Bjorn

I'd watch that.

I haven't played the new patch yet, but apparently there are reports that you can no longer bomb into or out of special rooms (treasure, shop, curse). It's unknown if it's a bug or intentional change. There was a change made to how Secret rooms are generated that could have bugged something. Also, if you have any interest in attempting a run with the super secret character, apparently there is currently a glitch that you can exploit to use seeded runs and still get unlocks. It's detailed in this thread. Given how hard the secret character is, even starting with a big advantage is far from guaranteeing a run.

Something about having employees working under "new conditions" for a long delayed project sounds really ominous to me.

I totally forgot about that. It would definitely be my best DLC/Expansion winner.

Samson's bloodlust was totally redone. In the original game, it boosted damage per enemy killed for a single room. Making it godly against bosses that spawned a bunch of trash, and pointless against solo bosses. Now, it boosts your damage each time you get hit, but for the entire floor. I think it caps at being hit 6 times.

Holy crap, the robot chef is amazing. I was really loving the poison beast, but the chef might be my fav now.

Krampus' Head does seem a bit of overkill. It was, what, a 3 room charge? I think making it a 4 would have softened it up plenty. Or lower its drop rate so it's more rare. I'd honestly rather see Lump of Coal anyways, as its always useful and the vast majority of the time the Head drops, I already have a Use item I want to keep.

The Secret Service assisted in rounding up of Japanese Americans for internment in WW2. Modern SWAT teams are descended from the union busting efforts of California cops in the '60s. The postal inspection service (the police arm of the post office) has a storied career of oppression and harassment (see Comstock). I don't know that the Park Police has ever been part of the systemic oppression of anyone. So yah national parks?

All threads are Sonic threads. I think Crash Pad is one of the gold standards for progressive porn. On the whole YouPorn thing, I just see it strictly as a marketing stunt that is meant to drum up controversy. My intuition is that progressive porn makers would never advertise or sponsor somewhere that did not 100 percent welcome them, so you'd never see a situation like this come up. They don't want to insert themselves somewhere they aren't wanted (I fucking swear I'm not even trying to lace this post with innuendo).

New patch, notes here (along with the requisite cheers and tears). Hard mode just got a bunch better, with normal bomb/key drops being enabled. I've spent a bunch of time in Hard (have been going for every boss on every character), and by far the key drought is the worst. It's very, very rare that I haven't had to skip multiple rooms and chests in a Hard run. Poor Dark Bum got a big nerf. No longer guaranteed soul hearts, can also spawn spiders. A whole bunch of exploits got fixed as well.

This thread's all about a gay guy, the Ferguson thread's all about the CIA. It's chaos!

to everything JC just said. But particularly: To put my own bias out front here, I genuinely do not think that either I or my lady's lives would be the same if we hadn't been fans of Savage for years. That curated introduction to topics (and sometimes the dissent of those who disagree with him), has got us to learn about so many more things, from a huge variety of sources, than I think we would have otherwise.

But a big part of the reason to outsource certain work to "independent" (hahahahahaha) contractors is to provide cover and distance between them and the government employees who are supposed to oversee them. Plausible deniability, and all that. So being pissed at the CIA is still the most appropriate target.

Both my wife and I played through it, and I'm pretty sure neither of us spent more than 6 or 7 hours on it. I said this (to Twig, actually), that I found it to be a very pleasant palate cleanser between other, more challenging games. I really quite enjoyed it, I think likely for the charm it brought. A game being charming or endearing is a quality that I really appreciate it, when it can just make me smile. That said, I don't think there's much else about it that elevates it above many other games that could serve that palate cleanser role. It was good enough to get me interested in the team's other games, like the upcoming .

