Gormongous

I consider the "but he's not real" comment about Pagan Min's Asianness to apply equally to, say, Dumbledore's homosexuality. Both are random characteristics, however topical, applied to a character without any actual attempt to integrate them into said character, so it becomes this particularly unreal thing that exists to be brought up outside the context of the fictional work, when Danielle complains about the continuing proliferation of white dudes in video games or when someone accuses the Harry Potter series of extremely traditional social values. Gone Home doesn't get that criticism because the LGBT aspect of the characters is essential to their portrayal (which ironically means it's brought up by other kinds of people as a reason why the game's bad).

And already we have our Tiananmen Square just from tonight:

It was alluded to by thefncrow earlier in this thread, but St. Louis county's prosecuting attorney is incredibly tight with the local police, being that his father was a police officer killed by a black man; his brother, nephew, and cousin all serve as police officers; and he himself wanted to be a police officer before losing a leg to cancer. In a situation involving a grand jury, where law enforcement already receives overwhelmingly preferential treatment compared to ordinary citizens, it verges on the perfect example of one hand washing the other. Protesters briefly closed off I-44 and Grand near Gravois, in St. Louis proper. Both groups were driven away with tear gas and rubber bullets, reportedly because the police felt "surrounded," but local officials are still trumpeting it as a "peaceful" dispersal. Ferguson is burning, but the national guard is only protecting "police" and "command" locations, so there's that. I shouldn't have made plans in West County for tonight, but the drive home wasn't that bad, except for everyone going a million miles an hour so that they'd spend as little time outside the safety of their homes as possible. I don't think that protests will last the week in St. Louis itself, but I think Ferguson is going to be messed up for a long time to come... as will the internet. The number of people in comments threads who seem to believe sincerely that the reasonable response to any crime, let alone to laying hands on a cop, is summary execution by said cop makes me sick.

"Disappointment" is the best possible reaction to what is probably coming. The crowd outside the Ferguson police department is huge and not in the highest spirits. Two phone calls from family members worried tonight is the night I die, so far.

Until those Junior Mints have a laser beam and some cords coming out of them, I'm going to let Steve's forum icon speak for itself.

I don't know where to put this, except here and in spoilers:

I was thinking of how the Thumbs would sell it, but then I realized the obvious answer is to drop in a clip of Steve Gaynor pushing cyperpunk anime, promo code SCOOPS.

That's a familiar arc for me, too. I went straight from Dark Souls into the sequel and the proximity of the two allowed for some continuity. Then I had to stop, because I'd beaten the game twice and the DLC was still a month out, and I just never went back. Dark Souls was such a complete experience that I didn't really need any more Dark Souls 2 than I found myself playing at the moment, but I only saw that with some distance. It's funny, because the DLC for the sequel is very high-quality and I saw that immediately from the little I played, but I'm much less invested in either character I have in Dark Souls 2, so I almost feel like I don't have an entry point to go back in. Also, it doesn't help that the limited humanity and soul memory features of Dark Souls 2 will punish me a lot more for picking the game up again than happened when I resumed my time with the first Dark Souls after a year's hiatus.

I have speculated several times in mixed company that there is definitely some degree of collusion between police officers in these two shootings and have been treated like a genuine crazy person for it. Forget egregious things like the constantly changing stories of Darren Wilson and the other officer, forget Badfinger's link about the distance at which Mike Brown was shot, forget St. Louis police departments' history of fabricating gun charges, assuming that the police aren't on the level in every way possible is tantamount to being an anarchist for many people here. They're scared that law enforcement might not actually be enforcing laws, so they punch relentlessly downward.

Hush, no one tell them that Newton was so devout a Christian that it made his contemporaries uncomfortable and that he conducted as much research into alchemy and numerology as into calculus and physics. Giants of reason, all of them. I never get tired of the STEM circle-jerk that is geek/nerd/gamer culture. They turn every scientist they get their hands on into philosopher-kings worthy of worship as readily as the American right turns every Founding Father into a Bible-thumper. Most scientists weren't and aren't idiot-savants obsessed with only their particular specialty. Historically, until the past half-century, any so-called scientist, as if it's useful to distinguish them so doggedly from other academics, had a rounded education including the humanities and would be much more likely to be sympathetic to social justice or at least have no stake in #GamerGate's culture war. But no, Newton is totally a bro and he'd be here on Reddit with us laughing at these stupid white knights while we tell each other logic problems. Morons.

