I'm sorry but Grian's last stand!!! hello??!?!? My man took on a 3v1 and was fucking WINNING. He lowered all 3 of them by so much! He alone in that fight dropped Scott from 35 to 12 hearts and Gem from 49 down to 5 (+10 for killing Grian) (I've not seen Impulse's ep yet).

But like?? yes King pop OFF

He even fought until his shield BROKE, fighting till the very last minute!!

Say what you want about this man and his easy flightiness with alliances when they begin to break apart, but this man had a mission and he fucking delivered on it and we stan a committed man

He managed to hold his own against a very good PVP player and he fucking owned it

The tragedy of it? He knew he wasn't going to win. Of course he wouldn't against the best PVP player in the server, a previous winner, and Impulse who consistently performs well in these games. He was surrounded, taking and blocking hits from all directions, throwing himself into the fray when he could have just walked away and waited for a better moment. But no, taking and giving swing after swing, fighting until the very wood of his shield splinters and breaks. He wasn't expecting to win, he could never win with how low his hearts were, but he knew he could bring them part of the way down with him. He just knew Gem and the Scots couldn't be left with their abundance of hearts, and my man sacrificed himself to make sure other players had a fighting chance.

Without him, Gem probably would have won with her stacked hearts

I hope the community milks the ever-loving shit out of this moment

Ok ill bite whats the worst mg series

alright, whats the worst magical girl series in your opinion?

Thanks you two for letting me do some yelling. The obvious guess would likely be one of the recent edgelord shows right? Magical Girl Site or something similar? But nay I say, for while MGS and Day Break Illusion and such and what not generally tell you what to expect right away. Don't like super violence and suffering? Watch something else is the clear message from the get go. One of the bait and switch series then like Madoka or maybe Yuki Yuna? For what faults they may or may not have, at least these series do something and are interesting, even if you're not huge on what goes down in the series. A parody then? They range from affectionate to banned in New Zealand but regardless of quality and their feelings for MGs, it's a parody. It's a joke and shouldn't be taken seriously (plus they're usually short so you can just forget about them forever).

So what makes a series terrible then, I am sure you are asking. IMO? Setting expectations for an interesting and enjoyable series, and then dashing them to hell.

Come with me below the cut, as I talk about Key Princess Story: Kagihime Eternal Alice Rondo!

Spoilers abound so if you care about those for a 15 year old series, click away.

Background: Kagihime was a 4 volume manga that ran from 2004-2006 that was picked up for a 13 episode anime adaptation near the end of its run. The manga is created by a pair (Kaishaku) who you may know for making Magical Nyan Nyan Taruto. Kannazuki no Miko, and Steel Angel Kurumi, and the anime had a script written by the same writer (Mamiko Ikeda) for Tenshi Ni Narumon who also did some script writing for Princess Tutu and Seven of Seven. The anime also had 6 character music videos which are fairly simple but a nice addition to the series for the main girls. Discotek has been publishing the anime in the states in recent years, and the manga was brought over by *squints at book spine* Dr Master Publications.

The Premise: Girls transform and enter weird outside of reality spaces to fight each other with giant keys to take each other’s stories to create a third Alice In Wonderland story.

Well, an off-brand Alice story written by Alternate L. Takion, rather than Lewis Carroll/Charles Dodgson, that while the series uses all the aesthetic hallmarks of the tradition Alice, the little we see of the in universe Alice story is clearly different. Which is fine, at the end of the day, it’s still about someone who loves the Alice stories and wishes there was more, and even makes his own fanfiction version. His? Oh yeah, while the girls do all the fighting, the main character is Aruto, a teen boy who loves Alice, and for reasons we don’t know till late game, can enter the liminal spaces that the ‘Alice Users’ fight in. He chases a girl who looks like the Alice he sees in his story, who is named Arisu, and gets roped into this fanfic battle royale. He is also the older brother of the very needy Kirihara, who also ends up being and Alice User. As does Kirihara’s bff Kisa. To round out the group of enemies-turned-friends-who-will-work-together-to-collect-the-Eternal-Alice-without-having-to-fight-eachother group is a young genius researcher Kirika who wants to know more about Aruto’s connection that allows him to enter the spaces where the girls fight.

Then there’s all the other girls, some of whom still have real importance to the story and some who have a few panels or 2 scenes total. But with a whole bunch of girls to design, the creators reached out to a whole lot of other people to have them create designs! Eventually the battle gets down to the last few girls, there’s a confrontation with the guy running the whole thing, and while the anime and manga vary quite a bit the whole time, in both version Aruto ends up with Kirihara. Oh and Arisu was created by Aruto’s super imagination powers.  

The Promise: Here on is subjective, particularly with what I personally saw as potential from this series. because I need you to understand how much I want to like this series. 

~Alice in Wonderland themed: I know some people aren’t alice fans and that’s fine you do you but as a big alice fan this is great. We have a few alice episodes and themed characters amongst series like CCS and MGRP, and even Alice themes in other series like Tweeny Witches and Alice 19th. But damn it I am down for Alice series.

~Giant Keyyyyyyyys: Yeah yeah Kingdom Hearts but these keys are much more staff like for a lot of the characters which ads and air of elegance rather than the KH ones that for me at least feel well designed for big ol props rather than actual weapons. We also get...

~Weapon variety: It counts as a key if it’s a thorn whip that can be shaped like a key right? How about a giant pocket knife? Crossbows can also be keys. Hush. And we have this variety because

~Guest Artists: For magical girl series where we have a variety of outfits designed by different people, we have Kagihime, Uta~Kata, and uhh I guess Magia Record? But that’s a mobile game with a hella number of characters and with how mobile game works I wouldn’t count it just because it’s less the intent of the series to have variety and more the nature of having lots of girls. (Precure doesn’t count because unless I missed a memo each season’s set is still by one designer). If a series isn’t about a team and therefore doesn’t need cohesion, bringing in other artists is a great way for variety and new looks. 

~The long term goal: Fighting with other people who love the same piece of media you do in hopes of creating new material that will be viewed as official? That’s just fandom nowadays. But it’s a legitimate interesting concept, and opens up so many doors for a message for the series, be it ‘what you create is no less valuable than the canon work’ or ‘it’s hard to let go when something you love doesn’t have more to it but you can still love it for what it is’ or ‘bond with the people who like the thing you like ya idiot instead of fighting about it’. The concept is interesting and there are so many narrative ways you can take this.

