Gormongous

Yeah, our culture has a very limited number of ways to signify femininity compared to masculinity. It must be frustrating as a creator (and as a woman) to come up against those. The crude-but- effective way seems to be flat out telling your audience that a character is a woman, then making her be however you want, but that lacks some subtlety. Actually, one of the most interesting experiences for me in recent years has been reading Ann Leckie's Ancillary Justice, a sci-fi novel where the default gender and pronoun are female, and feeling my brain totally fail to cope. Also, this is an inane statement, but it really bums me out to live in a culture where even a small percentage of women feel they have to denigrate and repudiate their own gender to be recognized as people. In my teens, I would have been really enthusiastic to meet a girl who said that she liked T&A just as much as a guy, but now it is the furthest thing from who I am.

That may have been McMillen's intent, but he's definitely mocking anyone sensitive to anything in his game. At the very least, ridiculing trigger warnings (at length) is not targeted at Nintendo or even at game companies in general, because none of them know (let alone care) what a trigger warning is. I never had a problem with motifs or themes in Binding of Isaac because I thought McMillen was very clear that this was a personal work done to exorcise his own demons. To see him so unsympathetic that some people find his offensive game offensive, without any apparent awareness that his demons might be shared by other people and therefore might upset them, makes me like it and him a lot less. EDIT: Also, what Jennegatron said. He puts racial diversity, crisis hotlines, fat acceptance, slut shaming, and trigger warnings on blast. The one instance of mocking people who are offended by Isaac maybe being something other than straight hardly counterbalances a screed overwhelming directed at issues of social justice, about which Nintendo cares not at all.

Trying to unlock some of these buildings, I turned off all my police stations and closed all my medical facilities. The crime rate is 21% and average health is 63%. Both have been stable at that for nearly a year. The game is screaming at me to fix the "problems" of having no police stations or hospitals, but my population's at 105,000 and rising, my weekly income's $20,500 and rising, and happiness has stabilized in the low 80s. This is a little disappointing, to be honest. How can a city function for a year without any policing or healthcare?

Ah, that's why the mainstream gaming press is so enthusiastic when a triple-A game comes out, even if it's been reported to death for years in advance. To preserve their impartiality, they had to suppress the memories of all those previews and interviews after writing them, so it's a huge surprise for them when this massive game comes out. GTA V, with three characters and forty-nine square miles, who knew! Where'd it even come from? On a less keen note of ridicule, it really is bizarre to have so many people demand repeatedly that journalists not use anything that could possibly result in superior coverage of games. No personal relationships allowed, no fancy writing allowed, no critical frameworks allowed, no references from other games or media allowed, no overlooked titles or perspectives allowed... Seriously, when will journalists get the hint that their job just entails rewriting press releases in long form for previews and feature lists in long form for reviews?

Having looked at a complete list of spring 2015 anime, I actually am interested in a few, although none completely unironically. The Ghost in the Shell ARISE series will get a hate watch or an actual watch based on what parts of the OVA it builds itself around, moving forward. The Melancholy of Nagato Yuki-chan will get a hate watch because I love the characters and the franchise but not the toxic moe shit that this spinoff is all about. Teekyuu and Robot Girls Z+ have both had good seasons, but they're too short to be an actual commitment, so they don't really count as something to which I'm looking forward. Even though I want to care, I really can't make myself, not about Trigger's new anime. Every time I look at the art and read the synopsis, my heart just drops to rock bottom. I might take you up on that, although a small part of me would love to have you on the putative show instead. Not everyone needs to have spent hours training their ears to recognize voice actors, and you just did a great job summarizing what's disappointing about When Marnie Was There (and everything else Yonebayashi's directed, which is just The Secret World of Arietty, although I can't be surprised that his works are psychologically simplistic when he's a longtime key animator suddenly promoted to director for a major studio at an incredibly young age).

