Gormongous

I've actually been holding out on organizing another 'cast until we have the final version, just so that everyone who contributed can listen and see what things they can improve upon. I've also thought about and practiced a bit being a more involved host, because I assume it's easier to edit out "Let's move on" or "Can you restate that" than to try and hew meaning out of five people hemming and hawwing about what Gintama's appeal is.

I know that outrage over the Sad Puppies fiasco hasn't gained much traction here, and that's totally okay, but the most famous person on the slate, Jim Butcher, finally tweeted something resembling his opinion on it and it's... well, it's what you expect from a more populist author who occasionally makes missteps in areas of social justice but generally just keeps his head down: https://twitter.com/longshotauthor/status/588441394806591488 The increasingly ubiquitous stance that opinions are bad and everyone should strive not to have any, unless they're benignly consumerist, is really upsetting to me.

Yeah, the discussion on We Hunted the Mammoth and videos that the so-called "Honey Badger Brigade" have posted make it clear that those women showed up spoiling for a fight and hoping to get kicked out at some point so that they could claim misogyny or bigotry or censorship or lizard people. The amazing thing is that the one panel they tried to disrupt was actually quite willing to accept the valid parts of the Honey Badger criticisms and to explain the misunderstandings that characterize most of the rest, which totally threw them off their script and left them bored and ready to bounce after maybe thirty minutes of grousing and occasional disruptions. My favorite part, courtesy of a WHTM commenter:

I kind of don't want to get into this, because it's totally just my gut feeling against someone else's, but I agree with you completely. I can basically see no scenario where having an old-ass Harrison Ford, who really hasn't put in a decent performance since K-19: The Widowmaker thirteen years ago, doddering around the scene is going to make the movie as a whole better for anyone besides someone who just gets their rocks off from recognizing famous actors in classic franchises. Having him show up to ferry Natalie Portman's clone, the ever-gasping black guy, and the soccer-ball robot somewhere, maybe give them some advice about how he didn't used to believe in the Force but now he does, will be even worse than Spock's increasingly pointless appearances in the new Star Trek movies, if only because Ford has at best a fifth of the gravitas that Leonard Nimoy had and therefore makes a poor choice if passing the torch absolutely has to happen. The best thing that could possibly come out of his casting is him walking into frame, saying something to the effect of "Gee, this new movie sure is great," and then walking out of the movie for good, in which case why did they even bother, except to make the fan rags lose their shit, of course. Nah, that's not precisely true. If they do Star Wars meets Space Cowboys and the bulk of the action is geriatric movie stars spouting cranky old-person versions of classic lines while their CGI Orville Redenbacher bodies do triple backflips through laser-filled firefights, that'll be great in a supremely terrible kind of way.

You are so lucky that you have missed part of the internet being set aflame by confused nerds blasting Pillars of Eternity for having absolutely no romance options whatsoever... unless you're mocking that fact, in which case, cool.

I mean, what I immediately think about the game sclpls linked is that China's history is not one of dramatic military expansion but one of sustained cultural influence, diplomatic hegemony, and occasional internal disturbances. I really hope that OE Devs (their business name, which unfortunately must be Oriental Empires Developers) is able to come up with a series of systems that reward stability, conservatism, and tradition in players' strategies... but, of course, I'm not optimistic. I remember clyde and I talking for days about what a postcolonial Civilization would look like and coming up with almost nothing. It's hard to think outside of the box, and I don't know if decades of training and experience make it easier or harder.

The only downside is that I have to go a while without some of the voices that I really value, but new voices are always good, especially if they plug so easily into the Thumbs vibe, and I can always count on Nick Breckon to return every twenty-odd episodes anyway.

Oh, I'm sure they managed to squirrel away some of the money, given the history of donations at AVFM.

Okay, about twenty minutes into the second full stream, Sean (mostly) gets over his extreme aversion to fighting multiple enemies, which is amazing. He has a five-minute tear that's as good as any Souls player of mid-level skill. He still is i) not confident about his ability to anticipate and disrupt enemy attacks, leading him to ii) back up too far and dodge too much, especially before trying to attack, which iii) gives enemies the initiative and allows them to overwhelm him sometimes. He's trying to pull guys like it's an MMO, but practically every one of his deaths has come from some combination of him running away, letting the enemies clump together, backing himself into a literal or figurative corner, depleting all of his stamina dodging, and then dying from enemies who could have been dispatched singly with one or two swings as they came. I imagine that him figuring out how to time his attacks to hit an approaching enemy the moment they enter his range, without giving them time to initiate their own attack, will be joyous for him. I'm sure that Sean really appreciates some stranger analyzing his style of play, right?

I guess by "fan wank," I mean seeing something cool, fixating on faults, and then trying to explain them away. I was mostly being tongue-in-cheek, this is no Lightsaber-hilt-gate.

Or it jumped out of hyperspace into the planet, although I'm willing to bet money that the mandate to the production staff was "have a big Star Destroyer crashed down," so we're just doing fan wank here.

Looks like Anym was last active April 6, and last posted January 21 in this very thread. That seems somewhat damning. Who's next on the list, me? Jeez. Yeah, I can do it, if we agree that it's the right step. I'd be just as willing to give it to SBM or Cordeos again, since both of them had single-digit reigns.

I'm watching them archived, although Twitch tries to trick you in every way possible to think that they aren't somehow. And no, you don't understand. In an hour of play, Sean used ten molotovs, mostly to pull single enemies away from groups, and fired two bullets, one of which was probably by accident. I'm sure he gets over his hangup later, but the fact that he can make bullets out of his health, which is relatively easy to replenish among trash mobs, seems to escape him for now and it was driving me mad.

