sclpls

It is really easy for people to often act as if activists don't know what they're talking about because they take the activist message at face value, and assume that that's what the activists' goal really is. But activists are just as savvy as politicians or advertisers when it comes to this sort of stuff, and they'll go with whatever message gets attention. Activists in San Francisco recognize that Google Buses aren't the real problem with people being forced out of their homes, it's the greed of the real estate industry, but that's a much more anonymous thing, whereas a privatized transportation system for a specific industry benefiting in the current economic climate is a much more visible target. Guess which one the media writes about, and people talk about? It's the same thing with #CancelColbert. Sure, a lot of people will dismiss it as a ridiculous thing, but it will also cause some people to consider an issue they hadn't previously considered before.

Last night I saw Jodorowsky's Dune. I can't recommend it enough (with the caveat that there is an off-color comment about metaphorically raping the novel Dune, didn't impact my judgment of the movie, but it was a totally awkward scene). They show a bunch of the pre-production work, and it really is incredible stuff.

Thanks!

That's a really good point, we're talking about a different sort of audience (basically film nerds) compared to something like South Park which is a cartoon on Comedy Central that is going to reach a much larger audience. So that comes with maybe a different set of expectations.

More to the point, what advice do people have for a new player without actually telling me how to do things, since I gather figuring that out is part of the fun?

I picked this up when it went on sale. I went through the tutorial and still feel like I don't understand how to play the game. Is that normal?

Personally I wouldn't bet against Amazon because Wall Street seems happy to throw all the money at them regardless of whether or not they earn any sort of profit. Any company that can pull that trick off is not to be messed with.

Oh yeah, so there's a video store in SF that has a crowd funded campaign going on right now so it doesn't disappear off the face of the earth: https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/save-le-video-a-sf-film-institution

That was a closer and better read than my own! I agree with the criticism. What I liked about the piece was the idea that even if a lot of the noise on twitter seems offbase, it's always worth paying attention to real grievances. Looking at it more closely though I agree that the New Yorker thing was framed poorly, and has a lot of unfortunate subtle put-downs.

Since someone brought up the whole recent Colbert thing, I thought I would just give a shout out to this New Yorker blog post that I think is a much stronger piece than the legion of articles written by people tripping over themselves to defend a comedian's right to engage in satire. http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2014/03/twitter-campaign-to-cancel-colbert-report.html This line in particular resonated with me: There’s a long tradition in American comedy of dumping tasteless jokes at the feet of Asians and Asian-Americans that follows the perception that we will silently weather the ridicule. I don't have any great point about any of this, but it's something that resonated with me. Anyway, good discussion about media literacy. I'm a big fan of the director Rainer Werner Fassbinder's work, and I sometimes have a difficult time articulating what I think is good about his films because at face value a lot of his movies are just awful people doing awful things to each other, particularly men doing awful things to women, or gay men treating each other horribly. His movies are really good at eliciting strong emotions, and then crystallizing them so that you can then view those emotions more analytically. That's a valuable thing for a director to be able to do, but it definitely requires a certain awareness of film language to really grasp so it can result in some awkward conversations with someone else that sees a movie of his and is just grossed out by it. South Park never clicked with me. As feelthedarkness said they kind of have "a pox on all houses" attitude that I find really diminishes the capacity for any interesting point of view. But the question of what sort of ethical obligation do ironists have to their audience is a really interesting, thorny question. Sir Thomas Moore's Utopia was incredibly ironic, but plenty of people didn't pick up on that, and wound up in experimental societies where they died as a result of that misreading. I'm still glad he wrote it, but it's troubling.

One of these days I will design a card game, because it is so easy to make a prototype without much effort. You can buy regular packs of playing cards for cheap, and then print stuff on similarly sized stickers. Unfortunately I haven't come up with any theme that I think would work well with card based play, but one of these days...

Well that was... unexpected.

Here's a nice companion piece to this episode: over at Ron Gilbert's blog he's been posting random notes about Monkey Island, this is the stuff Tim presumably had to work with when he was scripting stuff in SCUMM. grumpygamer.com

Ohhh... I had no idea this was a grindy sort of game. I'm glad I didn't end up picking it up, as I almost did at that 25% off discount rate. I've got no time for the grind these days...

Yeah, I prefer the philosophical lens of pragmatism for considering these types of things. i.e. Art is whatever appears in art galleries and museums, literature is whatever teachers of literature teach in class, etc. "Oh, you're running a program on a service you use to play video games on, and you're operating that program using a video game controller? It's probably a video game." I was thinking about the idea of people saying Gone Home isn't a game, and whether or not that is a dog whistle. I definitely think there is something to that, it's an argument that allows people to express some frustration with the game without appearing outright barbarous.

I've got Daft Souls in my queue, I'm looking forward to checking it out. I hear what you're saying about board game reviews, and by and large I agree with it. I will say though that on the SU&ST podcast I've heard him tear into some games that he thinks are bad, so that might be a better thing to check out for more critical coverage than the videos (I haven't seen that many of the videos, so maybe I'm off-base here)?

I didn't go because tickets were $25. but I don't think I've ever been at a movie at the Castro where cell phones were going off. I guess it might have been a different crowd though (not that the Castro has a typical crowd).

Seriously! I hate that my reaction as soon as I saw that article was, "of course that happened!" Not cool

Okay, now I feel bad for the Oculus crew. http://www.pcgamesn.com/palmer-luckey-did-not-expect-be-getting-so-many-death-threats-and-harassing-phone-calls-over-facebook-deal

That sounds good to me. I spent the weekend just playing random games, and was like, oh yeah, this game is insanely popular so that means it's gonna be the same as playing CoD on Xbox or whatever. So yeah, playing bizarre game modes sounds like fun.

Oh man, I am really glad people are keeping track of conversations from Spelunky streams! More of that please!

Another day, another opportunity for people to argue whether or not Gone Home is a game... http://www.polygon.com/2014/3/31/5566098/gone-home-is-it-a-game Help me out here, am I remembering things wrong, or did people spend this much time arguing about Dear Esther's game-ness when it came out? I just remember people saying it was pretentious and boring, but I don't remember people getting into the game semantic argument so much. What gives? More press? Some sort of feature of the design? Planetary alignment emitting some sort of weird neural wave distortion field?

I'm really interested in the controlling multiple characters aspect of the game. That makes it sound like Signal Ops, which had awkward controls that made the game difficult to get into initially, but was a really fun immersive stealth type game once you got the hang of it.

It still looks to me like they did a terrific job of creating a virtual Chicago, so I'm looking forward to this. I think Chicago's architecture in the Loop looks a lot better than Manhattan's skyscrapers personally.

Yeah, I feel like it's been so long since they first announced the expansion. I've been holding off on jumping back into FTL because of it. I'm also curious how the iPad port will turn out. I've actually been really skeptical that it would work well with touch controls, it seems so natural with a mouse and keyboard, but if it gets positive reception I'll definitely pay another couple of bucks to be able to play it on the iPad too.