Garple

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Posts posted by Garple

  3. Posted

    I went to the inaugural meeting of the North FL Fountain Pen Club (unless we decide to call it a militia, which I thought would be funnier) this weekend. It was just like you'd imagine it: lots of pens, at least one George R. R. Martin body double, and at least one "mint, never removed from box" item.

    Sounds awful...but I'm glad you enjoyed it. :)

  7. Posted

    Hey so apart from wanking how would you all recommend I spend my time in order to move on? :D

    I recommend picking one large goal that has a lot of components to it to which you can devote most of your free time. When you know what you want to accomplish...even if it's kind of vague, your motivation will shoot through the roof. I have clinical depression and I'm on meds, but eventually I realized that the drugs on their own weren't enough and I had to take matters into my own hands and take actions that would supplement them. I made my main goal for the foreseeable future to learn as much as I could about coping strategies for depression...I read about ten books in the first month and filled a notebook with everything I learned, trying to tie it all together, add my own insights and lessons learned from practical application and create a reference I could always go back to and get the most valuable material with a few minutes rereading. While I was doing this I developed a seemingly bottomless supply of energy and was never bored or without purpose for more than 5 minutes. Two books I'd recommend that I stumbled on through this experience are Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Mindset: The New Psychology of Success by Carol Dweck. These are just general books self-improvement through psychology, not specifically depression related, so anyone stands to benefit hugely from reading them, and they're not cheesy Self-Help, they're presentations of the results of years of intense research written by people who are pioneers in their fields (Dweck is a Clinical Psychology professor and researcher at Columbia University).

    Also: in regard to wanking/excercise...the latter will greatly improve the experience of the former (particularly cardio) because...you know...stronger heart, better circulation...(Also: Omega 3s).

  9. Posted

    Yes, I have heard of that also. I partake in the former more frequently than the latter, but I do try to go to the gym.

    Well, of course. The former is portable, and no prep necessary.

  10. Posted

    One weird thing about Skyrim is that now that I've been playing video games for a while, I can tell when a random item is going to be relevant to some quest in the future, so I've had a couple scenarios where someone said, "Could you venture forth into such-and-such cave and retrieve the stone of..." And I say "You Mean this?"

  12. Posted · Edited by GrouchoClub

    In order to bump the thread here's another moment from Skyrim.

    I got killed by a bunch of imperial soldiers who tried to extort me on a road outside of Whiterun, so as I was making my way down that road again, expecting to encounter the same soldiers, I imagined my character turning to his traveling companion (Lydia: the housecarl from Dragonreach) and saying "This is a rough area...I've had bad experiences here before. Be Careful." This was made even better by the fact that the second time we went down the road, we didn't encounter the soldiers. So either my character was paranoid, or it was like a real life situation, where often you walk through a neighborhood with a bad reputation and nothing actually happens.

    Edit: Also, I never steal in the Elder Scrolls games, although I feel perfectly fine stealing in the Bethesda Fallout games since I'm in a wasteland desperately trying to survive. In Skyrim, I feel like civilization is more or less completely intact in spite of various large-scale crises, so I try to obey what I percieve to be the social contract.

  13. Posted

    I did also kind of piece together an imagined backstory for my Argonian in Skyrim, which is something i've used to kind of guide the choices i've made story-wise.

    I accidentally committed a couple of crimes in Skyrim by accidentally clicking on things (I clicked on the ledger in an inn just to see what would happen) so I decided that I'd been falsely accused since it was accidental. With all the turmoil and strife in the land, the people of Skyrim are jumpy, so I'm building up a reputation as some kind of sneak-thief and any time I touch a chest to admire the woodwork or glance toward a ledger I'm convicted.

    I used a preset for my character and the guy who runs the Hall of the Dead in Whiterun looks exactly like me, so I've decided that we're actually brothers, but the two characters don't know it even though I (the player) have discovered it.

    The Jarl of Whiterun sits in that awkward slouchy way with his arms all askew and he doesn't wear sleeves which looks fine on a warrior, but I've never seen a guy sitting on a throne who didn't have some kind of sleeves. I've decided he's a product of the incest that supports the longevity of titled families.

  15. Posted

    I've been re-listening to old Idle Thumbs episodes lately and I'm struck by Chris' ability to almost always find some weird wrinkle to augment or change a game's fiction based on a quirk of the mechanics or presentation. His imagination seems to stretch the limitations of the system. The only example that comes immediately to mind is Alpha Protocol. Chris talked about how the character he choose looked like a South American dictator, so he imagined he was a Latin American military leader who'd been recruited by the CIA. Also...the stuff he talked about with Assassin's Creed 2...the pickpocketing mechanic that was also the fast-walk button...walking around town with a coterie of prostitutes and stealing from every single person he passed etc...

    So...my point is...share some stories about your own experiences with this kind of thing. How have you used your imagination to make a game "your own"?

    Obviously...this will be more natural in open world/sandbox games...so this thread could also branch off into discussion of how this can happen within the strictures of a more focused and/or linear game (in which case it's probably mostly about how one perceives what is happening). I'll try to dredge up some examples of my own too. I think this is one of the most interesting aspects of video games because it's where the player's interaction really comes to a head.

  16. Posted

    Just finished The French Lieutenant's Woman by John Fowles. I think it's a new favorite for me. It's set in Victorian England but was written in 1969 and uses sort of Faulknerian narrative techniques to tie the paradoxical nature of 1860s Western culture to that of the modern age. Sort of an existentialist fable that is also just a good story in its own right.

    Just for the hell of it since I mentioned favorites...some of my other favorite books:

    The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens

    Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger

    Catch-22 by Joseph Heller

    Jesus' Son by Denis Johnson

    Woman in the Dunes by Kobo Abe

    Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton

    Wonder Boys by Michael Chabon

    The Mysteries of Pittsburgh by Michael Chabon

    Labyrinths by Jorge Luis Borges

    Devil in the White City by Erik Larson

    God: A Biography by Jack Miles

    Cannery Row by John Steinbeck

    Child of God by Cormac McCarthy

    Shakespeare: The World As Stage by Bill Bryson

    The Nick Adams Stories by Ernest Hemingway

    And More...!

  19. Posted

    Man. No offence to any Elder Scrolls fans, but seeing this list really reminds me that I hate their universe. It just seems so bland. Maybe you have to play it for a long time before it becomes more compelling, but I remember reading the booklet that came with Oblivion, with all the history of the world in it, and it was SO dull and uninteresting that I couldn't take any of it in.

    That's how I felt about Dragon Age.

  20. Posted

    I heard this game was kind of like Twin Peaks, is that true? I would love a Twin Peaks style experience that was more playable than the endearing but janky Deadly Premonition.

  23. Posted

    I thought Fable III was 2010... maybe the PC version was 2011? Still, L.A. Noire practically has it by default over that other piece of garbage.

    wikipedia told me it was 2011, but...yeah, either way. Oh yeah, I also played Dead Island, but...

  24. Posted

    Thanks a lot for the advice guys. And, yeah I know I won't be able to run too much...but I figured I'd ask so that if I see something on sale on Steam I'll have some kind of idea where how this machine would handle it. I suppose GOG would be a good option as well...I played stuff like Fallout on my last laptop. Fortunately, it seems like a lot of the PC games I'm interested in are indie releases.