Griddlelol

Would it be intrusive to ask what this age related health problem is? I only ask because the fact you're not mentioning makes me immediately think "erectile dysfunction." Which says way more about me than you.

I agree, I was exaggerating to make a kind of blunt point. I just think it's important to remember that people aren't just upset over losing a shitty cartoon, they're upset that some people think it's ok to kill others in order to censor them. Which leads them to say a lot of the stupid things that you're commenting on. At least that's my interpretation of the events.

I've been looking for official wiimotes/nunchucks and they're damn expensive new, totalling about £40-50 on amazon. I recently bought unofficial ones from CEX (a second hand shop) and while the total cost was £5, they both broke within a week. You could feel the poor quality of the build too when using them. Apparently you can get them from the US nintendo store, refurbished for quite cheap, but I can't seem to find them on the UK one. I don't think any brick&mortar game stores even stock wii stuff any more. Those things that some people have 4 of hidden away are now incredibly expensive and quite difficult to find. All because I want to try Mario Galaxy and Skyward Sword. Edit: Also, it's like Nintendo heard me complain about £100 Metroid Prime Trilogy from ebay, and decided to offer it for £9 for a short amount of time. That's fucking awesome.

The news of a new Fire Emblem made me pick up awakening again. I beat it on Normal originally, so I tried out Hard last night. Fuck it's hard! Keeping characters alive is so freaking difficult. I think Normal is just the best way to play mainly for one reason: In hard you have to keep every single person together in a tight knit group to fight enemies. In normal you can split your characters into mini task forces that are able to deal with a few enemies each. I think that's just more tactical play, other than "keep everyone together." Maybe it changes once you get further into the game and have more choices/more power houses, but early on, hard difficulty isn't that fun.

My current understanding is that the opposite is far more likely to be true. Fertilization is, I believe, possible without sperm, but by reconstituting DNA from practically any cell into an ovum and initiating the steps required to form a zygote. If anything the role of men in reproduction will become an antiquated notion, and in vivo reproduction will be left to the hippies along with their meat from animals and organic food.

That really fucking sucks. I know some people who opted for majors that had no end/mid term tests. Rather they were essay subjects. It sounds like essay writing would be worse for dyslexic people, but they found that being able to work on something for 4 months in their own time was much better than taking tests. The problem with this is that 1) I've never been to a US university, no idea if it works like that there. 2) Your daughter might not be interested in such subjects - they tended to be arts rather than sciences (which relied about 90% on tests).

I feel like this is a better representation. I'm in no way defending the CH cartoons. They look pretty shitty and entirely racist, but I think this is the key point you're ignoring which caused the huge outcry.

The problem with "life expectancy" is that it's usually taken as a mean. As you said, infant mortality was quite high, which massively distorts the picture. People lived older than is assumed by the statistic prior to 100 years ago and I believe 60s is a pretty good estimate for a person to live if they made it past their teen years. Even as far back as 100/200CE. I'm by no means an expert in this though, so don't ask any follow up questions, because I'm sure you can google the answer as easily as I can. Although it's probably not really relevant to your point.

I believe he focused on creative writing. I'll mention editing to him. His world is alien to me, but I know how shit it feels to be unemployed so I promised I'd help.

What can someone do with an English degree? In all seriousness. A buddy has just got his masters and I had literally no idea what he could do, other than work in the service industry: which he refuses to do.

Not to mention how fucking weird a pump must be. One of my friends refused to do it because she found the whole concept repulsive. Don't blame her to be honest. The whole career/child thing is a difficult issue, and while I'm surely simplifying the matter, it's something that couples should seriously talk about before even considering a child. While my relationship is currently miles away from children, I made it very clear at the start that I will not budge on anything that will affect my career (the conversation was around moving to a mainland European country, but it was extended to all things). Being clear might not always be possible - some people don't necessarily know what they want.

Well that looks pretty cool. Souls like? Salty Souls?

I think I've already decided this will be my 2015 GOTY. It just looks fantastic.

The start of the multiplayer feels so restricted. You essentially just hold down R2. I tried to do some crowd control with an archer, but it was inevitably broken the moment I set it up so I stopped. I might have had more fun if I hadn't gone from being the arbiter of doom in single player to being a rookie in multiplayer.

I can relate to that a lot despite being XX years younger. Christopher Hitchins and Richard Dawkins both were great for me when I was becoming a sceptic but as I grew older they have too many weird views on social issues that I just didn't agree with and they appear to be complete dicks who I wouldn't want to associate with. I've never met anyone who is a "militant" atheist, but I feel like I'd probably find them more abrasive than most hyper religious people I've met. Then again, I live I'm the UK and there aren't exactly many hyper religious people here, so I've not come into contact with the kind of person who will tell me I'm going to hell. Fortunately the anti-vaccination crowd is negligible, but there is still a lot of misinformation that people seem to just take as gospel - I recently explained that meat doesn't "rot" in your intestine to someone which is a concept that sounds so incredibly weird to me that I thought they were joking when they said it.

Oh I know, but I was using your point to illustrate mine. There is no reason games can't be political narrative (unfortunately the game creators won't always agree with your particular rhetoric). I mean look at what Rockstar creates, there's two potential views 1) they are interested in making money. 2) they actually believe that it's ok to rape and kill sex workers because they are non-people. I think it's far more likely to be 1) but I'm sure there's a little bit of 2) in there, at least subconsciously. I didn't know they took out their ability to fight back. That's really interesting, seems like an odd design choice thematically. Yes, there does appear to be a no rule, but as you said, people don't like it. It is jarring in those games when someone is oddly invisible. It's kinda irrelevant, the God mode thing I said was more a joke about how I wouldn't know how to fix it. Thematically there is. As much as it sucks, it has moved from a weird Easter egg to become something people expect from the game. The problem to me is does rockstar really believe that it'll affect sales if they decided not to include it? I seriously doubt you'd get an outcry of people saying they're going to boycott GTA because they can't rape hookers. I feel like I'm having a hard time describing how I feel about it. I don't support it, I think it's gross, although I fully admit I thought it was funny when I was 13. The reason I'm struggling with the issue is because it's tangentially related to the "violence in video games makes people violent in real life" argument. It's suggesting that because when I was young I mistreated sex workers, I'm going to feel like they are worthless when I'm older. That's just false, as is the notion that because I gunned down millions of polygon people in FPS games I'm going to enjoy and promote war.

I don't agree with this. Sex workers In the game have more interactions that most NPCs. They do everything a random NPC does, but also you can pay them for sex. They require you to take them to a secluded place before anything happens, and if I remember rightly, they'll fight back if you do attack them. Most NPCs I'm GTA games have one interaction: you attack them, they run away screaming...or die. If you wanted to, you could run around killing only black NPCs. They'd have less interaction than the sex workers. No one kills black NPCs only because there's no shock value nor an adolescent kick from seeing pretend sex on your video game. I understand what you're saying, but if you refer to what apple cider said, rockstar are trying to make a realistic power fantasy. The idea of mobs forming to attack you because you are labelled a rapist for raping a sex worker is incredibly fantastical. Most people don't give a shit about sex workers in real life. That's not really true, there aren't bullet sponges in GTA games as far as I can remember. There are people who fight back, and that's about it. What is true is that yes: they are only interested in making a male power fantasy game. However I remember being punched to death in GTA III by a sex worker after I tried to gun her down (saying that makes me feel awkward). They're not defenceless in these games, and giving them guns would actually be a pretty good idea. Pretty much. But that doesn't mean they need to include it. I forgot they had strip clubs in those games. For what reason?! I'm not really a fan of GTA because it isn't the game it sells itself as - I want Goodfellas: The Game, not The Whacky Rockstar Adventures. I loved III because I was a teenager at the time and it stroked my ego, humour and fantasies. But now, they're not aimed at kids (or at least that's what they say, because they're far too immature for adults), so what exactly do polygon boobs or first person blow jobs do? If you have to be an adult to buy the game, why do you need to live those things out in a game? Internet porn doesn't cost £60.

I watched religulous - the bill maher documentary. Seriously? Fear mongering about religion? Creative (and blatant) editing to make people look as stupid as he possibly could. Outright insulting people and interrupting during his "interviews" showed a complete lack of respect for those he was talking too. I don't know why I watched it, Bill Maher is an ass, it just seems like he's a complete hypocrite. He talks about science, and how evidence is important, that if you're not basing you're views on evidence you're a crazy person. Then he goes and says Germ Theory is wrong, and is against vaccination. Twat.

Yup Jon, that sounds about right. The whole "you're not a true nerd if..." Is shitty, (and often the if is followed by "you're a woman") and just reeks of hypocrisy. I just read Danielle's piece on polygon about the years worst depictions of women in games. Holy shit that trailer for Ninja Gaiden Z was just embarrassing. Even if you ignore the sexism oozing from that trailer it's just kinda pathetic. I didn't really agree with her stance on GTA though. It's quite a tough subject, since the whole of the game is based around doing anything possible. So yes, there's the ability to kill someone after having sex with them. If that wasn't in there, it'd be a little jarring (sex workers get god mode after sex). It's not like it's incentivised nor is it mandatory. Obviously they could just remove prostitutes from the GTA games entirely, they don't really serve any purpose except for a shock factor from GTA3 that is now a tradition. Then again, in the world that they created they wanted sex workers, why shouldn't they be allowed to put them in? It's kind of a tough question, and while I said I disagree with her, it's more like I'm on the fence.

I'm not though. Liking video games doesn't make me into nerd, it's merely a part of a greater person. It's like saying because I like sports, I'm also jock culture.

Met some really interesting people through flat/house shares, and even experienced some rather emotional moments with people I barely knew. One girl's mother passed away within a few days of me moving in and I was the only one around to comfort her. Was very saddening but I'm glad I made a difference to her just as someone to talk to and cry on. In an all male house after a few months we all got a long gushing text from one of the sharers about how he was sorry for lying to us about his sexuality and came out as gay. He was incredibly happy when each one of us got home from work and basically said "that really doesn't matter" after he had a pretty bad experience a few years before with coming out to his parents. House sharing is pretty cool (but I have to admit I've been lucky and only ever shared with one asshole). Why do I always get new pages?!

I'm starting to find myself prefer games that rely on strong mechanics and game play and ignore story completely, or have a subtle narrative, than my traditional favourite games that focus almost entirely on narrative. I don't know why, but Mario, Bayonetta, Metroid and Souls are becoming my favourite games, the kinda stuff I would have hated as a kid. While things I loved as a teenager such as world war two games and RPGs or would have loved, like dragon age inquisition or bioshock infinite are feeling stale. Like they're written by people who don't really know how to write. I was able to overlook Destiny's lack of narrative because frankly, who cares? Mechanics are king in video games. But then there are narrative gems that occasionally come out and make me buy other narrative games again only to be disappointed with their lack of imagination or creativity.

I spent too long on google images looking for a house with Mr Crysis in the same picture. Grayson, is there not something like spareroom.com in your sea you can use to find a temporary house share? That website has saved my ass multiple times.

I wrote a long reply complaining about nerd culture but you know what, it can be summed up in a few words: Fuck nerd culture.

Oh ok, I tend to ignore where the saves are since I have the option.