Gormongous

Probably an Irish/Scottish start, although I think that both being dukes in the Holy Roman Empire would be good. There are a lot of strong starts at 1066, in general, and I figured we'd decide on the fly.

This evening, at 6 CST, Ninety-Three and I are going to try to play a learning game of Crusader Kings 2. If it's okay with him, which I cannot imagine it not being, others are welcome to join in or watch me stream it. My Steam username is Gormongous, same on this forum!

Like I said, I think calling something a "difficult" work (if you want to lean towards less pejorative) or an "obscure" work (if you want to lean towards more) is not dismissive or disingenuous in the ways that "pretentious" is. I will readily concede that Neon Genesis Evangelion is a difficult or even obscure work. I don't think it's pretentious, though, because the incredible breadth and depth in its several thematic motifs mean to me that, if it's pretending to complexity or significance, then I don't know a work of media that isn't. I didn't forget you, Ben. That's why I said "virtually." Technically correct, the best kind of correct! Also, I don't think I've ever actually seen you say "pretentious" on the forums, and you've had plenty of chance to do so during your FPS playthrough, so...

I know this is practically a bit now, but I agree with you on almost all counts. "Pretentious" is one of those awful words that the internet has helped to grow that puts a very logical-sounding veneer on an instinctual or emotional reaction. If you say that a work is pretentious, you're saying that it's pretending to greater meaning or importance than it is, which is an assessment that can only really be made if you know the work intimately... which virtually no one who uses "pretentious" ever does. Instead, they use it as doublespeak to call a complex work shallow and thereby excuse their lack of interest in understanding it, because who's going to bother with something that's only pretending to complexity? I understand the gut reaction that makes people call something pretentious and try to replace their usage with "difficult" or "obscure" in my head, but I'm a fan of two mediums (anime and video games) that frequently suffer from "lobsters in a bucket" syndrome with people who would rather tear down a popular or impressive work than acknowledge their personal failure to appreciate it, so it's still very frustrating even with that understanding.

Thanks, Twig! Everyone with important thoughts and feelings about FLCL in particular and anime in general, whether good or bad, sign up!

Uh, the twintails tsundere character is whipping the male protagonist with her hair... There are enough gifs online to convince me that I'm not imagining this, and that it's apparently a recurring thing... I really don't know what to think of Saekano after two episodes. The writing is incredibly savvy, but it's in the service of a surprisingly rote harem plot starring a celibate Potato-kun — in short, "An otaku uninterested in real-life relationships accidentally asks out several of the most talented girls at his school when he seeks their help in turning his brief encounter with unremarkable girl from his class into a video game, now he must string them all along to make sure that the game gets finished!" As a whole, the anime feels very much like a high schooler using their smarts to avoid hard work rather than to excel academically... which was me, way back when, so I'm sympathetic enough to see it out, I suppose.

I'd believe it. Gatchaman Crowds and all related materials for it have their scripts and series comp done by Oono Toshiya, who's only ever worked on Magic Kaito 1412, Tsuritama, Suite Precure, and Perfect Insider. He looks like he's just part of the new generation of anime creators who don't have the same baggage as the sort of people who wrote Leeron from Gurren Lagann (for example).

Harem anime is such a delicate balance in general, actually. If the girls all suck, it's not believable that the protagonist just pick the best one (or none) of them, and if the girls are all amazing, it's not believable that they're all interested in the protagonist. I guess that's why there's so many "crazy" archetypes in harem anime, because apparent mental instability is a low-effort way to make a female character plausibly "undesirable." For the record, Saekano seems to be erring heavily on the "amazing but crazy" angle, except for the titular "girlfriend" who is incredibly bland and boring. Still withholding judgment here. Like I'd said before, that really reminds me a lot of SNAFU and the feminine male character after whom the protagonist openly lusts, while still insisting on his heterosexuality. I think we're entering a new (marginally more) progressive era of anime stereotypes where scriptwriters are just putting homoerotic and transgender influences into their scenarios without any commentary and letting audiences decide on their own if they're a joke or in earnest.

