juv3nal

also the Paul Schmidt translation of Rimbaud's Enfance: (only an excerpt but all I could find online; er, there's full translations of the poem available, but not the P.S. translation which is BETTAR)

I like George Oppen a lot a lot: from here

Saw this randomly going through stuff on greenlight way back and I voted for it, but practically, I feel like controlling multiple dudes would be too complicated playing single player. Coop looks promising, but I don't really play that much multiplayer stuff on pc.

Just listened to the podcast. Briefly, re: the treatment of conspiracy in literary (and more often, "postmodern") fiction is that it is often something of a "meta" move. If one thinks of a conspiracy, one typically thinks of a conspiracy plot. In the converse to the way that things in the real world frequently do happen just by coincidence or for no particular reason at all, all the events that are described in a novel typically (exceptions, of course, for experimental things written by partially aleatoric processes etc.) are arranged and are only there by design.

I'm in for $20.

I don't think it's ugly, but the characters & character animation certainly suffer by comparison to the animated sequences. I do think the settings/locations/backgrounds hold up ok though.

It'll happen to me if I had too many carbs for dinner and I'm just grinding for levels, but I haven't had that problem when actually moving through story beats. Most notably, I feel compelled to grind for a bit right after I evolve a familiar (for those who don't have the game: the pokemans evolve into more powerful forms, but their level resets to 1 when this happens).

So my (and subbes') internet frand does these neat choose-your-own-adventure-by-committee things over on google+ and is about to start a new one and is angling for more participants. Basically it's a choose your own adventure story chapter/passage every weekday and the readers vote and argue betwixt themselves on which choice should be taken. It's loads of fun and he's a pretty good writer and a great writer given that he manages those updates on a daily basis. The 4th one (which had not started when I made that metafilter post) if anyone's interested in reading it, started here btw. There has been some speculation about whether or not the next one will be on g+ or whether he'll take it to its own site, but I can update this post as details emerge.

The AI doesn't really improve although you do get the option to tell everyone to attack or defend later on. Stuff is not that expensive if you just focus on keeping your people plus 1 familiar per person kitted out. Just give the rest hand-me-downs. It's only when you start trying to kit everyone out that it's really bad.

Story 5 has concluded, with a promise of a 6th one "soon" join the community to be notified when the next one begins.

lol. prescriptivism, meet descriptivism. try not to fight too much, ok?

Yeah, so I got this and downloaded it, but between some coop far cry 3 (which is kinda awfull on ps3 because mic communication be broke), ni no kuni and proteus haven't gotten to it. Wow, typing it all out like that I played a ton of videogaems tonight. Impressive.

So this pretty rad. I was surprised that protip: the help says f9 takes a snapshot or something which I originally took to mean a screenshot, but it's actually a saved game allowing you to return to a particular time of day/season/island if you like.

I've been collecting every one, but I just stuff them into storage as lvl 1's, only really putting serious time into levelling up a core 9 (I have a 3rd party member, don't know if you do yet) once I figured out which ones I liked (which to be honest, is based more on the way they looked than any rational assessment of their capabilities). And 3 of the ones I kept are ones introduced to you as part of the story (mite, esther's bird mage thing, the lemur/monkey thing).

Did the steam remote install thing to try to install it on my computer at home, but I don't know if that has ever worked properly for me. We'll see when I get home, I guess.

No! My attempt to keep tabs on the phaedrus group's shady dealings has been thwarted. I shall have to deploy HUMINT resources.

in case anyone was curious, I went to the trouble of figuring out how to grab an rss feed from a given youtube user (even though the new one isn't there yet for some reason? CONSPIRACY!): http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/base/users/thisisphaedrus/uploads

This is a thing from Ni No Kuni: "Wiseard" LOL

I dunno, maybe it'll wear on me later, but the lack of inventiveness is part of what I find endearing; it's tugging all the same nostalgia strings that got me pouring hundreds of hours into ps1/ps2 era jrpgs. I think, as squeenix has shown, oftentimes trying something novel is just giving yourself the chance to screw something up badly. In a hypothetical ps3 environment where jrpgs were plentiful like back then, a lack of innovation might bother me more, but as it stands, it's the first jrpg I've liked in a long, long while.

just FYI, 17.5 hours in (just got 3rd party member) and some grindiness is showing (although that may be down to the way I choose to play and might not be strictly necessary to proceed), but my "best ps3/360 traditional jrpg" call still holds. Hey, squeenix, you could do (and let's face it, have done) a lot worse for Final Fantasy than taking a page from NNK and slapping a different skin on it. Just sayin'.

existing thread: http://www.idlethumbs.net/forums/topic/8367-ni-no-kuni/

I've got it. Only spent ~3 hours with it, but loving it so far. Not counting wii & handheld devices (because I don't own 'em), it probably gets my vote of JRPG of this console generation. Which is maybe faint praise and/or based only on early impressions, but it's how I'm feeling about it so far.

Granted, Steam seems to be doing fine, but you need retail to sell your console and if they don't have disc games to sell alongside them, well, I can't imagine they'd be happy about that.

So, I don't really have anything to say about it other than it's more Uncharted 2 and I loved Uncharted 2, but I figure the other 2 Uncharteds are on the front page right now, so someone else must be playing 3, right?

I was recently reading a discussion on another forum where it was brought up that this is basically an incomprehensible line to anyone growing up now; because a dead channel is what? blue, often.