gregbrown

The best description I've heard of Gearbox is that "Randy Pitchford is a used car salesman," and I'd agree. DNF made me hate the company, and I must admit to some schadenfreude as it slowly became clear that the game was amazingly bad. If there's any silver-lining, it's in showing that: Previews were uniformly positive even when they should have seen this coming from a mile away, and hopefully people will recognize that the whole exercise is nothing but uncritical regurgitation of PR (unlikely), and We get to find out which outlets are really bad, like the EGM review that Mington linked above.

The Eagleman Stag is incredibly rad.

PT Anderson is adapting Pynchon's latest novel Inherent Vice, and it should be pretty damn great.

The cast is up, and I was absolutely wowed by Sean's feminist reading of the novel. It makes so much sense but I totally missed it in both read-throughs. The discussion of how Pynchon nailed the '60s as a period of counter-cultures and multiple potential futures was really interesting, since I just finished Gravity's Rainbow, which tackles a similar milieu even more explicitly in the post-war Germany setting.

The Caro books on LBJ are so great—as biography, history, and literature—and each stand alone so don't be worried about just biting off the first installment for now. They really are one of the few titanic literary enterprises out there right now, and I hope he makes it to the fifth volume!

I mainly watch it through my Apple TV, but when I've used the web interface it hasn't seemed too nagging or buggy. :\ On a side note, I have also seen the first two episodes of House of Cards, and loving it as well.

Is the first one the explosive money? That was one of the forgettable Brosnan films. (World is Not Enough, I think?) The last two Bond movies have been more interesting for the production work than plot, honestly. About all Quantum of Solace had going for it was the architecture, and this time it was the awesome cinematography. No one's quite cracked how to make a modern Bond that plays to its own strengths, without failed attempts at grafting on modern storytelling expectations/tropes. I'd love to see them start doing period Bond films!

Amazing.

I cannot image edit worth a damn, but I just made a gif of the original animation, and pulled out the six frames so someone more talented than me can edit accordingly. Six Frames in PNG

That's because the new one is unlisted, which hides it from public view. There used to be a bug that would show unlisted videos in the RSS feed, but I guess that's been fixed!

It largely depends on the director, honestly. They're not a novelty like they were in the old days, but the effect has been to largely weed out all the bad ones. The ones that are the best at it—Fincher and Soderbergh, for example—are still going strong. And of course, specialty houses like the Criterion Collection are as feature-filled and excellent as ever.

I am 130 pages in, and this seems to me the understatement of the year.

I moved away this summer. They do architectural boat tours down the Chicago river that are really neat. I'd also recommend the top of the John Hancock Center—known as the "John Hancock Observatory"—as it tends to be less crowded than the Willis Tower. Outside of that, go to some restaurants that serve food you love! There's a ton of stuff on the north side near the red and brown lines. For example, if you love traditional German food, there's a great Brauhaus in Lincoln Square. The really great thing about Chicago is the restaurant scene is much more competitive there than anywhere else I've lived, so all the survivors tend to be delicious. They're the main thing I miss from the city, especially being able to walk to them. :[

Haha, I had the same experience. My parents grabbed it for Xmas, and it just barely fit in my suitcase to come back.

Was it just me, or does the guy with no tongue end up doing nothing, and just flat-out disappear towards the end? I watched it while feverish, so I'm not 100% on that, but I was amazed.

Yeah, that's one aspect that suffers from a platformer's literal representation of space. If you have a single area with several branching rooms/problem-solving arenas, it's hard to stack them in a way that makes them all easily accessible, yet not overlap them at all. There are some upsides to the platforming—it feels more accessible and intuitive than a traditional adventure game interface, and allows for some physics-type puzzles—but some serious downsides as well. In addition to the one-to-one representation of space, a lot of the areas also feel somewhat visually and aurally sparse like Tanukitsune mentioned. Maybe it's just because I'm a little slow on the uptake with the puzzles, but my pace of progression means that I'm surprised whenever the Cave chimes in, just because I haven't heard from it super-recently. I don't feel like I'm too far in so I'm hesitant to say much more than that, but those were two aspects that have hit me so far.

Man, looking at those required specs, it's a real bummer that they're not making a Mac version (at least, for launch anyways). I assumed it wouldn't run on my Air, but it would run just fine. :[

What is it? Title says it all. WWE '13 allows you to create custom wrestlers, and share them with others online. Bazza, the guy who runs this, sets up CPU vs. CPU battles of video game characters—some of which he's created himself, and some which he's grabbed elsewhere online. They're accompanied by appropriate music, and an ongoing wrestling-style storyline. Why should I care? Because I guarantee you that tuning in will be hilarious as hell. Watching the archived streams only gets you part of the story; most of the appeal is in watching the stream while the live chat explodes at every turn. It's the best. More importantly, though, wrestling culture is fascinating. I've never been able to get into any of the televised stuff, but seeing characters turn face or heel in real-time is pretty hilarious, especially when they're Rafael from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. And like I said, the live chat REALLY gets into it—to pages of "1000 YEARS OF PIZZA" chants when Rafael wins a match. How do I tune in? VGCW runs about once a week at Bazza's Twitch.tv channel. On nights where it does run, the action starts at 6pm Eastern/3pm Pacific, sometimes with some pre-show events before that time. How do you know when Bazza's running it? He'll announce that "Tonight is the Night" on his twitter feed. I also highly recommend creating a Twitch.tv account and downloading their iOS app. That way you'll get push notifications to your phone whenever the channel goes online.

This is surprisingly apt since the live chat is filled with so much wrestling lingo that it's endearing. Also, there will be a show tomorrow night at 6pm Eastern, 3pm Pacific! Tune in, and follow along with the live chat!

Meaning awful.

It seemed really trite, with every story trying to be a little parable where the main character learned some truth. Egan's a solid writer on the prose level, but she also exhibits the tics and worldview that I'm already tired from seeing run rampant in MFA writers and This American Life. The futurism at the end is also pretty egregious.

Yeah, if anything I'd say the book is incredibly damning to the rich, portraying them as a bunch of spoiled infants whose adulthood is almost like children playing dress-up. It's totally different from, say, The King's Speech which bit that critique, I think.

Chris mentioned that the Amnesia Fortnight prototypes seemed to be more system-driven than what's usually considered to be Double Fine's traditional fare. Do you think that's, in some ways, an artifact of the pitch process? It seems like it's a lot easier to describe and get excited about synonymous systems to games we've already played, and I think we saw that a lot more in both the pitches themselves as well as the ones that got lots of votes.

Whoa there. The Argobot covered a lot of the other points, but this quip jumped out at me: writing, filming, and editing an excellent video is hard and a tremendous investment in time—especially if you don't have a ton of previous experience, or are aiming to push your craft to even higher levels of quality. The work:output multiplier can quickly get quite insane, especially if you're doing all the jobs at once, and have much more scrutiny and much higher expectations than you were planning for from the outset.

One of the ways the book was really great for me—and I'm interested in seeing if anyone else had this experience too—was in how I felt I went through the same sort of mindset as Oedipa in terms of becoming oversensitized to certain symbols and more apt to see connections there than is probably warranted. For example, after The Courtiers' Tragedy play, there's a few more times where bones are mentioned incidentally over the course of the book. Each time, I was like "Oh, that must be related" even though the book never calls it out, and any possible connection would be either nonsensical or impossible. The book took this ordinary word and infused it with a hidden meaning, to the point where I started thinking the same way as our protagonist. It's that evocative mindset, and the way Pynchon seemingly got there without deploying any fancy formal devices, that really made my experience amazing, and the book a fantastic choice for this month.