d L c
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Posts posted by d L c
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I had the exact same thing happen (today), I put it down to a bug...? Not even the person whose claim I was pushing got the land; on the Enforce Demands pane the results were just a prestige loss/gain.
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There's one puzzle type that I thought I had figured out, and for the most part I had, but then I came to one that I just couldn't get.
I believe it's the number of sides around the tile that need to be filled in by a line. So a single triangle is only crossed by once and the line doesn't bend; two is crossed twice separately or in one bending line; three by a line that bends twice, with one side of the tile unoccupied.
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Does anyone know if there's a "bibliography" anywhere for the various audio/visual content?
This youtube channel has a partial one: https://www.youtube.com/user/Sandamnit/videos (contains spoilers in some videos)
It's not great, but it feels like it will be a while before searching 'the witness' provides anything better than the Harrison Ford movie about the Amish.
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I like Baldur's Gate best because of the bravery in naming a game after a gate, a gate you never see, and Baldur, a guy you never see. Even the city of Baldur's Gate the game and plot have very little to do with. Sets up the way your character's personal story is almost irrelevant compared to the general tone. The sequels and expansions are disappointing in that sense; they actually relate to the plot.
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A lot of it isn't hard so much as boring - the 12 days is an immense amount of time, most of which is spent walking around rifling through bins (and quicksaving). This is especially true if you play the Impostor, who is very easy to play; it's much more tense as the Bachelor or Haruspex, since they're more likely to have to take big risks and be creative.* And almost all of the quests are simple fetch-quests or messenger-quests... That's not all bad since the draw is the dialogue and the (incredible) visuals/sound design/atmosphere etc. - but there is a reason they're remaking it rather than just hi-deffing it.
*Still I recommend playing the Impostor first - you can unlock her with a cheat, which presumably will still work in the rerelease.
If you intend to try (even the remake rather than the rerelease) I also recommend not reading the three-part RPS article - it has huge spoilers. As the article says, a lot of the atmosphere comes from not knowing what happens to the other two characters you aren't playing. -
How cool would it be if there was a video game about clowns and your save file was represented as an egg with your character's makeup painted on? And you loaded your game by picking the egg of the character you wanted to play?
Presumably that's what's on the back of the Last Express egg.
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Some form of roleplaying might be helpful. I've not entirely mastered this myself - what runs I've played have mostly degenerated into aggressive save-scumming - but I do play for an interesting narrative rather than just to win on the scale the game advertises (ie, on the strength of your entire dynasty rather than your actual characters).
I have 2x or 3x speed on more or less all the time: elaborate plans get sidelined and forgotten as more pressing matters crop up, and I am always comfortably engaged with things to do. Other things just never seem worth the effort as a matter of balancing: technology, military, and economics never really seem to bear any fruit (I think it takes hundreds of years before building towns makes a profit?!), and even intrigue seemed nerfed beyond possible use the last time I played. Anything dynastic I ignore. That leaves court politics, laws, and local foreign politics/expansion, besides the occasional pet project (making my successor a different culture, etc).
Come to think of it a lot of my actual enjoyment of the game was in passively watching the stories of other kingdoms altogether while nothing at all happened in mine (I wonder what the Welsh queens of Andalusia are up to...). It's a lot like I play Dwarf Fortress: occasionally coming off my perch to idly create something, but mostly just fascinated by the local plant life. -
I was trying to find that great Nick Breckon moment when he was streaming some with Chris. Then Chris starts staring silently at Nick upon which an amazing Breckonian moment occurs where he sees how long he can talk as Chris creepily stares at him. Which stream was that???
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More fuel for the 'directors really make a difference' theory I guess. The stark cuts mentioned above, and - I don't remember this from earlier episodes - closeups on people's faces, eg in the Frank/underling scene, slow-motion too, and the (excellent) leaning into a red light Ani does in the Ani/Ray cabin scene. I liked these bits a lot - made it feel OTT in a fun way, especially the Frank/underling part. Obvious 'The Departed' feelings toward the end...
