I've been dieting. When I say I've been dieting I mean I changed everything about what I eat and drink for 3 1/2 years. It's been a long road to it's current incarnation but family members have hesitated to recognize me so I'd call that progress. My diet is as incredibly simple as it is agonizingly painful. 4 days a week I eat what I want. But the other 3 I stay under 800 calories.
Bad days where I'm at work I've found I can keep busy and thus I can keep my mind off things like bread. Sweet, precious, crumbly, toasted, bread. But bad days where I'm off? It's a more delicate operation. Sometimes I have stuff to do, friends to see movies with, furniture to rearrange, trails to run, but that only takes up so much time in a day. There will come a moment where my stomach cries for 12 lbs. of pesto sausage penne and I must drive the demon out.
I've been a fan of "loot grinder" games since the first torchlight; Obama's second year seems like a lifetime ago dosn't it? The best of them challenged me till I broke. They all had an end game that would always smoke my ass. It wasn't as discouraging as that sounds. I wouldn't give up on a Borderlands character until at least two full runs. I was ready to try something else by then but I could have kept going for twice as long and not run out of game. I'm always impressed by that. It proves you've made a loop so successful some people would choose to play it for the rest of their lives. Millions of people played Diablo II last year. That's from W's first term.
My point is these loot grinders whether they be an action RPG like Diablo or 1st person shooter in Borderlands transition to a zen experience if you play them enough. Something that's fun but only requires 40% of your attention so that you can listen to music and make a plan to get a better job. I sh*t thee not I got over serious emotional baggage by finally rolling the perfect critical chance stat for a necklace all my characters could share.
Maybe that sounds sad. But to me that was tangible progress in an indifferent and occasionally cruel world. It was a little project I worked on while mining a vein of John Le Carre audio books on youtube. Somewhere in the middle of our kind of traitor I looked up and noticed I'd maxed 6 characters in Diablo 3. I had cracked the end game while gaining 3 lbs. of lean muscle. The culprit of my pudge all these years ended up being sheer boredom.
In the time under my digital bodhi tree I've listened to nearly 80% of the works of Sir Terry Pratchett, everything by Umberto Eco, an embarrassing amount of Miss Marple and I bought a suit 4 sizes smaller that the last. I have meditated on myself, my writing, and my treatment of others; becoming a better person with a firmer grip on my dignity. I owe much to my mantra:
I've got it. I've paid for it. I want to see what all the fuss is about but... I know too much of the ending's broad strokes. It's a bummer to put it lightly and I don't feel like going through that. I find politics much more terrifying right now than a film could be. For once I see a horror film largely being called great, something that happens only once every 4 years, and I'm good. My past self is sucking his teeth at me, knowing I've become something I hate.
But I like how guacamelee makes me feel. I'm gonna stick with that!
But some days you try to use a coupon for what you think is for $11 off a $45 prescription and it turns out that's what it cost now. $11. For a year. Also my bosom podcasting buddy Chance gifted me Gucamelee! 2 an hour before I was going to buy it myself. On account of me magically saving nearly $400 a year. Remember that? I do.
It's not as immediately catchy as Groening's past projects but the more I hear it over the course of the season the more I like it. It's a gentle mariachi/klezmer swirl and it's a lot like the show. It may not blow your mind immediately but keep listening. There's got more layers than it lets on.
So as always I'm late to a party, or at least later than a vice puff piece on one of youtube's best kept secrets. It's a bunch of chill hip hop beats looped endlessly day and night while a studious girl with googly eyes on her headphones writes in her diary.
I wish I had an echo or something so that this played in my apartment all the time. The songs can get repetitive at times but after a while I started to dig it. They're like mantras and I hear them even when I'm not listening to them, if that makes any sense. It's audible prozac, is what I'm saying. I hope y'all can do chilledcow a solid and like and subscribe:
You don't make a movie like this and call it Arizona without evoking two of the brother's best movies and you know what? I'm all in on a movie like this written by comedy writers. Not that the Coens aren't funny but over the years (the tail end of eastbound and Vice principles) Mcbride got DAMN funny. And that's exactly what this looks like. Plus where the hell has David Allen Grier been?
Yeah no, you're fired. But I'm sure you'll... LAND ON YOUR FEET.
I'm not much for Japan's fixation on cute things, I tend to tolerate it more than anything. But the cats in this game are pretty great and that's coming from a dyed in the wool dog person. I was able to make mine look like a fox and foxes get you points from me. Lots.
I was on board until a conversation with my new mouse keep- I mean house keeper became wall to wall cats puns. Didn't get one sentence through with this guy before he dropped a "purrrr-fection" on the floor. Right in front of everybody.
I love puns but that's not what these are. This is technically assault, cat people. Cool it.
*Update:
I'm sorry, is this like a medical condition for you guys? Are you physically able to stop talking like a lazy writer?
I've been in No Man's Sky for a while now, enough to start a review. While I do very much enjoy and continue to enjoy it... I have notes. Chief among them what Miss Jackson so eloquently put today:
I've been having a breezily good time with no man's sky and couldn't help but take some pictures. You should all check out the review aggregate on steam's page. The recent positives are flying off the damn chart.
So anybody heard of the jakalope hoax?
The gallant star ship: Ernesto MK II. I honestly miss it's cockpit. I don't think the new intern is working out.
Time to make the doughnuts.
If you've been skipping most of the dialogue... stop that.
The way this thing walks is as biologically accurate as it is heart breaking.
So lately/4 months ago I plum ran out of things to talk about. Entertainment wise anyway. I went to a really dark place and video games were a cold comfort. Something I could gab about once a week with a couple good friends, but not something to write about.
I wanted to write about Kafkaesque fascistic nightmares.
But since it looks like our Vichy government is reaching the end game I'd thought I'd pop back in and let you know I've found my love for video based diversion again. I've had a lovely time with No Man's Sky and I'm diving back into New Vegas to see if my torch for it still burns as brightly. Stay tuned.
My car burned down the other day. Not sure how and since it's a cube now. I guess I'll never know. If the median haden't run out when it did, I had about 45 seconds from smoke to fire, I could have been cooked. Makes you take stock. Finding a decent used car has become it's own purgatory but it's damn good having all my limbs and eyebrows.
You can juuust make out make out my favorite pair of jeans.
I make a huge mistake in this episode. I thought, through hasty googling, that Maya Angelou was born in Winston Salem. She's a Saint Louis native. But she sure did die there though! Why am I proud of that? Weird.
Rise and Fall is an expansion that is frustrating to write about. Not that I think I wasted a single dollar on it, though. Civ VI continues to be my favorite Civilization to date but it remains difficult to prove it to be the best. This had happened with V before it had it's 2 expansions. No one was particularly happy with V out of the box but Gods and Kings then Brave New World made it the definitive Civ. I'm worried VI will never get there. Rise and Fall is a fascinating new direction but it feels much more thin than the expansions that have come before.
But not in the new leader department. It's a relief to see some new faces as the cast almost doubles with 9 more stunningly well animated leaders. Robert the Bruce and Poundmaker stand out to me (and not just because I have 3 c's in my name.) I prefer to play as an ivory tower. An impenetrable economic and scientific dynamo. Before these two guys (and Civ VI, really) this was pretty hard to pull off if you weren't Babylon. Poundmaker's outgoing trade bonus will make your enemies think twice before mowing you down and Robert is a first in that he's a surprisingly pleasant neighbor. The guy hates war and particularly the AI's strategy of burning down city states. In several different games we teamed up to take down megalomaniacal jerks and they were without a doubt the most fun wars I've ever been in.
No I love you more.
