Mr. GOH!

So this is essentially fan fiction, right?

The 39 gram Cadbury creme eggs (although ours are now 34 grams and made from fake chocolate rather than milk chocolate). There are lots of similar and smaller chocolate egg types here, too.

Large chocolate eggs are not as common as Easter bunnies here, but the chocolate shop I went to the other day to get our Easter/Passover chocolate had big eggs. I've never seen a mass-produced chocolate egg or bunny here with prizes or other candy on the inside, aside from little Kinder eggs. Specialty chocolate shops do them upon request, I think. Small chocolate eggs are common, though. Like Cadbury egg sized. We do hardboiled painted eggs and plastic eggs with treats, in general, although there different regional or local traditions surrounding Easter treats. Growing up, we would get a wicker basket with fake plastic grass with candy in it, including a big chocolate bunny, loose jelly beans, chocolate eggs with candy shells, and real, dyed, hardboiled eggs. At first glance, that supermarket shelf could be in the USA this time of year.

The trailer is coming tomorrow, right?

Apologies for not getting your joke! I'm just salty we have to wait a week for GotG. From what I've seen of the beginning of the game, I bet it's timed and gated, but that it will be difficult to reach the gate in an hour. IIRC, there seems to be a good half hour to forty-five minutes of scripted content at the beginning of the game.

Racism can be contingent. There's the brute level "I don't like race X" or "race x is worse than race Y." Easy to identify, simplistic, and the domain of Trump/Brexit voters. Then there's systemic racism that enforce those views but may not explicitly state them. This racism is contingent on systems of power. In the context of evaluating Japanese-in-Japan attitudes towards Motoko's casting, Japanese people don't really expect to be represented in gai-jin adaptations and, apparently, seem to be okay with casting Motoko as a distant gai-jin, like a white person (I also suspect that casting her as a black person would be similarly okay with Japanese people). One of the reasons the casting gets shrugs from Japanese people in Japan is that Japan has its own film industry in which power is in the hands of Japanese people and from which almost exclusively Japanese people benefit. But Japan as a country has a VERY troubled history when it comes to how Japanese people view their neighbors; racist Japanese people tend to be racist against Koreans and Chinese folks in a similar intensity to the way racist Southerners treat black people or racist English folks treat South Asian people. The embedded systemic racism is Japan is aimed much more squarely at these folks than Westerners. This is why it is unsurprising that some Japanese people are okay with recasting Motoko as white but would be very insulted if she were recast with a Chinese or Korean actor. NB: Japanese people are not inherently racist or more racist than any other group, and there are of course countless Japanese who are not racist at all. There is arguable Japanese racism against non-Asians in the sense that we are exoticized by Japanese people and seen as uncouth weirdos, although I think that's more common among the older generations. My Japanese prof once told us my 3rd-year Japanese class that if any of the non-Asians among us went to Japan and spoke Japanese well, we'd be seen by older generations as delightful oddities, like talking panda bears. But the critique of whitewashing Motoko does not come from geographic Asia; it comes from Asian-Americans, against whom the embedded systemic racism in America is partially directed, especially when it comes to on-screen roles. Several of my friends are Asian-Americans who have careers in various aspects of the entertainment industry, and their Facebook feeds are constantly blowing up with examples of the entertainment industry's marginalization of Asian folks on and off-screen, from casting Asians as racist stereotypes, to whitewashing, to passing over Asian actors for roles in which race really doesn't matter (extras or small speaking roles). What Japanese in Japan think is largely irrelevant to the critique of racism in Hollywood. The Asian-Americans crying out for more representation appear to be split on whether Motoko should be Japanese or whether another ethnic Asian could fulfill the role. To my mind, because Ghost in the Shell is set in a fictionalized Hong Kong, adapting the role to be non-specific yet Asian would seem to be a good compromise.

GotG doesn't release until the 5th in real countries. An hour is it? I think i watched a preview longer than the demo would be.

Yes, many Japanese folks are indeed racist against other Asians and would rather a white woman play a Japanese woman than a Chinese or Korean woman play a Japanese woman. But as an American movie, it's insulting to Japanese-Americans to cast a white woman as a Japanese woman and, more broadly, Asian-Americans for casting a white woman rather than an Asian-American woman. I mean, I'm white, but Asian-Americans did actually condemn the whitewashing. to say they're voices have less weight than the Japanese voices is odd, at best. http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/movies/la-et-mn-ghost-movie-controversy-20170401-story.html https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/apr/11/asian-american-actors-whitewashing-hollywood http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/la-et-entertainment-news-updates-april-13-reasons-why-asian-whitewashing-shirt-1491263239-htmlstory.html https://www.theguardian.com/film/2017/mar/31/ghost-in-the-shells-whitewashing-does-hollywood-have-an-asian-problem Japan has its own homegrown movie and TV industry and so it makes sense Japanese people wouldn't care about the whitewashing; they feel represented in their own media and do not feel the need to be represented abroad. However, the issue here is that American companies have adapted an Asian film and modified it by whitewashing several characters, excluding Asian-Americans from the roles.

