Bjorn

No, I don't think I have. What episode is it?

I watched Lars von Trier's Nymphomaniac (Vol. 1) last night. It was fabulous, and I can't think of anything to say about it that won't make me sound like an insufferable fanboy, even though it's the only one of his movies I've seen.

As has been pointed out over and over, it's laughably absurd that journalists be expected to not be friends or friendly with potential sources or subjects. It is literally almost impossible not to be, and the smaller the community you cover the harder that becomes. My first reporting job was for a weekly paper in a town of around 4,000 people. Imagine trying to write anything in a community that size without become friends with at least some people you would eventually write about. When you think about the number of people that your typical games writer talks with in a year, it's probably not that different than covering a small town. Even some people I had an antagonist professional relationship with, I was personally friendly with when we weren't on the clock. We each had jobs to do, and didn't get personally offended at the other one doing their job so long as at least a certain amount of respect was given.

Thanks for bringing it up! I didn't start listening until after the Kickstarter, and don't delve into the back catalog much, so without people mentioning their favorite stuff, I'd never hear it.

It's interesting that you draw the correlation between when video games started and the weakening of labor's power in the US, though the odd thing is that creatives/labor were quite abused even very early on (the whole thing with Atari not giving credit, the ridiculous work schedules that led to stuff like E.T.). And into modern day, we still hear horror stories about people being ridiculously overworked. The video game industry historically has all of the kinds of pressure one would expect to lead towards some kind of unionization, and yet nothing of the kind has happened. Thematically though, you do see basic capitalism being proselytized through most games. A very American "work hard and you'll be rewarded" kind of mentality when it comes to how work or business is portrayed.

I messed around in a couple of shooters with native controller support tonight to try out the Nav with them, with both excellent and average results depending on the game. Serious Sam 3: BFE worked flawlessly. Detected the Nav as a controller, had no problems with combined controller and mouse inputs. Analog stick functioned perfectly, and exactly as you'd expect. It allows for custom controller mapping, so I was able to set the Nav up exactly how I wanted it. For the number of buttons that SS3 needs, the Nav feels perfect. Sprint on trigger, jump on bump, common weapon swaps on d-pad and reload on a face button. Metro: Last Light detected it as a controller and had no problems with me running it with a mouse. Analog movement was exactly as you'd expect, full range, move faster the farther the stick is pushed, etc. The problem was that LL doesn't allow for custom mapping on controllers, you can just pick from 3 presets. This ultimately makes it a bit more frustrating than necessary, as there are a couple of things I'd like to change (neither the bump nor the trigger were assigned anything useful). But I just changed the mapping on my mouse for a couple of buttons and it was still usable. LL is one of those games with a surprising amount of keys used though, so it's not really common for a shooter. I also played a few more matches of ME3:MP tonight, and continue to be super happy with the Nav+Mouse in it. I've dumped a bunch of hours into both the 360 and PC version and have a lot of experience with that game with both controller and M+K. M+Nav is unquestionably the superior input for me in it. I still haven't got this thing hooked up to Bluetooth though, I can't get it to pair. But I haven't sunk a ton of time in trying to figure out what's wrong though. I may simply be overlooking something simple. I know it's possible, as I can find examples of people doing it. I've tried a bunch of alternate type controllers over the years, and I don't think I've ever been as instantly satisfied as I have been with the Nav+Mouse. And for the low cost these things go for on eBay, it's doubly worth it since I've dropped significantly more on controllers or accessories that I ultimately found very poor.

Holy crap, that entire little podblast is now one of my favorite things I've ever heard from the Thumbs (I'm secretly a terrible person, I just pretend to be respectable most of the time).

Actually, I kinda lied with what I said about shields and PvP. I did continue to carry shields on me, but strictly to use against magic.

About your spoiler

I made multiple posts about the FYC over in the Feminism thread. I think it's perfectly reasonable to look on that project with great skepticism, and to criticize them for their message, their lack of transparency, their conduct, and the structure of their project. 4chan only embraced the project because they perceived the people running it as being allies once the FYC jumped into the dogpile on Quinn. If the FYC hadn't publicly jumped into the shitstorm around Quinn, 4chan never would have done anything for it, which should be cause enough to view their actions with some skepticism. This isn't even getting into the territory of breaking down the structure of the FYC project completely separate from the Quinn/4chan mess, and figuring out whether it is likely that a single dime will ever go to charity. The entire thing looks like a sham to me.

