DanJW

HAhaha it completely slipped my mind that the Walking Dead started out as a comic, so I thought you were talking about a Fables TV show (a nice idea but it would have to be treated differently to Kingdom). Still haven't seen the Walking Dead show, I'd like to though.

I think this hard disk has too much metacultural caché now. We must get the data off it somehow, to discover what it holds. This needs to be a full blown internet cause. Start blogs, chain-mails, celebrity endorsements, whatever it takes. I'm only half joking; I think it would be a cool Dave Gormanesque project.

I've read the first two Fables books. They're good, although not as masterful as the big boys in the graphic novel world. They're on the next tier down though. It's enitely possible that as the long-arc plot comes to the fore in later books it picks up a lot more epic momentum. (Is there a TV show? is it actually based on the books or does it just share a name?)

I remember you and your pináta horse. Welcome Back!

Well, mainly updating the resolution into something bearable, which I find makes a lot of difference. The rest is mostly UI tweaks; adding organisation, drag and drop and all the other little things that we take for granted these days. And better control over font sizes, UI layout etc. BG Tutu essentially lets you play BG on the BG II engine, including updated D&D rules, classes etc.

QUITED QUITTED I loved baldur's gate 2 back in the day, but I never finished it. A little while ago I decided to give it another go - but then I had the idea of starting from the first BG. I didn't get very far. I agree it has aged pretty badly. I've been collecting fan-mods for it though which should make it prettier and more playable. I'm just a bit worried about losing too much time to it at the moment, when I'm so busy. Similar thing happened to me with the first Fallout, to my shame. Other things... I've never managed to finish GTA IV, despite enjoying it. I always get stuck on the bank heist.

I'm not sure. Probably 48 hours. I did a 24 hour work shift once, as a QA consultant for a game with an overrunning Crunch Time. Enough sugar, caffeine and excitement meant I was pretty happy with my fatigue-high by the end.

Maybe it dropped through from an alternate universe. You should send it to the SCP.

I tend to suffer from aphasia when I have migraine with aura - something which rarely happens these days, thankfully. In particular I would be unable to remember or speak the word 'migraine', which made it quite difficult for me to tell my manager what the problem was. It was weird, fun in a trippy way and terrifying all at the same time.

Two fine, fine Thumbs. Happy Birthday to you both.

Not your fault - threads have titles for a reason.

Letztewort!

The SCP Foundation - you can very easily get lost in it, especially if you start delving into the 'meta' fiction. It is also, for my money, one of the scariest fiction sites on the internet.

That's why he was whispering! And I didn't hear anyone shush him

He probably thinks reading books is childish too. Retaliatory generalisation: So called alpha-males are soulless, uncreative, close-minded, bigoted, hate-mongering, unintelligent, afraid-of-what-they-don't-understand, chauvenist, girl-friend-beating, outdated, thankfully dying-out dinosaurs of a bygone age that will not be missed.

Did you say indentured servitude? That reminds me; the USA has the highest percentage of its own population in prison - something like 1 in 6 adult males (70% of prisoners also being non-white) (UK is highest in Europe). The USA is also the biggest producer of goods made using prison labour. A major part of its economy is propped up by the use of prison labour. I'm not sure what that is, but it's not capitalism; and not free market (free, geddit?) FQoLXBF4uSA

happy Birthdays to the most excellent Wrestle and Sombre!

It's a tangled topic. I don't think there is an easy solution - the argument will rage for a while and eventualy dwindle out, as they always do. I don't really know much about any of the players so I guess I kind of fall into the "they deserve each other" camp. I do think manners and courtesy have a place. I try to be polite to people and no-one has ever tried to get me fired. Reap what you sow etc. I do also support the right of comedians to say what they want, even if it is offensive - as long as their underlying point is clear and noble. They have an easy distinction to make though - when they're onstage with a mic and when they're not. Very few comics keep up the same idioms when offstage and if they do they get bad reputations (a lot of 'traditional mens club' comedians for instance). If you use offensive material but you pick up a sizable fanbase that beleives in the surface version for your persona - bigots who fail to get self-satirical racism say - then your skills are not adequete and you are failing to acheive your aim. You need to do something differently. If you continue in it anyway because it is making money then you have lost integrity. The Penny Arcade debacle I find more troubling and difficult to judge. I think I agree with the line "the original comic was justified, but they handled the complaints badly". I say 'they' but it was Krahulik really. Holkins wisely kept to 'no comment' and when he finally did it was well reasoned. There's a reason why he's the front man.

This page does not yet have an amusing yoututbe video upon it. Behold this capitalist marketing propaganda! R55e-uHQna0 It's Obligatory.

Communism is the ideal - in a post-scarcity society. Of course it is the interest of capitalist entities to prevent post-scarcity from ever occurring. Capitalism works... depending on your definition of 'works'. It's Dawinist in a survivial of the fittest sense, so long-long term it may have benefits for mankind as a whole. But competition and darwinism work by grinding up and killing 90% of the population. Unchecked capitalism isn't freedom - it is economic slavery. Rather than being restrained by laws, people are restrained by simple economics instead with far worse results. If you care about individual people rather than (or as well as) humanity as a species, then I don't see how you can justify turning them into grist for the mill. I'm not religious, but I find it almost hilarious how a fundementalist christian nation like the USA can cling to values which are so totally contradictory to the teachings of the bible. It really is madness. new rule: If you really must post on politics, you still have to inclide an Obligatory Comical YouTube clip: LGOIzsNZaPQ It's Obligatory!

