Deadpan

Okay, wow. I have mixed feelings about this one. On the one hand it's probably fair to note that on the spectrum of open relationships with clear primary partners to complex, interconnected webs of romantic and sexual connections, one end is closer to the hegemonic norm and, as always, getting more attention. On the other hand, the tone of the comic kind of suggests to me that personal life choices should be made focusing on disrupting the status quo rather than personal happiness, which is not a great thing to imply. Like, there's probably analogies to be made here to broader feminist discourse where you can sometimes kind of see inverted standards of appearance applied to people, i.e. wearing make-up makes you not progressive and a bad role model. And this list is just tripping me up for all sorts of reasons. For #1: It's great for these kind of queer, non-monogamous partnerships to get more visibility, but the notion that queer love, whatever that means exactly, needs to be centered, public and visible in order to push boundaries is kind of going in a direction of erasing bi/pan/etc identities and desires isn't it? A bisexual woman doesn't stop being bi when she's in a monogamous relationship with a man, and the same thing applies when she's in a nonmonogamous relationship with several men. If you make these kinds of assumptions about people's sexuality based on who you see them being with... aren't you kind of holding up these norms yourself? For #2: I'm not sure why this is being brought up opposite nonmonogamous relationships to be honest since this seems entirely possible to do within a regular marriage? A stay-at-home Dad and tech-startup Mom are going against gender norms, kinda (and they still are if they open up that relationship). Maybe it's not as extreme as building a queer commune, but I'm not sure what kind of standards this comic is interested in setting here. For #3: Isn't this kind of assuming that the people in these open relationship articles are actively repressing each other's desires, rather than them maybe just not wanting anything more than they got going on right now. Like, it's not evidence of policing if certain romantic or sexual stuff doesn't take place. For #4: This one is actually legit rad. For #5: This, again, seems to be assuming the absolute worst in the relationships that were talked about in articles. Clear communication is great, but I don't think it's fair to assume that when somebody (not even in the context of their relationship, but an internet article about it) doesn't say that they don't want to hold their partner back, that means that they will totes hold them back whenever they can.

Snakes OP. I know what kind of space I want vaguely, but there's no such space in the game really now that you run into any kind of player anywhere. Arena maybe, but I get frustrated with that too whenever somebody rolls out a legendary. Maybe I should just try to quit this game again, but ughhhh it's so convenient to play on the go on my Ipad.

For me it's more that Hearthstone is just getting to the point where I couldn't really tell you what I want out of games like this, generally. It's not like I actually want to compete at a high, high level of play because I don't want to put in that much time and effort (or possibly money in this case), but I don't want to feel like I'm treading water either. I appreciate some Tavern Brawl for being completely out of control bizzarre or creating a level playing field for completing class-related quests, but once it gets down to the ones where you get assigned one of two possible premade decks I'm kind of like "What's the point?" Early in the game's lifecycle I mostly felt like I was actually playing against people who roughly shared my level of skill and commitment when I played ranked, and a slightly more wide selection of player types in casual. At this point though it feels like there's just so many people who have been playing continuously since release that no matter where I go I'll run into more decked out pros or boringly efficient meta decks than I will casual players. Anyway, anybody here remember the Etherlords games?

Yeah, it's super weird to think that they'd just be so far off in balancing. Maybe they are just going for something completely different than what I want out of the game, but I keep getting frustrated with it not because it's difficult but because it really wants me to succeed. Right now I've stockpiled enough supplies to last me through about a week even if I twiddle my thumbs and do nothing, and I could go on exploring and add to the pile, but that's kind of not very appealing when you're not pushed to do it.

Depends on how you define relying on it I guess. In the recent Let's Play discussion we talked about how personality drives success there, and the impression I get for TB (also from people on here who talked about his early days) is that this kind of petulant smartassery is very much his #brand, so even when it's not technically required to put together the kind of content he produces, making a public performance of the attitude his fanbase likes about him is probably part of the recipe rather than an unrelated thing. It may not be entirely fair to list him alongside people who nobody in games knew or remembered before they signed on with this garbage, but it seems weird that just because he's doing okay on his own nobody ever considers that he may have pragmatic reasons for casting his lot with these people. It may not be as direct as shilliing for a Kickstarter, early access game, or a book, but the guy very much has a vested interest in participating in a campaign that calls into question the believability of traditional games media, his rivals in concept if not in scope.

Does the stuff in the houses regenerate after a while? I figured maybe a bit of difficulty comes in once the scavenging opportunites dry up, but then again I got to a small town yesterday and just the stuff from there would carry me through a week or so and if those houses fill up again that's just easy living. I made my way to one of the new areas for now, but I plan to be back to that place.

It's not terribly surprising, I guess, that the divide between how many options you have with basic cards and how many options you have with an expansive collection would only widen as this game grows bigger and bigger. It's still pretty frustrating. Not only are there new legendaries that become standard picks in the meta, like how 90% of HearthPwn builds seem to rely on Dr. Boom as a generic late game card, but even a lot of basic cards are now tied up in expensive single player content. Like I recently looked at what kind of deck I could maybe piece together with my collection, but was actually missing Mad Scientists as a core component for one of them.

