Nappi

The cult stuff did not work for me at all and, in a way, I wish it had been removed or replaced with something more interesting, especially because the Jacob de Zoet parts were so brilliant. Oh well, at least the ritual wasn't real... Hngghh....* * This does not really change my opinion on the The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet. I think it is a fantastic book, despite the poor middle part. It was a I-don't-know-if-I'm-ready-for-The-Bone-Clocks sort of "Hngghh".

Yeah, sorry, I did not mean ""erase"" in any the quotation sense. For some reason, my morning brain just did not find a better term (e.g. "ignore") at the time.

I find it really hard to get excited about this project. I'm not too nostalgic about the verb interface, I find the Maniac Mansion style graphics/character design uninteresting, and dread the idea of switching between five different characters (Day of the Tentacle did it well, though, so...)*. The latter two are the main reasons why I never got too far into Maniac Mansion. Still, I hope the game will be good, and I will probably pick it up eventually if that turns out to be the case. * Plus I'm still a bit perplexed by Ron Gilbert's If I Made Another Monkey Island blog post (headache warning) where he states that he is not going to make another Monkey Island game but if he did he would "erase" The Curse of Monkey Island and beyond, etc. He does not come across as especially arrogant or anything, but I'm still confused as to the purpose of that post. Some interesting discussion about the verb interface and Kickstarter there, by the way.

It does seem that the movements is indeed a bit slower, but I got used to it pretty fast. Many aspects of gameplay have been vastly improved: Separate climb up and climb down modifiers make traversing the rooftops easier. Escaping pursuers is no longer a lesson in frustration. You are given enough gadgets early on to make the missions fun. There are multiple ways to earn and spend money this time around. etc. I can't think of anything that is remarkably worse as compared to the previous games right now. (I do miss the ship combat, though.) So far the missions have been nice as well (I'm in sequence 6). They seem to have decreased the number of frustrating mission types, especially the tailing missions, drastically. The big assassination missions are also more open-ended than in the recent Assassin's Creed games, and there are side objectives that offer you new assassination possibilities or otherwise aid you in your task. There are definitely less shake-your-fist-at-the-TV moments in this one than in the previous iterations. Like I said, shame about the technical issues, because there is a good game underneath.

I don't remember having any issues with AC3 on PC. I bought Unity on PS4 in order to play co-op with a friend. The framerate drops to slide slow levels in weirdly specific places, which leads to me to believe that shit might be fixable, but I don't know if that's actually the case or ever going to happen. It's a real shame because they have made a lot of welcome improvements to the Assassin's Creed gameplay (e.g. escaping the pursuers is not a pain in the ass anymore) and Paris looks fantastic (although, the late 1800s Paris that was glimpsed in one of the rift sections looked even better).

I'm in like... a thing? I third, Dewar's comment.

I found Interstellar beautiful, but flawed, but entertaining. I was surprised, considering the subject matter, how unsuccessful the movie was at informing the viewers how much time has passed between the scenes. Oh, and Mackenzie Foy's performance as young Murph was stellar. Regarding the ending:

"My bad for not mentioned it in the game description, i did in youtube, but not in Steam. *Edited*" Still, not that big a deal, I think.

Yeah, that was added afterwards.

A bit of a dick move by Nick Breckon.

Still haven't quite gotten over that commercial for Lynch signature blend coffee. Also: From David Foster Wallace's excellent essay on David Lynch* which is sprinkled with funny tidbits, interesting observations and some really good meditation on the Lynch brand of sick and evil. * Rather than read the essay on that mess of a site, just buy A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again. You won't regret it. At the very least copy-paste that text somewhere else.

Are these 50+ stories the ones in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, The Return of Sherlock Holmes, and His Last Bow or some other stories? Those books have been available for quite some time in Project Gutenberg in various formats, including stunning audiobook renditions which helped shape my image of Sherlock Holmes as something other than a weird sociopath many adaptations seem to be going for, for which I'm really grateful. The narrator is simply amazing.

Glad to hear you are okay. Hang in there!

Your goal is quite ambitious! Good luck to all of you! I wish I had the skill, motivation and perseverance to write a novel.

