Gormongous

Phaedrus' Street Crew
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Posts posted by Gormongous


  1. Not terribly much, the general fucked-ness of the world aside! I got furloughed for the first year of the pandemic, more or less, then got rehired, but I'm getting bored at a job that's getting busier without getting more interesting, so that may change someday soon. I also caught Covid despite a booster right before visiting home for Christmas, so that sucked, but otherwise things have been good. My relationship with my current girlfriend is stronger than ever, my podcast is still alive somehow, and Elden Ring has managed to get me back into games.


  2. Hey Zeus! Glad to know that you've been doing well after what sounds like an incredibly rough patch. I'm embarrassed to be checking in... uh, two months late? But yeah, I stop by sometimes.


  3. On 9/29/2020 at 2:56 AM, chanman said:

    On the topic of the weird eugenics optimization part of CK3, is it possible to accidentally on-purpose end up with offspring as messed up as the Habsburgs from all the excessive consanguinity?

     

    The "inbred" trait is pretty harsh, but there are perks in the legacy trees quite early on to minimize the harms of inbreeding, so... yes and no?


  4. On 8/30/2020 at 6:16 AM, ilitarist said:

    I've made peace with TW problems with balance between battles and strategic map mostly cause 3K got it right. I was optimistic about Troy cause I thought it would be just like 3K but with characters I knew before that game.

     

    It's very clear that Troy is on a heavily modified version of Rome 2's engine and the best innovations post-Rome 2 have been backported in with mixed success. Certainly, the political and diplomatic systems can't remotely match Three Kingdoms for their lack of extraneous clicks and other bullshit. I'm playing the Furious Wilds DLC for the latter right now and it's incredible, after a win as Hector in Troy, how much I keep expecting agent spam, hiking across the map to deal with a sudden declaration of war, and tedious sieges when Three Kingdoms largely dispensed with that (and hopefully someone's taking notes there).


  5. On 7/28/2020 at 3:08 PM, twmac said:

    My girlfriend then noted that Nic Cage almost seems incapable of playing a non asshole.

     

    I think that Adaptation is the main counterpoint to that observation, because Donald is so kind and patient and forgiving... but, of course, he's playing the foil to the anxious and caustic Charlie, so...


  6. I only wish I had the time to register an account on a random forum in order to clutch my pearls dramatically about how underpaid nurses are and how it's the fault of the jocks who bullied me in high school. Why is anyone mad about professional athletes and other entertainers being, on the far end of the bell curve, mildly overpaid? The most cursory Google search reveals that it'd be much more logical and effective to blame health system and health plan CEOs for giving themselves multi-million dollar bonuses when it comes to nurses being underpaid, but I guess that that would require a critique of our society and not just blaming overpaid athletes as individual signs of our decadence.

     

    Also, how about this: professional athletes absolutely destroy their bodies (and, in some cases, their brains) over what is usually a decade-long career and they deserve whatever money people are willing to give them without being made into a bogeyman for the vast societal inequalities that have allowed billionaires to add $262 billion to their already ineffable fortunes during a once-in-a-century pandemic? Like, yeah, some people are overpaid for the labor they do, but your first target is professional athletes, whose work you can see manifest on their very bodies? Really?


  7. On 3/14/2020 at 10:53 AM, Erkki said:

    One thing that all of his movies seem to have in common is that they are almost all more about women than men, or at least they treat both as equals, often having main characters of both genders. And some of the films highlight the struggle that women have had to face. I'm not sure I'd call these feminist movies, but it's still so good to find that even back in the 50s Japan, not all filmmakers were sexist or focusing mainly on men's stories.

     

    I've definitely noticed that trend in Japanese media, too. I wonder if it's the cultural baggage of novels (and fiction in general) being a women-dominated endeavor in Japan throughout the pre-modern period. Men wrote poems and nonfiction, women wrote "silly stories," and that's how The Tale of Genji came to be considered as perhaps the world's first novel.


  8. On 2/25/2020 at 10:22 PM, clyde said:

    fuck

     

    can't say that I didn't appreciate the forum whjle it lasted.

    !Blast

     

    To be fair, I just haven't seen Frozen 2. I liked the first one well enough, but even those who loved it seemed to be mixed about the followup. Jenny Nicholson got a good video out of it, at least:

     

     


  9. 1 hour ago, Kroem said:

    Supported being a soothing euphemism for emptying people's wallets and, worse, encouraging other strategy games to follow the same model!

     

    Yeah, I enjoyed much of the DLC for Crusader Kings 2, but I find it incredibly telling that they twice announced that they were done making DLC for the game... only to renege on that statement. I'm not nearly naive enough to think that they got sudden ideas for another two years' worth of DLC twice, and design choices driven by financial necessity always make me leery but especially when it comes to video games.


  10. I saw The Beach Bum, Harmony Korine's latest film, and it was... fine? Despite Korine's stated motive of making a movie about a lucky dude living a happy and blessed life, it's really not too different from his previous works that figure near-sociopathic burnouts leaving destruction in their wake. Want to see Matthew McConaughey as a stoned pervert without two brain cells to rub together, but seen every other movie where he plays that role? I mean, sure, maybe try out The Beach Bum, although I personally got more out of a couple of the cameos myself (Martin Lawrence and Zac Efron, especially).


  11. 6 hours ago, chanman said:

    There was just something about the flight dynamics of the ships in XWA that made them feel a bit more lightweight; a bit less tight than in TIE Fighter or X-Wing. I don't recall playing X-wing vs. TIE Fighter, so maybe the change happened around then.

     

    Nah, I played the crap out of X-Wing vs. TIE Fighter and it was especially good about differentiating light and heavy craft. X-Wing Alliance was the inflection point.


  12. 16 hours ago, Erkki said:

    Aliens (1986, James Cameron) is such a brilliant action film. I had forgotten that I had already seen it and it must be because I saw it as a kid because some images came back to me as memories of nightmares. I think the story actually comes out better in the Director's Cut, which really makes the movie a lot more about motherhood, and maybe I looked at it in a naive way, but it felt quite powerful. The ending is still quite disgustingly good. The images in this film are just so amazing. I want to learn more about what they did for the lighting. I have the Alien to Prometheus box set with some extras so might go through those soon.

     

    My issue with the director's cut is largely that the addition of scenes on LV-426 before the outbreak ruin the dramatic tension of the first act, but the rest of the changes are golden, I agree.


  13. I successfully defended my dissertation yesterday. It's (almost) the end of a grueling three-month process where I was promised another year's extension on the program deadline, denied that extension by the university administration, and then given the chance to defend an abridged version of my dissertation, after much bargaining and pleading with my department. I have a lot of feelings: pride that I was able to write almost 25,000 words in the space of a month while also working full time in order to finish a draft for submission, disappointment that my dissertation couldn't be the full work that I'd envisioned, relief that I got it all done anyway, humiliation that I was forced to spend weeks begging for professors and bureaucrats to suspend arbitrary and often informal rules that they'd always tell me they didn't personally agree with, and anxiety that... well, that feels a lot like low-grade PTSD, like I'm on the plane home but I'll always be ass-deep in that jungle muck.

     

    I've been incredibly lucky to have a lot of friends, not a few of them from this community, who've supported me in this decade-long process, and I owe each and every one of them my thanks. Whether or not I use my doctorate to teach, as I had planned, I'm incredibly happy to have achieved a lifelong goal of mine, against such odds.


  14. 22 hours ago, Roderick said:

    I really like Waypoint's tone and writing, but I wish half of their articles weren't actually podcasts. I get that it's so much easier to discuss stuff in a spoken medium, but it makes me less inclined to visit their site. I can't count the times I've visited the site and saw a super interesting looking headline, only to find it's another podcast which I don't want to listen to. (I only listen to podcasts in my car and don't have the patience to put one on while I'm behind my PC or phone.)

     

    Yeah, that's a big issue for me, too. At the peak of the site's output, two thirds of the "articles" were either podcasts or those discussion prompts that they've thankfully gotten rid of now. I don't know why they hired some of the best writers in games journalism in order to put them in front of a microphone and have them churn out half-baked gut takes on stuff. Lately it's been really frustrating that their Neon Genesis Evangelion (re)watch has been almost entirely "I like this" "I don't like that" with Austin doing some history lessons in between.


  15. Also, I was such a big fan of the first couple seasons of Letterkenny and I was hoping that the fifth-season premiere was a sign of better things to come, after the slump of the third and fourth seasons, but instead it was bad and the sixth season is even worse. Jared Keeso has clearly chewed through all his material about small-town life in rural Canada and, accordingly, has fallen back on the last resorts of every long-running comedy: flanderization and in-jokes. The show's tight dialogue, a cocktail of obscure slang run through a byzantine syntax, has devolved into repetitive patter that fills up way too much time. Sometimes a joke going on for too long can be funny (and it was, in earlier seasons), but it's basically Letterkenny's only class of joke at this point. For example, their gag about "To be fair" is four seasons old now and the humor is entirely that they haven't forgotten said gag.  I wish they would. I wish I could.

     

    The fifth and sixth seasons are also odd because they feature cartoonish portrayals of Quebecois, Mennonites, and... gay men? I guess the show used up all its earnestness looking at farmers, druggies, and the natives on the neighboring reservation. I can tell that the writing of recent seasons wants to push this show to a fantastical place where everything can be exaggerated and outrageous (a place where there's more and easier material, presumably) but I just miss episodes like "A Fuss in the Back Bush" or "The Native Flu." Oh well!


