Gormongous

Whatever, the solution's easy. Just don't get sick!

Happy birthday, Tegan!

I wish they'd make some kind of announcement, even just to say the show's on hiatus for whatever reasons. The Thumbs have all worked in the game industry, surely they know that silence is never the best tack to take.

I get it. If you change the future, you change the past!

Car won't start. Well, more like the engine cranks and sometimes catches but won't stay caught. The tow truck will be here in a little over an hour. I have to be up to teach in six hours. This has not turned out to be a good day. EDIT: The tow truck guy got it to start right away, of course. It runs fine, except for the "Check Engine" light. I guess I know what I'm doing Monday after classes.

No 470 was not loud, it was a basic design flaw. But yeah, the main difference between vendors is the heatsink. Some companies use the stock heatsink, which tends to be better, but others use their own solution. You mostly just have to comb reviews on NewEgg or somewhere to find out what is what and if it is better.

Bioshock Infinite taught me that violence is always bad except when prompted by ethical or moral shortcomings, in which case you saw their goddamn face off.

Right, half a mile of wall should be enough, from the last time I read anything that indulged in theoretical habitat design. I know it's more about concept artists wanting something that looks plausible to human brains, which involves "protecting" inhabitants from the space right above their heads, but still. Still still still.

I'll always bring up King of Dragon Pass as the most educational of any game I've ever played. To be successful as a leader of tribes, you have to take into account the ebb and flow of the season, the superstition of your people, and the power of tradition. Only by looking backward constantly can you lead your tribe to something new. Better than any historical game, it answers the question I always get from my students, "Why didn't ancient people all just settle in cities and invent steel?"

Why do they always have roofs for ringworlds? If it's spinning fast enough to have gravity, it's spinning fast enough to hold atmo.

Nonsense, right now you are truly without fear.

Not to keep a thread off-topic, but isn't this the truth. Even when presented with a relatively minimal ship-building system, like Endless Space where you just fill "buckets" with parts, I still just settle for a balanced blend after one or two attempts to specialize. I feel like 99% of all space 4x games would be served with this design interface: You could divide that screen into heavy, medium, and light ships, if you really thought it necessary. Done. That's as much granularity as I've ever used, even when I was as deep into Galactic Civilization II's ship-building options as anyone else I've seen.

Nope, it's cake to have with coffee. I hated all bitter things as a child, so it took my poor mother years to convince me that coffee cake wasn't a Trojan Horse to get coffee inside me.

My bad, I thought you were bagging on its existence, not on its inclusion. EDIT: Actually on topic, I just finished listening to the tangent on the implications of intellectual property. Unsurprisingly, as an academic, I'm in agreement with Chris here. I'll even take it one step further: by tying the most salient aspects of a given character or work to a corporation, current copyright law ensures that the inevitable derivative works enrich the corporation, either with money or fame, rather than the character, the creator, or the culture. I'm a strict believer in "lifetime of the creator" limits, but that's mostly because my dissertation hinges on a book from 1926 that can't be reprinted or reproduced because it was composed and published by entities that ceased to exist after the outbreak of the Second World War.

Well, thank you for turning me off the Higurashi VN forever. That was something that really did need doing.

Girls Generation is South Korean, you racist. I'm kidding. About the "racist" bit, that is. Not Girls Generation.

The 1.3 patch, which has been a month coming, has failed to do anything more than tweak a couple of the changes put into place by 1.2. Well, that's not fair. They half-fixed the horribly wonky combat system, but managed to break all hotkeys and scroll bars, in addition to various little "off" things like rebel suppression. So it's more like they're still at square one. I bought Total War: Rome II a couple months ago and spent a week feeling incredibly burned. But I've left it behind and don't pay it a single thought anymore. The slow degeneration of Europa Universalis IV back into so many of the mistakes in previous installments, plus some brought over from other PDS titles, is much harder to ignore. I feel deeply sorry for anyone who bought this game on Rob's or someone else's recommendation as the simplest, most elegant, and most rewarding of Paradox's games, only to play it two patches out from those reviews and discover a confused and difficult title that is all about giving with one hand, taking with the other, and calling it "balance." The devs have said over and over that, despite all theme and UI evidence to the contrary, direct conquest is not supposed to be a viable means of expansion; instead, you're supposed to feed provinces to your vassals and then integrate them. Too bad that both are multi-step processes with several dozen undocumented "quirks" for players to learn the hard way! No matter, if you don't figure it out quick, a coalition of every neighboring nation will wipe you off the map, so you needn't worry about getting stuck in an invisible fail-state. Just play four or five games, until you stumble upon the right playstyle, then keep playing only that way. That's how Paradox likes its "sandboxes" nowadays! I have no idea whom this game is for anymore.

Yeah, I think that the slower pacing of TNG and its extreme introspection with most of its characters both mean that those episodes take longer to go anywhere and don't go as far when they do. I actually enjoyed almost all Worf-centric episodes more than Data- or Troi-centric ones, despite Worf being incredibly underwritten in TNG, because his personality kept the "Wow, it's fucked up being an alien/robot/woman in spaaace" stage of any episode's plot from lasting more than a few minutes.

I feel like the worst episodes in every Star Trek series are "Uh oh, there's something fucked up with Data's/Troi's/Odo's/Dax's/Kes'/Seven of Nine's body!" Trek just can't do good body horror, probably because its sense of reality and the attendant stakes are so fluid.

Easy, when Sisko grows the goatee.

Over the past three years, I rewatched both Next Generation and Deep Space 9. Both take a while to really get going, although for different reasons (for TNG Roddenberry was still around and the writing team hadn't really coalesced, for DS9 it took a while to figure out how to be more than just "TNG that stays in one place"). Both also really pick up towards the middle of their runs, and I really don't regret watching the mediocre early seasons, since they give you a good sense of how far the characters have come both in terms of narrative events and in terms of writing quality.

A thousand and one posts! This feels like some kind of milestone.

Also, the Command & Conquer reboot scrapped and the studio developing it closed.

If we're just giving opinions, Scrubs has its up and downs until the third season, although never as solid as the first, but afterwards it begins a slow decline that turns into a cliff after the fifth.

Tailypo! That's a good one. Man, it seems kinda profane that a spooky story has a Wikipedia page.