BobbyBesar

For the record, since nobody else mentioned it, nice deep cuts on the thread title.

Is Nicky as a nickname for the devil an older reference I'm unaware of? If not, does that mean you can draw a line between this "little Nicky" and this Little Nicky?

Well, she still puts on her panties one leg at a time, if you know what I mean!* *I don't. Also, I'm glad and slightly amazed that somebody else made the Teen Witch connection.

A couple things about Tojamura don't make sense to me: I believe there's a brief aside where Ben sends Jerry to Japan to check out Tojamura's background to see if he's legit. IIRC, we even see a quick scene of them on the phone, and Jerry says he checks out. Does that mean that Catherine has a real Japanese secret society backer or something? Or just that Jerry is really terrible at his job? (Which he doesn't seem to be, because he found 2 sets of legit previous investors). Also, Tojamura's disguise was so laughable, I pretty much immediately identified who it really was, and assumed that it was intentionally being played as a soap-opera-y farce. It's hard to know the context of the show and the unfamiliarity with asian actors during the time it originally aired though.

Nobody mentioned a bit of (obvious) significance to the "The King and I" joke: it famously featured a caucasian actor in yellow-face (Yul Brynner as the King of Siam). I also really don't understand Donna's game with stealing the secret diary. It seems like if she had a modicum of patience, she would have gotten everything she wanted without resorting to stupid heists. Even from the perspective of stupid teens, it seemed like a weird choice.

Just catching up on podcasts, and this was generally my interpretation. Norma's mom is just shitty to Norma. It isn't that she won't give Norma a falsely good review just because she's her daughter, she's overly critical and won't ever give a good review _because_ she's her daughter. Nothing is ever good enough for her. Don't they also imply that they're somewhat estranged when her mom shows up? I imagine that Norma has a sister who's the "good daughter" who always screws up, but her mother dotes on her and always bails her out regardless. Earlier, Norma described herself and Ed as basically, people who sit at the bottom of the hill while shit rolls down on them (paraphrasing). Norma's mom gives a peek at how her personality could have developed that way. For the record, it didn't occur to me that Norma's mom was the critic (partially because the critic storyline was horrible and I just wanted it to go away), but also partially because the dynamic of her mom being overly critical of the food is just a dynamic that I can accept as a mother-daughter thing. (Although there was enough specificity that I wondered vaguely if Norma's mom had run the diner previously).

Semantic Satiation.

I need some time to process all you're saying, Tycho, so I'll try to respond in due time. But for now, I'll just mention that inevitably, these conversations end with me thinking about how ultimately all life is equally meaningless in the context of the (godless) universe, so really nothing I do matters one way or another. I don't mention that to stifle others conversation, but just to note why I tend to disengage from the discussion after a certain point.

Are Steven Universe's numbers any good? It always seemed like it didn't have a clear target market to me.

It wasn't really intended to be a blanket indemnfication against criticism, so much as simply an acknowledgement that people are complicated and it's a complicated topic. First, let me be clear that I don't condone cannibalism (oh boy, this is getting weird fast). But I do think humans are basically just animals, so I don't see that much difference between test tube babies and pigs. So, when I think about it hard, I'm really not sure if your argument leads me to conclude I shouldn't eat pigs, or is instead forcing me to re-evaluate why I think it's bad to eat babies. But nobody (well, maybe a very very few) people would come to that conclusion. You can construct arguments about self awareness and nervous system complexity or whatever, but those are pretty much all post-hoc justifications. If people are just animals it comes back to: some animals are okay to eat, some are not, and the distinction is kind of arbitrary and seems based mostly on unconscious visceral reactions. To address the broader topic, I would probably argue that the statement "we should treat all species exactly the same" needs justification. As Gaizo mentioned, a lot of justifications for slavery (intelligence, for example) fell apart under any kind of scrutiny. I'm not convinced anything similar will be possible with the intelligence / suffering metrics commonly used to justify killing animals. The environmental arguments I certainly buy, but those are really practical arguments, not a priori ethical ones. Which is to say: I agree with you re: incorrigibility of speciesists. There isn't really any argument you can make that will make me change my mind, because it isn't a logical position. If that makes me Pig-Hitler, or whatever, that's fine with me.

