Mangela Lansbury

http://harddawn.com/leonard-nimoy-seize-control-of-illuminati/ Conspiracy theorists ask the hard hitting questions the rest of us are ignoring -- like did Leonard Nimoy fake his own death so he could seize control of the illuminati? This is the dumbest conspiracy theory I've seen in a while. I also have a hard time telling if conspiracy theory sites are jokes or not, so this might just be a joke???

I'm pretty sure the common wisdom is that Valve flies by the seat of its pants and does things without really thinking them through. I mean, their in house economist was only qualified to manage the finances of Greece after he left. Look how they're doing.

When I was trying to do the writing thing (which I should try again), I signed up for some web site that was some thing where you wrote exactly 100 words every day, and if you made it through every day off the month, they would push the batch out to be public! It was a way to get comfortable writing daily and letting my writing be seen. I need to get back into writing.

I finally found the perfect way for me to get over my weird aversion to the way people I date communicate: Go out with someone whose first language isn't English to force myself into stronger leniency! This is a terrible solution.

Alton Brown keeps a sword around just for opening champagne, so I don't think he has any room to talk.

I usually just go to Goodwill and look at their cookbooks. I'm sure there will be some Betty Crocker or Southern Home and Living or another staple cookbook for cheap there! Just flip through them and make sure they have dishes that interest you and instructions you understand.

I have opinions about that anime, but I'd have to rewatch it to be able to talk about it. When are y'all recording? And do my opinions have to be important, or can they just be whatever?

More than that, it's drivel about how the game journalist is basically trying to sell you the game at the preview stage. I only got partway through it, but the comparisons he makes say a lot about what he thinks the function of games coverage is. A reviewer isn't a real estate agent, because the real estate agent has a direct monetary interest in you buying what they're selling. And they're not the person working the counter at McDonald's because they're not being paid by a corporation to sell that corporation's product (hopefully...?). It's just dumb. I used to see that kind of response in comics before I stopped paying attention to DC and Marvel too. I don't get the idea that all press about some industries is supposed to be enthusiast press.

You're a monster. But there's a reason I don't want to watch Star Wars, and haven't seen it since I saw it on VHS. I know I was young and dumb when I fell in love with it and I like the version in my head more than I'll ever like the actual movie.

I love the idea of Brothers. The game itself not so much, for reasons already covered here. I think the reason it gets such praise is because it's a really polished game with the kind of personal, almost mythical story that you don't see much in such a well put together package. It deserves praise for what it tried to do, but just as much deserves criticism for the ways it could be better. Sadly, I don't think it got much of that criticism.

I think of coercive tactics as reactionary or negative reinforcement (wear your seatbelt or we'll fine you), and persuasive tactics as proactive or positive reinforcement (PSAs about seatbelts reducing death in accidents). This can be extended to drunk driving too -- get a DUI and your life is fucked versus public initiatives about how drunk driving puts you and everyone around you in danger, or programs some colleges have that will provide you with a ride at a discounted rate (sometimes free) if you can't get yourself home. This is complicated by things like the ACA which has a persuasive element (you have to get insured, so we'll help you pay for it if it's a high burden) and a coercive element (but if you don't get insurance, we'll fine you). The real world is usually messy like that, though!

I'm so sorry, Tegan. It's heartbreaking when someone surprises you with their shittiness, and that's just compounded by the surrounding already shitty circumstances. I'm so sorry that you have to go through this. Nobody deserves to have to question their ability to survive, least of all rad people like you.

I wish they'd find, if not a pair or trio, at least a quarto for any casting. This round robin shit gives VERY spotty coverage.

I'm very into games, and I wouldn't have given Eve a second thought if I hadn't known people who worked at the company when I was back home.

I think I was wrong from my first listen-through and mostly agree with Sean! I still disagree with the tone of the conversation, but I think I'm in agreement with how everyone thinks about the indie- v alt-game thing.

If this is fair in this point in the conversation -- I've been a part of many kickstarters, few of them for games, and every kickstarter has had an early response to people who have been really upset about them paying out something. Even when I just kickstarted a book that was about an island off Hong Kong, it was there. I think with Kickstarter, there's some hypercapitalist subset of backers that expect an immediate payout. You can look at the history of John Campbell of Pictures of Sad Children for a worst case scenario thing, but even with assuming most of them getting better respondents, I think kickstarter backers tend to have a VERY abusive channel.

