Merus

No, no, it's "I'm Doctor Who". I'm in a bit of a dark place* right now. I have a long-term project over the next five or six weeks to do, I'm supposed to be two weeks into it, and I've barely started. If I don't do it, I'm going to fail the course again. Doing it makes me feel like a failure because I'm bad at it, and making progress is like pulling teeth. I'm sure it's within my capabilities but I'm just terrible at doing anything that has the slightest bit of uncertainty attached to it, or anything that requires some kind of long-term commitment to see any results - for instance, the Wizard Jam. I'm not going to be happy if I'm not able to accomplish anything, but if I'm actually capable of doing it, it doesn't feel like an accomplishment. So I don't do anything. (* written by Garth Marenghi)

On the other hand, it looks like Star Citizen except actually playable, so.

Given that questions like these led to the foundation of the labour movement, I'd quibble with your characterisation of them as being 'easy'.

Valve seem to be under the impression that they're able to have an equitable relationship with amateur mod developers. (Bethesda are under no such illusions, I'd wager.) Fact of the matter is, those two companies are going to hold control over the mod scene. What happens when a game with paid mods integrates a paid mod into the base game? What happens if a mod grows popular enough that people are buying the game just for the mod? Can the mod creator demand a bigger cut? What recourse do mod owners have if the developer breaks the game or makes their mods non-functional? Like, Valve has always been comfortable with pushing out the work they're responsible for out onto their community to do for free (with the prospect of getting paid if Valve like it, and of not getting paid otherwise) but this is just a goddamn minefield.

I don't know how I feel about Last Week Tonight. I really liked the first season, but the second season, now that we've got enough of it to judge, seems to be convinced of its own importance, and the chutzpah of the first season has mostly given way to the same three or four faintly ridiculous codas to stories that aren't brave or outrageous or even particularly insightful. The one exception is the Edward Snowden interview, but I still didn't much care for it. Oliver, surprisingly, doesn't seem to be that good an interviewer. He did a series of interviews for The Daily Show on Australia's gun control legislation that were top-notch, but they're much more focused on getting the talking heads to give them good material to splice in.

Hey, I've been thinking about junking Avast after it silently and aggressively failed installs on me, and I'm sick of how chatty it is.

I found it under Demos, not Games. I think people are much more upset about P.T. going away than about Silent Hills, and I think the 'mourning' you're seeing is mostly because people's interest was piqued when P.T. actually was good.

Valve's business model is basically built on monetising their community. The amount of value they add to the mod process is zero, but that's not their cut. It's even the same for TF2, where they've managed to convince their community to do all their updates for them. It's digital sharecropping.

I don't trust John Walker's opinion on anything much - he didn't care for Part One, either, for dumb reasons.

So I managed to piss off a guy so bad that he sent me five expletive-filled, racist, homophobic private messages. This is a new experience for me! Apparently he also found my wordpress blog from 2010, so I had to turn comments off there. I'm curious to find out if he's going to keep following me across the internet. I'm not even mad because he was being a fuckwit and I called him out (among other things, he responded to me saying he was whinging with a five paragraph rant which unironically included the phrase 'slap in the face' which is a sure sign you're dealing with someone who needs to let it go) and his behaviour since then is demonstrating that he was acting like a fuckwit because he is a fuckwit. Like, I'd be concerned if it wasn't so fucking pathetic.

I remember seeing a single-player trailer for Splatoon that crystallised for me how it fits into the Nintendo aesthetic: it's a WarioWare take on sci-fi dystopia. Chris mentioned how it seems like a game could do an abandoned place interspersed with human stories; The Talos Principle does something like this really well, so long as you're okay with there also being puzzles.

We're not in disagreement there. I think this is the root of most of my problems with the series, because I know they're capable of writing interesting, multi-faceted characters, it's just that they had way too much going on so everyone got short shrift. But I'm happy not to get into it again, this is a thread about recommendations, after all.

I had a lot of problems with Korra.

Okay, but I want you to look at the ones they went with: Darth Vader Darth Sidious Darth Maul Now look again at that other list with only slightly dorkier names and tell me I'm wrong.

We have a Raspberry Pi running Kodi. We have a networked drive as the file source, with Kodi opening and playing the file. It plays just fine at 1080p if there's little network traffic, otherwise it gets chuggy. Streaming I don't know about.

The system is profoundly fucked up, which is why we're going to all sign a petition so we can demonstrate that we're upset Soon we're going to get a hashtag going Then they'll be sorry Edit: I don't think I expressed myself entirely clearly here; I think it's kind of gross that people's actual grief is being trivialised by turning it into spam and an internet petition. They've done exactly what they claim to be against, taking pain and suffering and teaching people to turn a blind eye to it so they can get through the day.

I think it's weird that we're still calling her Bruce Jenner. Apparently she doesn't actually have a new name yet? (may I suggest an unpronounceable symbol?)

I have one star to go (I know how to get it, I just decided to do it later) and I feel like the star puzzles actually add a lot to the story. You get a better sense of one of the other characters, and the gameplay really compliments the theme of questioning your assumptions. Only a few stars involve doing the puzzle just a little bit more efficiently; most of the time, the stars are about finding ways to subvert what you're "supposed" to do, taking the world as it exists and not how you assume it should be. Forgot to mention this, but the star ending also has another part to it:

I'm sort of excited to see if Valve has finally gone too far with Steam's creepiness. I mean, the backlash probably should have started a while ago but I'll take it

So I don't know if The Wire is still the greatest TV show ever made, but it's definitely important to the history of TV as one of the first shows designed to be seen as a package more than as individual episodes. It's also still pretty great. Its scope and ambition is phenomenal, building from a police procedural with an interesting hook to a thorough indictment of American institutions. That it manages to stick the landing and feel like every episode was going somewhere is extraordinary. I don't think they really managed to ensure that the early episodes of a season stayed compelling on their own - Season 4 manages it, with a storyline that reaches a climax halfway through the season, but Season 5 forgets that lesson. Well worth your time. (This does mean that my housemate now will force me to watch Breaking Bad, which is fine. It was next on the list, more or less.)

They're probably still better than most commentaries. I finished The Wire recently, went back to listen to the commentary, and they hadn't actually watched the episode before they recorded so there's a lot of dead air where they're enjoying watching the thing they made. I can understand that! That's why I watched it first.

They're definitely JRPG villains.

Squidered (no but seriously everyone made the squad/squid puns) I'll have to listen to the podcast, because my hands-on with it last year at PAX suggested that it was actually kind of shallow with just one weapon. Hopefully, with different loadouts there's a bit more to it.

Hey, so how about a comic book titled All-New X-Men that's tied to fifty-year-old continuity

I'm going to need a more detailed explanation than the one he gave because, while I can see why the album should get a nomination, I don't see why the music video should.