Merus

Procedurally generated animals and ships blow my mind. I can understand how they generate landscapes, that's fine, that makes sense. How do you make the animals look right???? whaaaaaat

Or they could just be wrong, for instance when I referred to a 15 minute program as a 'deep dive'

http://www.abc.net.au/mediawatch/video/

Well obviously one of these:

I'd abandon the Steam storefront and its weirdly coercive subsystems in a heartbeat, but there's a lot to like about Steam as a game launcher - it has a friends list, easy multiplayer group forming, automatically updates games, has built-in mod support, and theoretically shares your library across multiple platforms, although in practice my Mac can't connect to Steam unless I restart it. I can't imagine any storefront convincing the other storefronts that they should give up the opportunity to be the central game launcher. Microsoft is in a stronger position, but the abject failure of the Windows Store as a marketplace doesn't bode well for them managing to convince others they have the superior solution.

The people who are being depicted as acceptable targets have a right to not be further victimised, the people who want to victimise others have a right to use their speech as a weapon... I mean, if you're going to claim that free speech is a powerful weapon, let's follow that thought all the way through

Yeah, no-one's been pouring detergent down that slope. In practice, we're pretty good at saying 'hey this seems like it's trying to monetise hate, ban that, but this is merely expressing it but it has other things going on, let's leave that to society'.

Congratulations! have the wedding in three months so Idle Thumbs 200 is the wedding episode so did Chris go with the jumbotron or the marching band when he popped the question

Also worth keeping in mind that shows like Saturday Night Live or Dead Ringers or The Chaser's War on Everything don't travel, and so calling them 'must-see' only really applies to the country of origin. And also there are shows like Sesame Street that are remade in many different countries, so which specifically are you referring to. That said, I was really surprised when Katherine Cross was singing the praises of Media Watch on Twitter, because that is a show that totally does not travel. It is a 15 minute critical look at the behaviour of journalists in Australia over the past week, its smugness only eclipsed by its precision.

When I scroll down on Mac Chrome, I can scroll through your entire portfolio with a twitch of the finger. Macs don't have scroll wheels. I'm not a fan of the captions over the pieces, often because the captions are overlapping the pieces. Honestly, I feel like you're trying to serve two different audiences here - you want to show off your art pieces, and you want to show off your JS skills. In trying to show off your JS skills, though, you're making your portfolio much less usable, which implies that your JS/web development skills are lacking enough that you need a UX designer standing over you to ensure that your work can be used by people who are expecting to be able to scroll down and hit back and view it on a mobile. The only people I've seen who have really elaborate personal sites are the very top-tier, most people can get away with something simple. Make a separate section of your portfolio, put specific JS portfolio pieces in there.

Yep. My mum doesn't really understand depression and thinks it's just something that goes away if you stop being lazy. Also anti-depressants are fairly extreme; from what I understand they tend only to be used in cases where the depression is so bad that it impedes normal function. If you respond well to non-medication treatments, anti-depressants are all downside. (The specific reasoning your therapist is giving sounds weird but then... actually hang on it's a therapist. That's not a psychiatrist!)

Tacoma Original Electronic Soundtrack, or TOES Music, Instrumentation and Sound From and Inspired By Tacoma (or Music InSpired by Fullbright Interactive's Tacoma, but this one's less clean)

Well someone had to snap up Jeff Goldblum eventually

Let's hope it'll got what you neeeeed

Oh look it is a trailer with English voice acting I'm sorry, I meant voice 'acting'

And I know cute lesbians, and apparently scissoring is overrated.

The Wire

Well at least it lasted longer than a Woodgate

Thankfully it looks like politicians have decided that they're not going to do the 'tough on terrorism' thing and have been spending a lot of time de-escalating. A good change from the sturm und drang of the incident in September that was tied to The ISIL Threat. I think my favourite thing is that they evacuated the Opera House and no-one's entirely sure why. Actually my favourite thing is that this guy, or group, went to Martin Place, which houses major banks, a national broadcaster and the Reserve Bank, and is over the road from the NSW parliament, and what they decided to take hostage was a cafe. Good start to the jihad there, guys. They didn't even have their own ISIL flag and had to improvise I'm guessing this is less the vanguard of a global wave of terror and more a couple (at most) of fuckwits who are waaaaay out of their depth at this point. (my actual favourite thing is that everyone's alive so far and five people are out, and my friend who works at the Reserve Bank didn't pop down for a coffee)

As a GM, I'd probably play this as the wounds slowly healing over the 10 minutes, and if it's interrupted, they open up again.

So you know the old trope of opera singers being able to break glasses with just the right note? What's supposed to be happening there is that the sound waves are hitting the right frequency to make the glass vibrate, and at that frequency the vibrations aren't dampened by the sound waves coming in. Those kind of vibrations can be set up in basically anything, with the right kind of constant force. With the Tacoma Narrows bridge, the force was wind. Every time the bridge moved, it made it easier for the wind to push the bridge harder. (Technically what brought down the bridge was flutter rather than sympathetic vibrations - basically, the wind didn't have to be at just the right speed to set up the vibrations - but I don't understand flutter so I'm not going to explain it.)

This is indeed what I'm referring to. I found four games that had the right combination of on my wishlist, in the promotion (and I'm nonplussed/worried about the games that are participating in this promotion) and had relatively few bids so that, without putting a big bid down, I'd still have a good chance of winning a game. I'm guessing the vast majority of the gems comes from people dumping inventories full of things they crafted and didn't bother selling on the market. There are people with ludicrous level counts from crafting badges and getting cards and crafting badges, and while I have too much dignity to buy into that pointless bullshit I'm perfectly happy to appraise this new dumb thing to see if I can get any value out of it. I've got four bids down purely from doing the same, realising I had $2 of Valve Funbux in my Steam wallet, and then using that to buy 20 Arkham City backgrounds to convert into gems. Only one of them really looks like it won't win, which is fine.

I love that point in The Wire where you realise you understand what all the disconnected images in the opening titles are about - particularly the ones that seemed like the creators had just stuck them there for flavour and hadn't really done due diligence making sure it was accurate. The one I'm thinking about specifically here is the

So on Jake's distaste for reboots that are secretly sequels - I'm detecting a hint of Jake preferring original movies over either straight sequels, or reboots that are sequels, or straight reboots. I think, though, that movie executives have found much the same thing that game executives have, which is that original works don't sell anywhere near as well as known quantities, and what the mass audience wants above all else is to know exactly what they're getting when they buy a ticket. Everyone was watching very closely at the start of the millenium when Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings did a serialised story that came out at the same time every year and people kept coming back, the closest thing to a sure thing the movie industry had seen in a while. I don't blame movie executives for deciding that their movie will be more successful if they ride the coat-tales of something people already like, because it's really depressing to find out that original ideas aren't actually valued nearly as much as old ideas, reheated. It's really weird to me, and I think a lot of people, that most people decide to go to the movies first and only work out what they're going to see when they get there. Advertising for specific movies mostly seems to convince people that it's time to go to the movies.

Interestingly, emoticons and wallpapers seem to start at 80 gems, and they're extremely cheap on the Market. 40c gets 800 gems, and if my understand of how this works is right, if there are fewer bids on a game than there are games available, every bid will win.