Gormongous

Yeah, Hanzee's another character about whom I was undecided but eventually came down on liking. Like Peggy, he's a person defined by the expectations of the people around him, to the point that he has no visible history or identity outside of his time in Vietnam and his service to the Gerhardt clan, but, upon encountering Peggy and her inarticulate yearning, immediately catches it with his whole "Tired of this life" comment. I almost wonder if Hanzee's ruthless pursuit of the couple was him falling into someone else's expectations again. Even in his final scene, we see him stepping up to help a kid, although he's finally acting on the expectations of the less powerful than the more...

I play with just one other friend a lot of the time. It's hard going, just the two of you, at first because neither is an expert who's able to carry the other when needed, but you can grow into it. It really depends on what your playstyle is. Very, very few of the DLC packs are must-haves... the Terrain Expert Pack for the All-Terrain Boots, maybe, and the Ranger Pack for the UAV. The rest are to taste and are probably best bought as you discover what you like to use the best! The complete list, with descriptions, is on the wiki here and is probably best if you want to go window-shopping. There's also a reasonably robust selection of YouTube videos themed around each DLC pack, showing the weapons and stratagems in action.

I enjoyed the Fargo talk, especially Rob teasing out some of the things that make Peggy interesting for precisely the reasons that she skirts closely to a smear campaign for feminism. I also wish there had been more talk about the other female characters in the show, especially the two other matriarchs of their respective families. Jean Smart, cast against type as Floyd Gerhardt, I didn't pay much heed until late in the season, although I've read that she's doing clever work there upon which Rob touched briefly, but I think that Betsy is a truly excellent character: supportive and caring without just being a prop for her husband, possibly smarter and more talented than her husband at his job (if not for the baby and the chemo, who knows where she'd be), and most significantly, the only person who effectively answers Camus-quoting Noreen. For me, it's one of the more effective scenes in the entire season (and a definite answer to Peggy's directionless speech about her need for ideological validation and Lou's cogent-but-hypocritical anecdote about compassion during war that somewhat vindicates Peggy's efforts to stay on top of the bull, masculine bullshit aside). She's the only one who gets that. Everyone else is just snowed under by the nihilism, either explicitly or through the events of the show. I think Betsy's quiet, but effortlessly assertive decency is meant to be contrasted with Peggy's over-intellectualized "don't think, just be" philosophy that slowly gets developed. That's what keeps me from seeing the latter as a poison-pen letter to feminism or female characters.

The free content patch accompanying the DLC got announced last week, but I just looked at it: https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/index.php?threads/crusader-kings-ii-free-content-patch-v2-5.903473/ A couple of my thoughts I've already voiced. Infamy and coalitions make no sense in the period that the game covers; realms should break apart because it's impossible to keep everyone happy beyond a certain size, not because all the realm's neighbors get together to tear it down. There is not one example of the latter in the Middle Ages that's not already recreatable by the game's existing mechanics. Likewise, if the concern is that a lowly count can wed the daughter of the Holy Roman Emperor and use that marriage alliance to make the emperor do all the count's fighting for him, the answer is to improve the AI's matchmaking process, not to water down marriage alliances into marriage non-aggression pacts. Again, the historical basis for families bound together by kinship or marriage not supporting each other in war is vanishingly small and already represented by the ability to refuse an ally's call to arms. But there are two big changes that I think are unalloyed goods for the game: During non-elective succession, primary successor inherits 50% of temporary opinion modifiers from subjects of previous holder. Tweaks to many opinion modifiers to make it more difficult to keep good relations with your vassals. Oh man. No more instant revolts upon the death of a beloved king. No more dying to head off a revolt. Huge nerf to elective succession, which now trades potentially huge opinion boosts from father to son for a small permanent boost to all rulers regardless of dynasty. In general, a great gameplay change that should promote being a good dynasty more than being a good ruler who's suddenly shitty at the end of his life.

That was a really excellent revisiting of the conversation about copyright, derivative works, and "ownership," guys. It felt like you touched a lot of different perspectives, a few of which I hadn't considered fully. Thanks!

