nonstopintrospection

Members
  • Content count

    23
  • Joined

  • Last visited

About nonstopintrospection

  • Rank
    Member
  1. Android Games

    Someone on facebook introduced me to the basketball game, and it is the most addictive experience I have had with a mobile game yet. No f2p necessary for my brain I guess.
  2. Esports Today 3/10/2016: Between Katowice and Shanghai

    Like others here, I totally understand how much time monitoring that much e-sports takes, but will totally miss this podcast. I really appreciated your perspective and conversation. I hope we'll get the occasional cast, but I appreciate all the episodes we did get, and I wish y'all the best with books and freelancing and all that.
  3. GDC '16 / SF thumbs hang out

    I am in San Jose, so I might try to come up on Saturday. Hope all y'all at GDC are having a good time takin' names and makin' games.
  4. Idle Weekend February 26, 2016 - Hack the Planet

    The anime breakdown was pretty good, to expand a little on the cyberpunk reading front: Here’s a quick reading list of some stuff that was formative for me, I break down some of the authors and titles below the list, this is mostly early stuff, I’m sure there’s interesting cyberpunk that was made a little more recently (Altered Carbon was pretty decent): William Gibson, the Sprawl Trilogy (Neuromancer, Count Zero, Mona Lisa Overdrive) William Gibson, Burning Chrome (short story collection) William Gibson, the Bridge Trilogy (Virtual Light, Idoru, All Tomorrow’s Parties) Philip K Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Neal Stephenson, The Diamond Age, or a Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash Bruce Sterling, Islands in the Net As always Gibson is the starting point, and a good mixture of aesthetic and theme. Considering Blade Runner is considered THE movie canon, you can't talk about cyberpunk without Philip K Dick. His stuff is often a little further down the rabbit hole than the depictions of cyberpunk that we're used to. I remember reading Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? expecting something more like Blade Runner, and got a world that it took me half the book to wrap my head around. I think reading Dick was important for me to understand the way 60's drug culture and altered reality played into a lot of the hopes of technology some of these people had. I think that theme is much more important to early cyberpunk than what we are left with now. Neal Stephenson is another author that was a progenitor of cyberpunk. Snow Crash is pretty renowned, but I feel like it hews more to the aesthetic than the ideas and cultural descriptions of Gibson, I heard it was supposed to be a comic book originally, and to me it shows. The Diamond Age, or a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer is a better cyberpunk story in my perspective. Cryptonomicon has some ideas about technology that relate to cyberpunk but is basically void of the aesthetic entirely. (One of my favorite novels for the ‘punk’ of cyberpunk is a novel of his called Zodiac about eco-terrorism, but I wouldn't call it cyberpunk at all) Bruce Sterling also has some great stuff, if you're only going to read one book, read Islands in the Net. I also enjoyed Zeitgeist, but it’s more along the lines of Cryptonomicon, a future looking tech thriller, rather than cyberpunk.
  5. No Man's Sky

    As odd and funny as it is to talk about lines of code, some points of reference, in school for CS we got an assignment to program tetris. Myself and a few friends compared our (relatively) working assignments. My program: ~2000 lines of code Classmate 1: under 1000 lines of code Classmate 2: 10,000+ lines of code
  6. Dota 2 - Winter Major - Shanghai for the Dota Guy

    I haven't had a chance to go find highlights or commentary, but on a quick glance, their two wins against Secret were in 18m and 24m, so that sounds pretty commanding. The article I found on the Ehome series also sounds like MVP were in total control. I'll definitely be finding the replays and checking them out tonight.
  7. wrong thread

    I'm a dancer and have been teaching and dancing but not choreographing for a couple years, and I didn't think I could make anything I felt good about anymore. With some hand-wringing and pressure from friends over the holiday weekend I put something together. I actually feel pretty good about it, and I'll get a chance to perform it soon. It all came together really fast and surprised me super pleasantly.
  8. Idle Weekend February 12, 2016: Mad Skills

    As an aside to the Baldur's Gate note, I feel like jRPGs do a fair amount of poking at the player as main character tropes. Chrono Trigger and Chrono Cross both have pretty milk toast main characters, but over the course of the story really subvert the player as main character thing. Final Fantasy 6 is another example of a game that never truly gives you a main character, and has one of the most stellar ensemble casts, maybe partially because of that. And MGS2 is a pretty famous example of a video game being aware of and breaking the player as main character understanding. I recently read Driving Off the Map after hearing Austin Walker and Heather Alexandra talk about it. Remembering my experience with that game while reading the article was a fun and revealing exercise.
  9. Episode 342: Satellite Reign

    Maybe I'm oversimplifying or misunderstanding something, but I always felt a lot of cyberpunk (sort of driven by the "punk" part) was the opposite of competence porn. Broken or near broken people stumbling their way to maybe a temporary victory in a system that was way more powerful than them. Gibson, in particular, is very stingy with true success and more often it seems like characters almost completely fail, and then the system tears itself apart from their disruptive influence more so than their competence. The success is just the punk ideal that absolute corporate power will be broken down by sort of haphazard disruption more than protagonists actually accomplishing specific goals/tasks. That comment about neon and noir sclpls made resonates with this reading for me. Maybe that's just the type of cyberpunk I like, and so those themes stand out a little more to me.
  10. Firewatch Spoiler Thread | Henry Two Hats

    third thing was the wizards & wyverns rulebook or player's guide or something. But it was a W&W thing.
  11. Yeah, I take a little umbrage with the "could have been a short story, radio play, novel" idea. I really dislike the idea that strong, physical causation is the only significant choice we have in games, and that somehow makes framing choices totally non significant. The ability to influence the tone of a relationship and a character's reactions to a series of events felt as strong or stronger an experience than uncovering the story in Gone Home by tinkering around. Despite some jarring in certain transitions, I really did feel like I was influencing and creating a relationship between these two characters in a way that very, very few games ever give me the capacity to do. And for me it reflects how often relationships are like that in life. I am probably never going to choose to skip out on work, bail on my responsibilities, not do the thing that I "should", but I frame how my life relates to those actions, and how I respond to others and let them in or close them out from my life. That is an entirely different experience from observing an author's singular version of a series of events, i.e. a novel or play. This didn't feel particularly spoiler-y to me, but if someone feels it is, I'll move it to the other thread, it seemed like there was more talk of the Tom Chick review happening here.
  12. Firewatch Spoiler Thread | Henry Two Hats

    Just finished first playthrough, and that emotional journey was rough, but beautiful. There were a couple of elements of the mystery that lost me a little bit, but the script and acting blew me away. I was also convinced of bee significance for a while. The first day that the ring is on the table literally made my heart lurch. The picture of Julia and the ring were so obvious, and yet so effectively did what they were supposed to for me. My Henry didn't put Jules in a home, partly because I remember those discussions with my parents and grandmother regarding my grandfather, and how hard they worked to maintain that horrible experience, so that they could have those moments of lucidity. It left me with a deep fear of early onset Alzheimer's for years, but if my parents end up in the same situation, I think I'd still have to wait a long time before putting them in a home, as heart crushing as that is. I am so very glad that they kept the intro details out of media, because seeing that beforehand would have put me in a very different state coming to the game. As far as ending goes, I asked her to come to Boulder, and was glad it didn't commit their relationship into something. I was never romantic with Delilah in my playthrough, but there were certainly the roots of a deep friendship there and I didn't want her to think that I wanted to walk away. I was glad that option kept the relationship trajectory pretty open. I have a weird comment/question, did anyone else somehow hear Chris's voice in Henry sometimes? Something about the vocabulary or delivery occasionally very much reminded me of Chris.
  13. The Idle Book Club 11: Fates and Furies

    It was great to hear the podcast! It was fun to hear Chris and Sarah's takes on the book. I find it revealing and a little disconcerting that a lot of Sarah's points were totally new ideas and even a little alien to me, and I resonated a lot with Chris's experience of the book. It makes me really appreciate having Sarah's viewpoint on the podcast, and I hope it continues to make me reflect on these books in new ways. I've been meaning to read Kazuo Ishiguro for years, so I'm glad for the motivation. Love the podcast, so glad it's back!
  14. Books, books, books...

    It's not particularly short, but A Tale of Two Cities was the book that really made me fall in love with Dickens, and it was a very comfortable and engaging read for me. I never truly connected with Oliver Twist or A Christmas Carol in the same way. It's been a long time so it's hard to trust my memory, but I think the density of adaptations on the latter books made it hard to appreciate them as much, and I didn't have that problem with Two Cities.
  15. Idle Weekend January 29, 2016: Far Gone Prestige

    I actually saw the Best of Enemies documentary a few weeks ago, and none of my friends are much into serious discussion, so it was awesome to hear people talk about that. It was an incredibly compelling piece of history and filmmaking, while being an incredibly depressing look at where pundit politics started and thinking about where we are now. This is quickly becoming my favorite Idle Thumbs show.