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Virtually anything with a Newberry Medal is highly likely to have a traumatizing beloved character death somewhere in it. Maniac Magee and Bridge to Terabithia were good examples from my childhood.
Virtually anything with a Newberry Medal is highly likely to have a traumatizing beloved character death somewhere in it. Maniac Magee and Bridge to Terabithia were good examples from my childhood.
1 moa (minute of audio in 128000 bps mp3)
Give me 320000 bps or give me death!
I like the ability to adjust playback speed. I listen to everything at 1.1 and it just feels like everyone tightened up their delivery a little bit and took out dead air. There was one podcast where the subject was interesting but the delivery was agonizingly slow, so I turned it all the way up to 1.5.
I’ve been playing Shattered Pixel Dungeon virtually every day for years, through I don’t know how many updates. I’m far from convinced that every run is winnable, but there are some patterns that I’ve observed.
Mage and Huntress seem to be my best classes. The Mage’s staff means that you are guaranteed to have something that’s worth upgrading. The Huntress’ bow and her special abilities like growing grass by walking can make for some truly interesting gameplay changes, whereas I feel like most of the other classes’ abilities are more about moderate improvements to quality of life.
A Ring of Haste is probably my favorite ring to find, since being able to kite monsters is a great path to victory. Tenacity, Elements, and Strength are boring. Wealth can be good if it comes upgraded, but I wouldn’t put scrolls into it. Evasion always seems to turn on me sooner or later. Energy and Arcana can improve quality of life but are otherwise pretty mid.
A Wand of Regrowth is almost always a path to victory, especially if it comes upgraded, doubly so if you become a Warden, and triply so if you can combine it with the Sandals of Regrowth.
A Wand of Blast Wave is incredibly useful when used to knock enemies off ledges or into traps, saving yourself the trouble of killing them.
Other wands are a super mixed bag, depending on what you can manage to do with them, but I’ll say that some of my most fun and successful runs are putting a Wand of Corruption into my Mage’s Staff and becoming a Corruption Battlemage. You whack an enemy, Amok him on his friends, then corrupt them, then rinse and repeat until you win.
I’ve already mentioned the Sandals, which I’d say are incredibly useful if you’ve got a Wand of Regrowth or a Blooming enchanted weapon, but are otherwise hard to keep getting enough fresh grass to make worthwhile. I think the Ethereal Chains and Hourglass are my favorite and most useful artifacts. Horn of Plenty is okay but not great, unless you can combine it with being filled by the Battlemage’s energy generating ability. Other artifacts are mid, but I’ll make a special mention of the Unstable Spellbook which seems to screw me as often as it helps and yet I can’t deny that I have a great time with the mayhem it adds to my run. The Alchemist’s Toolkit is terrible; I hope a future patch significantly alters or replaces it, because honestly why bother using it at all?
I think my favorite runs are Corruption Battlemage or a Sniper with a nicely upgraded Boomerang; I always get a lot of fun out of using the boomerangs.
There’s no end to the conversation but that’s all I’ve got for now. It’s far and away the most played game on my phone… possibly my most played game ever, measured by eternal hours. The publisher is an absolute treasure and he deserves all the praise and success in the world.
If you’ve got an Asian grocery store near you they’ll most likely have loose leaf. I got into pu’er tea this way and it’s fantastic!
Not sure if I merit being called an audiophile, but…
Huge collection of mp3s ripped from CDs. Stored locally, currently using a Unihertz Jelly Star as a glorified digital audio player, running BlackPlayer EX, which I like for it being a good mix of minimalist and giving me freedom to customize as much as I feel I need. When I’m using headphones, I want my ears uncovered so I use Shokz bone conduction headphones.
Let us face squarely the paradox that the world which goes to war is a world, usually genuinely desiring peace. War is the outcome, not mainly of evil intentions, but on the whole of good intentions which miscarry or are frustrated. It is made not usually by evil men knowing themselves to be wrong, but is the outcome of policies pursued by good men usually passionately convinced that they are right.
—Norman Angell, author of The Great Illusion
Found it!
The essay is “Thinking About Thinking,” ©1989, collected in the book Magic: The Final Fantasy Collection.
If you believe that laws forbidding gambling, sale of liquor, sale of contraceptives, requiring definite closing hours, enforcing the Sabbath, or any such, are necessary to the welfare of your community, that is your right and I do not ask you to surrender your beliefs or give up your efforts to put over such laws. But remember that such laws are, at most, a preliminary step in doing away with the evils they indict. Moral evils can never be solved by anything as easy as passing laws alone. If you aid in passing such laws without bothering to follow through by digging in to the involved questions of sociology, economics, and psychology which underlie the causes of the evils you are gunning for, you will not only fail to correct the evils you sought to prohibit but will create a dozen new evils as well.
–Robert A. Heinlein, Take Back Your Government
See also: The Despecialized Edition of the Star Wars Original Trilogy
I’m wondering if I could obtain some kind of old/used android phone, remove all the apps so the home screen is completely empty, transfer via USB or ssh/scp the MP3 files (and metadata + cover art), then have some kind of music player app which would be the only app on the phone/device.
This is exactly what I did. I used an older Moto and uninstalled or disabled everything I didn’t want and only used BlackPlayer EX. It also has halfway decent external speakers so I can just play music directly off the device if I want to. The only thing that doesn’t thrill me is that it’s a full sized phone, which can be a bit awkwardly large at times. It’s been working great, but when the time comes for another device, I might go with one of the little Unihertz models.
There’s RiffTrax. They’re pretty much the only way I can stand to re-watch the Star Wars prequels at this point.
Let Bartlett be Bartlett!
Plus the hero killed like thirty goddamn people along the way to the big bad guy. Some of those guys had families too, asshole! You’re already a monster!
I’ll have it explain complicated topics using familiar frameworks. As an example, I had it run through various superheroes and villains and match them up with appropriate philosophers. This conversation was how I settled on the idea that Lex Luthor has a lot more in common with Ayn Rand than Friedrich Nietzsche.
And that’s why every carpenter bee horror story starts with “There was a knock at the door…”
Rubber hot water bottle. It is so nice to have when you’re sick or achy.
This is the way.