BobbyBesar

Arcade fighting games did have a patch cycle of sorts. In addition to Super / Turbo, etc, releases, arcade Street Fighter machines did have various different revisions. My understanding is that these revisions within the same title were usually for bug-fixes, but some balance changes may have been included as well. For instance, I believe that the famous "Guile Handcuffs" bug was patched out in later revisions of Street Fighter 2: World Warriors long before SF2: CE was released. MAME lists the following official revisions of Street Fighter 2: I'm not as into that world as I used to be, so I may be mis-remembering what exactly each release included. It's very hard to find detailed information on these. Similarly, the SF2 Turbo HD remix release explicitly supported enabling / disabling some bug fixes, although I don't recall which of them actually saw release in various arcade revisions or not.

It's only vaguely thematically related, but I feel like I should mention the character history of Final Fight's Poison here.

Even before the PSP Go, custom firmware that let you rip any UMD to memory stick was the true form of the PSP. The shock of running games off a memory stick and realizing the battery life was now more than doubled was really a revelation.

Ontology is a harsh mistress.

Pretty much my only familiarity with the Montage Parody scene is this Farming Simulator video: As far as I'm concerned, that's all I will ever need.

There's a sociological concept of "social capital" theory which basically describes this. Basically, by having an awareness of popular culture, you are acquiring social capital that you can then "spend" on others to strengthen social bonds (and establish your position within the social order). It's a high-falutin' way of saying that it's good to know about things because you can talk about them at the water cooler. This is partially why I watch football (also, it makes me feel like a real 'murican) So, I do a little bit of a sociopath / alien thing with some pop culture; if Taylor Swift is popular, I should experience it to try to better understand my own society. It can also provide a handy cover for guilty pleasures if you happen to have shame about that kind of thing. (In the case of Taylot Swift specifically, I find her fascinating as a nexus for society's views on female sexuality - as discussed in this thread - and constructed media narratives - Shake it Off is very much a response to her media image and critics). Of course, it depends on how you define your social circle. Here on this forum, having knowledge of Pokemon and the Indie Games scene can arguably be worth more than knowledge of Duck Dynasty and Miley Cyrus. It gets more complicated with sub-cultures because then there's also a huge element of signaling that you belong. (Not having knowledge of Taylor Swift can be signaling mechanism of its own, for instance, fir the above mentioned people with peer groups that specifically avoided pop music.) When I think about it too hard, I always end up being suspicious of myself, because who's to say that I like what I actually like or if it's all just social signaling. And then what am I saying about myself to you by communicating this post? It gets very ouroborus-y very quickly.

I own an embarrassing number of DS games, due to a combination of a fantastic library, lower default price point, and disposable income. Probably not over 100, but it's probably close. 10 years is probably enough time to put together a DS "canon", but agreed on many of the above. TWEWY is great, EBA / Ouendan are great. Meteos was pretty good (although Lumines was probably better). Canvas Curse was a great new spin on the platformer that showed off what the touchscreen could do. Devil Survivor was pretty good. It also popularized picross in the US with Picross DS, which is great. I spent a ton of time with the various Advance Wars and Castlevanias on the DS. Despite being partially sold on 3D graphics, it was possibly the last great bastion of 2d gaming. It's sad the Lost in Blue franchise didn't really survive that era (other than a mediocre Wii release). Infinite Space was pretty good, although I lost steam with it long before it ended.

Gerbil, have you read Carl Wilson's Let's Talk About Love? It really transformed the way I think about quality, authenticity, and taste.

Hey, I'm authentically Chinese, and enjoy cooking, so I'm a unimpeachable authority. Rasa Malaysia - I don't often look for Chinese food recipes online, but when I do, I frequently end up here. SAM mentioned Tea Eggs upthread, their Tea Egg recipe is more or less correct, but tea eggs are absolutely something you should play with to-taste. The reason I don't often do Chinese food recipes online because of Pei Mei, which is the gold standard in Chinese cookbooks as far as I'm concerned. Most of my Mom's recipes (that don't come from my grandmother) come from here. There are bi-lingual editions, which is what I have because food-Chinese is the worst Chinese (seriously, it's all nouns. It sucks). My stable of chinese food dishes isn't huge though, because I make mostly what my mom used to make, and there are things you just don't do at home. As for what you do with bok choy, I literally have one way I make every leafy vegetable, which is just to saute it in a little oil with garlic, salt, and rice wine. It is probably the only thing I can legitimately say I'm good at making because I've probably made it well over 1000 times. My two go-to "authentic" dishes (i.e. ones you wouldn't find in a restaurant) both involved special ingredients (pickled vegetables) - meatballs with pickled mustard greens, and pork with...uh, pickled root tubers? (zha cai)

