Luftmensch

Speaking of, have any of you played Yahtzee Croshaw's games? I don't remember if they were AGS specifically, but he had a pretty well-done adventure game series he made and apparently hasn't really decided to do more with now that he's writing novels.

I don't know if it applies to AGS, but I changed my driver settings only to allow proportionate scaling. Speaking of Cart Life, why the hell isn't there a Cart Life thread?

I finally listened to the podcast and I was just thinking about your discussion on Meyer Wolfsheim, and how the kind of stereotype he was written in just wouldn't be acceptable today. It reminded me of a section in Maus, where the author felt guilty writing about his father because his father acted just like a Jewish stereotype. I think that's interesting, because a lot of times in film and novels you'll see characters who you just straight-up say I know that person (Nick Breckon even mentioned that he "knows some Daisies"), and, in the case of Meyer Wolfsheim, he was a man that he knew, Arnold Rothstein. It's just interesting to me that sometimes that guy you know is something totally different and uncomfortable when it's also a racial stereotype. Most decent people consciously tread lightly around that sort of thing, even feel guilty for noticing it. Personally I do the same, but it does make me wonder if Meyer Wolfsheim is an invalid character just because he's also a stereotype.

Fun and educational!

Hey I got a postcard today! It was slightly damaged in post but it was a good day-improver. "It's those weird people, I think they want more money" I was told.

Like I said, you can conjecture and make valid points either way. Either way you're arguing for a lesser of two evils.

When Americans are talking about the Executive branch, we often refer to it collectively as The White House, where the offices of the president and his cabinet are located. Since the cabinet is appointed by the president and not elected, people often just blame the president for the executive branch. It's also worth noting that the office of the president is also Commander-in-chief of the United States Armed Forces. Technically, the Queen is your Commander-in-chief whatever that means. As far as our structure, although I'm not sure if the three-branch system completely applies here, the military is more or less part of the executive branch. Anyway, as an American, I've never heard "The Government" refer to the executive branch specifically. By your own definition, the Executive branch isn't even allowed to make policy (well that's also a bit muddy, but anyway policy isn't its job), so the dictionary doesn't support that perspective either.

Cool story bro. People are still saying they don't want mandatory regulation. And yeah, what Argobot said. I don't know how British law defines these things, but we define it all as the Government. The president doesn't have the power to tell the courts to rule one way or another, but that's an intentional limit in the structure of our government, not the courts being a separate entity. As for the police not being part of the government...

I had some early burnout with FTL. I figured out how to "beat" the game pretty early (within 12 games or so, albeit on Easy), but then I got tired of it pretty soon after. I managed to unlock the Federation and Engi ships before I stopped playing. I don't know what it was. Maybe I just approached it the wrong way from the start, but I did feel after a while that there wasn't enough game for me to explore. Trying to figure out how to use new ships is kind of cool, but I didn't get the feeling like there was so much enormous depth to explore. There was enough real-time interaction that, if I wanted to really get into it, I could be slightly more cunning and efficent*, but the difference was slight and there wasn't any point where I was fundamentally looking at the game a different way or seeing new possibility spaces open up. I'll probably go back and play it again. It was fun. I wish there was more. *Tip:

Porn, edited to be safe for work.

Well that's more or less what already exists: A self-regulating body is wholly in the interest of watching its own back, and assigning ratings that can make them the least accountable (hey! GTA is rated M, it's not supposed to be sold to children under 17 anyway!). They've even come up with new ratings whenever they think it's necessary (like when the MPAA introduced PG-13 in 1984 and the ESRB introduced E10+ in 2004). Even before film ratings, the Hays Code was an internal industry censorship standard to keep the public from making too much of a fuss about movies corrupting their morals (back in the day you couldn't say naughty words or let the villain get away). Fortunately it's voluntary. If it wasn't, at least a government agency is accountable to the courts. I think I have to share some of the blame. I'm working on that. At least that's what I tell myself.

I actually started chuckling when Super Hexagon started playing. Good job.

That's not what I would call self-evident. You can make a strong point either way. If you're going to be mandated into following a code, why would you prefer one that doesn't give you any power of say into its standards? In the case of the MPAA, it already follows politics to establish rigid standards that sometimes are unfairly unflexible (Bully's R rating was considered inappropriate by much of the public, considering the purpose and message, but it featured the word fuck more times than a PG-13 rating allowed). In the case of a government office, it's necessarily up for political scruitiny and legally accountable. Even though the MPAA can refuse to rate any film they like and only be accountable to studios, if a government office was denying ratings left and right, it can be fixed, even taken to court. The MPAA isn't beholden to the 1st Amendment, but the government is. But again, either way we don't want it, and it probably isn't legal.

That's a fair critique of that one tiny segment, but the boring POS that is The Phantom Menace is well-known, and Plinkett already spent about five hours explaining how terrible the prequels are (which is still shorter than the prequels themselves, but way more entertaining)

Most epic game of my short Dota career. They took out all our lane towers and in a big nasty fight they punched a whole in mid and retreated, leaving a nasty wave of creeps wrecking everything. When they came back, everyone who died in the last fight was revived, so we had a full 5-on-5 plus creeps in full majesty, and we managed to kill the entire other team as well as all the creep attacking our ancient. The next couple minutes fending off creep until they all respawned and kicked our asses were tense and dreary, and we lost, but it was a fine showdown.

at roughly 41 minutes for the more numerically inclined.

I remember seeing the trailer for Glitch when it first came out and thinking it was an amusing premise but completely not up my alley. Anyway, apparently it wasn't up enough people's alleys in general because a couple months ago or so the game shut down. The devs at Tiny Speck did something interesting though: They're releasing the assets and player-created content into the creative commons. Link to dev blog Link to pages with assets I dunno if I'm going to ever do anything with this stuff, but it's nifty to see something happening in the wake of the death of this MMO. MMOs as a whole aren't that old, but I've seen a few neat things happen, like shifting from subscription to free-to-play, or Everquest being revived long after it went dark. I don't think I've heard of the assets being released CC, and from the looks of it Glitch has taken a very conservative approach at that, since at a glance I can find hardly any environment assets and what appears to be far too few sprites to make an MMO. So anyway I dunno what to make of this specifically, but MMOs have existed long enough to die now, so I'm fascinated about what happens to them after death. Has there been an Emily Dickinson of MMOs, that had a whole chest full of amazing poetry locked in its attic but nobody knew until it died? Edit: thought I was posting this in video games. Whoops.

You'll have to give some examples, because from what I read the constitution is pretty clear about that.

I'm probably misunderstanding the core of the religions, but it sounds like the Jedi and the Sith are Tibetan Buddhists and LeVayan Satanists. Which makes the Sith super cool probably? btw that Plinkett segment pretty much summed up how I felt.

It's not completely serious and entirely jovial. Honestly, if you can't separate poking fun at someone's society from a personal attack, then, as goes the holy mantra of my religion: Fuck 'Em if They Can't Take a Joke. But in all seriousness, Merus is kind of right in saying that cultural perspective plays a big part. I'm not a complete moral relativist, but a Brit's views aren't necessarily relevant to American issues. Which isn't to say that you can't have a dialogue, but everyone's going into the discussion with different assumptions. One example that comes to mind is the absurd evolution debates, where creationist proponents claim "but evolution's just a theory!" which is obviously oblivious to what the word theory means in the scientific context. That's an unflattering comparison, sorry for that.

If anything, it's worse. I think his argument is based on something that exists in the financial industry that isn't technically government run but is empowered by the government to regulate. Which doesn't change it from being a thing we don't like. Or make it any more likely this bill will be passed.

If you guys get in another big Neptune's Pride game, I would just completely pore through it if you kept journals of your strategies and meetings and plots. Especially if I got to read four entries from the same day where everyone thought they were trying to pull shenanigans against each other but really Nick was just leading them all into one huge trap.

Touché. DoD has had an unusual relationship with free expression ever since Schenck v. United States.

Thunderpeel comes from a country that says it's illegal to show footage of Parliament in comedy shows, so I'll assume he has a slightly different understanding of freedom of speech than Americans do.