Zeusthecat

I bought a second PS3 controller for my daughter last week and we started playing LittleBigPlanet over the weekend. She's been having a blast and thanks to all the time we've spent playing Mario, she's been able to pick it up fairly easily. What's nice about this game is even when the levels get more difficult and she dies a lot, there are ample opportunities for her to respawn and since it is same screen co-op, I can easily show her how to do something by doing it first with my character. Add in the level creator and all the community levels you can play and I have found it to be a pretty great co-op game that a young child can pick up pretty easily.

Yeah, when I first played through MI 1 and 2 I played the original versions on ScummVM. I figured I'd give these special editions a whirl since I purchased them after the fact and they've just been sitting in my Steam library gathering digital dust. I really don't get why they didn't go with the CMI look either. Up until starting it last night I assumed that's what the special editions were going to look like since that was a great look. Instead I was greeted with freaky mannequin Guybrush. And I will definitely play the Tales of games... after I finish my backlog. Soon I will see the light at the end of the tunnel.

I've been working through my Steam backlog and started up The Secret of Monkey Island Special Edition last night. I can't believe it's already been almost 2 years since I first played it and damn does this game have some excellent dialog. I have mixed feelings on the special edition version though. On the audio side, the voice acting and musical arrangements are actually pretty solid. I think the humor in the game works better with just the text but I'm finding myself enjoying the voices more than I expected. On the visual side, I really like how pretty and high resolution-y the updated graphics are but the characters and character animations look a little bit strange. I expected it to look a little bit more like CoMI but instead the characters have this kind of weird, lifeless doll look to them. All in all, the original version of the game is the best, hands down. I think a big part of what made this game so great and funny had to do with the timing of the dialog popping up on the screen and the way the characters expressed themselves in their limited sprite forms. Having voices and weird doll looking creatures takes a little bit away from this. Also, I streamed my first session last night but for some reason the stream turned out all choppy. I'm going to mess around with my OBS settings to see if I can get it smoothed out and assuming I do, I'll be streaming the entire rest of the game throughout this week if anyone's interested.

I'm skipping Hardline. At this point, BF4 has become one of my favorite multiplayer shooters of all time and there is more than enough content to keep me interested for a long time. If your issues with 4 had to do with the shitty multiplayer connection issues, then I would recommend giving it another shot as I have had almost no issues over the last 9 months or so. If it's more of an issue with how Battlefield plays though, then I'm not sure Hardline is going to do much for you as their multiplayer modes sound more or less like re-skins or re-imaginings of modes in previous games.

I finally finished Dragon Age Origins and every last piece of DLC. It was pretty good and I liked most of the story and character dialog stuff but wasn't the biggest fan of the combat. My main character was a rogue archer and I had a really difficult time getting through a lot of the fights. I got to the point where I literally just saved my game every 50 steps or so because there were so many goddamn fights that I kept wiping on. The micromanagement and the amount of pausing that I had to do to get through a lot of them just wore me down and by the end of it, I found myself dreading every time an encounter started. And of course, I wrapped everything up with the hardest boss fight of all which was the final boss of the Golems of Amgarrak DLC. I spent well over an hour on that fight and had to look up a strategy for how to beat it before finally taking it down. So yeah, it was a good game and I liked it but I would have liked it a hell of a lot more had the combat not been such a chore. I have a feeling I might be one of those people that will enjoy DA2 because I could really go for some of this stuff being a bit more streamlined.

I finished Kids on the Slope and it was okay. There were parts of it I really liked but a lot of the show just grated on me. A little too much cheesy high school romance and people giving each other the silent treatment left and right because they are mad about something or another. And the ending really sucked hard too. I wanted to like it and thought I would like it and even did like it at times but I just don't think it quite came together for me. And now thanks to you guys arguing about it, I started Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex. I'm several episodes in and there have been a few good moments but nothing terribly interesting has happened yet. It's been kind of slow and there has been a whole lot of dialog covering various characters and organizations and whatnot that I am having kind of a hard time following. Also, I'm watching it on Hulu which only has the English dub and I'm not sure if I'm a fan of some of the voice acting. A lot of the people just sound really monotone and bored. And I gotta say, that unitard getup the Major has is pretty damn gaudy. It's not really that big of a deal to me but Jesus that is a terrible outfit.

