Bjorn

I've experienced "spiritual" moments, which I find pleasant and/or interesting, but I entirely attribute them to the weird biology of our brain, and nothing more. Edited to add: As an example, sitting in front of the ocean and feeling the energy of the waves washing over me is probably the closest I come to understanding spirituality.

I thought of myself as a militant atheist for quite awhile, and do still have a bit of a combative streak in me. But I think that was somewhat natural given that I "outed" myself as an atheist in high school in a small town, where pretty much 99.99 percent of the population either is, or pretends to be, Christian. Looking back on it, I can really laugh at how some people reacted. I got called "evil" by a few folks. I had two friends stop hanging out with me, which in hindsight was great, I ended up with a much more awesome group of friends. I don't want to oversell it, I wasn't like traumatized or anything. It just made me prickly and combative when talking about religion. The only time I get militant anymore is when dealing with religious folk who want to take rights or freedoms away from other people, which is sadly just a bit too common in this country.

All the really influential atheists from my formative years seem to have gradually disclosed just how kind of terrible they are. Maher was a breath of fresh air to a dumb teenager 20 years ago, but I haven't really been able to stand him for awhile now.

I don't even know what Frontiers is, but I'm interested. I'm really hoping its a old timey home decorating sim.

That's really funny. But unfortunately, I'm not sure that feature actually made it into IV or V. I didn't know that, but searching aroudn I could only find references to prostitutes fighting back in 3, SA and VC, and even found a thread of someone commenting that women seemed to stop fighting back at some point in the series. I know that there are at least a few invulnerable characters in GTA games, as I've seen posts about needing to glitch the game in order to kill them (because it really does bug people when they can't kill someone in a GTA game). Obviously that's always for story reasons, but the point is they already break the *rule* that everyone can be killed. The mob and billboard ideas were really just extreme examples of something a dev could do. The point is, there's no reason for a dev to include the ability rape and murder sex workers. Seriously, no reason, not thematically, not mechanically, not the story. It serves no other purpose than to let people rape and murder sex workers. And that's fucked. That *feature* doesn't have to be supported, there are a bunch of different solutions that would work to not allow that player behavior (some ridiculous, some that would work in the context of GTA's world). Rockstar's had five games to figure one out. They haven't. They want players to be able to do this. And its one of the biggest franchises that exists in games. I honestly try not to give GTA any thought anymore, as it just bums me out about video games in general.

The meta event this year was the auction, which just didn't interest a bunch of people I guess. It is weird that they ended up separating it from the sale, but I'm assuming they were worried it could cannibalize sales. Or maybe they were hoping people who didn't get games in the auction would be more incentivized to buy during the sale.

A caveat, I have never played a GTA game. I have no interest in them, but have a fairly good working knowledge of them. If I'm wrong in specifics here, please correct me. GTA has reached a point of being completely inexcusable in many of its design decisions, and being able to rape, assault then murder sex workers is one of them. And it is rape, not consensual, when the player is already planning on assaulting and murdering the woman to get his money back after the fact. Consent in sex work is predicated on the sex worker keeping the money. If that doesn't happen, then its rape. So what GTA both allows, and encourages to some extent with getting money back, is the rape and murder of sex workers. We live in an era in the US where we have to regularly talk about concealed carry and stand your ground laws. There's almost one gun per person in the US. Almost every person in the US is walking around with a pocket surveillance system. There's absolutely no reason that the prostitutes shouldn't be fighting back, and winning, against the player character. That if a player rapes and murders a sex worker, that his picture shouldn't end up on billboards calling him what he is, a fucking murdering rapist. That the next time he approaches a prostitute, that she doesn't recognize him and open fire on him first, or get a mob of people to chase him down. There are literally a bunch of different and interesting ways that a dev could approach this situation. But Rockstar doesn't do that. Rockstar doesn't do any of those thing though, because they don't want to interrupt the power fantasy of their players who engage in this behavior. They literally want this to be an option for their players. Add on to this that there are no male prostitutes in GTA. For all its "gritty realism", which players often use to justify murdering prostitutes (like, what, whores are supposed to get god mode after you done fucked them? Its not like there are characters who are hard or impossible to kill in the game. Oh wait, yes there are. How fucking jarring.), Rockstar is only interested in realism when it serves a traditional male power fantasy. Male prostitutes have become far, far, far more visible than every before in the last 10 years. But Rockstar isn't going to let you fuck and murder a dude. Fuck no, that's a privilege reserved for women. So fuck Rockstar. And fuck GTA. Sorry, that was a bit of a rant, I usually don't comment on GTA stuff on these boards as I know there are people here who like them. But fuck GTA. It's completely inexcusable at this point.

I'm pretty sure this is the chap who ran it.

We all have those days.

I take "Fuck Nerd Culture" or "Fuck Masculinity" to be saying, "Fuck the toxic and harmful baggage these cultures carry and propagate". "Fuck Masculinity" means saying fuck off to any social norms that dictate that men need to present as masculine in order to be respected, not that men or women can't be masculine. Saying "Fuck Nerd Culture" means saying fuck off to the pressures that some nerds put on one another to conform in certain ways and fuck off to the bullshit gatekeeping that some nerds have a history of engaging in, not that people can't be nerdy. Honestly, I will never not be nerdy, but its harder and harder for me to identify with greater nerd culture in a lot of places. Or maybe its just that nerd culture is fragmenting. The culture we have here is different from the culture at AV Club is different from the culture in Reddit gaming threads. These places no longer feel as unified as they once did, and that's not a good or bad thing, just what it is.

Isn't that what we both just said?

Yeah, that's how I am. There's a bunch of stuff on my wishlist I'd like to play, someday. But my backlog is already full of superb games I really want to play.

OMG, what if Patrick is dedicating all of 2015 to the PS3. A long form, multimedia project to explore the wonder and majesty of the greatest gaming platform ever released, in the year it reaches its full potential.

I've always heard good things about the DLC, its just so rare for me to go back to any game anytime soon once I've finished it. I typically only play DLC if I've ended up buying some GOTY addition way after the original release, or if I'm replaying a game years after finishing it the first time.

A lot of what you described sums up my worst concerns about the game, particularly how it its more stat than skill driven and that it appears most of the classes lack real diversity in builds (whereas in ME, I could literally throw together almost any combination of skills and make it through Gold). I'd still give it another shot with people from here. Its on my lady's account, Zanasta-1.

Ha, I didn't know that. I've never played any of the DLC for the ME games. Of course they put a sex scene for the most romanced character in 1 into the DLC for 2.

I've been very, very reserved so far in this sale. Bought 5 things and all but one of them were sub-$2. I did buy Never Alone, mostly because that's the kind of project I want to support while it's relatively new, even if I'm not going to play it for awhile. I give a to Stick of Truth. I'd say anyone who even somewhat enjoys South Park would get a kick out of it. I think Alien: Isolation is the only other thing I'm tempted by. Might pick up a couple of co-op games as well to pad out our list, since we managed to chew through several during the holidays. I've always wanted to play the old D&D arcade games they ported to PC awhile back.

Weirdly enough, the most effective romance thing I've ever seen in a Bioware game was in ME2 if you didn't pursue any romances but had pursued one in ME1. I played a FemShep and romanced Liara in ME1. But in 2, I just wasn't interested in messing with any of that. Then, before the final mission, there was a cutscene of Shepard sitting alone in her cabin. She looked over, and there was a picture of Liara. She picked it up, looked at it sadly, then went to bed. It just worked, and was believable, in a large part because it was out of my control in that game.

Did anyone ever stick with the multiplayer at all? I think some patches and more content have been released, was curious if it got any stronger since release.

I don't know who he is, but he doesn't even know how to spell video games.

To be honest, the only reason I've read or watched anything on GB for the last few years is Patrick, so unless they hire someone equally rad, I won't have much reason to visit there.

I got a super mysterious package yesterday! What's in it?! A bunch of pirate stuff from 826 Valencia! This is a really rad gift, in multiple ways. It's good to know my gift supports an awesome organization doing good things. Plus its a bunch of cool pirate loot. I have no idea if there are rules for the little dice game wit the skull and compass, but I really want to know. Thanks super secret santa! I checked on the package I sent out, tracking still shows it in transit, but it was going international so that's not a terrible surprise. I was really hoping it would get there this week.

Fans are happy to fill in the blanks in fiction when they would like to see two characters get together. Instead of having an artificial, gamified series of interactions to initiate the "love cutscene", would a stronger system to be one of simply having subtler interactions and hints with several characters and leave it to players to decide what happened off screen?

Dammit. You know, being a parent is fucking hard. What's not hard, or shouldn't be, is loving your kid. They'll do things you don't understand, things you don't agree with, things that challenge you. But that doesn't change how you love and support them.

I am not on board with all of his modern political commentary, he treads a bit too conspiratorial for me at times. But I'm generally interested in how he approaches things, and the best shows are when he draws some interesting thematic parallels between disparate events. He's also often willing to provide some context for modern events in a way no news outlet really does anymore.