Gormongous

The second half suffers for i) being a full-cour of episodes compressed into a half-cour virtually at the last minute, and ii) having the "antagonist" of the first half effectively split into two halves that are less than the sum of their parts, but I still say it's enjoyable, especially if you're watching the show to experience the escalating brilliance and degrading psyche of Light, rather than looking for a specific resolution.

That is a really great idea. I don't really play MMOs anymore because the FOMO of my weird schedule is too great, and the ones that do go F2P tend to have been tuned for the binge-style experience anyway.

Yeah, I think "black" has generally come back into favor because it is descriptive, succinct, and has emotional weight, in a way that "African-American" doesn't really approach. "Hispanic" and "Latino/Latina" are parallel developments — more so the latter. Also, very few other ethnic and cultural identities go the hyphen route, making "African-American" sound like a sterile euphemism or even something of a solecism. You'd never call someone "Anglo-African" or "Euro-American," but there you go.

As I said in the "Random Thoughts" thread, I feel like my preferred "free to play" experience is for the player's decision to spend money not to impact anyone else's play experience but their own. I dislike pay-only guns/vehicles/equipment as well as real-money boosts that affect a player's performance in a multiplayer space (beyond a money or experience boost, which I don't begrudge). I don't mind real-money currencies, but I dislike when a game tries to makes the alternative to buying into them be playing a large amount of suboptimal/boring/secondary content. Every time I've ever spent money on an F2P game, it's been because the game was surprisingly pleasant and not annoying about its business model, so I gave it money as a function of my enjoyment. The attempts of many F2P games to force me to pay money by boring me, by making me feel inferior to other players, or by locking off main-path content have invariably just made me quit the game instead.

I've found it funny that literally anyone who had at least double-digit posts when I joined seems to me an oldtimer and anyone who came after me still seems like a bit of a newbie. You totally seem like a newbie to me, jenna, but I think my brain's just slow. In my real life, I'm seven years in my grad program and still see the people two cohorts behind me as "the new kids."

In my opinion, Call of Pripyat is the most playable and the most complete. The other two put a lot of wonkiness in your way of playing the game, although I think that the weirdness in the world and the story of the original Shadows of Chernobyl is something to miss. Call of Pripyat is fun and engaging right out of the box, even without the "Reloaded" or "Complete" mods, so I'd recommend it unconditionally. The only thing you need to understand is that there's a Zone and there are anomalies in it that have magic powers (but also there are monsters in it, too).

I agree that this forum has a unique dynamic, but I have personally come to like it over the three and a half years that I've been a part of it. The threads may be huge, but they're not long, ongoing conversations; they're headers under which many different conversations happen. If the topic of a conversation is specific, as it often is in the "Video Games" subforum, then a unique thread is usually created and usually follows the lifecycle that you describe. For many other topics (i.e., "What's going on in my life" or "I watched a TV show") I find it infinitely less of a barrier to post in the relevant megathread, where it's not pursuant on me to say anything profound or start a whole new conversation. Sometimes the "toxic" dynamic of posts being made, missed, and corrected occurs, but it seems to happen just about as much as in any other forum with the more standard dynamic that you ascribe. On other forums, my heart has sank repeatedly to watch a carefully constructed thread by me go unviewed and unanswered before being bumped to later pages of the forum. At least, in a megathread, there's a good chance that someone will find my post and respond to it while catching up with the last couple days of the thread. Hot tip: Don't read the entire thread. Just post in it. I've only read two threads from front to back ("Books, Books Books" and "anime") and both times, I wasn't particularly edified by the journey. Small conversations about specific works spawn and die, with people inserting their own opinions about other unrelated works throughout. Even in situations where a new post repeated the technical content of a previous one, if people remembered the latter, they usually focus on the unique perspective that the former brings instead. There are some instances of people being irritated about having to repeat themselves, but all the examples of which I can think are in the Feminism and Social Justice megathreads, making them probably more examples of people getting tired of doing "feminism/social justice 101" that is universal to every progressive site on the internet. And yeah, I didn't really want to comment on it, but it's a little strange to put the dynamic of a forum on blast when you don't really participate in it. I'm sorry you're not feeling it, but I can personally attest that all of the Thumbs here are generous, gracious, and clever people who would help you in a second. To that end, if your neuroses prevent you from posting without knowing whether a topic exists, there's a "Does This Thread Exist" thread that's a source of comfort. You'll get used to the dynamic, I promise.

Done! Sorry, I forgot about the demise of our Soundcloud page. Also, we're doing the three Berserk: Golden Age movies for next time.

Yeah, the smell test for information leaked legitimately seems unreasonably and unrealistically rigorous here. I don't think there's a similar level of hand-wringing (and blacklisting) when the poster for a movie or some production stills are leaked. Why is "terribly wrong" the threshold for publication? Why isn't the public permitted to know what's going on in these companies, good or bad, if that information is available to independent outlets?

