Gormongous

To answer your question, I really get a lot out of having a shared history with someone. If I've dated someone for a non-trivial amount of time, their continued friendship is important to me, so long as they weren't terrible to me during that time. Still, everyone's right that there's no point in shared history if it's principally a means for my ex to shame me over an extremely exaggerated interpretation of my actions during that history. I've found that she's generally the kind of person who has to shit all over her former relationship to be able to "move on," which didn't really bother me because I was there and I know it wasn't a living hell like she sometimes says, but four years is definitely beyond the statute of limitations for low blows like I still get from her. I don't think she's trying to move on, I think she just hates me and doesn't really realize it. Cue my exit, yeah. Again, thanks everyone for your kind words. It's good to get this kind of support.

In light of the brief exchange that Osmo and I had a few pages back, why did no one tell me that Tad Williams is writing a trilogy that's a sequel to Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn?

That sounds very familiar to my experience of playing that game in early high school. Siphoning spells is something that's great in a design meeting (magic comes from interacting with the game's ecosystem) and incredibly tedious in practice (wring out every enemy you meet like an obsessive laundryman). The card game is boss, though. I can still hear the music in my head, right now!

It's funny, because the commenters in the RPS review of the game all acted like it was obvious that you'd follow the dog. It's Environmental Tutorialization 101, apparently!

I have been struggling whether or not to buy this game for almost a month now. I've made a promise that I won't buy it until I've beaten the main campaign of Rebel Galaxy and gotten my first blue item in Vermintide, but that's a weak resolve there...

To quote Raylan Givens: "If you run into an asshole in the morning, you ran into an asshole. If you run into assholes all day, you're the asshole." You have been perfectly polite. You have also been disrespectful, dismissive, and condescending to people who don't share your assumptions about games. Flaming an admin on an online forum where you have only been a member for a handful of days shows a severe deficiency of character, for which no amount of "politeness" can make up. All that said, I sincerely hope that, given a little bit of time for feelings to cool off, you'll have gotten something useful from this encounter.

Excellent! This is such a deeply important book for me as a historian and as a reader of fiction. The way that questions of authenticity are allowed to spill out from the confines of historical fiction (mostly through the existence of subtle differences between our reality, the book's reality, and the reality of the book within the book, and so on down the stack of turtles) really does an excellent job of problematizing what "really happened" and whether what "really happened" has any relevance to history—or, really, to the experience of people as they live their lives within the confines of what we understand to be "history." The subplot about forgeries, in a novel of alternate history, is a particularly fascinating touch in that regard. Dick is constantly asking in his works, "What is it about reality that makes it 'real' to us?"* and I think that that question hits hardest for me in The Man in the High Castle. Also, and this is something that was mostly revealed to me by Laura Miller writing on the television adaptation, but the anxiety and anomie of the principal characters goes a long way towards approximating the feel of colonialism (and post-colonialism) for a mostly-white audience. The Man in the High Castle shows America as a country of truly defeated people, denied their humanity and ruled by foreigners with alien thoughts and experiences, with survival meaning conformity to and flattery of the norms that those create. Unlike the television adaptation, there is no resistance, not beyond personal-scale resistance, and most of the characters are just looking after themselves and killing time, waiting for the end of history to catch up with them. I am especially looking forward to emphasizing this aspect of the work when I reread it. Finally, it's a well-publicized fact that Dick was somewhat obsessed with the I Ching while he was writing The Man in the High Castle (specifically, the iconic and impressionistic Wilhelm translation of the I Ching from 1950) and ultimately elected to use it to create the plot of his novel. Allegedly, he started with his premise and initiating action and, any time a character had to make a decision, he cast hexagrams and tried to interpret them as the character in question would. Often, the characters themselves cast hexagrams in the text of the work or quote certain hexagrams, consciously or unconsciously. This decision has been variously lauded and criticized over the years, with Dick himself coming to hate it for how it prevented The Man in the High Castle from being fully "about" anything, but, in addition to the broadly mystical feeling that it lends to the narrative's pace and direction, I think that Dick's use of the I Ching is another fascinating way of problematizing reality. Casting hexagrams is a mechanism of chance that supposedly reveals the surety of fate, and it leads one to question whether there are other similarly "meaningless" actions that actually reveal the "inner truth" of reality. I have actually read and used Minford's translation of the I Ching since the last time that I read this, and I wonder if it'll color or inform my next rereading. Anyway, I look forward so much to this podcast. Hopefully, if I write more, it'll be more coherent and less gushing! * Followed, naturally, by a laundry list of interlinked and increasingly distressing questions like, "Is it possible for an artificial or delusional experience to be more real than reality for one or more people?" and "If the truth of reality, its 'realness', can be superseded or suppressed in this way, by the dysfunction of individual people as reality-processing machines, is it really truth?" and "Is, then, the truth of reality that it feels real, that it is identifiable as 'authentically' real compared to a selection of other realities over time, rather than that it has a unique position in the hierarchy of these realities?" Sometimes, it is less than surprising that Dick suffered from schizophrenia late in life, although his interest in incomplete and interpenetrating definitions of reality appears to have been present from college.

