Gormongous

I don't disagree, having kept up with several shounen juggernauts in my life, but Twig's a member of an anime podcast. It would be hilarious but sad for him to get bogged down with literally three hundred hours of a single series, almost as sad as being into DBZ...

I agree, if you've seen any season of Detective Conan, you've seen them all.

My girlfriend's birthday is this weekend, so I don't even get to benefit from the "preorder and play it on Dec. 4th" perk. I'm suffering, I have no idea why my hype's this high.

I am personally a little saddened that the "anime" thread is now literally just the home-away-from-home for the Key Frames team.

I was curious about trying the new edition of Dark Heresy, which has been a classic in my in-person group, but apparently it's a horrible mess that resolves none of the first edition's issues while introducing new ones on top, so never mind!

I thought Speedy Desiato had that honor. Man, I miss that guy.

If you ever accidentally delete all the photos off your Android phone, rest assured that the Gallery app keeps a cache of low-res versions (supposedly for thumbnail-building) that is not deleted under any circumstances. It's trivial to load up the cache file in JPEGsnoop and extract all of them. And when I say "all of them," I mean all of them. If you've never cleared the cache for your Gallery app, literally every photo that you've ever taken with your phone is easily accessible. It's nice, because the CopperVision rebate app deleted all my pictures on Wednesday, but it's also scary, because of this fuckin' surveillance state in which we live.

Not a particular exceptional article, but an article on what makes lecturing an exceptional way of teaching the humanities (and repeatedly citing my favorite professor in undergrad, Monessa Cummins): http://mobile.nytimes.com/2015/10/18/opinion/sunday/lecture-me-really.html

Reaching back to the coddling/triggering/outrage culture debate on college campuses, there's an interesting statement by the president of one of the more liberal colleges in the nation, Wesleyan University: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-roth/this-university-president_b_8621760.html

I imagine so! In a game where team-killing is advertised as a back-of-the-box bullet point, why play singleplayer at all?

Looking around, there are ways to build your character to make them strong as a solo character (turrets, arc weapons) but they also make your character mostly useless for multiplayer, so I don't really see the point, unless you have no other friends with the game and hate playing with randos.

I know that the Subterfuge diaries on Cool Ghosts are the current darlings, but I really recommend their seven-part Helldivers series. It's really great to watch funny guys like Matt Lees and Quintin Smith go from feigned passive-aggression at team-killing each other to genuine passive-aggression at team-killing each other... and then, near the end, towards some appreciation of their growing competency in the game (while still team-killing each other occasionally). It's what put the game on my radar and now, like Badfinger, I wish that I could just play it right now.

Yeah, it really bummed me out to see how far the franchise had fallen. The original Jurassic Park was Spielberg at the absolute height of his craft. Twenty-two years later, not a single moment falls flat for me. Now it's just like Transformers and whatever else, an overwritten script foisted on an inexperienced director as a pretext for putting awesome special effects on the big screen.

A company has no inherent right to privacy. Its constituent members do, but you can't equivocate the two. Furthermore, the idea that the company's agency overrides its employees' agency is somewhat perverse and anti-creator, I think. Someone who worked on the marketing materials chose to leak them against the will of "the company." I don't really care what the NDA said, that makes it a legal and not a moral issue.

Should the existence of a work, not its contents, also be kept secret? Should the people who own the work be able to gag the people actually working on it from talking about it? I don't think it's as cut and dried as stealing your manuscript. What inherent rights to privacy does a corporation (not a person) have?

I meant the phrase "sincere conversion" specifically to refer to someone using religious objects from another culture (mandalas, etc). I think it's extremely difficult to make a "sincere conversion" to an entirely different culture, maybe impossible given the current history of white colonialism and imperialism. Your concerns about someone being "guilty" of something that they didn't do themselves or don't completely understand speaks further to privilege and systemic oppression. Even though I try my best to be an advocate for social and racial justice, I am still racist because I have privilege as a white (straight, male, able-bodied) person and I benefit from a society built upon the devaluation and exploitation of black lives. It is an inescapable part of myself and my identity, no matter what I do. Therefore, it is pursuant on me simply to be conscious of those facts and to try my best to be an ally regardless of them. I don't see a difference when it comes to cultural appropriation. No matter how it's alleviated by support and understanding, all cultural "exchange" between more and less dominant cultures is going to be cultural appropriation on some level, because of the current and historical dynamics of power between them, and accepting that state of affairs is an important component of social justice. I don't expect most people to understand that position, because it is scary and a lot of work, but that doesn't make it any less true.

Do they have to deserve it? Should everything that a company wants to be secret remain secret just because they want it that way?

My honest feeling, although I'll do some more thinking on it, is that if you don't know how to communicate your debt to and support of the culture that originated the element that you're borrowing, you should ask around members of that culture and, if they don't have any ideas or you don't have anyone to ask, maybe defer for the time being.

I think the jazz example is an excellent one in this conversation, because jazz as a musical genre was almost entirely an invention of black culture, but black people were prevented from practicing it and profiting from it in public spaces, often having act through white intermediaries (who often exploited or silenced them) in order to have their voices and music heard. Because of the enormous debt that jazz owes to black culture, the situation eventually righted itself and I don't think that it's a scene of cultural appropriation today, but the phenomenon of rock 'n' roll suggests to me that it could easily have broken the other way. Overall, colonialism and imperialism are the long history of white people saying, "I like that, so I'll take it. Now that I have it, it's mine as much as it's yours." It's the process of treating other cultures (just like other lands, people, and resources) as a buffet on which to fulfill your own self. Social justice, especially decolonization and the dismantling of white privilege, hinge upon realizing and appreciating that just liking and wanting something, whether it be a genre of music, a style of art, or a way of speaking, does not make it your own, not in the same way as it does someone whose history and culture has a long relationship with it. It also involves accepting that some things, particularly spiritual or ceremonial objects and practices from other cultures, can never be your own at all, not if you weren't born into them or don't come into them through a sincere conversion. It is only through massive, unexamined privilege that appreciation and desire automatically beget ownership. That does not mean that you can't practice yoga or get an afro, but fundamental human decency means vocally acknowledging the debt that your personal choice as a member of the mainstream culture owes to entire societies that have spend tens if not hundreds of years living, working, and suffering to make it available to you. That's the most basic level of giving back, which is what starts to transform cultural appropriation into cultural exchange. I really don't think that that's too much for oppressed peoples to ask.

Possibly, but again, when other feminists inform a male ally that he doesn't speak for them, because of inflammatory, misogynistic, or simply inaccurate opinions that he's expressed, we accept their statement, however disrespectful it is to his self-proclaimed status and experience as an ally. The same with other avenues of social justice, I think. The dignity and wellbeing of oppressed peoples requires understanding, respecting, and safeguarding in ways that white, straight, and/or male members of the dominant culture will never need. Respecting someone's choice to disrespect an entire people (by selling their culture as a commodity or reducing it to a fashion) is an odd application of Popper's paradox of tolerance.

Oh, I agree, but scholarly usages for historical peoples are different from casual and daily practice. In the United States, at least, only people of color get a hyphenated "American" name, like Jov and Bjorn pointed out, so I'm comfortable with it falling out of favor in non-technical contexts.

I enjoyed the summation of the apology in one of the comments to the Destructoid article about it.

After falling head-over-heels for the third season of Working!!, I bought the bundle of the first two seasons. In terms of video and translation quality, they're both very good, but NISA's production choices and packaging are a bit... off. They use surnames to refer to the male characters and first names to refer to the female characters (which is especially confusing for Yamada, because only Popura calls her Aoi) and replaces the word "episode" with "recipe" even in situations where the meaning would be ambiguous. I know that NISA's actually celebrated for going all-out with their licensed products, but in this case, a lighter touch would maybe have been better. But hey, Yamada's still great! Also, cool end-series facts about Satou and Yachiyo from Wikipedia:

I'm not sure. It'd have to pass a smell test, but it'd probably be the same way that status as "ally" is determined in feminist and LGBTQ circles. You can't just have a black friend or be one-sixteenth Cherokee, of course. That's tokenism. On a different note, Amazon decided to advertise for its series The Man in the High Castle by covering every surface of New York subways with imagery inspired by Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. No swastikas, thankfully, but plenty of rising suns, Reich eagles, and iron crosses. I am not really sure how this campaign was rolled out without anyone at Amazon stopping to think about whether it'd be a good idea to invoke these warmongering and genocidal regimes publicly, especially since the two most emphasized parts of the TV show (and, regrettably, the two least interesting parts that could be taken from the book by Philip K. Dick) are "Man, wouldn't America be a fucked-up place if it were ruled by totalitarian fascists and imperialists" and "Man, aren't these ideologies perniciously toxic even on their most superficial level."

Yeah, but cultural appropriation itself is disrespectful. Disrespecting the disrespectful is somewhat lower on my list of things to avoid. I like Bjorn's example of a woman with no ties to any communities of First Peoples selling Navajo- or Hopi-inspired items that she has made, because it shows how many ways that cultural appropriation is harmful: it replaces (or at least competes with) minorities in public spaces and mindshare; it profits from a minority's culture without giving anything back (besides a vaguely defined "credit" that is mostly a marketing point); and it erodes minority identity from cultural objects and practices. When mainstream culture decides that it wants something, it assimilates it, Borg-like, and you can technically argue that nothing was lost, but especially in the case of salable products and ideas, it's definitely deleterious to minority communities.