I grew up on JRPG's (and I liked the first section of Xenoblade), but these days I find that when I get one I almost always quit well before the end. After listening to some retro videogame podcasts, I think I've figured out why that is.

CK II is such a life suck game.

It feels like since the release of the new console there has never been more than one (and often no) games that I feel like I have/want to play immediately.

I liked this essay better when Dave Foster Wallace wrote it: jjsomers.net/DFW_TV.pdfsome…

The older I get the less sense grades make. It is only fine and proper, for example, to consider politics and morals when evaluating a work of fiction. But when you start to deduct points for being racist for example, things get strange (not necessarily wrong).

You don't even know, bro.

This song makes me want to cry while cutting aliens in half with a chain saw gun.

Try Jesus Son. If you don't want to make a purchase, the New Yorker has a fiction podcast where writers read short stories from the New Yorker back issues. I belive they have two stories from that collection in there.

I love Karen Russell ' short stories.

Much like the Vietnam War it purports to cover.

Tree of Smoke is great. But Jesus' Son is the bees knees, and it is 400 fewer pages.

Anyone else find it very strange that the Book Reviews get grades while the Video Games don't?

My girlfriend buys and reads way more comics than I do. I will pick up the trade of Saga or Fatale occasionally. But she has comic strewn all over the place (sex criminals, Captain Marvel, Hawkeye, Rat Queens, She Hulk). And there are even more on her iPad.

Someone once ttried to argue to me that Wal Mart was worst than the Irish Potato Famine.

Fatale is also very good.

Every holiday season I start a play through if Baldur's Gate 2. It doesn't hurt that that game has one of my favorite arcs ever, and it really makes you feel your progression from a middling adventurer to a force of nature capable of challenging gods. And the battle encounters are so well designed and so open ended…

I think I'm going to start Wasteland 2 this week. CRPG's are among my favorite genres and I have time now. Anybody that has played it got any advice for starting out?

The feature used to be more dumb opinions about dumb songs. It seems like the interviewers are doing deep dives into these horrible songs now. It's very strange to me.

I don't know what the hell is going on with this feature, but I think I like it.

I think my answers to this are pretty cliche: