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I found almost everything about 358/2 Days disappointing... the whole story and the way it was told lacked a lot of tension or drama, and ultimately most plot developments were retconned anyway. It just seemed like a way less interesting version of Roxas' backstory than what was implied by KH2; in the end, the game didn't even feel like his story at all, even though he was the only PC in the campaign. Xion herself lacked a very dynamic personality, although I will say that she at least had some sort of character arc that made sense. There was nothing really unlikeable about her, it was just disappointing that it wound up being her (largely irrelevant) story rather than Roxas'.

Grapefruit juice and cigarettes > Dayquil

1. Apocalypse Now (1979)

It's one thing to improve upon Mario Puzo. It's quite another to improve upon Joseph Conrad. Even though the Godfather is of course a classic, I feel that it's often too clean, too self assured. With Apocalypse Now, things feel dangerous, horrifying, and both grippingly real and feverishly hallucinatory. It features the first synthesized soundtrack in film history, and it also happens to be the best. Martin Sheen and Marlon Brando are not at their best, but just past their prime, in a sort of sublime twilight era. Apocalypse Now is not only the ultimate post-colonial film (again, outdoing Joseph Conrad) as well as Vietnam War film (and war film in general), but in it Francis Ford Coppola mastered the cinematic art of imperfection.

2. Ikiru (1952)

Given all of Kurosawa's incredible experimental films, it's ironic that his best is perhaps his least ambitious. Ikiru is more than a great film dealing with a terminal disease, it's more than a film dealing with being a cog in a capitalist system, and while it comments beautifully on the epidemic of loneliness in urbanized Japan, its scope goes far beyond just one place and time. It's about human identity, happiness and life, and what it means when you're mere days away from the end of it all.

3. 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)

Stanley Kubrick is a notoriously crazy director; he doesn't seem to like or care about other human beings at all. His films are shot at a marked sociopathic distance, as often horrible things happen to the characters. It's because of this that the pride, vulnerability and longing for life and happiness in HAL 9000, the supercomputer, is so striking and touching. While it is a visual marvel, and the interventionist theory of evolution which the film opens and closes on is certainly interesting, the heart of the movie emphasizing the small divides between apes, humans, and (someday) computers, and whatever else will come is both sobering and exhilarating.

4. Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back (1980)

Although the three films make up a sort of fable, Episode V is definitely the best of the Star Wars films. It's essentially the perfect sequel, following the fairy tale-esque simplicity of the first film with a structurally bold dual storyline. Star Wars is the most culturally relevant film franchise of all time, and without the brilliantly envisioned and executed moments of Empire (I could list examples, but 1. there are too many and 2. we all know them), it simply wouldn't be.

5. Samurai X/Ruroni Kenshin: Trust and Betrayal (1999)

If I'm being objective, this probably isn't the greatest anime film of all time. However, I don't know if any film has spoken to me in my adult life as much as Samurai X. No, I have never been an assassin. No, I did not kill my future wife's fiancee. No, I did not live during the bakumatsu (thank goodness for all three). It's just that there's something about Kenshin, brutal murderer that he is, that is so innocent and so forthright that he's utterly irresistible as a character. And it's through this that we're able to understand Tomoe, who is if anything an even more psychologically complex character, and together the two make what I feel is cinema's greatest tragic romance. Samurai X is about the complexities of living in a civil war, for sure, but I think it's also a very truthful and beautiful movie about love, the good, the bad, and the ugly.

Thought of this series when considering my top 5 animes. Obviously it's too early to say given that it's only entering its second season, but from what I can tell it's as universally beloved as any highbrow TV series like Game of Thrones or Mad Men. Seems like it's classic-worthy from its first season, but a lot depends on what they do from here. It could fairly easily become formulaic and melodramatic. Considering that last frame, though, it seems like there will be no shortage of surprises and interesting developments. What do you guys think?

I said current favorite song on a 12-string! Haha. That's more or less what I thought, given how rarely I hear 12-strings. I guess if you really wanted to cover a lot of early Beatles songs a 12-string would be a necessity. I think I've always been wary of extended-range guitars (particularly 7-strings) due to their association with nu metal, which I realize is probably unfair. What genre do you use them for?

1. Neon Genesis Evangelion: Probably the most influential and genre-defining anime of all time; it completely revolutionized the genre and the way that an animated story could be told. There are no heroes but vulnerable, imperfect, complicated human beings. The most gripping, visceral and moving take on depression in any TV series I've ever seen. It's anime's Watchmen.

