Gormongous

Yeah, I'm definitely not saying that people shouldn't cover gaming controversies on their gaming podcasts, but they need to be aware of the limitations of their chosen medium and of their place within it. For instance, this week's Isometric podcast discussed the Molyneux interview at RPS, but they were seemingly unaware that the controversy was almost two weeks old at that point and that plenty had already been written and said about it. I didn't agree with most of what the Thumbs said in their podcast, but at least it was timely and added something new to the conversation already ongoing in print. Isometric, on the other hand, only had Bri's perspective as anything different from the norm, and her stance that "people don't respect developers enough" is a drum that she beats every episode anyway, so their discussion really boiled down just to their same old saw about gamer entitlement, which they've played over a dozen other episodes, but this time with a comical amount of tisk-tisking Walker for being so "angry." It was literally a pointless conversation for which they had nothing to offer, but they had it anyway and made it last the full thirty minutes because... I don't know, they felt they had to do that as a gaming podcast? That's the trend that's losing Isometric for me. If they have nothing to contribute to the conversation on a controversy besides their individual shock and disappointment, I'd rather they voice those things briefly, because they're legitimate reactions to something real, and then direct their listeners to an actual critical perspective, whether another podcast or an article. I don't listen to podcasts to hear other people just be sad about the state of gaming for hours on end. It's fine as an occasional thing, because gaming can be a depressing hobby a lot of the time, but if it's going to be a regular thing, absent of any teachable moments, I can get it on my own. I don't need to download a podcast for it. Maybe that's just me, though. Also, the hosts at Isometric seem to be against doing prep work, which is a perfectly fine call, except when you're going to be doing deep dives into recent controversies every single episode, in which case you should probably know in advance who made what games and what the most popular opinion pieces are on a given topic.

"Pariah" is probably overstating it, but it's almost certain that no film by P.T. Anderson is going to win an Oscar for a decade or two because of The Master. The Master itself got a bare handful of nods, Inherent Vice got less than even Interstellar, and I don't doubt that the pattern will continue.

Oh, I don't doubt that Birdman's characters and themes were directed in part at the Academy, but "Oscar bait" implies that it was designed in some way to win an Oscar, with which I disagree. If the Academy liked people being critical of stuff that mattered to its members, Paul Thomas Anderson wouldn't be a pariah because of The Master.

Wait, can I dig up this post for a second? Everyone talks about how Birdman is just "Oscar bait" because it's about a white male actor who's having a midlife crisis, which is true, but Birdman is interesting not because it's a well-written and well-directed instance of writers-writing-about-writers and actors-acting-as-actors, but because of how it depicts that midlife crisis differently from mere glorification of the hard life that is "the biz." Let me look, I think I wrote about it on one of my blogs... And in general, the movie shits on the very thing that the Academy represents. Riggan hates that people treat him like his character even though they're two separate individuals, depicted separately in the film itself, and he craves artistic validation from haughty and uninterested gatekeepers who don't even care about his play because they see his past experiences of success as antithetical to the creation of art. On the whole, celebrity is deviant, distressing, dysfunctional and dangerous for him. And in the end... As positive as it is with its story about Riggan's rehabilitation as an artist and a father, the movie presents a fairly dark picture of art and of fame, with critics and other actors squarely to blame for it. Maybe the Academy is too philistine to get that out of the movie, but that definitely makes it something other than "Oscar bait" to me.

I finished Bakuman. I was annoyed with it until the very end, meaning that I was annoyed with it for most of the latter two seasons, at least from the hospital onward. I think this just means that I'm totally soured on the shounen formula, in which it's all about fighting a new challenger and failure only presages future triumph, even if the formula's used to cover a completely different subject. More on it later, if I feel like it. I'm still waiting for Yuri Kuma Arashi to come together like I wish it would. I'm pretty sure it won't, and even if it does, it won't be on the level of everything else that Ikuhara's done. Time to find a different yardstick by which to measure it, I guess.

I think I'm winding down on listening to Isometric. For the fifth week running now, the episode's discussion was entirely about the gaming controversy de jour and whether it's legitimate. That might be okay as the structure for a podcast, if it's done well, but there's never any real disagreement among the four hosts, so it's mostly just an hour of people taking turns trying to restate each other's opinions about how people could be mad about Sonic the Hedgehog. There's still some game discussion in the brief "Whatcha playin" segment at the end, if you don't mind Brianna Wu's Type A personality running roughshod over the other hosts whenever she feels like it. I thought I didn't, but when the rest of the episode is so weak, it turns out I do. I don't know. A couple weeks ago, when they'd all played Life Is Strange and talked about what resonances it had with each of them, that was nice. This week, they asked Georgia to psychoanalyze gamers as a culture for the third time in my memory, so I had to sit through ten minutes of preaching about entitlement and lack of empathy. No thanks, I don't need a gaming podcast to be well enough aware of that.

