Gormongous

I have a friend who loves everything about Cincinnati and plans to live there her whole life, but hates every single person living there and spends most of her time feeling incredibly alone. I really don't understand her at all, because what good is a place if you hate all the people in it, but then I'm from Dallas and, while I enjoy visiting for a week or so every year, I would never want to live there again. Sometimes I'm surprised I even made it the first eighteen years whole.

Very easy! I wonder if the designers intended for player to cut themselves off from content regularly. You're only really guaranteed that first meeting with a trainer or vendor, before events might take them elsewhere, but the game teaches you everywhere else that just carrying around a large amount of souls, the amount necessary to buy all the useful stuff from a newfound trainer, is a stupid risk to take, so I've met every important vendor without much of a soul to my name. It's really more that this is the first time that they've disappeared rather than moved.

Ugh, just realized that the dialogue I clicked through quickly about six hours ago lost me the pyromancy trainer at the Firelink Shrine. Not that I really have trouble getting down to the one in Blighttown or that I need Iron Skin, but still. Dark Souls: always answer "yes" to questions, except when you should answer "no". Training myself on those crazy huge cats in the Darkroot Garden should be a good way to destress. Careful, the Stray Demon is there, in a place that will surprise you, and he's a little tough, although probably easier for you after fighting other bosses and getting a higher level than me.

I should have listened to you anyway, Bjorn. The Catacombs were miserable for me from beginning to end, Pinwheel was a boring boss, and my attempt to duck into the Tomb of Giants to grab the bonfire for later cost me twenty-five thousand souls and all my patience. With more fluency or better gear, it probably wouldn't have frustrated me half as much. Anyway, I got myself back to the Sewer bonfire to farm some humanity and found myself totally ready for a break. Is there any advice for how to fight Prowling Demons? The one in the Catacombs seems nigh unkillable to me. Neither my +10 Claymore or my pyromancy took off much of his health at all, plus the corridor is too narrow to really make a waiting game work.

I think it's funny that male-genitalia insults usually have to be qualified by size, but female-genitalia insults stand on their own, sometimes even making no sense when qualified by size. Anyway, good article, good read!

I think the forums for most Kickstarted games are meant to be a bottle for the developers to catch the lightning of their Kickstarter. Whether they succeed in that is something I don't know. I'm a member of the forums for every game that I backed, but I haven't really found them to be very congenial places to frequent, because they're typically full of people with nothing else in common besides a shared sense of entitlement for and ownership of a thing that doesn't yet exist. The fifth thread addressed to the devs to the tune of "here's how I would design your game for you based on the Kickstarter video and your list of influences" was enough to get me to scale back my involvement across the board.

Or let it behave like a missile rather than a boarding drone, with a chance of missing or being dodged.

Booted it up. First impressions: menu system is nice? Info screen is weirdly glitched. Eh, can't wait to play it anyway. The PC Gamer review for the port is glowing, although it doesn't really say much specific about this particular version of the game itself.

"Idle Thumbs: a barf podcast, about video games!" This is gonna be a good one.

I was at a friend's house grading tonight while he beat the game (on easy, of course) with one. The short answer is no, it doesn't seem nearly as viable. From the early game until the endgame, he had to invest as much scrap in his weapons suite as he would have without drones, so it's no longer the alternative to traditional weaponry that it used to be. Granted, a Combat Drone II and a Defense Drone II meant that he pretty much took no damage at all during the boss fight, but before that point he was almost entirely reliant either on his charge lasers or teleporter to kill an enemy ship. I know for a fact he would have rather had hacking, which doesn't have the random chance of being shot down that the Combat Drone did. It's kind of disappointing. I still see drones as useful, but pound per pound of scrap the least cost-effective way around which to build your game now.

I think you might just have to show some superhuman patience, Griddle. That's how it was with the Stray Demon. Only about one in three of his attacks left an opening, so ninety percent of my time was just spent teaching myself not to trade blows and to wait until I was sure I could get a hit off without taking damage.

I don't think anyone is arguing that the scene is particularly egregious, even outside of the setting of Game of Thrones. The criticisms I've read and with which I agree are that the scene is just the latest in many over the course of the show that are spun as even more rapey than the already misogynistic books, in ways that are irrelevant or even detrimental to the plot and characters. Sometimes I wonder if the show is getting worse with this sort of thing because its principal means of promotion, at least in my circle of acquaintances, is through people expressing shock and dismay on Twitter and Facebook. I don't doubt that, were it possible, every episode would feature a Red Wedding, which bums me out, because the Red Wedding wasn't a particularly high point in the novels for me.

Well, I hated everyone before this thread made it cool.

Thanks! I figured, but I couldn't think of where else I wanted to go at the moment. I aced those skeletons easy when I was back in the Firelink Shrine, so I assumed that'd be where to go next. I also am really happy with how I've matured as a player in Dark Souls. I beat Quelaag on the first try just by being careful, watching her movements, and using the length of my weapon to keep me safe, the lattermost of which I haven't done well thus far. The Stray Demon was so much harder, but I persevered with only one rage breakdown and beat him after about a dozen tries, again by learning and being smart. It's really an experience like nothing else, no game has asked it of me in nearly the same way.

Do you think I'm at the catacombs too early? I rung the second bell and all I've done is peek into the New Londo Ruins and visit the Undead Asylum again. I know I need to return to the areas near the blacksmith at the Undead Parish soon, but I'm not really clear when will be most optimal.

Beat Quelaag and the Stray Demon today. Pissed away a ton of time and souls hunting for a way back to Firelink and thence to Oswald because I attacked Eingyi. Now I'm in the catacombs and finding it all a little frustrating. Not the skeletons or pyromancers really, just the twisting paths, dead ends, and spike traps. Is it all difficult-to-navigate areas from here on out?

In most Dungeons & Dragons settings, atheism does exist, but is based on the belief either that the gods are assholes and don't deserve to be worshiped or that worship is meaningless when it comes with material reward. It's a pretty interesting stance and one that characters in the Dragon Age franchise could adopt to good effect. Of course, Neverwinter Nights 2: Mask of the Betrayer shows that, in the Forgotten Realms setting, atheism is punished by being absorbed into the wall separating the afterlife from the rest of reality. It's a horrifying death and makes atheism much less defensible as an ideology. I don't know about you, but I think a lot of the logical basis for atheism is negated by the existence of the supernatural. If there are unknowable and uncontrollable powers outside of natural law, then certainly it's a force that deserves some kind of respect if not worship. It's a matter of giving the right name to a god, not whether one exists. I'm not sure how this observation dovetails into itsamoose's initial post, though.

Yeah! Not to mention his aesthetic argument is that "feminism" sounds too harsh and Germanic to be popular or effective, despite the fact that "feminism" comes from the French féminisme and not the German Frauenbewegung. You're right, it's a shockingly bad speech on so many levels and gives more ammunition to detractors of feminism than to feminists themselves. Now, whenever a MRA troll says he's a humanist rather than a feminist, he can point to good ole Joss.

I think people tend to be hostile to anyone whose convictions seem to condemn them. I also think it's a really immature thing to care about what another person does or doesn't eat. It's just one star in our own personal galaxy of morality, anyway.

My friend just sent me an email mentioning this manga!

Which one? He's given several and they've all been crummy. There's the one where he "interviews" a strawman about feminism, the one where he presents himself as the ideal feminist to a bunch of women, and the one where he says the word "feminism" needs to be replaced with something more aspirational. Honestly, I don't know why Equality Now keeps inviting a straight white dude back to talk about all the great stuff he's doing for them.

I've been wondering if I should do the same with cloaking. I'm not entirely convinced it's possible to defeat the boss without either cloaking or more defense drones than I ever have the scrap and reactor to field, but that's just a conviction and maybe should be challenged. I just beat the boss with the Slug B. Man, what a piece of crap cruiser. It feels like all the variants that start with a teleporter have to be just awful in every other respect in order to balance out the higher initial scrap intake. I probably spent 300 scrap alone just giving the Slug B some decent weapons, into something that could actually output enough damage to beat the boss. I ended up doing a heavy teleporter/mind control run, which worked better than I thought. I ignored mind control for half a dozen games because it seemed to be of very marginal use, but when it's fully upgraded a guy can kill a fellow crewmember and disable a system before it's all done. I slaughtered most of their crew firing breach missiles at the medbay, then cleaned up the ship itself at my leisure. It was an almost effortless run that I didn't think was going to happen when I was in sector five with just a chain laser, one tier of shields, and a halberd beam I had to turn off the chain laser to fire.

I say "best" and "worst" now because of the podcast. I say "super" a bit more too, but I like how this episode has added the extra cognitive step where I start to say something is "super" something, then stop to think if maybe "very" is the better word to use, then choose which works best.

Yeah, I guess. I don't know, Jaime's arc in the books is so interesting because the events of the first couple books teach you to loathe him as the enemy, but then as things begin to get rough for the Lannisters you see that actually he is one of the most honest and incorruptible people in that world, it's just that he doesn't care if anyone else knows. I can't imagine what sort of character arc the show's writers could devise that would be an improvement on that one, but then again my imagination's not always so great.