Gormongous

So... the past two episodes of Yuri Kuma Arashi have been pretty good, mostly because we're finally getting backstory and hence motivations from the main characters. Honestly, no matter how this anime plays out, I will always be arguing that that the first three episodes were a huge misstep from a writer and director as experienced and meticulous as Ikuhara. You build characters first and then use them to create an allegory once the audience has invested in them; you don't start with the allegory and then use flashbacks to give us a reason to invest in the characters that make it up. Why Ikuhara thought that an hour of ritualistic storytelling, stylized sequences, and rote phrases was the way to open a four-hour series with apparently complex themes about fundamentally human topics like love and hate (I'm not convinced about that last bit, but I want to cover my ass if this turns out to be a masterpiece) is beyond me, but at least now we know a little bit better who Ginko, Lulu, and Kureha are and what the Invisible Storm is, which'll help to save this anime from being a total trainwreck in the final summation. I'm never going to have any connection to Sumika, though. If she's the love of Kureha's life, the first episode should probably have given some evidence of that. Instead, she's dead in the first five minutes and we just have to endure Kureha saying over and over that she will only ever love Sumika, because... uh... they shared a fish roll? Yeah, it's definitely because Aniplex is a Japanese company that's trying to keep their American branch from the fate of Bandai Entertainment (which was forced by its parent company to bid on properties based on Japanese sales data but had to sell those properties in a marketplace where that data was meaningless, hence they folded), but NIS is in the same position and somehow manages not to ask more than eighty bucks for a given series, which is perfectly reasonable to me. When homegrown media of roughly equivalent runtime and/or episodes (say, Battlestar Galactica) is retailing for less than a third of one of your mid-tier titles, you're just saying that you're fine with niche sales, so long as reverse-importing doesn't sink your bottom line back in Japan. I see the same with wargame publishers all the time, actually. Time and again, some developer associated with Slitherine or Matrix gets caught on their forums going off about how their eighty-dollar product has to be that expensive because there's just no market beyond thirty-something wargamers who've been trained to accept that expense and how lowering the price will just net them less profit, period. Invariably, a year or two later, they've put some of their back catalog up on Steam and discovered that cutting your prices in half triples sales, at the very least, and they'll post another forum rant about the digital-download revolution, like it's something that happened yesterday. That's how Aniplex and, to a much smaller extent, NIS seem to me, except that the last part never happens because they'll always have their primary Japanese market to convince them that it's just America and the UK that are fucked up in terms of commercial potential.

It's inconceivable that they ever depict law enforcement as inadequate for the threat or unable to do the job, of course.

My front page is a huge pile of games I already own in physical form and notifications begging me to review my queue. I ignore it more than I ever did the old front page. It just takes too much effort to cultivate the various systems into presenting you with stuff you actually care about.

I baked a cake, too! I love Love's games and recommend them to anyone, even people who are leery of visual novels, because they're grounded so well in their theme.

I'm glad I'm not alone. I'm even fairly amenable to a heavy anime aesthetic, but there are a variety of extremely off-putting things in Revolution 60's artistic design that make it impossible for me to bear as a whole. When Wu talks on Isometric about the graphical ugliness of a game, which often boils down to something esoteric like the improper use of the alpha channel, I feel like I'm hearing the learn'd astronomer. And yeah, still voted for it on Greenlight. It'll be someone's game, just not mine.

Okay, halfway through Monogatari Series: Second Season, I'm officially to the point where I'd start making plans to buy all the Blu-rays, but, oh no... they're licensed by Aniplex of America. Aniplex got a huge amount of flak for selling the first fifteen-episode season, Bakemonogatari, for two hundred dollars, so instead, for subsequent seasons, they've divided them into individual four- or five-episode arcs, which they're marketing and pricing as full seasons. For two and a half full-cour seasons, sixty-five episodes, I'd be willing to pay maybe three hundred dollars in total, which puts me way outside the normal curve of anime fans, but even on RightStuf, which has a special agreement with Aniplex that cuts their pricing by maybe twenty percent, the full run of the Monogatari series would still add up to twice that, six hundred dollars. That's just shy of ten dollars an episode. Fuck me! Aniplex has repeatedly stated that they view anime as a luxury item, the value of which is determined solely by the price at which they are willing to sell it, but seriously? Desserts are a luxury item, but no one's selling slices of cake for forty dollars, and cake doesn't even have to compete with being free everywhere already. This sort of greedy idiocy is why the anime licensing bubble popped in the mid-2000s. I've got to watch the final OP for Nisemonogatari just to calm down Goddamn, I love bon-style dances. As far as I've heard it, the only way people enjoy the Danganronpa anime is if they've already played the game, because it's functionally the twenty-five-hour plot of the game compressed into thirteen episodes. Accordingly, there's not much time for character development or anything, so you have to have played the game to understand what's happening why, although if you have played it, I understand that the performances and shoutouts are actually pretty good.

