Gormongous

Thanks especially to Troy's comments on this episode. It really cannot be emphasized enough how little we know about ancient warfare (or, really, any pre-modern warfare). One of the most revolutionary articles that I've read in my graduate career is "War and Violence" by Brent D. Shaw, from the edited volume Interpreting Late Antiquity: Essays on the Postclassical World. In it, Shaw argues quite cogently that literally every concrete detail that we have about warfare and battles from 300 to 600 AD in primary sources is either directly borrowed from literary prototypes in classical antiquity or shows the same characteristics as having been borrowed, suggesting lost works. He even makes a moderately compelling case that entire campaigns reported by seemingly reliable authors like Ammianus Marcellinus are structured near-identical to earlier examples from Tacitus and Sallust and therefore might also be the product of literary convention rather than actual history, considering that archaeological evidence is wanting for every battle in that three hundred-year period. The entire article just drives home how hard it is to be sure that any historical battle of that period actually even happened and, if it did, what transpired before, during, and after it. There are even more controversies of basic knowledge in the classical era proper. I remember reading a rousing series of articles pointing out that surviving descriptions of Hellenic warfare of the fourth and fifth century suggest thousands of men equipped with linen cuirasses, even though flax is an unbelievably intensive plant to grow, refine into linen, and glue layer upon layer to make armor. Since space and manpower were at a premium in most city-states, certainly enough that hundreds of acres and thousands of slaves devoted to making armor only mildly effective as protection would be a pointless expenditure, several historians have suggested that maybe the linothorax was made of leather, from the dozens of cattle sacrificed weekly if not daily for religious ceremonies. And it makes perfect sense, except that the primary sources are unequivocal that it was linen or some analogue, unless we have a serious misunderstanding of language in Livy, Strabo, Herodotus, and countless other historians. Stuff like that makes rivet-counting nigh on impossible, not that the rivet-counters won't keep trying. And then there's this one talk that Alan V. Murray gave about how medieval peoples lacked the shipbuilding technology to make a vessel that carried a hundred and fifty horses with fodder enough to feed them, yet it's one of the few instances where the primary sources all agree that horse transports on the crusades did carry a hundred and fifty horses each... Also, when Rob accused Troy of being an Alcibiades, I could only think of this one scene from Deadwood:

Are you me? Pay student loans off and fund my dissertation work. Move into a decent apartment that I can actually afford to heat and cool. Buy a car from this century and keep it in good repair. Create and endow a series of dissertation fellowships for low-income ABD students. Eat and travel well. Buy the full run of the Monogatari Series anime on blu-ray.

Someone should have been quick on the draw and sent them this video:

Adding to the list of books, Lonesome Dove is excellent. It takes a while to get going, it's usually only sci-fi/fantasy doorstoppers where the action takes a hundred pages to get started, but it really is a deep and thoughtful paean of the Old West. Also, Blood and Thunder is about the period a little before the "Old West" that we understand took root, but it's a well-written and engrossing study of the clash between an expansionist young nation and an ancient peoples, through the lens of a man caught in between.

I also love that it puns on "non-digital system" and "something related by comparison to something else," with multiple resonances within the game's writing. That's a pun that doesn't happen enough, I think.

That is a great summation. It felt like David Bowie was whoever he wanted to be, not because of his fame but because of himself, and so anyone could be anything they wanted to be, too. It's trite, but What Would David Bowie Do often seemed like a good question to ask. Man, I feel crushed overall. I was just listening to Low on the drive home tonight. Now that's a dead man's music and... Well, goodbye, Lady Stardust.

