Bjorn

No way!

I'm really glad I never noticed that. Are there cats in dishonored? Dishonored seems like a game that should have cats. And thinking about it, now I want the real Bioshock game. The one where cats and rats, at first pitted against one another as enemies, band together to overthrow humans by giving themselves super powers with plasmids. Working from the shadows, they sew fear, dissent and paranoia against their human overlords. Andrew Ryan believed Jack to be a puppet, unable and unwilling to open his eyes and see that he and Fontaine were the real puppets, dancing to the tune of cat utopia.

I don't actually remember dead cats in the Bioshocks, is that really a thing?

We have Christmas threads for a reason, this is the wrong thread for all holiday related comments.

Apple Cider, those are great! Other than writing now and again, I am not the creative one in my house. The lady sure as hell is though. I had never heard of the art of paper quilling until she got into it this winter. She made a huge piece to give to our daughter for Christmas. I built the sturdy as hell shipping crate to get it there in one piece.

Boiling Veins and Hammerhead are not mutations I often take (though Boiling Veins if picked up early would also help some in the junkyard where I've certainly taking unnecessary damage to fire at times). I'll try that! Also, I have never, not a single time, seen the Jackhammer drop. Didn't even know it existed.

Picked this back up for the first time since months before it was finished...and I'm still super terrible at it. Yah! Any tips for the boss of the ice world? That as far as I ever got in Early Access, and still stuck there. Been mostly running Robot or Fish, because they are my only two with Golden Guns right now (shotgun and crossbow, respectively). I usually get killed within 10-15 seconds of the boss spawning, aren't even having time to see a pattern to deal with.

Rami Ismail has a really fucking (not surprising) well written piece about the structural barriers in place for getting more non-westerners into game development. I thought about dropping this in one of the mega-threads, but it really is a topic deserving of it's own space.

The only way it could get worse is if the horizon was a color: Red Horizon: Zero Dawn. Or make it sound more militaristic: Red Horizon: Zero Dawn Thirty. Like, neither of those seems outside the possibility of what might have been considered.

I replayed Parasite Eve when it was first released on the PSN. Still a really great game.

I've mostly gone on a moratorium of looking at new stuff for Xcom 2, as I want the pleasant surprise of discovering what all the techs like as you upgrade. But it is very tempting to look. That's just a mess of a response. The beginning does seem genuine, and like the person responding to you is well aware both of TB, his reputation and his fans. But the rest of it is just junk, it's like 3 different emails crammed into the same paragraph. Good on you for going ahead and contacting them though, sorry you didn't get a better response.

There's a secondary vein that runs through Americans that amounts to, "I should be able to get rich with little to no work". In American mythology, you can see it present in things like the California Gold Rush and the Oklahoma Land Rush (both of which actually took a lot of work, but still include the idea of a rapid reversal of fortune). In a more modern setting, things like discovering oil on your property fits the same idea and how ridiculously successful get rich quick schemes are in this country (successful in terms of making their creators a lot of money).

That was the point I was trying to get at, that it's not a bad theory but I doubt it works for most people in practice. I used the word cynical intentionally because, I feel like the argument as it was presented created an expectation of unforgivable fallibility. Not only will your idols fail you, they will do so in a way that's irredeemable, or the likelihood is enough that it's just better not to have idols (that's my interpretation of that approach, may or may not be what Rob intended). I feel like you can have someone as a personal idol or hero, and still acknowledge and expect their flawed humanity. This may be a definitional issue, where the way we think of each of these words (respect, idol, hero, admiration) are varied just enough that we aren't as dissimilar in opinion as it seems. Some of the people I'd probably slot into the hero/idol status are people who were actually pretty broken, or have gone through some very broken periods or done shitty things or been shitty people. Their very humanity is what makes them compelling to look up to.

I went back this afternoon and listened to the slightly longer Reply All version of the story to see if my original impression stayed the same on a relisten. (side note to others: several of us discussed this subject a few nights ago in the slack chat, Gorm and I were both on the side of having some discomfort with the game). I do think the parents are incredibly genuine in their desire to use the game as a way to process grief, to memorialize their son, to share the experiences. But I also still have some really strong negative reactions to portions of their story. I'm not sure I'm comfortable discussing those further in public though. There's too many unknowns, where I think I'm filling in blank spots with my own issues with both religion and family that may or may not accurately map over to their story. And given that we're only getting parts of the story, both from the interviews and the game itself, it's probably more generous to give them the benefit of the doubt. On another note, I suspect some of the negative reaction to the game in terms of both content (death of a child specifically) and exploitation comes from people who just don't have much experience with these kinds of stories. Parents processing grief through telling their story publicly has a pretty long history, and can be valuable, not just from other people being able to learn from them but even from an historical standpoint. The classic book Death Be Not Proud is the true story of a man's teen son dying from a brain tumor in the 1940s. One of the things I found most fascinating about the book was its recounting of the state of technology in regards to cancer in the 40s, which was much, much, much further along than I would have assumed (early forms of both chemotherapy and radiation are used on the son if I remember correctly).

What I heard from Danielle's side is more that it becomes harder or impossible to champion or support a professional who has said or done something to a certain degree. The line for me is whether or not the person's words or actions are affecting other people. My goto examples of this are Tom Cruise, Orson Scott Card and Mel Gibson. Cruise and Card don't just have views I disagree with, they actively promote views and put their personal power and wealth behind spreading views that are harmful to people I love. I can't support them, they don't just believe differently, they actively promote hateful and harmful ideas. Gibson, on the other hand, had a bigoted rant and is probably a bigot. As far as I know, there's no evidence he's ever actively worked to promote anti-semitism. I don't view Gibson the same way I view Cruise and Card, because there is a radical difference in what they've said and done. I'm not a Gibson fan in the first place, but I just don't really care what the guy does or doesn't do. Rousey, to a lesser degree, wasn't just espousing an opinion, she was making an argument that a particular kind of person doesn't belong in her profession. As a respected top level professional in her career, her words and actions (through what matches she accepts) aren't just opinion, they carry the weight of influence to help determine the policy of her profession. I'll be honest though, and say I don't know enough about the science and medicine behind transitioning when it comes to hormone therapy to know what the right call in sports is. It's not something I have an opinion on, because I don't know enough. But if other people more knowledgeable than me find her words and actions harmful, then I don't see how in good conscience they could continue to support her professionally. I didn't hear Danielle arguing that Rousey doesn't get credit for what she's accomplished, but that she just can't support her going forward. I don't really buy into Rob's argument about not having idols though. I've got a deeply cynical streak in me, but that's too cynical a stance for me even. I don't think most people's brains work that way. We connect emotionally with celebrities, often whether we want to or not. Someone like Warren Zevon isn't just a musician whose music I like, in many ways he's the soundtrack of my adult life. I don't know how someone whose work I've spent thousands of hours with can't end up in an elevated position in my brain. I do think we can too easily idolize celebrities, while knowing little to nothing about them. I suspect that what we do too often is build fake idols, imagining the person we want to exist, rather than the person who does exist.

Haha, yeah, that couldn't have been worded more poorly.

Two games that I've never played, but love the names of, are Skyward Collapse and Starseed Pilgrim. Both are very evocative names, without really telling you that much.

I looked it up earlier to see how many changes have been made. Since it's inception in '92, the odds of winning the jackpot have gone from about 1 in 54 million to 1 in 292 million, while the price of a ticket has doubled. The odds are astronomical no matter what, but they do just keep getting more and more so.

I've been curious about it since it came to Steam, more as an oddity than anything, so picking it up like this is perfect. Thanks for the head's up!

Yes I did!

But I came here for an argument!

Honestly, maybe a pattern could be identified, but that really sounds like the same kind of reasoning some hardcore gamblers I've known have come up with. There have only been something like 2500 total powerball drawings, with the rules changing over time. This was the 7th time they've changed the number of balls in play. I can't imagine with that sample size that there would even be enough data to start to show a pattern.

I did buy $10 worth of tickets, fun enough to dream with the lady about what we'd do. However, after reading this article, I did regret it some. I pay no attention to the lottery, so I had no idea that last year they altered the structure of the game to specifically create larger jackpots, including massively increasing the likelihood of a billion dollar jackpot, all in the name of increasing sagging sales and whipping up a media frenzy about the biggest jackpot ever. It was some incredibly effective manipulation.

I think you're crossing over into being pedantic....this is the wrong thread for that.