Merus

Apparently in the 3DS Animal Crossing your character basically stays indoors unless you're playing, so all of the villagers believe you are a hermit.

It feels like only recently that we've managed to get good random level design, mostly because it's procedural instead of random. I'm laying most of this at the feet of either Minecraft or Realm of the Mad God, because while we had random level design before then, when it was good, it wasn't random. It seems like the key breakthrough was in the insight that the procedural generation could run on multiple levels of detail. Most earlier random level generation felt arbitrary - it was clear there was no underlying logic to the level, that rooms had been created and joined together. Realm of the Mad God was an application of an island generator that took noise, applied order to it on a high level, then zoomed in and continued. Minecraft took it further, using different algorithms to generate the landscape based on the environment, which itself was generated.

This reads too much like paying one's dues for me to be comfortable. I hope I'm misunderstanding the metaphor here. It's interesting that Maddy Myers had a fairly different experience to Zoe Quinn and Cara Ellison with the Giant Bomb community. Maybe in the intervening six months they had a good hard look at themselves; maybe Zoe and Cara are more in tune with the tone of Giant Bomb than Maddy is, who knows.

This is really depressing, because one of my favourite story sequences in a game is the trial scene in Chrono Trigger, where the game takes a bunch of incidental actions you made in the opening hours and spins a narrative about how you're an amoral, out of control youth who clearly deliberately kidnapped the princess. I enjoyed how ruthlessly the game cut down my attempts to game the system - this chicken can be eaten and it gives me health, therefore I will eat it, even if the game says the chicken is someone else's. Finding the kitty is a sidequest and it is unlikely to give me a reward, so therefore I don't have to do it, even though in reality I probably would help a small child find her lost pet. One of the things The Walking Dead did well was implying an inner life for its characters, mostly by saying 'Clementine will remember' your actions. It's a shame that it's very limited how much you can do on that front. (I do kind of hope that trying to game the system can result in characters accusing you of manipulating them to get them to like the player.)

Guild Wars 2 has normalised same-sex relationships, including three of the main characters. Two of the enemy factions are bad guys because they're reactionaries - their attitude towards females and other races make them bad guys to the player characters. The writers put a lot of effort into the progressiveness of the writing without having that progressiveness be the point. (It'd be nice if the writing was across the board better, though.)

Michael Bay was between films and it's not like that government could just start committing war crimes and have everybody go along with it

Milo's book about Gamergate is suddenly promising to be a much more interesting read than we thought.

Coca-Cola sweetened with stevia.

It's like Lost, if Lost had been written wholly by people who understood what worked about Lost.

I'm really suspicious that several Idle Thumbs forum members and Jeff Goldblum have turned up in this game. Is it just drawing from your Steam friends list, or did they genuinely mine the forums for usernames? Is there a Merus in this game and if so can I sue that Merus for exclusive rights to my name

Gravity Falls season 2 steps it up big time. They have an impressive thing going where the ongoing mythology is always used to develop characters, which means that big shocking! swerves! end up also being really great character moments.

I think we're only allowed one quote inception per year, it was probably good someone cut it off before it went on too long.

I think it's very easy to claim that you're "for people" and then have a lot of problems with treating women and minorities as people and not as, say, bitches and thugs. The point where the rubber hits the road - that the system is racist and sexist, and isn't necessarily driven by prejudice people - is the tricky bit.

Yeah, it's What We Do In The Shadows, and it is genuinely pretty good.

Don't even joke about that.

It's Christmas! Merry Christmas everybody!

Reddit cares very deeply about free speech only as far as it affects white American males with access to the internet i.e. not the people that most need free speech. I have never heard Reddit talk about, say, Myanmar.

In two days someone's going to get 16/15 and then things will get fun again

I picked answers randomly, including several that grated to pick, and got 12/15. It's bullshit.

From what I understand, 'tumblr in action' was a Reddit meme to describe when Tumblr has opinions about social justice issues. There's a bit of a range there, from a tumblr user extremely upset that people are treating the scars of a man in uniform as some kind of sign of deformity, below a screenshot of Heath Ledger in The Dark Knight at the start of the police force attack, to tumblr users making the same kind of points we make in the feminism thread. Reddit is already biased towards the easily digestible and unchallenging, and it has a strong libertarian, and later MRA, contingent, so they weren't really inclined to work out what is and is not an overreaction. Kotaku in Action is pretty much straight GG; they're drawing an analogy between Tumblr and Kotaku, as part of their narrative that they are the true gamers defending gaming from interlopers who have infected everything and are trying to take cool games away in favour of walking simulators.

What I enjoy about Don't Hug Me I'm Scared is how it goes dark without feeling like it's going dark as a punchline.

I think the supernatural meaning of 'weird' has retreated to 'wyrd'.

I don't know, the dwarves solving their dragon problem via a heroic smithing sequence was the only thing I liked about that movie. Which is why I'm not going to see the new one (other than being full up on long, British, slightly racist war movies after Lawrence of Arabia).

Oh, right. That completely passed me by, that's not a particularly well-known story here. We do, however, know Green Eggs and Ham and One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish.