Disqus - Latest Comments for gbrown

Re: The shaking is not over in the trailer for San Andreas

gbrown — Tue, 10 Mar 2015 14:01:46 -0000

I really like Roland Emmerich's approach compared to more "weighty" directors, honestly. Outside of John Cusack being a giant sinkhole of charisma (and nearly dooming a chunk of the human race towards the end), 2012 nailed Emmerich's approach of quickly sketching out most characters and giving them each their own beat, usually involving death by calamity. There's the same glee as a kid playing with toys in her backyard, appropriate to the subject and rare outside of Emmerich's efforts.

See also: White House Down being infinitely more enjoyable than Olympus Has Fallen.

Re: There will be not one but two Gritty Reboot™-brand Robin Hood movies

gbrown — Fri, 05 Dec 2014 11:37:27 -0000

As it turns out, the Ridley Scott version was so bad that even movie execs have forgotten about it.

Re: Batman V Superman moves up to March 2016 avoid showdown with Captain America 3

gbrown — Wed, 06 Aug 2014 16:58:03 -0000

The Marvel and DC deluge is like a parent who, finding their kid with a cigarette, forces them to chain-smoke the whole pack to learn a lesson.

Re: After Latest Incident, Israel's Future in FIFA is Uncertain

gbrown — Mon, 03 Mar 2014 19:53:36 -0000

You can quibble about the definition of apartheid states all you want, but it's impossible to deny that the current situation in Israel is functionally equivalent to Jim Crow-era America, and just as deserving of condemnation.

The BDS movement (Boycott, Divest, and Sanction) is one last, desperate attempt to try and right this wrong in the most non-violent way feasible, and a moral imperative for us all.

Re: Irrational Games shutting down, and that's the bottom line cause Ken Levine said so

gbrown — Tue, 18 Feb 2014 15:32:40 -0000

More likely, Irrational was forcibly-liquidated and the spun-off team is Ken Levine's golden parachute. The rest is pure PR.

Re: Column: Our collective obsession with the trivial

gbrown — Mon, 18 Feb 2013 09:48:57 -0000

Really, the more interesting question to ask here is, "why did these 'trivial' events become such a big deal?" And the answer would have circumvented this whole editorial: they seem synecdochic of their times.

Health care reform genuinely was a Big F-ing Deal. Joe Wilson's shouted comment encapsulated GOP intransigence. And the water sip was the crowning moment of an awkward response that—as all responses inevitably do—paled by comparison to the State of the Union.

These trivial elements provide human, bite-sized moments through which we grasp greater meaning—and the "serious" grumbling about their outsized attention fundamentally misinterprets how informed the public really is, and why they all seem to latch onto the same fleeting glimpses of self-satire at once.

Re: Greg Brown (Seven Steps to Improve your Game Criticism)

gbrown — Fri, 28 Dec 2012 14:55:18 -0000

I wouldn't agree that those questions aren't part of the reviewer's job, especially if they're actually aiming to write a thoughtful critique. But more importantly, the questions are a stealthy way to get the writer to question some of their own conclusions.

For #6, I wanted to offer a chance to consider it from the developer's side of things, empathize with their real-world limits, and understand why things are the way they are—even if it's something as simple as recognizing the impracticality of some expectations. But more than practical limits, it's also a way of looking at some of our industry-wide assumptions, like recognizing why a developer completely missed that a female character was written paper-thin.

#7 is kind of a launching-off point for several different outcomes. We might discover a second purpose that the game seems to working towards, and that's revealing if they clash in interesting ways that contributed to how we thought it succeeded or failed. But it also may be cause to go full circle and question whether we really got the purpose right in #1. Maybe we thought Far Cry 2 was a power fantasy at the start, but by the end have noticed that it's trying to say something very different. Thinking about it as an "alternate purpose" (whether potential or realized) is a better way of sneaking around our original assumptions than to simply ask us to reconsider what we originally thought, and offers a better starting point for that kind of discussion.

Re: Reddit Readies For Brewing ‘Inter-website War,’ Bans Links to Gawker Media

gbrown — Thu, 11 Oct 2012 13:54:11 -0000

I have no doubt that the vast majority of Reddit users—both active and lurkers—don't traffic those subreddits. There are even several vital communities within Reddit like /r/ShitRedditSays who speak up and point out the underlying biases and moral issues with some of the other subreddits.

