Ninety-Three

I've been trying a permadeath run (Zweihander plus Sunbro armour) and my biggest obstacle isn't so much bosses as it is my tendency to play like a berserker against normal enemies. I keep dying in stupid easy places because I'm not used to having to be careful against random hollows (normally I'd rather play fast and loose and make the occasional easy corpse-run). I've sunk a few hours into it, died a bunch of times, and I think I'll give it a few more hours to try to unlearn my bad habits. Is there anyone else that's tried permadeath that can offer some advice? PS: If I get that far, I have no idea how I'm going to deal with those two archers in Anor Londo (you know the two). I might have to pick up the Hidden Body ring, does that have enough range to be useful?

"Spiderman game" seems like it would be right up there with "rollercoaster simulator" for inducing VR-related nausea.

If the machine is found guilty of murder, do we give it the electric chair?

Almost certainly. It would be bad business to make any kind of stronger statement, because that would result in lost sales. That kind of principles over business decision is something you might see out of a smaller developer, but I'd be genuinely shocked to see it out of the risk-averse AAA industry. It seems obvious to me that until GG's membership shrinks to the point of becoming a historical footnote, every company where decisions are made by profit maximizing execs will maintain an official policy of "No comment".

I saw Left Shark live, I liked it for the five second broadcast delay before it was cool.

Holy shit. They saw this: And took it seriously. I wish there was any way to tell to what extent they're being genuinely stupid vs willfully misinterpreting things.

I take that to mean that the number of trees that constitutes a forest changes based on how drunk you are.

My thinking was that if the hashtag is not attracting bile above the level of background radiation, then participating in the hashtag isn't silently endorsing rabid hate any more than participating in Twitter is silently endorsing rabid hate, since it happens at the same rate on Twitter in general. I think a lot of that comes from the perception that 50 Shades has been more successful than it deserves to be. Quality isn't perfectly correlated with success, but 50 Shades is way more successful than it is good (and that's not even calling it bad, it's so successful that there's a lot of room for it to be good, just not that good). To be cynical, that fills people with a spiteful desire to tear it down. To be only slightly less cynical, that fills people with a pedantic desire to tear it down: "No, it's terrible, and I need everyone to understand that."

Because they're hoping it's been long enough that people forgot how bad it got? I wrote that as snark, but the more I look at it the more it makes sense. Season 1 was good, after that things went downhill with every season, would people think better of Heroes years after the end rather than shortly after? To engage in a bit of pop psychology: The primacy effect (even accounting for the recency effect on the last, awful, season) says yes.

You're right, strictly speaking the band was always cool, and it was just that most people didn't think that because they didn't know the band existed, much like how ice cream cake was always an objectively clever idea, but it couldn't be widely recognized as such until the idea itself was widely heard of. However, I think you're being too literal, when people say "I liked X before it was cool", I always interpret it as "I liked X before it was perceived as cool", which in turn expands to "I liked X before it reached certain threshold of people thinking it was cool".

Having searched for the hashtag plus certain hateful words, I now see what you were talking about. I'm not sure what to make of the fact that I saw virtually no hate in my search of just the hashtag. I searched mostly the most recent tweets, so maybe it was more hateful yesterday than today? Seems unlikely. I'd need to do a more thorough survey and make sure my sample was sound, but I have a theory that the hate on that hashtag is just the background radiation of the internet: Twitter is that bilious on average, the hashtag isn't drawing any bile in particular. I tried to avoid discussing the validity of the criticism because that seemed like a tangent, but it is a discussion I'd be interested in having. I actually firmly defend the books (on the grounds of subject matter, writing quality is a different issue). The books depict an abusive relationship, but I wouldn't say they endorse it, except insofar as the narrative implicitly endorses it by giving it a happy ending. That's the same level of endorsement as every violent videogаme. And by violent I don't mean "Blood splatters and chainsaw swords", I mean any Video game in which situations are resolved through violence, even sprite-based JRPGs or RTSs. I think you're only allowed to have as much of a problem with 50 Shades as you have with violence in videogаmes. That's not to say you're not allowed to have a problem, there's a valid argument to be made that both videogаmes and 50 Shades strongly endorse their subject matter and that's bad, but I think it's internally inconsistent to say that one is bad and not the other.

I would say that a thing hasn't "become cool" until at least X people say it's cool, so if you were person number X minus one to discover it, then you liked it before it was cool. X is of course a hazy and undefinable concept in the same way as "How many trees constitute a forest?", but I can say you're person number X times one tenth, and then it's clearly possible to be in before it's cool. That's how it works when a thing propagates slowly (say, a local band which slowly rises to prominence, and you saw on their first gig), so I don't see why it should be any different when the thing propagates quickly.

It's definitely immature, she told the internet to ask her questions, and people started asking slightly wittier versions of "Why do you suck so much?". Regarding hateful internet misogyny, I think I disagree with your premise though. I scanned a few hundred tweets under the hashtag and almost every non-meta tweet I saw was addressing either a specific flaw of the book, or asking generally "Why is your book so bad / Why are you such a bad writer?". There were a handful that were just being silly or otherwise off-topic: "How are babies made?", and I saw exactly one that seemed like the kind of internet bile you're talking about: "You know nothing, EL James." Everything other than that one tweet stayed within the bounds of insulting her as an incompetent author, not as a bad human. What exactly is the rabid hate you think this snark is endorsing?

What exactly is going on? I hate Twitter's format and can't follow that mess.

To solve that problem, I tried playing without upgrades. Mostly, it only makes the large battles harder, where the absence of the upgraded bullet time bow and your lower finisher output is felt. It pushes you towards a stealthier approach, and the game's stealth is just too loose for that to be good.