Dude, you've repeatedly accused people who question the basis for some of your assumptions of "trolling." Personally, I have also wondered if you are actually here to have a conversation or if you just want to air your opinion and then tar anyone who disagrees with it, in whole or in part. Your increasingly aggressive and condescending tone isn't helping you, in that regard. If you're interested in actual feedback, I think that "what it's supposed to do" is really shaky ground upon which to plant your flag. The author is dead, genres are porous at best and arbitrary at worst, and it's fully possible to fail at one's intent but succeed at something else inadvertently. Confining what a reviewer should be allowed to discuss in a review to "how well did they follow this recipe" feels like a backwards attempt to limit what games can actually be about and, more worryingly, reduces the work of reviewing games to guessing at and then validating developer intent.

Yeah, I've been moving in that direction myself. I have repeatedly told her (and the other two) that her "reminders" don't do anything besides make me feel bad, but she's got this stock speech about how she believes in "honesty and remembering things how they happened" and I tend to give ground in the face of that because she's not wrong, per se. Tonight was the first night in a while that I really caught her out, bringing up our former relationship out of nowhere when I was talking about something entirely unrelated and then not backing down when I pointed out how it had nothing to do with anything we'd been saying. If she's not going to apologize for making digs like that when she's cut-and-dried in the wrong, it's probably appropriate for me to get up from the computer or get away from the phone. It's just too bad, I really do want to be friends, but it does seem like she's still mad about me breaking up with her four years ago, even though the relationship was supposedly terrible and all she wants is that part of her life back. Anyway, thanks for the ear and the sympathy!

I have three exes with whom I'd like to think I have friendships post-relationship. We talk regularly and trade advice, the usual. Still, all three will interrupt me mid-sentence if the discussion ever moves in a direction that makes it possible for them to tell me that I was a terrible boyfriend. I know that I was, mostly owing to inexperience and insecurity but also to selfishness, but I've apologized for all that, many times, and I don't feel like I deserve to have my nose shoved in it repeatedly, five or ten years down the line. If I'm even a decent friend, my weakness of character as a young man shouldn't really be on the conversational menu right now. The worst offender, the "love of my life" circa college, is definitely the hardest for me to bear, saying that our five years together was "one big mistake," whenever anything from our mutual past comes up, and never missing an opportunity to remind me of how unfaithful I was. I never cheated on her, of course, but she never found me particularly trustworthy anyway, and that's somehow still a bee in her bonnet now that we're both in our thirties. I've always been big about keeping fences mended, so to speak. My current partner teases me about it, but I like to think that the people from my past, girlfriends and partners especially, are an important part of who I am and that keeping the lines open with them is the best means of acknowledging that. Still, after I have an amazing weekend with Jen visiting and then immediately get brought down by one of my exes shitting on me (again, for being "unfaithful") in the middle of asking for advice about how to juggle two guys she's currently dating... I don't know, I don't want to cut anyone out of my life, but maybe I should answer the phone less. I'm not awful for thinking this, right?

Oh! I also finished the third season of Rectify, which was mercifully more about healing this time around than its relentless themes of judgment and hatred that made the first two seasons incredible but immensely stressful to watch.

I finally finished the first season of The Expanse like everyone else in the world did six months ago. I'm mixed: on the one hand, it's nice to see a well-realized sci-fi world presented with a decent budget and an eye towards consistent aesthetics. I'm looking to another season of it very much. On the other hand...

