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907 responses to “Talk Amongst Yourselves”
Mornin’ TAY! 😀
Morning buddy hows things?
I didn’t see this sorry haha. I’m good! How are you?
Haha all good, im good aside from this heat
Hello
Yello
Mello
What’s this a new TAY on a public holiday?! Amazing.
A public holiday? Victoria had ours on Friday (y)
Qld, NSW & some other state/states have one today heh.
QLD won’t get another October public holiday again unfortunately. It’s being moved back to May. 🙁
For reals? Damn.
oh yay! back to having no holidays after ekka day again! QLD FTL!
I still can’t believe we have a public holiday for that… just when I thought Melbourne Cup (Let’s celebrate this day with some good old fashioned horse race gambling for the whole family to enjoy!) day was the worst one, this is way more silly and unnecessary.
I actually spent all Friday cleaning my apartment to feel less guilty about taking the day off, otherwise I would’ve actually gone into work for free on principle.
Yeah I spent the Friday cleaning out the garage and chucking out old stuff we didn’t need. I think it was a public holidays because they ran a poll that said alot of people took the friday off so they could take their family to see the grand final parade and stuff but now that it was a public holiday people just went camping and down the coast and shit.
Halting the entire state’s economy for a whole day due to a grand final parade… gotta love it, eh?
Halting the economy while systematically paying people double time for working a public holiday, which is why restaurant were charging a public holiday fee ontop of peoples bills.
Also dude I need your paypal deets
Ah of course!
sdcdragonman[at]hotmail[dot]com
So totally halted the economy…
It was awesome. The city was buzzing, the parade was fantastic, and it set off a brilliant weekend of sport and barbecue. It’s the first public holiday of spring, and makes a lot more sense than a public holiday for a horse race.
Someone was explaining why you guys have it to a mate of mine who was bitching about it, apparently a lot of people just nick off from work to go see the parade or something to that effect.
I worked on cosplay. I don’t get days off =P
I’m close to finishing putting the other leg together, I’ve left it open to wrap around my leg for a size test, I think it might be tight around the knee but I’ll know for sure when I’ve done the rest of it.
I hope it stays just because I get paid double time and a half for being at work on a day I’d normally be in for anyway 😛
But it won’t, it’s a stupid idea.
I hate that most public holidays are on Mondays as I’m not rostered on Mondays meaning public holidays mean jack squat to me. Don’t even get paid for a day off.
I thought it was funny the the two companies in my building were do grand final BBQ stuff on Thursday this year instead of Friday. So they dropped productivity over 2 days rather than just one
I spent 3 days being a complete blob, playing video games and eating things that are bad for me and whinging about how hot it was.
Dang it. Slipknot have announced another UK tour, yet still nothing for Australia :/ I’m starting to doubt what Jim & Corey said when they were out here for Soundwave that they’d be back for a full headline tour soon..
Soon in band terms means anywhere from time of announcement to the time the band splits
Well they did say this tour cycle 😛
That just means they brought a tour bicycle and will only tour so long as the bicycle still works
I’d believe it 😛
There are so many good gigs coming up between now and xmas though: Rise Against, Amity, Soilwork, Alestorm, NeO/Plini, Parkway Drive, Tesseract, MegaDave, Devin Townsend / Periphery, AC/DC… It’s not like we’re struggling to find good gigs 🙂
In all of my excitement to be back on TAY I didn’t say what I did this weekend!
On Friday I had a glorious day to myself, where I saw my first movie by myself which was very liberating. I felt kinda strange at first buying a single ticket, I laughed out loud when I asked for a single ticket but the guy at the counter wasn’t fazed so that made me feel cool about it. I saw The Martian, goddamn that’ was a really enjoyable movie.
On Saturday I watched the AFL Grand Final and was utterly underwhelmed, then on Sunday went and did the Olivia Newton John Wellness Walk in Ivanhoe to raise a little bit of money on behalf of my Aunty’s best friend, so that was nice.
My Monday musing after watching The Martian; If you could be in the first group of people to travel to Mars and colonize it, would you go?
I would, I’d have done something very few people (Relatively speaking) have got the chance to in comparison, to go to spaaaaaaaaace!
What if the process involved in getting to Mars didn’t allow you to be conscious during the trip? So you’d essentially go from a launch facility on Earth to waking up on Mars. I feel like even if I wasn’t interested in playing in space the lack of the journey would be a deal breaker.
I’m sorry I fail to see how that breaks the deal of being the first of the people to arrive on Mars! It’d suck sure, but then I realise where I actually am and I might get over it fairly quickly 😛
Yeah, but there’s no next journey. You get to Mars and that’s the end of the line. I’m sure I’d spend time travelling on Earth before I left, but I feel like the last trip I take has to be worthy of a lifetime of being stuck on a farm.
Can you imagine how clear the night sky would be without Earth’s light pollution?! Oh my goodness it would be beautiful to look up at night
Absolutely and without hesitation. Being among the first to set foot on a new planet would be an amazing privilege. I strongly believe that if our species is to have a future beyond the next hundred years, colonizing other planets is going to be critical.
Stupid weather. I feel bad for my dog because I haven’t gotten her trimmed yet.
So about 2 years ago I backed the Warmachine: Tactics kickstarter. It came out a year ago but I never got around to it. Because I’m about to start up an Iron Kingdoms campaign I decided to play the game to get a better idea on describing the world.
What the hell happened? This game doesn’t look any better than when it was in beta. It still feels like a beta game. An unfinished game that I only managed to tolerate because I play Warmachine.
The story is bare bones, every twist and turn is so predictable I was wishing they would try something different. The character are straight forward (kinda expected that) but what got really annoying was how disjointed the acting was. Like how characters would act interrupted 3 seconds before they actually get interrupted. The presentation also sucks, a lot of cutscenes are just still 3d models talking (no lip movement) and having jump cuts to different positions. When they do move it can look really weird, especially when the UI, grid and spell effects are still triggered during these cutscenes.
The graphics are nice and they really captured the aethestic of the Warmachine world. I really loved how they made the Warjacks vibrate and rumble, as that’s how I expected them to move. But there were regular graphical glitches and even on low graphics it seemed like it was having trouble running.
Speaking of glitches, there was this really annoying glitch with designating the facing of your units had the model not facing the right way. It’s really odd seeing someone swing in the wrong direction or vaulting over air when they had to jump over a wall. It happened all the time and it can really mess with your setup when you forget the direction they’re looking at isn’t the right direction.
The music was really good, only problem I had is that for some reason it was really loud. I had to lower the volume to about 20% to hear the rest of the game.
But I could forgive all of that if the game wasn’t so egregiously slow. Even for a turn based game it’s so slow. All missions can easily last over an hour. Also there’s no save system, so if you quit or fail a mission you have to start from the very start. Including watching all cutscenes, because they’re unskippable.
I almost quit one mission where I spend 2 hours and 37 minutes playing. Got up to the last enemy unit in the game, he attacks a ‘jack and the blast damage rolls max damage on the Sarge character behind him, killing him and failing the mission. Because there are many levels where keeping your ‘jacks and Sarge alive is part of the mission. Sarge isn’t even a character, his model is no different from Trenchers. There are like, 2 missions where you need him to plant explosives, but anybody could do that, even your Warcaster. So if an enemy gets lucky he can accidently cause you to fail with a lucky damage roll.
Hmmmm thanks for the review. I’ve been tempted by it, but I guess I was looking at it as a way to play tabletop without the cost
The time factor will be an issue for me, so until I have some dedicated gaming time I think that is well of the list
20 missions, most take over an hour to complete, some about 2 hours. It was so slow that I was playing Mortal Kombat X online during my opponents turn.
If anyone hasn’t grabbed The Beginners Guide yet you absolutely should. Fantastic game from the guy who made The Stanley Parable that shows all the walking simulators how it should be done. So much I want to say about it but it’s the kind of game best to go in blind.
Do it.
I heard it was broken and full of crashing glitches.
I had one crashing glitch when I exited the game halfway through it wouldn’t start again. Starting it in windowed mode fixed it however, was able to switch back to full screen in the options.
Otherwise no problems I encountered and I’m usually the king of games breaking. Nearly 20% of my ~250 Steam games refuse to run.
PAX tickets get! Can stop stressing now.
Weekend was good, took the full 3 days which was nice. Friday we took Tiglet swimming which was successful so we will probably do that again with the weather heating up. She hadn’t been since she was 3-4 months old so wasn’t sure how it would go.
The that afternoon we went out to visit with her uncle who hasn’t seen her for a while. He has been very sick recently and this was the first time he showed active interest in wanting to see her so we did that. The swimming really tired her out so she slept longer than we want ed so didn’t have much time there which made Mrs Tigs feel guilty. All in all a fairly stressful trip but I think it is important to keep family in her life.
Saturday was grand final day which was fairly forgettable. Went to the in-laws and they are absolutely the last people I want to watch football with. Just seriously pathetic but got to do what you have to do. Wasn’t even an interesting game to make it worth while. Although seeing the interactions between Tiglet and her cousins made it worth while. What wasn’t worth while was a little trouble monkey who was far too amped up/celebrating a win/upset at the the poor game to sleep. Just screaming if she went anywhere near the bedroom. I ended sending Mrs Tigs to bed and sat on the couch with her. She had her teether and was putting on a roll of paper next to the couch and then taking it off again and showing it to me. She did this from before midnight until 12:30am. Finally managed to get her down after that and she slept in until very late morning. Was going to go out to brunch but had some emergency work I needed to get done before we left so it ended up being lunch instead. As some people may have seen on facebook Tiglet decided to get some batting practice in at the cafe. A sweet cross bat shot with the menu that sent a glass flying across the cafe, shattering into 100s of pieces. Mrs Tigs was horrified which was rather amusing. We managed to get some assassin’s creed played while she had an afternoon nap and a couple of games of splendor during the weekend.
Then after dinner and bath we had a repeat performance of not wanting to sleep. Seriously the only thing she will do is be up on the couch. Anything else and she screaming and trying to twist and throw herself out of your arms. Got her down around midnight and woke her earlier this morning so hopefully we will get back into her normal pattern,
My tickets haven’t arrived yet so still stressing. 🙁 Did you get them this morning? I had to zoom off to work before my mail delivery (the mailman gets there usually around 2pm)
We got the delivery pickup notice thing on Thursday (perhaps Wednesday arvo) but they have been closed all long weekend
Getting really worried now then. I don’t know what address it was shipped to.
I haven’t got mine yet.
Yeah but the diff is that you’re in a different city. Tigs lives about 5km away from me, if that.
cc @gingerchris86
So I’ve been trying out Galactic Civilizations 3 over the past week, gorgeous looking turn-based space strategy game and first thing I did was check the Steam workshop. Yep I’ll just go checking that box for the Imperial Star Destroyer, the Deadalus-class and Prometheus-class Stargate warship (No replicator ships, upsetting), the Tie Intercepter fighters, the Normandy, Starfox’s Arwing… whoa how did I get to page 150 all of a sudden?!
Also being new to this… I’m having difficulties getting started with horrible production times and economy and I think I know why, my research early game priorities should really be in planetary development and growth first as well as increasing fleet sizes. There’s a lot to take in on first glance like the MASSIVE TECH TREE, which made it really hard for me to figure out what to pick first (See: Sentence just before).
I actually can’t wait to design my own ships once I’ve gotten the hang of the game’s mechanics themselves and create my own Civilization of the Tech Knighthood, machines that rebelled against control-mad humans hundreds of years ago, protecting the weak and punishing the cruel, especially if they’re meatbags!
It really is good, I can safely say, that even with the 12 hours I’ve played this week I still have no idea what I’m doing, but I’m somehow coming first in a game I’m playing 😀
My weekend was pretty great. Started on Friday night, when I went to see The Martian with my mate Trent. The movie blew me away, Matt Damon was brilliant as Mark Watney, and the rest of the cast were great too. After the movie, we went round the corner to a cafe called Off Center. Nice to have a place that’s open until 10 to go and have a coffee after a movie.
Saturday was good. Went to the Farmers Market with Dad, bought some ginger beer. Then we went and had a coffee with a friend of Dad’s who is recovering from a near-fatal motorcycle crash. It’s amazing what good shape he’s in given that at one stage they thought he’d lose a leg.After that, we went to my Uncle and Aunty’s place. They invited me to stay and watch the Grand Final with them. Happy as a Hawthorn supporter, but disappointed that the game wasn’t a contest.
Sunday I woke up early due to time change for Daylight Savings, but that was good, as I was able to watch the second half of the Australia-England World Cup match. Big win for the Wallabies made me even happier. Then I had church, and after church I just went home and played games and watched movies. Pretty relaxing day.
All in all, fun weekend.
Don’t follow the AFL in the slightest but feel an obligation to support Hawthorn since David Hale was in most of my classes in high school.
My third monitor arrived! \o/
It’s at the post office. /o\
But at least DiRT Rally is amazing! \o/
Gaming weekend, mostly. Played more Skullgirls, I like Beowulf. Still suck at him though, pretty much any time a CPU Beowulf or Big Band come up I get combo’d to death. Jumped on Elite for some more beta CQC for a bit, then to prepare my ships for Sidewinder Sports Day which took place last night.
Loads of fun. Started out with a free-for-all deathmatch, everyone in Sideys fitted however we like. Started out ok, but then found myself in the middle of everyone getting absolutely hammered. Managed to avoid things long enough to get my shields back up (twice I think?), but the shield cell boosters never seemed to fire up for me for some reason. Annoying.
Second was a 20km race, from inside the station out to an Anaconda that you had to love-tap (surrounded by proxy mines), then head back to be the first through the station gate. Had myself fitted for speed, and *just* got pipped at the gate in the second heat. Didn’t even see the guy who got there on the first one. But I took the third, and made it into the finals! …where the same thing happened with that guy. Apparently he won, though on my screen he was nowhere near :/ Even just checked up on the shadowplay, I totally had that. Must be some hardcore lag.
Third was Hungry Hungry Haulers. 103T of goods dumped, with 80 worth one point, 20 worth two and 3 worth five, whoever has the most in their cargo hold at the end wins. Got hard done by lag or some such again, wasted time trying to scoop phantom canisters that were on my screen but refused to go into the cargo hold.
The rest were all in stock Sideys with shields off. Deadly Station Dash, From just outside the station, dash in and bump the back wall then be the first one to make it back out alive. No docking requests allowed 😛 Won the first heat easily, but fluffed the final. Bounced off exactly the wrong part of the back wall, went in and got stuck behind all the bars and stuff and just bounced around the walls til I exploded. Dammit. Station Chicken (everyone in together, stay in the back while the trespass timer counts down and the last one to make it through the gate alive wins) didn’t go so well either, thought I had the timing down well on escaping in time but got out too early and exploded anyway. And Station Demolition Derby, I was one of the last three left but didn’t have enough health left to do anything. My strategy was basically to try and follow others and nudge them into the walls so they take damage, but I seemed to keep losing health out of nowhere. The main person I was following was floating around a lot, thing lag was playing against me again. Humbug. Still, pretty happy with my flying there and managing to avoid everyone so well 😛
I’ve decided to take the plunge and download World of Warships and just thinking about it is giving me a NavyField itch
Be aware there isn’t any tutorial of any kind. They just dump you straight into it
Oh so like World Of Tanks before they released the ipad version
It’s weird because a little after I started they sent me a survey which asked how I found the tutorial and I’m like ‘what tutorial’?
It’s easy to play though. @coldcamv WASD. W/D increase/decrease your speed setting (reverse/stop/quarter/half/three-quarter/full) and A/D turn the rudder left and right. It’s a boat so bigger ships move and accelerate slower and have longer response times on rudder shift. Q/E will lock the rudder left/right so you don’t need to hold the turn, which is useful on big battleships.
Aim with mouse. Left click fires one main gun. Click and hold ripple-fires, one gun at a time in succession. Turrets fire in one go, so if you have eg a double-gun turret, both barrels fire when you click. Double-click fires a full salvo. You move the mouse where you want to aim, the guns track into position to aim there and the reticle goes green when you’re aimed and guns are on target and loaded.
Shift key and mousewheel zoom in. I like to zoom right out, then use shift to go to and from max zoom on the rangefinder. I go in and out of that quickly so I can maintain situational awareness.
The trick is that you need to lead your targets. Aim where they will be when the shots get there, not where they are. The rangefinder actually helps with this (hold alt while aiming and it’ll tell you how long the shot travel time will be) but it’s not important early on because you’re going to have only a few seconds travel time at most. Much more important when you’re in a battleship and your shells will be in the air for 10-15 seconds.
Two different ammo types, HE and AP. HE is explodey and makes fires. AP is heavy and penetrates armor. Press 1 to select HE, 2 for AP. Generally:
– Cruisers use AP on cruisers, HE otherwise
– Destroyers always use HE
– Battleships use AP on cruisers and battleships, HE otherwise.
If you’re using one type of ammo, you can pre-select the other type and it’ll be loaded after the ammo you currently have loaded is fired, so eg if you have AP loaded, you can hit ‘1’ once and it’ll select HE to be loaded next salvo. You can double-hit the other ammo type and your crew unloads the guns and loads the new ammo type straight away but this takes reload time. On cruisers it’s not a problem, on Battleships that’s often 30-40 seconds.
You can select ammo and pre-set your starting speed before the round starts.
Oh, also your guns have range. You can hold ctrl and mouse over to see what they are, or check in the pre-battle screen. Generally if you can’t put your reticle on it, you can’t shoot that far. The other thing to bear in mind is that you only appear to someone if their team has spotted you. Different ships have different ranges they can be spotted. Destroyers are invisible until you’re about 4-5 km away where big battleships can be seen from 15km or more. This means a DD can get in close and act like an assassin, hit you with torpedoes before you know they’re there (mainly IJN destroyers do this). When you fire your guns it adds like 5km to your detection radius and that lasts for about 10 seconds, so you’ll see idiots that fire to clear their guns of the wrong ammo type. Don’t be like them.
Some ships have torpedoes, but you don’t need to worry for a bit about that. You also have a repair key (R) which is on cooldown. You can use this to remove all debuffs on you – fire, flooding from being hit below the waterline, guns being knocked out, steering or engine damage etc. Learning to use that
For the early rounds it will require you to play in Co-op battles which is humans vs AI. Once your account gets enough XP to be level 3 or so you can play Random battles against other humans. Rewards are much higher in random battles.
You’ll start out in a Tier 1 gunship, which leads to a Tier II cruiser. The cruiser branches to a Destroyer and to a tier III cruiser, and the Tier III cruiser branches to Tier IV cruiser & tier III battleship. Tier IV battleship branches to carrier. Carrier plays like RTS. I haven’t tried it.
That’s really all you need to know. I play on North America. AtomicStrawberry. Add me if you’d like. I’m playing Pathfinder tonight but might be on for a little afterward, else I’ll be on the rest of the week.
Ill try and get on when the game finally finishes updating haha. Sounds like alot to get my head around but im excited
This long weekend I paid zero attention to sportsball of any flavor and spent my time alternating between watching anime, playing World of Warships and eating badly. I wanted to get a lot more sleep than I did but Daylight Savings is an asshole, and so are my goddamn neighbours. Wednesday morning, 7am there was circular saws going next door. Thursday, there’s fucking drilling on the shared wall between our units, right by the head of my bed, at 6:45am. Friday, same thing. Saturday and Sunday the other neighbours were obviously home because it was back to saws and drills again, plus what smelled like paint, and it was stupidly hot so I had to have the window open as well. So I’m feeling quite exhausted today.
World of Warships wise, I progressed a fair bit. Friday I spent a bit of time with my Wakatake, which is a terrible destroyer and felt like a step backward from the Tier II Umikaze, which while not as fast was able to launch more torpedoes at longer range without being seen. Wakatake’s torps are faster, but she has less per salvo and while they do more damage, they also have shorter range, barely longer than her detection range. After a couple of horrible games I managed to have a few that went my way and quickly leveled past her into the Isokaze, which is also more of the same – sadly don’t get long-range Torpedoes again until the Mutsuki at Tier VI.
After clearing Wakatake, I decided to spend time on Myogi and level through that grind as well, as I’d been told the Tier V battleship Kongou is much better. I’d had a few games in Myogi but I just couldn’t get the hang of it, her guns are very long range but stupidly inaccurate. Read some guides and got an explanation about the way the aiming reticle works and kept at it and at some point on Friday night, it began to click. I was suddenly starting to land hits. Not big hits, mind you – that’s not possible with her guns being so crap – and I was still having a lot of games where I’d get rumbled by a Destroyer and killed, or hit by aircraft (air-dropped torpedoes can be really unfair) but it was all starting to work. Started to get really frustrated by other players too. Kept seeing some truly idiotic play, like people in battleships literally stopping their engines. It’s not a tank, for fuck’s sake. You don’t gain any accuracy by stopping, but it makes you a trivially easy target to shoot at. 😐 The thing that was frustrating me the most I think with my Myogi is I never felt like I was making much of a contribution. Sitting at the back of the map, dropping shells down and hitting stuff a fair bit but never getting many kills and if the rest of the team didn’t perform, we’d lose. Basically felt like I was being carried. Still feel that way a fair bit, but contribution has gone up and I was periodically having 1000+ XP games where I’d take out a cruiser or two with some nice shots. Finally got enough XP to unlock Kongou on Saturday evening.
And the people that say Kongou is better are fucking liars. Maybe when fully upgraded she might edge ahead slightly, but she’s a piece of shit for me right now. Myogi turns faster (driving Kongou feels like I’m stuck in Fred Flintstone’s car), has faster turret traversal and better range. The actual guns on the two ships are completely identical and the only real difference is that Kongou has better AA (not that it matters, you’re going to get air torpedoed regardless) and she has 4 turrets instead of Myogi’s 3. Two forward and two aft instead of 1 and 2, but the Myogi arrangement actually was better. Kongou’s third turret is in a completely daft place, way too close to the stacks so you can only really get it on targets if you’re broadside, and if you’re broadside you’re going to get penetrated by something. Myogi was able to angle her armor and keep guns on targets much more effectively, I found. It might simply be that I need a bit more practice to get the most out of her but I’m really not liking Kongou. I’ve actually gone back to Myogi and started playing with her further to try and get the extra 8400 XP I need for the Carrier line to try that out as well and shelved Kongou for now, she’s just not very fun at all. Maybe with some upgrades she’ll be slightly less of a piece of shit.
Meanwhile, I decided it was time to progress down the cruiser line. The grind from Kuma to Furutaka is pretty steep, but I really want to get into the IJN cruiser line a bit deeper for the Myoukou. I’ve played some awesome games in Kuma, she’s an amazingly fun little ship. Quick turns, tons of highly accurate guns that can just melt enemies, and torpedoes to add that extra sting. I had a run of really bad games with her at first, but something clicked yesterday. I realized that the best way to play with her is to be aggressive. Charge in, whirl around dodging, and fire the guns. I was trying to play like a destroyer and be all sneaky (works with Tenryuu, but Tenryuu is essentially a big destroyer) but Kuma is best played with less subtlety. I also found that if I charged in and played well I could get a couple of kills and also break the other team’s early momentum if I did it right, which would often help give our team a win. The final game I did in the Kuma was probably my best in the ship. Solomon Islands map, I went around the side supporting a battleship. Hit a phoenix in the citadels with AP rounds and friendly sank her. Torpedoed a destroyer that was hiding looking for the battleship then started unloading HE and torpedoes on the enemy battleship in the area, setting her on fire and eventually sinking her. Remaining enemies ran, so pushed advantage, took out a second cruiser then spotted their carrier in the narrows between the islands so I went around and set the carrier on fire, basically gunned her to death. Then got into a running firefight with a St Louis. By this time I was on half health. He was the last enemy to go, nearly got me but I eventually got him. Finished the game with 3 kills, 4 torpedo hits, 3 citadel hits, 89 shell hits. And that put me over the edge in XP, unlocking the tier V Furutaka.
