clyde

I'm on Steam, I'll add you.

We've been having a great time playing a coop vs. A.I. match about once a day. My wife is pretty happy playing as Gadget and I've started getting into Feng Mao. I'm not a very good jungler, but I enjoy trying. I still get lost in the jungle a lot. Usually my wife finds a lane she doesn't have to compete for XP on and I run around the jungle if there isn't an empty lane. Then when she sees an opportunity for a gank, push, or needs to escape she will call me over. It's fun. We are winning these A.I. matches around 25 minutes in if everyone on our team is playing. We just got to the point where we are starting to really think about our custom decks.

I just discovered the term "Mary Sue". I was hoping we could discuss it. Then I realized that fanfic is a mycelium in this community and so it deserves a thread that focuses on it. Here is an especially succinct Wikpedia entry on Mary Sue characters. First of all, Mass Effect's Shepard is going to cause problems because you can pick your gender. As the criticism in the Wikipedia article points out, "Mary Sue" is a gendered pejorative, "Marty Sue" doesn't fix the problem, and the concept is incredibly valuable so a short-hand term like this is a good idea. "Cipher" seems like a good solution, so I'll use that term. This concept, and the small amount of context of which I have just become aware, is a particularly accessible entrance into a discussion of what fanfic is. Much like "hipsters", when I type it into Youtube's search-bar, I find an infinite scroll of derision. I'm not judging; I know that it can be fun to hate something together, but I think it is worthwhile to note how popular it is to make fun of fanfic. When I read the Wikipedia entry for "Mary Sue", I was struck by how well this concept described the tendency in action-movies and computer-games to create empowered characters that were devoid of anything but superiority and dominance. Is there a connection? Are Call of Duty, DieHard, and "A Trekkie's Tale" filling similar needs? Also, it seems obvious to me that a big part of what makes fanfic valuable is the exchange of creative agency from the author to the audience. Put simply, fanfic is for writing more than it is for reading. "A Trekkie's Tale" is lacking in its narrative, but the idea of a disempowered cipher in an established fictional world is intriguing to me. I love the idea of turning a passive medium into an impetus for a creative endeavor. Hopefully, by the end of the day, I will try my hand at fanfic.

Full strip.

My love of Far Cry 2 is legit how I found the Idle Thumbs podcast.

As I played this morning, I was reminded of the wonder I felt from Scribblenauts. Sometimes I get excited when I search for an exotic term of my own creation and look at the image results on Google. For example, if I type "birds playing scrabble" (which I haven't yet), I'll likely be able to check the image results that will have some amount of coherency with my wish as I phrased it. There is this thing in Slack that allows you to type /giphy and a term or phrase that will then show you some animated clip that the database associates to your reference. In all these cases and in Rehgehstoy, I experience a moment of genuine delight in seeing how my text-input will manifest. When I was in highschool, talking to friends on the phone in the evening, sometimes I would ask them to draw me a picture while we talked and give them a list of subjects to make sure and include. Then when I saw them at school, they'd present a picture to me and it would always be so exciting to see how my words were translated into an image within the artist's capacity. For me, the incompatibility between text and the manifestations they attempt to describe is something I think about frequently. Sartre's thoughts on the essence of a chair and other philosophical musings about how language is a crutch for understanding help me try to remember that instances are not the references we use for them. The presentation in Rehgehstoy feels much different from a google search-bar though. There is a sense that the manifestations did not exist before the words were put down; there is a library where the ambient sounds of rain create a distinction between the place in which the references exist and the place where the instances manifest; there is an exotic language, implied culture, and motive within the fiction through which we write things into existence. These aspects of the presentation and the psuedo-enforced formatting of the vocabulary-mechanic make me more receptive to cadences similar to the sing-songy spells in Shakespeare's plays or Disney movies. When I select my words in repetitive parallel stanzas, I experience a slight trance that moves my mind into a text-centric thought-pattern that conflicts with the non-textual manifestation that I can access immediately afterwards. This conflict is not only that I might have imagined the results differently while rapping, but also in the particular tooling my mind wants to use in order to approach understanding of the subject. Because of the poetic-technique I'm encouraged to employ due to the presentation of Rehgehstoy, I'm more likely to experience this dissonance more intensely. If only Google would try harder at making guesses when I type multiple stanzas into the search-bar.

I redownloaded Team Fortress 2 thinking that my new appreciation of Overwatch might have unlocked my ability to enjoy TF2. The modes are pretty much the same, but the two games feel very different. I think the choke-points are much more constrictive in TF2 due to the lack of verticality and ultimates. I still don't enjoy TF2.

The closest thing we have to a singularity thread is the Singularity thread. How have we gone so long without a thread devoted to the plan to create confused simulations of ourselves for all of eternity in a bid to avoid joining the great majority and start saturating the universe with self-replicating twitter-bots? The 2020's are coming, who else is excited about computers with more computational power than human brains?

I'm looking for youtubers (who have a similar sense of humor to my own) who have guide-videos on the various heroes. Any suggestions.?

