ewokskick

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Posts posted by ewokskick

  1. Posted

    Just picked up first The Wicked & The Divine and Sex Criminals. Read SC before and loved it but WicDiv is new for me and it turns out I love it too.

     

    Comics are so dang good these days.

     

    Anyone read KSD's Pretty Deadly? I keep meaning to check out her work but haven't found a good, non-superhero way in yet

     

    Jennegatron sent me here to weigh in.  I personally love the shit out of Pretty Deadly.  IMO, it is one of the best looking comic books on the market and it does a lot of interesting things with page structure and story-telling that you don't get anaywhere else.  However, there is a reason a lot of books don't do what Pretty Deadly does.  It is challenges the reader.  Unlike KSD's superhero work, it doesn't hand hold at all.  So I've read online that some people became frustrated.  If you're used to popcorn comics it's probably pretty hard to crack, but I don't think it is all that difficult if you read carefully.  The main thing to know about Pretty Deadly is that it is a folk story (told between a butterfly and a raddit skeleton).  If the story tells you that death did something and a crow did something else.  That isn't metaphor that is just what happened.  A literall crow or crow-human did something and death incarnate did something.  The other thing people don't like about it is that Emma Rios has a European comic art style.  She isn't in the Kirby tradition.  Art's subjective, but people who don't like Emma Rios's art are as close to objectively wrong as is possible in art. 

     

    Overall, I think the book is challenging, but beautiful and lyrical.  It has deep themes that focus on men's destructive possession of women and how to make up for the things you fucked up in the past.  The book uses a lot of embedded storytelling: the opening is a butterfly and a rabbit telling a story that starts off with traveling story-tellers in their story.  In the end, the story has a kind of stisfying didactic ending that you'd expect from a folk tale.  Personally, I think PD is of the best comics I've read.  YMMV.

     

    If you're just wanting to get into KSD in general, I think Bitch Planet might be the safer bet, but I think PD is the better book so far.  Both are amazing and the differences show her versatility as a writer.

  2. Posted

    Interesting things about quinine, the first European treatment for malaria: it's what gives tonic water its flavour. Also, the threat of malaria was one of the big things that prevented widespread European of settlement of Africa and Southeast Asia. Once quinine was developed, European powers were able to accelerate colonization.

     

    This is a classic example I like to use with students when talking about colonialism.  A lot of my students carry some notions about the natural (or environmental dominance) of Europe of Africa, Asia, and the Americas.  Most people are famailar with this argument in the form of Jared Diamond's Guns, Germ and Steel.  However, the quinine example is interesting because it showed that colonialism actually relied on indigenous technical and environmental knowledge to succeed. This knowledge was globalized via colonialism and essential to the colonial project.  Without the discovery of quinine in Lima the colonialism of Africa would not have been possible.  Similarly, without the colonialism of Africa the colonies of the Americas could not have succeeded because they brought labor in the form of slave sand technical knowledge about agriculture (e.g. African slaves knew how to grow rice and their captors didn't).  When we look at the actual practices of colonialism, the story becomes far more complicated than guns, germs, and steel.  Diamond forgot about the power of knowledge and how it radically changes the relationship between nature and society.  The malaria which Diamond argues prevented the development of Africa also would have made them impossible to conqueror (beyond the small European port cities) if it weren't for knowledge taken from the Americas.  The contextual historical explanations always buck the easy environmental narratives that capture our imagination.

  5. Posted

    Oh god, yeah, I saw that one. I can only imagine the toll it takes on a person, especially when it happens over the course of weeks. Anita Sarkeesian must be made of titanium.

    I didn't get any death threats this time*, but then again, I'm not showing the utter audacity of disagreeing while being a woman.

    * My team did get plenty of death threats when we were working on Fallout 3, including at least one very graphic comic. Eastern Europe takes its Fallout very seriously, but not as seriously as 4chan seems to take its misogyny.

     

    My awful first thought was "Wait, there was acutally someone that didn't like Fallout 3?"

