brkl

It's very thin on the human drama side (the protagonist has a ridiculously resilient personality), otherwise a very good watch.

Oh, no worries, I'm not here to take away your free speech. You can disagree with whoever you want and voice that however you want. I just take offense at the notion that redefining the term "video game" according to some prescriptive rules is a neutral act that should be of no concern to anyone, as if categorization never hurt anyone. You say that I'm ignoring Mountain's context, which must be a joke, since I've ever only seen it mentioned in connection to gaming. Releasing Mountain is not an offense that requires a philosophical argument as a defense and apology -- making something is contribution enough. If Proteus' developers had not been able to formulate an argument as to why Proteus is a game, Proteus would still be a huge contribution to the richness of video games precisely because it was not what was expected. If you feel that releasing products like Mountain and Dear Esther under the umbrella of video gaming is such a transgression that you want other people to agree with you that they don't belong, sure. Feel free to try to convince people. But it's a plea for people to stop discussing those products on video gaming forums such as this, for the products not to be sold where video games are sold, not to be publicized on sites that publicize video games, etc. That's an attack on those games and the people who made them. I also believe it's a call for stagnation in the sphere of video games and any headway your argument makes will serve to make video games more predictable and boring in the future.

Man, I wonder when I'll get my controller. No word so far.

Yeah, well most people who make games don't get attacked afterwards and so have no need to justify themselves. There's no need for arguments at all and whether a game-maker can construct a good one is irrelevant.

But you did belittle the creator of Mountain for even claming that Mountain is a game. Dear Esther and Mountain are based on video game culture, use its vernacular, are presented in the same places and are in conversation with it (obviously). Arguing that they should be placed in some make-shift genre that means nothing to anyone is an attack, just not a direct one.

You like to through around words like 'ludic' in favour of your argument, so I think you should read Huizinga's Homo Ludens before arguing that 'a game' is historically some clear cut thing that's now being violated by these pieces of software with silly authors who use the word for their creations. The only reason to define it so strictly is to claim ownership and power over what's accepted and what's not.

How are the later seaaons? I know someone here didn't like the second one. I loved the first.

All I know about this game is that it looks great and everybody starts out useless.

Huh, that episode did nothing for me.

So far Noah has surpassed my expectations easily. The first episode knocked it out of the park. The one with the dating app has been the weakest so far, but it's been pretty damn strong. The dating app is a soft topic and Jon's interviews were no different in those cases. Also, you are presuming that Trevor didn't want to promote that product and only did it for money. The vibe I got was that the product got promoted because they felt it had value.

Good point.

Definitely don't watch it like this for the first time. You'll have to endure a whole lot of flapping gums with no words coming out and people acting crazy because their motivations are only apparent in the missing dialogue. I don't know if the black and white gives anything extra to the movie, although it works well enough. The lack of dialogue really brings out the music. I wonder if it would have worked better without sound effects as well, because it just gets really discordant to see people talking without words coming out while you can hear everything else. There's also some great stuff in the dialogue that fills in the world, such as Joe's speech at the beginning. A lot of character is lost this way along with plot cohesion.

I can't bear the refugee "discussion" going on in my country. People love blaming the refugees for all kinds of stuff -- no one is mentioning the US, who destabilized Iraq where half of the refugees are from (and who could do that without the risk of hundreds of thousands of refugees at its borders). I've never been more pissed at the US' World Police antics.

https://soundcloud.com/b-r-k-l/sets/algorithmic-composition-test I've got this generative music system I've rigged up out of a hodge podge of ChucK code. I can feed it samples (the ones in the test tracks above are crude ones I recorded myself) and it uses loops and fundamentally pretty simple stuff to make these hypnotic tracks that occasionally resemble music. Inspired mainly by Brian Eno and Robert Fripp to try this sort of stuff, but I can't play any music myself. As soon as I uploaded those tracks I got a bunch of spam messages in soundcloud :/

I saw the new TMNT. I liked it fine. I thought the action was all right and it made me chuckle a few times. It's dumb but so are a lot of action movies that are far more well liked. Two stars out of four, goes well with whiskey.

It's an article on Wikipedia.

You'll be in the minority, FTL had the same problem but was praised for it.

https://docs.google.com/viewer?url=patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/pdfs/US20150079872.pdf Dude is crazy, but they sure look sweet: http://t.co/JPxBEjvvfU

Hah, I can't get Office to install links in the Start menu or anywhere else. It can't open Office files by double clicking, only through "Open with..." I could pull some shortcuts to the taskbar, but nothing to the start menu.

I don't know, I mostly watch Giant Bomb's videos if I know I won't play the game. It definitely happens that I sate my curiosity regarding a game by watching a Giant Bomb video, from which I get entertainment, GB gets revenue and the developer gets nothing. The financial model should be such that a game developer could make a game that works well for LPs but sells poorly, but is still successful through revenue generated by the LPs. I recognize the LP contribution, though, entertainers ought to be paid for their work. Currently, it's not balanced. Story-based games suffer greatly from LPs while strategy games probably only profit, for example.

Okay, that was a sweet, sweet episode.

I thought the cult based on pigeon superstition was pretty on point.

This BadHat situation demands a thorough inquiry.

If you read the Troy Goodfellow article above, that feeds into this IMO. I think games work differently from other products because they suddenly become huge on reasons that cannot be anticipated or replicated. Angry Birds was the right product for when it was released, but its success doesn't mean people will be lining up to buy the next thing the same company makes. Probably the next similarly successful title will come from another company just as unknown as Rovio was at the time. You can spend millions and be outsold by Flappy Bird.

Am I wrong or does that film have two astronauts from Interstellar?