Nachimir

If you're jumping toward something to get it with the whip, hit the whip button around the same time as you jump, maybe a second after. The hitbox and animation on it are one of the hardest things to get used to.

Everyone sucks at this game at first, and for many hours thereafter.

Before this, I did a practice run, was doing fine in the ice levels with no cape, jetpack, shotgun, or climbing gloves. Then found most of those in a shop on 3-3, went to the mothership for the first time and died after about 30 seconds. The boxing daily went really badly though, starting with me unintentionally blowing the floor out of a shop:

Gun Monkeys, which I already own yet cannot remove from it. I've reached a real stalemate with Steam sales. There are so many games I'm yet to play that I'm rarely in any hurry to buy more, so like Nappi's 10€ rule, I have a threshold for impulse buys and it keeps dropping. But, uh, that said: Fez (Not going to have a 360 much longer) Gone Home (I played the IGF build, been meaning to get around to the full game for ages). Incredipede Kerbal Space Program Papers, Please Teleglitch, Die More Edition Typing of the Dead: Overkill A few of those were christmas presents because my brother and I hate physical stuff and have decided Steam wishlists are a rad way to do Christmas presents.

It sounds like they have off site backups: https://twitter.com/GrantDuncan/status/415822331093995521 Born Ready Games are next door and were also affected, but not as badly.

Visiting family today. As well as a load of bike bits, my dad got me Star Wench, which I expected to be the same size as original choose your own adventure books, but it's huuuuge. Also pleasing: 5 y.o. half sister playing with a ring, laughing and saying she's pretending to get married. When her mum asks "Who would you marry?", she replies "I dunno, but it'd definitely be a girl". Sure, it's because she's five, but her mum surprised me by saying "Well that's cool" when she's come over as pretty conservative about a bunch of stuff before.

Merry Christmas! Some people know me very well:

Chief O'Brien at Work. (That's a handy imgur gallery thats been doing the rounds, but here's the actual source).

88:88 by Make Up And Vanity Set is the shit.

Oh okay. I almost went with pallet swapped Ice King.

Also, Matt Gemmell being excellent yesterday: http://mattgemmell.com/gamers/

PA: They openly, consistently, and determinedly mocked rape victims with the dickwolves shirt, later expressing regret they took it off sale. The video of people cheering at that proclamation is one of the most intimidating things to emerge from videogame culture. Plenty of companies have fucked up, and plenty of games events are skeezy or have skeezy elements. None of those things are as extreme as a leader raising cheers from fans of his organisation over mocking the raped. If anyone is hating on PA just because they think it's cool to do so, I don't think that's a particularly big problem. Aside: If anyone wondered about Stephen's own alignment on feminism during the discussion about Dave Sim, here he is tweeting today: https://twitter.com/PageFortyFive/status/414116849819725824 https://twitter.com/PageFortyFive/status/414117918691954688 https://twitter.com/PageFortyFive/status/414120175227518976 https://twitter.com/PageFortyFive/status/414121006102364160 https://twitter.com/PageFortyFive/status/414131228724322304

You know, I hope this infects the entire event and makes it a better place, but I suspect it will be exactly as a bunch of friends referred to it on twitter: the diversity ghetto. If you're going to do safe spaces, commit to it and make it the whole event.

Ah, I kind of have to be careful here since Stephen is a friend. I know for sure he doesn't have the same views as Sim, given as he is to humiliating homophobes and racists, and also being quite publicly gay. Sim and he have been (or were) friends for a long time though, as Sim and Gerhard were instrumental in setting up Page 45. Mark and Stephen were on tour with them, and griping about working for other people, and they egged them on into setting up a comic shop of their own instead. I'm pretty sure the biggest overlap in their beliefs was in Sim's advocacy for creators rights and support for people who wanted to self-publish. All I know now is that Sim's views became more extreme over the past few decades, and I don't think he and Stephen are in much contact anymore. It's been many years since Stephen and I talked about him, but he never described Sim's rambling as ironic to me. Sim has never resorted to "It was ironic" or "It's just a joke", instead splitting hairs over the definition of misogynist, talking about anti-feminism and his strong opinions on what gender roles should be, which basically amounted to "I don't hate women, I just wish they'd stop being uppity. But the women and the homosexuals and the muslims just won't leave it to us right thinking men". The essays got weirder, more intense, and more devoutly religious toward the end of Cerebus. If you fancy having your brain dribble out of your ears while a near-endless procession of straw men dances in front of it, I found some of them here. Probably the weirdest things are that he sees an incredibly diverse social movement as a single, monolithic thing, and that he sees his sequence of anecdotally based nitpicks as some kind of monumental takedown of it. Edit: First time round, Sim seemed a bit mad to me, and I was a bit young and naive to make much of it at all. On actually revisiting this, he seems a lot like the MRA types that plague us today. Which dovetails amazingly with this quote from him: I'd half like to see him engage in rhetorical backflips around the misogynist internet rage machine of 2013, but the other half of me just wants to walk away and do something more productive than give any of them attention.

I think the earliest use I've seen of it was by Dave Sim, in the mad, rambling, anti-feminist, anti-Islamic essays he started to put in the back of the monthly issues of Cerebus. Around 13 years ago I think. Edit: Oh, talk radio. That makes a lot of sense.

Weird. Maybe the black market entrance is bugging it?

Why are there two of these?

I played pretty badly today and had nothing left by the time I got to the black market. I am fairly proud of the recovery near the ghost at 6:50 though.

Proc-gen can feel very soulless and expansively empty, so I'm usually really sceptical of it. This is beautiful enough already though that I just want to play around in it for a few hours, regardless of whether it's any good as a game.

A lot of my friends are now settling down and becoming preoccupied with kids, mortgages, etc. I'm happy for them, but I still don't want any of that. I'm not sure it will ever make sense to me. I'd been umming and ahhhing about moving to a new place, and after thinking on it for a while then concluding "It's probably just me" at first, I sought advice from close friends and a few new acquaintances I've met through them: "It's not a very friendly city". "Yes, dating really is a bit weird here". "When I first moved here, I spent six months crying and thinking I'd made a terrible mistake. I'm still not convinced I haven't". "It's weird moving to somewhere where everyone is twenty". "After the first year, I gave up on dating here. I'm just here for the job". The city is full of students who are now decidedly too young to hang out with. Above 25, everyone seems to have moved away or settled down, and now I'm far enough beyond that age range, it's becoming really noticeable. I finally understand the chronically single men and faded, scatty alcoholics I met while growing up here. Screw this, I'm going to go somewhere else. Probably the middle of nowhere next to some good mountain bike trails, and when I get bored of that, the biggest city I can afford.

A bunch of different sources state the ghost has 9999 hitpoints, and entering lava takes away 99 of them. While looking that up just now, I found that UFO shots do 1 damage to it also ¬¬

Chilling calendar based on dental training equipment:

I screwed up the exit on 2-2, totally timed some shots wrong and got beaten to death by an almost dead, unarmed shopkeeper. Also, completely failed to spot the black market when it was right in front of me and would have been a safe exit.