Kinda, but the thing is that he's still at a place where he needs notoriety in order to maintain his career, since his success is built entirely on the platform of his public persona. Obviously fame is helpful in any kind of creative career, but Leigh Alexander for instance can thrive with Offworld or other writing gigs without people necessarily looking at her byline or recognizing her name, and that's why it'd be erroneous to assume, I think, that when he takes potshots at her on Twitter it's just a pointless tussle that both of these people should be above. He gets something out of doing that, and she does not. When she's done tweeting at him she gets back to his career, but for him this is his career.

At some point quite a while ago gators got it in their heads that Sarkeesian is somehow a bigger threat to free speech and free artistic expression than a guy who tried to instate actual laws to ban games. And of course Thompson, being the disbarred has-been that he is will do anything for a little attention. That's the delicious irony of a movement that likes to claim the people they hate are doing things for attention, when their big figureheads are all washed-up nobodies whose only claim to fame is getting in fights with people more successful and more talented than them. Smart, Kern, Milo, Bain, Thompson, take your pick.

I've gone back to The Long Dark today and I actually kind of like where it is going. The lowest difficulty setting now actually makes the wolves not attack you (unless provoked) so that helps with focusing on the slow descent as you run out of resources. Which are still plentiful, especially on that setting, to the point where I decided to roleplay as a vegetarian and forgo hunting/drop any cans of meat products. But they did add a lot of things that make the world feel more complete, like how firewood collection is no longer just a menu where you invest time and end up with resources, but actually about finding and breaking down wood in the world. And there's a bit of crafting now, apparently, most of which involves animal parts, so I might miss out on that I guess.

I'm kinda in a similar place. Sometimes I meet guys that I think are cute or attractive or have weird crushes on for a while, but I've never really worked out how far my interest goes since 1) I can rarely work up the nerves to flirt even when I'm not second-guessing my interest and 2) it seems unfair to drag somebody else into me figuring stuff out. But now both of my current partners have somehow individually broached the topic of moresomes and I'm going back and forth between thinking that might be a good way to experiment and freaking out because it's much more real than just quietly admiring cute guy friends.

That's what I thought. It's interesting, cause we also elect representatives at a department and university level, who mostly have service oriented roles like helping students clear beaurocratic hurdles, but are also represented on the panels that decide which candidates are given tenure-track positions and such. But then beyond that we also vote directly on who should represent us at national level in our students union, which is a whole different landscape with political parties and everything. It doesn't have a whole lot of power and is consistently called into question because the turnout of elections is always abysmally low (like around 25%), but it's there, and pretty consistent about its political activism.

Well not around here they don't. Except in lecture halls that don't have wooden desks, where clapping is a thing.

What about student politics? I've gathered from my media consumption that the only representatives students get to vote on are for a department or university level, but is this actually correct?

I don't know, maybe folk are just playing a super long game here. Like, Google's bid to control all information in the world was pretty far-reaching initially but they're getting scarily close by now. Maybe in 20 years they just own all of space and we're like "fuck, how did that happen?"

I figure it's similar to that weird robot arms race between big tech companies in that it's likely inspired by a combination of 1) people betting on there being some profitable future use for these technologies because they are just sooo futuristic and 2) rich as fuck entrepreneurs, engineers and venture capitalists being bored and wanting new expensive toys to play with/ever more expensive levels of luxury to assert their status opposite poorer classes.

I'm still kind of weirded out when people talk about this kind of thing because of how different university culture is in my neck of the woods. Like, from what I've gathered talking to friends studying in other places, our curricula are much more modular, meaning you might see a different group of people in every course you do and never really get to know the people who started at the same time as you, or indeed never form the kind of bonds you see in movies and sitcoms at all. Dorms exist, and apparently so do wild parties, but most students get a flat or flatshare around town and don't spend that much time on campus itself. And since fraternities played an unsavory part in the proliferation of fascist politics in academia during the 30s and 40s (right up to hunting down jewish students) they're a completely niche phenomenon around here, kept alive by a bunch of neonazi trash under the guise of "tradition". So I'm never completely sure if things I take for granted about being a student look completely weird to other people. Apparently nobody outside of the German-speaking world does that "drum your knuckles on the table at the end of a lecture instead of applauding" thing either?

Personally I call the genre scarcity simulators, which covers any game interested in disempowering you as a player and making you struggle to maintain your current state instead of growing ever more powerful. It's not ideal, because in a lot of games going in this direction (typically the ones I'm less interested in) it turns out that it's actually fairly easy to deal with basic needs and that the experience is actually about some other thing that exists on top of that system and taking care of yourself is simply something you need to do to access that. Like social interaction and building in all those crafty, online survival games, or combat, or narrative, or exploration. The Long Dark I've not enjoyed all that much because, at least in the areas I've seen so far, survival items are relatively plentiful and they've kind of tried to introduce difficulty through an abundance of absurdly aggressive wolves instead. I really, really like Out There though, even though that's another one of these cases where you do grow ever more powerful if things go well. Although in this case it mainly affects how easily you can travel around. I love that there's just flat out no combat at all in this game. There are enemies, but you can't engage them and don't have to run from them, you just can't go to where they are. Also you slowly learn alien languages, which is nice.

