Gormongous
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Posts posted by Gormongous
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8 hours ago, Paul Smith said:Coincidentally, Nick streamed on Twitch today:
https://www.twitch.tv/nickbreckon
I don't think he mentioned anything about podcasts but he is keen to stream some more provided work/allergies/other concerns don't intervene.
He spoke briefly on the slack about how he sees it as a hiatus like the others that Idle Thumbs has had, both as a website and as a podcast, and that they don't want to close the book on the podcast but more episodes are definitely not in the cards right now. Basically, what everyone thought was happening.
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1 hour ago, Erkki said:Well, what do you know, I think might have to change my opinion. The last two episodes of the season were great, and there was actually a nice payoff for the slow burn that happened before. But still I was on the verge of giving up earlier and I still think each episode in a series should be entertaining on its own.
Yeah, the tension between having each episode add up to a season-ending payoff and having each episode be enjoyable in isolation is something that post-peak TV really struggles with. It basically destroyed The Walking Dead and Sherlock for many people.
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And I'm Brick Neckon.
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There are pros and cons of both. I like the immediacy of the slack and the way that conversations can spring up voluntarily, but it's also a venue with very little memory (both in the sense that the archives only go back a handful of days and that any remotely noteworthy piece of news gets posted at least three or four times). There is also a strong shitposting aesthetic there that I find a little tedious. On the other hand, I like the permanency of the forum and the opportunity to think through what I'm saying before I say it (and edit it after the fact, if I get a better perspective on things), but the pacing is so slow that it doesn't foster conversation as well, especially with a smaller population of users. I'd been making an effort this past year to post in the Anime thread, since that's where most of my free time with media goes these days, but it was just me replying to my own posts for months on end, with Rodi and Coods occasionally interjecting, and that got me down.
Of course, the most important issue is that the past couple of years have been full of depression and unemployment for me, as I've struggled to change careers and get over a protracted breakup, and I just don't play games anymore, except for the couple of months where I was playing The Witcher 3 obsessively (years after everyone else). With the shift in my priorities generating less content in my life, the forums tends to come last after my podcast (which is still going somehow), my blog (which is not, since I've started a new job), my graduate work, and the slack. It's a bummer but it's not exactly a surprise. I miss y'all, though, even the ones who don't talk or log on anymore.
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On 9/3/2018 at 10:32 AM, I_smell said:I actually felt myself wondering "Do I just not like the cyberpunk genre?", but I loved watching Blade Runner for the first time recently, and I do like Final Fantasy 7's grubby neon slums. That cyberpunk is mostly about people just feeling abandoned in a very busy world though.
I think that is the core of cyberpunk, at least in my experience? The problem, as demonstrated by steampunk, is that there's a contingent of people who are just there for the aesthetic, rather than the themes that dictate those aesthetics. So many people who "like" cyberpunk actually just like high technology, violence, and super-beefy dudes. The themes of human commodification and atomization, societal and cultural alienation, and the ubiquity of corporate control in most classic works of cyperpunk are, at best, adjuncts to the fantasy of being a badass with a big gun to such people. If those themes go missing or are subsumed in more overt pandering, they won't complain.
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7 hours ago, Cleinhun said:The fact that Steven Universe starts out fairly mediocre is unfortunate. On the one hand, the effect that it has once the serialization kicks in is legitimately cool. If you're watching it with no expectations, it feels like a slightly worse Adventure Time-like, but then the bottom drops out and suddenly everything is re-contextualized, there is a serious plot, and the quality ramps up considerably. On the other hand, it takes most of the first season to get to that point, which leads a lot of people to abandon it before it really gets anywhere, and I can't really blame them for that. Once it gets going it becomes one of the best things currently on tv, but it does not do a good job of convincing new watchers that it'll get there.
My best advice is that if you watch a handful of episodes and aren't feeling it, it may not be the show for you. But if you feel like it has potential, if you're at all curious where this might be going, keep with it. I promise you, it lives up to that potential and then some.
The really weird thing about the first season of Steven Universe is that, if you go back and watch it through again once you've gotten to season four or five, there are a lot of surprisingly specific references to later reveals (looking at you, "Keep Beach City Weird"). Rebecca Sugar and her team had it planned out from the start, they just took forever to get there for some reason.
