Merus

oh, you're asking tegan to post the worst thing she can find on the internet speaking from experience, that's not wise

I can't believe this, the AU version still has random promotional tat.

I have an irrational urge to build Canberra. Big gridded highways, and residential areas that are just these twisty cul-de-sacs. Look at this. I want to build THIS.

Alright, we should have a guild stash! Everyone should have full access to it, so feel free to put things in, take things out, what have you. I figure the risk of everything being swiped is pretty low. 10PM EST is apparently middle of the next day for me, so keep that in mind if you want to include me. I think some guild dungeon runs or Silverwastes defences would be great; I doubt we'll be able to do guild missions (or even unlock it) but doing stuff together is why you have guilds. Oh, that reminds me: current word from ArenaNet is to not do Chapter 6 onwards of the story (specifically, anything after the mission where you go into a vision with Traherne at the Pale Tree). Past that point, the story's kind of a mess right now, and they're currently re-recording some dialogue and fixing up those story missions so they make sense. Part of those changes will be restoring a storyline that was in at launch but was cut when they moved everything into chapters. They expect to be done in about a month, and everything scales anyway so you can wait until level 80 to finish it. I don't know if that means that the story will be any good - the Orr invasion is pretty shoddily written, a victim of ArenaNet's pre-launch structure where the writing team acted as editors for content designers and only actually wrote open-world NPC conversations.

No, Patrick I believe in you You're better than this

I think he thinks he has his thoughts together, because he's not capable of recognising that he doesn't know dick about anything. He thinks the Dunning-Kruger effect doesn't apply to him, because he's smart, but not smart enough to realise that you never learned how to deal with being wrong.

oh god what Elevation and Final Fantasy IX do not go together

My favourite thing about GG complaining about the blocker is that its heuristics are pretty simple and easily gamed, yet they still can't get past it.

4chan uses awareness of in-jokes, memes, and social rules as a metric for dividing those invested in the community from casual visitors, which groups will always do because they are made up of humans. Take here on the Idle Thumbs forums - post counts partly serve this purpose, but the community mostly determines who is valuable to it by reputation. (Communities less inclined to remember why certain people should be remembered tend to fixate on post count as an metric of investment in the group.) Because the archives of 4chan are essentially unbrowsable, remembering what happened in them is the only real metric 4chan has to determine who's been around for a while. Memetic references then become the way a user says 'in this post, I am speaking as a senior member'. Honestly I reckon that's where the 'creativity' comes from: because references to past memorable events are essentially required to be respected, it means they'll force those memes in any old way.

Hey, who's JosiePosie?

There is a reason I keep fucking pointing to A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy because the stifling of individuality on 4chan is a direct consequence of the way the community is designed. To the 4chan social software, there is no difference between someone attempting to influence the group and someone trying to subvert the group: everyone is anonymous, every post is an individual. Therefore, influencing the group is identical to sabotage.

Like Something Awful? I mean, if your argument is that moderation stifles creativity, then the Something Awful forums can't have had the astonishing and long-lasting reach that they clearly had, from early memes like All Your Base to more recent work like the Yogscast and Let's Play explosion. I mean, if you want to give 4chan some credit then we can say that its format as an imageboard encouraged propagation of images, so it was an excellent environment for fostering memetic mutation, but I don't buy the lack of moderation as being responsible for the creativity of the community. It's well known that creativity thrives in environments without judgement or conflict, and the 4chan community has no tools to defend itself against subversion, so they developed toxicity as a way to try and out-troll the trolls. In that environment, a lot of potential creativity would have been stepped on just for the joy of upsetting people.

This is what I hear, which is why I finished watching Season 2 after abandoning it halfway through.

I love how, for a few brief moments, people have an incentive to support the weirdest shit because of the possibility it might be Frog Fractions 2.

It's based on that one short film which basically just started off with a TV getting dumped, which they optioned and put Adam Sandler in because

Least he didn't Andrew Ryan it.

Location: Pawnee, Indiana

Yeah, you get about 6g on average for Zojja's, while the profit on damask is about a gold, although the damask market is a lot less profitable than it used to be. The key is that Zojja's not profitable if you buy damask because of the fees, but if you make damask, you'll avoid half the fees, which goes right into your pocket. You want to pick your moment, though; Zojja's insignias aren't worth much right now, and the silk market is unstable.

T1 to T2 conversions are usually more profitable per skill point, and it's usually better to sell upgraded lodestones rather than crafting runes with them. The Heat Stone recipe was a godsend for that market - it's been six months and there's no more money in Heat Stones, but destroyer and onyx lodestones are still worth a gold each. Edit: here's an automatic calculator for how much you can make with skill points. I used to do skill point conversions a lot - these days I craft Zojja's insignias, which have a delicious profit margin because they use dark matter (which I have too much of) and damask (which is one of the easiest ways to make decent money crafting).

So my thinking on this is that Nintendo are working on a new handheld, but if they actually announce a new handheld (and yeah, it takes the wind out of the New 3DS' sales, which is clearly a stop-gap system like the DSi/GBA SP/Game Boy Color) the investors will be furious because it's Nintendo ignoring mobile again. Nintendo is right to boast they've got the most recognisable properties in the industry - Mario is at Mickey Mouse levels of cultural awareness - and the mobile market is built on recognition above all else. The audience on mobile largely don't know what's good, or who make good games - there's too much choice, and they're not yet savvy enough to be wary of free-to-play tricks. Recognition is all that matters. The games likely won't be great, but it won't matter. There's no reason to assume that, though - the mobile Rayman games are genuinely good quality, even though they're not the Rayman console games.

Having played a little more, I think this game has one of the best Metroidvania maps since Super Metroid. It's really solid: shortcuts, lots of connections between areas, one way passages, obstacles that seem impassable but it's not clear how you're supposed to overcome them (or even if that's something that can be overcome). The game doesn't have boss fights either, and their alternative seems obvious in hindsight. Of course, then I discover that several regions do not allows players to return to them, so anything in them is permanently missable. This includes major upgrades, of course. Why would you do this game. Also why are you allowing me to put the locations of collectibles on the map so early, I'm only halfway through. It's bothersome: there's so many difficult things this game does amazingly, but there's this tension at the heart of it where they didn't seem sure whether they were building a combat or acrobatic focused game. Exploration is rewarded, except where it's punished. Combat is de-emphasised, except where it's rewarded. Acrobatics are the main mechanic, but there are points where it becomes trial and error rather than execution.

It's this one.

Apparently skill points from champ bags will be more likely come the expansion, but I'm non-plussed that a system that made XP useful at max-level (to a degree; skill point conversions aren't usually profitable) is being replaced by a system that has a cap on the amount of XP a character can usefully gain. I'd be delighted if they address that with a perpetual mastery track.

It seems weird that voters haven't risen up as one and gone 'we don't give a shit, fix it'. Australia has way too many levels of government given the population, but councils, state and federal government have each got different areas they charge tax on without double-dipping, and occasionally the federal government pressures the state governments to abolish some taxes in exchange for funding from the federal government.