BobbyBesar

I feel like a lot of older children's cartoons characters were effectively genderless. Are transformers gendered? I mean, they sort of present as stereotypically male and have male voice actors...but they don't have meaningful gender. (I mean, the show was obviously very gendered, but not the individual characters?) Actually, thinking about it, I watched Transformers before Arcee existed. So maybe that's different-ish now? Similarly, I'd have said the Smurfs were superficially gendered, but effectively asexual, until Smurfette existed. Were the care bears gendered? I don't remember. Man, it's hard to make arbitrary distinctions for non-human characters, especially when there wasn't even a whiff of sexuality in the relationships portrayed. Edit: Hmm. transformers wiki says:

I very much doubt Mako was a direct tribute to Sailormoon, but Kill la Kill unquestionably has a debt to Sailormoon in innumerable ways. The sailor uniform as source of power, most obviously, and the magical girl transformation sequence. Mako was a big bundle of characterization jokes though, some of which were probably directed towards Usagi. I recall that scene. The animation on those tear blobs grossed me out a lot for some reason. There was some anime podcast discussion upthread. Is there a good anime podcast that has a series/episode focus rather than a general industry focus? I'm thinking more like Twin Peaks Rewatch or 3MA, and less like, say, idle thumbs or Giant Bombcast?

Last year, I played Conception 2: Children of the Seven Stars, for which my one-line review was "Hetero-normative game of the year", as it's got a lot of very gendered anime trope stuff, and having children is a central mechanic of the game (you spawn them magically in a religious ceremony that is totally-not-sex). But it occurred to me that I wasn't really equipped to give that designation, as I hadn't really evaluated any other games on that same basis. Now I kind of want to start a site called heteronormativegamereviews.com and evaluate games entirely on the basis of their heteronormativity. Maybe this belongs in the random thought thread.

2nd order question about podcasts: on some podcast (probably either Idle thumbs or VG HD), somebody mentioned a podcast (GDC postmortem?) that drilled down into the making of FF7 and how the technical limitations and engine design affected the game design. Does that sound familiar to anybody?

Knowing absolutely nothing about this show, this sounds vaguely interesting, given the context of Japanese society and the societal expectations.

The Time Machine nothing. Art from the classical period was patronage based, and thus was frequently explicitly political. The terribly subtle political message being "I am fit to rule and those other assholes are not". That's basically what Romance of the Three Kingdoms is about in its entirety.

A little theme music for Danielle's Cities:Skyline total conversion:

Apparently when i heard the number, I actually mentally adjusted my brain to assume that stupid 50's greaser James was actually in the 50's. When I started reading this conversation I thought "sure, but back then, a burger cost a nickel..." before remembering that "back then" was the 90's.

I was thinking of Hannibal, but if you're in it for the mystery, it isn't a great choice because

I fell off the Korra train around the end of season 2, for all the well-documented reasons that everybody else had. While I buy that it got better, I didn't believe it got better enough for me to actually make an effort to watch it (vs. my previous method of: set DVR, eventually notice there is a new episode). I'll probably watch the rest of it once it's on netflix or something, which is what I did with Avatar.

The (admittedly stupid) thing that bothers me is that for some reason, things the aliens touch turn into glowing pixels? I can see an alien race creating death machines that look like physical manifestations of Pacman or whatever, but the conceit of them somehow converting or infecting things with pixel-ism is pretty stupid. I mean, it's obviously just Ghostbusters-find/replace-video games, so that's their visual shorthand for ectoplasm, I guess. But it's very stupid.

Yikes. I feel sorry for everybody involved in that.

I'm not as in love with Adventure Time as I was, but I wouldn't be able to point to a specific reason why. I think it feels a little aimless recently, but I think that's an expected consequence of the way that they manage their writer's room. A couple other minor miscellaneous notes on the Steven Universe finale-week:

Ok, I finally watched the Steven Universe finale (yeah, I read spoilers before I watch things). Agree with most everything people say, some great stuff going on there.

Oh, also I'm a little surprised that Steven Universe didn't push the familiar thing from Connie's books a little harder, given what we know of Lion. Maybe it's too obvious to bother going into it? Or maybe that's a next season thing they're just laying groundwork for.

Seeing those spoilers, I feel dumb for not figuring it out earlier. They did a pretty good job of dropping all the hints you needed. For example, I did wonder idly about what SAM posted above, but I figured it might just be sloppiness. I give mad props to their writing team. Now I really want to rematch some earlier episodes (Alone Together, in particular).

In this case, dire mean it looks like a design that came out of the 90's (I do not consider that a good thing).

I like the new redesign more than the 2010 one. The 2010 one was too...youthful? It didn't embody the power of a grown person who's one of the most powerful beings in the DC universe. I like the new armor-y look a lot more. It's a little American Gladiators, but it looks more like something an adult would wear as a uniform (reminds me a little of a football uniform actually).

Talked to the guy who showed me Ayakashi, and he says Mononoke isn't nearly as good. So, maybe try to check out Ayakashi first, and watch Mononoke if you really love it?

Yeah. The 90's Azrael/Image-style wrist blades are pretty dire.

I want to make a game called White Knight/White Night/Wight Night/Wight Knight, where it is 4 different games and it picks one at random each time you start it. Alternatively, 4 separate share cart games.

If nothing else just meaning I don't remember it that well. I believe I only saw the last story (Bake Neko), which was in fact very creepy, Huh, just realized that apparently Mononoke (which I think is more readily available today) was spun off that story.