So, what you're saying is that she isn't a true pop musician, and also pop music is dead. #taylorgate. By which I mean, as I get older, the question of whether music (or anything else) is "authentic" or "real" is spurious to me as whether somebody is "really a gamer". Pretty much everything is manufactured, which is inherently neither good nor bad, and pretty much anything interesting is going to simultaneously be many things, which is also neither inherently good nor bad..

Well, if you replace "women" with "people", that whole screed is roughly accurate.

You really should just make "Sean's toilet iOS game of the week" a regular segment. You know you want to.

That's a lovely review, although much of then sentiment is something I can't let myself think about too much, otherwise I get all depressed and nihilistic.

All you white people look the same to me. I'm basically the same way. I was too old when the first wave hit, so the first Pokemon I ever played was Pokemon X this year, which I only really played because I got it for more or less free in a promotion. It's fairly charming.

Huh. It took me two or three tries to understand what was going on in the trailer, whose sole purpose should be to communicate the game's mechanics to you. That doesn't sounds promising. It's a cool concept. Seems like it would be expensive to produce content for, since each combination seems to need a custom interaction.

Also, random things: As people noted earlier, Ray Wise is the best. If you enjoy him (and who doesn't?), he played Satan on the TV show Reaper, and he is just Ray Wise-ing it up in every scene he's in, and it's great. He's got just the right amount of charm and menace in that role. Satan is the character he was born to play. "You are a terrible person, seriously." "That's my job, man." I also found the ordering a coke thing to be hilarious, I think it's actually another Gilmore Girls thing. According to an interview (or commentary track or something), at some point in the early seasons of the show, apparently they got a lot of feedback that Rory was too skinny, and people thought she was anorexic, or glamorizing anorexia, or something. So, the way they solved that was they had her constantly be ordering or getting or talking about food. But, here's the thing, eating on a TV show is gross: you have to do so many takes, and it's messy and messes with the audio. So, she's constantly ordering food, but never eats any of it. Meanwhile, in commentary tracks for the US The Office, the writers talked about how they thought it was hilarious when Rainn Wilson (Dwight) ate on screen. So, they started just writing excuses for him to be shoving stuff in his mouth whenever they could. (There's an episode where he's eating pancakes, forget when.) After hearing those stories, it became kind of a hobby of mine: I always look out for how people interact with food on TV shows. Once you start seeing it, you can't NOT see it. They waste so much food!

About the Josie-Ben Horne meeting: When Josie is sitting in the dark, it's incredibly obvious that it's Josie, right? Do people think that was intended as a reveal? To me, it seems like that scene is taking the piss on (what's the right preposition there? "on" makes it sound gross...) "surprising reveals" of that sort, the same way it often plays with soap opera convention. Maybe that's just from a modern view that's expecting those kinds of post modern touches though. Do people think that's supported by the text?

I felt that Audrey's appearance in Cooper's bed was thematically tied to her spying on her father. One assumes that she had some idea that her father was into bad stuff, but didn't really understand the whole of it. Now she's directly confronted with his infidelity and his plan to burn down the mill, all in one scene. I think that until this moment, a lot of her teenage rebellion was just that: flouting her father's instructions just because she could. As much as she was willing to manipulate him and ruin his business dealings, I think there was still actualy love there. It was more lashing out at parental neglect than actual hatred. But seeing her father with Catherine brings that crashing down. She finds out what kind of person her father truly is. Turning to Cooper isn't really about sexual desire: while he is a handsome stranger, he's also clearly a strong, principled potential father-figure for her. As mentioned: in Twin Peaks, your affairs have affairs: Cooper is, probably, the only honest person she knows. I think showing up in Cooper's hotel room can be read as a direct response to seeing her father having sex with Catherine. There's a childlike element of "this is what adults do" as well as getting revenge on her father (if he can do that, then so can I). Part of this is the question of: how "grown up" (by proxy, sexually experienced) is Audrey? I think not very. She's seems aloof from her classmates. Her poodle-skirt act is a signifier of her embodying the social and sexual mores from an earlier era, rather than the relatively wild and modern world of Laura and her friends. Audrey puts on an act that she's a strong, independent woman, but it truly is an act: she's really just a little girl (and engages in little-girl hijinks). No spoilers, but I think that her behavior later in the series bears out this interpretation.

