@Ganymede said in RL things I love:
Congratulations. You have constructed a home for Floof Wizard.
Now where are you going to put your computer?
You know, @Auspice said almost the exact same thing word for word on Skype.
The computer will still go there damnit. It just means I have to computer chair. My hope is that he'd rather sit in that than on the desk.
Which is wishful thinking, I know.
@Ganymede Thankfully, he's rather harmless of the three. He's the kind of jerk that will tear up the underside of the couch to crawl into it but then hide in the basement when someone he doesn't know comes over because he's afraid of his own shadow.
There was one time when at our old apartment, he was cowering behind the toilet because the Charter guy came over to fix the internet.
So it's the female. She's the little shit that'll claw at you if you bother her sleeping.
Because I haven't updated in a week or so. This has been a rather hard week for me, but I think I've found some respite in a couple things. Mostly in a very beneficial conversation with a friend and then another conversation with my therapist based upon the first.
A friend kept asking me 'why' RP was so important to me. I couldn't really give an answer to it. It was when I finally started to question the 'why' on the physiological level instead of the emotional and mental aspect of it. Turns out, strangely enough, I had been using MUing to self-medicate. When we do things we enjoy, our brains secrete four particular chemicals. Usually this is serotonin, endorphins, oxytocin, and dopamine. I had somehow subconciously been seeking out the biggest provider of serotonin and dopamine since that's something I don't produce as much as I should. There's a more long-winded explanation that I'll hold off on.
My therapist thought this was very forward thinking today, proud that I had come to that conclusion. There is a bit of guilt involved for me, now the sudden realization that I was treating people I RP'd with like some kind of drug pusher to get my fix.
That all said, today's session combined with now being on medication has helped immensely, and for the first time I feel like I can think straight. This last week has been hard. To the point where it almost felt like withdraw. I couldn't figure out why it felt like that until I came to the thought that I did. Still, the pull is there. It doesn't feel so dire now, and the need to remind myself on the now instead of fixating my thoughts on the past or the future.
Made a new attempt at mac an cheese tonight. I had...most of the ingredients. I mean...you can supplant milk for evaporated milk and and heavy cream for half and half, right? /Right?/
I should say I put this kind of punishment on myself, but there's a kind of odd annoyance when you eat something, and unsure if it's good or not, you keep eating it.
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. And then the murders began.
Is anyone else bothered by the tedious little cutscene that happens when you change from one planet to the next? I mean, in previous games, you could just zip your ship around, do your scanning and be off to the next thing.
Here, it's like this big deal that we have to first-person view the changing from one planet/system to the next and it just gets tedious after away. I just want to scan stuff, don't make it a big deal.
Also, unskippable cutscenes when I land and leave with the Tempest? What is this? 1998 Playstation?
@Thenomain I ran into that as well. Taking down the Kett stronghold on Eos, then talking to a merc(who's the son of my favorite character from ME2 as an easter egg)congratulating for me taking it down, then a moment later that I wasn't ready to take down said stronghold. Which left me with a 'huh' kind of expression.
Funny the only person that I'd like to be able to romance, isn't(awesome Asari doctor).
Also going to fine tune the sync with VO and mouth animations. And just fixing the overall lack of facial expression in NPC and squad mates. Granted this is all stuff they should've had when the game released, but that's dead horse by this point.
After beating the game once, I like it. No, it's not Witcher 3, and frankly, I doubt we'll see game in the near future coming close to how well done it was. A lot of people don't seem to realize that the team that made ME:A was a kind of a newbie team, though why BioWare would hand the reigns off to one of their captial IPs is beyond me. But also, it's easy to forget what a glitchy mess the first ME was, and that's still my favorite of the series.
Also, with people continually trying to compare ME:A to Witcher 3, I feel like these are a lot of people who never played Witcher 1, which was goddamn terrible in my opinion. Was the overall arc good? Maybe not as good as ME1's, but better than 3 and in some cases, better than 2. Combat is fun, probably the best combat in a ME game I've played.
If I have any gripe left, it's the fact that my Ryder is so weak in the health and shields department compared to the rest of my squad. How do I barely 630 health and 400 shields when the rest of my squad have broken the 1000 mark? Maybe that's just game balance, but that does tend to stick out to me.
@Sparks said in Mass Effect: Andromeda: The Thread:
(As for Dragon Age 2 being "bland and incomplete", I was told a trick that makes it so much more playable: just assume everything is due to the fact that Varric is narrating the game, and he's a wildly unreliable narrator. Enemies dropping randomly from roofs? That's Varric telling Cassandra, "And then we faced 5... no, wait, 10... or was it 20 enemies?" Every cave being the same? Varric doesn't care what the caves looked like, so he just hand-waves it by describing them more or less identically. Etc. My second playthrough was so much more fun that way.)
Many people forget that the beloved ME 1(which is still my favorite in the first trilogy)was the exact same way. Exact same looking caves, or bases or hideouts. Recycled the same three or four layouts that looked exactly the same. Enemies popping in? Happened. But people are so quick to harp on DA2 for it but completely ignore the fact the fact that ME1 did the exact same thing. It wasn't anything new.
It had always been a BioWare thing. KOTOR did it, Jade Empire did it. It wasn't really until ME2 and DA:I is where they started to stray away from that habit. Granted, ME2 was much more linear and DA:I couldn't ever strive to be what Witcher 3 had already mastered.
Dunno if anyone else has watched it, but I I caught the first two episdoes of the new season of MST3K on Netflix.
Amazing. If you're Mistie, go watch them.
@Ghost And here I thought you were complaining more about the tube steak than the pastel meat grinder.
@Ghost And here I thought you were complaining more about the tube steak than the pastel meat grinder.
He loves my tube steak.
Going back to the initial post of this thread(because I sorta glazed over everything else), I look at our society and, oddly, look at two things. The Fermi Paradox and the Singularity.
As reference to the former, not about aliens themselves(though I can wish I'll be alive when/if that day ever comes), but to the aspect of the Paradox called the Great Filter. Earth has already been through a series of these filters, according to Fermi and those who agree with the theory, but the reason it applies to the general Paradox in general is: why haven't we met anyone out there yet?
The idea is that these filters, enigmatic as they are, represent changes to a planet's overall state and society, whether by nature, cosmic events, the race's own actions, take your pick. In terms of humans, I tend ascribe to the latter of these. Some planets with life just don't make it past a filter, which is, in part explains why we haven't met anyone not from Earth. But this filter also ascribes to ourselves.
Basically, and while I wouldn't consider myself a pessimist, it may come off as such. I have strong reservations that we as a species will make it through the next barrier, the actions of the past couple of years is, to me, indicative to that. I don't doubt that nature will likely play a hand in it, but the biggest culprit I suspect is ourselves as whole. Not any singular person, just as a species.
Most futurists predict the next Filter will occur in the next fifty to two hundred years, give or take. And most consider the the Singularity will be apart of that. I don't know how much anyone else reads up on it, but there's been some slightly unsettling hints that we are getting closer and closer to artificial intelligence, and anyone in this particular field with any sense is saying that this is a really bad idea.
This isn't any kind of proclamation that 'the sky is falling', but looking at the slow degradation and regression of our culture as whole, and not to say it's anything new if you look back at the past three decades, but it doesn't give me exactly a lot of hope that we'll all magically find ourselves in a more cultured and evolved state.
Then again, I'm the same person that's always said that the only thing that's going to bring everyone together is either A. Being invaded by extraterrestrial threat or B. Simply knowing they exist. So... y'know, take with the biggest grain of salt you can find.
@Vorpal said in Mass Effect: Andromeda: The Thread:
Come on, people. If it had been true, think about it: Bioware could have created the first James T. Kirk: Space Exploration and Space Venereal Disease simulator. And that would have been one hell of a hilariously awesome way to go.
http://kotaku.com/the-witcher-is-getting-a-netflix-series-1795289049
Boy, am I apprehensive about this. Considering how the author absolutely hates the games. Never mind it was the games that made people want to read the books. Or incredibly salty for the fact that he sold the game rights to CPR for peanuts without asking for royalties, who then went on to make obscene amounts of money with it.
The author of Metro 2033, Dmitry Glukhovsky has stated two facts about it. One, being that he's more than happy his books were made into games, because it allowed people who had never heard of the books to read them. And has gone on record to refer to Sapkowski as 'an arrogant motherfucker'.
Got a new monitor. It's smaller than the tv I had been using as a monitor. It's very...wide. But the cool part about it, is that I can split the screen four times. It's like having four screens on one screen.
I was pretty used to have a big ol 32 inch tv for a monitor, but I'll take this 25 inch extra wide monitor
It'll take some getting used to, but I like it so far.
@Sparks said in Mass Effect: Andromeda: The Thread:
Well hey. http://kotaku.com/the-story-behind-mass-effect-andromedas-troubled-five-1795886428
Was wondering if anyone else was going to link that. Really interesting read, and pretty sad at the same time after finding out what could have been.
And then learning about how much of a nightmare Frostbite is to work with.
What are they? I bring this up because I gave in, mostly out of curiosity and bought a fidget spinner. And I haven't been able to put the damn thing down.
I hate myself.
So what are yours?