Mawd

Because they're dying to make a preface before their point first and they're hoping you won't switch off before-hand since they've baited that a major point is coming soon.

So it's uh late into 4.am (my partner and I are complete nightowls especially with the semester over) and we're hearing loud dragging sounds outside. It's been going on for the past half an hour particularly when we stop making a lot of noise ourselves, turn lights off, etc. It could just be an animal rummaging through trash but we feel pretty spooked. It's caused me to put away all thoughts of just going to sleep and we're feeling pretty unsafe. I'm currently playing Dark Souls for the first real time and trying to calm myself through that. But overall it's a very spooky night. We've brought down all the blinds, put up a screen between us and any windows, locked all the doors and closed the windows, etc. Still pretty spooked. We live down a driveway that's pretty far from the road but with three other houses around us. Apparently our house has been broken into before through our sliding door But that's secured as much as we can. We're in a nice ish neighbourhood that has a reputation of being a target for thieves because it's fairly secluded. It's hopefully just a possum but we're pretty freaked out. Luckily we don't have much that's valuable outside, we have some old bikes and boxes full of memories stored outside but the majority of enticing value is owned by our landlord whose garage is currently open. He's a major jerk so maybe any crook decides to steal his stuff rather than boxes of my siblings teenaged belongings. We're hearing a combination of loud and soft scrapes so it being an animal might just be wishful thinking. Edit: Well it's lighter now. Light enough to see outside and feel secure that nothing obvious has changed. Feels comfortingly liklier that it was just a weird possum. The multiple volume and location changing scraping sounds were odd though.

I've just watched the one after the pvp one and yeah so far that's been the best. I discovered The Legend and a whole bunch of troll pvp era shortly after. I've been following along ENB's play through of DS1 too which has been mostly fun and lore-y. I'm co-writing a DnD campaign which involves old ones and a form of the undead curse so I'm plundering all reference material.

I liked how goofy season 1 was. I'll be very happy if season 2 ends up with more people like Lester, Molly, Colin, or Bill being their goofy selves about the place.

I don't remember anything about Hack & Slash but I do own SB, did it only go out to kickstarter backers? weird I bought SB in oct 2013 and I've never heard anything about this. Ahwell. I liked SB but it's no Dwarf Fortress. As far as early access disappointments, it's no Towns either. Which I'd also put time into.

Going back to that Dota 2 major I was feeling that lack of informative commentary on the analysis desk. I mean, I'm all right with weird occasionally flat footed banter as much as the next Australasian. But it seemed like if there was any moment that people were getting too in depth in breaking down the action someone would switch the topic back to RedEye + Maelk bantz, or Capitalist + ?? Bantz, or "Your prediction was wrong and you should feel embarrassed" bantz, and it usually took over any other topics until it was time to hand off to the casters. So many bantz I just felt worn out by it all. The guys on the Dreamhack desk for SCII gave me the same feeling but I forget any details. Keep it light, sure but don't make it all about 1UPing each other.. But hey I got to actually see those tournaments live for once! At 3am+ Still, I saw some fun esportz

I'm starting to really fall for Blackstar. I'm feeling like this is another one of those albums that kinda alienates me at the start but almost overnight morphs into the next thing I can't be without. I read somewhere that Bowie and Co. were all super into Kendrick Lamar's To Pimp a Butterfly and wanted to do their own take on that style of album. So I'm super hyped. Now St. Vincent and David Byrne just have to do another collab album and early next year will feel like 2013 all over again.

Usually a tileset like Phoebus, or Spacefox, But sometimes I'll do an ascii fort. I usually try to keep each fort with what I started but its hard to remember sometimes. Btw I'm still finding it really hard to pierce aquifers even when causing cave ins, in frozen wastes. Last time I tried it was with an above ground wooden fort. Eventually I realised I needed some stone after all once a wave of dehydration left all but five dead and the tree count started getting low. I had some initial success over four different pits, getting 3 layers into the aquifer but eventually I lost all of my experienced miners and most of my supply of pickaxes to snap freezes as I got to the few layers that were still liquefied.

Twig, we'll get you a hat that says DevVveloper on it so you won't feel confused any more.

:x great, another white smissmass.

I've picked up Bonfire Side Chat and I'm liking I a bunch. Super keen for the later episodes when they talk about background influences like Berserk but I'm content with the Undead Parish for now. Also it was really neat to come across a developer for Kingdom of Loathing in this podcast. I loved that game so much in 2006/7 until my boarding school's IT guy blocked it and all the usual proxy sites. As for other DnD podcasts I've been liking DnD is for Nerds a lot lately. It's about a bumbling evil party run by some funny Australians. It's likely not everyone's thing though. TAZ is still fun. But I hated the guest episode with The Flop House which got weird fast when it quickly became about what dice rolls you could get to sleep with hawt chix; it felt like being in a room while some high school freshmen figured out they could see side boob in 'x' if they paused the screen. Only it felt more uncomfortable because at the same time they acted like seedy Dad's for each other.

Aw man no! I don't need this, not now! I was just getting over my sun sickness *whimper* Also it must be a language quirk but I love how brawls escalate to 'non-lethal'

Yeah there's a lot of fun songs across those two albums but I think the only other songs I can dance to are Orgonon Gurlz and No Credit Card. I've ended up liking Gurlz way more than I should and it made me check out Kate Bush for the first time which has been great so far.

Some new Prog Pfunk breaking out from Wellington, NZ with a free to stream album. Funkacybin - Voyager

I've liked plenty of Bowie Singles over the years and I've liked a fair amount of Bowie's production over the years (Raw Power) but I've never really tried and still can't listen to a full Bowie album. At least I thought that until The Next Day came out and it became the thing I listened to the most for 4 months.

This is the first sale in about a year that I've wanted to pick up anything. I've looked hungrily at some of the 'bigger' purchases like Subanautica ~$16, Killing Floor 2 ~$24, + others but I've had to restrict myself until the student loan actually comes through. Anyway I've picked up SanctuaryRPG ~$5 and I've loved it so far. A quirky sense of humour, a nice chiptunes soundtrack, and a punishing return to text based rogue like mechanics has made this a real time eater. Now I'm eyeing up TIS-100 (Tessalated Intelligence Systems) ~$5 from the creators of Space Chem and Infinifactory. The game has you tooling around with an assembly language that even has its own big printable manual to properly get that MS-Dos feel and while you do so there's some mysterious story to pick up along the way. It looks like the kind of thing I want to play but it's also the kind of slightly too technical activity that'd have me scrambling for something less brain intensive fast haha.

I've played SCII extremely casually and recently I started wanting to watch it (thanks to Esports Today). Anyway I've found watching streams of review or education minded streamers (like Polt or Winter) works well enough to understand what's going on; both players frequently talk about what they're doing or what went wrong, Winter especially holds nights where he goes out of his way to educate new players. Anyway after watching them play I managed to follow this week's Dreamhack Tournament without any troubles. The casters for that tournament were really helpful in explaining what was going on as well. So yeah picking it up can be relatively easy so long as you know most of the units and understand why players need to expand.

Yeah I'm kinda fatigued on the marvel comic movies (I still like the shows and Deadpool might be good?) but apart from the first Iron Man, the Captain America series are the only films that I've stayed keen on, so I'm happy for more. Plus Chris Evans being eye candy will always be appreciated by The Boy and I. Oh and we finally saw Trainwreck with my mum and my sister and it was the funniest movie we'd seen in a long time.

Yup! He basically only plays ranged DPSy mages and some supports across all LoMas. There is no way we can trust him with the legs of a close range brawler since melee range is so totally not his thing.

Oh that's super nice! He's pretty much the only thing that is making me want to dip back into Hots right now so maybe I'll just bug my boyfriend to get him so he'll be the mage and I'll be the legs. Then we can talk to our pro gamer friends and become elite Cho'gall comp gamers

I like the megathread format. I'd miss it if it were to go and I'd probably encourage other small forums to entertain it too beyond staples like "What made you xxx today?"

I've never really used Meta Critic or Rotten Tomato. But I will use steam user reviews. I like to see how the opinions balance easily one or two funny reviews, and how many people are posting their thoughts and how many hours they have played. I'm not sure if it's the best though, plenty of reviews either end up with "this sux" or a novel length meditation on what it means to be a new entry in x series as thought by TrueRedditGamer#92020. Anyway it seems super weird to even want all the champions from League. Maybe I'm the weird one here but I thought most people pick one or two roles to specialise in, pick those heroes, grow that pool, and then start buying some of the cheaper heroes of other roles for diversity. Like my partner only plays mages and supports, while I mostly play the same with a few top fighters and junglers thrown in. I don't like how slow it is to get a new champ that's for sure. That new Hots hero Cho'gall seems pretty fun but he's a single hero with two ability sets split between two players and only controlled by one player. That sounds pretty chaotic and fun but I have no idea how you'd go about having to buy, or queue as him.

Haha I was going to mention PoE too. That's a good explanation but there is a bit more. So for starters there are 5 damage types. Physical, Fire, Lightning, Cold, and Chaos. Physical Damage (which can cause things like bleed, pinning, and stuns) is mostly avoided by stacking Armour in the current meta, but it can also be avoided by stacking Evasion, stacking flat chances for spells and attacks to miss you, stacking EHP, and using certain Uniques like Lightning Coil which converts a percentage of physical damage to added lightning damage. Meanwhile Fire, Lightning, and Cold are all fairly explanatory and are resisted by stacking their corresponding type. However PoE features replayable acts with increased difficulty much like Diablo. When you enter a new difficulty your resistances take a flat hit causing you to stack more. For example gear that gave you above 75% resists in normal difficulty now gives you 0% resists (and it hurts). Meanwhile Chaos Damage deals a nasty damage over time that by default ignores any form of energy shield and requires a fourth resistance type that is much rarer to the other three. It can be incredibly hard/expensive to reach the (regular) full 60% immunity to Chaos Damage. However some builds can hard spec into a talent that gives you full immunity to Chaos Damage but sets your maximum health to 1 which requires you to specialise into energy shield + armour hybrid gear and invest in a unique which causes Chaos Damage to be unable to bypass energy shield. Idk there's tonnes more to that game which plays around those damage types and the defences you need to overcome them. Some builds spec into life-leech and apply talents that return the health instantly, others cause all cold damage to be converted to fire, and all fire into chaos damage, or convert all physical to lightning, or completely forgoe physical damage for higher chance at status ailments. Sorry, having a bit of a nerd out with this one. Also not a video game but I think Dungeon World has some interesting ideas in how to make a combat challenging which could be somewhat translated into a video game. A well known story about it's combat is to do with the 16hp dragon. Now I'm sure a lot of the combat effect is taken care of with narrative roleplaying actions and gizmos. But from what I remember of the story was that the dragon had some armour which first needed to be pierced by armour penetration (I think the game might treat armour quite seriously so you do need armour pen to have a hope of getting through), then the party had to deal with a fear effect brought by the dragon which has to be overcome through dicerolls and actions, then after getting past these two defences the party ends up dealing a total of 9 damage to the dragon while it in turn does 1d10+5 damage which results in someone losing an arm. Now the dice rolls don't really mean anything and a lot of the roleplay only works because of people's imagination and a DM. But you could get some type of game where defying your fear became an action and fear was treated like a form of psychological damage (maybe like Darkest Dungeon which does feature some nifty ways of damaging players). Meanwhile maiming is a particularly violent route to go but that could be lessened by making it more Monte Pythonesque, or done to machines, or exo suits, etc. Combat that results in semi permanent debilitation would be an effective form of damage in its own right and cause players and designers to think about the trade offs for protecting specific areas of the body vs speed or whatever. Idk, could be a fun set of ideas to channel into some kind of action game like a Dark Souls-a-like, party manager, or whatever.

I think some of the Devil May Cry series could have DnB in it. At the least it's always had a bit of a Hard Industrial skew along with it's metaley sound track (usually mixed together). I know for sure one of the boss battles has dubstep in it but heh people can be pretty divided over their dance music.

I'm hoping Slain! ends up being good but I don't get to find out until December. It kinda looks like if Dethklok made a 'vania game.