Stephen

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About Stephen

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    Pennsylvania
  1. Bioshock Finite: Irrational Games shuts down

    I think that when all is said and done, this is the man we need to remember. Look at those eyes. Those lips. Those cheeks, brazen with whiskers that sigh, "We blow now, never in need of halcyon days."
  2. State of Decay

    I think that, regardless of similarity between games, a score denotes how well a review believes a game accomplishes its goals. How close its grasp is able to settle towards its reach. At least, I believe that's the case for these two zombie games.
  3. Comics Extravaganza - Pow Bang Smash!

    I would have to recommend KC Green's comic website Gunshow. Gunshow It is possibly the funniest webcomic on the internet right now. Possibly. There's also the incredibly Not Safe For Work webcomic Oglaf, which only does a new strip every Sunday, and you should never visit if you prefer violence to sex. Sex is Oglaf's stock in trade as jokes go. Oglaf Also, if nobody has posted about the largely defunct Achewood or A Lesson Is Learned But The Damage Is Irreversible, then I recommend them highly to boarders. Possibly two of the most well-written webcomics to ever grace our Interzone. A Lesson Is Learned But The Damage Is Irreversible Achewood I also apologize for the links looking like links, rather than hiding in pretty sentences. I have not forumed long enough. EDIT: I think I figured it out? You just have to rewrite the link you're given as long as it's still attached to the link address. Also, since nobody has mentioned the graphic novelist Jason, consider him highly recommended. He makes the most beautifully understated and well plotted comics I've ever read. In The Last Musketeer he manages to tell a story that combines Dumas with Ed Wood and in The Left Bank Gang he turns the famous Paris writers of the 1920's into cartoonists and has them rob a bank together.
  4. Nextbox 1080: The Reckoning

    The next generation of Xbox is all about mocapping as many animals as they can. Did you see the fish?
  5. Nextbox 1080: The Reckoning

    For comparison, https://www.google.com/search?q=microsoft+stock+price&sugexp=chrome,mod=7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8 Also, I think I want to just play games on PC forever now. I'm just not interested in good looking dogs in fatigues.
  6. Short Fiction Read Aloud

    This is kind've a stupid post for being a little bit around the actual topic itself, but my girlfriend and I like to pick a short story collection off the shelf and read aloud to each other before bed some nights. You should definitely read short stories out loud from time to time. If a writer is good enough there is such a specific sound to the way they write that it can be almost shocking how much you can dig up in an old story when you're reading it again with your voice rather than your thoughts exclusively. It's actually a revelation almost similar to rewriting the story verbatim by hand. You learn a little bit more about how it was constructed.
  7. Far Cry 3

    I couldn't be terribly arsed to read through much more than the last few pages of this thread, but am still quite sure that I'm beating all of the dead animals and broken records with clods of silt packed around hard mud. So tell me. Is this game kind've mired in shit? Because I feel a bit crazy about all of this and I hope this doesn't start some kind of terrible feud. I'm not sure about the tenor of conversation on the quality of the game, but I hoped that the Thumbs forums would have some reasonable responses in mind. Is it just me or does this game have some good ideas for how to improve upon Far Cry 2, but serves to undermine itself at every turn with its bullshit gratification system loops, its spoiled dedication to the first person perspective's immersive qualities through every damn flashing corpse and objective beacon, and its runaway Yale writer who thinks good storytelling starts and ends with creating meta-commentary by flying naked above his Pacific Island funhouse sprinkling writing devices like so much confetti? But man, I had to stop when I started torching a pot farm. I stopped and decided to go read Wolf Hall. Because when I'm not enjoying the repetitive nature of the game itself, I'm tossed headfirst into this storm of bad writing and worse dialogue that has been trying to wink with increasing density at me all game. So, should I push forward to the end of this frustrating experience, or just be happy in the knowledge that Hocking's ideas went somewhere, and maybe they'll get it right next time? And let me make it clear that there is a lot that the Far Cry series does that I'm a fan of, but maybe that makes for a more disappointing experience.
  8. Recently completed video games

    I just finished playing through Lollipop Chainsaw and it's telling how little I enjoyed that game by how quickly I pushed through it, like I wanted to get through all of the gameplay to experience the game's flavor as quickly as my fingers would allow. At a certain point I found the end of the game and wondered how that had happened. The combat is impractically constructed to hide its combos in a shop system and I didn't begin to even derive a mild pleasure from it until the last third of the game. There was maybe a five minute chunk of time where I might have muttered to someone next to me, almost obsequiously, "Hey. Hey, this is alright. I kind've had fun there in that mime-in-a-box, Serious Sam AI, animation-priority indulgent arena." It's a shame that I have an affection for SUDA's games. They're largely boring to play, and Lollipop Chainsaw was almost frustrating as well as bland. But yeah, I guess that's a game I just finished. I don't recommend the experience.
  9. I need help identifying a game

    Guys. You all need to decide what these Realms are doing to this Haunting.
  10. The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway

    Even moreso, the World English Dictionary cites tight as meaning drunk when used informally, although it is the thirteenth definition of the word.
  11. The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway

    I expect to be berated for this comment. Mildly. Also, while this is probably his best novel, I might prefer Islands in the Stream like a crazy person, or maybe even A Moveable Feast. Nah, who am I kidding. The Sun Also Rises has one of the most perfect final lines in a book ever. It's so absolutely effortless that you don't really think about it like Hemingway sat there for some time thinking 'Oh gawd what is going to be the final line in the novel? How do I perfectly and poetically wrap up my genius?' whereas most other authors allow you to feel their breath prickling your neck hairs as they read over your shoulder going 'Aren't I good? Yes. This is good. So good. What a profoundly rapturous line of prose I have here. Wonders.' Although, interestingly enough, rumor has it that Hemingway was such a perfectionist that he spent entire day's composing a perfect sentence. Nil and nix.
  12. I first read Grendel when a crush told me about it. I had just started exploring philosophy too. It was a maddening experience.
  13. I believe that out of everything of Calvino's I've read Cosmicomics plays the heaviest into dealing with woman as objects. I'm wary of saying that this was done on purpose, and also that it might make things worse for Calvino, but I do believe that it was done out of a desire to get as close to the colloquial attitude of old folk tales as he could. Although Calvino was decidedly irreligious throughout his life, he had a dense obsession with the way stories are told. He even released a book intended to follow the Brothers Grimm, but for Italian folk tales. The times when I remember him letting loose are incredibly interesting then because of this. There are quite a few tales where woman are legitimate characters in The Castle of Crossed Destinies, which is a collection of stories told by Calvino playing tarot with himself. And in Difficult Loves there is specifically a short story in which a little girl completely shatters for a moment the gang warfare of two groups of swimming boys who are so enthralled with their nonsense they don't even realize she isn't playing. On the other hand, Calvino is good at fitting into a lot of stereotypes of the time for how men saw woman. He definitely never fully gets away from that. It's a shame. Although it's also a good thing that we don't read Calvino because he's a bit predisposed to terribly draconian gender ideas. Calvino is special because, more than any other writer I can think of, he explored what it means to tell stories and take away from them within the context of his own beautiful prose.
  14. I also need to point out the truth of this statement. I first picked up If on a winter's night a traveler... in limbo between middle school and my freshman year of high school due to a recommendation from a crush. I think in some ways it helped me to get over all of that. I ended up with a more enduring love in what the book had to say than in what the crush could ever give me. I realized a few years later how easily I had fallen into Calvino's trap when I read his book on what makes classic literature just that. He says that "A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say."
  15. I'm just going to leave here a recommendation to anyone that has enjoyed this collection so far. Don't stop there. Read If on a winter's night a traveler... or Invisible Cities or The Baron in the Trees or The Castle of Crossed Destinies. If anything read If on a winter's night a traveler... and maybe go, "That inspired these? What would Cloud Atlas have been if Calvino had not explored those ideas before him?" And on and on. Calvino is a wonder truly.