Gormongous

The justification is that Arise is equal parts reboot and prequel, so Aramaki supposedly hasn't earned Kusanagi's trust yet, but there have been so many scenes where Aramaki has either shown his trust in Kusanagi or proven to be right in holding her back that it feels silly. Over the course of the OVAs, he picks her by hand from an embattled command, pulls a ton of strings to get her assigned to his section, grants her the right to assemble her own fully autonomous team by whatever means she chooses, guards her from any political or personal fallout even in instances where she's deliberately disobeyed his orders, and is generally the boss that everyone lies awake at night dreaming about serving. Instead, Kusanagi constantly badmouths him to her team and to random civilians, calling him an "old ape" or "ape-face," and regularly undermines his command in ways that seem deliberately meant to be embarrassing or difficult for him to handle. Overall, it makes Kusanagi look stupid and ungrateful, which is in keeping with the general (and generally unsuccessful) effort in Arise to show her as a younger, more impulsive, and less experienced operative, but I really don't see how any respect could grow organically from such a one-sided and toxic working relationship, right now.

I watched the two episodes of Ghost in the Shell: Arise - Alternative Architecture that weren't just cut-down scenes from the OVAs. Honestly, for the most part, they were markedly better than the OVAs, which try to do the intense inter-departmental rivalries of Stand-Alone Complex but lack Kamiyama Kenji's command of the material, but they were also much worse in one respect: I really dislike how hard the Arise reboot is also pushing an intra-departmental rivalry between Kusanagi as expert and practical leader of the unit and Aramaki as her superior and bureaucratic liaison. For some reason, Ubakata Tow tries to convey the tension between civil and military authorities, a popular theme in Japanese sci-fi, almost entirely through Kusanagi perpetually sniping at Aramaki whenever they're speaking to each other. I know fictional works where a competent subordinate's dislike and mistrust of their desk-bound superior is the main element driving character development, but that dislike and mistrust has to be justified at some point, lest the subordinate appear to hold grudges and have poor judgment that undermine their supposed competency. Kusanagi supposedly hates Aramaki because he's not military (which means nothing to me as the viewer when I see her repeatedly flout the chain of command anyway) and because he doesn't always assign her how she'd assign herself (she literally claims to be the world expert at any operation that Aramaki is planning and then insults him if he relies on actual experts), but neither of these are justified, because Aramaki's judgment always proves to be correct, especially insofar as the leeway that he should be giving to Kusanagi. Kusanagi just comes off as hotheaded, petulant, and a poor judge of talent, both others' and her own. These are not traits that I'm particularly interested in seeing in the protagonist of a procedural. It's just really frustrating to me, because whatever your complaints about Ghost in the Shell: SAC, it had its character relationships down pat. The working relationship there between Aramaki and Kusanagi was a joy to watch, because of the respect and trust that underpinned it and allowed it to function effectively, and to replace that with a Kusanagi who hates Aramaki for no reason even though he typically turns out to be right in the end is a huge step down.

Yeah, the fight was total nonsense, even though I appreciate the broader implications that it could conceivably offer for the show. One guy firing blind with a Krinkov totally wrecks a police taskforce that was just criticized for being too large and well-armed? Four guys with Glocks manage to break through the police cordon (if there even was one) and then annihilate the majority of said taskforce, in addition to literal dozens of bystanders, before our three heroes finally gain the upper hand. You're right, what's with all the friendly fire, does anyone display any training? What's more, how ridiculous to end with literally everyone involved dead on the street except for the main-billed characters? It really was the assault on LeDoux's stronghold all over again, but bigger and messier, with less buildup and less of a clear upshot. I liked a few things. Kitsch's performance during the fight was good. I guess Farrell's was, too, but I had no idea what McAdams was doing and I didn't particularly enjoy the naked fear in her eyes when she ran out of ammunition, drew her boot knife, and cowered. It made her feel like a paper tiger, which is exactly where I don't want the show to take her character. The hostage-taking moment at the end was very good, with its tension and confusion leading to failure, but overall... I'm not sure what a Heat-like gun battle was meant to accomplish here. Also worth noting, this episode had the director who presided over the worst episode of the most recent season of Game of Thrones. You know the one. I think he was just meant to be a leash on Velcoro, digging up dirt on his partners for the Vinci administration on the side. It's fairly obvious that he just tagged along so that a named character could die in the firefight. What a waste of a good actor, but whatever. I can't be sure, but I think the implication is that the father of current Vinci mayor did research on soil toxicity from mining runoff in the sixties and seventies, the results of which are now being used to route the planned freeway through poisoned lands that the farmers of which are desperate to sell. Maybe Caspar's death was about him breaking ranks on this little conspiracy and selling shares in it on the side? I could be wrong, certainly about the relationship between the toxicity reports and the highway. Maybe they're being faked or fixed?

