Merus

it is good that you are in the hospital. it is not good that you are in a hospital in America because I've heard stories. it is good that you can get wi-fi in the hospital.

There was a period in my life where I had a few dreams that were set in a version of Edinburgh, which I visited only in the last few years. Most of the details were flat-out wrong, so I guess I must have seen something about Edinburgh on TV and my brain amalgamated the famous view of the castle (which is from the east) with the charming irregular streets (which are on the west) and the British trains (which are to the south, and are definitely not high enough to give you a view of the castle).

For some reason sometimes my dreams are fractals - I go over the narrative events of the dream, and then I revisit them, adding detail after detail in ways that contradict the larger context. For instance, I dreamt I was a young lady (huh) on a spaceship who'd come across a terrible secret of the... Good Guy Organisation, I didn't have their name. On one level I knew there were fights against evil space aliens in my future, but right now I was trying to evade capture after finding this terrible secret and not being able to read more than a few lines, and there's a secret room that can be reached from the mess hall, and a little alcove up near the docking bay. Except it's a secret my mother knew, and she's with me, but she doesn't have time to tell me, and now I can teleport and walk through walls so this time I don't kill the guards and -

I remember people saying at the time that Saints Row 2 took their soulless GTA game and stuffed it so full of goofy fun that if they kept that up they'd have a hit on their hands, and Volition took copious notes. Hence why SR3 and 4 resemble GTA so little these days. I suspect when they decided to make the character generator they also took notes from people saying how progressive and flexible it is. I imagine they just wanted to make a flexible character creator - Volition has always struck me as a develop that prefers to put as much control in players' hands as possible - but when they saw how people responded to your character always being treated with respect, they figured they were onto a good thing.

What's weird is that the original Mad Max is set in the open fields of a police state, with Max as a police officer whose partner was recently killed. (The psychopathic road gangs were definitely in the first one, though.) It's apparently all filmed in Victoria, but there are parts of Mad Max 1 that I swear were filmed close to where I grew up.

There are two things that I have internalised as being never true. The first is that there's a conspiracy against me - that everyone is lying and colluding towards the same purpose, whether it be to keep me miserable, or to deceive me in into thinking I'm liked. The second is that death is an option, because if I believe that, it means my survival instinct, the first and oldest privilege evolution has gifted me, is malfunctioning. If my survival instinct is malfunctioning, it means I cannot trust my thoughts. My thoughts are no longer me, and the hollowness I am feeling is also not me. These days, because my form of depression does not respond well to chemicals, this is also a sign to double-check my thoughts with CBT. I also do mindful meditation, which helps with the anxiety, but I'm guessing you might have the kind of depression that needs pills to break it and let the part that's you get some breathing room.

Lawrence of Arabia: still pretty good, if you can excuse the casual racism. Even then, though, the Magical White Man trope is tempered a little by the focus the film gives to the entirely justified distrust between the Bedouin tribes and the English, Lawrence's private acknowledgement that he's got no business being respected by the Arab armies, and that the newly formed Arabia needs Arab leadership. In any case, it's probably the only super-British, kinda racist, 3+ hour movie about a war I'm going to see this summer. (I'll see Bridge on the River Kwai some other time)

Hey guys, I may not be able to run the game this Friday. I'm still firming up what my family is doing for my mum's birthday, but it looks like it'll involve Saturday, which is when I normally run it. I'll be sure to update you one way or the other, but we may need to reschedule for the 26th, or, more likely, next year. Always the risk over the holiday period, unfortunately, hopefully people are still keen to come back to the game.

I love simple mathematical models like this, because I believe, generally, that the 'simplification' allows us to understand the dynamics of a more complex situation. We can make segregation happen in a model with one parameter. There's another simple mathematical model I love where by adjusting the distribution of the units in the grid, they were able to make units that would try to flip themselves to be unlike their neighbours to always follow their neighbours, which they called the 'hipster' model. I feel like showing system dynamics through simple rules and gameplay systems are something games can do really well, and should be doing a lot more of. I think little racist triangles and squares are more illuminating than stories about an individual person's struggles with racial bias, because plenty of people will write off one person's experience in a way they can't when they've had to internalise the behaviour of racist shapes.

