Gormongous

You're right, I misspoke. It's a suffix used to adapt French and Spanish words into nouns, but that doesn't make it a loanword itself.

Yeah, but that's why I tried to point out the limits of that observation, while still acknowledging its core of truth. Honestly, I feel like the pushback I'm getting on it is a little strange. If you say a media work is just like American movies, the conversation shouldn't have to be continually reframed on that broader assessment once it becomes clear from the contributions of others that what you actually mean are hyper-militaristic Michael Bay-style movies. For me, as someone who's watched a lot of anime, most of what I think to be the defining characteristics of anime, especially the twenty-first century epidemic of moe, are absent from Metal Gear as a series. Instead, the "needless gratuity" of Kojima's work puts me in mind of a larger group of Japanese authors, directors, developers, and artists who were born after the occupation had ended, grew up during the postwar "economic miracle," and came into their respective industries in the mid-eighties, during the peak of the sci-fi boom in Japan. You can call that sensibility "anime" if you want, I'm just saying it lacks the specificity you might think it to have.

Oh no, there's certainly recurring features in anime as a genre, which is why I tried to couch my objections somewhat lightly, but I still think that describing Phantom Pain as "anime," in anything more than an offhand comment, is not particularly descriptive or evocative, in light of more specific cultural touchstones available to us. It's the difference between making a reference to comic books and specifying that you actually mean Silver Age superheroes; the two might be synonymous to most people, but they're not really equivalent, so just using them as if they were isn't as insightful as it could be. Anyway, many directors of anime do relish breaking the fourth wall and muddying the tone of their work, probably in part because anime as a genre is generally more permissive of such structural oddities, but they're overwhelmingly not the norm, certainly not to the point that breaking the fourth wall and keeping the tone inconsistent could be seen as genre traits. In my opinion, that's a wholly mistaken impression, mostly owing to the runaway success of a smaller subset of shows and movies in the English-speaking world that are all "different" enough from Western media to find their own niche, and I sometimes wonder if it's self-reinforcing, given how Japanese animated works without those characteristics are frequently reevaluated, at least in the American cultural space, as anime that's "not really anime," e.g. Miyazaki's oeuvre, Ghost in the Shell, Akira, etc.

-esque, -ish, and -like are the most common suffixes for the meaning for which you're shooting, I think. I'm not against using another language than English for our neologisms, though.

I finished Golden Time, at long last. Thinking about it, the biggest recommendation I can give on it is that I want to stay in its world, among the characters with whom I've become familiar, and bask in their interactions. Toradora! had that feeling only a little for me, despite being written by the same author, and I'm almost inclined to invoke Kare Kano when trying to explain how nice it is just to watch people fall in love in the idyllic stretches of time that are our school days. Really, the problem with Golden Time is that it had these charming characters and this pleasant if somewhat vague setting, but instead it puts most of its creative energy and a surprising percentage of its running time into an utterly uninteresting digression into the effects of memory on identity: do you become someone else if you lose all of your memories up until now and, if you get them back sometime in the future but lose the intervening memories in turn, have you traveled through time or just picked up where you left off? By the end of the show, it's clear that Banri's relationship with Kouko, sweet and stumbling and sincere as it is, exists principally to establish the stakes of those identities being kept or lost. It's clever enough, but overall a mistake that squanders good characters to stage a thought experiment that something as mediocre as The Disappearance of Nagato Yuki-chan was able to pull off in less episodes with minimal flab. The flab's the thing, in Golden Time, even if the writers and director never realized it! The whole point of building these deeply flawed, easily lovable characters is to give them the space to live, play, and work together, not to hold them hostage to an incredibly artificial plotline about amnesia, the optimal outcome of which can only be for the entire show not to have been wasted time. A quick look around the internet tells me that these flaws in what I'm determined to say was still a good show are present in its source material, too, and I remember Toradora! having some of the same structural issues (namely, sidelining interesting characters and relationships in the name of chasing down some abstract point about human experience, which didn't bother me quite so much in Toradora! because most of the characters there were awful little shits at one point or another) so I guess the perfect version of Golden Time — with Kouko, the childhood bride who needs to find herself as an adult; Banri, the amnesiac who's unsure of who he is and who he can be; Yana, the ladykiller who's drawn to women who don't want or need him; Chinami, the friendly girl who filters emotions through her camcorder; 2D-kun, the guy who believes in love to the point that he shuns real women; and Linda, whose fundamental complexity never really made itself entirely clear to me — is going to have to exist only in my mind, which is mostly okay in the end, since that's where I reside. I just wish that the anime had preferred the story of Banri and Kouko trying to build trust in each stage of their relationship de novo, over the story of an asshole ghost trying to erase his former body from existence, in everyone else's reality, too.

I have literally never seen this phrase used except by people who feel wronged by something intangible and want to invent a reason to attack the people whom they want to attack. It was all over the Puppies' invective during the 2015 Hugos, and I'm entirely unsurprised to see it being used here to damn people for not appreciating the power of good intentions.

I got Door Kickers on deep discount during the final phase of the Humble sale and I'm enjoying it a lot, but I'm also a little flummoxed by the contradiction between philosophy and implementation of design in the game. I got the game because it's got a generously large array of real-life guns and tools to equip with my team, and indeed the developers seem to delight in presenting me with levels that contrast the advantages of a high-maneuver low-damage gun with the reverse, but on the other hand, everything's locked behind stars that I have to earn beating missions and... I don't know. The tuning's just not quite right and it's really highlighting to me the weird way that tactical/strategic games with an unlock system struggle between "explore all of the options we've given you" and "you have to earn the nice things by playing with the crappy things first." For instance, I started the first campaign the moment that I unlocked it and, three missions into it, I discovered a level that is basically unbeatable in any respectable way without the Breacher class (unlocks at squad level 8), silenced pistols (minimum of 10 stars, preferably 15, with the average one-off mission giving you two), and probably stinger grenades (another 5 stars). Since I'd spent most of my stars already on high-level armor and good assault rifles, I had to quit out of the campaign, grind nine more one-off missions, and then come back and basically teach myself how to use the Breacher class on the job with that one campaign mission. I love that the game is so full of options, but the fact that I'll probably never have 5 stars just sitting around that I won't be saving up to buy an even better gun means that I'll just never get to use the taser or the bolt cutters, which is a shame. I just wonder, are unlocks the only viable progression scheme for non-RPG systems? I don't want everything given to me right away, but there's got to be something more thematic than grinding missions to earn points so that my SWAT team has proper gear...

You're right, it's a legacy from typewriters, which naturally had monospaced fonts. Except for Courier and the like, almost all fonts on modern computers are variable-width, meaning that periods and other punctuation have all have custom spacings that don't require a double-space to account for their roles in sentence structure. These days, it's definitely just old people teaching bad typography because it's easier than changing themselves.

Eh, it's certainly decent, but I'm not impressed by Traveler in general. Their grapefruit shandies don't go down as easy as a Stiegl radler and their different flavors aren't as exciting or tasty as, say, Boulevard's new lemon-ginger shandy. I'll drink one if it's on offer, but it's never going to be a go-to for me, even among mixed beers.

I'm so glad that there's already an article out there explaining why the couple in the Vox piece who purport to be studying history by using their wealth to cosplay Victorian gentry is all kinds of fucked up.

It's also hard to say, but Japan has a slightly different attitude towards streaming and media culture, based on a more expansive idea of what constitutes someone else's content. I don't know what YouTube does over there, but Niconico is very big on encouraging users (including corporations) to post only the content that they expressly produce and own, with a certain latitude for highly transformative works like remixes and mashups, and this conception of content is most often enforced through silent takedowns promoting conformity. Really, I don't even know if there's a cultural and economic framework for fully recognizing the power of streaming and Let's Plays.

Funny, I figured that I wouldn't have the patience for a non-violent playthrough, so I just did the super-violent one and was really put off by how the game reacted. I wasn't killing everyone in the level, just everyone who got in my way, but it was really disconcerting and tedious how quickly the writing turned, from condemning the conspiracy against me and the empress as worth any amount of blood spilled in order to stop, to calling me a monster because I'd killed a few dozen traitors, soldiers, and cops in the course of restoring order. In the scene before the final mission, the way that everyone treated me like shit for accomplishing all of their dreams and schemes for them while they sat in the bar and chatted really turned me off of any good feeling for a sequel. A non-violent playthrough should be its own reward, don't bash me over the head with heavy-handed writing about morality and just force. Barf.

Something like this? https://ogiuemaniax.wordpress.com/2015/04/21/jesus-is-kind-of-like-a-buddha-right/

No worries, I'm not trying to call people out, least of all any specific person. It's just a bit too easy for almost anyone to talk about anime as a monolith composed of Evangelion, Cowboy Bebop, and Attack on Titan, along with lesser imitators. Yeah, those are the shows that have made the biggest impact in the States, much like Transformers and The Avengers probably look like the sum total of American movie-making to the rest of the world, and they similarly make anime look like an over-the-top, tonally inconsistent, and thematically shallow medium. Of course, my personal feelings about Evangelion's effectiveness as actual art aside, that's just because the popular palette hasn't really made a space yet for quieter "healing" anime like Haibane Renmei or clever literary adaptations like Gankutsuou — not to mention that runaway successes like Miyazaki and Satoshi Kon just get divested of their foreignness and incorporated into the landscape of American cinema wholesale. It's just a literacy problem, like games had back in the nineties about being wish-fulfillment murder simulators, but with the added barrier of language, and shortcuts that oversell anime's wackiness abound. I use them all the time, because it's what's different about anime, even if not necessarily good. Also, I totally agree with a lot of what you said about literary cred being pasted onto non-literary media through pointless or shallow allusions. There's a certain "breathed upon" nature of such allusions that seems to satisfy creators and audiences alike with its faux-depth. Nowadays, when I watch movies or games, I try to remember or write down the opening quote, just to make sure that the work follows through with it at least a little.

It's a little bit weird that anime is being used so broadly to explain everything that doesn't really work thematically in the new Metal Gear Solid. I mean, I'm not surprised that two types of work originating from the same culture share some common ground (and common weaknesses), but I don't know about relying on generalizations about a massive medium, especially typified by a singular work like Neon Genesis Evangelion, to explain so many of the weird, inconsistent, or disappointing parts of a single work from a different medium, mostly because they share that culture. Honestly, I'd rather venture that NGE and MGS feel so similar in places is because they're both made by intellectual and eccentric Japanese auteurs with a love of military hardware and science fiction who were born in the early 1960s, not "lol anime" or whatever.

I agree. There's a slightly better narrative to sexist garbage getting put in a game because a single identifiable human wants it in there, as opposed to a group of executives deciding that their target audience wants it in there, but the actual upshot is indistinguishable to me.

They're most obviously not appropriative when you're giving money to a Mexican or Japanese person to make you their native food. When we get into fusion venues and white chefs championing ethnic cuisines, especially ones that have been tweaked or made bland for the Western palette, then it gets a little more weird.

I like Another a lot (which shouldn't be much of a surprise when the alternatives are Shiki and Higurashi) but I don't like the OVA, not one bit. It explains very specific things about one of the characters that... just didn't need to be explained at all. Like, it's an episode-long flashback and infodump that doesn't uphold the tone of the show very much at all! I wouldn't miss it if it didn't exist.

Love Live! is a moderately popular anime about a group of schoolgirls who form a pop idol group to keep their school from closing. They succeed, with the second season of the show being mostly a victory lap. I guess the movie is them graduating? It probably won't be very meaningful if you don't know the characters, given how the movies have gone for similar franchises like K-On!, but it's certainly an interesting development.