I didn't know whether to post this in the San Francisco thread or here, but whatever: http://io9.com/when-a-newspaper-gave-blade-runners-replicant-test-to-m-1687558534

It's really weird to read someone write that, because after you bring up Grand Budapest Hotel, all the criticism that follow could apply just as much to it as to Birdman.

There's a lot of pseudo-nihilism to be found on the internet that isn't actually about the rejection of all religious and moral principles, but just about wiping the rhetorical slate clean in order to champion something without having to deal with history or context. "Everything we say on the internet is pointless; therefore, among these pointless things that we say, here is the one that I still manage to find meaningful." Like everything else TotalBiscuit says, it's classic derailment.

I love the lengths to which TotalBiscuit goes to explain that he totally understands the article and supports everything said in it, but that it should still be disregarded because its title makes him feel bad that not actively harming trans* people himself isn't good enough. Like the creator of the storify says, nice to know who really matters to TB. It doesn't matter if he even agrees with you, you also have to say it nicely, else he'll do his best to silence you anyway. Also, how fucked is it to condemn online support as slacktivism and to argue for a focus on face-to-face support instead, when it's a group whose members most often express themselves online? How much does anyone want to bet that TB doesn't know a single trans* person in real life and is just writing himself a blank check to ignore the issues they face in favor of... what, well-building in Africa? Well-building in Africa... Fuck me, now that's a cause with absolutely nothing wrong with it.

From the half-dozen games I've played, Dead of Winter has really similar tuning to Ghost Stories, another co-op game that is thematic in appearance but not in practice. Both are designed to be effectively unbeatable without full awareness of all the game's systems, and even then the advantage is with the traitor in Dead of Winter. For the traitor to win, only they have to understand the systems and have their shit together, but for the rest of the group to win, they all have to understand the systems, have their shit together, and not be seduced by putting their personal goals too far ahead of the group goal. Myself, I've never had the survivors win once. I'm wondering if our group needed to be more aggressive about exiling, but actions are valuable enough that an early exile without some proof is just stupid and I was never able to make happen later in the interval between having the suspicion and the game going past the point of no return. That makes it feel like a tacked-on system in the way that Battlestar's brig is not. Throwing someone in the brig is the core part of every single game of Battlestar, but it doesn't feel remotely as crucial to Dead of Winter, probably becomes it's an irrevocable and potentially disastrous decision for a given player, so you only do it if you're positive that someone's actively ruining your game.

I knew it wasn't going to be The Tale of the Princess Kaguya, no matter how beautiful it was, because a Japanese director who's not Miyazaki isn't going to win outside of the foreign film category, but even my friend who was making a "cynical" Oscar list in jest didn't got cynical enough to turn off her brain and pick Disney no matter what.

From Wikipedia: A rule of thumb is a principle with broad application that is not intended to be strictly accurate or reliable for every situation. It is an easily learned and easily applied procedure for approximately calculating or recalling some value, or for making some determination. The author is providing a different framework through which to judge a situation. For you, the judgment is effectively a standing "never," but other people might find more latitude in it.

I guess we're going to have to disagree, because I think it is ridiculous to let how your content appears on another site, entirely unconnected to you except as an aggregator, dictate how you edit and present content on your own site. I cannot get over how weird it feels to me for the number at the end of a review with a byline to be the final decision of someone besides the person in the byline, just so that a hypothetical person who reads Metacritic but not Polygon, thereby giving the latter no traffic, finds that number consistent with other numbers.

Regardless of what Metacritic and the readers interpret, the score goes under a writer's name, attached to a piece that they've written. Having that score be determined separately by a board of editors, hidden somewhat, in order to enforce a specious "consistency" across all reviews borders on ridiculous, especially since the writer is expected to revise their own work if they don't find appropriate the score that the board determines. It's all too reminiscent of every single Eurogamer review having a few "Reads like a 7, not a 8" comments after it, which were broadly considered to be the most annoying and tedious part of Eurogamer reviews.

Still making my way through Bakuman. No further comments until the end, but here's some unintentional hilarity: one of the manga being made in the show has "PCP" as the acronym for its title, and twice in just a few episodes someone has said something like "Yeah, we're going to do PCP!" or "I love PCP!" It's not like I expect Japanese people to run everything by an English speaker, but maybe the stuff in English at least. Also, the chief editor is hilariously bad at his job. I know the intent is to make him seem cool and decisive, but it would be a living nightmare working under someone who is so powerful and yet so mercurial. EDIT: "We can't let PCP beat us!" "Come to think of it, you helped to create PCP!" "You wanted to beat PCP, didn't you?" "Please continue enriching us with PCP." "Even if just one person out there learns how good PCP is, then I'll be happy." "That would make PCP lose its appeal for sure..." "It's thanks to you that PCP is popular." I could go on forever. These are just from the four episodes I've watched tonight.

Oh, I must have misspoke. I was simply saying that when it comes to mystical power in a fictional work, having an entirely accurate metric of that mystical power be both quantifiable and visible to all is a terrible idea, if only because it immediately demotes mystical power below real-life but unquantifiable abilities like intelligence or charisma. Midichlorians are a terrible idea, not just because they're boring and clinical, but because they suggest that it's possible and even practicable to rank every Force user alive empirically by relative power, all in the service of telling the audience that Anakin is really powerful. I don't have much experience reading Modesitt, but I know his good reputation, and I'd certainly trust him more than Lucas with just about anything.

That last bit reminds me of pachinko parlors, which are prevented by Japanese law from giving out prizes with monetary value. Instead, they give out explicitly non-monetary tickets, which can incidentally be exchanged at the booth outside or at the shop next door for actual prizes. I wonder what loopholes exist in US and UK for gambling and lotteries?

I saw that! Elsewhere in the comments, he was arguing the new line for "middle ground and/or status quo" crowd, which is that #GamerGate would have just gone away if the gaming press had ignored it. When someone pointed out that the gaming press did ignore it for two months and that those two months were the period of its greatest and most violent activity, he simply said, "Well, it'd go away now if the press ignored it." These people who want to blame victims and bystanders rather than those actually engaged in wrongdoing, there's literally nothing you can say to make them reconsider, is there?

Nice! I'm only able to bat better than five hundred on "Assistant" level. However, twice now I've encountered an interesting situation in the campaign. It hasn't given me access to the Offworld Market yet, so when I get to my final opponent and they've taken some precautions not to get bought out, it becomes nearly impossible for one to get enough money to finish the other off, because both of our economies are so huge. My first game, it ended after a fifteen-minute standoff when I finally spooked and tried to buy my own stock back, but my second game, I literally ran it on "AI_Test" speed for forty-five minutes before selling every single product for $1 each got me enough money to buy them out. On the one hand, it's great that the endgame gotterdammerung is so effective, but for the campaign missions without the Offworld Market, perhaps there should be some sort of substitute? At the very least, maybe it should offer the chance to build an Offworld Market through auction after ten minutes of stalemate or so, in order that the player can win or lose against the game instead of their own patience.

I mean, for my part, it's my discomfort at how Molyneux explains the place of the designer in the industry and in the culture. When Walker brings the conversation back around to whether Molyneux is a pathological liar, which he restates as saying stuff that isn't true without meaning to, Molyneux answers with something of an evasion, saying that anybody engaged in creative endeavors is lying just as much as him. I'm not interested in pillorying a developer for failing to deliver, even with a crowd-funded project, but I am very invested in unpacking the worldview of someone who is willing to project his behavior on to the entire history of art as a vocation in order to justify himself, so I appreciate the interview, uncomfortable as it is for me to read. Also, although the precise use of words so rarely matters to me, I'm getting very close to putting people who interpret "pathological" to mean "malicious and evil" rather than just "compulsive" on my list of peeves. No one here, necessarily, but it's definitely been an issue with the broader reaction to the interview.

Yeah, I think I generally understand how to play, although not well enough to get it right the first time on most maps, but it can be so hard knowing that you have a solid economic engine, but it's going to take a while to spin up to the point that you can start affecting things with the money you're making. I had a solid electronics engine this past game, but it was hard as hell not to gut it to put something into food production when a massive shortage hit.

Yeah, I have a dozen-hour game to which I haven't gone back since getting sick, probably because when I left it I was at the point of saying to myself, "Well, maybe I should retire. I'm not sure I'll be able to afford fuel if the next few missions keep going like the last one." It's a very weird feeling to say that to yourself hours upon hours into the game. I'm getting strong messaging to move forward with the Khanate, but it's an outlay of several thousand echoes that I can't count on having an immediate payday. I don't know. I like the design and writing of this game a lot, but I'm having so much trouble getting in tune with it, and I'm trying not to blame it on (possibly deliberate) bad tuning.

Yeah, that's something that's a little confusing. When I played the game a long time ago, I remember being able to capture and sell vessels for a profit that made combat usually worth it. With the release version, the fuel cost and hull damage means that combat is broadly unprofitable, and since you can't capture vessels anymore unless you have a flensing weapon, which are only mountable on sufficiently expensive vessels that I doubt it'd be good money at that point in your career, I assume the intent is just to make it something you avoid entirely.

Yeah, that's the irritating thing. Wardell just poops out a "tu quoque" and then keeps shitting on someone he doesn't even know, as if silencing all his critics will make what they say about him wrong.