[BONUS] Episode C - L.A. Noire

Crucially the fedora is not always a transfem look. There's some extremely cringe pictures of me about 5 years before transitioning FtM trying to rock the noir Marlene Dietrich crossdresser look. I did not in fact rock it.

Robo Javert mentioned reminded me of something beautiful and bizarre, lol. Shoutouts to the indie fighting game Arm Joe - a passion project by one delightfully specific Japanese hobbyist programmer who decided to make Les Miserable into a fighting game. It also includes guest characters Judgement*, Ponpon**, and Robojean - Jean Valjean as a robot. It's called Arm Joe because the Japanese translation of Les Miserable is Aa Mujou which in Japanese is homophonic with Arm Joe. * (as in the novel's theme of the judgement of history personified to look suspiciously like Yujiro Hanma from Baki for some reason) ** (a funny little rabbit-like fellow who AFAICT has nothing to do with Les Mis but the developer just wanted to add his OC) EDIT: Yikes that name of the cancelled sequel is entirely predictable. The first game came out only two years after the Hey Hey It's Saturday blackface debacle. We as a country are so backwards...

The whole point of Rockstar Games is to be derivative. You get to play as the cool characters in the cool scenes from the movies you watched. That's the appeal. They are cultural-amalgamation wish fulfillment, and they do it well.

Thank God I am immune to the apparently intoxicating feelings of "good grades and praise". These are the advantages of being bad in school, I don't need any validation, and furthermore, I refuse to accept or internalize people saying good things about me unless I really know them.

Definitely agree with a 1940s game where you play the Femme Fatale wreaking vengeance upon systems of power.

I kinda disagree with Nova at the very last hurdle: I think the narrative is weaker if everything was for nought, because that means that even the attempt at redemption was worse than hopeless, but actively destructive in a way that (I think) would be punishing the audience for liking him(?). If Cole dies ultimately having had his life entirely decided by his fucked up past, then we really just have to sit there and go, "damn, nothing of value was lost." There's no point to any of it, no point to willingly accepting less than 5 good boy(?) points, and I think it's easy to look at that "but what if it doesn't matter" question and mistake its grimness for depth. If I wanted to enter a world where everything that would happen to me was already decided for me, I'd just turn out the lights and let my depression convince me climate change and Trump were all the fault of my teenage self not being immune to neolib propaganda (famously both possible to achieve and entirely justified to hate yourself for failing to live up to). But because Cole shows he can do good, he can return the violence inflicted upon the powerless unto the powerful, we're forced to see the events of the game as something that did matter; it did matter that Cole tried, even if Cole ultimately broke under the strain. It did matter that he saved that one guy from killing himself. It did matter that he saved Elsa. He might have been damned by his own failings, but he did turn around and manage to give a black eye to the system which thought it could extract more from him. It means something is taken from the world of this game that we can recognize as having value and that he WASN'T redeemed by his death, rather than the game hitting you on the head with a hammer and saying, "yeah, hah, there was never any point to him doing any of this and you were stupid for wanting him to, loser. There was never any point in him not being the evil bastard who became Roy Earl even for a second." I think there's kind of a point that, by the end of the game, the Bad Guys didn't get away with it entirely. The DA caved, but since Jack survived, it's implied that at the very least the insurance scam won't go off, and that paints Roy's eulogy kinda like it's the knives which were all aimed at a unified enemy (Cole) turning inwards to ultimately wreck the scheme upon itself. Roy is trying to get out ahead by deflecting the blame away from himself, which is doomed to fail because he is far from the biggest fish in that pond, he's just stupid and corrupt enough to think he can somehow survive that without being made himself a fall guy.

Wait I have to pick between robot and woman?!

Apologies if it gets mentioned later in the ep, but there's a lot of Edmund Exley (of James Ellroy's LA Quartet) in the character of Cole Phelps: child of privilege, wrongly decorated as a war hero despite completely fucking it in combat, mistrusted by his working class colleagues.

I’ve never played this and my only other touchstone for la noire is the 9 hour Tim Rogers video which I’ve watched probably 3-4 times.

Would a dom giving their sub 4 out of 5 stars be a form of domming or would it be bad aftercare

Look that tie didn't mean anything I just thought The Hives were cool honestly

Ethical ways of watching? You mean a library?

I love the cast of TV actors they got for LA Noire; all of them do such a great job

Aaaaaaaa Geeeeeeeene!

in a better timeline this game would have gotten the Hitman treatment by now

I was so happy to hear the words “Vimes (future episode)”. The only fictional cop who ever made me want to be a cop. Hope you do Feet of Clay (if you only end up doing one, if you do them ALL, amazing)!

Congrats, that thumbnail was so funny to me I joined the patreon

re: envoy of mr cogito: its a little crazy to hear a poem from.my highschool polish textbook mentioned on a transgende rpodcast

I took immense psychic damage when I remembered getting my first suit (irl, I’ve never played LA Noire) - pinstriped charcoal grey, with a black shirt and white tie. My transition’s going well, thank you for asking

Would love that you cover Phoenix Wright or Ghost Trick. Sure, they are more detective tangentially, but there are crimes to be solved and people to be protected in both.

We had to put down my dog earlier today, and I’ve really been needing a laugh to get me away from just sobbing for hours. Thank you for providing that, you guys run a wonderful podcast.

So I have a query: do we think that semi adversarial detectives like Zenigata or Renee Montoya count for the purposes of this podcast or is it only protagonist/antagonitst detectives?

When I heard the words "Discworld Vimes novels (future episode)" I started bouncing up and down like a basketball with the zoomies.

avoiding the black shirt and white tie because i didn't want to fuck with learning how to tie the tie, even though I really wanted it

I wore the fuck out of that tie god damn it...and I still have the fedora...

The number of gameplay mechanics that have been shelved permanently and never iterated on because of copyright nonsense makes me weep.

I think this is the game where I brushed the characters teeth by shaking the controller and then had to lay down for the rest of the day. So a fairly low disabled accessibility score. Edit, no wait that was heavy rain.

I don’t trust this today but go on I’m sure lovely November, Mia, and Lucy wouldn’t betray our trust this early in the podcast