mdnthrvst

@defenestr8ed: All trend-setters act like hipsters. Our community creates something novel and quirky, and the world-at-large takes it out of context and fawns over it and eventually gets bored of it, and our special thing is dead. Luckily we're creative and impatient enough by that point to be working on the next major "meme" for Reddit or NeoGAF to steal, though hopefully not.

Even that awful flap over the Bioware writer that got Reddit a pile of shit originated on 4chan's /v/ a year before, though no one pays attention to /v/ except Reddit, so that by the time the scandal erupted, they took the brunt of the sanctimonious editorials and shaming.

@ReverendHunt said:

@mdnthrvst: Do you have a different definition of mythos than the dictionary? Because that's precisely what Slender Man has evolved into.

It seems like everything original and unique to arise from SA and 4chan earns its own 'mythos' at some point - the outside majority are wowed and amazed, and as its popularity soars, it loses its soul. By the time Nacy Pelosi was Rickrolling people, this was fairly obvious. I guess that's the fate of all trend-setters, and we are their online incarnation.

It's a good thing we still have the SCP Foundation to entertain ourselves. There's something that'll blow your mind.

>mythos

Really? This was always just a joke. EVERYTHING was always just a joke.

Typical outsiders interpreting things far more seriously and reverentially than they were ever meant to be.

@Crixaliz: The only issue with that PSN vs XBL argument being the critical mass of people. More people play multiplayer games over Xbox Live than PSN, and most of those people probably include the majority of a given person's friends.

I enjoy Call of Duty and Assassin's Creed once in a while, but it's always with random strangers, because my friends are on the Xbox. That and the superb implementation of Gamerscore and Achievements over pointless and cumbersome Trophies make Xbox Live a superior service, period, unless you're super into arthouse indie singleplayer games, which I'd give up in a heartbeat to play major games with my real-life friends and classmates.

So I was just curious how many Bombers out there are in this for the lore, seeing as 4chan and (obviously) the Official Forums contain a great many lorefiends in addition to average players. I came up with a list of twenty esoteric terms - metaphysical, divine, sorcerous, historical - to test one's judgment of the deeper lore that perhaps can't be grasped from ANY game. I have purposefully omitted most Skyrim content, as the Nightingales and Ysgramor and Potema and such will be familiar to a great many who would otherwise ignore such history. Anyone who knows ten of these knows their stuff:

Enantiomorph. The Wheel. Ehlnofex. Vehk. Zero-Sum. Dreamsleeve transmission. The Scripture of Love. Muatra. Trinimac. The Potentate. Ordinators-in-Mourning. The Prolix Tower. PSJJJ. Michael Kirkbride. Dragon Break. Baar Dau/Lie Rock. Yokuda. Cyrus. Duke Brindisi Dorom. Tsaesci.

How do you fare?

EDIT: Badly. Oh well, it's the wrong audience. Just for kicks, have a read-through of this and tell us what you think:

http://pastebin.com/xXk4YYXj

JUST FOR KICKS, and to satisfy anyone I mystified, here all ALL of those terms, laid out:

____________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Enantiomorph - One of the Walking Ways to Reach Heaven by Violence. It involves emulating the original mythic struggle between Anu and Padomay, to gain power from it; Walk like them until they walk like you; Talos is Arctus is Ysmir, etc.

The Wheel - The Aurbis; the eight spokes being the Aedra, the sixteen spaces between the spokes the Daedra, and the hub at the center being Nirn. Everything.

Ehlnofex - The language of the Earth Bones, the Ehlnofey, the original mortal race of Mundus.

Vehk - Vivec, the Magic Hermaphrodite, Master of Morrowind, and Warrior-Poet of the Tribunal.

Zero-Sum - the only way to die in the Aurbis.

Dreamsleeve transmission - top-secret, quasi-long-distance communication protocol involving the Dreamsleeve, the 'recycler' of Souls.

The Scripture of Love - Sermon 35 of The Thirty-Six Lessons of Vivec.

Muatra - Vivec's "spear".

Trinimac - Auri-El's champion, who was eaten by Boethiah and transformed into Malacath; his followers became the Orsimer.

The Potentate - the Second Era Akaviri ruler of Tamriel, who masterminded the assassination of Emperor Reman Cyrodiil and ushered in the Second Era.

Ordinators-in-Mourning - the Indoril warrior-priests of Necrom, tasked with guarding that sacred city of the Tribunal.

The Prolix Tower - Another of Vehk's Walking Ways to Reach Heaven by Violence; little is known of it, aside from it involving a lot of talking.

PSJJJ - the most sacred of the Eleven Forces, which was corrupted into "Psijic" and later "Sithis". Unpronounceable.

Michael Kirkbride - the developer who wrote ALL this shit.

Dragon Break - a sundering of Time; a temporary event wherein Akatosh loses control of Time and it becomes non-linear. A small Dragon Break was what caused Alduin to be flung into the future.

Baar Dau/Lie Rock; either flung to Vivec City or the child by anal sex of Vivec and Molag Bal; it is a rock hanging above Vivec City in the form of the Ministry of Truth.

Yokuda - the original home of the Redguards, mysteriously destroyed.

Cyrus - Redguard hero, protagonist of TESA: Redguard.

Duke Brindisi Dorom - Duke of Mournhold, killed at the end of the First Era by a temper tantrum of Mehrunes Dagon that also happened to destroy Old Mournhold.

Tsaesci - the vampiric snakemen of Akavir, of whom the Potentate is their most famous individual.

@Leptok said:

This is basically propaganda, but it makes a great read as well:

Sins of a Solar Spymaster #78: The Extortion of Empire

An outbreak of rare peace across nullsec has unleashed upon New Eden a wave of macro-level market manipulations that have already begun to reshape the power relations between hisec and nullsec. Five critical events have coincided with this peace, two from CCP and three from nullsec blocs: the mineral supply changes in the Escalation patch released April 24th, a crackdown on botting and RMT by CCP’s security division, the creation of OTEC - a price-fixing cartel which controls the Technetium supply - the Sack of Jita, and the newly bloc-sponsored Hulkageddon .

So: the Sack of Jita was only the tip of the iceberg, the birth-scream of a new economic era that was only hinted at during the Ice Interdiction. Nullsec now sends gankers into hisec to disrupt an already thin mineral supply and bankrolls freelancers via Hulkageddon to destroy miners en masse; each exhumer destroyed can only be replaced by production that requires cartelized Technetium, which goes right into the pockets of the very people bankrolling the gankers. A tremendous amount of uncertainty now hangs over the head of every hisec trade hub and each producer within it, as if Jita can be sacked, perhaps Amarr, Rens, or Dodixie could be next - and that uncertainty drives prices up still more. I can state affirmatively that there will be more ‘burns’ of trade hubs by nullsec alliances, but future attacks will not come with two months of warning - if there is any notice at all.

http://www.tentonhammer.com/eve/spymaster/78

Those are quite possibly the illest two paragraphs I've ever read.

Someone in the community should just craft a novel out of all this economic and corporate intrigue. I'd read that in a heartbeat, 'cause there's no way I'd EVER play EVE Online.

Ohh, Reddit, you're our favorite punching bag.

We beat you at Tribes, we beat you at humor, and now, even after WE coined Hamburger Helper, and stoked those first fires of righteous indignation, you are the ones who take the bullet for us.

Your boundless and eternal gratitude, /v/

@ArbitraryWater said:

a return to the first two Zelda games is asking for a return to the franchise before it truly defined itself

That's what he's saying, that the way Zelda has 'defined itself' is fundamentally broken and misguided. He's not proposing that it can be undone, just calling it out for what it is.

"Link must be allowed to enter areas he’s not ready for. He must be allowed to be defeated, not blocked, by the world and its inhabitants.

This world, dangerous, demanding exploration, must also be mysterious. This means: illegible, at least at first.

...You had to keep track of where you were, explore every corner, and fight your ass off. In fact, mastering Link’s position on screen, in the game’s gridlike space, was key to fighting effectively. It was, and is, a surprisingly coherent, unified experience. It was, unapologetically, an action-adventure game. And a fuller, more complete experience in 1987 than anything Skyward Sword, and its magic stick, apes today."

So basically Mr. Thomson wants The Legend of Zelda to be Dark Souls. Way to miss the point.

I concur with Playing Favorites.