pkirkner

Yeah, Fantasy Grounds seems great, but there's no way I'm paying full retail for digital copies of books that I already bought in print.

It's probably not what you're looking for since it tends to focus on more recent history and is very much US-centric, but I've enjoyed the past present podcast recently. It's a group of three academics providing some historical context for stuff that was recently in the headlines. I've also enjoyed the Gravy podcast recently, which is probably even further afield from what you're looking for, but is still history adjacent. It explores the culture of the Southern United States through the lens of food. The episode focused on Shirley Sherrod (the USDA official slandered by Andrew Breitbart in 2010) was particularly good.

Here's the twitlonger that Rob mentioned.

I only see an archive for and .

Assuming you'll be alone in lane, Dark Seer has probably the easiest laning phase. You just ion shell a creep, stay at the edge of XP range, and you should get nice XP gain and decent gold gain without having to venture into harms way. He's a little trickier to play in team fights, but not overly complicated. Basically just put up your wall, try to vacuum the other team across it, and focus the illusions you get on whoever you really want dead. If you have an offlane support, as is common for beginners, you basically just want someone who can absorb some hits without being forced out of lane. Bristleback, Tidehunter, Abaddon, Tusk, and Centaur Warunner all are pretty decent in that role. As for supports that are always good to have, Omniknight has been the highest win rate hero for some time now. He's also an excellent counter for Witch Doctor since his ultimate blocks all physical damage, and Witch Doctor's ultimate deals physical damage. Lich and Warlock also fit really well into just about any team composition. I found Lich especially good as a beginner support because his sacrifice ability helped get me in the mindset of manipulating lane equilibrium before I had the timing down to do stuff like reliably stacking and pulling creep waves.

They discuss the endings of the episodes they've played in detail. I think that was through the end of episode 3, but I'm not 100% on that.

I actually had almost the exact opposite reaction. My exposure to European fantasy is limited to Tolkein, C.S. Lewis, and J.K. Rowling, so while The Witcher 3's sense of place came across as distinctly European, the tone brought to mind stuff I've read by American authors like Glen Cook or George R.R. Martin. In addition, the protagonist's English voice-over came across as so aggressively drawn from Hollywood action movies (almost to the point of Kung Fury-esque parody) that I found the contrast between the setting and the delivery of the dialogue jarring before I learned you could play it using Polish voice acting with English subtitles.

Somehow I missed that this was to be both a gaming and pop culture podcast, so the TV talk at the end (and the intimation that there may be book talk in the future) was a really pleasant surprise.

I'm rooting for this FF7 remake to be a huge success not because I have the slightest bit of interest in it, but because I'd love to see a painterly remake of FF6 based on Amano's concept art some day.

Within those bounds, I'd be available for a session sometime between midnight and about 0700 GMT on weekends. As far as systems go I'm familiar with 5e and Apocalypse World, but open to trying something new.

Bravo

I'm interested in giving it another go depending on how the time zones work out.

40k space marines aren't huge because of the suits. They're like 8-foot-tall genetically modified super soldiers.

That's up now.

She also plays World of Warcraft on her days off.

Cloud Imperium held their annual backer gathering today, this time in the UK. They showed off where they're at currently with the multiplayer: Released a cutscene from the single-player (PC Gamer has the cast list): And added an interactive map of the star systems in the game to their website. I like what they showed of the multiplayer. They basically incorporated their FPS stuff into the Gamescom demo and added more stuff to do on that map. They only showed narrative stuff from the single player, and I've never been a fan of the narrative in Chris Robert's games, so that did nothing for me. All in all, I guess I'm glad to see them still making progress despite all the recent distractions, though I wish they'd take a break from having their devs crunch on these stage demos every few months. edit: They also one of the single-player levels:

It kind of was a decade ago. Given the extremely skeevy marketing for BC3000AD back in the 90's, I can't say I'm too surprised that Smart's throwing up the bat signal to MRAs now.

Smart never really had the limelight as a developer. He made his name via usenet flame wars and has been trading on that reputation ever since.

This episode inspired me to look through the folder I file misdirected e-mail into. There's a receipt in there from 2004 of a guy in Boston sending flowers to a woman in Tuscany. I just googled one of their names, and the second result was an article about their wedding in 2011.

The only items that it really matters if you duplicate are: Mekansm (and the Guardian Greaves they can be upgraded into) Crimson Guard Pipe of Insight Veil of Discord Vladmir's Offering Assault Cuirass Desolator For any of those, just ALT+ left click on the icon in the store for the item you want to buy. That will let your team know what you're building so they can avoid duplicating it.

Hasn't Valve run almost the same tiered pre-order scheme on Steam before? I could have sworn that X-Com preorders unlocked tiers with stuff like TF2 hats and free copies of Civ V. edit: Yeah, that definitely happened. They also did it with Bioshock: Infinite.

Colin Campbell wrote an extensive piece over at Polygon about where things stand with Star Citizen.

Tim Follin gave an interview recently about the production process. I was surprised to learn that he had originally planned on including adventure-game style puzzles:

As long as the SF community is as engaged in the nominating vote next year as they were in the final vote this year, this isn't happening again.

I'd like to second the recommendation of The Yawhg. Mechanically, it's a choose-your-own-adventure book with some light stat-management that supports up to 4 person local multiplayer, yet still works as a single-player experience. But the mechanics aren't the draw. It's a well-written, beautifully-illustrated, and superbly scored game that only requires about 20 minutes of your time.