Gormongous

I mostly attribute it to being the pet idea of someone important at Ubisoft, so everyone's afraid to pare it out. It might have been possible to do in the first few games, but now it's been around forever, so it can't be mistaken as anything less than deliberate. Also, exploring the rooftops of Victorian London sounds great. Exploring the rooftops of Victorian London in an Assassin's Creed game sounds dreary as fuck. I briefly mistook the picture for London during the Blitz, which would also be a great game.

Especially because it's a proven phenomenon that people vote on economic policy based on how rich they want to be, not how rich they are. Until the Republican owner of a small business making $60,000 a year can be persuaded that the entire sum of their income could be taxed from the super-rich without them even noticing, making sure that the US has a viable tax base is a loser's game. When I was reading about the collapse of urban society in late antique Rome a couple of years ago, I learned a new word: "euergetism." It's a concept from ancient Greece that wealthy people are expected to reinvest a large portion of their wealth back into the community and society that allowed them to become so wealthy. I'm not surprised that Western civilization kept around the concept of democracy but not another less-convenient sociopolitical practice, and yet it's still disappointing.

It's really weird with the Wardell thing. When he was accused of sexual harassment by a female employee, he was able to argue to fairly good effect that she misunderstood the company culture and was just accusing him to deflect attention from her own misconduct. I wasn't convinced, not when he was also arguing that he owned Stardock wholly and therefore had the right to treat his employees as his property, but a lot of people were mollified by such arguments. Fortunately, the smoke and mirrors aren't so convincing when everything's out in the open. You'd think that, after the huge embarrassment that was him going forum to forum insulting anyone who had anything bad to say about the first Elemental the week of its release, he'd know that for a fact, at least.

Yeah, the whole push for low taxes is the widespread assumption that everyone knows best how to spend their own money and that a little money being spent in a lot of places is best for economic development. The converse, rarely argued in American politics anymore but no less true in my mind, is that people are very bad at spending their own money intelligently and that the collective action of a single entity, namely the government, with a little of everyone's money, almost always produces a net positive effective (military-industrial spending aside, which is a fucking huge problem of its own).

But at the same time, the Articles of Confederation were widely acknowledged to be a failure, sufficient for it to be replaced by a federal government that was seen as egregiously invasive but still necessary. I don't deny that America's always had some ambivalence about the relationship between government and society, but it's an ambivalence that's been expanded and recast over the years to be prophetic post hoc about current social ills. There are a lot of American assumptions about political life that are crazy in their amorphousness, though. I still don't get the hostility to taxes. Throughout history, strong states with high standards of living have high taxes. There is literally no exception (in fact, it's almost always a strong correlation) so I have no idea why the average American is obsessed with driving down taxes and starving their government, just to save a couple thousand a year.

I wouldn't say that it's a founding myth. It's certainly a post-Nixon myth (and also something of a post-Nixon fact), which for most Americans, with their dim awareness of history, is tantamount to being a founding myth. Also, district attorney of some place like St. Louis County is a thankless job that no one would normally seek to do, so the only people who would run for it are people like McCulloch with an ulterior motive. The problem's not necessarily replacing McCulloch, the problem's finding someone better to replace him.

Yeah, I agree. "Look, we can make a block list, too! Isn't it annoying and hurtful to see your name on a list like this one? Also, see how many of you are on it, you're obviously a bigger problem than us!"

According to the Twitter account, it's to stop the bullying and harassment that happens when social justice warriors butt into your conversation and start judging everyone. According to sundry comments by the creator, it's to make liberal progressives look like idiots by doing to them what they did to #GamerGate and then watching them complain. Either way, it's free-speech maximalism that believes the proper response to internet "censorship" is to censor the "censors."

Having put a bunch of hours into it, I don't think that Redshirt is a particularly good game. It also gives me weird headaches. That said, it's a smart idea with several features that someone's bound to like, so I don't know where the accusations of payola are coming. Surely these guys aren't so stupid to think that twenty bucks given to an unrelated project is enough to buy positive coverage of your game from a high-profile video game journalist? Surely. Well, the creator of Redshirt says pretty much the same thing, but answering in good faith, so that's something. Also, I just recently found out that a guy from my alma mater whom I knew peripherally is the creator of the "SJW Autoblocker," which he claims is the largest block list on Twitter with 125,000 accounts. I used to follow him on the private blog server kept for current and former students of the college, but I had to give up because I couldn't stand how toxic he was becoming. Being gay and Jewish, he seems to have come around gradually to the conclusion that life is just a game and that whoever gets upset "loses" said game, so he harasses people constantly while talking about how oblivious/impervious he is. I shouldn't be surprised that he's linked up with #GamerGate (since he publicly concluded a few years back that "social justice warriors" are the easiest to get upset and therefore the best targets for "winning" the game of life) and some people on the blog server have commented that at least his block list will prevent prominent opponents of #GamerGate from getting more attention from stalkers and bullies, but it's really depressing for me to know personally what kind of person is attracted to a hate group.

