Gormongous

One of my friends and colleagues here was found dead in his apartment today. Between this and everything else that has been going on with me, in terms of computer troubles, money troubles, and professional troubles, I am having an extreme amount of difficulty finding an authentic version of myself to be right now. "Arrange your face" and all that.

Yet another moment when I want to "like" a post on here but can't.

Yeah, story of the internet, though.For me, I find it a little uncomfortable for this game about cops and robbers murdering each other by the dozens to exist in a country where a single shooting is a national scandal and police were used to put down the Occupy movement with brutal force. It seems to me to be a level of ridiculous and ridiculously tone-deaf fantasy beyond your typical hyperreal military shooter, so I feel awkward, but not really angry. Call me a hypocrite if you want, it's how I feel when I see a game about police and criminals shooting each other in the streets for money.

This is a thought, but have you checked in chrome://flags to see if the different forms of hardware browser acceleration are on? Particularly, I'd look at the D3D11 option, which makes browsing fast as all get out but is incompatible with something in almost any setup. Also, check your power supply.

I spoke too soon. Apparently the shock of multiple hard crashes followed by an entirely new piece of system hardware has brought my install of Windows to its knees. The .NET framework stuff that keeps half the programs on my computer running won't stop corrupting, meaning that basic things like Winzip and iTunes will suddenly refuse to run until I reinstall everything, and my computer is about four times slower than it was before my card failed, judging from the twenty minutes a basic registry search now takes. It looks like I'm heading towards a format, but thankfully everything's in good enough order for me to back it up at my leisure, as opposed to the middle-of-the-night, tears-in-my-eyes, copying-files-from-safe-mode way I've always had to do it. Also, hilariously, several people on different tech support forums blame a weak or failing power supply for a generally slow computer. It never ends!

Yeah! That's a good observation. Pitch Perfect is so good in so many ways, but no one with whom I saw it was interested in the romance subplot. Anna Kendrick was too cool to end up with some scrub who just wants to sit around and watch movies. In my head, the point of their relationship was to introduce her to the song "Don't You (Forget About Me)" and that's it.

Because the trade mechanics aren't really tuned that well, most republics have a massive stack of cash sitting around (plus their own pool of mercenaries to buy) and therefore make difficult conquests. Not to mention, if it's a game that's been going on a while, all five of the merchant families will have fully upgraded family holdings, which are another two or three thousand troops pretty much for free. And in my Lanka game, newly resumed now that my computer's fixed, I had a pretty lustful king who had a wife, two concubines, and an ever-rotating collection of lovers. At one point, I noticed that my latest lover had incredibly high stats and had popped out a couple of Genius kids. Turns out, she was the wife I'd gotten for my heir! Oops. Well, those kids had great stats and he obviously wasn't getting the job done. "The rot began with Ning / The fault lies with Jing," indeed!

Knock on wood, but the new card seems to have fixed it. At the very least, the things that made the old card crash don't make this one. It's also quieter and faster, sooo...

You're right, Twig. This is the worst thread now. I'm sorry. Eh, it's a private message on Facebook, I'm at work, and I've only got my phone right now at home. All my arguments were based off of stuff I just read recently for my dissertation, like Lansing's The Florentine Magnates: Lineage and Faction in a Medieval Commune, Bernhardt's Itinerant Kingship and Royal Monasteries in Early Medieval Germany, c.936-1075, and Skinner's Family Power in Southern Italy: The Duchy of Gaeta and its Neighbours, 850-1139. I'm replacing my graphics card when I get off work and after that's settled, I'll see about sending it your way. Actually, doing a quick Google search, Canning's got a new survey on these exact issues that really looks quite competent, A History of Medieval Political Thought, 300-1450. We've got a copy in our stacks, I might go grab one and then defer to him if it's any good.

Yeah, sorry. That was my anger talking. Fear is just the first thing that comes to mind when I see the most typical defense against inclusivity in games: "Well, next we'll all be forced to play paraplegic gay transsexual Chinese dwarf geriatrics in every game and no one will be having any fun then!" That sounds like someone who's afraid of change to me, at least the notion that change might keep going and leave them behind and make them look bad retroactively, but you're right that the concluding statement to the example I just gave is most often, "Just stop bothering the developers and let them make the game they want to make," so there are also (mostly misguided) concerns about artistic purity and and resource allocation and whatnot, too.

