Gormongous

Not board game news, but board game industry news: three months after acquiring Days of Wonder, French board game publisher Asmodee acquires Fantasy Flight Games. Three of the biggest publishers, all under one roof. The optimistic interpretation is that it'll give FFG products a better presence in Europe and fix Asmodee's production and distribution problems in the western hemisphere. The pessimistic interpretation is... well, what's the pessimistic interpretation of any amalgamation of capital on this scale?

Nah, there's no activity in my Paypal account after the payment for the package for which I bought the postage. I've never had a void take this long, and I've had to do it fairly often because the ladies down at the post office do reject incorrectly dated postage, as well as postage where the weight is incorrect by a couple of ounces even if it doesn't change the amount I'd have to pay. The main issue is that I can't contact eBay, Paypal's adamant that it's not their fault, and I'm not even sure how or if I can escalate with the post office.

I know you don't like Evangelion, Twig, but I like it a lot, and moreover I think it's a good example of a show that doesn't require insider knowledge of its subgenre to enjoy, not that I haven't been tempted to watch Gundam, Macross, and Mazinger Z to understand it better.

I don't mind, personally. I treat my anime advocacy like my video game advocacy. There's at least one anime and video game for any given person (but probably a lot more), it's just about finding the right kind and learning what to look for thereby. Since I've been recommending both types of media to people for about a decade, I'm as inured to "isn't that all perverted cartoons for pedophiles" as to "doesn't playing those things make you shoot up schools." The biggest question for me is, since you've clearly taken to the "slice-of-life but a little weird" subgenre, whether you'll go for full mundane like Minami-ke or for complete left-field weirdness like Girls und Panzer and Upotte!! at the end of the day.

eBay does not have an email address anymore. They don't have a live chat client or any active customer service presence online. They have a FAQ tree that can easily be made to go in circles and an automated telephone number that's the same. How I'm supposed to get a refund for a label I voided two months ago (which was partly their fault anyway, allowing me to buy postage on a day when the post office was closed) I have no idea.

I'm not crazy about it, certainly not to the point of thinking it's a deconstruction of the "magical girl" subgenre with anything to say that hasn't been said by Sailor Moon, Revolutionary Girl Utena, and Princess Tutu years or even decades before, but I do think it has a number of interesting ideas, as well as a dark tone that some people (not 2014 me, but maybe 2009 me) see as central to a "proper" deconstruction. I wouldn't necessarily recommend it to someone without much knowledge of the subgenre. The psychology of its characters isn't on the same level of, say, Neon Genesis Evangelion where it can be watched without any awareness whatsoever. I also love the art that's not the hideous moeblob character design, especially in the movie, but you can also get a lot of that in the later seasons of Sayonara, Zetsubou-Sensei, which I'd recommend before everything always. P.S. I'm finding it charming that you're always asking us if this or that anime is exploitative. Most of the good stuff isn't, by most standards, and you'll hear even among fans if it is. It's like asking people whether every American sitcom is sexist like The Honeymooners and King of Queens.

I really hate how most of the optimal builds for weapons look dumb as hell. Tan, green, silver, and black mods are all mismatched. Pistols have two laser sights and a flashlight on them. The amazing War-Torn Stock looks like a piece from another model kit that's been glued onto a shotgun. Every scope besides the Acough Optic Scope and the Spectator Sight looks glued on, too. Unrelatedly, I hate that I lack the willpower not to use the most optimal mods for my weapon builds.

You can feel it, not just in the news reports, but in the air of the city itself. Everyone seems to be sure that Darren Wilson won't be convicted and everyone's ramping up for a race war because of that. There seem to be no efforts being made to avert that. The police chief's even stated bluntly that Wilson will be back on duty immediately if/when he's not indicted.

I'm thinking of it more like a secret government project to see how far an untenably self-contradictory position about social mores can be sustained. Start out with "death threats should be ignored" and end up with "saying women shouldn't receive death threats is sexist!" Also: Pots and kettles, TB.

Yeah, on Twitter and on Reddit I have seen people claiming that Intel was inspired to do this fundraising campaign after seeing #GamerGate and the good it's done. I don't see any evidence of that besides some people really wanting it to be what's happening. It seems like they and many others in #GamerGate are testing the limits of that quote attributed to Joseph Goebbels: "The truth is a lie repeated."

So really, it's more the fault of a magazine like Time, which regularly reports on women's issues, for giving misogynists an opportunity to flex their muscles.

In less funny news, Time put "feminist" on their poll of Worst Words from 2014 that should be banned, alongside "bae," "basic," and "influencer," and it's winning by a huge margin. Time's rationale is about people overusing and misunderstanding the term, which just makes it one of the top three tone-deaf moves of all time, rather than the number one.

Use of "whilst," ten points from Gryffindor.

I agree completely! There was a lot of extremely dumb stuff on that infographic, but nothing bugged me personally as much as it being taken for granted that "nerds" excel in academia. I've found that most "nerds," whatever they mean by that, do well in secondary education because they're generally more self-motivated and intensive when it comes to intellectual endeavors, but there's a rapidly decreasing advantage to that from college onward. By the postgraduate level, the tendency of "nerds" towards adversarial relationships, fixation on details, and synthesis-free conclusions makes them no better or worse than any other self-identified subculture, even the dreaded "jocks," at what they do. The only way to make it work is to stretch "nerd" until it means simply "someone with a high degree of interest and expertise in a specific field of study," which is... I don't know, whatever. I really have no words for how stupid that infographic is. There are so many thumbs on its scales to make gamers/nerds not only a coherent group with universal characteristics but also one that suffers as many disadvantages as men and women combined, it's impossible for me to take seriously. If it were really that unremittingly terrible to be a gamer/nerd, no one would choose to be a gamer/nerd instead of millions of people choosing to be gamers/nerds. That's all there is to it, I'm sorry.

