Gormongous

Hah, Mako is great, but she's the "wacky" character from a hyperreal comedy, so she doesn't get the same points from me that Saten does for being funny, weird, and charming in an anime that's as dour and self-involved as the second season of Railgun. Honestly, the only thing that kept me going through Misaka's absurd martyr complex and her budding feelings for human spitball Touma was the prospect of returning to the strengths of the first season: namely Kuroko, Uiharu, and Saten. Even Kuroko's somewhat rapey affection for Misaka, hitherto a black mark on my enjoyment, would have been better as the show's defining element than Misaka's self-flagellating guilt that she allowed a research hospital to scan her genome when she was a preschooler and now that hospital is systematically slaughtering thousands of clones of her in the name of some nebulously evil plot.

Yeah, I wanted to note to Chris and Nick that multiplayer in the Souls games, especially the more recent entries, is really quite open and friendly in its structure. If your character is not embered, which causes them to glow like a hot coal, then you are effectively playing a singleplayer game. Once your character is embered, which also boosts maximum health by thirty percent, you will be able to see glowing signs in a flowing cursive on the floor, especially near bonfires and boss rooms. White and gold signs are people who will join your game and fight alongside you until you beat a boss. Red signs are people who will join your game with the intent of killing you. Purple signs are people who can attack both enemies and you (I'm not entirely sure what the point of them is, the number of available signs is never going to be low enough for them to be worth the risk over a white or gold sign). Also, while embered, you are vulnerable to being invaded by red phantoms of other players anywhere, especially if you've recently summoned a white or gold phantom, and certain areas also have hostile blue phantoms from covenants that are charged with "defending" those areas from embered players. Finally, there are blue phantoms that will be summoned to protect you if you're a member of a certain covenant, the Way of the Blue, although I hear that not many people are part of the latter covenant, probably out of a sense of rugged individualism, and therefore the scene there is pretty dead. If you want to join other people's games, you can buy the white soapstone from the Maiden at the Firelink Shrine and use it to inscribe your own white sign on the floor. People will summon you to their games and you'll get to keep a quarter of the souls that are earned from defeating a boss. There is no penalty if you or the host dies, besides time spent and the end of your tenure together. If you feel like playing conservatively and keeping risk low, it's a good way to explore an area and learn a boss without risking any of your own souls.

Well, Dick wanted to write a sequel more because he was dissatisfied with the place where the plot ended. He felt like it was incomplete and obfuscated the "truth" of the work. He tried at least four times to write a sequel and failed each time, either abandoning the work or turning it into something different, because he found it so distasteful to research the Nazis and write characters in their mentality. The Ganymede Takeover, Radio Free Albemuth, and VALIS are all rumored to have begun as sequels to The Man in the High Castle. Also, you probably want to give the show a pass. I only made it about halfway through, but it was totally caught up in the spectacle of a Nazi-occupied America. The self-awareness of being fictional history is virtually absent, except for the incredibly conventional touches that you've seen in a dozen movies and books where the Nazis won, and all the other themes, about colonialism and forgeries especially, are minimized, mostly because the focus is on the ridiculous bolted-on "resistance" plot instead. The performances by Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa and Rufus Sewell are good, but otherwise there's not too much to recommend it.

Even though the second season of A Certain Scientific Railgun is actually somewhat terrible—mostly because it imports a bunch of characters and their attendant pathos from the main series A Certain Magical Index rather than remaining a side story without that baggage, as summarized in several Karmaburn posts on the show (especially the middle one)—I am going to propose that Saten Ruiko is not only Best Girl in a show that's absolutely full of badass girls, but possibly Best Girl in all of anime. My argument, in three parts: 1. Saten regularly greets her best friend, the shy and studious Uiharu, by flipping up the latter's skirt and remaking upon the underwear that she's wearing. Rather than mocking her for her childish taste, as the trope usually plays out elsewhere in anime, Saten seems to be genuinely interested in what underwear appeals to Uiharu, often congratulating her on particularly cute or mature selections. Very few circumstances are able to dissuade Saten from performing this friendly duty. 2. When a rumor begins circulating that prepaid cards, still full of tens of thousands of yen, are being hidden in alleyways all over Academy City, Saten decides to sniff out the truth... literally. She makes no effort whatsoever to be dignified in this pursuit. She even takes the city's youth under her tutelage. 3. In the finale of the second season, when the most powerful psychics in Academy City are charged with defending an exhibition hall from an onslaught of twenty thousand combat mechs, Saten is there on the front lines, even though she is ranked as a "level zero" without any psychic ability or even potential. She acquits herself admirably. Later, she pilots a giant robot while shouting the cry, "Battle panties!" Ladies and gentlemen of the forum, I rest my case.

