Merus

Speaking of 'is that New England delicacy not just this thing I'm familiar with', there's a long history in Australia of increasingly elaborate coffee-flavoured milks.

Ben has been telling lies on Twitter about JP3 being not garbage, so take his opinion with a grain of salt.

I have long held that ThinkGeek is terrible and we've just never noticed because they're good at pandering.

I feel like if the podcast content isn't doing that then maybe that's probably the place to start?

I saw it! I have seen it. It is everything I hoped for, in that they went hard for the 'it's been 20 years and no-one thinks dinosaurs are special' and then they also do gross things like 'Verizon Wireless present Indominus Rex' which is exactly the kind of shitty corporate tie-in bullshit I was hoping they'd do. Contrasting Actual Dinosaurs and corporate exploitation of said Actual Dinosaurs gives the movie the cynical/gleeful tone that the original had with Stephen Spielburg adapting a Michael Crichton novel. There's a lot of invention going on here, which is clearly borne out of a bunch of people sitting around and going, 'what would we want to see in a Jurassic Park film? What should they have done by now?' It is everything I feared, in that I don't like any of the characters, the way the disaster unfolds feels poorly thought-through, Chris Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard have no chemistry, and the ending drops the ball. Weirdly, I had issues with the Indominus Rex and the raptor pack, but not the issues I thought I'd have - the super-dino is rooted in the film's logic, and the raptor pack aren't just Chris Pratt's buddies. Much like with the rest of the film, it's got problems weirdly congruent to the problems people were actually expecting. Spoilers for character deaths and the ending: There are good scenes throughout, but I did not come out of it feeling it was a good movie. That's not to say that it's a bad movie, it's certainly better than I expected, but it's not a good one either. I'm guessing that's why you're seeing such unenthusiastic positive reviews - it's too inventive to be bad, but it's not executed well enough to be good.

One summer my friends and I played the game very similar to the one Spaff describes, where he pulled a random book from the wall and do a dramatic reading. We'd read a random line, out of context, and we settled on quite a good one, a fairly overwrought book that pretty much always gave good out-of-context quote called And Quiet Flows The Don. It was a little embarrassing to discover this was a Nobel prize-winning novel, although I think we eventually decided it was more embarrassing for the Nobel prize committee.

Honestly, I can see the comparison - 4chan has the same problem as reddit, in that the software doesn't allow committed members of the community any control over the purpose of that community. It's a little different in that 4chan boards, because they have no defences against attack or subversion (because anyone can post), tend to drift into toxicity, while reddit mods can easily get rid of that kind of thing, but they've got the same problem that once the subversion attempt is a success, the people who really liked it back when it was functioning well have no way to wrench it back on course, and have to abandon it to the trolls. Also, 4chan is adamant that they're not reddit, which is a clear sign that they're a lot like reddit and trying to use defining differences to bury that fact.

From what I remember, r/news got taken off the default subreddit list when it became clear the mods would bury stories they didn't like. That's also glossing over a core problem with the platform: any subreddit that gets popular enough inevitably (and I do mean inevitably) gets overwhelmed with low-effort posts, like pictures, memes and suchlike. If you look at r/gaming, you'll see what I mean - very little in terms of gaming news, heavy on the 'look, it's a video game' pictures. It's a weakness of the reddit platform, that it democratises what a subreddit's purpose is, but has no way of differentiating between people who have a strong investment in the community and people who don't. The community cannot keep focus as it grows, unless it ruthlessly excludes. You don't even have to look at 'the wrong people are moderating this subreddit' to see where Reddit fails.

I actually had a look at the Kickstarter: they say it's suitable for EDC. What is EDC? Well, they helpfull annotate that it's everyday carry. Why couldn't they just say 'put it in your pocket or bag'? (The sad thing is that if this wasn't so goddamn ridiculous, I wouldn't mind a mint lip balm. I like mint.)