You're already walking around surrounded by an invisible cloud of farts and dead skin, though. That's just being a living organism.

So... would you be okay with it if Kotaku didn't publish the promotional images, just the existence and description of the game? Or is that information "intellectual property" too and I've been "stealing" from my friends every time anyone tells me a secret about their personal lives?

Part of it, I think, is a leftover from being an offshoot of the software industry, when a competitor could legitimately steal your product and beat you to market. Another part is that games take so long to make, it's easy for enthusiastic consumers to burn themselves out and forget about the game long before it's ready for release. Another part is just suits wanting control over shit.

I feel like some of these posts are coming from an alternate dimension. As a publication, Kotaku works with video game publishers, but it has no specific duty to them. It does have a duty to its readers, however, and they care deeply about the existence and nature of upcoming games like Fallout 4 and Assassins Creed Unity. To suggest that Kotaku should deny this information to them when it is freely given by employees making those games is flatly ludicrous. Kotaku has no responsibility to disclose privileged information only when the significance is huge or when harm is being done. They have no responsibility to conform to the marketing plan written on a whiteboard by corporate executives somewhere. They have no responsibility to keep an employee's NDA for them. They are a video game publication, publishing information about a video game. How is the rightness of this act even a question?

And the "e" is pronounced like the vowel in "pet." Also, since my nitpick is gone, I'll just say that the supposedly random year thrown out by Sean for the date of Shadow Zenith's email about MeUndies was 941. The only notable thing that happened in 941 was the birth of Brian Boru, eleventh-century high king of Ireland and founder of the O'Brian dynasty... the heirs of which were the subject of the Thumbs' Crusader Kings 2 playthrough. Hmm!

The recent conservative talking point that America should take care of its 50,000 homeless veterans before it takes on 50,000 Syrian refugees is really, really surreal, considering that the Republican majority in Congress has spent almost a decade blocking any reform of the VA system that would have helped those veterans. I know that it's going out of fashion to call people sociopaths, and rightly so, but I really lack another word to describe the self-interested hypocrisy of the politicians and pundits who are willing to accuse others of something that's their own fault in order to score points with ignorant racists, nativists, and xenophobes.

The main issue with lowballing the CPU is that, if you guess wrong about your requirements for the next decade or so, it's the most difficult and inconvenient part of your computer to replace (outside of the motherboard, which will also have to be replaced if you're upgrading the CPU).

I am deeply wary of any business model that strongly rewards unwise or excessive spending decisions by players. Saying that people should be able to resist cleaves a bit too closely in my mind to nineteenth-century arguments about addictive drugs not needing to be made illegal because addiction is a function of poor morality and such people will find some way to destroy themselves regardless. It's one thing if, as Bjorn says, there's just a certain amount of cash that's necessary to buy the player past intentional grinds, but the vast majority of games don't seem to be like that. Some, like Loot & Legends from the Card Hunter people, have timed bonuses to item drops that encourage binging on the game and paying more money to extend the timer. Some, like World of Tanks formerly, have golden ammo that is qualitatively better in every way than regular ammo. Allowing players to buy an unlimited item or effect that improves their experience while degrading others' experiences is... Yeah, there are abuses to be had and it's incredibly hard for developers to know if they're abusing players because capitalism is so shitty as a system that exploitation is inevitable to some extent.

Yeah... It's been a very peculiar situation. As several news outlets have reported, the moderators on the Steam forums for Payday 2 went on strike in response to the Completely Overkill Pack's release. After some cajoling, the game's lead producer Almir Listo agreed to an interview with the lead moderator, known as "Ashley," and what resulted was that I've ever heard. Near the end, Ashley even asked Listo to summarize the points and promises that he'd made and he refused, because he'd failed to say anything substantive beyond "We're unhappy with the community's response" and "We'll look into communicating better in the future." Ashley seems to be an optimist, because she was sufficiently satisfied by just getting to talk to Listo that she resumed her duties as a mod, saying that she'd quit for good if Listo and Overkill go back on their promises one more time. To that end, she's signed an NDA with Overkill that functionally makes her an unpaid community manager. There are a lot of concerns floating around, but I'll quote the best of them: Further note that Listo and Overkill have a history of making promises to involve members of the community in their development, making them sign NDAs, and then letting them sit under that gag doing nothing until they give up and go away. That's what happened with PDStats, the creator of which signed an NDA in exchange for being promised with an advisory role integrating his mod into the new "FBI Files" in Payday 2 but who ended up ignored by Overkill for half a year and then going broke maintaining the mod. Also, in general, it's really just great that one of Overkill's first efforts towards community transparency after Crimefest 2015 is an NDA with a prominent community leader... I'm glad that I've mostly stopped playing this game. The game itself — the skin drops, the new shooting model with more engine-mandated misses built in, the strangled mod community — is bad enough, but these developers are building a trapdoor in the bottom of their boat to hold more treasure and it's just going to sink them faster.

