Bjorn

Global Warming: Kartz! - An examination of how humanity's consumerist culture of disposability has contributed to climate change, but fun!

I'm bummed the controller is what's holding them back, but will reserve hope that it does eventually get released. Sure my 360 pad does fine, but I'm curious as hell how well the Steam Controller works.

Animated animal pun. I approve!

I fully agree with that, and by and large I think that's probably true of many of the men who identify as MRAs (that they do not become misogynists because they found an MRA site, they found an MRA site because they are already a misogynist). Honestly, talking about mental health is pretty far afield from anything that I am particularly well versed in. But what I was saying is mostly summarizing the thoughts of friends whose opinion and experiences I respect and can sympathize with, and their logic makes sense to me.

I'll see if I can get the gist of what I'm seeing out of some of my friends on Facebook. The umbrella term "mental illness" is used entirely too much to lump together what is in fact a hugely divergent set of illnesses. Addiction is a kind of mental illness. Imagine if we were used to seeing headlines that said, "Mentally ill man kills family of five in car crash" while the reality is "Drunk driver kills family of five in car crash". Or if a drug addict stabs someone to rob them, "Mentally ill man stabs local clerk in robbery". We don't use the umbrella term when we have more accurate and obvious terms. The problem is that we don't necessarily know what's wrong with someone like Rodgers. Misogynist, sure. Delusions of persecution? Likely. Sociopath? Maybe? And since we don't have a specific term, we just say "mental illness." Which is a really poor way to discuss something like this. Mental illness is as likely to be used to describe someone with depression as it to be used to describe a cult leader as it is used to describe a serial killer. It is functionally meaningless because of how it is used, but furthers the stigma of mental illness in this country. Which is already tragically stigmatized in the first place. We need specificity, but often lack both the proper knowledge or terminology. As for MRAs...I believe that these are dangerous groups composed of at least a percentage of dangerous people and that real harm comes to people because of them. Some of them pursue and harass women they believe are false rape accusers, publishing their personal details online and encouraging others to harass them. At one point A Voice for Men maintained a wiki with a list of hundreds of supposed false rape accusers (thankfully it appears to have been scrubbed since the last time I looked at it). As for PUAs, multiple of the "guides" in fact promote strategies that can lead to sexual assault and rape, like not taking no for an answer, isolating a woman from her friends and using aggressive physical contact, to some extent engineered to make a woman feel unsafe saying no. Kickstarter had to institute a ban financing PUA books and apologize after it was revealed that the previous writings of one author were essentially advocating sexual assault. But he still got his money as the campaign had already finalized. We have examples of other harm coming out of these communities. Rodgers may be an extreme case, but he is not isolated. Absolutely Rodgers himself is a complex stew of influences that we will likely never fully understand, and we should not mischaracterize him as being the poster child for how screwed up MRA/PUA culture is. But I fully support using this incident to take a harder look at the MRA/PUA communities, their toxicity and their systemic enabling of violence against women. Edited to add: Actually, it's not just the MRA/PUA stuff. As Argobot said, it's the greater culture surrounding young men, sex and entitlement. The MRA/PUA are just a really extreme, visible extension of that culture. And that culture needs to have more attention paid to it.

This surprises you after tumor-bat?

My Axe wielding character should be approaching the 2 million tier, I'd be down for some co-op and will likely be on here in a minute if anyone is playing tonight. Though I'm heading into end game and my SM is likely to jump up pretty quick. I still have some loose ends to clean up on this character and might stick around NG for awhile with him though.

Also on the Beast: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/05/26/santa-barbara-shootings-show-that-hating-women-is-an-ideology-and-killing-people-for-ideological-reasons-is-terrorism.html I'm definitely seeing some backlash on my Facebook about some outlets pushing the mentally ill element of the story, which I think this paragraph sums up nicely why this is problematic:

Yeah, I bought all the books in the series that were out a couple of years ago for my wife, figuring that if she loved Dresden, she would love Butcher's other books. I'm pretty sure she got through the first one, but just petered out on the second one. She didn't think they were bad, just didn't capture her attention the way Dresden did. After that, I just never bothered to read them myself. She reads way more fantasy and urban fantasy than I do, and I tend to wait until she's gushing about something before I try it. Whereas I read way more sci-fi and general literature than her, and she waits until I start gushing about something to try it out.

