BobbyBesar

Well, I understand why you might want to avoid it now. I've spent the last couple of days working on writing a Java program to do this in some downtime, partially because it sounded like an interesting programming task, and because I was kind of curious about the wikipedia API. It's been rather a slog, although that's partially because I'm not too familiar with Java's XML parsing functionality, but there are still issues with Wikipedia as a data source. There are api calls for getting structured data out of a page (XML, JSON), but the data itself is still subject to the whims of various editors. There are weird variations on different pages. There are somewhat standard "infobox" elements for nobility (and, I just discovered, maybe a separate one for royalty?), but within those there's still wide variety. Some people will have "Issue" listed in their infobox, and some will just be a formatted text list in the article itself. See: William I, where the editors just said "uh, I guess he had some kids? Or: Stephen I, with the pointless "see above" in the children list instead of just linking. Or, the great unit test of Henry VIII, who just has an entire separate page devoted to his marriages and children. There aren't _that_ many variations, but the problem is that there are enough that I'm not confident I'd be able to get them all, which means the tool's coverage wouldn't be reliable. (My plan was to just use backlinks from other pages to this person, as "Father" and "Mother" appear universally available, and there is a simple backlink api call). I haven't even gotten to building and searching the family tree, which I assume is a solved problem, but would require me a bit of work to put together (since family trees should track multiple parents for each person). At the end of the day, it probably doesn't really make sense to rely on Wikipedia for this. As interested as royalty is in lineage, it seems like there'd be academic query-able databases of this stuff in a better structured format. I would assume that anything available in Wikipedia is available there more conveniently. So, I don't know if I'll keep trying. I might, just to play with some different XML parsing libraries.

There's probably some kind of metadata identifying people or even nobility. Actually, looking at the page structure, getting mother, father, and spouse(s) seems pretty accurate. The children listing seems to vary in formatting, but they usually appear to be in an unordered list, and you could always parse all links, and only process the ones that link back to the parent's page as a parent. Not to taunt you with it's ease of implementation. I'm mostly surprised it doesn't exist already.

Hmm. I don't know much about the Wikipedia API, but it should be relatively simple to write a program that parses all the links on a page and traverses up to n levels deep until it finds the page you're looking for, or gives up.

Steven Universe takes a while to build some mythos, but it gets very good, and it develops the characters and relationships a lot more than simple super-team with goof-ball concept would indicate.

My wife recently noted that Persona 3 and 4 are asshole boyfriend simulators: you spend time with your dates and get to know them really well, then you have sex with them and never speak to them again. The violence came first. The Atari 2600 was designed explicitly for Combat: 2 sprites + 2 bullets (plus one "ball" sprite) is a hardware limitation. (Read Racing the Beam, it's very cool.)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josh_and_S.A.M.

That's like half the point of Smash Bros nowadays.

Oh man, has anybody actually been crazy enough to do fan-edits of long running TV shows that drop out terrible characters and storylines that don't go anywhere, or condense filler episodes?

Man, same exact reaction here. I'll probably get the amiibo though, and it will be the only one I own.

50% gray? You monster. 43% gray is the only true way to watch a featureless screen.

Yeah, I saw Max's journey in this movie as going from feral beast into passably-human hermit/loner. I don't know that I 100% liked the performance he gave, but I believe I understand what he was going for.

At the time he was introduced though, there wasn't that precedent. Sonic and Robotnik were the only other named characters. I did eventually notice it as a kid, but I think it was after owning and playing the game for quite some time. I'm pretty sure I thought it was Miles Prowler for a long time, since he's a fox, and foxes prowl, probably.

In everyone's defense, I believe that every time he's referred to in the manuals, etc, it's almost always Miles "Tails" Prower, or simply Miles or Tails. So it wasn't ever really in your face, at least as far as I recall. More story than most people have probably read about Sonic 2 (from the manual):

But are there zombies?

A brief piece about the author, kind of: https://www.gamerswithjobs.com/node/116918 Hatoful Boyfriend is one of my flagship pieces when discussing how a lot of Japanese game/anime works can be both sincere and parody at the same time, and in approximately equal measure. It also has a triple pun title, which is great (heartful, hateful, pigeon-ful).

Not sure if it still does, but a similar question used to exist for South East Asia in general as well. I assumed because of malaria, but I guess it could have been HIV.

Granted that's true, but honestly I had already convinced myself out of that interpretation before I read Weiner's comments. I think that the voice of the show as a work in general is more interested in the consistency of Don's character than that particular commentary about commercialism. For instance, while on the one hand we do have the Hershey's pitch, we also have Burger Chef, which presented the constructed "family" unit of Don, Pete, and Peggy reflecting that ad's themes entirely sincerely.

Not really. http://www.revzilla.com/common-tread/stop-saying-loud-pipes-save-lives Sure, there's some marginal safety value in certain circumstances. But by and large, it's just being a jerk.

I find the "Don creates the Coke ad" ending satisfying in some ways, and unsatisfying in others. The idea that Don returns to McCann and creates the Coke ad is unsatisfying in part because I think it Forrest Gump-s Don's character a little bit in a Mary Sue way. "Hey, you know the greatest ad ever? Yeah, I did that." I also have a bit of a logistical problem with the idea that Don still has a job at McCann after taking his unplanned hiatus (there are hints that it's possibly somewhat acceptable, but it seems hard to imagine). Also, you could argue that his experience at the retreat made him better equipped to deal with his role there, but I'm also not sure I believe that the fundamental problems with that environment that made him run in the first place would become acceptable to him. But, as Ted Chaough would say, there are 3 thematic considerations in every Mad Men series finale: Don as a character Don as a metaphorical avatar for the era The ending of a television show I've listed those in the order that I think matters to Matthew Weiner. Don returning to advertising in some capacity is the most respectful of Don's character (and also the most consistent with the rest of the show). Don's journey, such as it is, is about how he doesn't have a journey. Which isn't meant cynically: It's not that he doesn't learn anything ever. It's that he's still Don doing the learning, and that his essential nature doesn't change. Don goes out and has real emotional experiences, but what he does with those experiences is process them and transform them for his own ends. There's no big personal growth or "accepting that he's an ad man", because that isn't how people really grow. The same way that showing his true identity to Sally was "accepting that he's Dick Whitman". He's still both things. He learns that other people have the same feeling of alienation and aimlessness, but that doesn't cure his alienation or aimlessness, it just gives him another lens to process it with. And well, we've seen Don put his head down and grind out work in unpleasant circumstances. So it's not impossible that he'd suffer under McCann's rule. As the "finale", we feel the episode should mean something different. Either it should be making a statement, or ending a story, or something. But, it doesn't have anything to say other than what's already been said, and the end of the series is still just another day in Don's life. My initial, very bleak, reaction was similar to Sarah's upthread, in that I saw it as the inevitable grinding hand of commercialism devouring genuine emotion and experience and spitting it back out. But, while occasionally cynical, the show's been rather more measured about advertising and commercialism in the past, and so I don't think that's a reading consistent with the rest of the series. I think that that reaction is in part caused by expecting Weiner to make a statement at the end of the show. If Don DID make the ad, I hope that he managed to pull Peggy onto his team. I think she'd be satisfied with that as "something of lasting value."

Matt Weiner on the ending: http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/mad-men-series-finale-matthew-797302 I also find it somehow unsatisfying that Don created the Coke ad, for reasons I can't specifically articulate, but if you accept that interpretation, the thematic content of the end of the show are pretty straight-forward, I think.

My favorite (I assume) practical effects show was also the most ostentatiously CG one

That sounds hilarious. Somebody should start a tumblr where they grade classic fiction as though they're high school history essays.

Was People Eater the oil guy, I assume? I've just been calling him the oil baron in my head.

The Earth Abides is one of the grand daddies of the genre. Book of the New Sun is a "dying earth" book, named after the Jack Vance collection by the same name. I don't have any other specific recommendations on that genre, but it's another keyword if you're looking for more titles. Theres a pretty good anthology called Wastelands, it also got a more recent follow-up.

My understanding is that Mean Girls does a surprisingly accurate job of presenting the book's thesis, i.e. both the social structures as well as the de-escalation process that is montaged at the end.