Agreed, that fundamental confusion between a 2002 Age of Empires 2 reskin and a 2006 2.5D space RTS (plus a really mediocre ground-based component) with a turn-based campaign mode is a really inauspicious start for an episode that spends a lot of time talking about what makes a Petroglyph game. So much of what Rob, T.J., and Shawn praise as innovations (or at least newfound strengths) in Grey Goo were present almost a decade ago in Star Wars: Empire at War, especially the distinctive art design, the engaging campaign missions, and the factions differentiated more by unit tuning than by type. If you include the expansion, which added the "corruption" faction, there is even the third faction that plays a completely different game with completely different momentum from the other two traditionally opposed factions, although Tyber Zann was moronic as both fiction and mechanic even when compared to the conspicuously unsexy concept of "grey goo." As far as I can see it, even though I haven't played Grey Goo, the narrative is more properly Petroglyph finding its footing again after losing its way, rather than them finally hitting their stride, which is more what seems to be repeated through the podcast. Honestly, I have a lot of fondness for Empire at War and think of it as probably the best strategy-focused adaptation of the Star Wars universe. The space battles are dynamic and impactful, incorporating lessons from Homeworld and the first Dawn of War, while still sitting firmly in the Westwood idiom, and the campaign mode is at least as solid as the first few Total War games while being its own thing. The ground battles are slapdash and forgettable, but at least part of that is that you can't follow up the grandeur of space with three dozen stormtroopers wandering through some empty fields and keep the latter from suffering enormously.

I reread the Thrawn trilogy and the Corellian trilogy in my mid-twenties, right after graduating college and long after the death of any exceptional fondness for Star Wars in me. Both are not that bad, all things considered. Timothy Zahn and Roger MacBridge Allen are fine writers and understand the Star Wars universe well enough to craft plausible stories within it. There are more than a few callouts to lines and moments from the original movies that feel almost publisher-mandated, but otherwise they're solid mid-tier science fiction. I wouldn't recommend them to anyone who didn't love Star Wars, but they are an asset to the franchise as they are. The later stuff, I don't know... Zahn's formula became so common that it was used to retrofit preexisting sci-fi manuscripts that weren't selling into Star Wars novels, like Children of the Jedi and The Crystal Star. There's also just a ton of hack work, like Darksaber and The New Rebellion, and eventually the universe got spread so thin by the New Jedi Order stuff that it really ceased to have any meaning or impact. For me, the turning point was the takeover of the line from Bantam Spectra to Del Rey after the prequels started getting released, but you can always find shit at any point after Zahn.

The interesting element in a multiplayer game is that each person has to complete their business within the allotted time, else the time is taken out of the next person's turn. That makes for an incentive not to interfere unless they're horribly flubbing it, which is probably where most of us would draw the line in solving the "alpha player" problem. It does mean that XCOM doesn't seem that interested in being accessible, though.

I don't have the time to go into it with links, but Wardell generally has a poor track record as a decent human being. Multiple employees (mostly female) have come forward to complain about a hostile and abusive work environment at Stardock, Wardell's defense of which invariably boils down to his right to treat his employees however he likes, as owner of the company, with the implication (if we're especially lucky) that the complainer was a terrible worker anyway and maybe deserved some mistreatment. It's stopped me from buying Stardock-developed products the last few years, but not yet Stardock-published products, although I don't feel great about any of it.

