Deadpan

Our v's are generally pronounced as f's.The v sound you are used to from English is used in our w's, Meanwhile, here's a bit of contemporary Deutschrap to feast your studious ears on.

I forgot to document it, but I ended up making egg-in-a-hole tonight. With some barbecue ketchup and cucumber slices, it was a quick and easy snacktime.

So, I beat the game for the first time recently with a Katana DEX build, now I'm playing around with an INT build for sorceries and such. I'm currently at the Cathedral of the Deep, spent some time helping others and using the ember from successful coop runs to clear the area together with some summons. The last run before going for the boss was particularly productive, unlocking the final shortcut as well as going up into the rafters and killing both giants. Now during that time, as it happens, we got invaded something like three times, I think. I'm generally of the opinion that people who are looking for a fair fight should put down PvP summon signs instead of invading, but I'll still duel invaders one on one without estus if, for instance, I'm just hanging around the bonfire waiting to get summoned. If I summoned some people myself though and we're in the middle of getting shit done, I'll just gang up on invaders to get rid of them quickly. Since I'm with two other players, we make quick work of the first two invaders. The third person comes in while we're fighting the knights near the boss entrance. I'm hanging back a bit to cast spells, get hit from behind by a halberd, roll out of the way of the next attacks while they chase me, then we kill this invader too. A little while later, shortly after beating the boss, I get an invite to this Steam Group by the last invader. Despite my better judgement, I also had a pretty revealing conversation with them before blocking. Somehow a person with 1,000 hours logged in DS and 500 in DS3 cannot fathom why anybody would have trouble fighting them on their own, or have no interest in doing so. I guess this is pretty much a textbook example of what Chris Franklin talked about in regards to . Mainly though, I am stunned at the effort some are willing to put in to find a way to vent their gamer elitism. No option to yell at others in game for "playing it wrong"? Just send them a mocking message out of game. You're having trouble chastising all those "weak and cheap" players individually? Why not maintain a Steam Group specifically dedicated to ridiculing those who beat you unfairly, or fail to meet your bizarre standards in some other way.

If anyone is looking for places to write, games twitter some time ago collaborated on this spreadsheet of places that pay for writing. It's a neat resource.

When I asked this question on Twitter recently, the recommendations I got were Lightworks or Davinci Resolve. Didn't really make any progress so I can't speak to the quality of these though.

Another thing that I've been reminded of now in playing against it is the Legendary that resummons all your deathrattle minions that died in the game. This one probably adds to my impression that there are more and more decks now built on 10 cost cards that will instantly swing the game in a big way (on top of old cards like Anyfin is Possible).

I happened to draw Yogg-Saron twice in the free packs so I made a Mage deck with it. It screws me over with the random spells about as often as it helps, but I still had a strange run up to rank 11 with it, which is now adjusting down again.

In what I've played so far at least, that doesn't seem to be the effect. Not only are there still a lot of removal and board clear tools, now there's also a lot of C'thun minions that are on or ahead of the power curve, so it seems relatively easy to trade even with those and still slowly get ahead as you buff your big tentacle monster. This seems to be especially true of Warrior decks (and Priest to a slightly lesser extent), who have a lot of great tools right now to just armor up, clear minions through brawl, shield bash, etc., and then just play and recycle C'thun when the time is right. For a lot of decks it seems flat out impossible to ever get far enough ahead to outpace that level of recovery. So weirdly, just after they got rid of Grim Patron Warrior for winning out of nowhere with no opportunity for counterplay, this style of play is back and stronger than ever.

I'm only about ten hours in and I'm not sure if easier/harder is the right metric, but Dark Souls 3 definitely has a different vibe. It feels like from Dark Souls 1 to 2 to Scholar of the First Sin the games shifted away from duelling individual enemies to controlling groups of them, and that inevitably makes fights much messier because there's a much bigger delta of randomness in what moves enemies do and how well they path towards you when you are dealing with entire hordes. Now Dark Souls 3 throws in even more tiny but agile enemies and turns off Poise, suddenly fights can feel very snowball-y. It feels like a lot of enemies in the game can be easily overwhelmed if you bumrush them with a big enough sword or big enough group of coop buddies and just lay into them without ever giving them a chance to move. But if you don't manage to kill them immediately then suddenly they are somersaulting all over the place giving you hell with their fast sweeping attacks. So it seems to me at least, like the difference between going through certain areas alone or having an extra person around has gone wayyyyyyyyy up thanks to these changes. A lot of these crowded fights seem completely overwhelming on your own but become almost trivial if you have company. The Poise changes probably also add to the frustration of invasions. Previously you could somewhat negate the fleet-footed antics of pvp tryhards with big ass armor, but now they can always stun-lock you into oblivion.