The trouble is, Furutaka sucks. She really, really sucks. I’ve played about five games and yet to get a kill with her. I can barely even land hits half the time. Her rudder shift time is a joke. She’s fast in a straight line but the turns have to be telegraphed several days in advance. Her guns are extremely powerful for her tier (203mm when the others are 140-150mm) but they’re not accurate, reload slowly (around a 25 second reload) and only really do damage when you get a cidadel penetration. Her torpedoes are a joke (one 3-tube launcher either side, 6km range, which isn’t even historically accurate as she should have a Quad on each side with Type-93 Long Lance torpedoes) and her armor feels like it’s made out of paper, even when angled correctly. She’s got an enormous citadel and it feels like anything that looks in the general area will hit it. Plus her gun traversal is so horribly slow that you can’t even track fast-moving targets like Destroyers. In fact, players suggest turning the ship to get the guns on target because it’s faster than waiting for the turrets to turn. Apparently you’re supposed to play her like a crap Battleship, basically shoot stuff at long range. Awful, especially after how fun Kuma was.
The worst thing though is at Tier V you start getting into much higher-tier matches. The last one I played last night before I quit in a rage was a Tier VII match. Enemy team started to capture our area and the battleships had all gone off to one corner (after one of them was all like HEY GUYS MAKE SURE WE DON’T GET CAPPED. Fucker.) and I ended up being the focus target of a Tier V soviet destroyer that I couldn’t even see half the time, let alone actually hit, plus a pair of assholes in the Tier VII US Cruiser Atlanta and then a Tier VI US battleship rounds the corner as well. 😐 I didn’t even land a hit that entire game. Fired a bit but nothing landed. Died in seconds, and it would’ve been faster if they’d been using AP. This was 4th game in a row that went similarly – one where I was torpedoed by a destroyer I was desperately trying to shoot, one where I was hit from the air with a full torpedo salvo, one where I got into a firefight that looked okay until I turned wrong trying to get my guns on target, ran aground and got pounded, and then that one where I ended up being alone against four higher-tier ships. 🙁
Wargaming have a problem where they’ve got a rigid ten-tier setup and have taken some square pegs and banged them into the right shape to fit their tiers. Furutaka at T5 and Aoba at T6 is absolute nonsense. These two ships are near identical, and after they were modernized in 1942, Furutaka and Kako were the same size, displacement, engines and armament as Aoba and Kinugasa. Why aren’t they the same ship? Or at least, why can’t I get the 1942 version of Furutaka which had Aoba’s much improved 203mm twin turrets instead of six single guns? It’s especially annoying given that the top tier IJN cruisers are a ship that never was completed (Ibuki, laid down as a heavy cruiser but converted to a carrier halfway in and never finished) and one that never existed at all (Zao) but meanwhile there are several actual IJN cruisers that were designed to bridge the gap between Kuma (and the similar Nagara) and the heavy cruisers like Aoba. Why is the Tier V cruiser not Agano or Ooyodo? Both were bigger than Kuma and had better guns, but were still light cruisers and would be pretty much par with the US Omaha at same tier. Instead you get a heavy cruiser that has the weaknesses of a battleship combined with the weaknesses of a cruiser and no strengths at all.
Still can’t stop playing though. I’m actually half considering ditching the IJN and trying some US ships.
I’ve been considering giving it a go but think I have enough f2p games on the go at the moment. How long does a round last in general?
Shortest I’ve had is maybe ten to fifteen minutes. Longest probably lasted 25? If you get sunk you can jump out immediately and swap to another ship though, and you’ll get the results from the previous game once it ends (and once it ends that ship will be available again). So shortest game I’ve had was like 2 minutes. 😐
So what your saying is early-mid IJN is not great? Thinking going either US or someone else wish there was AUS
It’s weird actually. At the outset of World War 2, the IJN were absolutely and without doubt the best navy in the world. The Royal Navy were the closest match, but Japan had been secretly ignoring international treaties so they’d have a leg up in a naval battle. Rather than quantity, the IJN went for technical superiority. They had torpedoes with such long range that the US initially assumed they were being hit by submarines, but it was just destroyer and cruiser-launched stuff. Their battleships out-ranged and out-gunned (and out-calibered in the Yamato’s case – 46cm was the biggest gun bore ever mounted on a warship) the US Navy and the Royal Navy.
The problem is that Wargaming has to balance the ships at each tier. So you have a bunch of Destroyers for example that are pre-WW1 designs. In the 1930s, Japan basically changed the map for Destroyers with the ‘Special Type’ Fubuki-class, which basically packed a Light Cruiser into a Destroyer’s frame and obsoleted everything in the world overnight. At the outset of the war in the pacific, the only pre-Fubuki class was the Mutsuki, and there were multiple classes beyond Fubuki as well. The problem is that Fubuki was so advanced that to balance her against the US Navy destroyers, she’s not available until Tier 7. You have to go through 4 tiers of pre-WW2 destroyers (Umikaze, Wakatake, Isokaze, Minekaze) to get there. All of the US destroyers were used in WW2, from the Sampson (at tier II) onward. :\
The other issue is that Japan’s early Dreadnought battleships, the Kongo and the Fusou, were heavily improved after they were laid down, so the BBs that should be the ‘early’ IJN tiers are actually mid-tier because of how well they upgrade. The other thing is that the IJN didn’t actually have a lot of big battleships. The ones that actually were completed that were used in WW2 were the Kongo (4 ships), Ise (2), Nagato (2) and Yamato (2). They had two other classes, Amagi and Tosa, but after signing the Washington Naval Treaty they had to convert the Amagi-class to aircraft carriers and the Tosa were cancelled. The Amagi was broken in drydock by the force of the Great Kanto Earthquake and they had to scrap her and instead halt dismantlement of the Tosa’s sister ship, the Kaga and turn that ship into a carrier as well.
To fill out the big gaps in the IJN battleship line, they had to go to the plans of some of those cancelled or just theorized ships. Yamato is obviously top-tier, but the Amagi would have been better than the Nagato, so Nagato is Tier VII, Amagi is VIII. Tosa would have been on par with Nagato so is useless, and they had to basically invent a Tier IX that made sense facing off against the Iowa (US Navy Tier 10 is the designed-but-not-constructed counter to the Yamato, the Montana). The same goes around the bottom of the IJN line. They start you out in the Kawachi, which is the biggest piece of shit. It’s basically a pre-dreadnought protected cruiser, hexagonal shaped with a gun at each point. The guns are insanely inaccurate and only one destroyer has shorter gun range. The Myogi-class at tier IV that follows it is apparently a rejected design for the Kongou, but with the utterly dumb idea of putting two turrets aft and one forward, so you’ve got more firepower when retreating. That’s the issue, you have to go through two objectively bad battleships to get to the one that’s ‘good’ but I’m finding Kongou to be awful as well, she hasn’t fixed any of the issues I had with Myogi.
On the cruiser line, Wargaming don’t differentiate between Light and Heavy cruisers. The US navy’s early cruisers are weird old WW1-era designs, then you get into some WW2-looking stuff like the Omaha. They have light cruisers right down to the tier VI (Cleveland) and the Tier VII (Pensacola) is the first proper heavy cruiser in the line. The IJN line, meanwhile, ignores a ton of very viable Light cruisers at Tier V to give you an early heavy cruiser that plays like complete shit. That slot should have gone to the Agano. 🙁
The issue isn’t that the IJN ships are bad either. I think it’s just that once you get to Tier V, you’re going to get into the game with really experienced players in the V-VII bracket that will just murder you. Down at tier 3 and 4 you’re going to see tier Vs often, tier VIs sometimes. The skill cap isn’t as high. Also means that your teammates have a higher chance of being dipshits though.
Fuuucck thiiisss hheeeaaatttt….
Seriously, I almost wish the sun would burn up… almost…
Aircon’s broke on this floor and lots of humans don’t have their window blinds shut, urgh! -_-
Yep. Got about 2 minutes into my trip home from work and decided I was over summer.
It’s so great. Loving it.
Reminder to the Brisbane gang that there’s a meat of sorts at Oktoberfest Brisbane this upcoming weekend. Saturday, October 10th. Let’s say 6:30pm? I’m guessing that there will be folks around both before and long after that time. Nothing too structured. Come and go as you please. Mosey about. Eat food. Go on the rides. It’ll just be good times a-plenty in an awesome atmosphere.
I suggest you study up on this song as well as 99 Luftballons. There WILL be a test. 😛
That is all. 🙂 *flails arms*
General details can be found on the Oktoberfest Brisbane website.
@beardymcmuttonchops @beeawwb @cufcfan616 @dc @freezespreston @gutsoup @janexo @lambomann007 @popdart5 @sernobulus @strange @sughly @transientmind @welbot @virus__ @dkzeitgeist @rocketman @sunsoar77
Just tagging everyone. No need to reply or RSVP or any thing. Just making sure you all know. 🙂 Hope you’re all enjoying the day off! <3
I’m hoping I can still make it! I’ll be pretty broke, but hoping to still come!
Ugh… despite you keeping me in the loop all the time, its only just occurred to me that I have my wisdom teeth removal 3 days prior to this :/ I’m guessing I’ll be a no now sadly, I’ll see how I’m holding up I guess. UGH!
Aw, that’s okay, bud. Hope the dentist stuff goes well. Perfect excuse to eat ice cream and KFC potato and gravy though. Here’s to a speedy recovery! 🙂
Btw @sughly, I totally followed DC’s advice and ate KFC potato and gravy when I got my wisdom teeth out and it was the worst decision ever.
DON’T DO IT
It got me through, man. 😛
Or it’s sabotage. Who can say?
But you drink beer…
And your face will probs be swollen which will delight and amaze everyone! WHAT AN ICE BREAKER!
Oh I know, Dan.
I know…
Fears realised, 2 days before monthly pay and there will be no schnapps for me this weekend 🙁 will anyone be going to weekend after?
TAY RPG Pathfinder tonight with new Daylight Savings (QLD grumble grumble). The timing will be as follows: 7:30pm AEST, 8pm ACDT, and 8:30pm AEDT. Starring:
@redartifice @tech_knight @freezespreston @negativezero @beeawwb
The party continues on after the Deep Dwarf-tossing incident. On an unrelated note, @gingerchris86 has told me that he won’t be able to make any more sessions what with an influx of work so we shall have to say goodbye to our crystalline Duergar friend/projectile. He will be missed.
Let me know if you guys want to play tonight. Sorry for the late post but I’ve been a little busy today.
After being thrown through a table in front of all his friends he knew he could never be taken seriously as a true adventurer.
This is what happens when you insult a Northerner. He has much to learn.
7:30 it is.
I’m on recall tonight so I might get called away for work during the session and I also will be most likely eating by that time, but I’m up for playing tonight.
I’m keen! 8pm!
NegativeZero’s New Anime Season Update Part 1
Watching the new season so you don’t have to.
Seasonal Anime update post, part the first. This season has a fair number of sequels to previous series. In some cases it’s a new season, directly continuing from the previous entry. In others it’s a brand new show. I’ll try and mark those out (if they’re any good) and also try and be spoiler-free.
Kindaichi Case Files Returns Season 2
This is a direct continuation of the previous season from about a year ago. Kindaichi is a genius detective, trained by his grandfather. This is generally a great series, very consistent. Technically ‘Returns’ itself is a sequel to the original anime from a few years back, but that never got subtitled so you’d need to start with the beginning of Returns. It basically is a sequence of arcs, with each arc being a typical murder mystery and playing out over a few episodes. Kindaichi is facing off against his nemesis, a man that basically sets up people to commit murders and create puzzles to challenge and defeat Kindaichi on an intellectual level. It’s good stuff and each arc is fairly self-contained so worst-case you could jump straight in with this season.Rakudai Kishi no Cavalry (aka ‘Chivalry of a Failed Knight’)
This is as by-the-numbers light novel as you could possibly get. The protagonist is a sort of magic user, except he’s supposedly the worst in the world at it. Except it turns out that’s just because they can’t measure his amazing talent or something. And he ends up partners with a princess who has anger management issues. Feels very much like it’s stealing liberally from The Irregular at Magic High School, except despite the Gary Stu protagonist that had a thing for his sister, that was vastly better written and better animated too. Additionally the only subtitles I was able to find for this were atrociously bad. Full of grammatical errors, mistranslations, and bright yellow like a 90s DVD. Was like going back in time to a Chinese bootleg. Avoid this one I think.Lance N Masques
Dude was raised and trained as a kid to be a knight, so that whenever the situation presents itself he unconsciously acts like a stereotypical chivalrous ‘White Knight’. He rescues a little girl when she falls from a cliff, and she takes a liking to him and decides he’s her ‘hero’. Aggressively mediocre show but mildly entertaining. Don’t think I’ll last more than an episode or two.Itoshi no Muco
Short-form low-budget flash anime or something, but it’s about a dog and her owner. If you’ve ever had a dog as a pet, then this show basically nails what must be going through their heads. Enjoyed it a lotThe Asterisk War
Another time-a-dozen light novel adaption. Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: so people can do magic, right? And this guy who’s apparently average but actually really good transfers into a school where they magic fight. And he spots a girl that’s undressing and she throws fireballs at him but secretly wants to jump his bones because of the incredible attractive power that having the personality of a sack of potatoes gives him. They’ll pair up and be an unstoppable combination. Blergh. It’s far better executed than Sky Wizard’s Academy from last season though and it doesn’t seem offensively bad or anything so I may watch more unless it gets bumped by higher-priority shows.Attack on Titan Junior High
Imagine Attack on Titan, but everyone is a super-deformed version and they just go to school and periodically the titans invade and start picking them up and eating… their lunches. Now imagine they just re-do scenes from the original show, but are all like HEY HEY. REMEMBER THIS. YEAH. YOU KNOW THAT SCENE?! IT’S FUNNY BECAUSE WE’RE SLIGHTLY PARODYING OURSELVES. No insightful commentary or anything. It could be far more amusing than it is. That said, I think Attack on Titan is massively over-rated, over-hyped and mediocre, so this was actually more entertaining for me than the original show. Fans only I think.Heavy Object
Went in expecting this to be one of the better shows of the season (it’s by the author of Index and Railgun and I really liked both of those) and was a little disappointed so far. It’s not bad and I see a ton of potential, but I wasn’t blown away. Basically, humans developed Objects, giant mechanical weapons platforms that are nigh-indestructible (can take nuclear blasts and keep going) and are armed to the teeth. No conventional weapons are effective, only other Objects. The impression I got strongly from it was an Imperator-class Titan from Warhammer 40k, except not bipedal. The main character (who’s name is Quenser but for some reason they’re subbing it Quenthur – the subs available are a bit shit sadly) is studying to be an Object engineer, and is stationed at a base with his friend. They’re basically redundant, because the base has an Object, piloted by a girl who I think they said comes from an aristocratic bloodline or something. Honestly not much happened this episode, it was all about establishing the setting and characters. It seems promising but might take a bit to develop.Utawarerumono: False Mask
This is a stand-alone sequel to the original Utawarerumono, adapted from a strategy RPG by Leaf that came out a few months ago. The previous two Leaf SRPG adaptions (Utawarerumono and Tears to Tiara) were very enjoyable, so I was hopeful for this too. And it looks like I was right to be. So far this season, this has spoken to me the strongest. The main character wakes up in the dark somewhere, dressed in a hospital gown. He finds himself in a snowy forest, chased by a giant centipede monster. A girl appears and saves him, introducing herself as Kuon. She’s got fluffy cat-like ears and a tail (if you’ve seen the original series, she’s the same species as Eruru) and the village she takes him to, everyone is the same – she seems secretly quite fascinated at the fact that he has human features. He has no memory of who he is or how he got there, so she names him Haku, saying the name is famous as it’s one of ‘The Sung’ (basically a hero from their oral traditions – note: this is almost definitely a reference to the protagonist of the original, Hakuoro – ‘Utawarerumono’ literally means ‘The One That Is Sung’). This is looking like a really high-quality looking production, much more so than the original series. Not sure yet where it’s going to go, but I think it’s looking great. I really dig the visual style of Kuon’s village. It reminds me strongly of the Hida Folk Village in Takayama, but there’s some definite Ainu influence in it as well. Good world-building. Want to see more of it. Really hope the game might make it out in English too (it was PS3/PS4/Vita and Atlus have done previous Leaf / Aquaplus games).I also tried to watch Kagewani and Hackadoll, but both were so bad I dropped a minute or two in so you won’t have any impressions on those from me.
Also I am so sick of being redirected to a fucking Captcha that eats my comment whenever I post anything long on TAY that uses more than a couple of HTML tags. The first time, it always eats the post. Post it again, it’ll send to the Captcha again but this time actually post. Incredibly annoying.
I still appreciate it. I need to go back and read over them again when I have more time (paint is probably dry and I should continue)
I can never get past the captcha without trimming significantly.
Heading up to Sydney again in October (dates undecided) and also potentially going to Brisbane on October 19/20th.
Would any Bris people even be free then? I’m not sure if I’ll have free time in the evening as I might be flying up just for the day, but we’ll see…
Looks like I’ll be missing both Sydney and Brisbane’s Oktoberfest meats though 😛
Worst.
Best worst guy.
Bah. I burnt myself on the oven tray on Friday night, it’s been fine the last couple of days. But I think I bumped it at climbing or something, and it started to blister up. Urge to bust…
Don’t. It always hurts more when you do that.
I know. Which is why I haven’t.
But it’s so swollen it’s just begging for it 😛
Repress the urge! Repress it!
Finally fInished The Witcher 3. Great game, had a couple of problems with it though (bad crafting UI, characters controlled like they were wearing rocket skates) but still a tonne of fun.
I got
the WitcherendingI’m so sorry that you got the mediocre ending. 🙁
Hey TAY! I was wondering if anyone with let’s play experience would be interested in a little project I’m working on 🙂 I’m hoping to find a few eager contributors, and I’m sure there are a few on here who regularly record/upload stuff. My problem right now is finding the time to do it all, to the point where I was a tiny bit down on myself for not being able to do what I’d like. Anyway, that’s another story for another day.
If anyone’s willing to help a fellow TAY out and have a bit of fun, give us a buzz on twitter (link’s in my bio). Thanks guys 🙂 Have a good week!
As far as let’s play experience @fatshady comes to mind. It depends on what your looking on doing it on eg what system? what game? Etc
I focus a lot on mobile & indie games myself. What I’m looking for specifically would be those interested in contributing similar vids, if only to have a growing userbase and more content weekly.
@redartifice @beeawwb @coldcamv
http://www.lifehacker.com.au/2015/10/why-i-dont-recommend-buying-sex-toys-on-amazon/
Slick Eddie?
100% Top quality bamboo
Man so Gwent is frustrating.
How are you supposed to deal with Scorch? Every other NPC whips it out like it’s going out of fashion.
Play lower damage cards. Don’t play any big hitters until the opponent passes. Also, Hero cards
Play the lowest cards you can up-front to try and force them to spend big on the first round so that either you throw that round with shitty nothing cards so their hand is empty on the 2nd/3rd rounds, or so you can burn it all or use your big-hitters until after they’ve passed and can’t scorch anymore. Also, try to make sure that your highest cards don’t exceed theirs, because scorch affects both sides – if they burn a 10 of yours and have a 10 themselves, it’s gone.
Oh, and target dummies may seem useless but they’re far from it.
You can either spend big on heavy-hitters in the first round, get outclassed and use your target dummies to withdraw your big spenders letting your opponent overspend on their 1st round victory after they’re committed.
Or you can use the target dummies offensively, but pulling back ‘proc’ cards like medics who rez from your discard pool, or withdrawing spies that the enemy have placed on your side so that you can re-place them yourself on the enemy’s side and get the benefit of card-draw.
I guess, but I can barely fill a deck at this point and can’t find any more northern cards anywhere. Actually using specific cards is a little beyond me.
And are some cards immune to scorch? This guy keeps on scorching my 5/6 level cards with a 10 on the board that is not affected.
Oh yeah, the ‘hero’ cards with the golden sun for their number symbol are immune to all effects. Negative or positive. So they can’t be doubled by war-cry, they can’t be scorched, and they can’t be rained on or withdrawn by target dummies.
In general, when it comes to building a northern deck, the best thing is to gwent all the shop-keeps (you can save-scum if you’re feeling poor), and make sure that your deck is very slim and top-heavy. Always have the bare minimum of regular troop cards in there, the requirement to be valid. That way, you don’t run the risk of pulling out the shit cards when you get your hand. You don’t want to be drawing shitty little 2-4s when you’ve got a deck full of badasses.
Buy any and call cards you can so you can fit in some scorches, war-cries, and dummies and other specials, but also be trying to get ahold of the medics, siege masters and siege engines (so you can put out a bunch of 8s-11s and then double them when the enemy has let their guard down… after they’ve locked themselves out of scorching). I like to run with weather-clearing foltest to negate any dick-move weather effects the enemy dumps on you, but it can also be used offensively – if you know the enemy isn’t running siege, you can waste a turn halving your own siege weapons to make them less of a scorch-target, then when the cards are all laid out and they feel pretty confident in passing, you can clear the weather and boom – double damage they weren’t expecting, baby.
I enjoy Gwent. 🙂
Cool cool. Thanks for the tips.
TAY RPG Pathfinder concluded for another night. Starring:
@redartifice @tech_knight @freezespreston @negativezero @beeawwb
GM Summary: Level up! Lundgredolph also got lucky in love.
Many have said so; I disagree.
Also Dem’nion invents the first mic, then drops it 🙂
Ugh, now I don’t know if I’ll be able to sleep… 🙁
Fuck this goddamn stupid heat.
Best thing about moving to Seattle is not having to put up with feeling like I’m melting for half the year.
I just put a shirt on and I swear my body temp just rose 6 degrees
I warned of this.
Summer is coming.
I get an air conditioner installed at home tomorrow. I’m unreasonably excited by this
Actually glad to get to work today, after that weekend – unlike home, work has A/C.
My place has cooling.
It doesn’t work any more though. Packed up over the winter. 🙁
Morning TAYbies.
So long weekend was a blast – spent 2 days lounging on the beach. Our accommodation cancelled at the last minute (like, an hour before we were meant to leave to head there) which was annoying, but commuting to and from the beach each day wasn’t so bad.
Speaking of annoying, a couple of things I learned this weekend.
1. If you are playing X-Com: Enemy Unknown, TURN ON AUTOSAVE. Nothing more frustrating than getting 2 hrs into a playthrough and having the game crash with no save since you started. Will be starting another attempt this week, but god that was frustrating.
2. Don’t play games that rely on mouse precision if you are playing on a TV. The missus needed my monitor to work yesterday, so I hooked up my PC to the TV in the living room. It was more frustrating than losing my XCOM game – played 1 game of DOTA and a couple of rounds of CS:GO and gave up. That mhz delay is the worst.
However, minor gaming annoyances aside, great long weekend. Our new(ish) house has ceiling fans in nearly every room so the heat wasn’t too bad either!
I just have a habit of saving as soon as I have exited the debrief screen at the end of a mission, even if autosave is turned on.
Also I really need to play through Enemy Within at some point.
Every time this happens to me (and it’s happened a few times), I think ‘next time, I’ll remember to save before and after every mission!’… and then I get around to doing it, get 2 missions into the game, and promptly forget to save ever again.
I’ve heard EW is a great add-on, definitely intending to pick it up if/when I make it through EU.
Yes apparently it increases replayability by an absolute ton, and I really enjoyed going through the original campaign with my sniper duo angels of death, geez that squad vision ability can be really OP.
Enemy Within is a true game-changer and one of the more impressive expansion packs of the modern age of token cosmetic DLC.
Expansion packs, the almost-forgotten martial art of making post-release stuff that’s well worth getting rather than rolling the dice. 🙂
It’s no Frozen Throne, not a continuation as such, but it dramatically enhances subsequent play-throughs, turning the game into something much deeper and more complex. It’s more like the Civ expansions.
Why would you let Frank Miller anywhere back near Batman after All Star Batman and Robin I have no idea, but there you go
Because Dark Knight Returns and Year One were radballs and people forget Miller went off the deep end a long time ago.
Year One has aged a lot better than DKR. DKR has the weird Letterman bit, the RW pundits, the Ronald Reagan…
Oh dear, that’s a disaster of a drawing. And I read Dark Knight 3 is going to be called “The Master Race”???
Olbigatory TAY tracking post! =D
How dare you. This is a busy place and you are clogging up the fast lane
Pfftt we don’t even make it to page 7 these days =p
Oh, hello there my good folks. It is I, that weird Beavwa-esque looking fellow. I return, after 4 weeks leave to my workplace where I spend most of my TAYs. Chilling out, maxing, relaxing all cool. You know, the usual.
I have hundreds of emails to sort through. I’ll be back later. >_<
Well lookit Mr Popular here.
Hello, Mr Popular. I’ve missed you.
Burrrrr– wait, that’s not a burn as much as a… deep, gentle, warming glow?
It’s like slipping in to a comfortable bath. With candles… And soothing music.
Hit level 40/200 Light in Destiny after my first foray into the Crucible. First match of 3v3 my team quit after 30 seconds for some reason. We weren’t losing, they just left. After 2 minutes of 1v3 it was pretty clear I was going to lose, so what else could I do but run into the middle of the level and start dancing?
Then the enemy team surrounded me and started dancing too.
…and then I activated my Stormtrance and got a triple kill.
The rest of the match was me getting my arse handed to me (with a couple of lucky kills) but the shining moment was the message I got from one of the opposing players to the tune of “Bad luck about your team leaving, and we’re still laughing about that Super 😀 “
Well lookit Mr Popular here.
Gold. I’m sitting at work chuckling. 🙂
Was in crucible the other sunday playing a load of 6v6 just for a laugh, and we were getting hammered by bad lag. Still fun but some frustration with the connections.
Then we got one game where one guy with a good connection was just awesome and was owning us. Smart player, covered his team-mates, and was getting good kills. So I messaged him to say good game and it was nice to get owned fair and square by someone with a good connection for a change… 🙂 I think it’s good to be gracious.
After three weeks off work for the birth of my second child, I am back. Back to approx. 1,600 new emails, 228 spam, 99 missed calls (the digital counter maxes at 99) somehow despite diversion and fun times ahead. A great example of the pure chaos that is IT Support.
*Opens Seek on mobile phone*
CONGRATS! 🙂
Thank you. 😀
Wait you had babby 2 how did I miss that congrats!
You weren’t required in the process, if I had to guess. 😛 Sorry.
OR WAS I?
Nah, just wasn’t sure if you’d announced it here or not, I’ve been sporadically in and out of social media for the last few weeks
All good, yeah I think I did briefly mention it when everyone else was as well. There were a few of us that all just chimed in at once.
Well lookit Mr Popular here.
On mobile? Nah, open it on work computer so it sets off flags that you’re looking for work elsewhere and they offer you retention incentives!
…Or start preparing/making up a body of evidence as an excuse for firing. Some companies can go either way.
I had to Google the definitions for both of those expressions and I still have no idea what they mean. 😛
Generally neither do the people who use them.
Wait… which expressions? ‘Retention incentives’, and, uh… ‘body of evidence’? Or ‘sets off flags’?
Oh god. I’ve become one of them… the people who use these words un-ironically. 🙁
Yep, retention incentives and body of evidence.
Ohhh, OK.
Retention incentives are when a company realizes they have shitty conditions/pay and that there’s high turnover, so they offer incentives to retain folks who would be a pain to replace. Because going through a hiring and training process is time-consuming and expensive and frustrating and while you’re doing the training, that work isn’t being done, so why not just pay more to the people you want to keep, instead, right?
The ‘body of evidence’ is just a poetic way of saying a collection of evidence. A recorded collection of various incidents of failure or incompetence or poor communication etc to store up so that you can drop a ‘we don’t like you’ bomb on someone who you want to fire. It’s a dodgy practice which is partially legislated against – you can’t just fire people without good reasons, and you can’t just ‘make up’ reasons, or collect incidents and then dump them all in one pile as an excuse without warning. You have to give people opportunities to learn from their mistakes and improve, with concrete warnings of consequences when firing is on the table, instead of keeping an invisible tally on a shit-list and releasing it when it’s ‘big enough’. But that doesn’t stop some companies who DO think that’s enough… and those tend to lose when taken to the ombudsman. Of course, paying out the fired employee their 6 months or whatever and wearing the fine is sometimes a conscious decision taken when they really, really want to get rid of someone they can’t justify getting rid of, due to not fitting with the ‘corporate culture’.
HA. Management here would actually let someone leave, not replace them, save on rehiring and just spread the work out amongst two or three other workers. I kid you not, it happens.
Hmm, still rereading the second paragraph trying to determine how that relates to me..
So I’m collecting incidents of my own undoings? Do I want to get fired? I don’t think I want to get fired? Isn’t that a bad thing?
Oh, no, I meant that if you start viewing Seek on your work computer, it will flag an alert with management to start collecting ‘negative evidence’ about you so that they can fire you early ont their terms (when the timing is good for them), or use it as an excuse to give you a bad reference to torpedo your chances elsewhere, and thus keep you. Similar to what [REDACTED]-face did to Freeze.
Oh, you were being sarcastic! I thought you were giving me advice. Oops. 😛
Yeah, I know the deal, I’ve done evidence collecting for management before. It sucks, makes you realise how unproductive people can be (says the guy on TAY) and doesn’t make you feel very good about yourself. I’m not crazy enough to leave a trail behind me.
Oh god, what a weekend. The heat.
Also, played a lot of Destiny, fell back into Minecraft somehow (it still happens every so often, I guess, but hey, I built a fully automated tree farm powered by flowers :P), played The Beginner’s Guide (go play that now)…
Oh, and our raid team kicked Oryx’s arse last night. So satisfying… Over the course of about two hours, we had a bunch of runs where we were doing basically no damage, then our timing synced up for one round and we got all the way through to the end. Picked up a pulse rifle and a second shotgun, and finished off the last step for Touch of Malice.Well lookit Mr Popular here.
Your shotty’s got nothing on my dead cat hand canon.
Minecraft on PC?
Yep. Mostly play modpacks pulled from the FeedTheBeast launcher, in this case the 1.7.10 Infinity pack.
I should fire it up again.
So, a Tuesday Morning Question because I cbf writing out all of my weekend (shortly: Martian pretty cool beer good board games ace picnics fun but hot made this https://instagram.com/p/8b_cpbib8I/)
What are you reading? I’m working my way through Wolf Hall, about one of Henry VIII’s advisers. Really good, once I’ve finished it and the sequel I’ll be checking out the BBC adaptation
Started the Wheel of Time again. Never finished the last few books and there was no way I could remember the previous seven or eight books worth of story so, restart. It’s proving a little difficult, Jordan isn’t exactly concise with his writing style.
I’ve considered doing that but egh not sure if I can get through the middle sections to see how it ends. Maybe I need to get the all on ereader of some sort as I don’t know if I want to buy a bunch of them. Maybe I need to check the local library.
I’d be happy to send them your way as I finish them although I’m a bit slow, don’t have a tonne of time to fit reading into.
Where are you based? I have the whole series sitting around (including duplicates!) in Sydney, happy to spread the love, not so sure about shipping them interstate though.
I’m Melbourne based but thanks for the offer. You too Freeze. I think I have 4 or 5 of the first 6 floating around somewhere. More that I can remember trying to read path of daggers or whatever it was called and really not wanting to continue reading. Knowing the end is good means I might bring myself to read them at some stage
I was in the same boat – got up to Crossroads of Twilight (which I still think is the worst book of the series) and gave up. Left it for over 10 years before starting again and powering through – everything from Knife of Dreams onwards is great though.
Path of Daggers for me was the one that nearly broke me, but I was reading them as they got released. That was the one where a bunch of shit happened and then it basically reset and went exactly back to where it was. Also the one where Mat (at that point the only interesting character) wasn’t even in the book.
I don’t remember Crossroads at all. I think maybe I just didn’t have strong feelings about it either way. Then Jordan died and Sanderson took over and showed what that series could have been like in the hands of an author that knows how to plan and is less prone to waffle.
Yeah, there was so much in that series that could have been dropped without impacting the overall narrative.
The entire thing with Perrin and Masema was unnecessary. Hell, the entire Masema character wasn’t necessary. The entire Faile kidnapping arc was drawn out way too long. Nearly everything to do with the Windfinders after they activate the bowl of winds could have been cut.Do you want my set? Just taking up space. One of them got separated from the rest and I think it’s at my Mum’s place though. The final three books that Sanderson did are well worth it, and it’s really only the run from 6-8 that are awful, especially the 8th one where literally nothing happened.
Which book are you up to? I did the same thing a while back – it drags a bit in the middle, but the last few books (once Sanderson takes over) are arguably the best of the series.
Uh, I’m 200 pages into the first one…
As I said, not a lot of spare reading time.
I did read up to eight I think about 15 years ago.
Final book was miles better than I had any expectation of it being. Assumed it’d be a disappointing waste of time like most endings, but got the exact opposite.
I’d love to see Sanderson return to the setting and fill in some of the back-story or something but I think he’s busy with his own stuff.
Final book in the The Demon Child trilogy by Jennifer Fallon
Enjoying it and will probably head straight into the next trilogy afterwards
I need to start getting deeper in to “The Happiness Trap” but keep putting it off. I’ll probably start “The Terminator Gene” (Book 2 of the Human Rites trilogy by Ian Irvine) which I’ve been meaning to read for a while.
I really loved The View From The Mirror series but for some reason never read any other of Irvine’s works.
I read the first book in the trilogy (“The Last Albatross”) before it was revised / updated to become a trilogy. Enjoyed where it went and how it was written so when I found out it had been expanded I promptly picked up all 3 and sat them on my shelf where they’ve sat ever since. Story of my life.
I really enjoyed those books too. Did you read the subsequent stuff in the setting he wrote after the initial quartet? I found them to be even better personally. Apparently he’s got a direct sequel to the first quartet out at the start of November as well.
I did not, no.
Six books in two trilogies, set a few hundred years later. Well worth a go if you ever feel like it. I’d offer you my copies if you were here but they’re all the big-size paperbacks so they’d cost a fortune to post.
Still working my way through Song of Ice and Fire – nearly caught up to the TV show (about 1/3 of the way through A Feast for Crows), so that’s exciting.
…Ree-ding?
Is that like, codex entries in a video game?
What you reedin’ for
Weeeell looks like we got ourselves a reeder https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BwkdGr9JYmE
Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney, a lot of the game is reading and picking apart phoney testimonies 😛
Good morning TAY! I had a hectic but good long weekend. I ran 10km in the heat (yes, I know I’m crazy), and then my little boy had an awesome afternoon playing with his cousins in their backyard with the hose. Then we went to a drive in movie! (Oddball is a great movie, go see it!)
Then I went to hang out with my parents to watch the NRL grand final (go cowboys) and generally just spend some quality time with them. Then we rounded out the day with a bbq dinner with friends in a park with lots of small children grazing their knees and getting bitten by mosquitos. I’ve discovered that my car first aid kid needs a major overhaul.
Morning? 😛
meh, close enough.
So, I may be missing something here but is there any particularly good reason to require a shotgun that can empty a magazine in a few seconds? I can’t seem to think of any beyond “That’s cool and I want it”, zombie kangaroo apocalypse and you need to make a dash from your fort or you need to shoot as many people as you can before the cops take you down.
Freedom.
Landscaping? Like… instead of cutting down that tree, let’s shoot it down
You’re going to be shredding the tree you cut down anyway, you already saved yourself some time by shredding a part of it with your shotgun shells as you shot it down, efficient!
Why stop there? Load it with incendiary rounds and you can shred it AND burn it!
It’s to stop the king of England from walking into your house and pushing you around.
I NEED IT TO PROTECT MY FAMILY FROM HOME INVADERS
Because given I hold weird view like “Everyone should smoke” and “privatise everything” and “Fuck Climate CHange” and I got into the senate by not-exactly-illegal-but-still-fucking-shady means I need to now impose my fringe views over the rest of the county which is these days largely in favour of gun control and need a BANG BANG SHOOTY STICK to appeal to a fringe?
Hmmmm… Purely logical approach on defending yourself.
Rapid fire shotgun would be handy only if a) you’re being attacked by a group of deadly things (i.e. pack of wolves), or b) you’re being attacked by something large enough that one shot may not stop it (i.e. grizzly bear)
So while we have lots of deadly animals in this country, the best I can offer for a) would be the dingo, and for b) a salt water croc or cassowary (the latter being more for the slim target profile rather than multiple hits to put it down)
@freezespreston
As far as the dingo theory goes, they’re not a documented threat to adult humans.
Cassowaries, once again, not really lethal but pretty nasty when they attack (probably rate slightly higher but a similar scale to kangaroo).
Just leaves the ol’ salty. They average about 2 fatal attacks per year. Pretty much every one was in or at the edge of the water, and how often would you take a rapid fire shotgun swimming with you?
You’ve identified a market… Shotgun floaties!
I re-watched Fury Road on the weekend.
Was particularly struck by that one line:
“[Someone] used to call them anti-seeds.”
“Plant one and watch the thing die.”
Soooo, who here is a strategy nerd *raises own hand*
http://subterfuge-game.com/
Because that looks bloody amazing.
Looks pretty cool, would love a way to try before you buy though. E.g. “First week free!” or something to figure out if it’s for you. Would be easy enough. Just make it a free download with a single use “1 week trial” IAP and a “whatever the original app price was” unlock IAP.
I can’t believe I just advocated in app purchases. It’s been great knowing you all, remember me when you’re drinking.
*seppuku*
Pay $1.99 to unlock special “quick seppuku” option.
I will always order a second shot in order of B-ob, to remember the good times before he became ‘Bob from Marketing’.
I won’t pour it out though, that would be wasteful – I will drink it, the way B-ob would’ve wanted.
“Robbie” from marketing. Focus tested better.
Also, @beeawwb, that should be your Spoooooky Halloween name
We focus tested Spoooooky Halloween names but it didn’t poll well in our key demographics so we’ve decided to go another route in the interests of brand synergy.
What… what does that look like? Flashy suit, cufflinks, suspenders, and a bluetooth earpiece? A habit of saying nonsense things to people that only barely make sense until they hold up a finger, distracted, turning slightly to continue their conversation making it obvious that they haven’t actually been speaking to the person in front of them?
Look, it’s not difficult, you just need to synergise with the key dynamics and present to our demos a clear narrative of identity and you’ll hit all four quarters of the chart.
Gosh, Transient, it’s simple/
*gibbers in the corner*
We prefer the term “Enunciates creative and organic phonemes in a non-traditional location as a contributor to the space-sharing economy”
Round here we call him Sticky Ricky as every idea he has sticks.
Also because of… The Incident…. that time in the lunch room but we try not to talk about that much.
“Let’s just call it what it is.”
You mean Mark Edding from Marketing?
Ugh.
UGH.
Ugh.
…upvote.
IT’S NOT PAGE 6 YET, WHAT ARE YOU DOING!?
they are doing a free beta until 15 oct. if you want in let me know and I’ll email you the deets
One of the good things about being back at work is I can bring back some of my weekly rituals. Such as getting GYG for lunch and watching the latest episodes of CinemaSins.
Of course when I opened up YouTube and saw “WALL-E” was added, I was prepared to start punching the screen since it’s literally in my top 5 movies of all time. Thankfully the episode continues to prove that I have very similar tastes in movies / jokes as Jeremy from CS.
I’ve always enjoyed Doug Walker’s Real Thoughts but wife said I’m not allowed to watch him while she’s around after she saw him saying Patch Adams is one of his personal worst films.
How did you explain Pathfinder last night to the wife?
She said the less she knows the less likely she is to divorce me.
The question is, did that top Dan’s wife walking in while we were fiascoing?
I don’t think it did. Take a lot to beat that.
I don’t know that anything can beat that.
Cheers, I’ll check out that series when I get a chance. 🙂
Just downloaded the new XBOX UI preview. I swear it didn’t look this ugly in the screen shots. =S
*types “How to enable [feature]*
Ahhh, Google, you lovable scamp… how did you know that I wanted several hundred thousand entries on how to disable the feature?
It’s keeping you mentally alert by offering a chance to reverse engineer your own solution.
As far as I can tell, it’s such an unpopular feature that it’s actually been written OUT of the program, with only previous versions requiring people to root it out themselves.
Motherf…
Usually for me it’s “How to enable [feature]”
*clicks link*
*opens to forum*
“Anyone know how to enable [feature]”
“I would like to know this too”
“bump”
“No one knows?”
“Yeah I was just wondering the same thing today”
*cue 10 pages of useless shit*
What is it with Kotaku and Jughead? Is there that big a fandom on the site to justify the constant articles? I don’t think I’ve met anyone who’d name themselves a mad Jugger.
Doesn’t bother me, just find it odd.
Don’t you see the tagline: Kotaku, your coverage of Games, Japan, and Secondary Archie characters.
It’s right there in the site description.
I dunno, the few pages I saw of one of the recent ones made Jughead seem like one of the better characters.
I get the feeling that the US writers just put out whatever interests them. I haven’t bothered to check but I’d bet that Evan Narcisse has written every Jughead/Archie related article you’ve seen.
EDIT: I just realised that Narcisse is “the comics guy” in the same way that Lejacq is “the MOBA guy” or Goods was “the sports game guy”.
Oh thank god, the comment counters are back on the front page.
Ah, Oblig
KOTAKU AUSTRALIA
If you’re going with that, then….
TALK AMONGST YOURSELVES ON KOTAKU AUSTRALIA
Well lookit Mr Popular here.
My World of Warships stats are embarrassing. Especially that goddamned
FurrytacoFurutaka. 5 games, 20% win rate, 0.0 kill to death ratio, 0% games survived. 😐Did anyone else end up picking up the game to give it a try?
Wasn’t a huge fan of tanks, but warships seems like it could be more up my alley.
Or incredibly, rage-quittingly frustrating. It’s not high on the list, though.
I might have more time on my hands to try though, now that my MGS V run seems to be coming to an… end?
I think I’ve completed the game and got ‘an ending’, but it says I’m at 50% completion and there was a teaser for Chapter 2… and then a bunch of missions that were repeats of previous ones with difficulty modifiers, so I guess there’s some story ones interspersed between the repeats? (Also, fuck [subsistence] mode. Fuck it. I just want a rock or something I can throw to distract people is that really so much to ask?! Also some grenades or C4.)
? Use the magazines in thrown weapons, that’s what they’re for. essential.
[Subsistence] mode starts you off with no gear, no weapons, no suit, basic prosthetic, no buddies. Not even a magazine. I’d have to go and FIND one and hell if I was able to find any in that level. I set off alarms exploring four outposts in desperate search of a tool that would allow me to sneak about without setting off alarms in four outposts. 😛 Choked a guy out and got an assault rifle fairly early on, but it’s very bad at serving as a non-alarming distraction.
Basic Prosthetic knocks though (You’re farther in than me, I’ve been durdling across side ops. Just had
a long talky jeep ride with Skull Face and am about to fight Sahelanthropus)Yeah, prosthetic’s what I’ve been using, but I had been using magazine diversions to turn heads like a crutch for a lazy player/bad stealther. Also regretting how dependent I’ve been on D-Dog and his infinite mark-o-vision.
Good, Good dog
DD! Go jump on that guy’s head and fry his ass with a cattleprod in the mouth because it’s hilarious. Good boy! Good boy.
@transientmind I’m starting to use him as Fulton-Dog because I can use it as a distraction.
I’m trying to raise my bond with Quiet and D-Horse at the moment though. Had Quiet at 100% but then she got shot by
the sniper skull soldiers rescuing Code Talker and it hasn’t recovered yetQuiet’s rep goes up when you let her shoot people, so it’s not much effort to tell her to scout out an outpost then when all the intel circles are gone and targets marked, tell her, “Cover me,” and let her go nuts. You’ll be back up to max within a half dozen outposts, I swear.
I had the same issue with the snipers, btw. She pulled out and I pretty much just went tranq-happy for the rest of it. Worked pretty well.
The mansion in that mission is about the only time in this game I’ve gone “KILL ALL THE THINGS” because dear god it was annoying me. For some reason could NOT find the entrance to CT’s dungeonI didn’t have much trouble with that one because I’d fully-explored the map at length before I progressed the story. Y’know, grab all the cardboard box drop-off points and such. Loot all the materials. That kind of obsessive thing. Setting off several alarms in that place in the free roam was an excellent way to learn the layout. I pretty much never go ‘kill all the things’, though.
Fulton all the things, though…
I’ve been getting pretty good at using the alarms to my advantage. Use a rifle from just outside the base to shoot a guard in the head and set off alarms, everyone comes running over to search but I’ve looped around and can easily mark most of the solders then start picking them off one by one (occasionally two or three at a time) then FULTON EVERYTHING!
Mission objectives? What?
I felt ridiculously cheesy doing something very similar to that when it came time to infiltrate OKB.
I cleared a relatively sparse area that had a power generator. Flipped the switch, waited for CP to call a couple guys to come turn it back on, waited til they radioed saying that the coast was clear, took them out, then turned the power back off…
Aaaand repeat. It ended up being that they were pulling guys from three gates back to go check out that power. Never occurred to anyone at any point that they had just lost two platoons to checking out why the lights weren’t on. Guys were hopping out of vehicles to go check those lights then promptly disappear after saying all was clear.
Subsistence are the most annoying of the hard mode missions, but at least you’re almost guaranteed an S Rank. Just remember to hold people up instead of choking them (and if their marker stays red when you hold them up they’ll take a swing at you). I never thought to check but can you still do your clicker arm thing to lure enemies? Magazines were so much better that I actually forgot that feature existed even though it’s there every time I interrogate an enemy.
It’s a shame, the game is brilliant but with chapter two it becomes very clear it’s unfinished. Luckily the core gameplay is enough to keep it going and the story more or less wraps up, it just sucks that chapter two is mostly hard mode levels.
I never thought I’d miss the most basic tool that it gives you from the start – the humble magazine. But yes, you can still use the clicker for a non-alarm distraction to your position rather than a position you choose, and you can still use sonar.
I almost always prefer to choke out and fulton because it gets the target off the field. Hold-ups are great if you’re confident that there won’t be any alarms, but subsistence also removes reflex time, meaning your margins for error are razor slim. Alarm goes off, those dozen guys you held up and told to lie down are now back up and out for blood. As far as I can tell, hold-ups and choke-outs give the same points – tactical takedown. And yeah. It’s always amusing when you do a hold-up and don’t have any interrogation options – they drop their weapon and get ready to turn around and knife you or pull a sidearm. Not common, but always amusing.
It’s weird, you can’t take three steps without tripping over one in Ground Zeroes, but I don’t recall seeing a single one in Phantom Pain. You’d think the Subsistence missions would have at least one tucked away in a hard to reach place.
The advantage to hold ups is that they’re faster and leave you free to take out any unexpected guests. If they’re too close to others to Fulton just kick them to stun them then carry them off somewhere quieter (not sure how long a kick stun lasts, but they won’t wake up while you’re carrying them). If their marker doesn’t change colours immediately grab them because they’re going to take a swing. You can also get two for one if you don’t pull your gun until they’re both within range. It’s a bit tricky but very effective once you’ve got the timing down. Lure them out to a spot, come up behind and get them both together. Worst case scenario you have to double throw them but even though it’s noisy it won’t raise the alarm.
Kick stun is pretty damn short. A couple minutes. But yeah, they won’t wake while you’re carrying them.
You can actually dual-hold-up by swinging your weapon between multiple targets quickly, but the timing can be tricky and sometimes when trying that I’ve had to do a CQC take-down. Then kick the guy awake and hold him up on the ground.
Hold-ups and their infinite duration are good if you know you’re going to be taking your time and don’t have the wormhole fulton for distraction-free extractions. Knock guys out, carry them to somewhere out of the way, wake them up and hold them up so they won’t wake up and move around independently. Also, prior to getting the wormhole, great for moving the child soldiers to the LZ without having them wake-up. (Although I did accidentally drown one in one mission by placing him too close to the water.)
@transientmind I wish I had of thought of that with the child soldiers. I was just running back and forth as the tranq wore off. I think I could do four and I’d arrive at the LZ just as the first was beginning to stand up.
The other good way to go with transporting child soldiers to the LZ in preparation for an expensive pickup is to drop a jeep, so you can bring 3 at a time, loading one in the passenger seat and two in the back.
Oh, the other tip when choosing between hold-up, CQC or choke-out – the hold-up is noisy.
You’ll alert someone within I think it’s 10m, might be 15m. But you can silently choke-out a two-man patrol walking within 1m of each other, or two guards posted 1m next to each other so long as you position your grab so that you pull them back outside of their very limited peripheral vision.
I hit a ship once, missed about 20 times then blew up.
It takes a few goes to get the hang of leading targets and stuff.
Leading was easy. Firing elevation was doing my head in. Always skimming the top or splashing the sides.
Ah, yeah. Were you using the zoomed-in view at all? That makes it easier. For HE I like to position the horizontal line of the rangefinder in line with roughly the middle of their hull so that it’ll fall onto their superstructure, but for AP when they’re side-on you want to aim at the waterline and try and have your shots land right below the smoke stacks.
What I would do when I started was fire the guns one by one, checking where each shot landed and adjusting accordingly, basically walking the guns onto target. At higher ranges you’re going to have a fair number of misses as well, simply because the guns aren’t accurate over range.
At lower tiers you can get away with aiming HE at the waterline too, because HE hits on the ships armor belt will still fuck them up. Higher-tier ships and more armored ships that becomes less effective.
I think @gorzilla and @pyrean play (well, they’ve definitely played World of Tanks and I think have dabbled in Warships).
I’ve played a bit of it but I can’t bring myself to pay for it. I spent all the money I was willing to on tanks and I found even when you are paying the grind becomes unbearable. I didn’t mind the lower level ships but more or less stopped playing around the start of tier 4 because I was running out of the in game money to buy stuff.
I do like it though, and world of tanks (though I like warthunder’s tanks better) but I just can’t handle their monetization.
Fair enough. I just paid for premium to lessen the grind. I found War Thunder to have a lot of balance issues when I played it (planes though) and there’s nothing really that’s competitive with Warships anyway.
Sounds like I’m further into the game than you got now then too – have the tier V IJN Kongo and Furutaka, Tier IV Isokaze, and am halfway through the grind back on Myogi to get the first Carrier as well. Haven’t touched the US Navy line but also ran out of slots to put new ships in if I wanted to do that, since I kept a few of the IJN ships (kept Myogi until I unlock carriers, kept Umikaze because I was consistently having amazing games with her due to knowing how to play better than most Tier II/III players, kept Tenryuu and Kuma because they’re amazingly fun ships to play). I’m going to try and get the hang of Furutaka and Kongo hopefully and grind past to the better stuff. Goal is to try and get to Tier 7 in both lines – the Nagato for battleships and Myoukou for cruisers. After that will see how I’m going, may not want to push through to the Yamato. Might try one of the other tech trees (Soviet destroyers and German cruisers will be in the game by then)
Elsa is taking longer then I anticipated.
So much longer.
Looks like sleep may not be happening for a while, so don’t expect me to make much sense at pax.
Have PAX pass. Woot.
Hey all, how was everyone’s long weekends?
On Sunday I finally placed in the top 16 bracket of a Smash Wii U tournament again after 5 months of drowning in pools *yay* (about 45 players total). Instantly got knocked out in round 1 and in losers round 1 after that haha, but whatever, still had fun. The top players in Sydney handicapped themselves by allowing only a single use for each character, which was interesting to watch unfold as panic sets in near the end when they have run out of good characters to use.
And on Monday I saw The Martian! Really cool movie, I liked that it was a total nerd-fest and really enjoyed the huge diversity in the characters (bla bla bla sjw bla bla bla). Really tense in some parts but also had nice moments where the crew/team on the ground are working together in harmony and gives a really good vibe. It felt sort of like an ad for NASA though, but I’m not going to be cynical about that.
Guess what.
You’re mad and I’m not!
It’s nearly Halloween.
Pfft. With this logic Christmas is only around the corner 😛
We’re knee-deep in Christmas party planning and leave planning and strategies for dealing with the departments’ Christmas requirements.
CHRISTMAS IS HERE. 🙁
Eww. You poor man.
I need to get some trick or treat candies for PAX
True.
Ha, that’d be just my luck. I bathed the dog on the weekend and Petbarn sent me a coupon for a free dog wash. I guess Chilli gets 2 baths this month instead! Plus she’ll get to make new friends at the pet store, she likes making friends hah.
Oh hey, it’s that time already.
First complaint about the house being too damn cold and to turn off the air conditioning already 😛
Worst house mates ever..
Yes. Yes I would be 😛
Eh, I could deal with the air con being on right now, it’s too warm >=[
Hey! You claim to like the heat and summer, you sweat like everyone else! No air-conditioning for you! You might as well like Winter!
Such a shame that the glorious reign of winter is coming to an end. Soon it will be blowflies, sweat and salad as far as the eye can see.
Nothing wrong with potato salad or coleslaw, hell even tomato & avocado with a nice balsamic dressing is pretty awesome. But yeah summer isn’t overly attractive otherwise.
I was the one doing the complaining!
These days that were like 34 degrees… honestly I remember that feeling much much hotter as a kid than it does now.
You’re a madman.
So World Of Warships was a bust. After the 5gb download I went to play and got an error right after hitting play, can’t even get into the game. Apparently its affecting quite a few people and some methods work and some don’t so Im trying the ol reliable uninstall/reinstall. Of course as soon as I go to uninstall it loads up a survey on qhy I’m unistalling, I click that im reinstalling click finish and get a 404 error which then caused the uninstaller to crash and my laptop to freeze because of it. Thanks other WoW you may have killed my laptop
Repost since nobody has responded!
@fled @grandmasterb-funk @liondrive @phoenix
More Perth TAYmeat ideas!
Last year, I tried to organise an Adventure World meat. Only Liondrive showed up. With Adventure World opening for a new season, I was planning to go anyway. May as well invite people.
Is anyone willing or able to come Saturday/Sunday, the weekend of October 10/11.
Confirmed no-shows: thecracks, platinum-urchin. Sorry you won’t be able to come. We’ll meat someday.
Hey!
Sorry, no-show number three reporting in. Super limited free time at the moment & Adventure World isn’t really my sort of thing.
Hey Phlanisbro!
I’d love to go again, but I’ve too much uni work to do 🙁
When uni is all wrapped up though we’ll have to go again! 😀
That sucks, I guess the meat is pretty much canceled at this point, if Phoenix and b-funk haven’t seen the message at this point, it’s pretty much too late. I’m just glad you respponded to be honest, I considered making a Twitter account and tweeting you purely to ensure you saw the meat plans.
/hope One of these days I’ll be able to get a Perth meat together! I’ve got to keep trying, I’ve got to make up for completely screwing up the The Court meat. /endhope
Hey Everyone.
I was hoping to Cosplay at Pax but it looks like that’s no longer happening. I have regressed quite a bit with my anxiety and am struggling to come with it. (I’m starving atm but too scared to eat and I struggled to sleep). I think I over stressed myself, and I need some help, but I’m not quite sure where to get it.
I got help at beyond blue. 24 hour counselling. I’m still having issues but I am doing a bit better.
@novacascade I’m enlisting help to make sure Elsa gets finished
Please try not to stress yourself over it Scree. You need to look after yourself first
I’m trying but I am struggling
Hope you’re doing ok Scree.
I guess if you can’t get it done by this year it just means yku have time to make it even more awesome for next \o/
I now have two unfinished cosplays for myself =P I’ll be okay. I just need to remind myself that working myself into the ground will cause more harm then good.
Perfectionism is the curse of the artist. It can be paralyzing. By moving forward, I’d say you’re doing better than most who give up. Good for you on doing something about it.
Yeah. I have @gorzilla on despair watch.
I will finish it. I will.
Any way I can help?
Ooh perhaps you could cosplay as the box disguise from metal gear solid and then you could be in a proper costume and also be safe in a box!
I could faint in the box and no one would know!
Ooh that’s a point! Maybe you could add some kind of dead mans switch that you have to press every 10 minutes or something and if it doesn’t register a press, it pops out a flag saying “Help, I’m unconscious, dead or just forgetful”
Or all of the above
… but what if you just want to take a nap?
You live in Footscray right? I’m sure you’ve got plenty of people for emotional support and whatever, but if you ever find yourself needing someone to hang out with while you’re going through a rough patch I’m rarely far away. It’s a bit of an awkward offer to make, I can’t stress enough that there isn’t even the slightest hint of a romantic intent behind this, but sometimes having someone to walk down the shops and grab a Big M with is really important. Hell, sometimes it helps just knowing you have the option if it ever came down to it.
That offer goes for any of you on this side of the city (or if any of you out of towners get overwhelmed with PAX). I can’t guarantee I’ll be free to help 24-7 but it doesn’t hurt to ask.
Thank you for the offer. I was actually in Footscray this morning. My doctor and psychologist’s is in Droop Street.
I’ll be okay as long as I keep pushing myself in the anxiety department
Fair enough, just keep it in mind if you find yourself in over your head. These things have a way of starting off small at 9PM then snowballing until it’s 1AM, you’re overwhelmed and all your friends are asleep.
I hassled Numbers as I knew he didn’t have to work
@negativezero good news! I got warships running after loading it in compatability mode and starting with the window minimized worked for some reason. Bad news is I can only play on WOW ASIA and wont give me the option to switch, any ideas?
For some crazy reason, they lock each client to a specific region. There’s a mod here to allow it to connect to all regions:
http://forum.worldofwarships.com/index.php?/topic/39023-mod-the-seekers-wows-region-changer-0501/
But it only works with the NA client 🙁 Technically the region for Australia is Asia, I picked NA because I’m not going to be in AU much longer.
Do you get decent ping playing on the NA servers from AUS?
I haven’t measured it but unless I’ve got a torrent going or something I’ve never seen much lag. One or two very minor blips. But I’ve got a pretty fast connection.
I suspect given the nature of the movement in the ships (can’t stop on the spot) client-side prediction works quite well and so lag isn’t as much of an issue. I’ve seen snapping occur maybe five times the entire time I’ve been playing it.
If you’re thinking about opening an NA account, it’s worth it to go here:
http://beta.cursevoice.com/games/warships
Sign up for it and download the client, and you’ll get a key you can use when singing up for a NA warships account that will give you 500 doubloons (premium currency), an extra ship slot an the Soviet Tier III cruiser Aurora. Unlike the other low-tier premium (Albany) it’s actually pretty good, very similar to the US Tier III St. Louis protected cruiser.
Unfortunately the Curse guys apparently have NFI how to run a promotion to get people to beta test their software, so that offer is for new Warships accounts only 🙁
Holy crap I think my phone just had a stroke
Yep definitely had an issue
Do you get decent ping playing on NA from AU?
Mornin, TAY!
My long weekend was actually super great.
Pootled around the EB Expo on Saturday, wearing my Pokemon hat. It was okay. About what you’d expect. Nothing groundbreakingly amazing but still fun enough. Always get that feeling of weirdness when around a big group of nerds you don’t know, though 😛 Got to play Xenoblade X, Fatal Frame and Yokai Watch though so I’m looking forward to them. Somewhat tempted to get the new Need For Speed game as well but I’ll wait for reviews. I liked Underground back in the day and this looks kinda similar.
Went and saw The Martian on Sunday. Pretty good! Though for some reason the people behind us brought a bunch of very young kids along. Still, I liked it (though I still prefer Gravity :P)
And on Monday I went to the Jazz Festival at Manly beach, which was fantastic. They closed some roads and have a bunch of stages set up in the main strip and along the beach. Heaps of stuff going on. Easy to find a close seat as well because nobody wanted to sit in the sun (they were all huddled under trees and such way away :P). I ended up just staying at the same stage for most of the day and just watching whatever came on. Also on the smaller stages they carted out the high school bands who were disgustingly talented it made me want to punch them and steal their ice cream. But yeah, definitely going again next year.
Oh, and because it’s October I spent some time yesterday making my new Halloween avatar. So far I’ve done: zombie caterpie (for two years, I think), ghost caterpie, witch caterpie and now devil caterpie. What will it be next year…
Sexy
sluttycaterpie?Oh my god it’s actually a thing
http://orig07.deviantart.net/64cd/f/2011/252/4/b/caterpie_cutie_by_nickyflamingo-d49e5ow.jpg
Oh, that is just concept art for Pow’s PAX gym leader outfit
I’m afraid to click that link at work…
I’m with you. Not clicking while at work.
A wise decision. Nothing too bad, hand drawn, anthropomorphic caterpie with no nudity but pretty much what it says in the link.
This is an idea. Remind me next September.
:/
Well it seems my SSD is now on its way out. I’ve been having an issue where the PC won’t move past the motherboard splash screen/let me into the bios etc. My trouble shooting would point to the SSD since it still did it with the disk drive & both mechanical drives unplugged. God damn it. But eh, at least a decent replacement SSD is cheap, with the Samsung 850 EVO 240gb drives being $145 atm and both Intel 535 & Kingston Hyper X 240gb drives at $160. So that’s okay I guess. I can even just clone the current drive onto the new one so yeah.
I’ve started painting my Pip Boy! Hopefully I should have it all painted up by next week, which gives me time to work on some ancillary props- think I’m going to make some Nuka Cola bottlecaps, but anyone got any ideas for classic Fallout items you think would be funny?
Baseball, nuka cola truck, race car, teddy bear, billiard balls
No, my megaton house wasn’t filled with those items, why would you suggest such a thing.
Dinky the T-Rex Souvenir
Make a bunch, and then try to sell them to people for way too many caps.
Keep them behind a door, lock skill 100.
Ooh I should get bobby pins
“Painting my Pip Boy” sounds like it could be a great euphemism.
Yeah, just need to get in there and give it a spray and a brush stroke before finishing.
Open up Facebook.
Father-in-law is sharing a bunch of posts from a British neonazi skinhead group.
Nope.
Nope nope nope.
Nope nope nope nope nope nope.
No more Facebook today.
I’m out.
But has he seen kyle?
I feel so dirty for that “joke” now..
US Streetpass Adventures II: The End
The last stretch of my trip had the best and worst of US streetpassing:
– Grand Canyon: 1 hit!! What’s more, the guy was from NSW!! And yes, I took my 3DS to the Grand Canyon. What of it?
– Las Vegas: 2 hits across 3 days. Booo.
– Los Angeles & LAX: 0 hits across 4 days. BOOOOOOOO!
And now I’m home (or, more accurately, back at work). Trip was pretty good. Streetpassing was pretty terrible. 27 in total across 18 days. Lift your game, America!
Man, that’s a lot less than I expected. Pretty sure I used to get more than that just taking it to and from work 😛
On the plus side you managed to get the 3DS home and actually use the streetpasses.
Everything’s coming up Batguy!
Sydney people!
@35 @alexpants @anonymous_pessimist @batgirl @batguy @cakesmith @cffndncr @cj @cookingmama @dkzeitgeist @doc_what @effluvium-boy @fatshadylive @gingerchris86 @gorzilla @harli @hugo_the_hungarian_barbarian @mawt @morkai @markserrels @mrtaco @novacascade @powalen @pupp3tmast3r @ruffleberg @shiggyninty @alexwalker @trjn @freya @blaghman @bdkiaf @rize @shaneSunday October 11th from Midday
Pontoon Bar, Darling Harbour (www.pontoonbar.com) (tables for 20 booked)
No need to RSVP, and all welcome including partners and kidlets
Excite!
I’ll be there
I’m actually considering showing up and sitting awkwardly in a corner =O
Awkward is ok! We understand awkward around here. Come and eat lunch, they do good burgers.
What’s going on? I’m confuse.
The sydney taybies are having a get together on the same weekend that the brisbane taybies are going to Oktoberfest. It’s just a bunch of people having lunch and drinks at pontoon, come along if you want.
I’ll see what I’m doing!
Does that mean you’ll also be sitting awkwardly in a corner at Pontoon but with a mirror?
In Pontoon? Bugger that. If I got lonely I’d just wander somewhere cheaper =p
Wait @rize and @shane are in Sydney?! Since when?!
No, I just extended the invite to canberra peeps in case they wanted to come up and join us.
Oh man, so early 😛
What time start?
Oh it says midday right there, good reading CJ.
Me and Patience will be there!
Hello friends!
So…. my bro, best mate and i have started a Podcast… You can find us on itunes under “Syndicate of gamers” (the colourfull logo 🙂 )
so yeah its a learning experience, we recorded our first episode over the weekend, and yeah it came out sounding poorly scripted, followed by bad jokes, puns, getting tongue tied and forgetting what to say, the works. we didnt even pre plan our topics.
we’ve obviously learned that the best part of the podcast where the ones that were completely unscripted and just came across as a normal conversation. so yeah, we basically need to do the opposite of what we did… no pre-planned or scripted notes, just say things as they come, and improvisation is key. obvious exception with pre planning is actually lining up topics of discussion.
also the recording came out a bit echoy and the pitch of my voice is off (damn flu). we actually have pretty decent equipment, including studio condenser mics, and a decent mixer. the echos are a result of a big empty room we are using for recording… im trying to think of a cheap solution to that, working on something home made. would appreciate any ideas in that department.
if you are still curious and want to check it out, we are on itunes under “Syndicate of Gamers”
What.
http://pedestrian.tv/news/entertainment/stephanie-meyer-releases-gender-swapped-twilight-f/f853422b-49a0-4a7d-bc79-0a79ecbce893.htm
Yeah..nah
Well it was fan-fic originally anyway, so the underlying principle is pretty much the same.
Probably feels like getting back to her roots, I’m sure it’s been an enjoyable exercise.
And hey, it’s been ten years, with all that practice maybe she’s learned how to write! 😀
why change the method that’s made millions for her at least? *places pinky finger next to my lips*
Transientmind bringing the shade!
Step 1: Ctrl + F, hit the find and replace Male name -> Female Name
Step 2: Ctrl + F, hit the find and replace Female name -> Male Name
Step 3: Profit.
That actually sounds more worthy of an anime plot when you think about it… vampire girl and wolf girl 😛
I really prefer Jim Butcher’s vampires and werewolves.
Seriously starting to consider an AMD card for my next GPU upgrade. I never thought I’d go back after my 6970 Crossfire issues (and my painless switch to 580s in SLI) but seeing that a single Fury-X would have no Crossfire, and officially support my 5760×1600 Portrait-Landscape-Portrait monitor setup with Eyefinity (something Nvidia have yet to accomplish in NVidia Surround) … This might finally knock the 980TI off my radar.
It’s been years since I’ve used an AMD card, and anecdotally support / drivers seem to be better with the new hardware. Anybody using a recent card / have experience with them these days?
Nvidia is still miles ahead with drivers/updates. I can’t offer an unbiased comparison regarding any other factor though.
As a completely biased answer, if you get a 980Ti I hear it comes with a free backrub and you’ll also be made president of the world.
I guess when I’m looking at things from a driver perspective it’s from an “I haven’t played a new title at launch in so long I’ve forgotten what that’s like.” – Fallout 4 will be the exception to that rule, and that will actually probably be the point I plonk down for a new card. I’ve got a feeling my old ones just won’t cut it.
But a free backrub AND president of the world? You make a compelling case.
Seriously, if NVidia could just get off their butts and get “mixed resolution / orientation” support implemented in NVidia surround, it wouldn’t even be a question. Legitimately shocked that AMD beat them to the punch on that one.
I occasionally get a long, sweary rant sent from my brother about how horrible his AMD card is and how many games are very poorly optimised for them.
So what you’re saying is if I get an AMD card I can send you long, sweary rants? (My bad. I read that as long, sweaty rants and had an entirely different picture in my head.)
It was originally thanks to autocorrect.
I’m glad to see your phone and I have the same sick senses of humour.
I’m so not plugged into the hardware circuit. Hell, all I’ve heard is that in terms of developer support/game optimization, AMD has been NVidia’s bitch for the last ten years, but that DirectXwhateverwe’reuptonow, Win10, and AMD’s latest hardware etc are reversing those roles.
This is essentially my level of reading up on things.
I have a R9 270 (?) in a computer I built last Christmas.
Performance is great, but good lord, their driver updates are awfully slow.
A month after GTA5 has released and nothing, so I gave up checking. But hey, by the time Arkham Knight rolled around they were out, so woo! GTA5 also looks gorgeous.
im using a GTX 970 G1 Gaming edition… love the driver support…. dont know why but i also find that vendors put more focus on firmware updates for their cards that use nvidia chipsets rather than amd
I can’t convent from a user side, but I do do a lot of reading, so: The FuryX is a competitive card at high resolutions (which you’ll be using), where the 980ti will edge it out somewhere around 60% of the time, though differences are typically fairly minor. While mostly irrelevant, the gen in me is happy that its high speed RAM seems to actually work, and hopefully it’ll have a bigger pickup in the next series of cards from both vendors.
Other good news is that it’s also not so bad on the power consumption mark, at least compared to big green, only sitting about 30 watts over the 980ti.
Its biggest two weaknesses are that it only has 4 gigs of RAM, which can cause issues at high resolution, and with some games (AssCreed Unity has stuttering at that level that you don’t see in higher RAM cards, for instance). Its other problem, relatively speaking, is that it has virtually no OC potential, where the 780ti still has a bit of room.
And yeah, AMDs software team is still slow as balls.
So: Overall a slightly weaker card, peace of mind for resolution support may outweigh any advantages for the green team. Also, it’s not like you’ll actually need a competitive card to run Fallout decently.
Also not sure if AMD has addressed it properly, but a few of the reviewers complained about coil whine from the pump when it first came out. Which I sort of get, the pumps are cheap and if they put something better in they’d have to up the price etc.. But still when you’re paying over a grand for a graphics card you expect better imo.
My last AMD experience was with a 4870HD. The only game this seemed to run on without issues was Starcraft 2, every other game I had – including the original old Neverwinter Nights – suffered massive FPS drops for very trivial reasons, also caused major graphics… I guess I’ll call them mutations, e.g tree leaves that fell from trees became basketball-sized squares, same with chimney smoke, and any advanced water effects for its time never worked, the surface of the water was flat and constantly flickering.
So yeah… never again, was a horrendous waste of my money.
Has anyone here played Elder Scrolls Online with the new version? I’m kind of considering it since I’m bored and I’ve been enjoying Skyrim quite a lot. Also it’s only $35 on ozgameshop, being that cheap doesn’t hurt. I watched a video of it and it looks fairly good, not quite as good as Skyrim but not as bad as WoW.
Is it the kind of game that’s good beyond a few days or does it kind of peter out & get samey rather rapidly?
I hated it on beta/launch.
A cut-price Skyrim with no mods, shittier graphics, less play-style freedom (you’re locked into classes pretty early on and there are definitely ‘good’ and ‘bad’ builds), fewer interactive objects and impenetrable crafting, contrived factions, inexplicable trade restrictions, horrible combat hamstrung by non-US lag and MMO-targeting (hint: if you have a shield, you can’t actually block ALL the attacks – only the ones which are broadcasted ‘special’ attacks with a telegraphed red pain zone – so basically think WoW-style stand and wail on each other until the one moment when you change it up), 10-30second respawning mobs, dungeons which weren’t so much ‘explored’ as passed-through by a parade of bunny-hopping chosen-one-clones with shitty names.
It was shitty at both being Skyrim AND an MMO.
But after giving it a go when there was a free trial on after their big world-improvement (justice system allowing thievery) update, I was a lot more kindly-disposed to it. It’s still ‘not great’, but there’s an OK MMO under there.
Do NOT go in thinking about Skyrim. It doesn’t – can’t – compare. But as far as MMOs go, it’s not too bad.
I have not heard anyone say anything good yet about ESO.
My brother in law is obsessed with it. He’s never played a MMO game before but loves Skyrim. He mostly goes it alone, but has had fun temporarily teaming up with people. He’s having a blast and doesn’t want to play anything else.
And now I have.
My third monitor arrived for real this time! 😀
And I bought a Driving Force Gated Shifter, and an adapter for USB! \o/
are you building a racing sim? sound sweet!
Well, sort of.
I’m still stuck with the crappy stock DFGT pedals for now.
I’ll think about getting a three-pedal set that connects to USB in the future.
So tired. I’m not allowed coffee anymore.
you’re working on cosplay arent you?!?
Yes, but I also have not had much sleep
also on the topic of caffeine and tiredness, back in the ol days where we used to run excessively long lans, some friends and i found a store that sold JOLT Cola, and was clearing out their stock. the stuff came in boxes of 24, and these were special editions of 750ml bottles. once we noticed the 2 year expiration date we chipped in and bought a pellet of the stuff and hired a ute to take it 🙂
and holy crap that stuff had a kick…
I really miss the Cyberroom, a netcafe that was up some stairs on Adelaide St in the BrisCBD.
An enormous and dimly-lit layout with a ridiculously extensive library of games, sheltered booths, very respectable peripherals, moderate to high end gaming rigs, monitors with pop music, events, luxurious couches to peace out on and a few separate quiet/chillout rooms. And very generous bulk rates that made entire-day sessions financially viable.
They were the only place that I knew of that stocked Jolt cola.
Whenever life had handed me a shit salad, I would retreat to there to go play new titles I’d never heard of before or some mindless public lobby multi-player title, forming impromptu friendships with the regulars and forgetting the world outside. Bottles of Jolt and bags of Smiths chips were integral to the process.
It was a much healthier alternative to drinking my sorrows away in a dark bar, and open 24/7. RIP Cyberroom and its supply of Jolt cola.
Ah missed that one! I used to play at the one at the end of Queen Street – it was downstairs so had more of that gaming dungeon vibe. There was also pool there, which was good for a break from all-day sessions.
They did overnight lock-ins on weekends… I remember being super-excited when I came back to Bris on holiday and was planning on finally doing one, and finding that the whole place had shut down – little bit disappointing.
There’s one in the Valley that I went to last time I was up… Elysium or something like that? It seemed alrite.
The Bunker, right?
I used to go there a lot on uni breaks. Good value for a uni student.
Nah Bunker was further up, I think it was upstairs somewhere? The one I’m thinking of was right up the Casino end, it was called Cyber-something. Cyberlounge, maybe? Last time I was in Brisneyland they still had the sign up, it was next to… I want to say ValleyGirl.
The Bunker was right up the casino end and downstairs from street level.
Well what do you know… google reckons that both the Cyberlounge and Bunker were down the same end of Queen St.
And that, kids, is how your parents developed lifelong heart problems.
Seriously though, I remember in college just before Mother did that whole brand reboot thing – the Coles down the road was literally just giving away cases of the stuff because they couldn’t shift it. I think I ended up with like 50 cans of the stuff…. and I could see noises.
That rebrand was certainly interesting. To first fuck up that much and then to rebrand admitting you’d fucked up was gutsy, rather than just letting it die then launching with a new name.
I know right! That was probably my favourite ad campaign at the time (I was studying some marketing so it made it more interesting as well). I guess the logic was that it’d be easier to pique someone’s interest to re-try it after the relaunch than convincing them to try a new drink with 0 brand recognition, but still a pretty big gamble. I actually don’t mind the taste of Mother now so I guess it worked out for them.
And then the original beating up scientists ad was deemed to violent, so they brought out that stick figure one.
Super sharp campaign.
Wait, what? I never saw the stick-figure one, but loved the scientist-getting-brutalized ones.
Ayup. Complaint: https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=2&ved=0CCIQFjABahUKEwjfiNmrtK_IAhXi4KYKHbuXBrg&url=https%3A%2F%2Fadstandards.com.au%2Fcases%2F2008%2FOctober%3Fref%3D375%2F08&usg=AFQjCNEiEn4f-EIqAhx4KfjgB_dd0GT0zA&sig2=WgzZ-NWSRoT3kXLcUK6sQw&bvm=bv.104317490,d.dGY&cad=rja
Stick figures: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dNvnlUK2nDE
I still have a photo on my phone that my middle brother sent me of the first new Mother can, with emblazoned all over it: “TASTES NOTHING LIKE THE OLD VERSION!”
We actually wrote and drew an (as-yet unpublished) webcomic entry about it.
“This new energy drink tastes like sherbet.”
“ALL energy drinks taste like sherbet. Except Mother. Mother tastes like ass.”
“You know, I’ve never tried it…”
“Mother? …Or ass?”
*stare at each other awkwardly*
I miss LAN parties 🙁
I still try to head to a lan with a friend once a month or so. We both play together from home pretty regularly, but there’s something about being able to yell at people in the same room that is just great.
The friendly trash talking among friends at a LAN party makes it way more exciting, not to mention satisfying when you wreck them so bad they shut up immediately after it happens 😛
One of my fondest LAN memories was playing BF1942 with randoms in a fully-packed Cyberroom, speakers blaring with gunfire and explosions. I was in a plane, and after finishing up a dogfight with the only other aerial player, was doing a patrol pass around the battlefield to look for something to spend the last of my ammo on before heading back to refuel, repair, and rearm.
An enemy tank was pounding away – close range – at a small group of infantry that were tenuously contesting a control point, all ducked and huddled in hiding from the brutal main gun and machinegun. The troops were tossing what few grenades they had in the vain hope that they could move the metal monstrosity without someone having to suicide and run back from the nearest very-far-away respawn point with a rocket launcher, but it looked like they’d run out and were facing a stalemate.
They’d probably had an impact with their grenade efforts so far because when I swooped in low and fast, it only took one bombing run to destroy the tank. I heard my own plane’s engines and the tank’s explosion boom over half a dozen speakers over on one side of the room, and a huge cheer went up from the players who were obviously in that squad.
I do miss local LAN games. There was an internet cafe in indooroopilly a few years back that used to run a weekly Dota 1 night – it was great. A bunch of regular players, lots of trash talking, there was a bottle-o next door and the guys didn’t mind us bringing in beers.
So I wasn’t great at the game then, despite playing a fair bit. I went away to do an internship overseas for 3 months, and practiced nearly every day. 3 months later, and I was much better at the game. I prepared to return and stomp faces… to discover that the manager had been embezzling money and the entire business had gone under while I was away. Sad times.
http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2015/10/06/cyberpunk-2077-release/
““Cyberpunk is far bigger than anything else that CD Projekt Red has done before,” he claims. “Far, far bigger.””
So it’s way bigger than The Witcher 3? That game sucked up like 100+ hours from me. Jesus.
[anticipation intensifies]
“Set in a 1:1 recreation of what Night City would be, featuring over 2 million unique citizens, and the ability to murder all of them for… what’s the money in Cyberpunk called? Creds? Whatever. With a real time day & night cycle, and featuring an expansion of our beard growth system that lets you watch as over the real years your character ages and dies. Cyberpunk: Fuck the Bekenstein Bound.”
But will you be able to hack boobs.
It’s CD Projekt and you’re asking about boobs. What do you think?
Ah right.
Actual conversation blaghs and I were having today re Shadowrun, where apparently it’s a thing. Which is a) hilarious and b) kinda sleazyYeah but that’s Shadowrun. Shadowrun also has stupid shit like fucking Elves with the most weak of justifications for it. IIRC Cyberpunk 2020 (it’s been a long time since I looked at either setting so they blur together a lot) is a lot more William Gibson/Blade Runner-inspired and properly Cyberpunky IMO. More focused on Zaibatsu and Megacorps and stuff. Always felt more anime Cyberpunk where Shadowrun was more like D&D-meets-dystopian-future.
Shadowrun has a perfectly fine explanation for Elves and shit: Magic and shit.
Why did this happen? Magic.
Who made this happen? A Dragon did it.
Who are the biggest arseholes in the universe? See Dragons, again.
Why are Dragons such big fucknuts? Fuck Dragons, that’s why.
I hate Dragons. I’ve never even encountered one in my Shadowrun group, and I hate them so much.
The actual reason involves some stupid thing about radiation from Halley’s Comet.
@negativezero
Nah, Halley’s Comet did a bit of stuff, but is mostly irrelevant, from what I understand (it caused more magicy stuff to happen). The awakening was just part of the natural cycle of mana, and became more or less visible in 2011. Lots of mana returned, metahumans appeared, and weird magic shit happened some more.
@blaghman: Things might have changed since I bothered looking at Shadowrun (I had friends that were into it but it always was like “Well this sounds like really interesting cyberpu–wait, Orcs? What?” for me) but I distinctly remember some of the races being caused by radiation from Halley’s Comet and thinking that sounded utterly fucking ludicrous. The rest of it was some bullshit involving the Mayan Long Count and magic and stuff. Fuck Shadowrun so much. I wanted to like it but that stuff always ruined it for me. What’s the point of having one of the few interesting near-future Cyberpunk settings if you’re just going to ass it up with dumbass magic?
It’d be okay if it was a setting where you spent a lot of time diving into online worlds that had their own rules or whatever, and the magic and cyber orks and shit was kept to there as appropriate (think Otherland, or perhaps Sword Art Online). I mean, that’s arguably what The Strange is. But not as part of the core setting.
I am in love with this game already.
The good news for you, Mr Don’t Buy Any Games, is that they’ve been indicating it’s probably a 2017 or even 2018 release.
So apparently I’m allowed to share this news now.
It’sAGirl.jpg
More kids? Your mini army sounds like it is coming along well.
JPEGs are gendered (sex-typed?)? I didn’t know you could have girl jpgs and boy jpgs.
They can be whatever they want. Stop labelling everything, you fascist.
Exactly what I said
Congratulations!
You’d probably get a lot more writing done if you could keep it in your pants for any length of time.
In other news, I’m thinking about junking TyranoBuilder and moving onto another game engine for my game-in-progress. Possibly Unity – it has all the export options I could possibly want. On the other hand, I know nothing about anything Unity, so it’s going to take quite a bit of work to get it right.
Whee! Learning curves.
I’ve been meaning to learn Unity myself for a while. I think the downside to porting to Unity is you’ll have to do a lot of it yourself, and that’ll probably require learning C#. Which is a very useful skill but programming isn’t easy.
I was always of the impression that if I wanted to make a visual novel, I’d probably write my own engine rather than use one of the commercially available ones. But I prefer to do everything myself and then never get anything done. 😛
Is your issue just the lack of export targets? IIRC TyranoBuilder is just MacOS and Windows. You could look at Ren’Py, which can run in Linux and Android and has an iOS version in development I think?
TB is also pretty unstable, and doesn’t have a whole lot of debugging options when things go wrong.
To be absolutely honest, it’s the export-to-consoles options that have me most interested. Both Wii-U and PS development partnerships push towards Unity. So if I ever wanted to go further in that direction, Unity is pretty much a mandatory stop along the way.
Yeah, Unity is good for that. It’s looked like Sekai Project were doing Unity ports for a lot of the visual novels they work on.
I’s expect that an engine running in Unity could be just as unstable as TB, honestly. The big benefits would be that you can fix any actual bugs in the source, add your own features if they’re a priority for you (eg say you really need to control the music volume, or you have a specific animation or video format you want to play) and you can choose the script language that makes most sense for you.
I wonder what the legal side of things is for building a freely available Visual Novel engine in Unity. Might be something to investigate for me, I’ve been wanting a personal coding project for a bit.
So it turns out there’s a gap between where Fairy Tale on Netflix (where I’ve been watching it) finishes, and where it starts on Crunchyroll (the only other legit means I have of watching it). Hugely so. Apparently Netflix only has season One, but Crunchyroll begins five seasons later (despite calling it Series 2). So confusing! This is why I have a love/hate relationship with anime. 😛
Last night when I went to watch it and discovered the gap I started watching Hunter x Hunter instead. It’s so far fitting the bill of being something lightweight I can easily watch to wind down at the end of the day.
The US ‘season’ breakdown confuses the crap out of me. Crunchyroll lists it correctly. Fairy Tail has two series, each is a single ‘season’. The first series ran 175 episodes from October 2008 through Match 2013. the second started April 2014 and is currently running. The ‘seasons’ that the first series has been divided up into for the western release are complete nonsense that don’t reflect the Japanese schedule at all, just divided into arbitrary chunks so that Funimation can sell ‘season collections’ on DVD. They don’t follow plot arcs or anything.
Japan doesn’t do seasons per se, not for long-running series. If it has to take a break or anything, the continuation is considered a new series, which is the case for Fairy Tail (there was a year’s hiatus). Japanese TV is produced in cours, 13-week blocks, so TV anime is generally 12-13, 24-26 or 50-52 episodes depending on various factors like start times and whether they need to skip a week or two for some reason. Crunchyroll’s way of listing stuff can be frustrating too, though. Split-cour shows (where the one series is multiple cour but there’s gaps between) often have different names per cour as they are considered separate series, but CR munges them together and starts numbering them as if they’re part of the same season. See Unlimited Blade Works for an example – season 2 ep 1 is episode 14 on CR. It’s very annoying if you’re anal about it like me. 😛
Also Crunchyroll has been streaming it from the beginning.
I know because I have rips of all 250 or so episodes from them. Presumably at some point when Funimation licensed the show they must have blocked dirty Australians from accessing the first series? That’d be pretty typical for them, Funimation are assholes.I’d suggest Animelab but I doubt they’re streaming that much of it yet. Madman kind of have a conflict of interest with Animelab. If they put up too much of their cash-cow shows for streaming they run the risk that no one buys the releases. :\
So uh…
https://www.animelab.com/shows/fairy-tail
It’s all on Animelab. Eps 1 through 253. Huh.
Oh awesome. Thanks! I didn’t even think to look there yet.
Real Talk (As opposed to fake talk, which is whenever I open my mouth in public):
Ori and the Blind Forest is the biz.
Super biz. Ultra biz? No, that’s too far. Super biz.
It’s damn pretty, for a start, but it is a wonderful platformer. It plays a bit like Rayman, except way way tighter. Except that it manages to have forgiving controls in some areas, while still being super tight in others (there’s this move you do where you can latch onto an object/projectile/enemy and fling yourself in one direction and them in the other, and there’s a wide area to actually grab on, but then you need to accurately choose a direction in about 2 seconds before launching). Did I mention that it looks great? Because it does.
And it’s rad.
And when I first saw a video of it I assumed that it would play like arse, but it may well be the best metroidvania I’ve ever played. I keep doing things that seem like a good idea (read: is a horribly stupid idea, but fun), and it keeps rewarding me for it. It’s glorious.
Go play it. Or don’t, I’m a post, not a cop.
Also, also, Destiny:
So like, I’ve become like, super like, deep into like, the Sleeper Simulant theories. Like.
But that’s mostly irrelevant, because the main thing here is that it’s nice that there’s so much more to do in Destiny than just shoot things.
For instance, the daily Heroic mission as of right now has a secret area that you can get to (rewards for it are crap, but it’s totally worth it), but to do so you have to not have a team wipe, plus you need to go through some secret areas in the mission, finding these hidden little things, do a variant on an old jumping puzzle that’s noticeably tougher, and then fight a dickhead of a bullet sponge boss who has way too much health. But it’s just fun to do this stuff. Loving this crap.
Games are good, peeps. Games are good.
Woah woah woah. Another secret mission?
Damn, gotta look that one up for next time.
Two more hours! Tried it this morning without properly reading the whole explanation of what needed to be done. Wasted half an hour.
Basically a legit way to get the Cult Ghost without glitching into the last area, which may or may not unlock a quest down the line when Bungie decides we’re worthy. Annoying part is, if you die, or miss a ghost, you have to go back and recollect them from the start… which, in the VoG, basically means restarting the mission… or, time to finally learn the path back from the Templar well. 😛Gonna try again tonight.
Yeah, it’s way easier in a team, since you just have to not wipe. Which was good, since Cake and I had 25 deaths between us.
It’s amazing what can happen to an MMO when you give the directorial reigns to someone that’s actually played an MMO.
It was mad fun. I love anything to do with the Vault of Glass.
Uncharted collection, why you so great? 🙂
I had a nap.
I woke up in a panic.
Went into the lounge room in the middle of the attack.
I seem to have gone from the panic being a 7 to a 5.
I didn’t stop panicking earlier today until 11 am.
I spent 12 hours at a heightened sense of anxiousness.
Thank you for listening to me rant. It helps somewhat.
Of course it’s a page get
Thumbs up for page-gets and helping somewhat!
i don’t think page get is a positive
Hope your alright now scree, deep breathes and drink plenty of water.
Deep breathing actually sets my heart off by association. It’s so stupid.
Really? Ok smooth moderste breathing while thinking of puppies
I used a form of meditation. As you do deep breathing you think of numbers and only numbers. If you think of anything else, you have to start again.
Numbers like counting? or @lucifer9783 numbers 🙂
Actual counting numbers, for once.
Currently trawling TAY for new posts instead of working on a presentation deck that my boss needs finalized tonight.
I think I have a problem.
And that problem is clearly an unreasonably demanding boss. You should not work on your presentation as a protest.
Sir if I ever want advice on getting fired, I shall come to you immediately.
Have you heard about Pax meat?
I was invited to a meat-up (which sounds both dirty and awesome) in Sydney this weekend… unfortunately my parents are here for this weekend only, so won’t be able to make it.
Pax meat up is for all the taybies who aare going to pax
Oh right! That would explain the PAX bit.
Unfortunately I’m too broke to go to PAX this year (or possibly ever)
It’s a common story
As I was mentioning to @highperformance today.
If any Destiny players are looking for other peeps to play with:
https://www.the100.io/groups/382
Alpha Company 85! An essentially random but active bunch of players looking for group.
Highly recommend it, easy to find players to do everything from the daily story to the Raid.
So… how about a 5 and half hour meeting to suck up an entire day?
Also wedding anniversary on Saturday! Need to find some time in the next 48 hours to finish the gift.
Same wedding anniversary! We’re up to number 6, Iron Anniversary. So we’re visiting War Sword on Saturday to buy each other gifts. 😀
Edit: Just noticed you said “finish the gift”. Are you making something?
5th this year!
So wood – managed to track down a wooden covered photo album – so grabbing 1 or 2 photos from each year and will leave the rest of the pages blank for everything that’s coming.
Hardest part is sifting through thousands of photos to find ones…
We just had our 11th, we’re now into the “nothing interesting until 15” stage.
Hey gang,
I’m phoneless for a while. My phone has decided to permanently hang at the boot screen.
Looking for recommendations for a replacement. I have about $200-230 I can spare for this, which is just about enough to get a second-hand Galaxy S4 off eBay. Any other recommendations for phones at about this level?
I’m not too fussy (edit: this is only a half-truth, as I don’t really want to drink the Apple Koolaid). My last phone couldn’t run Facebook or Netflix and took thirty seconds to load the camera app, so just about anything is going to feel like an upgrade. Still, might as well shoot for the best bang for my buck.
Anyone looking to offload a phone at about this level for about this price?
If you’re even wanting to go brand new, i’ve heard good things about the Lumia 535, my friend got one as a backup phone for when her iPhone had to be sent away for repair. Couldn’t find a real negative thing about it. They start around the $120 area it seems. I’ve been contemplating getting one as a backup for when mine finally shits itself.
Yeah. I get my parents Lumias. They’ve got some nice cheap models that are pretty good. If you’re big on apps the Windows Store doesn’t get a lot of love (it has all the generic apps covered, but it’s usually overlooked when you need something specific). Other than that they’re reliable and pretty durable. Not a huge list of reasons to go with one over an Android phone but no reason to dismiss them completely.
[Edit: That said, you can’t really go wrong with a Samsung Galaxy. I’m not an Android fan but that’s just personal preference. The only phone I think is a mistake is an iPhone. Even if you’re all Apple they’re not great.]
I have the same Nokia Lumia and I haven’t really had an issue with it. However, it is a low ram phone and I’ve found that mine will cut out on certain websites to prevent it from going into a non-responsive state. I would like to upgrade to another lumia in the future. Just remember that they are transitioning the brand from Nokia Lumia to Windows Lumia
Thanks, man. In my mind, ‘brand new’ is code for ‘unaffordable,’ but I can’t find a dictionary that backs that up.
Haha, I hear ya there man. But at least some new phones are in your price range that are also decent 😛
I have an old iphone 4S granted I dunno if it works and if it does work its locked to vodafone which could also be an issue, if you want I can give it a charge and see if it works
Thanks, man, but I’m not really big on Apple products anymore. Been bitten once too many times, I’m afraid. Cheers, though.
You can have my iPhone 5 for free if you want. Screen is a bit loose and it needs a new sim tray.
Edit, upon inspection the headphone jack is also buggered and I seem to remember the camera not focusing. You, uh, may want to ignore this offer.
You lost me at iPhone anyway. 😛
Thanks, though!
Only now I see that you are a heathen and a heretic against the cult of Jobs.
I have a Nexus 4 and it’s great.
I’m looking into these now – looks like a winner in terms of price and specs! Thanks!
The major benefit is that it’s clean android – no samsung bloatware.
I got a 4S I might be able to offload.
Only thing wrong with it is a dicky lock button. Upgrading the OS might make that flaw irrelevant for most things though. I’ll resurrect it on the weekend and see how it stands.
Lol, dicky lock button.
I’m an adult.
Uh. On a interesting Destiny Quest.
Possibly Sleeper Simulant.
0.0
Deets! Dont tease!
Nah, more fun to do it yourself 🙂
The quest appeared at reset yesterday on Earth to investigate a mysterious signal.
There is a bunch of steps but leads to waiting on Banshee, probably till next Armsday, so you have all week.
Actually, Bungie confirmed that it’s just available for today… and will be available again at some unspecified point in the future. Not sure if they meant just the first mission, or the whole sequence, but I’d guess just the first mission that kicks things off.
Extreme spoilers for that quest below.
Incidentally, it was a huge letdown. What lore reason could there possibly be for the spawn order of Oryx’s forces being the passcode to Rasputin’s transmission? It makes no sense. /minirantYeah, that was a bit random. But I just googled it in the end anyway. It’s is not a hugely loreific little quest chain, but cool for something different.100% spoilers for the quest mentioned.
You need to have collected all the fusion rifle relics first. The questline ultimately leads to a dead end, most likely timegated. Full details here https://www.reddit.com/r/DestinyTheGame/comments/3nti72/the_first_firewall_quest_available/I’m a big transformers fan, but Devastation isn’t great. It’s not terrible but it’s very b-tier. I only got it because I can play as Wheeljack (best character)
I am going to have dinner on friday with a girl who loves CHRVCHES. I havent dated in a long time. I am so terrified.
My plane gets in at 9pm so make sure you’ve vomited on her by then so we can go get a beer.
A THURSDAY TAYDRENALIN SHOT
What tactile piece of video game stuff is your favourite? your favourite merch, cosplay item, shelf thing?
I miss mine, because it fell off my keys, but I used to have a Nathan Drake Sackboy keyring. it was awesome
My Eevee plushie, it’s so darn cute and cuddly
My personal favourite is a Dark Souls standalone bonfire made by this dude: https://www.facebook.com/PeterNordstromOriginalStatues
I also quite liked Drake’s ring that came with the Uncharted 3 collector’s edition, but I ended up auctioning it on eBay (and got back more than I paid for it).
My 3d printed vaporeon. It looks like dogshit but has pride of place on my desk.
I do love my Homeworld mothership statue.
Although I used to have a hand-knitted katamari. Lost through a “separation” move. I miss it.
Probably my Halo energy sword, made of metal with an oil slick kinda finish.
Which reminds me, I should hang that on my wall.
I don’t have many because they’re usually pretty cheap and tacky, but I am fond of some cloth game maps (Ultima, Oblivion) and a physical Septim coin.
OOH second favourite: the Plush creeper I made, Silasssssssssssss
before Minecraft was the thing it is now.
Soundtracks are a pretty cool guy. I’ve acquired a few thanks to Club Nintendo.
Hmm… not sure. From a practicality standpoint, my Murder of Crows keychain from the Bioshock Infinite CE has seen a lot of use. And Bungie make good shirts. From a pure cool factor, my Molalg Bal statue would probably be up there. As would my Bioshock 2 OST vinyl that I may get to listen to at some point. 😛
I picked up that Bioshock 2 CE months later, it was an awesome package. I ended up framing those 3 art prints to decorate my workspace, they were so cool.
My limited edition statues that I keep in their boxes.
Equal winners between a 10th anniversary plushie Pikachu from the Pokemon Centre in Tokyo, and the plushie companion cube.
Hmm. Maybe my Luigi Tube? A friend gave it to me as a 21st present, we were all sufficiently weirded-out by it. But it’s pretty cool I guess.
Otherwise I really like the die-cast Gottlieb G logo that sits below the plunger on my pinball machine, and would really like it as a keyring. Maybe someday I’ll get around to having something done about that.
As for favourite self-made thing, my House of the Dead: Overkill soundtrack. I think it’s one of the few things I didn’t actually make for a competition or anything of the sort, just because I loved the game so much and thought it’d be a cool thing to have. Sega America actually asked if they I would like to send it in for them to keep on display in their office, but I couldn’t give up my baby like that 😛 Though wish I could have created a second one to send them. Oh well.
https://www.candb.com/en/artwork/745/path-of-heaven-okami-capcom.html
I have #18 of 50 🙂
I know nobody cares but I’m going to rant anyhow.
Played a game of ranked Dota last night and one of my team mates played as Crystal Maiden. In itself not out of the ordinary but they had the arcana, a special hat that costs US$35. Most people who have the arcana for a hero are super good at that hero. You don’t dump that much cash into a hat if you suck.
They sucked.
I could rant about how they were severely underlevelled (especially as CM who can be greedy and pick up levels in the jungle pretty much just to pass the time) or how they didn’t skill their ultimate all game despite trying to rush an Aghanim’s Scepter (an item that upgrades your ultimate). Instead I’m going to rant about wards.
Wards are super fucking important in Dota. If you can’t see where the enemy is, you can’t do what you want to do. The game is that simple. Vision and map control basically decide the game.
This Crystal Maiden was buying all of the wards, a good thing, but placing them in spots that the enemy team was actively dewarding, a bad thing. It got to the point where I was dewarding the enemy team and then CM was placing wards in the same spot. You don’t ward where dewarding happens. Letting the enemy team know where your wards are is basically telling them to deny you vision.
It’s amazing how many people at my MMR (which is barely above average but still at the level you’d expect people to grasp the game) don’t understand basic things like this. Admittedly, this player was partied up with a friend and easily belongs in a much, much lower tier but it’s still irritating.
Man, this League of Legends thingummy sounds complex! What were Blizzard thinking?!
HATS!
It all goes to show, money doesn’t buy skill that easily, and I bought Pulsefire Ezreal, Battlecast Prime Chogath and two Project skins in League of Legends, that’s probably $80 worth if not more. I’m far from good 😛
Effective warding is arguably the most complicated skill to learn in Dota, especially if you get up to a high enough MMR that the enemy actively dewards. Being able to spot out where the enemy has vision is a bit of an art-form (unless you have a slark).
Don’t get me wrong – half decent warding (runes, turtle, the hills in radiant/dire jungle, etc.) is pretty easy to pick up, but top-level warding takes a seriously deep understanding of the game.
I’m only ~2.9k MMR, active dewarding happens most games and a good chunk of players in my bracket can spot wards. I’m definitely nowhere near top level dewarding but it doesn’t take much to understand “oh, they saw me deward this spot, I shouldn’t put an obs within sentry range.”
Basically, it boils down to knowing where you want vision and how to get it without warding the obvious spots. Do you know how good lane wards are? They’re fucking amazing.
Yeah I’m around 3200 MMR – funnily enough, other than dewarding runes, the cliffs near radiant bot T2 / Dire top T2, and the hill just up from Dire mid T1, no one seems to deward anywhere. I mean, those are the most obvious spots, but everyone seems to think ‘oh, no wards in the most obvious spots, they must have no vision’
Dewarding the non-obvious spots can be tricky (btw, I tend to consider the obvious spots: runes, jungle entrances, ancients and Rosh). If you can work out where they want to be, you can work out where they want vision. Most people tend to use player movements to spot wards. If someone suddenly gets defensive when you’re moving towards them from an angle they shouldn’t see, that’s time to buy some sentries.
You sound like you’re playing above your bracket!
In one particular sense.
There are more than a few flaws in my play that keep me down where I am.
Oops double post
So, objectively speaking, how much of these abovementioned skill sets would come from each of the following categories:
a) learned naturally through play
b) actively coached by another player at a higher skill level in real matches
c) extensive research – forum participation and watching lots of videos external to playing the game
d) playing against bots
They were doing so much wrong in this match that they were essentially a non-factor. Everything they did wrong could’ve been learned through naturally playing and expedited by coaching and research. I know that I learned most of this through A and C.
Bot matches in Dota are only good for learning mechanics. Decision making is 90% of Dota and bots simply don’t act in a way that teaches you to make the same decisions you’d make playing against humans.
I raise these categories as an attempt to align it to the closest personal experience at this sort of competitive play (which happens to be chess, but I’m doing the best abstraction I can to help get in the right mindset)
Do you think the friend they were partied with could have been providing that expedited coaching kind of experience for them?
The absolutely most basic thing is to stay in experience range so that you don’t fall behind. CM did not do this, their friend clearly did not coach them to do it.
Literally the only thing this person did was place wards. If their friend was coaching them, they’d have at least tried to do something more than that.
Bots – 0. They follow the same programming (duh) and they don’t deward, so it is terribly easy to read them and therefore requires 0 warding.
Extensive research and coaching (the ‘outside advice’ factor) is probably the quickest and easiest way to improve. Watching instructions on conventional and unconventional ward spots is crucial when starting out, as it will not only let you know where to place your own wards but also where the enemy might be putting theirs.
Learned naturally though play – not the best way to start out, but really the only way to become good. Knowing the optimal ward locations is half the battle, but being able to read the game to know which spots you should be warding at what time, and being able to spot out enemy ward locations is something that only really good supports players can achieve through lots of practice. To stick with chess – beginners will only know the most basic openings (ward spots). Good players will know the unconventional openings that might throw you off. Great players will not only know the openings, but know how to counter you, read what you are trying to do, and counter you 3 moves before you even know what you’re doing.
Yes
Got the monitor, now to get a DVI cable, just in case. 😀
TF2 Halloween update out now, Rocket League Halloween update on the 18th.
To me, Halloween is basically about game updates and not much else 😛
Validating some tables of data and under the “vehicle_make” field, which would usually say something like “Holden” or “Toyota” etc, the following entry was observed:
“HOME MADE POTATO”
I want to drive one of those so bad.
I feel like this is a terrible autocorrect but I’ll be damned if I know what it’s meant to be…
There’s a couple other “HOME MADE” (with nothing else after) entries in the data, but they’re all “Trailer” under the “vehicle_model” field. Nobody has any idea how this one came about. Totally bizarre.
http://www.theidearoom.net/2012/08/potato-race-cars.html ?
Feasible, but I’m not sure we’d insure a vehicle like that. 😛
A Thursday question for slow TAY.
I am training a team of six smeargle to hunt a shiny mewtwo. It will give me about a 99% chance of success with premier balls.
They all outspeed mewtwo, and they all have a 100% accuracy sleep move (spore) and a berry placement move (trick).
The leader is distinguished by maximum attack, a higher level, and additional moves false swipe and gastro acid.
The other 5 are all pretty much the same – max speed, max HP. 3 of them will individually carry the moves flash, surf and rock climb.
So, my question that is in fact a statement prompting a response. I need to give this team personalities. They need nicknames.
Please, nominate a specific one, suggest a nickname, and why it should have that name.
Edit: for further reference, a smeargle is a little bipedal ferret / dog thing wearing a beret and armed with a paintbrush.
Edit edit: OK, first one down, the rock climber is locked in as ‘Serrels’
Edit edit edit: now listing all six to fill in names:
#1 (false swipe, gastro acid, max attack): [name here]
Current suggestions: Bitey, Chuck
#2 (flash): [name here]
Current suggestions: Seedy Guy, Pedobear, Barry, Wally, A Pervert
#3 (surf): [name here]
Current suggestions: The Dude
#4 (rock climb): Serrels
#5: Hubert
#6: [name here]
Current suggestions: Snoopy, Billy
Edit edit edit edit: 10 character limit on nicknames.
You should call the big one Bitey.
Also, the rock climber is clearly destined to be called Serrels.
EDIT: Alternatively, call five of them “Steven” and the sixth one “Not Steven”.
Steven
Stephen
Stefan
Stephan
Stjepan
Not Steven
If only we knew somebody who was obsessed with rock climbing to name one of the Smeargles after…
PaintDog
SquidKid? KidSquid?
How long can the nicknames be? For the one with flash, can you name it ‘Seedy-Guy-In-A-Trench-Coat’?
I’m just imagining ‘Seedy guy in a trench coat used flash! It’s super effective!’
Edit: Dirty Flasher works too?
Twelve characters!
Ten before Gen VI
Oh you’re not doing this in XY? Ouch, I don’t envy you 😛
I’ve trained two of them in 5 days…
https://twitter.com/CannonFodderJnr/status/651735081820663808
Pedobear?
Gastro Acid? you have to call him Chuck.
Hubert.
I don’t care which one, just that one is. This is important to me.
Don’t let me down on this one Beav.
Good enough reasoning for me. Done.
Billy
Back story?
I never give my Pokemon nicknames.
This is a team with a particular set of skills, skills acquired over several weeks of grinding.
Need to add some personality to break the monotony of what I’m attempting.
Your scenario reminds me of the pack of Raptors that hunt the Indominus in Jurassic World. Their names were Blue, Charlie, Delta and Echo – sort of named after the phonetic alphabet. Perhaps you could try something similar?
The process is about 2-3 weeks prep and an expectation of about 3 months of resetting the game. I can’t afford to take it too seriously or I’ll go insane. Slightly silly is a boost to my mental wellbeing.
Gotcha. Aiming for silly then. Snoopy? I’ve always thought Smeargle looked a bit like Snoopy with a beret. 😛
Flash has got to be Barry or Wally depending on your flavour, right?
What about Rolf?
I was thinking more Wally West and Barry Allen. Unless there’s been a Flash retcon I wasn’t aware of….
I was thinking more of using flash, rather than being flash…
Always Barry.
Er… not that it matters cos DC r dum. (Not our DC.)
#2: “A Pervert”?
Mainly to make a play on words for when you use Flash attack 😛
The surfer one should be called The Dude
So I read some non-Kotaku news today and I learned things!
1) I learned that Bob’s Burgers is getting two more seasons! HELLYES. The wait for them to turn up on Netflix will be torturous.
2) I learned that the Video Game Voice Actors are going to strike, by the looks. Good for them. If only devs could, too. Difficult when sometimes they are their own bosses, though… crunch sounds more brutal than what voice-actors have to put up with, but better working conditions for everyone and smaller publisher profits are better for everyone (except publishers, but screw those guys). Gaming is a shady-as-fuck industry for workplace conditions and compensation.
3) I learned that Goosebumps is getting a game. Is… is that something we wanted?
4) I learned that… hell. Just about fucking everything reported on in the ‘real world’ meatspace is vile and unfair mindpoison and I’m glad I don’t live in that place it all talks about. (DO NOT DISABUSE ME OF THIS NOTION.)
I read Wil Wheaton’s write up of why they were striking, which was a pretty reasonable take.
Of course the comments were largely garbage like “devs get underpaid” “You’re a greedy bastard” “shut up Wesley” and “unions are actually satan,” all of which are easy to rebut:
“devs get underpaid:” True! They should form a union. Just because devs get underpaid and it sucks doesn’t mean an argument can’t be prosecuted that voice actors’ conditions suck and should be improved. Talk and chew gum, guys
“you’re a greedy bastard:” well, sure, voice actors get paid OK for what they do, but it is occasional gigs, not steady work, it’s a specialist skill, and VOs sometimes have to participate in marketing and the like, so eh.
“Shut Up Wesley:” dude hasn’t been Wesley Crusher for like two decades. ergh.
:unions are actually Satan:” nah man. Unions do what they are designed to do, make shit better for workers. Sure, some members may be corrupt, which blows, and some unions are militant, which makes life tough, but pluralist unions have made a pretty large contribution to working life so
Been watching Bob’s Burgers from the beginning recently. Louise is just the greatest. Oh my god.
Louise is best – pure, unrestrainted id. Tina comes close second.
I am Tina.
Well that explains a lot 😛
Goosebumps already has a game!
Ugh, now I have to find an Active MiniDisplayPort to DVI adapter, since the one I bought is passive.
Fuck.
🙁
EDIT: Bought one from PC Case Gear, taking the other one back tomorrow arvo. Good thing I kept the receipts. 😀
Getting one of those was the one and only time I stepped into the freaky alternate dimension of passive aggressive people that was an Apple Store. Thankfully it’s worked perfectly, so I’ve not had to go back. Also, holy crap those things are expensive now our exchange rate’s in the crapper.
Ha! I forgot about the nipple DLC in The Saboteur.
Mountains of crap piled on top of games and we keep forgetting about it all so it always seems like some experiment when the publishers try yet again and even harder.
Watched the Sarkeesian video?
Ah, the distant past. The year…2009
No?
http://www.cracked.com/blog/5-dick-moves-that-ripped-gamers-off/
Ah, right. The Saboteur nude DLC is mentioned in the latest tropes vs women game. Her response is essentially “Are you fucking kidding me?!” except drier.
Wait, someone thought Saboteur was buggy? I really enjoyed that game, never ran into a problem!
The black-and-white-with-red colour scheme contrasting with vibrant, liberated Paris was totally working for me, and Nazi-killing was just as satisfying as Nazi-killing should be… The main character didn’t parkour with the fluid grace of Ezio, but not bad for a scarred-knuckled boozer and levels seemed much better designed for verticality than any of the Assassin games so far. Planting remote-detonated explosives as a central mechanic was something there should be more of in any game. I still regard it one of the more underrated ‘sandparks’ of that generation. I don’t remember the DLC crap, might’ve got in too late, but as far as I remember your involvement with the stripclub that was your home was incredibly token.
DLC also filled the world with brothels full of naked women you could hide in.
Tasteful.
*snickers*
You are pretty short….
Ah, Paris… the city of red lights.
I’ve been busy playing Blood Bowl 2 recently and I’ve done something a bit silly. I’ve built an Orc team but using as many goblins as I can and getting a troll as well. My strategy is mostly around throwing goblins at the enemy team and hoping that it hurts them more than it does me. So far it seems to be going okay. One win, one draw, and one loss with hopefully more victories to come. And only one goblin has died so far.
Blood Bowl always seemed interesting to me but it looks like it’s something I will screw up a TON or just get horrible luck with rolls :P.
Also don’t trolls have to roll to act first and if you fail the role they get afflicted with “Dumb” for the turn and you can’t do anything with them? I remember TotalBiscuit had that problem in the bloodbowl tourney that was run a few years back he had horrible luck so his trolls only did stuff a little less than half of his games.
Not only do trolls have to roll to act first and not be stupid, they also have to roll to not eat the goblins when they try to throw them. I like to play risky :P.
Though the feeling when you ace the throw and knock out their ball carrier with a goblin, or throw your own ball-carrying goblin through the air and run in the touchdown makes it all worth it. Orc and Goblin teams are one of the few teams that can run in a touchdown in only one turn if the dice are in your favour. If they’re not, at least it’s entertaining.
Throw enough goblins at any problem and it should go away. At the very least, there’ll be fewer goblins.
I think these are both considered a win.
If there’s anything the goblins in Magic the Gathering are good for, it’s the funnies.
Even more Apropos: http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?multiverseid=370822
Is anyone still waiting on their Pax tickets?
@gorzilla
Yes. I haven’t gotten mine yet. I checked the Showclix site and they say ‘processing’ but I have NFI if that stuff gets properly updated or not.
Also for some reason I have two 3-day passes ordered and I can’t for the life of me figure out why. Purchased about an hour apart.
A glitch?
Or I ordered tickets for someone but don’t know who!
Ask around?
On the bright side, I might need to buy that ticket off you if you can’t work out who they are for.
I got @Scree to ask for me (I was stuck at work without Kotaku access) as there is a chance mine were stolen. someone broke into all the mail boxes in the apartment complex here last week and when I realised it’s about pax ticket time and I haven’t got mine yet I started to freak.
I’m really hoping they are still on their way.
Well I certainly don’t have mine.
It’s a bit of a pain that they’re shipping registered post but they don’t give you a tracking number or even tell you they’ve been sent. Kind of defeats the purpose.
I bought an Xbox1 Forza console! 😀
I bought Halo Master Chief Collection! :DD
I bought Sunset Overdrive! :DDD
I bought Rare Replay! :DDDD
Now I have no money. 😐
pfft, you can’t play Uncharted on that, 0/10
I’ve already finished Amongst Thieves on PS3! No thanks to Shane, of course. That one was pure awesome.
I’m not into re-releases! (says the guy who just bought Rare Replay and Halo) I did buy the Xbox to check out the exclusives, though, and would do the same if I bought (another) PS4 console.
Seriously… the f*ckknuckle printer technician that thought he’d queue up a 1300 page print job without telling anyone better be good at papier-mâché.
Thought it was weird that the printer was printing for so long, glanced and saw it was at 50 or 60 pages on the tray and shrugged. Looked back a few minutes later and it was approaching 300 double sided pages without having stopped.
Went to machine and paused the job.
Checked pages…
99% of the pages have a single ASCII character printed in the corner or a string of characters across the top of the page. Some of them are test pages or how-to/guides for using the machine.
Cancelled job whilst swearing profusely under my breath at the disgusting waste of resources.
Ah yes, the old office printer politics.
We’ve had staff here absolutely lose their shit when we tell them we are retiring certain old printers and adding them to fancy new, bigger ones. The reason for their theatrics? The new one now sits further away from their desk than the old one.
Tell them the reason for the relocation is because you’d like them to have to walk more, as you’re concerned about their weight.
Very concerned.
Sounds like either the driver is corrupted or the printer is screwed.
Also, printers are pretty well-defined in general as “a waste of resources” 😛
I work in a bank… and as much as I’d like to think we’re doing what we can to be environmentally friendly we’re only just rolling out fully electronic expense reporting. Up to next Friday we have to print a summary of all expenditure, sign, date, attach all physical receipts and store them for 7 years.
Now imagine an organisation with 50,000+ employees where a little more than half of them are likely to have a corporate credit card…
Sometimes makes me ill thinking about how much paper we must waste.
@blaghman @cakesmith
That hunter cloak that dropped last night: http://i.imgur.com/BzPH8Ag.png
Not my characters, obviously 😛
That looks like a cloak fit for Tron
Now I just need to find a Sparrow that looks like a light cycle…
I don’t know, “HotJosh” sounds like something you would call your character.
My bad “hotshotjosh”
My bad “hotshotjosh”
Omg! The rare double post!
Omg! The rare double post!
I just want the VIP shaders… 🙁
I’m afflicted by that one bug they haven’t been able to squash yet. Every time I log in the ‘updating’ screen is some horrible tease. “Oooh, did we fix your problem this time?! No! We did not! Haha!”
…
*googles “Destiny VIP rewards”*
Oh, probably most of you guys who qualified (bought the season pass or reached level 30 before Sep15) just did the Veteran’s Tour quest on logging in for the first time when TTK launched.
A questline sending you around the Tower to get your butt kissed by the vendors for being a hero, and showered in epix and goodies, plus cool black shader and bike.
Some of us, however, did not get that, despite qualifying. ;_;
And still have not got it.
The first couple weeks of dev feedback were patiently explaining how to advance the quest by deleting your shader, or patiently explaining that if you weren’t seeing the quest it was because you didn’t qualify for it, or patiently explaining that it was only once per account not character, until a thread exploded with a few hundred examples of people who abso-fucking-lutely qualified and absolutely couldn’t get it. I was ready to jump right in with a copy of my receipt and screenie of the shader not being visible in my collections, too, but they did finally acknowledge that yeah maybe that’s a thing.
…A thing that I suspect they don’t know how to fix.
That cloak hurts my delicate sensibilities.
TAYlist for the 8th of October 2015
TAYlist – the TAY Playlist, sponsored by my ‘new’ car, currently en-route from AdelaideChet Faker – Gold
Stardust – Music Sounds Better With You
Madonna – Like A Prayer
Social Distortion – Ring Of Fire (Artist requested by @scree)
Troye Sivan – Wild
1927 – That’s When I Think Of You
Bryan Adams – Heaven (This one is ‘their song’ for my parents, a nice choice if you ask me)
Queen – I’m Going Slightly Mad (Very fitting, see below)
Killing Heidi – Heaven Sent
Now, you may or may not have noticed an inconsistency with the TAYlist, namely, it rarely happens any more, this isn’t going to change for quite a while. For the rest of the year I will be taking a break from my show, to resume in January. The reason for this is that I’ve been feeling very burnt out on doing my show, I would find whatever excuse I could to not do it, or to do it for only one hour rather than two. After talking with my Mum about it, she and I both think it would be for the best if I did take this break, and I thought letting all of you know why the TAYlist has been inconsistently appearing, and usually shorter than it used to be, was the right idea.
Thanks for reading this, it’s been a blast doing this for you guys, and I hope that next year I feel a lot better doing this once again.
I actually saw Social D performing Ring of Fire at Soundwave a few years back. It was suitably awesome.
Your name is doing my head in. The heck is it?
Is it pronounced “Cuff’n’dernker”?
That sounds like an amazing insult, you cuffin dernker.
Coffin dancer?
CANNOT UNSEE
That was my assumption
Could
Far
Flung
Nebulae
Defy
Normal
Cosmic
Rules?
Possibly
We
Don’t
Really
Have
The
Technology
To
Know
For
Sure
Cffndncrpwdrhtttkfs.
For
Reals,
Every
Evening
Zone
Eyeballer
Still
Ponders
Really
Exciting
Stuff
To
Our
Noggins
Realising
Entropy
Doesn’t
Always
React
To
Infinite
Faceless
Internecine
Combative
Efforts
Now that’s good.
I’ve always assumed it’s some obscure but relatively high-ranking military rank acronym.
I started playing Diablo online in the late 90’s, round about the same time I was reading The Coffin Dancer by Jeffery Deaver. Loved the eponymous character, decided to use it as my gaming handle, but it was already taken… so I did what any self respecting 90’s kid would do and removed all the vowels, and have kept it ever since!
By the way – The Coffin Dancer is a great book! Sequel to The Bone Collector, same lead character.
I’m a huge Lincoln Rhyme fan, I’ve got the entire series! Deaver fans, yay! \o/
I stopped after The Empty Chair, when I got sucked into reading the Wheel of Time series. Might have to get back into it!
Oh, MAN, you’re missing the best ones! I won’t talk about any of them because spoilers, but if you decide to pick up the series you’re in for a treat. Twists so shocking (to me, at the time) that they injured me (because I sat up in bed with a start and clipped my head on a shelf)!
Thanks for doing it, it’s been great watching along even if not able to listen. You spun a good platter.
As an aside, have you heard the mashup of ‘Music Sounds Better With You’ and ‘Deepest Blue’? One of my personal favourites.
I have now, that’s a pretty killer mashup
Dammit, the only song and it was a cover. Boo.
Not the only song, the shortest song, the others were about 4.5 minutes each.
Sorry
NegativeZero’s New Anime Season Update Part 2
Watching the new season so you don’t have to.
Continuing from part the first.
Noragami Aragoto
Second season of Noragami. Noragami’s a really good show that came out of nowhere a while back. Possibly aimed at a more female audience, but it’s got pretty general appeal. Hiyori has a near-death experience after getting into an accident attempting to save the life of Yato, a god without a shrine who accepts odd jobs for 25 yen. Now she has a problem, her soul keeps slipping out of her body. Yato promises to help fix her, eventually. She gets drawn into his world of exorcising evil spirits and his own dark past as a god of calamity. It’s a highly recommended one for me (go watch the first season though). This season appears to be setting up to explore Yato’s backstory with the warrior goddess Bishamon, who tries to kill him a few times in season 1.Mobile Suit Gundam: Iron-Blooded Orphans
First new Gundam TV series to target an older audience in a while. This is another Alternative Universe Gundam series and is not part of the original Universal Century timeline, so you can jump straight in here with no worries. I’m still a bit iffy on exactly what’s going on, but the main characters appear to be a group of orphan teenagers that are used as child soldiers and effectively cannon fodder by a Martian mercenary / resistance group. Somehow they’ve either acquired or built a Gundam, and the main character appears to be ridiculously talented as per usual. This had the usual explosive opening episode, but didn’t spend much time setting everything up. It seems promising, but it’s very hard to be sure with Gundam as they always start well, even the stinkers like Gundam Seed Destiny were fantastic for the first 4-5 episodes. The interesting thing here is the director/writer combo of Tatsuyuki Nagai and Mari Okada have produced some really good shows, highest profile being Anohana. Nagai knows how to do an entertaining action show too, as he directed both seasons of A Certain Scientific Railgun. Most surprising thing was that the OP/ED seem to be incredibly pedestrian. That’s uncommon for Gundam.Comet Lucifer
This one seems kind of interesting. Well animated and nice art. Not sure what exactly was going on for the episode though, since it was light on world-building and exposition – not that I mind that. Main character spends his time in the canyons near a mining town on some planet looking for special crystals. He gets into a fight with some classmates and finds himself stranded with one of them deep inside the mine, near an underground lake. Some stuff happens and he meets a weird-looking girl with blue hair who turns into a giant robot or something. I dunno. It seems interesting. Kind of reminded me a little of Eureka Seven. May not be a coincidence as the script writer worked on multiple episodes of that. Director knows his mecha anime too, having done directorial work on Aquarion and Macross FrontierYoung Black Jack
I’ve never really experienced much of Black Jack. He’s probably Tezuka’s most recognized creation after Astro Boy. But I’m not super invested in it and basically going in blind. There wasnt much to this – Black Jack gets roped into some crazy surgery re-attaching the severed limbs of a boy who was caught in a train accident and he’s like super crazy good with his awesome medicalness. That’s it. It was an okay watch but I don’t know if I’m particularly interested in more.One-Punch Man
This is fucking awesome. One-Punch Man is a superhero in a world where there are constantly invading supervillains that generally look to be rejects from Ultraman or something. He’s trained so much that he lost all his hair, and is so strong that he can beat any enemy he faces with a single punch. This has left him bereft of all joy and purpose, because he never has any fights that challenge him and his life is pretty boring so he goes around with this vapid 😀 kind of look. The big take-away here is that the animation is fucking amazing. Luscious. There were multiple sequences in the first episode that had some of the finest sakuga animation I’ve seen in a long time. Talking Birdy the Mighty level action. Just look at this shit. Fantastic. It’s also got some genuinely funny moments as well. One of the high points of the season so far.Yuru Yuri San Hai
Season 3 of this. Yuri Yuri is basically a light yuri (that means some of the girls are into each other) slice of life comedy show. It’s got a pretty awesome core group of characters that really work well together and the comedy never really gets old. Really happy this is getting another outing and even happier that despite the change of staff since season 2, it’ doesn’t seem like anything’s changed. The art’s still consistent, Akari is still oblivious to everything and TOSHINO KYOKO is still a masterful troll. If you’re in the mood for a light comedy it’s a good one. If you saw the previous seasons this is probably on your list already. You could probably jump in here but I’d strongly recommend going back to the start instead as the cast and their various gimmicks are introduced over time.Oh hey, only had to fill out the captcha one time to get this to post for once.
Mmm. Thanks for linking back to the first, too. That’s super convenient.
Nothing really grabbing me personally, this season. Might just try to catch up on the stuff I’ve missed from the last year.
Though I do seem to be going through that persnickety phase again.
The kind when I forget what the entire medium is about and get annoyed that no creators have the balls to give their character some balls and answer the ‘will they/won’t they?’ question as soon as the character gets an opportunity to, instead of perpetuating the frustrating idea that every protagonist needs to be a bland-ass self-insertion template dripping in poon and ironically fucking terrified of sex. Possibly thanks to some 4th-wall-breaking awareness that actually making a decision would result in the show’s forums melting under the furious fan-rage of shippers who wanted a different result. At best the most we ever get to see is that the confession or kiss comes right at the very end like some kind of ‘reward’ or ‘ending’ instead of the complex and interesting HUMAN reality that the kiss/fuck is only the beginning of a good story and shit only gets harder(rimshot)/better/more interesting/messy(rimshot again!)/tragic from there. GROW THE FUCK UP, ANIME. The last time I saw you even TRY that shit was Golden Time and even then you half-assed it with sex-terror!But y’know… that’s not what anime is about. Best to do other stuff when I get into one of those funks, give it some time to rediscover the goofy joy.
I feel like maybe you should try One Punch Man. It’s about as far from that gripe as you can get.
The problem I think is that so much of what gets adapted nowadays is from Light Novels and LNs have degenerated into this really annoying formula where they have a snarky withdrawn self-insert character that gets paired up with a girl that is way too good for them. There’s so many examples. So, so many. And I suspect that because of the target audience (plus Japan having some weird hangups about sex in more mainstream media) relationships are rarely depicted realistically. Also sometimes it’s straight up removed from the anime adaptions (see Sword Art Online for example). It’s a cheap way to extend the thing longer than it should go as well. Thinking back to non-porn so-called harem anime I’ve seen over the years (and this is not an endorsement of any of them!), there’s only three I can recall that actually had characters having sex (actual or implied) before the end of the show: Kimi ga Nozomu Eien, Yosuga no Sora and School Days. All three are adapted from games, though, not manga or light novels. KGNE
involved the lead being in a sexual relationship with the best friend of his high school sweetheart who has been in a coma for years and that’s a good part of the story’s tension.Yosuga no Sora is a wierd one,basically it’s designed to be a series of character-specific arcs where the first two or so episodes largely repeat each time but things change and he ends up on a different girl’s route, so basically exactly adapting the game. It was also fucking creepy because one of the routes involves his twin sister.And School Days has possibly the least likeable protagonist ever, who coerces multiple girls into sleeping with him and is then brutally murdered by one when she goes full Yandere and it’s the best thing ever because the guy was absolute fucking scum. Also the famous NICE BOAT ending where the ending wasn’t broadcast on TV because of some kid murdering another kid in real life and instead they aired some program about a cruise ship.On topic, I think there’s still a fair few shows to debut but it’s not looking like an amazing season, just generally solid. There’s still a fair number that I want to try. One Punch, Yuruyuri, Kindaichi, Noragami and Utawarerumono are my top picks so far and I’m fairly sure Gundam and Heavy Object will join that list.
Oh hey, bonus! I forgot to mention one.
Peeping Life
This was fucking weird. Low-budget anime that uses CG models and clearly amateur vocals. Basically it was a series of 4 five-minute sketches that were basically Manzai stand-up routines. Manzai being a classic Japanese comedy format where you basically have two people engaging in a funny or absurd conversation, one is the straight man and one is the funny man. It can be quite entertaining when it’s done well. This involved basically some really ghetto CG characters made to look like classic anime characters (except the last pair). Astro Boy and the Professor having an argument after Astro Boy destroys a wall practicing his Kabe-Don technique, Doronjo browbeating Yatterman into fixing the flat tire on her bike, Black Jack goes to the doctor with the flu and gets diagnosed with an advanced case of Chuunibyou, and an annoying ditzy couple talking on the plane on the way to Guam. I… I don’t know what I watched. I’m okay with the fact it exists. It’s not really anime though, at least not what I’d look for in anime. I won’t watch more.Pedestrian’s Bachelorette. The only way to follow the show.
http://pedestrian.tv/news/entertainment/bachelorette-drama-tony–daveys-ocean-deathmatch-m/ec24dbb5-6573-4de4-ada9-a93a8e76b1f6.htm
Holy damn, Uncharted 2 is every bit as awesome as I remember. It looks spectacular on the PS4 as well.
SHAMBALA!
NATE!
CHLOE!
nononoNONONO
I’m hanging out for the Heavy Rain remaster.
*whispers* withbettercontrolsplease
Oh man, can’t wait to buy that. Beyond: Two Souls as well. Naughty Dog and Quantic Dream are my jam! 🙂
Weird double post? CARRY ON!
All went downhill from there. 🙁 I love the train sequence so much. From a pure technical standpoint it is an utter marvel.
That section blew me away the first time. And every subsequent time. 😀
You know the technical side of it? The way that it feels like you’re traveling on a real train up a mountain with the scenery changing and everything? It’s actually smoke and mirrors. There’s a sequence of about ten or so environments, each will loop if you wait long enough. Whenever you transition into a carriage it will distract you away from the windows while it loads in a new background area for the train to be going through, or sends you into a tunnel to hide each transition. That’s why it feels like some of the big vistas open up right as you hit certain points on the train and everything. If you don’t go forward, it’ll loop in the same spot forever. 🙂 It’s amazing technical sleight-of-hand and it gives the impression you’ve traveled miles upon miles on the train.
Only bad thing about Uncharted 2 is how it all goes to shit when the yeti things turn up and becomes a bit of a chore to play. 🙁 Plays far better than the respawning enemy shooting gallery of 3 though.
Oh, that’s really clever! Executed flawlessly too!
I don’t mind Uncharted 3.
It was the weakest by far, but has some nice character stuff going on with Drake and Sully. My major problem was they constantly changed the side kick you were playing with and you never really got much screen time with any one. So a lot of those story lines feel way more superficial than in the other games. 🙂 Also the Citadel had averybland art direction!Looking back it seems it was rushed and the Naughty Dog team being split in two for The Last of Us caused troubles. After the awesomeness of The Last of Us (fanboy’s gonna fan…) I feel like the studio has course corrected.
Bring on Uncharted 4! And Amy Hennig’s Star Wars game!
Naughty Dog are technical wizards. The other bit that always impresses the shit out of me in that game is the hotel sequence. Especially the part where it collapses with you inside. Apparently to make that happen they were doing something nutty like calculating the physics on the GPU and using the CPU to do the video rendering.
Wait, is that as crazy a thing as it sounds?
I may be slightly overestimating what they were doing, but most of the graphics effects are definitely done on the SPU.
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/uncharted-2-mastering-the-cell-blog-entry
Anyone who says modern games don’t need to do crazy technical tricks to achieve things any more because of modern hardware needs to look at the sort of shit Naughty Dog get up to.
And in the boat scene in Uncharted 3 they ran a water simulation, rather than pre-canning all the water stuff.
Ugh, damn eBay. I listed an item last night and it set the item as free postage. if I kept it up, I would’ve lost all the money that it sold for in the frigging postage of the item :/ I double checked and made sure that postage was set to what it needed to be, but noop. I some how missed it >=[
I clear the crap out of my workshop on eBay since it brings in some nice extra cash and keeps my courier accounts super active. If I operated the way they wanted me too I’d lose money. It’s really annoying. They assume everything brought and sold there can either be picked up locally or shipped for under $10 so they’re always pushing sellers to offer free postage and returns. Offering ‘bonuses’ to people who comply, which are really more like punishments for those who don’t. They suggest jacking up the sale price to cover postage, but to offer free postage on an 12Kg motor I’d have to charge a ridiculous amount for it just in case it goes to someone in the middle of nowhere. Argh. It’s frustrating just thinking about it.
I know right? I shipped something not too long back, $45 postage, the damn thing only went for $70 at auction, which is a lot more than what I paid for it, but still.
But yeah I hear ya man, it’s a total joke how they expect sellers to offer free postage and a million other incentives. They also probably expect us to pay the person buying it to take the item away…
@mrtaco
Is this you?
The YouTube name with “Gooki” seems to imply it is heh.
Edit: YouTube says I have also watched 2 of this persons previous videos. So i’m gonna say it is him.
Maaaaaaaaaaybe.
And immediately on opening it I want to close it again. Hate watching myself 😛
I know that feeling!
It sounds great though. You should be proud.
The best part of that was it led me to this.
Y’know, I’m a strong believer in digital preservation. Keeping all the old stuff around, warts and all.
Sometimes I disagree with me. Greatly.
So i’ve had Windows 10 like 5 days I think? I’m really loving the upgrade, it’s great. I would’ve happily paid for a copy in all honesty.
Have a biased upvote.
I haven’t upgraded my home desktop yetHaha thanks.
I’m not allowed to upgrade my home desktop yet.
Every time I click on that icon in the system tray it tells me I’ve registered and they’ll tell me when they’re good and ready to deliver an update.
That may mean you have some bit of hardware that’s not compatible with Windows 10, but could be a bug.
If you’re desperate you can force download it with the Media Creation Tool:
https://www.microsoft.com/en-au/software-download/windows10
(Can also use this to make a bootable Win10 install USB or similar so that eg you can perform a clean installation)
Given how long it’s been I might just give Microsoft a bell and see what’s up.
They’re usually pretty responsive on Twitter.
There are a few things I want back from Windows 8, and a few things that definitely need some refinement/rethinking, but overall I like it. It’s nice to finally be past Windows 95.
What are those? I never really used 8/8.1 I only messed around with the beta of WIndows 8, which was enough for me heh.
Mostly features that weren’t that particularly great in Windows 8, but were a few steps away from being an improvement. Instead of fixing them and using them properly they just reverted to the Windows 95 methods. I also really prefer the Start screen over the Start menu. With two screens it would pop up on which ever screen had focus when you hit the Windows key, but now it’s anchored to the Start button.
Charms for instance confused everyone because they didn’t know how to use them, and I can only recall like two programs that used them properly, but the core concept is really good.
That said finally having the Action Centre is worth the upgrade. Used to be that you’d miss half your notifications because they’d only pop up for a second before vanishing forever.
I also preferred the Start Screen once I got used to it (and removed all the shit off it and made it super clean and only have things on it I use). But the people have spoken and the Start Menu is The Only Way To Do It now. 🙁
That action centre is awesome. I also like how Windows 10 syncs my phones calendar with its and tells me when important shit is happening.
Enh, we use 2 screens at work and the start screen still shits me.
Takes up way too much screen real estate and can’t be escaped away from by just clicking anywhere that isn’t the menu – you have to consciously go back to desktop or hit escape. It doesn’t offer anything useful to trade-off those annoyances.
They’re minor complaints but when there’s so few points of difference between ways of doing things, the ones that are there are Deciders.
TA-DAH!
http://www.ebay.com.au/itm/181893665170
Thanks for the recommendation, @cookingmama!
Aside from the battery life, and the fact that it heats up like a mini-sun, I still like my Nexus 4.
Its battery is balls though, and I really should have pulled it apart months ago to add some insulation. Apparently air sucks at insulating, who knew?
Edit: Oh, and the speaker is on the back. Because LG like to do that apparently.
And now I’m just pointing out all the negative things on a phone that I’ve gotten to know for 2 and a half years.
Great!
If you want a positive, I’ve dropped this sucker about 300 times, and while the back is cracked, and the bottom two corners on the front have little cracks, the screen is fine!
Make sure you get a case!
Oh, I will be, don’t worry about that! I want this phone to last for YEARS.
Hmm. Decided to see if I could repair my lance I broke back at a party a couple of years ago. Seems to be coming along well, might have a costume for the Friday as well after all.
What’s this here on my machine? New Chvrches album? When did I buy this? It must have been a while ago because I forgot I had it.
It’s pretty good except for the couple of tracks with the dude doing lead vocals. Don’t like those.
Thanks heaps, Me from the past!
Argh, what’s with all the Beta’s? I signed up for the NFS beta the bloody thing went live while I was away on holidays, so I missed that, I’m downloading the Battlefront beta now and figured I might be able to tear myself away from MGSV to check it out, and now I’ve just got an email from Gearbox for the Battleborn beta. Got way too many assignments to do and so much to play.
Every time I see the name Battleborn, I hear that line from the Simpsons in my head:
No, Mom, you idiot! I have “Bloodstorm” and “Bone Squad” and “Bloodstorm II.” Stupid
I’m still not 100% about Battleborn, but I have put so many hours in to Borderlands I really want to give it a go. Can’t wait to try it out.
Arguably all these betas are not so different from the ‘finished’ versions that we’re expected to pay full price for on day one, except without the part where we have to pay money to play the worst version sooner.
Haha that is true. I have played a few betas and as good as they may be for testing, they can also turn you off buying a game.
So, I’m at work, we look in the skip, and there are a few game boxes in there.
Turns out that one is The Legend of Zelda Promotional Disc that was a Limited Edition release for the Gamecube, just thrown out.
Needless to say, it is currently residing in my jumper pocket.
😀
noice.
What really makes me shudder is thinking about how many times something like that ended up in the skip and no-one looked in the skip and it went to landfill.
Friday morning question: you’re chilling at home with a group of friends when suddenly some joker points a blacklight torch towards your computer desk. What do you do?
Accept my inevitable fate.
Have a laugh about it.
Poison the food.
Jokes on them, I don’t have a desk, so they can go nuts.
Heeheehee
Nuts.
Laugh and suggest we next check the lounge they’re sitting on.
Leave no witnesses…
What? Meatbags need to learn to respect privacy! 😛
‘Looks like the sock was pointless then, huh.’
‘I call it my Jackson Pollock.’
Ok. Maybe I’m just a weirdo but I’ve never understood this. Why would there be jizz on my walls/computer/keyboard? Do normal guys just let it go like a runaway fire hose? Same goes for peeing on the toilet seat. Mistakes happen but I feel like I would have to actually make a conscious effort to get bodily fluids everywhere.
Weirdos unite!
*sticky high-five*
Welp…
I am keeping that link on standby
I’ve already had it favourited ever since I stumbled onto it last week. It’s so good xD
You’re still in the thread! THE GIF LIED!!
…
SFW
Laugh at them knowing they need a chemical to activate the remaining proteins since if there was anything it would only be trace elements and shining a black light is otherwise useless. Unless they’re looking for uranium glass, which then they’re also out of luck there too.
That’s only blood. Semen, saliva, vaginal fluid and urine all naturally fluoresce.
Weird. Was stated differently on the forensic files show I was watching recently. Oh well.
Fun fact: you can buy a black light and try it at home! Fun for the whole family!
I’ve heard you should never, ever shine a blacklight in your bathroom if you ever want to feel safe in there again.
Haha.
Neuralyze them.
Nothing. Don’t think that’ll be a problem for my computer desk at all.
You’re more a candles, scented oils, bathtub, spoil yourself kind of guy?
No, I have a laptop. 😛
So quick question. I have been thinking about getting a New 3DS XL for a while now, mainly to use when commuting/travelling. I haven’t owned a handheld since my gameboy colour, which I played the shit out of when I was younger. How does the New 3DS XL stack up against other handhelds out there? My friend has a barely used one that he wants to offload for $150, including Monster Hunter, which seems like a pretty good deal from what I can tell. What do you guys think?
That’s a really good deal for a New 3DS XL. That’s basically the same price as a 2DS from EB but it’s also the New version so it is a more powerful handheld with a few exclusive games.
If you’re keen on Nintendo games, that’s probably going to be your best choice of handheld. I play mine almost every day while traveling and it works like a charm.
All comes down to if it has any games you want. Have a search around and see if anything appeals to you.
Personally I think the New 3DS (I have the regular-sized one) is the best handheld I’ve owned, but then I’m generally a nintendo fan anyway 😛
That’s a pretty good deal for a New 3DS though (especially if it’s in good condition)
My last handheld was a regular DS, and I’ve currently got an N3DS-XL (what you’re looking at) and I find it vastly superior to the regular DS in every way. Very comfortable to use as well. For $150 you can’t go wrong.
Cheers guys… I’ve never owned a Zelda or Pokemon game before, so there’s plenty of games I’m looking forward to playing. Seems like this is a pretty easy decision 🙂
I love my Vita and playing PS1 games on it but I have to admit I’ve played the 3DS more. Most because Theatrhythm.
I HAVE BOUGHT 3 3DS SYSTEMS. THROW YOUR MONEY AWAY CFFNDNCR!
(But seriously, I’ve had a lot of fun with mine, just wish the new releases hadn’t dried up. Oh, and buy Fire Emblem, it’s rad.)
On the plus side, if you’re getting it second-hand anyway, you can always just go and sell it to a different mate if you find you don’t use it.
DS, 3DS, PSP… I’ve bought more than a few handhelds with stars in my eyes, only to find I never fucking used the things and ended up giving them away.
http://www.ntnews.com.au/news/theres-a-bong-in-there-alex-papps-lights-up-play-school-with-familiar-contraption/story-fnjbnts7-1227562726824
Haha, I seriously want to know what they thought were making…
That was exactly what I was thinking…. WHAT IS IT!?
Maybe it’s like those fake kitchens you can get your kids so they think they’re doing the same as mummy & daddy, I mean where i’m from it would make sense.
I remember one time I was at a friends place and his parents were ripping cones in the living room, in front of him, his sister & his friends. Needless to say I felt that was irresponsible. We were I think maybe 10 or 11? Can’t really remember. He didn’t stay my friend much longer due to him revealing his true nature anyway.
The apple never falls far from the tree, amiright?
I remember back when they had bubble gum sticks that looked like cigarettes… used to feel slick as, choofing on a kiddie cigarette. It was a different time… a better time.
Yep. From what I gather he has taken after his parents pretty well. No real surprise when he wasn’t that bright either. Looking back I wonder why I was friends with so many like this, then again that was the majority of people I went to school with in the early years so there is that I guess.
Ah well, live and learn. At least you realized it and moved on – I’ve seen a bunch of guys get sucked into that whole no-hoper lifestyle despite being pretty switched on, just because they refused to acknowledge that they could do better.
Yeah, it’s sad seeing people with potential go down that path, but then again I know a few who have chosen that because it’s “easy”
It’s a fountain, they were showing the effect of air pressure on the water. But yes, it does look like something else.
@shane
New(apparently not new judging from the video upload date 😛 First I’ve seen it though!) Ace Attorney 6 courtroom gameplay video! (looks to be from the first case) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZjMxMtKxlXUCutscenes look a lot more dynamic, woah.
I’ve been going back and playing the old AA games and I only now really appreciate what Dual Destinies did with the style of the games. The old sprites were great but the animations and cutscenes make the whole thing more lively and intense. This is looking even better. Hype!
UWWAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH
I want this in my life!
Going to a Hackathon this evening despite not knowing a jot about code.
Pray for Mojo.
Admittedly, when you mentioned Mojo, I immediately thought of The Powerpuff Girls.
Curses…
I have forgotten my wallet!
Curses…
Dim lightbulb As Idea
For Each lightbulb In User.Brain
‘I have no idea what to do with this idea
MsgBox(“I have an idea… Wait. No. It sucks.”)
Next lightbulb
The faster you type the faster you hack. If two of you use the one keyboard you hack even faster.
Even more so if you can type on two keyboards at the same time, one per hand.
Hi, my name is Red and I do a lot of penetration testing for big corporations.
I figure I’ll go to a bunch of software engineers and say “I can do your talking for you.”
Heh heh penetration
One of the guys in this thread has a black light if you need it.
I realized today that ever since I started playing World of Warships I haven’t played Kantai Collection. Addiction broken?
Nope, just like going from crack to heroin.
I just wanted to thank everyone on here for giving me support. Doctor says I’m going to be tired for a while, but that I’m doing the right thing. I’m sorry about the whinging, just sometimes you don’t know what to do
I don’t think that seeking support in a supportive environment counts as whinging. Certainly I wouldn’t consider what you were doing to be whinging.
I would though. When you’re in this kind of state, you tend to question everything
Well, I’m saying you can rest easy knowing that’s not the case here. 🙂
I just wanted to chime in and say that Rare Replay is incredible. Last night I played a little bit of Battletoads and then went and started a new game of Banjo Kazooie and spent an hour or so with that. Great fun times. Highly recommended purely for nostalgia kicks.
I’m not sure if I should find this as funny as I do. But this month with my job search requirement for the government, literally 90% of the jobs I have applied for have been with Woolworths Group.
And woolies are like oh no this guy again
(first time I was on unemployment I did much the same)
Haha, funny story they just rang me to come to an interview next week 😛
Nice.
Yeah, so hopefully I can get that. Because money \o/ also I need to be able to afford to get my license and all that :/
In the meeting room:
“FFS just hire him already. I’m sick of reading these applications.” 😛
This is how it should be 😛
Do they still only stipulate a certain number of jobs you have to apply for each fortnight without checking which jobs you are applying for?
Right after I finished uni I had no inclination to find work… I was only spending $100/week on rent and just stayed home smoking pot and playing video games all day, so could get by just fine on the unemployment cheque. I applied for like 20 CEO/CTO/CFO-level jobs a week knowing I had no possibility of getting them, and the centrelink office didn’t care…. BUT GOD FORBID YOU MAKE A MISTAKE FILLING OUT YOUR LOGBOOK!!!! Fun times.
It’s pretty strict now, it all got an overhaul in June, when the new contracts started, and oh boy previously it was a fucking walk in the park. Now it’s a literal nightmare.
So for me it’s 20 jobs a month, no less, I have to provide printed evidence of email confirmation of applying for said jobs. If you don’t comply you lose $40 per job you didn’t apply for, and if you don’t show up to your interview with your job provider you lose 10% of your newstart every day until you comply.
Edit: then there’s the new Work for the Dole scheme, 25 hours a week, instead of the old system where it was 15 hours, and i’m pretty sure they now just tell you where to go instead of letting you look through the options.
Also it’s kinda shit when you’re only getting about $500 a fortnight and they say 25 hours of “volunteering” as they call it is a fair trade on top of having to actively look for jobs and go speak to potential employers.
But saying that I just do my own volunteer work currently, and that keeps them happy for the time being, but they’ll be sticking me into that if I can’t find a job by January or something I think, I dunno it’s not clear.
Crazy. When I was on it, I was supposed to be submitting a diary every month with evidence of having enquired about (not applied for, just asked about what the requirements were, etc) like… 4 jobs a week.
I submitted it literally once before finding a new job in the same month, and six months of working later, they gave me a phone call asking if they could schedule an appointment to give me some coaching on how to keep up with submitting my job diary.
Haha, man those were the days. It’s now an appointment at least once a fortnight with your “job provider” too.
Said this on twitter, but:
Video Game Voice Actors have authorised a strike action.
I now expect all of those reddit experts on gender studies to suddenly be experts on Industrial Relations
It’s also America so they public will generally have an even nastier opinion on unions and strike actions than we do in Australia. It’s going to be very messy.
…Can’t be too hard to take an old argument and apply a fresh coat of paint to it, right?
Take rant about how feminists are the worst, replace “feminist” with “union”, and “penis” with “job”.
https://m.reddit.com/r/union/
I think the REALLY interesting consequences are going to be around stubborn companies hiring non-union amateurs to soldier on regardless, what impact that will have on quality, etc. We saw what a cluster fuck the writer’s strike was for TV.
Will a strike show off just how fucking awful games can be almost exclusively thanks to bad voice acting (not that it seemed to affect reviews of FF13)?
Will the impact of that change only be noticable to critics and customers long after the strike action has already been resolved?
Are we going to see union-funded advertising to to show us shitty examples well in advance, and will that be targeting non-union VA or poor, unfortunate members who nonetheless did a shitty job?
How long does a strike have to be in place to have an actual impact, given that individual projects can go for multiple years, with it possible to update VA components within a pretty large window?
Will striking backfire when it turns out scabs do a pretty decent job after all?
VA is a very particular skill. Even being a great actor doesn’t mean VA will go well *coughdinklebotcough*.
There’s a reason you see the same people constantly popping up.
After grinding my teeth at early vanilla Destinyquesting with seasoned professional Nolan North, I’m not convinced Dinklage was at fault. Writing and direction had a lot to answer for on Dinklebot.
VA is definitely a very particular skill different to regular acting and is dramatically underrated – noticeable when you play indie games or watch kickstarter videos where the VA is obviously friends of the project, programmers/designers filling in the gaps, or placeholder stuff until a pro gets on board.
Or from titles in the 90s and 00s where developers/publishers hadn’t paid the role much attention.
That said… there’s always fan-projects that surprise you with quality, too. Talented amateurs exist.
I think it’ll be interesting to see what the results are, given the less immediate impact of one role’s absence/delay in a title that has multiple years of development in play.
Dinklebot was absolutely fine. Nolanbot is shit in comparison. He was intended to be a dry, bored, slightly sarcastic robot, at least based on the lines they originally had for him when the game was first shown off. Then they fired all their writers. Destiny’s dialogue was all awful, it’s just that Dinklage made the bulk of dialogue you actually hear.
North’s grown on me a bit with TTK stuff, but for the vanilla re-do, it’s… not as good. I really miss the deeper, darker tones Dinklage had.
I’ll put my hand up as a scab and we can test your theories with bonus TAY reviews.
I love it when a wedding invitation tells you you don’t need to think of a gift to get them, just money is fine. Nice big sigh of relief 😛
I’m a huge fan of the money well or whatever other gimmick lets you put some cash in an envelope to go towards a stupidly-expensive honeymoon or whatever.
I LOVE the cash-in-the-envelope wedding gift.
My best mate had it at his wedding – not only did I not have to worry about getting him a present, but I also got to empty all the shrapnel out of my pocket too. Winning!
I don’t understand why more people don’t do it. All the people that got us presents were mostly duplicates of stuff we were given at our engagement. Meanwhile with the money from the well we were able to get a decent fridge, washing machine and dishwasher.
Older generations find the money gifts distasteful. Mainly because in their day you got married at 20 when you had absolutely nothing and a wedding register was the only way you could afford to get stuff for your new house. Plus, having a register at somewhere fancy like David Jones was a status symbol. These days, most people already have stuff and a bit of money is way more useful.
Trying to find amusing short films for work and I found this mashup of The Shining and The Grand Budapest Hotel quite amusing. Thought others on here might enjoy.
The Grand Overlook Hotel (aka Wes Anderson’s The Shining)
…’For work’. Riiiiight.
So from all accounts The Verdict last night was as much of a fustercluck as people assumed it would be. Anyone watch it?
Someone made this tweet so I didn’t have to. Sounds like it went exactly as the network wanted:
Edit: I didn’t watch it. I think Q&A is too surfacey 90% of the time; I’m not about to go downmarket from that! 😛
I read a write-up. It sounds like the worst kind of extended-family dinner… could probably only have been worse with some drunkenness or violence. Though it seems like they’d probably have swung that if they could.
They’re saving that for next week.
So, it was just a really shitty Q&A?
TAFE NSW needs some serious help, when the nearest TAFE to me that does heavy vehicle mechanic apprenticeship courses is in damn Tamworth there’s a problem. I guess all the money the NSW gov’t through at my local TAFE to give it an automotive department didn’t go toward that area, when we have a lot of that sort of trade here 🙁
TAFE is a strange system in each state.
Far too big a bureaucracy, but provides stuff that no one else does because of gov fiat.
Oh it is that. Also what has happened to TAFE over the last few years is kinda like they just want to get rid of it all together.
I remember when they cut the IT funding for the TAFE I did my IT & Web Design certs at because IT isn’t relevant here was the claim.
You do realise Ashmore campus offers that course?
Well the traineeship I was looking at for the council said TAFE would be in Tamworth, the mostly work out of Alstonville TAFE for some reason though, rather than Murwillumbah or Kingscliff, also I some how doubt there’s any difference from NSW & QLD TAFE with this course since their sign writing apprenticeship you’d be going to Brisbane for the TAFE part of it.
Oh, well that wouldn’t really be a problem if it was part of employment. You wouldn’t go weekly, you would go down usually for 3 to 6 weeks at a time depending if they did it all in one shot or not. Employer usually pays for accommodation and travel, if not it all gets subsided by the government.
Yeah every 6 weeks for 1 week to Tamworth, everything else is just once a week kinda deal. Yeah that was also the other thing accommodation & transport was subsidised by the gov’t.
Started The Nathan Drake Collection this morning, took a break for lunch and intended to go outside to start stripping parts off my spare car, but instead found myself back on the couch with one of my favourite games from last-gen. God I love Uncharted.
Oh, and er hullo.
Metal Gear Online is solid fun. As long as you stick to Cloak and Dagger mode.
Battlefront is… huh, I dunno what to think of it. It plays smoothly, for sure. It’s no battlefield, I guess? I played a bunch of Battlefront 2 back then, but I can’t really compare it.
Destiny’s multiplayer is as baller as ever except for all the lightning and fire and the fact that I have a bow with a long shot time and only the one shot and it sucks just infinite amounts of dicks , my god I hate this bow
I missed a Minotaur with that bow. I just sat there and let myself die in disbelief. I am wet hot garbage with that bow.
To be fair, hunters already had two pretty decent supers. Whereas Titans has shit
I started levelling a hunter purely because his is how thing would go when I grouped with @cakesmith and @blaghman.
*cake and blagh both use special and kill every enemy that ever existed in the existence of the game*
*i use special and just block shots*
For Crucible the ground slam was annoying as shit.
It is, admittedly, utter garbage in PvE though.
Also, weapon of light Titan shieldy peeps are the best for when you want to kill a boss, just sucks to be the guy who pops it. :p
Ground slam is so shit in PvE.
“YAHHHH SUPER MEGA GROUND SLAM OF AWESOMENESS”
*enemy steps slightly to the side*
*you got 0 kills*
Pshhh, better than the Warlock bomb.
“I’m gonna bomb you!”
*gets killed before they can cast it*
Also it was depressing seeing the end stats for levels
Kills:
Cake: one million
Blaghs: one million
Nob: 2
“Hey guys, I’m just gonna go eat dirt in the corner because that would be more useful”
This is how I felt during Warframe while playing with you guys. xD
Enh. Apart from some of the very few balls-out ludicrous-difficulty levels, that’s pretty much anyone in Warframe who isn’t the front-runner or the person competing with the front-runner.
The enemies can barely spawn fast enough to satisfy one player’s bloodlust, they don’t have a hope against 4 players.
(Psst, join my clan.)
I can’t play it anymore as I don’t have enough disk space to handle the updates lol xD. Maybe once I get my new PC built and ready I’ll take it on again. I miss my Volt with UNLIMITED POWAAAAAA! *ZAPS EVERYTHING*
Apparently the number 4 volt ability/ult is getting a re-work for MOAR POWAH, too.
I didn’t mind Ward of Dawn as a defender, but it was only ever really useful if you were in over your head. For like 90% of your run, because you can’t shoot out from it, it just gets in everyone’s fucking way.
But if you’re up to your armpits in bloody wizards and knights and you can’t hear youself swear over the screaming of all the incoming fire, you’re grateful as hell for that little pocket of thrall-punching safety.
I feel like one of the upgrades should be you and your allies bullets can penetrate the shield. Then again, that would be broken in PvP
I’ve switched from the knight-killing in-bubble ultra-shield to the in-and-out shield-of-light for better party utility. I’m sure people would prefer weapons of light, but screw ’em.
Yeah, I see Stormcaller and Sunbreaker as revenge/rebalance for a year of dealing with f***ing Arcblade in PvP.
Survivortime Episode 3 Discush.
Nooooooo Tasha! I was despairing when she got shoved into the minority on a new team. She can’t go yet! Super lucky that that old dude was a total rat though. Took the heat way off her and that other old dude (who needs names). I’m also really glad that Abi didn’t go because she is insane and I’m not ready for that to end yet. I wanted the Rat guy to go simply because I wanted Peih Gee and Abi to murder each other verbally.Poor Spencer though. On the complete bottom of his last tribe, gets swapped to the minority of his new tribe as well 😛 Hopefully his tribe doesn’t go to council…
Also there wasn’t much
LlamaKass in this episode.Also, Woo is still lovably dumb. Like, super dumb though. It’s great.
@greenius @sughly @alexpants (who else is watching?)
Since the old dudes are easily distinguished by their sleeves or lack thereof, I vote for Sleeves and No Sleeves. Keep it simple.But sometimes No Sleeves picks up his discarded sleeves and puts them back on. What then. Sleeves and No Sleeves with Sleeves.I was wondering what’s up with that… so stupid 😛
@alexpants @sughly @phoenix
How good was Jeremy’s sneaky idol grab! I was sad to see (Andrew) Savage and Tasha in the minority – especially Savage who got RUINED by one of the worst twists ever (voted out members formed their own tribe and won their way BACK INTO THE GAME…). Jeff Varner is funny as hell, I’d rather him around than Abi/PG who annoy me with their stupid bickering. I feel so bad for Woo 😛A man in his 50’s left his wife for a nurse from the birthing suite of the hospital’s maternity ward.
I think he’s having a midwife crisis.
#Ilovepage6
Somebody called me ‘pretentious’ the other day.
I nearly choked on my latte.
My favourite response to that was Matt Preston from Masterchef’s.
“There are people who say wearing a Cravat is pretentious. to that I say ‘au contraire’”
I couldn’t work out how to fasten my seatbelt. Then it clicked.
A friend of mine tried to annoy me with bird puns, but I soon realised that toucan play at that game.
I just caught a gorilla spying on me.
I said “There’s no need to pry mate!”
I’ve been working on a Scandinavian joke, but it isn’t quite finish
Why did the pig quit running the marathon? He had a problem with his hamstring.
People who correct other people’s grammar are living in the passed.
My mate has been complaining because he can’t compress folders on his computer.
I told him to zip it.
I took my cat to the vet today. He picked her up, took a good long look at her and said “mate…I’m gonna have to put her down”. I was shocked, and asked him why…
“Well…because she’s too heavy…”
I tried to enter a robot rooster in a cock fight but was disqualified for a technical fowl.
YES!
At lunchtime today I came across 3 holes in the ground that were outlayed by bricks and mortar. I thought “well well well…”
Husband takes the wife to a nightclub. There’s a guy on the dance floor giving it large – break dancing, moonwalking, back flips, the works. The wife turns to her husband and says: “See that guy? 25 years ago he proposed to me and I turned him down.” Husband says: “Looks like he’s still celebrating!!”
I remember that one was used in a… I think Nandos ad? With a bunch of old guys sitting around a table and trying to explain to one of their number what the joke was. I thought the ad was hilarious… if only because I’ve seen that exact thing happening. The old actors nailed their roles.
What’s red and bad for your teeth?
A brick.
Confucius says: man who runs in front of car gets tired.
Confucius say: man who runs behind car gets exhausted.
Confucius says: Man who wants pretty nurse must be patient.
Confucius says: Man who walks through airport sideways is going to Bangkok.
Our leader using common sense and not using inflammatory language? This is scary and confusing times, folks.
http://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2015/oct/09/malcolm-turnbull-urges-australians-to-show-mutual-respect-in-battle-against-extremism
Not even a threat to shirtfront?! WHAT?!
I don’t know how he’s going to go in the top job, given that he hasn’t even appeared once in budgie smugglers. WHAT ARE YOU WAITING FOR MALCOLM!?!
Just a shame that his target audience won’t actually understand the words he’s using. Like, ‘counterproductive’.
Plus he won’t repeat himself 3-4 times, so people may very well miss what he said.
Not a single 3-word slogan? What does this clown think he’s doing!?
Giving Bernadi apoplexy.
Had to look that guy up. Re-learned he’s the one who tried to argue the natural progression from marriage equality would be acceptance of bestiality.
Classy guy.
He’s making noise about breaking away from the LNP and starting his own party after Turnbull got back in but so far it’s just been noise.
Maybe someone pointed out the irony of creating your own party immediately after complaining that politics has become a circus thanks to ambition and ego.
Obviously not having a fair shake of the sauce bottle, that’s what.
A Politician actually talking sense, somebody check hell, I think it’s frozen over.
I hate to agree with Turnbull, since I think he’s a slimy worm with a smile, but he is completely correct here.
Erggh. Gotta wash myself off.
I asked a hundred women what was their favorite shampoo. Their top answer?
“How in the hell did you get in my bathroom?!” #Page6I got asked to take off my jacket at airport security. When I asked why they said
“To prevent Arms smuggling” #dadjokepagesix #hi@strangeArms snuggling however is encouraged.
There you go, rubbing Oktoberfest in our face again
Why do Americans wear singlets?
Because they have the right to bare arms.My brother just sent me a Mass Effect pun, but I still don’t Geth it.
How did the Geth find us so fast?
The Geth consensus
I’m Commander Shepard, and this is my favourite pun on the Citadel!
*Hops on TAY*
*Sees it’s page 6*
*Hops off TAY*
It’s also that time on a Friday, right?
Page six is dad joke page. Either you seem to love or loathe it
I’m just glad we don’t get page 18s these days 😛
We try not to with @liondrive around 😛
😉
Page 6 is dad joke page? *new recurring task in calendar*
One of us! One of us!
Page 18 is sexy Page 18.
BEWARE
DON’T SEE THE PROBLEM MATE
(I’mma have to write all these down somewhere)
Thats the NSFW page that is the rarest of rare occasions. Haven’t hit 18 in nearly a year
There was also letter writing page 7 but no one seems to do that anymore.
@alexwalker
You’ll see the problem once I get started, stud 😉
@liondrive
Do you even know what page 18 is? Have you even seen it?
Amateurs, the lot of you.
@blaghman
Honey, Sweetie, don’t start.
I’m the only advocate for page 18 these days.
I miss it so 🙁
How many Three of Coins A man gotta burn to get an exotic! 10 coins it seems! 10 coins for an exotic! Balastic!
I’m still averaging about 5 for an exotic, though I gather that puts me on the lucky end of the spectrum.
FYI: dippizuka on Origin if you want to add me for Battlefront funsies.
Not finding anything when I search for you.
Add ‘Cakesmith’. Myself, @blaghman and @rize are playing at the moment.
Driving almost an hour over to North Sydney just to have dinner for a little and come straight home? Uhhhh ok.
Also trying to split the bill evenly when half the people had the most expensive dish on the menu. Why do they always do this. And then wonder why things get chaotic when I only chuck in the money for what I ate.
Or the people who order shots and expect the designated driver(s) to split the bill.
Holy crap, some of the CQC matches I had tonight. Almost carried a team match through from certain defeat to victory, had another match where I got knocked down to 3% hull but came back to full shields and went the whole match without dying, and a few others too. As much as I loved the heat beams, I think burst lasers are my new favourite.
Also seem to have just about filled up my shadowplay folder. Should probably clean that out.
Weekend! \o/
Spent like 30 mins trying to clean some white shoes only to realise it wasn’t really working well so I gave up and just bought new ones online 😛 (I think I’ll do this from now on for those cheapo canvas shoes)
And do any Brisbane TAYbies play sports? I want some tennis buddies! @SUGHLY
Ugh, Richius
*wears $100 notes as shoes*
I reckon @highperformance would be up for some tennis!
I thought he was in Melb? :O
I am in Melbz! I’m occasionally in Brisbane for work, sadly with my new job I won’t be heading to Brisbane but you’re welcome to a game if you’re down here.
n.b I have played three games of tennis in my life.
Well I’m born and raised and still in Melbourne but with my new job I’ll be moving to Brisbane
/o\
WHY CAN’T ANYTHING WORK OUT 😛
I think Rocket used to play tennis, but he mostly did so because he could beat all the old people who also played in his town.
Also, when you get your new shoes, buy a can of scotchguard and spray them. It’ll keep them clean for much longer.
Scotchgard Fabric? I’ve seen stuff like NeverWet online but wondered if there was a readily available alternative in Australia. Granted, I’ve never really had a look in Bunnings or wherever else is likely to sell those products 😛
How’s that affect the breathability of the shoes? Is it cheap and where do I get it?
You can get it in most shoe stores and even the supermarkets have some (scotchguard is just one brand). http://shop.coles.com.au/online/national/kiwi-shoe-waterproofer-protect-all
Even a light coating periodically won’t make much difference to the breathability, but it will help the fabric to repel dirt and moisture and make your new shoes last a bit longer.
🙁 it seems so hard to find nice dual monitor wallpapers, everything I come across is a pixelated mess, bleh.
Are you running 1080P, or something higher?
Because if the former, http://imgur.com/gallery/9BnP0
Or, if you don’t want to look through a gallery of over 1200 images, here’s a mere 100, http://imgur.com/gallery/pTzE5
Alternately, you could try cropping from something huge (like this http://cdn.spacetelescope.org/archives/images/large/heic1501a.jpg (although you’d want to de-noise the shit out of this to make it a background)), but if you’re running 2.5k upwards monitors it may be easier to just grab two thematically or visually linked 4k images.
Yeah only 1080P to be specific, 3840×1080
Mmm some of those are pretty nice. Cheers Blaghs.
Quick reminder for Sydney peeps about our Meat tomorrow
Pontoon Bar Darling Harbour, 12pm for lunch. Tables booked for 20 (booking name is Sarah)
See you there 🙂
I forgot to tell you (though you probably would have worked it out) that I am terrible and won’t be there. Thank you for organising this though, and I hope everyone has fun.
No worries
Right out front at Pontoon! Plenty of space and the Latin festival is across the bay
What do you call a parrot with a strong sense of justice?
The Long Arm of Macaw.Got Fallout 3 working on Windows 10 with only 1 crash so far \o/ love that game so much. Would have to be my favourite RPG of the 2000’s. But for some odd reason I just can’t get into New Vegas like I do Fallout 3. It also feels a bit clunky for some weird reason.
Two glasses of wine dowm, and Max is casually sitting on top of the couch, acting as a furry sentry.
Your cat drinks wine?
😉