tberton

Lords of Waterdeep is the Blizzard game of Eurogames: unoriginal, but highly polished, almost to the point of being dull. It's not my favourite, but it's a good choice for introducing people to the genre, or if you just want to hang out with people without having the game take up too much focus.

Already recommended, but I'll throw another vote in for Crate & Crowbar. It's quite good and has a very similar feel to Idle Thumbs, although the hosts talk over each other much less.

I wonder how they're going to get around the multiple endings of Human Revolution. Just pick one and say it's canon?

This essay does a better job of arguing about some of the problems of radical politics than most. Well worth a read.

Cara's accent didn't bother me, but I didn't recognize that it was Scottish until my Scottish friend pointed it out.. But yeah, Scottish accents are great. All accents are great.

There's actually an Offworld tournament going on right now that's all 1v1 and it seems super interesting. Definitely different, but still compelling.

The US Gamer review has May listed as the Steam release, but I haven't seen that confirmed elsewhere.

So I finally picked this up, and even though it doesn't run very well on my laptop, I'm enjoying it. Is anybody interested in setting up some games? The AIs are fun, but not that interesting to play against.

I agree that Broken Age isn't great, but I think the only name that's really amazing in your list, Roderick, is Grim Fandango. The rest are just pretty good.

Castroid.

I like the Chris asked Danielle if she'd been to Disney World lately. I think it's been established that no matter when in the whole of the timestream you ask Danielle that question, the answer will be "yes."

Thank you. I'll be honest, the main motivation for starting the thread was the chance to use that title. I've always heard that he did, but I've never actually looked that deep into it.

We do now.

Not exactly Metroid, but Axiom Verge is a Metroid-style game that just came out for the PS4 and is coming to Steam in May and is supposed to be really, really good. I thought the people in this thread might be interested.

I'm super close to my parents, and most of my (rather large) family. I'm closer to my mom than my dad, just because my dad can be frustrating sometimes and my mom's personality is closer to mine. But I can't imagine how it would feel to not be close to my parents, and I always feel bad when I find out that other people aren't, which I know isn't fair because people deal with their own relationships in their own way.

FYI, The Name of the Rose takes place in a Benedictine monastery.

When you encounter a bear, you should make yourself look big and make loud noises.

Not exactly sure if this is the right thread for it, but Laura Hudson just posted this article about Jason Shiga, a guy who makes weird papercraft, choose-your-own-adventure comics. They sound ridiculously cool.

This is really cool to look at, but christ, that would be the worst place to live. Imagine the noise.

Yeah, they've definitely talked about alcohol. Chris talked about getting drunk and playing Super Hexagon way back in Episode 75: Save the Razzin'.

I haven't listened yet, but on your Tumblr the description for each episode is the same, all of them referring to themselves as the "premiere episode." Might want to change that.

Fair warning: many people cite Great Bay Temple as the worst Zelda dungeon. I actually quite enjoyed it, especially since having the map constantly open makes navigating the temple a whole lot easier. However, I'm going to have to beat it again, because the Gyorg fight is complete bullshit and took me took long and I want to do the Don Gero's Mask quest, so I need more time for that. Oh well.

This is super late, but I just saw this post and wanted to clarify that I'm actually at Carleton, in Ottawa, not at U of T. Our history department, as far as I can tell, is mostly Canadianists and Early Modernists.

Well, I'm a history student, so yeah I generally encounter it in the Butlerian sense. Although I think it's expanded even further than that: a recent grad conference we had at school had "Performance" as a theme, and I'll be taking a class on performativity in history next year. It's a pretty popular idea in the humanities right now. The game's angle that Deadpan brought up is particularly interesting to me, since it will hopefully form part of my Master's research. The linguistics angle is interesting too though. I've heard about Searle's theories, but I don't think I'd heard "performative" used in that sense, but I see what you mean.

Yeah, like elvaq said, it's a pretty general world and doesn't have any inherent negative connotation. It's used in academic circles a lot, especially when talking about issues of identity. Generally, when you say that something has a "performative element" you mean that part of the value of the action is that it's meant to be seen by others. So if I say that I'm performing masculinity, for instance, it means that the purpose of some of my actions is to be seen as a man. To take a facile example, the fact that I wear jeans instead of skirts is a gender performance. In the example you brought up about feminism, it's certainly reasonable to be aware of the performative aspects of feminism (especially on the Internet), but don't take it to automatically be a negative. All discourse is wrapped up in performance in some way.