Bjorn

This is my new favorite tumblr ever

'Homeland is racist': Artists hide subversive graffiti in hit TV show

Wow, was not expecting to hear about both meat packing plants and a terrible quote from someone from my alma mater to close out the episode. I grew up tangentially around that industry (knew people who worked there, we raised animals for awhile when I was really young, etc), it can be a weird world. Besides often being cheap labor, immigrants/refugees are often also favored because they are much more comfortable with butchering animals, because of the massive disconnect between the American public and food production. Spaff wondered about the chain mail. It's how workers keep from slicing off bits of themselves on a regular basis. The knives and tools they are working with are ridiculously sharp, sharp enough to slice through cow hide, meat and bone joints like butter. Naturally they carve through human just as easily. The only thing that can offer any real level of protection is metal, so chain mail it is. Of course these plants want to maximize production, so workers are expected to butcher animals at a ridiculously fast pace. I've heard of some truly horrific accidents involving those knives on the cutting floor though, even with protection. Enjoy that next burger you buy! People bitching about immigrants, particularly Mexicans, is something that can cause me to explode. Our food supply literally wouldn't exist without them, and they're often paid and treated like shit for the incredibly necessary and dangerous job they do. People complain when the price of bread or tomatoes goes up, but a big reason for the low prices we already pay is the grinding machine we put cheap labor through to produce that food. If you like eating, then you can basically guarantee that a Mexican or Mexican-American helped produce, pack, slaughter or cut that food along the way (or all of that). When people think of Kansas farm towns, they tend to picture towns full of just boring white people, but the demographics have radically changed over the last few decades, particularly in towns with or near meat packing plants. Garden City (near where I grew up) is now about 50 percent people of Latino/Hispanic heritage (both new immigrants and 2nd/3rd generation Americans). Plus the Asian population is fairly significant now as well. It's got a surprisingly large Vietnamese population last I knew. Sorry, kind of a subject that gets me ranty.

Sweet! I'm super curious to see what you think.

Yeah, I'll buy this on release just to support awesome devs, which is probably the most common reason I buy a game on release anymore. Based on my current assumptions/knowledge of the game, I'd be comfortable paying $25-$30 for it.

The world is a weird fucking place. An Egyptian TV anchor used footage from a video game to praise Russian military, apparently unaware that it was footage from a video game.

I've been super enjoying the new Muppets show, much more than I had anticipated. A friend of mine has written an impassioned defense of it after getting frustrated with seeing some hate on it from various corners of her social media.

Entirely too long, kinda racist, but beloved all the same?

At this point, I'm willing to classify this entire argument as a competitive multiplayer video game and call it good.

Dark Souls 2, explosive barrels are often placed in such a way as to present more of a trap/hazard for the player than as a way to kill an enemy. And you've got to have fire arrows/bolts if you want to be able to 'splode them from a distance.

WNYC is planning on launching an entire podcast division separate from it's traditional radio offerings. Definitely some interesting shows they have planned, I'm particularly curious about a show dedicated to the Supreme Court, hopefully it's a mix of history and current rulings.

Benefits of being a geek! I haven't followed it closely enough to know what kind of time frame they think this might happen in, the bit of reading I've done makes it sound like the underground fire is not the easiest thing to track or anticipate with great accuracy, and it's the fire that is the primary concern.

Who knew that large hi-def screens would cause people to have the same reaction to both politics and porn.

My friend made his post public so people could share it, so reckon it's fine to post it here (spoilered because long).

Thanks all, that makes me feel a lot better about not dipping back into GZ (and I was going to be a lot less likely to buy Pain if I felt like I needed to drop $80 on both and not just $60).

Hey St. Louis people (aka Gormongous), I'm assuming you're well aware of the impending nuclear fallout in St. Louis? I had seen my StL friends posting about this over the last couple of weeks, but someone who has work experience in disaster preparedness just put up a Facebook post on what to expect and what preparations people should be making now for when/if the fire hits the radioactive part of the dump. Somber reading.

Thank the gods, someone finally figured out a use for VR: CNN Thinks Viewers Are Ready to Experience Presidential Debate Magic in Virtual Reality

What are people's opinions on the necessity to play through Ground Zeroes multiple times, both for the experience and to unlock things in Phantom Pain? I'm steadily working on convincing myself to go ahead and buy Pain, but have a nagging itch I'll be missing something by not having dug deeper into GZ. I played through GZ once, in a pretty short/rushed session, on someone else's PS4.

I finished off Legend of Grimrock today! Good game, not great, but good. Progression felt weird, you needed to dump every single point into a single tree if you wanted to max rank it, which seems like a thing a player would want to do. But it means the vast majority of the skills are pointless and unused. A different balance/philosophy towards leveling up and progression could have made it feel more engaging. Mostly I enjoyed exploring the levels and solving puzzles though. Definitely curious about the sequel. Also, I messed around with Proteus, and am calling it done. I was actually digging it and got a few little moments of genuine joy/wonder, and then I found the button to close my eyes and it kicked me out to the menu with no way to restart (I did find the post cards, but both were at the start of my world and I was in Fall, didn't want to spend another 30 minutes wandering around again). Ultimately a bit of a frustrating experience when it shouldn't have been.

Yeah, I could get down with an argument like that about the fairness of pricing if ultimately Valve's cost to provide the service was crazy low. If someone ultimately leaked documents showing that Steam's actual cost to run Steam was like 1 percent of the total revenue it took in, I'd definitely be more critical. Even from a business standpoint, maximizing profits at the cost of your suppliers (devs) and customers (gamers) is not necessarily the best practice if fairer pricing will result in more overall sales and product for everyone.

I have never understood this line of thought. Typical retail markup for physical goods can run 25 to 50 percent of retail price (my current business averages about 45 percent, a new business I've been working on will be very similar). Both my current business and my future business bypass traditional distributors, which would otherwise be taking a cut of the total price. Bandwidth is a tiny, tiny, tiny fraction of what shipping physical merchandise costs, costs which are figured into the prices you're paying for physical goods. Traditionally, retail markup on video games was 25 percent, but then you had these other costs on top of it. Compared to the physical market, Steam's cut should, in the majority of cases, be a better deal. Edited to add: I guess one could argue that Steam's employee base is much smaller, so as far as we all know, they are making much, much, much more per employee than any traditional physical peddler of games. But, eh, I guess that doesn't bother me. From a business standpoint, I think a variable cut makes a lot of sense. Small games take a smaller cut (15-25 percent), which makes small devs more financially viable, which in turn makes them more likely to continue to make more games to sell.

Rayman is the best. Origins and Legends has given me the closest thing to childlike glee that any video game has done for years.

Ice-Pick announced that Pathologic Classic HD (goddammit video game naming conventions) is going to get released this month on Steam and GoG. The remake is creating enough alterations to the core story/experience that they also wanted the original preserved, so it's got an engine update (new resolution support, blah, blah, blah) and new actual translation, making the previously impenetrable game slightly less so.

That optimism, it's impressive.