Mawd

Any love for kumara "sweet potato"? It's so good; bonus points if you grill them into wide cut 'coin' chips.

I think Kotor and K2 are too cemented in their times (re: tech limitations) to have been this while I saw some glimpses of what could have been enabled in the mmo. But that's just me.

Anyone else feel like playing this game is like seeing into the version of SW:TOR you wanted?

Wait what why's she sexist? I love Bee and Puppycat :c That character reminds me so much of a friend of mine. So I summoned my courage and actually read a tumblr post plus some comments but, I don't know. Is it insensitive to state that I think that people with a problem with that image are overthinking it a little? Like they saw things that stuck out as overly wrong for them and ended up in a critique loop? Which really just comes back to the bigger discussion occurring right now. edit: no they're not.

I knew what you meant. I hope I didn't come across as admonishing you or anything.

I'm just chiming into a very small part of an interesting conversation here but it is frustrating.It's not uncommon to meet other homosexuals, openly identify as bisexual, only to read the bemusement coming off them. Sometimes they then implicit that you're saying you're bisexual because its fashionable, or because you don't have the courage to come out as homosexual to everyone. But they're extremely horrible discussions to get into because only you can really advocate for yourself, and if you're lucky someone you both mutually know to advocate. Whereas they can draw from everyone they've known so you get a lot of anecdotes from people's time at highschool or some other point in life when a homosexual was uncomfortable with talking openly about their feelings so they did publicly label as bisexual before saying that they were gay once everyone else was used to the idea. Bonus points if they're talking about themselves. It's not that unsimilar to a conversation about personal expression (for example "how gay are you?" which inevitably revolves around the less stated question of "how masculine or feminine are you?" with even less discussion of what people think qualifies as masculine or feminine behaviour and how much is prejudice; also these discussions encourage a fair amount of people to crow "Man I'm so straight acting" or begin talking about how they don't like feminine gays because they colour the experience of 'coming out' for them because people are still really used to the idea that gay men are all effeminate musical theatre lovers because they're the most visible. But really the 'alpha' gays should just come out already to change the impression that all homosexuals belong to a 'gay scene' or act in a highly specific effeminate way/rant.). Something I hate about most internet discussions is that there's always some contrarian out there going "bullshit/honey, no" to statements you make about yourself. I'm not sure if this is really content for the feminist thread beyond examinations of what really makes people masculine or feminine although it's probably talked about frequently here. Eh I just really needed to let some frustration out. Conversations like the above caused me to no longer enjoy some forums where this kind of topic is more at home.

My partner and I have talked about sleeping with other men. But we trust each other that it'd only happen given mutual consent and attraction. We do have an unwritten list of people we'd bed together and we're quite comfortable with it. We know enough about each other to know there's no one else we'd rather love. edit: stumbled into the wrong conversation.

Elfroot is easy to buy, like 20 for infinity, same for blood lotus and spindleweed. I'm still enjoying the game. My biggest problem with gathering is that animation time. Also I wish there were storage chests in this game. I quite like having a collection of unique items. Had to abandon that hobby though. Also I'm finally doing my favourite Dragon Age activity; talking with fade spirits. Also Dorian's conversation with his father struck a chord with me. I could feel myself starting to cry by the end which was nicely cathartic.

With the war table just set your pc's system clock forward.

I think there's just a real rush to outsmarting other humans and using strategies that require multiple people to work together. Also NS2 is super social. I've met over a hundred people from playing it this year; people who are/were all fairly regular in the small but dedicated Australian community. Most of the people I know use mics as well (pretty much need to imo) so you end up way more familiar with other players than playing say pub TF2, PS2, BF4, Dota 2, etc. So the temptation is high to just boot up voice comms and play as long as my e-friends are willing. That said my recent break has left me way less tolerant for games with bad/stacked teams. I usually try to antistack but lately that means I'm in a team of ten with three other good players and 30 minutes before anything gets done about it.

Yeah I had a weird moment when I hit 1000 hours of Natural Selection 2 recently. I've taken a two week and counting break from the game which has felt really nice but I'm being slightly nudged to get back in hard next week because my clan hasn't been scrimming at all without me. I still enjoy the game and if I play a day or two I'll have my competitive level edge back but I don't think I can play it as hard as I used to now.

Yeah gathering sucks. I've been playing on hard and I've noticed that I only do 4 base damage to some enemies which is really lame. Plus my staff never seems to do as much dps as advertised anyway.

I'd be super happy with changing conversation options it's something I really want in my RPGs. (I also go super flirty usually although I'm holding back since I don't want to sneeze and accidentally sex someone ) I never played ME3 so I wouldn't know. As for lack of healing magic I'd still prefer a wimpy spell that healed things to 1/4 health and maybe no more. I'm not sure if you realised but I wasn't calling all healing magic wimpy, I was calling for a really weak healing spell that wouldn't mean infinite healing at all. I was on level for the Haven encounter but I'd built my party with my pc as a dps Mage, Solas as a hard support, Cassandra as a tank, and my mistake was taking Iron Bull for these encounters Because he became a huge potion sink which screwed me over. I'm not sure if I agree with the comment "it's like Dark Souls" honestly. This game isn't exactly wholly designed for that mode of play. I mean with DS most of the time I can avoid being hit so I don't need to use my estus at all (in addition to there being non-replenish-able healing stones anyway). But in DA:I it can end up being too hard to micro everyone away from danger to avoid certain types of party members becoming auto drinking potion sinks. In some of the extended encounters that's bit more noticeable as you're expected to ride the waves of enemies with fewer chances of respite. I'm not sure how many side quests at the Haven encounter you did but I feel like I should be able to manage it with a not wholly unreasonable party. Anyway I've just received that dreadful Nvidia crash twice in a row after Haven so I'm not sure how much more I can play right now.

I wish there was more of a chance to have a human 'jokey moment' with my companions. The only really option to do that is to choose one of the flirt options but then the entire camp gets all highschool and decides you two are like, totally going to have sex and get married. It just feels weird. So then I feel like I have to be tactical with jokey 'flirty' conversation options so I chose a character who I was fine with my pc romancing. So my female dalish elf is now chatting up Dorian despite the fact that he totally bats for the other team. Sigh the romance options in bioware games have always felt kinda dumb. Except for Mass Effect where it actually felt like after such a long time together some members of the team bond romantically; although it would have been interesting if rather than every character being an option for Shepard, several NPC's formed bonds among themselves or at least talked like they were. Anyway I have most of the problems everyone else has been getting. Not enough indication to what areas are suitable for a level, not exactly much reason to care for certain events, magic feels kinda wimpy in parts. I wish that I had a menu screen that let me talk to every character I wanted to at Haven without having to find them. It's neat every now and then but gets tiring. I wish conversation heads lit up when there was a new big thing to talk about as well. Also having to wait 22 hours for an offscreen action to happen is just so duuuuumb. I think with the offscreen gold and gathering missions it'd feel worthwhile doing them if in addition to the measly amount the PC gets the game also mentioned that say the organisation had 100 new potions for everyone else to use or 5000 gold to pay for logistics operations. Tactical camera's way too up in my face. Finally my last gripe is that having no healing magic is just so lame. If Barrier is so important either let me cast it on everyone at once or let me designate it for one person and let it hit the nearest people if they're close by because grouping up everyone for the AOE is painful. Besides the potion system just doesn't work that well. There's no way I'm going to go back to camp if I'm halfway through some dwarf ruins, I'd rather just spam barrier and save scum so let me have some wimpy healing magic at the least.

Hey thanks for that pdf; I'm keen to check it out tomorrow. :3

I just realised how scary my Dark Souls dream was from a weeks ago when I had a revisit last night. I didn't even clue in that I'd been there before until I came across an evil looking spike trap and proceeded to walk directly to a warehouse were last time I fought a pretty creepy mix of undead dog and hell dog/Cerberus. I pretty much 'noped' the heck out of there then. Oh and later last night I had a dream where I played several super disappointing games of Dota 2. It was crushing.

Yeah I might have to give Polygon another go. I do like Kill Screen though.

I'll check that out! RPS was my introduction to for lack of a better term serious games criticism. I used to check read the Sunday Papers all the time and their features and article recommendations introduced me to very interesting sites like NightmareMode, How Games Saved My Life, Sirlin.net, Hellmode, and a few other sites I found that filled the void of talking about games in a way I'd never really encountered before at least from any of the mainstream gaming press (Australia's PCPowerplay did give me a small taste of it growing up as a young scrub). But I still wanted a site that was more to the centre of games press that also paid attention to traditional pop culture interests like tech updates, news on comics, books, tv, usually all with a pop scifi or fantasy theme. I'm worried I'm not articulating this well enough but to use a possibly bad analogy; I still like to read one of the national newspapers even if I do frequently value Al Jazeera, ShortFormBlog, or even just /r/worldnews to a higher degree.

Huh that is pretty weird. I don't generally need to comment. I just need something to complement RPS with. Previously that was the Escapist for occasionally funny weekly segments along with more traditionally pop geek culture updates. With the Escapist Imploding and my enjoyment of what pulled me into it on the decline for some months I'm looking to try out any recommendation really.

Oh man fun writing might be a new favourite site.

After many years of ignorance I might finally be on board with Taylor Swift. Also finally listened to Sia.

I'd be really keen to read that if you don't mind.

So Birdman. Pretty much what everyone said it was. Really fun but ends in a way that didn't really grab me. Music and acting in it were terrific though. Oh and I finally watched Only Lovers Left Alive which I thought was really very good.

Ideally transplants and integration work best for humans and they work the most. You'd have a system of permits, regulated growing of introduced crops if they're needed at all, rivers diverted in ways that made ecological sense (which they can) etc. But animals do not respond to the same techniques. Namely because they don't use their own reasoning for that kind of purpose for a variety of factors; and because the monetary cost of transplantation is high as well as the cost of containment, and the rapid growth rte of the species in question I would have to suggest some mix of limited trapping, baiting, and killing. However I will firmly say that what works for humans in this case cannot work for animals for the reasons I've scratched the surface of. I don't really want to get into the question and evaluation of ecosystem services but I will say that question is at the core of ecology and conservation work. However I will say that in the case of any generic ecosystem the multitude of services humans or the ecosystem intrinsically 'enjoys' depends on redundancy. If too many sections of a food 'web' (chain is a crappy metaphor) are destroyed then the entire system unravels. You talk about sustainability but what is it if it isn't the preservation of resources for intrinsic reasons and their own future use? Furthermore many species plant or animal have astounding properties that can lead to applications in research, business, pharmacology, etc. People look at the natural world for all sorts of inspiration like bio-mechanics, the synthesis of drugs to fight disease. Heck a friend of mine knew some people that did a research project into a type of fungi found only in the Amazon that breaks down plastic naturally. It's these types of discoveries that lead people to take on roles like guardians of existing ecosystems in addition for the more apparent uses. Also at this point for a lot of regions that are extensively protected by programmes there already has been a scientific process in establishing them as such beyond "this is an issue of national pride, or they're so few in number but they have a lot of personality and bring in tourist dollars". You'd probably be best mining groups like the Millennium Ecosystem Assesment who write reports on hows and whys and why nots. As to species simply 'fading out' we're in the middle of the Anthropocene where the current rate of extinction is between 100-1000 times the background rate of extinction. To put it bluntly many forms of life on earth some of which we know of, many we don't are being annihilated by human practices, one of those is the practice of introducing animals. Humans have a responsibility to mitigate this risk if they wish to continue to enjoy their chosen climate and ecosystem because the global food web is being placed into a blender. Put extra simply if you want to help against climate change then eventually you'll have to consume less oil; if you want to help against the destruction of your local ecosystem eventually you'll have to kill some animals. It's also worth noting that I'm not talking about one plant species, I'm not talking about one animal species vs a group of humans. I'm talking about many animal and plant species that depend on each other for continued survival versus a settlement of humans and their needs or an explosive globetrotting population of small cute furry mammals that people on the internet fawn over. I read through a part of that but having been lectured by one of the co-authors of What Is Biodiversity? on ethics in ecology it felt like a very meandering waltz through old ground. Personally I prefer my articles to be a bit more straightforward without quotes from genesis or Aristotle. For reasons you can probably infer from this article on Newton's Flaming Laser Sword. I think the school of thought that term belongs to really needs to find either a new definition addendum or a new term altogether. It sounds like you or someone else from the same school would label me as a speciest yet I am not stating that populations from certain species need to die for human benefit alone but for the benefit of the other animals/ecosystem that has both intrinsic and instrumental value. Speciesism seems to include animals within a moral community however they themselves are not active members of the communities morals. I think that's fine. It's not like we put creatures on trial for committing what humans morally recognise as a crime. Which is all fine and good until an animal population begins committing (in addition to other factors -see humans and other environmental factors) genocide upon another population of animals then to protect the greater ecosystem they need to be controlled as a local population. Although from what I understand you would say that humans should take a 'hands off' approach since well, they're here now so we may as well let them fight it out I meant that's natural selection isn't it? Only natural selection tends to enable species to deal with the current threats to their environment, not cataclysm in the form of an introduced predator which has a range of diets to switch between. The argument I'm hearing is that if say a space-faring conglomerate unleashed the Alien or the Kharaa on a planet the reaction should be "That's natural selection right? Whose to say the species and people lost are even that important?" Or maybe the conglomerate mounts a special action to retrieve the animals in the rescue shelters. I dunno, prioritising widespread domestic animals over untold millions that you don't see at a farm, pet store, or zoo primarily for feelings of human interest or care/guilt feels a little gross to me. I'm not saying that it's suddenly okay to eat hamburgers as if I went "well everything's relative so who cares?" I'm saying that there's a moral burden for pretty much any industrialised food source. I hope you can see why given everything else I've been saying I don't have much of a problem with culling a localised population of globetrotting explosive breeding cute furry things to save hundreds of other species which are actually in equilibrium with their environment. Okay. I was curious to your answer. To remind readers this giant discussion is an offshoot of my attempt to explain why I'm okay with the deaths of industrialised farm animals provided there's little cruelty done for its own sake beyond death for meat production; that is 'ethical farming'. This discussion is beginning to significantly eat into my day so either my rate of reply is going to drop off significantly or this discussion will be tabled/concluded with the next two or three replies (hopefully some combination of the two. This doesn't mean I haven't enjoyed the conversation.

See I don't really see those two questions as comparable. The animals endemic to a region support the endemic plant life of a region. So if you get a whole bunch of rabbits into a land they'll quickly eat new shoots of growth and likely create a plant biosphere more suitable to a grassland. Which of course would destroy any type of encroachment from a forest; which lets everything in that forest diminish and die off. Likewise if you let possums, cats, and the like kill birds then you cease the process that the birds go through to migrate certain seedlings of trees that have adapted to have to go through the bird type's digestive system to become active seeds. Human groups being usually equal in terms of relative disadvantage can or could (don't really know because I'm not an anthropologist) be transplanted to most regions and create similar but distinct societies. But different species impacts on their ecosystems create dramatically different ecosystems. With the right numbers of pests humans didn't need to deforest most of New Zealand by themselves they could have just waited for predatory animals run amok in a region that has evolved not to have any to reduce potentially all of the endemic plant or animal species given enough time. To give examples most of our nesting birds that were initially wiped out nested on the ground because they had no need to be in trees. Tree nesting birds are still helpless because climbing animals will come to their nests eat all their young and eggs and the parents themselves. Which is pretty dramatic for a species that breeds once every twenty years with a partner chosen for life. Which gives another point of dissimilarity for your example -growth rates of populations affected. Killing two distinct populations of humans in an area is also more incomparable to killing distinct species because of the amount of relativity in the populations involved. Most of the predators involved are fast breeding with large litter sizes. I'm going to ask your opinion of an example now. North American Pine is a species of tree with highly toxic needles. They're prevalent throughout NZ and they're distinct areas because the only major endemic bird that thrives in them are New Zealand Robins. Also the toxic pine needles alter the chemistry of the ground so that only other NA Pines are successful growing there. Would you be opposed in destroying those forests? It's the same rational needed to condone the eradication of animal pest species. But from what I understand you'd say no to the killing of pest animals because it's too similar to murdering groups of humans arbitrarily. Even though differences between species effects upon an environment are quite distinct from what I'm assuming to be populations of urban humans. Also that I'm talking about the eradication of populations of a few dozen introduced species which have equilibrium with their environments in other parts of the world in an area that if given free run will let them destroy many hundreds if not thousands of millions of plant and animal species. A similar situation exists for the garden plant Hibiscus. Also it's of note that agricultural farmers kill plenty of pest species for the plant food industry in similar ways for economic reasons. I'm also going to say that if the meat industry was phased out the land already claimed would be converted into agriculture at a loss because a higher cost of plant fertilizer would be needed. Grassland or pasture is not expressly healthy in terms of nutrient replenishment. In fact many starting farmlands convert forestland for agricultural farming because of the high existing nutrient count. Some farmers in places like Australia are confirmed for converting bushland to cropland. In those cases its an entirely destructive ecological act But there is an argument that they're simply trying to accommodate the crop industry, possibly because the meat industry takes up other viable lands although I personally would not count that as the only reason. See what you're actually trying to ask me when you transplant that question into human terms is if I kill this one group of people, I save not only the current generation of the people I'm saving but the ability of that group of people to exist ever again in any way. Whereas the group of people killed have many recorded habitats around the world that they thrive within in equilibrium of their environment. It really does become us vs them because the species lost will never exist anywhere ever again while the species considered pests live virtually everywhere in North America, Australia and Europe. It's the same logic that prevents people from condoning the aggressive expansion of human settlements to every square inch possible. The reason I'm bringing up pests is that its very easy for me to see domestic produce animals in much the same way. That at the least these animals which I recognise to form attachments and emotional states comparable to humans should be phased out in the existing process of the meat industry than simply 'let go' somewhere in the country side. Which is another thing I wonder about, how do you see the end of the meat industry? Phased out or with a mass shut down and release of domestic animals?