Atlas

Best stand-ups I've seen live are Bill Bailey (going again in June), Ross Noble, and Dara O'Briain.

In terms of one routine from anything, I'm going with the "what time is it" routine from The Goon Show, series 7, episode 18, "The Mysterious Punch-Up-The-Conker".

Scene, Eccles and Bluebottle are in the ground floor attic of a local clock repairers. The scene opens with dozens of clocks chiming and going off at the same moment. Then a comedy horn, then silence before the first line:

Bluebottle: "What time is it, Eccles?"

Eccles: "Uh, just a minute, I've got the time written down here on a piece of paper. (pause for applause) A nice man wrote the time down for me this morning".

BB: "Wait a minute Eccles, my good man...it's writted (sic) on this bit of paper, what is eight o'clock, is writted"

E: "I know that my good fellow. That's right, when I asked the fella to write it down, it was eight o'clock"

BB: "Well then what happens if someone asks you the time and it isn't eight o'clock?"

E: "Well then I don't show it to them!"

(Pause)

BB: "Well, how do you know when it's eight o'clock?"

E: "Because I've got it written down on a piece of paper!

Maybe this makes me a sociopath, but the more I think about it, I'd like GBi much more without the voting element. The randomness is what I want from it - I want to be able to drift in at a random time and see what's going on and chat with folks. I don't like that certain videos or categories of videos are such overwhelming favourites when they come up in polls, and I hated the series feature. I might have had a different tone if the series that got chosen were more to my interest, which is selfish, I know, but knowing that GBi was going to be non-stop Metal Gear Scanlon for 2 days was miserable. And then the P4 ER started, and my reaction was much the same. I was happier with Demo Derby, because that's a series that I actually enjoy and think works for GBi due to being more varied rather than just being one game/series and the same people for 24+ hrs, which is what I really dislike.

It's obvious that we need to find the solution that's going to make the most people happy most of the time, and I am willing to admit that my position is a fairly extreme one. The people who want marathons should get their marathons. I've been on both sides of the "why would anyone vote for this?" debates - I ask myself that every time a "Talking Over E3 press conference" or "random episode from the middle of an Endurance Run" is chosen, but then I'll vote for a Game Room video and whenever that happens I see people in chat completely baffled as to why it won. The truth is, there is content that I want to watch and there is content that I don't, and that's the case for most people, I'm sure. I want GBi to be a chill, fun place to hang out and watch GB content, and I think that's what everyone wants.

Man, y'all really like action movies.

If the idea is films that helped shaped, or best reflect, our personalities, then mine would probably be:

Once Upon a Time in the West (historical, sprawling epic, understated, expertly crafted. As far as I'm concerned, the greatest film ever made).

Monty Python's The Life of Brian (sense of humour. The three things that most informed my sense of humour are Monty Python, The Simpsons, and The Goon Show. I never saw The Simpsons film and the only Goons film is pretty bad. All three Python films are amazing but Brian is my favourite).

Princess Mononoke (fantasy, also historical, magic, mystery, my love of Studio Ghibli runs deep but this was the first one I ever saw and is still my favourite).

The Social Network (probably a landmark film in terms of defining my taste in cinema. Also a very powerful character study for me as someone with Asperger's syndrome who had to learn that it's not cool to be a Mark Zuckerburg).

Ask me on a different day, and Star Wars or The Lord of the Rings (Two Towers, I guess) may well be on this list, and Mononoke or Social Network would be off. Or maybe Life of Brian would be replaced by Holy Grail, or maybe even Airplane!. The only one that is truly unimpeachable is Once Upon a Time.

I know it's tough, but it is very important to separate the personality from the products. We all want to believe in Dave Lang and Iron Galaxy, but their track record on things aside from ports is not great, and they clearly made a massive mistake by pricing the game so high. Even if it is longer than 4 hours, it's very hard to justify $60/£45 for a game that doesn't have many hours of singleplayer content or has multiplayer, and getting any kind of negative buzz can be a killer. It's fairly obvious that the project turned out to be a boondoggle, and that's a shame.

If you're going to release a game even though you know it's a dud, why wouldn't you sell the game for a lower price point? You can surely recoup more losses by setting the price point lower and selling to a wider market than sticking to $60 and competing with AAA heavy hitters, and it's a better look for customer relations as well.

My thing with 12 vs. 24 hour is that when using language to explain time, I prefer 12 hour - it's better to say 9pm than 2100 or whatever - but I use a 24-hour clock on my computer, my phone, and my alarm clock so visually I prefer a 24-hour clock. I think in general we Brits much prefer to use 12-hour clocks because it's what we're used to. But this isn't something I feel very passionately about, and if 12-hour timekeeping dies because everyone has digital timekeeping, I'll shed not a tear.

But the real question here is Swatch internet time - is that still a thing? I remember Jeff would often bring it up when discussing time, dunno if that's because he thinks it's genuinely better or if he just thinks it's funny.

If someone expects me to do something at 6 o'clock in the morning, then they can fuck right off. As others have said, the vast vast majority of time people can infer from context without having to think about whether someone means AM or PM. Also, it's still fewer syllables to say "six pee em" than it is to say "eight-teen hun-dred hours", which is 5 and a half syllables.

I hate that I know imperial better than metric for certain things. I grew up using stone, pounds, and ounces for weight, and feet and inches for height, but I can't really think in feet and inches for distance - easier for me to think in metres. But my main points of reference for the weight and height of a person are pro wrestling and American football, so I know what my height - 6"2 - means but don't really know what 1.89m means. In the UK, we're sort of all over the place with what units we use; we still use miles instead of kilometres, but I know litres better than pints/gallons/floz. I'd be in favour of switching everything to metric to be in line with the rest of Europe, even though it would probably give me more of a headache than most people of my generation.

Also the temperature should be in Celsius.

And the first day of the week is Monday, and that is a hill that I am willing to die on.

Oh, and here's a quote from FX's Archer, season five:

Malory: "Metric? Who uses metric?"

Lana: "Every single country on the planet, except for us, Liberia, and Burma".

Archer: "Wow, really? Coz you never think of those other two as having their shit together".

yeah

I just beat The Awakened One for the first time. It was also the first time I got the Block deck to work, and it really worked. The second form of the boss came back and I killed it in one turn - my block was over 300. This game feels so fucking good when a deck comes together.

Cats. Always had cats in the house growing up. We have two now, and they're probably the best pets I could ever have. Always get neutered males, brothers, at least two, 8-10 weeks old - if you socialise them a bit they'll end up extremely affectionate and loving. Our current cats are also very low maintenance - we don't have a litter tray in the house because they poop outside, and one of them has never been to the vet except for annual check-ups (the other has been in fights and gotten infected wounds). One of them is a ginger cat we called Garfield, so when during the third Garfield with Gerstmann episode when Jeff talked about how lame it is when people name their cat Garfield, I was deeply offended.

I would love to have a dog, but it's such a commitment.

I'm at nearly 50 hours played, and I think the game is fantastic, but I totally agree with your two main points. I've got 10 victories on base difficulty, 5 with each class, probably 3-4 of those are daily challenges - I have NEVER beaten the Awakened One. It was especially disheartening to get to the final boss with a really good Silent poison build, only to learn that the Awakened One loses all poison when entering stage two - I died a couple of turns later. I often end up in poison when playing Silent because I feel like it's easier to get cards that are functional even if you don't get the best relics or pay-off cards - obviously it's amazing when you DO get to Burst-Catalyst a boss and take them from 25 poison to 225 poison in one turn, but especially early on you can build a decent deck just by prioritising defensive cards and any spell that adds poison. I've found it much harder to get the Discard-and-draw and the Shiv decks to work (I don't know if the community has codified names for the archetypes, but I think y'all know what I mean), although the one really good Shiv build I ended up with felt SO GOOD. I haven't yet had to face Time Eater with a Shiv deck, but I'm sure it's utterly miserable.

As for Ironclad, I feel like I end up drafting cards with a good square power level first and trying to build a synergy second, which is probably the wrong way to do it. I have never gotten the Block deck to work because it requires you to go all-in on the strategy, but I've had several runs where I picked up good Exhaust cards or Pain cards and they were good even though I didn't build a particularly strong synergy. Brutality is a really good card by itself, especially when it's upgraded and in your opening hand every game, but some of the best Ironclad runs I've had are ones where I've gotten Rupture to go off with Combust, Brutality, Offering, etc., ending the fight with like 30-40 strength. Evolve is now completely useless since they nerfed it.

I didn't come to the game from Hearthstone but I used to play a ton of MTG. Magic is definitely a game that struggles with the balance of flat power level vs. powerful synergies, and one of the things that turned me off the game was how hard they started pushing in the direction of synergy, especially in limited (draft and sealed). I'm not sure it's a problem that Slay the Spire can solve when you consider that synergy requires cards AND relics, but I do feel like having bosses that punish certain linear deck builds makes the problem feel worse. When you're drafting a Magic format, you're usually sitting at a table with seven other people, and reading signs and signals is extremely important - almost every format has 1-2 decks that work around cards that nobody else would want to put in their deck because they do such a specific thing, so if you're seeing certain cards go around you can read the signals and try and move in on certain archetypes, knowing that you'll get passed cards that only you want while other people fight over cards that have a higher flat power level. But when you're drafting a deck from pure randomness, you miss out on all that; you have all the frustration of those drafts where your synergy-based deck doesn't have enough pieces to go off, without the satisfaction of being the one at the table that saw the deck was open and moved in on it.

I think there's a good chance that the devs will review the situation in the near future and try and find some better solutions, but at the moment they seem to be more focused on making the game more feature-complete; the improvements to the daily climbs in the last couple of patches have been really good.