Gormongous
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Everything posted by Gormongous
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Ouran Boast Club - Planning an Anime Podcast
Gormongous replied to Gormongous's topic in Movies & Television
As a less brutal alternative for poor Blambo, the K-On! movie is on Hulu for free. -
Official Giant Bomb Thread Mostly for Complaining About Dan
Gormongous replied to tegan's topic in Idle Banter
Yeah, I'm excited for exactly this reason. -
Yeah, we've mapped most cosmic objects out to the degree that we're 99% sure that nothing's going to hit us in the foreseeable future, but we can't be 100% sure about it, and we most definitely lack in-place technology to divert an asteroid coming at us by surprise.
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I don't know why other people like Tom Hardy, but I like him because he's put on incredible performances in Bronson and in Locke. Both of those are exhausting, singular roles that Hardy pulled off excellently, so I don't think he's a bad actor by any definition. Maybe you just don't like that kind of character and would doubt the chops of anyone playing it?
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Come on, having a kid is just like having a dog that slowly learns how to talk. They can't be that hard to train.
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Okay, noted. The equivalence I was drawing between "No, I'm a vegetarian" and "No, I don't like spicy food" was just that they're both answers to the same question, "Do you want to have some of this food?"
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Fair enough. I only meant to draw a comparison insofar as they're both circumstances where people won't eat something. There shouldn't have to be an "ism" attached to something to make it a legitimate position to take, even when it comes to food.
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Oh, there are ethical vegetarians, but there are also vegetarians that just never liked meat very much, so they don't eat it. Somehow, no one gives them shit, unless they're the kind of person who gives all vegetarians shit, while all kinds of people are always trying to make me try spicy stuff. It's my sincere beliefs that what people eat is their own business and most people have way too many opinions about what pickiness is justified and what pickiness is right out.
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I think Humanity Has Declined is mostly a personal story, framed by an apocalypse. The most interesting thing to me is the chronology, which is inverted by episode order. Instead of a bitter and isolated girl slowly finding herself and finding friends as the world around her falls apart, the story is rearranged to be the protagonist regressing as the world reverts to something more recognizable to us as the audience. The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya did it first, to rearrange an episodic gag show into a love story, but here I think it serves the central themes of the show better, namely the criticism that modern society can prevent innately good people like Watashi from being properly socialized and that the "decline" of humanity is not necessarily the end of its good works. I'd like to watch the show again, in true chronological order, but the thought of putting off the third episode, by far the best in the show, until the end is too much for me to bear.
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Ouran Boast Club - Planning an Anime Podcast
Gormongous replied to Gormongous's topic in Movies & Television
There's the double-episode OVA that announced the second season. That would qualify! -
I'm hoping it's the recent board game release from the Sherlock Holmes guys. EDIT: Yes! Also, the conversation about using Valve's tele-feel technology so that Sean can feel Jake's hands on the controller went very differently from my first impulse. Behold, that tech in action: And the "combat tutorial" with Snippy the Crab in The Witcher 3:
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Ouran Boast Club - Planning an Anime Podcast
Gormongous replied to Gormongous's topic in Movies & Television
No lie, I would love for an expert on yuri to watch all of Yuri Kuma Arashi and tell us all for sure if there's a functional allegory/deconstruction there. Ikuhara hasn't gone so far as to allude that Yuri Kuma Arashi is Evangelion for yuri, but he's sure enjoyed other people saying it, so I'm still in suspense, even after having watched the anime. Also, it would be a good excuse for me to stop watching Crest of the Stars and start watching Aoi Hana like I've always meant to do. -
Ouran Boast Club - Planning an Anime Podcast
Gormongous replied to Gormongous's topic in Movies & Television
New segment: terrible Rurouni Kenshin filler episode review! -
Ouran Boast Club - Planning an Anime Podcast
Gormongous replied to Gormongous's topic in Movies & Television
You're coming on at least one. We talked about the Rurouni Kenshin manga for maybe five minutes and I couldn't say a single thing because I didn't want to reveal that I hadn't read the manga but had watched all of the anime, even the unwatchably bad back half. That was a big podcast trouble for me, but it shows that manga talk is totes legit! -
Ouran Boast Club - Planning an Anime Podcast
Gormongous replied to Gormongous's topic in Movies & Television
We are awful. Also, easily a third are from me alone, for which I'm privately atoning. -
Cross-posting from the podcast thread, Key Frames, Episode 00 - Don't Feed the Dragon (Little Witch Academia) Show notes are below.
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Ouran Boast Club - Planning an Anime Podcast
Gormongous replied to Gormongous's topic in Movies & Television
I was actually stunned how long we talked about that damn movie. -
Yeah, I feel you with this. I don't think of myself as a picky eater, just someone with a strong aversion to spicy and bitter foods, but it's hard to convey the kind of shit that people give me, even now that we're all adults, because I take a little time to figure out the least bitter beer on tap or the least spicy dish at the Indian restaurant. Food is so weird and personal for everyone, but I've definitely noticed a trend among most people where disliking specific dishes is okay (people are allowed to dislike something) and disliking entire categories of food is okay (you can't fault vegetarians, vegans, and dieters for their choices), but disliking anything in between those two extremes is being a shitty baby who needs to grow up and like the foods that the person criticizing you happens to like. I'd never veto anyone's choice for a restaurant, unless there's literally nothing that I could enjoy eating there, and I wouldn't refuse to eat anything that anyone made for me, but I've still come to accept that I'll always get condescending remarks from otherwise nice people, just for ordering a burger at a gastropub or chicken fried rice at a Thai restaurant.
