A 1970 Corvette

The (robot) girl next-door. Her name is ABI:

 
It was fun to design a character with less strictly-human proportions for once. Fun detail: If you look veeeery closely at the long blue parts of her arms, legs, and torso, you can see that they're slightly translucent, because that's cool. I imagine they're also slightly squishy.

I was looking around my emails since I've been getting massive amounts of spam these days, and I found an email from December 2010.
 
It was the original pics of the DemoPan thread.
 
 
 

Made a meme from a recent Jobel stream.
 
 
 
 
Its a long story.

I look forward to the next Accursed Farms video where Ross not only talks about the insanity that is Unity's insane pricing plans (i.e. charging for every single install), but also the fact that people are getting mad at it for the wrong reasons.  (Specifically: yes, the price structure is unjustified and going to kill developers, especially those making free games.  But the bigger problem is that to implement this scheme they'll have to use invasive DRM to determine exactly when and where every game was installed.  After all, they've tried to claim that games installed by pirates and those installed from charity packs won't be charged back to the developers, but how would they know that without extensive data harvesting on the machines in question?)  The only real bright side is that a lot of the policy is clearly the management speaking out of their ass without any real idea as to how they are going to implement it.

Probably spends only a small amount of time online these days, like a lot of folks from 10+ years ago. He's won... he's escaped.

Marie from Peripeteia:

 
I like her creepy doll face

I played the demo for this game called Peripeteia recently. It's an "immersive sim" game set in a sort of bleak cyberpunk-ish post-Soviet Poland. You play as soulless cybernetically-augmented girl who lives in a crummy apartment and takes on various hits for a living. I don't usually blogpost but I feel like writing about this game so...
 
By far the biggest thing in the demo I enjoyed was the independence it gives you. I guess I get what they mean by immersive -- you can really just do anything. The guy you talk to at the start to get your first job? You can just kill him instantly with the gun he gives you. Or you can steal the stuff behind him and get shot instead. I was immediately surprised by how I could just pick up all the bottles lying around and keep them in my (tetris-style) inventory, after which I went outside, stacked some boxes, and climbed up an entire skyscraper just because (and accidentally ended up out of bounds henceforth). You play as a character, certainly (named Marie), but you're not steered down any particular path. The first person I killed for instance was a random homeless man I shot from a rooftop. I didn't even know he was an innocent homeless guy until I got down to check his corpse, and when I did, I actually felt bad. I had gotten so used to the videogame style of just shooting every person I saw that I just did it there without thinking. And he didn't even have anything on him. That's when I felt the sense of agency that Peripeteia creates.
 
Mechanically, the game has some interesting ideas. Like I mentioned, you can climb. Pretty much any surface that has a defined edge, you can cling to, shimmy along, and leap up. This means that there are virtually infinite ways to reach your mission objective, and the game is designed with this in-mind. For the first mission, you have to infiltrate a building, crack a safe, get a keycard inside, and bring it back. There's probably a more "intended" way inside, but I ended up sticking to the rooftops and then leaping down to a small metal balcony. I was a bit strapped for ammo so I played it more stealthily, using some of the bottles I picked up earlier to distract guards and whatnot so I could dispatch them quietly. There are also a variety of cybernetic augmentations you can toggle at the expense of a gradual energy drain, though I feel like I didn't make good use of these during my gameplay. Once I took out the boss and got the code for the safe, I got the keycard, began heading out, and along the way ended up in some tunnel underground where I found an arms dealer. I sold all the guns I took from the guards I killed and bought some new weapons. I also think I found a secret room? Then I went back, and mission complete. Also a cool thing worth mentioning is that your inventory is persistent and carries over between missions, so what you do exactly and how you go about completing levels does have an impact on future levels in that sense.
 
