Gormongous

I don't disagree, but why does Joffrey's sadism have to be sexual as well as violent, for instance? That's a question I think is worth asking. I suspect the answer is that it's sick to want to hurt people, but it's sick to want to hurt women, which is a sexism that exists apart from the world of a book containing monsters like Gregor Clegane.

This is something with which I've wrestled myself. Talking with my colleagues around the department, we've agreed that Martin does a great job building a world fueled on pessimism, which is fundamental to a "medieval" mindset. That said, he does abuse rape as a plot device, no doubt because it's so effective for setting characterization and tone. He certainly could find other ways, but feasts and sexual violence seem to be two things of which Martin can't get enough. It feels lazy, especially in light of the arduous world-building he's accomplished everywhere else. I don't know how I feel about that. Of course, it's always the TV show that sparks these conversations, rather than the books. I think part of that is simply the lack of authorial distance in TV as opposed to literature. You just don't stop and think "why did the scriptwriter do that" as readily as you do "why did the author do that." The other half is more just HBO being HBO. They've always ferreted out the tawdry and scandalous in any period drama (Rome? Anyone remember all the ugly, gratuitous sex in that otherwise excellent show?), but when the fictional world is already as dark as Martin made it, a certain amount of perversity creeps in. Even though many qualitative improvements in the depiction of female characters are native to the TV show (Shae, Margaery Tyrell, and Daenerys come to mind, plus we don't have to hear the Kingslayer call Brienne of Tarth "ugly" and "mannish" ten thousand times in his head), the compression and explicitness inherent in adapting a script make these things come faster and thicker, especially if violence, sexual or otherwise, is what the scriptwriters want to (or are instructed to) preserve. I don't know how I feel about that, either.

I had a friend who froze his bananas and ate them like popsicles. It was abhorrent.

Done in your best Max Payne voice.

I hate to say it, but the final three or four levels of the "remix" campaign are kinda the game that Jake and Sean were mistakenly railing against in the podcast. Every level is packed to the gills with machine-gun guards and trip-lasers are attached to shotguns that take off half your health. I can still clear a level with no deaths after five or six (or seven or eight) tries, but without any wiggle room the game is much less fun to play. You get seen when you don't mean to, you die, period.

It's really begun to bother me that most of the emails I send to my friends get flagged as spam, because they're typically a link and a couple sentences explaining what it is. The only way to get around it is fill the email with a paragraph of small talk, which is also a spam technique. I also fail CAPTCHAs a fair amount. Am I actually just a spambot?

It's to maximize scent dispersion. You're his, after all.

It seems like the general thing to do is hang out in the Idle Thumbs group chat and proposition each other. I'll certainly be on later tonight, after the department happy hour.

When I lived in Greece, I missed America enough that I'd get the newspaper just to see what movies were out. Most of them were straight translations of the English titles, except for one: Σε Βλεπω, "I See You." I finally figured out it was Saw. Saw is a pun, guys! I never knew. I was mislead by, you know, the saw on the cover. Also, I saw Borat in Greece and no one laughed at the gypsy jokes because they were true there. It was only manslaughter to kill a gypsy until a few decades ago.

If you ask me, Lysander is a solid role in the most straightforward of Shakespeare's comedies. You won't regret putting in the time. It's no Oberon, let alone Puck, but there's room to put your mark on it and to have some good ensemble play. Then again, there are ten million productions of A Midsummer Night's Dream every month and I have no idea what Gilbert Is Dead is, so maybe the latter is an even bigger opportunity.

The moment in my life when I felt most trapped by someone else's expectations was when I saw Enemy at the Gates with my father and there was a five-minute sex scene with Rachel Weisz. No matter how I reacted, I was going to have a long and uncomfortable conversation with him about sex and dating. I don't even remember whether I settled on interest, disinterest, or disgust.

The way I see it, you never regret applying for a job, only not applying. If you have the will and the time, go for it.

I hear you, Twig. I'm really picky about meat in large-hunk form. I'd much rather have loose hamburger than steak.

A draft report for the UN Human Rights Council recommends a moratorium on "lethal autonomous robotics." This will be seen as the opening salvo in the 2027 Mecha-War, I'm sure.

If everyone dies, they start over from the beginning. To be honest, a good team that knows the level's basic layout shouldn't see a TPK too often at all. Chances are someone either is the Redhead (resurrects teammates almost instantly) or has the bandages (instant AoE resurrection). There's so much interesting risk-management gameplay going on in Monaco, which has the unfortunate side effect of being tough on neophytes. Without an awareness of all the options (and even without access to some, until about halfway through the first campaign), the game can seem cruel and unforgiving.

