Bjorn

Congrats! Hope it's a great weekend. Absolutely okay to take a drink. Pretty much every wedding I've been in, the groom and all his groomsmen took one drink together before the nervewracking parts began.

I love both that and the inventory system because of how not gamey they feel (even though the look thing ends up creating some really silly poses for him).

I've paid very little attention to Destiny. Your post just created like a dissonance fracture in my head, as it doesn't jive at all with the limited ideas I had about Destiny.

Everyone knows the generic female costs more to support than the generic male. Ugh, I felt really gross typing that.

That's one of the weirder things I've listened to.

I managed to totally space off going and seeing that the one night it was in a theater close to me. Going to have to wait for a video release now. Dune exists as kind of a mythological thing for me, because among my friends in junior high, there were rumors of all these different versions of it, including like a 6 hour European version that was the "true" experience. It gave the movie this kind of crazy element of possibility that it only shared with things like ET or Heavy Metal, which were equally difficult to get ahold of. Of course there were multiple versions, but none like the ones we imagined there might be. I was just checking Wikipedia to verify that there were in fact multiple versions, and ran across this mind-blowing jem: I wish I lived in a world where Lynch had been given the reigns to Star Wars for one movie. The mind reels at what he might have done to it.

The Pac-Man expanded universe is one of the weirdest things that exists. You have to control his "moods" in that game to get him to take certain actions at certain times. It's actually a rather brilliant idea, but it is so weird that it appears in a Pac-Man adventure game where Pac appears to be roleplaying as Bart Simpson.

I doubt it. It's still one of those things I file under "glorious mess" that I rewatch ever few years because I enjoy so many individual elements of it.

They need those guns. The peanut butter must flow. When the peanut butter flow stops, all eyes will turn to the Netherlands. Also, how did I not know that Dunecat was a thing. This makes my day better:

Actually, I have no idea. I could see either group doing it. Something I may not have made clear is how shallow our Facebook interactions are. The good, more realistic discussions about science tend to take place entirely offline.

I feel that the claim that science has been anymore commoditized or fetishized than it has been in the past is kind of a strawman argument, as shown by Rubixs' comment about IFLS people. I think it's really hard to judge people's actual thoughts or attitudes based on Facebook comments or casual comments exchanged online. I don't want to mischaracterize what anyone has said here, what follows is not a specific reaction to any one post, but a general thoughts to the negative reaction to IFLS I've seen online. You could glance at my group of local friends and easily dismiss us as fetishizing science based on our Facebook interactions, which tend to be dominated quick stories, clever (maybe) remarks, amazing pictures, IFLS posts, and even a regular "Astro-porn of the day pic" (which is just about the most fetishized thing you can do). But that group is also made up of a couple of scientists, grad students, a professor of tech writing and a variety of less academic laymen. We can just as seamlessly go from shallow, doe eyed, hopeful discussions about the farthest reaches of what science might be capable of one day to a discussion about the nitty gritty mechanics of studying the terrestrial movement of bats and how to best gather research on that (something one guy has been working on for awhile now). By dismissing things like IFLS as simply being shallow fetishizing, there seems to be an assumption that people's interest in science doesn't go any deeper than what is presented on Facebook, which I don't find to be true at all. It's just harder to show that deeper interest on our current social media platforms. I'm not saying that my anecdotal group of friends is representative of the greater society, but I think the dismissal of people's interest in science as being fetishized, viewing it as mystical, or being incomprehensible is shallow reaction to a limited set of data. It would be like someone glancing at the IT forums and claiming that we are obsessed with the robot revolution, to a near point of fetishizing it, which would completely miss the point of the whole robot thing in the IT community. Nice! You should post to this thread as you get more features going on it. Particularly if you get a podcast going, I'm always interested in more sciency 'casts.

This is a true thing. I also originally played Xcom on console, and the inadequacies of using a controller led to me moving a guy to the wrong spot a few times unintentionally. I've known a couple of people who ended up with corrupted Ironman saves as well (it never happened to me, thank god). If you're really dedicated to the Ironman idea, you can just force yourself to play that way without it turned on and have backups in case of a corruption, without having to deal with manually backing up your Ironman save after every time you play. I would say the "purest" way (for me, not saying others should be obligated) to play is with Ironman (either enabled or just forcing yourself to live with consequences), on Classic with some of the Second Wave options turned on. I felt like the randomness added by some of the 2W options really enhance the experience and it's unthinkable for me to play without them now.

I didn't even realize this was a thing that existed. I'm gleefully excited about listening to it now. Thanks Jake!

That's a better explanation than just assuming they are purposely trying to mask their transmissions from us.

Yep, and there are plenty of billionaires on the planet who could be funding all sorts of incredible science adventures. Some are, most aren't. Allen specifically has dumped a bunch of money into SETI, but has said that he's not willing to fund something like that solely, even though he is capable of doing it. I don't think the assumption that a philanthropic person will continue is a strong enough proposition to say that it will happen. As far as space communication goes, if something like quantum entanglement ever pans out, then for internal communications among a society, light would probably no longer be used. Or we can imagine other technology that may or may not be feasible (warp powered communication devices, portal like devices for information, etc) that would explain the lack of light based communication. I actually find that to also be a poor explanation though, it's just a bit too much of a stretch for me to think they would care. It's kind of crossing over into X-Files conspiracy stuff. "The aliens are out there, but they don't want us to know."

Weirdly enough, I've found action-rpgs to be more compelling to me with a controller vs traditional KB/M. The clickfest that something like Diablo is boring to me now, but a controller changes the feel of the game even if the mechanics are the same. Don't know that I'm rational in that reaction, but it feels that way.

Will we blast them? Observation is mostly passive, letting information come to us. We'll only blast them in the hope that someone is listening, not because we'll get data back in our lifetime. How long does a species do that, send messages in a bottle through space? Once? For a year? A decade? Eventually you stop, and on the galactic time scale, you probably only have brief windows to reach another species that has both the technology to hear you and the will/interest to be actively listening.

The theme of humanity as precursor does pop up. Not as often as alien as precursor, but it's definitely there. The most obvious example would be Battlestar Galactica. It manifests typically as humans discovering that they once were far more advanced, but something drove them back to the stone age and they are just rediscovering their past. Edited to add: TVTropes to the rescue. The entries Humanity's Wake, Advanced Ancient Humans and Precursor's all address humanity as precursor to some extent. I'm definitely taking it as an interesting discussion, and not something more negative.

Good news, it's gone up since earlier this morning!

I've noticed the same thing about IFLS, and it's just weird. I don't spend much time on Facebook, so I don't know if the feed has changed at all, but it seems like most of the hate I see is just hating on it because it's popular and successful. It's like a hipster got mad at being friendzoned. "Oh, you fucking love science, that's great. You know, some people fucking loved science before it was cool and on Facebook. Some of us fucking hung out with science when no one else wanted to. Now everybody loves science, but not really. They just like science for now, they don't get science. They didn't spend hours every night listening to science. Understanding science. Science will come back, just you wait." I haven't had enough coffee to intelligently science yet, but the tiny, tiny fraction of time we've been observing the universe makes me question how compelling the Fermi Paradox is. I'll try to come back later and explain better.

I have the impression that DS2 is going to have a robust community for awhile. I'd guess you could buy it a year from now and still find low level people to co-op and PvP with.

I think a healthy dollop of skepticism is totally warranted, but sometimes it's just fun to be silly excited about the possibility of something. As for the Fermi Paradox, I've never quite bought a couple of the core assumptions of it. In order for it to be even slightly accurate, it assumes that space faring life has been actively exploring our galaxy for millions of years. What does a species or civilization that lasts for millions of years look like? Could we possibly begin to understand their motivations? And even if that were true, there's a second assumption that they would have discovered and visited Earth at some point that humans would have noticed, like the last 20ish thousand years. It requires finding 2 needles in two different haystacks (both the likelihood of visiting Earth, and then the likelihood of visiting here since modern humans evolved recorded language). To my thinking, it's always been a rather meaningless rebuttal to the existence of intelligent life because of those problems.

Okay, and it's double bad when the animation director for AC3 (no longer an Ubi employee), responds to their claims like this:

It's full of crazy little touches. Apparently every piece of armor (don't know about weapons), has a both broken and normal appearance, even though you hardly ever break armor, so most people have never even seen the difference.

Sweet, thanks!