~Gays: Between the anime and manga, we have at least 5 wlw. Is it a magical girl series without some gays? (side note- the manga had a short thing where the MC wears a girl’s uniform and is pretty comfortable in it and while there is no way this was the intent, between that and the emphasis on the stories that live in girls and how the fight zones have no men, I’m just saying, Trans girl Aruto.)

~Greater Fairy Tale Premise: We meet a Little Match Girl based MG who is obsessed with Andersen rather than the Alice books, and touch on a Sleeping Beauty character in the manga. The manga at least implies that classic stories and fairy tale authors uh. Live on in a liminal space as immortals with world warping powers within that world and there could be opportunities for other girls in the real world to fight for Little Mermaid 2: Electric Boogaloo.

The Good: Everything has positive points, no matter how bad it is.

~Character Designs: Some of those looks slap. As do most of their weapons. 

~Backgrounds: I have a strong opinion on backgrounds in anime that can be easily boiled down to old watercolor backgrounds good, modern filtered photos as background bad, and as a 2006 series, this might not be Memole nice but they’re quite attractive. 

~Splash Pages: Easily my favorite thing after the designs, each chapter’s title page for the manga just has a character standing in a setting. Which is not everyone’s thing I’m sure but it’s a nice simplistic way to let the characters breathe imo. Even if at least some of the settings were deffo traced. But that’s how backgrounds work to some extent? If I ever get to the Met again, I am tracking down this exact photo, but here is a likely candidate for an example.

~Different Versions: I do not understand the need to make an adaptation that tries to be a 1:1. Kagihime had the same ideas and characters and did some of the same beats but very much had a different finale story and a lot of changes in the middle (like the Alice cops in the manga). Again, not something everyone probably wants I’m sure, but I very appreciate this, especially since the Anime kept good pace with the number of Manga chapters (reading the manga again while watching the anime at 3.8x speed just now was very interesting to see the different interpretations of events in a different medium.)

The ‘Fine’: Yeah.

~Anime Visuals: Look 2006 was still early enough into digipaint that I will give it a total pass on these. The colors are too bright but in a very bland way, the lineart is nothing interesting, and the faces are. Iffy. But it’s not total garbage to look at (probably helped by backgrounds and character designs...) it just came out in an era where not enough people knew how to stylize things to account for the weakness of the tools of the time. (It was 4 years earlier but I feel Kagihime is the polar opposite of Chobits with its painfully bland color palette while still being just. Flat. Sorry for the drive by Chii.) 

~Music?: There sure were songs. Obviously, they are nothing to me.

The Bad: CW for.... somehow all the big things to an extent. 

~Fanservice: Look, I am fine with fanservice, especially for a series that’s, ya know, not targeted at kids, big Mai Hime fan here even if I would recommend skipping the panty thief episode. And honestly the series generally isn’t fanservicey, at least by the modern standards of having the camera choosing under the skirt rather than an over the shoulder shot like I’ve seen plenty in other shows. Even the sexier outfits like the rose whip dominatrix aren’t bad BUT. When the girls fight. One takes her phallic key and drives it into another girls chest between the boobs while the loser cries in pain and then her book comes out and when the victor rips out pages, the loser’s clothes also rip. It is very SuperS Amazon Trio assault metaphor-y. There’s also a bit of fanservice with the sister becauseeeee....

~Incest: If you read the premise up there, first wow good job because I’m sure not re-reading that, you might have noticed I said MC ends up with his sister. As someone who is a big mythology fan and watches plenty of anime, I have a decent tolerance for your obligatory ‘oh we’re siblings but actually cousins so our feelings are okay’ or whatever the fuck Citrus has going on I don’t know that series and I don’t vibe BUT. I have limits and boy did this series go beyond that because multiple episodes are dedicated to the sister being in love with the brother? And the brother returns her feelings but knows that they are wrong so he put everything he likes in his sister into his version of Alice who, of course, physically manifests as Arisu who he creates accidentally with his uh. Magic imagination powers. But again in both versions MC still ends up with his sister. Hey, at least the manga eventually said the boy was adopted when the sister was like, 3, so if nothing else no blood relations? The anime did not ad this. -_-

~Under Utilized Characters: Arisu’s gradual revelation that she has no childhood memories because she isn’t a real person is so interesting and they don’t do nothing with it but also? That’s the kind of thing I personally would love to dig into and Kagihime, while touching on this world shattering revelation, easily loops back to So Anyway She Should Fight For The Man and to hell with developing a life or personality outside of what has been written for her. The rest of the main 5 were 2 note characters which. Could be worse? The most interesting character ends up being the child genius who accidentally murdered her childhood bestie (and/or lover? depending on version) and her coming to terms with that (the friend is alive but the version changes how and why she thinks she’s dead). Then the villain has the motivation of ‘i lost my creativity and now have become an immortal living outside of normal space and am getting girls to fight each other because that’s like a story so I’m still relevant right?’. But shoutout to the anime for then taking death of the author literally. The numerous other girls are canon fodder outside of like. The manga version of the dead gf and the little match girl.

~Battle Royale: This is not a thing I have an issue with generally. Again, but Mai Hime fan, I need to read MGRP 11, BUT by not developing the non-main girls there is no emotional connection which makes them just canon fodder and that’s boring as sin for a royale system. The initial main character fights revolve so much around the MC guy being there that they fall flat, and the 2 or 3 final battles in both versions still feel without any stakes. Also for a royale thing most of the characters don’t actually die, which cool! Neat! Except when they do? Some nobodies and a somebody are murdered (at least in the manga) and the tone never feels like it’s supposed to be upping the stakes, it’s just. Some people are dead now. And do you want to guess which of the main characters died?

