Gormongous

Oh, of course. We agree, then. Good!

Overall, absolutely, but I'm in agreement with Henroid that it's not the SAG-AFTRA's job to advocate for anyone but its own members, which appear to be in need of a pay raise. In fact, trying to advocate for workers that it doesn't represent is somewhat dangerous to its utility as an organization for collective bargaining.

I'm a medieval historian, so I'm mostly irritated by the nonexistence of a single, neat adjective that can be used to group the Holy Roman Emperors of Germany and Italy with the kings of France, or the emperors of Byzantium with the kings of Armenia and Jerusalem. Overwhelmingly, these rulers behaved in similar capacities, but the technically exalted status of emperors means that pedantic editors will strike out "royal" every time. "Princely" exists to describe independent or near-independent rulers of a certain power, but there are connotations of a ceiling there. Literal princes, whether royal or imperial, can be princely, but not the kings and emperors that they become.

I just had this set of flowcharts pop up on my feed: http://imgur.com/gallery/yPVPj9Q I'm at work, so I don't have the time to look at the full thing right now, but it's incredibly thorough. However, I'm not sure that I agree with all of his methodology, especially with regards to the flowchart for "starter" anime. He has a principled aversion to anime that looks "old," which he mostly defines as non-widescreen, and that's fine, except that we've got Cowboy Bebop in the mix and, as much as I love that anime, those visuals look old as fuck next to everything else on the list. I guess it's "no anime that looks old or cheap next to Legend of Korra or Teen Titans unless I like it too much to cut it"? Yeah, lists like this are hard, I guess.

Related to the murderous discussion of copyright in the "Ethics & Journalistic Integrity" thread, a federal judge just ruled that the copyright for "Happy Birthday" that Warner Music bought from Birch Tree Group for $25 million in 1988 is only for the arrangement, not the song itself. Said song was written in 1893, but only copyrighted in 1935 after a protracted legal battle, which made its copyright due to expire in 2030 if Disney were to lose all of its lawyers and money suddenly between now and then. Copyright is so fucked. I live with its annoyances every day (since my dissertation is based on a work that was published posthumously in an extremely limited run by a defunct organization, yet is unavailable online because the date was after 1923) but I still forget how deep they go.

Listening to everyone talk about Super Mario Maker again, it seems really obvious to me that the game lacks "playlist" functionality and general persistence in order to keep people from using the tools to recreate all the official games wholesale. Rather than find a way to recognize and take down copies of World 1 from the user store, they just make each level self-contained. It's not a great decision, but it seems consistent with Nintendo's approach these days. I also think that the strained way that Nick said it was meant to signify the uncomfortable tension between liking something a lot, even just as a gut reaction, and hating some of its constituent parts. It didn't feel like he was unaware of what he was saying.

My personal opinion right now, battling a migraine as I try to find a decent source to cite the marriages of Adelaide del Vasto, is that fiction has almost a better chance of achieving meaning, because it is the prerogative of an author writing fiction to limit the world of their work to whatever they think is meaningful or at least useful. Meanwhile, an author writing nonfiction has to contend with all of reality, which is often (and by "often," I mean "usually," because it's late and I'm tired) devoid of meaning. My consumption of a hundred years of charters and chronicles about a noble family, in order to produce a meaningful (or, at least, useful) narrative on the forces behind their rise and fall, is a conspicuously creative act, as I'm feeling it right now.

It is one of the most persistent annoyances of my career as a medieval historian that the terms "royal" and "royalty" technically do not cover imperial rulers and their families, so if I want to refer to both, I have to use an ugly workaround like "sovereign" or "monarch."

This is actually the biggest obstacle in my dissertation right now. I've reached a level of knowledge about my subject that has me painfully aware of how much any statement, even an ostensibly factual one, is leaving out and what that says about my own perspective on history.

I honestly bet that it wouldn't matter to them. The core that remains is so entrenched in its echo chamber and so stuffed full of "crossroads of history" rhetoric that it probably is only capable of processing the attention that satire implies towards them as flattery. Still, jeez... Yeah, every asshole's dream, that they'll get a fucking monument for harassing people internet behind a semi-anonymous alias...

Yeah... Uh, not good.

Yeah, I was looking at my shelf and figuring out recommendations, but I was having trouble deciding between physically mature characters who may not be psychologically mature (Mobile Police Patlabor, Servant x Service), psychologically mature characters who may not be physically mature (Haibane Renmei, Kokoro Connect), and shows with mature themes that may have neither physically nor psychologically mature characters (Revolutionary Girl Utena, Neon Genesis Evangelion). It seems like it's somewhat difficult to me to recall a show that's all three, actually, although I'm sure they're out there in spades. I feel like every Manglobe production has weird mid-run quality issues, no matter who's directing or working on it. Even stuff that I like, Ergo Proxy and Samurai Champloo for instance, have these awful dry spells in the teens that almost make me think they were expecting/hoping to be cancelled at the half-cour break so that they didn't have to write a dozen more episodes, which is a little crazy of me, of course.

I guess I'd also like to know, do you mean that you want anime that deal with adult issues or anime that don't feature children at all? I was tempted to suggest Haibane Renmei or something, but they're all mostly children, so technically...

House of Five Leaves? Gankutsuou?

I believe that one of the original Rome mods had a unit movement script that would automate charge-cycling. Of course, Rome was one game where the cavalry didn't need it, it was already powerful there, as opposed to Medieval 2, wherein a charge without fully lowered lances would do no damage at all.

It's just a weird design choice for them to make, in my eyes. If the unlockable dozers are a long-term goal and source of gameplay longevity, it makes no sense to restrict them to a single difficulty unless the intent is for players to graduate immediately from Easy to Normal once they get the hang of things, which is not a common behavior in my experience. If the dozers are just a superficial reward for expert play, then I don't care, but it would disappoint me for the game to have no metagame progression, then. Anyway! More about the game?

