clyde

I liked Uurnog a lot. It was whimsical, took about 9 hours for me to complete, and the puzzles were so loose that I often felt like I was cheating. I don't tend to enjoy metrodvanias or puzzles, but Uurnog didn't seem like it cared much for them either so it was perfect for me.

I took the leap and bought the Zaccaria Pinball Platinum Bundle. If you like pinball tables from the 60's 70's and 80's, and you have and Oculus Rift or Vive, then I would recommend this; it is awesome. The pricing structure is not intuitive. Here is what I gathered: You can try most of the tables for free (with a score limit and a message across the screen). Downloading the game allows you to play Time Machine without limit. VR support costs $8. The Bronze Bundle doesn't give you any tables. I doubt I would have bought this if not for the VR support and I was nervous that I wouldn't like it in VR, but I like it a lot. I love these older styles of tables and since I live in the U.S. I haven't seen these tables before.

I kept thinking back to the Flotilla discussion as well.

I forgot how much I enjoy playing Fear Itself. The voice-acting and the music pump me up as that ball flies around the table.

@Siromatic I started playing a VR game called The Invisible Hours and it is pretty much a Sleep No More kinda thing. There is no interactivity beyond choosing where to be and picking up objects for examination (they settle back into place automatically). I've only played for about an hour, but it is awesome. The performances are better than I would expect, the characters are wonderful, and everyone is a suspect. I'm not only intrigued by the mUUrder, but by the history of the characters themselves and the alliances that are forming in one side of the house while I'm watching an interrogation in another. It's awesome.

I'm no physicist.

But if we level the playing field, the ball will never drain. It'll just stay up in one of the orbits.

I enjoy maxing out the challenges on the tables. It's helping me get into tables I've never liked and giving me reasons to play old favorites again (though briefly). I like the 1-ball challenge the most, but part of my process is to unlock the absurdly over-powered rewind-time upgrade by getting 5 stars in the 3rd challenge type. I think it's cool that the latter challenge types allow folks to see what completing a mode is like since they have always-on ball-saves. The scoring system that includes upgrades does bloat scores, but I like that the default mode accounts for time spent on a particular table. I also like that is essentially makes the table easier over time. A lot of Zen's tables have become too easy for me which results in a single game lasting +30minutes in a lot of cases, but for beginners I can see this potentially incentivizing them to keep learning a table until they come across the wizard-mode. For the tables that take too long to lose on, I'll just stick to classic after I max-out the challenges. Also, the table-guides are much better than they used to be. I'll join a tournament if one of you starts one. My only preference would be that the scoring be classic.

I'm installing it now. I read the Tom Chick review and I want to examine the purist-sentiment I feel welling up in me. The leveling-up sounds like sacriledge (though I imagine it could get more folks into pinball abd he says that classic leaderboards are still available so why not). I want to find out if I enjoy the experience-points idea or if it'll feel like added bloat to something elegant.

Since I'm doing multiple things to take care of this, I'm not sure which things are helping more than others. But I wanted to share this video because I've been casually doing these exercises and I think they are helping.

The only one I'll have to give up is Rainbow 6:Siege. The other FPSs I play are still fun if I can't shoot well.

I ended up getting a thumb trackball. It arrived yesterday and I've been trying to use it since then. I didn't think it was solving the problem because my wrist was still sore. I pulled out the mouse three matches into Overwatch (it's a difficult thing to accept the loss of half your dexterous capability in a game you play frequently). As soon as I started using the mouse my wrist-pain was apparent af. So I wound its cord around it and shelved it for a while. Eventually Competitive Play will match me with the other trackball players.

I saw this the other night and I keep thinking about it, especially how it compares to BladeRunner 2049. Has anyone seen Ingrid Goes West? I recommend it.