What about video games? Edit: DAMMIT FORUM AUTOCORRECT.

Neat! That's not something I knew about in the slightest (I'm pretty ignorant of photography in general), and didn't realize what Hoatzin was talking about with the fake depth-of-field stuff.

Weird, something about those pictures makes me think I'm looking at a miniatures scene that someone set up, not like an actual place. I don't know if it's the slightly out of focus border or what. At any rate, it's a cool effect and I like it.

This thread managed to get me to start a new game of Cookie Clicker over the weekend to see if much had changed since I "played" it back when it was the hot thing. Let it run a good chunk of the weekend, set up an auto-click AutoHotKey script, clicked things myself now and again. It was a super busy 3-day-weekend, so I just popped my head into my office once in awhile when I was at the house to see how it was going. This morning I caught myself starting it up and watching it in a small window out of the corner of my eye while I was working. Fuck that noise, deleted the save and added it to my banned website list. That's the reason I quit screwing around with it in the first place, way to hard for me to not just let something like that run while I'm working and be a constant source of low grade distraction.

I'm assuming this is the one that shows up in my feed as Idle News Podblast: 8/1/2010 - Surprise! The description says it's a ruined version of IT 36. Never listened to it before, preparing my ear holes now.

I eventually gave up on shields in PvP. There are certainly ways to use them, but (as you discovered), you have to approach it completely differently.

Arthur Chu, writing for the Daily Beast, apparently thinks that Objective Game Reviews are completely serious.

I just threw up in my mouth a little.

It bugs the crap out of me when it is applied to anything that's not a major political scandal that involves a president potentially having broken the law. It is arguably the single biggest example of corruption and abuse of power in our country's history, and should be remembered as such, not watered down by slapping -gate on every little controversial thing. If applied to other presidential scandals, I think it's actually okay because it reinforces the memory that presidents can in fact be ousted due to their actions.

Why don't you answer those questions yourself first. Because by asking questions, without volunteering any information yourself, you're tasking other people with work that you yourself aren't putting in. I'll give you the benefit of the doubt that you are asking in good faith, but asking others what are complex questions that take time to answer properly without yourself spending any time to explore the issue is a strategy that people use in arguments just to screw with people, cause them to expose themselves emotionally (potentially) and waste their time.

Yeah, I'll be happy to. It might be a couple of days though, not anticipating much gaming time in the next day or two.

Firewatch - Ign.com: "Believe the hype" So, so, so fucking good.

For me it's Mass Effect 3 MP that does that. "Oh, I'm hurt, I'll just pop a med kit...wait, why am I pulling out my rocket launcher?! Fuck I'm dead."

One thought I've been mulling over is the repeated idea (including in this thread) that a lot of this is driven by teen boys, which is a statement that makes me uncomfortable. It feels a lot like trying to shift responsibility onto a demographic that is different than our own (a thank you to Tegan for sending me down this line of thought a few days ago after she pointed out me doing something like this in another thread). We know where some of this comes from, the guys running the Patreon aren't kids (nor the people giving them money). The people behind the FYC aren't kids (and claim to have senior women leaders who have been completely silent about their project jumping into the dogpile on a female developer). We know that the ex-bf ain't a kid. We know that the people who own and run things like 4chan, reddit and Twitter are grown ass adults who profit from the cultures they allow to thrive on their services. Some of the people who are regular commenters on places like Joystiq or Kotaku aren't kids, because I've been watching some of those people post for 8+ years. I know that the absolute worst, shitty, hateful misogynists I interacted with on the Bioware forums aren't kids, because some of those guys posted videos of themselves demoing BW stuff at cons. JonTron isn't a kid. It's kind of how like some people don't see sexism because they are willfully blind to it. We've got a ton of examples of how it isn't kids driving this behavior, and yet the refrain that it's teens continues (that Slate piece was all about addressing a child, not someone who might be a social peer). I think for some, it's easier to try and shift responsibility for a lot of this to someone else rather than looking in the mirror and knowing that the people causing this bullshit are in fact an awful lot like us in terms of age, job, background, everything. Obviously not everyone thinks this, but it pops up often enough that it's worth addressing directly.

People who have seen it have been oddly excited about the rolos.