Is TWEWY a good J-RPG? I have absolutely no idea. I feel like Im on th — Zero Punctuation

"For the uninitiated, Sam Stone is a nineties action-hero graduate from the Duke Nukem correspondence course with some kind of unclear role in the military, and who started showing up to work one day in a customized t-shirt and jeans. And no one wanted to complain in case he blew cigar smoke in their face, or shagged their mums."

"I can only assume that using jump-scares to provoke funny reactions from streamers started getting old, and now theyre seeing if similar results can be achieved from just annoying the shit out of them. And if that is the case, look at me falling right into the trap. I hope the sweetness of that victory covers up the taste of MY DIIIIIICK!"

"I cant help feeling that Valve have missed the point of episodic gaming somewhat. The whole idea is to mix up the usual rigamarole of game publishing by having shorter games at lower prices released more frequently, and while they have aspects one and two down, they continue to struggle with three."

"The environments do a good job of building atmosphere with eldritch light illuminating the mist that coils around the trees, flickering shadows making an innocent mulberry bush momentarily look like a round-shouldered murderer with an axe and a massive erection. Its just that the game is fully aware that it does dark spooky forests best but little else, so every half hour it has to contrive a new reason for Alan to be lost in a spooky forest at night. Its like a crime drama about a detective who can only concentrate when hes around pastry, so every week the crime has to conveniently take place in a bakery or within walking distance of a pie shop."

"Find me one case in which random user comments enrich an online experience. Scroll down now and read the first five comments under this video! You should start feeling a cold metallic sensation because youre now holding a gun to your head!"

"See, the rub is that Cuphead is retro-style, but not in the usual sense, i.e., pixels the size of Plymouth; its deliberately fashioning itself after retro animation, in the style of Max Fleischer or very early Disney, and pulls that off with quite remarkable success! The film grain, the scratchy audio, the big brass band soundtrack, the fluid, exaggerated animation where characters all move like warmed-up gummy worms caught in the spokes of a bike; it all feels so bloody authentic! And most importantly, what a lot of people forget about early cartoons — here, we very unsubtly waggle our eyebrows at Epic Mickeys forgotten grave-site — is that they could be really fucking dark. See, back then, it wasnt generally understood that kids needed to have their delicate sensibilities protected, as odds were pretty good they were all going to die in a European trench war before they turned eighteen, anyway. So thematically, cartoons were lighter on wholesome lessons about friendship and heavier on skeletons and racism. So theres something overtly sinister about Cuphead, which might be from subtly wrong things like the drinking straw in our characters head — I mean, the teacup-head thing Id buy, but who the fuck drinks from a teacup with a straw? Thats just pushing it. But I think its the overall scratchy look and feel that makes me think the little girl from The Ring could push out of the screen at any moment and start making comical trombone noises."

"History is a strange experience. The world is quite small now; but history is large and deep. Sometimes you can go much farther by sitting in your own home and reading a book of history, than by getting onto a ship or an airplane and traveling a thousand miles. When you go to Mexico City through space, you find it a sort of cross between modern Madrid and modern Chicago, with additions of its own; but if you go to Mexico City through history, back only 500 years, you will find it as distant as though it were on another planet: inhabited by cultivated barbarians, sensitive and cruel, highly organized and still in the Copper Age, a collection of startling, of unbelievable contrasts."

"I cant read ten pages of Steinbeck without throwing up. I couldnt read the proletarian crap that came out in the 30s; again you had sentimentalism — the poor oppressed workers."

"Fiction is history, human history, or it is nothing. But it is also more than that; it stands on firmer ground, being based on the reality of forms and the observation of social phenomena, whereas history is based on documents, and the reading of print and handwriting — on second-hand impression. Thus fiction is nearer truth. But let that pass. A historian may be an artist too, and a novelist is a historian, the preserver, the keeper, the expounder, of human experience."

"(reading) Golden Mist Cologne. Mmm, my favorite."

"I learned about renormalization theory as a graduate student, mostly by reading Dyson’s papers. ... From the beginning it seemed to me to be a wonderful thing that very few quantum field theories are renormalizable. Limitations of this sort are, after all, what we most want, not mathematical methods which can make sense of an infinite variety of physically irrelevant theories, but methods which carry constraints, because these constraints may point the way toward the one true theory."

"In the development of intelligence nothing can be more "basic" than learning how to ask productive questions. Many years ago, in Teaching as a Subversive Activity, Charles Weingartner and I expressed our astonishment at the neglect shown in school toward this language art. ...The "back to the basics" philosophers rarely mention it, and practicing teachers usually do not find room for it in their curriculums. …all our knowledge results from questions, which is another way of saying that question-asking is our most important intellectual tool… There are at present no reading tests anywhere that measure the ability of students to address probing questions to the particular texts they are reading... What students need to know are the rules of discourse which comprise the subject, and among the most central of such rules are those which govern what is and what is not a legitimate question."