Gormongous

Cool! That reminds me a lot of one of the more peculiar quirks of Sayonara, Zetsubou-Sensei, which gives the year in all its dates as if it were still the Shouwa era rather than the Heisei era. With a few other clues, especially some of the styles of dress and address, the implication is that Koji Kumeta is writing his manga in a world where the militarism and nationalism of the 1930s never took off and Japan never abandoned the ideals of the Taishou democracy.

My friend's started using "retarded" a lot and thus far I've lacked the combination of opportunity and courage to tell him to cut it out. Solidarity! Not that you should be telling off your boss, but ugh.

I just made the time to read this. It's wonderful! I'm also very pleased that you have a matrilineal marriage and therefore there's no need for out-of-character murders to keep our game going.

I mean, the general sense of the show's historical era is the early 1800s, shortly before the Black Ships, the opening of Japan, and the decline of the bakufu. There are elements from before that time and elements from after, but they mostly combine to give a very "once upon a time" feeling, which I think is the intention, to set the show in a past just beyond living memory.

A bad thing.

I mean, for me, the issue is that Brianna Wu heavily implied that Brad Wardell could be an ally of hers, despite his history of harassment and abuse, just because she didn't have a horrible time with him at coffee and because they see eye to eye on how to manage a business. Beyond the pleasure of his company, what exactly is the worth of seeking out Wardell as an ally moving forward? The only thing that a victim of #GamerGate like Wu and a voice for #GamerGate like Wardell ostensibly have in common is the need to get past the crises of the past six months so that they both can go back to making and selling video games without having to be public figures in the process. I understand why they both crave a return to the status quo, and while I won't criticize Wu's motives for it like I will Wardell's, I still don't think that hers are particularly noble, not that they have to be. That's really all I have to say about it. EDIT: Brianna Wu isn't doing business with Brad Wardell. Where are people getting this? She requested that they meet to bury the hatchet over them fighting on Twitter, which I guess Wu "started" by telling people not to buy Wardell's games if he supported #GamerGate, and then they talked about being business owners. It wasn't a business meeting, unless "business meeting" means any social interaction in which you talk about your job. It was the internet equivalent of a diplomatic photo-op. Wu is very explicit about that in the link Nachimir provided.

Yeah, that was mostly my reaction. Also, there is a lengthy and somewhat gross history of prominent figures in a movement meeting with longtime critics and detractors, then telling everyone that they're not that bad, regardless of how they've treated and continue to treat others in the movement, just because they were decent to them personally. I mean, it's great that Wardell has a liberal policy for maternity leave, but that's not incompatible with deeply internalized misogyny, so is it particularly relevant information, especially when he was flaming people literally last week for disagreeing with him on issues of social justice?

I can't speak authoritatively on this, but I think it's her repeated statements that the remaining adherents of #GamerGate are all just "crazy" or "psychopaths," which stigmatizes mental illness by conflating it with the behavior of those monstrous assholes.

Well, she also implies that Wardell is now an "ally" of hers, even if they disagree over certain issues. That's worrisome, because Wardell certainly isn't sympathetic to a large majority of what Wu professes to stand for. It's one thing to sit down to dinner with your racist uncle, it's another to call him your friend. I'm not exactly surprised, though. Wu has repeated over the past couple months that #GamerGate is over and the only thing sustaining it is continued coverage on Twitter and Tumblr. She definitely wants the gaming community to move on, whether or not people are really done with this, so it makes a peculiar kind of sense that she'd make nice with one of the bigger dirtbags in the industry to jump-start that movement. As I said in the Other Podcasts thread, I've been drifting from Wu for a while, so it feels consistent for me to criticize her decision. She has a tendency not to see an issue from all sides and a tendency to push things through with force of personality, and I see both on display here, so it's probably a bad decision, but her bad decision to make.

That's a neat way to think of it. I'd never seen it that way before.

Yeah, the version I remember from Hesiod is that the box is given as a present from the gods to the first two humans. They gathered up every evil in the world that could afflict the couple and put it in the box to give as a gift to them. Of course, being a woman in a Greek myth, Pandora was convinced that they'd hidden some really nice things in the box that they told her not to open just so that they could laugh at her for being so gullible. She opens the box, all the evils escape, and depending on the version she either closes it quickly, trapping Hope in her keeping, or starts to close it before seeing that Hope is still at the bottom, which she sets free to combat the evils. The question is really why Hope was in the box in the first place, but then the Greek gods are serious dicks, so...

I just filed my 2014 taxes. I wonder how it is to be someone making actual money who dreads paying their taxes, rather than someone living on starvation wages who looks forward to tax refunds as a way to make it through the summer.

That's fair. I'm just reacting based on my personal tastes, but you're right that he seems happy at Gamespot and it's not like RockPaperShotgun can employ every critic I like.

Yeah, but it's also good to know who critics know. I can't think of any specific examples, but I definitely feel like there have been several instances of critics in video games turning me onto some of their more talented brethren because they're better aware of the state of the discipline. It almost feels unfortunate to me that Capozzoli is a regular contributor to Gamespot nowadays. I mean, for sure, it's great that he has work, but his style, which I like, is marvelously unsuited for the site. Most of his reviews that I've read, like for Total War: Attila and Civilization: Beyond Earth, are beautiful examples of New Games Journalism, shot through with features lists that I imagine are demanded by Gamespot's editorial staff. It wouldn't be hard to imagine a site that would fit him better, but who am I to say, really...

Yeah, that's what I was going to post. I don't particularly love Jade Empire, but I'd be willing to talk all day to someone who does. Hey Vasari, glad you're back!

Because of passive-aggressive competition between the chair of my department and the head of the interdisciplinary center, it's the second week in a row that we're hosting a conference. An accident of job responsibilities has made me the lead non-staff person for both, which wasn't so bad last week, but is now close to killing me. I spent most of my day in my car, driving back and forth from the airport, while thinking how much better I'd be paid if I were a taxi driver rather than a grad student obligated to do stuff like this all the time for free. Well... not technically for free, because I was later compensated with as many lemon squares as I could carry. After eleven hours in a car, I literally couldn't carry enough. I'd be less grumpy about all of this if the conferences were any good, but last week was an insular and regional affair where a bunch of old white professors all gave each other commemorative plaques for being old and white and professors, and now this week is stapled together from the vanity projects of several different professors from competing institutions. I feel sorry for anyone whose registration fees are paying for these lemon squares, because they aren't worth it to any of us.

That lines up with what I know. The accusation that I've heard from people I trust, again and again, is that Zak relentlessly attacks people who disagree with him, usually by bragging about his contributions to the "cause" and painting anyone who gets in the way of that as anti-feminist, and that he won't stop until the person who's disagreed with him disappears from the internet or publicly abases themselves in front of him. The only proof I have, besides the statements of people who claim to be victims of his harassment and to whom I try to be supportive because they're victims, is the post for Zak's permanent ban from RPG.net, which has been disputed by his fans for being one mod's grudge or the work of a secret sexist cabal, but still, it's enough for me to try and steer clear of the guy.

I'm changing my vote to Syn's "dead pangolin" comment. I know that there's no possible depiction of bosozoku culture anymore that's not going to be straight-up parody, but goddamn...

I'm glad you brought Princess Tutu into the conversation, because I've been wracking my brain for something that presents itself allegorically like Yuri Kuma Arashi does but in the service of making actual commentary through said allegory, and I should have thought of Princess Tutu, which I did just watch last year. It had something to say about the nature of narrative, of dreams, and of self in a way that suited its presentation, while Yuri Kuma Arashi is an allegory only through the one-to-one replacement of intangibles with tangibles, taking place in a low-rent version of Ohtori Academy and kept going entirely off of Ikuhara's ritualistic blend of visual and aural flair. Penguindrum was incoherent a lot of the time because it was doing too much all at once with not enough episodes to get it all done (for instance, all of the Ringo bullshit that I loved to watch but was totally irrelevant to the plot as defined by its themes) but at least it tried something. I don't feel like Yuri Kuma Arashi is trying more than its surface-level allegory. If it has more to say than that sometimes the people we love are monsters, that keeping monsters out of our lives is impossible, and that sometimes loving monsters is okay, then I will die of shooock. Kuma shock!

Eyeliner and a really questionable regent... Match made in heaven!

I don't really know where else to post this, but are people aware of a freelance games critic named Nick Capozzoli? I noticed him because he had a strangely erudite Total War: Attila review on Gamespot, which was unfortunately sullied by that site's execrable editing policy, and when I googled him, I came up with his twitter, which had an intelligent deconstruction of TotalBiscuit's so-called "activism" posted just this morning. Is he someone people know or should know? Okay, looking at the blog for his admittedly barebones site, he probably is. Sorry for thinking out loud!

Don't worry about it! I'm slouching towards an anime podcast myself, sometime in the far-off future, so every bit of craft to which I get exposed will probably help in the end. I just read Blood & Thunder, the dual biography of Kit Carson and the Navajo, and the Mexican-American War is possibly the most outlandish thing in it. It was basically a war manufactured on the orders of James K. Polk, fought and partway won before it was even declared, and responsible for increasing the territory of the United States by more than a third. It was even under consideration to annex the whole of Mexico to the United States, but racist concerns over the influx of Hispanic citizens mercifully put that to bed. I'm surprised and not surprised that Americans aren't educated about such a predatory act of aggression by their own country.

"Superficially hidden" is what I would say, but that's a bit weighty of a phrase if you're looking for something truly concise.

Have you seen Penguindrum? That might be a good thing with which to follow up Yuri Kuma Arashi. It has the same kind of feeling that it's half-baked masterwork by Ikuhara, but it's also more substantive, with real characters that just exist in an absurd allegory, and less of an obsession with fairytale-type presentation. Also, it's actually funny: