Gormongous

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.

Yeah, I haven't played Surviving Mars, but I felt the same about Cities: Skylines. Once you'd finished growing your town into a city, there wasn't really any added texture or challenge to the experience, not unless you attempted something fabulously risky, expensive, and unnecessary, like the overpass project Rob describes.

Yeah, I think there's a design philosophy behind Stellaris that will keep it from ever feeling like something truly rare and unique. The game was designed from the ground up to be balanced as a multiplayer sci-fi wargame with 4X elements, and all the species customization and event chains are just a grudging bone thrown to the way that the other nine people out of ten play Paradox games, as engines for emergent singleplayer narratives. There's never going to be anything that could possibly be broken or exploited in Stellaris, at least not intentionally, because it's a game that's meant to be played on an office LAN with you and your closest friends or coworkers over the next six months. And, like you point out, that's also why there's never going to be a midgame, not a real one. The midgame is where the different players, having established themselves, begin to differentiate and specialize to pursue the victory conditions, but Stellaris is designed to keep everyone roughly abreast of each other, given the same availability of resources. The semi-blind research tree works towards this end: because you're just offered a small, random selection from a large pool of tech, there's little point in pushing too far down any one brand of the tree, not when you can't count on the tech you need to come up when you need it. No, better just to advance methodically down the three trees and take whatever's most useful to you at that moment when it comes, keeping every stat safely within 10% or 15% of the other players' stats. It's the same issue as the planets: some planets are rich and some planets are poor, but more planets is always better and their location only matters for defensibility in the end. And that's even not to mention that Stellaris still only has three victory conditions, two of them military and one of them technically diplomatic but, in practice, military. Can you believe that there's a sci-fi strategy game where technology ultimately exists just to give you bigger and more beautiful weapons, not to advance civilization past the use of and need for weapons? I know that the victory conditions don't matter in Paradox games, but they can get away with it in historical grand strategy because the implicit end-state in those games is the present day, while the implicit end-state in Stellaris is... I don't know, the player gets bored? It's design choices like this that make Stellaris so bland once you get past the Star Trek: The Original Series-flavored opening turns. There's nothing to surprise you, and no way for you to surprise the AI besides when you choose to conquer it.

At least in my experience, "all y'all" means "everyone present," as opposed to "y'all" meaning "everyone I'm addressing."

Excellent article, especially its treatment of Sigismund's "foreignness," the decision not to subtitle the Cumans, and the fact of the Hussites on the historical horizon. Thanks for linking to it!

Because Reyturner and I are rewatching all of the Monogatari Series as part of a podcast project, I've been in a rewatch mood lately. The most recent thing I've rewatched is both cours of Kono Subarashii Sekai ni Shukufuku wo!, a send-up of isekai anime where a loser dude named Kazuma (or Kazutrash or Crapzuma) gets sent to a fantasy world where he is part of a misfit adventuring party that never leaves the starting zone and barely manages to accomplish anything. It starts out as a fairly straightforward (although acid-tongued and quick-witted) parody of RPG conventions and anime power fantasies, but once the core cast of Aqua the dim-witted goddess, Megumin the chuunibyou mage, and Darkness the masochist knight is assembled around Kazuma, the comedy largely shifts to him being a long-suffering (and dirty-minded) straight man to the broad and extreme dysfunction of his now-daily life. I really can't exaggerate how funny this anime is. There's so much to enjoy: Aqua's haughtiness repeatedly shifting to snot-nosed pleading whenever she encounters any setback, Darkness staying with the party out of a love of the humiliation that comes from their collective incompetence, Megumin passing out after casting the only spell she knows because it uses up all her mana and she refuses to learn any other ones, Kazuma's laziness and selfishness making him only intermittently aware of how everyone hates his perverted bullshit... The second cour makes the suspect decision to move away from the inherent humor of trapping the party in the starting zone and in extreme poverty, but the glimpses of the wider world that later episodes afford make it largely worth it. It's not for everyone, as dumb and cruel as it can be to its characters, but I was happy to go back and watch it again, so I thought I'd say so here. Oh! And I thought to watch it because I finally watched Record of Lodoss War: Chronicles of the Heroic Knight, the remake-cum-sequel to the (in)famous 1990 OVA Record of Lodoss War that was based on a series of fantasy novels based on the author Mizuno Ryo's mid-eighties D&D campaigns. It was... average, unfortunately: much of the original OVA's issues come from the highly compressed narrative, so it was nice to see the various characters luxuriate in twenty-seven episodes' worth of time, but the flaws for the source material (particularly the tendency of those characters to behave stupidly, belligerently, or even just randomly because of the original players' motivations) still make it somewhat difficult to watch and enjoy. In particular, the secondary antagonist, an immortal sorceress who's spent centuries sowing chaos and war to prevent any nation in Lodoss from getting the power to cause a cataclysm like the one that destroyed her homeland, ultimately allies with the main antagonist, a dark wizard trying to resurrect the goddess of death and destruction who'll end all life on Lodoss, because she is concerned that the heroes may become too powerful if they succeed in stopping the resurrection. Dude, missing the forest for the trees here! Really, the reasons that I kept watching it were 1) I don't tend to drop anime, no matter how bad; 2) I was laid up with the flu for two weeks at the time; and 3) Record of Lodoss War: Chronicles of the Heroic Knight has what is probably the best OP of all time. It's animated by Nakazawa Kazuto, an insider favorite with anime directors everywhere, and it plays over the haunting song "Kiseki no Umi" by Sakamoto Ma'aya (who voiced a minor character in the show, as well as other great characters like the Major from Ghost in the Shell, Nino from Arakawa Under the Bridge, and Shinobu from the Monogatari Series). Everything about this OP captures the nobility, tragedy, mystery, and adventure that is promised in works of Western fantasy, and I was so totally fascinated by it that I couldn't bear to skip it even once. A friend came over when I was just finishing an episode and I made her watch the OP, which left her stunned to silence... until it cut to the episode proper and we were back to the flat colors, animation shortcuts, and bland dialogue as the norm. Still, it's worth a watch, even as a blurry Dailymotion video.

I think El Dorado's offerings are good starters, because they're rich and sweet without the funk of island rums. The three-year is a good light rum to mix, the eight-year a good dark rum to mix, and the twelve-year a good dark rum to sip. I personally like Flor de Caña four-year to mix in daiquiris, but it's a lot drier and more astringent, it's taken me a while to get used to it. I also need more time to get to know Plantation's offerings, especially their five-year Barbados that I tried and found too gunpowder-y at the beginning of my journey. Cordeos has also been getting into rum, I think?

Also known as, "how most people think that ethics and morality work." I watched all of it while I was sick with the flu, the week before last, and it was very rewarding to see how far the show complicated that.

The six-ounce Dole cans are a lifesaver to someone who doesn't drink a ton and doesn't want to have to dispose of forty-six ounces of pineapple juice in the week and change before it turns (and bad). Sure, they're more expensive per-ounce and more wasteful in terms of materials, but six ounces is the perfect amount to make three tiki drinks (or other cocktails that use.pineapple, like the Mary Pickford or the underrated Park Avenue), which is how many you'll make if you make one for yourself, one for your friend or partner, and have enough left over for someone (maybe an interloper) to have seconds. Also, the Jungle Bird has a really interesting history as a tiki-adjacent cocktail that's since been adopted into the canon.

No, it's a reader mail about Fallout 3, where a misplaced grenade blows up a generator and frees a bunch of super mutants. In the late teens or early twenties, I think?

Honestly, as a native Texan, it's been really interesting over the last couple of decades to watch "y'all" transition from a humiliating signifier of my lower-class upbringing in a cultural backwater to the preferred second-person plural pronoun for a sizable minority of English speakers. Now if I can just live to see people appreciate the distinction between "y'all" and "y'aw," a matter of specific vs. general address like "nous" and "on" in French...

Even if it was, the troubadour was a southern French phenomenon during the eleventh through thirteenth centuries, with echoes in northern Italy and Spain. Having that culture and its ideal woman represented in fifteenth-century Bohemia is just as implausible as having a black African appear there, but not if you make the layman's assumption that European Christendom in the Middle Ages was a static and discrete monolith, as the game's developers have repeatedly shown themselves to have done. I'd be happy for there to be a real hunger for historical accuracy in games, but Kingdom Come: Deliverance is all about flattering the average person's gut instincts about how the Middle Ages "really" were: chock-full of drinking and wenching and murdering infidels.

I loved the Inheritance Trilogy, but I've found The Fifth Season so far to be a much clumsier effort by Jemisin. That said, I don't think of her as the master of allegory in genre fiction, not compared to, say, Mervyn Peake.

Four, actually, because they have one where they make Justin, too. Despite the supposed robustness of character creators in games like Skyrim, I think the wrestling videos are the best of the stuff that Monster Factory does. "Christopher Christopher Christopher Christopher" makes me laugh until I ache.

Your reasoning is correct, but the noun version has been pronounced like the adjective version by analogy since the eighteenth century, so it's going against over two centuries of common use to insist on differentiating the two.

I'm pretty sure the console version of Enemy Within doesn't have an option to play Enemy Unknown. That said, Enemy Within isn't that much more complicated and is, ultimately, the better game, so...

This is weeks too late, but I asked my mother over drinks after Christmas. Ends up she moved to Dallas after college because she stayed with her college roommate, who found work there. She worked on a few campaigns before ending up with 7-Eleven and got promoted to the Olympics campaign, which she finished before quitting to have me. Dad just grunted when I asked him, no surprise there. This post inspired by Night in the Wood's excellent mother/daughter relationship.

Usually I roll my eyes when Shut Up & Sit Down gets all starry-eyed about some game that makes them laugh and laugh and laugh... but, actually, Fog of Love is really good. They talk about it in this video: See what I mean about the laughing? So Fog of Love bills itself as "a romantic comedy as a board game" and that's... somewhat true. It's really more of a curated roleplaying experience? You generate characters based on randomly assigned traits, features, and an occupation. Interestingly, you choose the traits, which are secret goals for you to achieve, but your features, which determine your starting stats, are chosen by other player as the things that attracted their character to yours. That means that, often, you're playing a character who looks honest, fun-loving, and kind, but who is actually lazy, rude, and a pervert deep down. You then take turns playing sweet, serious, or dramatic "scenes" from your hands as you navigate one of four pre-made stories (with more, apparently, to come in expansions): one or both of you choose(s) a response to the scene, based on the composition of the scene itself, and your stats and satisfaction (your character's overall happiness in the relationship) change as a result. When you've gone through a certain number of scenes, divided into three or four acts, you have a finale where you present one of several destiny cards that have been drawn and discarded throughout the game, determining what your character wants in a relationship and, based on your stats and satisfaction, whether they get it. It's a fairly simple game, but the way that the scenes, which often have blind choices to make, and both characters' traits interact makes for a fairly authentic recreation of the ebb and flow of a relationship. If you choose to focus on being happy in the relationship by trying to please your partner, to the exclusion of who you are inside, you might make the relationship work, but it's just as likely that you'll end up miserable because you haven't met any of your trait goals. Conversely, if you focus only on your trait goals, to the exclusion of what your partner seems to want, you may end up happy together anyway, if you're both the same person deep down, but you'll more likely end up broken up. It took me and my friend a long time, basically all four stories, to figure out the balance between those two approaches. Fog of Love is, ultimately, a semi-cooperative game with lots of hidden information where your goal is to be a self-actualized person who's not also a dingbat to the other party in the relationship (unless you've decided to break up... in which case, you pretend not to be a dingbat), and once you're fully aware of all that entails, it's pretty easy to build a cute, entertaining story out of the game, as opposed to a brutal relationship fight simulator. For the record, in the five games we played (all four stories and then replaying the first again), we had a pretty broad spectrum of characters and outcomes: Jean, a hardworking politician, and Danny, a scatterbrained actor, ended up in a slightly miserable relationship as equal partners. Izzie, a wheelchair-bound musician, and Margaret, a closed-off cop, ended up in a very unhappy relationship with an uncertain future. Ian, a playboy manager, and Cassie, a fun-loving flirt, ended up in a contented relationship of mutual support. Colleen, a daydream-prone architect, and Jeremy, a hot mess of a banker, ended up with Colleen dumping Jeremy even though she was pregnant with his baby (Jeremy deserved it, he just could not get his life together). Nat, a web celebrity, and Chet, a stoned-out dancer, ended up in incredible, unconditional love together. You can see how we got better, kinda? Nat and Chet was the real success story, because Nat was a gentle, submissive worrywart and Chet was a jealous, insecure jerk, but they both managed to compromise sometimes (okay, Nat compromised a lot) and it worked out for them. It was cool. And even being in a relationship with Jeremy was funny and weird, just to watch the mechanics demand that he be the worst person possible in every situation. So... yeah, Fog of Love is recommended, although I have two major issues with it. The first is that, for all its cleverness, the destiny endgame is extremely underbaked. Sure, it's neat on paper that you start out with all these different directions that a relationship can go and are gradually forced to discard down to just a couple, but it's way too easy to be left without any viable options and the game doesn't really explain what it means when one or both players fail to achieve a destiny, besides just "You lose"? I guess they're just in the relationship but... unhappy about it? This ambiguity is further complicated by the "break up" destiny, which negates all other destinies except the "I guess you're right, we should break up" destiny, meaning that "Oops, none of my destinies work" is likely to happen one way or another in almost every game you play. It seems like they were shooting for something like hidden roles in a social deduction game, but you're so often struggling just to make the relationship work at all that it feels ridiculous to spend the mental energy to figure out if the other player is going for Love Match or Dominant or Heartbreaker. I mean, if the lattermost happens, it happens, and I guess I just deal with the unthematic uncertainty of it? The other issue is that, while the tokens are very nice, the cards and board are quite cheaply made. The board's only been opened twice and there's already color flaking off at the folds, and a half-dozen of the cards got stuck together and tore a bit coming apart. If you're someone who likes your games pristine, maybe wait until the second, non-Kickstartered print run.