I only have experience with Kindle Paperwhite, but I have been very happy with it. You can search for a word both in a dictionary and in Wikipedia. The former is offline while the latter, naturally, requires an internet connection. I'd imagine that most modern eReaders have some sort of a dictionary. I'd recommend buying one with a touch screen, though, because it allows you to search for a definition simply by touching and holding a word in the text. I get so used to the feature that when start reading a physical book, I occasionally find myself thumbing an unknown word hoping for a definition popping up. Not even kidding. Kindle also has an X-Ray feature which might be useful in some cases. Sadly, it is not available for all ebooks, including my Kindle edition of Infinite Jest. Again, I don't know if other eReaders have similar, or better, exploration features. The biggest difference between the Kindle and other eReaders is the format support. Kindle does not support some of the common copy protected ebook formats, while other eReaders don't support Amazon's format. Converting non-copy protected ebooks to a different format should be relatively straightforward, though, and I have understood that there are even tools for removing the copy protection before the conversion. Still, doesn't hurt to do a bit of research before deciding to purchase one or the other.

In my opinion, the footnotes do not serve to test the commitment of the reader. They act as a tool to flesh out the world and branch out the story in a way that wouldn't have be possible if Wallace was limited to the main body of text. The footnotes felt a bit awkward at first but I learned to appreciate them once I realized what the author was going for. Some of the footnotes are a bit pointless, but as I recall, most of them can be justified. By the way, it helps a lot if you don't jump to the footnote the second you come across it in the text. As for the words that I don't recognize, English is not my primary language so I'm quite used to skipping words that I do not understand unless I really want to know the definition or suspect that they might be integral to the experience. Oh, by the way, if you have a Kindle or similar, you might want to consider the ebook version of Infinite Jest. While ebooks definitely have their issues, I found the format to be ideal for this book for many reasons, including weight, durability, built-in dictionary, built-in search and ability to jump to a footnote instantly.

Good news everyone! Ubisoft found a way to integrate World War II into that boring-ass French revolution setting. Can't wait for that Eiffel Tower turret sequence!

Amazing!

I've been playing NBA 2K15 extensively for a couple of weeks now. I'm not typically into sports or sport games, but man this game plays fantastic. In addition to that the soundtrack is great, the player animations are some of the best I've seen, and the commentary is definitely the best I've ever heard in a video game. I also weirdly enjoy at least some of the-ask-Pharrell-Williams™-for-a-shoutout-in-Social-Media™-so-that-Jeff Golddigger-can-sign-up-a-sponsorship-with-Gatorade™ bullshit.

Nice! Looking forward to replacing my ugly-ass Clooney movie tie-in copy with a nice new paperback in... ...Damn.

I second Danielle's recommendation on Solaris and Stanisław Lem in general. Solaris is a beautiful examination on how people will react when they discover something genuinely new and incomprehensible. The book is also very pessimistic (that is to say, less optimistic than much of science fiction) about people's ability to truly understand foreign concepts. I wish I could re-experience the sense of chill of discovering what the planet was doing to the scientists. A lot of Lem's writing deals with the limits of human knowledge and inability to comprehend. The Invincible, for example, is a first-contact story with micro-bots that are impossible to communicate with and whose "motivation" completely eludes the human crew and the reader. Based on the description at least Fiasco deals with similar issues as well. Lem brings the theme to a brutal extreme in His Master's Voice in which scientists accidentally discover a message from space and top-level scientists from different fields are brought together in a massive operation to "crack the code". Not all Lem's works are like that, though. He has also written whacky shit like The Cyberiad: Fables for the Cybernetic Age. PS. There is a hilarious (inasmuch as severe paranoia can be hilarious) connection between Stanisław Lem and one of my other favorite science fiction author Philip K. Dick: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanis%C5%82aw_Lem#Philip_K._Dick

Please please please... stream a Payday 2 heist complete with a pre-game whiteboard planning of the job.

Just listened to the second episode. The musical interlude probably gets the job done just fine. At least it was much less awkward than the way the split was handled in the first episode.

Cool stuff. Congrats!

Great cast! This is a really pleasant way of rewatching Twin Peaks. Have you guys considered splitting the episodes into two separate files, one with current episode discussion and the other with spoilers for future episodes? This way you wouldn't have to spend so much time fretting over spoiling things for the first time listeners. Those listeners could simply listen to every other episode while watching the series, and then listen to the rest when they are done with the show (without needing to remember the time-stamps for the spoilers). This solution might not be very elegant but it would solve some of the problems at least.