Gormongous

Oh man, I love Jake's Jetta saga so much, but... are there not junkers or wreckers in San Francisco? The last two cars I've totaled, I just handed it off to the wrecker who towed it in exchange for a few hundred because he had a business relationship with a parts yard. I guess I figured they all do, but maybe I've just gotten lucky, albeit not lucky enough to be still driving my original 1985 Chrysler New Yorker, which did have the amazing digital dash and voice warnings.

Yeah, Arise has always been a "test" to see if the franchise still "worked" as a "series."

The two seasons of the TV show are equal parts police procedural and futuristic philosophical essay. I find them enormously successful in general.

It looks like they started patching the converter again with the Way of Life DLC and have kept up with the patch that dropped today. That's great news, I'm glad!

In the last forty-eight hours, I have become utterly preoccupied with the image of Josh Brolin in Inherent Vice screaming, "Motto panukeiku," with a full mouth.

I know the quest victory requires a large enough army to take a distant city from your most powerful rival. The science victory is neither helped nor hindered by a large army. The diplomacy victory is odd, because it requires a large enough army to be respected, but not so large to be feared, unless you're willing to invest enough to overawe everyone. So... yes, it's important, but not more than most 4X games.

I guess? EU4 is also a game about war, but not war all the time because that's unhistorical, even though there's vanishingly little to do in the game besides fight wars and make money to spend on troops or to spend on buildings that make money to spend on troops. It just doesn't feel entirely honest with itself. I find it weird to play a game that's nominally a sandbox, but in which you can't do any one thing for too long or for too well. The best design criticism I've read of EU4 is that it largely punishes success in the short- and mid-term, but not in the long-term, and that it does so in ways that fall heaviest on nations of less than thirty provinces, so it's not exactly preventing snowballing, just delaying it with forced waits that you're welcome to fill by fiddling with trade or colonists and watching green numbers go up and red numbers go down. It wasn't always this way, with coalition-chaining, vassal-feeding, and government-flipping, but Paradox has done a good job (in my opinion, too good, although government-flipping was a bit too gamey even for me) of making sure that, after a certain level of base competency, time, rather than knowledge, is the only currency with which to pay off challenge.

To push your point a bit further, there is a lot of art out there that derives its cultural payload from being created using new tools within historically prescribed bounds. Ignoring or dismissing those bounds because you might see them as irrelevant or just limiting verges on missing the point of why they're even there, which means missing the point of what makes a given work unique.

When I lived in Greece for half a year and couldn't afford any meat at all, I had serious problems with energy, hair/nail growth, and healing that no amount of legumes was able to assuage. There are scars up and down my arms from the little nicks and scratches that took months to close over. I'm sure there are solutions, but with my metabolism and whatever, they seem to be outside of my price range, so I just try to eat as ethically as I can without eliminating meat entirely. That's really where I'm sympathetic with some of Bjorn's points. I eat very little meat, maybe once a week in a single meal, and most vegans and vegetarians are fine about my choices, but there is a surprising percentage that has told me to my face that I'm no different from some big hoss eating a steakburger for every meal if I don't eliminate all meat from my diet (or eggs and milk, or consumer products from cruelty, or whatever). I understand feeling like there's a line to be drawn, but it feels shitty to have made the most ethical decision within my means and be told that it doesn't mean anything if it's not absolute.

Okay, listening to the episode again, I did have a bit of a problem with Paradox's relationship with fan feedback, especially about visibility of information, being described as quick and responsive. I remember the thread on the Paradox forums where Arumba's video was discussed when it first came out. More than one Paradox employee, along with a host of fans, fought tooth and nail against any acknowledgement that the fixes would be helpful until Wiz, the former modder who now does most of the AI programming, came in and identified eight as easily implementable. They happened so fast because Wiz was willing to take the time to do them himself, I think, but that doesn't tend to reflect the attitude of the development team as a whole, in my experience. For instance, when I think of EU4 development, I think of the changes to the diplomatic system. When the game first came out, they said that they'd removed the chance-based system from EU3 and replaced it with an entirely deterministic system of relationships that were scored with numbers from -200 to 200 and reflected thresholds that could be directly influenced by player actions. It soon became clear that, while the relationship scores were important, they weren't actually the defining value in the diplomatic system. That was the attitude, a black box of modifiers that overrode the relationship score in every instance and more or less recreated the chance-based system of the previous game, only abstracted one level out. When criticized by players for actually introducing complexity to the diplomacy by having two separate systems influencing the success and effect of diplomatic actions, developers from the team said that diplomacy was boring if it was predictable and accessible to player agency, so they had to introduce the attitudes, even though they went against the design philosophy of the relationship scores. Then, six months later, after several great essays and a couple of good arguments between fans and developers, it was decided to expose the package of variables and modifiers represented by the attitudes, which was hailed as a great victory for visibility and accessibility... until it was discovered through this visibility that attitude was largely determined by ruler personality, another black box inside the black box. And then there were the same arguments about visibility and accessibility as important or irrelevant to fun, and when ruler attitude was exposed three months later, it was discovered that it's a randomly determined value, not too different from the ruler's actual stats, that explains a lot of the idiotic and suicidal behavior of the AI. At least that time, there was a different argument, about whether the AI should play rationally or play the metagame... Even after a year, I still have my problems with EU4, and most of them stem from a game that is a jack of all trades but a master of none, seemingly by design. Is it a light and accessible wargame, despite game-ruining events with hidden triggers like the Peasants' War, rulers with completely randomized stats that dictate whether or not the majority of strategies are viable, and a coalition system that can trigger if a one-province minor gets caught fabricating a claim that it then presses through war and annexation? Is it a historical simulation of the fifteenth through the nineteenth centuries, despite world wars breaking out in the 1490s over less land than changed hands in the Italian Wars? Is it a sandbox game of nation-building, despite nonexistent internal politics, conquest mechanics that grind to a halt above a certain scale of play unless the player is willing to use exploits, and the restrictions placed only on non-European powerhouses like steppe nomads and China? I don't know, but the fact that it wants to be all three allows for Sean and Rob to go from saying that the best part about EU4 is the breadth of choice, to saying that it requires you not to choose any one thing, to saying that it actually forces you not to do certain things for periods of time. Okay? At least one of those three things cannot be true, at least in a general sense. I'm sympathetic to schizophrenic designs, especially with historical games that have to try to capture the complexity of their sources, but somehow EU4 frustrates me in ways that CK2, for all of its downhill progress since Rajas of India left the game in a perpetually near-unplayable state, does not. As far as I know, the converter has been broken for about three months now. When they added a bunch of new cultures and provinces for the rest of the world with the release of the patch accompanying The Art of War, those weren't added into the converter, which is really just maintained by Groogy in his free time. There's not any ETA for fixing it, although some fan fixes have existed for some time.

The really crazy thing is that, up until the last few decades, women could always be sure that the child they had was their own. It was literally impossible for it to be otherwise. If you're rejecting cognatic kinship and partible inheritance as a society, surely the matriline is the one to choose, but no, almost never, not even in reasonably-developed matriarchal and quasi-matriarchal societies like the Picts of Scotland. It makes you wonder how much of the patriarchy was built by the collective insecurity of men who were terrified of raising some other man's child and wanted the power to be sure they weren't.

I'm sure it's just dropping you in the calculated geographic center of the zip code. Even as small as mine is, it's not particularly close to where I live, but I think it's the center, looking at a zip code map.

That's really great news! It always strikes me how important your professors and advisor giving a shit can be to the general comfort and enjoyment of your time at college, and yet how much of academia is still structured in a way that discourages or downright punishes the spending of your time and love on students...

I loved Utena and think of it as one of the greatest animes of the nineties. I liked Penguindrum but found it uneven to the point of inchoate by the end. I don't like Yuri Kuma Arashi very much at all. The themes are equal parts obvious and obscure, plus I know nothing about the characters. The deconstructions present in Utena and Penguindrum didn't come at the cost of actual character development, but Ikuhara's growing dependence on highly stylized and frequently repeated sequences to build a sense of elevation and otherness are crowding out what might otherwise be a good anime. We're two episodes into a twelve-episode anime and I still know nothing about these girls except that some are sad and some are bears. How is that a commentary on yuri? It's enormously frustrating for me. I feel like the quality of an original anime production by Ikuhara is inversely proportional to the time he spends working on it. He spent his whole life, thirty-six years, building up to Utena, and then fourteen years until Penguindrum, and now four years for Yuri Kuma Arashi. This is a theory I've pulled out of my ass. I do like the environmental design a lot, though. I think that is one advantage over Utena, which has a rich Rose of Versailles look but can't match the intricacy and depth of the computer-rendered landscapes of Penguindrum and Yuri Kuma Arashi. I will always enjoy watching something by Ikuhara, it's just what the rest of my psyche tends to be doing that makes the experience imperfect.