If I recall from the half-dozen games I've played, events only trigger if a card is played for points by the player who does not benefit from the event. As a player, you have a choice between sacrificing your own events for points or dealing with benefiting the other player while giving yourself points. I'm not entirely sure if your complaint is that there are not enough crisis-driven confrontations or that there are too many. I've heard both, and my answer varies depending on that. I've played with all the expansions in various combinations and, generally speaking, I think that the base game has the most purity in its thematic/mechanic divide. The fact that, in my experience, truly dangerous crises tend to cluster, leaving long periods of doldrums elsewhere, emphasizes the social aspect of the game. An experienced team of players can overcome almost any combination of crisis cards, if they assess the appropriate response to them correctly and spend their cards wisely, but of course, there's at least one player who's not playing optimally, and that's where the interesting interactions come in a game of advanced players and knowledge. Overcommitting cards to crises, lying about whether you have Executive Order or Strategic Planning in your hand, and generally undermining any examples of strong leadership in the crew through fear and doubt are the tools that come to a Cylon over time. Also, the long periods where nothing happens leave the game open to witch hunts, usually led by bored pilots or engineers, and that's something I treasure whether human or Cylon. As far as managing randomness in the crisis deck, that's something about which the players have to be proactive. There are only a limited number of card types in the deck, so once you've played the game a little, it becomes more clear that the jump track advances roughly every two or three turns and that there's a major Cylon fleet action every eight to ten turns. Players can then use the purple scouting card, I can't remember its name, to prioritize better crisis cards, they can deploy fighter screens and reroute civilian ships, they can use quorum cards to replenish supplies, and if the jump track allows, they can jump early, using cards to mitigate the risk there. The interesting thing with Battlestar, to me, is that the game is a crushingly easy experience, in terms of making a plan and then managing setbacks, except that there's one or two people who deliberately aren't playing optimally, so the question is whether to purge them from the group or trick them into cooperating enough just to succeed. Really, the biggest flaw in the base game for me is when the sleeper mechanic goes awry and you get two fully active Cylons in round one. I've never seen a ship recover from that. Sorry if that was rambling, but this is a game that I've played fourteen times and been a Cylon for eleven, so it's something that I've thought about a lot.

I've been able to tolerate the misogynternet's obsession with whatever they've defined to be cuckoldry a lot more thanks to judicious imagining of General Jack D. Ripper from Dr. Strangelove ranting about purity of essence in a... well, a slightly different context. The level of delusional fear is about the same.

Yeah, I liked a lot about Sadness' design, although not very much about how she interacted with other characters. The other characters were so mean and dismissive of her (but not, say, Anger) it seemed obvious that it would figure into the plot, which I found a little predictable and dull. I liked the movie overall, though!

Yeah... Posts like those are business as usual on the Paradox forums, even when the game's in a well-patched state. There's a strong contingent of people there who believe that our actual history should be the best-case scenario for everywhere except Europe, and you can always mark them out by their argument that the game's called Europa Universalis IV. I love history as much as anyone, especially history that can be effectively simulated by complex systems in a game, but if your version of history demands that ninety percent of available factions in a game just sit around, waiting to be conquered by the first European army to look their way, then your history should probably go fuck itself, I don't know. Readings from Blaut for everybody! EDIT: Also, always glad to see TheMeInTeam still plugging away. He's one of my top three favorite people on the EU4 forums and I wait anxiously for the day when his proposals catch the eye of a Paradox dev with some heft.

I hear you there. Even though I like romance-driven anime, I've moved pretty concertedly away from shows that are not either i) about college- or adult-aged people (Golden Time, certain parts of Honey & Clover), or ii) about the challenges of being in a relationship rather than the challenges of starting one (Kare Kano, certain parts of Bakemonogatari). Even in other shows that aren't expressly about the romance, like Bakuman, the tendency towards chastity and love triangles as the dominant dynamics between characters quickly turns me off of a show.