Where I have a problem is when the community itself mobilizes to actively defend those subreddits. It's this weird hinging group identity where we don't feel liable to speak up for their wrongs, but we do feel liable to defend them as an e-family. More than just petty, banning Gawker media links to the site in prominent subreddits is the worst kind of this impulse and makes Reddit as a whole look very very bad. Again.

Re: Reddit Readies For Brewing ‘Inter-website War,’ Bans Links to Gawker Media

gbrown — Thu, 11 Oct 2012 11:35:40 -0000

Violentacrez was also the biggest poster on the old r/jailbait and other child porn subreddits, another cause that Reddit briefly mobilized to defend. Again, it took other sites pressuring and calling them out for the site to finally jump in and shut that down.

Reddit's compartmentalized setup makes it easy for other users to turn a blind eye to what's happening elsewhere on the site—handy for when you find the other topics merely boring, but dangerous when it prevents self-examination and allows subreddits like this to continue unabated.

Re: Millsin' About

gbrown — Wed, 08 Aug 2012 16:39:59 -0000

Imagine him saying that—cart full of groceries, pointing to the "12 items or less" sign—to the checker in the express lane.

Re: http://blog.millsbaker.net/post/15801320552

gbrown — Sat, 14 Jan 2012 22:50:01 -0000

It only gets more complex as we start to consider that humans must model each other in order to reach empathy, etc. Models inside models, eventually touching the face of infinite regress.

Re: http://gregbrown.tumblr.com/post/14740081714

gbrown — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 18:37:55 -0000

Would way-recommend this case if someone's looking for a lot of protection; just enough of a lip on the front to protect the screen, while pretty minimal and force-absorbing.

http://cl.ly/1W1E132T0j1p10...

Re: http://www.lbjbookclub.com/post/14770273503

gbrown — Mon, 02 Jan 2012 20:17:20 -0000

Got sick over New Year's weekend and spent a lot of time reading Caro. Thanks to that and holiday travel, went from being behind to around chapter 31!

I know it's not until the next installment, but the 25 pages or so Caro spends describing electrification—both the hardships beforehand and the struggles in making it happen—are some of the finest writing I've ever read. Really amazing stuff.

Re: http://www.lbjbookclub.com/post/13593962136

gbrown — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 19:52:23 -0000

I'm Greg, and I'm a community manager living in Chicago, Il. (but have worn many hats over the last few years).

Like Steffen, I was originally drawn to Caro by his account of power —how it was accumulated, and how much that account could differ from the stories we traditionally tell ourselves about democracy. There's also the institutional angle, and I'm interested in seeing how that differs from (and agrees with) Simon's panoramic portrait in The Wire.

Unfortunately, I haven't yet been able to make it through a Caro book, despite several stabs at reading The Power Broker. I'm hoping that this book club gives me the extra push to keep with them—and block out distractions.

I'm also excited to get caught up so I can read his fourth volume when it comes out. Having read Rick Perlstein's Before the Storm, a pretty amazing socio-political history of the era that also goes into great detail about Goldwater's campaign, I'm excited to see Caro's take on events.

Re: http://blog.millsbaker.net/post/11341463646

gbrown — Tue, 11 Oct 2011 22:35:24 -0000

Image originally from the excellent Tumblr blog If we don't, remember me.

Re: http://blog.millsbaker.net/post/4667823315

gbrown — Sat, 16 Apr 2011 17:14:10 -0000

That excerpt may or may not have been the subject of a CSS experiment by me.

http://gregblo.gs/?p=1

Re: The Advantages of Tourette’s

gbrown — Wed, 06 Apr 2011 19:34:23 -0000

Another example is one writer who ascribed some skills to stuttering, since he had to rewrite sentences as he spoke them to avoid troublesome sounds and combinations.

Re: To Replace Religion

gbrown — Mon, 21 Feb 2011 16:02:37 -0000

Is religion truly in decline, or are older ideologies merely being swapped for (or colonized by) neoliberal capitalism?

Re: A Year in Review

gbrown — Wed, 12 Jan 2011 00:23:54 -0000

And I think the true greatness of the ending is in making real to modern audiences the sort of myth-logic of Swan Lake's ending. You read classic greek myths like The Illiad and The Odyssey and it's hard to understand why the characters act the way they do. We usually excuse it by describing different cultural norms of heroism and sacrifice, but what we undersell is that the historical consciousness was distinctly different, just as even Odysseus' brain is missing entire lobes needed to get Twitter. The lead up to that performance - and Aronofsky's subjectively-driven depiction of it - sells the end of Swan Lake in a way the ballet couldn't, and never could. I certainly found it powerful, and in a way that clearly didn't work for you. Sorry. :(

Re: A Year in Review

gbrown — Wed, 12 Jan 2011 00:18:21 -0000

Black Swan was a very very stressful movie to watch; I think I saw Requiem for a Dream with liberal use of the pause button to pace around the room and relax, and quickly regretted not having that crutch. Aronofsky is an unabashedly subjective filmmaker, and I think that ends up supercharging the performances. The mom and Vincent Cassel were both great, and Natalie Portman had a great range of owning the scene when she needed to and simply stepping back and reacting when called to.

And then the final act comes along, the movie starts to cohere and structure itself, and the stress level goes down to be replaced by... transcendance? Something like that, both more hard-won than that in The Fountain and more ethereal.

I don't know if it will pan out to be one of Aronofsky's better films in the long-term, but it's certainly a hell of a roller-coaster ride. And it makes me really want to see "Swan Lake" sometime. So I guess that counts as liking it. So stressful.

Re: A Year in Review

gbrown — Tue, 11 Jan 2011 18:09:23 -0000

I am a billion-percent agreed about the awfulness of The Town. Ben Affleck's boston-schtick is suspiciously similar to Adam Sandler playing serious in both accent and affect. All of the actors felt like they were Acting, being predictable in all the ways they were stereotypically unpredictable. Jeremy Renner was the only one who felt genuinely dangerous or sociopathic. Completely did not buy the central romance and only survived through the film by constructing a parallel plot-line where Ben Affleck and crew worked at a Halloween Superstore which was where all the costumes came from.

However, I will disagree on Inception. I agree that it is a technical masterpiece (aka. a Nolan film) and that the toutedly-complex structure is actually pretty simple to follow (again due to Nolan being very underrated as an amazing editor). However, I found the whole Cobb-Mal background story to be more than sufficient as an emotional core, offering a portrait of suicidal depression that was both familiar to those of us who have been near it and also integrally connected to the movie as a whole. And I was also emotionally touched by the pinwheel enough to rank it a 5 or 6 on an emotional scale of 1 to Up Opening Scene.

Am seeing Black Swan tonight! So I skipped over that part with my eyes. (Also I liked Scott Pilgrim a lot for the Edgar Wright wit.)

Re: http://gregbrown.tumblr.com/post/2406610423

gbrown — Sun, 26 Dec 2010 23:59:32 -0000

I'm operating off the Kindle copy, but I can tell you that the philosophy starts to get interesting about 21% in, and even then Stephenson isn't anywhere close to showing off his full hand. The first 200 pages are still world-building and setting up the plot and read like something out of Eco's In the Name of the Rose - complete with sections that seem designed to bore most readers - but after that the plot starts to take off.

The central premise has a lot to do with Stephenson's ruminations on the existence or non-existence of math as a discrete entity and - if it was in an Aristotelian heaven - how that would actually work. Like he mentioned in the opening note, Anathem is NOT set in our world, but instead in a world where math (and geometry and logic and etc.) exists in the way he describes it. The entire book - including the main plot, once it congeals into clarity - is following that train.

Re: http://mills.tumblr.com/post/1198962906

gbrown — Mon, 27 Sep 2010 20:40:15 -0000

Also, I am glad to hear that you survived yesterday as I was worried about you after that overtime.

Re: http://mills.tumblr.com/post/1198962906

gbrown — Mon, 27 Sep 2010 19:50:04 -0000

The me/not-me gap seems like one of the most fundamental things, and the most disconcerting to lose. I freaked out once when I woke up to find an unaccounted for limb in my bed, only to realize a few seconds later it was my completely-asleep arm.

Re: http://mills.tumblr.com/post/1147764661

gbrown — Sun, 19 Sep 2010 01:17:57 -0000

Dogs are the best.