Iosef Stalin

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Posts posted by Iosef Stalin

  1. Posted

    But British people are drunken maniacs! :P

    I've read like half of this thread, but I ran out of stamina. But it's an interesting topic, and one I was thinking about recently actually. Here's what I don't get about feminism, if we accept that the goal is for women to be equal to men, and not superior to them. If you're a 'feminist writer' who spends half her time writing about women in games or society etc, it doesn't seem to me like that's being equal. I mean most male writers don't spend most of their time talking about what it is to be male, right? Maybe that's because males are dominant in society, a white male is the default mode/character for fiction or whatever, but still.

    "I think men and women should be no different. Now excuse me while I spend most of my time talking about how different they are." Huh?

    It's just, I don't know, maybe I can't see it because I am white, male from a middle-class background, not grinding poverty etc. But it just isn't interesting to me at all, the whole subject. I'd rather hear about things other than gender and race and so on, by all means tell a story that has those included, but don't make it the whole story. There's a couple of journalists that come to mind here, Leigh Alexander and Laurie Penny. They're really good writers, really interesting to read, but the constant pieces on feminism and about being a woman just turn me the fuck off as a reader. It isn't interesting. Why can't they talk about what it's like to be a person in society rather than being a woman?

    I mean I don't identify myself first as a MAN in society, i'm just you know, a guy, a person who is male. I go back to how my favourite novelists, authors are male. Is that because i'm sexist? I don't think so, I think it's because women by and large don't write about the things i'm interested in. Maybe I need to look harder, but generally there aren't that many women writing sci-fi or adventure epics, or good comic books or even interesting character pieces. They all seem to come at it from the perspective of being a woman first, rather than a person looking to write an interesting story.

  3. Posted

    But that's my point. When we think back on memories, we only have what's inside our head (unless, as will be increasingly likely there's a picture or video of it). But in a novel or a movie where the author or director controls what we see, you don't have to stick to that. And usually those parts are cut out and told in a conversation or something to save space or time. I don't really understand how this book would make someone think introspectively about their past in a different light, I mean unless they'd never done it before. I spend way too much time thinking about my past already, and in this book he doesn't do it in an interesting or new way.

    Did you think his telling was interesting? Or fleshed out, at all? It really didn't seem that way to me.

  4. Posted

    A book that I think would generate a ton of discussion for the Thumbs guys is Space by Stephen Baxter. I read it when I was younger without a lot of previous scifi reading baggage, so some of the common themes were fairly fresh to me. But, a lot of the reviews and such, say that he takes the "future of the human race" scifi genre and updates it to a more modern pace and technology.

    I thought it had some fantastic ideas, and different ideas, about where were heading as a species and what the end state for modern politics and policy might quite likely be.

    It really opened my mind to different outlooks and styles of writing and science fiction. And Baxter is also a really great writer, who's easy to read and does a fantastic job of putting across complex ideas about technology and physics.

    The Xeelee sequence by him is also fantastic, some awesome concepts and a great story. I should pick up some more of his work, i've got a few Culture novels to read first though.

    As for 'The Sense of an Ending', I did not enjoy it. I found it really dull, there was just nothing there to grab my attention. The protagonist was not interesting, or even likeable and basically nothing at all happens in the book. Not to say I can only enjoy a book if it's whizz bang spaceships, i've read things like Darkness Visible by Styron and of course Catcher in the Rye, and enjoyed them. But I just did not connect with Tony at all. I also didn't like how scant the detail was. He spends a while recounting his school days, and then fast forwards 40 years, really abruptly. I was like, but you skipped the interesting parts! Then the rest of the book is him moping around sending emails and thinking about all those years ago, but the thing is, you never get to revisit them properly. It's only him talking about his memories and how unreliable they are and so on. Yeah I get that that's the theme of the book or whatever, but I don't see how that decision was a good one.

    What's the old movie adage? Show, don't tell. All he does is tell, and it's fucking boring. The twist at the end did not interest me at all. I don't really understand how a book like this wins a literary prize, I mean I guess the judges are all 60 year old men so they probably thought it was amazing? I don't know.

    I have read a book with a similar premise to this, but done in a far more engaging way- 'Past Imperfect' by Julian Fellowes (of Gosford Park, Downton Abbey etc fame). He also has a late middle aged character going back and trying to retrace his past, or rather his old friend's past and also his. But the characters are interesting, you get a lot of flashbacks to the parties of the 60's and a real sense of a feeling of the time. Rather than the little sketch you get at the beginning of 'The Sense of an Ending'. He does have a bit of an obsession with talking about class and so on, which gets a little grating, but overall the book is a lot more enjoyable than this literary wankfest.

  7. Posted

    San Francisco's extreme hilliness (and relatively low concentration of fast food) says otherwise. And I've spent a lot of time in London, and other than the river I'd be surprised if many of its natural features are actually left from before the city was built on top of them, rather than being recreated as manmade parks or the like. It's a pretty enormous flat city, for the most part. (And an incredible one, primarily because of the human progress that has created it.)

    I know it sounds more impersonal, that's why I addressed it.

    I think generally you're just making a lot of assumptions that are partially predicated on your familiarity with your own city, and such familiarity with San Francisco or New York or Chicago would bear out similar affection if you actually spent a comparable amount of time in those places.

    I guess you're right. I don't really like London though, it's too big for me.

  8. Posted

    I think the grid would bother you less if you lived in one for a while. I (think I) know what you mean, in that a grid feels less natural and organic than a city that was unplanned and slowly grew out from a central core. But what I think is truly great about urban landscapes is not their natural geography, per se, but more the neighborhoods and scenes that spring up entirely as a result of the vagaries of human nature and decisions that branch over many decades. It's why a New Yorker can hear "5th and 40th" or "7th and 144th" and instantly be flooded with emotional associations--sure, those actual descriptors are just impersonal labels for points on a grid that was arbitrarily laid out centuries ago, but what's really important is how humanity has layered on top of that grid to create a living, vibrant city.

    Anyway, maybe that's not even what you meant! But I've thought about this a lot and that's my take on it. I love cities.

    Well yes it's mostly what I meant. I like the layer of human interactions and recent occupants of an area in a city too, it's fun to sit and watch people go by or go round and take pictures of graffiti etc.

    But I also really find fascinating the history of a city and the way it grows up and how it's built. Like my city, Bristol, it's kind of lopsided in that the "centre" is actually nowhere near the actual centre of the city due to the harbour and the gorge and everything kind of expanding south and northeast from there. And if you get up on a hill or high vantage point you can see how the bowl shape of the river Avon valley is expressed through the city. I love learning about all the old heritage too like this used to be a railway or this is where the steamers would dock up etc. I like that you can walk a lot of these old routes and go under a bridge which has the original brick and iron work with a new concrete bridge built on top or something.

    I guess it just seems that a lot of American cities kind of bulldoze over every natural feature, lay out the grid pattern and install some fast food franchises. And then if there's new development, any old architectural history is erased. Not that that happens everywhere, I love for example this video by Andrew Wonder about exploring under New York.

    http://vimeo.com/18280328

    And again, the naming system, maybe it is just a labelling system, but "5th and 40th" sounds way more impersonal to me than say "Hotwells" or "Jamaica Street" or "Clifton" etc.

  9. Posted

    I've been fascinated by San Fran for a while, and this is so lame, but I think it's because of Sim City 3000. That golden gate bridge man, I think I put that in every city I made. And they all had big rivers and harbours, cos that way you could easily split up your industrial and residential zones, plus you got to build a ton of awesome bridges. Bridges are cool as shit.

    I still don't like the whole grid system that US cities are based on, but guess SF has a bit less of that due to the geography.

  10. Posted

    I'm still freaked out by the rise of voice chat in games. I get all weird and quiet. Fuck adding video on top of that.

    Also, I'm transcribing an interview, and listening to my own stupid voice is AGONY. I don't know how these guys deal with it.

    Because they have sexy voices.

  12. Posted

    AI players are pretty bad, but real players are often not much better. I've been playing World of Tanks again recently, and holy hell are players in that game dumb. Or at least the players on your team.

    Half the enemy team is experienced clan players who know exactly what they are doing and flank and work as a team. Meanwhile your team is composed of the clown car division; the guy in the heavy tank with the medium gun equipped "I prefer the rate of fire!", the guy in the Maus super heavy tank going up the steep hill at 5km/h "i'm flanking!" the guy in the scout tank sitting behind a rock doing nothing, the guy who parks up your ass and prevents you from getting back into cover... :frusty::frusty::frusty:

  13. Posted

    It definitely was.

    Metroid II though, that game blew my mind!

    To my seven year old self, it was terrifying. Terrifying!

    With all of its weird, creepy

    .

    Ah, I was more of a Donkey Kong kid. I never played Metroid until Metroid Prime and Fusion.

  15. Posted

    I don't really agree with this. Like I said, I roleplayed it that way. Maybe I missed some extreme options that would only have been available if I were very good or very evil; I don't know, but the options that I was given seemed adequate and appropriate for my character. Whether I was doing a "good playthrough" or an "evil playthrough" just wasn't something I thought about at all (until I started a new character to try to game the system and get to the stuff I'd missed the first time through), and I didn't feel like I was being "punished" for it. If a game includes any meaningful choices, that pretty much means it's not going to be possible to see everything in one playthrough.

    I guess so. It's just that i'm one of those people who wants to do everything and get all the secret stuff and the best elite weapons in a game, and since that's practically impossible in games like Fallout 3, that drives me a bit crazy. (Not just because it has a morality system, but because of how huge it is.)

    But also it kind of annoys me that I know there are quests and perks etc that i'm missing because you can't get them all in one go because they rely on your karma level. It's like theoretically I know it should be cool that people will react to me differently depending on how much of an asshole I am in a game, but while actually playing I find myself being irritated by it.

  16. Posted

    This is somewhat tangential, but I made my Youtube account in like 2006 and put in some silly age, and when I started making videos and putting them up there it wouldn't let me change my age on my profile to my real one. There is literally no option to do that, so I have to go around looking like some 50 year old weirdo who still plays Yugioh cards. Thanks Google!

  17. Posted

    This dude right here, around 1996 or so. I'd played stuff on friends computers and messed around on our 386 at home, but this was the first gaming device I bought and owned myself. Then I got an N64 a couple of years later and it blew me away -IGN.com

    Gameboy.jpg

  21. Posted

    Hello! I'm totally new here. I heard about Idle Thumbs from other podcasts I listen to when the kickstarter began. I've been working my way through in a marathon of podcasts since then.

    Me too! I don't really know how I managed to miss Idle Thumbs back in 08/09 since I was definitely listening to podcasts and looking for good ones then. Oh well, the old ones are still awesome even if they're not topical. And i'm looking forward to the new ones.

    Video gaaa-aaaaames!

  22. Posted

    Why can't we just have websites, why do they have to be part of some stupid collective media bullshit? Do you remember that, when gaming blog sites weren't all owned by some conglomerate shit?

    And the actual content of each article is usually fucking awful. It's all shitty link-bait to generate as many views as possible. I find myself only visiting Kotaku for Tim Rodgers articles, cos he's a good read, but having to do it on their awful website where nothing actually works is such a pain.

  23. Posted

    I'm not clear on exactly what constitutes a "moral choice" in a game if it's not part of a points system or some other specific "morality" mechanic. Since NPCs are basically just robots going through a fairly simple set of instructions, morality doesn't apply to them in any real sense. By necessity, it has to be an illusion supported by having them react to the player's choices in different ways. And if you're doing that, there's always going to be some kind of numerical system underneath it (unless you're just dealing with every decision individually, completely free of context, which seems less than ideal). I don't think the points themselves are the problem; it's just that they're too transparent.

    The problem I have with most of these systems is that I feel like it's actually kind of antithetical to the way morality actually works, which is that you make decisions to the best of your ability based on what you think is right, without knowing what the outcome will be.

    The most satisfying version of this that I can think of in a game is Fallout 3. You have a "karma" score, but there's no real reward for going to either extreme, and it can actually be beneficial to maintain neutral karma. In dialogue options, you're never told what's the "good" or "bad" option (or whether that's even applicable) and sometimes your actions have unintended consequences and something that you thought was a good idea might go wrong and get you the opposite karma from what you were expecting. Characters get killed, quests become inaccessible, etc., but the game is malleable enough to give you lots of alternatives and there's never really one option that's clearly the best one. In that game (and even moreso in New Vegas), I always felt comfortable making decisions based on what I actually thought that I (or my character) would do or say in that situation, rather than because I was thinking about my karma or what reward I'd get. (In fact, I actually tried to start an evil character to see some of the quests I'd missed by being too good, but I couldn't do it because I felt too bad about being mean to everybody.)

    Right, but why does it have to be so codified and gamified? Yeah in Fallout 3 it isn't specifically indicated on the dialogue options whether a choice is good or evil, but it's usually pretty obvious. And then when you steal something or kill a "good" person you get that jangly hissing sound effect and you're told you've lost karma.

    Why does that have to happen every time? It's stupid as hell when you're just jacking a bunch of stuff, and it goes off every second, like yeah I get it, i'm evil.

    And the thing is, often you are punished for being ambiguous or following a neutral path because some options are only available if you are constantly good or constantly evil. You aren't really allowed to roleplay as a real person with conflicting emotions or decisions based on what your character might do in such a situation. Generally you decide that this will be an "evil playthrough" or a "good playthrough", which really just makes the whole thing a farce in terms of the 'R' part of RPG.