Deadpan

A lot of changes in language take place because people begin interpreting words differently than originally intended, or because the original meaning of words becomes opaque over time. That's hardly an indication of decay or incompetence. I'd argue the changes "literally" is going through are not dissimilar from the metaphorical meaning shifts that occur in a lot of words from the semantic field of writing. Consider how prosaic and lyrical used to indicate simply that something belonged to the genre of poetry or prose, but then came to mean "dry, boring" and "flowery, sappy" based on people's notion of what these kinds of writing are like. In the case of "literally" it seems to be a reinterpretation from "take these words in their exact, literal sense" to "these words are very important", which is always the implied meaning of calling attention to a particular part of your speech.

Okay now there's been a patch and my Volt Disruptor doesn't have a cooldown anymore. Maybe I'm just hallucinating.

It may be an understandable thing to do, but that doesn't mean we need to be supportive of that goal or help them accomplish it. A lot of people have been talking about their interests, or Kotaku's interest, but for me it just comes down to my own interest, which is to have access to unfettered critical writing, and that's why I prefer publishers don't attach unreasonable expectations to their support. To me, saying the onus is on Kotaku to resist that kind of thing is like saying the onus is on individual employees at a company to resist downsizing, pay cuts, or shitty workplace policies. Maybe that's something you can do if you have, say, a union and public support to back you up, but without those things you quickly end up with a shitty system that everybody is going along with because they see no alternative if they want thrive. For any individual it's almost impossible to change or resist the status quo, that's why it took a site the size of Kotaku to do something like this in the first place. Well, "gifts". Perhaps you could look at it as getting access to their products in exchange for the service they provide, and then look at that as analogous to how you and I get access to Kotaku's products, their writing, in exchange for the service we provide in looking at ads. You can see how there's a value judgement about the importance of games journalism encoded in this, right? The general attitude being that it's facile or banal is part of the reason why sites don't really get to assert their position opposite publishers. The only leverage they have is in the audience they represent, and if that crowd keeps going "whatever" when the two other corners of this triangle end up butting heads, well...

I'm just got up myself, I'm on Slack now too, let me know when the happening be happening.

Did they include the option to telefragstun guards?

It's a little misleading to look at this choice in isolation though, when the real issue isn't publishers not working with one specific outlet (something Kotaku managed to do well regardless of), but publishers playing favorites this way in order to influence what is written about their games and when. It's similar to how they like giving early access and exclusives to writers who are known to already like the series, so that there's a very narrow range of opinions floating around before launch, or possibly after. These practices may not be anything close to illegal, but they're not something discerning readers should be happy about.

I would argue that it is promotional material because it was created with the express intent of being used to promote the game. Sure, sometimes there are reasons not to put it out, like maybe the stuff that's being depicted in that screenshot isn't actually in the game anymore. But it's assuming an absurd amount of incompetence on the part of the publisher to suggest that this material would ever look genuinely bad or make them look bad. Like, whoops, we meant to put in a high-res screenshot of a finished section of the game, but actually it's a photo somebody took of their screen, showing placeholder art overlayed with the word emotions in all caps. Thief is a weird word to use, given that the person sending the information also played a part in the creation of the game. It's implying that they have absolutely no claim to their work, or the results of their work. I'm sure that's what their contract and NDA say, but I doubt it's a system I'd want to defend. I can see why people working on a game might decide for themselves not to talk about it, but when this becomes company mandate, and some person decides that fuck it, what's going on is 1) worth talking about or 2) not worth keeping a secret, there are few circumstances I can think of where I'd condemn their choice.

To a certain degree, I think this is understandable and probably has to do with the fact that, as far as I hear and as far as my own experiments go, games look like shit for most of their development, with placeholders everywhere, and huge components missing, or weird glitches. The game may already be fun to play! But you can't actually sit everybody down and let them figure that out for themselves, and the kind of glimpses of your work in progress you could give probably aren't going to go over well because the general public doesn't understand how a Video game comes to be and will just latch onto the fact that, right now, it still looks like shit. Of course the only reason people don't know about how games come to be is because people have always been so secretive about it, so that's a bit of a weird ourobouros of secrecy I guess.

You've literally crossed both into "What if it was an entirely different kind of information?" and "What if it was obtained in a completely different way?" now.

