Bjorn

A true hermit, a man separated from the human contact for 27-years, a man who expected to die without ever speaking to another person. That man...played Pokémon occasionally because he stole a Gameboy. Somehow that single fact is the most surreal part of this story to me. Edit: Crap, I actually meant to put this in the random thought thread. Oh well, I'll just leave it here.

It's not about a branching narrative (as the ending is, I think, always the same), but Deadly Premonition handles a branching experience well thanks to its open, real time world. At some point, you realize the rest of the town is going on with its life, and that there are opportunities for interaction all over the place that you may be missing. It's possible to do a perfect, complete run, but the more likely outcome is that you accept that you are creating a path through this story in which there are encounters you will have and encounters you won't. It's signposted thanks to the structure of the world.

I don't find Jezebel to be any more immature or any more poorly written than some gaming blogs. Much like Buzzfeed or Kotaku, they serve up a lot of mindless, entertaining crap along with their quality stuff. Edited to add: I'm not sure that's much of a defense, but I was just pointing out that they fit the pattern of many other sites.

To muddy the waters on Holder, some people have accused him of being asleep at the wheel when he was the US Attorney overseeing Washington DC and police shootings reached an all time high, and that he spent more time padding his political resume than he did enforcing the law. That's the only piece I've seen on his record, but it wouldn't surprise me that any analysis of US Attorneys (particularly those who have overseen DC) would find that they heavily favor law enforcement and make decisions to further their careers, so he may not be a statistical anomaly when compared to his peers. It might actually be one of those cases of scrutinizing a black professional more harshly than his white contemporaries.

After the Infowars factoid, I thought we could at least enjoy a moment of levity for a break from all the other grim news and reality of what's happening. But then the local StL alt-weekly broke a story that one of the Twitter accounts spreading false information and inflammatory posts was actually being run by a cop who has been on the ground working in Ferguson. Besides lying, he justified police force as saying that Ferguson was like a "war zone", and so the police action was appropriate. He also mocked protestors, undermined the authority of the officer in command and said he'd like to punch the Attorney General in the face. Edited to add: Also, Hercules is a racist asshole.

So the reporter who the cop threated to "fucking kill" on video turned out to work for Infowars, a conspiracy theorist site. You can't make that shit up. Or you could, if you were a conspiracy theorist. But then it actually happened, so it wasn't made up. And, OMG IT'S ALL REAL, JFK WAS AN ALIEN.

I only got the "bad" ending in SH1 because I was totally dense about getting some serum or cure. It felt really natural for it to end that way.

That's hilarious, I hadn't seen that part of it. I really want to know what happened that turned things so bitter and made them take on the legal risks and costs of trying to strip him of wage and stock that was his by contractual right.

This is a huge part of it, but there's an entire narrative structure that is supported by many leaders that racism doesn't exist. Or if it does, it's people like the KKK. But there's not systemic racism, and you can't act in a racist way if you're not a slur spewing racist. So you can't even try to talk about it without significant pushback. And if a cop or police force don't want to listen, they have powerful political and cultural allies who will reinforce their existing beliefs.

So apparently when the whole Marty O'Donnell thing went down, Bungie also stripped him of the founder's stock he had previously been given as compensation, and now an arbitrator has ordered that stock be returned.

Yeeeeeeees. You can also vote for it on Greenlight, which we should all do, just to piss off the manchildren. I just want to be a Social Justice Dwarf. Because dwarves are one of the oppressed people in fantasy. Fucking beautiful elves, getting all the attention.

So after all the bullshit heaped on Quinn this week, I finally got around to playing Depression Quest, which is now on Steam (the first ever Twine game on Steam?). I was not prepared for just how effective it would be. I found myself caring much more about my choices, and actually changing the direction I was going midway through. I had intended to resist any attempts at treatment just to see what happened, but about halfway through I just couldn't continue down that road. While I didn't personally identify with everything, there were certainly individual passages or days that struck a deep chord with me. Usually, in any game with story "choices", I often find myself agonizing over what to do, and then immediately wanting to know what the other options did. Maybe it's just the length, but I had none of that with this. Every choice felt very natural to me, even when it was the self-destructive choice. The entire thing felt a million times more effective to me at conveying a sense of agency within the story than big budget games like Mass Effect.

I laughed at that. It's morbid, but I think I needed a laugh. I'm also using that line at some point.

Maybe that is the scene I'm remembering, and I was just wrong abut which side it was on, because that is almost exactly what I remember with the boats coming in and everything.

I view that video as evidence of an unnecessary execution. The officers set the scene for a lethal takedown within the first second of their arrival on the scene, and it proceeded to escalate quickly until lethal force was necessary. Try searching for something like "knife wielding suspect subdued" and see what kinds of stories you have. Police all over the world routinely take down people with knives non-lethally. Sometimes a non-lethal approach doesn't work, and the suspect is still killed. But non-lethal options are attempted. In this case, the police force make it clear that going lethal is the last option, not the default. Or take a look at this case which made the rounds a few months ago, a drunk or unstable white guy holding a gun screaming at traffic. Look at how the police approach him, and compare it to the video of the StL video. In StL, the entire incident takes about 17 seconds. 1. Officers arrive, and park within 20 feet of suspect 2. Do not wait for backup, immediately engage 3. Pull guns within a second or two of opening their doors and take aggressive stances 4. Bark orders at the man, but do not try to talk to him 5. Do not back up, they stand their ground 6. And they shoot him dead Now, in the Kalamazoo vid, 1. Officers arrive, and quickly retreat creating a distant perimeter around the man 2. Wait for backup 3. Communicate with the man over loudspeaker, asking him to put the gun down 4. Clearly there is organization of other officers going on in the background as the officer on the loudspeaker engages the man 5. Do not pull guns trained on him (that you can see) and do not take an aggressive stance 6. After several minutes of talking, ultimately calm the man down and disarm him That's a good procedure. That's discipline. That's valuing the life of a suspect, and seeking out non-lethal solutions before lethal ones. It's everything that didn't happen in StL yesterday. Go reading from police and military sources about aggression, and about how approaching a potentially violent situation with aggressive, weapons drawn procedures is more likely to result in a violent encounter. Everything about that encounter was a step-by-step procedure where escalation was the most likely outcome. And that's fucked. It's wrong.

Fuck.

Was it the first CoD that had a very similar scene with storming the beaches of Normandy, or something else? I remember it being one of the most impressive scenes in a game I had ever played at that point.

The cynic in me says that "suspended indefinitely" means "suspended until no one is paying attention." I had seen an early report about the PMC, but thought it had to be false. Before we called them PMCs, we had another word. Mercenaries. Deploying mercenaries in the US is a bad fucking idea. On a personal note, I currently have a thread going in Facebook that includes a super liberal priest, a kinda nutty conspiracy theorist, a super combative atheist, and a relative who has said some pretty racist/homophobic stuff on FB before. This should be fun. So far no one has said anything (too) stupid.

The Ferguson subreddit is moderated by a racist clique that has 90+ subreddits (link goes to an article, not the sub itself). I'm a giant free speech proponent, but I'm becoming uncomfortable with Reddit over racist and misogynistic content there. All sorts of good things have come out of Reddit as well, probably more good than bad...but it is leaving an increasingly bad taste in my mouth to spend any of my time or attention there.

I can't believe this hasn't been done already.

I can think of a few cases were specific elements of COD games were criticized for the entertainment aspects of brutal violence that hit too close to home (No Russian and London). If an entire game had been built around those levels, I think you would have seen even more about it.

I've only got limited personal experience in Missouri (KCMO, Osceola and visiting StL now and again), but it's always struck me as being much less consistent than in Kansas. Kansas never had the proliferation of small municipalities, and the ones we did have are mostly all dead now, consolidated into county seats. And all this doesn't even get into the secondary and tertiary effects of collecting revenue in this way, where people's car insurance rates are driven up and for the poor (20+ percent of Ferguson), makes it more likely that they will not be able to afford either insurance or vehicle fees (another tax), creating a feedback loop of economic crisis leading to minor criminal offense leading to economic crisis, and on and on. I'm having an interesting discussion on Facebook right now with a retried priest from another city about this. He said his parish (Episcopalian) at one time provided short term assistance through buying gas for people so they could get to work. The courts ended up saying that the church could be held responsible for any accidents that people got into if the church didn't verify they had valid insurance before providing them with gas. Resulting in a situation where people try to help break the cycle with short term help, but the government attempts to short circuit that intervention with more laws and attempts to recruit charities and churches as additional watch dogs.

So beyond the obvious racial shit going on in Ferguson, understanding the racist economics of city funding helps clarify the history of the anger of the black population. Jon and I early kind of argued about whether the protests were mostly about Brown, or whether they were morphing into something else. I want to clarify that I don't think the protests are about these economic issues, but I do think years of frustration over things like this, which in part drive police behavior, helped build up the anger and resentment that popped a week and a half ago. In St. Louis county, towns have increasingly depended on fines and court fees as significant parts of their revenue. In Ferguson, it's around 25 percent and in other towns, it's as high as 50 percent of their total revenue. This puts economic pressure on police departments, turning them into revenue collectors rather than law enforcement. And when 9 in 10 stops, searches and arrests are on blacks, almost the entirety of that part of the revenue stream is coming from the black population, functionally creating a new type of tax that is almost exclusively applied racially. This is almost certainly unconstitutional, but since people with little power are affected, little has been done about. It can also be a relatively complex case to demonstrate, as you need years of data to present a clear picture. States have been trying to crack down on this for years, including Missouri having to legally go after it's own municipalities to stop them and capping revenue at 35 percent. But not every town has been caught, and there are a lot of tiny municipalities, even around St. Louis, that haven't been audited. Edited to add: I've been arguing for years that America needs to redefine what we call taxes, because of reasons like this. Taxes ought to be considered any money paid to the government, regardless of reason. It would help clarify many of the discussions that people try to have about our tax system, and it would make racial abuses like this jump out like the sore thumbs they are.

Besides text reports (and retweets), I haven't seen anything definitive yet (like a church source or pictures). And given how fast pics and vids are moving around the net, I'm taking this with a grain of salt.

I fully agree and support this. I'm not even comfortable replying to try and explain how fucked up this is, but feel some requirement to when I see posts that literally scare me in their logic.