Merus

I need to complain about this James Bond thing. So Anthony Horowitz, who has authorisation from the Fleming estate to write James Bond, said that he doesn't think Idris Elba would make a good Bond because he's too 'street', which got people upset and understandably so - unless you actually read the quote, where the author suggested Adrian Lester as the kind of person he had in mind. This is Adrian Lester: Look at this suave motherfucker. Why are you throwing this charming man under the bus, people on Twitter that I am definitely subtweeting right now, in favour of one of the few British black men Americans have heard of as Bond? There is more than one classy-looking black man Honestly, I'd argue it's tokenism.

Honestly, it ticks the boxes: Sounds like a human name Is not actually a human name Microsoft can use it because no-one else is Sounds vaguely futuristicy

Your metabolic rate is influenced by your level of exercise, exercise has a host of health benefits, and usually if you're overweight you're also sedentary so exercise will increase strength on parts of the body you're going to need later, but it's never going to be as big a contributor to weight loss specifically as changing your diet and reducing your calorie intake. It's possible to lose weight without exercising, but for normal people, if you're not exercising, you're not going to be losing much weight either. This is why most of the advice basically makes it mandatory - for most regular people, who are not being closely watched by a doctor, it's better to boil it down to 'you have to exercise'.

Wanna swap John Key for Tony Abbott?

This is from a while ago, but: The format shift of a journey up a river, with missions that act as blockers, means that there are some luck-based missions that can act as serious blockers and the game doesn't change until you beat them. The game tries to take advantage of this by giving out missions that are particularly easier or harder based on the area you're in, but it's already got a mechanism for tweaking the dungeon to suit the mission. Unlocking features, and thus the pacing of the game, is tied to mission completion instead of your personal performance. There's a lot of resources you have to wait to spend. 10000000 showed you your high score and how close it was to the target score, and even though your score was only meaningful right towards the end, it felt pretty satisfying to see that improve. In YMBAB, getting a high score is basically meaningless. The new brains and brawn resources solve a big problem with 10000000, which was that making matches while running was wasting moves, but brains are way more useful than brawn. The potions are particularly useless in this one. It's a bit of a nasty surprise to find out that crew recruitment is the secondary goal, and that your performance there is almost entirely tied to knowing how to recruit the secret monsters before you move on and leave that stop behind.

How do we not have a Ferguson thread yet. So police in Ferguson, a suburb in St Louis, Missouri, basically murdered a black kid. The community didn't take kindly to this, so in response the police invaded. No fly zones, journalists being arrested, the whole nine yards. This feels like it is going to be one of those pivotal points in American history. I know I won't be able to take America seriously when they talk about freedom and democracy and tyranny any more.

Sucks about your wife, but if the new CEO fired everyone the company's probably going under anyway. Best of luck to you with the new venture - it will be rough, so be prepared, and try and use the time to learn as much as you can about why new businesses fail.

Didn't intend to alarm! Was trying to think of someone whom I could not possibly imagine anyone starting a fight with over their social justice bonafides that wouldn't require a Google search. It's not my problem if you're reading nuance as whitewashing. Hugh Hefner is a pornographer, he wasn't a clandestine Harvey Milk, and I didn't think that needed to be made clear. But the thing that frustrates me, and it's something I think you're buying into a little, is the framing of people as being pure until we find out the bad things they've done, and then we decide whether or not whether their sins weight heavy enough to damn them. That's the only way I can make sense of that discussion, or not being interested what some random person says Erika Moen said when she was a very different person, as being whitewashing. You're claiming that by marginalising problems, I'm painting those subjects as perfect, and not as humans, part of and moulded by a broken system that we can't fix while we're still alive. If you're saying I'm an asshole for wanting to forgive people, then I'll gladly wear that.* Doesn't mean I always have to, doesn't mean anyone else has to. But I'll be fucked if I let anyone else demand purity around me without saying anything. I can't be the ally I'd like to be, but I can do that. *Judging by the rest of your post, I'm guessing that's not the only reason why you think I'm an asshole, which is fine. I can't be liked by everyone. I don't really take it personally, being seen as an asshole by someone with a long history of seeing people as assholes.

It's fun finding out that literally every person I'd heard of with any kind of influence in social justice is too questionable to listen to. Erika Moen, now? I'm looking forward to finding out how Apple Cider's co-host on Justice Points did a shitty thing once and therefore must be purged because she is impure.

Zero Escape 3 was announced. I don't know what's crazier, whatever the plot ends up being, or the fact that it exists at all.

I liked seeing the glimpses of it and assembling what it must look like in my own head. I'm doing that for the world map, as well, and it's amazing how much a world that, to be honest, looks pretty bland, benefits from being built in a way where you can see how all the various areas interconnect.

Honestly so far my least favourite area was the Depths. Lots of one-way drops and nasty surprises. I'd imagine Blighttown would have been pretty bad without my extra toxin resistance but it had striking visual design and that matters a lot.

