Deadpan

Probably the most frustrating thing about this event is seeing gaters smugly lie through their teeth about how to cover the group. "Just talk to us directly! Browse the hashtag and look what people are talking about! Read our diatribes!" This is, of course, exactly what people have been doing for weeks and months after the movement first started, and every single time we quote their words back at them we're told it's not representative. Irc logs showing how they've been manipulated? No, not us. Massive script on how to email advertisers and fake indignation? Belongs to somebody else. All these harassers, MRAs and literal Nazis? Lone bad apples. But hey, if you want to write about GG, just talk to the first person you catch tweeting about it. It's so simple!

But not before doxxing the referee.

They've been crushing it this split, but the amazing thing is that they didn't dominate like this because they always managed to build a lead, but because they could turn seemingly any situation around with superior teamfight coordination. They've been behind by a considerable margin in some of the later matches I watched, when there was already a bit of "When will this winning streak end?" mystifiying going on, but everytime I started to think "Is this it?" their opponents make some tiny mistake and they instantly capitalize on that. This is maybe more about the other teams' inability to push their lead than Fnatic's strength sometimes, so everybody's curious how long they can keep this up against better teams, but then again it definitely takes a lot of consistency to be able to maintain an 18 game winning streak, even if it's consistently being able to recover after getting yourself in a bit of trouble. After a while, it definitely started to feel like they couldn't mess up hard enough to not come out on top. They pulled out the highly unconventional Trundle support for their last two games. Granted, they weren't exactly facing the top of the leaderboards at that point, but still. Primetime League actually had this week looking at what's behind Fnatic's success. And can I just say how amazing I think it is that Riot have their own weekly esports show, complete with a fantasy fantasy football league of sorts?

Okay, I think I got this then. Strength on ice cards is actually just something you need to overcome to access subroutines, not to get past the ice. I was conceptually confused by this because I wasn't sure people we're making pragmatic generalizations about the topic or referring to a hard and fast rule, i.e. do you "have" to use the right type of ice breaker because a lot of ice cards end your run, or do you literally have to use the right type all the time.

Of course they're not going to sell it, because the government doesn't pay for that stuff. They just take it.

You're talking about using the right ice breaker if I want to disable subroutines, but my question was what happens If I don't want to disable them (and they're of the type that don't end my run, just trigger other annoyances like damage, tracking or the con gaining credit, that I've decided in this hypothetical are acceptable losses). Can I get past it with any icebreaker stronger than that piece of ice, or does the icebreaker still have to match the type of ice, even if I don't want to use the type-specific subroutine-disabling abilities? In other words, when people say an ice breaker has to be the right type to interact with a piece of ice, what does "interact" mean? The ability to shut down subroutines on that piece of ice, or the ability to get past it at all?

But the ice breaker doesn't have to match the type of ice to interact with it at all, right? So if there's a piece of ice that doesn't have the "end the run" subroutine but just makes me take damage or something, can I use any ice breaker strong enough to get through that, or does it have to be one that's made for getting through, say, sentries?

I got the starter set for this recently. I think I was able to work out most of the basics from the manual and video tutorials, but there's still some nuances I'm not entirely clear on. One was what happens to ice if the card it's protecting is removed, but I gather from this thread that it stays where it is and effectively becomes an empty remote server you can put a new thing into. The other thing I recall stumbling over was whether you could mix and match ice-breakers during a run. If I have one that's strong enough to go through a particular piece of ice (or cheaper to buff up) and another that can disable subroutines on that type of ice, can I combine the two, or do I have to buff up the one that's made for this type of ice if I want to use its abilities?

Niiiiice

Somebody may have already made that point regarding the misandry discussion we've now moved on from, but I think it may be useful to think of #KillAllMen as ultimately not dissimilar from #AllLivesMatter. Both are presumably said with decent intentions (to mock toxic masculinity or reassert the value of all human life), but both take a generalizing, non-specific perspective that feels wrongheaded in the specific context of these conversations (some lives being disproportionately in danger of being ended prematurely by police violence, and feminism's history of neglecting queer, trans, race etc. issues that also affect men, as well as stuff like white MRAs killing men of color with the stated intention of protecting white women). That's not to say they're the same, just possibly similar. I generally agree with what Lana Polansky had to say on this. The entire framing of this conversation strikes me as very disingenuous. The article complains that we're treating students like babies, but it seems to me that providing people with the tools and opportunity to make informed choices about how, when and if they consume certain material is actually a far less patronizing position than unilaterally deciding what's best for people. It's said that this will allow privileged students to avoid challenging material, but being able to comfortably avoid confronting certain ugly realities is something their privilege already allows them to do. Professors share these horror stories of people abusing the system, as if trigger warnings were the cause of student laziness and not the excuse they cite, as if students never before worked their way around reading something even if it's required, as if students automatically take something to heart if they read it.

The other side of that coin is that it's hard to provide tangible proof for how this stuff affects people (especially if you chalk up individual accounts to subjective experience (and consider subjective experience irrelevant)) because there's not really a clear line from one event to one result here. Discrimination is generally the work of many hands or various interconnected systems. The media they're exposed to and the experineces they make have a cumulative effect on one person's socialization and attitudes, and then in a group or a company or in a society the attitudes of everybody involved also start affecting each other. It doesn't mean that nothing is true and everything is permitted, just that thinking about these things takes a more holistic perspective. That's why people in social justice usually talk about the context in which something takes place (for instance, in the Feminism thread we recently talked about #killallmen and how it's maybe not a great thing to say in the context of feminism's history of ignoring queer, trans and race issues, all of which also affect men, and stuff like white MRAs killing men of color with the stated intention of protecting white women) and why they generally consider it wrongheaded to ask if an individual act is harmful in isolation. It's the same principle as that hypothetical where people try to claim double standards by asking if the situation would be different if a woman did that to a man or some such. Context is key, and if you either ignore it or completely change it, well then obviously the situation is going to look different.

I figure there's also a pretty big difference in attitude between primary and secondary school students who have to attend classes, and college folk who are there voluntarily or are even paying dearly just for the privilege of showing up. Disruptive behaviour can seem like a welcome break from this stuff that's being forced on you during the former, but eventually people's own goals start to change and they notice that their teachers are helping them reach those, and you'll actually see students telling other students to be quiet because they want to focus. I feel like there's certainly not much of a point trying to establish authority once people are at that stage.

Riot Games recently posted Live / Play, which looks a bit like the League of Legends version of Free to Play, except it doesn't focus exclusively on professional players, but also follows regular players from different parts of the world, a cosplayer and a crafter. I didn't have time to watch it yet. I imagine it's similarly saccharine, but like Free to Play, might still be interesting.

Here's my professional assessment of League cuties. Dreamiest player: Yellowstar Dreamiest coach: YamatoCannon How long will the Fnatic winning streak last? Will be proven correct? Also, Faker? Please.

I'm glad to hear this given I still worry if I come off as unintentionally condescending. Maybe the worrying about it is what has led to this though, in which case I have to keep doing it I guess. I can understand wanting to be given the benefit of the doubt, and yet that's also something that people often ask for with no intention of returning the favor. People rarely bring this up in social justice conversations because they want to start a productive back and forth on good faith, more often it's because they want to get their little "You know what really grinds my gears?" rant about gendered language (or whatever) out of their system in peace and then ignore or discard any counterargument to their criticisms by claiming that it's treating them with hostility. But for an actually productive conversation, it has to go both ways. If feminists (et al.) need to be willing to listen to these critiques, then its critics also need to be willing to listen to why maybe their arguments aren't entirely on point. I don't want to say that this is what's happened here exactly and I don't want to say that your experience of being talked down to here is wrong: if that's what you feel like, then that's what you feel like. But since it looks like nobody here intended to come off as condescending, maybe you can still find a bit of the same patience in yourself that you'd like to see in others?

The thing is, I think we're actually doing what you asked for right now megaspel by addressing counterproductive stances that are holding this conversation back, we just happen to have different ideas of what these look like. You think that radical or extremist viewpoints are harmful (side-note: many things that I support these days seemed overreaching or far-fetched to me at some earlier point in my life), while myself as well as others (I presume) think that appeals to a broad center, false equivalences, tone arguments and the casual ableism of describing one's ideological opponents as insane are much bigger issues. Actually, yeah, there is a thing that everyone here could do if they want to help, but do so at your own discretion since I'm about to link to very creepy stuff. If that's not an issue, go to this Pastebin and report it for spreading private information without consent (link via my Twitter in case it shows referrers). You can't report accounts directly it seems, but it's still worth looking at the profile and reporting pretty much anything that has names in the title, since these are all dedicated to tracking who people support on Patreon or Kickstarter, information that many people (like myself) have long since made private. It persists in the form of archived pages and such, but that doesn't mean we have to make it easy for them to pool and share this and draw more meaningless MS Paint lines between folk. I know it says you need an account for reporting, but you can log in with Twitter if you have an account there and just revoke app access afterwards. Looks like bulk reporting is the only way non-Pro users get heard so help is appreciated. Creepy stuff over.

I think the slower pace this thread has taken on lately is the ideal way to continue it. There's no need to indulge in the kind of misery tourism that Ghazi indulges in, and I don't know that continuing to discuss why and how it's bad is going to help given that basically everyone here agrees GG was a shitshow from the start (and anybody who disagrees probably isn't going to take well to the thread), but it's nice to have a place to vent, in moderation. For instance, a certain unethics database has recently redoubled its efforts to stalk a site I help out at, and I kind of like to keep tabs on that in case they end up posting sensitive information and I need to warn my friends. But that also leaves me with the urge to occasionally go "Can you believe this stuff?", even if it's best not to dwell on it. Yeah, that. megaspel's original argument a page or so back was that some people need to be cut out because they're not "helping the movement" (I think), but there's always so many tacit assumptions built into those kinds of statements. Like, what is the goal that they're standing in the way of? Do they actually share that goal? Or is that something that one group of people decided is best for everyone and are now telling them to get behind?

I missed most of the discussion around it now, but I'm really not sure what people see in deBoer given that any time people link to a piece of his writing it seems to completely fail to do the nuances of the topic justice, like when we talked about callout culture here a while back, which he seems very fond of describing as needlessly disruptive. Yet telling people not to tear apart the left strikes me as quite similar to Mark Kern's ridiculous campaign to "heal the rift" in gaming: a way of telling people to stop voicing their legitimate grievances for the sake of a common cause, whether they believe in it or not, or whether they are being subsumed into this group against their will or not. It's not that political collaboration isn't a decent goal, it's that it so often translates to self-righteously demanding support from folk because you claim to have their best interests in mind, while simultaneously telling them that they'll have to wait in line (indefinitely) before we can start addressing the issues that affect them. It's what you get when people actually start believing that being less terrible than the other candidate is an appealing proposal in and of itself. Any demand for further improvement is characterized as silly talk that jeopardizes the whole system. I see that same "maintain unity where there is none" rhetoric in this article, for instance when he says: Perhaps that is the original use of the term, I don't know. But the way I typically see it used today is not centrists pointing out that political groups that wave the anti-discrimination flag still end up with curiously homogenous line-ups (which is a fair point to make), but women (among others) pointing out that the political alignment they identify with is being hogged by bunch of guys telling them how to care about these issues properly, and in what order they're allowed to care about them. Suggesting that these terms describe criticism from the outside world is effectively disavowing that women have any definatory power over that particular alignment.

I impulse-bought Trackmania United Forever shortly after first posting here, but quickly refunded that. The main menu being more a web browser than a game screen is super unappealing to me, and at the time all of Nadeo's servers plus websites were down for some reason. Which wouldn't be so bad since I didn't really want to play any multiplayer, except the game apparently relies on these to deliver a lot of important parts? The actual steam download was only like 900mb, and seemed to include none of the higher quality textures judging by the blurry mush that I got. The server thing seems to have been temporary, but wow, what a reminder that I want anything to do with this model. Like, the very first thing greeting me was a little box telling me to sign up and log in so I can use half of the features in this, followed by the reveal that whoops, I actually can't do either of these things. Anyway, I dug up my copy of Sunrise while I was in my hometown over the weekend, hopefully I can get that to run on my newish machine.

It's a shame that this game will never follow up on the accidentally amazing promise made by unfortunate cropping.

If I can improve the speed or reliability of the function by coding it differently, I might look into that when I get around to it. I don't think this way of doing it is easier to understand, for me at least, than the thing I intuitively came up with though.

That's the first thing I wrote that vaguely achieved what I had in mind, so I'm liable to go back on the code later on, but right now I don't see how this is any easier, unless the prebuilt math code for those trigonometric functions is far more efficient than the one for normalizing.

I think the article does more than taking that notion seriously. I feel like it does a pretty good job laying out the reasoning behind its judgement, mainly the context that this wacky misandry ends up playing into. I don't know that I can lay it out more clearly, but I can try? Think of it as an equality of opportunity vs equality of outcome issue. The former proposes that if you shut down explicitly discriminatory systems, things will improve on their own, the latter acknowledges that to make up for unconscious biases, structural discrimination, etc., we might have to give things a little push in the right direction, because there's all this garbage that folk face before they even get to the supposedly level playing field, and if you don't consciously try to counter that, you end up perpetuating those structures. This is how wind up with all these male-dominated companies that think their hiring is based purely on ability, because there's nothing stopping women from applying, is there (except a thousand microaggressions built into their culture, probably). It's a similar thing with these generalizing attitudes, like hating everybody (although I've never met somebody who said that and actually hated all humans equally, but let's say hypothetically). From your point of view that may look like a pretty fair deal, you treat everybody equally after all, reserving equal scorn for each individual person. But their experience is gonna look much more varied: sometimes your attitude is going to hit somebody who doesn't really get that much hate in life, except maybe over personal things sometimes, and sometimes it's going to hit somebody who already gets a bunch of racist, misogynist or whichever other kind of hate, and your little contribution ends up compounding that issue. I think it's mainly an issue of scope, and just how often random men do that thing, especially if it's somebody with a sizeable following. And the explaining their joke back to them is probably still second to facetiously doing the jerky thing they were talking about. I also have trouble judging these situations though: sometimes people even make jokes that are intended to be picked up and continued, like with a novelty hashtag about replacing a word in the title of something, and then it feels like your joke being funny enough makes the difference between it being taken well or causing offense, and we've all overestimated our own sense of humor sometime or another. I figure it's best just not to make jokes at strangers, maybe? Too much room for misunderstanding.

How long until that tentacle realizes eyes technically also rest in a socket

Like the messiest horse Wait, that site apparently doesn't exist anymore.