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For anyone with an irrational dislike for black and white movies who was encouraged by this podcast to finally watch The Apartment I would suggest also being encouraged by this podcast to watch another black and white movie that was mentioned, The Sweet Smell of Success, because that movie is equally tremendous. And while you're at it you might as well watch the third black and white movie mentioned, Gun Crazy because why not.

The credits suggest that different people were lead writers for each episode. Sean or Josh handled the three episodes I liked, and two other people handled the two episodes I didn't like, so yes, I found the quality quite uneven too.

Who do you want managing prisons? Some government office that will change policy with the tides of the politics, or an independent apolitical contractor that remains comparatively consistent? It's the difference between having the police take care of law and order (owned by the government, changes policy depending on who is in power), and private security forces (independent apolitical bodies which the government doesn't control). Look, police ARE controlled by the government. I don't know why you would think they aren't. And in America, at least, government policy doesn't change any time there's an election - the people at the very tip top of important government agencies sometimes switch in and out, but the people actually doing the real work are bureaucrats there for life who provide a pretty big conservative buffer against crazy swings. I think you have an unreasonable degree of trust in independent rating bodies. You should watch This Film is Not Yet Rated. It's a pretty good documentary about how Hollywood movies are rated (by an independent, non-governmental, non-obligatory rating body). They are entirely unaccountable and thus end up being pretty sexist and homophobic. If the government is sexist and homophobic, you can sue it, because being subjected to compulsory discrimination is illegal. If an independent purely optional regulatory body is homophobic... you're up shit creek. The MPAA raters are anonymous, even, so you can't pressure them or vote them out of office the way you can do with government officials.

America has hate speech laws too, actually, and the settled law of the land isn't that freedom of speech is upheld without exception. There are exceptions. Shouting "fire" in a crowded theater is one of the biggest. But I don't think it's right to steer the conversation into "Thunderpeel is wrong because America is inscrutable to non-Americans except choice Canadians like Niyeaux" because I still don't understand Thunderpeel's point. How is being forced by the government to adhere to the rules of a rating body different if that rating body is run by non-governmental agents?

What would you say the difference is? Like, if I'm making a game and the law says I have to have it rated by the ESRB, what would be the difference for me if the ESRB is run by the government vs. if it isn't?

The Sith philosophy is the opposite of the Jedi philosophy in a few ways. The Jedi seek peace, while the Sith think conflict is the road to perfection and that sitting around being peaceful just leaves you weak and unfulfilled. The Sith think that passion and emotion should govern action and are the source of true power, whereas the Jedi think that a lack of emotion is the only way to keep from falling into ruin. The Sith think that the Force should free individuals and allow them to do all sorts of awesome stuff. The Jedi think the Force is something to be mastered and controlled and used only when necessary. You ask why the Sith want to rule the galaxy if they don't care about material goods, but you could ask the same thing about the Jedi. The answer is the same for both of them: they think that their philosophy is the proper way to do things and more specifically they think that the other people are doing it totally wrong. It's sort of a Nietzsche vs. Christianity thing going on, basically.

As the number of layers on the cube decreases, the number of threads on the Idle Thumbs forum devoted to the cube increases. By the time the cube disappears this forum will be nothing but threads about the cube.

Well, the Sith are all about ascetics too. Both the Jedi and the Sith are pretty monastic in a lot of ways.

I don't see how being forced by the government to submit to a rating body you have no real influence on is any better if the government doesn't run the body, but only makes you submit to it it. Like, if the law says you have to go to prison, but the prison is being run by a private company (as many US prisons are), surely you wouldn't argue that the government isn't throwing anyone in prison, right? The government is forcing you into the private prison! Just like this bill would force game makers to submit to the ESRB.

OK

Oh and also the whole "explore the alien ecosystem" game appears to actually exist, according to Rock Paper Shotgun: http://www.youtube.com/watch?f&v=Z5Y4oqVqths

That the game was designed for a shitty FoV doesn't mean people have to like it. I get a little nauseas playing low FoV games.

