osmosisch

I'm sure this is old news to a lot of people but I found this discussion of how fructose is metabolised both enlightening and a bit scary: There's a lot of hoo-hah and kerfuffle surrounding it and the speaker gets a bit obnoxious with his 'mkay, but the juicy biochemical part in the middle seems pretty unambiguous.

The one thing this game is lacking for me is a real 'practice fundamentals' mode, preferably even explaining the theory. The minigames seem to have this as goal, but their ancillary bullshit just distracts me. Aside from that I love this game; also picked it up during the Steam sale. It loads pretty quickly from an SSD so no complaints there.

B-but I don't have you on Steam!?

The way that Henry and Mike are embedded in a college but focused so heavily on sports especially is something that is very American to my mind. The sports college thing is really weird if you don't grow up in it. It would be rather unlikely for such people to have much to do with college professors here. Beyond that, I'm having trouble articulating exactly what it is, but the rather 'all in' nature of all the men in the book is also something that strikes me as very American. The total lack of reserve, of ways to prevent themselves from harm, if you see what I mean. e: I thought about it a bit more and to me it seemed that the main theme of the book was 'choosing one's path in life' and the myriad foreseen and unforeseen consequences. Of course bonding/friendship factors into this, but it struck me as secondary.

Hm. I can't say I found the 'male bonding' aspect of the book very relatable, but then I'm not American and so much of this book is intensely American.

It's so awesome to have good ice again for once. To the village skating rink we go!

I have pretty clear memories of finishing both 'Shocks before I even had reliable internet to read guides and such. I think it just boils down to being a system-optimising person with a high tolerance for trial and error. I think I restarted Shock 2 about 4 times before I got to the end.

I just finished this and I'll second that it is a very enjoyable book. The ending however left me feeling a bit hollow. Everything from the big climactic match onwards was...I don't know, it's not the type of climax I feel was a productive direction to take the book in. That said, the first two thirds of the book are really, really good. There's some fantastic and thought-provoking aphorisms seeded throughout the solid prose. My favourite was probably (paraphrasing) "Adulthood is seen as the moment when your actions begin to have consequences; actually it's when they cease to do so". Very nice. The characters were really well-fleshed-out and I loved their interactions. My only criticism would be that Henry is in the end just too much of a cypher to everyone including himself. That might be the intended message for all I know but it was a niggle. Finally, it's funny to read two so Moby Dick-centric books just before and after reading that book itself (Evidence of Things Unseen being the previous one). It definitely allowed me to catch some nice little references that were snuck in.

@Rodi: Jep

That book and The Life of Pi were really aggravating to me for precisely those reasons.

Hot Chocolate Day!

I have some spare copies of E.Y.E. Divine Cybermancy if someone's interested. It seems a very 'Thumbs'y game to me.

I just read this on this recommendation and holy crap, this book is amazing. It's a cross between 1001 Nights, Foucault's Pendulum and Much Ado About Nothing. Fantastic.A lot of the readability is probably due to the excellent translation1 but the themes and stories are also largely in that universally human category of star-crossed lovers, jealous aunts and what have you. 1. Although a lot of the footnotes drove me crazy with their redundancy.

The Book of the New Sun by Gene Wolfe is the first thing that came to my mind. The main character is a torturer (though that only figures into things tangentially) and an extremely unreliable narrator. Probably my favourite works of speculative fiction by far.

Haha, nice Yeah I should have said something like 'in my experience'. It definitely seems to be what is causing you guys to 'argue' at the moment anyway.

The best way to go about it is probably to try and play only with people you know and/or Thumbs on your team. That way everyone knows what to expect going in. As far as the community goes, as long as not many people report you for being abusive, you'll largely meet nonabusive people (by LoMa standards anyway) because the abusive people get shunted into their own queue.

The thing is that the term 'unbalanced' is usually seen as something that is objective, not subjective.

Oh man, Max Payne!

Dark Souls (the physicality and momentum, the way in which you go from needing stats to actively avoiding them to challenge yourself), Far Cry 2 (similar, doing stuff like a playthrough where you only use scavenged weapons; the sniper rifle) and Zeno Clash. I have a very nostalgic sweet spot for party-based turnbased combat due to .Xcom (the old one) and Silent Storm are huge favourites because of the terrain destruction and the tactical options it gave.

I thought one was simply Kevin Bacon at that point.

I see you're sorted but I also still have like seven left so for anyone who's interested: my steam's in my profile.

Sno, thanks for taking the time and effort to post the stuff I otherwise would have to try and express <3

A shooty character shouldn't have too much trouble earlygame. Use lean a lot and sneak around. Basically play the game like Thief with guns. Also unlock a medbay ASAP and head back there for free heals regularly. How far have you gotten?

It's sort of a reduction ad absurdum - even if you were able to imagine such a weird thing it would still be impossible for it to exist without spontaneously combusting.

Haha, oh wow, you're in for a ride. On reflection it might actually be more early seventies though. Either way it's a hilarious series of books, which underlies one of my favourite multiplayer card games (in concept anyway, its execution is a bit unbalanced): Steve Jackson's Illuminati. It's even classified as postmodern so fits in a Pynchon thread! My favourite character in Illuminatus! is called Markoff Chaney, and causes subtle chaos in his wake.