Gormongous

Yeah, I watched it a couple weeks after Captain Phillips, and it's almost comical how one is a serious study of the emotional and physical toll of a hijacking and the other is a vanity project by Tom Hanks doing a Pepperidge Farms accent.

Tegan, why don't you live somewhere that's not Canada so we can hang out?

I am incredibly excited for November 1st, because then Halloween will have passed and I can shave off this awful goatee I grew for my Game of Thrones costume. I've cured myself of pretensions of facial hair for at least a year this time...

Also, not to double-post, but browsing Christine Love's twitter, I came across this screencap of an 8chan post attacking DiGRA with a list of putative demands. Quite frankly, I love stuff like this. It shows a fundamental (almost tragicomic) misunderstanding of how academic research is conducted, what that research produces, and how professional associations figure into both. I don't mean to be uncharitable, but it is nothing short of perfect that this poster conceives of DiGRA as a SEELE-like shadow organization commissioning research into certain areas but not others in the furtherance of a supreme agenda. Whatever. People who come into academia study what they want to study. Sometimes there's some influence by their advisor, but it always pertains to what that advisor thinks is viable to publish. If there's a preponderance of progressive and feminist thought in academic research on games, it's because it's the kind of thought that's in existence and in demand among other scholars. There's no place at all for DiGRA to exert its influence, let alone set the criteria for what research is done and what is done with it, because every professional association I've ever known operates as a mostly passive forum for scholars to exchange old ideas in the hopes of sparking new ones. It can't encourage or discourage anything, because it doesn't exist outside the actions of its members. Even the executive board, as grand as it sounds, is just a bunch of busywork given to senior scholars as recognition for their achievements or to junior scholars as a way for them to make new contacts in the field. Basically, this dude needs to watch less TV, because none of his demands are even sensical to the academy I know and love (against all odds and sense). Above all, if these assholes don't like how research into games is being conducted and disseminated, maybe some of them should stop fellatiating the STEM disciplines and spend a few years picking turnips in the humanities. It would quickly disabuse them of any conspiracy among critics and theorists beyond building a CV and getting regular meals.

In the comment thread to an article about Sarkeesian's appearance, someone was talking about how #GamerGate spreading misinformation in response to it fits their longtime pattern of "winning skirmishes at the cost of the war." It seemed very apt to me. My mother's already asked me, in the tired way she asks me about pop culture phenomena in which she knows I'm already eye-deep. I didn't get thirty seconds into my explanation before she cut me off by saying, "Oh, it's just a bunch of people angry that they can't own a hobby, so they're trying to scare everyone else away. Okay." I wanted to say more, but maybe that's a correct enough understanding for a fifty-something woman whose favorite pastime is doing community trash pickup in public parks. Also, speaking of mothers, does it bother anyone else that Christina Sommers is referred to as "Based Mom" or just "Mom" by a substantial percentage of #GamerGate? Maybe I'm going too far down the rabbit hole, but it seems like #GamerGate is giving one of their most legitimate advocates (although that's a sliding scale, for sure) the only title of authority that a female can hold.

Reading the manual for Alpha Centauri is especially great, because it contains a bibliography that has both notable and the obscure works from contemporary science fiction and from scientific research. It was clearly a game made by writers who read a lot.

In the final episode of Gunbuster, Noriko tears open the chest of the mech she's piloting to remove its core, but because mechs are controlled by mirroring the movements of their pilots, she tears open her shirt in the process. Oops? It's an awesome and empowering moment, but still a moment of barely-justified fanservice from "Bustgunner." The titular character from Medaka Box is so noble and trusting of humanity and its intentions that she doesn't see any reason not to strip and stand around in her underwear if it's too hot or if someone asks her to do it. Played for laughs, but it's still a statuesque woman with huge boobs lounging around in lingerie. She's also a statuesque woman with huge boobs because she's the moral and genetic peak of the human species in every way, which of course means that she's conventionally attractive in a very specific sense. Holo from Spice & Wolf is an ancient deity only recently awakened to the world. She relishes her nudity as proof of her pagan heritage and only reluctantly puts on clothes at the insistence of her traveling companion. She regularly references the indignity of a goddess having to hide her form behind mortal clothing throughout the series.

And if someone wants a buddy they can learn with, I just got the game last week, am going to be pretty available over the next couple months, and would like to really dig into it!

Common on the TVTropes wiki is calling something a "sub-trope." That works great here.

Regarding the mask system in Payday 2, some awesome/awful things can be wrought, like the game that SAM, JonCole, Jason, and I just played tonight: The four horsebags of the apocalypse. Also, with regards to how Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri handled the tendency of sci-fi technology to be bland and contextless, two things come to mind. First, every tech was accompanied by a quote, usually one that used history to ground the technology in a certain morality or ideology. Even if it's hard to imagine on the face of it how "Cyberethics" relates to the colonization of an alien world, we know Saint Augustine and his Confessions, so we have some cues on how to react. Even the technologies that didn't have historical quotes had ones given instead by the game's faction leaders or their underlings, all of whom distinct personalities and ideologies. Basically, with all but a few technologies ("Retroviral Engineering" and "Industrial Nanorobotics" come to my mind) there is a strong and clear tone given for a technology via the quote that firmly establishes its specific utility in the player's mind. The other way, of which I'm quite fond even though it's less impressive and somewhat inimical to more modern designs like Beyond Earth, was the category mechanic that's built into the blind research system. Basically, in Alpha Centauri, research is conducted by default through allocation of research points to four broad categories: explore, discover, build, and conquer. A technology, like "Industrial Automation," is rated with a category and a number, like "Build 3." That represents the tree it's on and its position on that tree. Techs can easily cross trees, but you always have the category (to tell you what strategy the tech helps the most) and the number (from 1 to 16) to tell you how advanced it is, if you need a simple way to break it down. A lot of other sci-fi games like to obfuscate how important their individual techs are to preserve a sense of wonder, but Alpha Centauri gave you a system that you can use to understand the mechanical function of the tech if the aforementioned thematic function fails. Then again, most sci-fi games don't have the faith in their fiction that Alpha Centauri had.

Also, the KILL la KILL OVA might be my favorite thing from the entire series. It's so good.

You're right. Unfortunate, but there are other things to play.

Looking through the past couple weeks, he retweeted Christina Sommers, the anti-bullying stuff from Adobe, and a few testimonials from female-coded Twitters about how friendly and inclusive gamers are for women. It sounds like someone who's naive rather than malicious, although who knows. I can't really tell how serious their "two young brothers who create games" shtick is.

I love the ability to preempt someone's image-building of you online by having an obvious and memorable avatar of a face. Mington made watching Mad Men for the first time a little odd.

Tensions in Ferguson and the rest of St. Louis are still fairly high. On my personal front, the wife of a close friend in my program, who is otherwise very cool and kind, has been sharing every single post made by "Ferguson/Saint Louis Riot Updates" on Facebook. As far as I can tell, this page seems to be a venomously pro-police and anti-black affair that exclusively reposts reports of protesters acting out of line and media taking their side. If I were in doubt, the comments to every single post are about "slaughtering animals" and "exterminating thugs," stuff you'd expect from the nineteenth-century Deep South, not the twenty-first century "model community" of Ferguson. Having to see these hateful posts, even in passing, has become a great source of distress for me, but every other interaction with the person sharing them is positive, so for some reason, I'm hesitating to remove them from my life. Also, the different St. Louis police departments have had at least five recorded instances of planting guns and fabricating firearms charges. In each situation, the officers responsible have sworn that they were acting on their own, which is... I don't know. Whatever the case is, I have so much difficulty trusting the police that I simply cannot understand how so many people are desperate enough to believe that the police can do no wrong, to the point of advocating limited-scale genocide of those perceived to be the "enemies" of law enforcement.

I don't think we're friends on Steam...?

