Merus

Alright, I made a guild called Idle Thumbs [WZRD] on the North America server! (EU will have to sort themselves out. According to the wiki, I should be able to invite EU players to the guild as well, although you won't be able to play with NA players.) I set it up so that you've basically got no access when you're invited and access to everything but the build queue and editing ranks when someone sees that you've posted in the thread and we think we can trust you. If you post your full account name (with the 4-digit number, as in Merus.9475) I'll start inviting people and we can start earning influence and start building shit and unlock guild missions.

So my housemate has schizophrenia. Are you saying that he's lesser than me because he has medication that he takes? Are you saying that it's a valid comparison to compare him to, say, Donald Trump? Because I would violently disagree. Crazy is negative only because what you refer to when you refer to craziness doesn't actually exist outside of early 20th century psychology. That is the problem.

The biggest problem LoL has is that's it's built around a reinforcing feedback loop. If you're winning, you start winning faster, which makes small differences in skill dramatically larger. It's... not a good thing for a team game.

HTC announced a release date of Q4 2015, though.

Any suggestions for the guild name/tag? Idle Thumbs is pretty obvious, but I'm very open to a witty alternative, and the guild tags give us an opportunity to have some fun. [REMO], perhaps?

Judging by follow-up works, those poets, I think, will be fine. (Also this is why I use and suggest 'fuckwit' or even 'lackwit' because it does capture what many of those ableist words are trying to capture - that someone has their senses but just doesn't use them - and is one of the few that does.)

Anita's talk this weekend in Sydney's going to be crackerjack.

Even the easter egg backdrop game of Offworld is cool (oh my god it's Asteroids except you ram the asteroids and it feels so great). I had no time for the previous Offworld, but I have lots of time for Leigh Alexander and wish her the very best.

I'd also consider 'why do they expect people to take their argument seriously if they present it like that' is also a tone argument. The key problem is that it's a disingenuous argument; it's an argument that implies that the argument is being dismissed because it's being presented passionately, when the argument is in fact being dismissed because it challenges precious assumptions that aren't usually questioned in polite company.

I would not have a Freddy Fazbear animatronic in my house. I would also not have any animatronic in my house, but especially not a Freddy Fazbear. (I'm not appreciating how obviously sinister Freddy is in that video. Tone it down, guys, make it subtle. Also, have him constantly looking at you no matter where you move.)

WEEKEND, PEOPLE On the WEEKEND They've been showing off the first expansion to press, and it'll be playable at both PAX East and Rezzed.

May I suggest 'fuckwit' as a replacement for ableist words that are intended to suggest someone who's wilfully ignorant and doesn't see a problem with that?

Guild Wars 2 is once again 75% off this weekend, presumably taking advantage of the press coverage.

I understand a tone argument as any argument that boils down to 'I don't like your tone'. This is subtly different to 'you shouldn't be so angry' - it's still presumptuous as fuck but it's not a tone argument.

yeah, reading about CSR is what got me thinking along these lines.

I think the one that has the most traction is Slack, although Communicator would plug in pretty quickly to your Exchange environment.

In-game corridor. It looks like it's much more dependent on moving about than the primarily headset-based equipment.

How does Valve's system handle people moving down a corridor? Because I would love a game where you explore a dungeon or something at that kind of resolution, but if the game gets weird when you move down a corridor... I feel like this is an interesting case study for patents, actually, and I say this as someone who's been traditionally very suspicious of them: Oculus has been almost left behind by people with a lot more money, and a lot of it was kick-started by the approach Oculus took to make it viable.

This is a very half-formed thought, but: I kind of wonder if the assumption that capitalist entities only exist to make money isn't playing right into the hands of people who want to ignore basic ethical standards. Like, is there anything inherent in capitalism that says we can't expect corporations to not be dicks? They're already treated as equivalent to people, so why can we not hold them to the same standard? Like, seriously. Let's imagine we're in a world where we hold corporations to basic human responsibilities: don't punch down, clean up your shit, be nice, have good table manners. How does that break down? For people, we have a whole host of expectations of basic behaviour for humans, which we suspend when we're talking about a corporation and not, say, a club. For example, if a club leaves shit everywhere, it's obviously the club's fault and we don't need a law to assign blame for this. A corporation does it and we apparently need an organisation that can slap them around. Is it just that a corporation is so large that we can't expect bad reputations to spread? Or that there's no real way to shun them in the way that people can be shunned? Or that, if you shun the workers of that company, they respond that the job market's not liquid enough to support people resigning in protest... but then what happens if in this thought experiment we also have the Standard Income? Like, you do have hedge funds and banks who pledge to only invest in corporations that have a minimum ethical standard, so it's not entirely out of the realm of possibility, but we're treating that as a special extra rather than as a baseline.

So I decided to audition some new podcasts: Comedy Film Nerds - one my housemate really likes this, but I guess I caught it at a bad time because it didn't do much for me. It's not particularly comedic (they're comedians, but they're not performing and not trying to be funny) and it's not particularly nerdy either, with fairly surface-level analysis of the films. Maybe it's just because the movies recently have had very little to say about them, but I'm not heartened by one of them being offended by Kingsman's supposed anti-Americanism. I wouldn't mind a good movie podcast but I don't think this is it. Justice Points - our own Apple Cider's podcast, which is still in audition because the episodes are hella long but first impression is that it seems actually really good. I really hope it's not just because the first half of the episode I listened to was unusually strong. I like podcasts with room for silliness and really substantial discussion in the same cast, and it seems like the hosts are experts at setting up rapport with their guests and warming them up, so when the episode starts they're ready to go and making jokes about what names they gave to their guns in Counter-Strike or describing things as 'twee as fuck' or telling bizarre stories about virtual luxury sports cars, even though they're starting with the dreaded 'what have you been playing'. The hosts seem like they have good instincts for follow-up questions, as well, which is encouraging, and it seems like the guests are free to ask the hosts questions? A lot of guest-focused podcasts have problems where the quality is dependent on what the guests bring to the table, and I'm curious to see if Justice Points bucks that trend because of the looseness of the format. Anyway, rooting for this one.

I was planning on coming back to this thread and saying there's no such thing as a perfect victim, and how much of this distaste for Brianna Wu that people aren't quite so interested in swallowing is probably going to be used against her, and against other GG targets. But then the expectation that you should be able to at least listen to other people doesn't seem so onerous to me, so I think people who can't even meet that low bar probably shouldn't be considered leaders, or deserve influence.

The question I have is: UE4 and Unity 5 are also free to small developers. What exactly does Source 2 have over them given that both UE4 and Unity are mature tools with vibrant ecosystems around them? Especially since UE4 and Unity support asset streaming and Source 1 does not. (If Source 2 doesn't support asset streaming...)

If Wu believes that she can provide leading GGs an 'out' by endorsing Brad Wardell, and she also believes that the only people left in GG are detached from reality (which is not quite what she said but let's be generous here), why would she think that giving them an exit strategy would work? I think she's trying to find any way she can to make the awful-go-round stop, and if that means forgiving people who've shown no hint of remorse and don't deserve pity, then she'll do it.

The birth? Honey, we're definitely into the toddling phase

From what I understand, he's playing The Stanley Parable at the behest of his biographer, who's a video game journalist because in the world of House of Cards, video game journalists are good enough writers to become presidential biographers instead of beloved comedians