Bjorn

A "mysterious" badge has been added to my badges list.

That pizza is captivating.

"Hey kids, so you've never heard of Lemon Party?"

I've wondered for awhile if he didn't just decide that he might as well embrace the image the Internet gave him and run with it, Kaufman style.

I guess it just bounced off a lot of people.

One thing about the militarization of police is that it's coming at a time when overall violent crime is around an all time low (so low some argue that it may be about as low as it can get statistically), and when officers killed in the line of duty is also near an all time low. The trends for both of those pre-date the massive push for militarization. In some places, the homicide rate as committed by police far, far, far outpaces the homicide rate committed by the rest of the citizenry.

Huh...

I personally question just how big or important some of these servers are. It seems like a bunch of us had never even heard of these guys, and we are all pretty wired into the gaming world. But now they are coming out of the woodwork claiming how big and important to Minecraft they are. Not saying it is impossible, but it certainly feels like a pretty big inflation of their size/importance to me. Also, that Polygon piece is objectively bad journalism. It's got way to many weasel words to get out of the fact that there aren't enough facts to actually back up what he was writing. They also sidebarred Notch's response, rather than running his words in-line with the server owner's quotes.

I'm listening to this right now, and it's absolutely fabulous. This show might get added to my regular list, I enjoy the hosts enthusiasm. Also you've been pretty awesome on it so far.

We talked about the severed heads thing in the E3 thread, my take was that it was an entertaining, but really random, comparison to make to call out yet again how bad the big pubs are about gender diversity on stage at events. And the right time to call them out for that is during E3, because that's when it is relevant. That's when it is news. The pubs want all positive glowing press about how wonderful they all are, and don't want people writing about how shitty they are about having women on stage at their events. The MS one was especially bad, where they had all the awkward cutaway anecdotes with a bunch of different devs and only had a single woman out of all the people they cutaway too and never actually let her answer any of their cute little questions. They paired her with a man who answered instead. And then you had the double whammy Ubisoft announcement about how women are just too expensive to model as player characters, so they had to be cut from two games, followed by a former Ubisoft animation director crying bullshit about their excuse. So there were multiple things to legitimately write about how women were handled, treated and discussed during E3. The reason I said your response to the second one confirms that your an asshole is because you are prioritizing your desire to feel good over other people's desire not to be made to feel like shit. I watched the E3 pressers with my 20 year-old daughter who is trying to get into the games industry. She notices shit like a lack of women on stage, the few women there are not being allowed to speak as much, being brought on stage to talk about Sims, but not "core" games. Places like Polygon writing about these issues, and calling out the same things that my daughter sees confirms that she's not alone. That she's not crazy for thinking that women often get the shaft at these events. The reality is that the percentage of content on Polygon that is about women is actually really tiny. Like probably 1 to 2 percent of total posts tiny. But when you say that even that small percentage makes you uncomfortable, and you wish there was less of it, what you're saying is that people like my daughter don't deserve to have a voice in the gaming press, or ought to have a quieter voice. They don't deserve to have people writing about the same things they observe when watching something like E3. And that's an asshole kind of thing to say.

That kind of does make you an asshole. And that kind of confirms why it makes you an asshole (about this subject). And I'm not being mean by saying it. I'm an asshole about some things. We're all assholes about something. I generally think you're a pretty positive and awesome person around here. But you're an asshole about this.

Holy shit Gormongous. I'm really sorry to hear all that.

If they won't let Star Wars die, then I won't let old stale jokes about Star Wars die! You can take my childhood, but you can't take my stunted sense of humor!

There's no difference between NG+ and NG++, once you leave NG, then what cycle you are on no longer matters for matching up with other people. More than likely what has happened is that you got in range of the 15 Million SM tier, the last tier and the largest tier once you're on NG+. I don't think you get sin for using the red sign, so it must have been for something else. You can see your sin status on your player status screen. Your sin counts down one for each Blue who kills you, so you can make Blue invasions stop. Spend all your souls, leave DS2 running one evening and put yourself in a popular invasion spot. Just let the Blues kill you to their heart's content as you go do something else.

Polygon is a weird one for me. Individually, it has some of my favorite people in all of gaming news at it (The McElroys, Chris Grant and Danielle), but as an entity, it leaves me wanting more.

That looks fantastic!

I signed up for Hulu Plus tonight to try it out, and promptly watched the cinema classic Cronos (not really a classic, but certainly interesting). I'm somewhat shocked at the diversity of stuff that is in the Criterion Collection, I guess I hadn't ever taken a good look at it before.

Also, claiming any on-the-record interview is "private" is what I meant as being bullshit in my original post. Private isn't the right word to use to describe communication that exists solely for eventual publication.

So I no more than typed that up, and checked Klepek's feed to see if he had anything else to say. His next tweet was this: Sooo...he kinda agrees with my take?

I will defend Notch. As a former journalist, I think Notch doing that is kinda hilarious and awesome. Klepek is being whiny and disingenuous. Reading it, I see an on-the-record interview about Notch's business decisions, and it's reasonable to assume that Polygon was going to publish the answers they got. Notch published first, and it embarrassed them. Journalists don't like it when people do things like this. They always act like it's unfair, or unprofessional. Because they didn't get to publish first. Because their methodology and words were exposed without them having the benefit of being able to edit the story themselves, which is what they are used to doing. Shit like this helps keep journalists a bit more honest and thoughtful in how they approach sources and questions. It is, technically, unprofessional on Notch's part, but I'm not going to let Klepek off the hook for his bullshit tweet.

Lawl

I wasn't even aware that this whole pay-to-play server market thing existed.

I didn't actually click on any of these links.

Apparently one of the spawn points for invaders in the Black Gulch is directly in front of one of the two worms which, if they are active, can punch you right off the ledge as you spawn. Somebody at From did that shit on purpose.