I mostly want to kill the bridge dragon to see what's on the other side. Alright, I'll abandon my dream of building a weapon that scales well with both int and dex. This'll probably mean I'll stop putting points into int soon, as there is apparently a ceiling on its effectiveness based on the catalyst. I'm not having a lot of problems with health or stamina, actually, and haven't put a lot of points into either (health's at around 700, stamina at 100). Generally I'm dying because I'm not working out a good approach, not because I'm running out of stamina or I've let through one too many hits - my stamina management is reasonable against NPCs, though if I get invaded I'm probably screwed. Boss discussion: At this point I'm reluctant to sink too much into more health - getting enough souls for a level up seems so expensive that when it happens I'm looking to dull some of the pain. It seems like a better use of my souls to reinforce armour, invest in carrying capacity so I can keep my "heavy" armour and free up a ring slot (which does improve stamina), or buy spell slots, or maybe more damage (I'm doing enough damage to stagger enemies with two hits, which feels like it's in a good place, but damage is good). I'm sure there'll be a point where I look at my health and think 'that could be higher' but health doesn't seem like a huge asset for boss fights compared to damage. Getting hit is usually bad enough that it seems much less expensive to try and make the fight shorter than make it possible to survive more hits before using a flask. (Although more health for aforementioned nasty-looking boss would probably be a goer.) Having explored a little further, Sen's Fortress seems like the right call, although I've found what looks like the better entrance to the Valley of Drakes and it's achievable. Still, the amount of stuff I've found in Sen's Fortress speaks volumes.

There's a big glowy gate in the way halfway through Darkroot Garden, and because I've done some light spoiling I'm pretty sure I'll need to go through there for items that will be excellent for my build (because I'm not seeing too much resistance just yet and I know that if I'm in the right area I should be). I'm avoiding maps and spoilers about what enemies I'll find, but there are a few items I'm really looking forward to replacing, so I'm looking forward to where I can find replacements for those. Actually that's a question: given that I'm treating Dex and Int as equal priority, I'm thinking of acquiring an Uchigatana and trying to enchant it to magic +10. Is this going to work out as well as I'm expecting, or does splitting the damage like this cause problems I'm not aware of?

So I've re-organised my backlog into the games that I really feel I should have played right now, and guess what game bubbled to the top of the list. I'm... god I don't know how far through I am, but I've rung both bells and just now acquired a divine weapon. I'm using a dexterity/sorcery build (which made the Butterfly trivial) except I also got a gargoyle tail axe (which is the best because it provides increased defence against poison and toxin that improves as you reinforce it, extremely helpful for Blighttown). I'm in a position where I feel like I'm overlevelled (despite several instances of losing quite a lot of souls), and I've got a lot of places to go. I want to try and take out that pesky dragon on the Parish Bridge (it's become wise to my games and flies off when I try and attack it from behind) but my bow's pretty wimpy. There's an area of the Darkroot Garden I didn't visit, there's the Darkroot Basin, there's probably stuff in New Londo Ruins, there's the Catacombs, Sen's Fortress, and I'm sure there's something going on in the Valley of Drakes but I don't like the look of that drake.

Remember that more enemies means that, assuming you handle them okay, you level up faster. My housemate is playing SotFS without playing the base game, and he hasn't had much in the way of problems - at least nothing that he didn't see as par for the course for a Dark Souls game.

One of the many problems with my definition

I want to have my birthday in Canada one of these years, I think it'd be neat.

I always took a forest to be enough trees that when you look through it you can't see the other side. What officially constitutes a forest depends on where you live, though. In finding this out, I saw a definition of a forest as an area with trees that supports its own ecosystem, which is a better answer than mine, to be honest.

Oh wow, one of those bosses is significantly harder than the other.

I have some quibbles about You Must Build A Boat, but please understand they are quibbles from having finished it like six times by this point.

Like, can you describe a scenario where you take what you're hating about it and then come up with a challenge that just makes it so, so much worse?

My understanding was that queer also encompassed e.g. people who would identify as being straight or gay if they didn't have the hots, on very rare occasions, for someone outside of their preferred gender, or people who mostly want relationships with the opposite sex but are DTF with the same sex, or even people who are dating transgender people. The LGBT movement are not always as accommodating as they claim to be - I've heard of multiple bi people who are accused of being too afraid to come all the way out, and a lesbian friend of mine has had issues with the Sydney lesbian community assuming she was playing at being a lesbian because it was trendy (because she was too conventionally attractive), and of course there's always TERFs (and many second-wave feminists, for that matter). Because 'queer' embraces a certain kind of fluidity, there are a lot of people who just prefer to say they are queer.

Oh no, you do what you need to. It'd be hypocritical of me to say they don't have to be perfectly thoughtful but you have to be.

Well each level section is upvoted by the player base No I think he means there's a lot of reference humour in the background art.