Thursday Next

Yeah, fiddy five is waaaaay too much. I'll wait for a sale.

Need to mix up the purple and black for that supervillain aesthetic.

I know you know, but to be clear... She didn't "fight for IS". She was groomed at the age of 15, lured to Syria, married to an IS fighter, bore several children all of whom died. She was a handy test case for the govt, especially when (in a camp of IS refugees/prisoners, surrounded by people who were still adherents to IS) she did not express the remorse/disdain that the general public wanted (I would question how vocal most Daily Mail readers would be in their opposition to IS in the same situation). I'm not remotely surprised that in classic "they came for" style that Shamima was the thin end of the wedge.

Ahhh, got you. Yeah, I'm not fussed about the expanded lore stuff personally, but I get that it would be nice to have some better ties between Dishonoured and Deathloop. Even if it was in the form of some external resource like a comic or whatever.

I also really enjoyed Deathloop, feel like Arkane perfected the formula. While I get the frustration of failing a loop, I remember going for a no-kills run in Dishonoured 2 I reached the end of a really long level only to find that a guard had at some point slid off a roof while unconscious and fallen to his death, I had the choice of restarting the entire level which was a few hours of gameplay or just playing through to the end. At least with Deathloop the loops are pretty short and it doesn't matter how hard you fuck up a loop it's all forgiven at the end of the day, so I don't mind it as much as I find the whole package more forgiving than Dishonoured. I agree it would have been fun if you could have multiple routes to a kill 'em all finale but I guess that is a significant amount of extra work. I wouldn't be surprised if multiple end-states had been in scope at one point, but they had to scale back to make a launchable product. I do feel that once I had seen the end credits, I was kinda done with the game anyway so multiple endings were not something I personally needed. What in the story were you left unsure about? I feel like a lot was covered in the found documents etc. and that it took a more From Software style of story telling being there to dig up if you wanted, while only the basics were fed to you in cutscenes etc.

Death Stranding Finished the story. It's suitably Kojima levels of nuttiness and will take me a while to unpack all the meaning. I'll probably not go back to it for a while though. Feel like I'm "done" with it. On to the next.

"Guns don't kill people, the parents of people who kill people with guns kill people."

Nah, didn't feel I was missing any essential context. It's not Foundation levels of complexity where if you don't know what a Seldon crisis is and go bowling in to book 3 you're in for a bad time.

It fills the rolls and toasts them?

I've read from Dune through to Sandworms of Dune (you have Hunters and Sandworms back to front btw), not the prequels. The rest of the series (Heretics - Sandworms) has a good overarching arc, and a satisfying resolution provided you can get over the tropey sex-nun and other female representation issues (women do not fare well in the Dune series).

I think it looks really nice. I like the occasional game-y elements, they don't overwhelm it, but still nice to see bits here and there, not sure if I could sneak that past the wife though, lol. I'm glad I'm not the only one with a necessity driven "odd" tree. This is from last year, you can see the reason for this type of tree sitting under the tree. We'll be decorating at the weekend I think. Annoyingly, they still contrive to get into the tree somehow... Life... uh... finds a way.

Yeah, book 5, "Heretics of Dune" and the next like 4 or 5 books up to the end of the Atreides arc.

I enjoyed GamesMaster, I think it knows itself and as a result gets away with being a bit cheesey/cringey.

It makes sense where you have encumbrance or other limitations on how much you can carry (much as I tend to dislike those mechanics). Also if collect affects the aesthetic, eg removing flowers from a field that you may want to remain flowery. But if it's e.g. a "wood" resource that pops up after you have chopped down a tree, yeah, that should be automagic.

It starts to jump the shark when the sex-nuns turn up imho, but there's enough good in the series to read through to the end.

Ok, so either post-game, or once you have unlocked all teleporters (not sure which) the teleporters link so you can fast travel a bit. I've finished the story and have been doing a few speedbooster puzzles, but I have to say, I'm really not enjoying them, so think I am done with the game. NG+ doesn't really interest me tbh.

I liked MD apart from a couple of issues. I agree that it desperately needed fast travel (even if it was a late game thing, and only available between certain room types), the controls are also horrible. To aim and fire a rocket you have to hold "L" to aim, "R" to select rockets, aim with the thumbstick, and press "Y" to fire. When certain bosses require you to aim a rocket at a specific point, while avoiding stuff, it's just ludicrous. I also would have liked to have play post game with the hyper-beam, rather than the old Ninty stalwart of rewinding to before the final boss.

100% agree with this. The right answer is usually complicated, difficult, time consuming and most of all, b o r i n g. Yeah, AV would have taken some time and money to set up, yes it meant you had to learn complicated concepts like 1st preference and 2nd preference, but it would have made voting sooooo much more meaningful. Same with leaving the EU, boring chat about economics, rights, harmonised standards etc, intangible concepts of "soft power" all that boring stuff was nothing compared to brown people turning up to take your benefits/jobs (delete as appropriate) and people with funny accents telling you what to do. On the bright side, the Tories deciding that one of their own taking 3x in bribes lobbying compared to what he made as an MP did not even warrant the slap on the wrist of a 30 day suspension seems to have managed to actually piss off the Daily Mail, which is the equivalent of seeing Fox openly criticise the Republicans (although I note that the Mail blames "the commons" rather than the Tories).

I agree with pretty much all of what you said. I wasn't a "Corbyn fan", but I did agree with his policies, I voted LD last election as they were the most likely to unseat the Tories here (I always try to vote policies rather than politics fwiw and therefore tend to swing between Lab and LD depending on tactical realities). I'm still gutted that the country voted against the AV system proposed by the Lib Dems during the coalition. It was a great chance to have a more representative democracy, and having gotten away with it, not something the Tories are likely to risk again. My hope is that Starmer is keeping his powder dry and will come out with some sensible, ambitious, left leaning, fully costed policies come election manifesto time, rather than sharing his vision now and giving the Tory machine time to develop talking points and strategies against those policies. We'll see.

Yeah, ya see, I think that over time people would come around to Starmer's personality and style. To be honest with you, I think he does have personality, and charm. The tory supporting press and Corbyn supporting labour factions are keen to push the "Starmer has no personality" line, which people are quick to parrot just like they did with "Corbyn is a terrorist supporter" and "EU laws make our lives more difficult". But when you hear vox pops from people who have actually met him they describe him as a charming and interested person. I feel like people assume that because he is calm, and doesn't shout, and sticks to the facts instead of lurching into hyperbole that he doesn't have "passion". I have a similar personality, and it grinds my gears when people make those assumptions about me. I also think the british public needs to give their collective head a wobble. We need leaders with substance, not entertaining front men.

The problem is that Starmer seems to have listened to the people complaining he wasn't "passionate" enough and has dropped his analytical, forensic barrister style. This is a problem because he is really good at barristering, and not great at fluff and passion. I'd rather see an ad from them that just set out in clear terms "this is how the tories fucked, this is how we're gonna fix it".

I hate how the media that constantly whip up storms with their "Enemies of the People", "Crush the Saboteurs", "Traitors" etc headlines take literally zero responsibility for the monster they were and still are feeding. They look all wide eyed and innocent and wring their hands and say "how did it come to this" and I'm just like "How!? You were driving the fucking bus here is how!"

What's not to like about ASMR vikings?

I actually don't mind Blair, Iraq war aside (which itself was a symptom of being too reliant on the US and not enough on our EU neighbours) I think he left the country in a better state than it is now. I think that he was best we are likely to get, given that the media has painted the country against ever electing anything close to a socialist government. My dad always says "countries get the governments they deserve" which is, a bit reductive, but in the UK's case, we (as a nation) don't seem to want to elect a government that actually wants to help those in need, and ask those who can afford it to help pay for it.

That sounds a lot like how Frozen Synapse plays (in case you want to try more of that style of gameplay), except it is dudes with guns in buildings.