Precisely, thank you.

Mostly, I just dislike when games seem to have an "easy" mode in the spirit of inclusivity, but then restrict it in some way to make it clear that it's not the "real" game. I don't know how unreasonable I sound when I say this, but I wish those developers would get over themselves and just have the courage to make a hard game that not everyone's going to play, or allow for multiple difficulties as each being a fully legitimate choice. The weird way that some developers passive-aggressively try to disincentivize me from selecting an option that they decided to put in their own game just gets me, somehow.

I've barely ever played FTL except on Easy and I have all of the ships except the Crystal Cruiser unlocked. It may have been different on release, but by the time I started playing it, all playing on Easy did was flag your unlocks and achievements as having been done on Easy, which is... I don't know, whatever.

I had a long, long fight with a friend about this (well, maybe more a "friend," given how jazzed he was to play devil's advocate on trans issues), when the story about Dolezal first came out. A lot of what I wrote, especially the point about race being historical and cultural more than hereditary or psychological, comes from that, plus several months of rumination and regrets. Sadly, he was emphatically not convinced by the analogy to nobility and pointed out instead that people become lords and ladies through marriage and knighting all the time. My response that they do, but they're never quite accepted as real nobility (and often their children aren't, either), didn't get much traction.

Warning: the RPS review complained particularly that there are no unlocks or achievements on Easy, which I find almost unconscionable and which makes me worry. A game that won't let you play with all of it unless you play at a certain difficulty points to a bloodymindedness of design for which I have little tolerance.

Yeah, I think that Nick's thesis about Japanese media and its obsession with Africa is correct on a basic level (to me, it seems like Japan, which practiced imperialism for a few decades on its ethnically and culturally similar neighbors, is just a bit behind the West, which practiced it for centuries with all different races, in getting over the seeming alienness of the Third World). Still, to look at it more analytically, I think it's mostly just that Japan is less insidious and more blatant about it than the West, because the number of Anglophone games and movies that involve something crazy and primeval going down in Africa, the Middle East, or South/Southeast Asia is up there, too. I mean, Ubisoft alone has at least two different franchises that are basically "mad violence in the Third World" and "the past is a foreign country full of weirdos."

The distinction for me, between being transgender being a real thing and "transracial" not being one, is that gender exists outside of a cultural context. There are societies with any number of genders or gendered identities, but there are none where there are no genders at all or only one. The duality or multiplicity is fundamental to it. Conversely, race has no reality outside of its social and historical context. It only exists as a mixture of physical appearance, blood lineage, and cultural context, which is codified into a single "thing" by implicit ingroup/outgroup dynamics. Racial identities have appeared, disappeared, changed throughout history, so they're very particular to a person or group's own experiences. They can't be manufactured or redacted, so to style yourself as another race from the one in which you are born and raised is basically to reject your own context and appropriate that of another culture, which I think is what makes it so disturbing to people. It's like claiming to be a member of the nobility, another cultural construct created by a mixture of superficial factors: you can have a strong love of the aristocratic lifestyle and a desire to be a part of it, but calling yourself a duke doesn't make you one and never will. It's just not a part of your own cultural experience. It also bothers me that people ignore the ways in which Dolezal profited from her "black" identity, because that makes it less easy to see how her choices were more just racial appropriation on a scale so massive that we lack the language to understand it fully.

Since discovering that the campaigns in Door Kickers each give you forty to sixty stars in a single sitting, once completed, that game has replaced Payday 2 as my go-to game for appreciation of military hardware. Honestly, I'm not even that hot on the team-based tactical planning, I really just enjoy giving my guys new gear and then watching them put it to use. I'm beginning to think that I could be completely satisfied by a military-themed dress-up game. You know, I get a squad of four guys to equip with armor, pistols, and rifles, maybe decide what scopes and gadgets to put on each gun, and then the game rates me on my choices, with one of those polygonal aptitude graphs that you often see in Japanese games, and play some gunshot sounds to celebrate. High ratings for a complementary team loadout, appropriate to a specific tactical scenario, could unlock more gear that I could use in higher-stakes scenarios, maybe larger teams that allow more diversity of specialization. No need for actual gameplay, I just want lots of screens like this one, where I can compare sets of bars or numbers and decide which I like more for each individual person: Believe it or not, this isn't just me struggling with a hyperfetishized fixation on the military. I had the exact same feelings about the Rock Band series of games: I would five-star entire concerts on expert just so that I could buy clothes to kit out a perfectly matched goth or punk band. Obviously the "dress up a team with a theme" RPG sub-genre is a niche begging to be filled. The ones that exist are all about execution, but I want one that relishes the minutiae of planning as much as me and is not particularly interested in making me prove my concept.

Good suggestions! I'm just going to add just a few comments off the top of my head: It might once have been possible for a "fighting retreat" stance to be included in the unit mechanics of a Total War game, but nowadays so much of the design is meant to make unit contact stickier and to force zero-sum outcomes to combat, to make battles appear more decisive overall in less time. Honestly, I'd settle for seeing a unit get broken and then reform without being decimated in the process, something accomplished by the vast majority of mods through increasing the morale shock of charges and decreasing unit movement speeds, two more things that Creative Assembly has de-emphasized in games using the Warscape engine. Personally, I miss the incredibly lethal friendly fire of the first three or four Total War games. Position your archers too close to the back of your infantry and watch the latter drop like flies with the first salvo. I'm unsure with Rome 2, at least, but it seems as though there's more direct targeting with ranged units and less of an area effect, making firing on engaged troops actually feasible. That might just be my own lack of empirical scrutiny and I'm just killing my own guys too slowly to notice, but...