I've been pretty poor this entire year, so I missed out on a lot of 2014's best games. As a result, I've really only got two choices: Alcazar, and Shovel Knight.

Seems fine to me, I think that thread could go somewhere interesting.

GG don't have that rigid standard of behaviour typical of cults, but what they do have is a holy/unholy split between approved and unapproved behaviour. Those standards are very loose - support GG unconditionally and you're holy, no matter how much of a dickbag you are, but have a separate identity and you are unholy and therefore an unperson - but they're rigidly held. @a_man_in_black pointed out on Twitter that a lot of GG's behaviour makes more sense when you understand about chan culture, where people are expected to subsume their identities to the collective - but of course that makes it impossible for them to interact with professional adults.

Meanwhile, Randi Harper's got the name of an actual stalker and is pretty sure they've broken Californian law.

I think it's a bit dubious to claim AA as a cult, as there's a few key aspects to totalist beliefs systems (of which cults are a well-known type) that AA doesn't share - AA is fairly poor at maintaining a milieu in which they have control over the information people receive, for instance, and that belief in a Higher Power is not one that is stage-managed by AA, or derived from AA's revealed teachings. There's more to a cult than just a private club that has spiritual beliefs. From what I remember, AA is in that class of things where it doesn't work but everything else works even worse. Maybe that's changed in recent years.

From what I understand, they encourage you to not tell people you're going to Alcoholics Anonymous, but the real reason is that the book the founders anonymously wrote was called Alcoholics Anonymous.

So Guild Wars 2 opened up a new part of the desert; a small village filled with skritt - rat creatures that are obsessed with 'shinies', in a parody of the average MMO player mindset. The village has a wooden ramp leading down into a small cave, which goes into a somewhat larger cave: ... which is pretty cool all on its own - but then someone noticed that there's more to this cave system. There's a new achievement called Retrospective Runaround, which means there's a jumping puzzle down here. Jumping puzzles are one of GW2's signature gameplay types, where they take away the combat and it's just clambering over things, exploring. They're the pet project of one of ArenaNet's best environment artists, so they're usually as beautiful as they are challenging, and often there's no clear path forward and the challenge is in trying to work out where you can get to and whether that's going to help you any. Retrospective Runaround is one of these, but it's also one of the most ridiculous additions to the game since that time they added an 8-bit platformer. Let me show you what I mean.

Oh, well 999 and Virtue's Last Rewa-- oh

Last Window is a visual novel game where the novel is terrible. It takes hours for the story to get beyond minor domestic disputes with bland characters, and it's way too wordy, to the point where I expect the translation wasn't edited at all. This is an actual paraphrased exchange: *buzzer* "Hi, Kyle, what can I do for you?" "I need to ask you something." "Okay, well you'd better come in." *scene transition* "What was your question?" "I need to borrow something." "What do you want to borrow?" "A hammer." I still haven't played The Walking Dead yet. Most of the reviews of this game appear to have been largely positive because 2010 was a lean year for adventure games and people would take what they could get, but this simply doesn't hold up compared to what's come out a few short years later. I'm not wasting any more time with this.

Oh they sent you a pizza or at least the raw ingredients for one of their pizza bases

I am pleased that the internship is paid because unpaid internships are capitalism at its most nakedly greedy. My favourite field-trip-gone-wrong story is our excursion (that is what they're called in Australia) to the bohemian part of Sydney to see a performance of Macbeth, because they were doing Macbeth. It made the witches writhing lesbians and gave Macbeth a dog collar. This last was especially ironic because one of the big things the teacher wanted us to examine in the play was how Shakespeare blurs who's most culpable for Macbeth's deeds, and how a case can be made that both Sir and Lady Macbeth are more culpable than the other. Not according to that director! The teacher, bless her heart, came up with the idea to treat it as a teachable moment, and hesitantly explained to the class how to assess a bad performance. I'd like it to secretly be a technology that detects when you heart stops beating and then posts all your porn to your Facebook account. We could call it a killsnitch

Conversely, Dragons Den sounds like it'd be a lot cooler than it actually is.