My first couple of informational interviews last week went well, but the vast majority of people with whom I've met and spoken this week have been extremely critical of my reasons for looking at other career paths. My father, my former boss at the library, and several other people have all agreed: A Ph.D is worth any expenditure of time and money, even if it takes a decade and puts me tens of thousands in debt. Giving it anything less than my full attention will result in failure that I will regret forever. I've only got one shot at this Ph.D and taking a break isn't an option. Having a Ph.D opens up a vast array of otherwise inaccessible careers, even outside academia. These past six years will be an empty void on my resume and in my life if I don't have a Ph.D to show for them. There are no truly fulfilling careers outside of academia, at least for me. If I still find the topic of my dissertation compelling at all, then it is definitely my life's calling. It is infinitely better to work with scholarship, having media and technology as a hobby, than to work with media and technology, having scholarship as a hobby. Except for teaching, the jobs for which I'm most suited don't really exist, at least not anymore. Maybe, if culture bloggers got paid better... Any choice in life made on the basis of money or income is a choice that shouldn't even be entertained. Admitting the desire for a salary, some stability, or the ability to afford a visit to the dentist is embarrassing. I should be content to depend on my parents and my girlfriend to support me for as long as my Ph.D takes and just pray that I never encounter a hardship severe enough that they don't feel like helping me to pay for it. My car is totally never going to break down. Note, particularly, that all of these people telling me these things have a comfortable income and no Ph.D to speak of. I understand my father, who's done manual labor all his life because of a few poor decisions early on and is perennially concerned that I'll do the same, but everyone else is just bumming me out. I hate that so many people want to talk about my career prospects in terms of a "calling," because I've never felt a calling for anything in my life. I've done stuff because it was interesting and paid the bills, then stopped doing it because it stopped being interesting or stopped paying the bills. Historical research and teaching have held me for longer than most, because I'm good at them and find them endlessly entertaining, but it's becoming clear what a poor basis they are for a career, at least over the long term, for someone like me who doesn't want to spend all his time worrying about money. Meanwhile, I'm not even quitting my Ph.D! I've literally just expressed an interest in careers outside academia, maybe in preference to finishing my doctorate, and everyone's already coming out of the woodwork to tell me what a failure I'll be if I do that. People and their opinions...

Last week, the long-anticipated rerelease of Neon Genesis Evangelion on Blu-ray in Japan, in honor of its twentieth anniversary and the Third Impact, debuted with roughly 23,000 copies sold in the first week, good but probably not what Khara was hoping to get. The really interesting thing is that the rerelease almost certainly pushed the number of total sales for Evangelion over 200,000 in Japan, making it the first anime series to reach that number, as well as the third franchise to break one billion yen (after Haruhi and Gintama, with Gundam SEED likely to follow in fourth place any month now). My first reaction was to be happy, because the modest success of the Blu-ray rerelease, combined with the overall health of the Eva franchise and the demise of the ADV license stateside, makes an expedited licensing and importing of the Blu-rays to America, probably by FUNimation, a substantial likelihood... but maybe not. Past events have shown that GAINAX and Khara try to play hardball with license negotiations if they're enjoying almost any success (see, for example, the alleged two million-dollar price tag for the End of Evangelion license that prompted ADV to pass on it and let Manga get its awful little claws dug in) and the Eva franchise has been languishing with the international embarrassment that is the delay of two and a half years on Rebuild 3.33 coming out... well, anywhere, so I wouldn't blame anime licensing companies coming to view Eva as a poison chalice.

Actually, I didn't come here with a mind to connect this to your question, but this is something that was posted on Facebook by an acquaintance of mine and it seems like something with a different sort of angle and impact than your typical Feminism 101 spiel. Anything to post it, really: http://exgynocraticgrrl.tumblr.com/post/95118923264/deconstructing-masculinity-manhood-with-michael

Yeah, like Ninety-Three said, it's basically cooperative storytelling with preexisting rules that exist to help the players know what is possible for their characters to do and to help gamemasters decide on consequences for what those characters do. Truly great campaigns feel like living out one of the greatest novels you've ever read, but truly terrible campaigns (like almost every story in that link) feel like being trapped in the fantasy world of a sadistic asshole, so... Yeah, I've got a group with whom I run semi-regularly, but it's a labor of love that most people aren't really up to doing in their thirties...

God, the one about rape has me livid. Also, I'm only a third of the way through the article, so if there's more than one about rape, then it's the first one, and also, fuck the world.

Man, nothing brings down the glow of watching Sarkeesian's latest video like it finishing and me being confronted with a mosaic of pasty dudes in dark rooms, all sporting titles like "Women as Reward: My Opinion" or "Women as Reward: the Last Word." Just a guess, because I'm not going to watch any of them, but her bit about entitlement sailed right over their heads, didn't it?