I'm mostly excited, but I'm specifically quite disappointed that Paradox has chosen to discourage snowball behavior by porting the very contentious Aggressive Expansion, Coalition, and Non-Aggression Pact mechanics over from EU4 rather than expanding preexisting systems of internal instability and diminishing returns. I understand that it's difficult to design within the bounds of a system that only recognizes agnatic and affinal relations as effective diplomatic ties, but the answer's not to throw it all away; instead, weaken large realms in the process of snowballing by giving vassals more options for passive and active support of and resistance to their immediate liege and the ability to interact with their ultimate liege, preferably tied into the dramatically underused trait system. Just one example: vassals have an option (probably expressed via a checkbox) to contribute the maximum possible, the minimum required, or none of their levies to their liege's wars, with Patient AI vassals refusing all contributions regardless of their opinion and Wrathful AI vassals always giving the maximum. More like this, please! Add some more texture and depth via mechanics that are already in the game, rather than diluting the power and intrigue of marriage alliances by adding ahistorical systems from another game. Honestly, I really wish that Paradox would quit with their coyness about all being "amateur historians" and hire themselves a professional who can act as a consultant on their design decisions. I wouldn't expect it to have that much effect on the outcome, but at least there would be a voice cutting against the result of intra-office multiplayer and Wikipedia "research." Apart from crusades and counter-crusading activity, there is literally no example from 955 to 1529 that would fits a "coalition" as described in the CK2 developer diaries on their forums. Bouvines in 1214? Marriage alliance between the Welfs, the Plantagenets, and Flanders. Lombard League in 1167? Revolt against the Holy Roman Emperor. Varna in 1444? Crusade. Between the revolt system, procedural holy wars, and the dynastic mechanics, there's no historical situation that qualifies, but... ugh, I don't know. Parents, don't let your sons and daughters grow up to balance their grand strategy games by playing with their fellow devs.

For me, the fascinating thing about culture is its totality. The word, "culture" refers to the sum of human experience and activity, so there's no getting outside of it. You can only understand other cultures by analogy to your own: through similarity and difference, presence and absence, positive and negative. That's something that gave me pause when Rob suggested that progression systems in video games are maybe just a function of the human predilection for things getting bigger and better over time, as reflected in the foundational archetypes of the hero's journey. "Of course, that makes sense," I thought from my position within the modern capitalist culture of the English-speaking West, before I tried to think of actual examples in pre-modern fiction and faltered somewhat. Campbell's description of mythopoesis is evocative and useful, but he is definitely speaking from a his position within the modern capitalist culture of the English-speaking West, too. A lot of what he wrote off as noise, distracting from the kernel of commonality in every myth, are things that the originators of those myths valued a lot. In fact, many pre-modern narratives have their nominal heroes accept crippling disadvantage or submit to die because victory is impossible. Odin and Tyr suffered from mutilation of eye and hand respectively in their search for peace and order, which was significant as gods of a society that held such disfigurements to be so unlucky as to be contagious, and they ultimately lost their apocalyptic battle with the forces of chaos as a result. Even in the Christian tradition, Jesus Christ appears as the living incarnation of an all-powerful god, yet constantly provokes secular authorities and refuses to defend himself when they finally retaliate against him. In the end, his promise is essentially to abandon the world to the forces of evil and take all true believers elsewhere, which was an extremely attractive prospect for medieval authors who viewed the world as irretrievably tainted by its own creation and doomed to decay until humanity was effectively extinct. Otto of Freising, a twelfth-century bishop and relative of emperors who authored a complete history of humanity, wrote about living "at the end of time" with the most peculiar mix of joy and misery. I can't really imagine a video game from that cultural perspective, but I'm sure it wouldn't involve a tech tree or leveling up. My point is, these are people and stories that motivated entire societies for centuries on end, even though they run counter to what are understood to be the positivist tendencies of the human brain. Maybe psychology and behavioral science have proven that they were anomalies, or maybe they've just proven the effects of capitalist values on cognition? I'm not sure, because it's hard to see outside my own culture, but I sure do wonder.

I also thought the romance was rather limp, making its inclusion odd since it's the part of the narrative that Miyazaki borrowed from his own father's life and grafted onto the well-established details of Jiro's professional career. You'd think that it was meant to humanize Jiro, but he makes the less human choice when presented with his love's illness (marry her, then keep working while she sickens) and it does nothing to draw me closer to him. Anyway, I think I made a couple of posts on my discomfort about Miyazaki using a historical figure to work out his feelings about his father's career little over a year ago in the Anime thread... Yeah, here they are: CLWheeljack later comments how its interesting that, after a career of setting his movies in settings where World War 2 or its analogue never happened or ended differently, Miyazaki finally sets his final film as directly at the heart of the conflict as he's able, which is a substantial sign of some personal growth. Also, Deadwood movie! I can't let myself get excited, greenlighting happens all the time, but still...

