Gormongous

Especially if, as the author and the Escapist assert, the people whose identities it affects are willing to have it shared, but the publication has taken the higher ground of protecting them from themselves and simply making their accusations without it.

Regarding what Squirrel, Codi, and I were talking about with regards to the final season of Working!!:

It's even more absurd. The first article ("Eject! Eject!") came out on 9/25 with minimal sources and minimal reaction. Then, between 9/26 and 9/28, five one-star reviews were posted for Cloud Imperium Games on Glassdoor, which had previously received a review every one or two months. The second article came out on 10/1, quoting these recent reviews extensively as anonymous sources. The author had, at best, forty-eight hours to read the reviews, contact the people who submitted them, verify their identities, and ask permission to quote from their reviews. That scenario is made even more implausible by the absence of a private message system tied to Glassdoor accounts, so... yeah. Now that this has been revealed, the author of the two articles is claiming that the people who wrote the Glassdoor reviews contacted her immediately after her 9/25 article, so she and her editor had a week to vet them, which they claim they did "to some degree" for every one, and that some later posted their stories on Glassdoor independently and near-verbatim. She further claims that two of the sources offered to reveal their identities in the 10/1 article, which she and her editor vetoed for their privacy and safety, and that is why all the sources are anonymous. She also points out that she used the word "alleged" with almost all of her assertions, which is apparently a shibboleth that protects you from libel and journalistic fraud. Seriously, I get weird tingles reading all of this. Given such a suspicious sequence of events, the fact that the best The Escapist has to say is "trust us" makes me... I don't know. Ridiculous coincidence, ignorant fumbling, or a pathetic conspiracy in miniature? Who knows.

I mean, looking at the 4chan thread, they spend hours encouraging and advising him, then blame women for not dating him when they get the news that he went through with it. That whole scene is already deep in the toxic double-think.

Yeah, this is my experience with almost all of my teaching, and I teach college students. My first year, as a TA for a frankly terrible professor, I had a huge minority of students write essays about how the USA fought the USSR in the Second World War because class had skipped over that (please don't ask) and they had only been taught about the subsequent Cold War, wherein the USA did "fight" the USSR. Lacking one fact, they simply substituted another related fact into the essay. Much of the result of standardized testing is that students are fixated on learning these discrete "facts" that can be easily deployed during exams, rather than looking for the processes or context that create those facts and are actually the important things to know. Like I said in my initial post on this topic, memorization is the last stage of learning about something, reserved for information that can't be taught in any other way, but for some reason, probably to do in part with a culture of "cramming" or whatever, many people treat memorization as a way to skip actually having to learn anything. If you've memorized the facts, it's apparently not necessary to understand them.

If it helps you to make the distinction, I think that remembering things is an important part of learning, but I think memorizing things is useless except in a rare few cases where there is no better option for pedagogy. The former has a process and a context that gives it meaning and helps it to build critical thinking, the latter is just the pointless acquisition of information that people regularly mistake for true learning.If you've just memorized your multiplication tables without any supplementary teaching, then you can tell me that five times nine is forty-five but cannot tell me why. You know nothing, you know trivia. It's a terrible way of teaching people and I'm glad that math, which has always tended towards memorization to paper over basic concepts that are easy to get bogged down in, has found some new ways to be taught, even if they look foreign to me. EDIT: I wanted to work Nassim Nicholas Taleb's theories from his book Black Swan into this mini-rant, about the human tendency to over-value knowledge and treat its existence as more important than its use, but I couldn't, so I'll just link a brief review instead: https://www.brainpickings.org/2015/03/24/umberto-eco-antilibrary/

Further down in the Twitter feed, he rephrases his opinion that "black hat" and "white hat" feel weird to use because of their roots in Western films. It might just be an attempt to change the subject, but I agree with him there anyway. Overall, I'm sympathetic to the ultimate purpose of his argument to remove Section 230, in that it establishes one bound of the Overton window in our ongoing discussion on harassment, moderation, and responsibility on the internet (the other, of course, has long been established as total anarchy and chan-ology). I'm not thrilled for Chu to have advocated an ignorant position so publicly, but it sounds like the editors of TechCrunch encouraged him to do so and to be incendiary about it, so I really only blame him for being stubborn about being Wrong on the Internet. Watching Randi Harper spend an hour excoriating him for being "a legitimate threat to free speech, the internet, poor people, and now infosec" for, uh... posting a dumb op-ed has weakened my resolve even there.

Yeah, I would never ever give a test that simply asked for a specific date for a single event in isolation. I know a few old-school teachers who might, but their pedagogy is mostly shit all around, because that's what "old school" means in this situation. There are two contexts in which any teacher should be asking a student to associate an event with a date: i) given a list of dates and a list of events, do they have the skills in critical thinking to assemble the events into a chronological list using the connections between them; and ii) given a single event and several dates, do they have a grasp on historical developments overall to place the event in its appropriate year, decade, or century. In both cases, the dates are a pretext for the question and a structural element in it, but only because they're an easy way to trick students into thinking critically about chronology. There is literally no use in me asking you the exact year that the Third Lateran Council took place (1179, a telling two years after the Truce of Venice), and that's me speaking as someone whose research is as close to traditional politico-dynastic narrative as it gets these days and as someone who uses late antique, medieval, and early modern dates as a mnemonic to remember how much money he has in his checking account (incidentally, the siege of Damascus right now). Actually... No, in extremely high-level exams, like for doctoral comprehensives, there is a utility to asking what happened in 1215, for instance, because it's important for late-stage specialists to know exactly how history is everything happening all at once all over the world, but that's someone who's been in school for twenty-odd years. Before that point, and without an independent interest in history, dates are entirely unnecessary and teachers who test on them are bad at their jobs.

