Gormongous

I think it's a phenomenon that you see among people, usually smart and college-educated, who are used to winning an argument by being the most informed person involved in the argument. When you get to situations like this one, where more information isn't necessarily more informative and there's the possibility of doing bad research, it's hard for them not to double down and reduce the argument to the provable facts. Also, in general, Sylvester doesn't seem like a person who's used to be wrong.

This is my opinion, but I think that there's a spectacular failure of imagination in building the fiction of a post-collapse society in the year 5500 and basing the particulars of that fiction on your own personal experiences and some blogs that you read. Like... Sylvester knows that the sexual and romantic dynamics at work in Western society right now have only been in place for a few hundred years at most, right? In the seventeenth century, the vast majority of Puritan communities in North America were forced to legislate that a man had to fulfill his conjugal duties at least once a year, else most husbands, unburdened with the fullness of Eve's curse, would go without and leave their wives to suffer. Even further back, in ancient Greece during the fourth century BC, one of the justifications for homosexual relationships between men was that women simply enjoyed intercourse too much (remember, Tiresias told Zeus and Hera that women enjoy sex ten times as much as men, speaking from his experience as both sexes) and that made it really gross and distracting to have sex with them (NSFW case in point, erotic scenes on drinking cups that have men telling women to hold still and be quiet). Those are just two examples out of literal dozens that I have on offer, as someone with a very surface understanding of the issue, and I'm sure I could find even more examples if I cracked open a scholarly book or article on the topic, instead of making the system and then tracking down small-scale sociological studies and OKCupid analytics to justify the mechanics of that system. Unless you assume that 2016 is the end of history—which, granted, it's easy to do right now—there's no reason not to make your system of social interaction and attraction as utopian (or dystopian) as possible. Really, the only boring choice is to try to make it as much like your (white, male, middle-class, straight) experience of 2016, fail because of your innate biases, and then get defensive about it... which is what Sylvester did.

Well, I've found a way to go lower than my unapologetic love of Upotte!!, an ecchi anime about anthropomorphic assault rifles attending an all-girls (and all-guns) school. This season, the same studio is making Keijo!!!!!!!!, an anime about a near future in which the most popular sport is sumo wrestling... between young women in swimsuits, where the only legal forms of contact are using boobs and butt. It's trashy as hell, with Kotaku calling it "wretched" simply for being an anime about boobs and butts, but it's actually... good? Enjoyable, at least. Stay with me here. Yeah, it's full of fan service, especially the kind that involves butts surging towards the camera or boobs jiggling wildly, but in its premise and plotting, Keijo!!!!!!!! is a bog-standard shounen-structured sports anime. There's the plucky young protagonist who was inspired by seeing her heroes fight. She has a group of friends upon which she relies, all of whom have exactly two personality traits, one in-battle and one out of it. There's an elite class at her butt-wrestling school, full of sinister characters whose powers escalate in potency with comical alacrity: the first antagonist to whom we're introduced knocks out her opponents with a single supersonic hit to the jaw with her butt, a later one uses her boobs to hypnotize people, and so on. I realized that I was genuinely enjoying the show, instead of just ironically enjoying it with an uncomfortable eye towards the fan service, when it was revealed in the third episode that the protagonist accidentally used a move called the "Vacuum Butt Cannon" during a sparring match. A teacher pulls her aside and says that this is perhaps the most powerful move in Keijo!!!!!!!!, if one can master it, but that it destroys your hips and will leave you a paraplegic by your thirties. Heavy! The thing is, all of these are the most universally applied tropes in the shounen fighting/sports genre and Keijo!!!!!!!! only deviates from them by replacing "baseball" with "butt-wrestling" and "fist" with "boob." A character was just introduced who has the same "semi-sentient muscles" thing that Baki's father had in Baki the Grappler, except it's her butt instead of his back. I find it really interesting, in both good and bad ways, that some people who seem to have a lot of experience with anime have no problem with the shounen formula until the fighting or sport is replaced with fan service, at which point the formula's suddenly an insult for how shallow it is. Personally, I can't imagine watching Keijo!!!!!!!! for titillation: there's so much fan service and it's presented with such seriousness that it quickly becomes normalized, at least within the context of the show itself, as a natural and ineluctable collateral of the "sport." It's weird, but I'm excited to see where it goes!

Yeah, that's what I wish I could do. I enjoyed this game, but Sylvester comported himself about as poorly as it is possible to do when confronted with the implications of his own assumptions. It's really interesting (and confusing) that Sylvester programmed professions, skills, and backgrounds to be gender-agnostic, despite those things having the same kind of "evidence" for gender bias that he drew upon to make the system of social interaction and attraction.

The funny thing is, I had been aware of podcasts since I first downloaded Winamp in the late nineties, because it came with a podcast feed and a couple sample podcasts. I just thought they were a terrible idea (cue Jake saying that they are) until I moved to a new city and needed some surrogate friends. It took almost a decade for podcasts to be a thing I took seriously. Under those terms, Idle Thumbs is doing fine!

I love this episode. It has a mid-twenties feel to it, circa "Put on the Top Ghost." Horsebag! I got into Idle Thumbs because Penny Arcade (ugh) referenced Three Moves Ahead approvingly back in 2010, and the second episode of TMA that I listened to had Troy Goodfellow list Idle Thumbs as one of his favorite podcasts. I checked it out right as "Nasty/Good/Badass" came out and it became my favorite... right before Chris announced that he was becoming the new Nick Breckon and shutting it down. Good times! I was over the moon when the Kickstarter happened.

Well, I played maybe ten minutes of Mini Metro before getting my refund. Never have I played a game that felt more suited to touch controls and yet was more difficult to control on phone. Laying down lines is easy—too easy—and removing lines (or, worse, removing a single station from a line) feels like it comes down to luck. Touching on a station cycles through the lines that are available... except when it doesn't and it insists on laying a new line. And then you'll fuck up your one good line trying to delete the one you just laid. There are colored dots along the right side of the screen that correspond to the lines but they glitch up half the time anyway. Despairing of a manageable way to add and remove stations, I finally found the tutorial... which just consisted of showing that dragging my finger from station to station creates a new line and that's it. I'm sorry to stomp all over your zen garden, Dinosaur Polo, but you need to tell me how to play your game if you want me to play it. If you don't, that's fine, the trailer is very attractive.

Just now reading Saito Tamaki's Beautiful Fighting Girl, about the psychopathology of otaku, I came across this passage, explaining why there are no Disney otaku: "And then there is the fact that everyone knows that men past puberty are not supposed to visit Tokyo Disneyland, unless they are on a date." Hope you kept Sarah close, Chris!

Nah, all of those values look normal. I agree with Dewar that it's probably the interface circuitry, which is actually replaceable but probably not worth the cost and effort.

Try to find a tool to do a SMART check. It might be disk failure, that's what happened when my old WD external started being finicky about how and when it was connected.

The later ones, especially with that Scottish dude, drag badly. After one or two of the "big" twists, I'd realized that I only really cared about Kate Archer and H.A.R.M. insofar as what the next level was.

It makes me sad that NOLF didn't work out for you. I have fond memories of being fifteen and this game destroying my world. I played the sniping level with the half-deaf diplomat over and over, because that rifle had the best feel of any FPS gun until Far Cry 2's bolt-action. I do remember feeling like the game was drifting by the space station level, and I skipped a couple of the late-game cutscenes out of disinterest for the twists and turns, so I guess I had the same problems with a game, I was just fifteen and put up with them. NOLF2 was generally a better game, even I recognized, although I didn't like the pruning of loadout options and the less-connected nature of the missions. Another comment: Do you plan to play either of the Star Trek: Elite Force games when you get to their time period? I have unreasonably fond memories of the first. EDIT: Oops, second question answered!

I was telling the Slack that, although I'm glad the game is so sexual because Love's good at it, a small part of me wishes that it weren't, because it's a well-written "dating" sim without a lot of extraneous stuff, either narratively or mechanically, going on. It could be a really good gateway game to a certain type of person, a couple of my friends in particular. One of them, it might still be a good gateway game, but there's just no way the other would be receptive to me booting up a cross-dressing BDSM game for her. Also, unrelated but very good is Katherine Cross' warm review on Gamasutra. Cross really gets Love's games and is particularly talented at bringing out what makes them special, especially in terms of character interactions.

