Codicier

Phaedrus' Street Crew
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Posts posted by Codicier

  1. Posted

    we are dooomed
     
    https://www.engadget.com/2016/06/28/combat-ai-beats-air-force-experts/
     

    Lee, who has trained thousands of Air Force pilots and has been taking on AI opponents since the early 80s, was unable to score a single kill against ALPHA on multiple tries. In fact, he was shot down every time.

     
    DOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOMED

     


    Even when the researchers placed ALPHA at a severe disadvantage by limiting the speed, turning, and weapons and sensor capabilities of its simulated aircraft, the AI pilot was able to beat out other expert human pilots

  2. Posted

    The problem is these shorthand terms are only really useful when you are actually talking about a work in the medium/genre the term applies to. Jake made a comment in this weeks show where he called Doom "a game ass game" and similarly I've heard Gorm call a show a "anime ass anime".

     

    It's important when someone calls out the ridiculousness of a genre works use of well understood tropes that its clearly not being talked of as the totally of a medium and that you have both a audience and a speaker who have a affection for and understanding of a medium, and honestly i think Gorm and Twig are being to harsh on Patrick R because clearly he makes a distinction between his gut reaction to the term as a outsider and his knowledge that is not the entirety of it.

     

    I've seen a similar thing happening in the last week or so in reviews of the Warcraft movie, now don't get me wrong the film has a butt load of flaws and problems but a good few critics have just used "video gameness" as a easy stick to beat it with rather than actually talk about it's very real failures in storytelling or cinematography. 

     

    I think the reaction to Chris using anime as a shorthand results in the same thing, it wasn't particularly terrible, it was just a little lazy and didn't actually inform us what he felt the problem with the videos was. 

     

    Now to talk about the Overwatch shorts!  My instinct is to be similarly lazy and to say its like "dreamworks" (technically incredibly accomplished but with a overly self serious but sickly artificial sentimentality) does a "avengers" fight sequence (action centred far more around the showing off the combatants abilities rather than tension or drama).

     

    Blizzard has a reputation for over polishing things but honestly that doesn't feel like the problem here, its simply just not good use of the limits of short films. Trying to world build and set up clear emotion character motivations in 5 minutes is a ambitious choice to put it kindly, shorts are instead often at their best when they concentrate on creating a self contained moment something the TF 2 shorts did exceptionally well.

     

    my favourite of which remains

     

    the truly strange thing is that their trailer for Tracer in Heroes of the storm actually gets allot of that stuff right

     

     

    showing us her character and quirks rather than attempting to shoehorn a whole story in.

  4. Posted

    Ok so i realise the "best girl" trope is pretty widespread but:

     

    A: What criteria does a character need to meet to be declared a legit "bestie"? Is it just a fun quirky comedy sidekick character in a anime? Does the anime have to be a bad anime? 

    &

    B: Is there such thing as a "Best Boy"? 

  5. Posted

    Ok ladies and gent's SBM has informed me it my turn this week

    After a quick consultation with our benevolent overlord to check it was acceptable i can announce the theme this fortnight will be "the packed lunch"

     

    so rules are, any dish is fine as long as:

     

    - It can fit inside a Lunch box, Tupperware, Bento box or equivalent

    - It is ready to eat with minimal if any utensils (a spork or equivalent is acceptable)

    - It can be be prepared a decent amount in advance (overnight as a minimum).

     

    basically anything which you could pre prepare take with you to work or a picnic etc


    just some jumping off points to get people started here are things like sandwiches 

    Pan-bagnat-007.jpg?w=620&q=55&auto=forma
    http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2011/jun/11/sandwich-recipes-hugh-fearnley-whittingstall

     

    or salads

    Nigel-Slater-salads-007.jpg?w=620&q=55&a
    http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2011/jun/19/nigel-slater-summer-recipes-light

     

    or pasties

    1339_1_1436799069.jpg

    http://www.jamieoliver.com/recipes/vegetables-recipes/gluten-free-veggie-pasties/

     

    and if people are feeling more ambitious they can go for more complicated combinations like these

    sobanoodles-645x428.jpg

    http://www.brit.co/vegetarian-bento-box-lunch/


     

  6. Posted

    I've been working on finishing off a tau etheral model i started 2 years ago then got bored of

     

    post-24580-0-04210700-1459771291_thumb.jpg

     

    also experimenting a bit with this but ..............

     

    post-24580-0-78241000-1459771229_thumb.gif

     

    spin my pretty! spin!

     

    plan is to now do some pretty spectacular object source lighting on this guy which is why i thought id try to get some nice pics in case i mess up royally 

  7. Posted

    @Nappi

    Because of the fact it's consequences for failure can sometimes be pretty strong Hacking is pretty much either a luxury/emergency choice that as you said often only get's done when there's nothing else to do, or when you are in trouble and need that sectopod disabled "right NOW!", unless you have enough tech skill and equipment (high lvl drones & skullhack upgrade both help) to make it far more reliable. As Sorbicol say's a couple of the +hacking bonuses can be a huge boon

     

     

    (i.e. one missed shot at 90%+ leading to total squad wipes the next alien turn) 

     

    I had a ranger miss a 96% hit chance two turns in a row last mission >_< i think that's the worst i've seen so far this ironman run. It feels blatantly unfair when that stuff happens but it's bound to happen sometime.

     

    Also a minor warning to anyone using it there seems to be a small bug with the steam controller post patch where sometimes it purchases two of a item instead of one in the armoury :P

     

    Still at least the mission names are good

     

    post-24580-0-26560700-1458509656_thumb.jpg

     

    I'm currently about to undertake my 1st ever attack on landed UFO (for some reason they never came up in my 1st playthrough), I got the armour upgrade recently and i now feel hugely more secure.

    Feel my base is alot more efficent this time around got the both the AWC, & GW up & running as quickly as i could along with a nice centrally located workshop.

     

     

  9. Posted

    2 minor addition to bjorn's otherwise comprehensive list is:

    -Wraith suits also increase your dodge chance

    -War Suits give you a activated shield which gives you and nearby soldiers the equivalent defence to heavy cover (iirc)

  10. Posted

    post-24580-0-89192900-1457371620_thumb.jpeg

    Here's my pizza

    this use a Hugh Fernley Whittingstall dough which was basically 50/50 plain/strong flour.

    Sauce was plum tomatoes chopped up with some thyme and tomato paste

    Topping was mainly mozzarella with some cheddar on top to add some extra flavour and produce that nicely golden texture

    Green olives, pepper, artichokes, mushrooms, red onion, jalapenos and thinly sliced courgette plus some chilli flakes.

    Overall it waasn't a hugely adventurous version of pizza but I'm pretty happy with the taste

  11. Posted

    I tended to run double specialist in most missions, all with medical protocols one with haywire and one with revival and always restoration. I guess they were just always heal bots for me.

     

    As a side note what armor did people run late game?

     

    i tended to stick ghost suits on snipers & rangers and the heavy suits on everyone else apart from my hacking specilist who had normal armor so he could have one slot for his hacking tool and one for the med kit

     

    this was my final mission set up

     

    post-24580-0-54017500-1457040499_thumb.jpg

     

    & yeah god i love shredstorms

  12. Posted

    Oh man, I don't know how random the hack bonuses are, but I saw the absolute best one I had ever seen in the next to last mission (which, it could be scripted being that's when it showed up, and it showed up on a mission objective device?)  It was a permanent increase of +20 to the soldier's hack score.  If that can randomly show up, holy shit. 

     

    lets just say ive seen it a couple of times.... with the same guy...

     

    post-24580-0-85173500-1456519561_thumb.jpg

  13. Posted

    I thought that the whole point of One Punch Man as a concept was to problematize the habitual arc of shounen-type anime: in most instances of that genre, the solution to any obstacle is to grow stronger, so One Punch Man subverts everything by having a protagonist who is already the strongest being in existence. That puts the focus on the kinds of obstacles that cannot be overcome by growing stronger (and, in a few cases, ones that are made more difficult by strength), which is whence both the show's relatable humor and its surprising pathos springs. Saitama has no difficulty defeating anyone with a single punch, as the title goes, but being recognized and appreciated for that lack of difficulty is another (hilarious) matter entirely... as is making it to the market for triple-coupon day.

     

    So I can't help but feel that it's a huge misstep to introduce a final boss in the show's finale who cannot be defeated by a single punch from Saitama. Even though the way in which he grows stronger is comically understated in both its duration and extent (from a "normal punch" to "continuous normal punches" and then a "serious punch" as a finisher over the course of roughly five minutes), it's still breaking the show's eponymous rule to suggest that even the strongest being in the galaxy can grow stronger (or, at least, use their strength more effectively). By no means is it forbidden for a seinen subversion of shounen tropes to break its own rules, but generally that's confined to moments of dramatic revelation or personal growth, where there's some manner of larger point to be made. Vash, for instance, finally kills near the end of Trigun, after two cours of outrageously exacting pacifism, and his act is a nexus of character development for the entire cast of characters, definitely not just played for spectacle like Saitama's multi-punch fight with Boros. There are some tantalizing echoes of where rule-breaking in the twelfth episode of One Punch Man could have led, in the post-credits button when our protagonist is back to defeating his adversaries with one punch. After killing the king of the underworld, Saitama shows a little frustration at having experienced a true challenge for his strength, albeit briefly, and at having overcome it so completely. Such an emotional beat has resonances with early jokes at the expense of Saitama, whose boredom at having perfected his strength so utterly that he no longer gets to use it was genuinely funny as the show's initial hook, and with the paper-thin motivation of Boros, who led an intergalactic crusade to find himself a worthy opponent, but the show's writers just aren't interested in teasing the connections between these three instances into a motif, let alone a theme.

     

    And, really, I'm not even sure that the writers' reticence to do so is the wrong decision. Saitama's flat indifference to growth (which all happened to him before the first episode even took place) is such a strong pillar of the show's comedy. He is the humorously extreme end-state of a very specific set of tropes in anime, so the only way for him to grow is out of those tropes and the comedic role they've created for him, into something more serious (and, in my opinion, less interesting for being vastly less unique in the landscape of anime premises). Maybe it just would have been better for the writers to have come up with a different reason why Saitama couldn't throw a punch until the end of the fight? I don't know, I've run out of energy with this analysis.

     

    I agree generally but 

    I'm not sure if this will effects your personal read on the failing of the shows final fight in any way at all gorm, but the feeling i got from the end fight was it was basically all "were not so different after all"  trope.

    That as soon as the first punch hit Saitama & Boros both knew the outcome but that neither wanted to acknowledge it, and that Saitama is trying to give Boros the sort of fight he's wanted for himself the whole series out of a weird kind of sympathy which only comes to a end when Boros basically calls him out on it, giving him a choice to either stop messing about and treat him "seriously" (even if it is just for one moment) or watch him destroy the earth, and that the "serious punch" was actually a little bit of a deliberate overkill from Saitama as a sort of apology.

    Not that that changes the relevance of anything that you say, but i feel like it was maybe because it was taking aim at a specific different trope with what it did and the the problem arouse as a side effect of that rather than deviating back towards the norm of shonen fighting shows for no reason.

  14. Posted

    Nice Wooben! was that your first complete run or did you do a practice run on a lower difficulty first?

     

    So do we all take the post credit's sequence to mean the next expansion is going to be a Terror from the Deep remake (that or Pacific Rim :D )?

     

    Regarding the Psi situation i think what the wiki says is spot on with what i've experienced so far the only thing i wondered about while playing was "do psi stats effect those abilities which do dmg & will is used for those abilities based on mind control & effects" in other words does will effect the same things offensively that it does defensively, but everything dmg based uses psi?

    I'll prob try doing some testing to find out at some point, thematically it would be cool if it did but probably the more simple thing will turn out to be true 

     

    I'm now starting to think about planing my next run, and since I'm expecting commander Ironman to be tough as old boots I was thinking "should i have a upgrade path laid out in my head?" but then i started to wonder if the new strategic layer is weighted significantly enough that the best approach on higher difficulties will be to grab advantages where the game hands them me & try to capitalise on them rather than using a more strict approach.

     

    Instinctively my 1st play through has made me think the key early elements i want are (in reverse order of importance) 5 man squads, psi ops & the first armour upgrade. so maybe i should just aim to get those 3, but not worry too much about the order they arrive in?

  15. Posted

    oh don't mind me i've just psychicly took over two aliens and killed 2 and severely wounded another all on my own.

     

    post-24580-0-36552600-1456163072_thumb.jpg

     

    It's not like Psi-Ops is incredibly overpowered or anything, I mean it's not like you could solo a mission with one, oh wait...

     

     

    Yes you can :D
    Although that run was lucky in several places I still think even if things had gone wrong i would have come out fine considering all the fall back stuff a fully skilled psi-op has.

