Gormongous

I lost a car two winters ago driving in mildly heavy rain. I was driving on a highway, not even at the speed limit, and went over some standing water that looked no different from the wet pavement next to it. I hydroplaned and coasted slowly, like some majestic ship, into a six-foot ditch filled almost to the brim with water, promptly totaling the car without a scratch on it or me. I don't know what I could have done, and it made me incredibly nervous to drive in anything heavier than a drizzle for months. So yeah, your story is very familiar and you have all of my sympathy, Rodi. Hopefully, getting a new car won't be as hard for you as it was for me!

I thought about putting this in the "Random Thoughts" thread, but I feel it's too pointed for that. I had a depressingly predictable conversation with friends of a friend on Facebook about Iggy Azalea's refusal to acknowledge or support black hip-hop culture. I posted a short and polite response explaining what cultural appropriation is and what its context is in the history of the Western world, with which he had no problem agreeing. Then a crowd of a half-dozen other dudes (it's always dudes, at least when I talk race on Facebook) piled into the comments to blither about how I was the real racist because music has no race. I was fine debating with them, because "success legitimizes itself" and "haters gonna hate" are easy to answer as arguments, but then a black guy started commenting about how people need to stop inserting race into every conversation and start focusing on what we have in common instead... I don't have the energy or experience to talk with a person of color who's internalized and then projected racist structures to that extent. I tried briefly to point out every single way that white people have taken and made money off of creative works that black people have made popular while giving nothing in return, even just in the music industry alone, but he staunchly stuck to his description of that as "cultural exchange," no different than his background with soul food from New Orleans. I thought to say how that had also been created and then appropriated through the long-term assault on and mutilation of African and black culture by white people, but... Nah. I wish I'd had this article about the American invasion and occupation of Hawaii to read. When those people asked me, what does it hurt for a white girl from Australia who doesn't feel she owes anything to black culture or artists to be one of the biggest hip-hop stars out there, I can now quote the following passage, among others. And, on a less grand note, I'm still enormously frustrated by so many parts of that conversation on Facebook. The idea that anything you do or say is okay, so long as it's making you money, is one of the ugliest things I can imagine, and yet I hear it from minimum-wage stiffs like the dudes above just as much as from the one percent in the news.

Trying to decide my feelings on this recent article about nerd culture's repudiation of "privilege" as a concept: http://www.newstatesman.com/laurie-penny/on-nerd-entitlement-rebel-alliance-empire Mostly, the extremely conciliatory tone has me ready to bristle, but it seems like it hits all the important points in a time when they need to be hit. So much of #GamerGate and associated trends have been fueled on the entitlement of a social group that perceives itself as oppressed even when complicit (or actively engaged) in oppression.

I liked the premise of Space Dandy, but it quickly became clear that the majority of the show was going to be these uneven one-offs without even a framework like Excel Saga had holding it together. I'm sure watching it all at once did it no good service, either. I bought Jintai and I might rewatch it in "proper" order someday, although a blogger I respect did that and didn't get much out of it besides a bit better perspective on the characters. There's a movie, too. It's also good, although somewhat removed from the emotional arc of the series. I wouldn't be optimistic about the dub, since it's FUNimation's stable of actors, so it's probably a bunch of serviceable performances that aren't particularly suited to the characters. I know Syn has much stronger opinions about the FUNi dub factory.

That is incredibly upsetting. I'm not going to spoiler that, because I think you're right about the warning.

I've finished three anime in the past month. Jinrui wa Suitai Shimashita (or Humanity Has Declined), a show about a seemingly innocent girl living in a post-apocalyptic countryside where fairies have become the dominant species. I'm most intrigued by the tone and the characterization of this anime, which are remarkably light even for a gag anime, as well as the interesting spin given to both by an unconventional episode timeline. I'm not sure if it has hidden depths to be revealed by a repeat viewing, but I'm certainly curious. Silver Spoon, a show about a stressed-out city kid who applies to an agricultural high school to get away from his parents. It's a pleasant show about generally nice characters who learn some lessons and entertain thereby. I had a good time and learned a few cool things, but I'm a bit miffed by the conspicuous absence of anything that I could argue as greatness. It's not wasted time, at least. Space Dandy, a show about a dandy in space. I know this is the critical darling of the last couple years, but after the first few episodes, which I thought were fantastic and hilarious, it settled down to a solidly mid-tier show for me. There's something about shows where everyone dies at the end and the audience laughs that just keeps me from taking anything away from them, whatever in-universe explanation is given. I certainly loved the characters, especially Meow, but the show seemed way more interested in putting them in wacky situations than in giving me quality time with them, episodes like the one where Dandy meets that girl or where Meow goes home excepted. What I really learned is that I should probably rewatch Cowboy Bebop, which is lucky since the Blu-ray remaster should arrive any day now... Oh! I also watched Steins;Gate right at the beginning of December, but the less said about that, the better... in a good way. It's basically the Japanese Primer, but with less nitpicky science and more character moments. I know Zeus went wild over it a couple months ago and I'm just saying that he was right.