My stream is at https://www.twitch.tv/joekllr I've been meaning to get back to it. Mostly roguelikes and Dark Souls in the past, but I got some old garbage games lined up I thought about broadcasting.

Here's my burger attempt, made last week before I left town for a few days. The patties are a mixture of corn and beans, onions and herbs (thyme included for accuracy) and some breadcrumbs. The wrapping is a simple roll with pickles and apricot chutney, and a side of potato salad. I don't think I got the consistency quite right though. First I fried some of the mixture in a pan, but the breadcrumbs quickly started to soak the oil and left me with a weird sludge and some undercooked burgers. The next day I formed the rest of the mixture into patties and baked them in the oven instead. Perhaps that's a bit of an easy way out, but in my case it provided much better results. The burgers I made the first night

For my pie, I basically cut a few corners following this recipe since I didn't quite have all the ingredients and shops were still closed. I didn't have a lot of potatoes left, so I added extra breadcrumbs and soy milk to make the topping more like a puree than a mash. Didn't look like I had enough to cover everything, but it spread out nicely in the oven and the crust turned out delicious. My filling was mainly lentils and corn, with onions, carrots, sundried tomatoes and garlic for taste. I used a little too much salt on top of some salty ingredients, so I was chugging a lot of water alongside it, but I'm still pretty happy with how it turned out. Before putting it in the oven: After putting it in the oven:

The pre-election gets a lot of coverage around here, mostly with a tone of "Can you believe this Trump guy?", which is a little hypocritical given we have our own breed of blatantly racist douchebag politicians who never get grilled quite so thoroughly lest they accuse state-funded media of bias (which they still do, naturally). I don't know if this has been discussed yet, but I had a chance recently to read this transcript of Trump's meeting with the Washington Post, and it's sort of amazing. At times he comes pretty close to making sense - not in a way that I agree with, but not completely disconnected from reality either - but then he immediately follows up in a way that shows he has no concept of nuance even when you give him plenty of space to elaborate (of course it's also interspersed with the usual grandstanding about how he makes great deals and everybody loves him). There's this gem from the end of the interview for instance, in response to his dismissal of climate change. That honestly reads like he just now realized that nuclear weapons exist. Sure they are a problem, but they have been for a long time and are definitely less so now than during the decades of constant global standoff. You can't really make a point like this a) as if it invalidated climate concerns 2) without clarifying that they are still a problem despite the Cold War being over, or you just sound like an undergrad thinking they're so deep for waxing philosophical about Mutual Assured Destruction.

Open-ended games often bring with them a kind of analysis paralysis where, faced with a million things you could do, you get overwhelmed and don't do a single thing. So I certainly understand Nick's frustration, but my experience probably couldn't have been further from his. I finally picked up the game just now and played through some four days, and I really enjoy the tiny clearing I am tending to so far. As predicted on the cast, it only took a few minutes to get rid of weeds to the point where I could start farming. The game gives you a starter pack of 15 turnip seeds, so I'm not sure how Nick ended up watching a single plant grow, unless he sold his seeds to pay for more stale bread to munch in bed. I also learned that you can earn money by fishing or picking vegetables growing in the wild, so it really doesn't seem that hard to flourish in this game, assuming you are willing to leave your virtual house.

Tempted to get this, but I'm not sure when I will. I've been burned by that server stuff.

What I particularly enjoy is that they made both The Matrix and V for Vendetta, two of the movies most commonly appropriated by MRA dillweeds, whose hateful garbage is forever undermined by the fact that their creators clearly reject the norms they believe in.

