Gormongous

I really only have two resolutions this new year, and both are career-related. First, I need to stop being so introverted in my professional life. I'm actually a pretty social person in private, thanks to years of trying at it, but I can't ignore anymore that I've been blowing off conference presentations and making excuses not to publish because dealing with my academic peers stresses me out so much. It's only a little bit odd never to have given a paper by the time you finish your masters, but once on your Ph.D they should be a yearly fixture for you. Ugh, and I'm going to hate it so much. I just need to remind myself that everyone else's ideas suck just as much as mine, but we each possess only the knowledge to perceive our own suck. Second, I need to learn Italian. I've got basic reading competency, like with German and French, but my dissertation is primarily about updating a hundred-year-old monograph in Italian, which will involve close reading and archive visits. I don't really know how this is going to go over either, since my institution doesn't have Italian courses and I don't do well with immersion programs like Rosetta Stone, so I'll probably have to cajole the other aspiring Italianists into a reading group or something. Yay, more professional interaction! Hopefully they'll feed into each other just like that. I know I sound down about all this, but my New Year's resolutions are usually about personal self-improvement, which I handle quite well. I'd resolve to correct others less or be more generous around others and accomplish enough by next year that I'm satisfied. So it's better to start doing things outside my comfort zone that I know will be good for me.

Speedy Desiato, right? Shame, I liked the vague Hitchhiker's Guide reference.

Again, people who aren't interested in listening will say that's just the sort of socioeconomic wizardry only available to Scandinavian folk. Of course, Greece is choking to death on austerity but, to echo Luftmensch, that somehow doesn't count either. I guess austerity is up there with with laissez-faire capitalism for being "theoretically workable and possibly the best system if you'd just shut up with your counterexamples" to some.

Just finished listening to this and then donating to Chris' kickstarter. I was already thrilled to listen to a developer interview with such charisma and candor, but to experience Chris flipping Wildman in my mind from yet another Lords Management I couldn't care less about into the best RPG/RTS hybrid since Warcraft III was nothing short of magical. I really hope this gets the word out, because I have several friends who are big fans of Gas Powered Games but have written off Wildman the exact same way I had.

My first Gamecube died because it dropped four feet onto a stone floor while running. And by "died" I mean "ran just fine for six months more with a huge crack down the middle until the lid clasp gave out from holding the whole damn thing together". So yeah, that's something.

It didn't hurt how badly the X360 shit itself those first couple of years, from a hardware standpoint. My friend still talks nonstop trash about Microsoft because of having to return two RROD consoles, despite still doing almost all his gaming on that platform to this day.

I love this episode, if only for continuing the evolution of Phaedrus from socially awkward criminal through put-upon sibling to failed mastermind. Chris, does the Phaedrus Group have any plans to release the soundtrack of the vlog hack?

Yeah, even the Kutaragi-fueled "cult of hardware" surrounding the PS3 is only the barest approximation of the froth many Apple fans can work themselves into. When your product's form excites as much comment as its function, then you can start to think about charging Apple prices.

Oh man, I'd forgotten the canned bread and the NERV bucket. Actually, most of those sound familiar, maybe I followed that thread in a different life. What's really great is the Evangelion hotel room. The ad copy said something about spending a night in Rei's room and I got excited, imagining something like this: Instead, we get something like this: What the what. That's not Rei's room. That's like the Thumbs' joke about a Jurassic Park built to commemorate the events of Jurassic Park.

He knows it's nothing but net.

I feel skeevy just friending you out of nowhere for this code, Korax, so hopefully you can see this and know I'm not a creep. Edit: Thanks, Korax! Feeling only mildly skeevy now.

