Gormongous

You're right, the first two movies are re-cut and re-animated recaps of the series, which is a little weird because the Blu-rays of the series were already re-cut and re-animated from the TV broadcast. In the anime industry, runaway success tends to lead to a very release-oriented form of perfectionism, I suppose! The third movie is new material and, though somewhat of a side story, still plugs directly into the themes of the series, so therefore it's worth a watch if those themes spoke to you. I almost (almost) liked the last movie more than the series as a whole, which seems like it's not saying much because I hold the series in relatively low opinion, but the movie's just so much more thematically coherent than the show, which maybe applies to all of the movies, I don't know. Akiyuki Shinbou's always been interested in alternate media for his more experimental anime. Whatever I think of Madoka's thematic content, the fact that it finally gave a legitimate venue to his weird papercraft and clay animations that he did with Gekidan Inu Curry, previously confined to Sayonara Zetsubou-Sensei OPs and EDs (plus that one weird episode about a train station), makes me overly fond of it. The original character designs for the non-witch characters were done by an outside party, Aoki Ume, who's better known as the author of Hidamari Sketch, which I also find to be overly blobbish and inexpressive. I don't know why Shaft brought her into the project when they have several strong concept artists on staff, but whatever, it hardly sinks the show.

I hate to say it, more than anything because I think Deadwood is far and away the best show ever to appear on television even with its early end, but a Deadwood movie is almost certainly never going to happen. For some reason, from the moment that they declined to renew the actors' contracts and thereby doomed the show to cancellation, HBO has maintained that movie sequels were a standing possibility that held their interest, even if circumstances occasionally forced them to admit that said possibility was extremely low. Meanwhile, the sets have been torn down and a substantial minority of the actors have ongoing commitments, so I'm guessing that the most recent statement is a combination of pie-in-the-sky thinking and prudent PR, owing to Dillahunt discomfiting HBO slightly with his tweets. Even Milch has stopped talking about it since a 2011 deal fell through.

Doing something that's so improbable as to be functionally impossible? That's kinda how Dark Souls is fetishized on the internet, even if it's not really true. Also, good for a laugh.

In my experience, having offered trigger warnings a few times in my classes, I have never found the students who abused them to be students who would invariably find some other way to excuse themselves from engaging with the material, even just skipping class, were the trigger warnings not there. Maybe, somewhere out there, there are students who are perfectly happy to read everything I assign and to understand it, too, until trigger warnings are made an option, at which point they start shirking their implicit responsibilities as students out to learn the material, but I highly doubt it. Like Bjorn said, I think this article tries mightily to turn a dozen or so anecdotes into an actual trend, even citing other articles that do the same as corroboratory evidence, but I don't see it as particularly different than students have ever been, young and impulsive and sensitive and unpolitic. I have yet to talk in person to a student or a professor who's actually encountered this supposed phenomenon of "runaway PC culture," and I went to one of the most liberal colleges in the nation and now teach at a conservative Catholic university. It's all just articles on the internet. I don't know. Overall, it's my opinion that students have never lacked for ways to avoid material that makes them uncomfortable, whether that discomfort comes from boredom or distress.

I think you missed the part where Christianity coopted pagan rituals to destroy the uniqueness of those religions and supplant them in the public mindshare, not to mention how extraordinarily successful it was in that agenda. Cultural appropriation has always existed as the dark side of cultural exchange, throughout history, but it's most often been used by dominant or ascendant cultures to suppress and destroy others by taking the special features that form the backbone of a culture as their own and marking the rest as "dirty" or "ignorant." That's how rock 'n' roll and jazz have come to be considered hardly even black, thanks to the appropriations of performers like Elvis Presley, while hip-hop was ignored for decades as "just noise" until white people decided that they wanted that, too.

It's funny, because the first year that I taught a college class, I worked with the Caligulan mentality of "Let them hate, so long as they fear," mostly out of insecurities about my own potential for authority, and it didn't pay off at all. Later classes in later semesters benefited from being a lot more square with them and just letting them know how my process matched up with their process and the school's process. Actually, I imagine that years of "tough teachers" giving them the runaround left a lot of my incoming students with little patience for teachers who'd bust their balls to make a point, and being a lot softer (while never, ever giving an inch that I wouldn't give myself in their shoes) made my actual efforts at discipline a lot more effective, counterintuitively.

I agree. Most people agree that hipster headdresses are cultural appropriation in a bad way, because it reduces a set of deeply spiritual symbols that were worn as badges of honor for members of the plains tribes of North America to a set of aesthetics for white kids who want to look wild and free at music festivals, but drawing a line between that and something "harmless" like dreadlocks comes off as much more arbitrary than any possible line between cultural appropriation and cultural exchange. Are all religious objects off limits or only those that are specifically profaned by inappropriate use? Are important and unique objects without specific spiritual significance fair game? What about objects or features that signify certain personal or social statuses in that culture, is it offensive to pretend to them by implication? If an object wouldn't be permissible for its originators to use or wear in a certain type of space or situation, is it disrespectful to put privilege to use to make it permissible for oneself? I don't know, this feels like most complaints about being expected to exert a muscular empathy (it seems difficult, complicated, unclear, embarrassing, thankless, etc). How about just not using oppressed peoples as a shopping catalog for how you look and act? Best case scenario, you luck into it and don't offend anyone, because it's not like any person of color is going to be thanking you for wearing dreads in a way that glorifies black culture.

I finally got around to watching A Most Violent Year. It's been a while since I've seen something so titanic and yet so restrained, it's not surprising that it almost has a perfectly flat spread of ratings on Amazon. It's hard for people to get behind, but I certainly could. In other news, there's a podcast of three notable TV critics debating the best TV show of all time, The Sopranos vs. The Wire vs. Deadwood. I honestly feel like the guy stumping for The Wire does not give nearly enough ground on what the other two shows have over his hobby horse, but otherwise it's a very good discussion about what makes TV dramas great.

This is a great example of privilege at work. "If I want something, why shouldn't I have it?" Like most other examples of privilege, it benefits its holder immensely and there is no rational reason why they should set it aside. That said, I firmly believe that people are more than just a tabulation of their self-interest and that most of them, when presented with clear explanations of how their actions harm others, will choose not to continue exploiting them, even if the harm was inadvertent. I personally work hard to understand and defuse my privilege, even though I'm not a particularly good person. Saying it's a lost cause because it's asking people not to be selfish and to think of others is a dark fucking view of human nature, man. All people have to do (well, not all, but a good start) is give understanding, allyship, and advocacy when they choose to adopt the aesthetics of other cultures. Amen to that.

Choosing to adopt a very specific aspect of a distinct and different culture, suffused with its own history and meaning, while deliberately stripping it of those things because they're not as convenient to adopt, is not respectful in any way. It's an expression of privilege. It's saying that the most important (or the most relevant, at least) thing about dreadlocks is how good they look on you or how different they are to others, rather than what they mean and have always meant to the people whose culture they're already a significant part of. It's something that's happened for centuries, but like the theft of land and livelihood from peoples of color, it's about taking something that's not yours without giving anything back, neither culturally nor politically, simply because you feel like you'll use that thing as well if not better than its originators and that should be enough for them.

Some forms of medieval miniscule avoided Q entirely, using C and W to replace Q and U (no variant of Latin has K). It looks weird but workable.

Well, it wouldn't hurt for new players either. At least every other day, there's a thread created on the EU4 forums by someone asking why all of Europe declared war on them after they annexed their three-province neighbor, ending their campaign, and the answer's always "Pay more attention to the Aggressive Expansion mapmode and the tiny set of numerical values at the bottom of the peace interface."

I guess we're different people! When I'm really frustrated with a game to the point that I'm quitting, I usually come here to let everything out and clear my palette. I've been lucky enough not to have had anything nearly that bad for months now, but then I haven't been playing as much, either.

Haha, I'm not blaming you. I just quit good games all the time, despite being a compulsive completionist, and so I cringe a bit whenever I see someone else get talked around, however good the outcome there.

I'm not faulting anyone, but it's moments like this that make me hesitate to report my own latest entries into the Quitter's Club. If I've quit a game, I have damn good reasons and I really don't want to be guilted into laying them aside, even by the rational objections of other Thumbs.

I agree, it does seem like the way that Pizzolatto prefers to convey the density of his plot and his world is simply by introducing a lot of different elements and treating them all as important to the audience. I'm also just beginning to wonder at the viability of the eight-episode format for seasons. I was bored through so much of this season, but like you said, the problem was more that the episodes were usually paced for a much longer season, only punctuated by overly dense and elliptical lore dumps to make up for lost time. EDIT: Having listened to the podcast, I like Argobot's and Chris' defense of the ending, but I simply cannot see it their way. Both Jordan and Ani fight tooth and nail to be a part of the action, but instead are both ordered (and in Ani's case, literally compelled) to follow the wishes of the men who would and have sired children on them to flee and survive, wishes that are unconditionally vindicated by the outcome of the story even though the men themselves reject them as impossible for their own characters. To me, it'd be an argument for breaking the cycle of toxic masculinity if Jordan or Ani had deviated from or elaborated upon the plans of Frank and Ray, but they don't, as far as I can recall. They execute them perfectly and are rewarded with a "happy" ending, embodied in the new life of Ani's son. Honestly, it's the same problem that I had with the ending of the first season: Marty and Rust are rewarded for their macho bullshit with celebrity and near-martyrdom, even though the same impulses were shown throughout the show to be destroying their respective personal lives. Also, yay! My dopey fan-theorizing about Rust as a red herring in season one got mentioned!

I guess not "wrong," per se, but Paradox games do have a tendency to spotlight mostly meaningless or irrelevant information (like the map, in CK2) while sidelining or hiding actually important information (aggressive expansion remains the most important value in EU4 for efficient play, yet the interface options for it still don't tell you as much as you'd like), especially as their games develop and dominant strategies emerge.

Thinking more last night and today, most of the issues that I have with the second season really boil down to how close the conspiracy was to the surface and how little the writing bothered to make the characters' unique qualities instrumental to discovering it. The corruption surrounding the parcels of land was mostly explained in the first episode, with Blake's later revelations about Agranov's involvement just providing a wrinkle. The intentional poisoning of the land, which I thought was going to be a major tentpole of the conspiracy, was handled with a brief visit to a surveyor and a couple of explicit statements by Frank in random conversations, with the mysterious "Chessani Lodge" studies proving so straightforward as to be a nonissue. After spending multiple episodes on these mysterious sex parties, all it takes is Ray to tail the most suspicious man in Frank's organization to uncover all the substantive details of those parties, about which everyone suddenly seems to have always known afterward, and then it's trivial for multiple people to infiltrate (I shouldn't be so hard on this aspect, since it's the closest the show gets to actually solving a mystery). The whole business with the pawnshop was understood in its entirety over the course of two episodes, needing only a photo, a talk with a retired cop, and a brief search through a database to expose. The Ostermans are discovered by an improbable connection between a random mention from Vera, a comparison between two blurry photos, and then some conjecture. There's nothing at work in the second season that wasn't just sitting there, waiting for literally anyone with an interest to find. Maybe that's why the finale was so limp for me. Literally every aspect of the several conspiracies was out in the open and clearly understood (at least on paper; thanks, Slate!) by the last couple episodes, so what was left was for the male characters to act out their largely boring martyrdoms (Frank's demise was fine, I guess, but Velcoro was doing so well until he decided to jump out from behind a tree into full view of his pursuers) while the women are all sent away to survive and to embody new life after tragedy has struck or something. With literally all of the mysteries solved already, the writing had to resort to tedious speeches about not running away and doing it for pride to give its characters motivation, which feels like the last resort of any crime drama. I don't know, I know I'm going on without much of a point.

It's funny, I had the same problem with Liu Cixin's The Three-Body Problem, one of the Hugo nominees for this year. It also involves a popular but mysterious game that's about solving a massively complicated and multi-stage problem, but i) the author makes a point of reinforcing that only the "best" members of society, professors and CEOs and scientists, are really interested in playing it, and ii) it's solved individually by reclusive players who don't even try to work together. It's very weird how writers across cultures have this one idea about how the mysteries of video games are solved that is entirely made up and could be disproved by a visit to literally any online community for any video game...

I'm sorry, it was late for me to be posting and I wasn't entirely clear. I'm not saying that "SJW" is going to die out or anything. Like you say, it's at the core of the reactionary group that is #GamerGate and is instrumental to providing it with a common enemy. I'm just suggesting that the very use of the term like this has attenuated it so rapidly that it's going to become ossified as a dog whistle for that small group of people, like a lot of the terminology used by the MRA and anti-Semites, and become meaningless for everyone else. Even on 4chan right now, almost any use of "SJW" on any board that's not one of the core boards is accompanied by a chorus of complaints, the majority or a sizable minority already seeming to recognize that the term has become weak and unimpactful through careless overuse, much like "white knight" had become just a couple of years ago. Given that situation, I don't think it'll be too long before "SJW" becomes the exclusive province of #GamerGate and its affiliates, while the rest of 4chan and Reddit culture moves onto a less worn-out term to convey their hate, since most of them don't depend on "SJW" to give them a coherent communal identity. It's probably not where you read it, but George R.R. Martin's final response to Brad Torgensen hit pretty hard on that facet of Sad/Rabid Puppies. The latter started out using SMOF ("secret masters of fandom") to smear their critics as unreasonable elitists, but apparently the acronym had some positive connotations that couldn't be shaken, so they switched to CHORF ("cliquish holier-than-thou obnoxious reactionary fanatics") and mostly lost everyone because that acronym is ridiculous and obvious a purpose-built insult. Martin didn't go so far, but obviously these reactionary groups that are against something that's just a general trend in culture as a whole and therefore don't really have a coherent group of enemies, so they have to invent them by naming them, and somehow it's always some absurd acronym that is too toxic or silly to ever be self-applied.

I really hope that Pizzolatto's able to assess the weaknesses in this season fairly, without being reactionary or dismissive of the way the internet discusses things, and contrast them with the much-trumpeted failings of the first season in a way that leads him back to a strong collaboration with someone who can give him a second opinion on his work. Having just rewatched last season with some friends after this season's mid-run shootout left a bad taste in all of our mouths, I'm shocked at how that first season is like a child with a different father (or mother, I really don't want to get into the issue of parenting given both seasons' themes) that bears some resemblance but is a completely different creature along most of the lines that I use to evaluate a show's quality. The fixation on masculinity and parenting is there, as well as the tendency towards overwritten dialogue, but almost everywhere else the first season feels like a more mature, more focused work, which is superficially odd for a freshman effort. Maybe it's just the time that Pizzolatto spent preparing? We'll have to see with the next season, but overall I feel like this season's legacy, if it has any, is going to come and go with the character touches like Ani's knives, rather than being a notable entry in rural noir and the Weird South as well as displaying a landmark performance by its leads. On a side note, can someone who's a bit more self-aware than me explain why the revelation about Childress mowing the lawn in the third episode is electrifying but Leonard and Laura being the assistant and set photographer in the other third episode feels tidy and boring? Is it because Childress is the actual culprit rather than one of a dozen individuals taking part in several intertwined conspiracies? Is it because the first season does a better job of inserting Childress among a whole series of red herrings used to build the world, while the second season tries to tie virtually every character with a speaking part to the case in some way? Is it because there were hints about Childress' character throughout the first season that come together when he stands up from the lawnmower in a near-identical scene at the end of the seventh episode, whereas time from discovery of the children's existence to their total removal from the plot was barely two episodes' length? I'm asking seriously, because I feel like the replacement of mystery and revelation with confusion and skepticism looms large with this season's qualified failure for me.

From the link that Twig posted near the top of the page:

You're right. I wrote what I did out of concern for discrediting #BlackLivesMatter and placing people of color in danger, but it's true that my own expectations and anxieties are part of the social mosaic restricting black action. I really don't get the point of claiming to be taking down all political candidates, only starting with the most progressive one and getting to the less progressive ones maybe never, but I'm trying...

My first contact with "Social Justice Warrior" was the beginning or middle of 2012, maybe the end of 2011, at which point it began to appear in the fringes of 4chan like /tg/ and /x/ where I still browsed at the time. By then, it had already started its metamorphosis from apparent origins as a positive term used occasionally but unironically in the same fashion as "ecowarrior" into a blunt pejorative used still occasionally against socially conscious people whose basic identification with their cause made "white knight" too nonsensical for the more grammatically and lexically obsessed members of 4chan. I think its rise as a pervasive phenomenon is linked with the incredible semantic attenuation of "white knight" as a meaningful commentary on out-group behavior in 4chan. There was a need for a new term to indicate the Other and it just happened that the segments of /b/ and /pol/ that were active on Twitter around that time had begun to coopt a self-applied term from activists to use ironically, and here we are. Like Bjorn, I'm glad that it's being reclaimed, but I admit that it's partly because it means "Social Justice Warrior" has attenuated at many times the speed of "white knight" and soon both of those ugly, annoying terms will be functionally moribund.

Yeah, it had the best accumulation of information, but it's definitely written in an ugly tone. In general, I think it's going to be increasingly common for local-scale groups with higher militancy than the core BLM activists to act under the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag in order to give their actions a standing on the national level, leading to more incidents like this. My main concern is that it'll hurt BlackLivesMatter as a movement and affiliated groups as their allies, but maybe the decentralization thing will work this time, who knows.