Merus

I'm surprised that no-one noticed that Google's suggested use of their drone technology was to build a sky Net.

I'm curious to see if the grimdark starts getting to everyone else. It feels like a lot of the tension has gone out of the series now that no-one's really shooting for the Iron Throne.

Stop counting weeks. This is your life now.

Mega Man 9 is the Tree of Life of video games.

The logical endpoint of this thread is a sweet exchange.

I suspect the problem with Bravely Default isn't that the localisation process was bad but they didn't have the raw materials available.

The second-worst thing I've seen on the internet is fanart of people trapped in latex, somewhat transparent Pokémon outfits, and they'd clearly been in there a while. The worst was a gigantic collage of human flesh with grids of maws neatly Photoshopped into them.

On the plus side: the tech industry is at a place where this is clearly way outside the Overton window. That's good, right?

So I finished Assassin's Creed 4: You Liked Ships In The Last One So We Put Them Everywhere. I haven't played an Assassin's Creed game since 2, and they've pretty much succumbed to the tragedy of the collectathons, which I'm okay with! I think the writing is marginally better - it's not great by any means, and it edges close to actually grappling with some themes. It's sprawling and unfocused in the way many AAA games are, but for me, this meant the game was full of weird little systems with their own mechanics that injected quite a bit of variety into the proceedings. I enjoyed myself, overall.

Run by a sex offender, too!

I enjoyed the hell out of Fantastic Mr. Fox and chalked it up to Roald Dahl being a massive part of my childhood.

I am extremely fond of Minties, which are mints with the consistency of a particularly chewy caramel. Apparently unknown outside of Australia and New Zealand.

It would probably not be a Wes Anderson film either; he tends to trade in caricatures.

I think if it had stayed in the hotel it probably wouldn't have had a plot. It reminded me immediately of The Big Lebowski (except that I liked Grand Budapest much, much more) in that it felt like a caper film primarily involving people who had no business being in a caper film.

Vegetarians seem to get much less shit than vegans, mostly because there's a wide range of reasons why one could become a vegetarian, but there's very few that carry over to veganism and they all involve a moral judgement on the use of animal products. (There's also the related subject that many vegans people come into contact with are fairly militant about it.) Most of my vegetarian friends have essentially made a moral stance, but they generally are asking 'did the animal suffer for this and how comfortable am I with this?' So my housemate won't eat any kind of meat because he doesn't get that much out of being the beneficiary of a cow's death, and will get cruelty-free eggs, but he will wear a leather hat because, with 20+ years of use, that cow did not die in vain, and he'll eat cheese because it's non-invasive. I think you should only sustain lifestyle choices that you're comfortable with. I don't think this means you have to give up your morals about eating meat; if it's mostly about the hostile reaction you get, and you're otherwise getting enough iron, then maybe say you're a vegetarian that doesn't like dairy? After being a vegan for a while dairy's going to be weird anyway. But I don't know your specific situation and how much you'd have to compromise to please the people you want to keep in your life.

The Assassin's Creed games have actually started doing something like this: if you're playing as Aveline, a mixed-race woman adopted by a rich family, what makes people suspicious is determined by what you're wearing. If you're wearing fancy clothes, you're given a pass on a lot more low-profile activities but you're far more suspicious if you start running around. If you're playing as Adewale, a former slave turned assassin, there are slavers who will always treat you as suspicious. If you're playing as Edward, who's Welsh, you're only suspicious if you do assassin-y things.

I play Zombies Run - I used their 5K app, which I thought had an excellent C25K program, as the program's not strict about whether you're running or walking for a good half of it. A friend of mine has gotten into combination running-obstacle course races, and is dragging me into one in May.

I just want to address one specific point: the "smart construction" of the script. Into Darkness is clearly patterned off the Save the Cat template, but following a template doesn't make for a good film, and Into Darkness hammers its story into that mould until it feels weird and misshapen. A movie that manages to bomb San Francisco and make it feel completely dehumanised is a movie that's poorly constructed - a lot of that can be laid at the feet of Save the Cat, which prescribes a climax scene with cataclysmic stakes whether or not the story deserves it. This is just the latest in a long line of writers who treat anthropological research as a formula, mind - plenty of writers have abused the Campbell monomyth by treating it as a prescription instead of, essentially, TV Tropes.

My favourite bit about the Abstergo content is where Ubisoft are clearly snickering behind their hands at how terrible Abstergo is, with the social media policy and the leave only available after 12 months and the figurines instead of bonuses, but then it's an attractive office with lots of space and bosses that are supportive of your efforts and plenty of room to recharge. It's very curious to see how the institutional blindness manifests itself.

For what it's worth, I recall that Black was seen as a left-field choice at the time.

I have a lot of fondness for AC1 because most AC games are basically collectathons, and in AC1 the collectathon part was collecting progress to unlock the assassinations. I still think the assassinations in AC1 are head-and-shoulders above the rest of the series because they pull double duty showing why the people you kill deserve to die. The later games basically put your targets in some random place, pacing back and forth, not really doing anything.

You want running shoes - there's valuable cushioning in them that will keep your knees and joints from knocking around so much. You had a good run! Awesome! Stick to the program, though; you'll have off days as well as great days, and the combination of an off day and a program harder than you think you should be capable of can be very discouraging. Give your body time to grow into your new routine.

Both are, apparently. You can see Frozen's trope inversions coming a mile off if you're aware that it's going to do something with them. I think most people that complained about the snowman were going off the trailers and what they assumed his role is - in the movie he's a well-handled comic relief character who has some thematic relevance and a little arc. I think it's perfectly competent, and was heartened to see that a movie with two female leads and a female director made maaaaaaad bank because between that and The Hunger Games, there goes the idea that people aren't going to see movies with female leads.

I don't know if hipster has a meaning separate from poser these days, so I just prefer poser. It also means that I'm not dismissing someone who has specific tastes just because they have specific tastes.