So... Rock Paper Shotgun's comments section has become almost unreadable in the wake of Ubisoft's FemaleCharactersAreTooMuchWorkGate (which henceforth I'm calling LazyGate), with at least half the comments in any article about any game trying to paint the site's coverage as hypocritical by complaining about the very existence of any non-female character. I can't imagine how bad it is on sites with more centrist leanings and a less aggressive moderation policy. Is it ever not going to be like this? Is someone ever going to be able to say they don't like something because they don't feel included and not be mobbed by angry little boys who are scared of any change whatsoever?

People have been talking a while about how, when and if Paradox ever gets around to a cadet branches DLC, there ought to be included a system for dynasties to be either friends (like the Piasts and Liudolfings) or enemies (like the Hohenstaufen and the Welf). Basically, there'd be a score visible on the dynastic tree screen that'd the sum of every good and bad deed done to any member of one family by any member of another, living or dead, which would be either a huge bonus or malus to relations. I like it a lot, because it would solve the "instant civil war upon succession" issue that I think is the biggest barrier to new players, particularly the unintuitive "loves the father for giving him titles, hates the son for giving him nothing" scenario, in addition to making more complicated to deal with a large and powerful family in your empire. But yeah, if you've got a bad succession coming up because of a weak heir, then save up money, put as many vassals as possible in jail, and maybe even drop your feudal levy laws to get the easy +10. If your vassals like you at least 30+, then there'll be no factions and you can survive until your "short reign" modifier goes away.

Thanks to my graphics card troubles, I now have a free copy of Watch_Dogs for the PC to give away. Fair warning, it registers to UPlay, but I'm sure someone would be interested. EDIT: Given away to JonCole!

I really wouldn't recommend it. If there are no extant king titles for dukes to lust after and medium crown authority to keep them from fighting internal wars to create them themselves, they literally just sit there feeding you money and troops. It makes the best part of the game (besides the ever-present eugenics program) absolutely trivial.

If ever you find a long-term goal after becoming emperor that is as fun as becoming emperor, please post it here because I would like to know. The problem is that empires are just too stable unless they're gavelkind. The amount of resources at your disposal as even the smallest empire (which is Carpathia, I think) so dwarfs any kingdom in the game that other kingdoms will rarely attack you and your dukes will rarely rebel. Frankly, if you destroy all the component king titles of an empire, you can be done with internal politics altogether, which allowed me to conquer an area as the Prussians equivalent to the twentieth-century USSR at its height, in my last game. I wouldn't recommend it, really. In my experience, the only way to spice up life once you're an emperor is to i) switch back to gavelkind and spend most of your time managing your sons, ii) give out all your king titles and enjoy an earth-shattering civil war about once every twenty years, or iii) try to conquer the world.

Yeah, it was meant to be a satirical mashup of every tired trope from high school dramas in the fifties and sixties. I don't know anyone who enjoys it as that though, and I know plenty of people who love Grease.

When I talk about the fetishization of science, I'm talking about i) enthusiastic interest in the results of science without any in the process, ii) an unshakeable belief in scientific progress as always positive and positivist, and iii) a willingness to put other human needs second to the advancement of science. All these are deleterious beliefs, but more so when all present together. I don't remember who, but didn't someone here argue that working to end homelessness was pointless because there were no perfect solutions and the Singularity would fix everything one way or another when it rolled around? That's what I mean by the fetishization of science, in addition to the weird totems that Merus is talking about, like the entire internet celebrating the seventy-third day of the year as Pi Day. I'm not saying a love of "science" isn't a good thing. It's just not always a good thing.

Are we talking about Ozzie Mandrill? The place's never been the same with him around.

What's made Lynch's Dune better is watching Jodorowsky's Dune, both seeing the prehistory of the project and seeing Jodo's childlike glee at what a mess Lynch made of it.

Yeah, those old GTX 470s run so hot, I wouldn't be surprised. Also, seriously, fuck this card. I am literally going to toss it out of my apartment window into a dumpster.

Well, it's something. I opened up the case, ran the fans at double-time, and turned on temperature monitoring. Even though the card remains relatively cool, it freezes and crashes the moment it comes under load. That makes a small part of me worry that there's something wrong with the 12V rail, but I'm trying to reassure myself that, since it's easily reproducible and the graphical output remains corrupted for about half an hour after the crash, the problem really can't be situational demands on the power supply causing it to make the graphics card fail. At least, that's not how I've ever seen a power supply fail, although I've only ever had a couple fail on me in my lifetime.

I understand what you're saying, but I confess I am not surprised that, based upon a sample that is a group of scientists, academics and their friends, you conclude that the public's interest in science is more than superficial. That's certainly the case for the vast majority of my college and grad school friends, but I also have a bunch of friends from high school on Facebook, and guess which group more often just reposts I Fucking Love Science without any discussion or comment whatsoever? I also kind of think that Thumbs do fetishize the whole robot thing too much. But I really don't want to go into that.

The funny thing is that, while the high cost of war helps deepen the gameplay, high-level players of Paradox games exploit those costs to make the game even easier for them. A classic way to break up a big nation is to trap it in a war, kill all its soldiers and raze all its provinces, then refuse to make peace. It'll keep building armies, hiring mercenaries, and sending them at you, trying to win or at least to convince you to let it lose. Eventually, its manpower will be zero, it'll be thousands of ducats in debt, and its provinces will have tons of maluses, at which point you force them to release vassals and then watch them get devoured by all their neighbors. It's another instance where developer assumptions, mostly that players will want to do an unpleasant task for as little time as is possible rather than for as long as it is optimal, have made a game that's even more exploitable than if they tried not to saddle it with penalties. I feel for Rob Daviau in that regard, although the problem here is that no matter how bad war is, it's always worse for the losing side, so a player can exploit it as a zero-sum game. More and more, I like the way games like 7 Wonders do it (although I don't particularly like 7 Wonders itself), where the military is a way to earn points for yourself as a function of your neighbors, not an ability to ruin them.

Oh, I feel you. I definitely understand the desire for science to exist in the public mindspace as a positive force, even if it means being conceptualized as an arcane force harnessed by crazy techno-wizards who overturn our understanding of reality at least once a day. I just wish there could be the former without the latter. Actually, I was going to post this in the Life thread, but it applies here. Public perception of different academic disciplines is such an odd balancing act. I got dragged into a Facebook argument about the relative dearth of religious belief in Game of Thrones. Eventually, some guy, who was way too invested in fantasy novels being able to do whatever they want in terms of world-building, asked me what effect Christianity had on medieval Europe that makes its absence so inappropriate. I responded with a careful explanation of the development of social orders, sacral kingship, agnatic kinship, and chivalry as fundamentally Christian processes that are used in Game of Thrones without their most important antecedent. What did he say to that? "No, I don't think so." When I tried to get him to elaborate, he refused, simply stating, "My opinion is as good as yours." None of my sources or credentials could persuade him that I had a better understanding than him of the subject. So yeah, I'm a little envious of how marketable hard science is, but I think the risks for all academic disciplines in the end are the same. Either you present your work as esoteric and it gets fetishized (or ignored), or you present your work as common sense and it gets co-opted (or ignored). Having a bunch of Facebook friends thinking science is magic is probably better in the short term than a bunch of Ren Faire rejects thinking they're as good or better than professional historians, but I'm not optimistic about the long term for either. Our relationship with specialized knowledge in the age of the internet is... I don't know, difficult?

I feel like communication with intelligent alien life involves a lot of assumptions, any of which break the Fermi Paradox. Are the aliens close enough to communicate? Even within our own galaxy, the space between stars is pretty damn wide and we've only been listening for a few cosmic seconds. Do the aliens want to communicate? Most of what we've been blasting out, assuming they decode it, is base-level entertainment media that focuses on sex, violence, and consumer products, none of which might interest aliens not just desperate to know they're not alone in the universe. Do the aliens apprehend the same physical universe we do? Light is the most obvious means of communication if you have eyes, but not if your primary sense is gravometric or something. Are the aliens sentient as well as sapient? As much as I hated his book, I've got to give Peter Watts' Blindsight credit for this, because it had never occurred to me that self-awareness is not necessarily a criterion for high-level intelligence. In fact, in that book, communication itself is revealed to be a hostile act to the aliens, because it overwrites one mind with another, albeit temporarily. I don't know. I am pretty compelled by Occam's Razor in terms of why we haven't encountered alien life, but I also feel that it's a hugely conceited assumption that every alien species out there is just like us and dying to communicate in a way that we'll understand immediately. Yeah, I'm there, too. The commodification of scientific knowledge in a superficial way that privileges the mysterious and wacky is something I don't think it needs to survive and yet something that I Fucking Love Science feeds on exclusively. Then again, I'm the one that how the final episode of Cosmos spent a large amount of time ridiculing "petty ideologies that think they know everything that matters," then later described the Voyager plaques as using "the one truly universal language, science." Basically, I wish that modern Western society could talk about science in a way that i) doesn't fetishize science as some weird and mystical means of doing the impossible, and ii) acknowledge the limits of science without adding an implied "yet" after any admission of ignorance. But I know that's asking a lot.