Okay, having actually listened to the whole episode now, I cannot wait to have the Thumbs play Space Alert. It's fully possible to stream, considering that it's only about forty minutes to play once you all know the game. I don't care if they're never going to do it, the thought of watching Chris, Jake, Sean, Danielle, and Nick crew a broken-down Soviet-style spaceship is still the best thing ever. Nick has to be the captain. Nick has to be the captain. The captain's only real job is to take responsibility for the failure of the entire crew. It's how I found out that I'm not really leadership material, no matter what video games have taught me.

Fiiine, I won't. You're just doing the medieval versus the classical pronunciation anyway.

That's an interesting way of putting it. I have also avoided Dragon Age: Inquisition because I'm worried about how much of it would be a waste of my time, but after reading Pepyri's post, it occurred to me that my favorite games of the past year, or at least the ones I played the most, all wasted my time in fairly flagrant ways. Payday 2 has its whole metagame built on a luck-of-the-draw loot system, Euro Truck Simulator 2 is almost entirely about driving through empty country between two destinations with nothing else to do, and Crusader Kings 2 often involves waiting thirty or forty in-game years for something to happen. But then, in all of these games, anything can happen at any moment. In Crusader Kings 2, you can even lose a hundred-hour game in a handful of minutes because of events outside of your control and impossible to predict. That's scary, but also exciting, and pushes you to invest. Like you said, Dragon Age: Inquisition wants those scary and exciting moments to be the climax of a sixty-hour game, so you're forced to invest at the slow rate of its narrative until that point. The payoff sounds great, but the buildup seems too similar to the "game tax" of so many Far Cry-a-likes, demanding a dozen hours of powerlessness to let the player appreciate the lofty ceiling of their eventual low-level agency, while still being unable to fail in a meaningful way. It seems sometimes like so much waiting around.

So, so awkward. I don't mean to sound arrogant, but I think she was trying to impress me with her intelligence? She cut off a short anecdote from me in order to say what the lesson I should have learned from that experience really was, then launched into a condemnation of codependency in relationships, which gradually drifted into the inability of kids these days to have normal relationships because the internet's fucked them up. Nothing I said, in agreement or disagreement, slowed her down. Suffice to say, I don't intend to risk further lectures. Honestly, if you ever find yourself saying, "Actually, you know what else really pisses me off," just stop. Save it for later, if you have to. No one deserves to hear back-to-back rants.

Honestly, I think some of the "humanism" talk also comes from the discomfort that many people, usually speaking from privilege, feel when they have to interact with a ideology that doesn't expressly reflect or prefer their personal experiences and opinions. It's a very human to have a "what about me" response, but since feminism actively opposes the "what about me" response from the straight white male, the dominant voice in Western culture for millennia, the name becomes a sticking point, as a means to have the straight white male voice championed anyway. I'm sure there are plenty of guys who'd be on board if feminism were "humanism" instead, but they'd be as invested in the movement as Kentucky Fried Chicken is in whatever events take place in the Louisville KFC Yum! Center. So long as they own it, have their name on it, and know it's about them, feminism itself can go twist. That echoes a lot of what everyone's saying here. "Intersectional feminism" is one I often hear from academically inclined activists when they talk about issues of color. "Issues of color" or a similar variant is another. In the States, among red-blooded and right-thinking folk, you probably ought to stick to "civil rights" if you can't tag it to another more specific cause, because look how people reacted to #BlackLivesMatter when there were black kids dying on the streets. To make a nod back to the first part of my post...

I am being lectured by a girl with whom I've been messaging on a dating site about how the internet has swamped us with choice and made us intolerant of little faults. Ironically, or rather appropriately, this lecture is a little fault of which I am having trouble not being intolerant.

Just to clarify, Chris, do you not see the points brought up by Bjorn (#1 and #4 especially, although I hadn't thought of #2 and it's a really good point) as systemic issues in crime reporting, or do you see them as systemic but outside of Serial's potential scope? If the latter, what specific form could crime reporting take that you would find appropriate to address these issues? I personally would think that a podcast that is, as you say, about discovering the real people behind the caricatures of crime reporting could also be the right venue for addressing or even just touching upon the flattening effects of race on those same people, but you seem to disagree, so I'm curious for your thoughts. Also, somehow this thread has gotten pinned, presumably to serve as a warning to other, better threads.

