Gormongous

I think of Deadwood that way, but both The Wire and Deadwood feel more literary than actually being literary because their scripts are written explicitly for certain actors to deliver in accordance with their strengths, rather than just being generally full of high-grade verbiage. Without the performances of Ian McShane or Andre Royo, a substantial minority of what's being said by Swearengen or Bubbles is trite garbage, but with those performances, it works to a degree that nothing except Vaughan's "basement speech" has worked for me thus far in this season of True Detective. Now that the show has found its pace, my biggest complaint with it is the fact that it feels too often like it's been written for a table read or a published collection of scripts, rather than a largely visual medium, which couples with my second-biggest complaint, that most of the supporting characters seem to have been cast for how they look, rather than what they can bring to the material themselves. McAdams, Vaughan, and Farrell (but not really Kitsch, sadly) are putting in good work anyway, but (just as an example) W. Earl Brown is being utterly squandered in a way that I find almost upsetting, given the absolute strengths of his performance as a recurring character on Deadwood and the continued power of his one-off roles in Justified, A Single Shot, and Rectify, among others. He (and many other characters) are just there to be greasy sacks of shit on camera, and it's making me question the direction almost as much as the script's tendency to show instead of tell is making me question the writing. All that said, this was a perfectly competent episode and I agree with a lot of what the Thumbs were saying in the podcast about it. I'm just not feeling Sean's "rich ensemble" or the upshot of a script full of half-weight litotes, which bums me out a little

Fuck yes, the first moments of the first episode of Working!!! have a great Yamada moment. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lhnfSVpX2hY

I am in it for Yamada and Yamada alone! Did you watch Servant x Service, NinjaSquirrel? I honestly thought it was a tighter show with less cartoonish characters than Working!!, even though it's the same manga-ka, but for some reason it lacked a little of the magic for me...

Wait, Working!! is getting a third season this summer? Jesus, what is dead really can never die. At least the final manga volume is out this month, which makes this season most likely the final one, too. Also, I've been watching Jormungand, after a couple of people made fun of my (admittedly shameful) affection for Upotte!! and told me that Jormungand, an anime about an international arms dealer, is a truly good anime for gun nuts. I am here to say, on the record, that twelve episodes of Jormungand have led me to judge it as a thoroughly average show without much to recommend it, even to gun nuts. I have made a list of things that I like about Jormungand: The title is a cool reference to a less-appreciated corner of Norse mythology. The child-soldier protagonist seems dumb at the outset but actually turns out to offer an interesting perspective for the viewer. The guns themselves are drawn and handled quite accurately, even if the context of their usage is not. That's it. Every other part of Jormungand is sub-Black Lagoon junk, and regulars to this thread will recall that I don't have a high opinion of Black Lagoon anyway. Really, the biggest failing of Jormungand is that it has too many recurring characters (the arms dealer Koko Hekmatyar, the child soldier Jonathan Mar, and eight other bodyguards, plus a pair of CIA agents on their trail and at least one other long-term adversary), clearly a legacy of an overly conservative adaptation from the source manga. These bodyguards have names, favorite weapons, professional specialties, and personal quirks that the anime struggles to present to the viewer in a digestible fashion, but except for maybe Koko, Jonah, and the two lead bodyguards Lehm and Valmet, it never really comes through all the over-the-top action that is also being shoved to the fore. They're all just geniuses with hot tempers and weak morals, in different shapes and sizes, no matter how many five-second flashbacks the anime makes to photographs of family or memories of their younger selves crying. Yeah, Black Lagoon also suffered from over-the-top action overshadowing the character work that was actually intended to be driving it forward, but there were scraps of interesting stuff that still managed to emerge: Rock's increasing indifference to violence and the effect of this on his mental state, Dutch's lazy approximation of a moral code, and Benny's Judaism, vanishingly rare for an anime that's not about Judaism or other biblical topics... There's nothing like that in Jormungand, as far as I can tell. Jonah has some angst that could be interesting or could be boring, depending on the time that it's given, but everyone else, even the supposed enigma of Koko Hekmatyar, is that dime-a-dozen caricature of a violent psychopath always filling anime about "the mob" or "mercenaries" to the brim. You've seen them in Black Lagoon, in Baccano!, in Trigun, in Gungrave, in Gantz, in Golgo 13, in Madlax... You get the picture. There's nothing too special about Jormungand in any respect. It pretends to be a travelogue, but it's careful never to locate itself more precisely than a continent and a cardinal direction, rendering its attempts at local color somewhat empty. It pretends to be an ensemble piece about teamwork in combat, but since it can't spend that much time on its characters, the only way that it's able to convey the effectiveness of Koko's bodyguards is by never handing them a loss or even a setback, which works a little bit but also totally destroys any sense of stakes in the show's many drawn-out firefights. It pretends to care about weapons and the international trafficking of them, but it seems more concerned that any actual details might detract from the vague glamour inherent in dropping off a shipping crate full of "the latest tech" and having soldiers cheer or drool. Honestly, it pretends to be a lot of things, and if it were even a few of them, it'd be a great show. Instead, it's a lazy and ultimately generic adaptation of what I have to assume is a much better manga about an arms dealer and the kind of people with whom she surrounds herself, trading almost entirely as an anime on the thrill of wacky dudes (and ladies) shooting highly detailed firearms at each other and then maybe hugging after everyone else is dead.

