Gormongous

If Serial were traditional media reporting, I'd agree with you, but it's not and that's been central to its success. It's okay to enjoy the podcast, because its subject matter and presentation are very entertaining, but you can't tell me that it's not also enormously problematic for the perspectives and experience of Koenig as a middle-class white person to frame and mediate the perspectives and experiences of multiple communities of people of color so heavily, let alone for that to be presented implicitly as "true crime" or "investigative journalism." I'm sure Adnan and his family are grateful that Koenig took an interest in the case, but how and why she took an interest, especially in light of centuries of white journalists playing tourist (but also sleuth and spy) among people of color, will always make me uncomfortable, whatever the benefits to whomever.

That's a good summary of my issues, plus the aforementioned discomfort with Koenig's skepticism of any racism being at work here. Honestly, I think the This American Life model falls apart when it takes on true crime. It's one thing to have the show be some journalist's reaction to a story when that story is one man trying to memorize the physical location of every area code in America. It's another when it's a middle-class white girl reacting to a poorly-understood but evidently still-raw crime that touched and touches two minority communities. Whatever her intetest in it, it's not her story to tell, some might understandably say, and her attempts to tell it as her story through the imposition of her presence and neuroses in the reporting makes me a little uncomfortable.

If you read that sentence aloud, putting proper emphasis on the italics, it becomes overwhelmingly clear that the "ugh" is the sound of my discomfort at how much I like the mutiny sequence. If that's too complicated, you could use some context clues, for instance the following sentence where I talk about laughing in delight for thirty minutes.

I can't independently verify this, but if it's true, it's very awkward: the only witness to support Darren Wilson's testimony is mentally ill, a chronic liar, and a documented racist.

Luckily, the definition also fits my previous choice of Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri just fine. The story is so perfectly served by the mechanics that it feels somehow bigger than the biggest sci-fi novel, while still making ample room for your actions to have their own narrative. It has never once disappointed me in the fifteen years I've been playing it. Runners up are Dark Souls, for the reasons you describe, and King of Dragon Pass, because it's wholly unique compared to other games and captures a little-explored part of human experience.

Ugh, the mutiny plot is so good. I was sitting on my couch, laughing while playing like I was appearing in Nintendo lifestyle footage, for a solid thirty minutes.

It sounds like we're fairly similar, I agree. I might just have a stomach for slightly more boring optimization paths. For example, when I played the worker-placement game Tzolk'in yesterday, I quickly realized that I couldn't understand the entire system, which involved placing workers on certain gears of a massive clock and them removing them when the gear reached the desired point. Instead, I just focused on corn, which functions as currency in Tzolk'in, because I could see the path of those mechanics from beginning to end. Corn could be used to buy all the other resources and ultimately to buy victory points, too, so a massive corn-generating engine seemed like a good idea. And it was! It just needed to be hand-in-hand with a couple of other strategies so that I wasn't wasting all of my time converting corn into actually useful things. But, like I said, video games don't tend to have as much of a place for near-optimal strategies. Educating your heirs for maximal diplomatic skill in Crusader Kings II removes the biggest challenge in the game, and that's it. There's no downside or need to diversify. I am also incredibly interested in good fail-states for games, but this goes back to my original complaint, that I want to see good fail-states but my playstyle is almost entire built around avoiding them.

I agree with everything you've said, but especially how it comes through in this last point. I cannot understand how this is being framed as "consumer rights," except that it's the buzzword du jour for the segment of game-playing people likely to get outraged at a hyper-violent video game getting dumped by a distributor. The demand to be able to buy whatever you want whenever you want, regardless of a business' prerogative to choose their own inventory and deny service to certain clients, shows the general understanding of the video game marketplace to be far from developed.

I just drove eight hundred miles in Euro Truck Simulator 2 late at night on three hours' sleep, because I'm having anxiety about an upcoming flight and I'm trying to calm down. It was quite possibly the worst I have ever driven in real or virtual life. My truck and cargo both had damage percentages in the high teens once my sleep-addled brain finished two hours spent swerving back and forth across Europe's highways, ramming cars and poles like I was sharing my truck cabin with four starving Capuchin monkeys. The grade I was given was "Reasonable." I still make $40,000. I shudder to think what it would take to be graded as "unsatisfactory," but presumably getting enough speed to jump a railing and lose your whole cargo in the Rhine would be sufficient.

Not a very revelatory article, but Damien Walter at the Guardian posted a brief reminder that some people in literature are just as discomfited by the moral landscape of Tolkien's legendarium as some people in games.

