Twig

The touchscreen Nook has buttons on the side of the frame specifically for turning pages! I like it. I'm super glad I skipped the generations with a keyboard. I might have killed myself.

This is not a story about DayZ. This is a story about Video Games. I was playing with a couple friends, trying to meet up with them... but I was out in the middle of nowhere, so it was taking a while for me to get to them. But I was finally making progress. (this was my first character and I got lucky enough to find a crashed chopper the first night I played, along with an M14 AIM!) So, in Mumble, I hear all about their shenanigans. One of them keeps dying, while the other manages to get away every time. Meanwhile, I'm on the edge of dying of thirst the entire time... Eventually, as I'm still running along the coast, just getting past a city, getting ever closer to them... They start lagging out. As they're lagging out, a guy manages to kill them. As they sit in the lobby, waiting to respawn (which takes forever, for some reason), that guy says to them, "You mad I killed you?" over voice chat, which is weird. But then the one friend, Termyte, respawns. THEN. The guy who killed him spawns right in front of him, but takes a while to load. So... Termyte digs into the dude's backpack, steals his gun, and shoots him while he's loading. This is justice! THEN. It turns out the dude had a gold AK and gold revolver? What. THEN. Three minutes later, the entire server is teleported off the map, up high in the sky, and falls to their deaths. So, we're guessing the guy was a hacker who got unlucky and took his revenge. One of the other random players goes, "Goddamnit. That's the fifth time today." I guess this is not a completely uncommon thing? Ughrerhghgh. So that's frustrating. I don't care if I die to zombies or other legit players, but fuck, that kind of thing really kills my mood.

Now that the spam's gone... That's not a bad idea, but what about the people who are literally just starting and have no outlet for marketing? Makes it a lot harder for them and a lot easier for people who already have attention, anyway. But I do think it's better than charging a hundred dollars, even with that downside.

Steam Greenlight just got a whoooole lot better!

There are already a bunch of iOS games on Steam. Some of them are free to play (like Bunch of Heroes? or I'm thinking of something else). Most of them cost like five bucks-ish?

Newgrounds and DeviantArt are both completely full of shit; for all the good stuff on there, there's at least seventy point three billion items that aren't good. And also... they're free? Their purpose is not to attempt to make it big and make bank on a huge digital delivery service (although DA does offer selling of prints, I guess). Their purpose is to provide free entertainment for visitors to the site and an outlet for artists/creators. I'm not sure a similar system is really... viable for something like Greenlight. Maybe. At least they're giving to charity for the opportunity to be jerks!

Brave is probably my favorite Pixar movie, but I'm biased because the setting (lots of green, green, green everywhere) and the music were all right up my alley. Celtic music always pleases me. X:

CDProjekt seems to be doing pretty well.

Yeah, high school reading killed a lot of books I think I would have otherwise very much enjoyed. There are only two books I ever read for school that I emerged actually feeling satisfied, and I think it's because I finished both of them in a weekend instead of over the course of several weeks like I was "supposed" to. Those books are 1984 and Lord of the Flies. I still like those books a lot, I think.

I will always prefer physical books over digital books, but I have not the space for them. Maybe whenever I get a house (or at least a bigger apartment with more than just a living room and bedrooms), I'll start buying physical again. But, then again, by that time, physical books might be on the way out for good? I dunno if that'll ever happen permanently, though. Unlike movies or music or games, books can still be a very tactile experience, even if all that really means is the delicious smell you get when you open a book for the first time and the feeling of turning a page. X:

I finally finished this book! Only 108 pages on my Nook (at smallest font settings, which aren't really all that small to me, but that's neither here NOR there) and it took me several months. This hour long commute is the greatest thing. I finally have time to read without being distracted by computers. Anyway, I have nothing to really say about the book. I'm always envious of people who can actually get something from reading a book or watching a movie or whatever. I generally... don't. It was a fun read, but maybe I'm just too young to appreciate a lot of what the book has to say? (I'm 25.) I don't really know. I think I just suck at reading books in this way. But that's also part of why I'm excited about the bookcast. I'm hoping that reading books along with people who clearly do have these kinds of reactions, and listening to these reactions, and identifying with or disagreeing with them will better put me in that mindset over time. I have already purchased Cloud Atlas, but haven't started reading it, yet.

A united front against piracy does not run counter to denying that DRM is an effective countermeasure.

I never said it was a perfect solution. It has its obvious downsides. If Valve comes up with a better solution, I have zero doubt they will implement it as soon as possible. Dejobaan rocks! EDIT: As an aside, I find it hilarious that Bad Rats is always used as an example of terrible games on Steam (another RPS article, this time about the $100 fee). I take solace in the fact that I was bitching about Bad Rats before it was cool! In the inaugural episode of my horrible podcast.

Holy fuck. RPS asks all the right questions and Ubisoft just avoids answering anything. Man, that's an awful interview. I commend RPS for trying, though. Ain't enough for me to boycott the company, though. They continue to make good games, and, aside from the DRM issues (and Uplay's horrifying...ness), they've usually been pretty good ports! IMO. I'm glad they're improving things, but it'd still be nice if they were more transparent. "Corporations." I guess.

Do you have a better solution? I mean, in the end, $100 is like... nothing. I understand it might seem like a lot for the starving artist, but it's really just kind of not? I dunno. It's kind of shitty that it has to be done, but... like I asked, do you have a better solution?

I think I might be.

The thing I am talking about specifically is definitely not stop-motion animated in any form. It's not really a spoiler, so I don't know why I'm hiding it, but hey. Claymation was a mistake. I just refer to all stopmotion as claymation even when I know it's not. His body is definitely molded from something similar to clay, though, as can be seen in the making of featurette thing! I don't know words (or really care).

I saw Paranorman, and story-wise, it was nothing special. Fun enough for me! But man, the art? Especially at the climax? SO good. The way they render . It ain't claymation, but I love it. It's one of those times I go, "Fucking hell, I wish I was an artist instead of a programmer." And then I go, "Well, I could be both..." And then I go, "But where would I find the time?" ):

Yeah I had to wait overnight before they'd let me get my serial key. Seriously, fuck Best Buy. Never buy digital copies of anything from them. Also, it's amazing how, even though I hate it, I'm quickly falling back into the MMO pattern of run from point to point doing all the shit they offer just to get it done and level up. I am now making the conscious decision to never ever touch any of that shit again. You can level up through WvWvW, right? So, I can play that to get to the point where I can do something interesting instead of this lame "cleverly" disguised typical MMO trope kill X, deliver Y crap? Also, I guess the more important question is... is WvWvW actually even any good?

YEAH! I'm like, "Maybe this time?" BUT NO. IT STAYS TERRIBLE. Always. ): Thankfully Edmund McMillen went on to make actual good games that I love a lot!

Adding a shortcut doesn't fix the main problem which everyone who says that always seems to conveniently ignore: the convenience of having everything to do with that game all in one place. I don't have to go to the website and remember whatever information I need to access the download link and maybe have to renew my key if they're particularly archaic (it still happens, for some reason) or at the very least find that key in my email archives IF they even ever emailed it to me and THEN download and then install it and then add the shortcut to Steam and then finally play it. Instead of doing all of that? l only need to find it in my Steam library, double-click to install, and play it. And, bonus, if it's a more recent game, it probably has Steam Cloud support, so I can pick up right from where I left off on another computer or a year ago when I had to uninstall for whatever reason. Steam is fucking ridiculous in how convenient it is. It's not just about being able to run a game from within the Steam client. There are dozens of other reasons Steam is great.

I usually don't have much trouble quitting a game I detest. I even have a Steam category for those which I own on Steam. It is titled "FUCCCKKKKK" and includes Bad Rats, Depths of Peril, Gish, RIP, RIP 2: Strike Back, RIP 3: The Last Hero, Speedball 2: Tournament, and Your Doodles Are Bugged! Now, most of those are shit games that I got in a bundle randomly and was never actually looking to buy. Gish is something people love for some reason. I think it's completely awful. Your Doodles Are Bugged! has its fans, but I dunno. It's just so goddamn tedious. I should note that I actually DIDN'T quit Bad Rats. I fucking destroyed that game. I hated it so much I refused to let its nondeterministic ass shut me down. FUCK YOU, BAD RATS. FUCK YOU.

He was also joking, I'm willing to bet...

I angrily listed out like twenty heroes at a friend and said if I see any of them in the finals I'll be satisfied, and then Na'Vi picked Nyx! Of course, it seemed like they had no idea what to do with him, and also he got totally shut down, so bugger that. While I accept that many Dota heroes are situational picks, it is still kind of boring to see most comp play consisting of a specific subset because no one ever wants to take a risk and draw out those situational picks. C'est la vie.

Nnnnooo. Greenlight's explicit purpose is to get games on Steam. XBLIG is an alternative to XBLA. Very rarely, Microsoft will take note of a particularly impressive XBLIG game and offer to publish it on XBLA, but it's not a user-vetted system like Greenlight is.