Then you have Steve, where romancing him was a total rebound off of his recently-dead husband.

Yeah. . . pretty much :p

Somehow I think we're not quite hearing each other here. Good talking with you anyway.

Condescending much?

We'll agree to disagree with the collectors.

I need to agree with Ruhemaru on this one. The connection with the reapers was tenuous throughout all but the very, very end of the story. You didn't really know who the collectors were, why they were collecting, why the reapers were bothering with them in the first place, how the reapers were directing them, what…

There was just a lot of fan service all around, and the Makorra was the epitome. The romance didn't work because it was contrived and felt cheap, not because it was there. Personally, I think it takes from a story when characters become defined by their romantic choices, rather than their choices being defined by…

Pretty much.

HOLD on here now. It's men, their masculinity and the entitlement men feel toward to their families?

*Sigh* and it begins

It reminds me a lot of how we looked at the inner party of the USSR. Never really knew what was going on, and we speculated about all of the potential power struggles the party might have been going through based on what little we could glean from their media.

Of course, those in the party probably were laughing at…

IMO, the best way to think of the Kim family is Godfather type criminal family. Of what happens in the DPRK, very little of it is meant for the outside world, but rather the antics and shows and pomp and everything else are tailor designed to maintain the Kim's position of power. Take the latest war scare for example:…

. . . and now I remember why Raggedy Ann & Andy terrified me. Eww.

I'll second that. Ever since I was a kid I *loved* dark, creepy, macabre films. Things that were slightly disturbing, or just a little bit off. No idea why, but I enjoyed a movie that could scare me just a little bit.

I loved that scene as well.

Good article. Freud doesn't get enough credit for the things he did get right, at least conceptually. Take, for example, his primitive theory of neurons:

Well, there you go. Though none of my Thai friends spoke like that . . .

By sell sword I meant "person with little or no real skill who an employer dresses up in armor and hands a sword to look intimidating, but who has no real expectation of coming out of a real combat situation alive." So basically take a big, tough looking young man, give him a "security" shirt, and that he's able to…

Well, you'd have to meaningfully be able to participate in the game, even as "mundane" levels. We know from titles like Farmville that people *are* willing to literally be farmers in a game so long as there is a compelling game mechanic. I would think a system in which being a high-level farmer is not any worse than…

Interesting ad, and interesting analysis. It goes without saying that this heroic motif doesn't apply to *every* game, but I would argue that it doesn't always happen in the Skyrim's or Mass Effect's.