anthonyRichard

Phaedrus' Street Crew
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Everything posted by anthonyRichard

  1. Feminism

    Not saying it's not a failure. I explicitly called it a failure. I'm saying that the failure shouldn't be used to infer the intent of the author if you can see that it could plausibly be a failure. If we can see that a phrase is ambiguous then it doesn't seem ok to decide to go with one interpretation over another (threat vs ill-conceived attempt to be considerate), with all the implications of that interpretation, at least not until there's a little more to go on than what we have. I don't know, your disagreement with what I said contains nothing that I disagree with or I can see that is in conflict what what I said, so if I am unable to explain what I mean here then I don't think I have the writing ability to clarify further. :/
  2. Feminism

    In Non-Fiction, just because something could be legitimately interpreted in some way, it doesn't necessarily mean that thing, or reflect on the authors intentions at all, except on their failure to write clearly and unambiguously. It of-course still matters how it can be interpreted, especially if a misinterpretation can hurt someone. But the authors intentions are of primary importance. They are sort of the whole point (as opposed to Fiction, where this kind of analysis is totally fine and encouraged). I'm saying that the passage was ambiguous and there is nothing to favor one interpretation over another (yet) that couldn't be more easily explained as a person who is panicking about his life being ruined and not using the best language, and that letting it affect our feelings about his intentions is ill-considered (for now). This is why it's important to wait for a follow up response. If he still uses weird language that is easily interpreted as being shitty, well then we'll have another data-point and we can extrapolate from there with slightly more confidence.
  3. Feminism

    Another way to look at the ostensible legal threat is to consider that Temkin is a successful public figure, who very obviously has access to lawyers. If I publicly accused someone like that of something serious and potentially libelous and he responded with protestations of innocence and didn't explicitly take lawyers off the table, I would maybe be pretty worried. In that light it seems more like a clumsy attempt to be considerate than a veiled threat. This seems just as plausible as the other interpretation, and there's no evidence to favor either. I do hope he comes back in a week or two and posts something more considered & constructive.
  4. Feminism

    There's a problem of terminology that has really unfortunate history/associations. There's the strong historical (and current, to a lesser, but still too-great) tendency to downplay sexual assault and victim-blame and talk about what is and isn't 'legitimate' rape. So to combat that, we've taken a hard line. All sexual assault is rape and all rape is rape, and that is that. The reasons for this position are clear and understandable. But it's also not a good idea, I don't think. Person A forcibly assaults someone, physically overpowering them or threatens them to comply despite clear unwillingness. Person B misunderstands consent and causes the victim to feel uncomfortable/violated before deciding to stop and leave the situation of their own volition. Both of these people have done something wrong, clearly. But they are not the same. They have hugely different implications as to their plausible future behavior and potential rehabilitation. Person B didn't know they were doing something wrong and just needs to be convinced of how consent works and will plausibly stop doing it wrong. Person A is a clear and present danger to society and needs to be sequestered from the general population to prevent further harm. Conflating these two seems at best unfair, and at worst dangerously irresponsible. Temkin is being accused of being Person B, but a lot of moralizing I'm seeing online is treating it as the former, or something close to it. Because of the language conflation, it's almost impossible to talk about the Person B with any kind of nuance and not slide into the assumptions and invective more appropriate to the Person A, either unknowingly, or to avoid the appearance of trivializing or downplaying it. The moralization around the term 'rapist' exclusively takes on the assumptions of Person A. I don't see that changing, not even a little bit, so using that term for the huge range of behaviors associated with sexual misconduct seems like a bad idea. I'm not talking about being fair to the accused either (although that should be a concern, if a minor one). It has dramatic implications for personal risk assessment and for policy-making. American universities in particular are becoming increasingly convinced of a rape epidemic, and are crippled by mismatching moral panic and solution-seeking for disparate kinds of aberrant sexual behavior. Anyway, to be clear, I'm not trying to say that what Temkin is being accused of isn't that bad, or that we should all just chill out, or anything. I guess I'm saying that if we really take sexual assault seriously in terms of a problem to be solved, then the rhetoric and moralization around rape as we currently understand it seems to be problematic, that's all. As a side-note this is actually pretty terrifying to post. I've been seeing people getting called rape-apologists and all sort of horrific things for merely suggesting that the situation seems unclear and maybe too early to definitively judge.
  5. Steven Erikson and The Malazan Book of the Fallen

    The prologue for Deadhouse Gates showcases the best and worst of the writing, read it for free here.
  6. Feminism

    Disappointment at a lost opportunity seems an appropriate reaction. Scorn seems ... understandable, but not really reasonable.
  7. Idle Thumbs 161: The Eyes of Luigi

    Yeah, I just assumed he didn't elaborate because what he saw while working at Bethesda was privileged info, and he didn't know how Bethesda/Machine Games would feel about him discussing it publicly. That's not really something you see people do. Would have been cool, though.
  8. Idle Thumbs 161: The Eyes of Luigi

    This is sort of what was being discussed in the cast, right? In the situation you are describing it's not that the AI is necessarily better, all modern FPS games have AI that can sometimes try and move behind you, it's that in FEAR it takes weird and unexpected paths to do so. Probably a big contributor to this effect is just having lots of pathable objects, by having the path nodes be allowed to go on top of cover/set decoration & inside windows, and having appropriate animations for mantling those kinds of nodes. Then setting up areas where what the player imagines the paths the AI can take don't 100% match what the AI can actually take, so as to allow the player to be surprised occasionally (but not constantly). I don't know that it's an AI problem so much as it is a level design problem.
  9. Idle Thumbs 161: The Eyes of Luigi

    Maybe my favourite thing about Breckon is his willingness to publicly talk about the times that he has embarrassed himself. (this was a great cast, also)
  10. Idle Thumbs 157: Molymoto

    Yeah, Epic's sudden indie friendliness seems like a turnaround (and is), but makes some sense. Once it became obvious they should do that then they seem like the kind of people who will go all-in on a thing; "We're gonna be the market leader in indie-friendly. We'll be the most extreme at whatever we do."
  11. I don't play or watch DOTA2 but enjoy this podcast. So ... cool, you guys. Good.
  12. Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel

    http://ooccommunity.com/media/out-of-the-game-archive/ Calling it a book-cast is a bit of a stretch, but it's true that they did talk about some books sometimes. Those dudes are used to recording in-person and the skype format did them no favors, but it was still good enough that I miss it.
  13. Unity Questions Thread

    Chris I am not that familiar with the new Mecanim Events, but I just tested it for looping anims and it works for me. In the import settings for my walk cycle I made an event then in the "Function" field I wrote "OnTestEvent", then in a script attached to the object that has an animator component that will call that animation I made a function OnTestEvent() that just prints some text to the debug console every time it's called. Works as expected. Maybe try doing it with something on a new object & anim that isn't connected to anything else in the game and see if it works, then scale up from there to find where it stops working?
  14. http://naturebox.com/thumbs
  15. We should step back a moment and notice how easily in discussions of this nature things get pushed out to the extremes. 'Could be misinterpreted in a gross way' became straight-up 'oppressive' really quickly and nearly invisibly.
  16. Far Cry 4: A grenade rolls down everest

    There's no way they will make this game, but fuck yes. Honestly if they just ditch the 'Mission Area' bullshit & go back to true open-world then I can probably stomach whatever reeking narrative ejaculate they smear all over it.
  17. Amateur Game Making Night

    Yeah, if I'm coding something I'm unfamiliar with, week-ago me is basically a different person and looking over his code is a baffling experience.
  18. Tone Control 9: JONATHAN BLOW :o

    I guess I don't understand why you think that's unfair, or even relevant. He wasn't discussion the merits of Sand of Time as a game. He wasn't Critiquing it. He was talking historically about how he got the idea for the rewind mechanic in Braid, that he thought you could do more with it in a systems-design sense. What part of that anecdote necessitates being 'fair' to the narrative of Sands of Time, or even having to mention it at all? What has that got to do with it?
  19. Tone Control 9: JONATHAN BLOW :o

    @CustooFintel Problem : reloads. Solution : rewind time. Execution of solution : rewind is a resource that runs out until you have to reload anyway. The particular execution of the proposed solution doesn't actually solve the initial problem, only pushes it back one step. This is taking a solution to a problem and only partially implementing it, thereby only partially solving the problem. I'd say that's a pretty good definition of 'bolted-on' and 'ugly' in the context of systems-design. That it happened to appeal to you (and others) aesthetically is immaterial to the specific point Blow was making.
  20. Bioshock Finite: Irrational Games shuts down

    "Very little", but not nothing. Right now we've got nothing from official sources. Worse than nothing, obvious PR spin. So it's not unreasonable to use the little we have to form tentative opinions. But of course people are liable to take tentative opinions and transform them into sure facts and you're right to call some of those specific comments out, but you go too far in insinuating that we can't have an opinion at all unless it's backed up by facts. Here are some facts: That there is a long history of unconfirmed rumors of Levine being an egotist/asshole. (It is a fact that the rumors exist & have existed for a long time, which is salient on its own for reasons that should become obvious) Bioshock Infinite took approximately twice the time to make that typical games like it take. Levine's studio is now being shut down. For the announcement of that shut down & the firing of almost all of its staff, Levine or 2k PR chose to write a letter that emphasized that it was his own choice to leave because he wants to form a new studio and to please now be excited for his next project, in an almost too good to be true parody of his long-rumored egomania. I know that, knowing nothing for certain, it appears to be bizarre and gross. I don't know that it actually is, but I know that it very much looks like it is. What's wrong with me saying that?
  21. Idle Thumbs 146: Osama's Dog

    If Danielle, a repeat guest & friend of the show, in describing a game that the thumbs haven't played, notes in passing that it contains "some sexism", then why wouldn't they accept that at face value? I mean, presumably they've played a JRPG before, or, you know, a video game. It seems pretty plausible?
  22. Amateur Game Making Night

    As an addendum, if you have the movement code in Update, but the kind of movement you are doing is to AddForce to a rigidbody, the rigidbody is secretly actually doing its physics calculations/movements in its own FixedUpdate, so that's where you want your camera follow code. I don't know any of this for sure, but it's what I've discovered through extensive trial and error. I don't know if you could get rid of deltaTime, I would guess not, but try it and see.
  23. Amateur Game Making Night

    As far as I can tell, camera movement logic needs to be in the same kind of Update method as the movement logic of the object you are following, whatever that happens to be. Jitter seems to occur when the movement between target & camera is happening out of sync/on different Update cycles. Rigidbody physics happens on FixedUpdate, whereas if you are manually moving some object manually in code, then it's probably in Update. The right answer will be specific to a particular game.
  24. Tone Control 8: TOM FRANCIS

    I like listening to Tom. He has a smile in his voice.
  25. I've noticed that press seem to have real trouble with Early Access. They seemingly simultaneously occupy two opposite positions about it and it's causing them to do and say weird things. They almost universally agree that it's a great thing for all the usual reasons, transparency, freedom for developers, etc. But they also still hold strongly to the consumer/product review paradigm, where if a product is asking for money it should be treated the same as any other product asking for money, if the consumer pays for a thing then they should get that thing. On the Giant Bomb GOTY podcasts there was a discussion of Early Access in the context of it maybe being a finalist for 'Worst Trend' category (they talked themselves out of it, eventually) where Jeff read out the Steam Early Access note from the developers of RUST : , which he reacted strongly to, saying that the proper response to being told that a product you are being asked to pay real money for might change a lot is "fuck you". The rest of the panel generally agreed that this was an example of what was wrong with early access, calling it "crazy" and "egregious". Earlier (and later) in the discussion they expressed that early access was great so long as the developers were open and honest, not misrepresenting the situation to gamers, etc. Faced with an example of exactly this, they balked, reverting back to responses more reasonable for the games-as-consumer-product viewpoint. I'm not pointing fingers at GB or anything, they are just the most recent example to come to mind. To me, this is emblematic of how the press have reacted generally, to greater or lesser degrees. I do think everyone will adjust, but it's going to be weird and frustrating for a bit.