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I thought that the LibSyn worked like this: If you have a 100mb/month plan you can upload 100mb one month then 100mb the next month, but the first month's data remains downloadable. Wouldn't this be great for keeping your backlog available? Or am I misunderstanding something.

We are enjoying making a podcast and a few people have said that they like it. I think that the lack of an RSS feed is probably an inconvenience to our listeners (I'm currently putting the mp3 files up on my dropbox). If anyone has advice about taking our podcast to the next level (an RSS feed and possibly inexpensive hosting) I'd appreciate it.

Apparently Simogo is making a podcast/radio-play related to The Sailor's Dream.

After playing a couple of games where I bought the cheapest company out and inherited massive debts, I've started to buy the stocks of the high-value companies. So far it is working really well. Buying companies out has the snowball-effect I would expect it to have. This makes me think that in a multiplayer match (though I haven't played one), staying in second place until a final rush isn't a very good strategy because in my opinion, that is the most strategic company to buy out first.

For the week of February 23rd, 2015 we will be playing: Mashkin Sees It Through by thecatamites You can play the game in your browser here. Or you can buy the entire collection of 50 games from here.

The thing I keep on thinking about in that article is when Wardell is comforted by having a large amount of twitter-followers and seems to think of them as weapons. This really bothers me; it's easy for me to imagine that he has a similar attitude about how many people buy games with which he has involvement. I don't want the fact that I bought and enjoy Offworld Trading Company to contribute to his might-makes-right delusion. I am aware that producing enjoyable art doesn't excuse douchebaggery, but I don't think he is.

For the buildings that are physically connected to your base, you can scrap the older buildings and invest in different production. That won't change what you are mining though. The last couple of games I've found myself using a combination of the hacker array and the black-market to create artificial scarcity on life-support resources that I have stockpiled. It doesn't win me the game necessarily, but it is something to do that can give me a big enough bump to buy a weak company's stock.

We just posted episode 5 of our short free games podcast. I haven't relistened to it yet, but we think it's probably a good one. http://shortfreegamestalk.tumblr.com/

The offworld-market was locked away. I was referring to the demands of the martian population.

I don't think anyone linked the Brad Wardell interview yet. http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/video-games/gamergate-interviews/12397-Brad-Wardell-GamerGate-Interview The poor guy is so oblivious, I feel a bit sorry for him. He seems to have a hard time taking criticism as anything but an attack and his faith in inherent gender-differences makes me feel embarassed for him. I like Offworld Trading Company though. It's an interesting and fun game that helps me wrap my head around capitalism. Edit: I think I'd rather make judgements on the behaviors rather than the person so I'll rephrase: Criticizing a work with an understanding of white-supremacy and patriarchy is not necessarily an attack that "taints" the artist. Gender equality is not the status quo in the United States. An imbalance between genders in a hobby is more likely to point towards a feedback-loop of exclusivity than an inherent difference of genders. Talking about Gamergate as if it is a movement for journalistic integrity is harmful and ignorant because it is just a tactic to confuse and inflate activity in a hate-campaign. Games journalism has no obligation to ignore the ways that games affect and reflect culture. But I like Offworld Trading Company because it helps me understand capitalism and it's fun, consistent, challenging, and there are few computer-games that use capitalism and markets as a mechanic and medium.

I'm currently disillusioned with the single-player campaign after going back to skirmishes. I like the scenario permutations like "No black-market" and the idea of being motivated by persistent upgrades, but it doesn't do a good job of teaching me how to change my strategy with limited upgrade-paths. It would be cool if campaign missions had the effect of easing me into understanding different strategies that are effective in skirmishes. Maybe I'm looking at this in the wrong order, maybe the campaign is for when I tire of skirmishes and need more challenge.

I wonder how long it will be before I see an android in a non-demonstration setting. If I live to 100, I really think I'll see an android at some point when I'm walking around downtown. Consumer-line self-drivng cars can't be more than 10 years away right?

Sounds similar to my difficulties last night Gormongous. If I had played better, I think I would have eneded up in that situation. I haven't looked, but are there any videos where Soren Johnson shows how to move ahead of the opponents when we are all producing the same materials and most of the higher complexity products are locked away? Late game, when everyone has exhausted their claims and maintaining reasonable supplies on their own, I have no idea if the NPC colony starts valuing some goods more than another (assuming there is plenty of water). In my game last night the condition was "no black-market" so I couldn't think of a way to inflate or deflate prices that wouldn't have just evened out. I should have invested in steel, but I suspect things would have still stalled.

Those tutorial videos helped me so much. Shift+click sells 100 units. I now understand how scientific colonies can put secondary resources on primaries. Watching Soren Johnson panic a little bit in tutorial video #5 helped me understand how much I could reasonably know about what is going on. Just watching some strategies unfold was helpful. I replayed the tutorials after watching each video and I feel like I have a pretty good grasp on the game now. I think I might manage to win two matches in a row on employee difficulty in the campaign! One down. Edit: Nope. I am playing as scavenger and skipped the iron/steel part of the economy. They sold both the entire game and because I don't have any high-level production besides the pleasure dome unlocked, I couldn't find a high priority market that the two of us were not sharing. It looks like I should have had a steel-mill just so that I'd be sharing in that market rather than giving it all to the opponent. Economics is weird.

