Gormongous

You're that guy so we don't have to be that guy.

Excel Saga holds up completely, so far. You're right, it's probably pretty damning that it does. I'm just a big fan of everything Watanabe Shinichi (see The Wallflower above) and had put off his seminal anime for way too long. Cromartie High is super funny, but I will say that you shouldn't marathon it, since so much of the humor is about repetition. I had a couple of my friends rewatch the entire run of Sayonara, Zetsubou-Sensei with me about six months back. One had no familiarity with Japanese culture at all, but they both rather enjoyed it in the end. So much of what Kumeta Koji rails against is the corruption and perversity of modern society, which anyone alive today should understand. Sure, a neophyte will get confused about Maria being a tsukkomi for New Year's boke and why Commodore Perry is charging around the school opening everything (because "to open Japan" and "to open school" are homophones, of course), but even I miss a lot of references and I own all the manga. Missing references is part of the fun! You're totally right about the Evangelion references. My favorite is the end of a sketch where the class finds out that it's Hito Nami's birthday and has to improvise a celebration, much like another improvised celebration/ending: There's a mostly complete list here, I think. Is Ouran High School Host Club really that good? I always put it in the same mental box as InuYasha: anime for preteen girls because preteen girls cosplay it at cons.

As several people have pointed out, it's just Berserk for today's audiences. Which works fine, because the movie versions of Berserk are awful. I agree with Tegan. Nichijou is so good. It kills me that Bandai considers it a failure because its DVD singles didn't sell at ¥80,000. I actually don't like live-action serial comedy very much. The last one I watched was How I Met Your Mother back when it first started and I burned out almost immediately. But I'm a huge fan of anime comedy. Oh! Edo Rocket and The Wallflower (Yamato Nadescio Shichi Henge) are two of my favorites. Sayonara, Zetsubou-Sensei is amazing, but pretty dark. Maybe School Rumble? Depending on your tolerance for totally contrived love triangles, it can be a good time. I'm watching Excel Saga right now, since I missed it the first time around, and I think it may be genius? Six episodes in, it seems like it.

So Hot Scoops asked for anime recommendations on his Twitter. At first, I was not surprised to see the usual suspects everyone always recommends anyone who's seen and liked Ghost in the Shell and Cowboy Bebop: Azumanga Daioh, FLCL, Serial Experiments Lain, Samurai Champloo, all stuff from the 1995-2005 "golden age." But then I tried to think what I'd recommend for him in their stead and it's still from the same "golden age," , even really deep pulls: Revolutionary Girl Utena, Gankutsuou, Planetes, Ergo Proxy. I've never really bought into the idea, probably because I watch so much anime anyway, but maybe there was a brief time when American and Japanese sensibilities converged to produce a bunch of anime with perfect crossover appeal, before the US market collapsed under the bubble and the Japanese market was devoured by the moeblob. What do you guys think? Does anime have a sweet spot for you? P.S. Other anime I'd recommend to someone like Steve, if I had Twitter, because I feel like I know him (but know I don't, see this thread): Eden of the East, Last Exile, Mawaru Penguindrum. All flawed shows, but with their own sense of futurism.

I agree completely. It's the power of Mantel as an author that preserves the nothing that is Cromwell's past before meeting Wolsey and entering the documentary record as a defining point of character, instead of just eradicating it. The truth is, today we don't know anything besides the stories Cromwell and Wolsey told, which makes the indulgences that the former shows towards the latter's inventions of the latter all the more arresting.

This is me being the latest to the party, but I just finished Metro 2033. To be honest, I was incredibly underwhelmed. I liked the atmosphere, especially scavenging a body for ammo and then using it to buy supplies, but everything else that involved actually playing the game was terrible: floaty shooting with no impact, awkward platforming, lots and lots of first-person stealth, a hidden morality system, no quicksave, and so on. I've owned the game for almost two years now and only just finished it because I'd play for maybe an hour before getting bored or frustrated enough to quit. Is it just looks that have people crazy about Metro: Last Light? I really don't see what this series has that STALKER doesn't have already in spades, but I'm still curious? EDIT: I do want to say, but thank you to Metro 2033 for being a game that didn't need a final boss. With how regressive some of the level design was, I was sure I was going to have to defend a position from waves of monsters until my eyes bled.

