Gormongous

I typically watch older or at least out-of-date anime. If you don't have anything to contribute, even on that count, you can just ask smart questions. Those are always welcome!

Winner gets claim to the title "Mr. RTS"!

Yeah, but the current trend really tends more towards "someone who tries to get revenge against you by becoming a world-conquering villain." The cartoonishly over-the-top character is still there, only now they're driven to such heights by a (typically hidden) relationship with the protagonist rather than something. It's remarkably effective in some movies, particularly the original Star Wars trilogy (even though there's an argument to be made that the revelation about Vader hamstrings the character in Return of the Jedi), but it doesn't work in others. If I had to hazard another guess, which I'm doing a lot in this thread, I'd say that the reveal of a personal connection between a movie's protagonist and the color-coded embodiment of villany is effective for how it subverts the audience's expectations about the relationship between good and evil, whereas the reveal of a personal connection between two murderous sociopaths, one of which happens to work for a national government and the other of which is a sometime terrorist, is ineffective because it subverts... nothing. It merely confirms the movie's premise about the cruelties of fate in an unsurprising way. It's usually an interesting complication when major characters have relationships beyond the basic action of the plot, but those can't always be a tentpole, yet modern screenwriting seems totally caught up in its efforts to shock and enthrall audiences by making everyone their "father’s brother’s nephew’s cousin’s former roommate." Shrug.

I actually stalled out last night at Arima's second on-stage breakdown in the show. The flashbacks accompanying it made me feel like he's got horrible issues with past abuse that would probably need a therapist to heal in real life. Hopefully, it's just a roadbump, because it's the first bad impression that I've had of anything in the show...

Saenai Heroine no Sodatekata (known as Saekano) is getting very favorable retrospectives from the blogs that I follow. Did anyone watch it? I know anime often gets more credit than it deserves when it goes meta, but both Karmaburn and Omonomono are usually hard to impress with that sort of thing...

Reading you say that, I think that the real issue there is that a number of important pop-culture landmarks in decades past have used the surprise twist of a personal connection, making it an accepted part of the "kill the cat" scriptwriting philosophy even as its popularity gave it diminishing returns as a useful point on which to anchor the plot. It's so good that everyone uses it, which makes it suck.

For me, it boils down to presupposing the legitimacy of the students' viewpoints, as participants in and the pretext for an intellectual culture here in academia. The biggest effort for me, as a teacher, is to get students to voice their opinions, to own them, and to feel good about that. It takes so much work to get the average freshman to do the work and speak up in class, I'd be overjoyed to have students speaking and acting out like they are in these articles about the protests. I don't care that their motives for doing so seem unworthy to me or anyone else, at least they're engaged in the culture of an academic institution. In light of this, I'm deeply troubled by the apparent preference of so many people to defend the speech of university authorities, professors and administrators, over the speech of their students. If the intent is to show that responsibility and consideration needs to accompany personal expression, then why don't the authorities make the first move, as the adults in the situation, rather than the teenagers whom these authorities have offended? It doesn't really matter if the authorities (or random bystanders) feel that they're justified in their actions, it's not like the students don't feel the same way. Compassion and empathy are as much liberal values as free speech, but they regularly get left behind because someone's job has been threatened (although probably not seriously) and kids just need to take their lumps. Fuck that, I say. I also really don't want to get into a disagreement about whether or not the email is offensive. It is not offensive to me, but I see literally dozens of statements that are entirely justifiable prompts for someone else's offense. Overall, emphasizing the value of "free speech" over the value of freely-expressed offense is emphasizing the oppressiveness of the status quo to minorities. To take examples directly from the email, it is more important for Erika Christakis to be able to wear a sari and imitate a foreign accent in the name of "play" than for an Indian student to have a night free from middle-class white women wearing his or her culture as a Halloween costume. Honestly, I see it no different than the "free speech" argument asserting that not wanting to hear rape jokes in a comedy routine makes you an enemy of that culture as a whole. It's not about censorship or silencing dissent, it's about not wanting to deal with assholes, however unintentional their assholery. The fact that Christakis sent out an email putting the onus on students not to let assholes provoke them into offense is so telling to me.

