Merus

So apparently Australia is being allowed to compete in Eurovision this year, in part because SBS, the all-purpose multicultural station, puts on a Eurovision show with Australian commentators that rates quite well. We have a real soft spot for incredibly daggy European music, so Eurovision-senpai noticing us is thrilling, but it's also really conflicting. On the one hand, it'll be more fun than ever to mock the terrible decisions of the contestants. On the other hand, we've either got to send someone deeply humiliating, or we cheat and blow the opportunity to really get into the spirit of Eurovision, which is making everyone else in Europe wonder just how dire your music industry is. For some reason, the Australian papers are captivated by the idea of Australia winning and thus being allowed to host and compete again next year, which is not going to happen in a million years.

The Eurogamer one is particularly damning.

It's more interesting, to me, that they're leaving Metacritic.

I always thought it weird that the game its teasers was teasing was much more interesting than what it ended up being. I wanted that weird horror thing they were teasing.

I felt it was competent, but we're not talking a classic film here. It was fun times and not much more.

Apparently they did actually make a lore bible when they started but it's clear it's expanded - there are waves of content added later in Fallen London that introduce concepts that clearly weren't thought of before, like the hymn of the Bazaar. But they're really good at writing stories that feel like you're just getting a snippet of something larger, of choosing ways to talk about things that have resonance. Also Failbetter's writing staff are super well-read and they're drawing from sources that most other games writers are drawing from third or fourth hand.

That's Spacemarine - not only does he have a frighteningly comprehensive understanding of Fallen London, he's also the person who used a particular card in Fallen London to send the developers thousands and thousands of dead rats. There's occasional references in Sunless Sea to rat sending and rat infestations which almost all draw from that prank.

I have heard people use 'hack' to mean 'terrible' but I've never considered it the meaning of the word. I think you're right - a hack is someone who turns in barely competent work for the paycheck.

I've been working on the definition of a breakthrough role as the last role the actor did before marketing departments start treating them as a draw - I'm guessing that's what the original question is about, because we're trying to establish female equivalents of Bruce Willis. Alien isn't exactly an action film but it did demonstrate that Sigourney Weaver was a credible badass, so it's either that or Sandra Bullock.

I've always wanted to make like a style guide for achievements, just kind of explaining the different kinds of criteria that tend to work and not, what they'll mean to players, when to set the timing, that sort of thing.

So I started a diet two weeks ago. Instead of eating certain kinds of foods or following a meal plan, instead I'm counting kilojoules. I have a daily target, which shifts every week based on how many kilojoules my metabolism is burning, and basically I can eat anything so long as I know how many kilojoules are in it and therefore how many kilojoules I have left for the day. I don't have to deny myself chocolate or chips or a hamburger, I just have to ensure that I'm not going to eat my entire allowance of kJ in one meal, and if I am, I need to be bloody sure it's going to be worth it. Been having a lot of salads (protip: salads without dressing are just raw vegetables in a bowl. A good dressing ties it all together.) I've lost 4kg in two weeks. Part of this was because I stayed with my parents in the last two weeks and Mum's desperately trying to get under 60kg again, but part of it is just trying to avoid sources of kJ that I might have previously not worried about, like chips.

I think it's reasonable to say that Jennifer Lawrence is now an A-list star who broke through on The Hunger Games. I'd define a breakthrough role as one where, after the role, the star themselves are a measurable draw for a film. Hackers, I think, doesn't count, but Angelina Jolie might - it seems like she became an A-lister from Tomb Raider, although there's a strong argument her 'breakthrough' came from Girl, Interrupted.

Here's the trick with The Secret: it's partly confirmation bias and partly positive thinking and the importance of framing, so it's probably easier to try and focus their attention on the parts of it that are actually valuable. The human brain interprets stimuli based on its own internal state, and can be easily misled by deliberately setting out to change the way one looks at a situation. If you have a positive mindset, are looking for opportunities and have decided a goal is within your grasp, you're more likely to see opportunities that exist that you'd otherwise ignore. This is, in fact, why the scientific method exists in the first place - we need a frame that encourages us to look at the facts before we draw a conclusion from them, which we're not normally inclined to do.

Technically, the A-list are people who will be a draw if invited to a party, and the B-list are people who will be interesting party guests but won't be a draw on their own. The term comes from professional party and entertainment planning. (The C-list is sometimes described as people who are obligated to receive an invitation but wouldn't normally rate one.) The analogy is clearer this way - 'A-list stars' are actors for whom people will go to see a movie because a particular star is in it.

Yeah, pretty much. I feel like Blizzard is more open about how they're in the business of genre killers, not innovative gameplay ideas, and what they bring to the table is impeccable polish. They're not doing anything new, they have a house aesthetic that gets old and there's lashings of cliche, but if you're willing to accept that, what you get is a game system that's tuned to perfection. (Diablo 3 aside.) Also Blizzard makes a wider variety of games - if you don't like multiplayer games, most of Valve's output is not for you, while their strengths as a studio (aesthetics and character) are sort of wasted on the games they make.

I feel like they haven't been successful enough given the supposed talent there. It's like feelthedarkness said back on page one - it's odd how little they've managed to put out in the last decade, and how much of it is refining other people's ideas instead of creating their own. They bought Team Fortress, they bought CounterStrike, they bought Portal, they bought Left 4 Dead, they bought DOTA... they're like a publisher that just doesn't outsource, one that has the money to just buy out competitors instead of trying to out-compete them. So why do we expect that Valve are working away on the next great game idea? They're not, and they haven't for a decade - the next great game idea is going to come from the team they buy, and yet people act like they're not EA with better PR. I don't have a problem with Valve, per se, I have a problem with everyone else's perception of Valve.

Oh man, that was a great game. Thanks to my players for finding ways to make a mechanical puzzle potentially lethal, and falling into nearly all of my traps. I hope you had as much fun as I did.

My dislike of Valve more or less comes down to the thing they talk about in the podcast - they have 300 people there. What the fuck are they doing? Why is the most interesting thing about them their organisational structure and not their output? Particularly because that organisational structure has huge downsides - they can't function if they give developers their own offices, but devs function significantly better with their own offices. I largely think they get given a free pass because they run Steam and so they're part of the infrastructure, and they're willing to talk about their crazy ideas, while everyone ignores that their ability to bring them to market is really poor. They're a company sustained mostly by hype, Steam revenue, and divested Microsoft stock options, and because of that they don't have to play in the same world as people who have to make good games to survive. I think the case for focusing on the core gameplay is frequently overstated. Take Tetris, for instance. I've played Tetris, I like Tetris, I'm done with Tetris. It can't engage me on the level of making tetrises any more because it's routine. I need some kind of meta-structure over the top of Tetris for it to be any fun. There's a lot of games and game-ancillary things (like gamification) that do something similar - take an uninteresting or simple interaction, and layer multiple reward systems on the top of it. Does it go too far? Absolutely. Does it work? Absolutely.

The cookie thing is weird, though.

The Stanley Parable did this, pretty much. The key is to add an achievement that is explicitly unachievable.

If you're looking for lively, there's always Dr Karl's science hour. Basically he takes questions from callers for about forty minutes (interspersed with songs that aren't syndicated on the podcast) and they run the gamut from 'what's a brontosaurus' to 'why have we evolved to find nails on the chalkboard extremely irritating'.

In capitalism, at least, the state's supposed to be the arbiters of the market, which doesn't have any kind of violence component. Moreover, I think it's a bit reductive to talk about the violence inherent in the state when it's frankly kind of unusual that we've decided that regular creatures should not have access to violence. Violence is inherent to life on Earth, it's just that there's advantages to living in an environment where that's not really a concern.

Reportedly Riot isn't thrilled with these rules.

Excel? Honestly the hard part of budgeting is not the accounting, it's building awareness of where your money's going.