Gormongous

I imagine they'll just have a bio-sensor on the edge of the controller surface and then assign you a character based on your thumbprint readout. That's suitably Nintendo.

My issue is not you disagreeing with Quinn's behavior, which I think is perfectly valid considering how little is known about the full actions and involvement of both parties. My issue is you choosing not to address the brutal abuse and harassment of Quinn, in favor of pointing out that she was a somewhat impolitic critic of another project involving women, and thereby declaring that you're closer to 4chan's side than Quinn's. It comes too close to taking the stalking and death threats perpetrated against women as a given that should be ignored when determining fault, which is something with which I can never be okay. My real concern with these incidents is that we invariably get trapped to some degree in comparing the best and most laudable motives of the perpetrator (ignoring the bullying and intimidation that supports it) with the dirtiest and most questionable sins of the victim (ignoring the willingness of the Internet Hate Machine to bend the truth). What does that accomplish? We all have dumb or shitty things we've done that could be inflated into evil-sounding conspiracies by an Imgur user with sufficient imagination, but why the hell should we have to spend any time at all weighing whether the victim of heinous online assaults is a good person or not anyway?

Doesn't AMV Hell 6.66 have it with the Eva dummy system scene? That's almost as good. it takes control and slowly tears you apart

Also prone to overstating his point with abrasive speech. But yeah, that wouldn't be a problem if he was more able to just walk away from things.

It seems rock solid. I've gone to several different sites, as well as a few testing pages, and found no observable difference in performance or stability. The install is really smooth, too. I was expecting this link to install a 64-bit client alongside my 32-bit client, leaving me to uninstall the latter and migrate settings, but it installed quietly in place on top of the previous client, with the only evidence that it's 64-bit now being that the Task Manager doesn't flag it as "chrome.exe *32" anymore. Color me impressed. Except the fonts. Fix the fonts, Google.

I've got it stored up, but I've been pushing through several other shows the past few months, so I haven't gotten to move on it yet. I'm excited to hear that it's worth my time, that I don't have to scrimp and save for good moments like the previous season.

I like the design a lot, because I'm dumb, but 4chan does have a history of being decent when it wants to be, and you're totally right that you don't get a prize in feminism for creating a character that is not a disgusting sex-doll caricature for once. Other boards like /x/ have had non-sexy girl mascots for years, but that doesn't stop them from contributing to a very ugly misogynistic atmosphere at times.

Chrome 64-bit launched on the stable channel just recently, and it is noticeably faster and more stable. Unfortunately, because I am insane, I do not focus on that, but rather on how the way certain fonts are rendered has changed and it is annoying as fuck.

My main complaint about AMVs and the like nowadays is that they often crowd out clips of the actual show on YouTube, which is very irritating. Trigun: Badlands Rumble is a fun time, but unfortunately they chose to follow the tone of the early episodes, not particularly to preserve the continuity, about which the movie is not terribly concerned anyway, but because they wanted a light action-adventure romp, which is good but not what makes Trigun great. It's worth ninety minutes of your life to watch once, at least.

I hope you don't regret getting into it at all, but I'm not exactly clear on what you mean when you talk about "sides." You say you agree with the 4chan side, except that you've ignored all but the best behavior by them and all but the worst behavior by Quinn in order to make that decision. I think you have to take all the actions of a given "side" in sum if you're going to define them that way. Accordingly, I can see how an (alleged) attempt to shut down a game development competition could make you view Quinn as something of an asshole, but I don't really see how that compares to having an eight thousand-word rant divulging (and possibly inventing) your personal life in the most unflattering light possible, experiencing systematic harassment and death threats, and generally being made into a strawman for everyone's pet gripe against games journalism for weeks on end. Is it just that you don't have a name and face to attach to all of that assholery that makes Quinn's behavior feel more egregious? This is what I mean about how the internet could make any of us look bad if it wanted to do so. I'm just lucky that I'm not successful or female enough to attract its toxic gaze. And, like Bjorn, I am also unimpressed by people come out of the woodwork to profit by economic or cultural capital from all the hate against Quinn and other small indie devs. Basically, I'm really going to have to see TFYC take the high road in some way, shape, or form before I'm willing to privilege their accusations over the documented experience of human suffering at the hands of their supporters.

I have a soft spot for a couple of good ones from way back when in high school. That Nichijou one is nuts, though. I feel like I just watched the show, but I didn't recognize multiple vignettes, so maybe I need to rewatch it...?

I'm having an odd moment. A friend's girlfriend was in the same room when we watched the Berserk movies and she absolutely adored them, so she wanted to watch the anime. Since she's moving across the country on Friday, I can't lend her my copy, and DVD sets of the series run well over seventy bucks for even a copy in poor condition. If you want the remastered version that Media Blasters briefly printed before it collapsed, get ready to pay three figures. So I thought I'd download a fansub and burn it to DVD, with the understanding that she'd buy the series later. Well, apparently Media Blasters (and FUNimation, who own the rights to the movies) worked very hard to have almost all copies of the anime taken down. I finally found an old FTP in the UK with a complete listing, but now I'm wondering about memory, archiving, and the internet. It used to be that things stuck around forever, but now we have multiple instances of companies driving off all the fansubs online because they have the license, then folding or losing the license, so that it's extremely difficult to acquire a copy either legally or illegally. I don't have a point, it just frustrates me in a weird way. I watched the first episode about two years ago and loved it, then immediately chose to watch something else I enjoyed less instead because I wanted to have a good show in my back pocket. It's stupid, I should get on it.

I guess I didn't quite finish my thought, did I? I mean to say, a player who is a careful planner in Castles of Burgundy will win over a player who is a clever improviser nine times out of ten, but they'll win 48 VP to 45 VP, no matter how much more work they make for themselves, and that can be demoralizing for many. We expect the game to reflect the effort we put into it, but this is a Euro that rewards you for putting in more effort, not for how much more.

I loved playing Castles of Burgundy more than a few times, but I never fight to get it on the table anymore, because it's one of the Euros where you set your brain on fire for a solid ninety minutes and end up with three more VPs than if you'd just played by the seat of your pants. Some people live for that crazy margin, wringing the last drops of efficiency from the machine, but I found it extraordinarily exhausting, at least among the people with whom I played it. Then again, they're all serious types who don't like jokey commentary on the state of play, so maybe that's what was missing for me.

I had an Iroquois game that I managed to push through to a conquest victory, but I had much the same impressions as you. I puppeted a lot of what I conquered, but still razed all of the more worthless towns, and yet by 1000 AD my empire looked like a pathetic string of nomads, despite being the foremost military power in the eastern hemisphere. I think a big issue is not just that per-city efficiency drops off dramatically after three or four cities, making large empires dramatically more vulnerable while being less able to defend themselves, but also that culture spread doesn't actually reflect power-projection in an effective sense. I had a huge army across the Asia-equivalent continent and my cities covered an area equivalent to modern-day Russia, but my control of the territory in between those cities was not reflected at all by the mechanics, let alone my ability to beat up on people in Europe, North Africa, and India at will and without consequences. The snaky cultural borders are interesting and quite attractive for small-scale empires but do not really grow in proportion with the systems they seem intended to complement. And yeah, the game tries hard to deincentivize "wide" empires both through permanent diplomatic maluses for conquerors and through economic penalties for large empires, even if they only have one city that's not essentially a dominion. I don't really understand why, except to differentiate the game from its predecessors without regard to how fun it happens to be. In my Iroquois game, I progressed slowly for another few hundred years, conquering a new city every time a technology gave my empire enough excess happiness to allow for it, but I eventually concluded that a traditional world conquest would be prohibitively tedious for me, albeit technically possible because Firaxis loves soft caps lately. Instead, I build steamships and loaded them with musketmen, then did naval landings at the remaining four capitals and won the game in a handful of decades. The AI didn't see it coming and had no idea how to counter it. I remember feeling triumphant when I figured out a reliable Ancient-Era rush strategy in Civilization IV, but sniping victory from an unsuspecting AI in the sequel left me cold, as a lot of the game does.

Somewhat like I said in the other thread, there are definitely gradations of nepotism/cronyism, the softer of which are almost essential to the proper functioning of any field or industry. For me, nepotism/cronyism is only problematic when people without qualifications are being preferred over people with qualifications because of the former's connections to the decision-makers (to cut another discussion short, I'm including identity politics under "qualifications" because they are). However, I am finding a definite group of people who consider the preference of people with any connections to the decision-makers to fall under the definition of nepotism/cronyism and therefore is entirely undesirable. Not only does it seem to me that most of the people saying as much have never been on a selection committee in their lives, but it's fairly simple to make such a hard and fast rule about hiring ethics result in less "ethical" hiring decisions. For instance, say I am a well-placed editor with a lot of experience. I know most of the top people in my field closely and personally after years of working alongside them, both as colleagues and competitors. When it comes time to hire my replacement, choosing from all of these people, my friends, could easily be called cronyism, but it wouldn't be, because they're all qualified. I know them because they are qualified. Of course, like Bjorn says, the system is far from perfect. Efforts are always needed to break socioeconomic, gender, and race monopolies (and biases) on certain industries, but I think such a broad-reaching definition of nepotism/cronyism can even hurt in that respect. If your friends can't be a factor in you getting jobs, how many people who've championed women, queers, and people of color would have to have recused themselves and let the hiring machine chew through resumes until it hit upon the "most qualified" individual, who no doubt would have been a straight white male.

I doubt the Holy Roman Empire will ever operate anywhere close to how it worked in the Middle Ages without 1) an overhaul of how empires work, making them a powerful but tenuous thing only possible under exceptional rulers rather than just super-kings, and 2) an overhaul of crown authority, hopefully with more granularity and gradations rather than just pumping it up to High for the succession change and then back down to Medium. I am very nostalgic for how empires worked under the now-defunct Britannia 479 AD: The Winter King mod, where there would be two votes upon the death of an emperor: first, whether the title should continue to exist, and second, who should rule it. It made it so that empires had to expand slowly if they wanted to remain intact and so that separatists could drift out of their orbits without having to win a battle against a huge blob. There was nothing better than watching a great conqueror be succeeded by an unworthy son and the empire title disappear, leaving the son to be king of the core but having to spend the rest of his life pulling together the scraps if he wanted to pass it on to a more noteworthy grandson. It worked almost perfectly, but Paradox is very slow to adopt mechanics from mods. Wiz, the creator of the CK2Plus mod, now works at Paradox, but his amazing faction system, which replaced the succession-focused factions with static "interest groups" that made demands to make the kingdom more suitable to their interests (Church faction would push for high ruler piety, more bishoprics, green-trait advisors, etc.), has mostly been ignored (and somewhat ruined by the people who succeeded to the mod). If they were to combine a revamped faction system, where different groups would push for higher and lower crown authority according to their circumstances, with the more fine-grained crown laws of the Project Balance mod, which had different crown laws for a lot of stuff like title revocation and war declaration, it would make for a much more dynamic game within the realm and allow kingdoms to be weak in some ways while not being total pushovers. The big problem with the HRE is that there's no way to make it as fragile as it was, five stem duchies and Italy united in the person of the emperor, without making all feudal realms weak. That's why I'm hoping for new mechanics, but it's not on the bullet points of the website for the DLC, so no breath is being held. Also, yeah. Ugh, Paradox needs to code the Great Schism, but not only would it be incredibly difficult and prone to breakage, but there'd be no way to simulate several centuries of gradually differentiating policy properly through events and you know they're not going to introduce new religion mechanics to make "natural" schisms and heresies more workable.

I'm getting tired of people making a big deal of the fact that funds raised for Darren Wilson have quickly surpassed funds raised for Michael Brown. Do you mean to tell me that people who support the establishment, however corrupt and cruel, have more money to give than people who oppose the establishment? Color me shocked.

The thing I really love is that, while an expanding and more inclusive membership has never outright killed a media community to my knowledge, the restriction and intimidation of membership by self-appointed gatekeepers among the hardcore has done just that several times in the last couple decades alone. I mean, not to be cruel, but why not ask wargamers how their hobby is doing and if they still feel so sure about women and children being excluded, eh? Actually, what gets me the most is how all these people apparently think that journalism happens. If not for reporters and bloggers with friends in the games industry, would there be anything to print besides official press releases and the occasional well-coached interview? Do they really think that every person a journalist meets, they have to inquire on their career, else they might inadvertently make nice with a developer or vice versa? I can only imagine the dramatic ceremonies that must be conducted when a journalist is hired by the industry. There must be several nights of revelry with his journalist friends, after which he must bid farewell to each of them to begin his new life as someone who creates games, free of their taint. If that journalist is dating another journalist when she changes jobs, she is allowed a fortnight to consummate her love in full with her partner before they are dead to her forever. Never again, never again. We must all live, monk-like in our devotion to games, in order to preserve and deserve their quality. Ugh. Seriously, just reading the first paragraph of that article, with all its hand-wringing about "corruption" and "sleaziness" of the entirely alleged relationships, I really wonder if these people even understand the implications of the absolute and hermetic seal they expect to exist between the industry and its media. I doubt they hold themselves to the same standards, but isn't that just how privilege is?

Yeah... I've found that, in many instances, "nepotism/cronyism" is what people without serious networking potential call networking. It's easy to take an abstract moral stance that the person hired to do a given job simply be the best on paper and in the interview, but in an infinitely interconnected world like today, how are you supposed to find that person unless you already know them somehow (or at least know someone who knows someone who knows them)? If I get my cousin work as a secretary in my department because he needs a job, that's nepotism, although really the softest kind. If I nominate my friend for the executive board, it's going to be because he's the best person I know for the position. Being my friend is just how I know that he is the best.

Actually, it's kind of perfect that the Spartans (possibly one of the most brutal, repressive, and fascist polities in human history) has become a symbol for both Tea Party and libertarian conceptions of freedom just because, at one point, the rest of the Greek city-states convinced the Spartans to take a stand against a (polyglot, multicultural, inclusive) empire for a few years. So yeah, wear those belt buckles and defend your right to beat your wives, murder your slaves, and force young men to serve in your military. I'll be laughing (and crying) over here.

I admired the belt buckles until I realized they were inscribed with the words of the Spartan king Leonidas at Thermopylae: "Come and get it." Ugh, it's all crazy!

I was well on the way to beating my second Dominions 4 campaign as Middle-Ages Jotunheim when the "Necromancer's Lair" story event went off the rails (because my province patrols killed the eponymous necromancer the first turn he appeared, which apparently glitches the event chain) and the game wouldn't stop spawning skeletons and plagues in my heartland. I got it mostly under control, if by "under control" you can understand to mean a permanent army of supply-free units camping the affected provinces, but what should have been my bread basket was a dustbowl and I had half the income and twice the borders that I'd otherwise have had. It wasn't an unwinnable game, but it was tedious and dumb, so whatever. I guess I know why story events are off by default in the game options... I just hope this doesn't kill my interest in ever playing again.

I love your idea, clyde, but there's only a matter of time until the scandal comes out that these objective men were birthed by women and are therefore tainted with subjectivity from the start.

I am not in love with this line of humor. But hey, whatever helps us fight the power!