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Swimmy
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Swimmy
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Joined: 16 Sep 2005
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PostPosted: Tue Dec 06, 2005 10:18 pm    Post subject: Swimmy Reply with quote

So I guess I'm staff now.

Rock and roll's why we're all here. Rock and roll's why we got long hair and get high.
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PostPosted: Tue Dec 06, 2005 11:00 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

aw shit, swimmy's in the house
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PostPosted: Tue Dec 06, 2005 11:24 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

word.
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dessgeega
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PostPosted: Wed Dec 07, 2005 4:06 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Swimmy's the best addition to the staff since me.
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PostPosted: Fri Dec 09, 2005 11:26 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote



One second of a video clip is all it takes for me to go fanboy fuckoff.
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PostPosted: Sat Dec 10, 2005 1:27 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Is it possible to gamma-correct that in a way so that I can actually see what the hell is going on?

It's... presumably pyramid-head, right?
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PostPosted: Sat Dec 10, 2005 6:42 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

I do not know how to do such things. I can just save frames and slap 'em together.

That's pyramid head, though. Look at the shape of that head in the first, bright frame.

Actually, I'm glad that I can't quite tell what's going on. The teaser has the grain filter over all of it. If they keep that the movie through, I'll be a happy camper.
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PostPosted: Sat Dec 10, 2005 11:40 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Swimmy wrote:
The teaser has the grain filter over all of it. If they keep that the movie through, I'll be a happy camper.

Considering the photos I saw of the film they NEED to keep that film grain or the movie will look pretty ... bad. I mean:


actually, that needs more than just film grain.
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PostPosted: Sun Dec 11, 2005 10:37 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

That particular shot looks cheesy, yes. And also too bright. However!



Is that set design not perfect? If they put as much work into the rest of the sets as that one, man...

But it still needs the grain filter. Ebert may complain about them trying to hide the special effects behind a mask, but the fact is that the less we can tell what we're looking at, the better.
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PostPosted: Sun Dec 11, 2005 1:07 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

re: that image

SHIT YES
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PostPosted: Sun Dec 11, 2005 1:14 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

I looked at it closely, and I think it already has some sort of artificial grain that would be more obvious in motion.

Or I could just be totally high like RIGHT NOW
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PostPosted: Thu Jan 19, 2006 7:50 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

http://www.myspace.com/engineerbearbunny

That's my band. If you want to call it that.
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PostPosted: Thu Jan 19, 2006 8:54 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Are you the alto or tenor?
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PostPosted: Thu Jan 19, 2006 9:47 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

The alto. Though I employ a wide variety of voices on the album, ranging from "girl voice" to "80s hair metal voice" to "screeching bat thing" to "Satan."
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PostPosted: Wed Mar 01, 2006 11:27 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

This is a zip compilation of all of my old roommate's essays that I collected. Make a cup of hot coffee and enjoy.
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PostPosted: Wed Mar 01, 2006 11:41 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

What is this tripe you've defiled my computer with?
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PostPosted: Thu Mar 02, 2006 12:05 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Seryogin, read "Napoleon."
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PostPosted: Thu Mar 02, 2006 9:41 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Swimmy, do you still have your "edits"?
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PostPosted: Thu Mar 02, 2006 10:41 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

They're all in my LJ, of course. I'll have to convert them to Word documents and put them up, too.
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PostPosted: Thu Mar 02, 2006 11:40 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

swimmy, your sig is wonderful and it is something i have never seen. where is it from?
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PostPosted: Thu Mar 02, 2006 1:13 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

dark steve wrote:
Seryogin, read "Napoleon."


Oh, I have.

Now, I've written my fair share of utter trash in college (I don't blame myself, it took me three years to become accustomed to writing in English), but this sparkling analysis is beyond even my meager abilities.

I don't want to saying anything about that's not already obvious. He might as well have plucked his analysis out of a Donald Duck cartoon.
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PostPosted: Thu Mar 02, 2006 1:29 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

dessgeega wrote:
swimmy, your sig is wonderful and it is something i have never seen. where is it from?

I got it from a Ken Ishii video that fort90 linked. I had to gif that bit immediately.

