Only Yesterday, Pom Poko, and The Tale of the Princess Kaguya are three of my favourite films of all time. Takahata was a true talent, with an ability to effortlessly shift styles and subject matter in a way that almost no other animation director could match. We lost one of the greats today.

I thought I was the only other person who had that opinion. Glad to see I’m not alone. The spirit parade sequence remains one of the most beautiful animated sequences of all time.

Cecil Taylor died too, reportedly.

Animation has lost a giant.

Pom Poko is the best Studio Ghibli movie. Thanks, sir.

Hela is a Goddess of Death. She is a deity that represents death in relation to her pantheon.

Didn’t he rearrange some planets to spell his name to impress her? Which ... well, you’d think spelling HER name would be more appealing.

Yeah but that doesn’t justify Thanos upsetting the natural order of the universe because to show a woman who’s not interested in him that he’s a “Nice Guy”.

I’m just hoping that MCU Thanos has the same motivation for wanting to commit genocide on a cosmic scale, so that Death-Senpai will notice him.

Maynard at least has a bit of a sense of humor about his own pretentiousness, for example:

It all gets blended by the apparatus of Kinja. Long long long ago I was a member of the AVClub, but it had been many years (and a full run at a career within AAA games) between there and when it joined the Gizmodo Media Empire. I apologize that I conflate the two, but its not an unnatural conflation.

I have to say that I did figure out relatively early (well... not all that long before bailing out at the 10-hour mark) how to read the signs that a given puzzle required knowledge that I hadn’t yet acquired. But yeah, it was not always blazingly obvious, and that’s a bold decision in itself to have an open-world…

The biggest issue in The Witness (for me) was difficulty in figuring out the rules of a puzzle. The game is built around tinkering and “AHA!” moments from figuring it out. But finding the starting points for the puzzle areas was rough. It’s very easy to stumble into an advanced area that builds upon previous knowledge…

I hope this won’t be considered as spoilers, but as far as what my progress was, I had discovered a sun temple and made my way mostly through it (there was a watery puzzle in the basement that I couldn’t figure out), plus one old-timey BBC video in an underground conference room, plus an unexpected fast-travel-ish…

I’m surprised you came to that conclusion after only 10 hours (depending on how far along you managed to get in that time, of course). It’s hard to explain how this could be true of a game that presents itself as simply drawing lines on a series of silly little grids on an island, but once I got extremely far in that…

I’m discontented with the general consensus criticizing him for being so far up his own ass, while 90% of the content of both this site and Kotaku scrolls on by uncritically challenged, despite being everything wrong with both gaming and society at large (in short, cosplay = idolization, MMOs=subjugation of humanity…

The word Braid does appear in the text. When “the princess” who is actually a WMD, turns away from Tim, her Braid lashing him across the face.

the literal meaning in the story is the braid of the princess’s hair that hit tim in the face as she left. the metaphorical meaning could be a lot of things

Played this a couple of years after it came out, fairly early in my grand return to gaming after 15+ years, and while I enjoyed the gameplay and found it fascinating and unique, I wasn’t especially struck by the story. (I would probably be among those who had issues with Blow’s “prose”, as mentioned in the article.)