Bjorn

PJ Vogt and Alex Goldman of WNYC's On the Media are splitting off to do their own show (which has a mysterious url of Untitled Audio). For awhile they've done their own show under the OTM umbrella called TL:DR, which tended to cover things that didn't quite fit within the scope of OTM's coverage of the media. I enjoyed it quite a bit, and I'm curious to see what they come up with on their own. If I haven't recommended it before, On the Media is one of my favorite shows, and if you're fascinated by the media, it's required listening. Mostly they cover things related to journalism, but they will dip into music, movies and games on occasion.

Gamergate (based on the number of threads and comments in KiA) is kinda obsessed with the shirt thing. Which seems to dilute their message that they're really about ethics. Huh, imagine that.

I have an unhealthy coffee cup obsession, and really want this.

In the Games Giveaway thread, several peeps are giving away their extra copies of Insurgency if anyone is interested.

A ton of Team 17 games (including WA) are currently in the Weekly Humble Bundle. Edited to add: For some reason I thought SBM's post was from today, not a week ago.

I want to second this I'd actually much prefer a gift that is a reflection of the giver than something that was picked because I want it. In the JPAGSS, some of the best gifts I received were people just giving the stuff they already loved (someone's favorite party board game, another person's favorite book, a CD I hadn't heard before and this groovy tiki god stature). They were all things the gift givers thought were awesome, and wanted to share. I think that's the best rule of to follow when trying to pick out a gift for something like this.

SillyCatMonster

Weird songs pop into my head all the time, but the weirdest by far is the theme song from Green Acres. I haven't seen an episode of that show since I was a kid, and I don't remember the last time I heard the song playing naturally. And yet, multiple times a year, I just catch myself humming....greeeeen acres is the place to be....

Well that looks pretty incredible.

Ha, if you could hear me laughing now. I know that feeling, I know it well. There are a couple of items that I swear exist solely to troll the player. I did that tonight as well! Unfortunately I died a floor later, so I didn't get to see the full consequences of it. In another run, I did find the most ridiculous combination of stuff I've yet seen. Isaac's Tears + Mom's Knife + Chocolate Milk. Isaac's Tears normally are an activated item that fries a burst of tears, and then recharges from you shooting. But with that combination, the Tears appear to endlessly charge as long as you are charging the knife, resulting in a starburst of tears larger than the screen that would kill any room in a single shot, including bosses. And I got that combo by the third floor. Easiest run I've ever had. I also tried a few more speedruns tonight. Making it to Mom in sub-20 minutes with some characters is HARD.

Chris kind of brushed aside whether or not BoI has anything particularly deep or interesting to say about abuse and religion. I don't know what Chris' childhood was like, but I wonder whether someone's own childhood changes how they perceive Isaac. I wasn't abused per se, but I had a pretty fucked up family as a kid. Like, not in the way where everyone's family is fucked up, but some serious mental health issues in two different members of my family which seriously warped the way I viewed the world for a long time. Things I thought were "normal" as a kid turned out to be radically out of tune with almos. As an adult pushing 40, I'm just starting to come to terms with the long term effects of my childhood. Knowing what Edmund has said about his own childhood, and how BoI is an exploration of some of that is really interesting to me. Because it's less about having something deep to say about abuse or religion, and more about someone working to process deeply fucked up elements of their past in a creative manner, and that's something I can both identify with and learn from. To me, it's less about the narrative of BoI and more about the meta-narrative, that Edmund has gone through some challenging and abusive times, but come out of that and is personally dealing with those through his art. For all its poop and blood and demons, I find BoI to overall be a really inspiring game. Plus it's just tons of fun. Oh, and as for co-op, as far as I know there is nothing that is specifically designed for co-op, but several of the optional Challenges do favor bring a co-op partner with you. As there are 4 challenges where Isaac cannot fire any tears, and must depend on alternative damage sources (flies, bombs, space bar items, etc), and a co-op partner is a tremendous asset in those. Having my wife along is a big reason I was able to get through all those.

About that place again... Blank Card is a crazy item in the first place, I've only gotten it a couple of times, but totally broke those runs open. I haven't got the Chaos Card at all yet. So I decided to try a speedrun during my lunch break today, just took Azazel, figuring she would be the easiest/fastest to try with (my wife insists Zazzle is a she, so that's what I'm going with). I easily made it to Mom with bunches of time to spare. That was cool/not cool in equal measures. The whole run was crazy, I ended up going all the way to the Chest and finishing in around 35 minutes. I picked up a Brimstone Baby, some damage upgrades, 3 guppy items, fear shot and anti-grav tears, which has a cool interaction with Zazzle's mini-Brimstone. Then, in the first room of the Chest, I got the Ludovich Technique (I think that's it's name). It lets you guide your shots. Holy crap is that an interesting synergy with her mini-brim (and I'm assuming regular Brim). I should have got a screenshot when I was tearing up the Chest, but I didn't think to do it until everything was dead. You can see the synergy between Brim and Ludo in that shot if you want (final room of the Chest, no boss present if you're worried about spoilers) I actually got the achievement for completing The Chest without taking any damage thanks to that. So that was a really crazy and unexpected first attempt at a speedrun. Now I'm sure the next 20 attempts will awful.

That's the two brothers I think, this guy just gets to take off with his love slave. Which all of the non-lethal target eliminations are disturbing, but handing a woman off to be taken away like that is extra disturbing.

Weird, I'll have to see if I get that same message with a different character. The other thing you found there... So I got curious about some character item unlocks (wondering about a couple of specific items), and looked at a guide for what characters unlock what items. And I saw a couple of symbols for goals I didn't recognize. In general, each character unlocks an item for beating each major/plot boss. You have to beat the Heart on Hard mode to get its unlocks though (no other bosses are required to fight on Hard as near as I can tell). And if you've noticed that there's a clock on the level transition screen, that's a 20 minute timer to reach the Mom fight. Achieve that and something happens. So I guess I'm going to start trying Hard Mode and speedrunning now. Which works out pretty well, I'm almost out of Challenges, and I usually mix in a Challenge for every couple of regular attempts. I've got 6 challenges left, and 2 of those are still locked.

Yeah, it seems well liked. I just don't like taking games if I don't think I'm going to play them, being as how my backlog is already way bigger than I'm ever going to play. Maybe someone else will come along who really wants to play it.

Twig, did you ever play Long Live the Queen? I've thought about picking it up several times, but don't know if I'd actually play it or not. I have an Insurgency key, just PM'd Limp to see if he still needs it. I might end up with more as well, as I may buy that bundle again to get a second copy of Full Mojo Rampage and SR4 to play in co-op. But I want to try them both out before buying again.

It sounds delightful.

I haven't wanted to play a CoD game since Modern Warfare, but I have to admit that Spacey being in the new one kinda makes me want to play it (or at least rent it to see him in action a bit).

That thing is kind of a hot mess, more thinking out loud than trying to craft any kind of coherent statement or argument. It's also just kinda whiny. "Why does she have to talk about the binary so much? Why can't we talk about aaaaaaaaart?"

And what does Gordon Freeman whisper to his crowbar at night, when no one is listening? I did something I didn't think I'd ever be able to pull off tonight! I beat the Chest with ???! I tried a bunch of ??? runs in original BoI and just never got anywhere. I've tried around a dozen times in Rebirth, but most ended within the first floor or two, with me giving up after a couple of early hits or a crappy first treasure room. But tonight I got Daddy Longlegs first, then picked up a Dead Cat, which let me sacrifice my life a couple of times to get Devil Room items, including Brimstone. Between Daddy and Brim, it was pretty smooth sailing from that point on. Especially when I got the Wafer in my last Treasure room, so that later levels weren't as scary for my health. Umm, so I got there tonight too, and...

This is a sentiment that I really identify with, and a reason I've by and large stayed out of the discussion about the word gamer. I have a diversity of interests and passions, but ultimately games have played such a pivotal role in my entire life, that it's an identity that fits really well for me (along with several others, but gamer is certainly one of them). The gamergate crap has tainted the word for me, but then I reflect on the roll that games have played in my life (and particularly the human relationships which have been influenced by gaming in some way), and I'm like you, I think, "Fuck those fucking fuckwits for fucking up my fucking word. They can't have it."

Tauntauns roasting on an open fire, Wampa's nipping at your heels

So what you're saying is that some of the gg folk you've spoken to don't understand moderation and diversity.

A lot of it has to do with multiplayer, to be honest. I just felt like the game was balanced so much better. While a few broken items/combos exist, by and large I felt like I had a chance to win a PvP fight no matter what I was wielding. Backstabbing managed to be better in SP play, and less obnoxious in MP. Counters exist for almost every single type of attack. Shields that mostly/fully block every time of damage. There's backstab/crit protection. You can't use all these things at once, but that they exist means that people you are fighting are less likely to be homogenous in the strategies they are using, as if the meta shifts to far one direction, then the corresponding defense becomes much more likely to be used.

I like them when they're making fun of shitty movies.