Mawd

I just make sure they look like this

I forget the specifics but some seniors at companies like Capcom or Nintendo 'leak' info through twitter to help build buzz for x or y thing. I think one of the examples involved sending through a vision document for a Resident Evil 2 re-release. The tone here at the time seemed like leeks were fairly wrong to report on and I'm trying to see situations where leaks are useful especially when they build hype for the hype gods and break the ice for a bigger discussion in the eventual release. I'd think that some leaks that aren't publisher friendly but are useful for consumers to know about might be things like Until Dawn's on rails shooter DLC; I'm sure it's pretty benign in the scale of things but it's the only one coming to me right now; aside from the whole Konami thing.

Not folding socks is just inhuman. You're all snake people.

I basically just default to fatpants and long johns after dark; even in summer so far. Plenty of houses in NZ have crappy heating especially if you're at the cheaper end, so our options generally involve layers. On the plus side we don't sweat through our socks as much so they're fair game for a few days. Its super windy we're we live too so even on summery days it feels weird to just wear a T-shirt since sometime in the afternoon there will always be a chill south easterly wind that doesn't quite settle for a few hours. I lived in Singapore for a few months and it was just the weirdest thing to actually feel a warm wind.

I like the way Path of Exile structured their F2P store. You can buy skins which offer no bonus other than looking rad but now the Devs are offering skins in competitive events and timed (weeks/months long) challenges. There is one thing every player is going to want to buy from the store though and that's stash tab space. In a Diablo 2 style Rpg that relies on trading things of relative value instead of gold, you're going to want more space for your booty eventually. You can't really not engage in trading unless you want to shorten your character's lifespan/effectiveness considerably. But I don't think you need more than the default .. Four? Stash tabs until you've been playing for several months. When you do buy more tabs you're paying ~NZD$20 for enough credits to buy 6 stash tabs with some creds left over. Every month or so stash tabs are discounted by about %20 so it doesn't hurt too hard. Still I'd rather they had the price around $15 because 20 still feels like a huge buy. I find it sad that I often don't need to use potions and other trinkets to make it in a Video game. It feels like in most games you don't need to reach further than your health or mana pots + one or two cures to win unless you're playing on hard.

From what I understand some companies actually rely on leaks to further a discourse from non official positions so they can prep an audience for a flashy press release. #notAllLeeks

Why you do this to meeeee?

The same advert for SCII just played 5 times back to back on Twitch. I've whitelisted the entire site to support the content makers but this is the sort of thing that makes me regret that decision. Ugh. Just show me some different ads. Is that so hard?

Blizzard had an announcement around hiring a new senior software engineer while talking about their original *craft, and Diablo games. Although I'm not sure if that represents a commitment to update their visuals and/or mechanics rather than just making them compatible for modern computers. Like anyone still playing Diablo 2 now is forcing resolutions higher than say 1024 768 by fluffing with .ini files.

Being careful about words here just alleviates some of the deeply personal pressures that seem to get talked about openly with trans people. Some of those are highlighted here. It's to help negate some of the shitty intrusive questions that come on. "When did you start feeling like a boy?" Etc. There's more to it but I'm probably not experienced enough to get into it.

I do see this as the final mark of an era but I don't think it's an extinction event. Long 'dead' Sea creatures from the Cambrian era are still turning up in New Zealand alive and well. We've left the Cambrian eras for sure, the cryptic sea life and armoured fish of the C&C, *Craft, and *Annihilation style games are no longer the dominant forms. They've instead been supplanted by the weird amphibians that are the Lords Management games. But I don't think it's goodbye. While we're trotting out 'x is dead' examples I'll say that hey did anyone see Chaos and X-Com making a come back? Or the return of classic adventure games? Maybe classic rts games get a shrunken market? What if they ended up as a niche genre like so many Paradox games? Those still do well even with mid tier budgets. Wouldn't it be funny if the classic RTS genre got it's own publisher like what Paradox is for 4x history games? Personally a gift from the ancestors would be another perfect C&C game in the style of Tiberium Sun. But that's thinking pretty wishfully. Blizzard are still thinking about keeping their older titles relevant, playable at least, the Overwatch setting is likely going to host different genres. People are still releasing content expansions for Age of Empires 2. Dawn of War 3 is more than likely going to be a thing. Not many were thinking about Blues Rock until The White Stripes and The Black Keys came and repopularised it.

Yeah I wasn't even born for betamax to be a thing but I still remember taping shows on VHS for everyone to see.

This might be branching out too far but I actually really liked Waterworld. Dennis Hopper was going full Ham, the setting was pretty fun, parts of it just looked really pretty, the action felt good for what it was. I was a kid when it was a movie I watched a lot of and I was way too young to understand the uncomfortable sexual subtext that underpins the first half of the film between Kevin Costner, the little girl, and her mum. Obviously those things are super shitty and would probably tank a large chunk of the movie for me if I watched it back as an adult but I've still got a lot of holdover enjoyment out of it from watching it as a dumb kid. It's not the best movie but I don't think it deserves the kind of 'worst movie of the 90's' rep it seems to have about itself. Bad Lurhmann's Moulin Rouge, and Romeo + Juliet are two movies I think should be recommended more.

Sigh. In unrelated news NZ Prime Minister John Key stating that his political opponents in a debate about the Australian led deportation of New Zealanders and their confinement in the already controversial Australian Refugee Detention Centres (never mind the daily human rights abuses that occur there) are backing rapists while he backs New Zealanders caused mass offence as many women in parliament stood up and started speaking about their offence and experiences with sexual assault and were promptly ejected from the chamber which lead to a mass walk out on the part of mostly Green and Labour MPs in protest of the PM John Key not apologising. It's just been really gross seeing this. Seeing the speaker of the house silencing these women who are coming forward and talking about their offence and experiences, many for the first time. Meanwhile the PM has been complaining about the amount of abuse he's been receiving over these comments and still there's no apology. Watching the videos and interviews made about this has demonstrated for me what silencing culture is about; when the PM says something like that in an attempt to win banter points in a parliamentary debate and is not reprimanded in any way while people who have actually experience what he's making light of are talking about why his comments are so hurtful and are speaking about the power of using this type of accusation as 'banter' to many of the people who are victim to it and are well, further shat upon by a culture of people who treat sexual assault as the victim's fault and feel like it's pretty fine to bant about but treat it as a disruptive topic to bring up when someone wants to say how hurtful it is. I think from now on if someone wants to debate on what privilege is in a 'real world' context I can show them this incident. Where someone not affected by sexual assault can make a disruptive claim like John Key has and have his party's appointed speaker silence and throw out people who are affected and experienced with sexual assault for.. causing a disruption. Funnily enough there's more than a few echoes of this within debates about "PC culture gone MAD" amongst people focusing on college campuses. Also what I'm hearing at least from some journalists is that this might be John Key's version of Lynton Crosby's 'Dead Cat' trick of changing a conversation. Essentially after a labour MP on a tv show called JK 'weak' in his attitude toward Australian Deportations he decided to punch down on these issues and change the conversation on how weak he is to how much of a bully he is; using sexual violence as fodder. Meanwhile we have a well sourced post detailing the budget cuts to Woman's Refuge, the closing of Rape Crisis support centres, and the struggling state of our sexual assault support community after cuts to their public funding over sums as low as $30,000 which is peanuts comparatively for a government budget. All done over JK's three terms of office and all showing how he sticks up for rape victims and New Zealanders.

I'm someone who is just dipping in and out of games; often just abandoning them for months until I feel an itch for them again. It feels quite normal especially when I usually run one game as my 'main' and everything else is a side dish. I do feel bad about it sometimes especially when I end up so busy with the main game that I never seem to play anything else. Oh and it kills my HDD space to have Pillars of Eternity, DA:I, Witcher 3, etc all waiting to be picked up again which is slowly forcing me to only install when I've completed. I agree with SBM, when I let half these games go it's because I've already gotten a pretty good run out of them. Like I was zone clearing in DA:I because that's the way I was role playing my Inquisitor but at about 5-8 hours a zone I was kinda tired by the last third of the game. Maybe Shadow of Mordor is a better example, it was fun, but when I opened up the second map that was when I decided I'd already played enough of the game to that point. With the current meta focused around completion and providing half your life worth of 'content' it's easier to lose respect for a game that doesn't manage player time well. It's at the point where I think of it like the Thumbs think of lore. It's just there, it stops adding, it's chewing up the bits I like ahhhhhhh. Even MGSV gets this response, the rinse repeat to summon my chopper, wait as it arrives, wait for it to fly to international waters, then redeploy somewhere else in the map is really annoying. I wish they'd just given more cigars up front to change the day night cycle. It might sound funny complaining about this when as a series the games were long and had movie length cutscenes but I liked those, the constant simulation of my heli arriving and going out is something I want to opt in and out of.

I like stealth games or at least versions of them. I grew up with Tenchu and MGS, always liked going stealth in Oblivion, really enjoyed being as stealthy as I could in Dishonoured and the Batmans, I loved being a ninja alien in AVP, my MGSV gameplay is mostly stealthy, I really liked what I played in Mark of The Ninja, idk it depends. Some of the MGS VR missions basically had a no spotting requirement and I didn't like that style of stealth. Coming back to my home turf, the multiplayer fps NS2 involves tonnes of stealthy play relying on hunting other players as aliens either to ambush them or sneak past and take out their economy, or as a marine setting up an ambush while building things that can be heard from a room away hoping you can get a phase gate up in time to kill a base before their heavies notice and engage you. So I suppose the type of stealth I favour is the version where you can still fight back in a quick & dirty struggle. Or at least smoke bomb to safety. If I can pull time away from Path of Exile's Diablo2 like clicking hell I'm going to go try out Thief Gold.