~Gays: Oh boy the best friend of the brother-complex sister is in love with her and (in the manga) dies. She does apparently get better for the last chapter but the death itself is only felt by the rest of the cast for a page or two before we go back to feeling sad big brother wants to kiss his mentally generated sister clone rather than his actual sister u_u. Bury your gays is nothing new, but I wonder if it was also intended to be justified because Guess Who Is Creepy and a bit Perverted? Oh look the lesbian keeps the used swimsuit of her beloved and manipulates events to get an indirect kiss and when she sees the sister trying to strange Arisu for a moment she decides to do it for the sister? It’s not good. You want bad gay rep in a magical girl series, well here ya go. We also had a nobody in the first(second?) episode whose story pages reveal her having a kiss with a girl, and then we also have the prodigy again and- in the manga- her. Uh. childhood lover who she thought she killed but the girl has been wiping her mind over and over so prodigy remembers ‘killing’ the friend and not the she’s alive so she can keep? fucking with her? Toxic!

~Sexual Content: But wait you say, you already covered fanservice! Ah but that is sexual content for titilation. This is sexual content for dramatic backstory! The red riding hood character was sexually assaulted, another character was manipulated into sex first as a teen and then more often to ‘get into the publishing industry’, and the same writer forces some aggressive kisses on the MC. None of it is gratuitous which is nice, but also, was it necessary? Not making a new point for this but read riding hood’s dog was also murdered so unnecessary animal death gets tossed on in there. 

~Male Lead: You can have a male, non magical character as the main character surrounded by magical girls. This is not how to do it. If I can make a vicious and hopefully not understood reference, Aruto is basically Tate from the Mai Hime Manga. If you understood that, I am so sorry. If you didn’t, congrats! Don’t read the manga. Or do and send me asks about the iconic final page of the first volume (18+). Anyway, this dude is boring, everything revolves around him, BUT I’ll be generous and say at least this isn’t a harem series? It looks like it out of context but it’s just a triangle with a fun attached scientist and token lesbian.

~Premise: They didn’t make good use of it. The initial goals of ‘take other girls pages from their soul books because if we get enough we unlock a third alice book’ is good! And then we add the twist that that was never going to happen and either if we get all the pages we can grant a wish, or these fights are just happening for the amusement of and asshole. Either way, yeah okay I guess. But at no point do we ever achieve this forbidden wish granting book and the asshole just. Lives. Nothing happens to him. His peers don’t even dunk on him. The only real changes from the beginning and the end of the series are: the siblings are now chill with dating, and the scientist lady won’t turn into a child in magical spaces. Oh. Yeah.

~Why did we make this adult a child sometimes?: I think we know why. Stop trying to get those types of folks to watch your already meh series. I also could have sworn at points in the past looking up images for this series I’ve seen extra art for Yuuri the Thumbelina-y Alice User that seemed like it would fit alongside anything by POP. You know, the Moetan guy. If you don’t know, god I wish that were me. 

Wrap Up: I have definitely forgotten some points and am well within my rights to ad to this whenever I remember more points but uh. Yeah.  

Listen you want an alice themed battle royale with nice outfits? Rozen maiden is right there. Battle Royale magical girl series that’s good with fanservice? Mai Hime. Series with different outfits while being based on a classic story? Pretear.

Hope anyone who read all of this at least got what I was saying, even if they don’t agree with it. And thanks for reading because whoops. 

The Myth of the Kindly General Lee

The legend of the Confederate leader’s heroism and decency is based in the fiction of a person who never existed. Story by Adam Serwer

The strangest part about the continued personality cult of Robert E. Lee is how few of the qualities his admirers profess to see in him he actually possessed.

Memorial Day has the tendency to conjure up old arguments about the Civil War. That’s understandable; it was created to mourn the dead of a war in which the Union was nearly destroyed, when half the country rose up in rebellion in defense of slavery. This year, the removal of Lee’s statue in New Orleans has inspired a new round of commentary about Lee, not to mention protests on his behalf by white supremacists.

The myth of Lee goes something like this: He was a brilliant strategist and devoted Christian man who abhorred slavery and labored tirelessly after the war to bring the country back together.

There is little truth in this. Lee was a devout Christian, and historians regard him as an accomplished tactician. But despite his ability to win individual battles, his decision to fight a conventional war against the more densely populated and industrialized North is considered by many historians to have been a fatal strategic error.

But even if one conceded Lee’s military prowess, he would still be responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans in defense of the South’s authority to own millions of human beings as property because they are black. Lee’s elevation is a key part of a 150-year-old propaganda campaign designed to erase slavery as the cause of the war and whitewash the Confederate cause as a noble one. That ideology is known as the Lost Cause, and as the historian David Blight writes, it provided a “foundation on which Southerners built the Jim Crow system.”

There are unwitting victims of this campaign—those who lack the knowledge to separate history from sentiment. Then there are those whose reverence for Lee relies on replacing the actual Lee with a mythical figure who never truly existed.

In the Richmond Times Dispatch, R. David Cox wrote that “for white supremacist protesters to invoke his name violates Lee’s most fundamental convictions.” In the conservative publication Townhall, Jack Kerwick concluded that Lee was “among the finest human beings that has ever walked the Earth.” John Daniel Davidson, in an essay for The Federalist, opposed the removal of the Lee statute in part on the grounds that Lee “arguably did more than anyone to unite the country after the war and bind up its wounds.” Praise for Lee of this sort has flowed forth from past historians and presidents alike.

This is too divorced from Lee’s actual life to even be classed as fan fiction; it is simply historical illiteracy.

White supremacy does not “violate” Lee’s “most fundamental convictions.” White supremacy was one of Lee’s most fundamental convictions.

Lee was a slave owner—his own views on slavery were explicated in an 1856 letter that is often misquoted to give the impression that Lee was some kind of abolitionist. In the letter, he describes slavery as “a moral & political evil,” but goes on to explain that:

I think it however a greater evil to the white man than to the black race, & while my feelings are strongly enlisted in behalf of the latter, my sympathies are more strong for the former. The blacks are immeasurably better off here than in Africa, morally, socially & physically. The painful discipline they are undergoing, is necessary for their instruction as a race, & I hope will prepare & lead them to better things. How long their subjugation may be necessary is known & ordered by a wise Merciful Providence. Their emancipation will sooner result from the mild & melting influence of Christianity, than the storms & tempests of fiery Controversy.

