BadHat

Got those back to front. Spot on otherwise. Spoiler tags are [ spoiler ] [ /spoiler ] without the spaces.

Good luck tegan. I just got two letters from the same credit company on the same day. First one was to inform me that because I'd failed to make an agreed-upon payment (untrue, I made the fuck out of it) I was culpable for the full amount within 7 days or legal action would be taken. Second one was to inform me of another unpaid bill I had no idea existed, on a car I didn't know I still owned, which is also due within 7 days. Meanwhile, I'm a broke as fuck student, already swimming in debt from study (interest-free thank god, yay socialism), paying off a bank loan and a credit card which I already can't afford. So I have until monday to sort this shit... which also happens to be my birthday! Thanks universe, you shouldn't have.

Whenever someone asks me what a good band name would be I just substitute their name into "<name> and the <name>sexuals."

You can definitely handle all these things at the point you are.

Heh, I just realised I called him "Gilbert guy" and wondered how I'd gotten that wrong for a second before remembering I'd read this before posting. http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1p2lwp/i_created_dilbert_ask_me_anything/ccy3s9h

Scott Adams (Gilbert guy) just did an AMA over at Reddit, and I was pretty eager to see whether he was getting grilled for his hilarious blog post on men's rights (since deleted, but you can read it here). Well, he didn't exactly get grilled, but he did respond at least. http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1p2lwp/i_created_dilbert_ask_me_anything/ccy3ckc The comments then descend into fawning and excuses about how people misconstrued his tone and don't actually understand the content of his argument... and then nobody bothers to explain what the fuck he actually meant. Pretty much all the comments attempting to call him on his shit are downvoted, because Reddit. Really though I don't really see how his post could be misinterpreted that wildly, it seems pretty cut and dry what he's trying to say even if you ignore the unfortunate rhetoric. But then you see that he posted stuff like the below image in response to reasonable objections and you realise, oh, he just doesn't give enough of a shit about what he's saying to actually attempt to stand behind it in any meaningful way, so he'd rather blame the internet for not being "rational" enough because that is definitely not a problem he or his devoted readers have.

I quit playing my original game on Xbox after I got to that part again on NG+ and lost ~200k souls to them because I'd been saving it for the giant blacksmith. Nope.

I keep meaning to get some Baroness, everything I've heard from them has been pretty tight in a Mastodon-but-sludgier sort of way. Which album/s would you recommend dive in with? Listening to this and studying is super chill. Live jazz interpretations of Ghibli music. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EtLB6Z8G4bI

Ugh ok, maybe I'll reconsider. Thanks for the tips anywho. Is GFWL getting torn out of this at some point? I just read it was removed from the Arkham games, and that existing saves won't work any more since they were encrypted on GFWL. I wonder how they'd even manage that for this since all the matchmaking stuff depends it too.

Well, flicking through the last few pages has been somewhat educational for me, at least. I've been frequently frustrated with the simpering "why call it feminism when we should be fighting for equality" non-position that's been rearing its head again lately, not just for how clearly most people espousing it fail to understand the salient points behind feminism, but in how limp and non-committal it is, how it refuses to meet reality on it's on terms and instead ekes out a safe neutral space where you can't be held accountable to your politics. However, I've had my own qualms with self-identifying as a feminist which I now realize were just as limp as pointless, thanks to a bunch of great posts explaining feminism and what it means to support it in very clear terms. My issue with the term wasn't that it didn't account for other positions, since I mostly find myself coming down on that side of the argument anyway, but rather that I had the impression that identifying as feminist meant that you had to be actively forwarding the cause in some way instead of just adopting the attitude in everything you do. Now that I actually think about it, not identifying for such a waffly reason really only weakens the term by strengthening the position that you can be "all for" feminism and acknowledge everything the movement stands for without actually attaching your name to it, no matter how inconsequential your voice might be. So, thanks for clearing that up.

I replaced my xbox 360 controller recently with a flash new special edition one (the ones with the not-shitty dpads). I've mostly used it to play Spelunky and now the right trigger creaks when I push it because of the constant running/walking/running. Maybe I should rebind that.

Oh god those eyes. Maybe portals never existed and the game is actually the struggle of a person with extreme double vision.