Sorry, I made the mistake of trying to shorten my definition, which is truly a mistake in the Pedantry thread. I meant to define "high concept" as "a work the premise of which can be clearly and succinctly expressed, often through a 'what if' statement." It's contrasted with "low concept," a work concerned with subtleties of aesthetics, characterization, or production, although it's rarely a term used outright. I think you're right, Badfinger, that "highbrow" and "lowbrow" are infecting terms that use "high" and "low" for different meanings. It's funny, because things are so rarely described as "highbrow" or "lowbrow" these days, but there must be a cultural awareness of them anyway.

I don't typically get pedantic about most things, but subgenre classifications definitely get to me. A certain host of a certain podcast described Skyrim as "low fantasy," presumably because he wanted to cop to its simplistic world-building at some point, but his use of that term fit neither with the original meaning of "low fantasy" (taking place in the real world with rational laws rather than a "high fantasy" taking place in a fictional world with fantastical laws) or with the more common meaning (focusing on human agency and events, like politics and wars, rather than on supernatural agency and events, like dragons and magic). It's an odd phenomenon, but rather widespread, that terms containing "high" or "low" eventually shake out to "good" and "bad" or "smart" and "dumb." I've watched the total destruction of "high concept" as a sensical term over the past decade, because it sounds like "fancy or esoteric concept" rather than its actual meaning of "simple and succinct concept."

I've actually seen that argument pop up twice in the brigaded comments of articles reporting on this: #GamerGate has a valid purpose as a honey trap to lure unwary publications into ethical missteps. Both comments (possibly by the same person) insist that, even though photoshopping pictures and spreading rumors via social media is bad, giving those pictures and rumors public coverage is worse, so whatever the assholes and trolls do, it's all good because it catches out even worse assholes and trolls. I really can't even relate to these people anymore. Also, it's wild how #GamerGate apologists flood the comment threads of every goddamn article about them. I can't imagine a much more pathetic existence than getting up every morning and searching the internet for the bad things that people are saying about me and my friends so that I can make a dummy account to browbeat and nitpick those things into nonsense. /r/KotakuInAction might make it easier, but it still must take a depressing amount of time to do.

https://vine.co/v/iB0QOv73n7u Unmute it, it's totally worth it.

Multiplayer a success! Once we figured our way around a desync-inducing player action and cleared our caches several dozen times, that is. We've also determined that it's probably better moving forward for the student to stream and the teacher to hang out on voice chat, since I have trouble explaining some of the interface elements where CK2's vital information is located.

To me, Interstellar is pretentious. It uses complex ideas about the nature of space and time as chrome for a simplistic story about a father and daughter whose love overcomes obstacles like time, distance, and misunderstanding. All of its most interesting moments, especially those regarding the grandeur of the cosmos, are in service of aesthetics rather than themes, a disparity that is brought to its greatest extremity by the prolonged deus ex machina of the ending, which discards a lot of the logic in the plot to emphasize emotional resonances that... really aren't there for a lot of the movie, Anne Hathaway's ridiculous second-act speech about love being the most powerful force in the universe aside. Now, I know that people like Interstellar, so they're free to disagree, but that's a place from which I think a judgment of "pretentious" can come, rather than finding an oft-popular work boring and confusing and choosing to blame it for your own lack of interest.

I'm not making an argument from authorial intent, I'm making an article from basic familiarity with the work. Maybe you run in different circles of the internet, but I almost never hear "pretentious" used in the context of "I watched the entirety of this series and its themes were shallow despite being presented as deep." I almost always hear it in the context of "I started watching this series, but it used big words or talked about religion too much or had a really intricate visual style, so I quit." Almost universally, it's not a critique, it's a thought-terminating cliche that sounds like a critique. Pretension, in its commonly identified form, seems to condemn a work's divergence from the accepted potentials of a genre or medium, regardless of what success it meets via that divergence. It implicitly asserts that there are limits to the artistic achievement of a given genre or medium, easily identifiable to the audience, and that transgressing them automatically excludes a work from serious critical consideration. It almost seems classist, in a way, like... I don't know, list off five works that are commonly accepted as "pretentious" and, at worst, you'll be giving me five works that are better and more interesting than the latest Transformers or Hunger Games movies, which have no pretensions whatsoever. EDIT: Wow. Really, doing it incompletely is the same as not doing it at all? What about the holistic experience of the work, which usually uses some motifs as themes and some simply as aesthetics?