Gormongous

Regarding whole bleachers of people dying to kick off a succession crisis in England, it already happened. In general, monarchies are fascinating. My favorite page is the list of titles and honors claimed by the Spanish crown, which includes such niceties as King of Jerusalem, Archduke of Austria, and Emperor of the Romans. In the real-life game of Crusader Kings 2, the Spanish house of Bourbon (itself a cadet branch of the Capetians) definitely won just by lasting long enough to get claims by marriage and inheritance to most of the other titles of medieval and early modern Christendom.

Tegan right now:

NGOTY would be a good award to start kicking around.

Hush puppies, I guess? God, that is a bad puzzle, even so.

I use them in semi-professional emails to convey levity and in online conversations to convey unreliability. I don't know what that says about me.

Yay! I am so, so excited. Feel free to message me if you have something specific you want to do and need help with the mechanics to do it.

This isn't my experience, but I thought it was an interesting way to test the bounds of Fantasy Life on the 3DS: http://www.thegia.com/2014/12/15/fantasy-life-devaluing-violence/

I don't necessarily know that I agree with you. Last year, when we read large portions of Olaudah Equiano in my class, it was heavy stuff with which a lot of my students clearly had trouble. More than a few didn't show up that day because of it. If that's what's happening already, I don't see a problem with formalizing it through a trigger warning or something similar ("content warning" sounds less like it comes from the internet and means the same thing) and encouraging students to talk to the professor if they anticipate issues with the material. It might help some of the students who skipped out entirely to access the material in a limited way, rather than not at all. The students who don't want to do the work will always find a way not to do the work, so classroom policy has to be based on enabling students who do want to do the work in any way possible.

I totally don't mean for this to be as confrontational and adversarial as it's probably going to sound, but your response is very similar to a lot of the more considered ones I see from left-leaning people reacting positively to the article, namely that it speaks to a kernel of truth despite being poorly argued by a suspect journalistic authority using cherry-picked evidence. Because I don't trust asking this question on Facebook, I'd like to ask you, why do you think that is the case? I'm not sure myself, but I still find it somewhat worrisome that such a deeply flawed critique could gain so much traction among otherwise right-thinking people, for the most part because it confirms their own sneaking suspicions about certain segments of the liberal left. Isn't that part of an echo chamber like the one that we're supposed to be condemning here?

Okay, I've been following this discussion and mostly understanding both arguments, that statement is weird. Wasn't your original complaint about the Emperor card teleporting you to a boss before you'd healed up? If you were better at combat in Binding of Isaac, that most certainly would have helped you avoid the downside of that item. In fact, I can't think of any item the downside of which is not mitigated by being good at the other systems in the game. I would argue that you should only risk picking up items insofar as you believe your skill at the game can handle their potential downsides. That's an interesting dynamic that would be lost if all items had positive effects.

I wouldn't say it allows us to self-segregate, I would almost say it forces us to self-segregate, unless you're one of those few people with unlimited emotional energy to deal with knee-biting and back-stabbing. And... I don't know. Over the past decade, I've grown immensely as a proponent of feminism, social justice, and LGBTQIA rights. I don't think it's a process of radicalization, but it's definitely a sincere change in my outlook from someone who was joking-but-not-joking as a half-hearted proponent of dictatorial government and military expenditures as a young teen, not exactly fertile ground for liberal ideas. I can't exactly trace the path I walked, but the path is there somewhere for real communication and I mostly walked it via the internet, so I'm not entirely despairing of the possibilities for dialogue, even if I don't see now how I would change my own mind, were I confronted with a fourteen-year-old me in some forum thread. Either way, I just resent "here's what's wrong with the left" articles, because they seem to serve no purpose besides getting thrown in the face of left-leaning people in a way that doesn't really happen with other political allegiances. Why do left-leaning people keep writing them?

Ugh, two separate long-term assholes on my Facebook feed have already linked the Chait piece with comments like, "And this is why I tell bleeding-heart liberals to stuff it when they demand that I consider my 'privilege.' Free speech cannot be silenced, liberals are worse than ISIS!" Whatever the reasons Chait has for writing this piece, I am willing to bet money that its only perceptible effect will be getting linked by MRAs and #GamerGate to defend their right to say offensive things from the criticism of progressives. It bums me out that any attempt, good or bad, that the left makes to self-assess its own flaws is simply incorporated into a hate machine bent on its destruction.

