Bjorn

Was the thing with mystery bags dropping in the daily normal to the daily, or a function of one of the starting items? It ended up making the challenge super easy to complete, I got a CAH card, filled a big room with poop, got a poop trinket and then like 20 of those mystery bags dropped, so I was rolling in keys, money and bombs before I was even out of the first level. My time was ass though, as I messed around a bunch. Super Greed is a definite sponge, but I did beat him with Azazel today, got some of the bomb upgrades that make the bomb shoot out the same as your shot (so it's brimstone), and a few of those just torched him in no time. Saving up money for the Greed machine is definitely worth it.

I'm not sure what to make of Dungeon of the Endless. If you don't know what it is, it's a mish-mash of different ideas and genres. You've crashed your space ship, and you need to escape with your power core. You'll traverse 12 levels (on the easiest difficulty) to do so. It's both turn based and real time. You have 4 resources to use to build a variety of Major and Minor Modules in rooms which can help you with producing resources, defense, healing, killing enemies, etc. Opening a door causes 1 turn to pass, which is when your resource generation happens, skills refresh one tick, research advances one tick, etc. If monsters spawn, it becomes real time though, you have to maneuver your people around, killing the monsters before they kill you or destroy your core. Once the exit is located, the game is a mad dash for your ragtag group of heroes to escort the core to the next level. On paper, this sounds like a perfect game for me. But it's just not clicking. It's much slower paced than I expected, almost too slow. My first playthrough took me several hours, probably 4-5 hours, with later floors taking 30-40 minutes to clear. Which feels entirely too long for one of these procedurally generated dungeon crawls. I much prefer the 1-2 hour arc for games with a lot of replayability, so I can get in a complete game in one session. Maybe more familiarity with this will speed it up a bunch, but I'm not expecting it to drop to an hour. There's a lot of micromanagement that I wasn't expecting. Monsters don't spawn in rooms with lights on, and between each door sometimes you want to change which rooms are lit and which aren't to funnel them specific ways. There are items that can give your heroes skills they might not otherwise get, and with stuff like Repair, you can find yourself swapping out items in between every wave of monsters to fix your stuff, then go back to your fighting gear. One of the little joys of the game is opening doors. The door slowly opens, the room gradually lights, and then you get to discover what's there. But in later levels, I found myself immediately backing out to map view as soon as I clicked on a door so I could see where enemies were spawning, thus robbing myself of that little door opening joy. Research is done at crystals you find, and typically takes 3 doors to finish. In order to maximize research, you find yourself having to run back across the map every 2-3 doors (depending on the number of research crystals you found), again slowing down the pace of the game. There are just so many little things that kill the pacing the game could have. It's kind of a death by a thousand cuts for me and this game. No one of the things that bugs me would normally seriously impact my enjoyment of a game. But all the little irritations in this one have really brought it down for me. Which is frustrating, because it is a good game. I'm sure there are people out there who love it.

Did Steam change the drop times for cards again? After the added returns, the put in a 2 hour delay to drops to stop people from buying games, getting cards, refunding the game. But I bought Westerado when it was on sale this week, played some the other night and had all the cards drop within the first hour of play.

I got in one game last night before we had to go out for the evening. I tried the new Greed mode with Samson. It's neat! Rather than exploring a level, it's a series of levels centered around a horde mode of 8 waves. Samson just destroyed it, but he ended up with some solid early items as well. The final boss is brutal though, the biggest damage sink of a boss that I've ever seen in Isaac. I didn't get any of the new items though. I did see 2 for sale in the store, but didn't have the money for them.

Wait, I was only slightly paying attention to this. The "gamergate" panel is not a panel discussing gg, but is actually a panel composed of people representing gg? I assumed it had to be the former not the latter.

It's making me feel better about my max combo being 12, knowing I'm getting that sweet gem bonus. (I'm terribad at this game, but I haven't unlocked Levitate yet either)

I pay for the Savage Lovecast, which comes down to I think a bit less than a dollar a show. The paid version is longer and has no ads. There's a couple of other podcasts I've be willing to pay for (or have contributed donations to if they support that). I also increasingly think that I would be willing to pay someone to be a music curator for me. Like if an individual charged a bunch of people like $5 a month and made a variety of curated music lists, I think I would totally try that. I'm just terrible about finding new music that I like, so I listen to the same stuff over and over (and all the algorithmic based suggestions do a terrible job of deciding what I like).

Derp, Computer Employee was the one I forgot, I knew there was something. Still, the requirements are pretty clear and it's another area that employers are likely to try and misclassify people (she works with computers, so she must be exempt!)

Common misconception that isn't really true. Companies are notorious for misclassifying employees as exempt, when the employee does not meet the federal requirements to be overtime exempt. Both hourly workers and salary workers can be exempt from overtime pay, what matters are the duties they perform. Salary just became a convenient shorthand because it's the more common scenario (but I come from having worked in both news and farming, two of the industries with hourly exemptions). As a general rule of thumb, exempt salaried employees need to be managers, who oversee other employees with the ability to hire/fire. Or they need to be a professional (doctor, lawyer, etc). There's a few other minutia that SAM could fall under, not knowing all the requirements of the job, but contrary to what a lot of businesses believe, you can't just willy nilly classify anyone you want as salaried. The penalty can really rack up for a company if they are found to have misclassified, to the tune of having to pay employees double overtime (3x pay) for every hour they failed to properly compensate someone. That's all I remember off the top of my head when I was reading up on this stuff last year, I'm sure it's not a perfect summary, but it's pretty close.

I had missed that Prostitute Laundry was kickstarting a book, and it ends today! PL was an email memoir (true, or mostly true as far as I know) chronicling the life of an escort, sent out to a bunch of strangers on the internet. It's fascinating, and intimate and hard to know that it even existed. PL has ended now, but the writer is collecting the whole run into a book now. I'm glad it will live on in another form.

That explains a lot for me!

Also, I think the final boss of FTL gets a bad rap. There are builds that will crush it, at basically no risk. There are builds that can't win, period, no matter how good you are. And then there are the interesting builds, the ones of, "maybe this will work, let's see." Overall, I think it fits the designed theme of FTL. You're a little ship trying to escape a big problem, and it just ain't going to work everytime. Now I want to play FTL.

It's really hard for me to get excited about Paradox acquisitions, after how the completely mangled everything about Majesty when they bought it. But I'd also love to see something interesting come from those properties, so at least someone will be working on them.

I liked Steamworld Dig quite a bit as well. The team making it isn't doing a sequel, but they are planning on trying to make Steamworld their universe that they make different games in, keeping the aesthetic and themes. Steamworld Heist is next, where you lead a group of steampunk space robot pirates, looting from spaceship to spaceship.

I've got some scattered thoughts on this that are all things I've been thinking about for awhile. A) There's a tendency to treat all offense as equal levels of oppression, so a fan artist doing something racist is the same as a major network producing a racist character. Both may be bad, but one clearly reaches an audience of scale of radically different proportion and matters a lot more. Sunglasses) Related to that, it can feel difficult or impossible to address offenses that actually matter, like institutional oppression in our major institutions (government, police, academia, etc), to the point that it's easier to feel apathy about change than it is do anything. But, you can yell at some individual on Tumblr who will actually listen and pay attention to you, so that feels like doing something. C) I think the age thing Markson mentioned matters a lot, on both sides. Many communities seem to have an expectation of equal levels of wisdom in regards to social justice, regardless of age, upbringing, geography, context, etc. We should all strive to improve ourselves, but the reality is that many people are going to have different levels of hurdles to get past to make that improvement. The message becomes that active growth is bad, because if you need to grow, then that means you're a bad person who has done/thought bad things, and thus are irredeemable. I've got two people on my Facebook feed who regularly make posts along the lines of "If you think X, then just go ahead and de-friend me now, because I don't need you in my life." I see that thought run through something like this whole fiasco as well. If all you are interested in doing is preaching to the choir, why do you speak at all? Your words have no meaning, or purpose, for they will never enact change, and that's what you claim you want. D) Martin Luther King, Jr., and Ghandi wouldn't be welcome on Tumblr, or in a whole bunch of other communities. Tumblr today would reject, cast out and seek to destroy MLK as a misogynist of the worst degree. Change will never come from the perfect, because there are no perfect people. And yet, such is the standard that is set. Seek, raise, praise, question, destroy, seek again. This is the cycle of existing with any degree of prominence within these communities, it seems.

Hahahahaha, I hadn't actually looked at the pricing for this thing. Holy shit, $40 for the Season Pass, which does not include all the starting DLC? There's 0 discount (in fact, it's 1 penny more expensive) to buy the Pass/Game bundle (which also does not include all the starting DLC). To buy everything at launch would be $120.84. The cost of 2 brand new AAA games, plus a cool new Indie game.

Probably not, it's actually very rare to get giftable copies even when buying a bundle of games you already own, letalone getting a copy for free.

Jeebus, what the fuck? How is that even legal?

And having a cop or officer of some sort in a school that size makes some sense to me, that's only slightly smaller than my hometown (3,500 people when I lived there), and we had a whole police force. In any ongoing population of a couple of thousand people, you are going to have minor crime, fights, car accidents, etc. I don't see it as significantly different than having an on site nurse. The problem is that it is a significantly different job from other forms of policing that should have its own training and requirements and oversight, which is all lacking as far as I know. I grew up in a different world. Small town, pre-Columbine, in a world where school shooting wasn't even a phrase, where my dad knew ever cop by first name, and I knew most of them. My older brother took a gun to a high school football game once in the late 80s (being dumb and showing off), and he didn't even get arrested. Cops took him to the station, called dad, dad picked him and the gun up. I can't even imagine how that would play out nowadays, even back there.

We put hundreds of hours into ME3 MP, which was just a grindy horde mode to get credits to play a item upgrade slot machine. There's a certain kind of grind, when paired with mechanics/combat I enjoy, that is exactly what I'm looking for at times, it's the comfort of returning to a system I know and enjoy. So that's actually a plus for Warframe for me I suppose it's similar to people who play competitive shooters mostly, except I mostly hate PvP, so my analog are certain co-op shooters.

Woot has brand new PS4s on sale for $299 until they sell out.

Yeah, it's been a few months since I saw Destiny for a fresh comparison, but Warframe looks great on PC. Also, it's on PC, Destiny is not And there does seem to be a story. Not sure it's a good story, or that it goes very deep, but there's totally a story being told to me right now.

I cleared the rail nomads camp (where I originally stalled out) and am in the Prison now, as far as I've ever played. Still having a good time with it. I know that several people were frustrated with the sheer number of skills and making sure everything was covered without having too much invested in Intel. I think the DC version alleviates a lot of that, with some planning. My suggestions are: Asses: The 3 asses all include a perk now that adds a free skill level. Between that, skill books and trinkets, they only have to be manually raised to 7 (and 6 in the case of Hard Ass which has a gun that adds to it as well). Distribute these on combat focused characters with low intel, since they can save 20-26 points. Or plan on picking them up on recruited companions. Explosives - Now has 3 perks that 1) gets you more explosives and 2) makes them somewhat better in combat. I'm swimming in dynamite and pipe bombs. This should go on a made character with no combat skills and a 10 intel. You can easily do 5 or 6 skills on this character, and it can still help out in combat when needed thanks to boom booms. All those explosives also mean that... Safecracking - I think this can be completely skipped. Explosives can open safes without breaking the contents inside. Some safes take safecracking, others take Computer Science. You'll save 30+ skill points by just bombing open the non-CompSci safes. If you recruit the hobo, he starts with 2 in both safes and lockpick, but has a very low intel. Not leveling up Safes would let you focus on his Lockpick and shotgun in the early game. Mechanical Repair - Has an early perk which prevents Critical Failures. This means that as long as you don't mind having to try a few times on any Repair checks, you don't need as many points invested since you'll never break the item. So you can skip the last couple of levels in it, saving a dozen points (figuring getting 2 levels from trinket/skill book). It also means you will always get 2 checks on lockpicks, since you can repair critical failed lockpicks one time. Weaponsmithing - Now includes a (very early, only takes 4 skill points) perk that gives a bonus Action Point when wearing light armor. I kinda hate movement penalties, so only wear light armor. Knowing that you can get this perk early on might be worth considering when assigning Stat points, save a couple in Coordination and put them in Awareness for initiative, or into Intel plus another point to get to 4, which would then way more than pay for the skill points needed to add it. Also might be worth adding to multiple characters later in the game if you've maxxed, or near maxxed, the skills they need. Toaster Repair - Take it, or recruit Ralphy in Rail Nomads. There are a few skill books that can only be had through trading toaster items. It mostly pays for itself. Mostly. So thanks to Explosives, Repair, Safecracking and Asses, you can save most of 2 whole skill trees worth of points, which takes a lot of the pressure off of feeling spread too thin. My made characters are running 10/4/4/1 Intels, and I recuited the mutant, Vulture and the hobo specifically because of their skills. I'm better at combat thanks to better stats (I had way more Intel in my original game), and I havne't felt annoyed at not being able to do any non-combat stuff.

Best of luck. I managed to get...partway through Chapter 2, maybe chapter 3, before finally just completely giving up. Whatever wonders are hidden there, I am not worthy.

OH HOLY SHIT THAT'S PERFECT! Thanks for the head's up. We have 2 PCs, but generally prefer couch co-op if possible. It usually takes something pretty special for us to want to sit in our office (where we spend all day anyways) and not in our living room. Edited to add: I wonder if it will go on sale tomorrow because the EE version is coming out? That would be sweet. If so, I might be interested in going in on the deluxe version with someone to split the cost of two copies.