Deadpan

To be fair, there is this quadrilateral parable and I understand it's not entirely wrongheaded. There's definitely a lot of weird baggage in the unquestioned assumption that we should all be interested in and working towards unity, similar to the discussion that was happening in the Feminism thread about Chait's article and the idea that "but I'm a liberal too!" should work as a shield against criticism. The fact that we all play games isn't a particularly strong connection and it gets increasingly bizarre that people want to establish this kind of forced bond. Why should a rift in games be a bad thing then? Seems to me that if we can create a physical obstacle between decent folk and douchelords, it can't possibly be wide and trap-laden enough.

Funny how the narrative has changed from "Your sites can't live without us, you're going down!" to "Please, please help us." Funny, and also gross, as per usual. To elaborate on that particular point, why wouldn't I get to write off Ken Levine? I have no plans to yell at the guy over any of this, but I'm also not obliged to read or consider his perspective on these things. It's an undeniable fact that he's sort of important in games right now, but it's also not an immutable law and I don't have to take part in continuing to build him up. Without any nostalgia for games he made decades ago, his entire claim to fame is making a couple of recent games that I don't care for, and some structural decisions for his company that I also don't care for. His statements on this are something like the kicker, and they look all the more damning when you consider that writing (supposedly, but not really) insightful commentary on social issues is part of his damn job. As has been said, it all fits right into that "truth is in the middle" false equivalence people took Infinite to town for. For a more extreme example on all this: I get (or got, bless you autoblocker) similar complaints from gaters whenever I mentioned that I'd absolutely stop playing and writing about any games made by asshole developers who take part in all this. Even if I wasn't doing this on my own time and money, generally, even if I was paid to write about every game in the world 24/7 there'd be plenty of people I'd never get around to for simple reasons of time, and they think skipping somebody who harasses other people on Twitter is some sort of weird injustice. "But their game might still be good!" So what, there's a hundred good games going unreported on every direction I look. In general, it sounds awfully nice to say that you're interested in fixing things, but it also suggests all sides are equally to blame for this. Levine is, at least, the actual petition has the gall to suggest this is entirely journalists fault... somehow. Probably in the same way it was Leigh Alexander's fault that people never bothered to read a single word of her Gamers are Over piece, and even managed to consistently misquote the title.

I was a bit angry about that at first, but it's probably one of the more exciting parts of this whole playthrough, the clawing back afterwards. Sometimes I don't want to go too far towards ideal results. Like all those spotless missions in XCOM endgame? Gets kinda boring. That Hellion probably got another nerf coming I guess. Maybe just to her insanely strong pendants at least. I played around with the Grave Robber for a bit, but that was before the stage coach even presented me with a Bounty Hunter or decent Jester so I was just looking for somebody who could attack from third position. Probably not a lot of use beyond that general versatility of moving up, then fading back with stuns and self-buffs. Now I use the Bounty Hunter for hitting from the back line, stuns and pulls. Or just the Jester. I am kind of fond of the Occultist though. The Vestal is definitely the more reliably healer, but I don't mind the bleed to much since most folk seem to resist that reliably, which turns him into something of an erratic healer. Sometimes I get exactly zero points out of healing out of that guy, other times he instantly patches a comrade back up to full health. Most times it doesn't seem to be necessary to be pumping out heals constantly, and in those cases he just offers a bit more damage than the Vestal, I think. Abyssal Artillery is pretty good for targetting the back lines, or you can bring the debuffs. Didn't get to test the synergies with the Bounty Hunter yet though. Outside of boss runs and other missions that require extra safety, I've also taken to sending people out for torchless runs. With upgraded skills, weapons, the buff from total darkness and battle ballad, crit chances get around 30% easily, and at that point, people seem to be landing them reliably enough to take care of the extra stress. The usefulness of EVEN MORE LOOT! definitely rubs up against the limits of the backpack though, plenty of times when you fill that up with good stuff either way.

