Roderick

I'd like you to read the golden, golden comments on this Kotaku topic about a possible Mass Effect MMO, detailing the moral troubles an apparently young Christian father (or troll) had buying Mass Effect 2 for his son. http://kotaku.com/#!5790724/surprise-a-mass-effect-mmo-totally-makes-sense

Really? When I meant learning hiragana and katakana, obviously that does not imply being able to read or even write them fluently, that's a slow process of weeks if not months. But simply recognizing the shapes and knowing which sounds belong to them takes little more than a week and the dedication to write the list down three times a day. I guarantee you'll get this shit down within a week. Learning Japanese on your own has its drawbacks, Vimes is absolutely right. Learning a language is most efficient when you can speak and write it with other people. But why can't you strike up an online contact? I practice speaking over Skype and write e-mails to friends half in Japanese. I won't deny it's hard mustering the motivation to keep doing this every day (which is what it takes if you want to get anywhere), but at only an hour of study a day I make good progress.

I'd like to nuance what Kolzig wrote about the kanji a little. There are about 40,000 kanji all in all and practically no one knows them all. Whether Japanese all carry pocket dictionaries, I wouldn't know, but the comforting fact is that you don't need to know all kanji to function in society. The Japanese government has compiled a list of about 2300 kanji that are used in society. Know these and you'll be able to read any sign, newspaper or article out there. This is functionally all you (and most Japanese themselves) need to know. 2300. That's way better than 40,000. Like, way. I started studying in January and my aim for this year is to learn the first 1000 of that list. The rest next year. This is completely possible. The first thing I learned when I began learning Japanese is how incredibly much the brain can absorb if you're even a trifle dedicated to it. This is something that you don't learn on school, because most of the time you're not actually there to learn things, just to sit out time. This is horrible, but fortunately besides the point. -- Katakana en hiragana are alphabets in the same way ours is, they phonetically describe syllables (ours obviously uses letters, not whole syllables). In Japanese language it's all about syllables, which is why borrowed words usually sound completely different. They've first been mangled through the system of syllables. Kanji are a different matter, they are symbols describing whole words, or sometimes you compose multiple kanji like a goddamn Transformer to form a single whole word. It's best to take it one step at a time and start off at the beginning with Rosetta Stone or www.textfugu.com or this essential grammar site: http://www.guidetojapanese.org/learn/grammar. Kanji are a rabbit hole some levels deep, but if you take it step by step it can be extremely exhilirating and rewarding to find out how it all works.

See, I knew there was a reason I started learning this stuff last January. Nostradamus can kiss my ass. Oh, what Kolzig says. Do not learn romaji. You might feel it's a good way to start out, but it's laughably useless. Step 1: Learn hiragana & katakana (shouldn't take more than a week each if you're ambitious) Step 2: Start learning the kanji and dig into grammar. There's tons of resources on the web for this, and Rosetta Stone is an excellent way to put down a basis if you flesh it out with other methods and studies.

The Quebecois are proto-French? I'd say the French are the proto-Quebecois.

I had a big Baader-Meinhoff yesterday with the word 'braggadocio'. You'd THINK this is an obscure word, yet I encountered it in Oblivion the day before yesterday, looked it up, and then it appeared in True Grit a day later. Well, Baader my Meinhoff!

Still want to watch Torrente. After the infamous Consolevaniareview of the game, it's practically a must.

There's little about genderspecific nonsense that I do not hate with a passion. BS like specific colors being 'male' or 'female', or dress codes like skirts being for girls and pants for men, or in the hobby sphere: sports and home improvement for men, flower arrangement and knitting for women. It's all arbritrary bullshit, patterns that emerge culturally yet have no inherent value or meaning. Yet it does push people into not being 'able' to do things they might really like. Of course, in today's society where everyone's a freak it's more OK than it used to be to step outside of the boundaries of your gender, but damn if there isn't still a medieval mindset in most people about this stuff. A simple thing like me having a pattern of cool looking silver flowers on my week planner is enough for people to go deeeuuhhhh?

When I was young I carried a huge plastic baby doll all over the house that I named and fed. I also played with my sister's barbies, as well as 'my' toys. I think if you don't make a big deal out of it as a parent, there's little harm done. If you're looking for really gender-neutral toys, go for Playmobil/Duplo/Lego. Sure it has lines geared more towards boys or girls, but as far as toys go Lego is pretty much the best. Also; fucking Noam Chomsky, exposing the ugliest sides of our world, grmbl, grmbl.

I deleted it because brkl came in and chose to be all concise and helpful. He's the real fucker Anyway, I'll be going with quite some likeliness now, so if anyone is coming and wants to meet up for some shenanigans, it could be arranged!

The Diabolical Box was better in some ways, worse in others. I disliked that the games had become both less inventive and tricky, yet also way too difficult in ways that were not fun (huge math puzzles). It felt like a rehashing of the first game. Now, the THIRD game, The Unwound Future, is where it's at. Fantastic integration of puzzles and story, a great narrative, interesting characters. So far it's the pinnacle of the series, though with the Specter's Flute and Mask of Miracle on the horizon the series can still grow. Personally I'm looking forward the most to the crossover with Phoenix Wright. If they manage to marry the gameplay of the two games in a decent way, it has incredible potential.

I was there once on a press trip for World in Conflict. The city was foggy and beautiful and felt distinctly 'Nordic', which I found very appealing. Pity you can't go =(

Three seasons already? I thought the taiga dramas ran for exactly one year (about 50 episodes), not in seasons. Ryomaden might be different of course... I'm hauling in the series, but it's a slow process unfortunately.

Are any of you crazy Scandinavian people attending the Nordic Game conference in Malmö? Because I might be.

Good luck with both ventures!

I doubt anyone's looking for Old Gregg.

Why couldn't it be an expression of their own sexual empowerment? It's going a little off-topic, but why should women wearing sexy outfits necessarily be a sign of repression, slavery and anti-feminism? It would be if there's an element of (male) coercion involved, but if they wear it in their own fantasy segments where they're kicking ass, I don't see the problem.

He meant Leonidas was having a gay old time in Bedrock.

I didn't think any of the action sequences were interesting in the slightest. The samurai battle was atrocious, completely devoid of tension. I didn't think the movie was that sexist though. It had lots of scantily clad women, but thematically that's what you get in a brothel, and narratively it was about these women empowering themselves to get through an ordeal. In the end, their strenght wins through, so I fail to see what was sexist about it. I mean to say: the movie doesn't need that claim to suck outrageous balls.

I was mistaken about Sin City, that was Robert Rodriguez. 300 was exciting and tense. It was ridiculous, but it made sense and the fighting had purpose. The abundant CG and slow motion scenes had the very clear goal of emphasizing that this battle was Epic.

Just came back from Sucker Punch in the cinema and hooo boy, is it awful. Yesterday I happened to see the excellent Harry Brown on the small screen and the contrast couldn't be more telling. Where Sucker Punch is a mess of a movie that in the end is about nothing and riddled with flashy, vapid action/video gamey scenes that fail spectacularly to either entertain or enthrall, Harry Brown is muted and quiet, slowly building up tension and interest using little more than the landscape of Michael Caine's face. Any scene in Harry Brown involving two people menacing each other with words or knives is unendingly more exciting than Sucker Punch's unfulfilling use of CG Bullshit. That's in capitals because CG Bullshit has become a hallmark of bad movies. Zack Snyder seemed to know how to handle this stuff with 300, but in Sucker Punch he makes amateur mistake after mistake.

Bah humbug, the deal already fell through: the demand was for an income 4.5 times your gross income. That means the apartments are only available for rich people or couples. Ironically, if you have so much money to spare, there's no reason not to take a real house in the first place, negating much of the use of building such high class properties (in areas that have no historic value such as the inner city). Meh. I'll just search on.

That's a good tip, I'll try that next time. Orvidos, feel free to use it, I'd be flattered if it turns up somewhere. I've found a prospect today, one that seems pretty good so far. It's expensive at 700 European Coins a month, but it's brand spankin' new and has an additional room that I can turn into my Lego room

I had a doozy of an infinite loop problem with my Radeon a while back when I installed new drivers to play Magicka. After a bunch of bullshit I finally just reinstalled the old drivers and everything was A-OK again. That might not work for you if your card is well and truly borked, but I'm just saying -it might actually be a driver problem.

Yes, multiple times. I even went upstairs in the middle of the night. It was quieter after that, but I can guarantee this will happen again and again -the house is just too thin-walled to prevent it. And in any case, it doesn't solve the warmth problem, nor the independence problem. I just gotta get out.