Mangela Lansbury

A good argument against the free speech maximalists who want to embrace an ideal that doesn't even exist in American law is this fun little blog post. Sarah Jeong (I think?) has written some good things on the subject too, but I am too lazy to google another article.

I live in a college town and I've noticed a fair amount of undergrads doing this. Living in the minuscule downtown area is stupidly expensive and, well, Michigan isn't exactly doing great economically so houses a bit outside of town are super cheap. The people I've come across who've done that say it was one of the best decisions they made for while they were in college (stable living, quieter than apartments, less incentive/harder to overindulge in the college party scene, etc), but some of them have had problems selling the house after the fact.

Notch making outrageous demands of Microsoft, about 2 years ago. https://twitter.com/notch/status/251239807257296897 https://twitter.com/notch/status/281139739304800256

Mostly, I think it's wrong to try to identify people who are making edits unless they bring their identity into it. Jimmy Wales, co-founder of Wikipedia, says a lot of questionable things, but I think his comments during the Essjay controversy are really sensible: If you want to construct a persona to edit Wikipedia that's fine, but don't portray yourself as an authority when you aren't one. Even if what these people are doing is obviously repugnant (I don't agree with doxxing people under most circumstances, so I'm not going to read the article you linked to know exactly what they're doing), as long as they're just editors who are working within the Wikipedia system, I don't think it's right to pick them out and say, "You are not worthy of anonymity," unless they make who they are an issue first and who they are is actually a salient fact.

I went on /v/ to see what they were saying about their part in releasing Sarkeesian's address. In the little bit that I read before having to run away and restore my faith in humanity by sighing wistfully while thinking about Jeff Goldblum, a comparison to Snowden was made. It's not that they ignore their own crimes. They just think it's justifiable.

My Samsung Galaxy Note 2 is pretty stable. I sometimes have to restart it when it decides to update 30 apps all at once and then runs abominably slow the rest of the day, but that's something I've experienced on every smart phone I've ever owned. The most unstable that it gets is when I'm out running errands and it's connecting and disconnecting from my car's bluetooth a lot, but just restarting it fixes anything that goes wrong there.

The Escapist has published some new journalistic ethics guidelines and a weird editorial to go with them. I don't understand the convoluted car metaphors, and I don't think it's because of me. Also, they try to play gatekeeper for some ill-defined notion of what constitutes a gamer which is just really bizarre to see in, like, a real publication that's trying to garner respect? Is this paragraph actually implying that misogyny and the mistreatment of women is an integral part of why they enjoy games and that removing it would change the product irreversibly, or am I misreading them?

It's like they're not even talking about a human being.

Growing up gay in the south and all the terrible and wonderful things that go along with that. A lot of other things too, but that particular experience (group of experiences?) probably inform the way I think and act today the most.

Ever since Vice got one of its sources arrested, I've had a hard time trusting them. I've been hearing a lot of good things about their documentaries though, so maybe I should I try to get over that.

I had fun with the game for a while, but the more complicated teleportation-heavy levels just felt like a chore. The map helps, but even then it's just kind of a pain that I have to depend on a map to tell me where to go in what was billed to me as a fast-paced shoot-em-up. It slows down the game a lot and just makes the whole thing not very fun for me.

https://twitter.com/Max_Fisher/status/508001611776798722 Max Fisher can get a lot of things wrong, but he has a point here.

Is secondhand vindication a thing? I think that's what I'm feeling right now.

I haven't lived where I am very long, and I met most of my friends up here through volunteering at places that matter to me. There's a local art house theater where I volunteer at the guest services desk, doing the glamorous job of validating parking and selling t-shirts one night a week. I met other people there who like film and through that got involved in screening for the local film festival -- just because I took the initiative to try and help out with something I enjoy. It takes some of the pressure off of trying to come up with something to talk about ("Light night tonight, huh?" "Have you seen this movie yet? I really liked the one other thing I've seen from this director.") and even if nothing really comes of it, at least you contributed to the continuing success or furtherment of something that matters to you.

I mean, like I said, if after we've seen more it really does look like it's a straight white male playable character because the writers were straight white men and that's what they defaulted to, they deserve any criticism they get for that -- some of which will be from me. You are right to be suspicious of intent and ask questions, and I hope it turns out that the game as a text/Campo Santo answers them well enough on its/their own, for your sake and mine both. Part of the problem is the choice of what stories to tell, and whether that story could have been told just as easily from the perspective of someone who wasn't a straight white male. Saying that someone's race is dictated by the story is a non-starter of an argument -- at some point very early on you make conscious decisions about who the story is about, and that decision could just as easily be that this person is a second generation Iranian immigrant as it is that they come from a nebulous white middle American background. It's a choice that was made by the creative team, not some Platonic truth that was plucked from the ether.

I think it's a fair question to be raised, and one that doesn't need to be justified. If the main character is a straight white male because of narrative reasons, that's fair but not beyond reproach. If the main character is a straight white male because the writers are straight white males and they thoughtlessly defaulted to that, that's a damn shame and they deserve to be criticized for it. Having heard them talk about representation, I doubt that it's something that they haven't discussed or that they don't have internal justifications for. I wouldn't go passing judgment on something we know so little about, but it's a good question to ask.

