tberton

Stop it, you're making me crave my mom's matzah ball soup!

I only listened to the CULT episode of Game is a 4 Letter Word, but I really enjoyed it. Not quite as slickly produced as A Life Well Wasted, but I'm so happy that somebody took up the mantle of that show. Agreed with Mangela that the audio cues don't need to be quite so prevalent. Also, in the episode I listened to, there were several different interviewers who all had similar voices. Maybe splitting up those sections a bit more consistently and using people's names a bit more often would help differentiate that stuff. Otherwise, it was great. I'll probably go back and listen to the rest of them at some point.

Just finished this and I'm glad I'm not the only one who had problems with it. My complaints are basically identical to what's already been expressed here. My favourite part of the book by far were the appendices - I like the world building a lot, but the prose, plot and characters just weren't doing much for me. I bought a three-pack with this, The Player of Games and Use of Weapons, though, so I'll stick with it and read those.

Yeah, remember that Twin Snakes was a Silicon Knights project. I'm not saying Denis Dyack was responsible for all its failings, but where there's smoke, there's fire, y'know?

Kieron Gillen must be going mad with all the work he's been doing lately. Next week, he has no few than 6 comics coming out: WicDiv #14, Phonogram: The Immaterial Girl #2, Siege #3, Mercury Heat #3, Darth Vader #9, 1602: Witch Hunter Angela #3. No clue how he does all that.

You had to take screenshots of the configurations? I thought they were super easy to remember.

They restricted it to the first six because they were all on the NES and they thought that was best to keep the collection coherent.

I had a lot of the same problems with Act 2. I look back on it really fondly, but I got super frustrated a lot while playing it.

I'm waiting to pick it up for 3DS.

I don't understand why people don't like the rewiring puzzles. Those were by far my favourite part of Act II, once I got past a hump on the first one. They were the only puzzles that felt like they had consistent rules. I could think of half a dozen other puzzles that frustrated me more.

This is the best "Ten Years After Katrina" article I've read so far, about two women who led there respective communities in the aftermath of the storm.

This is pretty hilarious/sad, considering how many race riots there were in France in the mid-aughts.

Yeah, exactly. Intersectionality though, to my understanding, is usually more about identity than artwork. Unless I'm wrong. I'm sure these ideas have been talked about extensively in other communities, I just don't see it brought up with video games very often. And I'm increasingly annoyed about games, and especially video games, being analyzed in a tiny little bubble.

I think we pretty much agree here, although I think that generally referring to different works of art as members of sets and subsets is not particularly accurate or useful. Rather, I prefer to think of works of art as nodes in a relational network that cluster together in certain spots but don't have a clear rigid structure. You could draw a lot of really tight lines between Uncharted and Call of Duty and Gears of War and you can also draw fairly clear lines from those to Indiana Jones and Saving Private Ryan and Aliens, but the lines from those games to Her Story or Threes would be much fainter and looser. That is to say, I think intertextuality is a better analytical framework than medium or genre. Also, the thing about "formal" definitions of games is that good ones don't really exist. Anthropologists and sociologists a\have been studying games for at least a hundred years and, as far as I know, none of them have come upon a good rigorous formal definition. People will use working definitions, but it's always clear that it's a shortcut and that there are things that are clearly games that don't fit the definition, or things that clearly aren't games that do fit the definition. That's why I think it's better to abandon to search for rigorous definitions entirely and instead define things by what other things they share similarities with.

Clint Hocking is now working at Ubisoft Toronto. Funny, I never actually realized he's Canadian, although it makes sense.

In some cases, I think it's even detrimental. Trying to draw that clear line around video games implies that, for instance, Rock Band, Spacechem and Thirty Flights of Loving are closer relatives of each other than they are of karaoke, programming and short films, respectively.

Canada just removed the tax on women's sanitary products. It was pretty big news. I don't think they're covered by medicare though, which is bullshit.

Honestly, I find the distinction between video games and other kinds of games is becoming less and less useful as time goes on. There are just games and some of them are similar to each other and some of them have digital components. Drawing hard lines is unproductive.

Speaking of Jack Black and Tim Robbins, I recently rewatched High Fidelity. They are both really fun in that movie.

But Wait, There's More! is also a good take on the genre.

Depression Quest. Be careful though, it hits hard.

It was the Rabid Puppies, not the Sad Puppies, who dominated the nominations though.

The Wired article was a pretty good breakdown, but I find the implication was science fiction has historically been apolitical or that non-white man writers have already recently entered the scene to be misleading. Sci-fi has always been political - even overtly so - and many of the biggest names from the genre's past are women. Like Gamergate, one danger of the whole Puppies thing is an attempt to rewrite the history of the genre, so that an "SJW" invasion seems more threatening.

I just realized that Gary Danko was not the bassist for The Band. That was Rick Danko. I listened to this whole cast (twice!) thinking that the bassist from The Band had started a really fancy restaurant.

I don't really like any of Swift's videos, to be honest. Blank Space and Shake It Off are both great songs, but their videos are both kind of lame. Blank Space ruins the tension of the song by cutting back and forth between way too many scenes way too fast; Shake It Off just has this weird gimmick that is completely unrelated to what makes the song good. I guess the We Are Never Getting Back Together video is alright.