Gormongous

The SHIV's a weird thing. It's basically a soldier with no customization options that provides cover, so it's cool to have one on your team, but rarely better than having a human trooper.

Yeah, when the Thumbs were talking about the way players interact with a space, I thought back to my experience with the second episode of The Walking Dead. There's a part where you come across a campsite, and I figured out immediately that something inside the tent would set off a trigger. So, in the interests of experiencing the full story, I scrubbed the entire campsite first, then went inside the tent, and oh crap. There are four different things to interact with and, of course, the first one I picked started a cutscene. Oh well, I did my best.

Yeah, but Asuka always illustrated that for me better. I don't need yandere, I have tsundere. My main issue with Mari is that she feels like a fan-fiction character. It doesn't quite feel like she has a place in the pride/fear/duty triangle of Asuka/Shinji/Rei, so I resent her in most of her scenes. But I don't want to! I love me some meganekko and hope that the new movie gives her something to do. Actually, I did hate Shinji for his cowardice and impotence when I was sixteen, but what changed my mind most was simply growing up. Sometime in my early twenties, responsibility stopped being an opportunity to succeed and started being a burden. Suddenly, Shinji's preference for doing nothing rather than failing made a lot more sense, as did Asuka's self-hatred and Rei's surrender. These characters are mental illness made flesh, after all. It just took me five or six years to appreciate that.

Vagina eyes and blood crosses... Yeah, this is Evangelion. I'm so damn excited for the fansubs to start land next week. Even "Illustrious" Mari Makinami can't change that.

I love the classic dynamic of this podcast. The old panel back together again! Also, I haven't finished yet, but you guys seem super punchy, either because this is round two or because Sean's presence compels seriousness. Who knows? We'll have to do another round of debugging to find out.

Yeah, and Tom was asked to be on it. He's said many times that he's a big believer in Metacritic's mission and that it's part of a valuable set of tools for the gaming public to have. The problem, of course, is that many (if not most) of Metacritic's users think of it as one-stop shopping. Like Tom recently said here, that's a huge failure of game criticism, not of Metacritic.

Yeah, I've been crippled by a need to give useless advice since this whole thing began, Tegan. On the one hand, you could use the money. On the other, you could use a life free of emotional blackmail more. It's really what you think is best for you, whatever the cost.

There was a short online game called Spent, where you had to survive a month on a thousand dollars. Not the same, because it's more about the impossibility of financial planning below a certain threshold than anything else, but similar.

What the hell, dude? Where do you get off talking like that to someone for expressing a perfectly legitimate opinion? He said he'd be fine with any Three Moves Ahead regular hosting the podcast, but luckily we have them all. I agree.

By the end, I began to think that maybe the confusion was intentional, that we are supposed to be lured into thinking every "he" is Cromwell and then be frustrated. There was one part near final third of the book, when Cromwell and Norfolk were talking with the bastard Richmond, that was so bare of signposts that Mantel had to have meant it that way. I'm not certain of her purpose in doing so, though.

Just plain ol' medieval history. I'd probably have gotten a better response from early modernists who actually study the Tudors, but I'd never associate myself with the likes of them. As it stands, the two people who knew enough to discount More knew enough to discount Cromwell too. None of them have my affection for history's losers, like the aforementioned Wolsey. I also happened to be watching Showtime's The Tudors when I started Wolf Hall, though I gave up on the former pretty quick. For a while it was really great, because the show, in which Cromwell is a sinister cipher, is stuffed to the gills with blood and sex. I could sometimes imagine both works taking place in the same continuity, with Cromwell so caught up in his own intricate perception of reality that he doesn't even notice all the tawdry bullshit, except when Mary Boleyn invades his personal space.

I've been waiting for this thread since I finished the book a couple weeks ago. My favorite thing about Wolf Hall is the sense of history that Hilary Mantel has built into it. Every character is the sum of their experiences, without exception. Reading about their experiences allows you to understand the characters without really even knowing them, at least not in the way that we are accustomed to knowing characters in novels, through explicit narration and all that jazz. With Cromwell, we see the process of accretion, which is history to those who live it, create a man to whom I still feel an incredible connection, despite never really liking him in the historiography I've read. His experience as a soldier weighs on him, especially in his attention to the positioning of people and the movements they make. His experience as a cloth merchant weighs on him, especially in his attention to what people wear and what everything is worth. His experience under Wolsey weighs on him, in more ways than I could possibly list. Every piece of advice Wolsey gives Cromwell recurs again and again over the years, often with less specificity until it's just one of many habits Cromwell has. I was initially quite unhappy with how Mantel passed over much of Wolsey's fall, considering how important it is to what follows. I like Wolsey as a historical and fictional character, so I was sad to see him gone with almost three hundred pages left to go. It didn't take me long to realize there was a logic behind it all, though. Wolsey remains present throughout the rest of the book, especially in his many absences, but also in the stories and lessons he left for Cromwell. We know what Wolsey would think of any given event, because that's the first thing Cromwell thinks of. We see how service under Wolsey made Cromwell who he is, as well as the joy and heartbreak of service itself, which is something too often missing from even scholarly books on medieval and early modern subjects. I could go on and on, especially in my attempts to reckon what makes this attempt at historical fiction so special, but maybe after other people have talked more. I'm so eager for some discussion about this book. I couldn't convince any of my colleagues in the department to read a book about someone everyone knows is the "bad guy."

I've been in a couple of large-scale beta-testing environments where particularly analytical posters have been asked to post less in order to "prevent bias of the playtest results." It really depends on what the developer and/or publisher is looking for in a beta test or playtest. If they just want to generate word-of-mouth or release a demo, someone who crunches the numbers and finds serious flaws in the game is going to be unwelcome.

Yeah, it blows my mind that a family would love an ideological position more than their own daughter. I'm so sorry you had to go through all that, Tegan. Onward and upward, eh?

Isn't that just a turnover?

I always love reading the circumstances under which people started listening. The first episode I heard was "Nasty/Good/Badass" after reading Troy Goodfellow's Formspring about Idle Thumbs being a podcast he followed. I couldn't tell Sean and Jake apart, so I thought that one was talking a ton and the other was just sitting in the back doing Chris' "badass" voice. Then the podcast ended like a month later, but by that time the Moonbase Alpha story had convinced me to go back through the whole archive. I have oddly fond memories of having to turn off "Shambling, Goofy" and console one of my students crying outside class, right after Nick's story about being harassed on Heroes of Newerth had made me extra indignant about bullying.

Does anyone have any opinions on the alternate covers Irrational released? I personally find the third one, "Falling Art," so visually arresting that it would have made for an instant buy, rather than a long bout of hand-wringing.

I've been saving a lot of my observations for the inevitable episode thread, but I feel the same way. Just about the only one I could lift wholesale was Wolsey's advice about knowing what people wear under their clothes. Luckily, its my favorite quote.

Unless they're gay but you don't have to be gay if you don't want to.

The new season of A Certain Scientific Railgun starts today! Don't judge me.

That's weird, though. Why can't we talk about missed opportunities, especially with a game that has so much going on?

From experience, the most stereotypical femme thing to do is grouse about how no one reads you as queer. Good start! Fuck all that other jazz though, it's unbelievable. I could see your parents holding the mistaken belief that they can tell you how to live your life, but not your doctor. Goddamn.

Same here. When I finally did watch it, I found it all fascinating, but both seasons really are at their best when there's a minimum of "romancing the pagan wolf goddess" going on. My favorite is the arc on commodity speculation but the arc on currency devaluation is good too also oh god who am I? Synth, I missed your comment on Mitchiko to Hatchin the first time around. It looks like it's going to get a physical release (possibly to test the waters for the inevitable FUNimation Cowboy Bebop license), so I'll be really curious to hear someone else's reactions to it, because it's a downright gorgeous anime with a plot always about to come apart. I think I let it sit for an entire week before I settled on the verdict I would use for my list of anime watched. Still, it's miles better than the only other "gang war in Rio" anime I've seen, Gungrave. Man, that show does not hold up even a little bit (and this is coming from the biggest Trigun apologist ever).

I got some pencil boards with the Haibane Renmei box set that were beautiful enough to frame, but mostly I'm better off seeing the art in action. Are there any anime/manga artists or designers you're a fan of, separate from your appreciation of their shows?

I've held off thanking you for sharing this, because I don't know how to contribute, but I found it all really interesting. I own a couple of anime artbooks, but only ones that came with special-edition DVDs and Blu-rays. Though the books are pretty, especially the Lain one by ABe, I'd never buy one on its own, but you're an artist, right? That might make more sense. I occasionally spend a hundred dollars on certain box sets, but my grail is video quality. That's why I'm take pride in my remastered Berserk and original Geneon Gankutsuou, though I haven't worked up the guts to pay monster bucks for out-of-print Blu-ray titles like Jin-Roh. I don't like to import non-RI discs, because of my own quasi-OCD issues, so I do have maybe fifty anime on my list that get instant buys when/if they get a US release. Some never will, so I just archive the best fansubs and find other ways to express myself, like buying all the Sayonara, Zetsubou-Sensei manga. I like the idea of having a collection that extends beyond a bunch of discs, but my attachment to anime is so closely tied to the onscreen experience, I can't really imagine it any other way. Anyway, speaking of Bandai Visual Blu-rays, I went ahead and bought Gunbuster vs. Diebuster after watching all of the former but only two episodes of the latter. I liked Gunbuster a lot for being early Anno, with the themes that would create Evangelion already visible, but Diebuster really surprised me. It's like FLCL or Gurren Lagann if they took themselves more and less seriously, respectively.