Mangela Lansbury

This is definitely dependent on the cop and the school. I was one of the weird kids at my school (look, I like anime, okay, if that makes me weird then I will bring my Naruto hug pillow to dinner at a fancy date restaurant tomorrow night) and I hung around with some non-white students, so the courtesy officer did not fade into the background. When I was taken into the office for a serious offense, he threatened to arrest me and when I asked for my parents he said that the administration was trying to get in touch with them, but while they were occupied I was all his. He was not a nice guy, and he was very intimidating if he decided he didn't like you. Partly because of him, my senior year of high school school was spent full-time dual enrolled in community college so I didn't have to go to the high school campus. I don't know any by-the-numbers studies, but a purely anecdotal look at the rise of school shootings since courtesy officers became a widespread thing says they're not very effective! Even in schools with officers, they can't be everywhere at once. I think there was some hubbub after Sandy Hook about how the courtesy office did, like, nothing?

School monitors and courtesy officers are police that are on campus to... be cops on school grounds? I've honestly never been clear on what they're there for, but they're there full time usually.

There was a "courtesy officer" at every school in my area through my high school career, 2000-04. It really kicked off after Columbine, and the rash of school shootings since then hasn't lowered demand for an armed authority figure on campus since then.

agreed

I don't see why you want to restrict forms of play to exclude activities like "going hiking," "reading a book," or "socializing." I think most people do consider those things types of play, even if they don't regularly and explicitly refer to them as play.

The Lonely Death of George Bell is a beautiful eulogy for a man who died with nobody to notice he wasn't there anymore.

Specifically, he did one on Revolutions. He's only gotten through the English Civil War, the American Revolution, and the French Revolution so far. I haven't listened to all of it, but what I did listen to was pretty nice. http://www.revolutionspodcast.com/

Is persnickety sufficiently technical?

I agree with watching. I don't think CK2 plays on Macs, which I might be wrong about, but I've always been interested in CK2 ever since I tried it and it was an unapproachable mess.

Danceable AND the title is a reference to a really good movie! Sign me up! This whole album is pretty great, and songs like the War on Women have a pretty nice message ("The war on women is over if you won it" etc).

I wish we were in a place, as a society, where this was an okay thing. Regrettably, queer sexual politics since the emergence of the HIV crisis have been all about pushing a heteronormative relationship dynamic that meshes with the late capitalist idea of the nuclear family as a reliably, predictable spending unit.

"Hey, I'm trying to schedule a meeting with these 4 ED doctors and everyone's schedule is pretty jam packed. Here are three times -- can you let me know what your calendar looks like for each of those?" "This time you didn't suggest works best for me." "Can you please let me know about the times I suggested? Do any of them work for you?" "This other time you also didn't suggest works great for me too, thanks for doing this!!!" this is how you get uninvited to meetings people are terrible at scheduling and i don't understand how

i would be okay with this. even with everything set to auto-hide the doodad whatchermajig, the actual loading of giphy gifs still causes some lag in the chat and it's annoying.

Software art is separate and distinct from any kind of video game, and is already a term in use. See Scott Draves, Lia, Martin Wattenberg, Netochka Nezvanova, Shirley Shor, Deb King, Duncan Holby, Lalo Hernandez Diez, Alan Bigelow, Pall Thayer, etc. Software Entertainment is also a term that's already in use, and it is used interchangeably with video game. The Entertainment Software Association boasts members like Ubisoft, Capcom, EA, Epic Games, Activision/Blizzard, Nintendo, Square Enix, Playstation, etc.

I'm trying to think of a quick easy way to dress up as a genderbent anime girl Jean Luc Picard borg and be Locutest of Borg for Halloween, but I don't think I'll be able to pull it off.

Up until now, all the marketing materials have been this weird mix of "It's new and fun and great!" and "It's that thing you like from your childhood, it's just the same but a little bit different!" so I think I'm just going to sit on the tickets I bought and ignore all marketing materials from here on in. I'm going to go see the movie regardless, so all the marketing materials that are just a little unsettling in how they're sending their message don't have to matter to me. Buying early sets you free, I guess???

I think the onus is on a government to serve all people within its borders, and if that means providing language resources to a population then that's what it means. Language barriers are pretty simple to tackle. They just take effort, time, and collaboration. Society is not immutable in the way that toxic Western nationalist attitudes makes it seem, so making room for an incoming population should be fairly simple.

I largely relate "they need to learn the language!" with the American far right who want to pull a Hungary and build giant walls on all our borders, so I don't see learning the language as a necessity. Once there's a large enough population to make it worthwhile, I think a government and society should change to accommodate the population and their neighbors. It might be a pipe dream, but that's still how I'm going to say things should work! It's not segregation in society, as long as they are able to get jobs and work and aren't excluded by society/government for their alterity as a big-O Other. And any segregation isn't the fault of people refusing to change their way of life to better fit into a certain country's idea of the way things should be, but rather the fault of government and society not making a space for an incoming population to flourish.

I never really understand the "integrating into society" concerns. There are a lot of large immigrant populations in America that never fully integrate, instead just opting to form their own (large, robust) communities that they only really leave to work, if they leave it at all, and they're pretty successful communities. But also the only explanation of what "integrating into society" means to a European I've gotten came from a Frenchman trying to explain the great success they've had with the French Algerian population, so my understanding of what's meant by the phrase might be tainted by the obvious racism that conversation had to involve.

Reading a book is 100% a game you play with yourself. EDIT: There are so many varying types of play that trying to define a game is absolutely pointless. Everything can be a game, depending on your approach. I can treat scheduling a meeting at work as a game, and I can treat vacuuming as a game, and I can treat picking something out of the fridge for dinner as a game, and I regularly treat peeing in urinals as a game. Watching a movie can be a game, and reading can be a game. Staring at the ceiling can be a game, and if you remove the ceiling then stargazing can be a game. And a video game is a game -- which can be anything -- that includes that electronic element. There are different types of video games , but they are all video games -- to pull a comparison from earlier, like how the Waste Land is a novel, but a verse novel. Favoring a certain type of play over any other type of play is simply exclusionary. A person can play with a plot like a person can play with controls. They just have different inputs and outputs.

First I would say it's The Waste Land, two words, and then I wouldn't have any problems with that statement! I have a book that's just the Waste Land and it's pretty hefty. It's just a novel in verse, which is a whole genre -- Gilgamesh, the Odyssey, Eugene Onegin, Time's Fool, Aurora Leigh, etc. One could even argue that Markson's Notecard Quartet was a series of novels in a sort of free form verse! It's a well established genre and there are no problems with calling the Waste Land a novel.

And that's the kind of granularity in definition that's super meaningless to me. It's all video games, why use other words for it??? Also, interactive kids shows like Dora the Explorer are probably video games.

I think things like those 90s board games that incorporated VHS tapes are video games along with little things like Simon, so whatever man, all this granularity in the video game definition is just nothing to me. I've played a video game in Excel, it's fine, it's cool, video games are everything you want them to be.

KiA is forced by the rules of Reddit to call a lot of things doxing that they might not necessarily consider to actually be doxing. I saw discussion of doxing documents there when I used to visit it and they were always talked about in this kind of "we can't post them here because of the rules, we don't want to get this place banned, but if you want them, you know... wink wink nudge nudge" way. I don't think KiA is a great place to get GamerGate's opinion on doxing. The rules of Reddit have a chilling effect on discourse around the subject.

I beat SOMA last night, and then also had a SOMA based nightmare. This is a good game.