Selfsurprise

^ Thanks Tron! I love the idea of a sapient and unstable flesh golem, that's certainly one way to interpret the image. You were supposed to post a new picture for the next player, but don't sweat it. If there anything I'm not short of in life it's pictures of weird and unspeakably eldritch abominations from beyond the rational bounds of earthly sanity. Next monster...

I know right! What is the deal with that?! Sometimes I bump into old acquaintances that are the same age as me, that I recall being children when I was a child, and they've suddenly transformed into fifteen ft. tall atomic superhumans. Meanwhile I'm still bumbling about like a garden gnome despite being almost thirty years old.

“As our eyes grow accustomed to sight they armour themselves against wonder.” ― Leonard Cohen, The Favourite Game 2016 is turning out to be a giant pile of bollocks.

@ AP_Pastor: I'm lucky enough to live above a shop, and that my front door is inaccessible to postmen, door-to-door salesmen, Jehovah's Witnesses, etc. Generally interruptions aren't something I hate, though getting a phone call when you're right in the middle of brushing your teeth or you have a mouth full of food only to find out that it's a cold-call from somewhere in deepest darkest India inquiring whether or not a "miss Ben Harris" (< not a typo, the amount of times I've been asked this...) lives at my address. S/he might! Pet Peeve #11: When you're playing the game Animal, Vegetable or Mineral with friends and family, and you just know that someone will get one of the animal kingdom's wrong. Me: Is it an animal? Answerer: Yes. Me: Is it a mammal? Answerer: Errrrr, no. Me: Is it a bird? Answerer: No. Me: Is it a reptile? Answerer: What's a reptile? Me: Snakes, lizards, turtles, that kind of thing. Answerer: No, definitely no. Me: Is it a fish? Answerer: Yes. Me: Great! Is it a big fish? Answerer: Yes. Me: Bigger than a car? Answerer: Yes, think really big. Me: Is it the biggest fish in the world? Answerer: Yes they are. Me: Ooh I know! It's a whale shark! Answerer: Nope! Me: What?! Someone else entirely (probably my mum): Is it a whale? Answerer: Yes! You win! Me: WHALESAREN'TFISH WHALESAREN'TFISH WHALESAREN'TFISH!!!! Disclaimer: I'm officially banned from playing Animal, Vegetable or Mineral with my family. When I was informed that white supremacist hip-hop was an actual and not totally made-up thing in Russia, I just about died of amusement. Nothing screams "Aryan pride" like extremely derivative gangster rap!

La Tristesse by Rémi Parson

Fallout: Recife - Brazil's sixth largest city known for it's vibrant graffiti scene and unusual public art. I just think it would be interesting to see so naturally colourful a city in ruins. I'd imagine that even in a post-apocalyptic state the place would be pretty well inhabited and the locals creative as ever. And who wouldn't want there to be a faction of psychotic carnivàle raiders?

^^^ Condemned Ascetic, Medium LE Undead (Incorporeal, Lawful) Condemned Ascetics are the disembodied spirits of once noble monks guilty of slaughtering innocents with their martial arts. For their heinous crimes they cursed to haunt the material plane of existence, their hands and feet shackled by black ethereal chains, without hope of ever attaining the transcendental ascension all members of their class aspire to. Their day-to-day activities resemble a sad and futile parody of monastic routine - meditating fruitlessly, or tirelessly drilling themselves in various martial disciplines as in life. Next monster...

@PsychoticNinja: I think the internet is inundated with spazzy animation, but if I'm honest with myself I actually find it a lot funnier than my critical tendencies would otherwise allow. I don't think I'll ever be able to shrug off the soft spot I have for animators like Oney Cartoons and Egoraptor. By far the greatest parody of artfully and deliberately "bad flash animation" has to be David Firth's Jerry Jackson stuff. The affected illiteracy of the protagonist, the willful awfulness of the aesthetics and just the general tone of Northern English grimness somehow equates into one of the genuinely funny series on the internet. I guess I'm just nostalgic for a certain clique of Newgrounds animators from back in the day. PLUDE1fTFCQ Pet Peeve #6: Don't you hate it when you can't think of anything pertinent, clever, divisive, funny enough for a thread about pet peeves?

"Get your arm down."

Collision meshes on in-game objects are the absolute bane of all stealthy playthroughs, or even just games that involve avoiding enemy gunfire. I always remember the bleedin' amount of invisible walls and obstacles in Fallout: New Vegas, especially when playing on higher difficulties and getting shot was often detrimentally serious for your character. Trying to take cover and taking careful pot shots at enemies would often result in you shooting point blank the unseen border around boulders and between slats in fences, wasting your ammo, and naturally the enemies bullets seem to find their target through the magical force fields just fine.

