Bartimaeus

joke somebody just sent to me: ​ ​what has 4 letters, sometimes has 9 letters, but never has 5 letters ​ ​I felt like a dummy when it was explained to me

Yeah, 12v12s in casual TF2 pretty much always sucked - and the 32 man servers were laughably bad. For casual play, I always thought 8v8 was best for most maps - some of the bigger ones were fine with 10v10. Competitive was a different beast, of course.

I don't know what it is about people singing in a non-singing locale that makes me squirm, but there it is

​ hey guys I don't know if you've ever heard of this little known band, but ​@Shady: though I was a big Psych fan, I hate musicals that aren't cartoons. I was never able to sit through it, so that was actually my first time hearing it. it was...uh...silly.

Rodgers, Tannehill, Bradford, Palmer, Luck, Watson: it's a bad year for star injuries, and that's just the QBs.

I'm not a big release day person (i.e. it's extremely rare that I have to play a game on release), so Denuvo doesn't really bother me if it's eventually removed: by the time I get around to a game, even if it might pose a problem, it'll no doubt be removed by then. And for as long as it's not removed, it's unlikely I would purchase it, so that rather takes care of itself. For people that pay full price to experience a game on release day or near then, I can imagine how improperly implemented DRM schemes could be quite annoying. Isn't that the one that didn't let you run Cheat Engine? On a singleplayer game? Into the garbage can it goes, and never will it return.

Yeah, I'm pretty sure if Romo didn't apparently even contact the Packers when Rodgers went down, the Broncos probably aren't going to change his mind either (seeing as Romo loves the Packers...). I think he's happy where he is - less pressure, less injuries, and probably more fun.

The reality is that moderately-sized mods in 3D engines take a variety of skills and a lot of time to create in any manner approaching "good"/professional. Modeling, texturing, scripting and/or coding, writing, game system balancing, figuring out how to place it all in-game, etc. Depending on what you're doing, it can be sort of like having a part-time job for a not-insignificant amount of time to complete a mod that you will ultimately get little in return for...and we're assuming that your mod turns out to be any good, which there is certainly no guarantee of. Total conversions, then, are that much harder. There have been so few successful total conversions that it's really hard for me to ever get my hopes up by any. I've never worked on a total conversion project, but I've tracked the progress of many, and guys work on them for literal years with no apparent end in sight, with little benefit to come from it (maybe if you're in the video game industry, you could put it on your resume, maybe?), and just get burned out. Throw in real life complications and obligations, and it's easy to see why total conversions never get finished. One of the few that I've seen actually get released that I was excited for, Stalker: Lost Alpha, ended up greatly disappointing me. The level/world design was pretty rad (which was ostensibly the original point of the mod, restoring cut/scaled down content like the levels), but the developers mucked about in a lot of other areas like writing, voice-acting, and game balance, and all of it really just fell totally flat on its face for me. It's a crappy predicament, but if I'm not enjoying their game, I'm not enjoying it. They worked on it for bloody forever, too...and while it seems like they had a good vision in some aspects, it felt to me they didn't really know what they were doing in others, and the experience ultimately ended up being sub-par because of it. I think for a long-time development project to be sustainable, that by necessity needs a bunch of people with a variety of skills working on it for a significant amount of time, there needs to be some sort of funding. But that's sort of the problem with modding: what kind of quality of work are you getting out a bunch of amateur (in terms of level of experience) unknowns? We, as consumers, would no doubt just be endlessly burned by people who can make a good-looking proposal on sites like Patreon or Kickstarter and never end up delivering (if funding by those sites to mod other people's games would be even legal - I know some emulator developers have taken up receiving funds via Patreon, but it still seems to be a bit of a grey area as of now). You also can't get commercial funding for this type of effort, like you could if you were trying to sell an original game (or the idea of a game) to a publisher. So I don't really see a good way of solving this problem, which is probably why video game modding has been the way it is for the past few decades: smaller endeavors, such as a mod that only does some game re-balancing or a mod that only adds a few items (or whatever) can be successful, and occasionally a smart and dedicated developer comes along and makes something more moderately-sized like an overhaul of game AI or a complete HD re-texture of the game or something...but by and large, big projects combining a lot of skills just don't end up making it.

I mean, I liked it just because I really like the setting and overwhelmingly like the cast. Jonathan and Nancy are probably the two biggest drags of the show for me, but even they aren't bad. I have a soft spot for good and likeable child actors and good adventures, and Stranger Things puts both of them together. Yeah, it wasn't quite as good as season 1, but it was still really good.

I saw it earlier today, and gave it about twenty seconds before I closed out. Just for you, I tried again: sadly, I still no likey.

https://twitter.com/AdamSerwer/status/925018021005070337: "We need someone to communicate that DT is not doing these trips. It should be someone low level in the campaign so as to not send any signal" https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-10-30/trump-foreign-policy-adviser-pleaded-guilty-in-mueller-probe Perhaps more interesting than the Manafort and Gates arrests, one George Papadopoulos, a foreign policy advisor for Trump, secretly plead guilty earlier this month. He appears to have been flipped by Mueller.

"[the cross] asserts the truth of one religion and, implicitly but necessarily, the falsehood of all other religions" Though I know this type of meaning has been propagated by a multitude throughout the millennia, it's a pretty crappy way to look at it (and similar icons) in a modern context, and especially in the additional context of its original creation and subsequent donation.

I just finished Stranger Things 2 as well. (e):

two episodes into things that are stranger electric boogaloo, seems pretty good so far

The euphemism is still well-known, I'm pretty sure...just in really, really bad taste, as Hurlshot said. Furthermore, he actually said "prison", not asylum. So you're having a big problem about black players protesting about police brutality, so you make a parallel between them and prisoners. It's not quite "we can't have the slaves running the plantation", but man, it's still pretty bad. But hey, at least Jerry Jones seems slightly less awful in comparison to that guy. As for the rankings, Cowboys have the biggest fanbase, so that might be propping them up a bit (very optimistic fans pushing the betting lines against the pros), plus no huge injuries unlike a lot of teams right now is surely helping as well. Meanwhile, clearly neither fans nor pros have faith in the Packers without Rodgers, and so it seems, if anything, there's a bit of cynicism there instead. And I thought I was grim about the rest of the Packers' season...seems Vegas thinks even more poorly of them than I do.

https://twitter.com/rjinvegas/status/923705489162039297 From 3rd to 30th - the Packers are only better than the Browns and Colts without Rodgers in Vegas' eyes. Brutal. I'd probably put us more at something like 24th or 25th, but that's just me. (e): 3nd -> 3rd, lol

Detention, "an atmospheric horror game set in 1960s Taiwan under martial law" that has overwhelmingly positive reviews on Steam. I thought it seemed like an interesting setting for a potentially more story-driven horror game, but it just alternated between boring me with not that well-written dialogue and other text, and startling me with jump scares. Not for me. Not as bad as other poor entries in the genre like Dreadout, that's for sure, but still not what I was looking for.

Yup. BioShock: Infinite has the worst gameplay in my opinion. The guns handle better compared to BioShock 1 & 2 but the level design is so awful you barely get to use the environment against the enemy. The second DLC was pretty good though. Gameplay is solely based on stealth and survival and the story is good if you are willing to go through the mind-numbing story of the main campaign and the first DLC. Overall BioShock 2 was the most entertaining game in the series for me and ironically, it is the only BioShock game that Ken Levine didn't work on(directly). Anybody remembers this? Here are all the changes explained in more detail: There is also a video interview of Ken Levine explaining BioShock for the first time and making ludicrous promises such as the main character being able to change the size of his sexual organ...couldn't find it on YouTube though. Being restricted to consoles? Not enough budget? Only Ken knows! The combat just feels so...undynamic. I'm just running and gunning through every level all the time, and it doesn't help that the guns that I used just don't have any weight to them. Wielding an automatic machine gun should feel different than a pistol...but it doesn't. The only thing that feels different is how fast the bullets are coming out. It's also not very hard, which is a little perplexing when there's an endless fountain of resources spread around throughout every level...and then you also have tonics and your quite strong melee attack on top of it. It all just feels so dissatisfying, easy, and repetitive. And that's not even talking about the story, which seemed like a bit of a load on top of it. Bah. It makes me wonder if I would enjoy playing BS1/BS2 today, or if my tastes in shooters have actually changed that much since I played those.

