Gormongous

Except for that extended period when I changed my username to "Snowpiercer." That'll probably mess things up pretty bad.

I'm satisfied with this brief Watchmen discussion:

I thought it was painfully obvious that someone had used one of gaming's most iconic villains to pillory the paranoia, viciousness, amorality, and entitlement that #GamerGate represents... and then I got to the end and had a doubt. The comments removed it and replaced it with several others. At least a minority of these people actually like being compared to a psychotic supercomputer that's willing to murder an infinite number of people in order to meet some arbitrary deadline?

Yeah, take it easy, Nick! You're the most unique voice on the podcast, it's always better with you there. I guess I'm lucky that gray temples seem to be the only physical effect of my job. It made for a good Littlefinger costume this Halloween. Wait.. no, I take Tums semi-regularly now, so there's that, too.

I think many people who have never worked in customer service are totally unaware of how much customer service is just about flattering the customer on the pain of losing your job if they don't dig it. This especially applies to every dude who thinks all the baristas at their favorite coffee shop are totally in love with him, rather than them all recognizing him as a regular customer who expects to be flirted with when he orders coffee.

I agree that it's dumb. Is Ubisoft stuck in its own little bubble, thinking that Valve's a company and Ubisoft's a company, so it's simple for the latter to make a product to compete with the former? Or is there some evidence that Origin's working out for EA on the PC? It's certainly not working among anyone I know, but all my friends are in their late twenties and early thirties, with a hostility to putting their name and credit card info into yet another "universal" digital platform, so I'm willing to concede that they're not representative.

It makes me think about how the prequel names broke the spell of Star Wars nomenclature for me. The subtitles of the original trilogy are set in my mind as real things, but even Han Solo sounds goofy to me if I dwell on it too long. Just about every combination of non-words sounds like the name of a Star Wars character to me, and every portentously vague phrase sounds like the subtitle for a new Star Wars movie. It's madlibs at this point.

This is only tangentially related, but I remember seeing John Carmack speak at a convention in 2007. He spoke about a lot of things, but my favorite anecdote was when he talked about diminishing returns with aural and visual fidelity in games. He said that Doom 3 had a fully simulated 3D audio engine that modeled the level geometry as positional sound data and used texture flags to determine what mix of audio effects would be applied to the output for the player. According to him, it was a masterpiece of engineering, but a buggy mess that never worked a hundred percent even under perfect test conditions. One night, frustrated by the whole thing, Carmack stayed up late and ripped it all out, replacing it instead with the long-standard system of environmental effects presets for individual rooms. He said it took the rest of the team two weeks to notice, and only then because one of them realized that the audio engine hadn't crashed in a while and dug around to find out why. His point then was that there's a practical limit to any kind of fidelity that just relies on the five senses, but I think it's also worthwhile to use his example to point out how low the average person's threshold for aural fidelity is, even when fully aware of the complexities at work. Some of that is probably natural, since sight is the dominant sense for most people and hearing a distant second, but I also think that CollegeBaby has it right that the film and television industries have done a reasonably good job educating their markets on the defects of SD content in order to drive sales, although sometimes to the detriment of producing truly HD content, while the music and consumer electronics industries have done virtually much the opposite in order to keep the mp3 bubble nice and full. I'm sure there's a much more interesting point to be made by extrapolating further, but it's late, so I'll leave it to someone else.

I think, because they rely on long-form adaptation more, they know the pitfalls of it a little bit better. Everyone knows the big mistakes that anime adaptations have made: Dragonball Z's infamously slow pace, Fullmetal Alchemist's non-canon ending full of off-the-wall revelations, Death Note's tragically compressed second half, Bleach's sudden flashbacks mid-action to unrelated events... These mistakes are still being made in 2014, but most shows are content simply to break off where the source material ends, in hopes of a second season or an OVA coda.

I found the whole discussion on remasters interesting because the two genres of visual media about which I have the most knowledge (television and anime) both have this unfortunate period between 1998/1999 and 2005/2006 where film masters were switched to digital, but everything everything was still saved at standard definition, so there's literally no information there to move to high definition. Farscape and FLCL are two of the most unfortunate examples of this, especially because companies want to release Blu-ray content anyway and therefore just do really aggressive DNR and edge enhancement in order to make fundamentally SD content look HD. It's gross. Also, and unrelatedly, Sean's Bane voice makes me realize that he must like the "oh no" at least in part just for how it sounds, as do I. I would happily have an entire podcast where Sean just repeats pieces of things that the other Thumbs have said in the Bane voice.

A quick Google says that they need more manga material to even consider a third season, which'll take between one and two years to happen, so you're right that there's a chance it might get passed over in favor of "fresher" properties in the future.

With all the conversation about street harassment lately, #DudesGreetingDudes is a great takedown of the sexism going on there.