For instance, and I said this back in the episode thread, most progression mechanics only make sense in a modern Western context. In other places and other times, "things get better over time if you put effort into them" is hardly a given, no matter what psychology has to say about how the human brain works in the twenty-first century. To take my own speciality of knowledge, most medieval Europeans believed quite firmly that the world was slowly decaying from the perfect state in which God had left it at the moment of creation. Likewise, they also believed themselves ineluctably stained by sin, which could be alleviated by their actions and their faith but never overcome. We see this reflected even in their fiction, which is overwhelmingly about a protagonist having lost happiness and having to sacrifice much in order just to get back there, sometimes unsuccessfully. In terms of postivist tropes, redemption arcs are common but rarely unprovoked self-improvement. I feel like such a society would not make RPGs where you get points for doing basic tasks and those points make you better at whatever you want. At best, it'd be full of "abili-tease" moments like the Metroid games.

That's an interpretation of John Goodman's character that I hadn't fully processed, thank you for that. I always thought that Goodman's speech about voodoo and your life mysteriously turning to shit were the meaningful parts of that sequence, but this gives me more perspective. It's so important that Llewyn's life goes nowhere and we're never informed whether he's right or wrong in his beliefs and actions. To steal a part from the review that Patrick linked, which really summed the appeal of the craft in Inside Llewyn Davis for me: "...I love a great deal of Inside Llewyn Davis, and especially admire its stubborn refusal to exonerate or condemn its anti-hero (who continually tries to do the right thing and then gives up when it proves too daunting or difficult)..." That kind of performance is really Isaac's strength. Another movie (not by the Coens) that was excellent for me but mixed for almost everyone else to whom I talked was A Most Violent Year, which relies on Isaac's understated but ineluctably expressive performance to convey the inner strength of someone who is simply having the worst imaginable year of his life and not... ah, stopping, either metaphorically or literally.

Fair enough. I guess I'm more sympathetic to Llewyn because I've been there and I know friends who've been there. His partner just committed suicide and he's got an entire city saying that he's got no worth without him (and, in the case of Lem, unwittingly but explicitly encouraging Llewyn to join him). I feel like all the moral tests of the movie (taking care of the cat, helping with Jean's abortion, leaving his ex to her own life, sharing his music with people who want to hear it) Llewyn passes or does his best to pass, and his failing is just that he's not nice to people. I personally am tired of protagonists in movies for whom niceness is a signifier for fundamental goodness, so I enjoy watching a movie about a character who is not nice but not evil either and watching how he is still made to suffer for it. Anyway, I don't want to clog up the discussion of the Coens' oeuvre more, so let's just agree to disagree.

I've watched Burn After Reading four times, maybe? That's more than I expected when I started typing. I like it, I think that it's probably the closest that the Coens have gotten to their perennial thesis of a chaotic and unparseable world, and I like that they expressly wrote it to bring out the strengths of the specific actors whom they cast, but I don't find it a meaty or fulfilling experience enough to put it above even O Brother Where Art Thou, personally. Well, the nice thing about the Coen Brothers is that their work supports that sort of disagreement. The story isn't about success, it's about how a combination of personal and societal shortcomings leads to protracted personal failure. If you can't connect to the story of an essentially good person struggling with depression and a generally caustic attitude about life getting left behind while those hundreds of people go on to their wonderful vibrant careers, that's really unfortunate. For me, it remains possibly my favorite Coen and I think it's fairly odd to fault it for being "meaningless" literally sentences after praising Burn After Reading, a satire that's literally meaningless, as in "eschewing meaning."

I think that you're underselling Inside Llewyn Davis badly. It has a marvelous amount of things to say, in a beautiful and understated way, about how happenstance becomes history and what happens to the people who are left behind by it. Sure, the seemingly cyclical nature of the narrative that occasioned so much comment in the first few weeks after release is entirely aesthetic, but I think it's a reasonably deep and incredibly lovely study of what happens when you're not Bob Dylan, partially through impersonal accident and partially through your own stupid actions. Also, I'm shocked how far down on everyone's list A Serious Man is. It has so much to say about the experience of divine compassion versus human compassion, and the limits of both? Maybe you have to be Jewish? I'm not Jewish but I think that I get at least some of it. Give it a decade, maybe, and people will come around.