Really? Toronto's generally known for a strong medieval program, especially manuscript and document studies, thanks to its world-famous Latin courses. I forget, are you not in history? The funny thing about my research is that I have zero interest in playing a Montferrat in Crusader Kings 2. The individuals are just too important to me, and I get frustrated that their paths to power are mostly nonexistent in the game's systems. It's like I'm too knowledgeable to enjoy myself in that respect. Yeah, I don't begrudge people listening to Carlin. He's engaging in a way I wish I could be and has a nose for stories. I just don't like his style, which I think sometimes keeps him from doing good history, and that means that I don't listen to him and can't really recommend him.

I know it's weird for me to say, but Isometric is probably still worth your time. Although I love her in most other mediums and even in the podcast itself, Brianna Wu is easily the worst part of Isometric, for reasons I covered when discussing their GOTY episodes, but she goes into these hyper-technical, opinion-first and rationale-later rants only occasionally. Of course, I say that when the most recent episode had its discussion about the boob-kerfuffle in Resident Evil HD Remaster interrupted by a long and seemingly clueless rant by Bri about the technical demands of physics modeling, so whatever. Maybe you shouldn't listen to it, Bri loves to rag on the lack of "innovation" in Pokemon despite playing it obsessively the past few months... Actually, it was announced that Brianna Wu has a new podcast where she invites guests and talks with them about various geek things, so I'm hoping that a lot of her more incongruous and intrusive rants will get let out there.

Thanks for sharing that, Chris. I think you're right that we'll have to agree to disagree. Maybe it's my Midwest upbringing, but I almost always apologize to people if they're offended, even online. The sheer fact that they're offended causes sufficient regret for the apology to be sincere for me, unless by apologizing I'm enabling or encouraging toxic or destructive behavior, in which case I don't for obvious reasons. With that perspective, I find it very frustrating, especially online, how rarely people apologize for saying or doing things that cause clear and sometimes severe distress to other people. An apology costs nothing to me and it can be the difference between the best and the worst day for someone, often an oppressed person who might have less opportunity for good days overall, so I'm really unsympathetic to complaints like those of Chait, even if they are borne out of legitimate frustrations.

Well, I think it's part and parcel of the medium, put that way. The way someone perceives disagreement as a producer of content is a million responses to a single statement. The way someone perceives disagreement as a receiver of content is a million statements, most of which merit the same response. Under those circumstances, I can see how both sides mourn the difficulty of legitimate and well-meaning debate on the internet, but I don't agree that it's a direct consequence of the culture that can or must be resolved. There's no magic bullet to make Twitter anything but shallow and tangential, that's how it was designed to be. More to the point, I know so many people who are tired of debating (and defending) their own identity politics in general, legitimate and well-meaning or not, and would rather just have an apology when they tell someone that something is offensive to them, but there's very few articles about how people don't apologize enough on the internet. Instead, we get the same article over and over about why callout culture is annoying, which rarely address why callout culture came into and remains in being. It's weird what we each see as a fundamental part of the system and what we see as alterable.

You are referring to those getting their arguments dismissed as individuals but those doing the dismissing as an undifferentiated group. I don't know if that's a helpful characterization of the situation. Individuals make arguments and individuals dismiss them, each ideally according to their sincere beliefs. I understand that it is frustrating to have your arguments dismissed, but it is equally if not more frustrating to have to be presented over and over with the same arguments, sometimes borderline offensive, just because of who you are and how you've constructed your identity, especially when most presenters expect to have treated their arguments treated specifically and with all due consideration. The dismissal (and the specific ideas of having an opinion that inform it) isn't coming from a vacuum.

All of these articles have in common the belief that discouraging the speech of generally white, generally straight, generally male voices, even by indirect and unintentional means, is an unequivocally bad thing that demands a fundamental change in the direction of liberal and feminist culture to rectify. The fact that many of the authors find the fear of saying something offensive and being expected to apologize for it a huge problem, but not the fear of being attacked or just not being heard as a minority voice speaking out against oppression, tells me volumes about their privilege and somewhat about the relative worth of their arguments. Like Deadpan said, it's a bunch of white dues being worried that no one cares what they have to say, which is not malicious but certainly a bit oblivious. I don't know, I agree that callout culture can sometimes feel hostile and stressful, but I don't see how the repudiation of it is going to be anything but silencing to those who need a voice.

