Salacious Snake

DSC07252 by J.D. Cohen, on Flickr

CTF never forget

I started netflixing my way through Voyager, and dang, it sure uses technobabble poorly. It's not my favorite device in the best of circumstances, but it has its purpose. It can be a quick contrivance to raise the stakes or close off dramatic dead ends. You can save yourself a lot of scenes of trying various solutions before settling on the crazy last resort by saying, "I've run a series of simulations. The only possibility is to put my dick in the plasma stream, Starfleet regulations be damned!" It's just bad when a conflict begins and ends as technobabble, rather than the tech stuff serving something more relatable. Of course, I can't single Voyager out for this; all the series do this, and TNG has a big pile of clunker episodes where the entire A or B plot is just a stream of tech diarrhea. This first season of Voyager just seems particularly thick with it. Thick with diarrhea. I guess a good rule of thumb would be that tech is good when it offers a narrative shortcut, but bad when it acts as padding. It doesn't help that Janeway is tech literate, so there's no proxy for the audience asking the nerds to tone it down. Torres is all, "The jim-jams are bunged up with McGriddles--" and Janeway jumps in and completes the sentence "--so we need to generate a 360 behind-the-back power dunk!" followed by them excitedly looking at each other and punching shit into their computers. It's like the least dramatic thing in the world. It's what I imagine it's like for my wife when she hears me talking excitedly to someone about video games... or about Star Trek, I guess!

DSC00416 by J.D. Cohen, on Flickr

http://cosplay.kotaku.com/dragonball-cosplay-kicks-wrestlemanias-ass-1768824637 Seems like this belongs here.

Now we know how we end up in this future:

Started my morning with a nice cuddle pile. Life is good!

Lately (in terms of how far I've listened) it's turned into a lot of him just describing stuff and even having scenes with multiple NPCs expositing at each other while the players just sit there*. I think it works best when everyone gets to do stuff, and the story emerges from their actions. This arc feels like a Final Fantasy game. *It's pretty ridiculous how good he is at carrying out these conversations with himself, but it sucks the energy out of the game. It's like the opposite of action.

I pitched in. Considering that I'm aready on episode 33 of The Adventure Zone, to which I was introduced by this thread, I figure I must be really enjoying it! Although I have to say that Griffin could stand to tone down his plot-heavy machinations. The players haven't had much room to goof around since this whole Crystal Kingdom arc began. (And I'm having a little trouble keeping track of what's even happening.) I have to give him credit, though; for someone who is just learning the ropes as a DM, he's incredibly good at it.

If it doesn't have platform mode, I'm not interested!

Having an on-screen avatar that looks convincingly like you can definitely be weird. I did the camera-based face-mapping in ​Rainbow Six: Vegas​, which was really effective. The weirdest part was seeing myself eat it. The best part was when I held a laserdisc cover for ​Hard to Kill in front of the camera, and gave myself this face: It worked well enough that I'd hear people through the Xbox's voice chat saying things like "Holy shit, it's Steven Seagal!"

Speaking of things that are CD-ROM as fuck, I just started playing Pegasus Prime, the remake of The Journeyman Project. It's pretty sick so far.

bumpy knuckles

I would consider The Corbomite Maneuver to be an essential episode. It contains some pretty major Kirk speeches that basically make the case for ​Star Trek as a whole. Plus, it has Clint Howard. The Devil in the Dark similarly lays down the Trek thesis, and is just good. The Doomsday Machine is a good action show.

I've totally played with groups like that. What's really funny is when the opposite happens, and some NPC who was just meant to be a faceless shopkeep or whatever ends up with a detailed story, because the players want to know about her deal, and then make a point of interacting. You really have to think on your feet as the DM when that happens. It's so gratifying when they become memorable characters. God damn it, I wish I still had the time and energy to play RPGs.

I've played a little! I haven't formed much of an opinion yet, but I will say that it runs really well on a laptop with Intel HD 520 graphics, and it looks good. I mean, it's the kind of game that should target crappy systems, but you never know.

A few corny music videos spring to mind! Also, there's no video, but the intro to this album has some furious keyboard-mashing (hacking) during some kind of heist with helicopters and shit, it's amazing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IoyaQyjXRZI COMPUTER! HOW YA DOIN, BWOY EDIT: Forgot about this classic!:

Oh man, Strange Days.

Mmm, tortie!

Now I understand what was going on when I tried to pick up some mac and cheese at S'mac a while ago. The kitchen was super backed up because of this one dude picking up a shitload of orders, and the place was full of disgruntled customers. I figured he was doing deliveries, but now I realize it was a service like Postmates. In fact, looking back at articles on it, that was right when they started their service in NYC, so it was probably an extra large clusterfuck at the time.

I think CoolGames, Inc is off to a promising start!

I think I like this game. Playing dress up and running around the High Line was cool, at least.

I'm glad this is being discussed. I tried Postmates, but before I placed the order, I googled around to see about tipping and stuff, since the app didn't mention it up front. (As others have mentioned, it does prompt you to tip after the delivery is complete.) So, I tipped with cash, which they probably appreciate anyway. Icky business model aside, it's pretty incredible being able to expand my delivery zone. I have an annoying dietary restriction that makes it really hard to do the takeout thing otherwise (ow, right in the gluten). Getting stuff delivered from Manhattan to Brooklyn is baller as fuck.

So I got the Teenage Engineering PO-20 Arcade and messed with it a little: https://soundcloud.com/eotf-seork/supergun It's super fun. I've never been a big chiptune guy, but they did a good job of putting together some fun, usable sounds, and the workflow is pretty awesome for this style of device. It's ridiculously easy to chain pattern and cord changes together on the fly, and the FX are very immediate.

Awesome!