Whitewashing is racist and in this instance is particularly racist. That said, I re-watched the original Ghost in the Shell with my wife recently and, man; it was dumb. Wonderful, beautiful, brilliant animation, and the story it told of the world was pretty great. But everything else was kinda stupid. My wife and I re-watched before the release of the ScarJo movie and we were both embarrassed by how dumb the writing was. My wife is no anime hater, either, and she has great love for Asian films in general, from nigh-unwatchable kung fu schlock to contemplative Japanese dramas, to zany Korean monster movies. One of her favorite movies is Akira. She worships at the altar of Miyazaki. But, damn, Ghost in the Shell was a rough ride for her and it was not nearly as good as I remember from when I was 16. And I remember thinking the subsequent sequel shows/movies were not nearly as good as the original. What I'm saying is, schlock breeds schlock, so it's no surprise the live action remake is dumb. But that does't excuse the racism.

Since Sludge is so heavily connected to Enchantress, is she in the movie too?

Hulk will be in most or all the major trailers. Ruffalo has openly talked about being in the movie for over a year. I wasn't following it closely and I've known he would be in it since January 2016 when Ruffalo started talking about it and his involvement. From what he's said, one can infer that the Hulk reveal happens fairly early on, too. For what little it's worth, I've read that the teaser trailer consists mostly of stuff from the first half or even third of the movie. The shots of Hela in her full headdress and Valkyrie charging at her and then falling from the Sky seem awfully like scenes that would accompany exposition about Hela's background rather than 'live' shots of action. The most spoiler-tastic character reveal in the teaser is Skurge, I think. Had no idea he would be in it. There are also rumblings that the teaser does not reveal some of the major players in the movie at all.

Yes. Those limits encourage the airline to not offer anything more and to call in the cops to kick off any passengers who won't take the offer. Management likely does not give the airline customer service reps the authority to offer more than the legal obligation, which is what led to this mess. I apologize for not including the DOT regulatory maximum reimbursement amounts, but they are low and not concomitant with what getting bumped is actually worth to a passenger. I think as part of your check in you should be allowed to set a reserve price (and maybe a small set of terms; price if your delay is under X hours, a different price if it's over x hours, a different price if they refund your ticket versus putting you on a new flight, whether all tickets bought together would have to be bumped together, etc.) at which the airline can in effect buy your seat back. If they accept your offer, your ticket is gone and you get the payout you agreed to in advance.

This is a great case of where the airline acted within its legal obligations yet still manages to totally be in the wrong. Yes, the randomly-selected passenger signed a contract of carriage and further did not obey orders from flight crew or law enforcement. But that flight crew and law enforcement were ordering him off in the first place is completely fucked up. The laws allow and encourage corporations and their employees to act like sociopaths. In this case, the low maximum obligation for a carrier to reimburse an involuntarily-bumped passenger created an incentive for the private corporation to utilize the state's monopoly on the use of violence to force a customer off the plane. If the there were no limit on the obligation to repay, the airline would have (and should have anyway) kept upping their bid until enough people accepted the price. The bloodless cost analysis embodied by the reimbursement regulations does not factor in the major inconvenience cost to the bumped passenger or other, ancillary costs incurred by bumped passengers (missing out on family visits, missing out on work, canceled hotels at the destination, and so on). The most efficient and, incidentally, capitalist way to get folks to comply with involuntary bumping is not to make passengers feel powerless before the violence of the state or the corporate machinery of the airline, but to allow the passengers to bid on what they would accept in exchange for being bumped.

After the Storm, a Japanese film directed by Koreeda Hirokazu about a kinda loser middle-aged man dealing with his divorced wife, their son, and his aging mother. The main character wrote one successful novel fifteen years before and afterwards slid into compulsive gambling and now works as a part-time private eye, mainly spying on cheating spouses (and then extorting his targets without telling his boss). It's not the best Koreeda movie, but it's a nice, small film about family, relationships, and the choices we make in life. The acting was all quite good as well. Colossal, which I really liked. The premise is that the main character, played by Anne Hathaway, fucked up her blogging career in New York a few years prior and descended into being an alcoholic leech on her successful boyfriend (played by Dan Stevens). He kicks her out of his posh Manhattan apartment because of her hard partying and she moves back to her small town and meets up with an elementary school classmate played by Jason Sudeikis, who gives her a job at the bar he owns while she gets back on her feet. She ends up drinking with him and his group of loser-ish friends after her shift at the bar every night. I won't spoil too much, but after she moves back to her small town, a kaiju appears in Seoul and trashes the downtown for ten or fifteen minutes and then disappears. Hathaway's character figures out that she controls the kaiju in the sense that it tracks her movements. I won't give any more away (this is all in the trailers). The movie is ultimately about toxic relationships, feminism (although not in a direct, hit-you-over-the-head way), and about considering the effects of one's choices on people both close to you and impossibly remote. The critics are divided on this one, but any who say the movie does not have a clear thematic throughline just don't get it. And, finally, I got around to watching The Green Room, a non-supernatural horror film about a punk band that gets trapped in a rural punk venue run by neo-Nazis in the Pacific Northwest. Anton Yelchin and Patrick Stewart are great in it, and it is a tight, bloody horror movie that is never boring. It subverts enough traditional horror tropes to be fresh, but it isn't innovative in any huge way. Lately, these sorts of movies feature weird or intentionally mysterious and creepy antagonists; Stewart and his skinhead thugs are not cartoonishly over-the-top but are nevertheless thoroughly reprehensible antagonists. I highly suggest it if you like horror films.

Post-ending gameplay in story-centric games has always struck me as silly cheevo-oriented nonsense. The story is over, the tests of skills have been passed, and characters have been fully developed; why would I then waste time doing lesser things? It seems hollow to go back and do sidequests with a character who has already saved the world; it diminishes the achievement of beating the game. It's like it exists so that trophy hunters can go back get trophies at their leisure (which also diminishes what makes trophies/cheevos special insofar as they're easier to get than if the game ended when it, you know, ends). I'm fine with missable content. Missable content can be deployed to make a game more interesting and raise the stakes of player decisions. I complete Torment: Tides of Numenera last night. I really dig the world and the writing and the overarching story, for the most part. There are six companions, though I only got to know four of them, but they were all good in their own way. I wish there was more room for loyalty quests with their own separate locations and more quests focused solely on the companions' arcs rather than have them all blend in with main quest locations. It also feels like the the game in split into halves that would better serve as thirds, with a missing third main set of locations and quests with heightened stakes once you kinda figure out what's really going on. As it is, the game does not give the player time to really reflect on its central themes, nor do there seem to be all that many consequences from the players' choices on the main quest. However, this is *all* in line with the original Torment, so I can't complain too much. I also both enjoyed the odd leveling system but I felt like it was capped too soon in terms of development (rather than too early on in the narrative itself; the main character can max out early, but your companions won't max out until the end of the game). There are hooks for a sequel game, as it strongly suggests that the story of one companion in particular is not over. Otherwise, the main narrative and the story of the changing god is most definitely put tor est, one way or another. I hope they make a sequel that's bigger and better now that inXile has made this one. There's a lot of potential for interesting stories in the Ninth World.

Split. It's a slick B-movie with some great character work from McAvoy. The abducted girls are good, too. I quite enjoy the movies Shyamalan has made since his fucking-up of the last airbender and subsequent humbling. While there isn't a traditional Shyamalan twist, the movie works best if it's not spoiled too much beyond the basic premise. Heavy spoilers behind the tag.

I read somewhere that they essentially tweaked some shaders to fix the robot eyes. The animations are much better, too, however.

What the hell? That's tons better. No excuse it wasn't done before release. I mean, just fixing the eyes makes a bunch of the NPCs feel a million times less robotic.

Trump being interviewed on air force one today while the Rogue One scene in which Vader is unveiled plays.

Here's the the rundown of the Scorpio's technical specs: http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2017-project-scorpio-tech-revealed I believe there still won't be xbone games that aren't on PC, so it doesn't matter to me.

Regardless of guilt, it's odd that the punishment is exile to one of the world's biggest cities under the questionable care of a man who houses you in a storage room and proceeds to not supervise you at all.

When will they finally complete the Darksiders quadrology? I feel like buying the IP and selling 'remasters' of the first two games obligates Nordic to finish out the other two.

I watched the Giant Bomb quicklook of the first hour and a half of this last night. Bonkers. Ethan: if you want to implement Japan's. . . innovative juvenile sentencing practices vis a vis the crime of interfering with a man who's beating his woman (not a crime here, but pretty sure it's a crime in Kansas), I could probably recruit strange adult single men who own creepy cafes with empty storage spaces to take, in exchange for large cash sums, the juvenile offenders off your hands but not supervise them in any meaningful way at all.

Finished the game. I know I've ranted about its shortcomings, but I enjoyed it overall. Lots of loose ends and I'd like to compare lore notes and choices with other folks who've completed it.