Claire Hosking

Hmm this seems pretty tasty actually http://www.epicurious.com/recipes/food/views/roasted-garlic-soup-with-parmesan-cheese-100669

I'm glad someone mentioned roasting garlic. You don't even have to eat the roasted garlic. Coat a whole head of garlic in oil and roast it alongside meat or potatos to give a subtle flavour. I've also heard of garlic soup but I've never tried it. I don't know how to help the listener who wrote in last week to stop checking their phone, since I'm a terrible addict. I can offer advice for how to make it a constructive rather than destructive experience tho. 1. Install a reading app on your phone. I like the kindle app but there are others too. This has been by far the biggest change. Always having a book with me right there on the first screen has turned 80% of my "frittering time away on draining social media" habits into reading books. Likewise, comic reading apps like comixology are great, and feedly is good for following blogs. 2. Put other activities on your phone! Follow a blog that reviews mobile games on feedly and then download the games & play them. Install the wikipedia app and use the random article function. I'm fond of Golden Thread Tarot as a way to reflect on what's been happening in my life lately. I also like the vogue runway app for looking at cool fashion. 2. Unfollow everyone on twitter, only refollow a selection. This has two benefits: It helps you get your bearings again and it means your feed will actually run out, letting you get on with your day for a while. I went from following 1540 people to following 130ish and it's been great. Do whatever the equivalent is on fb or other social networks. Maybe mute everyone and only unmute selected people if you don't want to hurt feelings. 2.1 Follow a news source rather than getting your news from whatever trickles into your feed. 2.2 Twitter now lets you mute words in your timeline, tho you have to use the web app to do it. I have everything from trivial turns of phrase like "architecting" to slurs to the names of many prominent trolls and odious personalities. 2.2.2 Turn off image previews so you have to opt into seeing images in your feed. It's just... nicer. 3. Find spaces to talk online that are topic oriented. It might seem counterintuitive, but I really like the reddit app because I only follow subreddits with good cultures that talk about topics I'm interested in. I also like the idle forums and I'm in a handful of slacks. You don't realise how much you missed the psychological safety of being part of a community until you join one again.

I have to reread the book before I weigh in more but I'm glad you addressed race, b/c when I think of women who have gone through handmaid-like experiences, one of the first people who jumps to mind is Sally Hemings, particularly how she lived in a small bedroom within the main white household and how isolating that probably was.

Oh no I missed this whole arc! Oh well I'll just add my hp thoughts anyway. I got the first book as a 12th birthday present in 1999, it felt innocent compared to the other stuff I was reading. YA in the 90s in australia was lots of John Marsden, which was all teens being very gritty and sexy, stories about jail and drugs and teen freedom fighters and daughters of corrupt politicians etc. and here was something really beautiful and optimistic and dreamy. I loved the reveals of the world, the exciting things it suggested -- owl post, the ceiling in the main hall, the talking pictures and moving staircases. Quidditch! It reminded me a little of the scene in A Little Princess when she wakes up to find the room is luxurious. That tradition of magic in british kid's lit. The later books never felt quite as magical to me as the first, b/c they don't keep exploring new delights. The third book was still in hardcover when I went to buy the second soon after. I covered both my copies of the first & second book in contact b/c so many people were asking to borrow them. I also read a portion of the first book in its latin translation when I was 19, which was delightful. The translator had to invent a bunch of compound words to describe new technologies that didn't have ancient roman counterparts. I gave up b/c the translation was a bit beyond my abilities, but now I wonder if I should get it on kindle and keep google translate close and see how I go.

I guess not every show can do the midsommer murders thing of nearly every character is a cameo by someone well known

If you're interested in presenting at the Level Designer's Workshop at GDC 2017, you can submit a topic here - https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfUT34dT9HNxVTAxK9IZhUQposGqJenuT9DTxZxPb77xzl_2w/viewform?c=0&w=1 This was really good, I did it last year, and while it was a lot of work to write a 25 minute talk, I'm glad I did! The organisers very much want to encourage a broad range of talks that cover the diversity of what's happening in game design. You can approach the topic in many different ways (tho "what I learned from designing these levels for this/these games/s" is tried and true). I'm mentoring this year so you might even have my seasoned wisdom to help guide you through the process Ps If you know any other forums where this might be good to post (other dev or modding communities perhaps?) please pass it along!

One of the start up tips says you can shoot hanging things to make them fall, and I was surprised, b/c I've tried to shoot lights before & it didn't work. What kinda stuff can I shoot down? I know of two things from paris, but they seemed like special cases?

huh that is more interesting. That makes augments seem more like student debt, almost? You take it on to get skilled for employment, and needing to pay it back can trap you into some really exploitative work. The fact the groups are divided by an actual difference in ability seems weird to me. Racism usually means a meaningless difference (eg skin colour) is used as a pretence to create a very real difference in advantages/disadvantages. While plenty of times racism has been justified by the idea that the oppressed group is "physically superior, but less human in some other way" that's supposed to be an unfounded pretence, not an actual real difference in ability like it is in this game. There are stories where robots are the underclass, but the premise is usually that the robots are secretly equally human, just humans discriminate against them b/c of a superficial difference (they're electric, even though they feel all the things humans do). Janelle Monae's albums equate black people with a cyborg underclass and essentially take this approach. I guess there are a few examples where people have been exploited for real physical advantages (the sherpas on mount everest come to mind). But this would be like enslaving the sherpas to ensure the inferior non-sherpa climbers had more physically fit guides to assist them? Or maybe oppressing the augs b/c you fear they might attack you is more like the way some people perceive all muslims as a bomb waiting to go off? I don't mind if the game isn't making a metaphor, just telling the story of what happened in this particular made-up society. But if it's not a metaphor then the allusions to stuff in our own world are weird.