I haven't played much of it lately, but everything has been going swimmingly for me outside of occasional boss surprsises. The game definitely loses a bit of difficulty not only when the quirks start disappearing, but also when you get a chance to fully customize your party and start seeing the big picture of what skills they have on the whole vs. what they have unlocked at the start. Like, right at the beginning of the game I thought that plague doctors were of no use at all because I happened to pick one up right after getting out of the tutorial (when I didn't have much choice in who to take) that didn't have any of his actual damage abilities unlocked, so no noxious blast, no plague grenade. At that point it looked like he was doing a similar thing to the vestal I picked up as healer, except for being much worse at it. I still haven't gone back on plague doctors, but I've definitely noticed that even classes I like sometimes start out with skills that might have given me a different initial impression (and that also feeds into the troubles with level 1 cash grinds if you're in a position where you have to take any volunteers available). My only real loss after learning the ropes was against the Swine King, or Prince or whatever. I think this was the second version anyway, which means I must have lucked my way through the first fight of that variety. For the medium Swine boss I learned that it's apparently not ideal to kill the little swine first, since it makes the big guy enter rage mode. He kept doing this one move which targeted my entire party and had a pretty good chance of stunning, plus he went several times in a row at that point. So even though my entire party was still stunned, he'd have a chance to stun them all again, just in case. This was right before they implemented the increased stun resistance after clearing one to address that kind of permanent stunlock, but I got to see why they would first. Between the early attacks I got in on him and people occasionally dodging or resisting those stuns, I still got him down to one hit from death, but my entire party was at death's door and stressed out in various ways by that point, so they all managed to whiff or throw a fit on what few attempts they got to hit him, and he kept hammering down until they all fell. Which is the point where I had to earn back some cash for supplies and upgrades by throwing new recruits into the meat grinder and since then no real hiccups. Which I'm still not sure is a real problem, the fact that the game allows you to brute-force your way through stuff, in the sense that you're sort of equally responsible for the kind of experience you want to get out of it. I'm definitely in a unique position approaching this, and you probably are too, because of my experience with roguelikes and other such challenging games, most people probably find this a lot more challenging as it is because they simply don't approach it with optimization or brute force on their mind. Making it more challenging for us is probably going to force everyone more in that direction of farming and preperation, which I wouldn't want to see.

I've been there, and it also happened after failing a mission left me with around 200 gold to spare. I picked up new people from the stagecoach to do level 1 missions, but random team compositions (who needs healers) with random negative quirks and no torches or food to avoid stress generation aren't exactly a recipe for success. Had to end a couple of those early after the entire crew got stressed out, better to grab that bit of cash than let them all die in another fight. If your perception here is that level 1 stuff is impossible to mess up then I'd have to disagree.

There is the part where you can get lucky and get a really nice combination of positive quirks in a hero that you're going to miss not having around. Also the material loss of gold invested into upgrading their weapon, armor and skills is a bit of a reason to hold on to them. Which circles back into economics of grinding through free reinforcements to gain cash, of course.

I guess the thing that it already has is you running out of money, which is a place I found myself in after cutting it a little close before one mission and then losing my entire team against the boss (who was one hit from death, too). Although then I just sent out some unfortunate new recruits without any kind of equipment and that worked out alright. I think I had to cancel a couple of missions early so that I'd at least get the treasures they found before they kick the bucket, but I made my way out of that fairly quickly. I don't know that it really needs a sense of urgency or any way of screwing up irreedemably though, it feels pretty okay to just run a quirky dungeon running business, if the quirkiness of your adventurers actually was preserved a little longer, and I maintain that might mostly be an issue of the large overall team size, which is what allows me to keep people out of rotation for long enough to cure several quirks and commit them to stress relief, rather than having to make do with any less than ideal heroes. Although, that part is probably also hard to change. They probably want to make it possible to keep full teams around for easy, medium and hard missions for when the remaining dungeons unlock, since you have to go through the local bosses in succession.

For sure. The interview could have gone into discussing issues of crowdfunding in a substantial way, but it felt much more like Walker was interested in getting Molyneux to confess being personally responsible for every problem in that environment.

The problem I have with this view is that the interview feels all too much like retroactively beating up Molyneux for hype that RPS themselves have been actively complicit in producing. They may always present those earlier interviews with a wink and a nudge about taking this with a grain of salt, cause you know how it is with silly old Peter, but that doesn't seem to make up for just how much time they devote to talking about how hypothetically interesting all those ideas were, should they come to pass. If you think somebody lies so consistently about everything that you need to accuse him of that right of the bat, maybe stop helping him spread those lies? The interview feels like a way to get angry at Molyneux for 30 years of broken promises without having to consider your own responsibility in continuing to fund and cover the man. I don't know how he led those other interviews, but Walker previously took that same aggressive style to Jason Rohrer and Jeffrey Yohalem to great success. The main difference seems to be that those interviews circled around Walker's understanding of Far Cry 3 and The Castle Doctrine - matters of interpretation tied to specific examples - while this circles around his understanding of how games are made, which quickly turns out to be a little flimsy, and then leads to increasingly petulant questions about why he can't give an exact schedule for his game even though nobody else in the world can, either. And what was he doing in that fancy hotel when there was work to do anyway!? Large parts of this read entirely too much like GG "grilling" journalists with questions about lacking objectivity, publisher bribes or secret cabals. Those questions are hard to address for sure, but not because they're particularly insightful, more because they're so mean-spirited and uninformed.

I've been thinking about something Cameron Kunzelman said about the interview and how that incredibly aggressive style previously led to some great discussions (notably RPS interviews with Yohalem and Rohrer). I think the big difference is that in those cases the conversation was rooted in Walker's understanding of the games themselves - questions of interpretation and specific examples - while this time it's rooted in his understanding of how the development of a game works, which quickly turns out to be flimsy at best, and then it starts circling around itself and gets into increasingly petulant territory like why can't he give a perfect estimate for how long something will take even after doing this for thirty years, and how dare he be in a fancy hotel a couple of days ago when there was work to be done. Large parts of this read entirely too much like GG "grilling" journalists with questions about publisher bribes, trust funds and hidden cabals. Yes, those questions are tough and mean-spirited, but they're also pointless and show you don't really understand these issues and aren't interested in addressing them in any meaningful way. It's downright bizarre how much of this seems to be a proxy war over Molyneux's previous broken promises, an exercise in vindication that allows people to pin their anger on Godus or Kickstarter specifically instead of having to consider their own responsibility in continuing to fund and cover a man who so notoriously overpromises on things. Like, if RPS thinks Molyneux lies consistently about everything, maybe stop interviewing him every time he announces some new project regardless?

They still got episode recaps for current TV shows, in case you want to keep up but also can't be bothered to watch them. Also Robert Rath's Critical Intel column, if I'm up to date. The site really hasn't been worth visiting since it axed weekly features a couple of years ago. The few good things still clinging on felt out of place there ever since.

It is pretty cool, but also a blog I write for has picked Sunless Sea as their next item of discussion, and even as the only guy around who spent a lot of time with Fallen London I'm sort of unsure what can be said about it, generally, except that it spreads puns and solid writing across a very broad and very varied slice of bread. There's a lasting facination with the secret life of mundane objects (screams sealed in jars with wax, letters in a secret language that can burn your skin if you read them) and it generally places itself near the idea of natural philosophy (so a time when natural sciences and humanities were not a seperate things yet) but other than that? I'm just sort of overwhelmed with trying to interpret something so broad right now. I mean, it contains about a million words by their own account.

It's certainly questionable whether attempted murder would hold as an actual case to be made against this (This usually isn't applied to comically ineffective methods, but it doesn't have to be particularly promising of success either, as far as I know, especially if the intent is made clear somehow, say in accompanying tweets wishing for somebody's death. Also laws are different in different places) but since I imagine none of us are qualified to speak to that with any expertise, it seems to me more that the argument was about whether such a gleefully reckless thing counts as an attempt to kill in spirit.

These articles also only seem to be talking about raids that are officially considered to be a failure, and I'm not sure that translates to the actual number of innocents hit. I'm fairly certain that more than a few "justified" killings that take place in the course of these would look more than a little suspect if examined more closely. You know, in a system that finds no cause to indict Darren Wilson.

I imagine there's definitely going to be a lot of tweaks to the general economy of the game and hamlet management and such. The Sanitarium probably is an issue, but low effectiveness and chances of removing a positive trait are still trade-offs that I might take (since I also recently learned that there's not infinite room for positive traits, I think, and some of them are not that useful). I think it might be something that should be addressed from the side of the hero roster. You have room for 20 adventurers once the barracks are fully upgraded right now (which is five full dungeon running teams) and that just gives you so much room to swap people out and leave them at home multiple weeks in a row to cure stress, get rid of any and all diseases they might have picked up, etc. etc. If I had less people to work with I might have to take along people with leftover stress and such more often. Or they could grow restless if I never end up using them I guess, similar to how they just implemented heroes complaining about wasting time if you cheese a fight by leaving a single enemy alive to spam heals.

The one I'm thinking of is for the Hellion and gives +10% damage and 15% chance to bleed skills. Although maybe I'm reading that wrong when I assume it's damage done not taken, and chance to cause bleed not be bled. Some of these are phrased a little awkwardly. I'm pretty sure the fasting pendant read "+100% less food consumed" although that seems to be changed now so I guess they're working on everything anyway.

Yeah, I picked up on some these uses, they just still feel entirely to situational for me and in most cases don't warrant bringing along the item. Except keys for a couple of extra heirlooms and shovels to avoid the massive amounts of stress caused by clearing obstacles by hand. The actual, intended uses of bandages and antivenom are even worse though, I've definitely never encountered a situation so far where it wasn't an easy option to just let my healer take care of any cases of bleeding or blight and not have to spend any more gold. There's probably something to be said for playing the game in a slightly less than optimal way though. I've been using the sanitarium to remove almost all negative quirks from my core group, and while that has made them a lot more reliable, the game has also lost quite a bit of personality in the process. It's been a long time since anybody actually got stressed out in a dungeon run for me. My case with trinkets was more that besides these fairly even trade-offs between one skill and another, a couple of them promise raw power with nary a downside. Seems a bit weird.

There's a real dichotomy between taking all calls seriously or pre-screening all of them somehow, but there's a false dichotomy in your framing of this as "lives will be lost if they don't move out instantly" since, as has been pointed out, lives could just as easily be lost to the zealotry of this notoriously violent police force.

This is certainly one of the few times that this particular thinking of the wrong country blunder has gone off this way and not the other way around.

My first attempt also consisted of running headlong into rocks until I was killed by pirates. Makes it all the weirder though that the game then asks what kind of relationship my next captain should have to this one (rival, shipmate, etc). None at all, hopefully?

I've been watching Baertaffy play this and am kind of irked by how many items he brings to dungeons, generally at least one of everything. The effects these have with certain objects are nice, but I'm not sure it's worth it to bring them just on the condition that you'll have the chance to use it. Plus more often than not it seems like my inventory ends up chock full of loot whether I bring extra items or not. Although I do bring at least one key always. Keys and shovels. Plus I only recently stopped bringing torches, so what do I know? What's the deal with trinkets though? Most of them seem fairly useless, but then a few exceptions are just off the charts good. Like the Hellion gets one that raises damage and bleed chance without any downside.

Cider already alluded to it, but I think SWATting tells us as much about the complete lack of concern on the part of these remote terrorists as it does the sorry state of policing, gun culture, etc. etc. that allows these people to so easily turn law enforcement into their weapon. Like, from what I gather from some of these reports it's enough to mention that somebody at the address you're targetting is suicidal, and how the hell does storming the place make any sense there except when you're trying to help them end up dead. Maybe vetting the calls isn't an option, but they certainly need to be prosecuted for that shit. I've heard rather too many people suggest it's a waste of resources to go after "pranksters", but then laxness allows them to waste even more resources in the future with more fake calls.

It definitely seemed to be something of a catalyst for uniting and establishing networks between hateful gamers, MRAs, sexist Metalheads and literal Nazis. Although this has also been a problem long before. Half-relatedly: There was an incident in the German blogosphere something like two years ago when the blog of a female MRA ("See, we must be right about this, there is demonstrably at least one woman who agrees with us!") turned out to be run by a dude... from some sort of PR agency as far as I recall. The frustrating thing, as always, is that the clarifications and corrections and potential apologies that happen opposite lies and gaslighting never get carried as far as the initial message. I mean, even with the best intent this is hard to do on something like Twitter, but people who are trying to actively spread confusion can almost be certain that the news of them eventually being caught will not be as widely heard as their lies. It all ultimately banks on a definitive law of internet communication.

To be honest, I think you're already going on a limb there. Here's a passage that I quoted in the original Freeze Peach thread, that still mirrors my thoughts in a lot of ways. I mean, to be clear, if people wanted to shut down those cartoons, gunning down the cartoonists was the absolute worst thing they could have done. It led to their widespread circulation all over the world, turned the artists into martyrs in the eyes of a lot of people, and generally caused folk to lionize their work even if they might feel a little iffy about the content. That result was easily predictable. It seems strange to assume that the gunmen themselves wouldn't have seen it coming, or that whatever shadowy figures are pulilng the threads in this "war" have any illusions about being able to kill ideas with bullets. Sure, maybe they haven't, maybe they still thought it was worth it, there's a lot I don't know about such a warped worldview. However, whatever they might have thought they were doing, it's pretty clear to me that what they did had little to no effect on free speech, only on the increasing divide between muslims and an increasingly islamophobic west. I'm not sure why we're allowing them to unilaterally define what this tragedy is about. Just because they made some weird monologue about it? Why is this the only kind of terror attack in which we unquestioningly parrot the announced motives of the terrorists? When Elliot Rodger's manifesto was linked, it wasn't to show the cause of his attacks, it was to show why he thought he was doing it. So in short, I think there's a massive difference between the reasons and reasoning given by terrorists and the actual cultural meaning of an attack. One thing that bugs me generally about these discussions of violence is that epistemic or systemic violence are not acknowledge as such, which leads to a pretty slanted view of who's commiting violent acts on who exactly. Police officers gunning down kids not being seen as murder is the most obvious example, but it goes all the way to much more mundane things like how constant beaurocratic hassles for trans folk aren't seen as microaggressions or harassment, just some depersonalized force of nature they have to endure. If you don't look at violence commited by states or agents of state, a brick through a shop window is going to look like a massive breach of peace, but if you do pay close attention to these many, tiny infractions it becomes hard to believe why people aren't rioting all the time (although, your insinuation that "changing the system" is a call for mass executions is pretty gross).

Poe's Law is always in full effect with MRAs, Meninists and gaters.