Watching Sean learn Bloodborne, I am about to burn down my apartment with anxiety that Sean is throwing around molotovs left and right but rationing bullets like they're made of gold and not just enemy drops. I haven't even played Bloodborne, I've just played enough of the previous games to know a rare resource when I see it. Still, I can't help but smile hearing him flip out with joy about playing his first Souls game.

I love how inane their smoking gun is: It's like, despite all the games they claim to have played that had to have had military hardware manufacturers and defense contractors at the center of a dense web of commercial and social ties (in short, the military-industrial complex), it never occurred to them to consider how much of that was actually real and in what ways. Now that they've realized it and done their digging, the best they can unearth is that one part of a massive company represents the products of one part of another massive company (among dozens of others) in a single foreign country, a relationship so slight that neither of those companies sees fit even to publicize it outside of said country, and yet that the tenuous connection of two otherwise unrelated human beings to that economic edifice constitutes absolutely damning corruption. There are no words. What exactly is happening? Is Quinn making her boyfriend ask his dad to tell the Brazilian division of his company to give one of their vendors a little extra in the quarterly contract (or just threaten to stop representing their products) so that the vendor's parent company will donate more money to the campaign of a member of Congress (or, again, just threaten to reduce contributions) so that she is willing and able to hold hearings about internet harassment that Quinn can attend in order to further spread her lies? Who has so much time and money that they're willing to spend in order to risk so much and accomplish so little, besides #GamerGate itself? Actually, I'm more surprised that they didn't also seize upon IMI and IAI among the companies that Gehr International represents, then we could fill the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion" bingo space, too.

If it was me, then my bad! I think my keyboard is pretty quiet, but people always seem to complain.

I'll take Reus, if no one else wants it.

I don't have much experience with kids younger than their mid-teens, but this is the best advice, I think. Be there for him, if you're comfortable with it, but make sure you're not becoming a surrogate for an entire circle of real-life friends. There's nothing more concrete you can (or should) do to stop the bullying, anyway, so it's best just to give him some of the strength to weather it.

I think it's all from the recording of Nick in episode 58, "A Castro Situation," which is the only time that he's been able to say a full sentence without interruption.

I just realized that Sean and Chris both used the same horrifying portmanteau of "no sweat off my back/brow" and "no skin off my nose/teeth" that my friend used to say by accident but now says because he knows that it makes me flinch. Also, I was thinking, and doing a lore dump at the beginning of your game is kind of like demanding that someone learn their multiplication tables before you'll teach them math. In the abstract, they're both the most efficient way to habituate someone to a new set of rules, but there are just so many other ways to do it these days that forcing rote consumption and memorization without any kind of framework is mostly just a sign of someone who really doesn't know better (or who thinks their stuff is good enough that they don't need to know better).

Yeah, I think this is the most obvious fault with Pulaski. Most things in science fiction are standing in for something else, so when you have a character claiming that an android (which looks like a human, acts like a human, and is played by a human) isn't human, there isn't much room for subtlety. It's just having a character denounce a surrogate minority "inhuman" and leaving it there.

By "gunplay," I mean the operation of firearms in combat conditions. Girls/guns shoot other girls/guns in Upotte! but it's rare and avoids any focus on the damage caused by bullets on the human body. The show is much more interested in the stress of prolonged usage of a gun outside the idealized environment of a shooting range. Like I said, a lot of people probably find it gross that the combat bears more resemblance to an Airsoft match than to an actual battle, but I don't think that it's advancing the thesis that guns are harmless toys. It's just focusing on the guns themselves, rather than the humans, who in this case technically aren't even present in the combat. Anyway, it's available for streaming on Crunchyroll, so you can check out the first few episodes if you like. Fair warning, the first one is grosser than the rest combined and dwells excessively on the implications of a human teacher "handling" a girl/gun student, so it's totally fair to get turned off by that. Cancel everything, we're declaring this the Third Impact podcast.

I went after Morrigan in Dragon Age: Origins, because Claudia Black and because they shove the possibility of her in your face from square one, but after the first time we hooked up, she let loose the stream of Damaged Character Bullshit that Bioware has gotten a bit too good at writing. I didn't really want that in my Dragon Age as well as my Mass Effect, so I started flirting around, had fun with Zevran for a while, and then ended up with Leliana, who was a lot more interesting and giving than Morrigan. Surprise, though, because Leliana is damaged too, albeit in very different ways and for very different reasons! It made me want to date Aveline really bad in Dragon Age 2, but she wasn't an option beyond the flirting I did religiously, so I went for Merrill, who was cute and Welsh but... surprise, also horribly damaged! There are other kinds of women, Bioware. Kaiden's biggest character point was that his equipment gave him headaches sometimes. I don't know what else we were expected to do besides ditch him.

I dated Liara in the first game, because Ashley was a space-racist and I wanted none of that. I still sent Kaiden instead of her to die, though. Second game, I tried to make it with Jack, but deeply disliked how her personality turned once we got serious, so I reloaded (oops!) and went after Tali instead. Man, that was tepid, and I got so much more out of Liara in the Shadow Broker DLC. I didn't play the third game, but I think the DLC for the second would have convinced me that it's best to be loyal to Liara anyway.

It's not a bad list at all, especially considering how far it strays from the 1997-2005 "golden age" consensus of anime, but I do find it a bit odd that a lot of Kahn's "further reading/viewing" choices are... more manga or anime by the same person? That's not really how beginner lists should work. They should make connections between works by disparate authors to give an impression of the medium's full breadth, not just guide you through Fumi Yoshinaga's full bibliography because she's so good. I also question praising Michiko to Hatchin specifically for being set in Brazil, when I thought it came off as the typical "United States of South America" setting that you see in a dozen other anime from Gungrave to Black Lagoon, but that's a more personal opinion that's probably not as valid.