Yeah, my friend's argument was never quite that The Incredibles was Randian in premise, more just broadly elitist and privileged, by creating a plot where those born with superpowers deserve them, even if they use them irresponsibly, and those without do not. Just thought I would add it to the discussion, sorry if it was unhelpful or uninteresting!

If I remember, Dark Souls II was the first Souls game where I made a hybrid melee/caster, because most enemies had non-insignificant physical resistances and spellcasting enchantments to weapons were a must. It definitely felt like a game that was designed by someone who knew the optimal paths that most people took through previous games and set roadblocks across them.

Also, I think that a lot of games, maybe even the vast majority of games, are designed with the assumption that the player ought never to fail while playing them. In most games, if you die, you're unceremoniously reset back to the previous stage with no acknowledgment of failure, like a newbie DM rolling back a game of Dungeons & Dragons after accidentally killing their players' characters. Whatever else you think about the Souls games, they are definitely designed with a set of mechanisms to recognize failure and make up for it: progress lost upon death remains in the world and can be regained, the world state can be reset at will, the cooperative multiplayer is designed to let players both tutor others and experiment themselves, and the fact that the game is perfectly beatable (in terms of narrative progress) without any mechanical progress (leveling up, equipment, upgrades, etc). I have no investment whatsoever in other games copying the supposed difficulty of the Souls games. That's not why I've put double-digit hours into every single one of them. I want more games to copy how the Souls games reject the conventional structure and pacing of low-level gameplay in order to better conform to how players actually build and express competency when playing epic-scale action-adventure games.

Nick is on top of shit, the man with the forum plan.

Yeah, that's exactly the situation of which I was thinking. Batman vs. Superman also had a related groaner with the "Martha" revelation. Anyway, I watched the second season of Better Call Saul and the show still does nothing for me, not really. There was an excellent cliffhanger, which will probably have me tuning back into the show come winter, but Breaking Bad this ain't. More specific thoughts:

I think that the execution of the film finesses this point, but my friend who absolutely hates The Incredibles criticizes the movie for having its villain's supposedly evil plot be "give everyone superpowers" and the resolution be the sabotage of that plan, the villain's death as a callback joke, and the restriction of superpowers to those who are born with them. Presenting this as the right and normal state of things is very troubling to her, no matter how intellectually dishonest Syndrome was with his plot. Note, for instance, that the movie doesn't end with Mr. Incredible returning to his boring job and accepting his role as a father, it ends with him gearing his family up to fight another villain, which undermines the whole "it's more important to be responsible than to be exceptional" reading. I don't know that I can defend that interpretation more than that, because it's not mine, but I know that some people have problems with The Incredibles and it's not just a misapprehension of the movie's themes. Its blend of sensationalized superhero action and personalized family drama makes it an absolutely dynamite film, but it has to choose one of those paradigms for its ending beat and I think the choice of the former undoes it a little bit.

If their house style didn't make it difficult for me to read more than one article every month or so, I'd remember more often that Cracked has some really good pieces of criticism about visual culture. For instance, this listicle of annoying writer cheats in TV and film is practically an inventory of everything that causes me to drop shows these days. The only entries that it's missing are "killing off recurring characters as a substitute for dramatic tension" and "making every antagonist the long-lost friend or lover of the protagonist."

