Gormongous

Sometimes it's a fairly awkward RMA process with the manufacturer, but yes, I've never bought a non-working computer part from a reputable seller and not been able to return it, even weeks later.

Yeah, my take is that the showrunners are (mostly) excellent adapters of material who were betrayed in previous seasons by a lack of certainty about where that material was actually going. Given free reign in the world that they helped to build, their pacing has quickened but become impossibly uneven, with scenes being chosen and crafted for short-term effect only. Characters act inconsistently and events fall out of nowhere because the eye's only on the climax of the episode, the last two episodes of the season, and nothing else. It's thrilling TV, to be sure, but not good, at least not for me. It's BSG if every season ended like the first or Breaking Bad if every finale had a near miss between Walt and Hank.

Nick should keep talking about Total War: Warhammer, because nothing is better than Chris murmuring, "Ah, [faction name]," every time Nick says a Warhammer term. Also, I think the Dwarves are Byzantium? Norsca is definitely the Vikings.

I haven't noticed an appreciable change, personally. Nudity, torture, and rape are still recurring devices for the plot, it's more that the plot's moving so much faster that there's less time for that loving touch. Game of Thrones still wants to shock you, desperately so. It's just too busy to do it like it used to.

I'm not on Slack right now, where this has certainly been posted, but here's a good article on the ways that this season of Game of Thrones is different and what they mean for the show as a whole: http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2016/06/how-game-of-thrones-became-a-different-show/489305/ I'm not as bullish as the author, feeling as I do that I'm already flush with "exciting" TV but that doesn't mean I get much in the way of "meaningful" TV. Still, an excellently incisive summation.

I don't mean to sound elitist, but this is depressing: https://www.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=10154067682497745&id=70101247744 Nozomi/RightStuf asked people for the license of their dreams, and the overwhelming answers are "more Bleach" and "more Berserk." Do these people, presumably fans of anime, not know the difference between anime licensing and anime production and between companies that do one or the other? Also, Sayonara Zetsubou-Sensei is the only correct answer to post.

The first Google return for "Perdido Street Station steampunk" is someone saying that someone told them it was steampunk but they didn't agree, and then a bunch of people echoing that sentiment. I'm in Denmark right now, though, and might be getting atypical results. PSS is just not steampunk to me. The technological aesthetic is mostly there, but not the world or its themes. It's as much steampunk, in the way I understand steampunk outside of cosplay, as Alien is cyberpunk.

If you're describing steampunk as the aesthetics of a work's setting, maybe Perdido Street Station is steampunk, but genre definitions usually touches on more than aesthetics (except on the internet, where aesthetics are king and KonoSuba and SAO are considered part of the same genre). To be fair, third generation "-punk" descriptors ARE entirely aesthetic, at this point. I've literally never seen a definition of dieselpunk from author or critic that wasn't just "I like the look of machinery after the death of Victoria but before the Second World War."

I don't really think of Perdido Street Station as steampunk fiction, not like The Difference Engine is. To me, steampunk set out to ask what it would look like if the mechanisms of communication and control from the age of transnational corporations were present in the age of transnational governments. That's very distinct from Mieville's replacement of Tolkien's aesthetic and societal outlook with Dickens' as the foundational genius of modern fantasy.

As a historian, the ways that people have consciously and unconsciously structured the actions of various parties into a single narrative here is really a fascinating example of "hot" topics in history like memory and the agency of memory. It'll be a great dissertation for someone, a few decades from now...

The #GamerGate meme was a riff on that (and hence the name of the IRC channel that coordinated raids on Quinn for months before dumping its chat logs online to "prove" that her description of the channel was overblown... only it wasn't).

History bears this kind of thing out as cyclical, going back at least to the late eighteenth century. A generation experiences a cataclysm that forces them to move more towards humanitarian and liberal action, then the moment that the majority of that generation has passed on, there's a rightward and nationalist counterstroke that usually precipitates the next cataclysm. Every forty to seventy years, like clockwork, which is very depressing. The implication was nakedly "We'd give more money to the NHS, but we're flat broke after paying all these membership and service fees to the EU. If you could get us out of that obligation..." It reminds me of a common observation about the US political cycle: present issues with the economy in the form of issues with the nation's "household budget" and people will overwhelmingly vote however you spin it, even though the national economy and your typical household couldn't be more different. We can't have free universities and healthcare because there are no raises in the global marketplace, duh! http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2016/06/24/british_voters_regretting_their_decisions_a_roundup.html

Yeah, I'm also waiting until the mid-summer DLC deploys, then I plan to see how the technical glitches have cleared up. I still think of it as one of the better strategy games of 2016, in a bounteous but rocky year.

I've seen several articles claim that Nigel Farage's desultory attempts to connect the Brexit to the fate of the NHS moved a lot of voters to cast for "leave." Lots of old people afraid that the EU is stealing their healthcare, apparently.

I would also like to get back into Helldivers. I fell out during winter break and never came back properly. Bjorn, a warning that same-screen coop shares the same profile, so only one of you will be earning experience and unlocking weapons. Depending on your available funds, it might be worth it to buy some DLC items to mix things up, else it's going to be a boring initial few hours until you're able to equip starkly different loadouts.

Hey, I am really anxious about my conference in Denmark this weekend! I am trying to focus on just going there, giving my paper, and then having a normal vacation in the sleepy town of Odense.

Yeah, I really enjoy singing the Doxology and there's basically no place in my life for it now that I haven't gone to church in nearly a decade.

I agree. It seems to me as if its moment has definitely passed.

Agreed! I like secret games and Chris is apparently all about them. First the bear, now this...

I mean, that's the foundational flaw of almost all fantasy, isn't it? It's always high drama unless it's doing low grit. Anyway, I'm excited to find out if Under Heaven holds its promise together.

I've been told for years that you either "get" Guy Gavriel Kay or you don't, but I just read the beginning of Under Heaven and, despite plenty of the cod-purple prose that's way too common in fantasy writing, it has easily the best single-chapter hook of anything I've read in years. I guess I "get" Kay!

I could go on forever, but that last one is so good.

I know that Sanders isn't likely to be radically different, but only one candidate currently has a record of hawkish actions, completely with a proudly-stated friendship and mentorship with fuckin' Kissinger. When I say that I support Sanders, people have told me to look at actions before words, so I'm doing that here, where suddenly it's unfair. I also agree that Clinton's warmongering has been overstated, but it's equally important not to underrate the consequences of Clinton's pet projects. News sources have been unanimous that Clinton spearheaded the "lead from behind" coalition that bombed Libya to cinders and left it a warring patchwork of radicals and slavers. Obama is generally agreed to have been reluctant to intervene in order to prevent the humanitarian crisis, but Clinton is on the record as pushing hard and ultimately creating the humanitarian crisis that she sought to avert. Events have proven that she had no plan for peacekeeping or reconstruction, even less than the Republican agendas in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the country is still a wasteland for it. I don't think that history will rank Clinton's bombing of Libya any lower than Kissinger's bombing campaign that brought the Khmer Rouge to power (http://www.salon.com/2016/02/12/henry_kissingers_mad_and_illegal_bombing_what_you_need_to_know_about_his_real_history_and_why_the_sandersclinton_exchange_matters/). And that's not to discount the actions of the State Department elsewhere, in Honduras and Mexico. I feel that it's dangerous to present all of the "tough" decisions that Clinton made as unavoidable and all military actions as roughly equivalent in impact.

I hate to say it, but you can say that because you have no chance whatsoever of being at a wedding targeted by a hawk's drone strike. Millions of people who aren't in that situation would probably you rather chance inexperience.