Merus

AAA marketing has to appeal to as wide a range as possible, and thus making it so that it'll appeal to highly informed audience members is a bad idea if it means they alienate uninformed audience members. AAA is eating itself

This is not uncommon for CEO, in this case they're typically paid in stock options.

Let me tell you how it will affect people: people will freak out every time they get a dislike and demand to know the reason why.

When you really think about it, the filmography in the footnotes of Infinite Jest is basically lore.

How many female characters are attractive but not then sexualised? There aren't a lot.

Hollywood Reporter is reporting that Five Nights at Freddy's has been optioned by Warner Bros. I have no idea how you'd adapt this in a way that'd be worthy of the effort. It seems like, no matter what they do, they're going to make something that's significantly lesser than the source.

I don't know if placing the cops in the hands of the organisation that gave Native Americans smallpox and continues to racially profile people to determine if they're a terrorist threat is really the best way to combat endemic racism in the police force. Also I'm pretty sure black Americans have been saying that the police force is racist and can't be trusted for about thirty years now, and it's only now that white America has started to take them seriously. The reason it appears to be a major fire is because, well, it's been burning for decades and everyone kept ignoring it.

There are large Idle Thumbs communities on NeoGAF and Something Awful, and I'm sure the hosts know of other places with lots of Idle Thumbs listeners. The hosts also would have received emails that aren't being taken into account.

It seems like this was premature.

I just realised this is the toxic right-wingers thread and not one about voting. We probably have a thread about voting somewhere.

So you believe you have the right, but not the responsibility, to vote? I think it's a fallacy to say that because the best informed people choose not to vote, then not voting means you are informed, or that informed people choose not to vote because of that information and not, for instance, that they are incapable of choosing between acceptable options. As Chu points out, the most invested in a particular issue are often wrong, and violently so. This isn't exactly a problem with voting. If none of the choices are genuinely of any value, then the problem is with the system. If the system disenfranchises the oppressed, if it fails to reflect popular demographics, if it fails to capture actual preferences or encourages strategic voting, if candidates for issues that enjoy popular support don't even get a look in then democracy is not seving its intended purpose, and therefore it must be changed. And there are organisations that currently campaign on these issues! Use your 'vote' to lend them your support, instead of sitting back and expecting, in a thoroughly bourgeois fashion, that because you are more discerning, then you are entitled to wait until someone delivers an acceptable political option to you.

Yeah, in Australia voting's on a Saturday, there's a cultural acceptance that as an employer you gotta give people the opportunity to go vote, and you don't need identification to vote. Voter fraud is, in practice, not a particularly big deal. I'm not sure it's fair to lay this at the feet of mandatory voting - after all, with voluntary voting, the poor and indigent still don't get any control over the system even though they're supposedly entitled to it. This is a problem with every democratically elected official, I think.

I like this: http://www.salon.com/2015/04/06/sci_fis_right_wing_backlash_never_doubt_that_a_small_group_of_deranged_trolls_can_ruin_anything_even_the_hugo_awards/ I like any essay that has a really great point as part of its setup, because it's going straight to Interestingtown for a sea change. Expressed better than I ever could: the case for compulsory voting in Australia. (As later comments make clear, it's not a panacea.)

The last one: Valve's clever use of motion and light to catch the player's eye is noteworthy here; Ori needed to be a lot more obvious about where the game expects you to be - the second escape sequence suffers significantly from this, where it's just not clear what's about to happen and it requires effort (or, more likely, trial and error) to determine where Ori needs to be to survive the next sequence.

Yeah, it's clear those sequences needed a lot more playtesting before art was finalised. They all have their problems, and they're different problems.

sounds like a job for someone fond of getting in fights with windmills because if there's one thing we should be aware of by now, it's that GamerGate actually don't give a shit about ethics in journalism

I've finished it. I really liked it.

I don't get the sense that Harper is defending Chobitcoin for any reason other than she's being accused online under semi-dubious circumstances. Like, she's willing to demonstrate that she's awful, isn't that enough? This is one of the reasons why I think 'I don't like what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it' is bullshit in practice: there is no appropriate response for words we believe cause harm to society, because we cannot, in practice, differentiate between words we think should not be said that we're still going to allow to do harm and words we think should not be said that we want to keep unsaid.

Well, I guess there was a reason for my difficulty in bringing up internalised misogyny without sounding like an asshole. I think the point here, guys, is that after the discussion she is still going to be in a place of unequal power, and now her coping strategy is wrong too. The pressures that encouraged her to throw other women under the bus still exist, and she's clearly not inclined to see them as unfair. It's sort of how it grates when wealthy people tell poor, unemployed people that if they just got a job/worked harder, they'd be less poor. In a sense that might be true, but it's ignoring structural problems that the rich person would rather not think about.

I cannot deal with internalised misogyny. I just have no idea how to argue the point. I remember having an argument in my guild about women serving as infantry, back when the Australian Army removed gender restrictions on combat roles, and a women who does parkour chimed in saying that there was no way the women were going to be as effective in combat as the men if they weren't required to meet the same fitness standard, and I didn't really have a good reply to that. The answer, apparently, is that the Army redefined 'combat effectiveness' to include the culture of the unit and their ability to engage effectively with non-combatants and civilians (because the effectiveness of your efforts is severely hampered if some of your battalions are committing war crimes, or merely pissing off the locals). It's well-known that a diverse team is more effective, so if you're defining combat effectiveness to include more than just kills and casualties, diversity is more important than fitness. I will forever treasure the brief moment we had of militaristic feminism.

I'm going to be the buzzkill here: quite apart from all the other problems with IQ, implying that gamergaters can be classified by their IQ does disservice to the mentally disabled who can work out pretty easily that things like Gamergate is wrong. Gamergaters aren't disabled, they're fuckwits.

maybe they're locking you out for Good Friday?

Someone was supposed to come up with one and no-one ever did.

It's worth remembering that most Nintendo games have a much longer tail than most other games, which is why games get taken off the shelves in the first place.