Gyokuyoutama

I vaguely recall hearing it claimed that another editor told Palmer something like "you know this stuff is all crazy nonsense, right?" with Palmer responding something like "yeah, but watch how much I can make it sell."  But I can't immediately find the source where I saw this.

Man, there's nothing like sentence mixing.
 
 
EDIT: Oh wow, he actually's doing the whole series
 
 

This is something I never really thought about until watching this video:
 
 
For those who don't want to watch, he discusses a phenomenon where children remember being able to float on the air down the stairs (but not up the stairs.)  This is something that they are only able to do in private, and lose the ability to do when they get older. And it's never something that can be used to go up the stairs, only down them. Apparently this is something that a lot of people remember.
 
Now I don't remember ever having this happen to me.  But this is the "dreams" thread and I do dream about this quite often.  I don't lucid dream very much, but I do sometimes get a partial awareness that I'm not in the normal world but in the dream world.  And when this happens I am able to float down stairs like is described in the video.  I've always thought of it as "falling, but you miss the ground."  How it works is that I take a small jump at the top of the stairs, just enough to be above the next steps.  Then I simply continue moving forward in such a way that I never touch the ground.  It's not just jumping because I do not get to the ground as quickly as I should, and I can even go around corners in spiral staircases and the like.  Furthermore, I am able to maintain this state for quite some time after the stairs end.  It's not flying because eventually I will hit the ground, and when this happens I can only get back to the floating state by getting to the top of a stairway (or a slope) and jumping off the top again.  So this technique can't be used to up the stairs.
 
The thing is that when I am dreaming, this feels completely natural.  Like it's just something that any human could decide to do.  But in my dreams most people do not descend the stairs like this, and that actually causes me confusion.  Like, it's so simple so why don't they do it too?
 
I've had this experience in literally dozens of not hundreds of dreams.  It's so common that the cases where I walk down the stairs in dreams are probably rarer than the times that I float down them.  Until I saw the video above, I thought that this was just a quirk of my psyche.  That is, I knew that dreaming of having your breaks not work, being late for an appointment, losing a tooth, etc. are common dreams so I don't think of anything when that happens to me.  But I assumed this was one of those things that are unique to me.  But I guess it's a common thing?
 
Of course, most people responding claim that this happened to them in real life, just when they were real young.  It makes me wonder if they are just remembering dreams though, since I've confused dreams from childhood with reality.  (In particular I remember an event where our family computer got infected with a virus that caused it to display flashing ASCII art in a golden ratio spiral.  There is no distinction in how I remember this incident versus other events from my childhood.  But no one involved remembers this happening, the virus in the dream destroyed the computer but the computer worked just fine throughout my childhood, and when I think of the room where this event supposedly took place I realize it doesn't correspond to the room the computer was in, nor indeed any room in any house that I've lived in.  So it must be a dream... but if I hadn't had investigated I easily could see myself telling someone else about a weird virus that ruined one of our computers like it really happened.)

I'm getting Star Wars Battlefront Collection flashbacks.

No!!! Now you'll never be able to reason out which comments were mine!
 
For the record here are the comments I remember:
 
Cryptic Command (which doesn't even fucking come up when I search for it in the new Gatherer, adding broken search engines as a common topic) - Normally modal spells give you subpar options but are playable due to flexibility. For example, Assault//Battery is either a sorcery speed shock or a green Hill Giant, neither of which is great on its own, but the ability to switch between removal and threat makes it playable. For Cryptic Command you get six modes, each of which is absolutely worth 4 mana, meaning that the value this card gives you is insane.
 
Jedit Ojanen - This card is kind of a litmus test to when you started playing. When he came out he was cool: a bit cat guy with a fancy gold frame and evocative flavor text.  Definitely something to get nostalgic about.  But everyone who played later realized that this guy wasn't even well costed for the time.
 
Order of the Sacred Bell - These guys were awesome in Kamigawa limited. The block was stuffed with high cost but low stat spirits with tricky abilities.  So rather than take part in that nonsense, you drafted these guys and smashed face.
 
Sinking Feeling - At a sealed event my opponent carefully looked over all my cards and then put this on my biggest creature... which was Morselhoarder.
 
Viashino Cutthroat - Don't think about this as a creature, but rather as repeatable burn for 5.
 
Word of Command - The art is just a closeup of the art on Howling Mine.
 
Iron Will - When your creature tries to block, show them that it rocks!
 
Crackleburr - If Thundermare is an elemental horse, how is this thing not an elemental fox? I mean look at it!
 
Arctic Foxes - It's funny that this is an Amrou Kithkin variant, and both ended up being the only creature of their type for years.
 
Foxfire - I don't remember if I actually posted this comment, but this is my favorite card art.
 
Master of Arms - For confused new players, when this card was printed tapped creatures would not deal combat damage when blocking. So the activated ability was at tricky way to prevent damage done to Master of Arms.  The sixth edition rules did away with this rule, making the ability largely pointless.  Then they later added errata to make it so the tapped creature wouldn't deal combat damage, restoring the original functionality in a similar way to what they did with old "continuous artifacts" like Howling Mine.  Then a few years later they removed the errata, making the ability pointless again.  So I guess five years from now they'll errata it to prevent combat damage again.
 
(They didn't.... though apparently they did make a fixed version in a "Mystery Booster" just to spite us.)

No!!! Now you'll never be able to reason out which comments were mine!
 
For the record here are the comments I remember:
 
Cryptic Command (which doesn't even fucking come up when I search for it in the new Gatherer, adding broken search engines as a common topic) - Normally modal spells give you subpar options but are playable due to flexibility. For example, Assault//Battery is either a sorcery speed shock or a green Hill Giant, neither of which is great on its own, but the ability to switch between removal and threat makes it playable. For Cryptic Command you get six modes, each of which is absolutely worth 4 mana, meaning that the value this card gives you is insane.
 
Jedit Ojanen - This card is kind of a litmus test to when you started playing. When he came out he was cool: a bit cat guy with a fancy gold frame and evocative flavor text.  Definitely something to get nostalgic about.  But everyone who played later realized that this guy wasn't even well costed for the time.
 
Order of the Sacred Bell - These guys were awesome in Kamigawa limited. The block was stuffed with high cost but low stat spirits with tricky abilities.  So rather than take part in that nonsense, you drafted these guys and smashed face.
 
Sinking Feeling - At a sealed event my opponent carefully looked over all my cards and then put this on my biggest creature... which was Morselhoarder.
 
Viashino Cutthroat - Don't think about this as a creature, but rather as repeatable burn for 5.
 
Word of Command - The art is just a closeup of the art on Howling Mine.
 
Iron Will - When your creature tries to block, show them that it rocks!
 
Crackleburr - If Thundermare is an elemental horse, how is this thing not an elemental fox? I mean look at it!
 
Arctic Foxes - It's funny that this is an Amrou Kithkin variant, and both ended up being the only creature of their type for years.
 
Foxfire - I don't remember if I actually posted this comment, but this is my favorite card art.
 
Master of Arms - For confused new players, when this card was printed tapped creatures would not deal combat damage when blocking. So the activated ability was at tricky way to prevent damage done to Master of Arms.  The sixth edition rules did away with this rule, making the ability largely pointless.  Then they later added errata to make it so the tapped creature wouldn't deal combat damage, restoring the original functionality in a similar way to what they did with old "continuous artifacts" like Howling Mine.  Then a few years later they removed the errata, making the ability pointless again.  So I guess five years from now they'll errata it to prevent combat damage again.
 
(They didn't.... though apparently they did make a fixed version in a "Mystery Booster" just to spite us.)

This could probably go anywhere since it touches on common SPUF talking points (internet ephemerality, corporations being tech dumbasses, etc) but Wizards finally updated their Gatherer website and destroyed about a decade of archived card comments. Admittedly we all knew this was going to happen since they broke commenting in 2015 and never fixed it, but still, it was a fascinating microcosm of player opinions, evaluations, and even jokes frozen in time. There were even some comments from actual card designers in there which may or may not be the only source of some behind the scenes tidbits such as a designer apologizing for Archangel's Light and explaining that the card was initially something broken that they had to pull and replace with something safe that sucks instead. I still wonder what it was that was so broken, considering Innistrad as a block was kind of very high power. As of right now it seems the mobile site isn't updated, but it's only a matter of time. Hopefully the waybackmachine has snippets I guess?
 
Also they updated their site to reflect 15ish years of screen size upgrades but they're still offering extremely low res pictures for a lot of sets so it looks like complete ass, but that's nothing new.
 
