Problem Machine

DisneyWorld, not DisneyLand. Similar name but on the other side of the country. Also, the most obvious comparison that comes to mind when I look at NiTW stuff is to Achewood, which also has animal characters but gives them unique and well-drawn personalities and sometimes goes into very dark and surreal territory. I haven't played any of it yet though so I don't know whether that's accurate at all.

Holy shit, that's actually so stupid it goes past my lowest expectations for tb. He's devolving alongside the shitty movement he tethered himself to.

Within a Deep Forest with dev commentary was pretty great, especially since it's a not super-well-known game that I like a lot. I'd recommend anyone who hasn't played it give it a shot, it's not very long and is consistently good, with a fantastic soundtrack.

Would this be like a Weekend at Bernies kinda thing?

So Zoe Quinn's life is still pretty fucked.

The most commonly relevant thing though is that if you take a deal with a devil you'll get more devil deals and if you take an angel pedestal you'll get more angel deals. I don't believe either red chest drops or Krampus drops count, it has to be deals or angel pedestals.

I don't think it's a bug, it's always been that way. You can force a devil deal on the first floor with a Joker (same for cathedral/Sheol which also normally can't have one) but I don't think goat head works. Anyway, it's not 100% if you got one on the floor before, but on basement 2 it's almost guaranteed if you don't take damage, and nearly so if you just don't take red heart damage. Also, goat head doesn't affect whether you get devil/angel rooms, it's just that the most common way to get it is by buying it from the devil which sets a devil room precedent.

That's Brimstone + Anti-Gravity tears. It's a pretty powerful effect, particularly because it means that that brimstone shot no longer cancels when you charge another, so it lets you fire brimstone a lot more often. Enemies shouldn't be immune to damage, though, so that's weird -- unless you just mean immune to the magnetic tears effect, in which case yeah rooted enemies aren't moved by it. You did manage to find one of the few item combos where magnetic tears are more helpful than dangerous, though, so congrats on that.

Dishonored Dishonored Also known as: Honored

I honestly don't doubt that Brianna Wu still gets tons of shit... hell, she's hired someone basically solely to handle harassment and related issues, hasn't she? If she says she thinks the energy expended on fighting gamergate could be better spent elsewhere, I'm inclined to cede to her experience.

That was actually a joke which would only make sense if one had already seen the episode I was referring to. I'm sorry.

wasn't this an episode of Aqua Teen Hunger Force?

TB was also instrumental in making GamerGate a Thing, using his platform to spread a lot of the rumors about Zoe Quinn and Nathan Grayson early on in a way that was irresponsible. In general, he seems to take a lot of pride in the reach he has without being willing to take any responsibility for using it.

I think it is important to have a term for the kind of harassment that would be perfectly acceptable discourse as a one-time interaction, but repeated so often by so many people it becomes an act of aggression. Whether sealioning is a good term for that, I neither know nor care, but it is a helpful distinction to make.

That's true. It seems like the comic relies a lot on absurd juxtapositions against Victorian archetypes, and expressing this joke within that context definitely also adds to the unfortunate implications.

One of the grand jurors from the Darren Wilson case is suing Robert McCullough for misrepresenting the circumstances

That could be pretty good, yeah.

I don't mean to say it's an invalid interpretation, but it strikes me as a bit single-minded in its intent. I mean, I agree that the comic problematic from that perspective, I just think it's still useful and worthwhile, and the parallel drawn is obviously unintentional on the part of the author, as well as on the part of the people sharing it. It does certainly raise a very interesting point, which I think is worth keeping in mind: If the comic ended on the third panel, the woman on the cart would be obviously in the wrong, since she's basically talking shit about an entire species. Going on to show that the species in question deserves it because they're assholes, and her criticisms are thus justified, resolves this and flips it around to some degree, but it still doesn't cast her in a very good light. Even more, though, in choosing a species to showcase this passive-aggressive harassment, we end up with The Orc Problem, inherent evil (assholishness) justifying mistreatment (fuck those sealions amirite). Anyway, like I said, I think it is a problem, but I also have a hard time imagining how the comic could have told its joke without falling afoul of this particular problem, so I just try to take it in the spirit in which it was intended..

I rather disagree with her take on it. No matter how out of nowhere awful and offensive the original thing said was, at the point where you are continuously hassling them to justify themselves, to the point of violating their boundaries, you Become The Asshole. If that comic had ended on the third panel, the ladies on the cart would Be The Asshole, but because it keeps going and going, the Sea-Lion becomes the asshole, with the implication being that this is typical behavior for a sea-lion, justifying the otherwise unjustified attitudes of the first panels. Granted, it's rather clumsy equating being a jerk with an immutable inborn attribute like species, but that's a slightly problematic trait of an otherwise on-point satirical critique. I think we can take the satire in the spirit its intended and forgive that flaw, though I can understand why the implication would make people uncomfortable. This is the problem with drawing analogies: Sometimes they take us further than we intend to go.

Man she must have sensed the hubris and wanted to smash it

It may not be the best, but you gotta admit... it's got heart.

What? Why?

That is very much along my own lines of thinking. It's certainly a useful point to raise: Exactly what use would it be to measure intelligence, if we could? I used to be very self-congratulatory about my own intelligence, though I don't think I was nearly as insufferable as TB -- or, if I was, I at least had the excuse of being young enough not to know better. For me, the turning point came when I realized that the only meaningful, empirical measure of what a person can achieve is what they have achieved. Everything outside of that is just hot air. This is not necessarily to denigrate the accomplishment of scoring exceptionally well on an IQ test or whatever -- I just consider that a feat closer to, say, placing in the top 3 in a Starcraft 2 tournament than to actually writing a novel or scientific paper of merit. That is to say, it is a difficult task performed admirably, but doesn't necessarily have any significance beyond that. Even if one creates such a novel or paper, it isn't necessarily an indication of 'intelligence', whatever that is, but of an aptitude for writing novels or research. Which is, I think, actually a far better attribute to possess than some nebulous 'intelligence'.

That, but also intelligence in general is mostly a social construct. It's a catch-all term used for describing a certain set of problem-solving abilities, and if we don't recognize abilities outside of that set they aren't recognized as intelligence. The entire idea of intelligence as something that can be ranked is kind of nonsense. It's all about specific aptitudes as applied to specific problems. And, as with what we define as physically desirable in terms of attractiveness, what we define as mentally desirable in terms of aptitude is very shaped by our culture and all of the baggage that comes with it.