James

Well that will teach you for changing your avatar (which, for those playing at home, she has done again, making my error painfully obvious). I can't keep track of you people if you all keep changing your Internet faces. In seriousness, though, sorry. I remembered that "subbes" was married to another forum member or something, but it's only now that I remember that "shammack" is the male component of that particular equation. I should pay better attention. Or become more comfortable with humiliating myself with these sorts of blunders. Marriages as equations. I really am quite the romantic.

I'm pretty sure the bit about the back seat flipping back up was just EDIT: her friend making a joke.

I bought this but never really played it, so I'd have some interest in multiplayer, but I don't really do much of that on the consoles any more, what with them now being in a communal room. Stupid bloody consideration for others. Maybe, though.

My experience of Sweden over the years has contained very few beards, braids, tattoos or Scientologists. Or game festivals. I mainly just see relatives and Öland. It has a fort and a lighthouse.

Certainly not, although there is a bit of an undercurrent of "If that's what you want to do with your life rather than improving the world, fine, I guess...", which some might find a little disheartening. NEVERTHELESS, an interesting call-to-arms. While I enjoy much of the gaming environment as it is and has been, I do wonder whether more of a conscientious effort ought be made in making progress towards specific goals. Quite what those should be, I don't know. I like the idea of gaming exploring ways in which it's uniquely expressive, but that's the woolly hand-waving opinion of an uneducated gamer with no development experience.

To be clear, I meant the Richard Wilson letter, and I only meant it in the "I'm not trying to sound important, it was a stupid mass-produced thing" sense. Not that anyone cares, of course, and it's way after the fact, but reading back over it it sounded ALL WRONG.

EDIT: oops

EDIT: Sorry, apparently I misjudged the situation.

I feel like I received roughly equal quantities of unconvincing bits of paper from either side. I got a letter from Richard Wilson, actor! As did everyone else, I'm sure.

My intended point was that the nature of the medium, including its limitations, are an important part of the art itself, and that the surface-level qualities of the medium can't really be used to determine its expressiveness or breadth. Or, to take a slightly different approach, the possibilities of sufficiently well-established medium are essentially limitless, rendering comparison on such grounds irrelevant. Sure, there's theoretically more room for manoeuvre in some media than others, but I don't anticipate us reaching the end of any of them, so as far as I can tell it doesn't really matter.

I often wonder what the audio description tracks are like for action sequences. Or sex scenes. Does the narrator maintain a relatively neutral, or do they get into it? So anyway, are films more varied than paintings because they have thousands of images rather than just one, and sound to boot? Or is that a foolishly reductive way of looking at things?

Apparently they've done a DNA match with 99.9% certainty. Returning to the AV stuff for a moment, depressingly, if not surprisingly, there may be no perfect voting system. The problem I have with arguments for either side is that they tend to depend on emphasising very specific situations with counter-intuitive results under the opposing system. In reality things are pretty messy, and it's basically impossible to have a single system that will untangle that mess on all occasions. At least, that's my limited understanding of it.

The crux of the matter seems to be, as Gwardinen pointed out, games can differ in all the manners which films do, and in the manner of their interactivity. It's worth remembering, however, that the apparent restriction of being a static medium does actually afford films a lot of things (such as authorial control) that are harder to obtain in games. While technically, as an audiovisual medium capable of any arbitrary arrangement of the audio and the visual, games can contain anything films can, there comes a point when one is just calling something a game to try to prove some sort of a point. If you take games as they actually are, there's an awful lot of similarity in narrative and emotional content where films exhibit much greater variety. I guess my point is that I'm not sure whether all the variety in games is inherently valuable. Certainly, I'd rather there were variety than not, but I don't think it elevates the medium above others, by any means. It's almost remarkable, the number of different ways games can evoke very similar reactions and fail to make much of a point. Which is fine, of course.

Sadly, playlists exist.

I think people overplay how "fucked up" English is. It has its idiosyncrasies, sure, and its mixed roots can lead to some confusing inconsistencies, but it's not like it's fundamentally broken, and it's not like other languages don't have their difficult quirks. Caveat: I'm no linguist, and can barely speak one language, let alone any extra ones. So I may be entirely wrong.

One could propose a counter-argument that non-native English speakers have already learnt one foreign language, probably with more aptitude than most English-speakers learn any foreign languages (certainly better than I've managed, anyway), and have therefore had more practice at working outside of their home tongue. I imagine it's significantly harder to learn Japanese than to move between European languages, but at least the language centres of the brain have been better exercised. This is all pure speculation, of course, and it probably depends much more on the individual than their nationality, anyway.

Well then, you can thank Merzbow for diverting any weird looks that might have been heading your way. Seriously though, I think stuff has to be pretty extreme or experimental or extremely experimental to raise an eyebrow on the Internet these days. At least, that's my experience. I don't listen to a great deal of "unlistenable" stuff like that, but Merbow does have a track called Birds and Warhorse that I do genuinely quite enjoy. That Black Moth Rainbow track is pretty good, though. I'm afraid the only analogue synth music I can think of right now is The Moog Cookbook, and they're not exactly trippy: SHPkgIPDfcE

Yeah, that multiplayer we were talking about hasn't happened yet. To my knowledge, that is. Everyone might be having fun behind my back.

?

Bollocks. I was actually planning on dropping in, but I didn't say anything because I had a feeling I'd end up missing it, and I did. Is there likely to be any further sessions?

Twice in recent months I've had a dream in which I remember the dream immediately prior as a dream and recount it to real-life people. In the first instance I was telling my dad about a dream when I realized it was actually quite embarrassing, so I had to dodge around the specifics and leave it as a thoroughly unsatisfying and pointless anecdote; in the second I was telling my friends about a dream in which I accidentally made my boss cry a little bit, and my flatmate (one of the audience) laughed the exact same laugh he laughed when I told the real-life him about the dream and meta-dream. Because that's his laugh, I suppose. It's all rather entertainingly post-modern. I wonder whether it's anything to do with my finally nearing the end of Gödel, Escher, Bach. I also had a dream containing original music (at least, it seemed original to me). It even had words, but they didn't really make any sense. I don't really remember much of how it went, but it seemed pretty good. It was probably actually garbage, though.

- M. L. King

Even creepier RealDolls!

I had a Fat Tuesday bun (semla) one time in Sweden. TOO MUCH CREAM.

Hey, me neither. Ideally something one could move around, like some sort of crazy hologram or something. But a stereoscopic 3D image would be closer than a flat 2D image.