     

    I think it was Cordeos who suggested it in slack but i'm currently wondering if just psi-ops with a few personal healer specialists would work for the "beat the final mission in conventional gear achievement"

     

     

     

     

     

  16. Posted

    Only had time to do one mission and start a 2 nd before heading up to bed but am i setting correctly that initially assert least civilians alert aliens to you presence if they see you?

  17. Posted

    Just something like a proper endless mode or side objectives for missions like meld could change the way the game was played without feeling mandatory like a new class or weapon might. That said i'm still probably gonna pre-order the whole thing >_<

  18. Posted

    I'm pretty annoyed at the DLC pack for XCOM 2, first that it's a pre-order for future, unfinished content and then that it adds 1 new class to the game and new weapons (not just skins/cosmetics).  A new class and weapons to me feel like absolutely mandatory content, not something like the additional missions of the original XCOM dlc (not counting Enemy Within, because that was a whole expansion). 

     

    I'm not sure how you balance something like XCOM with the knowledge that you're adding a new class and weapons within a few months of release. 

     

    yeah it's feels it's becoming frustratingly common for strategy games to bundle units and factions with pre-order DLC in a way that feel's a anathema to the inherent to the drive towards perfect balance expected of the genre

  20. Posted

    Like so many here i first heard him when raiding my parents record collection, He's one of those few people who seemed to have been around forever but had managed to somehow defying the natural order of things to remain relevant on his own terms.

  21. Posted

    been doing some more digging to try and inform my choice of HDD because it seems to be one of those components that no one actually does many reviews of.

     

    managed to find some interesting stuff so i thought i'd throw it up here for anyone else who like me was a bit confused by the lack of info

     

    1stly there's this blog post by a cloud backup company about the failure rates of the drives they use its interesting to see that some models seem to have weird anomalies

     

    https://www.backblaze.com/blog/best-hard-drive-q4-2014/  &  https://www.backblaze.com/blog/what-hard-drive-should-i-buy/

     

    also managed to find a site which just seems to review the various kinds of storage

     

    http://www.storagereview.com/best_drives

     

    both sites are looking at a higher end products than i was initially thinking but its interesting to see brands i didn't even think of like Hitachi doing so well (although now their HD business has been sold off partly).

     

    think now  i might consider making the jump to a WD black as a long term investment

  22. Posted

    I'd like to see some larger scale stuff put up by people on here, you need some quite different techniques A friend of mine had been getting into doing larger Forge World stuff by GW and it's been interesting watching him figure stuff out. I've also been thinking of digging up and stripping a old GW Titan

  24. Posted

    post-24580-0-88372800-1452008036_thumb.jpg

    Tried to get started again with a bit of work on some pieces from the Spartacus board game

    The concept I'm working towards is to make them look like a series of gladiator statues since i don't feel they have enough detail to look good if i tried to do actual skin tones

    I'm working very slowly down from sprayed a pure bronze (The model with the net on the left has had nothing done except the spray) using a green glaze made of party black ink, party green wash and dash of dark green paint mixed with some gloss medium and flow enhancer with the intent of getting a more worked and weathered look (as hopefully evidenced by the guy on the right.

    Needs a few more layers of glaze plus some spot highlights to enhance the contrast i think plus some weathering effects and maybe a marble effect base but I'm happy at the general direction it's heading in

  25. Posted

    I've been looking for a new big HDD to go along with my SSD for a while now, i have 2 computers one which is a gaming and graphics work pc which this would be the drive for, and another which acts as more a media pc 

     

    looking at the recommendations above would a 3TB WD black be a solid choice? 

     

    http://www.amazon.co.uk/WD-3-5-inch-Internal-Hard-Drive/dp/B00FJRS5BA/ref=sr_1_1/280-3431458-8233345?ie=UTF8&qid=1452004000&sr=8-1&keywords=4tb+black+wd

     

    or would i be better off with a blue 3tb? (i think they are a replacement for the green line, but reviews on them seem mixed)

     

    http://www.amazon.co.uk/BLUE-Desktop-inch-Internal-Drive/dp/B013HNYVCE/ref=dp_ob_title_ce

     

    after reading about a bit a fair few people seem to like the mid range seagate drive so i guess thats back in the mix

     

    http://www.amazon.co.uk/Seagate-inch-Barracuda-Desktop-Drive/dp/B0073Q7GU6