prismatic

they should have turned the gender flipped version into a movie

Not a lot this year. Technically there were quite a few games I installed, ran for a tiny bit didn't return to, but not many I actually played. I've had a hard time getting into things - I don't want to learn a new system, I don't want to dedicated the next 40+ hours to a story and I don't want to spend a lot of time fiddling with things.

Citizen Sleeper 2 - It's not as good as the first, but it's still a short, narrative based game I think I completed in just a night or a day off or something. I appreciate that. Though maybe it is as good as the first post-DLC, it's a rare game where I think the best time to play it was right at launch as the additional content added in patches robbed a lot of the impact from the alternate endings. 7/10

Dispatch - Another short, narrative based game. It's just superhero popcorn filler, and an extremely linear "choose your own adventure" but it's very competently done with some excellent vocal performances. Me and my partner had a great time with it. 8/10

Fortnight - My partner likes it so I got roped into it when we had to spend a few weeks apart as something to do together online. I fucking loathe so much about this game. The predatory cash shop. The constant, massive updates. The fact it has that fucking Unreal Engine stutter that everyone swears is the fault of lazy devs but even Epic can't fix in their own games. The horrific, aesthetic whip lash. The fact that it performs like shit and looks so blah. The fact that it is buggy as all hell. 2/10 and I only gave it any points because I enjoy my partner enjoying things.

Aeon Flux is the only one I can think of not mentioned yet. 90s, Cyberpunk, Hyperviolent - it's just not Japanese, though it is animated. It's weird, and the first two seasons are are series of shorts.

That was surprisingly good

I picked blue, purple and black.

Just going to work through this, but:

I already got ears, not sure what a tail would add. Seems like it might be inconvenient even. Pass.

I don't need estrogen. If I somehow need it later, it's readily available in forms other than pill. Pass.

I actually like my body hair, it's soft and feels nice when people play with it. Pass.

Look $20 is $20 but come on, pass.

I'd have passed on a more competitive board because the person I want to find me attractive already does, but this is still just broadly useful. Taking this one.

The difference between the best pizza I have ever had and the best pizza I have ever made isn't much in the grand scheme of things. It's not like there isn't a difference, but at it's best it's not exactly a mind blowing meal. Pass.

I was originally really high on water tasting and feeling like my favorite drink until I remember we use water for a lot more than drinking. Can you imagine cooking pasta in your favorite soft drink? Pass.

I can already talk to cats. They sometimes talk to me too. Mostly it's "I want food" and "I want you to open this door". I don't need a pill for this. Pass.

Not having to sleep is potentially such a brutal monkey's paw answer but I'm willing to risk it. Taking this one.

I guess I've got to circle back, and I'm going for master pizza chef. I almost went with $20, but I guess master pizza chef takes pizza from a fun thing I can make sometimes to a potentially marketable skill.

Never watched the Critical Role campaigns myself, just watched most of Vox Mach and now this. (No spoilers for S2 if you’ve watched the campaign I’m presuming this is based off of, please.)

Having watched the campaign, I'm actually not sure what they're going to do in Season 2. They have made a lot of changes. Some plot threads are happening much faster while others are much slower in weird ways. It's very strange in ways I can't detail without going into spoilers.

Anyway.

I like this a lot more than Vox Machina. That felt like a very unfocused parody and the humour just wasn't landing. A lot of that same humour is still here - but it works much better contained mostly to a comic relief character.

Also while the changes feel weird, the substantial rewrites I think make for a better TV narrative structure overall where as Vox Machina seemed more faithful to it's detriment. I realise I've only talked about the changes that didn't really hit for me below, but I do think overall it's for the better.

The Tiefling Circus performer (of apparently many names) Molly, fun character but having no memory felt a bit too “hand-wavy” at times. Nice tool to use for the GM but, eh… not my personal cup of tea in a character.

Yeah, I'm not sure how I feel about Molly either. He's used for really clumsy foreshadowing and broody introspection which just wasn't the case in the campaign. He didn't really care about his past, and that stuff didn't really come up until much, much later. It honestly makes me wonder if they're just going to cut out like 80% of the campaigns middle arcs and try to weld the ends together.

I’m a bit disinterested in the Beacon as this end-all-be-all overpowered contrivance. Hoping there is indeed more to it than seems. Bit of allusion that it could be so, we’ll see?

The beacon seems to be a fumble here. In the campaign, they stumble upon it at about the same point but with little clue of it's significance. When we do learn about it, it's not through the lens of Ikithon, who thinks in terms of power and practical usage which strips it of any intrigue, but as a cosmic mystery and an item of religious significance. You get something like Ikithon's perspective towards the end of the campaign from Essek, but even then it was posing questions, which are currently just absent.

Some of the voice acting, particularly outside the main cast was amazing.

Wow, I just looked up the guest stars for this and it's honestly crazy. Here's just some of them:

• Alan Cumming

• Nathan Fillion

• Jonathan Frakes

• Lucy Liu

• Ming-Na Wen

What the hell are they doing in this?

Very cool, though the quality leaves a bit to be desired.

For popularity>0, we got close to all tracks on the platform. The quality is the original OGG Vorbis at 160kbit/s. Metadata was added without reencoding the audio (and an archive of diff files is available to reconstruct the original files from Spotify, as well as a metadata file with original hashes and checksums).

For popularity=0, we got files representing about half the number of listens (either original or a copy with the same ISRC). The audio is reencoded to OGG Opus at 75kbit/s — sounding the same to most people, but noticeable to an expert.

The slop ratio hasn't gotten better from abandoning that format.

There is some recency bias, but Pluribus as well. It's the only water cooler show I've come across in years where people actually want to talk about in real life.

Firefly, even after the deluge of post-marvel Whedonesque slop that has worn away some of the charm of the banter. Only a little bit though, it's fortunately not quite the same.

It managed to slip in just before they killed off episodic story telling for genre shows, but just after there was a very noticeable increase in production quality. So it's got that rewatch factor nothing made after like 2005 has but without my girlfriend rolling her eyes at sets and costumes that were designed to be viewed on a tiny 4:3 CRT.

Obviously there were other episodic genre shows made in this weird interstitial period but none have nearly as many banger episodes, even those that got additional seasons.

Maybe hot take but I'm still interested in Zero Parades, despite ZA/UM being stolen. A CRPG about a spy who is a burn out is extremely my shit and it's one of the few studios that have unionized.