Codicier

I think dota compares quite badly to many pro sports because they don't snowball in the way it does, chess is a good example of something where a early imbalance does tend to become greater as the game continues. I think it's telling perhaps the only other example within sports I can think of is martial arts where a competitors ability to fight is degraded as the bout continues doesn't have any stigma about someone admiring defeat & tapping out.

I disagree with your disagreeing with his disagreement. (Or at least with some provisos I do) I don't think there is the same idea of players primarily as entertainers in most pro sports I see this side of the Atlantic at least. Fundamentally we want our team to win and we don't care how they do it. I speak as a fan of a football team which was lauded for playing the most exciting football last season and who's title challenge ultimately disintegrated against teams who played 'anti-football' but who knows the majority of his fellow fans considers the way his team played as a prime example of tactical naïveté. I don't blame Chelsea for beating Liverpool, I blame our own players for getting sucker punched, by a team who knew 100% what they wanted out of a game & set about getting it as efficiently as possible. So IMO Don't blame VG for how they played blame valve for designing a game which produces those outcomes, all the great sports are near unrecognisable from their original formats. I if valve wants it's players to be entertainers it's up to it to make the game reward them.

My experience was pretty much the same (except i really am considerably more n00bish), watched most of the initial rounds with the beginners stream before switching to the main stream later in the tournament when i felt i was familiar with more of the vocab and hero abilities

The adventure mode is out today, must admit i'm dreading what it will do to normal play but hopeful it might be a fun puzzle

Wait, what? I'd always assumed it was just a nickname & everyone knew who he was. That is truly crazy. Yeah your 100% right on that VGvEG game, though there was some split pushing that was more about just absolutely efficiently destroying towers. I think my mistake was to think about "Rat" as being defined by efficiency & concentration on objectives (which route one certainly is) & that game more than almost any I remembered over TI4 was one where the winners just went straight for the throne. So is "Rat" more about refusing to engage while denying your opponent the important objectives? Any good examples of it you can think of this tourney? I seem to remember one example which fit that bill but failed, I think it was Alliance vs EG (will go check replays). Anyway competitive Dota terminology is still very new to me so thanks for the clarification.

I feel like were getting closer & closer to the stage where this is a distinction which won't matter as much (if at all), whether it's a ipad, a kindle or whatever it feels like i'm one of the few people i know who doesn't own any digital comics something which this sale on Young Avengers may well change. It got me wondering if maybe one way of doing a 'book club for comics' could be to pick webcomics? I mean the criterion collection film club idea works because they are universally accessible in a way which webcomics share. That said i struggle to think of any webcomics i really hold in the same high regard as the best of print comics, I wonder if the episodic nature of most of them just makes the incentive to keep pushing out regular content to high for the creators to really do longer story arcs etc.

Football has always & will always remain my baseline for all competitive sports, part of why I found myself pleasantly surprised at how well Dota held up at times as a spectator sport. That brings up a interesting question for me as a relatively new to dota person. Both the Puck play today & Universe's play on faceless void the other day just seemed near perfect in the drama & spectacle they brought to the games they took place in, virtuoso pieces of individual skill perfectly capitalised on by their team mates. Now over the years football has had a lot of rule changes to make that sort of play more likely within it & to make what we call "route 1" play (the offside rule being the biggest of these) either impossible or suboptimal. Before the tournament i saw a lot of talk of "rat" as dota's of "route 1" equivalent a very efficient style of play which could be very boring to watch (iirc it was a ratty strategy which eliminated one of the fan favourites EG) So do you think as time passes pressure may grow on Valve to tune the game to make the optimal plays also the most spectator friendly?

I found that last draft interesting in it's own way. It reminded me a bit of the Brazil-Germany game in the world cup where it felt like one team realised subconsciously almost as soon as it kicked off they had made a mistake and reacted not by trying to adapt but just falling into a delusion that the only thing going wrong was execution not the plan itself. Maybe Dota has even less room to adapt than international football though. Come on though, for me 2nd game Puck performance seemed excellent enough to make the day as a whole worthwhile. Admittedly she's the hero(ine) I've spent the last week practising with so it was great to see someone execute flawlessly with it.

Oh damn it don't link something with such a nice art style & colours on the 500th page, now I've got another webcomic to read all the way through!

We are in the middle of horrible heat wave, I've got two fans on my desk fans blasting away at full speed & all the windows open and yet the air seems to remains cloyingly humid and still. My sleep patterns (which aren't exactly perfect at the best of times) has gone to pot, and I'm having huge trouble focusing on my work and it's left me grumpy/brooding. My dark mood isn't helped by the inhumane business going on in the Ukraine & Gaza. Both are in their own ways horribly depressing, the festering wounds of conflicts that claim more lives daily.

Hey guys I'm hoping there might be a couple people amongst the thumbs community who can throw me some advice about what the best way to host a set of forums for a small group of people (specifically the MMO guild i'm part of). I'm sure there's some people on here who must have run a small forum for their hobby, or for their clan etc & can offer some advice. Specifically I'm having real trouble finding a hosting solution that sit's in between the ad infested mess represented by most free solutions, and the massive overkill represented by most professional paid solutions. Frustratingly the solutions gear specifically towards guilds seem to all be built around cookie cutter templates without much room for customisation. I wouldn't expect the site to have more than 40-50 active members of which probability only half would post with any regularity, probably a little less than some of the different show sub forums on here get. I've tried to keep this brief, but can talk more if need be. Anyway if anyone has any advice or experience with small forums I'd be grateful to hear what worked for you.

