Gormongous

Do you have thoughts on the second season's finale this past Sunday? I honestly didn't like it very much at all and it confirmed to me that the things I viewed as improvements from the first season aren't really understood as such by the creators. I just finished rewatching the third and final season of Deadwood and I'm honestly stunned at how much better it does dysfunctional individuals, more or less, facing the irruption of an existential threat to their respective ways of life both singly and together as a community. George Hearst is genuinely terrifying, even when sometimes made to look the fool, and the show's writing works mightily to help the audience understand exactly why he has the power that he does and what it means to every other character in the series. Maybe it's unfair to compare anything to what is possibly the greatest television show ever made, but it's what's on my mind when I watch The Leftovers' scripts give Regina King an amazing hour of performance and then totally forget about her for two or three times that span.

I'm glad that you captured what was possibly our worst helldive. An entire objective destroyed by a stray recoilless rifle round and deaths in the double digits... So much fun! Playing alone a bit later to unlock some more of the basic stratagems like the Resupply Pack, I discovered that the Cyborgs are extremely difficult, almost impossible, to solo thanks to the dogs. They acquire you beyond the visible range of the camera and charge straight at you, so you have to kill at least two before they close with you, else you get stuck knocked over and bit to death. I got through the mission, but it was frustrating. I don't think I'll be playing the Cyborgs again without a team to back me up...

I'm going to equip and trick out the UAV, which reveals samples when fully upgraded. It will make sample farming a trivial task, I hear. Actually, that was the other "essential" DLC item, rather than the HAV.

I'm sad, I thought I was special. Every rando I've met has been a dude, though! And yeah, maybe half of the DLC packs are full of junk, but I've heard from PS4 veterans that it's good to have a bunch of jokey weapons to put spare research points into, once you've upgraded everything you actually like, so I'm not mourning my splurge, really.

Be a lady! I'm a lady.

There's apparently a $25 all-in-one pack that some glitch in the Steam API prevents from being shown on the base game's page. Only when you click on a specific piece of DLC does the option become visible (which speaks to how much research many of those outraged by the DLC have done, but I agree that it's still a failure in messaging). Of course, some of those outraged are of the vocal opinion that i) no game should launch with any paid DLC whatsoever, no matter the reason, and ii) all ingame objects should have an option to be earned by sweat equity, read "total hours put into the game." That's really the entitlement that's baffling to me.

It's killing me that this game is taking a little bit of a bath on Steam reviews and Reddit for having DLC at launch. A very cogent and polite statement by Arrowhead's CEO, stating that the game's been out almost a year on PS4 and that ongoing development has hitherto been supported by monthly DLC packs going for two or three dollars, which are all now available on the PC for the same prices, has been met with platitudes about PC gamers (unlike console gamers) being used to low prices for lots of content, so of course this cannot stand. Maybe if they dropped their DLC prices to a dollar or made them unlockable ingame like Warframe or something, they say as totally impartial observers of the marketplace... I'm almost never one to bang on about gamer entitlement, but goddamn. Nothing in the DLC packs is essential, except maybe the stasis fields and the HAV, and if you've played the base game the hundred-odd hours necessary to unlock everything that it comes with, perhaps consider kicking a few bucks back to the devs for some new toys rather than carping about sweat equity as a player in a video game.

All the laser weapons are great, honestly. Removing ammo as a consideration is such a relief, and their pinpoint accuracy makes them relatively safe among friends. The only downside of a fully upgraded Scythe is a somewhat slow movement speed, and there are perks for that.

I honestly wish there was a bit more of that, even so. The often-criticized absence (or rather, whitewashing) of racial tensions contributing to the problems of the prison-industrial complex would benefit, especially. Imagine the difficulty of hiring non-bigoted guards and trying to rotate shifts to keep a guard's grudge from blossoming into full-blown racism, maybe even to the point of helping prisoners of a certain race dodge harsher punishments... Tough, but interesting, I'd think.

Laser, LMG, and ammo for me. I'm thinking of rolling with a bunch of red strats instead, since the laser uses no ammo and does about as much damage as the LMG once fully upgraded. Maybe the recoilless rifle too, although I haven't played enough hard levels to need armor-piercing weaponry...

I will die happy if I can just play one game without being killed by turret or mech. Ninety percent of total party kills so far have been a poorly placed turret mowing down the entire team!

