Not It
1) A dog who knows how to play with infants, and a papa cat who is less than helpful when checking on an exhausted mom. Plus, a momma dog and her subwoofers and games with your cat.
2) First, this Winter Falcon fanart was very funny so reason enough to link it here, but it highlights something Mike has pointed out, which is that everyone on TV is a good artist.
3) This news from the UK about its postal service is outrageous. While less awful, I completely agree with this discussion about unpaid work services.
"Possible labor law violations aside, it’s no coincidence that these nice office “extras” - the things you’ll rarely see listed in a journalism job description because historically nobody has considered them worth paying for - disproportionately fall to women and people of color.
Think back to the office you used to work from. Who unloaded the dishwasher, stocked the snacks, circulated the get well cards, made the coffee, bought the birthday cakes?
Did she get paid for it? And did the man who never did any of those things get paid 20% less than she did? No, because that would be insane, right? Because a mother works for free, right?
There’s another term for the “extras” Merrill mentions. Researchers call them “non-promotable tasks.”"
Personally I think it would be absolutely great it many of these things were never a "thing" again as they seem like a feature, not a bug, of telecommuting.
4) Thanks in part to thunderstorms and this week's Internet outage, I went through the LEGO Movie videogame fairly quickly. Part of the reason was that it was just a simpler game.
The hub worlds, for example, were single scene setups in which the only thing to do (other than collect coins) was to find Red Bricks. As in most cases though, one's ability to get them is hampered by not having access to either enough money or the right characters. Other than the 2X stud multiplier, which I was able to get after the first level, everything else had to wait until I'd finished all the Story mode levels.
It was also complicated by there being 5 different hubs so that one had to travel to particular ones to find particular bricks. Not only that but since there was no single place to access all the story levels, I was actually held up in doing the Free Plays in order because I couldn't find two levels. Turns out that there was a slide from one corner of Cloud Cuckoo land that led me to a water filled room with both entry points.
And speaking of Cloud Cuckoo land, I gather that the game follows the movie very closely with clips from it and voices from it. Boy am I glad I never wasted time watching it. It was not only painful but the Cloud Cuckoo stuff was so overwhelming with all the noise and colors and overdone everything that it was a relief to finish with those sections. I fail to understand why the DC Heroes showed up but at least those were characters whose powers I didn't need to figure out.
There were the usual number of glitches and freezes. I had to reboot the game twice and at least twice more had to exit out of a level because either a character got stuck or something which was supposed to be happening was not happening. There was also the "impossibly dark except for screen brightness maxing" section where one was swimming through undersea tunnels for a whole level.
Luckily the car chase level proved less difficult for me to hit needed items than it seemed. A lot of stuff just went by too fast and was too small for me to focus on. I was relieved to see I had all 5 gold cards by the end. There was also a section where the character rolls like a tumbleweed through a long scene and had to hit 5 mailbags on posts. This was harder than it sounds given the difficulty in controlling the character and the ease with which he might fall off ledges. (Also, despite being in Free Play, one could not use any other character in this scene).
One thing that was different in many levels of this game is that certain things had to happen in order, even if one didn't actually have to play the whole level out in order to find the Free Play items. I had to replay a few levels more than once because I had inadvertently failed to trigger something that needed to happen before a gold card would show up.
However even the gold card items were, not necessarily easier, but shorter in this game. In most of the LEGO games one has to find 10 of something in each level. In this game it was only 5 plus a pair of pants (which in other games might be Citizen in Peril etc.) One of the hardest parts I had though, at least in Story mode when I didn't yet have Regenerate Hearts or Invincibility, was early on in the Old West level.
This game's unique feature is the "Master Builder" mode, where one stands in a green circle and has to highlight three items, which will then kick off a clip where the character assembles something necessary to move the scene on. The hitch is that one or more items has to be created first, usually by breaking and reassembling something else. But in one scene, your character is being shot by a hovering robot with a laser. It never occurred to me that the robot itself was the third item. And given that one could only stun it for 10 seconds or so, even completing the Master Build was very difficult, much less when the third item seemed nowhere to be found. I think my studs level must have been down to 10% after all the tries I went through to get past that.
Overall the game would have been more enjoyable had the movie's story been more enjoyable. I didn't have much trouble getting through the Story mode without consulting the walkthrough, except in places where I needed to be sure something was supposed to be happening when it didn't seem to be. But it was handy to be sure I'd collected everything I was supposed to in a given place before moving on. And also discovering where those 2 levels were… But having read that the LEGO Movie 2 game wasn't very good and having had more than enough of it after this game, I'm definitely passing on it.
5) Although I made several posts to
common_nature in the past few months, Pillowfort being back is going to make that easier, so I should be making more of these.