Criticisms and such
 
Now conceptually, I feel like there is an amazing game in Peripeteia. I love the ideas, the concepts, and atmosphere. But I feel like the systems in the game don't serve those ideas to their full potential. For instance, in the first mission, I tried to play it stealthily, but all the weapons you're given are very loud. In the second mission, there are rooms full of enemies where it was much simpler to just go in guns blazing than try to play tactfully. The enemies also can't open doors, so I ended up exploiting this a couple times, which just felt bad and cheesy. As it stands, it feels like there's little reason to not just go ape with all your guns and kill everybody; there is no difference in the outcome, even killing random bystanders produces no effect. The game gives you all the agency in the world, but no consequences around it. For instance, that arms dealer I mentioned? He has a bodyguard blocking the door to a back room. The only way to loot the back room is to kill the bodyguard, and hence the dealer, who will then aggro on you. There is no way to go about it stealthily. The optimum "videogame" play here IS to kill the dealer, take what he was selling, kill the bodyguard, and loot the back room, because, as is, there are absolutely no consequences for doing so. You just get a ton of stuff for free.
 
I also do feel like the game could use a liiiitle bit more direction in its mission objectives. I'm not talking Ubisoft shit, but for instance, in the first mission, you're told to go to a building, to the west, by the canal, with scaffolding around it, and retrieve a keycard. I feel like that's very clear yet non-intrusive. The second mission, however, has much less direction. You're told to blackmail or kill a certain politician, and that's it. I ended up wandering around lost for a long time, because I had no idea where this guy might be in this huge map (where you can traverse almost any vertical surface mind you), or how I might even begin to blackmail him. I ended up on a very, very distant rooftop where there was a random clue, which only raised more questions than answers. Tangentially, I feel like the game also needs better out of bounds safeguards. That may seem antithetical to the game's approach of letting you go pretty much anywhere, but I'd argue that being able to go out of the bounds of what is intended is antithetical to the game's core principal of creating immersion. I ended up getting out of bounds in the first mission when that wasn't even my aim, I was just wanting to climb up a building, because it was possible.
 
Final thing
 
Now, this was just a demo I played. The gameplay was a little rough and crusty in some places, but from what I understand, the demo is several years old by now and the internal state of the game has gotten a lot nicer since then. And it's worth mentioning that in regards to my criticism about there being no consequences or weight to your problem-solving, that the demo does have a relations system, it just wasn't really utilized in that brief demo snippet. I'm really looking forward to this game still, it feels very ambitious and unique in its ideas and I love its weighty atmosphere.

That's a deep cut. But let's see them recreate the tenth edition art.

Wrong:
 

 
 

I remember learning the basic gist of the Romance of the Three Kingdoms from Dynasty Warriors's encyclopedia entries and the campaigns.
 
It was a weird thing in hindsight that I even bothered looking around in there but young Corv very often explored every single aspect of a game's menu to look for weird stuff like that.

We all know the first, of course
 
 

So, I got a new drawing tablet.
 

This time it's only two pages in the "chapter" before the next big arc (hinted at in the first strip.)
 

 
"Kitsune style udon" is udon with deep fried tofu in it.  There's two ideas for why it's called as such: I've heard that the fried tofu was originally made in triangular shapes, like a fox's ear, but now it's rectangular like you see in panel 2.  The second idea is that fox's are supposed to love fried tofu.  Real foxes don't, but maybe mythical ones do.  In any case this idea is commonly used in fox fiction: in addition to what you see here The Helpful Fox Senko-san and Tamamo-chan's a Fox both had this come up as a plot point repeatedly.  I don't remember if it came up in Wagaya no Oinarisama, Konohana Kitan or Gugere Kokkuri-san.
 
The cup noodles are probably Nissin's kitsune udon line.  I suppose this is another good time to bring up their long running series of commercials featuring foxgirls (under the spoiler.)
 
EDIT: SPUF software acts weird if I put multiple video links in a spoiler, in particular not letting the spoiler ever end (regardless of where I put the /spoiler tag.)  So you'll have to open up the spoiler for the second page.
 

17 years ago we had DOTA
 
 
And now, finally, DOTA 2
 
 

Reasons to learn each language:
 
You are a weeb (default answer) - Japanese
 
Who  cares what they use it for, it sounds cool to speak - Latin, German
 
You need to watch fansubs of some shit anime - Spanish, Indonesian, Italian
 
There are people in your FPS or RTS chat that you need to chase away - Brazilian, Korean, Chinese
 
You need to install mods for Heroes of Might and Magic 3 - Russian, Polish, Slovak, Hungarian
 
You need to find new death metal - Norwegian, Swedish, Finnish
 
Who cares what they use it for, it sounds hilarious when people speak it - French, Dutch, Afrikaans
 
EDIT: I though this was in the general thread, not the gaming thread, but I guess it doesn't matter that much.

While I was browsing around trying to fix some other terrible fucking Origin shitshow related to buying the titanfall 2 steam release while owning the inferior origin release and that causing the steam version to be unplayable (never found the solution btw and I'm not convinced there is one) I ran across a classic support forum happening

"just right click and press exit anyway lol" god I'm not sure if I should laugh or cry

I was digging the depths of my hard drive and I just want to dump some old TF2 media here.
 
It's not the Black Box we got, but has ideas later used for the Beggar's Bazooka.
 
BUT THERE IS ONE THEY FEAR
 
Gang Garrison Engineer
 
The Holy Canteen
 
Part of a Fake Engineer update. Never got a nailgun, but the Cloak draining and EMP ideas were used in the Pompson and Short Circuit.
 
How tob eat spycicle
 
Pirate Fortress, Someone made models for them, don't know if they were ever released.
 
Before Collector's quality weapons, there was Science Achieved.
 
What if we could burn like... way more stuff?
 
I don't know if this was ever released as a mod.
 
Behold this ancient crossword puzzle.
 

Had a dream that I accidentally found that the old private Ragnarok server I used to play was active again.
 
I was doing something on my PC and found the old patch you had to install on the original to access the private server.
I click to start, and it actually works. It recognizes my old account and character, the screen brings me to the server select, and shows that there is one player online.
I walk around Prontera and find the other player. Apparently, he got the full source code and database of the server and was testing it when I joined, which is why I could use my old account and character.
I look around my character, inventory and stored items, and suddenly memories start to flood back. The events, the community, the in-jokes...
When I check the city again, a few more players start to pop up, like they never left.
For a brief moment, I am transported back to almost 15 years ago.
 
You know, I woke kinda happy today.

Misaki's introduction.  This one had an obvious difficulty in the fact that most of the information is behind her tails, and both removing the text and repeating the effect on English text was definitely beyond my image manipulation abilities.  But this caused me less difficulty, since I decided early on to just leave it as is and put the translations to the side.  I guess that means that those of you who know some Japanese (which I guess means one person) can more easily critique my translations.
 

 
In panel two the three children each have a kanji making up the word "children" (子　供　達).  I did my best to mimic this in English.
 
The phrase "I use no tricks or gimmicks" is originally 種も仕掛けもない, meaning the same thing, and is apparently a stock phrase that magicians use in Japan.  If I recall correctly Trucy Wright says that even in the translation.  I originally changed it to "I have nothing up my sleeves!", the western equivalent stock phrase, but then Miko's retort didn't work as well.  And I've heard magicians make very similar statements in English so I ended up leaving it as is.
 
The text in the fourth panel is crossed out in the original.  Literally the first paragraph means something like "she loosens her expressions" but as far as I can tell this is an idiom to mean looking fiercely determined.  But it's crossed out presumably to indicate that no, she just ahs a fox's head at this point.
 
In the second to last panel the kids are screaming about a monster.  I almost changed it since I could have replaced that text, but at this point I just want this chapter to be done with.
 
There's a pun I didn't translate in the last panel.  "Master fox" corresponds to a word 達人 except 人 is literally crossed out and replaced with 狐.  The word 達人 means something like "master", i.e. someone very skilled in his field, and the second kanji literally means "person" or "human."  So the joke is that since Misaki isn't a human but rather a fox she should properly be a 達狐.  I couldn't find a way to preserve the pun, but if you can think of one let me know.
 

 
Now we get to the most tertiary character of all, Yuzu.  I don't much to say here other than to remind you that a "Yuzu" is a type of citrus fruit, which Yuzu is holding.
 

 
The title of the chapter is tricky to translate.  It means something like "a relationship decreed by fate" which could refer to Yuzu ending up living with Miko and Misaki, but I am taking to reference to how she's stuck being thought of as "that shrine girl."
 
I have no idea what the cloud is on panel 3.  Presumably some sort of spirit, but spoiler alert: it never shows up again in the comic (not even in the extra art pages provided in the pdf.)  All we know is that it's kind of like a cloud, it's hazy and it can take on other shapes.
 
The game Kokkuri is basically the Japanese version of Ouija.  You write out the kana on a piece of paper and have different people touch a yen coin which then gets moved to spell out messages in response to questions.  You may have seen it in anime without realizing it, for example Yukko tries to get Mio to play it in an episode of Nichijou.  The reason why Yuzu is getting asked about it is that rather than a ghost (like in Ouija) Kokkuri is supposed to be a fox spirit, like in the Kokkuri anime.
 
And that's it for the introduction.  I have drafts done of several of the later chapter, but since I need to revise and polish a lot I'm not going to give an estimate on when you'll see them.  (I don't think that actually lets you dodge the comic curse, but it doesn't hurt to try.)
 
EDIT: I just realized that I didn't replace Miko's text on panel two of the last page, and I'm definitely beyond caring enough to repost the image.  She's just saying "okaerinasai", i.e. the standard welcome you say to people when they get back home.

Nice argument. Unfortunately:
 

If I had to guess, I would say it was because the 80's was the last decade of truly "unified" culture where big organizations controlled most of the mass media. Which I recognize sounds conspiratorial, but it's actually not! "Cultural decades" as a thing are only possible in industrialized nations where technology is advanced enough to allow rapid and national change - but not advanced enough to allow self-segregation. Which is to say, the "idea" of having cultural decades is something that is now past us.
 
Before the 19th century there wasn't much of a "national" culture anywhere in the world. For example, Occitan was the everyday language of most people in Southern France, and Occitan is only somewhat intelligible with what we think of as "the" French language, so you couldn't really have a unified national culture - let alone national cultural shifts. And even if you could, introducing a new style of clothing, music, etc. simply couldn't happen that quickly in the pre-industrial age. In a way the United States was the perfect country for national cultures to emerge, as it came into being right before communications technology was advanced enough to facilitate national cultures, in addition to lacking any historical cultural baggage. Even still, regionalism was prominent throughout the 19th century and I would argue you didn't really get cultural decades until the 1920s with the proliferation of radio.
 
From the 20's onward the media landscape was comprised of a few large media companies (radio, then television) that produced nationwide content, those being the Big Three networks of NBC, CBS and ABC. This worked until about the 1990s, when the internet became popular enough to create distinct subcultures throughout the United States that could no longer be confined to specific regions. At first it was just nerds and freaks who abounded on the internet, so mass culture was still humming along, but once the smartphone became mainstream normies flooded the internet and started self-segregating as well.
 
One of the plainest examples is in news - in the "national culture" age, almost everyone trusted large news corporations or at the very least trusted the broadcasters themselves, like Walter Cronkite. You can debate whether or not media was more trustworthy back then but the fact is most people trusted it simply because that was what was there. Now, in 2023, the average person has to actively go out of their way to find news they disagree with. Ditto with popular culture - if you got home after work in 1965 and didn't want to go out you would have to watch whatever was on, which wasn't much. And music? You'd have a lot less choice back then than today as well. So of course most people would share memories of specific eras, which makes it easier to conceptualize and communicate the idea of a cultural decade.
 
Basically, The Breakfast Club couldn't happen in 2023, because all of the kids would be on their phones in their own niche communities, listening to their own micro-influencers that nobody else cares about. So in the future, when people think back to 2008 or 2010 or 2015 or 2023, it will be hard to see the difference because any cultural changes would be perceived within these isolated communities, and not the nation as a whole. Ironically enough, the only thing that affected just about every community equally - the pandemic - also drove people further into online bubbles.
 
On the "bright" side, maybe big tech will eventually become so consolidated we'll all be force-fed the same media soon.