Gormongous

To be completely fair, for most of the medieval period, marriage as an institution was mostly an ad-hoc process meant to make a couple that was already one physically and mentally be one spiritually and legally. It was only with the rise of state power near the end of the Middle Ages, on towards early modernity, where marriage became more about power dynamics and subjugation. It's just another of the things that money ruined, really, but I almost think that a medieval priest still would have had a better opinion of free marriage for all sexualities than a modern conservative, for all that the latter hearkens back to the former, because the latter never seems to talk about love. But yeah, those Obergefell arguments were unreal. They were a bizarre pastiche of impressionistic opinions about marriage, cobbled together into a chimera that perfectly fits an unexamined belief of what marriage ought to be. I'm surprised you could stand to hear the whole thing. EDIT: Also, Christ... I'm reading some of the ancient Greek stuff in those arguments. Hey, you know what else for which there's no precedent in ancient Greece? Female citizenship. Marriage between a man and a woman had to have a legal dimension in Athens, because otherwise the woman would literally cease to exist, in the eyes of the law, once she reached adulthood and left her father's house to be married. Two men, both citizens, wouldn't need that, and the ancient Greeks were always loathe to make laws about "private" matters unless totally necessary. Meanwhile, read Plato and decide whether marriage between a man and a woman or an affair between two men is more valued. Guess which is treated as an often-inconvenient necessity and which makes the couple "more blessed than ordinary mortals"? Historical arguments for or against the nature of marriage are all garbage. Marriage has always been whatever a society has needed it to be, and the problem now is that half of our society needs it to be inclusive and half "needs" it to be exclusive. There's no reason to invent precedent for that. Angerrrrrr.

I don't have much to contribute, but I love that Lou Avery moved to Japan to work with Tatsunoko Production, which was just entering a decade of prosperity as one of the first television-focused anime studios in Japan, before the mid-eighties crash wrecked it and all the talent left. If it makes any haters of Lou feel better, his fifteen thousand-dollar "down payment" is probably most of the money that he was going to see, because cash-starved Japanese companies preferred to buy and sell rights for production and distribution outright, rather than chance it on fees and residuals. Tezuka Productions famously sold a single season of Astro Boy to a smaller subsidiary of NBC, mostly concerned with low-level syndication, for chicken feed in order to make ends meet. They thought they were selling it as a loss-leader to NBC proper to entice the huge company to pay out the big bucks to fund more episodes, but NBC was not enticed, because twenty-six episodes was enough to fill in some holes in its annual schedule of reruns in places like the Midwest. Hence Tezuka's "limited animation" became the standard for the entire industry. Totally, and any non-ridiculous person reacts to it how Pete (initially) did.

Yeah, as you can tell from my posts, I'm not particularly good at the Souls games, mostly because I'm too cautious to lower my shield when I should and I'm too attracted to the aesthetic of knights in full armor with weapons bigger than them, but it rarely takes me more than a half-dozen tries for me to ace a boss. With that in mind, all the DLC bosses I've fought have been harder than just about everything except the Gargoyles with my tank build and the Ancient Dragon with... well, anyone. Sinh's equipment degradation, toxicity, and occasional instant KOs mean that he's hard to hit at all without someone else running around getting aggro from him, and the black phantom trio and Elena are both hard to manage in terms of multiple enemies that can't really be ditched or kited. Honestly, it looks like "multiple enemies" is more the theme of the Sunken King DLC than the rest. The Old Iron King DLC looks like it's about unpredictable move sets and inconsistent tells, the Ivory King DLC looks like it's about mid-battle gimmicks and buffs. I understand that I'm close to fighting Sir Alonne in the Old Iron King DLC, I'll report back how it was if anyone's interested.

The best I've got going, besides Teekyuu, is just The Disappearance of Nagato Yuki-chan, which is mostly going to be useful in a few years to show critics of The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya what a "safe" adaptation of that property that just panders to moe looks like. It's so boring and sterile, I almost can't believe it's an actual anime being made. Also, I know that being down on Shirobako is in vogue here right now, but I found a list of characters and the real-life figures to whom they refer on Reddit, which was abandoned by the tenth episode, probably for the creator's sanity, but gave me an interesting piece of information that I didn't know: the eminently annoying and incompetent production assistant Taro is the director's caricatured self-insert, taking himself to task for how he was before he came to grips with the commitment of becoming a respected member of the production team. It makes me like Mizushima Tsutomu that much more, for being able to do that to himself in an anime that gives characters plenty of excuses for being annoying or useless.