2. Serial Experiments Lain: Beautifully animated and intellectually complex; Kurosawan perspective shifts make the show occasionally frustrating to watch but fascinating to consider. Really ahead of its time with its consideration of the internet's growing dominance in human experience.

3. Fullmetal Alchemist (2003): It's completely insane that I had to put this at number three, given how much I love the show and the characters. It's ending is notoriously weak, but not nearly as bad as everyone makes it out to be (in fact, there's very little I don't like about it other than the surprise villain). Gorgeous animation, exciting and interesting action scenes, great characters and some of the most emotionally engaging dialogue and storylines in TV history.

4. Cowboy Bebop: It's got all of the assets of a classic anime (excellent animation, memorable characters, interesting storylines), but Cowboy Bebop is one of those special shows that has a greatness that's sui generis. Other than Samurai Champloo (which I feel was in large part an attempt to re-capture the magic of Bebop), I've never seen any show with such an intimate connection with its soundtrack. Yoko Kanno is listed as one of the core creators of the show, and rightly so. The woman is a goddess of modern jazz and blues. Bebop is just a once-in-a-generation kind of show.

5. FLCL: Maybe it shouldn't count because it's really a miniseries, and maybe it doesn't deserve it because one of its six episodes is only ok. However, FLCL has the unique ability to evoke a special kind of feeling: a nostalgia for unhappiness. It so vividly captures the feelings of awkward adolescence that it makes you want to go back and relive those moments for some reason. All of the madness and complicated plot stuff and phallic imagery seems overwhelming and bizarre, but really, I don't think any other show has come nearly as close to recreating what it's like to be a neurotic adolescent boy.

I'm a pretty fastidious viewer of most things Rooster Teeth, except for its signature series. After watching five episodes of Season 11 of RvB I gave up. In some sense, it felt like the show had essentially run its course, so I'm not sure how good it would be even if Burns was still the head writer, but it's still kind of disappointing the way it's gone. Maybe I should try to pick it up again someday. Definitely looking forward to Season 2 of RWBY; I'm going to give it the benefit of the doubt and assume that most of the problems in Season 1 were just growing pains. And as always, Achievement Hunter is entertaining and hilarious.

I think you should play it in order to develop a spec script for "Destiny's Embrace" (the idea for what KH would be like if Toriyama took over). I think it's about time Square took another chance on a movie, anyway.

I think it's very obvious that stories, and particularly sequels, are required to give a consistent message about the world they take place in. Part of the advantage of a sequel is that said world is already built, and yes, it can be expanded upon. But here is where I must stress this point: Kingdom Hearts is not a story into which so-called shades of grey can effectively be introduced, because it has set up a cosmology in which light and darkness are both behavioral traits and real physical forces with the capacity to destroy, and they are diametrically opposed. It's not at all inaccurate to say that beings of darkness are "genetically coded to fight Sora" other than that genetics probably doesn't exist in this universe. In every instance, if someone's attacking Sora, they are both bad and from darkness (or alternatively, Nothingness in BDSM suits), or have been tricked into doing so by someone who is. Kingdom Hearts had a simple message: while there is great darkness, a light shines within. Clearly, darkness is something to fight, to resist within oneself and in its physical manifestations, because darkness is everything that's bad about humanity.

Now, here's a moral that would make sense: it is a good and healthy and prudent thing to examine one's personal weakness, i.e. one's darkness, and to confront it, so that one is not overcome by it. But darkness is still something bad in this scenario; it's just something that can exist in good people. That's the message which kind of seems to be given, but that's completely different from saying that light and darkness are symbiotic or able to be harmonious.

What I mean by the sequels failing to work is that yes, sequels are obligated to explain themselves if they completely contradict their predecessors. Kingdom Hearts I functioned on a very simple logical construction: light is good, darkness is bad. Sora opposes pseudo-Ansem's claim that darkness conquers all worlds because light is evidently "stronger" or more resilient. The thing about a fantasy series like this is that forces of light and darkness (that is, good and bad) have physical manifestations. Sora's conviction about light proves true, and pseudo-Ansem and the darkness is defeated. They didn't learn that there needs to be a balance between the two, they learned that Kingdom Hearts cannot be used as a method for destroying the world via darkness, because it is in fact light. Childish? Yes. Simple? Oh goodness yes. Simple and clean, one might say.