Yeah, the lack of titillation is important for me to be able to focus on the humor in a sex-based gag comedy. If it's trying to be funny but also sexy, then it just feels like the ickier parts of Bakemonogatari to me. Diff'rent strokes, I guess! I hope it pans out for you. I watched all of Anohana under similar assurances from friends and acquaintances that the show would turn me into a faucet, but... I don't know, it just never happened. It was an incredibly slow-paced show about teenagers being petulant assholes to each other because of unresolved grief, with which I felt some sympathy but not nearly enough to feel anything else along with it. Generally speaking, I don't trust anyone's recommendations about emotionally affecting shows anymore; the two most affecting shows for me are Evangelion and Utena, neither of which is very high up on the lists of tear-jerkers that get passed around anime forums every so often.

I've actually come to be quite down on the Matrix movies as examples of competent fight choreography because they don't really have a physical narrative in the vast majority of their fights. To make the agents appear strong, they take hits left and right without really registering them, which means that it's up to the actors' facial expressions and (of course) the music to keep you as the viewer informed on the rhythm and intensity of the fight. Human-on-human fights, like the famous sparring scene in the dojo from the first movie, are generally a little bit better, but it's still overly reliant on incidental scenery damage and musical stings to convey who's winning and why they're winning, rather than the actual results of their actions in the fight.

Honestly, the whole "all sex jokes" thing in certain anime seems to land way more often than it rightly should. I watched all of Seitokai Yakuindomo, which is wall-to-wall jokes about mishearing something to be dirty or assuming someone to be a pervert, and I'd say maybe eighty percent of it was genuinely funny. Seitokai no Ichizon is much less even, but otherwise has a similar bizarre effect. I think the reality is that, whenever you're making a comedy entirely based upon sex jokes, titillation becomes almost useless for driving character interactions, so the writers have to get a lot more clever than "soft" comedy shows.

Hah, I love it. Very meta.

I bet they feel stupid now, they could have just bought up a bunch of their debt and then driven them into the ground while enjoying record approval. Oh wait, they'd have to entice them into a monetary union first... I bet that's not going to be a very popular proposal for a few decades now.

The full details are even more horrifying. The Eurogroup proposal is impossibly strict, essentially demanding substantial results on every point before the Greece economy is given any more relief at all, and its sovereignty as a nation is severely curtailed through economic sanctions (and a gross "time-out" from the euro) until that point. They are strangling Greece and saying that they will only loosen their grip if Greece shows that it's able to take a breath first. I'm honestly speechless at how this has played out. Like Krugman has just written, who can trust Germany with anything now? EDIT: Note, please, provisos for changing the structure of Greece's legal system with regards to labor and for privatizing their energy system. Jesus.

Yeah, although I wouldn't put it so harshly. Since Greece failed to meet the first of the IMF's ludicrously optimistic milestones, Germany has gradually come to realize, in practice more than in theory, that a union is only as strong as its weakest member, so increasingly since then, Merkel, Schäuble, et al. have mostly been stage-managing the bailouts and the negotiations to be as politically optimal as possible for them in Germany and Germany in the EU. At the end of the day, they've used unilateral declarations and pointlessly hardline positions to push Greece into one bad decision after another, lest its leaders commit political suicide, with the ultimate outcome that Greece will leave the euro (in order to free the leaders and citizens of other members of the EU from the mess in which they had a hand) with its economy in shambles (in order to cast the blame elsewhere than austerity and to put the fear of God into other weaker members of the EU). Thereby, they will have validated authoritarian control of debt crises within the EU by its strongest members, even though they helped to create this one and are almost entirely responsible for prolonging and worsening it, and there will be no outstanding argument against them taking charge when (and it will be "when") the next one happens.

