This question stemmed from a friendly argument my S.O. and I had involving The Sims. She thought it was the weirdest thing ever to try and create myself within the game. I understand the idea of truly creating a new character, but my first impulse is always to create myself and then behave how I normally would in whatever game I'm playing. I don't know if this is laziness on my part, or some sort of subconscious effort to maximize immersion.

Disclaimer: I do often create characters that don't just emulate myself, but it's almost always after I've finished my first play-through. I'm not averse to role-play AT ALL.

I noticed it spans further than character creation too. Like, if there's a pool of characters to pick from, I almost always pick one that looks the most like me, or one that I relate the most with. My S.O. will pick whichever one she's feeling at that time (usually the cutest). I've also noticed that I'm more apt to consistently pick that same character, while she is more likely to switch it up every so often.

One last observation I made that I think ties closely to this topic: When I'm playing a game, my mentality is always "I'm going to do this, then I'm going to do this. Did you see what I just did?!" etc. I see it from a first-person perspective, even if I happened to create a character that does not emulate myself. When she plays, it's always "Look what he's doing, oh man my guy did this" and verbalizes the game from a third-person perspective.

What's your take on this? What's your mentality when you game? Do you think there is a fundamental mental split among players? Is it because I game drastically more than her or started gaming sooner in my life? I'd love to hear some other perspectives on this.

I played the older 2017 demo with 2 characters and really liked the gameplay and visuals. Great old-school feel, yet very polished to feel somehow modern and unique, with novel mechanics like the character-specific skills or "paths" when interacting with NPCs.

I also tried the new June 2018 demo for a few minutes as Tressa. It was fun but jarring with few interactable NPCs and very little in the way of introductory story or cutscenes, fewer than I remembered from the old demo. I wasn't sure if this was because it was still just another demo, so I've decided to hold off and start from scratch in the full game. (The save file carries over from the June demo to the full game.)

I would normally have preordered, except for my extended backlog from the Steam summer sale.

There's a review roundup on Reddit in /r/JRPG: https://old.reddit.com/r/JRPG/comments/8ybg3i/octopath_traveller_review_megathread/ -- looks like a lot of 8's and 9's with a meta score around 84/100.

SSS is finally over and those sweet (although not as sweet as they used to be) deals are gone. What games have you gotten your hands on?

I didn't get too many games this time around. I actually found a bunch of games in my library that I didn't know I had, so I felt like I had enough to play for a while.

Games I bought:

• Stick Fight
• For the King
• Cuphead

From speakers to earphones, how do y’all enjoy your music? I wanna find out what kind of sick rigs that we have on here but also wanna know how many of us aren’t into audio equipment but are super into music.

MIYNT- Baby One More Time
This is is a strange one because it completely changes the mood and not even in an unexpected way. Well, it is unexpected. But given the lyrics (unaltered), it feels much more tone appropriate.

Side note- Max Martin Wrote and co-produced this song and many of britneys stuff, and taylor swift, and many other #1/top10 spots. Mad.

All About That [upright]bass
Who doesn't love upright base?

Redbone | Childish Gambino
I actually heard this one before the orig so this might be a bias for me. But when I finally got around to listening to the orig, it felt empty. Turns out i love those trailing high notes and it wasn't entirely the same feeling without it

That's all I've got for now but I bet a one or two sprung to mind for you

A number of years ago at a family reunion, I remember a rather raucous aunt of mine who sat at the table gloating that she reads “so many books.” After she thoroughly disparaged society for its preference of films, television, and video games, etc., it was revealed that the entire corpus of what she reads is harlequin romance novels.

Being the shy and tepid fellow that I was, I didn’t call her out on her somewhat vapid achievement. But, the thought that crossed my mind was, “Two hours spent watching ‘A Clockwork Orange’ or ‘Lawrence of Arabia’ would be a much more rewarding and mentally invigorating experience than spending six hours filling my head with the risqué adventures of Fabio.”

To which, this (kind of) opens up a question about the worth of the medium that we use for storytelling. Is there intrinsic value in written stories versus audio/visual ones? Often enough, a film will be adapted from a book. The sentiment that frequently seems to follow is, “the book is better than the movie.” Is this because we value books as a format more? Is it the greater degree of detail? Perhaps our “mind’s eye” creates a more appealing interpretation than a film director ever could? Or maybe it just makes us feel good to say that we like to read.

I’m just using the books and movies dynamic as an example. The truth is that we can have this debate about all forms of artistic medium, whether it is live theater, television series, poems, music, radio plays; the list goes on. Marshall McLuhan famously coined the phrase, “The medium is the message.” How true is this, and how does it affect how we value each different kind of medium? What are your thoughts?

We've been having a smattering of art, poetry, and photo participation posts, such as this, and this, and this, and this.

We seem to have enough ~tilders to have a schedule of sorts, but not enough to have each activity every week. How about we rotate weekly activities for a while and see how it goes? I'm thinking we have enough interest for a series of visual/craft based threads and a series of writing based threads. For example:

July 3-9th Photography (subject exploration or technique)
July 10-16th What are you making now?/Speedart
July 17-23rd Photography (topic or equipment)
July 24-30th What are you making now?/Media challenge

July 3-9th Freestyle Writing (up to a thousand words)
July 10-16th Themed Drabbles
July 17-23rd Poetry format challenge
July 24-30th It was a dark and stormy night

Please note that these are suggestions and not an arbitrary bid to codify content or become TEH LEADER. I just think it would be fun to have an activity to look forward to every week. We could even just sign up for hosting a week's topic, and whoever is in charge of the week picks the activity.

What does everyone think?