Merus

I went to remedial social education as a kid. (It was a few days, mind; if I'm on the autism spectrum I'm waaaay over towards the neurotypical side.) How to socialise is a skill that can be learned. There's instruction books and everything. I have them. Conversation structure, body language, social conventions, tone, politeness, respect, social niceties, you borrow two or three books from the library and read them, and you'll be caught up enough. It is a prison mostly of their own making; everyone's bad at something, and part of growing up is either learning it, or discarding your need for it. And humans are herd animals so you've gotta drive yourself crazy to discard that you need your herd. Also socialising with people who are good at being social is so much easier than those who aren't.

I can imagine! TotalBiscuit styles himself as the Cynical Brit, so they're the same person. Also I've known of him since my WoW days - his first big break was beta coverage of the Cataclysm expansion - and he's always been a dipstick. In that time we've seen a lot of YouTubers connect with their audience and develop a more mature and inclusive persona, but TotalBiscuit's mostly just gotten more views.

Make the ARG lead back to 4chan.

I haven't been approached by any, but if I do, I'm going to try and piss them off by bringing up the Boston Marathon bomber. 4chan doesn't like Reddit, so I bet I can piss a couple of them off of reminding them when their hated also-fuckwit rivals thought they'd do some investigation and circlejerked themselves into identifying an innocent man who wasn't even involved. The fixation on sex is, I think, MRA influence.

This is interesting -- oh my god this is just Insomnia.ac writ large, isn't it. Okay, so: the previous forum I was at had to ban outgoing links to that website, or mentioning its owner, because it'd trigger a whole bunch of really entitled and furious guest posters who were incensed that gaming no longer treated pure technical challenge as the only valid kind of game. Games that had a story and you didn't have to show mastery over the game systems? It was a cancer that was ruining video games.

Some games just don't work with the Steam overlay. Be prepared that it might not be possible.

It's hard to know how much this is a beta. Like, there's issues with the level design and lighting, but is that up for change?

This is an interesting topic! I have absolutely nothing I can contribute. Not every country has seen the labor movement dismantled in the way that it has in the US and the UK, but thinking of games from countries with a strong labour movement, I'm not sure I detect any particularly strong differences in philosophy. Most of the games that attempt to depict the 'real' world tend to be American, British or Japanese. I can't really think of a lot of games outside of these countries that have room to express their views on work. Michel Ancel's games are high fantasy and science fantasy, and while there's a non-violent resistance movement in Beyond Good and Evil, Jade is a freelance photographer with, it seems, no real job stability. I think the closest Australian-made games have gotten to depicting the real world are Destroy All Humans!, where you play as an alien mostly oblivious to human society, Ninja Pizza Girl, where you're an entry-level employee with no union protection, and early versions of what became The Bureau, where you play as a government agent because of course the government's going to try and take care of alien threats.

No, my suggestion was to provide everyone with a candelabra that moved around when they moved their head I mean sorry what

They have fewer, but not zero. Like you've discovered, there were female knights. There were also female Vikings, female Zulu warriors, female warrior queens - despite our perception of women in patriarchal societies, women have always fought. But to depict a patriarchal society in the short space of time you have in a fictional story, you have to rob women of the agency they would have realistically had. Part the first: patriarchy (if you are not familiar with this, Google it) is built on the silent consent of those inside it, of everyone agreeing that this is normal, that there's nothing unusual going on*. The people attacking Anita believe that those who are being silent about the abuse silently agree with them (Mark Serrels of Kotaku was talking about getting emails to this effect just today). Serial rapists consistently report that they assume every man would act as they do if they were bolder; rapists also cheerfully admit to raping women, so long as you don't actually say the word 'rape' in the question. If you have patriarchal attitudes in the work, and don't address them, it helps to reinforce the idea that this is normal. So, yeah, if you're a creator you can't just present it and leave it there; on the other hand, if you're a creator you're probably not keen on the idea of culture putting meaning into your work that you'd never put in there yourself. There's also the economic argument that just because you think it's necessary doesn't mean your audience wants to have that in their fiction, when they can enjoy something where patriarchy isn't expressed. Part the second: patriarchy isn't universal. There are tribes that exist today, that you can fly over and visit, that do not privilege men over women. So patriarchy isn't inevitable, and so neither is systemised violence against women.

Here is an interview with an expert on bigotry that only has to do with games because I'm saying that it's surprisingly on-topic: https://www.insidehighered.com/views/2014/07/23/interview-stephen-eric-bronner-about-bigot-why-prejudice-persists I'm not entirely sure I agree with its conclusion, though - the parallels between the worldview presented here, and the worldview of the cult member, are striking.

