Brick Fight

"Why is the average AAA story worse than Transformers?" This one quote is freaking brilliant."

 

If this what his average viewer sees as "brilliance", no wonder he can get away with just bitching for over 20 minutes about how bad "MODERN GAMING!" is without ever making a single point at all.

His reviews really aren't like that. I've been going through his stuff since Loser started posting it, and it's actually interesting to listen to a shooter fan who doesn't just humbug every new game.

edit: Watching more of his videos, and one thing annoys me in that he's one of those guys that loves shadowboxing over poltical correctness. Most notably he goes out of his way to justify Duke Nukem Forever because something feminism something political correctness.

Neat video. When EC actually gets someone who knows what they're talking about instead of smugging out on people after reading a wiki, it's genuinely interesting.

   DooM gameplay looks pretty solid - fast, brutal, skill-based shooter. I hope that it would not feel like a generic shooter game. It would have been better if number of monsters were higher. 30 monsters on screen max sounds like DooM 1 with it's 32 (IIRC) creatures on screen max engine limitation.

 

I've done this bit a few times, but I would argue that Doom 3 is more like Doom 1 than any game out there. One thing people forget is that the original Doom game didn't have mouselook, and you could only use tank controls. We also didn't know where all of the secrets and health/ammo pickups were, so lots of people who actually remember their earliest playthroughs agree that it played more like a survival horror game, what with its aesthetic and resource management. While Ultra-Violence is considered the default difficulty these days, the game was damned near impossible above hurt me plenty for a lot of folks. Even on UV, the monster count was relatively low, and it wasn't until Doom 2 that they really started to push the games as "big open areas with shitloads of enemies."

It just kind of bugs me that everyone forgets about that. I keep hearing people getting ultra-mad that the game isn't like real Doom in that it doesn't have assloads of monsters or rocket jumping (yes, I've heard this a lot). I've also heard developers saying stuff like "jumping, mobility, and high flying action are what Doom's all about!" so it's kinda weird.

I played the hell out of DoW 1 and it's expansions and mods.  Was a member of several mod teams back in the day.  I liked the base building aspects.  The lack of base building in DoW 2 was one of the big things I didn't like about it.  I played through the singleplayer and never really got into the skirmish aspects of the game.

That's fair. I'm not big on base-building strategy games and I played it after DoW 2, so it definitely wasn't my thing.

I hope the return of base building and special designated cover zones doesn't mean DoW 3 is going to be missing all of what was good about 2.

True, though to be fair the best part about DoW 2 was that it was a complete departure from DoW 1.

Trump running as a third party is the biggest question I have to see answered before I make any predictions about November.

I hope Doom 4 ends up good. I just want a good single-player shooter, and from what I've seen I can get into the SP and snapmap. I'm wondering how Bethesda is responding to everyone basically saying the multiplayer is a huge pile.

Right, and you're also seeing that Anti-Trump Republicans (ATRs) are predicting a massive loss for Trump in the general, based on... "The media will turn on him."

Um, what planet are they living on? The media has BEEN against Trump, and he's thrived on it. "But they have so many facts and evidence and stuff against him!" So? Since when has any of that mattered in an election? Since when has Trump cared that you could cite him saying something? He always just says "I never said that" and moves on. He's lying, but again, who cares? Your "low information voters" (i.e. normal people) don't.

I agree with Scott Adams on this (though not a whole lot else): a Trump v. Hillary election results in a landslide Trump victory.

The media doesn't support Trump on an ideological level, but they've been the biggest help to him.

Think of it like the Kardashians. How many shows about no-name families or rich people have there been? Now, how many people screech every day about the Kardashians having a show is contributing to the downfall of society? How many people who don't even watch this lame cable show about another pointless rich family have a very strong opinion and share and like every news story or social media report (positive or negative). Overall, everyone has a negative view of this family, yet they only get more famous and more rich. It's because everyone's always talking about them, and since they're not running a charity group or something like that, all they need is to put their name on something to get more money.

Same goes for Bieber. I actually listen to my local pop station because they play good stuff like MGMT, The Black Keys, and Arctic Monkeys. They play all other kinds of pop, and I still have not heard them play a single Justin Bieber song. Yet everyone hates this kid's guts and can't shut up about him and his music. He'd have gone the way of the Jonas Brothers or any other manufactured teen idol if the world just decided to stop talking about him.

