Bjorn

From what I remember, the environment of 1 wasn't that weird to me, because it's not that much different than a big chunk of the Midwest in the US.

Yeah, in ME3 you can totally walk in on them trying to figure out how to make out.

Obviously I'm just an old, unimaginative conformist.

It's obviously just proof of how inviting anonymous, uncensored free speech is to all people. Because nothing says welcome to the party like a Nazi.

Christmas 2015 has already been ruined by crass avatar commercialization, clearly Roderick is just an advertising shill for Tim Schafer.

Sarkeesian posted a big update to the Tropes Kickstarter page yesterday on the history, goals and evolution of FemFreq, and it's quite an interesting read.

to the Thunderdome. Also 3 has a badass Tina Turner, which apparently left an indelible impression on the lady, making Turner one of her heroes and icons for a long time. Honestly I don't remember the movie that well to know if Turner was actually that badass, but to a 10ish year old girl, she was.

Rock chalk indeed, Mr. President (Obama was in town this week, wish I could have got tickets to see him).

The Internet makes me feel old every day. And I'm not even actually old yet, dammit. In every other facet of life, I feel like a person in the prime of my life, and the Internet makes me feel like a grumpy old man yelling about hills and lawns. I was a teen before some of these fuckwits were born, a teen before most people had dumbphones. And I was on the Internet (at least occasionally, 28.8K dialed long distance FTW!). To be fair to them, they were comparing available numbers from comparable release dates (like a week out from release or something). But it doesn't make it any less ridiculous.

I'm not sure there's a more important story to read about sports, and particularly college basketball, than this. The Fighting Indians Earn It I drive by Haskell all the time, sometimes every day. To be honest, it serves as both a mark of distinct pride and shame for this town. A lot of people, even me at times, will point out that we have the only 4 year tribal college in the country. But the shame is how little we do to actually support this school, or the people who pass through it's doors every year. This is the self declared most liberal, progressive city in Kansas, and arguably in every surrounding state. But that reputation is also really unearned in a lot of ways. Anyways, please read that.

The ticking clock mechanic, while rare, might be one of the most divisive mechanics in gaming. Because it either makes or breaks a game for someone (see all the arguments about Dead Rising's clock). It's not even a love/hate thing, it literally makes a game unplayable for some people while elevating a game from average to splendid for others.

"Oh shit, my gun!" Fucking perfect.

Oh, c'mon, it's a contentious issue on the Internet. We'd have found some way to derail it no matter what. I do find the focus on mosquitos to be something really hard to engage with though. Pushing extreme examples can be useful to test the boundaries of an ethical stance, but there's something specific about using bugs here that doesn't really stick with me, any more than using racism as companion to the speciesism argument works for me. I will come back to this, but simply haven't had the time to type up any additional thoughts or responses.

I can't help but think the periscope sight on that cyborg is really only valuable for shooting over chest high cover and around corners.

Holymotherofgod. I really hope that book is actually meant to be a subversive teaching tool warning children of the upcoming apocalypse.

I saw that. I would say it's jaw dropping in the hypocrisy department, but no, it's actually exactly what I expect now. Also, hilariously, KiA is currently crowing about how an anime porn game is performing better than Gone Home. You're telling me that something pornographic on the Internet is more popular than a touching coming of age story? Holy shit!

I'd play that. When the hero has to go to some big meeting about the end of the world, and listen to a bunch of people drone on, you just get to go run around and get into some shenanigans until the hero needs you to kick a door down or blow up an asteroid or something.

Meet the ‘Radical Brownies’ – girl scouts for the modern age

:hypnotoad:

I had basically given up on gaming podcasts until the rebirth of Idle Thumbs. Though recently I have added Justice Points in as a second gaming 'cast. But most of my job isn't terribly mentally taxing, so listening to in-depth stuff on politics, history, economics, etc., isn't a distraction. Sometimes I think I get more enjoyment from the overall games community and culture than I do actually playing games.

Today at the Windows 10 event:

Thanks for posting that, watching a whole run brought back a whole ton of memories for me. I think I had actually blocked out just how insanely hard parts of that game are. We definitely got good enough to make it past the Turbo Tunnel on a regular basis, but I think I had nightmares about the snake level, nothing after it was familiar to me, so that must have been the brick wall we ultimately hit.

The "places you can shave" conversation is the perfect complement to the underwear advert from last week.

I'm going to return to something that was dismissed quite a few pages back, which was Gormongous bringing up plant intelligence and pain. Tycho, you were incredibly dismissive of this argument, even incredulous at its mention. Going so far as to make a quite ridiculous claim about how a shoe (a completely dead, inanimate object) is as likely to feel pain or cry out as a living organism. That comparison has stuck with me. It's suggesting that plants have more in common with non-living inanimate objects than they do with living animals. Which is very convenient for the ethical model you have presented, but completely absurd and counter to every thing we know about life. I think this piece references virtually all of the major research that I have found mentioned in every other article, so it's as good of a reference as any to everything that follows. Since that was brought up, I've been trying to find an article or two a day exploring the subject, and one thing is clear. People who disagree with ideas of plant pain and intelligence resort to mockery, dismissal and mischaracterization of claims. Established scientists even going so far as to say that peers at respected universities have come from the "nuthouse" and declare them a "foolish" distraction to the field. That's the kind of thing that's going to ensure that very, very few scientists want to seriously explore a field. You're risking your reputation and livelihood to even ask such questions, let along pursue them. So there is a loud and distinct pressure against scientists pursuing this idea at all. And yet what has been learned about plants is fascinating. They can be anesthetized. They produce their own anesthetizers in response to what we would typically call "pain". Why would a living thing that can't feel pain produce a natural pain reliever? They produce a variety of neurotransmitters like serotonin, dopamine and glutamate, even though they would apparently not have a traditional use for them as animals do. They definitely transmit information about a variety of things, including damage, though we don't know what exactly they are transmitting. Plants can exhibit behaviors such as competition with outsiders, but sharing or caretaking with family members. The ability of many plants to sense the world around them rivals or exceeds humans. The chemical distress call that corn and lima beans emit is hardly analogous to the tearing of shoe leather, and much more analogous to the instinctual cries of pain that any child animal might display. The plant is communicating with another species in a call for help, and that call is answered. If you were able to take someone with absolutely no preconceived ideas about plants or animals, and present them simply with the capabilities of both, what kind of ideas would that person come away with? Would that person find plants far more alike than we typically describe them, or would that person conclude that they are radically different organisms? I think if presenting to a blank slate, one would have to conclude that plants are far more animal-like than we are ever taught to think, and that there are clear divisions in the behavioral and reaction abilities of plants, similar to the divisions in animals. They might, with no pre-existing biases, conclude that plants experience the world and pain in similar ways to animals. You keep asking people about racism to justify their choices, and yet you were so quick to dismiss, even eager to dismiss, the idea that the dominant biologically complex life form on this planet by volume (plants) may be far more complex and rich in life than you give them credit. Even the piece that you linked to in reply to Gormongous doesn't really do a good job of rebutting plant pain, that article actually strikes me as a far more emotional reaction to the idea than any kind of reaction rooted in logic or thought. It relies on "common sense" facts that everyone should know, that are actually factually wrong. Since when, in science, does common sense trump observed facts? And I see an emotional, not logical or scientific, reaction from other scientists when challenged with the idea. The only real objection seems to be, "But they don't have brains or animal neurobiology". Which, seems pretty weak as a response. The scientific response is to ask if all these traits we associate with animals could arise in a structure that didn't have animal neurobiology, not to declare that without neurobiology they can't exist.