I'm just glad I screenshotted my favorite comment only a few months before it happened.

Multiplayer FPS matchmaking systems are such a punching bag for angry players nowadays it's kind of unreal. Casual queues? Full of "sweats." Ranked? Games take forever to fire and my team always sucks. There's either too much or not enough skill based matchmaking. I'm only just now really encountering this since I made the mistake of checking discussion for The Finals now and then (previously I remember SBMM on Apex Legends being a hot topic but I mainly played in a stack and avoided discussion of the game outside of important info).
 
I've had a pretty good solo queue experience with that game honestly. It kind of just creates this weird feeling that I'm playing the same game as these people but getting a completely different experience. It's kind of impossible to verify if they're just tilted past the moon or there's an actual problem.
 
When did this all start happening though is my other question - because I played 'old' matchmaking-only FPS games in the MW2/Halo 3/Reach/Advanced Warfare era and there wasn't any kind of "fucking matchmaking is trying to poison me in my sleep" sentiment that I remember (other than perhaps recognizing certain "clan stacks" that would roll matches due to being clumps of good players in a party). Or am I just remembering wrong and that was also a complaint back then?

So I realized that the HD mod for Heroes 3 does not enforce expansion differences.
 
Each Heroes 3 map is marked with an expansion version, Restoration of Erathia, Armageddon's Blade, Shadow of Death.  if you load in a map from an earlier version, it will not spawn content from later versions of the game.  So for example if a map is marked "Restoration of Erathia" then it will not generate conflux creatures as random creatures or have conflux heroes available for hire, since these were introduced in the Armageddon's Blade expansion.  (They wouldn't appear in the map normally since you can't place them in maps marked as Restoration of Erathia, but without this restriction they could appear on heroes or creatures with random identities.)  Similarly, you can't make combination artifacts, since those were introduced in the Shadow of Death.  But it will keep later changes to the base game, like the ability to use spacebar to revisit a location or the changes to how moats worked.
 
I played Angelic Pride, a classic Restoration of Erathia map (since it was made before Armageddon's Blade came out.)  I realized early that the edition forcing wasn't working properly since the archery items given to me early on allowed me to make the Bow of the Sharpshooter, which made the early game easy.  I wondered if I should keep this, since it's basically cheating.
 
Then I got to the point in the map where the neighboring necromancers were able to break through their border towers into my territory and I didn't regret using the combination artifact at all.  You see, the map designer had placed the Amulet of the Undertaker, Vampire's Cowl and Dead Man's Boots. In Restoration of Erathia that bumps up the Necromancy percentage by 30%, which is potent but something you can deal with since it just gives more skeletons.  In Shadow of Death though that makes the fucking Cloak of the Undead King for those not in the know, this gives another 30% boost to Necromancy (total of 60% boost) and improves the type of creature it raises.  At expert necromancy (which necromancers will always prioritize early anyway) it raises liches.  A level 5 ranged unit.  Keep in mind that the 60% is a boost, with expert necromancy raising 30% already and the Necropolis town having a building which buffs this by 10%, so it effectively gives a necromancy rate of 100%.  Thankfully there was a nerf before Shadow of Death which requires that the creatures killed have enough hitpoints to equal what you are raising, so that you need to kill 30 peasants (1 HP) to raise 1 lich (30 HP), but it's still an insane ability.  And the map maker ended up unintentionally giving all the necromancer heroes one of these under Shadow of Death rules.  When I got attacked the enemy hero literally had over 700 liches, at a point in the game where having 700 of a level 1 unit would be impressive.  I can actually whittle down the enemy heroes armies by killing everything but the liches and killing 100 or so liches on top of that, but since after they win the battle they get another 100-200 liches, it doesn't really matter.
 
The funny thing is that to fix this problem I have to convert the map into a Shadow of Death map, since banning artifacts was not a feature present in the Restoration of Erathia and the map maker enforces that policy.
 
EDIT: That doesn't work since banning the Cloak only bans it appearing randomly.  It can still be assembled from its parts.  Looks like I have to go back to the original game...
 
EDIT2: Actually I tried this on a non HD mod of the complete edition and the same problem happens there.  I swear I had an install that was done by Restoration Erathia + Armageddon's Blade + Shadow of Death that didn't have this issue, but maybe I'm insane.

I just beat Star Fox for SNES again and now I have to leave my TV on for ten minutes to hear the secret music.
 
This is part of the contract you enter into when you play Star Fox.

A random character I thought of:


I wanted to try and give it a dated feel with the style somewhat, I think I succeeded

What I've learned is that if it sounds like the 80's, you can usually get normies to roll with it.
 
The Protomen, Astrophysics's Miku covers and the Bubblegum Crisis soundtrack are all fine.  Similarly Haken is in general too weird for most people to accept, but you can get away with Affinity.
 
A major no-no is lyrics that can be easily parsed but not understood.  No normie is going to let you get away with playing lines like "lad did you know a girl was murdered here?",  "the demon in your mind will rape you in your bed at night," "And they vowed to eradicate Hasbro, crashed the plane, kicked the door, went inside" or "Do not forgive us Father, because we believe in alien lifeforms."

Fahrenheit: 0 = really cold, but commonly experienced, temperature.  100 = really hot, but commonly experienced, temperature.
 
Celsius: 0 = kind of cold but it gets colder than this in most places. 100 = お前はもう死んでいる (i.e. you ded.)
 
And yet Celsius apologists will defend their system on the basis of finding it easier to remember the temperature that water boils at, as if you wouldn't be able to tell if water was boiling without putting a thermometer in it.

The ideas persisted for a while.  I recently picked up a Hoyle's Board Game collection from the late 90's (after Windows 95).  It's Clubhouse Games but without quite 51 things.  It does have virtual opponents though, who will make various commentary on the games as you go through them. The game has a default menu for picking games (which resembles the aesthetic of Packard Bell Navigator):
 

 
If you click the spaceship, you get this instead:
 

 
Clicking on the buttons causes a hologram for the game to appear.  (Also note that an astronaut has randomly drifted by, why not).  You then click "engage" to play the game.
 

If you click the cabin you instead get this:
 

 
A prerendered 3D cabin you can navigate Myst style.  The games are scattered throughout.  You can see in this screen the combination checkers/chess board.  Click on the pieces you want to use and you'll play the game.  Something I didn't realize about this is that the game will actually default to changing seasons with the system clock.  When I first played this game it counted as "winter" and hence the background looked like this:
 

(The snow and fire is animated, by the way.) Here is another location in the cabin with more games:
 

 
If you play in this mode the background will carry through into many of the games:

 
(The bear talks, by the way.)  None of this was necessary.  The game would have been perfectly fine as just a collection of 10 board games.  But they did it anyway.
 
I think at the time the idea was that old people would feel more comfortable using a computer for games by using the cabin environment, and that kids would be more excited about things with the sci-fi environment.  That's certainly the explicit idea behind the Packard Bell Navigator environment.  (I have the disc for that too by the way, but it's designed to come pre-installed with a computer and as such relies on some files which are either not on the disc or which cannot be installed automatically.  So I can get it running to the point of showing off a location or two, but it will crash almost immediately.) I can see why companies stopped bothering doing this sort of stuff, but I do like this aesthetic a lot.  It makes the whole process of using the computer a fun experience.

The ideas persisted for a while.  I recently picked up a Hoyle's Board Game collection from the late 90's (after Windows 95).  It's Clubhouse Games but without quite 51 things.  It does have virtual opponents though, who will make various commentary on the games as you go through them. The game has a default menu for picking games (which resembles the aesthetic of Packard Bell Navigator):
 

 
If you click the spaceship, you get this instead:
 

 
Clicking on the buttons causes a hologram for the game to appear.  (Also note that an astronaut has randomly drifted by, why not).  You then click "engage" to play the game.
 

If you click the cabin you instead get this:
 

 
A prerendered 3D cabin you can navigate Myst style.  The games are scattered throughout.  You can see in this screen the combination checkers/chess board.  Click on the pieces you want to use and you'll play the game.  Something I didn't realize about this is that the game will actually default to changing seasons with the system clock.  When I first played this game it counted as "winter" and hence the background looked like this:
 

(The snow and fire is animated, by the way.) Here is another location in the cabin with more games:
 

 
If you play in this mode the background will carry through into many of the games:

 
(The bear talks, by the way.)  None of this was necessary.  The game would have been perfectly fine as just a collection of 10 board games.  But they did it anyway.
 
