Argobot

First, I want to say this game was a lot of fun playing with a second person. I was the notetaker, which meant I had the fun job of keeping track of the proper nouns and trying to piece together what happened during each interview. It was a lot of fun to puzzle out this mystery with two people, so if you can play in pairs, I really recommend it. Now for spoilers of the entire game:

I totally understand why some women believe that they are only being rewarded because of their gender and not based on merit, because I have also felt that way. My response to that sensation is reminding myself that this is just what society by default does with straight white men. Picking women because they are women and you want to have better representation is no more different than picking men because society unconsciously favors men. It sucks that women or POC are constantly questioning their credentials while white men get to go around believing they got to where they are solely because of merit, but that's the reality of our unbalanced society. Again, I really empathize with the woman on your team, but I wouldn't let her hesitancy convince you to not invite women as presenters. This stuff will only get fixed when underrepresented groups are convinced that they are worth more than their tokenism, and that will only happen when those groups are more present in public spaces.

Honestly, I think it's a good sign to stay off Twitter. It really encourages that kind of dual reaction that can make you feel dizzy and dejected. More broadly, it's important to recognize that there will always be problems in the world. There will always be a BUT in your lifetime. Once you can accept that, it becomes a lot easier to not feel discouraged by every bittersweet victory. If you can't accept it, than prepare to feel disappointed and burned out for the rest of your life.

Wouldn't the Fair Housing Act ruling from yesterday secure protections for LGTBQ?

Maybe my opinion is really skewed because I'm prepping myself for San Francisco prices, but Seattle doesn't seem that bad at all.

Not to harp on this too much more, but a lot of the negative reactions the writer had to the comic were also present in the movie. She dings the comic for portraying Furiosa as an Exceptional Woman Character, when that's kind of what she is in the movie.

So I strongly feel that these backstory tie-ins are usually garbage, largely because they detract from whatever made the original story great. In this case, the movie Fury Road is great because a lot of these background details are never explained to the audience, which is an incredibly effective form of storytelling. A prequel comic will always be worse, because by its nature it is undoing what made the film work. That said, I really do not like this article that is getting linked with its page by page deconstruction of this comic. The author really feels like she is trying to find fault in every line of the comic, which ends up making her argument feel incredibly weak and overwrought. If she had just written a generally summary of why this comic is bad, why using rape as a narrative can be bad, then I would be much more supportive. This combing over of every possible transgression the comic can make is not a good way to criticize something, especially when her criticism feels very thin, which is often. I shouldn't read an article like this and start to sympathize with the comic, but I did, largely because I saw the author working overtime to twist everything to fit her thesis when she didn't need to.

Edit: I'll post tantalizing Seattle pictures when I'm off my phone.

So I live in Ballard, which is a Seattle neighborhood north of downtown. People say the rent is getting bad here, but I'm from DC and am moving to SF soon, so the rent doesn't seem that bad. You can find affordable (for a city) stuff anywhere, you just have to look and be willing to compromise (if living in a city matters to your daughter). I don't have a car but a lot of people do. Some neighborhoods are hard to use mass transit it in, so I would recommend she look up bus routes to and from where she's working to where she wants to live if she wants to bus at all. I like Ballard a lot. It's a little far out of downtown (30 min bus ride, Seattle is huge) but it has it's own culture so you don't rally ever need to go downtown unless you work there. Fremont is also great. Capitol Hill, Belltown. The Udistict has cheaper housing but that's because there are a lot of students there. Does she know where she'll be working? I moved here two years ago from the East Coast and have absolutely fallen in love with it. It can get kind of grey in the winter, but the absolutely gorgeous summers more than make up for it. If she is outdoorsy than she will love it here; lots of good hiking/nature/mountains. Even though I'm really excited to FINALLY be living in the same city as my fiancé, I am going to really miss it here in Seattle. It's a good West Coast city.

Colin Farrell was shushing the junkie on the street across from the reporter's apartment, but it did have that extra look of him doing it to the audience as well.

Unlike the second season of True Detective, this podcast is off to a really great start (lol). I appreciate that even when everyone was discussing the parts of the episodes they did not like, there were never easy or lazy criticisms; everyone came with thoughtful deconstructions of what didn't work for them that felt much more satisfying to listen to than a lot of the dismissive responses I've seen to this episode. It's clear that the True D crew is trying for something much more ambitious this season that might not pay off, but I have to credit them with going for broke and positioning their show so far outside what season 1 represented. I'm so happy that there is no hyper competent Rust Cohle on this show and that Rachel McAdams does not have to play the female saint to the male sinners surrounding her. Everyone is so damaged and that could lead nowhere or it could lead somewhere interesting, but at least for now it feels really different from what's on television. I have to wonder if a lot of the negative reaction to this episode doesn't come from the fact that there are no easy answers on who the audience should root for. Even when Marty and Rust were doing bad, bad things in season 1, it was still easy as an audience member to want them to succeed. I'm not sure if I want any of the season 2 characters to succeed and I'm really excited about watching a show that is written that way. Also, it's nice to watch one of these crime mystery shows where for once the central dead character is not a young woman.

The single take is absolutely beautiful, there's no denying that. It's unfortunate then that the shot is inservice of such an unnecessary narrative detour. It makes me wish True Detective had only be seven episodes. We didn't really need to see Cohle resume his narcotics cover and reconnect with a biker gang. It presents nothing new about Cohle's character and just further adds to the infallible badassness of everything that he does. Thanks guys for doing this podcast. I hope that season 2, if it cannot attain the same heights of season 1, is at least an interesting watch for everyone. Maybe Taylor Kitsch will finally catch a big break after this. (Poor Kitsch).

I'm going to be really sad to see this go! Thanks guys for sticking with it for these past few months! To talk more about the copy cat Twin Peaks shows, none of them seem to understand how to use the Pacific NW. Shows like The Killing and Wayward Pines, which are ostensibly set in Seattle/Idaho, but are so clearly shot on a studio lot somewhere. You don't need to spend a lot of time in the PNW to tell when a show is faked or not, and I think the faked shows really ruin the moody atmosphere that they're trying to ape from Twin Peaks. The only other show I can think of that did it right was the X-Files. Most of their shooting locations (at least for the first 5 seasons) were in the woods of Vancouver, and therefore they have a very Twin Peaks-feel. It wasn't an intentional rip-off, since The X-Files is not isolated to the PNW like Twin Peaks was, and that's probably way The X-Files largely succeeds as being a good successor to Twin Peaks. If you haven't, I really suggest going back and watching the pilot episode of The X-Files. It takes place in a small Oregon town, and has a lot of visual callbacks for Twin Peaks watchers.

Yeah, I'm going to guess that it's not the content of the ads that is alienating marginalized people, but more likely the content and makeup of the podcast. Misrepresenting yourself will only give the podcasts hosts the impression that they're reaching a more diverse group of listeners, and maybe therefore what they're currently doing is fine and doesn't need changing.

I don't think it's a spoiler to say that the second season is set in a completely different location with different characters, since that was announced well before the first season ended. As much as I love the first season - despite its flaws, it really hits the perfect balance of mystery and occult horror that I love - I really hope the second season has nothing to do with that stuff. I'm sure this will get discussed on the cast, but there really aren't any major threads left to continue from the first season. Giving more information to the story will just dilute its effect. I have similar hopes for new Twin Peaks. They have to pick up the Cooper threads, but I hope that additional Black Lodge lore gets left behind. I'd even be happy if Laura Palmer wasn't a major character, but I guess we already know what happens when you take Laura Palmer out of Twin Peaks.

I just want to point out that my dumb signature on this forum comes from that dumb X-Files episode. Besides making Mulder a gamer (??), the episode also turns him into aggressive perv, where he and the other men in the episode are literally drooling over the sexy video game lady. It's a fascinating disaster. Anyway, look forward to X-Files 2015.

I mostly picked because I liked the comical Ira arrow.

People ignoring their real cats for in game cats is such a great thing.

I downloaded that cat game and am now fully ruined.

I'm going to preface this by saying that I've never played Brothers and therefore completely invalidate my opinion, oh well. On the one hand I am really sympathetic to increased representation in stories. On the other hand, I don't like this idea of individually critiquing a creator's decision because they "arbitrarily" decided to favor one gender over the other. Usually, if the creator is good, those decisions are not arbitrary. There's a big difference between a game called Brothers and a game called Sisters (or a game called Siblings), and hopefully the developers of Brothers justified their decision to have two male leads in their game. Calling for a direct substitution for women in place of men leads to a lot of the bad Strong Female Character writing, because it favors shallow characteristics over actual depth.

Now that I have actually seen an episode of this show, I take back my joke suggestion. Woof. Wayward is right. The speed at which the first episode 100% confirms that there is a conspiracy happening in a small Idaho town is shockingly fast. There are at least four major reveals in that first episode. Maybe the showrunners are intentionally trying to avoid the Lost trap by actually answering their mysteries, but the rapid pace at which information is thrown at the viewer destroys any atmosphere the show tries to establish. Compare that to Twin Peaks where it takes so long for anything overtly supernatural to occur. Bob doesn't even (officially) show up until the second or third episode. Comparing Wayward Pines with Twin Peaks is really unfair, especially since the former tracks more as a lost clone than a Twin Peaks clone, but watching both has really made me appreciate the importance of pacing when establishing your quirky town show.

Maddy sees Bob and I don't think Donna ever does:

A lot of today's purchases are by driven by prices that obscure the true cost of the product. That's been true for decades, but it seems to be getting worse with the rise of the app economy. I can see how low-balling game budgets on Kickstarter might be a response to that reality and also something that's contributing to it. It's hard to get people to accept and pay for the true cost of creative products. That's why the Internet scoffs at paying $20 for a game or why the idea of paying for any written content you read on the Internet is so objectionable to a lot of people because too often "it's on the Internet" = "it should be free." I don't know what the Kickstarter solution is except maybe for games studios to either be incredibly transparent with their budgets or not share their budgets at all. It seems strange private companies would be obligated to share their financials in order to assuage a group of people who are mad that creative products cost money, but it's equally strange that someone would see $500,000 and except that as a regional budget for a game that staffs more than 2 or 3 people.

If this movie had been directed by someone else besides David Lynch (other Twin Peaks staff members, perhaps) I'm not sure I'd find it as successful. Especially if the movie continued the Black Lodge lore themes of the later part of the show that I find really unconvincing. Lynch's name might make people more open to this film because his name means something as a director, but I'm not sure people would bend over backward to love this movie just because Lynch did. In fact, I know a lot of diehard Lynch fans that hate this movie. And I really want to continue defending the Agent Desmond part of the movie, because it works so well. Yes, I realize that the role was written for Cooper originally, but as is mentioned on the podcast, having a different but similar character get involved really drives home the idea that this town in not Twin Peaks and Teresa Banks is not Laura Palmer. Desmond's introduction in front of a bunch of crying children in bus as the bus drivers and prostitutes (?), is so incongruous to what you'd see on Twin Peaks the TV show. It's hard not to laugh at that stuff and also slowly settle into the fact that this movie will be different from the TV show. That's what really makes the beginning worth it for me; the way it straightforwardly prepares the audience from something different than what they might expect. People thought this movie was going to resolve what happened to Cooper at the end of the series finale and it kind of does, but the movie ends with Cooper still trapped there. Instead, the movie is a prequel that spends a lot of time with characters that aren't directly relevant to the show and I appreciate that expansion. It helps make the movie feel like a movie and not just an overly long episode of television, as I assume it would have felt if Lynch had strictly limited himself to Twin Peaks. Honestly, it's kind of amazing this movie is any good. Usually shows that are kicked off by a dead girl mystery don't have any luck bringing those dead girls as real humans. They are symbols for whatever greater ills are plaguing the detectives or the particular town, and never are allowed to become their own fully realized character. The writing and acting in FWWM is so great though, that it breaks out of that unfortunate pattern. It gives Laura depth that she was never afforded on the TV and it is really rewarding to see her experiences as filtered through herself.