  16. On 6/9/2019 at 9:40 AM, TychoCelchuuu said:

    Hemsworth was actually one of the only parts of the movie that worked for me. I thought he did a great job at being charismatic and seductive, which is the main trait of that character.

     

     

    I feel like, if you're riffing on Manson, you need more than just charisma. You need the threat of extreme violence, and the bar's got to be higher than "Sometimes shoots people for no reason" because that's already a character trait of half the cast. But hey! Diff'rent strokes.

     

    Actually, they had a Phil Spector stand-in and just used him for a #MeToo flourish, so I don't really know what I was expecting with this movie's historical shoutouts.


  17. Saw Bad Times at the El Royale half a year late. Generally speaking, I like Drew Goddard, but this movie needed someone else on the script or a different person directing, because it was full of bright ideas (including one tremendous scene involving an a cappella rendition of "You Can't Hurry Love") but struggled to integrate them into its flashback-heavy chronology without gutting the pacing. By the time that a surprisingly miscast Chris Hemsworth showed up, I'd mostly broken up with the film, but I imagine it'll be one of those experiences where I remember only the high points a couple years from now, like its motifs of people pushed to the fringes and the need for absolution, and not that it overstayed its welcome by a good half an hour.


  18. 22 hours ago, Ben X said:

    Miles better than Game Of Thrones, too (definitely regretting my decision to move back to the show instead of waiting for the books now).

     

    If it makes you feel better, Martin's said that the endgame that he gave to Benioff and Weiss was just one possible outcome, so any resemblance to the books that'll hopefully come out someday will probably be only passing.


  19. 4 hours ago, SecretAsianMan said:

    Oh man, Deus Ex.  I bounced off that game so hard.  I had never played a Deus Ex game before Human Revolution and I was quite excited to get into it.  The story seemed interesting and it has all the world building details I normally love but I HATED everything about playing the game.  It felt so ridiculously clumsy and awkward.  Attempting to do anything either in stealth or loud was a comedy of errors as I never managed to accomplish either one with any amount of grace.  It could be a personal failure on my part but I very quickly gave it up after much frustration.

     

    Weirdly, I didn't have that reaction to Deus Ex: Human Revolution, but I did to Mankind Divided. I'm not sure what the difference was: the formula getting tired with another thirty- or forty-hour game, the layout change from corridor missions linking small open-world areas to a more holistically open-world design, the incredibly dumb and obvious "ripped-from-the-headlines" themes of Mankind Divided... Whatever it was, I played through Human Revolution twice but gave up ten hours into Mankind Divided.


  20. 1 hour ago, I_smell said:

    I recently bought Stardew Valley and I just don't get it. The tone feels like it skews toward an even younger audience than I expected. I don't like the artwork, I walked around talking to characters and I don't like any of them, I don't like walking around the map so much, I don't mind farming but it's not that exciting...

    I saw myself reaching 4pm and saying "welp, I might as well go to bed now!" a couple times and it felt heavily depressing. I can imagine a different execution of this concept that I do like, I loved hearing it described to me, but playing this is sapping the life outta me.

     

    I also bounced off of Stardew Valley, despite the farming life appealing a lot for me, but it was because I couldn't handle the combination of (perceived) time pressure and missable unlocks. I know that it's supposed to be the kind of game where you say to yourself, "Aww, I didn't manage to plant the strawberry bushes early enough! Oh well, next year," but I'm just not set up like that. Also, I found myself getting kind of annoyed that you could give a nice gift to someone and they'd feel indifferent or even negative towards you, because of a secret list of likes and dislikes for every character. I guess what I'm saying is that I'm built for more of a management sim-style farming game, but I liked the surface vibe of Stardew so much...


  21. 17 hours ago, Henke said:

    Dead Cells - It looks great and has been hyped to hell and back, but I'm just not feeling it, man. I don't think this kinda Spelunky-esque procedurally generated platformer thingy is my kinda thing. Speaking of which...

     

    I feel you on Dead Cells. I can appreciate the intricacy and the skill of it all, but beating a boss or getting a cool new blueprint just leaves me feeling exhausted and frustrated, not exhilarated like in Dark Souls.


  22. I bought Star Traders: Frontiers last year on the dual recommendations of Rock Paper Shotgun and Tom Chick. It is everything that they say it is: a breathtakingly vast space sim where you can do well as an illegal or legal trader, a mercenary, a diplomatic courier, a pirate, a spy, or any mix of those roles. It's got as many interlocking systems as a Paradox game and it truly does its best to let you engage with or automate them, whatever your taste is.

     

    And yet I've played over twenty hours without really clicking with it. It seems at once too deep (the reputation and character RPG systems, especially) and too shallow (you make money to make more money to make even more money). I recognize it as an objectively good game, and I keep wanting to come back to it, but I just can't connect. Have my tastes changed? Is it the presentation, which is admittedly anemic? I don't know.

     

    Do you have any games that you should like and that you keep trying to like, but just... don't?