deanb

http://www.slashfilm.com/leia-hugging-rey-jj-abrams-force-awakens/ The Leia & Rey hug: Basically JJ assumed a bit too much about his direction. He's right in his thinking, just shot it a bit weirdly.

I assumed he was talking about the fact most new console games at retail are usually £45-50 and have been a while. http://www.game.co.uk/en/Tom+Clancy%27s+The+Division-232266?cm_vc=Cat_1 (PC is still cheaper mind, but creeping up. And also plenty places do deals, pre-orders etc. But the MSRP hasn't been a flat £40 for a while)

My understanding is the planets are procedurally generated on your console. The universe map itself is on server side. Once you've been there and named it and the animals on it that info gets sent to the server. Which is pretty easy to assign a key and a few values for generation. #10374832492834932492 = "Deanosaur, red, horn,quadped,aggresive" or whatever. Compared to giant textures and 3D models and such. Hence a lot of indie titles being rougelikes and the such, less need for individual hand crafting.

FFXIII Lighting Returns on PC in the SE Steam Sale. Had some pennies stocked up too, so works out at £3. Wrap up the trilogy.

Oh I tried that names thing. My family name is unsurprisingly focused on the Yorkshire/Durham area, which is not surprising given a town/village bears my name there.

As I said on Twitter I figured it'd be priced at the same point as Minecraft, it's a roughly comparable game of a procedurally generated game with places to explore n resources to gather. And also they can charge what they want, it's their game. And gamers can pay what they want, it's their money. Basic economic principals, and the market will tell what it's valued at. I think the inability to form fleets with friends is sort of gonna be a killer for it. Also it's a massive unknown on the variance of the planets and fauna & flora in the game given it's procedural there's obviously a set pool it can pull from, and it's already known that only the planet name & location is kept, the surface is respawned each time. So I think there'll be a quick vapidness to it. You can't play with your friends, and nothing you do apart from plop a name on things is ever really permanent. It does look pretty though, which it has that going for it.

I though the use of CGI was terrible in the trailer. The old films had great effects but they were practical composited in. Had quite an ethereal feeling to them. This was solid 3D items floating in the scene.

NewCastle.

I guess it's a thing. Looks a bit flat to me, but I guess we'll see going forwards. Also being a "reboot" but also referencing the originals is a bit weird.

Yeah my understanding of the worst/best of Clinton is she'd be "more of the same". Keep the boat going on from what Obama has set-up, rather than any huge radical plans of her own.

That's great! And he's totally on Spotify, so something to work along to tomorrow. edit: VR Where's Wally: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1RG6ThD6Ynw (once again as it's VR no embed cos won't wholly work) edit 2: SIGGRAPH reel

http://i.imgur.com/JR0JX8b.gifv I have no idea what it's going on in that little nation of yours. It's like watching a train wreck through a telescope. You can't do anything, but the train is full of nukes and even on your telescope you're not far enough away.

"Change Theme" is in the footer, and there's a "Dust Blue" theme which is in black. Was specifically requested iirc. Maybe even by you

Beat Stick of Truth. Pretty good, though kinda disliked any button mashing that was needed as it usually required a pretty high frequency to do anything. It was crude in humour, but mechanically pretty sound. As remarked elsewhere it's kinda like a grown up Costume Quest. I like that you could knock folks out with the environment.

USB 3 has a higher power output than USB 2(and USB C even more so to be able to be an actual power & data cable), which theoretically scales up to 100watt if need be (and specification allows). Normally it's 4.5watts to USB 2.0's 2.5watts (and USB 2 charges up your phone, so nearly double that is more than enough to power a HDD)

Full Monty is such a British film. Lot of films like that in the 90s (Billy Elliot another big one). The crime used to be punishable by being thrown down a mineshaft but err...yeah.

I liked with Witcher that it wasn't labelled as "easy" n such, but "Story" "Story+" and something else. But yeah, it's fine playing it on the basic version, the story is harder than much of the combat anyway (which I thought was neat, but most find not very compelling). Like you can fuck up kinda bad if you just skip through everything (like, you're not gonna be unable to complete the game, but you'll end up killing the wrong people. Or heck missing entire sections out. Like I missed the werewolf stuff my first time around and bits near the end were kinda confusing). Otherwise, it's not aged brilliantly, there's a lot of re-used assets in the game, but the story is neat and yeah it leads onto Witcher 2 and Witcher 3 which is a great game.

I saw a tweet about this game this morning, concerning its save file being a raw XML, so you could easily nip into it using notepad (or editor of choice) and do bits up if you wished.

Snap

You can change back to the old list view. It changed it to the old look automatically after introducing the new interface because I'd previously disabled "Recommended books". Unfortunately the new look means that it doesn't show all your books, you've got to manually show the non-Kindle store books which is pretty fucking annoying.

I'd guess cos Valve carry on putting loads of frivolous shit like the controller driver, VR stuff, Steam Link and Big Picture stuff into the main client instead of running them separately if you get those things. Not only does it cause issues the Steam folder is a bloated horrible mess too.

I've got that kicking around, I think from a Kindle deal a while back, should give a read at some point. Not keen on the latest Kindle update though (which is more focused on shoving the "recommended books" down your throat). Currently still working my way through the Tiffany Aching books, but doing comics in the meanwhile too.