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I only just now remembered an hour ago that I backed this game on kickstarter and now I'm downloading my redeemed steam key. Kickstarter is great because it's where I go to get presents that two-years-ago me bought my today self.

Progress this week: -Started painting in skin weights on the bear avatar, noticed when I got to the jaw that I forgot to put the tongue bones into the skeleton hierarchy before doing the smooth bind, so now I need to see if I need to start over or if I can add bones after the skeleton's been bound. Posed the mouth closed put in all the relevant joints for the hyena avatar: Finished retopo/uv unwrap of cat avatar, almost ready to put bones in and start skinning said cat:

I like to tip 20% because I am very bad at math and it's easier for me to figure out in my head than 15%. D:

Oh man, all of this is stuff I can absolutely get behind as a voter.

Looks like the cringelord who did the Crash Bandicoot 2 run last night had his twitch channel shut down. I caught the tail end of it last night and he very much sounded like The Guy in the Convention Reg Line You Regret Starting a Conversation With. So many lame channer-esque jokes about suicide, domestic abuse, and mass murder.

This is my first time ever watching speedrunners and the fact that there is a huge ecosystem of people who build their identity around playing video games at high speed as a performance thing on youtube and on livestreams makes me feel so, so old.

Made it to coaster king! A fun minigame in Splatfest is trying to determine whether my party is crap, or if we're just paired against teenaged killbots. Without teamchat or any kind of way to communicate with people in the lobby, it's hard to figure out what people's intentions are, but I've noticed an interesting trend - the longer I stay in a party, I'm able to get a pretty good idea of who knows their business and who's a liability. After a loss, a few people will drop out of the room, and my assumption is because they think the team is crap and they're rolling the dice on a better room. HOWEVER - and I know that anecdote is not evidence - the trend I'm noticing is that the poorer players tend to be the ones to bail early. Which is nice, because it means that the quality of players in the room will trend upwards as long as you continue to stay put.

I've actually used The Power of Twitter to summon some folks to try out roll20 with me as I DM my way through the 5e starter set, which will probably keep me busy as far as tabletop gaming goes for the next few months. D: I'm kicking the tires on roll20 and while I think it's a very neat application, I find the interface to be very, very counterintuitive.

I think my favorite part of Moray Towers right now is finding the most inconvenient/improbable places to drop a sprinkler. Drop off the side of a switchback facing backward, plonk a sprinkler on the wall on your way down! I haven't experienced any special difficulty with rollers in the new level, usually you can see them coming from a long way off and it's a lot easier to scale those switchback walls with a gun than it is with a roller. Lately I've been trying to change up/expand my proficiency with the weapons in the game - I was leaning on the aerosprays pretty heavily for a long time as soon as they became available to me, but after seeing so many matches where teams will have three or four aerosprays with them I figured it was time to maybe expand my horizons. I've gotten pretty comfortable with the .96 Gal, which I've been using a lot lately, and alternating it with the custom splattershot jr, which I find very frustrating to play against in the hands of someone who uses the disruptor bombs well. I've also been seeing players using blasters to do a cycle of swimming, leaping and firing simultaneously, and dropping right back into swimming. I think this is a thing that you have to be a 16-year-old Japanese killbot to perform well, but after clumsily trying it a few times with the Luna Blaster, it's immensely satisfying to be able to pull off a kill with that method. I don't think I'll ever be good enough at it for that method to be at all helpful in securing a win through paint coverage, though.

I would like to report on my d&d podcast findings: the official d&d podcasts with the robot chicken writing staff are boring as shit and I gave up three episodes in. For some reason I thought that Seth Green might be one of the players and I was very dismayed to discover that he was not, and also that it takes them maybe three minutes into the first episode to get to a dick joke. Boring White Nerd Dudes Taking About They Dicks is basically my least favorite genre of podcast. I re-listened to the first episode of Nerd Poker and it was funnier than I remember it being (one of them does a bit where they goof about fictional sponsors that's pretty great), and now that I am all het up about d&d, the actual gameplay parts of the episode are less boring. Especially now that I've listened to some exceptionally awful d&d podcasts and know how deep and dark that particular pit is.

I just got the 5e books and I'm itching to play - is there a game I can jump into, or is anyone interested in starting a new one?

I know that John Roderick is running for Seattle City Council, so that's a thing!

