Bjorn

I actually like Blasphemer, but I'm a sucker for cheesy art that looks like it could be on a heavy metal album cover.

He looks like how they dress the male mannequins at a clothing store.

Ha, this is the same kind of semi-coherent pearl clutching that's been going on since the late 90s. You could go digging, and find pieces like this from every niche and broom closet in journalism, published practically monthly for the last 15 years. I'm not in journalism for a reason, I can't afford to be, much as I love it. When I graduated, I had friends taking professional jobs for less than you could make walking off the street into your average fast food joint (literally, KFC was hiring for $10/hr for shift managers with minimal fast food experience while I had a friend taking a job at $8.50/hour at a TV station). I already had a kid and a long term partner, and it would have been selfish of me to chase that passion when I had more profitable, but still personally fulfilling, avenues I could pursue. Almost everyone I've stayed in contact from my class with is now working in PR. I lost touch with the one guy who was doing good interesting work, particularly down in Louisiana post-Katrina. But last I knew, even he kept a part time gig to pay his bills, because his professional pieces weren't paying enough. One thing I can't decide is who this line is being snarky towards, the old guard, the wannabes or both: The reality is that newspapers, particularly, have depended on people without a journalism education for decades to pad out their content. At one point, I had one of my professors counsel me to change my major to something else, keep writing for the college newspaper, and then come back to the j-school for my masters. He basically said that no one really needs a Bachelor's in journalism to be a journalist, it's there for the people who can't imagine doing anything else. I had 2 paid and published journalism gigs (one staff and one freelance) before I ever had my Bachelor's. At any rate, I'm glad you linked it, not because it was about video games, but because it's always interesting to see how this message is subtlety shifting in the ever changing quicksand that is modern journalism.

So is this the biggest failed gaming kickstarter so far? Over a half million raised, and nothing to show for it. I know a few prominent projects have gone dark, but not officially canceled yet. The explanation kind of reads like exactly what you would expect out of a failed KS project:

Hey, at least I hadn't posted in that thread and had forum amnesia about it (which is totally a thing I've done). I'm familiar with the style of game, and have almost bought both Hate games multiple times, but talked myself out of them for some reason. Your opinion is one I respect a lot, and between these comments and your first few comments in that thread, those are clearly things I need to try whether they're ultimately something I'm into or not.

I have to give credit to the British version of Being Human for trying to tell a story that I really didn't expect as they moved from the third to fourth seasons. Intellectually, I was interested in what they were doing. I just lost all emotional attachment to the show. If you didn't make it to the end of the third season, I think it's worth watching that far, then just pretend it got canceled or something.

I've almost never seen Analogue pop up around here. Is it that good? And I need to play COS:2014. Going out of town this weekend, might make for a good laptop game on the road.

I'm not into MMOs, but I keep wanting to try The Secretion World.

I have no reason to be in this thread, but scheduling an event for Zaterdag sounds so much more badass than Saturday.

I found the American version unbearable. Tried to watch one episode and couldn't even get through it. I loved the British version, but dropped out early in the fourth season. What I liked was the chemistry between the 3 leads, and once 2 of them left the show I just didn't care about it anymore.

Is ActRaiser on the VC? That's a great game to check out, surprisingly ambitious for a game (especially a console game) back then. You alternate between 2D platforming and a SimCity like city building game. Edited to add: Oh, and Uncharted Waters 2! Tanukitsune recently posted about it over in the completed games thread. I only got to play it briefly as a kid and I always wanted to play more.

I think the American version of Being Human went into production during Season 2 or 3 of the British version.

Yeah, I almost bought it tonight, but want to finish up The Bureau first. Can't wait to see what the Thumbs think of it. I like everything Ace Team has made, even if it isn't really good.

Have you tried asking Clippy? Sorry, I got nothing.

Dogs in video games! I've been playing Shank in co-op the last couple of nights. And it has dogs. Shank does the thing where every single enemy is given a name above their health bar, like Big Jim or Ted. The dogs have names too. So now every time I kill one, I glance at the corner of the screen with their health bar to learn that I just killed a dog named "Whiskey" or "Banjo." It's the personal touch that really makes some horrible.

The culture around sex is so fucked up, I can see how you ended up feeling that way. Consent shouldn't be difficult, and it's actually really easy if we didn't have a history of being taught wrong things about what consent is, about women's desire for sex, about slut shaming, etc, etc, etc. I think the conversation about consent really needs to be divided into two separate, but related, camps. One is for singles or new relationships, particularly younger people. For them, we need to teach them that the standard is enthusiastic consent, or at a minimum affirmative consent (a clear and definite yes, no ambiguity). Some guys probably think that means they'll never get laid. But the funny thing is, if you can get to the point where you can prioritize that and talk about sex with someone you're interested in, you'll probably have more sex. And the sex you have will sure as hell be better, without the risk of not knowing if you raped someone or not. It's absurd that it's even controversial to say that affirmative consent ought to be the standard we expect. I'm with that linked Nerdlove article on established couples though. It's great when both people are horny and ready at the same time, but 10+ years into a relationship, jobs, kids, etc., sometimes you get the sex in when you can, even if one or both people aren't necessarily feeling super into it. Consent still matters in a LTR, no question. You can say no to a partner, and that must be respected. But the dynamics and needs of two people over the long haul, particularly if they are strictly monogamous, means that consent can be quite a bit more bendy than the kind of behavior that a 19-year-old college kid should be engaging in. It still needs to be affirmative, but not necessarily enthusiastic.

I'm not actually a big fan of CAH. It was amusing the first couple of times I played it, I'm with SAM on it. My friends can be as funny, or funnier, than anything in CAH. More often then not, it's mildly amusing rather than hilarious. Here's another piece worth reading, less for his commentary on the case, and more for his personal reflections on his own young experiences and reflections on young men's place in rape culture. I don't think it's mansplainery, more like he's trying to speak to other men to get them to get it. It's more about the conversation about consent than it is Temkin, which like Argobot and others said earlier, is one of the things that ought to come from this. Part of it is the sex ed we give our kids. People talk about saying no, but not really about consent. We certainly don't talk about enthusiastic consent. We don't talk enough about the fact that the fast majority of sex is had for fun. We talk about disease and pregnancy. It's going to take a long time, but fixing how we talk to kids (like, starting at age 12 or younger) is the solution to a ton of rape culture. First, please feel free to post in here if you have thoughts on anything. A lot of what you'll see is people talking themselves through understanding these things, and sometimes figuring out your own words/way through a post is a great way to do that. I don't honestly know enough about the legal distinctions in the States to know whether or not there are already different categories of crime for assaults. It seems like that ought to be the case already, but maybe not?

It may be clumsy, but part of the problem with what he wrote (and that's all we have from him right now) is that he didn't explicitly take legal action off the table. He said he didn't want to do that, but not that he wouldn't. Which is one of the things that makes it a threat. Actually, the more I've thought about that part, the less I buy it. Like, I'm not even sure that his lawyer would counsel that EXCEPT as a strategy for shutting her up, not because they could win. When I was still in journalism, I was involved in two stories where a libel suit was a possibility (including one that involved a regional public figure and sexual harassment). There were conversations with the paper's attorney, and I've had some training and education in thinking about defamation from a journalism perspective. I'm no expert, but I'm not clueless about it either. A defamation case requires that you prove the allegations were false. Temkin is no more able to prove the accusation false than the accuser is able to prove it true. The only way to prove it false would be to find statements by her directly contradicting her claims. What other evidence could you present? For a public figure, you also have to prove actual malice, that the person acted with full knowledge that it was not true or with reckless disregard for the truth. Again, short of finding evidence that she contradicted herself, can you imagine proving actual malice in this case? Ultimately taking legal action would most likely be messy, ugly and inconclusive, serving only to hassle the accuser, not to achieve clarity or clear Temkin's name. This looks to be different from the Connor Oberst case, where the accuser had a trackable history of making up stories online under different names (I am not super familiar with the Oberst case, just passingly. If I'm wrong about that, please correct me). So if that is the reality of a libel case, why would he bring it up at all? Would a lawyer describe this as a "clear" case, without a whiff of evidence to actually use? Or is it a "clear" case of being able to use wealth and the legal system as a weapon against someone less powerful than you? Out of curiosity, is anyone seeing any talk about this on their personal social networks? A lot of my friends are big fans of CAH. Most of them are both big into nerd culture and passionate about feminist and social justice issues. And I haven't seen a post one about this at all. I posted about it last night, and got no response from anyone.

I agree that taking sides is not a necessary action here, and is too often a default reaction. But that's a gross and unfair characterization of what Gormongous wrote, particularly when you think about how incredibly shitty that post is (I'm not going to grace something that includes threats and intimidation as an apology). Trying, to contact someone (twice!) who has said your name gives them panic attacks? Who does that? He had time to try and contact her and have a conversation with his lawyer. He had some time to think about what he would write publicly. It's perfectly fair to take a hard look at that and draw your own conclusions.

I loved the aesthetic, music and ideas in Eden, but it is the one PixelJunk game that I haven't been able to stick with. I've tried twice, and just gave up on Garden 2 or 3.

Old, oddly relevant video popped up on my Facebook feed this afternoon:

Unless I misunderstood something, what you're describing sounds an awful lot like fraud, in which case the only reason the company wouldn't want it talked about is because they are being fucking criminals and don't want anyone to know.

Giving people subliminal nightmares is one of my hobbies.

Actually, Kane is worth pointing out how beloved it is by journalism nerds completely independently of any of the other marvels present in its making. Sure, we're a niche, but it's a niche made up of people who write about shit for a living, which is one of the reasons I'm convinced that Kane has the reputation that it does.

He's got the address of Guillemot's secret DeviantArt page dedicated to Rabbid x Sam Fisher fan art.