It seems a little bit more complicated than that. An acquaintance and former colleague of mine in Greece emphasizes that Tsipras showed up to negotiations without a new plan. Perhaps foolishly, it seems like he had brought the old one that Merkel et al had already declined to acknowledge until after the referendum proved that Tsipras the mandate to bring it. Now that he has the mandate, they still don't want to discuss it, so he gets castigated for not having a new plan, different than the one they've already seen and clearly don't like. I agree with you, though, that Germany is playing some serious hardball here. I almost have no choice to hope that they know what they clearly think they're doing.

Have you ever felt a twinge of regret whenever Travis or Griffin brings up one of Justin's many mistakes as a teenager and Justin succeeds in shutting it down? There is no such regret here, mon frere.

Yeah, I'm torn a lot, because right now, a lot of the pleasure I get out of watching anime is recognizing directorial choices, design styles, or vocal quirks and correlating them to cast and crew between shows. That's why I always jump upon a seiyuu whose work I know, even though I can tell just from my co-hosts' reactions that going into Orikasa Fumiko's frankly unbelievable voice-acting pedigree is maximally uninteresting to most people. I'm getting better, I only mention seiyuu and character designers when they're actually relevant now, which is why I didn't mention them at all in this past episode! EDIT: Correction, in our most recent episode, I looked up Chie's seiyuu, Sawashiro Miyuki, and then gushed about her obvious range. I'm the worst, I don't even realize that I'm doing it.

The latest episode of MBMBAM is possibly the best one that they've ever done, more so even than the one with the "Jimmy Buffett or Kenny Chesney" contest or the one with Travis' rant about Mango. They just let the pre-roll go for about twenty minutes, realize they're never going to get to questions, and so just keep going, making fun of each other's life decisions. My face seriously hurts from the smile that I've had this past hour.

Write in questions to... uh, keyframespodcast@gmail.com!

Either works. I just had a friend complain that they can't listen to Episode 00 anymore (and SoundCloud has a shitty "file not found" error message for "hidden" files that makes the person think it was deleted, which caused some panic), so we should do something sooner or later.

Well, the idea is that the strong economies of France, Germany, and the Scandinavian countries are what's holding the EU together, so if they're all impoverished giving bailouts to irresponsible Mediterranean economies that are destined to fail anyway, the EU will shake itself apart. To some people, granted no one to whom I've talked personally, giving Greece increasingly harsh demands until they achieve an economic miracle or ditch the Euro is more like culling the weak from the herd, and a lot of the rhetoric about how Greece "lied" to get into the EU and "lied" about the amount of debt that it was bearing is just laying the groundwork for how Greece really doesn't belong in the EU anyway and so pushing it out doesn't represent a failure of the EU's guiding philosophies.

Yeah, the logic of hardliners is now that Greece has to fail under austerity or be pushed out of the EU in order to keep the EU itself whole. I think it's beyond gross and shows a misapprehension of the EU's overarching purpose as a common market and currency union, but then I'm not making the hard decisions here.

I honestly think that this is our best episode yet. Even though we talk about Jojo's Bizarre Adventure for over twenty minutes, I think we get a great back-and-forth going and make a good talk about our various shows. I do what I think is the best job that I've done yet of making a defense of The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya.

I have some strong opinions on Greece, but they mostly revolve around the corruptness of banking institutions. While international banks were working hard to help Greece cook its books to join the European Union, they were also buying up Greek debt on the cheap, which they sold for profit once EU membership made Greece part of the same risk pool as Germany and Sweden. When that private debt turned toxic during the recent economic troubles, the response was to turn it public with the first bailout, and thereafter the troika of the EC, IMF, and ECB have functionally treated Greece as a bankrupt corporation to be liquidated. Sure, they post well-intentioned projections of how their austerity programs will cause a long-term resurgence of the Greek economy, but it's hard to argue with the reality of their actions since 2010: That's not a lazy and corrupt economy struggling to repay an oversized loan, that's five years of a country being strip-mined in the name of austerity. The article from which I'm linking that picture is a good summary of what I feel. I'm strongly in support of the οχι movement in Greece, because this seems exactly like what happened during the housing bubble in the US. Banking institutions try to make money by disregarding moral hazard and making loans to people who wouldn't be able to pay them back. The banks are either ignorant because they don't know that those people aren't able to pay or they're immoral because they don't care. Either way, when the wheel makes its turn and those loans become clear for what they are, it's somehow entirely upon the lendee and not the lender that the debt can't be paid, with bailouts going to the banks that knowingly assumed the risk and not the people inadvertently harmed by those actions. Lives get ruined, banks roam free, and the world keeps turning. Sure, Greece shouldn't have borrowed that much, but governments make mistakes like that all the time. Germany, for all of its economic rectitude, had its debts cancelled after the Second World War, and national debt for the US is currently well over a hundred percent of our GDP. What's happening in Greece is political theatre made to appease European elites. The interests of the Greeks don't even enter into it, as the recent referendum shows. Bankers shouldn't dictate terms to governments. That's a nightmare out of the nineteenth century or some cyberpunk novel. I don't know why anyone is okay with it, but most people with whom I talk have expressed the very simple view of "you should pay what you owe," even though more than a few of them have student loans in the tens of thousands that they're quite sanguine about never being able to repay in full.

Yeah, I have to remind myself all the time that people who actually judge me like I'm constantly afraid they're judging me are really awful and that I'm better without them, even if I also worry that I'm not. Nolite te bastardes carborundorum, tegan!

Cool project, but not enough FEAR for me!

I mean, I assume that brkl's mostly right. By using the auto-blocker, ISIS is able to hide its activities from the keenest minds on the internet! Something something puritanical SJWs are basically jihadists anyway.

I remember that in Day of Defeat the German weapons, even the bolt-action rifle, were all better than American weapons. The automatic weapons (MP42 and StG44) had better magazine side and accuracy, the rifle (K98k) did much more damage, and the machine gun (MG42) had a faster rate of fire... which, for each class of weapon, was the most important thing about them. In maybe nine months of heavy play, I joined maybe three servers with too many people on the Americans' team, as opposed to countless overstuffed German teams. I've also definitely noticed a low-key tendency among game designers to rhapsodize the hidden potential of the Third Reich, because it's expected and because it's easy asymmetry. Germans need to be made elite in as many was as possible in order to make them an interesting and worthy challenge to the Allies, with their numbers and their economic superiority. Expensive failures like the Elefant and the Maus are typically depicted like superweapons, partly because a disappointing and overpriced unit is bad design but still. The Russian T-34 and IS-2 never seem to be depicted as equals to the Panzer IV and the Panther, let alone the Tiger, and this is actually a defining element in the tactics of Company of Heroes 2. In Axis & Allies, two of the technologies are explicitly German inventions during the war (rockets and jet power), two are debatable (super subs and industrial tech), and two are inventions shared by the entire Allied side (heavy bombers and long-range aircraft). The Waffen SS get a starring role in any game about Germany, but when was the last time that the British Commandos or SAS took a similar place in the spotlight? These are just off the top of my head, but I've always thought that the myths of technological prowess particular to Nazi Germany are an offshoot of the Lost Cause, adapted a bit for the modern era. The South will rise again because its cause is just and true, the Fourth Reich will come again because its science was strong and pure. I don't mean that people consciously think that, but there's a romance that surrounds a mighty foe once defeated, and mistaken impressions of advanced Nazi technology, maybe lost in the postwar diaspora of knowledge, are a little bit like Barbarossa asleep under the Kyffhäuser, you know?

