prawks

Finished The Fall after hearing people getting hyped for the new one. It wasn't bad, and would serve as a nice gentle intro into adventure-y games, but the story didn't really wow me and the combat could definitely have been left out. Overall dialogue writing was good and the world-building too. Going to wait for reviews on the sequel I think.

I'm surprised to see this advice. From what I've read, putting any pressure on your carpal tunnel sounds like it's not a great idea, and my experience plays that out. Last time I tried using one it not only pressured my wrist but made it less mobile: I did a lot more wrist turning rather than using my forearm to move my mouse which absolutely killed my wrist. But everyone's different, I guess just tread carefully and figure out what works for your specific case. I second trackballs, specifcally finger ones rather than thumb ones. They're becoming more popular, but aside from the premium CST ones I don't have any specific recommendations.

Nice! Need to do my own research before I jump to such conclusions

On the topic of lacking control over all interactive systems and they're designed to give the illusion of control, some auditory examples of fooling consumers in other ways: ATMs do not actually make any noise when they dispense money. The sound is played from a speaker. Silence of a mechanical system is percieved by consumers as a sign that it's not working. Similarly, many car doors are actually filled with sound dampening to give the illusion of "quality" to consumers, who look for rigidity and heft as a sign of quality. Without it, they would jangle around as hollow pieces of metal and fiberglass with some janky electronic door controls.

I've likewise been playing with the Survival mode lately and am finding it a pretty fresh experience. I've gotten bored fairly easily in the standard mode, but Survival seems to be keeping things interesting, at least at the outset (though I'm a total sucker for early-game experiences in open-world games like this). Starting the game a 10-minute walk from your damaged ship with only enough environmental protection for a 2-minute walk makes for some interesting strategies. You end up engaging with the more obscure mechanics like life support draining faster when sprinting or jet-packing, seeking out overhangs for shelter, and scavenging many small bits of resources. Requiring 100% launch fuel to take off also makes for some interesting experiences when you have no plutonium around your landing site and the planet you landed on happens to have "aggressive" Sentinels. The extra-lengthy cooldown on the scanner I could definitely do without, though. Now that I've made it to the second planet and started accumulating some resources (I now have enough plutonium to land *and* take off after), it might slow a bit as is usually the case with those early-game experiences I love so much. I wonder if playing Survival as more of a roguelike would fit my interests more?

I'm pretty excited for Mr. Shifty, might be the first game I pick up aside from BOTW. Looks like a good game to sleep/resume often on.

Screen side looks flat though? Saw some discussion on reddit suggesting it's not a bend as much as the back bulging a bit, either by design or due to some other flaw.

I... I... I swear I tried that... wow how silly. Yup, works.

Ditto, sans the joycon issue, mine's been fine. A little tight in the dock but I put a tempered glass screen protector on it so it doesn't worry me. One thing I can't quite figure out: if it's sleeping in the dock, how can you wake it with the joycons? I haven't figured out a quick way to do it, but if I just keep pushing different buttons eventually the console turns on. Takes some time though. Doesn't seem to be any rhyme or reason, and I don't have any joycon reception issues when I'm playing so I don't think that's it?

Honestly this is one of my top episodes in general, I think. Ever since Idle Thumbs stopped, Idle Thumbs has been excellent! Thanks Nick! (fuck Chris)

There's a pretty great 35mm -> 1080p scan of Jurassic Park up on myspleen.org (home of the Harmy Despecialized trilogy). Highly recommended for some truly choice grain and dust specks. It's a really cool little community, actually, full of gems. I also snatched a restored Matrix with the original colors before everything went Kermit. EDIT: Oh I forgot, a fan edit of Episode 1, where basically a ton of things the general fan community doesn't like were trimmed, as well as what I think is a super cool use of editing to color young Anakin:

Sounds like quite a bit, http://www.dailydot.com/esports/quake-champions-esports-bethesda/

If it turns out to be good, I'm hoping it can sustain an audience. Quake Live suffered from never garnering a critical mass of players, though I can't recall what the PR was like for it. I always got the sense that they pushed it as a toy example/experiment of browser plugin games and only recently attempted to make it more of a traditional format (and removing cross-platform support...) by shifting to a binary on Steam. I also wonder how aggressively they're planning to push it as an eSport. That seems to be increasingly common and Q3 is in my opinion one of the most enjoyable FPS games to see played at a high level. id seems to have done right by Doom, so I'm quite hopeful they retain the classic feel and speed of Quake movement and satisfying weapons.

I have a feeling the competitive mode will be much different in regards to choosing and switching characters. I think pick/ban might be nice to try out, though it would probably need to function differently somehow from DotA because of changing sides on the map.