granderojo

I've consistently seen journalists from many of the larger sites, Gamespot, IGN, Polygon*(I originally said Idle Thumbs here but that was a typo, I think I'm getting acclimated to Danielle being on the show regularly), Giantbomb talking about this very topic on podcasts and such. I believe the words Patrick Klepek used to talk about it were something to the effect, "I felt like I needed to learn how to stream because my job will depend on it in the coming years, because the written word is slowly going away."

I don't see what's so wrong with the premise of that Slate article. I'm partially colour blind and I find youtubers more frequently and more efficiently talking about that subject while they're playing games than writers for the enthusiasts press by the nature of their medium. The only person who seems to regularly do so that I follow regularly that is a writer is Jeff Gerstmann buthe only does so on his podcast or in a quicklook for which it might as well be on youtube or in many cases is on youtube. There are articles that write about the subject but by and large they're not written about certain games unless to reiterate a press release the company sent out that a colour blind mode was added to the game. I'm almost certain that there are a host of different special interests being served by youtubers/streamers that writers are not that I'm not part of and can't see how that doesn't cause antagonism from writers to this new media. You listen to writers talk about the explosion of youtube onto the scene and the fear is constantly present, so yeah I don't see what's wrong with the premise of that article. That said, I don't see why he distinguishes between enthusiast press and youtubers, they're all enthusiasts to me but that's a matter of semantics that's superfluous.

I know a few women who are devs who initially supported the gamergate thing because they honestly don't like some of the ties between journalists and game devs or the hesitance of some critics(their words not mine) to talk about the mechanical issues behind some of the games which receive a lot of praise due to their subject matter/sympathy of story surrounding the game due to cloning(Gone Home, Vlambeer's games,etc) but immediately stopped supporting it because honest to god misogynists and those angry at gamergate were using what they were saying online out of context. Generally giving too much attention to them and inflating what they were saying. I really like reading Jenn's work across the years since EGM, some of it wasn't for me but nothing ever will be entirely. I think it's fine to disagree but the outright attacks and the volume of it directed at so few people really sucks. As a kid my family were lower middle class so they didn't want to buy many video games growing up so I ended up reading gaming magazines more than playing games up until I was teenager. I'm really thankful I had someone like Jenn to contribute to that and it really pushed me in my current career path of programming, so yeah again, super thankful to her and others. I hope nothing I said offended anyone, and everyone has a better time tomorrow when some of the dust settles from all of these terrible things tonight.

Well that looks a lot less interesting than what was described in that email. Welp.

What was the name of the Pikmin/DotA hybrid game the listener wrote in about?

The most depressing thing about PvZ2 to me is that they're doing a 'timed exclusive' on iOS. Way to miss the zeitgeist entirely popcap. Most of the apps that sell poorly on Android that are multiplatform sell poorer than the iOS version not because of piracy or android users not wanting to buy apps, it's because of word of mouth. Can't wait until sometime this Fall I get to experience the disappointment of having to replay content to move on, until then I can be disappointed that Popcap decided my market wasn't worth bothering with until later.

I've been sitting here looking at my book shelf & kindle library for the past half hour thinking of a book that I would most recommend. After I've been mourning the passing of Ryan Davis over at Giantbomb for the past few days, the book which most stands out to me presently is one which I love dearly but is profoundly dumb. That would be The Last Starship From Earth by John Boyd. It's a short piece of speculative fiction that is all together preposterous, cliche, campy and at it's very core a good 'bad' science fiction. The book operates on a conceit that Jesus, instead of dying on the cross, instead lead an assault on Rome toppling the government changing Christianity from being a religion about self-sacrifice & changing it to be a religion about action. Everything in the story is completely unearned, Boyd cheats you by throwing curve balls the entire book but I wouldn't have it any other way. It's his debut novel and it got people like Arthur C Clarke to admire him for it. He once said his ideal reader "should have the mentality of a Southern stock-car racer, be a Baptist with a sense of detachment, have a well-developed sense of the absurd, and be fascinated with the quirks and accomplishments of the human animal." With that, I feel like he knew exactly who his audience was and he didn't care how absurd his premise was for something like The Last Starship From Earth. All he cared for was the aesthetic, the pure unadulterated unnatural camp of the speculative fiction that came before him. I honestly believe he was influential in a lot of the good 'bad' science fiction we now have today, and since Ryan really liked good 'bad' science fiction I figured I would make that my recommendation in this thread.