I went looking online for skip guides to the first season, which is harder than you'd think since the fandom is adamant that every piece of content (except for the Uncle Grandpa crossover, of course) is absolutely essential to the experience. This one seems pretty good, if you just stick to the green episodes, although it focuses more on which episodes contribute to the lore than on which episodes contribute to character development. I'm curious to see what SAM's friend says, though.
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7 hours ago, Ben X said:This seems like rather a strange idea, and without any further information I'm a little pessimistic, but who knows could be amazing!
I am mostly just hoping that he's coming back because he wants to do more, and not because of financial or commercial considerations, because Stewart was so bored and checked out in the last couple of Star Trek movies. The dune buggy scene in Star Trek: Nemesis was specifically included so that he could partake in his favorite hobby during shooting.
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19 hours ago, clyde said:I just figured Luke needed way more training than Rey did. Always looking toward the future he is.
44 minutes ago, SecretAsianMan said:Luke is kind of a crappy Jedi. I think he gets way more credit than he deserves. I feel that Rey has more potential than any Force user seen thus far given all that's she's been able to accomplish with zero training but as @Gormongous said character portrayals have been very inconsistent.
I like that Rey's defining factor is not her level of skill but her sense of self and where she comes from, but overall I still find her to be a very boring character when not playing off someone with actual conflict, like Kylo Ren or Finn. Part of the reason that people, especially the toxic fanbabies that have rejected this movie so violently, were so attached to Luke is because he grew so much in the course of three movies. Rey is very static, with other characters having to come in and inform her (and us in the audience) of her own abilities that she just... has. But she's not the Chosen One or anything! Sometimes she feels like an attempt to write a protagonist who experiences no struggle or failure, with plot contrivances like just finding the Millennium Falcon or just having the Jedi texts teleported onto it propelling her along.
This is a complaint that I don't like making because the well's been poisoned, but it just feels weird (albeit correct) to say that Luke is still struggling and failing decades later but Rey just... gets it.
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On 7/23/2018 at 7:53 AM, SecretAsianMan said:As for Kylo being sneaky when killing Snoke, I just don't buy it. I don't think he's that good. He's shown virtually no emotional control whatsoever in the series thus far. Despite the fact that he did it, he was extremely conflicted about killing Han and he didn't even take the shot on Leia. He rages at Luke in what is clearly meant to be a trick. I have a hard time believing that guy is able to kill the person who has been manipulating him in such a controlled manner. And if that was the intent of the scene, it feels very inconsistent which is a problem I often have with Star Wars.
I feel like the problem with the new Star Wars movies is overwhelmingly inconsistent characterization. Characters are dumb until they're smart, cautious until they're cocky, and conflicted until they're confident.
I personally thought that this thing was as hot a pile of refuse as the prequels. Why take the technology of Star Wars, which has always been a stand-in for the magic of the plot, and bolt a Battlestar Galactica-style resource crisis onto it? Even if this is the Empire Strikes Back of the trilogy, it's not remotely plausible that they're just going to run out of fuel and get blown out of the sky, especially not after Ackbar's token death that's an attempt to make up for their unwillingness to give Leia a suitable end (and after the incredible moment when Kylo Ren hesitates on the trigger and then his wingman takes the shot for him, ugh).
On the other hand, I didn't expect to like the training stuff, but I did like maybe eighty percent of what Mark Hamill was doing — the world-weary sage stuff, not the smug saves-the-day act that he warns against and then later does anyway — and I found the scenes between Rey and Kylo to be strangely powerful, especially the telepathic ones, and a great way to enhance the mystique of the Force that's not just old men jabbering at you. Too bad it ends up being Snoke's doing, because the secondary antagonist needs to be built up somehow, and too bad that that and everything wraps up perfunctorily and arbitrarily.
I also felt that the universe in the movie felt incredibly small? People and places didn't get mentioned unless they were going to be (or already were) part of the plot. Big-name actors like Laura Dern and Benicio del Toro get flown in for a few scenes that are usually far out of tone with the rest of the movie. In fact, it really felt like the script was written by someone who loved Star Wars and then heavily revised by someone who had no idea what Star Wars is.
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Attention everyone: Letterkenny is now streaming on Hulu, so everyone who's not Canadian or a pirate can enjoy this subtle, witty, rude, silly comedy about small-town life in rural Ontario. I've been burned when I described it as Shakespearean before, but I'm going to go ahead and do it again. This kind of thing is downright Shakespearean:
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On a whim, I read the script for the deleted route with the President in Ladykiller in a Bind. I understand why Love got rid of it, since she wanted the game to be a safe space, but I think it's really well done? It's got huge issues with mismanaged consent, but that's the point and I think it's a good point to make, that there are no safe routes.
Honestly, the way it's used is what comes to mind when people ask, "When is a good reason to put sexual violence in a work?" Same as those two scenes (you know which ones) in Analogue: A Hate Story. Not that I'd ever give anyone guff for passing on them because of that content.
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5 hours ago, Dosed said:Since both of my favourite gaming podcasts, Thumbs and Besties, have stopped doing gaming stuff could anyone recommend some good gaming podcasts?
I've tried out The Bombcasts in their various forms and they weren't for me. The Super Bunny Hop cast is a bit awkward for my likings. Although I do love his YouTube stuff. Has anyone got anything in the vein of Thumbs or Besties?
I'm generally happy with Waypoint Radio. Sure, their subject matter has increasingly drifted away from what they're playing into the black hole of all gaming podcasts, Important Gaming Issues, but they're still a solid cast that keeps me feeling engaged with the wider community. Episodes without Austin and Rob can be a bit more... eclectic than those with them, but that's to some people's taste?
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I have to say, I was disappointed to hear David Heron on this podcast. He has his good points, but he tends to be so negative and nitpicky, even about games he likes, that he has a chilling effect on an episode. It's not even four minutes in, just after introductions, that he's explaining his history with the BattleTech franchise largely by way of pointing out how bad the tabletop game was and how broken the MechWarrior games were. When the panel starts to discuss the game itself, his first substantive comment is to talk about how easy the first two thirds of it were (because he found a degenerative strategy, David loves his degenerative strategies), followed by a dismissive description of the game's character progression as "magic powers" and a litany of the game's other design compromises and bugs. Surely the first twenty minutes of your podcast are better spent on something more consequential than how wonky enemy reinforcements can sometimes be... I don't know, like covering the core game loop? I'm not against a nuanced or vigorous critique of a game that the panel overall likes, but Heron doesn't really seem interested in talking about a game unless he can frame it by its shortcomings.
After hearing Rob talk with Austin on the Waypoint article read for the game, I was hoping to get further conversation along similar lines, but with a panel of friends from across the industry. Instead I got a repeat of awkward bug-obsessed gripe sessions like Sins of a Solar Empire: Rebellion or XCOM 2.
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I'm watching Nisekoi because I've watched almost every other show that Shinbou Akiyuki's done with Shaft and I see no reason to stop now. It's a love comedy about two kids from crime families who have to pretend to be dating, even though they hate each other, to avert a gang war, although it's gradually evolving into more of a harem anime. After a rough start with the first couple of episodes, it's actually turned out pretty well, largely on the strength of the secondary characters like Ruri, who encourages her friend to confess to the male protagonist even though he's dating someone because why not, and Seishirou, a woman raised as a man who seems to be in direct conversation with Yuu from Gekkan Shoujo Nozaki-kun and other Takarazuka-adjacent character tropes. The love triangle at the center of the story — Raku, the kind and low-key boy; Chitoge, the brash half-American girl; and Kosaki, the shy girl with a crush on Raku — is whatever. There are some good moments with them, a few of which actually made me laugh out loud, but I think they're supposed to be entertaining less for their inherent characteristics and more for the situation that they're in.
The stumbling block for me, so far, is the "childhood promise" subplot, where Raku carries around a massive demonic-looking locket that was given to him by a girl whom he liked a decade ago. He doesn't remember her face or name, just that she has a key and that the two objects represent a promise to get married someday. Isn't this part of the plot to Kujibiki Unbalance, the made-up anime that the Genshiken characters are all obsessed with? Anyway, of course both Chitoge and Kosaki have keys from their childhood, but Kosaki's key seems way too big for Raku's lock and the first OP repeatedly shows Chitoge inserting her key into Raku's locket... ahem. This means one of two things: Nisekoi is fine with spoiling its stupid "mystery" from jump, or Nisekoi is faking me out to make that "mystery" more interesting. Either way it pisses me off a little? But either way I'm sure the ultimate message of the show will be that keeping promises is important, but you have to trust your heart in the end, even if it means breaking those promises or hurting someone. I don't know, we'll see.
Also, this is unfair but I hate Chitoge's design, especially her stupidly huge bow. What is she, a Touhou character?
EDIT: I need to reiterate, I'm enjoying this anime. Solid B/B+. It's just easier to nitpick, particularly when the main character carries around a massive demonic-looking locket that a little girl gave him way back when!
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I loved the discussion of places closing before the internet archived the existence of everything! Places in St. Louis that I miss and that are "remembered" in maybe one Google result: Mama Josephine's, a soul food restaurant in Shaw that got killed by rising rents; Six Rows Brewery and Buffalo Brewery in Midtown, both beer-and-burger joints that couldn't survive the summer slump in customers; and Tarahumara, a Mexican restaurant specializing in tortas that was always understaffed and so people stopped coming.
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12 hours ago, Merus said:The thing that bothers me about smart characters being painted as wish-fulfilment is that if I wrote down things that I did, in my own life, and ascribed them to a fictional character, I get the feeling they'd be painted as wish fulfilment. No-one's just born knowing French. No-one's that good at something they've never done before.
No one's just born so good at sex that an immortal demigoddess of carnal lust who has spent centuries fucking men to death with the rawest, most uninhibited sex imaginable refuses to believe that they're a teenage virgin who had never known the touch of a woman.
Oops, that's exactly what happens. Really, I think there's a line between wish fulfillment that makes a protagonist more different and interesting and wish fulfillment that protects a protagonist from having to experience any hardship or setbacks. The more of the latter that appears in a story, the less tolerant people tend to be of the former, I've found. It doesn't help when a lot of the hardship and setbacks that Kvothe gets out of through his smarts are things that his smarts got him into in the first place, from his homelessness on the streets of Tarbean to his pointless Harry-and-Draco rivalry with Ambrose to learning how the Aiel-alikes fight to defending himself in court with a dead language he learned overnight. It gives me, as a reader, the sense that Rothfuss is spinning his wheels while piling impressive deed after impressive deed on Kvothe's back, which adds even more to the weird air of entitlement around the character.
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There's a mission in the first Black & White where you threw everything you could through a portal to another world to escape an attack, and then you came out in a land where there was a constant rain of fireballs. They gave you a shield spell to protect your people, but it never seemed to work? I tried mightily for the better part of a week to beat it and just couldn't. I'm still not sure if it was bugged, or if the building and item placement was dependent on where it came through the portal and I just got screwed? Who cares, Black & White wasn't even that fun of a game anyway.
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5 minutes ago, Patrick R said:I always associate Kiki with Spirited Away, rather than Totoro. The self-reliance time-to-grow-up thing. On the other hand I don't think much of Totoro at all and can hardly remember what happens in it outside of giant mutating trees and cat buses.
I think of Spirited Away as part of the Totoro lineage because of the coming-of-age allegory as being coopted into a world of gods and magic to escape the trauma of adult concerns imposed on child minds, but I do agree that Kiki's disruptive model of "deciding who you are out on your won" is more in line with Chihiro in Spirited Away.
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A few months ago, my movie-buff friend had us watch The Iceman Cometh together, a Clarence Fok movie from 1989 where a Ming guard is frozen while trying to defend the emperor from assassins and resumes his hunt for the culprits when he's thawed hundreds of years later. The charm in the movie is really watching the femme fatale, played by the inimitable Maggie Cheung, guide a stiff Yuen Biao through modern life, which takes up a substantial portion of a movie otherwise bracketed by lengthy hand-to-hand fights. I was really taken with it, to my surprise, and have thought of it repeatedly in the last few weeks.