Double post, because I just finished Your Lie in April. I liked it a lot, although I didn't love it like Twig, I think. The moments that got me teary were the flash of a bow in Kaori's hand while she was miming a duet to Arima's piano-playing over the phone, and the paralleled scenes for Arima and Kaori during the final two episodes (which put me so strongly in mind of the final chapters of Iain M. Banks' Use of Weapons that some waterworks were inevitable). Listening to the points discussed in the final monologue, I feel like this show suffered a little for not being thirty-seven or even a full twenty-six epsiodes — there needed to be a bit more filler to make Arima's relationship with Kaori feel less like a prolonged encounter and more like a full relationship to match the one that he'd lost with his mother. Still, I'm nit-picking, because the show never missed an emotional beat or injected useless drama into the plot, which is something big when I just got done watching Golden Time a few weeks ago, another show that made me cry but less than it could have. Now I'm watching Saekano and... it's good? The first minute of the first episode has four naked girls relaxing in an outdoor bath while talking about how hard it is to get into anime series that frontload their fanservice. They then wonder if the male protagonist is trying to peek on them. Cut to him leaning against the dividing wall, weeping that they're talking about anime without him. I admit, I laughed. It's going to be an odd show to watch, though, if it tries to walk the like of "mocking shitty anime tropes while still using shitty anime tropes." I'll keep everyone informed! EDIT: The OP is almost entirely panning shots up the bodies of the female characters that cut before showing their faces. I'm feeling more cautious, now.

Chris' talk about zeroing in on an abandoned highway and finding a way on top of it reminded me so strongly of Eidolon, about which I think Danielle talked several dozen episodes ago. Like the Bethesda-style Fallout games, much of the player's traversal in Eidolon is motivated by distant landmarks, often so shrouded in mist as to be unrecognizable, but I like Eidolon better for its willingness to have the space between those landmarks be wide and often quite empty. It makes the discovery of something grand and decayed so much more moving when it's been preceded by half an hour of walking through trackless wilderness. Conversely, it often seems like the world design of the new Fallout games is deliberately tuned to make sure that the player is never surrounded by absolutely nothing, which makes for a more interesting but less memorable experience. I remember the first time I found the rusted steel skeleton of a skyscraper in Eidolon, I almost lost my mind at the sudden presence of something so huge and artificial where had hitherto been all trees and streams. I instinctively followed the half-buried highway next to it for almost two hours, mostly because it was so novel to have an object in my world that actually expressed intent in the form of direction.

I had the same question, and the only thing that I can find is that April is traditionally seen as the "end" of the spring season, owing to the school schedule in Japan and the slightly different rhythm of the seasons. Accordingly, drawing on the connotations of spring that you mentioned, the title could be read, "Your Lie at the End of Youth." That's a pretty aggressive read, though, and I think the rhythm of "Shigatsu wo Kimi no Uso" is just as much a reason for it being the title.

Can someone remind me why I brought up Le Chevalier d'Eon? I know it was me but I don't remember why.

Urgh... it's a YouTube transfer of a downscale of FUNi's notoriously bad upscale of the digital masters. I know, I know. I shouldn't complain, free is free.

Adding to this link are a few others sent to me by friends and acquaintances on university campuses: From Patheos, Christakis' email is offensively callous because it defends the right for students to be bullied. From Salon, outrage over outrage is still outrage, making outraged calls for civility more than a little disingenuous. From Vox, an incident at William & Mary several years ago suggests that the response from the public and the media is different when outrage is in defense of the status quo. From the Washington Post, racial tensions exist in part because colleges and universities still have only single-digit percentages of black professors and administrators, except at historically black institutions, despite over a forty percent increase in black PhDs in the past decade.

This reminds me of shrines in the first Diablo. High-level play invariably involves not touching them because the permanent consequences if they're bad so vastly outweighed any possible benefit to them being good. If the best response to the randomness of a system is just not to bother, I don't know that the system's so good...

