RubixsQube

So, I actually can't say if the bathroom trick helped, but I was mostly happy since it's a fairly bright room, with ceiling lights that allowed me to easily check whether or not the surfaces were perfectly clean of dust. The steps you go through, in more detail, are: 1) Wash your hands. 2) Remove any joy-cons, and lay the switch down on it's back. I put it down on a flat surface where I'd lay out some clean butcher paper. 3) Open up the wet nap satchel with the wet cloth, and cloth down the screen. 4) Open up the wet nap satchel with the dry cloth, and dry the screen. At this point, the screen was pretty immaculate. 5) For any weird spots, there's a little microfiber cloth you can use to just make double quintuple sure. 6) Open up one of the baggies with the tempered screen. It is sandwiched between two plastic layers on either side. One plastic layer has flaps on either side for holding when you apply the screen protector, and the other has a tab with some writing on it. You're going to want to remove this second layer, the one with the writing, to expose the side of the tempered glass with the adhesive that's gonna lay down on the screen directly. 7) At this point, make your final check over whether or not there are any pieces of dust or hair or lint or whatever on the screen. 8) Using the side tabs, hover the screen just over the switch, trying to align everything using the little notches on the bottom. You're going to want to set it down fairly straight, and you'll find that because it's not a cheap piece of plastic film, it'll kind of smooth it's way out gradually as it lays down. It's a pretty process. 9) Remove the top layer of film that has the side tabs you just used to apply the glass. 10) Inevitably, there will be a few smallish bubbles. Use the included hard piece of cardboard to push these out. Make sure to go around the edges of the screen protector, too, pushing everything down to apply the protector. Ta-da!

...does anyone want to help me defeat lady maria tonight? I could use some help. I'm streaming at twitch.tv/rubixsqube at the moment. ...found someone! Defeated her! Ooof.

So, I decided to go into the bathroom and do this directly after a shower while it was good and humid in there, and while I fucked up the first install (there was a big piece of stupid lint that must have fallen right as I was figuring out which side of the protector I remove or whatever), the second one went great, and while there was a tiny bubble, I just kept pushing it around with the included piece of cardboard and it went away. As of now, it looks like it installed pretty much perfectly. I feel so, so much more safe putting it into a case, or into the dock now. The piece of glass is pretty sturdy, and while there's a little bit more reflectivity, it's not super duper noticeable. This is by far the best screen protector I've ever used.

Mine too. I'll put it on and take some pictures to show it off. I'm excited, although I'm not "put the screen protector on in a steamy bathroom so as to not get dust on the screen" excited. I also think that I may want to get this case, which is pretty expensive, but I have already taken my switch to multiple houses to play with people, and this seems like a pretty ideal solution for travel.

(Nick, Jake, and Chris are explaining to an alien about the oddities of Earth culture) Jake: ...and that's why the film Cars is secretly very weird. Alien: Actually could you go back to the part that started this whole thing, where your people has gone and built a fictional city from this children's story such that you might...walk around in it, and perhaps enjoy meals? Nick: Also, there are rides. Alien: Rides? Nick: Yes. You sit down inside some of the characters from the film and you are propelled quickly around. In one case, you kind of go through the story of the film Cars. Alien: Wait, from what you said, the characters from the film Cars are cars. Chis: Yes, which is why it's so weird they decorate their cities with - Alien: (shaking off Chris) How do you arrive at this place, with the recreation and the rides? Jake: ...we drive. Alien: In a real car? And not a fictional car, or a character from the film Cars. Jake: Yes. Alien: So you get in a car, and are propelled quickly...to a recreation of a fictional city such that you might wander around and then get inside other...(fake?) cars, which are characters from a children's story, to also get pushed around. I would assume that here you are...moving quicker than when you traveled to this place originally? Jake: No, actually. It's much slower. Alien: Yeah, see, this is the weird thing, guys.

As Jake mentioned in the episode, this is from a talk by this dude Bryan Lunduke at the "Open Internet of Things Summit & Embedded Linux Conference". The talk is real hand wavey, and real silly, and the dude is an author and tech journalist, so you should take the whole thing with a whole shit ton of salt. But it makes for a silly podcast subject.

I'm really, really enjoying my switch. I've been lucky to not see any of the issues people have seen (not even any left joycon desynch). I have played a bunch of Zelda, but I've also had a lot of fun with 1-2-Switch (that HD rumble is some sort of weird miracle), and I recommend that people pick it up once the price drops quite a bit. Snipperclips is just a perfect game to introduce someone to the idea of the console. I really like how low pressure it is, and yet creative and fun. I haven't played with more than 2 people, but I think that might also be a silly time. As for the activity log, I've noticed that my profile says what I've been playing, but doesn't list any information about the amount of time I've played anything. I don't know if I miss the activity log at the moment, as I'm sure it'll be part of a later update. I think that there's going to be a lot coming in future updates, and I'm all right with what I have right now, especially since Zelda is just so, so good.

I wrote in a big long email about the Wold Newton Family/Universe, and at the end proposed a few of the potential brains, and it got me thinking that perhaps one of the recurring segments would be to figure out the ownership of the 45 brains.

A secret wonderful thing about Far Beyond the Stars is that the actors who normally are under a bunch of alien makeup are shown without and it's super weird.

From what I can tell, Nick plays the Souls games because he likes to fight difficult bosses, often while deliberately making his playthrough more difficult. He doesn't care about any story, he hardly cares about weird enemies he meets along the way, he wants to just get to bosses and defeat bosses. And, from his comments on this week's episode, it seems like he thinks that other things in the games are perhaps not just boring to him, but boring to his viewing audience. The issue that Nick has had with Bloodborne is that the game decided to make the healing items something you have to collect, which directly gets in the way of his play style. It has been written about to death, but making blood vials collectible: 1) means that you have to slow down and explore the areas and defeat enemies in a more careful and thorough manner 2) means that you have to value blood vials and think about exactly when to use them, and you are forced to get in and fight enemies to "rally" and regain lost health. I hate feeling like I'm wasting time in a game, and I'd never played a Souls-style game before picking up Bloodborne. From my experience, I can say, 100%, that if Nick were to be more patient and explore along the way to the boss he's had trouble with, he'd have enough blood vials such that they acted like estus flasks, refilling from his overstock at each death. Also, by playing patiently, he'd have better armor, items, and blood echoes such that he could level himself and his weapons up. ALSO, by playing patiently, he would learn the intricacies of the parrying system, which turns out to be pretty vital to play the game. Instead, he's decided to just hobble himself right off the bat with character and primary weapon choice, and then hurl himself through to get to bosses, only to find that his usual strategy (repeatedly dying and running back to the boss until he can manage to beat the boss through sheer force of will) isn't going to cut it. He's got to slow down, and farm for a bit. I bet if he found some sort of off topic conversation to get into, he'd find that he built up a little stock of blood vials in no time, and he'd learn about when he should parry enemies. But he's not gonna do that since he's worried...we might get bored?

Also Trip Hazard, it looks like you went through a bunch of the game that I made my way through before stopping (right around your number 2 - 3 there, I beat the boss with a big cage on his head but didn't go past that) and moving on to the DLC, which is very, very hard, and I have to parcel it out slowly since I get so damn frustrated by it.

This part here may have destroyed my entire soul.

From Austin Walker's (kind of spoiler-ey) review: What a weird obscure pull, does anybody here know anyone who even likes Far Cry 2

I bought this case for traveling with the console, and this little stand, since I forsee myself wanting to play it portably while also charging the device. Both haven't been released yet, but I expect to get them early next week.

If you want to show a film shot at 24 FPS on a NTSC TV (at 29.970 frames per second, not 30 frames per second, because of the addition of color to the signal and some complicated integer frequency math), you have to use a telecine machine to convert the film to video using a 2:3 (or 3:2) pulldown which has, as its first step, slowing the speed down by 1/1000th, from 24 to 23.976 fps (which is imperceptible for people watching). At this FPS, you can get four frames of film for every five frames of your final 29.97 FPS video.

This is great, thank you! If you change the speed to 1.25 on the Diary of a Perfect Murder Theme, you can better compare the two, and yeah, they're definitely different recordings. Most importantly, the Diary of a Perfect Murder Theme doesn't have this insane whistle noise at the end. Speaking of that weird whistle noise, I am going to link to an entirely different thing that I have tweeted fourteen hundred times and is maybe my favorite weird musical youtube video of all time:

Also, I think that Chris' description of the Poirot theme as the Matlock theme with Careless Whisper was pretty inspired. I encourage anyone to go and click on the Matlock theme, click the gear, and set the speed to 0.5 for a more moody version. It really makes me long for a radio station that's entirely slow New Orleans dirge music. I've wanted this since first hearing Radiohead's wonderful, wonderful Life in a Glass House.

Holy shit you are correct. Also, he only posted this a month or so ago, so there may be a chance yet.

I really do think that you could get back up and running if you followed my guide above for like, ten to fifteen minutes. You're going to need to get back into practice, and this provides a pretty good ramp in terms of enemy difficulty, while also allowing you to build up blood vials and quicksilver bullets. Also, you didn't, at all, finish exploring much of Old Yharnam, which would further allow for you to collect echoes and level your character up. You've got to level up your character, especially since Jasper started as a pretty crummy underleveled dude. It was fun watching you play these games, and, as you do have insight points to spend (or at least, madman's knowledge to potentially get insight points), at the very least I guarantee you that someone in the chat would love to come and help out with the fight.

The TV is at a normal height; I kind of sit right in front of my TV when playing, since that's the only way I can get my stupid green-screen set up to work without purchasing a ps4 camera extension cable. I kind of like how it makes it look like I'm looking up at the action on the screen instead of staring straight forward. It's a little weird, and if I play for like, three hours it can be pretty rough on my legs, but it works fairly well.

I spent a bunch of time trying to fight this Hunter who waits in the Cathedral after beating up the Crow Lady (Hoonter of Hoonters), slowly baiting him down the stairs to kind of control his movement, and, well...this happened. Don't worry, I ended up getting it right on the next attempt, although I had an accident with the Crow Lady just afterwards. I am really liking this game. I've just gotten confident enough and at a high enough level to help out other hunters with boss fights, and I started the DLC, which is a significant step up in terms of difficulty, and seems really expansive.

Two things: 1) I always thought that Bobby Moynihan's Snagglepuss was pretty funny. Also, "Heavens to Murgatroyd" is like, the best weird phrase. 2) Over both the moments in the episode when the themes were played, I sang "games, video games, video games, video gaaaaames" once the horns came in, in the same cadence as in the Idle Thumbs theme. It works pretty well.

Did I miss something...has Nick taken an extended Bloodborne Break?

I really, really liked Affordable Space Adventures. I've played through it with a couple of different friends, and it is such a neat idea, done just perfectly. It's sad that there aren't that many fun asymmetric co-op games. It's so much fun to work with someone in a kind of silly way.