Laxan

This one time I left an unconscious body in a room with a steampunk fan running and the guy never woke up.

I want to see the "Welcome To Jurassic Park" scene with Big Dogs frolicking majestically alongside the Brachiosauruses.

“In shadow, we find the light Safely sealed in darkest night. So make sure y’all keep it tight. Wizards only, fools.” From the latest Adventure Time episode.

I assumed that was Meronym, but you might be right.

If the reincarnation theory is literal, it seems to have a pretty big flaw. How can Cavendish be a reincarnated Luisa Rey? Rey is 20something in the 1970's, while Cavendish is in his 60's less than 40 years later. Even if Luisa Rey is fictional, and the author is the real birthmark-bearer, aren't we told that Hilary V Hush is also alive and sending manuscripts to Cavendish? It seems weird to go to all the effort of spelling out this reincarnation theory and then not following through with it fully. Unless it's a sign that all the talk of reincarnation in the past/future stories is hocus pocus, and nudgingly letting the reader know not to take it so literally.

Well, with all those impending funding cuts... It was really strange hearing you guys talk about how great the Cavendish story was. The entire experience of that first half felt really clichéd and clunky as he set up the scene. Everything in that first half goes wrong, every effort Cavendish takes to fix the situation is misunderstood and it all generally boils down to a "one big misunderstanding" situation. His brother dying and leaving no record was annoyingly neat, and infuriating to read through. There's probably a tv trope page for what I specifically dislike. I guess that this feeling of powerlessness and general bad luck are what Mitchell was trying to convey, it just seemed a bit like a crappy Robin Williams* film at times. Maybe I'll try a re-read and see if I think differently now. Great cast though, thank you very much! EDIT: Thinking about it, Robin Williams is not the best choice here. The use of increasingly frustrating plotpoints unfolding because of a fundamental misunderstanding that can't be rectified for trite reasons, is a very British thing I think. Maybe it exists in American media too, but it brings to mind things like some Monthy Python sketches and Mr. Bean.

You have to consider the risk vs reward of playing higher difficulties. Sure, hard mode may be more rewarding, but if I hit some seemingly impossible wall, I'm pretty sure I'd personally just stop playing. Not even out of conscious decision to stop, but those walls just sap your enthusiasm. I tend to play on normal the first time through to see all the content and get a feel for the mechanics, then tell myself that I can do hard on the second playthrough if I still want to. I never want to. I don't think I've ever had the impulse to play campaign-based games back-to-back. By the time I would come back to it, I'd probably need to do normal again because I'd forgotten all the mechanics. I think that's why this recent wave of roguelikes is so great. I can run them on hard mode and get the benefit of tough gameplay and challenges without needing to sink hours and hours into a campaign mode that could turn around at any moment and kick me in the balls.

I realised that since I started playing I've always put the starting trio on pilot/weapons/engines mainly cause I saw Chris do it on the livestream. It hit me recently that pilot/weapons/shields might work better, seeing as how I usually don't upgrade the engines that much and having a guy start his training on shields earlier might be nice. So, any other starting configs? Or is P/W/E simply the best?

They died the only way they knew how. Asphyxiating in a crumbling Mantis ship.

Someone on Reddit linked to this thread which seems to tell you how to reset your skills via console commands. http://forums.runicgames.com/viewtopic.php?f=47&t=34271

Yeah, I just assumed that he didn't have access to the source files.

This Space Jam/Gangham Style remix is kind of the best.

Played an engi game using mainly drones. I'm not sure how drones are viable without the recovery augmentation that essentially makes them free. Fell at the last boss stage because my paltry crew couldn't handle the invasions (and I forgot to flush them out the airlocks in time). Otherwise, A++ would engi again.

Yeah, for some reason in the shop interface it has his full name. I'm not sure why.

Nick Breckon is the only character I've found so far with a first name. It's pretty great.

"Game semantics" is a pretty good description of Idle Thumbs in general.

Is it worth finishing the Hitchiker series? I finished the third one years ago and never felt like I should go back. Also, is the Eoin Colfer continuation any good? I got a copy as a gift a while back but haven't touched it.

Having drawn the EU PS3 straw, I've just finished ep. 3 now. Holy shit.

The second screen looks like some kind of Testificate Bar Mitzvah is going on.

On the note of Assbro vs Spy Party: I haven't played Spy Party yet, but one thing I worry about is how the NPC tells and animations work, and how microscopic it could become. By making a tiny room be the setting, and by restricting the verbs possible to players, snipers are able to pay much closer attention to individuals than in Assbro. The fundamental mechanic becomes less about who generally stands out from the crowd, and more about who made a small animation blip that NPC's shouldn't be able to. End game and competitive players could end up simply memorising the list of generated weirdness (like, oh sometimes the game makes an NPC move their hand this odd way), and then comparing any visual cues with this list. I guess what I'm getting at is that in Assbro, the weird NPCness happens organically because Assbro is a systems driven game. The results of these interacting systems is what creates the weirdness. Crowds shuffle into each other, NPCs regularly shove into each other, or simply stop dead in their tracks. While Spy Party is systems driven too, one of these systems is a purposeful attempt at generating weird NPCness by hand, and thus is much easier to trace back and understand/memorise. I haven't played Assbro super seriously, so this could happen there too.

Still no saxophone solo from Nick.

Hmm, I'm intrigued about this article now, could I get a link?

I read Cloud Atlas and De Zoet based on Thumbs recommendations, and would firmly recommend to read Cloud Atlas first. I personally adored De Zoet, and enjoyed it more than Cloud Atlas, but Cloud is basically the ultimate crash course in an author ever. Watching Mitchell step into the skins of protagonists is one of his defining features, in my opinion, and Cloud Atlas delivers on this front in pretty incredible ways. But yeah, after Cloud, definitely go for De Zoet if you want a really solid novel without the narrative gimmicks (maybe gimmicks is too harsh) of Cloud Atlas.

So eventually all the best servers will be matched against each other in WvW, right? Will this lead to a situation where the top US servers need a healthy EU playerbase to maintain overnight shifts in the eternal battlegrounds? WvW is weird.

Oh right, I've been saving up materials and doing a craft dump every 5ish levels. It seems weird that in many zones the main city doesn't have any crafting stations, forcing me to go to Lion's Arch to do anything with all the stuff I picked up. I guess I should take more frequent trips back just to pace out the exp a bit better. But I'm still about 6 levels lower than I should be, so I don't think it's all because of my lack of crafting.