Yeah, many of my friends have given me the side-eye for being open about sexual incompatibility being a dealbreaker. I'm not saying that I won't make compromises, but sex is such an important part of how I conduct a relationship that "no sex" simply isn't a compromise that I can make. Regardless, "try harder" is the worst kind of advice to give about virtually anything, in my experience.

No! Not true widescreen support, just stretching the UI! I actually went into my graphics card settings and created a custom 4:3 resolution (1440x1080) so I wouldn't get a headache.

It's very hard for a teammate to weigh anyone down in WC3 and TFT unless they're doing hard tech to tier 3 or stealing everyone's expansion mines. In 2v2(v2(v2)) maybe, but even then, the biggest risk in FFA is losing out on the creep game and first contact because you're teching, so having a teammate who's just pumping out footmen or archers to carry you until you've hit your endgame strat is really nice. FFA is so much purer as an exercise in strategy and skill, but team play is more interesting, overall. Plus you get cool crossover strats like knights/priests/HF and wyverns/shamans/BL turning the world upside-down.

When you talk about admitting a "wrong opinion" as one component of an apology, I think you are losing a distinction between the correct thing to say and the right thing to say. If someone is mourning the death of a friend, it would be correct for you to say that mourning can't bring them back and that they should move on with their life, but it wouldn't be the right thing for you to say and I don't think that they would be out of line to expect an apology from you. Neither would someone be wrong to expect an apology if you made truthful criticisms about them several hours before a car accident or a breakup. Being correct in your words does not excuse you from accountability towards the people whom those words may hurt, regardless of intent. To make their recognition of your correctness a precondition to your recognition of their hurt is a deeply immature position to take, in my eyes. The legitimacy of an opinion is not only tied up in its content, but also in its time, place, and manner. That's why the latter three are a frequent set of restrictions placed upon freedom of speech in US law. Just a few minutes ago, a friend of mine linked to a timeline of events at Yale, which shows that much of the student protesters's outrage stems from the university administration's seeming indifference to several incidents with a racial dimension to them, the email being just the most publicized one. Looking over it, it seems difficult to deny that Erika and Nicholas Christakis chose an exceptionally poor moment to champion transgressive costume-wearing as part and parcel with the values of liberal democracy. Really, beyond a certain point, reasonable people (like a university professor and a dean of student life) ought to be able to see that the pain, distress, and insult inflicted on others by their opinion, however correct or sincere it happens to be, outweighs the utility of that opinion as part of the public discourse. At that point, I do expect them to apologize, even if there was nothing else "wrong" with their opinion besides the offense it caused. There simply is no other alternative, since it is worse than useless to disagree with someone over the hurt that they are feeling. Opinions have no corporeal form. They cannot be defaced or destroyed. If the moment is not ripe for them, they will keep until another day, indefinitely if need be. The same cannot be said for the happiness and dignity of fellow human beings. That is how I determine my priorities in complicated situations such as the one at Yale.

It's late and I have to get up early, so I'll just put out an outline that I can fill out tomorrow at work, if I feel like it. Nicholas Christakis was being "berated" for appearing in front of protesting students to defend the premise of the offending email rather than to give redress for its effects. He went out to talk with the students, when the administration's apology for his wife's email proved insufficient to answer their protests, and then had the temerity to "disagree" with the offense that they took and with his implicit culpability in it. Honestly, thinking about it makes me want to berate him, too. What was he thinking, that they just hadn't read the email properly? Why should you bother listening to someone that clueless? Erika Christakis took the original IAC email, which suggested that students be mindful of others' feelings when choosing their costumes for Halloween, and rebutted it with an extremely unfocused meditation on the psychological and sociological cost of being mindful of others' feelings. In my eyes, it was the direct equivalent of walking into a poor black neighborhood and trying to engage passers-by on the necessity of the police as the manifestation of the state's monopoly of violence in a well-ordered society. She's not exactly wrong, per se, but why now and why at all? What possessed her to take concrete advice about an actual problem that students were facing and use it as the pretext to start an intellectual debate that was not only inappropriate but unhelpful? I don't know. People were offended. I'm sorry that you don't understand or agree with the legitimacy of their feelings, but isn't your opinion rather irrelevant on that count? To take an example removed from campus politics, you can't look at Mitt Romney's "binders" from 2012 comment and tell women that his intent is clear, even if his wording is poor, so they must just want to have been offended by it. In fact, "wanting to be offended" is a pernicious sort of thing to say, because it places the blame for pain on the recipient and not on the agent that inflicted it. We are all responsible for the effects that our words have, even if we cannot anticipate or account for a given effect. It's funny that you talk about the protesters standing on principle to the detriment of others, because isn't that exactly what both of the Christakis have been doing? From my own experience, I am sure that a prompt apology the moment that it appeared Erika Christakis' email was having an adverse effect, something to the tune of "I realize now that I was treating the damage caused by cultural appropriation as a theoretical exercise and not the lived experience for hundreds of students at Yale," would have prevented further protests. At the very least, it is extremely hard to call for the resignation of someone who appears to understand what they did wrong and regret it because it was wrong. However, they left it to the administration at first and later appeared in public only to double down. Apologizing would have cost them nothing, but they chose to took a stand on an email that a lot of people, right-leaning cultural critics aside, have had no trouble finding problematic. I think that's called "laying in the bed you've made." If you think that the problem with Nicholas Christakis' response to the student protesters was his tone... Okay, I'm officially out of energy. You're saying that screaming at him was the wrong thing to do, but isn't that just tone, too? Are some tones different than others, or just some people? Oh! Side note (or maybe a chance to move the conversation here forward) that the New Republic published another article, from a black woman who's graduated from Yale, that works the Yale protests into a discussion of the ongoing Mizzou protests as perspective on student activism. Its synopsis of the Yale protests has a lot overlap with my comments, but it's worth reproducing here because Roxane Gay is a better writer than me: I have to say, I disagree that an apology is not necessary from one or both of the Christakis. Apologies cost literally nothing and I've never understood the insistence of university administration to have officials do it rather than the offending parties. Still, maybe Gay's point is that an apology would have no effect now, two weeks out from the email with multiple failures in diplomacy since then. I might agree there...

The internet seems fixated on the second season of The Leftovers as this remarkable refutation of sophomore slumps, but I feel a little removed from that. Sure, the second season's trimmed away most of the stuff that didn't work — namely the Guilty Remnant, which raised the stakes of the first season's small-town interactions without ever giving a payoff — and I'm enjoying that a lot, but the show's also had to betray the characters quite a bit to fit into its new setting and tone. The mystery of Miracle, TX is only interesting as long as it remains a mystery, same for the disappearances there that launched this season, and for once it seems that Lindeloff and company are aware of that, but they've accounted for this character- rather than event-centric nature of the show by giving all of their characters a ridiculous laundry list of hidden traumas that are plausible motivations for all kinds of illogical behavior. This latest one, focusing on the hitherto-excellent Nora Durst, is a case in point: the first season saw Durst wrestling with unbelievable trauma that held her constantly at the brink of instability, but the pleasure of her character was seeing how that dysfunction didn't necessarily impede her competency. This season, Durst is still sad and angry, but the first season's finale resolved her reasons for being that way, so she's just sad and angry because that's just her character now, the one who's sad and angry. It makes her so remarkably ineffectual, smashing windows and snapping at people without a hope of getting some resolution, and it's boring to watch. The second season of The Leftovers have a bunch of characters like that, bitter and broken people who aren't really functioning and can't accomplish anything. It lets their actors give some truly powerful performances, but it means that the plot's a bit of a non-starter. I imagine the season will end how it's been progressing so far: characters get into fights with each other where they're forced to reveal the nominal source of their trauma, and then everyone will agree that the big problem's unsolvable when they can't solve each other. Blah. On the other hand, I've just started the second season of The Knick and that's how you move a show forward into a different set of themes and tones. The premiere established where everyone is, whether they're facing their issues or running from them, and planted the seeds of conflicts that will clearly intersect with these characters' issues and force a reckoning. I barely noticed the forty-five minutes go by. It's still a bit too fashionable and sexy for its own good, but it's definitely a show to watch. Is anyone up on the new season of Fargo?