I'm honestly getting to the point where I think that the design tension of avoiding and removing traits is probably not a good dynamic for the game. To me, it just feels like there's no decision space after a certain level of learned skill: either the trait is a meaningless five-percent reduction to something and I just ignore it, or it's something that vastly reduces the character's utility and I have to remove it immediately if I can afford it or at my nearest convenience if I cannot. I would rather have bad traits be much less frequent and more transformative, the effect of leaving a character too long with too much low-level stress or of taking them on too many consecutive dungeons, and also have them be hard if not impossible to remove, just a part of the character now. Constantly paying large sums of money to make bad things go away just isn't fun enough for me after a dozen hours or so.

It's so hard, because it changes, but I enjoy the thematic complexity of Inside Llewyn Davis and A Serious Man so much lately. I think The Big Lebowski is a classic and Fargo is good but probably overrated. I probably need to see Barton Fink and O Brother Where Art Thou? again, because I think they're both overlooked, albeit for different reasons.

I agree that this kernel is the genius in SNAFU, cutting against the "loner whose superpower is self-martyrdom" archetype of literally every other show in the genre, but (as you said) the anime itself is so exceptionally bad at communicating said kernel that I'm really hesitant to celebrate it myself. To break it down more, I appreciate the fakeout that's built by the first season more, where the budding affection that is born out of hidden connections fails to coalesce even into friendly intimacy among the main characters, because life is more complicated than that, but the second season is badly underwritten in terms of its elaboration of that theme into "being a capable and proactive person doesn't automatically make you friends any more than being a passive loser does." Yukino's arc is criminally muddled (like you said, her older sister teases her for being dragged along by her clubmates while approving of how Hachiman drags her in new directions, then disapproves of her following her parents' desires while also being the one who ratted her out to said parents) and Yui seemingly exists to be a middle ground between the contrasting desires of Yukino and Hachiman (while never quite functioning as a lens through which to understand how those desires conflict). The show also starts having the club's former clients, like Isshiki, show up and help out more, which makes for a more varied palette of interactions but muddies the "friendship/desires triangle" as well. It's not even like they ran out of time and money, it's like they weren't quite sure how many episodes they had until the end and so there's a weird mix of filler and vague monologues to pad out the arc (while still leaving the ending feeling rushed and lacking explanation). Likewise, I'm left feeling like all the good ideas are lost in the shuffle there and it's not like many other "difficult" anime where repeat viewings will tease them out. Regardless, I also hope for a third season as well. The very existence of a "loser" protagonist who isn't quickly beloved when he begins to interact with his classmates because he's secretly some kind of saint is enough to justify the show to me. Still, it appears that they might have caught up with the finished arcs of the light novel, though, and since it's unfashionable to have an anime-original ending these days (possibly rightly so) they decided to end it and wait? Who knows.

I meant to post a translated list of the pitched production schedule for Neon Genesis Evangelion, which is getting a lot of renewed attention now that the first volume of the Evangelion Chronicle, the most complete compilation of production and promotional materials, has been released officially in English... but I don't really have anything deep to say about it. It is really interesting, of course, to map it parallel to the working knowledge of Eva's budgetary problems: the first fourteen episodes are almost perfectly according to plan, then from fifteen onward there are minor differences as it becomes clear that the "traditional" arc of the anime took too long and cost too much money (most of the cuts, tragically, were almost all of Kaji's personal arc and a more explicit relationship between Shinji and Asuka, which was replaced by an expanded but still somewhat sketchy treatment of Rei), and then the last six episodes are entirely tossed out and rewritten to account for the fact that the final arc is more like an entire cour of episodes (an apparently proactive ending that involves defeating the Angels was scrapped and only Kaworu was salvaged from it). Although a recent thread on the usually terrible /r/evangelion subreddit about the ways in which Eva failed almost unanimously agreed that Kaji's briefly implied arc and Rei's sudden elevation into plot MacGuffin remain the weakest points (apart from all the idiots who apparently want the religious symbolism to "mean" something), I think the changes are generally for the best. Shinji transforming into a wholly active or even contentedly passive character is just against the spirit of Eva's themes, and I'm glad (with some qualifications) that the extreme austerity of the later episodes forced that reappraisal. Also, I wish that it was taking Sentai twelve months and then four months to release the two volumes of Shirobako because they're catching every profession-related reference in the characters and shows, but I know that they're taking that long because they want to pad out their release schedule after the holiday rush. Ugh! I'm glad someone who's seen the show agrees with me. No anime has made me feel as stupid as SNAFU did. I couldn't tell if I was missing obvious cues because I didn't get the characters or if they were just playing it way too subtly and ambiguously to get anything across.