I'm chugging down a big old bottle and cider right now and can confirm this is quite neat. The best thing about drinking is failing miserably to play Spelunky but you don't even care.

I'd say stick with your character. My first character was a paladin type dealie with some faith spells and I never felt like the covenants were really necessary, more circumstantial. Besides that, faith spells tend to make the game a little more manageable and predictable, which is great if you're having trouble, but I wouldn't say it's a really "fun" playstyle in and of itself unless you enjoy being very defensive.

100% scientifically accurate dragon MMO. Actually, it'd be really cool if someone made a Minority Report style game in the vein of Papers, Please.

I can never get enough of Pete Holmes' Batman. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rsv28UFbOG4

I can't help feeling this way the more I play V. That's not to diminish all the things V does incredibly well, and all the things which are almost inarguably improved over IV, but I felt like IV had a character to it that's all but missing from this one. Case in point: I can't stand the radio most of the time. It'd be bad enough if this was just down to the lack of variety (I miss you so bad, Fusion FM), but the juvenile humour in the ads is so often intolerably bad or just downright lazy that I find myself switching stations or just turning it off to save myself listening to it. I don't normally find it easy to become personally offended by shock humour that fails to hit the mark, but there's a point where it goes beyond good natured satire and just becomes grating and Rockstar flies so far past that mark they don't seem to be able to even acknowledge it ever existed any more. The constant, unending gags about vapid, money-grubbing, only-good-for-sex women just make me want to feed the game into a fucking wood chipper.

Has anyone else attempted/completed a soul level 1 run? I have a save sitting at the bonfire just before that fucking crystal place with Seath the Scaleless and I've just about given up. The lack of health doesn't bother me as much as the lack of stamina. I can cheese most stuff with either my ridiculously upgraded starter axe or massive array of pyromancy (having nothing else to spend souls on simplifies things, at least), but having such a low stamina pool means you have to be ridiculously conservative with your blocking/dodging, especially against bosses. I'm trying not to think too hard about tackling places like Tomb of Giants or Lost Izalith (fuck the dragon butts, I'm farming humanity for the shortcut). Then there's the Abyss stuff which will be all new to me. I don't want to stop playing until I've at least experienced that stuff, but I'm also far too stubborn to abandon SL1 and just turn it into a normal run.

I'm still slowly slogging through GTA V, but that mission definitely put a damper on my enjoyment, especially when I finished it and failed to achieve a 100% rating because I didn't <spoiler> the guy in the right order or whatever. It's hard to appreciate that they might have intended it to be some kind of satire or commentary when it ends in such a hilariously gamey way. You know it's bad when they hyped up how realistic the dog is in the new one, and how emotionally invested you'll be in it, and literally everyone on the internet went "oh, I can't wait until it dies." I stopped playing the campaigns after MW2, but it'd gotten comically overwrought even by that point. I think part of what made it so effective in 4 was, besides being kind of unprecedented, it made total sense in the context of the mission it took place in, instead of just being tacked onto the end as a silly shock value thing.

Haha, that was a hilariously disastrous run but I enjoyed your commentary. Also enjoyed watching someone with a vaguely similar skill level to me (by which I mean, someone who hasn't done 10,000 runs already and makes me lose the will to play by how blindingly proficient they are... no offense). If I could offer a criticism it'd be that the game sound, particularly the music might be a little too loud. I never really had trouble understanding you, but I had to focus a bit sometimes if you were talking softly.

I'm pretty late on this one since I've just been catching up on a bunch of stuff, but I finally watched Madoka Magica and it totally blew away my expectations. Did anyone else watch it and sense the potential for a great game using some of the ideas laid out later on in the show? I can't go into it without spoiling stuff (for the 3 people who still haven't seen it), so Anyway I'm not actually a Game Person I just thought this was interesting. *cough*

Since the theme here seems to be beautiful things, here's something really pretty I was just reminded of. It's a reinterpretation of Massive Attack's Teardrop.

You want some bloops? I'll give you some fuckin' bloops. (Sorry if you didn't want some bloops.)

Hi! I like video games. I like podcasts. By sheer chance, I also happen to like this podcast which happens to be about video games. Haha! Yeah.