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Lamp, broken circa 1988

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Posts posted by Lamp, broken circa 1988

  2. Posted

    SATISFACTORY [3]
    Every now and then I play a game with a lot of intensity and focus, and then when I'm done playing it, I realize that what I was actually doing was a complicated coping behavior through an intensely depressive situation. Now that my personal life has calmed down, I have realized that the 40 hours I put into Satisfactory was the latest variation of this behavior pattern. So, uh, it's fine. It's Minecraft with conveyor belts. So instead of depleting the resources by hand, you harvest infinite veins with hardcore drill technology. It's in early access, so the endgame isn't there, so I've bottomed out on it. But! Glad it was there. Really needed it. If you need some zen digging shit with spooky caves, it's there for you.

    ENVIRONMENTAL STATION ALPHA [4]
    Inspired by watching streams of people playing Bloodstained, and after talking myself out of beating Cave Story for like the ninth time I decided to find the cheapest Metroid I could. Environmental Station Alpha is $8. I'm fucking loving it. It's got a really particular graphical style, kind of similar to the Pico-8 stuff (basically pixel art with half the detail, extremely small sprites and such), but the gameplay is there. It's floaty but it takes place on a decommissioned space station, so it's contextually floaty. The control otherwise feels tight, the boss fights feel nice and dangerous, the music is fantastic, the environs are VERY spooky... I really don't have anything negative to say about it at all. Recommend. Hopefully I finish it.

    FUN FACT: The other game that the developer of Environmental Station Alpha put out? Baba Is You! So that's 2 for 2 on great games.

    MAGIC THE GATHERING ARENA [3]
    This earns a 3 (which, reminder, means "I don't regret playing this") simply through the nature of the friends I am playing it with. Gameplay-wise, it's MtG that makes Hearthstone explosion sounds. You already know if that's for you. I want to talk about something else.

    I want to talk about the battle pass thing. It really did not take long to make me resent this application of economics in games. Games are preying on addictive behavior in a way that is getting more and more concerning as time passes, and this new frontier bums me the fuck out. For the unawares (oh blessed are ye), the battle pass is a tiered system in which you pay for the Premium Skinner Box and you always see what you could have gotten from that Premium Box whenever you go to collect whatever you got. It is the infection foisted upon the world by Fortnite, although it's rooted in Dota 2's nightmarish Compendium thing. It was fine when it was in Dota 2, because the bar for entry was "must be unhinged enough to play Dota 2 enough to understand why you would want these cosmetic effects." And, it was only available once a year because it was a fundraising system for their world championships.

    The adaptation of that system into this unending fundraiser is like the transition from "we are a political action group and we're gonna fuckin solve this to "well I guess we need a new problem to solve, we'll always need problems to solve." It creates a yawning infinite drain where there was once a closed loop. It's a recursive end game. It's the end of history. And now every fucking free to play game shoves this fucking thing in it, which also has the double effect of creating this dichotomy of Haves and Have Nots (go look up the emergence of "Default" as pejorative among kids thanks to Fortnite), so no matter when people come into your game, since the battle pass is never ending there will always be a wave of new players experiencing the joy of being the Have Not and the immense constant reminder of how all you need to join the Haves Club is enough disposable income to un-disposable yourself.

    Seeing that MtG: Arena left me feeling numb. It's already a randomness game, strapped to the pay to win nature of booster packs being the only way to upgrade your decks. That it would also have The Brand New Soulsucker is the opposite of a surprise. Once you cross the threshold of exploitative, what is the point of stopping?

    by the way: yes I know it's a business and businesses have to make money, yes I know that you don't have to pay if you don't want to, and yes I know that it's "only cosmetic."  I've got family with gambling addiction problems. those facts will not change my position no matter how ornately they are expressed or displayed before me. please don't. just consider this some venting.

    • Like 1
    • Thanks 1

  5. Posted

    12-3 considering he's got two bad arms right now too. You're not wrong though, his style is transitioning to a real Old Man style, of maximizing movements and not really winning by sheer power. His leg strength is still fucking nuts so he can pull a lot of that stuff off. Plus, he brought back the slap/elbow tachi-ai a few times this basho and that helps. I imagine he sits the next tournament and makes a hard run at november, and he'll alternate on and off until July for the olympics.

    It's easy to forget that Kakuryu is a yokozuna because he's such a low profile character. He's kind of inscrutable, and the only really observable part of his style is his weird over-reliance on pulling despite being just awful at pulling.

    That Endo/Hokutofuji match was probably the best match of the basho. I've been a doubter on Endo for a while, thinking he was more hype than top-level rikishi. That one shut me up.

    UNRELATED

    BigSumoFan is selling a bunch of magnets right now. Here are some that have been purchased by myself and my brother.

    My main man, Kotoshogiku.
    His weird fav, Chiyoshoma ("he's like the Homsar of sumo wrestling.")
    Tochinoshin, Takayasu, Shohozan, Aoiyama & Enho.

  8. Posted

    Friends are warmer than gold when you're old
    And keeping them is harder than you might suppose
    Lately, I tend to make strangers wherever I go
    Some of them were once people I was happy to know

    Mounting mileage on the dash
    Double darkness falling fast
    I keep stressing, pressing on
    Way deep down at some substratum
    Feels like something really wrong has happened
    And I confess I'm barely hanging on

    All my happiness is gone
    All my happiness is gone
    It's all gone somewhere beyond
    All my happiness is gone

    Ten thousand afternoons ago
    All my happiness just overflowed
    That was life at first and goal to go
    Me and you and us and them
    And all those people way back when
    All our hardships were just yardsticks then, you know
    You know

    It's not the purple hills
    It's not the silver lakes
    It's not the snowcloud shadowed interstates
    It's not the icy bike chain rain of Portland, Oregon
    Where nothing's wrong and no one's asking
    But the fear's so strong it leaves you gasping
    No way to last out here like this for long

    'Cause everywhere I go, I know
    Everywhere I go, I know

    All my happiness is gone
    All my happiness is gone
    It's all gone somewhere beyond
    All my happiness is gone

  10. Posted · Edited by Lamp, broken circa 1988

    What's amazing about Kakuryu is that this is a basho where he's won at least twice by pulling (once on Abi, forget who the other was atm), and traditionally pulling gets Kakuryu knocked into orbit. So this is just going to reinforce that habit until he tries it on like Takayasu or something and gets sent to the cheap seats. Look forward to it.

  12. Posted · Edited by Lamp, broken circa 1988

    well, turns out that still might be required.

    dude went for the Cusack "Say Anything" but instead of a boombox it was a collage he made of all the times other people said nice things to her, spanning back to several months. I'm not wiling to explain what she does that he would have access to this information.

    so she checked into the hospital today and is gonna be there for a while.

    • Sad 4

  13. Posted · Edited by Lamp, broken circa 1988

    update: she went public with the dude's harassment and their mutuals have been on his ass like wild dogs, so I wont even have to do anything. Hopefully now the healing can actually start, now that she knows she's safe from like threats of exile/exposure or whatever.

    • Like 9

  14. Posted

    I'm going to make this as broad as I can because the second I get into details I see red.

    My sister is suicidal. She has been doing everything she can. What is not helping is that there has been an extremely horny dude that's been hounding her for months, taking every conversation and turning it into "you know maybe I could fly out and we can get dinner and a movie and just you know cuddle and stuff." After she went public with feeling suicidal, he has been trying to leverage that information into his attempts to fuck her.

    I want his head.

    • Sad 5

  15. Posted

    I have an update on Konami's Pixel Puzzle Collection. If you dont remember what this game is, it's Picross with old Konami spritework. I cleared it 100% today and as I was working on the puzzle I was thinking "Gosh, I really don't want to uninstall this but I guess I'm done with it." So when I finished the puzzle, it popped up this big screen that said "NORMAL MODE CLEAR."

    And then it unlocked expert mode. They removed the ability to make X's, and in order to earn credit for clears in expert mode you have to clear it faster than your time in normal mode.

    So uh this is probably the best phone game?

    • Like 1

  16. Posted · Edited by Lamp, broken circa 1988

    here comes an extremely esoteric rant.

    So my favorite band ever is Women. They're from Calgary. They're amazing. You might have heard me talk about them. Anyways, how amazing they are has lead me down wild roads searching out new bands from that scene and related ones, which has lead me to a lot of amazing groups. Freak Heat Waves, Telstar Drugs, Manchild, Faux Fur, Jean Audet and his million bands, Each Other, Grime Kings, etc etc etc. A lot of stuff that I've listened to obsessively and dissect for months when I find some newly unturned stone.

    There's this new buzz band called black midi. They're talented musicians. They have some good tunes. They also do a lot of extremely, extremely similar things to all these Calgary bands I've mentioned. A lot of the critical response centers around how experimental and new they sound. This frustrates me. Greatly. I will continue writing songs, there will be at least one about this hernia forming in my stomach.

    I had to put this somewhere and I chose here.

    • Like 2

  19. Posted

    MARIO MAKER 2 [3]
    yeah what he said

    OUTER WILDS [4]
    I don't believe I am built phobia-wise to play this game, but, it is Neat as Fuck and I wish I was. Basically: Myst In Space, where the other books are just other planets, and the planets are very small in a stylistic way. I am freaked out by Under Water Stuff and Space Stuff so about once per hour my body just goes "AHH" and I have to close the game. So, not looking good for me beating it, but, strong recommend. VERY clever.

  20. Posted · Edited by Lamp, broken circa 1988

    first response: "am I being stereotyped"
    second response: "oh I see why you'd say this about me and this band"
    third response: "wait they're literally from calgary"
    fourth: "ok i'm being stereotyped but this owns"

    • Haha 1

  21. Posted

    On 6/16/2019 at 3:51 AM, MORELOCK said:

    ApologiestotheQueenMary.jpg

    There's probably like four decent indie rock bands and Wolf Parade is one of them. I've listened to this album a fucking lot in my life so I could yell about it for hours, but I'm going to summarize it by saying that as I've aged I've liked Dan Boeckner's songs more, to the point where I almost prefer his stuff on this record to Krug's. Like, I think I've spread my opinions on being Anti-Ballad, but one of the few exceptions I make is for Same Ghost Every Night. Also, one of my favorite songs to play on guitar is Shine A Light.

    • Like 1

  22. Posted

    On 6/16/2019 at 2:28 AM, Pete said:

    hqdefault.jpg

    So I've been meaning to listen to this record for years, so it was nice to finally get around to it. I didn't like it.

    I try to give a wide berth to rappers for singing about ignorant shit, especially the older it is because it's a young art form from a population that traditionally hasn't had chances to express themselves the ways they've wanted to. Like, with older stuff, it's people inventing a language for themselves in their youth, so of course some of the shit they say is going to be wack. To be young is to make mistakes. That said, I was reading about the reception to this album and all of the people that positioned this record as like "FINALLY, A 90S ALTERNATIVE TO GANGSTA RAP" unnerve me. I don't know. There's a disconnect between this and me that I'm not sure I've actually done a good job highlighting here. It's not like a bad record at all, it's just extremely of it's time and place and I wasn't there.

  25. Posted

    On 6/15/2019 at 9:48 PM, Execproducer said:

    Image result for tsushimamire album covers

    TsuShiMaMiRe- Pregnant Fantasy.

    I will say that when I saw there was a song on here with "Ska" in the title I felt real, real dread. I am no friend of Ska. Then I put it on and just genuinely enjoyed the record all the way through. I feel that it's got what a lot of rock bands are missing, which is engaging in tropes because you enjoy them and not because it's your brand or because you're seeking some puritan ideal. They immerse themselves in rock history but none of the dogma, so they can fuck around with it in anarchic ways. Really enjoyed this. Favorite song was Manhole.

    • Like 1
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