This is true, but in usual GG fashion they tend to do botch it up so hard it doesn't usually take much to see through their attempts. These people are much more familiar with the arguments and methods, and can use them to do crappy things without really getting in trouble.

I feel similarly, like it always seemed to be a coping thing for her mainly, and while maybe that's not very productive on the whole I wouldn't want to deny her that outlet either. But then there are others, whose main motivation seems to be to hold on to the internet fame they got for disagreeing with a cartoon villain. For some of that folk you can literally see them turning into the thing they claim to be fighting step by step. Just a couple of days ago, one of them got retweeted into my timeline saying something to the extent of "Where's the proof that we are being mean to other progressives?" (and a side of "How dare you be critical of us, we're doing this for you") and it's just getting so fucking close to the way GG and other shitheels angrily demand proof for how and in what ways their behavior is harmful, because woe is them if they should end up contemplating their actions for no reason. In some ways that indignation of self-styled progressive personalities is even more annoying because they wrap their garbage up in social justice language. Like, sometimes there are legit reasons not to name names when you talk about stuff, because often specific people aren't even that relevant to a point you want to make about larger, systemic issues and then maybe you don't want to get dragged into a conversation with somebody defending themselves. But knowing that script for vague callouts and knowing how social justice Twitter tends to respond to these, unhelpfully, by piling on, has given some antiGG personalities a way to send people after their critics without actually making any concrete accusations, or even while making a performance of how concerned and socially conscious they are.

It's weird cause when he joined up with them it looked more like he was just some clownshoes-wearing clown who had no idea about anything, especially not how silly he sounded when trying to talk about real issues, but as time goes on we learn that he's actually been complete garbage the whole time. He's also tweeted how people who mock him for getting that ridiculous truck last time he was allowed near a game in development don't understand how the truck was totally rad and he views that as one of his successes. So, that's just for reference for how out of touch with reality he is at this point.

Fun things I've caught on Twitter: Apparently the gator who got arrested was also Milo's "source" for the ridiculous claim that BLM activist Shaun King is actually secretly white. The poor baby is trying his darndest to backpedal and deny that fact and it's hilarious. Also, it seems Mark Kern threw a hissy fit and quit GG when they turned out to not be shitty enough for his taste. Some in the movement criticized transphobic remarks he made about Sarah while parroting those ridiculous pedophilia accusations, so he spent some time shouting about how dare they come at him with this having an opinion garbage and how apparently GG and aGG are exactly the same now. And then after all that mock indignation about pedophilia, he started flooding his timeline with loli porn, which is... wow. At this point, the movement is a litte bit like that waiting experiment from . They've been waiting over a year for their scare tactics and terrorist garbage to somehow win them the hearts and minds of the people, and anybody who wants to leave the group now has to make their exit in the most pathetic and ridiculous way imaginable.

Is there really nothing up with you can come?

I think the sarcasm would work better if this wasn't a fairly accurate description of the state of things, especially opposite games, where about the only time developers really end up with the rights to their creation is when they also happen to own the studio. I mean, I get that you don't want to have a bad faith argument about all this, but the way you're acting in this conversation is immensely frustrating. It's not like we're dragging you back in here by your feet to squeeze you for more hot takes on Let's Play culture, you just keep coming back on your own to tell us that the situation is complicated and we should therefore have complete trust in the current legal situation since it's about as close to a fair and just system as we're ever going to get. Once challenged on any of the weird assumptions you rely on, you imply we're being so disrespectful for not agreeing with you and make disingenuous claims about how much time we've "forced" you to spend on this or how this is about us desperately wanting to talk to you. And then you leave and return a little bit later to make the same couple of declarations. You don't need an excuse not to talk about this at all or not to talk to me specifically if you don't want to, but please don't put on this weird show to justify your decision.

But the only reason that kind of creative self expression could be seen as competing with their recent release at all is because their latest release is yet another of these capitalist efforts to turn consumers into a product and sell them back to themselves, similar to how Facebook or Twitter profit (well, Twitter actually still struggles on that point) from the intellectual labor of its users, and depend on convincing them that it was so facile, banal or trivial that they do not deserve compensation or recognition. Tell me again how your argument doesn't favor the big corporations then? This is exactly the kind of rhethoric used to justify them laying claim to ever larger parts of our lives and public culture: because it's easy to shrug off the importance of individual contributions on something that was shaped by many hands. I mean, what's the big line in the sand though between work that is derived from other work and work that is merely inspired by other work, the way that all art is to varying degrees. If your answer revolves around prevailing legal norms, I'll have to throw my arms up in exasperation.