Gormongous

Slackbot screaming characters from Hamlet on cue is finally an Idle Thumbs Forum joke with which I can get on board!

A variation on J.J. Abrams' "black box" theory of screenwriting, perhaps? I get it, totally.

My high school growing up had a couple of officers as liaisons. If I remember, one hung out in the parking lot in his car and the other stood in A Hall, close to the front entrance. That's for a school of 2,400 people. You'd see him when you went to and from school, as well as occasionally on the way to class, but you eventually tuned him out, unless you were a pothead or black. It's not too different from how security guards are usually dressed to look as much like police officers as possible, just so that the uniform cows people and so they get used to being under passive surveillance all the time. I didn't have much contact with the outdoor cop, who seemed just to be there to spook would-be car thieves and asshole drivers, the indoor cop at my school was good-natured in almost every instance. He was mostly there to arbitrate petty crimes between students (like the theft incident that jennagatron mentioned) and to provide first response for student-on-student violence. He put himself in danger more than a couple times, throwing himself bodily between two dudes fighting so that the teachers could restrain them without risking harm to themselves. I do remember that a couple of teachers, the less competent ones, were prone to calling him into their classrooms to intimidate unruly students, which no one but those teachers seemed to like, but he never arrested anyone for disciplinary infractions, to my memory, and definitely not on his own initiative. It's definitely a weird thing, I just never thought about it because I was a kid and I felt like I was surrounded by authority figures with the power to discipline and punish, so the fact that one of them specifically represented the state's monopoly on violence didn't stand out to me as much.

Yesterday, Breitbart lauched Breitbart Tech, the better to continue profiting off the hatred and rage of #GamerGate, and put Milo Yiannopoulos in charge, of course. When he went to /r/KotakuInAction to announce this event, someone jokingly gave him a pop quiz on basic tech/gamer literacy. Yiannopoulos couldn't answer a single question (he didn't even try) so naturally the entire subreddit hounded him off the internet and doxxed his entire family because he is a fraud among gamers. Just kidding! They patiently explained all the answers to the questions of the quiz, as well as the significance of each to tech and gamer subculture as a whole, and thanked him for agreeing to be their advocate even though he's not very familiar with games or gamers. The hypocrisy is to be expected, but it's losing some of its charm for me. http://wehuntedthemammoth.com/2015/10/28/gamergaters-applaud-hiring-of-fake-gamer-as-breitbart-tech-editor/

I love (okay, "hate" is the better term, but I have to maintain my ironic distance) that the answer in the United States during twenty-first century to Juvenal's iconic question, "Who watches the watchers," is, "We watchers watch each other. Trust us, it works. If you see someone getting threatened, abused, or killed by a watcher, trust the other watchers that we always have a good reason. Always do what we say!" It's beyond sickening, as is the brigade of people on every comment thread who blindly believe that obeying legal authorities in every imaginable instance will always keep a person safe. I mean, when even the president can talk about being stopped for the offense of Driving While Black: http://www.addictinginfo.org/2015/10/27/obamas-been-stopped-for-driving-while-black-made-sure-room-full-of-cops-knows-it-video/

Sadly, no. It's been picked up by no streaming services. Not even the manga it's based on has had an official translation (for that matter, it hasn't even been scanlated). It's definitely a niche series outside of Over-Time's fansubbing job. Honestly, looking at how ridiculously that ADV had to spin Yasuhiro Takeda's Notenki Memoirs as this crazy Japanese adventure, too far out for real life, in order to sell an extremely straightforward and unambitious account of fan subcultures in 1980s Japan, I doubt there will ever be a market for something like Aoi Honoo/Blue Blazes to get licensed here, even though it is actually crazy and a little far out.

I watched Gundam 0080: War in the Pocket. Overall, I liked it, but it definitely had weaknesses, most of them connected to its status as part of a mecha franchise. I enjoyed getting a brief but detailed look inside the Gundam universe, but I was frustrated by the apparent flatness of morality therein. The Zeon are obviously arrogant, misguided, and evil, leaving the show's efforts to humanize its soldiers somewhat weakened. I also enjoyed having a child's perspective of war, which was mostly well-executed, but I also felt that the show takes multiple opportunities to make Al look stupid and childish in a way that alienates me from the emotions that he's experiencing. Then again, the show occasionally allows its message to collapse down into a flat statement that War Is Bad, Someday We'll All Stop Fighting, so lesser tonal slips seem in keeping. I did find it very attractive for 1989, even the giant robots, the design of which is ugly to me but still interesting to watch in motion. I mostly just wish I'd watched some other Gundam show from the "Universal Century" continuity to get a feeling for it first, even if I didn't like it, because just having the context would probably have improved my enjoyment of War in the Pocket immensely. I am going to recommend it as a spotlight for our podcast, either it or Macross: Do You Remember Love?, if only because its eyecatches would be so good for a thumbnail icon: Now I'm watching Yahari Ore no Seishun Rabu Kome wa Machigatteiru, probably better known to Anglophone fans as My Teen Romantic Comedy SNAFU, on the repeated recommendation of anime blogger OgiueMANIAX. There, it was presented as part of the fairly typical sub-genre of anime: a misanthropic loner dude is co-opted into a silly club full of difficult women, where he ends up helping people and winning hearts with his unique perspective on life, the universe, and everything... only, apparently, SNAFU mixes things up by giving hints that the protagonist is unhappy as a loner, by playing the eventual love triangle very close to the chest, by demurring from showing the protagonist's "victories" in a positive light, and by showing him slowly changing with the help of the people around him, even as he helps them more overtly. So far... Well, I see all of the above and I can't say that it's wrong. In practice, the show comes off as a mix of Haganai (setting and characters), Sayonara, Zetsubou-Sensei (themes and hook), and Medaka Box (overall structure). These are all good shows (well, Haganai is actually terrible, at least for me, but it's fine on paper, so whatever) but they all carry their flaws into SNAFU. Like Medaka Box, SNAFU starts out episodic, with different episodes devoted to helping different individuals with their (often stupid) problems, and allows the accumulation of characters and knowledge of characters to push the plot gradually towards a shift in pacing and focus. The problem is, while the shift in Medaka Box is to over-the-top shounen action, the shift in SNAFU is to flashback-heavy teen drama, which wrecks the brisk pace of the early episodes and bogs the show down badly before it's even half over. Similarly, Sayonara, Zetsubou-Sensei uses the perspective of negative or unpleasant individuals to disrupt audience expectations, like SNAFU, but the former does it in the name of absurdist commentary and the latter does it to build out characters and drive the plot. As for Haganai... maybe just imagine a version of Haganai where all of the characters are not just superficially selfish and cruel, but in fact are selfish and cruel all the way through, because Haganai wants its audience to work to find the good in Kodaka and Yozora while SNAFU just wants them to understand fully the personal cost of bad personality traits, whatever good they do to others. None of the above kills the appeal of SNAFU entirely, but they are missteps that punish critical viewing with an ever-increasing awareness of shortcomings. Honestly, I'm still enjoying myself, which is a surprise when I both perceive all the show's faults intellectually and dislike most of its characters emotionally. Part of it is just the pleasure of seeing the protagonist, Hikigaya, fail to be valorized for the great anime virtue of "getting things done" and "fixing problems," because his solutions are blunt and often hurtful. The argument that means, not just ends, matter when it comes to dealing with other human beings is an argument rarely taken with this kind of show, but here it is practically the central thesis. People argue against results and I like that. I also enjoy the subtlety of the love triangle, which has barely been expressed out loud by any of the three parties involved, but maybe that's just because I don't like any of them and am not in any great need to see them happily in love. Finally, some of the secondary characters are great. Hikigaya's little sister and Yukinoshita's older sister are both sources of keen energy, which the show is otherwise missing, and Hikigaya's friend Totsuka is interesting for the latent homosexual attraction that Hikigaya regularly expresses to him, without judgment from the other characters or the show itself. Sadly, though, I don't think that My Teen Romantic Comedy SNAFU is going to turn out to be the diamond in the rough that I hoped it was going to be. It's better than average, for sure, but the average isn't much about which to crow when it comes to loser-makes-friends anime. Maybe the second season, when Hikigaya truly begins to turn his life around, will reveal to me that the writers really know what they're doing, rather than having just stumbled into a slightly better version of an accepted formula...

I agree with this. The podcast was a bit of an oddity to hear, with less experienced players telling a more experienced player that he was being too hard with his misgivings about a game's depth and longevity. I've wasted too much of my life playing indie trifles that hooked me with the ostensible promise of infinite depth and then revealed that that "depth" was either a tedious opener or a grindy endgame for high-level play. I'm thinking of Space Pirates and Zombies and Reus especially, games with a look and feel that continually tempted me to play them even though I found them unsatisfying because their design so clearly incorporates the symbology of complex strategy design. Even though they aren't as flagrant time-wasters as (say) a 4X with no endgame at all, I'm still less forgiving of such games than Rowan, if only because you'd think that smaller games, lacking the multiple interlocking systems of a larger-scale title, would have what gameplay they do have baked more fully. With Kingdom, it sounds like they didn't really expect anyone to play it to completion, and that's disheartening.

Hey, I love my chosen field, but I'm only a historian until someone offers me more money to do something else!

You'd be getting a tutorial for Crusader Kings 2, with live questions and feedback, from a professionally trained medieval historian! If that's not worth something, my chosen career is definitely doomed. Really, though, I wouldn't be concerned about catching anyone's playstyle. As much of a granular engine for narrative as it is, mastery of CK2 isn't that individualized and the few things that are (preferred capitals, spouses, educations) are strongly and obviously down to taste. Moreover, as someone who knows about actual history (and whose love of it has occasionally estranged him from CK2), I'd hope that I'd have enough perspective to give advice for whatever kind of fun that someone else wants to have. Anyway, if you or anyone else is interested, message me on the forums or on Steam and we'll get something set up.

Oh, totally. "Brood of vipers" and all that.

Eh, it should be fine for a low-stakes teaching game, and that's enough for me, at least.

So Crimefest is over and Overkill has spoken: even though their decision to institute gameplay-affecting microtransactions for a twenty-dollar game with over a hundred dollars of DLC, against repeated assurances that they would never do such a thing, has received an overwhelmingly negative response from fans and the press, they're keeping them in. In his post-Crimefest AMA, lead producer Almir Listo stuck mostly to canned PR responses, saying that the microtransactions for stat-boosting gun skins were already a success "statistically" and "from an economic standpoint" despite "complainers," but also confirmed that Overkill's decision to triple its staff from 25 to 75 employees in two years, without releasing another game, has forced its own hand. Reddit is claiming that Starbreeze, Overkill's publisher/owner/alias, posted record profits in the millions this year and has no basis to be presenting itself as a cash-strapped "indie" developer, but either way, it seems like there's plenty of bad judgment somewhere along the line. Anyway, I'm officially done playing this game. The mod scene has collapsed, with the creators of GoonMod and DMCWO formally washing their hands. The creators of the Long Guide and the Optimal Weapons Guide have also quit, as have the proprietors of /r/paydaymeta. The current balance of the game has made most of my choices, especially with regards to weapons, either meaningless or obvious. I've spend dozens of real dollars and millions of ingame dollars setting up a character with equipment that has been mostly invalidated by the new state of affairs. The game's still there and it's still fun, but I have no energy or interest in dealing with it anymore. There are so many games out there, and Overkill's naked greed and disrespect just isn't for me anymore.

Sure, but I'd also like to do it with someone. I've been playing CK2 for a thousand hours, so I don't really know what's not obvious to a non-intensive player.

Here's a running list: http://www.medievalists.net/2012/10/05/ten-medieval-podcasts/ As far as I know, none of these are as good as the ones to which you've listened already. The British History podcast and Lars Brownsworth's two shows are enthusiastic but not very rigorous. If you find one that's actually good, let me know! Actually, I've been tempted for years to do a History of Rome-style podcast for the Holy Roman Empire, starting with Charlemagne and ending with Hapsburg dominance, but I simply don't have the energy that'd take, I think.

For the best experience of the game, which I consider to be playing a Christian feudal lord at the 1066 start, you only need three DLCs at most: Sons of Abraham, Way of Life, and maybe Legacy of Rome. Every other DLC only adds the ability to play a different religion or a different nationality (with the exception of viceroyalties with Charlemagne and custom kingdoms with the "Ruler Designer" DLC), but the game's focus is always strongest when on Latin Christendom. Uh, it varies these days, courtesy of my dissertation. I'm busy this weekend, mostly, but I'm available most weeknights between 6 pm and 2 am CST, not to mention other times if you let me know in advance. My Steam username is "Gormongous," feel free to friend me there and communicate.

I have made this offer countless times, I know it'll never be accepted, but for you or anyone else, I am totally willing to play a two-person multiplayer game of CK2 and walk through the best ways to play via Steam's voice chat. It seems silly, but doing that would combine medieval history, video games, and teaching, three of my huge passions, so...

I mean, that seeming alienness of emotion is part of why Matt Damon's the only fun part of Interstellar, but I get your point.

I was hoping more for "serviceable" than "profound," but alright.

I liked the size and shape disparity of the buttons. I don't know how a quartet of buttons with identical size and texture, set in a symmetrical diamond, became the industry standard, but it's a UX disaster.

That sort of thing is really mockable in the book, too. There's one point where he's like, "Whew! Finally, a day with no problems to solve. I've been looking forward to a break," and I just laughed out loud because, as the book presents him, Mark Watney lives to solve problems. He might even go mad if there were no problems to solve, there being so little else going on in his head. Honestly, that's why the book was such a failure for me. Survival is not just dealing with emergencies, it's dealing with yourself, and the book had no interest in depicting that beyond the occasional, "Gee, I'm a little lonely today," every half-dozen chapters. I haven't seen the movie yet, but I'm hoping that it fixes a lot of my problems with the character writing because, in order for an actual human being to inhabit the role, Mark Watney has to be more than a pair of figurative waldo arms for the author to solve nerdy "what ifs" on a foreign planet.

It is literally one of the most annoying things on this dull earth to email someone with explicit times that you cannot meet with them and then to have them email you back with a suggested meeting at one of the times you gave. Right now, I'm combating it with passive aggression ("Wednesday afternoon? Great! If you can settle on an exact time, I'll see if my boss will let me take off from work to come over there and meet with you.").

This isn't the case for many of Microsoft Word's practices, but I honestly wish their hotkeys for diacritics and dashes were an industry standard. Ctrl + - for an en dash, Ctrl + Alt + - for an em dash, easy as can be.

Well, the main issue currently is that there is very little optimization possible anymore. At best, mods now shift accuracy and stability the equivalent of a single point under the old system so, save with regards to damage and concealment, a gun is not radically different from its base stats. That's a problem because: Assault rifles now have terrible accuracy and stability, with most of the mods balanced to increase one to the detriment of the other, so even though ammo and damage has been increased across the board to hit important breakpoints, most guns have an accuracy equivalent to 10 or 12 that can maybe be modded to 14 or 16, meaning that you can't trust your gun to hit what it's being aimed at farther out than ten meters and, because stability was also nerfed, you definitely can't trust the follow-up shot to be anywhere near that first one. Shotguns, especially primaries, have had their damage and ammo aggressively nerfed, because it wasn't clear before that Overkill doesn't understand how shotguns work and definitely doesn't want anyone who bought the DLC to think that they made a good purchase. The Locomotive and Judge came out okay, but every other strategy, especially primary-focused ones with HE, is broken for good. With some exceptions, mostly always-terrible guns like the Mac-10, submachine guns have stat parity with assault rifles now. In some cases, like the Para and the CAR-4, the SMG outperforms its AR counterpart in every respect except mod slots. It's a completely ineffable decision that's totally in line with Overkill's overall efforts to make secondaries the new primaries. And that brings me to pistols, all of which have had their damage pushed past the 39.85 damage threshold. Unlike assault rifles, their accuracy and stability haven't been nerfed to compensate, so almost every pistol is now a one-shot killing machine with laser precision. Ironically, this makes most of the pistol-focused mastermind skills useless, because the damage, accuracy, and stability boosts are no longer necessary to make pistols effective. I'm just fatigued because it's wrecked the meta and put nothing in its place. In most categories, you're left with an abundance of mediocre choices, but in a few, every choice is optimal. Both are bad for a progression-based multiplayer game. There's no nuance and definitely no understanding of potential weapon roles. Overkill doesn't seem to play their own game, which makes me not want to play, either.

Okay, someone's captured all of the base stats for the weapon rebalance: https://www.reddit.com/r/paydaymeta/comments/3ow3n1/crimefest_day_1_meta_discussion/cw0zo53 It's... really out there. Shotguns have been nerfed into the ground. The previous king, the Steakout 12G, now can't even hit the 39.85 breakpoint. Assault rifle damage is largely unchanged but have moderate accuracy and stability nerfs across the board. Only heavy ARs like the Gewehr 3 and Eagle are able to hit perfect stats. Pistols and submachine guns got a huge buff. Most pistols can hit the highest breakpoint of 79.85 while keeping perfect or near-perfect accuracy and stability. Many SMGs can, too. The Krinkov, one of the worst SMGs in the game, now outperforms the CAR-4, hitherto the perfect assault rifle. Mods have been nerfed across the board. The vast majority only add between one and five points to a given stat, which is a substantial downgrade now that accuracy and stability are hundred-point scales. It's going to take the community weeks to find out what the "best" guns are again. It would be an incredibly exciting time, except that many of the smartest and most experienced people in the community are quitting over the F2P weapon skins, so who knows what the new normal will be?