miffy495

I tried playing it but it wouldn't work on my desktop. Boo. That said, I'm probably going to pick up Home for less than a Coke...

Brad is the guy from Carolina. He's a blond guy with a deeper voice. I've just always liked him, and I don't really have a good reason to. He just seems like a genuinely nice guy that I would hang with given the chance, and the times when you can hear his brain working trying to come up with a forced pun that never fails to fall completely flat make me think we'd have a similar (completely lame) sense of humour.

I picked this up last week and got totally hooked. I've unlocked the Cat and the Gazelle, played the Sika Deer once and the Pomeranian twice, as well as the first three levels of Story Mode as I unlocked them. Given my free time lately, that's a tonne of gaming for me. It's really rad. I wasn't sure about this game, as usually stuff that's just "endless mode" turns me off, I like a narrative to pull me through. I've been surprised by how much I've loved playing this game though. Can't wait to play more.

Just as a heads up, I played ME1 and 2 back to back in January - March of this year in preparation for ME3. While ME3 was fine for what I played, I think I burned myself out. Only now I'm starting to think about going back to finish ME3 after I wrap up Darksiders 2 sometime in the next few weeks. It's a good game, from what I've seen, but man that was a lot of Mass Effect all at once.

Brad is actually my favourite. Liked that guy a lot since the Gamespot days. Patrick's ok, but it bothers me when he says stuff like "obstensively" (when he means "ostensibly"). He does that with a bunch of words, but "obstensively" can be counted on at least once a Bombcast. Still, in general I appreciate what he brings to the mix. Never really followed Tested, so thanks for the video heads up. I'll be checking that out sometime over the next few days.

I'm just over 100 pages in, and was definitely feeling that for the first 30 or so pages. Weirdly, my brain flipped at some point and now I keep forgetting that Nat, Aviva, and Julie are white. I'm definitely getting a better feel for the characters now, but my own damn small-town Ontario brain (I grew up in Grafton before moving to Calgary, know it?) spent way more time than my conscious mind was comfortable with assuming everyone was white. In my late teen years, I really started loving Jazz, Funk, Soul, Hip Hop, and old exploitation movies (Coffy is probably in my personal top 5 films), so I get the references and understand a bunch of what's going on with that, but it did not provide much of a defence against the mental habits that I got from the town I grew up in being approximately 498 white people and two Koreans. That said, I'm still quite enjoying the book. I've never read a Chabon before, so I'm not coming in with any particular baggage, and finding the prose to be a lot of fun to read. It becomes occasionally very apparent that this is a white guy writing though, so I'm kind of curious how successful even he thought he was at giving characters so far outside his demographic an authentic voice. Looking forward to the book cast, at least, though thanks to cramming for the end of my courses over the next couple of weeks, I'll probably not get to finish the book and listen until mid-month.

Make one! If nothing else, it'll exist as a resource.

Well, first thing's first: the thinnest string goes at the bottom. Also, don't feed it after midnight. In all seriousness though, there's a hard physical barrier to entry, and that is that for the first little while your fingers will be in fucking agony as you develop the callouses from the strings. Learning to play the guitar hurts like hell until your fingers toughen up. From that point on, it's up to your dedication to actually keeping up with practice. Tabs are pretty easy to read, so if you're just looking to learn certain songs you'll be able to figure out songs that you want to play fairly quickly. I've found that if I'm looking for something specific, I can usually rely on www.ultimate-guitar.com to get me a playable tab quickly. Also, that site has a check box to show the fingerings for different chords, so if you don't have the muscle memory for playing the different chords yet, you can get started learning to recognize them. That's what I've been doing for the last couple of months, and also what has now become a bit too simplistic for me, which is why I decided to try out Rocksmith. What doing what I've described won't tell you at all though is theory, which is what I'm hoping to learn a bit of. I know how to play a bunch of songs, but if you asked me what key any of them were in I'd have no clue. If you asked me to play my scales, I'd just shrug. I know what all that stuff is from learning piano back in the day, but I never extended it to guitar. If that's the kind of thing you're interested in learning, you're best off taking formal lessons if you have time. I'd love to do that, but I don't have a schedule for it. If Rocksmith delivers the goods in helping me learn some of that stuff, I'll be a very happy person. My hopes aren't too high for much of that, but a guy can dream, right? Also: for god's sake get a cheap guitar for your first one. I have an ancient Ibanez Roadstar II that I got used when I was 12. It's still in good shape, and it does all I need to to. I also have an old Mansfield folk acoustic guitar which I love a lot. I don't think either one of my guitars cost more than $200 14 years ago when I got them. As a final note, if you want to go a bit easier on your fingers, you could always start with a classical guitar as those tend to have nylon strings. Folk and electric have metal strings (my folk has steel and my electric nickel, I think) and those will beat the shit out of your fingertips if you're starting out.

See, in my case, I don't really need to gamify it to motivate myself to practice or anything like that. I already play my guitar for an hour or more a night. I'm just at a point where I'm ready to step up complexity but have no time in my schedule in which I could actually fit proper lessons and have no idea how to even start teaching myself. I'm just hoping that, in with all the songs and such, they've got some tutorial stuff that'll help me either get more acquainted with theory or get some more technical skill. I'm happy to look up tabs on my own, but that's not doing it for me as much any more and I'm interested in seeing what Rocksmith may be able to do to improve my playing.

That sounds like a goddamned amazing class. Where are you studying, if you don't mind my asking?

I borrowed my girlfriend's copy, which she'd got about 80 pages into and stopped reading, so the beat-up-ness of her copy is by my doing. I've actually been considering buying her a fresh one and claiming the beat-up one as my own as a symbol of my achievement. HappyBob, I would recommend two bookmarks. One for where you actually are, and one for the footnotes. It made the process so much easier on me when I started doing that after about 150 pages of the book proper.

Awesome that this seems to have resolved as well as possible. Good luck to her. Also, congrats on the (temporary) job, Subbes! Glad to hear you found something, even if it is only for a bit. Portfolio building and such at least, yes? As for myself, the first big snow of the year happened on Monday and caused me to skid on a patch of black ice and crack my car's front right turn signal on a bush. Could have been a lot worse, glad that my first accident caused only about $40 of damage, and only to my own car. Been getting used to driving on the horribly maintained Calgary roads since, and feeling a lot more confident as I go. Also, just got my placement for my month-long practicum that starts in two weeks. I'll be teaching a grade 1/2 split class pretty close to my house. I've never worked with kids that young, but I met with their teacher as class ended yesterday and she's super nice and helpful, so I'll work it out. Exciting times!

Hey wow, a topic for this actually exists. So I picked up the guitar again for the first time in over five years this summer. I've been really enjoying myself, but between my last year of school and working a bunch, I've only been able to teach myself some chord progression-y stuff and have learned no theory at all. I definitely don't have the kind of schedule that I could work formal lessons into, so seeing that this game came out on PC and figuring it'd be worth a chance, I ordered a copy off of Amazon. Ubi's customer support people told me that the code would be redeemable on Steam, and ordering the bundle ended up cheaper than buying it on Steam and buying the quarter-inch-jack-to-USB cable separately. Hopefully it'll be worth it since I already have an electric guitar. If I didn't have one, I think the price for the giant bundle may be a bit much, but when they deliver the game, I'll report back on how it actually plays. Did any other thumbs try this out on any of the platforms it had already come out on? 'blix, did you ever follow through and try it?

I'm not sure, but I may or may not have cracked up completely at the dropping of "Corsair" in the middle of all that.

My favourite one of these was actually Metal Gear Solid 3. When they realized that it was actually possible to kill Ocelot early in the game, rather than removing the ability to do so they made a special case "TIME PARADOX" game over for if you decided to kill a character that a bunch of the franchise's plot revolves (unintentional pun realized after I wrote it) around. Classy, and gave me a good laugh.

I've been slowly playing through Revelations since about March. I like it, actually, I just need to pace myself more than with the rest of the series for whatever reason. I'm starting to get near the end, and every time I pick it up (about once a month) I have a bunch of fun with it, I just then forget to pick it up again for a while. I'd still say it's worth a punt if you're interested.

If you truly can't talk about it, our thoughts are with you anyway man. I've routinely been both saddened that you have to live with some of the things you've described and impressed that you seem to be living a mostly normal life despite it. Good luck to you. We're pulling for you.

Knowing this, I find it weird now that the US doesn't spell it with a "u", as they were so chummy with the French around their time of independence.

Infinite Jest is the Far Cry 2 of books. I thought it was kind of funny when Sean and Chris were discussing Sloosha's Crossin' section and about how adapting to reading that kind of language. I was reminded heavily myself of Maribou Stork Nightmares, a book I loved when I read it about 3 years ago, and was idly saying to my car radio "Have either of you guys ever read Irvine Welsh?" when Sean brought him up specifically. Good pull, Sean. As for disliking the Luisa Rey section, I actually totally loved it. It was pulpy and trashy, but so what? Those books are popular because they're fun. It felt like a nice bit of levity in an otherwise very serious book. While the occasional quips of Frobisher and the ending of Cavendish's section also had me chuckling to myself, Rey's whole portion of the book just felt very refreshing alongside everything else. It wasn't my favourite, but I thought it was great.

I have an exam tomorrow but I also finished Cloud Atlas today and wanted to read the threads that I'd been holding off on. Cue and hour later and I still have yet to crack my textbook.

I choose to only welcome non-dillweeds. I hope the dillweeds can understand.

Yeah, in Canada "West" in the American sense (ie: California & Pacific NW) basically means Vancouver or Victoria. Calgary and Edmonton are nice enough places, but as a whole Alberta really does work hard to earn its reputation as the seat of Canadian conservatism. It's not like it's an oppressive atmosphere or anything (I can hang out in public with my friend and his husband and very few people react to their holding hands, kissing, etc. Hell the fact that I can say "my friend and his husband" is pretty damn positive) but just a general feeling of never being quite sure if it's cool to be as left wing as I am that I've never felt in any other Canadian city. I'm not super negative on the place, I've made a good life for myself here and (assuming the Calgary Board of Education hires me for next fall) I intend to stay quite a while, but there's a whole lot about this place that drives me crazy. On that note, anyone ever considering living here, have a car. The sprawl is goddamned ridiculous and the public transit is utter shit.

I did! I have Armageddon! That was the sole reason I pre-ordered this game. Anyone else down to play the shit out of that and ignore the new game?

I fucking loved Freelancer, for the record. Then again, maybe that's because I'm young enough that it was the first one of those games that I really dug into, going back into earlier stuff afterwards.

Pretty much this for me. It got to the point that when I paid full price for Darksiders 2 and hit a game-breaking bug at 7 hours in, I started a new game and played a good amount past that. Then school started and I stopped playing, but I do intend to go back soon-ish. Compare that to something like Warhammer 40K: Space Marine, which I got at a massive discount and still haven't installed. Game looked fun enough, but between school and trying to maintain relationships with actual humans, I don't often get around to playing things like that until a long time after I purchase them, if I still remember to play them at all.