Gormongous

I missed that last comment and yeah, it's an uncharacteristically closed-off comment about the intellectual possibilities of Eva's endgame. Generally, although there's not enough text to be sure, Mark Simmons seems to be a bit more superficial in his treatment of the series than Patrick Macias. Because I was curious about their career after Animerica shuttered, Mark Simmons now publishes fan guides for the Gundam universe and acts as a script consultant for mecha dubs, while Patrick Macias went to become head editor at Otaku USA and is now "senior manager for new initiatives" at Crunchyroll. Weird.

Never underestimate the power of Nick Breckon to build a narrative that he finds personally confusing, regardless of the material he's given.

Man, it's rough sometimes how bad partners can train you to be a bad partner. A lot of my insecurities in relationships come from a string of girlfriends in my teenage years who'd deny me affection until I did something to "deserve" it, and even though it's been fifteen years and I'm almost entirely past it, it still triggers bad reactions from me sometimes.

It's taken me years and I'm still not sure I've taken all my feelings about Eva in. I do know, however, that the mix of psychoanalysis, philosophy, and theology that most people dismiss as superficial is probably what gives it its impressive emotional weight. Few other characters in fiction appear to experience their feelings with such authenticity as Shinji, Asuka, Misato, Ritsuko, and even Rei. Related, someone scanned the September 2002 issue of Animerica that reviews End of Evangelion. Fascinatingly, it's a cogent and considered discussion of what the movie means that I'm not really used to experiencing in writing about anime. The death of print really hurt critical discourse on anime, nothing on AnimeNewsNetwork is anything as good as this...

I am the same way, and it's been a little bit of an issue in my current relationship, but I've just had to work on cultivating patience and understanding without taking it personally that other people's behavior makes no sense to me. If the relationship sticks it out at a serious level for three or four months, you eventually get used to it. Communication, even half-joking communication, about how much regular contact means to you (framed in "love language" concepts, I've found it best) is also a good step to take.

This is what I was complaining about with Tgyan's clips, too. Every discovery is "unprecedented" or "beyond even what he would have expected." The sense of drama and stakes in the writing is dreadfully overplayed with almost every voiced character, as if the developers were too insecure to let the complex interaction of gameplay systems communicate to the player the tension and wonder of the game's world. It's a strange place where I find Shen the least skippable of the talking heads, considering that her "you have unassigned engineers" bark is both annoying and confusing.

No worries, it's just another little bugbear of mine, because I have a few ownerless guns floating around my base with mods that I can't remove, even though I have the NA continent bonus.

Not quite "freely;" you can't remove a weapon upgrade, only replace it, which is annoying and doesn't seem to serve a purpose

I just had my first flawless mission, no one taking any damage. It was an Avatar facility sabotage: one round of positioning, one round where a grenade paired with my top sniper's Killzone ability wiped out the enemy patrol between my team and the facility, one round blowing open the wall of the facility with a rocket and running in my fastest Ranger, and one round for extraction. It was perfect and the best note ever to end on.

A good combo for taking out a pod is the Grenadier's grenade launcher and the Sniper's multi-shot pistol ability. That finished off two groups of Chryssalids in my last terror mission. I also mostly open with grenades, too, but sometimes there's a soldier out of position and you need something that's guaranteed to do four points of damage to the closest enemy. The fact that it doesn't destroy corpses makes me much more liable to just throw the grenade now.

Eek. I wondered why the drops I was getting had started to taper off. I figured it was something to do with how late I was in the game!

Yeah, they've also made a few changes to the way that health works that makes it too easy to get an entire squad benched, if not wiped, with a bad mission. In-mission healing does not reduce a soldier's wound level at the end of a mission; the game either records the soldier's lowest hitpoint level or adds up damage received to calculate whether they're lightly wounded, wounded, gravely wounded, etc. Also, better armor is no longer factored as a buffer that prevents the first few points of in-mission damage from affecting a soldier's wound level; now, it's calculated on a sliding scale, so that two damage on the base armor and three damage on the predator armor causes the same wound level at the end of a mission. I understand it, as an effort to make tactical battles be more consequential at the strategic level, but it's very annoying that a soldier in elerium armor can get a point of poison damage at the beginning of a mission, have her static vest heal it immediately, never take damage again, and still be "lightly wounded" for three days. A change that I dolike a lot is that grenades don't destroy corpses like in the first game! I avoided using them for most of the early game because I was worried about starving myself of research materials, but now that I know (and now that I have one Grenadier with the extra grenade uses, the advanced launcher, the plasma upgrade, and that skill that gives grenades +2 damage and a 50% larger radius) I'm using it to level buildings that block my snipers' shots. It's really and truly great. I agree, the theme works a lot better in the second game. The justification in the first that you don't have the confidence of the various world governments and they're looking for an excuse to pull out is tenuous and does not really correlate with my experienced reality (look, for example, at international cooperation in the various examples of specious military adventurism in the Middle East). The notion that they'd pull their funding if you weren't protecting them properly is bizarre, especially when a lack of funding is almost exclusively the thing holding you back from protecting them. Here, you're poor because you're living off the land, you can only do one mission at a time because you can't be everywhere, and you're a team of two dozen soldiers and half that in support staff because you're rebelling against a semi-legitimate world government. It makes sense and it makes a lot of the dumb actions in the previous game feel less dumb now.

