Gerretic

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Posts posted by Gerretic

  2. Posted

    I am only just realising why it is that Uplink allows you to hank a bank, transfer a ridiculous amount of money into your accounts, and skip all the progression. If you can do it, you don't need the progression to ease you in.

     

    Is that really true? What I recall is that even if you know how to do it, you need to buy a bunch of specific stuff to be able to do bank hacks, and that this stuff costs enough that you have to do milk runs for a while to be able to afford it.

  3. Posted

    At my college, people would clap, but for lectures given by a certain professor only - he was a Nobel laureate, one of very few people of that stature who taught freshmen students.

  4. Posted

    Ok I picked this up and I'm playing it for the first time now. It's really good.

    I died like ten feet outside of a safe house I had just captured but not yet entered, and now my buddy is just running around outside that safe house. Does anyone know how I can get her rescue-ready again? She doesn't ever do the thing when I go into that safe house, a different safe house, rest until nightfall, or save at a weapons dealer.

    Edit: fixed itself. Nevermind. Game is awesome though.

  5. Posted

    The use of chiasmus in "Cool for the Summer" is probably the weakest application of that device I've heard.

    "I've got my mind in your body and your body on my mind."

    That's just the same sentiment twice! There's no juxtaposition here at all.

    I like the song though.

  6. Posted

    I'm going on a date tomorrow night! This is probably a pretty big milestone in my life, technically; I was in some relationships in and after college but meeting people as a student is very different; I've never been on a date set up through online dating, and the last time I went on a date with a stranger at all was seven or eight years ago, in high school, and even that happened no more than twice.

    I'm pretty excited but also fairly nervous; I feel I basically don't know anything about how to go on a date, how to flirt, what the etiquette is, if I should flirt, etc. I'm not a totally shy person but I'm typically very reserved with people I don't know well.

  7. Posted

    Hmm...fundamentally non-optimizable system? Sounds like a board game.

     

    Each player controls a suite of nominees, and tries to convince the group to settle on voting / nomination rules for that round. A round of voting based on that system is run, and each player receives points for election. After each election, amendments to the voting process are presented and evaluated. Repeat for n rounds.

     

    Sorry, I'll stop posting now.

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nomic is the game you describe in probably its purest form; players voting on changes to the rules of the game. In some cases you start with a basic win condition and can vote to change it to something more interesting; I think in others you might start with no victory condition at all. Obviously changing the rules for how voting can be done is very powerful. I've never played it myself but as you can imagine there are play-by-forum communities since it's so well suited to being played online.

  8. Posted

    One thing that's different between speedrunning and other esports, though, is that the latter are just harder to commentate. Watching AGDQ, they'll often explain why the backwards hopping is happening, what the particular glitch is, or if something that just happened is good or bad luck, which is great as a casual viewer, but they have the advantage that the route is planned and nothing unexpected will happen to any reasonably prepared runner, at least for most games. With Dota they could explain why the guy is wiggling his lord back and forth in front of the other little monster guys, but they want to explain the interesting dynamics emerging in the particular match instead.

  9. Posted

    Talos Principle is 66% off and I have to ask.... just how are the puzzles? Are they a bit repetitive or are they different enough from each other to not feel like a drag?

    What I'd say is they're more repetitive than a Portal game, but they didn't feel like a drag to me. Portal tries to have every puzzle be revelatory, where Talos doesn't go quite that far: you'll sometimes see several puzzles that rely on the same insight or principle about manipulating the game objects. I think it still works; there's not the set order to the puzzles you'd have with test chambers, and it does introduce enough variations that it didn't bore me until I was trying for the secret stars.

  10. Posted

    Well, with two rejections today, both for jobs I would really have liked, I can probably stop worrying about all that stuff I mentioned before on how to leave gracefully or whatever and just accept that I might be here a while longer.

    I'm just bummed. One of the positions, I was really excited for - it would have meant a huge raise and a transition into the kind of engineering I'd prefer to be doing. It might still pan out later. They're a startup and I know multiple people there who want to bring me in within a few months, but they're not the ones with final say. I want to hope they'll come through but it would be really foolish to expect it to work out.

    The other one, the recruiter called me the week after the interview to say they all thought I was really bright, but I didn't make enough eye contact and they were worried it might be an issue dealing with the creative side of the company, and I guess my answers to her questions about how I would work around that were not satisfying. Encountering hard truths about myself and areas for improvement is probably a good thing, ultimately, but it's sad and frustrating.

  11. Posted

    Me and my partner had a great time playing Twilight Struggle at our local game shop yesterday. Question to those who have played it: If events trigger whether or not a card is played as an event, why is there the option to play cards as events? What advantage would there ever be to not playing cards as operations? I feel like we're misunderstanding some fundamental rule of the game somewhere.

    Oh no now I'm double posting!

    I'm not a Twilight Struggle expert and it's been many years, but I think the rule you're missing is this:

    Your opponent's events always trigger, but you also get to play them for points. Your events, you have to choose one or the other. Events that can be played for either side, I think you also have to choose.

    edit: ninja'd but at least I didn't double post :P

  12. Posted

    I'm curious if any of you folks have played the Battlestar Galactica game, because, it's one of BGG's top rated games (#29 last I looked), it's wonderfully thematic, but in the half dozen games I've played I am seeing a major flaw in the game. Specifically, the way that the game progresses via the Crisis Deck, is just too random, or put another way, too predetermined based on the shuffle. Given that the Crisis Deck is the sole factor to deploy Cylons and advance your jump track, the randomness in the order and amount of either of those two events occurring has made my plays of this game feel preordained, almost deterministic. If anyone else has played it, I wonder if you had the same impression.

    This was one of my favorite games for many years and I have many opinions about it and about what you can do to handle this issue, which is an issue to be sure. So, some options:

    The last expansion, Daybreak, adds a Cylon fleet board and a Pursuit track, so when you get Cylon ship activations off Crisis cards with an empty board, they advance on the Pursuit track and eventually catch up and jump back in. Then when you jump the ships on the board just move back to the Cylon fleet board. This replaces completely the Cylon attack set-up cards in the Crisis deck, and means that there's actual value to destroying Cylon ships. (In the basic game, jumping the fleet is equivalent to pressing a button that says "Destroy all Cylon ships and also get closer to winning" since they don't persist in any way.)

    I have some issues with this expansion that come out after playing with it a while, which I'll put in spoiler tags because you may be able to play for a long time without finding them yourselves if you choose to pick it up. There are not any spoilers for the actual show in here.

    With the pursuit board, there's a new somewhat degenerate strategy available to the humans, which is that leaving a single Cylon raider alive and kiting it around Galactica will hugely reduce the rate at which new Cylon ships spawn, so it's kind of the easiest way to progress as humans.

    This kind of relates to the more general issue I have with the game recently, which is that my group recognizes "correct" human play very readily, so that it's extremely difficult to make any interesting plays as a concealed Cylon. That being the most interesting aspect of the game means I don't play it as much as I used to, but obviously we only got to that point because we played it an awful lot, because it's very good.

    Another option you can try is treating the Cylon setup cards like Pandemic's Epidemic cards, if you've ever played that game. Essentially you divide the Crisis deck into equally sized chunks, shuffle a single setup card into each chunk, and then stack the chunks up. This means that you can still be surprised somewhat by a setup card or have two come relatively close together and mess up your day, but you'll always have them arrive eventually. I don't recall how often I played with this houserule because once the expansion came out we started doing it that way, but I think it would probably work fairly well.

  13. Posted

    This reminded me of the stories about Apple's first live demonstration of the iPhone. Not that I'm saying Apple is or was haphazardly managed, but that account makes the iPhone demo sound like a very close-run thing.

     

    Of course they had many additional factors in their favor. I don't know why I brought it up really. Silly.

