Merus

Frederick Douglass was a campaigner against slavery. His advice is specifically about how to deal with those who don't see you as a person. I think this is also absolutely vital. It needs to be inescapable, and easy enough that you don't have to be a wit to do it.

I prefer Frederick Douglass' advice on dealing with people who clearly have all the facts but refuse to listen, personally: Because change, real change, won't happen if we have to play whack-a-mole with these fuckers, because they can always go somewhere else and they'll never have to really look at what they've let themselves become. They expect civility, and they won't respect it. Anger, they can handle. But mockery? The people who make dreadfully serious videos intoning they should be 'expected' are not the kind of people who take kindly to those who think they deserve only ridicule. They blew up because people started watching My Little Pony, for Pete's sake. I've seen them on imgur get their hackles up because people conflate /b/ with 4chan, as if hanging out at Walmart all the time doesn't make you a Person of Walmart, even if you're there for the bargains. Their sense of humour is stunted and warped, and that is their weakness. Bring fire.

My favourite part of this were the 4channers on Twitter claiming that this whole thing was a false flag conspiracy cooked up by Zoe Quinn: I was delighted to find such a clear and obvious example of why 4channers are fuckwits.

I have the Mythical Man-Month* knocking on my head, but it'd still be nice if we could get a couple of programmers from around here to help shore up Jay's code so he can make a decent PAX showing. * adding programmers to a project takes time, and usually makes late projects later

Oh my god SMTIV was announced for Europe and Australia, finally. September, apparently.

For what, upper-middle class stock like me, this whole thing has been an education into what was meant by 'fuck the police'. Like, I can imagine this kind of shit going on in LA in the 90s. Course, there was also a lot of crime, but also I'd guess a lot of poverty and racism fueling the crime.

Yeah, I think people reach (in a somewhat ableist way, and I'm trying to correct this myself) for medical terms to describe straight-up assholes, in a vain effort to stress just how much of an asshole they're being.

BG&E's one of my favourite games, so, sure: I love Hillys; it feels like a place I'd want to live in. The place feels alive in a way most Video game worlds don't, which I put down to a few things: the wildlife photography sidequest, making the various kinds of wildlife on Hillys worth observing, and the game's commitment to concealing its plot triggers, so that things seem to change because the world does, and not because it needs to open up access to the next part of the game for you. I love the tonal journey it goes through - each of the major indoors areas have a very different feel to them, in appearance and in gameplay. The characters are appealing, with appealing designs, and what happens to them is unexpected but reasonable. (I love how the inventory is a character.) There's a scene towards the back half of the game, the lighthouse scene, that's just this wonderful confluence of the narrative and how you've been playing throughout the last couple of hours. I enjoyed that the game handled its stealth sections more like puzzles than as the prelude to combat. I liked how the music throughout tied into plot elements in the last dungeon. Overall, I loved that it felt like a game that had been crafted by people who agreed on what their game was about, and wanted to ensure that their part of the game made everyone else's parts work better. The story elevated the gameplay and the gameplay elevated the art and the art elevated the music and the music elevated the story.

I think, at the point they arrested journalists, that they gave up any hope of being able to sweep this under the rug. There's too much attention, and the tactics they're using only work if no-one digs too much. But journalists, ever looking for a new angle on the story, have started talking to residents and finding witnesses and it seems clearer that the police are straight-up lying.

Who I continually confused with Steve Oedekerk, who is not quite as talented.

I don't know why you'd hire a distinctive artist to do your concept art and then not make that. I was bitterly disappointed when Metroid Prime's concept art was cool and creepy and nothing at all like the actual in-game stuff, as nice as it was.

Also in Mr. Show.

Well I know I'm going to be disappointed if there's no potential to make drastically wrong decisions. One of the reasons LucasArts games drifted towards goofy comedies is because they have no way of providing tension with consequences. Certainly the Sierra model (with exceptions, like Quest for Glory) had lots of problems, and the Infocom school of design they inherited from has mostly been discredited (or adapted, as The Last Express does). However, it's been nearly 20 years since Chainsaw Monday, so I think it's reasonable to expect the design of these games to have moved on- both from Sierra's school of design, and Lucasarts'.

I just want to highlight this because I've never seen this so clearly expressed.

Like I say all the time on Twitter, people have nowhere better to go to get what they want from Twitter, and trolls look at ads too. After someone high-profile is harassed off Twitter, Twitter always release a statement that sounds like they'll do something about harassment but actually don't have to do something useful. And they don't respond at all to people who don't have the ability to get mainstream media articles written about them.

? ? Re: choice in The Walking Dead, Failbetter literally just posted this quote to their blog (?) that I think underlies a lot of the issues people had: I remember talking with the producer for Silent Hill: Shattered Memories, and he mentioned that in that game they were trying to create moments of rising and falling tension with the Underworld segments, which worked for most people. Some players, though, worked out that there were never any monsters in the real-world segments, and thus there was no danger, thus they could do what they liked. Doesn't matter that the tension is supposed to be waiting for the Underworld to appear, because it'll only appear once they hit the appropriate trigger. I think The Walking Dead had a similar problem: for players who ignore the story and try and work out what the effects of their actions are, it becomes clear that there's no point agonising over any of the choices because no matter what they choose, stuff will happen and they'll get the best ending. To them, there's no such thing as a right choice, so why care?

I think, out of all the approaches you can take, sending in tanks when people get upset that one of your officers shot a guy is maybe not the best approach which you can discover for yourself in Battlefield: Hardline, coming soon from EA!

The Dead Island comparison is an interesting one because the teaser for that game was clearly made by a creative company that's more creative than the people making the final product.

Kind of can't wait for John Oliver's show this weekend.

I've been trying to read more, and broaden my range a little. Bad Pharma is a scathing and comprehensive deep dive into the medical industry, and how it's systematically distorted in ways that hurt patients. It spends a good deal of time on the pharmaceutical industry, for obvious reasons, but it's just as unimpressed with governments, researchers, and medical regulators like the FDA. I learnt a lot about science and ethics from it, which I'm sure the author would be happy about because that's his job, and it gave me a lot to think about when it comes to how much we really know about medication and whether it's the best possible treatment. Wool is a post-apocalyptic story about people who live in a gigantic silo. Anyone who expresses the idea that they want to leave the silo are immediately sentenced to do so, and they're given wool pads to clean the cameras showing the outside world. It's reasonably well-told, although there's nothing really new going on, and I think the author probably killed off a few too many characters while I was still getting invested. I'm reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, and the opening quote is addressed to Phaedrus. I couldn't handle that.

Because you need APCs for counter-drug operations for some reason

One of the smartass responses I and others have made is how this is basically exactly the scenario that those worried about 'tyranny' have been fearing, and it's funny how they're not out in force. And then someone retweeted this, which I think explains a lot: this is the Confederacy mindset. They're not out in force because this is what they actually want.

I was promised Sunless Sea talk. You promised, Danielle! Persona cured me of my completionism, because there are a billion fucking choices and some of them are impossible to get to no matter how hard you want it.

Funny thing though; I'm on-board for a King's Quest game that's riffing on its own mythology instead of real-world mythology. I'm hoping it's a video game version of Big Fish.