Gormongous

It does that on its own now. Feature, not bug!

I love how Sean's cougar, eagle, and electric guitar sounds are all really just the same sound. Also,the story about the meeting at Disney was just tremendous! I haven't laughed that hard in fifty episodes.

Came home, booted up my computer, and opened Microsoft Word, only to have white squares appear everywhere and the computer freeze. Fun! After a couple hours of work, downgrading the drivers, and underclocking the graphics card, I can get it to run for twenty or thirty minutes before freezing up. If I do anything more graphically intensive than opening a web browser, which apparently sometimes includes using a word processor, it'll die in mere seconds. I'm writing up a paper to give at a huge conference in a couple weeks, so this is the worst time possible for me to have a broken computer. Anyway, I paid fifteen bucks extra to have a new card sent overnight from Amazon. I'll probably have to ask for it to be my birthday present from my parents two months early, but such is the life of a grad student, and in this instance time is more valuable than money. Honestly, I'm just surprised that it took this card four years to fail. I always knew it was a piece of junk. The memory was impossibly sensitive to voltage and crashed the driver at a moment's notice. Never buying Galaxy again, no matter that they're thirty bucks cheaper than the competition. Twin Frozrs all the way from now on! EDIT: Also, I really hate how every forum thread on every hardware problem ever has someone chiming in that it could be the power supply. I mean, yes, it could be the power supply, but it's probably the piece of hardware that's actually showing failure symptoms. At least, that's what I need it to be right now.

Jeez, it's like they're stuck drunk-posting press releases or something.

It's been said before, but countdown to an offensive Photoshop beginning... now.

I'm looking forward to picking up DLC and some indie titles, but there's no proper game I'm actually holding out to buy.

That's the real problem with the NRA, that it is vulnerable to the same radical shift to the right that produced the Tea Party. Nowadays, I know no one, even from among fairly dark-red conservatives, who does not see the NRA as a parody of itself. The Welcome to Night Vale bumper stickers are closer to the NRA's current position than the opinions of anyone who actually owns a gun:

My money is that they focus-tested Arnaux or Arnaud and found that nine out of ten Anglophones pronounced it "Our Knocks" or "Our Nod" and they didn't want to have that lack of control over the brand messaging from the outset.

I miss "Filthy Batman", said like a child. Fiwffy Ba'man...

WHAT NINE THOUSAND

I am just very lucky to have started an RP-heavy playthrough of the Rajas of India DLC for Crusader Kings 2, so all my undergrad- and grad-level history courses on the subcontinent are coming back to me. The thing is, India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bengal, and so on are countries with a scale and diversity of culture on par with all of Europe, so I would sincerely hope that Ubisoft makes the effort to set it somewhere specific if ultimately fictional, rather than putting everything its writing and art teams know about the region in a blender and coming out with something comparable to the odd Polynesian/Malaysian/Melanesian/Micronesian melange of Far Cry 3.

Really interesting episode! From the discussion, it seems like the reason that military strategies are more powerful than others is because it's a zero-sum game when trade, economy, and culture aren't. I wonder what a 4X game would look like where there was a fixed amount of gold to earn, limited resources that are consumed by buildings, and culture/religion/population that calculated as a percentage of a global pool. It'd be interesting to have a game where you can't afford to buy new troops because there's a massive trade empire next door sucking away all the money... Also, I know this is my hobby horse, but though I think the Paradox mechanics for warfare and treaties is unique and fun, the supremacy of military might is certainly not a solved problem in Europa Universalis IV. On the one hand, there is no endpoint system in EU4 besides war. Gold buys troops or things that get more gold, diplomacy controls or circumvents the conditions for war, and tech/ideas increase military efficiency or feed into other systems like trade that feed into war. On the other hand, new territory is the most cost-effective means of increasing power in EU4, both in terms of the MP expenditure, as opposed to buildings or ideas, and in terms of net short- and long-term rewards, in that new provinces give more gold to buy troops and more manpower to support them. The upshot of these two things is that an optimal playstyle for EU4 involves bashing one's head up against Paradox's magical fairy walls of nope (as the forum calls Aggressive Expansion and Overextension) over and over as one tries to play the game successfully while trying not to transgress Paradox's ever-changing rubric (if the patch notes are any judge) for how much success is too much success and hence "ahistorical", never mind that the Ottoman conquests of Hungary and the Mamluks and the Prussian conquest of Silesia are currently impossible with the game's systems being what they are. It just speaks to me that even Paradox, on their fourth iteration of their most successful franchise, still doesn't really know how to shape player behavior ingame, at least beyond setting hard thresholds that are effectively unbalanceable, although why they should care at all about player behavior in a predominantly singleplayer sandbox game with no victory conditions is beyond me and really another question entirely.

Ugh, yeah. Like I said, old wounds. Sorry, everybody! Yes, part of the Himalayas are in India, but those areas speak Pahari, not Hindi. If it's a fictional Himalayan state, it's a little odd for its residents to be speaking the language of their lowland neighbor. Also, I've now seen it repeated in a few other places that what's wrong are the big-city accents as much as the choice of language. People are saying that Ubi must have just brought in some Indian immigrants to do all the "native" parts. Again, disappointing if true. I can't tell, but I'm inclined to defer to people with the ear to care.

You can't un-sink a ship, Merus.

Not to reopen old wounds, but Ubisoft previewed the first five minutes of the game today. I love the setting, which just looks breathtaking, even the mud on the road, but about the rest I'm pretty lukewarm. The player character has an American passport and accent, the villain is a craaazy eccentric psycho who stabs his own subordinates and takes kidnapping selfies, and overall it just feels like a remix of Far Cry 3, complete with cack-handed meta-commentary about games-as-games ("There's a party waiting for you" and all that). A couple people commenting on the RockPaperShotgun article also complained that the Nepalese soldiers were voiced by Indians speaking Hindu, which is disappointing if true. Less optimistic the more I hear, but still holding out hope.

There is a "destroy title" console command, but you have to have the title ID, which I don't know is visible through "charinfo" or not. You might have to dig through the text defines to find it out.

I liked it. It was nice to have an entire episode take place in one location rather than jumping all over. It's a shame they only do it for big battles, though.

For the former, there's "secret bastard" events that can trigger and are fun, but they're pretty rare. Basically, the only difference that you'll notice is that if you type "charinfo 1" into the console, you'll notice that the DNA code for your son is completely different. Otherwise, your character's line has actually died out and only you as the player have knowledge of it. And yeah, like Dewar says, it sounds like a bug where the antipope wasn't automatically deposed when someone made a de jure claim on Hamar. Theoretically, the "depose antipope" CB should apply to any realm containing an antipope, but obviously that's not happening, so you can either fix it with the console or just play it out regularly. I also recommend reporting the bug to the Paradox forums, if you can. They haven't been in any hurry to make things work after Sons of Abraham changed a lot of the antipope mechanics, but at least having it on their list is a mitzvah.

Maybe? I don't know, when more of the Thumbs were in journalism, they had no problem discussing a game which one of them was playing on release and another had played a year before at E3. Even today, they have no problem discussing a game that one of them's played if the rest have seen the marketing and Twitter responses. They just let the person with the most current and firsthand knowledge take the lead in the conversation, it tends to work out. In fact, once Nick moved past a lot of his hesitance, there were several interesting insights, like about the stage at which the music was built into the game. And yeah, like anthonyRichard, I assume it was deference to a former employer or a desire not to be overly negative about major issues that might not exist in the game anymore, neither of which I'd begrudge him. But if the reason really is a concern that Nick's impressions would just be out of date and lack common ground with Chris, then that is very silly.

I really don't see how that would be ridiculous or untenable. Example exchange: Nick - "I remember this thing being this way and that thing being that way. I liked it a lot because it seemed to have potential, is it in the final game?" Chris - "It works really well, but maybe they changed this and that because things sound different? I don't remember this one thing you said being in it. Instead, there was something else." I can understand not wanting to dish hot scoops on one's former employer, and if that's the reason then it's totally fine, but having two people compare two different iterations of a game through the medium of conversation is one of the reasons I listen to the podcast. It's not like we're tuning in to hear the latest on 2014's hottest new games, we just want to hear what you guys think about stuff.

I don't know much, but isn't the Heroes of Newerth community renowned for being incredibly toxic, so maybe using it to predict the effect of a surrender function on the Dota 2 community is a little faulty, unless of course the latter is just as toxic, which I don't know for sure because I'm not interested in a multiplayer game that doesn't have to end until my opponent gets bored of taking victory laps.

Aaand it's a perfect time to link a lovely article by a former classmate of mine on Harry Potter and epilogues: http://the-toast.net/2014/02/10/harry-potter-and-books-after-they-end/

I'd probably have a better response to the politics and dynamics of anime OPs (usually made by a different studio that's just given the show's art and an explanation of the themes by the producers) but I'm wiped out today, so I'll just say that the Madoka staff's Latin use continues to be the death of me. I've never seen vinco used in the passive with numquam to indicate a state of being and it freaked me out a little. Either Non vincar (which is still ugly because indicative shouldn't be carrying intent) or Numquam victus sum (which I don't think conveys the futurity they seem to want). I'd almost say Non victurus sum, but that's more medieval than classical, so maybe just pick a better word like supero or succumbo. Vinco really shouldn't be used too extensively in the passive if it's not preterite. Yeah, I know. Sorry!

Yeah, I can hear them shouting, "Grenade!" in my head. I don't remember their response to the player in cover beyond attempts to flank, though.

I really hope so. I cannot imagine anything I would be less likely to buy than a pay-to-win space combat game.