Gormongous

I've invariably played Sid Meier's Pirates, time and again, by ignoring the plot and most of the shipboard stuff, instead loading up with as many guys as I can and going around the Caribbean flipping the entire map to the French or Dutch. Capturing cities for a faction is presented as doable, but I don't think it was intended to be done wholesale, to the exclusion of everything else, because the game's systems start to groan pretty bad once all of Central and South America are French...

The worrisome thing for me is that the quasi-respectable parts of #GamerGate like Erik Kain now exist, in a very visible way, to passively or actively reassure any video game figure who says something dumb or mean that it's really everyone else's fault for not seeing the logic or humor behind what they said. I know, in the past, when I've said awful stuff, it's only taken one voice telling me that all the rest are wrong for me to double down, and a lot of those voices were not nearly as well-spoken as Kain, who has proven to be as much a disappointment for me as for SmartJason.

The local PBS station in Dallas, KERA, published a short interview with a civil rights authority where they pretty much go sentence by sentence through the Sandra Bland arrest, as recorded by dashcam. It's a bit of a depressing read. Bland knew her rights very well and was fearless in defending them to the officer. His response was invariably to escalate the situation in order to assert his authority in a situation where, legally, he had none, and the upshot was Bland's arrest and later death.

I got a graduate assistantship this year through some backroom politicking, even though my contract is supposed to be up, and I feel incredibly lucky for the money and health insurance that it represents, but there are already issues. In my job briefing early this week, I was informed of two non-negotiable dates that I have to work with full twelve-hour shifts, but I've just found out that a family wedding is taking place on the second of the two. I'm almost certain that my new bosses won't accommodate me, so it's time to call in some more favors to persuade another grad student to sub for me... except the guy most likely to be their sub of choice is the busiest guy in the whole department. Ugh! I hate jobs. My heart goes out to you, man. Most of my relationships have been long-distance, largely because I've had the luck of dating people in the middle of life transitions, and every single one's been dragged down by the distance and our respective flaws, especially with regards to communication skills. None of them ended up hating me, but all of them ended up pretty firmly done. So yeah, if it's something you want, go for it, but good luck if you do.

Yeah, now that I've noticed the trend and almost gotten over it, I'm enjoying the most out of all the actors how Vaughan handles the sudden deepening of his character's dialogue, pushing out the word like it's been something he's been saving up and is now anxious to be rid of, but I agree that it feels a lot like bits of Rust chopped up and mixed into every single character this season. Yeah, this is an excellent observation. It feels like the actors and the carousel of directors aren't getting enough input on the show. The script is so openly king here and even lines that clearly don't work or don't make sense in the context of the scene as it's shot seem to retain their place of prominence. It just appears to me like there's less of a collaboratory presence in the second season, which I miss a lot. It's Pizzolatto's show now and I'm becoming less and less sure that he was my favorite part of the first season. I don't mean to bag on this show every episode thread, but it's currently neck and neck in my mind with Halt and Catch Fire, a similarly disappointing show that I'm watching with less money and pedigree behind it, and that makes me a little less than sanguine of its overall quality.

Hahah, oh! My bad. Yeah, I love when seemingly mundane phrases that have become memes on Idle Thumbs put the show at the top of the search results.

I mean, a lot of what's wrong with John Bain is the very common problem that intent is not magic. He'll frequently say something ignorant, naive, inappropriate, or cruel -- like all of us do to varying degrees -- but get extremely angry and defensive if even a few people point out that his message was not what he intended. A lot of that probably dovetails with Bain's fetishization of his own supposed intelligence and rationality, which keeps him from admitting to himself and to others that he didn't actually stop to think about any consequences to his actions that are now obvious in hindsight. I actually don't think that he's comfortable acknowledging that his actions have any unintended consequences, which means that he has to do some pretty serious revisionism about his various intersections with #GamerGate a year out now.

Nah, it's an early one, the first or second time that Steve comes on as a guest. It's one of my favorite Steve moments, I'm mad that I don't have the exact episode.

I agree. I was excited for the Chinatown-like poisoning of farmland to buy it up cheap for the rail corridor to be a subtle, expanding part of the conspiracy, and then in this episode Frank just states the explicit involvement of Archeron in that while having mostly unrelated conversations with two other characters. The plot moves forward, but in weird and surprising ways, and I'm still not entirely sure where the main hook is supposed to be for me.

I posted "Staple Stable," the OP for Bakemonogatari, as a joke in the "Stable of Staples" thread, but it's actually stuck in my head now. Part of its appeal is probably a really strong bassline, but part of it is Shinbou's mastery of striking and slightly disconcerting imagery in the visuals. For most of the ninety seconds, you're invited to think that it's just massive staplers running through a maze of urban infrastructure that is almost Anno-like in its complexity, and then a brief shot in the last twenty seconds has Senjougahara emerge, a titan in such a mundane setting, before it's all quickly sealed up with staples again. Maybe I'm just entranced by larger-than-life animation superimposed on urban photography. One of Shinbou's previous works, the Zan: Sayonara, Zetsubou-Sensei Bangaichi OVAs, has a double-length OP the final third of which is rough-drawn characters taking over a typical Japanese cityscape, and it's a perfect encapsulation about the way that the show's worldview gradually begins to gnaw at the edges of its media presentation and spill over into the real world. Clearly I'm missing my now-defunct blog series where a friend and I reviewed anime OPs. Oh well, the one that Twig posted above is better, anyway. Still, while I'm on my jag here and while I'm looking at the laser-farting headless schoolgirls of the above OP, I do think that Shinbou will never be as upsetting or transgressive as he was at various points in Sayonara, Zetsubou-Sensei, and therefore, with the codification and commodification of a lot of his thematic fixations in the production values of Puella Magi Madoka Magica, he's probably reached his artistic high-water mark. That bums me out, when it feels like a creator's ceased to grow...

I definitely had this experience. I was driving downtown, just after the Supreme Court decision about marriage, and had to have a long conversation with my friends to figure out that it was not just some corporate rally but a warm-up event for Pride, so much did the tents and banners for banks and telecom companies outnumber the fucking rainbows.

My staple lately is Payday 2, although it hasn't even come close to the hours that I've put into Crusader Kings 2. Other games that I've put several hundred hours into and keep coming back to include Europa Universalis 4 (which really feels like an offshoot of my interest in CK2), Total War: Shogun 2 (and Rome: Total War before that), the two Souls games available on PC, Euro Truck Simulator 2 (for obvious reasons), and Civilization IV (which I don't own on Steam and therefore have no idea how many hundreds upon thousands of hours I've put into it, invariably drawing me back from any investment in Civilization 5). Several of those games, I don't know how I'll ever play out my interest in them. CK2, ETS2, and Payday are still getting regular DLC that's keeping them, if not fresh, than somewhat less moribund, so... yeah.

This is an obvious contribution, but "Frank Sinatra Has a Cold" is still one of the most timeless and interesting pieces of journalistic profiling.

Yeah, John Bain has a long and disturbing history of doing perfectly neutral and rational things that just happen to enable random, ignorant, and overwhelming harassment of game devs. Sometimes he apologizes, but sometimes he doesn't apologize, and it's never in a way that avoids blaming the victim for getting hurt by Bain's perfectly neutral and rational thing. It's literally the comic that someone posted a little while ago about a man who's followed around by hornets wherever he goes. It might not be his fault (although honestly, after a certain point, we're assuming that Bain is incredibly ignorant and incapable of learning anything when we keep giving him the benefit of the doubt) but maybe it should be his job not to post something every couple weeks that's able to be weaponized against women, minorities, or developers.

That's what I mean. TV shows and movies are about adventures, people in everyday life only have misadventures. It's probably not an absolute trend, of course.

Has anyone else noticed how "misadventures" has mostly replaced "adventures" in daily speech, outside of media titling?

Also, The Disappearance of Nagato Yuki-chan closed out with a post-credits "Endless Eight" goof from nowhere. What a careless end to a fairly dumb show.

It's more about saving a little money and a lot of space on my shelf. Premium editions, even "nice" ones from Aniplex, always have these huge but flimsy art-boxes with a bunch of pointless booklets and pack-ins that I really hate. Give me a nice lite-box blu-ray case that I can put on my shelf alongside all my other anime, please!

NISA finally gave in, two years after the initial release, and has announced non-ridiculous "premium" versions of Daily Lives of High School Boys and the first two seasons of Working!!. It doesn't matter that I can't afford them right now, I am still hyped up to the stratosphere, and if they let slip about a non-premium version of Uchoten Kazoku anytime soon, I might just reach orbit. Hyped!

WHY HAVE YOU NOT COME ONTO OUR PODCAST I have more to say about how I'm beginning to find my critical distance from the Dragonball Z franchise annoying because it keeps me from engaging at all in conversations like these, but I'm a bit too drunk to put it out there properly.

It was somewhat obviously a setup to me, just because it makes no sense for The Powers That Be of Vinci to be hanging around the ops room making ominous jokes, but the fight itself was so clumsy and the outcome so pat, having killed literally everyone on that city block except the three people that were probably intended to be killed, that the show's going to have to do a lot of earn a conspiracy surrounding it.

As a follow-up to this ridiculous thing, wherein a somewhat clueless and self-important journalist from outside the industry stumbled up on #GamerGate and decided that the problem was no one giving the movement a chance to explain itself, things were chugging along quite nicely until the arrangements for AirPlay, the conference-in-a-conference hosting the #GamerGate panels that Koretzky is organizing, were announced on July 13. Sure, no gaming journalists or feminist critics had agreed to be a part of AirPlay, about which Koretzky seemed disappointed but unphased, and the board for the Society of Professional Journalists had given its blessing but not endorsement, specifically requesting that its logo be removed from the AirPlay website, but there was every chance for the project to succeed at its goal of providing an entry point for gaming consumers and non-gaming journalists to come together and talk about ethics. And then, a day later, Koretzky makes a post titled "Maybe I Was Wrong." One of his primary panelists apparently threw a shit fit about only being given fifteen minutes (instead of the grueling fifty that he was promised, what lies) to introduce a planned two-hour panel with a brief history of #GamerGate. Koretzky claims to have weathered an hour-long storm of immature racist insults, even though the panelist knew that he was keeping him from dinner and his family with it, and left the matter to simmer. Keep in mind, this is someone chosen by a committee of #GamerGate figures as someone who best represents them, but of course, once Koretzky posted the story, he was buried under an avalanche of "No True Scotsman" and vitriol about airing #GamerGate's dirty laundry for everyone to see, never mind that they previously required that he stream all six hours of the initial planning meeting for AirPlay in the name of transparency, which #GamerGate is all about but only when it makes them look good and not like angry and entitled children. Koretzky posts some of the worst tweets here, but don't worry, he still thinks that hearing "I told you so" from critics of #GamerGate is just as bad as being subjected to an offensive tirade from someone to whom he's donated hundreds of man-hours and man-dollars to give an uncontested platform for... whatever, so a middle ground is still worth having. Several comments claim that human dumpster Sargon of Akkad has volunteered to replace the pissed-off panelist, great. I really can't believe this. I don't last more than ten seconds in the comments of the three above posts. Buzzfeed's coverage is extremely depressing but spot-on for the most part.

Robert Picardo is known almost exclusively to me for being the holographic doctor on Star Trek: Voyager. He's easily the actor with the most range and the most weirdness on a show full of weird dudes and ladies (I'm looking at Tim Russ and Kate Mulgrew in particular), so he's just as interesting a choice as Jeff Goldblum to me.

There's a lot that's really clumsy in the writing of Arise. The writer is different from SAC and is generally less interested in building a complete picture of a future society wherein the police operate, instead focusing on specific themes of departmental infighting from a hyper-expanded bureaucracy and the potential of a highly interconnected network to have apocalyptic consequences when attacked. Those are interesting things, sure, but they only allow for one kind of story, and it's a story that can't help but be compared unfavorably to the Laughing Man and the Individual Eleven. The character writing's also just weaker in the OVAs. Characters are constantly sniping at each other or proving themselves to each other as a way of structuring their interactions. There's not much in the way of actual relationships. I also just like the hyper-competent Kusanagi better as a character. A character who makes multiple mistakes but still gets her man at the end of the day could be a good time to watch, but it requires a writer talented enough to make her mistakes not look like the results of ignorance or pride, which Ubakata Tow has not been able to achieve thus far. Who knows, maybe the movie next year will be the breakthrough?

Especially since one guy is using two Glock 18s, which take just over a second to empty their mags and just over five seconds to reload under perfect conditions. It was a ridiculous firefight, with every shot either missing completely or hitting someone in the head, and yet we have Detective Bezzerides running out of ammo, drawing her knife, and hiding. It's maybe the only realistic thing in the fight, but it makes her look scared and weak. What's more, and this is what bothers me, it makes her previous statements about carrying knives to even the odds look like her being scared and weak rather than a pragmatic woman trying to give herself an advantage. Besides making Ani out to be a fraud, I don't see the point of having it in there. The other characters don't even see her do it, it's something for the audience alone to know.