The argument here is that slavery is bad for white people, good for black people, and most important, better than abolitionism; emancipation must wait for divine intervention. That black people might not want to be slaves does not enter into the equation; their opinion on the subject of their own bondage is not even an afterthought to Lee.

Lee’s cruelty as a slave master was not confined to physical punishment. In Reading the Man, the historian Elizabeth Brown Pryor’s portrait of Lee through his writings, Pryor writes that “Lee ruptured the Washington and Custis tradition of respecting slave families” by hiring them off to other plantations, and that “by 1860 he had broken up every family but one on the estate, some of whom had been together since Mount Vernon days.” The separation of slave families was one of the most unfathomably devastating aspects of slavery, and Pryor wrote that Lee’s slaves regarded him as “the worst man I ever see.”

The trauma of rupturing families lasted lifetimes for the enslaved—it was, as my colleague Ta-Nehisi Coates described it, “a kind of murder.” After the war, thousands of the emancipated searched desperately for kin lost to the market for human flesh, fruitlessly for most. In Reconstruction, the historian Eric Foner quotes a Freedmen’s Bureau agent who notes of the emancipated, “In their eyes, the work of emancipation was incomplete until the families which had been dispersed by slavery were reunited.”

Lee’s heavy hand on the Arlington, Virginia, plantation, Pryor writes, nearly led to a slave revolt, in part because the enslaved had been expected to be freed upon their previous master’s death, and Lee had engaged in a dubious legal interpretation of his will in order to keep them as his property, one that lasted until a Virginia court forced him to free them.

When two of his slaves escaped and were recaptured, Lee either beat them himself or ordered the overseer to “lay it on well.” Wesley Norris, one of the slaves who was whipped, recalled that “not satisfied with simply lacerating our naked flesh, Gen. Lee then ordered the overseer to thoroughly wash our backs with brine, which was done.”

Every state that seceded mentioned slavery as the cause in their declarations of secession. Lee’s beloved Virginia was no different, accusing the federal government of “perverting” its powers “not only to the injury of the people of Virginia, but to the oppression of the Southern Slaveholding States.” Lee’s decision to fight for the South can only be described as a choice to fight for the continued existence of human bondage in America—even though for the Union, it was not at first a war for emancipation.

During his invasion of Pennsylvania, Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia enslaved free black Americans and brought them back to the South as property. Pryor writes that “evidence links virtually every infantry and cavalry unit in Lee’s army” to the abduction of free black Americans, “with the activity under the supervision of senior officers.”

Soldiers under Lee’s command at the Battle of the Crater in 1864 massacred black Union soldiers who tried to surrender. Then, in a spectacle hatched by Lee’s senior corps commander, A. P. Hill, the Confederates paraded the Union survivors through the streets of Petersburg to the slurs and jeers of the southern crowd. Lee never discouraged such behavior. As the historian Richard Slotkin wrote in No Quarter: The Battle of the Crater, “his silence was permissive.”

The presence of black soldiers on the field of battle shattered every myth that the South’s slave empire was built on: the happy docility of slaves, their intellectual inferiority, their cowardice, their inability to compete with white people. As Pryor writes, “fighting against brave and competent African Americans challenged every underlying tenet of southern society.” The Confederate response to this challenge was to visit every possible atrocity and cruelty upon black soldiers whenever possible, from enslavement to execution.

As the historian James McPherson recounts in Battle Cry of Freedom, in October of that same year, Lee proposed an exchange of prisoners with the Union general Ulysses S. Grant. “Grant agreed, on condition that black soldiers be exchanged ‘the same as white soldiers.’” Lee’s response was that “negroes belonging to our citizens are not considered subjects of exchange and were not included in my proposition.” Because slavery was the cause for which Lee fought, he could hardly be expected to easily concede, even at the cost of the freedom of his own men, that black people could be treated as soldiers and not things. Grant refused the offer, telling Lee that “government is bound to secure to all persons received into her armies the rights due to soldiers.” Despite its desperate need for soldiers, the Confederacy did not relent from this position until a few months before Lee’s surrender.

After the war, Lee did advise defeated southerners not to rise up against the North. Lee might have become a rebel once more, and urged the South to resume fighting—as many of his former comrades wanted him to. But even in this task Grant, in 1866, regarded his former rival as falling short, saying that Lee was “setting an example of forced acquiescence so grudging and pernicious in its effects as to be hardly realized.”

Nor did Lee’s defeat lead to an embrace of racial egalitarianism. The war was not about slavery, Lee insisted later, but if it were about slavery, it was only out of Christian devotion that white southerners fought to keep black people enslaved. Lee told a New York Herald reporter, in the midst of arguing in favor of somehow removing black people from the South (“disposed of,” in his words), “that unless some humane course is adopted, based on wisdom and Christian principles, you do a gross wrong and injustice to the whole negro race in setting them free. And it is only this consideration that has led the wisdom, intelligence and Christianity of the South to support and defend the institution up to this time.”

Lee had beaten or ordered his own slaves to be beaten for the crime of wanting to be free; he fought for the preservation of slavery; his army kidnapped free black people at gunpoint and made them unfree—but all of this, he insisted, had occurred only because of the great Christian love the South held for black Americans. Here we truly understand Frederick Douglass’s admonition that “between the Christianity of this land and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest possible difference.”

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/06/the-myth-of-the-kindly-general-lee/529038/

Editor’s Note: We’ve gathered dozens of the most important pieces from our archives on race and racism in America. Find the collection here.

Games You Might Not Have Tried #11 – Find New Games – Extra Credits

I sure hope you folks enjoy watching these as much as I like making ’em, because… I don’t know, these are fun! These episodes always take us a couple of months to put together, so by the time each one comes out, James has already got a new batch of games to recommend. Anyway! You know the drill. We don’t promise that all these games are good, just that they’re different.

Their design is interesting in some way, even if the most interesting thing about them is how they failed to achieve what they’re setting out to do. Anyway, enough talk. Have at you! Zero Time Dilemma. Years ago, we recommended 999 in one of these episodes. It’s been quite the journey since then, but now the franchise (or at least this chapter of it) is coming to a close, and the story is perhaps one of the best yet in the series. The graphics… not so much, but don’t let that deter you. This game may handily demonstrate just how much better 2D graphics can look, and that switching to 3D isn’t always the best choice, but, if you’ve followed the series so far, you owe it to yourself to finish this one out. And if you haven’t checked these games out yet, well, maybe get on that. Inside. We would be remiss if we didn’t mention this one.

