Merus

Club Nintendo Australia's offerings are like half wallpapers. I don't think they've ever had anything good up there.

Oh my god the stereotypes are true

I don't think there's very much difference between calling for non-violence from marginalised people and calling for them to, say, wear purple. It's not the message that's the problem, it's the assumption that their opinion should matter.

I've never been sold on TAL and I dropped Radiolab after deciding it was a science program for people who didn't actually like science all that much (the Hmong debacle was a factor, as well). But I really enjoy Planet Money, which does have a similar public radio style and structure.

Oh, Invisibilia's okay, is it? I ended up dropping Wait Wait after realising that I had mostly because I didn't have enough good comedy podcasts, because it wasn't ever particularly funny. At least Ask Me Another has wordplay questions, but I did end up dropping that too.

Yeah, Sterling's made it clear he's not impressed with gamergaters. He's rankled a few people because he's had plenty of opportunities to fuck up and have it not ruin his career, and his Patreon did particularly well so he's kind of a reminder of how people like Maddy Myers or Liz Ryerson aren't 'wanted', but at least he's not John Bain.

So Anita Sarkeesian is going to be speaking in Sydney (at the Opera House, no less) next month, as well as on a panel with other feminists discussing How To Be A Feminist, which promises to be interesting mostly because I'm expecting Germaine Greer to start a fight.

Here is Jeff Atwood, charting the slow decline of respectability in Evony ads. The last one is my favourite, as it's the logical endpoint.

Of course, when she hits about 6 she'll want to play Minecraft basically all the time judging from what I keep hearing from parents

I don't eat potatoes much because they're basically carbs at dinner.

Apparently my guild isn't going into meltdown, they just lost a few of their senior people at once for varying reasons. Anyway I'm on Synka Dynmerus usually (hopefully at some point I'll have some spare gold around to make that name fit the asura naming scheme), and my account is Merus.9475. I'm happy to show you cool things as you're exploring around.

It's shit like that that makes me glad I live in a country where the labour movement won.

There's a few things I think they dropped the ball on - it's taken them a long time to get PvP to a healthy state, although they're preparing a ladder system that I think will be the cherry on top; WvW has grown stagnant thanks to serious neglect; and there's very little content that really pushes the limits of their combat system, although there's smatterings of it here and there, particularly in Dry Top, Silverwastes and in some of the festival content. But it's an MMO that can, honest-to-god, be played casually, and it sounds like what they want to do with the expansion is really address some of the long-standing issues.

The problem I have with this argument: is: sure, that's fine in the abstract, but who's determining whether a complaint is wise or fair? Obviously the complainer can't, but the complainant isn't usually in a position to make that call either, particularly if they have the privilege of never having to consider a problem that their actions are contributing to. The existence of complaints on the wrong side of that line is exactly the kind of thing that 'social justice warrior' was originally intended to describe, but where that line's drawn is, in practice, dependent on your own personal understanding. Tumblr, who probably invented this problem, has come up with the 'problematic fave' as a solution, where people are encouraged to not reach for a complaint if they feel the work is otherwise worthwhile.

I still do, but I think my guild may have decided to implode, in literally the worst possible moment (given that there's a surge of players drawn by the expansion announcement and the big sale recently). I'll let you know if it's still stable. It's got a sizable Australian contingent and a lot of the players are on Sea of Sorrows, although that's not the impediment it used to be now that world choice is only really relevant for WvW and what map chat tends to look like.

I don't use very many and get self-conscious when I do. But then sometimes I try and write like Ryan North and everything becomes an exclamation! Like so!

I think the B2P model is a good one - it means your cash store can be fairly reasonable because you have that revenue stream from box purchases. GW2's cash store with built in gold-to-premium currency converter is... well it could be better, but it doesn't have to use 'fun pain' (i.e. pain) to encourage players to pony up.

A review of American Sniper.

From what I remember of the Super Metroid map, Griddle might have fallen for a trick. It might help if you

I've never seen a dating thread work, because eventually its flavour shifts to the point where vanilla people won't post in it any more. I remember one where several times, people would post that their partner wanted to try polyamory, the polyamorists encouraged it, and it turned out it was basically a pretext to break up. No-one ever learned.

Obviously the appropriate way to comment on other people's bad behaviour is through a newspaper column. [citation needed] anecdotes are not data, but feminists calling out Penny Arcade is the only reason I have any exposure to feminist thinking. Call-out culture forces people, at least a little, to be afraid of what they say, and that's a definite improvement over the world where people could say whatever they wanted without having to think whether it could hurt someone. And to be honest it's not hard to get people to back off: you step back, you listen and acknowledge you understand social justice things, because it's largely enflamed not by the first instance but by fucking up the response and demonstrating that you're dismissing. Call-out culture is a proxy battle because the attitudes and people they actually care about are protected and defended by people who won't see the problems, particularly amongst their friends and family. (This is the problem Archie Bunker was intended to symbolise - a loving family man who's also really, really racist.) I also think it's harder for people who can't pass for acceptable as easily as Chris can. A lot of people don't get to outgrow the thoughtlessly cruel comments, so they don't get the opportunity to let it go. Being able to live normally without being political is not a privilege everyone gets. The other thing, about the Natasha Allegri thing, is this: do you agree that sexism is everywhere? If so, then it's not unreasonable that someone would use a poor example to argue that sexism is everywhere.

BGOAT? (my answer is always and forever Super Metroid)

I wonder how the environment of the first one plays for foreigners. To me it feels like it's in the Australian countryside, small towns dotting the landscape, except with these weird fascist hints here and there. 2 is weird because it's super 80s, with the Cold War and the assumption that gasoline is a constant. (It's charming that everyone calls it 'guzzoline' because the actors would know it as 'petrol'.)

This is the article I'm thinking of where Blow talks about what Braid was about.