Things I ended up liking about Honey & Clover after watching all forty episodes against the advice of everyone here: Yamada's story is awesome. I wouldn't say it makes the rest of the show watchable, but just seeing a strong and smart female character try to keep her love for someone alive because it's important to her, even though there's no hope for it, is unique and beautiful to me. Her monologues were the best monologues, especially compared to the facile bullshit that Takemoto spouts while he's having his walkabout. The interlude, in episode sixteen maybe, about the dying beefsteak plant is as good a metaphor of unrequited love as I have ever heard. I wish her story were the entire anime, but we have to have the disgusting love-polygon around Hagu take the spotlight instead, with the lukewarm sideshow that is Mayama and Rika to dull my senses further. None of the characters have any inner life besides Yamada, which is ironic considering that she's so easily put into the category of tsundere at the beginning. The OP for the second season is really catchy and captures the emotional heart of the show. Too bad that the label has pulled it from every YouTube video they can find. The idea of college-centered anime really appeals to me, even if the specific art college of Honey & Clover is this weird place where no one goes to classes or makes new friends or does anything besides work on their senior theses and have drinking parties. Not to mention, no character in the show graduated on time, is that common or just a symptom of being a long-running manga with a relatively small cast of characters? Either way, I think Golden Time is in my future... The rest of the show was really bad. It's so hard to watch a show about love and growing up when you don't actually wish any of the characters happiness or fulfillment. How this is one of the greatest shoujo works of this generation is beyond me. Hyadain is awesome and I hate that it's so hard to get his music anywhere besides NicoNico and YouTube.

Of course, Tuesday 6:00 CST is Tuesday 4:00 PST, Steam's scheduled maintenance time, so we'll have to wait a bit, it seems.

I'm not mocking these people to their face. I'm not even really mocking these people. I'm mocking their beliefs, mostly the way they are presented, only within the confines of a small forum among people I can trust after weeks and weeks of enduring an onslaught of hate. Maybe you just don't understand that we're not making these jokes in the interest of disseminating them, but just to keep morale up among people on the front lines of said hate, and that's okay. I've said as much and now you'll understand. But if you're saying that I need to be patient and calm not only when speaking directly to #GamerGate, which I already am, but also among friends and in the privacy of my own head, then I disagree vehemently. That is tone policing at its worst and demands an impossibly saintly standard of behavior for specious outcome. I'm also really not sure why you bring in the false emotional/rational dichotomy at the end there. Nothing about #GamerGate is rational and appeals to rationality have unilaterally failed. Surely those studies that you cite say the same thing, that rationality is utterly incidental to the success of any dialogue. There's no need to denigrate emotional responses to the events of the past two months, even if they are somewhat unpalatable to you personally.

I'm in Central. I could potentially leave even earlier, and I don't really have a bedtime.

Thank you for putting it more lucidly than I managed, Jon. I may come off as uncharitable here, but my interactions with #GamerGate as a movement and as individuals have not led me to believe that there is a significant percentage of them willing to consider their opponents' criticisms, just so long as those criticisms are delivered nonconfrontationally and with due consideration to their personal circumstances. Even if there is such a percentage, those people are not allies of social justice and never can be, not without substantive change on their part. They are, at best, a group that we can persuaded to stay neutral if we spend the effort to cater to their sensibilities -- a neutrality that's liable to vanish upon even a whiff of criticism. In many situations, no criticism is even necessary beyond the absence of total agreement. Accordingly, if we're determined to achieve positive social change by propitiating the reactionary elements of society, we're picking the longest, hardest, and most exhausting road for it. It sucks that some members of #GamerGate feel attacked and that those feelings might lead them to radicalize, but I don't know how we can avoid that when criticisms on the movement are regularly construed as attacks on its constituents, not besides hiding our light under a bushel so that our criticisms don't appear as such on the face of it. I definitely don't think that Gerstmann points a way forward for anyone, because he was criticized by #GamerGate for not supporting their movement and by #GamerGate's opponents for his fallacious arguments to moderation. History might vindicate him, like it might vindicate Obama's conciliatory centrism, but I don't think so for either.

It lacks the personalized element of Crusader Kings 2, but if you can learn the systems, Victoria 2 is as internal a strategy game as they come. Managing one's economy to encourage growth and allowing sociopolitical change without outright rebellion are the primary challenges in the game.

Nah, anyone who wants to see the literal thousands of hours I've spent playing Crusader Kings 2 and Euro Truck Simulator 2 is welcome to my shame. My username's the same as my name here: Gormongous.

The entire thing feels parodic. The model looks and moves like someone hastily skinned Keanu to make a bodysuit. And yeah, I'll be back from the office by six, so you guys can shepherd a newbie around. I've actually played the Nightclub level and like it a lot, on par with the Diamond level, but I'm sure I have a lot of weird tics from playing with night-invincible bots to whom I'm unable to delegate anything.

I just bought this game and am at level twenty-five or so just playing with the bots to learn the missions and systems. Mostly, what I've learned is that most of the better missions are impossible with the bots. What I'm saying, I guess, is that I'm on board with some more serious play with awesome Thumbs people.