Selfsurprise

Makes literally* no sense ever, yet is aware of it...

:3

* I might not actually be as literal as this post suggests, I like your sig quote.

"Well fight me irl and we'll see who's the real idiot."

I'd say "thanks for agreeing with me" repeatedly until they either give up or have an aneurysm. The hardest-kid-in-the-playground syndrome is both devastatingly sad and hilarious to see in action.

Sad to have just discovered that the American painter Shirley Jaffe died a few days ago. She began her career and developed in the abstract expressionist zeitgeist of late-forties to fifties in her home country, but during the sixties developed a more colourfully geometric yet rigorously "flattened" style which she later became celebrated for. Looking at her work from that decade now, it's quite evident that she had sidestepped the more thunder-browed and overtly spiritual insistences of other abstract contemporaries. The art critic Holland Cotter perhaps summed-up her talents best by stating that she “makes painting look like fastidiously worked joy.” She died aged 92.

“You go to a museum and you hear somebody explaining the painting only in verbal and literary terms. They are never saying, Look, look at what that artist did! It’s deplorable to me. Even when they look at a Goya or a Velazquez, they don’t see the humor that the artist might have had in the way he placed the little dog or the cat. People are not sensitized to what pleasure they can have visually.” - Shirley Jaffe

Long Black, oil on canvas (1965-66)

Pise, oil on canvas (2003)

If you're looking for something creepier and more atmospheric than my previous suggestion, yet with plainly deductive and entirely reasonable puzzles and investigative elements, I'd recommend Dead Secret by a studio called Robot Invader.

I finished Dead Secret earlier this morning. If you've played and enjoyed the two Darkness Within games you'll find a lot to like in this title. It's admittedly short-ish by most gaming standards outside of point n' click norms but it's certainly a more substantial game than even the most compelling walking simulator/interactive narrative experience fare. Despite being set in a single countryside household locale and having a somewhat pared-down coolly-paced gameplay, the game does an excellent job of inducing a heady mixture of dread and curiosity, in conjunction with a plot both meaningful enough to make one actually care about the (largely absent) cast of suspects in the mystery and artfully nebulous enough to avoid easy interpretation. If you are even remotely interested in creepy Japanese lore, fringe science gone awry, or simply the prospect of solving a mystifying murder case in an isolated and atmospheric setting, you could do a lot worse with your time and money than giving this game a peep.

Nuanced.

1849, a somewhat casual strategy/resource management game that is nevertheless a lot of fun. Inspired by U.S. history in the form of the great Californian gold rush of the titular year, you plan a small settlement and go about placing various building types to generate resources, ensure your growing population of workers have adequate housing, build saloons and sheriff's offices to alleviate boredom and alleviate crime, trade with other towns and generally watching your once modest depot-cum-town centre transform into a chaotic but productive landmark. Although the engine and the gameplay is rather basic and will likely be disappointment to you serious management enthusiasts out there, it runs perfectly even on my shuddering pile of electronic stone age sadness that is my computer, and more importantly is a nice game to diddle about on for an hour or less at a time.

I never mentioned, regarding the Wondermark comics, some of the amusing and prescient titles each new update is given.

#346; In which This is Life, now

#245; In which Misfortune is Heralded

#301; In which Hair Growth is Noticed

#266; In which Rascals Attempt to Woo

#533; In which Public Opinion is Leveraged

Distance (Cadency Remix) by dotwav

Do you still get paid?

Yup! I booked it off as holiday way back in February...

I don't have to go to work for the next three weeks...

Talk To The Church by Gaussian Curve

What a wild night in Vegas that was! I'm not sure if Helio remembered any of it, but frankly if he did, he wasn't there.

Matrimonial Kings of The Edgelordian Empire.

The Oddworld games. They were all clunky on release, and it's only got worse as time went on. Abe's Oddysee is frustrating, Abe's Exoddus is slightly less so - but the movement is just so clunky you don't have any fun solving the puzzles. Abe's Oddysee got a remake a couple years back which improves on a lot of things, but it really lacks the atmosphere the original had - is having the same graphics, but in a rebuilt engine too much to ask for?

The same goes for Munch's Oddysee, only in the opposite direction. The movement is so imprecise and you feel like the characters are on rocket skates, which is kind of important for a puzzle-platformer. All of the environments were built for what I figure is a very precise input, and the controls just mess that up completely. Not to mention squad mates have a habit of ignoring orders due to buggy engine or buggy port of it on the Windows version. It's just a mess, but I still recall having fun with it on the original XBox release.

Abe's Exodus did have a considerable improvement over it's predecessor in that it had (a rather novel concept at the time) quicksaves. Being able to save literally anywhere took a considerable amount of frustration away from the games harder moments without compromising on the overall challenge. It saddens me that one has to look considerably harder to find a franchise with the Oddworlds sense of aesthetic and thematic uniqueness.

I may not be able to do an Undying series, since I can't find a copy of Undying that isn't around $60. I am possibly gonna either continue Sohn's Mind into the HL2 mod MINERVA, or I'll make it a completely seperate mind series, but who knows...

Now I'm worried you're getting a vibe of undue pressure from me, I'm just throwing ideas about here! Don't sweat it...

That's a new one I haven't heard before Selfsurprise. I probably would've called them incompetent slobbering manbeasts but this works too. Coming up with your own insults is fun isn't it?

I'm sorry about that post. I needed to vomit forth my utter contempt for my work colleagues and I might of come across as a total edgelord. It has to happen sometimes... ;3

I prefer Meatbag

You say potato, I say potatarmatermorts!

I went into work today after my "weekend" (I have tuesdays and wednesdays off) only to discover that none of the primitive ball-bags that I work with (across the company's hierarchy) had actually managed to rework a vast percentage of the 1000% LEGIT over-stocks from monday. Things that were the 29th of september that couldn't go onto the shopfloor on the 26th of september were still apparently sitting in the fucking chiller on their due date. Fucking abject scum. My co-workers make me grateful for things like Islamic extremism, harlequin ichthyosis and accidently stubbing one's toe on a door frame. Human beings are the reason we can't have nice things!

Edit: Just a friendly warning. Don't google harlequin ichthyosis if you are sensitive to images of disfiguring medical conditions. It isn't nice, trust me.

Well, with his accent, it does help that I actually do have a southern accent. I was gonna set the reboot in Residual Point(The mod where Jack is from. The original is filmed in Residual Life and the later bits of Residual Point.), and was gonna write it so that Jack ends up wearing an HEV suit due to a mix-up, but I'm not sure if I will now, since after watching through the series start to finish(which I have never actually done), I can see a whole lot of comedic moments in there, and I wouldn't wanna possibly ruin it with a reboot in a different mod. My biggest pet peeve in the series is that I didn't actually start enhancing the dialogue and making it sound better until around episode 10-11. Before that, I just recorded raw audio in Sony Vegas, and kept all background noise. I wish I could go back and enhance the audio for the earlier episodes, but I don't have the footage or dialogue anymore. I may actually move on and do the Undying thing now, since I've dropped my idea of rebooting Sohn's Mind and Season 2 will take awhile, since the Source engine doesn't wanna allow me to keep the hud turned off for more than two seconds. It all depends.

It's your time and effort, I know all too well how these sorts of side-projects take an absolute age to muster. It's best to direct your concerted interest to something you actually care about. I've barely begun watching Sohn's Mind as it is, so the prospect of no reboot isn't exactly problematic. I wish you luck with whatever you do next!

I purchased a few things from Steam yesterday and I played one particularly spooky title called Dead Secret. I don't think I've even scratched the surface of the mystery yet but I've unlocked two endings already. If you are a fan of murder investigating fare, atmospheric dread, Japanese mythology and parapsychology then you'll find a lot to enjoy in this game.

His Freeman's Mind quotes never fail to remind me that I ought to make a point of watching the series again.

"Basically I'm every one-man black metal band ever."

Eriotciv by 74185#

Like I said, as long as SOMEONE gets enjoyment out of it, I may do it after I finish Sohn's Mind. I'm planning on making a reboot of Sohn's Mind, since I don't really like how the series turned out at first.

I just watched the first three episodes of Sohn's Mind, I really enjoyed what I've seen so far. I'm beginning to appreciate his dejected Southern drawl in contrast to Freeman's more bipolar voice modulation. Oddly enough the bits that made me laugh the most were the noises he made whenever he was fighting aliens or otherwise doing something dangerous, sort half-angry half-scared grunts and utterances - especially at 3:50 in episode two . I certainly wouldn't be opposed to a reboot of the series, if you think it needs one. There was a handful of lines that gave me a chuckle or two.

"Are we creating toxic waste like it's butter?"

"Electro-xeno-raptors"

[/two vortigaunts suddenly appear]

"OKAY I ADMIT IT'S NOT THE GREATEST NAME IN THE WORLD!"