I think at the time the idea was that old people would feel more comfortable using a computer for games by using the cabin environment, and that kids would be more excited about things with the sci-fi environment.  That's certainly the explicit idea behind the Packard Bell Navigator environment.  (I have the disc for that too by the way, but it's designed to come pre-installed with a computer and as such relies on some files which are either not on the disc or which cannot be installed automatically.  So I can get it running to the point of showing off a location or two, but it will crash almost immediately.) I can see why companies stopped bothering doing this sort of stuff, but I do like this aesthetic a lot.  It makes the whole process of using the computer a fun experience.

Fellas I feel compelled to share that I became a dad recently
 
My boy is doing great and it has been awesome bar the tummy ache nights where me and my wife get literally 0 hours of sleep

Two random characters based on species of palm common to Florida, the saw palmetto and sabal palm tree. They were really fun to think up and design!

The bayonetted rifle was what tipped me off at first, but the red eyeliner and ever so slight trace of a halo (almost looked like more red hair streaks, but the angle wasn't following the flow of the hair) was what made me stop and question it. I actually found the art where that's from, it's an official promo art for the Wakamo event:
 
 

I kinda went left to right line and top to bottom. There's a lot of these that I recognize but don't have enough of a thread to say one thing about them and there are probably some that I missed even though they're in the same series as others I did recognize but I wanted it to be really off the cuff and if I looked up stuff it would dilute the results.
 
 
I think I did well all things considered.

Hell if I know.
 
Ran and Tsukasa from 2hu
Ahri from LOL
Fenneko from Aggretsuko
Gal (Fox Costume) and Jade (shes a CATgirl) from Fight n Rage
Lt Vixen/Yeou from Squirrel and Hedgehog
Konata from Lucky Star
Fox from Undertale Yellow (never played, google says "Ceroba")
Bard from Beyond the Edge of Owlsgard (do you have a fascination with this game or something?)
Krystal and Fara from Star Fox
Megumi from Rurouni Kenshin when she is joking
Nazuna from BNA
Alef from Shining Force
Ninja Oboro class with a fox ear item and a straw hat from Ragnarok Online
Xiaomu from several games, I personally know her from Super Robot Taisen but I know she was also from NAMCO X CAPCOM
 
Way too many vtubers
Some characters from stuff I've seen you post
Maybe two from stuff I've seen and I can't recall their names (girl down left from Fenneko, the one with a blue tie two spaces right of Xiaomu)
 

We have a medical drama and a character is a loser gamer.  But as the character has just suffered a stroke, and can't say anything to indicate that  So how do we solve this problem?
 
Break out the Pipkin Pippa shirt:
 
 

Not sure if being trolled...
 
but she does explicitly retain the nickname Osaka in Yotsuba:
 

Osaka from Azumanga Dai-Oh is now a teacher in Yotsuba:
 

You know, one thing I do miss about cable TV is when you would be channel surfing and then come across something bizarre and end up watching the whole thing.
 
That's how I ended up seeing Zardoz.  I'm sure that there are other more obscure cult movies that I saw in this way which are buried in my subconscious.
 
You don't really get that with modern broadcast TV.  There are plenty of channels that serve random stuff, but it tends to be only TV shows and movies that have withstood the test of time for long enough to be firmly in the public consciousness.  (You ain't seeing stuff like Unhappily Ever After, Get A Life, Jack of All Trades or Sheep in the Big City.)  There's stuff like Svengoolie that does low budget horror movies, but since that show is directed at the whole family you won't see the really bizarre arthouse stuff.
 
Now a lot of this stuff is online, but the trouble is that you have to look for it so you don't get the same experience of accidentally stumbling upon it.  Furthermore, while you can find bonkers movies on places like Tubi, there are so many no talent cash ins on those sites that it's almost impossible to find the "so bad it's good" or the "so weird I don't know how to evaluate it" stuff from the "so bad it's boring" stuff.
 
All you really have is word of mouth, though there's a couple of problems with that.  First, when you stumble upon something it has feels very personal.  You saw it, but who knows who the hell us saw it (especially if it's 2 AM).  If you get a recommendation off a video with a million subscribers, it's obviously not something personal to you.  The second problem is that word of mouth is very heavily focused on the mainstream with anything outside of it viewed as a "cult film."  So there's not much room for movies that aren't watched by many, but which are good for the right audience.  (I'll give you some recommendations though: Streets of Fire, The Hidden, The Last Man on Earth, Beyond the Black Rainbow.)