It's always had (bad) elliptical dialogue but it feels like it's imploding now... You're a good man. No I'm not. Do you remember? What? Anything!!
re: above I thought she was crying because she thought she'd figured out why kid Paul liked the film - it shows a better mother and child relationship. But yes I think the specific cut was just a tragic thing rather than implying anything. -
'The story of Nick Breckon, Sim, may have told us more about the real Nick Breckon than any story the real Nick Breckon has ever told us about himself.'
Where does the term drone come from?
When unmanned flying vehicles were first introduced to the U.S. military, the ability to control them from afar wasn't very sophisticated. So the first drones flew along pre-set paths, operating off an internal navigation system. This led to servicemen informally referring to any machine that flew without human control a "drone," and Germany still has some like this in service today. That said, the "not being controlled by a human" part of the definition has since been lost to everyday use.
From Flying Robots 101: Everything You Need to Know About Drones
Great to hear the two jingles make it into this ep too.
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My brothers and I used to play a great game we found in a bargain bin called Europa 1400: The Guild [mobygames] [gog]. Despite being built for multiplayer (a lot of the mechanics - blackmailing to stop someone from acting x number of turns, spying and counterspying when you thought someone was acting against you, strategically voting in elections etc - resembled a boardgame and were massively more interesting multiplayer) the actual network code was awful. We could only get it to work when different people ran different patches; this ended up with some pretty strange bugs. When a player gets married the other players see it happening in a cutscene - one time we noticed that on one of our screens both bride and groom were men... after testing we found that our different clients disagreed on certain NPCs' genders.
Naturally we exploited this to aggressively marry same-sex; certain professions were gender-locked so by marrying men you could get children with better genes and more interesting ancestries. We eventually ran breeding programs over generations to try to create more and more interesting people (very rarely, NPCs would appear with fantastic archaic German or Italian names and rare portraits and costumes, for no apparent reason - we tried to isolate the gene). The endgame being what it is you always ended up with the winning family crushing the competition and coming to own the entire city of London, Madrid etc. - but instead we turned swords into ploughshares and our city was a bizarre oligarchic enclave ran in peace for the single aim of creating beautiful people. -
Does anyone remember when Young Steve actually really did say "zingle de dingle dingle!" in an early podcast?
I'm actually asking when that happened.
, first few seconds -
Re: the relevance of Leonard Cohen's song "Nevermind"...isn't that a raven mask that the killer wears?
*Interesting note, the Raven (ie: the mask the killer is wearing) is linked to Pallas Athena in Greek mythology. Specifically, the Raven was her companion and a symbol of wisdom but was terrible at keeping secrets. When it revealed too many secrets, Apollo punished it by turning its feathers black and the Owl replaces the Raven at Athena's side. There's also a passage in the bible that specifically mentions that when ravens kill lambs, they peck out the eyes first.
I think it's an eagle: the sharp curve of the beak, the flat head, the brown eyes, the couple of white feathers (like golden eagles have). An eagle that's been painted black and silver, but still. But we shall see!!
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Interesting, I totally did not notice that they had rearranged the verses.
I wonder if listening to the song (Leonard Cohen's "Nevermind", which he apparently released as a poem "Never mind" some ten years ago) will spoil important plot points in the future episodes.
Haha, the reference to Leonard Cohen obviously flew over my head when Chris mentioned him, I had no idea. That makes rearranging the verses weird.
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For comparison, in case it was too dark to see in ep1:
There's a bunch of dumb stuff that seems to have been added in just to feed the neuroses of armchair theorists, eg, the last verse in the theme song changes episode to episode (which I transcribe for completeness):
My woman's here, my children, too
Their graves are safe from ghosts like you
In places deep, with roots and twine,
I live the life I left behind
The war was lost, the treaty signed
I was not caught, I crossed the line
I was not caught, though many tried
I live among you, well disguised
to
I could not kill the way you kill
I could not hate, I tried, I failed
You turned me in, at least you tried,
You side with them, whom you despise
But never mind, never mind
I live the life I left behind
There's truth that lives, and truth that dies
I don't know which, so never mind
and similarly this:
I also noticed an eclipse featured in the intro - but I refuse to speculate on its meaning!!!! I don't like this stuff, it feels hackey to slap it on just to capitalise on the needless buzz around season 1 theorising. And I still hope there aren't any occult overtones to the secret brotherhood hinted at, even if (with all these masks) that prospect is shrinking away.
