Bjorn

Someone on my Facebook feed pointed out that in states where gay marriage unequivocally became law, the funding for gay rights organizations basically evaporated over night. Which is depressing.

Yes! That's actually exactly what I meant, that the shift over to video content in general is limiting to the total topics covered. The same is true of all news media historically, look at the depth and diversity of coverage that the New York Times can deliver in a day versus the total number of stories covered by CNN.

My, limited, understanding of that ruling is that it came with enough limitations and was more about lower court guidance that a radical alteration to how housing suits are currently handled. It also still depends on people being within a protected class, which is not universally true for LGTBQ people (see the recent Kansas state government stripping the protected class protections away from all state employees on the whim of our governor).

Notice the asterisk text. This is now my favorite advert on Steam.

I had no idea that Neon Struct was out, it looks cool! It's definitely harder now for a dev to stand out from the crowd, or even get coverage. I have to wonder if the audience shift over to streamers is also affecting discovery. Some place like Joystiq could easily write about several dozen games in a week between reviews, previews, news, commentary, etc. A popular streamer is unlikely to cover more than a few games in one week.

I'm 99 percent sure it's Bremerton, but I'll double check with him when I see him later this week, he's supposed to be back on leave here in the next few days.

Thanks all! I'll pass all this along. Argobot, she does not know where she'll be working yet. She's starting to work on that process now. She's also planning on going up late next month for about a week to check it out. Also, some more general information, she doesn't necessarily want to live like in Seattle proper, just somewhere in the area. That area has been at the top of the shortlist of places she'd like to try living since she was like 12, just one of those places she became enamored with and has never been able to get out of her head.. There's a few things going on with this move. Her boyfriend joined the Navy last year, and is getting stationed out in that area. They don't necessarily want to move in together, they're serious but not necessarily to the point of wanting any financial ties between them. He'll be around the area until late in the year, then he'll get shipped out for 6 months, plans on living on base to save money until after his first deployment is done, then they'll decide if they want to move in together or not. She wants to move out there in the fall, rather than waiting until his first deployment is done, because she wants a chance to live in the city for awhile on her own to see what it's like. She's also ready for a break in school. She started in engineering, and that didn't pan out well, has been doing business and accounting since, but is starting to think she doesn't like them. She's still feeling pretty lost about what it is she wants to do professionally, which both her mother and I completely sympathize with. We both took breaks from college and ultimately felt it was for the best. She got offered a manager position at her current job, and that's about the only thing making her vacillate on moving. It's decent money for her age, but if she's not going back to school, she doesn't necessarily see any reason to stick around here, and there's no better time than her age to take a risk and move somewhere new. I'm worried, but also excited for her. It will suck to have her so far away, but I also want to see her happy, and to go out and have some adventures.

Yeah, I've heard similar things, but I really don't care. TF2 drops are different than cards to me. Cards are an advertised feature of buying a game, TF2 drops were a free reward for playing a free game. There's a fixed number of card drops for a game, period. TF2 drops were only limited by day, so with farming accounts, you could radically change the intended number of items in the economy. You can't do that with cards. Cards are also a feature shared between Valve and devs, whereas Valve wholly owns TF2. And with the change to a minimum 2 hours passing before cards drop, Valve dicked with people's ability to get them naturally, since there are plenty of games I never even play for two hours. Now, Valve may not agree with my take on it at all, but I'm fine taking the risk. If someone has an interest in just idling for their cards, I also think it's the responsible thing to do, because it's silly to waste the bandwidth and electricity on downloading and playing games just to idle them.

Over the last week, I've been trying out IdleMaster. It basically fools Steam into thinking you are playing a game when you aren't, so you can get the card drops for it, even if you have never downloaded the game. I was a little leery at first, because it needs permission to sync to your Steam account, but everything I could find on it seemed legit, and the source code is available for all to look at. I can't recommend it enough. The number of games I had with cards had ballooned over the last year, and there were dozens of games with hundreds of cards. It wasn't worth the time, electricity or bandwidth to download and run them all for the 3-7 cents per card that drops. And now that cards don't drop for the first 2 hours that a game runs, it takes even longer to get them. IdleMaster solves all that though. I've just been running it during the day while I work, get 3-4 games a day done. That huge backlog of cards is worth $15-$20, so sweet, free game! This is also good because I have OCD where if I look at my badge page, and it shows I have games with cards still to drop, it bugs me. So this is solving that little itch as well. Figured with the new games from the Steam sale, could be useful for some folks.

Zero Dawn immediately created one of those mental connections for me to Zero Dark Thirty, which is not a good association for a game to have.

I'm shocked their were no gamergate jokes. I figured somebody would try to slide one in.

The thing you buy on Steam includes a Prologue, Episode 1 and Episode 2. I'm not sure if that's considered the complete Season or not.

I didn't know that was new! I really haven't paid any attention to the patch logs for this. Yeah, that's what I was specifically saying shouldn't be spoiled. The chest thing is just a natural mechanic to me, but the tube thing isn't necessarily as obvious. Speaking of the tube thing:

Skipping the experience tubes can also be useful (though this should be done without having it spoiled if you've never done it before). I had also never realized how Chicken's headless ability worked. I guess I had never managed to actually heal in the few seconds you get with him.

Holy shit, it's pulling a 70 percent negative reviews on Steam. Seems like a lot of them are because of framerate and poor performance.

So contrary to my post last week, I ended up playing this some over the last couple of days when I just wanted something quick and arcadey while waiting for dinner to finish cooking. I got to 5-1 tonight, which is by far the deepest I've ever got (I'm not good at this game!). I think I'm finally getting a handle on how to play it though. I looked up some tips, and there are all sorts of things I didn't understand (like how skipping chests can be useful, or exactly what certain mutations do).

Are there environments that are better than the airplane once you get past it? I enjoyed the Prologue, but something about the plane environment just annoyed the hell out of me (walking up and down the same aisle over and over). It might be that D4 just doesn't work for me, but if there's some silver lining I've missed, I'm willing to listen.

I didn't make it out of the first year listening, I remember early on them taking some questions seriously, because people were actually asking them serious questions. That's one of the things that got old for me, is they couldn't exactly figure out what they were going to do with the show, and it wasn't working for me. Yeah, that sounds crappy.

MBMBAM got old for me after awhile, but I don't remember it having content that bugged me, just the schtick wore thin. Are they still treating it as an advice show, or did they ever move on to something else? If it's still an advice show...eh, I honestly cannot think of an advice columnist or podcast host who does not say something shitty on a semi-regular basis. I suspect when primarily commenting on other people's lives, particularly their love lives, the opportunities to say dumb shit are ever present. That doesn't excuse it, but if someone knows of a long running example of someone who doesn't end up doing that I'd be interested (I have a not so secret obsession with advice columnists and shows).

I only got 3-4 hours in, so take this with a bit of a grain of salt: Encounters - Mostly fixed, with some new ones added after certain events (there's some backtracking, but nothing to onerous so far), though I have found two areas with random, respawning enemies (actually useful for farming money and healing items, which seems pretty limited otherwise) Menu Battles with a manual combo system for some characters. You can choose not to mess with the combos and auto-cast them, with a minor (10-20 percent?) reduction in damage Character leveling - Typical JRPG leveling, somewhat impenetrable stats go up with each level and you get new powers at some levels. There is equipment to equip, but each character has specific equipment associated with them (with a few crossovers). Each character has been a unique class so far, most of which have some corollary with other RPGs, but their own unique flavor suited to the world. Oh, and one other thing which I did not understand when I hit hit, because it wasn't really explained very well. Your main character is a drug addict (and apparently a few other party characters are as well, but so far the rest of my party is clean). At times he goes into a withdrawal/craving fit, at which point his basic attack stat gets zeroed out. You can sleep it off (instantly cured), fight through it (certain combos still do damage, but basic attacks don't, eventually it goes away for awhile) or take some drugs to make it go away instantly and get a big stat boost for awhile. I suspect that using drugs may have some long term implications, it doesn't strike me as just a throwaway mechanic given the opening of the game.

The Tale of Tales Collection (guilt buy after their announcement) Sunset (same as above) Bloody Trapland Final Exam Resident Evil Revelations Resident Evil 6 RER2/BHR2 Episode One: Penal Colony Runers LISA Cook, Serve, Delicious! FORCED D4: Dark Dreams Don’t Die (not really a sale purchase, had planned on buying it anyways, even if it wasn't on sale) Nom Nom Galaxy Minerva's Den Life Is Strange Episode 1 (gift from someone) Plus a couple of gifts for people As always I bought more than I planned on going in, but pretty much everything was already on my wishlist and a majority of them (9 of 15) are games with co-op.

Yeah, I just went ahead and bought Sunset and their pack of 3 games. I've enjoyed the hell out of listening to and reading smart people say things about their games for years, and never bought anything.

That's a super fucking bummer that they are going away. And I feel like a bad person, because I hadn't bought Sunset yet, so I'm one of the assholes who is a fan of their work who has chosen not to support them. Their post about the closure is both extraordinarily open and heartbreaking.

Was looking at Resident Evil games on Steam, and noticed the Lady Hunk DLC on Revelations: The main difference in the characters is that HUNK has pants, and Lady HUNK doesn't. Go go video games.

Hammerwatch also has local co-op, and I really liked that game. I remember thinking the expansion was just as good, if not better, than the original game. I played that as a kid, but haven't seen it in years now. Does it hold up playing it today?