clyde

Is anyone else noticing the war-drums? Seems like the Obama administration is lining up public support for a more obvious prescence of U.S. troops in Syria. I suspect that it is being timed in such a way to make Clinton look hawkish enough for the election. I bet she's the one who will announce the war once she's elected.

It seems like YG is starting a new cycle with the 2NE1 formula which works so well. Teddy seems to be feeling it. ...it's like a post-Red Velvet 2NE1. They even have a with overly dramatic vocals for the harmonious parts used for breaks.

\ I love thinking that this is what was on the stereo when Reinhardt and Ana first hooked up.

Once you have an understanding about what is happening based on positioning, what characters have the most damage output and who is about to ult, Mercy can become a frantic game of triage-versus-buffing. But yeah, the other supports allow for drastically different playstyles. For instance sniping with Ana or wall-running, knocking people off cliffs with Lucio.

I watched a Let's Play of the beginning of the first level out of curiosity (I skipped past the intro cut-scenes). Jensen skydives into Dubai or something and lands like a naked Terminator. Then the player looked around and saw that some objects have highlighted borders. Approaching the objects, they then had the option to move or throw them. I quickly noticed that these objects were duplicated frequently enough to make this high-fidelity production immediately feel repetitious (I think they were hinged-saws). Then the player found a ventilation-grate they could remove and they did so the reveal a cubby with a dead worker who had a credit-chip to loot. Behind that desicated body (which I believe could be moved or thrown) there was another chip of some sort. The player picked it up and was prompted to download a phone-app in order to scan its geometric pattern. Then he moved some boxes in order to go through a door. I have a vague interest in craft and the systemic reasons for video gameness. I've been playing Magic Wand which seems to be an 8-bit JRPG hyperbole that seems to attempt to maintain enough ambiguity to keep the player in a state where they can't quite define what is going on in the narrative. Watching a few moments of this DEus Ex Let's Play made me immediately want to see what a similar treatment would look like if given to these self-proclaimed AAA games from the 2010's that ask players to create multiple log-ins and maintain the odd theatrical qualities of trying to form a character within a power-fantasy where you can do such limited actions in a world of prefabs. This form is so odd and I'd love to see a game that hyperbolizes these qualities while still being interesting to play.

r...r.i.p. ...COD? I think it is really just an acknowledgement of how multiplayer games depend on having other players. I'm sure that in some cases, the sentiment is literally trying to convince the group one plays with to get one game rather than another. To be honest, I think it's entirely fair; the publishers are well aware that franchises and platforms have a stickiness that makes it difficult for groups to move from one to another, they leverage that. The desire to express that a franchise will fail or just be a bad investment is an attempt to dissolve the mineralization of one's perceived player-pool so that a decision based on the current situation (or personal desire) will be made rather than one that is made by immobilization imo. Sometimes the perceived player-pool is a somewhat fictional, but perceptible gaming-consensus.

I think the concept of an audience adding a layer of fictional frame-work over and over again until they reach a point where the piece is comfortable to interpret is actually really interesting, so thanks for that. I guess what I am trying to say is that the "flaws" some people point out about TBG in order to disprove the conceit of the framework, I see as prompts for the audience to break the conceit (so that they can add an additional layer of frame-work until the reach a point where the piece is comfortable enough to interpret). I should mention that after watching Davey Wreden commentate over a Twitch-stream of two people commentating over TBG, I no longer think that Wreden intended the audience to believe that the non-narrator author was fictional, but I still do. That was a nice video zerofiftyone, it helps to have someone lay out some concepts for meta-textual analysis like that. As a bonus, I enjoyed seeing the meaning of TBG that the video-maker felt was general and corroborable enough to feel confident about settling on.

Doesn't Battlefield: Hardline have a mode similar to Bounty Hunt? Have y'all played that mode? Is it interesting?

I think I asked an irrelevant question above. Let me try again. The versimilitude of The Beginner's Guide's conceit was broken so intensely at various times that I began to think the story was about an unreliable author writting a story starring an unreliable narrator. So instead of buying in to the fiction that this was a autobiographical work, I was building a persona of the fictional author that was being expressed through what we were seeing/playing. By the end, I felt that making assumptions about this fictional author was a preparation for the audience to then make the same types of mistakes Davey made without making assumptions about the person, Davey Wreden, himself. So I saw the holes in the conceit as something that was actually intended to make the audience start to bypass the narrator as the main character and start thinking of the author as one.

RIP COD

Does chalking it off with your conscious suspension-of-belief still allow you to include the conflation of the narrator (Davey) and the actual author (Wreden) as an integral part of the piece?

I'll be searching for a Titanfall 2 stream when I get off work in 3 hours. If you are streaming, post here so I can get that artisinal shit. Edit: my itenerary has shifted. Still please post if you stream.

I totally forgot about Culdcept Saga I played that demo over and over for a while. It had a really distinct feel.

I felt that sense of the conceit being unreliable from the Counter Strike level in the beginning; I didn't think that was a level-file actually pulled from another game. So the entire game felt like awkward preachy rhetoric to me, but I came to enjoy that sensibility. I liked the idea that the narrator was a creation of Wreden that was depersonalizing themself through the levels in the game and a "Coda" of their own fiction. Simply put, the conceit being absurd is what triggered what I eventually came to like about the game.

I'm starting to want a rail-sliding animation for all the characters. There are a lot of rails to slide on.

We bought a table-griddle thing and we've been cooking on it as a way to spend more time looking at each other and talking while doing something simple. Fake hot-dogs were what we cooked on it last night. It's very easy to clean too. We also cook pancakes on it. For both of those dishes, we slice up an apple and throw them on the griddle when waiting for other food.

They should name the new map "Dewar" to honor the person who bought all the loot-boxes that payed for this.

I haven't played the game because of these concerns. That said, this thread is really interesting for me. PlasticFlesh's metaphor of the game basically being an exploration of a folder-structure in a first-person game form is a concept I'm totally into. On launch-day I looked at a few streams and all of them were in what amounted to a very pretty loading-screen and so I decided that I am too impatient to play this game, but From what I'm reading, No Man's Sky is illuminating some fascinating discussion. I'd be really interested in players being able to affect the universe in ways that were apparent and interesting to other players. I heard there is going to eventually be a base-building mechanic. My assumption is that the structures that other players create won't populate everyone else's game automatically (perhaps requiring an invite instead), but I like thinking about the side-effects of trying to impliment a shared, effectable universe. I would imagine that they would have to reverse the procedural-generation by creating some sort of compression algorithm that could condense player-structures into something that could be produced procedurally which might corrupt the structures in interesting ways. For instance, maybe it would just record and reproduce the placements of corners and fill in the tile-choices as defaults. Would players start to exploit these corruptions in order to shortcut construction-processes? I think that type of thing is interesting to think about.

Master's Sun has the best chemistry between actors imo. It can be slow at times due to the structure of the episodes (it's kinda like a 16-episode Quantum-Leap show where they are solving a problem each episode, but the romance does progress in the background). This is the only one I've watched where I looked for fan-fic after it was over because I needed more. I think Playful Kiss is the best because everything that happens in it is essential to the overall message, it's a joy to watch, and the story manages to actually communicate something that I feel is significant and applicable to real-life. Both of the main characters in the show change each other in believable ways. Unfortunately, the lead male-actor is a scumbag in real life. I really enjoyed Coffee Prince. The inner tension of the male-lead due to his homophobia is a really effective device (in this case) for showing how strong the attraction is, but I could see that being really offensive for some folks. My Lovely Sam Soon is probably the most mature story among my favorites. The ending feels less idealistic than the fantasies I'm recommending. Kim Sun-a's performance really impressed me. I never came around to liking the male-lead's character, but I can believe that Sam Soon is smitten. There is a lot of fat-shaming in this one, sometimes it feels like an expression of the culture the characters are dealing with while other times it feels abusive (if I remember correctly). Dream High was a lot of fun. Don't judge it from the first episode (first episodes are typically horrible anyway, but this case is extreme imo). This isn't a romance, but they try to shoehorn a few in. The appeal to this show was that it's glamorous to see the social and academic lives of high-school age idols (I don't think it is realistic, but I enjoy the fantasy). If you like things like Fame and Highschool Musical, then give this one a shot. You're Beautiful also has a musical appeal, though it doesn't establish itself completely in that sense. This is one of the campiest of my favs. The premise will tell you whether or not you want to watch: a nun has to pretend to be a boy and live with a boy-band while her twin-brother gets eye-lid surgery in America. I included a mixture of DramaFever and Viki links, if you prefer one to the other, you can probably find all the shows on either but they might have slightly different titles. If you find any that you like the first 5-or-so episodes of (they often fall off the cliff quickly), please tell me that they exist. THANKS FOR ASKING!

She's got a point, he hasn't shared his gamertag.

Pocket Card Jockey

I'm interested in doing a BigScreen Beta meet-up with any of y'all who are interested. The frame-rates of the displays are very much internet-speed dependent though. My download-speed is 3Mbits/s and upload is 0.5Mbits/s. So that means that I'll be able to see your displays at about 10fps and you'll be able to see mine at around 1-2fps. STILL! I think it might be fun.

PSA I just read some Reddit posts about how the displays in these devices can easily get fried when sunlight goes through the lenses and burns the display. It hasn't happened to me, but I didn't know this was a big vulnerablity.

IU is badass. She was actually in Dream High with Suzy. I enjoyed very much after the first episode even though it's not really a romance. JYP plays a really fun character. I wonder if it is significantly different than how Disney controls their child-stars like Britney Spears. I've been really into Primary lately

I wonder if the behind the scenes standards will get more abusive or less abusive as it becomes more popular internationally.