I've spent a lot of time thinking about this, ever since I soured my college roommate on anime recommendations from me after he found Neon Genesis Evangelion too old (4:3 aspect ratio, hand-animated, hand-colored) and too annoying (Shinji is disempowered, Asuka is overassertive). The thing is, the Rebuild movies do work fine on their own. They're good stories based on a well-considered precedent. I've shown them on their own to a couple people who I knew were never going to sit through a seventeen-year-old anime series about loneliness, depression, and the apocalypse. But if you haven't seen the TV show in its entirety, a lot of the "oh shit" moments are missing or invisible. Shinji's SDAT player, Rei cooking dinner, and Asuka testing EVA-03 are all just plot points, rather than earth-shattering deviations. Especially in Eva 2.22, where seems like more of a standard end to a love story without the events of End of Evangelion in mind. On the other hand, a couple of the changes I'm still not sold on (pretty much just this Mari Makinami Illustrious bullshit) maybe aren't as jarring. So I don't know. I don't think there's any good compromise between watching all or watching nothing. I'm actually quite the apologist for Evangelion: Death and Rebirth, mostly because of how Anno plays with his growing interest in theatricality, scripts, and roles as an analogue to the intersection between personality and society, but I don't know if it's a functional replacement for the series as a whole. I mean, it's pretty complete in its summary of events, mostly due to Anno's love of stark and cryptic title cards, but so much of Evangelion's meaning is in the silence and stillness between events (a good article here on that here) that I don't know if Death & Rebirth works without some foreknowledge. I'd say just go with the movies, it's your call. If he loves them, you can always reward him with the pleasant surprise that is the existence of the series. Have you seen the Schick ads for Eva 3.0 that involved Gendo shaving off his beard and shaking his depression? Best (worst). I've read the manga up to volume six, but it's kinda left me cold. I don't like how Shinji's passive-aggressive instead of just passive or how his increased closeness to Rei overdoes the Freudian undertones. But I'll keep reading and probably regret my words here sooner or later.

I found the settings file in My Documents and was thrilled to see this line I'm thinking of doubling day length, because I have trouble crossing the island during daylight in the time I'm given. But I'm weirdly hesitant to fuck with the particulars of the game experience. You can also hide the time-advancing pixie circle, I can't even imagine how that would play out.

The Call of Duty crowd is confirmed to have tons of money. How much money does the Splinter Cell crowd have? Unknown. Do the math, guys.

I think it must have been a high-level marketing decision that was considered common knowledge among anime creators from about 1997 to 2005. Almost every seinen series I've watched from that time period starts out with five or six episodes of pure comedy that introduce the protagonist as a wacky goofball, before gradually introducing thematic elements that culminate in an actual dramatic plot through the teens and twenties. I guess they thought that people wouldn't watch a series that was dark and serious from square one, but it's baffling anyway, because no one likes it. I mean, I liked it in Trigun until I realized it wasn't their stylistic choice but rather following the crowd.

Yeah, it was, but it's forty-two episodes and still going strong. I've heard rumors of a sixty-four- or sixty-five-episode run? Maybe you'd be better off watching Planetes instead pending Space Brothers ending. They're both about basically the same thing, but Planetes has some really good hard sci-fi going on once you get past the obligatory early-2000s goofy opening half-season (see: Trigun). I'm also going to add my voice to those recommending Mushishi, which is this great episodic series of Japanese-flavored fables about how people interact with each other and their environment, and maybe submit Oh! Edo Rocket as well. It's the studio that did the first Fullmetal Alchemist, but the writer of Tenga Toppa Gurren Lagann, and it preserves the sensibilities of the latter, but in the guise of a magical-realism comedy skit. I don't know, I was thrilled to see they'd released the complete series for twenty-five dollars on Amazon, so it's at the front of my mind right now.

The shoujo-ness (and the heavy yaoi undertones) of Toward the Terra really turned me off, though I had a good time watching the series overall. I like space a lot, as with many here. But I should probably go back and edit my comments about Space Battleship Yamato 2199, because I've watched half the series now, and only because that's all that's available right now. It's pure melodrama, where the good guys face obstacles but triumph through their goodness in the end, but it's really, really fun at the same time. It's the same way I feel about the art in this series: generations of artists and writers have polished this script and these designs to a mirror sheen. There's nothing left not to like. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U8QWBiPfDSM I mean, never has an OP captured the spirit of an anime more perfectly. The lyrics even explain the premise so there're no surprises.

I want to talk about some of the experiences I've had, but I don't want to rob anyone else of them. Suffice to say, this is a game that encapsulates everything beautiful about all four seasons. Watching the island change before my eyes was transcendent. The days are too short, really. Edit: Oh god, the Steam Community page JKO linked is nothing short of toxic. Read RPS' review instead.