When I played WC3 back in 2002, I started with Night Elves, but I quickly soured on the rhythm of play with them and switched to Humans. They're so slow to build momentum, and I don't really like the feel of factions where all their frontline units are available from the beginning but need sequential upgrades to match other top-level strategies. Still, Druids of the Claw with Dryad support are very fun, if a bit too micro for my tastes (if you're going to use Roar and Regenerate to their full potential).

Warmup AAR: I just won my second try at a four-player FFA with normal AI, the first having confirmed (for the nth time) that my beloved gryph rush doesn't work with the "new" weapon/armor rules in TFT. What does work, turns out, is classic knights/priests/HF with paladin support. I had maybe one bad brush with an Orc AI going buffed grunts and headhunters, used a TP to pull out, and then let everyone murder each other over the center mines while I did some light creeping and put out my first set of six knights and eight priests. I didn't have a single hardship after that. Of course, playing with real people is different. Even on the highest levels, the AI diversifies way too much (for instance, the Nelf AI that was "winning" before my final push seemed stuck between mountain giant/dryad and huntress/archer specs that had no overlap or synergy) and that's not the death sentence it was on vanilla WC3 (see my much-mourned gryph rush) but still easily overcome by a mid-level human who knows enough to make sure his upgrades overlap and to push past at least one tier of units. Still, very fun and a good reminder of what masterful design the whole game is. Next, I wonder if rifles/sorcs/poly is still viable...?

I have been thinking a little bit more about why pushback against university officials, whether professors or administrators, is so often interpreted as "silencing dissent." Maybe it boils down to this quote, which has resurfaced on Facebook and Twitter recently: This quote can be rephrased in several different ways, all of which ring true to me. For my purposes right now, the most relevant phrasing is that, if you don't respect an authority as an authority, you're not respecting them as a person. That's how the one student in the Atlantic article, who flatly states that Christakis doesn't deserve the attention for his explanations, is transformed into a villain, simply by expressing lack of interest in hearing him out. Denying a tenured professor at one of the nation's most prestigious universities an audience is tantamount to denying him his voice, just like denying his authority is tantamount to denying him personhood. If students believe in the values of liberal democracy, they should be obligated or even compelled to hear him out in full, whenever he wants, because otherwise he isn't able to exercise his freedom of speech. If there's been a better example for the experience of privilege over the oppressed lately, I haven't heard it Overall, the politics of authority, namely its self-legitimizing purview to arbitrate all social interactions, are so fascinating to me. When I worked retail at a bookstore, during my year off between college and grad school, I had customers ask for my job on a weekly basis. As far as I can recall, the reasons were never as clear-cut as (say) me composing a long and patronizing email about the need for minorities to be more tolerant and understanding of mainstream culture. One time, I wouldn't open up a sealed boxset of The Sporanos in order to sell a customer the exclusive bonus disc inside. Another time, I wouldn't show a customer the second floor that our strip-mall location didn't have. The worst time, the time that got me sent home, was when I wouldn't accept a return in November for a book that the customer had received in July. It had no stickers or receipts, but when I told the customer that, she went off on this wild tirade about the power trips that retail employees have when really we're at best cogs and at worst grease in the machine. I told her that she didn't have to talk to me like that, and she said, "Today's the last day you work here." Even though I am white, male, and reasonably handsome, I still worked in constant fear of saying the wrong thing while helping a customer find a book they didn't even know they wanted and having them make enough of a scene that I'd be fired. Where are the Atlantic articles about my freedom of speech being sacrificed on the altar of some soccer mom's bad day? I guess I didn't have enough authority for my personhood to be threatened.

As a general rule, if I remember competitive play, you should be pushing into low upkeep as you first make contact with the enemy, but only into high upkeep once you think you have the game in the bad. A lot of the more food-intensive strategies (aboms/meatwagons, knights/priests, etc) don't follow that pattern, though.