I don't mean to put words in your mouth, but for me, what fell flat was not exactly the inclusion of magic, but the inclusion of magic as ridiculous and unambiguous as baby-killing and blood-drinking. If it had been something more animist, in keeping with Japan's cultural and religious history, rather than trading on the silly but still real blood taboo, it wouldn't have felt so disruptive to me. Maybe it was Mitchell's intention to make the supernatural element so out of place, but it didn't entirely work for me, either.

Listening to the podcast again, I really love the analogy of #GamerGate as a civil war fought after a successful war against an invader. Historically, it happens more often than not that the war only glossed over divisions between the victorious allies, and what better way to resolve said divisions than with the arms just laid aside? Especially in the case of the Persian invasion of Greece and the Hunnic invasion of the Roman Empire, the invader tends to get invited back by the losing side in the ensuing civil war. The question is whether Jack Thompson is the Darius II to #GamerGate's Sparta or the Huns to their Roman Empire?

After a week of constantly trying, I've given up my attempt to get my money back for a voided label I bought from eBay back in August. Between the other three parties with a hand in the transaction, only the post office has actually given me a positive response. Unfortunately, they're the ones least responsible for this mess. They approved the void fourteen days ago, eBay just never gave me my money for it. Meanwhile, I am entirely unable to contact eBay and Paypal has rejected both attempts by me to revoke the charge. I guess I've just learned a $11.34 lesson that turns a good sale on my part into an average one. Honestly, I'm really impressed at just how effective it is for a popular business not to have a customer service presence online. I have literally no recourse, no matter how much eBay has cheated me, because both the post office and Paypal only have resolution methods predicated on both parties being in contact with each other.

I was worried that Interstellar would pass by the podcast without comment, even just a little bit, but of course not, because SPACE.

Maybe you already have that technology installed, then?

After joking about Upotte!! to Blambo, I went and watched it myself. Girls und Panzer it's not, by a long shot, but it's still a show filled with a surprising amount of loving detail about modern firearms. It's really more of a shame that it presents itself as a fairly explicit ecchi harem around a human teacher newly transferred to a school where all the students are anthropomorphized guns, but it actually moves past that rather quickly and becomes pure gunji-ota fanservice. I don't know, I'm not recommending it unless somewhat sexualized jokes about the L85A1's many design and production flaws are going to make you laugh, but it was good enough for me to put in my Amazon basket for this Christmas... or next, I don't know. Also, researching the features on the Sentai's edition of the Blu-ray, I came across a pretty histrionic review by someone who doesn't get moe, doesn't get military otaku, doesn't know what shounen means, and throws in a paragraph about school shootings, too. Not that outsider perspectives aren't interesting, but it sounds like this one just isn't for you, dude. For instance, "Genkoku" isn't the human teacher's name, it's his title because he teaches modern Japanese literature. The show's as explicit about that as it is about responsible handling of firearms by people who aren't their personifications. At the root of it all, I'll never get tired of how particular America is about its media violence, to the point of hypocrisy. The flagrant military porn of the Transformers movies and the Call of Duty games gets by mostly without comment, but when Japan makes an anime that pays too much attention to the technical characteristics of firearms, regardless of how bluntly person-on-person violence (and the military-industrial complex that profits from it) is condemned, then suddenly it's almost too "disturbing" to watch. No learning about guns, just keep them in the back of your mind as magic wands that turn men into heroes, okay?

I don't get it. Do they think that all male feminists are stupid, or just that they're willing to die along with their entire gender for some positive female attention?

