James

I believe there are numerous electronica-inclined Thumbs. Post away!

I had fun crashing into you guys and generally ruining your days. Do you have any pointers on what cars I should be focusing my disgusting paint job energies on for next time? Or should I just try to have one from every class?

Are we going to do a PC round sometime? Did I already miss it?

Shit, I didn't notice you were Finnish. Sorry for telling you stuff you already know! I'm not sure what to make of your desire for my mother to be sexually attractive, however... I guess I'll choose to take it as a compliment.

FUN FACT: The music in the background is , which is a Scandinavian Christmas song. My mum and her cousin, being Swedish, drag their respective families around the house to that and , a little like , but with less enthusiasm and more embarrassment from the non-Swedish-speaking portion of the group, which is most of us. It's kind of excruciating every year, but I secretly kind of like having the tradition, even though I contribute as little as is possible without actually refusing to take part.PIP BOY

Oh, I totally don't mean to knock long-term monogamy. That's the ultimate goal for me (in as much as I pursue that stuff at all, which is pathetically little). I just mean that to dismiss everything else as worthless or a failure or somehow unacceptable is dumb. Sure, it's disappointing, and sure, if somebody betrays you or otherwise does you wrong, you'd be justified in getting angry, but sometimes (most of the time, perhaps) people simply aren't compatible, or circumstances interfere, or some other element of chance gets in the way, and this does not render the time spent worthless. The idea that all relationships must be entered with the concrete goal of spending the rest of the rest of your lives together is a bit silly, I think. Shouldn't that be something that emerges over time? Thrusting it onto things from the outset seems stifling. It's not that I promote all that "playing the field" or whatever stuff. I'm pretty much completely the opposite. Promiscuity is kind of intimidating and completely alien to me. I just think that mature relationships should probably all be valuable, regardless of whether they ultimately work out. Also, sometimes it's better to break up. Not that people shouldn't try to rescue things, but sometimes prolonging a relationship can be damaging to all involved, and create unnecessary resentment, and all that jazz. I really have no authority to say any of this.

Yeah, the implicit idea that the only good relationship anyone can ever have must always end with at least one party dying is ridiculous. I'm no relationship expert, but it seems absurdly naïve to think that if one ends, you might as well not have bothered. I don't know exactly how common that type of thinking is, to be fair.

Yeah, that was definitely the highlight for me by a long shot. It went right down to the line in the end. I had one fleet at a nearby star, but that was too small to take his homeworld. I had several batches of reinforcements on the way, but I believed they would arrive fractionally too late to make it before the next production cycle when he'd have a bunch of new ships and so on. So I started spooling up the first fleet's junp drives about twenty minutes before the second fleet arrived, then quickly transferred all the reinforcement ships to the first fleet's carrier in the ten-minute window when they were both at the star. I'm not sure whether this was strictly necessary, as I never worked out whether fleets go through a full thirty-minute jump prep on multi-stage jumps, but it created a terrific narrative in my mind, and was very exciting. After that there was a fairly quiet patch while I prepared for my next assault, and by that time fatigue had started to set in. I no longer had the energy to properly analyse the galactic situation, so I never really realized how vulnerable Murdoc was. Besides that, things seemed quite slow for a long time, and a lot of the pre-climactic action happened outside of my scan range, so dpp went from being a major threat to being badically finished with no visible intermediate phases. I also think my tendency to focus on key targets at the expense of everything else hurt me. Early on it netted me a lot of science, but I never really adjusted to getting the sheer weight of numbers necessary to win the game. I was always playing the long game, even when there wasn't long left in the game. Had the victory condition been total annihilation, I think I might have won. I will admit that I squandered my lead, but like I said before, I'm generally terrible at strategy games, so I'm quite satisfied with my performance overall.

Yeah, I noticed some tech trade shenanigans. I think Wurtzi was up to some of that as well. SHAMEFUL.

Well the point is that it all depends on how you define the rules, and how you define the rules is pretty much entirely arbitrary, because it's all impossible. Internally consistent rule sets may be more appealing because they're closer to a conceivable reality, but they also might make it all narratively stupid. So in the end if you're going to accept any sort of time manipulation (manipulated through time), you pretty much have to do it on the game's terms. Well you don't have to, but there isn't much of a logical basis for kicking up a big fuss.

BUT WHAT ABOUT ALL THE AIR MOLECULES? Either stuff moves, in which case stuff falls down and the world doesn't make sense to people who weren't in stopped-time, and it would generally be a disaster, or stuff doesn't move, making water seem solid, but also making anything but a vacuum impassable, or everything is solid except stuff the time-freezer makes contact with, in which case the water thing wouldn't work, or stuff only moves when the narrative requires that they do, which isn't consistent or particularly feasible, but which is the only option that makes for a satisfying outcome. Except possibly the first one, but that would be insane, and not especially different than that Flash Forward programme, but possibly actually good. At the risk of getting out my depth, as I understand it, time does not have independent existence, and is purely an extraction defined by the movement of things (or the progression of any processes, really). "Stopping time" can only mean anything significant if some but not all movement (or processes) are temporarily ceased. The problem is deciding on a delimiting factor that is consistent and makes any kind of internal sense. THE PRINCE OF PERSIA

360 - TheJamesM PS3 - TheJames Yeah, I'm getting it for both. Yeah, I'm an idiot. Not sure when it's arriving. I don't think it's been shipped yet.

Well Murdoc and I had a strong alliance from the beginning, and it turns out I didn't quite have the heart to betray him. Not in time, anyway. I kind of feel like I fell too far behind on stars at least a week ago. I guess I was also too reluctant to plot out long attack paths. I tended to send a fleet to attack one or two stars and then leave it at that until the next day. Towards the end I found it increasingly hard to keep track of what I was doing and what the next stage of the plan was. That's kind of my problem in strategy games. The fact that Neptune's Pride moves so slowly is what allows me to compete at all. Anyway, good game all. I choose to interpret this as a victory for the Great Southern Alliance. He didn't actually have to try that hard. I was just paranoid about being attacked by my neighbours, particularly once I'd grown that silly thin westward string of stars. This is another reason – had I been completely insular, it probably would have been easier to rally everyone against me. I may still have been able to decisively defeat one enemy, putting the rest off the idea, but it seemed like a risk. To be honest I wasn't even thinking about it at that point. I went straight from seeing Joflar as a dangerous threat, to seeing you as a dangerous threat, to seeing the game as basically being over. In retrospect, if I'd taken out Murdoc's major fleets I guess I could have slowly taken his whole empire, but I didn't really think of that at the time. Other players seemed to be better about sweeping up the spoils of battle, even if it wasn't their battle (I noticed this a lot from Sombre, being my neighbour, and being boxed-in and desperate for new stars). I think possibly my main lesson was that I'm not really cut out for war. I was surprised that I did quite well, but I had real difficulty engaging in any significant conflict with any players I'd had any real communication with. It was fun to jokingly vilify and dehumanize Squid Division, but I feel like in a weird way it actually worked and was a (very loose) analogy for what happens in actual war. No hard feelings SD, obviously. I guess I learnt that I'm a pussy, and that I should remember it's only a game.

Since when has responding to an opinion with a different opinion constituted the banning of the first opinion? I just find it curious how you can find Owen more annoying than such an irritating character.

And the edit button? Clive Owen was fine in Children of Men. It was that godawful hippie woman that spoilt it for me. It's still a great film, but she is awful.

All I have left is innocent allies!

This is getting weird. I feel like my superiority in almost all respects other than stars is not paying off.

The water stuff looks fun to me. It doesn't make a great deal of sense, but that's a problem with all time-manipulation stuff. Why does some stuff (like water) get frozen in vanilla time, and other stuff (like air) move according to meta-time? BERNARD'S WATCH COULD NEVER HAPPEN.

It takes me about an hour to get home, and an hour to get into London, or perhaps an hour and a half if I go directly from work and remain hungry, so there'd have to be something definitely happening for me to make the trip. I'll check the thread later for BREAKING NEWS.

Children of Men is very good. Clive Owen is in that.

For my feelings on PoP 2008, check out this horrible long muddled lump of awful. I'm looking forward to Forgotten Sands, as it looks to be a lot more my sort of thing. I don't like the whole jump to wall, pause, run up wall thing, though. It wasn't like that in the older games, was it? Could you even run up a wall after jumping to it? It doesn't seem to have any natural momentum to it. In the most recent game I put his ability to do that down to the claw, but it seems it's just how they do things now. I guess it's a pretty small thing, but the flow of the movement is one of the coolest things in the 3D Prince of Persia games. Anyway, I'm pretty excited.

So that's not just a default AI name? I guess Squid Division got a squiddy avatar in the first game.

Depending on how busy work is, I might be able to do something on Monday. I may have to stay late, though. I'd hopefully be able to get into London at some point between 7 pm and 8 pm.

No, I meant I'd like to sit this round out but maybe join another one in a few weeks. I was just wondering if there would be any interest left at that point. I guess it's impossible to say.

Will we be doing another one after this? I'm feeling pretty Neptuned-out for now, but I might like to try again in a while, and possibly bring a non-Thumb friend if that would be OK.