Deadpan

I brought it up mainly because it seemed like a daunting task when I first considered it, but using the noise removal tool in Audacity actually turned out to be super simple. You can run a default Normalizer and Compressor too if you want to get fancy with it, there's a lot of posts on r/letsplay or such where people describe their own methods.

Not getting anywhere on this room escape puzzle.

I isolated the interference you were talking about, ran the timecodes and waveforms through some pattern analysis and was left with this. Thoughts?

+ = ???

I don't know how interested you'd be in getting fancier with the recording setup, but I can't help but notice an issue in these videos that I also ran into early on: the low drone of pc fans overpowering the rest of the audio. If you record your voice separately on Audacity, there's a neat and simple option to filter out noise like that. It would mean having to edit those separate files back together though.

My understanding is more based on the history of the genre (like the writing of Allende, Marquez or Rushdie) than the meaning of those words put next to each other, I wouldn't say it's a setting where magic is everywhere and treated as mundane, such an overt presence of the supernatural just seems to take it into fantasy territory. For me it's more about a realist work, set in the a world that is almost exactly identical to the one we live in but for one small arcane element, which often isn't even the main point of the story, but a lens to examine the mundane part. Say, the story of a bored office worker who discovers that pigeons have a secret language and are holding cabal meetings on the roof of their workplace. Or a coming of age story in which the protagonist discovers some utterly useless magic ability, like being able to change the color of their tongue. Or anything Magic Realism Bot tweets. For me it's not "realist fiction set in a magic world" but "a story set in our world, with a small twist". At least, my impression is that magic realism wants its supernatural components to be noticeable, not feel like a normal part of the universe. It wants to make you think about the magic that could be hiding around you at all times, the secret lives of household objects when you are away, animals that seem to be observing you intently, strange patterns in the traffic that might have meaning...

I'm hoping for The Podpoint Waycast.

Shout out to Ben Abraham for his classic Far Cry 2 Permadeath blog.

They haven't reset saves at all since I started playing ca. half a year ago. After a big update happens you just get a warning that if you upgrade an old save you might not see all the new stuff until you start fresh with the new terrain data, and if you built anything inside the chunks of the world that they messed around with it might be destroyed.

That's the same point I was trying to make though. I don't doubt that you can climb to legend just by playing a fairly economic deck to perfection, even with my own clownish Yogg-Mage I find that the biggest obstacle to getting ahead is actually putting in the time to grind ranked. But for me doing well in the game isn't about where I placed among all players at the end of the month but getting to build fun and interesting decks that can still find some measure of success. That's getting much harder when the gap between a hypothetical card combo I come up with (or happen to draw in a pack) and the optimal late-game combos is this huge. Who cares if you can win games, when the game pretty much limits new players to one playstyle that still feels like an unhealthy situation to me.

The issue for me is that a specific deck archetype shifting and going up in the meta is as well connected to the question of how accessible that archetype is to new players. Traditionally, rush decks are one of the things new players could lean on to stay somewhat competitive: they don't tend to rely on legendaries so at most you have to craft a few epic cards to finish them. The late-game focused Old God decks are pretty much the opposite of that, legendaries comboing off of other legendaries. My impression is that in making these polar opposites competitive with each other, the game ended up cutting out the middle of the curve. Midrange decks aren't really a thing anymore: you can't keep up with pace of aggro decks, and you can't whittle down these late-game decks before they activate. There have always been powerful late-game legendaries, but they didn't necessarily turn the game the instant they dropped on the board. These Old God cards can turn a game so quickly that they put a clear timer on it: if you're not running one of your own, and you might not have the cards to do so, rushing the enemy down feels like the only viable option. I can certainly understand why anybody coming to the game now would feel their decision space is pretty limited. The gap between how much your deck can do late-game with these cards vs. without has become so huge.

I mean, at least Yogg is relatively "balanced" in that you risk being pyroblasted in the face by it, even if the effects tend towards the positive because a lot of spells have targetting requirements that make you draw cards and get secrets while enemy minions get blasted. It doesn't make it any more fun to randomly lose to it, but it also keeps it from being a dominant force in the meta. N'Zoth feels more annoying to me in terms of how much value deathrattle decks get out of it if you can't win before they draw it, especially if your enemy has invested enough time and money to get all the classic deathrattle legendaries. As if Tirion, Sylvanas and Cairne weren't oppressive enough, now you'll have to kill all of them twice.

The game feels like it's leaning into its randomness more and more now though, with Yogg-Saron probably being the worst offender (even though I love playing it).

Have you played Card Crawl yet?

The bigger problem to me is that the entire ladder has become homogenous through the ubiquity of meta-decks pulled from guides. There's tiny differences in what types you run into at what ranks, but even if I don't play for a few months, and get kicked back down to the lowest rank, I immediately run into N'Zoth Paladins playing every Deathrattle legendary from the original game. So the even the bottom of the ladder doesn't provide a good place for new or returning players to start out again, and I'm not sure Casual or Wild are much better.

I decided to turn some of my video making efforts toward Youtube. Here is the first result, me playing some .

I wrote a thing.

I don't think better is the right word. My understanding of Ingress is that it's entirely about fighting for control of areas, and much of the work you put into that can be quickly undone by other players. This is great news for very committed players because there's always something to do, but that constant erosion of progress isn't very enjoyable to more inexperienced or casual players. Apart from the IP nostalgia blast, that's probably why Pokemon GO is doing well with mainstream audiences. It does have some territory control in the gyms, but most of the game is just building up your pokemon collection at whatever pace fits you.

I think this game will continue to do phenomenally as "just" an app to pop open on your commute and the occasional walk around the block. If achievers and competitive types end up bouncing off of it, that will just end up making the experience more enjoyable to basically the entire rest of the population. I've been back in my hometown over the weekend, and players I met during the day complained that there's apparently a crew of pokelords farming since before the official launch who now drive from town to town every night to claim gyms for their team. I was at a gym later knocking out some of the low level pokemon there (or trying since the game glitched out) and indeed a very obnoxiously styled car rolled by with two people inside, who spotted me and shouted "pokemon freak!" and then "fucking noob!". So honestly, it might be a very good thing for this game if traditional gamer types get bored of it soon, because that's the kind of garbage that audience brings.

Or vrooey, in the case of VR interfaces.

Oh hey, thanks for reading my email even though you got pelted with the news a million times. Doy!

Around here we just call them experts or spokespersons.

It feels like the situation could be resolved relatively painlessly, if politicians could find it in them to show backbone. Of course, given a choice between admitting their deceit and sticking to their guns, I fear they may decide to drive the UK off a cliff, just so they can stay in charge of that "Let's fund the NHS!" bus while it falls.

It's not ideal, but consider the precedent they would set by renegotiating the UK's membership. Before the vote, Leave politicians toyed with the idea of using the referendum for leverage to get a better deal, that's the whole reason Cameron was so adamant about this vote being a final decision and not a poker chip to use later on. His replacement might still try to find a way to stay in the EU and save face by bargaining for extra benefits. I think that's what the EU is really worried about. The union can arguably withstand the loss of one country, but if every member begins pressuring it for preferential treatment its going to tear itself apart real quick. Quite obviously, it's just not possibly for every country to be paid out more than it pays in, even if the peace, stability and freedom the union brings makes this more than worth it. As callous as it sounds, I think the EU currently sees it as their best move to let Britain slide into a recession to demonstrate to the rest of its members why they are actually better off inside.