After six hours of a flashing covenant icon and not a single summon, I gave up and farmed enough Wolf's Blood Swordgrass from the Ruined Keep bonfire in the swamp. Not as fun as PvP, but it gave me the items I wanted for my build. I'll come around again on NG+ if I get that far.

Also, that the times are changing and these are interesting times and the interesting times are changing interestingly. The Idle Thumbs episode about the game is spot-on about how it felt like there were at least two different writers on the game: one who laid down the dreary Old West tropes with a fuckin' shovel and another who did a pass on all of the characters and made a select few tolerably close to human beings.

NB: If you're planning to join the Watchdogs of Farron, keep in mind that the range for PvP matchmaking is (roughly) +/-10 SL and +/-2 weapon & shield level, making the sweet spot for that covenant SL 35 to 40 and +3 weapon/shield. I'm feeling this hard right now, as someone who is SL 55 with a +5 claymore and was looking forward to the Wolf Knight's Greatshield that's the final reward of that covenant... I'm going to try again, at peak hours with my +3 zweihander, and if that doesn't work I'll just be sad.

Not a very substantive post, but a comment on We Hunted the Mammoth, about a spokesman for one of Harvard's "final clubs" defending their all-male membership by implying that female members would be in danger of getting raped, gave me a small revelation about feminism and rape culture. I was going to rephrase the comment, but I'll just leave Policy of Madness' words as they are:

Of the five (proper) bosses that I've fought, only the first three had me roll behind them. The next two aren't unique to the series (a teleporting mage and an endless horde) but are different and interesting.

I actually just finished the Cathedral, then cleaned up the lower Swamp. I was panicking with the Cathedral for the first third of it, until I found how all the paths linked together and got a picture of it in my mind, which seems to be a very common dynamic between me and Dark Souls. I find the feeling of choosing forks in games really stressful in general, but it's interesting how it's usually resolved in Dark Souls in particular: anxiety as I realize that two paths diverge and neither is a dead end; relief when I kick down a ladder or open a one-way door; pleasure at traversing the new shortcut and confirming that there are now just two routes to the same place. The Cathedral's good for that dynamic, even more so than the Undead Settlement. Meanwhile, I'm fairly sure that I've killed everyone and grabbed everything in the Swamp, but I will probably never return there because it feels so trackless to me. I think it's a big circle? At one point, I headed right from the bonfire and ended up somewhere that was where I'd headed left before. Anyway, I finally figured out that I had to extinguish the flames (a rare moment where Miyazaki and his team are forced to spell out the player's objectives at the entrance to the level because it's too obscure otherwise) and got out of there. Thank heavens, farewell! I also wasted some titanite getting the zweihander to +3 before deciding that I don't like its moveset. There's been a decision with most greatswords and ultra greatswords to give them all the same (or broadly similar) movesets when one-handed and only make them unique when two-handed, which I don't like at all. I like the aesthetics of swords in this game, but the R2 for each and every one of them is this forward stab that never quite reaches as far as it looks like it should. Without the overhead slam, the zweihander is just a longer, worse-scaling claymore, which... meh, no thanks.

Great return to streaming, guys! Dark Souls 3 and tiki drinks was an unexpected combination, but having a tipsy Nick beat a non-pushover boss with his messed-up character turned out to be a genuine pleasure.

I spent three or four hours in the swamp, getting lost and having those goat guys jump on my head. It was deeply unfun and I'm hoping that the Poisonbite Ring that I found in the Cathedral will make it suck less.

The Cathedral of the Deep has had at least three Greatswords and the Heavy Club as item finds, FYI. I think you're supposed to go there before the swamp, feels like?

Yeah, the two times I've played it, my non-gaming friends loved it because there was nothing for them to master, and it drove my gaming friends absolutely batty because there was nothing for them to master. One of the more hardcore of the latter spent two hours afterward on my couch, brainstorming ideas for how to fix the destiny/story endgame, which I also found to be the bigger weakness of the game (you're making a bet (with yourself?) about which of two (nebulous?) groupings of events you will overcome(?) in what proportions). A few of his ideas resembled some of Cbirdsong's document, so I think it's just a common impulse of many people, fixing parts of Tales of Arabian Nights.