Complete, just not on Steam. Because of its content, it's unclear if it's ever going to get onto there, but Love's promised keys to Humble buyers if it does.

It came out on Monday and I just finished it! I have a lot of thoughts. First, the non-spoiler thoughts: this game is incredibly polished, especially with regards to the interface. Love has a mastery over RenPy now that makes her earliest games play like they're on another engine entirely. The dialogue system is not as revolutionary as previews on RPS and elsewhere had led me to believe, as it mostly consists of branch options appearing and disappearing as the conversation moves forward, but it flows well and there is the nice temptation to say something now or wait for a chance to say something better later. It is well-written on almost all levels, transitioning between steamy and funny without feeling really jarring. The art and music are good, especially the sumptuous art-deco backgrounds of the cruise ship and the downbeat jazz that plays during the daytime, but certain details on the characters doesn't read as well as they should, especially the hair. The game finishes comfortably in four and a half hours, though a hurried person could compress it down past four with relative ease. The only problems I have with Ladykiller in a Bind as a gameplay experience are that auto-skip function doesn't play nice with the dialogue system, making it far too easy to skip past dialogue choices that you didn't take the first time around, and that certain interface elements (pertaining to scenes viewed and ranking in the game-within-a-game) aren't really explained at all. Both are going to be addressed by Love in a patch, I understand. Spoiler thoughts: Have other people played? Who'd you pursue? What're your thoughts?

I didn't really have anything to contribute to this excellent discussion until now, but... I've tried my best to keep an eye on this issue and it seems that there's no good answer. Some people dislike "Native American" because "native" is commonly a dogwhistle for "primitive" or "savage" and "American" is the name given to the continent by a succession of foreign interlopers. They tend to prefer "American Indian" (or just "Indian" if they object to the whole business with Amerigo Vespucci) or "First Nations/Peoples"... except the issues that other people have with "Indian" are well known, while "First Nations" or "First Peoples" are variously disliked for feeling overly sterile/ethnographic with the "nations/peoples" terminology and for calling them "first" like they're ancient history and not around anymore. Every option's problematic, except trying to use the chosen name of the specific nation or tribe itself or, if that's not an option, using one of the general terms and just being contrite if someone takes offense.

Honestly, every Civ game since Civilization 2 has had a rough launch. Civilization 3 was nearly unplayable and Civilization V was just a bad game before patches and expansions. Civilization 4 got close, but it launched with an AI that couldn't really keep up, so I'm happy in waiting. Worse comes to worst, I get the pleasant surprise that Civilization 6 is playable six months earlier than its predecessors.

So, I think we should have a separate thread for the rest of the PDS games. With the Europa Universalis IV already demo out and the full game landing on Tuesday, it seems like the right time. I'll go ahead and put down my thoughts about the demo, though I really want to hear other people's reactions. So... in an extremely questionable series of decisions, I finished my reading for the night, chugged two Dr. Peppers, and then played two games as Portugal (one a trainwreck, one not so bad), five as Venice (all trainwrecks), and two as the Ottomans (one a trainwreck, one an amazing game that had me googling for a save hack so I could keep playing it in the full game). I like some of the things they're doing a lot. A lot, a lot. The trade node system is a bit obscure, but once you get your head around it thematically, it's a set of mechanics that's intuitive and makes sense, rather than the EU3 uber-mercantilist, uber-monopolist focus. Merchants are used to shape the flow of trade towards the node nearest you, where you can use a mix of economic and military force to exploit it. The administrative/diplomatic/military point system is an even better addition. They're generated by your ruler's stats, which are sadly randomized upon succession, but there's a neat sense that, since every action takes some points from one of the three categories, a strong and well-rounded ruler can do everything, but a weak or specialized ruler has to choose between winning a lot of small battles with only short-term consequences or losing them in the name of a greater goal. The war system's still really wonky, actually more so now that they've changed the way that war score works. It used to be that battles, blockades, and occupations added or subtracted from a percentage, which represented the amounts of concessions that could be gotten by the winning side. It's still the same system superficially, but now nations are weirdly stubborn if you haven't exterminated all their troops and/or occupied their capital. During a war with Hungary, I was kicking the living shit out of them, they had like 60% war score in my favor after like a year. It was brutal! But they wouldn't back down, even when I only asked for two provinces totaling 35% value. The bonus/malus calculus on the diplo screen just said "Hungary still has its capital." Yeah, bloody good it does you with half your country under Ottoman boots! Stuff like this puts distance between me and the game, which is why I tend towards the personal touch of Crusader Kings II rather than the immortal god-emperor of EU or Vicky. So yeah, I have this weird relationship with Paradox games on release. They're not the unplayable messes they used to be, but there are still odd edges that haven't been rounded off. One TMA podcast with Chris King mentioned that a lot of their balance testing is inter-office LAN games, where stubborn or stupid AI seems to be funny instead of frustrating, at least to hear him tell stories. The first couple patches usually shake these issues out, so I think I might be in for Europa Universalis IV, especially with so many good ideas keeping me up until two in the morning playing. Clearly the caffeine hasn't worn off yet. Maybe I have time for Austria before bed...

