clyde

The only one I'll have to give up is Rainbow 6:Siege. The other FPSs I play are still fun if I can't shoot well.

I ended up getting a thumb trackball. It arrived yesterday and I've been trying to use it since then. I didn't think it was solving the problem because my wrist was still sore. I pulled out the mouse three matches into Overwatch (it's a difficult thing to accept the loss of half your dexterous capability in a game you play frequently). As soon as I started using the mouse my wrist-pain was apparent af. So I wound its cord around it and shelved it for a while. Eventually Competitive Play will match me with the other trackball players.

I saw this the other night and I keep thinking about it, especially how it compares to BladeRunner 2049. Has anyone seen Ingrid Goes West? I recommend it.

I'm going to paste what I wrote over on Waypoint about this film. The more I think about this movie the less I like it. The most positive thing I can say about its rhetoric is how it evokes a powerful emotion on the political effects of fertility.I appreciated the scale and colors and such, but I think it is worth asking oneself what this movie looks like to an ethnonationalist or fascist or misogynist. Everything (including the visuals) is about monetary, patriarchal, technological and violent power. I’m not well schooled on Futurism, but I think it might be a movie a Futurist would make in 2017.There was only one character who was anything more than her societal role and she was in the movie briefly. All the other characters appear as pawns of the actual hero of the film, the cruel distopia itself. Some of the minor characters (including K) have the shallowest idea of faith and hope, but ultimately they are just vehicles to show how the distopia exerts its power. I can see an argument that the point of the movie is to show how this technology nightmare rips everyone out of their sense of interconnect humanity and uses them all as individual tools, but the resulting lack of acceptance of human dependencies on one another takes what I find interesting about narratives Out Of The Narrative. It’s a tech-demo of cool ideas and premises with no actual humans living in it (with the exception of Stelline). This is the dehumanization that bothers me in the film and even though it is made to look unpleasant, I think the overall rhetoric is a glorification of the rhetoric that makes it possible; people are no more than their professions and political affiliations and human agency is no more than a reaction to where one is placed in an institution of power. I think there is some truth to that but when it is presentedso absolutely and cooly, I don’t like it. With the exception of the visual aesthetics, the only things I find interesting about this film is my reactions against it.

Currency has confused me for a long time. I've been thinking about the way this podcast episode explains it since I heard it and it is helping me with my confusion. http://traffic.libsyn.com/citationsneeded/The_Deficit_Scolds_Part_I.mp3?dest-id=542191

Rom-com K-dramas do this regularly. Scenes that are very clearly abusive have comedyesque music played over top to take the severity out of the circumstance.

I thought about this a little bit. I describe it to myself as a 2017 white fantasy of uncovering your own ancestral victimhood.

Redownloading all my tables is an inconvenience and I haven't heard about any new features that make me think it is worthwhile to do that.

FBR has entered heavy rotation in my personal play-time. I haven't played Plunkbat, only watched. FBR is fun for a few gamesd til I finish in the top 10, then I'm done for the day.

I'm enjoying the beta. I like how everything feels more chunky and deliberate. It's also interesting to see how the game looks more like Battlefront than it does to Battlefield 4. The vehicles on the current map are much more rare than in the other games and it changes the dynamic of conquest significantly. I can't find a rocket-launcher anywhere, so I'll take a base with an cannon within range and try to deal with tanks that way. I also enjoy teh gas grenades in combination with the bayonet rush; I'll make some phat clouds, put my mask on, and then run in screaming. Lots of neat little adventures have happened to me already. At one point I was looking around for the buildings at 'B' and I didn't see any. I was like "I know I'm standing at 'B' and there are buildings at 'B'", but apparently someone had used the cannon at 'A' to demolish all the structures. Pretty fun.

There is some sort of preview-the-new-maps event and I think they are really fun maps. I won't buy them because it will make finding a game harder, but I'm enjoying them at the moment.

I've only seen the movie. I didn't think about it for a decade until I realized that my wife hasn't seen it and I bought a copy because it seems essential to understanding who I am.

Do you sharpen your knives? Seems like learning to use a whetstone might be a better investment.

Here is something I'm interested in learning more about the socialism perspective of. So for the sake of argument let's assume that powerful labor-unions are an impossibility in the United States due to automation for instance. So at this point in our hypothetical situation you have a group of corporate conglomerates (megacorps) that have mixtures of competing and shared interests mediated by the state which all of the megacorps have established stakes in. At this point, some public poilicies that benefit the population might benefit one megacorp while hurting another. For instance having a single-payer healthcare system is more likely to benefit the Walmart megacorp because that would largely externalize healthcare costs for their labor and provide more consumers with disposable income, but the Anthem megacorp would lose its ability to monopolize the healthcare market as a seller now that there is a larger buyer for the medical industry. In the socialist perspective, is it possible to boost Walmart's influence on this particular issue in some way to basically create a temporary coalition between Walmart and public interests? If there is an effective way to boost the influence of particular megacorps as they war with each other over profits, could it be more effective than trying to organize labor which has no power in our hypothetical situation of full automation?

I was thinking about this again this morning @Siromatic. I made a game last year that was supposed to be historical magical-realism set in the Byzantine Empire circa 1330. The narrative didn't really work well and I realized that it was because players hadn't spent a few weeks watching YouTube videos and reading Wikipedia articles about the monks on Mount Athos and the hesychast controversy. So my narrative defaulted to a very base travel story with no significant development and stilted dialogue. I basically made a history fan-game that was completely dependent in the player already having enjoyed the source material. So I was thinking about the synchronous floor model and wondering if it would be able to fix that disconnect and I think it would. Just by having a series of narratives in that world taking place synchronically, my narrative of intrigue could be discovered in a similar way to how I enjoyed coming up with the speculative conspiracy theory I developed while researching for it. Now I want to re-visit that project and see what might be able to do with this format.

@Siromatic If the appeal of these synchronous scenes is mostly observational, then there are a couple of performances you may be interested in knowing about. The Order dvd of Matthew Barney's Cremaster 3 is a novel thing. Users can basically switch between cameras as dude climbs the the inside of the Guggenheim. It's been a long time since I've played with it, but I'm pretty sure that the performances on various floors keep time with each other while you flip around. Another comparison would be the Cirque du Soleil performances in VR. They don't switch between cameras, but there is a modularity to the performances that surround you and your gaze is limited so you can never see it all. I know these are not really what you are talking about, but I think they can provide us with some observations relevant to your hypothetical game. One thing you seem to be focused on is the idea of making sure the player can see enough in a playthrough to feel satisfied by the narrative. You also seem to want there to be a strongly authored main through-line. The novelty of The Order and the Cirque du Soleil performances for me is a certain humility I feel as the audience; I feel decentered by a persistence that occurs without my gaze. I think this is the main strength of this type of performance. In order to move towards audience satisfaction, I would recommend filling each "floor" with something sublime in itself that also can be unified with the eventual juxtapositions which are likely to occur in order to give the piece a more general sensibility. The resulting rhetoric can still be affecting even if the juxtaposed pieces can't be fully attributed to a strongly authored narrative (though a strongly authored narrative is still relatively possible).

I am pretty sure I'm on a U.S. server. To be honest I'm not sure that I want to play this game with anyone. I don't enjoy the combat, loot, crafting, or merchantilism at all. I'm just moving through quests and finding out that everyone in town has a peculiar story. I don't know anything about mmo's though. I hear people talk about going on raids but I have no idea what would be fun about raiding. I'm open to trying something out, but I'm not willing to put much effort in or committing to much.

I bought it and I'm enjoying it. I'm not an mmo player so the other players killing my targets is actually a bit distracting as I explore the world (through the quest-chain) and check out these visual-novel esque short-stories. I'm a Khajit Nightblade in the Dominion.

@itsamoose I think the idea is basically that capital accumulation has created a situation in which the two political parties in power (in the U.S.) both side far more with the interests of capitalists than with labor. So their plan is to find ways to give labor more influence. The DSA seems to actively avoid any details of what a socialist system will look like while aiming for one. The reasoning for this is that to come up with a socialist design for a system would lessen the power that those who inhabit that system would have to design the socialist system once it comes. I can understand why that will be an unsatisfactory answer for many, but I kinda like the idea. Capitalist interests have slowly created a circumstance where labor doesn't have the ability to organize and influence the public sphere. At this point, we can see where capitalists interests tend towards in U.S. politics (and I don't think it is a good direction). So I think increasing the influence of labor, learning about a socialist perspective on things like race, gender, and class, and promoting more active citizenship has some hope to it.

I think this song is an enlightening expression of masculinity. I don't think that masculinity is fully comprised of confused jealousy, but I find myself thinking that the way the jealousy is expressed in this song is masculine . I figured this would be a good opportunity to discuss what we think masculinity is. Sometimes it seems that masculinity is only brought up as something in opposition to feminity and I'm interested in developing a more full understanding of the gender that I most identify with. I'm hoping that we can talk about it honestly, both its positives and concerning aspects. Gender confuses the shit out of me largely because I'm resistant to forcing generalities on folks, but feminism seems to suggest that a lot of good can come from identifying with gender(?). So let's talk about this one!

I had a blast playing with you yesterday. After you talked positively about the shotgun I saw there was a shotgun-challenge available and I played with it last night. I like using Smoke with it now because I tend to push back a little bit when time is running out and I can throw smoke and then shoot in that general direction a few times. Which operators do you have? I know you rock Sledge a lot. I've probably asked you that before but I don't remember. In a way I envy the limitation of having a small roster to get familar with, but I do like the novelty of getting to choose a particular operator based off of what killed me two rounds earlier.

Is anyone else playing the beta? I like it a lot. I haven't seen anything as innovative as this in the millions of dollars, multiplayer-competitive, team-based shooter genre since Titanfall. I'm still rather clumsy at it, but I'm starting to get an idea of where the entrances to the rooms are. I've unlocked IQ and Pulse and have very little understanding of how their abilities work. My favorite part of the game is when I'm breaching with four teammates.

I feel you and I appreciate you putting this sentiment into words. It helps explain how I can be excited about becoming a member of the Democratic Socialists of America without feeling confident that I understand what "Socialism" is. I like the policies the DSA supports and the ways that they support them.

I will say that I've tried this and it stopped working for me. That is if you define "rigorous" as organizing behind any named ideology besides centralism .