This kind of thinking would've flown better with me (and likely others) pre-election - now, after over half a year of the utter clown show that is Republican control of every branch of our government, not so much. Yeah, they're disturbingly similar on a lot issues as well as their general characteristics as groups (such as a despicable loyalty to party over country and fellow citizens), but I'm pretty sure some of us are starting to notice some differences at this time...

Bioshock: Infinite. First time ever playing it. I got to Elizabeth, quit and uninstalled. I wasn't too keen on the game to begin with, but it managed to kill any interest I had in a little over an hour. Really wonky and, quite frankly, boring combat, beyond hopelessly (and totally unnecessarily) cluttered level design that kills my desire to ever explore areas (...not that there seemed much of interest to explore to begin with), and the story and dialogue were really not pulling me in. About the only thing it had going for it was the aesthetic. Meh.

Secret of Mana (SNES). First time playing it. It's surprisingly...uh, not that great. I've been playing it co-op with a friend online, and the hit detection system is really annoying and just makes so playing with multiple players is ineffective. I think they were trying to avoid being able to stunlock enemies, but really, that was already mostly dealt with by the stamina system - they could've just made it so that only 100% stamina attacks stun enemies, or made stuns only occur over a threshold of damage as a percent of the enemy's life, or something. And the story is...well, it leaves a lot to be desired. As far as SNES JRPGs go, I currently massively prefer Terranigma.

Alternatively, parental guidelines, which already cover most "objectionable" content, could just be expanded to be a little more specific in why it has the rating it has. You can read much of why a movie gets the rating it gets on sites like IMDB, but it's crowdsourced information...which seems kind of silly when we have a literal rating agency that keeps track of this stuff to some degree already - you'd think they'd have their own site for this sort of thing already. Same with video games, really - although I'm not really too sure how TV show ratings work, to be honest. The back of a movie cover probably isn't the perfect place to put all of that information, but it could easily direct you to somewhere that does. I wouldn't think it'd be really necessary to have such content warnings in the movie itself, but I mean, if it's literally just like 5 seconds that quickly summarize up the type of objectionable content and, again, direct you somewhere else for more specific info, I guess I don't really care. You almost certainly won't get those warnings if you happen to watch it on cable or online or something: if content providers don't think there's enough time for displaying the credits at super-speed and even random bits of the show/movie you're watching that they've deemed "less important" than showing more commercials or whatever (see Seinfeld re-runs and "TV" cuts of virtually every movie), they sure as heck aren't going to want to spend time on showing the rating of the movie. Personally, I'm not very comfortable with gore for the most part, and the onus kind of falls on me to pay attention to the rating of the content I'm (potentially) choosing to watch and investigating further to make sure I'm not subject to something I don't want to be. For the most part, that's kind of how things work in life. However, having a few more tools at your disposal for figuring that information out is always good, and spending literally just a few seconds summarizing up the objectionable content is no skin off my back. I'm more offended at the idiotic anti-copyright nonsense - the whole "we will knock down your door and literally cannibalize your family in the middle of the night while making you watch if you illegally share this movie" FBI warnings - and the bloody ADVERTISEMENTS, at the beginning of each legitimate movie you own. Like, c'mon guys: if I HADN'T bought this, I wouldn't be seeing this crap. (e): The Motion Picture Association of America (US's rating agency) actually does have a website...but it's predictably useless and doesn't even provide any information on its ratings. Pah.