baladec

Phaedrus' Street Crew
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Posts posted by baladec


  1. I made the mistake of touching the circuit board of a disposable camera in high school. The charge of the capacitor bucked my body and I was left with an empty tingling sensation.

     

    That's how I feel after watching episode 18: like I have been electrocuted.

     

    Dale Cooper feels like Roland from the Dark Tower. He's just completed his first cycle and there's signs he's making progress. Dale knew after seeing Diane that something was wrong, there was still something out there pulling the strings, which made what would be a severely happy moment feel worthless.

     

    The final moments of season three is going to give me nightmares. I am deeply unsettled.


  2. Has in been discussed how Bad Coop knows so much about good Coop? It's doesn't strike me that his doppleganger knows anything about his counterpart, but instead is being directed by BOB who had an incredible amount of exposure to Coop and those close to him.

     

    The through-line I get is that BOB is a being of dark chaos and Bad Coop wishes to unravel every good thing Coop has done and turn it for his own profit.


  3. Something amazing happened while listening to this episode.

     

    When Jake was in the middle of talking about Mario 3D Land, he skipped like a CD and everything fell silent in my headphones. I couldn’t help but laugh, because it was a pretty fitting gag when paired with the context of the Stanley Parable, repeating and restarting. I was anticipated someone to chime in with the Idle Thumbs introduction, but enough silence warranted investigation. Turns out, my podcast app had crashed.


  4. To extend the topic of “What game would you suggest to someone who hasn’t played games?” I would have to throw Fez in there. At it’s core it’s very simple: jump here to get these things. Then, it expands into a quest for information to solve these puzzles: what do these symbols mean? These rooms clearly hide something, but what? All while being surrounded by a soothing, welcoming environment that doesn’t hold any consequence around character death. I could see someone getting a lot out of it, slowly, over time.


  5. A run of Spelunky (at least for me) is often only 15 minutes or so, very rarely more than 30, and there's no winning or losing, you just die and try again in a pretty low-pressure way. Dota 2 is cool but it's too intense for me to want to spend that much time on. I also have a strong resistance against games that are best played with arranged groups, not because they're bad but because of all the logistics involved and because I know I have to commit to a certain amount of time during which 9 other people are counting on me to have uninterrupted focus and attention. One of the reasons I have so many hours of Spelunky logged is because I just leave it running all the time. I've only played two games tonight but probably logged something like three hours on Steam, because it was paused for the duration of dinner. I just find it hard to get psyched up about the amount of focus and attention Dota 2 demands right now. I'm sure at some point I'll have a cycle where I'm more interested in playing hardcore multiplayer games.

     

    It is definitely a time commitment. My approach has evolved since I began playing to the point where it feels more like team sports than any other comparison I can think of. The notion of being expected to play a match to completion or be penalized, is a type of expectation that hasn’t really existed much in video games. Companies instead tend focus to design a game where a player wouldn’t want to quit early, to a point where the common loss is not getting precious XP that would let you unlock something new. The consequence Dota’s penalty requires an extra level of planning on my part, that often makes me consider my real life surroundings and scheduling much like leaving the house to play an intramural sport or running an errand would.

     

    The intensity on the other hand, like any group activity, depends on who you play with. When I play with friends, there’s a lot more room to make mistakes and take risks, because there always an option to play against bots with a low difficulty, even without a full team five in your party. The intensity mostly comes from playing against other people that unlocks that primal desire to win and crush your enemies to dust. When things don’t go that way, is when you see a darker side of people that throw blame, or generally make people feel like shit. Again, it reminds me so much of the dynamic of team sports, and it’s had me consider who I choose to play with, and consider if my mood will be affected by someone acting up if I play with a random group. It’s certainly not for everyone.


  6. I loved the Monty Python-level of randomness in this episode. It's something I loved from the earlier 'casts.

     

    This is an odd sidebar: has Chris played Dota 2? I can't see him getting into the game with Sean, because the second they try to play against people, the matchmaking will probably rocket to a level that would make the game very unfulfilling for a new player.


  7. The “SIR! SIIIR!” is going to haunt me. I don’t think it’s Caddyshack, it might be Blues Brothers, but I don’t know. This will eat away at me until I figure out what it is.

     

    EDIT:

    I think it’s the end of the fancy restaurant scene after the brothers leave.

     

    EDIT 2:

    Or was it Ferris Bueller?


  8. I also tend to stay away from graphical mods with a single exception: the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series. The complete mods for SoC and CoP added some allowed me to be pulled further into believing I was walking around the Zone.

    Also, congratulations of finishing the trail of tears! I've had a few friends expressing that they cried upon finishing the Walking Dead. I'd hand you the award myself, except I didn't have the fliff handy to buy my way into having dinner with you fine gentlemen.


  9. remember though that he only figures it out because he recognises adrian's posture and features.

    i've been considering that central phrase about tony not 'getting it', and what 'it' might be. the first answer is the twist, and that he eventually does get it, and end of story.

    but veronica also says 'and you never will'. tony from that point reflects and reconstructs and decides that he has got 'it' but considering the tone and theme of the book i think 'it' is something else - something that we as the reader will never get either because we only have tony's side of the story - we can't decode veronica's (or adrian's) reasoning or history because we don't have that information. veronica has her own internal version of truth that we are not privy to - something that makes her character so much more real.

    the point for me is that tony thinks he has figured 'it' out by the end - and in a practical way he has - but it is only his version he understands.

    i don't know if that makes any sense, and i feel absurdly uncomfortable referring to him as tony given how much know he hates it...

    Given the various philosophical outlooks of history throughout the book, to me, Tony is desperately trying to wrap up a version of a story that doesn't want to be documented, much like the suicide in the beginning of the book. To make meaning of the title, Tony only gets as far as a sense of an ending, rather than the actual one. When he recounts this story to other people it will be boiled down to its essential qualities of Adrian sleeping with Veronica's mother, getting her pregnant in the process, and offing himself when he wrongfully thinks that his potential will be put to waste with the responsibility of raising that kid.

    Immediately after finishing the book, I wanted to read through it again. I equate it to the first read would be me seeing everything through the eyes of Tony as he searches for this information that wasn't a problem until it was resurfaced late in his life. The second read would be seeing what Tony willingly or not tried to hide about his history and what other characters tried to get him to see. There's a lot of mirroring in the events that makes me think history, and the recounting of it, is the real protagonist of the book. We see how it's collected, how its altered, and even how it repeats itself in such a short amount of time.