No worries! I wasn't particularly correcting you, I just wanted to get those words out there again, because a lot of well-meaning people are using "ban" for this situation and it's somehow magically turning this into a free speech issue, which is immune to human fucking decency, of course.

The thing is, no one's banning the game. Valve's just not choosing to distribute it through their service, which I think is a reasonable business decision on their part. The makers of Hatred are welcome to find a different digital distributor or a physical publisher to tap into the gold mine that's evinced by those wonderful Steam threads.

You're probably right. I quickly get bored of trying to crack a system completely (unless it's something with both mechanics and theme I'm interested in, like Crusader Kings II), but I still don't enjoy feeling like I'm not doing well in moment-to-moment play, so I naturally gravitate towards the most self-contained and comprehensible set of mechanics and learn it all the way through. I had a board game day with my advisor today and noticed this exact behavior with Euros (Tzolk'in, Agricola, and Hadrian today), where it rarely secures me a victory on its own, but in the simpler and less interconnected systems of video games, it's often more than enough. I still roleplay, but only within the subconscious confines of pushing towards my chosen specialty, like big paydays in 80 Days. I hope it's not an annoyance that I'm so analytic and hard-nosed about my games. Sometimes they totally sweep me away, but I'm a problem solver in real life, so I guess I have a hard time not also being one in my escapism, even if I'd enjoy it better otherwise. Funny! I suck at Binding of Isaac, because I don't have the mechanical skill. I never have, really. It makes me wonder how I ever beat Olmec in Spelunky, but at least I knew there that Hell was almost certainly beyond me...

I have now played two recent games with emphasis on narrative aesthetics through iterative failure. Unfortunately, the first run of both games was a charmed experience for me, so I'm not sure where to go from here. A couple weeks ago, I got through This War of Mine with only one character death, thanks to an incredibly lucky first few scavenging trips, and spent the final two weeks living in ridiculous comfort, only going out at night to scavenge parts for building luxury items like a moonshine still. It actually got a little boring near the end, since I only found difficulty if I made it myself. Then I played 80 Days last night and got around the world in sixty-three days thanks to picking up an item in Paris that sold for £4800 in Berlin and an item in Lima that sold for £3000 in Port Royal. I was even imprisoned for a week and still made it effortlessly because I could always afford the most expensive direct flight to wherever I wanted to be. This isn't how these games are supposed to go. I'm supposed to bash my head against the wall over and over until I learn the system and then catch a lucky break, right? I feel like it's almost perverse, after a solid win in each game, to go back seeking failure because that's the memorable experience everyone else has had. Come to think of it, this is also why I stopped playing the new XCOM after one campaign, too...

I would totally hang out with Twig. Like I said, I'm expecting to spend the entire holiday in a pointless cold war between my parents, so I wouldn't mind an out for an afternoon. I'll be in town from Friday onward, Twig, so just give me a shout through PM with your contact info or something.

...Which sparked the bloodiest war that Europe, maybe even the world, had ever seen at that point in history. A third of Germany's population died as a direct result of Luther having a problem, initially quite specific, with how the local inquisitor handled indulgences. Of course, neither he nor anyone in the church who opposed him paid a drop of blood for the chaos and devastation that came from their stubborn insistence on each of them having their own way, so it applies perfectly to Ken Levine, poster child for the out-of-touch privilege of a games-industry auteur. I'm sure it suits him fine for members of hate groups to make controversy-baiting games, since he'll never be the target of them. If there are two things I cannot stand, they're people 1) throwing down historical references just to score talking points, and 2) insisting that people and business provide public venues for their critics to excoriate or ridicule them. By their powers combined, they form the duo of "clueless entitlement!"

I understand that. I'm more just tickled that the underdog complex of #GamerGate is so strong that it prevents them from making intelligible or compelling propaganda. It's like these idiots think that Churchill's "Finest Hour" speech was just him screeching, "They're fucking bombing us, you dipshits! Get off your asses and do something!" Inspiring, to say the least. They want to be underdogs, sure, but they also want their few and tiny victories to be written in lights, so we have this confusing map where #GamerGate is as big as the "corruption" but has conquered much less territory, and that territory is only a small toehold in Tumblr and in the "corruption" proper. Because they want so bad to be weak but strong, it's impossible to tell what's going on, at least without the laughably inept naming scheme. Is the purple blob opportunistically invading the orange blob because the latter's dealing with a rebellion elsewhere? Maybe, it's hard to say. Maps as a pedagogical tool are supposed to make complex political situations immediately visible and comprehensible to an uninformed viewer, but somehow #GamerGate has managed to make one that does nothing of the sort. Honestly, you think with #GamerGate's obsessive conviction that they're fighting new-age Nazis, they'd have the sense to show Europe in 1940, rather than an ugly Tamriel-as-the-internet. There's an actual narrative of struggle there, albeit one still totally unconnected with the current situation. Maybe they could even have a map of Europe in the first days of Operation Barbarossa, with Russia labeled "Metalgate" or something. See? I loathe #GamerGate, but I can still invent better propaganda for them than they themselves can.