Journalistic guidelines for such cases do not suggest that this kind of reporting is only allowed in matters of grave public importance, merely that you need to weigh the benefit to the public against the potential damages caused to your subject. So while Kotaku's posts may not have been huge achievements of investigative reporting, this is offset by the fact that the only damage caused is a slight hiccup in a huge company's marketing scheme. When promotional material that is revealed early looks good, then it likely ends up working in the company's favor anyway. When it looks bad, well then people probably deserve to know. The only cases I could think of where publishing information could cause excessive damages was if it was misleading, i.e. the kind of internal documentation, vertical slices or prototypes that industry folk can put in perspective, but regular people are going to misinterpret. Also, as far as I'm aware, this person contacted Kotaku (and potentially other sites who didn't run the story) out of their own initiative and volition, so how exactly is Kotaku to blame if a choice this person made ends up damaging their career? Yes, there was, and it is to show that publishers do not get to control when and potentially what people write about their games. They have set up a system that uses game sites' desperation and fear to keep them in line, twisting their arms by limiting access to the early copies, events and exclusives they need to satisfy gamers obsessive curiosity and draw in the clicks that mainstream games journalism currently depends on, for better or worse (generally worse). A site writing something a publisher did not want them to write is not a fucked up thing. That any site would consider not running a newsworthy story for fear of falling out of favor with the massive corporation they are supposed to call out on their bullshit, that is the fucked up thing.

Perhaps, but it's entirely possible for perfectly legal business practices to still be morally or socially reprehensible, see also that business bro who raised the price of that cancer medication by about a billion percent. So even though it's understandable that these companies want to control the flow of information around their products, we don't therefore need to accept this kind of bullying and favoritism as a necessary consequence, especially considering our own interests are better served by a strong press apparatus. Publishers want sites to write what they want, sites want to write what they themselves feel like writing, and video game consumers at large should want sites to get to do so without repercussions (except large amounts of them have absurdly become convinced that PR material is divine scripture that becomes corrupted when it is handed down by mere mortal games journalists). What is also true, however, is that the exact incidents that caused this blacklisting were not terribly subversive of the system in themselves. It may not have happened on the schedules of Ubisoft and Bethesda, but these kinds of leaks typically still end up serving the kind of hype build-up these companies want to instigate. On very rare occasions, this kind of information is used to call into question the promises that have been made in advance, in most cases readers end up treating it as preview material they simply got their hands on a little earlier than expected. So in publishing these, Kotaku was still technically playing the hype game publishers want them to play, where the only winning move is to consider not talking about a big game just because it's big. And still, they were simultaneously daring to step out of line, something we should applaud them for, even while recognizing they did it for cheap clicks. On the other, other side of things, once Bethesda and Ubisoft did blacklist them, they inadvertently turned them into the journalistic paragons Totilo makes them out to be, When you talk about this whole situation, you should not only consider the pieces that caused the blacklisting, but all the writing they did on these games since being cut off as fallout (hehe) to the original decision.

It's pretty neat! I always thought XCOM was the most interesting when you played it as a roguelike, but with at least a dozen hours or so to finish it that's pretty hard to do without ruining your life. This has a nice short length for playing repeatedly. Derek definitely sounds pretty useful, I hadn't even considered that you could hand over the teleportation device to another character. In the main game your objective and the teleporter room don't often end up on the completely different sides of the map, but with the addition of having to search for batteries the likelihood for that seems to increase. Just recently I thought I had hit the jackpot when both the teleporter room and the augment grafters I was looking for were placed directly adjacent to the starting room, until I remembered I stll had to fetch that battery from behind a gauntlet of killer drones.

I think they might have changed some stuff about Xu. I didn't really get to test that theory, since it was in an Expert campaign I started today where I immediately ate shit, but when I disabled safes to loot them, they didn't show up as hackable objects afterwards. Or is that how it's always been? Also Volt Disruptors have cooldowns now, I'm pretty sure that is new.

I'll probably be at my desk working most of the weekend anyway, so I can adjust my sleep and work schedule once we figured something out. Maybe we want to have some sort of Skype group/call for on the side?

Which is absurd, considering that their main talking point for the first couple of months was "Why aren't media outlets picking up this obvious smear campaign uncritically, boohoo" It's so weird. I turned off the autoblocker recently cause I figured people had probably stopped tweeting at me at this point, but sometimes people I follow poke fun at this mess, and now I once again get to see these weird hate-followers show up, without fault, to let them know that they absolutely disagree with that. This is all that's left I guess, a bunch of internet arguer people and a bunch of actual terrorists.

I don't imagine anybody outside the group really doubted the connection, but it's still nice to see it laid out so plainly. The weird mind-bending gaters are attempting over this whole thing is really a special kind of maelstrom of shit. No that wasn't us, but also isn't it totally justified, remember that time he made fun of white people, also this shows that we're absolutely right in demanding ethical journalism, even though it's us fucking asshats who caused this problem in the first place, blah blah blah... The ethical course of action, now as ever, would be for the group to advocate for its own abolishment. That penny will never drop, I fear.

