CollegeBaby

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Posts posted by CollegeBaby

  2. Posted

     

    It's incredibly (and terrible!) how much work they're willing to put into researching everything and anything about whoever speaks up against them but won't consider what they are saying for even a second. GG, looking for the tiniest speck of fecal matter on their enemy's coat with a magnifiying glass, forever unwilling to turn around and confront the heap of dung right behind them.

     

    On a more general note: Nina White wrote about why the term sealion makes her uncomfortable and more people should probably read this. She raises a valid point, I think, and it's disheartening to see people dismiss it (r/GamerGhazi doesn't deem it worth talking about, for instance). Makes me worry that condemning GG is seen as the mark of progressive video game folk, when really that's just a good baseline.

     

    It's a valid point. The comic - without the context in which it was created - leaves it ambiguous enough to interpret it both ways since it doesn't show the motives behind any of the characters. I don't know, I guess it shows how a single comic with a cute metaphor can't always succinctly sum up your snarky opinions.

  3. Posted

    The backwards leaps in logic they have to make to justify their outlandish conclusions just seems so totally exhausting. To be a GamerGater, MRA, chan troll - whatever they are - they just seem like that guy you knew from high school who always put more effort into avoiding homework assignments than it would to actually do the homework. For a while I gave them the benefit of the doubt that most were just insecure bullies who didn't truly believe the GG rhetoric and just wanted to lash out to feel good, but to actually believe this shit and consider it as logically consistent is completely baffling to me. Is it because I don't own a fedora? Do fedoras just have a supernatural ability to erase cognitive dissonance?

  4. Posted

    Just a note here: I believe that both the terms hooker/prostitute are somewhat outdated/offensive terms, I use solely sex worker at this point. 

     

    I am kinda amused that the campaign to prove that violent video games doesn't make you violent worked, but in a lot of ways, it conflated that point in a lot of ways that makes it hard to push for better representations of marginalized people, since that IS something that is impacted by portrayals in the media. It largely has to do with how enacting violence in an interactive way and how enacting or interacting with representations are two different things from a psychological and sociological standpoint. Enacting violence in real life is often based on a different set of parameters and has not as much relation to how it is enacted in the virtual world. However, all THAT being said, I find it really unnerving how the overlap between the military complex and video games is getting larger. Video games being used as training or inspiration for the military (along with TV shows, no less) or having ex-game devs go on to talk about how rad Call of Duty is being applied to military procedures is incredibly scary. 

     

    I don't want to go on a tangent since this is the Feminism thread, but this is a thing. Shooters: How Video Games Fund Arms Manufacturers

  5. Posted

    I think it was on Isometric podcast a few weeks ago someone brought up the possibility that the sex workers - seeing as they are hired by pimps - were affiliated with gangs, and if you killed a sex worker then other sex workers would refuse to serve you and you would get heat from gang members.

     

    I'm not sure that it would make it wholly acceptable, but I think it's a more interesting and less arbitrary way to mitigate the problem mechanically rather than just getting rid of sex workers or making them invulnerable.

  6. Posted

    I guess he's going independent now? I don't know, I'm recalling the Bombin' the AM episode a month back with Jim Sterling where they talked about Patreon for like 40 minutes.

     

    I don't know in much detail but Patrick appeared to be heavily responsible for networking with other people and getting them in GB site content. The podcast guests, the E3 panels, his interviews etc. I hope someone can pick up the slack there. I've become pretty bored with Giant Bomb (mostly Dan) so the times where they get other rad people have been the most entertaining for me this last year.

  7. Posted

    I didn't meant that in defense of Dan Savage as a columnist, he definitely appears to be missing that part of the brain that thinks before it blurts out shit, but after 2 decades of this I just don't have the energy anymore to get worked up every time he says something tone deaf that he thinks is funny. Maybe it's cynical, but this is progress from some of his past remarks about trans and non gender conforming people.

  8. Posted

    I can totally understand why people would "hate" Dan Savage for advising his readers to be tolerant and respectful of other people's gender identities and desired pronouns even if they don't understand them.

     

    Yeah. I know he's being a flippant and snarky about it, but Dan Savage gonna be Dan Savage.

  9. Posted

    Sorry to briefly hijack with a general Dragon Age series question:

     

    Despite enjoying it the first time around, I never finished DA:O. With Inquisition getting all this buzz, I decided to go back and finish that game (I'm having fun so far!). My question is, what other Dragon Age games/content are/is worth playing? Was Awakenings good? Everything I hear about DA2 is bad, is it safe to just skip it without a thought? Are there other games that I'm not aware of?

     

    If you have Origins you must have whatever DLC gets you Shale as a companion. Best Dragon Age companion ever.

  10. Posted

    The_Martian_2014.jpg 

     

    Today's launch of the Orion spacecraft seems like a good opportunity to talk about this book. For those who don't know - it is set shortly into the future after the third manned-mission to Mars goes horribly wrong when a team of astronauts must abort the mission and leave behind a crew member who is presumed to be mortally wounded in a sandstorm. Trouble is, he survived. Stranded on Mars, Mark Watney must use his technical skills in engineering and botany to extend what was originally a 30-day mission to last for years before he has any chance of rescue.

     

    This book is an extremely well researched hard science-fiction triller that impressed me with how much commitment it had to its science and did not compromise it for cheap dramatics. However it had just enough humility and sense of humour to not make readers feel out of their depth with the concepts. Many people have compared it to a mix of Cast Away and Apollo 13, and as such I visualised the main character as basically being Tom Hanks.

     

    I really liked this book. It heralds a degree of scientific literacy such as Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke that is rare to find in fiction. It also avoids falling into blind scientism since it is very respectful of the limits of Man as it confronts the overwhelming indifference of the Universe. This is especially impressive since as far as I know the author has no scientific background.

     

    Some problems I had with it were it pushed a bit too hard with the humour at times. The book is mostly told in the form of first-person journal entries from Mark Watney - who while a very talented and professional scientist - he tends to respond to stress with dry black humour. This is great most of the time to provide comedic relief from the tension and to condense complex scientific principles into simple analogies. However I think it came at a slight expense of some interesting introspective character moments that were too few and far between. This does not reach too far in trying to be a dark dramatic character study like Gravity or Interstellar (which I am truly grateful for because it was handled poorly in both those movies) but it does come off as a bit too flippant at times and the first-person window you get into his experience feels a little bit wasted.

  11. Posted

    This year was pretty weak. A lot of good games but not many great ones. Divinity: Original Sin, Alien: Isolation and The Colon: More Colons are the only games I would even consider. I am looking forward to The Witcher 3 and Bloodborne more than anything that came out this year. :/

  12. Posted

    Eh. Dan coming to Giant Bomb and the controversy around it is pretty much the reason I stopped listening to Bombcast and started listening to Isometric. Maybe I'd still be listening to it if Ryan and Vinny were still around, but I think over the years I have grown tired of their company culture of talking about wrestling and fast food for 3 hours as if it was the peak of Western civilization, and Dan is just the bete noire of that. I wish there was a podcast with just Drew, Brad and Rorie being nerds without Dan and Jeff shitting on them all the time.

  18. Posted

    So InternetAristocrat (originator of the pre-GG "Five Guys" controversy and premier anti-intellectual assdouche) has quit gatergate and pulled down his YouTube for the foreseeable future. Apparently for finally discovering what the rest of us have known for months, which is that gatergate has turned into everything that it has been protesting against: a sheltered denialist community that has been hijacked by profiteers who only want to exploit rage culture for their own selfish goals. It also appears his Twitter has been taken over by a GG faithful trying his damnedest to make him like stupider than before, although it's hard to tell.

     

    In other news, InternetAristocrat also just discovered that humans landed on the Moon. 

     

    Seriously though, it seems as if he has had a falling out with other YouTube GGers before this. They suspect this is just excuse-making from him, and he will return with a different alias once he gets bored. Whatever the case, GG is tearing itself apart from the inside and falling further into obscurity.

  20. Posted

    Ugh this game has the same annoying FOV problem as FC3 where it changes to the default super narrow FOV during cutscenes, opening doors, and other first-person interactions. It even happens while in a vehicle. I don't remember that being the case in FC3. Flying a helicopter is almost unplayable while looking through a cardboard tube, and it makes me nauseous. Even worse it seems to change depending on the speed you are moving and which direction you look! What the hell were they thinking? I can't even see if there is a way to fix this because all the search results are about how the pirated version has no FOV slider at all. I have a FOV slider, but the game seems to ignore it whenever it feels like.

  22. Posted

    I think that there's a lot of like, video game coolness pressure to make people who use guides and FAQs and the internet feel bad for seeking outside information, usually under the guise of: "it's cheapening the experience," or "it's making it easier than it would otherwise be," or "it's not how the game was designed." I'm ok with how anyone wants to play a game.

     

    I tend to be on the side of the New Criticism view of video games, where developer or authorial intent takes a backseat to my own reading/playing of a game. I seek out guides all the time, because I don't have an infinite amount of time to play and re-play an area and slowly tease out its secrets, and I get what I want out of the experience. Sure, discover and experimentation are very fun, but I'm not at an age where I can do that forever in a video game.

     

    I agree. It's all well and good to play the game "the way the designer intended" but I've never forced myself to play a game that way when I did not want to. I don't see it as the "right" way to play a game. It assumes that the author is infallible and that the way they intend for me to play their game is what is most rewarding. To me the whole point of games as a medium is that they can exist as a conversation between the player and the text, not a one-way didactic lecture with only a single correct interpretation. The social link stuff in Persona is a good example. The dating-sim aspect of agonizing over which decisions will compromise me for the rest of the game when it comes to friend and school commitments is not the fun part of the game for me. The whole gamification of social choices actually really pisses me off in games. It cheapens the actual role-playing experience by changing the motivation of the player from wanting to express themselves through choice to just trying to power-game the systems.

  23. Posted

    This completely fucks up my personal canon where Jurassic Park exists in the Law and Order universe and that one geneticist is so fucked up over his experience at the park that he switches to psychology, gets his PhD, and starts consulting with the NYPD to try to help other trauma victims.

     

    You could perhaps replace his backstory as previously being the chaplain from Oz who's daily experience dealing with a prison full of the worst people on the planet caused personal trauma that he then used for research on his PhD.

  24. Posted

    Dinosaurs are rad so I'll watch this. I don't care if it is dumb. Could it be worse than JP3? Possibly but not likely.

     

    Also I kind of like the idea of a franken-dinosaur. Some of the dinosaurs were not very scientifically accurate in past films (especially Velociraptor) so this seems like a more honest appeal to the rule of cool. I think the first film used a loophole by saying they were spliced with other animals because the samples had missing genetic information or something.