ihavefivehat

Now watch 2:38 in that video and imagine that the robot is coldly staring into your eyes as he silently wraps his lifeless fingers around your neck. This is how the revolution begins.

You might get lost in the over world now and then... I would just look up a spoiler-free FAQ if that happens. It's definitely worth playing through the rest of the game if you like the first bit. The story-heavy sections will be more spaced out from here on, but they're still worth going through. Also the plot will become exponentially more incomprehensible, but it's fun in its own way.

Newsflash, Billie Holiday is amazing! Ok, so that's obvious, but I just heard her earliest recordings from the mid 30s for the first time and my appreciation for her has reached new levels.

Hey guys I have a bunch of Steam and Origin keys from past Humble Bundles that I either didn't want or already had. PM me if you want one! edit: See new list on page 20!

Yeah, the monolithic 4 CD box sets can be intimidating, but they're usually worth listening to. The nice thing I've been finding while doing this is that if you have the individual tracks tagged with the year they came out, you don't actually end up listening to the entire set back-to-back. I'm up to 1929, which in my library is full of some really fantastic folk music. This one's from the Anthology of American Folk Music. (An absolutely phenomenal compilation which played a large part in launching the folk revival of the late 50's/early 60's, but that's a whole other story.).

Holy shit, Squirtle always seemed so friendly... I guess you really can't trust anyone these days.

This game is fantastic.. I get the urge to go back and play it every so often and I appreciate it a little bit more every time.

Just watched The Act of Killing, the new Joshua Oppenheimer documentary. It's one of the those things that's not easy to watch, but you will be glad you did. Highly recommend it, but make sure you set aside a few hours for the bout of brooding depression which will follow.

I've gone a little bit overboard in collecting digital music recently, music library is filled with a ridiculous amount of songs which I have just never listened to. In order to remedy this, and also to try a weird experiment, I've decided to avoid purchasing music until I've listened to every song in my library. But I'm doing it in the order of year released. The idea is that I'll be able to understand each track as it was heard during the time it was released. Not sure I'll really follow through with it, but so far I've found some great songs I never paid much attention to before, for example: also:

15 years ago on this coming Saturday I was sitting bored out of my mind at a meet for my swim team... my friends and I hated those to no end, but the cool thing was that all the nerdy kids who were only on teams due to the 'encouragement' of their parents would bring their game boys and link cables, and the things would turn into giant portable LAN parties in-between the actual races. My best friend happened to be on the team with me, and his super-nice mom decided to bring us this new 'Pokemon' game as a reward for doing our best. And she soon regretted it, because I proceeded to miss being called for my big event because I was busy training my Charmander. Good times!

Oh my god, guys.... Half Life 3 is the Steam controller. Valve has transcended the medium of video games and is working on an entirely new conceptual level..

I don't think GTA 4 really did New York justice. That city may be a mess, but it's a beautiful, vibrant mess, with all sorts of cultures and architectural styles crammed in next to eachother and built on top of one another. There's energy coming out of the walls there, and you can feel the culture and the vibrancy by standing on just about any street corner. Some might call it ugly, but it's definitely not drab and empty like Liberty City was. I like GTA 4, and that was probably the closest representation of the city that I've seen in a video game, but I don't think the technology was there. I'm excited for them to do it again.

Holy shit Mega Charizard! I wish I could send this picture to myself 15 years ago and watch the reaction!

My experience with every Wayforward game: "Wow! This art looks amazing! I can't wait to play the rest of this game!" 2-3 hours later: "Wow! This art looks amazing! I feel so guilty for not wanting to play the rest of this game!"

I hope not, I freaking loved those games!

I'm excited! And I love how many underhanded Mega Man references are in that video.

I've been building up a huge amount of tourism via great works for most of the game now, but I didn't even realize this expansion had added culture flipping until it happened. There wasn't really any warning, I just got confronted with the annex/puppet/raze screen as if I had conquered a city. I soon realized what had happened though, and I knew that I didn't want to deal with the -12 happiness with which the city had burdened me. This was coupled with the fact that I was at war with Rome and knew I couldn't defend the city, so while I was touched that the good Roman citizens thought so highly of Brazilian Freedom, I knew I'd have to get rid of them fast. So basically I went around peddling Antium to the highest bidder, which turned out to be Hammurabi. He must have thought it was a great deal, but my ambassador was totally snickering to himself on the way back. "Have fun with that one, buddy!". I imagine the Atiumites wouldn't be too pleased if they realized I sold their city for less than the cost of a worker. While this was going on, I liberated the Korean city which Rome had taken from Sejong as part of their peace terms. It was on my border, so I wasn't solely with Sejong's well-being in mind that I handed it back to him. After all that I was finally able to sue for peace for favorable terms. Around this time Korea adopted Order, so that might explain why they denounced me. Maybe their denunciation pushed the rest of the world over the edge, and that's why I was denounced by everyone else. Either way, Brazil has a reputation to restore. Hopefully I can convince Sejong to adopt Freedom. Korea was my buddy, and they were also a good buffer against the rest of the world becoming envious of my territory.