    Hilarious. The owner of this company printed that article out and passed out around to everyone a while back. I suppose what he wanted us to get out of it would have been to think that the parallels we have on our projects are OK, it's fine to burn out your employees if you end up inventing the iPhone?

    Thanks for all your advice, everyone.

  14. Posted

    Yeah, giving notice is a sure thing. My department has already lost more than half its people in the past few months so my question is really, what do I do when two weeks doesn't seem like enough? I agree that I don't owe the company anything more than that; my concern is purely for individual coworkers who I like personally and will be putting in a difficult spot when they have to rapidly learn my stuff and their other workload remains the same.

    Oh well, there's never going to be a good time.

  15. Posted

    I have some questions related to my job search situation and a quick straw poll. First the direct stuff: I've been wanting to leave my current company for several months. I've recently started a major new project and so many other people have also left the company recently that I'm ending up in a fairly major role on it. I'm not confident enough that I'm going to find something new to give notice yet and I fear I will become even more central, so what is the best way to exit gracefully without putting my remaining colleagues in a bind?

     

    Straw poll:

    How many of you either think or hear the thought expressed by a coworker, "I wonder how this works at a real company," "I wonder what it would be like to work for a real company," or something along those lines, on a regular basis?

     

    I have only had two jobs so far in my professional career and both were at fairly small companies (<500 people) but it's hard for me to imagine that most companies do things the way we did, which was often haphazard. I'm curious how common that sort of sentiment is.

  17. Posted

    OK, that isn't it, then.

     

    And I totally get that, and am not going to try and get unblocked anymore. I certainly don't want to bother someone who went to the trouble of blocking me, I just thought it might be a mistake.

  18. Posted

    Is there a way to tell if I'm on some kind of block list, in particular any that are run by bots or something? I basically just use my Twitter account as a feed of stuff from people I enjoy and now one such person has blocked me and I don't know why! They happen to be the only person I've had an actual conversation with but it was short, pleasant, and more than 6 months ago so I can't think why I'd be getting blocked now.

  20. Posted

    Dark Souls was the free game with Xbox Gold sometime in the past year, which I expect has given it an infusion of new players. For people like me who are bad at games and don't play that often that's been enough time to put in about 35 hours.

    All the Bloodborne talk on the various casts has me getting back into it a bit more. I will say most areas I've been since (currently I'm in Blight-town) seem less populated in terms of ghosts and number of bloodstains or messages, but still not empty.

    Also, a question: I found my way to the shaft that gets me behind the weird giant bug attached to the wall. I feel like I should be able to kill it now but how do I do that?

  23. Posted

    Obviously this isn't the Hotline Miami thread, or the Fight Club thread, but Film Crit Hulk has a piece about Fight Club which I remember liking a lot, basically arguing that the movie fundamentally fails by making Tyler Durden really appealing and never adequately tearing down him out his ideology. In other words it's the film's own fault that people take it the way seemingly many do.

    http://badassdigest.com/2012/01/22/film-crit-hulk-smash-hulk-vs-fight-club-and-the-work-of-david-fincher/

  24. Posted

    Gorgeous stuff, Brett.

    Your train roundabout has me thinking about differences between cars and trains in reality. I feel like you wouldn't want a roundabout for trains because they can neither seamlessly merge nor easily slow down and wait, both of which cars do fine.

    What a great game.

  25. Posted

    Also there's no disasters. But I dunno, do people actually miss and want disasters? I never remember liking disasters.

    I was a kid when SimCity 2000 was a thing and the only way we ever played it on the school computers was watching various disasters destroy cities. I think that can be a funny way to play these games, but even though there are no alien invasions it's definitely intact because you can ruin cities with bad dams.

    Random natural disasters cropping up and ruining your city doesn't sound fun to me, but that said: I've got a giant forestry district and it's weird that I'm never punished for poor fire coverage. Traffic problems mean that individual businesses keep burning down but that never propagates to destroy everything else.