The Bard

All right, I'll toss you a quickie, but no talking.

Jesus, my ex has a new boyfriend who looks like a total grunion. She could do so much better. Anyway, this dating site bullshit is boring me senseless. I'm only really looking for hook ups anyway, thank fuck I'm moving to London this weekend, because Manchester has thus far kept its good looking, educated women pretty well hidden.

It was just poorly written and atrociously paced, full of bullshit ancillary arcana and unnecessarily baroque language. I read until halfway through Two Towers and had an existential moment of realisation that I really didn't need it in my life.

Word. Lord of The Rings is a despicable, wretched piece of shit.

I genuinely don't mind spoilers in the least. Knowing how a plot is going to unfurl never spoils my engagement with it. I tend to enjoy watching something more the second or third time than I do the first.

Diaspora? It used to be called Beyond The Red Line. Played the demo way back, and thought it was actually incredible. Edit: Turns out Beyond The Red Line is a separate mod, although it features "the majority of the team" that is now working on Diaspora. Can't wait to play this ish.

I really wish that this was a joke. Actually it's inspired me to create some fake profiles for griefing

It's a toss up whether this goes in the good shit or the bad shit thread, although inevitably, the serious and intense laughter it induces is unbalanced by the aftertaste of sheer dread you have towards the human race

Hell yeah man. Do I have you on Steam?

Nobody ever likes my statuses because they're mostly about poop.

Anyone going to be hosting a PC match on release day? I'm in as Gunzerker/ Dude with sword.

Oh thank fuck, it's about time.

Same here. Two girls in particular have been dropping hints at me about "a cute little vintage cafe on Blackrock Road," or a fucking nature walk. The process of flirting genuinely makes me wilt a little, because I have no idea what to say to women in a romantic situation.

Actually, I made it clear that everything I said was based on impressions I'd gleaned from podcasts, magazine articles and interviews. So totally second hand . I couldn't imagine playing it at the puny, muddy resolution it's available at on consoles though. @Deathjam, mine has been pretty much locked at 30fps. I've never had a single issue. It also feels oddly responsive for a 30fps game; I'm used to a lot more input lag than I'm getting.

This shit is, like, super good.

It's a great game, just switch off whenever story exposition is happening. The pre-rendered, cyberpunk aesthetic and the music alone are enough to justify the game's existence.

Just got this on PC and got a patch fix for the resolution constraint and now that I've got it running at 1080p I can say that it seems pretty damn atmospheric, eerie and exciting so far. Unfortunately, getting murdered five times in a row on my way in New Londo Ruins does its share to put a dampener on your excitement for a new experience, especially since you have to trek all the way back on a corpse run before you can even attempt an alternate route. What a bummer.

Another thing I really hope they can do is bring out previously NTSC exclusive games such as Chrono Cross, overseas, very much in the way Nintendo brought out Chrono Trigger on the Virtual Console over here. Of course, there may be a ratings problem that Chrono Trigger was able to circumvent because it was released on the PSone and the DS, whereas Chrono Cross has never been released in any form over here.

I just downloaded the update, but for some reason, there's no PSone games tab in the PSN Store.

Oh my god, it's been a long time since I played Alundra.

The Great Gatsby. It taught me about class distinctions, social identity, and served as my main reference point when I went to university and started reading Marx and Gramsci. More than anything, it taught me how to write; how to balance analysis with an expressive beauty.

The problem is, that this particular disease and diagnosis is surrounded by a lot of sensationalism and controversy, without people looking into the essential scientific facts of the situation. The truth of the matter is neurological, and it's twofold. In people with ADHD, the nucleus accumbens, a brain area in the frontal cortex, responsible for executive functions (in other words, ability to consciously and deliberately focus on any given thing) is somewhat compromised. It's unable to function properly. The second problem is that perhaps as a result of this, in most ADHD the prefrontal cortex suffers a developmental lag of 3 1/2 years, as measured against a control group in an nMRI. Think of that; the most precious commodity we have as human beings, the command center of our brains, and by extension, our ability to memorise things, focus, our capacity to direct our actions, and to exert control, is reduced. In an instance of bafflingly simplistic logic, doctors think, oh! Dopamine is the currency that drives the nucleus accumbens, lets feed these poor kids amphetamines. It works, in the short term, but the problem is that the brain is a system in equilibrium; it will react to oppose any change imposed upon it, and in response to the amphetamines, it bushwacks dopamine receptors. I was, once upon a time, when I struggled with anger and depression, I was wrongfully diagnosed with ADHD, and took a small dose of methylphenidate for around six months. The interesting thing was the method of diagnosis. The had me take an IQ test. I got 122, which is by any measure a fucking good score, but nevertheless, I came up comparitively short on working memory and processing speed tests - apprently two things indicative of ADHD. It didn't help, all it did was get me a little high and made me want to do nothing but sit in bed and listen to music. What people don't realise is that ritalin is a stopgap measure, and that 65% of the time, there is no structural problem that isn't caused by some external factor. Depression, for example, causes many of the same symptoms, reducing frontal cortical thickness, yet psychiatrists often neglect to observe the emotional health of their subjects where an ADHD diagnosis is involved. The problem with me, was actually what has been theorised to be the problem with Charles Darwin - the reason the was often in a depressive torpor and unable to work; I had two undiagnosed food allergies. The interesting thing about the compounds that I'm intolerant to in Wheat and Milk, is that not only can I not process them, but they have a physical structure very similar to opiates. It's been theorised that around 60% of the people diagnosed with ADHD actually have some sort of food allergy that contributes to a lowering of brain dopamine, which being a sort of currency in the brain, reduces the ability of the frontal cortex to function at optimal. Not sure if I'm really addressing anything here, but I just thought I'd ramble for a bit.

Yeah I thought the jacket was pretty snazzy when I saw it at the meet. And then you explained that it was from Dr. Who .

Good man. Hopefully it won't be botched in the same way the first game was. Really looking forward to playing it cooperatively this time

Dude looks and walks like he's been fed on nothing but pork scratchings and pizza grease for four months. Hell, I was a fat kid once. Never that fraking bad though.