Golden Calf

I think the explanation from the 'do' paragraph clears up any seeming contradiction:

I found some cool music online today for my barbecue today

Someone is streaming a journey to the edge of the world, which by my calculation should take about 17 days. It's pretty cool to stare at for a little while: http://www.twitch.tv/jl2579

For those at all into youtube let's plays, I heartily recommend Kay. She just finished her run through DS2, which I thought was pretty entertaining. Here are her deaths:

I hate this shit SO MUCH. It's not inconvenient, it just pisses me off so fucking much, I don't know why. I get so mad when I get a goddamn inventory notification, whenever the robot decides to leave a paper bag of shit on my doorstep.

The Partially Examined Life is particularly good. Not all the episodes will interest you, but I guarantee that ones on topics/authors you're interested in will be satisfying. They have a great, straightforward style and pride themselves on not showing off or being obtuse, but engaging as seriously as possible with what the texts are saying. Also, they're pretty funny. Their episode on Ayn Rand is absolutely hilarious. It's also really manageable if you want to follow along with their readings for a given episode, because they pick reasonable-length sections to focus on and, whenever possible, provide them for free on their website.

lol I was planning on posting something about this tonight too. I learned the important fact that her company is called Kimsaprincess, Inc.

For those interested, the stream Danielle mentioned can be found here.

Oh my god this is incredible. If I were a god I would probably walk around like that guy. "Moondog visited America briefly in 1989, for a tribute in which Philip Glass asked him to conduct the Brooklyn Philharmonic Chamber Orchestra, at the New Music America Festival in Brooklyn, stimulating a renewed interest in his music." So cool.

I'm decently excited about the game, but somehow I doubt a majority of players are clamoring for elaborate insurance schemes and hundreds of dollars of ships for purchase. It's true they're available for in-game currency, but that's what's claimed with shitty free to play iphone games too. Whether the star citizen version is non-shitty is something nobody knows at this point, no matter how many company/fan videos you watch.

I cannot recommend this game highly enough.

I have a lot of trouble falling asleep without noise / people talking (or all all, really), so I almost always listen to podcasts before before falling asleep. At this point I've probably run through the entirety of the thumbs' back catalogue about four times, and I still absolutely love the old stuff.

Jesus the gifs of the Vane environments are incredible

I think DS2 is inferior to DS1 in several ways. I still enjoyed it a ton (and still am). The satisfaction from mastering the combat is hard to come by elsewhere.

you fuckers made me watch the movie again last night I'm not sure it's very good in terms of film-making... you end up getting a bunch of fairly boring shots of people's faces, desperately trying to be emotive without over-acting. But I don't know of any better way to do it. I don't really think the book can be adapted in a way that captures well all the time spent with characters' thoughts, hand signs, etc.

If you're going to really appreciate the experience you should first play A History of Democratic Process in Eire.

That is her birth name. She was born for fitness greatness.

You're probably going to want some adaptability too then to get more invincibility frames in your roll animation. FUCK THAT PLACE

You may be trying them too early. I only attempted them after I had cleared everything else in the game except the final boss. And even then they were tough. Kalameet was definitely incredibly difficult for me, and Artorias only slightly less so. Bizarrely, Manus was really easy for me, and I beat him without summons on my second try. I have very little insight as to why. The margins for error on their fights are very small, so the only way to get them right is practice really. I would try a few runs on Kalameet a night until I got frustrated (~30 mins or so). I think I beat hear on my third night.

I did not get very far in this game at all. I would get some basics up and stable, and then look at all the items, and have no interest in them. I could have taken forever to figure them out individually, or looked them up online, which would have been super boring. I wanted to do neither, so I just quit. I think part of the problem for me was how short the day/night cycle is. I felt almost constantly pressured / interrupted from what I was naturally interested in doing - in Minecraft, I was almost always acceptably safe exploring the game and its systems in whatever direction I was interested in at the time. lol

Ya the more info I hear about this game, the more skeptical I become of it. I backed early, and have been super excited for it, but it's sort of hard to believe they'll manage to make a cohesive experience out of a space combat, fps, economic sim, etc, etc all combined. Maybe that wouldn't matter. My life isn't a tonally consistent, cohesive experience, so presumably they're going for life in space or something approaching it. But ya I have a hard time believing this will all work together very well. Hopefully I'll be blown away™.

If you haven't seen the trailer for Never Alone, you should check it out. The language is seriously beautiful.

Do you guys think people should be able to upload full-length movies to youtube as "let's-views" with their commentary over the top? Stream them on twitch? Granted, I don't really know where I fall on this, as I watch a ton of twitch and mostly hate our current copyright system. I expect that a ton of studios would be ecstatic at the exposure, and willing to grant license to streamers / lets-players to provide what amounts to free publicity, but there's also probably a set of studios (maybe ones that do more story-driven stuff) that are going to lose sales if people can watch full playthroughs online. I know that I have put off buying The Forest and just watched people stream it on twitch instead. Maybe without the availability of protracted playthroughs the developers would have 15 more dollars. I imagine that there's a similar dynamic with Gone Home and Walking Dead. Maybe there will be with Firewatch as well? (DEFINITELY NOT A SOLID AND COMPLETELY THOUGHT-THROUGH OPINION HERE)

The amount of invaders in NG+2 is ludicrous.... Most are blue phantoms, and I only ever got tokens of spite from putting down my sign for dueling : ( : ( : ( : ( woe is me

Out of nowhere, Slate's feminist podcast closed with a recommendation for Prison Architect this week (around the 41:20 mark). There wasn't much discussion, since it was just a recommendation, but it was cool to hear out of the blue. Also, the podcast is generally good, especially when the normal host, Hanna Rosin, is on (not this week).