I'm all for people criticizing Savage. I mean, absolutely hold people accountable for their words/actions. He says things that I occasionally groan at, and dude gets seriously fucking grouchy some days, to the point that he needs to apologize for being shitty because he's in a bad mood. That said, he's been writing an advice column for almost a quarter of a century, and doing a regular podcast for most of a decade. Write and talk about people's love lives for that long, and you're going to put your foot in your mouth occasionally. Some of the things people hold against him are many, many years old and its clear that he's learned, grown and changed his opinion. Asexuality is a good one, where he said some shitty, bigoted things in the past but now makes a concerted effort to talk about asexuality differently and have asexual educators on the Lovecast. Same with bisexuality. Context matters too. There was a viral tumblr going around awhile back about the X number of worst things Savage has ever said that took a whole bunch of things wildly out of context. I've said this before around here, I have a real soft spot for sex/love advice columns. I've been reading them since I discovered Ann Landers at around 10 or so. I even love the bad ones I vehemently disagree with. I honestly think part of the hate for Dan comes from people being ready to have a new person fulfilling Dan's role. To have someone high profile doing his job offering advice to people outside of the mainstream. But there's a massive inertia existent in all the current columnists, and it's super hard to build up a sizeable following unless you take over for one of the big dogs for awhile.

Are you talking about the gender one that came out today, or a different one?

I'd say it's definitely worth dropping the occasional note in here about it. I know that I don't check the development thread, ever, and I'd be curious how it goes.

FWIW, I started taking Wellbutrin for depression today. Truth is that I've really been struggling with it for a year to a year and a half. It's far easier for me to admit it here than it is to anyone in real life close to me. I've always had ups and downs, but usually in about an 80/20 up/down ratio. Last year or so that's been flipped. I've faked it when I see people in person, and even online on social media and around here. But a lot of things have been suffering, mostly work related because of how unmotivated and unfocused I am. My lady is frustrated that it's taken me this long to start meds, but thankfully our relationship is still good. After having a long talk with my doc on Monday, ultimately picked Wellbutrin from the medication options I had because of its double use in stopping smoking. Hopefully I can kill two birds with one stone here, get my mojo back and finally kick a stinking habit. I've resisted taking anything to help with quitting smoking in part because I've had a terrible opinion of anti-depressants, and a real phobia about taking them. But I'm finally getting over that stigma. I really can't imaging being on an anti-depressant being worse than the flavorless malaise I've been in for too long now.

I finally played Thomas Was Alone this year as well, and it's deserving of all the praise it gets. Had I played it in 2012, it would have been shortlisted for GOTY.

Okay, so it didn't feel as hard tonight as it did last night. Twice we made it to the final level (the ship, I'm assuming its the last level), but couldn't make it through it. Still on Easy, but then we started messing around in Normal to get the Monster Logs to unlock another character, and we were making it to the fifth level. Unlocked a few of the artifacts as well. Command lets you pick your reward from chests, but surprisingly in solo I was doing poorer with that than I was with random rewards. I would try to make a really focused build, but I think it would end up being too specific to survive where the normal random chests just forced me to deal with whatever I got. I'm surprised at how deep this game actually is. Wouldn't have guessed it from first glance.

Realistic simulators are WEIRD.

:barf: :barf: :barf:

I immediately made the same change in the sandbox, which I suspect is an intended consequence of the author's. It actually saves them having to outline it for you. You can ask yourself, "Hmmm, here's the demographic of my city, let's see what happens." And be unprepared that it devolves to being unsolvable with real world numbers.

KiA is upset that a WaPo writer compared gg to the blogger who doxxed the woman at the center of the Rolling Stone rape article. So far, the blogger has posted her name, called her father, posted pictures from her Facebook page, posted screenshots of her Pinterest, and erroneously published a photo he thought was her, that now looks to be wrong. Go ahead and look through the KiA thread, and see if you can find a single person mentioning how terrible doxxing is. Or condemning the blogger. Nope, it's all about distancing gg from someone they don't want to be associated with. Image control first, ethics...eh, sometime. As a friend of mine is want to say, consistency is hard.

I went shopping over the weekend, but ended up not being able to find the one particular thing I had in mind (isn't that the way it always works?). I'll figure out something else this week, for sure.