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Onderzeeboot

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Isn't Gideon a biblical name?
There certainly was a biblical Gideon: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gideon

It's probably not necessarily biblical, though it's use in the western world most definitely is related to the biblical Gideon.

Anyway...

I actually don't hate Jace as a boy's name.

Side tangent- Boys names usually either suck or shorten to something that sucks. Why would I want to name my kid Lawrence if everyone is going to call him "Larry?" I guess you could go with the "Italian Option" and call your kid Lorenzo (or the Italian version of some other name), but that's just weird if you're not Italian.

There are a few girl's names I like at least. I guess I can just hope to not have boys when I'm older :p.
Come live in the Netherlands, we've got a lot of boys names that don't suck! ;)
 
Anne, Ingmar, Lieuwe, Onne and Wytse are girl names, right?

It sounds like that in Danish. Anne in for instance a girl name in Denmark.
 

Onderzeeboot

Ecstatic Orb
Anne, Ingmar, Lieuwe, Onne and Wytse are girl names, right?

It sounds like that in Danish. Anne in for instance a girl name in Denmark.
Ingmar is primarily a male name, though there are a few women with that name (1356 vs 45 in 2014). Anne really is a gender neutral name in the Netherlands, with roughly 1 in 5 with that first name being male (8606 vs 29720 in 2014). The other three are definitely male names over here. For anyone interested in first name usage in the Netherlands, we've got an institute that actually keeps a really nice corpus: https://www.meertens.knaw.nl/nvb/english :)

For example, Anne, while gender neutral, as a male name is primarily used in the province of Friesland, as this map nicely shows: https://www.meertens.knaw.nl/nvb/verspreiding/relatief/man/eerstenaam/Anne#data

I love this site to bits, if that wasn't clear already ;)
 
Nah, like Anne, Benjamin, Douwe, Epke, Frank, Guus, Hidde, Ingmar, Jeroen, Koen, Lieuwe, Merlijn, Niek, Onne, Pelle, Quirijn, Roan, Stef, Thijmen, Wytse. Of course, I'm completely biased, and a lot of these names are probably unpronounceable for English speakers :)

Yeah... If I named my theoretical son Anne or Thijmen, he'd get bullied.

I think we should all just agree that all boys names are terrible except for...
 
fuck that name boys anne

Ok, even excusing the fact that in current American culture naming a boy Anne would probably get them bullied at school, it's still not something I'd want to name my hypothetical kid regardless of gender. Like, it's not a bad name, but it's pretty basic.

I'm a big fan of the name Scarlett for girls.

I don't hate the name Thomas for boys.

Ok what were you expecting from me at this point in time??
 
I think the best exercise when coming up with potential names for your kid would be to come up with a list of names you like and then one by one go through them and think of the dumbest insult you can. Because other shittier kids will definitely pick up the lowest hanging fruit from that tree right off the floor and use it. They are ruthless.
 
I think the best exercise when coming up with potential names for your kid would be to come up with a list of names you like and then one by one go through them and think of the dumbest insult you can. Because other shittier kids will definitely pick up the lowest hanging fruit from that tree right off the floor and use it. They are ruthless.

I think we need to subscribe to the Hank Green philosophy and run our potential names in front of a focus group of 12-year olds so that they can come up with all the worst insults for us.

Actually, there's a lot of good naming tips in here.
 

Onderzeeboot

Ecstatic Orb
Those are good naming tips indeed :) I've got another tip that's can be either unnecessary or really useful, depending how people and organizations address you in the mail. In the Netherlands, it's customary to use the initials of a person's given (and often middle) names followed by their last name, e.g. H.G. Wells. I made sure my kids have different initials from me and my wife, so we can actually tell who the mail on our door mat is addressed to before opening it ;)
 

Onderzeeboot

Ecstatic Orb
So, Owen Turtenwald is "back", or at least, back at streaming, Hearthstone that is. This has lead to quite a stir in the community, it seems. He might or might not have been a terrible person (the allegations are pretty damning), but writing an article with your mind already made up doesn't make for good journalism...

https://www.hipstersofthecoast.com/..._source=mtgnexus.com&utm_content=communityhub

//He also seems to try and shift some of the blame for his actions onto his use of alcohol rather than taking full responsibility. “I believed because alcohol was involved [my actions were] harmless,” he said, “and that is absolutely false.”//

Really? He is doing the exact opposite, saying he no longer wants to hide behind the alcohol excuse and owning up to the fact that he alone is the one to blame. This is the worst misinterpretation, but they're pretty actively trying to put bad faith in every single word Turtenwald wrote in his apology tweet. A tweet isn't going to set his past actions right, but willfully misinterpreting it doesn't help either...
 
Do adults still care about Hearthstone?

It is one of those games where you get enchanted by first look, then you go greedy, dump a lot of money and want to optimize your decks and start playing ‘competitively’, then you decide Rank 5 is competitive because ladder grinding is boring, then rotation happens and you are happy again for 9 days and then finally you realize that the entire game has an extremely limited design space and your decisions don’t really matter because 9/10 games are on auto pilot and you are just paying to be a spectator to a visual beautiful game with great background music.

I started playing during Closed BETA and continued to play up until december 2018. By then I had been playing for two straight years hoping Blizzard would expand the game and make decisions matter like Magic. But then I had had enough. I hope others will realize these facts earlier than I did (It took me 5 full years).
 

Onderzeeboot

Ecstatic Orb
Do adults still care about Hearthstone?

It is one of those games where you get enchanted by first look, then you go greedy, dump a lot of money and want to optimize your decks and start playing ‘competitively’, then you decide Rank 5 is competitive because ladder grinding is boring, then rotation happens and you are happy again for 9 days and then finally you realize that the entire game has an extremely limited design space and your decisions don’t really matter because 9/10 games are on auto pilot and you are just paying to be a spectator to a visual beautiful game with great background music.

I started playing during Closed BETA and continued to play up until december 2018. By then I had been playing for two straight years hoping Blizzard would expand the game and make decisions matter like Magic. But then I had had enough. I hope others will realize these facts earlier than I did (It took me 5 full years).

Hipsters of the Coast actually posted another article about Turtenwald yesterday in which he is quoted:

// Turtenwald was effusive in his praise for the game. “[Hearthstone] is my favorite game,” he said. “It is the most skill-intensive game I’ve ever played, that’s for damn sure.” //

:') Having played Hearthstone for years (I actually removed it from my iPad only two months ago), that's very hard for me to take seriously. I really like Hearthstone's gameplay, and it can certainly be skill-intensive at times, but "most skill-intensive game"? Lol, no. The very fabric of the game, with all its streamlined, "single" player turn-based, interference-light gameplay prevents it from being that.
 
I mean.. don’t get me wrong. I loved the first long period of Hearthstone. And there are sooome decisions but not a lot. I just had some realizations as I grew more experienced and I know those to be facts and not opinions. Therefore I hope other people will learn these a lot faster than I did.

And no the game is not very skill based. Of course it matters a little bit what you do and you cannot rank up to Legendary without having some skills. But almost anyone can if given 250 hours to play in any given month with any given skill set as long as they have the right cards. Just keep hitting that GO botton.
 
I'm not a big fan of Hearthstone from the little I've seen of it. It just doesn't have the strategic depth to keep me engaged, I'm not the biggest fan of online platforms for card games, and I really don't care for any of the aesthetics of the game.

Also Owen Turtenwald is a dipshit. He was a pretty good player, but kind of an awful dude even before those allegations. Just very unpleasant from what I've seen of him and from what I've heard from people who have actually played against him in real life.
 
So, Owen Turtenwald is "back", or at least, back at streaming, Hearthstone that is. This has lead to quite a stir in the community, it seems. He might or might not have been a terrible person (the allegations are pretty damning), but writing an article with your mind already made up doesn't make for good journalism...

https://www.hipstersofthecoast.com/..._source=mtgnexus.com&utm_content=communityhub

//He also seems to try and shift some of the blame for his actions onto his use of alcohol rather than taking full responsibility. “I believed because alcohol was involved [my actions were] harmless,” he said, “and that is absolutely false.”//

Really? He is doing the exact opposite, saying he no longer wants to hide behind the alcohol excuse and owning up to the fact that he alone is the one to blame. This is the worst misinterpretation, but they're pretty actively trying to put bad faith in every single word Turtenwald wrote in his apology tweet. A tweet isn't going to set his past actions right, but willfully misinterpreting it doesn't help either...

Hipsters of the Coast has only marginally more journalistic integrity than Unsleeved Media did back when he was terrorizing the Magic community. The opinions argued on that site shouldn't be given much weight.

As for Owen Turtenwald... Who cares? He's not even playing Magic again. Obviously it's not a good look to have a sexual predator as a visible part of the wider TCG gaming community, but I think our society has bigger fish to fry than some alcoholic playing Hearthstone.
 
It is one of those games where you get enchanted by first look, then you go greedy, dump a lot of money and want to optimize your decks and start playing ‘competitively’, then you decide Rank 5 is competitive because ladder grinding is boring, then rotation happens and you are happy again for 9 days and then finally you realize that the entire game has an extremely limited design space and your decisions don’t really matter because 9/10 games are on auto pilot and you are just paying to be a spectator to a visual beautiful game with great background music..
Not to be mean, but this sounds exactly like Magic.
 
Not to be mean, but this sounds exactly like Magic.

I mean, the first part of the statement sounds like magic, but not anything regarding the design. Unless you're playing a really bad starter deck, Magic games are not on auto-pilot. Even super linear strategies like Boros burn in modern have more options and more complexity than most Hearthstone decks.
 
The one thing Hearthstone does right is that it has some awesome effects that you can't do with physical cards.
200px-Archbishop_Benedictus%2862856%29.png

There's surely more, but this is one that stuck out in my mind. There's another one where you reveal your hand and summon a random minion with the same cost as each card revealed. I don't see too many Hearthstone cards, but I often wish we had access to some of this instant copying stuff.
 

Onderzeeboot

Ecstatic Orb
The one thing Hearthstone does right is that it has some awesome effects that you can't do with physical cards.

Actually, the other thing it does right is that it just oozes charm. It really is a polished game. Also, Archmage Antonidas was the direct inspiration for my scroll mechanic :)

200px-Archmage_Antonidas%28220%29.png
 
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