Gormongous

All of that sounds really rough, and I'm glad you got to a place where you could notice the pattern of abuse and break out of it. It's not remotely comparable, but my last big relationship had a similar dynamic where something bad would happen with her, it'd have to be someone's fault lest it be hers, and I was usually on hand and involved enough in her life to be a good patsy. The immediate cause of our breakup was Trump getting elected, because she was furious at me that I didn't support Clinton enough, but the proximate cause was me telling her that she had deep issues with anger and trust that she needed to get help with. She also went to a therapist after our breakup (I guess because I actually got through to her that being so stressed and angry all the time wasn't normal) but that therapist also just enabled her issues and let her spend her sessions complaining about minor work gripes. We don't talk anymore, but I'd be surprised if she kept going after we stopped. I think there's an dynamic in our culture that can lead women dealing with severe anxiety or anger issues to dump in their relationship in a way that can become abusive, and it's hard to maintain the relationship as a safe space for both partners to feel their feelings while also being like, "I'm not your punching bag for when life gets you down." It's good that you've found a way to move on and find some happiness for yourself, since it doesn't seem like it was in the cards for you to be happy with her.

He spoke briefly on the slack about how he sees it as a hiatus like the others that Idle Thumbs has had, both as a website and as a podcast, and that they don't want to close the book on the podcast but more episodes are definitely not in the cards right now. Basically, what everyone thought was happening.

Yeah, the tension between having each episode add up to a season-ending payoff and having each episode be enjoyable in isolation is something that post-peak TV really struggles with. It basically destroyed The Walking Dead and Sherlock for many people.

Can anyone tell me why Better Call Saul is really Saul Goodman, the Incompetent Lawyer who Always Does the Right Thing in the End? Why is this the show that Vince Gilligan has chosen to make? It's continuing to wreck it in the ratings, but the seven episodes I've seen so far, except for the one that was just backstory on Mike Ehrmantraut, are all glacially-paced dramas, but full of characters out of comedies, with Bob Odenkirk the only actor who really knows how to walk that line. Forget about lessons learned from Breaking Bad, there's no signs of anything that went into Breaking Bad.

And I'm Brick Neckon.

There are pros and cons of both. I like the immediacy of the slack and the way that conversations can spring up voluntarily, but it's also a venue with very little memory (both in the sense that the archives only go back a handful of days and that any remotely noteworthy piece of news gets posted at least three or four times). There is also a strong shitposting aesthetic there that I find a little tedious. On the other hand, I like the permanency of the forum and the opportunity to think through what I'm saying before I say it (and edit it after the fact, if I get a better perspective on things), but the pacing is so slow that it doesn't foster conversation as well, especially with a smaller population of users. I'd been making an effort this past year to post in the Anime thread, since that's where most of my free time with media goes these days, but it was just me replying to my own posts for months on end, with Rodi and Coods occasionally interjecting, and that got me down. Of course, the most important issue is that the past couple of years have been full of depression and unemployment for me, as I've struggled to change careers and get over a protracted breakup, and I just don't play games anymore, except for the couple of months where I was playing The Witcher 3 obsessively (years after everyone else). With the shift in my priorities generating less content in my life, the forums tends to come last after my podcast (which is still going somehow), my blog (which is not, since I've started a new job), my graduate work, and the slack. It's a bummer but it's not exactly a surprise. I miss y'all, though, even the ones who don't talk or log on anymore.

I think that is the core of cyberpunk, at least in my experience? The problem, as demonstrated by steampunk, is that there's a contingent of people who are just there for the aesthetic, rather than the themes that dictate those aesthetics. So many people who "like" cyberpunk actually just like high technology, violence, and super-beefy dudes. The themes of human commodification and atomization, societal and cultural alienation, and the ubiquity of corporate control in most classic works of cyperpunk are, at best, adjuncts to the fantasy of being a badass with a big gun to such people. If those themes go missing or are subsumed in more overt pandering, they won't complain.

The really weird thing about the first season of Steven Universe is that, if you go back and watch it through again once you've gotten to season four or five, there are a lot of surprisingly specific references to later reveals (looking at you, "Keep Beach City Weird"). Rebecca Sugar and her team had it planned out from the start, they just took forever to get there for some reason. I went looking online for skip guides to the first season, which is harder than you'd think since the fandom is adamant that every piece of content (except for the Uncle Grandpa crossover, of course) is absolutely essential to the experience. This one seems pretty good, if you just stick to the green episodes, although it focuses more on which episodes contribute to the lore than on which episodes contribute to character development. I'm curious to see what SAM's friend says, though.

I am mostly just hoping that he's coming back because he wants to do more, and not because of financial or commercial considerations, because Stewart was so bored and checked out in the last couple of Star Trek movies. The dune buggy scene in Star Trek: Nemesis was specifically included so that he could partake in his favorite hobby during shooting.

I feel like the problem with the new Star Wars movies is overwhelmingly inconsistent characterization. Characters are dumb until they're smart, cautious until they're cocky, and conflicted until they're confident.

Attention everyone: Letterkenny is now streaming on Hulu, so everyone who's not Canadian or a pirate can enjoy this subtle, witty, rude, silly comedy about small-town life in rural Ontario. I've been burned when I described it as Shakespearean before, but I'm going to go ahead and do it again. This kind of thing is downright Shakespearean:

So I just replayed Christine Love's Analogue: A Hate Story in anticipation of starting on Hate Plus, the sequel that just came out, and found myself really wanting to have some Thumbs discussion about both games and any of Love's oeuvre, for that matter. Honestly, I think this is one of the most affecting games I've played in years. People complain about the visual novel format and manga art style, but both of those fit really well with the game's concept as the recovery of written logs from a deserted Korean colony ship. What's more, playing it a third time after about a year, I found that Love did a great job building the opposing dualities of male and female, speech and silence, power and submission into the different threads of the story, even the minor ones that I previously thought were only meant as incidental set-dressing. Two moments especially, were just as vivid and disturbing as I remember. And now I'm playing Hate Plus and it's great! The interface is much better and there's a nice graphical presentation that, while not as stark a statement as the previous game's women-free family trees, is still interesting to look at. Not to mention the game is time-locked and you have to wait twelve real-life hours between in-game days. The achievement for completing the first day makes a Majora's Mask reference, was that how that Zelda game was? Anyway, I love Christine Love's games because, not only are they different and well-made, but I can give one to people who are interested in media (but not games) and count on them to get something out of it. What does everyone else think?

On a whim, I read the script for the deleted route with the President in Ladykiller in a Bind. I understand why Love got rid of it, since she wanted the game to be a safe space, but I think it's really well done? It's got huge issues with mismanaged consent, but that's the point and I think it's a good point to make, that there are no safe routes. Honestly, the way it's used is what comes to mind when people ask, "When is a good reason to put sexual violence in a work?" Same as those two scenes (you know which ones) in Analogue: A Hate Story. Not that I'd ever give anyone guff for passing on them because of that content.

I'm generally happy with Waypoint Radio. Sure, their subject matter has increasingly drifted away from what they're playing into the black hole of all gaming podcasts, Important Gaming Issues, but they're still a solid cast that keeps me feeling engaged with the wider community. Episodes without Austin and Rob can be a bit more... eclectic than those with them, but that's to some people's taste?

I have to say, I was disappointed to hear David Heron on this podcast. He has his good points, but he tends to be so negative and nitpicky, even about games he likes, that he has a chilling effect on an episode. It's not even four minutes in, just after introductions, that he's explaining his history with the BattleTech franchise largely by way of pointing out how bad the tabletop game was and how broken the MechWarrior games were. When the panel starts to discuss the game itself, his first substantive comment is to talk about how easy the first two thirds of it were (because he found a degenerative strategy, David loves his degenerative strategies), followed by a dismissive description of the game's character progression as "magic powers" and a litany of the game's other design compromises and bugs. Surely the first twenty minutes of your podcast are better spent on something more consequential than how wonky enemy reinforcements can sometimes be... I don't know, like covering the core game loop? I'm not against a nuanced or vigorous critique of a game that the panel overall likes, but Heron doesn't really seem interested in talking about a game unless he can frame it by its shortcomings. After hearing Rob talk with Austin on the Waypoint article read for the game, I was hoping to get further conversation along similar lines, but with a panel of friends from across the industry. Instead I got a repeat of awkward bug-obsessed gripe sessions like Sins of a Solar Empire: Rebellion or XCOM 2.

I'm watching Nisekoi because I've watched almost every other show that Shinbou Akiyuki's done with Shaft and I see no reason to stop now. It's a love comedy about two kids from crime families who have to pretend to be dating, even though they hate each other, to avert a gang war, although it's gradually evolving into more of a harem anime. After a rough start with the first couple of episodes, it's actually turned out pretty well, largely on the strength of the secondary characters like Ruri, who encourages her friend to confess to the male protagonist even though he's dating someone because why not, and Seishirou, a woman raised as a man who seems to be in direct conversation with Yuu from Gekkan Shoujo Nozaki-kun and other Takarazuka-adjacent character tropes. The love triangle at the center of the story — Raku, the kind and low-key boy; Chitoge, the brash half-American girl; and Kosaki, the shy girl with a crush on Raku — is whatever. There are some good moments with them, a few of which actually made me laugh out loud, but I think they're supposed to be entertaining less for their inherent characteristics and more for the situation that they're in. The stumbling block for me, so far, is the "childhood promise" subplot, where Raku carries around a massive demonic-looking locket that was given to him by a girl whom he liked a decade ago. He doesn't remember her face or name, just that she has a key and that the two objects represent a promise to get married someday. Isn't this part of the plot to Kujibiki Unbalance, the made-up anime that the Genshiken characters are all obsessed with? Anyway, of course both Chitoge and Kosaki have keys from their childhood, but Kosaki's key seems way too big for Raku's lock and the first OP repeatedly shows Chitoge inserting her key into Raku's locket... ahem. This means one of two things: Nisekoi is fine with spoiling its stupid "mystery" from jump, or Nisekoi is faking me out to make that "mystery" more interesting. Either way it pisses me off a little? But either way I'm sure the ultimate message of the show will be that keeping promises is important, but you have to trust your heart in the end, even if it means breaking those promises or hurting someone. I don't know, we'll see. Also, this is unfair but I hate Chitoge's design, especially her stupidly huge bow. What is she, a Touhou character? EDIT: I need to reiterate, I'm enjoying this anime. Solid B/B+. It's just easier to nitpick, particularly when the main character carries around a massive demonic-looking locket that a little girl gave him way back when!

I loved the discussion of places closing before the internet archived the existence of everything! Places in St. Louis that I miss and that are "remembered" in maybe one Google result: Mama Josephine's, a soul food restaurant in Shaw that got killed by rising rents; Six Rows Brewery and Buffalo Brewery in Midtown, both beer-and-burger joints that couldn't survive the summer slump in customers; and Tarahumara, a Mexican restaurant specializing in tortas that was always understaffed and so people stopped coming.

No one's just born so good at sex that an immortal demigoddess of carnal lust who has spent centuries fucking men to death with the rawest, most uninhibited sex imaginable refuses to believe that they're a teenage virgin who had never known the touch of a woman. Oops, that's exactly what happens. Really, I think there's a line between wish fulfillment that makes a protagonist more different and interesting and wish fulfillment that protects a protagonist from having to experience any hardship or setbacks. The more of the latter that appears in a story, the less tolerant people tend to be of the former, I've found. It doesn't help when a lot of the hardship and setbacks that Kvothe gets out of through his smarts are things that his smarts got him into in the first place, from his homelessness on the streets of Tarbean to his pointless Harry-and-Draco rivalry with Ambrose to learning how the Aiel-alikes fight to defending himself in court with a dead language he learned overnight. It gives me, as a reader, the sense that Rothfuss is spinning his wheels while piling impressive deed after impressive deed on Kvothe's back, which adds even more to the weird air of entitlement around the character.

There's a mission in the first Black & White where you threw everything you could through a portal to another world to escape an attack, and then you came out in a land where there was a constant rain of fireballs. They gave you a shield spell to protect your people, but it never seemed to work? I tried mightily for the better part of a week to beat it and just couldn't. I'm still not sure if it was bugged, or if the building and item placement was dependent on where it came through the portal and I just got screwed? Who cares, Black & White wasn't even that fun of a game anyway.

I think of Spirited Away as part of the Totoro lineage because of the coming-of-age allegory as being coopted into a world of gods and magic to escape the trauma of adult concerns imposed on child minds, but I do agree that Kiki's disruptive model of "deciding who you are out on your won" is more in line with Chihiro in Spirited Away.

A few months ago, my movie-buff friend had us watch The Iceman Cometh together, a Clarence Fok movie from 1989 where a Ming guard is frozen while trying to defend the emperor from assassins and resumes his hunt for the culprits when he's thawed hundreds of years later. The charm in the movie is really watching the femme fatale, played by the inimitable Maggie Cheung, guide a stiff Yuen Biao through modern life, which takes up a substantial portion of a movie otherwise bracketed by lengthy hand-to-hand fights. I was really taken with it, to my surprise, and have thought of it repeatedly in the last few weeks. When I feel like having an argument, I tell people that Porco Rosso is my favorite Miyazaki movie. I think you're right to point out that it's Miyazaki laying down themes that he'll repeat later in The Wind Rises, but Miyazaki's tendency to repeat the themes of his early movies more pointedly in a later one has been exhibited throughout his career (Nausicaa to Mononoke, Totoro to Spirited Away, etc.). Porco Rosso is also really great for stating, as much as it can state, that the protagonist's affliction as a pig is a universal curse made explicit in his person, and one that can only intermittently be transcended. I don't know if it's a truism yet that early Miyazaki is the most interesting Miyazaki, but it should be (as opposed to Takahata, who has only improved with age).

I think the experience of "touching history" offered by CK2 and EU4 is enough to fill in the gaps for most people. The most detailed sci-fi setting in the world lacks the breadth and impact of real-life history, even dimly apprehended, and so the bare thrill of playing a historical person or polity in an actual location somewhere in the world is always going to be thematically nourishing for the average player.

The podcast has often talked about their bafflement with the sci-fi 4X community's love of the ship designer. In some ways, I think that Stellaris is the ship designer generalized to the scale of a whole game. You can add bits and bobs to the framework of a "standard" sci-fi 4X faction, making them warlike zealots or peaceful merchants, and have the game respond with customized flavor text that acknowledges the choices you've made, but you can't make or play anything outside of the developers' vision of what a "standard" sci-fi 4X faction can be. I think Sword of the Stars and Endless Space get a lot more criticism because people are much more likely to be nitpicky and critical of other people's creations, especially if they violate expectations or mores, while an identikit faction that they've built themselves gets more of a pass because of a sense of ownership and self-expression. "I did my best to recreate the Starfish from Blindsight in Stellaris and I'm pretty happy with how they turned out! Meanwhile, what the fuck is up with the Cravers from Endless Space 2? I just don't get them." Does that make sense?

I mean, "hard sci-fi" has a genealogy extending back to the 1970s, when the subgenre of sci-fi was codified as one of scientific rigor and rejection of anything thought to be impossible by the current scientific consensus. For instance, Iron Man is not hard sci-fi because its miniature arc reactor is both nonexistent and implausible. Star Trek is not hard sci-fi because it's impossible to travel faster than the speed of light. Snowpiercer is not hard sci-fi because perpetual motion is a physical impossibility. Under the Skin and Inception are, in my mind, sci-fi influenced fantasy, lacking any logical or scientific justification for their fantastical elements to an extent that might as well make them magic. Only Gravity, as I see it, is hard sci-fi, and that's to be expected because hard sci-fi, as a subgenre, tends to privilege rigor and plausibility over spectacle and execution of themes. It's been weird, in my lifetime, to see "hard sci-fi" versus "soft sci-fi" go the same way as "high fantasy" versus "low fantasy," from technical distinctions of premise and rigor to value judgments on execution. "High culture" and "low culture" will assimilate all other distinctions in the end, I suppose.