Fred the Barber

@Down, it's depressing how young you are for how mature you come off. You either need to cut loose and shitpost more often like the rest of the youngsters around here, or just up your age by no fewer than five years. Happy birthday.

Watched episode 5 of Charlotte. It was awesome. I'm trying to give episode 6 the best possible odds of success, so I'm moving to watching it in the living room instead of while cooking. That left a gap in my programming, and I thought I could do with something a bit less predictable, which led me to... JoJo's Bizarre Adventure. Nice. Very nice. I'm two episodes in, and I love the heavy stylization (of damn near everything) and the atmosphere. Some pretty unique shit going down here. I'm already really looking forward to where it goes next, even though it's really only got a few pieces in play so far. Incidentally, I couldn't believe my ears when I heard Yes's "Roundabout" for the ED in JoJo. I listened to a shitton of Yes back when I was a teenager (and, no, I'm not that old - they were already ancient at the time), but I've hardly listened to them since. I don't think I could have named anything less likely to be used for an anime ED, but I guess they could've done something weirder if they'd tried; maybe played a song from Tales from Topographic Oceans over an entire episode or something.

Make sure you don't work for this guy: http://venturebeat.com/2016/04/16/game-developers-must-avoid-the-wage-slave-attitude/ The money quotation IMO is: "You can’t 'make fun' on a schedule, under budget, on time with a bunch of people who are all grumbling about what a miserable time they are having finishing a game together." Since the second half of that sentence is actually predicated on a failure of the first part, I'll just paraphrase this to: I don't know how to make games on a schedule, under budget, on time. - Alex St. John Although I do also really like the part where he explains that making games is not "an actual job", and that's why you should feel privileged to be shat on as an employee in that industry. I've literally never seen a better exemplar of everything that's wrong with American white collar businesses. I hate the "love your job" mentality that pervades modern middle-class moralizing morons like this man. It doesn't make anybody any happier. Hard-working people don't get to eat dinner with their families for months because a bunch of idiots, like this clown, fail to predict how much work it would take to make, say, Madden 2016, despite having gone through exactly the same experience year after year for decades, with Madden 2015, Madden 2014, ... And then this guy comes along and tells them that, simply because they're working on video games, this is some massively privileged position that deserves their undivided love, and if they want to work on them they should be willing to throw away everything else in their lives. I guess fussing with the deployment scripts for the eightieth time so you can rev the service backing your game is doing God's work, or something. Screw that, and screw him. Now, don't misunderstand. If at all possible, you should find a job you like. It makes the hours go by a lot faster, and you'll even enjoy your time there most of the time. But unless you're in the 0.01% of people who actually live to work, rather than the remaining 99.99% who work to live, you probably are better off if you don't love your job and you realize that that's ok.

Remind me never to bet on @littleshogun's predictions. Obviously it was that eminently approachable and popular game, Sharin!

The gnaborretni is, of course, the inverted interrobang used for prefacing a Spanish (and a couple other languages) sentence which ends with an interrobang. Edit: In that case, I'm definitely sticking with "?!". Edit 2: Incidentally, the reason I finally went and looked this up is that I'm editing a text that used "!?" and was changing them out of habit, and then realized I should probably make sure there's some basis for my preference aside from a vague memory that it was supposed to be done this way. Looks like I'll have to go back and change them all back... or at least all the ones spoken by cute girls.

Confession: Today I learned that "?!" and "!?" are considered equally correct, even though I've always used "?!" and I find "!?" weird. As a side bonus of learning that, I also learned about the gnaborretni.

Welcome! Sounds like you'll fit right in

I have fond memories of enjoying the good arcs in Naruto. The chunin exams in the first series, for example, was some high-quality entertainment. I certainly wouldn't judge you for wanting to watch those. However, rewatching old stuff from time to time is nice, but surely there's new stuff out there you could be watching. If your MAL's up-to-date, then maybe give Rokka no Yuusha a try (seems to be in your areas of interest, and is quite good). Or maybe try something completely different like Haibane Renmei (often considered a masterpiece).

At times like these, you have to state your desires clearly.

Edit: put everything in spoiler tags just to avoid preview spoilers

Still have choices. I'm finding it hard to spend much time with this...

The download edition is re-downloadable and can be pulled onto multiple computers; you'll create an account with them and be able to download it whenever you want. I don't think there's any sort of DRM on it, either.

I've so far read maybe four or five scenes with Aya. God help me, I will now write serious critique of ImoPara. The main conceit here is, obviously, the younger sister taboo. But somehow the way it's played out renders the taboo uninteresting - the fact that literally every character we ever see (or at least that I've seen so far) is 100% on board with subverting the taboo renders it less powerful, and thus less appealing. And it might even be fine if we were just talking two characters, and nobody else was even aware of the situation, but here it's literally everybody, totally cool with incest. All the casual conversations, everything. Incest is ... boring? First time I've had that exact thought. The fact that all the females share insane devotion to the main character, right out of the gate, actually kind of bugs me. Maybe this is normal for a fairly vanilla nukige (again, so far; admittedly I've only seen a little bit of the game)? Even the tsundere is clearly incredibly dere from the moment you see her. This is probably going to sound ridiculous, but there's not enough of a story here. It's a nukige, fine, but that doesn't mean it can't have at least something happening. I'll point to Ultimate Boob Wars as a good example. It has a little story, which is mostly pretty stupid, but it's not ashamed to run with that story, and it's self-aware enough to turn its stupidity to its advantage for humor value. On the other hand, it's definitely possible to go too far with putting a game behind the nukige - I think of Beat Blades Haruka as a nukige, but it wasn't a very successful one for me, because it had too much gameplay under the hood. This one has the opposite problem (not in terms of gameplay, in this case, but in terms of story). Some middle ground between BBH and ImoPara is probably the right place to aim for, at least for it to work better for me; Ultimate Boob Wars is about right. I'm hard-pressed to think of something it does well. Umm. Aya and Michika are kind of cute? The rest of the characters aren't especially interesting to me. I don't especially care for the art, so that's not helping any. I'm probably going to put this one down after grinding my way (so to speak) through Aya's route. All things considered, I'd rather be "reading" Ultimate Boob Wars. It's got a perfectly good imouto - in fact, a way better one than you'll find in ImoPara. I'll take quality over quantity.

Hello, and welcome! If you're just finding your way with VNs, you've found a good place. Another good way to find well-thought-of VNs is to look at VNDB ratings: https://vndb.org/v/all?q=;fil=tagspoil-0;rfil=;o=d;s=rating To offer a single specific recommendation rather than a billion, Steins;Gate, which is rated number 2 there overall and is one of my very favorites, has an officially-licensed English release which you can buy from JBox/JList (either downloadable or boxed edition, whatever you like): https://jbox.com/sg001. If you've already watched the anime, though, be aware that there's very little additional content in the VN, although what's there is actually some of the best stuff - alternate endings. In that case, you might want to go with something else, such as one of the fine recommendations above.

Yep, your sig is most definitely the source for that one

Have you read I Am A Strange Loop? It's pretty lengthy, but it provides an interesting perspective on what a "person" is which I haven't really seen anywhere else, and one that I think you'd find interesting.

So, first of all, I think the distinction between "localization" and "translation" is bullshit. Rather, there's more like a continuum of how thoroughly translated a text is. Native English speakers are going to prefer something farther along the thoroughness spectrum for an English translation, and it should be obvious why: you want to read something that is maximally natural to you, because it's easier on your brain. Reading something in your native language that sounds completely bizarre is confusing and upsetting. It takes you out of the story. Probably my only real contribution to this discussion: it creates vastly more cognitive dissonance for us native English speakers to read stilted, unnatural English than it would for somebody who doesn't speak English at a native level. You're already reading something that's a little weird to you, so you notice less of the additional weirdness of a poor translation. We're reading something that should be second nature, but it keeps tripping us up because it's not sufficiently translated.

Ehh, I know people who do that all the time. One of them did get sexually assaulted though.

Just noticed that the last Spice and Wolf light novel, volume 17, will be arriving at my doorstep on its release day, Tuesday. The last one I finished was volume 11, so it might be time to just sit down for a while and read through them all. I'm pretty excited - it's very rare for me to pick up an incomplete series (though this one was only incomplete in translation, of course), especially for as long as I've been following this one. Can't wait to read through the remainder and see how it wraps up. The tension I feel from this series is an itch that nothing else scratches.

Demonstrations like that one are why I kind of shrug at the watchmaker analogy and intelligent design. In the grand scheme of things, the odds are pretty much in favor of literally everything imaginable happening somewhere, sometime. I find it more cool than depressing.

@LiquidShu I don't know why people want to not spoil how the choice system works. That caused frustration for both me and especially poor @Nimbus. It's very simple once you understand it, but at least for both of us, it wasn't the least bit obvious in the game. If you really want to figure it out for yourself, I guess I don't want to get in the way of that, but it's not anything I would consider a spoiler, and not knowing it is potentially going to waste a ton of your time. So, for your own sake, just read the spoiler:

Thank you so much for doing this. I don't pirate VNs, and haven't spent the time figuring out any of the websites for buying downloadable copies, so I've been stuck importing physical releases of everything unlicensed that I want to play, which is less than ideal... This is really helpful to me personally, and probably to many others as well.

That's more or less me, except that since it's been some 12 years now since I last studied Spanish, so I can't even write it for shit anymore, let alone speak it. So I'm not even going to try and risk butchering the language. I used to be able to write passably, and my reading comprehension is still pretty good, though... Sadly, I've noticed that Japanese vocabulary has replaced a lot of Spanish vocabulary in my brain over the last couple years. If I reach for a Spanish word, I'll often come up with Japanese instead and then have to think about it for a moment before I figure out why it sounds horribly wrong. Also, I can sympathize with Nay - I think a lot of the reason I can still handle reading Spanish (and can passably read other Romance languages that I've never studied) is because of taking a year of Latin. But because of that conglomerated view, I'm pretty sure if I tried to speak Spanish now, I'd come out sounding like Salvatore from The Name of the Rose. Edit: holy shit I just noticed this is a really old thread that got necroed. I was wondering why some people who I haven't seen in a long time were coming out of the woodwork

I actually laughed out loud at this idea. You have to understand, the Steam guidelines that prevent content are going to be pretty specific. Basically think of it as a straightforward checklist that the game developer fills out to ensure they meet the requirements, rather than the result of a human actually playing the game and making a judgement call (this is impractical for many reasons, not the least of which is that said human might simply not see a large portion of the game). Seeing as "this game does not depict exposed breasts larger than 90 cm" isn't one of those checkboxes, it's not surprising at all to see it get a Steam release.

Confession: I was about to do something productive, and was going to start up some music first. But I accidentally (no, really) clicked the Huniepop icon right next to the music player icon. ... I played it for over an hour and now it's time for bed.