The thing is, The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya wants you to think it's just another Lucky Star, but it's actually about God falling in love, which is why themes of disappointment and disillusionment, compulsion and free will appear in every episode. Each character in the SOS Brigade is such a pointed caricature of high school slice-of-life anime archetypes after the mid-2000s moe boom (the Rei expy, the moe blob, the tsundere, the wonder boy, the potato-kun) that, if people really think it's the flagship for all that, they're not far removed from those arguing (not without cause) that Fight Club endorses fascism. I don't know, the "Endless Eight" arc in the second season and the subsequent movie really drove home to me that The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya is fine with you thinking it's just slice-of-life with an omnipotent asshole at the reins, but there is more to it if you're willing to look (especially if you watch the episodes in broadcast order rather than DVD order, the latter being Kyon's POV but the former Haruhi's). Awesome point about Anno's masterful use of visual matches and extended motifs in the Rebuild movies, though. Totally agree. He knows what he's doing there to a frightening degree, especially when he calls back to End of Evangelion: I just downloaded and watched a couple episodes. It's good, I guess. I mean, I think I'll keep watching, but it's really just Space Battleship Yamato with CGI. Lasers flash, ships explode, men give speeches, and the good guys win. Except the seventies hair and the jingoism goes down a little less smooth, maybe.

Yeah, the devs coded the audio engine to use OpenAL in a way that makes Creative sound cards, which use a proprietary OpenAL variant called ALchemy, crash the system. They don't have a Soundblaster in their office (and can't afford one, maybe?) so they aren't able to work out a solution, except to force the game to use software audio with a modified shortcut.

I wonder if it's at all to do with Kathryn Bigelow getting raked over the coals for not explicitly condemning torture in Zero Dark Thirty.

Maybe you should set up a chair and cut off one of your legs, instead. I'd post my view, but I work in a windowless office and my apartment looks out on the nearby Red Cross parking lot where drug deals go down all the time, so maybe not.

Yeah, avast! has cute little noises that play when you find a virus, to make you feel like you're a cool sysop in a sci-fi movie, but apparently disabling them does not preclude the program from accessing my sound card drivers. Anyway, apparently it's something to do with how the game uses XRAM and OpenAL, so when you switch to another program that accesses the sound card driver, the system service associated with it goes down and takes the OS with it. I think. I'm not terribly learned in the language of BSODs, but SYSTEM_SERVICE_EXCEPTION seems pretty self-explanatory. This is a good game though, really. Just update your drivers and maybe wait until release if you have a Creative card?

So Rebuild of Evangelion 3.0 came out a couple months back and the second Berserk movie just got subtitled, so this feels like the perfect time for me to revive this thread. My two favorite anime series of the nineties are getting multi-movie theatrical reboots! And all I can think is that neither replaces their predecessor, though each for separate and telling reasons. The Rebuild movies are really good. I can't say that enough. It's great to see Hideaki Anno, the creator and director, come back and weave the same story and atmosphere with radically different tone and themes. It's made me realize that, for all that "infinite replayability" is tossed around in various industries, the Evangelion franchise is one of the few for me that really deserves it. Every time I watch the show all the way through, depending on my mood, it becomes something different: a Gnosticism-flavored giant-robot sci-fi, a time capsule of millennarial apocalypticism, a multi-tiered psychological study, a parable of human inadequacy and frailty, and so on... To see Anno explore different themes using the same iconic characters and events is thrilling, because it realizes the potential of the franchise so well. The new Evangelion movies do not replace the series because there are more stories to be told. On the other hand, the new Berserk movies are pretty good. I have to keep saying that. True, I find the computer-drawn art uncanny to the point of distraction, but the series I know and love is still present, albeit in two-hour chunks. But that's really the problem: it's the same damn story. Berserk is great for being hard-nosed and unflinching with the consequences its characters incur, but its narrative of trust, betrayal, and vengeance is not terribly deep. It lives to shock you, but a movie reboot that's pretty much shot-for-shot doesn't do that too much, not unless you're so steeped in the series that, like me, you notice when they cut a recurring cameo early or telegraph a future plot point better. Maybe this'll be like the Fullmetal Alchemist reboot, where it'll improve drastically once out from under the shadow of its forerunner, but I'm not holding my breath. The new Berserk movies do not replace the series because the series has already told their story. Damn, but it was nice to see the "century-slayer" scene go down without the animators struggling to cut costs, though. I could watch a whole damn movie of Guts just killing people, which is precisely what the manga turns into after the Golden Age arc the movies cover. So maybe I am a bit optimistic, I don't know. Has anyone else seen anything good lately?

I'd love to play, but there's been a bug since the closed beta where the game will BSOD if there's another program running that uses the sound card, which includes my antivirus for some reason. Since it only affects Soundblaster X-Fi Titanium cards, which have been deprecated by Creative, the developers have said they're in no hurry to fix it. Makes me sad, I had a lot of fun in between restarts.