I'm rewatching Ghost in the Shell: Arise after Twig stumped so hard for it in the Movies/TV thread, and I'm liking most of it, just like I remembered. Almost all of my complaints boil down to its nature as an origin story, which is invariably underbaked to some extent, and its decisions to disregard some of the more interesting backstories of the show in order to heighten dramatic conflict. Pretty much my only real complaint that doesn't boil down to how good the original show was is Arise's treatment of artificial memories. Everywhere else in the several worlds of Ghost in the Shell, artificial memories, especially as the result of a virus, are incredibly traumatic, because they cause you to act differently once inserted and you have no way of knowing whether what you think about yourself and your experiences is true. In the original movie and at least twice in the two seasons of the TV show, they make it clear that people's lives are ruined because the technology exists to create memories but not to remove them. It's a powerful theme that underpins most of what makes Ghost in the Shell interesting as a franchise. But in the first two episodes of the Arise OVA, artificial memories are a major part of the plot, and both times they're just brushed off as a trick hackers sometimes play that can be remedied with a little work, should the victim be up to it. There's no psychological depth except for the "Gotcha!" moment of a character acting on incorrect information and I have no idea why. Okay, so I'm still complaining about something being different from the original show, but I think it's very representative of Arise's preference for action and thrills over more cerebral pleasures, and it's disappointing to me because of that. I know, I know. I should have listened to you, Rodi. In general, I'm very slow to accept people's anime suggestions, because my backlog's already so huge and there's such a broad delta for taste, but that just means that I'm the one a year later being like, "Hey! Did you guys watch Space Dandy? It was pretty good!" I've downloaded Aoi Honoo (a joke on Aoi Hana?) and have it pretty high in my queue now. Yeah, they made an anime out of Insufficient Direction last summer, voiced by two of the actors from Evangelion (Yamadera Kouichi and Hayashibara Megumi). I liked it a lot, but Anno is a hero of mine if it's possible for me to have one, just because I love what he does but I don't understand him at all. As a work of anime, it's more about getting a peek into the otaku lifestyle. It's short as hell, because it's made up of thirteen three-minute flash-style episodes, so you can have the entire thing watched in half an hour if you don't care about identifying which a capella version of a tokusatsu theme is playing over each set of end credits.

I started out researching conquest, settlement, and state-building in the Latin East, but I gradually moved to the marquisate of Montferrat, a noble house that built itself almost entirely out of marital and martial prestige in the twelfth and thirteenth centures, especially via crusading, before it was ground down by the circumstances leading to the Italian Wars. My dissertation in particular looks at the lives of three generations of marquises, all of whom participated in crusades to escalating degrees, and uses new research about the institution of crusades and the Mediterranean cultural system to reassess the overly regional conclusions of Leopoldo Usseglio's I marchesi di Monferrato in Italia ed in oriente durante i secoli XII e XIII, written in 1926 but still considered authoritative. Hopefully that doesn't make me totally googleable. If all goes well, I've got an article getting published in a festschrift through Ashgate this summer, which will be the inception of the documented part of my academic career.

In terms of fostering conversations that dismiss personal experience as somehow invalid, there's no beating the internet. I'm very aware of my privilege there, because I only have a minimal number of non-mainstream identities, and even those get attacked all the time. For someone dealing with intersectional oppression, I can't even imagine. Anyway, I just wanted to make sure that you knew I wasn't dismissing the bisexual experience when I said what I did. I was mostly just referencing the hate that they get, but there's almost not enough quotation marks for that to fly.

The sheer number of negative comments on that article amounting to either "TB was an asshole in a different way from the way you said, so your argument is invalid" or "TB is successful and successful people should be allowed to behave however they want" are why this'll never be a thing, no matter how justified.

I'm trying to unpack why this makes me uncomfortable. I don't know about the world as a whole, but on a dating site full of near-anonymous strangers, people should probably abide by the relationship preferences that are explicitly listed. The politics here are personal ones, about consent and agency. Because of my general appearance, I am sometimes propositioned on dating sites by gay men who want to show me "the truth" about myself (or who get a kick out of fucking a straight guy) and I take exception to any implication that I should be open to gay sex simply because I attract interest by presenting queerer than I am, the reason I usually get when I thank them for their interest but restate my orientation. How exactly am I supposed to keep random people from making unsolicited requests of my person contrary to my stated wishes? I can only imagine how it is for bisexual women who actually have to navigate far deeper waters, especially with a history of bisexuals being people who just "can't decide" or who are "open to anything" (and the history of women's bodies always being perceived as available).

I find Dan Carlin really frustrating. I've only listened to one stretch of Hardcore History, the "Death Throes of the Republic" hexology, and I went from loving it in the beginning to hating it by the end. Carlin has a talent for rooting out the more extreme interpretations of any historical figure and a penchant for using them because they're interesting rather than necessarily true. These are both things against which I've struggled myself in my own professional career, so they're really hard for me to take in stride. Having to hear Carlin go on and on about Gaius Marius being a rock star of the ancient world, rather than trying to contextualize him within his own times, almost made me quit on its own. I really have no problem with people listening to him, because history is history and I won't begrudge people a more salacious take on it, but one look at his website, with "Blueprint for Armageddon" and "Prophets of Doom" as two of the latest releases, tells me that he's still not for me. I also doubt that Carlin would ever do something like the history of the Holy Roman Empire. There are titanic confrontations between people who purport to rule the entire world, but these confrontations repeatedly end in compromise and failure for both sides. The upshot of the Investiture Contest and the Hohenstaufen's destruction is the enslavement of the pope to a different secular power and the end of the Holy Roman Empire as a political force on its own. I don't think that matches Carlin's style. Heck, it took me several years to get to know the people involved in that massive two hundred-year clusterfuck before I found my own place in it. I agree about publicizing this, but I won't do it myself because I'm by far the most prolific poster in this thread. Maybe someone can drop a mention in the "Random Thoughts about Video Games" thread. Anyway, here's the save file. I used TinyUpload, because the file's only three megabytes. Good luck!

Okay, something of a recap, which I'll hopefully reedit into something sensible if this headache ever goes away: I haven't had this much fun with Crusader Kings 2 in maybe half a year. I know a lot about the kingdom of Burgundy, owing to its geographic and dynastic proximity to the subject of my dissertation, but I tend to avoid it in CK2, because the game's mechanics conspire to ensure that events can never play out as did history there. All the dukes convert to German culture, the Holy Roman Emperor uses his troops to keep them in power, there's no fragmentation or dissidence, and France never annexes the region. Still, trying to roleplay an ancient dynasty with over-the-top pretensions to glory made it fun. I wish I could keep playing... I was incredibly unlucky in some ways and incredibly lucky in others. I ruled for thirty-six in-game years (which bothers me a little, because William Bertrand succeeded in 1051, so I ruled fifty-one years in reality) and I got one forged claim, despite my total diplomatic score never dipping below 40. One! On the other hand, the Holy Roman Empire never started any stupid wars, besides little skirmishes with France over the Low Countries, so it was always stable enough for me to have a good income. I also had a terrible education, so I risked educating Acfred with my chancellor, Guiges the Fat, and it came out beautifully! He's diligent, brave, kind, and charitable. I couldn't have raised him better myself. I know that I gradually got more and more religious in my in-character voice as time went on. It was really me getting more comfortable writing as him, but I also like that it sounds like an old man finding God after a somewhat disappointing life. I only that I could have captured with equal clarity the bitterness of having the supposed love of my life treat me monstrously after my stroke. Did she hate me all along? Emergent narrative, indeed! The most important things moving forward are threefold: make sure to educate Acfred's two sons personally and continue the high-diplomacy eugenics program, so that the realm can continue to expand once the Dauphiné has been inherited and the kingdom created; keep the nest egg of a thousand gold as much intact as possible to hire mercenaries in case the Holy Roman Emperor figures out what you're doing and tries to revoke a title from you as a non-native duke; and marry inside the Holy Roman Empire, with the kingdoms of Bohemia and Bavaria particularly, because the emperor is married to the duchess of Tuscany and will soon be a huge landowner able to put down any rebellion. Here's a quick summary of the past thirty-six years below. The only really notable things are the subjugation of the papacy to the empire, the failure of the Norman conquests in England and southern Italy, and the centralization of the Pomeranian, Finnish, and Abyssinian crowns. There's a couple of tweak guides on the Paradox forums about how to reduce CK2's load on the graphics and processor. Maybe look at those? I'd really like to have you follow me up, you seem to get the role. How should I pass the save file on, anyway, whoever does follow me?