... I feel a bit sorry for TalShiar and The Rusty Magus, as I suspect they might be real.

I like achievements/trophies for peripheral stuff. I tend to go and look at them on my second playthrough of the game, as suggestions for stuff to try and further challenges. What I hate is trophies for the main arc of a game. Having a 'ding' sound and a popup when I have just beaten a boss, say, competely destroys my immersion. And that's just one of the less egregious examples. Ding! You have earned 'Lose a Loved One'. Ding! you have earned 'Make a Tough Choice' and 'Feel Emotional Turmoil'. Ding! You have earned 'Shed a Tear on Level 7'. Acheivements are fine for gamist sandboxey and arcade stuff, but they don't belong anywhere near a narrative.

Oooff, January was a bit crazy for me too. Let's see: I was doing sound design and operation for a play. Lovely cast and crew and the production turned out great. I'm down to design lighting for an upcoming production of All My Sons, which I love doing, and have minor-helping out roles in other plays. Plus I got talked into auditioning for a crazy madcap play based on Clue(do) where every actor plays four roles. It went great, I got callbacks and now I'm waiting to hear if I got it. I acted in three plays last year; after a while considering giving up and sticking to backstage stuff, I had a great experience with them and can't wait to do it again. Did I mention that all my theatre work is voluntary? Yeah I'm still technically unemployed. But I've got an interview tomorrow for a crappy phone helpline job. I decided that I have enough cool stuff going on that I can handle a meaningless soul crushing day job for a while. I'll still be applying to more interesting things, but I need the money. And I'm moving house. Oh yeah, my flatmates are moving on so I have to find a new home. Been looking at places and having lettings agents bring their prospective tennents to invade my personal neurotic space. There was a scare where the lettings agents, ravenous as ever, thought I was giving one months notice instead of two and so they geared up to chuck us out. Eugh, I'm glad that got sorted. I'm hoping to get a studio flat as I'm not keen on sharing again - this last houseshare was great and I felt comfortable but that is a rarity. So having a steady job of any kind will help with the bills and references. I would have done bar work again, but for the theatre and the comedy - I am now co-running three small-venue comedy nights a month, occasionally compering it myself. They're all going pretty well, although with the last few weeks of chaos we had to cancel a gig for the first time in six months when I failed to spot that the venue double-booked us. I felt awful but our track record is still pretty good. One of the venues is putting a lot more pressure on us than the others but hopefully we'll get that under control. I have few small writing projects and minor things too. I had to abandon a short-story competition when I just couldn't pull the draft together. There will be another one eventually though. So last year was my best in ages, possibly my first good year in many. Helped by an amazing and lovely French girl who I was seeing. Sadly it didn't work out but we're still friends and still hang out from time to time, so it could have been a lot worse. I had a bit of a mood dip in the new year so haven't really felt up to much flirting since - indeed I seem to have forgotten how. There are a couple of girls I've thought about asking out... one of them I even admitted my feelings to... and then nothing really happened. It's weird, I was sure I'd got better at this sort of thing and regained my dating confidence last year, but I seem to have lost all romantic momentum right now. I'm not agonising over it, puzzle that it is; I figure I just need a bit more time to sort the rest of my life and my mind out. Feels a bit disorganised in here. ...aaand breeeathe... OK, so, February. Here we go.

I finished Star Wars: Force Unleashed. And I'm still playing it on the unlockable super-hard setting. So yeah I like it quite a lot. It's nice, light entertainment. It does everything you expect it to. Even the story and characters are... not bad. In fact I would have liked more of them. The cut scenes and character development were nice, along with the secret history of the rebellion, but I just felt like there were bits missing. There seemed to be months or years in between each mission and cutscene and the game would have benefitted from showing us more of that - the charatcers would have meant a lot more by the end. I'm guessing stuff got cut out during rushed development. Talking of which, the cracks do show in the otherwise slick facade. sound run-overs, stupid loading times, occasional crashes. Not really what you expect from the world's biggest movie/game franchise. The writing did suffer from the prequelitis symptom of contradicting the original movies (Princess Leia doesn't seem to have met a wookie before Chewbacca, and she certainly doesn't have much regard for him. Yet in this game she is held prisoner on their homeworld and begs you to free the noble wookie slaves... doesn't add up). OK so that's a really nerdy nitpick but various mistakes like that still irritated me. The game is a bit too easy, but with some crazy difficulty spikes, mostly on bosses. I came to enjoy it all; steam-rolling carnage or challenging duels. The action can get a teensy repetitive as most reviewers said, but if you add variety of your own it's not too bad (I would have liked even more evnironmental 'traps') and the whole thing is short anyway. Such a shame that Force Unleashed II is apparently horrible.

Cool. I missed this last month somehow. And rumours say as soon as March!