Gormongous

I've just booked flights the last week of June for a conference in Odense, Denmark. It's a great opportunity, I know, but I don't travel well at all. Is there anyone on the forums from Denmark who can give me advice, especially on traveling by train from Copenhagen to Odense and maybe on good accommodations near the University of Southern Denmark? I would be embarrassingly grateful.

My two biggest issues are: Clinton being the central figure devising and pushing our disastrous "lead from behind" strategy in Libya that killed thousands, reduced the country to ashes, and basically made the democratic process impossible there. If I can help it, I never want to vote for someone who says shit like, "We came, we saw, he died," about military adventurism against a non-hostile power. Clinton repeatedly asserting that it'll be impossible to pay for Sanders' healthcare and education plans, but then suggesting that the way to stabilize the Middle East is to occupy it for sixty years, like we did with Germany, Japan, and Korea. Sure, that costs nothing and is totally the appropriate use of America's military power. Honestly, Clinton's record with foreign policy is such an abject mess of neocon bullshit that I would rather have someone with no preconceived notions about the "right" way for the US to interact with the rest of the world, so that they could assemble a team of advisors who're able to craft a foreign policy that doesn't demand overlooking the deaths of thousands of brown people so that Levis can keep its worker wages in Haiti at 31 cents per hour. I don't see this as contradictory. The most urgent way to stop ISIS is to cut off their ability to funnel oil through Turkey and into the black market. A treaty organization that includes Turkey with other US "allies" like Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Kuwait, which are all the source of substantial donations to ISIS, will allow for a unified economic and foreign policy, beyond just military deployments and diplomatic favors, to close those loopholes. We emphatically shouldn't be putting any more boots on the ground against ISIS, and hopefully Sanders' plans involve the cessation of drone strikes across the board, but we'll see.

Considering that Sanders was polling at twenty points behind a few days ago and ended up two points ahead tonight, it's maybe the biggest primary upset in US history. That's what has me worried about Clinton: beyond taking issue with her Kissinger-flavored foreign policy in places like Libya, Honduras, and Haiti; beyond her being known for crossing the aisle to get things done but rarely getting others to cross the aisle to her; beyond her record-setting unlikeability across most demographics and the several ready-made scandals she already has on the table for the general election; I just don't think that she has the juice to dominate the real battleground states. Almost all of Clinton's vaunted "runaway wins" have been in states that'll swing hard toward red in the main election, while Sanders has generally better performance in bluer parts of the country, Massachusetts excepted. If Missouri and Ohio swing Sanders' way next week, it's going to be a tough case to make that Clinton's going to be able to pick up disaffected, anti-establishment, and overall independent voters like Sanders does.

It says "Grenade us, please" way too much for me to ever risk it.

Yeah, don't worry about the counter unless the game explicitly tells you that you are about to lose. As long as you're expanding towards them, there's always a facility to hit and it's almost easier to roll back the counter than for it to go up.

Yeah... Titan Quest had the unique setting, at least. This has nothing even approaching that. Apparently I've put sixteen hours into it over the past two weeks and, although I enjoyed myself, I just finished the first act and felt no intrinsic sense of progress from it. I've unlocked a few skills, some of them active as opposed to my tendency in Titan Quest to prioritize the more-powerful passives, but I'm still playing the game in the exact same way that I did during the first hour. I don't even have the silver lining that I frequently find when revisiting Diablo 2, where I got to see my guy go from a peasant in cloth in leather to a metal-clad god; in Grim Dawn, I'm a weird, spiky bucket of rust throughout. Anyway, I've gotten my fifty bucks of overeager Kickstarter funding out of this. I'm probably going to uninstall now.

I'm glad that you posted that so I didn't have to post it. I also think that, as much as Justin and Griffin appear together on most things, Griffin works a lot better with Travis than with Justin at the basic interaction. Griffin's comic disbelief and sandbagging sometimes make an impact on Justin but has never once dissuaded Travis from anything he's said. The "mango" bit is literally the most outrageous thing that I've ever heard any human being say:

Actually, if you look up most definitions of fascism, you've described it perfectly in Trump's actions. Fascism isn't so much about ideology as about methodology: appeals to popular frustrations and fears, with authoritarian control offered as the answer to all of them. The actual content of the appeals doesn't matter because authoritarianism is always the answer to them. That's what makes studying Franco and Mussolini (and to a lesser extent, Hitler) so aggravating, because they're constantly shifting the supposed "heart" of their message to be immediately salient to whatever they personally wanted at a given time. Mussolini even says right out, although I'm going to paraphrase it, that you will never understand fascism if you have to ask what it means, because it's an instinctual force that opposes intellect. That's Trump to a T.

I remember Helldivers from Arrowhead, the studio that made Magicka, getting a lot of attention from the PS4 crowd maybe six months ago. Now it's coming to PC via Steam and I'm curious whether it's a good pick for my gaming group, which typically plays two or three times a week for a couple hours and has drifted from Payday 2 following the fracas with that community. Any opinions? According to the Arrowhead website, there have been three major expansions to mission content that'll be free with the base game, plus 14 weapon/cosmetic DLCs that are available for a moderate discount if you preorder. Most of the guns seem nice, but are they worth paying twenty bucks extra? I'm also curious if any other Thumbs are looking to get (back) into this game with the PC release, of course.

There have been a few good articles over the last few weeks that have pointed out how much American exceptionalism has been recast in the negative: "America’s twenty-first century 'exceptions' appear as dubious distinctions: gun violence, carbon emissions, mass incarceration, wealth inequality, racial disparities, capital punishment, child poverty, and military spending" (http://www.commondreams.org/views/2016/02/26/we-are-not-denmark-hillary-clinton-and-liberal-american-exceptionalism). On the other hand, America is certainly not exceptional for having its political process hijacked by a narcissistic demagogue appealing to reactionary bigots. In that, Trump is eerily similar to ISIS against which he rails...

As I understand it, it's treated like DLC, so it's available from the jump. I need to get into the game and try it out!

Yeah, in the case of the Jurassic World version of that, it actually thinned out the heady cocktail of emotions in Williams' original score into just one of them, a sort of watery wistfulness that ironically felt less like Jurassic Park, to me.

The RPS hands-on preview is an interesting read: https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2016/03/03/no-mans-sky-preview/ Personally, I find a lot about which I could get excited, but a lot that also worries me. There's the reference to The Long Dark when talking about tuning the difficulty of the survival systems and there's the assertion that the procedural generation was weighed heavily towards producing "beautiful" outcomes... I don't know. This is most definitely a wait-and-see kind of game for me.

There's a certain warmth that comes to the podcast when Jake's pleased by something that was said. It's apparent even when he's not talking, as I discovered when Chris said, "Jonathan Bro," and I could almost literally hear Jake beaming for the next thirty seconds. It's okay, I was laughing, too.

Hah, my most successful made-up-on-the-spot NPC was New Trash, the Harkonnen-like gang leader ruling an abandoned space station in the Outer Rim. He overthrew Trash, his pragmatic and almost kindly predecessor whom the players exploited ruthlessly and left holding the bag, and I made New Trash, who was hostile and paranoid, as a way of blocking off that avenue of the campaign and giving the players consequences for treating the NPCs as pinatas. Instead, they put a huge amount of effort into their diplomacy with New Trash and eventually I let them win him over, partly because they put in the effort and partly because they were so enamored with this guy who hated them and wanted nothing to do with them. They come back to his station at every opportunity, these days...

When I really think of it, all of my best characters as a GM have been ones that players have forced me to fill out on the spot. Part of it, I'm sure, is just players being players and having less investment in something that I've put effort into, but part of it has to be the special sauce of last-minute inspiration.

I agree enthusiastically, but it's true that the Ivory Crown DLC especially has some places that seem tailor-made to burn out a player who's pushing ahead.

If communities are composed of the same short-sighted and advertising-addled people who can't be trusted to spend their own money intelligently, how exactly are these community-based programs going to come about and be sustained? Are they going to be imposed top-down via centralized government and, if so, how are they going to be administered, vetted, and reviewed? It seems to me that you have a greater faith in institutions than in people and I'm not really seeing a basis for the former without the latter. People have a sense of ownership for their own property that is unfortunately absent from communal property, hence the tragedy of the commons. Additionally, "community-based" has a very urban tinge to it and doesn't apply to the large numbers of poor people living in rural conditions, where there is no "community" outside of their extended (or sometimes even just their immediate) family.

Yeah, the diaries on primitive civilizations and on uplifting species have done a great job of convincing me that this game is going to be a better sandbox than virtually any 4X game out there, if it's successful in its design goals.

Honestly, as much as I like the more lengthy and baroque entries in the Idle Thumbs library of themes, I prefer this shorter one. The best moments of the longer themes is when they're abruptly foreshortened or cut off, usually by shenanigans from Jake, and now I get that with every episode!

Has anyone played this? I installed it last night and put maybe three hours into it. It's... a very strange beast, to be sure. On the one hand, the systems are solid as solid can be. The basic act of clicking on enemies to make them die feels impactful, the gear and skill progressions make sense and go easily, and overall it's just a nice thing to run around in. On the other hand, it's very messy in a way that I don't think would happen in a traditionally published game. The art design is grimy and dirty to the point of making some enemies and objects unreadable. The items themselves are all trash or trash-derived, which make sense in the setting but is distasteful in that teenage "hardcore" kind of way. The skill system is needlessly complicated, with most skills having fourteen or sixteen ranks that make for incremental changes and rarely connect to anything else. The devotion system is hard to understand and feels like it's been tacked on. NPCs will natter at you for screens, usually with uninspired voice acting, and the upshot is always "Go here, get/kill this thing, come back." So much of the game is mediocre in a way that makes it hard to see where the ambition was. All the best parts are easily recognizable from Titan Quest, but they don't come together with the same cogency, especially with the basic act of making a character. You're never really making a build, you're just collecting a set of tools that often has duplicates or gaps that you just paper over. I'm very mixed at this point, to be honest. It's not my first Kickstarter regret, but...

Public services require infrastructure, both physical and bureaucratic, to implement. That's much more expensive than you think. I can't find the specific article by Jessamyn West, but somewhere on Metafilter is a good description of how public transportation infrastructure, the public library system, the civil service, and telecommunications infrastructure all have to interact perfectly for an elderly person to be able to apply for disability funding—and that's if everything goes right. If the bus is late, if the librarian is busy, if the form is filled out incorrectly, if the web address doesn't work, then that elderly person goes hungry next week or next month or until they can beg the time off from their part-time job at the grocery store to try again. As several people have observed, a lot of the preexisting systems don't work well enough, either through insufficient coverage or excessive overhead, and simply increasing the funding to those systems doesn't necessarily make them more effective, not if they've been built under the assumption that people need to be vetted for coverage and sometimes denied it. In those cases, increasing funding is just increasing bloat in a way that puts most "minimum income" proposals to shame. Also, and I can't stress this with enough heat, it is a profoundly classist and capitalist concern that, if the poor are given money, they might use it to make themselves comfortable or happy rather than just alive. Billions of human beings spend money on luxuries, usually without any comment from the peanut gallery, but we are all raised to believe that poverty is a personal failing, whether we're aware of it or not, and so the poor have to suffer appropriately to deserve our help—and they can never suffer enough to deserve the luxuries that the rest of us take for granted, as part of our just desserts as "successes" in the capitalist morality play. It's a nineteenth-century mentality to its core: back then, the "cure" for the suffering of physical or mental illness was invariably some kind of physical or mental torture to force the body to "cure itself," through pressure-sweating or electroshock therapy, and likewise the "cure" for poverty is invariably austerity, to force the poor to work harder. It's a broken assumption, without any consistent statistical support, but people still cling to it, for various reasons.

Anime's a funny medium for cyberpunk because, even though it is the venue for several foundational texts in the West (namely Akira and the first Ghost in the Shell movie), it really didn't fully coalesce into a genre in the East until the mid- to late nineties and, even then, the antithesis of the individual was conceived to be the disintegration of selfdom in the face of millenarian angst (an outlook more commonly found in Western music, like Radiohead's OK Computer) than the stagnation of society under total corporate governance. Accordingly, a lot of anime resembles (or prefigures, or adopts) the material culture of cyberpunk without really buying into the full thematic range of cyberpunk: for example, the three biggest "cyberpunk" franchises in anime (Patlabor, Bubblegum Crisis with its A.D. Police spinoff, and Ghost in the Shell) have well-realized near-future worlds that address social themes about the relationship between technological change and societal change, but they also feature ensemble casts of characters working for the establishment (not that I'm complaining, because the "future-cop procedural" sub-genre is one of my favorites and Japan has had it on lockdown for decades now). Anyway, under first-wave or proto-cyberpunk anime, built from Bubblegum Crisis (a futuristic "magical girl" anime) and Patlabor (a mecha anime) but heavily influenced by the breakout success of Akira: Bubblegum Crisis (1987) Akira (1988) Mobile Police Patlabor (1988) Patlabor: The Movie (1989) A.D. Police Files (1990) Mobile Police Patlabor: The New Files (1990) Bubblegum Crash (1991) Battle Angel Alita (1993) - This one is post-apocalyptic in its setting but hews strongly to a cyberpunk aesthetic in its characters and action. Patlabor 2: The Movie (1993) Under second-wave or high cyberpunk, inspired by Ghost in the Shell and brought to its ultimate form by Serial Experiments Lain: Ghost in the Shell (1995) Neon Genesis Evangelion (1995) - Whatever else, the production design for the technology and locations is a consummate expression of cyberpunk. The End of Evangelion (1997) Gasaraki (1998) - Often passed over for being too political and too robot-filled. Jin-Roh: The Wolf Brigade (1998) - In a reversal from my other exceptions, this is more strongly cyberpunk in theme than in aesthetics. Serial Experiments Lain (1998) A.D. Police (1999) The Big O (1999) Boogiepop Phantom (2000) Under third-wave or post-cyberpunk, which is mostly about self-conscious use of the aesthetic as a vehicle for other themes with some throwbacks like Blame! sprinkled in: Full Metal Panic! (2002) Ghost in the Shell: Stand-Alone Complex (2002) Heat Guy J (2002) - Kinda shit, but better than the ignominy it currently enjoys. Blame! (2003) Parasite Dolls (2003) Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence (2004) Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex 2nd Gig (2004) Paranoia Agent (2004) - Not my favorite at all, but hard to ignore. Ergo Proxy (2006) Dennou Coil (2007) From that point, it really begins to thin out, although Darker than Black, Eden of the East, and Psycho-Pass all have strong influences in traditional cyberpunk fiction. Most of the ones I've listed are good, but no promises!

No worries. Happy thread!

You people bringing meta jokes into the Happy Thread are awful. Congratulations, Vasari! That's a turnaround in the best way.