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Zelda games have a lot of interesting implementation details. You might also be interested in Twilight Princess Eyes Breakdown: http://www.benjones.us/twilight-princess-eyes-breakdown/

Well, of course. That is how fandom works. I don't particularly care if Bella gets with Jacob or Edwards, but I don't like the Twilight books. In order to dislike a particular team/company/entity, you probably have to passionate about the field in general.

Labyrinth is indeed brilliant. The best wargames recreate history and suck you in. Twilight Struggle is another excellent example. But that's also the highest level of complexity I'll tolerate. Friends of mine enjoy the super detailed a rule for everything games but I think those are better left for the digital realm...just too fiddly for my taste.

I'm an avid gamer (>150 games in my collection) but I only own three war games. Twilight Struggle, Napoleon's Triumph and Maria. I'd recommend all of them :)

Andean Abyss is on my to buy list.

Edit:
Link to BGG, wargames only: http://boardgamegeek.com/wargames/browse/boardgame

> Tinder isn't about "mating", it's about hook-ups (primarily)

You can separate sex from mating in your conscious mind but most of your mind is not conscious.

Your view of human behavior is overly simplistic/idealized. We don't choose what we find attractive and most of what motivates us are chemical systems that are beyond our understanding. You can consciously posit that sex is "something pleasurable that people do to feel good" but that's how not how you, or anyone, really feels about sex if you go even an inch below the surface.

> This is obviously fallacious. Women and men often both desire very smiliar things in a relationship, known as the ability to reciprocate. Whether that's emotional support, working a job, or giving oral sex.

"The ability to reciprocate" is a pretty broad category. What men find attractive in women is very different from what women find attractive in men. If you want to learn about what women find attractive in men, there's a billion dollar industry that caters to women's fantasies. Read Twilight, 50 Shades of Grey, or nearly any romance novel.

This is awesome. Twilight Struggle is one of my favourite games and the other implementations I have played are wrapped-up in too many unnecessary flourishes -- useless sound effects and video -- this looks clean and puts gameplay first. The focus is where it needs to be. I will definitely be using this.

The idea behind the blockchain is interesting too. Looking forward to hearing more discussion from people in the blockchain space about whether we can actually do this on POW and POS chains and whether the critique of bitcoin here is valid.

I used to be, too. Here are the two easy steps I took to break that habit:

1. Start reading Atlas Shrugged. When John Galt starts making his speech, skip to the next chapter. You have now gained the ability to skip pieces of a book that are really, incredibly tedious.

2. Start reading Twilight. When it starts feeling like torture to continue, stop. Use the rest as fire starters for your grill. You have gained the ability to not read books you discover that you don't like.

Take those unfinished off the shelf and get rid of them. Sell them to the used independent. Donate them. Burn them. Landfill them. Whatever. You can reclaim that shelf space for books you not only want to finish, but re-read and finish again.

You're confusing "quality literature" with "books people like to read." They aren't the same (though they may overlap).

The Da Vinci Code keeps a frenetic pace that makes "quality" secondary, and quite difficult to achieve. (I would submit that The Bourne Supremacy is superior in both pacing and quality, however).

Harry Potter is insanely accessible and easy to read, and has a very surprising amount of internal consistency, even over 7 books (which is in stark contrast to most mainstream sci-fi/fantasy series).

As for Twilight, I don't know what makes a book appeal to that demographic, but it seems pretty different than any area I've dabbled in as a reader.

(I worry that giving opinions like these opens me up for some interesting flaming, but whatever.

How often do really good writers come along? It's interesting to hear what contemporaries thought of Gatsby because, 90 years later, we know that it is an Important Book. On the other hand, how many people will read Stephen King or Twilight or 50 Shades of Grey in the year 2100, even though these were commercial blockbusters in our time?

A buddy of mine bought me a copy of the Steam version of Twilight Struggle. If you have a willing friend to play with, the PC digital version is just fine.

Matchmaking is there as well as async play, so you can get a game going with a stranger. but, it might take awhile.

I've played it (with a friend) about 30 hours so far, it really is a great game. After a few brutal losses I started to get the hang of it. There is depth, sacrifice and tough decision making. I'm definitely a fan of the game, now.