Gormongous! History Extra has been a good history podcast to listen to. They usually do two disparate topics over an hour but they're almost always speaking to actual historians or talking to people that have researched historical works while writing narrative history which often enough brings up some interesting things that didn't make it into or were kept in mind while writing say Wolfe Hall or The Last Kingdom. Other cool subjects include an interview with a co-creator of a Celtic exhibition as well as a look at how the word changed from involving ancient Greeks describing some people in Western Europe to being a sort of catch all term for some people from pre-Roman Britain. Also looking into a year of medieval England the year of the Magna Carta and seeing what the people of those days would have remembered as significant (like the division of The Bible into chapters), far more significant than a failed peace treaty that lead to civil war. It's not deep dives like the Dan Carlin series but it is a series of very interesting drill cores of historical periods. Some really cool popular history has been seen on YouTube lately. Extra History by Extra Credits has been fantastic their series on the South Seas Trading Company is my favourite highlight and their episodes on what they get wrong are as cool as the main body. There's also a week by week history of WWI that I forget the name of but is worth a look.

How about 'Planet Earth' or one of the other Sir David Attenborough series? Same for Cosmos. Seeing as yer not much more than a sponge right now it might be a good time to sponge some pop science. As for actual movies I'm not much of a buff anymore especially for quiet movies. But the BBC miniseries In The Flesh is spectacular and hopefully the righ amount of loud and quiet to see.

Eh it wasn't just the stealth sequences. The core gameplay loop was solid enough and as an early Uncharted (1&2) fan it was something I'd previously liked. But with some games I just get to a point where I think I've seen enough to get the gist like with Shadow of Mordor or Bulletstorm. Partially related I've also noticed that after playing thousands of hours of very fluid multiplayer shooters I'm getting quite specific tastes in what I want from other shooty games especially singleplayer games. I think weaker or different shooty gameplay can always be enhanced by adding other players who bring their own playstyles to the game. I play games like HL2, F.E.A.R, Halo, or even Mass Effect in a very fast and loose, on the fly style. So I've found that the less the game allows for that style, the more time I spend crouched by a shoulder high wall, the less patience I have for it. -except MGS, Fallout, Elder Scrolls or Borderlands, it can be really fun picking apart the enemy at a slow pace with those games. It doesn't mean I don't think tactically either, even in the fast paced fast movement style games (like TF2, NS2, DirtyBomb, or Battleborn) the other players and challenges bring about huge challenges in how to overcome their strategies. It just means I really enjoy throwing myself into the thick of the problem and solving my way out of it.

The Last of Us never really grabbed me. I liked the story well enough but by the first stealth insta kill mushroom sequence I kinda felt that the gameplay wasn't satisfying enough to stick through it all.

The Culture Society from Ian M Banks' series is very okay with sentient AI, other races, both genders and gender transitioning. It's citizens don't always trust the more advanced AI's because they're inscrutable tactical geniuses but most AI are likeable apart from ones that love being annoying. Although of what I've read most of the story focus is between the Culture and other less tolerant societies so you might not get what you want out of it at times.

Hey thanks! I'm on break so I have the time to dig into most/if not all but I'll start with The Runaways, Bikini Kill, and Le Tigre

Can someone give me a crash course in Riot GRRL music? That would be great. TY. I can't stomach the wait for the next Haim, Warpaint, and Savages albums.

Hey if you're fine with watching the gay version of American Pie, the Eating Out series was a surprisingly solid set of movies. The Birdcage is another good gay comedy with Robin Williams and a few other stars in it. I really liked Kaboom! as a surreal queer movie about the end of the world. My boyfriend rates Boy Culture really high but I haven't seen it. Priscilla Queen of the Desert and Hedwig and the Angry Inch are both classic cult gay movies for their own reasons. The History Boys touched on gay themes but was largely just a good movie about its own thing. Summersturm was a decent gay movie from Germany. I'm being told the french film Just a Question of Love is good, and Les chansons d'amour aka Love Songs is a good queer musical about polyamory. Personally I'd like to see more weird films like Kaboom!. We've also had a lot of tender coming out movies but maybe we need more films about forming an identity or just living in queer spaces or just being queer today. I want more movies that combine multiple sexualities and gender identities rather than most queer films neatly lining up into "that one about the gays/lesbians/transitioning people". While still recognising that there's fertile ground to have a movies solely about those experiences. I think at the moment there's better work done in tv. Characters in shows like Looking, Hunting Season, even Shameless tend to come off more like real people than person analogues in many of the gay movies I've seen.

Videodrome. I really tried to like it. Especially after The Naked Lunch. But the whole thing just came off as too deliberately try hard and it felt boring. Maybe that's because I missed the generation boat of that being super weird, new, and 'out there' but that context doesn't suddenly make me enjoy it as a film to watch I feel the same about Taxi Driver. Star Wars Empire Strikes back is the only SW movie I can watch in full and enjoy; I'm right there with Twig, the EU is what let's me still enjoy that world. As for well known anime, why do people talk about Appleseed? That movie should be mass recalled. As much as I liked Ghost in The Shell the first like five times I saw it I don't think much of it holds up. Some of the scenes are really well made, and I still love the boss battle with the tank (probably my favourite part). But there's way too much time put into the 'trippy bro' monologues. The soundtrack is still great though. Everything touched by Christopher Nolan that isn't The Prestige. Memento maybe gets a pass.