Yeah, it's a really exceptional movie, not least for how it takes viewers' tendencies to anticipate the direction a movie is headed and runs with it. It's good to know that Alex Garland has a good third act in him, especially after the beautiful but disappointing script that is Sunshine.

I think that the Puzzling Stone Sword (is that the right name?) has bugged scaling (it says S in dex, but really it's D) that keeps most power-gamers away. Also, yeah. Elena's the Nashandra clone. The only difference is that she occasionally summons mobs, including a half-HP Velstadt clone, which makes her a bit hard to handle without summons. Killing her opens the way to the dragon fight, which I aced as a magic-based character but which was a brutal slog as a melee-based one. Did you find the hidden bonfire, halfway down the ruined temple to Elena? That makes boss runs a bit less tedious with her.

The latest update of Avast, which is rapidly becoming the worst best free virus-scan software out there, has made their "file shield" feature a lot more aggressive. As far as I can tell, and I can't tell much, it prevents programs from writing files to disk without a brief interpolated scan, which apparently works fine for most programs but makes Bittorrent, which I guess has a more complex system for disk caching, choke and die in a matter of seconds. Solution? Go to Avast's "file shield" options, add *.!bt to the list of exceptions, and make sure that the corresponding option is activated in Bittorrent's options. The system will still poop itself a bit when Bittorrent flushes to disk, but at least it doesn't stop your torrent every fifteen seconds. Seriously, between this and Avast's "secure virtual machines" feature creating massive restore points regardless of whether that system's even turned on in Windows, I'm beginning to question my continued use of it. But what's the alternative? AVG's also terrible and that's the only one with nearly the same ratings.

Have you seen the updated effects for the TNG blu-rays? It's almost a "what could have been" scenario for sci-fi digital graphics, if fake realistic shaky-cam effects hadn't taken over the industry in the early 2000s. Yeah, I honestly think it's a matter of preference, possibly linked to what Star Trek you saw in what order, which defined for each of us what Star Trek actually is. I watched VOY first, so DS9 was kind of a revelation, both in terms of cast dynamic (VOY is a couple of powerhouses, mostly Bob Picardo and Tim Russ, batting against whatever softballs the rest of the cast is throwing, plus Kate Mulgrew doing her own thing) and in terms of a strong plot for the entire series with something meaningful to say about Star Trek. The end of season five and the first few episodes of season six represent the limits of what Star Trek can be for me. Compared to it, TNG is a bit too stately and impersonal at times. I've watched it all twice, but I think it really is just diff'rent strokes.

In case, like me, you were wondering about the "Please, call me" plumber: I admit, I imagined him balder and sadder...

I mean, I understand your point, but personally I think that it's important for DS9 to be Star Trek. A central question of DS9 is what happens when a utopia has to fight for its existence and what does that even look like. The answer, of course, is that people fail and fall, but the utopia survives them. The important point here is that I don't think it would have been nearly as difficult or interesting a question to answer if there weren't literal decades of Roddenberry-style optimism against which it has to set itself. Looking at another Ronald D. Moore "politics on a spaceship" joint, one of Battlestar Galactica's early and enduring weaknesses is that it has a lot of trouble getting its viewers to view holding onto democratic principles as a rational decision for its characters. Because its setting is sufficiently removed from our real-life experience that our actual politics are practically a non-issue with it, most people that I've known have had no problem agreeing with the most radical characters' stance in BSG that a military dictatorship or some other authoritarian system is the appropriate response to a near-extinction crisis, a flaw in audience framing and character motivation that requires several charismatic actors to stump constantly for democracy as a matter of course, just to raise its profile among the available options. I think DS9 works because it doesn't have to worry about that. Star Trek pre-DS9 might be a little dull, but it's still enjoyable and memorable, which makes the Federation something for which people are justified to be defending in DS9, occasionally through compromise or hypocrisy, rather than just a pie-in-the-sky ideal that doesn't have any grounding in the characters' actions.

I beat all of the Crown of the Sunken King DLC! Man, it's tough. Turns out, there's plenty of multiplayer still, but only for the one necessary boss fight, with the Nashandra clone. Everyone just hates the other two, and I can't blame them. The trio is just a pain to fight, since they're basically black phantoms with backstab and estus, and I only really beat them because, as an unforeseen miracle, both of the heavy hitters aggro'd on my NPC summons. I killed the archer, backstabbed the lightly armored guy, and then barely killed the heavily armored guy, literally getting him down to three health and then getting caught in a combo because I thought he was dead. The other guy, Sinh the Slumbering Dragon, is someone that no one wants to fight because he's basically Kalameet from the first Dark Souls' DLC, only his model destroys weapon durability and two of his attacks break guard now. I could die happy never having to fight that fight again. Wow, fuck that. Shrine of Amana is already one of two areas that stands in the way of a Dark Souls 2 replay (the other being certain stretches of Earthen Peak, for some reason). EDIT: And fuck me, Crown of the Old Iron King is so much harder than the Sunken King. Sometimes it's in a good way, like the precarious platforming and navigation of a massive hollow tower, and sometimes it's in a bad way, like the stupid Ashen Idols gimmick that basically encourages a suicide run to disable them. It probably didn't help that I switched from my greatsword-wielding tank character to my dodge-happy wizard, but I'm going to blame the game instead.

Agreed. DS9 starts out as "TNG but they stay in one place" and remains that way for almost three seasons, ranging from decent to poor in quality. It's only once they contact the Dominion that the show finds its own voice as something different (and, again, better in my opinion) than TNG's vision of idealistic but staid sci-fi. Likewise, Bashir languishes as a flirty idiot, because why not introduce a character through his failed romances and conversations with strangers, until the writers start building him out as a person to complement his relationship with O'Brien, and then he becomes one of the stronger characters on the show. DS9's a grower, not a shower, and I can say from experience, as someone who watched both series all the way through for the first time as an adult, that anyone who's soldiered through the two frankly terrible first seasons of TNG can do the same with DS9 and be rewarded just as much.

I've read it just recently, and I agree with FuryBoy. The first two books are tremendous, the Titus Groan especially, but the last one suffers from the Chapterhouse Dune issue, where the author decides to take the series in a different direction and then dies before that direction really starts to make sense. Reading the first two books lets you end in a good place and is totally sufficient to appreciate Peake's mastery of the form.

http://www.tettix.net/lordran/lordran.html

Well, reading Bjorn's posts inspired me to finish the DLC with the second of my characters. I'm sad to report that at my level, which is just over three and a half million souls, the Crown of the Sunken King couldn't be more dead in vanilla Dark Souls 2. I've literally just been sitting outside the fog gate for the infamous trio's boss fight for over two hours. I figured that I'd throw down a sign, help someone else beat it while reminding myself of the chamber's layout, and then summon my own help once I'm human. Nope, nada. There were more people active in the first Dark Souls on PC two years after release than there have been today in Dark Souls 2. This'll probably drive me to buy Scholar of the First Sin someday, more than any actual features. EDIT: Quit after thirty more minutes. Before I did, I threw on a ring of sacrifice (or whatever it's called) and tried to solo it. I died after a few minutes, but it seems doable, just very boring and prone to error. Kite the three around the chamber until you get the archer alone, hit her once or twice, then repeat. Once she's dead, do the same with the guy in Alva's armor, since he's slightly faster than the guy in Havel's armor, and then it's just one-on-one with the Havel guy. It's not impossible, but it would take at least fifteen minutes without much of a mistake, which is not something I relish at all. I remember a few boss fights in the main game also being like this and it bums me out to think that they'll be functionally unbeatable when the server populations move on to the next Souls game.

Yeah, maybe I'm a cynic, but from the few large-scale mod projects on which I've worked, that seems like exactly enough money to heighten the recurrent drama and squabbles, but not enough money to actually smooth anything over or make it workable as a real project with full-time resources.

Xenophobia aside, I'm pretty sure that they want a new monarchy, which can avail itself of all the products of science and rationality (you know, one of the main outcomes of the Enlightenment, but shh) in order to avoid all the pitfalls of medieval and early modern monarchs. I'm guessing no one's had the heart to tell them that "enlightened despotism" was already a thing and it pretty much sowed the seeds of social change... or they do know and they think that Frederick the Great of Prussia was just doing it wrong, in classic internet fashion. I mean, sci-fi's also one of the few genres where you can write about a truly oppressive or abhorrent society without total condemnation from your literary peers. The hilarious thing is, just like #GamerGate, no one's taking their toys away, but the fact that another story about a hyper-fascist military dictatorship triumphing over an even more monstrous foe is not winning awards anymore is just an unbearable situation to them.

I had incredible longevity! I ruled some thirty-odd years, but I guess maybe my wife had a low health score that she passed to my children? Video game genetics is confusing.

