Gormongous

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  1. I Had A Random Thought...

    Gormongous replied to Zeusthecat's topic in Idle Banter

    I actually was just talking with an acquaintance who let her daughter get her ears pierced at six. She's been trying to teach her about body autonomy and consent, and her daughter's requests to get her ears pierced grew out of the whole "it's your body to do with as you want" worldview that she's been taught. She had her daughter talk to her friends and do most of the research herself (well, "herself," because she's six) and then took her there. The poor kid got one ear pierced and started screaming for them to stop. So she's got one ear pierced now, although I think they're planning to take out the stud and let it heal, and has decided on her own to wait at least another year before she's ready to try again. I guess it's been a good life lesson for her? Kids are weird.

  2. anime

    Gormongous replied to Moosferatu's topic in Movies & Television

    To the surprise of everyone, myself included, I'd never watched Patlabor: the Movie 2 until last night, but now I can join the chorus of voices say that it is absolutely excellent. It's an Oshii film in all of the right ways (beautiful animation and direction, meditative pacing and tone, deep interest in the role of violence in civil society and in the modern blurring between peacetime and wartime, alienated characters clinging to or placing themselves in opposition to institutional power structures as a means of preserving their damaged selves, military thriller in which lethal force is the consequence and not the catalyst) without being an Oshii film in the bad ways (needlessly obscure or muted plot beats, multiple soliloquies on tangential philosophical concepts, cheesecake filler, casting the villain as a social and political cipher). Watching it in 2017, it's easy to see and feel the bones there of what would become the first Ghost in the Shell movie, two years before Oshii had even made it, but I also think Patlabor 2 is more grounded and more interested in depicting a society in which the foundational institutions are fundamentally in conflict with each other. The bureaucracy pushes the military around, the military pushes the police around, the police push the bureaucracy around... and, if any of them ever gets a chance to push in the other direction, they'll do it in a second and damn the consequences. The choice to make the viewpoint characters the seasoned SV2 captains Goto Kiichi and Nagumo Shinobu, rather than their goofily semi-competent crew like Noa Izumi and Shinohara Asuma, reinforces that depiction of society. These are fiercely intelligent individuals, with long histories of public service, who know how politics, violence, and order interpenetrate and who can navigate that inward-tending geography of ideology and humanity in order to achieve whatever small victory they might hope to win against a society at war, albeit a quiet and undeclared war, with its constituent parts. I'd watched the original OVA, the spinoff TV series, the sequel OVA for the TV series, and the first movie before this, so I'm not entirely sure how much of the sense of deep characterization that I intuited in Patlabor 2 comes from having consumed over two dozen hours of Mobile Police Patlabor beforehand, but a lot of those two dozen hours were pretty damn bad (the TV series, especially, swung between near-Ghost in the Shell: Stand-Alone Complex quality and early-nineties direct-to-video garbage practically every other episode) so it's probably more of a wash than anything one way or another. Also, this doesn't really fit anywhere, but I really enjoyed how this is the most traditionally modern and military of Oshii's sci-fi works. No super-soldiers with Nazi-evoking armor, no thermo-optic camouflage, no semi-immortal fighter pilots, and barely any robots, for that matter. Just lots of uniformed soldiers and guns and tanks and helicopters, controlled (and, almost, haunted) by bespectacled government spooks like Arakawa.
  3. Oh man! I missed this. I love your logic, I want to frame it above my bed. Zeus didn't call you an asshole in the Veganism thread when everyone else did. The sensible conclusion is, of course, not that you were an asshole and Zeus didn't care, but that Zeus is the one true discerner of assholes, and I'm an asshole, just for saying that there is no ethical consumption under capitalism whether or not you eat meat! It's beautiful, frankly. "What bad energy? Maybe you're the bad energy. Now let me obliquely imply that you're an asshole a few times for disagreeing with me!" Aaanyway, back to the boring stuff. If you think I'm trying not to see the ethical problems of eating meat, then you're wrong. You're just assuming that I don't see the ethical problems in eating meat because I still eat meat, but that is an unwarranted assumption. I am aware of the ethical problems in all of the food I consume, meat and not meat, and I try to balance it out. I don't pretend that cutting meat out of my diet is some totem that