Best posts made by Derp

@Ghost said in Real World Peeves, Disgruntlement, and Irks.:

So...
...Silver Kanye.

Do I even want to google this? I think... no.

My partner of going on 15 years has cystic fibrosis. As does his brother. It is a terrible disease that does terrible things to the body. While my partner has been very, very lucky and is still in decent health, his brother and many of his friends are not.

Even of you have very little interest in Pathfinder, every cent that goes to research helps to create new medicines and gene therapies, which puts us one step closer to finding a cure.

Please consider donating even a small amount, if you can.

@surreality said in The Crafting Thread:

If you ever decide to look into something along those lines, give me a nudge. I may be able to track down one of my old textbooks on it that was SUPER HELPFUL and explained how to manipulate that basic pattern (also one for pants, one for skirts, princess line styles, etc.) pretty well, and I'm betting you could still find a copy out there.

As someone interested in this dark Sorcery, what book is that? I might not ever use it but it would be fun to know, and I have lots of bookstores around here.

ETA: Asked and answered before I finished reading!

So I picked up a couple of things at Gencon that have turned out to be super interesting so far. The first on the list, and by far the one I've had the most fun with, is called Three Things:

https://www.gumnut.io/collections/party-games/products/3-things-what-will-it-take-to-survive

This version looks fairly expensive, since I picked it up for $20, but it's made by Shenanigames, and I can't find a better website.

The basic premise of the game is that you and several other players are given a scenario ("Trapped in a mall full of zombies..." "In the ring with a heavyweight boxer..." "Separated from your spaceship..."), and there are a bunch of little cardboard tiles in the bag that indicate different items (Lipstick, underpants, pie, a chainsaw, a fire extinguisher, a flip-flop, etc.). You have to come up with a story about how you used these three things to overcome the situation you found yourself in.

One player acts as the judge. That player determines how many of the items you found a plausible or creative use for, and awards you a ration for each of the items you used well (in their opinion). So you get a little thing with a 1 to 3 on it. Whoever has the most rations at the end of play wins.

You can come up with some crazy things. It's great fun.

Next up is Uno Flip. https://www.amazon.com/Mattel-Games-GDR44-Flip-Card/dp/B07JKB2H59 Which is very much like the Uno that you know and love, but each card has a "Dark Side", revealed through the Flip card (where you flip the deck and everyone flips their hand to the other side), which are much more punishing. Draw 5, Draw until you get a specific Color, Skip Everyone, etc. So much fun.

A last one here is "Sing For Your Supper", which is great fun and completely humiliating if you can't sing. The basic premise is that you're trying to create a whole 'meal', and in order to do so you have to sing a part of a song. But since lyrics are expensive and copyright is an issue, the card you're given contains a clue as to the genre and the decade, and you have to decipher what the song should be and sing that part of the verse.

Example:

"Someone has a firearm."

-or-

Country 2010's:

Infant you are a melody, you induce me to open the windows and drive, on a country road, running stop signs, in the center of the road, each small hamlet with you, in my brand new pickup with a high center, it would be beautiful if you were inside it.

Other players have cards they can play to screw you over though, so don't expect it to be easy!

http://incarnategames.com/supper.html

@Ganymede said in Real World Peeves, Disgruntlement, and Irks.:

@silverfox

That may be false in part of the United States.

Or for criminal attorneys in general. Jails are fucking gross.

@Tyche said in OWoD Humble Bundle:

Actually, it's the code which allows the server to connect to the internet that does.

Then why are you even still here? Don't you have a bridge to hide under, somewhere?

@Ganymede said in Real World Peeves, Disgruntlement, and Irks.:

She may have been a lawyer once, but I still am.

God help you, you're with another lawyer?

I admire your conviction.

And will pray for your soul.

@KDraygo said in General Video Game Thread:

@Selira I'm afraid to get it.

Don't be. Seriously. So far it's been almost completely faithful to the original, and expanded on all the things in between where fans were going 'huh I wonder why they didn't do X thing between these other things'. I have not been disappointed by a single thing so far, and have been playing it almost non-stop since I got it.

The way they expand out Biggs, Wedge, and Jessie? Just... you will not be disappointed if you are a fan of the original. All the nostalgia.

ETA: The combat system is the perfect blend of the original and FF15's combat thing, complete with all the options. It's what they should have done with FF15. It flows very nicely, and materia is actually both really important and has to be used very strategically.

A QUIET PLACE PART 2?!?!?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XEMwSdne6UE

@Lotherio said in Cheap or Free Games!:

They made a second ff?

FF1 FOREVER

Re: Aglio e olio --

I make this a lot. Like, a LOT a lot. Because it's yummy.

While the recipe above is good, I do a few things differently.

First, don't crush the garlic. The point isn't to have an even distribution, the point is to have slices of blonded garlic in the pasta for a lovely hit of it when you bit into a garlic slice. You just slide them into the oil long enough for them to just start changing color, and voila, lovely garlic.

Second, you should add both garlic and red pepper flakes to the oil. Maybe not much, but you want a bit of heat in it.

You can go crazy on the parsley or not, but the earthly flavor of the parsley offsets the citrus from the lemon and the spice from the red pepper and the garlic.

When you're only working with like six or seven ingredients (pasta, oil, parsley, red pepper, lemon, garlic, maybe some parm or romano cheese though I don't think it needs it) leaving one out can drastically change the composition of the dish.

Booted up Far Cry 3 because -- I had never played it. Yeah, I know. Shut up. Having immense fun with this game.

@saosmash said in Depression Meals:

@surreality I love that meat hammer. I bought a pizza cutter in the shape of the starship Enterprise once. (NCC-1701, no bloody A, B, C or D)

I use it for all my dough cutting!

HEY. HEY. Don't you diss the D.

@warma-sheen

I'm playing it on the PS4 because frankly I don't have a system good enough to run it on PC (fingers crossed for a future investment), but it crashes all the time. Navigation is sometimes almost impossible because you hit these big gray walls and can't see what's on the other side of them until you're through them so you have no idea if you're about to turn or crash into something or mow down a pedestrian and get a warrant. Conversations and quick-hacks have been glitchy af.

I love the game, the writing is awesome and I'm trudging through it, but there's nothing quite like being on one of the longer missions and having your system crash mid-combat only to realize you have to start basically at the beginning because you can't save while enemies are alerted.

It's a mixed bag.

@Rinel

Why you gotta be rebels, with your weird bar exam business and your parishes instead of counties?

@kireek said in The Cyberpunk 2077 Snuff Chip Problem:

We reach the crux of the problem... and the original post. It isn't freaks that make the market, there are too few to really make such a detailed operation sustainable..

You're making an assumption, here. A pretty big one. Niche markets are still markets. It just means that you have less competition and can, in fact, charge higher prices, especially given the danger/effort involved in making it.

Yes, it absolutely can be sold to 'a couple of freaks' for very high prices, just like any other item in a niche market.

@kireek said in The Cyberpunk 2077 Snuff Chip Problem:

And instead of [ad]dressing it, I wonder why people are so quick to point out it isn't real and fake.. when that.. clearly is obvious? Like no duh? It doesn't change the fact people are participating in this sequence without questioning it. Just following along, perpetuating the market in this game..
That raises no eyebrows or questions? None at all?

...no. Because it very clearly is a game, and you're using it as justification of some kind of ... what? Social engineering experiment? That just isn't there. Like, you are the only person seeing it.

And hey, maybe you're right and we're all being trained to be Secret Nazis, or whatever. But like -- given the events of 2020, nobody has to be subtle about that shit anymore. You can just vote them into office.

@kireek said in The Cyberpunk 2077 Snuff Chip Problem:

As for why it is a trick.. eh, it doesn't really explain what participation means in a broader context.

Because there is no broader context. That's -- kind of the point, here. The game does not have to make a commentary on the society of the world we live in. It just doesn't. It exists, as a thing, unto itself, and requires no justification.

@kireek said in The Cyberpunk 2077 Snuff Chip Problem:

WHy did CD Project Red make this sequence instead of something else? There was a point to spend meticulous man hours on what is ultimate a sequence which could be done a myriad other ways. This was done with a purpose what purpose?

To show that the world of cyberpunk is fucked up? HOW? How is it showing its fucked up? Why is this necessary?

Becuase there is a market for BDs like this, that society has decayed so much that death is commercialize. But how does this market exist?

We reach the crux of the problem... and the original post. It isn't freaks that make the market, there are too few to really make such a detailed operation sustainable..

The crux of the problem is that you are trying to inject entirely too much RL into what is essentially an escapist fantasy, albeit a dark one, with apparently very little understanding that people are capable of separating fantasy and reality, and one does not necessarily influence the other as much as you seem to think it does, book thesis or no book thesis.

@Auspice said in The Art of Lawyering:

I guess that's why they call them rules lawyers.

@dreampipe said in General Video Game Thread:

Something I think some folks might be happy about, out of light of Anthem ceasing development.

Bioware will be making the next Dragon Age a single-player RPG, after originally planning for it to be a service game.

Thank Christ.

@Pandora said in Separating Art From Artist:

breaking some sacred rule they haven't come up with yet

I don't usually agree with Pandora, but I agree with this. Despite may vocal voices to the contrary, there is not an objectively wrong belief or practice. For every argument against, there is almost always an equally valid argument for. Which makes them entirely subjective, even if we find them incredibly distasteful by current perceptions. Every culture has some kind of practice or belief that later cultures find abhorrent in some way, and try to go back and demonize them -- even though those practices were widely accepted at the time, even believed to be commanded by the gods in some cases.

In the not-too-distant future, someone is going to look back at something that we thought perfectly normal and justified and go on just as big a rant about that thing as we do today. We don't even have to look back that far. We're already throwing most of the nineties under the bus.

Pretending that we're some omniscient objective observer, and trying to retroactively apply contemporary standards to the past and force it to conform, is a ludicrous endeavor that's more damaging than helpful. You can change what happens right now. Not what happened a thousand (or thirty) years ago. Art, by definition, tends to be a distillation of a culture's symbolic beliefs, so some future generation is always going to find it problematic somehow. It's just the nature of the beast.

@carma said in General Video Game Thread:

@derp I enjoyed Alan Wake for a couple hours, but then it lost me.

***Just some gripes***

click to show

As I found more of the titular character's manuscript, I got increasingly turned off by his writing style. I'd have to look back at it to give it a fair shake, but I was grinding my teeth at just how amateurish his writing is.

I was hoping that the game was building up to the fact that he's supposed to be a bad writer who's plagued by the pressure of a publisher and fans who love his stuff despite him being unable to meet his own personal standards, and the supernatural things he experiences are manifestations of the pain that plagues him... but either I misinterpreted the ending or that isn't at all what the story was building up to.

Somehow, despite my love for horror novels, I don't think I was the targeted demographic for that game. And that saddens me.

Well -- I mean, granted, I'm not all the way through it, but:

***Spoilery Spoiler Stuff***