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Here is one of many videos showing what you can do with the fresnel lens from a huge projection TV. (To be clear, the big screen TV in this episode isn’t this kind of unit and I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t have this kind of lens in it.) Still, if you did find such a thing, it would be amazingly useful here in post-zombie world.
Autoblography

The story of me. If you're looking for a picture of what it was like growing up in the seventies, then this is for you.
Gamers Aren’t Toxic

This is a horrible narrative that undermines the hobby through crass stereotypes. The hobby is vast, gamers come from all walks of life, and you shouldn't judge ANY group by its worst members.
Marvel's Civil War

Team Cap or Team Iron Man? More importantly, what basis would you use for making that decision?
Project Frontier

A programming project where I set out to make a gigantic and complex world from simple data.
The Loot Lottery

What makes the gameplay of Borderlands so addictive for some, and what does that have to do with slot machines?
I gotta get me one of those lenses.
In real life or a zombie apocalypse, I’d say the best source of fresnel lenses would be a school with a bunch of overhead projectors. The ones in those are less unwieldy than the big screen TV lenses (which you won’t be able to get much longer, since the kind of TV used isn’t in production anymore, are they?).
If it’s not a zombie apocalypse and you still want them, make sure the school is selling the projectors before making off with them.
But if you take those projectors, how will the zombie teachers instruct the zombie kids how to properly conjugate “brains” and “mmmrr”?
I’ll give some of them back if they tell me how they’re making electricity to run them in the first place. :)
And don’t forget to let the fan run for a few minutes after or you’ll wreck the light bulb!
OHPs aren’t made any more either, so you’d be unlikely to find either of them in a near-future apocralypse.
Most schools now use data projectors, because it’s much better for the teacher to spend the first ten minutes of any lesson fighting Windows’ copy protection to get a usable image on the screen.
That said, the lenses in a data projector are much higher quality, albeit smaller.
If you like the video of the solar powered oven, then you’ll love the one with the solar foundry. Please note the burn marks seared into the cinder block.
My goodness. That just massively incresed the anticipation of the move next month, after which I can finally restart science-ing.
Joel: Don’t Open, Dead Inside
“Don’t dead, open inside?”
Joel: Don’t open, there is only Dead Space inside.
Eh! Eh! Get it?
How many shivs is one sid worth?
We’ll count them later, just keep stabbing.
“And then I bumble out,a bearded overweight nerd,and everyone just laughs”
And then Chris starts throwing his shivs,killing them all,and then he feasts on their flesh.”Told you Im 20 shivs”.
I know what you’re thinking. “Did he throw 20 shivs? or 19?” Well let me ask you something; do you feel lucky, punk.
So,how did bill plan to use a trucks battery in a car?
Also,I think we have reached the time where we shouldnt be making apocalypse games in modern times,because while you could fix a car on your own in the 80s and 90s,modern cars wont even let you change the tires without specialized equipment.
Can’t you just hook it up with jumper cables and keep the battery in the passenger compartment? As long as it’s 12 volts, there shouldn’t be that much of an issue.
eeehhnnn…. maybe. I mean part of the problem with low-voltage DC as a means of transmission is that it’s REALLY sensitive to conductor resistance, which you get from wires and connections being either too small or too long for a given load (which, in the case of starting a car, is a LOT). Dropping a volt from 200v AC is trivial. Dropping a volt from 12.5 to 11.5 might mean the difference between starting and not.
The battery in my car genuinely is under the passenger seat, so this idea really isn’t as daft as it sounds.
You could easily fit one several times the size if you removed the seat completely.
However, the important bit is that a modern car battery is heavy, and a post-apocralyptic home-made battery is going to be heavier still. So whatever you do with it, you’d better strap it down tightly!
Huge props to Randy for maintaining that authentic Season 1 mic quality!
20 Shivs sounds like a Borderlands mini-boss. Probably made a bunch of them into a shiv afro.
I have to disagree with Campster and reiterate what I wrote last week: it is perfectly rational for Joel to be reluctant to give Ellie a firearm. Friendly fire, accidental discharge, unnecessary use that may attract more enemies… That’s a lot of risks that come when you hand a gun to an untrained person.
Except that she is not untrained.She is a kid born into this world,so assuming that she doesnt know how to use a gun is like assuming a 20th century kid is illiterate,or 21st century kid doesnt know how to use a computer.Those cases do exist,but they are an exception,not the norm.
I don’t think its crazy to assume that a 14 year old kid, whose barely even left the city, hasn’t used a gun before. Besides, Joel has no reason to give her a gun anyway. He’s the most experienced and proficient out of the two so it makes sense for him to be the one who does all the shooting.
Also, shooting a gun doesn’t mean you have training.
But it’s negated because he gives her a gun later and she’s good with it and none of the bad things happen. I mean worst comes to worst, you give her a gun and tell her not to use it unless it’s absolutely necessary. She’s clearly smart enough to understand that, it doesn’t waste ammo, draw attention and it avoids the situation where Ellie has her face gnawed off and Joel stands there thinking ‘well I guess it would have been better if she’d had _something_ to defend herself with’
I commented in the last post, I think he does it because he doesn’t want Ellie to be a real person who will get involved in his life. If he had his way she’d be no different from an inanimate object. When Ellie does get her gun the game is definitely playing up the ‘Joel is willing to let her enter his life now’ angle
But he only gives her a gun then because he had no choice. He needed someone to cover him. Before that part it makes no sense to give her a gun since you’re with Tess at first and later on you’re with Bill. It’s completely unnecessary to give her a gun when two people are doing just fine.
“It's completely unnecessary to give her a gun when two people are doing just fine.”
I see we’re redefining “just fine” now.
Besides, with three people with guns, “just fine” becomes “And nobody is worried about getting their neck bitten by a Clicker anymore”.
Well… Exactly how fine they are doing is entirely dependent on Josh, but it would be unkind to harp on this point, as I enjoy watching the show…
Not entirely,seeing how tess got bitten.I mean if “they are doing fine because as soon as one of them died another person got drafted” is considered fine…
I can see that.That explanation suits the narrative well.
Once agin, Daemian, we don’t have the same idea of how an oppressive military regime works. I can’t really see the soldiers in the quarantine zone handing guns to kids and saying “Go ahaead and learn how to use those, it’ll come in handy later when you become a smuggler outlaw.”
Is it a useful skill to have in their world? Certainly.
Did Ellie learn to shoot? We have to assume yes since when she is called upon to do so, she does well. But still, I have to assume that the training she received must have been not nearly as much as you might want.
By that same token, Joel should have taken Bill’s gun away as soon as he blew their cover at the start of the backyard section. Or when they got rushed by that small pack and he refused to pull the trigger – he obviously has no idea what he’s doing.
I’m just glad the situation changes later on, this whole not giving her any means of self defense thing seems really out of place in this world. In fact, so many things seem out of place for what this world is supposed to be that I’m having a difficult time watching the playthrough. I’m amazed at the plot holes and inconsistencies that I missed seeing it for the first time, incredible what novelty and a bit of emotional tension can do to cloud logic.
Not giving Ellie a gun isn’t a plot hole. He’s doing it for emotional reasons and as a character it makes sense for him to have those reasons.
Aren’t Ellie and Whatsherface from the DLC in military school before the events of the main game? Presumably they have some firearms training.
Not necessarily, no
Except that he also refuses to give her a bow, which she DOES have training with, can’t give their position away, and uses ammo that is otherwise useless. There’s no reason not to have Ellie armed by this point.
(Also, Joel is clearly terrible with a bow.)
Also, this. *At the very least*, give her one of the melee weapons.
She does have the infini-shiv, that is her switchblade, so I think she’s fine on melee weapons. I’d say that while there are perfectly valid concerns for Joel to not give her a weapon the reason he doesn’t is pretty clearly due to how he views her rather than any pragmatic standpoint.
Isn’t it amazing how many guns and how much ammo is found lying around in the post-apocalyptic United States, and yet there is a single switchblade in the whole country!
I’m thinking back to the bit where they meet Bill. When Bill handcuffs Ellie she hits him on the head with a pipe. What would she do if she had a gun? Imagine if she panicked and shot him, or tried to threaten him with it, causing him to panic? It wouldn’t be entirely unreasonable, given that she has a bite mark and may not trust Joel to sort the situation out, but it would also have created more problems for them.
I wonder if that scene was supposed to reinforce the “not giving Ellie a gun” angle, or if it’s unrelated.
Wow, I was actually going to come into the comments and make a joke about looking at Detroit to see what a real post-apocalypse would look like when Shamus was talking about it.
That log Josh jumps over at 2:24? I went the long way round through the zombie infested garden instead because games have drummed it into my head that that sort of thing is an invisible wall.
If I recall correctly,you are younger than Josh.So is this a generational thing?Josh growing up with games that had the jump button and so he bunny hops everywhere,while you grew up with games that dont have such things?
It’s probably more just a passing moment of sillyness, but it is an interesting idea.
My formative games were probably during the peak of awful invisible walls, after bunny hopping died out but before context-sensitive climbing/disguising walls better. 2005ish Resident Evil 4 era.
It is always a massive pain to try to figure out exactly what level of non-intuitive game logic you are dealing with. It’s usually not a problem because most games seem to operate on about the same level, until you do something that you hadn’t thought possible and suddenly your entire world view is shattered. I usually just blame a poor tutorial section but god help you if you’re playing an adventure game.
I don’t really like how ammo works in the game. If you’re stealthing through it then almost no-one drops ammo, so you don’t recover your ammo from all the battles. If you do fight every battle then ammo drops way more frequently.
I guess they probably design it so that ammo drops depending on how much you’re running out and then it’s weighted to make you feel like you never have _quite_ enough ammo to be safe. It’s one of those situations where I want nice things to happen to me for not using ammo, whereas the game wants me to feel a particular feeling anyway.
Yeah, it’s understandable where they’re coming from, but obnoxious all the same. It’s the problem of maintaining difficulty when the whole situation is contrived to start with.
Kinda reminds me of public school – if you don’t do well they’ll slow it down just enough so that you can barely manage to understand, and if you do well they’ll pile on the busy work until they see you struggling to their standards.
The key is that you all feel equally overwhelmed and frustrated. Still, makes the game incredibly obnoxious once you see how it’s rigged. And then there’s no incentive to put any effort into it, knowing you’ll be stuck in the same situation either way. The only difference being if you screw around and halfass everything you’re not quite so worn out by the end of the level. Quite a lame way to set up a system.
Hold on why doesn’t Joel have a good knife? A decent knife that is well kept can last a long time. Heck even Ellie has a knife in her segments. I mean he was a smuggler nobody was selling a decent knife? No Joel just keep making shiv that last a long as a pencil.
Of all the game magic, this was the only one that actually bothered me some times (well that and the ammo). I really don’t care about the bricks, the game always litters the areas with them and its easy enough to get by without one. But its just frigging weird that he can’t find himself a knife that can stand being used more than twice.
Ha! I just posted the exact same comment in an earlier thread. I guess it’s too much to expect that it’s a sarcastic comment at a United States so obsessed with guns that they have forgotten about the lethality of other weapons.
Man, near the end there Joel really…lost face
Kudos, sir. Nicely done.
I like how right at the part where Campster’s talking about how ridiculous the paths are, Ellie asks about it in the game, and Bill replies with “I’ve got some idea who might have come through here.”
“It was Twenty Shivs. That crazy bastard.”
So I don’t know if it’s been brought up before, but this episode had me really annoyed every time Joel would have his rifle out and be shooting, and then holster it so he could punch zombies. I get that that would completely break the “disposable melee weapon” concept of the game if he could just shatter jaws with the butt of the rifle, but…
Dude, have you realized how durable everything in this game is? If Joel were to start smacking people with his rifle then it would be seconds before it disintegrates into dust!