Diane Rehm is a boss. I love how she moderates discussion.

I was like "oh who is this new person in the Plug Your Shit thread?" and discovered that Thrik changed their avatar. I can't remember what the old one was and all my Thrik associations are tied to that picture.

Did y'all say that Scorched Earth when the runner has three cards, one of which is I've Had Worse would still kill the runner? I would think that the draw would happen before the runner has to discard the fourth card.

I'm looking for a picture of an ancient-civilization's classroom where students sat on benches that surround a dirt/sand area where the teacher draws in the dirt/sand with a pole. Anyone have a lead? I don't remember where these classrooms existed.

I've been think a lot about computer-games that have minimal interaction and are kinda like interactive picture-books. UFO Panic Attacks is a good example of one. Adding or subtracting layered elements with mouse-clicks and giving us an animation that we can control slightly, what does this do for the story? When the "Space aliens were climbing through the window" layer pops in, I get the sense that the frightful fantasy is developing on top of the room. UFO Panic Attacks reminds me a lot of Night Thoughts, Some Bee Ess and maybe Anxiety World; all of these games have hypnagogic themes. Black backgrounds with light-colored lines (with the exception of Some Bee Ess) give me the impression of not only night-time, but of the way a dark wall can become a screen for my hypnagogic visual projections as I lay in bed before I'm tired, not wanting to be exhausted the next day at work or school. In my own life, I tend to associate these occurences with lucid-dreaming ( by category, not by synchronicity). Because of this I'm actually surprised that I don't see any games about lucid-dreaming; I see the interests being so close to each other. As far as the specificity of the subject matter goes, I can identify. The fate powers of extraterrestials in Close Encounters of the Third Kind was involuntarily paired with tabloid photos of grey aliens and that television show that was my first experience of a disingenious documentary series. What was it called? It had the guy talking and renactments. Ah yes, Unsolved Mysteries. For some reason, that show managed to blend X-Files style fictions with 60 Minutes news shows to encourage my desire to give supernatural occurences more suspension of disbelief. I suppose I was christian at the time too, so I had all sorts of faith-based understandings of reality developing in me. Extraterrestial humanoids seemed to be all over night-time network television when I was a kid. I kind of doubt that the same saturation exists for people now. You really have to look for an alien-thread rather than stew in an alien-fad these days.

I would recommend Portal and PuzzleQuest or PuzzleQuest2 (I'm not sure which one would be a better introduction, but you probably won't want to play both of them). Portal turns a first-person shooter into one of the most engaging puzzle-games I've ever played. PuzzleQuest uses the match-three game mechanics in combination with RPG upgrades and abilities. So at first it is like any match-three, but as you choose which skills and equipment to upgrade, the player develops very specific strategies that completely change the way you will look at the board. PuzzleQuest 2 has a much more polished everything, but it felt too easy after obsessing over PuzzleQuest. I'm not sure if PuzzleQuest's story was better or if I was just feel nostalgia for the first game.

Racing-games, sports-games, simulation-games, dating-sims, match-three games, traversal-games, and exploration-games all focus on non-violent mechanics. I'm interested in helping you narrow down what you are looking for though. Are you looking for games that have explicit fail-states that are non-violent?

For the week of February 16th, 2015 we will be playing: UFO Panic Attack 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.

Creamerz feels like an off-brand version of an American Greetings property (Strawberry Shortcake and the Care Bears were created by a greeting card company). But while those narratives include personified opposition that positivity can conquer, Creamerz shows us a saccharine, intentional optimism with no explicit opposition which leads us to assume that the optimism itself may be a flaw. Self-care seems like a low priority in the beach-scene where the creamerz is melting away. It's possible that the dogmatic positive-thinking is blinding the sweet treats from their actual needs of survival. And once I see this, it occurs to me that maybe Dipped In Chocolate isn't actually shy, that's just the protagonists rose-colored version of getting a cold. shoulder. The reasons for non-interaction with the other creamerz in the downtown-scene is possibly an excuse to escape the hurtful realization of the protagonist's inability to socialize with them. Throughout the game I sense that whether or not the reality of the situation is non-ideal, the hopeful thinking distorts the protagonist's perception enough to maintain their isolation and non-interaction. There is the exception of the friend at the store who in encouraging this attitude.

I feel like asking why, but figure that I would have to play through again to ask with any sincerity.

I'm going to make a bad recommendation, Mount & Blade Warband. You start out as a single person with some weapon training but you can do work for various people in the world. As you earn money from those jobs (and from selling clothes from looters or buying low and selling high), you can hire farmers and mercenaries to create a gang. Eventuallly you will want to affiliate yourself with a nation after doing some missions for their generals. After that, if you do well, they will give you some land and maybe even a castle. You may find yourself leading the nations army and I've heard that you can eventually become the king of that nation and take over the whole map. It's very combat focused, but I think the combat is fun. Also, once you use a game-system once or twice, they can feel very repeatitive. This is probably not the game you are looking for, but your description reminded me of it.