I'm starting to get into it a bit. For some reason, this morning it clicked for me. I opened the book on the far-left, top and found a note that says "hello". I wanted to add it to my vocabulary, but couldn't find a way to. I noticed that that particular book and a few near it are oceans. having already played the game a bit, I was confused as to why I couldn't write; I ended up thinking of this status as a narrative where the D'ni sometimes have writers-block. I started clicking a bunch of books randomly trying to get to the point where I could write again and slowly started becoming interested in what was written in some of them. There was one particular island that caught my interest because I couldn't understand how it was made with the mechanics I'm currently aware of. It was kinda like a waterless caldera with a few pits about fifteen-feet wide each. I noticed that the word "scattered" was used and that there was almost a meter to the poem where the verses could be thought of as nesting in the previous ones; this created a coherency with the island itself which seemed to have concentric deformations. So once I got words (still not sure how), I tried to do it myself whimsically and it resulted in the island depicted above. What was most interesting to me was that the ambient noises and the action of creating repetitive verse hinted at a trance-state as I added stanzas. When I go back in, I plan to try this method of writing islands in earnest.

Is there a lore-bible? I'm curious about where the train has departed from, its final stop, and if there are any stops in between.

It's totally better. I suspect that I may one day see cosplay of the Dot Gobbler.

Thanks. I think I'll make a thread too. Heads up, this is what the diversifier check-list looks like currently:

Is there a thread in which to put finished games? I made a flickgame based on the description for episode 253.

I didn't enjoy this at all for the first day of the beta, but I got kinda into yesterday and today. I like assessing the situation at the objective and then changing my hero to counter it. No one seems to play Symmetra which is strange to me since she seems to have a big influence on whether or not the match is won. Has Blizzard announced any sort of long-term support plan?

That's a really good point Ninja Dodo. The scope of Mass Effect 3's narrative doesn't go far beyond what Mass Effect establishes by its end.

It would be nice if William Wickland was on these here forums so I could quiz them about what online game-making communities they are aware of. I know the email seemed to be more about fostering a local scene, but it drives me crazy thinking that they might not know about non-capitalist game-making culture like Glorious Trainwrecks, and the Wizard Jam. I like to think that once someone is able to define their desire for non-commercial games, they can simply find them but I'm not sure if that is true. One certainly can't expect non-capitalist games or the communities who make them to be marketed in widely broadcasted distribution-channels.

My wife and I played our first game of Paragon together this morning (still only playing cooperative vs. AI.) It was a blast; lot's of her yelling "Stop jumping around, I'm trying to heal you!" and me coming back with "Stop putting the healing bubble in an enemy's area-of-attack!". It was really fun. We haven't figured out how to invert the y-axis on a controller though; she is stuck in her ways.

So I still feel that I only have initial impressions even though I've been playing this every once in a while and I've been thinking about it a bit. My memory of Myst is that it is a series of static photos arranged as perspectives on a computer-graphics island of puzzle machinery and trees. I never got off the first island. I just walked back and forth across it trying to make anything happen. My macintosh took a while to load each individual perspective so deciding to go elsewhere took some sense of commitment. The only things I know of Myst's lore are things I've misheard in passing. So really, the game's bio on its itch.io page is the most I know of Myst's lore. In that context Rehgehstoy is neat largely because it approaches a fan-art effort with systems-thinking conjecture. I like that Rehgehstoy expands the universe only by allowing the player to experience the details of the labor of creating that universe as told in the fiction of the original work (I'm assuming a bit here). This is especially entertaining for me considering that the authors of Myst were likely relying heavily on a metaphor of their own experience making the game, here realized in an experiential form they never intended to be experienced. And it works; Unity's visual defaults are compatible with my fallible memories of Myst's aesthetics. I felt that this is how the fictional creators may have gone about beginning to create the digital place I experienced briefly 20 years ago. here are some things I found interesting about the design decisions that went into Rehgehstoy: -I'm surprised that the books aren't re-rolled every time I open the program. That permanence makes the shelf feel specific. In this context, the ones that are just oceans become something akin to the blank Unity projects I have with different names. -The prioritization of the increment-notations is really odd. It communicates a lot about the D'ni people's awareness and control of intensity. I think that cooking-recipes communicate that priority in cooking as a comparison; there is a culture that notices the difference in a teaspoon of salt and a table-spoon of it.

Can you explain a bit more? I still don't understand why people who don't do the master-challenge thing (whatever that is) would be at a disadvantage.

I just read on neogaf that Paragon is having a free-weekend currently.

You are right. They are having some sort of double XP weekend. Maybe that has something to do with it. Just in case there is any confusion, there is no cost to be able to play any character; they are all free to play as.

Even if Sanders or Clinton win, we are about to see The United State of America's least inclusive, racist, misogynistic, nativist views be spouted all over the radio, television, and internet for months. It's embarassing and damaging. I like to think that the white-supremacist patriarchy is more likely to be rejected when it comes out of Trump's mouth, but he seems to be popularizing it. Pat Buchanan was explaining how white-supremacy is the only realistic standard for U.S policy on NPR this morning. The amount of publicity these views are getting because of Trump is concerning since I view any exposure as advertisement.

It looks like the mastery challenge things are 75,000 reputation points (I've earned about 22,000 so far with somewhere around 10 hours of play) or 1,300 coins (coins are basically pennies, so that's $13). Card packs (of five) are 10,000 reputation points; it doesn't look like you can directly spend real money for those, but you can buy boosts that increase the rate at which you earn reputation points. I don't really know what the master challenge thing offers beyond new skins. Cards on the other hand allow you to build your character out in specific and variable ways. Also of note: I seem to have been earning card-packs automatically. I think I've probably received about 5 or 6 packs without intentionally using any points on them.

Even though this video is about a build for a specific character, it really gives a good idea of what playing feels like (though it's heavily edited; the pace of the game is much slower).