Well, I'm reviving this thread, which is one of the first in which I posted on these forums. After all the talk about the Total War series in the TMA episode threads, I decided to dust off vanilla Shogun 2 to see how it plays a few years down the line. My impressions ended up being surprisingly positive, albeit a bit unorganized and with a streak of pessimism that is characteristic both of me and of discussions on Total War. Wow, the unit balance in the original game is so tight. Ashigaru are almost worthless fresh out of the gate, but they increase dramatically in effectiveness after the first few levels of experience, to the point that they're equal with freshly trained samurai. Experienced samurai will still win in a stand-up fight, even if you're using spear wall with your yari ashigaru, but a decent general evens it out. It's so different from Rome 2, for example, where the starting army that you build for your first few conquests becomes useless once you've progressed down the tech tree to anything with armor. There are no godlike units in Shogun 2, except for the heroes units from that one DLC, which are so tiny and yet so expensive to build and maintain that they warrant their place as miniature generals on the line. Despite all the clans having similar unit rosters, their individual bonuses to certain types of units, along with a single unique unit if you have the one DLC, is remarkably effective. The Ikko Ikki have larger ashigaru units and weaker samurai, encouraging large armies of trash troops that are held together by units of warrior monks. Using their unique "marathon monks" as substitute cavalry continues the impression of a clan that fights very differently from a traditional samurai-core army while not forcing you as the player to discard the basic tenets of tactics in Shogun 2. My most recent game as the Otomo, another DLC faction like the Ikko Ikki was also interesting. They get early access to gunpowder thanks to beginning with a nanban trading port, making your ashigaru-based armies extremely effective in the beginning but eventually outclassed by more mobile and more experienced samurai. Even so, a traditional army from the Otomo, stiffened by Portuguese tercios and donderbuss cavalry, has most enemies already in tatters by the time the melee began. Shogun 2 feels like a master class in tuning near-identical unit rosters to feel different for every faction. On the other hand, the naval mechanics are still terribly unfun, even in light of the utter shitshow that was Rome 2. The tactical battles are trivialized by ships that handle like light trucks regardless of wind or rain and higher-level strategies basically boil down to gaining or losing small amounts of money through raiding, unless you're dealing with off-map trade, which is superlatively important to the point of almost breaking the game and basically requires that you invest as much of your limited attention in it as possible. Furthermore, without the constricting geography that exist on land, the game's AI scatters its fleets to the four winds, which is fine when you're not particularly the target of more than a couple factions at a time but nearly unworkable once the realm divide hits and they all functionally operate as a single enemy against you. Speaking of the realm divide... Jeez, the realm divide is even worse than the naval mechanics, not least for how it reveals the weaknesses of the diplomatic system. The way that Creative Assembly set it up, it is implausibly and frustratingly difficult for any allied or vassal relationship to survive realm divide, at least for any useful amount of time. Upon realm divide, an immediate penalty of -50 is applied to all factions' opinion of you, in a system where -100 to 100 is the typical range and -200 to 200 is the outer bounding, and that already-high penalty increases by -5 every turn until it reaches -200, meaning that a faction that you, as the player, have done nothing but aid and flatter will feel, at best, completely neutral about you after thirty turns, no matter what you do. Clans that hate you through the mechanics of realm divide will always hate you. There is literally nothing you can do with them besides annihilate them, which (granted) isn't saying that much in a game where vassals regularly betray their overlords while being overrun by a mutual enemy. Really, the most unbelievable thing, beyond this completely artificial way of forcing the player to confront the inconsequentiality of their decisions on the diplomatic front, is that there is already a "recent expansion" penalty that is roughly -5 per territory taken, with further penalties if the territory is "desired" by the various factions' AI, which already does a great job of making the player be hated for being powerful. It's fairly obvious to me that, in beta testing, most talented players were able to get close to taking and holding Kyoto before their gradual expansion finally made the entire island their enemy, just like Oda Nobunaga in real life, which must not have been enough for Creative Assembly's vaunted vision of "total war," so they introduced an unavoidable penalty that hits at fifteen provinces regardless of the player's situation and literally never goes away, encouraging you to stop dead in your conquests once you know that you're at that arbitrary threshold and milk all your diplomatic options dry before crossing it. I'm even more sure that it's a last-minute addition because the AI doesn't suffer from it or anything like it. In my recent Tokugawa game, the Otomo held Kyushu, Shikoku, and western Honshu up to Osaka, a total of at least twenty-five provinces, and yet they were the principal ally of the shogun, who denounced me as the devil incarnate after taking my fifteenth province from the ten-province Takeda. Whatever. The agents are fun and thematic, especially once you've leveled them up to be truly great at their jobs, but having them walk all over the map is ultimately tiresome and irritating after you're larger than eight or ten provinces. It feels weird for me to say it, but I'd rather lose the agents in favor of a separate interface window with tokens that you assign to various provinces or armies. Building more buildings could contribute points for spending on local and global actions or modifiers... I don't know, when it's possible to block an army from besieging a castle by surrounding it with agents, with which the army cannot interact mechanically but through which it also cannot pass physically, it makes me wonder whether the horse is driving the cart here. What I have to say the most about Shogun 2 is how clearly it focuses on a specific experience, realm divide and all. There is a singular arc to any campaign of Shogun 2 that is absent from a lot of other Total War titles. In every game of Shogun 2, you are going to build up a core group of armies that play to your faction's strengths; use them to carve out a corner of Japan that's been made secure by mountains, forests, and water; and finally make a push for Kyoto as the world falls apart around you. There's none of Fall of the Samurai's overbuilt tech tree, forcing a false choice between tradition and modernization on the player. There's none of Rise of the Samurai's curiously empty map and unit roster, trying to project the vanilla game's strategic complexities onto a one-vs-one scenario. There's certainly none of Rome 2's massive map full of pointless variety, which almost demands the player feel aimless and invalidated by whatever decision they make or success they achieve. It's a big game, but it's just about one thing, and that doesn't detract from its scale at all. I wish Creative Assembly had taken better notes on that, really.