I found myself humming a song while I got dressed this morning, then realized all of a sudden it was "Waltz for the Moon" from Final Fantasy VIII: I can say for a fact that I haven't thought of that song (or even the game it's in) for six years. I wonder how/why my brain dredged it up. Just some maintenance work, I guess?

Yeah, but it can get really intimate with podcasts. It's like I overhear a two-hour conversation with Chris, Nick, Jake, and Sean every week. My brain totally processes them as my friends as a result, but it's completely monodirectional and there's no way to get around it. I like in the Midwest, so I doubt I'll ever see any of the Thumbs in person, but it's still something that weirds me out. I think this came up in a reader mail a couple dozen episodes ago? Jake said basically the same thing.

I was thinking how disappointing that there is no Skipper Croft or Ford Force Four among the aliases.

It's all a consequence of them trying to trade up from a preteen to a teen core demographic. It's funny how the show is a lot more immature because of it. Tenzin's the best character, as the son of the previous Avatar, but he's mostly played for laughs, of course.

"Color your hair. Dad said a funny thing, what do you guys think? What, no love for Dad?"

This is the dorkiest thing ever, but rewatching Planetes tonight, I wished there was some way to fit space-garbageman gameplay into Kerbal Space Program. You know, flying a single-stage-to-orbit craft up, doing an EVA to de-orbit space junk, the works. I know someone will tell me that it's virtually impossible for debris to affect gameplay, not unless you run hundreds of missions on the same save, but I still think it's cool. Then again, I'm much more impressed by a neat space station in Earth orbit than landing on far-flung rocks, so maybe I should just shoot for that.

This is not the same at all, but I've been fairly impressed by Duolingo thus far. Sure, it's the most superficial gamification ever, but it uses its lessons to gauge your skill level, ultimately to crowdsource you documents they've been hired to translate. And it's free! *Pockets his commission*

Ah, the joy of summer as a Ph.D candidate! I've been working my ass off adding about a page per day to this article, but now I need to figure out when to fly home, buy a car, and drive it back, so that I can maybe get my old job at the Medical Center Library back and not drain my savings dry like I did last year. Spend money to make money, eh? To be fair, part of all that was because I was house-sitting for my advisor and then he paid me a fraction of what was expected. Man, that was a barrel of monkeys. Tegan, I plan to give you some money once I buy the car. It'll be the end of May, will that be too late? I don't need anything in return, just keep being my Eva-loving online friend.

Yeah! I was thinking, it'd be a living nightmare to hear an audio recording of my friends making fun of my voicemail message, but since I'm not Steve, it's the best. No really, it is.

I think this thread is for lighthearted bullshit and the Life thread is for serious business.

I want to make clear, I'm not necessarily recommending Shadows over Camelot to anyone besides the betrayal-obsessed Thumbs. Much moreso than Battlestar Galactica, Shadows over Camelot is a pretty inferior game made okay/good/great by the traitor mechanic, in that you're basically playing Old Maid with a medieval theme. It can still be really fun with the right group and even with the traitor mechanic removed, unlike Battlestar, but it's a definite try-before-buy. On the other hand, the last couple Battlestar Galactica expansions have added a lot of nuance to the base game's traitor mechanic. There are now friendly Cylons and independent Cylons as well as hostile Cylons, plus random agendas for each Human player, so it's become less about finding out who's suspicious in the long term and more about finding who's trustworthy in the short term. Then again, one of the great things about the base game is the lightweight gameplay, which allows the interpersonal shit to take the fore, so expansions distract from that a lot. I haven't played enough of them to really say for sure, though. I mentioned this in one of the episode threads, maybe when we were discussing Neptune's Pride mechanics, but the Avalon Hill Dune board game has a really great diplomatic model. Each of the six factions has several unique powers, one of which they can share with up to two allies, so there's a strong incentive to form alliances, even if they're with people that you don't plan to support over the long term. Meanwhile, most of the other game mechanics are built around hidden information (resource gathering, card powers, unit movement, and combat resolution), so the few games I've played have had this great sense of massive power blocs ready to blow apart if certain information ever comes to light. If you're not willing to sink a few hundred dollars into one of several desktop publishing kits, Fantasy Flight has a rethemed reprint called Rex: Final Days of an Empire. It's hard to recommend it, if only because the Twilight Imperium universe is bland as hell and spoils several of the better mechanics, but it's the easiest way to play one of the best multiplayer board games ever made, so...

I typically post, then start editing because I see all the grammatical and rhetorical errors I made, let alone the content of the post. If I'm lucky, no one saw fit to reply before I finish, so I can go unnoticed.

I guess I consider myself a "completionist," but it's definitely not some sort of self-styled label. I just get really anxious about missing out on content, especially in open-world games, so I cope by hundred-percenting, if I can. I mean, if a game is clearly designed to lock out content as a gameplay mechanic, like The Witcher 2 or The Walking Dead, that's fine, but the first Assassin's Creed was almost unplayable for me because of those stupid little flags hidden everywhere. Conversely, though I enjoyed Risk: Legacy a lot, my group made it about ten games in before ditching it. The unlocking mechanics are really awesome, but at the end of the day, you're still playing Risk, which only has so much juice in it. I would really love to see you guys play Battlestar Galactica or even Shadows over Camelot. Nick would lose his mind in a game that's actually about betrayal rather than just supporting it.

Sometimes? I'm constantly stewing in self-hatred over the dumb shit that comes out of my mouth.

The funny thing about bringing in Wolf Hall to the discussion is that it already has a TV counterpart of sorts in Showtime's The Tudors. I think the difference between the two is telling. While it does depict a sexist reality, Wolf Hall does not delve much sexual discrimination and violence because it has little bearing on the story of Cromwell, but The Tudors revels in it. The audience is treated to every fling that even the most minor character was rumored to have had, plus sex is used extensively as characterization on its own. I mean, George Boleyn Viscount Rochford seems like a pretty loving brother, if a bit slow, except that he's sometimes a homosexual who beats and rapes his bride on their wedding night. That's Lazy Writing 101 and, while Game of Thrones never even approaches that low, I'm sometimes reminded of it anyway, especially in scenes with Joffrey. The thing is, fiction has the advantage of history and even historical fiction because there's a narrative. In history all the time, sometimes things just happen and there's no reason for it. Emperor Henry VI suddenly dies of malaria at Messina on the eve of his crusade, throwing Germany and Italy into twenty years of chaos. It helped some people and hurt others, but there was no through-line. Fiction can do one better, which is what makes A Song of Ice and Fire so great. Martin has created so many characters, all of whom have their motivations and plans laid out, which intersect to drive the events of the plot. So I kinda get pained when people imply that misogyny and rape are so thick on the ground because "that's how it was" or something. Sure, Martin's chosen to depict a grim world and he's chosen to have sexism be a part of that, but he's also chosen to say very little about it, as I Saw Daesin points out. It's certainly not ideal and I feel a little disappointed at times.

Well, I think that's what we're talking about here. At what point do books and TV shows filled with terrible characters doing terrible things become terrible themselves? I don't mean to say that A Song of Ice and Fire and Game of Thrones are terrible, of course. I've read the past three books the week they came out and I've never missed an episode of the show. Still, it's worth examining the amount and intent of sexual violence (and violence as a whole, really) in such a popular franchise, because why not? It's interesting.

I'm sorry, I'll add something above it. I thought putting spoilers behind spoilers would be enough. If he was violent but not sexual, would he be less of a horrible fucking person? What I'm saying is that it's problematic how every character who needs to be flagged as "beyond redemption" commits acts of sexual violence in Martin's books. At some points, it feels like having Anakin Skywalker murder children out of nowhere at the end of Revenge of the Sith so that the audience can know he's a really bad guy now. It doesn't necessarily compromise Martin's books, but the TV series does highlight how often it's used, by virtue of the narrative compression.

I don't blame you. I found the beta to be pure cotton candy, but it was still a tough couple of weeks when everyone was buying it and the entire internet was crying, "Diablo, Diablo!" I was busy with some other game at the time, I can't recall, otherwise I would have fallen to the siren song as well.

Then we're not going to see eye to eye on this, I'm afraid. If the presence or absence of sexual violence against women and children by a given character has no bearing on the plot, its inclusion is senseless at best and sexist at worst. I mean, I love Martin's characters as much as the next, but are there any "bad" guys who aren't rapists and perverts? The Hound, I guess? Spoilers for Storm of Swords: