Bjorn

I meant to mention this earlier, I think my distaste for New Londo is entirely rooted in my first playthrough, where it was just a nightmare for me to get through. My character wasn't built as well as it could have been, I didn't have as many of the temp curse items as I needed. It was just a disaster. On replays, I still find it to be incredibly stressful because I remember what it was like the first time. I am in the minority of really liking Blighttown, stutter and all.

I'm not going to disagree with you about that, and I'm not nearly as active on Twitter as you are to see how this stuff is playing out day to day. I was under the impression that gamerghazi was down to just a small group (there's barely a dozen posts a day there). My thought was just that the anti-gg that gamergate thinks exists is radically different from whatever the organized, regularly active anti-gg element is that does exist.

anti-gamerate, because gg needs to pretend that there is an equal and organized opposite force to them.

Someone is claiming that they've found one of the few prototypes made for the Nintendo/Sony console that was ultimately scrapped. It makes me wonder what gaming would look like today if Sony had never entered the market. Would the Dreamcast have been a success, with one less competitor? Would Microsoft have ever entered the field?

I love Sen's Fortress so much. You die in some bullshit ways, for sure, but man is it such a good area.

I would suggest clearing out all of Darkroot, there's some useful stuff there (not know what you may have missed, it can be a coinflip on if it's anything you need or not). I'd save the Catacombs for later. You're completely capable of doing them right now, but you'll save yourself some backtracking if you wait. You probably can handle exploring Valley of the Drakes if you really want? It's not strictly necessary at this point though. If you try a drake and get your ass kicked, it can always wait. Save New Londo for later (I fucking hate New Londo). Sen's Fortress is by far the most important location though, head there after clearing out as much of Darkroot and the Valley as you want.

We played Telestrations drawing from Cards Against Humanity tonight. I'm not sure I've laughed that hard in years. Some of the top contenders of the evening were "Disco Ninjas" and "Snowman who feels unsure about butt sex".

That would explain it then. It's fascinating how if you quit eating fast food or drinking soda for months, and then try either again, most people think they taste like crap after an extended break.

I have to admit I've been enjoying how complaining about the weather is essentially universal regardless of culture.

Honestly, your life kinda sounds like the setup of a b horror movie for the last week. Enjoy the weekend, you deserve it!

What kind of asshole wouldn't enjoy a room full of play-doh?

Also, seriously, thank you for having an easy to find RSS feed. A big pet peeve of mine is when a podcast manages to hide (or not even have) just a generic feed.

Well, except that we don't know that it was a technical failure, and not a design decision. Skyrim, Oblivion and Morrowind all feature weather. I don't think it exceeds expectations to say that AAA, multi-million dollar games with months long stories set in large open worlds should probably feature weather of some part of their world building, particularly when both the engine and developer are more than capable of weather effects. And that same philosophy extends to a lot of the other world building in F3. The Elder Scrolls games routinely feature farmers, craftsmen, etc., as part of their world. F3 just wasn't given the attention as a world as the Elder Scrolls was. I'm not sure that it's nit-picking to say that a game failed due to a death-by-a-thousand-cuts. When you're expected to spend dozens or hundreds of hours in a world, all that detail stuff adds up to being a big chunk of the experience.

Looking up the giant penny is what initially led me to the page on it.

That goes a ways towards explaining how I've long felt about 3. If I had only played 3 for 10-20 hours, then lost my save or something, I would probably say it was one of the best games I had ever played. Because I hadn't stuck around long enough in the world for it to all start falling apart around me. But the longer I played 3, the less I liked it.

And this sent me down a rabbit hole of reading weird shit about batman. 1. The Batcave West is Batman's California headquarters in San Francisco, whose secret location is fronted by a "specialist leather goods and fetishwear" store. This is now my favorite piece of Batman trivia ever. 2. For awhile, Robin apparently had a pet cow named Bat Cow. Fuck all this gritty realist shit, I want a Batman game with leathermen, fetish lovers and Bat Cows.

I'd never really thought about Batman as just a bored, rich big game hunter, who prefers hunting in his backyard for trophies rather than flying to Africa. But the Batcave certainly makes an argument for that interpretation.

And I finished it last night, absolutely loved it. The battle system was getting a little old by the end, but I think that's probably because I just don't find JRPG menu battles that interesting anymore, though it held up far longer than I expected. Still have a ton of thoughts on this, but will wait until someone else has finished it. Oh, I decided to just look up the extra scenes from playing on Painful mode. There is some really important information for understanding the story, but unless you absolutely love the mechanics of the game, I think 'tubing it makes more sense than playing back through.

That's the fucking worst. Good lord. What kind of attitude does Japanese culture in general have towards being gay? I'm totally unfamiliar with that.

Alexander said something similar in a series of tweets: On one hand, I agree that the problems, hate and harassment predate and are bigger than gg. On the other, there's no doubt some of the hate and harassment is organized under the umbrella of gg. There's definitely a problem with trying to shove it all under gg though, since I'm sure some of the people harassing Moosa are people who never go to Reddit or 8chan or interact with gg in any way.

I'd almost just truncate that and call it the classic failure of journalism. Lots of pros do it as well, and sometimes just as badly as the amateurs (its been days and I'm still laughing about this).

Jesus fucking christ on a cracker. How? How do you look at all that and see conspiracy?

Oh wow, I would totally read about the fall of Neopets. I, weirdly enough, played around with it for a little while. My daughter was into it, so I played some of the games with her (I remember an extended meta quest thing about finding map pieces), but I also eventually found a couple of the games that I rather liked as little time wasters when I'd have 5 minutes or so to kill. Edited to add: Bummer, they must have purged old accounts at some point, as neither my old username nor email are found in their system.

I almost finished it tonight, I'm sure I'm at the last area, but decided to save the end for tomorrow, when I'm not super tired (why do I always hit the ends of games past midnight). Having gone through almost all of it now, I'm sure Normal mode is the better way to play it the first time. I save scummed my way out of getting fucked by the RNG a few times, but there are plenty of places where you simply have to make a very hard decision, so it's not like save scumming is really robbing you of the experience.