When I was 18 I decided I was going to get a tattoo. I had finally settled on exactly what I wanted but backed out at the last minute when I realized the guy who was going to do my tattoo was a meth addict and douchebag. So I went and got a kitten instead. I was going to name him God cause I thought it would be funny but went with Zeus instead to avoid needlessly offending people. Zeus is almost 12 years old now and developed a nasty habit a couple years ago where he continuously chews off all his belly hair so he has a permanent bald belly. It's pretty gross and whenever he does it it sounds like someone is masturbating so we get to deal with that on a daily basis. Anyways, here's a picture of our other way cooler cat Pima on the other side of our filthy sliding glass door.

Maybe that's really what it boils down to for me then. I prefer a story that presents a situation that is applicable to and can be related to as an adult. So the stuff in Steins;Gate was great because I never felt like their age was a big factor in how that story played out. Sure they were all in the 16-18 range but they could have all been 10 years older and I think the story would have still worked pretty well. With Kids on the Slope, their age and where they are at in life is much more integral to the story. And to contradict myself a bit, as much as I'm not a fan of the high school crush stuff, I actually really like how the quiet reserved kid becomes friends with the tough 'bully-ish' kid (I haven't watched enough to learn their names yet). That stuff is great even though I don't relate to it as an adult so much. So yeah, I guess I'm not very consistent with my pet peeves.

Aren't almost all western cartoons overtly for children? I'm sure there are a lot of exceptions I'm not aware of but I feel like virtually any western cartoon that isn't on Adult Swim or Comedy Central is pretty much geared towards kids. (I expect to be corrected on this) But yeah, I think it's the whole dynamic of a character having a crush on another character and being flirty and awkward around them and beating around the bush that just really annoys me. And anything in a high school setting is inevitably going to have that in spades. I guess cynical grown up me just gets frustrated seeing characters supposedly fall in love, but they are too nervous to tell the person so they get a friend involved, but the girl that the friend likes mistakes the situation and thinks the friend who has a crush on her really has a crush on the other girl. If they just used basic human communication all of that dumb love triangle bullshit wouldn't happen and it would feel a little more relatable to me. Despite that though, it's still a relatively small complaint and I generally really like Kids on the Slope.

4 episodes in to Kids on the Slope and I'm liking it quite a bit more than I expected! It's a pretty big departure from most of the other more fantastical anime that I've watched but I'm finding it surprisingly engaging and interesting. And once again, the music is really great. The only thing I'm not a big fan of is the whole high school romance stuff. With where I'm at in my life and have been for a long time, the whole high school crush falling in love thing is just weird and awkward and unrelatable to me. I definitely enjoy a good love story and don't usually have a problem with that (the romance stuff was one of my favorite parts about Steins;Gate) but when it's in a high school setting like this it just seems kind of cheesy.

Glad to hear you're doing all right. And no complaints here, just clogging up threads with my dumb bullshit as always.

Ucantalas you're alive! Glad to see you back man, how have you been?

