Problem Machine

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Everything posted by Problem Machine

  1. The Next President

    Agreed, this is a shit show.
  2. The Next President

    :poring: :poring: The connotations behind words and phrases changes with time and circumstances :poring: :poring:
  3. The Next President

    Yeah see that stuff is fine, you just seem to get really aggressive whenever anyone isn't 100% convinced by one of your arguments. I mean I have no problem with bringing up evidence against Clinton, it's just the tone whenever someone says why they don't find that evidence damning or brings up counterevidence or tries to bring it into perspective that NO You're WRONG and then supporting that with some kind of diatribe that's usually only tangentially related to the thing they actually said that seems... not productive.
  4. The Next President

    ...what?
  5. The Next President

    I think it's fine to feel that way but it's kinda coming off like you're haranguing others for feeling differently?
  6. The Next President

    Hillary has been in the spotlight a lot longer, it's really 0% surprising or indicative of anything underhanded that more of her statements have been examined closely
  7. The Next President

    You can easily check that on the site, but about 170 for Hillary and 70 for Bernie edit: ~100 for trump, ~100 for cruz, ~60 kasich
  8. The Next President

    I think that in a colloquial sense we usually mean half-true to mean intentionally true but misleading, whereas in this case they just mean fundamentally incomplete. I don't think half-truths are as much an indication of weasellyness in these ratings as they're generally associated, where most of what we'd consider "half-truths" would probably be filed under 'mostly false'.
  9. The Next President

    Yes, but the statements made by the other people aren't the ones that are getting categorized on those pages. Click through to the statements and they're all direct quotes or paraphrases.
  10. The Next President

    It rates both. If you go to their pages it lists their statements by category and if you click any category it lists the statements within the category. Also, to clarify my personal position, I actually generally prefer Bernie: I think Hillary is basically just a politician who does all the things a politician does, and a vote for her is a vote for the status quo. That said, I certainly think it's worthwhile questioning the narratives that get spun around her, both positive and negative. I'm actually glad you posted the info challenging the perhaps unearned positive image of her, but I think it's also important to challenge the criticisms of her that are, perhaps, specious, ie dishonest, shouty, etc. Not trying to endorse anyone here, just trying to establish an honest and straightforward discourse.
  11. The Next President

    So I guess HRC is the most objectively honest candidate?
  12. The Next President

    I wouldn't necessarily expect her to know it off-hand, but I would expect her to fact-check it before making a statement. The fact that she didn't is... odd.
  13. The Next President

    Okay something you don't seem to be getting: This conversation, the one we're having right now? Isn't about Clinton vs Sanders, her voting history, anything like that. This conversation is about how you've framed the narrative about people who disagree with her. The validity of criticism of HRC has no bearing on whether its demeaning or productive to speak of the electorate in the ways you have.
  14. The Next President

    The thing about 'stupid' is it doesn't actually explain anything. Stupid isn't a reason why people do things, it's just a potential factor in the reasoning that makes them do things. It's a thought terminating cliche. 'stupid' is stupid. And inflammatory. And, moreover, ignorance is something that is often specifically fostered for political purposes, and is effect as well as cause. Discussing ignorance or 'stupidity' as though they are the source of problems, rather than the product of problems, is not a very helpful approach I think. It neither explains why that cognitive gap exists nor why it leads to the reasoning that you disagree with. And, again, is inflammatory. Henroid, the core assumption you seem to be making is that if a decision someone else makes makes no sense to you it is therefore definitely the result of their flawed reasoning, rather than differing belief systems or flawed reasoning on your part. Do you not see how this seems condescending?
  15. The Next President

    Naw I can twit just fine in all other ways. I'd expect it might be a NoScript issue except even if I disable it it still doesn't seem to work. Dunno!
  16. The Next President

    Not learning skills like that also seems like an educational issue, though... also, I dunno if anyone else has this problem, but I can basically never see the images Henroid posts, just something like, in this instance, 'CdsrQ2XWEAIDptt.jpg' -- which is a link, and when I click on it leads to a loading wheel spinning infinitely.
  17. The Next President

