Bjorn

CQ2 is in the Halloween sale, and is half off on Steam. I almost feel bad buying it at half price when it just came out.

She took her Twitter down as well. I looked through the responses to her earlier, 95 percent of them were positive, but there were a haundful of ggers trying to explain how she had gg all wrong, watch this video, then you'll understand! One guy was being pretty shitty. Also, the bipolar guy I referenced earlier also showed up Tweeting her, that might have had something to do with it as well.

Mah beard?! WHAT HAVE I DONE!? It's weird, I forget how much more expressive a face without a beard is. And I keep reaching up to fuck with my beard, and its not there. On the bright side, my wife loves me clean shaven, though now she's threatening to not let me grow my beard back out. This makes me sad.

All Hallowed Jake's Day!

Huh, Mother Jones links together a bunch of the studies on video games, aggressive behavior and gamergate. Honestly, I'm pretty skeptical about a lot of studies about behavior. I think there's really valuable things to learn, but I never know how to judge them. Blargh. Also, a female teen aspiring game dev admits that gg makes her afraid about entering the industry.

It's a *spooky Halloween forum ghost* ooOOOoOooOOOoooOOOoOOoOoOoOOoOoOOo

I really burned out in the Rail Nomads camp, haven't fired it up since then. Every few days I think about playing it some more, but then I decide to watch some Farscape instead. It's weird, the game was just nailing it perfectly for me right up to that point. I should probably power through it and see if it picks that vibe back up once I'm out of there.

As long as we're sharing Thumb tweets, Steve Gaynor pointed out that the inventor of the Ouija board has one carved into his tombstone:

Posting this here instead of the sports thread, because ahhh, how fuckin' sweet is this kid: Day after losing World Series, Royals rookie ace Ventura is out playing softball with a bunch of kids.

I see it drawing from multiple sources to make something that doesn't look like it plays like any of those things, which is what makes me excited for it. Ha, so I was about to ask a question that was answered literally in the first two paragraphs of the Gamasutra piece. I was wondering if this was the same game as the one that Dan said was canceled awhile back.

The ablist stuff seems to come from 3 main places: 1. Criticizing 8chan is the same as making fun of its owner, so that's being shitty and ablist. 2. A faked Brianna Wu tweet made fun a primary gg harasser, using a autistic slur, but the tweet was easily proven faked. But of course that didn't stop the accusations. 3. Reports of people making fun of boogie for his weight. Which, quite frankly, I don't doubt. Being overweight blows, and it seems like there is rarely a shortage of people who are willing to remind you that you're fat. Of course, one thing gg won't do is ask Big Mike about his history with fat shaming, or his endorsement of Return of Kings #fatshamingweek: Big Mike is also currently highlighting the posts, tweets and criminal history of a man he claims is a leading anti-gg figure, who actually appears to be a man with serious mental illness (admits to being diagnosed as bipolar I). Mike is saying that people who are critical of gg need to be stepping in and confronting this guy. Mike is trying to get people critical of gg to engage with a stranger on the Internet, a bipolar person with a history of violent threats, because...ethics?

The history of conspiracies around Daylight Savings Time is nutso, although the TV stations controlling it is a new one to me. People say it's about the energy companies making more money, and that the claims it saves money are just a bullshit smoke screen. That it's about thought control, getting the masses to mindlessly obey whatever whim a government might have. It's socialist. It's authoritarian. It was fine before, but Bush Jr. turned it into a big conspiracy with his Saudi oil buddies. I'm sure Alex Jones has a theory on how it's all about the lizard people wanting to study our sex lives. At least this year people seem to be a little more rational about it, realizing that actually, it's about ethics in games journalism.

Those are indeed both awesome!

The birth of Mr. Fusion! And welcome new folks!

If you end up with some cool stories, or need any help, the xcom thread is buried in the strategy subforum. I love EU, and if you decide you want more, the Enemy Within expansion is great.

Brad Wardell says that #gamergate did start with bullying and harassment...by SJWs towards the good folks who just wanted to make games. Late in that piece, as proof, he links to this thread and says look how badly his friend gets shit on for defending him. Except I read through the rest of that thread, and I don't see anyone being shitty to his friend (I read it quickly, possible I missed something). One person thanks him for posting, and another points out that how a person acts with friends may be different than how someone acts with female employees. Unless I missed something, it's kind of a crazy bit of proof to try and show how people harassed your friends for standing up for you.

OMG, so cute. And Happy Halloween all!

Holy shit, I'm dying laughing at that. But don't worry, Big Mike still doesn't really believe in rape.

I'm really glad I'm not a soccer fan. Kansas City has to be the first city ever (or one of the very rare few) to have two different professional sports have their postseasons ended on consecutive nights, as New York knocked Sporting KC out of the MLS playoffs tonight. I've got a buddy who's a big Sporting KC fan, and went out for drinks with him tonight to watch the game. He's also a Royals fan. This was like the worst possible back to back days in sports ever for him. Thankfully college basketball starts soon.

I've known some folks who worked at a brewery, and part of their employment package was that they could take a case home a week. But I think there was a deal where if you didn't want free beer, you could instead get a quarterly bonus or something equal to the production cost of the beer.

Swindle: Mark of the Gunpoint ^this is a good first impression!

I was catching up on Raph Koster's feed, and saw this: I've had the thought more than once if some people online realize how easy it was to get contact info for the average person back in the day if they didn't explicitly have an unlisted number/address. Obviously modern doxxing is still a bad thing, but we're only 20sih years removed from this being a standard communication tool that was literally in every single house in America, and the knowledge how to dial the operator and ask for any number in the country was relatively universal as well. There are a few people who have backed gg that I haven't brought up here, mostly because I don't know what to say about them. There's a woman candidate for Austin city council who is actively courting the gg vote (like did an AMA with them). LianaK is someone I've actually found pretty valuable to read. She vacillates between pro, anti and neutral, but she's said a lot of interesting things. Then today she just went off about Sarkeesian, about how she's alienated from gaming because of Sarkeesian, because women like Sarkeesian are the only ones that the industry wants and will drive everyone else out. And it's just like, what-the-everlasting-fuck.

Time and money well spent! Also, seriously, you have to be a great teacher.

Oh gawd, that JT quote. Incredible. So I reckon that Buzzfeed is next on gg's hit list for going after advertisers, since they ran a piece on the mods of KiA. This got brought up earlier in this thread by me when We Hunted the Mammoth looked at some of the mods. But BF looked at all of them, and all the subreddits they also mod or contribute heavily to. The author's conclusion: The KiA reaction is...interesting. They're claiming that this is sexuality shaming, a hit piece, character assassination, etc. Also, it's why the can't have leaders, because no one is perfect any leader they chose wouldn't live up to SJW expectations. Again, the cognitive dissonance here. "You must be perfect because we can't be." There's also a conspiracy theory floating around that the Sarkeesian interview was a lot longer, that Colbert was way harder on her, that she floundered and all around looked bad BUT THEY CUT ALL THAT OUT OF THE AIRED VERSION BECAUSE FEMINIST PUPPETMASTERS. They are demanding Comedy Central release the uncut interview. Because it's all about ethics in games journalism. Fuck yeah. Oh, and thanks for the Chu link. That was a hell of a piece. I wonder if it hits any nerves for pro-gg folks, like in a good, self reflective way. I hope so, even if it's only a few of them.

Something completely different! On why we should be considering an all or mostly female crew for a Mars mission: It makes the most sense.