Except for the ones that have obvious Japanese, you could tell me all of these titles belonged to Journey songs and I'd believe you.
On topic, I haven't seen any. I'm going to change that tomorrow by watching... I suppose whichever one's favored most in this thread.
Castle in the Sky is a good one to start with if you're not particularly acquainted with anime. In many ways I consider it to be the quintessential adventure story. That said, it certainly isn't as profound as some of the studio's other works.
I have been fortunate enough to see all of Miyazaki's works but Ponyo, as well as Arrietty and Whisper of the Heart. Of them only Whisper of the Heart has the distinction of being my favorite film throughout all of the movies I have ever seen. It feels odd to say that considering it's about a Japanese highschool girl growing up, but no other film has struck the same chord with me in quite the same way. I was sentimental and nostalgic for it the very moment it ended. Yoshifumi Kondō died just four years after I was born and a full thirteen years before I would see his film, but I can't help but get depressed over his death even now.
I've been reading a lot of nonfiction lately. I'm not sure what prompted this shift from fiction and poetry,which have typically been my primary interests. Nonetheless, as of late I have found Ken Robinson's The Element, G.K. Chesterton's What I Saw In America, and Alan Jacobs' The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction to be all quite stimulating. I would even call the first and last items to be essential reading for anyone anywhere living in any context under any condition; regardless of whether you agree with their arguments and ideas, your response to them will absolutely give you a more informed perspective on your life and how you are living it.
All that said, I've always found the works of Bill Bryson to be both fascinating and delightful. He is a fantastic writer and has a penchant for making seemingly mundane subjects shockingly interesting. He writes a lot about history, culture, and language.
I would be perfectly fine with it. The podcast forms a very significant part of my week. Do what you need to keep it going.
People may suggest this is compromising what makes Giant Bomb unique. I personally think there is more appeal to this staff than their reticence towards advertising.
By and large I think the greatest issue with this sorts of conversations is that it's hard to confront anyone about discrimination without having this undercurrent of some sort of direct accusation. Society has progressed greatly from the days of the Middle Ages where theological debates were over whether women had souls, or from the days of Ancient Rome where women didn't even have their own personal names.
Things are getting better, but if they are to improve further we have to realize there's elements of our modern institutions and individual subconscious perceptions that too-greatly influence women's general experience in society. To say the videogame industry is sexist isn't to say that it's full of horrible people who explicitly, consciously hate women for the very fact they are women. Indeed, it's rather full of people with the best of intentions. But nobody's perfect, and we ought to call bullshit when we see it, or we can't expect things to get any better.
What does what mean for the games we love? Women making them? You really think everyone out there is thinking "Crap, if women start developing games, they'll get really bad...". To treat this like it's an issue specific to the games industry, driven by game-related reasons, is crazy. In EVERY industry, every workplace in this country, sexism is an issue, because some people are sexist assholes. That is the underlying issue that needs to be addressed - that behavior needs to be made unacceptable in the workplace.
I'm confused as to what difference that actually makes. That a problem should be universal doesn't render it any less of a problem wherever it should manifest. There are numerous industries out there that are struggling in their transition to a more egalitarian landscape, and the videogame industry is one among them. The underlying issue you speak of is very real. But each and every one of those communities nonetheless needs to make that transition and become a more welcoming environment for minority voices. The culinary industry is certainly famous for the glass ceiling women experience in that field, but few if any of us here on Giantbomb probably have any significant presence in that community. That's not a conversation we can even begin to participate it—a battle we by and large cannot fight. But by virtue of being on this forum we are certainly involved and invested in the videogame community. We can't fix everything simultaneously, but at the very least we can try to improve things on our end.
The thing that puzzles me most is the contingent decrying articles like this for the fact that the movement in question is ultimately pointless and unproductive. I can recognize why someone might not perceive this effort as not being particularly constructive, but then they seem to somehow derive a regressive or destructive element to the commotion—I can't conceive why else they would protest it so vehemently. There's been mud slinging involved, granted, but aside from the decidedly distasteful elements of the internet that have flocked to this conversation (as, honestly, they always do to any controversy of this nature), what, exactly, is so wrong about spreading awareness about this sort of thing? However unproductive it might be, that doesn't explain the vehemence I see some people exhibiting when making such complaints.
When does simply informing people of the fact that the videogame industry is a less-than-hospitable environment for women become something to be positively enraged over?
P.S. I want to clarify that by no means to I consider every person who take issue with this movement to be an example of this sort of individual. I am instead referring to a specific subset of that category.
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