As Greece is getting pushed to the brink, there are several statements coming from members of its administration that paint a Machiavellian picture of how the Troika has halfway engineered the current crisis in order to force Greece out without damaging the euro or the prestige of membership in the EU. Fans of Civilization IV should put in mind the paraphrased quotation from Jefferson to the effect that "banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies." First, a tell-all interview with an anonymous member of Greece's negotiating team: And a public statement by former finance minister Yanis Varoufakis: I have a friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend on Facebook who is adamant that the long-term economic destruction of Greece is Greece's fault alone for borrowing too much, no matter what abusive and extortionate methods the Troika chooses for extracting repayment of Greece's debts. I asked him, if it's entirely the business of the lendee to make sure they can repay whatever loan that they take, why no banks will lend me $1,000,000, because trust me, I'm totally good for it. He didn't respond.

I think that the global food bonus was capped at some point, maybe in a late-cycle patch? Maybe not. Looking at "advice" on the TWCenter forums is still ridiculous, though. A short guide for the Uesugi recommended building a new market at every settlement until you have five to recruit the maximum number of metsuke, then demolishing them all and just leaving the one on Sado, the island with the gold, with a fully upgraded port and all the metsuke stacked there to get 25 growth a turn, plus the food surplus. Barf, that sounds fun. I agree about the problems with Rome 2's economy being worse, though. For sure, it's disappointing to see that there are flaws that let the AI impoverish itself and the player use exploits in Shogun 2, but you get the distinct sense that the buildings and economy in Rome 2 (and this seems like it was unchanged in Attila) were tuned quite deliberately to make growth and expansion necessary evils with the narrowest margin of actual value. Careful planning and an empire of at least three or four provinces could make for something reasonably balanced, but it still strikes me as extremely odd decision for an empire-building game to make the simple act of growing wealthier and more powerful such a mixed blessing.

Servant x Service is good in a lot of the same ways as Working!!, but fair warning that it's definitely a different sort of alchemy that's a bit less for it. Working!! and its subsequent seasons are funny because the characters themselves are ridiculous, they don't necessarily need to be combined with each other to produce situations that make them funny. Seriously, every time Yamada opens her mouth and says something awful out of her own cluelessly needy entitlement, it's funny enough to me that the other characters' (usually negative) reactions aren't even really needed to get me laughing. Actually, Working!! is one of the few shows where everyone's persistent cruelty and disregard towards a given character hasn't poisoned it for me. Yamada's never actually hurt or offended by the resentment and dislike of others, so... I will say, Working!! was something I wouldn't recommend to people for a long time because its commitment to keeping its characters in stasis for the sake of comedy was really tiresome to me, especially when the characters have a fundamentally gross trait that they aren't permitted to grow out of or into. When it was just two seasons, Inami was always going to be comically violent towards men, Takanashi was always going to be a supposedly harmless pedophile, and Satou was always going to have a weirdly hostile relationship with the object of his secret crush. Still, just knowing that there's going to be an ending that'll probably involve some kind of change or growth already improves my opinion of the entire franchise.

Okay, on my third full-scale campaign, as the infamously hard Uesugi, I think I've found my first big beef with the design of the campaign. Shogun 2 does such a good job covering up the large amounts of financial aid that's given to the AI factions on even just normal and hard difficulties, but the outcome of that is that the AI rarely finds it cost-effective to build economic buildings and grow its revenue. If it's anything like the original Rome, the AI will only build economic or cultural buildings if it lacks the revenue to produce a unit every turn at every since settlement that it owns. That's fine, it's mostly invisible to the player anyway, but it has some odd effects that ripple out negatively. At the end of my Otomo game, my western ports that had been nurtured by metsuke for fifty turns were churning out almost five thousand koku each, something that I never found in any of the other provinces that I conquered. Even what I captured from the Chosokabe, all of which had never experienced a siege before and two of which had the requisite pair of market and sake den, were only doing maybe seventeen hundred, because the AI doesn't specialize its provinces and recruits from everywhere. Disappointing, although I suppose that it does keep the player from snatching a single settlement from the AI and collapsing its economy... I think osmosisch is more referring to the fact that the movie's deep visual and thematic similarities to the setting of Fall of the Samurai makes it hard for him to enjoy the intangibles of a game that reminds him of an overrated actor's "white savior" vanity project.

I hope so! He's a really solid actor and has a particular ability to come off as both sympathetic and a dirtbag simultaneously.

It's hard to put together from the statements, but it seems from the "Charlie Manson" and "brainwashed" remarks as though the judge is convinced that the mother has programmed her children to hate their father and that she's willing to put them in jail to remove them from her influence. Statements like this make me really doubt the validity of the judge's actions: