Gormongous

It does, but they're generally disliked because in 99% of cases they elicit only generic responses from NPCs. The whole point of keywords is that you can write custom dialogue for each person without worrying about appropriateness, right?

Just so I know exactly where to look, if I want to restore my registry to the Windows backup from the command prompt on the recovery disc: cd /d c:\windows\system32\config xcopy *.* c:\regback cd regback dir copy /y software .. copy /y system .. copy /y sam .. Ugh, I get bile in my throat just looking at that. The most protip of protips: do not absentmindedly run CCleaner or some other registry cleaner before restarting when you have Windows updates in the barrel.

I beat the first Crysis, of all things. God, never in my life have I had a game go from awesome to awful so fast. For half the game, you're the motherfucking Predator, but for the other half, you're Oscar Mike before that was even a thing. If I just distance myself from the frustration of fighting the aliens, it's actually kind of funny how bland the final act was: you have a general yelling in your ear constantly to defend the flight deck, disarm the reactor, shoot the hatch, etc. You don't even need your suit powers, except to punch doors on occasion and to run faster in order to keep the barks from looping. Just give me an empty field and some Koreans to murder, Crysis. You can keep your ice squids and your ominous forebodings for some other game. Also, developers, even if you think your engine's sweet, try to exercise some restraint when planning the money shots. I'm sure Crytek would shed a tear if they saw how impassive I was when I watched the alien ship implode from the back of my VTOL. I was impressed the first dozen times, but when the whole damn game takes place at dawn, dusk, or high noon and everything's on fire, the spectacle wears thin.

I just finished Mitchell's The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet, which has been in the barrel since Chris mentioned it almost a year ago. I don't know how much I want to talk about the book, because I liked it better than Cloud Atlas but found it less ambitious. Still, maybe it was ambitious in more insidious ways? I expected a detailed portrait of Japanese society at the turn of the nineteenth century, but instead got a beautiful homily about the ugliness of colonialism/imperialism from the ground up. I don't know if de Zoet is the best portrayal of a pious man that I've ever read, but I did like that no one was a child or an idiot for believing what they did. That's so rare in historical fiction, usually someone has to be right and someone else wrong. As a side note, there was a scene about a third of the way through where they have to remove a kidney stone from one of the hands. I was so pleased to see the scene almost perfectly mirrored by a moment in the second season of Deadwood. Nothing makes me happier than being reminded of that show, even a demonstration of the fact that kidney stones were impossibly lethal before the twentieth century.

I still maintain they didn't do enough to distance it from the Lords Management genre. To most strategy gamers, who are quite hostile to multiplayer and "hybrid" games, it sounds like Chris was putting lipstick on a pig and trying to sell a Lords Management game as an ARPG. Thirty seconds of him talking about coop play and tech trees on this podcast convinced me otherwise, but there's very little sign of that in the pitch video. It kills me, because in the comment thread on RPS about the kickstarter failing, people were saying stuff like "I'm a huge fan of GPG, but fuck Chris Taylor and his DOTA clone cash-in" and "I'm so tired of having good single-player games ruined by mulitplayer." There was a communications breakdown somewhere, because barely anyone was talking about Wildman in the form that Chris pitched it.

But strangely enough, almost every explanation on forums or comment threads as to why they wouldn't support Chris' kickstarter was either "I can't believe Gas-Powered Games has sold out and is making a Lords Management" or "I'm still mad about Demigod, Supreme Commander 2, or Space Siege". There's not much to be done about the latter, but the former could have been easily avoided by making clear that mechanics are being borrowed from the Lords Management genre to make something different, rather than just being a straight DOTA clone. It seems like Chris' kickstarter pitch focused more on how they'd hitched their wagon to this exciting new genre, when he should have been emphasizing what made it different.

Is that confirmed? The features list only mentions the bookmark, but the ad copy says something about being able to start "as far back as the year 867 AD", which implies a continuum. If only a bookmark, disappointing. A lot of cool things go down in those two hundred years, which I guess might be too much for us to ask Paradox to model. Still...

Weaver's description of his process is so illuminating. Umberto Eco has written, "Translation is the art of failure," right? Truer words were never spoken. Sometimes, if I'm lucky, I get commissions from other professors to translate Latin texts into English. It's a job I hear I'm quite good at, but it's still so daunting. I can work for hours getting down the meaning of the words (which is no small feat in itself, considering that Latin has many more and much subtler words for arriving, leaving, falling, killing, etc.) and still know full well that I've obliterated the artistry of the passage they make up, because Latin has fluid word order and can position words wherever you please, for dramatic or ironic effect. There's just no way to translate it, the entire sense of it is lost. It must take a person much more accustomed to failure than me to be a translator full-time. That said, I think Calvino will be a great read some months down the line. It'd be a good excuse for me to read it now, rather than when I'm more fluent in Italian, which is what I always tell myself.

Dammit, you're right. I'm a dumbass and mixed them in my memory. Do you ever wish you could rewind time? My point stands for Calvino, though. At least until Nappi comes and pokes holes in that.

I was really thinking only of Lolita, which is better in the original Russian. But yeah, fair point.

Nabokov and especially Calvino make me paranoid, because they're in translation. I know enough Italian at least to know there's some serious legwork being done to render Calvino into English, which gives me disquiet.

Oh god, that is monstrous. The most intense and insuperable pain I've ever experienced was the full dislocation of my right shoulder. Dealing with that as a matter of course doesn't even seem livable to me. I'd planned to start a "weird medical shit" topic after finding a tonsillolith in the back of my throat last week. I'm a little relieved someone beat me to the punch.

Yeah, I've never fainted when getting blood drawn, but every time I come very close. Colors fade, I get tunnel vision, my head swims, my limbs lose feeling... My body dislikes the look and feel of needles enough to trigger a shock response, which unfortunately means that they'll usually have to try a few times to find a place with enough blood pressure. Bodies are weird. Oh, a dude in my high school theatre class once snuck up behind me and put me in a headlock. I passed out before I knew what was going on and woke up like fifteen seconds later on the floor. But that's not quite the same.

See, this is why I study dead people.

I think it's in around 1:11:05. There's a reader mail early in the second half that asks whether the Thumbs have memories of playing games with parents, Sean says his mom has no clue what he does and then apologizes to her, and Steve ruins that sweet moment. Sean's distress after that is freakin' beautiful, as is the Wicker Man reference from Chris that follows.

Okay, I listened to the podcast and have more things to say. In particular, Troy's comments on the push and pull of the seasons on the Germanic tribes on Rome's doorstep made me think of Colin McEvedy talking about the "pulse of Asia" in his discussion of why the Mongols won themselves a steppe empire, rather than the Huns or Avars or Maygars or Pechenegs or Cumans or Turks. The notion of other tribes pushing you up against the Romans and threatening your annihilation, while at the same being necessary for your survival, excites me so much. Too many games incentivize a genocidal policy because less enemies and more land is always better. If you need other tribes' income to complement your own, that's a very interesting wrinkle on the gameplay. I'm way too tempted to push for more historical features that may or may not be within Jon's remit, like the federation of two weakened tribes or the settling of a defeated tribe inside Roman borders, but I hope that similar measures exist to keep the pressure from both nature and man high through the whole game.

This one time, I told an anecdote.

I think it's indicative of the mentality out there that .mkv is such a powerful and useful format, but companies like Sony didn't support it for half a decade because they declared it the format for pirates. Even now, although their most recent round of Blu-ray players supports .mkv in theory, updates routinely break that support and bork basic things like font rendering. It's like 1960s record execs trying to downplay the success of the Beatles. And yeah, ads before DVD and Blu-ray menus are ludicrous. I actually put a disc in this weekend with five minutes of previews that "menu", "skip", and "fast-forward" all didn't work on. I nearly took the disc out right there. Fuck that.

Something like the candy-fueled delirium of "Farewell, Video Games" would be perfect.

I don't subscribe to Netflix, but I do buy lots of physical media, and this totally captures my feelings. Without a doubt, the pirates are delivering the superior product. It's delivered faster and more easily, with higher quality, than anything I could pay for. It's even worse with anime, where free fan translations for Japanese Blu-ray rips are routinely head-and-shoulders above what even the most successful anime distros offer. I have several burned DVDs with fansubs of series I already own, just because the free version is so much better. If there were suddenly a five-dollar fee attached to pirating a twelve-episode cour, I would pay it in a second. I know it's easy to dismiss that statement as the bluster of someone already compromised by pirating, but I spend a lot on media, more than any of my friends who watch all their shows legally through Netflix or Hulu. Yet I'm fully aware that companies could get even more money out of me if their digital efforts weren't so awful.

I bought a little shop-blower, because compressed air leaves a slight residue that bothers me on a low, irrational level. Supposedly you're not supposed to use a vacuum because the action generates static, but that might belong among the same half-myths that sold grounding bracelets.

To be fair, some of the Expanded Universe stuff on Han Solo's smuggling career is really good. I've reread a couple of the Han Solo Adventures and they still hold up. Maybe Abrams or the scriptwriter has read them too? Keep in mind, we're now free of Lucas' prideful insistence that third-party material never be incorporated into the franchise.

I haven't listened to this yet, but was Jon Shafer inspired by my first post on the Idle Thumbs forums? Either way, it's funded sight unseen. The fall of the Roman Empire and the so-called Dark Ages don't get nearly enough attention in games.

Yeah, I had a really weird reaction when I finished Dennou Coil this summer. It took me a while to realize it was satisfaction. There were no loose ends or questions marks, just a show that explored its premise to the fullest and then tied everything up in a bow. Shame it'll never get a full release. I'm usually really good about guessing people's half-remembered childhood anime, but I have no freakin' clue here. Sorry, man.

The really exciting thing is them pushing back the start date two hundred years. The Carolingian empire is still twenty years away from its final split, the Abbasid caliphate owns half the map, Great Moravia and Bulgaria are regional superpowers, and England is still three or four different kingdoms. It'll be a completely different game, for better or for worse.