saves all animal, human, and plant lives from suffering from the consequences of industrialized late-stage capitalism, ethical problems that I've repeatedly brought up and that you've ignored in favor of banging the "veganism" drum some more. And, more to the point, I know about those ethical problems, thanks both to you and to the many other vegetarians and vegans in my life who aren't quite as supercilious and belligerent as you. Dan literally asked not to be told about the ethical problems with Walmart. If you find these issues with eating meat to be important enough to bring up out of nowhere in a random conversation, surely that means that you believe that knowledge is a key component of ethical living and, accordingly, my knowledge is better than Dan's ignorance, ethically speaking, if the given is that we both don't modify our behavior (which isn't true, I've come to eating meat only once or twice a week, which is incidentally probably an order of magnitude less than Dan does). If we agree on that count, then you also agree that Dan refusing to hear about Walmart's ethical problems is more worrisome than someone knowing about the ethical problems with eating meat and choosing not to take the same actions as you, and if we disagree, then there's no point in engaging me further because my knowledge on the issue is immaterial if I don't take the same actions as you.
  4. Why the fuck does everyone have such a raging hard-on for equating criticism of Dan's words and actions with him being a "bad person" and, by implication, the critic being a good person? Did I miss a memo or something? And by "human nature" I meant the way that human beings process and face moral challenges. I'm not invoking the naturalistic fallacy or anything here. Again, if you see it as morally and naturally equivalent to ignore a beating happening right in front of you and to ignore a beating happening somewhere far away from you... well, I don't think we agree, and you're probably very busy anyway, dealing with the water crises spurred by modern industrialized agriculture, the human and ecological damage of conflict minerals in the eastern Congo, and ten billion other instances of suffering worldwide because apparently proximity has no bearing on the ethical intensity of issues to you.
  5. Again, because I never see the cow I eat face to face, or the miner in a conflict region whence the materials for my phone and computer come, or the political conditions under which most of those materials are made into components, or the sweatshop worker who's paid thirty cents to make my shirt, or the migrant farmhand who suffers deprivation and wage theft for me to get my fruit, or the people driven off their land so that the grains in my bread could be farmed more efficiently, or the millions of insects killed so that grain comes pest-free, or the rainforest that's slashed and burned for ten thousand different reasons... but I do see the Walmart employee working under conditions like therealdougiejones described, every time I walk into Walmart. They have greeters right there, front and center, to show you the face of Walmart's often-captive workforce. It's part of their corporate strategy and it's inescapable, unless you make a concerted effort to sneak past it. If you're saying that you can't understand why someone ignoring an injustice right in front of them is more worrisome than them ignoring an injustice that capitalism has worked hard to make invisible to them, then... I don't know. Maybe you understand less about human nature than you think you do?
  6. Yay, bringing the bad energy from the old Veganism thread over to the Giant Bomb thread. It's the best of both worlds! Seriously, though, there's no ethical consumption under capitalism, for any of us, but not wanting even to know about the conditions of the workers with whom you interact face-to-face every time you go to Walmart is a particularly conspicuous failure of empathy to me to me to me.
  7. I love that the other Thumbs' teasing of Nick's gruff, laconic delivery invariably shades into a Nixon impression at some point. And, you know, it's not far off? I'm almost certain that the sentiment of "You won't have Nixon to kick around anymore" has been voiced by Nick a few times in the several runs of Idle Thumbs. Also, Jake, tiny niggle, but 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit isn't the ideal ambient temperature for the human body, despite being the ideal temperature of the human body. Mammals maintain a high internal temperature to maximize the efficient functioning of their biological processes and rely on a cooler external environment to bleed off the excess heat. Efficiency of medium matters a lot, which is why air that's 75 degrees feels pleasant but water that's 75 degrees feels chilly, but all things being equal, according to this paper that I found with a quick Google, thermoneutral external temperature for a naked human at rest is 80.6 degrees Fahrenheit. Now, we're rarely naked or at rest, so room temperature is usually pegged in the mid-seventies, but there you go.

