Merus

Phaedrus' Street Crew
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Everything posted by Merus

  1. Guys I kind of want the title of Idle Thumbs 150 to be Best Debut and haven't found a good place to express this preference.
  2. Discworld

    Have you read any of the later ones? It's interesting you didn't care for Mort, as that's the one where people say the series starts coming into its own.
  3. Discworld

    I think Colour of Magic suffers from this a little, but only a little, because Pratchett was always careful to ensure his world had an internal logic to it that Xanth never had. When that internal logic became self-supporting, the series really took off.
  4. Life

    I need to lose 5kg in essentially 2 weeks (1 week now), and crash diets like this are absolutely not sustainable or healthy no matter what they claim. I am well aware. I plan to give my body some quality time to recover afterwards (I'm remembering the 40 Hour Famine that kids would do, and they'd make themselves very sick by going to Pizza Hut straight after instead of taking it slow). The whole point is to 'dip' under the goal weight to win the bet and then put it back on. I've "lost" 2 kgs and very little of it appears to be fat; most of it appears to be water and important parts of my body. I basically can't afford a new laptop and I'm an IT student, so losing my laptop will make my studies tremendously difficult. I agree, it would have been much better to sustainably lose the weight, but that didn't happen for reasons I won't go into. I figure damaging irreplaceable equipment I use every day is less worse than losing a different kind of irreplaceable equipment I use every day.
  5. Reading about Games

    I'm with osmosisch, this aperson guy is not an interesting person to have an argument with. I enjoyed how he took osmosisch's statements about aperson's logical fallacies as a personal attack, thereby proving his point, but just look at that wall of text he's got there hanging on an out-of-context quote. He's not here to engage or discuss or learn anything, he's here to be the clever Dan, and those kinds of people tend to see no-one engaging with them as meaning they were right. I think if we ignore him, he'll get the self-proclaimed victory he wants and hopefully he'll rack off.
  6. Ugh. If you're going to build a 'narrative engine' then how are you representing person vs environment or person vs society conflicts with a zero sum system? And just giving them one axis on which their opinion is based? If you're going to track complicated opinions, you should be able to expose that to the star's actions, so you can have a slap-slap-kiss kind of character. (But really it's probably easier to just write good characters)
  7. Gone Home from The Fullbright Company

    Never read unmoderated comments.
  8. QUILTBAG Thread of Flagrant Homoeroticism

    The very best suggestion I've heard is to picket the funeral with signs like "My condolences" and "Sorry for your loss". Apparently Phelps had been excluded from WBC activities in his final years; based on what I know of cults, I'd say the current tactic of silently preventing them from being visible at picketed events is likely the most effective way of undoing some of the brainwashing. I suspect the family outside of Phelps is less capable of keeping up the wall between them and the world; if that goes down, it's all over, because like most people eventually they'll actually meet a queer person and discover they're pretty normal.
  9. The Big LucasArts Playthrough

    I can never tell what people here consider spoilers, so I'm just going to stay out of this thread and come back later.
  10. Recently completed video games

    From what I've heard, when you actually reach 'Princess Kenny', none of the kids actually knows what rape is, it's just something bad that's done to women, so Kenny and the "rapist" are just kind of standing in the room waiting. If that's the case, I'd read it as punching up; rape is intensely traumatic, and it's been trivialised so much that the kids think it's something they need to include to make their game more 'epic' without even knowing what it is. I don't know how people who've gone through with it would feel about it, and their reaction is a damn sight more important than mine.
  11. Life

    So I made a foolish bet with my Mum to lose weight. The deadline is April 1st, and neither of us are close to our goals. If I don't make it, I lose my laptop; if she doesn't make it, she has to spend a week with her douchebag brother who she hasn't talked to in years. So I'm on a crash diet, specifically a juice diet. I am so fucking hungry It has been half a day
  12. QUILTBAG Thread of Flagrant Homoeroticism

    Fred Phelps certainly shaped a lot of my thoughts on free speech: I could see, from here, the harm he caused just by saying what he believed. He spread a poison of the mind, and he made it easier for others to follow two steps behind because at least they weren't as evil as the Phelps-Roper clan. He made it easier to hate gay people simply by expressing that is was an option. In a weird way, I almost admired that he took what is a fairly mainstream perversion of the Bible's message, and followed it through to its logical conclusion: if you believe that God is a creature who made a place of eternal torment that he sends those he supposedly loves, you've basically decided to worship an evil monster. If you make the core tenets of your faith opposition to abortion, homosexuality and biblical inerrancy instead of, like, tolerance and love and charity, then that road should inevitably lead you to terrorising people at their most vulnerable.
  13. anime

    So that Kill la Kill, huh. It was on my radar since I'd heard buzz that it suddenly got a lot better than people were expecting, and I discovered that it's one of the few anime series actually available for streaming here. yeah It's pretty fucking crazy. I'm late into it, and I skipped ahead to see that things get even crazier. There's a lot that bothers me about it, particularly at the front end - obviously the weird-ass fanservice, the insistence that all men are perverts, the way it can't decide whether its crowds are gender-balanced, all male, or 20% female, which is about the number we're trained to see as 'gender-neutral', the rape and incest in the back half - but it's decided it's skeevy so it might as well do something with it. And Jesus it just keeps building, doesn't it.
  14. The Big LucasArts Playthrough

    It's more that signs don't actually behave that way in real life, and there's no reason to believe that that sign in that room has very different behaviour to everywhere else. Also, you can hold down the use key when you find the fire extinguisher. That will save you some time.
  15. Cartoons!

    I think, if Disney Animation and Dreamworks keep going on their upward trends, I'm okay with Pixar's golden age being over. It had to happen eventually.
  16. Guys I found it It looks deceptively small, but the box is actually 3km long.
  17. The Big LucasArts Playthrough

    One of the puzzles in the Petrified Forest is bullshit, and another suffers from interface problems. So don't be too surprised.
  18. The City and The City by China Mieville

    I kind of want to see an omnibus version of this, Perdido Street Station and Embassytown called The City and The City and The City and The City.
  19. Reading about Games

    I think the most valuable thing you can take out of theoretical game design discussions is that no-one agrees with you about a) what is a game or what is fun. It's humbling. You stop thinking a) games have to have a checklist of things for them to work properly and that the kind of fun you like best is the most legitimate kind of fun. When you get out of your own experiences and start trying to work out what the audience wants, you improve as a designer.
  20. Tone Control is a Podcast!

    This generally happens because the visibility of women is reduced and reduced and reduced, and the frustration of not being able to get the same amount of attention for the same kind of games, or even worse the kind of attention that's all about the designer and not this cool thing they made*, can often inspire a design that is fresh and distinctive and very much about "women's issues". (I also note that, for instance, Anna Anthropy has made games both about sub/dom lesbians and about space explorers on distant planets.) We also forget, as males, how often we see "men's issues" presented as a universal theme - like there was an awful lot of games about fatherhood specifically last year. Which is why I brought it up in the first place - on the face of it, Steve would be aware of all of this, working in a gender balanced team that took a fairly successful crack at a story about teenage girls. Tone Control is the kind of venue that contributes - strongly - to the visibility of game designers. If you want a world where game designers are not white upper-middle class men, this is the sort of place that leads that conversation, if it's going to take place. I find it puzzling that it's been several months and it's been for the most part a sausage fest; I can imagine scheduling would be a problem and Steve might want to be in the same studio as his guests for maximum audio quality, but still. * I remember this terrible comic from Something Awful that made Jade Raymond out as an honest-to-god whore around the time she was leading Assassin's Creed, and it still makes my blood boil.
  21. Yeah, part of the fun of watching a speedrun (or a glitch run) is familiarity with the space, and seeing people do something that's seemingly impossible with the space. I remember a Let's Play of Link's Awakening that presented itself as a regular run, commenting on the weird difficulty spikes, odd graphics and disconnected story of a glitch run that broke the game wide open. It was as mindblowing as someone showing me there's a tunnel near my house that gets to my parent's house in 10 minutes when they live in a different city two hours away.
  22. Tone Control is a Podcast!

    Anna Anthropy and Porpentine would also be fascinating, although I think you'd have to avoid having them on the same podcast as I recall they don't get on.