Oh, I agree, but Danielle was talking about flawed but deeply psychological and existential sci-fi. If I could recommend her any anime, it'd be Revolutionary Girl Utena, which seems to be an even stronger cocktail of things that she's said to like, but none of them have been the topic of discussion in the podcast... yet.

Maybe if we interpose a pause or a tongue-click between each U? Anyway, it looks like we do agree. I was reacting mostly to your obvious anxiety about where to put these fan-produced Valve spinoffs in your memory palace, about which I'm sympathetic but try to be mostly rational. I personally feel very uncomfortable with companies providing the tent for fans to make derivative works based on their properties, but I don't think there's a better solution immediately presenting itself in this age of (ineluctably) strong copyright, especially now that more compassionate arrangements like the "gentleman's agreement" between corporations and fans in Japan have begun to break down. It used to be that creators died or moved on to different projects, making room for derivative works, but now it's definitely the nature of running an organization and a business shaping that decision with Valve... yet they're still content to pick up pennies here and there letting fans do their work for them. It's a very weird place to be, and I'm unsurprised that my thoughts about it are so unstructured. Sorry!

The podcast's conversation on derivative intellectual property is so interesting, albeit somewhat a retreat of a previous conversation specifically about Black Mesa. Jake's fanboyish reaction of anxiety about not knowing which works are the real works that he should take seriously is definitely a product of someone born several generations after strong copyright. Before then, almost since the beginning of human culture, "derivative fan works" were the norm, most usually continuing or redacting endings that dissatisfied fans. I taught Letters from a Peruvian Woman a few years ago, which was an eighteenth-century epistolary novel that incredibly popular but absolutely reviled for its final chapters (wherein the titular woman decides to reject Western civilization and the love of a man to live alone and spend her wealth on herself). Within months, dozens of works with titles like More Letters from a Peruvian Woman, Letters from a Peruvian Woman Revisited, and Letters of a Peruvian Man were out on the market and most outsold their exemplar. Likewise with so many of the works on Sherlock Holmes at the time. I think Chris put it best when he was troubled by the new development for how it's reshaping fandom in a way to put more money into companies' pockets, where hitherto these things were free and mostly disregarded by companies. I think more derivative works are generally a good thing, because they give people with less creative ambition a venue in which to express themselves and because they generally heighten the discourse around creative works in a way that benefits everyone somewhat, but the monetization of other people's hard work because they don't technically "own" the ideas that inspired it is... troublesome. I say that derivative works are a good thing, but I'm not entirely optimistic about the consequences of them being sold under implicit license. Also, we all had a laugh (haha) but Luuuke isn't canon. He was created as an April Fools' Day joke by Timothy Zahn to troll fans who thought that his clone Luuke Skywalker (by analogy to the cloned Jedi master Joruus C'baoth) was named in a dumb way and he should feel bad. I know that typing all of that out is a bit hypocritical after making a bit of a big deal about how "canon" is bunk, but I can't let it pass again!

I get what you mean, history is guesswork built on guesswork for almost any era, but I honestly don't don't think that the podcast overstated their specific point at all. Between the questionable reliability of the historical record (did you know that we don't have a single artifact that corroborates the Celtic invasion of the Balkans and Anatolia in 279 BC? We know that it happened because the primary sources are unanimous, even those that weren't in dialogue with each other, and because Galatian artifacts start appearing later in the third century, but otherwise Delphi could have sacked itself for all we know) and the extremely partial nature of the half-dozen primary sources that can be brought to bear on any event before the fall of Rome (Grandazzi and others have made compelling arguments that Livy was extremely partisan in his use of Quintus Fabius Pictor, not to mention his aggressive revisions of Polybius' extant narrative of the the Macedonian Wars, and let's not even start with Caesar's careful but extensive "neatening" of events in the bulletins meant to justify his one-man campaign of genocide and conquest), it's virtually impossible to know anything for sure about ancient warfare... and that's not even getting into scholarly arguments that literary tropes probably dictated the structure of historical accounts more than actual events (the Greeks rename everyone to be either Greeks, Persians, Scythians, or Celts in their histories, even when it makes no sense, but we assume that everything else was a reasonable reflection of reality, mostly because we have no other choice; this has begun to bother me a lot with my own research on medieval studies, since a series of critical works on Geoffrey of Villehardouin's narrative of the Fourth Crusade have shown much of it either to be inconsistent with earlier statements or consistent with prior literary exemplars, meaning that we really have to face how much we've disregarded details from Robert of Clari and the Devastatio Constantinopolitana because they conflict with what we know from the "better" historian that we thought Villehardouin was). Overall, the modern historical process of finding the most plausible consensus in the primary sources is a dangerous thing when dealing with a wholly foreign culture with a different set of societal expectations and literary traditions. The example that Victor Davis Hanson uses (what a disappointment that man has become, I wish his history of the Peloponnesian War wasn't the equal of Kagan) is that Greek accounts of hoplite battles before the fourth century BC always dwell on the bloody nature of those battles, especially for the loser, and yet archaeology is fairly conclusive that casualties for almost any battle were in the five- to ten-percent range for both sides, maybe fifteen if it was an especially one-sided loss after a protracted fight. Ancient authors have lied to us, even though their values wouldn't have led them to agree, because they were authors first and historians second (or not at all, if their patron or their audience didn't want them to be).

I agree, and I also think that the intellectual disquiet brought on by those concerns predisposes a certain type of personality to make unnecessary criticism of a work, in order to reconcile said concerns. Danielle didn't mean it, but it was very weird to hear her criticize Mike Milligan from Fargo for being too full of "jive" when the character was written for a white actor (even outside of Bokeem Woodbine's interviews, there are hints of this when Milligan occasionally refers to how America "used to be great" in the past) and cast against type (something that apparently happened with the other characters in the second season, just more subtly, which I'm afraid I missed because I'm not familiar with the career arcs of Ted Danson and Jean Smart). I do it, too, because I'm skeptical of anything that I like too much, but trying to intellectualize every gut reaction you have to a piece of media, especially intellectualizing it against itself because you can't entirely explain it otherwise, is an impulse that's begging to be second-guessed.

Eesh. I haven't had time to watch Jessica Jones myself, but the mere existence of this complaint makes me less like to find that time. Nothing turns me off of a show worse than characters acting against their best interests and motivations in order to keep the otherwise natural conclusion of the plot from happening prematurely. Sons of Anarchy had this in spades and, when the latest incarnation of it became the centerpiece of a season finale, I turned the show off and never looked back. A subset of that issue is the refusal to kill off an antagonist who has naturally come to a position where it makes sense for them to be killed, either by the characters and by circumstances, because the writers want to keep them around for future plotlines. That's how The Walking Dead lost me. I guess I just have no patience for TV writers sacrificing the quality of a script in order to hedge their bets.

Hah, of course! I guess my point was just that it's as easy to be fallible about remembering people are fallible as it is for people to be fallible in the first place. In my experience, it's been better for me just to keep such things in mind and try not to defend "bad" behavior because it's "good" people doing it, rather than police my admiration too closely. For others, I imagine that the latter comes more naturally.

I agree in theory, but I also think it is very difficult for almost anyone to isolate their admiration for a person's achievements from admiration from the person themselves. It's a natural equivalency for anyone living in nearly any cultures, to me. I know that I do my best to have a mental auriga standing behind everyone whom I respect, reminding me that they are only human, but it's still quite easy to let that slip and to fall into the patterns of thought that make that great accomplishments (or talent or attractiveness or power or eloquence) a signifier of greatness (or, even worse, goodness) itself.

The design of the unreformed religions is to force you to reform, full stop. You're setting yourself up for a game that's much more difficult than normal because a lot of mechanics are intentionally locked off in order to force you to convert or die roughly around 1100. Good luck!

Personally, I like stories about the experience of faith in extremity (particularly a person feeling the presence or absence of God in events). A lot of my discomfort with That Dragon, Cancer has come from a Radiolab/Reply All interview where one of the creators said quite specifically that the ultimate purpose of their game is "witnessing" for the Christian faith and that that's the reason why they and their son had to suffered. I haven't had an opportunity to play the game yet and maybe I won't ever get it, but I'm deeply uncomfortable with the thought that a game about such a difficult subject being presented with an agenda that purports to have an answer for why it happened. I can only hope that the witnessing is the passive recounting of events rather than the active construction of a narrative, I don't know.

I also was a bit miffed about the coy skirting around the different Gaugamela adaptations and would have appreciated a more low-level breakdown of their respective strengths and weaknesses.