sclpls

Yeah, there is a lot of exciting stuff being added, along with a bunchof stuff that I'm too new to know how to feel about, and other stuff that I don't know how I feel about.

I get frustrated by how Hollywood handles this stuff now though where setting feels more like some sort of referential thing, rather than something that grounds the movie in a lived experience. I think there is a huge difference between the Iron Man movies, and a movie like Trading Places which is set in Philadelphia, even though it doesn't have any particular need to be set there, but nonetheless provides the movie with some real character. Similarly, I'll take the Dirty Harry movies or the Conversation over the nods to San Francisco in the latest Star Trek or Planet of the Apes.

I loved this as well. It's such a bummer that women int he video game space have to be like, super guarded and walking over egg shells all the time because if they say something that doesn't jibe with a segment of the internet they are going to experience a lot of extremely aggressive behavior.

Yeah, I mean, we can bring this full circle and point out how video games didn't use to be so heavily marketed in this gendered way back in the arcade era, but that all changed when the NES showed up, and suddenly video game consoles fit into the "toys" category of something you sell to kids.

Lobster is gross, but otherwise you are wrong.

Okay, so I'm actually now listening to the podcast, and realizing that people are talking about this in the context of rides at Disney Land/World/whatever, and that's obviously a more complicated thing whereas I was just kind of responding to people on the thread talking about HP Lovecraft or whatever.

Yeah it seems pretty obvious to me you shouldn't censor this old stuff. Otherwise you miss out on being able to have critical discussions about it.

I think both this and Hack n Slash have been kind of disappointing and not up to the level of quality I associate with Double Fine games. Making games is hard, and I'm learning the hard way that promising looking prototypes don't necessarily translate into well realized, fleshed out games. If I were Tim I would also maybe rethink the whole open Amnesia Fortnight up to the public thing.

It's funny to me how these perceptions work. I think this isn't the first time Idle Thumbs have gotten criticized for talking over a guest. The Crate & Crowbar podcast has the opposite problem where every time they have a guest on people in the forums get upset over the perception that the guest is stepping all over the hosts' lines. For my part I'll take either over that awkward Skype pause.

Yeah it's kind if like when they manage to find that one guy from the physics department that thinks these climate scientists don't know what they're talking about.

Ok, you guys are still talking about Sommers. Like, how is this woman saying anything different from some typical Ann Coulter nonsense?

My understanding about someone like Sommers is that there's always money in the conservative pundit stand.

The diet metaphor thing is an interesting thing to me. If it were accurate as a metaphor I think that would be a point in reading a diverse amount of literature's favor only because some diets are in fact better for you than others. Even if some of the moralizing around diets is inappropriate/wrong (i.e. someone is lazy if they don't eat correctly, etc.) it is still nonetheless the case that people will be healthier/feel better from certain diets than others. You can also take it a step further and say that people's bodies are different, and therefore not all diets are appropriate for all people, and people's reading habits ought to be the same. All that being said, I don't actually think reading habits are the same thing as eating habits so it isn't a comparison I would put forth. The argument I would make for reading stuff beyond young adult fiction is pretty simple. YA fiction is fiction that a lot of people of different age groups can appreciate. There is some fiction that I think can only be fully appreciated as you get older. For example, lots of people have a bad experience reading The Scarlet Letter in high school when it's used as an introduction to symbolism. However most people I know that have read it as an adult, either for the first time or rereading it, end up loving it. Fiction can cover a lot of topics that younger people can't appreciate. While I wouldn't describe it as some sort of failing if someone never read any of that stuff (there's not enough time in a lifetime to read everything worthwhile) I would think of it as unfortunate the same way people can miss out on all sorts of good stuff.

I see a lot of those ads while reading RPS and it is a bummer to be sure.

While I wouldn't agree that it is "uniquely good", I definitely believe that fiction provides unique opportunities for introspection that are distinct from non-fiction. Like, I am fairly certain my views about racism would be poorer if I was only familiar with the autobiographies of Fredrick Douglas and Malcolm X, but I had not read Another Country, Invisible Man, or "Benito Cereno". That's not to denigrate non-fiction, it is certainly true that similar unique opportunities exist in that space. I just wouldn't be so quick to dismiss the opportunities for fictional works to challenge your thoughts and assumptions. To Gormongous's point, I'll readily concede that this idea of the value of literature, and how it improves the mind is a relatively new concept. I'm less sure about how much weight I would place on our 15th century German observer's moral concerns about reading. When Augustine observed St. Ambrose silently reading, it was a profound and unusual enough event for him to write about it. Back then, most reading was done out loud. Last time I checked, scholars estimated that silent reading as a common practice in Europe happened around the 10th century. That created some religious conflict as it created the space for private readings of text, and people started to develop their own interpretations. Heresy suddenly becomes an increasingly pressing issue, and certainly by the 15th century it had reached something of a boiling point. I don't know the politics and beliefs of this German, but I would not be surprised if these other social concerns colored this moral unease with silent reading.

Yeah, I agree that you raise important points about economic and other factors transforming how we think about adulthood. However I disagree that looking at things like representations in books, films, TV, music, games, etc. is a flawed way of trying to understand these sorts of transformations because I do think these mediums do reveal something about the worldview of the people making them. In other words, these narratives don't control how we think about these concepts, but they do act as a mirror that let us see these concepts plainly. That's why we talk about things like sexist representations in games right? The issue isn't that the games are making people more sexist, but that they reflect sexist views that we've inherited from our culture. I think the Victorian era is a really fascinating example of a massive transformation in how people understood family, gender, and the different between adult and children. This was in large part because of the impact the industrial revolution was having, but we're able to comprehend that change thanks to representations in novels and other forms of entertainment (poetry, popular song, theater, etc.).

The Shut Up & Sit Down podcast is worth listening to if you're into board games at all. I hadn't listened to it in awhile, but I need to give a special shout out to a particular episode called "Brendan's Correct Way to Scratch" from July 10th. I think everyone should listen to it, and can only describe it as literary genius!

I created another thread about these questions about age and adulthood since I think it's a good discussion, but getting off topic at this point. :-)

Man, I was so pumped for Rise of Nations when it was released on Steam. Unfortunately for whatever reason I have terrible issues with overscanning in this game, and it typically takes a bunch of steps for me to fix, and I have to keep doing it over and over again so it has become kind of a headache and had a demoralizing effect on me wanting to play this classic. :-(

The whole thing is built upon a mountain of misinformation so I don't see why they would start paying attention to any facts.

Definitely not worth treating any 4chan related thing with any assumption of good faith.

That thing on the Toast is really funny and on point.

I used to worry about these sorts of things, and then I stopped. Now I just try and make my point, and move on with my life. At most I respond to someone responding to me once. I avoid a back and forth. The back and forth isn't worth it. I think of myself as a pretty reasonable person, so I assume other reasonable people will just agree with me, or at a minimum think that I am saying something reasonable, and the person that is being argumentative and unreasonable will appear as such to other people. For example, when Tim Schafer bows out of a twitter conversation where one dude has tweeted at him over 50 times, he hasn't lost, he's just stopped talking to some crazy person.

This isn't entirely about feminism, but it does have a lot to do with our sexual identities, as well as age, and there is a lot to think over in this article: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/14/magazine/the-death-of-adulthood-in-american-culture.html?_r=0