Niyeaux

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Posts posted by Niyeaux


  1. In a time where people earnestly worry about their personal brand and how they, as a person, appear as a branding effort, I think it's overly cynical to be completely unforgiving of someone for presenting a version of themselves to the public. It's not inauthentic if you're simplifying your self for consumption. It's just capitalism.

    Late to the party here, but I think there's a massive difference between someone making a personal decision to present themselves a certain way, versus someone being presented by a multi-billion dollar corporation in a specific way that they have previously determined will make them the most money on top of their existing fortune.

    I think basically any time any creative work is created in a way that takes financial viability into significant account, that sucks and is bad. Something like a Taylor Swift album is the most extreme possible example of that, and as such it is extremely sucky and bad.


  2. Also I take issue with the claim that she is authentic. Whether or not the lyrics in her music contain genuine sentiments, it's still fashioned in a highly contrived way so that songs about New York, or teenage love, or whatever are the products of the pop music machine's idea about these topics. Like I don't even know how you can even discuss authenticity, it's like a totally immaterial concept to the world she operates in.

    I've noticed a startling number of otherwise intelligent people buying into Taylor Swift's marketing. It's completely baffling. I can think of few things less authentic than the weird fun-house mirror version of a human being that major label pop acts sell themselves as.


  3. On the topic of Xibalba: The band that that reader mail referred to as "some metal band" is a pretty big hardcore punk band from LA. They're signed to Southern Lord and have a couple really solid albums. You can stream their most recent one here: http://xibalbasl.bandcamp.com/releases

    On the topic of "Shadow of" games: There was a game on PS2 called Shadow of Rome. The subtitle of STALKER was "Shadow of Chernobyl." The subtitle of Baldur's Gate 2 was "Shadows of Amn." 


  4. I haven't watched, let alone played, Dota since early Warcraft 3 days. I'm just here because I'm interested in the opinions of smart people on subjects about which they care. Why are you here, that you want to shut down the conversation?

    Seriously. I don't play Dota 2 at all, but this conversation is still super interesting to me. Moreover, it's basically the reason I come to this forum in the first place: to read people who know a lot about a thing having an in-depth conversation about it.

    If you don't like it, there's a lovely button in the top right of your screen that will solve all of your problems.


  5. This year's PAX Prime is only a month and a bit away now. I recall there being a pretty sizable Thumbs meetup last year, though I somehow managed to miss it. Are we gonna do that again? Do we have a decent contingent of people attending again this year?


  6. This is very definitely a scam. Their video contains footage from the original STALKER, as well as footage from an old Unity engine tech demo. Almost all the art assets they've used are stolen from various places. The supposed CEO of the company is a stock photo from shutterstock. And, according to this article, the guy running the show (and who is receiving the Kickstarter pledge money), has already run a shady kickstarter campaign once before.

    For the love of god do not back this.


  7. I'm still not convinced that there is an outside world, or that the country is a real place. In my mind, these folks live in Cloudbank and die in Cloudbank. The country seems to me to just be a euphamism for heaven. If I missed hints to the contrary, that might be why I have different feelings about the story (and Red's selfishness) than others.

    Yeah, I think this is implied by the way they use "see you in the country" as a euphemism for never seeing them again until the afterlife or whatever. "The country" seems to be a place that exists only in fictions/belief systems, rather than a place anyone can actually go.


  8. Congrats!! Idle Thumbs referenced you again on the most recent podcast, and I was thinking "Oh, Polygon just ran that story, I wonder if it's the same guy?"   :D

    I'm not the guy whose emails they've been reading on the cast, I'm just a dude who heard that stuff and got inspired to track some of those people down and write a feature about it.


  9. Re: The Transistor thing where you lose a move instead of dying when you run out of health: The move you lose isn't random, it's always the move with the highest memory cost that overloads first. You'll probably have noticed when equipping stuff that every move has a memory requirement between 1 and 4, and the total cost of an equipped move is that move's cost plus the cost of all the modifiers you have attached to it.

    Example: If you equip Cull(), which costs four bars of memory, and then attach Crash() [1 bar] and Jaunt() [3 bars] as modifiers, the total cost of that move is 8 bars. That cost is then used to determine which moves overload first, starting with the most expensive one.


  10. I've been playing through this for the last few days. It's still under embargo, so I can't really say much, but I'll have a review up at 9AM the morning of the 20th. I'll link it here when it goes up.


  11. Now Disney owns Marvel, does that mean we'll never see another marvel vs capcom fighter?

    Hopefully they'll create their own fighter or kart racing game, they've got a big enough cast of characters to topple Mario Kart. Imagine it, a bubble head Han Solo sat in a millennium falcon kart racing against Manny Calavera in the Bone Wagon

    Disney has owned Marvel since 2009. MvC3 came out in 2011.


  12. I played through Mirror's Edge for the sixth or seventh time this weekend. It's still the most beautiful game I've ever played, despite being almost six years old now. It's also still one of my favourite games to play through in general, and is probably my favourite game period of the last several years (with the possible exception of Dark Souls).

    My current rig can run it at max settings with all the cool PhysX stuff on, so I took some fancy screenshots.