blackmamba

I haven't opened it yet, so I can't really say if I like it one way or the other. From what I understand he intentionally phased out a lot of his pop culture references in this book which seemed to be one thing people really disliked about Murakami. I'm generally pretty easy to please though.

I'm wondering if the share function will only allow you to stream or will you be able to archive video with it? I'd be very interested in that sort of function. As far as the preemptive downloading, I can only say I hope there is a toggle for that because everything about it rubs me the wrong way. I'm into pretty much everything else though assuming I can disable some of the social features.

Ah! One of my favorite games! I gotta catch up then. I still remember the eel colossus being one of the unnerving moments in gaming for me. Seeing Wander float in the water with the huge shadow of the beast beneath him brought back all my worst fears of swimming in the ocean.

I picked up The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles by Haruki Murakami today since I enjoyed one of his short story collections quite a bit. Has anyone read Mo Yan? I looked at Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out at B&N this morning and it seemed like the kind of thing I might like just from the description and all of that. Almost bought it but I bought Moby Dick instead since I think I need to brush up on the literary canon a bit.

It was easier for me to relate to the narrator of By Blood because I didn't know where his obsession comes from. You're just thrust in the middle of his disturbing perspective without much context at all. If it was defined, I'd probably end up thinking "Oh, well my obsessive qualities come from a totally different place, so I'm not really like this character at all." So I was fully able to inject my own reasons for behaving obsessively, feeling lonely, etc.

I'm not sure where to post this but it would feel weird to make a thread out of the blue. Has anyone ever played forum mafia or some variant of it? Some people know it as a party game (sometimes called "Werewolf"). It's similar in concept to a game like The Ship or Spy Party. It was created by a soviet psychologist to determine who has an advantage between a large uninformed group and a small informed group. You can play with a group of around 11-30. The majority of the group is designated as "town" (or "human", you can use whatever flavor you like) and a smaller section is designated as "mafia". A town player only knows his or her own identity and role. The mafia player knows the identity of the other mafia players in the game. They are also able to communicate/plot in secret outside of the game while everyone else is constricted to a public forum of communication. Each "Day", usually a 48 hour cycle when playing on a forum, everyone votes on a player to eliminate at the end of the day. That player is then eliminated and their alignment is revealed. After the day cycle, there is a 24 hour "Night" cycle where the mafia convenes and chooses a target to kill that night. The goal of the game for the town is to eliminate all mafia players from the game. The goal of the mafia is to reduce the number of town so that they are equal or lesser in number to the mafia. In the purest form of the game, no one is allowed to communicate at night except for the mafia but I rarely see this enforced in forum games. There is a lot more to it than that, of course. But even when you add in a lot of special roles or third factions, the core of the game remains the same. The town must analyse the posts and behavior of everyone in the thread, trying to determine who is part of the mafia faction. The mafia must participate in the town discussion and remain unsuspicious, trying to take part in the finger pointing without incriminating their teammates and encouraging the bad lynch mobs that rise up against innocent players. I think it's a blast. There aren't a lot of great avenues to play the game, unfortunately. I used to host and play games over at TeamLiquid quite a lot but since I've stopped posting there, it's hard to find a good game. Don't know if it's something anyone would be interested in but for anyone who likes armchair psychoanalysis, it's fun as hell. The biggest barrier to entry is that there is often a lot to read and it can be a pretty involved and emotionally draining game for some people. I hope I explained it adequately.

I'm wondering if it's going to actually have a serious narrative or if all that stuff is just context for the gameplay. Can you ever "beat" the game? Or will it be a WoW style sort of thing where players can complete certain narrative events and new ones are continually introduced via patching? For such a long video that Bungie has released, I feel like I know pretty much nothing about this game. I can't remember the last time a game started off a big PR push this vaguely.

Do you need to preorder the game directly from Irrational to get the code for Industrial Revolution? I preordered from Gamestop.

The concept is neat. I wonder exactly how the multiplayer will be implemented. I was under the impression that this would be an MMO and I'm glad I was wrong about that. It looks like it will have something closer to a Journey/Dark Souls style of multiplayer? I'm interested in how they're going to balance narrative that places your custom character at the front of the story with always-on multiplayer. I wonder if there will even be an option to disallow other players to connect to your game. But- ever since Journey and Dark Souls came out I've really been hoping more developers would try doing something totally different with multiplayer, especially in a shooter! Sounds like that's what Bungie is going for. Maybe I'm being too optimistic though.

Not gaming related - but if you're a fan of the NBA, even casually, you should check out The Basketball Jones. Best sports podcast out there along with the B.S Report. Very goofy and it definitely has much more of a comedy spin than your average sports podcast but it's still packed with good analysis and statgeek stuff. Broadcast from Toronto, Canada.

Hi. It's been a long time since I've posted on any forum, used to be a big part of the StarCraft:BroodWar community (specifically regarding Korean E-Sports). Eventually lost interest in life (and StarCraft) and spent about 2 years in complete seclusion without reading, writing or doing much at all besides working and playing video games. I feel like a huge chunk of my brain went missing during that time so I'm fumbling around trying to socialize on the internet again. In any case, I found the Idle Thumbs podcast a few months ago after hearing it mentioned on either the Bombcast or 8-4 Play. I immediately fell in love with it, it's definitely my favorite podcast right now.

Finished the book a few days ago. really enjoyed it. I had no problem with the narrator being an underdeveloped character. He wasn't really as much of a character to me as much as he was just a filter for all of the events in the novel. It made the connection to him and his point of view - more intimate? By being dropped into a persons train of thought with no context I avoided my natural inclination to try to separate myself from the character, more so than I would for a typical first-person narrative. It wasn't the narrator and the facts of his existence that interested me, the only interesting thing about the narrator (for me, at least) was his eccentric view of the world around him. I definitely related to the narrators detached connection with the patient. It's certainly not the point of the book but it made me think of the strong relationship everyday people feel with celebrities, or maybe their favorite musical artists. Not quite to the level of obsession that the narrator had, but I've had the sense before with a person that there is some bond that doesn't really exist at all. That being said, I didn't take much out of the book when I finished it. It's the first book I've read in a while, so no deeper thoughts. I definitely look forward to the podcast though. I regret having spent the last two or three years without reading or really stimulating my mind at all for that matter.