Zeusthecat

This has become a new staple and might be the only breakfast I ever eat from now on.

One of my co-workers has been trying to get me to play these games for ages but I kept putting it off so I could keep making progress on all my backlog games. With that out of the way, I finally purchased the Nathan Drake Collection and have been playing it for the last couple weeks. Prior to this, the only experience I've had with a Naughty Dog game has been with The Last of Us, which I absolutely loved. At this point, I've finished Drake's Fortune and liked it so much that I went back through to mop up all the trophies aside from the ones you get for beating the game on Hard and Crushing. Starting the game, I was immediately taken aback by just how good it looked. Considering this game was an early PS3 game, I wasn't expecting much in the visual department. But it's immediately apparent that they put a lot of effort into sprucing up the visuals and upgrading the textures. There is just no way it looked nearly this good on PS3. The color pallet was especially nice and all of those vivid green leaves in the jungle areas really made the scenery pop and feel alive. Having a nice crisp framerate on top of that made for a very smooth, consistent experience. After starting the game, it quickly became apparent that the gameplay itself was fairly standard, middle of the road stuff. The gunplay and traversal was just as good as it needed to be to propel the story forward and that is all it needed to be for me. I hear it was originally way worse on PS3 with some bullshit Sixaxis control mechanics but the way they implemented it here, I never had any problem shooting the dudes I needed to shoot and platforming the platforms I needed to platform. Although, there were maybe a couple spots where the platforming could have been a tad better. I did have a few frustrating deaths that resulted from me being unclear on where I was supposed to jump. Despite the middle of the road gameplay, this game really kept me engrossed with the general premise of the story, the stellar writing, and the beautiful environments. It was an Indiana Jones ass game and I loved every minute of it, cliches and all. The banter and character dynamics between Nate, Elena, and Sully was top notch and of a much higher quality than what I'm used to seeing in a video game. I kind of expected some cheesy romantic angle to come up between Nate and Elena but to my surprise, they almost entirely avoided it. The little bits where you do get a sense that they are maybe becoming drawn to each other through this crazy adventure were done really well, especially when you get to the end of the game and just see it kind of fizzle out after a near kiss. I'm so glad they didn't shoehorn some unnecessary love story into this game but still touched on the possibility that maybe they started to develop some feelings for each other. Considering how unrealistic a lot of this game is, the relationships felt surprisingly grounded in reality. Elena was probably my favorite character but all three of them were very likeable and interesting. Again, the writing in this game is a big step above what I'm typically used to seeing in a game. The story itself wasn't necessarily anything great but nonetheless, it came together really well for me. It was clear that they were going for a very Indiana Jones-esque story and I think they nailed it. It had the grand adventure to recover a mystical artifact, the cheesy villain characters, wisecracking charismatic protagonists, and some great action scenes. They even appropriated the Grail diary, which I thought was a great touch. The one part of the game that didn't work for me was the zombie stuff in the later chapters. That whole section just felt way out of place and was frustrating to play. Especially those couple rooms that were just littered with ammo and had zombies pouring out of vents. I hope to see less of that in 2 and 3. After finishing the game I went back through and got all the collectibles and weapon related trophies. It was nice and wasn't a whole lot of effort to get a couple of sweet gold trophies. I may eventually go back through and beat it on Crushing to snag the platinum trophy but for now I've moved on to Uncharted 2. I'm about halfway through that one now and it is quite a step up from Drake's Fortune. Once I finish I'll probably post some thoughts on that but so far it has been quite incredible.

Minecraft version 1.9 (Combat Update) hits next week! There are some fairly significant changes coming that I am super excited for: Addition of shields, dual wielding, multiple types of arrows, and other combat changes including an attack strength mechanic. Up to 128 strongholds per world instead of 3. Introduction of End cities, structures, and ships on infinitely generated End islands, End specific plants (chorus trees/fruit), End rods (new type of light source), several new End blocks, and a new End mob. Ability to respawn the Ender dragon. New item, Elytra that the user can equip in the chestplate slot to allow flight. My friend and I have continued to play this on an almost daily basis and have made some significant progress in our world. We've purposely avoided trying to get to The End though until 1.9 hit so we could experience it for the first time with all the cool new shit they are adding. In the meantime, we've continued building and preparing ourselves for some of this tougher content (not to mention the insanely difficult water temples that were added in 1.8). Last weekend, we finally got around to building a basic mob grinder using a canal system to funnel the mobs into a central point and a lava blade to kill them. By just AFK'ing near the collection point whenever we're busy doing other things, we've managed to collect dozens of stacks of arrows, bones, gunpowder, and other materials that we need to beef up our armory. I'm not entirely sure what we'll need to take down the Ender Dragon so we're just making sure we have all the TNT, arrows, and enchanted weapons and armor that we would need to take on a small army. We've also advanced our nether operations and have constructed a cobblestone tunnel from our portal area down to one of the two nether fortresses we found. Then we enclosed all the nether fortress walkways with cobblestone to give us some fairly safe corridors to run around and farm Wither Skeletons without having Ghasts and Blazes raining hell on us the whole time. And luckily, that fortress happened to have two Blaze spawners in close proximity to each other so we walled those off and now have an easy, endless supply of Blaze rods we can farm which are usually difficult to come by. Our villager breeding operation has continued to expand and we've been relying on the trading economy a great deal to get some fantastic items. By trading massive amounts of wheat, pumpkin, carrots, and potatoes to one of our farmer villagers, we've been able to keep a steady balance of emeralds that we've been using to get enchanted tools, armor and weapons from the tool smith and armor smith villagers. And we finally bred a leatherworker, giving us a way to finally obtain saddles to use with our horses. Once we were finally able to trade emeralds for saddles, we built a couple of maps and decided to go out exploring on our horses, which we've never done before since they were introduced after we had stopped playing way back when. It turns out, horses are the fucking best. They can go faster than a minecart at full speed and automatically walk up single block inclines. So we quickly found that we were able to get from one side of a fully zoomed out map to the other in a single day where it used to take us several days travelling by foot. We brought a couple of leashes with us as well so we could ferry our horses across rivers whenever they blocked our path and so we could tie them up to a fence post in whatever makeshift shelter we made each evening. In just a few Minecraft days we managed to cover every inch of our maps and made note of several interesting places, including another village, that we will eventually go back to. And through further research, we found that each horse has unique equine stats and as you breed them, you can breed better running and jumping stats to eventually get a horse that can clear up to 5 blocks in a single jump and run way faster than the apparently shitty horses we have now. I also started doing some fishing and was surprised to see just how much better that has gotten since its initial implementation. There are now several types of fish that you can catch as well as random rare treasures that you can only otherwise find in dungeon chests. And when you cast your rod, you see little splashes in the water and a little stream of bubbles that approaches your lure right before a fish bites. I somehow got lucky on one of my casts and fished out a nametag which I used on my horse to name it Skittles. So now, it's clear which horse is mine and which is his (which was already obvious because he appropriated the one set of horse armor we managed to find in a chest). I'll eventually need to do a bunch more fishing so I can catch a bunch of puffer fish to use in water breathing potions, which we'll need to eventually tackle a water temple. Up next, I'm thinking of making an automatic lava moat that is hooked up to a daylight sensor and appears out of the ground each night. Not that we necessarily need the extra protection at this point, it just seems like it would be cool.

We've been stressing out for awhile about our son's speech delay and within the last month or so he has finally had an explosion of new words. He's a little over 2.5 years old and had just refused to talk up until recently. We've had a number of behavioral tests done and had been taking him to speech therapy every week but it just didn't seem to be going anywhere. But now he is rapidly learning new words and seeing all that fast mapping finally happening has relieved so many worries. I guess he just didn't give a fuck and wanted to talk on his own terms. Work is the one constant positive thing and I'm super grateful for the position I'm in and the group of people I work with. I'll hit my 7 year anniversary in June and I've suddenly found myself going from standard software testing and software deployments to leading development efforts and managing projects over the last year or two. At this rate I think it's likely that I'll spend the remainder of my career at this company and it feels great to have that level of stability. On the video game side, I completed my backlogs for Steam and all of my major consoles. I was worried for a bit that the goals I set for myself were too unrealistic but I totally pulled it off and it felt great!

Honestly, I think grown-ass people need to watch more cartoons because cartoons are awesome. I think my problem is more that the grown-ass people making some of these movies need to stop injecting Looney Toon antics into every animated work in a lame attempt to appeal to kids. They spend all this time building these incredible worlds and go to painstaking lengths to build a good level of internal consistency and then throw it out the window so they can have a clumsy Tom and Jerry-esque chase sequence. Why is this necessary? Do they throw that kind of stuff into these movies intentionally or have they internalized it so deeply that they can't fathom making an animated feature without it? It's infuriating.

Jesus Ben, why do you keep thinking things I think but like several months to years before I do? First it was Jurassic Star Wars, now this? Not to mention the LucasArts playthrough being partially (mostly?) your idea. And honestly, I'm not sure that anyone else aside from me is bothered by those things. The problem I have with these things is that a magic toy horse still has to follow the laws of physics that clearly still apply in the toy universe. He's not a flying unicorn and he doesn't even have batteries. He's just a regular ass toy horse and has to use his magical toy muscles just like all the other non-battery powered toys. There is no reason why he should be able to catch up to a plane when it has been clearly established elsewhere in the toy universe that their little toy legs physically limit their running abilities to basically make them scaled down versions of us. A full grown horse could maybe catch up to a car driving on an average surface street so it would stand to reason that a toy horse 1/1000 the size of a full horse could, at best, maybe catch up to the RC car driving at full speed in Toy Story 1 (and even that would be a stretch). And the flea being able to put enough pressure on that lighter fluid bottle to shoot out a stream of fire is utterly ludicrous! It completely breaks the movie and makes it even more pointless because that flea would have been capable of taking out the entire group of grasshoppers with a few matches and some well placed shots of lighter fluid. Screw the bird. Flick is an idiot for wasting his time on that stupid bird instead of capitalizing on the destructive capabilities of that lighter fluid and that flea.

Yeah, it definitely works a lot better when it's framed that way. But if I were a toy, I would totally prefer to be in a museum with all of my matching accessories and a sweet little display to live in. It would obviously be of much higher quality than some cardboard box fort that I'd be forced to live in if I were owned by a kid.

I really enjoyed Toy Story 2 and agree with Patrick. The second Buzz really was great and kind of retroactively made Buzz's situation in Toy Story 1 work a bit better. The gags and the lessons learned all made sense and worked quite well throughout the whole movie. I find the scene with the old toy repairman fixing Woody especially cathartic to watch. I think generally, this movie explores what it means to be a "child's plaything" much more effectively than the first movie My only real complaints: The end sequence where a toy riding a toy horse catches up to a plane on the runway. I guess I'm not too fond of clumsy chase sequences where there is the constant back and forth where you think they are rescued, but then the prospector jumps out and pulls Woody back and then he does get rescued, but they need to save Jessie. It seems to be a staple of these types of movies to have these frustrating to watch, drawn out chase sequences. The overarching message that toys don't belong in a museum and should instead be played with. Yeah, the bad guy was an asshole for stealing Woody but they never really sold me on the idea that it was somehow worse for a toy to end up in a museum than to be played with and eventually forgotten by a kid. I guess I could make this same complaint about The Lego Movie too although I think it was handled much better there.

I'm just saying, we do this all the time for all kinds of other things people believe in. Whether its someone who's an MRA and believes feminists are ruining the world. Or people who believe in gamergator ideology. Or people that don't believe racism exists any more. Or any number of any other things. If we can have frank discussions about how stupid we think those people are for their illogical beliefs that are harmful to others and aren't rooted in reality then why should religion be off limits?

And I think that's kind of bullshit. There are so many ridiculous things that people believe in. Why isn't it fair game to state my opinion that it is silly for people to ignore logic and believe a lot of this stuff purely on the basis of faith. Some people still believe the Earth is flat too. Do we have to tiptoe on eggshells around those people so we don't hurt their feelings for ignoring reality? It's just ridiculous to me that we can't talk frankly about how we feel about this kind of stuff.

Oh hey, this thread! So I have some new respect for what you were trying to do here Austin. My daughter and I have hit the 220 hour mark on Super Mario 3D world by maxing out save files and then erasing them and starting all over. I've lost track of how many times we've played through now but it is actually quite enjoyable starting from a fresh slate over and over. We've both gotten super good at the game now and its pretty fun trying to blast through these levels as fast as we can while trying to get all stars, stamps, and top of the poles.

That's different though. While kids do tell each other dumb stuff all the time the religious stuff is incredibly pervasive and she will be bombarded by that messaging all throughout her life. She will hear it from other kids, their parents, teachers, and all kinds of other people in positions of authority. That puts additional, unnecessary pressure on me to consistently put forward a convincing enough argument that she doesn't need to worry about that kind of stuff. Being told that you will burn for all of eternity and be in intense pain if you don't follow along with some stupid book that a huge percentage of the population follows can be very damaging to a developing mind. Much more damaging than kids just being dumb kids and making up stories about monsters.

It turns out that hypothesizing about how to make a cool game based on the Bible is pretty damn fun. In the interest of not further de-railing the Feminism thread, I figured it might be a good idea to move this topic to a new thread. To start off, here is the horribly fucked up series of posts from the Feminism thread that started this. https://www.idlethumbs.net/forums/topic/7428-feminism/?p=268850 (I have no idea how to quote posts from other topics/pages so if someone cares to drop some knowledge on me I'll update this to show the posts from the Feminism thread properly) Apparently what I'm trying to do exceeds the maximum allowable number of quotes in a post so I'm leaving it like this. Thanks for dropping some multiquote knowledge SecretAsianMan. Edit: And here is the link to the Wisdom Tree thread mentioned below - https://www.idlethumbs.net/forums/topic/9097-breaking-news-wisdom-tree-still-exists/

New idea. You play as a Christian and instead of a health meter you have a persecution complex meter. The goal of the game is to use psychological warfare through branching dialog trees to get NPCs to join your cause. Those who don't join you add to your persecution complex, which makes it slightly more difficult to get future people to join. Once you feel fully persecuted, you and all of your fellow followers try to enact legislation to force Christian laws onto the entire population. If you've managed to get over 50% of the NPCs to join your cause, the legislation goes through and you (and God) win. If you haven't managed to get over 50% of the NPCs, you still win because Everything Happened According to God's Plan.

Totally agree. As much as I despise religion it is absolutely wrong to be shitty and disrespectful to other people on that basis. And that's what's so fucking gross about this stuff. A core part of so many religions involves trying to sucker other people into seeing the light and accepting Jesus or whatever other deity is in charge. And that usually involves saying some pretty shitty things to non-believers to scare them into signing up. I think we can all agree, whether we are atheist or religious, that an atheist is being an asshole when they mock and belittle someone for their beliefs. But when a Christian (or other religious person) does it, they are doing the lord's work in the eyes of religious people.

Didn't you know? God turned the Sadducees into vampires before sending them to Christian hell.

As I expected would happen at some point, my daughter came home from school the other day saying that her friend told her she was going to go to hell because she didn't believe in God. She then proceeded to tell her all about how there is a bunch of vampires and fire and scary shit in hell and that she needed to believe in God if she wanted to go to heaven when she died. So naturally, my daughter is saying she believes in God now because she is scared of going to hell. So I have to now try to work on explaining to her how some people let fear run their lives and end up believing in some really silly made up stuff because they think they are going to be tortured for all of eternity if they don't. I know this is a very unpopular opinion but having been raised very religious, I think it is a form of abuse to raise your kids believing this shit. Teaching children to let fear run their lives makes for a pretty agonizing childhood.

Actually yeah, the first Sahelanthropus (I never know if I'm spelling that right) mission wasn't all that bad. A little annoying that even when you sneak away he still magnetizes to you and seems to know where you are but otherwise it didn't bother me too much. That last fight though? Ugh. Maybe it's because I never unlocked the legendary gunsmith and hadn't really spent a bunch of time upgrading my heavy weaponry but it just took way too many rockets to take him down. It would be a massive understatement to say he was a bullet sponge. The extreme version of that mission is what really got my blood boiling though. With those spikes often killing you in one hit it got incredibly frustrating and it took a lot of patience and determination to finally get through the whole thing without accidentally getting caught by those. I did rejoice out loud when I finally did beat it though so at least I got a great sense of accomplishment from it when it was all said and done. I also ran DD over with a tank repeatedly while retrying that mission and that made me sad.

6 degrees of Jonathan Taylor Thomas.

I recently finished this game and really really enjoyed it. I ended up putting about 90 hours in and managed to complete all 50 missions and around 25% of the side op missions. After I knock out some other games I've been meaning to get to I will probably come back to this to do the rest of the side ops and max out my base. One of the best things about playing this game has been discussing it with other people who have played it and hearing how different their approach to certain situations was from my own. I quickly adopted a pretty basic stealth strategy that carried me through a good number of missions where I would scope out an area first to find weak points in guard placement on the perimeter of an area. Then I would start at the outer perimeter and just systematically sneak up to each guard, grab them, interrogate them, knock them unconscious, and fulton them. Then I would slowly move deeper into enemy territory strangling and fultoning everyone as I went until the entire base was empty. I preferred not to use my tranquilizer pistol because the silencer didn't have much durability and it was usually more likely to alert other guards. So I would more or less just watch and wait for the perfect moment to go strangle someone and if I was spotted by someone nearby, I would tranquilize them with my pistol as a last resort. As I got deeper into the missions though, I was forced to branch out and improvise a bit more and that is when the genius of this game really started to shine. Whenever I hit a spot where my strategy just wasn't working, the game always seemed to support exactly what I thought I would need to do to get through. For example, as the missions got tougher it got harder and harder to get through without being spotted and I knew that I had to do something different. So naturally, I figured I would need to start putting more effort into luring enemies away so I could isolate them and take them out easier. It turns out that this game supports several ways to do that so I settled on throwing ammo clips as my go-to way to lure enemies. However, it wasn't quite enough and I was still having trouble in some cases with finding the right position to take them down once they were close enough to me without them seeing me first and alerting the others. So I quickly found that if I just hid in a cardboard box behind a rock and threw ammo clips, they would walk right past me without seeing me and I could jump out of my cardboard box and strangle them once they had walked past. Discovering the cardboard box was a game changer for me and I was shocked to hear from other people that had beat the game that they never even touched it. Once I realized how useful it was, it became one of my main infiltration tools. It was endlessly fun to cause just enough chaos to freak everyone out and make them go into an alert state and then watch 4 guys walk right past me and my cardboard box without a second glance. And my absolute favorite was doing the Wandering Mother Base Soldiers side ops, running up to the delirious dudes in my cardboard box and having them realize it was me and just let me fulton them. As far as buddies go, once I got Quiet and started using her I figured I would probably just use her for the rest of the game as it seemed hard to justify gimping myself by using another buddy. But as I continued going through the game and getting frustrated with certain missions, I was forced to adjust my strategy again and started appreciating the glory of DD. While Quiet was great at scoping out bases and providing cover fire, I was finding that some missions were just getting way too chaotic and I couldn't keep things under control well enough. So I started using DD more and came to really appreciate how well his mechanics complemented my basic stealth approach. With him at my side, I was able to start luring 2 guards at a time while hiding in my cardboard box and once they walked past I would order DD to distract one while I tranqued the other and then interrogated and choked out the one DD was distracting. Combining his distraction capabilities with my existing strategy and the fact that enemies didn't go into an alert state when he fucked with them opened things up considerably. That dog is so fucking rad and I just love pressing triangle repeatedly to tell him how great he is. I think the ultimate culmination of all of these stealth strategies building on each other came out in the Code Talker extraction mission when I started using decoys with voice recordings. I was having kind of a tough time getting through the mansion without being spotted since there were a bunch of guys patrolling both inside and out. I hadn't tried using the decoy yet and figured I would give it a shot to see if I could combine it with my other strategies to get through. So I went through the library area and found a little walkway at the top of some stairs that was adjacent to a hallway with two doors. Once I got up to the walkway I threw a decoy down at the top of the stairs, hid in a box at the end of the walkway, and deployed the decoy. As soon as it deployed I saw a couple guards in a nearby room get alerted and come down to investigate. As soon as the first one walked through the door and walked up to the decoy to see what it was, I burst out of my box, tranquilized him, and popped back inside. The other nearby guard was initially alerted to my attack but was then immediately distracted again by the voice recording so then he came through the door and walked up to the decoy to investigate and I burst out of my box, put him down, and popped back inside. Meanwhile, other guards in nearby rooms started getting alerted by the decoy as they got close enough and they just filed in one by one as I popped out of my box and put each and every one of them to sleep. Then with the last guy I sent DD to distract him which gave me all the time I needed to waltz over to him, interrogate him, and choke him out. When it was all over there were about 7 or 8 guards all sleeping in a massive pile in front of a decoy. Everything was silent except for the occasional cheesy line coming out of the decoy voice recording. As I was about to leave I saw one of them start to wake up and went to try to grab him before he had fully come to. Instead, I accidentally kicked the pile of sleeping bodies and fucking tore out of there like a bat out of hell when I saw all of the blue triangles turn to a red circle and everyone start to stir and get up. Another fun one was one of the missions where I had to rescue the kids that had run off and I went super decoy heavy on the outskirts of the palace to lure enemies away and choke them out. By the time I had finished the mission the entire palace was empty and as I was walking out I got a good chuckle when I realized that the aftermath of my infiltration just left a bunch of my decoys facing in one direction while there were a bunch of enemy decoys facing in the other direction. Parts of this game did kind of suck though. The whole Quiet thing was problematic in a lot of ways but ultimately I think she was the most interesting character in the game. The story wasn't all that great and I really didn't care for how everything concluded. There were certain moments regarding Huey where I really wanted the game to let me make a moral choice and instead it just all played out in a pre-canned cutscene. Eli and the stuff with the kids was also mostly garbage and bothered me more than it probably should have. And seriously, fuck Huey. There were some fantastic moments but I just don't know that Hideo Kojima's convoluted storytelling ultimately works for me aside from some of the cool, flashy, action stuff. It didn't help that this game was nearly devoid of the silly poop humor that I was hoping to see. Not that there was a whole lot of that in 4 but there were enough poop jokes to keep me interested. On the gameplay side, the only thing I didn't like were the action heavy missions. The Sahelanthropus boss fight was the worst (especially the extreme version of that missions, ugh) and the skull boss fights were also incredibly frustrating. It just feels so jarring to have all this realistic stealth stuff and then suddenly have a mission where you are fighting a guy that can absorb 20 rockets without flinching. Given that I am basically commanding an army I feel like those missions would have worked better if there was some way you could actually call in the troops to help. All in all though, this game was great and its easy to look past the less than stellar parts. It's strange, I thought I was ready to put this game down for good but as more time passes, I find myself wanting to jump back in more and more.

So every day I'm falling further and further back down the Minecraft rabbit hole. My friend and I started up a new world about a month ago since our old world that we inhabited for a couple years was generated on a much earlier version of Minecraft and was missing a lot of stuff that's been added over the years (we didn't want to have to travel super far to find new chunks that hadn't been previously loaded). We had both burnt out on Destiny a couple months back and figured it would be fun to hop back into this game and see if we could re-kindle the old Minecraft obsession. At first we just played a couple hours on the weekend, then started finding time to play a few nights during the week, and now we are on pretty much every day and texting each other throughout the day as we re-read the entire Wiki to get up to speed on all the changes and new items that were introduced since we stopped playing. To my surprise, this game is just as engaging and exciting as it ever was, probably even more so now that we have started fresh with hundreds upon hundreds of hours of prior experience. This is still my number one game of all time by a very large margin. It is pretty much fucking perfect in every conceivable way. I'll probably post some more thoughts at some point but there is one new-ish mechanic that has resulted in a pretty hilarious situation. In the past, villager breeding was just based on the number of valid doors in a village and villagers would breed until the number of adult villagers reached 35% of the number of valid doors. In a subsequent patch, however, they added a layer on top of that to change the mechanic so that they would only breed if they were willing. To raise a villagers willingness to breed you can either trade with them (villager trading was another great addition to this game by the way and adds a surprising amount of depth) or give them certain food items to fill up their inventory (also, villagers now throw food to each other if they detect that another villager doesn't have enough food which is fucking rad). Since we never ended up finding a village, we eventually ended up curing a couple of zombie villagers and shuttled them over to a basic village we had built. It took a bit to get up to speed on the new breeding mechanics but we were able to finally get them to reproduce after doing some trading and setting up the village with enough doors to fulfill the 35% requirement. From there things took a slightly more disturbing turn. Once we had a handful of villagers, we forced pairs of them into houses and fenced everything off so they would be forced to reside in the specific houses we chose (there is still a bug where big villages tend to have all villagers congregating in a corner of the village and leaving the rest of the houses empty). Then, we got about a dozen stacks of 64 raw potatoes and put them in a central village chest. With that setup, we then started making regular visits to the village to make sure our villagers were continuing to breed. This basically involves us running over to the village, grabbing a stack of potatoes out of the chest, and throwing a bunch of potatoes to each of our villagers. They then take the potatoes and a few minutes later they emit hearts above their heads and a baby villager pops out. I didn't think much of this at first but then I did start thinking. And I realized we have enslaved a bunch of people in tiny houses and are forcing them to breed by feeding them a diet of nothing but raw potatoes. I love Minecraft.

I've bought a good number of my consoles based on a game or games I really wanted to play N64 - Super Mario 64, Wayne Gretzky's 3D Hockey, Star Wars Shadows of the Empire, and Pilotwings 64 Dreamcast - Worms World Party, Shenmue and Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2 Virtual Boy - Wario Land and Mario Tennis Gamecube - Star Wars Rogue Leader PS2 - GTA III Game Boy - Tamagotchi, Pokemon Blue, and Harvest Moon Xbox - Halo 2 and Conker Live and Reloaded Xbox 360 - Gears of War and Halo 3 (and really just online multiplayer gaming in general) Wii - Wii Sports and Twilight Princess WiiU - Super Mario 3D World 3DS - Animal Crossing New Leaf I've bought plenty of other consoles but never really for a specific game or games.

Seems fair. I like my references too. But references or not, A Bug's Life is Pixar's worst film (sorry Twig). Which I guess still makes it an above average kids movie.

So I was discussing A Bug's Life with one of my co-workers and he completely disagreed with my assessment and loves the movie because it is apparently a big homage to Seven Samurai. I hadn't heard anyone bring that up here but if that's true, does that somehow make this a better movie than it otherwise comes across? I've noticed this thing with film criticism where a lot of movies and shows that seem kind of generic and uninteresting to me tend to be lauded by huge swaths of people simply because they reference other classic movies or have some apparent awareness of film culture. Like that weird lizard man X-Files episode the other week that my wife and I absolutely despised and had to turn off but is apparently everyone else's favorite episode because references to classic X-Files. Or that movie Rango that was just drab and boring to me but highly regarded by others because references to western movies. Maybe if I watched a ton more stuff I would be able to frame these types of movies/shows differently and appreciate the artsiness of it but I'm not so sure that if I went into A Bug's Life with prior knowledge of Seven Samurai that that somehow would have made it a better movie.

Yeah, I just really hate the way drug use is discussed in an almost universal negative light in modern society. Describing it as an "epidemic" just further poisons the conversation and demonizes people. Drugs can definitely be pretty terrible. But in my experience, they can also be totally awesome.