Here I'll start to pull on a thread that will take us through everything new worth talking about. Cites now project influence. The more influence on a tile (the closer you are to another civ's city) the more loyalty you'll lose per turn. When you run out of loyalty, your city revolts and becomes less of a city state and more of a... pirate nest? Nassau, I guess. Back to my ivory tower style I'm loving how much more personal space the AI now gives me. Before if there was some oil juuuust out of my reach it wouldn't be long before the enemy had a new city all up in my business. This simply does not happen anymore and it. Is. Awesome. But now the race to the new world has even higher stakes because once someone gets a real foothold it's almost impossible to stretch out. Unless you have the right governor.
Over the course of your culture tree you will now earn "governor" points. You'll never guess what you spend them on. Every player has access to the same roster of 7. Each focusing on either loyalty, faith, science/culture/production, and you get the idea. Most of their skills won't tip the balance of the game either way, but they all have their uses. Though there are a handful worth bending over backwards for. 2 points into the defense guy and you have a city that cannot be put under siege. Yeah, holy sh*t.
And another from the educator, with some help from the Oracle, lets me run the table on nearly all the great people for pretty much the whole game. He can double your great person points in one city and the Oracle slaps another 20% on top of that. The AI has started 9 different wars with me over my sure to be nerfed strategy. But that's the thing. I've never had a strategy in Civ I thought needed nerfing and I love how smart Rise and Fall has made me feel.
Oh yeah, well the only thing people know your folk music from are Wes Anderson movies!
But about the whole "rising and falling" thing. It's a nice idea, carving up the game's eras into mad dashes for points. Get enough and you stay in a normal era. Get twice that and you get a golden age where your cites positively spew loyalty and you choose a passive bonus (like invulnerable trade routeseeeeeeee!!!) for the whole age. Fail to get enough points and you wind up in a dark age. Get enough points for a golden age in a dark age? You earn a heroic age where you can choose 3 golden age perks. So how do you get points? Difficult to say. Building unique districts gets you some the first time. Killing units in the company of a great general does as well. But if you're down to the wire and you're not sure how to get those last couple points to stave off the darkness... well...
It would be neat for your advisor to suggest the best way to get more points as it's hard to remember what you have and haven't done game to game. Mod community? Get on it. Until then, I say it's a good idea that is obtuse and punishing. And the golden filter over everything gets old pretty quick.
So I really enjoyed Rise and Fall. It needs some work but what Civ game doesn't? Unfortunately while most previous expansions were as great as they were necessary this is something I could see some people skipping. That's a shame, but there it is. But the changes that were made in service of the less violent civs made some of my most enjoyable games possible. Not only that, but I also hit my highest score ever and that can't be a coincidence. I cannot say whether VI will eventually receive the accolades I say it deserves but I am certain it will always be my favorite.
When early access games start getting 9/10 reviews and cost less than $20 what do you have to loose? So I got it... and I played it. And I absolutely goddamn love it. After blood borne I didn't think a randomly generated souls game could work. That the level design was integral to the combat somehow. Dead Cells has spent 3 hours showing me how wrong I was. If you ever loved Castlevania this is worth your time and money.
In the wake of The Incredibles Ralph loses a bit of thunder. Both being the only two animated films I can think of that actually deserve a sequel. Getting John C. Reilly and Sarah Silverman to be the leads in anything deserves sequels.
It's been 5 years, with Zootopia by Rich Moore made in the interim. That was the first CGI Disney film that can go toe to toe with Pixar's best and while I have high hopes Ralph Breaks the Internet delivers; I'd be happy with it being just ok. But who knows? Maybe this is their Toy Story 2 moment where the laws of sequel gravity are defied. That "bunny gets the pancake" bit is f*%ing gold.
I'm playing a lot of Civ VI. Which means I'm listening to a lot of Civ VI. Which means I'm still gushing over Geoff Knorr's soundtrack. Vocals are one of the most radical departures for Rise and Fall and I was wondering if actual members of the Cree sang for Poundmaker's theme. According to Knorr's Facebook, several of them were even part of the man's extended family.
