Badfinger

I had someone today tell me they wanted to read more Pratchett (after reading Good Omens), and was asked for a recommendation on where to start. My internet life is starting to merge with the real one. I said try Mort or start at the beginning, because that was much easier and less pedantic thing than to ask a bunch of questions in return and meticulously explain that there are a number of different story threads so depending on what sort of fiction you like and have read in the past, you might conside *is strangled*

That's the only country song I like.

I actually mistyped/am an idiot, because I said "Intent is important part of discussion" and right after that I said "intent stops being part of the discussion!" What I think I was driving at was that the intent can become a part of discussion, but in contrast to the interpreted meaning. You posted right after my post, and it was about responsibilities of the audience and creators so I used it as a jumping off point. I realize I'm taking a pretty hard line here.

I still have a frustratingly hard time agreeing to a perspective wherein someone can create a work, people view and discuss the work and find meaning or consensus in it, and then the creator can come in and say "Nope. You're wrong, you don't get it." I do see a perspective where the creator could say "oh, that wasn't my INTENT", which becomes a meaningful part of a discussion. Once a creator's work is in the wild her interpretation ceases to be the driving point of discussion. Perhaps that's wrapped up in your mention of the creator being honest and we are agreeing. I think someone telling all the other people they're wrong about a commonly agreed view of their work is not being honest about the work they've done.

I am reminded of the Far Cry 3 discussions that happened here and surrounding the game in general. The writer did an interview and basically accused his audience of not getting that the presented story wasn't the "real" story. Nope. It is, emphatically, not the audience's job to do the heavy lifting for the presenter. However, like I said before that doesn't excuse the audience from having to participate in the work. Willful ignorance doesn't count.

With regard to media literacy and interpretation, I'm very strongly of the opinion that if a work is misinterpreted the onus is on the creator/presenter. Excluding things like willful misinterpretation or some sort of language/cultural divide, if someone didn't get it it's your fault not theirs. I have this problem where I have awesome obvious ideas or solutions and then when the words come tumbling out everyone gets all glassy-eyed. That's not their fault, it's mine.

[in a Vanaman-esque tone of awe] This forum! This fucking forum! You're all the best.

I am, in that it appears to me the end game is merely that shit be stirred rather than effects resulting from it.

Wow what a thread. It is awesome when Danielle is on. It is awesome when the podcast is two hours. It is awesome when things start as a small dip into video games and then end up all over the place in interesting ways. I disagree, Sean. Referential comedy is potentially great. Like most forms of comedy, it can be incisive, worthwhile, or just flat hilarious. Where it breaks is when someone's bad at it. I tend to take comedy pretty seriously, as a boy who wanted to go on the road and be a stand up comedian (WRITING IS REALLY, REALLY HARD). Repetition is an extremely important part of comedy, and thus referential comedy comes included with it. On the other hand, you get people who think that just quoting The Holy Grail makes them funny, or the reboot of South Park and "remember that time when..." which I personally would place more under non-sequitur but I am making a tangent on my own line of thought at this point. The only thing worthwhile I saw out of either of those articles about Suey Park is the insightful line about using Asian stereotypes as "safe" by comedy writers, which may be true. Beyond that, and I'm not going to be apologetic about this, everything I've seen about and from her is she's a shit stirrer with an axe to grind and she'll grind it on almost anything until it makes noise. I had more thoughts about the pod but it was a long cast and a long thread! e: Oh I remember, the writing style guide and discussion about where games should be on the review/criticism scale. I have always thought Jeff Gerstmann's take on reviews is very interesting. It also comes from a place where he's literally done thousands of reviews for probably more games than I've ever come in contact with. His thought is that at the end of the day (this phrase should be eradicated from all lexicons, please) reviews are buyers advice. Should you spend $60 dollars on this product? Video games are products you interact with, thus reviews by their nature need to be somewhat mechanical because unlike a movie, you could potentially completely fail to interact with the game because it is broken beyond usefulness. So it ends up being like a car review or phone review in parts because in some ways it is like those things. He has also acknowledged this means that games, probably unfairly, get bonus extra credit for merely being a working product. From what I understand, and I'm interpreting on my own here, he feels that reviews and criticism are somewhat separate. Watching and reading work he's done for near a decade now, I can say with certainty that he's not afraid to be a part of the tear down and criticism of games as expressive media and thinks that has merit, but that when it comes time for him to put a score on a review he always comes back to that same place as a reviewer. Which leads back around to objective/subjective reviews and criticism (in an awesome way). How do you know the reviewers values with product purchases align with your own? You have to go on honesty, openness and their prior body of work.

GET IN THIS DANG DIABLO CLAN, NORTH AMERICANERS.

I am glad I backed off about being much more rude about it, then! I was in a cranky mood. Swiftboating is a pretty negative connotation, regardless of pun status.

I personally find the teleporter less fun and more micromanage-y than traditional capital ship style combat, but that's not really an argument I can put any quantitative value on.

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That is just about the most confusing thread title I've ever seen.

Don't you dare apologize for pizza, ever! I also will vouch for C25K. Even I was able to do that for like 8 weeks before the runnui caught up to me.

I don't hate the act of running altogether. I will run with purpose. I like exercise. I just finished up the curling season, and in 2 weeks softball starts. I have belonged to kickball and indoor soccer leagues over the last 3 or so years as well. It's just the "sport" of running. 20 minutes is my wall on a treadmill. I'm not too exhausted to continue, I'm just too bored to go on. I've done a few 5Ks and they were the worst. I listen to the Bombcast, VG HD, Idle Thumbs, Tone Control etc while working out but that does not increase my will to go on. Maybe I'm just too stubborn but nothing has ever changed that, EXCEPT when I worked at a job where I got an hour for lunch and it was in a closed off business park. It was so stressful that even jogging for 30 minutes during lunch was sweet relief.

I hate jogging. It's the most mindless, boring exercise activity. That combined with the fact that it's the lowest point of entry to making sure I do cardio is basically the worst thing ever.

One of the cornerstones of DayZ is persistent experience, so the servers are hived together. You can log on to any server that is in the same hive as Idle Thumbs and your character will be there. It would be an extremely different game if every time you logged on to a new server you started from scratch. It's sort of Rule 0 of the whole game. I would suggest it makes it less Video Games than the other way around. As long as you're on a hardcore server you'll be the same as you are on the Thumbs server.

First thing is that flat out I wasn't able to do it by myself. I absolutely went to a trainer because I needed a plan. Because I am an internet nerd, I went to an internet trainer that I found through Something Awful. http://www.swolept.com/learn http://www.swolept.com/fitquiz (this is new since I was on the site, it seems quite cool) Take that quiz. Be honest. Be overhonest if necessary. Mostly because it gives you a fairly accurate indicator of your base metabolic rate and calorie burn per day. As I was prattling about in the thread earlier, weightloss = calories in - calories out. If you're a more resourceful person than me you can probably just take that and go from there. The basic gist is that he built a diet structure and an exercise structure for losing weight and building muscle and then it was just up to me to follow it, plus consultations multiple times a week depending on the plan chosen. I don't want to make this post a cheerleading ad for the trainer I used, but he was awesome and I'm grateful. The biggest (hugest) factor for me was preparation. If I planned ahead, prepared and brought meals, there was no reason to cheat. Why go out to lunch when lunch is 30 feet away? Plus it's SO inexpensive. At one point I estimated I was eating about $4.50 of food a day and that was with 30% protein in my diet. If I hadn't been buying expensive greek yogurt for breakfast it would have been even lower. I slipped back due to a number of things including a lot of stress, thus the comment about "getting back to it", but I lost about 30 pounds in about 12 weeks when I first started up. There's nothing fancy about doing things properly. It just takes effort. For me, lots and lots of effort. Oh, and a real effort to get a good night's sleep.

(The server doesn't actually matter). I'm at the hospital and I have morphine. Get in touch and we'll see if we can fix you up. I'm pretty sure you added me on Steam at some point.

Oh my gosh, yes. Nothing crushes battery life like Threes does. This is the only thing that has run my battery down to the point of me charging it prior to going to bed since I got an iPhone, the whole purpose of which was that it had good strong battery life compared to the Android phones I'd been using.

Loose pants, lose weight. Did it. I am currently in full "get healthy" mode. It's so strange how portioning food seems like a horrible torture and then when you get to the end of the (actually reasonable, stupid american stomach) portion your stomach says "OH MY I AM FULL NOT ANOTHER BITE". it's satisfying in both ways. Also there are times when my body tells me it's compelled to exercise, as a good thing rather than as a punishment for liking candy.

Some of these aren't terrible packages (except you are paying to propose at a baseball game, the terrible part). $100-200 for a MESSAGE on the jumbotron? Why even consider that.

What's up? Where are you and what's your situation?

what sort of damage do you have for T2? Depending on toughness I need I'm fluctuating between like 500 and 600. I have no idea who or what to compare myself against.