Niyeaux

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.

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.

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."

Yeah me too, it was good times. Defs gonna attend again this year.

Is there a thread for all the ridiculous domains we've been registering through the Hover promo? If not, there should be. I know we've collectively registered a ton of them, because people always mention them in episode threads.

Sounds like the podcast might be getting a bit off blade.

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.

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?

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.

And here's another one for good measure, about bands much nearer and dearer to my heart. http://therunout.com/post/88686417571/slacktivist-fan-entitlement-is-slowly-killing-punk

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.

I wrote a big ol' feature for Polygon that's based off some of the Steam hat trading stuff that was talked about on the cast a couple months ago. I tracked down and interviewed a bunch of the people involved in that stuff, which was really goddamn difficult, but I think it turned out pretty well! http://www.polygon.com/features/2014/5/22/5590070/steam-valve-item-trading

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.

I don't have a good photo of my desk/PC gaming area, but here's a picture of how my living room looks now that everything is put together properly.