SuperBiasedMan

Oh as far as I know Apple has never dealt with Humble Bundles in any way.

Except that Blow has lamented that more people don't get his game.

Correct, there are no direct downloads or steam keys with this bundle.

That moment of Leland looking into the mirror was so much more devastating on this rewatch. Uh, very mild FWWM spoilers I guess. The Nadine storyline is usually pretty flat, as is the Ed/Norma one to me, really. But every so often there's a moment like this and it breaks through to me as a reminder that these people just live deeply unhappy lives. Ed is trapped in an unwanted marriage with an unstable woman. Norma is married to a convict and watching the man she loves stay locked away from her with another woman. But Nadine. I mean, I really think her storyline is such a shame because the character is so tragic. Her husband doesn't have the guts to leave her but he is willing to openly bemoan her presence around him. Her only way to rectify the state of her life is to first devote her entire existence to making the world's most silent drape runner, then to commit suicide, and then she languishes in a living fantasy of her dream highschool life with the boy she always loved. Sure these are all goofy and played for laughs, but if there's ever a show that warrants looking at the darker side to something, this is it.

I could totally get that you're bothered by the monogamy default, I'm sure I've said as much in some post. But your first post after that seemed to be asserting a high degree of narrow mindedness because of not being willing to communicate with men on a dating site, which is a notoriously toxic environment for dialogue. Maybe that wasn't that big a deal to you, just a trigger for you to launch your post from (it does seem a bit like that) but it came across as a direct response and you stayed pretty firmly in opposition to the rebuttal. I don't think you're arguing for male sexual dominance, but I think you're neglecting to consider the severe gender slant of sexual politics that makes it hard to really have this conversation on a level playing field. If I was bi and being approached by women to ask me to enter into threesomes, I wouldn't automatically feel like the woman probably saw me as a piece of meat or a high level sex toy. The opposite can't be said for dudes approaching women, and that has more to do with the interactions of the genders than it does the concept of polyamory.

This is a very new thought so I may be out of line but I think that even if you have an unprivileged sexuality that doesn't mean you should be entitled to push for people to take your viewpoint. Certainly challenge people being stubborn or close minded, but you can't demand that they try your particular experiences if they really don't want to. It's entirely possible to not want a polyamarous situation for valid reasons, not just because of monogamy normative society.

Totally, my previous point is just one significant factor, not the end of the conversation at all. The thread felt like someone bemoaned the fact that they were often being contacted by men for threesomes because of their sexual orientation even though they explicitly stated that they didn't seek out anything of the sort. Your response was to criticise monogamy normative society, which is not the problem at play there. Society is monogamy normative and presumably impacts upon you in that respect but there's a difference between challenging people's monogamy and impressing sexuality upon them. You didn't seem to respond to the point about being marked as seeking friends in good faith, which made it hard to really have a dialogue with you.

I've enjoyed the aftermath of my first day of work (and a new colleague's birthday) with a couple drinks. I then foolishly posted several things on here. My brain currently says that I did well with those posts, all things considered. And now I realise that's exactly what a too drunk brain would say. I'm going to make pasta.

I think a significant complicating factor in explaining this is how differently (cis) men and women will experience being subject to gaze. Men don't have a constant presence of watching, so the idea will seem harmless, innocuous and even complimentary. While the reality for women is not a positive experience. Frequently men do seem to respond in a way where they're dismissive of the negative aspects because of the assumption that it's easy to brush off, not realising that it gets exponentially harder when so many male encounters are tainted with this. I was plenty guilty of this. Not really perpetrating the problem but failing to grasp it just because I hadn't personally lived it.

I didn't intend for this thread to be about solidifying a concrete pantheon of The Games. I wanted people to give personal impassioned cases for games. Maybe not everyone would enjoy the actual play but you want to communicate what it is about the experience really makes you treasure your particular game/s.

Looking for friends is not always that you only want friends, sure. But it is 100% a signal to say that you don't want other people making moves on you. Polyamory had a bad rap among mainstream but that is distinct from sexual aggressiveness/sexual imposition. You can't assume your feelings onto others, you have to take their word for what they want and be as accepting as you can. Otherwise you're just pushing your feelings onto them. Suddenly my own point makes me feel the need to explain that this is my take and I'm not trying to actually speak for Apple Cider or anyone else.

I'm gonna try out those tweaks and see if I can still play. We could email or Dropbox the file pretty easily. They're not that big, right? Also we should totally post about this elsewhere on the forums so other people can follow along who normally ignore the strategy board.

Bonus points, asking the shitty anecdote question to them provoke a poor response and criticise that response.

It broke totally in 2 for me because it was presenting as if the whole world and main plot were impacted by my choices, but then 2 entirely undermined that due to the practical necessity of not having multiple starting points in the game.

Well if you examine why cheating is wrong it's because it seems like it's a breach of trust that the other person is uncomfortable with. So you could say that polyamory is the same act but given consent, so that there is no breach of trust. That obviously means polyamory requires very explicit consent and boundaries drawn but does not necessarily need to apply to all parties. You can have one sided polyamory if it feels a comfortable situation. I think it's worth asking why it makes you uncomfortable though Griddlelol. You may not know yourself but reasons can vary between all sorts of sources. And if you're comfortable with partaking but not allowing, maybe there's some problematic reason like sexism, insecurity or jealousy. It doesn't seem fair to ask for something your partner doesn't get without fully committing to it yourself. Though I'm aware you're not asking for it, at least it seems as if you're remaining monogamous. This probably reads as a criticism of you now, but really I'm just trying to prompt some deeper thought about your motivation.

The best way to check how you take criticism would probably be to actually start criticising you in the interview and gauging your response.

Totally, not saying that author's intent is the be all and end all of a game's success. I was only speaking about criticism of Blow and his intended message. I entirely enjoyed playing the game just as a game. The underlying narrative mostly escaped me, I read the ending as purely a feminist point about the power dynamics of being male in a relationship with a woman and it being problematic. But I could tell that reading glossed over some text passages, and when I tried to read more thoughts about it I found that the response was muddled at best. I'm 100% certain this is because he thinks that the message is best conveyed by the game itself, and that explaining it in words is redundant when the message he spent years crafting exists for people to hear.

I was totally aware of choices not mattering in the cause and effect sense, and that made me appreciate the choices for the responses of the characters and the micro level storytelling going on. I essentially roleplayed the game, shaping a Lee in my head as best I could and making the kind of choices he'd make.

I definitely think there's too much of an anti-Blow contingent that got annoyed when the meaning of the game didn't present itself to them conveniently. But at the same time, as an artist you have to decide both what you want to communicate and who you will communicate it to. With that dual goal in mind, you need to figure out how best to say what you want based on the content of the message and the audience receiving it. If the message is not fulfilling to the audience, whether that's based on the audience themselves or the content, there's a certain degree of responsibility to which the artist is beholden. I'm not that familiar with Blow's output to know how much he's thought about how he should have presented the game to make it clearer for the people he wanted to talk to, but I think it's fair to say that he did not 100% communicate what he wanted and he could have tried different methods of getting it across that could have done better. This is just how I look at it personally, but I definitely think it's a valid way to criticise Blow to an extent. But it is also difficult to make a game that's meaningful if you're not going to tailor it to a framework gamers are used to operating in.

Yup Grim Fandango, Monkey Island, Day of the Tentacle. I'm currently unsure whether to rectify that with the updated version or not. I probably will go with this rerelease, given the constant praise it gets for being faithful.

Portal totally works, I meant unmissable in the sense that it offers something special, whether that's a message, a game mechanic, or some little thing you think it did in a unique way. The point is that you feel like people shouldn't miss out on it, not that it's "Unmissable" -IGN.com

I have put 920 hours into TF2. Part of that was from wanting a hobby that made me feel skilled during a unemployed and unoccupied portion of my life. So I think the number is a relatively meaningless "oops" but the actual motivation for playing so much for that part of my life was an actual cause of concern. (I also suck at my endlessly played game) In totally opposite news, I start my new job tomorrow. I don't know if I'm more worried about doing poorly at the job or doing well enough that they're willing to rely on me and put me into a position where I can do real damage.

The game seemed to be about pursuing something so doggedly that you lose sight of your true goal, so in that sense it seems fitting that getting all the macguffin collectible items fails to tell you anything about the character's narrative.

A heads up, I may need to defer my place. My laptop seems to be overheating a lot, especially with Crusader Kings 2. I'm trying to play a bit to get ready but the attempts have not gone well. I'll let you all know if I need to be pushed back as soon as I can tell clearly. I don't wanna start into the file then have to give up my place after a week or anything like that.

It's a good thing you're here now, in the bastion of Internet safety that is the Idle Thumbs forums where we'd never discuss trivial poop related stuff.