I had my first encounter with the Watchdogs of Farron. Glad that's back. I'm not sure if I'm being sarcastic in the above comment. Overall, ten hours into the game, I'm harboring positive impressions. Important for me is that they finally figured out the stat system: there's no must-have stat, so I'm actually pumping up class-related stats earlier than pouring points into Endurance or Adaptability to make the game playable. I wonder intermittently if Luck is a "trap" stat, seeing that it serves just to get you items that you won't be able to use without leveling other stats, but it's not remotely as bad as, say, Resistance, in the first Dark Souls. I miss the risk/reward of keeping liquid Humanity around to up the drop rate, but it's probably better to have it all codified in one place, as opposed to having a valuable resource with additional hard-to-notice effects. I like the level design of the first few main-game areas, generally, although fuck trekking through another swamp. The concerns about linearity are totally there, though: the best that it's gotten so far is the Undead Settlement, which seems to have separate paths but a few keys and one-way gates turn it into one big pretzel and that's cool. The other areas have mostly proven to have a more traditional pattern (well, "traditional" for other games) of open area, then bottleneck, then open area, with a few dead-end paths and one-way drops to give the feeling of more space. It's good but not remotely the revelation of, say, the Valley of Drakes linking up with Darkroot Basin, New Londo, and Blighttown. I'm having a lot of problems with human-scale mini-bosses doing the 180-degree pivot swing still, which is very frustrating. I can only beat that one Black Knight one out of three times because of that, and I barely beat the Winged Knight way back at the High Wall because of the same. I also miss multiple targeting points on bosses, I don't see why Miyazaki got rid of that from Dark Souls 2. I haven't gotten into the weapon skills much, because I am playing with a shield and am generally too rusty to experiment. I just got the Black Knight Shield, which allows for one-handed skill use, but it's too heavy until I put more points into Vigor. Vitality? The one that improves carry weight. I like the tweaks to the forging system: the material qualities from Demon's Souls are back, theoretically letting you make any weapon good for any build, but of course it's probably best to make a greatsword Heavy, a rapier Sharp, and so on. I'm drowning in titanite shards, though, and that lets me push more than one weapon with a moveset I like up, to see if I like its progression scheme too. Overall, good changes. I am scared of the poison swamp and will probably be giving myself the rest of the day off from the game because of it. The 20,000 souls I just lost in my last duel with the Black Knight (why do I want to farm his stupid, heavy armor) has nothing to do with anything.

It's a unique pleasure of Dark Souls to enter a visually stunning space, admire it openly, and then realize that it's obviously a boss arena and backtrack to the last bonfire to spend some souls. I'm digging this way more than Dark Souls 2, which I ended up playing through four times, although it feels like it's missing a little bit of the special sauce that I remember from the first Dark Souls. Maybe I'm just not feeling secret blob-snakes and farmer kitsch? I hear the game moves past that, though. I thought I was immune, initially, but then I found the Northern Armor set, which has an open helm, and my game promptly locked and crashed when I went back to a bonfire. It runs great, so long as I keep my knight helmet on!

I was going to respond saying that Dick is notorious for having an extremely spare style of building sentences, especially in forms of thought and speech, but then I remembered that Japanese actually doesn't need referents for its pronouns or subjects for its sentences. It's common, especially in more literary works, to leave out a subject or deny a series of pronouns their referent for multiple sentences, with the implication being that the previous subject or referent still holds, and then either intensifying it by reintroducing it or disrupting it by changing it at a dramatic climax. So... I guess the answer is yes, it's imitating some form of Japanese, but I'm not sure if it's intentional or just a happy accident.

This is always my philosophy in games. When a game ends, the state of the board is frozen, like it is at the end of history. Shitting up my empire and erasing the decisions that I have made over the course of an entire game, just to make another player's victory less complete, is absolutely inconceivable to me. Of course, most of my friends don't see it the same way, but having a reputation of being the "principled" one in a group of gamers isn't that bad...