A video game podcast that manages to cram Proust, Melville, Kubrick, The Empire Strikes Back, and Bedouin crab dinner all into one episode is pretty amazing. The talk about discovering an ecosystem and learning and stuff reminded me a bit of Outcast, which wasn't quite as much about ecosystems but which did have the whole "you are thrown into this alien world and a lot of what's good in the game comes from moments of discovery and realization" thing going on. seamus2389 also mentioned Ice Pick Lodge's games which are very much like this too. I tried Planetside 2 a bit during the beta and although I liked the epic scale and all that stuff, in the end it just felt like a round of Battlefield 1942 that I would never be able to win. The sisyphean nature of the thing really hit me in the gut as I stared into the possibility of spending hours capturing bases that will just be recaptured later, and so on. The Battlefield games have concrete end points when you win or lose - without that I think I'd find it hard to justify continued involvement, because as much as the individual moments can be neat, just to get myself into the game I'd have to accept that the whole thing would be pointless not just in the "I'm not getting anything else done" sense but in the ultimate "I can't even win" sense.

I apologize for assuming you didn't know anything - the reason I assume this is because the first response of a lot of people to feminist ideas is to feel like they are personally under attack and that they have to fire back volleys of criticism explaining how feminism can't be all correct and how whatever they happen to be doing at the time is fine. Since I hang out online and talk with nerds, this usually turns into tedious semantic debates or arguments about how feminists haven't proven anything. Both of these are pretty much direct arguments from ignorance. The semantic debates ("I'm not a misogynist because I don't hate women") and the pseudo-scientific "prove it" debates would both be cleared up if they read enough literature to understand why and how these words are used and if they read enough literature to understand that a real problem exists, a problem that they can barely comprehend. And it's not just nerds that drag feminists down with these tedious nitpicks - it's the entire world. More than the explicit arguments against feminism, all of society often subtly but strongly pushes against feminist interpretations of reality (and against minority interpretations of reality, and so on), because this is what the patriarchy does. It shapes us in ways that make certain things seem normal, inevitable, desirable, and unchangeable, and anything that pushes against these values is seen as obviously wrong, or somehow "off," of framed in the wrong way, or shrill, or off-topic, or focused on an unimportant side issue, or otherwise subject to dismissal. So when you jump into a thread talking about women being harassed and you pull out an argument I still don't understand about how men can be assholes to women because the women are women but somehow this isn't sexism, I just assume that you're one of the infinite representatives of the omnipresent force of normality that is constantly pushing against the acknowledgement of outside views. I guess you're not that - I guess you're just extremely argumentative, to the point where it's more important to nitpick issues at the extremes rather than to get to the heart of the issue. It's just weird that you always happen to nitpick in the way that lets you espouse the most venomous and least useful positions and argue for what are basically the wrong conclusions. Like, feminism has enough actual devils opposing it that we can get by without any devil's advocates. But I think I'm still a little fuzzy on where we stand - regardless of how much you do or don't understand about the issues, you clearly don't understand some very basic things if you think getting harassed for being a biker is the same as being harassed for being a woman. It's just... those are so different that it's hard to understand why you would draw the analogy. People harass bikers for things they perceive bikers to have done or for the people they perceive bikers to be. People harass women because they think it's okay to harass women, because they think women like to be harassed, because they've been raised to believe that harassing women is the right thing to do.

I have to agree. I'm not a huge fan of the whole mecha aesthetic, but I feel like I could get over that if the whole game didn't look like Freespace 2 with 90% of the complexity stripped out. Basically for me the space sim dogfight genre goes from X-Wing/TIE Fighter and the Wing Commander series, which is amazing, to Freespace, which is the pinnacle, and since then, nothing has really done anything massively interesting. Something like Darkstar One is better than nothing, but things like Sol Exodus and potentially Strike Suit Zero are pretty much a slight step up from Star Wars Battlefront II's dogfighting, which could charitably be described as "merely serviceable."

I play the demo quite a bit. I am shit and haven't beat it yet. I will someday buy the game, either when I am richer or it is c heaper.

Thanks, that's encouraging. People have said the same thing to me in other contexts, too. Another forum I post on just had two threads all about sexism, one about the #1reasonwhy tweets and one about the Dead Island dismembered torso, and I was fairly active in both of them (much more the #1reasonwhy thread) despite having recently decided that life's too short to be active in those kinds of threads (which gives you an idea of how good I am to sticking to my guns). But in both threads, after quite a bit of discussion, some people responded to me (and to others saying the same sorts of things as me) that they actually changed their minds, or that they really appreciate being able to read articulations of these kinds of arguments, because it helps them get their own views more in order and shows them that they're not alone and so on. So really, as if we needed more evidence of how bad I am at sticking to things, I might actually be starting to reverse the "life's too short to argue about sexism" thing on the Internet. What I don't think I'm going back on is the idea that this shit could easily just stop if people like Luftmensch weren't just super duper ignorant of the relevant facts. If we had a chemical engineering thread where people were talking about what happens when you combine chemicals, I doubt we'd have anyone in there saying "combining those chemicals with a catalyst might cause a reaction in itself, and it probably speeds up the reaction" but who spends most of their time doubting that certain chemical reactions happen. Why? Because nobody knows what the fuck happens when you put chemicals together until they've studied it a bit, maybe read some Wikipedia pages or whatever. But with social phenomena, people who know nothing about psychology, sociology, the history of feminism, or the basic arguments for various positions love to think that just because they live in the "ostensibly" sexist society, they're an expert of whether that society is sexist or not.

The game is pretty explicitly about making hard choices, often under time pressure, and not once did I ever go back and replay a section that I felt I had "messed up" because it felt authentic to me that Lee had messed up in the same situation. It was only in those cases where I felt the messing up was the fault of the game rather than my fault, particularly in Episode 2, that I thought about replaying things, but in the end I decided that I could swallow the "actually Lee messed up" pill and live with it. When it comes to something like the food distribution case, there's no way I would redo that even if I felt bad about it - that's something that was very simple and not at all time-limited, so if I screwed that up it was entirely on me, not the game's clunky controls or a failure of the game's narrative to communicate what the choices were. For an example of a choice that didn't work, from the end of Episode 2 (probably my least favorite episode):

It's actually quite recently that I decided that life's too short to discuss feminism, sexism, and other topics on the Internet, which is not to say I never do it (I'm in this thread, aren't I?), but it is to say that my energy levels and enthusiasm for explaining this sort of stuff to people who aren't well-versed in the issues and who therefore, through a perfectly understandable and not at all malicious place of ignorance, constantly spout unhelpful, patently misogynystic stuff at every turn under the guise of simply trying to understand why anyone would ever be really serious about feminism, is... diminished. It certainly doesn't help that I'm teaching an English class and my students are reading the Bible right now, and part of the reading we're discussing tomorrow is a part where a woman gets gang raped then chopped into 12 pieces and Fed Ex-ed to various parts of Israel, and then I look at the headlines and the best we've managed to do is make it to the point where gang rape victims aren't also dismembered. So when 2000+ years of "progress" isn't enough to stop this shit, my energy levels for trying to solve it with Internet posts is miniscule. So instead of writing out a big long response, I'm just going to say that if you think the distinction between being harassed for riding a bicycle and being harassed for being a woman isn't about sexism but is instead about dudes being assholes then you don't know what the word "sexism" means and you haven't even the slightest clue what kind of connotations it has and what it means that our society today is sexist.

Yes it turns out if you swap the genders around it would be just as bad, I suppose it's pretty fantastic that women don't harass men in the street and make them constantly feel unsafe, isn't it? I hate the whole "if you swap the genders it's still bad" point that people bring up in sexism debates because it ignores the fact that in real life the genders aren't swapped. Shit happens to women that doesn't happen to men.

Ah yes, Future Music.

Rock Paper Shotgun interview with spoilers.

I found a picture of a wizard at this artist's website:

Pretty sure that lady wasn't going to be able to amputate the affected areas.