I am also one of those people, and I yell all the louder because no one's taken me up on it. Probably because I yell at them so much. It's a vicious circle.

Saw some cool folk making cool things at Hand and Eye Society's Wordplay 2015 in Toronto. Beyond that, didn't get much a chance for anything game-related this week.

I can relate to that all too well. My general solution is to have so many games of that type going that when I fail in one, I can switch to another, so that any one failure isn't too soul-crushing.
That leads to its own kind of addiction, though. Currently, on my phone, I have Candy Crush, Zookeeper, Super Glyph…

I think so. Spock and Kirk get around.

Um. Fair point.

I really like Catherine. More bizarre gothy puzzle games/life simulators should get big releases.

It Follows is now on (Canadian) Netflix, and I watched it with my roommate. I liked it a lot more than she did, as I've got a little more sympathy for the "precocious twenty somethings quote poetry and are awkward" thing the film was going on. Overall, though, I thought the central conceit was a cool idea for a horror…

Right. If you want a scholarly take on it, Henry Jenkins has a whole chapter on that history, in his book Textual Poachers.

It's more complicated than I have the knowledge or ability to explain, but the bare bones of it is that China was undergoing a series of internal wars from about 1850 on during the period where Japan was comparatively occupied with unifying, and seeking to expand.

Although from what I understand, it was originally used mostly to describe two male characters together, and gradually came to mean any pairing.

I'd say he sounds in the ballpark of his Captain Hammer character (arrogance, but with more refinement)—which is still him doing a voice.

I think my favorite development over the past decade or so in television is that following showrunners can be a thing now. (To a greater degree, at least.)

Soos' delivery is what really sells that line.

Yeah, Dipper acknowledging the parallels between him and Gideon is a great character moment for him—I think I wanted Gideon to do a good turn just as a reward, of sorts.

I remember that show freaking me out in a way so thorough I made my parents stop the movie halfway through, and I've now blanked all memory of *why* it freaked me out. (Please don't tell me.)

That sounds right.

That's true. It's probably telling that in both, the darkest things are what Pratchett takes directly from the real world.

How did you find the Chalker? I love his sci-fi ideas and the weirdness of his stories, but I did most of my reading of him in my teens. Returning to him as adult is… harder. In When the Changewinds Blow, for example, it's hard to shake the notion that this is a middle-aged man writing very enthusiastically about…

I enjoyed it, especially the glimpses into Chinese history that get woven into the narrative. The main character does suffer a bit with the sort of obliviousness that means you tend to figure out the plot long before he does, and you have to wait for him to catch up.

For pure fun, I like the Maurice story better of his YA work, but the Aching series is some of my favorite Pratchett. It's interesting that the Tiffany Aching series, while starting as sort of children's books, wind up dealing with themes darker than main series; by book four, there's a very thorough episode on…