Speaking of which, I ought to go take my turn.

Okay, try getting through Shakespeare without the discipline of being an active reader and you'll get nothing out of it but boredom. Listen to jazz and classical without actively listening, and you'll mistake the music as being relaxing.

An activity is engaging when you are a participant; that's the difference between reading Twilight and 100 Years of Solitude. If you want to accomplish something to its fullest effect, you cant do it passively, as this article seems to suggest is okay.

Did I miss something?

"Because if you look at the books that are selling, and you look at the fiction books that have impacted our popular culture (Twilight, Fifty Shades of Grey, etc.)… they are for women."

This seems a little selective!

What about stuff like Tolkien, Pratchett , A song of fire and ice and countless other fantasy/sci-fi things?

Perhaps Women see reading as a more social experience , whereas for men it's more of an individual activity?

Amongst my female friends , it seems that if one of them has read a book then they have all read it. So perhaps that might explain why the bestseller lists will tend to favour books intended for women?

I have had first-hand experience with this: video games are largely made for males - partly due to video game developers being largely male. When boys prioritize playing video games, this impacts their academic performance.

Also, the rise of at least one series of books targeted towards females (twilight saga) has likely had a huge impact on the reading levels of girls since 2005, while the last best-seller books targeting boys (Harry Potter) was made back in 1997 and has since lost much of its appeal. Also, Harry Potter didn't outright exclude girls with its content, while Twilight saga was hated almost unanimously by boys. As a result, you find more girls reading for pleasure.

The effects of arts and culture are probably as important as the genetics/hormones of growing children.

>Interesting quotes/passages are few

Well, I wasn't limiting it to meme-friendly fragments such as "To be or not to be" from Hamlet. To go back to the premise mentioned by theswan, it was "good college-level literature course".

That means most of the text like Hamlet is discussed and annotated front to back. A literary guide such as Norton Critical edition of Hamlet will have annotations for every single line of the play. Hamlet is easy to digitize into RapGenius because it's 400 years old and public domain.[1],[2]

For a recent book still under copyright such as Twilight or Harry Potter, the rabid fans could conceivably want to discuss every page of the book. Therefore, a thousand fans "sharing annotations" leads to reconstructing the entire book. If the entire book isn't presented by the website to annotate, what exactly would they be annotating?

For literary and difficult books such as Ulysses by James Joyce, the entire book begs to be annotated. If a permissive license doesn't exist to present 100% of book for thousands of professors and students to share annotations, I'm not sure what the value is.

[1]http://www.bardweb.net/content/readings/hamlet/lines.html

[2]http://lit.genius.com/William-shakespeare-hamlet-act-1-scene...

In the board game Twilight Struggle, a game about the Cold War (& #1 on boardgamegeek.com), you lose if you escalate matters to defcon 1 and cause a nuclear war. A big part of the strategy, though, is knowing how to cause your opponent to inadvertently trigger defcon 1 (http://twilightstrategy.com/2011/12/12/general-strategy-defc...).

It's true that a whole lot of important filtering goes on.

Otherwise we'd have to put up with Twilight and Fifty Shades of Grey, when we could be reading polished high-quality titles that twinkle with the elusive literary aura that only publishers can add.

[snerk]

Here is The Thing: publishing used to be an educated middle class business catering to educated middle class readers.

Self-publishing opened the market to less-educated writers producing work for less-educated readers. Amazon basically reinvented the old Victorian penny dreadful market in digital form.

Does this matter? Not really. The penny dreadfuls didn't kill literature. In fact, in a round-about way, they eventually launched science fiction and fantasy as genres.

Publishers gave up on real literature back in the 80s, when all the old small semi-amateur publishing houses were swallowed by corporate sharks. So don't look for not-crappy there.

There is some basic filtering to eliminate people who can't write at all. But Amazon reviewers are getting pickier, so it's not obvious the can't write at all crowd will survive for much longer.

Meanwhile, many not-quite-mainstream writers have pulled themselves out of publisher-enforced poverty by selling direct.

Is this a bad thing? No, it really isn't.