Merus

I'm amused that the internet in general is convinced that gifs are an excellent format for short, looping animations, and several sites these days take those gifs and just convert them into video because that is actually the appropriate format. I think the reason why dialogue gifs exist is so you don't need sound, because fuck sound.

I think it is fine to have words that only appear in certain cultures that express things important to that culture. Part of the appeal of language is how you can see the history and philosophy of a culture baked right into how it communicates - like the idea that the words werewolf, woman, and wife all tell the story, in little pieces, of a culture that used to differentiate between males, females, and the species, and how that eventually changed to females being relevant only as an extension of males. Or, for a less contentious example, the colour orange.

I remember you were looking at this thing like six hours after the Ferguson debacle broke. Do you think that might have influenced your reaction? I apologise if I'm being insensitive, but I know I've been reacting to things oddly in the wake of Robin Williams' death.

Doesn't look like it's the Failbetter collaboration after all. Well, fair enough. Edit from the 17th August: Failbetter confirmed their project is still unannounced.

I reread the post and he's talking about Below.

Edit: thought you meant Smite, which is out. My bad, no way to delete posts.

So some thoughts on the ethics discussion in the reader mail: * One of the ways that companies try to manipulate key influencers is with access. Not only will we fly you around on our dime, they say, you'll also get close to our staff, and you might even become friends. You do such similar work, and you both want the same thing, right? There's a measurable bias that results from this kind of behaviour - key influencers don't want to diss their friends, and because they know one particular product much better than the others, they're more comfortable with it - and the best part is, both parties swear black and blue that there's no bias going on, and everyone is acting entirely professionally. * I think that it's extremely unlikely there's a lot of this going on in games journalism, because bias is a topic of great interest to both readers and journalists. Journalists are very ready to talk about ethical lapses and what steps they take to guard against them, and that willingness to discuss the ethics of game reviewing on its own does a lot to keep the industry wary of ethical breaches. A lot of the accepted best practices - the firewall between editorial and advertising, having different people do previews and reviews - guard against ethical lapses, and don't have people questioning why they should exist, as happens in other media. While individual instances of people claiming payola because a game didn't get a perfect score are fuckwitted, the overall climate where the audience cares deeply about whether coverage is ethical or not is the only thing keeping gaming journalism relevant. (I suspect the currently ongoing blowups regarding YouTube reviewers and their flexible ethics is going to bite them in the ass fairly soon.)

How much does she actually read as being neurodivergent, though? I know Greg Miller posted in response to this that he had never considered that she was anything other than capable of normal function, but unlike Clem hadn't accepted the reality of the world they'd found themselves in. I haven't played any TWD so I honestly don't know. I gotta say it'd be pretty funny if Telltale always meant to make a hateable character and had accidentally made a disabled one instead. I just imagine Alan Moore getting really fucking frustrated at all the fans of Rorschach.

Given Nintendo's track record thus far, I doubt it was a tactical masterstroke on their part. It took them an entire generation to work out how to run a store that anyone could make money on.

For me, this is the first celebrity death that really hurt.

There's a few endings; I got the one where you wake Mars, but there's another two endings that I looked up on YouTube where you go a little further still. I felt like I'd had my fill of it at that point, but I'm open to going back and doing it "for real".

I beat Waking Mars, which was fascinating because it's one of the few games I've played where I felt like its world was large and unmanageable. It's quite easy to completely fuck up an ecosystem if you're not careful, which I did towards the end.

Well, we'll just fire up the photoshops and you can have it be whoever you like.

I cannot imagine using that hashtag for anything other than mocking Pringles.

That's Guild Wars 2. The first shot's in the new desert area, Dry Top, which has an ongoing scramble to get as much done as possible before a sandstorm hits. The more that gets done, the more the hostile residents push back during the sandstorm (and the more loot they drop). The second shot's in the Hidden Garden, a gorgeous secret area. It's high up there, so the wind blows the grass back and forth in a way that doesn't really come across in screenshots.

It wasn't even famous, someone found it in the back room of their shop.

I enjoy how concerned they are that random strangers are watching them record a video feature that they will put up on their website.

I don't know if 'FUNi licensed something' counts as exciting news. Aren't they garbage?

My little gremlin greaser meets a celebrity: Also, he she is about to leap from floating rock to floating rock, as is her wont:

Yes. Yes they have.

That character pose for the main character... no-one actually stands like that.

I don't think my opinion on Prometheus will improve because the characters were too stupid to care about. I doubt that'll change on a rewatch. I wonder what the relationship is between expecting actors to look in their 'peak' and the increase in sedentary work and obesity in the West. I'd be fascinated if the large increase in people who have no idea what physical fitness looks like influences how movies try and show 'this is a man who is extremely fit'.

See, there are ways to get around the storage problem. For video that almost no-one watches, you can put it on high-density archive tape, for instance. When someone goes looking for it, you say 'hang on, gotta get it out of the archives'. I think it's worth pointing out how Reddit solved their cashflow problems. They lost money for a long time, which they eventually solved by putting a meter on the front page showing premium membership sales, and how much they needed per day to be able to grow. (People are able to gift a month of premium membership to others for specific posts, which are specially marked.)

isn't that what retweets are for though?