Merus

Phaedrus' Street Crew
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Everything posted by Merus

  1. Does Farscape count? I seem to remember that the conflict in that show's more about evil empires than xenophobia. I can think of some science fiction where the conflict is driven by xenophobia on the part of a minority, but most of the viewpoint characters have let go of their fear of the other.
  2. Dr. Phil psychically mindmelds with a family:
  3. "Ethics and Journalistic Integrity"

    As in, it's already been sold to a producer, Amy Pascal, after a bidding war, so multiple people think a studio will stump money for this.
  4. SPECTRE (new James Bond movie)

    We're in a weird place where a Bond movie is compared unfavourably to a Mission Impossible film, but then again they started building them around Simon Pegg which is a move I certainly approve of.
  5. "Ethics and Journalistic Integrity"

    I'm sort of alarmed that Eric Raymond turned out to be a terrible old man, but then I find out he's a libertarian, and I remember that his biggest period of influence was when women were driven out of computer programming, and I'm not quite so surprised. Please tell me Steve Wozniak won't become shitty.
  6. Walking in a WINTER WIZARD JAM

    So I don't know anything about winter holidays. They're cold and not particularly interesting except for when my birthday falls in them.
  7. Life

    I'm just trying to work out why you don't cook together. But anyway, what Gwardinen said.
  8. Let's be honest here, this thread isn't a classic. I can't work out if this thread is supposed to be 'works that are overrated' or 'classics that didn't work for me'. Like, the latter thread might have potential if everyone goes into it knowing that nothing is 100% liked except there'll be one person whose tastes are so out of alignment with everyone else that it just causes friction.
  9. No Man's Sky

    You know, I'm with Twig on this one. I think at this point I've got a pretty good handle on what you do in the game based on what we've seen. It's 70s-style pulp sci-fi, so it looks to me like a travel game, like 80 Days, with some light space combat because it's a 70s style sci fi game so this is clearly necessary. I think the idea is to generate enough that just by virtue of the colliding systems, it'll generate the circumstances of a moment in pulp sci-fi.
  10. SPECTRE (new James Bond movie)

    well I guess you've all saved me a ticket. I did not like Skyfall and was wary of Spectre. and Casino Royale was also bad so it's not surprising that the Bond movies that attempt to bottle that lightning fail; you can't trick people into thinking that you've reinvented Bond more than once.
  11. So Twitter has started introducing polls, so I did the only logical thing, which was to give Doug a second chance at life.
  12. Quitter's Club: Don't be ashamed to quit the game.

    See, the thing I liked about those was that people weren't actually giving you missions most of the time, because obviously you're just an innocent caught up in this strange circumstance, representative for a shadowy organisation, me? You must be mistaken. The questline you get is your character deciding to do something based on what they said, so they'll talk about the monsters outside, and then you'll go, huh, I can do something about this, and then you do that. If the opening cutscenes irritate you, though, you will not find anything worth your time in it. The build system is clearly inspired by Guild Wars 1, with the wide array of powers you boil down to a limited deck of abilities, but every weapon type plays more or less the same and the combat is pretty clunky even in a genre known for its clunky combat.
  13. I don't think it does, and that's part of why I made a list of actual mechanics used in games free and paid that I think are worse. What I'm trying to highlight here is that word choice reveals something about the mindset that the argument comes from. Arguments aren't made in a vacuum, and it takes training to read and write arguments based purely on verifiable facts. Most of us humans don't argue this way. 'Anti-consumer', I've found, is a phrase used when someone's throwing a tantrum about the value proposition of a product, a close cousin to 'the customer is always right' and not that far off TotalBiscuit's fuckwittery. So it's a dog-whistle phrase that makes me far more suspicious of someone's arguments. If it wasn't a fair deal, you'd lead with that. If it divided the playerbase into paid and unpaid, damaging the ability of the community to play together, you'd lead with that. It's introducing a real-money gambling component, but it doesn't seem to be the pernicious effects of gambling that's bothering you as much as changing the business model. The appeal of the gun seems very narrow, as Payday 2 is a somewhat unforgiving game as I'm led to believe - a great gun in the hands of someone who doesn't understand what they're doing will not save them. I still refuse to argue in favour of lockboxes, though.
  14. I also don't think it changes the quality of the game enough, and I'm leery of someone claiming this is "the most anti-consumer thing imaginable" because they're clearly full of shit. It's like the phrase "slap in the face" - anyone who's using it is almost always overreacting. For instance, I can think of a universe of worse options: Pay to reverse a called alarm Pay for limited invincibility Introducing new gameplay modes that are pay per play An energy system The DOTA2 Compendium Like, I don't think it's a good change, but what the Payday 2 community is proving here is that they're shitty enough that Idle Thumbs should make sure its Steam curation page steers potential players away from them.
  15. Social Justice

    I don't know why people see fat shaming as bad but bigotry shaming as a-okay. Fat shaming is bad because using shame as a weapon is bad, not because fat is good. (Fat is whatever.)
  16. So what we're hearing here is that movie studios aren't as dumb as they look: if Ridley Scott gets a good script he'll deliver a good movie, but Neill Blomkamp had one good movie in him and everyone was wary about giving him Alien.
  17. Life

    Currently I don't get overtime pay, but I get 30% loading to make up for it.
  18. "Ethics and Journalistic Integrity"

    Leigh Alexander, writing for Wired, has misgivings about the expanded SXSW programming. Is it serving the people who need it, or is it serving the SXSW brand?
  19. "Ethics and Journalistic Integrity"

    Yeah, 'cultural Marxism' is a conspiracy theory that Marxists, having largely lost the cultural war, have infiltrated universities and teach kids the tenets of Marxism, which in this conspiracy theory mostly means 'boogeymen'. The point that Marxism largely lost because better theories supplanted it doesn't really feature, but then this is a conspiracy theory that paints anyone who disagrees with them as anti-humanity, and that, I think, is a much, much larger point against it.
  20. Recently completed video games

    I know one person who has beaten the dark world
  21. Life

    My boss is explicitly talking about making sure they have a new contract lined up for when my current one expires. It expires in 8 months. This is probably a good sign.
  22. Recently completed video games

    Super Meat Boy is a game where the difficulty is so goddamn high that I think only a handful of people have done everything. I don't know anyone who has beaten the dark world.
  23. Modest Tech: The NX Generation (Nintendo Switch)

    how could you not care about esoteric structural choices Nintendo makes for their firmware, Twig it's like I don't even know you
  24. Modest Tech: The NX Generation (Nintendo Switch)

    There's a lot of subtle distinctions in that, though: you can easily use Android implementations of things without running an Android operating system. Given Android's open source, Nintendo's firmware team would be smart to cherrypick existing implementations of things where it makes sense for their goals.
  25. Other podcasts

    And I've mentioned it before, but The Dollop is a comedy history podcast about entertaining stories from history read by an asshole to his friend who's going in blind. (This is particularly effective when the story is about someone involved in a famous incident - one recent show was about the Lincoln assassination, and specifically the guy who killed John Wilkes Booth, who was a nutter.) They did an Australian tour recently and had a whole bunch of stories from Australia which were great.