What I did like most about ep2 was the tone of the rat scene. In that it's like life is ambiguous enough as it is without any overt mysticism on top; reminded me of the way Louisiana was portrayed in season 1 as the, even in places unconnected to cult goings-on. (I think it reminded me because of the damp which prompts Semyon (Vince Vaughn), just as damp ruins the files in the Louisiana police basement).
<spoiler removed for sake of guilty conscience> -
When Ani is introduced, there's a lingering shot on a copy of Hagakure, The Book of the Samurai, who's thesis is that bushido (the way of the warrior) is to live as though already dead, willing to die at any time.
It might turn out I'm completely wrong but my feeling is that there won't be any mystical elements like in season 1. That book, and other bits of the episode, felt like in-your-face jokes about what isn't going to continue through the seasons. Her being introduced with them felt like a direct reference to Cohle and his books/talks on parapsychology and mysticism (? can't actually quite remember what they were), the joke being that Ani is fallible, didn't find any answers in them, etc.
Similarly there's almost immediately an introduction to a mystic cult, except this time it's a commercial and apparently innocent one, and laid pretty bare from the start rather than being the ultimate discovery. And there's the lawyer scene, which seemed to be a joke about the old season's format of interviews prompting flashbacks not continuing: she even says 'you might have the wrong idea' [about the show's format!!!!]. Even the floating nude seemed like a reference to Cohle's hallucinations, given that they never revealed it was a video projection - but then Lynch is also a good call.
I love that that floating nude is a real piece of art (I thought I recognised it). I'd love to know the painting in the flat, if that was real.
Other than those the actual episode just disappointed me, in a similar way to Sean: sure, I will watch the rest because the pulpy bits could still be used well as in season 1. But if this was the pilot to any other show I would never watch the second episode.
One thing I laughed at was that the 'senior staff writer' was called Dan Howser......
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Long time listener, first time poster
Re: Orin,
I think you are 'meant' to forgive Orin - I think that's the point to Marlon and Kevin Bain. Marlon insists that Orin is a product of his mother's emotional 'abuse'. His letter is presented as a joke, with its stuffy tone, constant qualification and obvious projection of his own problems - but he is actually aware of that, he admits it sounds like a self-indulgently broad definition of abuse, that he sounds like a snivelling worm. Ultimately he has a point: he does have problems, as does Orin, and neither's are particularly their own fault; they're just hard to forgive just because they're particularly slimy or apparently inconsequential problems.
Which I think is deliberate since depression and addictions too are often treated as non-problems. Worth comparing Erdedy's introduction where he watches a cockroach with the passage where Orin's hatred of cockroaches (!) is described - both scenes where obviously privileged men are confined to their homes and their aimless, self-destructive habits are described. It's maybe hard to sympathise with that kind of precious ennui but I can only presume that is the point. (Why else are the settings a halfway house and a tennis academy if not to compare the problems of their inhabitants?)
I think that's the point in the scene with Kevin Bain and the men's movement, which while funny is oddly-placed as an apparently isolated incident toward the very end. It's the very beginning of Hal's (and the reader's) path to understanding but he completely fails to ID because he can't get over how superficially icky it is - despite the fact it clearly works for them, they do get something out of it.The same themes feature heavily in Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, especially the interviews and The Depressed Person. But they're much, much bleaker and more scathing, even if more funny, and it's harder to see how it is anything other than the exact kind of nihilistic irony that DFW is supposedly meant to despise.
Crusader K+ngs II
in Strategy Game Discussion
Posted
I think in my case the one place relevant to my claim was occupied by another power. I didn't notice because of the bizarre circumstances of the war: I was fighting for a duchy from someone whose only constituent title was a barony, in a country independent from him... Still feels weird that I didn't get the duchy even if not the barony. I thought you could, for example, win a duchy even if the constituent counties were occupied by rivals and you didn't get them. Perhaps it would be impossible to leave him as an independent baron...?