Gormongous

Phaedrus' Street Crew
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Everything posted by Gormongous

  1. anime

    Well, after watching too many airing anime for the winter season because of holdovers from fall and two girls-in-airplanes shows, I only have one anime that I'm planning to watch this season: Sarazanmai, the new show from Kunihiko Ikuhara. Do I think it's going to be good? No, not after the unevenness of Penguindrum and the blowout that was Yurikuma Arashi. Am I going to watch it anyway to see what will be, at worst, an interesting failure by the creator of one of the greatest anime of all time? Yup.
  2. Looking for TBS recommendations

    Yes, but could you have a tactics game like XCOM where you control zero characters? I think that's the more instructive edge between the two terms.
  3. Looking for TBS recommendations

    "Maneuver" or "move," I guess?
  4. Looking for TBS recommendations

    I think the distinction between strategy and tactics is important here. Strategy is the overall plan to achieve a goal, tactics are the moment-to-moment decisions that execute that plan. I think Divinity: Original Sin 2 probably has a lot of tactics, but I can't imagine that it has that much strategy besides "go to this place and talk to/kill everyone."
  5. Looking for TBS recommendations

    The word "strategy" is clearly dead and needs to be buried.
  6. The Good Place

    Yeah, there is possibly some manner of jurisdictional convenience in having the Middle Place exist that might have lead the Bad Place to allow or enable it.
  7. This is interesting, because Creative Assembly has made it its explicit goal since Rome 2 to reduce the number of systems to onboard new players more easily. I think there's a fundamental misunderstanding there, because fewer systems doesn't always mean less complexity and, often, the increased level of abstraction results in large, important systems that are very difficult to take in at a glance. Rome 2's weird, hyper-abstracted family trees at launch are a good example, they're simpler but so much less intuitive (because people know how family trees work but not vague "buckets" of individuals). I don't know, I keep hoping that Creative Assembly gets better at UX and systems interoperability, but I don't think that they actually need to because, like Bethesda and its games, they occupy their own subgenre with a loyal community of modders who'll fix all their oversights and mistakes.
  8. I agree with everything here. There's no character that functions as a moral center in Mad Men (or, rather, the moral center shifts from episode to episode as different characters have bad and good moments). I enjoy that the show is full of characters who are complicated and well-realized but deeply flawed and heavily implicated by the times in which they live, but I can understand someone else not valuing that too much. What condemnations of bigoted or regressive behavior do happen in Mad Men often come from people who are definitely not above it all in any way shape or form, like when world-class fink Pete Campbell blasts Harry Crane for being annoyed by all the coverage of MLK's death (offending Bert Cooper in the process). I do think that Mad Men doesn't endorse alcoholism and sexism any more than The Sopranos endorses being a mobster and killing people, but it's very unblinking in how it depicts the biases and failings of mid-century America as simple facts of life back then and expects you to care about characters up to their necks in them (even if, deep down, they fundamentally suck, like Don Draper does).
  9. Books, books, books...

    I have a friend teaching a history class with a vocal proponent of Peterson among the students and, even before he declared that 12 Rules for Life was his favorite book, he was really easy for her to clock. All of his fans, but especially the younger ones, seem to have these short but highly generalized and discursive scripts that they've internalized from his books and videos, usually about "feminine chaos" and "masculine order" and myth this and Western that. If you ever manage to get them off such a script, they'll throw around those buzzwords until you take the bait and then they can pivot back onto another one they've got ready. It's really tedious and anti-intellectual, which is rich when Peterson's held up as the thinking man's... well, everything. If anyone's reading this and want a good critique of Peterson, the article in Current Affairs is excellent, as is anything written by Paul Thagard on Psychology Today.
  10. Half-Life 3

