Bjorn

Ha! (to both of those) I just feel like I get out of equilibrium about once a year, where gaming is the default thing I do, subsuming the time I normally give to other hobbies (reading, building shit, working out). Usually it starts with one particularly obsessive game (like a Spelunky, BoI or Dark Souls), and then some bad habits set in and I get stuck in a rut. I just have to make a clean break and not play anything for awhile to get that equilibrium back.

I had been thinking about a similar line of questions today, mulling over the reply to me about abortion. Because speciesism really goes far beyond just the original subject of the morality of eating meat, due to the base assumptions in it (the valuing of all animal life as equally as possible).

Ever feel like you just totally need to take a step back from gaming for awhile, like it's become too much of your default activity?

I've felt very much in an ethical dilemma the last few years being a college basketball fan, exactly for the reasons you described. But I also live in a town that hosts what is one of the most storied college basketball programs in history. It feels functionally impossible to disconnect from that, and I don't even really want to as icky as it can be. The community, passion, love and camaraderie here are infectious. My love of KU basketball is not just about the sport, but also tied into my years spent as a student there, to watching my daughter play in the band at games, to going downtown with her and the lady when we won the national championship (where thousands of people managed to peacefully celebrate without rioting or burning anything up). It's an emotional dichotomy that I don't know how to resolve.

On the poly thing, I'm willing to give Apple Cider and other women who've told me similar things the benefit of the doubt that the couples who contacted them were using poor judgment (in being able to appropriately screen women who would be good matches), or were not being respectful in some other way. That matches up with my experiences hanging out in lesbian bars, and in a few other spaces. It's one thing to be approached in a manner where you're being treated as an equal human being, and another to feel like you are being approached as a living sex toy. I know both types of couples exist, but given human nature and the internet, women are probably more likely to encounter the latter than the former.

I totally listened to all 5+ minutes yesterday, I just started it and clicked over to another tab to write an email. Kind of soothing, really. Edited to add: Fuck yes Twig.

Pimple's the best, because he's the big, dumb one. And the big, dumb one is always the best.

I'm pretty curious what your experiences with it are, I'd probably be willing to give it a shot.

A completely intentional metaphor as well. Though while the health, concussion, and player behavior issues all helped tip the scales, ultimately the biggest factor in deciding to be done with football because of what a colossal waste of time it is. If I watched a couple of games a week (which used to be my norm), that's up to 7 hours of tv watching for a total of maybe 20ish minutes of actual sport. With basketball, I can watch 3 games in that same time frame and get 120 minutes of actual sport. Baseball tends to be a much more social event for me, like most of the playoffs I watched with friends and I go to way more live games than I do watch them on TV, and always with at least a few people, making it more like a night on the town with friends. If I had the same social aspect with football (which is obviously possible, that's just not how I partake in the sport), I'd probably still be watching it.

Dammit, I don't need another domain. But that is so, so, so tempting.

I'm pretty much only into KU basketball and Royals baseball nowadays. The NFL used to be my favorite sporting events to watch, but a whole host of issues has ended up clubbing my interest in football to death. I think I watched 2 games this year.

No official merch? That blows. I almost never buy video game knick-knacks, shirts, etc., but I would totally take a Manny Calavera figurine to sit on my desk.

That's selling it super short. Battletoads has achieved a legendary, cult classic status. Even if most of the people who talk about it never played it, they know what it is. As a kid, I never thought of it as a Turtles knockoff (though obviously it is). Given how fucking weird a lot of games were back then, having a couple of 'roided out toads who were intergalactic space marines didn't seem strange in the slightest, nor like they were drawing from the Turtles.

Kansas legislature held an informational hearing on medical marijuana today, which getting at least medical use approved is an issue that two former co-workers of mine have busting their ass on for the last couple of years. I can't imagine it passing this year though. The Kansas state houses have been a mess as long as I've been paying attention to them (one year they attempted to pass a sin tax on sex toys to financially punish people who bought them and in the same month approved state owned casino's because gambling is good old, profitable American fun).

Something else kind of odd about this is that I was pretty sure in the past when a high profile site has had major layoffs and restructurings, that the other high profile outlets have covered it. But there appears to be near total silence about these firings.

We also rented it a bunch of times, probably enough to justify buying it. It was easy to get obsessed with. I'm sure that my brother and I got through Level 3 at least a few times, though I'm also positive that we never finished it. Looking at some videos, I think we made it to level 5 or 6 a couple of times, as those look familiar but later levels don't so much. But I'm also sure that the Turbo Tunnel killed us many, many, many times.

The piece where the new EIC of the Escapist introduces himself is a little weird. What does that even mean? It reads kinda like the new Escapist attitude is to ignore any problems in gaming to focus on the fun factor of gaming and geekdom. It's the kind of sentence that sounds good in a vacuum, but in the context of of the last 6 months and the Escapist's roll in it...

No, it doesn't carry over to alcohol for me. My biggest problem with personally using pot is just that it makes me super sleepy, in no time. Tried it several times in my early 20s, several different *types* and the exact same thing every time. I just wanted to take a nap. That's no fun at all. And I don't like the smell at all. I certainly went through a binge drinking phase back in my 20s, though nowadays it's more of the go out and have a drink or two and be done. Probably once a year I do get fall down drunk, but it's always at my oldest friend's house. We get hammered together, reminiscing about our youth, the people who are already gone entirely too young, telling each other stories we've both heard a hundred times and a bunch of other stuff.

I don't think being vegetarian or vegan is extreme, but I think arguing for it from an ethical stance of anti-speciesism is. I think that because once you start extending anti-speciesism as an ethical philosophy beyond eating, then it starts breaking down. Once you're arguing from a point of animal equality, one could argue for the mass killings of humans because it would be in the greatest ethical interest of animals at large, much in the same way that we exterminate pest animals that have invaded an environment they don't belong in. If a squirrel is as valued as a human, then it is not a reach to say that a fetus past a certain development point is as valuable as a born human. Almost every facet of human civilization's development for the past several hundred years (or more) has caused the death and suffering of animals, and continues to do so. To argue from a stance of anti-speciesism is to argue against the development of human civilization, past, present and future. Almost every human, every single day, benefits from the suffering and death of animals. As I said much earlier in this thread, I'm sympathetic to ethical arguments about the treatment of animals, about the cruelty of our current systems. I'm on board with minimizing suffering. But I don't think anti-speciesism, as an ethical philosophy, ends up actually being able to be a functional framework, for anyone. It can be an interesting thought experiment, but not more than that. I think you can care about all the things that you and others in this thread care about without falling back on speciesist arguments. Because they collapse under the weight of the expectations they bring.

I see what you're saying, but it also kind of just looks a lot like moving an arbitrary line around to whatever makes someone comfortable. Which is fine. That's how I approach this, I know where my comfort line is in regards to meat eating, and I respect that other people have personal comfort lines they live by. But the way its been presented in this thread is not as being particularly arbitrary, but built on a pretty firm ethical foundation. One that potentially leads to some pretty gnarly quandaries, and possibly human rights issues (in the case of mapping the framework over to abortion).

A 4x sized room full of spiders in the first floor has made me restart more than any other thing (maybe all other things combined).

I had decided to stay out of this thread, but there's something about the speciesism line of argument that's been bugging me (I've been reading and reflecting, even if not participating). The core idea is that all animals lives should be valued as equally as possible and that suffering should be minimized (and suffering can mean several things, ranging from the immediate physical suffering to denial of future enjoyment of life) and that needless death at the hands of moral/ethical humans should be eliminated. And given the repeated comparisons in this thread to racism, then obviously this means that all animals within a species should be treated as equally as possible, with a goal of eliminating as much suffering and needless death as possible. How does adhering to that model of ethics not lead one to conclude that abortion needs to be banned in all cases except where the mother's life is in clear danger? It's the needless ending of a life, in deference to the preference of another animal capable of ethical reasoning that results in long term suffering (denial of life) and possibly immediate suffering (depending on when the procedure is performed). Edited to add: I'm not trying to do some crazy derail here, I'm genuinely curious. One thing about thinking about ethical models and whether they are a fit for you is to extend the logic and structure of them over to other scenarios where they also map out, and see if they still hold weight.

For no apparent reason, he showed up at the Windows 10 event wearing a Battletoads shirt. Which previously he wore a Crackdown t-shirt to an event or something before Crackdown 2 was announced. So people are hoping this is him being cheeky and having some fun hinting that a new one is coming (which someone at Microsoft has said recently is a property they want to bring back).

Sometimes I think this thread should just have its own The Toast rss feed built into the side of it: Misandrist Lullabies

I see that, and actually think about just having it for work more than gaming. If I could basically set up my office and eliminate a whole fuckton of physical stuff (monitor, calendar, white board), I think I'd do that at the right price.