Absolutely. A good example in my life is music. My wife was on a vocal scholarship in college for awhile, and has a great appreciation for the craft and art of singing. But some of the music she likes, while I technically can appreciate why it's good, just leaves me...cold. Whereas I tend to favor singers who may not be perfect, but drop dumptrucks of emotion into what they are singing. On topic! I don't know when I'll start reading Skin Game, need to decide if I'm going to wait for Butcher's local reading to pick up my copy, or drive into KC to get it early. I fucked off and forgot to order it early enough to have it shipped to me.

Damn, it's Dead Island: Epidemic, not Dead Rising. I got really excited about covering wars and making sweet dirt bike jumps in a Lords Management game. Maybe a mode where the whole objective is to put funny hats on your opponent and take compromising pictures of them.

For what it's worth, even with my criticisms of the Dresden Files, I still really like them. They're fun, exciting reads with characters I love. It's one of the only book series I've ever read twice. And if you liked Storm Front, they only get better. It is the weakest of the books in a lot of ways. The official Dresden fan club has suggested that new readers actually skip the first two or three books, and then come back and read them for background once they are engaged with the world and characters. And even looking at it critically is kind of fun, because it is soooo scattershot. Strong, independent and engaging female characters while also having a bizarre sexist thing going on. Shitty white-washing of Chicago and some possibly racist characters/themes, while also having really awesome non-stereotypical minority characters. There's some incredible world building going on that takes a dozen books before you realize just how much ground work he's been laying for years to set some shit up, contrasted by what is at times some pretty cheesy and groan-worthy writing. Sometimes I like things that are broken, in part because they are flawed. I think the Dresden Files might fall into that category at times (see also Deadly Premonition). Unfortunately, from what I've heard (I've never read them, so no direct knowledge), Butcher's other big series is also pretty bad on the focus on women's bodies and kind of ridiculous running commentary on them, and it isn't written from the first person. So it seems like it may be more an element of Butcher's writing and less a narrative thing with Harry. Though I am still holding out hope that it does get better or that there is a narrative element that pays off. I actually went down a bit of an Internet rabbit hole this afternoon of reading criticisms of the Dresden files, most of which were written around the time Cold Days came out. I had managed to forget just how many problems the series has. A lot of people have some pretty serious issues with characters like Listens-to-Wind, who is a character that I both really like and can recognize has some super fucked up issues in terms of design/writing. There's actually some narrative potential there to clean up some of LtW's stuff, if Butcher ever takes the opportunity to.

This is definitely a thing that happens. My university and our in-state rival each excel at different sports (American football vs basketball), and so each team's fans basically refuse to acknowledge the validity of the sport that their team is bad at.

If the plot with the Mantle plays out and actually did this, I'd be thrilled. But yeah, I don't think it is likely. The whole attitude towards women is also compounded for me by some sexuality stuff. There are several instances of extremely convenient hot bi-girl activity. Because that's such a typical male fantasy. But no lesbians, and the only time gay males are mentioned is Thomas' over the top impersonation of a gay hair dresser, Harry being assumed to be the boyfriend of Thomas in awkward ways that are played for a cheap laugh, and then the very weird anonymous gay sex park scene. Now narratively, I think a lot of this stuff makes sense. Harry's history is fucked, being raised in an abusive household, isolated from society and encouraged to fool around with the girl who was raised as his kind of pseudo-sister. The Winter Mantle does look like it is having an effect on him. A sex vampire having threesomes seems totally reasonable, which, btw, hooray for ethical non-monogamy showing up in a book. I actually like how Thomas' relationship has been handled (though there is a criticism there about how her sexuality serves her man's needs, while she is apparently supposed to be completely satisfied by satisfying his desires, but that's going down a weird rabbit hole). But taken as a whole, much of the attitude towards sex and women's bodies is super juvenile. A lot of the characters around Harry have gone through major changes. But 15 books and about 15 years of time in world, Harry as a character doesn't seem to have particularly changed or matured in regards to anything related to sex or sexuality, and may well be getting worse (Winter Mantle or no).

Scanning the coverage today, it does seem like there is a lot of focus on misogyny, PUAs, MRAs and the toxic attitude that fed whatever other mental illnesses this guy had. I'm somewhat surprised by the coverage, to be honest. I also scanned the right leaning blogosphere, and it's as disgusting as one would expect. Blaming women, blaming feminism, blaming liberals, blaming Hollywood, blaming Rodger's dad (he takes artistic nude photos! The horror!), trying to discredit any piece that mentions misogyny, all sorts of crap.

I don't mean to rub salt in this wound, but you're actually getting the easy version of the Shrine of Amana. The Shrine was patched to nerf the mages, the magic missiles were more damaging and had near perfect tracking in an earlier version. From the second to the third bonfire, just take it slow and carry a bow (I rhymed!). You can always snipe them one at a time. If you don't have a bow, you can either dodge or just strafe left and the missiles will miss you. You can also infuse your best magic defending shield with more magic, which will easily let you tank the shots. When there is singing in the background, the little water dudes actually sparkle, so they are super easy to see. And if you move slowly, you can constantly click auto-target to locate them. The guys with the maces are total dicks. Do not engage more than one at a time if you can avoid it. Once you're at the house in the middle, you can actually sneak around the left and take out the farthest left caster with a bow, making the next section a lot easier. Inside the house, you can summon Felicia the Fucking Strong. She'll be happy to face tank a bunch of enemies for you, which will make the Mace guys a lot more manageable. If you do bring her in and she lives, dismiss her BEFORE you fight the boss. She's an absolute disaster if you take her in there. She's also hilarious and worth summoning once just to see her and her lance go charging into enemies. Pop your head out the back door of the house, lure the one mace guy in, murder him, and then go out and murder the one priestess left. Now you've got a couple of casters, two mace guys and a healer left. Take them out one at a time, let Felicia tank them, whatever tickles your fancy. Charging the two mace guys is a terrible idea unless you have something like a halberd that can hit them and the healer at the same time. From the third bonfire to the boss, I'll let you discover that area on your own. But remember PATIENCE IS YOUR FRIEND. Don't rush through here.

ODST has a rep as the "bad one"? Did not know that. It was an absolute treat, and in a lot of ways was the turning point in the series for me. I played Reach, but don't remember a lot and skipped 4 completely.

Apparently in that same series, Catwoman became a werecat. OF COURSE! Bats was into the whole vampire/were-creature thing before it was popular. Hipster Batman is too cool for sparkles. That's why he has chest-knee-face tumors. It's the physical embodiment of his future disdain for Twilight.

I've vacillated on if I actually want to play MP3 or not. I have a lot of fondness for the originals (no clue of they hold up, haven't played them since they were relatively new), and so much about 3 just struck me as...off or weird somehow. Like completely failing to nail the things that made the first two interesting.

Because Internet.

Is there a companion Doritos truck?

I wasn't solely replying to you with my original comment. I was replying to Brooks being brought up at all, it just happened to follow your post.

Absolutely valuable. Because MRA types objectify and lump all women into a kind of single "other" entity, it can be easy to accidently do the same thing when talking about them because you are talking about their beliefs and writings, but not necessarily delving into the diversity and experiences of women. This is getting afield from Rodger himself, and more into general MRA/PUA stuff, but the obsession with sex as a commodity and the woman as object is so alien to me. It seems like it all comes from a place of self-sabotage. If your ultimate goal is just to have some sex, that's actually not that hard of a thing to accomplish in modern American society (particularly if you don't worry about pursuing whatever criteria you find personally attractive). But their standards, methodology, attitudes and whatnot all create a situation in which having sex is next to impossible for them. It's like what they really want is to be sexless, angry, hateful misogynists, and they've created a self-fulfilling breeding ground of resentment that would actually be really easy to escape from, if they wanted to. They can't imagine, or accept, anything other than this elusive perfect power dominance of another human, something they've convinced themselves once existed and was lost.

I've been meaning to go through and listen to some of the commentary tracks since they got added, this makes it more likely that I will do so.

How do you know how the dog feels? Dogs seem thrilled at the chance to slurp up puke. One of my cats gets so excited I have to lock her in another room to clean it up, if I even get a chance to clean before it's gone.