    I suppose you would
  18. The Next President

    So in other words by the time the government does anything we'll all be fucked? Because it's not going to be just one, or just ten or a hundred, people that die if climate change gets really bad... Especially when you account for the fact that so many people are going to deny unseasonable storms and the like are stemming from human-caused problems.
  19. Idle Weekend March 11, 2016: Buried Treasure

    Yeah this is something I tried to get at in my response to the 'guilty pleasures' discussion a few episodes back. I feel like thinking about this stuff, about why this thing that seems bad feels good, can be one of the most genuinely educational and fascinating responses we can have to a work -- what makes a piece of art worthwhile is your reaction to it, not its reputation as great art or as trash. I think the Alien: Isolation discussion very nearly put its finger on the core conflict, or set of conflicts, that make horror games maybe impossible to really do right: We expect horror to be surprising, while we expect games to be consistent; We expect games to be fair, we expect horror to be one-sided; we expect exploration to be encouraged in games, we expect exploration to be deadly but unavoidable in horror. The genre of horror as it is traditionally understood and the tenets of 'good game design' as we traditionally understand them are deeply incompatible. That's not to say that horror games suck, but usually some aspect of the 'horror' or the 'game' sucks by the standards of the other: Many people, while considering the old Silent Hill games to be excellent horror games, decry the clunky and confusing combat, while ignoring how something faster and more intuitive would undermine the horror atmosphere; Later Resident Evil games made the decision to streamline the gameplay at the cost of any remaining vestiges of actual compelling horror, but they're also good games just because they're fun to play. Something's gotta give to make a good horror game, and the inevitable result is that by many of the metrics we use to evaluate it it will be a failure. This is just the current situation, anyway. As we expand what mechanics we understand, perhaps away from quantifiable systems and player empowerment, coherent horror games may be more feasible. In the meanwhile, they'll still be interesting and often good, but flawed by the definitions we have set them out by. Also, glad to hear you guys responding to stuff posted in the episode discussions. For a little bit it felt like discussion happening here wasn't really filtering through to the cast in any way, since y'all don't seem to post in the discussion threads. I suppose it doesn't have to, but the emphasis placed on the letters section in the cast suggested an open enough discussion that I guess I expected it to. Anyway
  20. Whoops, punctuation error. I actually meant Tony Hawk's Crew: Sade R. King's 22nd Birthday Bash Minigame Collection
  21. Whoops you misspelled his name. I think you're thinking of Tony Hawk's Crusader King's 2.
  22. The Next President

    Just edit your original post and go into the full editor
  23. Idle Weekend March 4, 2016: Soft Spots

    I just listened to the part where you discussed my email on the cast (thanks!) and felt I had to clarify one point: Rob, I'm not saying you shouldn't have had that discussion -- quite the converse, I want more conversation: I'm saying that there was, as I mentioned, an unwarranted leap in the reasoning which left a gap. That is, I think there was a conversation that wasn't being had about why The Witness is infuriating, intriguing, etc, due to the facile analysis of it being 'like learning'. 'Like learning' is a great stepping off point, but raises a whole lot of questions about how we regard and value learning and how that relates to games! I understand you only get an hour of casting, but that's why I found it frustrating, anyway. Also, related to the weekly topic of 'soft spots', I wrote a short piece a while ago about how sometimes the things we find really appealing in a work of art are simpler and more straightforward than we like to admit. I also wrote about the role of frustration in game design and gameplay a bit ago, which is maybe relevant to the witness discussion. I don't normally link my work this much but Idle Weekend discussions have a strange tendency to coincide with stuff I've written about! Anyway, back to listen to the rest of the cast now while I make egg salad.
  24. The Next President

    Do whistleblowers generally stand trial? I thought that was a term denoting a form of immunity, not a form of prosecution.