Jolly0451

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Posts posted by Jolly0451


  1. Ten Percent Happier is a great read and was what got me into meditation about a year ago. With regard to meditation and personality, I don't think meditation changes your personality so much as lets you observe and accept it with equanimity. Not that you can't change as a person but its similar to starting a couch to 5k running practice and being worried that you'll be running marathons and won't recognize yourself anymore. Its a lot like exercise in that regard, sure you could change as a person if you are more mindful or healthier but nothing about it requires that you do.


  2. I found out about Idle Thumbs because GFW Radio had stopped recording, so I was looking for new podcasts to listen to while going running. I remember Chris or Nick talking about Diablo 2 and being shocked that people knew about Diablo 2 because it came out when I was four years old! I assumed Diablo wasn't popular because few people played online at the time and no one I knew talked about it except my Dad.


  3. The Witcher 3 is a game where entirely of the main plot is actually concerned with Ciri's "chosen one" plotline. By the end of the game its clear that Geralt wasn't the protagonist of the story. Of course, it is also told as an epistolary frame story of Geralt's journey as written by a side character and poet Dandelion who is also in the plot which he wrote. Essentially the Witcher 3 involves hypo-diagetic flashbacks told to Geralt in the diagetic level of narrative based on his choices but then told to you the player through the Extra-Diegetic level by a narrator who has included himself in the story. Unfortunately, CD project Red never uses the diegetic layers they have except to justify the journal in the pause menu as being written by Dandelion which makes the entire narrative structure feel pointless.  

     

    Additionally the main critical path story-line is non-linear in that you can go to each area whenever you feel like it but then the flashback sequences which are linear missions inside of the non linear structure of the main plot. Because the main game is open ended that means the playable flashbacks are linear segments of the story which you can get in any order which is interesting because the game's narrative accepts that it is linear but not deterministic.


  4. Good show but I think calling the LoTV balanced isn't really accurate when there is a balance patch tomorrow Nerfing Adepts/Photon overcharge and Uthermal was the only Terran to make it past the round of 32. Uthermal did do some cool meta strategies in this tournament. For example he did a cloaked ghost rush in a series when he knew Showtime would think it was the more common proxy cyclone/reaper build

     

    He beat Harstem with a 1/1/1 allin in the last game of the series when they are extremely uncommon on four player maps after also beating him when he had his proxy scouted in the first game and had to play the rest of the game from a disadvantage.

    Outside of that Uthermal also played a weird Marinetank composition during his macro games when every other Terran at the tournament favored using liberators/mines with their bio instead.


  5. Looking at Byun all you need to know is this http://aligulac.com/players/47/results/?after=2015-11-10&before=2016-01-16&event=&race=ptzr&country=all&bestof=all&offline=both&game=all&wcs_season=&wcs_tier=&op= Having a 86% winrate in matches against the top Koreans in online tournaments is insane, like better than Innovation at the end of Hots crazy. If he continues to play this well there is no way Byun doesn't make ro4/finals of GSL or SSL. The only way he gets eliminated early is if he has to play a Protoss since PvT is silly right now until adept/prism gets patched.


  6. Good podcast guys.

     

    I'm not sure how a Game Mechanic itself would engender ideology in sclpls's first sense of presenting a worldview. The standard definition of Mechanics are the actions a player takes and how the game responds to them, E.G. Mario jumping, combat in the Witcher, grenade rolling down a hill, etc. But if you take the context of the game out, so its now just a game which solely consists of the Mechanics and their outcome then do they still say something w/r/t the game's worldview? Without Win Conditions or Thematic elements it doesn't seem that Mechanics push much of a worldview by themselves on the player compared to the rest of the game.

     

    The second sense of ideology, the Marxist sense of the assumptions is present in every work of media. I don't know if a Game's Mechanics reflect their culture's ideology and social framework significantly differently than any other form of media or not, but I'd be interested if anyone had thoughts on that.


  7. Loved the Christmas stories on this show and how different the tone is to other gaming podcasts I listen to.

     

    Personally, my favorite Christmas story is getting a gaming computer in eighth grade. My parents had bought the parts I had on a list rather than an entire computer, which in retrospect was an awful idea yet miraculously produced a working machine. So on Christmas morning me and my older brother assembled a computer for the first time and proceeded to troubleshoot issues for an eternity.

     

    Then when we got it to boot we immediately downloaded source and proceeded to spawn a crazy amount of entities in Garry’s Mod and destroy them with nukes.


  8. Good podcast. Crazy that the CS GO changes have already been reverted. Sort of untimely of Valve to be so quick on patching for once http://blog.counter-strike.net/index.php/2015/12/13394/

     

    In other news, free source quality GlobalStarcraftLeague preseason has been awesome. Highlights so far would probably be TY v Hero (@1:47) and Sorry V Symbol(@2:36) http://www.twitch.tv/gsl/v/30056863 

     

    Oh, and also Forte v True shows some cool builds(2:23)http://www.twitch.tv/gsl/v/30221674  First game is a Taeja-esque TvZ with CC first into hellion/banshee map control and pressure. Which turns into a cool slow push positional Ghost liberator versus corrupter/roach/ultra-festor lategame. Second game goes about as different as is possible with a macro proxy two rax reaper into a hellbat cloak banshee allin. This series is LoTV in a nutshell.


  9. Small Corrections on the Rain V Polt series commentary, despite Terrans using Mech in TvZ and TvT, Polt's style of Bio play is still as standard as it gets and is the predominant style of Terran versus Protoss. Its not really old fashioned at all, Polt did a 13(12scvscout) reaper fast expand into 3 Rax which is the most safe and standard build in Starcraft 2 across all matchups. Secondly, Polt actually never parade pushes his units across the map or SCV Pull's, instead he uses "Safety Rallies" where he sets his units to go to the spot equidistant to his expansions before loading them in Medivacs to boost them across the map during the mid game to harass. The reason why Mech play isn't viable in the matchup is due to Zealot Charge/Immortal's just beating Mech compositions flat out. Terrans either play to drop Bio like Polt or Maru or you hit a SCV timing pull because there are no other options that work consistently. Good show on the whole though.