Having recently watched Jim Sterling's playthrough of Fahrenheit: Indigo Prophecy, I'd love to see Ross's take on this unusual game and it's marvelously disjointed clusterfuck of ideas, game mechanics, plot arcs and ambitions. Harking back to the game with world-weary eyes and in some aspects it hasn't aged well, though I still liked this game a lot when it came out in 2005 - blew my teenage brain back in the day, the Matrix series hadn't exactly become a hoary old cliche yet and the whole "there is no spoon" ethos of the early 00's still felt pretty rad to a confused demiadult who didn't know any better.

I know this is an old thread, but since Ross mentioned it in the November chat, there's a huge difference between an affiliate link (what GOG was offering), and a sponsorship deal. Sponsorship deals mean that you receive money directly for creating content for a site. What GOG offered is simply the opportunity that, if a game appears on GOG, he could toss a link that will result in him receiving a small amount per sale. I have a similar deal with No Scope. They've never paid me a dime to promo their stuff. Nor have they influenced me to overpromote. It's just a thing that exists, and if I feel it appropriate I can toss a link in my video description. Now he would need to disclose either in the video (if he mentions buying it from the link), or in the description near the link that it's an affiliate link and that he would receive compensation for sales made through that link. Aside from that though, it's not a major issue, and I doubt he's going to start picking games specifically to cash in on that. From the way he described the offer, it sounded like GOG actually wanted to be above-board and reasonable. Mind you I wouldn't blame Ross for being more than a little ambivalent towards any sort of sponsorship, given the awful experience with Machinima he was forced to endure. That load of nonsense would of put me off from making financial arrangements with other parties.

Looks like he won by a distressingly high margin. 6YMPAH67f4o

I've been putting off watching the news, but I Just saw the results. I kind of feel like I'm living in a terrifying alternate universe where the human race won't survive the 21st century. Centuries from now, when our far more advanced parallel planar neighbours master dimension-skipping technology, they'll come across the melancholy wreckage of our civilization and shudder. P.S. Forgive my dramatic flourishes, I'm just rather anxious about being in a "special relationship" with America right now.

CoShg5hIeRM

Just a heads up, even if nobody else posts in this thread I'll probably be updating it on a near daily basis anyway. I've been trying to come-up with a thread that will draw me back here on a regular basis, so even if you don't particularly want to post in this topic I'll still be posting my own ubiquitous strain of geeky obsessive weirdness therein. DECADES AGO I used to make homebrew monsters on the WotC forums and I've been hankering for some half-arsed made-up monster action for a while now. Onto the last image I posted... Adumbralette, Huge CN Outsider (Chaotic, Extraplanar) These winsome and powerful three-armed female giants reside in regions of the transitive cosmos where the astral and shadow planes intersect. A certain subset of multiplanar sages have theorized that in the same way dryads and oreads are spiritually connected to trees and waterfalls, an Adumbralette's essence in inextricably tied to portals connecting the two aforementioned planes. Next monster...

I would love to stop and chat with you, but I'm a rabbit. Therefore I lack the language and sapiency to communicate with you. You should probably keep taking your medication. Jus' sayin'.

It's obviously Helios from Deus Ex. "We have no enemies, only topographies of ignorance." I think that has to rate amongst the top ten most badass quotes in gaming history. There's a cold and calculating certainty in that statement that only an A.I. could truly conceive of.

@PsychoticNinja: Just to clarify, your peeve is with people's inconsiderate noisiness rather than just beatboxing/b-boying specifically? I enjoy vocal percussive stuff in hip-hop, but there is definitely a time and place for it. Same goes to those people who consider walking through council estates at 2:00 am and screaming their bastardized near-human language at each other a perfectly normal and reasonable thing to do. I'd support a gobshite genocide. Assuming I've understood you correctly then I'm one-hundred percent with you in regards to being vexed with other people's noise. Pet Peeve #4: When people say something along the lines "old art is better than modern art" and then proceed to present an abstract expressionist painting from the 1950's (or something older still, like a cubist image from THE 1920's) as if it were inconsolable proof of their (entirely imaginary) incredible insight and critical faculties. I fully accept that a person might not subjectively like abstract or minimalist art (the two particular genres that raise the most ire in misinformed art haters) but anybody even remotely informed about the 20th-21st century can tell you that these two particular tropes are a fragment of the aesthetic diversity in the multifaceted field of art making and theory. You don't even need to be interested in art as a subject to grasp that! Maybe I'm just a bit more heavily invested in this because mainstream antagonism towards contemporary is so obviously and demonstrably unwarranted, and the accusations leveled at the medium by those people are, to me, obviously and demonstrably wrong. If they are going to do the whole "art then/art now hyup hyup hyup" gaff, they should at least actually find some work by a contemporary artist - as in, created within the last two or three years! Maybe even pick an artwork created in 2016! They've still got nearly two months left! Or maybe they shouldn't bother at all. Because for any supposedly archetypal example they gleefully imagine represents "all modern art" I could present them with about five hundred examples of something entirely different in a heartbeat. Thanks for the kind acknowledgement Jeb! :3 The forums seemed like they could do with some more positivity lately, so naturally I decided to create yet another thread about random complaints Seriously though, I hope the thread makes people feel more included than excluded.

Made just because I inexplicably felt like making a new forum game thread. Skorpenkopf, Large LE Magical Beast Sinister, intelligent and ambitious monsters hailing from an infernally brutal desert of black sands. Skorpenkopf are rightly feared for their totalitarian dreams and their capacity for manipulating other equally sapient monsters into fighting on their behest. Psiro, Small CG Fey (Air, Psionic) Lithe and supernaturally nimble fairy worshippers of Chaav, the god of laughter, joy and pleasure. Unusually for fey, their agility is psychoportational in nature rather than being purely magical. That Goddamn Tornado Sonuvabitch That Lives In The Cemetary, Annoyingly Big CWTF Elemental ("Seriously, An Angry Tornado With Arms?" Subtype) This massive prick hangs around perfectly good cemetaries and makes a huge mess when gravediggers and ghouls alike are just trying to go about their business. One of the few monsters that will compel clerics and necromancers to work together. ~ Assuming you are still here and haven't been scared away by my teratologically inspired outburst, this aim of this game is simple! I'm sure some of you are fans of and/or familiar with Dungeons & Dragons, in particular the endlessly inspiring monsters manuals that many of us have, and still do, fondly thumb through. Every time someone participates in the thread they must post an image of a monster - the source of your image, photograph, illustration, etc. is up to you, let your imagination get the better of you! - and then the next poster needs to interpret it as some kind of D&D monster or race. The kind of responses I'm hoping for might resemble the three above examples, though you needn't go into extreme detail, or provide an italicised description, or even take D&D's game mechanics seriously if you want to. Using the previous posters monster image simply provide us with a name for the creature (species or unique individual, as suits you) as well as the creature's size, alignment and type (see the handy collection of links below) and then post your own picture of an entirely new monster. If you aren't overtly familiar with D&D rule terminology then don't sweat it! I'm fine with humorous entries, most of all irreverent subtypes and alignments - "chaotic and lawful stupid" being perennial favourites. Some topical aids for your perusal A helpful list detailing monster types and subtypes Wiki page about D&D's alignment system Useful chart of monster sizes (including approximate height, weight, etc) ~ Next monster...

(just a friendly forewarning, I couldn't decide if this was a better fit for the Free-For-All or Forum Games subforums, I settled on the former due to the hope that this will engender some discussion) Do we have pet peeves and personal bugbears in common? Thinking about this recently I decided to create a topic that would be something like a cross between Jeb's Discuss your Opinion thread and nomogoodnames' Vent thread - which has been a rather busy topic of late! ;p The aim of the thread is to post a short-ish description (if you need to write more, feel free to) of some pet peeve you have. The next person to post needs to then confirm or deny sharing that particular frustration (feel free to describe your reasoning) as well as offering up another pet peeve for the next poster, and so on ad infinitum. If you would also be so kind as to number your latest pet peeve, so that future users can continue putting the world to rights and comment on past subjects, without disrupting the "forum game" ethos of the thread. Pet Peeve #1: I hate it when people who were born late in a particular decade wax lyrical about and nostalgically reminiscence a year they were certainly too young to recall. I was born in 1987, yet I'm always hearing people my age or slightly less unironically calling themselves a "child of the 80's" as if they were caught up in the stylistic and cultural zeitgeist of the decade. As far as I'm concerned if you were born between '85 and '89, you weren't there! I understand some people recall their childhood more clearly than others, personally I can barely remember the 90's, but surely latter-day 80's babies like me were too busy chewing furniture and recklessly touching open plug sockets to notice any of the 80's idiosyncrasies?

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Banned for callously deeming me judgemental.

Why does winter have to be a thing?

Cutesy.