By the way I've started a Game of Thrones fantasy league. Join up before drafting on Sunday.

Join here: http://www.fantasizr.com/joinleaguelink?league=6005360961781760&key=8Fe315d3fABca1bcD4CeDC70BcDA4D ;

 I suggest turning on autodraft in Settings > Draft Rankings. Your characters get points for being awesome, getting naked, or drinking (among other actions).

Info here: https://www.theverge.com/2017/7/7/15892436/game-of-thrones-season-seven-preview-fantasy-league ;

There are no more Stargate Atlantis episodes for me to watch.

But, I've figured out that I can filter out tags and pairings on AO3, so I've got that going for me now. 

And there's, like, four dozen "official" novels. 

There's something special about the first POTC movie. I'm partial to the third one (is it the soundtrack? the finality? the wedding scene???) but this guy made a whole video about it. Worth a watch.

Last week all the snacks were replaced with Munchies snack mix and the bottom flap told me to smoke weed everyday.

Also, Bioshock Infinite was not the game I needed to play last week. Its themes of american exceptionalism and nationalism are, how say, a lot more relevant now than they were in 2013. And I already knew the ending but this time I found it impossibly hopeless and demoralizing because sometimes things never change.

There are a million million worlds. All different and all similar. Constants and variables. There's always a lighthouse. There's always a man, there's always a city... I can see them through the doors. You...me, Columbia, Songbird... But sometimes, something's different...yet the same.

 - The neighbour cut down their tree in the front yard. There was nothing wrong with it. They just didn't want the roots creating lumps in the driveway.
- Gotta socialize at an industry mixer today. I don't really want to...
- Need to write several pages about machine learning techniques. I'm not qualified to do that. Profs should have hired a fourth-rate CS grad student instead. 
- Reyes Vidal. 

- Making the training set for my thesis work :(
- Finishing the minor revisions on That One Paper (... There is only one paper)
- Finishing Adam's X-Wing (why won't he try it himself?) 
- Visiting Justin and eating Justin's food
- Betaing a Solas/Trevelyan kinkmene fill (It's going to be, like, 10000 words long and it's really good so far!) 
- Climbing into probably some SEWER TUNNELS to get a D5/T5 geocache! 

Ever since Archie comics shook off the Hays comic code they've been doing some interesting things, chiefly Afterlife with Archie, but now also Riverdale. I have some small thoughts about episode 1 - river's edge:

- I like the casting! Veronica (Camila Mendes) is an excellent pick, for sure and she has the best material this episode. Archie (K. J. Apa) looks like a slightly younger Andrew Garfield and Betty (Lili Reinhart) looks like Heather Morris from Glee. I guess it's worth mentioning the cast diversity, relatively speaking. On paper everyone (except Chuck and Nancy) look white as mayo, but Josie and the Pussycats are clearly set up as Destiny's Child, Reggie and Dilton are now the Cool (douche) Asian and Asian Nerd respectively, and Veronica is now Latina. So, this is very cool! 
- That being said I still think it's very weird for actors in their 20s (... Cole Sprouse) to play 15 yr olds. Is it normal for 15 yr olds to be ripped? 
- It's also very odd that Miss Grundy looks nearly the same age as the students... and I can't believe she's in that romance subplot. Squick. What the hell? 
- the dialogue is pretty stylized, but after all, Riverdale is more Brick than Mean Girls. This is not a bad thing. 

My personal predictions, which i will update as time goes on: 
- Betty is going to go completely off the chain by the end of the season, out of stress, and... extenuating plot factors that force her to grow a backbone. Also, I can't see her accepting what Archie was up to that summer. 
- Miss Grundy is going to die. 
- It's jarring that Kevin acts so flamboyant in an adult way at the tender age of 15. IDK it felt a lot more subdued when Kurt in Glee was camping it up. I wouldn't be surprised if they reveal that Kevin did the wild thang for the first time when he was 13, is extremely traumatized on the inside, and pulls a Brandon from Easy A. And dies. 
- Cheryl didn't commit the murder. That's too obvious. But they're definitely incest twins. That's a known fact. She is going to survive and be very unhappy. 
- Veronica is going to die, because she's currently my favourite character. And she's not really reformed right now. 

Title: Scenes from an accidental courtship
Fandom: Stargate SG-1
Pairing: Sam/Daniel
Categories: Friendship, romance
Length: 25k
Warnings: None
Summary: "No, not that way. We were really, really good friends." And maybe just a little bit more. Season 7 behind-the-scenes friendship and romance.

Link

What I thought:

OH MY GOODNESS, I don't think I've had so many FEELS to deal with since, like, Kirk/Spock.

This fic hits soooo many points for me. I didn't even know I shipped Sam/Daniel until I read this fic. But what do I know? When I started out reading HP fanfic I was only into canon pairings. And here, having only touched the tip of Stargate fanfiction, I thought that the SG-1 team members had the sexual chemistry of four pumpkins all spaced a polite distance apart from each other. I've tried a few shippin' fics already but none of them have really SOLD their pairings to me yet, y'know?

Well, the characterization of this fic is believable. Which makes the friendship component believable, and the friendship component of this fic is what makes it goes down smoothly. If the friendship aspects of the fic are believable, it's only a gentle slide down to being open to the romance aspects of the fic. But thank goodness the fic is only rated T because I might have not have been able to suspend my disbelief otherwise. Maybe another time, yes? But small steps first.