It's going to suck when we all die and go to heaven and are given our own personal lightsaber and you're stuck with the dumb broadsaber because you had to go and lie on an internet forum.

I'm mostly just bummed that there's going to be a Sith antagonist at the center of things again. I thought that the Expanded Universe and the prequels taught everyone that Jedis and lightsabers are cool, but they can't be the driving force of your plot because it makes the whole movie into esoteric wizard politics like that handful of scenes from Lord of the Rings. The classic struggle is between Rebellion and Empire, with that between light and dark existing on a higher allegorical level. Also, regarding the broadsaber or whatever, the lightsaber is a good example of something so dumb it's cool not becoming even cooler if you make it dumber.

Like I said, we've really beaten this into the ground in the thread about the game itself, but I'm not that sorry for assuming that a blonde character in a Western-style suit from a AAA video game is white when I see his image at 500 x 500 pixels, the maximum resolution at which the images were available until they started being criticized. Ubisoft hadn't earned benefit of the doubt from me at that time, and I'm still not sure they've earned it, since Far Cry 4 seems to be characterized by plain ol' Orientalism and appropriation instead of outright racism and imperialism, like Mangela, Danielle, and Turgid all say. Baby steps, but still...

The thing is (and I've been learning this myself recently) grand juries aren't about establishing reasonable doubt. They're about establishing the possibility that a person is guilty of the crime for which they're accused. If that possibility exists, they go to trial, where reasonable doubt is then established. When the prosecution bombards the jury with dozens of conflicting witness reports, when Wilson's own testimony is not even cross-examined by the prosecution, and when the prosecution makes the nigh-unprecedented decision not to ask for an indictment at the end of the process, it's hard not to see this for the farce it was. To look at it all from another angle, I watched George Stephanopoulos' interview with Darren Wilson and read some breakdowns. What struck me, like it struck many people, is that, when Wilson was asked if he could have prevented Brown's killing, he says no. He says that he has a clean conscience because he did his job the way he was trained to do it and that he will not be haunted. I don't think Wilson himself is evil, but I think the banality of evil oozes from his words. How else can a man say so quickly and confidently that he has no regrets about killing another human being, especially when it sparked months of protests and riots across an entire nation? It boggles my mind that these people cannot seem to recognize their own role in what is so obviously a Very Bad Thing.

I just found out that the St. Louis county prosecutor is president of a fundraising organization for police officers that helped to set up a t-shirt drive raising funds for the Darren Wilson Defense Fund. This has been known since August, but the organization, called The Backstoppers, has resisted both accusations of impropriety and attempts to investigate further into the depth of their association with the fundraising. The fact that the prosecutor for this high-profile case is so openly corrupt and compromised has come to be upsetting for me. I can only imagine how it is for Mike Brown's friends and family. I'm basically only finding comfort in the increasingly effective breakdowns of the grand jury evidence, like this from the PBS Newshour: Source, which also points out that some of the most crucial witnesses establishing "doubt" over Wilson's potential guilt, like Witness 30, were a "few blocks" away from the scene of the incident. Fuck me if it isn't the spitting image of the master's tools...

I think you're both in agreement with me that it seems crazy not to have there be some kind of DLC "upgrade pack" for the base game in order to keep the community mostly together, but who knows what the minds at Namco-Bandai are thinking? For me, it's really the difference between buying a DLC but not buying a completely new game, but maybe they think a total relaunch as a "new" product will motivate more buyers with different feelings than me about Dark Souls 2?

I mean, I'd buy a Snowball or something if we were actually going to do it, but you're right about the "Skype" podcast. It takes someone willing to spend four hours editing the raw sound data into something cogent and listenable, which... can't be me right now. But I am excessively deferential in conversations, so it'll almost never be me talking over people! I'm finishing up the first season of Seitokai Yakuindomo right now, which is really funny despite being only sex-pun misunderstandings. I almost typed Seitokai no Ichizon, which I watched a few years back and is also a show about a student council full of sex-pun misunderstandings. It almost constitutes a genre unto itself!

Maybe I'm misunderstanding the wording in the Polygon article, but doesn't it explicitly say that current owners of Dark Souls 2 will get the 1.1.0 update (read, all the "upgrades" to the base game apart from the DLC campaign) free of charge?

I would be, but I would probably ruin it. Maybe that's the depression talking. I feel like I have a lot of breadth when it comes to anime, but very little depth outside of a few "greats" like Utena and Twig's hated Evangelion, so I worry that I won't have much to contribute. I'm working on being able to recognize studios by art and actors by voice, though, so I wouldn't be adverse to crashing and burning with a few good people.

Jake pitching a jokey movie idea and realizing by the end of it that he was pitching Demolition Man is a good example of why Idle Thumbs is my favorite podcast. No worries, Demolition Man is actually a really good movie. It's impressionistic, from scanning names in the game's credits, so I might be full of shit for all I know. I just should have used "Western," but I had so many Ws in that sentence already...

