Gormongous

Okay everybody, who put their money down on fifteen posts before someone invoked Poe's Law?

I liked this too, especially. I thought about it in my latest Europa Universalis IV game, when I was in a race to colonize all of North America first and so was running my armies through, slaughtering natives, so that they couldn't rise up later and damage my unattended colonies. It's funny how a limited number of options can cause a gamer's sense of efficiency to override their sense of decency. Not to play this card again, but I wonder how much that actually maps to real life.

And then the chat is there with you during the whole fight, congratulating you on your entirely accidental discernment or ridiculing you for your foolish show of trust. It just wouldn't be the same game without ten thousand gibbering idiots on the sidelines.

"Dove hai comprato la maglietta di Lupin III?" Though that's probably super stiff or formal because I'm just taking an internet course...

Okay, I played all three routes. It was a pretty intense experience, actually. I'll spoiler my thoughts. Hmm, this is a lot more scattered than I intended. Maybe I'll give it an editing pass after a bit of thinking.

I'm really glad to be reminded that incongruous hardware gimmicks are not a new thing for Nintendo.

Maybe. But I think the threshold for different people varies wildly, usually based on a person's interest in and knowledge of the subject. I've spent the last week comparing twelfth-century legal charters in northwestern Italy for my research. This is something that I would have thought boring and meaningless a year ago, but my perspective has been changed by the demands of my job. If I can do an about-face on poorly edited documents of medieval Latin legalese, why not on anything else? I more have a problem with the implication of the XKCD comic that people will develop said interest and knowledge on something if you just force them to consume it. That goes against my experience. The reason that the internet seems to be full of people obsessing over every subject is just because it's so big and so interconnected that people can be found for anything anywhere. It's not like it was a generation ago, where you only knew that one guy who liked trains a bit too much.

I just don't like that the two screens aren't the same size. The absence of a hinge makes it really obvious and aesthetically unpleasing.

And you will!

I love Star Wars and I think Space Balls is super unfunny. But I kinda like History of the World, Part 1 still? Not as much when I was a kid and the dance scene with Caledonia was the hottest thing ever. Mel Brooks has always been hit and miss with me.

But has Dragonball Z Kai been worth your time overall? I have a friend who loves DBZ so much, he's been trying to sell me that Kai is pretty much a whole new series. I know that's a lie, but is it even half the mess that the original cuts were?

I'm not asking you to write a book, Twig. It's just that you pretty much passed over my comment in order to restate your same opinion about a movie I like. That felt like you not caring, though I'm sure your intention was otherwise.

I had a friend stop watching during the scene where Kintaro visualizes his hand as his penis. Golden Boy definitely doesn't care what you think about it, which can be more of a turnoff to some than you'd think.

I figured you didn't care because I gave a straightforward answer about the movie's influences and references, and you just said, "Oh, I don't know who that is. The movie's still mediocre to me!" If you don't know anything about a movie and didn't much care for it, but don't show any interest in actually educating yourself about why other people do, then I don't think you have much to contribute to a conversation about that movie. I mean, I could derail a lot of conversations about Dota 2 that way, but don't. But hey, maybe you just have a different way of caring, I don't know.

Hey, you said you didn't know what made it fantastic for everyone, so I told you, but now you don't care. Cool? I thought you'd be interested in why other people like it, but I guess not.

Speaking of awkward otaku pandering, I'm kinda digging Watashi ga Motenai no wa dou Kangaetemo Omaera ga Warui! so far. I always like hikikomori or NEET stuff, but the added layer of a female protagonist who is not really fetishized in any way keeps me coming back for more. I mean, Tomoko should be attractive to me, if I know my own moé, but she is just such an awful and miserable person in WataMote that I'm not. I think I find that interesting? Also, 2013: year of the sentence-long title that everyone references using just the first couple syllables. Wasn't FLCL a parody of that back in 2000? I'd rather spend time with any girl in the series other than Kirino, but the "first girl" rule is in play here. Even if the show didn't feature her in its title, she was the first female character the protagonist met, therefore she trumps all other love interests. Even if they rock, like Kuroneko. Such is the stuff of "best girl" threads all over the internet.

It's a Raymond Chandler mystery, but with a stoned buffoon instead of a hyper-competent ex-cop as the protagonist. That's what makes it great, not White Russians and "the Dude abides" like a lot of fanboys out there think.

Not really. He finds out about her in like the first episode, decides he wants some of that in the second, and spends the remaining ten just agonizing over it. There's a nice "alternate path" coda of four episodes where he falls in love with Kuroneko instead, but then the writing forces him to fall out of love in a really obvious and awkward way so he can keep drooling over his bratty little sister. I hear the second season is just miserable, but that's probably not going to stop me in the end.

Ore no Imouto ga Konna ni Kawaii Wake ga Nai has a lot of money on display. Stuff like that still counts in anime. But yeah, it's like Working!! in that the two main characters are totally toxic, but everyone else is great fun. Codicier, I feel terrible for not jumping on this when first I read it. Just looking on my shelf at what I thought worth buying, there are And Yet the Town Moves (no dub), Golden Boy (great dub), Last Exile (haven't-heard-it-so-don't-know-but-it's-Geneon-so-probably-quite-good dub), Lucky Star (decent dub), Oh! Edo Rocket (great dub), Ouran Host Club (great dub), and The Wallflower (great dub). I don't know if any of those are on Crunchyroll, sorry.

Totally not Alpha Protocol. The sane answer is always at the apex of the dialogue-choice triangle. Maybe "punch" is the sane answer this time?

