thefncrow

On Venture Bros, there was an interview that talked about the end of this season, and it mentions the confusion about the Gargantua special thing: It's too bad, but I think I'm on board with that. Those last two episodes are really good and it would be a shame for them to force a finale they haven't quite gotten figured out rather than produce those episodes. They say that what was planned for the finale will currently be the start of next season instead of doing it as a special.

I don't think they've ever really said that they're going to do an Arcade mode.

I'd say it's less that the final tutorial is "more set-up" than it is that the military base probably requires less from them. I mean, it's one big building, some fences, the jet, and then office furniture. Also, the mission being set at night helps, because it means there's a lot more dark areas that hide how incomplete it looks. When you've done that mission a couple of different ways and have spent time scaling the building, the unfinishedness of the main building stands out a lot more. The first tutorial scenario doesn't look all that unfinished aside from the boat, and that looks super unfinished because they don't have a body of water at all and because it's a daytime scenario that highlights the unfinished look.

Who pays is a primary/caucus distinction. Primaries are state-run and they pick up the tab. They run a single primary election for any and all political parties who wish to participate. Caucuses are private events paid for by the political party that's hosting. Whenever you see an instance of only one of the major parties having a primary, it's because the other party has opted for a caucus instead. You won't have two different primary elections in the same cycle for the same state but for different political parties.

New Hitman is so good. I've played the Paris level like 8 different ways by now. On the more elaborate tutorial mission, it's still a half-constructed scenario setup like the boat, it's just that the fakeness of the military base is a little less obvious. But if you look at the exteriors of the building, you can notice that it's very unfinished, because it's still just a training room that this Assassination Agency put together for your test. The opportunities stuff is a little too spelled out for the player, but you have three settings for those you can modify in the game options. "On" is the system that's set by default, where you can choose to track an opportunity and it'll just give you a bit of text specifying the next step and a HUD indicator pointing you to exactly what you have to do. There's a "Minimal" setting that still gives you the text description for the next step but not the HUD indicator leaving it up to you to locate it. You can also just turn them all the way off. I would imagine you still get the conversations with the opportunities turned off, but I don't know. One of the playthroughs of Paris is so good, but since the kills are the thing this game has to offer, I'll put it in spoilers: The game also has these missions called Escalations which are really interesting. They're structured as sets of 5 missions, all on the same map. When you start the escalation, it'll give you an objective like "Kill Guy A with Weapon B while wearing Disguise C." You do it and exit, mission over. Now it goes to the second mission, which will ask you to do the same thing, but now you have to fetch the contents of a safe. Each successive mission will add another target, or add another objective, or add conditions on how you play. For example, the escalation on that Russian military base tutorial level has you killing this one guard on level 3, and there's a fairly simple way to kill this guy via an accident death. Then you go to level 4, and it adds a condition that all bodies must be hidden within 90 seconds of your kill and cannot be seen. Your accident death doesn't work anymore, because there's no way to hide the body after you've made him fall to his death, so you have to calcuate a new plan to integrate the new condition. The episodic nature of the game seems so weird at first, but playing it, it feels somewhat natural. If you got this released like a traditional game, you'd play each of these scenarios once and move on. Releasing the game episodically like this encourages people to replay the same level and actually use all the options the level has available. I totally get the structure after playing it. Also, when you started to talk about "that face robot", the thing that instantly came to mind and took me like 30 seconds to realize it wasn't what you were talking about was this: https://media.giphy.com/media/jM66C09QgTon6/giphy.gif

The biggest thing I'll say about the final mission is that snipers are useful, but high ground is very, very scarce and sometimes just not present. The final map is shockingly flat. If you've been equipping snipers with Spider Suit over Warden Armor, I'd go with Warden Armor here, because that grapple is not going to be as effective. If you have the Wraith Suit, then make your decision on that or Warden Armor based on whether you would prefer the dodge abilities and Wraith power or the point of armor. You do not get a chance to heal between missions, but the game lets you deploy wounded soldiers for the final fight, so you can take them with you. I assume it may incur a minor health penalty, but I didn't notice.

My experience with that was that once I completed the research and got the cutscene you refer to, Avatar progress sped up considerably. Maybe it was just awkward timing, but after that cutscene, the Avatar project jumped up 3 blocks within a week and a half. It was enough that it made me take a hard look and decide I didn't really have time for any significant further research, and I rolled on into the ending.

That's the one.

Depending on what you've done or not so far, you may have seen a Shadow Chamber research project that you cannot quite yet do. Let me suggest to you that if you need to grind up a 2nd Psi soldier, you should refrain from doing that research until you are ready. (Completing that research project is essentially a point of no return. The game gives you a point of no return warning when you go to do the mission it opens up, but the real point is really before you've unlocked that mission. You can continue to do development after it, but there's a change that makes doing that less viable.)

I'm personally not a huge fan of the Clintons at this point, but yeah, laying blame on them for DADT is a big misunderstanding of the problem. Bill Clinton wanted to just outright remove the prohibition on homosexuals in the military full stop, and it was going to be within his power as the President to do so as the prohibition was just a part of the armed services regulations, which would be within Clinton's purview to alter. When Clinton took office, he had opposition within his own party to doing that, and Congress began looking at taking the existing provision and codifying it in law, removing Clinton's ability to undo the ban. DADT was the compromise that came from negotiations with the people who wanted to codify that bit of bigotry. The changes were going to be added to the yearly must-pass Defense Authorization bill. This is a favored pressure tactic because the defense authorization is the appropriations bill that funds the armed forces. Any time someone wants to do something involving the armed forces that would encounter pushback from the other half of Congress or from the President, you tie it into the Defense Authorization and then club them over the head with "They tried to stop Our Good Military Men And Women from getting paid!" if they act to block it. DADT was basically Clinton wringing every last bit of compromise he could get out of a situation that could have very easily could have just been Congress taking the power to remove the ban out of the President's hands and retaining every last bit of the existing prohibition.