Looks like you're probably right, since Tyson just started tweeting a bunch of Interstellar inaccuracies, too. That makes all of that substantially less odd, although the movie itself's still a mess. I don't know if anyone's linked it before, but there's a SlashFilm article comparing the 2008 script to the 2014 movie. It seems to be a more coherent and interesting movie overall, but too complicated and with some of the same thematic confusion, so... I don't know.

I'm not being critical of you. I just feel that, while Leigh Alexander's deconstruction of "gamer" as an identity is interesting, it's not meant to be proactive, and trying to talk good people out of identifying as gamers is at best pointless and at worst counterproductive.

Guys, we have this conversation with Twig at least at least every other month. Isn't enough to let everyone make their own informed decisions with regards to identity politics? I haven't identified as a gamer since early high school and doubt I ever will again, but I understand Twig's own reasons for continuing to use that label and hope him all the best with it. Having reasonable people who identify as gamers for strong personal reasons distinct from #GamerGate's raisons d'etre is a good thing ultimately, even if it'd suit some of us better to see everyone fleeing the label like rats from a sinking ship.

I'm loving your username something fierce, SJW.

I know, it's just odd to me that his tone is so completely different with Interstellar, about which he is aggressively positive in multiple interviews even though it also has a lot of dumb science goofs in addition to blatantly hand-waving technology like single-stage orbital planes. It makes me wonder how egregiously inaccurate you could make a sci-fi movie and still get a thumbs-up from him for being positive about spaceflight and for having a respected scientist as a consultant on it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VzE6bKIKK3A http://www.buzzfeed.com/adambvary/neil-degrasse-tyson-trolled-gravity-on-twitter

Also, and this is an old hobbyhorse, but isn't it odd to see Neil DeGrasse-Tyson stumping so hard for the accuracy of Interstellar after eviscerating Gravity last year for making fewer and smaller mistakes? Is it just because the former's so bullish on the possibilities of space travel?

I'd love to have the old Nolan back, but I can't think of many instances where critically acclaimed directors who were ruined by big budgets and popularity come back to their roots in a way that's effective or compelling. I think we might be looking forward to another decade of mediocrity. I think that everyone here has done a good job of encompassing why I was so disappointed by Interstellar myself. It's clearly a work of great ambition, but with no thematic coherency beyond the "love" theme pasted all over it, and I have a hard time giving it much credit considering how many of the characters and ideas are borrowed from previous Nolan films and done better many years before by other works of science fiction. When I realized that the standout moment for me was a robot genre-savvy enough to make jokes referencing 2001: A Space Odyssey and other killer computer tropes, I knew that "derivative" and "underwhelming" were going to be my watchwords going forward. Also, I can't get over the implication that Casey Affleck named his son Cooper Cooper in honor of his father, who apparently only had a surname.

One of the dominant interpretations of My Neighbor Totoro (but certainly not the exclusive interpretation) is that it's Miyazaki re-imagining his own childhood in a more "feminine" world where the Second World War wasn't happening, his parents had daughters, and his father was a literature professor at a university. Most of the other biographical details are virtually identical to Miyazaki's early life, particularly his mother's tuberculosis, and there's some kind of significant pun with the little girls' names that I can't remember now (ah, "Satsuki" and "Mei" both signify May, a month seen as both the perfect time of the year and as a metonym for growing and flowering, as opposed to violence and destruction). I think all the parallels and their connection to the Japanese concepts of satoyama and furusato are covered here, in an interesting albeit not terribly well-written article. Basically, by setting My Neighbor Totoro in an idyllic rural setting pervaded by a traditional (but not militaristic) Japanese culture, Miyazaki was attempting to rehabilitate his family's history from the more modern and urban developments of the twentieth century. That's mostly why I'm surprised that he made The Wind Rises as a much more literal (but still not explicit) reevaluation of the same themes.

I enjoyed The Wind Rises immensely, but I have trouble getting over the degree to which Miyazaki fictionalized the life of Horikoshi Jiro with details from his own father's life. I feel that the end product ultimately justifies the deliberate inaccuracies, but it's still uncomfortable that Miyazaki's essentially dressing a portrait (and, to some extent, a defense) of his father, who made the rudders for the Mitsubishi Zero, in the guise of a more famous and historically relevant figure. It doesn't feel right to me, especially since he already made My Neighbor Totoro to understand his father's role in and guilt from the war anyway.

I really do love the repeated implications in that screencap that ideas gain power passively by not going away or changing, rather than actively through discourse of any kind. It's so transparently how the poster wants human psychology to work given the situation, regardless of how it actually does work. I've also said this before, but I wouldn't be surprised if this is another instance of members of #GamerGate projecting their own feelings about the movement ("All these months and so few people believe in us... Maybe we're not as right as we thought?") onto those opponents ("If we feel this way when we're right, anti-GG must be ready to fall apart with doubts!").