13 Comments

Diablo 4 dude. So fucking fun. But it’s kind of a button masher.

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I own it, came with my Xbox. My wife and I cracked out in D3 for awhile but moved on once they finished all seasons.

Timely you mentioned it because I set the timer to download the expansion last night and was planning on giving it a run this afternoon. Not sure what class to play.

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I do get what you were saying about there being no path of discovery. Safe world vs scary world.

But also, once you dial in a character and get your timings down, it’s fun just fucking melting waves of enemies.

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Druid or Necro. I keep coming back to Druid.

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Again, with Cyberpunk. All roads lead to it.

This is what post-apocalyptic Japan looks like. Remember, Japan kind of sort of had an apocalypse. 2 nukes. I’ve heard many an argument that this enabled them to just go balls out on manga and anime.

Also, this is what western corporatism, fully played-out, looks like.

Cyberpunk-ism is a predictive age, or a cautionary tale, more than the alternate universe that some people think it is.

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Game is a fucking masterpiece and I stand by that statement. Not to mention the religioius themes.

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Tooky's shout-out, LFG! Appreciate the Asheville shout-out too. Our cohost Cap actually was visiting there at the time and said it was insane.

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No worries, I'm a fan. We need to do a colab. Have your people call mine, and by that I mean shoot me a DM if you ever wanna do something.

I was just up there, West of Asheville in Sylva for vacation and man is that area beautiful and everyone so nice. Sad.

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I was just saying as much to my cohosts last week about having you on. Once we get our next bit of backlog knocked out definitely will make it happen

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New to Substack, new to your pod, but I've enjoyed it, thanks for the conversation.

Paginate. Few comments:

So this hits on something I'm currently writing about, including the topic of "storytelling" in the mainstream. Forgive me, I'll probably overstep boundaries in commenting.

One problem is that the largest impact nobody focuses on that we got through post-modernism is the inability to really grab the appropriate strands of narrative, and NOT include irrelevant points, storylines, characters, etc.

This is further complicated because of the ideological insistence that everyone gets a turn as the center star. It creates a glob of unnecessary and/or irrelevant elements, and you cannot say that because identitarians will claim you are treating their existence as arbitrary or inconsequential.

WHICH it may in fact be, in the grand scope of whatever "universe" the story exists in. This is why I call our era the "Post-significance Era."

The other issue I would propose is that much of the media consumption feels that explaining every single aspect of a thing is how you immerse... When the "void space," or as Hem said "what you cut out" is invisible, it is still inferred by the reader/viewer in a subconscious manner, even though it is not stated.

Sorry for text wall, but thanks for the episode!

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I shall pass on the coffee in favor of lemony tea, but the whiskey shall certainly remain. I do believe I'll make this my afternoon listening today.

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I'm more of an earl gray dude myself.

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Fun podcast.

Descent was a great LAN party game.

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