dium

"PC Master Race" is a really, really un-PC thing to say. Personally, I love messing around with hardware, reading about it, troubleshooting, tinkering, etc. But boy is it time consuming. I absolutely wouldn't do it if I didn't enjoy it, even taking savings into account.

I remember the Intel thing. That led to a women in tech initiative of some kind (or at least a women in tech PR campaign, I didn't really look into it), so that's at least surface-level cool of them. I'm guessing Vainamoinen meant to say Intel but please tell me if I'm wrong!

What's this in reference to? What did AMD experience?

Some friends had a re-watch marathon this weekend (like everyone else in the world it seems). I couldn't attend all of it, but I was there to watch Empire (one of the 'special' editions) and a fan-edit of Attack of the Clones. (they were watching the movies in "machete order", the efficacy of which I can't really speak to). I started watching Revenge of the Sith, but had to leave earlier than halfway through. I went into it with a willingness to reassess the prequels and let myself be entertained—free of the influence of mass-consensus that they're terrible movies. But alas, the consensus isn't wrong. They're truly difficult to watch. Surprisingly, Yoda v. Dooku was way less bad than my memory of it. When he pulls out his lightsaber there is of course a communal groan of anti-anticipation, but then the fighting itself is blessedly brief and really no stupider than any of the other lightsaber fights in the movie. Faint praise, but still. This makes so much sense... the only thing I could think during that sequence was "why is this happening?".

Yes. Almost more important to me is dental floss; I cannot abide pieces of lunch in my teeth in the afternoon.

If the NX is backward compatible with the WiiU, I might be convinced to get one in its first year. But I am not at this point interested at all in new hardware that won't play any games I already own. I understand that the WiiU was a big flop for Nintendo, but I was quite satisfied with it while it survived. Like dartmonkey, I found more to be interested in with the WiiU than either of its competitors, despite almost all of the games coming from a single company. That said, I bought it in 2014 expecting it to last me longer than a year and a half. Perhaps that was too optimistic.

This is a good point. I guess it's all just branding at this point, and there's no point trying too hard to "get it right".

Genuine ignorance here: is there some entity (man or company) with the name "Lucas" that still owns some of these properties? Or is it all Disney now?

THANK YOU for saying the name of the song! I thought of the same joke pretty much immediately after seeing the name of the episode but my brain is remarkably stupid and I couldn't remember what the song is actually called. Now I am at peace.

I feel that way too, absolutely. I'm probably being painfully unoriginal by bringing up Warren Spector's endlessly quoted "one city block" concept, but that scale at that detail is still super seductive to me.

A summer camp is such an awesome environment for a video game, and I think there's a lot of room to explore more video game experiences in that space. I'm particularly infatuated with the idea of a Prison Architect-esque Scout Camp Builder game. But the setting would also lend itself well to an RPG, or any genre that can support a large cast of interesting secondary characters to interact with. But I guess that's all kinda off-topic.

This is kinda tough, because when it comes to the specifics of the SB9 situation I did and do take issue with how they handled it. And it's shitty that they haven't owned up to it like they should've. But also, I really like Double Fine games, and I quite like the way it seems they run their company in general. I feel positively in those respects about Double Fine to a degree that I really don't for most other game companies. And the unfortunate SB9 situation simply isn't a big enough issue for me to stop wanting more Double Fine games and to support them in general.

I also don't agree with the "story is great but the gameplay isn't" crit of Psychonauts; I think the game was great for much more than just its writing (one or two iffy levels notwithstanding) and no amount of clever ideas and snappy dialog could carry the game if it wasn't fun to play as Raz. This is what I kinda meant to say: MI2 improved on MI1 by looking better, sounding better, and by having an even better narrative than its predecessor. I don't think improving only those three elements will be enough to make Psychonauts 2 great. ...that said, I'm kinda being a devil's advocate here. I dunno how good of a platformer Doublefine can make in 2015 but I have no reason to believe they'll be shitty at it.

Those are all adventure games and rpgs, though, which are the game genres that most depend on the quality of their story to carry them. The quality of an adventure game is arguably more dependent on story and presentation than on any "gamey" element (I do say arguably, don't fight me on this). That's just plain untrue of the type of game Psychonauts is.

I didn't know that was a thing he's done more than once! Weird. I just really like Erik Wolpaw's writing. I went into the video with a lot of mixed emotions about yet-another-double-fine-crowd-funding-venture, and I still kinda feel mixed emotions (seeing those tweets from JP does a lot to muddle my enthusiasm). But the possibility of another Schaefer-Wolpaw writing collab is just too enticing. Also, I share everyone's envy of Tim's phone case. I have a pretty low quality Grim Fandango fanart phone case that I got when looking for something like what Tim has and finding nothing.

