Nachimir

I find Rymdkapsel only has a certain amount of repeatability, but it is really good.

Where are you from Jac?

Poor little guy! Glad he's okay subbes.

Speaking of Terry, he linked to A Ride Into The Mountains yesterday. It is very indie with its big pixels, but actually it's a nice little archery game, well presented. It manages to vary stuff without any of it feeling tacky or bolted on. You are so fucking wrong about that See? That's nearly three (Fnar. It's one of the deepest games I've played on iOS). Edit: Also, Badland has really good level design and art. It may be the helicopter game, but of many variants I've had sent to me, it's the best by far.

I'm glad they can be replaced with dogs, though I'd kinda rather they were just dogs rather than people. Doug Wilson has been streaming every night this week. The last time is tonight at midnight GMT. Highlights from last night: Doug spectacularly screws up his daily challenge (His face as it happens is really excellent). A particularly good teleport. The entire teleporter speed run that came from.

This run is brilliant: http://www.twitch.tv/baertaffy/c/2671715

Roborally can get exhausting sometimes, but I love it. The slightly rushed yet fundamentally dry and orderly programming phase contrasts magnificently with the later chaos of everyone's plans suddenly crashing into each other Werewolf varies a lot depending on house rules, special characters, and the crowd you have. The worst I've played had no debate, just voting, and also allowed metagaming, i.e. people accusing others on the basis that they "heard them move in the night". The best games I've played were at barcamps: To stop metagaming, all the players had to make noise at night (mooing, zombie moans, or showtunes), and all accusations had to be seconded as well as have some reasoning behind them. Those two things seem to bring out a really extroverted combination of the silly and the desperate in people.

Hehehe Thrik

Tilda Swinton went and did this, asking people to share it: The Guardian just posted this quick roundup of gay rights around the world: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jul/30/gay-rights-world-best-worst-countries It's depressing and embarrassing just how much of the bad is a legacy from the British Empire.

This reminds me of a Bridget Christie preview I saw recently: Tronhound, you're either trying very hard to get a rise, or there's some actual kind of belief that motivated this car crash of a post. Please stop.

https://twitter.com/jennatar/status/362321919766315009 http://theboobjam.tumblr.com/

I finally have a proper headset, and will be around next week.

This Ridiculous Fishing update also has new stuff in the shop: and [edit] some new fish that Omicron HD seems to be getting very little attention. I don't know why, because it's excellent.

Saw this recently too, and loved it. I'm not sure why some people were so confused by it: The storytelling is sparse, but I understood most things on first viewing.

Bah: Being single in a university town, and realising after a bunch of dull first dates that I'm now too old to date students. The dating pool here seems to have a very young skew, and outside of it most people around 26 - 35 seem to have either settled down or moved away. Woo: Escaping to London for six weeks soon. Bah: Coming back to Nottingham for the whole winter because of stuff. Woo: That includes GameCity. Woooo: Last night, I went and did a few hours of mountain bike skills training, with someone who managed a British downhill racing team until recently. He was a very good teacher, and I picked up loads of technique. By the end I understood berms properly, was flying through terrain that intimidated me before, and was beginning to turn the bike in the air.

My opinion is definitely coloured by having briefly met him a couple of times. He's a very direct and quite intense person. I've always known people like that too, so when I read stuff he's said online that people are losing their shit over, I sympathise more with him than them. Also, his words appear to have been cherry picked and sensationalised by tabloid-like blogs. I think most people judging him adversely aren't really taking that into account, or the sheer magnitude of negativity that he found himself the focal point of. Especially with the latter, I just don't think any of us would behave very well or come out the other side of it with particularly good mental health. Pabosher, I want to clarify this is not a dig at you, just a very funny answer I saw recently to "If you can't say anything nice…"

Ah, that would make sense I guess I read it in the context of a lot of "Don't let the haters get to you" type tweets.

I can. Phil's been at the focal point of a parabolic mirror of internet rage for a long period. There is no way to dismiss that as insignificant over time. Even if no individual instance feels like it's getting to you and you feel fine, over time the effect builds up. It's not the unpleasantness in the moment, it's the erosive force of it over time. A boss of mine used to bully me. I thought he was a shallow twat who regularly exercised bad judgement, so laughed it off every time, but after three years of it realised it had actually been actually wearing me down by imperceptible degrees. Now imagine that, but instead of coming from one neatly isolated source, it continually comes from random strangers, often basing their attacks on partial or misquoted words you said. That'd be enough to shake anyone's faith in humanity and their professional environment. When celebrities from any field let their personalities show and they're a bit weird, nowadays I automatically understand it as an inevitable byproduct of the amount of attention they receive and that's demanded from them. We are not designed for and are not very good at adapting to that kind of pressure. That combined with Phil's rage are an especially bad combination, but I don't think any of us would handle it well or be unscathed. Going by most people talking about him, this is the paragraph where I have to put a mealy mouthed qualifier about the things Phil's said being unjustified, too harsh, not classy, etc. Fuck it though: I have nothing but sympathy for the man. Any bit of hatred people have had to deal with from him is orders of magnitude smaller than the collective heap of shit they've served up to him. He once said "Gamers are the worst fucking people", and a load of them seem hell bent on proving it.

*WINK*

I didn't play Wars, but the original had that split: Management phases with research, agent upgrades, weapon procurement, loadouts, etc., then a world map that led to different missions. In mission, your agents had three different drugs you could tweak to alter their performance. I don't remember what any of them did except adrenaline, but they all had thresholds and recovery periods, so you had to plan pretty well as you went. Some of the missions were living city type things, others were quite orchestrated, with events such as parades going on (the laser would vaporise entire lines of people all the way down a road) or really specifically laid out goals. The AI was pretty dumb; one of the most effective ways to take out enemy agents was to provoke them, run away, then hide just around a corner with a flamethrower and toast them all as they ran past.

Thanks for the reminder. Pretty sure it's around 16 years since I've had one!

Aww, man. Really sorry to hear that. I wish I had some good advice beyond "find better people and things", but that's pretty much been it for me in a similar experience. Someone I was falling for once told me "There's another man", days before I finished the most ambitious, public facing solo thing I've ever done. I had to just bury all of those feelings for the week, and if I think about it, still hate her. It's not much consolation I'm sure, but if it'd happened before you shipped it'd probably be doing a lot more damage to you. I hope you have time to heal now.

Good reflex A martial art I did teaches people to basically soften their body and flow around impacts. After doing it for a few years, now whenever I hit a part of myself on something, I've noticed I move around the point of impact to lessen the force without really thinking about it. I don't think time spent on training becomes less valuable if we never need it in a crisis: As well as external consequences, any practice has internal effects, which in turn can change the way we approach situations and deal with others. Case in point: I took up Systema because some people tried to mug me, and while I bluffed my way out of it, I realised I had nothing backing me up if they got more aggressive. Since I started taking those classes, I've not been in a single confrontation, but the amount of shit I get from random people in the street has diminished to nothing, which is probably an effect of the increased confidence I got in relation to those kind of situations. I'd say learning to strike, grapple, ground fight, etc. in any martial art, is just the foundation of something much more complex. As for the aspect of your thoughts that touch on altruism: It seems like you're hovering between the personal and social value of a thing. We can't live entirely selfless lives.

The storms have been nuts here compared to normal. Last night, the one Thrik videoed was warm enough we felt perfectly comfortable being out in it. This morning, thunder woke me up and was loud enough that we could feel it through the floor. This evening it rumbled continuously for about 45 minutes.