Zeusthecat

That's a pretty solid explanation. I think you swayed me.

Yeah, I pretty much agree with what Twig said. I mean, aren't we getting to the point where we want people to be able to physically identify with how they feel on the inside without having to disclose "who they really are"?

This is so true. And I think I even saw an article yesterday pointing out all the instances of white kids doing this exact same thing without anyone batting an eye.

Wait, are we seriously arguing that this may have looked bomb-like enough that the school and police may have possibly been justified in their reaction? Maybe I'm misunderstanding the tone of the posts here but it seems ludicrous that we would even be having this debate when it's clear from virtually every report that this kid did nothing more than make a clock that he was proud of and wanted to show to his teachers. This is getting weird.

Please forgive me for this possibly super naive question but, why would "race reassignment" not be an acceptable thing when gender reassignment is? At first thought, there does seem to be an awful lot of parallels between the two.

Yep, this is correct. Over the weekend we started to notice new things getting unlocked as soon as we met the criteria you mentioned.

I played this a ton over the weekend with my daughter and it truly is remarkable how fun it is to just mess around and create levels. The presentation is top notch. I'm not quite ready to upload any of mine yet as I'm still trying to find the right balance between making an engaging and interesting level without relying too much on making things super difficult. I am just not really a fan of the super difficult bombastic stuff and the automated levels that so many people seem to be gravitating towards making.

Oh maybe they did then? We played quite a bit today and never unlocked anything beyond a few items at the beginning so I assumed that lockout was still there. And yeah, the 10 Mario Challenge is more or less the story mode in this game with a barebones story and mini world with 8 random levels that culminate in a boss style level. Another thing worth mentioning, the music and sound effects are just mesmerizing. It's got kind of a cool, trancey feel to it and every item you place has a robotic bark that identifies the item. Kind of like someone talking through a talk box. Then if you drag the item across the screen to place a bunch of elements, the voice repeats in a different note each time that matches the background music resulting in a really cool robotic sounding Mario theme. It's hard to describe so just trust me, it's super cool. I am very very impressed by this game.

Absolutely. I hate editing a shared document and finding out the previous person used freakish double spaces after every period. Your sentences don't need that much room to breathe.

Yes, the book comes with the game. It's pretty damn impressive. Also, this game is really great you guys. We already created five levels and did a couple sets of the 10 Mario Challenge and just everything about it feels perfect. The only downside is that it will take some time before all the tools are unlocked.

It's so beautiful.

Yeah, that's a whole other argument. I'll stick with my stance that given the capitalist system we live in, there is little we could change that would be an across the board improvement for everyone. It will always work out in the corporations' favor. Maybe we can shorten the duration of copyrights and make other minor tweaks that would sway the balance of power a little further away from big entities. But at a fundamental level, I think our copyright system does about as much as it could do to protect the small people in a capitalistic society like ours.

That's fair. But I'm sure you realize that finding a way to legally make that distinction between the starving artist and the person in a position of entrenched power and then enact a system that works differently for people under each category would be a very difficult thing to do.

If there was an easy way to make the distinction between an artist and a corporation, then maybe it would be easier to navigate this conversation. Yeah, you would think the distinction would be simple but I'm not sure that it is. Clearly, a single artist is pretty distinguishable from a corporation but let's say an artist creates a successful IP and then they start hiring a bunch of people to build on that IP further. Is that when they've become a corporation and must ethically treat other artists differently than when they were just an 'artist'?

Dude, your last post literally said: So I don't get how you can say that that's a shit place to start an ethics debate from when a big crux of your argument is how bad things are now because of how it favors big corporations and screws over the small guy. If you're now saying that this whole conversation is pointless, then sure, I agree with that.

Okay, so either way, everything is heavily weighted in the favor of big corporations. I don't see this alternate scenario of people not having the right to control their IP necessarily being better for the small guys. Because in that scenario, big corporation gets to come in and profit off of the small guys' IPs and the small guy would actually have no legal recourse to stop it. I think it is better to have these protections in place because it actually does more to protect the small guys than a situation where big companies can freely use any IP they want and throw all of their millions of dollars at it, possibly devaluing the work of the original artist.

Also, in this case, Nintendo isn't exactly annihilating these things from existence. They are just trying to get them removed from a highly visible space where millions of people can easily stumble upon hacked up versions of their IP (and yes, I realize a lot of these are quite awesome). These things can and will still exist but I don't think Nintendo is necessarily in the wrong for wanting to control the image of their IP on one of the most popular locations on the internet. I mean yeah, it's kind of a bummer for these guys that are getting their videos taken down but that is an inherent risk when your line of work relies on the owners of the various IP's looking the other way. Well, what's the line in the sand for some of you guys arguing the opposite? Should artists not have any ownership over their IP because at some level it is derived from something else? If you agree that artists should have some level of ownership over their IP and have the right to prevent other people from profiting off of it, then where do you draw the line on what is "derivative enough"?

I imagine most of you have probably seen this but I just have to post it here. It is magnificent and really hilarious.

I think I'm going to pick up Super Mario Maker today. If I do, it will be the first game I've purchased on release day since probably Halo 3.

It's really too bad that the push towards formula has been so prevalent. So many people I talk to these days are convinced that formula is just as good as the real thing because of how strongly doctors push it in America and how we are supposedly so technologically advanced that we have figured out how to cook up a perfect substitute for the real thing in a lab. That's a great article and the science behind breast milk is endlessly fascinating.

Please tell me what you did! It's the same freaking link I used! Edit: Okay, got it now. Just had to explicitly declare it as a link instead of just pasting it into the post. It's because I said bad things about Apple. I just know it.

As I've mentioned before on these forums at one point, I just don't and will probably never understand all the hype around Apple's yearly announcements of the exact same overpriced shit that they unveil every single year (although I guess they did release a watch this year that I've heard exactly zero people talk about since it's release so there's one new overpriced thing). So I was very happy to stumble across this article that was written specifically to cater to my opinion: Link I've just come to accept the fact that I'm an Apple hater. No disrespect to any Apple lovers out there, this brand just never clicked with me and that means I must hate it irrationally because it's Apple and you have to pick a side. Edit: Dammit, can't get the link to work. I don't understand the internet sometimes. You would think just copying and pasting a link from the address bar would go to that thing and not some stupid separate comment section thing. GOT IT!!

With Unepic and Outlast finished, my Steam Backlog is down to 5: Team Fortress 2 Batman Arkham City FTL Binding of Isaac Kerbal Space Program I'm planning to put about 20 hours into TF2 before I consider it completed (I've got 10 hours logged so far) and then I'll shift my focus to Arkham City which will probably take me several weeks to go through since Destiny will probably be stealing a lot of my time. So close now. And man, TF2 has changed so much since I played it on Orange Box. It is a scary and intimidating and microtransactiony game. I kind of miss the simplicity of old TF2.

I finally knocked two more games off of my Steam backlog over the weekend. First, I finished Unepic. This game gave a horrible first impression. The premise behind the story isn't necessarily terrible (dude goes to the bathroom while playing a tabletop game with his friends and is transported to a medieval castle) but the writing and voice acting is absolutely atrocious. After five minutes I turned the character voices off and the game immediately improved. I guess terrible writing is a lot easier to deal with when you are reading it rather than hearing it spoken. I contemplated quitting this game after a couple hours in but decided to stick with it as I did find the Metroidvania and RPG elements somewhat appealing. Over time, the game surprisingly ended up growing on me quite a bit and revealed itself to be a much more competent and well designed game than I originally gave it credit for. Navigating through areas was satisfying and just challenging enough so as not to be frustrating. There was a wide variety of different enemies with various strengths and weaknesses that forced you to get creative and actually use a lot of the spells, scrolls, and potions that you might otherwise ignore in a lot of games. And the boss fights were extremely intimidating at first, but manageable once you figured out a workable strategy. There were definitely a few bosses that seemed completely impossible at first and had me considering whether I really wanted to keep going or not, but each time I pushed through and eventually found a way to crush them. Looking back, those boss fights were actually all really good. I don't normally like boss fights but they really did an excellent job of presenting a seemingly impossible situation and then giving you a wide enough variety of tools to overcome it and feel smart and badass for doing so. So I'm definitely glad I ended up playing this. Overall, the gameplay ended up being quite enjoyable despite the terrible writing and finishing the game actually felt like a real accomplishment. It's just too bad my reward for finishing was a dumb scene where the bad guys in the game go into the real world and try to sodomize a guy who says bad things about Unepic. I would normally spoiler an end game detail like that but this game doesn't earn the right to have anything about it spoilered. The other game I finished was Outlast. I'm not really a fan of survival horror but felt obligated to complete this since a friend had gifted it to me and I consider it a part of my backlog which I am so damn close to completing now. It was pretty alright. I got a good handful of jump scares throughout and the atmosphere was good and creepy through a lot of the game. Similar to other survival horror games I've brought myself to play, my favorite part of this game was the first couple hours. At that point, everything is still a mystery, things are so much creepier because you have no information to go off of, and it isn't even really clear what kind of game it is. And then, the naked men start showing up. I don't know, call me a weirdo but there is something about staring at the flaccid penis of a deranged, emaciated cannibal that just sucks all tension out of the game. I guess that's how they thought they could bring something new to the tired old "spooky insane asylum" cliche: just make all the enemies naked. It's just really frustrating because there is no good reason why they wouldn't be wearing clothes. It is stormy and presumably cold outside, plus there are other deranged people around that apparently like to castrate other patients as well. If I was a patient there and had witnessed the horrors that had been committed, the first thing I would do is put on five layers of clothes. Flaccid penises aside, this game was entertaining enough to hold my interest for the 7 or so hours it took me to complete it. I enjoyed exploring around and the tense situations definitely got my heart pumping. Unfortunately, as the mystery unraveled, it became clear that it was a really stupid mystery. Like really stupid. I'll just leave it at that.

Oh absolutely agreed. The story in this game just sucks, period, whether you are doing a violent or non-violent playthrough. And fuck that boat guy that calls the guards on you at the end if you were doing a violent playthrough. I immediately restarted that mission and murdered him before he could ever sound the alarm. Especially considering all the morally reprehensible stuff you have to do to complete the game 'non-violently'. Luckily for me, the act of playing the game was just so so good that I was able to keep my eyes from rolling out of their sockets. Story bits aside, I got immense satisfaction out of both playthroughs.