Likewise, Trump could have been relegated to being another no-name. While most of his popularity comes from party missteps since the late '90s, Trump is only a big deal because he knows how to use media, both "official" and social. As a businessman, he's been shown to be competent at best, and incompetent and inscrpulous at worst. What he does do well is sell his name. Like the schoolyard bully who knows how to press buttons, he gets people more and more riled up. This gets media attention who want in on that sweet story, and that gets more people riled up. You now have a movement where even media outlets trying to "take him down" are only feeding the beast.

What is it about communism that made the economy was shit but the education was amazing?

As far as economics go, it was lack of exports, problems in diversification of products/materials/manufacturing, and the myriad of cultural and political problems inherent to each little area down to the provincial level. I finally finished Central and Eastern Europe: The Opening Curtain? by William Griffith recently. Despite it being the driest soul-sucking book I've read in a while, the book goes into excrutiating detail on the last economic/political years of communism in Europe.

Lance on the vz. 58:

I'm not an expert by any means, but even I can't see much similarity. And I thought Alex said a good piece on what guns it shares features with.

Things that stood out to me:

-Christ, those kids at the beginning were young, yet I could imagine being idealistic enough to be roped into a cause like they were at their age.

-No organization whatsoever, and I'm not just talking militarily. They couldn't find rockets, mags, their shitty makeshift rifle grenades in the piles of garbage in their vehicle.

-These guys must have run previous campaigns primarily on fear and fighting unsuspecting, weaker enemies. Any determined resistance with half a load of sense could have wiped out an attack like that. I'd like to see how they worked to make their earliest advances.

As far as dumb summer Blockbusters go, I mind Men in Black the least. I still hold the first one as a genuinely entertaining movie.

Brickfight? Did you vote in Pennsylvania? And is there a lot of media overkill?

Yeah and no. There's not really much of a "media" here, as most of the year, the biggest stories are "Man falls down near road." The big joke is that there were a few Sovcit groups who tried to get open-carry groups to intimidate folks in Pittsburgh, but nobody showed up at the meeting zones for it. Pennsylvania is like a lot of Appalachian states in that it's mostly small, very centralized towns with miles of farmland or mountains separating them, so news media ends up extremely regional, and nobody really cares what happens to one of the polling places in Frog Balls, PA.

More views into the minds of these people:

http://www.seditionists.com/refugehc.pdf

Besides the paranoid "gubbiment psych ops and overloading satellites", one notable section is that she only briefly mentions the moments before Finicum truck left the refuge. Apparently one of the people who was supposed to go with them, David Fry, was nowhere to be seen at the time.

The big one people are mocking is how Ammon received a gift and blessing from a "General in 18th century dress who is a great-grandson of a Declaration signer."

Fucking Jesus, the amount of patience they showed when he was screaming at them from his car. There have been people who have gotten guns drawn on them for saying less.

I don't know how much came of this, but it's a recording a Judge meeting with representatives of the "Coalition of Western States" (yes, COWS, very cute). They wanted him to support the ding-dongs in the refuge. He wasn't a big fan, since those ding-dongs were sending death threats to him.

https://soundcloud.com/opb/010916cowsmeeting

The comments are the usual grandstanding nonsense.

Why are people pushing Star Citizen like it's anything but a huge joke doomed to fail?

I stopped myself from picking up a dehydrator a few weeks ago. You guys'll have to give me tips.

One of the stranger things on my resume is a consulting gig. Nothing business official, but there was an Italian guy who had just emigrated to the area, and he really enjoyed our food. Soon, he started asking questions about the town and business and it became apparent he wanted to open a restaurant. I tried to tell him what I knew, why places always closed, why some never open up. He then pulled me, an accountant, and another more traditional chef into a room, and being very open about his finances and plans, asked us for input. The other chef gave him tips about opening a legit restaurant and what it would take, while I was more about the small-time. We pretty much came to the conclusion that his best bet was a paper-plate and pizzeria in a small storefront that was not a restaurant prior to his owning it.

It was so fucking nice to be listened to for once. Since I'd been involved in openings, I basically advised him and his accountant to figure out what equipment they'd need for what they wanted to make, then set away the majority of funds for code violations. Whatever was left would be used for bare-bones cosmetic renovations and re-invested or put away. The blindspot for code violations is the biggest killer I've seen. If a place has been approved year after year, new owners believe they'll be grandfathered in. That's never the case. Usually, the health inspectors either get buddy-buddy with the previous owners or just don't want to deal with hassle, but they eventually see new owners as a chance to get some changes to unsafe or unsatisfactory conditions.

