Bjorn

That's funny, because usually if I take the time to post here, half the reason is to see if someone can turn me around on a game. If I know I'm sure I'm done with something, it just gets deleted from my hard drive and I move onto the next game.

Hooray! A budding convert! I wish I had a better memory of what all things I enjoyed using. I know that I tried to take in at least one new combination to every single battle, because there are so many to try. NG+ is interesting as well, as you begin to get copies of existing functions, which let you do some interesting combinations that aren't possible in the original playthrough, though I never got very deep into NG+. I know I found the Help() function fascinating since it has such a radical different purpose depending on how it is used.

The phenomenon of "vocal fry" appears to be pretty gender neutral, but it is solely women who end up getting criticized for sounding that way. There's even some horrible/hilarious examples of men who use/have vocal fry criticize women for doing it (like Howard Stern).

RP1 is a weird one. I enjoyed it for the fun/fantasy/escapist elements of it, but I know parts of nerddom that fucking worship that book and I don't really get that out of it.

No, no you are not. I'm silly excited for it.

So we played a bit of this in Early Access, then decided to wait for the full release, which is now out! Yah! It's quite a bit of fun, though I strongly suspect that their original ambition for this game was much, much, much larger than what finally got released. Each map is basically a mini-Terraria which you need to explore, build a base, make soup, crush your competitor and then move onto the next world. It can get a bit repetitive if a particular planet is difficult to automate, but since we're playing only in co-op, we can take turns to alleviate that if either of us gets bored with manual management of the factory and farms. I'm hoping the later worlds get bigger and have more of an opportunity for long form sandbox play. I'd love to get a massive, hundred room automated factory going, but through the first two-thirds of the worlds, none of them seem big or diverse enough to support that yet. I also hope they aren't done building this, that they've got some further plans. At one point there were (or at least plans for) research trees, weather biomes, more robots, and much more systems driven interactions on the planets, which were all scaled back. I don't think they'll ever get back to those points, but I'd still rather see some more development on it.

We finished this up a couple of nights ago. Sadly it does not grow terribly much in complexity, though there are some neat gimmick levels later on that force you to do without some equipment you've been used to using. The final level is by far the largest and best stocked, and would probably make an interseting level to build a massive base on, which is something we will probably go back and experiment with. They've said that a sizeable patch is supposed to be coming within the next couple of weeks though, which will add in some minor cut content (most notably, half the tutorial was cut for some reason and is being restored) and a bunch of balance/bug fixes. Overall even with my disappointments in it, I enjoyed our time playing it and consider it well worth the purchase. I was just hoping for something more like PJ Monsters, which is a game I continue to return to every so often years after playing it the first time. Edited to add: I've also been really impressed with the dev interactions with the Steam forums, which is always something I like to recognize. I've asked a couple of clarification questions, and devs have responded to them.

I'm so disappointed in you Tanukitsune. Transistor was easily at the top of my list of favorite games last year, I remain perplexed how incredibly divisive it was in the experiences people had with it.

This is more a general response than a specific one, but I'm quoting you to separate it out from the barricade discussion above. Something I didn't address earlier that I also found interesting was a response I saw repeated by multiple people which was essentially, "Sanders isn't perfect, and we shouldn't expect perfection out of him, it's just take him some time to address this particular issue to other people's satisfaction." The reason I found that response particularly interesting is the implication that they do apparently expect perfection from the BLM (or whatever group it was that did the Seattle thing) to act perfectly, more closer to perfection than they did. It falls in line to me of how it's okay for police to make mistakes, but mistakes by black people justify their execution. This is kind of like the progressive version of that, white people are allowed to be flawed, but black people better be perfect in how they act around them or we'll abandon our support of them. Fair point! I mostly phrased it that way because they knew what the likely outcome of their action was. I generally agree with your take on barricade placement and police response to peaceful protests like this, but was speaking more from a realistic expectation stance rather than and idealist stance.

My introduction to SJW as a term came from gamers in the Bioware forums and the old Joystiq commenters, and it was never used as a positive. Not saying that it wasn't used that way somewhere, but my knowledge of it was certainly as a derogatory term used by the shitbags of the gaming internet. I rather enjoyed that it was gamergate that ended up getting us to reclaim it as a positive self-identifier. Though I actually think it's a term that should probably be left to die anyways. It's too meaningless in a lot of ways, or full of too much contradictory meaning.

Yeah, common definitely doesn't make something right, but the main reason that I pointed that out is that you never see the level of vitriol and bullshit that have been thrown at the BLM people thrown at other protesters who interrupt events (at least I don't have any in my memory and some casual searches didn't turn up any, if other people do, please educate me). Part of considering this whole thing, for me, is not whether the original action is inherently right, but what the response tells us about people, particularly white progressives.

I've had some conflicted thoughts about the BLM protestors who have targeted Bernie, but ultimately I've come around to being okay with what they've done. First, heckling and interrupting politicians and candidates is super common. You can find multiple examples of it already this election cycle (including some white folks interrupting Clinton). Not to the degree of taking the microphone, but certainly being a significant disruption. I've never seen the kind of reaction to this that I have from BLM interrupting Bernie. I think that's kind of telling. This is an established, regular form of protest, but when black people do it to a progressive darling, white people freak the fuck out about it. This is not okay. Second, there's a pretty reasonable argument that Bernie wasn't paying much direct attention to racial inequality in this country, he was focusing mostly on economic inequality. Now lots of folks say he's the natural ally of BLM, but I think you can excuse people for not trusting that an old white guy who isn't talking about their issues now will be any different once he's elected. Third, is it a good strategy? Well, Bernie has made some adjustments to his campaign and he is forcing Hilary to take clearer stances on several issues. He's hired a new press secretary who is out of the BLM movement and help him communicate better with black people. It's looking like this was a successful strategy to get both candidates on the record about this whereas they weren't before. Was it the only strategy? Probably not, but with activism, you gotta take the gains you can. Fourth, they have shown the ugly, racist side of progressives who are ready to abandon or attack BLM at the drop of a hat. This is not a bad thing to force other progressives to face.

I honestly think you're having a bit of an overreaction here, what Ninety-Three posted is the far more accurate description of what happened. And since this was a planned attempt to get arrested (including them moving from the original spot to another one closer to the building after 20 minutes), it really does a disservice to the intentions and plans of the protestors by not telling their story accurately. I don't think that was Mangela's intention, since I did see some social media posts earlier that were not characterizing it in an accurate way and it would have been very easy to make poor assumptions based on the Internet's early reaction.

Governor Nixon: "Those who terrorize communities with gunfire and commit violence...are criminals, and their reprehensible acts must not be allowed to silence the voices of peace and progress," Nixon said. Oh, wait, no, read that wrong: "Those who terrorize communities with gunfire and commit violence against police officers are criminals, and their reprehensible acts must not be allowed to silence the voices of peace and progress," Nixon said. That's right, state sanctioned violence is fine.

Cool! I actually quit listening to Bonfireside Chat awhile back, but I'll have to make sure to download this episdoe.

I really wanted to keep digging into Abyss Odyssey, I completed it twice and there was the whole community progression element and different characters, but ultimately I didn't find the actual gameplay to be quite good enough to just Spelunky levels of playing.

I was actually curious about that when the kiddo moved into the dorms a few years ago, the price did outpace inflation, but it was only by about 20 percent (no where near the tuition difference between what I paid and what she was paying). But on the corporatization side, I really wish there was still good investigative journalism around here, I'd kill to know (or be able to easily dig) into the finances that go into these dorm remodeling and new dorm projects. But as part of that privatization, the student housing is (as far as I understand) a private corporation of which the university is a primary owner (just like the part of the athletics department that handles certain parts of the finances), which exempts it from certain disclosure laws. That shit drives me up a wall, because it's just a bunch of smoke and work paperwork to reduce accountability and disclosure.

Living around a college town, and having a college aged student, I do think the coddling of college kids is worse now than 20 years ago when I started school. The difference between the dorm rooms the lady and I lived in versus the fucking suites they have now is staggering (at the same school, mind you). That said, I think there is a whole bunch of hand wringing that goes on, and I thought that Seinfeld came off like a sheltered jackass in his earlier thing about this topic. Kids aren't nearly as fragile or sensitive as some adults make them out to be. I would say the order of things I hear my academic friends complain about is state level politicians, administration, parents and then their actual students. And these are the people working with students every day.

Huh, okay, that combined with other people's arguments and discussions just swayed my impression of the phrase a bunch.

We're also both dealing with the imperfections of interacting in first draft comments on a forum, which inevitably seem to lead to some amount of poor communication, I would probably state my case/feelings a lot more clearly if I worked them over for a couple of days in a txt doc instead of just typing out loud. And....I didn't go back to work. I have continued reading that piece between Kang and deBoer. This (from deBoer) really struck a nerve for me. I've been finding online activism and leftist/progressive spaces to be harder and harder to engage with for awhile.

See, and this feels like putting words in my mouth I didn't say, or taking what I've said in the least charitable light. I've actually literally said the opposite, that people's concerns should be listened to and considered, but not be an automatic veto. The middle ground is that humor some people have issues with can continue to exist while we simultaneously listen to their concerns. This, many times over. His criticisms of the Toast don't make any sense to me. I've read several pieces of his in the past that I've loved, but the Toast and the Ortberg he's talking about aren't ones that I recognize. The comments on the piece aren't "going wild" for it (though I know what he's talking about from other Toast pieces, but that specific comment section isn't doing it, which kind of breaks his point). Much like his imagined "comments gone wild" section, the male tears response is also imaginary. The only person who references male tears is him. People, men and women, are discussing books they do and don't like on the list. This might be because of my own personal social bubble, and that I rarely interact with Toast fans online. The fans I know are all people I know in person. And not one of them would shy away from criticizing the Toast for sometimes throwing up some low effort or sub-par content. But hey, you can't hit a home run every time. I think someone could write a really smart piece that's critical of the Toast, but that's not it. It honestly feels like he's trying to crowbar the Toast into some other larger points he wanted to make. Oh hey, so I just noticed there's an entire back and forth between DeBoer and another person about the Toast section of that. I will have to read that later, as I really got to get back to work, but reading the opening section, I think this paragraph kind of gets into my reactions on this topic: While back we had a long discussion on here about the call out culture, and what a destructive, energy and time wasting monster it could be when run amok. I see shadows of that in things like this discussion, where something that problem doesn't really need all that much attention ends up being entirely too divisive (like killallmen, and my own continuation of this discussion, but I am finding it to be an interesting discussion and I've learned some thing).

I'm just disclosing a personal frame of mind here. In journalism, there's an old phrase, "If your mother says she loves you, check it out." Skepticism of basically everything and everyone is fairly deeply hardwired into my brain at this point. I actually try to push against that in my own head, because I think it can make me more cynical than I like to be, but still, pretty much there all the time. Also, that's...kind of infantalizing to me, I think? Like, PoC are not a monolith of single opinions, and with something like humor, you're likely to be able to find people with positive, neutral and negative reactions to most types of humor. Below I link to some Misandrist Lullabies, and these were read out loud at a party awhile back. The guy who lost his shit laughing the most was a black dude, he fucking loved them. That's anecdote, but so are all the references in that article. We're just dealing with anecdotes of people's reactions to humor, and usually anecdotes in the single or double digits. If I'm listening to all of them with less skepticism than I do anyone else, and I'm hearing a variety of conflicting opinions and reactions, then what am I learning? How do you decide what the line of acceptable skepticism is? Hmmm, I probably need to think about that some more before saying anything else. Also, are any of us here really engaging in a picking apart of the reactions? I'm not saying that a reaction is somehow illegitimate or shouldn't be considered, just saying that a few people's reactions don't necessarily have to be the final say in what someone thinks is funny. It sounds like you were pretty thoroughly immersed in this kind of talk for awhile, whereas I've only really encountered it on occasion. There's still some novelty to some of the ironic misandry because it's not part of my daily, weekly or even monthly encounters. And The Toast is probably responsible for 95 percent of the misandrist humor I encounter. Misandrist Lullabies still make me giggle. Maybe some day they won't, like how Cake/Lie jokes make me groan and roll my eyes now.