just earns you money, of which you need only enough to pay for military to defend you and for your advisors to give you more Monarch Points. That's why trade is king, because it requires no Monarch Points besides those already spent on tech in order to make the big bucks, unlike taxation, production, or even colonization. The closest thing to a true competitor to tech for use of Monarch Points is ideas, but ideas stop paying dividends after you've invested in it seven times, which tech progresses infinitely, unlocking better units, new features, and larger bonuses along the way. There's simply no contest, so an advanced Europa Universalis player will soon be able to be judged just by how stingy they are with Monarch Points, because that is the sole path to victory, unless Paradox ups the "neighbor" discount for tech dramatically or make Monarch Points "spent" rather than "saved" unlock tech in a later patch. Who knows, bigger changes have happened in Crusader Kings II post-release cycle. Anyway, here's the world of 867 Britannia at 1821: Note that, while France has a Brazil infection down south, glorious New Wessex stood no such thing. I brutally put down insurrections by colonists hoping to form Quebec, Louisiana, Mexico, and the USA as independent states. And here's a map of the trade flow I had near the end, with my dream network in white:

Yeah, you summed up pretty much all my thoughts on the movie. The huge, unavoidable problem with Lindelof and co. is that they have a great nose for dramatic setups but zero interest in following them through. I've long since given up trying to figure out if there's zero ability there too. Either way, it's to the point where actual plot beats are ridiculously obvious and clumsy, if not outright told to the audience through the most diaphanous of fourth walls, because those beats are the only moments where the script isn't winking at us knowingly while the music swells in our hearts. Case in point: McCoy going, "I'll be right there, Jim! I'm just injecting this dead animal with some blood to see what happens. Maybe it'll pay off later! Science!"