First off, Idle Forums is the only form of social media (if you could call it that) that I have ever used so please forgive me if I have a naive perspective on this topic or come off as pretentious. In the years since social media first became a thing, it has been really interesting to observe how discourse between people has changed. Like, it's fucking terrifying if you really think about it. Before the mass adoption of social media (and the internet, but to a lesser extent I think), people had a much smaller sphere of influence and most interactions tended to take place face to face. It actually took effort to maintain relationships and you only had a finite amount of time to spend with the people you valued the most. Trends and fads stuck around for longer and information moved a hell of a lot slower. Now, almost every human being with access to the internet is active or at least exists on some form of social media. The average number of friends some people have on Facebook or following them on Twitter is fucking staggering. Personal and mass communication between friends happens now with minimal effort and fads and memes come and go in the blink of an eye. While I think there are a large number of very positive benefits that have come from social media being widely adopted, I can't help but feel that it is also doing a lot of damage to the way we interact with and understand each other as humans. Interacting with people and presenting opinions through text (often limited to 140 characters) is very different from doing the same thing with other physical human beings. There is just so little room for nuance and much less incentive to exercise restraint. It is much more common for people to be instantly judged as horrible human beings because of vile opinions they may spout on the internet. In a lot of cases, yeah, people that act this way on the internet probably aren't very nice people. But I think the increased tendency for people to categorize other people into neat little boxes based on what they have said on the internet is a significant downside to the broad adoption of social media. Although maybe there is an argument to be made that it is fair for people you have only interacted with on the internet to be fully defined by the words they type. When I talk to people in real life, there is just so much more complexity to the interactions that I think gives me a much more informed and fair opinion on who they are. Hearing people's voices and seeing their body language as various topics are discussed makes for a much richer interaction and makes it much harder for me to instantly write someone off as a shithead. I will often find that I share a lot of the same opinions with a person and get along with them really well only to find out later they like to casually throw around racist remarks and have fairly shitty opinions on a lot of other subjects. When this happens with people I interact with face to face, I find it much harder to just categorize them into that nice little box that I might if I only knew them as a random internet person. They are more complex and there are factors and influences that go into forming their shitty opinions. In person, there is at least some chance of coming to understand some of those factors and maybe even adding your own positive influence to that person. The chances of this happening with some random asshole on the internet? Slim to none.

Hey I liked that one pretty well too. The unexplained talking bear is just pure awesome and I like how it aired more on the side of realism with the way physics worked and everything.

Especially if the glass box is actually just a miniature replica of the popemobile. I really wish I had the motivation to follow through on this but with work and the kids and all my other responsibilities, I just don't think I'm going to find the time to locate a small glass box, put a poop sack on my cat, and drive out to a remote but not too remote desert location to do the deed. And then set up and promote a Facebook page for it. If anyone else has enough motivation to do this, you have my blessing.

Haha, oh man! Very nicely worded. Probably fished out of litter unless I can find the cat version of one of those poop sacks horses wear when they are walking around in residential areas. And on a more philosophical level, will the cat turd only assume the state of being cleaned up or not being cleaned up once the first person shows up to take a selfie in front of it? #Schrodingerscatturd

Okay, so I've been giving this cat turd Facebook page thing some serious thought throughout the day and it is way more of a conundrum than I would have expected. So I'm curious if anyone else here (I'm looking at you Bjorn) could solve this riddle: in what public location could you put a cat turd where people could easily go and take selfies but where nobody would try to clean it up? I do live in a desert so I could just put it in a glass case in the desert and provide exact GPS coordinates but it would never take off that way.

I am going off of pretty limited experience but Space Dandy was the closest I've seen to Space Jesus. Maybe not the most apt comparison but

Oh man, so much potential for mech piloting space Jesus. He could even give matter mass! Yes I know what I said is really cheesy.

Oh man, this Battlefield Hardline article makes me sad. This little nugget especially bothers me.

I have no knowledge of this universe so I'll just take your word for it.

You and me both. I hope they make one of those one day where the chosen one is actually just Jesus piloting a mech.

So I guess they're making Frozen 2. This is very bad news for the Zeus household.

Yes, it is okay when weird explainable shit goes viral. If I can look at a thing and say "Oh, I see why that went viral" then I'm totally cool with it. And come on dibs, we all know poop is a timeless tradition and has many more merits than mini vans.

We must be polar opposites in that regard because I hate when unexplainable shit goes viral. It's a really weird pet peeve I know. I hated the llama thing too. Or maybe there's something deeper going on and I just hate anything that goes viral that comes out of Arizona.