Nothing about their stance makes sense. Period. Am I not supposed to trust a White House reporter because they're chummy with some White House staffers? Should I not trust a reporter who's embedded with a squadron in a war zone because they happen to have made some friends among the soldiers? Is a Wall Street reporter not reliable because they sometimes grab a few drinks with people who work in finance? Should a film critic's reviews be called into question because they network at Sundance? If a food critic goes to a private function catered by a chef with a successful restaurant, should I not trust their restaurant reviews anymore? Women in the public eye are always subjected to undue criticism from both inside and outside where they work (see Jill Abramson being criticized because she was "bossy"), but I don't think I've ever seen anything of this magnitude, either in size or in vitriol.

That'd be it. FOIA requests are just requests for information that you think should be released. The agency you submit them to can either give you what you ask for or tell you why it's unable or unwilling to. I guess they're just trying to guess what police department they need to file with to get their requests (a slow process where requests are usually rejected if they can find any reason to and which typically costs you money to receive the results of as a private citizen). I'm just clueless about what "smoking gun" someone could possibly think they're going to find by looking at a police report about threats and harassment.

This was my only Banks too. I remember things just happening so that someone could look cool and having problems with the way he wrote female characters. Some of the political parts of the book were interesting enough, but it was all presented in a very superficial way that didn't really convince me that Banks had anything value to say about it. I don't really have strong memories of it since I just listened to the audiobook once while I had a data entry job, but it was bad enough that I didn't seek out anything else he's written.

In the USA, you should at least be able to access a statewide interlibrary loan system. If you have access to a university library, the interlibrary loan system is more robust -- but the state / county interlibrary loan system is probably good enough for most things. Just go to an information desk and ask about the interlibrary loan systems your local library has access to and you'll probably make some frustrated librarian's day.

The French edition has the best cover that I've seen for Dune. I found a Chilton edition at a used book store once. I really like old sci-fi book covers, so the cover is right up my alley.

A weighting towards liberal democracy just makes it more realistic, yo. It is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism, Western liberal democracy is the final form of human government, etc. My roommate bought Democracy 3 a little while ago. He said he liked it, but had a hard time describing his one major problem with it -- he seemed to be saying that it provided you with a lot of information, but the depth was largely superficial and the robust catalog of information you're given is ultimately not as meaningful as he'd like it to be. He's a big CK2 and EU player though, so who knows what he looks for in games. And looking at his profile on steam, he hasn't played it all that much.

I've seen a fair amount of games coming out with things like materials or content usage licenses, which are basically guidelines for how you are allowed to stream/make videos from their games. Here's FFXIV's policy as an example, or Microsoft's policy for another. Generally, you're allowed to stream or make videos and profit from them using advertisements (for instance, through a YouTube partnership), but you're not allowed to sell the video outright. Blizzard's policy goes so far as to make special note of the fact that you are not allowed to make money from videos of their games except by advertising via partnership programs on popular video sites. There are some very grey areas, though. For instance, Activision buys a license from EOTech to represent EOTech's holographic sights in their games. I have no idea what would happen if EOTech (or their parent company, L-3 Communications -- I think EOTech's legal department is one person so she probably wouldn't tackle it herself) took issue with a video that said bad things about the way a sight looks in a video from a Call of Duty game. I remember there being a big deal with Nintendo not allowing Evo to stream Smash at some point, and Nintendo generally being really controlling of their content on YouTube, but I can't find their official policy (ie, it wasn't on the first page of google results from my first search).

Normalization has a lot to do with these things becoming okay and commonplace, so it's not wrong to say what you do about "video games make you a killer," but in this case it would be more accurate to say media makes you a killer. You make a fair point about the fact that if people see the police as a paramilitary unit doing brave, heroic things in movies, on TV, and in video games, they're more likely to be okay with the police rolling down the street in a decommissioned military vehicle.

My dad used to tell me stories about how when he was stationed in Germany guarding things, the Americans would either have the Flemish soldiers with them do the shooting or have the Flemish soldiers replenish their ammunition stores after an incursion because the paperwork involved in accounting for every bullet they shot was a nightmare. The paperwork QTEs would be pervasive if there was any realism with regards to that. But that's the military 30 or 40 years ago. I'm not very educated on the force side of things (beyond incidents like a SWAT team disfiguring a baby in a drug raid by throwing a flashbang into his crib), but I know that as police are given more invasive policies -- things like civil forfeiture and stingray surveillance -- they use them, generally operating in areas so grey they're basically legalized corruption. There are a lot of examples of bad policies ending in people being injured or killed if you just google phrases like no knock raid wrong house or and the cops in those cases generally don't have anything happen to them, if that's what you mean -- and they're not exactly rare, as you can see in this CATO institute map of botched paramilitary raids. There are also some pretty troubling instances of the FBI convincing people to take part in terrorist activities then arresting for it, if that's the kind of policy change you're looking for. These aren't necessarily new policies but they're policies that are being used more today than they were when they were originally put in place, arguably beyond the original intended scope.