Gormongous

I'm not saying that the Middle East and Latin America would be safer under a hypothetical Trump presidency. I pointedly did not say that, because I don't believe it would be true. I'm just saying that millions of lives are going to be destroyed, no matter who we elect, and the fact that virtually everyone I know is getting up in arms now because some of those lives might be American if Trump is elected makes framing the choice in terms of privilege feel really shitty to me. To be completely fair, Trump vocally opposes the TPP, something that Clinton has only recently come to oppose after helping to craft the deal and traveling to something like thirty countries to promote it. The Democratic Party still supports the TPP, despite Sanders' urgings to reject it, because they don't want to embarrass Obama, which is... worrisome. Anyway, stopped clocks and so on. Otherwise I agree with you completely, I'm just saying that it's not "privilege" that gives people occasion to have misgivings about Clinton. It's words versus deeds and an awareness that US foreign policy has been overwhelmingly monstrous since the beginning of the Cold War.

Again, there is an equal amount of privilege at work in saying "nothing Clinton does could possibly be as bad as anything Trump does." At this point, Trump has been directly responsible for zero lives destroyed, while Clinton's four years as secretary of state has been directly responsible for the destruction of millions of lives of men, women, and children of color in Libya and Syria, the sabotage of the economy and the hijacking of the government in Haiti, sending refugees back to Honduras where women and LGBT individuals are especially suffering from loss of their human rights, and so on. It's literally a "devil you know vs. devil you don't" situation, so I find it galling for it to be constantly implied to me that any hesitance to throw my support behind Clinton is a personal failing, coming out of pettiness and a lack of perspective. The fear of a Trump presidency is fundamentally the fear that the US government will do to US citizens what it has been doing (and what it will continue to do, I assume) to the rest of the world for decades. I understand that that's a fear that's worth keeping from coming to pass, because our government treats Latin America and the Arab world pretty terribly overall, but it's not "privilege" that's staying my hand here.

First three seasons are weak, until the Dominion is introduced. Way back when, I posted a list of must-watch episodes if you want to bootstrap to that point.

Man, I've been following the excesses of the alt right for a couple of years now and that article is still a kaleidoscopic haze of outrageous evil to me. It's not easy to find the DNC bylaws online, but the copy I found definitely indicates that impartiality between all campaigns is expected (and that it is the duty of the chairperson to enforce that impartiality): It still feels really weird to me that the mainstream reaction to these emails (as well as to others calling Sanders' campaign manager an ass, saying that Sanders will never be president, and trying to get an anti-Sanders article circulated "without attribution") has been that it's just politics and Sanders got played by the better politician. We get the system we deserve, I guess!

And Tim Kaine, former governor and current senator of Virginia, has been announced as Clinton's pick for VP. I'm not as down as some on Kaine, if only because he's vocal on Congressional approval of military matters, but I do think that his history with abstinence-only education and informed consent for abortions must be embarrassing to those early endorsements from Planned Parenthood and NARAL, just as his vocal support of NAFTA and the TPP is worrisome for others.

I'm really late to the party, but I played this most of the evening and my feelings are... mixed. Like many Kickstarter titles, it's artistically beautiful: the art and music is evocative and perfectly fitting. I can't say that enough. The gameplay... I don't know. The crafting and inventory is clumsy, especially the choices to make crafting in a list format that only "unlocks" recipes when all the materials are present to complete one. At multiple times, I was lugging around the components for something I desperately needed, but I hadn't scrolled down to the very bottom of the list to figure out all the intermediate recipes I needed first. With that much elbow grease at play, there has to be a better way. Also, the combination of the canted perspective for the rafting sequences, the swiftness of the water, and the idiosyncrasies of the hit detection makes me feel like I didn't really have any control over where I was going, beyond a three- or four-second window. A camera set squarely behind the raft would be less artful but much better for gameplay. All in all, I'm like Reyturner in my appreciation of a win state, but I'm also disappointed that many of the game's systems are simply inaccessible behind the barriers of the endless mode and repeat play. I'm having fun, but I can tell that the game's systems aren't satisfying enough, at the level of their core loop, for me to keep plumbing the depths. On beginner level, I'm never short of food, water, or sleep, yet I'm still two or three bad encounters away from a fail state that, like the rafting, I'm not always certain I can control. That's the problem with these survival games, right? If it's not forgiving like Eidolon or punishing like The Long Dark, there's nowhere for me to make contact. I just do well until I don't, and figuring out why isn't that interesting right now.

Wow, that seems like the first "lol video gaems" thing that I've heard about this one. Is it something that's planned to be fixed in the future, or is it a feature and not a bug?

To relate to another comment I made above, I think that much of the DNC (and the RNC) sees primaries and caucuses as public opinion polls rather than the will of their parties' constituents made manifest. For some, I imagine, an internet survey released to all registered members would work just as well as a formalized election. If the DNC doesn't trust Sanders to toe the party line, that's definitely an issue with personalities and not policies. Is there a reason why leftist Democrats would fall in line with centrist Clinton as president but centrist Democrats wouldn't fall in line with leftist Sanders, besides personalities and in-group signaling? I'm having trouble imagining a situation where Sanders doesn't support a $12.50/hr minimum wage from Congress because he wants $15.00/hr instead (or vice versa) but I grant that anything's possible after this year's events. More to the point, which of Sanders' policies does the Democratic Party as a whole actually oppose, rather than just disagree on the particulars of timing and extent? The only one that comes to mind is that Sanders opposes the TPP, which Clinton also happens to oppose (for the moment). The rest of Clinton's platform has come to align with Sanders' platform quite closely. Is the concern that Sanders will change his mind, once he's in office? Is that not also a concern for Clinton, who has swung hard to the left during the primaries and is expected to swing back to the center for the election? I guess I'm trying to draw a distinction between "Is this good for the party's members" and "Is this good for the party's leaders".

I think the question for me is, is the Democratic Party a party of policies or a party of personalities? If the Democratic Party is a party of policies, that wants to see certain legislature enacted and certain institutions funded, then it shouldn't matter whether their nominee has done time in the party echelons shouldn't matter one jot, because his policies are overwhelmingly the Democratic Party's policies. However, and I think that this is sadly the case, if the Democratic Party is a party of personalities, it has every reason as an institution to resist Sanders' candidacy. He hasn't done the time, he doesn't know the right people, and he's not been vetted—not to be a presidential candidate, mind you, but to be the nominee of the Democratic Party, which is clearly something different. If what we are electing when we poll with the Democratic Party is a personified brand, then Hilary (#ImWithHer) was crowned before Bernie (#FeelTheBern) even had a chance. That's not a problem right now, strictly speaking, since I'm confident that Clinton will have no trouble getting elected against Mussolini-but-a-clown, but I think it'll be a problem as the DNC leadership ages and as technology makes these who-knows-who maneuvers a public embarrassment to a generation that doesn't understand (or doesn't have to understand) that they're how politics has always been done.

It certainly does seem like there's a substantial part of the Democratic Party that's willing to alienate and disillusion younger generations of voters just to win the present election for their preferred candidate. I don't really know if they don't realize that that's not sustainable or if they just don't care because they'll be out the door before the absence of those voters in the ranks of the party is really felt. Brad Marshall is claiming that he was referring to someone else in that email about Sanders' atheism, of course. He doesn't, however, clarify how that makes any sense at all, so I'm going to go with "don't care" for now.

Wikileaks has released emails of DNC leadership (CEO, CFO, director and deputy director of communications) trying to out Sanders as an atheist before the KY and WV primaries because it "could make several points difference with my peeps" and suggesting that the governor of RI could head off a scandal with Sanders supporters because "she's one of ours." Fuck me, this election season is so terrible, even the "good guys" are part of a massively and shamelessly corrupt structure of cronyist politics. I almost have more hope of reform for the US government proper than for the DNC.

"Idle Thumbs 907: The Corpse of John Riccitello." "Idle Thumbs 973: The Alien's Always An Cop."

I am loving the RimWorld streams, although I don't think that I ever want Chris as my (virtual) boss. He gives his people shit for taking walks, for sleeping in, for cloud-watching... I'm just waiting for him to say, "If you have time to lean, you have time to clean."

Oof, that's the worst. A while back, I was in a similar situation with my long-distance relationship after a year and change. She was suffering from severe depression, slowly getting pushed out of her program, and struggling on money, but we were both unhappy and I finally realized that there was no light at the end of the tunnel for me or for her. Everyone, online and offline, told me that, the moment you realize you need to break up with someone, you need to do it. The positive effect of waiting for the right moment is invariably cancelled out by their realization that you decided you didn't want to be with them anymore but then hung around for weeks or months and faked it until an opportune moment showed up for you to do it "kindly." I did not take this advice and waited over a month; I wish I had taken it. Regardless of how it goes, I'm sorry and I hope better things for you both.

It is! I hold no grudge at all.

What can I say, it's my passion. I think that the transition between spoken and silent reading is fascinating because the latter is such a given to us, to the point that we don't even consider that spoken word was how the overwhelming majority of people read in public and in private until the early medieval period, and yet it was a matter of unbearable, nigh-apocalyptic scandal even to a great mind like St. Augustine. Julius Caesar was considered exceptional for being able to read silently without even muttering or moving his lips, and one time, when he read a letter in the Senate without making a sound, he cause the room to erupt in consternation, so perverse it was thought to be. The first time I thought about it was in the context of a conference presentation that had an amazing quotation, with the time and place removed, about the author's horror at finding someone sitting alone in the corner of a room, fiddling with a small object, deaf and blind to everything around him, and laughing or crying at nothing. He found it indistinguishable from madness, but the audience was invited to consider what disruptive new form of communication it was: radio, TV, video games, smart phones, etc. Of course, the quote was from the late sixteenth or seventeenth century, I can't recall which one, and it was the author's first encounter with someone reading one of those newfangled novels silently. A century later, the birth of the romantic novel would cause an even greater stir. I really wish that I had taken down the citation for it, but this link describes some good reactions: http://web.stanford.edu/class/history34q/readings/Manguel/Silent_Readers.html

My favorite thing about Pokemon GO is that it has intensified the moral panic that's existed around smartphones to the point where it perfectly resembles the moral panic around silent reading, first in late antiquity with the popularization of spacing and punctuation, then in the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries with the invention of the printing press and the emergence of popular fiction. People moving around silently, lost in thought as they carry their own little worlds with them, not reacting to people or things that they encounter, regardless of the danger... People gathering in groups, sharing the empty and useless knowledge that they've obtained from these little devices, encouraging each other to dive deeper into perversion and ruining both public and private spaces for people who'd use them for their proper purposes...

I like the land combat, too. Honestly, after my first full playthrough, where I was dueling a young captain of the guard for the honor of yet another governor's daughter at fifty-eight and realized that I was too old to win this fight or any other, it's all that Pirates! has that's kept me coming back. Once I get into the late game, with two brigs and a frigate all with triple bunks, you were able to take on any city, even provincial capitals like Havana, and that's where the land battles started to click for me. My only frustration is that the mix of cover and units was very arbitrary, so sometimes you could be screwed with too many ranged and not enough melee troops, the idea mix being two of the former to one of the latter.

An interesting side note about The Romance of the Three Kingdoms: the prologue, which imparts much of the overt political message of the work, was added during the Qing dynasty by the editors Mao Lun and Mao Zonggang. They excised approximately one sixth of the manuscript attributed to Luo Guanzhong, especially poetic asides and praise for Wei, They added the famous line, "The empire, long divided, must unite; long united, it must divide. Thus it has ever been," to emphasize the cyclical nature of history for China. We're actually not sure if the Mao were Qing sympathizers (seeing Qing as the restorer of Han like the Shu) or not (seeing the Ming remnants to the south as Shu under siege by Wei). Either way, they sought to reinforce the continuity of dynasties early in the reign of the Qing even more than Luo writing during the height of the Ming. Curiously, the original oral version, the pinghua, as well as several plays and poems not in the tradition of the Romance itself, extends the narrative well into the collapse of the Jin dynasty, ending on a minor note with another civil war breaking out. Writing with anxiety about the non-Han Yuan dynasty, it was a story of repeated disintegration and failure rather than unification and dominance. So yeah, there are political agendas at work in the Romance, but they're diverse and sometimes contradictory.

Monkey 47 tastes way too much of iodine for me to consider it as part of a cocktail. Have you tried Uncle Val's Botanical Gin? That has some of the same notes, but smoother and less intrusive to the mix.

Hah! Jokes aside, you'd effectively learned the boss by the end of your stream last night, Nick. You were just fatigued, frustrated, and playing under a sizable mechanical handicap. When you only have the HP to make two mistakes, at most, and you're only doing a hundred damage a hit on the second phase, that's demanding an exhaustingly long streak of near-perfect play from you in order to beat the boss. Trust me, there's no trick you're missing, you're just fighting this boss too early for your skill level, character level, and weapon level. Clear out Lothric Castle, beat the next boss or two on the critical path, and come back with upgraded stats and weapon to show the dragon king who's boss. That's the Dark Souls way!

I'm reading The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb right now, and one of the many things that it's really driven home is that any historical events of real importance are going to be unpredictable and irreplicable. Predictable and/or replicable events are reduced in importance by the forces of foreknowledge and hindsight. I think it's really telling that many of the seminal events of medieval and early modern history (the Investiture Contest and its aftermath, the Fourth Crusade, the Sicilian Vespers, the Ottoman conquest, etc) are impossible to achieve or even to approximate in Crusader Kings 2 and Europa Universalis IV, for all the clever coding by Paradox. You either make a game where historically plausible things are all that happens, ignoring the silent evidence of how close a call the vast majority of those things were and ending up with a game that is railroaded to the point that it doesn't recognize the player's most meaningful accomplishments,* or you make a game where anything historically possible can happen and end up with Europe Universalis III at release. It's a knife's edge that I'm not sure systematized history will ever be able to balance upon. That said, for players, I agree that a more robust system of contextual traits and events is the closest to "touching history" that the Paradox games can reach. It's time-intensive, but simply having a set of conditions watching for whether a character of X culture holds territory in Y region and is at peace or is at war with a character of Z culture, in order to give them a trait recognizing this, would make everything feel so much more authentic. One of the least-appreciated features of Crusader Kings 2 is the epithet system, mostly because it recognizes a wide variety of conditions and makes the result visible to the player in a way that validates their experience. I wish there were more systems like that in CK2 and less like the fully systematized selection of cardinals and popes, honestly. * I was at a historical conference last week and spent lunch talking with Thomas Madden and Alfred Andrea about how the crusades basically wouldn't have happened if Stephen of Blois a) didn't desert the siege of Acre or didn't stop in Constantinople to tell the emperor that the crusade was doomed. And that's even not even taking into account that Alexius believed Stephen and that the crusaders defeated Kerbogha without either of them! Between the three of us, we had literally no idea what the world would look like today if the Byzantine emperor had accompanied the crusaders to Jerusalem or if the crusaders were defeated at Antioch, except that it would look nothing like our world as it exists now. Counterfactuals are funny like that: pick a large enough event, and anything becomes plausible.

I really hope that this isn't the end for Nick. It's his first brick wall, going somewhere lacking the gear or the stats to beat it without hours of practice, and I'd hate to see him give up there.

Congratulations!

Yeah, I've personally been debating whether I want to wait until Heinlein comes out or to jump in right now, because major feature changes start happening.