Okay, for starters, it hasn't been "weeks." Christakis wrote the email on October 30, so it's been just over a week on the outside, even if the outrage and escalation of that outage was immediate. Said email is full of remarkably dumb, offensive, and dismissive things. Comparing the students to pre-school children by implying that her knowledge on the latter is transferable to the former, she says that offense is something that a person chooses to feel and that all opinions are equal in that regard. This is someone who's supposed to be an advocate for the students and instead she's saying, "Don't rock the boat," in multiple different ways. Despite this clear failure in compassion, she hasn't apologized, nor has her husband for his tone-deaf attempts to justify his wife's ill-considered words. No, the administration took six days to apologize generally for the hurt that the email caused, without apologizing for the email itself, which is classic damage control, and then Nicholas Christakis met with the students in person, saying things that made it plain he felt his wife had done no real harm. So... a lecturer sends out an email encouraging minorities to be doormats in the name of fairness, the administration gives an apology that carefully admits no fault, the lecturer's spouse confronts the ongoing outrage to it as a matter of abstract ideals, and we're sitting here wondering why the students are still upset? Above all, if students are hurt, angry, or scared, they can't and won't learn. Anyone I know who's an educator can tell you that you need to have trust and respect really to be effective at teaching students anything. The current obsession in mainstream media and public discourse with forcing college students to confront the nebulous "hard truths" of systemic racism and sexism, embodied in the people charged with their education and support, is antithetical to building a classroom and campus where students can learn. If one of my black students had taken Christakis' advice and had a calm discussion with a fraternity brother who'd chosen to wear blackface for his costume, I don't think that they'd be enlightened by the interaction. What's to learn there that a lifetime in American society hasn't already taught them? No, the consequences of that conversation would be (at best) to distress or (at worse) to enrage them, so that they come into my classroom on Monday as closed-off and disengaged as that girl in Spring Valley High before the police officer started throwing her around. That kind of teacher-knows-best-what-you-need paternalism in higher education is becoming obsolete, in my opinion. Erika Christakis' email emphasizes the need to talk to people and understand them for the shitty things they say and do, but it doesn't seem like she had any experience talking to people of color or other minorities about why they get upset and choose not to talk. That's fuckin' hard to hear, in a society where Ferguson is still a thing, and I don't fault any of the students in the video confronting Nicholas Christakis for their anger, as poorly as it plays on the national news. They're teenagers, they're expected to overreact and be upset and act selfishly. Christakis is the adult not getting the value of apologizing and being contrite, instead choosing to start a debate with them about their feelings. The presumption there is infuriating to me, honestly. EDIT: The most bizarre thing to me, reading the article in the Atlantic again, is how baffled the author makes himself out to be that a student would walk away from a conversation with Nicholas Christakis after catching the drift of the latter's intent. Imagine, for a second, that an acquaintance says something incredibly hurtful to you, maybe reminding you of something one of your parents did that really fucked you up in the past, and you don't talk with them for days. When, finally, they contact you about talking, you agree because you expect an apology. You had let them know how much they hurt you, surely their first impulse is going to answer that hurt. Then you meet with them and realize that an apology isn't forthcoming, they just want to explain to you why they disagree with you being hurt. In a gesture of good faith, they offer to have you over for dinner, to explain that disagreement in full. Would you walk away, saying, "You don't deserve to be listened to?" I probably would, if I was angry enough. I try not to be, but then I'm not in my late teens anymore.