Well, that's good. I also remember that Elfstones of Shannara is less derivative, but sadly the quality of writing is very low for the first half-dozen that I read, at least. I don't know for sure. I do know that, with the Disney dubs, he works with Lasseter personally on the script and approves the final product, so he definitely likes them more than, for example, the old Streamline dubs, but I don't think I've ever seen him express a preference for how his films are best to be experienced, no. EDIT: There are some comments in this critical volume, with citations that I can't follow up, saying that Miyazaki likes dubbing because he believes anime is a global product and wants there to be as few impediments to its distribution as possible, but that's not the same as a preference.

If you're not listening to the original language tracks in The Wind Rises, you're missing out on Anno Hideaki as Jiro, hand-picked by Miyazaki for the role. That's so much better than Werner Herzog making a cameo as Castorp! I mean, you probably have read them, considering that their plots are beat-for-beat from The Lord of the Rings with only some of the serial numbers filed off. Even when I read them at age fourteen, it was still absolutely shocking to me how someone could write Tolkien, with inferior prose and changed names, and make money off of it. Then again, we have Fifty Shades of Grey today, so...

Oh man, be careful with that! When I got obsessed with Race for the Galaxy a few years ago, my friends could only play on weekends, so I found an online computer version and it changed the way I play. I though it was for the better, but... well, I wouldn't say that the ruthless and mechanical style that I was taught made me not a fun person with whom to play, but we did stop playing Race for the Galaxy only about a month after I discovered solo play. And then I kept playing alone, for many months after!

Saekano is getting a second cour, dated to October 2016! That's good, because as complicated as my feelings about Saekano are, they're still incomplete without more episodes. I realize I didn't publish my full thoughts on Saekano in this thread, so here are some slightly edited comments from the Key Frames slack channel: What's truly great about Saekano, rather than just earning the grade of "not embarrassing" in most of its low-level interactions, is that it's an anime about making a game, so the particulars of its depiction of making a game highlight the various creative processes that it is subject to itself as an anime. For instance, the childhood friend, who has the most visually intricate of the main characters' designs, is obsessed with art and aesthetic appeal in their game and also thinks that preexisting relationships make for the best way to drive the plot. On the other hand, the kuudere genius argues for the primacy of chance encounters and the power of fate, precisely like the circumstances under which she met the male protagonist. The titular "boring girlfriend" just wants slice-of-life stuff and the male protagonist, a huge otaku, is constantly pushing everyone to conform to stereotypes in order to please their audience... which makes it so much more clear and pleasurable when the anime subverts those stereotypes. Each of the characters is arguing for their own archetype of character and the style of storytelling that they represent to be the defining feature of the anime in which they take part. There have been some examples of this type of commentary in other anime that I've watched, but in Shirobako it was largely confined to small winks at an audience already in the know and in Seitokai no Ichizon (licensed as "Student Council's Discretion" in the States, barf) the anime functioned as a barebones framework for the commentary, not a proof-of-concept for the commentary's theses. It's all very interesting, even if it takes place in a fundamentally problematic harem anime. Also, Saekano has some of the best gifs:

I wish, but my main contribution to the project is a series of Latin translations from an extremely difficult fourteenth-century text with no published editions. There's no one with my level of Latin skills in my department who isn't at least as snowed under as me. I just need to be more assertive about boundaries and remind him in every email that I'm working on two grants due at the end of the month...

Danielle, this might be an obvious question, but considering that you found something enjoyable in Prometheus just because it was sci-fi that asked questions about the nature of reality and the place of human consciousness within it... how much anime have you seen? Twig will groan, but have you seen any of Neon Genesis Evangelion?

Yeah, he's extremely nice and enthusiastic about everything. He's put me in touch with a couple of short-term employment opportunities (none of which panned out, not really his fault, see "enthusiasm") and is really bullish on getting me a first-round interview when the next professor in his department retires, too. It's just tough when I don't believe in this article at all and when he keeps dumping things on my plate out of a naive desire to share the wealth? I feel terrible for writing this post, but the last thing I needed today was that rejection letter, even if I'm not invested in the work itself.

