Chris

I just saw Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy in the theater again. Goddamn that is a good movie. My favorite film of 2011. I'd see it a third time.

It's possible for something to become so commonly adopted that it becomes a cliche, and the bar justifying its usage raises considerably if you mean to make something worthwhile.

I'm Remo on Drooga's Pleasure Barge as a Republic Smuggler. Happy to group up with anyone, although I'm remembering how frustrating server-based persistent online games are as I've failed to find anyone I can actually play with so far. I even chose this specific server because Steve is on it, but I didn't realize he was on the Sith side so we STILL can't even play together. I'm level 20 I think.

Went ahead and made a Wordfeud account. Wordfeud: chrisremo Words with Friends: chris-remo

Read a shorter one first. 1Q84 is nearly a thousand pages, no need for it to be your introduction to Murakami.

I'm getting that feeling now.

I've played hundreds of hours of this goddamn game, probably half of which has been against Famous Vanaman. I'm chris-remo. Someone else already took chrisremo and when I challenged him to a game, he declined. One request I have is that if you're going to use online word finder cheat things, please don't start a game with me. When it becomes obvious I'm playing against someone who's doing this (the unbelievability of the words used starts getting pretty apparent after multiple games), it turns into a cold war of word cheating, and it really ceases being fun. Obviously, everyone ends up playing nonsense words not infrequently, just because you try some goofy thing out and it works, but there's a line between that and the more outrageous feats allowed by actual external tools, and the line tends to be pretty visible.

Tabaccast

I just finished The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides and really loved it. It's set in the early 80s and is essentially a modern take on the 19th-century marriage plot novel, but with something of a self-awareness that such a plot is utterly unworkable in modern society. It doesn't come off as gratingly meta or postmoderm or whatever though, it's very humanly told. I found it full of moments that could easily have been cliches but weren't executed as such. If it is ever turned into a film, I suspect it will not manage to straddle that line. My only major complaint, ultimately, is that the female protagonist is ultimately not as fully realized as her two male suitors. It's not a damning issue, as she was believable and sympathetic to me, but as the reader I didn't feel as enraptured by her as the two men did. Perhaps that's part of the point? --- Before that I read Ruth Rendell's late-90s novel A Sight for Sore Eyes, followed by its 2011 sequel, The Vault. Those are the first Rendell novels I've read and my opinions of them differ radically. A Sight for Sore Eyes I found to be an incredibly well observed and gripping piece of ostensible crime fiction, whereas The Vault (which, unlike its predecessor, she shoehorned into her long-running Inspector Wexler series) was a much more conventional and bland genre piece. I was surprised. Here are my fuller thoughts after finishing The Vault: http://chrisremo.tumblr.com/post/14273126251/the-vault --- Yesterday I started Murakami's newest, 1Q84. I'm only about 120 pages into this thousand-page behemoth, and I have a feeling it's not going to Blow Me Away. I've never been able to quite determine whether the stilted feeling I get from Murakami's dialogue is part of his style--a detached tone to accompany the surreal tinge of many of his stories--or if it just comes with being translated into a foreign language. In either case, I've found it a frustrating part of his books, which I otherwise enjoy, and I suspect it's going to wear thin on me as I progress through another 800+plus pages. Edit: Merged into one post

I love Downton Abbey. Can't wait for the second season to head to the US. I agree that it trends toward the overly romantic, but to be honest I find it almost a relief to have a show that's both 1) not relentlessly cynical and dismal and 2) not unbearably maudlin and brainless. House of Cards is great. I watched it last month or so and really enjoyed it. Never seen I, Claudius but I've meant to for some time.

I also prefer 16:10. It's a bit more multipurpose.

UH, AND ME (directly above Jake)

There are still dice rolls involved in the card game and you can pull off some great stuff, but it's definitely less focused on that than the primary board game. I don't know how available it is; I played a friend's copy. At least here in the States it's available for about $30 on Amazon. http://www.amazon.com/Blood-Bowl-Team-Manager-Card/dp/1589946901

This weekend I played a board game called Blood Bowl Team Manager. It's a card-based game that simulates a whole season of Blood Bowl matches through several series of "game highlights." Over the course of it, you build up your team roster, collect additional abilities, and accrue fans. It's pretty straightforward, plays quickly, and is a lot of fun. I highly recommend it.

I had a complete set of French Muzzy VHS tapes and I watched all of them multiple times. I loved it when I was a kid.

I had no clue this film had anything remotely interesting about it. I saw a bunch of posters and cardboard cutouts in movie theatres when it was screening, and I just assumed it was a bunch of dumb fantasy bullshit, like that Dragon Wars movie that came out a few years ago.

Hello new folks!

I'm not going. I don't know which Thumbs are.

Uh oh Diplomatic Pouch In this far-flung cyborg future of video game discussion, nobody known where the cast ends and the break begins, when your last shred of humanity gives way to a robot soul, or why you're full of ants. One thing is for sure, though: you will pay to click a cow. Games Discussed: StarCraft II, Cow Clicker, Street Fighter X Tekken, Tekken X StarCraft, Red Dead Redemption, Toy Story 3: The Video Game, SimCity (iPhone), SimAnt, Darkspore, Deus Ex 3, Singularity, Back Into Samuel L. Jackson's Arm, Kitty Tap HD

Any part that isn't self-evident. I specifically referred to your accusations about the developers' motives. You're obviously being deliberately obtuse by asking if I'm demanding evidence that Grand Theft Auto is about crime. Don't accuse people of being childish, and then act childish. There's a difference between claiming something is "about crime" (an objective fact) and that something is a "base and childish cash-in" (a presumably speculative accusation about motive).

Do you have any evidence of this whatsoever? You're making accusations about motive, not simply commenting on actual content.

I fully disagree with this. I think that since its inception, the GTA series has had a strong sense of self-awareness. I also think that if you're making a game about crime in a modern urban city, a relatively high degree of "dark and gritty" is utterly intrinsic to the setting, and not there simply for its own sake. I mean if there's any setting imaginable that actually deserves to be dark and gritty, it's the one in which the player is a criminal living in an impersonal urban metropolis. Hell, just walking down the street in some parts of New York in real life can be a dark and gritty experience.

Not really the same thing. The "jankiness" associated with these kinds of hardcore PC games is generally the result of massive numbers of player-driven systems interacting in unpredictable ways, combined with likely very lax QA procedures to often create a buggy mess. Games like STALKER exemplify this. That game isn't hardcore because it's difficult, it's hardcore because it's so incredibly complicated in terms of the sheer amount of it there is--in terms of volume of systems, depth of systems, and straight content.

This is indeed overlooked. Crysis' story isn't any good compared to...an actual real non-video game story, but compared to the great majority of shooters, it's utterly competent. The dialogue and delivery was better than a lot of what's out there in significantly more linear, "story-driven" shooters. Of course, even though Crysis was absolutely chock-full of amazingly-executed elements, it was slammed at every turn for being "just a tech demo but not a very good game" by people who have absolutely no idea what they're talking about.

I'm pretty sure you don't need to enter the serial number unless you play multiplayer. I've put in 8 hours or so and still haven't typed in my serial number. Another handy thing to keep in mind is that in Steam, you can right-click on a game in your list and view the CD-key from there, and then copy it into your clipboard. If the game supports copy-paste, you can just paste it in when you get into the game.