Gormongous

This NYTimes piece on the post-racial myth explains a lot of how "not racist" people who voted for Obama voted for Trump because of or regardless of racist dogwhistles, at least to me. Also, the blue-collar working class who've lost their jobs to automation and changing market demands fill me with pessimism. It's not just that they want jobs: they want their old jobs, exactly how they were when coal and the American automobile were king. Obama put into place job-retraining programs for out-of-work coal miners. Only 0.5% of those individuals invited to participate in those programs actually did, because they've all been raised from birth to think that coal-mining is the noblest profession. The government actually looks bad to them for trying to get them other work.

Patrick, I would gladly follow a Tumblr series of you quitting adventure games with a zero-tolerance policy for bullshit. I doubt I'm alone. I was going to suggest VA-11 Hall-A as an example of the latter, but it clocks in around ten. It's extremely well-written, though, which is what makes it different from both Western VNs and Japanese VNs, which are largely either underwritten or poorly translated. For example, as treasured as it is, Muv-Luv is so long and nearly unreadable.

It may come to pass that Trump is willing to appease Putin in the latter's imperial ambitions and a confrontation is averted there. I am unconvinced that such appeasement will better the lives of people in Europe, Central Asia, and the Middle East. Meanwhile, his stated interest in hostile confrontations with China, Iran, and others promise conflict there that not even Clinton would have touched. Are you aware that Trump is the candidate who talked about mass deportations of undocumented immigrants, reintroduction of stop-and-frisk with minorities, and a government registry of all Muslims? Are you aware that he has voiced a willingness to roll back LGBT rights, even as he wrapped himself in a rainbow flag, and to criminalize large portions of women's health? Are you aware that his tax code lowers taxes on people making above $225,000 and either leaves alone or raises taxes on the middle class? How were these things, if even one of them comes to pass, going to be better for ordinary working people than even the worst-case scenario neoliberalism-as-usual of Clinton's presidency? Again, you've exhibited a disturbing propensity to project your worst political fears onto Clinton while ignoring the things that Trump actually said. He's told us what kind of president he wants to be. We have to assume that he meant what he said, or else we assume that he was lying to get elected. Either way doesn't bode well for a transparent and responsible presidency. If Obama came into office on a platform of peace and, because of the existing infrastructure of the post-9/11 government, ended up deporting the most immigrants and assassinating the most foreign nationals of any president ever, I have zero faith that someone like Trump won't be exactly the same, at best, and much worse, at worst. What's he going to do, replace all the hawkish bureaucrats and generals who've served since Clinton and Bush with his ready supply of peace-loving Republicans? And that's even if he doesn't keep any of the other promises he made on the campaign trail. Basically, your combination of ignorance, naivete, and willful self-delusion makes me impossibly sad.

Yeah, I wasn't Clinton's biggest booster, although I was ultimately happy to vote for her in the election, but only one of the two major candidates voiced a willingness to use nuclear weapons (and to increase nuclear proliferation worldwide). It wasn't Clinton. If you think that Clinton's hypothetical interest in nuclear weapons is more real and more dangerous than the interest that Trump outright stated multiple times... well, you've probably got some biases to unpack there. Yeah, here we are again: the visible threat is less real than an invisible one.

I believe that that Viper King bug has existed since the DLC's release. It's really puzzling that it's not fixed by now.

Go ahead and use all my stuff. I look forward to seeing how the game turns out!

I believe that, in addition to reducing poise values across the board, DS2 added a mechanic that used poise to calculate a hidden pool of "hyper-armor" that enabled the player to ignore staggering from a set amount of damage taken character animations. What made this system frustrating to many, myself included, was that "damage" to that pool was i) modified by available stamina, which meant that it was very difficult to know how much hyper-armor you had left if you didn't have all or none of your stamina, and ii) the pool was not automatically refilled after it had been emptied and the player staggered, instead being a fixed interval after last enemy attack and/or non-movement character action, with the rate of replenishment again based on a function of poise and current stamina. All of that basically meant that, unless you knew the system already and went all-in on maximizing hyper-armor, there was no way of knowing if an attack was going to stagger you, no matter how many times you'd faced a given enemy. You just had to assume that any attack could stagger you if your poise and stamina were low, which meant in practice never getting hit and avoiding the ambiguity altogether. It wasn't very good (not that DS3's implementation of poise and hyper-armor is any better, in my opinion). I also had a lot of problems with enemies getting implausible hits on me in DS2, between the very generous hitbox on the player character and the implementation of 360-degree tracking on certain attacks. I remember, there was a fight with the Ruin Sentinels where one of them pivoted completely about-face, as I rolled past him, and caught me on my heel... That was my rage-quit for the week...

I believe the RPS review noted some crashes and a general finickiness with different hardware configurations, although neither so endemic as to make the game unplayable.

I think the appropriate response is amnesty for non-criminal immigrants, especially those with jobs and families, while building a better path to citizenship for future immigrants that makes the danger of sneaking into the country (or sneakily staying past a visa's expiration) less attractive of an option. Over two and a half million people have been deported under Obama, not including people who were turned away at the border or who "deported" themselves under pressure from law enforcement, and the three people, out of that two and a half million, whom I knew personally all underwent terrifying and devastating experiences that stretch the bounds of necessity, in my mind. My uncle's son from his first marriage stayed here past his visa because he found a job he loved as a roofer, but he got picked up in a routine traffic stop, spent almost a month in near-solitary confinement, and then was deported and banned from entering the US for ten years. He's not going to get to see his son grow up because of that, and I struggle to understand why, besides him not having the money and connections (and, to be frank, the wit) to get a long-term work visa for his job doing blue-collar labor. There are estimated to be over eleven million immigrants living undocumented in America. That's almost five percent of the population. If all of them were deported, it would destroy countless communities, families, and businesses. Amnesty and a revised process for naturalization are the only answers that work.

Every right-leaning person I know who opposes the Affordable Care Act has a story about their wife's cousin's former roommate whose premiums went up five hundred percent after the ACA was passed. For me and the overwhelming majority of people I know, health insurance has become much more affordable, as the law promises, but the fact that edge cases happen, often with the totem of the Republican Party that is the self-employed businessperson of some means, is cause enough for some people to want the whole system gone. Even "moderate" proposals to roll back the ACA, by allowing people to opt out, spell the end because young and healthy people will opt out, old and sick people won't, and insurance companies will accelerate their pullout from less profitable markets even more, as the risk pool dwindles. That last bit is very frustrating to me. I have a reasonably close friend who dreams of seeing the ACA burn to the ground, along with Medicaid and Medicare, because he firmly believes that the supply/demand pressures of the free market will keep insurance premiums low if the government just gets its money out, which is... not how insurance has ever worked. Even now, insurance companies are raising premiums because the government subsidies are going straight to executive salaries and bonuses, which are at an all-time high. Aetna just pulled out of Missouri and Cigna cut its available plans there in half, which would be fine if it weren't the only game in town. I don't see how less regulation and less government money would fix that, but "less regulation" as a means is an end all its own, to many.

It's funny that the Thumbs talked about the problems with Westworld being endemic to "peak TV" post-Mad Men just a week after Vulture posted its (near-comprehensive) list of all the shows that tried to copy Mad Men. Granted, the list focuses more on thematic similarities rather than aesthetic, but it's still an edifying read.

Excuse me while I marinate in the rich irony of condemning Black Lives Matter as "divisive" and "evil" while writing an entire post about how Trump should get a chance because, even though he's a buffoon, he's still a better candidate than Crooked Hilary. How many people have suffered BLM-related hate crimes, again? Surely it has to be more than the hundreds of hate crimes with ties to Trump before and after his election. How many groups have been slandered and insulted by BLM, beyond the implicit "insult" that prompted #AllLivesMatter? Surely it has to be more than Trump's systematic insult of every non-white, non-male demographic (and even some that are largely white and male, like veterans). I don't know about you, but I've spent the last year and a half giving Trump a chance, and he remains the one I view as an "insidious, divisive, and evil entity" who will "damage our culture and society." BLM just wants cops to stop shooting unarmed black kids for no reason (and also, for some of its members, reparations, which is worth discussing). I don't see how they pose a comparable danger to Trump, and your weirdly hostile and unfocused post doesn't exactly change my mind. Also, what exactly does a damaged culture look like? I mean, I have examples from all the anti-women protesters in the 1910s who insisted that giving women the vote would damage our culture, and from all the anti-black protesters in the 1960s who insisted that integrating society would damage our culture, but they were wrong, so I've got nothing, really. Unless you can provide actual examples of damaged cultures and societies, I'm going to have to assume that it's a dogwhistle for "a hip-hop musical starring black people is dominating Broadway" and "sometimes I can hear the Islamic call to prayer from my house." I can only hope you know, in your heart of hearts, that you weren't banned for having a different political opinion, but for opening that political opinion with this fucking sentence, insulting the hosts of the show on their own goddamn forum: "I have to admit to feeling a small sense of shadenfreude [sic] when listening to two teeth-gnashing, palm-wringing, regressive social justice warriors lamenting the "end of the world"; confused, deluded, blissfully unaware that they and their ilk are the creators and biggest enablers of Trump." You said "no offense" at the end but we all know which of the two statements you really meant. Like... a little bit of self-awareness, please? Some people here don't know the internet troll playbook: that you post a long but only semi-coherent rant that has some valid points hidden among the many dogwhistles and outright insults; you complain that people aren't engaging with the meat of your rant when they react to the insults and the overall antipathy instead, like non-trolls often do; you get banned from the podcast's forum for saying disparaging things about the podcast, its hosts, and its fans; and then you come back with another account, hurt (wounded, even) that no one wants to have a conversation as you now try to use the ban to prove that people who disagree with you just can't handle your opinions (rather than, as a more mature and generous person might conclude, that you insulted a bunch of people and no one wants to talk to you after that). Sorry, better luck next time?

I do. I think it's a pretty easy transition. Similar humor, different format. I like Friends at the Table a lot, but the early episodes have so much bloat. I'm sure no one has time to do this, but a recut of the first season that cuts out explaining basic roleplaying mechanics and non-relevant joking would be a huge booster to my experience.

I think that Tom's proposed solution works fine: each technology has a stable of five or six "eureka" moments and one is randomly selected for each tech per game. Five moments each for seventy techs is too much for it to be optimal to memorize and, if the moments are designed around best practices for a player to be doing around the time in the game that the related tech is usually discovered, more the better. At that point, it becomes about rewarding behavior rather than driving it. My question is, why didn't Firaxis think of this? The natural response to "Build two galleys to get fifty percent off this tech" is "Do I have to do this every game," but... I don't know, I'm glad that the new Civilization is a success, but I'm seeing a lot of the half-baked design that made Beyond Earth and certain parts of the previous Civilization such a disappointment.

It feels like every system in the mid game that tries and fails to engage players does so because they all have hooks for characters with high agency and diverse behaviors, yet the character system just isn't built to provide that. It reminds me a lot of the earlier Europa Universalis games, plus Europa Universalis: Rome, where characters were buckets of modifiers with randomly assigned names. It's only really the Crusader Kings games where the characters are central enough to the player experience to make their influence on gameplay outcomes not frustrating. Even with EU4, its worst moments are getting a bad ruler out of nowhere since you have so little engagement in the process.

In an alternate universe with a much trashier Nintendo, we'd definitely have gotten a "Mario goes to war" shooter already. The gunji-ota boom in Japan has actually been enjoying a revival, the past few years.

I swear that some of the guards I killed were talking about how things are better now that the Empress was dead. Maybe it wasn't all guards, I don't know. I'm a mute mask-wearing warlock, I can't make all the hard calls.

I really enjoyed Dishonored until the end, when the developers tried multiple times to make me feel bad about my high-chaos playthrough. It was some rough ludonarrative dissonance to be told at the beginning, "We have to defeat the usurper and restore the crown at any cost," and then in the last few missions, "Wait, that's too much violence, we're not prepared to pay that cost." Come on, at most I killed a couple hundred people, many of them open supporters of the usurper who aren't exactly going to go unmolested when Emily's got her butt back on that throne. It's practically a bloodless coup for quasi-Victorian England. The new Deus Ex games did this, too. I've honestly had my fill of games pretending that violence and nonviolence are two equally legitimate avenues for player expression, but then browbeat you if you don't engage to their satisfaction with the nonviolent systems. The disincentive should be that I find killing people, even virtual people, distasteful, not that I get tongue-lashings from a bunch of NPCs too lazy and incompetent to accomplish the things I do.

Yeah, I'm not happy about it. It's so short-sighted, but there were TV ads that showed ratlike politicians struggling to get into a large safe containing your money and they couldn't. Thanks, Amendment 4! It's hard to argue against that imagery, even if Missouri is an under-funded state, especially on its roads and school, and governments need taxes to operate. One of the interesting things I read, courtesy of staying in touch with people at my Midwestern alma mater, is why Iowa went for Trump despite doing very well under Obama, with the lowest unemployment in the nation. Iowa is prosperous, by post-2008 standards, but polls and interviews show that Iowans don't feel prosperous, partially because the recovery has been gradual enough that they aren't able to assign it any agency and partially because enough of them know people in Kansas, Wisconsin, or Michigan who aren't still doing well and make any good times feel like a fluke. Sure, Brownback and Walker are really to blame there, but I think a lot of people (liberal elites included) vote for presidents as wish-fulfillment and Obama's slow, growing prosperity just wasn't enough for some people.

Missouri, my state, passed a voting ID amendment by 57% that is sure going to make the incredibly long lines and multi-hour waits that people from both parties were complaining about a lot better. It also passed an incredibly stupid "no new taxes" amendment, so it's enshrined in the state constitution that the government can levy no new taxes on goods or services without _another_ amendment. Ugh!

That was probably one of the things that worked for me about Breaking Bad, though. His falling-out with Gretchen and Elliot, especially how the two parties remember it differently, felt like a genuine character touch, rather than just narrative convenience.

Yeah, although it's always a moment of ludonarrative dissonance in all of the Civilization franchise when you realize how long a war took, in terms of the game's timescale. Even the most one-sided war is going to take a minimum of ten turns before the AI will consider a peace deal, no matter how badly they're losing, which is reasonable in the modern era where a turn is one season, but in the medieval era when one turn is a decade or the ancient era when one turn is a century? Ridiculous. The facts that one-unit-per-tile makes wars last twice as long for all the maneuvering and that ranged units can't capture cities has just exacerbated it (to a comical degree) in the franchise's last two installments.

That's a good point. For Sylvester, the minimum complexity of the system involves substantial age-, gender-, and orientation-based asymmetry. It was important for him to include those features where other ones, especially reflecting the potential for social boundaries and comfort, were not so important. It's an interesting insight into what the designer of Rimworld sees as the essential dimensions of human interaction.

Apparently, it's a story that everyone's seen multiple times, judging from the huge Reddit thread asking for advice on how to deal with it. Anyway, my argument is not that Sylvester should have modeled a different society's system of sexual and romantic dynamics. It's that Sylvester is hiding behind FACTS and DATA and RESEARCH to justify an inaccurate and offensive system when a cursory knowledge of the history of social interaction and attraction shows that he only ever made the effort to confirm his own biases. If he were intentionally trying to model how a fedora-wearing MRA thinks that love and lust work, that'd be fine if a bit uncomfortable, but he's said (multiple times) that his system models real life according to empirical research. That's not true and it's a pernicious argument to make as the designer of a video game.

I don't know, does the piety of Tarn Adams deny the existence or agency of certain identities? The despicable acts that are possible in Rimworld are just that, possible. You can play an entire game, at any difficulty, and never resort to cannibalism or organ-harvesting. It's difficult, but you can capture (human) enemies, disarm them, and release them. The game provides you with the tools to act out your vision of post-collapse interstellar society... except in the case of social interaction, where every man in your settlement will harass a beautiful twenty-something lesbian until they die or find another partner. There's a deep difference in design between providing the player with the tools with which to enact their own descent into despotic tyranny and mandating that despotic tyranny with the fundamental code of your system.