I read research once that people enjoy plots more if they know them ahead of time (I guess this is except mysteries?), but I also hate spoilers in trailers even tho I'm pretty tolerant of them elsewhere. I think it's because I can handle a whole discussion b/c there's a reason and payoff, but just an isolated clip that reveals a plotpoint for no good reason feels frustratingly pointless.

I really empathise with that thing how John Dickerson has to write the piece to find out what he thinks about something. I had an oops moment a few years back where I pitched an editor something, and while writing the piece realised I'm an idiot and my original opinion was the wrong one. I still had to make a deadline tho, and had no idea whether I could just write a completely diff point, so there was a bit of a surprise! mid-piece argument reversal. Sorry editor Now I only pitch stuff I've mostly finished writing. These days I just have a drive full of pieces I work on occasionally. I have a doc about violence in games I've been adding thoughts to for months now, maybe longer? And much older things that I add to whenever I play a new game that's relevant to that or read a piece etc. I should go back and finish my firewatch piece sometime. And yeah I'm sad Chris that twitter expects you to be fully formed and can't be more forgiving for thinking out loud. It's absolutely built for decontextualising every thought.

I dunno what the game's logic for calling something art is, but in the real world what matters is that the maker had some intention and tried to accomplish it. Wanting to create a chair that feels sturdy, or that highlights the particular character of steel would be enough, though adding something representational never hurts. I guess chris' rimworld character sought to explore one of the more rarely represented human experiences? Maybe they were exploring disgust, Patricia Piccinini style (http://www.patriciapiccinini.net/) ? My fav simple definition of art is this one, which I think the chair fits in a lot of ways: "Art, art, art. Art isn’t holy. It doesn’t float on gossamer truth-wings in a rarefied aether of absolute beauty. Art is merely the graphic representation of ideas, presented from a point of view. Good ideas, bad ideas, medium ideas, ideas that other people have had already, ideas that initially seem clever but get kind of old once the novelty wears off, startling ideas, political ideas, glorious ideas, ideas that fucking stink. A few ideas typical of those that find their way into art: Symmetry Horse Angst Orange Square Rectangle Hopelessness Buy This God Can Kick Your Ass War Is Bad Flowers Are Pretty Less Is More Women Are Whores The State Is Glorious Dudes Are Great! Whoring Is Great, Too! Look At These Fucking Naked Chicks Taking A Bath In The Woods! Like I said, not all ideas are good ideas, and not all representations are philosophically legitimate representations. Artifying an idea doesn’t automatically legitimize it. Some ideas, such as “the male gaze reigns supreme” and “women enjoy oppression,” not only suck, they are so violent and antisocial that it is impossible to represent them without harming innocents. Certainly lots of art, such as advertising graphics, or Koons’ “Michael Jackson and Bubbles”, which is the graphic representation of vacuous excess, ensmallens its audience. Some art merely has a null value, like the framed poster of Monet’s water lilies hanging in your dentist’s office. Some art — this is the rarest kind — enbiggens its audience. I allude to the sort of crap that, when you look at it, seamlessly transmits to you its philosophic value. Suddenly you yearn to get off your ass and foment unrest, or wish to do good works in the community, or vow to start eating better, or sign up for a class, or experience something grave, excellent and out of the ordinary, or go “ha!”, or regard the status quo with renewed suspicion." I tend to think good art is the stuff that humanises us to each other, that let us better understand others or ourselves or both. I guess everyone knows that terrible "I just vomited for days" feeling.

Oh, sorry, I feel like I understand you better now. I guess part of what I was trying to say was that it's normal to not feel part of your culture. Like, my whole point with traditional dress was that most people don't wear their "traditional dress", that yeah, it's just picking a fashion that country had at one point in time. When you're inside, it can be so default and unchosen that it seems like background, not self.

I think cultural identity can be a bit like an accent. You can't always hear your own. But as an Australian, American cultural identity and the subtle ways it exhibits itself in americans is fairly apparent to me. Americans have all sorts of cultural traditions! They have particular folk heros, they have proud and shameful history, they have traditional dress (leather jacket and jeans and wayfarers, for instance) that they mostly don't wear but sometimes invoke (like most other cultures), they have unique holidays like thanksgiving with very specific rituals, the list goes on. I don't find it that different from any other immigrant culture in Australia, except they don't tend to think of themselves as immigrants.

I know we've already discussed this a little but I'll add a few more thoughts -- I feel like a huge amount of what drew me in was just even the surprise of seeing things I identified with in another artwork. Like the manga on Nina's shelf is manga I read around that age, I know that exact feeling of mindless click click games to while away time so I can carry on multiple chat convos, and I met my first bf over the net (though very differently, with very different outcomes). It's still really unusual to "play" a real person, and I'm still thinking about that. Like Being John Malkovich, but where you have control over the hands and the decision to talk to people, but not the content. But then Being John Malkovich is a weird movie creatively, having an actor play themselves but in fiction, not biography or cameo. hmmm.

Yeah I have, they're equally slow and boring and very very pretty.