Gormongous

I have some sympathy for you, actually, because just two days ago I broke it off with a girl I was seeing extremely casually since the end of March. Like, we hung out for a few hours once every couple weeks, but I just wasn't feeling it as much as I ought and I felt like she was getting attached, so I was honest with her. And... man, I'm glad I broke it off when I did, because I got a lot of the same stuff as you. Not marriage and children, because that wasn't really her thing, but how she thought she'd finally met someone who understood her like no one else and now she was going to be alone forever. There was about four hours of crying, which was hard, although no anger really, which was a relief. But yeah, dating, tough stuff. It's really odd (although not at all surprising and eminently understandable) that people take breaking up so hard, even when it's only been a few months, when all relationships end, except if you happen to die first.

Yeah, I really dislike when creators talk up Patreon-exclusive content. Mozart's Ascanio in Alba wasn't exclusive to Empress Maria Theresa. Patronage allows a creator to produce more and better work, which attracts more patronage. It's different from and less exploitative than a subscription service, which plays on people's fear of missing out. I'd like to think that a payment model based on positive emotions would be better than one based on negative emotions, but I guess I can't really judge people working in the insecurity of the arts.

And not to double-post, but there's serious problems with Paradox and its fans after the 1.7 patch that accompanied the Res Publica DLC. The DLC itself has been one of Paradox's better and more successful releases in recent months, but the patch contains a major change to the way truces interact with warscore. Now, a white peace gives both parties a five-year truce, but if warscore increases for either party, both instead get a truce that scales up to fifteen years with 100% or -100% warscore. Naturally, in a game that already places several awkward and gamey obstacles in the way of player progression, this is almost entirely an unwelcome change, and the Paradox forums went so nuts that Johan waded into the changelog thread to defend what was revealed to be his decision here. His primary argument was that repeated wars every five years, with strategically ruinous peace deals, were being used in multiplayer games to cripple certain players permanently, so the fifteen-year limit was decided in order to guarantee that a player would have time to recover from any war, no matter how bad. It went downhill from there. When asked about the effects on singleplayer and whether the AI understood the change, Johan said, "I don't give a **** about the AI in this issue. It's a matter of problem for the players vs. players." That's a literal quote. Still, he asserted anyway that the changes incentivized smaller and shorter wars, in which the AI tends to perform better, so the benefits to singleplayer would soon become clear. People pointed out that the "length of war" peace modifier prevents any war from lasting less than a year, during which it's almost certainly been totally won or lost, so changing the length of the resulting truce can only be a top-down effort to dictate player behavior. They also pointed out that adding a malus to a more optimal interaction does not actually incentivize the less optimal interaction. They also also pointed out that most high-level players break truces all the time and that the skills for doing so without messing up your game are rather easily learned and practiced. To all those criticisms, Johan said he wouldn't respond. He said it would be like explaining algebra to a three-year-old, which is not a direct quote because the thread was closed and deleted shortly after this. So... yeah. Basically, this confirms every complaint and every fear I have had about the way Europa Universalis IV has developed. It is abundantly clear that, whatever the skills of the team he leads, Johan is not a good designer and has no clear vision for the game beyond the most short-term reactions to however his latest multiplayer game went. He has turned Europa Unversalis IV from a masterpiece on release to a big old box of nope because he does not understand how to shape player behavior except through nerfs and penalties. There has been no patch that adds bonuses to a given style of play, only patches that add maluses to any style of play that does not conform to how Johan wants you to be playing the game. Hence the ever-increasing OE and AE values, the ever-increasing basetax requirements, and now the increased truce timers, which will continue to be tweaked and tweaked until that impossible time when enough magical fairy walls have been constructed that every player fights one or two limited wars every decade or so and otherwise waits patiently for everyone else to do their thing. Related to this is his firm belief EU4 must be successful as a multiplayer game, even though the only evidence he has given that there is demand for multiplayer grand strategy games is EU4 itself, a game in which only fifteen percent of the players have even clicked on the "multiplayer" button. My heart goes out to the rest of the EU4 team, especially Wiz, whom I knew on the forums before he was hired as a hardworking and inventive programmer, but the game they have made is bad, and what's worse, it's not accidentally bad like the old Paradox games that gave them such a reputation. It's bad because Johan's impulsive and arrogant personality has led him and his team to become obsessed with controlling player behavior in a sandbox game. It's a fool's errand and I'm done throwing any money their way. Maybe a year or two from now, when they're done releasing DLC, someone will tell me that EU4's design has reached an equilibrium and is no longer subject to the whims of reactionary and vindictive patch changes, I'll consider buying it at a deep discount and booting it up. For now, though, it's ALT-F4 and delete local content.

I was thinking on my way to work today, but I am really surprised that no one's posted this picture after the talk about Alan Wake's outfit:

I played the hell out of the first Crusader Kings and know a bunch of friends who did, too. For all of us, the late game always turned into a pretty sophisticated eugenics program, because the potential was there but tantalizingly inaccessible, so a similar game that actually supported that diagetically would be... well, not necessarily great, but fascinating.

I think he means that he knows people who are like the father character. Nicky's father is charming enough, but it's blatantly just a veneer, whichever of the routes you take with him.

Yesssss this is perfect!

So I've been playing this game way more than I ought to be, and I'm finally getting my feet under me at the Iron Keep. Then again, I thought I had my feet under me after I'd navigated No-Man's Wharf successfully, so maybe I just don't have a fix on what this game wants from me. Still, I don't see how I'm ever going to get the fire defense to cross some of these gaps, even with a bunch of gear and rolling through water, and I don't like that the Dull Ember, one of the most important items in the game, takes a jump that I've missed twice. Gripe gripe gripe. I know a lot of my difficulties with this game are my fault. I keep seeing people in plate armor carrying rad Buster-style swords and I'm so jealous, but I committed to a different kind of playstyle, so here I am. It helped a lot to respec my character from a Dex fighter who spends spare points on Int to a Int caster who happens to have a high Dex score, but I don't know how it'll pay off in the long term...

It feels most obviously like someone has already reached a conclusion and is instead trying out arguments to see if any of them can be made to arrive at it. Patreon is clearly a dead-end, for one reason or another, and Gera will find out which one why! It needs an editor (another ever-dying profession) and a couple nights' think.

I feel lucky that the worst I've been burned so far is just not being very impressed with Grim Dawn. I don't know how much money or how many Kickstarters it'll take, but the boom can't last forever (and in many ways, has already begun to wane, since the frenetic days of the Double Fine Adventure).

It reads like frenzied pearl-clutching. I'm not sure a comment is necessary, but I think studied disregard is.

I like the quartered one. It feels authentic. Any reason the House of Snake and the House of Key married?

Under these clothes I'm naked.

It's a visual novel with very little to distinguish it to someone unfamiliar or adverse to that format, but it and its sequel Hate Plus are incredible feminist works that I think about at least once a week. If you have the time, they're worth it, as are all of Love's games (Digital: A Love Story and don't take it personally babe, it's just not your story). It looks like there's a thread here on them, which I apparently made myself. Well!

I wish I didn't, but I knew more than one mother growing up in Texas who was obsessed with the possibility that their womanly influences, however loving, were turning their sons gay. If you buy into the quasi-Freudian understanding that a lot of people have about homosexuality and just plain sexuality, it makes a sick kind of sense, but then again, why should you buy into it? It's insane, evil, and wrong. I loved this game, too. I kept trying to push the "I'm your son and you should love me no matter what" angle and it was horribly engrossing how it blew up in my face. I haven't felt this shaken by such a short game since Analogue: A Hate Story, which is high praise from me.

I've also had issues where GFWL wouldn't sign in properly from inside a game unless I'd booted up the marketplace first outside. After having formatted, I've got everything running how I imagine a whiteboard said it should run, but I'm terrified of messing with one leg of the tripod (GFWL client, GFWL marketplace, Windows Live ID Sign-In Assistant) and tipping the whole thing over again.

Objectively boober.

It's a little paranoid, but I'm sure in the past dozen pages you can find me saying unexamined or inane things and then walk them back later when I or others realize what I'm saying. And yeah, I feel it's a bit naive to hope that we could legislate into an existence a societal understanding of unintentional rape. I wish it were possible, too, but I know from my own work that laws are useful more for showing how we want society to be than for how it is or even could be. I don't really know much about it, but I understand that a lot of feminists have been pushing back against the preexisting legal distinction between sexual assault and rape, because the idea that invasive and chronic molestation is less of a violation than rape is... problematic. I think the big problem is that we have language to negotiate failures of consent, but we don't have the societal concepts to make such negotiations effective. People know rape only as a supremely intentional act, so there's no room to understand that you could accidentally rape someone just like you could accidentally kill or rob or slander someone, not that any of those acts are equivalent to each other. It's almost as though the fear of being accused of rape unwittingly has a mirror image in the conviction that rape is only committed wittingly, which feeds into the ridiculous myth, disproven over and over at every level, that most rape accusations are false (and even sour grapes for otherwise justified behavior). I guess what I'm saying is, we don't want to be a society that rapes, which means that we don't want to acknowledge the existence of rape in order to do anything about it. In such a society, it's no surprise that Temkin can admit he had short and ultimately acrimonious series of sexual encounters with a young woman and yet state categorically that there is no way she was raped by him. See? You can watch me making statements and then walking them back several times in just that post. I'm probably monstrous, too.

I played it four years ago, maybe, and really liked it. It's not a great game by any stretch of the imagination, at least in terms of its professed genre: the RPG character-building and the combat system are pretty spare, as is the plot, come to think of it. But the setting and characters are really great and I would recommend it to people who like the Bioware "formula" but are starting to tire of it.

Great post, James. You don't need to worry about posting in this thread if everything you write is half as thoughtful as this. We all have self-doubt, I just happen to have a lot of anger along with it. I wish society were that way, but we already have different tiers of rape, at least in the public consciousness, and they're a huge stumbling block to the successful prosecution of rape cases. Just two weeks ago, a British judge gave a lighter sentence to a man who raped a sleeping woman because he wasn't a "classic rapist" and just "lost control". And I don't need to mention all the nonsense about "legitimate rape" floating around Todd Akin and his ilk. There can be a difference of circumstance and motive in rape cases, but most people are only starting to recognize something other than being nabbed in the street at night as rape anyway, so I despair of something so subtle as what you suggest. All it would do at this juncture is put the burden of proof even more in the hands of the victim. I don't know, you can't really argue in court that killing someone was neither murder nor manslaughter, but almost all alleged rapists argue that it was just sex and not rape. I mean, that's fundamentally what Temkin's doing, rightly or wrongly, and it's effective enough not only to defend him from the charges, were the accuser to bring them to a court of law, but also to support a potential libel case and restraining order against that accuser. The problem here isn't that "manslaughter" rape isn't an available option, it's that Temkin doesn't know or doesn't understand or doesn't care or that unwanted and hurtful sexual contact resulting from miscommunication is rape... nor do most other people, either.

Noted! I think we substantively agree, it's just semantics. Also, complete non-issue, but I meant that Cards Against Humanity is Shitty Apples to Apples in terms of the content discussed in the game, not the quality of the game itself, although I'm not the biggest fan of party-style games anyway.

Thank you, Bjorn. I didn't mean to say that I was taking sides, even though that's literally what I said. I more meant that I became much less sympathetic towards someone who discovered that he might have raped someone ten years ago when I read him gaslighting his accuser, threatening her with legal action, harassing her through Facebook and email, and then ending his "apology" to her with a public request that everyone be nice to him because he's having a hard day. All those are human reactions, but in sum they make for a pretty terrible portrait of a human being who, as Bjorn pointed out, had twenty-four hours and the advice of a professional legal counsel to figure out how to respond to a sudden and unpleasant reminder about events that he clearly has no problem remembering. Actually... To take a cue from Miffy, I have not always been good at communication and consent. When I was younger, I was smart and charismatic (and also unkind) enough to push my girlfriends around quite a bit, so while I don't think I've ever been guilty of outright sexual assault, I have definitely been guilty of less-than-perfect consent with more than one woman. Later on, I have contacted all these women, at least the ones I could find, and apologized for what I did. Most forgave me (or said they did) but a couple told me to disappear from their lives forever, and I've respected both. It's been a hard thing, but I am accountable for my actions and do what I can to make right. That's rape culture and how to deal with it, not by writing a self-righteous post about how something's not really your fault.

I can't really answer that properly, having never experienced it myself in two years of customer service work, which is partly why I keep talking about theoretical standpoints as functionally useless to me, but I'd probably do my best to understand and respect their feelings of discrimination while asserting the limits of my ability to help them overcome them. If you're talking about claims of racism made in bad faith, I can't really answer that properly either. I guess I'd say that I'm in a sufficient position of privilege that taking every case of discrimination seriously is not a substantial inconvenient to me, so why not? Speaking of: I liked parts of the RPS write-up, but it definitely did seem like an attempt to force a "teaching moment" upon people who own and like Cards Against Humanity. Its utility to the victim and her allies is very limited. The more I read people's opinions, the more I'm inclined to side with the victim, not just because of my feminism, but because of the apology itself. Who gives an apology that almost literally says, "There was a failure to communicate. It's understandable. Also, I could sue her for making public said failure to communicate, but I won't." It's someone who does not believe in their own apology. No great loss as far as I'm concerned with him, Cards Against Humanity was always just Shitty Apples to Apples.

I think maybe words wear out a lot faster now just thanks to the existence of the internet. Millions of conversations are happening simultaneously with no cultural arbiter. I can't really think of any non-technical word that hasn't experience a substantial amount of dilution and drift over the past twenty years. If they're even the least bit punny, they'll wear out five times as fast, too.

Charter's mostly located in the central and eastern US, not so much in the south or west. They're a big one, they tried to buy Time-Warner but failed to out-perform Comcast. The only other game in town is AT&T's DSL network, which provides an expensive and inferior alternative to Charter. They're mostly about tempting people with DirecTV and serving as a bargaining chip to help people drive Charter's prices down. It's a weird situation, though more typical than it should be, I understand.