Gormongous

"If X isn't Y, then what's the point?" is the gold standard for being a jackass.

I think it's an archetypal shortfall between the pulp-comic vibe Lucas has always aimed for and the increasingly complex philosophies of the various in-universe organizations. All the source material and Expanded Universe stuff says that the Sith are an ancient and sophisticated society, but they have to play cartoon villains in the movies and it's terrible. Almost as terrible as making your space opera about trade disputes and legislative procedure. I know, right? I remember seeing them in theaters and thinking, "These aren't great, but at least they're competent sci-fi fun that I can watch again someday." But then I saw the third movie again a couple years ago and found it unbearable. It's so boring, I can't see how people didn't walk out of the theaters in droves. We spend two solid hours watching people blow off an increasingly distraught Anakin until he finally snaps and starts killing children. Really, don't even get me started on the lack of subtlety in Lucas' writing. When the dude you're relying on to help you with your wife's troubled pregnancy starts shooting lightning out of his fingertips while screaming, "Unlimited power!" it's time to take the rest of the day off and find someone else to make your decisions for you, preferably not the aforementioned wackjob.

This sounds like a registry key or two is corrupted somewhere and is inhibiting the system from recording your preferences properly. Besides a bughunt through Regedit in search of a "could not access" error message, I couldn't tell you how to fix that, but it's a problem I've come across a couple times myself. I lost a good two hours I'd laid out for work yesterday because the system sounds for Windows weren't working and I couldn't change my wallpaper or screensaver. Ends up one missing key in HKEY_USERS had caused Windows to freak out and disable all profile features, including all personalization. It was a joy to track that down (create a new profile, go line-by-line through the two registry directories to find the missing key, export and re-merge).

Yeah, I'm going to go ahead and bite too. I trust in the Thumbs' great Steam key exchange, I'll just have my Steam username up here as well: hallib@sbcglobal.net

Yeah, it's so incredibly trite to say, but the opening paragraph remains my favorite beginning for a novel, ever: You know, sooner or later we're going to have to stop calling them "novels".

Thanks for reading my reader mail on the podcast, guys. In retrospect, I probably should have reproduced more of Bissell's argument, but you all reconstructed the lion's share of it on your own. Basically, Bissell's beef is that this cultural aversion to spoilers prevents good gaming criticism from happening, at least without copious hand-wringing and fan outcry. He would rather gamers police their own content pending sometime in the future when it becomes recognized that plot twists are only the smallest part of a game's appeal. Myself, I avoid spoilers for media I plan to consume, but always keeping in mind that, if knowing the plot ruins a game or movie to the point where I won't bother watching it, I'm probably better off knowing and not bothering.

Yeah Luftmensch, you're kind of stretching here. Saying that something happens for specific contextual reasons does not discount it from happening for general systemic reasons. For instance, I was denied funding the first year of my grad program because I was coming in with an English degree and therefore wasn't a safe bet, so I had to prove myself first. A female colleague was denied funding because she was coming in with a pair of ovaries and therefore wasn't a safe bet, so she had to prove herself first. Those aren't the same thing.

Agreed. It's an attempt to dismiss white privilege by pretending to own it, which is gross. Tellingly, no one would ever use the tag #richpeopleproblems on their own tweet.

Wow, I totally remember that ruining the game for me. The memory came out of nowhere reading that, even though I can't remember playing the game itself.

I'm not boiling anything down. I'm arguing against monocausotaxophilia and for multi-pronged approaches to problems. Yes, we need less firearms out there, but it also wouldn't hurt to bulk up and diversify our educational programs on the remaining ones, so that the gun Dad left out by accident isn't the first one Jimmy's seen that's not on the TV. I mean, really? I spoke about those DARE sessions I attended and health class lectures I received, but if I'd found a gun at age ten, I probably would have played with it just a bit before going to find someone, trying my best to be careful because the grownups had said, "Do not touch," because I'd never touched one before. I don't think that would have been the case if I'd been allowed to touch a gun under supervision in a formal setting, so I think it's worth considering.

No, and he's carrying it too far, but you did make it sound like there are a lot of at-risk low-income teens who are holding off on their gang initiation until they get their firearm safety down pat. I think having kids see and handle a gun while a responsible adult shows and tells them why it's not a toy and how to make sure one is safe to touch isn't ridiculously out there in plausibility, though who knows in this current political climate. Like you said, a lot of current in-school programs are just "Guns are bad, mmkay?" browbeating that don't teach kids how to behave around a firearm at all. There are a lot of deaths from accidental discharges that could be prevented with a less abstract curriculum.

It's not much, but when I was a kid growing up in Texas, I was taught in multiple grade-school safety sessions and in junior-high health class not to touch my parents' guns, if they had any lying out. I was told that they were the opposite of toys, that they had the power to ruin lives, and that I should go find an adult I trusted to handle them. It wasn't much, but it was something.

It might just be sunk-cost fallacy with the big names. They've had to develop their own D-pad design, who cares if it's inferior now? I was also going to mention "not invented here" syndrome, but that's maybe too many corporate-culture buzzwords.

Forget the "cyber" part. Punk was long dead before kids currently in college were born. Stuff like anarchism and DIY is totally lost on them.

A large part of America is ready for it, but America itself isn't ready for it. That's been the really weird thing about living in the States this past decade, with healthcare and gay marriage and now gun control.

Kids these days still know what static is though, right? I don't know, I'm always shocked what my students don't know. Two years ago, there was the horrible revelation that Gladiator is no longer a touchstone I can use to get them excited about ancient history. Braveheart? Something their parents watched before they were born.

Yeah, I wince a little to hear some aspects of XCOM's design praised, when it definitely has a "right" way to be played from a gameplay perspective. At the strategic level, there's a single optimal path up the tech tree, unless you're counting false decisions like "research guns then armor, or armor then guns?" At the tactical level, the game rewards ludicrously conservative play that is deeply unfun, in that there is no disincentive besides the player's own boredom not to move the entire squad forward an inch at a time, preserving a perfect overwatch net. Those two elements ruined the game for me during my third playthrough on Classic Ironman, and I haven't checked back since. It was great to hear Crusader Kings II brought up again though, even if most of the podcast members are looking at it in the rearview mirror. It actually seems like Paradox is trying to address the pacing issues with the way the Muslims, Factions, and Republics alter the core game, but I don't think it's in the right direction. All of the new features, the Republics especially, play at a breakneck pace, which means more is going on at all times, but really that just means that the player is pausing ten times as often. If Paradox wants to keep the player better engaged, I think they might be better off finding a way to present decisions in a way that doesn't force the player to pause the game and have a good think every time the dialogue window comes up. I'm incredibly experienced at the game (Steam says 357 hours, that can't be right. I did have it running at the lowest possible speed in the background while I studied for my doctoral exams over the summer...), and I still have to spend ninety seconds clicking through windows and lists to make sure my German duke wants to have a fling with this specific milkmaid the game presents to me. I don't know how, but that really should be a shoot-from-the-hip decision.

"Exceptional [in badness]". I love a word with an ironic connotation that has totally eradicated its literal denotation.

I still remember the first FEAR for having really frenetic combat, only regulated by the protagonist's slo-mo power, that tore up whatever room it went down in and left a real mess. All the guns were loud as heck and gouged chunks out of the walls and floor, so even when you missed, it did a lot of visible damage to something.

The problem is not the law itself, but the current interpretation. Overturning that is a longer and much more complicated process. Some legislative body will have to make a law directly contradicting the current interpretation, the legal challenge to the law will have to make it to the Supreme Court, and then the makeup of the nine justices, who serve for life, will have to have changed enough to ensure a different outcome. The whole process has a half-life of a generation or so. Change doesn't happen fast, with regards to the Constitution, so it's probably better just to do an end-run around the "well-regulated militia" thing with an assault-weapon ban or whatever, rather than carp about the Supreme Court sucking at its job, which it often does.

Yeah, I've been craving some fruitcake too. If anyone has a spare copy of The Ship, I'll be your lackey (unless you're my target).

Yeah, the "tone" argument, while often well-intentioned, is also a weapon used to silence. It's not enough to have valid points, but you have to say them nicely, or they'll be ignored. Meanwhile, the self-appointed arbiters of tone are too often the ones baying for blood at the very existence of those points, so it's a no-win scenario for the underdog here. Me, I've watched most of Sarkeesian's existing content and mostly find it good stuff. The only way I could view it as "smug" or "disapproving" is if I considered the issues she talks about to be common knowledge and therefore her commentary on them to be gratuitous. Seeing as we just had a major developer offer as a pre-order bonus a headless, limbless, bikini-clad female torso covered in blood, that doesn't seem to be the case (and the existence of a cultural climate that lets shit like this slip by dozens if not hundreds of smart, informed people is exactly why we need words like "patriarchy" to distinguish it from simply the status quo). And yeah, some of her fans suck. But fans everywhere suck. Fandom is a black hole of human sense and decency. It has no bearing on those around whom it coalesces.

I had a really long post typed up about how self-help (aka, kill the bastard yourself with your privately owned weapon) never fails to receive the most recognition as the foundation of political and juridical power when articulated in the face of a centralized government exerting new and/or unfamiliar forms of authority, based largely on the chapters I've been reading in Edward Muir's Mad Blood Stirring: Vendetta in Renaissance Italy, but then I closed the browser window instead of posting. Rest assured, it was very clever and insightful, if somewhat stating the obvious, but I'll just settle with echoing my agreement for now. It seems to me that societies republican in origin tend to breed a citizenry that views itself as the individual vessels for all powers the state arrogates to itself. Therefore, they all want their fully automatic whatevers, so they can continue to keep exercising said legislative, judicial, and executive powers on their own if the state should break down. Monopoly of legitimate violence and all that. There's also probably something to be said about America's millennarian anxieties being carried past term, no doubt due to 9/11 and all that, since I don't know of many other two-hundred year old democracies where a large percentage of the populace believes itself perpetually on the verge of civil war.

I need to print out this blurb and post it beside my monitor. As a medieval history student raised on Bioware and Black Isle, this has been the most tempting "what if" title out there, but I've always avoided it for exactly the reasons you say. What a shame.

Whoa, hey now. A company on the decline trying something new? Has that ever happened?