I'm a bit fuzzy on the details but it basically means that you can experience romantic and sexual attraction to all genders which goes beyond man, woman, or genderqueer, etc. in scope. The top google result put it better: "not limited in sexual choice with regard to biological sex, gender, or gender identity." I always understood it as "Bisexual, except explicitly allowing for attraction to complicated/nonbinary stuff". Also, I find it really weird that when ever pansexual comes up, the phrase "attraction to genders" is used. No one is attracted to a gender are they? A biological woman who identifies as a man (not transitioned) would be attractive to people who are attracted to women, and not to people who are attracted to men.

I uh... don't get it. A woman named "Anna Anthropy" being referred to by her last name would be "Miss Anthropy": Misanthropy. I guess the same way internet streaming video hasn't replaced TV. It's strictly better, but some people are slow to change and/or technophobes.

The only obscene enemy I ever encountered was a guy who was immune to ranged, immune to stealth, immune to being jumped over, and had a shield so you had to jump over him to attack. He was literally invincible until I realized that ranged drain builds combo, and spent about two minutes chaining drains into combat finishers to kill him. Other than him, every enemy was either vulnerable to combat finishers, in which case I'd build combo off random orcs and pump the boss full of finishers; or they didn't have whatever the super uncounterable/parry/whatever ability was, and so once I killed all the other orcs they had no hope of damaging me as I slowly basic attacked them down to zero. Until I ran into the "must be jumped over/can't be jumped over" enemy, I assumed that certain traits were mutually exclusive (like being extra good in basic combat + immune to finishers) to avoid producing anything really stupid. I may have just gotten lucky.

Does "queer" mean something special? I've always understood it to be a catchall term for LGBT, a way of saying "Everything other than straight", but I have been seeing it used in ways that suggest that's not the only meaning. The biggest thing is that I've heard people identifying themselves simply as queer, which seems like a strange use of the term for the same reason it would sound strange to say "I am a person of colour" rather than the more specific and equally concise "I am [insert race here]".

I just finished Waking Mars. I don't have many interesting things to say about most of the game (it was full of interesting ideas with not-super-interesting implementations), but ART's dialogue was incredibly adorable. I'm actually considering replaying it just so I can record it all. A quick Google told me no, but does anyone know of someone on the internet who has already done so, and perhaps posted it?

I don't understand the point of the Nemesis system. Like, why is it supposed to be good? I didn't have much engagement with it, because almost all the chiefs I faced died the first time around, but whenever a chief survived and leveled up, it didn't feel that significant because I didn't tend to think of the chiefs as people or discreet enemies. Their traits were never significant enough that I would say to myself "I'm going to hunt the nearest chief", then change my mind because the nearest guy was a badass, and by time bodyguards became a big thing, I was powerful enough that I didn't have to worry about picking them off before facing their boss, I'd just attack the boss's stronghold and kill his bodyguards in the ensuing 4v1. I also want to say that the mind control thing was a huge letdown. When I got it, I made it a personal mission to mind control every single named orc, and that manifested as simply going around hunting the nearest orc, and finishing him off with mind control rather than a KO. My mind controlled army only really paid off in one fight where the boss brought in three bodyguards, two of which came already controlled. When I finally had them all, it was a huge anticlimax, because there was no payoff, no reason for me to have done it, and the game didn't recognize my accomplishment (the plot really doesn't make sense when you own the entire orc command structure). In fact I realized that I'd have been better off killing them because that way I'd get their sweet rune drops. Tangent warning: Mordor is also just fundamentally looser than Arkham's. You can keep your combo despite being struck, and with runes your combo meter takes forever to time out. You can crouchwalk up to an orc who is looking straight at you, across an open field, and you'll still have time to stealth-takedown him before he alerts anyone. When you have bullet time, the bow isn't even a weapon, because you don't fight with it, you just use it as a magic device for converting arrows into free kills. Arkham combat had a way of recognizing and rewarding perfect play that you get in very few games, and more than the looseness just being bad, it lost Mordor that recognition of perfection, which I think is the major problem.

Desktop Dungeons, Plants vs Zombies. I also like playing various roguelike games in ~15 minute segments because I enjoy the sense of progress, but most roguelikes (true roguelikes, as in turn-based dice-rolly dungeon crawls) get dull if I play too long.

I haven't bought this game, but I've seen a bit of gameplay footage, and I'm left very curious about something. How does the game end? Not narratively, I want to know what game-mechanical action you take which causes the credits to roll. Is there a particular clip or set of clips that end the game? Is there an "I figured it out, the butler did it" button?

I had a surprisingly strong panic reaction to that too, and I'm not sure why. I haven't played Sam, so I don't have the suicide guy point of reference, I want to blame the musical cue which immediately put my brain into horror game mode. Do you have any insight into why it panicked you?

Is there a way to sell, or even discard Trinkets? I've got about two pages of them, and it's a pain to scroll to the bottom of the Trinkets screen so that I can switch my Sun Rings between active and resting teams. A few: "Is it just me or...?" questions: Sun rings/cloaks are by far the best equipment, right? Given that I already want to keep my torch above 75, they're the only item with zero downside, and their upside is really quite strong. Are Eldritch Altars just bad news? I've interacted with over a dozen, and every outcome has been either neutral or negative. Is there anything stronger than three Bounty Hunters? I mucked around for a while trying to find a party with inter-class synergy, but since Bounty Hunter essentially synergizes with itself thanks to Mark, my favorite party is now three Hunters and a Vestal for support.