The goofy Erik Wolpaw endorsement in the video won me over. I am an easy target.

Glad that many of the minor annoyances in Fallout 4 are being modded out, even if it's unsurprising (it's a Bethesda game! Mods everywhere!) The dialog and compass mods mentioned in the podcast are great. This mod (and several others) let you put armor over your sequin dress (I was also annoyed that you couldn't do that by default). The only thing I really want now that I can't find a mod for is reducing the stupid amount of gore, especially in VATS. Unless I'm wrong and there's already a way to do it? I'm not holding my breath

Feeling a little weird about new Samurai Jack after the loss of Mako. I'm assuming they'll get Greg Baldwin to play Aku. The world seems to have accepted Baldwin as Mako's understudy with pretty open arms (at least in the context of the Avatar franchise), so I do too. He does a damn good imitation, in any case. I've also got nothing against Phil Lamarr's performance as Jack. But it makes me a little uncomfortable thinking that the only two real recurring characters, one an Asian man and another with a distinctive Japanese accent, will be played by a pair of non-Asian actors. To be clear, I am super white. These are white man thoughts.

Goddamnit. I hate how many blind eyes I have to turn in order to enjoy any damn anime show.

I played, finished and, for the most part, enjoyed Uncharted 1. But I think the main draw for me, at the time, was how it looked. Looking back at it now, I dunno if I agree with my own assessment in that regard. I own both Uncharted 2 and 3 for some reason (well, roommates), but I can't bring myself to get through more than half of Uncharted 2 so I'm probably done with the series

Marvel movies tend to have thin and unsophisticated plots, "snappy" dialog that does not try to feel genuine (nor beautiful), and a major proportion of their appeal is purely production value. I don't think it's fair to call them "bad" for that, though. Low-brow seems more to the point. If you think the superhero genre is bad in general, then that's probably a defensible opinion – but in the context of this genre you don't like, I think Marvel movies tend to be well above average. I would absolutely call Iron Man a good movie. I would call Batman & Robin a bad movie. I think The Matrix Reloaded had some well done action sequences and CGI, but I absolutely wouldn't call it "fun" (nor "good").

Some rambling about buying things, and a preamble to my question: I'm planing to upgrade my old budget-model 1080p monitor to a new sexy 1440p ips beauty (specific model tbd). To prepare for all the extra pixels I'll need to push (and, potentially, to be able to play new graphics-hog games at decent settings), I'm also planning to upgrade my 6 year old lowish-midrange graphics card to something modern. While I'm at it, my CPU is similarly old and dusty, so I might as well upgrade that too. Which probably means I'll need a new motherboard. Which probably means I'll need to upgrade to newer-format RAM. And with all that happening, I wouldn't be surprised if I need a higher capacity power supply too. So long story short, I've made the round-about decision to buy an entire new computer (although I'm putting it in my old case, with my old hard drives). And also to budget the next several months of my life around funding this decision. Question: How do y'all tend to handle your old parts after upgrading? With some parts it's straightforward: I know I can put away old ram or an old graphics card until I find someone who wants it. Can I do the same with an old CPU or motherboard? Is there some proper way of handling/storing that stuff outside of a machine? Is anyone actually looking for old used PSUs?

FMA is something I've often considered rewatching and have always decided not to, because I have such fond high school memories of it and yet I'm pretty sure I'd find it boring if I watched it now. Hopefully I'm wrong, but I'm not brave enough to find out!

I've been watching One Punch Man and really enjoying it! I don't usually watch anime as it airs (this is sorta the first time) and it's a novel experience. I feel a little bit of this. Specifically: whenever Saitama is not in a scene I struggle to care at all about what's happening. Saitama is gold, but without him the show feels like it's treading water, setting up uncompelling pieces until Saitama enters and makes the show interesting again. I guess that's ~kinda~ why it works? And at least it looks really good while it's doing it.

The HTML spec is responsible for this, and it probably isn't a conscious feature of any forum software. HTML renders all consecutive whitespace characters down to a single space, and web software has to specifically account for multiple consecutive spaces (as they do not show up naturally). This isn't for stylistic reasons, it's because of the formatting of the markup itself. Take this snippet of HTML: <div class="dumb"> <p> Really awfully dumb example. <a href="http://cool.museum">CLICK ME</a> <p> </div> There's a bunch of spaces (or tabs or whatever) used to indent nested attributes, for code readability (or, in the case of the spaces before the anchor tag, no reason). HTML won't render any of those spaces, and thank god. Removing the second space after a period is merely a delightful side-effect of HTML doing this. I've read many many (seriously too many) posts or articles that mention, to varying degrees of seriousness, how important it is to them that two spaces come after a period – but HTML has silently removed the superfluous spaces from these people's text and it is DELICIOUS.