Deadpan

Zach Gage apparently made a short video explaining some of the inspiration for the . It's interesting stuff.

I've been playing it a bunch more yesterday and got up to a pretty consistent win rate on Normal and even a few victories on Hard. How annoying or dangerous events are and how useful their current location is to you in terms of maybe getting to use that module's special effect is totally random, but there are some micro-level strategic decisions in how to address those fires. One optimization I try to go for compared to what I saw in those Let's Plays for instance is that instead of figuring out my approach to events on the fly, I try to plan out the entire turn in advance. Instead of always using the closest person to fix a problem, you can often take advantage of your Doctor's or Captain's special ability (the Captain's ability to give dice to people feels especially useful) by setting up groupings and either making them go first, before people run off to fix other things, or last, when people are crowded in a particular module. Of the modules that I want to go to, do any have Void or Injury dice? Then I might want to go there before using up my all my assists on comparatively harmless Stasis rolls elsewhere. Or sometimes the best solution to a problem isn't the direct approach, like putting low scoring dice into research instead of using them towards the repair score, or adding ship health instead of getting rid of a problem. What you can and can't do in a round is limited by the game, but you don't have to just have to go from one fire to the next always.

I played it for a little bit now and made it to Mars twice, the first time was a pretty rough ride but the second time I had ship health to spare. It's one of those things where early events can snowball pretty hard on you I guess. When you have lucky rolls and event generation early on, you might get a chance to devote one person to harvesting food or recovering dice for themselves, and then you can use those extra dice in the following turns to make more extra dice for yourselves, etc. etc. On the other side of the spectrum, if any of your crewmembers actually die during events, you are most likely screwed. You can kind of play into the game's balance a little bit by leaving some minor events unattended in the beginning in favor of creating more resources for yourself, plus there is a way they introduce after a few turns for you to bounce back a little bit, although for my taste that is a pretty heavy-handed way of introducing a moral dilemma.

I got into this game over my holiday break. I really enjoy the feeling of heft that the ships in it have opposite the more shoot-ery stuff like Freespace that I used to play. My first instinct in the game was to move my mouse left and right to make my ship look in a diffferent direction, and instead I rolled in place like an idiot. I realize that you can change whether that axis controls pitch or yaw, but because of how slow ships turn that way it's still not really a feasible method. It took a while to wrap my head around this new system, but it felt pretty rewarding when I could finally control my ship with some degree of competence (I even bought a cheap flightstick for it). As impressed as I am with the feeling of flying (and landing) and amount of simulated space there is in the game, now I'm kind of getting bored with it again. I upgraded to a Viper pretty early and then mostly spent my time flying from system to system in search of a way to make money reliably without dipping into the trading part of the game. The best way in my case seems to be flying to conflict zones and earning combat bonds for one of the two sides fighting there. The bounties are lower than those for criminals, but looking for those also seems much more intermittent than the constantly raging battles. Sometimes I get shot down when enemy ships gang up on me, but sometimes the battle tips in the favor of my side and I can be credited for destroyed ships by simply pointing my lasers at an enemy who is already taking heavy fire. I'm kind of losing interest now though, because I don't necessarily want to spend my time grinding in these zones just to more effectively grind in these zones in the future. Is there something grander to do that I'm missing? The first time I joined sides in a conflict zone, I figured I might hang around to really push my favorite faction to success, but when I returned to the game the next day, the civil war had ended and both parties involved remained miniscule opposite the dominant force in that system. I guess this is the downside of making such a huge game: it is too big for me to influence in any meaningful way without devoting a lot more time to it than I actually have to spare.

It's maybe not very clear in isolation, but Zoe made a couple of tweets there to point out that because there are enough people hate-watching anything she does, video suggestions afterwards tend to be filled with the kind of garbage GG truther nonsense that these people also watch. It was a reminder to think about the larger implications of the kind of algorithms you build your platform on, because in this case for instance it has managed to figure out that there is a connection between point A and point B, but it doesn't know that that connection is actually an MS paint red line of "What does it all mean?" conspiracy garbage, and so it ends up playing into that.

Maybe we need a new name for that group since the title they choose themselves is an obvious lie that we all keep around by saying it all the time (and I'm sure there are much funnier names we could give these assholes). There's absolutely a lot of cool people out there actually advocating for men, whether by speaking up for the marginalized groups of men MRAs clearly give no shit about, or just doing the work they claim to want to do, but never find any time for in their busy schedules of complaining about things women have done. These aren't the people who provide help for men, these are the people who call up women's shelter with some made-up story to expose how sexist they are by not taking in men (even though 100% of the time the people there tell them of different places that could help them and offer to set them up there).

I've been playing the hell out of Subnautica recently too and it's really good. I like how simply throwing you into water is enough to make the environment alien and threatening to the point where you don't instantly start thinking about what kind of mega-project you want to build to ruin the environement you are in. I get a real feeling of shelter by returning to my base here.

This doesn't seem like a meaningful distinction: the reason people "fall" for trolls is because they genuinely care, the way to avoid that is to be snidely indifferent to everything, or even to become so jaded that you can occupy any position for the sake of argument, at which point you are the troll. Technically this weird mentality isn't against caring, but in practice it seems much easier for its followers to stop caring about things (at least any serious subject) than to constantly assess conversations for their level of sincerity. It seems to me that at a certain point channers stop going "Is this the time to have a real conversation or do I just go whatevs and mock this person" and simply default to "go whatevs and mock this person" because that way, in their minds, they can never be wrong.

Gotta remind all y'all again that if you liked a game this year, maybe you'll also like to talk about it for this unreasonably large GOTY list I am hosting. I'd love to get as many people and as many games as possible on there, to counteract the boring canon of normative top ten lists.

Michael Lutz wrote something on this subject and I think it's pretty good. I think the most benefit-of-the-doubt kind of read I can give her is that, as she says, when she first recommended the game way back when, she got a lot of complaints from dumb-butt people accusing her of shilling stolen goods, and now this little remark was intended to deflect those ridiculous criticisms. After all, if she actually believed this stuff herself, the thing to do would be to recommend people stay away from the game not somehow consume it without paying. Also, it still feels pretty wrongheaded to try to honor these folks absurd non-fictional read.

I guess that's another similarity: most people are really bad at placing accents and will make weird guesses based on stereotypes they have in their head.

Yeah! This is an analogy I also wanted to make. It's easy to forget you have one, particularly when your environment and your media reinforce the idea that you're just talking normal, and of course the easiest way to be reminded of it is when you stand out or are made fun of for your pronounciation. They're also similar in how some varieties arbitrary became the norm and are now seen less as a specific, unique thing and more as a general marker of prestige, like good job you have made it beyond your roots and are a global citizen. Despite their origins, I don't think a lot of people would still look at jeans as a culture-specific garb so much as a general symbol of western capitalist hegemony. Looks like there's been a whole big conversation since I've last been to this thread. It's a shame that some people see posting in it as something they'll inevitably regret! I have thoughts about that whole topic, I guess, but I'll keep them spoilered and then you can decide for yourself whether you want to see my meandering thought process.

It's obviously not on the level of reliving trauma, but it is weird just how emotional GG dillweeds get while mocking other people for not being able to handle "getting their feelings hurt". They're pushing for a world in which they'll be exposed to plenty of Video game titty, but not a single uncomfortable thought or idea, yet somehow it's SJWs who just can't take any disagreement. So yeah, similar to what Bjorn is saying, I think people see safe space as a bad word cause they don't realize they've had access to them all their lives.

The thumbnail for that video gave me hope that there'd be a donkey class in that game, presumably to lug other people's equipment around for them.

Does help?

Whooooa, livin on a prayer!

Apart from this not exactly being the most effortless english, the non-sequitur nature of that comment kinda makes me suspect it might have been in response to a different comment implying that feminists were to blame for this, that might have gotten deleted before that screenshot. I mean, how often do you see companies just bring up those kinds of issues when they don't have to? Maybe that really is the reason that that one poor community manager wanted to give, but it looks so weird with nothing else in the conversation pointing in that direction.

I'm organizing another massive "what games were cool this year?" list for a site I'm with and maybe you'd like to help me fill it out a little bit? It's pretty much open for anyone, you can just go here and add your name to a game, or add a new game and claim that, just maybe also send me an email so I can find you again when it's time to collect those write-ups.

That's true, and since you can't talk about the game before it is done I'm generally more upset at pre-ordering and the day one buying rush for making sites try to hit that same window with their writing. Sometimes that's impossible to do well, especially since virtually every outlet in the world requires you to play stuff on your own time. So then you got a week to play Fallout 4, on top of everything else you have to do. That's not gonna do that game justice.

Have you heard of this cool indie game Samorost?

Look, I just forgot to do it for a couple of weeks and then I felt like it would take so much time to get up to speed again and now every week it gets worse.

Welcome, new person! I find it a little strange that you suggest long-living threads lead to stagnation. It's actually been my experience in those other kinds of forums you describe that the short-lived and quickly replaced threads there lead to this repetition of ideas. It's definitely exciting at first: a thought hits you, you make a thread about it, people discuss it and everything is great. But once you're around for a while, you begin to notice people having the same kinds of conversations on certain topics every few weeks (or months) and never going anywhere with them. Somebody posts a known controversial opinion, then people trade back and forth the first dozen points/counterpoints that come to mind, and then the thread is locked or deleted or buried under an avalanche of new short-lived conversations. So I kind of enjoy that there's a sense of history to the megathreads we keep around here. I don't imagine anyone here thinks you're obliged to read the entirety of them before posting anything in there, but because we have people who have been active in them for a long time and because all that earlier stuff is still there (rather than being swept away when some script auto-deletes locked threads after a while), there is at least the option for somebody to go "actually we talked about this before" and tell you where to find that conversation or just use their experience to rephrase what they took from that. Sometimes these, frankly, absurd page numbers are needed to really dig deep into a topic. Meta-commentary contribution: When I came here I just assumed that everybody who was already here had been here forever. I like the laid-back liberal bent enough that I staid, even though I'm increasingly worried what people will do when they find out I haven't even listened to the podcast in half a year or so.

Some of the buyables in League definitely feel a bit weird. I hear those chroma packs they've been doing are considered massively overpriced for something that is essentially a hue shift on a character, something modders have also been doing for free apparently? Also having to buy extra runes and mastery pages always felt a bit like twisting players arms a bit by making you have very generic setups unless you get enough of these to have specific builds for all the characters you like. On the whole though, unlocking things in the game always seemed kind of trivial to me opposite the kind of obsessive relationship players have with these kinds of games anyway? If you spend enough time with it to become proficient with multiple lords, you'll probably also have the grind currency to unlock them. If you're starting out, then in my experience at least you'll probably want to look around to find one you like and then stick with that for a while until you get bored again, and by that time all the training that you kind of need to put in anyway probably means you got enough grind currency to go for a new one. I've never played it in any serious way, but I still got to level 30 after a while almost despite myself. Also I generally prefer playing ARAM, a mode where both teams get random lords and duke it out in a single lane, and owning fewer lords almost works out in my favor there cause I'm not going to be assigned one I've never seen before ever.

You don't have to imagine them, they are out there. The embargo system may prevent races between individual reviewers for who can get their write-up out first, but it doesn't prevent reviews from being rushed in general, when the timeframe between getting the game and the embargo lifting ends up being way too short (which is almost impossible to prevent for long, open-world affairs). Or then there's the times when publishers are kind of aware their game sucks and set the embargo date to after the release date, like with Assassin's Creed Unity last year. In practice, embargoes are just another symptom of how publishers' interests and consumers' indifference work together to create a messed up system. The only reason getting enough time to play these games before talking about them is dependent on publisher goodwill at all is that practically nobody is willing to wait a few days or weeks for a review. If the review comes out before they can actually buy the game, then maybe people will give it a read, or at least look at the score in order to make them feel justified in their excitement (or angry at the reviewer, if they end up disagreeing). But because large parts of these games' audiences are going to run out and buy them sight unseen, or read reviews only to get to take part in the cultural conversation for the few days or hours that it stays on that one particular game, it's very hard for sites to say "We're going to take our time with this one."

EDIT: Nevermind this, made the same joke as somebody else by accident.