BobbyBesar

Was that James? He still looks like a goober.

Personally, I like recurring bits because they structure the listening experience. Am I almost done, or just 50% through? Will this last me the 20 mins through my bike ride home, or will I need to Futz with my phone halfway through? I could look at the progress bar, but who has time for that? Anyways, yeah, just personal preference.

A recurring feature (stupid game) is always good for structure. Even something as basic as the reader mail segment for idle thumbs. For instance, if twig is one of the recurring hosts, he could do a "why this weeks anime is better than Eva" bit every episode. Even something as basic as "if you liked this show, you might like X" to close out the program. Knowing the leanings of many of the posters here, brief comments on representation might be appropriate. (this show is sooooo sexist..."how sexist is it?") I have some thoughts about trying to apply modern US/anglo centric cultural norms to a disrinctly foreign cultural product...but that's a different conversation.

Too literal. "Benson" = "Ben's Son". Ben is the kindly man who pulled him out of the gutter at his lowest point and showed him the time machine that sent him back, he took the name as a tribute to the man that he considers to be his true father. I know what you're thinking. Yes, Ben is Benjamin Linus from Lost (obviously).

What is Mad Men? To me, its the most concerted exploration of existentialism in pop culture that will probably exist in my lifetime (Existentialism is kind of anathema to the American self-image). I mentioned in passing earlier, but I think that the overt sexism evidenced by the McCann douche-bros was more than simply exposing behavior that was always unspoken. The "End of an Era" tagline isn't the era of Don Draper, it's the end of the era of Bert Cooper (60s become the 70s, Cooper's death, the Moon Landing). We've transitioned from an, if not genteel era, a more reserved one. The effects of the social upheavals of the 60s are coming home to roost. Previously, sexism meant simply knowing that men were better than women: you didn't NEED to say it out loud. In the new modern era, these declarations are made explicit and public. During the Cooper-60's era, there was a thin veneer of "civilized behavior" holding in all the unrest and inequality. Now, that veneer has shattered, and everything is on display. Much of the explicitly bad behavior that we saw from previous seasons was from outside of our "society", as represented by Sterling Cooper: clients like the sleazy Jaguar guy. This has always been there, but we've been shielded from it, for better or worse. I found your reaction to Ken's decision to sign on with Dow Chemical rather than retiring to become a farmer / novelist interesting. I can see where you, as creatives self-employed in a creative industry would be pushing for him to follow his dream, to choose self-fulfillment. But to me, there was no choice. Buying a farm and writing novels, these things are dreams, fantasies. It's tied up very closely with the sense of masculinity at the time. Consider how Don could not accept that he was being pushed out of the company, they company that he built. To accept defeat in this way would be a failure for Ken. His wife presented the option of using her family's money to survive in the meantime. To rely upon his wife in this way would be a failure as a provider, a failure as a man. Recall how Pete reacted when Trudy offered that they use her father's money to buy and apartment. The structural societal pressures were stacked solidly against Ken. The idea of sacrificing income and stability to chase your dream is a fairly modern one. Ken was only 1 generation out from the Great Depression. It takes a while to forget things like that.

I looked into it briefly,and apparently the Rock Band microphones are atrocious as microphones. I suspect you'll be better off with a headset if its decent.

The first season intentionally laid it on a little thick, as you said, it was to shock the audience. The other big one of those moments was Betty and Sally with the dry cleaning bags. I consider those sometimes heavy handed elements to be meta-textual content that I don't really hold against the show in general.

One thing about the mid-season finale that's been sticking on me: Cutler (and everybody else) seems to assume that with Harry Crane's impending partnership. Don's ouster would be a fait accompli. Basically, that he would vote with Cutler, because Cutler pushed to make him a partner. But I don't necessarily buy that Harry would have voted to remove Don. We've seen him trying to connect with Don multiple times (most recently at Megan's party in LA), and in the previous episode, Roger noted "Say what you will about Harry Crane, he's loyal." I'm not sure that loyalty to Cutler would trump his loyalty to Don. It doesn't really matter, of course. And I could certainly understand why Don would not want to put his fate in Harry's hands. But I thought that was a bit strange.

Don has already changed significantly throughout the series. It's just a long slow process, with many opportunities to backslide and fall into old habits. There are times when it's easy for him to do the "right" thing. Taking the McCann deal at the end of last season was both selfish (he got what he wanted) and selfless (Cutler: "It's a lot of money"). It was both easy (doubling down on what he's done before is very much Don's M.O.) and hard (sacrificing the freedom and self-determination that he had spent basically his whole life pursuing.)

Spoilers: everybody is still unhappy. Actual spoilers:

Just finished here on the east coast, but I'll avoid spoilers until everybody's had a chance. Overall, it had a lot of heavy lifting to do to situate us back into the new status quo, so there wasn't anything spectacular, but there was lots of good stuff nonetheless.

Lip sync is such a weird thing to get hung up on in animation to me. Its such an abstraction that I absolutely do not notice. My childhood circumstances (growing up with significant multi-lingual content and ubiquitous subtitling) probably predisposes me to disregard it though.

I honestly don't understand people who think that somebody has to jump off a building by the end of the series. It simply makes no sense to me, to the extent that I wonder if we've been watching the same show. Don has been metaphorically falling for literally the entirety of the show, and Weiner clearly delights in undermining TV tropes and audience expectations. There's just no reason it would happen.

Neat! I find it very difficult to talk about Mad Men in text. It can be both very subtle and very obvious at the same time, so I never know how much of which of those parts to talk about. But I'll certainly listen in. Its hard to say what I want from the end of the show. I'd say that plot ranks about 4th in what Mad Men is about*, so I kind of don't care what happens to who, except in the way you worry about old friends who you dont really talk to when they post bad news on Facebook. But I'm very intruiged to see what Weiner ends the story on, as I think that will indicate his views on the legacy of the time period on modern society. * Acting, Writing, and Themes all take precedence.

Problematic writing and clothing aside, there are a number of kickass looking female wrestlers with a range of body types. Some of the smaller promotions (Shimmer) and Japanese promotions put a higher premium on in ring talent, but even the WWE has had some pretty capable female wrestlers.

I sure am excited to hear people argue once again about "content on disc" as though that's a meaningful distinction.

I don't remember that section at all, but is the elevator the only way out (did the battle with Ridley destroy the way you came in)? Besides which, exploring is like half of what Samus does (the other half being killing pirates and local fauna). Maybe she's just curious what's down there. She's been on like 300 elevators on that planet at that point, why would this one be any different?

Apparently this is the first topic I found when looking for Mad Men discussions. I assume that with Twin Peaks Rewatch, doing a Mad Men weekly cast for the final season is no longer feasible? I'd be okay with a spoiler-ed extra half hour of Mad Men talk at the end of each Idle Thumbs, but I assume some people would hate the idea. Also the 4 letter search word minimum makes this show impossible to search for: Mad Men...on AMC...Don...Pete...Joan....

I suspect problems with Arietty feeling untidy might just have to do with the abundance of source material in the Borrowers, and not knowing how to integrate and edit those elements.

I think Merus's comment doesn't read the way it's supposed to, but I suspect he was indicating that having no social interest at all in other people is often a sign of depression or a social anxiety disorder.

For my money, I prefer the Devil Survivor games, which have FF Tactics-like combat. For some reason, the main-line SMT game that worked best for me was Strange Journey. I don't know how it'll hold up today though.

I guess part of my point above is that ascribing asexuality to (at least nominally) children's cartoons seems like a strange endeavor. By and large, children's cartoons have never really featured sexuality in any form. We can joke about how Teela and Prince Adam were totally boning behind the scenes, but that's a completely a-textual inference. With regards to Stephen Universe specifically, fusion is clearly a metaphor for intimacy divorced from sexuality. When people say there's a lesbian couple, what they're really saying is that there are 2 people who present as women who are in a stable, intimate relationship. That's consistent with both a lesbian and an asexual metaphor, so people are just using the metaphor that's most familiar or attractive to themselves. The question of sexual attraction vs asexual intimacy just seems entirely foreign to the text of the show, and the genre in general.

There's quite a lot happening, it has a convoluted and crazy story, but you have to like pokemonning, as you spend most of your time recruiting and breeding demons. I never finish SMT games, although I occasionally get to the end. But they're entertaining while they last. The last boss (and usually mant mid bosses) is invariably impossible without the right demon combination, which I rarely have.

Not in any meaningful way. while Persona is a JRPG with social link / dating mechanics, the main line SMT series is basically a dungeon crawl (think Etrian Odyssey) with demons filling in for Pokemon.

Here's my set of sort of standard recommendations in this field. Some are probably out-dated, and there are probable other newer ones, but this is probably a decent start: Rules of Play, Zimmerman and Salen - Fairly standard game design textbook. Theory of Fun for Game Design, Raph Koster - More readable / accessible. Like McCloud's Understanding Comics, but for games. The Art of Game Design: A book of Lenses, Jesse Schell Half Real, Jesper Juul First Person, Various - Essays on specific game design topics. Probably somewhat outdated, but the approach is sound. There have been a couple of follow ups that I haven't read (Second Person, Third Person). Design of Everyday Things, Norman - This isn't game design related per se, but it's a foundational text on product / object design. This will show you how to think about how players and users will experience the things that you make. Racing the Beam, Bogost, Montfort - Not directly about game design, but this is very smart people talking about how the Atari hardware influenced game design by defining what was possible (number of objects, refresh rates, etc). Again, this will expose you to new ways to think about design. That should give you a place to start at least, if you track other works by those names, you'll be in pretty good hands.