Mawd

FYI this Arca guy was the main producer for FKA Twigs' EP 2 as well as several songs from Yeezus.

Something I can always move to.

Cheers.

I did a cursory search and couldn't find a thread of a similar subject. Anyway I thought that it'd be nice to have a thread for talking about moments of particular games that remind us why we play 'x' game, why we game in general or just to celebrate a particularly fun stunt that anyone would like to share. It might be a story of that ice embark in Dwarf Fortress, or that time you roleplayed a particular experience in Gone Home, or when you cleared the best Fade during that NS2 scrim. Anything really. I just seem to notice a lot of discussion about the current 'meta' or news of games and not enough campfire stories.

The Sprawl Trilogy is a fantastic read, I do seem to prefer Neuromancer to the rest although they all have their moments. I haven't read much else of his But I will say that I highly enjoyed Virtual Light and even grew to love Idoru.

Sometimes I ask my friends but these days I mostly go to a niche bookstore run by Lit. students, check out the latest titles and write down names and authors. Then I go to the library and comb through the new releases. Sadly all the newest ones all have a $5 surcharge and a shorter borrowing time so that method hasn't exactly been fruitful yet. Another thankyou, I went to the library and found 'Dear Life' by Alice Munro and yeah she's everything I've been craving. Really enjoyed the first story, 'To Reach Japan'. I also found Duplex (the only one from your recommendations that wasn't on loan) so I'm ready to dig into that after I sample more Munro.

Thanks I'll be sure to check them out!

I remember in the earlier days of Guild Wars 2 I'd specced out my thief for maximum stealth. I used to go headfirst into dungeons or WVW events and it took so long for people to kill me because I could just invis and roll away that I'd often be able to creep back to res my allies and frequently that was just enough to save the day and push the enemy back. I remember once in a full wipe on the second path of the Arah explorable I managed to stealth and heal long enough while fighting the gigantic boss that I managed to bring the whole team up, we wiped twice; it must have taken us three times as long to complete the dungeon than if we'd just left for a new party but it sure as hell felt like a great victory when we finished it. Also any time I try teaching the basics of lerking or skulking in Natural Selection 2 and the newb gets it and starts doing well feels great. 'nother NS2 story; back in my previous clan the captain and I found a voice morphing program. He went for a deeper cheesy 'demonic' preset while I found the squeakiest anime girl preset I could. So we linked them to mumble while also using them in game while aliasing. I think prety much the whole server had us muted but it was so much stupid fun.

Cool! I remember moments like those. The Trigen really kicked my butt! I remember when I was in the final moments of Metal Gear Solid 3; when you finally defeat The Boss and she asks you to shoot her. I delayed it for what seemed like forever. It wasn't just out of respect for my own emotional journey of the story, I was trying to simulate Big Boss' own feelings. It was one of those forced moments in gaming I really enjoyed even as I experienced a sense of loss for completing the mission.

Nostalgiaaaaaaa.

Could anyone please recommend some awesome contemporary dramas in the vein of Laurie Moore? All the Adult Contemporary I see at the library usually incorporates death and mystery as the central plot device which I find quite tiresome. I've been really enjoying stories that have female main characters and centre around people between 20-40. It doesn't have to be female centred just focused on 'mature' themes; Actual mature not the type of 'mature' description people apply to sex, drugs, and pimps. Other than that I've really enjoyed Larry Niven, L.E. Modesitt, and William Gibson of late. Although I've lately been sick of the tendency for many (usually fantasy) writers to describe the sexual appeal of every female character. I don't know if I have a bug up my butt or it's just that I'm a mostly homosexual man but I don't need to know if the very young girl is starting to 'fill out' in her 'bosom' (thanks Raymond Feist) or the woman is 'comely' yet also has a weighty bosom (L.E. Modesitt). It doesn't ruin books, but it does provide a source of frequent eye rolling. As a source of possible hypocrisy I was amused by Laurie Moore's female character in 'Who Will Run The Frog Hospital?' who described herself with a myriad of pet names for her 'mosquito bumps' and drew attention to the disconnection between her self image of having small breasts and the reality of her emergence into womanhood.

Ooooh that's a neat idea! How about.. James K. Baxter!

