Bjorn

This is kind of chillingly accurate:

I cannot watch them. I tried about 20 minutes ago, and just had to stop a couple of minutes in. It's the most obnoxious mix of fake enthusiasm and smarm. So about the only thing I caught before I turned it off was "pc negotiable", which is worrying.

Once you see a real pro at work, you realize just how far you have to go. I've watched that Undead Giant one like 20 times and I get the giggles every single time.

Brushing and washing can both help. We usually bathe our cats twice a year and try to brush them regularly during the spring and summer.

Girlfriend and Tig both love being brushed, and react in a similar way as Jellybean. Mangus hates being brushed and tries to run away when he sees it. I didn't mention, that big pile of hair is all from Girlfriend and only from a few minutes of brushing. Our old brush would have only got a fraction of that out in the same amount of time. She's the longest haired of the three cats, and gets increasingly grumpy as it gets warmer, I think because she just doesn't shed her winter coat fast enough.

I mention the other one only because it's an option (and that's the path I took with my first character because I was blind and had gone through the church a dozen times without noticing that a new door had opened).

You've got a few paths. The best one is probably to go through an (easy to miss) side door that opens up in the church with the beggar after beating the BSB. Otherwise you can buy a 10K scarf from the merchants that will open up a gate in the church district.

The lady bought a new cat comb. Our old one did a good job on Tig, but didn't pull very much out of Girlfriend or Mangus. I think the new comb works. If you don't already have a cat comb you like, I don't think we can recommend this one enough.

I also play the vast majority of my PC games on my TV, but for stuff that requires KB+M I just have a board I sit on my lap to comfortably use them. I've also gotten used to sometimes having to make some config file changes to do things like bump up text size if it's not something in game you can change. But depending on the game/TV size, even more information in smaller font crammed onto a screen can be a game breaker. The first time I tried to play Space Rangers 2, it was the font size that made me put it down. Also, the Steam Controller should be out by the time this is out, so maybe that will still let it be super controller friendly? Edited to add: And one of the reasons I think Fuck Yeah at that description is actually the speed of play. I'm excited they're thinking about how UI design and button layout affects game speed. Once I went over to PC, I was surprised at how quicker a campaign was vs the 360 version. Some things you need to do might only be delayed by 2-3 seconds per action with the old UI and a controller, but when you make thousands of actions in a game, it can add up to hours of playtime.

That was kind of weird. The few pieces of mine they published were all just things I pitched individually, and I always heard back very quickly each time I pitched. But when they actually put out a call for a new regular/staff position I also applied and never got a response back on it.

And I read that and think, "Fuck yeah!" Having it be a resistance group does seem to be ripe to dig into some more personal stories, but on the same hand, I'm not sure how you meld that with the replayability of XCOM without those feeling stale after you've seen them a few times.

I wonder if those user blogs also got deleted, I kind of remembered those PAX ones you wrote and was going to take another look at them, but couldn't find them. I'm a little irritated that I no longer have a byline on at least one of the pieces I wrote, for some reason its just credited as Staff now. It's probably that the byline name linked to my forum profile, which has now been deleted. They were unpaid stuff that I just wanted to write because I knew more about the subjects than anyone on staff, but as long as an article is up, the correct byline should be on it. I also realized that I was in fact NOT Bjorn on those forums, I was Roland, which is my second go-to screen name for a lot of things. Roland came from my obsession with Warren Zevon, and specifically the song . But I'm sure I had my gamertags linked at various times, which would have always been Bjorn related.

Even if I'm not playing, I'm still digging watching videos of Bloodborne. This guy's Next Level Strats series is just fucking killing me.

Yeah, that's literally just a sale-price matching guarantee, which has been a feature of retail policies at a lot of stores for decades (I remember stores advertising that when I was a kid). The other criteria still apply, you can't have played the game more than 2 hours and it can't be more than 2 weeks later. It's literally just there so you don't feel ripped off by a game going on sale a couple of days after you buy it.

Scooby Doo has also been announced for Dimensions. So far I have successfully avoided all these Skylander/Amiibo type games, but Ghostbusters and Scooby Doo both being in Dimensions will probably get me to crack.

I'm really hoping for a King's Field reboot for maximum thread title ridiculousness.

That's it, it was Co-Optimus not Joystiq! Yeah, I was around there as Bjorn for awhile, even wrote a couple of articles for them. I eventually drifted away, but I'm still friends with Nich Puleo on Facebook, so get updates about how its doing now and again. I just went there to see what avatar I used, but they've deleted their forums, so all that is gone. That's a bummer. I really liked that place, but it wasn't ever a very high population forum. I used to chat with justabaldguy occasionally as well, but haven't heard from him in years. I'm pretty sure I found Idle Thumbs around the time that the old Joystiq Podcast went away because of the McElroys and Grant going to Polygon and I needed a new gaming podcast to listen to, which happened to coincide pretty closely with the Thumbs Kickstarter. Who didn't want to be Jessica Fletcher at some point? I had what might be an oddly deep love for that show for having been like an 8 year old when I was watching it.

I can't remember if I've asked you this or not before. Did you used to be one of the regulars on Joystiq, probably 3-4 years ago? When I started hanging around here, I was pretty sure I remembered you from the 'stiq, and it was a good sign for this community. I used to comment there under my actual name (Courtney), but I think I had the same avatar pic. My name origin is pretty simple. Bjorn was the name of my first D&D character (a drunken Dwarf fighter who wielded a greataxe). When I started making online accounts, it was just one of those natural things to use that name, since a lot of my early accounts were gaming related and I named soooo many characters Bjorn. I've usually had to add something to it though. I think the Idle Forums might be the only place I've ever had just Bjorn. Side note: The lady and I actually met during that campaign, and to this day she also still uses the name of her character from that game for most of her gaming related accounts.

Does part of this get into that thing where certain behaviors by women are viewed as negative, while the same behaviors by men are viewed neutrally or positive? Self-promotion being one of those (because women are supposed to be more humble). And tying into the Caitlyn subject, a Bruce Jenner who goes on a media blitz of self-promotion is not something anyone even comments on. But a Caitlyn Jenner doing the same thing suddenly becomes evilly self-serving and manipulative?

I have thoughts about that, and this in general, but nothing I have the time to write up right now. But I think you are vastly underrating what that experience would be like.

Tig decided to skip the drawer phase of covering all our clothes in his hair.

And now I'm super curious what your opinions on that are! I'm personally apathetic about the Kardashians, but that's really just because I'm apathetic about the entire landscape of reality television, it's just a thing I don't care about. I wouldn't tell others not to pay attention or discuss something, but I have such little knowledge of any of it (other than what naturally filters through things like Facebook or NPR) that I don't even really have anything intelligent to say about them. I do have what feels like a disdain particularly for them, but now that I think about it, I'm not sure where that comes from. Probably from just listening to other people be disdainful of them, since I can't have watched more than 10 or 15 minutes of their shows over the years.

I'm curious why that reaction bothers you.

My understanding is that deep in the Chalice Dungeons, you can start running into levels with multiple Chime Maidens who spawn endless conga lines of spiders that seek you out where ever you are in the dungeon. I keep thinking about going back to one of my other builds, or to my NG+ character, and then I play DS2 or Borderlands instead. All the different weapons are just a little too samey to me, there's not enough mechanic or fashion variety to pull me back in. PvP also lacks the community. Like I enjoy going to the bridge in DS2 in part because you walk up the stairs and there's a half dozen red signs, three or four dragon signs, a couple of small co-op signs. It's just an immediate visual reminder that there are dozens or hundreds of other players standing in the same virtual space as you right now. And you can walk around and look at the doll that pops up to check out people's loadouts. You might get summoned into a fight club, spectate some other people fighting, then have that turn into an impromptu dance party. None of that can really happen in Bloodborne, and it makes it harder for me to care about going back.

Is it a "pay now" type pre-order, or are you not charged until it ships? I'd be tempted to pre-order one now just to get it early, but have no real interest in dropping 50 bucks now for a controller I can't have until October.