Well, not that you probably need the encouragement, but I would heavily recommend Sekigahara as an intro-level wargame for two people with a strong interest in strategic decisions but not necessarily much historical grounding. It's a simple block wargame, not terribly different from Hammer of the Scots, that plays out the two months leading up to the battle of Sekigahara on October 21, 1600. Players sit opposite each other and move stacked blocks that only have unit information on one side, so each can see a vague outline of the other's forces but not its exact effectiveness. The two sides start fairly scattered out, but each player has a limited number of moves and can only move along each road once per turn, so the real difficulty is getting all of one's forces in a single place where an attack can be made. Additionally, armies move slower the more blocks there are in them, and while this can be alleviated somewhat by discarding cards, those cards are primarily played to make blocks participate in combat, without which they'll just sit there and get wiped out. This combination of mechanics leads to at least three really interesting and historically authentic situations: an army too big to move from its defensive position, an army that has to split up along different roads to be able to reach the enemy, and an army that won't attack or won't defend itself when attacked because of exhaustion or bad politicking. I've played this game five times, which isn't that much considering that playtime is usually under two hours, and I really can't get enough of it. There's nothing like setting up an eight-block army (large, but not huge) fifty miles east of Kyoto and hoping that my opponent doesn't know or remember that it's mostly composed of units from the Date clan and that I've been using all my Date cards for move orders the past three turns... or maybe hoping that he'll think all of that and try to wipe me out with a four-block strike force, only to discovered that I have cards for every block there. There's also a minor betrayal mechanic that punishes overly aggressive mix-maxing of cards in one's hand, but that's probably the most complicated thing that the game has to offer. It's a really brilliant design and probably the best light- to mid-level wargame that I've ever played. There's actually not many videos of it being played, despite it being a tactile and visually interesting game, but here's a decent video review:

I agree about Anor Londo. The closest that I get to smug gamer superiority is listening to Justin McElroy's "Anor Londo: A Musical Tribute," because I had an amazing time there and meanwhile he's complaining about how hard it is to beat using that goddamn Drake Sword.

However inappropriate and unpalatable their actions might sometimes be, I don't think that the small core of people documenting the actions of #GamerGate are actually responsible for creating or perpetuating #GamerGate's delusions of an equal-but-opposite opposing force. When people who identify with #GamerGate talk about AGG or whatever, they invariably refer first and foremost to the support networks of people like Anita Sarkeesian or Zoe Quinn, which "oppose" #GamerGate simply by making their intended efforts of stalking and harassment more difficult. Basic database activity, even accompanied by polemic, doesn't seem to set off #GamerGate the same way, probably because they identify with the essential impulse there.

Since no one else has said it, it's not worth it to try and take out the Bridge Wyvern. You have to cheese it unless you wear a bunch of special equipment, it's not a fun or challenging fight, and you only get 10,000 souls from it, which is chump change by the time that you're high enough level to try and kill it. If you're a maniac, like me, then wait until you're near the end of the game and fill him full of 150-damage arrows, but until then, give it a pass, for real. The best are maybe Magic Falchion, Velka's Rapier, and Painted Guardian Sword. The rapier is the best on paper, but Dark Souls is almost always more about the moveset, anyway. None of them are stupendous, certainly not compared to getting forty dexterity behind an S-ranked weapon, but a lot of your damage is coming from spells if you're boosting intelligence, too, so it's not a wash by any means.

Can I ask a quick question? When talking with the therapist, McAdams' character says that she grew up in a household of five kids: two now in jail, two dead, and her a detective. Where does that leave her sister, who wasn't actually imprisoned in the first episode, right? Is Ani just cheating by leaving her out, to make the therapist guy feel bad?

I agree and love how it's put. It reminds me of my classicist friend who uses "ethically true" to denote something that's not necessarily true but feels like it is or should be. Really, for me, since I'm so deeply immersed in history as my profession but none of my friends are, I'd almost reverse the panel's working definition to turn it into "not obliging the player to abandon the mentality of historical decision makers in order to succeed." That's really the point of failure for the Total War games, as I've been thinking about them lately, because success in those games almost always means using non-contemporary strategies in the campaign and tactics on the battlefield to make "history" break your way. An excellent example of a game that does not need to be played with a mind towards historicity but that rewards both historical and ahistorical play is Matt Calkins' Sekigahara. Played abstractly, it asks the fairly straightforward but extremely deep question of how to concentrate (or how to appear to be able to concentrate) an overwhelming but diverse force at a given point with enough resources left over to use it effectively, but played historically, it does just as amazing a job of driving home the volatility and friability of medieval armies, forcing me to confront the twin issues of command and control in an extremely authentic way. I can't recommend it enough. Also, with all the talk of COIN games, especially non-modern ones, I'm feeling two months of dissertating about Frederick Barbarossa and the Lombard League morph into a potential COIN game in my head. Four factions: Barbarossa, Milan and the Lombard League, the reform papacy, and Manuel Comnenus. The German princes, the Burgundian marriage, the kingdom of Sicily, and the papal schism would make for a great set of event cards...