Badfinger

For me, the things I learned from the relationship previous made the one just recently end faster. I wasn't happy, and I put up with the unhappiness for far less time. I realized that when I looked into the future I didn't see the two of us, and continuing the relationship because it's easier than ending it is essentially just me lying to one of us. Of course, that makes me think desperate things about where my life's going and the future. Maybe I'm not a forever person and never will be. But for now it was better.

Oh! I was so tied up in being serious that I forgot to weigh in on the Avengers. I was shocked he exhibited so much displeasure. I think The Avengers is the only superhero movie I've ever seen that I'd give 4 stars (for superhero movies). I had only seen Iron Man and was able to keep up fine. I didn't feel lost or somehow brought down because I hadn't seen the other movies, and on the flip side it didn't compel me to watch the others that are tied in like a cash grab. It was a complete story, it was funny, the acting was good, the characterizations were well done, and I had a bunch of popcorn and got to see stuff blow up and Robert Downey Jr made fun of the movie during the movie. I MAY be inspired to watch Hulk movies in the future, because Mark Ruffalo as the Hulk was fucking fantastic. I actually liked it enough that when it was free on Amazon Prime (e: still free on prime for me) I bought the Rifftrax for it because I was really curious what a movie that I already thought was funny and good would be like given the MST3K treatment. The movie was still good, and even funnier (surprise).

Sorry about your bad taste bud luck and poor choices. Posting on a page where someone doesn't like BREAD. Craziness abounds.

^^^^ have you ever tried any of the gluten-free beers? My cousin was diagnosed with a gluten intolerance, but drinks gluten free beers sometimes. I can't really comment on them too much, just curious. That's honestly like saying "cheese is disgusting" or "fish is disgusting" or "vegetables are disgusting". What KIND of cheese? What KIND of vegetable? They're not all disgusting. Beer and wine are not drinks. They're food. There are so many different varieties and preparations of beer (and wine). The breadth and depth of tastes is so incredibly vast that you can't just lump them together. They are not all alike. There is a large difference between saying "mayonnaise is disgusting" (completely true and verifiable) and "beer is disgusting", which is not true. You don't like whatever beer you tried. ALL beer is not disgusting! There are some beers that are fcking terrible, though. Not everything is special and wonderful.

Oh! I understood the conversation you guys were having. I just momentarily hijacked the thread to do my own musing on specifically attempting to make (and complete) a bad game.

I think something important to consider in all this is that history is not static. The events don't change, but the light we view them in and the breadth of information we have changes things, sometimes dramatically. Quick examples: our previous perception of dinosaurs from big, lumbering komodo dragon-esque lizards changing to maybe the warm blooded reptile ancestors of birds is something that's changed in my lifetime. Or that show that is an Idle Thumbs sponsor about a Revolutionary War about this spy ring that no one knew about for over two centuries. It's also not that people weren't in opposition prior to what we know now. Charlie Chaplin stood to ruin his reputation with The Great Dictator. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Dictator https://www.google.com/search?q=winston+churchill&rlz=1C1CHFX_enUS502US502&es_sm=122&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ei=sn9IU6rOLayz0QHj-4DwDg&ved=0CAgQ_AUoAQ&biw=1920&bih=955 The depiction in Luftrausers could hardly be more Churchill. The realization that you kill Churchill when you take down the blimp has changed my perception some. Need to gather thoughts before I weigh back in I think, lots of good discussion here.

You can change the difficulty on the fly. Just drop to the character select screen and put it to whatever difficulty you'd like. If you theoretically needed to drop the difficulty down, you can do that without even leaving the game from the main menu.

I honestly would rather have it this way than another way. What if someone who doesn't really follow games but liked Diablo bought the game 2 years ago, and picked up the word Diablo on the internet but not the context and decided to jump in and play. What if you see someone on your friends list as level 70 and have a freak out? Better to have it spelled out in your always-online instanced drop in/drop out game, I think! So yes, I think you are just old and grumpy.

You're correct! I would contend however, that both a) Hogan's Heroes didn't depict Nazis (Klink was a lifelong military man who was decorated in the Great War, etc) and (my second point is way cool according to this emoticon) that many of those sorts of comedies and sketches took place before people in the public at large were aware of the tremendous wartime atrocities that were committed under the Nazi party. I just put it forth as a thought, and it's also possible I should have said "American" rather than Western audience? But if I wanted to forge on with that line of thought regardless, you could say that sort of mocking was done when the Nazis were Bad Guys and not seen as the utter Evil they're now portrayed to be? I don't know if you had particular images in mind when you were thinking of this but my mind goes to Monty Python and various contemporaries or earlier. I'd also say that mocking Hitler specifically is quite different from laughing at Nazism writ large. it's the mustache.

That's not a strictly Japanese phenomenon. I love You Got Served. It's one of the worst movies I've ever seen. The thing about a game being so terrible that you can't believe you played to the end means it's functional enough you could actually play to the end.

I wonder how difficult it is to make a bad game. Does it have to be fully functional yet completely irredeemable? If it's bad but there are kernels of ideas nestled in there, is it disqualified?

I know. I didn't know there was a Wipeout, though I did infer it through your post!

Double posting, but btw Sean the Earth's atmosphere is almost 80% nitrogen, so your desperate reality is already here.

More like San Francisco RUSH 2048.

The fact that in Red Alert you have time machines and stealth tanks and tesla coils and Albert Einstein helps people go back in time to handshake Hitler from existence helps put some of those themes beyond the pale. They're free game because they're two steps outside of ridiculous to the point of absurd. There are stealth squids in Red Alert. Stalin is in no way portrayed as a good guy in that series. He even shows up and says some semblance of the "One person is tragedy, a million is a statistic" quote about halfway through. I wonder if maybe the Soviets are (for swathes of Western culture) the Bad Guys, but the Nazi are Evil. They are so evil the superpowers who would battle over global supremacy for 50 years afterwards teamed up to fight against them. There are multiple genocidal, facist, authoritarian, etc dictators you can be in Civilization. Or just brutal and ruthless military leaders if you don't want to apply modern ideological terms to certain people. You can be Attila, Genghis, Caesar, Stalin, Alexander, Napoleon, Hannibal, Shaka Zulu. Chairman Mao! No one bats an eye at seemingly any of them. Civilization is also not a game where the leader is the person. They form broad strokes that you can make disparate gameplay partners out of based on loose ideologies. Ghandi still declares war on you sometimes. So, I'm Jewish. That doesn't make my reading any more valid than anyone else's, but this is my perspective. My first reaction to seeing Luftrausers was "wow, they're going there with this?" To my eyes, there is NO Nazi imagery in Luftrausers, but they are toeing the line on Nazi aesthetic. I read Vlambeer's response on their blog, and I do honestly thing they made a stronger statement and apology than the Thumbs are giving them credit for. However, there are a couple of things they could have said that I think they thought that could have seen them through. The first was that if they just flat out said "You are not a Nazi and we never intended it that way, we're sorry if people read our aesthetic as intended to be Nazi". That's one. The other is the point that others have brought up in varying degrees, which is that the Luftwaffe and Wehrmacht have been used in other medium (and other games) without being accused or portrayed as being Nazis, because many/most of them were not. I disagree with you Gormongous, that it's "Nazis" in CoH. It's the German Army. I would also agree with you if you countered that you can't just disassociate the one thing from the other, but in the context of the video game conflict it's man (and technology) against man, rather than ideologies against each other. FWIW my degree's in history and I find your teaching stories fascinating and resonant to when I was in school. I never had a concentration but I ended up taking a number of classes in both modern and business history. History of the dark ages was brutal. You might be intrigued because learning about the barbarians after the fall of Rome sounds awesome. Shut up, you're wrong and everyone is named the same thing. I was tricked because the course was literally named History of Barbarian Europe. TRICKED

If you're a Thumbs contemporary, that's because Carol Channing is well before our time. It's like if you didn't know about Milton Berle or Jack Benny. Famous actors, maybe even influential, but not institutions beyond themselves? I'm probably making a terrible misstep with examples here. 40 years from now someone makes a Julia Roberts joke and a 20-something says "Why do people make all these Julia Roberts jokes?! I don't understand."

I'd be pretty exuberant about that.

A little bit of Occam's Razor, but I feel like when I was getting and reading print magazine for game coverage the people doing the previews didn't talk about that stuff and focused on the game and the team. Once in a while they mentioned the location. For me at least, that stuff didn't come to light until people in the games industry sat around on couches and talked about how insane it all was after the fact. I never complained about it because I literally did not know it was a part of the industry, rather than not thinking it was worth complaining about. Compared to someone in a more informal setting giving full disclosure about their friends and acquaintances and how they have to handle themselves when covering their friends beforehand, it seems straightforward to me why one thing gets criticism and the other doesn't.

I disagree strongly with both making references not being cool and the affectation of ignorance only "starting" to be cool. "Making references" is so broad a topic, and people have always been outcasted for Knowin' Things.

Working on the requirements to hit Gen 6, when the matchmaking servers cooperate.

I honestly think that sort of thing is going to happen forever, and not even through (conscious) malicious intent. One of my favorite comedians is Patton Oswalt, who I consider of the most progressive successful comedians working today. When there was an internet uproar around Daniel Tosh's awful rape joke at an open mic, he weighed in on it and joke stealing. http://www.pattonoswalt.com/index.cfm?id=167&page=spew The reason this is relevant is he has a considered take on it, but 5 years ago he was telling rape jokes. And 10 years ago he was telling gay jokes. That doesn't mean you can't have jokes about those things or a multitude of other things, but the way you approach them changes. I believe that you CAN make a joke about anything, but making a joke where it's at the expensive of a victim is not a valid way to do it. The only way to incorporate those things into culture is acceptance and time. We may not even know what innocuous things in our comedy culture right now are going to sound like they're coming from a person raised on purpose to be terrible 25 years from now.

Went to the 1 year birthday party of one of my college roomate's daughter. Somehow it makes me feel immensely old, and yet time's moving much more quickly for everyone else.

Oh god what am I doing with my life.

There is actually a curve to leveling. I hit a wall with my melee characters at about level 65 and slowly decreased the difficulty until I hit 70 and could start accruing gear to level back up. Plus besides "making the bars go up" you get skill unlocks as you go, which both gives a nice sense of power growth and also sets a good pace for players to learn the systems. The devs certainly have a strong sense of how long it takes a fresh account to level to cap going through on normal or hard or whatever and that means they have that time to teach you all the systems. I'm pretty sure rare and legendary items don't even drop under a certain level, and they build up the types of items and affixes they can get as you go. You get the sense of progression and also a sneaky tutorial almost the whole way. Also important to remember that it's only been about a month or so since they rolled out the new difficulty system and level used to be a massive part of how you could progress through the game. Rather than take out one of the most iconic (and useful) parts of Diablin' they expanded it in what I think is an awesome way. I honestly remember almost nothing from D2. I didn't play very much of it; most of my recollection and understanding is through Chris remembering it on podcasts. Blizzard has been campy fluff garbage with regard to storytelling for well over a decade now though, so they're keeping pace well with the expansion. It was rad seeing so many people on in the clan this weekend. You can still join even if you don't play much and enjoy the in-clan conversations about how we're listening to Idle Thumbs RIGHT NOW while playing.

Shaolin Soccer is also a good movie you should watch if you enjoy goofy martial arts movies. I think the most impressive thing about the Nature Box website is the photography. There is really only so much outside the picture you can do to make something called "Oat Bran Dippin' Stix" seem appealing.