Well, there's a lot of other stuff, both cultural and not, that Europa Universalis IV glosses over. The most important historical feature of the years 1444-1821 is the growth of the state, just like Crusader Kings is about the growth of the dynasty and Victoria is about the growth of the nation... only EU has virtually no internal politics to reflect the growth of the state, apart from the newly introduced and mostly irrelevant "autonomy" mechanic. I was always taught that the state grew in response to the expanding military needed to conquer more land, but in EU4 it almost happens in reverse. You conquer more land to expand your military, and l'etat c'est toi, so who cares about the state. To be a negative ninny, I've only played EU4 maybe a fifth of the time I've played CK2, because the former feels so darn unhistorical. The systems don't reflect the historical realities of the period very well at all (notably, they're systems within which the decade of post-Varna conquests by the Ottomans and the Fronde of Louis XIV's minority are equally unworkable) and tend to punish the player for historically authentic decision-making. I'd probably enjoy it a lot better without the theming, which is a harrowing thought for me.

I'm actually just reading about the Khitan empire, which was this semi-nomadic polity that existed for two hundred years on the northern border of China, up until the Mongols wiped it out. The crazy thing was that it was literally two states, one nomadic and one sedentary, united under a single emperor. The emperor would usually rule the Chinese, Koreans, and so on from present-day Beijing, while his wife would rule the Turks, Khitans, Mongols, and Tatars in the traditional style of the khan. It was a remarkably equal arrangement, especially considering the Confucian and Neo-Confucian misogyny that the Khitan culture absorbed with its partial Sinicization, and actually led to a lot of political instability rather early on as the empresses, who controlled most of the empire's military resources in the nomadic clans, repeatedly challenged the supposed primacy of their husbands and sons. I have no idea why we never learn about idioms of female power and authority in different cultures. They exist, sometimes in striking relief, but they disrupt the narrative of progress and separation that still describes the "modernization" of the world, so they're ignored. Late in my semester of teaching, whichever semester it is, I am always reduced to describing history as people finding increasingly more efficient and effective ways to be terrible to each other. It's usually once we get to 1848 or so, when I start to explain the generational cycle of rebellion and retrenchment that goes back over two hundred years. Just about every forty years, people protest injustice and some small things get overturned, then it gets rolled back after all the original protesters are dead and it happens again. 1780s, 1848, 1890s, 1930s, 1968, and now the 2010s...

That's rough. I really don't have any advice. I'm trying to think of the advice I'd give a student who came to me with these issues, but I think you have all the bases covered. If the university won't admit for something extreme like essay-based exams with dictation, I'd recommend a light courseload and being up-front about the disability with professors... which only does so much good if academic probation is already in effect. Depending on the professor, some would even admit for alternative syllabi that focus on project- rather than exam-based coursework, but you can't rely on that to get you through an entire degree, not unless you're doing something highly technical like computer science. Basically, I don't know. It breaks my heart to say that, because I'm trying to become an educator who won't fail people like your daughter, but...

This is probably really obvious and something you've already looked into, but how is the college for academic accommodations. As a TA, I have almost no tools besides my free time to help a student who's clearly suffering from some kind of disability that's making the class go to shit, but having documented accommodations, which usually require some medical documentation, opens me up to a bunch of different resources I can put at the command of the student. Double time on tests, recording devices or a paid note-taker, increased access to testing and writing centers... I don't even know the process for dyslexia, but I know that even the most mild forms of ADD enable all of that stuff, so it's something worth looking into if you haven't. I feel your pain, though. There's nothing worse than seeing someone you care about getting wrecked by a system that's just not designed for them. I have to watch at least a couple students every semester drown hardcore, and I have no idea where they go after.

