tberton

I didn't finish the Bad Blood video, because I find that song so disappointing. Such a good hook but such inane lyrics.

Oh, I didn't mean to imply that Chrono Trigger was the first game to do combo attacks. Just that those were my favourite part of the battle system.

I highly recommend that anybody on the fence about Contradiction go look at the videos Giant Bomb East did on the game. It's hard to convey exactly how wonderfully hammy the acting is without seeing it for yourself.

Journey.

Double-post to say that anybody in the Toronto area looking to get into the game should attend Snakes & Lattes' Core Set tournament. You're only allowed to build decks out of a single Core set, so it will be really welcoming to new players. I also know the guy running it and can guarantee that it will be a good time.

Fuck puns are pretty awesome.

Man, if you're calling it "ice-hockey" then I don't know if you're in a position to call it the one true sport. It's just hockey.

Clyde and Cleihun make some good points, but I'll just chime in on the terminology point. I'm pretty sure they renamed "deck" and "hand" and "discard pile" because the Runner and Corp each of one of each of those, and both sides have cards that affect all three. If they didn't have unique names, every card that referred to "Archives" would instead have to refer to "the Corp's discard pile". Likewise for all the other locations. It's a bit frustrating when you're first learning them, but once you have those names memorized, it's actually far more useful than the more straightforward names.

Yeah, the key thing to remember is that you're only forced to end the run if the ice or some other ability tells you too. Otherwise you can keep sailing through if you want.

Yay Torontonians!

Yes.

I don't have a ton of teaching experience, but I have worked with kids a lot at summer camp and I've never found the "hard ass" approach to work. I lean that way naturally, especially when I was younger, but it starts to lose its effectiveness quickly. Trying to get kids to toe the line precisely at all times just inures them to the reprimands that are actually important to you. I've always had more success trying to engage with them on a more personal level and only getting hard about the really important stuff. I get that such an approach may not be possible with a full classroom though.

IPA is really only meant for use by linguists when writing about phonetics, phonology and the like. It's pretty cool to learn about, though, especially just to remind yourself that your throat and mouth and tongue really are just like any other noise-making instrument. Make air flow differently and you get different sounds. As for actually learning it, it's not that tough. Most of the consonants - at least the English ones - use pretty straightforward symbols. The vowels get a lot more confusing though, because the way English vowels sound does not line up with how they're written in the same way they do for most other languages using the Latin alphabet. Reading [sit] as "seat" rather than "sit" is kind of hard to wrap your head around.

So basically you wanted the IPA.

Cue.

Read the first issue of Phonogram: The Immaterial Girl today. Good stuff. Exactly as weirdly metaphorical and abstruse as I've come from the series, along with the so-clever-it's-annoying-but-it's-still-clever plotting and scripting that's trademark Gillen. Seriously, dude, a comic about a girl who gets sucked into a music video about a girl who gets sucked into a comic? Get out of here. But also I want more.

THE BLUE JAYS ARE IN FIRST PLACE! IN AUGUST! IN THIS DIMENSION!

Now I kind of wish that the thread title was actually "Life Finds a Way".

Oh, I didn't mean to guilt anyone. Like I said, I don't blame anybody for quitting a game they don't enjoy. I just really love Transistor and was befuddled by how mixed the reaction to it was, so I'm always interested to know why people didn't end up liking it. Also, Tanukitsune seemed pretty hesitant about quitting the game, which is why I offered my help. Had the original post been a more definitive quitting statement, I probably wouldn't have barged in.

I used that a bit, but mostly used the random function to fill out the database, just because I felt like it. Something that came up a bit in the other thread: did anybody else play for quite a while after understanding everything? Even after I knew the story of the murder, I was convinced that Eve had killed Hannah (an explanation other than "twins" barely ever crossed my mind) and I still had a bunch of videos missing. So I didn't take the prompt to end the game and instead kept searching, sure that I could find out what had happened. That's when I got super into the tattoo, the coffee and tea, and the tap code. Obviously, nothing came of it, but it took me a while to give up. Did anybody else have that experience?

Well, the Blue Jays' performance won't have a ton to do with that, but I wish you the best.

That discussion was really interesting, especially because I've encountered Innis' writing a lot through school and work, but never that particular idea.

Congrats Snake! He's beautiful.

The Blue Jays have won 8 straight, are in the lead for the Wild Card and a game and a half behind the Yankees. Dare I dream?

Wouldn't that encourage you to experiment more? It's not like Transistor is stingy in that regard - you get a chance to change your loadout after pretty much every fight. I don't know if "breaks the game" is really accurate. You can certainly still run into trouble playing like that, especially, as you say, against Men. Fetches are also troublesome. But also, most of the fun of the game is that are a bunch of different loadouts that feel extremely powerful.