Fred the Barber

Yet more proof that, as we just discussed in this thread a few days ago, the viciousness of middle-schoolers knows no bounds.

Finished Rokka no Yuusha. That was a pretty solid first season, with an abnormal amount of plot resolution and character advancement for the kind of show it is. If there's not a second season, I might have to look into the light novels. Spoilers: That done, I picked up Arakawa Under the Bridge and watched the first episode. On the one hand, it is hilarious. On the other hand, it is so weird. And on the third hand (yeah, I have three hands, deal with it), in spite of being weird, it is also very "normal" in a way that I find quite appealing.

It's nice seeing the time/resource management mechanics in this video, to understand a bit more what's behind the curtain. I'm looking forward to seeing a terror mission where you actually have a big crew, though. It seems like the pacing of the time/resource management part is quite a bit different from what I've seen in XCOM 2. XCOM 2 likes to send me flitting around the map scanning things constantly, so I haven't spent time idling (with a small reward) back at my base since the very beginning of the game. Also, must be nice having your monthly income actually get handed to you, rather than having to go fly across the map to find it, and then harvest it for 3 days...

I haven't either, though exactly one time in college I was up until about 4 AM working on a final project for Networking class (implementing a decent-sized chunk of TCP was both rather difficult and rather time-consuming, for me then).

Between a variety of external influences (most notably a girl I'm interested in talking about it passionately, but also @Tiagofvarela's OpenXcom playthrough thread), I decided I should try out XCOM 2. That decision was made yesterday morning. Steam says I've played 14 hours so far. It's very hard to put down. I'm playing it on the lowest difficulty setting right now, because when I started I had absolutely no clue how any of the mechanics worked. I'm absolutely not reloading any saves, though; I live with my mistakes. And I've made dozens of mistakes in the time/resource management game alone; countless more in the main tactical gameplay. I am, thanks to the low difficulty level, still getting along fine (I think). I've lost a number of soldiers, of course, but only a couple missions ago I lost the very first soldier I picked up from the tutorial mission; my only Major, a Ranger, got wrecked in a single round on the first occasion I ran into those acid-spitting aliens. Naturally, those guys have been complete pushovers every time I've seen them since (though that my be in part because I focus-fire them so heavily...). Ugh. But it's fine. I've been rotating soldiers a fair bit of course (injuries don't give you much choice anyway), so although I wouldn't say I have a deep bench, it should be sufficient to get the job done. That said, I guess we'll find out if that's true, since the mission I just started and saved on, before I decided it was time to call it a night, will be my first mission labeled "Very Difficult" At any rate, I'm thinking I'll finish up the playthrough on this difficulty to learn as much possible and then start right up with another one, one or two notches higher (definitely not crazy enough to go to the top difficulty level immediately).

I heavily use the Shift key to turn on the cursor targeting system, which works fine for me. Pretty much the only time I need to target stuff is on the first of the season, when everything has to be tilled again, nowadays... Also, for what it's worth, I'm totally used to the fishing at this point. It's a combination of training myself and of using the tackle that makes your bar decrease less when the fish is outside it (the only tackle worth using); you can start using tackle as soon as you buy an Iridium rod, which I think Willy starts selling when you get your fishing up to level 5. But that's really only even remotely necessary if you're dealing with a very difficult fish; anything less than a legendary fish is a slam-dunk for me even without any tackle. With appropriate tackle, I'm catching the legendaries I've seen so far about 50% of the time. It's actually oddly gratifying being good at this fishing game, so I really would recommend trying it unmodded. I'm getting seriously envious of the anime sprites now... I'm still trying to convince myself that I like the originals better because a change of pace is nice, but at this point my brain is just wired to think "so cute!" when I see stuff like that.

Confession: I started playing XCOM 2 yesterday morning. Now I can't stop playing XCOM 2. When I sit down in front of my computer, the menu music starts playing in my head before it starts playing in the game. Lino, ganbatte!

Thanks I've now finished all the ones I'm going to make (probably), but one more that was worth sharing came out of the process: Trust ittaku to handle To Heart 2

In general, this game is very forgiving, so don't sweat making highly sub-optimal decisions. As long as you're planting and harvesting frequently, you'll do fine monetarily. You should definitely keep mining whenever you have spare time - getting more and better metals is useful across the board, especially copper and iron for making quality sprinklers. Ahh, that reminds me: don't ship quartz. This was very unclear to me at first, but you can and should refine quartz in the same furnace where you refine your copper ore. Unlike copper, one quartz -> one refined quartz. I believe you need refined quartz to make quality sprinklers. Now, to be clear, you will certainly eventually have more quartz than you could possibly need, to the point that I just ignore it when I see it in the mines. But you'll be surprised at just how much refined quartz you end up using. Flutterz's crop choice advice is right on the money, of course, with the caveat that for those recurring plants, they're only the best if you plant them right at the beginning of the season. Otherwise, I think melons (summer) and pumpkins (fall) are a good idea. And you'll probably have an opportunity to plant those one-shot plants further into the season, when you have cash on hand you can put back into seeds (say, 10th of summer or 10th of fall). You'll eventually want some livestock both to have some income in winter and also for a bunch of the Community Center bundles. In preparation for that, you should buy a silo from Robin soon, so that when you cut grass with the scythe it will stockpile hay. Buying hay is hella expensive, and you won't be able to harvest any in winter (the grass totally disappears overnight between Fall and Winter o_O); I screwed up timing of things and ended up throwing a lot of money away on feed in winter. Also, unlike all other buildings and house improvements, silos are very cheap. Grass grows based on other grass around it, so it's a good idea to leave a decent exposed surface area of it on your farm (but far from your crops, buildings, etc., of course) so that it keeps growing back. Flutterz's advice about artisanal goods is solid too, but you probably won't be able to afford going that direction for a little while, since it takes a fair amount of resources to make even one keg (for instance), and wine takes a long time to ferment. Again, don't sweat it much; I didn't get into the wine-making business until the end of the first winter. Also, some of the community center rewards are really fantastic. Definitely try to complete the whole room that unlocks mine carts ASAP for faster travel, especially since it's pretty easy. Doing all the ones for the greenhouse is hard, IIRC (I probably didn't make 5 high-quality parsnips in the first Spring, let alone know to save them...), but the reward is monstrously useful; I don't think I got it until year 2 spring, and even then I only got it because I was prioritizing it as soon as I knew I should do so.

Picture of General Tiago in full dress uniform:

I finished putting together all the slides for my "Getting Started with VNs" presentation at SakuraCon. Countdown timer until I have to actually deliver it: 4 days and 45 minutes. It looks pretty good, and having gone over everything several times on the path towards finishing it, I have a very good handle on the material by now. Tomorrow I'll do some practicing, and then probably late tomorrow I'll do a full rehearsal, record it, and put it up on youtube or something. I'd post just the slides somewhere, but the slides will make absolutely no sense without accompanying audio, so as anxious as I'm sure you all are to see it (so you can heckle me properly), you'll just have to wait a bit longer

If anybody's curious what inspired this topic, I'm putting together slides for my presentation (which is in only a few days o_O) and I wanted to use these as catchphrases for the part at the end where I'm quickly going through some VNs to build a little excitement. Here's a sneak peek at a few of the better ones that I've made so far:

I keep telling myself I'm going to watch the Monogatari series, one of these days. But probably not any time soon. Every time I think about it, I go look up the series to try to find the right starting point, and that alone makes my head start spinning.

Alas, the pressure of being the ace finally got to cowardly Camouflaged Sausage. Rooke tried to pick up the slack, but, well, we all saw how that ended... Me, when you had No Dice throw the first grenade: "Isn't your ship in the way?" Me, a few seconds later: "Yep." Me, a few minutes later: "Wait, did Tiago really just throw another grenade at his own ship?"

Let's see if I last longer here than I did in Tiago's OpenXcom playthrough. The bar and my expectations are both low, so the only potential surprise waiting for me is pleasant!

Grabbed the sonnets off my shelf, flipped to a random one, and landed on 94. "Who, moving others, are themselves as stone / Unmoved, cold, and to temptation slow / They rightly do inherit heaven's graces" - sounds about right. We're not unmotivated, just chill. Edit: Also, congrats Mr. T on becoming a primary target

Stick with it, Nimbus. I guarantee he'll get better. I finished Chapter 7 and took the fork for

#TeamUnenthusiastic is "Idk green?" our battle cry? And is it better described as a battle mutter?

Ahhh, I see. That would change things a lot. Thanks for explaining!

I've only played Soul Blazer, which is indeed pretty amazing, and part of Illusion of Gaia, which was fascinating but not what I was looking for at the time. I haven't done much nostalgia gaming in a while because I have too much non-nostalgia gaming to do, but there is some constant nagging feeling that I'm missing part of my life as a result. I recently happened across Screw Attack live streaming EarthBound, which was quite a trip down memory lane. And I do mean a trip - I watched them first go through Moonside, and then the monkey cave where you have to trade presents to all the monkeys. What a beautifully bizarre game.

This I totally understand - I'm not faulting you on that account at all. Just to clarify, I did understand the problem you mentioned about friendly fire and line-of-sight already. But if you have several squares between you and a door, you can still have several people watching the door, all with a clear line of sight. There were a couple situations in your 3rd episode where it would be applicable, notably the one where Rooke was watching the door, if you had more people inside the ship at the time.

Interesting - the AI doesn't change at all on higher difficulties? That's actually almost kind of disappointing, since it does seem a little dumb. That is not to say that I think you should be doing any better, or even that I blame you for Fred dying at such a tender age - even on the difficulty level you're at, the odds are obviously heavily stacked against you having a flawless victory with any kind of regularity. I'm actually totally in agreement with the idea of stationing people near the door, but I'd really expect it to be more effective to have, for instance, as many people as possible looking at the door with good line-of-sight, when you have a high expectation of someone coming through that door. For instance, when you're actually going into the ship, I'd probably try to have as many as four people going in, two to each side, rather than having more people wandering around. But I'm sure there are good reasons for why you have people a bit more spread out than that - watching your videos is currently the full extent of my experience with this game, so I'm well aware I'm missing a great deal of context.

Exactly - his true power isn't in his stats, it's that the RNG does his bidding. I mean, my expectation would be that they should come through the door and gun you down, especially if you (and by "you" I mean "slow old man Rooke") don't fire when they walk through the door. But instead they walk through the door and just stand there, waiting patiently for you to shoot them. Probably this is one of those things that changes on higher difficulty levels.

I shall enlist with Team Down. We will bury you.

I love the text commentary. Rooke has impressively shitty reflexes, but crouching in front of the right door does seem to be a surprisingly decent strat. Also, three times makes for a pretty clear pattern: Camouflaged Sausage is OP.