Gormongous

I finished the second half of Jormungand, after dragging my feet for almost three weeks. What a piece of junk! So much effort was put into the firearms and the combat, but the show keeps pushing that aside to spotlight its overstuffed cast of mercenaries. There were several scenes in the last two episodes where literal minutes were spent going through the protagonist's ten-man bodyguard and hearing every character's identical opinion on her Bond villain-esque plan for world peace, and then in the epilogue there's another extended scene of all ten saying "Welcome back" to another character that similarly lacks any differentiation. I don't think I've seen a more total failure than adapting what was apparently a character-driven action manga into an episodic and setpiece-driven anime...

I'm getting really sick of a select group of people on my Facebook feed exulting in the troubles that the so-called "Center for Medical Progress" has manufactured for Planned Parenthood over the past few weeks. They are so unshakably convinced by a handful of heavily edited videos that it's literally impossible to engage them in conversation about the supposed contents. I just want to say, "It's been a while since I've attended church, but you realize that I could easily edit a video of any denomination's service into something heavily implying that Christian are cannibals, that they drown babies, that they wish the entire world to be destroyed, that they do not believe their actions have consequences, and that their leaders take bribes in return for their services, right? It wouldn't even be hard!" It's too trite to quote Matthew 7:1-3, but James 4:11-12 works just as well: "Do not speak evil against one another, brothers. The one who speaks against a brother or judges his brother, speaks evil against the law and judges the law. But if you judge the law, you are not a doer of the law but a judge. There is only one lawgiver and judge, he who is able to save and to destroy. But who are you to judge your neighbor?" It's so goddamn frustrating, because my work inclines me to be sympathetic towards Christianity even though I'm not remotely religious, but so many Christians are such awful people, completely poisoned with myopic self-righteousness.

I'm resurrecting this dead thread to continue my vendetta against I Fucking Love Science. This time, it's image-based! Maybe I just should have posted it to the Comical Picture thread...

I can't really speak for Turrican, but I like what Paradox does in theory with its titles: feature and content expansions via DLC to fund balance and usability updates via patch. In practice, Paradox has a great deal of trouble with putting some or all of its usability updates behind a paywall and with pricing its DLC based on community impact rather than actual content, but on paper, it's maybe the least exploitative model of DLC of which I'm aware.

Eh, the most recent example is Her Story. I wasn't going to buy any games this summer, because I really just couldn't afford it, but then this game comes out that's a huge darling, and I know that, by the time I feel like I have enough money to drop on it, the discussion will have moved elsewhere and I'll be going through a dead thread in which I can't really participate. I'm not bitter, because it happens, but the effort of trying to sync up my gaming purchases with whatever the smart people around me want to talk about can be a little frustrating and lead me to wish, maybe aloud, that games as a whole were cheaper.

Well, in his initial posts starting the conversation, Turrican brought up The Witcher 3 and Galactic Civilizations 3 as well as Destiny and Mortal Kombat, so I think that shifting the discussion to focus on the latter titles honestly feels more about picking the triple-A niche, where there's a ready explanation for high price points. I also have been spending a lot of time with some new non-gamer friends and I would say that Minecraft and mobile games are far more visible to them than the latest Call of Duty and Assassin's Creed, the latter two having more advertising behind them than actual mainstream cache.

I agree that the tiny fraction of games that are triple-A are probably more expensive than ever. I don't see how that's a particularly useful point, though, when we're talking about the cost of games in general, unless the argument is that triple-A games create the Overton Window of "fair" game pricing.

I mean, true that games' prices haven't increased with inflation, but overall it's also so much easier to make games than it was twenty years ago. There's a host of middleware and development engines so that a game don't have to be coded from scratch, the talent pool is wider and deeper than ever before, and distribution is almost as simple as it could possibly be despite a paying audience that's an order of magnitude larger than it used to be. If we're talking about the dying niche of the triple-A game, then yes, the pursuit of graphical fidelity and Call of Duty-like success has inflated development costs beyond reasonable sustainability, but the vast majority of games don't need preorder bonuses to sell, because of other factors at work in the industry.

As a counterpoint, I understand feeling like gaming is expensive, even if we can summon up all these comparisons to more expensive hobbies. If you take the cheapest gaming experience (for instance, a free-to-play game on a computer or mobile device that you already own for professional or personal use) and compare it to the most expensive or even to a typical gaming experience (now with DLCs and Amiibos and preorder/early access pricing tiers) it can feel like the amount of money that it costs to game is entirely arbitrary, which can slant towards feeling unfair or excessive if you lack the income to buy games outside of Steam sales or lack the childlike ability to play the same game for six or nine months without pushing yourself to do so (I would give almost anything to have that ability back, honestly). Even the best community, like this one, occasionally pressurizes me towards purchasing decisions that I really can't make, not that I blame anyone, and I'd rather direct that frustration towards the companies that profit from such a culture than the people who simply partake in it.

I have yet to see a pro-#GamerGate commentator actually understand what "intersectionality" means. Even the ones that are willing to listen to responses and give follow-up questions are still always like, "Yeah, so you say you can care about multiple things, but which one do you care the most about?" It's like the imageboard cultural tendency of "best vs. worst" has left them unable to engage with anything that doesn't cop to whataboutism.

I'm just imagining it being vastly more efficient to micro the giant units to break them out of their animations as soon as possible, and the thought makes me never want to play a "cinematic" strategy game again...

I mean, part of the vision of Banks' so-called "minds" in the Culture series of books is that, given sufficient resources and freedom, a truly advanced AI will spend the overwhelming majority of its time and power playing games or indulging in fantasy, while using only the smallest fraction to help humanity if it feels like it, even though that fraction would still seem unspeakably immense to us. Part of his argument is just that reality is extremely boring: there are a limited number of physical laws, most of them are entirely predictable, and the universe is mostly empty anyway.

Like I said, my current relationship and a couple of my current friends communicate almost entirely via text. I don't think any of them have ever called or emailed me, actually. Until a couple of years ago, I deleted text messages after I read them, but having met some of these people and given my nose for "information" that needs to be "archived" or at least "preserved" in some way, I began hoarding them. If I knew about the Android (and before Android, Blackberry) bug that made it increasingly likely for your entire text message database to be corrupted (and hence overwritten, since there's no recovery protocol for that database) with every message you don't delete, I probably would have engaged in more active pruning, but as it stood at the time, I saw no reason not to keep everything, especially since there's a really robust search function in my text messaging app that benefits from having months of texts saved up.

I've had what I think of "meat gloves" syndrome several times, especially during college and grad school, and it was always a combination of insufficient sleep with a sudden spike in stress. Sleep always fixed it for me, I'm sure it'll be the same for you. Sleep tight!

I am becoming an expert in backup solutions, after the fact. Actually, I had to stop, because it was making it worse for me. I also briefly bricked my phone using a third-party data recovery program, which helped me to move on. Anyway, thanks, everyone. The great thing about the Thumbs community is that people come out in force to feel for you even when it's dumb shit getting you down. I talked to my girlfriend and she mentioned something about using one of those iPhone backup programs to make me a PDF or HTML doc of our first four months of texts. It would maybe be the best homemade birthday present that I could imagine, because I'm clearly a historian at heart.

My phone just deleted all of my text messages out of nowhere and I'm beyond devastated. The entire physical record of my current relationship, as well as a couple of previous ones, is just... gone, because of some glitchy SQL overflow that's been a known bug with Android since the very beginning. I have no words and I am humiliated at how much it has spoiled my day, maybe my week.

I definitely think that the artistic goals of the "Endless Eight" arc have mostly been spoiled by the cultural phenomenon of binge-watching, yes.

Sadly, if I delete this account, all the information that I used to sign up for it is retained in the servers for two weeks or something, so I'd have to use a different email and account name just to get the username that I want. Ugh.

Hot off Hampton Sides' excellent Blood and Thunder: An Epic of the American West, a dual biography of the Navajo people and Kit Carson, the man who brought about their destruction, I allowed myself to be talked into reading S.C. Gwynne's Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History. Honestly, I was very disappointed with it. Maybe I should have been able to tell from the disparity between the two books' subtitles, but Blood and Thunder was an intimate portrayal of two extremely private subjects, largely interested in rediscovering and reassembling their own words in order to understand them primarily on those terms. When the evidence is wanting, Sides says so and then is silent. Conversely, Gwynne revels in the silences, imagining a version of the American West where extreme coincidences were commonplace, mostly through liberal use of the phrases "must have been there" and "must have spoken." He is deeply enamored with the century-long Comanche empire that dominated the southern United States, but lacking the contemporary accounts to understand it in full, he falls back repeatedly on what were its most striking aspects to white observers: its primitive technology, its underdeveloped culture, its functional poverty, and most of all its extreme brutality. Never did I think I'd read a book published in my lifetime that contains the phrase "Stone-Age pagans" unironically, but there you go. Despite appearances, I don't think that Gwynne was trying to demean the Comanche, really, but to emphasize how improbable and underappreciated their power has been, at least to a popular audience, yet the terms he uses are clumsy and sometimes offensive. Hence, It's not surprising, then, that he has a similar attitude towards the people about whom he writes. Barring a few well-documented military careers that prevent him from doing it, and even then the most detailed one about Ranald Slidell Mackenzie is an exception, Gwynne frequently descends into historiographical ecstasy about how important this person or that person was to the exact sequence of events that changed some aspect of the nineteenth-century American West. Even if it's a single conversation or a ten-man shootout, Gwynne takes pause to wonder at the marvel that is human causality. The only real exception to Gwynne's overly sensational take on past people and events are the final two chapters, plus the epilogue, on Quanah himself. I have to assume that this man, a half-breed Comanche who was a violent opponent of peace but later became a prosperous cattleman and advocate of Indian interests, had inspired the study, but whose life prior to his late thirties or early forties turned out to be too poorly documented to hold an entire book together, because it is fascinating how well he ended up playing the white man's game while still preserving a distinctive personal and cultural identity. I wish I could have known more about him, but Gwynne is more content to crow about Quanah's fame overall than document his life in too much detail. Oh well, at least that last bit about a truly unique figure in the Indian Wars meant that I didn't hate this book entirely...

Finally, an article on the Greek debt crisis that goes more into what I think clyde had in mind when he created this thread: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/02/magazine/why-greeces-lenders-need-to-suffer.html Note the later parts of the too-brief article, which point out that the 2008 bailout to save the bond market effectively ruined the bond market by making normally high-risk bonds low-risk by virtue of a bailout being inevitable in case of a financial catastrophe. Moreover, by bailing out the banks and the lenders who represent them while squeezing Greece dry with austerity, the Troika has created an impressive mechanism for transferring money from the populace of a foreign country to their own investor friends (if not, in the case of Schäuble, directly to himself). It's all pretty fucked, but then so's the entire world economy.

A friend of mine is applying for a job at Riot Games, so I created a League of Legends account to help him learn the ins and outs of that company's product. While typing out my "summoner name," my finger slipped and dumped a bunch of random characters into an otherwise readable username. I didn't catch it before hitting enter, and there was no confirmation dialogue, so that's just my username now, I guess? I contacted Riot's support about the mistake, mere seconds after making it, and they helpfully informed me that I could pay them money to fix it. All in all, a great start!

N1njaSquirrel and I had discussed how excellently the third season (well, strictly speaking, the third half-cour) of Working!! is doing. Man, everything that I resented about the show, especially its insistence on a reset-to-zero at the end of every episode, is being wiped away by this final season, which is totally committed to wrapping up every little plot, even those put out as gags, nearly simultaneously. It's pushing the previous seasons of the show into "must buy" territory... Oh! Edo Rocket has a similar setting, but a greater emphasis on historical-anachronism-as-humor than Gintama, as I understand it. When I'm listening to the soundtrack, it's certainly hard for me to decide whether I'm experiencing fond memories of Evangelion as one of my favorite anime, a psychic echo of my mental state when I first watched the show while sick in bed during Easter my senior year of college as I admitted to myself that I wouldn't be going to grad school the next year, or simply the handiwork of Sagisu Shirou as a talented and prolific composer. I've always thought that it's a lot of the first and a little of the second, but my recent obsession the past few months with the Kare Kano soundtrack, which I watched under perfectly normal circumstances, has pushed up the prominence of the third a lot. "Treasure Every Meeting" and "We Meet Only to Part" are staples for driving home from work or a date nowadays. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XPQ28v-_cLY

I'm glad that a lot of you got something out of this episode, because I was bored and baffled from end to end. I knew it was going to be rough going for me from the first scene, picking up the finale of the previous episode, pregnant with violence, to take the two characters to a breakfast nook where they have an overly portentous yet still vapid conversation that ends in absolutely nothing. It wasn't a realistic rendering of such a confrontation or even a hyperrealistic rendering, which is how I hear a lot of Pizzolatto's more excessive floridity explained, but a seeming recreation by aliens or foreigners of a partial written account of that confrontation. This was repeated with Frank's totally nonsense conversation with Stan's wife and then his son, bringing up Who the Hell Is Stan for the nth time since Stan's ignominious death, as well as with Paul's touching but utterly disconnected reminiscence with the former cop about two children orphaned by a decades-cold case. Some things clearly connect up: the cabin in the woods for torturing women in private, the missing hard drive full of sexual misdemeanors, the twice-stolen blue diamonds, the Russian connection in the slave trade and the rail project. Others, though, like the aggressive presence of that random Mexican cartel, the non-lethal trap laid at Caspere's second house, the stolen car set alight by a clumsy fugitive, and everything in the above paragraph, continue to come off as filler in a show that's struggling to give its important plot points the limelight. I know we're sick of comparisons to the first season, but all of its major incidents had a haunting similarity to them, exploiting the audience's tendency as collective possessors of human brains to see patterns everywhere. This season has none of that: maybe I'm slow, but I look at the blackness and see only blackness, lying in wait for something to direct my gaze to what actually matters. It's just not fun to indulge in the mystery here, probably in a big way because the first season seeped with sex that was occult, but the second season seeps with sex that is merely transgressive. Where's the "great moral evil" of the first season, or does Pizzolatto think that prostitution is it? And yeah, that brings me to the final set of scenes. Wow, what an utter mess! Leave aside, for a moment, Ani's ridiculous Old Hollywood-style intoxication, which seems to have affected her, the person for whom she's looking, and none of the dozens of other girls, who are having glamorous fun or faking it in a way that mostly undercuts the surreal horror of sex work en masse, an angle that the direction couldn't seem to decide whether to push or not. Leave aside the revelations about Ani's childhood abuse, the disappointing aspects of which Apple Cider and richardco point out just fine: it brings nothing to her character that wasn't introduced by her speech to Ray and then (in my opinion, unnecessarily) restated with her panic during the firefight, besides getting to see a woman suffer in personal distress. Leave aside the sundry plotholes about Ani's recognizability as the perpetrator and survivor of a much-publicized shootout a couple months back as well as having personally met the party's host, about vomiting doing nothing to relieve intoxication from an aerosol mouth-spray, about infiltration with a transponder being unnecessary when Ray and Paul tailed the bus anyway... In fact, let's just leave aside everything, because I was going to type a rant about our three intrepid heroes going to Plot-Point Chateau, a closely-kept secret frequented by the rich and famous, and getting out scot free with every MacGuffin in the show, short of the much-discussed blue diamonds, which would be tedious for all my dear friends here to read. Yeah... Suffice to say that this was a frustrating episode for me to watch. Even when Pizzolatto is bodily shoving the plot forward to make up for so many episodes full of nothing, he still can't resist filling his characters' mouths with self-important (and more infuriatingly, utterly humorless) rambling that mostly fails to connect up. He refuses to leave anything worthwhile to his actors or his directors, and it's ruining the show for me. If not for this podcast and the continuing enthusiasm of a couple of my friends, this episode would have been my last. It's bizarre to type these words, but I really enjoyed the stabbing and its aftermath. For all that this show has problems with depicting violence with weapons convincingly, I loved i) that Ani executed that maneuver with her knife perfectly, ii) that it didn't bring the guy down immediately, so that he was still able to do serious harm to her, iii) that that clearly frightened her in a way that made sense and was affecting, and iv) that the guy's dying words being an extremely human "The fuck you doing...?" to which Ani just shrugs helplessly in response. It was a masterful series of moments for which I really can't account in an episode that ran so against my taste. The closest thing was Ray's awkward meeting with his kid, the attempts to engage the court observer on a human level, and then his utter despair at the glimpse he got of himself through her eyes, played out with drugs and an ill-considered phone call.

The entire thing is great, but the penultimate track, "Expansion of Blockade," is a great seven-minute compression of everything artful that Sagisu Shirou is doing with the music for Evangelion. It revisits many of the show's main themes, weaving them into a completely new melody, and with absolutely sumptuous orchestration. I think the drama's on par between the two sides of the franchise, but I think the pacing and the characters are much different. Coming from The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, I find the characters in the spinoff frustratingly defanged, but it sounds like that's part of the "dumb precious babies" appeal for you. I think Haruhi, like a lot of latter-day KyoAni stuff, has its darling and quiet moments, but there's more of an edge and an urgency there than in, say, K-On!!, which is all just harmless cuddly "fun."

Yeah, the whole "find your imprisoned family members and revenge yourself on Baron Raimundo" thing. It's actually been pretty funny in some games, where I accidentally find a relative or a villain in a city I'm capturing, free or defeat them, and then go on with my business, despite the game jumping and cheering about my heroism. All in a day's work, I guess?