It gets neater. They all refused money and insisted on a unique form of payment, Poundmaker souvenir jackets:
Let Shaka Zulu's atomic era theme get you through this foggy n' drizzly Tuesday. If Geof Knorr keeps this up he might get my OST of the year twice in a row.
Yes I know it's the 18th. Yes I know it feels like I've ghosted the crackpot... I'm still working 6 day weeks and I don't know how to get off. But this sh*t right here makes it all better. Creating the facade that every cast in every production is the best of friends is part of doing business. The sad fact is all those people can't actually like each other that much.
But this is different. Parks and Rec ended years ago. Each gal in this picture has bigger stuff going on. Hell, Kathryn Hahn was only in a handful of episodes. The evidence for P&R being one of the greatest American comedies of all time grows ever stronger. I mean, have youactuallyseen Aubrey Plaza look so f*&king content? Lighting in a bottle, folks.
My favorite Civ ever is growing up. I may only have 20 minutes to poke around until work but I can't remember the last time a game made me even consider hooky.
Whatcha been up to? Those are some beautiful robo-bulls you got there. And I think we both know Hopkins isn't really dead... though I'd get that cameo sooner than later. The man is 80 after all.
New Bosses, a new storyline, and a new game mode. Whether that's a boss rush or something original we do not know. But we do know that this last update isn't simply the last one for free but in perpetuity. This was my favorite new game last year and while the switch port still languishes in QA testing for the foreseeable future I will pester everyone I know (that games) to give it a shot.
Please play Hollow Knight, Ya'll. It's the best $15 I've spent all year.
So there's a live action film being made staring a CGI Pikachu. Who talks and solves crimes. Played by Ryan Reynolds. I feel high just describing this thing. Now Bill Nighy's in the mix though the nature of his role is unknown. He does seem to pop in and out of live/CGI roles so for now I'm hoping he's Chief Constable Butterfree.
I've started a new job. Until I've settled in that place and worked out a more equitable scheduling treaty between the two of them I've no choice but to do everything they want. Which is a 65 hour week. Don't get me wrong, I need the money, but I am sorry the Crackpot is left in such a state. I shall return Tuesday!
In which Kratos looks back on his past and goes "...yeah I was a real piece of sh*t." I pictured a self loathing father figure emerging from him as likely as a feminist deconstruction of Duke Nukem. I'm
REAL damn hyped over it now. They're gunning for The Last of Us in
terms of story quailty. They won't land anywhere near it but the fact
they tried this hard really makes me smile.
There's an 100 year old poem written by Lovecraft that the internet just realized is the exact same meter as piano man. Being the age of information it took New Yorker musician Julian Velard less than a week to set it to music. It ain't half bad!
What could fill the vacuum left behind by the end of Breaking Bad and the hollowing of The Walking Dead? This. This sh*t right here. A Napoleonic Jaws but with a Yeti. Or maybe they just want you to think that's where they're going. Seriously, the book it's based on has rave reviews and this cast is bonkers. I'd follow Jarred Harris into the 9th circle but Ciaran Hinds and Tobias Menzies?! Ok, AMC, enough! I'll take you back.
Not content to having made just one of the best science documentary series in existence, Fox and Neil DeGrasse Tyson are back for Cosmos: Possible Worlds. Yes. PLEASE. Roll that gorgeous CGI and silvern orchestral soundtrack:
A suit so dope I wish I could make it for Halloween. But I can't. That would be...foolish.
Early trade routes, super scouts, and food bonuses to foreign traders. Poundmaker is exactly how I want to play Civ. See, the trick to surviving the early game is playing nice, building a massive financial war chest, and setting off to the undiscovered country before anyone else. Eventually the people you want to go to war with will do so on their own out of what I assume is pure digital jealousy.
I managed to get into my first ever fender bender. 12 years behind the wheel... had to happen sometime I guess. No one was hurt, no witness or red light cameras, (which according to my DPD sources wouldn't be on anyway shhhhhhhh) so it's a "no fault" situation. Not great, could have been worse, any crash you walk away from, right?