I haven't made anything yet. But I was driven to pursue software engineering after three years of an Ecology major and a Marine Science minor because games were all I thought about. For a great deal of time I wasn't even playing games just reading about experiences, mechanics, and the like. I realised that not only could I create abstractions of real life and carve them out into niche gamified experiences (see Mai Nichi, Gone Home, etc.) but I could take already existing game experiences and distil them into other abstractions (games like Anitchamber). I've always felt creative urges but never really outputted. Gaming provides a metatextual response that I find film or writing could never quite provide, it's the intersection of each and relies on personal interpretation in more than story but drive as well. Unlike some other friends of mine, I don't quite mind if the things I create aren't well known and validated. I'll be making these experiences for myself as much as others. Though after experiencing the strange fraternity of the NS2 competitive scene I would love to make a game with a niche multiplayer community; which I must admit is a pretty odd goal. In an odd way, games are ecologies of themselves. Ones I love to explore. I guess my drive is similar to the tweet above it's a weird combination of desire and pathos. Though I guess as yet this is a combination of purple language from someone who has no output to date.

I think I've found my new main artist. Needed a change from the still excellent work of 'The Drones'. I think Girl is probably one of the strongest songs on that album. I wish we could've seen more from that direction. Though I guess there are echoes of it in some of Heem's solo albums. I haven't heard anything new from Kool A.D. though so maybe that's where the majority of that sound went.

Well with this patch I've finally started to invest serious time in Dota 2. Before I used to just appear for a go at Viper or Omni once or twice a month but now it's game after game. Been really enjoying the map changes on radiant side as well as my newfound love, Weaver.

Reminds me of the feeling one gets when they listen to these guys. I can't help but post the live this time though. So much yes! I just rediscovered them last week.

Thaaaank Youuuu

I applied for a software engineering bachelor of IT rather close to the wire but I've been called back and asked to come to orientation! So excite.

Neat, I'll try to check it out sometime.

Yeah I could see that being a problem. I'm still in very primordial stages of development. But my best idea for it would be to treat elements like they're nouns and the actions as verbs. So as a starting wizard you would receive the noun 'air' and the action 'wall' that would be used to create a wall of air to deflect arrows or some other spells. Eventually you'd pick up action words like 'jet' or 'nova' to further change how each element could be manipulated. I'd hopefully be including environment puzzles to still make it worthwhile to know your whole magical vocabulary.

Well the short version is to do to spells what Receiver did to guns. I've got other ideas to flesh it out a bit but I'm happy to shelve things while I discover technical ability and a way for the controls to not seem completely arbitrary and unfun.

The game Loadout has implemented F2P fairly well, it cordons off cosmetic items to the realm of paid transactions but it gives you enough of the starting real money currency that you can wet your whistle on hats. Most of the other things that show a free to play origin like player experience levels (and a second type of currency that you earn) feel like they're tied into the regular style of xp based progression that's a feature of many existing pay up front games. I guess what I'm trying to say is that it's a shoot em up battle arena that sells you hats like TF2 without being Valve. I guess the jury is out on whether its successful. But I feel like as it is, it's been rather good. I don't think F2P is inherently evil But it does seem like you have to work harder if you don't want to create a bloated grotesque game that kills players via a thousand tiny cuts. Edit: well If we're using moral descriptors I'd at least rate that shitty game style as malevolent. Also I've probably been eating the thesaurus too much. Anyway I think the tiny cuts are all in all conducive to whaling, though I swear I should be adding "Don't shoot imma newb" to every game des. thread I'm in. Anyway TychoCelchuuu I do have an actual question and that is whether there are 'evil' games that aren't shitty and evil. Are the 'evil' whaling games you can identify redeemable with a different f2p philosophy or would those games end up being completely unalike?

Probably the stable job. Being 'on call' in a job you can't say no to can be horrendous. For someone who wants to create a space at home where they're calm/creating it might be better to have a job that has clear boundaries about when it ends. In recent life news after going outside late to investigate a very loud and regular animal cry those that arrived on scene found a heavily impacted chicken doing battle with a hedgehog. The unharmed hedgehog has been left alone while the chicken is being attended to.

I wasn't aiming to call in to question whether they existed. Thanks for yer response!

Heya welcome! I'm just a layman But what was your take on Stephen Hawking's refutation of our current understanding of black holes? What's your take on it; do you think that it affects your work at all or are things hunky dory at your end?