Gormongous

Which is certainly still a misstep. The moment a fantasy work introduces a way to display magical power empirically, through the length of a wizard's beard or whatever, that's when it begins to deemphasize shows of reputation and of strength as a means of characterization, becoming a weaker-written work as a result. Can you imagine how much cooler it would have been in The Phantom Menace if the power of Anakin's presence, as a being conceived from the Force, made every Jedi that he met react with discomfort, something similar to Kenpachi's reiatsu in Bleach? Nah, instead we watch a blood-sugar test being administered and then are informed explicitly that Anakin is the most powerful Force-user ever. Hooray? Every fucking scene in the prequels is an example of why "Show, don't tell," while not a universal maxim, is still pretty damn important.

Okay, I just bought it, mostly because it's 33% off on GMG with code 23PERO-FF2GOO-D2MISS. Next time there's a game, I'll play if I've done the tutorials by then.

Yeah, for all the talk in the episode thread about nothing useful coming out of the interview, this was the biggest takeaway for me, too. Molyneux states several times that creative projects are "almost impossible" to bring into being and that he can't really be held responsible for what he has to say in order to make one happen. He says both of these things at the beginning and near the end of the interview, so it's not something he just pulls out of his ass in response to a specific question. Either it's true, and he has no business running a video game project, or it's false, and he's just lying to make himself look sympathetic. In both cases, I know now not to have any more dealings with Molyneux, and I also have somewhere to point people like two of my friends, who were impressed by Godus during a Steam sale, having no awareness of Molyneux' history or reputation, and ignored my advice to wait and see.

You are all monsters. I'm going to be wandering these forums feeling like I have the Capgras Delusion for weeks now.

Well, I could have saved myself several posts if I just had a Twitter account and followed her on it...

I actually just linked this up with a conversation a week or two ago in the Anime thread. Aniplex is determined to use its knowledge of the Japanese anime market to sell its products in the West, which means selling shows for fifty dollars a disc and trying to impart the extra value by including posters, pencil boards, and stickers. It's not terribly successful, but their primary goal is to keep foreign markets full of high-priced but legitimate versions of their product, so that neither piracy nor reverse importation threatens sales in their home market. It's definitely shitty, but it feels like most Japanese companies aren't really able to have different strategic plans for multiple markets. Even when they do, like Bandai in the late nineties and early naughties, it involves forcing their American branch to sell DVDs as loss-leaders for a plastic model market that made money hand over fist in Japan but never appeared in the West. It seems to be a universal thing with Japanese (and Korean) media companies, at least. I wonder if it's the same with car manufacturers and consumer electronics, too?

This fucking show... Thank goodness for my medieval history degrees, else I never would have spotted the match, right? It's a five-second shot in altogether brief scene, given no fanfare whatsoever, but is indicative of the dizzying care put into the adaptation, even down to shot composition.

My bad, that's what I get for typing political analysis of a children's book from the couch.

I mean, I'm sure there's plenty of people who have issues with Bioshock Infinite or Levine's ill-timed comments on some other matter coming out of the woodwork here, but myself, I'm honestly just tired of notable public figures abruptly interposing themselves in the middle of #GamerGate, trodding on half-healed wounds in the process, in order to make themselves some kind of impartial arbitrator out of their pure intentions. There is so much literature out there now about what #GamerGate really is and what its consequences have been, so for Levine to come out of nowhere to stump for such a half-baked and wrongheaded petition as a panacea for the woes of the games industry tells me outright that either i) he has not read that literature and therefore shouldn't be presenting himself as authority and intermediary, or ii) he has read that literature, but has disregarded it, so his position in the so-called middle ground is a conscious decision rather than a well-meaning mistake. Either way, I don't intend to do more than comment briefly on the naivete and ignorance of his statements in a thread on an internet forum, then keep ignoring him like I have been since shortly after Bioshock Infinite's hype cycle began its final rotation, so I don't really see the harm.

The book is actually kind of fascist. All the kids who disobey are destroyed, and only Charlie gets to the end because, unlike in the movie, he never once disobeys Wonka, so is rewarded as Wonka's heir.

Hey, we're just trading idle talk in a forum thread about some dumb thing a public figure said. Feel free to email him about it, I'm sure he'd be all ears.

That article more or less states outright that only the DX11 changes are exclusive to the new release, but that can't be right, can it?

I had the same misremembrance as you, but for me it was Levine getting himself up in a wild lather a few months ago over select sites shutting down their own comments sections, with him using historical references to the fucking sixteenth-century wars of religion to make his point that it's better just to ride out the haters than to build a safe space: Because he's tried to put the blame for #GamerGate on both sides at least twice now, this time by vocally supporting a petition that makes the gaming press the ones who are to blame for the broader cultural consequences of this whole mess? If he's trying to argue that you're part of the problem if you aren't part of the solution, he should really start by looking at himself.