  8. U.S. Healthcare Reform

    Gormongous replied to clyde's topic in Idle Banter

    It's not a good-faith amendment. It's a poison pill meant to damage the Democrats politically, even just a little bit, and salvage some political capital from the failure of the BCRA, without actually risking that single-payer become a reality were it to pass. There is no advantage in voting "yes" on a good amendment to such a toxic bill, especially when Sanders has already announced that he's going to be introducing a single-payer bill that's untainted by the BCRA bullshit.

  9. Books, books, books...

    Gormongous replied to ThunderPeel2001's topic in Books

    I'm not boosting her, just saying that she exists and was/is notable in the genre. I mean, if the ranks of female authors are deep enough for a major one to be the center of a scandal like that, then the argument that there are no female authors of notability is even more patently false.
  10. Crap, I knew I forgot someone. Spaff's... uh, Data and Garak?
  11. I'm going to give this my best shot. For the sake of challenge, I'll name characters from both shows for each of the Thumbs: Chris is Worf and Odo. Jake is Geordi and Rom. Nick is Barclay and O'Brien. Sean is Riker and Bashir. Steve is Guinan and Jadzia Dax. Danielle is Tasha Yar and Kira. Woof, that was tough. And that list is bad, but whatever.
  12. Three posts of a few sentences each, over the course of several hours, were hardly beating you over the head with anything, especially when the longest one was about the book in response to you saying that you hadn't read the book and knew only hearsay about it. The rest of your comments were dismissive of my opinions ("I find him entertaining and am not bothered by the things other people are bothered by") or my reasons for having them ("I don't see the need to judge someone based on their potential as a role model"), which was why I kept engaging. Anyway, I'm sorry you're frustrated over me disagreeing with you in the way I did, because obviously you're unhappy about this entire interaction, but I'm not sure why you inserted yourself in a conversation about Dan's issues in the first place, if you weren't interested in engaging with people who didn't already agree with you that those issues don't matter. I've learned a lot about Dan from you and others, although not enough to change my opinion of him, but clearly you don't see anything that you can learn from me, which is a bit of a bummer.
  13. I actually am arguing that Dan refused to seek professional help, things worked out for him anyway, and he wrote a book about the whole experience that he's selling on Amazon for $13.10. Maybe, even though it's for sale in the "health, fitness, & dieting" and the "self-help" sections, he doesn't actually mean for people to emulate his irresponsible and privileged example, but regardless of whether that's true, it still typifies the blithe "Well, it works for me, so it's fine" attitude that makes me dislike him as a games journalist, internet personality, and role model for the Giant Bomb community. I'm glad that other people find him inspiring, but it can hardly come as a surprise that that feeling's not universal. And Zeus, I like you, but you seriously need to work on how much you process this criticism of Dan as criticism of you and your tastes. No one's out to get you, certainly not me. It was not my intention to criticize anyone but Dan, and criticism of Dan isn't implicitly meant as criticism of you or anyone else except Dan, because I know we all have problematic faves. That's how the world works. However, what I am going to criticize, now that we're throwing around phrases like "unhealthy levels of hatred" and "vitriolic backlash," is that some people seem to believe that, so long as Dan means well and conducts himself humbly, his know-nothing attitude is totally fine and that anyone who takes overt issue with it is being at best a killjoy and at worst... well, all the things that have been implied of me thus far by you and electricblue. Honestly, I'm stunned at how people who are fans of Dan are reflexively dismissive of or even hostile to sustained criticism of him, especially when there are plenty of perfectly obvious reasons to dislike or even resent Dan, many of which have been covered in this thread. It's like you can say that you don't like Dan, but then you're supposed to drop it, else you're harshing everyone's buzz. In light of all of this, the fact that you repeatedly imply in your latest posts that there's no compelling reason for anyone to genuinely dislike Dan and that his detractors, me in particular, are putting it on out of a desire to make you feel bad about yourself really, really disappoints me. I feel like I've worked hard on this forum to be more than branded a "hater."

  14. The McElroy Family of Products

    Gormongous replied to jennegatron's topic in Idle Banter

    The McElroys appearing on @Midnight is pretty damn funny. After all their jokes on the podcast about not being able to think on their feet, they all made a really good showing!
  15. I'm sorry, did I miss something? What exactly is your basis for calling me ignorant but not Dan "Intentionally bombed an eyesight test to get glasses and now has to wear them to see" Ryckert? Rest assured, I have experienced the full range of what the medical field has to offer in terms of treating depression and anxiety, including alternative medicine, both in my person and in the person of my friends and family. At the very least, that puts me one up on Dan, who didn't even try medication "just because." And all I'm saying is, see a professional before you decide what's best for you. Don't just go on advice from a guy who tried to cook and eat eggshells.
  16. I'm sorry if you feel attacked for liking Dan, Zeus. It's not my intent to make you feel criticized by proxy or talked down to when I criticize him. I'm just feeling a lot of frustration because I have more than a few important people in my life who are struggling with mental health and for whom the constant bombardment of privileged white man-children saying shit like, "All it took for me to find good mental health was the right lifestyle choices," especially when they're making poor lifestyle choices elsewhere, is an actual, serious trigger, so I have difficulty expressing sympathy for people who like him because that sort of idiocy is "refreshing." I've seen that shit hurt people and I hate being told that it's harmless. That's on me, I guess, and I own that. I could be a lot more politic. Nevertheless, just from a look at the Amazon reviews for Dan's book, there are many, many people using Anxiety as an Ally as a self-help book for depression and anxiety, just as it is categorized on Amazon, and some of them specifically reference using it instead of going to a doctor. For that alone, beyond even the annoyance of seeing someone make a lucrative career out of ignorant, know-nothing attitudes, I'm always going to dislike Dan... which probably means that I don't have much else to add to this conversation. I'll let myself out.
  17. I mean, that's nice that you're not judging him as a potential role model, but that doesn't mean he isn't one to others and that isn't something for which he should be judged. He published a whole book in the "health, fitness & dieting" section of Amazon about his worldview, I think that's about as "advocating" as you can get. Here's the publisher's blurb for Anxiety as an Ally: How I Turned a Worried Mind into My Best Friend, the fourth of five books that he's written about being a carefree yet successful dumbass: That really sounds like a self-help book to me, one that discounts the efficacy of doctors and medicine based solely on Dan Ryckert, God's perfect idiot, thinking that he doesn't need them. In a world where thousands of people suffering from mental health issues don't see a doctor or therapist because they don't think anyone could possibly understand what they're going through, and where they don't take medication because medication means that there's something wrong with them, I feel okay taking issue with Ryckert peddling some unscientific "If I can do it so can you" yoga-and-meditation palaver for money. I really don't think the existence of worse things in the world means that I'm not allowed to say that this shit is probably not good.
  18. So it wouldn't creep you out if your kid or a friend was suffering from severe mental health issues (or even mild ones) but didn't want to take medicine or even seek medical help because Dan Ryckert doesn't like drugs or doctors and says he didn't need them to feel better? I mean, I'm fine with having someone being the dumb and goofy one on a podcast, but when you're selling that ignorant worldview to people for a profit, that crosses a line for me.
  19. I get that, but (for instance) the dude also published a book that basically said, "I ignored doctors and refused to take medication for anxiety so crippling that I almost couldn't work, then I taught myself meditation and I'm fine now," as an autobiography-cum-self-help-book. It skeeves me out to think of Giant Bomb's younger fans paying money to hear that strain of Dan's ignorance and trying to imitate it, to their likely detriment, because it's held up as aspirational. There are people who don't really see that Dan is naive and stupid, they think he's just honest and bullshit-free. I run across them constantly.

  20. Other podcasts

    Gormongous replied to Erkki's topic in Idle Banter

    I would not describe MFM's "Corrections Corner" as self-effacing (it's usually Karen admitting to not actually knowing a fact that she stated with certainty in a previous episode and then declaring that it doesn't matter and she was close enough to satisfy non-haters) but otherwise, yeah, that's a very good encapsulation of the appeal for me and for my ex, who got me into it.

  21. Other podcasts

    Gormongous replied to Erkki's topic in Idle Banter

    Yeah... There's a lot of odd stuff going on with them. Given that Karen and Georgia are both professional entertainers, they're weirdly hostile and defensive about non-flattering feedback, so the "podcast business" segment at the beginning has ballooned from a few minutes about merch and live shows to fifteen or even twenty as they crack jokes about their weeks, in total defiance of the many fans (whom they label "skippers") who've complained about it. That, combined with the incredible density of ads (thirty to ninety seconds of ads before the podcast starts, between two and three mid-episode ad breaks of thirty to ninety seconds, and a sixty-second end-of-episode ad bumper), makes it hard for me to recommend it to people, but I still have fun. I'd actually say that the central "true crime" segment has gotten more serious, as Georgia has increasingly become prone to audible distress when hearing and talking about murders, but the surrounding material is very jokey now. Your mileage may vary.

  22. Other podcasts

    Gormongous replied to Erkki's topic in Idle Banter

    I've continued to listen to My Favorite Murder over the past year and I think it's settled into a comfortable groove for a "casual" true crime podcast, but no episode gets by without 1) Georgia advocating the abolition of some constitutional protections for the accused in order to get more suspected murderers behind bars and 2) Karen flagrantly making up some fact or statistic about psychology, sociology, or geography. Usually it's good for a laugh but sometimes (like during Georgia's multi-episode campaign against double jeopardy) it's definitely not.

  23. Social Justice

    Gormongous replied to clyde's topic in Idle Banter

    I know that everyone's been making fun of David Brooks for his latest gaffe of condescending about condescending about sandwich meats (which, in my mind, isn't as sad as him complaining about no one wanting to hang out with him lately or about researching Trump's Russia scandal being too much work, but diff'rent strokes), but I actually got a lot out of a Slate article about how David Brooks almost comes around to a backdoor understanding of class privilege, but then backs away when it becomes clear that class privilege is can intersect with and be compounded by white privilege, male privilege, straight privilege, able privilege, and so on. Nwanevu scores a ton of points on his own, so it's foolish for me to paraphrase his words here, except that I'd go farther and say that Brooks and conservatives at a whole don't just seem incidentally blind to privilege that isn't class privilege, which is revealed to them by their politics, but willfully blind to all privilege that isn't class privilege expressly because of their politics. Regardless, it's a great read.

  24. The Big FPS Playthrough MISSION COMPLETE

    Gormongous replied to Ben X's topic in Video Gaming

    Because of the level design and some of the weapon/plasmid changes, this is something that I found a lot easier to do in Bioshock 2, which is what makes it a more enjoyable game to play for me.
  25. Yeah, I was reading that Wikipedia article, too. It's an interesting example of America being influenced by contemporary British linguistic practices, since in many cases of divergence, America is a preserve of pre-independence British linguistic practices. I guess the fact that it was an elite fashion trend, rather than a usage-borne development, explains it. Actually, patterns of prestige speech in general are fascinating, because it's almost always that something is a huge fad until the casuals get wind of it, a process that probably happens really quickly nowadays with the internet being a thing.