Merus

We Hunted The Mammoth pointed out that one of these guys is a Dark Enlightenment supporter. Basically they believe we should all go back to feudalism. Of course, both of them are nasty pieces of work.

Also there's a famous story about Coke and Martin Luther King: when King won the Nobel Peace Prize, Atlanta was initially not going to acknowledge it in any way until Coca-Cola made it clear to the Chamber of Commerce that they weren't going to operate in a city that wouldn't acknowledge one of its most successful citizens, saying that while Atlanta needed Coca-Cola, Coca-Cola didn't need Atlanta.

For me it starts off with 'Super Male' in the Meat Boy voice, then rapidly becomes the Mortal Kombat announcer for 'Vitality'.

There's a lot of irony in HuffPo sending a writer to report on people getting screwed by the system. HuffPo are digital sharecroppers.

I'm pretty sure that most of my family and friends know that shitty things are going down in Ferguson. The narrative is different here - we find your cops with their guns terrifying, so the reports pay lip service to the police line but they're the ones pointing guns at civilians.

owww

Reiki. Honestly the 'hey, if they're going to be suckers I might as well make money of it' is cult-like behaviour; there's plenty of people in cults who see through the hoo-ey and figure they'll go along with it. They might see through the hoo-ey, but they haven't seen through the con, which is to keep them participating and reinforcing the specialness of the cult. It's remarkably like being called over to play Three-Card Monte by a street conman; the only winning move is to never get involved in the first place. I understand the NHS's support of bullshit alternative therapies comes from Ol' Bigears, who will one day be King of Australia and mark my words on that day someone will table a motion for Australia to become a republic.

From what I remember, the "bad" ending of Silent Hill 2 is significantly more narratively satisfying than the "good" ending. The "good" ending's a cop-out.

There's a small part of me that looks at these asswipes panicking that 'their' games are being taken away, and thinks 'now you know how it felt when you took my adventures games away, you fuckers'. There definitely seems to be an invitation into shared delusion - you'd think that people would be more skeptical of an ex airing dirty laundry - that's common along certain sections of the population. Here's a secret, the email that Obama wasn't really born in America says, that you could probably disprove with a little effort. But isn't it nicer to believe that it's true? That you're part of the secret club that knows the truth, and that we're all heroically fighting together against the forces of darkness that are secretly poisoning all that we love? But we see through their little games, don't we. We won't be fooled. We're the good guys. The horrifying thing is that to them, it's nicer to believe that everything they care about is irredeemably corrupt than it is to believe that they're not particularly special.

But are you a pregnant woman beyond the first trimester?

See, when I think of what we supposedly get out of having scrupulous ethical standards (specifically, that large corporations who will spare no expense to convince people that their specific tentpole game is a necessary purchase), I wonder how that's any different to people getting obscenely hyped up over a big AAA game that turns out to have major problems when critically re-examined, like, say, GTAIV. Of course, there's always pressure from the audience to score a highly anticipated game highly, no matter its actual quality - if anyone had given GTAIV a 'this is well-made but kind of tedious and hollow' kind of score the pitchforks would have almost certainly have come out. I think there are systemic biases in how games are reviewed (such as the 4-point scale) that reflect the history of the medium, but I think there's an expectation by the audience that these biases will stay in place.

Congrats Jake

I might bring this up with one of the police officers I know to see how the Australian police handle it. Police brutality isn't as prevalent/visible here; I'd be curious to see if that's due to specific training or what.

Fark predates the .com bubble. It's ollllllld. It's not quite old enough that there are people who can drink that were born before it started, but that'll happen in a couple of years depending on your jurisdiction.

I made this joke on Twitter, but I'm really more of a Social Justice Sorcerer.

My favourite part of the whole Fark story is Drew Curtis' snippy reply to Slate. We can't embed tweets on the forum, can we.

Trial's still ongoing, I think, but there have been more allegations that have come to light. The army chief has said that he expects that, as he is demanding a cultural shift, that there's a long way to go and there'll likely be more incidents coming to light as that happens. I recall there were a couple of officer cadets charged this week, so it sounds like women might be more willing to make reports, and the brass more willing to take them seriously. The academy has a woman running it now, and it looks like all three defence forces are hitting their gender makeup targets for women. I find Lt Gen Morrison's approach to feminism particularly amusing because it's not especially altruistic. He is a career soldier who became aware of a recurring problem in his army that affected his troops' morale and safety, and hampered their capacity to completely represent the country they serve. I love how incongruous his speeches are. (The Australian Army has different fitness standards for women than for men, which is often controversial - it looks like the ADF believe, for now, that while there's a risk of having less effective soldiers, there's enough women committing to the defence forces and passing non-gender specific fitness standards that mitigating that risk is not worth the cultural problems that come from strong gender bias.)

Here is a guy with a clear roadmap to defusing the situation in Ferguson.

Yeah, that one's pretty good. Also I have difficulty believing that you could find 5 games journalists who'd still go ahead with writing a review after they'd slept with the developer, given how casually game journalists seem to accept that they can't review their friends' games.

Black Lightning will probably be a very gamey game, and it is delicious irony that I'm getting interaction tips from something dipsticks like TotalBiscuit are quick to dismiss as not a game.

Oh, Depression Quest is the Twine game that crosses out certain interactions that are reasonable in the circumstance but not something the protagonist is in the state of mind to be able to do! I saw a screenshot of that somewhere, and that solves a big problem I've had in a long-term project I've had bubbling away where the protagonist is a cult member and I need to show her fucked-up thought patterns.

I think it's worth remembering that most research into online group dynamics finds that it's not much different to group dynamics as it's been traditionally understood. The key difference is that shame is harder to deploy. The other major difference is that most social software is built by people (who are often Californian for some reason) who deliberately design social software that does not allow anyone to take control of the conversation, and then are surprised when it turns out the community has no way to defend itself from internal threats by people using the software in intended ways. And then they write a paper, and the next group that comes along doesn't read it. So most of what we know as how the Internet works is the way it is because the Internet has traditionally never had a way for the community to collectively enforce its own standards, except of course by flaming. But underneath all that, people are people, and the basics don't change.

I think there's two things here: 1) One of the big things that made the difference is that the entertainment industry collectively decided to start portraying gay and lesbian people in a different, less threatening way. When I say we need to bring fire, I don't mean flames. We are a storytelling species, and our worldview is shaped by the stories we tell about ourselves. I believe satire is one of the most powerful things we do as a species - it has a long tradition of unseating the powerful and threatening the status quo in ways that can't be undone. It's a way of bringing truth - but good satire isn't civil, either. 2) There's two different groups involved in the anti-gay movement. When people are confronted with the people they love, that they choose to listen to, come out (because they've been emboldened by the stories they see and see themselves in) and tell them that what they believe is not true. And at that point, they choose: to listen, or to not. Those that choose to listen, they can be reasoned with, they can be brought back to the light, and they deserve understanding and civility because the world is shifting under their feet but they are listening and that is valuable. But the other people... well, if they've chosen not to listen, and they keep choosing not to listen, there's no such thing as the perfect argument that'll change their mind.

I get the feeling that the design of this game was predicated on most players losing interest because it seemed like there was not much else to discover, except that people found the ending too quickly so everyone knows there's a reachable ending, and the way to reach that ending is capricious and annoying because you're supposed to think 'oh, it's just looping' and quit.