    New favorite post by a drive-by spammer.
  11. Crusader K+ngs II

    The Steam sale was a good occasion for me to catch up on CK2 DLC and give the game another shake. I started as the Weimar count (but technically margrave) of Istria and forty years later I'm king of Carinthia with appurtenances in Verona and the Steiermark. I am mostly enjoying myself? I'm probably going to go home and try to squeeze some more time in before a date (which is ill-advised), but I think I'm already a solid list of pros and cons of the latest version. Pros The map overhaul is good. The balance of holdings in counties, counties in duchies, duchies in kingdoms, and kingdoms in empires works about as good as it's going to work in the game. Areas that are prone to fragmentation have their own little kingdoms that can form and break away, although independence revolts are still way too rare. It was very common in the Middle Ages for border regions to slip into nominal suzerainty and it's immensely frustrating that CK1 supported that dynamic but CK2 does not. The custom rules list is more inclusive and permissive. They let you turn off most of the combat overhaul, you can turn off the free casus belli that everyone gets now, you can fix how religion and culture and disease spread, they have rules that are really effective at curtailing border gore... and all of those options are available without disabling achievements! Paradox tends to have a problem with wanting you to play their sandbox games their way, but the custom rules list is a great feature that empowers the player (if it doesn't overwhelm them). The "shattered world" and "alternate history" game modes look really good if you put in the time to figure out which customization options appeal to you. I couldn't be bothered myself, but... The interface for raising a kid has a lot more clarity, making it virtually impossible to make a fucked-up idiot or to send away your heir to be raised by a cave bear. There are even highlighted icons to help you figure out what education is best for them! Cons The rest of the interface is abjectly terrible. The diplomatic menu is flooded with so many choices that you'll never take, the intrigue menu has a lot of good automation options but is otherwise a nightmare hidden submenus, and the council and laws menus are tabs within tabs within tabs. I have a great memory for these kind of things and even I get lost trying to find the button to click to forbid someone from leading an army or to change a law to let me appoint women to my council. I don't know how they're going to improve this for the next game, but they gotta find something better than medieval-themed pivot tables. The council is still a pain to interact with and a source of constant aggravation if you disempower them. There's this whole system of factions and agendas and favors, but ultimately it's irrelevant. Councilors will never vote against their own best interest, no matter their relationship with you or your rivals, so every law change is simply a matter of dumping money into the council. I literally can't imagine a player who wouldn't put the law that disempowers them on the fast track after a few decades of play. Relatedly, favors seem to be nerfed? There's not much that you can do with a favor, especially if there's a large power disparity between the character who owes the favor and the character to whom the favor is owed, except requesting to be on the council, but most characters on your council are the ones with high stats whom you'd want there anyway, so owing them a favor costs you absolutely nothing. Crusades and jihads are pointless back-and-forth all-or-nothing affairs that now leave you fabulously wealthy if you just go along with what the pope wants and don't try to grab land for yourself. I really have no idea what the new Holy Fury DLC changed in that respect, but at least you can set the custom rules to keep random AI rulers from getting Mediterranean-spanning empires, and the game makes it easy to switch to a relative of yours who claimed a title in the Holy Land if you want. I guess it's not as bad as it could be, but it's telling that my favorite thing about the system is that you can opt out, same as with the council. Empires, especially the Holy Roman Empire, are still far too powerful and stable. I think that they've changed the way that voting in the HRE works to keep the emperor from being able to push any law through with brute force by creating more vassal dukes who love him for giving them titles, by instituting a bespoke "elector" system, but it's still way too easy for the emperor to fend off all comers and to expand at the expense of its neighbors. The HRE is simply too big and too culturally homogeneous (especially after vassals in Italy and Burgundy start converting to German for the opinion boost) to stay weak and fragmented like it was historically. At the very least they've made the switch to primogeniture difficult enough that it takes at least a century before the emperor is the hereditary title of whatever family was in power when the stars aligned, but it's still deflating. I have been a constant thorn in the side of the HRE and it's still annexed Poland and much of Croatia, Hungary, and Denmark. The alliance system is still bad. A single-degree blood or marriage relation gives you a non-aggression pact, which you can upgrade to a full alliance with a diplomatic action, but the death of your current character forces you to renew all your non-aggression pacts that are less than three degrees and then upgrade them again to alliances, unless they remain within a single degree... It's so fussy and so easy to forget about until you're under attack and you realize that the king of Bohemia and the duke of Swabia have no diplomatic relations with you. At least they removed the penalty for allying with someone while at war? And don't get me started on coalitions, which seem to be a way of punishing the player for doing too much in an already-slow game. I turned them off in the custom rules and thank heavens I could. So... basically, it looks like my issues are largely the same as two years ago. Still ready for Crusader Kings 3! If they could have interpenetrating fiefs with multiple lords, that'd be great (and terrible).
  12. Netflix Originals

