Following the rather annoying trend of naming new games in a series in confusing ways, we have the upcoming Doom, which is Doom 4, but it isn't, because it's Doom now. But, it's not Doom, it's a reboot, called Doom.
Isn't Doom 3 also a reboot? They called that Doom 3, even though it was a reboot, right?
Read that article, and all you'll find at first is a description of it as a common chemical reused and repurposed throughout many living creatures. As this is incredibly common (numerous chemicals are reused and repurposed throughout living things), it doesn't sound particularly more noteworthy than any other chemicals. Then you read the "conjecture" section (which seems to have been a concession Wikipedia made to the weird cult), and things go off the rails, with description of mechanical elves and otherworldly beings mixed in with the notion that this chemical is linked to "higher perception" and so on. As reigned in as that section is, the implication seems to be that this chemical, in drug form, is somehow unlocking psychic stuff.
If you go too far beyond this initial relatively safe description, you find this:
Just... check out a few of the reviews. There is a long tradition on Amazon of wanna-be comedians first testing their craft with comedic reviews (some hilarious... some... needing some work), and this book is no exception. What IS exceptional is how quickly you lose the ability to discern which ones are genuine and which ones are mocking, almost as some mad parallel to how detached from reality this drug can make someone. Going a bit further down the rabbit hole you'll find whole communities have popped up with the mad fervor normally reserved for the Resurrection of Jesus Christ, the god made man who WALKS AMONG US NOW.
What the hell is going on here? Why am I listening to nose-ring guy wearing the most boring shirt outside of a 1950's prison? "Spirit molecule"?
You'll quickly find they aren't being metaphorical with that title. They literally believe that DMT isn't just a drug that functions as a gateway, it is, in actual fact, REAL spirit particles, the stuff souls are made out of, "embedded in all living things". They keep repeating that last part there, as though it's the ultimate proof of just how magical it is.
As commenter tomfable at Cracked states:
Quote:PLEASE DONT STATE FACTS BASED ON INTERNET ARTICLES WHEN IT COMES TO DMT. AND PLEASE KNOW:
First of all, to all those who think DMT is a drug, you're wrong. The spirit molecule is much more than a substance that makes you hallucinate. In order to understand this, you'll have to observe it on the 5th dimension (or in other words, experience it). In our world we have hundreds or even thousands of trees or maybe even plants (probably many undiscovered) containing enough DMT for use. Each one of those sacred trees is a teacher, with knowledge rooting thousands of years ago and a unique lesson for every individual who asks to learn. Afterall plants have probably even been here before us, why not choose them as your teacher?!
I think it's great that the fabled Tom here thinks that plants have "probably" been here before us. Someone who paid that much attention in biology/theology (BOTH of which make it clear they came first) is certainly someone we can trust to inform us about 5th dimensional meta-chemistry and which ents we need to listen to.
That's the part that gets me. Pot heads can get a bit annoying about their particular crusade at times, but generally I'm on the side of legalization purely because punishing an addict solves nothing. These days, most pot heads don't try to argue the hippy dippy "weed reveals the truth of the soul" stuff and stick with "I enjoy it so I'd like to do it without getting arrested" part, which is basically all you need. Most alcohol drinkers will say the same (outside of a few bizarre rants from the lazy fat bums of the world). These ones are WAY worse about this thing than ANY other drug promoter I've ever dealt with online though. There's trying to sell me on an experience, and trying to sell me my SALVATION, and these people are certainly in the latter camp. Most of the time, just saying no is enough, but I get the distinct impression DMT promoters are just crazy enough to want to trick people into taking it "for their own good". I'd be wary of this group.
hey y'all I'm here to tell you about ~*BLOODBORNE*~, a game I ignored for many weeks because all the preview videos on Polygon made it look boring. There was no zest, it was just some cookie-cutter Victorian hack-n-slash. For reasons unspecified, I picked up a copy today on impulse.
Fuck, 65 bucks for a PS4 game?! And with Gamestop, it used to be that if you didn't like a game, you could take it back within one week and exchange it for another. For a full refund, maybe not cash, but store credit at least. But now, taking it back means I'd only get half that in store credit, what the fuck Gamestop?!
Anyway, ~*BLOODBORNE*~ is a game where you go on and fight baddies and harvest their ~*BLOOD*~ so you can get ~*BLOOD ECHOES*~. If this sounds like a shit Anne Rice novel, well... just be glad there aren't any rock star vampires. Yet. You start the game pretty much unarmed, and you have to fist-fight a large wolf. Inevitably he kills your ass, so they send you to some Dream world, to let you equip some weapons to go back and beat the snot out of him.
So I get to select a Melee weapon and a Projectile one. Okay sure fine, I'll take this big saw thingy here. I have a choice between two guns, no idea how either of them work. Fuck it, flip a coin, good enough. Now let's get this show on the road. LET'S GO KICK THAT WOLF'S ASS. Wait. How do I get out of here? So I'm running all around the Dream-world like a chump trying to figure it out. I finally google it, and you have to go to some random gravestone to escape, wtf. How was I supposed to know that? I kind of wish video games gave stupid people like me more direction to figure out wtf I'm doing.
Okay so I get summoned back up and YEAH, TIME TO ICE THAT MOTHER FUCKING WOLF. Ow, hey, fuck, stop that. Oh shit, he bit me the third time. I'm dead. My character crumples to the ground.
...yes, I died. Thanks, game. So I gathered. So I'm taken to a loading screen that says
and it takes a minute to load. C'mon, hurry up. I want to play again. Whew, okay, here I go again, let's take this wolf dow-
...you son-of-a-bitch. Okay, I'm still getting used to the controls, that's alright. Now if I could-
I KNOW I FUCKING DIED, I SAW MY CHARACTER DO IT, STOP
tanoehutrneouhrsaepuhcrRRRRGGHHH
So after maybe ten tries, I finally get the bastard. Frustrating, but manageable. So I pop out of whatever castle I'm in and get on the streets. Everything has a brown/red/gray tint. Boring aesthetic, boring color scheme. Where's the personality to this game for Christ's sake?? Okay, here's some townsfolk and they're a little easier. Dodge, slash once-or-twice, bing bang boom... blah.
I'm at a part where there's a big fuck-off mob of people marching the streets with torches and pitchforks and whatever else they could arm themselves with. Sounds pretty cool, right? ...no, it's not cool. It's fucking
Okay, this hack saw thing I've been using is pretty good, now let me use my gun. I'm at the point where I really need a projectile weapon. ...wait, where is it? I pressed the left D-pad like the game told me to. My Helsing stand-in just kind of stands there, worthlessly patting his ass-pockets and then looking back at me, like he's shrugging and saying "Well, you tell me ol' Beanjo."
wut. Open inventory, go to weapons... yep, it's right there. Two menu options:
USE (grayed out)
DISCARD
...I paid good fucking money for this gun! Now I can't use it?! As I kill enemies, I keep getting these Bullets, but I guess my gun can't use them? Fuck, should have chosen the other gun. Maybe I can go back to the Dream world and exchange it. I think there was a portal back there... YES! Okay, here I am, now where was that weapons shop? ...it's gone. fuck. I'm saddled with a projectile I can't use, constantly teased by getting the wrong bullets and making the wrong choice. Well fuck damn it, how was I supposed to know?!
God fucking damn it ~*BLOODBORNE*~, you're getting on my nerves. Should have never listened to the guy at the auto tire shop.
3/10 so far, let's hope it improves. How the fuck did this get good reviews anywhere? ...oh, right. Video games reviews are worthless. Someone get those Gamergate morons on the line and tell them to fight the real injustice, websites like Polygon and IGN pretending that shit like ~*BLOODBORNE*~ is not only passable, but purportedly entertaining.
Okay, I'm having issues with a hard drive, and I wonder if anyone can help.
I have Windows Vista, and there are 4 hard drives in the system (two 320GB drives, a 500GB, and 2TB). One of the four SATA ports on the motherboard broke off several years ago, so I got a PCI SATA card for one of the drives. The 500GB drive is the one attached to the PCI card. I recently got a 4TB external drive, which uses USB.
Some time (I don't know how long, for a while I didn't notice the drive was missing... :p) after moving a bunch of stuff over to the new drive, the 500GB drive, the one attached to the PCI card, has vanished from Windows. Neither the drive nor any of its partitions exist in Disk Management, and the disk does not appear in the Device Manager either. The drive isn't listed in the system BIOS either, but since it's attached to a PCI card and not the system, that might be expected. The drive IS listed in the PCI card's RAID-settings BIOS, which is by Silicon Image, but you can't do anything there except set up RAID options, which I'm not using. So I knew the drive wasn't totally dead, something (I have no clue what) just went very wrong.
Next, I tried attaching the drive to the motherboard, using the SATA port that the 2TB drive is on (I forget which of the two physical 320GBs is the boot drive, so I didn't want to mess with those unless I have to). I didn't attach the 2TB to anything, just left it unconnected. This... caused Windows to fail to correctly boot -- the screen went black after the Windows logon screen (where you choose an account and enter your password). I could get the Task Manager to open and get to a few things through that, but it didn't really work. This was quite concerning to say the least.
After this, I re-hooked up stuff the way it was at first -- 2TB to motherboard, 500GB to PCI card. If the problem is something relating to the PCI card, I don't want to mess up some other drive too by hooking it up to it...
Most recently, I tried a Linux boot DVD that I made several months back, to see if I'd get any farther there. Here things get interesting -- Linux can see the 500GB drive! Now, the 500GB drive has three partitions on it, two about 220GBs and one about 9GB. Linux could see, and access, two of those partitions, the small one and one of the 220GB ones. I copied some files off of both partitions to another partition and it worked fine; access was slow, but it's doing it off of an OS on a DVD, so maybe that was a factor. Anyway, it worked with no problems.
Now, the third partition, called Amur, is an issue; Linux can't mount that drive. It can see the partition name and the amount of data on the partition (~120GB full of ~220GB), which is correct, but can't open (mount) the drive. Maybe this is related to why Windows can't see the drive at all? The OS gives the error message "This location could not be displayed. Sorry, could not display all the contents of “Amur”: Error when getting information for file '/media/ubuntu/Amur/$RECYCLE.BIN': Input/output error". Hmm.. interesting; I don't know what it means, but it's something different anyway. Is there any way of fixing this and gaining access to the drive again?
Going back to Windows afterwards, the drive still doesn't exist in either the Disk or Device Managers. Other partition management programs in Windows cannot see the disk either.
So uh... any help here? I'd prefer to not lose the data on the drive (I could at least copy over the two partitions Linux can see to another drive, but not the other one of course), but anything that gets the drive working again would be great.
I remember hearing about Kid Chameleon here and being sure I'd seen a game about a kid who turned into a chameleon on the NES at some point. I think this is what I remembered (badly). I think it's that cover art that confused me. In-game, the kid turns into a frog man rather than that lizard (among other things). Now I've got to pick this one up.
That's right, here it is. Iga, who left the sinking Konami, is doing what everyone ELSE from slowly dying companies does, kickstart a game that's exactly like the ones we love!
Specifically, this game seems a lot like the last of Iga's Metroidvania's, Order of Ecclesia. That's not a bad thing. The basic mechanics of the game were refined to a science with that one. Mechanically speaking, it's the best of the exploration style Castlevania games. That said, the exploration was probably done best in either Aria of Sorrow or Symphony of the Night.
Either way, he was responsible for all of that, so yeah, looking forward to yet ANOTHER one of these games :D.
I'm catching the tail end of this particular news cycle. It would appear oh so very many are upset at this new "buy your mods" system Valve has set up. (For the past year I've repeatedly been calling Valve the company "Steam" by mistake.) They're upset at the notion that someone might want to charge money for a mod.
Now, part of me understands the notion of how "the community" might be mad at this. I can see how bad money can drive out the good, in some ways. That does happen, and inevitably we'll see some of that moving forward. However, sometimes the sheer time and effort put into making a mod should justify the author's desire to actually profit off of their work. Why should such "derivative" content as they develop not be profitable? Along those same lines, those who make extremely tiny "small" mods (and those philosophically opposed to the new model) are still free to make their mods free, and those free mods are sure to be instantly more popular than priced mods that do the same thing. I don't see a future where the modding community becomes so corrupt that minor "fixed this quest bug" type mods are going to be sold.
However, I'm giving the modding community for a lot of these games too much credit. Sure, there are a number of good to amazing mods available to games, but the vast VAST majority of mods I see on sites like "The Nexus" are just... awful. I'm talking about mods that just add their favorite OTHER fictional stuff as "reskins" for your character in the game, with no thought at all as to how well any of it should fit. There's mods that are just internet memes for the sake of memes. Mods that turn your sword into a keyblade, or your eyes into some weird anime eyes. And oh, the anime mods. They all just clash terribly with the in-game art style, and generally don't even look like anything but anime cliches stapled together. Oh, a blue haired pig tailed cat eared lady with weird frog eyes and a nose piercing? Congratulations, you totally NAILED the look of Oblivion sir! Oh hey, it's Megaman's "suit"! Nice one. Did you just mod the main character in Deus Ex to look like Link from the legend of Zelda? Unironically? You win! You win my enmity! Hell, at LEAST try something that was actually your idea.
This video more or less sums up the modding scene in Skyrim right now:
Frankly, I'm shocked that the above modded game worked as well as it did. Another big problem with the modding community is most of the mods I'm talking about here seem to be made in a vacuum. There's a core group of dedicated modders who work hard to make sure that their mods work well with other popular well-made mods, but outside of that, no one seems to know or care about compatibility with the major mods.
Let's tackle the elephant in the room here. Go to any specific game page on the mod nexus web site, and you'll find the list of the current most recent and most popular mods, and just about ALL of them are creepy "nudity" mods. I won't judge someone's sexy style kinks or whatever, but their need to "justify" these mods in the description is what creeps me out. At least they should be honest about their actual motivation, but wow, the lies they come up with... For example, half of the mods that change all the females in the game to ridiculous "bimbo" stereotypes describe themselves as "more realistic women" or "more beautiful women" (frankly, neither of those are true in any way shape or form with the blow-up dolls they seem to be showing in those screen shots). They alter the clothes to ridiculous levels (this is the frozen north, right?), or just change all the women (almost always women) to walk around naked. The most popular mods are just to model in genitals when someone disrobes. Now, that last one I could understand if they were actually going to program in sex scenes or romance systems, but they don't. The entire justification, full stop, is "realism", even though at no point in the narrative does someone get stripped down to their bare essentials. If making stuff players will never see look "more realistic" was such a priority, why don't they fix the various edge of the world "unfished" stuff nearly as often as they fix this?
What I'm getting at is this. At least with the ability to charge, a bit of culling is going to start happening. We might actually see people motivated to make decent mods aside from a dedicated but very small group.
Ever seen St Elsewhere? I've recently come across a fan theory that all of television takes place in the mind of the kid in the last episode looking into a snow globe (named Tommy Westphall). Okay, there were a LOT of 80's crossover episodes. One of those was Cheers. They already linked this show to Cheers through those crossovers. That's where the problems start for all of Japanese entertainment. Mickey Mouse once visited Cheers in a TV special. Mickey Mouse is in Kingdom Hearts. Final Fantasy characters are in Kingdom Hearts. All of Final Fantasy is linked together through Dissidia. The Final Fantasy 1 characters are in Mario Basketball for Nintendo DS. Mario is in Smash Bros. Smash Bros takes place in the mind of a child. That child.... is Tommy Westphall.
(Those were all huge enough properties that eventually I'm sure you can tie together everything else in Japanese media. That's one creative autistic kid.)
Ugh, so now the one big game the Wii U had for this holiday season is gone from the year. I don't think, like, Xenoblade Chronicles X and Splatoon will make up for its absence this year... let's hope Nintendo has something good to announce at E3 for release this year. But just in general this is sad because Zelda is my favorite series, and I'm really looking forward to this one. It's been quite a while since the last 3d Zelda, Skyward Sword!
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