Bjorn

Hidden, but there's only a few items that affect them, so it's pretty easy to know if you've picked some of either up. Actually, I just did a quick search, and it looks like it's still unknown what exactly Faith/Evil/Sin do. Some people argue that they only affect the likelihood of Soul vs Sin hearts dropping.

So would a Dishonored GOAT be the game of all time from a previous incarnation of our universe?

Yeah, you cannot get a Devil Room on the first floor without a Joker/Red Chest. Completely intentional. The Goat Head does affect Devil Room chance, I think. It raises your evil some, which makes Devil Rooms slightly more likely to appear than Angel Rooms. But you can still get an Angel Room.

The attack on the woman, or anyone over this, is vile. And it shows the silly double standard in regards to things like the hijab law, where women need "educated" on the secular norms of France, while the French do not appear to worried on educating the French amongst them who are violently racist. Sadly, not enough people have opposed France's efforts to ban the face coverings in public, and head scarves in schools. It ought to be the kind of thing where we saw hundreds or thousands of people standing in solidarity, wearing banned clothing. And yet the majority stayed silent at best, or actively supported it at worst. Right before the CH attack, Glenn Greenwald had a piece about the criminalization of online speech, provided that speech originated with a Muslim. He followed up today with thoughts on the re-publishing of CH's most offensive and hateful pieces. He included a number of anti-Semitic cartoons, asking that if the true power of freedom of speech was the power to offend, then people should be supporting the printing of cartoons like those.

I've yet to be impressed by the couple of Slate podcasts I've tried out. The first time I listened the Gist was the last time, as it was appallingly ignorant.

Oh, I can see how Adventure Mode is really compelling to a lot of people, and I'm still messing around in it. But I think these kind of endless grinds in various games really just end up clicking with someone or not, sometimes for not very clear reasons. Like Mass Effect 3 MP was nothing but grinding for better gear, and I loved every minute of my hundreds of hours I put in it. I'm just not sure that the D3 grind does it for me. But I still want to play more, so maybe it does. Some of the unique effects on the high level sets and legendaries sound super fun. We still haven't got a greater rift key to drop. I'm definitely curious about that. I had seen Blizzard say that they lowered enemy density on consoles, which makes some sense. The camera is zoomed in some, which that alone could make density a problem. Then there's the questions about controller vs mouse speed in attacking. Getting up to Torment 1 is when enemy density and toughness really started to feel right. I would love it if density were higher though. Legendaries don't appear to be account bound on console the way they are on PC (assuming that's still a thing). We've got three people playing, so it's nice to be able to hand down equipment between our characters who've outgrown something.

Now the prosecutor has come forward to talk about the case to The Intercept. I don't believe for one second that Koenig and company didn't attempt to contact him multiple times. Given what we know about Koenig's reporting, that's just not believable. So that put me in the mood of already being skeptical of what he had to say. But he's super confident in his narrative. Sidenote: I'm quite curious how the Intercept got these interviews. It's...convenient. As a new publication, the biggest thing it needs is for people to know it exists. And securing extended interviews with two people who wouldn't talk to the biggest podcast in history is a massive coup. And weird. Each of these men likely had a dozen outlets or more reach out to them, but they chose a relatively unknown publication to talk with.

I'm a weirdo. It looks like my very first purchase on Steam was for the Introversion Anthology (now the complete pack or something like that). I had pirated Uplink several years earlier, and absolutely fallen in love with it. I had never even seen it for sale in any local stores in Kansas City, it was just some random game I downloaded to try out. Years later when I saw their collection was on sale on Steam, I remembered that game and felt bad that I had never paid a cent for it. So I bought the collection. There are probably 20 or 30 games in my Steam library that are pure guilt purchases from when I was younger and pirated games.

Also, how do you go about mocking and lampooning extremists and criminals without creating the association in some people's view that you are mocking the entire religion/culture/country/ethnicity that they come from? Because I have no fucking problem mocking extremists, whether they be anti-abortion terrorists, Muslim terrorists, asshole atheists (I can't think of any actual criminal words to apply to atheists), pedophile Catholic priets, etc. I mean, a lot of Catholics have been pissed off about the mockery their church has faced over the decades long abuse, and the coverup of it, by their leaders. But tough shit, mockery and humor is one of the ways we deal with that. If you make fun of terrorists who bomb things, behead people, etc., by doing that are you really indicting an entire religion or culture anymore than the people who made fun of the Catholic church? This is the thing that's been driving me up a fucking wall, and I had intended to bring it up in this thread anyways, so thanks for broaching it. When I looked at my news feed yesterday, the headlines for CH and the NAACP bombing were right next to eachother, and I knew before reading either that one would use the word terrorist, make assumptions about motives and the other wouldn't. This, to me, is so much worse than CH, from the bits and pieces I've seen. Even assuming the worst about CH, they are literally cartoonish evil, and had a regular readership in the 10s of thousands at most. Whereas the institutional racism of our media that ignores acts of white/European terrorism does more damage than a thousand racist cartoons.

Do we have any French members on the forums? I don't think we do. I'd be curious what people of different backgrounds think of CH experiencing it in the context of French culture. These are mini-obituaries of the twelve people killed. Mostly old folks, some of them old enough to have been kids during WW2. A couple of Jewish descent. A Muslim cop. A cartoonist who was a member of a group dedicated to 'unlearning intolerance' through cartooning (which, in context, seems odd), a group who in part was organized by Kofi Annan (former Secretary General of the UN). That's why I'd like to see the perspective of some folks who actually experienced Charlie Hedbo's work first hand and didn't draw their conclusions from looking a dozen cartoons on the Internet. Because the bits and pieces I'm seeing about the staff of CH, it's hard for me to believe that their work was as limited in range or conclusion as has been presented in the last 24 hours. CollegeBaby, do you have any experience with CH other than just the covers you linked to? If so, I'd like to see what else is informing your opinion. Edited to add: Is it possible CH is something closer to South Park than Fox News type bigotry? It would be really, really easy to paint South Park in the same colors that CH is being painted, but you'd miss a fuckton of context by doing so.

That wasn't so much aimed at you, as it was a thought in general, as I've seen this thing about CH brought up a few times last night and this morning on social media. There are many, many, many people, companies and media outlets that occasionally or regularly contribute to the demonization of marginalized people (Fox being an easy example). The point I was making is that I think CH is itself being both victim blamed and used as an example in a way that other outlets wouldn't necessarily be. I don't have any proof of that, but the history we have of selective blame certainly makes it a possibility in my mind.

Hmmm, I don't know anything about Charlie Hebdo. But I'm going to take a dozen cartoon covers with a grain of salt. Yes, a lot of those are bad and should be criticized. But I could take probably any major English speaking media outlet and by picking out a dozen examples paint them as being homophobic, racist bigots who think women should cook and not speak, particularly if I was providing the context and translation to non-English speakers. Fox News is, quite often, all of those things. But if a bunch of Fox News employees were murdered tomorrow, I don't think we'd see a rant like this.

Remember the child porn fiasco and KiA's defense of it? Yeah, that's still going on (twitter timeline of gamergate supporters continuing to try and defend and deflect 8chan's policy).

Yeah, its pretty crap that at least Master difficulty isn't unlocked from the get-go. We had no problems at all on Expert, and just blew through the whole campaign in a few evenings. The entire idea that some difficulty levels should be locked until future playthroughs feels archaic and useless. I'm not entirely sure what I think of Adventure Mode. I mean, its fun. But the progression curve feels ridiculously slow. Like, almost impossible to feel, its so slow. I've found myself more interested in leveling up other classes than playing my level 70 Barbarian, as that since of progression is there for them.

I feel super dumb. So this is my second go around with Diablo 3, have probably put 40ish hours into it between back when it launched and now. And I just learned that you aren't restricted to choosing one power from each category, that there's an option in options to let you pick multiple powers from a category if you want. That was always one of the things I thought was terrible in D3, that they restricted build design so much.

I really enjoyed it. The absolute best parts are the increasingly bizarre essays the protagonist writes about classic arcade games.

Ha, totally went over my head. I watched the first couple of seasons of ATHF back when they were first on, but haven't watched any since.

No clue, it showed up in my Facebook feed today with no other context. Did a search, and everything I came up with was in Spanish (which I am extremely rusty in).

This video might be very mildly NSFW, as it features a drawing of a naked woman throughout, but it's pretty fascinating/horrifying. Titled: Designing a perfect woman.

KiA is, once again, going absolutely apeshit over the Intel announcement. There's a bunch of hilarious shit in there right now, about how Intel is nothing but a bunch of racists supporting and supported by other racists like Sarkeesian. They worry an awful lot about the diversity initiatives of tech companies for a group who is organized around ethics in games journalism.

Fixed.

Speaking of the intersections between sex work, culture, religion and stigma: Meet Mia Khalifa, the Lebanese Porn Star Who Sparked a National Controversy.

The Frederick News-Post is making an early entry in the 2015 category for Best Take Down of an Asshole by a news organization. I'm going to be laughing about that for days. Sitting in on that editorial board meeting would have been an absolute treat.

Finally listening to the 'cast, and the discussion about twist endings (like Empire Strikes Back). Has anybody read the classic Heinlein short story "All You Zombies"? No, it's not about zombies. There's a movie based on it being made soon, and if it actually keeps the key points of the story, it has the best face-melting twist out of any story I can think of. Like, I can't wait to see people's reactions to it if it is done well. I don't even want to talk about it or link to anything if people aren't familiar with the story. Edited to add: Oh shit! The movie (Predestination) releases this weekend in the US. I knew it was done, and had gone to a festival or two, but had mostly avoided learning too much about it and didn't realize the release was this close.

This needs to exist. The Idle Thumbs should branch out into movie production as well.