BobbyBesar

I was thinking about this again recently what with the release of Inside Out (which I haven't actually seen yet, so some of this may be off base). While they're somewhat more varied, it occurs to me that the character designs for the emotions that present as female (and have female voice actors) are significantly more "same-face"-y than the ones who present as male. i.e. Anger and Fear are a square monster and a muppet-thing, while the Joy, Sadness, and Disgust are...basically just different colored women. Also, the idea that different emotions are gendered is itself a little problematic (from the credits, it appears that the mother has female actresses playing her Anger and Fear?). And the comically stereotypical sit-com gender representation from the trailer left a really bad taste in my mouth. It seems there's a lot to like about the film, but it seems like there's some pretty tone-deaf stuff in there too?

Some people may disagree, but I don't think there's nearly as much variance in FPS movement, and most of the issues I can think of involved things like FOV or head bob, which aren't as integral to the physics of the movement model. Arcade vs. Sim racing games probably has a similar divide though.

Sure, Justify it however you want. But deep down, you know it's going to be nagging at you. Sitting in the back of your mind. This knowledge that your sense of completion, of conquest, is false. Slowly driving you mad. A deep, disquieting feeling that you have something left undone. No matter the successes in your life, the joys you experience, you will always feel that gnawing emptiness inside you. You'll see something out of the corner of your eye, but when turn your head, it won't be there. On your deathbed, you'll realize that it was Chow Yun Fat as Master Roshi, and with your last, dying breath, you will scream.

I think I 100%'d New SMB (not with Luigi though), so I'm not a terrible platform guy in general. But going back to the original SMB was weird. For comparison, I beat hard mode Shovel Knight and I replay Mega Man 2 constantly (and it's still fun and great), which is why I think there's a fundamental philosophical difference to the way those games handle their movement.

I recently re-played the original Super Mario Bros for the first time in ages, and the movement felt pretty terrible to me, too. I think one thing about esp the first game is that it's really about continuous movement in a way that a lot of later games that took cues from Castlevania, etc are not. A good example of that is Hudson's Adventure island, which (IIRC) is more explicitly about constant movement, the movement is tuned similarly to if mario was always running (holding down the B button), and one of the power ups is actually just an auto-run item (skateboard).

Sort of a random thought that occurred to me during your historical accuracy discussion: lots of games have unique and / or hidden win conditions, but can you think of games (probably board games) with unique / hidden lose conditions? Basically, situations where your win condition is only known by your opponent, so that the dynamic would be trying to figure out how you could win by seeing what he's trying to prevent you from doing?

Yeah. If you know who Chris Crawford is, you also know enough to know how problematic his history and what he's attempting are. Then again, I'm a little surprised that no independently wealthy angel investor (Notch, etc), has ponied up just to see what it ends up being.

Does it include Dragonball: Evolution?

Meanwhile: Dreamworks, 1998: What if an ant made a wacky face? Dreamworks, 2001: What if an ogre made a wacky face? Dreamworks, 2004: What if a zebra made a wacky face? Dreamworks, 2007: What if a bee made a wacky face? Dreamworks, 2008: What if a panda made a wacky face? Dreamworks, 2010: What if a face made a wacky face?

Sorcery!

Crawford's name has some recognition from a theory perspective, but in terms of actual product, he doesn't have much credibility.

For the Milo thing, it's internet stupidity, but not exceptional internet stupudity. A lot of the people commenting on that probably saw the headline reported as fact, failed to click through for context or fact checking, and responded based on that. I feel like everybody's probably done that at one point in their lives or another. The Sunset "conspiracy", however, requires a special kind of idiot.

I typically read it as "I liked x before it was cool [to like x]."

Wow. I would have never figured that out. I see now that the robot is based on Destructoid's branding, which I guess I've never noticed.

I definitely would not have noticed those were references without being told. After like 5 minutes of staring at it I finally got La Mascara and Mega-Hombre, but I still have no idea who El Destructo or La Bomba are, other than generically a bomb. Bomberman I guess? Does Bomberman have a star on his belt? That iconography looks important. So I'm either the perfect person for this game, or the worst person for it.

In retrospect, I should have intentionally inverted the Sean and Jake voice-attributions, just for fun.

Indeed. Good old John Bannon.

UK Lad mags like Zoo and Nuts do feature topless models. Similarly, the UK tabloid The Sun (more or less analogous to the National Enquirer in the US) used to feature a "Page 3 girl", which was just a topless girl on page 3. US versions of these (e.g. Maxim) typically wouldn't feature topless-ness because Americans are prudes. But they would have hilariously airbrushed photo-shoots that would avoid showing nipples by giving the models barbie-anatomy. (Looking back at those photo-shoots and playing "where would her nipples even go?" is fairly entertaining in a hawkeye-project sort of way.) As noted above, Playboy likes to see itself as being relatively sophisticated in comparison. The concept was a gentleman's magazine, including everything a gentleman would find interesting, including naked women, but also including politics, etc. In that regard, it's probably partway between pure titillation and, say, classical appreciation of the beauty of the nude physical form (or at least that's what they would like to think about themselves). Playboy has also historically been relatively, let's say sex-positive? in a 60's sexual revolution kind of way. I believe that Hefner advocated for tolerance with regard to homosexuality going back a ways, although I'm not totally sure about that. He's been relatively in favor of gay marriage recently, but I'm not sure if that's a consistent position or a result of his daughter Christie's PR savvy (as she mostly runs the company now). It is, of course, in the weird position where the 60's era liberal may be somewhat out of step with modern liberalism. As far as I know, Playboy hasn't been particularly guilty of exploiting lesbianism (no more so than other pornography companies, and less so than many), but I don't think that's an especially principled decision (as it doesn't necessarily fit with their aesthetic guidelines). There's probably also a significant distinction between the Playboy empire at large, and the magazine itself (where each shot typically only features a single model).

In theory, somebody could pay a couple hundred bucks to transcribe all the existing idle thumbs episodes and then Markov chain the results, and generate new idle thumbs episodes pre-robot overlords.

v0.0.1 of the Wikipedia-powered Cousin Calculator is available for download. It's an executable JAR because I don't know anything about the internet. It's already been feature creeped pretty extensively, going from a bare bones command line tool to a having a multi-threaded Swing UI. I did some much needed optimizations, including re-writing my initial search algorithm which was very stupid and took way, way too long to complete (I think I re-traversed every node path for every adjacent node...it was really dumb). It also caches the family tree now so you can query multiple relations to the source person without re-querying wikipedia. There are countless additional features that could be added. I wanted to do a user-name search, for one. On the even more pipe-dream-y features would be a tree visualization and the ability to save / load a tree locally so you could run searches entirely offline if you wanted to. It still takes like 2 minutes to generate a useful sized tree for large families. Gormongous, if you do have an actual use for this, PM me or something and let me know if there's anything that's broken. I guess I should put the code on github or something.

If you want a quiet bar, just look for an old-people restaurant with a bar in the front. Places with things like Lobster Thermidor or Beef Wellington on the menu. As a bonus, they usually have a guy who knows how to make a fucking great martini, because he has to serve them to people who know what a fucking great martini tastes like.

Also, any data mining company is going to think I'm super obsessed with french royalty now, since I've visited those wikipedia pages dozens of times.

Results! This tells you that Stephen I, Count of Burgundy is the grandson of Reginald I, Count of Burgundy. Those numbers are wikidata IDs. I need to add a lookup function to get the Label associated with each page. I also need to add the ability to read the usernames from the command line, or to query the user for them when the program is run. I'd also like to add the ability for the user to input a name (E.g. "Henry") and have the program return all results from the wikidata results to disambiguate ("Henry VIII of England"). I suppose I could also build a swing UI with a query box, and possibly use a graphing library to display the family tree on the outside. It depends on if I want to re-learn swing, I guess. That's the first actually functional thing I've coded in years. It was kind of fun. Edit: Cool.

Re: Persona 4, I think reading Kanji as gay and Naoto as trans only make sense until you complete their storylines. Kanji works better as a critique of toxic masculinity, and Naoto as institutional sexism. They simply happen to converge on some of the same themes that a gay / trans character would. I interpreted Rise's arc to be less about sexualization per se, and more about agency and having control over her own identity. Yeah, Catherine is a fairly straightforward adolescent dude-bro doesn't want to grow up story, which is a well worn archetype. It doesn't have a lot of interest in the women other than as props.

Blarf. As is always the case, there's a much cleaner data souce that I hadn't noticed since I don't know anything about wikipedia. WikiData provide just the structured data set. (e.g.: https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q519641) That's fine for your purposes because it retains parent/child relationships, and that's all you're really interested in. There's also apparently an entire Java toolkit devoted to accessing the data. That's what happens when you have no idea what you're doing. Well, it should be relatively straight forward now.