"Dishonored Jake Rodkin" is now handily my favorite callsign for you, Nick, and that's speaking as someone who loves "Nick Breedon" quite a lot.

I have reservations about this episode title, because it retroactively encourages confusion over episode 50, "Farewell, Video Games"... which was a sendoff for Nick Breckon and not Jake Rodkin. Still, farewell, Danielle!

I'd like one, because I'm afraid that Twig will murder me otherwise. Hit me up at ben.halliburton@gmail.com

I know I'm a constant disappointment, Gaizo. I just needed a half-cour comedy really bad at the moment. It'll be over soon!

I will believe it when I see it, just like Rebuild of Evangelion 3.0 + 1.0.

Rurouni Kenshin: Trust & Betrayal is a four-part OVA prequel to the TV series that covers Kenshin's training, his work as an assassin during the revolution, and his decision to swear off killing. I'm personally more fond of the other OVA that it was often sold alongside, Rurouni Kenshin: Reflection, which is the "end" that the TV series never had, but Trust & Betrayal is a stronger and more effective work overall. The recent "New Kyoto Arc" OVAs are a different thing and, while not a disaster, are severely hampered by budget and time constraints, and are definitely inferior to the twenty-year-old TV series' treatment.

I just finished the first draft of a two thousand-word grant proposal and I'm never going to get a grant because I'm from the Midwest and I deeply hate having to talk up myself and the significance of my dissertation. There's never been a monograph in English on the noble family that I study, despite them being leaders of multiple crusades and cousins of multiple kings and emperors, please give me $30,000 please, I do not want to adjunct for pennies.

The reverse of every other video game protagonist's relationship with female NPCs!

Yeah, that was the sum of my reaction. Its tone at the beginning and end are also very odd and aren't really that useful as a framing device (the majority of people reading this comic aren't non-monogamous in any way, so addressing it to a hypothetical non-monogamous couple that "learns something" in the process feels overly pointed in what is otherwise a comic about general awareness-raising).

Well, in the anime, Welkin is the source of almost all the winning stratagems, so even though he's got this nerdy, half-baked peacenik vibe to him, he at least gets shit done. I imagine that they don't push his genius too hard in the game, because that disempowers the player, but it makes him bearable in the anime, whereas Alicia's tsundere feelings for Welkin just involve her yelling at him that his plans aren't going to work, despite episodes and episodes to the contrary. It's still a gross dynamic between them and it overwhelms what seems like it wants to be an ensemble script about teamwork, because we have tank-owning military prodigy on the one hand and innocent demigod battle-maiden on the other. How can characters like Rosie and Largo possibly get a fair shake in that? In the anime, it's a mix between very light body horror and identity shock, dislike of the other "evil" supergirl, and fear of disappointing pacifist Welkin with too much killing. These aren't rendered very vividly, with one or another coming to the fore to be the excuse for a given situation, but it's interesting that the anime made roughly a year later rewrote a lot of the character motivations and dynamics, only to make a work that was deeply flawed in different ways.

I watched the anime on recommendation from people who apparently must have loved the game, because there was so very little in the anime itself to like. It was an anime about war with nothing to say about war, which was especially egregious at the time because I'd just watched Girls und Panzer and that supposed trifle had infinitely more to say about the shock and stress of combat, and it also was saddled with possibly the worst tsundere archetype of all time. Alicia didn't seem irritable and loving by turns, she was just irritable all the time, and that irritability made her a bad friend and a terrible soldier, which became truly untenable (instead of just inexplicable and sad) when her divine heritage was revealed and she was still too much of an scaredy-cat shrew to set her own feelings aside and save some fuckin' lives. I understand that the game and anime follow each other very closely, which means that I'm warning you, it doesn't get better. Honestly, I'll probably never play this game because of how much of a slog the anime was to watch, which is disappointing, because it looks really fun at certain points.

On the subject of cats' obsessions with bedding and fabrics, my friend had to throw out a deep-pile bathmat because his two cats gradually escalated from curiosity to interest to fixation to, uh... a seemingly sexual relationship with it. At its worst, he found himself having difficulty getting out of the shower because both cats refused to move off of the drool- and fur-covered mat, even at peril of being dripped and stepped upon.

ESDF was pushed pretty hard by the Tribes games, you might have got it from them, if you played them.