Even though it's what got it a lot of attention early on, I think the "magical button-push" approach to problem-solving has led to a lot of the more unthematic and tedious parts of optimal play in Europa Universalis IV. I love DDRJake and he's a wonderfully gracious guy, as well as an extraordinarily talented gamer, but the tendency of Paradox to see his exploit-hunting as testing for them has led to several bone-headed decisions in patches. It needs to be acknowledged that DDRJake will always find a way to break your game and that designing said game to be difficult for DDRJake to break means designing a game that's less fun for everyone.

To build on what you've said, cross-promotion is how companies make money with anime. There are no production companies that aren't part of the media wing of a larger corporation, so the interconnected web between anime, light novel, manga, and live-action film is crucial. Anime airings and to a lesser extent anime Blu-ray sales (although maybe DVDs are an end unto themselves, I'm not sure they have the same crazy price disparity) exist to draw people to the manga or light novel series, where long-term investment and cheaper production costs can turn them into profitable customers. It's serious enough that, if there's no ongoing work on the manga or light novel, no matter its popularity, it probably won't be adapted (or at least further adapted) into an anime because there won't be enough of a "long tail" to make the payoff profitable. Hence there's no new Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya despite having six or seven more novels to adapt, because the writer's taken a hiatus, but there's a new Disappearance of Yuki Nagato-chan spinoff despite a marked lack of enthusiasm even among fans of the franchise, just because it's an ongoing manga with an unknown number of volumes left to go. The best they can hope from a new Haruhi is that every fan of the show goes out and buys the light novels, which are finite, but that's nothing compared to having someone hooked on the spinoff manga, however inferior, for years to come.

Hey! It's the state of Misery, thank you very much.

My first race was the Vaulters and I was really underwhelmed by Endless Legend as long as I focused on learning them. The fact that they came from space is cool, but most of that only comes out in the quest, which invariably stopped dead when the "take a random city on the other side of the map" objective came up. Play anyone else, I say. Not only are they more complex and different, but they make the Vaulters seem interesting again in contrast. That said, it's relatively easy to outperform the AI in the mid- to late-game, like Gaizokuanou says, and the draw will always be the weird factions and the interesting city-building system, rather than the challenge.

Nappi's right. The prompts on the XBox controller are A to dominate and then Y to command. You can send any captain on a mission to a warchief to become a bodyguard, then send them on another mission to the same warchief to betray said warchief. Both have to be completed as on-map missions. You can also just stack a warchief's bodyguards with your men and then hit up on the directional pad during a confrontation to have them turn on him, if it's the achievement that you're shooting for.

Yeah, I feel for Danielle completely, being that I have a Texas accent I bring out very rarely. I have had longtime friends and colleagues tell me in the course of the same conversation that they find my accent charming and honest, but that if they heard me talk in it without knowing me, they would assume that I was an ignorant hick. At least two famous and respected professors from the South have put it this way: accents are for when you've made it. I'm just glad Danielle's made it, in her own way. This is a much better version of what I wrote, thanks for posting it! I actually enjoy Brianna's disruptive role on regular episodes of the Isometric podcast for the dynamic it produces, but you're totally right that it made a GOTY episode inevitable and inevitably miserable. Really, what bothers me most about Brianna, besides the difficulty she has not framing her criticisms as dismissals, is that her professional expertise informs so much of her appreciation of games, even during noncritical conversation about play. If I were as picky about depictions of medieval history in media as she is about rendering technology in video games, I would be enjoying In the Name of the Rose, Marketa Lazarova, Wolf Hall, and... yeah, that's it. Upon achieving a certain level of professional or techincal specialization, you have to reinvent how you consume and discuss things related to that specialization, at least so that you can use your knowledge to recognize and champion the good in works with ostensible flaws in light of your specialization. Otherwise, you become the kind of person who stops themselves from calling Middle-Earth: Shadows of Mordor "graphically gorgeous" because some of the landscape textures look like they might be filler from a library. It's interesting, in an abstract kind of way, but it destroys discussion.

Well, they kept better than bread and don't taste terrible like hardtack. That's something.