Merus

I was legit excited when I found out Dave Anthony was considering a Gamergate episode of The Dollop. People getting upset about video games being driven by a posse of actual rapists is the kind of horrifically bizarre turn that The Dollop lives for.

Oh man, you're going to be excited when you find out the name of the main character in Snow Crash.

Yeah, Roosh is a real piece of work.

Interestingly, it doesn't look like people are getting a repro on this particular issue. It's apparently mediocre but fun enough, nowhere near Sonic 2006 levels of terrible.

I think there's a key difference between the story being ongoing and the story being complete and ready to download. Generally, I put my faith in the idea that Reddit will do more harm than good. I'm reminded of the recent released of someone forced to confess by the Innocence Project; Redditors will expect a particular narrative to emerge because it is still, to them, a story, and that's likely going to end up being wrong because humans generally don't operate to narrative convention.

I am really hoping that Half-Life 3 has Gordon speak, and it's Morgan Freeman's voice.

It feels to me like they're either registering it defensively because they own it, or they're renewing it in preparation for an emulated re-release. I think a new Battletoads is very unlikely.

Someone promise me: if I ever attempt to claim Martin Luther King, shoot me. Also that headline is great.

You can also get legitimacy by being right and expressing your point clearly, succinctly and inescapably, but I can see why Gamergate doesn't think they have that in them

No, I think that's a fair criticism, although I think his point was that they inevitably get conflated. On a happier note, Milo was suspended from Twitter.

I thought this was interesting, because it describe the problem I had with "social justice warriors" when they were merely fuckwits on Tumblr and not literally everybody. It was never a great name, of course. I'm less sure about the critique of the progressive movement, because it's really fucking hard to point out systemic inequalities at the best of times. But maybe the tactics to politicise the personal aren't necessary if people are merely allowed to share their stories without people jumping in and trying to explain it. I'm always fascinated by the regular Reddit thread where people discover for the first time that women get way more shit than men do on the internet.

More Gone Girl:

You're in luck! Scroll up to that search bar at the top of the page, and watch amazed as it only finds results in this thread!

the whole reason we're doing this is because everyone's an uber noob (and a good GM delights in having a new player in their games because the noobs tend to have the most fun and they haven't seen the usual tricks yet) I'm keeping the holiday season in mind. I think it's also worth remembering that people will want to join mid-game, which is often a great opportunity, so you're welcome to join when you've got some stability.

note how it doesn't talk about how the IGF believed GamerGate when they said that Mattie Brice said a bad thing and their statement can be easily twisted by GamerGate to sound like a further statement of support.

I was expecting to have Saturday afternoon free, which is what time it is for me, but I forgot I had agreed to attend an elaborate birthday party. Given the early start, if you can't make it, that's fine, and we'll do some preparatory stuff in the thread. Edit: this is just for this first session, we'll normally start a lot later.

So I realised I'd made a pre-existing commitment on the day I was going to run our first session. That'll mean I'll have to run it a little earlier than I wanted, and cut it a little short. I'm sorry for this. I'll need to finish up at around 6:30 CST, and will want to start as early as we can manage. We'll do what we can in that time, and we'll have a full, proper session next fortnight. If we can't manage it, maybe we'll try and do character creation here so we can launch straight into it next time.

Yeah, given the long-standing whiff of dodginess around the IGF, I think this is the last straw for me. I think they've been fairly useless to indies by rewarding games that make a good first impression or have a pre-existing reputation - they stopped being a decent discovery tool for indies around 2005 - and now we see them being actually harmful to indies. Fuck 'em.

People have been waiting for Blizzard to make a film for years - lord know the cinematic team are the only ones at Blizzard who know how storytelling works anymore. The cinematics team seem disinclined to make a film, though.

I had heard comparisons of Interstellar and Prometheus going in. I did not hate Interstellar coming out nearly as much. A lot of things bothered me about it, and I could have done without it wrapping everything up in a neat little bow, but at least its story fundamentally worked.

I'd disagree; you can get pretty far in Minecraft without ever bothering to learn the more complex systems. Redstone and potion brewing are both fairly complex, but neither are they required. The most complex part you're forced to interact with are the crafting systems, and even then you can get all the tools you need to interact with the world just putting the three things you've found in the crafting grid and seeing what happens. The only things you really need to understand are that you get wood from trees, you need to make shelter and a light source, and that better quality tools let better quality materials spawn. Good luck, have fun, hunt diamonds. In terms of the actions players have, it's essentially 'remove block' and 'add block' (or 'attack monster') and the complexity comes from the world generation, which has long been Minecraft's greatest asset. But you are, of course, right that even this is a bridge too far for the vast majority of people, who have to look up external guides just to understand how to participate. There's an argument that this lack of tutorial is one of the reasons why it was so successful; the reasoning goes that the lack of handholding forces potential players to engage with the player community much earlier than other games ever do, and that community compels them to explore further than they otherwise would have. To bring this back to Zelda, though, the vast majority of the time when you're trying to find a secret in Zelda you're looking for the one exception to the rule that walls don't do anything when you bomb them. That's not especially interesting unless there's some kind of external clue to say that this wall is an exception. In Minecraft, the dirt always responds when removed, because there's just more dirt behind it and if you dig yourself into a hole you'll have to put it back to get out.

The elephant in the room of this conversation is Minecraft.

I suspect there's a big influence from the Too Many Cooks short film Adult Swim has.

I was being sarcastic, because I genuinely did not know they didn't release the other two Star Wars films under the name Star Wars.