I haven't read this whole topic because it seems to have escalated fairly quickly. I did want to chime in with a bit of a recommendation about a book that's done a very good job of informing the way that I feel about eating meat, as well as about general animal rights topics: Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat by Hal Herzog. If I had to boil it down to a single thesis, I'd say that it's that people hold internally contradictory beliefs all the time, about all matter of things, particularly about animals. To an extent, that just isn't a big deal: there's no particular reason to expect people's beliefs to be logically coherent. If you want to analyze your own beliefs by that rubric,that's fine, but if you don't want to: that's fine, too. Apparently the NY Times recently held a contest to identify ethical arguments in favor of meat eating. His entry is a reasonable distillation of his arguments (as is his recurring column, in general). The "happy animal" argument that animals-for-consumption would not have existed at all unless raised for consumption is a particular one that has always troubled me from a logical perspective, as it seems specious, but I find it difficult to completely refute it.

I feel more or less the same way. It seems like they've been pushing mythology quite a bit in the last few episodes, so you have something to look forward to.

So, through a weird series of events I became aware this weekend of World of Golden Eggs. Aside from some seriously catchy music, it's fairly confusing. It feels like something that came out of adult swim style alternative audience channel. It's sort of a cross between...Beavis and Butthead, Aqua Teen Hunger Force, and South Park? And about "America", as defined by stereotypes held by the Japanese. And also it has some sort of English education function, which appears to be part of the joke? Part of the joke seems to be "look how shitty this is", which, while not unheard of in anime, seems followed through to an unusual degree here. Does anybody have any experience with this? It has an absurdist / variety show sketch comedy aesthetic, and some things feel like they're derived from the weird things Japan calls comedy. But...yeah. It's weird.

Well, with regards to old Grimey, from some of the articles discussing the 25th anniversary (some of which were probably linked in this thread), it appears that Oakley and Weinstein thought they were destroying Homer. They assumed The Simpsons was on the verge of being canceled (for general senescence) and were systematically disassembling it to see what they could build out of those weird parts. That doesn't really directly account for Maude's death, but I suppose by that point the writers had simply internalized Homer's impenetrable blamelessness as core to the character, to whit: there was nothing left to destroy because he was already well into being a caricature of himself.

Regarding the Katamari thing, in an old Shoot Club column, Tom Chick coined it "bleed through".

Thanks, that's interesting about the way the data is constructed. I assumed that it was harder data, like tournament appearances / wins. The fact that it's consensus ranking data is in some ways better, and in other ways worse. For instance, how does consensus ranking data square with the speculation that Mewtwo rose in the ranks due to simply popularity, i.e. "I beat you with the worse character"? If that's the case, then he should have remained at the bottom because he's still the worst. (Unless increased usage revealed increased nuance in the character, which increased his overall rank, but in that case shouldn't people have started using the new worst character (losing to Pichu would have to be more embarassing)? Unless there's a sweet spot of "worst that's even potentially winnable with. So, even (maybe especially with) knowledge of the data set, the data analysis is definitely suspect at best.

I believe that they had established that Jacques bartended at the roadhouse in previous episodes before he got wise to the heat being on him and escaped north of the border. Ed, at least, was familiar with him (and presumably the entire sherriff's dept was) and Ed makes a point of stepping away when Jacques comes on shift at the table because he would have recognized him despite the terrible disguise.

I'd never get elective plastic surgery, because I'm afraid that if I change my appearance, I wouldn't know who I was anymore, and I'd have a weird existential crisis and subsequent nervous breakdown.