Brought to you by the creators of Limbo, this is a dark and mysterious run through a puzzle-filled testing facility. James didn’t find it quite as compelling as Limbo, but it’s still a solid title, and the atmosphere alone is worth your time if you want to learn how to build that sort of oppressive feeling into your own games. Reverse Crawl. James just tore through this one. It’s one of those, “just one more battle” type games that’ll have you so sucked in that you won’t realize the sun is rising and, oops, you didn’t sleep. The really interesting thing about this game is that it takes the “Heroes of Might and Magic” or “Kings Bounty” formula, and does away with the exploration.

Now, that might sound terrible – James felt that way too, at first. I mean, exploration kind of seems like the lifeblood of those games. But by doing away with the exploration, Reverse Crawl is able to make the combat much tighter, with specifically designed encounters and a progression system that really makes the player consider what they want to be able to play with. Add to that the fact that the player can’t just barge into battle with a ridiculously broken combination of units, but instead has to pick from a wide variety of pre-made unit groupings for each encounter, and you get a tightly designed experience.

You can even beat it in one night if you don’t sleep. I don’t recommend it, but, I’m just saying, you could. ([evil laugh]) (And this, my distinguished gentlebots,) (is the new SteamWorld!) SteamWorld Heist. Since we’re talking strategy games, let’s talk about this pleasantly surprising little gem. This is a game that takes all the conventions of our isometric or top-down tactics games, and puts them on a 2D plane. And it works! It works because the designers considered how 2D might change the formula, what they might be able to do with the design in 2D that’d be harder in one of those other formats. And the conclusion they came to was to make you aim manually.

Yep, this is a tactics game like any other, but sort of like Valkyria Chronicles, when it comes time to shoot, you’ve gotta eyeball it. With no reticle to guide you, this makes variables like cover become a much more interesting and interactive element of the game than we saw even in games like XCOM. So, if you’re looking for a quirky tactics game, or even just like thinking about how we can push the formula, you might want to check out SteamWorld Heist. (And of course it all went according to plan…) Now, a whole lot of you asked if we could talk about some tablet and mobile games on one of these lists, so let me just throw a slew of those at you before we get back to the weird PC games. Let’s start with Galactic Keep. Galactic Keep is exactly what I always wanted a storybook adventure to be when I was young. It takes some of the work done in Steve Jackson’s excellent Sorcery series to the next level and really makes you feel like you’re playing a solo tabletop role-playing module.

Seriously. I’m not sure I’ve ever felt more like I was at the Barrier Peaks without a GM screen on the table. Out There. This game has no combat, and yet, it is brutal. It’s a roguelike survival adventure where you are the last surviving member of humanity trying to make it home. Its vignettes are excellently written, but unlike most story driven games, you will not easily reach the end of this story. I think it’s the very fact that Out There presents a harsh universe where you will die time and again before ever being able to see one of its many endings that kept drawing James back. If you like sci-fi, if you like roguelikes, if you like narrative and are interested in a brutal challenge that never once involves firing a blaster, you better check this out.

Icebound Concordance. Speaking of writing, here is a game that is all about writing. Or rather, it’s all about rewriting. The game itself is a conversation with an AI built from the mind of a writer, and you are there to help it edit and rewrite its last book. That’s pretty interesting in its own right, but then you get to the real bit: the Icebound Compendium. If you’re willing to pony up $25 to pick up the companion book, you are in for something…

Novel. I can’t say much about the Compendium without spoiling things, but, suffice it to say that periodically throughout the game you will be prompted to search through the book for pages related to some of what’s going on on-screen. Then, the game will use your iPad camera to scan the pages and to make the book itself come to life. My only complaint here is that the book itself is poorly made. The cover fell off the binding of James’ copy before it even got through the mail. Of course, that’s a sample size of one James, so hopefully yours will be sturdier. (♪ This is the Guild of Dungeoneering,) (♪ On our quest, we’re never fearing…) The Guild of Dungeoneering.

This game is here simply as an example of what a difference platform can make. James found this to be a mediocre strategy title when he first played it on PC, but on a tablet, its lighter shorter sessions and more casual strategy experience really works. If you want a relaxing strategy game to play on the go, it’s worth trying. Really though, this game is worth buying for the songs alone. (♪ The Guild of Dungeoneering!) (♪ Curse and swear, but don’t despair,) (♪ The way out appears to be over there,) (♪ I think we’re lost, but what do we care?) (♪ The Guild of Dungeoneering!) Templar Battleforce.

I haven’t tried this game on PC, but the mobile version was exactly what James was looking for in a slightly more hardcore tactics game. If you want to play Space Hulk, but the actual modern Space Hulk video game didn’t cut it for you, get Templar Battleforce. It’s everything Space Hulk should be. It’s got an interesting class system, a varied advancement tree, multiple ways to customize units of the same class, and yet the levels are short enough to play on the go. Alright, that’s enough mobile games. Let’s return to the PC, and let’s get weird.

Cat Lady. We so rarely get to recommend adventure games, so I’m glad we get to talk about this piece of weirdness. There are a lot of counter-intuitive design decisions in this game: sometimes on purpose, sometimes as pitfalls of the old-school adventure game ethos, but if you’re looking for something surreal, creepy, and dark, Cat Lady has you covered. The art style perfectly fits the madness, feeling at times like Monty Python channeling Poe.

And the decision to do away with the mouse entirely in an old-school adventure game and streamline things by going with a keyboard interface alone? That’ll put you on a “Games You Might Not Have Tried” list. Fran Bow. We can’t talk about horror games without talking Fran Bow. If you want disturbing and strange, this game has it in spades, but it’s the ambiguity of this game that I love. I’ll try not to spoil anything, but let’s just say, the game leaves itself open for interpretation, and I think that’s great. Too often, horror stories try to explain all their nightmarish surreality, and in doing so, kill the horror. That’s not to say that horror stories shouldn’t make sense, but leaving your nightmare world as an ambiguous metaphor is often so much better than feeling like you have to tie up all the loose ends by saying something like, “See? It was a dream all along!” Fran Bow is an excellent example of this.

