Zeusthecat

Can't we just agree to disagree here? Is it really necessary for you guys to bombard me for not submitting to your point of view? Jesus it gets tiring. I'm not stupid and I don't need people constantly trying to "educate" me on why I'm wrong and why they're right. Grow up.

I'm not judging him based on his qualities as a potential role model, I'm speaking strictly about how he comes across to me on the podcast. And I haven't read his book but from what I've heard, I don't think it is as nefarious as you're making it sound. I thought he just decided to write a book about his experience navigating through his issues which I don't really see a problem with. If he handled shit a certain way and managed to write a book about it and get it published then that's fine. I don't see the need to judge someone based on their potential as a role model and from all the podcasts I've listened to, he has made it pretty clear that he acknowledges he is weird and never really spends any time advocating that everyone else should see the world the way he does. Considering all of the other shitty humans out there he's pretty damn harmless.

Eh, I don't know, as a personality on the podcast, I find him entertaining and am not bothered by the things other people are bothered by.

I'm fine with Dan. It's nice to see someone who has almost no filter and is comfortable saying incredibly stupid and naive things on a regular basis while still somehow not being a miserable piece of shit. I can totally understand why so many people are put off by him but I feel like there are plenty of podcasters out there who are super careful with every word that comes out of their mouth, sometimes to a fault. Dan is like the polar opposite of that and it's kind of refreshing sometimes.

I came to bed and my wife still had the TV on and had dozed off with our son in the bed. I guess she had lowered the volume and put subtitles on to not wake him up and then fell asleep.

I saw this last weekend with my wife and this pretty much sums up how we both felt about it. I had a big dumb grin on my face the entire time and it just felt good to watch. I could maybe nitpick at a few things but it was just too enjoyable for me to bother.

Somehow I found myself watching Grease last night with the volume muted and subtitles on. I learned two things: 1. It's not "Grease Lightning", it's "Greased Lightning". 2. I always hated Grease and thought it was an unbearable movie but when you can't hear anything it's actually not bad and kind of hilarious.

Great posts synth. I remember feeling overall positive about MGS 5 when I played it in large part because of how fun and engaging most of the gameplay was. But hearing your perspective, it's hard to deny how shitty and inconsistent large parts of that game were. What a weird game. Now that some time has passed since I've played it, I don't feel nearly as positive about my experience as I did initially. I think the gameplay was just so captivating that it kind of pushed the negative stuff to the background. But now that I'm 1.5 years removed from the experience of playing the game, that good gameplay feel has faded quite a bit and most of the memories I am left with are those of a weird and gross story constructed by a total pervert.

I've been going through a bunch of Kyle Landry videos and that dude has put together some really fantastic arrangements. I especially like this one:

So I found out last night that someone who had followed me on Twitch a while back and watches my streams is not only from my same hometown of Tucson Arizona, but even went to the exact same tiny Seventh Day Adventist grade school as me at the exact same time and was in my class of <15 people (3rd through 6th grade all in one class with one teacher). She had already shared her name with me previously so as soon as she name dropped the school I realized I knew exactly who she was because there was only one person in our class with that name. What's even stranger is that we had spent a fair amount of time reminiscing about Tucson previously and joked that we had probably run into each other at one point when we lived there. Turns out that we actually knew each other for years up through the beginning of high school. My mind is still reeling from that revelation and just figured I'd share. The odds of her randomly running into my dumb Minecraft streams and actually following me and sticking around have to be so astronomically low, especially considering our Seventh Day Adventist school literally had like 35-40 people from kindergarten through 8th grade. Edit: Oh, and having that revelation while streaming and playing with my other long time friend from Tucson was especially weird. It was very hard to keep my composure.

Managed to get yet another video of Winter's vicious purring.

My friend came into town a couple weeks ago and we were able to get a couple nights of good VR fun in. And we even managed to successfully stream a good portion of it! Here's a couple highlights from our experience with The Lab (The Lab is a load of fun with multiple people) and with Minecraft in VR via Vivecraft:

They provide a platform and ecosystem for these artists to sell their work and make money off of intellectual properties that they do not own, something that I'm pretty sure no other similar service out there provides. And the costs for Valve to run the servers and manage that ecosystem are certainly not zero. I can agree with the argument that 75% is a pretty steep cut, but it is their storefront, their intellectual properties, and I don't think they are "evil" for setting the terms the way they have and for curating that market as they see fit. They could certainly do a bit better, but I don't think it is as evil and exploitative as that article makes it out to be.

Yeah, that article definitely went overboard with its characterizations. I think it made some really bold claims for how harmful they are to consumers and the gaming industry without providing enough compelling evidence to back those claims up. I did not find the piece compelling at all. Plus, what Kyir said.

Sorry, I can't resist chiming in a bit here to help clarify. Analog sound is comprised of a bunch of different frequencies plus noise. Converting that analog signal to a digital signal involves taking a bunch of Fourier transforms to extract all of the various frequencies into discreet components while filtering out the noise. The more you sample the signal (the Nyquist frequency (twice the highest frequency in the signal) being the lowest possible sampling rate to reproduce the signal without error), the better the digital representation of your analog signal. Converting this digital signal back to analog involves just reconstructing the waveform from those discreet frequency components and will always be limited to the original sampling rate. I don't know much about how commercial DACs work these days but I imagine the better ones just do a better job of reproducing the signal while injecting only a minimal amount of noise back in. Since I'm posting in here I should probably add a relevant recommendation: mess around with audio signals and fast fourier transforms in Matlab! It's fun once you get the hang of it and gives you a greater appreciation for all of the math that makes analog to digital and digital to analog conversions possible.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_satiation Happens a lot when you have kids...

Ah okay, so it sounds like the "Players in the last 2 weeks: 2,845 ± 1,543 (0.85%)" metric is probably the closest indicator of copies actually sold for money. Regardless of how much or how little it has actually sold, this is a pretty good example of a game that should be removed from the marketplace.

Wait, is this for real? How the hell did that game manage to get 335,000 in sales? Or is number of owners not necessarily indicative of number of sales? (for reference, Firewatch has just less than double this, which makes me extra suspicious) Given that we regularly see much higher profile games with lower sales than this, I just can't help but be a bit skeptical about that huge number. And if it's real, holy shit.

I think it all depends on demand and whether or not those games still function. If an older game continues to sell copies at a reasonably healthy pace, and can run on a modern operating system, then no, I don't think they should or would be removed with more aggressive curation. But if nobody is buying them and/or they don't run on modern operating systems then yeah, I think it would be reasonable for them to be removed from the store. It's maybe not a perfect comparison since a traditional store has more finite shelf space than the practically infinite shelf space on Steam, but I think it is a reasonable model for Steam to strive for (and Valve's cost to host these games is not zero). In theory, I like the idea of having an infinitely expandable storefront where everyone can find exactly what they want and anyone can put a game up with as little or as much effort as they feel like putting in, but in practice, none of these changes to Steam have been able to mitigate the disadvantages of such a bloated storefront. I don't envy Valve. This is a tough problem to solve.

That seems like kind of an unnecessarily harsh characterization of the arguments others are making here. Personally, I think some good points are being raised by clyde and others and it's been a really interesting conversation to read. Ultimately though, I think I do tend to agree with your point of view. At the end of the day, when you consider what Valve is (a storefront), I think it is perfectly reasonable and within their rights to take some steps to ensure that there is some minimum standard of quality present in all of the products they sell. This is literally what every store that sells anything does. It will never be perfect and there will always be bias and some really good or interesting things may not make it onto the store. But in aggregate, I think Steam and customers will be better off with some type of more aggressive curation that prevents tons of shit permeating the store. I think it is slightly unreasonable to expect that they should sell anything and everything people submit, especially with the seemingly exponential increase of the amount of new games released on Steam each year. They are a store, not a junkyard, and the problem is only going to get worse as more and more games flood an already saturated market. On Jim Sterling, that's cool to hear that he isn't a shithead. He sounds like a decent guy. But I don't think I can ever bring myself to watch his stuff because his brand is so goddamn off-putting. I do wonder though if he has found such great success due to or in spite of his style.

I've never actually watched a Jimquisition video prior to clicking that video above and I have to say, that guy is somehow so much worse than he looks from his video thumbnails. His "style", if you can call it that, is so far past terrible I don't have words for how bad it makes the insides of my body feel. Is he going for like "serial killer nazi pimp" with that incredibly stupid outfit?

More of my cat purring. She is seriously the sweetest goddamn cat.

http://www.polygon.com/2015/1/14/7545635/harvest-moons-story-of-seasons-has-a-sublime-new-trailer It's no secret, I'm a huge Harvest Moon fan (Magical Melody on Gamecube is one of my top 3 F-GOATS). So naturally, I'm excited for this game. The Streetpass functionality and being able to visit friends' homesteads and share resources all sounds like like some pretty cool stuff. So... anyone else excited for this?

Wait, is this seriously a name Ganon has had in a game? If they are gonna play it that loosely, I vote for Ganakin Dorfwalker. Did you know he built Navi?

Out of curiosity, I've been checking Amazon over the last few weeks to see if there would be any WiiU price drops... and $250 for a used/refurbished WiiU is the best I've seen. It's the strangest goddamn thing considering how often those $250 PS4 w/ game deals keep coming up.