Argobot

That's fine, because then the title of the episode might have overshadowed the amazingness of the episode description.

http://steamcommunity.com/tradingcards

Doesn't Steam already have an achievement system? That's basically what the Steam badges are.

Same. Although sometimes it's funny to imagine what would have happened if I kept my nondescript avatar and then later met people.

But aren't those two basically the same idea? The moment you realize you're truly fallible is the moment you become fallible. The larger point I was trying to make is that Wolf Hall lavishes so much praise and attention on Cromwell to the point where he almost becomes unbelievable as a real person and starts to feel more like a character in a piece of fiction. Which is probably the correct way to portray him in the first book of a trilogy, since it allows Cromwell to be the clear hero. The next book is all about setting up Cromwell's eventual execution, so it does more to ground Cromwell in reality. That grounding is part of the reason I love the second book so much. (Also, everything about Anne Boleyn)

I think we should have recorded our game of Weinhandler, at the very least for our own amusement.

I'm trying so hard to come at this book from an objective point of view. My only experiences with Hemingway is what I read in high school (A Farewell to Arms, which I remember liking) and a lot of my conceptions of Hemingway and his writing have been colored by other people's thoughts and opinions. It's so hard for me not to completely write him off as an example of masculinity run wild, even though I know that characterization is completely unfounded and unfair. After every page I have to remind myself that I shouldn't dislike this book based solely on the fact that Hemingway wrote it (and that I shouldn't feel obligated to like it for the exact same reason). Basically, I have to force myself to only consider what the book is presenting to me and not any of the outside commentary on Hemingway and what he may or may not represent. It's a completely tortuous and ridiculous way to think -- I freely admit that -- but I'm kind of thrilled that reading this book is making me question so many things about how I relate to literature. This might be my favorite book cast choice, because it is so far outside of my reading comfort-zone. Also, I really love the straightforward prose style. It just hammers home how meandering my own writing (and speech!) sounds. I wish I had the same talent for economical sentences that every writer from the 1920's seemed to possess.

Yeah, that Jenn Frank article at Unwinnable is truly excellent. It made me confront a lot of my own issues with assigning meaning to different body types and really changed the way I perceived the whole Dragon's Crown controversy.

Guessing with no outside help. Using the internet kind of defeats the whole point of this game, I think.

My BF got one that was just the inside of a nondescript classroom. I don't remember where it ended up being, probably Australia.

I used the recipe and they turned out amazing. My kitchen still smells like melting brown sugar and it's fantastic. Thanks Doug! (next time I think I'm going to use more butter though.)

Maybe, but if the joke is meant to be at the man's expense, wouldn't it have made more sense to say "that's because you're not a man" vs. "that's because you're a woman" ? Actually emphasize the gender you're supposedly mocking. And I'd just like to point out that everything I've said was aimed at the TV show, as I have not read the books and cannot offer an opinion on them. I don't really think the show itself is 'sexist' but that it does often have questionable elements in how it writes or frames women or other minority characters. I didn't create the title of this thread; I just wrote an inane blog post that has led to much more interesting conversations on how gendered violence is portrayed on screen and the diverse reactions that people have to that kind of violence. Which is way more interesting the the snarky jokes I was making at the expense of this HBO show.

That's an interesting view of the term, I'm not sure if I buy all of her reasoning though. But it's worth pointing out that just because a show has nudity doesn't mean that it's bad or bad for women (because let's face, most of the nude people are women on this show). Certainly an interesting take though and one I'd never seen before. Thanks for linking to it.

Edit: I just want to add that the above is entirely based on my personal interpretation of that scene. Other people may not have been bothered by it in the same way I was. If you didn't have a problem with it, cool. I don't think that makes you a sexist or a terrible person, it just means we have different perspectives on a TV show that I actually don't like that much (but apparently I do because I keep watching it and writing about it on the Internet)

Just really quickly want to say something re Wolf Hall: Yes, Mantel is writing about a world where women were significantly powerless in comparison to men and yes, many of the male characters have less than enlightened attitudes towards women -- as would be expected from that time period. The reason it works (for me at least) in Mantel's writing is because it never feels like she's exploiting these attitudes to provoke some kind of reaction in the reader; she's just being realistic for the time period. Women are not well-treated in Mantel's universe, but they also are real characters and have agency. Compare that to other fantasy or historical-focused literature, where the author beats you over the head with how sexist everything was and how awful life was for most women, and you can tell the author wants you to think: "wow, things sure were terrible for women back then, glad that our modern age isn't like that at all!" These female characters have no agency; they're stand ins so the modern audience can feel better that women aren't treated this poorly anymore.

Is anyone playing this? I've been seeing a few positive reviews popping up, but it wasn't until I read an interview with Tom Bissell (who I didn't even realize was one of the writers on this game) that I became really interested in playing it. My only concern is that I haven't paid any attention to the Gears of War series since the first game, so I wonder how hard it would be to drop in on it during its fourth installment. Here's the Bissell interview: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2013/03/gears-of-war-writer-tom-bissell-on-video-games-and-storytelling.html (In addition to discussing Gears of War, that interview has some good rumination on 'literary' games and some nice praise for The Walking Dead.)

I would agree that just because an author writes a story about something like pedophilia, that does not make the author himself a pedophile. But I disagree with the idea that character actions don't have an effect on the quality of a piece. If the author can't justify why a character is doing something horrible then I have every right to ask why it was necessary to include this horrible act in the first place. Going beyond Martin and Game of Thrones: I take issue with the way a lot of authors use sexual violence in their stories. Most of the time, I get the impression that an author includes this kind of action because they want to shock the reader; it's used as a lazy way to insert drama into the story, and very rarely do I think it's ever justified or done well. If an author feels the need to include something like this in their story (or murder or pedophilia or drug use or any of number of horrible things) then they need to provide a reason beyond 'I want to temporarily shock my readers.' Nabokov had a very intentional reason for making Humbert Humbert a pedophile, all I'm asking is that other authors be held to that same standard.

I just want to point out that I don't necessarily think that Game of Thrones is sexist. I think that the HBO show has a lot of problems with how women are represented -- most notably the use of sexual violence as a plot device -- and I have always been bothered by this representation; usually I can ignore it because the positive aspects of the show outweigh the negative, but last night's episode was particularly gratuitous (at least for me, other people might not take issue with it, which, fine). I've never read Martin's books (I tried reading the second book but gave up), so I can't really speak about them in any way. My only knowledge of this universe and its characters are what the TV show presents, so that's what I'm basing my opinion on.

Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov is my favorite Russian lit from the 20th century and I would highly recommend it. It's bizarre and you'll probably need to be a little familiar with early Soviet history (and Faust), but the book is really worth reading. Unfortunately, I don't know that much about post-Soviet literature, so I can't recommend anything more modern than that.

Well, I will give any book a read if it engages with Russia/Russian, so I will definitely be checking this out. Thanks for mentioning it!

I've decided to go to grad school, which means that I will be leaving my relatively financially secure position to move across the country and embark on something that I'm not even one hundred percent sure will pay off in the end!

Fervently hoping for a future where presidential hopefuls campaign on how good they were at playing games like Neptune's Pride.

The talk about the smug, goofy jokes that fathers make to their children got me thinking about who will be listening to these casts in the future. I can easily imagine a future where a Dad Thumb forces their children to listen to old episodes of the podcast. Or even better, a future where some precocious Thumbs grandchildren do a little Internet searching and stumble across Idle Thumbs episodes. They'll ask their grandfather, "who were the Idle Thumbs?" Their grandfather will smile, and get that wistful look in his eye that people get when they remember past experiences. Then the grandchildren will ask, "Also, why did they talk so much about animal sodomy in a game called Dragon Age?" Good cast guys.

Hmm, are you trying to say that Wolf Hall is flawed because it was a quick read or because it had a fairly simple plot? I guess, what exactly do you mean by challenging?

Everyone should write their book reviews drunk now. I really think that some of Cromwell's more Mary Sue-ish qualities are lessened in Bring up the Bodies because that book actually shows him making mistakes. Just looking at the Cromwell from Wolf Hall, it's hard to imagine that a man like that would ever mess up enough to be executed, but Bring up the Bodies gives you at least an inkling of what will ultimately cause Cromwell's ruin. Cromwell is a Walter White/Frank Underwood character, but written backwards. Characters like Walter White start off slightly flawed, but eventually reach a point where they literally cannot make any mistake. Cromwell starts off infallible, but because of his ego (or his friendship with the king), he starts making mistakes that have actual consequences. I'm really curious to see how Mantel takes his arc into the the third book, which I'm hoping has the most nuanced portrayal of Cromwell (if the progression of his character from the first to second book holds true.)