Gormongous

My relationship's in a bit of a weird place right now. It was an absolutely crazy whirlwind for almost six months exactly, with neither of us ever having been more in love before, and then we had a run of disappointing weekends, culminating in a few fights where she was stressing about how much money we spend as a couple, both by going out and by getting each other things. Since then... well, the past month's been a big change. We're seeing each other a lot less during the week, maybe getting dinner or watching TV together once or twice, and recently our weekends have involved a lot more breaks and meals apart, again to save money. Somehow, although I make a third of what she does, money's more the thing that matters to her, so this is what we're both doing, even though it means seeing less of each other and doing less when we're together. It's fine? I don't know, my biggest insecurity in a relationship is my partner getting less interested in or attracted to me over time, so even though I don't think she's being that much less affectionate, at least when I ask for affection, the dramatic deescalation of our time together is still gnawing at me in a bad way. She's also been looking for a better job, which I support completely since she is enormously talented at what she does and mostly squandered at her current place of work, but she's had difficulty finding anything at the other hospitals in town, so she's recently started looking at jobs in Chicago, and that's very confusing to me. At first, I didn't think she was serious about moving four hours away to a completely new city, just to make a slightly bigger paycheck, but she's talked about it enough over the past couple of weeks that I can tell it's really an option in her mind. I tempted her out to dinner tonight, since I hadn't seen her for the better part of a week, and she was talking sincerely about the potential of moving to a new city and totally overhauling her finances. I was just like... cool? She knows I can't move, not with my assistantship only halfway done, and I don't know what conclusions to draw from that. We couldn't really talk much about it at the restaurant, because she left right after the bill was paid to go watch TV with her dog. I'm trying desperately hard not to feel like I'm being broken up in the slowest and most passive way possible, hopefully not... sigh. A lot of this relationship has been reminding me how much it hurts to be in love, since I haven't really experienced it since college. It's amazing to have someone to whom you can give yourself over entirely, but fuck me if every little thing doesn't mess you up. It was a great deal easier dating people whom I didn't particularly like and wouldn't really miss too much if they took off. I know, I know. Ridiculous, I am.

With redundant organs and stuff, yeah.

Because anime fandom on the internet is always obsessed with newer being better. Remember that flowchart I posted a while back and how arbitrary its cutoff on date of production was for a lot of anime? Half the reason I want to talk about anime more myself is that the internet is so interested in chasing the hotness of a given season and has almost no self-awareness or historical memory of the genre...

It's been too long since you've watched the original if you really mean "long-winded." I love Fullmetal Alchemist, but its willingness to lose entire minutes to different characters' emotional reactions added maybe a dozen episodes onto its possible runtime.

Hah! That's basically why I can't listen to a lot of history podcasts, "oversimplification" usually being "I bet you've never heard of [historical person], they were the biggest badass of [historical period]" in this case. And I'm not saying you shouldn't enjoy it. I'm just frustrated that there aren't better options with less compromises, and more than a little disappointed in Jamie that he loves history enough to make an extremely slick podcast about it but not enough to treat all of history's participants with the same level of enthusiasm and understanding as his hometown heroes. It's my sincere hope that the process of researching and writing The British History Podcast broadens his horizons somewhat, but who knows.

Howl's Moving Castle is a mess in terms of story, pacing, and stakes, but I found its art to be gorgeous, its characters to be broad but entertaining, and its themes to be a pleasantly uneven stew of everywhere in Miyazaki's career, some even darker than usually attempted. It's not a genius film, for sure, but it has a spark in it that's totally missing from Tales of Earthsea, which is an entirely unwatchable mix of annoying characters, uninspired setting, and bland plot. If you disagree on that latter count, ask yourself which of the two you'd rather be stuck watching for all of eternity. I don't know anyone who'd pick Tales of Earthsea. That list is not bad, but it certainly is... odd. I'll just confine myself to my major critiques Nausicaa is ranked way too low, with the list's author counting its rawness and naivete as flaws rather than strengths that elevate it above Princess Mononoke, in my opinion. Pom Poko being above Spirited Away, Only Yesterday, and Porco Rosso must be a joke. I love tanuki as a metaphor for the protean demands of living between past and present, but seriously... Castle in the Sky is very good, but it features one of Ghibli's most motivation-free and unsympathetic villains, and the rest of the storytelling is a bit too frictionless for my taste, one thing leading to another too readily. Kiki's Delivery Service and Whisper of the Heart being ranked so high explains to me why the list's author ranks Spirited Away and Only Yesterday lower, because they are very much independence-affirming coming-of-age stories rather than family- or community-affirming ones. He likes the former more than the latter, I guess! Princess Mononoke is not the best movie from Studio Ghibli. It's a legitimately great movie, for sure, and among the best, but I have no idea where the list's author is getting some of his arguments for it being the best, hands-down. The other characters that Ashitaka meets are treated sympathetically, but he is relentlessly vindicated in his worldview like they never are. Both he and San are also just so grim, lacking the wonder at a dying world that makes the apocalyptic visions of Nausicaa so heartening. Mononoke is just less complex of a world, for all of its historical roots in the death of Emishi culture in medieval Japan, and it's not as willing to invite you in as many of Miyazaki's earlier works, either.

To be fair, sometimes it happens when you're talking into a mic and you don't even realize it!

Yeah, I should have refined my meaning a bit. I guess I mean more that, in history, the fandom is often open about and proud of its distortions and untruths. So many people who claim to be passionate about history take as given that they need to lie at least a little, by omission if nothing else, to make history interesting. That's different to me than mainstream publications punching up the findings of science studies because the strictures of the discipline discourage too much speculation about implications. You don't get a science podcast saying, "Yeah, I'm going to pretend that everything after Newton doesn't exist because it makes my explanation of physics too complicated." They're a science podcast, they're there to get into complicated explanations. They're there to take real-world messiness, present it to you in full, and then help you to see a little order in its midst. That's really what frustrates me. Telling a good story is one thing, but inserting or omitting details in order to create heroes and villains out of actual people is crossing a line. Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall is an amazing book, a truly humbling piece of research and composition, but it's not history. It's fiction, and so is an unfortunate (and, in my mind, unnecessary) chunk of The British History Podcast. Yeah, I'm sorry if I come off like I'm attacking you for listening to The British History Podcast. I'm not, I'm just frustrated by the state of popular history, especially with the advent of Wikipedia and the internet in general. The truth is, there are tons of engaging audio lectures out there on historical topics by people like my advisor, even just on Audible, but mostly historians have been slow to adapt to the newer format and trappings of podcasts. Mostly, we're too busy (well, I am, at least) and so passionate amateurs lead the way. Sometimes they're careful and humble, like Mike Duncan, and sometimes... I don't really know what Jamie is trying to do with his podcast, but he seems unapologetic about his biases (in almost a "c'mon, of course I'm rooting for the Celts, what did you expect" kind of way) and that's literally incomprehensible to me, because the very first thing I was taught in my profession is that my opinions are meaningless at best and harmful at worst if I don't have evidence to back them up. We left that kind of thing behind with Edward Gibbon and it kills me to see it being revived because someone's identifying too closely with his subject matter two thousand years dead. If you're not a reader, I don't really have an alternative, though. There are so many amazing books out there, but if every book is boring to you, no mater the content, then the best you're going to get really is Jamie's historical fan-fiction about Celtae Invictae. Maybe that'll change in five or ten more years, as more internet-savvy historians enter the field, but who knows.

Overall, it's really complicated but, as I understand it, the Communism scares of the 1950s allowed pro-business conservatives to roll back a lot of the unions' economic and political power, which was mostly broken in the 1970s when the world economy had recovered enough to start flooding the States with higher-quality imports. Lots of industries moved to the South, which had less of a tradition of unions, and the unions lost all their clout with the Democrats, and the ones that survived the eighties were vilified as clannish and ineffectual because they lacked the power to protect the average worker (some of it their fault, some of it not). Some states still have strong union traditions in blue-collar labor. Missouri is the most pro-union state that I've ever encountered and you simply won't find a non-union plumber or electrician in St. Louis. Elsewhere, though, there's a widespread belief that unions steal wages from workers in exchange for mafia-like "protection," while also strangling business' profits and making them less able to grow and hire more workers. It's a definite victory for that way of thinking, that even someone like Austin Walker doesn't want to say "union" for fear of being Norma Rae'd.

Tolkein and Hienlien are some of my favorite genre writers from the mid- to late-fifties.

I've posted in the Payday 2 thread in the Multiplayer subforum about how I'm quitting, but my reasons for exhaustion and disillusionment are so personal that I wouldn't impose them on others. The Thumbs seem to have played very little Payday 2, and I think that the appearance of the game on their curation page is more an endorsement of game design than business model, so I feel uncomfortable asking them to take it down because the latter has changed, even if the change is substantial in my eyes. I know that someone took over Goonmod, so you might want to look into installing it for its Gage Shop feature. Basically, it lets completed courier packages become currency to buy weapon mods. Technically cheating, I guess, but we've now been told that unfair advantages are okay in co-op games because they benefit the whole team, and anything to reduce the game's grind, I say.

I guess? I admit, I brindled when he made that statement. He had already done an excellent (if somewhat idyllic) history of pre-Roman Britain, which covered all of the sources not Greco-Roman in origin, but then he proceeds to read the Greco-Roman sources in a way that attempts to strip them of what he sees as their Greco-Roman bias and get the "true" picture of what was happening in Britain. As far as I can tell, his only guides for this endeavor are his own deeply-felt but nonetheless modern beliefs about what is British and what is Roman (and never the twain shall meet), which is even more galling when the legions withdraw from Britain and Jamie talks about the native Britons "taking back" their land and culture, carefully avoiding the term "Romano-British" and any implications whatsoever that Rome's three and a half centuries of rule might have had more of an influence on Britain moving forward than tribal polities that were dead and gone when the oldest living grandfather's grandfather was not yet born. There is really good literature out there (seriously, Jones' work is tremendous and I think about it on a monthly basis, at least) suggesting that the Romanization of the British Isles was uniquely incomplete in some ways, leading to a sub-Roman culture that amalgamated with the invading Anglo-Saxons in a fashion that the Gallo- and Hispano-Romans mostly didn't. But the way he is doing it, positing a pan-Celtic consciousness that lay dormant during fifteen generations of Roman occupation, Jamie is engaging in historical fiction, plain and simple, and it's every bit as silly as a historian writing about the history of what would become the United States of America as a continuity only briefly interrupted by British occupation, 1607-1776. I'm often frustrated by the whole mentality of "Biases or inaccuracies don't bother me, as long as I'm aware of them" when it comes to amateur history. It's incredibly toxic at times, if only for how it disregards hard work by trained professionals in preference to entertainment value, and it feels like only the social sciences, psychology and history in particular, have to deal with it on such a level. Basically, every day is "we found an anomaly in the transmitted light of a distant star, please don't call it an alien megastructure yet" day, in astronomy terms. I don't mean to be taking my issues out on you (and I'm sorry, because that's exactly what I'm doing, looking over what I've written), I just have it as a bugbear of mine when there's an implicit dichotomy between good history and interesting history.

Despite what people said about Goldeneye as a return to form, Bond movies are always at their worst when they're reminding me of older and often better Bond movies. The moment when the Spectre trailer had the line "I need to disappear" or whatever, I immediately thought, "Oh, like Bond did in You Only Live Twice." And the hook there totally failed to find any purchase. It feels like a matter of time, who knows how long, before Bond movies are a mix-and-match of previously established elements from Bond movies, whether intentional or no. I feel like the fascination with showing audiences "Bond like you've never seen him before" is pushing us closer to that point in time, even more so than consciously striving for it...

I mean, maybe, but what's a "proportionate" amount of tempered expectations for a game that promises to procedurally generate entire biospheres for a functionally unlimited number of planets? The lack of explanation for what gameplay will be is one thing that does not bother me, but what No Man's Sky does make positive statements upon seems like the moon, if I stop to think about them. Unrestrained optimism for a game is as toxic as unrestrained cynicism, in my mind. Both encourage stupid, exploitative marketing and business models, and both lead good games to be damned for not being the thing that they were never meant to be.

How far are you? It's mostly with the Roman conquest and occupation of Britain where I started feeling like I had to quit, because Jamie was projecting at the same time the most charitable interpretation of native Britons' motivations and the most proto-nationalist effect of their actions (to the point that I was reminded of the whole "What have the Romans ever done for us" bit from Life of Brian)... and it just isn't in the sources, it's in his head, which is... I don't know. It's not good history, even if it makes for a good story. I put up with it for about a dozen episodes and then I had to quit, because he was already intimating that he felt the same about the Saxon settlement and (simply put) I didn't want to face the Danelaw or the Norman invasion being told with such a spin. Pan-Celticism is totally made up, anyway. For me, at least, the truly cool and interesting thing about Britain is that it's this unique melting pot of peoples and cultures created through repeated invasions (the original henge-building Neolithic inhabitants, the P-Celts, the Q-Celts, the Romans, the Anglo-Saxons and Jutes, the Danes and Norwegians, the Normans and French... and technically the Dutch and the Hannoverians, I guess) and it's really limiting for a historian to identify "real" Britain with one of those groups (in Jamie's case, the P-Celts) and to treat the rest as interlopers "ruining" (or at least "disrupting") the native culture. Hopefully it won't be such a deal-breaker for you, and if he's not like that all the way through, I'd sure like to know.

Yeah, I agree. The creator of a fictional work building an explicit reason into the universe of their work for why a character has to have an amazing body or dress and act sexily (which I see as the core definition for "Baby Got Backstory") is distinct from from the creator of a fictional work simply designing a character who likes being sexy (which is more like faux empowerment or something like that). Both use the same techniques to distance themselves from the objectification of their characters (one, by making it part of the world-building, and another, by making it part of a character's personality), but I agree that they are different in execution and effect.

It's true that the design has the philosophy of "many ways to fail, one way to succeed," but I think that's valuable when the way to succeed is often counter-intuitive and so evocative of a pre-modern mindset that takes effort and imagination to inhabit. It's a shame that, once you've beaten the game, the only way really to discover the game anew is to place handicaps, whether by playing suboptimally as a War or Peace tribe rather than a Balanced one or by simply trying to be more modern and progressive in your approach to the game. Still, it's a reason that I have high hopes for A-Sharp's next game, if it ever comes to a platform other than iOS.

It is my sincere desire that the continued appearance of Downwell on "Games Discussed" means that Jake's initial predictions about Chris' life being consumed whether he knew it or not are true.

This is such an excellent point. One of the most amazing things about King of Dragon Pass, a thing that makes it feel so grounded in a foreign culture of a distant time, is that most of the traditional rubrics of success don't really apply to the game. Cattle are the ultimate wealth, but bigger herds require more defense, which means a larger tribe that proportionally makes the wealth less impressive and useful, and at a certain point your herd is simply indefensible because of its size. Goods are good for trading and small sacrifices, but they're meaningless to many tribes and in some situations, and again the more you have the less they're worth. Even having a large clan, while good for war, is hard to feed and becomes an unmanageable engine for generating no-win disputes between people. You can't really "beat" King of Dragon Pass by getting bigger or more sophisticated. There's discovering rituals and building temples, but those are more of a safety net than a prerequisite for progress. Instead, the watchwords of the game are "consensus" and "tradition." Promoting harmony between people, even if they aren't inclined to agree, is how you win the game, while avoiding failure relies on knowing your clan's history and being able to emulate it flawlessly. I love it, words cannot say.

It's funny, because I remember Dark Forces 2: Jedi Knight having really legible and naturalistic level design, and then I played Mysteries of the Sith and it was immediately back to these alternately cavernous and labyrinthine designs.

I have every element for a pretty high-level costume from Labyrinth, except the wig, and it's stressing me out. With the wig, I'll be Jareth the Goblin King, but without it, I'll just be Crap Bowie. Crap Bowie's a sight better than Crap Anyone Else, but it's no good as a costume.

Simply put, because I cannot speak for anyone but myself, I have not bought Metal Gear Solid V, but I have bought Payday 2 and put almost a hundred dollars into its DLC. That's what makes Overkill's "I'm all right, Jack" attitude sting for me, while I don't give a shit about Kojima or Konami. No company can be entirely responsible for the toxic community surrounding its games, but it simply cannot be argued that Overkill isn't getting the community they deserve with their rotating arsenal of flattery, spin, and silence. Remember the Hype Train event this past spring, where Overkill flatly asked its community to help them sell two million dollars of DLC, which turned out to be in exchange for rewards that no one wanted, like PaydayCon and a professional gaming tournament themed around Payday 2? Remember the Completely Overkill Pack released during that event, a twenty-dollar piece of DLC that was nakedly presented as a way of donating money to Overkill? How exactly is structuring your fan events around them making you money and openly asking for no-strings handouts from them going to breed anything but the most entitled fans? Even that would be okay if they were interested in interacting with the community that resulted from the aggregation of those fans, but they aren't. They just wanted their fans' money, while still being unwilling to deal with the heightened stakes from letting those fans get invested in the game's development. Almir even complained that the reduction of prices for old DLC back in May, which they presented as a thank-you to a devoted community, was really meant to spur sales but didn't. It's all just money, and that's why I can't let myself cut them any slack for the outcome of Crimefest 2015, much as I deplore the idiotic brigading by Reddit and the Steam forums. Furthermore, I have zero faith that Overkill is going to work on its most recent mistakes. That's why I can't fault the community in particular for raking them over the coals for the weapon rebalance, which shows total insulation from and ignorance of the community and its extensive meta, because it's liable to be the status quo for months if not years. The game's balance has been a joke since the first DLC packs started dropping, yet this is the first and only weapon rebalance in the game's entire lifespan. Without something like the stat-based skins system as a driving factor, whatever reason would they have to waste man-hours revisiting it? Remember when they released the first part of the Infamy update back in January 2014? They stated that they were dissatisfied with the implementation and that they would return to it. When they did, in this year's Hype Train event, they made no changes whatsoever to the existing implementation and simply added twenty more levels of experience discounts, calling it "Infamy 2.0." They also stated that they were dissatisfied with that implementation (or, really, the lack thereof) and that they will return to it. No sign of it yet and no word from Almir when asked during his AMA. The thing is, Overkill doesn't really have a history of fixing its design missteps, unless those missteps have an obvious visual component like animations or models that can be advertised. They just don't seem to be interesting in maintaining the kind of game that they created, even though they'll gladly ask five dollars from the community every month (and now two-fifty every other week, to open a safe) to keep doing their own thing and telling the people who paid money for Payday 2 that they're No True Fan unless they agree with everything Overkill does. It's just... I don't know. And hey, even if they do fix the weapon rebalance, what's the point of it if there's no Long Guide or Optimal Weapons Guide? You may say that these people quit out of exhaustion, but I have only their words by which to go, and both Frankelstner and KarateF22 have been very explicit that Overkill's conduct as a developer and as a company have been what exhausted them. With their absence, I feel exhausted, too, because the meta is the only thing that elevates Payday 2 above Left 4 Dead 2, a game with a superior shooting model, more interesting level design, and better feedback systems. If I leave, I just won't come back, and Overkill gave me literally no reason to stay besides sunk-cost fallacy, so yeah... I'm done for the foreseeable future, sadly. I'm glad you're having fun, though!

There are no finer points! They are not Orlanthi, they do not fight, and they do not own cattle, so some tribute must be extracted from them, if only for appearances. Not too much, but enough to use as precedent in the future if they complain of unfair treatment by your tribe. I am beyond excited about this podcast. It makes me wish that I could send in questions about the game, just to hear more smart people talk about it.

Also, someone in the comments of the We Hunted the Mammoth post pointed out that Breitbart is making the same mistake that Roosh Valizadeh made in trying to monetize #GamerGate through a dedicated website: #GamerGate is small at ten thousand members, highly informed about its interests, entitled to the point of hostility, and very easily upset about any perceived slight. That makes them almost impossible to exploit them over the long term for pageviews on clickbait content, the very business model that Breitbart trades in. They're basically setting themselves up to fail in the most obvious way possible.

Yeah, thinking about what I said and what Syn said, it sounds like maybe they just assign cops to school based on ones who seem to have the most appropriate personality? I actually don't know a lot of how the police force decides who has what duties, besides the intense intra-office politics that movies and television show me to be at work.