View poll: Kudos Footer-281
Comments at Dreamwidth
.
2) First, this Winter Falcon fanart was very funny so reason enough to link it here, but it highlights something Mike has pointed out, which is that everyone on TV is a good artist.
3) This news from the UK about its postal service is outrageous. While less awful, I completely agree with this discussion about unpaid work services.
"Possible labor law violations aside, it’s no coincidence that these nice office “extras” - the things you’ll rarely see listed in a journalism job description because historically nobody has considered them worth paying for - disproportionately fall to women and people of color.
Think back to the office you used to work from. Who unloaded the dishwasher, stocked the snacks, circulated the get well cards, made the coffee, bought the birthday cakes?
Did she get paid for it? And did the man who never did any of those things get paid 20% less than she did? No, because that would be insane, right? Because a mother works for free, right?
There’s another term for the “extras” Merrill mentions. Researchers call them “non-promotable tasks.”"
Personally I think it would be absolutely great it many of these things were never a "thing" again as they seem like a feature, not a bug, of telecommuting.
4) Thanks in part to thunderstorms and this week's Internet outage, I went through the LEGO Movie videogame fairly quickly. Part of the reason was that it was just a simpler game.
The hub worlds, for example, were single scene setups in which the only thing to do (other than collect coins) was to find Red Bricks. As in most cases though, one's ability to get them is hampered by not having access to either enough money or the right characters. Other than the 2X stud multiplier, which I was able to get after the first level, everything else had to wait until I'd finished all the Story mode levels.
It was also complicated by there being 5 different hubs so that one had to travel to particular ones to find particular bricks. Not only that but since there was no single place to access all the story levels, I was actually held up in doing the Free Plays in order because I couldn't find two levels. Turns out that there was a slide from one corner of Cloud Cuckoo land that led me to a water filled room with both entry points.
And speaking of Cloud Cuckoo land, I gather that the game follows the movie very closely with clips from it and voices from it. Boy am I glad I never wasted time watching it. It was not only painful but the Cloud Cuckoo stuff was so overwhelming with all the noise and colors and overdone everything that it was a relief to finish with those sections. I fail to understand why the DC Heroes showed up but at least those were characters whose powers I didn't need to figure out.
There were the usual number of glitches and freezes. I had to reboot the game twice and at least twice more had to exit out of a level because either a character got stuck or something which was supposed to be happening was not happening. There was also the "impossibly dark except for screen brightness maxing" section where one was swimming through undersea tunnels for a whole level.
Luckily the car chase level proved less difficult for me to hit needed items than it seemed. A lot of stuff just went by too fast and was too small for me to focus on. I was relieved to see I had all 5 gold cards by the end. There was also a section where the character rolls like a tumbleweed through a long scene and had to hit 5 mailbags on posts. This was harder than it sounds given the difficulty in controlling the character and the ease with which he might fall off ledges. (Also, despite being in Free Play, one could not use any other character in this scene).
One thing that was different in many levels of this game is that certain things had to happen in order, even if one didn't actually have to play the whole level out in order to find the Free Play items. I had to replay a few levels more than once because I had inadvertently failed to trigger something that needed to happen before a gold card would show up.
However even the gold card items were, not necessarily easier, but shorter in this game. In most of the LEGO games one has to find 10 of something in each level. In this game it was only 5 plus a pair of pants (which in other games might be Citizen in Peril etc.) One of the hardest parts I had though, at least in Story mode when I didn't yet have Regenerate Hearts or Invincibility, was early on in the Old West level.
This game's unique feature is the "Master Builder" mode, where one stands in a green circle and has to highlight three items, which will then kick off a clip where the character assembles something necessary to move the scene on. The hitch is that one or more items has to be created first, usually by breaking and reassembling something else. But in one scene, your character is being shot by a hovering robot with a laser. It never occurred to me that the robot itself was the third item. And given that one could only stun it for 10 seconds or so, even completing the Master Build was very difficult, much less when the third item seemed nowhere to be found. I think my studs level must have been down to 10% after all the tries I went through to get past that.
Overall the game would have been more enjoyable had the movie's story been more enjoyable. I didn't have much trouble getting through the Story mode without consulting the walkthrough, except in places where I needed to be sure something was supposed to be happening when it didn't seem to be. But it was handy to be sure I'd collected everything I was supposed to in a given place before moving on. And also discovering where those 2 levels were… But having read that the LEGO Movie 2 game wasn't very good and having had more than enough of it after this game, I'm definitely passing on it.
5) Although I made several posts to
common_nature in the past few months, Pillowfort being back is going to make that easier, so I should be making more of these.
View poll: Kudos Footer-281
Comments at Dreamwidth
.