The way I understand it is (also) as the process of beginning to express your gender openly, which may or may not involve a lot of different things, like changing your name (or not) or wearing different kinds of clothing (or not). Considering this entire system is such a mess of arbitrary norms, it's kinda weird how we grade trans folk on their performance of honoring these weird rules. I've been doing a lecture on legal gender studies recently, and one reason the professor offered for why legislation, at least around here, was more willing to make changes for trans folk than for queer folk (and did so earlier), is that their existence feels soothing to people who still strongly believe in a binary system of genders, because any kind of identity that challenges these assumptions can then be explained away as being the result of this person being "in the wrong camp" and just needing to "switch over to the other side" and then everything will work as expected. That's not how it actually works, of course, but you can still kind of see those attitudes in how quick people are to judge trans people's dress and desires and whether or not they meet their own expectations. If you're cis you can dress differently than people would expect and date somebody the same gender as you and most people, I think, will just be like "that's how it is I guess". They might not be accepting of your identity, but they're probably going to accept the fact that you are who you say you are, while with trans folk people might feel like they know better than themselves whether their identity is "correct" or not.

So, has everybody got their stuff ready and running? Are we doing this still?

Just finished a campaign with the DLC. Maybe I shouldn't have set it to 120 hours, didn't know the DLC would slap an extra 48 hours on top of that, so by the end there I had pretty much every upgrade imaginable. I was hoping to find Ping or Parasite 2.0 along the way, but the passive programs I ended up finding instead ended up being pretty useful too. Controlling drones for an extra turn is pretty helpful when you can suddenly hold onto these huge killer drones for two turns instead of one and move them further out of the way. Daemons lasting two turns less became pretty great by the end of the game, especially when those agent-tracking, device-rebooting and hack-disabling debuffs in the final mission get knocked down to a single turn. I'm curious what kind of team setups people prefer. I still really love Internationale as my main hacker, remotely getting power from consoles is super helpful and sensing devices through walls is great for getting parasites running early and figuring out the rough layout of the current mission. I tried backing her up with Sharp this time, and after raiding a couple of cyberlabs early to stack implants, his KO damage was high enough to disable guards for eight turns, a real comfortable window even when I wasn't pinning them down. I unlocked his archived version after this campaign, and I imagine getting passive armor piercing would be even nicer for the late game. I also ended up finding Olivia in a detention center (not sure how the game explains having two versions of the same person around), and her passive of generating power for KO damage she deals also seems nice. It meant I could either get back all the power I'd have to invest in more fancy disruptors, or use an unsuspecting, unarmed guard to generate some power. You even get power for attacking guards that are already down, so if you're feeling particularly cruel you could keep one around as a kind of human dynamo.

I finally noticed there was an option to import save files from Rebirth to Afterbirth recently. I'll have to go through Greed mode again then, but that's not so bad since I still really like Greed mode. Also my third save slot now has the Real Platinum God image on it even though there is absolutely nothing unlocked on it, which is weird. Probably the design decision I find most annoying in Afterbirth is the way Ultra Greed and the new super secret boss cap the maximum amount of damage they take per hit (or maybe it's not per hit, I don't know). It's true that in Rebirth most bosses, even right up to Mega Satan could become trivial if you ran into the right combination of items, but I never really saw this as a problem. To me, Isaac is the most interesting not when it hits a sweet spot of being the right amount of challenge, but when I get an interesting, unusual or particularly satisfying item combination. Getting those broken runs once in a while just makes up for all the annoying ones you had leading up to it, and personally I'm even guilty of rerolling runs until I find a nice item in the very first item room when I'm not in the mood to deal with Isaac's shit. So even though the intended effect of this damage cap may have been to always put up a fight even when the player is incredibly OP, the actual consequence, for me at least, is that you now need to be incredibly OP in even more specific ways to deal with those guys. Glass cannon builds aren't really an option, since the game explicitly prevents you from dealing damage quickly enough to end the fight before you take more hits than you should. So now you want plenty of health mixed in there, and defensive items that help you not get hit, and of course you still want those damage and tears up for the rest of the run and so you can deal as much damage as you're allowed to in those fights. Maybe it wasn't ideal that damage trumped everything else in Rebirth, but actually needing to have everything doesn't increase the amount of viable approaches.

I did go on Battlenet just to see if it works (and if anybody is there) but I didn't realize it at least added a placebo option for picking an appropriate resolution for my screen. Still kind of in shock over how zoomed in it feels now.

I got the game to run now at least, so that's a first step in the right direction. I don't know, I've never really played this online and it's been forever since I played it at all so I feel like I'd get knocked out pretty soon in FFA, but I don't want to weigh down teammates either.

I'm interested in this, but I'd have to dig up my copy first and then there's still the issue of being in Europe.

Maybe I should have done the actual dusting off part of dusting off my Vita for this!

The game's finally out in my region and I've already plowed through story mode at an unreasonable pace. Since then I've just worked at unlocking Backside of the TV in Free Dance and then gave it a break finally. Does anybody know why some notes have a red line around them when they're getting close to the scoring area rather than a yellow one? I noticed that I sometimes lose my combo without explicitly missing a note, but I haven't worked out the exact conditions for why that happens, although it seems to happen right around those notes, and also when I have a couple of near-misses in a row.