I don't know, if you don't think that the extraction and distribution of resources and services is innately violent or coercive in any way, I might have a bridge to sell you. Also, the restriction of violence in some way or another is a basic concept of civil society, dating back to Aristotle's politics. It's exactly that society is not always violent, whereas it's almost universal in nature, that makes violence (or the occasional lack thereof) such an important and useful descriptor of the state. Of course, I have issues with the division of experience into "society" and "nature" as well, but you get the idea...

Well, I watched Nekomonogatari (Kuro) and I can say for sure that it wasn't nearly as good, so at least my brain hasn't been broken in a way that makes me love all of the Monogatari shows equally and uncritically. Their strength is definitely the large cast of starkly realized characters, especially their interactions and their relationships with the protagonist, so it's no surprise that the series that introduces them one by one and a prequel before most of them appear both bore me in a way that Nisemonogatari didn't. Monogatari Series: Second Season is apparently a chronological sequel, so I'm a little excited to be watching it soon. Yeah, specifically Otaku no Video is an extremely fictionalized account of Yatsuhiro Takeda (the fat guy in the cowboy getup from Aoi Honoo) and Okada Toshio (the rich shut-in, who is hilariously rewritten as a handsome tennis player in the anime) founding General Products (a garage-kit business that got folded into GAINAX after it lost all its money moving from Osaka to Tokyo) beginning immediately after the events of Aoi Honoo, so in that way it was a good fit to follow up. But, like I said, you can't really match the deep characterization of Aoi Honoo, which I've already recommended to several people who'd want to know what anime looked and felt like in the eighties. And ugh, Yamaga. I never thought someone who's just smart enough to identify talented people and stick to them like glue would be so funny. Oops. It was late and I was distracted! I watched Dennou Coil maybe four years ago, but I remember my feelings about it being really similar. It almost feels like its length diluted its message, but it came out in the days when full-cour anime were de rigueur, so it's kind of screwed there. It's definitely a gem that'll never get licensed and that's a shame, considering all the absolute junk that was brought over during the licensing bubble of the early 2000s.

I am deathly curious what this "unfair advantage" is...

It's an interesting article, but I don't find it absolutely convincing. It seems to be motivated principally by a desire for the state not to be coercive and violent by definition, alternatives for which he doesn't do a bad job of floating, but the arguments made in pursuit of that desire don't really pertain to any state in reality. It's especially striking to me that he sees laws and territory as fundamental to a state, even with something like the internet existing, but not the coercion or sanction that has upheld laws and defended territory since time immemorial. I don't know, I'll agree that the state isn't necessarily coercive and violent, else we're all fucked in the longest of runs, but I won't agree that the political reality of the state in the modern world isn't invariably coercive and violent. But yeah, if we want to continue this discussion, we should dig up one of Clyde's old philosophy threads and get to work.

If it makes you feel any better, Nisemonogatari is a direct sequel to Bakemonogatari, just at a slower pace with only two "cases" in eleven episodes. It's right after that, with the prequel OVA Nekomonogatari (Kuro), that they start going nuts and bouncing all over the place chronologically. In general, Nisemonogatari just feels more focused, even just in having less Shinbo/Shaft-style interstitial text cards that actually do a lot of the heavy lifting in Bakemonogatari. There's an extended conversation in the second episode about how adding the phrase "the courage to" onto negative things makes them positive without implicating yourself that I found more intelligently funny than the entirety of Bakemonogatari. And cool, I'll look up Katanamonogatari, although I actually like the Shaft "house style" a lot and, given a long enough exposure to it, I'll be won over to any series that has it. I was actually just thinking, an anime written by Ikukara, directed by Shinbo, and produced by Shaft is one of my few dream teams...

Triple post! Is Nisemonogatari better than Bakemonogatari, or did I hit my head sometime in the last twenty-four hours? Sure, the fan service is way way worse, to the point of being openly pornographic for extended periods, but it also feels as though more time is being spent on (occasionally non-pornographic) interactions between established characters rather than an endless parade introducing new ones, which was the thing that turned me off of Bakemonogatari by the end.

Yeah, I'm not really saying that we go smash the state. I'm saying all this as another argument that the conception of a state as an inherent limiter of violence, which should never be attacked or upset, has ideological repercussions that are dangerously self-legitimizing and probably ought to be re-examined.

I guess I just mean "ability" when I say "right." The idea that the state is innately nonviolent and only uses violence to keep select members nonviolent, thereby making violence against the state invariably unjustified, misunderstands the nature of rulership. It encourages social quietism under the (almost certainly false) assumption that the state will recognize an excessive use of its violence as a defect in its systems. Instead, I've come into the idea that the state is innately violent and only uses nonviolence to keep select members nonviolent, which justifies violence against the state under circumstances in which oppression is so widespread or egregious as to make the monopoly of violence essentially meaningless.

That's a really good point to make. In the discussions surrounding Ferguson, one thing that was repeated over and over was that the victims of police violence shouldn't have been doing anything illegal if they didn't want to get shot, which invokes this extremely Weberian vision of the state as a monopoly of violence. I've been helped recently by the observations of an acquaintance online, who pointed out that the state is inevitably violent, as all rulership is in the Machiavellian sense, and therefore it's less useful to conceive that the state reserves the right to harm you if you break its laws than that the state reserves the right not to harm you if you obey its laws. At its basest level, the state is an engine for the legitimization and application of violence, which is why the use of violence against it, even by a single member of a group, is automatically rejected as illegitimate, regardless of the reasons or outcome. I don't think he's arguing an individualized view of progress as a totalizing paradigm, just that the aggregate is functionally useless to anyone's actual experience of living and is used overwhelmingly to paper over existing issues in favor of a generalized narrative of ever-increasing good. Obviously, the aggregate has a place when talking about issues of inequality and oppression, but alongside community- and individual-focused perspectives that do less to obscure the fact that, say, the likelihood of a black youth being shot to death in the street has not decreased (and in some regions has even increased) since half a century ago, just because violence as a whole has decreased in the United States. This comes from my history background, but broadly speaking, I think the idea of "progress" is one of the most toxic cultural concepts in Western civilization. Since its popularization in the seventeenth century, it has been used almost exclusively to guide short-sighted policy decisions, silence dissent, and justify the status quo in society.

I don't doubt that there are more than a few men out there who want feminism to die so that they can create and be a part of the exact same ideology, just with male leadership and "men" in the title. It's misogyny in its most obvious and ridiculous form.

The historical precedent is to invite a cadet branch of the monarchy of a nation with which the kingdom has historically shared cordial relations to take the throne.

An update that Aoi Honoo is really good, much more so than I've previously come to expect from live-action Japanese television, and also strangely affecting for eleven episodes mostly made up of jokes about being a college kid with a fat head. I was also very gratified just to have Anno be there as the villain by virtue of his extreme weirdness. I'm hoping that it'll segue well into my first watching ever of Otaku no Video, but I don't know it will, because the specificity of Aoi Honoo is so high and, even though Otaku no Video has been praised as a GAINAX tell-all by Okada Toshio (or Yamaga Hiroyuki, depending if you believe the rumors), even the first twenty minutes feel like the edges have been carefully and deliberately sanded off.

I lost more than a few at the end of high school and the beginning of college, plus there's a bunch of people with whom I fell out of contact after graduating from both who seem to fall into the same unconscious mental space.

I was pretty drunk tonight (okay, still am pretty drunk) and had a discussion with my colleagues about the nightmares we have. I discovered that I have 0% nightmares about driving or running from stuff, and 100% nightmares about seeing old or dead friends with whom I'm no longer in contact. Sobering!

You can often tell a great game by how it tempts you into the mentality of its subject matter. By that rubric, Sons of Anarchy: Men of Mayhem is a masterpiece, if just for how it had my meek bean-counting friend threatening to put some of my boys in the emergency room over territory that meant nothing to him, just to show that I couldn't walk up on him like that. Of course, I ended up being the one who threw down, even though it lost both of us the game, because I knew I had the guns and he didn't. Learned my lesson, you can't be wasting your time beefin' over corners when there's another guy out there pushing product. Okay, it's obvious I've watched The Wire more recently than Sons of Anarchy, but this game really captures any piece of media about small-time gangsterism.