I watched Errant Signal's video about "peak Star Wars" and now I kind of wish I could start a book club for the Star Wars EU novels. They were such a huge part of my literary diet as a kid, to the point that I'd buy one at Borders and then wait up to six months before reading it to savor the anticipation, and then The Phantom Menace happened and I never bothered with them again, except for a brief re-read of the Thrawn Trilogy to see if it was actually good (I'd rate it a middling or low B as a sci-fi novel). It'd be really fun to go through the bad as well as the good with smart people who've read a lot, but the trick there is convincing people to read a Star Wars novel (and then to read some more).

You sound like you've really thought this through, Codicier. I usually tend towards the logistical end of things, but I have no experience whatsoever with telecom or audio tech, so I'm willing to defer to you or to whomever else is willing to put in the labor there. I'm also happy to be the "lead" host, if that's something that we agree is needful, although I worry (as ever) that I lack the charisma and talent to helm a podcast. Anyway, I've got a Snowball mic sitting in my Amazon shopping cart, so if we have enough people in this thread (and in this forum) willing to be part of a pool of hosts, I say we move forward. We can start a separate thread where people can voice their interest and their contributions, decide on mics and software, and fine-tune the subject and themes. I don't mind having a "Whatcha watchin'" segment followed by a panel discussion of an up-to-date (or classic) anime as a whole, but I worry that other people, who rightfully do not watch as much anime as me (generally, half a cour a week), will not be able to contribute to that format in the way they'd prefer. Anyway, it's definitely up for discussion. There are probably things wrong with Shirobako, but I really can't see them, because for the last few months I've been stewing in a perfect mix of Japanese media about the Japanese media industry, by watching Shirobako, Otaku no Video, Aoi Honoo, Bakuman, and Kantoku Fuyuki Todoki and by reading The Notenki Memoirs. It's a niche subgenre that doesn't really exist in the West and I totally love it, because it's a straight procedural about an obscure subject with which I'm already well acquainted and that's really rare.

Bummer! First broken quest for me. Warning: if you want to complete the Parable of Wael, do it before you attempt any part of the Theorems of Pandgram. There's a broken trigger in the latter that turns everyone in that location hostile on all subsequent visits. EDIT: Actually, I've started to get a whole raft of bugs in just the last hour or so. The loot image left on the ground when an enemy is killed doesn't go away when its items are picked up, unless I double-click on it again and pick up the nothing that's there. A lot of the yellow-tagged NPCs are permanently rendered as ghosts now, not just when I "read their soul" or whatever. One of my party stopped walking in the middle of a map and I had to babysit him by clicking every five seconds to keep him moving to the next area. All these are nothing as far as bugs concern, but they've all happened at once, late at night, and it's making me feel really down on the game. Hopefully some of them are fixed by the patch that's looming by the time I have the opportunity to play again later this week.

One of us! One of us! I found myself rewatching Upotte! while doing some editing last night because I wanted to hear highly technical jokes about firearms while watching cute girls do cute things.

Yeah, it's definitely a strategy more for people with sufficiently fragile egos that any criticism is perceived as an attack, like itsamoose's link points out about TB, so you have to frame it as if it's a mistake that they surely didn't mean. Hopefully, over time and with several "mistakes" like that being caught, they eventually begin to avoid the behavior on their own, with understanding of why maybe following, but maybe not, too.

Codicier and I have talked a bit about a podcast, too. I would love to contribute, maybe even buy a microphone to replace what is no doubt my shitty webcam mic, but I don't know about doing a currently airing series, especially because this coming season looks so barren. Still, talking about anime with cool and smart people who know a lot about the genre would be a lot of fun, and maybe other people would like to hear it, too. Also, yeah. Shirobako is hands-down the best anime of last season, maybe of the past year? Using a detailed industry procedural to tell an ensemble of interesting stories about careers, ambitions, and failure is really genius.

Yeah, if you don't want to create an NPC, push ahead in the plot until you have at least three if not four members in your party. That was definitely the point where the combat went from "wildly unpredictable and seemingly unfair" to "under some kind of control." I really like the combat tuning, at least once I turned off the option in menus that required double-clicking for party members to move in a way that incurred an attack of opportunity (or whatever it's called in their non-D&D terminology), but it's balanced very aggressively for five or six party members, which makes the one-man party achievement a little confusing.

Nine hours in and I still haven't skipped any text, barring reloads. That's really something, because even in a well-written game like Sunless Sea I still compulsively skip ahead past sections that seem long or full of filler. Other little things I like: Finding an enemy wizard's grimoire and pillaging it for spells feels great. It kind of sucks that scrolls don't really serve that purpose anymore, but it's awesome to kill someone and take the things they were using to fight you for your own. It's awesome that spells now have an inner and outer radius, it's a very natural development. Like Jutranjo said, the two health systems is also very natural and solves a lot of weird and gamey player behaviors. I'm not sure about having a fatigue system on top of that, especially because I can't find the stats dictating it, but maybe my opinion will change.

I'm running an elven paladin dude, a Shieldbearer of St. Someone. I'm enjoying myself, especially after I abandoned the sword-and-board for a two-hander, but I'm also really having trouble figuring out what makes a paladin not just a shitty fighter. The auras are nice and apparently my character gets stronger based on roleplaying according to my order's characteristics, but all of that's hard to see in action thus far. I'll tell you, the game immediately stops feeling so ridiculously uneven once you get your second companion. I have four companions right now and it's smooth going with actual tactics. It just makes me wonder at how smart Baldur's Gate II is to start you with a near-full party right at the outset of the game.

Well, it ended up that it wasn't just the two of us. I basically was there as a third party while she hung out with her ex-boyfriend and we all watched a movie together. Not particularly great, but I kept my cool and had a reasonably good time. Yeah, I'm mostly embarrassed because the kinds of divination with which most people are familiar, like astrology and fortune cookies, are so patently ridiculous. The fact that hexagrams are thrown through a random system to answer a specific question, the fact that the commentaries on the hexagrams are more general wisdom that specific advice, and the fact that changing lines can turn one hexagram into another, combining their separate readings into a massive number of discrete outcomes, make me feel like the I Ching is on a different level. I got a copy because I saw that John Minford, one of the translators for Penguin's amazing version of Dream of the Red Chamber, had made his own edition, and it's as academic and introspective as I could possibly want. I feel like I share the most in common with my dad, but since he divorced my mother and I moved away for grad school, I haven't exactly been close with him. I hear from him maybe every six or seven weeks and we talk mostly about money and my career, but it's still pleasant, so I can't complain. I'm much closer to my mother, since I talk to her every week or two, but we're also very alike in temperament and don't really get along well over the long term. Sometimes I'm caught between a desire to be closer to both of them and the fantasy of not visiting home at all this year. It's a weird thing.

Not that the Thumbs are more likely to play it, but the Murder She Wrote board game sounds somewhat like an overbranded and underbaked version of the excellent Japanese board game Tragedy Looper. Hopefully the similarities extend to include enjoyability during play.

Yeah, I just reread my post and realize what a weirdo I sound like. I just have fairly stiff boundaries and am really disconcerted when people act like they're closer to or more distant from me than I feel they are. It wasn't something about which I really thought when she lived on the other side of the country, but the prospect of spending a night out with someone I consider barely above an acquaintance threw me off. I spent the morning thinking, and I definitely think the hexagram (and my gut, of course) says that I should just stop being such a weirdo and have a good time with her. So... yeah.

Yeah, I also am a habitual min/maxer, but I've been rescued by the fact that most games don't give me this much control over the firearms I use, so I'm able to use some of my latent gun-nut tendencies to push myself to use the Commando and the Gecko, guns that I think are gorgeous, instead of using the CAR and the AK, both of which I think are ugly as sin. It's definitely not for everyone, but the drive to buy and customize guns that I've always liked to see in action has functionally turned Payday 2 from a one-month pastime to an indefinite one. One of my builds was a pure Mastermind and one of my friend's builds was a pure Ghost until my other friend convinced him to respec it with skills from the Technician and Fugitive. They worked, albeit not perfectly. The game's definitely balanced for everyone or almost everyone on the team having that handful of must-have skills spread out between the five trees. I don't think that Overkill sees it as a design problem, but then they're the same people who force players to customize their guns, the most important element of the game, based on a really fickle RNG until recently, so I'm not surprised by that. And agreed about stealth being worse when played with other people. The easiest fix of which I can think is for max number of pagers answered to scale with the number of people in the game, even though I know that opens some levels up to abuse. It's just ridiculous that you're twice as likely to be discovered in Shadow Raid or Hoxton's Revenge with two people playing, but you're given nothing in return, besides an extra pair of hands to carry shit. I guess that plays into Overkill's lack of concern about wasting your time. I'm stunned at how many "hard" levels become trivial if you're willing to spend thirty or forty-five minutes beating them in the most cautious and risk-adverse way possible.