I'm going to paste what I wrote over on Waypoint about this film. The more I think about this movie the less I like it. The most positive thing I can say about its rhetoric is how it evokes a powerful emotion on the political effects of fertility.I appreciated the scale and colors and such, but I think it is worth asking oneself what this movie looks like to an ethnonationalist or fascist or misogynist. Everything (including the visuals) is about monetary, patriarchal, technological and violent power. I’m not well schooled on Futurism, but I think it might be a movie a Futurist would make in 2017.There was only one character who was anything more than her societal role and she was in the movie briefly. All the other characters appear as pawns of the actual hero of the film, the cruel distopia itself. Some of the minor characters (including K) have the shallowest idea of faith and hope, but ultimately they are just vehicles to show how the distopia exerts its power. I can see an argument that the point of the movie is to show how this technology nightmare rips everyone out of their sense of interconnect humanity and uses them all as individual tools, but the resulting lack of acceptance of human dependencies on one another takes what I find interesting about narratives Out Of The Narrative. It’s a tech-demo of cool ideas and premises with no actual humans living in it (with the exception of Stelline). This is the dehumanization that bothers me in the film and even though it is made to look unpleasant, I think the overall rhetoric is a glorification of the rhetoric that makes it possible; people are no more than their professions and political affiliations and human agency is no more than a reaction to where one is placed in an institution of power. I think there is some truth to that but when it is presentedso absolutely and cooly, I don’t like it. With the exception of the visual aesthetics, the only things I find interesting about this film is my reactions against it.

Currency has confused me for a long time. I've been thinking about the way this podcast episode explains it since I heard it and it is helping me with my confusion. http://traffic.libsyn.com/citationsneeded/The_Deficit_Scolds_Part_I.mp3?dest-id=542191

Rom-com K-dramas do this regularly. Scenes that are very clearly abusive have comedyesque music played over top to take the severity out of the circumstance.

I thought about this a little bit. I describe it to myself as a 2017 white fantasy of uncovering your own ancestral victimhood.

Redownloading all my tables is an inconvenience and I haven't heard about any new features that make me think it is worthwhile to do that.

FBR has entered heavy rotation in my personal play-time. I haven't played Plunkbat, only watched. FBR is fun for a few gamesd til I finish in the top 10, then I'm done for the day.

I'm enjoying the beta. I like how everything feels more chunky and deliberate. It's also interesting to see how the game looks more like Battlefront than it does to Battlefield 4. The vehicles on the current map are much more rare than in the other games and it changes the dynamic of conquest significantly. I can't find a rocket-launcher anywhere, so I'll take a base with an cannon within range and try to deal with tanks that way. I also enjoy teh gas grenades in combination with the bayonet rush; I'll make some phat clouds, put my mask on, and then run in screaming. Lots of neat little adventures have happened to me already. At one point I was looking around for the buildings at 'B' and I didn't see any. I was like "I know I'm standing at 'B' and there are buildings at 'B'", but apparently someone had used the cannon at 'A' to demolish all the structures. Pretty fun.

There is some sort of preview-the-new-maps event and I think they are really fun maps. I won't buy them because it will make finding a game harder, but I'm enjoying them at the moment.

I've only seen the movie. I didn't think about it for a decade until I realized that my wife hasn't seen it and I bought a copy because it seems essential to understanding who I am.

Do you sharpen your knives? Seems like learning to use a whetstone might be a better investment.

Here is something I'm interested in learning more about the socialism perspective of. So for the sake of argument let's assume that powerful labor-unions are an impossibility in the United States due to automation for instance. So at this point in our hypothetical situation you have a group of corporate conglomerates (megacorps) that have mixtures of competing and shared interests mediated by the state which all of the megacorps have established stakes in. At this point, some public poilicies that benefit the population might benefit one megacorp while hurting another. For instance having a single-payer healthcare system is more likely to benefit the Walmart megacorp because that would largely externalize healthcare costs for their labor and provide more consumers with disposable income, but the Anthem megacorp would lose its ability to monopolize the healthcare market as a seller now that there is a larger buyer for the medical industry. In the socialist perspective, is it possible to boost Walmart's influence on this particular issue in some way to basically create a temporary coalition between Walmart and public interests? If there is an effective way to boost the influence of particular megacorps as they war with each other over profits, could it be more effective than trying to organize labor which has no power in our hypothetical situation of full automation?

I was thinking about this again this morning @Siromatic. I made a game last year that was supposed to be historical magical-realism set in the Byzantine Empire circa 1330. The narrative didn't really work well and I realized that it was because players hadn't spent a few weeks watching YouTube videos and reading Wikipedia articles about the monks on Mount Athos and the hesychast controversy. So my narrative defaulted to a very base travel story with no significant development and stilted dialogue. I basically made a history fan-game that was completely dependent in the player already having enjoyed the source material. So I was thinking about the synchronous floor model and wondering if it would be able to fix that disconnect and I think it would. Just by having a series of narratives in that world taking place synchronically, my narrative of intrigue could be discovered in a similar way to how I enjoyed coming up with the speculative conspiracy theory I developed while researching for it. Now I want to re-visit that project and see what might be able to do with this format.