Lechimp

Phaedrus' Street Crew
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Posts posted by Lechimp

  1. Posted

    MO:ULa is free and can be downloaded from www.mystonline.com. The installation on Windows 10 required some troubleshooting: http://mystonline.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=40&t=28177 The real pain is getting the account, as there doesn't seem to be any automated system for creating the accounts. Instead you must create a forum account (or resurrect your 9 years old account, depending on your circumstances), apply for PM rights on the forum and then request an account via PM.

     

     

    Yeah, I checked it out a couple of years ago when it was free and it was a pretty odd experience. Since most of the people playing it had already beaten everything in the game a long time ago, it is now basically a chatroom for the Myst community and there were a surprisingly high amount of people playing what was a MMO that didn't have any new content made for it a few years. 

     

    The engine for Uru was eventually used by Cyan to make a game for the chain of hotels Great Wolf Lodge called MagiQuest Online. I guess it's the video game version of some playground thing they have at the hotels? 

     

    This was the only game footage I could find

     

    Cyan has had a really weird history.

  3. Posted

    PinballFX is oddly relaxing for me. I guess because the stakes are so low and if I'm not doing well on a table, I can just switch to a different one and have fun with that instead. Real pinball is the exact opposite though, as much as I love it.

     

    I use Trackmania/Trackmania 2 for relaxation sometimes.  Not directly competing in races.  There's a subset of user created tracks called "Press Forward" tracks where through clever environmental object placement and track construction, the only thing you have to do is accelerate constantly to ping pong successfully through a level.  There's a nice mix to me of admiring the scenery rushing past without having to react, and delighting in the clever ways the designers manage to flip and tip you around.  Sort of like watching someone solve a really elegant math problem, or something.

     

    By way of example:

     

     

     

    That sounds way better than what I remember the majority of Trackmania custom tracks being, where you had to have a perfect run through a level or else you miss a ramp in a 8 minute long track and have to start everything over.

  4. Posted

    Just finished The Devil in the White City and......eh

     

    It really felt like it should have been split into two books to me because the stuff about the world's fair barely felt related to the serial killer stuff.

     

    Currently trying to finish The Innovators before the next Idle Book Club selection since I loved the Steve Job biography by the same author. It's not bad so far but I found the Steve Jobs book more captivating, maybe because it's more focused?

  5. Posted

    I'm a huge fan of PKD. I read The Man in the High Castle in college but I'll probably read it again after the show left me with a bad impression. One thing that makes PKD so timeless is how he intentionally withholds detailed information about the world in his stories to let your mind fill in the gaps, something I wish the show had at least made an attempt at.

     

    I think that's partially why I liked this book and others by him so much. I really want to learn more about this world, and it looks like he considered writing a sequel to this, but I don't think that having the details filled in ever lives up to the mystery.

     

    Also it sounds like if I really loved the more surreal elements of the book, don't bother with the show?

  7. Posted

    I feel like I'm just repeating myself, but maybe it will sink in the second time:

    Both metaphorically and practically I think this works just fine. On a metaphorical level, the acceptance of death as something that just can't be avoided, because it's inevitable, and because this has been drilled into you as your destiny from the earliest age, is hardly an inconceivable mindset, right? I'm teaching the Iliad to students right now and one of the points that book hammers home is how humans are mortal. Our fate is to die. There is no getting around that. The clones in this book have the same approach to organ donation and death - is that so ridiculous?

    On a practical level, people will put up with any old shit in the right circumstances. This is like asking why the population of North Korea doesn't just all rise up and liberate itself or why people on death row don't spend every day trying to break out of jail or why people in the concentration camps in Nazi Germany didn't all fight back or whatever. Humans are malleable and just because you imagine yourself trying to escape in this situation that doesn't mean it's implausible that there would be people (maybe even you, if you were in the same situation!) who wouldn't even conceive of fighting back or trying to escape.

    I think people who are like "why don't they ever try to get away" are failing to look outside the difference in these two societies, ours and theirs. In contemporary Western society human rights are such a big deal that everyone is raised from the earliest age to think of themselves as special and inviolable. It's inconceivable that we'd ever harvest your organs against your will. But that's just a specific outlook we have in our society not some universal truth the whole world has always been convinced of.

    If you don't believe me, look at how we treat non-humans. We harvest their organs, and their flesh, all the time. We breed them to have better organs and more flesh for us to harvest. We keep them in appalling conditions and make it illegal to film those conditions. We use euphemistic words to talk about what we do to them. And almost nobody gives a shit.

    Imagine you went to a society that looked at us as monsters for what we do to non-humans. They ask "how can anyone be complicit in treating non-human animals like this? It's so obviously wrong!" My response would be "I tried not to be complicit. I was a vegan and I advocated for non-human animals. I did my best." What would your answer be? Why can't the characters in the book use your answer as a way to explain why they didn't try to escape?

     

     

    I don't agree with that though. There's definitely instances of people trying to escape from North Korea, concentration camps, and from slavery. I'm not asking for every character to revolt and fight against the man. I just think one or two of the characters should have had the thought.  

  8. Posted

    It probably doesn't mean anything but when Chris mentioned Firewatch he said "Jake and I shipped Firewatch..." and it made me realize that we have not heard Sean on the podcast in awhile. I infered some big stuff is going on in his life so I am not surprised or anything, but that stood out to my brain. Is Sean still officially on the cast?

     

     

    I had assumed that Sean was just incredibly busy handling the business side of Campo Santo and Firewatch during the launch week.

  9. Posted

    Finished this morning, and while I'm still processing everything, there was something that nagged at me throughout:

    I'm not sure how I feel about the fact that none of the donors ever seems to consider escape. I assumed it would have been a major theme - life finds a way and all that. Even after Kath and Tommy are told that there are no deferrals, I suspected at least a suggestion of alternative possibilities (from Tommy), but there is a bit of frustration followed by resignation.

    Was this intentional? I found it difficult to empathise with Kath when she showed almost no interest in self-preservation. And it felt a bit inconsistent with other moments throughout the book which seem intended to emphasise the humanity of the donors.

     

     

    I found this really distracting too, to the point of it making the book a lot less enjoyable to me. I get that it's intentional and people often don't do what's best for them but they obviously recognized that they were going to die if they stayed there and tried different things to get out of it. Not even one person had the thought of escape?

     

    I guess I thought the book was still ok despite that. I'll probably need some time to let the book sink in. Maybe the podcast will change my mind.

  16. Posted

    Now that I finished it I was wondering if anyone else felt underwhelmed by the game.

     

    I don't think it's bad but the story stuff isn't as interesting as I thought it would be, considering I found the very few scraps of story interesting in the first game, and I found a few of the levels a lot more frustrating that anything in the first game. It also felt a lot slower paced in the outdoor levels.

     

    Oh well, I'll still probably try to unlock a few of the achievements as an excuse to go back to some of the levels and at least the soundtrack is still amazing.

  17. Posted

    I think it's more of a differentiation. The panel talked about 'rebranding', actually; they pointed out that suffragette was a term of derision, as was 'women's libbers', so rebranding feminism takes away some of its cultural power to avoid the structural backlash that'll happen no matter what you call it. Tara Moss noted that when she performs talks about feminism, she gets few hands from her audience from people identifying as feminist, but most of the room agrees with feminism's goals. Anita Sarkeesian put forward the notion that just privately agreeing with the importance of women's rights isn't really enough. Advocacy is needed, and that appears to be the sticking point.

     

    This seems like something that has happened before and unfortunately becomes necessary after a group gets shit on for its ideas even if plenty of people agree with them. It seems like the same thing has happened in America with more liberal people calling themselves progressive instead of liberal since that seems to have a negative connotation to a lot of people for no particular reason other than efficient messaging by conservative groups I guess?

     

    For whatever reason so many people associate feminism with non-sense like man hating and I don't think it's possible to reverse that mindset at this point without just calling it something else.

  19. Posted

    Got my vinyl set today. I only listened to the first LP but I'm loving the soundtrack so far. It's pretty much what you would expect from a Hotline Miami soundtrack. Can't wait to hear the rest in the game tomorrow!

  23. Posted

    Awesome, I'm also trying to not die from boredom from the iOS game menus and UI I'm designing.

     

    Menus are the best worst!

     

    I mostly hate them because at least I have a better idea of what feels right during the gameplay. With the UI and menus I'm not as sure and I don't think I'll really know until I start making friends test it out.

  24. Posted

    I would say that a great amount of interactive fiction is about solving problems through non-violent ways. Try checking out a game like Lost Pig that's good for IF beginners or the hundreds of games made using Twine.

     

    There's also a lot of games that are primarily based around walking and experiencing the environment like Proteus and Dear Esther.

     

    There's also the Myst series.

  25. Posted

    For the longest time everyone had thought that ID Software had given Wisdom Tree the Wolf3D source code as revenge for Nintendo make ID censor Wolf3D on the SNES, the book Masters of Doom even says it, but apparently Wisdom Tree licensed the engine like any other developer would. Oh well. Apparently it's also been rereleased so you can still buy the game!

     

    http://pikointeractive.com/store.html#!/~/product/category=9430344&id=30897400

     

    And Joe Biden was mentioned in this podcast, which is enough of a reason for me to post this, which I had just found in an article on PC Gamer