Technically, the idea of an emperor derives exclusively from Rome, but the prestige of it is so great that the meaning has been aggressively shredded over the centuries. The political science of the later Roman empire (which had always asserted that its emperors ruled the entire world, they just hadn't gotten around to organizing most of it) combined with the triumphalist theology of early Christianity (which grew up in the shadow of the empire and therefore was pervaded with the idea of solitary rulership being the norm) to produce the idea that a Christian emperor was the universal ruler and a direct connection to God — prototypical caesaropapism, if you will. Other kings and princes could exist, certainly, and act with divine authority within their lands, but they were all symbolically (and, depending on the strength of this hypothetical emperor, also maybe literally) subject to the emperor, the counterpart of God in the secular realm. Two things fucked this up: the pope gaining power in the West, which decoupled the sacral aspect from the emperor's supposedly universal rule, and the rival between the Carolingian and Byzantine emperors, both of whom claimed to be the successor of Rome (one to the dignity, the other to the polity). The weakness of the Holy Roman Empire, starting in the thirteenth century but reaching back to the post-Ottonian elections of the eleventh century, opened up the field first for Spain and later for France and England (among many others) to claim imperial power simply as a kind of "over-king" status that they felt they had by holding multiple crowns and ruling multiple ethnicities, while the fall of Constantinople did the same for Russia and the Ottomans, one claiming the translatio imperii through the Orthodox faith and the other through the occupation of the imperial capital. Other cultures peripheral to the core of Christian Europe had "over-king" terms (the Irish have their "high kings," the Persians have their "king of kings") but the concept of an emperor, with its sacral dimension still present if diminished, was too tempting for most monarchs sufficiently full of themselves to seek a new title to pass up. So yeah, that's how "emperor" came to mean "a monarch ruling over a large realm, especially one containing multiple political structures, legal traditions, or ethnic communities." The generic term of "prince/princess" as a member of a family ruling by hereditary right comes from quite late in the Middle Ages, as a truncation of "prince of the blood" that was used to convey the lordly dignity of someone who had no lands but whose pedigree still demanded a noble title. Elsewhere, as a substantive title, "prince" simply means someone who rules a territory by their own right, as opposed to the delegated power of a king or emperor. It is most often applied to independent dukes and counts of the Middle Ages, but also to the most powerful lords in a realm ruled by a king or emperor, although the latter usage is technically incorrect if those lords do not hold any of their lands by allod, meaning naturally held without any feudal obligations (an outcome usually dependent on them having held those lands since before the existence of formalized feudalism or on the documentation for the original grant having been lost). To be perfectly correct, all independent rulers with some kind of hereditary succession are princes and princesses, but the existence of it also as generic term, which has a different role in describing the process of hereditary succession, means that equivalent but more specific terms like "royal," "ducal," "imperial," and "comital" are preferred wherever possible. Ugh, this is my most egregious post in the "Pedantry" thread by far...

Also, I'm watching Natsu no Arashi, the show that Shinbou made with Shaft right before Bakemonogatari kicked off and made the Monogatari series the only thing he'd ever direct again. I kinda like it? More than any Shaft production, it lacks an identity (probably because its themes, about the present day being a light dust of mundanity atop the horrors of history, are not ones that Shinbou is particularly interested in or good at handling) but it's such a pastiche of Shinbou's past and future work that it feels good to have it wash over me. It's the characters and setting of Soredemo Machi wa Mawatteiru, the dialogue and rhythms of Arakawa under the Bridge, the supernatural flair and overall direction of the Monogatari series, and the pop-culture references and schoolgirl outfits of Sayonara, Zetsubou-Sensei. I downloaded it over four years ago because I was on a Shaft kick, then left it on a shelf unwatched because the summary "ghost of a schoolgirl uses a thirteen-year-old boy to travel back in time to save people's lives during the Second World War, in between shifts at a sketchy cafe" sounded miserable, so I guess I'm here to say that it's not, really...? Yeah, I guess that's my point, too. If you have to make arbitrary rules in order to make the chart have any structure whatsoever, that's one thing, but if you don't have to make them and you're breaking them all the time anyway, maybe just let the flowchart be a visual model of your own free associations with anime?

I actually found myself finding shows that I knew and/or liked, in order to work back to the start. Overall, even though a lot of people mediate their watching of anime through genre, I agree that it's a fairly useless way of finding something that you personally will like. For example, in order to capture the effective genre contrary to the formal genre, the creator of the flowcharts put Neon Genesis Evangelion in the "thriller/horror" chart, which... I mean, yeah, but no one's going to come to it that way. It just shows the weakness of flowcharts as a means of self-guided recommendation, because you're usually following the creator's specific path to watching a work. Also, more irritation about the creator's arbitrary limitations. He says that he won't include movies because he hasn't seen enough and it's about series anyway... except Millennium Actress and End of Evangelion are on still there, the former because he felt Satoshi Kon was underrepresented and the latter because he felt it "completes" the series. Seriously, guys, don't bother with hard and fast rules if you're going to break them for all of your favorites. It makes me mistrust the entire mission of these flowcharts!

I assume that it's possible to fudge how much a game has "made" in terms of money but not in terms of units sold. If they went by measures of gross profit, stuff like the rarely-stated marketing budgets could swallow up all of a game's money even though it's making it hand over fist.