Merus

It did not occur to me that civil trials can have jurors. This is a brilliant idea. Wonder Woman's the head juror.

I want you all to meet Ken.

It really is delicious how Gamergate's violent opposition to Anita has done wonders for the visibility of her work and how seriously it's taken, and their first (only?) big 'win' has resulted in Intel committing $300 million to diversity. It would have been nicer if it hadn't involved vicious harassment, mind. Also I see the Grace Hopper Celebration on that board, and that seems like an appropriate thing to support because Grace Hopper was a badass.

I have a pitch, too, based on the observation that Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice sounds like the name of a courtcase: Batman realises he can't beat Superman in a fight, and so sues him in court with the Wayne billions. Superman uses the Daily Planet to try and turn public opinion against Superman. As part of the settlement, they form the Justice League.

This city has taken down their Christmas decorations

Well, it's not a grudge if you don't wish them any malice, you just want them to stay just over there and keep the aisles clear. I've had a couple of years where I didn't speak to my parents, because I was having problems and I perceived them as making them worse, and I know it hurt Mum a lot because she read it as yet another person she loved abandoning her. I didn't have anything close to the history that you've had with your family, but I'd imagine that for any parent, that attachment to their child that forms over the first few years of life is hard to break. I imagine it's genuine loss she's feeling, but she is incapable of understanding what she did to you, and it's going to be difficult-to-impossible to bury the hatchet.

I have an interview on Thursday. I've applied for two jobs, callbacks on both. I should probably be less scared of applying for jobs...

I can't imagine that Rockstar will change. They seem completely disconnected from criticism. They'll keep making the same game until their latest game crashes and burns.

The possibility that the analogy is leaky because it's not actually intended as an analogy, and is in fact just a bizarre joke about an unpleasant interaction that people decided was an analogy for a problem they were seeing, seems pretty likely to me. It's strange that no-one considers that. Wondermark is frequently bizarre, and it's not particularly political, so the idea that Malki ! decided that this was the time to break from tradition and make a topical joke doesn't seem plausible. I mean, he likes it when his work has resonance but I don't recall any sort of topical humour from anything Malki's ever done.

It's a fun debate to have whether Raiders or Last Crusade is the better Indy movie, and there's good arguments either way, but Temple of Doom doesn't really get a look in. Unappealing characters, racism, and a flaccid last half? It's got a couple of great scenes but it's surrounded by a mean-spirited movie.

The crystal skulls are real things, though. I get that they wanted to keep the plots drawing from the pulp obsessions of the era, and part of the fun is how the reality and the pulp intermingle - but the pulp doesn't mingle all that well in Crystal Skull. Aliens turn up at the end, but during the middle of the other Indy movies there's tension where the mystical threatens to bleed through.

It's a bit more complicated than that, but I assume you're getting at how IQ tests largely measure your performance on IQ tests, and there's a lot of other mental behaviours that would be considered by the public as part of intelligence that aren't adequately assessed by tests. The kind of people who talk about their IQ as being a defining feature are absolutely wankers. I only got to have this feeling recently, but I'm always really excited to chat with my friend Andrew who is super fucking smart.

Brian Ashcraft and, to a lesser extent, Luke Plunkett, are easily the worst that Kotaku has to offer. Kotaku's reputation would rise significantly if Bashcraft moved on. Then again, if I'm reading Kotaku I mostly read the Australian edition, which has some great writers as well as a lot of Kotaku's content (though they refuse to republish some of Bashcraft's stuff.)

I remember having a profound spiritual moment when I saw that Gamecubes were half off. God may work in mysterious ways but that seems a little too mysterious to me.

Many of these people, it turns out, tend to be the smartest person they knew growing up. At around one standard deviation or so above the norm, kids still have to work hard and pick up all those vital skills that have nothing to do with intelligence, and they tend to get the most value from their intelligence. Over two standard deviations, and life is so different growing up that many kids end up hitting a wall when their natural intelligence isn't enough to let them coast. At that level, the deficiencies are so obvious that many profoundly gifted adults have had the asshole beaten out of them, if they even manage to survive. Between that, though, their deficiencies aren't quite so crippling, so many of them don't have the experience of being outclassed, nor awareness of their own deficiencies because they've never had to improve. This kind of makes them easy pickings: so long as you can keep up, for the first time in their life they're dealing with someone who won't respond to their deflections, and they don't know how to handle it. This doesn't really answer your question. Let's just say I've had the asshole beaten out of me and leave it at that.

I think in some ways it feels like validation, which is why I think there's not a lot of reflexive thought about whether the military are involved in games in the right way. It feels to me very much like the NFL's embrace of Madden, to the point where plays that work in Madden tend to trickle into the actual game, except instead of football it's murdering people for politics. It does also show up some of the medium's blind spots; there is no good reason why we don't have a game about building vital infrastructure for wartorn communities in an effort to get civilians onside, or peacekeeping, or the other things that defence forces do that is not murdering people for politics. (I can't ever recall seeing a game where a bunch of children run along behind the main character. How is that not a thing?)

this is not okay, teg

As someone who played WoW when TotalBiscuit first made it big, he's basically always been a douchecanoe who thought he was the smartest motherfucker in the room. That kind of person is basically a smug git in private as well, because they don't have the understanding that other people might be more qualified to speak, or more interesting - so I imagine, without an audience, he'd be much the same. One of my greatest joys in life is being the person in the room smarter than they are.

Many pubs have open board game nights these days. If you're proposing that a game's primary utility is to make it easier to meet strangers, board games almost universally do it better than video games. They're more collaborative, they have a better arc of play and they think more about the implications of the rules than most video games of the era did. For that matter, speed dating does it better than games, so I'd propose that your criteria isn't a particularly good way to find the best video game, but the best thing that you personally want out of video games.

It's probably because I live in Australia and the Classification Board has never found this aspect of GTA particularly appropriate, but I've never pulled over a prostitute in a GTA game. I wish that NPCs would dive out of the way of your car like they used to before GTA3 came out.

The more I watch of the yearly Wipes, the more I suspect that I don't care for the yearly Wipes. The few I've watched always seemed weirdly forced compared to the Wipe series.

I think the standard that asks you to prioritise cabinet over home games is the same standard that asks you to prioritise board games over video games. A standard that says that the best video game is the one that most resembles another medium entirely is not a standard that will lead to the pinnacle of video games.

To be fair, Persona 4's random dungeon generation was pretty shit even for the time.

My resolution this year is 1920x1080

I just want to make sure that people get another chance to see this post