Yeah I found out it just ends trade routes, but they can still sell their luxuries. It might be better to try to get one of their luxuries banned instead. So maybe you guys already knew this, but I just figured it out. When the world congress is about to vote, if you have diplomats in a civ's capital, you can use the trade screen to try to get them to vote for a specific proposal by bribing them with gold or luxuries or whatever. It's pretty helpful, and I think that's how you're supposed to become the WC host if you're not the leader in raw delegates. I'm wondering why everyone suddenly hates me. I had kind of a weird situation going on where a city in the middle of Rome's empire decided to join my civ, but I didn't really want to deal with it. So I made it a puppet and then immediately sold it to Babylon. I don't know if that was the reason though. I even retook one of Korea's cities from Rome and liberated it, and a few turns later Sejong is denouncing me even though we've been friends since the Classical era. I thought I was a nice guy!

I can't believe they haven't fixed the bomber speed yet. At first it was comically annoying but it quickly becomes annoying-annoying. You can try this mod: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=83056827 Not sure if it works with BNW though. You totally hit the nail on the head about the world congress. It gives the other leaders so much more personality and makes them a lot more fun to hate/be friends with. The idealogy system is a ton of fun in that regard also. Caeser is trying to create an autocratic world-empire in my game. So I'm trying to band together a freedom loving alliance by liberating his conquered cities. Hopefully I'll gain enough friends to embargo him at the next WC.

This is actually my first BNW game too, but apparently once you research radar, you can build airports which allow you to move troops instantly between cities. I haven't actually tried it yet, so I'm not totally sure how it works.

I'm playing on a Pangea that is basically divided into two hemispheres by a huge series of mountain ranges that are really only passable via the far north and south of the continent. I dominated the western side by conquering the every civ except Korea, who are my bros and who help buffer against the Roman juggernaut which is slowly taking over the east. Caesar is just generally being an asshole, so I've been looking for reasons to go to war with him. Problem is, to get to him I have to bribe the city states in the hilly passes or take the long way through Korea. So when Caesar declared war on Korea I jumped at the opportunity to kill some Romans. At first I was just going to help Sejong defend, but then I got a little bit ambitious and thought that while Caesar is busy duking it out with Sejong, I'd snake my troops through the mountains and come up behind him, where I could liberate the poorly defended former Aztec lands. So I built up a large group of state-of-the art troops (musketmen and lancers) and started snaking my way through Cape Town. I didn't have enough money to bribe them, and they had no pertinent quest, so needless to say, they weren't pleased with my massive train of military units passing through their territory uninvited. It was fun to watch their impotent rage as they looked on helplessly as I used them as a welcome mat into Rome's back door. However, it turns out I probably should have my plan out more thouroughly, because after 50+ years of marching through the mountains my formerly state-of-the-art army wasn't looking quite so shiny. Also, Rome seemed to have gotten wise to my plan, because by the time I got to Tlatelolco, Caesar had stacked tiles full of riflemen and gattling gunners. My troops must not have liked the looks of that, because they decided they'd rather spend 50 more years in the mountains than get mowed down in the trenches. I like to think that the leaders of Cape Town were just starting to re-gain their cool, thinking they'd gotten rid of me when the massive troop-train re-entered their borders going the other way. I haven't forgotten about the War of Aztec Liberation. My next plan is to plant a city in the uninhabited desert to just south of Cape Town, and then try out this new airlift feature... this isn't over, you Roman bastard!

Thanks for this! I love finding out this sort of thing. It restores my faith in the world's weirdness, though it throws a wrench into my vegetarianism. I did some googling, and found this article which gives some interesting info, and somehow manages to make 'stuff that comes out of the same place as beaver poop' sound weirdly classy.

I had a dream that I moved into an apartment I'd never been to with a dude I'd never met before. He seemed alright, but when we got to the apartment, things went downhill. The apartment turned out to be a gritty 80s cyber-punk style alleyway, with dim colored lighting and steam rising from grates in the floor. There were all sorts of seedy looking people just sleeping around the room on the ground. My room mate was cooking meat on a spit over a makeshift fire that he'd started in the center of the room. When all the meat had been eaten he said that he had to go out and get some more, and he needed me to go with him. We went out onto the streets and approached the door of a nice, wholesome looking all-American style house with a white picket fence and freshly-mown lawn. Suddenly he handed me a baseball bat and told me to wait off to one side of the door while he knocked. When the door opened, two ostriches emerged. They looked just like normal ostriches, but it was understood that they were the family which lived in the house. They seemed mildly annoyed at my room-mate's presence, but they hadn't noticed me yet. Suddenly my room mate started yelling at and verbally berating me, telling me to 'do it' because it was the only way we would get food. Eventually I gave in and hit the ostrich over the head with the baseball bat. It was only stunned, but now the ostriches saw me and they were angry. I felt like I had to kill or be killed, so before the bird could react I hit again, harder this time and it crumpled to the floor as its family looked on. And that, my friends, is why you don't move in with a room mate you've never met. You never know when you might be forced to become complicit in ostrich-murder.

That's one of the best things about animals. A dog down the street from me lost one of his legs, and after the pain/recovery period was over he got right back to his normal life of running around chasing balls, going on long walks, and what not. There's no self-pity there, they just keep doing what they love to do as best as they can. It's really inspiring in a way.

I really enjoyed the beta. I played through once, and my entire family died. It was a really bad feeling, so I went back and played it again with all my knowledge of how the mechanics evolved and power-gamed it, earning way more money than I needed. Kind of a hollow victory that second time, though.