The discussion about race representation in games reminded me of an AV Club article from a while back where they evaluated an episode of the Amos and Andy television show. This kind of discussion is probably fairly commonplace in critical race theory, but that article encapsulated a lot of issues therein. It talks specifically about how something can be appealing from a personal perspective (as per the reader's mail who noted that they appreciated an Asian character with non-caricatured physical features) while remaining generally abhorrent in a broader social context. But the main thing they highlight, and something that I've taken away from that article, is that when there is minimal representation, it puts too much pressure on those individual instances to be all things to all people. Amos and Andy featured a broad cast of black characters which included some ugly stereotypes, but also included some progressive subversions of those stereotypes. In a medium with broader representation, the comedy aspects (as noted by the historian weren't entirely dissimilar from contemporary comedies) could have passed without comment*. The problem isn't just that there's a black man that's presented as a lazy buffoon*: it's that that lazy buffoon is the ONLY black man on television. But is that Amos and Andy's fault? What is their responsibility as the only television show to even bother featuring black characters to begin with? Similarly with Ubi and Far Cry 4. What is their responsibility with regards to Pagan Min. Is it enough to put the character in there, or do they need to account for all the other characters that other games (ones they can't control) didn't create? *Amos and Andy is incredibly interesting and fertile ground for this debate in general. As noted in that article, the TV show was relatively mild, but much of the backlash associated with the title comes from it's days as a radio program, which did feature white voice-actors doing what amounts to blackface on the radio.

It depends on how you read it. The idea that _individual_ politicians are selfish and can't be trusted is a pretty distinctly post-Nixon phenomenon. The idea that Government in general is prone to abuse of power despite the best intentions of the individuals in it is closer to a founding principal, the source of the whole checks-and-balances theory of government. It may be less pronounced. America has the myth of social mobility, which allows people to envision themselves as becoming members of the super-wealthy class. Many countries with more explicitly stratified societies don't even entertain the idea that people can better their position, socially. It's absolutely a myth at this point, as social mobility in the US is, as I recall, at an all time low, and even at it's high point was never really all that much better than other countries. But the idea that you just need money as opposed to money AND a title, for instance, makes people think they've got a chance.

Interesting. One thing that article leaves out is the actual distribution of the wins. It lists a hard ordering of the characters, but that implies they're evenly distributed. If the top 5 character represent 90% of the wins, that describes a very different (and probably less interesting) competitive scene than if that top 5 characters account for, say, just 30% of the wins. You can infer some of this from the volatility of the ratings. I.e. if there's a lot of constant jockeying across multiple ranks, that implies that they're closer together. However, even that's not necessarily true (i.e. the best character could be consistently, but only very slightly better than the next character). In the Melee dataset, Jigglypuff is definitely the most interesting data point. But aside from her, the top 6 seem remarkably stable, which re-inforces the general impression of high level Smash being Fox vs. Fox all the time. Also, that X axis is totally bonkers, so it does a terrible job informing you about the time scales involved. While the spirit (that the meta changed significantly over time without patching) is sound, I don't really trust his data analysis at all. I'd be really interested to see his raw data set though.

Also, regarding the deer antlers, it certainly is a charmingly guile-less technique if presented sincerely. However, my referent for it is much worse than Blues Brothers: There's a stuffed owl behind him.

I found at least one concrete example of revisional changes, in SF3. Note the example includes bug fixes as well as specific balance changes, by making unblockable moves blockable. (it isn't clear to me if that is an intentional balance change or an introduction of a new bug, but it would change the meta regardless.) http://tcrf.net/Street_Fighter_III:_3rd_Strike_(Arcade) Also, for Darkstalkers 2,which are more explicit balance changes: http://tcrf.net/Night_Warriors:_Darkstalkers%27_Revenge_(Arcade)

Yeah, I believe it does, but those are in addition to the official releases above. There are also some other releases that MAME apparently doesn't have dumped. I found a reference to some of those in regard to reproducing specific bugs (such as 910218), but I don't know if that's transcription error or it's a separate release.

If you've seen NBC's Hannibal, the imagery of the antler-man has it's own whole set of implications and baggage. Also, while we've discussed Josie's racial portrayal before, it's interesting to think of how different Josie's portrayal would have been with an Italian woman rather than a Chinese one. Many of the exact same scenes and even lines could have been re-used, but it's difficult to imagine that the performances would have been the same.