Darklink42

I still wear my shirt out and about in California, but despite there being a couple of people that live or used to live around where I'm at, the only person I've ever run into was Upthorn, who was at a mutual friend's house one time.

I know we've got at least a few dads around here, so report in and be celebrated. It's worth it, because as challenging as it can be, it's still the best feeling in the world when your kid looks you in the eye and says "I love you dad." Or just to see your kid try to shove an entire cookie in their mouth in one go, that's a good one too. Happy Father's Day OCR.

I'm actually really surprised they didn't put Chrom from the newest game in as an upgraded reskin. Still, it's good to see Ike return, I enjoyed playing him when my friends would let me. The guy is a real bruiser.

The Penix?

First this happens when I submit my six year WIP of Traverse Town: Then, when I go back and do some autotuning, I get this in my feedback: This is a major hardware flaw, and frankly I'm surprised no one caught this before release. If my robot reviewer can't even muster the energy to have good dance moves, then I for one, refuse to accept it. Count one of your long time supporters out OCR. There are way better places on the internet that can and will support my amazing talent, and that have people running it who know how to move their head to the rhythm the way this site never will again.

Is anyone going to save poor alfzer0 from off the coast of Southern California? Unless he lives on an oil platform or is a mermaid, I'm assuming he's supposed to be in the vicinity of Santa Barbara. Also, I had no idea Zyko lived up north (and so close). I always assumed he was down in the LA area.

We'll have to rename Northern California at this rate.

I added ya. I also added Damned, Amphibious, Stevo (who had already added me ), Vilecat, Soul Splint, and Kitty. Apparently I've been waiting for The Damned to add me since I last entered numbers in here. Which was something like a year ago. Why can't we be friends The Damned? Edit: my code is 4210-5286-5376

I added a bunch of people too, since I got X for my secret santa gift this year. Need more safari time.

Pics or didn't happen. Glad you liked it and that it didn't get lost somewhere in the crazy winter weather.

Gift is now in the mail. Not sure how long it's going to take to get there, but it's apparently traveling first class, so maybe Monday or Tuesday.

Got the second part of my gift yesterday: it was Pokemon X! Friggin' awesome! Thanks to UnstableHamster (I think) for the great presents. I'll be enjoying the hell out of this game once my finals are all finished. In regards to sending, I'm happy to say that I found time to get my present made for my recipient. Should be able to mail it out by this weekend.

Got my Link, who promptly found the triforce all on his own.

My recipient will have to wait until a little closer to Christmas to receive their gift(s). Downsides of being a college student and all that. It (they) will be worth the wait though.

I'm cool with whatever people want to send my way. I've got a 360, a 3DS, and a steam profile (Which is here). But homemade gifts are also appreciated and very much welcomed too. I'm a huge Zelda fan, obviously. I also dig Kingdom Hearts, Alan Wake, Fire Emblem, and Fallout. If none of those work for you, I've got a two year old daughter, if you want to send something adorable and videogame related for her (She doesn't really have a preference yet, so anything cute works.)

My favorite time of the year. Count me in again.

A friend gave me a mix CD with a bunch of Zelda tunes on it, some from Ocarina of Time, and some that were remixes, probably off of Limewire. I found myself listening to Po!'s (Now posu yun) HyruleCastleDarkWorld a lot, and staring at the website in the description, wondering what the site was. I didn't really trust random links (rimshot) but one boring day, I typed it in to see what it was all about. I kept coming back after that, grabbing new tunes, until at some point I took a look into the forums. Signed up, latched on, and I've sort of been along for the ride in a very minor capacity ever since.

Ever since the writing competition died down, I don't get to see too many writers hanging around here, doing their writerly thing, with the exception of the biographies thread for those guys up in the right hand corner (Which I'm super proud to be a part of upon occasion). I'm not prolific enough to get the creative writing aspect of the community restarted, but for those interested, this is where my work ends up: http://darklink42.tumblr.com/ Yeah, I know it's Tumblr, but rest assured there's maybe two reposts of fan stuff, everything else is one hundred percent my writing (and occasionally other stuff like perler bead projects or my Alan Wake Halloween costume/video.) Feel free to check it out, read something if you've got the time or inclination, and leave commentary or critique if you feel comfortable enough.

I beg to differ, I think you could put a semi-colon there if you wanted but it would be slightly awkward. In this case a full colon would be the best bet. The previous sentence leads up to the explanation of the element within it, in this case Surf, and the description follows after. Someone once said that a colon is kind of like a gate: it opens the previous sentence into the next one without completely stopping the flow.(See what I did there?) On the other hand, if the sentence were phrased a little differently, such that the description of Surf stood alone without leading up to something, a semi-colon would be more appropriate. Say, for instance, "Surf is a powerful attack that some Pikachu(s?) may learn; their ability to crash down on their opponents with the power of Poseidan's might is rare but impressive."

Sorry. I guess I meant to say that to me it's odd, because there's no need to emphasize ownership of something when there is only one such object in existence. If I said "This is my Falchion" it implies that there is another, or several, Falchion somewhere else in the world. Instead, I'd say "This is Falchion, my blade" or "This is my sword, Falchion." The same is true of Excalibur. There was never a twin version of Excalibur in existence in that mythos (despite what RPGs would have us think), so it would be introduced as "Arthur and Excalibur." In short speech, it would even just be "Arthur and his sword", because we know which sword it was he had. Edit: Yes, I believe King is capitalized because it's a title. Edit 2: To further explain, to my knowledge, the emphasis is generally on the holder of the object in this case, not the object itself. The owner may change, but the object does not, hence why the object is given a capitalized, unique name. That being said, it's still an object. So you don't get weird sentences where, for example, "Falchion and its Marth" are a thing either, though you could have "Falchion and its owner/wielder."

Marth's Falchion is "The Falchion" for the purpose of the Fire Emblem series. While there is a sword type of the same name (in real life, not in the game series), the one he uses is a capital lettered sword because there is only one. I agree with Dafydd that it's odd to call it "his" since there is only one, (until Awakening, but that's a different thing) although it should remain capitalized because it's a unique, legendary weapon.

Brandon: I will admit upfront that I didn't read your entire block of text, but I get the gist of what you're saying (I think). I can't argue with you that what we're killing in games is anything more than data, at the end of the day. The reason it remains relevant in videogames, however, where it does not in other media such as videos and text, is that the player is the agent behind the action. We make the choice to pick up a controller and blow people away, and continue to make the choice to do so as we play along. That's a meaningful thing, or at least it ought to be, and I find it far more disturbing when a game offers up hyper-realism in violence, and people defend it wholesale by saying that it's all just fantasy. That's a disconnect from what's going on. I believe that we should always spare at least a small amount of thought to the nature of the story we are creating when we play. I am not in control of Jason when he kills a bunch of teenagers in a movie, but I am in control of (insert character name here) from Call of Duty as he caps several hundred people in the face over the course of a game. This is why scenes like the airport one, or the white phosphorus scene in Spec Ops, held (or were intended to hold) so much power. You, not a character you play, are in control there. Digital or not, you're making choices of a violent nature. Arguments about cartoonish violence (a la Saints Row or GTA to a lesser extent) are valid here, but each person will have their own metric about what they believe approaches the "too far" line. We debate this topic because it's a frighteningly thin line between the agency undertaken in a fantasy and the agency taken in real life. I'd never make the argument that videogames make people more likely to kill in real life, but there's a reason people jump so readily to that explanation, misguided as that may be. If a given person is unlikely to show restraint or morality in their gaming, who's to say they can or will outside of that? (As a hypothetical question.) We cannot enforce a players habits, and we can't inject morality into them either because each person's is there own. We also debate this topic because we need to always have a reminder that it's something that cannot be settled, merely explored. I would be FAR more disturbed if one day we all just stopped questioning and absorbed violence in whatever proportions it was doled out with no further comment.

For me it's a case-by-case basis. I didn't mind Saint's Row 3 because it established for me early on that this was a world in which the sort of ridiculously over the top violence was just that: ridiculous and over the top. It wasn't meant to be taken seriously, and I didn't have much of a problem not taking it seriously. If I'm offered the option of a pacifist run(Iji, Metal Gear, etc.) I tend to take it as much for the challenge as because I like to have a narrative that runs against the shooter mentality now and again. It's good to question the need for violence without having someone tell me that's how it has to be. I couldn't get into Call of Duty: Black Ops because it never once made me question why all the people I was shooting had to die. It was too realistic for me, with none of the invitation to consider the ramifications of what I was doing. On the other hand, cartoonish violence doesn't offend me, though extreme violence tends to be something I avoid overall (organs exploding/bones being shattered/mangled corpses in high detail.) The only game I played that skirted the line enough for me to continue was Dead Island, and that was because it was zombies. I suppose it's kind of a cop out, but violence is a part of human nature, even just in small ways. It's how we come to understand it in ourselves and in our stories that defines how much or how little we can accept. I try not to play games that don't define the ethics and the reasons for the death that they portray when it comes to killing humans. (I say human because fantasy and sci-f tend to involve a lot of monster killing which is, curiously, not even an issue for me.)

I really dug it, even though I've only played the first three levels at the moment. It wouldn't work for me for a long while until I discovered that ad block and it do not get along very well.

That's because he's currently acting as a stand in for all the Square Enix bios we had up there. They asked us to take down all the images of the characters they owned, but since people went to all the trouble of writing bios, those remained.