Bjorn

My thread over at the official forums got locked, as it's considered a "Touchy Topic" and those aren't allowed in the Dresden forums. Ah well, whatevs. Anyways, had a movie night tonight, will hopefully get back to reading it tomorrow!

Zardoz movie night was a rousing success! That was a terrific movie, and perfect for a group watching. It was way more entertaining than I had expected.

The whole thing can probably be done as quickly as 10 minutes if it's flawless, it's really not that long of a thing. With some deaths, anywhere from 30 minutes to a couple of hours. General advice, be patient and take the regular enemies one at a time, snipe with the binoculars and lightning. Use poison arrows if you have a bow. In most areas, it's possible to aggro 2-3 enemies at a time if you rush, which is close to a guaranteed kill given the power of the enemies down there. Overwhelming the boss as quickly as possible is the best strategy if you're not comfortable with a very difficult extended battle. Use herbs to refresh your best spells if you've used them before the boss. I've done it melee once, and it was fun for me, but that's not going to be everyone's cup of tea. And watch your step. My first time through, gravity got me more total times than enemies.

Sounds like we've got a dozen people coming out, and only one person has seen it (I've never seen it!). Quite a few people had never even heard of it, just seen the Connery thong pic, but had no idea what it was from.

Dragon Chime is AMAZING for high level miracle users. Like its equivalent at +1 or +2 to the next best option at max level, with a higher casting speed. If you're already a lightning user, I think you'll find the Dark to be manageable. I rushed it crazy early on my current character because I needed the armor set you get at Rank 3 of the covenant for Fashion Souls (RPing as The King in Yellow alternating between the Warlock Mask, a crown and a hood with the rest of the pieces of the Xanthous Set). So I used a Shrine skip and was able to get through it with just one copy each of Lightning, Greater Lightning and Emit Force and I was somewhere around SL65 or so. I wasn't even able to use the Dragon Chime for awhile because of its 50 Faith requirement, but once I could use it...it's just soooo good. Nothing slings lightning like it does. Man, but the Chasms of the Dark are so freaking cool though. If you haven't been through them, you shouldn't skip it.

My feelings about this started in Season 3, with the torture porn built around Theon. The trajectory of the show as been to accentuate the violence and horror over other things in the books, or perhaps it's just that they only have so much time and important story beats often involve the greatest violence and horror. Movie night is tonight. I'm super excited!

Yeah, basically two scenes and the second one is actually pretty badass and a great re-imagining of the climatic scene in the original. This is a movie where I really can't endorse or condemn it. I'd say it's worth catching at some point for anyone interested in Disney stuff, fairy tales or feminism, though not necessarily needed to see it in the theater.

I should clarify that I'm not sure that I'm necessarily down on Malifcent, even if my original post sounded that way. I just typed that up pretty quickly after seeing it. I can totally see some of the stuff in that piece you linked. And my wife absolutely loved the movie. Like seriously loved it. She was a very, very angry young woman with some temper control issues who ultimately views her daughter as one of the things that saved her, as she had to learn a level of patience and forgiveness that a younger her didn't think possible. So she literally saw herself in Malificent. Then there were a pair of girls a few seats down from us who squealed with delight when They were so charmingly delighted that it wasn't the typical fairytale. And yet then all the stuff in my original spoiler is also there. It's a movie with a ton of different things going on, much odder than I expected in many ways and the reception to it has been interesting.

I've tried Smith's podcasts and found them grating. To be fair, I downloaded like 2 of them randomly, found the opening 10 minutes of both to be not good, and never went back.

And the floor apparently

I'm pretty much as privileged as they come: straight, white, male from an educated middle class family.

Yeah, I was super weird about male homosexuality when I was a teen and in my early 20s, which is not something I'm proud of. My freshman year of college I skipped class on Pride day because it unnerved me so much. Like a lot of people, I didn't chill out about it until meeting and becoming friends with a couple of gay guys, who just turned out to be pretty awesome people, not like anything I had been led to believe gay men would be when I was a kid and didn't fit any of the stereotypes (one of the guys was a college football player at a private Christian college...definitely not the typical stereotype). I'm still super happy I met people like them who helped me get over the weird baggage I had from growing up in a small rural town.

I never got any piercings, but a bunch of my friends in high school did and it was always a big deal that you had to make sure you got the left one pierced! Cause otherwise everyone would think you're gay, which in Western Kansas was actually a problem that could have resulted in a severe ass kicking. And that might be one of the reasons this shit bugs me. It was a joke for most kids in high school, but in hindsight having learned that a couple of my classmates were gay and terrified of what would happen to them if they came out, these kinds of things just aren't that funny to me. The whole earring thing was as much a reminder to closet cases that they couldn't, under any circumstances, safely come out as it was a community indicator. It just depended on where you lived. I posted over in the official Dresden forums about this, as I didn't see any threads about it. And predictably, people are defending it as being a funny joke at best, or a silly throw away line at worst. Of course a thread this morning about feminism and any female issues in Skin Game was locked over there, because the trolls were being trolls. Because don't ban the shitheads, just close the thread and don't talk about serious things. They did let it go on for quite awhile before they closed it though.

Finally got it yesterday! Yah! He mostly just did a Q&A again, which was as hit and miss as any fan Q&A ever is. Overall quite enjoyable though. So like 10 pages into the book, he's already being weird about the gays. I wished I would have read that part before the Q&A started, as I would have asked him why Dresden is sooo terrified of anyone thinking he might be gay. With gay rights and marriage steamrolling through the country, things like that are rapidly becoming anachronisms.

What did you think of it?

Putting this here because it's more fitting than the movie thread. So we say Maleficent tonight, as she's my wife's favorite Disney character ever. My wife tends to like villains more than heroes/princesses, and plays evil whenever she can in a video game. It's kind of a weird movie. Jolie is great, but the structure of it is...troubling?

I have a 150" home theater projector Usually movie nights are no problem to set up, but this thing is like herding cats. A bunch of people all want to come out, but no two people are available on the same evening next week.

The Dragon Covenant is for dedicated dueling. You put down a dragon sign, get summoned, and whoever wins gets a dragon scale, which nets you ranks in the covenant. The flip ring used to work if you were sub 50-percent load, but they eventually nerfed it to...25 percent? I think? At the pre-patch level, everyone wore it in PvP and the iFrames it gave people made them much, much harder to kill.

Cthulu-frog. I approve!

I never watched any of the original Swatch_Dogs stuff, just basically gleaned things from gaming blogs and general gaming chatter. I certainly had the impression that it was going to have a focus that was farther afield than your typical open world action game. Now that's not necessarily Ubisofts fault, but there are reasons that the impression of the game developed as it did for people who were just paying attention casually to it. And this is a thing that happens. Like when Brutal Legend was released and people were SHOCKED! to find out that it had RTS elements. Shocked and pissed that their funny action game suddenly had this RTS thing shoehorned into it. If you paid attention in the slightest to the early stuff on it, or read any interviews with Schafer, that was clearly one of the goals and features of the product from super early on. But lots of people missed out on that info anyways.

What's funny, is that for all Nintendo attempts to explore alternative controllers, if the WiiU suddenly supported every little batshit controller that has ever been used for a Nintendo console, and devs could program for whatever controller they wanted, I would immediately consider it a must own gaming device.

Announcing Star Wars: Clone Management, the last Lords Management game you will ever need.

That's how I always saw it. I had a group of friends who played TradeWars for years (all the way into the mid-to-late 2000s), which was my original introduction into a limited turn system. I actually really liked TW, KoL and games that used those systems pre-gross-monetization, as it allowed me to participate in certain games without having them turn into time sinks, which is kind of the opposite of what modern monetized limited energy systems attempt to create.

Going to host a movie night next week to watch Zardoz, it just shipped from Netflix. Super excited about this.

I haven't played Transistor yet, but what I loved about Bastion wasn't the story, but how the story set a tone/mood for the entire game. It added character and personality to the world while not managing to step on itself in any way.