Merus

I cannot get over that Mington isn't willing to make a half-hour train journey. Also that Olly is playing board games in a pub and apparently this isn't cool to Mington. I'd clearly be a much better friend to Olly than Mington. Now all he has to do is move to the suburbs of Sydney so he'll be half an hour away.

I can't imagine Del Toro will get the money for a Metroid film, so that's out.

The best video game movie is Wreck-It Ralph, followed by Scott Pilgrim. Ace Attorney is good mostly because it realises it is not good, so it is a solid B-movie affair. Although actually I think you could do a solid Shadow of the Colossus movie if you did it as a Western, with flashbacks. The screenwriter who was doing it is not the screenwriter who should have done it, though. It will be interesting to see how the Warcraft movie turns out, although I strongly suspect it'll be pretty poor.

Video files are not nearly as heavyweight as they seem these days. For instance, the dialog box animation in Windows (copy, etc.) are all movie files as well.

I think this year's PAX AUS will determine whether or not I'm going to make time for future PAXs. It's healthy for the local development scene to have a show that takes them seriously - the only other gaming-focused show is the EB Expo, which is very heavy on the AAA stuff and pretty sprasely populated. I gave up on that fairly quickly.

Remember that, no matter what software you use, encouraging people who mostly socialise in-game to actually go to your forum and post on it and be active is a herculean task.

Yeah, based on discussions about where they put PAX AUS, convention centre size and centrality is really important to them, both where they start and where they can expand to, as well as the nearby developer community. I'd guess they picked Texas because of the Austin development scene.

I've heard stories about how if you go to movies in the right part of Los Angeles, you'll hear cheers from members of the audience during the small print credits. It matters to someone.

I think that, while it's possible to work out how it's not quite false, it's still trading on the meaning of 'exclusive' that they're not actually meaning. When you say 'exclusive to', people take it to mean 'only available to' and then have to work out how you don't actually mean that.

It bothers me that he's looking at the camera and not at the person he hit.

Average backer pledge is about $8, which seems about right for something that went viral. (Although Patreon is basically this model - very low impact pledges, spread over a wide base, with a posted total so people are encouraged to maintain their pledges.)

We didn't need the ruling to go our way for help. Life-saving surgery and Simon's hospital stay is covered by Medicare. Rehab wasn't, but victim of crime compensation paid for that and Simon did some promotional stuff for them so they might have waived some fees. He also had sick leave, so he kept getting paid for the couple of months that he was out (I think the sick leave ran out but his boss was hardly going to fire him because he was in rehab) and his expenses were a lot lower. So basically yeah, Australia doesn't handle medical bills in the same way. Man, don't fall into that trap. Don't project how you're feeling onto her, particularly because the things that you're trying to do might well be the things she finds most attractive about you. You don't know what she's thinking, so don't go thinking the worst of her.

Are there not false advertising laws for this kind of thing?

So the trial for the guy who put my brother in the hospital completed today. The Crown brought two charges before the court: assault causing grievous bodily harm with intent to cause grievous bodily harm, and affray recklessly causing grievous bodily harm with intent to cause actual bodily harm. That second one he pled guilty to - essentially it means that he's pled guilty to fighting in public, intending to hurt Simon, and that he put him in the hospital. He contested the charged that he intended to cause grievous bodily harm, and was found not guilty of that, likely because the jury thought that he was drunk and off his face on e and punched him as opposed to attacking him with a weapon. The Crown wasn't sure that one would fly, but if it did it'd set a precedent that you're still responsible for serious crimes you commit while drunk, which would have been very helpful. But the second one is still serious, although a lesser charge, and the judge seemed to imply that when he decided the sentence that he'd err towards the typical sentence, which is somewhere within the realm of 4 years for affray and causing GBH with intent. That seems fair to me - the fear was that he'd get a year, including time served, and he'd walk out of the courtroom today, repentant right up until the cameras turned away. (There are always cameras. I might be in a shot. I hope I don't look too goofy.) I know a lot of the details of the case because I asked the Crown prosecutor, who was only too happy to chat about the case. We've found the justice system, police and prosecutors, warm, approachable, compassionate and professional. We chose to put our faith in the justice system, and while we didn't get the result we would have liked, we got a result that doesn't feel unfair to us. A++++++ WOULD TRUST WITH JUSTICE AGAIN They were worried we'd be disappointed if they couldn't prove intent to cause grievous bodily harm, but we're not too worried. Things have changed in the year since Simon got punched. There's now a specific category of assault for the kind of attack Simon faced - a single strong blow to the head, while drunk, no intent to cause specific harm but to fuck up whoever was in front of you. They call 'king hits' 'coward punches' now, in that very Australian half-ironic way. (Police stations are often nicknamed 'cop shops', particularly by police. Ah, Australian English.) There are new laws that stop alcohol service at 3am and entry into pubs at 1am, which may or may not be a good idea but it's being tried and there'll be balance found - after all, we're also the country that mandated uniform plain packaging for cigarettes to see if that'd make them less appealing. (Seems like it might do.) More than anything, I feel like our pain was listened to and acknowledged by the justice system and the wider community; we could have lost my brother if the dice had gone another way, but here we are. It feels like the end of something, rather than the middle.

Wait, if we're talking about whether Zeus should watch Evangelion, what about Cowboy Bebop? I also really like Stand Alone Complex, but it's a bit more cerebral than something like Attack on Titan.

You should email the people who make Trapcode Particular and thank them for making a tool that allowed you to make condoms fly out of the Olympic Village, and tell us what they say. Just that line. No context.

Apparently Sunless Sea's Steam release has gone very well - they've been on the top 10 list since going on sale. It's an all-too-rare example of a developer coming up with a great concept, then combining it with gameplay that respects the player, then finding success. (Also of note: Failbetter have been consistently good about gender identity, which started off as an opportunity for a throwaway joke which they kept up when they saw how it affected players. Sunless Sea allows you to pick a title of address, but points out that your own gender is up to you.)

I'm going to mess up your scale

Actually, now I re-read the sentence both those men would probably not need a lot of convincing to be sniper targets in a video game.

Netflix is reportedly 'launching in Australia' soon, except it's widely believed that it's going to be shitttttt. In America, Netflix licensing movies is a win for Netflix and a win for the content owners. In Australia, Netflix licensing movies cuts the distributors out of the loop, which is bad for the studios if they care about their distributors, and Village Roadshow have clout. Although apparently Madman have launched a streaming service, clearly patterned after Crunchyroll.

This is fascinating because I have not gotten a pack once despite having six games eligible for booster packs. I see the system as 'buy an expanded friends list, except you have to match cards instead of just buying a friends list expansion. Here, play a game for two hours and we'll give you a start!' The system would make more sense if players actually had any chance of getting booster packs even if they didn't buy cards, but that has not been my experience and considering you apparently get more with a higher Steam level, I can't see how that would ever happen. I think I'd also be happier if you still had to play the game to get cards, and the booster packs just filled in drops you would have gotten. The badges don't correspond to the games you actually like at all. You know what, I just don't like the card system and I resent Steam's monopoly on PC gaming and I'm tired so I'm going to stop nitpicking.

Well it can't be that expensive to get former PC Gamer editor Charlie Brooker.

Yeah, that's what happens when the writer isn't able to influence level design. I'm definitely conflicted about the writing but I'm also pretty sure I'm buying this game - both because the last one did a lot right and because, and this is interesting, the last game also had a lot of criticism about how Lara was being presented that wasn't really reflected in the final product, to my mind. (Although I'm also trying to keep in mind that these kinds of criticisms are less 'this game is doing something wrong' and more 'this is a recent example of a thing that happens a great deal more than is healthy').

I'm never sure how to take Rhianna Pratchett because I don't think I've liked the writing on any of the games she's been involved with, but I get the sense that it's because the games that employ external writers generally don't value writing. I liked Tomb Raider's writing at the time, but I've soured on it with distance. Which is odd, because I still remember Uncharted 2 and 3's writing with fondness even though they have much bigger tone problems. I do remember the concerns at the E3 reveal that trauma caused by the call to adventure was oddly gendered, and what people liked about Lara Croft was that she was an action hero who notably didn't get traumatised by her many adventures. I get the strong suspicion that neither will really delve into it - Tomb Raider because the writers have to bow to gameplay, and there's not going to be a CBT mechanic, and Uncharted because Naughty Dog aren't the kind of company that systematises their themes, so the dissonance of Uncharted is still going to be there. I take it all back if Tomb Raider introduces a CBT mechanic, partial credit for mental health.

Here's the video on Nintendo's channel: