Joewintergreen

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Posts posted by Joewintergreen

  1. Posted

    Well that's not quite as bad as I had thought. Still hope it goes well for you!

    Thanks. It starts tomorrow! I just spend hours scrubbing walls and floors. Ow.

  2. Posted

    Oh, I thought I posted about this in here already but maybe not. It's not as dire as it sounds at all. I'm having to move out of where I am because it's not cost-effective anymore, but don't particularly want to live anywhere so I'm going to be homeless-on-purpose for a while and just couchsurf and travel around for a bit. Should be fine.

  3. Posted

    Moving does suck. Fortunately I only have half the job this time: I'm moving all my stuff out into storage and then I'm homeless from Friday! Woooo

  4. Posted

    "The actual point is, there's a conflict right now between those who want to support women and those who want to silence them. But declining to be one of the former, you are ceding to the latter by default." 

     

    no you don't have to be one or the other

     

    I guess I don't really want to get in on this argument, but... this is why he said "ceding". If you're not supporting women you are ceding to those who want to silence them. I just thought I would point this out because it looked like you missed that word and therefore the point

  7. Posted

    I only played the some of the first Splinter Cell and then Chaos Theory (number three). In the original Splinter Cell, Fisher's tendency to torture was implied to be part of his loose-cannon Navy SEAL attitude: it wasn't Third Echelon policy to torture or necessarily allow for torture on the field, but it was tolerated as part of the slack on the leash that Third Echelon kept on Fisher. It also eased into the notion of torture as part of Fisher's approach: I think it was the third or fourth mission before Fisher actually snatched someone (a chauffeur, I believe) from out of the shadows and interrogated him while applying pain, and again, the implication was that Fisher was crossing into Third Echelon policy gray zone in doing so. Note that this was in 2002, so after 9/11, but before Abu Graib and the illegal combatants controversy

     

    By Chaos Theory, Fisher was routinely strangleholding people (goodguys and badguys), during which the player could press info out of one and then choose whether to sleeper choke him unconscious or break his neck. (Now that I think about it, I don't remember a single female target of this process).

    This is the opposite of my read on the Splinter Cell series. Fisher has no tendency to torture in either 1 or 3. What he does is grab a dude, hold a gun or a knife to him, and say he might kill the guy if he doesn't cooperate (give Fisher information). In 1, you also don't have the option of pulling the trigger on the guy, you can only knock him out. Maybe I just have a different definition of torture to you but I wouldn't consider pointing a gun at a guy and asking for a door code to be torture. In Conviction, where you hold a guy's face in a fire for 5 seconds, that's torture.

     

    In Chaos Theory (which is pretty much the game where Sam starts having a personality) he's shown to be disgusted by torture and torturers. The first mission has a scene where you witness a guy hanging over a bath being tortured to death with some electrical device or other. If you "interrogate" (this is the hold-knife-to-throat-and-ask-questions routine) the torturer, Fisher angrily wants to know why he tortured the victim, and when the guy doesn't even know, says something like "You're just the stupid guy who likes to hurt people? Can you think of any reason the world wouldn't be a better place without you?" (whether you kill him or not is, as always, optional). 

    Also, though Lambert orders Fisher to leave the torture victim's body where it is (hanging, bleeding into a bath), the player has the option to cut the rope and lie the guy down in the bath, saying "Just because he's dead doesn't mean I need to leave him here hanging like a piece of meat". Lambert tells him to stay rational, and Fisher says "You can spare 30 seconds for some simple dignity". 

    Stuff like this is why it seemed like such a bizarre turnaround in Conviction and to a lesser extent Blacklist when Sam just tortures and kills everybody he meets (I'm pretty sure there's only maybe 3 guys you need to kill in the entirety of Chaos Theory). 

     

    Semi-related: one of my favourite things in Chaos Theory is the scripted sequences it has which can play out differently, including different voice acting, if you try to go off-script, and it's never signposted. Like the time you're ordered to call in an airstrike on some crashed US planes whose pilots are still alive in the wreckage (I guess in order to destroy some data they were carrying before the enemy can get it). There's no hud pop-up to tell you it's a Moral Choice Moment or anything, but you can sprint off down the street and get the pilots out of danger before you call it in if you're quick, with the short term repercussion that your boss yells at you about it. 

  12. Posted

    When you fell through the geo, did the "return to checkpoint" option in the pause menu not work? If so I need to get the fuck on that. Unfortunately there's some stuff we just can't fix with UDK on account of not having engine code, and physics objects occasionally passing through geo when moving quickly is one of them. 

    The fans seem to get different results between PCs sometimes, which is interesting and troublesome. Also varies some by frame rate. This is another weird stupid UDK physics thing.

    In the forest where you're at, there's a steam vent you have to use to get up to one of the huts. You have to unblock it first by just pushing some boulders out of the way. If you are a super badass you can actually also just jump all the way up using a halfpipe.

  17. Posted

    I'm still enjoying the show a whole lot, and haven't taken issue with a lot of plausibility stuff that's grinding gears on the internet, but I am similarly concerned about the morality angle. I read a few threads about the show on the interwebs and even now, pre- potential martyrdom situation, a distressing amount of what I'm reading is people siding with Walt (often against Skylar) and viewing him as the hero of the show and an unambiguously good guy. I kind of agree also about the cartoonish supervillainy - I would have liked to see him eventually coming to the limit of his ability to self-justify his awful shit, and I thought that was going to happen with Jesse, but then he ordered his death without honestly seeming that conflicted about it. He has been a less interesting character from the start of this season, I think.

     

    That quote from Vince Gilligan about the story being about "Mr Chips -> Scarface" makes me think that this final season was approached as "Okay, he's full-on evil Scarface now, write accordingly", abandoning a lot of complexity that I think the character still had as of season 4. 

  19. Posted

    I didn't really think it was out of character for the nazi dudes to show up even after Walt tried to call it off. Their priority is keeping Walt alive and available to cook for them, not doing what he says. I fully expected them to still come after he said not to

  21. Posted

    Sorry for your trubs, twig. Internet hugs.

     

    I just found somebody to take over my lease on this apartment I don't want to live in anymore, and they are even going to look after my cat until I know what I'm doing/where I want to live. I'm pretty much giving away or storing away all my shit and planning to be homeless for an indeterminate amount of time until my desire to do anything but drink and travel returns. It's sort of scary but also a thing I feel like I gots to do, I'm hella burnt out right now. I'm really hoping enough money comes together from the game that I can do some actual international travel and maybe just visit a bunch of my internet friends. Where should I go you guys?!?! I guess there's a thread for that.