Argh! This one research project that I did over four years ago with a local professor just won't stop coming back to haunt me. At first, I felt bad that I brought back to him an unequivocal negative to his hypothesis, especially since he paid me reasonably well for the anemic state of our field, so I agreed to keep meeting with him to develop his research into something more publishable. Mostly, the meetings have been a nice way to get a free meal every four or six months and to keep my ear to the ground with what's happening at UMSL, but this past year he started pushing hard for my help in getting the work that we did together published. That's right, he wants to publish the fact that he was wrong about something — namely, his process for finding this out! I didn't really understand (and still don't) but he promised that I would just need to provide a final draft of the work that I'd already done for him and he'd handle the rest, with a co-author credit to my name. He's got a book out with Harvard University Press, so I thought it was a safe bet and an easy bump on my CV. Nope! Right at the height of writing my biggest grant, he sent me ten pages of largely unstructured thoughts, with a small collection of footnotes absent any primary sources beyond the ones I found for him, telling me that he was satisfied with his work and that it was up to me to add anything I felt was missing. Five drafts and four additional pages later, we were up to something that might fill out the back end of a mid-tier journal like Comitatus, but he wants to start at the top and asks me to research a list of the top journals in early modern history and their submission guidelines. Again, the timing was terrible, but he was reasonably flexible, and eventually we settled on Viator. Our article is not Viator material at all, but he repeated the whole "start at the top" thing and went through with the submission. Maybe things are different outside of medieval history, I thought? Well, we just got back an absolutely scathing rejection, mostly focused on it being "under-researched and under-argued" but also touching on some errors in my work that I wouldn't have missed if the article hadn't been my third or fourth priority at the time, and now he wants me to take the lead on edits! Ugh. I've made it clear several times over the last couple years that I have no time to workshop an article over and over, especially not when it's outside my research interests, and I know that he's not ignoring that on purpose, just trying to involve me in his process... but I'm beginning to feel like his process sucks, this article shouldn't exist, and I don't need the distraction from my grant-writing, which is already a distraction from my dissertation-writing!

Sure! In its final form, with the Crusader Kings: Deus Vult expansion, a vassal would have a chance every month of gaining the "rebellious" trait if their opinion was below a certain negative number. In addition to a blanket boost to their stats, rebellious vassals would be regularly offered the option, by event, either to rebel against their liege and leave the realm with no claim on them, to slip out of the realm leaving a claim by their liege, or to stay loyal for a prestige bonus. The way this worked allowed a realm ruled by an incompetent or disliked ruler to come apart very slowly, as disgruntled vassals would either become mightier while losing none of their ill feelings (because prestige in CK1 was basically a currency directly spent on ingame power), become independent with minimal immediate consequences, or start wars for independence that every other vassal with the "rebellious" trait would be offered a chance to join (again, by event, because triggered events were essentially how every system in CK1 functioned). CK2 turned the "rebellious" trait into the "ambitious" trait, but without the event system underpinning it, it's just a straight malus, as opposed to a threat that must be actively countered by all by the most skilled rulers, who could afford to wait the decade or two until the "rebellious" trait expired (via event). An adjunct to this system was the "realm duress" trait. Any liege with a certain combination of rebellious vassals and low "stability" score (the latter an EU system ported over poorly and obscured from player agency, unfortunately) would gain the "realm duress" trait, which decreased stats of and opinions about the liege, as well as offering an increased chance for vassals to become "rebellious" themselves, with the consequences described above. It was an extremely clumsy way of forcing civil wars, relying too much on triggered events that sometimes ran completely counter to the actual strength and integrity of the realm in question, but it did allow for more dramatic and historical-seeming rebellions, as opposed to CK2's here-and-there rebellions by vassals without a hope of victory. A ruler with the "realm divide" trait was going to have to fight one or two serious civil wars with a sizable minority of their vassals, usually their most talented and wealthy ones, and by the time that the conditions for the removal of the "realm divide" trait were satisfied (by the failure for any more vassals to gain the "rebellious" trait over a certain period of time, either through the independence of all vassals that might have been candidates or through their liege's military supremacy) the outcome was either a vastly reduced realm or one that was stronger and more stable than ever. It was extremely jury-rigged, but I feel that it worked better than anything short of the CK2+ mod's faction mechanics.

