deanb

Xandar is the planet Nova is on. The one Ronan tried to destroy. Xandar, well Nova corp, had made peace with the Kree (which Ronan is from, and which Agent Coulson is sorta part-ish). Xandar in film: Xandar in comics:

Snow Piercer This creeped higher to on my watch list due to the unfortunate recent demise of John Hurt, who continues to be stellar in this. In fact pretty much everyone was pretty great in this, and it was quite an unusual film so a good cast picking (Tilda Swinton always good choice to cast in an "unusual film"). Some great moments, stuff like the fight with the axes, the school room section, etc. All quite surreal in how it pans out. I've got High Rise to watch, and I think that's almost the same premise of sorts except from the view of a rich member and in a building instead, and Jeremy Irons instead of Robocop. Oh on the front, I'd actually guessed that Wilford was going to be John Hurt Also, super big budget and length Coca Cola advert. I will say I have some issue with the logic of things given it does sort of try to go out of its way with the "how the train works". For example: Like, good film but a lot of things that are largely unexplained. But you can go with most of it. Oh I tried posting this last night, but after 3 power cuts I was like "fuck it". edit: You guys should watch some films.

Who wants Eggos?

Johnny Cash is hot right now (like my ring of fire. It burns burns burns). Also FUCKING MEMORIAL DAY RELEASE. AARGH. What's that in Metric?!?!? It sounds like this might be good, and very self aware of itself. Also Dwayne "Alcatraz" Johnson is scoring a lot of points of late. Hey, another familiar song: New Life trailer. Not really feeling this one, feels like just a mash of a bunch of already familiar films. And Ryan Reynolds is feeling a bit too Deadpool now, gonna be a while to shake that off I think.

Hey some Superb Owl stuff also: We get it in April. I'm kinda curious on the "Marvel films hitting Europe first" thing. Oh and he's totally Adam Warlock.(with one L). edit: Oh he's apparently confirmed as "Ego the Living Planet", but leaving my Adam Warlock thing for the stargate joke. Ego also goes by alias of "nu-Xandar" which leans in to my theory of Xandar being fucked over by Thanos completely to get the Power gem. (in the comics Xandar is pretty much a mass of floating semi-populated planet debris). How Petes mum had it on with a planet we won't know (until April I guess). edit 2: I completely glossed over the bits at the bottom, but someone has noted it has Sly Stallone in there too.

Been a while. Gave Wicked + Divine a spin, not super duper keen on the "jumping around in chronology" but the art is good and the premise interesting. Other day I read the first volume of Valerian since it's currently free on Kindle. Man it's some super old school art style, which after the super new of Wicked takes a bit to go through. But I can see how its premise sets it up for a long running series, it's pretty much "Doctor Who if he was sort of black ops". When you have (almost) all of time and space at your disposal it opens many doors.

It's like 45 minutes long so I've not watched it all, but so far seems to be a decent overview of the trilogy so far and its creation.

Enemies that run away. It's something you only really see in a few games. Like it's a common joke about Skyrim that the bandits dressed in rags carrying sharpened sticks will attempt to take on a guy wearing deadric armour wielding legendary artefacts. So yeah, it's a thing Ni No Kuni does. Not straight up, seems there's sort of an "agressive-o-meter" so some animals still come for you, but many as you level up will run away on the overworld. It just makes it much easier to return or travel through low level areas (and also provide a bit of a cue that you're over levelled for the current area and should move on).

One for Mr GOH (and others I guess)

Shadow Campaigns: The Thousand Names and The Shadow Throne. So read these on recommendation of person that recommended Kingkiller. It's kinda good, it's quite character focused, with a large edge of napoleon era light fantasy. The first book follows a colonial army on the march to reclaim the throne of a...well colony. So yeah has that subtext going throughout it. It's written in how I'm to understand GoT is written with like segments written from a specific characters point of view. Which is interesting when it then refers to other characters. So you're reading "Winter"s segment and she talks of Captain D'Ivoire, which takes a bit to process is "Marcus" (who in his segments he'll chat with "Lieutenant Ihernglass"). You don't ever get the view point of one of the main characters, the colonel (and later "Minister of Justice" then "Minister of War") Janus. Which is purposeful, since he like to keep many people sort of in the dark on things, given his main political enemy is the head of intelligence it sorta makes sense. But yeah, vast majority is sort of Napoleon era kinda of world, with the odd touches of fantasy in the form of "demons" that can be bound to a soul and grant various gifts such as near-immortality, captivating an audience, superior agility etc. (specific to one demon). There's like a subplot of a long thought disbanded "church of the black" that are trying to get rid of these demons (while using their own) in a kind of inquisition style way. I think if I knew a lot more about field battle tactics I'd maybe get a lot more out of it, I kinda get quite lost during the battle sequences, it gets a bit hard to visualise during those bits.

Arrival So yeah this is pretty damn good. I'd mentioned to my step-mum about maybe watching it with them when I'm next door but figured might go over heads, and watching the film I would agree with my assessment. Great opening, and I feel it would be super effective if you went in knowing nothing about the film. Kinda reminded me of the 7/7 bombings, when everyone ends up glued to TV. I was helping out in the ...err "creative week" (I don't know what other schools call it), doing technical stuff for a play worked on so the hall was next to the reception which streamed 24/7 BBC News (it's like the "safe" channel, every business with a TV in has BBC News). I should note I was too young for 9/11 (also not at school then, or in any public space). Those rare events when you're all glued to the TV. So yeah, really great opening and sort of setting the tone. It was quite well done with the sparse coverage of the "how the world is reacting", kinda going quite cliche but it was very much subplot. I though the aliens were well done (I like the recent trend of more creative aliens than "people in latex suits", hooray for CGI). And loved their language. Would make for some cool desktop wallpapers. Very different kind of hard sci-fi with the focus on communication. Oh I liked the Kangaroo story cos I knew as she was telling it that it's a falsehood, and figured it'd go into Lucy territory of "10% of your brain", but she right away clarifies to hawkeye that it's a fake story. Kinda weird they never went into the Fibonacci and mathematics side of things since that's what we're usually taught to use. But I guess for the most part that's clarifying the whole "we're not total dumb dumbs and can add 1+2, and hey we even know 0 is a thing now*". Some gorgeous shots too. Though I'd be noping out right away at the inverted gravity stuff. My fear of heights doesn't mix well with looking down the corridor and there's the floor at the end of it. Certainly adds to the "strangeness" of it all, including their departure. But yeah, good watch. Give it a shot. *for those not in the know, 0 is a relatively recent invention in human history. In Roman Numerals V - V = ?

Interesting. And yeah a major UI overhaul would be nice. For the most part it's currently a hugely inefficient wrapper around a webkit browser. Most updates that come out are usually for Big Picture mode and I'm not even sure how many people use that (I guess it's the main client of Steam Link which means paying Steam users, but surely that's regular joes too). I use themes for it, but it can only cover up so much. Oh though no idea how their "continue playing" and "Recent games" thing will work considering at the moment it thinks I've recently played 247 games.

http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=1339972 Zenimax awarded $500million over Oculus suit. That's a fair few pennies.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-38833883 Well time to get a list of names. Some of them have to have voted against their own constituents given the MP vote far outstripped even the popular vote in favour of leaving the EU.

I've a feeling they're basically giving a half-hearted response on VR to keep investors happy. If they were truly on board the VR train was well out of the station when they started working on the Switch. Heck I'm pretty sure Oculus was firing up when Wii U was launched (Yep I googled it and Oculus Kickstarter was 3 months prior to Wii U release). They've no intention to bring VR to the Switch or it would have had the capabilities out the door.

AKA never. It's way too low-res for one unless they knock out a sort of Switch Pro/Scropio kind of dealy-o down the line with a mid-lifespan bump to up the screen resolution (and CPU/GPU power on board too).

Also it's not like Guerrilla Games are a totally new unproven studio either...

I'd guess it's in not knowing that "xXxhotsniper360xXx (2)" is bob and not john.

Doesn't matter, you're pro/demoted.

So word is they're teasing a sequel.

So I decided to dive into nu-Thief following Dishonored and didn't get too far into it. It just feels so clunky, and I think a big part is how slow some of the animations are. Also it encourages you to explore, except there's a chunk of stuff you can't explore and it's not overly obvious what you can climb up on and what you can't. So instead due to discussions about the new one coming to PC I hopped on to Ni No Kuni. Such a nice game to dive into given the current outside times. It's a pretty simple JRPG fare with the nice Ghibli animations. And hey the king is a cat. It's pretty slow going to start with but eh it's nicely mixed in with animation and such.

https://playtable.xyz/ This seems like an adaptation of some of the stuff that was being worked on with the MS Surface (the original table thing, not the tablets). It's quite well priced (especially for the pre-order price) but also seems like you're reliant on a lot of connections with board game makers (which I've a feeling in stuff like this won't happen). Also limits you for many games (e.g Firefly or Betrayal, since they're pretty large). I guess I wish them the best, I just don't see it being much more than a niche product.

https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/536BV89 FF Twitter account through out this survey. Dunno if you want to fill it in.