clyde

In my first game, the thing I'm having a hard time with is understanding what my expectations should be for the pace of the game. I don't know if games are going to last a few hours or a few months. I actually don't know if it even ends. But I am very conservative with time so I'm reading a lot of the tool-tips as I test out all these options and when there are no obvious quests to do, I try something like investing time in boosting a species' economy but I don't really know what I'm doing there and when I advance the clock I get nervous as populations and military powers inflate very quickly. It's not a complaint, I'm just saying that time seems like a valuable resource and I have very little idea of how I should be spending it. -------- Later on. Apparently I'm still in the tutorial. I'm going to miss the written voice of the "computer" when it ends. I hope this is what Cortana will be like. http://images.akamai.steamusercontent.com/ugc/442825888107019643/9C8689FF8D57C3CEDBB90C52AE9D36D9EB930C16/

I just started The Last Federation. Feel free to figure out how to play it as I do the same. https://www.idlethumbs.net/forums/topic/10268-the-last-federation/

I completely agree with you. Still, I value articles like this not because of their reliability, but because the get me thinking of the potentials of systems or complex relationships. How could the author have contextualized the article in a way that it would be seen as more of their personal speculation, where they are trying to figure out their own hypothesis? Let's suppose for a moment that further research is not possible, but the author has this idea of how the evolution of particular forums (with similar styles of moderation) have popularized media-tactics which are being used by hobbyist activists on both sides of the left-right spectrum? I think part of the gamble with an writing an article like this is that the folk-history account is not necessarily reliable, but helps to understand how those embedded in the places described see their community's history. Does that make sense? I don't even know what to call an article like this, but it reminds me of things like This American Life and RadioLab where the entire thing seems like some heavily edited anecdotes in the terms of an experimental hypothetical to tie it all together. Reality television would be another similar example. It's a bit unrelated, but this is a useful opportunity since I know you have some history in journalism and I write like the author of this article. I often ask myself if I should keep or remove unconfident language like "it seems that" and "I think" and "in my opinion".

I thought this article makes some interesting points about how unmoderated anti-establishment internet-culture awakens the misogynistic white-supremacists. While I appreciate that being pointed out, the article gives me the impression that misogynistic white-supremacy is growing faster than compassion and reason (which I doubt). Also, I don't think I know what fascism means.

I don't have any immediate recommendations. I'd have a better chance if you asked for something more specific like "Is there a turn-based strategy game with a [blank] narrative theme that does x rather than y and where you play from a [blank] perspective." I'm not sure what you aren't getting out of your current collection.

For the week of June 29th, 2015 we will be playing: Candy Planet by thecatamites You can play the game in your browser here. You can download the single game from here for free Or you can buy the entire collection of 50 games from here.

I didn't see it being a population of private-investigators, I thought the small, controllable character was just one of many inhabitants of New York City that happened to be a P.I. Still, I also enjoyed the difference in scale between the Warriors and the native New Yorkers. Ancient Warriors is a strong game. I think that the purpose of the majority of the game's design is to inflate the scale of the Warriors. The rampaging battle of the colossi causes a whirlwind of massive destruction, buildings are knocked out of the way like beach-balls. By obscuring the reason for the fight in a legendary unknowableness, the Warriors are given an olympian god-like status. The versus-placards seem to borrow an importance more from promotions of televised boxing matches than Street Fighter for me. Saturated, sunset colors and heavily shadowed structures, give the circumstance of the encounter a weight of finality. The auditory squishes and glass crackles of pieces of the environment being blown into each other reduces the size of the buildings in comparison to the collisional growls of the battling giants. And the player interaction of controlling Hawk establishes the scale of reference the player pays attention to in order to make the New Yorkers more insignificant to us until our scale of control has been reduced to their perspective after a few battles. Everytime I play, this switch in scale takes a moment for me to change modes and I think it's really effective in creating a circumstance where I am made to feel like a much less powerful actor. The lack of collision between the New Yorkers and anything within the battle increases the scale again by putting it into the distance; it's far more common for games to do this visually with parallaxing layers rather than layers of collision alone. I was reminded of Spinjas. The design of the warriors feels like it comes from a similar essentialization of visual design from the soldiers of ancient empires and science-fiction enemies, then mechanized. The fighting system was the most apparent similarity for me though. The way directional momentum is hard to build up, but the distances that result from bouncing off a collision with the enemy seems to be sudden and drastic. Most interestingly (to me) though is how all of that effort towards inflating the scale I pointed out previously seems similar to the goals of the context provided by Spinjas' promotional materials. This isn't a toy, it's a hard-hitting action-packed stand-off and the victor will assume the throne of the kingdom at the center of the Earth. I'm a sucker for fictional context like that, it feels like a saturday-morning-cartoon version of some fantastical heavy metal album cover from 1981. There was often an implied scope of epicness and importance in commercial toy media of the 1980's cartoons. World-saving robots battled it out to prevent the destruction of all humanity. I think Ancient Warriors presents the imagery of that genre to us through the child-like perspective implied by the marker-style that thecatamites has been using in many other examples within 50 Short Games. But it's mixed with some interest in the narrative or contextual complexity we become interested in as adults. It doesn't feel nostalgic to me, instead games like this one give me the sense that there is a way to perceive our contemporary adult-reality in the terms of the media we consumed when young; I expect to go to work by way of looping HotWheels tracks unless I take the subway-train whose speed is controlled like a slot-car. By the way.I beat Doug a few times, but even after an epic battle with Yoko, Hawk still couldn't win.

Starseed Pilgrim or The World Beneath or a harder table on Pinball Arcade like Gorgar, Centaur, Central Park, Big Shot, or Eldorado.

I really enjoyed Episode 5 if the Beastcast. It was funny and interesting. I think they are finding their groove.

Apparently there is the an attempt to get a campaign rolling against folks who work on the John Oliver show. I just saw this tweet, I have no idea how much effort it looks like they will put into this. https://twitter.com/superspacedad/status/614619167384166400

@moddy Thanks for sharing that feeling. I didn't realize Natural Selection 2 had that type of thing going on with it. It's interesting how all the gruesome violence and competition in many video games can lead me towards thinking that there is no sustained solidarity and communion among players. It's interesting to try and figure out what encourages sustained non-anonymous communities in multiplayer games rather than just trying to figure out what keeps a population high. Also what is "pugging"? Do you mean "pubbing"? As in going into public matches?

I continue to think about this visualization of image-recognition machine-learning. This seems like such a big deal to me (because I can now kind of see how it works). I look at this Twitch stream and have all sorts of thoughts. This isn't just a trippy-demo. The demonstration of an algorithm that a program has developed for itself in order to identify images (with the help of humans tagging the relevant examples) is the first time I really have begun to comprehend how self-driving trash-trucks are going to pick up my trashcan, having never seen it before. That this is a visual demonstration is also helpful for me to be able to grasp how more conceptual implementation of machine learning works/will work. I could totally see a doctor-robot recognizing the totality of my symptoms and physical diagnostics like weight and blood-pressure as a patient with a certain variety of illness using similar methods as this bot that adds pixels to match psuedo recognitions. But this visualization also helps me understand how my mind creates models of the world around me. Our ability of prediction has to compete with reality and we have more complex motives than a stream of suggestions from Twitch-users, but I see a lot of similarities between how I extrapolate from personal anecdotes and how this bot draws pagodas.

Music Creator 7 is on sale for $20 today. I should also mention that I'm coming around to it. Getting everything initialized for your particular setup can be kind of confusing and frustrating (and necessary), but now that I have it set up and I bought the woodwinds DLC, I'm pretty impressed with all the interfaces I can use and how good the synths sound. -I adjusted the buffer size to 20ms and it feels good now (and sounds right) when I use the virtual keyboard. -Going between the virtual keyboard and the staff-view and having a decent sense of the cut/copy/paste functionality is allowing me to do what I want to do in a reasonable amount of time. -I really do like playing the synths. Just making chords experimentally with the virtual keyboard is chilling me the fuck out. I made a short melody-line with my new wind ensemble.

I played it, I thought it was pleasant. Thanks for sharing.

@JonCole I want to throw my support behind the idea others have mentioned that sometimes an individual needs to just take a break from the news-feed. It's important to recognize that when you are jacked-in to the net, these surges can take an emotional toll. I was feeling kinda crazy from all the news from the past week and the surge from today that you described. My wife and I went for a nice long walk after taking an hour long nap and eating a vegetable dinner. I didn't check my phone during that time and I feel much better. I'm here and going to check Twitter in a second though.

This comic lists some questions a 6 year old East Indian/Jewish boy asks his mother. I thought it was cute and interesting. http://www.buzzfeed.com/mirajacob/questions-from-my-mixed-race-son?utm_term=.no0YA8zzG#.wfrE6dWD3W

I really feel you on this itsamoose, I really do. I think you are right, but I just want to kick racists in the balls so bad that I'm focused on how this is being taken rather than having my feelings be trumped by the sloppy, heavy handedness. To be honest, I like the fact that this feels like an abuse of power. The reason I like that is because it makes it feel like Apple is risking some sort of timeless, objective moral high-ground to just sucker punch people with more interest in free-speech than in the concerns of existing members of a minority who has been both brutally and subtlely oppressed for centuries. Does that make sense? Like, I don't necessarily think that your example game is promoting slavery, but as clyde, I just love the sense that a inconsiderate tidal motion is causing problems with anyone near a flag that many are using for the purposes of explicit and implicit hate-speech. I really agree with you though, I'm just selfish and angry about this particular issue and I like watching things burn. By the way, I would think it was awesome if Apple ends up doubling down and removing Gone With The Wind or David Allen Coe's music when the free-speech contingent puts pressure on them. A nice drip-feed of messy anti-racist culling of the arts appeals to me.

If I was in Apple's position, I would do this as a deliberate political message that says "We want to devalue and humilate those who think that a heritage of enslavement is something to be proud of." That would be my reason for doing it so broadly. Some developers might have to get creative and do some extra work, but whatever. Sending a clear message that says "Fuck you you fucking racists, you aren't welcome" would be worth it to me. And I think they've done it without having to remove movies or books or whatever. I agree that the ability of Apple to do this is bothersome though. Really, what I don't like about it is that Apple's store isn't open and that it is so incredibly large. I don't enjoy distributors like Walmart and Apple deciding what messages to promote and which ones to starve. So in summary, I would do this if I could, but I don't want anyone to have the power to do it.

As distribution-platforms become more popular and more centrally controlled, we are going to end up with enforcements of their terms of use that remind us that they are not open platforms. I would have probably made the same decision they did in this case, but they also took Phone Story off the store. It's a weird situation. I wouldn't want Gamejolt to leave a game up even though it's a simulation of beating up a specific person made as an act of intimidation.

The Apple store has removed all the apps featuring imagery of the rebel-flag (from what I've heard on twitter). Some claim that only a government can censor. I don't think the word "curation" really captures what is going on here. Anyone know what to call a central power's removal of content from a massively popular distribution channel they own because they don't want to support certain views or offend customers, partners, and workers? Maybe "enforcement of terms of use"? Edit: nevermind, apparently there is already a discussion in the Business Side of Video Games thread.

I can't listen to this while reading. She's speaking to the language part of my brain with the piano. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jRZd3l9TMAY

Orange Is The New Black misled me. I was assuming that transgender women inmates were treated as women. Apparently both the american prison system. and Immigration and Customs Enforcement lock up transgender women with men. Trigger warning: there are lots of anecdotes about rape and sexual assault.

What did you like about this article?

I don't quite understand it, but everything linked in this blog post is kind of... it makes you think. I guess they are teaching AI to manipulate images based on what it manages to kind of see? It's weird. http://317070.github.io/LSD/ It's pretty wild that google's image recognition software dreams of all the pet-photos people have been putting up for the last decade.

I made a video trying to show my midi-composition workflow in Musc Creator 7.