Archie might have been kidding? Personally, I've always found The Prince to be a fairly obvious parody. His Discourses on Livy and Florentine Histories show an intelligent man deeply involved in and committed to humanist values as embodied in a republic of free men (which he identified as Florence before the Medici, a debatable conclusion of his). But then, the Assassin's Creed series has always been about the dime-store versions of historical figures, good or bad.

Generally speaking, I find it a good rule not to trust the word of anyone who says that their country doesn't have a race problem when their country has a history of colonialism and imperialism. Considering that that's virtually every country in the world, I think it's safe not to trust the word of anyone who says their country doesn't have a race problem, period. I'm also finding it almost shocking how many ways TotalBiscuit is showing the world that he's a somewhat ignorant, somewhat self-satisfied, completely average white dude. Maybe next he'll start talking about how biological differences between men and women mean that true equality is impossible and the goal only of radicals.

There's an intuitive style of debate used by many people from #GamerGate that freely reproduces disproven rumors and photoshopped images because they possess a moral reality that is more important to said people than the actual reality. I don't doubt that it'll get a lot of attention whether or not a the presence of image alterations are established. Looking at it now, the way the shirt hangs and the positioning of the image certainly makes it look like it's photoshopped, but those are the least relevant factors in determining whether it's "real" or not.

I'd dig a GAINAX podcast in general, looking at the good and the bad, not necessarily even in chronological order. Also, here's the blog link. My friends and I had conceived of it this past July and August as a series of highly personal retrospectives on anime, television, and movies, but so far I'm the only person to contribute much and it mostly puts my creative exhaustion from dissertating on display. I'm proud of the light research I did for the origin of an Evangelion fan myth and this latest one on the death of the fansub, but otherwise it's not something worth bookmarking yet. I don't mean to imply that it is in the company of the few "critical" blogs I mentioned, since I can only really dream of getting to the high level of discourse that KarmaBurn and Ogiue Maniax sustain. It does have a Daily Lives of High School Boys post, though.

Yeah, it's been sobering to watch the recent growing pains in video game journalism, because I think anime's got a similar problem that it might never grow out of now that the anime bubble's burst and Cool Japan is mostly dead. Almost all professional journalism on anime is press releases and industry reporting. Most criticism happens on blogs and fansub circles, which are still very steeped in 4chan culture and therefore tend to be about assessing the "objective" quality of the shows versus commenting on their influences and themes. Some blogs write a little on the latter two, and there's an academic culture of media criticism for anime forever in its infancy, but they're all so isolated from each other and their audience that I can't imagine a Polygon of anime (or even an Idle Thumbs of anime) ever being a thing. It bums me out. I have an anime blog I keep updated but never advertise, and I've thought of starting a podcast several times with some friends, but do I have anything to say about anime besides broad assessments of quality and myopic nitpicks? Maybe, I don't know.

I actually got suckered into listening to AnimeNewsNetwork's podcast because it finally sounded like a format that'd work, basically reevaluating a random decade-old series every week, but it was a complete strike-out. Two of ANN's "journalists" and an animator friend did The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya and just ended up bitching about how it's not as smart as it thinks it is and how moe's taken over everything. I'm getting to the point where I don't think there's a register of critical discourse in anglophone conversations about anime that exists sufficiently to be captured on a weekly or even monthly podcast. It's like how all fansub groups end up either hating anime or broken up over drama, maybe.

I'm mostly just teasing. Still, I tend to like comedy anime even though I don't like many live-action comedies. And Yet the Town Moves, Oh! Edo Rocket, Shinryaku! Ika Musume, The Wallflower, and Ouran High School Host Club are all good candidates for humorous everyday vignettes tied to a loose overall story, although I'm sure there's serious stuff out there for you, too. Also, Tegan will probably drop in sooner or later to sell Ouran to you. She certainly did to me.

All other things being equal, which they're not, I love how being interviewed for TV at work in front of hundreds of thousands of people while wearing a hideous shirt is perfectly and unproblematically equivalent to photographing oneself in a hideous shirt at home. Apparently I'm a streaker because I've been naked alone in my home, which is just the same as being naked in public.