MrHoatzin

Huh?Well, there wasn't any. Dude left LEC and took his Sam & Max with him.

They used it sparingly before and as the joke. This time around it was kindof different. Start at the one minute mark: 2qpDfkfOvCE Walkthrough dude clicks the third option and the game sortof just says the first one. There is no real narrative or dramatic reason to want to beat around the bush with a conversation as relatively banal as this. Not cool. But aside from that, I really loved the game. It looks the sexiest of all the Telltale games thus far. I loved the animation, I liked the character design, I liked the typography in the dialog tree container, I liked the writing—the broad strokes as well the fine crafty details, really, really rad little game. AA++++ Will TMI again. It is kindof weird to see community people involved (and competently!) with such an important artifact of our childhoods. This kind of realization didn't hit me with Sam & Max three years ago, possibly because I never lamented Purcell's fall from grace in the same way I mourned the slow death of LEC. Sam & Max were always free, whereas Guybrush was mistreated and confined to the back of some vault, and not on any horizon as a potential source of fresh, somewhat sentimental joy.

OMG! We're in a dire need for a flash soundboard! And then we can use it to prank-call Ken Levine or something.

I agree with what Chris said. Haven't finished the game yet, but it is some hot shit and I like it more than I don't. On an unrelated note, it would make for the greatest inside joke ever for Largo to appear in one of the episodes and be voiced by Dom.

Yes, relax. Nothing to worry about, elmuerte is a professional.

Email Ron Gilbert and ask him for a torrent link.

Never read it so I can't judge. Maybe it is actually amazing and worthwhile literature and the wiki page makes it seem actually interesting. I don't have a problem with actually interesting things that happen to be thrown into the steampunk genre. I have a problem with the steampunk that only has other steampunk as inspiration, that just cashes in on the aesthetic and forgets to do anything worth doing with it. A steam powered database sounds exciting. On the other hand, a town square grate that contains randomly rotating gears for some reason is annoying, does not seem thought through in the least. Babbage's analytical engine is a gorgeous piece of machinery, but IT DOES SOMETHING. A lot of steampunk is full of purely decorative gears; the uniquely steampunk notion of a decorative gear pisses me off.

Man, I really hate steampunk and all it stands for. There is a little bauhaus duder inside me who starts foaming at the mouth at the notion of random brass gears glued to things made of mahogany and adorned with random bits of green glass. I have nothing against the Victorian era as far as its design and industry and technology and fashion and sci-fi go, but I really hate steampunk. I have never seen anything (a work of art or craft or whatever) that eagerly embraced the Steampunk moniker that at the same time competently referenced the Victorian era. Everything steampunk is superficially and whole-heartedly based on other steampunk conventions and works. It is a very inbred, incestuous aesthetic. Kitschy too.

This is some weird weird stuff. I wonder how much of what she's saying is actually happening and relatively easily interpretable and how much she (or is it he?) is editorializing as s/he's telling this tale... I have no point of reference as to how coherent their little Simmish conversations can be.

Saw the attached on Boing Boing earlier. Generally this bailout talk lacks perspective. This is a diagram comparing the bailout sums to other major US expenditures in the last 206 years. This is neither the lassez-faire capitalism that the Right claims to espouse (since the govt is meddling in business at an unprecedented scale, right as said lassez-fare policies caused the mess in the first place), nor socialism that the Left fancies so much (since the government doesn't get to own squat of what it spends on). This is madness. The most annoying part of the whole thing is that the entirety of the expenses is just smoke and mirrors that are supposed to prop a system based on hot air to begin with. What I mean by this, is that with utter destruction of manufacturing in this country we've created an economy based on selling abstract credit products to municipalities, Asian nouveau riche with lots of money and nowhere to put it, and miscellaneous small tater investors. Now the people in power are trying to start this same imaginary money machine back up again. First Bush dumped a shit ton of no-strings attached cash on the banks and their cousins, then Bama let the banks declare whatever they wish as the true worth of their distressed assets. This whole bullshit is making money look more and more valueless. I see is a middle-road, middling, bullshit plan where no one is spending any political capital on anything actually ballsy or worth doing. I don't know exactly what this would be. It just seems that nothing being done is doing any substantive good. If anything, it is just buying time. Thoughts?

I remember a drawing a relatively simple table for this.

I've been thinking about this all day yesterday. Why stop at adjusting for GDP of the country at the time the purchase was made. Why not compare all of these against a GDP equivalent of a purchasing power of any one individual. Or any one household. Might make for an enlightening, educational diagram. How does the national debt compare to a debt of an individual? Is the Louisiana purchase like buying me buying a new car, or a new house in the fancy part of town?

I didn't say they should be forbidden from expressing themselves, I just said that they are not inherently friendly towards free speech, reason. That said, I probably wouldn't argue at length* that Republicans are a monolithic, homogeneous mass epitomized by Rush Hannity, but it is a far more uniform and disciplined mass than the Democrats.I'm looking at the Republican leadership and the only reasonable people I can see near the spotlight are Charlie Christ** and John McCain† from three years ago and maybe Jon Huntsman‡ of Utah. And these people are accused of being traitors to the pure Republican base. Maybe the large bunch of Republicans in the middle are really freaked out by all this, and I know some thoughtful people who declare themselves Republican who couldn't vote for Republicans in the recent few elections, but I wouldn't consider these people the heart and soul of the party. And they definitely don't have a voice today. Maybe California Republicans are a different breed from what I see from where I am sitting: a bunch of crypro-Jim-Crow good ole boys who recite Limbaugh as an authority on all things political, who came dangerously close to putting creationism in grade school science text books, who yesterday were so patriotic to see criticism of Bush as treason, but want to secede from the union today, etc... There is a scary number of Sarah Palin 2012 bumper stickers around here, even though Bexar county went blue this cycle. It is reassuring, however, that so many Republicans were outright disgusted by Palin. These are reasonable people. I am not afraid of reasonable people, I am afraid of Sarah Palin. __________________ *See † below. **If I had a choice between voting for Christ or voting for any of the Clintons or anyone deep from within the Clintons' camp, I would probably vote for Christ. †Man was a relatively sane, not-too-religious, western-type Republican who got mauled by the expectations of the bellicose fundamentalist wing of the party. His transformation is representative of the kind of pressure Republicans are under to conform to the loudest currents within the coalition. This is why I can feel comfortable with my rough abstraction of all Republicans into these voices; it is a functional model for thinking about politics. May not be absolutely true for each and every Republican, but those who don't fit are outliers. ‡The only thing I know about the man is that he is willing to let gays have their rights and that he's from Utah.

I just double checked the cost of Louisiana and it came down to 15,000,000 of then dollars. The square for the Louisiana purchase on this graph is bigger than the template 50 billion in the center, so I am guessing the stuff is actually adjusted for inflation. That said, comparing against the GDP would be interesting voodoo, actually, but somewhat moot.

As soon as these people are on their legs they will start lobbying for the preservation of the status quo from two years ago (with its fictitious-money-based prosperity). And they are the problem. Just like there is grim future for health care reform as long as insurance companies call the shots and as long as the entire medicine sector is being run as a for-profit business (what with supply/demand and bartering not really working in the context of HELP ME NOT DIE TOMORROW, DOC). It's like shoveling coal into the Hindenburg engines. Or something like that.

Oh, man that's awesome. My French is really rotten tho. I understand most of the words, but the meaning still escapes me.

Yeah, as I was writing that, I was wary of martyrs, but I just wanted to bring the thought to its extreme, whatever its implication, for the purpose of on-going discussion. The Republican party over here is overflowing with persecution complexes, even when they are in power, they invent The Liberal Media to rail against. They refuse to recognize facts and research that flat-out disprove their biases and prejudices and philosophies. They see natural selection as some sort of very elaborate (and always patently incongruous) conspiracy. Just like Nazis cashing in on their right to free speech, these people are cashing in on modern medicine and technology while refusing to recognize as valid the science that makes it possible. These kinds of people scare me. And there is too many of them. How does one deal with a force that not only does not respond to reason and logic and basic human decency, but rails against reason and logic and basic human decency while crassly cashing in on the reason and logic and basic human decency of the society they're in?

Sometimes the virtues of Enlightenment, as showcased here, scare me. You, being a Liberal-minded free-speech kind of duder, see it as an unfortunate paradox that you have to let the Nazis do their thing. The Nazis, on the other hand, see your Liberal-minded free-speech as something they would need to abolish, were they to come to power. Sometimes the phase shift between ideologies in theory and in practice show a very scary middle ground that is hard to define unless one tries to cross from theory into practice. In theory free speech for the win, no compromise; in practice Nazis being totalitarian, narrowsighted, jingoistic, tribal, xenophobic are the natural enemy of free speech and open expression of differences. To preserve free speech in actuality, one needs to shut the Nazis the fuck up, make them go away, ridicule them, outlaw them, break their stores, etc. One has to get one's hands dirty in the very moral dimensions one purports to protect. On the other hand, Enlightenment has worked rather well thus far, but at the very least we have to be wary of the enemies thereof. We gotsta keep 'em in check.

Here's a potential explanation for a hypothetical EMI LeChuck that I would suggest if they asked me today: I am not proud of this rabid, futile exercise; I just felt the above tirade needed an example.

The original had many anachronistic jokes about corporate culture and the US Way Of Life in general, (International House of Mojo, the little ™s all over the place, Stan, the Grog machine, I found the treasure of Mêlée Island and all I got was this lousy t-shirt, etc.) but because the rest of the Caribbean was disgusting and decrepit and lawless, these jokes were funny. In EMI they decided to go away with the punchline by making the settings literally quaint and touristy as opposed to just aspiring to be in some official narrative, but failing to follow through. And while LeChuck did allegedly shapeshift between Lester Shinetop and his ghostly form, he did that as a ghost, and never when he was a zombie or as the flamin' demon or whatever. In the forth one he reappears and all of a sudden he can shapeshift between all his old bodies, for punctuation... Honestly, though, I don't want to engage into pedantic explanation as to how, if we look carefully in SOMI and MI2 he does indeed change his form and blah blah blah. I can't help but see the shapeshifting as anything other than the creative team's failure at coming up with an interesting fourth form for LeChuck, that they resolved by just cramming all the other ones in. I don't know what kind of amazing and awesome ideas they had for the game that fell through because of budgetary concerns and pressure from on top, I bet they are all a really competent and capable bunch. Unfortunately they really botched EMI on many fronts and I am a bit freaked out by the fact that I am still bitter, ten years on, a high school diploma and a college degree later. I really tried to play it again a few months ago and couldn't get past the intro. I AM SORRY. I realize that some (most?) of the EMI team are at Telltale now. I enjoyed both seasons of Sam & Max and the Wallace and Gromit games and I have what I believe to be reasonably, realistically high hopes for the Tales of Monkey Island.

The attempt to tie everything together was really crappy in MI4, I felt like they were retroactively explaining things in the previous games that really didn't need explanations. Guybrush was for the first time ever a complete loser who was snubbed by everyone and the focus of everyone's derision, not someone actually on top of things who was just not believed. The touristification of the Caribbean was a lot of fun in the previous games where the Caribbean was actually a rotten hive of scum and villainy and the touristy crap was actually funny. They made it too literally touristy and killed the joke. The giant power rangers robots being the secret of monkey island, Le Chuck changing shape randomly, etc. All really weak and not well-executed plot elements. I played the game only once, when it came out. I tried to play it again recently and couldn't get past the opening prologue bit. I was ready to give it another chance, but the little exasperated monkey facepalming to Guybrush's not understanding what was going on was just representative of what sucked about the game.

Yeah, but someone needs to spend some political capital to embarrass these small taters to behave reasonably. No one wants to deal with crazy hicks screaming that their god-given rights to educate their younguns the way they want to is being trampled upon by some university-educated fancy pants from the big city.

It is not just states that make the rules, it is individual school districts. San Antonio falls squarely in the middle of Bexar county. It contains a slew of school districts, among them Northside, which is one of the most well-off districts in the nation, and Edgewood, which is amongst the poorest districts in the country. In Texas at least property taxes are directly tied to education spending. The disparity is also shown in all metrics of efficiency of education (text scores, going-to-college rates, dropout rates, etc.). At some point in the last five years city officials decided to institute so-called "Robinhood" Laws that had the rich folks subsidize education for the kids in the barrio. There was crazy outrage from the parents in the rich district. On one hand you heard, "MY CHILD NEEDS HIS MIDDLE SCHOOL OLYMPIC POOL HEATED FOR LATE NIGHT EXTRACURRICULAR ACTIVITIES, YOU DAMN DIRTY MEXICAN HIGHWAY ROBBERS" vs on the other hand, "IT WOULD BE NICE IF THESE KIDS HAD TEXTBOOKS, YOU RICH FUCKS". Education in the US is a real clusterfuck. No one really knows how to fix it. Nobody has the bollocks to do anything drastic. If the federal government steps in, everyone screams STATE RIGHTS, if the state steps in, everyone screams ROBINHOOD. And then in weird backwater middle-of-nowheres, you have the problem of crazy religious motherfuckers who don't want their kids taught no stinkin Darwinism in classrooms, and they will claim some sort of local autonomy to give their kids rotten education if they so desire, etc.

Just wanted to add, for those not yet eager to believe the noob, that Explosions in the Sky are, as he says, rad. :tup: They take after a kind of brilliance of sound, lots of high-hat noisiness similar to Sigur Rós (I'm thinking of Takk for example). Am I the only one for whom the smileys are borked?

Just to complete the Tejano trifecta, I live in San Antonio and do web design in a design firm. While I graduated with a painting degree and figured I'd be doing a lot of artsy fartsy stuff, I turned out to be a rare designer with programming aptitude and code cleanliness, so I end up doing more programming than design.