Zeusthecat

Two trees constitute a forest. Although I'm a bit drunk so maybe it's three trees?

Yikes, I didn't realize Guacamelee was that divisive. Yeah it had some dumb referential humor but aside from that, I loved almost everything about it. And yeah it was pretty difficult in some spots but it never took much more than 30-45 minutes to get through some of those spots which I felt was still in that range where it was more satisfying to overcome than it was frustrating. And personally, I loved the music and art style. Maybe I just have bad taste.

So I'm stuck in Minneapolis. I was supposed to have a connecting flight to Tulsa Oklahoma but the flight leaving Phoenix was over an hour delayed and my connecting flight was just starting to taxi as I got to the gate. Now I have a new flight leaving at 5am tomorrow morning which means I need to wake up at about midnight phoenix time to give myself enough time to get a cab to the airport, check my bags, and take another long ass flight with another layover to finally get to Tulsa some time after noon. And I was supposed to meet with our prospective client's IT department tomorrow morning to set up for a demo. So now I get to show up super late with 2 hours of sleep if I'm lucky and try to impress these people and get our system up and running. And no word on my luggage yet. Just sitting here in baggage claim waiting for them to find my shit. If they don't then I guess I need to go buy some new clothes since I'm in shorts and flip flops. Flying really fucking sucks ass. I haven't been in this much of a panic in a really long time.

Thanks Argobot, that's a solid response and I think you're right. It sucks that our industry is so male dominated and that we don't just have an equal number of qualified women so this wouldn't even be an issue. I would love to bring your perspective up to her but I'm really hesitant to try to convince her to look at it another way. Being a dude and all it would feel kind of wrong.

Yeah, Steins;Gate didn't do much for me until around episode 12 or so. Then it proceeded to become possibly my favorite anime. With the caveat that I've still only seen less than 20 anime. I've watched the whole thing about 4 times now. Just don't watch in English, it's terrible.

On the E3 thing, that reminded me of something that happened at work recently. We have this demo coming up and and some of the people on the selection committee are female. So some of the higher ups in our group decided that we should bring one of our female team members along to show better representation. However, when one of our female team members was asked, she got pretty offended because she felt like we were only asking her to come because of her gender, not because her skill set was a good match for what we are trying to show. And I totally agree with her and think she had every right to feel that way. So what do you do in that type of situation? Do you include a female team member (whether it's the E3 stuff or my situation) just because she's female or do you only do so if that person is the most qualified person to cover that material? It seems like it can be kind of sticky either way and I'm not sure I understand the best way to go about making these decisions.

I like this perspective, although I take more of a dick stance about it because I'm a jaded butthole when it comes to family. Family are just people you know like anyone else. If they've made your life miserable, they aren't owed a goddamn thing. In a lot of ways, family can be worse than regular acquaintances because they can treat you 10x worse and just keep barging into your life whenever they want because they're "family". Some family members can be awesome and having that "family" factor makes it even better. But when they aren't, I figure they're just like any other shitty person that just happens to share some of my DNA.I don't have any experience being disowned by my family but I've spent my entire adult life trying to minimize contact with them and maintain my sanity whenever they do come around. And unfortunately when you have kids there is a lot of pressure to keep them around so the kids can see their shitty grandparents and shitty aunts. And man if there was some kind of adopt a family program where you could interview people and find the most suitable surrogate family, that would be the best.

Me, Cussedcayuse and Zasa had a pretty epic run last night that went into the wee hours of the morning. First, after a couple failed attempts the previous night we gave the Nightfall another go and managed to very narrowly squeak out a victory. We were on the final boss just trying to pop bubbles and burn him as fast as we could. Me and Cussed both went down as the boss was near death and then Zasa went down a few seconds later but somehow miraculously got the killing blow at the last second, giving us the victory before it could reset. Then we decided to take our first ever stab at level 34 prison of elders. We were a little handicapped because I was only 33 but we blasted through the first three rounds without issue regardless. Round 4 though was a real pain in the ass and I think it took us about a solid two hours to finally get through it. By then we had our shit down really well and took out the final boss on our second attempt. He had a pretty cool mechanic where every couple minutes the floor would go hot lava and we had to stay off the ground. It wasn't too bad though and we were able to juggle our supers pretty effectively to get through it. I'm so stoked to have finally gotten some etheric light. Now I just need to wait for either gloves or boots to show up for house of judgment and I can use an armor core and my etheric light to hit 34.

Zasa is my friend and he plays pretty regularly with a few of us so I invited him to join the Idle Thumbs clan. He's a cool guy. Sorry if I sucked a little through parts of that. It didn't help having that guy berating me and referring to me as a kid even though he was fucking up just as often as anyone else. It was fun and I'm stoked to have gotten some great drops but damn that guy was an ass. Thankfully the rest of you guys were awesome as always.

I don't really understand what you mean by that. Care to elaborate?

I usually saved molotovs for bloaters. For clickers, I tried my best to sneak up on them and use a shank and if that didn't work, some well placed bullets usually did. If you can power through a little further, it starts to get a little easier once you've upgraded gun accuracy and shank durability. Not sure if you've gotten to the part where you are hanging upside down and having to shoot infected and clickers that are rushing you but that is the hardest part in the game since it's early enough that you hardly have anything upgraded. Everything gets easier from there.

I joined the group. I would love to do Crota's End and VOG HM this weekend. Have yet to do either of those.

This Friday and Saturday the wife and kids are out of town so I'll have lots of availability. Still only level 33 though.

I know I'm a little late here but I wanted to chime in to say that I totally agree with Twig here. The number of shits I give about exclusives is close to zero. I am loving my PS4 because there are a ton of great games to play on it even though most of them are available on other platforms. I like the ecosystem, the trophy system, playing comfortably on my couch, and not having to worry about PC specs or anything like that. When I get around to upgrading my PC I'm sure I'll probably shift more towards PC gaming but even then there will still be a lot of stuff I will play on PS4. In fact, the only time I really prefer PC gaming is when it comes down to graphics. I am a sucker for pretty graphics.

7 games left. I started UnEpic last night and I'm not sure how this one's gonna go. I had to immediately turn off voices because they were just godawful but even with the voices off, the plot and dialog so far are pretty cringeworthy. However, the gameplay is starting to pique my interest a bit and it looks like that aspect of it might be kind of fun.

I finished Guacamelee. I had a blast with it. The art style and music were really solid and gave the game a really great sense of atmosphere. The platforming also felt really good and I enjoyed those difficult segments where you have to have pinpoint timing on all of your button presses and world switching. Some of that shit got really intense and it felt pretty damn good when you finally pull off the correct sequence of moves with the right timing after 20 minutes of failed attempts. The combat also felt really solid and had a lot of complexity woven in, allowing for a lot of different combos and improvisation. All in all, this was just a really solid game. After completing it I saw that Hard mode had opened up. And nope. Fuck that. The base game was difficult enough. I also finished Borderlands 2 on PS4. I've been playing this for the last couple months with some co-workers and I still love the hell out of this game. I enjoyed it when I first played through a couple years ago and found myself having just as much fun the second time around. The only main complaint I have is that if you are going through and doing all of the side missions as well as the main missions, it isn't long before you become way over-leveled for everything. Enemies become too easy, you barely gain any levels and the game does get pretty boring. We'll probably run through some True Vault Hunter mode after we knock out the last two DLCs which should be fun.

I'm totally not outraged at all about anything Destiny related. It's been interesting to see the love/hate relationships people have with the game and how that's developed over the last year but I feel like I've more than gotten my money's worth out of this game and the two DLC's I've purchased. I've spent more money for far less content in other games and I bet a lot of other people have too so it's kind of weird that people get so riled up about this one. Then again I never paid much attention to the game before I got it so I never had to deal with any broken promises or mis-aligned expectations. If the new DLC seems to have enough content to justify $40 then I'll get it and probably enjoy my time with it. I don't care about emoticons or any other junk in the collectors edition so there's nothing for me to get too upset about.

I just don't get fashion critiques at all. It is such a stupid fucking thing to focus on and yet our society is completely inundated with magazines and television and so-called 'fashion experts' making claims about how wonderful person A looks and how terrible person B looks because of the combination of fabric and colors they decided to wear. It is just all so dumb and pointless.

My daughter's 6 and she really liked it but I don't think she fully understood everything that was going on. I feel like this is one that has a lot more to offer to adults. It's definitely fun for the kids but there's no way they're gonna grasp some of what's going on.

I took my daughter to see Inside Out and it was absolutely incredible. Definitely one of Pixar's finest films.

Yesterday was one of those days that I thought my eyebrows were gonna burst into flames the second I stepped outside. And that's after it started to cool down a bit.

Merus, I think I follow what you're getting at and it makes sense. I hadn't considered that perspective. I like Mangela's Amazon tribe example too. But let's say that there are some terrible aspects to that culture that makes life miserable for a subset of people within that culture. Would it really be worth preserving the entirety of that culture if that were the case? Let's say that instead of preserving their culture, we just preserved certain perspectives and behaviors within that culture. Does that then become a bad thing because we are maybe "westernizing" that culture and picking out just the parts we like? What is our moral obligation here? This is honestly incredibly confusing to me. I kind of feel like our reverence for culture is misguided and that we should instead focus on preserving behaviors and perspectives that are unique to cultures that aren't our own. But this seems to be frowned upon because it isn't our place to try to influence cultures that aren't our own.

I've been thinking a lot about the concept of culture lately and I realized I don't really have a solid grasp on why it's so important. To be more specific, I guess I don't really get why it is important to preserve sets of beliefs and behavioral patterns purely because of "culture". Whether it is southern culture, hipster culture, Native American culture, or any other of the multitude of cultures out there, what inherent attribute do they have that makes them so important? All cultures had to have started somewhere and it's weird to think how, over time, they eventually gained enough traction that they became a powerful enough force to actually dictate people's morals, behaviors and beliefs. In that sense, it kind of seems like a terrible thing because, for a lot of people, it can be used to justify terrible behavior and bigoted beliefs. And a lot of people accept it because as soon as the culture card is brought up, suddenly it becomes harder to argue against because culture is considered so important. I don't mean to say the concept of culture is necessarily bad, I just honestly want to understand more about why it is important and why it is a thing that people hold on to so strongly.

I won't use the H word but what you describe sounds like a very H word concept. Which is totally fine! When you say the cocktails were unique, do you mean they were unique in a good way? If these are the types of cocktails that wouldn't normally sell well, I fear that it might just be a lot of horse semen apple shots. Which is also totally fine! And really fucking gross sounding. Now the quiet aspect sounds very appealing to me because shit is usually just way too loud. It kind of makes me want someone to start a chain of bars with a librarian instead of a bouncer.

I've been going through the back catalog of GB podcasts for about a year and a half now and am currently listening to the E3 2012 episodes. Specifically, I'm listening to one with David Jaffe and I have to say, I can't fucking stand that guy. I've heard him in a few previous episodes as well and he just comes across as a coke fueled whiny douchebag. Hearing his stupid opinions and his constant whining about things is grating on my nerves so badly. I don't think I've ever played any of his games but after hearing him go on and on with his bullshit, I don't think I'll ever be able to see a game with his name attached to it and actually want to play it.