Patrick R

Half-Life: Uplink!

Also, there is a huge range of commitment levels. I probably spend 30 to 50 dollars a month going to the movies, my cinephile friend spends 100+ dollars a month on blu-rays and DVDs on top of going to the movies. I only ever buy a game if it's under 10 dollars (unless it's the incredibly rare instance where I'm super excited for a game and buy it day one, like Gone Home and probably Firewatch), so I probably spend an average of 5 bucks a month on gaming. And the only piece of hardware I ever specifically bought for gaming was a wired 360 controller.

Here's a few suggestions: The Battle Wizard (1977) - 77 minutes of pure crazy kung-fu action from the Shaw Brothers. Cobra Thunderbolt (1984) - Thai super-future-tank synth score insanity. Crazy dangerous stunts. - No-budget Reanimator shot on video. Great trash.Action U.S.A. (1989) - Basically a stunt team's demo reel loosely connected with bits of plot. All fairly obscure and completely crazy.

I really liked the super glitched Gauntlet (PC) run that PJ and Murphgator did.

You should! It's really good!

PL_Goldrush from TF2. I've probably played 200 hours of this. Hell's Kitchen from Deus Ex for all the reasons said in the linked article. The last stage of Dead Center in Left 4 Dead 2 always felt the most insane and frantic of them all.

I just saw Tangerine, a totally unapologetically vulgar Christmas screwball comedy about trans sex workers shot on iPhones. Which sounds super gimmicky, but it's actually one of the most incredible things I've seen all year. Despite the low-budget equipment it's actually an incredible and gorgeous looking movie.

I've been watching this on an off in between work and I guess I'm just #blessed, because I haven't seen any gross behavior yet. The worst I saw was that one of the commentators made a weird "over-protective/abusive boyfriend" joke about Nemesis during RE3 and the runner was clearly uncomfortable and tried to walk it all the way back, and ended up saying a few earnest (if a bit awkward) things about how terrible abusive relationships are.

Ding. No servers equals no tipping. Also, since there's no tipping their minimum wage is higher than it is for jobs with tipping.

When I worked at a pizzeria I never got tipped for takeout orders, and didn't expect it. But that's just me. I will occasionally tip for takeout, but it's always a whim and never more than two dollars.

One comparison is qualitative and the other is metaphorical?

I am really terrible at strategy games and don't quite understand the rules of Civilization IV, so I always play it on the easiest setting and the fun comes from just watching my beautiful civilization grow unencumbered by worthy opponents. I used to play Starcraft a lot and would always use cheats for resources and fast production to basically do the same thing with base expansion. In Warcraft 2 I would make my own custom maps where the opponent was walled off (for some reason enemy AI couldn't attack walls) and just play it like a weird shitty version of Sim City. I would use Sim City 2000's map editor to create huge mountains and cliffs and valleys, and fill everything with roads and then import that into Streets of Sim City so they'd be crazy stunt tracks. My mom made me play Mario 64 with my little sister even though she didn't know how to play, so I invented a hide-and-seek game where you would lock the camera down and then go and run Mario behind some wall or object and the other person would have to guess where he is.

There's Lynne Ramsay and Satoshi Kon in one hand, and Michael Bay, David Fincher, Steven Spielberg, Edgar Wright, Akira Kurosawa, Jackie Chan, and Martin Scorsese in the other. I'd say my "largely" qualifier is apt.

I'm definitely being petty, but I think film students already tend to over-focus on individual elements (usually the ones that you don't need experience, historical context or human empathy to appreciate) and not actually think about how films work as synthesis, as alchemy. Hence the people who make the prettiest compositions get the most attention and you have a hundred thousand Royal Tenenbaums and Fight Club posters on a hundred thousand dorm walls. So it annoys me anyway. Speaking of me being petty, your professor was being ridiculous because you can't hang a shot on a wall. Unless you do it via a TV or monitor, like an art installation. Also, the desire for a beautiful shot shouldn't overwhelm it's contextual function. That's how you get nonsense like Zach Snyder movies. Ok I'm sorry, just being stupid, I'm done.

Kermode is a good example ( ), except that he came from radio first. I wouldn't call him a YouTube critic any more than I'd call This American Life a podcast. Still definitely worth checking out. The answer to "Why isn't there more good thoughtful ______ criticism on YouTube?" is because good and thoughtful criticism isn't really rewarded by that medium, or by most internet mediums. And the amount of time and effort to make a video essay is already so huge that if it isn't going to go viral and be viewed by a shitload of people it's probably not worth the effort. It's much easier and more alluring to just make a super-cut of people getting punched through windows or something. Even the beloved Every Frame A Painting* is only popular because it largely focuses on established critical darlings (usually genre films that primarily appeal to the 18-35 year old men) of the past 25 years. No viewer is challenged by being told why their love of Edgar Wright is justified, or why David Fincher is important. It's well-made, but limited in it's scope. I think if you want really good video essays on film, there are two routes to go. For historical context, there's plenty of documentaries that cover the history of film, film movements and filmmakers. The best of these is probably The Story of Film: An Odyssey by Mark Cousins, and Los Angeles Plays Itself is also excellent. And for specific critiques, commentary tracks by people who didn't make the film are always enlightening. On that tip, a lot of Criterions and special editions of older movies will have good commentary tracks from critics or historians. If Steven Soderbergh does a commentary track, listen to it, full stop. *On a much more petty note nothing drives me up the wall like suggesting one artform's power by comparing it to another. "Every Frame A Painting" feels as worthless a statement as "Tupac elevated rap to the level of poetry" or some nonsense like that. Every frame isn't a painting. Every frame isn't even a photograph, really, not the way one actually views them. Also, the popular Twitter account "One Perfect Shot" doesn't feature shots, it features frames. Little things.

Today I saw a Red Bull ad outside a 7/11 that said "Power ups for your quests in Destiny" and it sounded like the craziest nonsensical gamer pandering word salad before I remembered that Destiny was the name of a video game.

I imagine one David Lynch film catch-all would serve your purpose.

the original original knife-drone

The reader mail song made me so happy.

I've been making my way through the documentary series and while it definitely feels like a really valuable document (that will only get more valuable as time goes on) I think as an exploration of the creative process it's a bit hampered by the fact that they don't want to spoil everything. Which is a problem that I don't really think would be solvable, considering the circumstances under which it was produced. But I always feel at an arm's length from the creative process because the specificity of choices people are making are often hidden away. I will also say that it is an incredible piece of marketing because even as a non-backer I feel like I have so much emotion invested in Broken Age right now that it'd be ridiculous for me to not buy it.

I didn't see the prompt! Oh well. I have no idea how you can make art look that good in Flickchart. Do you have a digital drawing tablet or just a super accurate mouse? Or perhaps you didn't take Lithium for a decade and do neurological damage to your fine motor skills.

I thought this whole thing was so weird that I checked out the curation page and ended up getting sucked into Clicker Heroes because it was on there. If only that game was 60 FPS, then it'd have some integrity to it.

TF2 is number one. I find myself falling in and out of love with Spelunky, but that's after 233 hours of play. There is no single player game that I've played through more than Deus Ex. I probably sunk a hundred hours into Gemcraft Labyrinth before my save accidentally disappeared and I lost all my progress.

I was surprised this even took 2 hours but it did. Room Painting Simulator 2015

I saw it. Fascinating story told haphazardly. It's one of those documentaries that immediately made me suspicious because the story of how the documentary came to be would be one of the major events and yet is never told.