Not as much as you might think. None of the Democratic primary contests are winner take all, they all assign delegates proportionally, some of which is done by splits at the Congressional District level and the state level. The result is that 50.x/49.x and such splits will come out as damn near ties in pledged delegates. Bernie needs a 58/42 split in his favor of the remaining pledged delegates to pass Hillary. If he were to run the board and win every primary left but only by 5% each, he would still come out behind. Hillary's lead is actually quite large, given the circumstances.

FYI, there was no such rule change where a talking filibuster was made no longer a requirement. People assume that there had to be a standard of talking filibusters because of things like Mr. Smith Went To Washington, but the talking filibuster has never been required. All you need are 1 objector who remains in the Senate chamber and 41 Senators who are disinclined to vote for cloture. There is not and never has been a mechanism in the Senate's rules to automatically move to a vote simply because no one wants to speak on a bill under consideration. In order to move to a vote, you have to actually motion to close debate. In the original Senate rules, there existed a Motion to Move the Previous Question, which, if carried, halted debate and moved you to voting on the bill under consideration. In 1806, Aaron Burr suggested that this motion was irrelevant (it had not been used in the short history of the Senate) and moved to strike it from the rules, which happened. This inadvertently created the filibuster, because now the only method for closing debate was for the Senate to come to a unanimous consensus that debate was over, and any single Senator who wished to remain in the chamber and object to closing debate could keep it open indefinitely. Eventually, cloture was added to the rules in 1917, adding a method by which 2/3rds of Senators present and voting could cap the remaining debate and restrict what could be discussed. That was amended in 1975 to change it to 3/5ths of Senators seated, which is where the modern 60 vote figure comes from. Talking filibusters happen because Senators want to be seen as standing up for their constituents, nothing more and nothing less. Actual filibustering has never required such theatrics.

I really liked this, despite having zero interest when it was announced. What I like out of Borderlands is much more the loot-driven FPS stuff than any of the story stuff, especially anything involving Handsome Jack, so this sounded like something I shouldn't really bother playing. But I heard enough good things about it to check it out, and man, it was great.

Probably the most worrying thing to me in that trailer is that it exposes the idea that they apparently gave their white female leads all advanced science backgrounds of some sort and the black woman is given the "street knowledge" role. You really couldn't have flipped it so you didn't fall into that trope? If you want to create a split and say something about practical vs theoretical knowledge, you couldn't have made the black character one of your science background characters? It might not be that bad in the movie, hopefully, but the way that trailer is playing it is troubling.

The Nintendownload X-Press was so good. I must have listened to that episode with Special Guest Rick "The Ricker" Peterson like 6-7 times. My favorite part is The Ricker talking about donating cocaine to charity:

I get the same thing from Primer, because I was going to UTD at the time he was shooting on and around campus.

Yeah, the game feels really good. Very much enjoying this so far. Went with the PC version because of the cross-platform play and also I already owned a 360 stick. FighterID is thefncrow. Also, the in-game currency being Fight Money is so good.

In the last East video, they see that ship and it's already completed that escape vector that he was on when the West crew booted up the game. So they won't even have the chance to pull that move with jetpacking back into a Kerbin orbit. I look forward to seeing how that goes.

If I'm not mistaken, they got that craft to the Mun, got off the Mun, and then ran out of fuel after they got an escape trajectory from Mun's gravity. So, yeah, very elliptical orbit, and the Mun probably caught them and caused the ship to enter into the solar orbit.

An interesting bit of info about Project BEAST gets dropped at the very end of the Beastcast this week. Apparently, the episode with Scott Manley is just with Drew, and none of the east coast people are going to be watching that video, as not to taint the rescue missions they're going to be launching. Which is actually going to be amazing, to actually show everyone how this is supposed to work, then go back to see how the east coast folks try to solve the same problem.

I didn't know who he was either and had to get an explanation. In short, he's a Kerbal ringer.

What It Is videos are typically them talking over pre-recorded video. So, like, they got to see and record a gameplay demo but weren't recording real-time audio for a QL:EX, or they were at an event and captured video of them playing but couldn't do a QL on the spot. They were called "Ask Me Anything" before they were "What It Is", and I think those things might be handled under Unfinished now because that's how they did some Halo 5 coverage that would usually go into the "What It Is" format. I half expect it's actually a QL and using the old name is just to play into the joke.

There is going to be a 30 for 30 documentary on John Scott and that All Star Game real soon. And to think that the NHL for so long seemed dead set against that happening.

From my recollection when I looked into this when it was starting, the material itself is donated to researchers, and the people who are donating it may ask for a small amount of money to cover transportation costs. (Right now, PP isn't even asking for transportation costs to be covered because a bunch of people were pointing to that tiny amount of money and acting as though that was a violation of the ban on selling fetal tissue even though it wasn't.) Pretty much, you violate the ban on selling tissues if you end up making money out of the deal, and you violate the ban on buying tissue if you offer any money beyond covering the costs of transport.

One of the big things is that stand-up comedians who haven't worked at improv can have this interview style where it feels like they're just burning time until the host can lob them a softball that they can use to launch into a prepared bit. And that is death for podcasts because it doesn't really advance the conversation at all. When the bit is over, the host either tries to dig in further to a topic where the prepared material has been expended, or the host resets and the stand-up goes back to looking for an opening to do another prepared bit.