No, Edidin makes a big deal about how Jean has absolute knowledge of the truth, courtesy of her telepathy, and the reason that she's making a hash of it is because she's a teenager. You can talk about the emotional realism of coming out all you want, but it's definitely weird for that to be facilitated by such a perfect arbiter, who can accuse someone confused about their sexuality that they're lying to themselves and be depicted as in the right about it. Basically what Big said, especially this: Like, the only reason it's presented as okay for Jean to pull that shit is because she knows better than Bobby, because she's a telepath and because she's more modern-thinking, and I can't get over that. The coming-out story could be messy without Jean walking all over her friend in her sassy "I'm a good ally" way. I'm clearly speaking from a lot less experience here, though, so I'll quiet down. No, I agree, and I probably didn't articulate myself very well in my comment. It's just the usual problem in a lot of genre fiction that there are these wild magical powers everywhere, and somehow they're never used to make a situation better beyond how it could be in real life. If Jean's a telepath, surely she can feel Bobby's fear and confusion, so maybe she could use that to be the perfect facilitator who helps him confront his sexual identity without ever pushing him outside his comfort zone, instead of just dumping all of it on him at once and then pushing him into banter about how great she is and how gay he is. Yeah, sorry. I don't even read comics, besides when I remember that Saga exists. I'll shut up.

Thank you for posting that link, just because it contains an image that captures, all at once, the reason that Dark Souls is so treasured by me, not just as a game, but as a story.

I remember the novel where this happened. It was, not incidentally, the last Star Wars novel that I ever read, though my interest had already been flagging badly since The Phantom Menace. They were starting a new time period, the ultimately quite soapy New Jedi Order series for which a genocidal invasion of the galaxy by the Yuuzhan Vong was planned, and the order came down from somewhere on the heights of Lucasfilm and Del Rey that the author needed to show that they meant business when they called it the new Jedi Order. They chose to kill Chewbacca, because he had the double bonus of both the longest-lived and the most incidental of the main non-droid cast from the movies. The entire thing just dripped with stupid to read: they're evacuating a planet because a moon is falling from orbit, I can't remember if it's by accident or enemy action, and Chewie just... stays behind? He can't make it to the shuttle for hand-waving reasons, so he just stands there and tries to stop the moon from falling on him with his arms. I'm not even sure I finished the book, not because I didn't want anyone from the original trilogy killed, but because the message sent by killing Chewie like that was just so awful. Still, I'll always stand behind a big chunk of the EU. The Thrawn trilogy, the X-Wing series and its spinoffs, and even parts of the Corellian and Dark Empire trilogies are irrefutably solid, particularly in the otherwise shaky realm of franchise novel tie-ins, and I hope that they at least inspire parts of the new movies, although I'm probably more willing to bet money that "not invented here" syndrome will rule the day.

I agree, it's mostly a good piece, but I guess I don't understand about how telepathy works in the X-Men universe, because Edidin stakes the entirety of her section about bisexual erasure (besides the bit where she says that sometimes bisexuality really is half-closeted homosexuality, which is whatever) on the argument that it's possible and even expected for a telepath to know you better than you know yourself, even in terms of basic unconscious drives, and for them to be able to tell when you're lying, even when you yourself have believed the lie for years. It makes me feel like the X-Men should be using their telepaths to give infallible tests for personality and vocation, too. I mean, I'm not even saying that it's an irredeemable argument, which really depends on the light in which it's presented, but it's definitely the weakest part of an otherwise broadly empathetic piece.

I enjoyed that a lot. I especially take Sandifer's point that there are at least two types of people in speculative fiction: those who revel in the power of the future and our imagining of it, and those who use its genre conventions to excuse reactionary and regressive politics. Sci-fi and fantasy have always had as much of a problem as wargaming with closet Nazis finding them a good outlet for socially unacceptable impulses and sympathies. Probably because there's no outright category for it, even though "Related Work" might suffice, and the way that Hugo rules work makes it almost impossible to change that.

I felt that Don was a little put off by the advances of Sally's friend, but he made a clear decision to roll with it when she took a cigarette. I think Sally's reaction is justified in that case, especially if Don's talking about these girls' bright futures while going through the motions of womanizing.

To add onto PC Part Picker, I am a big advocate of TechReport's system guide, not necessarily to choose specific hardware (although I've used it a half-dozen times in the past four years to that end), but just to get an idea of where the state of the art is in budget, mid-line, and high-end PCs.