    The Haunting of Hill House was not good, but it was full of good moments that tantalized me, like chocolate chips in an underbaked cookie. There were themes that I really liked, most of all the implication that our experience of the present moment is, by the simple fact of how our consciousness works, inevitably and completely interpenetrated by the past and the future, and therefore that a solitary trauma can destroy someone's life with its reverberations. It's also interesting to think of a haunted house or, more relevantly, a broken social system as a predator that hunts us down through our anxiety and guilt and then feeds on our weaknesses. Unfortunately, that was all smothered by the writing's willingness to make a given scene about whatever was convenient for the next plot beat, so these motifs of damage and dysfunction had to coexist next to themes of openness, forgiveness, and community. Every part of the show was most concerned with short-term impact. The actors, though competent even down to the children among them, were stuck playing characters who spent so much time being dysfunctional that we didn't really get to appreciate the cause and effect behind that dysfunction. And don't even get me started on the endless succession of monologues and voiceovers in the last couple of episodes! God forbid we don't know exactly what's happening in any given second of an already broad and obvious narrative. The thing is, even considering those two paragraphs of griping, I mostly enjoyed it. It's sorely overwritten and overdirected, it's weighed down by a desire to scare without really upsetting you, and it's too long yet desperately in need of stronger characterization and payoffs... Yes, all of those things are true, but watching seemingly talented people making something ineluctably mediocre has become a private pleasure of mine, perhaps by necessity, so I don't mind Mike Flanagan trying to spook me with some grody ghosts while he wonders aloud what we owe each other. I do mind him lifting the opening monologue of S-Town about antique clocks and witness marks beat for beat, though. It's a far better allegory for the hidden intricacies of a person's life than for, uh... ghosts in a scary old house? Did Mike Flanagan just think that no one listened to S-Town and he could get away with ripping off its most enduring imagery? I'll never know because I don't want to find out.
  13. I Had a Random Thought (About Video Games)

    (Oh wow, The Mask looks really bad now.)
  14. anime

    Yeah, I'm not saying that the end result came as a particular surprise for me. I was already cynical about how big production companies, Production IG in particular, have made it a policy of consolidating legacy properties and giving them to young writers and directors in order to help them get their sea legs with a product that basically can't fail. In the abstract, I even approve somewhat, given that the first generation of anime creatives has begun to pass away and the second generation is looking to retire. I just wish they'd had something more to say with it? As it stands, the two sequels feel like a business decision rather than a passion project... which I know they were, but still. I guess anime's catching the fever for obligatory sequels, same as every other creative industry, and I guess that it's good that it's just as much to train the next generation as to make scads of money. I just want more, especially from something as storied as FLCL, and not for it to serve merely as a loose thematic framework for coming-of-age stories. At least, after making a dog's breakfast of Ghost in the Shell with the awful ARISE OVAs and The New Movie, it looks like Kenji Kamiyama's coming back to the franchise, hopefully to direct a third season of Stand-Alone Complex rather than to continue the over-grim, over-dramatic world of ARISE.
  15. anime

    I finally got around to watching FLCL Alternative yesterday. While it was much better than FLCL Progressive, which leaned way too hard into the "pseudo-scientific lore" and "deliberately exotic and ambiguous imagery" axes of the original OVA series, it still felt almost as oddly lightweight in its themes and their presentation. It's like Motohiro Katsuyuki (best known for Psycho-Pass), Uemura Yutaka (best known for Saga of Tanya the Evil), and Iwai Hideto (best known for... nothing? He's written for and acted in some live-action horror movies, I guess) had a great idea for the first episode of FLCL Alternative (which is really, truly wonderful, the best thing to come out of this revival) and a good idea for the last two episodes (which has its charms, sure, in its message of change being natural, inevitable, painful, and necessary), and they just had to kill time for the middle three episodes because it has to have six episodes to be FLCL. The aimlessness is really reflected in the adult characters, especially prime minister and the head of the agency, who come off like they're waiting around for the finale from the very first episode. Even Haruko's just kind of... there, like she's a permanent fixture of the FLCL world now rather than an agent of chaos in it. Still, the shift in focus from age 12 to 17 and from a single alienated boy to a group of anxious girls was welcome, albeit shifting from well-trodden ground to even more well-trodden ground, and I didn't finish the last episode regretting my time in their world like I did with FLCL Progressive's stupid dueling Harukos and magical Transformer headphones. Overall, the two new versions of FLCL aren't as bad as I was worried that they'd be, but they're still amateurish efforts to copy a work that's unrepeatable, not just because of the level of creative talent that went into it but because the landscape of anime has changed enough to make a trippy mecha adventure as coming-of-age allegory feel... well, rote. It doesn't help that Production IG seems determined to grab these landmark properties like Ghost in the Shell and FLCL and then hand them off to neophyte teams that struggle to make their own voices heard in them. Much better to let them make their own names with new adaptations, like Nomura Kazuya (who made the execrable Ghost in the Shell: The New Movie) is doing with Run with the Wind.
  16. Bloozzard

    I am also a bit leery that Blizzard's general tendency in remasters towards "excessive detail as art direction" will make Warcraft Reforged look theoretically better but practically worse than the original (which, I agree with Deadpan, still holds up marvelously), but I think that Blizzard's going to Blizzard and I'll probably buy it anyway because Warcraft 3 made my teens.
  17. Movie/TV recommendations

