Bought Rainbow 6 Siege. Super Bunnyhop gave it a resounding recommendation despite the always online DRM, Uplay integration, and Ubisoft's poisonous little touches. I want to like it but I haven't had this torrent of frustration since a week-long roadtrip with the family. Fundamentally the game controls like a hardcore FPS with a molasses atmosphere, sluggish ADS, and a high time to kill. As a Red Orchestra fan, this was right up my alley. Methodical, anxiety-inducing gameplay that compensates for a lack of constant action with enveloping tension. Maps are wide and dynamic, with generous amounts of cover or concealment. But in R6S, the maps are microscopic. Those two elements should not be compatible in a PVP game and is evident by the total lack of contemporary equivalents, but is gratingly accepted with the frankly impressive level destruction in R6S. Defenders end up sitting in a corner for 2 minutes every round, making for a boring and predictable experience for both sides. And good god, the maps. Chalet in particular is ruminatingly awful with cramped 1F and 2F objectives. I want to get my $10 to go far, but the ratio of enjoyable games is somehow lower than CSGO, a game that marries you to 40-minute session of addictive mental torment. I just had a game where I died only to teammates. I want to like this game, it's got the perfect amount of breaks to have casual talk with your friends.

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hylics review I once was perscribed Tamiflu after a deserate midnight taxi ride to a Saitama hospital. While the trip was a fevered blur, I remember my mom's parroting concerns about me jumping out of windows as she poured the powdered antivital into a paper funnel. Somewhat excitingly the medication had a reputation for making sickly bodies believe they can fly, a questionable side-effect in conjunction with the vertical concrete landscapes of Japan. Instead I spent new years tripping about steaming the wrinkles in my bedsheets with my body heat, accompanied by repeated visions of LEGO Bionicle balljoints sandwiched between sessions of brief consciousness. Hylics is a 2015 indie role-playing game with a deceptively brief description, "a recreational program with light JRPG elements." Just like my drug-fueled influenza experience, going through Mason Lindroth's creation is like recovering from a traumatic head injury. If its release was accompanied with little fanfare, Hylics would have undoubtledly accumulated an LSD Dream Emulatoresque cult following. Surreal games like this ultimately leave me with a human interest behind the game's developers and their vision for making such a deviant and hypnagogic gaming experience. Derived from a lengthy dream journal by one of the developer's employees, LSD's retina-molesting visuals and obtuse first-person controls efficaciously sells the gameplay as occupying someone's dream. In contrast Hylics is even less grounded in reality, the unfamiliarity of the game's absurdist art and incoherent character dialogue gives way to exploration driven solely with the player's interest in the author's madness./ Lindroth's other conjurations. Yet through the distorted claymation animations and pixel artifacts Hylics manages to deliver a genuinely enjoyable and even accesible playing experience. The gameplay, as expected from an RPGmaker derivative, is far from incoherent and maybe even typical. The time-tested collage of HP, MP, and character skills serves as a beacon of familiarity through this salad of weirdness. Secondary only to the artwork in excellence, the pacing is very well done. Enemies present a persistent challenge without becoming overbearing, and bosses have a genuine sense of power that you satisfyingly match with leveled-up skills. The map progression too, facilitates active exploration through distorted landscapes and a rewarding sense of incremental progress. The music however falls flat, with no region-specific tracks and the disjoined guitars easily overstays its welcome within the first hour of playing. Sedate and strange, you emerge from a confused wanderer to an invested bystander. It's a $3 escape from reality, its vision matched only with a few obscure Japanese games. Grab a copy and sit idly for Hylics 2. https://mason-lindroth.itch.io/hylics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LSD%3A_Dream_Emulator https://masonlindroth.tumblr.com/

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3/14/2020 I've been preparing an emergency bag lately. I used to be big into camping/wilderness survival as a kid, and going through the motions have really brought those memories back. Playing out scenarios in my head, logging shopping lists, drawing out neighborhood plans. The idea is to stock PPE, important documents, and a couple days' worth of food in preparation of evacuating to a school or community center. Last year's hurricane got me shitting my pants, and apparently my sister's friends did come home to a flooded apartment.

Turns out pandemics aren't terribly sexy. Everyone's sort of stuck indoors because it's the sensible thing to do. Cultural norms have not given way to barbarism either, people panic buying at the supermarket will still grimace at your CBRN katana cover. Governments also tend to be more inept at fulfilling their institutional 1984 fantasies. Flat out denial seems to be trending among world leaders from America to Brazil in the most depressing cultural intersection since slavery. And here's an absolutely fantastic rationalwiki article unraveling rationalizations of American preppers, with SHTF examples from Argentina and Somalia. Turns out classic prepper scenarios also aren't very arousing or individualistic for that matter. Either that or they result in your timely, solitary death.

I get it though, there's a definite allure to the level of agency during a dire situation. Fantasizing about a disaster is a refreshing contrast to our numbers' based day-to-day of productivity, consumption, and death. A plane crash or shipwreck exists as a vacuum of value systems. I'd love to be a Crusoe or Robeson, blazing my own trail of self-determination free from the long-winded conventions of modern society. As any camper will tell you, constructing a dwelling is rewarding. Making improvised tools feels good. Catching your own food somehow adds flavor. And a big axis to that contradictory freedom is money.

"Time is money," despite the milleau of cultural attitudes it occupies, pretty well sums up the intimate bond between capital and human morality. Time, any time, can be spent on producing capital. The one enveloping force behind everything in our daily lives, reduced down to "productivity." If not producing, you're occupied with something surely lesser, a childlike value system subservient to cold hard cash. Getting an education is increasing your human capital. Learning a new language is increasing your human capital. "Experience" adds to your human capital. Forgo the interactions that make you a better informed, more well-rounded human being, that is secondary to your value to the enveloping economic system we live under. You don't match up? You are inherently worth less as a human being.

Yet descents into financial ruin will not lead to a quick death, there's always a comforting buffer as you resort to subsisting on a steady diet of saltines and Tampico. Today, you don't construct dwellings, you pay rent. Why do you even have tools if you have a desk job? Why interact with your food when you can just drive to the cornerstore? Why buy things when they will surely deprecate in value? Just like that, directly rewarding interactions are replaced with numbers. Your work is worth this much. You existing here? That costs this much. That item on the shelf? That took this many hours to produce. Not in this country of course, one where human life is inherently worth less. And purpose is alluring. I can live my life utterly uninvested in my surroundings, and the globalized economy will pander to my apathy offering morally questionable commodities at similarly questionable prices. The conditions at which you live and die feel less proximate, your agency under a set of qualifiers. Dying while being wholly in charge of your value systems is idealistic (and pathetic) in a Mishima way. Sepsis is not. incessantpain