BobbyBesar
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Posts posted by BobbyBesar
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The original character designs for the non-witch characters were done by an outside party, Aoki Ume, who's better known as the author of Hidamari Sketch, which I also find to be overly blobbish and inexpressive. I don't know why Shaft brought her into the project when they have several strong concept artists on staff, but whatever, it hardly sinks the show.
From some of the wikipedia quotes, it sounds like they were attempting an intentionally misleading pre-release campaign to make it seem more like a typical magical girl show. So, the deliberate use of more stereotypically moe-ish characters might be part of that.
I watched the Madoka movies through with my girlfriend recently (she went from "why are you making me watch this" to "I love this" and then back to "why did you make me watch this") and they're more or less a more neatly edited version of the show with some flashy transformation sequences added in. The only part I found really weird is they completely skip Madoka's dream sequence at the beginning, so when she recognises Homura at school it doesn't make any goddamned sense.
I love the movie. Don't read anything about it, just watch.
I'm trying to figure out whether I think Madoka is good enough to recommend that my wife watch. She tends to be somewhat more critical than I am, and I specifically think that I got more out of the action sequences than she would. It might be worth it just for the visuals, but the more that I think about it, the less thematically coherent and interesting it feels. Maybe we could watch the films, which would be slightly less time intensive, and would also be something new for me.
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One of us* should watch both of them to find out!
*not me
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Also, unrelatedly, Dragonball: Evolution is on Syfy tonight. Holy crap is it bad.
Update: this is probably the worst movies I've ever seen. Justin Chatwin's acting is a war crime.
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I watched Madoka, based on some specific recommendations and the fact that it's on Netflix (dubbed, but a reasonably good job of it).
It was pretty good. I thought it was doing one thing for a while, but it ended up being more of a Whatever Happened to The Magical Girl?, which is kind of neat, I guess. I assume I missed a lot of references in the first half of the series (for instance, after seeing Sakaya's world, I assume every witch world we see is a reference to somebody specific. Also, I didn't quite understand the Murakami / Superflat witch, which I assume has some significance (as Murakami's work is very charged), but I haven't thought it out yet..
How much Madoka actually is there? There are 3 movies on Netflix as well. I gather that Beginnings and Eternal are retellings of the series? (Which seems like a good idea: I think several sequences dragged a bit and the overall story would have worked better in 4 hours than 6). It looks like Madoka:The Movie might be an alternate timeline though?
Although I'm lukewarm on some of the character design, it's still quite beautiful overall. The Dave McKean style multi-media witch worlds were neat, as were the several silhouette sequences.
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Mayo on a burger is fantastic, although if you're using store bought mayo, I can see the reticence.
Mayo is also the correct condiment for dipping fries into.
Seriously, home made mayo takes about 3 minutes to make.
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Re:Salt and salads, I used to not understand salads at all (we never ate them growing up, Chinese family, so usually some variant of sauteed chinese cabbage*). It just seemed weird to eat vegetables raw, like eating an ingredient instead of a food.
At some point I read something that noted that "salad" derives from the same root as "salt" (Latin: sal), so by definition a salad is supposed to be salted. Now, I enjoy salads, largely because I specifically toss them with salt and black pepper before applying any dressing (often, this means you need less dressing as well).
So, I still think of lettuce = ingredient, but lettuce + salt = salad = food.
* It's still almost the only way I cook vegetables. Heat Oil + Garlic, add leafy vegetable + rice wine + salt, saute until wilted.
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Do we really even need the letter Q? It's clearly the worst letter in the alphabet and K, W, C, and U can all come together in various ways to accomplish everything that Q accomplishes.
Malay* uses K for all hard C sounds, and S for soft C sounds, so C is always pronounced CH.
* When using roman letters. There's a traditional written language that looks like arabic, but it's terrible and nobody likes it.
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How do you feel about quay?
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Part of this might be a result of working in philosophy, where "social justice" has a long, storied history of being something important and worthwhile that we of course ought to be fighting for - at least since the 1970s, when John Rawls published his groundbreaking work A Theory of Justice, social justice has been one of the most talked-about aspects of philosophy. So in the context of a philosophy conference or whatever, if you say that you're a social justice warrior, someone would just assume that you work for the Southern Poverty Law Center or something. So for me maybe it's not much of a jump to reclaim the term social justice warrior.
I think even (especially?) in that context, some people would be turned off by the "warrior" part, as (at least from my perspective), it isn't taken literally and can be seen as trivializing the concept (on the contrary, it's possible that outside the context of a gaming community, "warrior" _can_ be taken more literally, since it doesn't have DnD connotations).
In that case, I think something like "social justice activist" or something like that might be seen to be more appropriate.
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Basically it's a speech pattern where you go kind of croaky at the end of your sentences. It's a criticism thrown at women a lot, especially on places like NPR where the audience is older and thinks that it makes women sound "unprofessional" http://mentalfloss.com/article/61552/what-vocal-fry
Thanks for the example.
I actually listened to several radio stories about it, but came out the other side still not understanding what it was.
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I've only ever heard someone complain about "SJWs" out loud in that video where Jeff Gerstmann talks to a GGer. It's a really bizarre thing to hear out loud, especially because the concept of "social justice" is one that's been coming up in Scottish politics. Our First Minister used the term alot before the election in reference to things like poverty, welfare and social services. Every time I heard it I thought "Great, I'm going to have to have a conversation with someone whose only understanding of 'social justice' comes from reddit."
This may not be particularly relevant, but I strongly associate "social justice" being used pejoratively with Glenn Beck (2010). He used to harp on it as a concept, and I always thought it was a weird choice of phrase to demonize: "Wait, are we against justice now?"
So I always figured that Beck probably popularized it in Breitbart / Stormfront sorts of online communities, and that ultimately that's the usage that GamerGate eventually picked up.
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I have a hard time with how unpleasant Rick and Morty looks. The show is still good enough that I can get past it, but it's a thing that I have to actively ignore.
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Not to be confused with the Promise Keepers. I was really confused for a minute.
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A murder joke doesn't offend me because the idea of even a single man in my life being murdered seems silly and joke-worthy. The other day, I was getting my haircut and my African American hairdresser told me that her brother had just been shot on his front lawn in a gang shooting. This really happened, I'm not making anything up. Now, knowing that, I would probably be less likely to make a murder joke because for that person, murder is a reality in their lives. Statistically, this probably won't be the last person in her life that will be killed or injured in a violent altercation of some sort so me joking about killing all men would probably not be all that sensitive.
This isn't directed at you directly, but as a thought experiment, it's interesting to try swapping it with "All men should be put in prison." This may be somewhat more relatable to the stereotypical middle-class white person, but i think it's also easier to see how it would be similarly disproportionately offensive to people of color, given the incarceration rates for many minority groups.
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Sorry about dredging up an old argument, but I was thinking about this:
Oh I know that (Cantor's Diagonal Method is near the top of my list of mind-blowing revelations). What I'm talking about is when somebody describes a number as infinite when it's just really big or arbitrarily big.
There are certain contexts where finite but arbitrarily large numbers might be "effectively infinite", such as the number of possible chess games (which is too many to be played before the heat death of the universe).
For precision's sake, these should probably be referred to as "effectively infinite" or "un-computably many", but "almost infinite" may not be a terrible way to express this. (Pedantically, of course, it's still wrong.)
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Chrono Trigger's battle system is really something that needs to be revisited. It was pretty fun already, but if it leaned into the combo stuff, elemental magic and especially positioning, it would be truly great.
The PS2 Grandia games did a bit with positioning and AoE attacks within a standard JRPG battle system. But they're pretty by-the-numbers JRPGs beyond that.
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I've had this conversation with a friend of mine who's an accountant, and he provides a compelling reason as to why minimum wage is so low in some cases. People with no experience or skill are not worth more. If minimum wage was higher, he asserts that unemployment would be higher too.
It's a fairly common argument, although one that has significant problems. The argument is that (assuming the labor market is perfectly competitive) the labor market clears at, say, $7 an hour. A minimum wage is a price floor on labor. Therefore, setting the minimum wage to $15 (above $7) results in a labor surplus: there are more people willing to work at that price than are willing to hire.
There's a couple problems with that. One is that minimum wage jobs may not be price-sensitive: if you want somebody to wait the tables, increasing the cost of labor may not decrease your demand. If you needed X waiters before, you still need X waiters. Maybe you could get away with fewer than X waiters, but how many less? Is your need for waiters going to be cut in half? Probably not. Will some restaurants go out of business due to increased labor costs pricing their product out of reach of their customers? Maybe. But, all restaurants will be equally affected by this rule, and so the playing field is still fair for all competing restaurants. And as Cordeos mentions above, the multiplier effect of increased demand from the low-wage workers may result in restaurant demand remaining more or less constant. (Studies indicate that this is probably the case).
The other thing is that labor is very much not a perfectly competitive market. For one, it's kind of impossible for a laborer to exit the market. (i.e. You have to pay for food and lodging). The unemployment numbers don't count people who aren't actively looking for work, so the unemployment _metric_ might reflect a roughly competitive market, but those people still need to eat somehow. As long as they're alive, they are still "producing" labor.
Personally, I don't think any of that even matters though. I've come to view the minimum wage not as an economic efficiency argument but as a moral one: we have a moral obligation to provide a living wage to people who are working. (I'm also increasingly in favor of a guaranteed minimum income for people who are priced out of the labor market, but that's a whole other can of worms).
I typed the above before your youth unemployment clarification. While it's true that's a different case, there's a canard that minimum wage jobs are entirely (or primarily) gateway jobs for young people, and so pricing it as supplemental income (below living wage) is fine. However, that's simply not true. There are large (and increasing) numbers of adult people who rely on one or several minimum wage jobs to make ends meet (see the DOL link above).
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Thanks for the resources. I'm sad that I missed that original bundle, but it seems like most of these can be obtained independently. Never heard of Boss Fight Books, but I absolutely love what I see and can't wait to check them out.
A word of warning about the Boss Fight series: they're all done by different authors with (what appears to be) minimal editorial oversight, so they vary hugely in quality. ZZT is apparently quite good, and I think Earhbound is as well, but all accounts I've seen peg the Chrono Trigger book as pretty bad.
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How about induction cooktops?
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Here's a problem I think you might like if you haven't seen it already:
Show that for any set of n > 3 points in a plane, unless all points are contained on a single line, there always exists a line that only contains two points.
It sounds almost trivial, but it's harder than it seems to show. There's a very elegant proof that I like though
I'll give the name below but you should give it some thought before looking it up.That sounds conceptually similar to another seemingly obvious proof (and my personal favorite), the proof for the pigeonhole principle (If you have n boxes and n+1 pigeons, there must be at least 1 box with 2 pigeons in it).
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I thought the exact opposite. In fact, I almost commented yesterday that films have about 4 months to stop putting 80s influenced synth in their adverts before I start ignoring them completely (like when every film had the Inception clang in it).
*Bwaaaaaaaamp*
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The weirdest thing about this is that in Shovel Knight (at least on Normal difficulty), death is essentially meaningless because checkpoints are so plentiful. But money requires time to grind.
Also, one of the most likely outcomes with the death bags is that you retrieve them, but die during (immediately after) the retrieval. This was especially easy to get into with the ronin-heroes)
So, it can be rational (and not fun) to try over and over again to get the same bag back up to n times, as long as n*time to get bags < time to grind that much money.
In that regard, the game felt largely designed around considerations for expert players / achievements challenges (speed runs, no death runs, etc).
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Sorry if this is a bit incoherent. I don't mean to say Troy Baker is in the right and I don't mean to say that people dogpiling on him is wrong. I just wanted to lament how frustrating it can be to watch this type of stuff go down in a cesspool like Twitter. Nobody seems to learn anything and it just ends in people often needlessly turning other people into enemies if they display any errors in judgment.
This isn't necessarily a perfect fit for it, but this reminds me of a popehat post that I bookmarked so that I can re-read it everytime there's a twitter "thing":
http://popehat.com/2014/11/17/shirts-and-shirtiness/
Twitter lets us reach all of our followers instantly, and potentially be repeated to thousands or millions more. But it lets us do it in an instant, with very little thought or effort — really no more effort than it takes to speak it. Yet when it serves our individual narratives, we tend to assign a level of intentionality to Twitter and other social media that we would normally reserve for planned, deliberate, formal expression. A tweet might be a throw-away, a vent, a yawp, but we interpret it as "this person carefully formulated this statement and deliberately transmitted it to thousands of people, intending that it be passed on, showing how important they think it is."
Yes, the joke was tasteless, but it was a throwaway retweet and who knows what the intent was, if any? It's probably worthy of a "hey, that's not cool" followed by a "You're right, my bad", rather than an escalation of dog-piling and twitter-quitting.
"Ethics and Journalistic Integrity"
in Idle Banter
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Has there been a major update recently on this? The Sadpuppy fiasco has been ongoing for quite some time now (I suspect it's even been discussed in this or the Social Justice thread).
Just wondering if something prompted this NPR story in particular, or if they're just catching wind of it now.