neonrev

Wearables implies a future where any space on your body that could have a screen strapped to it will be treated as a new and exciting market. iRing. Unlock your car, use it as a credit card, bump rings together with people green lantern style to add them on various social media sites! I think I actually want that last one. Doesn't seem impossible either.

I love how the whole thing is based around "One should not automatically trust a publication just because it's got a big name." and then him stridently ignoring the entire idea that fact checking is a thing that exists and makes those publications more trustworthy. It's a big publication, it disagrees with me, therefore it must be a conspiracy to RUIN EVERYTHING. I think America's whole cultural love of "individual out against the System and it's Oppression" and some people's blindness to the fact that they are in fact part of the system and not part of the oppressed creates an impossible to argue with group. Trolls who view themselves as some sort of John Wayne figure.

Not a book, but still incredibly good. http://www.sbnation.com/2014/8/18/5998715/the-tim-tebow-cfl-chronicles Its 44,000 words, it gets close. You also don't need to care or know about football to enjoy. I certainly don't, and I loved it. It's a retelling of Jason and the Argonauts in the best of all possible ways. Edit: I also mostly wanted to hit the 'last post in all sub-forums' goal and I did it. I just needed to say a thing about a book. I can rest easy.

Yeah, not really sadly. I've heard that figured stated as "A majority of Russian born after the 80's have at least one congenital disorder.", but not for a long time, and upon reflection I've never seen any study to support that. I'm mostly speaking to the preponderance of chemical, industrial or nuclear aftereffects of the Soviet Union's complete disregard for environmental or health concerns, and the anecdotal stuff I've heard about the normality of birth defects there. I can't easily find any data right now, but then again I'm guessing Russia isn't super into publishing that kind of stuff. At the very least, most of the military analysis I've read about the readiness of Russia makes note of it. They do indeed have issues finding enough young men and women healthy enough to fill uniforms. "General Nikolai Makarov said only 11.7% of young men aged 18-27 were eligible for the army service but 60% of them had health problems and could not be drafted under law." Also, thank you everyone for being both nice and jokey about first page post angst. I have social anxiety issues that invade the digital medium, and even if wasn't meant to be, it was oddly comforting. I also didn't know about the star thing and assumed everyone who reads that page is going to see whatever inane shit I said first thing. Good to know. For the record, Twig said it right:

As far as I know, Notch is still at Mojang, just no longer it's CEO or president or whatever. While I can't imagine him possibly wanting to do that, I'm also pretty sure he bowed out of the business side of things a while ago since he doesn't have any background or skill in running such a massive enterprise with such unforeseen ramifications. He's definitely no longer the lead creative on Minecraft, and last I heard his main focus now is on using Minecraft funds to support him experimenting and prototyping new games. Which I support. Minecraft is an unwieldy, legally sticky and difficult to innovate game with a rabid and impossible to please player-base who'll decry every possible decision. Microsoft is a gigantic black box that can probably shit out updates at fifty times the rate Jens can (even if they do continue the 'updates free forever' thing, which I don't see happening.), has basically infinity lawyers and could not give less of a fuck about either forum rants or stagnation in design. I think maybe Microsoft and Minecraft are made for each other. I also think Minecraft under Microsoft would be the end of the game that the word "Minecraft" means now.

This isn't the ethics in journalism thread, but John McAfee is and was sort of a monster whose only claim to ever doing anything positive was creating a shitty malware-esque virus scanner. If his money made him untouchable to normal police methods, I really, really don't mind if a news agency (who is already more 'edgy' than 'professional') contributes to the arrest of an unrepentant pedophile-rapist. I actually find it pretty awesome. And yeah, they do a LOT of on the ground coverage from typically untouched areas. I'm willing to forgive an awful lot from someone willing to leave the studio/office once in a while.

There isn't enough shale oil in the world to actually get Putin to invade Estonia. While it's small enough for his 'fait accompli' style of invasions and land grab to work, it's not distant enough to the west. It's also not a country made up mostly of Russians and people who speak russian. It's primarily Estonian, primarily liberal, and is way, way too close to Europe. Georgia and Crimea had none of that. Estonia is also a vital part of the EU 'cyber-security' network. Putin gets more out of antagonizing the EU and NATO without prompting actual conflict with them. He gets to show everyone not traditionally in the "west" how weak and ineffective the old powers are, or at least how cautious they are. He gets to build Russia as an alternative to the NATO/EU/US block. (Although, an actual hot war between Russia and the west would probably not work out so well for Russia. They may have a lot of soldiers and such, but they also have a pretty crippling equipment situation, and a majority of russian people under the age of 30 have at least one congenital disorder or disease. This also ignores their rapidly dropping birth rate and the fact that a really significant amount of EU and NATO military build-up has been set-aside in the interests of not antagonizing russia. How quick do you suppose an Iron Dome style system will be put in place then? How much would the US love to get rid of some elderly M1A1's? An actual invasion of a NATO ally would be the end of Russia as anything but a pariah state.) Putin's real smart, and there's nothing smart about invading Estonia. He gets shale oil, more coastal area in the Baltic, and a population that loathes him and has been under a conscription model of army since it was there. It'd be an incredibly tough bit of land to swallow nowadays, even if no one else steps in. As a personal note, I'm a Polish-Ukrainian American whose family fled Ukraine in the 20's because of a Russian genocide (holodomor) that eliminated all of my remaining family there, and the town we came from was renamed from Kassel to Komarivka and resettled with Russians. I desperately, desperately want this war, in all honesty. I've read the letters. My elder extended family begging for food, for money to buy food, for anything. At some point the letters stopped. They don't have a recorded date of death, or a headstone to find. As far as the Soviet union was concerned, they just never existed. The last few months have been very hard for me. American rhetoric over it has been hard for me. Seeing people afraid and inclined to give russia what they want has been hard for me, even though I can understand it. I just boil with rage when I think on it. It's like if Turkey was reinvading Armenia (IMPOSSIBLE, RIGHT?) using Ottoman-era phrasing and we just all ignored it, since it's 'not our place to intervene.' Come on, what the fuck world? Thank you for your indulgence reading this. I'm just a little box of fury. Edit: I am so fucking bad about putting stupid ranty things up as a new page topper. Is there a way I can see if that's going to happen? Sorry everyone. Again.)

Your artist's claw sounds like my "soldering thumb". I get it after doing any real amount precision work on electronics, and it effects whichever hand I'm working with the most. I can luckily switch hands for most things, but I can only solder with my right and it sucks. I actually use my girlfriends cramp pillow (like a weird cloth tube filled with either rice or beads with some aromatic whatever in there.) You microwave it for a couple seconds, and it's a nice warm, heavy and form-fitting weight, and the heat helps the aching. I'm not actually certain what they're called, but I do know that they are sold to help with menstruation cramps and such. I bet a sock filled with rice, heated and folded over the base of your thumb would do about the same thing. (Make sure the rice has time to cool first.)

Okay, thanks, that answers my questions. They were talking about Blizzard people saying you could go so far as to hire a small team to work on a SC2 mod to sell, one that is more complex than DOTA is, for example. It all sounded like insanity to me, but I wasn't sure if there was some quiet community of people doing insane shit with it. Makes sense it ended up being mostly maps and different 'modes'.

So I'm listening through the older episodes, and in ep 40 (Idle thumbs 40,000) they talk about the possible expansiveness of the StarCraft 2 mod kit, and Blizzard having a marketplace for them in the future and such like. I never ended up playing or following the game, did any of that end up coming true? It seems sorta pie in the sky, and I haven't heard more on it, but I don't know.

I think telling a story about a particular person who is a white male is not the same thing as using a white male as a blank template for the individual player. You can create a great deal of specificity if you approach the player character as a white male when deciding how that person could or should react to things instead of using that as a blank slate for the variable player to try to put themselves into. It's the difference between writing a character and writing a cipher, and I trust the campo santo folks to carry that through. Also, the majority of the team is white, and I think all of the writing people are? It's not wrong to write what you know instead of reaching too far in a specific context you can't personally understand. I'd rather someone hit a really resonant tone than try too hard to create an experience they don't personally know and have it come off discordant. Also, sometimes I feel like this is a far more intense version of the Tom Francis experience. Instead of reading reviews and then following a more detailed game development, we've (the readers) listened to hundreds of hours of a number of the camp santo people talking about their views on games and the industry as a whole, and then recently following a more closed development while having all that baggage of the podcast. Making a good product that has a chance to succeed in the insane video games market as a fledgling studio is, I'm sure, really fucking hard. I don't think we should begrudge anyone for playing to any of their strengths in that pursuit. I want campo santo to make lots of games on lots of subjects, and I think part of that is putting your best, strongest foot forward first. (I'm also sort of drunk. I mean what I say but still. Drunk phrasing and such. Very emotional.)

