Flynn

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Posts posted by Flynn


  1. I'm tempted to take a crack at Jake's generated Frasier idea, well the text-only part -- so the simplest part.   The idea of feeding the original script back into the generator with Frasier's lines removed and asking it to guess them might make for a nice middle ground between silly nonsense output and the actual script.

     

    But my beefy GPU is busy mining Reddit's new Garlic based cryptocurrency...

     

    What a world we live in.

     

     

     

     

     


  2. It sounds like you already decided to launch a brand new show instead of keeping this feed.  And that you took some feedback earlier?

     

    I guess I'll chime in anyway.  Many of my favorite podcasts have completely gone off the rails from the original format/topic/genre and that's cool.  Would probably prefer just keeping the existing feed.  Whatever though.


  3. I think you guys wrote off Clash Royale too quickly.  It's a 3 minute Lords Management/RTS game.  Perfect little bite sized strategy. The f2p stuff never prevents you from playing a match.  Matches are real time and PvP.  

     

    And most importantly, my personal experience is that there's absolutely no impulse to ever consider paying any money for it because it would only raise the equilibrium point I hit on the ladder.  Unlike a game like Hearthstone where I can make perfect copies of pro decks if I just put in a little more money, I will never max out my Clash Royale cards since it would take something like $20,000 dollars so there's no reason to even try.  Paying money just means you hit an equilibrium point on the ladder slightly higher.  I strongly dislike any f2p game that has me constantly wondering when and if I should put money in so this works out surprisingly great.  

     

    Now Clash of Clans and Mobile Strike and those others are dreck.   


  4. Volt Disruptors still don't have a cooldown as far as I can tell.  There is also new item the DLC adds which is halfway between a volt and a neuro, it uses a certain amount of power per armor penetration needed, and does have a cooldown though.  


  5. I'm playing on the easiest difficulty and I only have 3 days it seems?

    Literally pumped my fist in the air after completing detention rescue by the skin of my teeth. SO GOOD.

     

    The DLC adds a couple extra days if you have it enabled, which nearly doubles the playing time of the campaign.  As I understand it - I haven't reached the end myself.


  6. This game is just fantastic.  I started on Beginner, but at Day 2 I restarted the game on Experienced, and the difficulty is pretty solid for learning the game with the three rewinds.  I did start with the DLC and I kind of wish I hadn't, so I could have played one short campaign and then done the longer campaign on Expert, but so it goes.

     

    I'm sad that it doesn't seem very popular - I can't even find anyone streaming it on twitch and I think the permadeath and tension would make it an exciting game to watch.  This forum is also the only gaming forum I've seen active discussion on it, other than the Steam forums.  


  7. I love his chess analogy.  You wouldn't play a game of Chess (or soccer, or Civ for that matter) and if you happen to lose the game, you don't think "well since I lost, I wasted all that progress in the game and now I have to play the whole game again and catch up."  But that's how people treat many games where loss is a possible outcome or even inevitable.  


  8. http://nymag.com/scienceofus/2015/11/myth-of-the-fragile-college-student.html

    What separates present-day moral panics about college students from past ones is that we live in a golden age for confirmation bias. We have greater, more intimate access to scenes from campus life than ever before, which makes it easier than ever before to slip into the trap of “I’m sure this thing is happening because I see evidence it’s happening.” But prior to YouTube and Twitter and the morass of think pieces choking the internet anew every morning, there were also campus-politics freak-outs, there were also nervous breakdowns in counseling centers, there were also tragedies involving students and their mental health — and there were also adults proffering cultural theories for why everything was falling apart.


  9. Except for the power of a national-scale news outlet aggregating the reactions of dozens upon dozens of different students to a campus scandal, making it seem a massive and coordinated response by the entire student body, I don't see anything particularly out of the ordinary here for a university campus, neither when I went to college a dozen years ago or when I teach at a college today.

    ...snip

    Sorry, I know I'm being glib, but I can't emphasize enough how this "coddled college culture" phenomenon seems manufactured to me. Campus scandals have always been like this, if my time reading back issues of my university's newspaper has anything to say about it, but now there's the infrastructure for them to get national attention and a cottage industry devoted to spinning them into a pattern of problems leading to... something bad? I had more I wanted to write, but there's a recent article in the New Republic, another publication that's made some hay in the past on the moral panic over trigger warnings, that covers most of my broader thoughts about the changing dynamics of sensitivity and tolerance in campus culture as a whole: http://www.newrepublic.com/article/122543/trigger-warning-myth

     

    Wonderful post.  You should combine your recent comments into a medium article or something.  I can't even count the number of hot takes I'm seeing this week on pc culture run amok, the same pundits going back to the story multiple times in the same week.

     

    For me, the issue thing was summed up by someone on twitter with: "If I got into an argument with my condominium manager would it make national news?"


  10. Every fourth episode of True D must end in a gun battle. Every midpoint of True D must end with the suspect being killed by the cops before they can get answers from him which later leads to the TWIST that the dead suspect wasn't the guy behind the crime.

     

    Hopefully this continues to it's logical conclusion and the show continues to mirror the structure of the first season, because that would means the next episode is a time jump 17 years into the future. The rest of the series takes place in a dystopian cyberpunk 2032.  Vinci is a corporate free-commerce zone fully independent from the United States.  Everyone's smoking ecigs and "robot dick" is no longer just an expression -- it was foreshadowing.  


  11. First, I want to say this game was a lot of fun playing with a second person. I was the notetaker, which meant I had the fun job of keeping track of the proper nouns and trying to piece together what happened during each interview. It was a lot of fun to puzzle out this mystery with two people, so if you can play in pairs, I really recommend it.

     

    Now for spoilers of the entire game:

    This game feels like the classic example of the mystery being more satisfying than its conclusion. I felt mildly deflated after finally learning what happened to Simon, because that knowledge is no where near as interesting as the haphazard search for information the game has you fall into for the first few hours. The mystery of Eve and Hannah both being two people or the same person didn't hold up for me at the end, so I don't even get to enjoy that post-game thrill of trying to tease out what is really going on with this woman (these women). Even though the game seems to really push you in this direction (most notably with the fingerprints), I find the "she was a twin all along" conclusion to be a bit of a letdown, because it's so contrived. This fantastical story of an eight-year-old hidden in an attic for years unnoticed is too much for me to accept. The fantasy of this game is more interesting if it's not taken so literally, so I choose to believe the women are one person. Maybe Hannah intentionally created this second identity to try and escape a murder conviction or maybe it's a personality disorder born out of a childhood guilt over her twin sister dying in utero. Either answer leaves room for much more exciting interpretations than what the game leaves you with.

     

    I'm sorry if I sound really harsh about the ending, but everything that leads up to the conclusion of this game is so masterful that I am disappointed the game couldn't stick its landing. Criticism aside, I hope this game gets a lot of press attention. It really deserves recognition for trying such a unique method of deploying a narrative. I don't think the game is entirely successful, but I don't regret the several hours of my Sunday evening that I spent playing this game.

     

    Now, can someone please explain the significance of it Sarah who is viewing the clips? I read in a review that originally it was meant to be Hannah who is reflected in the computer screen and that it was later changed to Sarah. What conclusion are we meant to draw from this revelation?

    >. The fantasy of this game is more interesting if it's not taken so literally, so I choose to believe the women are one person.

    I couldn't decide either, but I chose to believe they were twins because I thought it made for a more thematically interesting story.  It starts like a fairy tale where they have this magical life where they share an identity, but then the story doesn't just have a neat ending, it keeps going and when the pregnancy hits the creepier ramification of the logical extensions of such a fairy tale life break in.  As one of them says in one of the interviews life isn't wrapped up neatly like in those tales.

     

    I also found the idea of a split personality that worked like this even more far fetched than a secret twin living in an attic.


  12. I've now played more Hots than any other Lords Management.  The short games really help take the sting out of all the faults.  Just about ready to jump into Hero League, though I can only play maybe 3 heroes competently.  

     

    I find I'm way less annoyed by the free-to-play stuff than I expected.  My inclination is just to play the same hero over and over again regardless!  


  13. For me, it's because there's so much less room for mastery than the more complicated games. This means it's less awesome to see truly skilled players playing because there's less opportunity for their skill to shine through.

     

    I just started playing, but I don't think that's the case.  I was watching a Rank 1 player analyze a game he played, and he must have said, "This is what I should have done, or our team should have done, based on what we can see in this situation... but this is what we did instead." more than 20 times for that single match.  There's still a ton of room for improvement at the top.

     

    Example: http://www.twitch.tv/followgrubby/b/654591019?t=2h41m

     

    I also hadn't seen that the 'standard' way to play Vikings is to have every player take the same lane and push, while Viking player lanes the other two lanes by themselves, and leaves a third viking in the group lane to help push.  Watching someone skilled play that way is pretty nuts, they are dodging enemy skill shots and everything in all three lanes at once!


  14. It's been so long that I hardly remember, but I know I rarely used stacks of all the same composition.  The economy was really interesting and different.  Retreat with wounded companies and let them heal up again was a cool dynamic.  The various movement options -- move faster, but if you're caught, you're stuck at 50% combat effectiveness, etc.  Battles were very position based, you really had to start the battle with everything just right since you can't just disengage, that wasn't like any other RTS.

     

    Maybe start with the TMA episode: http://flashofsteel.com/index.php/2012/05/26/three-moves-ahead-episode-170-classic-game-analysis-kohan/

     

    I don't remember much about the campaign I played mostly custom games, using mixing humans and AIs.  Note you can download improved AI scripts, easily moddable AI was one of the innovations as well: http://awakening.chimaerica.com/downloads.php?sid=ca482a40f9238d220e938ff634c21e96


  15. I can add feeding and jungling to the list of terms I didn't follow. And looking things up on a wiki isn't really possible when listening on the train.

     

    Again, please don't get me wrong, I'm not saying every show should be accessible. I'm just asking nicely that if you're going to geek out down the e-sports rabbit hole, could you discuss other genres to a similar depth? (or, join forces with the idle thumbs e-sports spin off podcast?).

     

    It's pretty crazy how far Lords Managements have penetrated into gaming.  There are more active players every month playing League of Legends than all of Xbox Live, all games, both consoles, combined.  There are almost 10x as many active players on LoL as there are on Steam, all games combined.  So words like 'jungle' and 'last hit' really have entered the common vocabulary, but there's still a huge wall between people who who have played Lords Managements and those who haven't.

     

    I found a decent breakdown of hots mechanics here: http://www.gosugamers.net/heroesofthestorm/features/4041-what-you-should-know-when-playing-heroes-of-the-storm-for-the-first-time

     

    No joke, I haven't lost a game since listening to this podcast and getting a basic understanding of some of the mechanics I never bothered to look into before.  8 - 0!


  16. One thing I do remember him saying is that the restrictive information and design came about when he was reading Lord of the Rings before it was translated into Japanese. His English was very limited, so he had to make up what happened between the parts he couldn't understand. He wanted to reflect this in the story-telling in the game.

     

    Yeah, I recall something reading this too, somewhere.  I think it was something like his family used to vacation in Europe as a kid he didn't know the language very well or at all, so he'd be poring through books and trying to make sense of what he could understand, using what pictures were there as a base, etc.  And as a child this was exceptionally evocative.  So to some extent Demon/Dark Souls were an intentional recreation of that feeling.  Wish I could find the exact interview.


  17. Biddle dismantled a portion of her life just because he could, because it was funny to him with a bonus that he got paid to do it. If I could eradicate one of the two behaviors, I think I would pick getting rid of someone gleefully fucking with strangers' lives over some kinda racist dumb tweets.

    I'm not convinced that Biddle and his ilk aren't just as dangerous as the worst of gamergate.

     

    http://gawker.com/justine-sacco-is-good-at-her-job-and-how-i-came-to-pea-1653022326

     

    And, as it turned out, Justine Sacco is not a racist monster. She is a kind and canny woman who threw back cocktails, ate delicately, and spoke expertly about software. She was friendly, very funny, instantly relatable, and very plainly not a cruel sicko. We talked about college, jobs, home, family, and work—she'd recently landed on her feet as the communications boss for a small New York startup, and seemed to be happily rebuilding her career.

    I was severely nervous throughout. It was like a first date, only it's not a date and also the person has a really good reason to hate you, and has had half a year to stew over that reason. For about an hour, we talked about anything else; we gossiped about our respective industries, her treatment in the press, and cheery career goals.

     

    Maybe it was the third drink, or months of piling, compressed guilt, but midway through our meal I had to say sorry. An apology to Justine Sacco had been itching at my throat from the moment I saw her. I was afraid to say it—because who knows what else I should be sorry for?—but the itching was worse.

    So I did it: I said I was sorry posting her tweet had teleported her into a world of media scrutiny and misery. I'd tried not admitting even to myself that I was sorry, toying with various exculpatory principles like a child's wooden blocks: posting her tweet had been media criticism, industry watchdoggery, social justice, karma.

     

    I'd managed to half-convince myself what I'd done was right, but then I saw her face. How often do you get to say you're sorry to someone you ruined on the internet? I was in a daze.

    ...

    Her tweet was supposed to mimic—and mock—what an actual racist, ignorant person would say.

    Ergo, tweeting that thought would be an ironic statement, a joke, the opposite of what it seemed to say. Not knowing anything about her, I had taken its cluelessness at face value, and hundreds of thousands of people had done the same—instantly hating her because it's easy and thrilling to hate a stranger online.

    How could someone who tweeted something so stupid be so emotionally perfected? How could she not hate me? She was serene, decent, and despite the continued existence of Twitter, hopeful: "Someday you'll Google me and my LinkedIn will be the first thing that pops up." That part was heartbreaking.


  18. Well it would also be strange if they introduced a bunch of new facts in the last two episodes, unless they were just recently revealed.  It was already a little hokey the way they held back information in the first few episodes.

     

    For me the peak was the conversation with the Innocence Project folks.  It was an interesting discussion anyway and then the lady she's talking to decides to assign her students to the case.  

     

    It's mind blowing that Nisha mentions that she talked about the video store in the one damming phone call that the case hinges on.  She says this unprompted (the prosecutor has to cut her off even!).  There doesn't seem to have been much followup on this, although the full transcripts are not available.  But this seems like a mistake almost as big as not following up with the library alibi.

     

    Some interesting followup on what her laywer could have done in cross: 

     

    http://lawprofessors.typepad.com/evidenceprof/2014/12/ive-done-nine-posts-herehereherehereherehereherehere-andhere-about-sarah-koenigsserial-podcast-which-deals-withthe.html

     

    So, that's my strategy. You start with The Nisha call being pretty damning based on the prosecution's case. To believe Adnan, you have to believe (1) Jay made some kind of butt dial to Nisha; and (2) an unanswered call that keeps ringing could register as a couple minute call OR Nisha is wrong about not having an answering machine on her phone  (by the way, how did the prosecution or defense not figure out whether Nisha's phone had an answering machine and/or use Adnan's cell phone or another phone to test out how unanswered calls registered in call logs?). If I'm a juror just hearing the prosecution's side of things, this is pretty damning.

    After the above interrogations, however, I now have to believe the following to think that Jay's story bears any relation to reality: (1) Jay is WAY off on when he left Jenn's house; (2) Jay is WAY off on the length of The Nisha call; (3) Jay is mistaken about where The Nisha call took place OR the cell tower data is unreliable; (4) Nisha is mistaken about the call taking place while Jay worked at the adult video store; and (5) Nisha is mistaken about the call taking place towards the night.