Merus

Wild guesses aren't going to win you brand new cars. Your reasoning is not correct.

Have we had Monty Hall in here yet? Let's have Monty Hall. You're on a game show, and for the bonus round the host puts you in front of three doors. Behind one door is a BRAND NEW CARRRRR and behind the other two are booby prizes, and contest regulations prevent the producers from moving around prizes after the bonus round starts. When you pick a door, the host will smile and make you feel a little nervous and then go and open one of the other doors, showing the audience the booby prize behind it. Two doors left, one of which has the BRAND NEW CARRRRR, one of which has another booby prize. Then the host will come back up to you, and say, "Well, __________, are you confident with your guess? Are you going to stick with the door you picked, or do you want to change your mind? "What will it be? "STICK or SWITCH?" Should you switch? Does it matter?

So in this episode Chris started reading my email and then moved it into the 'To Read' folder which I'm pretty sure is the place where emails go to never be read on the podcast. Should I just post it here instead? Do people want to see deleted scenes?

No, because she turned to me during the waterfall scene and went 'oh this was it'.

I went to see The Lion King musical this evening (spoiler: I didn't care for it - I'm not a big dance person and there's a ton of dance, although the puppetry was pretty good) and during the intermission the woman next to me struck up a conversation. Within about two minutes she brought up how much she loved the computer game version and she always got stuck on 'the fountain' level. Explain to me, slowly and carefully, how the fuck we got to the point where everyone believed girls don't play video games.

It's a suburb in inner Sydney. Australian Aboriginal place names often have an abundance of double vowels, and often repeated words. highlights our weird ass-place names rather well.

From what I understand of the running time of Arabian Nights, this'd be one game.

It starts to get a little prohibitive to have every guard build a mental model of what their beat should look like, from what I understand. On the other hand, if it turns out no-one's actually tried it, and it's possible to have AI agents that have a mental model of the world and they notice every change, things like doors being unlocked and guards not being visible would attract suspicion, and that'd be fantastic. Right now stealth is in a bit of a rut where the most effective way to proceed is to eliminate every guard patrolling their set routes. If guards have a 'beat', and they do the rounds when their mental model gets too old, you could have more elaborate environments and get rid of the old saw of a guard being paid to stare out a window, then turn to stare at the wall.

Huh, I guess I was misinformed.

This thread made me realise that I basically don't care about reviewers who are not TychoCelchuuu at all any more. My decision-making process for what games I play basically has no room for reviewers any more, and I've been burned too many times by reviewers being hyperbolic about AAA games and suspicious of smaller titles that are actually great to trust any of them to actually be right about anything. I am not for a second accusing any of them of payola; merely that the review process is completely orthogonal to how I play games that it's basically meaningless.

I'm not money motivated. So long as I have enough to be comfortable, which right now is about A$50,000 per year, I don't really want much more. I'd far prefer to be doing interesting work, solving hard problems and working with people I enjoy on $50,000 than earning $100,000 and not getting any of those things.

I think it's pretty presumptuous to decide what reasons are valid for reading books. YA books usually have a focus on being highly readable at the expense of depth. They're light entertainment, and that's fine. If you're presuming that people reading light entertainment are somehow avoiding weighty issues, then well, that's hardly the book's fault, and more importantly, you have no way of knowing whether they don't get that from somewhere else, or whether they're emotionally or psychologically able to shoulder the problems of the world right now. I am delighted by the existence of The Magicians and The Passage chiefly because they are literary novels about boy wizards and, well okay The Passage is about the vampire apocalypse, not romance, but the point remains.

When all this stuff broke I didn't notice that you don't get sick leave and annual leave because it's a full time position, of course you get mandated sick leave and 4 weeks annual leave. And all the other stuff, well they are basically saying upfront what every other small IT-focused business does and pretends they don't do. Small firms give you more hands-on control in exchange for shittier pay. You will be expected to do a lot, and you can be on call because you're all they've got. I don't know how much Penny Arcade makes but I can't imagine the funny T-shirt business is significantly more profitable for them than Topatoco is for webcomics people. You probably couldn't run a 40 person company on T-shirt revenues, so they'd have to run lean. And while they'd make some money from PAX, Reed would take a massive slice of that income. Penny Arcade as an enterprise is incredibly ambitious, which is why before there was a lot of awareness of social issues in gaming, Penny Arcade was a big, big influencer. They always seemed much, much larger than they actually were.

Honestly I'm getting Max Headroom flashes.

Oh Soundcloud. I already do.

Oh shit that reminds me Tycho got a sore throat and I didn't poke anyone else for the general. Is describing something as 'fine' a dismissive thing in England?

When you have crazy ideas that are constantly challenged by reality, for instance that HP Lovecraft did not just make up from whole cloth the idea about aliens coming to Earth and influencing previous civilisations, at some point you either have to dissociate from cultural norms or dissociate from your idea. And when you've pulled up that wall, then you're free to, say, build giant temples (or museums) to your terribly wrong idea. (Yeah that's right, I'm tying crazy alien guy's hair to creationism.) Normally these kinds of things collapse, but if the bubble gets large enough, and reality bends a bit, it can survive in that environment as long as the bubble stays intact. It serves evangelical leaders to have creationism around, so it can act as a shield against natural science for their insistence that the Bible can be read 'literally' (and thus you can take slivers of it out of context and they're more true than interpreting the overall theme that contradicts those).

What indies need more than money is exposure. If they sink a copy of their game into trying to drum up some press, and more than one person is convinced to buy the game based on the review, then they've got a 100% rate of return on that copy. They're probably also willing to spend a copy of their game to get a laugh. They know you're probably not going to shit on their game.

I beat Strider. I actually liked it a lot. It's got a Metroidvania structure but it's mostly pretty linear; basically the only thing they use it for is when you go back into an area you've been before and what was a normal room suddenly has a lot more importance. Like 90% of the upgrades are on the critical path; the vast majority of collectables just unlock concept art and that sort of thing. It has a lot of bossfights and they are all the kind where you have to watch the boss' pattern, identify a weak spot, avoid their attack and strike as much as you can. No hitting obvious vulnerabilities three times. The games responds to skill quite nicely; you have a handful of moves but they're all useful, and although I didn't use the Ultracold attacks very often I can see other people playing it differently. The plot is so, so dumb. It clear they felt they needed one but they also liked the idea of a game where you don't need to worry about the plot and there's this awkward compromise where you start the game with a 10 second cutscene and no context other than 'Eliminate Grandmaster Meio' but you still get (bad) cutscenes where the villains monologue at you. They've kept all the mechanic-focused names from the original game so your three major powerups are called Option-A, Option-B and Option-C. It relies on gauntlets a little too much and the UI is a little janky. I played on hard; you don't really have to engage with the game's systems very much on normal, which I think was a mistake, but it is a substantial action game with a character that's fun to move around and attack with, and level design that is a little more elaborate than most action games without being directionless.

okay

Hmm, I guess if she's a competitive fake plastic rock player the appeal might be more in making quick decisions under pressure than mental stimulation.

Fifteen whole minutes down the drain.

Well, it's only a couple of countries over, probably the same standards. No but seriously fuck that guy. Re: introversion/social anxiety article, yeah I'm introverted but I've only got relatively normal social anxiety. I'll postmortem the shit out of major social interactions though.

Oh hey the image got deleted even after I did all that research.

I know what he's talking about but I'm not going to post image macros on the Idle Thumbs board without a very good reason. There isn't even any context. Anyway, I found this a worthy read and I suspect any thread I start for link dumping will just end up being about the thing I linked. http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/02/23/whole-foods-america-s-temple-of-pseudoscience.html