     

    In all seriousness, I can barely handle reading that stuff said about other people.  I can't imagine it being a part of my daily life.

  6. Posted

    Well, it seems that these people's harrassment has worked, insofaras their intent seemed to be to drive the people they were harrassing away.

     

    When gamers complain about being stereotyped as immature boy/man-children, I'll remember when they were harrassing people online.

     

    When gamers complain that the genre isn't taken seriously as an artistic medium, I'll remember when they drove away the genre's most talented critics.

     

    When gamers complain that there aren't any good sites/gaming publications, I'll remember how they treated the journalists they had.

     

    When gamers complain about the stangnant state of mainstream games, I'll remember that they hated calls for diversity.

    Fucks games.  Fuck gamers.  Is there any reason I shouldn't just give up on all this bullshit and hate gamers like everyone else?

  7. Posted

    I made a highlight video for the first round.  Since I am amateur as heck at making videos I either messed up the quality or maybe twitch downloads are always low quality, but it looks bad unless watched in HD.  Anyway, give it a look.  It has some cool plays, I think.

     

  8. Posted

    Is anyone else watching it?

     

    In case you don't know what it is, it is an amateur Dota tournament featuring game industry professionals.  Among those participants include idle thumber-s Nick Breton and Sean Vanaman as well as Dota Today co-host Brad Muir and regular guess Ayesee.

     

    If you an interested, you can find out about the teams here and you can look at the bracket here (spoilers). 

     

    You can watch it at http://www.twitch.tv/rektreational or http://www.twitch.tv/rektreational2.  There are VODs on those twitch accounts for those interested in seeing some of the recent games.

     

    There is also a rektreational subreddit which has some updates and info at http://www.reddit.com/r/Rektreational/.

  10. Posted

    But that's not really a colour commentator is it?

    Most color commentators are trying to humanize the event or make it exciting.  There are very few heavey on analysis.  In my opinion, it's because sports (and e-sports as well) are pretty unintelligible if you don't know all the rules.  However, if someone can give you the human and emotional weight to the event than anyone can enjoy it.  I mean could you imagine tuning into a Dota2 match for the first time and being hit with  a bunch of accronyms, play calls, and stats?  It would be totally unintelligible trying to understanding the basics of the game is hard much less the statistical analysis.  The best thing about Ayesee is that he gets this and is obviously doing things to make the game more watchable for people like me who watched my first pro game (that he called) fter playing 2 or 3 games.  It's amazing how thrilling it was and how well he made me feel like I knew what was happening.

  12. Posted

    I meant analysis during a game, but thank you. I know enough to ask some questions. I have general knowledge about some things and I'm familiar with multiple forms of managing lords in general. I need specifics, which is not to say you have not provided useful information, but more to say that my competition watching brain demands them. I'm a member of SABR (well, was until I let my dues lapse), I watch All-22 film of football games, I know where to look up my hockey team's Fenwick scores, Kevin Durant was a deserving winner of the MVP award because he led the league in PER. I want my casters to go into strategic depth, because the basic tactics and strategy get absorbed easily.

     

    I like numbers'n stuff.

     

    This is so not the point of your post, but PER is a really terrible way to measure how good a player is.  First, it barely takes into account defense (supposedly fouls are a slight indirect indicator of defense).  Second, it reward players who iniate the offense and shoot a lot (e.g. Kevin Durant's numbers are inflated because he shot more than anyone in the league).  Lastly and most importantly, PER has no predictive value.  That is, PER doesn't equate to wins very well.  That is probably the best test of any new advanced metric and PER fails at it.

     

    Anyway, I like numbers too, but I don't want that from my sports casters.  To me the excitement of sports or other live competitions is the feeling that anything can happen in the moment.  So, I want the announcers to describe what is happening with as much clarity as possible, and then to get excited when something important happens.  Just normal sport, I want a play-by-play caller like Ayesee (who is really good at this) and a color commentator/analyst.  I don't want a stats guy calling the guy.  I love reading those write-ups afterwards, but to me it cheapens the excitement of the moment and makes it more difficult to enjoy casually.