Bjorn

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Posts posted by Bjorn

  1. Posted

    10 hours ago, Gregalor said:

     

    That took place in Montana, right? I guess when Richard Horne skips town, he really skips town.

     

    I don't remember if the text gave a specific about where "the farm" was (I just remember Montana).  But TP is in the north eastern corner of Washington, walking distance to the Utah state line.  It's only a 3 hour drive from Spokane to Missoula, MT. 

  2. Posted

    Nongünz was included in this month's Monthly Humble Bundle, and it's totally the surprise standout for me.  It's a rougelite 2d platformer where you're exploring this cathedral/castle place.  You have a hub that populates with NPCs and stuff over time, which you return to when you die or when you elect to leave the castle by jumping out a window.  

     

    There's so many good things going on in here.  The art style is gorgeous mostly black and white, with just splashes of color (enemies are color coded to give you an idea of their difficulty).   There is no text in the game.  Everything is communicated through pictographs.  There is definitely a learning curve, but the devs wrote a Steam Guide that's basically just a manual to help you out if you need it. 

     

    The balance is really interesting.  You get passive powerups which are cards, that also double as your health potions.  But cards also expire over time.  So if you're trying to make a deep run, there's a persistent pressure on you knowing that your cards are expiring, and you may not be picking up enough new ones to replace the ones you're losing to healing.  There's no "perfect" build, it's just constantly dealing with the slow degradation of whatever you can cobble together. 

     

    There's also an Idle Clicker element to the hub world.  You gather worshipers who produce points over time.  And every time you fire your weapon, you produce points, whether you're shooting an enemy or not.  And there are ways to make time pass faster, to build up points more quickly.  And this ties into the "mystery element" of the game, which you learn very quickly, but I'll put it in spoilers because it's relatively neat to discover.

     

    Spoiler

    It turns out that you are playing a guy sitting in his bedroom playing a video game. When you "exit" the game, you appear in the bedroom and there are various things you can do, like play with a ukulele, walk on a treadmill, look through a telescope or go to bed.  Going to bed is the actual exit to the game.  Walking on the treadmill makes time move faster in the game, making your idle currency production even faster. 

     

     

    Overall the pressure of expiring powerups plus the Idle Clicker meta game element have just made this one of the neatest 2d roguelites I've played in a long time. 

  3. Posted

    2 hours ago, TheArm said:

    Does anyone know why douggie/coop started giving Sinclair a back massage. Originally I thought coop was gonna pick the dandruff off of his suit jacket but then he started rubbing his shoulders and I was lost. Still hilarious though. 

     

    I'm pretty sure you hear the chime/music that has previously heralded the Black Lodge guiding Dougie as he walked up to the back of Anthony. 

  4. Posted

    4 minutes ago, WickedCestus said:

    During James' performance, I started thinking about Donna. Is it confirmed that she's not on the show? No one on this forum has talked about her at all. I mean, basically everyone else has shown up at this point, or has had their absences explained at the very least. I could totally see Donna just leaving the town of Twin Peaks and never associating with anyone, especially after the Ben Horne subplot at the end of season 2 (does anyone remember that?). 

     

    I don't think there's been anything to point towards either of the actresses who played Donna returning, so unless it's a hell of a secret, I don't think we'll be seeing her.

  5. Posted

    2 hours ago, UnpopularTrousers said:

    Loved the first half but found the second half to be incredibly dull. I can't imagine the folks who didn't like last week's episode will have many nice things to say about any of the stuff set in Twin Peaks this week.

     

    I was one of the ones rather lukewarm on last week, and I loved this week from start to finish :P  This show is a roller coaster.

     

    More general thoughts:

     

    This episode was packed, so many good scenes with so much going on, from the fun and goofy of the conga opening to the upsetting looping boxing match at Palmer's house. 

     

    I really liked the RR scene, perhaps because it had little to nothing to do with the overall plot.  Just good to see more of these characters, and another old timer just dropped in with no fanfare.  Big Ed is both incredibly sad, but also very believable.  Healthy romantic relationships were never exactly his strong suit, so a life where he and Norma end up splitting but remaining friends is believable.  And while she's expanding her business (with some concerns), the Gas Farm hasn't changed at all. 

     

    I had been hoping that the only James scene we were ever going to get was the "He's still cool" one, but I'll take him showing up again to sing that song. 

     

    I don't think anyone's mentioned it yet, but Richard Horne showing up at the end of the BadCoop scenes was unexpected. 

  6. Posted

    21 minutes ago, Gregalor said:

     

    You don't think a monster would have appeared and killed him anyway?

     

    I don't think that's a particularly interesting question, because that's not how it happened and both of us would answer it in ways that were satisfying to us rather than addressing what the show presented.  There's an infinite number of hypothetical "what if" questions that could be asked about this season. 

  7. Posted

    47 minutes ago, Professor Video Games said:

    That reddit post about patience is interesting but I'll tell ya what, that guy that was hired to stare at the glass box seemed pretty patient and things didn't work out well for him at all.

     

    He was impatient by letting the girl he liked into the restricted room, and then impatient by getting all sexy with her rather than waiting to do so not sitting in front of creepy glass box.  As long as he was showing patience, he was fine.

  8. Posted

    3 hours ago, JPL said:

     

    ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

     

    Hahaha, well, that was something. 

     

    3 hours ago, LadyHawke said:

    Possibly inconsequential, possibly not. In another thread I had remarked on the use of Morley cigarettes, which someone pointed out was a standard fake brand, rather than an X-Files reference ... But Sarah Palmer was buying a carton of perfectly ordinary Salems in the market.

     

    I noticed that as well, the show bounces around between using generic brands and real brands, and it's hard to tell if there's any rhyme or reason to it.  I saw on reddit as well in the grocery store scene that there's a Big Red sign that's blocked in such a way that it looks like Big Ed.

  9. Posted

    5 hours ago, SecretAsianMan said:

    Yeah that's kind of one of the things that makes me uncomfortable about a kid getting pierced ears before they can talk.  Someone who's old enough to say they want it (even if they don't truly want it but they at least know enough to have an idea) is one thing but to make that determination for them before they can even have a base understanding is another. 

     

    In all honesty I'll probably cave and let my daughter do it if she asks but I at least want her to be able to ask the question.

     

    Our general attitude raising our daughter is that she was always welcome to challenge our rules, but she had to be able to make a convincing argument.  It couldn't just be, "Well I want this thing," she needed to be able to communicate her emotions and experiences better than that.  Although sometimes, "I want to feel like I'm fitting in with my friends" was actually a good enough reason for us, because fitting in with your peers matters sometimes. 

  11. Posted

    Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone once wrote a book in which he gleefully recounts sexually harassing women employees and his co-author gleefully recounts raping, harassing and threatening women while the two of them ran a newspaper in Moscow. 

     

    I've liked Taibbi's work over the years well enough, but I'm fucking done with him and Rolling Stone for having employed him.  It's not like this is some rumor shit or anything, they literally published a book recounting all the awful shit they did while in Moscow. 

  13. Posted

    55 minutes ago, Ford said:

    Re: use of rotary phone by Audrey's husband. Jane-E used a yellow rotary phone in their kitchen back in episode 2 or 3. 

     

    I was curious because I couldn't honestly recall.  I don't think that's a rotary phone, but it is an old style push button phone (looks like a rectangle of buttons in the middle to me).  It's slightly out of place, but nothing close to the office in Audrey's scene. 


     

    Spoiler

     

    phone.JPG.bf2968cf07648d46341d11a73f2c8b69.JPG

     

     

     

     

     

     

    Edited to add: The video clip I pulled that from.

     

  14. Posted

    Just now, forstm said:

    I understand that but you are assuming then that she came out of the first coma and is now in another coma? 

     

    I'm not building some grand concept here, I haven't put anymore thought into it other than my first post on it.  I just think that the out of timeness of the technology in the room and some of the other trappings of the scene stand out as feeling potentially within in a dream. 

  15. Posted

    3 minutes ago, forstm said:

    I know Twin Peaks is weird but I'm pretty sure women in coma's don't have children. Unless you are subscribing to the thread that Richard is Donna's boy (assuming she changed her last name to Horne). I can't remember for sure if anyone every explicitly said Richard was Audrey's.

     

    A woman named Cooper gave birth to a kid after spending most of the pregnancy in a coma. 

     

    Quote

    A car-crash victim who was in a coma virtually her entire pregnancy has given birth to a healthy, nearly 8-pound daughter.  Doctors said it is one of few known cases in the United States in which a comatose woman was able to carry a baby to full term.

     

    The mother, Chastity Cooper, 23, has slowly improved since her November car accident but still cannot move or talk. She is in a vegetative state, able to open her eyes and follow people around the room.

     

    It would be incredibly rare, but it would also fit within the Soap Opera aesthetic of TP. 

     

    Edited to add: I just googled whether or not a woman could carry to term while in a coma, and that story was the first one to pop up.  Just kind of a weird coincidence that a woman named Cooper is the first example I found.

  16. Posted

    13 hours ago, ThatThomas said:

    Do we know for sure that Audrey is out of the coma? Because the only way I could fully make sense of that scene - outside of the complete randomness being kinda funny - is that might be a coma dream Audrey's having where she's partially tuning into what's happening in the real world and incorporating it into the dream.

     

    The more I was thinking about the details of this scene this morning, the more I give the idea of her still being in a coma or this being some kind of dream sequence some credence. 

     

    There's the "out of time" feel that it has.  Husband is using a rotary phone, doing a bunch of paperwork by hand and has an old school contact book.  Of course within the quirkiness of TP characters, it's possible this is just the way the guy prefers to live.  But we've seen stuff like Truman and Doc Hayward skyping.  Audrey's scene doesn't feel quirky, it feels like it was literally set in another time.  And it had the melodrama of a soap opera, like trapped in her own head, she's still living out some kind of melodramatic weird fantasy. 

     

    Then there's the whole thing of Audrey not having been mentioned at all so far by any of her family.  Truman goes to see Ben, rather than Audrey.  The reasoning is to get Ben to pay for the woman's medical care, but still, you would generally think that a guy's mother might also be notified.  Richard violently attacks Grandma, and no one warns Audrey that her son is on a rampage.  Given the dysfunctional nature of the Hornes, again it's possible that none of them are talking to Audrey. 

     

    Audrey has literally felt missing from the whole show, and here she shows up, but it's all wrong and out of place. 

     

    Ultimately maybe it is all taking place in the real world, but it does seem like it's well set up to be something else as well. 

  17. Posted

    1 hour ago, Mike Danger said:

     

    Is the Chuck she's talking about Richard? The story she tells about the truck sounds an awful lot like what happened with Richard and the guy Andy talked to who we never saw again...but then again it could be a weird coincidence which would totally be par for the Twin Peaks course.

     

    Another connection I can't believe I missed this week: Blue Rose as the successor to Blue Book

     

    Edit: I love that that first scene goes down in a room which has curtains for two of the walls, apparently

     

    Yeah, Chuck being Richard is the only thing I could come up with, but it feels like a real stretch that that's what she meant. 

     

     

     

    Ben elected to not tell the Truman about Richard's assault on grandma.

     

    I'm sharing the sentiments so far on this one, that it's one of the weakest episodes.  A few highlight moments, but a lot of other time spent that just didn't feel like it was hitting the mark for me. 

     

    "I really worry about you sometimes Albert" was my solid laugh out loud moment, although by and large that scene was a miss for me.  I'm assuming the french woman is a sex worker and it was drawn out to show Albert's discomfort.  I can't quite put my finger on what I found wrong with it though, because all the component parts I'm fine with. 

  18. Posted

    On 7/23/2017 at 10:19 AM, Erkki said:

    I just saw Night of the Living Dead for the first time. It wasn't bad, but I was expecting more. But definitely worth seeing just for being the first movie to show modern zombies, I guess.

     

    If you haven't done any reading on the impact that NotLD had in its time, it's worth doing to appreciate its role in history and culture beyond just having zombies.  The level of violence and gore in it set the stage for today's gore porn horror, and at the time challenged what was even considered within protected 1st Amendment expression in the US.  A black protagonist in a film that wasn't explicitly about race was still a rarity.  All in all it's just really interesting how many different things intersected in that one film. 

  19. Posted

    FWIW, this is on Netflix streaming now if people hadn't seen it (like we hadn't).

     

    This was kind of a fine in the moment action flick, but it's really not a good movie.  This and the other new Star Wars movies just end up feeling so empty for how frenetically busy and non-stop they are.  They never take a real moment to just breathe and enjoy the characters or scenery.  I just watched it last night, and I think I can only remember one of the new character's names.  It all just flies by. 

     

    I had also presumed that this would be more like a stealth/spy movie, not a giant galactic battle with Darth Vader and shit running around. 

     

    I just don't think I care at all about Star Wars anymore.  Like I'll probably watch them once they hit streaming services and I want to just chill for an evening.  But it's impossible to get excited for them now. 

  21. Posted

    On 7/18/2017 at 4:49 AM, twmac said:

    Yeah, sadly the DLC didn't really live up to the full game so I would recommend not bothering with that.

     

    Multiple playthroughs are less fun to be fair.

     

    I finished this up tonight, and I see what you mean about multiple playthroughs.  With both the other DRs, I was ready to restart right away after finishing, usually to take a shot at some of the harder challenges or saving everyone, or whatever.  But none of the PP Trials are interesting at all, I saved all the survivors the first time, so it would just be rushing through the story on Nightmare, which doesn't sound all that appealing. 

     

    Still though, totes worth playing once and I had a bunch of fun with it. 

     

    Sadly DR4 sounds like a train wreck.  Continuing to simplify stuff down to just being an untimed open world game where you buy stuff from merchants for currency, just like every other open world game. 

  22. Posted

    I'm pretty okay (at this point, the actual end may change my mind naturally) if the show were to wrap up with many or most threads unresolved, and there being no Season 4.

     

    The reality is that's most of all television for me already.  I've finished, maybe 3 total television series in the last decade (and all I can for sure name are BSG and Penny Dreadful).  Every other show I've started I've stopped, lost interest, it got canceled, or whatever.  A series stopping, and being unresolved for me, is the natural state of television.  And honestly, I find the ends of most television runs to be disappointing anyways, because wrapping stories in a way that I find satisfying on television seems to be damn near impossible.  So as long as the journey to the end is satisfying, that's good enough for me. 

  23. Posted

    11 hours ago, therealdougiejones said:

    Just wanted to point out a couple of cool cast interviews. A podcast with Matthew Lillard went up today on a show called "The Watch" which is part of The Ringer podcast network (owned by Bill Simmons, famous sports columnist/personality). Very revealing about Lynch's process making this new season.

     

    Also this interview with Amy Shiels who plays Candie - http://www.vulture.com/2017/07/twin-peaks-amy-shiels-on-her-tragic-backstory-for-candie.html

     

     

    Thanks for both of those, that interview with Shiels is great (the air conditioner improv bit is really good).  I'll listen to the Lillard interview later.  Here's a direct link to the show for anyone else who wants it.

  24. Posted

    I am bummed that we are most likely done with Matthew Lillard after this episode.  Although we've only had a few scenes with him, every one of them has been an absolute treat. 

     

    Also, no Roadhouse song this time.  Instead Viva Las Vegas plus lounge piano.  Which, in regards to music, Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima showed up again, although I'm not familiar enough to know when it was used to be honest.

     

     

    Oh, the scene in the desert was such a goofy ass mirror of the climax of Seven.  "What's in the box?!" 

  25. Posted

    24 minutes ago, Ford said:

     

    I think that's fair and I respect that opinion. My only issue would be if that's the take away than it's really not Twin Peaks. It's something different Lynch wants to do using Twin Peaks to sell it. 

     

    But Season 1 is not Season 2 is not FWWM is not Season 3 is not the Frost Books is not the Secret Diary. 

     

    The idea that Twin Peaks "is" something leads from an expectation created by Season 1 that is never carried forward by any of the creators.  Every incarnation of it has shifted and changed, sometimes rather radically from Season 1 (which I think is what people mean when they say Twin Peak is something specific). 

     

    30 minutes ago, Crunchnoisy said:
    • I so, so wanted that piano player to be Badalamenti himself.  I looked him up and it's not.  Aw. 

     

     

    I did the exact same thing.