Gormongous

Hey! Remember when we opposed the partitioning of China because of Spanish-American War had kept us from getting a toehold along with the rest of the West? Remember when we supported brutal regimes around the world, with our soldiers' lives and with theirs, in order to win a propaganda war, not just with another hostile superpower, but with ourselves? I love how many textbooks I've read that claim that the United States just "fell into" its possessions in the Pacific and the Caribbean. Yeah, and Rome occupied the Illyrian coast to stop piracy in the Adriatic. Accidents happen, right?

For anyone wondering, one of the better culture bloggers on ANN posted a short "versus" review between Story of Seasons and Harvest Moon: The Lost Valley. Check it out!

I mean, it's an old trick. No empire in the history of empires has ever expanded its territory out of the stated intent just to have more territory. Even the Nazis had lebensraum as a fig leaf for their wars of aggression. Meanwhile, the Romans annexed some tribes and forced the others to pay tribute or dismantle themselves out of an interest in "order" and "peace." The Romans were very proud of bringing peace. I know a bit less about the Chinese, but the Zhou, Han, and Tang all framed meddling in the affairs of the less mighty as "bringing civilization." In general, a quick survey of historical empires reveals that almost all of them had a single ideal or set of ideals that they valued, which accordingly made them the embodiment of that ideal because they were the most powerful and cared about that ideal, hence every action an empire of "freedom" takes is about freedom because how could they not? Ugh, it just bothers me for people to buy so completely into America's propaganda. I don't believe in the Pax Americana or anything, but jeez, it's one of the most obvious historical patterns out there and American exceptionalism is right at the core of it, not the reason it doesn't apply here.

Yeah, except for every other instance of #GamerGate that's not a formalized interview by a certain segment of media outlets. Also, if they claim that women have figured so prominently in the promotion and dissemination of #GamerGate, to the exclusion of men, isn't building the committee entirely out of voices from the supposedly unheard male perspective exactly what "tokenism" means? ITALICS ARE TAKING OVER MY LIFE.

Okay, having seen the episode finally... "Don gives to charity. Duck returns with an offer. Betty writes a letter."

Alumni giving is one of the biggest things that can push an institution up the US News & World Report, both in terms of number of people giving and total amount given. A university trying to improve its standing in the report, which directly correlates to better attendance and investment, can spend large amounts of money in reforming its department structure and building new facilities, or it can push more volunteers and temps to busk for donations. Sadly, most choose the latter, and it's the US News & World Report that's mostly to blame, although that doesn't excuse them for being goddamn annoying and/or clueless.

The self-congratulatory smugness of that first post totally turned me off of reading the rest. He honestly seems to think that he's the first person of account to think about taking #GamerGate seriously and that there's hay to be made by giving the movement an opportunity to explain itself. As for the "ten good apples in a barrel of a thousand rotten ones" bit, which he uses to handwave the ubiquitous awfulness of #GamerGate, so what? If you're only willing to regard as "true" members of a movement those who elevate the discourse to a level that you find acceptable, what's the point of even discussing the movement at all, as opposed to those select individuals? I'm sure that, somewhere out there, there's probably one Neo-Nazi who's a genuinely nice person with considered but moderate ideas about white separatism, yet his existence couldn't possibly legitimize a group whose effect on the world has entirely been one of hatred and suffering. EDIT: On second thought, I don't think I'm particularly surprised that someone from an organization of waning influence, due to changes in media and the economy, is excited that there are hundreds of people on the internet who are rabidly eager to stump for their organization, even if they have ulterior motives. It's still incredibly gross, though.

God, that makes me intensely angry, because some of it is true, but only because kids are so heavily socialized to be that way. I don't have any children in my life, but the most cursory observation of those that friends and strangers have let me know that kids will play with and develop a preference for anything. It's only the policing of adults as individuals and as a society that makes them aware of what things are good toys, what things are bad toys, and what things aren't toys at all. That whole section about aspirational play is total shit, though. What male gender role is being modeled when boys play with dinosaurs, eh?

I've actually gotten phone calls and mailings from my graduate institution for donations because I did a masters there. Apparently, their system doesn't have a way of noting that I'm currently in the same program getting a Ph.D. Right now, I'd just be giving their own money from my funding back to them.

The point, at least for me, is how utterly unremarkable KIA is, in virtually every respect. Its levels of contribution and spread of discussions are the same as an online community focused on genealogy or model trains. There's literally nothing in the data to suggest that its segment of #GamerGate is unique in any way, let alone that it's a revolutionary social movement only just draped in the clothing of your average online community. Like you said, it's neither a vast army nor a band of brothers, just some people on the internet. Again, nothing particularly revelatory to most of us, but considering how often #GamerGate trots out its whole "we're secretly special" delusion time and again, it's worth having some data to back such common sense up. If KIA represents Gaming Militant, then so does every online community to its respective constituency, and of course the latter's not true at all. We have always been at war with Eastasia, I'm guessing.

To be honest, I thought I hated Betty until the fire and smoke from their divorce cleared, and then it became apparent that what I hated was Don and who Betty became around Don. I feel like that's different from the people who hate Betty from Mad Men and Skyler from Breaking Bad for being the disapproving wives of TV's wish-fulfillment protagonists, but maybe it's not.

Brianna Wu did some data-mining of /r/KotakuInAction and found what everyone expected her to find: it conforms almost perfectly to the 1/9/90 rule, just with a somewhat heavier burden than usual carried by a few creators and respondents. That means that #GamerGate's frequent gesturing at KIA's ever-growing subscription rate is meaningless to the point of irrelevancy, at least with regards to their claims of representing the majority (or even a substantial majority) of gamers. At the outside, roughly twelve hundred threads were created by six hundred users, most of them their only thread, and six thousand users responded sixty thousand times, again most fewer than five times. That's the face of #GamerGate, not the thirty four-thousand subscribers to the subreddit (many of which may be deleted accounts or the same user on different devices anyway). Also, I learned that the Quinn/Gehr/Raytheon/Lifschitz congressional conspiracy from a couple months back was complete bunk, even if it was admitted the ridiculous chain of influence they were proposing. The CEO of Gehr and Quinn's boyfriend's father are two completely different people with the same name, which is apparently enough to power #GamerGate for a week anyway. Ethics! They do. Off the top of my head, Kurosawa Minamo from Azumanga Daioh, Kuroi Nanako from Lucky Star, Katsuragi Misato and Akagi Ritsuko from Neon Genesis Evangelion, and Taeko from Only Yesterday are all explicitly called "Christmas Cakes" as a way of showing how those characters push up against and don't conform to the stereotype, which seems broadly considered as old-fashioned and outmodeled. The teachers from Mahoromatic, Toradora!, and Puella Magi Madoka Magica are the only anime of which I can think wherein it's played straight, although they all have a disturbingly mean edge to them that points to some unresolved personal and/or cultural tension.

Yeah, that was going to be my advice, even though I'm pretty far away from the games industry. "I want to work with your people/at your business in whatever capacity" sells really well, especially if actually true, unless you're using it to beg for an entry-level job that isn't there.

I sent some money and asked for some Eva fanart whenever you had the time. If you don't, that's okay, too!

Having played through all the DLCs, there seems to be one boss that's incredibly popular, with no correlation to the "main path," and then the other two are dead as can be. In Sunken King it was Elena, in Old Iron King it was Alonne, and in Ivory King it was Aava. I honestly had to stop putting down my sign outside of Aava's fog door, after getting summoned a half-dozen times by different people who all didn't have the Eye of the Priestess but were fine with fighting an invisible boss that could one-shot them anyway.

Yeah, like CLWheeljack, I love it from a wordplay perspective, and I also generally like it in anime, where it's almost never played entirely straight, but it's an awful thing to label a woman. Still, the same concept is definitely present in Western cultures, but like many examples of "extreme" Japanese bigotry, it mostly boils down to them having a specific word or phrase for it that can more easily be called out than a media culture that starts ignoring women in their late twenties unless they're willing to transition to "mother" and/or "businesswoman" roles.

Yeah. If I were to guess, there was definitely a mandate at From that each DLC had to have a traversal-and-survival gauntlet in a single bonfire at the beginning encouraging co-op, especially since signs placed outside the DLC entrances by players who don't own the DLC can be seen at the start of each of said gauntlets, but no one actually likes playing them, because they're long, tedious, and prone to sudden host death. I didn't really care with the last two, because fighting three phantoms and fighting a buffed Smelter Demon both weren't really anything to write home about, but here the gauntlet is so creative and the fight itself is pretty interesting, but both are obscured by the deliberate difficulty spike. I had a sign up for a long time, maybe an hour, and didn't get summoned. The three Loyce Knights are just so easy to get and their presence doesn't raise the Burnt Loyce King's HP, which is incredibly low going solo, so I think most people rightfully don't want to co-op that fight. It bums me out, because it's a cool locale in which to fight, if nothing else.

I tried farming the horses out, but it seemed like it was taking forever, and then it didn't matter anyway, because my fresh Greatsword broke shortly after getting the second of the two lions down to half health. I'll also bring my lightning Zweihander next time, but right now I think I've had enough of watching my character walk in one direction in total whiteness for twenty minutes at a time. I really don't get this DLC. I love the level design, the frozen/unfrozen dichotomy, and the other two bosses, especially the Burnt Ivory King, who is great for how his stages progress. On the other hand, the Frigid Outskirts are just a blatant "fuck you" that doesn't encourage any kind of mastery at all (you either get lucky or you spend two or three hours grinding it down) and I just discovered that the Loyce Souls that dropped by the Burnt Loyce Knights during the King's boss fight are something of which I was supposed to be farming fifty (50!) if I wanted the "true" ending to the DLC, technically speaking. It feels like someone designed a great Dark Souls DLC, and then someone else went over it with a "video game bullshit" pass. Cool trek across a windswept field of snow, fighting off demon horses? Drop the visibility to zero and make the horses spawn continually when you're nearby. Awesome multi-man and multi-stage boss fight? Make the first stage drop something unique that needs to be farmed extensively.

Inclusivity! Diversity! Telling people to fuck off because their language skills are a bit rough! Man, who wouldn't want to be a part of #GamerGate at this point?

I was about to come in here and praise the Ivory King DLC for having the best level design, in terms of tight and interwoven corridors that give you a great sense of scale through vistas and drops... but then I decided to duck into the Frigid Outskirts and, seriously, fuck the person who was in charge of designing that part of the DLC. All the Crowns have one boss that's usually a co-op focused remix that you have to pass something of a gauntlet to reach, on which I'm solidly neutral, but whoever thought that the logical culmination of that idea was a literally blinding blizzard full of infinitely-respawning demon horses, each with twenty five-hundred hitpoints and the moveset of the Chimera from the first Dark Souls DLC, can fuck right off. I never really bought into some people's arguments that Dark Souls 2 was ruined by From Software buying into its own "prepare to die" marketing, but then I play these DLCs, which are all better designs than virtually anything in the base game, and yet the density of little dev-sent "fuck you" bits is higher, not lower, so I can't help but feel like they're core to designer intent and that intent is sometimes to make me eat shit until I find a way to thwart or just bypass said intent. Yeah, I've also realized that the ice-type enemies are just a lot harder on certain types of weapons. I've started diversifying my melee arsenal quite a bit and the difference was, er... striking.

These comments actually made me curious about female-directed anime, and I was actually rewarded somewhat? Female directors make up less than ten percent of anime directors on a good year, and they usually have to work years as keyframe and storyboard artists before they're given a shot, but this list surprised me. KyoAni has two? That's cool. I'm halfway inclined to submit the K-On! movie, since it's a movie about women by a woman that destroys the Bechdel test because there's barely any men in the movie to be talked to or about.

I haven't really been able to notice the effects of the patch. Without the knuckle ring, my greatsword seems to wear out at roughly the same rate (ie, it's almost gone after a run from one bonfire to another in the DLC).

Ugh, you just made me realize that I hate living in the city a little bit because I don't get to hear lawnmowers in the summer.

I'll keep looking for it! I remember the crux of its argument being that the manga version is important for knowing how to tie a lot of stuff into a coherent whole, which is not the biggest recommendation but something that warrants a close rewatching in the near future. Nah, I'm just having trouble addressing two people simultaneously. I probably shouldn't have tried it. I guess I'm a bit more blase about the fundamental accessibility of other cultures' works in totality because I'm a medieval historian and spend nine days out of ten reading charters and chronicles, written in a foreign language by people whose mindset is almost entirely unrecoverable to me. I'm not saying that it makes me an expert in obscure stuff, just that I've had nearly a decade to get used to the idea that most interesting things are impossible to understand entirely in the way that they were intended, and it's up to me to derive my own understanding that is functional and meaningful, not authoritative by any means. If I've talked past your point and missed it entirely, I'm sorry. I've really just not been on my game the past few days. All I've been watching lately is that awful travesty of a show, The Disappearance of Nagato Yuki-chan, which might be the first show I've hate-watched since college. I need to finish Patlabor. I always need to finish Patlabor.

Sorry for getting my goat up, guys. I just spend a lot of time watching anime and enjoy extracting some greater meaning from it, at least when it's worthy of it. I know that a lot of anime is creatively compromised, most often through commercial considerations, and I find that a frustrating obstacle to useful analysis, but I don't think it's a particularly Japanese thing. I have a raft of TV shows like Sons of Anarchy that I've quit because the script was done and the arcs were complete, but the show was still slated for two more seasons after that. That's not even counting stuff like Hell on Wheels, which was a mess from the beginning and made no effort to cohere more than being a tone piece about angry men workin' on the railroad. So yeah, when an anime strikes me right, I usually dig deeper and, if I find something that doesn't work for me, I do my best to research the context, to see if it's something for which I'm just not carrying the appropriate baggage. Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn't. Sometimes it's hard to tell, like it is with KILL la KILL, because it's a little bit of both? I don't know, moving on. I used to agree about FLCL, personally, but recently I was reading an article that I can't seem to find it my browser history, which pointed out a lot of the ways that each episode is tightly clustered around a central theme, which together attack a lived experience of childhood in a holistic way. Reading through some of the character profiles and episode summaries again, I was impressed by how deeply FLCL is about the desire for children to be adults and the tendency for adults to be children, as well as how those desires both come from similar but not the same places. I feel pretty strongly right now, although probably not always, that FLCL only appears scatterbrained because it suits its themes to be that way. Also, cicadas make me think of summer nights, but then I grew up in Texas, where annual cicadas are pretty common in July and August. After over a decade of watching anime, it hasn't been hard to extend that association to summer days. I honestly think it's a masterstroke in Evangelion that the cicadas are ubiquitous, as a way of conveying the heat and that the world has been ruined in a very specific way.