Luftmensch

The talk about exchange rates reminded me of a conversation I had with an Argentinian friend about the same thing. Apparently as far as cost of living, AR$1 roughly equals US$1, as in if you buy a hot dog off from a street vendor you'll spend about the same amount of pesos as dollars. However, in terms of exchange, back when we spoke, it was about three pesos to the dollar. Argentina has jack shit for national industry, so most manufactured goods have to be imported at ridiculous cost. My friend's boss wanted a custom self-inking rubber stamp, and ended up importing one from Germany, which after exchange and shipping cost AR$80. That shit's crazy. The plus side to Buenos Aires is that if you're a foreigner with a moderate amount of spending money you can take it really far.

I just got to the part of Rosetta Stone Spanish where they cover different types of meat. My immediate reaction was imagining tumblr social justice warriors demanding trigger warnings on the product box. Gotta love Tumblr vegans.

I think Meta Knight. He basically only exists to challenge you to do better. Plus, of I worked for him, I'd probably work on the Battleship Halberd, which is rad.

Well, new Humble Bundle. Once I've sorted out my duplicates I'll have codes.

Hey, that's why Counter-Strike guy loves Peggle. Good kineticism is the kind of thing that always makes or breaks my experience with games. I wonder if its just my bias or if its inherently (what a weighted word) good game design. I try to play indie games a lot, and the huge breaking point for me is when it feels wrong. I recognize I'm hugely biased there (Mario feels almost ideal, I can't stand Sonic), so maybe I'm robbing myself of great experiences that way. When I was really playing around with Source, I kept finding all these weird quirks in the movement. When I took then out, the movement felt totally wrong. Totally unintuitive stuff too, like, if the player is a certain distance from the ground, he'll snap down to the nearest floor. It looks super weird in 3rd person, but in an FPS it's totally natural.

I've been playing a bunch of iOS room escape games. They're enormously hit-or-miss, and at this point I rarely if ever feel bad about using a guide to get through puzzles because sometimes they're utterly abtuse. I've actually run into game that are literally impossible for me to beat because they require a particular manipulation of the home button that my old beat up iPhone physically cannot do (the home button doesn't work properly), and sometimes they're just severely unoptimised for an iPhone sized screen. Still, when they're fun they're fun, and they have amusingly bad quality control.

The "argument" is brief and inconclusive. Unlike on these forums, they all basically just agree to disagree about what they did and didn't like and volunteer to call themselves pretentious cocks for trying to define what constitutes gameplay. I was amused that they kept calling Ben, the lanky band kid, a jock. I guess it's the sweater. I was also amused that they would refer to totally fictional locations by name (e.g. Hershel Farm), but then they would refer to actual real world locations as "some town" (e.g. Savannah, GA).

Whoops, those were totally separate thoughts that got inappropriately juxtaposed. Nope, I definitely don't think crunch is a good thing.

Plus I bet the lack of crunch adds a few months to production. I feel like I fanboy too much over Valve sometimes so some skepticism and criticism is fair.

For a superfluous employee base they sure boast a high per-employee profitability. I dunno how true it is (it's not really verifiable as far as I know), but it seems plausible. Who knows.

Because The Hobbit is actually a long indulgence into the appendices of The Lord of the Rings. I really enjoyed the first part a lot, it really gives Peter Jackson an opportunity to explore the depth in the world that you couldn't otherwise. Honestly, I prefer it a lot over people trying to make 2-hour adaptations of 300 page novels. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo? I kind of enjoyed both of the films, but I felt like neither had the chance to really develop the characters meaningfully, and they were too fast paced to really build up suspense (and here I was saying Ferris Bueller was too slow). I feel like some of the best film adaptations are based on short stories or novellas. The Shawshank Redemption and True Grit are good examples (the latter is so short, the Coen Brothers actually added scenes). Or they're based on a novel, their focus is so narrow or shifted that it barely resembles the source material (The Princess Bride). I think to actually adapt a novel without severely abridging it, you have to make a miniseries or a three-part monstrosity like The Hobbit.

I just checked, and while I don't have one to experiment with myself, apparently the source code for the Yamaha Disklavier player pianos is released open-source with a GNU license, which is pretty fab. Plus I think it just takes regular MIDI input, so in theory as long as you have a computer, a microphone, and a MIDI cable, you should be able to make your Disklavier say whatever you want. If you did that, you should be able to hook it up to any old keyboard and make it talk in synthesized harpsichord or shitty guitar voice. Back at my last job, we'd use little CNC machines all the time, which would make hums of different pitches depending on what shapes they were cutting. My boss mentioned that he met people who programmed their CNC machines to play tunes, using what amounted to only two electric motors. I bet that if you had a robot with dozens of noisy servos, you could make it talk by moving. The hardest part would be making it not fall over when it talks.

neiorwigejjaneinen sta eessjey lankueuige tje lljerrnn

Which is strange, because that goes completely against how Hollywood dealt with the ever-growing size and budget of films; they assemble an entirely new company for each project. I guess films are streamlined enough that you can just pick the guys you want and go.

I grew my first beard when I was twelve, which was pretty ugly so I cut it off. I've grown it as long as 10", and tried going clean-shaven on-and-off, but I feel most comfortable with a clean-trimmed not-too-long full beard. I've always had issue with my mustache which grows in blonde and never really felt full enough for my liking.

Digital audio crap has never been perfectly real-time, but I bet it would t be too hard to take any old spectrum analyzer that works in real-time and rig it up to a piano. Last time I dropped by a music store they had player pianos that could straight record anything you played and then repeat it back at you (I bet these aren't new either), so if you had one of those maybe it wouldn't be too hard to connect them.

I'd be glad to trade. I live in a small town without hardly any buildings over three stories tall unless you count church steeples. Plenty of golf courses and views of the largest urban forest in the world. It's gorgeous, but it's too small for me right now. Everyone my age is going somewhere, everyone who's staying already lived somewhere else.Did you guys realize JJ Abrams wrote Regarding Henry? Weird how he's just considered the lens flare guy now. So I want to watch something comforting right now. Either Ratatouille, Princess Mononoke, or Raising Arizona, since each of those are fondly on my mind. What do you all say?

I went ahead and watched the Tomb Raider trailers on Steam and it seemed to me that they were just going with the theme--in my opinion a compelling one--that the hero just can never catch a break. It didn't look like a great execution exactly, but in theory I'd love to play a game that made me fail all the time, even if it was purely scripted. Again this is purely from watching the trailers on Steam, but I saw zero material that made me feel like she was being sexualized. Except or the scene where some dude starts sexually assaulting her and she kills him. The only things in the trailer that turned me off were the numerous QTE scenes. That Alien game sounds amazing.

One of my little final buys at The Curiosity Shop was a one cup teapot with a nesting tea cup. It turns out this is absolutely perfect for my favorite oolong; my tea is whole leaf and the pot has a tiny spout that the leaves don't fit through. Also, the way oolong works, you add water to the leaves repeatedly and it actually gets better the more you use the same leaves, so it's perfect for that.

See I must be missing something, because all I saw was a video of Lara getting impaled, which is gross but didn't seem at all like a rape torture fantasy. As a design by committee product, it looks pretty innocuous (beyond the face value part where someone gets impaled on a chunk of rebar). It is weird though, I can't think of any time I've played a major mainstream game an my character actually suffered real meaningful personal harm. I bet that happens more nowadays and I'm just not playing mainstream games (fact), but it's kind of a staple of traditional storytelling.

Really? I don't remember being swept up in the setting for Brave as much as, say, Ratatouille, which felt vibrant and warm and romantic. Maybe I just prefer urban settings. I really like the kinds of large reflective stories that reflect off of natural vistas (the beginning of 2001is a prime example of that, as are many Mitazaki movies), but for close personal dramas I feel like cities tie it all together much nicer.

Cool, I respect that Tomb Raider might be and probably is terrible at that. Based on what I've seen there's no way I could jump to that conclusion. I looked up that frog and it's a whacky frog when he goes GYEEEEUWW (Jake: feel free to correct my spelling) towards the screen. I dig it.

My arc for Brave was weird. The first tidbits I heard about a princess who accidentally turned her mother into a bear sounded great. The teaser trailer was kinda generic but featured great moody Scottish forests and looked great. What kinda bummed me out was when the first proper trailers showed up. I kinda hoped that the film would just be about a princess who, without any other pretense besides necessity, had to leave the plush royal life and descend into the bleak mystical wood and go on an adventure. Instead the trailer revealed a really heavy-handed "I don't want to be a princess!" story. With a corset tightening scene! How cliche does it get? I know it's just taste but I'm really tired of that trope. I wish people were willing to just let women be badass without stressing the point. Part of why I was excited for Brave was that the original director was involved with Prince of Egypt, which had some of the coolest women in animation. Ultimately I did enjoy the movie a lot, but not as much as, say, Wreck-it-Ralph. It's still really good, just not great. Anyway: Twilight Samurai is great. Can't remember if I recommended it before but it's a terrific study in restrained action. Seriously, those were the most tense battles I've seen in ages.

You say creating fiction that might arouse pervs is bad, I say being butthurt is bad. Its a quality judgement either way and necessarily subjective. The fact that my iPhone, without any manual programming on my part, just autocorrected butthurt for me is awesome. That has nothing to do with Lara Croft at all, it's just wonderful. More on topic, so what if there's a difference? You can acknowledge the difference and make it meaningful and still treat the roles as roughly equivalent. Kill Bill's a swell example of that. She gets beaten and brutalized constantly through both movies and that's the point and it's great storytelling. Tip-toeing and never letting your precious heroine come to harm because that could be titilating is the wrong response. Blanketing over the entire notion of female action heroes as sexist is wrong. I don't think that it's always handled well, but that's a fault of individual portrayals, not a mystical product of the Male Gaze™

Seems like a grossly limiting attitude to me. I don't feel at all disingenuous in saying that I don't see Lara Croft/Sarah Connor/whomever as a sex object, and it doesn't bother me to see any of them act interchangeably to male heroes. The fact that you imagine that someone's ogling their boobs--or for that matter, the fact that somebody almost certainly is--seems completely irrelevant to their value as characters.