Killing Time at Lightspeed. I love the premise of this game. You’ve left Earth. You’re traveling away at light speed, but you can still see your Facebook feed. But here’s the catch: at relativistic speed, every time you hit refresh, a year has passed. You can touch base for one snapshot of everyone’s lives back home then it whirls past and time moves on – for them, if not for you. My only complaint is that most of the time, most of my friends back home simply talked about the news, and for me at least, that’s not how social networks work. That’s a big part of it to be sure, but it’s in the background of all the tiny day-to-day things that people post. I would have loved to have more emphasis on the personal, on the relationships of people and their daily lives, as that backdrop would have given the big events of the world that much more impact, seeing how they affected the people I loved even as I whipped away from them at the speed of light.

Anyway, neat game. Try it out. And finally, Quadrilateral Cowboy. What happens when you mix stealth capers with command line hacking and a PS1 visual aesthetic? Well, you get Quadrilateral Cowboy. Your mileage may vary with the art style, but there is something so cyberpunk about actually hooking up a computer to a jack and having to turn off a security laser with a series of semicolon delineated commands. Am I alone, though, in this making me long for a multiplayer game where one player plays the stealth action hero, and the other one plays their off-site hacker buddy? Like, unlocking the doors and shutting off security cameras in the nick of time with a command-line interface? That would be rad. Somebody, get on that. Anyway, I think that’ll do it for today. Thank you for watching; recommend some of your own weird favorites in the comments below, and we will see you next week..

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Cooking in the time of Covid-19

These days I am reminded of the epic love story, “Love in the time of cholera”, written by Gabriel Garcia Marquez.  In fact, I had intended to title this post “Life in the time of Corona” but the reference seems a bit tired by now.

Reading is a wonderful way of travelling without leaving home.Actually so is cooking. The smell of lemongrass and Thai basil will take you right back to the streets of Bangkok and the aroma of ripe tomatoes and bell peppers from a luscious ratatouille (photo) accompanied by a cool glass of Rosé will transport you immediately to sunny Provence. So now that you cannot actually cross borders, I recommend you put on your apron and travel around the world with my favourite cookbooks and go-to recipe websites.

CHINESE CUISINE

There are eigh major Chinese cuisine: Anhui (徽菜; Huīcài), Cantonese (粤菜; Yuècài), Fujian (闽菜; Mǐncài), Hunan (湘菜; Xiāngcài), Jiangsu (苏菜; Sūcài), Shandong (鲁菜; Lǔcài), Sichuan (川菜; Chuāncài), and Zhejiang (浙菜; Zhècài) cuisines.

My paternal and maternal grandmothers were from the provinces of fujian and chaozhou (in province Canton bordering on Fujian) respectively and I’ve never needed a cookbook. Whenever I crave Chinese food, I just ring my mum or I search on the web and just tweak the recipes based on my experience.

Most Chinese restaurants around the world serve some variation of Cantonese food, although in recent years, the popularity of Sichuan food has led to a proflieration of Sichuan restaurants. However, more does not mean better and most Sichuan restaurants are really nothing at all like the real thing (I should know, I have eaten in Sichuan, China). While preparing for my trip to Sichuan last autumn,  I chanced upon Fuchsia Dunlop’s “The Food of Sichuan” as part of my travel research . Since my return from Sichuan armed with Sichuan pepper and doubanjiang and with the help of Ms Dunlop’s cookbook, I’ve been able to whip up delicious mapo tofu (photo above), gongbao chicken and other delectable Sichuan dishes.  Thanks to the popularity of Sichuan food, you’ll be able to find most of the ingredients you need in your local Asian grocery shops.

Ever wanted to make your own char siew (marinated roast pork), dim sum and Peking duck etc? Then Andrew Wong’s The Cookbook might be just what you need. But be warned - the recipes do call for some experience in Chinese cooking. I’ve had to improvise or interpret some recipes to make them work. But my har gau (photo below) and char siew tasted very close to the ones I’ve eaten in Hong Kong and his Xinjiang lamb ribs recipe alone makes it worthwhile to buy this cookbook.

INDIAN CUISINE

I’ve been cooking with Dishoom’s recipes since I got the cookbook a month ago and every recipe I’ve tried (apart from the chapati - photo below) has turned out super yummy. See my post on 2 Mar. for more details on the cookbook.

ITALIAN CUISINE

The story of Harry Cipriani’s famous bar in Venice where incidentally the Bellini cocktail was invented, is told here in The Harry’s Bar cookbook which contains many recipes for Italian classics. Learn how to make your own pasta, cook an al dente risotto and succeed in finally making a super tender osso bucco (stewed veal shanks - photo below with risotto milanese). What the cookbook does not have is a recipe for tiramisu. I do however, have a great recipe for tiramisu and the next time I make it, I’ll remember to post the recipe.

Another Italian cookbook I like is Jamie’s Italy. Like all Jamie Oliver’s cookbooks, the recipes are not complicated and easy to replicate.

JAPANESE CUISINE

Fans of gyoza, tempura, soba (photo below), ramen and other Japanese comfort food will be happy to know that Japanese Soul Cooking is just the cookbook you’d want to have. I’ve tried many recipes from it and have been satisfied with the results. My only complain is that the measurements are in U.S. imperial units so conversion is necessary if you live in a metric world like me.

But what to do if you’re like me and what you really, really love about Japanese food is sushi and sashimi? Even if Jiro would never encourage anyone to try making sushi at home, I would. I basically taught myself how to make sushi, although I must confess that I have stopped making nigiris (fish on top of rice) and only make makis (rolls).  Unfortunately I don’t have a good cookbook on making sushi that I can recommend but if you have access to superfresh fish (forget it if you don’t because not only might you risk food poisoning, it’s too much effort for too little pleasure!), then go ahead and try making them yourself. I recommend a make-your-own sushi party. Invite some friends, find a recipe or two on the internet, buy the ingredients and have fun practising together. If all else fails, you can just make wraps using the seaweed (in a sushi restaurant, this is called a temaki and is a cone-shaped wrap) and still enjoy a good meal.

LEVANTINE CUISINE

Levantine cuisine is the traditional cuisine of the Levant (a large area of eastern Mediterranean). Hummus, baba ghanoush, tabbouleh etc. made popular by Yotam Ottolenghi (an Israeli based in London) are part of the Levantine cuisine and even if some of these well-known dishes originate from countries neighbouring the Levant, they have become part of the its cuisine.

There is a reason why Ottolenghi is so successful - his cookbooks work! I have Jerusaleum (my favourite of all), Nopi and Simple and use them regularly. Be warned though, Simple may mean easy and the recipes are not difficult, but doesn’t mean quick (cross-references make for deceptively short recipes but in fact take time to put together).

THAI CUISINE

My go-to Thai cookbook cookbook is The Food of Thailand by Sven Krauss, who was executive chef at the Thai restaurant in the beautiful Sukothai hotel in Bangkok. I ate in the restaurant more than two decades ago but a quick check on the web showed that the restaurant is still beautiful and the food is still good. All your favourite Thai classics tom yam goong, beef salad, pad Thai, green curry etc. are featured in this cookbook and the recipes are easy to follow.

THE MUST-HAVE COOKBOOK (ESPECIALLY FOR BEGINNERS)

Remember Ferran Adria of the El Bulli fame? In 2011 he published a book called “The Family Meal” and it is a great resource for beginners and advanced cooks alike. Every day at 6pm the staff at El Bulli would stop to have a 3-course meal. These meals are prepared by the staff for the staff. And because the kitchen brigade is international, there are recipes from all over the world such as gazpacho, Thai curry, miso soup and Mexican chicken. The book is divided into 31 three-course menus with measurements provided for 2, 6, 20 and 75 portions. Each step of each course is documented with a photo  and the explanations are clear and concise. I once hosted four 15-year old teenagers over the Easter holidays and in return for my hospitality, they cooked me a meal from the cookbook. Every course turned out tasty and as it turned out, they really had fun.

ONLINE RESOURCES

I am old-fashioned when it comes to books. And cookbooks are no exception. There’s nothing like browsing through the pages and being inspired by the lovely food photography. And on a practical level, analog cookbooks allow me to make notes directly on the page. Yes, the pages might get dirty in the process but that makes it all the more charming (I did say I was old-fashioned that way).

Having said that, I regularly use the internet to find recipes and be inspired. I try to avoid using random recipes as my experience has been disappointing. If the source is not proven, you’ll end up with disappointments. My favourite websites are the recipes section of BBC (and BBC GoodFood) and The Guardian (How to make the perfect...). The NYTimes has great recipes but you’ll need to be a subscriber and there’s the conversion issue with measurements. 

I am a big fan of Nigel Slater’s recipes. They are so varied (Italian, Thai, French, Levantine etc), easy to follow and works well everytime. Even his cake and dessert recipes are fantastic. I have two of his cookbooks and I use his Kitchen Diaries so often that it’s falling apart. He also has recipes on his website and contributes to The Guardian and BBC.

If you read German and are looking for recipes, then I recommend the websites of Essen and Trinken and Brigitte. I use them for classic German/Austrian dishes and sweets (cakes and desserts) and so far my German guests have not complained. German language versions of The Harry’s Bar, Jamie Oliver, Ottenlenghi and The Family Meal (Das Familienessen) cookbooks are available.

LAST BUT NOT LEAST....

As with a meal, I will end here too on a sweet note*

*homemade mango tart (short crust pasty base, mascarpone filling topped with fresh mangoes) 

If you have any questions, send me an email at [email protected].

Meanwhile, stay safe, happy cooking and enjoy the fruits of your labour!

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Sundance 2018 Day 7: National Lampoon, 'Monsters and Men,' 'American Animals' hit

We're coming down to the end of the 2018 Sundance Film Festival, and NEON seems to be the shining light for several films including Assassination Nation ($10 million plus deal), Three Identical Strangers and Monsters and Men. See all of our coverage of the 2018 Sundance Film Festival. As director David Wain (Wet Hot American Summer, They Came Together) said, "No publication was more consequential to changing culture in the world as much as National Lampoon," and that's the subject of his A Futile and Stupid Gesture biopic. “To make a very popular comparison,” McHale said National Lampoon co-founder Doug Kenney was, “kind of like Hamilton in that nobody knew what he had done, but he really changed comedy.” Below are the highlights from Day 7 of the 2018 Sundance Film Festival.

A Futile and Stupid Gesture

Doug Kenney, the unsung maverick comedy writer who co-founded National Lampoon and helped launch the careers of John Belushi, Chevy Chase, and Bill Murray, gets exactly the sort of irreverent meta comedy biopic he’d likely have wanted in A Futile and Stupid Gesture. David Wain’s star-studded film adaptation of the book by Josh Karp premiered Wednesday night and will begin streaming on Netflix this Friday. Wain immediately establishes this as an unconventional biopic by employing an unusual framing device with 74-year-old Martin Mull as the imagined modern-day Kenney (though he actually died under mysterious circumstances at age 33). Always a welcome presence, Mull narrates the film on camera, selectively deciding which events to include. We’re soon introduced to young Kenney as an impertinent, whip-smart college student (portrayed by the always buoyant Will Forte) as he teams with pal Henry Beard (Domhnall Gleeson) to oversee the Harvard Lampoon just before it evolves into the iconic comedy mag National Lampoon. A radio show and live show spawned by that publication introduce a bevy of household names, including Chevy Chase (Joel McHale), and they go on to make Animal House. When the film becomes an unexpected blockbuster in 1978 (it was the highest-grossing comedy for many years), Kenney’s downward slide begins: his cocaine addiction escalates in an attempt to defeat the writer’s block that confronts him when he tries to create a follow-up. He eventually makes another comedy, Caddyshack, which, though underappreciated at the time of its release, does go on to inspire a devoted following. It’s a kick to see the behind-the-scenes making of these classic comedies, and whenever the film veers away from the comedic tone, a character will punctuate the drama with the Animal House battle cry “food fight!” The film also looks at Kenney’s strange passing during a hiking trip in Hawaii, when he either fell or leaped to his death, but it leaves his demise open to interpretation. It’s a challenge to think of a director better suited to this material than Wain, whose reputation was made with his own cult comedy Wet Hot American Summer, which premiered during the Sundance Film Festival in 2001. During the Q&A following the screening, Wain told the audience that, having watched Caddyshack “ten thousand times as a kid,” he wanted to make a film about “someone whose name we don’t know, but he really invented the comedy I grew up on.” A Futile and Stupid Gesture will undoubtedly keep Kenney’s name alive for years to come.

Monsters and Men

When director Reinaldo Marcus Green came to the 2015 Festival with his short film Stop, about a young black man who gets stopped by the police on his way home from baseball practice, he found himself in an intense conversation about the Eric Garner killing with a friend of his who appeared in the short. “We saw two totally different [sides]. I saw a guy that I thought shouldn’t have died, and he saw something a little different — that it was unfortunate that he was dead but that he was resisting arrest. One thing led to another, [and] it was a really, really heated discussion with my friend. We kind of hugged it out afterwards. … But it was just honest. We were just honestly missing each other.” Not only did that critical conversation inspire the idea for Green’s latest film, Monsters and Men, but that friend actually ended up appearing in the feature. The story follows the perspectives of three different men after a killing committed by the NYPD: that of a young father who recorded the act, a black police officer trying to make sense of the killing, and a high school athlete on the periphery who wonders whether he should get involved in speaking out. With a triptych structure that dives into each point of view, Green explores the nuances of each man’s character. “The idea of the title is that we all have a little bit of good and bad in us. … And we can choose to turn a blind eye to the things that are happening around us or we can do something about it. We’re [all] human, and we have choices to make, and we have to live with those choices.” However, Green admits that it’s not always easy to know what to do. “I think about my own personal life and how I can become more active or how I can become involved, and a lot of times it’s like, ‘Man, it’s such a big issue. I don’t know what to do.’ And the issue becomes so overwhelming that we end up doing nothing. And I just thought, that can’t be. Even the smallest thing, even just paying attention [can make a difference]. And that was really the start to [this film]. We’re not going to end racism with the film, but we could start a conversation.” NEON, which made a big splash at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival when they spent over $10 million for global distribution rights to Assassination Nation along with Three Identical Strangers and a slew of other films picked up domestic rights to Monsters and Men, but the terms were not disclosed.

American Animals

While the nimble, meticulously constructed heist film American Animals was presented as part of the U.S. Dramatic Competition at the Festival, hearing the filmmakers discuss their methods after its screening at the Library Center Theatre on Wednesday suggests that their unique creation also bears the heart and rigor of a documentary. It tells the true story of four middle-class suburban college kids in Lexington, Kentucky, who plot to steal rare and valuable books from their university library’s special collection and sell them on the black market. The protracted and, at times, shambling setup leads them to New York and Amsterdam, and ultimately to cross lines they’re both eager and horrified to traverse. The events in question are performed by four young actors and staged with the gusto and resources of an ambitious fictional film, but director Bart Layton also intersperses interviews with the real foursome throughout the feature. And rather than serve as a contrapuntal element or arch flourish within the story, these interviews actually serve to anchor the narrative. As the filmmakers described, in terms of editing construction, these interviews were put together first, and the rest of the film was built around them. Layton explained that the script changed in crucial ways because of new information introduced by the subjects of the story. The original version was based on correspondences with the foursome when they were in prison — letters, emails, and phone calls. But then when they were released, which was deep into the film’s production, they were able to be interviewed on camera and convey much more than they had expressed through correspondence. “A lot of things came out of it, not least [of which was] the depth of emotion that you see, and the remorse,” Layton said. “So I actually had to put a pause on production to go back and rewrite based on exactly what had been in there.” Though the actors do look very much like the real men they’re playing, Layton said he didn’t cast the actors to mimic their characters but instead sought an authentic dynamic between them, one that might resemble the dynamic between four young people with different, specific personalities and motivations for pursuing such a crime. Despite all four actors — Evan Peters, Barry Keoghan, Blake Jenner, and Jared Abrahamson — wanting to spend time with the real protagonists, Layton said his feeling was that “it wouldn’t have been helpful. They were 10 years older than they were when this happened. And most of those 10 years they’d been in prison — they were different people,” he said. “I thought that what I had put on the page was what they needed.” Layton and producer Dimitri Doganis discussed the seemingly oxymoronic conditions for such an amateurish heist, and how this crime performed by these four young men potentially spoke to both larger societal issues and particular psychological ones. “Why would well-brought-up kids from quite good families end up committing a crime like this? They didn’t need the money. And did they even think they could get away with it? It didn’t really seem like it,” Layton said. In letters from prison, Spencer TK talked of being an aspiring artist who was frustrated by the dearth of experiences and tragedies to inform his work, and that piqued Layton’s interest. “Having a central character whose main fatal flaw is that he doesn’t have a flaw or a problem so he goes out to manufacture one” proved worth exploring, he said. “We felt that it was a way of telling a story about a very lost generation, a group of young people who feel a huge amount of pressure to have an identity, to be interesting. Fifty years ago, their dads would be the definition of success — food on the table, nice car in the driveway, all that. But for them that’s not a success, that’s mediocre.” “I met them just after they got out of prison for the first time, and we were sitting in this amazingly picturesque pub in Kentucky, which looked like to me a picture postcard of the American dream: detached homes, SUVs in the forecourt, basketball hoops, literally picket fences. And I was asking them about their time in prison,” Doganis said. “And they agreed that their first two years in jail were probably the best time of their lives.” Considering the surroundings for this conversation, an idyllic and non-incarcerated landscape, he wondered how that could be. “They said it’s probably a simplification, but in a way we freed ourselves from all the expectations of what we should do, and what our parents expected of us. They knew it was a naive feeling and one that certainly didn’t last, but the notion that somehow growing up in the bosom of the American dream and what looked like it should have been the perfect environment was stultifying, whereas being in a federal jail felt like quite an exciting dynamic.” “I wouldn’t recommend it, though,” said Layton. MoviePass Ventures and The Orchard partnered to buy North American distribution rights for $3 million, and most importantly, the distributors are putting up a significant P&A commitment. Most filmmakers know this is what can get a film out there as most distributors don’t commit and this can be the death of many great films.

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