I also love way that Sorrel draws out the friendship aspect of the fic to add tension so that every time the romance aspect steps it up, I'm more than ready to accept it. Also, UST is delicious.

The last two paragraphs are a kick in the teeth. There is a sequel (Winter). I need a sequel between this fic and Winter in my life, but there isn't one!!!

Anyways I now find Sam/Daniel utterly obvious and natural and all other pairings are ruined for me temporarily.

Same deal as before.

1 - Kind of an iredeemably rubbish episode.
2 - A bit rubbish but with at least one sufficiently cool part.
3 - A solid episode.
4 - A memorable episode, in a good way. I have a bad memory.
5 - Personal favourite

( expand table )

Conclusions
- About the same as Season 2
- The Tok'ra and the Tollan can't be trusted
- Which must be why the Asgard never go running to them for help.

Dishonored is depressing as hell but it is one of my favourite games - definitely on my personal top 5 list. So, I was hyped for Dishonored 2. I was so hyped that Justin bought it for me as an early birthday present to put me out of my misery. Also, my birthday comes AFTER Christmas.

There was something special about the first game. It was simple in concept and brilliant in execution. You play an assassin who has been bestowed magical powers by an amoral entity with a beguiling voice. Well the voice was beguiling and intriguingly neutral in the first game, and aggressively petulant in the second. A bad decision on the part of the developers. Compare:




Othertimes, the voice acting feels rushed in cadence during the cutscenes. A bit like certain cutscenes in the Witcher 3. I do appreciate a voiced protagonist, though.

"Having a voiced main does limit some dialogue options, but it's still much better than dozens of heroes who all seem to have lost their voice-boxes in tragic childhood boating accidents."

-- pokeybanana (2012)

I also resent the way that the game spells out the objectives every level and recaps at the end of the level.  And the plot points. In the first game it was only implied that Corvo was Emily's father. In this one the game slaps it right on us in the tutorial and then tells itself that's OK with flavor text later in the first level because it was "the court's worst-kept secret."

Also crafting. Every game has crafting nowadays. If Mass Effect Andromeda has crafting I will be a little bit unhappy (It will definitely have crafting). And it's not even good crafting, it's half-assed crafting designed to check the "crafting" box in Bethesda's publisher checklist. It really breaks realism if I can slap together a trr-effect whalebone charm while perched on top of a streetlight. There are vices all over every single level, couldn't crafting be limited to those vices only?

However there are many aspects of the game that I feel are improvements on the original. Nonlethal drop-takedowns and combat moves now exist! Karnaca is painterly and beautiful. The level design is as good as in the first game but bigger. Emily's powers suit my playstyle better than Corvo's in the first game. I spam F5 and F9 less frequently but according to the stats I've died about 150 times and I haven't even finished my first playthrough yet.


Different game, same principle.

There have also been a lot of reports about performance problems on PC - mainly mouse acceleration weirdness, low frame rate, and stutter. Though I haven't turned on Fraps or anything I haven't personally experienced any of these issues playing on (mostly) Medium settings.

Some of the level design, in addition to being much sunnier and varied than in the original Dishonored, is really creative. The clockwork mansion, for one, is a house whose configuration shifts if certain levers are pulled. In another level, you have to use time travel to solve puzzles and traverse obstacles in an overgrown mansion. My sense of direction is not great so I got lost and confused frequently. It was great. The level design in the original game was also very good but this was better. That said I sure am sick of overgrown mansions and bloodflies. Or for that matter, an overgrown asylum or an overgrown conservatory... Would have liked to see an industrial setting too, like the whale processing plant from Knife of Dunwall. Or a prison.



I also found some unexpected consequences to my actions in unmarked and unlisted objectives. I don't want to spoil this one too much but you can kill nearly anyone (and it only sometimes leads to a game over.)

I feel a little uncomfortable having so much of the plot hinge on the original Dishonored' DLCs - The Knife of Dunwall and the Brigmore Witches.

To summarize:

Improvements:
- Gameplay
- Level design
- Extreme replayability

Steps back:
- Outsider's voice acting
- Objectives really spell things out for you

I think I would be a lot more impressed if I hadn't played Dishonored. To put it another way, Yahtzee says a good sequel should build on the original.

A good sequel--like Half-Life 2, Silent Hill 2, Tranmere Rovers 3--is one that uses the original as a jumping-off point for a whole new story with whole new technology, while a bad sequel merely wallows in the original, like a hippo in a vat of liquidized children.

-- Zero Punctuation: Bioshock 2 Review

Dishonored 2 doesn't do anything particularly innovative but it does make a lot of improvements over the original. The ratio of Dishonored 2 / Dishonored is close to the ratio of Mass Effect 3 / Mass Effect 2 or Portal 2 / Portal. It's lower than the ratio of Mass Effect 2 / Mass Effect 1 but a lot higher than Assassin's Creed Brotherhood / Assassin's Creed 2. I'm not gonna try to compare the Dragon Age games in this context; they're just too different.

This review comes off as kind of negative but at the end of the day I hurt my hand because it's fun to play and I'll happily buy the DLC when it comes out and the university reimburses me for the dang conference.