I actually have a soft spot for don't take it personally, babe, it just ain't your story, just because I played it right when I started teaching college-age students and a lot of the incidental stuff felt spot-on. That said, I think both Digital: A Love Story and Analogue: A Hate Story are better. Like Tycho said, the narrative and setting conceits of Digital are great, but Analogue is a genuinely interesting story outside of those trappings, plus it's about as nonlinear as a visual novel with a coherent story is going to get, as opposed to DTIPB's rather obvious railroading. In fact, I think a lot of what makes Analogue great (even greater than Digital, in my humble opinion) comes from Love's extended postmortem process with DTIPB. There are drastically different routes, each with their own interesting and sympathetic characters, and the revelations at the end of both are built into the storytelling throughout in order to maximize their impact. Also, Love has matured substantially as a writer over the past few years. Hate Plus is almost shockingly good in terms of composition and tone, at certain points. So yeah, I think it's fairly simple. If you like Digital, you'll like Analogue; if you like Analogue, you'll like Hate Plus. I just finished my first run of Hate Plus tonight, so once I finish my class prep over the next few days, I'll post some thoughts. There's some especially transgressive stuff that I'd like to get a second opinion on.

Non-western cultures (basically, anything east of Austria, west of Spain, or south of the Mediterranean) get three penalties graded on how "backward" Paradox considers them: increased tech costs, inferior units, and penalties to monarch-point income. For instance, in the Indian culture group, technology costs 150% more, the units that those techs give you are three generations behind their Western equivalents, and you get one less point a month from each monarch skill. It's probably the most extreme form of historical determinism in any of Paradox's games. China will never pull itself together without Western help because it has even more massive handicaps than bankruptcy inflicts on Western nations. Later in the game, you can get into the Western tech group and remove all those penalties, but you have to share a border with a European power and endure fifty to a hundred years of "westernization," during which your stability score drops to -3 and all your monarch points are set at -100. Basically, your nation gets thrown in the toilet and your hands get tied. General agreement on the Paradox forums is that it's not worth it, but then again general agreement on the Paradox forums is that the Native American culture group, which has 250% tech costs, stone age units, and -2 to monthly monarch point income, is 100% historically accurate and needs no changing or critique. I don't know.

All these suggestions sound different, therefore scary and bad. As a fan of the series, I'm just hoping for a game where I'm the chosen one or something, but in space, and there's an ancient evil about to awaken, like the Reapers again but we can call them something else, maybe Reavers or Reamers, to mix things up.

It seems like every time I'm stuck on a section in the article I'm revising for submission – which happens a lot these days, he says not quietly enough – what ends up being missing is a single sentence somewhere that I didn't even think to include in the first place. Usually I have to walk away from the part that's bugging me for a day if not a week, then I come back and "Oh, of course! How could I think of talking about the hostile response to the peace negotiations without even a sentence outright stating that the negotiations themselves were in bad faith?" Or something like that. I kinda hate how much job is making me blind to the thought processes of people who don't spend every waking hour with dead white men on their mind.

Well, that's what this thread's been about, thus far. I'm giving it a general positive impression, although I'm not entirely sure all the checks and balances of the system are ship-shape yet. I just finished a game as Vijayanagar-turned-Hindustan. Uniting India was by far the most fun I had, using all my claims from becoming Hindustan to force half the remaining subcontinental powers to be my vassals and then leading them in a massive alliance against those who'd refused. I'd planned to attain the borders of British India and then wait until the Western powers came knocking so that I could westernize. Well, I'd united all of India by 1600, but no ships came from the lands of the setting sun. Once I got a better awareness of the world, mostly through secondhand discoveries, I found out that they were leaving a buffer zone around me while they gobbled up smaller powers. I hadn't realized it, but at that time I had the most provinces and soldiers of any nation on Earth, which the AI was taking into account for some reason. Well! I started a hard push towards the nearest colonies in the East Indies. By 1821, I had annexed all of Greater Indochina, but was still a couple wars away from sharing a border in Java with Portugal. It's not like I wanted to be westernized like them anyway. Other observations from a pretty successful Ironman game: I'd mostly wanted to westernize to get rid of the terribad non-Western unit types, but it didn't matter in the end. I had lvl. 31 military tech, just one or two behind the big powers, and I had triple the manpower of them, so yeah. It feels like there's just not enough to spend military monarch points on, unless you're paranoid about revolts or want leaders for all your armies. The primary sink for military points, the buildings, just aren't that good. Forts and armories? No. Once you get to a big enough size, everyone will hate you for even the smallest hostile action. My first conquest in southeast Asia was annexing a two-province nation that I had full claims on. Didn't matter, everyone's opinion slammed into "outraged" territory and I never recovered. I even released Ming from the Shun, who had conquered them, in the hopes that one or the other would cozy up to me. Instead, they both allied against me, even though their claims should have made them mortal enemies. And you know what? It didn't matter. By the time the AI had gotten its shit together enough to be throwing coalitions my way, I had more manpower than all of them combined. I could fight more or less nonstop, which meant that the big powers could never recover from every little war of conquest I started. By the nineteenth century, Shun, Ming, and Muscovy were in nonstop revolt. The only credible power to oppose me was Portugal, who'd guaranteed Aceh in a last-ditch attempt to keep me from getting a land border with them. Yeah, I was still using Caravels for my fleet, but any army they could land on my soil was instantly annihilated. I shiver to think if I had managed to westernize. I like the game, but the AI is still a bit too slow to recognize a credible threat and way too stubborn to deal with it over the long term. I'm sure a patch or two will redress that, though.