I think the idea of taking less pay is to do something that you want to see in the world. I don't know how much value an internship working on a project that's going to turn out crap is actually going to have for your resume; I would try and ask someone in the animation industry whose opinion you respect who seems to enjoy giving advice to newbies.

There's three problems with this. Firstly, there's lots of historical detail that Martin glosses over, simply because he is telling a story and he has to focus his attention somewhere, so saying that depicting violence against women as 'essential' to reproducing the character of the period is actually sort of creepy. It's arguing, simultaneously, that Martin should be reproducing the medieval period, and that he needs to exaggerate the amount of violence done to women compared to history to make sure that everyone can see that it's medieval and cruel. It ends up being a lazy shorthand; instead of digging deep into the relationships between class, power and religion, you can throw in some dead hookers whose chief important to the plot is that they're dead flesh acted on by a monster. In that way, the prostitute that Joffrey shoots could be someone's beloved dog for all that their humanity is important. Secondly, it frames women as victims, who are typically unable to defend themselves, with the characters we see who do defend themselves as an exception that others in the world couldn't expect. Women, as a whole, don't get to challenge this paradigm, because they have to stay pliant victims for the story to work as the author wants it to. Again, women don't get to be human unless imbued with humanity by the creator; men are assumed by the audience to be human by default. Thirdly, it normalises sexual violence in the service of a grander story. Violence against women is probably not as important to this story as marauding zombies or smartalec dwarves; a core theme of the story is the victimisation inflicted by the powerful, but violence against women is considered about as important as victimisation of a princess's family by invading armies. It ends up being window dressing, not given the focus or attention it deserves. Given that including it is saying that of course it's supposed to be here, what does that say about violence against women in the real world? That it's obviously going to happen, and it's terrible, but it's inevitable? That's not actually true. That's not actually helpful. Power always corrupts, but patriarchy isn't inevitable. (This is the same problem that Bioshock Infinite had with its racist theming: Daisy Cutter's objections to racism are presented as being equally as bad - and also as justified - as Columbia's racism.) Feminist Frequency's latest video is essentially about this. (Am I just trying to clumsily summarise the video? Absolutely.) As Anita says at the start of her series, this doesn't mean that you're not allowed to enjoy Game of Thrones or A Song Of Ice And Fire, you just have to be accepting of where it has problems, in the same way that readers of the books probably shouldn't aggressively defend the pacing of book 4. (Thinking about this did make me realise that a lot of the core characters have legitimate things to say about victimisation, and Martin has a character almost perfectly placed to comment both on the use of women's bodies as commodities, and societal silence around domestic violence.) By the way, did you know the Tropes vs Women series is also produced and written by Jonathan McIntosh? Not to discount Anita's work, but it's funny how his name is almost never mentioned!

Based on the making-of, they're committed to preserving the original composition of the game.

Yes, but our world is in the mind of an autistic boy staring at a snowglobe

See, I can buy Peppermint Patties and refrigerate them, or I can buy Minties, and I can have a mint that takes a little while to get through. I have options. Danielle, though, is irreplaceable.

See, I had Junior Mints for the first time recently, and they're not that great. I can't imagine that a country like America has only one candy using peppermint essence.

If they're performing with the Melbourne orchestra, they should go to Melbourne in around the start of November and maybe do a panel kthx I want to touch Tim Schafer

Guys this is set in the same universe as ours because it shares forest fires and the state of Wyoming

I think I see Tim Schafer, in the middle there, reading the tweets he'll get in a year So it sounds like PAX this year has been mostly pleasant? No drama?

See, I've lost days to Cookie Clicker and games like it that I never lose to MMOs, so I'm deeply suspicious of these kind of games. The thing that worries me is that Cookie Clicker has no goal, but it does have an endless series of subgoals that provide progress towards the next subgoal. Because every single sub-goal increases your cookie output, just appreciating reaching a sub-goal is enough to set you on the path of the next. It's as if the reward for turning in a quest in WoW was automatically teleporting you in front of a dead boar with a quest item on its corpse and a new quest in your tracker to find 8 more. It doesn't help that all these games are balanced so that they take ever-increasing amounts of time between each upgrade, even if you're playing them optimally. At least the Particle Clicker one unlocked neat (way too technical) descriptions of the various particles that colliders have found, and also ended in about 40 minutes.

I also have suspicions that this is a 'checkmate atheists' approach; a whole bunch of questions that allow the asker to frame the debate however they want, especially when the problem with the debate is that one side is coming in with a frame that denies the validity of that debate. Of course, it could be just a guy, who knows. But you're welcome to actually start a dialogue at any time instead of the quiz show format.

I think the word 'manchild' was invented for this purpose: they're not necessarily teenage boys, but they exhibit the thoughtlessness, self-absorption and occasional cruelty that is stereotypically associated with teenage boys.

I am enjoying this song by Banks: