Bjorn

This is so much worse than HL3 for me. At least Valve doesn't even pretend like it exists. I certainly hope that Ancel does well independently, and will be excited to see what he designs outside of Ubisoft. But I also worry about the guy spreading himself too thin across multiple projects, which is what it sounds like he's doing.

This is kind of a wandering post, so apologies for that. Okay, so completely different thing. I own a business that specializes in niche computer parts markets, like laptop and notebook parts. We also occasionally take contract work from businesses to liquidate large amounts of tech for them. It's almost entirely OEM, used or refurb stuff, so we never handle retail packaging. We started a new contract at the end of last week to clear out a bitcoin miner who is getting out of it, a single individual who had a pretty respectably sized operation going. Part of liquidating his stuff is testing and reboxing hundreds of GPUs. This has reminded me of just how gross the retail packaging is for some PC enthusiast stuff. The miner had saved all the original packaging for all his rigs, so we've been reboxing all the cards to sell them. Which means I've spent a significant amount of time this week staring at these, often physically surrounded by stacks of them. Obviously using sexy women is nothing new, but this is really the first time I've just been so physically surrounded by this kind of marketing for hours a day, for an entire week. It's increasingly creeping me out. I'm pretty much the opposite of a prude, but it is seriously weird to spend hours with these digitally "perfect" renditions of women sitting around. It got me thinking about the rapid desensitization that must go on when you work a job where this kind of material is just constantly around you, within your field of view constantly. I tend to think that claims of desensitization because of media are pure bullshit (like virtual violence desensitizing kids to real violence), but when your reality is filled with this stuff for 8+ hours a day, does it contribute to seeing the female form as background? As wallpaper? As marketing? Or does it have no effect? I really don't know, but I'm pretty sure I wouldn't want to work in a space where this kind of sexualized imagery was the norm all day long. Just been a weird week, and thought this was an appropriate place to share it.

Yeah, that's like a mandatory skill for breaking people into a new game well. I'm a rule book junkie, I sit down and read rulebooks for fun sometimes, and I despise just sitting and listening to someone read the book.

We're just playing on a LAN right now, but it's not like setting up an account is hard. We'll probably be on in the evenings, US time, two or three times a week.

Dollars to donuts that at some point this paragraph was birthed in his head, and come hell or high water, he was going to find a way to make it work: It's a fun paragraph, even if it ultimately doesn't work very well in the rest of the piece.

Dramagames reminded me of this for some reason:

This isn't about generalities, and it's not about private activities. That's treating this exceptionally disingenuously. This is about two very specific individuals and their years long interaction with the customer base that WotC serves, through their previous professional work. You're talking about this as though it were some vague situation about someone's private beliefs that can be extrapolated out to any person or company. Do you not believe that how you have publicly comported yourself in a professional capacity has no bearing on whether or not people should hire you in the future?

Courtesy of RPS, I was introduced to Nested this morning. If you've got a few minutes, just click the link and cruise around for a bit, see what you find. It's not a game, but it's...neat? I don't want to spoil anything. If you need a reason to click, here:

Don't listen to better judgment! Better judgment hates fun.

Man, that just makes me remember the joy of getting a Vulcan Cannon up in Total Annihilation without your opponent noticing.

I tend a bit more towards being an extrovert (with some introverted moments), but honestly joining randoms in a game can give me anxiety if I'm expected to interact with them. Without the structure of how you communicate in person, or the time delay of a forum or email, I don't feel at all comfortable talking to strangers online. I've never particularly liked voice chat or chat rooms. But I can strike up a conversation with a total stranger in person no problem. So I tend to favor MP games that have no requirement to communicate, like Dark Souls or some co-op horde modes (like Mass Effect 3). Oddly enough though, something like DayZ doesn't intimidate me, though I haven't played it yet. The expectation that I'm going to be abused by a psychopath is so high, that it feels like it comes with some inherent structure. It's the unknown that gives me anxiety.

This...this can't be real, right? The boss said, apparently to a reporter directly, not second hand:

At least in one case, it isn't someone who "has an opinion". It's someone who has attacked and harassed other designers and gaming fans. And written rambling, incoherent paranoid screeds about a conspiracy to destroy tabletop gaming. You really think that it doesn't matter if someone being paid by a company has a history of harassment and abusive behavior towards people who are customers of that company? This isn't a case of, "Oh, this employee has an opinion I disagree with." It's a case of someone who is consistently toxic and degrading to the community at large. The case against Zak is less clear to me, as the one linked example was actually on the tame side for a forum argument, but I'm not going to say that the people who are upset by his choice are wrong. In order to get banned from RPGnet permanently, there must be more to that story somewhere.

I remember watching a couple of the Hit it with my Axe episodes on Escapist with Zak and the porn stars. It was mildly entertaining for an episode, but I didn't enjoy it enough to watch more. Other than that, I had never encountered anything by him. Holy straight jacket Batman, the other guy, that's tinfoil hat crazy land. I feel like I'm a little crazy after have just read a few articles on his site. Obviously he's known for that site, and WOTC brought him on as a tester/consultant anyways?

I haven't even glanced at the mods yet, I usually don't look at modding/workshop stuff until I've beaten a game or if there is something driving me nutty about it (like the inventory and map in Don't Starve). Reading through the Synergies feature list sounds like a significant overhaul, like that's something I'd do for a second playthough, or maybe bring my second character over to it if that is a possible thing. We played for a couple of hours last night, really settling into and getting comfortable now. Then I continued with my SP Outlander (so I don't out-level my wife) for a bit. Abandoned dual pistols and went Shotgun/Crossbow (short and long range respectively). Super happy with that, blasting things to bits and watching them explode in poison and spawning bats makes me giggle every time.

Oh, that's easy then. So it's "For the puffin of the Internet!"

Oh, I'm going to buy it the next time I have a couple of friends out to the house. It looks like a helluva time!

Motto: Lords do not manage themselves Battlecry: Cry havoc, and let loose the lords of war in a measured, thoughtful turn based manner! - Lame, I know, but I seriously can't think of a good battlecry for this game that's not sickeningly cheesy.

That's actually exactly her point: Yeah, I inherently agree with self-care and taking some time to switch gears between work and home life. But the structure of the full post is just...very old fashioned about the man as breadwinner and woman as home keeper.

Oh god, I don't know where to put this, but it's wonderful. May be slightly NSFW due to swinging Speedo package physics: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=0ze_3yTxd8c

Figured out why this blew up and what #orangeroom is. The Today Show ran a piece on Women against Feminism this morning, and their trademarked hashtag for viewers to discuss issues of the day on Twitter is orangeroom. They interviewed the honey badger that Ben linked above, which is why her blog is making the rounds now. I just spent some time looking around her blog. She's running a series called "100 Days of advice on how to treat men right." Parts of it read like a guide to being a good housewife in the 50s.

This piece is kind of fascinating, I can appreciate how this woman's history and her family shaped her views. But I find her claims of how universally wonderful her sex work experiences have been to be as hard to swallow as I do a piece like this insisting all pornography and sex work are dangerous traps that exist to please and reinforce the patriarchy. Both sides have legitimate points, but take their logic to an extreme that it's hard to take them seriously, as their assertions don't seem to line up with reality very well.

Good to know, glad it looks to be working out for everyone.

I had never heard of college football having a mercy rule before, had to look it up. There is no official mercy rule, however in rare blowouts a losing coach can request a continuous clock, which will be granted if both the officials and the opposing coach agree. Weirdly enough, 2 of the 3 times it has happened, according to Wikipedia, involve teams in the Big 12. Not surprisingly, my alma mater was on the losing side of one of those games.

Started this up tonight and played a bit. It's the very definition of an Ace Team game; equal parts brilliance, WTF?, and frustration. It's stylish, beautiful in its own way and has some interesting ideas on death. I'm not sold on the fighting mechanics yet, but I'm going to level up a bit more and see if that continues helping. It feels just on the sluggish side of what I want 2D combat to be. But each power I gain is having a significant impact on fighting, so it may just be that I need to get up a few more levels to feel comfortable. What it does with death is fucking cool though. So there are soldiers wandering around in the Abyss along with you. If you die, one of these friendly chaps always shows up just after the nick of time! You take control of him, and if you can reach an alter, he can resurrect your body. He's slower and weaker than you though, so the game definitely gets harder if you have to fall back on him. But then you can shapeshift into enemies, either by absorbing their essence (which is fairly rare) or buying their essence from a merchant. While shapeshifted, you have a new health pool. When you die, you automatically change back to your original form. It's an elegant way to handle "lives" in a game like this, instead of just giving you 3 lives to start. Finally, there are checkpoints that you can pay soldiers to man, so that if you die, they will fetch your body and resurrect you there instead of you being sent all the way to the surface. But the checkpoints are constantly under attack, and each time you die another soldier holding the point will be lost, until none remain, at which point its back to the surface again. If you use them, a constant stream of soldiers are laying down their lives to pave the way for you to reach the end. Everything about the death mechanic feels so thoughtful, like it mattered that the cycle of starting a run, dying, and restarting make sense in a completely believable way inside the world.