Gormongous

I can do one better. I have no clue what the lyrics to "Two Princes" are, but I know the lyrics to the Bill Nye the Science Guy parody "Two Eyes" by heart. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o6ePh8xcsTs

Sometimes I wonder if the guys in charge of video game boobs have ever touched/seen/heard of real boobs. In all seriousness, the gameplay looks like a blast, except when Jessica Rabbit saunters onscreen.

A couple nights ago I noticed that the seams in the crown of one molar are kinda dark. I would pay serious money for it not to be a cavity, even though I probably need at least one filling redone...

It'll do a good job of recreating the paranoia of first contact, where you attack every person you meet because you're afraid they'll attack you first.

Samus is the Obama of video games.

I would recommend against going to grad school just because you want more school. It's not just College 2.0. Grad school is to college as a career is to an internship. That said, do what you want, do what makes you happy, and taking classes or getting another bachelor's degree can be a good way to go about that.

There needs to be more conversation about Warcraft III. I played that game intensively for about a year and it totally shaped my view of online communities. Sean was talking about how important this game was for him, I'd love to hear more from him or anyone.

I can't really write a long paean for it on my cellphone, but for me my favorite game of all time remains Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri. Fourteen years after the fact, it remains the perfect fusion of gameplay and theme. Its fiction is on par with better sci-fi novels and pervades the game through the descriptions of technology and secret projects that are the heart of the moment-to-moment player experience. There are several game systems that are visible and malleable but operate on their own terms. It has better characters than most shooters, let alone any other 4X. The win conditions are multiple, adaptable, and responsive to player intent. It's a symphony with not a single sour note. Every time I boot Alpha Centauri up, which is usually every six months or so, I expect it to look its age at last. Instead, I'm humbled once more by one of the best game experiences and sci-fi stories I've ever had the change to have. It was magical when I was playing hotseat multiplayer with a friend in junior high, it is magical now when I do a mindworm rush in grad school.

Yeah, I know. It's the thematic equivalent of Far Cry 3 parodying goofy blood-filled empowerment storylines, but because almost every video game's storyline is goofy blood-filled empowerment, the parody is a little moot. I knew that, but I still had the typical internet reaction of "stop disliking things I like" for a brief moment. I could never go past an impertinent comment on an internet forum, though. The people who are so threatened by Sarkeesian that they'll have her videos taken down by any means necessary baffle and upset me.

I'm pretty sure they haven't, at least in the past twenty years, because I still have all my money. Near-future space exploration is sorely underutilized as a game setting, who knows why.

You should guest-star and keep making them explain the jargon. And use your Jimmy Stewart dad voice the whole time. I didn't mind Dota 2 talk on the podcast, so I'll just take this as a chance to hear more Thumbs. Enthusiasm for games is always contagious, at least at this point in my life.

I enjoyed it all the way through. There seemed to be a little more of an edge that suited her, especially the bored repetition of the wife/daughter fridge/damsel mashup. Oh, and a reference to one of the funniest jokes in Wreck-It Ralph. "The most tragic backstory ever." It was also good to hear her go into the way that the revenge fantasies we act out in games damage masculinity by limiting the scripts available to its expression. Getting to that point was worth hearing her overstate the domestic violence and property arguments a bit. About my only complaint is the two references to Hotline Miami. Surely the hyper-violence in the game, which is actually about violence unlike most violent games, is kind of a gimme. Whatever, she was just using it for the images, which certainly are effective.

Damn! I guess I picked the wrong time for a visit home then. Anyway, like I said in the Crusader Kings II thread, there are three main "vanilla" mods: Project Balance, CK2+, and The Prince and the Thane. The first focuses on balance, the second on gameplay, and the third on atmosphere. I find Project Balance to be too much like the base game, frantic and arbitrary, and The Prince and the Thane too focused on roleplaying, plus bugs galore, so I'm a big advocate for CK2+, which has a very deliberate pacing that highlights decisions and consequences. Sadly, the mod creator, Wiz, got hired by Paradox to work on Victoria II, so the mod is going to be discontinued after a promised compatch for The Old Gods. Who knows what's next.