I got briefly stuck in the first dungeon myself. I found all the hints for the main puzzle before I found the puzzle itself, and didn't realize that the non-permanent hints would be recorded in my journal, so I wandered in circles until I gave up and looked online. Note to self: read your journal if you're stuck. And then the second level was so brutal on Normal that I had to cheese it a bit, for which I feel bad. Clearly, in hindsight, I was supposed to advance the main quest immediately after becoming able, which would have given me another NPC in my party, but I'm stubborn and hate to leave dungeons mid-crawl, so instead I ran around kiting ghosts. Shaaame, shaaame.

I'm handing out with a friend from out of town tomorrow night and don't really know what to expect. We weren't particularly close when we lived in the same city, but she's become incredibly friendly since moving away, to the point of regularly saying that I'm the person she misses the most, and set aside an entire evening of her three-day stay to spend with me. I'm not even sure what she plans to do here! It just feels very weird to me. I asked the I Ching about it and got Hexagram VII, the Army. Though the earth is poisoned by war, resolute action wins the day and averts harm, even if risks are taken. At least, that's what I distilled from the commentaries, which also have a lot about emotions being the army of the body. I don't know what to make of it. Before you roll your eyes, I've actually really enjoyed learning about how to use the I Ching in daily life. The readings of the hexagrams are so pithy and obscure that it's just been a good way to make me reflect on my hopes and anxieties over a given situation. Throwing a hexagram is basically the best way to ask myself for advice that I've yet found.

Thanks for that, SAM. When I first started playing the game, I thought the tree you bought into was the only tree you could spend skill points on, and the more I play, the more I'm a little disappointed that it isn't like that, because everyone has these hyper-optimized hybrid builds that don't have any real identity. I guess I agree with you completely there, then. I agree with the skill trees, mostly because the design has so much +5% this and -10% that, which just gums up the weird way the game calculates numbers even more. Bain is incredibly annoying, and a big part of how awful it is to wait is listening to him. The other problem is just that drills take maybe sixty seconds too long across the board. It feels like there was an initial design decision to make the drills take a long time so that there'd be a bigger chance of discovery, but more than half of the use cases for drills are when there's no possible failure, so it's totally just wasteful. Oh well. I still like Payday 2 and play it, but only with friends who enjoy taking on discrete "roles" and only using guns that I find fun to shoot as well as fun to look at their numbers.

I have a city that runs entirely on office buildings for its "industry." As long as you have docks and shipyards bringing in goods for your commercial districts, it works fine and seems to pay out more overall in taxes. The main issue is that it seems to restrict demand for commercial zones compared to a standard RCI build, I'm not sure why.

Actually reading it, it's funny to hear Ryan Morris say that Miyazaki is a big enough fan of Game of Thrones to have bought the Blu-ray while in America, because it wasn't available in Japan yet. Of course, he says that he likes it because it reminds him of the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, with its political maneuvering among a massive cast, rather than him just liking the grimness or sexiness or whatever.

Vasari quoted the interview you guys are talking about a few posts up.

From what I've read about the classes, there are really no "squishy" classes. Stats determine a character's role, and classes seem more like thematic groupings of strategies for implementing that role. There's that one interview about how a high-intelligence barbarian and a high-strength wizard both work, which makes it really seem like they've turned the idea of "trap" builds on its head.