Seryogin: He wasn't foreign, so no excuse there. He told me he was a junior, but I think he was just in his third year, as he was taking a bunch of classes I finished my freshman year.

He was an "athletic training" major or something. Football coach's assistant. You know, going to a football school because of football. Not terribly surprising, but I'm still amazed he couldn't even BS essays above an 8th grade* writing level.

*I wrote much better than this in 8th grade, but I'm told by people who went to more typical, public schools that that's the level he's at. Sad.
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PostPosted: Thu Mar 02, 2006 9:47 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Commentary. Gotta catch 'em all.
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PostPosted: Sun Mar 05, 2006 12:09 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Swimmy wrote:
Ken Ishii video


that is the greatest thing i have ever seen in my life.
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PostPosted: Sun Mar 05, 2006 3:22 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

not the greatest, but one of the better things I've seen in my life. The button-tapping at the end is really great.
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PostPosted: Tue May 09, 2006 11:38 pm    Post subject: This is a crosspost Reply with quote

Today in Animal Crossing, something horrible happened.

Actually, it's been happening. It started about a week ago. My favorite animal, Mitzi, a cute little cat with a white body and black face, packed her belongings in various boxes and told me she was going to move out. "No!" I told her. "You can't!" After pleading with her for a bit longer, she told me that she'd stay in town if I wanted her there so much.

But right about then, a change took place in her personality. Instead of playing guessing games and spreading rumors about the other animals, she started asking if I wanted to race her to catch a horse mackerel. She asked me every day. Of course, around this time of year I only have time to play a little of the game every day, long enough to shake my fruit trees, hit the bell rock, water my plants, and dig for fossils, to hell with fishing. Since I didn't want to hurt her feelings, I told her that I'd accept her challenge. Eventually I had to turn her down, because that one dialogue sequence every day was getting old.

The next day, her furniture was packed up again. Once again, I told her repeatedly that I didn't want her to leave. But this time she wouldn't have any of it. "A family emergency," she told me. There was "no way you can talk me out of it." And today, in my mailbox, a letter from Mitzi telling me she was gone.

I know I had been neglecting her, but my real life was busy. The game didn't give me a chance to keep her around. I didn't feel like talking to my other animals today, even the ones I like. I just got my daily income and turned it off. To make matters worse, there's been a baboon in my town for two weeks that I've only talked to once. I figured out he was a stereotypical jock character who would rant about his muscles all day and haven't messed with him since. Plus he's ugly. He's still there, and my best friend in the game left me.

And why did I like her so much, anyway? Because a couple days after she first moved in, she sent me this letter:



I'll miss that cat.

I might quit playing.
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PostPosted: Wed May 10, 2006 12:10 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

I feel your pain! Wart Jr. left my village a month or two ago, and it hasn't been the same. If it weren't for Alice the koala and Agent S the squirrel, I'd probably stop and finish one of those long RPG-type games I've got collecting dust for my GBA and DS.

Even though Alice and Agent S are cool, Wart Jr. was one of the grumpy characters, which in my opinion are the absolute best. Some of the things he'd scream at me when I visited him in the middle of the night (he kept hours in-game like I do in real life) were absolutely priceless.
Unlike most of the other animals (especially the stupid jocks or the conceited girls that NEVER LEAVE NO MATTER HOW I IGNORE THEM!), I got no three-day grace period in which Wart Jr. had all his belongings packed up in boxes and I could try talking him out of it--he was literally here one day and gone the next.

I think some dumb jock bear took his place.
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PostPosted: Sun May 14, 2006 1:43 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

I quit playing the day that I realised Cameo Frog moved out. The worst thing was that he moved out to a friends DS and he didn't even recognise me.

Damn game.
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PostPosted: Mon May 15, 2006 4:25 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Before Wart Jr's defection, my girlfriend stole my cherished penguin, Aurora.

If that isn't grounds for the forceful dissolution of a good thing, I don't know what is.
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PostPosted: Tue May 30, 2006 2:27 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

I haven't read the forums in a while. Whoops!


I started a videogame blog or something. A TGQ member was real nice and made an LJ feed for great justice. I also made a web page dedicated to pictures of my cock placed in historical pictures and paintings, which is still in development. That's obviously not safe for work and you probably shouldn't click it unless you've wondered what my penis looks like or are generally turned on by genitals in inappropriate places. (I'll take fan submissions eventually.)

What a busy summer!
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PostPosted: Tue May 30, 2006 7:13 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Why did I have to find this out at work. . .

I can't tell if you are serious or not, but I am at work! So, I really am curious as to why exactly you are doing the cod-piece thing.
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PostPosted: Tue May 30, 2006 10:27 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

1) Yes, totally serious.

2) I made the first one, where my penis is Stalin, a couple weeks ago. I actually came up with it in the context of an essay on coersion, but made it thanks to a conversation about coconut bras. My friend thought I should make an entire website, and damn, she was right.
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PostPosted: Tue May 30, 2006 10:51 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

that's pretty fabulous. you should replace a bunch of male historical figures with your cock.

i think your next one should be your cock crossing the delaware.

also your cock is a little jagged if these photoshops are accurate.
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PostPosted: Tue May 30, 2006 7:36 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

So, my curiosity got the best of me. Now I am baffled as to why you did it.
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PostPosted: Wed May 31, 2006 1:00 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

dessgeega wrote:
i think your next one should be your cock crossing the delaware.

Would you believe that was already the next on the list? I should be done in a while.
Quote:
also your cock is a little jagged if these photoshops are accurate.

I am bad at cutting and pasting, apparently. I'm sure they'll get better with practice. That's how these things work.
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PostPosted: Fri Aug 25, 2006 3:09 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Shapermc wrote:
I quit playing the day that I realised Cameo Frog moved out. The worst thing was that he moved out to a friends DS and he didn't even recognise me.

Damn game.


Shaper to this day, your Camo Frog is living in my town.
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PostPosted: Fri Aug 25, 2006 3:56 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

DaleNixon wrote:
Shapermc wrote:
I quit playing the day that I realised Cameo Frog moved out. The worst thing was that he moved out to a friends DS and he didn't even recognise me.

Damn game.


Shaper to this day, your Camo Frog is living in my town.

YOU RAT BASTARD!
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PostPosted: Fri Aug 25, 2006 9:08 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

dessgeega wrote:
also your cock is a little jagged if these photoshops are accurate.


You need a better video card- I turned up AA & AF and it looked just swell.

Great Mega Man post on your blog, by the way. I've been waiting to find a good comparison of them all like that. Now I don't have to play them!
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PostPosted: Fri Aug 25, 2006 10:27 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Requesting link to said blog update.
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PostPosted: Fri Aug 25, 2006 11:14 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Here.

I should note that I actually love Pokémon, I just want it to stay out of my Mega Man. And Transformers and Castlevania and everything else it's infiltrated.
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PostPosted: Sat Aug 26, 2006 12:55 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

The inordinate number of MM titles sometimes makes me think that perhaps the ideal New Games Journalism treatise lies within a stack of Battle Network titles (and a few sacks of uppers).
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PostPosted: Mon Nov 06, 2006 2:55 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Do a google image search for "she is still trapped in the system." With or without quotes.
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PostPosted: Mon Nov 06, 2006 4:09 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Swimmy wrote:
Do a google image search for "she is still trapped in the system." With or without quotes.

That's totally awesome. I had my pointer on the X button because I was sure it would be NSFW material, but I was pleasently supprised!
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PostPosted: Mon Nov 06, 2006 5:42 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

google is stalking me!

uh, time to change my sig?
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PostPosted: Sun Dec 31, 2006 10:46 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Guys. Guys.

Behold:


$12. As much as I badmouth Tennessee, it's amazing what you can find here sometimes. I am totally going to write an article about this, this game is amazing.

Also, witness my new favorite picture:

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PostPosted: Mon Jan 01, 2007 9:34 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

oh wow dude
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PostPosted: Sat Jun 09, 2007 3:24 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

I encountered a real-live 9/11 truther tonight. I don't get a chance to meet people like this often--I'm not very social, so a lot of what I see is only on the internet. I know trying to argue with these people is a silly venture, and there's no reason to get angry that anyone would believe something so ridiculous, but I do dumb things when I'm drunk.

He was from New York. He was there, man.

I can't get it out of my head. Not the theory itself--I mean, dude still hadn't heard the steel-structural-weakening argument, wtf--but the implications of the general tone. "I've researched this for two and a half years! Top physicists (HA!) agree with me! I've read peer-reviewed papers! Just do me a favor and look up WTC 7." These same sentiments repeated over and over and over until I finally agreed to at least watch a Youtube video with him.

Bryan Caplan, local econ professor and author of The Myth of the Rational Voter, likes to talk about irrationality as a consumption good. People are irrational because it gives them some sort of pleasure; they think harder / reform beliefs / get a clue only when the costs of not doing so outweigh the benefits of enjoying their irrational beliefs.

I've never been more convinced. What's worse, it seems one of the most important belief-changing costs--social ostracism--is actually another consumption good to the conspiracy-minded. They enjoy it! Rational irrationality and rational persecution feed on each other.
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PostPosted: Wed Jul 11, 2007 1:22 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

I am now going to use this space to review movies!

Ocean's Thirteen: Read Ebert's review. Then, after this sentence:
Quote:
Only the characters know what the plan is, and we are expected to watch in gratitude and amazement as they disclose it out of their offscreen planning and plotting.

put a little side-note about how they still spend 75% of the movie talking about it anyway. Also, his beginning list in the first paragraph is missing the most important element of the caper movie: while the caper is being carried out, some tiny thing goes horribly wrong, and our caperers use their amazing collective wit to get around it. None of that in Ocean's Thirteen. Everything--everything--goes exactly according to plan, and there's never a single OMG moment. They try for one, but it fails miserably because the hints were too obvious. So, uh, it sucks even worse than Ebert imagines.

The Descent: I find this movie funnier since I grew up around the Appalachian mountains. I wonder how long it would take for humans to evolve into blind cave-dwelling neck-ripping animals? Remember, dogs are the exception because they were selectively bred. I like the strain the creatures undergo to open their eyes. Aren't vestigial organs cool? I mean, except when they're causing us to die. My girlfriend got appendicitis this weekend, so I've been musing on that. And let's not forget Wells' classic Country of the Blind. Of course they didn't turn into ravenous beasts. They didn't need to; they had the llamas.

Anyway, The Descent sucked but it sucked in a way that I like my movies to suck. It just didn't suck in that way quite enough.
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PostPosted: Sat Jul 21, 2007 7:49 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

The following is a review of Live Free or Die Hard. If you want the spoiler-and-curse-filled mini-review, just skip to the last paragraph.

It's a great time to be an action movie. Computer effects have brought us to the point where, given a large enough budget, we can set our heroes up to convincingly fight criminals while snowboarding away from an avalanche, get married on a pirate ship in the middle of a giant whirlpool while swordfighting sea creatures and dodging shrapnel, and launch cars up ramps at just the right angle that they flip upside-down and allow nearby cranes to dislodge the bomb underneath--just in time!--and subsequently land on their wheels.

It's also a dangerous time to be an action movie. The Matrix trilogy, composed of one highly entertaining film and two unwatchably bad followups, has popularized a brand of cheesy slow-motion effects in which computerized shrapnel and bullets are visible as they slowly travel through the air. Unfortunately, many directors haven't yet realized that slowing down their big explosions more often reveals how silly their computer-generated explosions and gunfights really look. Moreover, with this newfound power at their whims, directors are suddenly tempted to shoot too many action scenes in a row.

On the whole, though, I'd say recent action movie developments are net positive. But I should qualify this by admitting that I love my movies to be completely over-the-top and ridiculous. I don't want to see the hero doing something unlikely, I want to see the hero do something maddeningly impossible. And I want to see it done with style.

So it goes without saying that I fucking love the Die Hard movies and think they're fucking brilliant. I worship John McClane as an action hero and would let him have me if he wanted.

Live Free or Die Hard is a thoroughly modern action movie, for good and bad. First, the bad: The "slow" scenes are often made up of unnecessary characters: government bureaucrats talking and getting offended about government-type things, possibly to make a statement about modern America, possibly to explain a little backstory about the movie's Next Big Location, possibly to reference the back-and-forth of the police and FBI from the first movie--none of which are necessary. And there are the silly clichés. A semi-circular room, at which people sit at their computers and stare at giant wall-mounted screens that depict images that would never appear on any computer screen ever. Did the creator of the Starship Enterprise somehow design every government office used in an action movie, I wonder?

The movie also goes far too overboard with its imagined power of modern computers. The villains, being cyberterrorists, are able to pull up images of not only every traffic camera in D.C. (which are all crystal clear, of course), but are even able to access live feed of an elevator camera in a random D.C. building--with sound, no less! They are able to divert the flow of all natural gas lines in a county to one central location. They can even remotely access one character's personal webcam, turning it on and getting its picture. And they can do all this wirelessly, from a moving vehicle, without ever interacting with a mouse-driven GUI--any PC they sit down at requires only a few key punches to instantly initiate complete chaos. I'm thankful there was at least no scene in which the heroes enhance a blurry image beyond the original's resolution.

It bothers me that, in a movie about cyberterrorists, they couldn't have done at least a little research. Or even obscured the view of the monitors most of the time, so the rest of us could suspend our disbelief a little easier.

That said, there's a lot of great stuff to make up for it. The action scenes are over-the-top and brilliant. The pacing is nice and easy, so it never feels like too many explosions to take in. The villains are superb--Timothy Olyphant plays one of those ruthless-but-whiny types. You know, the kind who acts tough until his shit is ruined; then he gets a twisted and pained expression on his face that's just. . . that's just great. McClane is still the best action hero ever: tough but not too tough, witty, clever and resourceful, self-sacrificing, superhuman (but still convinced that he's just a regular guy), and disgustingly brutal when he has to be. His sidekick this time around is nowhere near as endearing as Samuel L. Jackson's loudmouthed and racist Zeus Carver from Die Hard: With a Vengeance, but he still has personality and heart. (Plus he manages to kill a couple of dudes, which is always good.)

It's a really, really good movie.

And now for the spoiler-and-curse-filled mini-review:

THIS MOVIE WAS FUCKING AWESOME HOLY SHIT! MCCLANE FUCKING LAUNCHES A CAR INTO A HELICOPTER! HE RUNS THIS CRAZY KUNG-FU BITCH OVER WITH A FUCKING VAN, WHICH HE DRIVES INTO A FUCKING ELEVATOR SHAFT! HE FREEZES A DUDE WITH SOME KIND OF COOLANT AND THEN KNOCKS HIM INTO A NEARBY FAN WHICH GRINDS HIM INTO A BLOODY PULP! HE FUCKING DRIVES A SEMI-TRUCK THROUGH BUSY TRAFFIC WHILE NARROWLY AVOIDING MISSILES LAUNCHED BY A FUCKING JET! THEN HE FUCKING JUMPS ONTO THE FUCKING JET WHILE IT'S CRASHING, AND JUMPS OFF ONTO A PIECE OF BROKEN HIGHWAY JUST AS IT EXPLODES! HOLY FUCKING SHIT!

9/10 stars.
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PostPosted: Tue Jul 24, 2007 1:16 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

A comment I hear pretty regularly about Dragon Warrior VII is, "I liked it, but I just coudln't finish it."

Well, as someone who's finished it twice, I always kind of want to sit people down and make them watch me play it, because it's fucking good. Now, in the world of Let's Plays, I realized I can offer the whole of Dragon Warrior VII, with commentary, to the internet. The problem, of course, is that the game is 100 fucking hours long. I figure I'll off-screen all the leveling, and the battles go by so quickly that pacing the dungeons won't matter too much, but I still think nobody will watch it.

I'm gonna do it anyway. It'll at least be a handy reference for all the wonderful stories, right?

Anyone wanna recommend some software? I'll need the ability to capture video from my PSX emulator, record the audio, and splice it into the video. I'll also need a timer, since each video can't be too long and I'll lose track of time. (I already have software to excerpt clips from video, so maybe the best way is to record large videos at a time and separate them individually?)

Also, in a week or so I should have something incredibly dorky that will ensure that I never get laid ever again. Tune in!
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