jennegatron

Moving to the west coast & having a long commute has seriously messed with my ability to follow basketball as well as I would like. It's incredibly frustrating to come home and have NBA games half or completely over before I can even eat dinner. DAMN YOU TIME ZOOOONES

Ratamero is absolutely right. Cities that developed after the advent of the general consumer having access to the automobile are supremely different from those that were developed around other forms of transportation. When cars were novelties for the supremely wealthy it didn't really matter, but once mass manufacturing of cars was available in the US it totally changed how neighborhoods, homes, & cities as a whole were designed & developed. If you live in the Southwest like eot mentioned Dallas, they were designed & developed assuming that the citizens would have cars. Like if NYC was developed in the 1950s instead of the 1650s there would absolutely be way way more single family homes, way more garages & driveways, & way more lawnspace for those single family homes. Urban Studies as a field is interested in how advents in technology change the way urban (and by extension suburban & rural) spaces were/are developed. The wealthy left urban areas to build homes in the suburbs & move away from undesirables (aka People of Color and the wealthy were white, thus White Flight as a phenomenon.) This deprived urban centers of the tax revenue that rich people provide, thus creating a cycle of disinvestment, causing poor urban centers to spiral into dilapidation. (If you're interested in how this manifests itself, please please please check out Origins of the Urban Crisis by Thomas Sugrue. He writes about Detroit, MI and it will crush your soul and cement to you why institutionalized racism has been a problem and continues to be a problem.) Thus the suburbs were built to accommodate what they assumed wealthy people would have (personal cars, a desire for larger homes and yards.) The working adults who grew up in the suburbs are now thinking they want to move to the cheaper urban centers that their parents or grandparents moved away from, driving out the poor People of Color who lived there before because they could not afford to live in the suburbs, forcing those people move elsewhere in the city or the oldest suburbs that were built in the 50's and 60's that have high maintenance costs & require cars that were not required in the urban centers before. Because these suburbs were designed and built for the middle & upper middle class, there is little in the way of public services (bus or public transit service, social service offices like health clinics or welfare offices, etc.) Cities established before the automobile (like Detroit) tend to have stricter restrictions on the books about expanding city lines. They have very rigid borders with neighboring suburbs, and were unable to move out their borders to capture the suburban growth (and tax revenue) fleeing the city. Cities like Dallas or Oklahoma City have what are called "elastic borders." It is very easy for the city council to capture the growth of the wealthy moving out of the city center & continue to tax them. Because these cities become enormous (by area) to capture that growth, it becomes increasingly difficult to provide services to the city.

Stream Friends is delightful. I also watch Day9tv but only on Monday nights @ 7pm PST when they do Mostly Walking. 3 friends from graduate school (they went to USC) get together and play an adventure game of some kind every week & talk about it. They do full playthroughs over the course of weeks & the recordings go up on Day9's youtube channel. The backlog is very worth watching, as is the old MetaDating show they did on Geek & Sundry where they talk about Romance/Dating and how it's portrayed/incorporated with game mechanics in games.

I know I'm mega super late to this train, and that I doubt anyone is even playing anymore, but I got AC:NL for valentine's day, and if anyone is interested in letting me steal a piece of fruit or 6 so I can plant more trees, I would be v grateful.

I bought a step stool from the children's section of Target when we moved into our apartment because at a totally average height of 5'4", I can't reach our upper shelves. #noShame

I received Pokemon Art Academy & Animal Crossing New Leaf for Valentine's Day. I have been tweeting my progress & my NPC classmate Lee's progress as students at the Pokemon Art Academy, so feel free to check out some gems over there. (My Twitter handle is the same as this forum username.) I just started AC:NL, but if anyone wants to let me come over to pick up some non-Pear/peach fruits I would be eternally grateful.

My bf has read Pretty Deadly, I'll direct him over here since this stuff is his jam.

Thanks for offering to help Tegan. I managed to get the last of the legendaries I was missing from GTS on Friday. Now if I could get a great international Ditto...

Hey fellow Pokemon buffs, I think I need some help this weekend filling out my National Pokedex, specifically the non-event legendaries from the past couple generations. I have a list at home of stuff I need help with, but if anybody is available on Sunday to help me out I'd really appreciate it. It's just taking so long to get someone to send me something super valuable in exchange for a Mareep. (Understandable.) Thanks!

For sure. I remember when GFW was still a magazine as an April Fool's day joke they decided they weren't going to assign scores to anything, then they realized they actually really liked doing that & that a half page review of something could communicate more than any 1-10 integer could. People got real mad about it and they eventually had to switch back to including a score & I'm sure sites/publications before them were battling about this too. I know I'm guilty of scrolling past and looking at just a score, but it's almost always for a game I wasn't interested in anyway, but I think will be a point of conversation for others. (Personally, I'm with Justin on the 7, having no nostalgia for the game. I think the complaints he raised were very valid and I think Broken Age Pt 1 does a really good job of avoiding them. What did that get Double Fine? A bunch of gamer babies complaining that it was too easy & short, and because it was too easy to those steeped in 'Adventure game' logic those people burned through it very quickly. I always knew what I was doing and why I was doing it in Broken Age which was not true for me in GF.)

Whenever I read "Darkrai" my brain completes it to be "Darkraichu" because I had this Pokemon card growing up (not a first edition, but still): http://ts2.mm.bing.net/th?id=HN.608039667315314155&pid=1.7

You're being rewarded by the RNG gods for your persistence.

Oh dear that's so cute. I love seeing these shiny screenshots.

I think teasing your students requires a very sensitive barometer on who can take it and who can't, and all my favorite teachers had that. Thank y'all for being so great. These forums are a perpetual delight.

I know that if any of my high school teachers were more interested in teasing me over my vocal pattern than listening to me, I would stop talking in that class, and avoid any other class taught by that person, because nothing filled/fills me with more anxiety than being scolded by an authority figure. I'm sure he picked on everyone about it because what else are you going to do as a high school teacher than tease your students. I bet this actually made him charming to a lot of students. He wanted his students to know it was a silly thing. But silly by whose standards? Why did he (or anyone for that matter) think it is silly? Because it makes you sound like you don't know what you're talking about? Why is that the perception? Is it because of an age thing? Young people talk like that and young people don't know what they're talking about? Young white women talk like that and they don't know what they're talking about? I just think asking the question as to why it's a pet peeve of anyone that I think is something worth thinking about. (This is true of almost all linguistic pet peeves; they're always worth interrogating a little bit.) I don't think that he was actively making this a gender thing. But I can't help but see that that criticism (on the whole) is most often lobbed at young women. That's all. Teachers have a lot of impact over their students lives and those tiny little things that may seem innocuous or funny to them can really impact kids for the rest of their lives.

The most recent This American Life about internet comments talked about the use of "like" as well as "vocal fry" as something that old people complain about in regards to young women's speaking patterns, even though men do (or did in this case) it too, things like the "Valley Girl" speech pattern is pinned on women. So when I hear a high school STEM teacher harping on a vocal pattern most often attributed to women, it's just another thing I think about that keeps women out of those disciplines. I'm sure he was just a dude who thought he would bully it out of people and they would speak "normal" and sound like grownups, but I bet more than a few people just stopped talking in class to avoid being belittled.

I wish Jigglypuff had a more dramatic shiny version. Jigglypuff is my jam & maybe the cutest thing ever?

Nailed it.

On the topic of unachieveable achievements (if you are interested in Hate Plus, the sequel to Analogue: A Hate Story, I would not recommend clicking this list. It has a fairly big spoiler as one of the achievement titles, which is part of the joke, but you can at least be warned.): http://steamcommunity.com/stats/HatePlus/achievements Hate plus written by Christine Love (who is amazing) has an achievement that is literally impossible. People have deconstructed the code trying to find a way to get it & have just failed. I think it's a really interesting way to pull a prank on your community. If you think about it for a little while after reading the title, and have a knowledge of Final Fantasy, you'll realize 'of course it's impossible.' She will also give you an achievement if you bake a cake in real life and send a picture of it to her. I highly recommend playing both Analogue & Hate Plus. They're often on steam sales for super cheap (but are totally worth paying full price) & I think a really good use of storytelling in games.

I read issue 1 of lumberjanes because it should be exactly what I like but it just didn't click for me. My bf is reading Bitch Planet so I may grab his copies and catch up.

KSD & Matt Fraction truly are a force to be reckoned with & I adore them. I wonder how much is affection for them as people. Before Matt abandoned twitter he was by far the coolest person to follow me. I'm not super into comics, but my boyfriend got super into them in 2013 (and still is.) I read Bravest Warriors in floppies when Joey Comeau was writing it, but it kind of fell off in quality after he left & the Kate Leth run hasn't thrilled me. I was super into the Ryan North Adventure Time as well because I love webcomic writers/artists. I haven't tried the new team yet. Also our LCS doesn't seem to want to carry Boom books. My bf even tried to add Bravest Warriors to his pull list for me and they just never ordered it. Ryan North's Midas Flesh is a really great sci fi mini series. Otherwise Sex Criminals & The Wicked + The Divine are the only ongoing books for grown ups that I read. Mostly I just love the variety of stuff that Boom & Image puts out.

Thanks Tegan! I've been doing the checking with the IV Judge. I somehow have 2 destiny knots, which is pretty great. If I have any questions, you are the one I'll come to since this ain't your first rodeo.

I'm making my first foray into seriously breeding pokemon & have decided to start with Mareep because I will happily look at like 600 of those fluffy lil babies. Also I can put the duds up on GTS and get pretty much anything other than legendaries back.

My mother often times made my sister peel potatoes because my sister got an odd joy out of it and my mom didn't have to stand over the trash can for 10 minutes.

Man. Chance the Rapper is my favorite & his Acid Rap mixtape is still my go to thing to listen to in the car. Thanks for sharing.