Mr. GOH!

Reminds me of simpler times and the pacifist options in the original Fallout games. I think the original Deus Ex was reactive if you didn't kill anyone (at least other than must-kill bosses, IIRC). Anyway, folks have been banging on this drum for RPGs for over a decade, now. I am fairly certain that Torment: Tides of Numenera will be beatable without violence.

People have had fixations on funny-sounding words since time immemorial, so blaming Invader Zim seems odd to me. I mean, Bugs Bunny was making those sorts of jokes in the 30s.

Plan to catch it tonight on DVR after I finish Agent Carter.

I started at episode 16 of season one and completed all of the second season. I watched and hated the pilot when it was new, too.

Been bingewatching Agents of SHIELD and Agent Carter. Man, they are mediocre in many, many ways, but they truly achieve an excellent hammy pulpy noir-lite sensibility above everything. They're dumb like 30's movie serials, and they just seem so low-budget and kinda dumb. I am enjoying them nonetheless.

One Million Moms is gross and hyperbolic, but they're not calling for a boycott, just conducting a publicity campaign on the premise that the Muppets is no longer for kids. They're wrong about the Muppets never including adult humor, but the pilot did seem aimed at adults since it's about celebrity interspecies relationships. Then again, the mainline Muppets were always about that during Henson's life.

Ben Carson couldn't govern his way out of a paper bag. The only folks worse at overestimating their competencies than lawyers are goddamned medical doctors.

Huge surprise. http://www.isidewith.com/elections/2016-presidential/1368000660 I am so politicized that every issue is at least a "More" important to me.

I saw it at a preview screening at the New York Film Festival. Ridley Scott and some of the actors were there (not Chastain or Damon, though). The biggest scientific error in the writing of the Martian was made on purpose:

Are you being sarcastic, TN? Making a separate mode for emissions tests that purposefully does not reflect real-life performance and hiding the existence of that mode is pretty much textbook defrauding the government. In fact, it's almost certainly indictable under the RICO act, the U.S. anti-organized crime statute. Hell, the customers who bought the TDI engines at issue probably have a class action civil RICO cause of action against VW and any of its employees involved in the fraud. I mean, yes, VW wanted to sell its cars with too-good-to-be-true performance from a diesel engine, so it cheated and lied about it and sold cars that belch poisonous nitrous oxide. The other thing is that it's crazy to be sympathetic to a corporation, which by definition is amoral to the point of psychopathy. VW gives no shits about you.

The Martian. I really enjoyed the novel and the movie translates the humor and wonder very well. It does not dwell on the step-by-step engineering of every solution to the problems the main characters face, but to do so on film would make the movie 8 hours long. As a space adventure movie, it's fantastic and way more hopeful than other Ridley Scott Sci fi movies.

The only part of your argument that I dispute is whether Facebook paid Disney. I still think it didn't, but I'm not interested in arguing about it. Rather talk about Star Wars. Have they released a class name for the new Star Destroyers? And what are they calling that black shuttle-looking ship in the first image?

Well, I asked my friends (and one colleague) about this directly regarding Disney/Star Wars and Facebook and two have direct experience with these sorts of deals between Facebook/Google and a large media company. I asked them about this directly after reading after my first post because the idea that Facebook would pay Disney to advertise for Disney made me think I was taking crazy pills both as someone who spent years working on developing marketing campaigns and as someone who has significant experience working with business-to-business negotiations. I do think there's a deal between FB and Disney. But I don't think it involves FB directly paying for the opportunity to host Disney's ads. It may include a friendly rate for Disney and most likely includes exclusivity language, but, at base, Disney is almost certainly paying FB to promote the ads and not the other way around.

Video dead. Edit: Video alive.

Facebook definitely has an aggressive sales strategy. But it's not the general practice of ad sales folks to pay the advertiser anything. Disney may have gotten a deal, including significant low-cost-to-free technical assistance for making the 3D video, but there's very little chance Facebook straight-up cut Disney a check. I thought the video was cool, though; I noticed it on FB while I was still half asleep and that it adjusted to how I was holding my phone startled me to be more fully awake.

It's Endurance S.P.E.C.I.A.L. video day!

802.11 a all the way, baby.

And I'll say it again: the people I spoke with who actually do these sorts of deals and who work daily with social media campaigns with Facebook and Google told me that it is highly unlikely Facebook paid Disney directly for the placement in a "Facebook will pay Disney $[number] to be exclusive." It's more likely Facebook gave Disney preferable terms for the ads and may have even co-produced the video for no fee. In fact, as a product manager for who is in charge of promoting her company's media offerings on social media told me, Disney may even have agreed to Facebook demanding exclusivity based on the vastly improved visibility of a Facebook post compared to a YouTube post. She told me the idea of Facebook approaching Disney to offer cash in exchange for publicity would be like the channel that shows the Super Bowl (or, for you non-USAns, the World Cup) approaching an advertiser and offering it money to only advertise during the Superbowl. Then again, none of these folks work for Disney or Facebook, so maybe they're wrong.

Studio apartments are doable if you're single.

I am generally not a fan of the whole amiibo concept, but that's a cool amiibo, TCP.

I bought Undertale and Soma and am looking forward to messing around with them over the next week or so.