Man, I'd hate to be a journalist on twitter. You apparently need to do your best to never reply to anything from anyone who may ever make a thing or know someone who makes a thing you might talk about. I guess only the anonymous random dregs of twitter are the only legitimate, unbiased part. Maybe that's the thing. Maybe big news sources paying more attention to random twitter and reddit traffic and ascribing news to it has given these guys the idea that they're the real baseline of opinion, and any relationships between writer and subject(s) are now indicative of collusion to those guys. The only thing, as far as I can tell, of merit to these guys is "research" preformed by an anonymous kid and disseminated at random. If whoever says a thing would rather not use their real name, it must be true! They simply must hide their name to protect against the jackbooted thugs of social justice. (I really want there to be jackbooted social justice thugs for real though. I'd join up. Already got big stompy boots.)

Ugh. Just ugh. Actual journalistic integrity question that's been on my mind recently, for comparison. Al Jazeera is one of my favorite news sources, one that covers Africa and the Middle East in addition to the more important events in Europe and the Americas. It's also owned by the Qatari royal family, who manage a modern day slave state that includes a lovely air base from which the US manages all African and Middle Eastern air operations, and soon the World Cup. This seems to introduce pretty significant conflicts of interest in many areas, but I'm unaware of any serious problems with their reporting. Egypt certainly doesn't seem to like them, at least. It's hard to reconcile these two ideas being under the same umbrella of "Journalistic Ethics".

Wait, what, who? Who thinks they should be fired? Also who do these people think should be fired? How in any possible universe two reporters being in a relationship (I guess? Also can't read what that image says.) is a violation of any code of ethics is beyond me. I guarantee the entirety of that outrage is because both people are women. I can't even detect the veil of legitimacy anger at that can hide behind. This entire last month has been bizarre for me, personally. I don't follow gaming sites beyond idle thumbs, RPS and the occasional polygon article, so my entire exposure to this has been semi-jokey references to shitty common gamer culture and sexism mixed with brief flare-ups that suddenly seemed to blow up in the last couple months. All of a sudden I'm seeing all this insane shit and really disgustingly virulent sexism, and I both feel bad for ignoring what must have been an obvious problem in some places, and also oddly good for running in circles that don't usually contain that. Its been a surreal look into the gaming culture I guess I'm a part of, and I feel like I'm experiencing a weird echo chamber containing and magnifying the worst examples of things I didn't see before. Edit: I have an uncanny skill at making my ill-advised ranty-er posts being first on new pages. I promise I dislike it more than anyone else possibly can.

I'm glad my 4 am desire to hear discussions about randomly selected animal sex has brought joy to people in this world. It has been a dark week and bestiality humor is a good antidote, I find. It still doesn't appear in my RSS, but the mp3 now has its own little playlist called "Best of Idle Thumbs". I might add more snippets to that at some point, but more likely I will not. Unsurpassed and unsurpassable as a work of vocal entertainment, that podblast is.

Personally, if crazy people are going to create these things about anyone they need to do it at a more legible resolution. I'm getting tired to straining my eyes to see what fresh insanity the day brings. Also of the days at this point.

Glancing through the movies on gog right now it looks like they are all indie documentaries about video games. I don't think steam actively sells or distributes many movies, but I think they've also only been video game documentaries so far as well. I'm guessing it's as simple as audience and distribution rights, but when if ever are various game sale sites that branch out into movies going deeper than documentaries about video games? Humble is the least purely video game example I know, but that's quite different I feel. I don't know what else they could host, but it does seem a bit shallow to me.

