Gerretic

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Posts posted by Gerretic

  2. Posted

    • Upgrading the roads is so destructive and unpredictable, I feel like I have to have this wide apron of available space around every road I build, and because of how zoning works, I feel like there's no way to take later expansion into account. Once you need to upgrade a road, you have to bulldoze everything around it. Of course, this is very true to real life, and I don't really know if tearing down a few blocks actually is as terrible as it feels.

     

    I was antsy about this at first but I think you just have to do it. In my experience buildings rebuild pretty quickly after being demolished by a road construction and it's not been a huge problem.

     

    • I guess I'm mostly concerned with road traffic ... I would love a tool that let me select a car or some points or whatever, and see how it calculates that it shouldn't use my brand new asphalt and concrete pillar knot of wide-open road, and instead line up in the dirt road traffic jam along with everyone else

     

    Check out the Traffic Inspector mod in the Workshop, if you haven't already. It's not quite what you're asking for, in that it won't determine why cars are choosing to pathfind the way they are, but it will at least show you a car's planned route or all planned routes passing through a particular stretch of road.

  3. Posted

    That's correct; they default to the direction in which they are drawn. I saw a post from a dev somewhere saying they're patching in the ability to reverse the direction. I want to say this was by right clicking but since that's typically the cancel out of a road button I'm not sure? Possibly this patch is already deployed; I haven't played in a couple days.

  4. Posted

    This is a general pedantic question not tied to any particular comment: what do people mean by 'performative'? I see it used a lot in ways that, to me, read like "I'm saying this to put on a show of [whatever]," for instance, if I were worried that I'm using discussion of feminism to seem like a conscientious person*, I might express concern that my feminism is performative, or something like that.

    So, I think I mainly see the word used in that kind of context. Is that what people mean or is it something else? I ask because looking up the definition I see that it can refer to "performative utterances," where the act of saying something is itself a concrete action, e.g. "I now pronounce you man and wife." This is a neat concept that I'm glad we have a word for and I would be sad if that meaning were lost.

    *

    I am often concerned about this but this is not the appropriate thread.

  5. Posted

    I just played for two hours and then lost everything when the game crashed. :(

    Guess I'll just build a new city now. Save often kids.

     

    The form of the crash was the game stopped displaying anything, but it seemed to still be running just without showing me anything at all; I could click and hear the sound of myself dragging a road around, and the music kept going. Is that a thing? I don't play many PC games.

  6. Posted

    Is it not standard to teach limits before derivatives? We were taught limits first in high school and it seems like you need limits to motivate what a derivative is and how it works: (f(x+h) - f(x)) / h as h -> 0.

  8. Posted

    shout out from a listener from Bangkok, Thailand -- Love the podcast[/size]

     

    Since I am also considering moving to a binder for my cards, I was wondering what caused Quinn's change of heart about Ultra Pro Binder in this episode? ^_^

     

    Thanks,

    He was joking; he still likes them. In the corp episode he heavily promoted a product from a corporation and in the runner episode he savagely bashed it.

  9. Posted

    You weren't just tired - it is not the most mechanically tight game. I'm especially not sure about the balance with a betrayer. But, it is a nice experience generator a la Tales of the Arabian Nights. Comparing it to that game, it's weird that you read out the results of each decision on the crossroads(?) cards before you choose one. It makes it more about the mechanics than the narrative choice the group is making, which does not play into the game's strengths.

    Agreed. I haven't played Tales, though I'm passingly familiar with it, but that aspect of Dead of Winter struck me as really odd.

  10. Posted

    About 25% of my department got fired today for reasons that seem completely arbitrary. These folks weren't necessarily the super stars but for the most part they were quite good and they'd all been putting in twelve+ hour days for weeks trying to meet deadlines. This is hugely demotivating although I have good reason to believe I'm secure for now. I don't love my job anyway and it happens that my favorite coworkers are all gone now. Shitty times all around.

  13. Posted

    I've never played this before but I remember really wanting to, when I saw my older cousin playing it years ago - I guess it would have been new, or not very old, at least, at the time. I'm really excited it's come out now and looking forward to starting it.

    I know some other new readers of the Thumbs out there are also working through the backlog of old Idle Thumbs podcasts and I just wanted to warn anyone else also doing this and planning on playing Grim that Jake spoils a puzzle in, I believe, Ep. 37. I'm a little sad about it because I heard it coming, tried to skip ahead past it, and skipped right to the spoiler exactly. Even worse, it's all in the context of how it was one of his favorite puzzles because he felt like a real detective figuring it out (in much the same manner, I think, of more recent discussion of Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective.) So I'm a little bummed to be missing that moment now, but still pumped to play this soon.

  14. Posted

    So if on a run, an ice is rezzed, and the runner skips all the subroutines, what happens to the ice? Does it just stay there? And can you unrez an ice? If so, when?

    The basic way it works is the corp pays to rez ice once, and then it stays on that server and rezzed indefinitely. The runner has to keep paying every time they run that server or the ice subroutines will fire every time. You didn't mention it specifically but it's a common misconception so I'll point it out: if the ice doesn't say that it ends the run, the runner can continue. So the runner can decide that it's not worth paying to break a piece of ice and just suffer the subroutines and keep going if that suits them.

    Once ice is rezzed, it will stay rezzed (barring cards that say it derezzes explicitly, like Emergency Shutdown, or Cell Portal). If it does get derezzed by a card, you just flip it back over, no money back or anything for the corp.

    If a runner accesses an agenda and steals it, what happens to the ice protecting that server? Is it trashed?

