Deadpan

Funny how all this ethics stuff only applies to what other people do.

Also let's just take a second to appreciate the fucking gall of a movement that specifically and routinely targets people for using Patreon, one of the few ways marginalized folk can make some money in an industry not interested in supporting them, now going "What about class issues, guys?"

There's some merit to the notion that class privilege can (at least) alleviate some of the discrimination people might face over other things (it's been noted on Twitter recently that rich trans folk get hashtags when they come out and poor trans folk get hashtags when they die), although obviously it's ridiculous to conclude that these things therefore don't exist, especially considering people's economic situation is directly affected by these other kinds of discrimination through hiring biases, pay gaps etc. etc. The idea that because the 1% have it almost equally good, the remaining 99% logically also have it equally bad across all genders, races etc. is almost charmingly marxist in its appeal to unity, but about as outdated as holding out hope for a global proletariat uprising. Actually, keeping around a few people to point to as "one of the good/successful ones" is used as a tactic to enforce, not challenge or discredit cultural hegemony, because it keeps alive the lie of meritocracy and allows people to claim that obviously you can "make it" regardless of who you are (meaning people should blame themselves and not structural disadvantages for not making it), even though often one of the prerequisites for "making it" is stepping on other marginalized folks heads and internalizing and reciting a lot of garbage about them. Kind of how like Jenn Frank observed in hindsight that it's relatively easy to be "one of the boys" as a woman, so long as you're willing to talk shit about all other women (or how GG is happy to accept folk of all identities, so long as they agree that it's secondary to being a gamer and never talk about anything that's specific to their lived experience). I think this is that typical brocialist garbage where they tell folk to shut up about identity politics and focus on class struggle while completely neglecting how the former informs the latter. Like when Jonas Kyratzes tells Anna Anthropy to stop talking about trans issues because look at how fucked up the situation in Greece is! Except the stuff that he points to once again disproportionately affects trans women, sex workers etc. etc.

That, truly, is some fancy counting. I really forgot too much of this stuff since the one semester of advanced math I took at college. No more proof by induction for this guy. Although I recently ran into a problem in my amateur game dev stuff where it was nice to be able to call back some of this stuff. I wanted to spawn a ball on a 2D plane that would move in a random direction, so I assigned a random value between 1 and -1 to x and y of its spawn vector. But then it spawns at different speeds, of course, the resulting vector would be much shorter if the values end up being close to 0. And I just had to normalize it to prevent that. The eventual process was: add together simple math functions to perform a complex thing -> realize there is a prebuilt function for the complex thing -> use that instead.

Dang, I love that game and its huge ships. Maybe one of the missions where you fight one of these giant things is more memorable for me overall, but they definitely threw you for a loop in that one.

Maybe you should just switch over to an easier language, like German, where letters actually mostly correspond with sounds (except for loan words, of which there are a lot, but many of them are Engiish, so you're basically set!).

Well, pronounciation is a pretty complex thing that varies not only across regional (and other) variants but also according to the immediate and larger context of the word and sentence or simple day-by-day fluctuations. Phonetic transcription is only an approximation of how this all works, and I don't think it's worth getting too pedantic about individual examples. For instance, the vowel in free is produced open-ended and is consequently probably pretty close to how you might produce it in isolation if prompted, while in the word beat your tongue has to be ready to produce that t sound at the front of the mouth. Likewise, a single person might pronounce the word robot pretty differently depending on whether you clearly enunciate it in isolation or slur it a little in the context of a sentence.

I also got an intense craving to go back to that one from this thread, it was such a neat little game! Not really feeling those stadium aesthetics as much as the tropical island stuff.

Apparently during that run somebody used a donation comment to claim that they worked on the game and it "had only one QA tester", which looks to be complete bullshit and also plays into the misunderstanding that huge bugs and glitches are left in games because incompetent developers fail to find them and not because budget/time restrictions keep them from fixing stuff they are well aware of. I find a lot of the comments on this stream insufferable in how self-congratulatory folk are about games and gamers saving the world or something, but at least for the most of them that's the end of the story.

The umlaut is similar to the th sounds in English in that they have no real importance to your ability to make yourself understood, take incredibly long to get almost right, and even then native speakers can still probably tell something is off. The vowel + e thing is correct, and that's still how people spell out umlauts when the circumstances don't allow for putting it down (for instance when I have to spell my name on English forms), but I'm not sure how helpful that is to know given that the German e sound isn't exactly equal to English e sounds (this page has some approximations in the vowel column). Regardless, I'd argue that uber has been in use in English long enough to have been fully assimilated into its phonetic system. At least, if you want to be a stickler about pronouncing it the German way then you should also be aware that these two languages handle the endings of the word differently, as you can hear in those pronounciation examples. So it'd be similar to oo-buh instead of oo-brr.

Yeah, I think the issue is rooted more deeply than this. Obviously being exposed to this constant deluge of comments isn't going to help (his fanbase being the sort of people who are nasty in tone even when trying to be supportive), but his own positioning as a consumer rights guy almost makes it necessary to keep that channel open. And when you play to the crowd that cares so intensely whether a turn-based game runs at 30 or 60 fps, don't be surprised if they have a lot of garbage, nitpicky complaints about your own work too I guess. I don't want to say he deserves that crap, nobody does. But it makes it seem strange and stranger that he continues to support their outrage. Maybe it's just a business move or maybe he genuinely believes in these incredibly petty crusades, but either way I'd feel more sorry for him if it looked like he made any attempt to listen to reasonable criticism instead of the toxic garbage that's... kind of the basis of his editorial philosophy? Or at least stopped acting like attention from his fans was an unequivocally good thing - I'm sending people to your charity stream, I'M HELPING.

Heh, nice.

Eh, I don't mean to be a stinker, I enjoyed those videos a lot, but his conclusions seem somewhat at odd with his deliberations on how complicated real-life problems are. It's hard to know which is the right thing to do, but talking to the Angry Jacks in your life is definitely the right thing to do apparently. I generally hold the same philosophy of arguing for men to talk to other men about feminism so women aren't constantly expected to give Feminism 101 lectures about it if a dude so much as tweets at them, but I also usually suggest doing this with men that are already part of your life, like friends and family. This can be a challenging thing to do because it might have consequences for personal relationships in your life, but that goes both ways and consequently your friends can't really gnore your position on this as easily as a sockpuppet Twitter account. People who are upset enough about this to yell about it on the internet are probably beyond our reach, and while that probably doesn't mean we should never respond to them, it does make thinking about the consequences of that action a litle more complicated: What if we are teaching them that they always deserve a response and suddenly they feel even more upset that all these women never deem them with one? What if we're giving the image that feminism is defined by men, and so they begin to feel they too should have a say in it? And even if we address all those concerns, there is still the simple question of whether or not this really is the best use of our time or if it might not be spent more fruitfully talking to people you already know, or doing some real-world local activism.

Oh yeah, talented people moving up in the world. Like Cara Ellison working on the next Dishonored.

There's a huge difference between something that emerges bottom-up from the community like the walking simulator tag and something that, because of Valve deleting the 30fps tag like you mentioned, had to be reintroduced top down by a single individual. The former speaks to shitty attitudes that were already present in the community, and popular re: particular games enough that the damage there likely has already been done (even though there's always room for more damage): the fact that enough people tag something walking simulator for it to show up means it's likely that the developers have already been heckled by those folk. A list, by contrast, only needs a single person to add new entries, and this allow its curator to potentially mark 30fps games that have until now flown under the radar of shitheels as a new target for their misguided anger. A tag emerging is evidence of something that's already going on, a list is a way of saying "go after this one next". And TB in particular has a history of using his megaphone in endlessly shitty ways. Sometimes he apologizes for it, sometimes he doesn't, but I've never, ever seen him address these situations in a way that actually tries to minimize harm for the folk he wittingly/unwittingly sent his fanbase after. Maybe he'll say, like he did this time, that he's sorry for the way his idea was used but you have to admit that the idea was still pretty good, and doesn't that ever spell to his fans how some overly sensitive folk ruined a great concept. Ditto for the popular "I'll stop doing this now because people got upset even though I still think it was a cool thing" and especially for "Stop talking about this already, it's in the past now" (his past maybe). But even if this list had simply been sourced from the community like that deepfreeze garbage, I still think it's next to useless so long as it operates on the principle of just tagging any game with framerate caps without any concern for what type of game it is, how and when it was created etc. Because right now that list features Dark Souls, a game where I applied the framerate fix myself, and the Jackbox Party Pack, Banner Saga: Factions, and all the other stuff I mentioned in my last post.

Weirdly, yes. I don't see much use in lumping together any and all games with framerate caps, given that not all of them are created equal, nor are all of them equally disposed to twitch gameplay. Not all of these games are shoddy console ports, and for some of these I struggle to see any convincing argument for how they would be improved with a higher framerate. The current list of the group includes, for instance, the Jackbox Party Pack, a game where you'll be more focused on your smartphone screen or your friends anyway, and Banner Saga: Factions (the main game is not/no longer on there), a hand-animated game that just so happens to have been drawn at 24 frames. Or Gemcraft, a tower defense game with Flash roots, VVVVVV, and Gothic, a PC RPG from 2001. If you want to take a customer service approach to this issue, nuance is absolutely required. Bringing something like this up in the context of a review may be helpful, but just listing games with framerate caps without context is pointless, just something for silly people to get upset about, people who likely have no idea how or why games are made with such specific limitations sometimes. Like that indie games steam curation group that promised it would have "none of that Gamemaker crap" and immediately recommended Hotline Miami, Gunpoint and Spelunky.

Well the show's not called Misadventure Time now is it? Maybe a different show is though.

I didn't really mean to vaguely call anyone out. it's hard to tell in individual cases whether people mean that Gawker allowed this through, which speaks to a real structural issue with editorial oversight in their "throw everything at the wall" model, or whether they mean that Gawker decided to do this, where it's more likely that this was a call made by an individual writer and editor or some small combination of people.

I guess I can give them that taking down the post was ineffective at this point (mostly because they put the damaging information into their apology anyway), but that doesn't mean that taking it down isn't still the absolute first thing that has to happen in this case. And if a "large percentage" of your editors disagreed with putting it up in the first place, how come it went through? I guess "many" does not mean "most" here, which also doesn't speak well to the judgement of most of their editors. Ultimately, I'm confused how anybody could think this is the appropriate time to complain about corporate meddling. Either you would have removed that post yourself anyway or you would have demonstrated why you clearly need corporate supervision if you had decided to leave it up. A thing that still slightly bugs me about this is how people talk about it as "the work of Gawker". It's an issue that Ian Williams tweeted about briefly and that really needs about several pages of nuance to do justice but the short of it is that internet publishing is really weird and none of the big sites that we have are monoliths, so talking about them as unified things rarely makes sense (unless you're going to have a really messy conversation about structural issues). Doesn't mean we shouldn't hold them accountable for this shit, but the "never going to read this outlet again" response was really more at home in the age of newspapers, when the shitty stories came physically bundled with the good stuff and there was no way around supporting both at the same time except to stop altogether.

Hey folks, I'm working on an expanded version of this list of places to pitch to as a writer's resource for Critical Distance so if there's any places you can recommend from personal experience that are open to submissions from new folk (or maybe you run a site yourself and need people) I'd super appreciate a heads up. Also, how's the writing going gentlefolk?

This mirrors my experience. There's some obvious issues with how this is sometimes played for "feminism is sexy" marketing (because it would still be worthwhile if it wasn't), but I guess it's not terribly surprising that pushing for something to be enjoyed without shame, coercion or bartering speaks to thinking highly of that thing.

Pretty sure that a robot just posted this to deceive us.

I haven't played these since Sunrise, so where do I begin now?

The name may be coincidence, but we did recently quote them here for spinning GG bullshit.

But even for shows or games that take place on a single planet we sometimes talk about their settings as universes. I'm misusing this thread by not caring about these things, ain't I?