Less of an 'anyone remember?' and more an 'anyone else have this?', but I was in a weird mood earlier and wanted to listen to the ruined "Surprise Animal" version of episode 36, and it wasn't in my rss feed as usual. It's still in the archive under "!!", so I am satiated in terms of thumbs' discussions of animal sex, but I'm just curious if it's an isolated behavior or if they took it off the rss in the interest of not embarrassing themselves, or taste. At any rate, I now have a copy of Jake breaking in to mention dwarf bestiality for my very own.

The G36 is one of my favorite guns throughout the entire series. Just great. The Bar is pretty much the main hub for mid to late game everything, so its not weird to get overwhelmed. I like to bunch a couple of sidequests or areas likely to contain a juicy patrol or unlooted loot into a single patrol that starts and ends at the hub. Or you can just activate all of them and just do the ones the main quest line takes you past, it ends up being the more important ones I think. The Dark Forest is one of my favorite areas. It is just a snipers paradise. There's even random civie sniper dude! Hearing that story about the electrical anomaly things in that area is really cool. They freaked me out for more than one playthrough, and I never tried to shoot them because I usually was also low on ammo, and paranoid about drawing worse things with my fire. I only found out about it on a wiki years later and felt real stupid. Having the boxes and trash float up and hit you is a really interesting player weakness move. It does sound silly, but after a while you start to go crazy, especially when you don't know how to stop it. Yeah, the bulk of my obsession with Stalker stems from that mod and my time with it. I've put a really terrible number of hours into it and got really fascinated with its design for a couple months, and I've been unable to really put down my thoughts, but yeah, the Misery mod is awesome. Just amazing. I totally understand your criticism about the money, and agree completely about mutant health (It's just unreasonable at a certain point. Dogs DO NOT keep running after two .45's in the body. And it only gets worse from there. Ugh.). I personally like the really deep economic oppression, it makes me really consider the cost benefit of an engagement in terms of resources in a way I've never done before, and that's just really exciting to me. Do I creep up and find a good ambush point for that bandit patrol and hope that I either avoid getting hit or grab more medical stuff from them, how much ammo do I have, and are these guys carrying enough stuff to make the ammo worth it's while? Have I heard distant gunfire recently? Are these guys walking back fat and rich from knocking off a couple of duty guys, or are they weak and poor after fending off a pack of snorks? Should I just give them room and head back? It's a sort of tactical gameplay I haven't really found anywhere else. Maybe Dayz, but the multiplayer part sort of ruins the possible peace of non-action, as the higher skill bounds make things a little crazy. Also the respawning nature of it, but Stalker has saves obviously, so I don't know. The respawning in Stalker is less a new world and more a new chance to play a situation better. All I know is that A-life is a fucking amazing engine. I desperately want an Old West game utilizing the faction system and AI of Stalker. Different towns/counties, nearby tribes, federal troops and officials, bandits and guns for hire, all with goals and alignments and territory to patrol. A lot of room there to create a lot of different situations, using a more limited weapon set. I've been thinking of it for years.

In modern parlance, "Brand Self Confirmation"? I know what you mean, I do the exact same thing, but I've never heard anyone have a word for it. It's a gross thing to me. Like a first impression that lasts the last few months of your life. Ugh.

Yep, the blue boxes that look somewhat like footlockers are safe storage, as is any stash, incidentally. Containers never reset in stalker. Duty/Freedom is one of the only interesting faction situations I've ever found. I've usually tended towards Freedom, but mostly because of the weaponry I liked more. Duty has typically warsaw pact stuff, heavy hitting and fast firing, and Freedom uses NATO weapons and ammo, lighter and more accurate but weaker. On the narrative side though, neither side is 'good' or 'bad' at the end of the day. There are darker things in the Zone than mere humans fighting over what to do with the zone. The zone decides what to do with you. Also, snorks are good only for target practice. Skeet shooting really.

The garbage is particularly bad for radiation, I'd wait until you have a stash or something marked there before you go exploring to much. There's not much that I remember being hidden explicitly in a really irradiated area, and you'll be passing through later with better gear and more anti-rad stuff anyway. The garbage is also one of the more buggy areas in the game (mostly related to a cut faction system that was later in Clear Sky), and I'm not sure how well various bug fixes deal with things, so look out for that I guess. Yeah, rads reduce over time, but they also reduce health at about or more than the same rate as health, so waiting it out is only really a good option if you just stumbled into a bad area for a second or such. Vodka is more efficient than anti-rads for small things for sure, being much cheaper and available, so if you can stomach the screen effects go for it. Personally they're the only video game thing that gives me motion sickness to watch. Everyone play Stalker games. It makes me so happy.

The STALKER Complete mod series (SoC, Clear Sky or Pripyat) is probably the best way to play the game, especially if you've bounced off of it in the past. The weapon handling is also greatly improved in a way I can't really describe. Less jerky, more weighty? Complete also bundles in a number of atmospheric mods, both audio and visual, which should also be mentioned. It has utterly gorgeous skies. Complete also includes some debug/cheat tools in the menu, and I'd advise you to never even look at them. I know they intend the teleport system to be a feature and not a debug tool, but it utterly ruins the zone as a place. The walking is important. If you find the zone not punishing enough, the Misery Mod for Call of Pripyat is my personal favorite game/mod combo for the series. It is incredibly deep and fleshes out much of the game, but is definitely not a good way to start, unless a Dark Souls-esque Stalker experience sounds good to you. General starting tips I guess: (I'd suggest playing at least on normal or hard (whatever they're called again) unless you're really having problems with the combat. The AI for the enemies doesn't really mesh with their lower health and your higher damage, and it makes them seem really stupid. That plus the fact that the environmental dangers are unchanged can make the game all the more frustrating and off-putting. A-life is the heart of Stalker, and it functions best at higher difficulties.) Muppjockey is right, only make contact on your own terms. It's a little like DayZ when it comes to fellow Stalkers. It's always worth determining whether a fight is in your favor or even necessary. Some Stalkers are friendly, and can be a source of quests, free or paid distance movement (the actual in-game teleport) and trade. Of course, many others will just as gladly shoot you in the head and take your bread and vodka. The creatures are different. In my mind, unless you have a good reason to engage, they're just a waste of ammo and health, and more dangerous than they look. Until you have a surfeit of medical supplies and ammo, just walk around. You can waste them with little effort later. Don't be seduced by automatic fire. Stalker has a ballistics system, and a fairly complex one. The AI doesn't get suppressed, and body shots are far less effective than pretty little headshots. Once the other Stalkers get body armor, having a little fire discipline and more practiced knowledge of the ballistics will come in handy. Don't worry about artifact hunting until you have a much better detector and armor. Most can kill you with their heat or radiation alone, regardless of how hard you try to navigate them. Once you find a weapon you like, stick with it. Some of the games have repair and upgrade systems, and a weapon customized to your needs is going to work out better in the long run than stock weapon upgrades. Along those lines, keep everything repaired, and keep enough food and medicine around. Being well supplied is better than having new gear. Run away from bloodsuckers very fast. Do not stop until you can find a corner to safely back into and cry while spraying shotgun shells into the rest of the room. This is the only way to deal with them for a long time. There's more specific things about the different games, but I hope that's helpful generally. (Edit: Boy I love talking about Stalker. Sorry world)

Picked up Enemy Within two days ago and am loving it. Would also recommend the Long War mod to go along with it, really small, really simple install that adds a pretty incredible amount of new weapons, maps, equipment, perks, classes, etc. It's very well balanced, and also even more brutal by default, but I find it adds a far greater tactical depth. Risks are much riskier, and the domino effect of a mission going wrong is very intense. It also has a number of config options to make it either nigh impossible or easier. I'd been waiting for EW to go on sale so I could try it and the mod and neither are a disappointment. Best ten bucks on gaming I've spent all year.

It's totally fine, I just didn't have the full context of the game to know that it rises above a lot of common tropes regarding race and such. People seem pretty quick to defend it, so I'll retract anything I seemed to claim anyway. I was only talking about the article and the thread. I do agree about the somewhat misplaced anger too. I'm particularly inclined to let the perfect be the enemy of the good, and it isn't a good thing for the world. Things only happen in increments.