I just wish they'd have done it with everything, even utilities. Juggling one medkit around my different squads feels profoundly foolish and unthematic. Give me everything infinitely, with a greater cost, and let carrying capacity force the hard calls instead. With the weapon and implant drops, those are the things that are actually painful to lose when you leave a dead soldier behind, because I can't make more. If my Support dude dies with my only medkit, I go back to the Avenger and pay thirty supplies to make another one instantly. It's not an interesting moment and the mostly-pointless dichotomy between limited and infinite gear has contributed to confusion with literally everyone here. At the very least, put the vests under "utilities" because that's their gameplay function if not their objective purpose in that game. It actually doesn't bother me that much, I just wish there were more thought in this specific aspect, because changing the weapons and armor has been an incredible convenience that detracts from none of the tension and ambiance.

I really wish it were more codified. I was thinking last night how absurd it is that three scientists spend five days thinking about magnetic weapons, report their findings, and immediately the engineering team is ready for full-scale production. If I were to suggest an alternative, it'd be that research only unlocks proving ground projects that were all one-offs, but after you'd completed a proving ground project once, it'd unlock it in the engineering screen, giving you the choice of continuing to produce items singly at the proving ground for low cost (and risk them being lost) or paying a large sum to engineering to make them infinite. It's not a perfect alternative, but the current uncertainty about what projects produce infinite items and what you're actually going to get from the "experimental XXXX" projects is unacceptable. It remains very, very silly that you can lose your one medkit on a mission and not be able to afford a new one, when you literally have a frickin' heli-carrier with a medical wing treating your mutilated soldiers.

I personally found Great Expectations to be the most enjoyable of Dickens' novels, although nonstopintrospection is right that the density of adaptations can make any of that author's works feel tired and predictable even if you haven't sought them out. The power of Dickens is in the surprising extent of his description and his ability to draw happy connections between unhappy individuals, both of which are a little bit sapped by the diffuse pop-culture awareness of his works. If I wanted to treat you as a perfect guinea pig, I'd suggest sticking to minor Dickens like Bleak House or Hard Times, both of which capture Dickens the writer without being masterpieces that have their own agency in the public mindshare. I actually liked Hard Times a lot but I know it's not "great" per se.

Sorry, I guess I just don't understand what you mean by "organizing principle" then, at least insofar as something that their past movies have but their recent movies lack.

I would actually say that what the Coen Brothers have done is move beyond "genre X in setting Y" subversions that have made their movies such pleasant surprises. No more "hard-boiled crime film in the frozen North," no more "Chandler-type mystery with a deadbeat LA pothead as lead," no more "screwball musical comedy in the Depression-era South." For better or for worse, they're playing stuff more straight these days, and I mostly see it as a good thing? It certainly makes them a bit less digestible, sure. I haven't seen Hail, Caesar though and I'm not terribly optimistic. Outside of Birdman, which is more about the semi-legitimate madness of celebrity anyway, I don't tend to enjoy movies where the film industry talks about itself.

I love you, namman. I want to hear more!

I haven't found re-entering stealth to be as useful as the raw damage output of a fully upgraded combat-focused Ranger. Then again, I've had more than a few instances where I get "spotted" when a character moved nowhere near an enemy or their field of view, so I haven't been engaging with the system as much as I should. Seconding thepaulhoey that it's functionally impossible to run an entire mission on concealment, because it's impossible not to get spotted eventually and once you are all the patrols you ever sighted during the stealth phase will converge on your position whether they're still in range or not. You can easily lose a mission for yourself by waiting too long to break concealment, not because you're out of position but because you'll just have too many enemies to fight at once, and that takes a while to get used to. I've been impressed by the leanness of the resource model, although part of that has been me not knowing how important it is to prioritize rebel comms for the first month or so. Once you get a couple regions locked down, especially if one of those is South America with its "all in" bonus of twenty percent more supplies, the game shifts but not in a way that makes you feel like you've broken it. It is very odd (but not entirely unpleasant) for me to be rolling in elerium cores and alien alloys and just waiting for the monthly supply drop to put them to any use. It certainly makes me pounce on those "supply convoy" missions... I also like that they've slimmed down a lot of the equipment upgrading... for the most part. In some cases, you're upgrading your entire supply line so it gives you infinite gauss rifles instead of infinite sniper rifles, which is great, and then you spend less on per-soldier sidegrades like the EXO suit. What I don't like is that you go to the same screen for both of these; it's way too easy to think that you're getting infinite EXO suits or poison ammo, only for it to be a one-off project instead that's not really worth the time and resource investment at the moment. I agree that the timers are a good addition, philosophically, but there are probably too many and the invariable limit makes some missions vastly more difficult than others. There was one VIP escort that had the target locked in a high-difficulty van over four screens away through a heavily-built urban area, then the extract point three more screens away from that, on top of a three-story building. My soldiers barely shot their guns, mostly running past enemies because I didn't have the time to engage, and I still had to leave one guy behind because two aliens on overwatch deprived him of one turn to move (on a side note, I wish there were rescue missions to get back stranded soldiers, so much). I also generally enjoy the obfuscated timers like the terror missions, but the requirement to save as many civilians as possible and kill all the enemies means that you mostly ignore the former in favor of the latter. Finally, I have one sniper on my team, she's a colonel, and I think that I'm literally in love with her. She's got the bob and the aviators and she's never been hit in combat. I'm a bit disappointed that Matt Lees' description of characters getting different stat boosts based either on never getting hit in combat or getting hit and weathering it was largely the confused passion of an overactive imagination, but I still pretend it's the case with Lucy "the Baroness" Robinson.