I love that this meme is associated forever with Far Cry 2 when it's actually from Fallout 3.

I was going to write up the five best anime I watched in 2017 (only one of which is technically from 2017) but instead I posted it on my long-defunct media criticism blog, so... enjoy!

And Gwardinen!

If you ever wanted to watch a version of Blade Runner that is four and a half hours long, set in a stunningly generic vision of a futuristic city, and told from the perspective of Deckard's sullen, ineffectual, and violence-prone partner, then AD Police is the anime for you. Otherwise, I don't know why anyone would bother. This is my first one-out-of-ten anime in almost seven years, and it earns every non-star. Eat shit and die, AD Police.

One thing that I took from RedLetterMedia's old Phantom Menace review was that Star Wars as a series of films has always struggled with the temptation to multiply its plot threads, in order to produce a more epic climax. Going from A New Hope (the Death Star run) to The Empire Strikes Back (the Cloud City escape and the duel between Luke and Vader) to Return of the Jedi (the strike team on Endor, the attack on the Death Star, and Luke confronting Vader and the Emperor) to The Phantom Menace (the attack on the control ship, the attack on the palace, the battle between the Gungans and droids, and the duel in the power reactor) seems sometimes to have left a "high water mark" in subsequent Star Wars movies, where there's generally a little more going on than there needs to be. The later prequels got it a little more under control, but The Force Awakens was back to three separate plot threads in the third act (the sabotage mission, the duel between Ren and Rey, and the Starkiller run), and now this movie's shown a similar reach and grasp.

Yeah, jumping back to old nineties-era stuff is a bit of a shock. In hindsight, it's obviously a transitional stage between the flat, angular, high-detail styles of the eighties and the soft, rounded, representational styles of the naughties, but it's really rough to look at these lanky, boneless figures with their angular, over-shaded hair and clothes. AD Police seems closest in kin to Outlaw Star, but its low moments remind me of Blue Gender, which is the gold standard for the ugliness of this era.

Well, because I didn't get enough of watching a "history lesson" anime like Space Runaway Ideon (which was... fine, I don't know), I'm watching the much-maligned AD Police series that was a spinoff of the AD Police OVAs that were a spinoff of Bubblegum Crash that was a continuation/sequel to Bubblegum Crisis. Whew! So far, it's really not good. Its vintage is the late nineties and it's trying mightily to fill similar shoes to moody action dramas like Cowboy Bebop and Outlaw Star. The problem is that it has no budget and all its characters are raging assholes. In the first episode alone: The protagonist, Sasaki Kenji, uses cash to show that he's old-fashioned, violates police procedure to show that he's a rebel, and endangers a bystander to punish her for a catty comment that he overheard her make... to show that he's an asshole and a misogynist, I guess? Kenji's partner shows up, says that he doesn't like Kenji because he's a jerk (thank heavens they laid that pipe beforehand) and all of his partners die mysteriously, and then goes off to die himself. Kenji is somehow blamed for this. The entire office makes fun of Kenji's inexplicable grief for this dead partner, and his boss puts him on administrative leave for failing to stop the killer robot by himself, even though it later takes five cops working in concert to kill it. Kenji drives his motorcycle (because of course he has a motorcycle) so fast that his arm starts bleeding for some reason, then stands outside a girl's house and watches her play violin, then goes to a bar and starts a fight with a guy who says that he looks sad and tries to buy him a drink. And it ends up the next morning that that guy is Kenji's new partner! Uh oh. It all feels like a parody of a seinen anime built around a brooding, tortured protagonist, especially the shallow "characterization" that's laid so thick on the ground, and that's not even getting into the extremely poor animation, wherein most fight scenes are crossfaded animation loops with minimal tweening. I didn't expect much of a series based on the cops who are so bad at their job fighting killer robots that the Knight Sabers from the Bubblegum anime need to intervene, but... yeah. EDIT: New partner mentioned old partner, and Keiji said, "There's one thing you'll need to remember if you're going to be my partner," and then he drew his gun, fired it into the ceiling, and left. Later, he uses that gun to coerce a doctor into breaking doctor-patient confidentiality, and the episode finale involves him shooting a perfect doorway in the side of a van with it. This anime is something else.