feelthedarkness

http://cyberarms.wordpress.com/2013/10/31/chinese-clothes-irons-coffee-pots-and-online-thermostats-that-can-hack-you/ http://arstechnica.com/security/2013/10/meet-badbios-the-mysterious-mac-and-pc-malware-that-jumps-airgaps/ TLDR: criminals installed chips in coffee pots and irons that seek networks within 200m and try to gain access. A different new mystery virus transmits itself from computer speaker to microphone circumventing the whole need for network. It still works on unplugged machines. This is how it starts people. Don't trust a big dog.

I would have kickstarted another MEAN STREETS or Martian Memorandum or even Countdown! It's such a bummer they ditched this fully function 3D car flying sim for pg softcore. Also,

i haven't watched the video, but i'm old enough that these FMV games represent to me a critical downturn in the quality of games i liked for a few years. Adventure games got dopey, particularly the Tex Murphy games, and wing commander turned into the mark hamill made for tv movie hour. everything looked like and starred what looked like softcore porn people but they never got down to BIZNESS.

I just want acknowledge that sweet image supported tychoC post.

The second season does have some bumps, and the honor of featuring one of the most poorly regarded episodes (a clip show, seasons finale). They also ran into a writers strike. there are some good ones, Q Who in particular. They also replaced the doctor for this season alone.

Fallout NV is one of, if not my favorite game of this generation, and the 4 DLCs are the best integrated. Almost like classic "expansion packs" and taken all together form almost a coherent second game. There are a few narrative threads that run through tying them into a larger story. If you are a fan of the original games, it does a great job tying everything to those games. I think it's significantly better than F3, just more affecting story stuff, and faction building. Vampire the Masquerade is great too. I really want to replay it, especially after reading that it's received the KOTOR treatment, of continual updates fan patches, and significant restoration and finishing of cut content. You can get through most of it nonviolently, which is always neat. The other thing I'd really recommend is Painkiller. Just the first game. I always regard it as the perfect high action FPS. Frequent checkpoints restore health (and I think ammo) and then unleash waves of highly destructible demons. No need for hording, or save scumming, so it forces you to fight with abandon. The weapons feel real solid, particularly the stake launcher, who's stakes are like fenceposts. It pins ragdolling enemies to any surface, including each other.

The story with the first 2 seasons of TNG being a little weird, is that Roddenberry was getting into his later years, but still involved in production. Lots of sex focused stuff. He was retired in Season 3 and people generally feel that's where it turns for the better.

People should get Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines! It's great, and like KOTOR 2 it's in perpetual fan development. Some guy restored a bunch of cut content, and has been regularly patching it for years.

I'm almost finished with the audiobook of Inherent Vice, and I'm really enjoying it. I think he does a good job capturing the rightward drift of the country post 60s. Maybe not the same heft 49 or GR, but still a heck of a lot of fun. Maybe the single best audio book rendition I've ever heard. He sings the songs. All of his books have a great, deep understanding of their popular cultures. I just didn't know about much of it in GR.

This was fun! I got in at like 1:20 AM and saw a tweet. I can't image 24 hour of straight casting. Also, I'm glad the Bookcast is still theoretically still on the table. It was pushing me to step up my BPMs.

man, Hsingen Blues is so damn good. Too bad the record after it was a clunker. You should peep the MAGIC CIRCLE record! Boston dudes. Sabbathy!

time to get the mostly finished, then canned Obsidian RPG out of mothballs!

I probably shouldn't have posted anything, as it was like 20 years ago, but the sense that there was a template for a plot arc, and each book hit the same beats at the same time, just with different names.

I read a few of those in late middle school/high school, but my main memory is the feeling that they were almost the exact same story over and over.

This was fantastic and compelling. I love the inside baseball stuff, especially since game people tend to seem SO secretive about process and actual solutions. It's come up before, but think about the Diablo 3s that must exist?

Rogue Legacy - Holy moly, this thing infected my brain. All achievements, all skills completed. woo. 3 total mansion clears. The 3rd one was to just put a cork in it. By the end I could only play with the barbarians or paladins, because it was too hard to bounce back with any other class.

Super Vivisection Bros

Yeah, I loved clearing outposts with the bow. There is one in particular, that backs up to a gold mine, and has a river down a hill in the front, where I stood on the big rock in the river, and silently arrowed every guard from 60-80 meters. Took almost all my arrows, but felt like the most beautiful, most expensive shooting gallery.

It's worth considering that a conversation about making space for and listening to women, particularly in gaming, has become about how it can be changed to appeal to one man. For TSH, I really think you need to spend more time on the idea of "how can we make this better for them" rather than "what they need to do for me."

A few of my all time favorite games have been Ultimas, but those early/mid ones could be punishing. Ultima 5 stands out in particular. I could never get it going for more than a little while because it was so hard to get money, then your food ran out right away, and I couldn't get an injured team back on its feet. I remember reading a thing that suggest you serial remake the party, gathering the default food onto one character.

Even if it's scary, it's ultimately a system you control, where the dominance and authorial experience has shifted from the director to you. You're the director, you point the camera. I probably didn't express it too well, but I'm just thinking about the fundamental difference as compared to Wallace's essay on David Lynch.

I've always had a negative view of motion controls because they undo one of the nice things about the way video games work. We always imagine the cool sword fighting game, where we get really proficient at parrying and riposting. Neal Stephenson certainly did. The problem is that this assumes a physical ability on behalf of the user that you really can't account for. Almost everyone can push A, or time the pushing a stick from left to right and pushing A. Not only does the user need to be good at video games, but they need to be physically agile. Does the developer spend a ton of money creating this really fine tuned system that you know most of your audience isn't physically capable of doing?

no doubt it also houses a USB stick with a HL3 installer on it.

I think the mechanism of how the idealized film operates is the same, just the actual effectiveness varies from film to film. In the actually essay he breaks down a little more. Books are less passive, both in terms of physical scale as it doesn't tower over you, force you to gaze up into it, as well as requiring more focused and direct action.

In David Foster Wallace's article on David Lynch he talks about the relative morality Lynch employs, and about film as a domineering form. MOVIES ARE AN authoritarian medium. They vulnerabilize you and then dominate you. Part of the magic of going to a movie is surrendering to it, letting it dominate you. The sitting in the dark, the looking up, the tranced distance from the screen, the being able to see the people on the screen without being seen by the people on the screen, the people on the screen being so much bigger than you: prettier than you, more compelling than you, etc. Film's overwhelming power isn't news. But different kinds of movies use this power in different ways. Art film is essentially teleological; it tries in various ways to "wake the audience up" or render us more "conscious." I can't help but think how different video games are and how that has shaped the outlook and attitudes of the people who play them. Essentially uglier, and to quote leigh alexander "about feeling powerful and you getting your way." Game people are not only resistant to criticism, but the idea of criticism. We see critical reviews and articles dismissed as just "trying to get attention." (or to quote Homer Simpson "i say the phone company made this film ON PURPOSE") Games have trained us not to just watch, or be told what to think.