Had a talk with a friend who's quite tech literate and we are going to give the whole WP thing a shot initially, kicking the whole can of worms that is decision on hosting costs and forum software firmly down the road for a while. It may not be a perfect choice long term but it gives me the opportunity to get something up & running again While we have already had successful forums once, I'll admit conditions have changed radically since that time(3 years is a long time on the internet), and the community has fragmented since we moved to a "guild site" that never really felt like our home (& due to the way it worked put barriers in the way of people who stopped playing remaining on the forums). Main aim with this is to give people the opportunity to keep in touch, and chat etc if they want.

So Marvel have announced there's gonna be a new Thor & that it's not a he but a she. i think overall I quite like the new Thor design. A nice earthy feel to the costume, main let down is that in the end her main armour is still basically "boobplate" (although you can argue its a tribute to the original Thor costume), feel like they could have gone whole hog and thrown in a chain mail vest for her. Possibley open to acusations of being a publicity stunt but still a good thing all in all, wonder if it was successful they'd ever have the guts to make the change permanent.

So as the World Cup draws to a close I'm thinking again what a truly wonderful thing it is when a event is truly global/universal. Most of the time in the UK domestic football is stuck behind a great big paywall (IDK if it's the same in the US or not) so it's been amazing once again having a event where if you want to watch you can.

I know I bailed after a few episodes of HotD, it went from so bad I could laugh at it, to so bad i felt embarrassed watching it. So perhaps this would also be too much for me, if you were built of sterner stuff than me & able get past the cringe factor in HotD that I couldn't .

I'm almost tempted to watch the other one because of how bad you make it sound, any potential in it to reach "so bad it's good" territory?

Are you watching http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ping-Pong_Club as opposed to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ping_Pong_(manga)#Anime ? because what you describe doesn't sound like the series i watched Here's the OP http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q3vAXOLaMpY

Twig, just watch Ping Pong. Using fair means or foul get your hands on it. It's just transcendently good

So while helping my dad clean up his study I found this Before I go any further I should point out I have hugely fond memories of Kenny Everett. , Flamboyant, slightly surreal, and high energy he was along with Monty Python one of the comedians most important in forming my teenage tastes in comedy. However I have no strong memories of the book itself, at most they consist of a vague sense of boredom and confusion, but graphic novels certainly weren't as available then, so I probably took whatever I could get when it came to reading opportunitys. So opening it up for the 1st time in 16+ years yesterday I can't say I felt much anticipation, more of a vague sense of whether I was old enough “to get it” now. Early impression were surprisingly good. So you guys all remember the part in every superhero comic where the protagonist is going to school in a weird Dadaist landscape before getting into a fight with a bully then uses his super strength to tie his neck in a knot so he couldn't speak before tearing his leg off because he 'refuses to surrender'? Me neither, but that's what they went for here. Obviously his punishment for this is extra homework, at which point the story then transitions to Kremmen daydreaming about becoming a space captain, which in turn is immediately followed by a flash forward to Kremmen becoming a space captain. I actually like this framing quite a bit, overtly admitting “everything that follows is a psychotic teenage power fantasy” is actually quite refreshing. It does a very effective job of paying tribute to early British Sci-fi spaceship design too. I Love the look of Troll 1. Its part Thunderbirds, part Dan Dare, and part Only Fools and Horses. However that page was probably the last one before the whole experienced turned a more than a little sour for me. The risk any attempt at parody treads is that it can become a even worse version of what it was trying to mock, and sadly this is a line I think Kremmen crosses. I'm going to get the worst of it out of the way here, and say that to someone living in 2014 Kremmen has some pretty horribly misogynistic, and at times vilely racist moments. I present at this time Exhibit A: yeah Taking a moment to step back I think I'm not overreacting here but it's always hard to tell in these situations, what offends me may not offend others. But I think in the end nothing, not the whole “1977 was a different era”, or “it's a joke!” I think can in the end excuse this. Which leads me to the question “did Everett ok this?”, and were there similar moments in his TV show that I've just forgotten about? I think i'm going to cleanse my pallet by reading some early Love & Rockets which while riffing on some similar theme's is everything Kremmen is not. sidenote: would people prefer me to put spoiler markers around those other images, i put them round that one image because frankly it's horrible but i'm not sure if i should do the others too to save space?

Wow I utterly forgot about Claymore during this whole conversation. I remember it being incredibly popular for a while but it seems like its audience figures just dropped off a cliff at some point and everyone (inc myself) had forgot that it was ever a big deal. It's good that gormongous brought that up though because if he hadn't i would never have I looked up Claymore on TV tropes and found this wonderful catalogue of the most hateful worlds in anime http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/CrapsackWorld/AnimeAndManga

ah ok it wasn't entirely clear to me from the jazzy splash screen, those new game modes were what I was mostly thinking about regarding future play time. Tbh the environmental effects thing is tempting too, I'm a sucker for well implemented rain/snow/whatever.

The way these things are going its only a matter of time untill these two threads achieve a unholy union of some sort

Always love listening to Dota today, I think it almost doesn't matter that i don't play dota atm, its seems like its a game which produces a lot of great anecdote. Because of this despite less than 20hrs in game I've been watching a lot of Dota the last couple of day and thanks to valves pretty unsubtle marketing I've been wondering is it worth picking up a compendium At the moment I mainly watch games, so i'm not sure it would be much use to me, but i'm sure that at some point i'm going to roll up my sleves and actually put some time into learning the game. So i'm wondering if you guys & girls know if I would i level it up enough just through watching for it to be of benefit to me at a later date?

I can only assume if you combined Danielle talking in her natural accent with Jake pretending to be a Pig, Sean & Chris would explode with glee

This is just the best, it's like performance art as a forum thread.