It's not, though! Twitter is still private information that someone is choosing to make public. You aren't entitled to anyone's private information, no matter how public they choose to make it.

I'm really upset that my neighbors started closing their blinds. Why would they have open glass portholes into their lives if I wasn't allowed to look in?

Wittgenstein's Mistress by David Markson is the only one that's springing to mind. It's a 280 page stream of consciousness rant from the last woman on earth.

This just makes me think of all the conversations I have with my sister where she has to hang up because one of her kids is doing a thing, then she calls me back later and the kid starts throwing a fit about something else and she's just like OH FINE WHATEVER, HERE, IT'S FINE, JUST BE QUIET. Then she sighs and just says, "One thing at a time with these boys..."

Maybe! I don't know, maybe I should go back and listen to that section again, but it seemed like he was saying that film could be difficult because film has such a history and a cultural foothold that the language of it is more universal and understood, but games didn't have that kind of cultural cachet so they should couch their messages in more accessible (which I read as homogenous, either in mechanics or themes) ways?

I'm on the other side of this! Some of the best films I've seen -- even some of the best jokes I've seen in film! -- are incredibly offputting if they're not your thing. People like Wojciech Bakowski and Sylvia Schedelbauer make very inaccessible movies, and they're amazing, unique artists with very distinctive voices -- and they're okay that they're never going to make a wildly successful Hollywood movie because that's not what they're trying to do. I don't think pushing people to create accessible work is the right framing since it kind of seems like a way of pushing people towards homogeneity. I think encouraging people to inspect the choices they make in the creative process and ask themselves why they make them is a better framing. If you're making your game this arcane, cryptic thing, why is that? If you're doing it because you want to be cool to the alt games crowd or because people liked this other game and it was kind of cryptic, that's probably not a good choice to make. If you're doing it because that's what you want to make or it's the way you want to present whatever it is you have to say, that's exactly the choice to make. But pushing people in either direction, or even saying "this approach is better," isn't something that sits well with me. Everything is culturally meaningful on some scale. You don't have to make a massively salable product for it to be a cultural object. Sometimes all you have to do is make a little thing about how you feel in a moment and present it in a way that you know how, and let it resonate with the people it's going to resonate with. If you want to engage that 15 year old who's just starting to get to find the words and ideas that feel right to him and it's important to you that she be able to find and understand what you're making, then make that thing. If you want to make something else, then make that. Both mean just as much, but they'll mean it to different people. And since I couldn't find anything on YouTube by either of those filmmakers, have an excerpt from Encounters With Your Inner Trotsky Child from Jim Finn, a 90's new age self-help style short. Kind of inaccessible, but pretty fun.

http://i.imgur.com/Z9ruTno.png

I've recently changed my let's-check-internet-connectivity Google search from dogs wearing sunglasses to dogs on skateboards. I'm happy with this change in my life.

For the sauerkraut -- she went to her grandma's house once and she was chopping up all this cabbage, and my old roommate was very interested in what was going on because this was so much cabbage, what would you do with all that! So she helped her prepare everything, and then they put it all in jars to help with this other stuff and then, when they went to put them in the garage, there were already jars there! So she asked what it was and her grandma let her open one and it was rotting and disgusting and had obviously gone bad (after all, I'll have you know, her grandmother was a terrible person who was constantly showing up her parents and trying to buy their love by giving them money when they couldn't afford things, she was the WORST) and because of this experience over 20 years ago, the sight or smell of sauerkraut will make her gag. And then this one time she was sick -- like really sick, when she was 5 or 6 or maybe it was 7 but young anyway, so sick they didn't know if she would make it! -- and she kept coughing up all this phlegm and it was REALLY gross and wouldn't stop coming up! It was chunky and awful and terrible and there was nothing good about her life ever, but especially not this taste, and the smell when she coughed it up into her nose! But anyway, she got better eventually (there were a lot of doctors, but she never had to go to the hospital for an overnight stay, and one doctor gave her a lollipop but she couldn't even taste it with all the grossness, the doctor was a cruel man with no love in his heart), and when she had a sandwich on wheat bread it tasted EXACTLY like her phlegm had! So she's never eaten wheat bread since because the smell just reminds her of that terrible awful no good taste. I've tried to capture the rambling, the tangents, and the general woe is me tone in the stories to justify "I don't like it." I hope it comes across.