Yeah... As much as I am not usually prone to ragging on a game for its tutorial philosophy, so long as I have the tools to teach myself the game, XCOM 2's biggest flaw, as far as I've seen, is that the different ways it tries to educate you on how to play it are often at cross purposes. It's a little galling to have the designers rely so heavily on my knowledge of the previous game for how rebel comms ought to work, while also using that knowledge to fuck me over with the Codex. Sure, the talking heads warned me that something unexpected could happen, but I started to tune that out several missions before, after seeing that the desire of the narrative to instill awe in me meant that every fuckin' thing that happens is the most unpredictable and mind-blowing thing that Tygan and Shen have seen in twenty years of alien invasion and occupation. It's even Tygan's bark for finishing a research assignment! Meanwhile, the game regularly spits out useless warnings about nothing, foremost among them being Shen's comment about having unassigned engineers, which comes off as maybe 25% "You have an engineer unassigned, make sure to put them somewhere" and 75% "You have too many engineers and that's bad because reasons." Mercifully, this is not a problem with the game itself (although I'm not sure I'll ever understand how the number for my soldier's hacking ability interacts with the number for the hacked system's difficulty to produce the percentage chance of success... Maybe it's the bar that fills up, but it's a total black box to me right now), just with how the game explains itself to first-time players. Actually, what's really the biggest flaw is that, in cutscenes, the camera does all these dramatic upward pans and swoops, but then occasionally it remembers that it's supposed to be the Commander's point of view when the talking heads turn to say something to it, so I repeatedly imagine my guy being this bizarre Mr. Bean of a military leader leaning over and ducking under everything, right in everyone's way.

There's also some wonky collision stuff that I think is just a bug in the system. I've had windows explode before my soldier was even close to them.

I like this game a lot, I think that concealment gives you the tools to dictate your engagements in a way that makes it a lot less frustrating than the first XCOM. That said, the (first?) Codex fight is bullshit. There's no preparation for all the random powers that it busts out and, if you're taking your cues from the first game, it's fully possible for it to spawn with your squad exhausted and totally out of position. Maybe it's an authentic experience for aliens to slaughter your squad because you had no idea what they were capable of, but it wasn't particularly fun. Good thing it was the B team, but still... Also, five out of maybe a dozen missions have taken place in Kansas City for me. It makes me chuckle, in a good way.

I am unsurprised and incredibly pleased that the nightmarish screaming of "Drop" Johnson from Miller's Crossing is something that Chris (or Jake?) knows well enough to reference immediately and stick it multiple times in the podcast. God, listening to it sounds like a fever feels...

Well, it looks like Conclave is another botched release from Paradox that would have benefited from even a few weeks of singleplayer testing. Coalitions form immediately if you win even two wars too close together (or inherit a lot of land); are often a bizarre mix of pagans, Muslims, and heretics; and take forever to come apart. The new alliance system (where marriages form non-aggression pacts that must be upgraded to alliances through mutual consent) means less alliances overall and more war, because it's somehow messed up the AI's ability to calculate a "smart" war to fight and because your allies join wars automatically (and you join their wars, annoyingly). Going against all history and sense, non-aggression pacts are totally inviolable until the marriage ends with the death of one spouse or the other. Shattered retreat (rather, chasing ping-ponging armies) has made wars take much longer without any other mechanical benefit. The new council mechanics make it incredibly trivial to control your vassals, leaving it a non-issue to pass laws because the maluses for doing so have been removed in preference to the new "favor" system. Meanwhile, you can just hand out favors like crazy to get support for anything, because favors are so limited in utility right now that there's not really a trade-off. There are pictures all over Reddit of four- and five-county Irish duchies with the entirety of Europe and Asia east of the Elbe and the Mediterranean in a coalition against them, plus multiple reports of the AI that plays Henry IV getting the Holy Roman Empire to agnatic primogeniture in six years! As a historian who's done some work on one of the most energetic and intelligent emperors of the Middle Ages failing to do just that, it makes me sad. People have generally agreed that it's the team that took over CK2 development a year ago applying their experience developing EU4 to this product. It's too bad, they're different games and you can't just port mechanics over wholesale.

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