Yeah, I feel like the majority of the enthusiasm over Attila is equal parts passion for a fascinating period of history and relief that Creative Assembly didn't completely shit the bed with another launch. The Warscape engine is still a cartoonish parody of actual combat, with units racing around and crashing into each other like bumper cars. Character development is still an inscrutable collection of stats that only allows for an impressionistic guess at a character's actual competencies. The hate-you-forever diplomacy is still there, preventing the assumption of a rational actor even though it's been improved, and people are still excusing it because of the "appeal to title" fallacy. The AI still can't play its own campaign, so there's still tons of behind-the-scenes cheating to keep the AI from running out of food or money. Even with the addition of the family tree, the politics system is still an absurd series of "fill this bucket or empty your opponent's bucket" decision trees that repeat far too soon. Even more than Bethesda, Creative Assembly excels at building Potemkin villages that give players an extremely specific experience and fail utterly when pushed outside that experience. Attila succeeds only because its setting is one of long odds, hard times, and decay, which makes the inflexible systems and rampant cheating feel less incongruous. I certainly don't feel like it's the sign that Creative Assembly's back on track, not when all the "innovations" of Attila like razing, hordes, and family trees are all mechanics from previous games (in most cases, the original Rome's "late antique" expansion) modified to fit into the systems from Rome 2, for better or for worse. Meanwhile, the Chaos faction from Warhammer is DLC for the upcoming game, so I don't feel great in general about anything. I did appreciate Fraser going to bat for the original Crusader Kings. It's an ugly and difficult game, but it has virtually all the systems in place that make Crusader Kings 2 a truly great game. It's missing the fullness of the opinion mechanics and the de jure system, as well as the marriage/alliance equivalency, but otherwise it's all there, and it's been my opinion that the first game handles the process of revolt and disintegration better than the second, too!

It's actually something interesting that I noticed while I was looking at the Internet Movie Firearms Database entry for Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain. There's certainly a love of the physical appearance of firearms, especially the intricate machinery of automatic weapons made from modern materials, but the contributors to the IMFDB entry, whom I assume to be true "gun nuts," mostly have a rock-bottom opinion of the game for how haphazardly the guns are designed and handled. In most cases, it's like Kojima's artists googled "shotgun" or "assault rifle" and then combined the coolest-looking elements of a half-dozen different images almost at random to produce the guns ingame. None of them would be functional if built in real life. Really, it's a love of guns as abstract aesthetic objects and not as tools of human work that exist in reality, which seems like a relatively niche outlook for appreciating guns.

I just soloed a lvl. 10 planet, three missions total, by myself, with the Guard Dog backpack, a bunch of Distractor Beacons, and the Cardio Accelerator. It wasn't hard, per se, but it was tedious, a lot of running away from patrols, setting up a beacon, and then looping back while they were caught up there. Like S.A.M. and I agreed, this game is so much like Monaco in its basic arc: a frantic "stealth" game that's fun and funny when you're failing but quiet and a bit slow when you're actually doing it right. Thankfully, Helldivers has the risk of teamkilling, even among good players, to flip the table entirely, but I can definitely see an endpoint where four experienced competent players watch four respective quadrants of the screen, make no major mistakes, and have a bit of a dull time with it. I'm still miles away from that, though, and I've played a fair amount. EDIT: And then a lvl. 12 helldive with Wooben and two of my friends. Maybe I am getting good...

I feel like you've made a great synopsis of one of the particularly strange cycles of logic in 4channer thought: sincerely caring about a subject leaves you open to getting trolled about it, and getting trolled is bad because it's a sign of out-group status, therefore sincerely caring about a subject is bad. Of course, there are clearly subjects about which 4chan and 4chan-adjacent communities care, but there's this rigorous imposition of artificial distance in their "caring" that supposedly distinguishes cool dudes doin' it for the lulz from stupid mundies and their motivations. It's utterly bizarre to watch it played out, even five years ago I remember being in threads on 4chan where the tone totally flipped because of a collective awareness that too many people were enjoying themselves too sincerely and that must be the fault of anonymous out-group interlopers who are only able to be driven out by pervasive contrariness...

Ah well, neither that game or the one discussed on the podcast is probably for you, then!

Does anyone have any experience with or knowledge of Hanako Games' latest offering, Black Closet? The Steam reviews are universally positive and I figure that "quasi-procedurally generated intrigue simulator as the student council president of an all-girls school" is a slam dunk, but there's been almost no critical reaction since its release in mid-September and one of the hosts on TMA mentioned it as a charmingly crap game in their episode on Thea: The Awakening, so... I don't know.