    Nah, I think the special spice was the interaction between Pizzolatto's writing and Cary Fukunaga's directing, but the two clashed repeatedly during the filming and seem to have parted on bad terms, at least to gauge from the inclusion of a primadonna film director wearing Fukunaga's trademark braid-and-bun in the third episode of the second season of True Detective. Pizzolatto also seems to have taken steps to keep another director from exerting the same level of influence on the production, given that no director helmed more than two episodes of the second season and most only got one. I was glad to hear that Jeremy Saulnier, the director behind the excellent Blue Ruin and Green Room, was on board to direct an unspecified number of episodes in the third season, but then he exited the project after only two and Pizzolatto stepped up to co-direct the remaining six with Daniel Sackheim, a fairly rank-and-file TV director. It seems like Pizzolatto has trouble sharing his toys, which is unsurprising given that his only other experience before True Detective was working in the writer's room for The Killing and disliking the lack of control there, and I can't help but wonder if the lack of a strong directorial vision between the episodes of the second season were what made it so underwhelming for many people. Who knows, maybe sharing the directing chair with a guy who's done everything from Law and Order to The Walking Dead to Game of Thrones will be enough to help Pizzolatto achieve the vision that he clearly feels he has. I'm certainly open to (and would welcome) that possibility!
  18. Movie/TV recommendations

    It was dead for a while, but I think HBO is looking at a near future where Game of Thrones is finished, its spinoffs don't take off, and people continue to not really care about Westworld, so they're flinging as many balls into the air in the hopes that some of them stay up there long enough to catch people's attention. That's why Deadwood's getting a movie sequel, for instance. There was a bunch of noise six or so months ago about how Milch was joining the revived show in a major production role, but of course it was just a stunt and the show's actually looking quite severely undercast except for Mahershala Ali.
  19. Movie/TV recommendations

    Ugh, I just read that all David Milch contributed to the upcoming third season of True Detective was a co-author credit on the fourth episode's script. Otherwise, it's the same authoritarian grip of Nick Pizzolatto that drove the second season into the ground, down even to forcing a popular and talented director out of the project over creative differences. Bummer.
  20. Cyberpunk 2077

    I think there's a "silent majority" element to it, as well, as there is to most reactionary bigotry since at least the Goldwater and Nixon years. These racists, homophobes, and transphobes think that the general public (and especially the gaming public) overwhelmingly think that race, sexuality, and gender issues are a ridiculous fad and therefore they're only offending a hundredth of a percent of the people who'll view Cyberpunk 2077 tweets (and most of them are faking that offense because... reasons). That entire population is contained to Tumblr and a few SJW-aligned gaming sites, and the rest of the people who see the tweet probably think it's really funny but they're afraid to speak up. It's all a sick, self-reinforcing worldview.
  21. Looking for pacifist games

    That's a great suggestion, especially now that there's an unofficial patch that's fixed a lot of that game's bugs and made there be a bit more flexibility in the One True Build Order to beat climate change.
  22. anime

    I hate promoting my content on other sites here, but I've got an OP- and ED-review series called Wednesdays Watching Anime on my personal blog, something that I'll be winding down in the next month or so as I transition to a Mad Men rewatch with a friend, and I'm really proud of my write-up on Nadia: Secret of the Blue Water and the spectre of Hideaki Anno in the fandom. Read it if you like! Golden Kamuy is highly arc-driven and some of those arcs appear to go nowhere, but I think the first cour finishes strong and the second is a good start. We'll see! It's not like they lack for source material.
  23. Life

    Spoilered because this isn't the cat thread:
  24. The Good Place

    Yeah, I think that's the best thing about The Good Place, as others have observed. It's got the perfect setup to dump any premise that isn't working or is taking too long.
  25. Life

    Thanks, Osmosisch. I'd forgotten how little I've been sharing on here, honestly. Yeah, 2017 was a big pit of depression because of political and personal things, and 2018 has been a little better with the latter, at least. I have a job and a cat and I bought some new furniture that makes my apartment look less like a sad person lives there. I have also been trying my hand with Tinder since early spring, but haven't been really pleased with the results: four months of dating an incredibly neurotic lawyer who ghosted on me when I cancelled a date because of a migraine and... the second date that I'm going on tonight. I keep feeling like I'm having trouble with connecting with people, but part of that is probably me still healing from what was a six-month breakup with a multi-year fallout and part of that is Tinder being full of goose eggs (which, honestly, is some of the appeal, because there's less pressure).