Bjorn

I don't really give it credit for acknowledging that though, I guess? The front half of that article is heavily, heavily loaded by being framed around an anecdote that looks to be at the pretty far extreme of what people talk about when they use the term microaggression. Any hedging or acknowledgement after that comes after the stage has been set, and is in many ways too late.

I'm a real big fan of Don't Starve, it's easily one of my favorite games from the last 5 years. I've generally avoided a lot of the first person ones, because it seems like all the ones I know about have ended up in Early Access hell, just kind of continuing forever without reaching a finished state (I may be wrong about that, but it's my impression). Oh, and there's Miasmata, which the Thumbs were enamored with for awhile, but I don't know that they ever got that far in it. I started a game of it, and really liked what I saw, but got distracted and never went back.

That was one of the better post credit rolls y'all have had! On misdirected emails, I get a few a year, which are always kind of delightfully weird. I have a fairly uncommon name for a man (nowadays), it's by far most commonly a young woman's name now. About 10 years ago when I would google my own name, only a few people would show up, including a high school girl on a cheerleading team and a young woman in nursing school. I've definitely gotten nursing related emails meant for her (or another nurse with the same name), and used to get regular updates about some random woman's life that was sent to a list of like 20 emails, though those stopped last year. I thought about replying a few times, but it was such a little interesting random curiosity to get them. Mostly mundane stuff, but mundane stuff about a stranger for whom my only point of reference were these emails a few times a year. I just googled my name for the first time in a long while. I used to be the majority of the links on the first couple of pages, and now I don't even show up at all until several pages in. Bummer.

Firefox has encountered a bug

If I ever do a second playthrough, one that doesn't have any interest in crafting and uses Stims, that would be something interesting to try. It would make carry weight have some meaning, rather than be an annoyance. As it stands, with a 7 str (which will eventually be raised to at least 9), I have no problems carrying my armor, 3 weapons and a fuckton of food. Optimally, what I would like to see in a game like this is carry weight include: All your equipment (including any hot swappable weapons), ammo for your equipped guns, plus like 5 slots for consumables, all of which have weight.

And now I'm hearing the classic RE ominous intro voice say: "Resident Evil...Babies"

The Atlantic published a followup piece about the microaggression stuff. I don't disagree with some individual points in either article, but I think it is also doing the thing of conflating anecdote with data. The hundreds of times a day that people manage to communicate about this stuff in perfectly reasonable manners don't get much press, but the very high profile, drama-ridden examples do. I'm also reminded of a few recent interactions the lady and I have had. One, where in a business interaction, an older white man was being condescending and disrespectful. I, politely, told him he was being condescending and it wasn't appropriate in this environment. And he flipped his shit. The lady was flying last weekend, and when she got back, she commented on how many older (white) businessmen she observed being shitty to airline employees, crossing over into straight abusive screaming a couple of times, once at a black, female security guard because a line wasn't moving fast enough. I'll await with bated breath on the Atlantic's expose on how how the fragile ego and short temper of white American business men is destroying business culture. Because even though I find some activist types to be annoying at time, I've never witnessed out of them the absolute super shit level of behavior I have out of white businessmen.

Yeah, I had found those and figured they could be used for storage, but the biggest reason I was frustrated with carry weight was crafting. I really couldn't justify keeping anything on me except my meat for cooking, so whenever I want to cook more complicated recipes, I'd have to go to a campfire, see what I needed, go to my storage, pick those things up, go back to campfire and make it. It's just really needlessly wasted time. I didn't crank up my carry weight until the last couple of hours I played last night, but once I increased it, I found just wandering around the wastelands exploring to be soooo much more enjoyable.

This thread and Shelter finally got me to try New Vegas, and I hit the point with the assassins tonight. The fucking destroyed me the first time, because one of them was next to invulnerable like you were describing. But I did happen to have a chainsaw, which I was saving because of durability concerns (pure melee character). I reloaded and switched to it and just cut ribbons through them. A weapon that completely ignores DT/DR is kinda crazy. Speaking of that kind of weapon... The first squad dropped a Thermic Lance, which kills things even faster than my chainsaw. Now I get really excited when each squad shows up, because they are the only ones I've seen so far with one. I feel like I broke the game, it's so much more powerful than every other weapon. But I didn't do anything out of order, hadn't even really peeled off to explore the wastes on my own yet. I had put off playing New Vegas for years because 3 left such a poor impression on me, but I'm really digging NV. It feels like a more complete world, characters and factions feel like they have some more believable motivations. I'm also playing on PC instead of 360, which let me eliminate two of my bigger irritations. I used the console command to increase my speed by 35 percent, because the base speed feels too slow. That's made exploring much more pleasant. And then I used it again to increase my carry weight to 1000. Dark Souls has really ruined me on ever being willing to put up with a carry weight system again. Do encumbrance based on the equipment being USED, and then just let me magically carry a billion things on me. Because going back to sell or store stuff every 20 minutes is not fucking fun or interesting. Plus I'm on Hardcore mode, and refusing to use Stims, so all my healing comes from food. The crafting/cooking system seems pretty cool, but the sheer variety of stuff you can make means you can't possibly carry it all on you, so you've got to constantly run stuff back to storage.

Thank you for linking that, the idea of the "redemption of the gross" is something that falls in line with some other stuff I've been thinking about, and that piece helped actually illuminate some of my own thoughts.

Insurance Commercial FanFic - Everytime I'm sure the Internet is an irredeemable hive of assholes and trolls, someone makes something magical.

I think I needed to be a bit of an asshole, hadn't scratched that itch in awhile. Thanks for the opportunity! I want to say it was a typewriter thing for some reason. Journalism did away with it years ago, and as far as I know it has pretty much completely passed out of all styles now. However, I do it almost all the time. It's how I was trained to type, and I just double tap after every sentence unless I think real hard about it (like this post). I've got at least one program that automatically strips them out. Microsoft Word used to automatically add a double space even if you just entered one.

Triple down assholery incoming It's occasionally redundant, but there are multiple times when it isn't. The times when it isn't are plentiful enough to say that claiming it is wrong, as in breaking a rule, would be incorrect and confusing. In addition to eot's example, there's also, "What are you laughing at?" And the English language is full of redundancies, most of which people don't even recognize. Even still, given that it's only inelegant in print, and takes up only 3 characters, I'd call it pretty low on the totem poll of redundancies that occur with the written word. Take this sentence for example: "I will refine my statement then to say my annoyance is in ending with the redundant "at", because even after reading that link I'm still convinced it's wrong and it bugs me." Then is redundant. Also, it is a much harder writing rule to always place punctuation within quotes, which is why in a sentence like that it would be more elegant and space saving to opt for something like italics to separate out the "at" instead of quotations, or just not accentuate it at all and trust the reader will understand that in this usage it is serving as a noun referencing itself and not a preposition. The quotation marks are redundant because of context. "I will refine my statement to say my annoyance is in ending with the redundant at, because even after reading that link I'm still convinced it's wrong and it bugs me." As illustrated, your sentence was not wrong, but it was not as concise, free of redundancies or elegant as it could have been written. Much like ending a sentence with at. I could have actually dissected the hell out of that sentence to eliminate multiple other redundancies or oddities, and you can do this with almost every single published piece online, from the most prestigious journals to games writers just starting out. I just think it's mostly really nitpickery stuff that's a waste of time.

As someone who was educated to be a professional wordsperson, I'm endlessly bothered by people trying to claim that ending a sentence with any preposition is somehow bad grammar.

So I think this is going to be the first Kickstarter project I've backed that hasn't been massively delayed (original intended release was "late summer 2015", and mid-September is close enough to call that a win). Comes out in just a few more days!

Twice, I have had incredibly delightful pumpkin ales, just truly wonderful beverages that I think back on wistfully. And so pumpkin ales are much like Charlie Brown's football to me now. I know, just know, that it won't turn out good. But that tiny sliver of a chance that this one, this one could be another good one, keeps me trying them every year. Pumpkin apple cider blows balls. Please do not try it.

Marty really doesn't come off at all bad to me. Some of his behavior looks somewhat unprofessional around, but it also looks like that was in response to some pretty bullshit behavior/decisions by other people. It also looks like he was being setup for awhile to be cut loose, and in such a way that they would be able to strip him of a bunch of money/stock/power.

I've listened to several of Namman's recent recommendations, and have to say I've enjoyed every single one of them so far. Been binging on American RadioWorks today while playing some catchup with some work.

Hell yeah, my wishlist AND all my shopping are done in one fell swoop.

Can Black people culturally appropriate one other? Interesting essay on Black America's adoption of African dress, jewelry, tribal marks, etc., as fashion trends divorced from the original meaning and context.

But, I think this is actually just the rare time when Americans experience this phenomena, while the rest of the world has to deal with our culture doing it to everyone else all the time (see every incorporation of history, religion, philosophy, ethnic stereotypes, geography, etc in video games and movies). That doesn't mean that it isn't a valid criticism or observation of Japanese creators/anime/MGS, but I do find it a bit odd the weight that it's given as a criticism when it appears to be pretty universal.

So it sounds like Activision was sticking their noses pretty hard into portions of the development, and O'Donnell was one of the team pushing back against that? I can see Activision not having much respect for a music/audio guy, and how that could really piss him off.

I didn't figure I really needed to, as the general critiques of it have been pretty common over the last few years: 1. Copyright lasts too long 2. A handful of companies have entirely too much say in determining changes to copyright, while the general populace has none 3. There are no punishments in place for company's who attempt to misuse copyright, take down critical (but legal) work, etc. 4. This is the consequence of 1+2: The idea that copyright is intended to furnish a decades or centuries long revenue stream for corporations flies in the face of the original goals of copyright, which were to balance the needs of society (access to information, evolution of ideas) with a content creator having limited control over their property. The balance has been thrown out the window. In the short term (anything up to 10-20 years), I really don't give that much of a shit what company's or creators do with their copyright. That's why I've generally stayed out of this discussion, what interests me are the evolution of copyright and the long term effects.

Our old man kitty gets very stressed out going to the vet, which is only like a 15 minute drive away. He's a big reason we just started leaving them at home. I think it's somewhat stressful on them to not have us around for a few days, but it's a lot less stressful than a car ride and a strange kennel.

Is leaving him home an option? Unless we're going to be gone more than 4 days, we always just leave our kitties at home. We make two or three temp litter boxes out of cardboard boxes, put out a bunch of food and water, and they're fine. If we're gone more than that, then we just have someone check on them a couple of times while we are gone. If he eats on a schedule or can be destructive when left alone, that may not be an option though. I feel a lot better about leaving them home alone than I do about kenneling them.