Merus

I have developed a loathing for enterprise Java, which I suspect is tied more to the enterprise aspect than the Java aspect, but I got a thing up and running so bully for me.

Overcranking is when a movie is running at less than 24 fps. Frames are being held on screen for longer, unlike with slow motion. I don't think the movie does much undercranking, and I don't recall any incidents where it's playing action back faster than 24 fps. We'll have to agree to disagree on the action scenes because in my opinion the motorbike bombing run and the pole transfers were a damn sight better than anything in The Road Warrior.

I guess you do pay less for games in developing countries; what with the endemic corruption in politics, the brutal and violent police force and multinational corporations coming in and doing whatever they want, you guys have got other things to worry about. I hope you guys get some of the benefits of developed nations one day, like universal health care, or universal paid maternity leave, or the metric system.

The speed-ramping complaint is a little weird, because a lot of the movie is overcranked. It's essentially the same effect as when a video game slows right down because there's way too much on the screen.

No, it's definitely on the linear end - there's generally only two or three places where the new traversal mechanic is useful, it's not hard to anticipate which way is 'forward', and once you're heading in the right direction, the path doesn't deviate very much except to introduce a few passages blocked by an obstacle. I'm mentally comparing it to the map design to Ori and the Blind Forest. In that game, if it didn't insist on hinting where to go, you'd have a devil of a time working out which direction is the way forward.

I miss them talking about being in Australia and paying twice as much for games.

The biggest complaint I've seen about Mad Max is that there's no backstory to the characters and people felt it was too hard to work out what people were about. I suspect this is going to hurt Fury Road in the long run - critics fucking love it, but the general population don't get it. This is a shame because I would very much like the movie to make enough for a sequel.

Also it's being made by an American team. Do they have a sufficient grounding in Australian car culture, which underpins all four films? Can they think of a concept as simultaneously gloriously stupid but bizarrely logical as the Doof Warrior?

It seems awfully linear in a way that's kind of annoying. My housemate's already abandoned it because to him, it's just a linear platformer and one with really annoying sound effects. I'm still giving it a chance.

I agree with this: these days I see people writing off others as being 'gross' or 'shitty' and in the back of my mind I always think about what made them feel free to cast the first stone. It's a difficult question, especially because a lack of compassion and understanding for marginalised people is a pretty serious handicap when talking about feminism. Someone who's a transphobic feminist, for instance, probably doesn't have the moral authority to take others to task for their lack of compassion or acts of marginalisation, and their arguments likely have problems I'm not smart enough to spot which means I need help to see where their shitty opinions have led them astray. On the other hand, though, if you're looking only for people who haven't held shitty opinions, who grew up in a patriarchal environment and had it not stick in any way, you're looking at a pretty short list. (Many of Gamergate's most popular targets, for instance, would be ruled out.) And it's human nature to not want to admit failings, especially if admitting failings brings attention to those failings.

I appreciated that

I don't know if 'aleph zero' really flows in a sentence.

Nope! Unique is binary, it's either unique or it's not. You can't modify it by saying it's 'very' unique, and you probably should use a different word, like 'unusual', or 'singular', which is useful because it can be used in the way you're trying to use unique.

There's a part of me that is satisfied by the idea that someone made a fish that enters schools of fish, appoints itself leader and them presumably leads them to glory against the humans, and that it is white. That seems like the kind of thing a white fish created by humans would do. Think about a game like Neptune's Pride, where your nerves are constantly frayed because a devastating attack can come at any time and knock you out of a long game. Take away the 24-hour, can't-sleep-we'll-be-attacked aspect, and replace it with your friends lying to your face and betraying you. Not like the coy 'I'm not the traitor' but things like 'don't worry, I've got your eastern flank, you worry about the west, and together we're going to win this thing'. You learn things about your friends while playing Diplomacy that you can never unlearn.

Just putting it out there again: if you can play at around this time two weeks from now, you're welcome to join out Numenera game.

I think the problem with the expectation that the player of an adventure game will turn it off and think about it in their own time is that, especially these days, many players will instead move on to another game. The expectation that players would willingly keep the adventure game in their mind was really more of a hope.

A comment I saw on Twitter is that Billy West probably has like 57 missed calls.

Yuh-huh. Like, okay, America was founded on principles, but it's largely not been particularly good at living up to them. The 'recent years' Rubio's referring to is erasure of the long, long history of America compromising its ideals, and I think that erasure is far more interesting as a topic than all the things Rubio 'forgot'. That doesn't happen in a vacuum.

A famous moment in video game history: the announcement of the PlayStation's US price.

I think this is essentially what killed adventure games - the people who wanted chunky inventory-based puzzles to solve and the people who wanted an interactive story can't actually both be served at the same time.

Will Jughead continue to wear that stupid hat that no-one actually recognises as a hat any more? I have more complex, half-formed thoughts, but that one's fully formed.

Wasn't the ostensible reason they got into the Spanish-American War and the Philippines to bring 'freedom'? I mean, as well as the actual reasons, securing cheap land and ensuring their ships had places to restock supplies.

I enjoy how Bill Trinen posted some flippant tweets about leaving Nintendo hours before the video went up and people thought he was actually leaving.

Persona Q is actually a Persona-skinned Etrian Odyssey game, so it's not necessarily indicative of the way mainline SMT games play.