Okay, those are great thoughts and I appreciate you sharing them. I guess I'm still stuck in the same place in which I started, regardless of Pagan Min's race, because it's still a mostly-white and Anglophone game studio choosing to depict their villain this way. In a worst-case scenario, it resembles #GamerGate inventing Vivian James to say #NotAllMen for them, except I don't think Ubisoft's creative decisions have remotely the same level of toxic and self-serving intent, beyond the desire to sell this badass and exotic experience to as many people as possible. It's just a little unfortunate that they had to decide on an Asian antagonist under such circumstances. Like Chris points out, my reaction is based entirely on marketing materials and the previews I've seen (although it's disconcertingly easy in this day and age to view a substantial portion of a game's plot before it has even been released), so I'm looking forward to a more authoritative perspective from someone who's digested the entire game with these thoughts in her head. Maybe I'll even duck into the stream next time!

If Danielle's Toad voice and Sean's Yoshi grunt become Idle Thumbs memes, I will be a happier person living a happier life. Also, and I'm already regretting dragging this talk into yet another thread, but is someone able to walk me through why a blonde white guy in a Western suit sitting on a desecrated Buddha and using a person of color as an armrest is worthy of discussion and maybe criticism, but a blonde Asian guy in a Western suit sitting on a desecrated Buddha and using a person of color as an armrest isn't, when both hypothetical images are made by the same mostly-white and Anglophone game studio? Multiple people on the podcast (well, maybe just Danielle and Sean) have said that the "revelation" of Pagan Min as Asian somewhat defused their misgivings about the racist and imperialist imagery of that depiction, and I'd frankly like to experience the same.

I don't know, I think that tokenism is just as big a problem in games right now. It's seems like they have a limit of one person of color per game, always like Coletrane from Gears of War. The protagonist and antagonist are going to be white, if there's no good reason to make them another color, and I don't think making the antagonist Asian, still without a good reason, actually addresses the whitewashing of games. Moreover, and this is not connected to anything, but I think one needs to be thinking a lot harder about what race one makes one's flamboyant and transgressive video game villain in an exotic foreign setting. The blind spots in the marketing of Pagan Min make me wonder what the full story of his genesis is. Also, I didn't make this very clear, but it's not just external justification. Lee from The Walking Dead doesn't have to be black, in terms of the broad motions of the plot, but his blackness is still present throughout his character, both in how he behaves towards others and how others behave towards them. His blackness is essential to his character, if not the story as a whole. In the many cutscenes that Ubisoft has released, I haven't seen anything like that for Pagan Min. Maybe it's all in the third act, I don't know. I'm sorry if I sound tired. We argued this to death in the Far Cry 4 thread months ago. The release of the game itself has not really answered my ultimate issues with the marketing for it, which is that the villain is a Westernized and somewhat whitewashed Asian, surrounded by racist and imperialist imagery, who might as well be white with regards to how he functions in the story and with other characters, making me feel like his character was an arbitrary decision by the writers. Don't get me wrong, it's still better than having an actual white dude, but I don't see the game as much of a victory for better representation of people of color in digital media. That's on me, and I don't blame anyone else for being thrilled that both the protagonist and antagonist of a game are non-white.

I guess that's why I brought it up in comparison to Pagan Min's Asianness, despite other people rightly pointing out the many ways in which it doesn't apply. There doesn't seem to be any in-game reason for Pagan Min to be Asian. He's still a foreign king ruling and oppressing people of color, while also stealing their culture. In all of the marketing materials and the several twenty-minute videos I've watched of Far Cry 4's story, being Asian doesn't seem to inform his character in any way that is qualitatively different from a white person. He's voiced by Troy Baker (aka Booker DeWitt and Joel) from Dallas, TX of all places. As far as I can tell (and I'm very willing to be proven otherwise because I find it depressing) it seems like Pagan Min is Asian because a white person can't look and act like the writers want Pagan Min to look and act without being called out as problematic. I have not been able to find a plot or character justification for why Pagan Min has to be Asian, besides it just being another way to make (and justify making) the game more exotic without sacrificing any actual storytelling liberties, and that's why I'm having trouble giving Ubisoft the benefit of the doubt.

Because Sam and Lonnie aren't shown doing a bunch of crazy problematic shit that gets handwaved away because the makers of the game tell us they're gay.

Considering that the sexuality didn't come up in the novel, I consider it more part of the author's head canon, like you say in a way, than something that's particularly essential to the character. For Pagan Min, tons of people went, "Oh wow, a blonde guy in a Western suit is sitting on a desecrated Buddha and using a person of color as an armrest, that's really problematic imagery," and the rejoinder was, "Don't worry, he's Asian," as if the character was the one who made the decision to have that picture be what it was and not some white dudes in Montreal. That's what I got out of him not being "real."