Posts by Thrik

  • What have you watched recently?

    Just got through the first season of Hannibal and now onto the second. It took a while to really get its claws in but I I can honestly say it's one of the most well-crafted and delicately written shows I've ever seen. It completely subverts typical expectations of Hannibal fiction by flipping roles and leaving the viewer as much in the dark as the characters. It's great, but definitely a 'much watch every episode' kind of programme.

  • What's going on with your life?

    I think you're right, romance definitely becomes a big factor later on but the initial stages really come down to raw attraction and heavy flirting. I discovered when I started dating more that when I played it safe I got nowhere, whereas being brave about touching the girl (this sounds awful but I just mean casually putting your hand on her while talking, etc) and being 100% forward with my intentions almost immediately led to repeat dates and beyond.

    Just going for the kiss is pretty important because, basically, it's what the girl expects from a man and getting this wrong can actually be disastrous not just for you but also her belief in you as a confident guy — just like not asking for a number when the opportunity is there. It can be terrifying if you're not great at reading the signals, but a key thing to learn IMO is how to play off failed attempts (i.e. girl turns away) without it going awkward as hell. Same for the more physical stuff: you've got to push, and she won't always go along with it so think how to pull back without it getting weird.

    At the beginning it's not about a relationship, if you're thinking that far ahead you need to stop because it'll make every single encounter seem way more important than it is and you'll freeze yourself due to so much pressure, or even worse appear needy. Just go looking for a good time with someone you find hot, and IF something develops from there great. If not, you've both had a good experience and may even remain friends (or 'friends' ).

  • Far Cry 4

    And now people are saying it's just been changed because people were complaining about it... wat. Maybe it's just my eyes but he always looked non-white to me. Someone should find a photo of a similar-looking actual dude to show these guys.

  • What's going on with your life?

    Always sucks, but at least you learnt something from it and in future you know what to do differently. I definitely recommend not trying to plan or save things for a certain time, relations with girls are completely unpredictable and it'll just lead to disaster.

    Have no expectations, take every opportunity that presents itself, and if a girl likes you she won't feel like you've crossed some boundary or etiquette because you want to kiss/touch her — just do it, and fast! Otherwise it's straight into the friend zone.

    If it gets to the point where you're talking about liking each other before actually doing anything about it, it's probably too late. That kind of thing just gets weird, and if you DO end up talking like that and aren't kissing within seconds then you can call it a day, lol.

    Seriously though, sooooo many girls out there. Just keep putting yourself into new situations and bear in mind that it's kind of a skill — you will totally mess up a whole bunch of times before things start clicking in your head and you realise what things to not do. I've thrown away some promising dates while figuring this shit out.

  • What's going on with your life?

    The whole sitting thing kind of comes down to this for me: do I want to live a little longer, or spend the rest of my god damn working life standing up all day? I need to do a lot of deep thinking at work and I just can't do that very well stood up. It's probably just because I'm unfit, but before long the 'oh my god my legs' part of my brain takes over.

    In all seriousness though, I've come across this numerous times during my life and the science is very divided. I've seen just as many things cited as issues caused by extended standing as I have extended sitting, and the last I saw a review of all data thus far couldn't find any real conclusion one way or the other (if you see the word 'study' then be skeptical because they often contradict each other).

    The fact of the matter is that humans aren't designed for sitting or standing for 4–8 hours straight, and there are health risks associated with both. The ideal route is to do neither, but as that's not an option for most of us then at the very least taking regular breaks (as in, GET UP) and not just sitting on yo' ass throughout lunch is the best we can do.

  • Godzilla (2014)

    Just watched Pacific Rim for the first time this weekend, and will probably be following up with Godzilla soon. It's going to take something good to beat the awesome-ass nature of the former, which just had so much fun with its concept it was a joy to watch.

  • The Last of Us

    Still not played The Last of Us, so I'm definitely waiting for the remastered PS4 version. A really interesting article about what's gone into it here:


    The last of it: Naughty Dog on bringing The Last Of Us to PS4


    Includes some intriguing points about the nature of new-gen games and how hard it is to show how much better they are:


    Quote

    llustrating the sheer amount of work that’s gone into remastering the game is a challenge nobody ever anticipated. A half-decade or more of publishers’ bullshots created in Photoshop or produced by monster PCs outputting a 4K image has made selling the visual quality of new generation games a difficult task, and the online spaces games are marketed in aren’t up to the task of showing off The Last Of Us Remastered.


    “How do you show it on the Internet? Any next-gen game?” Druckmann asks. “We have the game running in 1080p at 60fps, and YouTube brings it down to 30fps and does a compression on it, and it’s hard to tell the difference. When you see it running on your big TV and you see all the hi-res assets running smoothly, it’s hard to go back to the previous version after that, but it’s hard to show all the work, the optimisation and the artistry that went into it. We’re still trying to figure out what the best way to do that is. We tried to put a non-compressed version of the trailer running at 60Hz for people to download, but it’s several hundred MBs. It’s a huge file. Maybe there’s something on PSN where we can make this stuff available, but it’s something we have to address.”


    I'm sure all of us here know how big a deal 30 FPS vs 60 FPS is, and how much sharper things can look on a large TV with 1080p compared to sub-720p. But I bet your average gamer appreciates the difference far less and sees new-gen games as being the same as last-gen ones because every fucking screenshot was a bullshot taken at like 4000p.

  • Far Cry 4

    BTW could you (deceiver) or Dark clarify whether the guy in the pink suit is white or East Asian? Was having a chat about it earlier and I'm pretty sure he's meant to be East Asian/native with dyed hair.

  • Far Cry 4

    Didn't play Far Cry 3 but if this ends up having a similar style I might skip it and wait for Far Cry 4. A big problem I've had with open-world games is what feels like copy/paste gameplay, like something is designed once then scattered throughout the world. It's a very poor sense if what open world should be, because one of the primary attributes of the genre is a 'go anywhere and discover missions' atmosphere — completely destroyed when it feels like you're just encountering the same shit everywhere.

    GTA5 is actually the first game I've played that more or less eradicates this, because almost every mission feels like the environment and gameplay was made specifically for it — and in most cases it was. With the previous GTA games it felt more like they built a sweet world and then just threw objectives, enemies, guns, etc around it.

    Anyway, tangent because of what was being said above. I like the sound of FC4 because it's great to see games having more fun with creating memorable villains like you get in film — something we need a LOT more of. The best characters that stick in your mind can be villains and so many games seem to miss that by making them too generic, no charm.

  • What's going on with your life?

    Been sat at the train station for 45 minutes so far because someone was hit by a high-speed train just outside it. Currently watching shitloads of police, paramedics, etc slowly going down a 12-carriage train looking for blood and remnants.

    A reminder that no matter how bad life seems, at least you're not splattered all over a train and a mild inconvenience to a load of business people on their way home.

  • What have you watched recently?

    Quote from FMPONE

    In honor of the late Giger, I watched Prometheus for the first time. Why do I feel like one of the few people that actually, thoroughly enjoyed it?


    There were a few little, I guess you'd call them plot holes, but goddamn I loved that movie. Seriously loved it. Cannot wait for the sequel.


    I really enjoyed it too, but I'm coming from the perspective of someone who's never watched Alien and had no expectations whatsoever regarding Prometheus. As a slightly philosophical sci-fi horror (albeit quite restrained), I enjoyed it. I guess if you were looking for something much deeper from it you might be disappointed, I understand it's meant to provide some kind of Alien lore backdrop. But as a standalone piece I liked it, and I thought that its story was a nice self-contained bit of drama.

  • Internet Stories

    Peris wins the internet.


    I don't think I have anything you could really describe as cool to share, but I do have the dubious honour of running the premier fan sites for Tim Schafer's games:


    All three have been more or less unchanged for years, but they were very popular in their time and still get a fair amount of traffic from people looking for shit to do with the games. I'm actually revamping the Grim Fandango site as some fairly special things found their way to me from a spy during LucasArts' shutdown.


    Tim Schafer used to send me Christmas cards and merchandise gifts as a thank you, and name dropped the Psychonauts site during a GameSpot interview. Back when I was like 16 all this felt like the coolest thing ever.


    [Blocked Image: http://serve.ryanjohnwilliams.com/images/psychonauts_stuff_1.jpg]


    [Blocked Image: http://serve.ryanjohnwilliams.com/images/psychonauts_stuff_2.jpg]


    [Blocked Image: http://serve.ryanjohnwilliams.com/images/psychonauts_stuff_3.jpg]

  • 24 - Live another day

    So, erm... did anyone watch this?


    I'm not sold yet. For me the first two episodes felt a bit contrived and like a lot of stuff was being squeezed in to re-introduce all of the characters and hook the audience with crazy over-the-top action. Hopefully the future episodes will be a bit smarter and bring back some of the tension and quieter stuff that always made 24 so good.


    Quote

    I find the Kate character interesting. My first thought once she started taking out friendlies and going against her own agency was ‘this is exactly like Jack Bauer in season one’. In fact, if you look at Kate’s whole narrative thus far she has effectively become Jack Bauer of the past, and Jack Bauer himself is like one of various 24 characters of the past who seems like a villain but actually isn't.


    It’s actually one of the few parts of the new season I found genuinely interesting. The show is essentially getting us to see Kate as an antagonist and someone who’s way over the top and out of line, even though she’s doing exactly what Jack Bauer has always done. Whether or not this was something the creators intended is another story.