I came to this thread with this same question, I've been searching for more d&d podcasts to listen to, because The Adventure Zone has got me Super Into 5e now. Like, to the point where I'm working on drafting up a campaign setting for the story universe of my webcomic for readers to download and play. I've listened to a few other d&d podcasts (and in searching for more, discovered this weird pocket universe of 'actual play' podcasts, which I guess are just nerds recording their gaming sessions and putting them on the internet, as opposed to podcasts ABOUT tabletop gaming) and I think there's a reason why TAZ rocketed to the top of the itunes charts. Podcasters that pay attention to production values are the exception more than the rule, it turns out. D: I have no recommendations yet, but I'm going to be giving Nerd Poker and Harmontown a listen, as well as playing through the back episodes of the official D&D podcast that feature the Robot Chicken cast playing through a campaign, and I will report back with my results.

Next splatfest is weekend after next! July 17-18, 9pm to 9pm pacific, rollercoasters vs. waterslides!

I'm finding that while Tenacity goes great with any special, it's really, really handy when paired with Echolocation. Any time your team number drops, you can even up the score in a hurry.

I only got to play for maybe an hour yesterday but I sure ain't gonna complain about ten sea snails.

This was my experience this morning, too. As soon as all of the people who got frustrated with losing dropped out of our matchmaking lobby and we got filled up with competent players, we were just fucking unstoppable. There were a few instances where one of our teammates had a connection drop and the game started with us playing with three players and we still pulled it out with a 60%. I don't know how matchmaking works for the opposite team - like if there's two lobbies, and your lobby gets rotated through the opposite team's lobby, or if there's one lobby for both teams, but it looked like the lineup of team dogs we were matched against changed after every round. I'd like to believe it's because after playing against our Team Cat Elite Murder Squad people were like hm, nah, but it's probably the two separate lobbies.

I'm super annoyed that splatfest is tomorrow, I wish they could have picked a non-holiday date when I'm not having company from can til can't. As it is now, I'll have to get my sea snails by purchasing them, like some kind of animal. The new ranked mode is fun, I've been fortunate enough to either be playing with teams that are pretty good at it or playing against teams that are still (like me) figuring out what the optimal strategy is. I do wish there was an opportunity to choose between tower and control zone modes in your ranked battle preferences, rather than having them randomly assigned, though. My strategy for tower mode is to allow my teammates to sit on the tower itself while I run advance and splat the opposite team before they can knock my teammates off. Inkzooka is very, very satisfying when the other team has control of the tower.

It looks like at least one new map was introduced today?

I got Splatoon last weekend and I'm up to level 15 with stealth swim + stealth jump + tenacity and I love being a goddamned menace in ranked battles. Inkstrike is mostly useless in a standard match but gosh it's great for ranked. Also bomb rush: get up on top of the central tower and do your bomb rush and hello it's christmas, you get a bomb, you get a bomb, everyone gets bombs. In ranked battles I notice teammates tend to not be terribly concerned with inking the ground outside of the zone, which I think is a mistake. If you're inking all the way to the zone on your initial approach, you'll usually have covered enough ground to trigger your special by the time you get there, and if you're using inkstrike or bomb rush that's kind of a big deal. I am terrible at shooters generally, I mostly got this game because I didn't want to be left out of the miiverse fun. I'm glad that Splatfest for NA is cats vs. dogs because I can be hella racist about dogs. Also my NNID is duskchapel, add me if you are down to splat.

I just got splatoon, please add me if you are down to splat. NNID - duskchapel

I just watched The Babadook and I deeply regret it. It was viscerally unpleasant. I mean it was a good movie, I can see why friends who love horror movies really enjoyed it but god. I do not handle horror well.

My webcomic patreon recently clipped a milestone that enabled me to afford an a3-size fine-art scanner that actually scans my watercolors with accurate color fidelity. I am pretty stoked about this for a few reasons, the first and most obvious being that my comic pages will actually look the way I painted them, and the second being that I snagged it on ebay for about a third of what it usually goes for. I paid as much in shipping as I did for the scanner itself. It is also the size of a small planet.

Man every game I can think of that I think of as being lore-heavy are games that I really enjoyed. Assassin's Creed's lore is as fun to me as the murders, Mass Effect, Final Fantasy 12 (especially the way codex pages are unlocked after you kill x number of creatures), having to scan stuff in Metroid Prime, picking up audio logs in System Shock 2, etc. I mean unless lore is being distinguished as something that I'm failing to understand? Is it only lore when it's boring and worldbuilding when it's fun? I've never played dota so I have no point of reference there.

Like my vision legit blurred with how angry these two sentences made me.