Roderick

THat's quite an upgrade! You got some birthday money there, Piratepoo?

Damn it! I had applied for the job of senior vice Ron Gilbert I can't believe they hired that schmuck Ron Gilbert instead.

Can we PLEASE change the topic title to the proper name of the podcast: Nick Breckon featuring the Bethesda podcast?

I like how it's immediately exactly clear what happened just by reading 'Tim hires Ron'. There's not a whole lot of forums where that could happen

Happy!

Much in the vein of what I was saying earlier. It bums me out that the utterly artful world of Infinite is only used to support the verb 'kill'. Whereas there are a thousand verbs that I'd rather pronounce when I'm thinking about a turn of the century city in the clouds based on Manifest Destiny gone berserk.

Seeing the weird effects within the Infinite world I can only think of one thing: interface with the Animus confirmed. I, also, wasn't planning on watching this thing, but I did. It was incredible highs coupled with incredible lows. The first minute is so great. Walking about that world, seeing burning houses with that Irrational brand of people-gone-mad that gets a woman to sweep the floor while the world is crumbling down. Crow guy. The gun rally. Super great. Then it devolves into everyone wanting to kill you and the same extremely combat-based gameplay that Bioshock offered. In fact, apart from the difference in themes it reminded me all too much of the feeling I got when seeing Bioshock trailers for the first time. It reminded me how incredibly elated I was watching it at the time, and the disappointment that the whole thing eventually revolved around shooting instead of interacting in a more interesting, earnest way with the world. I know it's stupid, insane, pointless to keep expecting these guys to make something the game is obviously not: an atmospheric RPG instead of a shooter. But it's just too goddamn painful to see all these wonderful ideas and brilliant themes of turn-of-the-century racism, manifest destiny and what have you, and then have that serve only as the wonderful coathanger for another shootey action game. It's like you're making the Mona Lisa to use as really supernice toilet paper. Fuck fuckerdyfuck.

I needed a tool to splice Gary Busey into all of my photos without much hassle!

Ah right, Nathan Barley. I get it. Vice Magazine only confuses the shit out of me some more. I am desperately out of touch with culture, it seems!

I'm willing to buy into this, but explain to me what a dickhead is? I saw the video, I'm just not sure... they're... faux nerds? Crossed with hiphop hipsters and hippies? Is that a thing? Should we be worried?

Actually, covers like Ultima VII (I assume their main feature being 'no discernable features') have appeared, but almost exclusively as collector's editions of games whose normal editions had 'normal' covers with graphics. I'm thinking here of the Oblivion CE, the World of Warcraft CE's, Bioshock... So designers still think it's cool, they just can't risk people being put off in stores by not immediately knowing what's going on in the game. With really well-known properties (Resident Evil) sometimes they don't put text or explanations on the back, just a big juicy quote like 'EVIL NEVER SLEEPS' or somesuch. That's ballsy too.

What's all this heresy with id Software content? Give us that 4-hour long Morrowind retrospective!

Congrats Nick, is what I meant to write

Man, it's great I really like how Nick's handling this. Those interviews are surprisingly candid and not 'corporate patter' at all, which you might have expected of an official company podcast.

Saw Four Lions today! Though not butt-smackingly hilarious, it was surprisingly moving. A nice, quaint, unique film that I'm glad I saw.

That is shockingly beautiful, Kingz, your underwater garden.

It's a weird thought to be sure, but then again it seems like the mildest death ever. You just go to sleep and never wake up again. And since you can't regret dying so young when you're already dead, it's maybe not something to be particularly terrified about. I worry far more about the method of my future death. Anyway, that 51, eh? Vell händled.

Seeing as how I have a phobia for throwing up, that might be a problem for me. I mean, hypothetically when that day comes in a future that I hope at that time looks so much like Star Trek they can just perform surgery by scanning you with a Nintendo handheld.

We should reeeeeally do this in a separate thread (and in any case I have a story of crushing, unrequited love that I should be posting here instead), but damn, you're right. It's so easy to get raid-blocked if you don't ride the crest. Not that I've ever raided, or geared, at all, but maybe this time I could. The biggest reason I'd start afresh is that others at my office are going to do the same and level up together (for as long as that lasts...). There's a huge incentive to join in. If I place my cards right, perhaps even monetary incentive? Trust me, it's not beyond them.

I'm torn about whether to first do the new high level content in Cataclysm or start a new character to do the new low level content. Fuck options! I'd love to visit Japan someday. I'm sure it'll happen some day or later, it's pretty much bound to. In that case on my list are Tokyo, Nagasaki (for the Dutch Dejima colony! That's a piece of awesome Dutch history right there!), Kyoto and some rural touring about. I've seen so many of those forests and shrines and roads in anime and movies, I'd love to experience it firsthand to see if it feels the same.

Seconded. Also, has this episode been Snooglebummed, or Bummed in the Snoogle, yet?

I'm actually a little curious what general aneasthesia would be like. So far in my life I've had only minor surgeries (moles removed, wisdom teeth, that sort of thing), but I'm sure something will come up eventually (though I've never broken anything). When I got my wisdom teeth I first wanted to do general out of sheer fear, but I never really pushed it through and I'm glad I didn't because the locall procedure was so quick and painless.

Kroms and Vimes, good posts there. I loved reading Moby Dick a few years ago (so much so that I even adapted the story into my Captain August webcomic, which became an insane, year long project http://www.captainaugust.com/moby-dick-%28or-the-whale%29-1). It was undeniably a tough read, mostly because of the many asides into whaling, but I again loved the scope of it. I loved how daring it used its proze, now all Shakespearean and full of pomposity, then whimsical with sea shanties and singing. It might sound strange, but I had long been struggling with the question what literature was. When I had read Moby Dick, I finally knew. War and Peace is, as you can imagine, a year long endeavor in itself, and I have a good 450 pages to go myself. I´m taking it slow, and I´ve been reading various shorter books in between, notably Howl´s Moving Castle, The Last Unicorn, Origin of Species and Beyond Good and Evil. The Apple store velocipede was hilarious, thank you.

What´s Gary Oldman doing now

Wuxtry! Joker pulls boner of the year