Okay, so I took a break from watching Chihayafuru because it was a recap episode and watched another of Shinkai Makoto's movies, Children who Chase Lost Voices from Deep Below. I think I've finally found one of his that I don't like, despite its whimsical and evocative title. I know that his favorite anime is Miyazaki's Castle in the Sky, but for him to make such a clear imitation of it as a feature-length film is hardly flattering. It makes me wonder if all the comparisons being drawn between the two creators, despite their works having very little in common besides medium, have gotten to his head somehow. To make a more pointed critique, I was disappointed by the lack of thematic complexity in CWCLVFDB, especially compared to earlier works by Shinkai. I know it's been easy to joke about how his first three movies were really all the same movie, only with different characters and settings, but the fact remains that Voices of a Distant Star, The Place Promised in Our Early Days, and 5 Centimeters per Second are all beautiful and thoughtful experiences that do a great job of depicting people in the process of losing what they never expected to lose. From the horse's mouth, CWCLVFDB was intended to handle the next step, letting go of what was lost and moving on, but the theme's never directly addressed in the course of the movie itself. Things are lost and people move on, but no perspective's given, not even though character development. It's so understated that I had to start asking myself if the events of the plot were somehow meant to be some kind of extended parable making the figurative literal, but if so it's terribly misguided, because the message is still just that people die and it sucks but you have to be happy and keep living for them. Is that a subtle truth that needs two hours and a wild fantasy world to explicate? Really, the whole of it doesn't even hold a candle to the final scene of 5 Centimeters per Second at the train crossing. My dislike of this movie bums me out, partly because I was hoping to have something new to love and partly because it disrupts my internal narrative of Shinkai as this talent gradually but steadily finding his voice as a writer and director. It makes me less optimistic about The Garden of Words, his latest work, but maybe the strictly realistic setting has prevented Shinkai from further Miyazakian whimsy.

Yeah, having a pistol with a good ammo-to-damage ratio makes the Mastermind class have crazy legs. For most of the second act of that Hoxton mission, I only whipped out my primary when there were more than half a dozen guys who all need to be dead tout suite. When I played with my friend after I left you guys, he insisted on doing Shadow Raid. It's actually very easy if you have insane patience, which he does. We played it on the base difficulty and made out with about $1,500,000 easy, so I guess the lesson is that having a guide who knows the ropes of the level is everything. Love you too, Twig! I got to hear what you sound like for the first time. You sound like a dude.

This is an excellent summation that captures all the reasons why #GamerGate is slowly self-destructing now that it's been rejected by the mainstream. Also, if anyone was curious, the KingofPol incident led me to confirm that "argumentum ad dictionarium" is an actual term for an informal fallacy, one that I'll be making sure to use more on the internet and with my students.

The thing is, as awful as the implications of his words actually are, I don't see this as a conscious position being taken by TotalBiscuit. He says something from his gut, then makes an excuse for why it makes sense, then makes an excuse for the excuse, then makes an excuse for the excuse of the excuse, then says that he's being derailed and goes back to his original point as if it were never challenged. It's not considered or rational, it's just a "smart" person who's not used to having to think. He's presenting his instinctual response to harassment and death threats as the correct way to respond to them, then twisting himself in knots trying not to acknowledge that maybe it's not the correct way and that maybe he has no right to that authority anyway. But I do agree with you on the effect of both intentional and unintentional victim-blaming, so the above is really just a quibble.

And when someone does attack a woman in real life, he'll be the first to admit that it was really unlikely for it to happen and that his advice still stands for everyone else. Yeah, I'm totally done with this guy and his weird desire to be the arbiter of things about which he knows nothing.

Todd Ciolek writes about Bayonetta and other justified-cheesecake characters in this week's X Button: http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/the-x-button/2014-11-05/uncovered-paths/.80685 Yeah, the Honored Matres fit, and I wondered if you were talking about them, but what nerd worth his salt would mix them up with the Bene Gesserit, seriously.

I know it's something said offhand in an attempt to justify a larger (and equally ignorant) point, but I am stunned by a statement like this from someone who claims to any sort of objectivity, even as a rhetorical gesture. TotalBiscuit, you don't need to invent this concept of death threats being "credible" only when they lead to the death of the person under threat. We already have a word for it, which you are welcome to use. It's "murder." In that sense, you are correct to state that Anita Sarkeesian has not yet been murdered. You are incorrect to say that she has not received "credible" death threats, because at least some of the threats she has received have been sufficient to involve law enforcement, which has been independently verified by other sources, and they're about as credible as institutions get on a day-to-day level. Christ, the weasel words this guy uses just to cling to the high ground... I think you're right, Nachmir, that we should just be ignoring him now. By his logic, the class D felony of "threatening the President of the United States" is a legal impossibility because it would only be invoked if a successful assassination were made, in which case the charges would be first-degree murder and high treason instead. It would take ten seconds of self-reflection to come up with any number of contradictions like this, but TB just wants to be right, so he doesn't make the time.

Is that a nose or a tear?

It's embarrassing how long it took me reading this to notice it's the same as last week.

Also, they typically marry to have that sex, then raise those children. It's barely sexualized at all, at least in in the original works. I haven't read many by Herbert's son, so if there's a scene in those books where a Bene Gesserit walks up to the Duke of Ginaz and is like, "Take me now," and then later it's revealed that it was part of some breeding program, then that works a lot better.

I can't tell which way to read your emoji, Twig. Is it an extremely unhappy man with just a heavy brow, or a mildly unhappy man with a very wrinkled brow?

What I was thinking about last night is, what would the ultimate point of an apology from Patricia Hernandez be? What would it accomplish if TotalBiscuit's wildest dreams in that respect are realized, and all professional journalists not only issue corrections to articles but also write apologies to accompany them, like they're politicians who've betrayed the public trust or something? Would the added humiliation of it make them less likely to make mistakes? Are people more likely to trust journalists if the latter are forced to publicize every one of those mistakes? Of course not. It's not about improving journalistic standards, it's about getting a progressive feminist voice to abase itself in front of #GamerGate so they can feel gratified and claim another "win." The fact that TB insists on it even when Totilo points out how unnecessary and pointless it would be is goddamn embarrassing, but looking at the whole of the podcast and the article ProblemMachine posted, it appears as though TB doesn't have any shame.