I didn't notice it the first time around, but it bothers me a little to have criticisms of race and privilege surrounding Serial be dismissed as "not useful." Even if the criticism of "this perpetuates a long history of white reporting on communities of color and that makes me uncomfortable" doesn't particularly strike you as useful, I don't think it follows that it shouldn't be made. Criticism isn't under any obligation to fix the object of criticism, it just points out the strengths and weaknesses of it, both on its own and in context. I just have trouble seeing any difference between disregarding criticisms of Serial's racial politics specifically because they don't offer a roadmap for overcoming a largely systemic problem beyond saying "try to be more careful next time and do less of that," and, say, Anita Sarkeesian's criticisms of women in video games, which mostly have similar apparent failings. I think it's great that Adnan's story is being reported by any means, although I personally know at least two people of color who feel differently. Still, they and I both agree that Serial is far from the best possible way it could have been reported, which I feel is hard to argue against. Maybe people are more frustrated that Serial is being criticized for things that are really shortcomings of our entire society, but I prefer to think that Serial reveals those shortcomings in a small-scale, innocuous, and comprehensible form, the better to be called out. Serial has made me think more about white reporting on communities of color than anything before, and I personally find that useful.

Hey, no worries! The mental image of you drunk-posting definitions of logical fallacies is worth any bruised ego on my part.

I aim to please. Happy (belated) birthday!

And totally justified, too. The argument that any cultural product of humanity is worthy of preservation, just because it is a product of humanity, begs the question in a way that really worries me.

I don't think it's as huge as distinction as you do, so we'll probably just have to disagree. I don't mean to discount Koenig's skills or work, but there are myriad social and cultural factors that position her to tell this story, even though she seems at times unsuited for it. That's the definition of privilege, and I am entirely sympathetic to people for whom that makes Serial difficult to enjoy. The show may be remarkable in terms of its intimacy and popularity, but it is wholly in keeping with the history of the relationship between white journalism (even good, ethical, interesting white journalism) and stories of color.

I find this really fascinating, Chris. I feel the same way about the problems of white reporting on stories of color the same way I do about misogynist tropes in video games: it's not usually the specific games' fault and I'll probably play them anyway, but I try to voice the criticisms I have to help with the visibility of those issues elsewhere, regardless of whether the only practicable solution to them is a gradual and general change in the culture. Because Serial is so prominent and so popular, I feel it's a good venue for criticisms of white journalistic trends, even if it's not the perfect example of them, just because it's an example to which so many people have access. Anything that gets people asking why this was a story only a white woman could tell is good in my book, although if you have other unrelated criticisms that you find more pressing, I can see where your frustration would come into the picture.

The concept of "self-censorship" is practically Newspeak anyway. It reminds me of the "self-criticism" of the United Red Army in Japan in the early seventies, in which members were peer-pressued into often lethal tortures to force them to take responsibility for others' failures... except it's not that, it's people deciding not to be assholes based on good-faith feedback from fans. Next they'll be saying it's self-censorship to drop a feature from a game after beta testers confirm that it's not working, but only if the dropped feature involves a sexy lady, of course.

I'm on my phone, so I can't type anything too deep, but I thought it captured a truly alien experience, and thereby that presented rape culture in a way that was comprehensible and threatening for men. Not to mention the mesmerizing, headache-inducing presentation. I like the book a bit more, for working factory farming and consumer culture into the thematic offering, but they're both powerful works for me.

Yep, it's apparently called subornation of perjury: http://www.justice.gov/usao/eousa/foia_reading_room/usam/title9/crm01752.htm McCulloch openly admitted in his interview to four of the five particulars needed to convict him of that charge; the only thing missing is explicit evidence that he knew ahead of time that the witness was going to lie. McCulloch has risen into the public view so rapidly, I'm having a hard time telling if he's one of the most corrupt public officials I've ever seen or just one of the most incompetent. Or both!

I agree that the medium of a podcast puts problems front and center that exist in all forms of journalism, only subliminated. It might even be argued that the traditional presentation of journalistic reporting exists to obscure the presence of a human reporter inside of it, which goes back to what Bjorn and Danielle have said about Serial exposing a lot of interesting and troubling things. But still, Koenig repeatedly chooses to present herself in ways that seem slightly sheltered and underinformed to me. It maybe be more honest than traditional reporting, where authoritativeness almost demands omniscience, but it also makes me feel like there could have been a better way. And when we're dealing with a literal matter of life and death, that makes me uncomfortable in a way that interferes with my total enjoyment of the show. Edit: Fuckin' sclpls... Just skip my post and read his, everyone.

McCulloch said in a recent interview that he made the deliberate decision to present the grand jury with testimony from witnesses he knew had lied and were lying. He frames this decision as his professional duty to make sure everyone's stories got heard: http://www.buzzfeed.com/mikehayes/st-louis-prosecutor-says-he-knew-witnesses-lied He also says that he has no intention of charging said witnesses with perjury, because of reasons. I admit, I have no clue anymore what it means to be a lawyer, let alone district attorney.

I think you're overcomplicating things. It isn't given that I hate everything that discomforts me. Haven't you ever felt a pleasure so keen that it's uncomfortable? That's the "ugh."