Honestly, I think one of the biggest but least-discussed weaknesses of Clinton is that her campaign doesn't have a core argument beyond her own political career and electability. Clinton doesn't need to go in-depth about any issue in particular (and largely hasn't in her more-than-a-hundred-day desert of press conferences) because she doesn't really built a platform besides "more of the same." There doesn't really seem to be a hill that Clinton's willing to die on, which is good for a politician, but not on every issue.

Building off of this, here's a pretty good breakdown of the "botched" interview that Sanders gave to the editorial board of the New York Daily News and how many of Sanders' supposed flubs were either factual errors on the part of the Daily News (its editors conflate the Treasury Department with the Federal Reserve and then interpret Sanders' attempt to correct them as confusion), admissions that he doesn't know trivia off the top of his head (Sanders is needled for being unable to cite the exact statute violated during the subprime mortgage crisis, though he explains the legal principles behind it), or completely off-topic (Sanders is asked to critique a recent action by the Israeli Army in Gaza). It's a downright embarrassing affair for the Daily News, to read the transcript, but the media's seized upon it as proof that Sanders isn't the serious candidate he pretends to be, of course.

I'm really digging it, six hours in, and I have two friends that are falling hard, so we'll be a feature for a couple of months, I think. Just a thought!

Sadly, I feel that's a common tendency for great authors who are reasonably prolific and live a long time. For instance, after the mid-2000s, Iain Banks just wrote retreads of his previous works, usually with one idea in them done better and every other idea done worse. Inspiration is not infinite, apparently, and it's especially not infinite when you write these intricate, well-considered works.

Well, any help is welcome. I booted up the game and, despite all the talk of gear and levels on the internet, I couldn't find any menus like that and was shunted very aggressively into a single mission, the difficulty of which I couldn't change, and then died ten minutes in. I went to bed, maybe I'll try again tonight.

Necro! A friend bought me this game this weekend for his birthday(?) and I'd be happy if any of the Thumbs who know more than me (read: everyone and anyone) would show me around sometime. Gormongous on Steam, as always.

Well, we've seen time and again that these "objective" review hounds aren't actually satisfied by drier, barer, less passionate, and more technical reviews. "Objective" is just a dog whistle for what they really want: reviews that validate their instinctually-felt expectations and opinions about a given game, but with well-written prose—but not too well-written, lest they be made to feel stupid for not thinking of it themselves. That's why they can never decide who the most "objective" reviewers are, except to hold up the few who seemingly tailor their reviews to whatever the prevailing winds of hype are, and even then... Maybe, in our dystopian future, this will be a solved problem, because data metrics will be used to guide those in search of "objective" reviews to sites that match their preconceived notions perfectly. Until then, I doubt we'll ever see the end of people carping about a lack of "objective" reviews.

I totally understand it being nice to see Toronto treated as Toronto in a movie (although, again, that's something the comics do better in every regard) but I really can't agree with you about the audio-visual experience. The efforts to do a graphic-novel presentation, in particular, were usually too distracting or on-the-nose and sometimes propped up jokes that should have been cut or rewritten for the screen. I also thought the choreography of the fights was good, but diluted by the length of the fights (and the fact that Scott fights Gideon twice to play out the "extra life" bit). It just aggressively didn't work for me, to the point that I may never watch it again... which is sad, somehow, given how much I like the comics. Probably, and I'm probably being too hard on it for that, but it definitely puts me in mind of, say, Wolfgang Petersen's Troy: compressed timescale, flattened themes, gutted characters, etc. It's the classic mid- to late-naughties movie adaptation in that way, for all the creativity and energy that Wright personally brings to the table. Yeah, I remember reading that, too, and that partially accounts for the feeling that the third act is like a funhouse mirror of the comics. Just about the only difference that I like there is how affable Schwartzman plays Gideon, like he'd rather control Ramona by coopting her past than by destroying it. I'm not sure it matches up perfectly, but... Still, there's ground laid for what the Nega Scott is from early in the comics, and the decision to have Scott buddy up with the personification of every shitty thing that he's done and then denied was "really him" instead of fighting it or acknowledging that he and it are the same person is... I don't know, it really bugs me. I'm a weirdo for it, I know.

After rereading all of Bryan Lee O'Malley's Scott Pilgrim series last weekend, I rewatched the movie adaptation by Edgar Wright. I remember the latter being passably fun, but it sure wasn't this time around, not at all! The first two acts keep the episodic rhythm of the comics, but they also try to create a through line by imposing a "Battle of the Bands" framework, which mostly plays out as one interfering with the other and making the movie feel both draggy and rushed. The fights are entertaining enough on the surface and have their stakes properly established, thanks to being lifted almost wholesale from the comics, but they also last increasingly overlong and the final one with Gideon stretches for nearly twenty-five minutes with only occasional interruptions. Furthermore, that fight is filled with a lot of gratuitous and flow-breaking callouts to video games, which exemplify the movie's unfortunate compulsion to take the air that the comics left in their reference humor and fill it up with more reference humor, like Wright wasn't aware that the air is necessary for the humor to have impact and for the characters to come off as actual people instead of joke dispensers. And let's not even start with the decision to flatten the comics' themes of internal versus external integrity, personal histories, and the costs of being a "good" person down into just being honest with instead of jealous of the one you love... Mark Webber, Chris Evans, Anna Kendrick, and Kieran Culkin are superb with no reservations whatsoever. Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Ellen Wong, and Allison Pill are all passable (Pill is actually great but screwed by Kim Pine being totally gutted as a character with anything resembling an arc). Jason Schwartzman would be passable, even good, if he weren't just playing shades of the same character that he's been doing since Rushmore (I don't know if he doesn't take direction well or if he was cast to play that character, but either way...). Brie Larson and Michael Cera are absolutely terrible, Cera in particular making the movie unwatchable for broad swathes of time as he struggles to convey earnestness and repeatedly settles for his signature blend of awkward, anxious, and mock-serious instead. Scott Pilgrim is supposed to be someone who doesn't believe his own bullshit, but keeps spinning it out in the hopes that everyone else does, yet Cera's Pilgrim definitely does believe his own bullshit, more than anyone else, and that's why he makes friends with Nega Scott in the end instead of fighting him or running from him (get a few drinks in me and I will bring any party to a grinding halt explaining how this proves that Edgar Wright misunderstands Scott Pilgrim to an extent that's only equaled by Baz Luhrmann misunderstanding The Great Gatsby). Usually, I'm an apologist for slavish adaptations of novels and comics to the silver screen, because watching a fictional world come to life before your eyes is often pleasure enough. I don't think Zack Snyder's Watchmen is all that bad, for instance! Here, though, efforts to recreate the aesthetic trappings of Bryan Lee O'Malley's work lead to a movie that not only is nothing like the actual experience of reading them, but is also frustratingly dull (and dully frustrating) to watch on its own merits. Boo.

I feel you, I wish I could really dig into what I agree with, disagree with, and understand but am personally grossed by among Rapp's views, but there's no space for that because she's a victim of this hate. Still, that's like... one of so many things that harassment campaigns have taken from us, not even the worst thing either.

I think that, at this juncture, there's an important distinction to be made between "having a problem" and "voicing a problem," though. Like, I'm not sure how I feel about Rapp's thesis and tweets, but now's not the time to express that uncertainty, not when it's just been used as a lever to dump all of this shit on her. I know you know this, probably better than anyone else posting in this thread, but it's so frustrating that harassment campaigns against women are an open invitation for everyone to share their opinion about how they lived their lives. People who didn't even know that she existed now get to have considered opinions on her fucking honors thesis (at which I personally cringe to see her trumpeting in her tweets, it feels like I'm seeing a trainwreck happening). I can't find the links, but Rapp claimed that her bosses at Nintendo were looking for reasons to terminate her since early in the harassment campaign and that moonlighting was just "frowned upon" and not strictly forbidden in all cases. I've been in work situations where my employer wanted me gone and, even if Rapp didn't have any dirt, the next step is invariably just to pressurize her until she's miserable enough to quit on her own. They'd already started that before the firing, taking her off the front lines. Really, it was a no-win situation from the moment that #GamerGate decided that they wanted her gone.

Yeah, I can't help but feel for her automatically, because attracting a hate mob for my boss' decision and my boss doing nothing to stop that mob is maybe one of my greatest professional anxieties. It's utterly despicable and the only comfort I can take from it is that she's probably better off not working somewhere where her bosses so emphatically refuse to take responsibility for something like that.

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