Bjorn

So this blogger claims that the story about Max was known to at least a small group of people back when it happened, and gets into the culture of Groucher, which apparently (either at the time, or even up to now) claims that there has NEVER been a rape or sexual assault on campus. Yeah, no pressure there to be the first person raped on lovely Groucher's campus. That's fucking nuts for a college to claim that. This is probably one of the better balanced looks at the situation. If nothing else, the whole thing sounds plausible. There are, statistically, many tens of thousands of men who have, probably when they were in high school or college, sexually assaulted a woman. They didn't necessarily do it with intent. They may not have even recognized it for an assault, taking silence as consent. That doesn't make it less wrong. It doesn't mean it caused less harm. But there are a lot of men out there that did it. And women who have never said a word. All of us likely know men who have sexually assaulted someone. Some of those men are probably people we like.

This experience for me has caused me to heavily temper how I recommend things to other people. The more someone insists that I must read, play or watch something, the less and less interested I become in it. I have a small section in a bookshelf of books people have pressed on me, insisting that I must read them. But every time I look at them, I feel like there's too much responsibility inherent to the act, because someone else is anticipating me having a positive reaction. Realizing that I must do this myself at times to other people, now I generally try to be nonchalant and non-judgmental about it. Like, "Oh, yeah, that's really good and worth checking out at some point." The thing I've noticed over the last few years is the push so many people have about various TV shows. OMG, you haven't watched Mad Men, or Breaking Bad, or Dexter, or whatever. And it's like yeah, those things are huge time commitments and I don't give that kind of attention to television anymore. I think I've offended people by insisting that I really don't want to dedicate 50-100 hours to one show and they take that as me judging them for having done it. And it's not! I waste a lot of time in my life, just not on television.

Ah, I think the track has been removed, it's not showing up for me. Edit, nevermind! It's on the article that Tegan linked to. Jesus, this is painful. Not sure I can get through it all.

I'm going to quit Jamestown, a little indie shmup/bullet hell game. It's the first time I ever remember quitting a game because of the final boss. So congrats indie dev, on a personal first for me. I get that bullet hell games are supposed to be hard, but the progression in Jamestown just feels like artificial bullshit. The game is super short, like someone good at shmups could beat it in 30-45 minutes. There are only 5 levels. The first three have 5 difficulty options. The fourth has 4 options and the final level only has 3 options. You have to play the first four levels on the third difficulty setting in order to unlock the last level. Being generous, the dev might have thought this structure was training a player to get through the 4th and 5th levels. Being honest, I think they ramped up the difficulty artificially, particularly in the final level, to compensate for how short the campaign is. It's also a bad co-op game, which is the main reason I had picked it up in a bundle of other co-op games awhile back. It is the very rare game that is harder with another person than it is solo. Alone, you get 9 lives to get through a level. No health bar, one hit kills you. In co-op, you get 2 continues, that are used if all players die at the same time, but otherwise infinite lives, as players respawn after a bit. The problem is that we tended to both die at the same time at certain bottlenecks or difficulty spikes, resulting in an experience where in co-op we functionally had 3 lives versus the single players 9 lives. Not allowing players to play the final level on the difficulty of their choice just feels like some real crap. For bullet hell enthusiasts, all those other difficulties are there for them. Let the casual shmup player get through your game, have some fun and leave it as a positive experience.

My anecdotal experience with friends in KC who are getting hooked up to Google Fiber is that they don't want pay for gigabit speeds when there is a super cheap, but good enough, option. Every single person I know has opted for the unlimited free 5mbs (one time $300 fee) in lieu of the $70/Mo gigabit connection. I was all excited that I could at least go over and play with someone else's super fast Internet, and then no one actually got it.

Congrats! If you use spells at all, you could go stock up on the items that restore casts. If you think you might try a no bonfire run on NG+ (some people prefer to do it on +), buy a ton of repair powders. Buy all the limited stones the stone lady sells. But really, it's not that big of a deal. It doesn't take that long to get really deep into the world in NG+, since you know where everything is. Friday's patch is also widening the summon range, so if you do go back, there will probably be people to summon thanks to that. And I have yet to have an issue summoning or being summoned because of too high a SM. My problem was always rushing to develop a new character, and being way too underleveled. But I took a couple characters up to a fairly high SM in NG and still saw plenty of signs.

I just finally watched Cronos relatively recently and enjoyed it. It's an interesting take on a vampire tale, and I always enjoy a new way at looking at classic horror icons. Ron Perlman is great. I liked the bizarre, and completely unexplained, dynamic going on with the old man's family.

I never have any of my own shit to plug, but my sister-in-law was on Katie Couric's show a little while ago! So that's cool. http://katiecouric.com/videos/is-someone-you-know-addicted-to-pain-pills/

No worries, the thought had already occurred to me! I'll be disappointed if that's not the case as well. And I doubt this thread needs spoilers. Is anyone playing the Bureau for its gripping world class story?

I should clarify that I don't think there is anything wrong with Mountain, even if the intent was as a joke or as an Andy Kaufman like piece whose primary purpose was the entertainment of the creator. That doesn't detract from it for me, I just think it's a reasonable question to ask about it.

The difference with all three of those (if I'm remember the details correctly) is that they were all presented by credible creators, with the intention of pulling the rug out from beneath people eventually and revealing the hoax. But O'Reilly has already made one hoax. We have someone who has previously wanted to observe how YouTube viewers would respond to what they thought was an animated short created by a 9 year old, and then again how they would respond when the hoax was revealed. Fair or not, once you've done that, I think you've invited skepticism about future works. I want to be clear that I do not think Mountain is a hoax, as his presentation of it does not misrepresent it or him in anyway. It might be a joke or a prank, but he didn't seek to deceive anyone about what it is. If it is anything other than an earnest attempt at a minimalist interactive audio/video experience, I would suspect that similar to the YouTube experiment, O'Reilly just wanted to see how people would react. Positive or negative, it doesn't matter. Which you could probably make an argument about it being the kind of work that draws the audience into becoming a part of the art, for those who choose to publicly write about it. In which case Kuchera is now a part Mountain, forever. He has symbolically crashed into the Mountain and become one with it.

That is, in fact, very possible and isn't going to surprise me at all. The very opening cut scene sets up that possibility.

If you're looking to polish off the old ticker, you can read the college's official response, in which they do not mention the most damaging and dangerous allegations in the article (like outing the victim, implying to her that she made a false accusation, finishing the entire investigation in 12 days, not taking physical evidence into account in clearing the accused, allowing the football coach to meet with the accused and a key witness in a group meeting, etc), but repeatedly emphasizing how amazing they are at handling sexual assault claims.

I made another one in the Bureau thread, just for you. <3

It's possible I'm wrong, but I don't think so. The subtitles don't even identify which of your people is talking. The barks aren't that frequent (maybe a couple on a small mission and a few more on a major mission), so they aren't frequent enough that the same voice for different agents would end up super noticeable. And it would fit with some other stuff. At one point walking around my base, there were 2 guys taking a break and they had the exact same face model. Could be they were twins, but I doubt it. One of my favorite ridiculous parts of the story so far is that Agent DAWG (Drunk Angry White Guy, my nickname for Carter) is super concerned about how paranoid their director is. Like he has brought it up in conversation with almost every single person in the base that he can talk to at this point, and expressed how disturbed by this paranoia he is. Except that there are alien infiltrators who can shapeshift (?) and look human. One has already tried to blow up Xcom. Another successfully assassinated a bunch of high ranking military and civilian leaders. And in game he knows the Soviets still have active spies trying to infiltrate Xcom. And there's a bizarre disease of alien origin sweeping across the land. The paranoia of the director has been to increase security, create a test to identify infiltrators and infected and to limit information about certain missions to key people. This all seems super reasonable to me, but DAWG can't handle the man breathing down his neck. Maybe this goes somewhere, but if so, they've done a terrible job of justifying DAWG's paranoia about his boss' paranoia (Yo DAWG, I heard...).

If I had to guess, I'd say the reason voice acting. There's a bunch of comments that your field team will make when on a mission when you find or see certain things. They would have had to either record twice as much audio for field team, or scale back/eliminate your team interacting with you.

Link, for anyone who wants it.

I wouldn't normally find myself defending Kuchera, but I think skepticism in the face of certain types of art is not...unwarranted. I think it's perfectly reasonable to wonder if a joke is being played on you when you've got a person whose work history includes animations for the Hitchhiker's Guide; writing, directing and animating an Adventure Time episode; and a YouTube hoax featuring an invented 9 year old boy. Fuck, given that history, I think Kuchera's response is far more honest than people who haven't (publicly) considered whether it is a joke. I'll admit that I struggle to appreciate some minimalist art. I rather like minimalist architecture and house design, but in particular works of minimalist visual art just do absolutely nothing for me, even if I can recognize that real skill and craft went into their creation.

So thanks to the 2K bundle, I'm a few hours into this. It's such a crazy beast of a game. That's not to say it's good, but it's not bad either. The mix of shit going on is weird. Gender and racial stuff As discussed previously in this thread, they clearly had a desire to not be racist and sexist dickbags in their game, but still managed to cock it up. There are a variety of non-white personnel wandering around the base. The people you can recruit are of a good racial mix. Your office mate is a Hispanic/Latino chap. And there are a couple of early badass female characters you meet. The second in command of XCOM is a highly skilled field operative who is now stuck to a desk thanks to her promotion. And the head of communications and PR is, based on her uniform, a super decorated Air Force (?) officer overseeing an office full of dudes. But, no women on your field teams. Because? Fuck if I know. A committed gay male couple is introduced early in the game. That was unexpected. There are audio logs and overheard conversations about both sexism and homosexuality on the base, but I haven't heard any about racism yet. It's like they recognized that these things would have been out of place in this era to some extent, but instead of just letting them be, felt the need to point them out through NPCs. Gameplay This thing is XCOM: Mass Effect edition. Conversation wheels, slowing down combat to issue combat orders to your 2 squad mates. You have a hub with little side missions in it that you wander around in and talk to people. You select your missions from a map, including small side missions and multi-step story missions. Your character has Lift, for god's sake! Like, not even a different name or anything. At level 1, the squad mates were terrible, more of an encumbrance than help. But at level 3 they seem to be pulling their own now and actually being useful. Story The plot is like XCOM alternate universe fan fiction. I can't possibly see how this ties into Enemy Unknown. The lore appears to be significantly different than EU. People in your base have important items and info that can help defeat the aliens, and they won't give it to you until you've done some minor quest for them! It's deliciously absurd. Normally stuff like that would bug me, but I'm just amused at the ridiculous of it all. I think buying that bundle was worth it just to play this. I forget that sometimes I like things that are delightfully bad, but mechanically competent enough to be fun.

:tup:

I was going to make a joke about imagining a MySpace convention, and then I went to MySpace for the first time in years and discovered that it's a hiply designed music service now? So I guess a convention for it would just be a bunch of musicians, which would be a festival, and festivals are cool. My entire joke collapsed on itself. Thanks myspace.

I wonder if it was a case of them becoming so good at the game over time they didn't realize how hard it was until they brought in fresh playtesters. The first phase of that fight is so tight that if the boss were even a quarter second faster, he'd be almost impossible to kill.

Part two is a love story where the Rock Banders help Courtney Love reunite with Holographic Kurt Cobain, culminating in an intense courtroom showdown where Kotick tries to prove that he in fact owns everything there is to own about Cobain. But Holographic Kurt Cobain, through the (with a very special Huey Lewis cameo), has become sentient and declares his independence from Kotick.

I couldn't even reply to that yesterday, the story was too much. The transcript of the "hearing" made me want to punch something. I've had no training in that sort of thing, but do have some experience conducting sensitive interviews, and I could have done a much better job questioning both people. Is it even constitutional for a student to not be able to have a lawyer with them in a situation like that? Schools are empowered by federal law to have the power to hold these hearings, essentially operating as a court. If you're going to take on the power of a court under law, shouldn't at least some of the rules that govern courts come along with that? I still don't understand why we let college disciplinary boards handle felonies. Like WHAT THE GODDAMNED FUCK. If someone was murdered on campus, we wouldn't just turn it over the to school. Not that police and DAs have been shown to be the most competent with rape cases, but still, turn that shit over to the proper authorities. The bizarrest part of that story is how incredibly competent the campus police look. The rolled in, did their job professionally and looked after the victim. It's like, look at these guys, is it that hard for the rest of you to act like professionals?

Yeah, I've gone through some sections like that. It was bad when I was running a sniper + engineer. But then I switched to commando + sniper and got them up to rank 3 and took Grenade capacity on my Shepard Agent Drunk Angry White Guy (codename Agent DAWG (yo DAWG, I heard you like grenades, so I put grenades in yo grenades)). I also recruited a new sniper and commando to change their rank 1 passive skill to better fit their roles. Taunt, Lift and Critical Strike to start an encounter gets 2 threats dead, and one immobilized for a bit. Then when we hit a big enemy, DAWG's got 6 grenades to chuck at it to soften it up. I haven't even tried a support yet, which is pretty much how I viewed supports in Enemy Unknown as well.