Chris

I don't even know what the opinion means. Describing things as "white" has become so vague as to be meaningless as far as I'm concerned. It just seems to be some kind of criticism having to do with wealth, or hipsterism, or privilege, or SOMETHING, depending on the context, but at this point I just read it as general snark.

For what it's worth, and I know this seems a little semantic, but it's not "the American government" trying to pass this bill. Like pretty much any other bill, it's been introduced by one or more individual congresspeople. It's not reflective of actual government policy. Any congressperson can theoretically try to get anything passed, but that doesn't mean anything with respect to the current administration.

That's true. We've all quintupled our podcast-related take-home pay.

Technically, it's currently actually more a thing where we pay their bills and none of us make any money at it!

I would also like to thank the 3MA guys for doing a great podcast and for agreeing to be on our podcast network, whatever a podcast network is!

Sean and I actually discussed reading The Art of Fielding for the cast but we both kind of felt that the book has been SO heavily discussed in the literary world since its release that we would kind of be throwing our mere two cents into a Scrooge McDuck-like pile of cash. Of course, we just did an episode on The Great Gatsby...

Too late

Welcome, new people!

This is pretty much why we chose this book.

openpaths.cc

I regret not talking more about Jordan in particular, because I find her a really fascinating character. Daisy is in a lot of ways the nexus of all the action of the story, but Jordan almost feels like a totally incidental character. Except that you do get the sense that she and Nick really do have a pretty substantial relationship, which is always really crazy to me! With respect to Nick's narrating, Jordan falls somewhere in the middle of the spectrum defined by Nick's complete attention (Gatsby) and casual brushing aside (his daily work life). She is clearly a bigger part of his life than is reflected by the attention he gives her in the retelling.

I thought Wiggins was absolutely masterful at this in last month's novel.

These are all excellent URLs to register at www.hover.com/wizard

Hey guys, I recently (finally) made the Thirty Flights of Loving original soundtrack available at Bandcamp for pretty cheap: http://chrisremo.bandcamp.com/

(I did admin it in. I'm a jerk.) And yeah that is a fascinating post.

I HOPE THE SITE YOU ACTUALLY USED WAS HOVER.COM/WIZARD

Welcome new people!

Yes, I think this nails it. Red Faction Guerrilla is hardly a masterpiece in a lot of ways, but it is a lot more honest about what it actually is than Far Cry 3 is.

I don't agree that it's "Skyrim with guns," at least not beyond the kind of funny observation whose response is either "Haha yeah it kind of is", or a goofy tangent about dumb shit like wizards with semiautomatics, which is certainly in our wheelhouse. But your wallet example is actually a perfect example of what's wrong with this game for me. You just described putting a system in a game as a decision that's basically within a vacuum. "Well, we have animals, and we want the player to fight all the animals, so let's have a crafting system. Well, I guess that means we need stuff to craft. A wallet I guess??" I mean, is a wallet an appropriate thing to make me craft? Is the amount the wallet can hold before needing a new one appropriately chosen? Was this even the right time to pick that battle about only certain animals needing to be used for certain things in the first place? Even having made all these decisions, should you really be bombarding me with a popup EVERY SINGLE TIME I encounter a pickup that would give me money, reminding me that my stupid wallet isn't big enough for some more scraps of paper? Repeat all of this for the shit with the backpack, thus effectively doubling (or more) the number of times I see those popups, every single time accompanied by an obnoxious whooshing sound effect. Just because another game that's abstractly similar to this one had a particular system doesn't mean that system is right for this game--or that the specific way it was implemented is right. It isn't even the basic existence of the crafting system that bothers me, it's the ridiculous way it's implemented in the world. I don't remember ever being this irritated by an arbitrary limitation in Skyrim. And if this really were a game about subsistence and limitations, then they sure fucked up the rest of the game because it doesn't communicate that AT ALL. Here's the thing: Systems in games aren't arbitrary, isolated, and minor things. They aren't just annoying things for me to nitpick--they ARE THE GAME. Far Cry 3 isn't "a sort-of-open-world shooter that also has a crafting game attached to it", the crafting system is part of the game itself. If the systems aren't working together towards some meaningful harmonious whole, then they probably shouldn't be there. Or, if they're going to be there, they shouldn't be shouting shit in my face that I clearly already know, every three seconds, especially when that shit is pretty absurd. By the way the reason I already know this piece of information it's trying to tell me is because it's been shouting it at me for an hour straight, whooshing sound and all. It's just a style of unconsidered maximalist design that I really have no patience for at this point. I am perfectly happy to have a discussion with someone about why they think the game is good and I don't, but I'm not going to countenance the notion that I'm simply looking for minor things to pick apart in a game that I should otherwise love.

I'm not sure I really take your point, since that discussion was paired with discussion of another game that we sincerely enjoyed, so clearly we aren't out to sandbag games at all cost. Negative critique isn't my "default" position, it's the position I take when I very much dislike a game. The questions you ask towards the end of your post are not ones to which I would have charitable answers in the case of Far Cry 3, and having already spent more than four hours in that game, I'm not inclined to spend even more of my limited time on the off-chance that might change. If it's your claim that it is "intellectually lazy" to criticize a game I find obnoxious, heavy-handed, unfocused, and crass, then we'll just have to disagree on that. I'm not going to do mental barrel rolls to strip away 75% of an off-putting game to find the remainder of the game that connects with me, at least not this game. In the case of something that feels more honest and restrained, I do often make that effort. There are plenty more criticisms I have of it that didn't make it into the podcast, but past a point it's probably not worth enumerating them.

Yep. I think for a lot of people, Eco is too clever for his own good as a novelist, and I can totally understand where they're coming from, but he has enough raw and powerful beauty in (most of) his novels that, to me, he earns his acrobatics and digressions.

Agreed with all of this. My reading time has been challenged recently so I've still got about 20% of it or so left to read, but man, Mantel is something else. The fluid way she plays with perspective and tense, while remaining rigorously within Cromwell's own eyes at all times, is really remarkable to me.

Other Fact: It's not in slow-mo, just pitch-shifted down. It plays at the original speed.

Thanks for all the kind comments about the music, guys! Actually, the music layering system I wrote for Spacebase just uses regular streaming MP2 files (which is what we use for pretty much all of our streaming music in our games). We feed uncompressed Wav files into Fmod and we have various compression presets for different types of sounds: music, effects, voice, ambience, etc. Then Fmod (running on one of our build machines) compiles all of the audio into one or more banks (usually, a bank for each category of sound), and those aren't playable in regular music software. Our 3D Buddha engine supports audio events with "parameters" (that is, various layers that can be cross-faded in Fmod), but our 2D engine based on MOAI does not. That's why I had to write my own system for our implementation. (For what it's worth, we could build in that native support to our engine if we wanted to, but it wasn't practical for a two-week prototype.) To get around that limitation for Spacebase, all three music layers are separate music files that all start playing as soon as the game loads (or when the player switches tracks, or un-mutes, etc.), and my system is actually just dynamically managing their relative volumes in the background.

It'll be nice when this isn't a usual requirement for fictional women in mass media. There are plenty of male supporting roles in all kinds of media in which you would much more readily describe the look of the actor (or animated representation, etc.) as "interesting" rather than "handsome" (someone like Steve Buscemi, for example, whose rules generally highlight, rather than downplay, his quirky facial features). It's hardly an option at all for female characters to be anything other than cute or beautiful.