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Ouran Boast Club - Planning an Anime Podcast
Gormongous replied to Gormongous's topic in Movies & Television
It's here! Key Frames, Episode 00 - Don't Feed the Dragon (Little Witch Academia) Show notes are below. -
This summer's looking to be an odd one. On the one hand, I have a serious girlfriend for the first time in almost three years! I met her at jury duty where she recognized me off of Tinder, so I can't say that app never did anything good for me. We started out moving really fast, which was lots of fun but caused a few problems after a month or two, and now we've settled down into a comfortable rhythm. I feel very happy about her, if somewhat haunted by my obvious good luck. On the other hand, the person for whom I've always worked at the library over the summer, to make ends meet, just returned from a month-long trip vacation to tell me that she can't hire me this summer (or ever again). Apparently, my contract work for her was so good that it convinced the library's board that a full-time assistant for her work would be warranted. I guess I'm happy for her, even if I lost myself a job to get her there, but now the two thousand-dollar nest egg that I'd saved up to ease my transition in the fall from an assistantship that paid well to an adjunctship that doesn't is now going to be used up supporting me while I find a place that'll be okay with me working part-time for three months and then quitting when school starts again. Oh, and I still haven't heard back from my department about whether there even are any adjunct positions open for the fall. There probably will be some, but there is also a not-insignificant chance that I could be totally unemployed with no savings, no prospects, and a quarter-finished dissertation come September. I'm trying not to panic.
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I am really curious how a developer who doesn't play games even gets into the gaming industry. It'd be like an author who didn't read, and there are so very few of those outside of Garth Marenghi.
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I remember reading a great article, maybe in the New Yorker, by someone who shadowed the creator of Soylent for a week. The farts thing seems to have been a long-term problem, because the body demands a lot of sulphur but if it gets too much or gets it in the wrong way, it'll fart most of it out. For years, apparently, they were just putting the daily value of raw sulphur into the Soylent formula and it was making people's bodies go apeshit with farting. Eventually, the body gets used to getting sulphur through direct ingestion, but it's a huge adjustment process and a strong argument against "supplemental" Soylent use. Like Tegan said, it's invented by an efficiency-focused engineer, so it's had a lot of ugly growing pains that come from not actually consulting nutritionists and dietary science, which is not exactly systemic in its knowledge but is light-years better than using the FDA's recommended dietary requirements as a recipe. It reminds me of this scene from Cosmos:
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No problem! It doesn't really bother me that you're critical. I mean, there are few things that I care about more in this world than Neon Genesis Evangelion, and I mostly kept my cool. You saying that moe is gross doesn't really bug me. I just worry that you're forcing yourself to watch the wrong kind of anime out of a sense of obligation or out of bad curation. If you're persevering, never mind, and keep throwing whatever thoughts you have up here. Yeah, I like Claymore, but fair warning that it takes a long time to go anywhere, and then it ends abruptly when they run out of manga. "Satisfaction" is definitely not part of the equation there.
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I mean, I think that's a survival strategy for most "true artists" in mainstream anime (and, thinking of games like Spec Ops: The Line, also probably in AAA video games). You have the surface layer of culturally-reduced escapism to sell the show to the people who will actually make it profitable, and then you have a deeper layer of actual meaning, which may or may not integrate the thematic and aesthetic elements of the surface layer, that is then assessed as successful or not based on the dissonance therein. I don't think anime is conspicuously more complicit in this dynamic than movies or video games, but because the added level of cultural difference promotes a degree of othering that's not present in homegrown media products, people are a lot less tolerant of it when it's not something they've been trained by modern media culture to expect (or want). There have been more than a couple people, almost always forum newbies, who've shown up in this thread to say that anime is childish entertainment for gross perverts, without blinking an eye at how much of the world still thinks that video games are childish entertainment for psychotic killers. Then again, that perception also exists in Japan, where cultural difference can't explain it, and it's existed since at least the late eighties, with the first "otaku murderer," so maybe that's just the typical obsession over the validity of a new medium, which tracks back to sixteenth-century German monks complaining that these newfangled "novels," which were read silently and alone instead of in public to an audience, were going to turn people into solipsistic obsessives trapped in a fantasy world. I don't know, they seem like two sides of the same coin to me, so I try not to worry about the KyoAni moe machine just like I try not to worry about Call of Duty. Like the Thumbs said a few weeks back, it's all about developing a palette that can recognize and appreciate the strengths of a given work beyond the requisite slather of violence or sex that basically everything mainstream is obligated to have, at least if it wants to be profitable. I think there's a lot to love in anime, but it does take work, because animeeeee (sung in the same way as "video gaaaaames"). In general, I don't waste much time or effort worrying about cultural stagnancy. Historically speaking, over several millennia, those concerns have almost never been timely or pressing, so long as artistic mediums remain the province of people and not institutions. I do worry about people on the other end with unhealthy patterns of media consumption, no matter the medium, but I think the vanguard there should be the social and cultural framework, especially how it talks about media in a way that's critical and also aspirational. That's a lot of what I try to do when I talk about anime.
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That's also a good point, Tanu. I consume an order of magnitude more anime than anyone I've ever met, but I'm also going to grad school (which, granted, a lot of people don't consider the "real world") and maintaining a circle of friends that isn't huge but is still more people than I can reasonably expect to spend quality time with over the course of a single month (even if I were to stop watching all anime). I don't think I've been infantilized or sheltered by the moe-type anime that I consume, any more than someone who plays an MMO in their spare time is being seduced from reality by the conveniently bite-sized challenges offered in the virtual realm. I don't think that's exactly what Blambo meant, though.