I just downloaded A Delicate Truth as I saw this drop, really looking forward to it. The AV Club review really sold me on it.

I'm absolutely in love with this book. I'm only half way but in no way was I expecting this. Never read any of Hemingway's, but in The Sun Also Rises it's just awkward and masculine enough to not be distasteful. There's such a awkward optimism in the way Jake Barnes deals with his post-traumatic stress by taking it easy that is quite cathartic.

So why exactly must the story have to be a tragedy? In no way did I feel Mantel was going for a tragedy with Wolf Hall. Quite the opposite, it's a comedy. Clearly supposed to be an optimistic take on this turning point for England & in a broader sense the West itself. By comedy I do not mean she's going some source of laughter, I mean it in the strict classical sense of the word. For me this is one of the strong points of the novel, not a lot of people are doing comedies like this today. edit: this post is going to look weird, I was responding to the people on page 3. I thought I was at the end of the thread.

Well Mantel is definitely taking a pro-Cromwell take on the history as opposed to Thomas More which the history books prefer overwhelmingly. By taking a pro-Cromwell stance Henry has a more favorable position by default. That said, I found him to be no more than an impotent man-child.

Hello Idle Thumbs faithful. I’ve been a fan of Idle Thumbs & Three Moves Ahead for quite a while but I didn’t decide to join to interact with the forums until I started to take part in Idle Book Club. I had a free day today so I decided early that I would go downtown by the bay at a cafe & not come home until all of Wolf Hall was read. Many of my problems when reading of English nobility is that, almost all of it is obnoxiously favorable to the Tudors. It’s funny that just recently while I was playing a lot of Crusader Kings II & blogging about it over at Giantbomb, I was unsuccessfully searching for non-Tudorcentric perspectives on The War of the Roses. While I didn’t find that in Mantel’s novel here, certainly I did find in it that she was purposefully trying to look through history of this time period with different biases than is the norm. These biases, painted a cast of characters that I found abhorrent. There are no heroes there’s only Thomas Cromwell, little more than conservator over the shift in power from nobility & the church to this new class that would be known as bourgeois. This transition was an important one historically, and as disgusting as I find the cast, it felt proper in a way that I haven’t read of this time period. The nobles are a grody bunch, stuck in their ways & eerily modern. I couldn't help but pause while reading the book seeing privileges people walking by in their own right & see in them the cast from the novel. My favourite part of the novel was when Cromwell was visiting the King Francis of France and he says “Monsieur Cremuel, we may not meet again. Your Sudden fortunes may not last. So, come, give me your hand, like a soldier of France. And put me in your prayers.” When I read that part of Wolf Hall, I paused looking up noticing that my County Commissioner, an ambitious man in his own right slightly overweight & toady in appearance & plain-spoken just like Cromwell’s description in the novel was parking his Cadillac to go into a government building for what I assumed would be a meeting. This man, having been caught by the FBI for convincing an opponent to fall out of a race with a bribe, was to me the embodiment of Cromwell. Having to ask myself, was Cromwell really like this or is Mantel projecting modern bias exaggerating his ambition? How little it must be these instruments of the state have changed in their approach in the five centuries since the protestant reformation. King Francis's love of Cromwell was a rather poetic sort of irony, foreshadowing the rest of the novel & putting the transition in power between royalty & bourgeois in greater context. This is both refreshing and exhausting for me to think about. I apologize if this doesn’t fit the parameters of discussion. I just got home from reading the entire book in one sitting & here were my unbridled thoughts. They’ll probably change once I sleep on them.