Vader

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About Vader

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  1. I think that BOTW lacks Mario controls because the run/jump function is not central to the gameplay. It's more important to have the run and action or "attack" buttons in easy access rather than the "jump" button. Being able to run and attack quickly is essential to optimally positioning yourself when engaging multiple enemies in battle. As someone else pointed out, running/jumping feels good but if anything offer a bit of a disadvantage as it needlessly drains the stamina wheel. I still enjoy the feeling it gives, though. I've grown accustomed to shifting my thumb slightly when I want to pull off the run-jump combo. I still think the choice is entirely defensible considering which button combinations actually offer gameplay benefit. Of course, if the game offered button mapping players could try both and decide for themselves which works better. With so many other conventions thrown out, it wouldn't have hurt if Nintendo had given us that option.
  2. The discussion about button placement on Nintendo controllers had the hopeless Nintendo fanboy in me yelling at the pod. The thing is, I have the opposite experience of Chris: my go to gaming machines for my whole life has been PC (keyboard and mouse) or Nintendo. A year or so ago, I got my first Xbox controller for a new gaming pc, and it took me an embarrassingly long time to get used to the "weird" placements of the buttons ("Y" is where "x" should be!) side note: nintendo's button scheme precedes Xbox's by almost a decade. Oh well. I hate the part of me that gets annoyed at this stuff
  3. Modest Tech: The NX Generation (Nintendo Switch)

    It's probably safe to think of Christmas 2017 as the "true launch," the months before then are probably just fans getting to play it early. The lineup from Nintendo is solid for year one of a new console: Zelda, Mario, Splatoon, and new original multiplayer (Arms). If people were expecting more than that, they probably should have tempered their expectations. Those will be plenty to occupy both my time and bank account for a good while. I was never not going to buy the new Nintendo console eventually, but the Mario and Splatoon announcements coupled with the NES Classic shortage fiasco inspired me to preorder fast. Now if only they could bring down the cost of those peripherals...
  4. I will admit I didn't immediately make the sexual connection when I heard the name. I think Danielle is reading it as an S&M reference. Also, I'm glad I can always count on Jake and Danielle to always have opinions on the latest Nintendo news. Every video game podcast needs at least one of those.
  5. Modest Tech: The NX Generation (Nintendo Switch)

    I think I'm OK if the battery life is only a few hours. I'd prefer longer battery life, sure, but the crazy portability of this thing is still killer even if I do need to camp out somewhere with an electrical outlet. Hell, I even like this about the Wii U and have been known to plug the damned unit in on Amtrak Trains and Greyhounds. Once the Switch/Breath of the Wild bundle is announced, I'm preordering that jawn.
  6. Thanks for responding. Sorry if I came across as a little combative. If you couldn't tell it really ruffles my feathers when people come across as dismissive of what I see as the rich cultural output of Latin America. I think perhaps one problem with this discussion is that I am speaking in defense of an entire genre, a genre that has a rich library beyond its Anglo-American or Western adaptations, and you seem to be making what are perhaps isolated critiques of specific works? I'm not sure what specific elf-imbued work of fiction you are referring to here (if any), but perhaps that poorly developed manifestation of a spiritual reality in a material world is what offends you, not the concept of material-spiritual hybridity itself. This could perhaps also explain your comment about critiques of western civilization being "heavy handed." Again, that sounds more like a critique of something you have a specific beef with than of the genre as a whole, unless you truly are just tired of the heaters hating on colonialism. In this sense, maybe your criticisms are not unlike someone saying that all American action flicks are bad because they saw Transformers 2
  7. Yes, thank you! I was going to go into some Anglo American cultural myths if anyone pressed me on this but you beat me to the punch.
  8. I just need to share the email I wrote the show about the Magical Realism discussion. Was hoping what I wrote might get discussed in the show, but understand that the hosts got lots of emails. I appreciated Danielle's humility. I'm sure Rob means well, but I couldn't help but find him a little condescending. He seems to be operating under the assumption that magical thinking in the Secular Anglo Western world doesn't exist and that in this worldview folks just purely operate as rational beings. Rob, everyone sees the world through a mix of magical and materialist thinking. You can have a belief in things like ghosts as a lens of narrative cultural interpretation and also embrace science. That, in fact, is one of the few cross-cultural norms in our post-colonial times. Magical thinking just looks more obvious when you observe it as an outsider of a culture foreign to you. To act as though the Secular Anglo Western lens is so unique and perfectly well reasoned is just patronizing. Maybe I look at the destruction of the planet that your non-spiritual, materialist paradigm has brought down on us and see THAT as a truly irrational mode of thinking. In light of this, it's a little rich to hear someone from this school of thought complain that the anti-colonial perspective is heavy handed. If that's the case, the whole story of the Americas must be a sappy melodrama we should all just forget so we can blow fossils out of our tail pipes and rebuild every piece of dead land to meet our every industrial whim. I love you Rob, but I really think you need to look outside yourself and check out how others might perceive what just seems to you as 100% normative and smart. Oh well. Here's what I wrote. ____________ Hi R&D, Maybe I can help shed some light on this often invoked but seldom understood genre of "magical realism." Magical realism has its roots in the 20th Century Latin American literary tradition. To have a better grasp of what this means, I would highly recommend checking out the works of authors like Isabelle Allende and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. What Danielle described as "inconsistency" can be better understood as "hybridity." That is, people experiencing life on different simultaneous planes of reality. Many mestizo and indigenous folks get this. Beause of the melding of european and indigenous-american cultures, we often interpret things both rationally and narratively, both materialistically and spiritually. Pan's Labyrinth, counter to Rob's point, actually presents an excellent example of this. Ofelia experiences her abusive, imperialistic stepfather both as a harsh, industrial millitarist and as a literal monster that fits in perfectly with her cultural mythology. For a real life site imbued with magical realism, check out Coricancha or Church of Santo Domingo in Cusco, Peru. Coricancha was one once a "temple of the sun" built by the Incas as a place to worship Inti, the sun god. When Spaniards conquered Cusco, they attempted to destroy all the "blasphemous" architecture and cultural sites, but were largely unable to do so because of the Incas' robust architectural designs. Thus, the Spaniards instead converted Coricancha into the Church of Santo Domingo, and today they are simultaneously experienced through the lens of both Christian and Quechua spiritual tradition. (I uploaded an image of Coriconcha). Magical realism is vital and even profoundly political in our time. Its inconsistency comes not from haphazard "world building," but from the way millions of people actually experience the world around us. Love the show, and looking forward to the next cast.
  9. The Next President

    Yikes. As a Philadelphian, the tear Bill Clinton went on that disparaged BLM protestors got me pretty upset. I really think Hillary needs to either keep him in line or just stop letting him be a surrogate for her. I think this piece by Jamelle Bouie in Slate is a thoughtful reflection on Bill Clinton's tirade, and what it says about his complicated legacy. http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2016/04/the_politics_of_bill_clinton_s_crime_bill_were_messier_than_they_seem.html
  10. Miitomo

    I'm @nvader90 Follow me on Twitter and maybe we can miitomo?
  11. The Next President

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/04/05/this-new-york-daily-news-interview-was-pretty-close-to-a-disaster-for-bernie-sanders/ Has anyone here read the NYDN interview with Sanders? I listened to a recording last night and it was pretty... uncomfortable. My heart wants to love Sanders, but my brain keeps getting in the way
  12. The Nintendo Wii U is Great Thread

    I hope so. I'll be so mad if Zelda U is an NX 'sclusive
  13. The Next President

    Luckily, superdelegates often change their minds if the person they initially supported is losing national support. The current superdelegate count is how people intend to vote, not how they necessarily will. See Obama in 2012
  14. The Next President

    Hillary made a similar argument about DOMA recently. She said it was passed (from many Dems perspectives) to short term stop a constitutional amendment that would have prevented marriage rights nation wide, and to preserve the ability of individual states to allow marriage rights even if the climate for that wasn't good nationally (a more draconian law could have stopped marriages in places like Massachusetts). I could see this as either being a bit of politically convenient revisionism or being the outlook she and Bill actually had at the time, it's hard to know. The point is that it's much better to look at the telos of someone's career than individual actions. This will better indicate what they might do when they actually have the power to do it (see also the fact that Lyndon Johnson fought like hell, way harder than Kennedy, for three sweeping civil rights bills as President when as a senator the Texas political climate prevented him from doing much of anything on that front)