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[NJW2000]

Mine thinks it can eat anything a human can. Like carrots. He goes through the groceries, and ignores us when we give him cooked salmon leftovers.

[Zangi]

Hmm...  I think my Origin / EA account has been hacked/phished.  Someone reset my password for it. 
Jokes on them, I probably only have the free version of sims 2 on it at best.  Well, maybe some poor decisions. I don't remember... I've lived a few years. ... Though, I'm pretty sure that wouldn't be my main email account anyways.

[Yoink]

Mine thinks it can eat anything a human can. Like carrots. He goes through the groceries, and ignores us when we give him cooked salmon leftovers.

My old cat loved roast carrots, as I discovered on the same day I discovered they tasted awful.
Kid-me waited 'til my mother wasn't watching and gave them to him, he ate them all with gusto, I didn't get in trouble/have to insult my mother's cooking, everybody won!

[Frumple]

Little belated, but eh, I went to sleep,

The only practical use for the data that I can think of is knowing where and when to evacuate. And monitoring the area for that could be done quite cheaply.

There's also stuff crawling out of it, which is... generally it's a good idea to kill that before it gets too far (a weak one you encounter earlier in the game that got out basically reanimated an entire village of ancient dead into cannibal ghouls just by being in the area), or at least have someone around to tell people further outside there's gribblies coming. Also apparently making advancements in fixing people that get only partially corrupted. And yeah, warning people when a major extrusion is happening. Trying to figure out a way to close Yog-Sothoth's glory hole. All that kind of nice stuff.

And you'd think monitoring it would be cheap, but, well. The borders move. Sometimes slowly, sometimes, "Oh hey, the deathlands were a fortnight's walk away when I went to sleep, now we're completely surrounded in all directions." Things crawl out of it. It basically mutates living things that get stuck in it too long and/or eats/drinks anything that's been corrupted. Monitoring outposts they're currently maintaining have to be built underground and perpetually rebuilt, since, y'know, the geography is mutable and occasionally one of the wings and everything in it turn into virulently rapine cheese or somethin'. Building ones further out would require substantial (but, perhaps, less) resources just 'cause you'd have to have more of them to cover the wider border, and there'd still be the risk the mess decides Tuesday is the day it feels like having a gay ol' flare up and douse a few extra (dozen) miles in soul-devouring hair oil.

Basically, the only non-suicidal course of action is to maintain fairly heavy investment in pretty-close monitoring (and further-out monitoring, too) and what extent of containment (of the non-geography bits of roaming death) is possible. And, well, the land's high-up muckity-mucks are considering... not. And the one that's actually came to the place to check it out has someone managed to live inside one of (well, to be more precise, the only one that hasn't spontaneously exploded and/or disappeared, yet) the in-area monitoring bases for some time without being irrevocably convinced money needs to be thrown at that shit hand over foot because good goddamn, some things you don't just close your eyes and think of home about, y'ken?

[IcyTea31]

If the enemy is a corrupting force sweeping over the land, how do stationary monitoring outposts make any kind of sense? No wonder people are complaining about the financial aspect if they have to rebuild all the time. There are more effective, efficient and economical solutions available. Who taught reconnaissance to these guys?

[Zangi]

The casualty rate must be pretty high, even with competent people.  (PS: All the competent ones are probably gone or insane.)

[Frumple]

Stationary monitoring posts are about the only thing that doesn't just die, heh. Or worse. You basically have to dig in (quite literally) to be able to survive for any meaningful amount of time (unless you're the protagonists, anyway, and it's intimated that if they were staying there for very long, Bad Things would start to happen), and use those as a sort of staging ground. It's basically the best option their capabilities have, at least until they understand the area better and are more effective at mitigating the effects. Could do something roughly similar closer to the edges instead of further in... but again, more area, and that's still no guarantee the outpost doesn't get eaten. Near as the setting's allowing, what they're doing is already about as cost efficient as they can manage, given the conditions and general capabilities.

And it's not really sweeping over the land, per se... as noted, and part of the stated reason they're considering just whistling off into the distance and letting the horrors from the beyond have their way with that corner of the continent, the area stays roughly in the same spot (though, y'know, "same spot" seems to be an area around the size of florida or somethin'), and only occasionally spews out countryside destroying abominations. For now.

Though yeah, they lose a lot of people. The government in question has, to the game's current date, managed to construct four monitoring bases. The first two more or less just exploded, and the forth (and largest/best constructed to date) just recently lost communication. It's fairly likely that last one wasn't actually caused by the area itself, though. Entirely, anyway.

[hector13]

RE: the prodigal cat: a trip to the vet may be in order to make sure that paw isn't the only thing up with it.

[Flying Dice]

Dude, like, really reading that description without knowing anything? Its creativity is my creativity: not actually fucking creativity. It's all derivative. Your most specific example was literally just a Macross reference.

To be more specific about my creativity: creativity purely for the express purpose of avoiding actually having to be creative. I may be a bit hard on myself there, but then again there's no evidence that I'm capable of doing anything creative.

In terms of creative merit I'd say that you're already at least an order of magnitude above them because the shit you make, even if it is derivative, isn't completely asinine or pointless.

Really, there's not much point on hating derivation for being derivation; in the broad sense just about everything creative humans have ever done has been a new application of older ideas even when it wasn't a direct reference to specific prior works.

[Lord Shonus]

Playing Dark Souls for the first time (several years late, I know), and up until now the game has been fair. Brutally hard, but never unfair. Until these godawful archers firing arrows bigger than my goddamn character that hurl you back about ten feet every hit while you're trying to cross a narrow bridge and navigate a ledge to get to them (shooting back is suicide, since there's no bows available that have the range these things do), and they catch me in a crossfire every time. The only way I've found to get past them is to abuse their AI and pathing to get one to jump to his death, something I've not had to do so far.

[WealthyRadish]

Personally, I loved that part (once I got through it, anyway). It's rare for a game to deliberately put in an area like that which is so clearly bullshit, and force you to either try something creative (i.e. cheese it) or get good (you can kill them without a shield or ranged weapon with one well-timed roll each).

[Lord Shonus]

Dark Souls already had Sen's Fortress. Wasn't that bullshit enough? Sure, it was fair, but it was still bullshit enough that I think the designer should be forced to run it in real life.

[Zangi]

Dark Souls already had Sen's Fortress. Wasn't that bullshit enough? Sure, it was fair, but it was still bullshit enough that I think the designer should be forced to run it in real life.

I don't think he has that many soulslives to lose.

[GiglameshDespair]

Playing Dark Souls for the first time (several years late, I know), and up until now the game has been fair. Brutally hard, but never unfair. Until these godawful archers firing arrows bigger than my goddamn character that hurl you back about ten feet every hit while you're trying to cross a narrow bridge and navigate a ledge to get to them (shooting back is suicide, since there's no bows available that have the range these things do), and they catch me in a crossfire every time. The only way I've found to get past them is to abuse their AI and pathing to get one to jump to his death, something I've not had to do so far.

Time your rolling under the arrows
Use the Iron Flesh pyromancy
Use a greatshield
git gud scrub

There's ways to get through that bit.

[Bouchart]

So I received an email today at work that a film crew plans on blowing up a car nearby tomorrow afternoon, so I shouldn't worry about any explosion sounds or smoke.