I think the intent is to build buzz and momentum before the actual release. I hope it's working, because it doesn't seem like they have any other advertising going on...

Yeah, it's a great game that doesn't have you caring about failure because the chain of events that led to it feels so ridiculous.

Yeah, that's my problem with Up. It runs out of ideas halfway through and reverts to a really banal formula: a half-mad antagonist with no discernible motivations besides stopping the protagonists from doing anything for no reason.

I appreciate the advice, everyone, and I hope that I'm smart enough to take it. I think my main hangup, to which Osmo alluded, is that my happiness in a relationship tends to come from feelings of physical contact, proximity, and intimacy. Absent that, in the past, it doesn't take much longer than a year before it begins to feel like the relationship itself has started to dry up. The last time that I thought that I had "the one," back in college, this sequence of events happened twice: we'd date for about a year, she'd have to move (back home the first time, grad school the second), and we'd make it eighteen months, maybe two years, before our relationship had been reduced down just to complaining (and sometimes arguing) over the phone and getting naked together in person. I know that the circumstances are entirely different now (though very supportive and kind, that ex was deeply depressed and quite negative even when not so depressed; I'm getting better at self-reporting all the time; my current girlfriend is proactive, ambitious, and wise, which unfortunately is what makes her so excited to take on this opportunity) but I still have to work off of the experience I have, which does not make me confident about upcoming events. But Merus is right, I can't tell her to stay without destroying our relationship for certain, and I am excited in the abstract for how this new job will help her career and finances. I just wish I was financially stable and emotionally secure enough to know that I could make this work for certain, through visits and self-confidence. Ah well!

Likewise! See you all in hell... diving: http://steamcommunity.com/id/Gormongous/

Count me in, and a couple of my real-life friends have also bought the game, so we'll probably be able to have a full team sometimes! http://steamcommunity.com/id/Gormongous/

Available for download as of 8:30 PST! It's five gigs but installs quickly.

Yeah, I know this is good for her even though it feel scary and a bit of a betrayal to me. I just need to get myself into a place where I can make it all about her instead of worrying about what it means to me. Thanks, everyone.

Update: she got the job offer, at a third again her current salary, and we immediately got into a fight about how it would or would not change our relationship. This fight has recurred over the past few weeks as she rejected the offer, because the company only gave her the weekend to decide, and then was invited to visit her prospective workplace and make her decision before the end of the year. I'm very stressed out by all of this, not least because I have a long history of great relationships falling apart once they go long-distance and because this one has been so natural and easy thus far, but I think she's ultimately going to be inclined to take the offer, since she feels trapped in her current job and craves any kind of change, and our relationship's just going to have to adapt or die. I can't tell her to stay, because that'll kill our relationship for sure, but I don't feel good about any of this. I fuckin' hate grad school in the humanities. I have literally no way of making enough money to help myself, let alone to support someone else while they do what they want to do. Moments like right now leave me feeling so trapped because of that...

The word from the devs is that it'll be late morning PST. I'm... totally not setting an alarm.

I imagine that Tad Williams' Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn hold that place for me with fantasy literature, but with fantasy literature. I've been extremely reluctant to reread them or to track down any critiques of them because of that. Hamilton is good, considering how huge the Night's Dawn trilogy is and how early he wrote it in his career relatively speaking, but it's definitely from an age that's passed and will never return, for me. Reading the Southern Reach trilogy felt like having a migraine come on while I was recovering from a fever. It wasn't a sensation I seek out, but it was unique and gripping in the extreme. I hope you enjoy it, if you happen to read it!

