Argobot

:/ Chris and Jake aren't THAT old

Yeah, the blu rays are expensive but completely worth it if you can manage. The quality is just so fantastic and the packaging is really great.

I agree with Bjorn. There's a good chance this won't be any good, but there's an equally good chance that it will contain something interesting and worthwhile. An older cast is fertile grounds for Lynch to grow his absurdity on. (Honestly, I have a hard time imagining it will be outright bad, but I also enjoy the (flawed) Fire Walk with Me movie, so maybe my opinion isn't to be trusted.)

I get a lot of my recommendations from reviews, obvious places like the NYT and the New Yorker and smaller places like The Awl or The Millions. That's usually for more recent publications. For older books, I'll just walk through a local used bookstore and see what's available. Usually they have something in stock that I've been meaning to read for years. Finding one or two friends with similar book tastes is also great, because then you can swap books and use each other as barometers for whether the other one will enjoy reading something.

Inherent Vice is probably one of Pynchon's more straightforward novels. It's just a mad cap detective story, but Pynchon does an excellent job infusing it with this threatening presence. There are scenes in the book where the main character drives through various parts of LA and they just pulse with this inevitable doom. I'm really excited for the movie, because I think PT will do a good job translating that feeling to the movie.

California just signed a "Yes Means Yes" policy into effect for college campuses. It replaces the old "No Means No" standard of proving sexual assault and all of the problems that came with it. The subject of sexual consent is often fraught with ambiguity, especially when people are younger and less experienced; hopefully this policy will succeed in teaching young men and women what consent is and how to give it. http://t.co/U6Zk7xQdlM

Alice Munro! All of her writing is about painfully realistic women navigating through the world. And like Lorrie Moore, Alice Munro writes compact short stories where every word carries weight.

David Mitchell has said that while you can read all of his novels as individual works, they are also connected by a larger thread with repeating characters, actions, etc. That kind of writing doesn't appeal to me generally, but I can ignore it for the most part. However, The Bone Clocks contains an egregious connection to Thousand Autumns that had me rolling my eyes the entire time I was reading it:

Kind of suspicious for someone who claims to have never seen the movie..... https://twitter.com/search?f=realtime&q=marty%20mcfly%20from%3Achrisremo&src=typd

Since a lot of us here read Cloud Atlas, I'm hoping that the David Mitchell interest will carry over to his newest book, The Bone Clocks. It's in the same vein as Cloud Atlas -- fragmented narratives that span across time -- except there is a single protagonist who connects each of the different narrators. Mitchell is truly wonderful at writing characters and that's what I enjoyed most in this book. His downfall, I think, is the need to bolt on what feel like superfluous fantasy subplots to his novels. The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet fell victim to that and so does The Bone Clocks. The fantasy story is supposed to represent the struggle between Good and Evil, but Evil in this book is represented by people who actually kill innocent babies. That's such a facile approach to a weighty subject, and it's made weaker in comparison to the complexity of the writing that surrounds it in the novel.

I generally give time travel a pass because it's so messy and not really the interesting part of these kinds of stories (I hear Primer is the only movie to do time travel well, but I haven't seen it yet because I'm garbage). What always bothered me more about BttF 1, even as a young kid, is that Biff tries to rape Marty's mom as a teenager and then years later he's employed as their oafish repairman AND NO ONE IS BOTHERED BY THIS. Seems kind of weird of you, beloved 1980s children's movie!

Isn't @tinybaby part of "weird Twitter?" I wouldn't be surprised if that screengrab or whatever they said to get banned wasn't some kind of joke. Also, any ello invites left? I'm curious now.

The unread Harry Potter email reminded me of a send off to the series that Sady Doyle wrote where she reimagined the books as if Hermione were the hero. It's a good take down of the dopey male hero trope discussed in the past two episodes. http://globalcomment.com/in-praise-of-hermione-granger-series/# Doyle received a lot of hate for this piece, but I think her point is really strong.

If season 7 is it then women have it worse than I thought.

All seasons really. Either Giles, Spike, Angel, even Xander fill that paternalistic, I'm-your-stand-in-father role. (I was a teenage Buffy devotee who has since strongly soured on the show but I will always love season 3.)

I actually think the trope of a young woman being trained by an older, wiser man is fairly common. The most egregious example I could come up with is Buffy, where there were two prominent male characters who filled that role. Sadly, I can't think of any examples where an older woman trains a younger woman in anything but seduction techniques or how to be a good wife/mother.

I recall that some of the ads were for clothing as well. And I don't really see the point of comparing TV to games. Does it matter if TV is better or worse? Not really given what Anita's series is about.

To add: she does provide a larger cultural context. This most recent video had ads that used dead or assaulted women's bodies to sell products. The first video she did went into the history of the damsel. She always makes a point to cite statistics on the larger issue (ie violence against women).

Haunted Mansion was changed to a Nightmare Before Christmas theme for the Halloween/Christmas holidays. It was fine - much better than the Space Mountain Halloween ride - but I'm told the original is still the best. Hopefully I get to see that one soon. I mentioned in the episode thread that my mom was very anti-Disneyland/World when I was a kid. I was a little afraid that her reaction to me going as an adult would be less than positive. Instead, she told me about taking my older sister to Disneyland when they were living in California. I had no idea my mom had ever been to Disneyland. The whole experience was hilarious.

True cities are expensive, especially SF, and true that more policy is needed to make sure that everyone but the very wealthy are not priced out of urban areas, but that doesn't mean we can reasonably expect business to relocate to cheaper locations. Living in a city is a major draw for many young people; if development studios all decamped to less populated areas, I imagine they'd have a harder time bringing in employees. It's a trade off for sure and I can full admit that the draw of urban life is stronger for some than others, but one Early Access game being shuttered doesn't mean that a studio in SF is unsustainable.

The fallacy isn't that sexism in games causes real world problems while violence doesn't; it's trying to ignore or downplay one because the other exists. It's like if I talk about campus rape and someone else tries to end that discussion by saying "What about gang rape as a war tactic, why aren't we talking about that?" Both are real problems and one doesn't cancel the other out. Same is true for violence and sexism.

I tend to ignore the death of sincerity trend pieces that crop up every few months, but I suspect that they all contain a kernel of truth; cynicism and cool detachment are definitely prized over genuine enthusiasm (tangentially related to the discussion of adding China scenes to big blockbuster movies, which reads a cynical cash grab). While I do think it's essential to remain wary and not accept the world at face-value, I worry that I personally give that too much weight in how I act. Until a week ago, I knew nothing about Disneyland except that it is owned by a very large corporation and I had a very sneery, I'm-above-it-all approach to it. Having that knee-jerk reaction turned on its head was a really rewarding experience that will hopefully help me stay honest about these kinds of things in the future. Anyway, I want to go back to Disneyland.

I love all this Disney talk! My parents -- especially my mom -- were the type to shun Disney parks because of the obvious crass commercialism and the expense. I grew up assuming that the bad was all a Disney theme park could offer, and probably would have continued thinking that way if I hadn't met a lot of smart people who felt differently. The emphasis on "if you wish hard enough, your dreams will come true" at Disneyland made me uncomfortable, sure, but there was a lot of good to balance out the more unsavory aspects. Apparently visiting Disneyland for the first time as an adult with basically zero knowledge of what the rides are is the way to go.

Cool that Anita was on the podcast and cool that The Toast got a shout out!

It's probably fine??