Even without invoking obviously magical things like ghosts, you can see magical thinking written all over the traditional Anglo-American mindset. Ask a "rational" person how the economy works. Ask them how to keep from catching a cold. Ask them what they think the weather's going to be like over the next month or two. Ask them how the past hundred years of international politics have led to our world today. Ask them about their friendships and their job. All of their answers to these questions will probably have a "rational" process of thought that's functionally irrational because its premises are, at best, heuristic assessments of chaos and, more likely, working backwards from instinctual beliefs about how the world works (or should work). It all puts me in mind of alt-right STEM fetishists who believe that, if you just stop feeling emotions, you'll always be logical and therefore always be right, because logic is never wrong. Obviously untrue, but to some practically an article of faith anyway.

Okay, I'm about ten years away from a complete 1066 to 1453 playthrough as the Stenkil kings of Sweden. Most of my praise of the game as it is currently still stands, but I have a few sharper critiques: The council system from the Conclave DLC is cool for maybe fifty years and then is the dumbest and most annoying busywork in a Paradox game since calculating supply weights in Victoria 2. In just under four hundred years of gameplay, I have had twenty-two factional revolts to "empower the council." Considering that it took me maybe seventy-five years to disempower the council, after I got bored of buying favors from my vassals to do the basic business of rulership, that is a revolt every fourteen years. That is too many revolts, especially since I am an experienced player who was using opinion thresholds, bribes, non-aggression pacts, and my spymaster to keep my vassals out of that faction. The problem, I think, is that there are no criteria barring vassals from the "empower the council" faction except for opinion thresholds: Any vassal with an opinion of less than +50 will join the faction and they won't leave unless they're +80 or above. The wiki tells me that the faction stops being a high priority if the council has the power to vote on laws and wars, but it's still stupid how it's done. No matter what you do, vassals will keep trickling into the faction slowly, until there are enough for a revolt, and then you get the ten-year opinion bonus that'll keep the faction from revolting again until it expires (although I have had back-to-back "empower the council" revolts twice). If only vassals that wanted a position on the council joined the faction, or if only "powerful" vassals did, that'd be one thing, but as it stands it's basically a system deliberately designed to nullify the best practices of vassal management. I hate it. The minor epidemics, the everyday diseases like slow fever and smallpox, are too common and too lethal. This is usually the case with a new mechanic that's featured in a DLC, but it's still frustrating because hospitals do nothing (I have yet to see the +50% disease resistance of my capital city affect anything over the course of a hundred years) and doctors are as likely to maim you as save you (which wouldn't be too bad or too inaccurate, except the average character is seriously ill two to five times in an average seventy-year life). The coming of the Black Death is great, with your court huddled indoors and praying for it to go away, but it's lessened when an outbreak of consumption across three counties has largely the same effect. My current ruler, in his fifties, has five children and seven siblings. Six of those siblings have died from diseases or from complications relating to treatment, as have three of those children. We're a family of mask-wearing one-legged mutants, thanks to the futile ministrations of our doctors, and it's impossibly silly. Unless Paradox fixes things, it's advised to turn the setting for "minor epidemics" way down. As a side effect of the high lethality accompanying disease, alliances have gone from one of the most transparent mechanics in the game to a fiddly mess that often screws you over. It used to be that a blood or marriage relation between close relatives (grandparents to grandchildren) allied the two parties. Apparently, that was being exploited, especially in multiplayer, because the AI tries its best to fulfill alliances, whether or not they're viable, while human players pick their battles, so Paradox made two changes: answering an alliance is now compulsory (or, if you have the setting changed in the options, effectively compulsory, unless you want to take the hit of half your prestige, two diplomacy, and -25 opinion for the next half-century for ignoring a call to arms) and blood/marriage ties form a non-aggression pact that must manually be upgraded to an alliance. In practice, this means that you're constantly having alliances broken by sudden deaths, marrying daughters to rulers who then won't ally with you, and having AI rulers invite you into four losing wars that'd cost you a combined 8,765 prestige to decline. Just about the only positive effect of the new system is that you can sign non-aggression pacts with blood relatives among your vassals, which does a great job of reducing the formerly suicidal decision of landing your brothers and uncles to a calculated risk. Otherwise, it's a fiddly and fussy system that's prone to breaking and hard to express intent through. After all the changes, the Holy Roman Empire is still too powerful, and the game's setup still allows it easy expansion to turn its early dominance into permanent control of central Europe. Unlike Byzantium and the various caliphates and sultanates, which counter each other, the HRE is surrounded by France on its western flank, Poland and Hungary on its eastern, Denmark and the Wends to its north, and Sicily to its south. All of these are either small and fragmented or prone to fragment, especially in the 1066 start. Thanks to the changes in the Conclave DLC, it's easier than ever for the HRE to bootstrap itself to primogeniture succession, making it a rock-solid state that can expand without succession wars every generation. It probably won't be the Salians who enjoy the fruits of their labor, but some dynasty will, and that's ridiculous when, at no point in the Middle Ages, did the HRE ever behave as an expansionist power. Anything grander than an invasion of Sicily supporting the lawful inheritance of the Hohenstaufen there would have been unthinkable. Nevertheless, in my game, where I have fought wars every decade to keep the HRE in check, where France has stolen much of Lotharingia (with my help) and Byzantium holds most of Italy south of the Po (with my help), the imperial crown has still been passed effortlessly from father to son for two hundred years and the reigning emperor can still bring upwards of eighty-five thousand troops to bear on any problem. For comparison, I hold the crowns of Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Norway, Pomerania, Lithuania, Russia, and Poland and I can field maybe fifty-five thousand under a good king. It's just lazy design at this point: I was sympathetic to Paradox's difficulties coming up with a reason why a ruler controlling (even nominally) the riches of the Rhone, Rhine, Po, and Elbe wouldn't be the most powerful ruler on the face of the earth, but not after three years and continued design choices that empower the HRE. Someone in their offices must really think that it's working as intended. That said (hah) I had a good time. I just think I might be ready for Crusader Kings 3, whatever that looks like.

I actually got in a fight with my girlfriend this weekend because of Nate Silver's over-the-top anxiety about the election. For perfectly understandable reasons, she's bought into the idea that anything could tip this election towards Trump (while, of course, nothing can secure it for Clinton) and that's definitely the message that FiveThirtyEight is pushing. Linking to, say, the Princeton Election Consortium doesn't really assuage her fears, because the data overload at FiveThirtyEight makes it seem authoritative.

Presumably, they still have the 3D assets that were used for the game's marketing, but they choose to use some low-grade anime stylings for the art instead. The girl is fine but bland, Jensen looks strangely Lupin-like, and Pritchard is the stretched-out lovechild of Togusa from Ghost in the Shell and Zolf Kimblee from Fullmetal Alchemist. It wasn't a good call, whoever's call it was.

Chris, I think the app includes your statistics from all the modern Deus Ex games. Is it possible that you had an abortive run as a sniper in Human Revolution?

Yeah, I don't think Berman gets enough credit, even from me. The vast majority of interviews in which I've seen him talk were Insurrection and Nemesis-era. He just seems bored and tired in those, it's hard to imagine him as the vital force that basically took a show built around Roddenberry's sometimes-goofy ideals and turned it into a universe where multiple shows with multiple ideologies could be set.

I'm not as optimistic as you, but I'm still listening. I think the pitch that's made during the crowdfunding launch will tell: Wasteland 2's pitch, for example, was all about how many content hours there'd be and what a "full" game it'd be. If I see that here, I'm bailing, but if not, I'll follow with interest.