On 2/10/2018 at 1:10 AM, Patrick R said:The first was Porco Rosso, on jennegatron's recommendation and she was absolutely right because that movie's great. I think the pulp adventure sensibility of Porco Rosso works well to counter-act what often feels like an acute sentimentality I often feel with Miyazaki's work. It tackles a lot of the same ground he'd later cover with The Wind Rises, particularly the tension between the purity and joy of flight and the corrupting nature of war, but I think it's much better here. The plot is very 1940's Hollywood and the eponymous lead reminds me of Humphrey Bogart, if Humphrey Bogart was an anthropomorphized pig. That it's never explained how Porco, a former human, became a pig and his curse is never relevant to the plot was a welcome surprise. I thought for sure he'd turn back human when he found love or when he started acting less selfishly but his form mostly appears to be a symbol for his trauma. The art direction is great but it's a Ghibli movie, you could have guessed that.
When I feel like having an argument, I tell people that Porco Rosso is my favorite Miyazaki movie. I think you're right to point out that it's Miyazaki laying down themes that he'll repeat later in The Wind Rises, but Miyazaki's tendency to repeat the themes of his early movies more pointedly in a later one has been exhibited throughout his career (Nausicaa to Mononoke, Totoro to Spirited Away, etc.). Porco Rosso is also really great for stating, as much as it can state, that the protagonist's affliction as a pig is a universal curse made explicit in his person, and one that can only intermittently be transcended. I don't know if it's a truism yet that early Miyazaki is the most interesting Miyazaki, but it should be (as opposed to Takahata, who has only improved with age).
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On 3/26/2018 at 11:04 AM, ilitarist said:Still it doesn't explain EU4 or CK2 popularity. Here factions are both predefined and have no personality. Of course, gameplay varies much more: European Horde is more different from European Trade Republic than any 2 spacefaring civilizations in Stellaris. But they're much more faceless than Cravers or any other faction, those German duchies or some Finnish craven greedy count are random noise.
I think the experience of "touching history" offered by CK2 and EU4 is enough to fill in the gaps for most people. The most detailed sci-fi setting in the world lacks the breadth and impact of real-life history, even dimly apprehended, and so the bare thrill of playing a historical person or polity in an actual location somewhere in the world is always going to be thematically nourishing for the average player.
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The podcast has often talked about their bafflement with the sci-fi 4X community's love of the ship designer. In some ways, I think that Stellaris is the ship designer generalized to the scale of a whole game. You can add bits and bobs to the framework of a "standard" sci-fi 4X faction, making them warlike zealots or peaceful merchants, and have the game respond with customized flavor text that acknowledges the choices you've made, but you can't make or play anything outside of the developers' vision of what a "standard" sci-fi 4X faction can be.
I think Sword of the Stars and Endless Space get a lot more criticism because people are much more likely to be nitpicky and critical of other people's creations, especially if they violate expectations or mores, while an identikit faction that they've built themselves gets more of a pass because of a sense of ownership and self-expression. "I did my best to recreate the Starfish from Blindsight in Stellaris and I'm pretty happy with how they turned out! Meanwhile, what the fuck is up with the Cravers from Endless Space 2? I just don't get them." Does that make sense?
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18 minutes ago, Patrick R said:So I'd still maybe disagree with you a little about what is and isn't plausible (I think Snowpiercer and Inception are highly implausible, while Under the Skin's technology is merely inscrutable) but I think I resist using your definition of "hard sci-fi" (while acknowledging that, if it's indeed what most people mean when using the phrase, it doesn't make any sense for me to stubbornly cling to my own definition) because I'm just not the kind of dude who can pick out what is and isn't against the laws of science, especially when it comes to films that deal with other worlds, alien species or civilizations centuries in the future. And saying Iron Man is hard sci-fi because there's a lot of scenes of Tony building and testing his suit while Star Trek: The Motion Picture isn't because the warp drive isn't supposed to work like that (or whatever inconsistencies pop up in the Star Trek series) feels strange to me.
I mean, "hard sci-fi" has a genealogy extending back to the 1970s, when the subgenre of sci-fi was codified as one of scientific rigor and rejection of anything thought to be impossible by the current scientific consensus. For instance, Iron Man is not hard sci-fi because its miniature arc reactor is both nonexistent and implausible. Star Trek is not hard sci-fi because it's impossible to travel faster than the speed of light. Snowpiercer is not hard sci-fi because perpetual motion is a physical impossibility. Under the Skin and Inception are, in my mind, sci-fi influenced fantasy, lacking any logical or scientific justification for their fantastical elements to an extent that might as well make them magic. Only Gravity, as I see it, is hard sci-fi, and that's to be expected because hard sci-fi, as a subgenre, tends to privilege rigor and plausibility over spectacle and execution of themes.
It's been weird, in my lifetime, to see "hard sci-fi" versus "soft sci-fi" go the same way as "high fantasy" versus "low fantasy," from technical distinctions of premise and rigor to value judgments on execution. "High culture" and "low culture" will assimilate all other distinctions in the end, I suppose.
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1 hour ago, Cordeos said:Its funny because I feel exactly the opposite, I found cities got really dull as soon as I set up the basic city. Where as in Surviving Mars I feel like I'm always on the edge of cascading failures and colony collapse which keeps me going.
Yeah, I haven't played Surviving Mars, but I felt the same about Cities: Skylines. Once you'd finished growing your town into a city, there wasn't really any added texture or challenge to the experience, not unless you attempted something fabulously risky, expensive, and unnecessary, like the overpass project Rob describes.
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2 hours ago, ilitarist said:But Stellaris is balanced even though it's random. All the unique anomalies and special resources are within strategic sane boundaries. They're all there to allow you to balance things out, see if you rather want +5% food or +10% speed of energy weapons. It's granular and lifeless. You will never see enemy hold system that you have to fight for.
Yeah, I think there's a design philosophy behind Stellaris that will keep it from ever feeling like something truly rare and unique. The game was designed from the ground up to be balanced as a multiplayer sci-fi wargame with 4X elements, and all the species customization and event chains are just a grudging bone thrown to the way that the other nine people out of ten play Paradox games, as engines for emergent singleplayer narratives. There's never going to be anything that could possibly be broken or exploited in Stellaris, at least not intentionally, because it's a game that's meant to be played on an office LAN with you and your closest friends or coworkers over the next six months.
And, like you point out, that's also why there's never going to be a midgame, not a real one. The midgame is where the different players, having established themselves, begin to differentiate and specialize to pursue the victory conditions, but Stellaris is designed to keep everyone roughly abreast of each other, given the same availability of resources. The semi-blind research tree works towards this end: because you're just offered a small, random selection from a large pool of tech, there's little point in pushing too far down any one brand of the tree, not when you can't count on the tech you need to come up when you need it. No, better just to advance methodically down the three trees and take whatever's most useful to you at that moment when it comes, keeping every stat safely within 10% or 15% of the other players' stats. It's the same issue as the planets: some planets are rich and some planets are poor, but more planets is always better and their location only matters for defensibility in the end.
And that's even not to mention that Stellaris still only has three victory conditions, two of them military and one of them technically diplomatic but, in practice, military. Can you believe that there's a sci-fi strategy game where technology ultimately exists just to give you bigger and more beautiful weapons, not to advance civilization past the use of and need for weapons? I know that the victory conditions don't matter in Paradox games, but they can get away with it in historical grand strategy because the implicit end-state in those games is the present day, while the implicit end-state in Stellaris is... I don't know, the player gets bored? It's design choices like this that make Stellaris so bland once you get past the Star Trek: The Original Series-flavored opening turns. There's nothing to surprise you, and no way for you to surprise the AI besides when you choose to conquer it.
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in Idle Banter
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All of that sounds really rough, and I'm glad you got to a place where you could notice the pattern of abuse and break out of it. It's not remotely comparable, but my last big relationship had a similar dynamic where something bad would happen with her, it'd have to be someone's fault lest it be hers, and I was usually on hand and involved enough in her life to be a good patsy. The immediate cause of our breakup was Trump getting elected, because she was furious at me that I didn't support Clinton enough, but the proximate cause was me telling her that she had deep issues with anger and trust that she needed to get help with. She also went to a therapist after our breakup (I guess because I actually got through to her that being so stressed and angry all the time wasn't normal) but that therapist also just enabled her issues and let her spend her sessions complaining about minor work gripes. We don't talk anymore, but I'd be surprised if she kept going after we stopped.
I think there's an dynamic in our culture that can lead women dealing with severe anxiety or anger issues to dump in their relationship in a way that can become abusive, and it's hard to maintain the relationship as a safe space for both partners to feel their feelings while also being like, "I'm not your punching bag for when life gets you down." It's good that you've found a way to move on and find some happiness for yourself, since it doesn't seem like it was in the cards for you to be happy with her.