Surprised this hasn't been mentioned, re: Sean's (?) old man "Monster in my Pocket". Pokemon are POcKEt MONsters, using the common Japanese style abbreviation of taking the first syllable or two from each word (For instance, McDonalds -> MacuDo). Also, from my knowledge of spanish, I would assume that "buca", like "boca" would be translated more typically as "mouth" than "hole", but I know nothing about Italian per se. Re: Taylor Swift, more than a purity thing, I think there's a potentially ugly racial element regarding how the industry and public is consuming her album. She isn't the anti-Katy Perry, she's the anti-Iggy Azalea, and, judging by current radio play, arguably even an anti-Meghan Trainor ("All About That Bass" internalizes a lot more hip-hop stylings while also being somewhat more explicitly sexual than Swift's singles).

Re: Leo's truck: I was for some reason under the impression that he was trying to sell his truck (presumably to buy a better one). I could be making that up though. Audrey's secret spying spot has been mentioned a couple of times. One thing I'd note is that I don't think the crawl-space / storage closet between rooms is all that contrived. I believe it's indicated that it's basically the back-side of a storage closet (probably for linens, cleaning supplies etc used by the hotel). I've seen back-of-the-house spaces like that crammed into all sorts of places in hotels and restaurants: why let a hollow wall go to waste when you could jam stuff in there out of sight to the guests? The unfinished interior is just part of that. That being said, we do see learn that there's an actual honest-to-god secret passage in the back of Ben Horne's office, so there's that.

Amazing.

Not really spoilers: Lucy's cousin is also Luke's sister. No, I didn't look that up. #GilmoreSuperFan. While the individual characters aren't deep per se, the way that Stars Hollow is presented, it always seems to me like a town that has an existence outside of just the events of the show*. Arguably that's just because they drop in absurd traditions and then they characters are _so_ into them, but even so, that's where I felt the connection. *Ironically, given how obviously it's a studio lot.

FLCL is great. Its music is pretty much the best thing ever (Yay, Pillows). We could talk about it if you want, although I haven't seen it in years. I'd re-watch Kacho Oji (Legend of Black Heaven), but I'd need to buy it because I only own it on honest to god VHS TAPES THAT I PURCHASED BECAUSE I AM OLD! They came with cool little foil postcards that I presumably still have somewhere. Yeah, I haven' really actively watched anime in ages, aside from a couple things my friends have forced on me and Ghibli's output. Also, Paprika. Paprika is pretty cool.

Well, there's also the question of finding enough anime that even warrant a podcast. I think your best bet would be to do something like the Twin Peaks rewatch: a series-specific re-watch for a seminal series, but aimed at a new audience. Even then, you'd probably want to do 2 episodes per week, and even then I think you'd have trouble filling more than 30 mins for most shows. Anime are built as fundamentally serialised television, often very little changes or gets resolved from week to week. It's probably possible to find one, but you'd need to be smart about the series you selected. From the era of anime when I really last watched, Trigun and Cowboy Bebop would be my first 2 choices, but I don't know them well enough to recall if they could actually support discussion. There isn't much of it, but I might listen to an FLCL re-watch with the right people. Really, you're probably better off treating it as an anime movie podcast and targeting either films or <6 episode OAVs.

Huh. It seems like a lot of modern 3d animation has super stylized watercolor 2d concept art before being turned into the more generic 3d models. I saw similar concept art for Frozen. Off the top of my head, the first time I remember seeing that kind of thing was Pixar credits sequence art from things like Ratatouiile and The Incredibles.