I haven't seen Time of Eve yet, but its Kickstarter is blowing up. I'm really happy that there can be another way besides Funimation eating up everything and shitting out Crunchyroll streams. EDIT: Oh, I've been watching tons of stuff too. Little Witch Academia, which I think Tegan linked a couple pages ago, is amazing and restores my faith in the "new" GAINAX, as if Medaka Box Abnormal didn't already. Excel Saga holds up completely and is also amazing, even just for what a risk ADV Films was willing to take licensing and importing such an avant-garde anime. The "sequel" OVA Puni Puni Poemy is pretty good too, despite being obviously a studio in-joke they somehow got money to make into two whole episodes. Now I'm finishing up my rewatch of Rurouni Kenshin. I knew that Studio Deen took over after the Kyoto arc and the series gradually lost its quality, but watching it now, a little more jaded than a decade ago, the drop-off is shocking. Right after an incredible battle between two political ideologies personified, we have A) old swordsman's lost love, foreign prince's body double, C) plot foiled by thieving dog, and D) fake engagement ring hijinks. I haven't watched shounen anime this bad since that one Bleach filler episode where there was a ghost chef whose cake they had to finish before he went berserk, which I consider the worst twenty-two and a half minutes to which I have ever been subjected.

The Old Gods DLC is landing soon. Once the CK2+ mod is updated for that, I'll be losing another weekend as one of the grandsons of Charlemagne.

Tegan, watching your saga of poverty reminds me of my first year of grad school, when I wasn't funded and had miscalculated my loans so that I had to live on $500 a month, including rent. I drank a lot of water, which manages hunger great but makes you into a miserable pile of shit in the long run. You're certainly faring better than me. And yeah, after living on nothing, any paycheck is cartoonish luxury. I can buy a whole tub of tapioca and eat it in one sitting!

Considering that I spent a not insignificant portion of time pawing at her lower abdomen and thinking I was rocking her world, yes. Ignorance of ignorance is the worst.

Early in Bring Up the Bodies, page sixty-six or so, Cromwell explicitly states what was my favorite motif of his from the previous book. To paraphrase him and Mantel, marriages go stale and children grow up, but a master stays your whole life. It's maybe the least modern thing about Cromwell, but it saves anything and everything else of him from even a hint of my dislike.

Yeah, same here. I'm usually loath to lampoon the South for its backwardness, because I've come to have a quiet sort of pride in where I come from, but in this case it was exactly what you'd expect from a sex-ed class in Texas: a stripped-down, clinical treatment of the subject, shot through with health trivia and scare tactics. Thirty seconds spent trying to feel up my first girlfriend during Fellowship of the Ring taught me infinitely more.

The lack of message control is appalling. Weren't they forewarned by the half-dozen kerfuffles in the months leading up to their announcement to have a strong, explicit position on always-on functionality and used game sales? We now have at least three different versions of how the new Xbox will work, all supposedly from the mouths of Microsoft execs.

I fixed it for you. This is what's happened in the past whenever anti-consumer practices impact sales.

I ran into a particularly nice instance in the game I started after listening to this episode. I was Greece, in the United Kingdom's sphere, which was a frustrating game mostly because the "Megali Idea" decision is broken, but there was a moment where the UK was at war with the rest of the Great Powers and all her satellites & protectorates went bankrupt because they couldn't trade with the enemy, which was the rest of the known world. It's a fascinating system to see in action, just not always to play.

I saw The Great Gatsby tonight. As a movie experience, it was excellent. I can still feel the thrill of some scenes and performances. Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt. But, as an adaptation of a great American novel, it was baffling, even upsetting. How could they make a hundred-million dollar movie that doesn't understand its source material? Anyone who thinks that The Great Gatsby is a story of love and hope needs to throw out their old high school book report and read the novel again.

Have big tech companies always been into intentionally restricting their possible user base in the name of theoretically greater profitability, or is this a new development? I'm asking in all seriousness.

Well, with debates on sexism and misogyny, being right is implicitly tied to being a good person and being wrong to being a bad person, even though most of us are aware in the abstract that saying a bigoted or ignorant thing doesn't make you bigoted or ignorant unless you keep saying it in the knowledge that it's bigoted or ignorant. We all want to be good people. I think all of us are, too. Personally, after the Feminist Frequency debacle, I've tried to stay away from conversations like this one unless I have something really useful to add. I don't care about being right nearly as much as I used to, but I still like to fight sometimes, which is the last thing we all need here.