I hear you, Twig, but I doubt you're half as stubborn as her about letting the person with whom you're talking say that they've had a bad day. I've known her for over a decade now, about half of which was us dating, and she's always struggled with deep clinical depression, which I'm used to addressing in conversation. It's only been the past couple years, during her second run at grad school, that she's gotten so militant about shutting down my negative feelings. For instance, a couple weeks ago, I was suffering from a multi-day headache that was making me really unfocused and cranky, and she brought up that one of my richer friends had bought me a nice dinner the previous Friday as a reason why it's unreasonable that this headache was getting me down now. Usually it's not so bad, I'll just say I'm lonely and she'll say I'm not, because didn't I hang out with someone a few days ago. Still, if I do the same to her, even with really and truly positive stuff like finding a nice job or having a fancy weekend getaway with her new boyfriend, I'm not letting her feel her feelings. Why can't we both just say that we're miserable and stew together? I hate it when conversations are actually competitions.

I care deeply for my ex-girlfriend, but I really hate how her depression means that I'm never allowed to admit any unhappiness to her. If I mention anything even potentially positive going on in my life, she'll pounce on how lucky I am for it, especially compared to her, and how I should be happy. I feel like, with her own mental health issues, she should understand that you can have anything or everything and still be depressed sometimes, but the few times I've tried to point that out, she's gotten really angry and offended about how I'm policing her attempts to "make conversation." Funny how that conversation is almost always about how my life is going great and her life is going terrible. It's making it so I don't want to talk to her if I'm anything less than ecstatic, which is basically never. And on Thursday I'm going home for Christmas, which means being fought over by my divorced parents for nine days. Yesterday, I found myself secretly wishing that I'd get sick so I'd have to miss my flight to Dallas and be able to just relax and regroup by myself for the break. I got most of my goals for the semester done, but I'm really worn out and not interested in playing referee for anybody, apparently. Whine whine whine.

I love that they've drawn a map that shows them losing their imaginary war horribly. I love that all the vast territory that the "corruption" has occupied is deemed "neutral," so that they can say no territory's been lost despite getting kicked out of originally sympathetic places like 4chan. I love that they claim the FTC was originally part of the "corruption" but is now occupied by #GamerGate, just because the FTC is allegedly planning to release new guidelines sometime next year about placement of advertising in web articles. #GamerGate, if you're going to make stuff up, you could at least draw a map that actually conveys a sensical narrative, maybe even one of right action. What the one that Christopher posted looks like is the purple country invading the orange one because the former doesn't recognize the latter's territorial claims... which actually seems about right.

Although I'm not the biggest fan of the music played during the credits, I do appreciate the credits themselves most perhaps out of any single element in the show. I love that images from each season are added to the credits as they appear, making them a kaleidoscopic impression of Baltimore's present-day problems that evolves as the series reveals more complexities.

Why is there no option to filter the massive list of auctions of games by inclusion on my wishlist and DLC by inclusion of the base game in my library? These days, Steam's "events" mostly exist to remind me of how much I miss a proactively designed UI when it's not there.

Screensaver seems to be working, but when I got home tonight, I noticed that my computer was really slow and that I was losing approximately seven gigabytes of hard drive space every time I rebooted. After some panicked Googling of symptoms for hard drive failure, I thought to check system restore, which has always been disabled on my machine. Even though the system was still disabled, the max usage slider was all the way to the right and Windows appeared to be making or updating a restore point every ten minutes or so anyway. I tried enabling and then disabling the system several different ways, one of which finally seemed to stick, but it was really freaky for a while there. I just formatted this computer at the end of June! There's no reason it should be having any of these glitches yet, certainly not two in quick succession.

I love that comic. Even if he gets a bunch of shit from his "fans" for them, I love when Straub does overtly political stuff. Along similar lines, I've also had this tweet in my head for the past week or so: Okay, digression over.

And the FBI has its roots in the Pinkertons, a nineteenth-century for-hire private army best known for strike-breaking. Yay, government!