Roderick

Read Hunger Games! It's all the rage!

When I was in SF in January 2010, the temperature was an extremely pleasant 15-18 degrees outside. Perfect for exploration. Wear a sweater or jacket and you'll be more than fine. Of course, I can't name any averages based on one visit.

By 'they', I'm assuming you mean 'we'.

Oh, interesting, I should reread the first chapter. It's a little annoying the discussion about this book might be held in both this topic and the one about the bookcast, and in either case I'm not sure what to do. I posted a long blurb in the other topic, but got a little shock when I saw nobody else there had, so I think I might have been premature and ruined the whole thing.

Seems about right. Wow, I'm kind of surprised to hear this. I had expected Capcom to learn from RE5, but apparently NOPE, this is now what RE is and it's only going to get crazier from here on out. I still miss the merchant.

Hey! Bishvabis happens to be a respected member of our community and initiator of great discussion.

Sexism is OVER

That is the scariest casual comment I've read on these forums so far.

Surely it's possible between adults to place a temporary taboo on politics? I hope I'm not being terribly naive at this, but a little bit of preparation and consideration should go a long way.

I assume anyone reading this thread has finished the book and will dispense with using spoiler tags in the following. Caveat lector! So, I finished The Sense of an Ending. It was short, but so packed with ideas and layers that I doubt I’ll be able to fully encapsulate the experience in words. Rather, I’ll just put down a few scattershot thoughts. The first thing is that I thought Veronica was being more than a little unfair in her treatment of Tony. She is constantly telling him that he’ll never understand and pretends like he is insensitive and incapable of reading her emotions. Whereas the root of the problem turns out to be that he didn’t know that Adrian and Veronica’s mother had a child together. This is a factoid Tony couldn’t have known, so it’s strange Veronica treats him as if he should have been able to ‘feel’ his way to this truth. I don’t feel like drawing the conclusion that it’s a failing of the book since part of the story hinges on Tony’s perceived simple nature, but like to view it more as Veronica being a needlessly difficult fruitcake. I was pretty shocked by the transition between part one and two. The first part is all about boys gearing up for their lives to begin and then bam, it’s retirement time! The story skips Tony’s entire adult life and that is a powerful punch. Like the boys, I too am still in the familiar ‘waiting for life to truly start’ mindset, so suddenly arriving at the end gave me a nasty feeling. Having said that, the continuation of the story offers the thought that even at an old age, you are still actually living. One may be old, but not living is a choice made at every point in your life, not something done once and then regretting ever after. Tony’s main thought about his life seems to be that he’s ‘peaceable’ and seeks stability and safety and shies away from adventure. He calls himself average, though I find that term far too contextual to use – after all on a school of brilliant people, being a genius is average. The book doesn’t draw any stern conclusion on whether this way of living is preferable. Tony seems to have liked his life quite well, even if there are some nibbles of doubt here and there. I don’t think anyone will be able to escape that. I for one don’t seek an all too adventurous life either, being rather fearful and sensitive, but neither do I subscribe to the idea that have a ‘peaceable’ existence is necessarily dull or unfulfilling. Life is far too extravagant and multicolored, and people too, to draw any conclusion on what is the best life. Some people want to crush their enemies, see them driven before them and hear the lamentations of their women, others find deep fulfillment from tending their garden every day. Tony doesn’t reach a conclusion either way, but he doesn’t seem to mind all that much. What I really liked was how the whole book facilitates thinking about it in deeper layers than just the actual story. The short snippets that comprise it, the playful jumping up and down the timeline, the interfering thoughts; they make it easier to see the connection of the themes on an emotive level. It made me happy that the book doesn’t push the plot harder, or puts more emphasis on things like the twist at the end. If you take the twist as-is, as a narrative event, it’s cool but sudden and maybe a bit of a disappointment if that was what you were waiting for (I actually didn’t). But taken as a narrative device, it’s great, because it allows you to look back at everything that happened and figure out what it was really about. For the third of fourth time, everything changes. It illustrates how shifting the quagmire of memory is, how subjective the story of our life. It encourages thinking about your own life’s story. I don’t really have negative things to say about this book. Its themes certainly affected me and I like how it depicts older people as still being people, and not just caricature grandparents who have lost their passions. Having said that, the book didn’t touch me profoundly. That’s not always necessary though, it was very pleasant reading The Sense of an Ending and I was able to enjoy the book on many levels. I suspect rereading it will offer additional insights.

It would be far too easily thought to assume that if being gay is dependent on cultural/nurturing aspects, that equates to 'choosing' to be gay. Something doesn't have to be genetic to be involuntary. 'Nurture' works in pervasive and invasive ways, nurture is not about choice.

Well, there is a margin of error here, but also enough reason for a healthy dose of suspicion.

To be certain, his willingness to comment on people he knows nothing about is nothing short of stupid, but the point is that he singled her out, choosing to scrutinize her rather than the gazillions of male gaming 'celebs' on the internet. Why single her out? It's hard not to reason that it must be because to Perez, she's in a special category. Then, of course, he opines that if you are a known female in the gaming industry and you are not 'adding anything creative', you must be a 'glorified booth babe'. [ADDED] I'm not saying Perez is a conscious misogynist, but these tweets strike me as the product of the typical sexist culture prevalent in the gaming world. Hence my earlier suspicion that he doesn't actually know why he did a bad thing.

A personality, as in celebrity, who is also female? Don't twist my words. Or, you don't know Felicia Day? She's quite well-known because of her work on The Guild and Dragon Age.

Hot from the press the gangrenous guts of the internet: now ex-Destructoid contributor Ryan Perez made some drunken, sexist remarks at Felicia Day on Twitter yesterday, wondering: and In a spasm of internet justice, things quickly turned against him and he now no longer works for Destructoid. Typically, his apology sounded insincere, Twitter posts strongly implying that he was more sorry that he got caught than that he did something wrong. I'd frankly be surprised if he has actually understood why what he said was so misogynistic. Most likely, in his head his tweets were still a fair question, and not at all the unfairly singling out and placing under extra scrutiny of one of the few female personalities in gaming.

Why are you learning Japanese? I took it up last year, but work pressure forced me to temporarily stop and I haven't picked it up since. I really enjoyed learning kanji though and can almost read that sentence you typed.

Tommy Cooper raised from the dead, obviously.

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After having it linger around for a couple of months, I've finally started playing Resident Evil: Revelaitons (sic). It was weird having my 3DS suddenly boxed in by the cumbersome CPP and shackled by both earplugs and the charger. It felt like plugging into the goddamn Matrix. But the game is so beautiful and atmospheric. I took my time going through the opening prologue, which is as always very moody and scary. I LOVE how the game seems to embrace its horror roots again and goes balls-out for the scary stuff. And the graphics, oh, everything else on the system suddenly pales in comparison.

I'm curious what you discussed, if you actually had an hour-long conversation that went beyond pleasantries. Nice photographs in any case!

If you want a daily dose of the best Lego models but don't want to visit dozens of different Flickr pages, your best bet is to visit The Brothers Brick: http://www.brothers-brick.com/ Different from a lot of people here, apparently, I really like building sets. Though I plan to make my own designs once I have my own house and am able to fulfil a long-time dream of having a spacious Lego room, I enjoy constructing sets to instruction. I tend to pick my sets in order of beauty, building difficulty and part list. Of course, most official Lego sets, even the ones geared towards AFOLs, don't feature terribly advanced building techniques. There is one set from Star Wars, though, that was really cool and challenging and probably the most difficult set I've ever seen from Lego: Count Dooku's Solar Sailor, it featured pretty cool SNOT techniques and every angle was smooth. It saddens me Lego doesn't feature more tricky builds like this. I'd love to see them do something like a 'master builder' line where they just go all out.

Here at home me and my mom are sorting out all of our old Lego, washing the bricks and putting the individual sets back together. It's an awesome nostalgia trip and is making me go to ebay to look for second hand sets from my childhood. Ice Planet 2002! 2002, the actual future in which we're visiting unknown ice planets. It's not certain yet that Lord of the Rings will indefinitely push away the regular Castle theme: after all there were still Space themes after Star Wars. My main point is that the sets themselves are overpriced, less playable and less imaginitive. In last year's incredible Castle wave we got this amazing set: I bought two of those.

About five years ago I came out of my 'dark age' (the period where you stop playing with Lego as a kid) and rediscovered the amazing hobby that is building with plastic bricks. I've been an avid collector ever since, spending insane amounts of money and building an enormous collection of especially the higher end sets (modular buildings, Tower Bridge, Emerald Night train, that sort of thing). I am what they call an AFOL: Adult Fan of Lego. I'm not particularly excited by the Lord of the Rings Lego, to be honest. The sets are a little dull (Helm's Deep is a pretty uninteresting castle wall) and like all licensed sets it will come at a premium price. These sets are usually only interesting for the minifigs. The problem I have with Lord of the Rings, as well as with Pirates of the Caribbean, is that they replace the standard Castle and Pirates sets, which were tons more interesting, playable and imaginitive. I absolutely loved the revival of the classic Pirates line (in fact, that was what booted me into the hobby again as I wanted to collect every set), and was subsequently dismayed when it got canned after only one year to make place for the incredibly overpriced and mediocre PotC line. The licensed themes have done Lego a world of good, Star Wars pretty much singlehandedly saving the company. But I'd be very sad if all they did was use licenses to replace their own themes, which ultimately have much more value than yet another toy based on Lord of the Rings.