Nappi

Chris, did you get the critical path ability of swimming in Ori and the Blind Forest before you started grinding for the upgrade to breathe under water? I think that upgrade just takes your oxygen meter away. I agree that the Metroidvania aspect of Ori can be a bit aggravating at times.

Excellent!

Finally saw Inherent Vice yesterday. My expectations were somewhat lowered by certain things I read in the reviews and comments, but I found myself enjoying the movie quite a bit. It's a shame that the excellent foreboding atmosphere of the novel was largely missing (or at least toned down) in the film, except for a couple of music choices and a few lines fed to the narrator. Fortunately, the sense of stoner paranoia and of Doc being completely baffled and lost most of the time was still there. I didn't expect the film to be as funny as it was, and I am mostly happy with Anderson's effort to transfer Pynchon's weird humor into film. Some reviewers seem to take issue with the plot being too dense and incoherent to be enjoyable, but I (having read the novel years ago and remembering almost nothing of the plot) and my friends (having not read the novel at all) did not find this to be an issue at all. Overall, the adaptation was not what I had initially hoped for or expected, but I still enjoyed a lot. Oh yeah, and I really really loved the soundtrack.

Yes, Paperwhite has no actual buttons and you have to swipe or (more conveniently) press one side of the screen to turn pages. The new Kindle Voyage has both a touch screen and buttons for turning the pages. I don't know if you can disable the touch screen functions in that one, but somehow I doubt it. I used x-ray all the time when I was reading Gravity's Rainbow to keep up with all the characters. The interface is a bit slow but I found it very useful. Oh and yes, the built-in LED is excellent feature.

I am doing extremely well money-wise, but I feel like I won't be able to, say, double my population without the traffic being a complete nightmare. I actually prefer that kind of difficulty, to constantly having to adjust taxes or whatever.

I will test my prototype time machine tomorrow. SecretAsianMan kindly volunteered to be the first test pilot. Excited to see if it works!

What they mean to say is "Welcome to Idle Forums!"

Thank you for taking the time to explain that! It is still a pretty dumb setup in my opinion, but as you said, at least it is more plausible that way.

Oh wow.. Pretty much everything in this episode was atrocious. I had to watch that part again to check if I got it right. Yup, it was really that dumb. Is the witness protection shenanigans explained any better somewhere else, e.g. in the movie or the books?

I'm at 125,000 citizens and the traffic is seriously starting to kick my ass. Apart from the messy roads and messy traffic, I'm pretty happy with my first city. I just built the Space Elevator which is supposed to greatly boost tourism. My income from tourism is now 400 credits. The upkeep of the thing is 16,000 credits. Don't rely on tourism for your income.

As far as I understand, the direction of traffic on one way streets is determined by the direction you draw them in.

James' savings amounting to $12 and him still requesting Ed to send them to him is the only item in my Best Moments of the James Hurley Storyline. I laughed out loud when the figure was mentioned.

Plus, use Page Up and Page Down to control the elevation. That took me a while to figure out. Someone mentioned it already, but be aware that cemeteries and garbage dumps can only be relocated (or destroyed) once they are emptied.

Just to clarify, you don't need to destroy and rebuild services buildings. They can be relocated at a cheaper price.

I started building my city way too close to the entry point and was in serious traffic trouble at about 30 000 citizens. I had quite a lot of money though, so I leveled part of my city and completely rebuilt the road network to accommodate larger city. It's not pretty but it gets the job done. Almost. I'm now at 100 000 citizens and the motorways are getting pretty crowded again in certain areas. I will have to look into upgrading my public transport network next. So: you should definitely take traffic seriously, and it is easier for you if you do this early on. However, you can also make drastic changes to your city layout after you start getting into traffic troubles, as long as you are doing okay financially.

You and your crazy suicide motorways.

The Pratchett quote in the xkcd eulogy is marvellous, especially with the first sentence included. I should read more of his books.

I played a couple of hours five hours (fucking hell) of this and I can already tell that this is hundred times more enjoyable than Sim City (2013). Yeah, I started building my city like I would have done in previous Sim City, which is to make use of all the available space starting from the entry point. It quickly became apparent that I should have just extended the motorway and build residential and other zones off the off-ramps. I was doing quite fine for a long time. I had more than million units of money and I was gaining 20k a week with my city of 35 000 people when the exact same thing happened to me. Suddenly practically the entire city was without electricity and although I made some dramatic changes to the street layout, the oil trucks just couldn't get through. My city dwindled to 4000 people in no time at all. My solution was to load up a save and replace all the oil plants with solar plants. I still have to figure out how the traffic works exactly. The trucks delivering the oil from outside the city had only one right-hand turn and then straight road all the way to the oil plant. That particular road didn't even have heavy traffic, but still all my power plants were out of oil all of a sudden.

Excellent episode! Cara was a great guest. Yes!

Well, damn.

I hope they do it right. The story

If you are ever thinking of buying deluxe quality books as a gift or for yourself, you should probably check out Folio Society. I received my books today and they are gorgeous! (Quite expensive, though.) Another photo.

I started reading Bring Up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel after watching a couple of episodes of the Wolf Hall tv-series. I read Wolf Hall back in 2013, and thought that the series would be a good way to recap the plot of the first book. It sort of was, but it also turns out that Mantel does a brilliant, subtle job in going through the events of Wolf Hall as well as the key characters (and most importantly their relationship with Cromwell, Henry, and Anne) in the first part of Bring Up the Bodies. So far the reading process has been much smoother than I remember it being with Wolf Hall. I'm not sure how much of it has to do with me being used to Mantel's style and flow by now and how much of it is the fact that I finished Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow just before this one. I would guess that Mantel's style has not changed dramatically between the two books, although it seems that "he" is now followed by "he Cromwell" more often than in the first book. Oh, and I'm absolutely loving the book so far! Also, thanks to Goodreads, I now know which book I'm going to pick up once I'm done with Bring Up the Bodies: Choke Hold by Christa Faust "Angel Dare went into Witness Protection to escape her past—not as a porn star, but as a killer who took down the sex slavery ring that destroyed her life. But sometimes the past just won’t stay buried. When a former co-star is murdered, it’s up to Angel to get his son, a hotheaded MMA fighter, safely through the unforgiving Arizona desert, shady Mexican bordertowns, and the seductive neon mirage of Las Vegas..." (This is a genuine "Because you are reading Bring Up the Bodies..." recommendation from Goodreads)

Finished Joe Sacco's Safe Area Goražde. Gross and depressing on macro level, and both and distressing and beautiful on micro level. Excellent book, but it might be a bit too much for some. By the way, the Special Edition harcover is absolutely gorgeous!

Something got messed up in my AV receiver when I started watching this episode, which resulted in the opening credits sequence playing without a sound. It was eerie as hell, but somehow very fitting – a moment of silence for Maddy – and for quite a while I thought this was intentional, especially because everything was working perfectly just a while ago in the bluray menu. I started to get suspicious when Donna and James were mute as well.