It's the classic truth, becoming more classic by the day, that calling out wrongdoing is always taken to be worse than the wrongdoing itself. Being racist or sexist? Not great, but human nature, so whatever. Saying that something or someone is racist or sexist? Unbelievable injustice, is there no mercy or decency, etc. Levine saying in effect that there are certainly problems, but that it's more important to keep up the pixel wall of silence, is really the pinnacle of that attitude, though.

No problem! One of the biggest takeaways for me from Eight Eurocentric Historians (I hate that title, it sounds so unscholarly) is how much emphasis we place on the Fertile Crescent for its tenuous connection to European history. Blaut points out that intensive agriculture began near-contemporaneously in Southeast Asia and on the Indonesian peninsula (and possibly even before, although we can't say for sure since so many potential sites were lost when it became the Indonesian archipelago during the transition from prehistory to history), but since it can't be linked to the European Miracle, it's written off as a fluke in a way that Mesopotamia isn't. Same for evidence of prehistoric agriculture in the Americas.

Whatever else I have self-esteem issues about, I can say for sure: nude selfies of me would not be shit posting.

Thanks for sharing that with us here, Argobot. I'm glad you felt you could. My grandmother had early-stage breast cancer late in her life, and even though she didn't lose a breast in the course of treatment, it was a major factor in her redefining her identity in a way that wasn't centered on her femininity. Maybe that's somewhat easier to do when you're in your early seventies, but reading your comments still made me think of it. Anyway, I certainly won't treat you any differently, which unfortunately seems to involve disagreeing with you regularly even though I value your opinions a lot, and I'm sure that cancer will just be A Thing that Happened soon enough, until which point we're all here to support you.

Yeah, Misa's flaws as a character definitely serves a purpose in Death Note, however useful that purpose actually is. On the other hand, except for Miyoshi, who really just feels like a direct expy of Chizuru from Kimi ni Todoke, all the female characters in Bakuman are similarly flawed, even the dowdy manga assistant, and the only one for whom the flaws serve any purpose is Azuki, who's annoying as hell because of that purpose, for the reasons you've stated. Every time Mashiro acts impatient and stupid, I can't help but feel like it's because he wants to stick his dick in Azuki ASAP, and that robs his actions of any emotional immediacy for me. Why the fuck should I invest in a dude working himself to death in order to realize a promise made on a whim in middle school, just so he can kiss the girl he likes on the mouth? At best, it just reminds me of KarmaBurn's description of most anime romances as "a perplexing celebration of celibacy and prudishness bordering on gynophobia," which will always piss me off for how true it is. Really, I like this show the best when it's about the manga business, which it thankfully is most of the time, but I don't believe in any of the characters' relationships at all and hence a lot of the relationship-based drama, even the seemingly business-related feud they're having with their editor right now, is totally falling flat for me.

I mean, his argument is that the Fertile Crescent was the earliest and most successful example of intensive agriculture, which is only partially true at most, but he presents it as entirely (and indisputably) true in order to argue in turn that the Mediterranean, speciously asserted to be part of the same historical region as Mesopotamia, was able to capitalize on that earlier success in ways that the "tropical" civilizations of China and India were not. The problem with most of Diamond's work is that he builds assumptions on top of assumptions in order to get to the point where he can close that last bit of distance with "scientific" research, which is rarely wrong in and of itself but is almost always predicated on obsolete historiography. As for early modern powers that were better placed to capitalize upon those resources, the distance from Spain to Central America is roughly five thousand miles, but the distance from China to Central America is roughly nine thousand miles. However, the distance from China to Kenya is roughly five thousand miles. Also, although the distance from West Africa to Central America is only forty-seven hundred miles, fifteenth-century West Africa was undergoing a prolonged period of strife from the collapse of the Mali, the rise of the Songhai, and the incursion of European slave traders, all of which Trastámara Spain and Ming China (and even Vijayanagara India) didn't have to deal with. I don't mean to paint world history simply as a race to depopulate, colonize, and exploit the Western Hemisphere, but the proximity of Europe to the Americas is a much more robust explanation for the world in which we live today than anything involving societal or environmental determinism that stretches back to prehistoric times.

I have had the flu since Saturday. The fever's only begun to break, so that should explain any shit posting I've done around the forum, but the deadline for my big article was last night at midnight, so I submitted it then. In the past twenty-four hours, I have become obsessed with worry that the last-minute revisions I made at the behest of a professorial colleague are actually terrible because they were made while my temperature was over a hundred. I have checked again and again and I am unable to find any fault with my changes, save for them being slightly less polished than I'd like in a perfect world, but it's still been the cause of a couple fever dreams since then. This is not the relief I was expecting from submitting an article to be published in a Variorum by Ashgate.

Hey! So, on the subject of sublimated anime misogyny, I'm partway through the second season of Bakuman and jeez, it would be a great show about dudes making a manga if it weren't for all of the annoying female characters messing up everything! It makes me feel bad for suggesting to an offended friend that Misa from Death Note was a deliberate choice to write a vapid and ineffectual female character, because another work from the same creative team has the exact same problems with female characters. Maybe they won't be an ongoing issue with Bakuman, but even what they've done so far is really offputting. Both Azuki and Aoki are fragile to the point of delusional, finding redemption only in placing themselves under the guidance of male characters, and the OP for the second season suggests they're bringing back the girl from the first season who thought she was Takagi's girlfriend for years because he shook her hand that one time. Yes, I'm being serious. I'm sure she won't turn out to be damaged in a way that is distressing and disruptive to our dynamic duo of protagonists! Bitches, right? I'm actually enjoying Bakuman, which is fitting very well with Aoi Honoo and Shirobako in terms of being about the technical details of manga and anime production, but it certainly isn't easy. Every time I see Azuki with her stupid hoodie-shaped fringe, I want to turn off the show, and I love bangs!

I really wish I'd taken notes when I read J.M. Blaut's Eight Eurocentric Historians last year, so I could better participate in this conversation. Looking now at an article by Blaut that provided the kernel for his chapter on Jared Diamond, the arguments against Diamond involve the premise that European civilization even was particularly prone to adaptation and evolution, and thereby to dominance, which has repeatedly been shown to be fallacious if the immense resources from Europe's exclusive access to the New World are discounted. Given unlimited sources, all societies will keep expanding, but only Europe was given anything approaching unlimited resources after 1492. Really, in general, Diamond's impression of world history is shaped by a lot of post-hoc rationalization of Europe's dominance, which undermines the supposed takedown of European superiority through good ol' science. Most frustratingly, Diamond has an understanding of Asian history that's stuck in the fifteenth century and an understanding of Asian geography that doesn't extend beyond the North China Plain or the Indus River Valley, so he's not equipped at all to argue how environment affected the development of East Asian and South Asian societies except in relation to how they differ from the European model. Furthermore, whenever environmental causes fall short, as they sometimes do, Diamond's fine with falling back on Eurocentric ideas of Europe's unique individualism, freedom, and rationality in order to find environmental causes for them instead. It's hard to see as you're reading it, because we've all grown up with the idea that Europe's somehow special, but having it pointed out makes it painfully obvious. Really, I can't recommend The Colonizer’s Model of the World and Eight Eurocentric Historians enough. I wish Blaut had survived to write the third book in the trilogy, proposing an antidote to Eurocentric history, but alas.

Do you really see that happening in the interview, Twig, or is that just how you feel when you put yourself in Molyneux's shoes? Myself, I don't see anything resembling "submission" from Molyneux throughout the interview. He pushes back hard at every negative statement that Walker makes from start to finish (and some positive statements too, like Walker saying that he likes some of Molyneux's games), and it's not as though his initial position is altered at all in the course of it, since he restates at the end that Godus will be right as rain in six months and that is "the absolute truth of the matter." I really don't see how the presence of antagonism invalidates an interview, anyway. If it did, then our entire judicial system is fucked (and it is fucked, but more for other reasons, which is a conversation for the Ferguson or the Social Justice thread).

I don't exactly see the logic behind things said under stress not being representative of one's genuine opinions. Surely, what you say with preparation and what you say on the spur of the moment are two sides of the same coin that is you? You're almost implying here that Molyneux is saying anything he can to get through the interview, but that's i) incredibly suspicious if true, and ii) definitely not true. Molyneux is quite consistent in his responses to Walker's statements. At no point in the interview does he respond to the stress by changing tack, revising his position, or backtracking on a statement, except when Walker catches him saying something explicitly untrue, like when Konrad joined the company. Instead, Molyneux reiterates his key points over and over, and it's those key points that I find unsettling: it's natural for projects to go over time and budget, so he shouldn't be held accountable for that, and it's natural to overpromise when talking to the press, so he shouldn't be held accountable for that. Sure, Walker is way too hostile at times, especially when bringing up shit like the Mayfair, but he's not some wizard who's tricking Molyneux into saying things he doesn't actually believe. Meanwhile, when Molyneux finally does get around to answering whether he's a pathological liar, which Walker restates as someone who says stuff that isn't true without meaning to, here is his answer: That is not the opinion of anyone else I personally know working in creative media, no matter what kind of stress they're under. It gives the impression of filmmakers, novelists, designers, and artists being people who lie habitually and occasionally make one of those lies come true. It makes the creation of art seem like it's some kind of dysfunctional pathology, yet it's something that Molyneux explicitly accepts. How is that not revealing in any way? Myself, I'm trying to figure out how to deal with it, as more than a one-time thing, since I quoted an extremely similar statement that Molyneux makes in a different context several dozen lines down. That's the value of an uncomfortably hostile interview like this one for me, the equivalent of Nixon saying, "When the president does it, that means that it is not illegal," to Frost.

Yeah, I feel bad that you died so young, but you definitely carved out your own niche. Who's next, Riadsala himself? I assume he's going to commit some infanticide to keep our game from ending with him...