    When the runner accesses an agenda from a remote server, the ice stays there and the server is now empty. The corp could play another card into that server next turn, protected by all that same ice. A common tactic is to play a card into a server, even one that isn't explicitly an ambush, hoping the runner will think it's an agenda and go broke getting in to access it, then play an agenda in a following turn

    Can the corporation trash ice? Is there any point to doing so?

    The corp can trash any amount of ice on a server when they install ice on a server. Any ice they leave behind shifts down and the new ice always goes on the outside. The main reason to trash ice is that it costs more credits to install multiple ice in the same server, and you may want to save the credits if some of your ice is made irrelevant by the runner ice breakers. A common example would be Enigma when they have a Yog.0 installed: it doesn't even cost them money to get through so you may not want to pay the cost.

  16. Posted

    Hey, I'm looking to buy a bunch of data packs (all of them eventually, if possible), but I'm having trouble finding some of the earlier Genesis Cycle packs online. Is there a good place to get them, or is eBay my best bet? 

    Amazon and CoolStuffInc are both often reasonable placed to buy data packs. If the pack you want seems too expensive there or isn't available, that probably means it's temporarily out of stock across the board. They reprint all the old packs fairly regularly, so if you check periodically I'd expect an opportunity to pick up whatever you can't find will come along in a couple months? (They list reprints for some Genesis cycle packs in Q1 of 2015 on their website.) If you don't want to wait that long, I'd check eBay and maybe call some local shops.

  17. Posted

    I got Netrunner the other day on the advice of the thumbs. I originally went in to get Munchkin. How easy is this game to get into? I have never played this game before :S

    Different people will take different paths into Netrunner; I dove into it full-force almost immediately, buying all the expansions and finding groups at local game stores, etc., as soon as I decided to play it at all, but many people have a lot of fun playing with just the core set and one or two friends. A "typical" trajectory with Netrunner is to play with the prebuilt decks for a faction pair for a while, then switch to other factions, then start building your own decks within the core, and if you enjoy all that, start buying the data packs and building new decks. Have you played other card games like this before (Magic, L5R, Yu Gi Oh, Pokemon)? If so, did you mostly play with friends at home, or go to game shops and play there? I hadn't played a card game like this in 10+ years when I started Netrunner, but when I did I played at stores and that's what I gravitated towards in Netrunner as well. If you haven't tried it but can find a local group, maybe give it a shot anyway! The community aspect of it can be really nice and I enjoy playing this kind of game with strangers, even though I don't typically enjoy playing most board / card games with anyone I don't already know.

    Episode 8 of the Terminal 7 podcast (https://www.idlethumbs.net/terminal7/episodes/eventually-your-breathing-will-stop) discusses tips for new players, but that may require a bit of experience with the game already internalized to make sense.

  20. Posted

    Bah, I'm done with 80 Days. Three times now I've been planning a route, negotiated a reduced price for passage somewhere, paid and then when I return in 2/3 days time it says I can't afford the fare, despite my money having been taken! Maybe I'm doing it wrong but I think the UI could be a little clearer. I'm in Port-au-Prince, day 96ish, penniless.

    The negotiations are, as far as I have seen, never for a reduced price; they're always an "expedite fee" of some kind to be able to depart sooner. So if you go broke paying to leave early you may not be able to afford the ticket anymore.

  21. Posted

    I think it's worth pointing out that this

    (and arguably still is: Skyfall certainly makes use of it) a Hollywood-wide trope, not just a Disney thing.

    I was watching Catching Fire again the other night and thought back to this discussion immediately. I haven't seen The Hunger Games as recently, nor Mockingjay yet, but I recall / imagine they're much the same. I noticed in Catching Fire that the president / main bad guy, Snow, dresses in this style, but he's not campy or effete in the way other characters (Caesar, the general masses of the Capital) are. I suppose they want Snow to be cold and intimidating, but still part of the frivolous Capital culture.

  23. Posted

    Then I wind up wondering if that was what passed for biceps in 1991?

     

    No!

     

    On the other hand, though, maybe yes? I saw a side-by-side comparison of these two images (spoilered below just for large images, no Twin Peaks related anything within) once and I can't find it now, but comparing Hugh Jackman as Wolverine in X-Men vs. the more recent Days of Future Past.

    X-Men-hugh-jackman-as-wolverine-19520767

     

    HughJackmanYoungWolverineXMenDaysofFutur

     

    Obviously the first X-Men was ~a decade after Twin Peaks, but I think our expectations for muscular action guys have changed from what they used to be. Arnold was a bodybuilder before he was an actor; I think it's fair to consider him an exceptional case.

  24. Posted

    When Cooper retells his dream to Lucy and the Sheriff (It's not really a spoiler, but if you haven't seen the European pilot and don't want to know anything about it, then don't read)

     

    A lot of the details that he gives are from the events in the European pilot. Mrs. Palmer seeing the face of the killer and Hawk drawing him, the one-armed man calling Cooper, etc. The first time I watched this show, I just assumed the discrepancy between Cooper's dream and how he tells it was an intentional comment by the writers on how hard it is to accurately remember our dreams, but now it seems more like a weird leftover of having basically written the end of the show for the European version well before the American episodes had ended.

     

    Also can't really be called a spoiler, but to play it safe:

    Not having seen the European pilot, to me this came off as a well-executed manifestation of the way you just know certain things in dreams, seemingly inexplicably.

  25. Posted

    I know every single person here disagrees, but I like having the man dance over the end credits.  It breaks the Red Room sequence out of Cooper's dream and lets us know that, yes, that really happened in this episode and odd events like this are something we'll need to deal with throughout the show.  It replaces Laura's homecoming photo, and shows us that—just as Laura is always going to be a presence—so are the goings on of Mike, Bob, and the Man From Another Place.

     

    I presume this was meant to go in the thread on Zen, not Traces to Nowhere.