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Everything posted by gregbrown
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Agreed. Really, really great post.
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Except I specifically addressed that in my next paragraph; approaching it from the angle that Men's Rights Activists choose is not a way of actually getting to the root of the issue, and inevitably becomes shoring up or completing the existing power imbalances. For example, to make divorce and child-rearing cases more equitable, we have to tackle the social expectations of men as bread-winners and women as child-raisers, not just agitate for changes by solely looking at the outgrowths. Tackling those social expectations is part of Feminism's project!
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Valve announced today that Half-Life 3 would be released in the liminal state between waking and sleeping, a perceptual universe where the mind begins to turn inward and extend outward, opening up possibilities as wide as our imagination with the power to not just emotionally affect us, but change how we understand our own lives. Several SKUs will be available, with more information coming sometime next month.
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Except that self-declared Men's Rights Activists demonstrably are an outlet for the worst regressive crap of how the Internet treats women, as evidenced by any number of posts collected on the Shit Reddit Says subreddit. They're for gender what people wondering why we don't have a channel called "White Entertainment Television" are for race. There are serious issues with how men are treated like expectations around masculinity that lead to many of the problems you mention, but Feminism is focused on tackling that too! But Men's Rights Activists typically choose to focus on the ways men are getting "screwed" without bothering to tackle the deeper symptoms. When they do start to tackle the symptoms, it's typically through the lens of rationalizing the existing order. While I'll admit to not having read every Men's Rights Activists posting or manifesto ever, from the self-identifying ones I have read, to liken it to Rush Limbaugh's slight is flatly off-base and the worst of false equivalences. There's your "kneejerk" response you asked for.
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Finally got around to seeing the video, and it's frustrating to see that one of the first critiques was that she gets too emotional. The reason why she is so even-toned for most of the video is exactly because women are held to different standards than men: criticized when they become too emotional, even "hysterical". That's also why you so very rarely see Obama get angry, because he's trying to avoid the Angry Black Man trap. Because she can't get too emotional, that limits the number of ways she can be engaging! Still, though, I think she does an excellent job considering the circumstances. Simply pulling together all the source media—even knowing how to pull them—took a lot of work. Video production gets very time-consuming very quickly, even with help. As others have said, talking about the most obvious and popular examples is a good way in. It's hard to expect deep analysis out of something that's primarily outreach-oriented, and she did a great job of making the trope stand out when for most of us it's become background noise at this point. These kinds of things are hard to notice when our antennae are dulled by the more egregious examples. If anyone's interested in the pre-video game examples of the trope in action, a great place to start would be by looking at captivity narratives, where a woman is stolen by savages and has to be rescued by a man. It was originally used for women abducted by Native Americans, but was later resurrected for mythical bands of freed slaves rampaging the South. Susan Faludi does a fantastic job of describing this all in her book The Terror Dream, which lays out the history and applies it to post-9/11 media in stunning, damning detail. (If you do read it, though, read Part 2 first, then circle back to Part 1. I have no idea why she placed the history stuff after the post-9/11 media analysis, since it makes so much more sense the other way. Probably was an editor/publisher decision to emphasize the current-events angle and not start out with a bunch of history.)
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Idle Thumbs 97: The Dash Rendar Synergy
gregbrown replied to Chris's topic in Idle Thumbs Episodes & Streams
To make up for it, here's an even-more-amazing video of Andy Reid (then Eagles head coach, current Chiefs HC). -
Jake and Sean are already in England for the BAFTA Games Awards, and the ceremony starts Tuesday at 9pm GMT, 4pm Eastern, 1pm Pacific, etc. You can watch the broadcast live online. The Walking Dead is nominated for: Best Game Story Game Design Performers (both Melissa Hutchinson as Clementine and Dave Fennoy as Lee) Music
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I've uploaded video of The Walking Dead winning the BAFTA for best story.
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Streaming now at http://www.twitch.tv/bafta
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"Basically polished them" greatly understates the amount of work that they've put into each of those games. For example, take Team Fortress 2: outside of the classes and basic abilities, almost everything else in the game is different. Portal only carries across the basic mechanic from Narbacular Drop, adding cleverer puzzles and a strikingly unique story. Just looking at their official releases is also misleading, since they're continuing to push out new content for a lot of those games. And even for DOTA 2, that's a surprising lateral move for a company that's previously done FPS games only. Granted, they have been pretty quiet recently, which is probably due to the new engine stuff that Lu? and BigJKO mentioned. They also have side-projects like Steam going too, which would take a surprising amount of effort between infrastructure, continued development, publisher relations, etc. But historically most of their work—and their success—has been in actually spending 90% of man-hours on the last 10%. I just don't feel that you can attack their work by saying that they pulled in most of their mechanics from outside teams, since the whole breadth of their projects is really rather stunning.
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Random anecdote: I played all the way through the PC version without discovering that you can arbitrarily save at any point, not just the safe-houses. And honestly, I'm glad I did; Far Cry 2 is a great example of the immersive and creative power of restrictions, and it was always gripping to try and survive long enough to get to a safe house after a mission, or to unlock safe houses out of necessity because I needed a nearby save-point. Consoles are limited to safe houses only, though.
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The franchise that's best survived one-upping itself is the God of War series, if only because crazy-scale shit is essential to the aesthetic and premise. That said, the narrative has suffered from the same problems as everything else: going from a pretty focused story about personal revenge to existential threats. I'm sure others have written about it before, but loss of focus has been increasingly endemic to the AAA genre as team sizes have swelled and games focus-grouped. It's also a reflection of the wider media culture, I think, since movie franchises are having the same problems.
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A lot of PS3/Xbox 360 games, shooters especially, will internally render at a resolution lower than 720p because they'd rather have the visual quality or frame rate.
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Quadrocopters are only getting scarier.
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It would make for an interesting game, but I think the mechanics required would turn many people off. Part of why cities are so weird is because the needs, values, and capabilities of people have shifted over time. The optimal strategy for one era would turn out to be harmful in the next, much like how in FTL the weapons and upgrades needed to get through the sectors can be different from the weapons and upgrades needed to defeat the final boss. So there's this constant tension between going in one direction, but not so far that you can't pivot later on. That said, there would be a tremendous opportunity to explore some of the normative choices that have made today's cities thrive or die. Representing historical developments like mass transit, automobile, the post-war boom, redlining, white flight, and bedroom communities through the lens of a game would be a goddamn incredible way to treat subjects that most people are woefully uninformed about.
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I felt the same way. So much of the current generation has been Sony not understanding why the PS3 was failing compared to Microsoft's efforts, and I feel like they did an excellent job of addressing most of those pain-points. Some of it is an easier architecture and better dev-tools (which reportedly have gotten a lot better for the PS3 in the past few years), and some of it is the Gaikai acquisition as an admission that they didn't understand internet gaming well enough. Hosting the event in NYC was also a big surprise, and bodes well for dropping the Japanese insularity that made them dominant in that country but also hurt them abroad.
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I felt the complete opposite, and as a result was very, very frustrated with the book as a whole. It felt like a good 150-page novella wrapped in a boring therapist plot wrapped in a bad narrator plot, all working to drag the book out as long as she could. The numerous chapter-breaks didn't help things at all, making it very easy to walk away from the book, and padding out the page-length further. A large part of the frustration is that it felt like Ullman decided how the plot had to be punched up at certain points, and use the most transparent devices to get there. For example, at one point she decided that the book needed some time-pressure, so the manager re-appears with his request. The narrator needed to feel a certain aggressive engagement with the patient's story, so we get the therapist's background. We need to get across certain facets of the narrator, so he wanders into various parts of San Francisco, with flimsy justifications for why he's doing so. We can certainly backfit explanations onto his behavior, as Ullman clearly did, but they feel like deviations from the flow of the novel thrown in to achieve a specific end. The novel never really cohered for me, and it felt like while the characters' all dealt with identity as a core question, those threads never really informed each other outside of the patient's immediate families. All-in-all, this felt like what could have been a good book was buried under countless concessions to punch it up into popular fiction. Information was doled out sparingly to draw the reader along, in what must have been 5-15 minute therapy sessions judging from how much is actually discussed before the inevitable interludes. And even though I liked that central narrative that the patient actually experienced, as a whole, It's the book I've easily liked the least out of our selections so far.
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The social gaming features—and the work Sony's putting into growing the platform itself and making it easier for developers—will be far more important than any of the games, exclusive or not, shown today. It's also the stuff that's hardest to demo, so I guess we'll see!
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It's frustrating to see what seems to be a nice sci-fi premise and know it'll just be used to justify shooting things (and eventually, will become top-heavy with increasingly boring strata of canon).
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I'm only a bit into the novel, but did the narrator remind anyone else of present-day Tony from The Sense of an Ending—the solipsism, the mystery, the obsession?
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A good rice cooker is one of the best investments you will ever make. It makes for very cheap and effortless meals, and you can get pretty creative with throwing in different ingredients. The best, by far, are the Zojirushi cookers. I have the 3-cup version, but they make larger ones as well. They're the most durable ones you'll find, and very easy to clean. One of the cooler features is a timer that won't start the cooker at a certain time, but will instead make sure that the rice is DONE around a particular time. This way you can have the rice ready when you get home from work—and if you're late, there's a "keep warm" feature that'll keep it tasty for up to an hour. I personally fell in love with Basmati rice, but it'll cook all kinds.
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Idle Thumbs 94: Readers Like You
gregbrown replied to Jake's topic in Idle Thumbs Episodes & Streams
MMO games are a more pressing archival problem, just because it's hard to recreate the sense of what it was like when the world was alive with thousands of people playing at once. I can't imagine how we could recreate EVE in 20 years. AFAIK, the field of dance suffered a similar issue before video recordings, since dance notation varied quite a bit and left some elements up to the performer. -
Idle Thumbs 94: Readers Like You
gregbrown replied to Jake's topic in Idle Thumbs Episodes & Streams
Full Nick Breckon But Baby sounds like a cut Tony Hawk Pro Skating move. -
Alien is still absolutely stunning and as good as when it was released, but I really disliked Aliens (and Cameron's other work, though I haven't seen the first Terminator). The best thing Alien 3 did was immediately wipe the slate by killing off the other characters.