I recently read two sci-fi trilogies. In a way, they demonstrated what a weirdly limp and useless term "sci-fi" is as a genre designator, because they were as different as can be. The first was the Southern Reach trilogy, also called the Area X trilogy, by Jeff VanderMeer. Apparently, this was the subject of some online buzz a year or so ago and, although I'm skeptical of "buzz" in general, it's totally justified here. These books are short, totaling maybe four hundred pages altogether, but they make up for it in psychological weight. I would call them more "supernatural horror" than traditional sci-fi, although they do center around presumed contact with an alien lifeform. The incredible, terrifying otherness of that contact is what makes these books absolutely golden, especially when it's steeped in a consciousness of Southern culture and gender politics that feels very savvy and kind to its characters. I don't even really want to go into the details, just check it out if any of the words that I've said look good. The second was the Night's Dawn trilogy by Peter F. Hamilton. You've probably seen it if you've ever been in the sci-fi section of a bookstore, it's three thousand-page volumes in solid green, orange, and blue. Honestly, I was crazy about this book for the first eighteen hundred to two thousand pages. It has a very clever premise: a secular, spacefaring, post-scarity society discovers by random chance that the afterlife exists, or at least a hell, when angry souls appear and begin possessing people. The clash between science and faith is done quite well, surprisingly, considering the spine-breaking verbosity of the prose. I didn't even mind the eight hundred pages of scene-setting in the first volume before anything actually happens, because it reminded me of the good old days when trilogies were everywhere and it was accepted that things could take a lot of time. Still, the books soon wore out their welcome and the entirety of the final volume was tedious for me. First, there were just too many characters, many of whom were introduced for a one-off viewpoint and then kept around because Hamilton seems to have made a commitment with himself to follow every character's story to its (often) boring end. Second, some of the conflicts were interesting, even the nature of the afterlife, but most were boring. Having Al Capone resurrected, without his syphilis, as the principal antagonist was dumb and made no commentary on either him in particular or history in general, especially since no other known figures from the past (besides a certain first mate from the HMS Bounty) made an appearance. It was just a gimmick, really. Finally, Hamilton clearly had no ending in mind, which probably contributed to the length of the trilogy. The setting, as it starts out, is a small confederacy of planets still in political and social flux, with only two alien races that (to Hamilton's credit) are legitimately mysterious and hold no magical MacGuffins or anything. Nevertheless, near the end of the third volume, suddenly the number of alien races increases (again, to Hamilton's credit, in interesting ways) and a god-device shows up that explains the entire cosmology of Hamilton's fictional universe to the most Mary Sue of the characters and then fixes everything for everyone, with an overlong epilogue showing that everyone (even the deceased) are happy. It wasn't bad, but it needed an editor. I almost think it a shame that it's so long, because reading it makes me think of the possibilities that other writers could find in Hamilton's vision. It's not like there's a shortage of things to borrow, in that great mass of text...

I feel like I'm only ever proud of what I post on my blog when I'm talking about Neon Genesis Evangelion. I was inspired after being pointed to a trio of videos comparing the original series and End of Evangelion to the Rebuild movies. They come down a bit harsher on the latter than I'd like — especially You Can (Not) Advance, which is not quite the betrayal of the original series' characters that the author of the videos makes it out to be — but they're an excellent primer for what's interesting about those works (especially the original series) simply by being relatively short and listenable, which is more than I can say for virtually any other video series about Eva. Quick hint: if the person making a video says "EE-von-GHELL-eon" I just close the browser window.

I finished the second "season" of My Teenage Romantic Comedy SNAFU last night. Honestly, most of my comments about the first "season" stand. It's honestly a strange show to watch, because the Volunteer Club that comprises the main characters is very good at solving problems, so that's never in doubt. Instead, the tension of the show comes from those characters' differing philosophies and their failure to respect them. Sometimes it comes off as subtle, but sometimes it's just inscrutable. It took me half the fucking season to comprehend that Yukino's been putting on an act with Yui and Hachiman and that her mounting diffidence towards them is a hesitance to get any closer and endanger that act. I know I complimented the low-key presentation of the love triangle, but the second season takes that same approach with virtually every other emotional arc and I was just losing the thread of the plot way too often. It sucks, but I can't recommend a show like that, when I'm constantly asking, "Wait, what is she mad about?" or "Wait, why don't they like his plan?" I will say, the character of Hikigaya Hachiman is excellent and everything that was advertised. He starts out a bitter and closed-off loner who is forced to perform public service in a club, but his cynicism turns out to be good for solving problems and he gradually makes friends thereby, without changing his fundamentally negative personality. It's slow and subtle, but deeply effective, rather than the usual anime trope of a loner otaku finding love and acceptance and suddenly becoming this happy dork with no commonalities to his previous self. I just wish he were in a different show, because his arc clashes with those of Yui (friendly but awkward girl trying to figure out how to voice intimate feelings), Yukino (girl putting on a perfectionist front to protect herself from others' judgment), Hayama (popular jock who wants to be friends with everyone, even the girls who're competing for him), and others, so it's easy to miss it and how well it works on its own.