Gormongous

Slight derail, but I would very much like to hear someone's thoughts about that, whenever you finish the game. There has been a little critical discussion about the racial and social tropes present in Wolfenstein, but the alternate-history setting and the presence of Nazis has dissuaded even RPS from doing a good deep-dive.

I'm already just sick of seeing this argued around the internet. My most reasonable Republican "friend" on Facebook, a trial lawyer by trade, is insisting that the actual practical effect of the ruling is negligible because it only eliminates four out of anywhere between fourteen and twenty birth control options, without adjusting the amount actually paid by the company to the insurance provider. Fair enough, but the one time I bit and asked about the precedent set by a ruling that allows a private entity to select which parts of a law it wants to follow based on fallacious information and in a way that endangers the rights of other more fundamental private entities, he said that the opinion brief was very clear that this ruling only applies to this specific instance of birth control and medical coverage, so there's no precedent being set. I'm pretty sure this is not how common law has ever worked since the beginning of time (or at least the reign of Henry II of England) but I didn't want to get into that with a lawyer. Legal history is my second least-favorite field of history, anyway. I want to unfriend everybody.

I still spent thirty bucks, so I don't feel like a winner, but thanks. Ramen all this month to celebrate!

I did okay. I talked myself into putting Democracy 3 and Euro Truck Simulator 2 on my wishlist rather than buying them outright. What I did buy: Nidhogg Four pieces of Total War: Rome II DLC Three pieces of Europa Universalis IV DLC Don't Starve: Reign of Giants DLC

That really pleases me to read. It's been way too long that I've seen Paradox roll out a straight bugfix patch for any of their products, not without also rolling out some more features that could break even more.

There's a lot of problematic things at work in that decision, "corporations are people" is just the most egregious. Can anyone tell me when the "sincerely held religious belief" thing made its penetration into the American legal system? It seems like an untenable concept on so many levels. How do you tell if a religious belief is sincerely held? Is there a paper trail that must be established? How do you distinguish a sincerely held religious belief from a sincerely held non-religious belief? Does it have to be a documented tenet in an organized religion? As we're applying it right now, it seems to be up to the judge's willingness to believe the defendant, which is... tenuous, especially since it apparently allows both people and corporations to opt out of whatever laws they don't like. I really hope someone refuses to pay their taxes and manages to document a "sincerely held religious belief" not to feed Mammon or whatever. This'll get overturned so fast your head will spin.

This happened to me, too. It's abominable.

Apparently I'm a dick. I remember now, it's already in the new beta patch. Dewar, if you update to that, there's a good chance your save will transfer over and then you can use the converter.

I saw the new deals today and came here immediately because I know you'd be happy. All's well that ends well!

I will never understand trolling, not as it is usually applied today. Look at this post from the anime fansub group UTW. The release guy got sick of being asked when a show was going to be done, so he located, screencapped, uploaded, and posted literally over a hundred shots of some girl from another show that's the supposed rival to the first one, in addition to several thousand words of text and lyrics. And then he pops up in the comments thread to the post over and over, laughing behind his hands at all the "jimmies" apparently being "rustled" when people ask why he spent hours making a massive, site-breaking post with absolutely zero informational content. What does it even mean to troll someone these days? Is it the same thing as pranking, because that's what this is. It's a prank, except it's a prank the prankster plays on themselves and then calls an even bigger prank when other people react with confusion at how dumb they seem to be. It's like the time I shared a room with an asshole from my department for a conference and he "pranked" me by eating a ton of spicy food that made him horribly sick so that he could fart a bunch and stink up the room. Yeah man, you really trolled me there. I do hate other people's farts, maybe even more than you hate twelve hours of stomach cramps. Also, UTW used to be one of the good groups, but I know now that every fansub group gets taken over by cowboys eventually and then dies a quiet death about a year later. Ah well.

Yeah, I miss Nick, too. He's the cranky bastard of the podcast, which is kind of voice upon which I tend to center myself. He also ratchets up Sean really well sometimes, which makes for good chemistry. To echo what everyone else is saying here, as well as what was being said in the "Anyone Remember?" thread, I enjoy the energy of the old episodes, especially the willingness to piss away minutes upon minutes on some worthless tangent without anyone even thinking to say that they should get back on topic, but I also like the focus of the new episodes, especially the tendency to resort less to old memes at random moments. If there was one thing I wanted, I'd like some sharper and more assertively stated opinions, which is not so much about everybody being bigger assholes and more about just having more people to provide the kind of diversity that drives constructive conversation.

Yeah, I use a Coolermaster Hyper 212+ with two fans and Arctic Silver. I think I hit maybe forty-five degrees under load. Building this last machine has taught me never to cheap on case and cooling solutions.

Paradox says that they'll update it when they feel like it, which is always implied to be soon.

I keep forgetting about IRC! I'm doing rare books archive work in front of a computer, too, so it would be perfect!

I hate the cards mostly because we spend every Steam sale talking about how awful the cards are, rather than what games are on sale or how we like what we bought.

Note to self: having played many times as every non-English kingdom in the British Isles, please learn someday that England can never just be "taken care of" in one or two wars.

This is petty, but I'm a little pissed that a lot of the Crusader Kings II and Europa Universalis IV DLC isn't on sale, even though the games are. There's minor cosmetic DLC released back in early February that's still being marked as full price when the game itself is seventy-five percent off. I really don't get it.

Hah! In my country, it's "You've got to spend money to lose money." We're a simple people.

My half-remembered review of the four Anderson/Herbert Dune continuations I read my senior year of high school: Unsurprisingly, written in the same literary style as the Star Wars Expanded Universe novels. Not bad, but not great and downright ugly next to the elder Herbert's prose. Much more interested in the breadth than the depth of universe. Its characters fly all over the galaxy, while Dune and its sequels very smartly drill down into the layers of experience covering a single place. Quickly fumbles most of the original book's unique touches. Ix makes machines and they're everywhere, Tleilaxu clones people and they're everywhere, the Landsraad uses sonic gavels and hover chairs. Reminiscent of Game of Thrones and the "new" school of sci-fi/fantasy, but in a bad way. "Intrigue" just means that everyone except House Atreides has imminent plans for the genocide of anyone who's ever looked at them funny. This is my own hobbyhorse, but it totally rejects Herbert's philosophy of history in favor of a pulpy "great man" take on the subject. Instead of history being this incredible and impossible force that a single man, even a messiah, struggles to control, to the point of sacrificing his humanity, every single plot point in the prequels is the direct result of some character's conscious decision to steer events that way. It's ridiculous when you think that unintended consequences are driving force of the elder Herbert's Dune books. So yeah, one of the evil cyborgs kills a baby because he finds it annoying, then the baby's mother becomes the leader of the Butlerian Jihad, which is called that because her surname is Bulter, and it's nothing like the strange, inexplicable, and even mystical event alluded in the original novel. I can't actually tell you how the Legends of Dune trilogy ends, because six hundred-plus pages of workmanlike prose playing out the most obvious interpretation of everything cool about the Dune universe killed any desire to read more. The origins of the Fremen are well-executed, but because there's nothing open for Anderson and the younger Herbert to ruin. We just know too much already about their history, culture, and philosophy. In conclusion, I have a friend who went to a sci-fi con where Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson were signing books. Herbert was drunk at two in the afternoon and spent the whole time heckling people lined up to meet him. He refused to sign my friend's book unless he said something nice about it first. Anderson was polite enough but clearly tired and barely made eye contact with my friend for how much he was rolling them at his co-author instead. In terms of how much a son is worthy of inheriting his father's legacy, I consider Brian Herbert on the opposite end of the spectrum from Christopher Tolkien and gave up long ago on giving any money directly to him. That's a cool observation! On the internet somewhere there's a timeline that maps out how George Lucas was introduced to Dune when the film option was first being floated by Jacobs, right as the former was being pressured by Twentieth Century Fox to expand his much-maligned thirteen-page treatment into an actual script with plot and characters. It's pretty convincing, which is to say that you're right to see Dune as a big influence on Lucas, though I don't he's even aware of it anymore. I'm glad you liked Dune Messiah. I was too shy to say so in this thread, but I think it's an excellent distillation of and epilogue for the themes of the original novel. Children of Dune is good, too, but unless you're one of those people for whom God Emperor of Dune just clicks, and there are quite a few for whom it does, it's all downhill from here, becoming a cliff after the son takes over.

I really miss the journalism aspect sometimes, which is why I'm glad Danielle is guest-starring so much now. There was a moment in this last podcast when video-game-review-score-as-college-grading-scale came up and Chris was immediately like, "I don't want to talk about this," even though Danielle was ready to hash it out for a bit. I like that there's someone around on occasion who's not only still in journalism but is still eager to tackle the big bugbears, even if I sympathize more with Chris in terms of my actual desire to discuss the finer points of reviewing video games.

To be fair, he is right that there have been several MMO games that have sold in-game real estate or unique items during the pre-release phase to build buzz and cash, all of which ended up crashing and burning because it's hard enough to balance a complex in-game economy without people who have paid to opt out of its most important money- and time-sinks. Really, I'm not surprised to hear that Chris Roberts regrets lifetime insurance. His only real choices are to gut it with massive waiting periods or make all insurance trivial, because otherwise I don't know. Can you imagine how the roads would look if there were people who had unlimited full-coverage insurance driving on them? It's going to be a bizarre game no matter what, and I kind of agree with a more pessimistic version of Jake's prediction that it'll take a miracle for it all to work together well.

Two observations from reformatting, which otherwise went really well: Chipset software is terrifying. I know of no other program or driver that looks at the obsolete installed version, compares it with the new downloaded version, and says, "Eh, not enough difference to risk rocking the boat." Given a Steam list of around seventy installed games, you would be shocked how many bury their save games and settings deep in some lost corner of the AppData file, rather than in the My Games folder or the cloud.

AAAH

https://www.idlethumbs.net/about I don't see her there... It'd be a shame to ruin the three-by-three layout, though.

I was really hoping that Sean would ask to describe Muninn as a (king) crow man.