A great synopsis of the biggest problem that I had with Spectre. Warning, there are major spoilers about the identity, history, and agenda of Christoph Waltz's character. I wonder if there's more to be teased out about the current vogue of making motives for the villains of action movies be so "personal." Looking at it with my eyes crossed, I'd almost see the manifestation of a modern anxiety about you having done someone wrong in your past, without knowing it, and them having devoted their life to punishing you for it. The protagonist/antagonist relationships in Star Trek Into Darkness, Dark Knight Rises, and Spectre all remind me of this song:

I'm inclined to agree with you, lacking a more thorough knowledge of religiosity in the modern black community, because these are the same processes that lead to the rapid spread of Christianity in the Roman Empire. Yet another piece of evidence for (the awful and false analogy of) Pax Americana!

My current institution falls just shy of $40,000 a year. My undergrad institution was $32,000 when I was a freshman and $36,000 when I was a senior, but they've probably passed $40,000 by now. Oops, I just checked it, they're $59,000 a year. Jeez, I wouldn't be able to afford Grinnell if I were a freshman today! That actually makes me a little sad. Anyway, I am not sure that universities paying lip service to student protests is anything new. In 2004, before social media and outrage culture were really going concerns, my undergrad institution signed a lucrative deal with Coca-Cola to make it a Coke-only campus. This was at the same time that the news about "killer Coke" was coming out of Colombia, so there were weekly demonstrations for several months until the administration put the associate dean who brokered the deal on administrative leave and made a promise not to renew that deal when it expired in a year. Grinnell doesn't have a large administration or adjunct staff and, given the largest per-capita endowment in the country, it's not remotely dependent on the tuition of its students or the donations of its alumni, except as metrics for the US News & World Report, so it's minimally vulnerable to the pressures of the corporatized university, yet I have absolutely zero doubt that this is the sort of event that would be reported by news outlets as another example of over-sensitive students complaining about their first-world problems, namely the right to choose which blood- and sweat-soaked product from the developing world to consume. It's anecdotes like this one that make me feel that they're different processes, itsamoose. Yes, university administrations have an incentive to keep their students happy, because they're increasingly regarding them as paying customers. They also have an incentive to keep the students' parents happy, because those are usually the ones paying the tuition, and these two groups often have different priorities. There are also incentives to keep alumni donors, trustees, corporate sponsors, and local elected officials happy. In almost all cases, these are the meaningful interests to an academic institution, thanks in large part to the fucked nature of the aforementioned US News & World Report. The corporatization of the university system means that there are a lot more claims to the attention of individual universities but, like with actual corporations, the student as "customer" only has the least of those claims.

Also, on a much more personal note: if the fear of coddling college-age students is that they'll get a worse education for it, I wish that those people would direct that energy into the adjunct crisis and corporatization of the university system, rather than demanding that victims of childhood abuse to go into reading Lolita blind...

Except for the power of a national-scale news outlet aggregating the reactions of dozens upon dozens of different students to a campus scandal, making it seem a massive and coordinated response by the entire student body, I don't see anything particularly out of the ordinary here for a university campus, neither when I went to college a dozen years ago or when I teach at a college today. Yeah, that email is almost offensively Pollyanna to me, especially in the same week of news that saw Mizzou football players striking to force the institution's president to step down over racist remarks, and I might be outspoken enough to say so in the public view if I were a student at Yale today. Clearly, many actual students at Yale felt the same way, each individually or in small groups, because they're still teenagers and often overreact to upsetting things with an insufficient level of jadedness and realpolitik, but that's not the same as a student-led movement to silence "dissenting views," especially since the article in the Atlantic doesn't really bother to make clear what those views would even be. Honestly, I'm going to say it more explicitly than I've ever said it before on these forums: I have spent eleven years now in post-secondary education, three of them also teaching between sixty and seventy students. I have around two dozen friends with whom I'm in regular contact who are also either teachers, students, or both at a post-secondary level. In all of this time, among all of these people, I have never encountered anything as apocalyptically pervasive as the stuff that's regularly reported about trigger warnings and social justice gone maaad. I've never even heard a second- or thirdhand account that approaches it. It's all through these news outlets, with a nigh-invariable tone of hand-wringing about these darn over-sensitive kids, and that doesn't surprise me at all, because news outlets have several large incentives to research and publish these kinds of articles. First, as has always been the case since "political-correctness" became a thing in the nineties, you can generate a lot of page-views conflating the efforts of oppressed people and their allies to create safe spaces for themselves with the censorship of a nebulous "dissent," something that has provided reliable fuel for movements like #GamerGate as well as the old-fashioned racism of Greek organizations, for example. Apparently, in a truly tolerant society, people of color would be better to let white people go in blackface, if that's what those white people have always wanted deep down, or at least ask them why they're doing it — so says some middle-class white woman. Second, criticism of contemporary campus activism is always popular, if only as a low-grade form of whataboutism, because it makes people reading the Atlantic feel better for caring about the real issues (whatever they may be; the article cites massacres of First Peoples, in an attempt to be both humorous and dismissive) instead of subliminated racism in college administration. With any luck, by the time that "fuck your safe space" becomes the new "hippie cut your hair and get a job," they'll be too old (or dead) to feel sheepish about being bystanders on the wrong side of history. Finally, it makes young people look stupid for caring about shit and saying occasionally ill-considered things, which is also important to readers of the Atlantic. Note, always, that when a person of authority says something dumb or shitty, it's a reasonable mistake that anyone could make, but when a young person (or, heaven forfend, multiple young people) say something dumb or shitty, even in response to a dumb or shitty thing said by someone else, it's a culture of coddling that's killing intellectual discourse in the Western world. Also, don't let our youth grow beards and learn Greek, because that makes them womanly and unfit for political office... wait, sorry, I confused us with Rome in the second century BC. Did you know that human history has been a nonstop decline as successive generations don't properly appreciate the things that previous generations find important and instead are interested in things that previous generations find unimportant or even unpleasant? We'll be hitting rock-bottom, any century now... Sorry, I know I'm being glib, but I can't emphasize enough how this "coddled college culture" phenomenon seems manufactured to me. Campus scandals have always been like this, if my time reading back issues of my university's newspaper has anything to say about it, but now there's the infrastructure for them to get national attention and a cottage industry devoted to spinning them into a pattern of problems leading to... something bad? I had more I wanted to write, but there's a recent article in the New Republic, another publication that's made some hay in the past on the moral panic over trigger warnings, that covers most of my broader thoughts about the changing dynamics of sensitivity and tolerance in campus culture as a whole: http://www.newrepublic.com/article/122543/trigger-warning-myth

Yep! I used to rank pretty high in 3v3 and 4v4 until TFT came out, that's when my near-perfect gryph rush was wrecked by the introduction of the fourth damage/armor type. I liked that larger teams could have one or two players specializing in first- or second-tier strategies (grunts/shamans, huntresses, etc.) that let others on the team push hard for the less-seen but often more-interesting third-tier strategies. Anyway, I'll play whatever, if I can make my schedule work!

So tempted, although I prefer team games to FFA. Is this just going to be the base game or the expansion, too?