The two big ones are fireproofing and exhaust. I swear there's a lobby to get a new exhaust code law written every year to benefit contractors, because they get ridiculous. I can always understand fireproofing after seeing places go up in flames, but the amount of shit that exhaust runs into like soundproofing and building height ratios is devious. The smartest people I see usually just sell the old equipment and put in their own, because hand-me-downs are not worth the hassle.

He eventually took a lot of my advice, and he's got a fantastic little authentic Italian deal. The one thing he was especially grateful for was my advice on slow seasons: Just close. If you're making good money, then there is no point in eventually spending it all again to keep the place running during the awful summer months we have here. Even if there's that one festival in the summer months where you'll clear a shitload of money, all it's gonna do is pay for more slow days. He tried it one time and just scraped by, whereas from now on, he closes up, pays a stipend to employees to have them come back, hires a guy to patrol the place, and goes back to Italy to visit family. People like Bourdain talk about stuff like literal bean-counting for funds or liquor licenses being a necessity, with this big blindspot of wasted money going to utilities and wages when no customers are coming in.

So after the Bellingcat report on MH17, Russian government officials got mad on a few occasions and made attempts to call them out, eventually contacting Bellingcat directly. When asked for evidence of fakery, the Russian MFA came out with this (direct links to pdf downloads):

Russian: https://www.bellingcat.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/%D0%9E%D1%82%D0%B2%D0%B5%D1%82-%D0%91%D0%B5%D0%BB%D0%BB%D0%B8%D0%BD%D0%B3%D0%BA%D1%8D%D1%82-21042016.doc

English: https://www.bellingcat.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/MFA_response_1_en.pdf

It turns out they may have plagiarized some blog posts. Bellingcat's proof:

https://www.bellingcat.com/news/uk-and-europe/2016/04/22/mfa-plagiarism/

And a rebuttal against the MFA letter:

https://www.bellingcat.com/resources/articles/2016/04/22/the-russian-ministry-of-foreign-affairs-presents-its-evidence-of-mh17-fakery/

Forgot how huge those things were.

Knife, knife never changes

Photo credit Cyrano4747

(The one on the left is a Gewehr 98 bayonet)

Wusthof's better anyway, though I don't keep either of those brands anymore.

Part of the problem for me is that all of these games seem to be made under the assumption that the playerbase will all have a ping of under 100ms (with no sudden spikes) from any of the servers and that they have the wherewithall to download multi-gig updates for all of their installed games once every few weeks. It also seems to be an assumption that the average user has 10 hours a week to invest, sometimes per game, to remain competitive.

I think the last one has to do with mobile gaming. There seems to be a metric of "days per week/month logged in these days" that devs are pushing, probably under the direction of those responsible to shareholders. It was the problem with The Division until a pretty good fix a week or so ago. You could pretty much only get decent loot drops by doing daily missions. You had one chance per day basically, and then nothing. The only other way to get good high-level loot was from crafting, specifically using blueprints that you only got from being high Dark Zone level, which took at least twenty hours of just grinding NPCs in the DZ. They fixed that with better loot drops recently, but now they have their hands full with bigger problems.

I don't mind the "log in for rewards" thing. I just don't like the "log in for a chance to possibly earn rewards. But hey, if you don't get anything there's always tomorrow *WINK*.

Anyway, I've been playing R6: Siege again, and it's super good.

Remember when good games with single player campaigns were coming out, and it was obvious that the campaigns suffered because of shoe-horned multiplayer and we all said "Hey you could do multiplayer or single, it doesn't have to be both!" I feel like devs/publishers took the wrong lesson from that. Because now all of a sudden we're inundated with action multiplayer games.

Overwatch, Battleborn, The Division, Garden Warfare 2, Escape From Tarkov, and Umbrella Corps, among others, are lined up for 2016 in a world where multiplayer games are dying on release or in Early Access. It's also gotten to the point where playing any action game is pointless due to the sheer amount of hackers. The Division is a serious shitshow as of this post because of a large amount of hackers and a glitch that created a cascade in stats that allowed people to get infinite materials and damage stacks in addition to other exploits.

I've been going back to play the Brothers in Arms games, Wolfenstein: New Order, Resistance 1&3, and classic Doom just to be free of always-on shooty action that instead focused on creating fun single-player experiences. Hell, I'm actually even getting back into R6: Siege because it's just tinkered well enough that I feel like I bought it and the devs are leaving me alone, only to pop in to fix bugs and provide occasional content.