Selfsurprise

Thanks man! I worry that my verbose ranting grates on people's nerve, because I hate the idea of posting something for folks to read without even attempting to make it funny or irreverent. Maybe I've just been doing too much of it lately. But I'm glad someone got a kick out of one of my Lovecraft protagonist-esque diatribes against life. I'm "blessed" with the ability to turn my hand at wordsmithery whilst in a foul mood. For what my sincere but ultimately useless empathy is worth I'm sorry to hear about your problems dealing with an arsehole, I respect your choice not to talk about it but if you change your mind and instead endeavour to pour your unutterable scorn onto the individual go right ahead. In the meantime, I hope a swarm of taxonomically unclassifiable lifeforms invade his digestive system and slowly gnaw his intestines from within, resulting in an agonizing death from the inside-out. MERRY HATEMAS

Broken Sword + The Last Guardian = You're A Talking Goat! The talkative stuttering goat easter egg from Broken Sword 2: The Smoking Mirror is back, and he needs George Stobbarts help to save his home kingdom of Goatlandistan. Having underwent a sorcerous trauma that transformed into a giant winged ruminant, the Broken Sword 2 Goat transports George to his fantastical kingdom where they must work together to solve goody lateral puzzles and jump about like liquored-up parkour runners. Make sure you don't feed the goat marzipan. God, he hates marzipan... Don't worry that only about two of you guys reading this nonsense will understand the reference. I'm sorry everyone.

^ Name: Wakemko of Black Apple Valley Race: Badger Hengeyokai (intelligent shapeshifting animals with their true animal form, as well as human and hybrid forms [source: Oriental Adventures]) Age: 19 Class: Barbarian Alignment: CG Deity: Valkar (CG god of courage [source: Complete Warrior]) Next portrait...

^^^ Bouquecoo, Medium Usually N Aberration (Shapechanger) The colloquially named Bouquecoo is a highly specialized shapeshifting creature that is capable of disguising itself as numerous varieties of domesticated houseplant in appropriate manufactured potting. They typically target larger households with large gardens, and despite being capable of taking on diverse array plant and receptacle traits individual Bouquecoos tend towards conservative habits. Left to their own devices and unless compelled to by coercion or circumstance, most Bouquecoos will manifest their abilities by transforming into the same arrangement of flowers, typically of the same kind and colour, with most favouring vase-like "bodies" to compliment their ruse. Their real form vaguely resembles the outline of an oversized bouquet of flowers in a lumpen, upright cylindrical body covered in mustard-coloured greasy fur. A rasping multi-jointed "tongue" projects from the base of the body and immediately below that are it's disarmingly cartoon-like boggled eyes. The mass of the creature sits atop a intertwined circular bed of writhing green tendrils. Next monster...

Don't make me post a twenty paragraph riposte to this Ninja. ;p (sorry) I see you're too lazy to make your twenty paragraph riposte ... hey!

^ I'm just about done with technology this month too Ninja. For some unquantifiable reason almost everything in my house decided to break or otherwise arbitrarily stop working, presumably because all the inanimate objects in my home have become sapient and did so out of sheer existential boredom. My internet only started working again a couple of days ago despite having a new router sent to me and even a TalkTalk engineer having looked at my connections. It still doesn't feel or function the way it used to.

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Soft croissants donate door-eating laptops and overpriced cursed demonic candy for the Vietnamese.

That is a good question Ninja! For me personally, it has to be the latter option. The whole "Machinima Movie" thing extremely novel and undeniably exciting, but I honestly think I look forward to his Game Dungeon episodes more intently. Also, very little in life compete with my affection for Freeman's Mind. I'm more excited by the prospect of Freeman's Mind 2! ;p Same question, because it's a tough one and worthwhile keeping on the radar for a bit.

Manga

A post-victorian flat above a shop. What's the oddest band or genre of music you're in love with?

"I'm still mad you, even if you are a cutie..."

Relaxing. Calm before the storm, you might say... :/

Banned for telling others not to wave at people, and having an avatar depicting someone who is waving.

^ No apology necessary Helio! There's nothing wrong with a boldly philosophical argument between friends. Violent performance art is a medium that a viewer flatly cannot disassociate from personal experience. You can assuage yourself from the intention or message of an artist's self-inflicted violence but out of human empathy it's hard not to connect with the utter physicality of the action - part of the reason performance art fascinates me is it's unimpeachable bodiliness, the "presence" of the artist isn't alluded to or abstracted as in other mediums. Reading my initial post I see I didn't exactly conclude my point very effectively. Fantasy violence in the vein of the games you mentioned is a very different beast. Performance art might present and simulate unreal situations but the fleshy human presence creates a friction with the equally fleshy human subject, it's a fictionalized and engineered reality. There isn't that degree of separation between artist and audience in a fictional and engineered setting. I don't especially favour one form of violent content over the other, and despite what I fear it says about me I garner a lot of intellectual and sensate enjoyment from fantasy violence through illustration and literature, or the arguably performative violence of art and criticism. I guess I'm endlessly drawn towards the theme and imaginative understanding of violence. ~ Philosophical Topic #2: Alien Horror I've been reading a lot of literature relating to Speculative Realism and lit-crit books regarding horror and science-fiction. I wanted to present an argument formulated by the writer Dylan Trigg that roughly surmised the content of his book The Thing: A Phenomenology of Horror. Why do we find the notion of the alien so frightening? Are we frightened of being confronted with something outside our range of experience? Is it not more accurate to state that we are repulsed by something that recalls to us our own animal bodiliness? Our ancient prepersonal biology older than our thoughts, though ruptured into permutations we rarely conceive of. Does this tension between familiarity and strangeness also extend to our native environment in opposition to a potentially alien one? The writer Sara Ahmed put it a better way, though she was actually talking about institutionalized whiteness; "To be comfortable is to be so at ease with one’s environment that it is hard to distinguish where one’s body ends and the world begins..."

I haven't gotten to DS3 yet as the series is fairly new to me. I'm currently working my way through DS2. Though since I enjoyed DS1 and am loving DS2 I suspect I might like DS3. Just a suspicion. You should really give them a try. I bet you would love the monsters. Especially Bloodborne if you happen to have a PS4. I have actually played the first Dark Souls game and, to be totally honest, I found it absolutely rock solid to play. I'm not exactly a kick-ass gamer at the best of times and I've been somewhat spoiled by the inherent hand-holding standards of later fantasy games and a lifetime of playing graphic adventure/point n' click fare. But you are right about the monsters and enemies. I'm a fan of the website Bogleech and he has written several articles about the series bizarre menagerie of bad guys, including Bloodborne and it's diverse cast of "Great Ones". I've forgotten the name of the series developer, but even to someone as unfamiliar with the games as I am the artistic and thematic direction of Dark Souls and Bloodborne is breathtaking. I might make a top ten enemies according to franchise thread or something in the future, just to celebrate the team's teratological creativity.

I understand what you're getting at, because ever since his Strife (or maybe as far back as Eternam) video the standards of Game Dungeon were a lot more in-depth and bordering on documentary intensive efforts. I don't see any reason why Ross can't have shorter and less intricately edited episodes (there is a precedent already, Potty Pigeon or Super Cult Tycoon are examples of less complicated but still entertaining episodes) as well as the occasional "all-bells-and-whistles" episode in the vein of his three-part Arcade America or his recent Realms of the Haunting.

"This heat is pretty intense, but I know I can take it..." "I'M BURNING!" I personally don't think Ross outsourcing some of the video editing is a bad thing for the series. Much of Gaming Dungeons appeal for me is Ross's irreverent analysis of the settings in the game he reviews, and his snarky and occasionally angry humour result in some of the best one-liners on Youtube. I'm not sure if Ross himself would agree with me but I feel like the slightly "hands-off" approach in this episode would free up time to emphasize the strength of his jokes and glorious self-effacement - the latter being a marvellous tonic in the face of gamings more arrogant, self-assured and typically cretinous standards. "Is this the turning point where everything goes to hell? Maybe!"

♪♫ So this is Christmas, And what have you done? My name is Mark Chapman And I have a gun... ♪♫

I hate interruptions from cold callers so I can definitely sympathize with you AP, though carolling isn't really culturally endemic to the region of England I live in. If anyone is doing any variety of christmas singing they'll generally be doing it in a public place like a supermarket or high street. I'm also blessed due to the fact that I live above a shop without neighbours or any sort of public access to my door. If there were any carollers around here they would have to sing up towards to my living room window from the street below. Next pet peeve - PP#23: Another seasonal treat! I know the old "christmas is crass and commercialised" bit is a nauseatingly smug cliche by now, but working in Asda I can't help wonder if Christmas is a collective hive-mind neurosis we all suffer from. When did food shopping become such a gut-wrenching, despair-invoking, cancer-propagating, tumour-inducing matter of balls-to-the-wall life and death for people? Assuming you actually like the standard fare of a traditional christmas dinner, would you normally eat turkey and sprouts during the other eleven months of the year? They are available for your perusal and purchasing pleasure if you do! Do you honestly feel as though you are losing out on the holiday zeitgeist if you do something marginally different from the superorganic unwashed multitudes of humanity? Eat something you actually like! I'm planning on cooking a beef madras on the 25th of December for the sheer spiteful hell of it. In my humble opinion the word christmas sounds far too much like kristallnacht. Disclaimer: I apologize unreservedly for the unseemly amounts of inarticulate edgelordiness in this one. Please forgive me. Christmas leaves my spirit bruised and my optimism for my fellow men and women undermined.

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Fallout: Chorley - A small Lancashire town in England. Basically because I wanted to update the thread and I recently read some folklore story about a local parish called Angelzarke which is supposedly home to a dog-like beast called the Skriker; a terrifying black hound with red orb-like eyes that imitates the sound of crying infants to draw unsuspecting folks to their dooms on the moors.

That is legitimately weird. I've not played this game myself, is there some of secret world/magic realist sub-narrative that I'm not aware of in the titles lore? Is it an in-game nightmare of one of the characters or something?

^ I might be able to guess what you favourite title in the lineup is.