I love the rest of your post, but I do just want to give a little bit of pushback on your opening statement, because I'm not sure what mechanics in Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri were weak, really. When I think of SMAC, I think of the planetary council, which was the best implementation of the mechanic in a Civ-derivative because of its early emergence in any given game and its potential to alter the landscape so radically. I think of the terrain and weather system, which gave the climate and elevation of a square more significance than just its military value, as well as allowing for a player to create land bridges and rain shadows in a kind of low-level ecological warfare. I think of the native wildlife, not just the fungus that plugged into the aforementioned terrain system, but the mindworms and locusts that escalated with the increasing economic development of the planet and therefore kept them from being a solved problem by the midgame, not to mention giving a Planet-focused strategy a better payoff for its early weakness. I think of the social policies, which actually enabled drastically different playstyles instead of just being bonuses to boost a preexisting strategy that the other factions would applaud or condemn. I think of the faction-on-faction diplomacy, which is largely scripted in nature but still uses that scripting to be responsive to a player's actions, whether by being prepared to make a deal for almost any technology or by trying to surrender absolutely when defeated (as opposed to fighting to death). And yeah, I even think of the unit workshop. Everyone rightly hates it now, because it's clumsy and messy even for the auto-generated units, but I also still appreciate the agency that it tries to give me. Where SMAC fails mechanically, it's because it exposes a level of complexity and control that the player simply does not need and is not rewarded for using. With the workshop, that's mostly due to bad UI, which makes it hard to understand how one unit improves upon another, and the prototyping system, which strongly encourages the use of preexisting designs in sub-optimal circumstances over the expense of creating a custom-made design to handle those circumstances. It's also a UI issue for most of the systems described above. I know old games can get pretty long in the tooth, but when the changes that SMAC made to Civilization 2 are all so innovative and influential, I have trouble calling it "weak" myself.

Continuing my long-running pattern of coming to shows maybe two years after the height of their buzz, Your Lie in April is so good. The transitions between drama and humor are natural and effortless, motifs in the dialogue like the dichotomy between "sparkling" and "dull" are upheld consistently in the art rather than just being bullshit flung between characters, and those characters generally seem to feel their feelings deeply without wallowing or anything. I especially like the arc in the fifth and sixth episode that views the male and female protagonists falling for each other through the eyes of the guy's childhood friend. The bittersweetness of her waning crush, the desire to see him happy slowly winning out over her desire to be the one who's happy with him, reminds me of everything that was good about the Yamada/Mayama parts of Honey & Clover without anything about it that made that show contrived and tedious.

In the Diablo system of naming for randomly-generated magical items, armor that increased health was given the name of large mammals, like "bear." "Whale" was the highest rank in this line of names. Likewise, armor that increased its own armor class was given the names for deities, so that's why it's "godly." EDIT: Yeah, I thought that there was a restriction on more than one max-level affix spawning on an item, thanks mrwynd.

I always think about Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast trilogy capturing the hearts and minds of mid-century fantasy-reading audiences, rather than Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, myself.

I'm actually having an easier time than expected making my way through Space Runaway Ideon, which I'm trying to finish before the end of 2015 (Year of the Third Impact), but the biggest obstacle is really the fact that the antagonists are named the Buff Clan. Every time someone talks about being attacked by the Buff Clan or about the pride of the Buff Clan not being able to bear something, I am ejected out of the (admittedly fragile) world of Ideon at lightspeed.

Mostly, I've heard about it from people loudly trumpeting their decision to jump ship from Payday 2. What I understand, its big downsides are i) it's highly focused on melee in an engine that doesn't particularly enable melee combat to be that fun, and ii) it's got a serious grind, on the same level as Payday 2. Still, I'm very tempted myself, since I'm also one of those people looking to jump ship.

And Bruce Willis, while not winning any Oscars, at least seems to be having fun as Corbin Dallas, which is good, because Bruce Willis not enjoying his role has been the end of many otherwise good movies. Hell, him having fun is literally the only thing making Hudson Hawk watchable... except for maybe David Caruso's weird mute spy.

I must confess, I'm loath to ask, because i) I don't feel like taking up one of our reduced times together with a Big Talk, even if it ultimately helps calm my mind, and ii) I'm afraid of what the answer will be. When our best-case scenario of her getting the job is "She'll move at the end of November, we'll do six months of long distance, and then I'll move away from all my friends and employment opportunities to be with her," I'm just not optimistic about anything. I'll get around to it someday, I guess... She's actually an amazing cook, but she hates cooking. I like cooking, but I have zero talent in that area. I've enjoyed the handful of times that we've stayed in and made something, but she definitely hasn't, so home cooking is more of a "special occasion" thing for us.

Er, Chris Tucker, I think.