To add to Henroid's excellent advice, a guard that sees you running will fill up their question mark almost immediately. If you are sneaking, it will fill up at a much slower rate, depending on how close you are to them, whether you're doing anything suspicious like picking a lock, and whether there's an alarm. If you're several dozen feet away while sneaking, it's fully possible to walk in front of a guard in plain sight and leave them behind before their question mark fills up and becomes an exclamation mark, which means they've noticed you. When you get them, disguises follow similar rules. Also, playing a few more levels, you'll probably get better sense for the level layout and especially for identifying "panic rooms." For me, it's usually a bathroom, a closet, or a utility room at the end of a long hallway with lots of turns. I just outrun the guards, who are going to be moving slightly slower because they're reacting to incomplete information, and piss in the toilet (no one's mentioned this in any review, I feel like. It's great, unless you're the Redhead or the Lookout) until the exclamation marks disappear.

I think I just might be sensitive to it right now. We have a department Diplomacy game ongoing, so I get enough "Did you hear Phil was the one who told everyone to attack you because he heard you say you didn't have to worry about him eight turns ago" on my own. Far be it from me to dictate the content of my favorite video game podcast, of course.

I didn't want to say anything, but I've actually started feeling the opposite. The Neptune's Pride discussions are all about people I don't know interacting with each other and seldom about the game they're all playing, so there's not too much for me to dig into. A few episodes of it have been fascinating, but I'd almost rather the Thumbs talk more about Dota 2, which I don't care about but has multiple points of intersection with other games, than what amounts to a bunch of he-said-then-she-said gossip... in space.

It was great to hear you guys talking about Monaco, though I think Sean's being too hard on the game, in terms of identifying a fail-state. Even if you're pretty good at Monaco, you're going to get seen all the time, but bushes, disguises, smoke bombs, catwalks, windows, and just running the fuck away are all methods for managing that. The guards only pursue you to your last seen position, marked by an exclamation point, so even turning two corners in quick succession or ducking into a bathroom can save your skin. I do wish the game was better about tutorializing some things (the right time to sneak, the right time to run, the rules for disguises, etc.), but I think in the end that Monaco is a lot like Hotline Miami: when you're playing both right, you feel constantly on the verge of failure, like you fucked up thirty seconds ago and have yet to realize it. Hopefully some more Thumbs will be playing Monaco this week and weekend. I sure hope to play a few more full-roster games soon, even if I'm still stuck playing the Gentleman. EDIT: Oh man, and Sean's ad-libbed Kickstarter pitch at the end! You're forgiven.

It looks as though the historical Cromwell had a warm relationship with his wife and trusted her with some business, if the one surviving letter is anything to tell, but who knows what. I also think that, intentionally or not, Mantel ends up wooing the reader with the recognizable and reassuring "modern" mentality of Cromwell, using him then as a jumping-off point in order to acclimate the reader to less sympathetic historical figures, like Thomas More and Henry VIII Tudor. Cromwell's respect and admiration for More, bitter almost to the point of hateful, was really striking to me, as was his gentle acceptance of the king's many flaws, never dismissive or demeaning. Oh, and Katherine of Aragon! Poor, strong Katherine. My favorite quote in the book comes from Cromwell's first mention of her:

Didn't Hitman: Blood Money have one of its hits take place in a street parade during Mardi Gras?

There's no good answer to this question, but I won't let it stop me. In short, More's persecution of Protestants as heretics have been seen to be in keeping with the times, perhaps rightly so. The sixteenth century was a time of religious upheaval and bloodletting, with the punishment for heterodoxy being the same as it had been throughout the history of Christianity: death. It's almost unfair to expect Thomas More to have acted differently. if he persecuted heretics less thoroughly, he would be derelict in his duties as chancellor. If he persecuted them not at all, he would be derelict in his duties as a Catholic. That said, Thomas More is beloved because he was a prolific author and was friends with prolific authors, all of whom admired the same moral rectitude that actually made him a bit of a monster in hindsight. His trial and execution, as well as his Catholicism, have turned him into an underdog for British historians in particular. If you want to be remembered fondly after you're dead, the two easiest ways are to have a lot of material surviving that shows how great you were and to have the circumstances of your death be as unjust as possible. I almost like how Cromwell is aware of all this, in later chapters. He knows More is gaming the system but cares more about the present himself.

Yeah, there was one time last night where Lu was walking along the edge of a room knocking out guards, you were flooding the room with viruses, and I walked right up to the altar and grabbed the treasure without being seen. It felt like a movie.

My gripe with the Locksmith is that, while he can open safes really fast and not set off handprint alarms, he does nothing that the wrench can't do, plus the wrench can kill people. Many of the items replicate the functionality of certain characters, but usually with qualifications (explosives destroy stuff like the Mole, but they're imprecise and make noise; crossbows put people to sleep like the Cleaner, but they're harder to aim and limited in ammo; etc.). With the Locksmith, he's almost less useful than the item that replicates him. There are going to be, what? Five safes on a level, max? You'll never run out of wrenches that way, so why waste a player slot with the Locksmith? EDIT: All that said, I really hate ruining this game with talk of "optimal" character picks. The fun is to be had in everyone picking who they want to play and then trying to make it work on the fly.

Well, I finished 3.33 late last night and slept on it. In sum, I liked it, though I think it's because I liked the end of 2.22 so much. Sundry thoughts spoilered: