Ninety-Three

There's a lot of talk these days surrounding American airstrikes (particularly drone strikes), their legitimacy, and often the specific question of whether or not they are/should be allowed to kill an American citizen. This question has always disturbed me because of the implicit premise that killing an American citizen is somehow less acceptable than killing a foreign national. For that to be true one must grant that American lives are somehow different and that ending them is worse/less acceptable. By the transitive property, one must then grant that ending non-American lives is not as bad/more acceptable, and that's really, really fucked up. I've observed a decent amount of discussion surrounding the question, and no matter the speaker's opinion, they always seem to accept that implicit premise. I'm not American, so I'm aware that I might not know everything relevant to the discussion (for instance, perhaps there's some legal detail that limits how the American military may act upon its citizens): is there something I'm missing or is everyone really taking it as writ that foreigners just don't matter as much as Americans?

I don't get it. Is there something in particular I'm supposed to be noticing?

I don't think it is for story reasons because it doesn't make sense as a story. I was fairly certain it was just done because they didn't want the player to die, reload and try again.

I played the demo, and I noticed that the final fight was impossible to lose, although it tries to hide it. Your damage magically increases at the end, as your health drops, you take progressively less damage, and at very low health bullets run away from you (I tried, I couldn't get hit at 1 life). It feels like this wasn't acknowledged by the narrative at all: Then I replayed the beginning of the demo and it turns out that Flowey's death circle is scripted to vanish when it's about to hit you: if you run to the middle it will close in almost all the way then vanish, but if you hug a wall it vanishes much earlier. Now I'm wondering if any of the fights were losable, was the game cheating the whole time?

I understand this logic, but it seems to break down in the case of someone migrating to another country. Consider a black person raised in a country where they are the racial majority and do not experience discrimination: they're not "black" in the same way an African-American is, and if they were to move to America they would be changing their own context and acquiring that of a new culture. If race is purely a social construct then it varies by society, "South African black" is hugely different from "American black" (probably having more in common with "American white"), and the hypothetical African migrant has no more claim to the "American black" identity than Dolezal does. I would like to figure out how to square the ideas that migration is okay (because of course it is) and what Dolezal did is not (because it's my gut reaction), but the only way I can make the logic work is to focus on the fact that Dolezal was deceptive about having the American black identity/experience/whatever it is. Am I totally off on this "race varies by society" premise? Unrelated to the above: My understanding of the Dolezal interview was that she took a long time to come to the idea that she identified as black, and the lawsuit (presumably) happened before that, so she wasn't "turning off her blackness".

I am bothered that everyone calls Ashley racist, because she's really not. Shamus Young wrote up a good article on it. There's one or two remarks people misinterpret (she's not mad at the Council, she just doesn't trust them to protect human interests which is shown to be correct, she doesn't want non-military personnel poking around the top-secret stealth ship which is entirely reasonable), and as he put it:

Yeah. I follow his devblog, I think it was over a year ago now that he said something to the effect of "The game is in a state where, if for some reason we needed to, we could fill out the uncompleted stuff and ship it in three months."

What it reads like is Time Cube. Just like Time Cube, I understand a bit of it, and I feel slightly ashamed of that fact.

Doom was released with the first episode free, so the designers were incentivized to put the best levels at the beginning to hook people for the full version.

I always shortcutted that entire affair by just exploring until I found an area with Tallbirds to farm. Plus, throw in some drying racks and their meat will keep you topped up on health and sanity as well. As I say this I realize that my playstyle bypasses most of the resource management/survival aspects of that game, and I wonder if that's a good thing.

I think the article addresses that though. As much as generalizing from anecdotes is a deplorably common trend in discussions of modern culture, I don't think the article was trying to say "This is happening everywhere, look at this example!" It seemed to be responding largely to the paper (inherently accepting the paper's premise that a culture of victimhood is on the rise), then simply using the Oberlin incident as something specific to walk through and discuss. The article's link to the paper in question is locked behind the standard academic wall that says "Random people who are interested in this but not part of the system must pay $30 to read the paper". For those interested, there's a public-facing version here. I've not read it yet, it looks to be about 8000 words.

I always play ~3 str characters and I still see carry weight as... not even an annoyance, it's basically just a profit factor, a "You are allowed to carry this much loot out of each dungeon you visit" restriction. How are you folks playing that carrying capacity affects more than just how much random loot you carry to vendors?

Poor phrasing, I meant that I didn't have much ability to recognize skill in general. That IT Crowd bit is perfect "Maybe he will- he has, and apparently that's worthy of the commentators going crazy". Upon reflection I think it is that I'm a baby: I don't know the abilities of each of LoL's 126 champions (I was going to use hyperbole but Jesus Christ there are literally one hundred twenty-six of them), and that changes it from a strategic contest to a spectacle of light and colour where anything can happen at any moment, so nothing means anything. It'd be like watching Starcraft without knowing how any units attacked or what their specials were (and also all the units have a lot less visual distinction than in SC). So now that I know what question to ask: Do you actually remember each champion's abilities? Is there some trick to understanding what's going on when you don't know everyone's abilities?

I have no idea what's going on with that site, because even in post preview mode, a manual link is fine. Lacking a good explanation, I shall blame a shitty mobile version of the site, because Deadspin seems like the kind of place to have a shitty mobile version that interferes with regular browsers. Either that or Apple's Wizard Corps tried to hex down your link.

Working link of Zeus's article.

How does one watch pro League? Or more specifically, how does one enjoy watching pro League? I've played maybe a couple dozen hours (which is to say that I'm no good at it but at least understand how the game works), but when I watch others play I have little ability to recognize a good play, and less ability to appreciate it. Am I just a baby who needs to get good, or is there some particular way you're supposed to watch League?

My graphics issue magically went away (???) and I played some more of the game. In my previous playthrough I had explored the open world segment, assuming it would be full of puzzles and critical parts, but I ended up finding a bunch of areas that could be solved with the simple application of one part. This time I set out with a different goal: Beat the open world as quickly as possible. It was awfully short, but it captured the kind of interesting challenges I had hoped to get from the game. Unlike my previous plug and play use of abilities, it had enough complexity and thought put into it that it felt like my solution instead of just the solution (or one of the four solutions). Also I correctly guessed at how to perform some probably-unintended-but-kind-of-intuitive exploity bullshit, and that's always rewarding. My solution:

I apologize for my tone, I have realized that I was communicating poorly and coming off as aggressive. I tend to think in terms of "I don't understand your point, this is my contradictory point which seems correct to me, where is my error?" and I've realized that in posting here, I tend to leave off the "where is my error?" as implicit. I can see that part was not coming across, which is entirely my fault. In retrospect I should have been more clear about this and I can see that it was rude and made me seem confrontational. Apologies all around, I'll try to be better in the future.

I'm dropping the rape topic as requested, making the responses below because they're more about the discussion itself than the topic. I am certainly pedantic, but that doesn't mean everything I do is. I fail to see how responding to an article by disagreeing with its conclusion is pedantic. As for the suggestion that I'm only disagreeing to play devil's advocate, I'm not sure how to respond beyond "No". There are many contentious social topics I have agreed with, I post mainly disagreements because when I agree with the majority opinion, I rarely feel that I have anything to add to the discussion. Aggressively? It seems to me to be a perfectly civil "I disagree, here's why". What about my post was aggressive, and how can I state such disagreements less aggressively?

I'm sorry that we disagree? I'm not being pedantic, I was expressing my dissenting opinion on the topic, I wasn't aware that was forbidden.

I don't think it does, and not for the reasons that you anticipated. Having different models for this stuff makes sense in music, because in music consuming and editing the medium are two disconnected things. With games, consumption requires editing, consumption is editing. Remix culture builds on top of something, Let's Plays work within the thing itself. They are a continuation of what games are. I think the MST3K example validates the music comparison. MST3K undeniably added something meaningful, but they still had to license the movies they talked over. If they had wanted to do some kind of MST3K for music, they would have had to license the music despite producing video content about it. Saying that the developers aren't entitled to a cut of the ad revenue is saying that even though something depends on their creation to exist, their contribution deserves no credit.

That article had the opposite of its intended effect on me. What it reminded me of was the fact that Charles Manson claimed to have taken inspiration from Beatles songs. Obviously (even moreso than with the Beastie Boys case) nothing in Helter Skelter incited murder. At some point you have to acknowledge that wrongheaded people will do unreasonable things with a message and that anything could set someone off. If some psychopath shoots a man in Reno just to watch him die, while it may be technically true that Johnny Cash's lyrics inspired that, I can't see any sort of reasonable argument that the lyrics were harmful. I can't imagine that anyone would say that Cash's lyric contributes to a culture of violence and murder, so it seems silly to say that the Beastie Boys lyric contributes to rape culture. Folsom Prison Blues isn't wrong, and neither is Paul Revere.

Thank you for elegantly stating a big part of the argument I had been laboriously working towards in the old discussion. White people with dreads are (accurately) seen as benefiting from a double standard, and it seems that that association makes some people jump to blaming the dreads-havers for the existence of the double standard. And the thing about those cases is that it's not the appropriation that's the problem. The problem with a racist caricature isn't that you're using someone else's culture, it's that you're making a racist caricature. People can't appropriate their own culture, but people can and do engage in racist caricatures of their own race (I've mostly seen this in comedy, though I'm sure it happens in all sorts of places).

I know who she is but I feel like I'm missing the joke. In other news I've realized that since this is on PC and there's a game-completion unlock for Quiet that puts her in actual armour, it should be super easy for someone to create the Clothed Quiet mod. So that's nice.

Bear soldiers. Duh.