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Dammit, not her too

I guess if you had the music lower it'd be drowned out by the talking, so you increase the volume until that doesn't happen. I'm more bothered by the volume at cinemas, not that I go there with any regularity, but I always think it's much too loud. Everyone has their TV insanely loud too.

I didn't know the name for those things until just now.

I was doing some experiments today, mostly trying to get back to the point where I was earlier. I'd gotten it fairly nice and decided to not fiddle with it anymore. Since I already had better data though I didn't save anything, then about an hour later I noticed it hadn't changed at all, which would've been great to have data on but since I didn't save data during that hour I can't show it and at that point it was too late to let it sit another hour. Always be saving data I guess. I hope I can reproduce it tomorrow :[

Maybe there's some truth in the cheesy "tree of libery" quote, if the ideals of a civilised society have just become platitudes in some people's mouths.

Had some liquid nitrogen leak today and got a bit of a light show.

Is the banner image from The Magic Circle?

If you're bold you can avoid the frenzy damage using the iframes in your dodge.

Congrats

See, I don't think it is slow and methodical and that's something I miss. Maybe it's slow if you compare it to a Platinum game (I wouldn't know), but not compared to Souls games. There are so many changes to make you not play slow and methodical, the fact that a lot of enemies have little to no poise, dodges with a ton of iframes that consume almost no stamina, very short heal animation that doesn't stop your movement, regain system, dodging out of stuns, large parry window etc. Stamina management barely matters, positioning matters way less (there have been times where I've been surrounded and chained 8+ dodges to avoid getting hit, and not because I'm amazing), timing your heals is rarely a thing. I think when you add it all up the combat is quite different. I'm not arguing that it's worse, but it is different. As for the weapon variety, I think that even when you subtract the weapons that were very similar in Dark Souls (Scimitar vs Falchion) you are left with more variety. In addition to the regular weapons you have all the boss souls weapons, the tail weapons and other unique weapons like the Black Kngith stuff, covenant weapons (Gravelord Sword) etc. Almost every enemy in the game can drop their weapon, there's even that silly Plow thing the gardeners use. For me, the 'bad' weapons add value too. I guess it's good that all the weapons in Bloodborne have amazing movesets, but trying to do a playthrough with say Ornstein's Dragonslayer Spear is a lot of fun too. Finally, the item variety matters a lot for the exploration. The fact that there basically are no items to collect in BB makes exploring less fun and that matters on subsequent playthrough too. When I start a new Dark Souls playthrough I think about it in terms of the items I want to get and in what order. In BB the only items you want to get are upgrade mats. I guess there's like one or two armor sets and maybe the Rifle Spear or Tonitrus. There's also nothing with high stat requirements, which feeds into the problem of it not feeling like it matters what you level up. I'm not sure I think the leveling system even has a place tbh. While I'm complaining I might as well add that the Runes are pretty unimaginative compared to the Rings in previous games.

It might be this: But I like deluding myself that it's not and that Dark Souls is actually special. A decade from now I think it'll still be a game that gets talked about.

It's not obvious to try, but you can parry the grab move that the frenzy singers do. The fast/slow poison just seems like yet another vestigial system. Those are the parts I like least, where it feels like they took Dark Souls and just removed stuff from it rather and didn't redesign all the other systems to compensate. They diluted the RPG mechanics so much that it doesn't make sense to base them on such an insanely stat heavy game as Dark Souls.

I wouldn't mind the Halo collection, although I doubt we'll get that one.

Another Tuesday, another Humble Bundle I forgot to buy. I don't know why I have such a strong compulsion to wait until the last moment when I always end up forgetting.

Did they already pull the game? It's not on whatever version of the store I have. edit: oh, I found it. This store isn't great though.

They put out something playable, even though it might not have ended up being representative of the final game that's at least more than people had to go on for say Prey 2, or hell, even The Last Guardian. I guess I should download this even though I'm not that into horror.

In case you hadn't heard, Valve and Bethesda now allow mod makers to sell their Skyrim mods on the Steam workshop. A lot of people are upset about the revenue split (25/25/50, modder/Valve/Beth) but I think the problem is allowing it at all. I don't want capitalism everywhere, it's not always for the better. It'll turn a collaborative community into a competitive market, maybe in Valve's utopia that'll mean professional game developers making Skyrim mods for a living, but maybe it'll mean people charging for unofficial bug fixes to a broken game. Sure, it's great that people can make money off of something popular they built, but you know what it's also okay to do something because you enjoy it and other people appreciate it. I haven't played Skyrim since the winter it came out, so it doesn't affect me personally, but I'm strongly against it on principle. This "monetise all the things!" direction Valve have been going in makes me uncomfortable, and as great as Steam workshop is it's also problematic in giving Valve even more control over everything PC gaming.

Dune has the first problem solved at least.

I guess I should read Infinite Jest then.

I forgot about that. The prequels are irredeemable.

I dislike everything about that scene. That poorly coreographed, vapid lightsaber wankery epitomises so much of what those movies got wrong.

Would you say he's lost his passion?

Did you guys see this? Regarding the Doll

There's a strange issue with my mom's macbook. Typically the shortcut for highlighting the url field in a browser is cmd+L, but at the moment that's not working in Firefox. Instead it's been changed to cmd+I. Now, what I think is strange about it is that there's no built in option to rebind those shortcuts, and cmd+I is still "Page Info". If you hit cmd+I the "Tools" menu at the top flashes, as if you selected a command from there, although it doesn't show page info. However, if I click the menu so the drop down appears, then do cmd+I it does show page info. I can use a plugin to manually rebind the shortcuts, but it still bugs me.