What I'm saying is that at no point is this proposition of light=good and darkness=bad ever seriously challenged. Yes, in Kingdom Hearts II and BBS, characters spout some kind of greater wisdom that the two must both exist, and that darkness is apparently not bad but just "scary." However, every character which is associated with darkness up to this point has been a villain which has been valiantly slain by Sora, and rightly so. That's the only reason why the conversation always steers towards Riku, because he's evidently the one exception. But he's not! After his change of heart, Riku's agenda is entirely in line with Sora's. Xemnas even refers to him as a "hero of light." If Riku were to actually act like he was a representation of both light and darkness, then I guess half the time he would help Sora and the other half he would deceive him or try to kill him. Because that's what every character associated with darkness tries to do to Sora at some point, without fail. The games clearly set up a logic in which envy, self-loathing and hatred are the path to darkness, and kindness, fidelity and courage are the path to light. The "light and darkness in harmony" line was clearly just adopted after Kingdom Hearts and continued through the rest of the games, but it just flatly contradicts the logic the original was built on, without any indication that this new ideal is ever true in practice (other than that it gives you dope fireball-shooting techniques-- again, at the cost of sacrificing your selfhood and nearly ruining everything ever).

Sure, I can definitely accept that KHI was written at a time when there was a possibility that there would be no sequels, but there were definitely ideas present: most notably the reveal that Riku isn't dead in ASAS. But there's a way that sequels necessarily have to function that Nomura and co. just didn't follow at all. What exactly does Kingdom Hearts do? You're saying some kind of wish granting factory? That seems to make sense, because pseudo-Ansem asks Kingdom Hearts to shroud the world in darkness, and it looks like it's going to to so. Sora then says Kingdom Hearts is light, and so then it's light, or something. But... how come? Does it have a consciousness? Did it just decide it liked Sora better? Why? And none of the sequels do anything to clarify the nature of the titular concept/entity.

I'd also agree that the sequels make the story more complicated, but they do little to actually explore moral depth and questions. Sure, Riku is supposedly some kind of middle-road figure, but what is his "darkness" except for everything he did wrong in KH1? So Riku gave into envy, pride, and (potentially) lust and wound up betraying everyone he cared about... and now he has some kind of moral high ground on Sora because he apologized? There weren't really any lessons learned from Riku's experimentation with darkness other than "doing this will turn you into a monster which kills everything you love and makes you lose all sense of self." There's never an example of darkness being preferable to light in a particular circumstance, other than the few perks of dark powers. Is that the message here? That you should betray and nearly murder your friends so that you can eventually learn to teleport and shoot fireballs? Definitely a novel take on the Disney morality tale, I must say.

In a broader sense, I don't feel like there's ever been a cohesive understanding of the light/darkness relationship in the series. Like in the first game, when Sora says "Kingdom Hearts is light"... what? Where did that come from? Where during this cosmic fight to the death did he arrive upon this realization about some nebulous entity which he just heard about? Is that even true? It seems to be, given that this realization apparently has physical effects, i.e. disintegrating pseudo-Ansem. But if Kingdom Hearts is light, why were there Heartless coming out of it? In the first game, I took this to mean that the writers were saying that while people aren't perfect, all hearts are light, in essence. That is to say, human nature is fundamentally good. But then in KHII they start getting into this kind of Taoism-lite which states that light and darkness can be in harmony... even though historically speaking this has never once been the case because Sora and co. murder every single Heartless and person who associates with darkness. Now they just started pulling out arbitrary numbers about lights and darknesses and apparently people can become Keyblades (???). I don't anticipate any logical or satisfying answers to this quandary.

Thank you for the warm welcome, everyone!

That is a great story (and, I would guess, the inspiration for the "backstory" to QWOP); while it's not an issue of economics, I think that it is essentially a case of supply and demand. For instance, the U.S. has a great deal of well-trained athletes who would like to compete (i.e. supply); however, because of this, the demand for athletes in terms of pure numbers goes down as far as the Olympics is concerned. In the case of underdeveloped nations, because the supply is low, the demand is actually quite high, because the Olympics is ultimately an international peacekeeping enterprise (I could go on spouting Constructivist theory, but I'll spare everyone). In other words, getting the greatest number of competing nations is in the best interest of the Olympics, even if it means accepting "lesser athletes".

Were all 80s pop musicians stalkers? Or did they have people that they could just ask about this stuff? (see: The Police, Dead or Alive).