complexmath

Rumor has it that there will be an open beta in late February, so maybe wait for that before you decide.

Yeah, the story is a problem with The Division. There's been an apocalypse, and to set the world back on track it's your job to go into NYC and murder everyone who was too poor to have an exit plan! Also, being a silent protagonist in this game just doesn't work for me at all. I played a black woman in the beta, and having to stand there while a bunch of white people argued about plans and then conclude by telling me to go kill more poor, sick folks was... yeah. Not great. Though I didn't really expect much given the premise of the plague (it's a virus that infects and is transmitted via paper money). The Rikers thing bugged me as well. I've friends who spent time on Rikers Island. Misrepresenting them as the worst of the worst just didn't sit well with me. However, I was fully on board with The Warriors-ing of different factions. I only wish they'd gone further and told me to go fight The Baseball Furies or something.

I hope they do use FairFight. A server-side solution would be perfect, and it's reasonably effective in Battlefield 4.

For what it's worth, apparently the way multi is handled in The Division (as of this last closed beta) is kind of a trainwreck in terms of its resistance to client-side hacking: https://www.reddit.com/r/thedivision/comments/43jr61/pc_version_will_be_plagued_with_cheaters/ UbiSoft has responded to this issue and promises to have a solution prior to launch, but I'd keep my eye on the upcoming public beta if you're planning to get this on PC. If the game ships without changes, the Dark Zone could be filled with invisible, teleporting people with unlimited ammo. Given how these hacks work and how close the game is to launch, I suspect the fix that will be applied is likely to be an invasive third-party tool that dynamically detects code modification. But that's just speculation. I hope they find a less contentious way to address this.

For the Gryphon I just kept my eye on what it was doing, and made sure I wasn't in its flight path when it dove. I never used any skills, just ran around. My pawns got pretty beat up though. I found myself wishing I had an archer in the group to bring it down faster. I mostly just waited for a few minutes until it landed, then charged over and hacked its wings off.

Go has been insurmountable until recently for computers because the traditional approach to solving such games (directed graphs) don't work because Go has too many possible moves from any given game state. So AI for Go sucked until about 5 years ago when someone made a breakthrough, and that approach has been improving rapidly since then. Personally, I think this is really great because I love Go, but AI opponents have been terrible until recently. Less than 10 years ago it was possible to break the best Go AI by doing things that would be suicide in a normal game, like drawing a line of stones across the middle of the board. Now I can play a solo game on my phone and the AI is good enough that my game actually improves from the experience. It's awesome.

The Knight-Enchanter or whatever it's called? Shield and spell? Or Warrior. So far I've found the pawn AI to be a bit weak, and so for my group to be most effective I need to place myself as the primary source of crowd control, which pretty much means sword & board. Warrior attacks, while exceedingly powerful, were just a bit too slow to wrangle a group of enemies. I've maxed the base Fighter class though and so moved on to the magical fighter to experiment. So far I've found the staff skills to kind of stink (because they're too slow and so poor at melee range), but the shield skills have potential. Chimeras aren't super hard though. Jump on their butt and take out the snake tail first, then go after the other heads. I haven't found Gryphons to be terribly difficult either, though it's a bit of a waiting game until they land and you can jump on their back to attack their wings.

"People should have basic empathy. Now let me demonstrate my lack of empathy by rejecting this idea."

Oh right. Then Evangelion certainly fits. I feel like there should be a thread for this though. It would be easy to rattle off a bunch of examples that are thematically appropriate.

It's certainly very different, and much shorter. Personally, I think the prose in Crying of Lot 49 was meant to read like an acid trip flows. There's a stream of consciousness sort of rambling to it, and every discovery is somewhat ridiculous and only gives rise to more questions. The book is very much a product of the time it was written, though I think if you're going to read only one Pynchon book, this is the one to read. Regarding Maxwell's Demon. The second law of thermodynamics states that the entropy in a system will always increase. Basically, if you light a fire in one corner of a room, the entire room will slowly get warmer. So energy transfer is always in a direction that results in a state of eventual equilibrium. Maxwell's Demon is basically a mental exercise regarding some force that violates the second law of thermodynamics--imagine a tiny magical creature who eternally separates heat from cold. There are philosophical discussions that could be had, but in a practical sense, if Maxwell's Demon actually existed you could use it to drive a perpetual motion machine. Free energy forever. It's like the Philosopher's Stone of thermodynamics. Now if you're really into computers you may have heard of Peltier coolers (heat pumps). They basically perform a similar task as Maxwell's Demon, but they don't violate the second law because of the amount of energy required to make them work. It's important to note that the work performed by Maxwell's Demon is done for free.

Evangelion isn't an anime I'd typically suggest for people completely new to the format, but it would certainly make for an interesting talking point. Though I'd be just as up for a Thumbs watch of Brazil, for many of the same reasons (contention about the ending, for example). Or perhaps I'm just shilling for Brazil. Which I wouldn't feel guilty about at all. Brazil is fantastic.