Here's another Witness opinion. Whoo! Every game requires you to learn its language, but also some languages are easier to learn than others based on their proximity to languages you already know and the kinds of instruction available to you. In the kind of genre framework that most games exist in, these languages often have a lot in common with each other: the syntax generally works the same and most of the vocabulary goes back to a shared ancestor. There's always some exceptions and idiomatic constructions you need to pick up of course, but what this generally means is that the first time you dive into a particular genre there will be all sorts of new stuff learn and any time after that you can draw on what you already know in general about "games like this". The Witness doesn't really do that. It's definitely an advantage if you already know how to navigate a 3d environment, but most of the game is entirely its own logical language, that you painstakingly intuit from environmental clues and feedback and then never use again in any game ever. This kind of disconnectedness is a nice way of making sure the experience is roughly the same no matter how experienced of a player you are, but it also feels like Jon Blow's way of arrogantly pooh-poohing game literacy as a stupid thing that won't get you anywhere when faced with a real challenge. So I do think it's fair to complain about The Witness' somewhat selfish demand to master a skill that is not transferable to anything else in life (like other games). If Portal amounts to a few classes with a robotic-sounding language coach and Crusader Kings is equal to reading a textbook on your own, The Witness feels like one of these linguistic exercises where you try to draw conclusions about the grammar of a fictional language based on sample sentences.

This took a lot of time but was also really fun. A great opportunity to try something I always wanted to make myself. My dough was based on this recipe, but maybe I shouldn't have followed it so closely cause I have a ton of leftover dough now. Guess I'm making pizza again this week. For sauce I just made what I usually serve with pasta: fresh tomatoes, basil and balsamic vinegar. I didn't plan on storing the fresh yeast I bought, so I ended up using most of it, a lot more than the recipe asked for and consequently the dough ended up rising to about 2-3cm in height in the finished product. I actually really liked that though, it's a nicer balance than huge toppings with nothing to support them (the direction most take-out pizza seems to go) and allowed the dough to be both crispy and chewy. Pictures! Sauce: Dough (before resting, after which it almost filled that bowl): Rolled out tough (accidental egg shape for the Easter season): With toppings (before baking): The (partially eaten) result:

Speculating about ways to improve the voting system is interesting enough, but it seems like reality is moving in the opposite direction with voter ID laws and campaign finance rulings. As an outsider, I wonder how much of this is due to ingrained cultural notions of US exceptionalism. It feels like there's this expectation to balance any kind of criticism with a reminder that the US is obviously still number one, and the "world's greatest democracy". Is this big ole mess allowed to stay messy and get even messier because political figures can't speak harsh truths for fear of being perceived as unpatriotic? The weird thing about Trump is that Austria, too, recently saw a clownish, old, rich guy with silly opinions try to enter the politics, and it was a total failure. Maybe that speaks to a different political climate, maybe we got lucky that he wasn't as charismatic as Trump, or maybe local xenophobes are just satisfied sticking with the nationalist parties that have consistently been making gains here.

I picked this up recently and it's scratching my ARPG itch quite well. I liked Titan Souls and this keeps some of my favorite ideas from there intact, like how enemies that drop particular weapons also use them (just had a tough fight against a human boss cause he had a rare pistol that could freeze me) or how it sorts and now even stacks your inventory for you. Not entirely convinced by the setting, but I did like that for a while early on there was a focus on finding other survivors and kind of upgrading the camp that way. Then the tone kind of shifted away from that unfortunately.

Also, to Chris's point about designing with speedrunners in mind: I don't think smoothing things over completely is a great idea, partly because it would mean giving up on interesting mechanics or entire genres that are considered unsuitable for speedrunning (RIP autoscrollers) and partly because a certain amount of friction probably makes runs interesting in the first place. But speedrunning still seems like a valuable source of design insight. Because runners repeat levels and sections so frequently to perfect them, they essentially hold a comically oversized magnifying glass to the tiniest speedbumps in your game, and I think in a lot of cases these annoyances are things regular players also notice but don't necessarily know how to communicate. Things like platform cycles not matching up perfectly, or the game pausing to tally your score for a level with no way to skip or speed it up.

I can't really speak to how internally consistent the simulation of traffic is, but in my experience it certainly feels very true to life, in the sense that if you grow your city organically over time instead of applying extreme forethought to each decision, traffic is just always going to be a nightmare. I don't think it's necessarily a problem that traffic is hard to get under control in this game, it feels more like that is an intended and accurate representation of how it's not very desirable to traverse large cities by car.

I'm sure you'll soon be introduced to another enemy that can grab that special place in your heart. But yeah, Archons are really annoying around the time you encounter them, they are so durable and fast, and their dodge chance is so high that sometimes I'd have a full squad on overwatch and they could still fly in unharmed.

That sounds like there are a lot of promotions waiting for people in the infirmary.

I've started another run recently, I'm close to 2 chips and also not sure when to reincarnate.