I don't think you need to go to a soundalike for this to sound sexual. The double entendre is right there - here, I'll send you a photo of my dude stick.

Reddit can be thought of as thousands of sites, with a similar framework and a shared login. They have different moderators, and that makes a big difference. Where this falls down is that Reddit actively tries to encourage users to go between sites, something that, say, Wordpress or Livefyre doesn't do.

This is good for adding to my list of reasons why the Internet of Things is a bad idea, which currently only has two entries on it: Your refrigerator liked your washing machine's post The inevitability of subsidised appliances (and even things like elevators or escalators) with ongoing usage charges

It is, but I was trying to think of other games on Steam that were short and notable. It's probably good to be thinking about how this affects the ecosystem because I've seen creators on Twitter reluctant to pursue getting onto Steam for their smaller games because of the refund thing. I also saw an argument that the refund thing highlights how many games are being sold to people who don't want them these days, through bundles and such-like, and how a correction away from that is probably necessary.

He did! He consulted on Glitch and he's working on a game that, if I recall correctly, is about holding hands.

This is almost an excellent thread title, and that's the only reason I'm posting in this thread. (I forgot that tweens are 9-13 year olds, which is younger than the teen protagonist.)

I think you basically have to have an inkling that he's lying about what 'minge' means.

I basically just use the Guild Wars 2 subreddit because every other subreddit occasionally leaks bullshit. As soon as it leaks bullshit too, I'm gone. Re: The Verge - it didn't have that disclaimer when I posted it, and I agreed that it seemed to be painting all efforts at building robust anti-harassment tools as 'unreliable', apparently because Chris Plante used one and it didn't quite work for him, despite it not being necessarily tuned for the kind of harassment he was getting. Apparently they've done some consulting, but Twitter's solution doesn't update blocklists like Blocktogether does. Harper mentioned that Twitter reached out to her and gave her access to an early version, which she's using for her most recent tool, a dogpile defence toll named ShieldsUp.

I'm so pleased with this

This is probably a better solution than not dropping cards until the refund period is over. I had to clarify because I was looking at that sentence and thinking, 'no, not dropping cards is what should happen' because it's an awful system.

I'm going to guess it was Ninja Theory who came up with the theme based on every game Ninja Theory has worked on, and the publisher is the one who came up with the name based on every game Ninja Theory has worked on.

Well, there's a couple of things going on here; intelligence, achievement and self-awareness are all different things. Dawkins has very little self-awareness. This guy may or may not be 'smart' but he's likely got little self-awareness. Whether that's because it's beyond him, or because he clearly doesn't need it because he's awesome (aka Dunning-Kruger effect), we're probably not going to be able to tell from a post. In my experience, the most insufferable people tend to be of somewhat above average intelligence, enough to know they're smart, but not enough to know they're not exactly in the top 1%. Either way, I doubt it matters because I reckon BioWare looked at that, held their head in their hands, and then got on with what they want to make.

Twitter is implementing a new core feature: sharing blocklists, which is what powers the GG Autoblocker. Naturally, in order to communicate the existence of this new feature, Chris Plante, formerly of Polygon and The Verge, had to throw the people who wrote third-party blocklists under the bus. (The author of the GG Autoblocker has been working with Twitter, and has shipped a third-party tool using the new Twitter functionality that is intended to stop dogpiling.)

I think there's two other problems with it that Steam needs to address: games where the expected playtime is less than 2 hours (e.g. The Yawhg, Depression Quest), and the way this system interacts with trading cards (I've heard that developers have been seeing games being returned by players at the 1:59 mark after they've induced as many card drops as they can in that time).

If you've done a dissertation on player sentiment or anything along those lines, I'd be interested to read it. My knowledge of the area is a little shallow - I know the Bartle player types and LeBlanc's 8 kinds of fun but that's about it.

If Nintendo knows what they're doing in terms of competitive balance, we're going to see someone wearing a different outfit come in and wipe the floor with teams assuming everyone's wearing those clothes.