Gormongous

The first day of Crimefest was just announced! It's... a CS:GO-style crate-drop system with weapon skins (whatever) that you unlock with real money through drills (okay...) that have stat boosts and unlock new/different mods (uh...). There's also apparently a massive weapon rebalance in the works that is totally uncertain in its outcome. I'm honestly flabbergasted that the first "free" content released in Crimefest is the ability to access a F2P system. Overkill's PR is wringing its hands that CS:GO, TF2, and Dota 2 get a free pass for exactly the same business model, but somehow keep missing the comments pointing out that those games are free (or, in the case of CS:GO, a fifteen-dollar purchase that is on sale every month) and Payday 2 is a twenty-dollar game with a hundred and ten dollars of DLC. It's just a fiasco. I'm tempted to boot it up when I get home just to see the bloodbath. EDIT: Even more choice: http://www.gamespot.com/articles/payday-2-wont-have-microtransactions/1100-6410303/

Just listened to a random episode of Isometric from the late summer and, within the fifteen minutes, Brianna Wu i) literally makes everyone start the podcast over when they're not suitably impressed by the workshop she did at Harvard, ii) interrupts Steve multiple times when he's trying to introduce Maddy because his actions as host make him "the patriarchy," iii) draws out a DV joke about her husband playing as Bowser for almost five minutes, and iv) asks Georgia to psychoanalyze Steve again, out of nowhere and for no reason. I know that all of those are in jest, but together they make me feel like I'm listening to someone be bullied. So yeah, definitely just as bad as I had left it.

It appears that you've confused things that were invented, created, or popularized by members of a certain culture with things that are meaningful or important to members of a certain culture. Surely you can see the difference between ritualized or historicized garb like a kimono or a headdress with functional garb like blue jeans, especially since the appropriation and popularization of the former destroy the specificity and uniqueness for that culture in a way that it would be impossible with the latter because it's already popularized by being a product of the dominant culture. Also, definitions of cultural appropriation don't really need to be reversible to be valid. The context of white patriarchal culture makes that as sensical as reverse racism or reverse sexism.

Hey, is anyone still listening to Isometric? Has it calmed down since I quit at the beginning of the year, after the GOTY fiasco and then the string of boring-ass episodes about gaming controversies? I miss a lot of Isometric's energy, but if it still has the "alpha host" problem, then I'm trying my best to chalk it up to nostalgia.

I think this conversation is missing examples from non-digital games, which have always had a loose definition that is mostly built around a philosophy of "play" and not systematized challenge or complexity. I was reminded by Brendan Caldwell's article on Shut Up & Sit Down about "dumb games," my friends used to play a "game" called "Pie Hole," where one kid would make a ring with his fingers below the waistline and claim free punches on anyone who happened to look at it. To call that a game, not that it has ever been called anything else, applies significantly less rigor than anyone who wants to make "interactive video poem" a phrase that normal people try to use. There's no choice involved, except to choose to play the game, and it's over immediately once that choice has been made. Is it just the multiplayer aspect, which contains no stronger of an interaction than that existing digitally between video game creator and player? I'm sure someone will come and say that "Pie Hole" is actually a prank and not a game, but whatever. Pranks don't have rules, not like games do.

Yeah, but I think it's both malicious (they know they're doing it) and ignorant (they don't realize they're doing it) in nature, in differing amounts. I can't really comment on the maliciousness, so I comment on the ignorance.

Thanks, Bjorn. I live south of the areas most likely to be affected, but I'm going to bring this up in conversation with friends (and possibly stay with my girlfriend, who lives near South County) to be ready if it goes down. I'm lucky enough that a passing interest in militaria and Fallout-style costuming has left me with several sets of goggles and a filter mask, at least!

This is the first that I've heard about it, but... Shit, I don't know. I guess I'll start doing some research.

There are multiple 100% perfect saves uploaded here and there across the internet, for the completionist. If you've played it once for the aesthetics, I say that's enough.

Yeah, it's very odd that a handful of attributed rights as consumers, especially "The customer has a right to be heard" and "The customer is always right," have bled into certain subcultures' understanding of their First Amendment rights, which are then applied not only to interactions with the government and to corporations but with individuals as well. It's all rolled up into this vague nebula of beliefs amounting to entitlement, and it's so poorly understood by everyone that it's impossible to defuse or debunk.

I like the app. It's less finicky than the browser version, although it still sucks typing on a virtual keyboard and the channel's occasional gif-fests look like nonsense (but how is that any different, hey).

To be accurate, there are generally considered to be four "great" novels of pre-modern Chinese literature: Water Margin and Romance of the Three Kingdoms from the fourteenth century, Journey to the East from the sixteenth, and Dream of the Red Chamber from the eighteenth. I sympathize with Troy having difficulty finishing Romance of the Three Kingdoms: when I read it this past spring, I found the first two thirds entertaining, if somewhat dense, but then the last third, which played out after all the principal characters of the epic were dead, really tried my investment in what was going on. It certainly doesn't help that the opening lines "spoil" the ending: "Long divided, the empire must unite: long united, it must divide." Dream of the Red Chamber is maybe the finest work of fiction that I've ever read, but I can't imagine a Koei game about the daily activities and small deceptions of a crumbling aristocratic household...

I mean, my point was that sort of logic is a huge red flag for any series' ultimate antagonist and that is partially the reason why I find it the most boring of the stock "good" reasons for being evil. Scrapped Princess and Gurren Lagann are great examples of it, both of them well-executed beyond the rigor of the trope, while Death Note is... complicated but, opposed to the typical action of Aristotelian melodrama in anime, it's best explained as an Aristotelian drama where the flaw is hubris. Isn't it funny that "drama" and "melodrama" have basically switched from their Aristotelian definitions? Calling something a "drama" just means that it's not a comedy, often involving no tragedy or injustice, while something that's a "melodrama" is typically thought to have the pathos that Aristotle would assign entirely to drama.

Well, that's what I get for talking about a show that I didn't watch. I just feel for BadHat because, if a character starts talking about peace and is not clearly flagged as the protagonist in a show about nonviolence, then I know they're evil, stupid, or both.

I don't know, can you give any examples of anime/manga protagonists who are like "I want to stop all fighting forever and I'm going to kill as many people as it takes for that to happen"? I'm struggling to think of one, although I'm sure my impressionistic take on the trope has exceptions out there.

It doesn't sound like modern Russian to me, even with an accent, and the internet doesn't seem to have picked that up. I certainly hope your friend is wrong anyway, because Russian is the product of a very specific historical situation (Norse rulers of a Slavic population blending into a single culture) and making it an "ancient" language is really othering. It's possible that they're using something like Old Church Slavonic, which eventually became Russian, as the language, but I can't hear enough words clearly enough to tell. My hope is that they either use an isolate language that's known to be rather ancient, like Basque, or they cobble together something out of the reams of research done on Proto-Indo-European.

I make the distinction between the trope of a character using nonviolence or minimal violence to protect individual people or groups (the protagonists from Trigun and Rurouni Kenshin) and the trope of a character using violence or hyper-violence to enforce an abstract "peace" on everyone (every Naruto villain, every Gundam villain). They're both common, but they're very different from each other on a thematic level. You never see a protagonist who wants to end all war forever, for example, because the desire to protect people from harm is only laudable when it's feasible, hence the smaller scale. Impossible dreams that only hurt people in the process of being attempted are the province of antagonists only, except for certain subversions (Evangelion, for example, which asserts that all dreams are impossible and hurt people, but having no dream is even worse).

To be fair, if the actual strength of the show was the ever-present tension, they shouldn't have even risked tipping their hand on the whodunnit part. In almost every Japanese genre work with that sort of thing, the well-intentioned extremist "doing it for peace" is always the bad guy. I don't know if it's because the United States nuked Japan "for peace" or what, but it's almost universal as a toxic motive in anime and manga.

Plus a balance has to be struck that makes a game beatable for a player who seeks out only the core content (the person most likely to be screwed by a poorly tuned economy) while still being interesting for a player who seeks out every single piece of content in the game (the person most likely to complain about a poorly tuned economy, even if it breaks in their favor). My favorite broken economy in a singleplayer game was Neverwinter Nights 2: Storm of Zehir. The plot of the game was that your party was serving as bodyguards for a caravan company increasingly under attack by straaange forces. As side content, you could invest in the realtime simulation of the caravan network and buy upgrades for the company to improve the overall payout. Unfortunately, it was a relatively simple matter, during character creation, to buy only the basic equipment, tough out the first few encounters, and be set to invest the 2,000 leftover silver in the economy from first moment after the tutorial. Clearly, the developers did not design the systems to handle the early investment and repeated reinvestment of a large cash sum, because maybe an hour into the second act I had well over two million silver. I just... stopped playing, at that point. If my party's that rich, why should they care about some stupid snake cult wrecking shit out in the desert?

As we lead up to my much-awaited watching of Mobile Suit Gundam 0080: War in the Pocket, maybe even this weekend, I'm just going to post screens from the relevant episodes of Aoi Honoo:

Yeah, and they're going to get a huge surge once they hit $1,850,000 because everyone that I've seen who's waiting to back this game is waiting until it has a "full" campaign.

Haha, your first post in a month!

Christmas is coming, but not today, so let's try to live our lives like normal, please. That's all I have to say about that.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/oct/06/carly-fiorina-medieval-history-degree-fight-isis

If I have to put my money on anything, it's on there being different tribes that conform to different racial stereotypes, like dark-skinned cavemen with facepaint and proto-voodoo, and maybe the default tribe just being vanilla movie cavemen. But who knows, Far Cry always manages to surprise, somehow!