Bartimaeus

Shady, before you do anything rash, I have a number I'd like you to call. Give it a try - they're very nice people, and I'm positive that they can help you with your problem. Trust me, it gets better.

Yeah, if I started rejecting publications (or any other source of news) because of that, I'd have no sources of news left in approximately the time it takes me to cross off every single source of news I currently have, including this forum.

Humble Indie Bundle 18 is now live. Includes Owlboy at $13.

...was that in a copy+pasted or a response to somebody? Maybe he just didn't notice that he included the original poster's name.

It seems like s13ep is just plagiarizing his posts from somebody on deviantart, anyways. Doesn't even share the same birthday. http://cmspdr.deviantart.com/ Incredible to think that there may be at least TWO people out there who think that this word salad actually makes any sense or means anything.

Oh man, I WISH it was.

You don't know us, everyone could all suddenly start getting along instead. ...Yeah, never mind.

Yep, see, I knew I probably missed something - 200 titles is a lot to skim and not miss something, . And yeah, I'm sure there's probably stuff in there that I could appreciate...I mean, with 200 albums of varied tastes, it'd be hard not to, right? Yeah, it was me. But now you know even MORE about my musical tastes! Fancy that, huh? But yeah...men vocalists I generally feel less extreme about than women vocalists - positively and negatively. Women vocalists I don't like will drive me utterly mad, while male vocalists will generally just reach the level of "I don't like this very much and would prefer to stop listening to it"...but the women vocalists that I do like I tend to like a lot.

The bigger names that are my favorite vocalists: Emiliana Torrini(!), China Forbes (of Pink Martini), Beth Gibbons (of Portishead), and...um, hmm, David Byrne (of Talking Heads/himself). I guess it's a little more than just five or so, really, as there's also a few smaller names, too, though, from artists most nobody has ever heard of and that you can't really listen to unless you actually physically own their stuff (->me). Most of the artists that I listen to I'm actually just merely "okay" with - VNV Nation, Weird Al, Tom Lehrer, They Might Be Giants, Depeche Mode, etc. It's more that their voices don't actively bother me than that I really like them all that much. Instrumental music is mostly fine - definitely subject to less arbitrary dislike than music with vocals. There are a few things that still bother me, though, and the usual suspects are brass instruments and electric guitars - however, the latter is obviously extremely varied in its usage, and so that's kind of hit or miss, too.

Well, like I said, I just plain don't like the majority of vocalists. Nothing to do with any sort of "quality" or the lack thereof - I just have an irrational hatred for most singing voices (misophonia). When I hear a singing voice that I like, it's a pretty huge deal to me - I ALWAYS check out a decent portion of the rest of their music to determine whether they'll become one of my "favorite" artists. It's not always meant to be, but I can forgive (or acquire a taste for) a lot if they're a singer that I like. The reason I haven't checked out the rest of those more "known"/popular artists is, sure, I know of them and have heard a few songs, but I didn't really care for what I heard, so yeah, I haven't listened to their albums. For most of my life, I really have not liked music much at all. I liked just a little bluegrass (think I'll Fly Away by the Kossoy Sisters) (e: and a little swing like the Andrew Sisters, now that I think of it) that my mom would play to put me to sleep as a baby/toddler, and some classical music (probably thanks to watching Disney movies like Fantasia and Sleeping Beauty many times, again, as a baby/toddler...), and of course, video game music - note that these last two don't really have much singing in them: that's not happenstance. It was only in my late teens that I finally found a singer that I liked. Nowadays, I have probably about 5 singers that I really like, and maybe 10-15 more whom I'm 'just' fine with...while I actively dislike the majority of everyone else. It sucks to be this picky, as majestic said,

Yeah, vocalists are the most important thing for me, too. And unfortunately, I just straight up don't like the majority of vocalists, and so I don't like the majority of music.

Snake Pass. ...It's a platformer where you play as a literal snake. No, really: http://store.steampowered.com/app/544330/Snake_Pass/ It's actually pretty decent, and not actually as hard as I thought it would be (...although note that I have played both Octodads and a little of Surgeon Simulator already). I'm about halfway through (and having found everything). Worth $20? ...Yeah, if you like this sort of thing.

We're not exactly seeing people get straight up murdered or bombed or...very often over here*, either, though. If there was an "Awesome Murders/General Violence" thread, I imagine it'd probably get shut down sooner or later, too, *And when we do, it's usually tangential to another topic...

There's generally a certain level of professionalism and cleanliness expected from an official developer's forums. I think it's obvious as to why that thread would cross that boundary. ...Now as to why the perpetual pissing matches in the political threads don't receive that same level of scrutiny and judgement, that I am less sure of...

I might've missed something, but I believe I've listened to exactly one album out of those 200, and it's the one The Residents album, .

That's the difference: we can TALK, as in, DISCUSS, those things. There's little to no discussion value in the posting of pictures of scantily-clad women. Additionally, it clearly offends some people's sensibilities while providing nothing of value, and so the logical conclusion was finally actually followed for once. I personally had no problem with the thread per se, because I could easily avoid it...but then it started leaking outside of that, which then lead to a few reports on my part, .

C'est la mort, more like,

Yeah, I mentioned that the bbcode post editor suddenly broke probably a year+ ago, but nobody seems to care.

No problem. This is, as should be obvious now from a few of these discussions, an area of interest for me.

Well, "Istanbul" just means "The City", so that makes sense. The "official" Turkish name for it was "Kostantiniyye" for some time (though "Istanbul" was used along side it), which I'm pretty sure I've seen before, actually...

Or just be like me, and only play one new (i.e. recently released) game a year, and instead mostly play older (and cheaper) stuff, whether it's something I've played already or not.

Another irony is that the Byzantine Empire (which was the eastern half of the Roman Empire after Rome became so big and stretched so thin that it became effectively impossible to govern from a single seat of power, especially one so far away from the eastern most reaches of the empire) became a thing after the city it was named after, Byzantium, had been renamed to Constantinople, in honor or Emperor Constantine. After the fall of the Byzantine Empire to the Ottomans, the city would be renamed again to Istanbul, for further spite. On the plus side, it would inspire a pretty great They Might Be Giants song. Could just as well be the Constantine Empire... The star and crescent used to also be associated with Constantinople - though its origins probably extend even further back than that. After it was conquered, the Ottomans took it and it eventually became more or less a global symbol for Islam...

My devices are the Sennheiser's 598s for headphones, and the Kanto YU2s for speakers. It'd be nice if somebody else chipped in the discussion for reference and an alternative point of view.

It might just be a certain sound signature that you prefer - I've more often heard this sort of thing applied to headphones and speakers and what people prefer (as most devices are better at certain things than others), but I suppose it makes perfect sense it'd apply to microphones as well, since it's pretty much the same idea. I actually feel as though the BG2 lines are a little better, personally - the BG1 lines have this sort of slightly unnatural feel to them, and there's like no dynamics at all (basically, it sounds like they're talking directly into a microphone at a flat/normalized volume level - doesn't sound natural to me at all; BG2, in comparison, some parts of what she said are quieter and less enunciated than others, making it sound more natural). Okay, well, you posted again after I wrote this - so basically, you're hearing a sort of static/overly-edged sound? That's strange. Even turning up my volume to max (...it's usually around 40-50%), I still don't hear any sort of static or anything like that. So yeah, not sure. What headphones/speakers are you using?

I don't hear much of a difference vs. the BG1 lines in terms of quality. Her voice has much more of an edge to it than her softer, more child-like lines in BG1, sure, but I am pretty sure that's a result of the voice-acting itself, not because of the sound quality. Can you describe more specifically the issue? Not that there's anything we'll be able to do about it, but maybe your ears are picking up something mine aren't.