Roderick

Yeah, go make something great! Maybe involve your girlfriend, so you can combine her and working on the project?

Cool, Vimes, on my list. I plan to eventually reading everything Tolstoy wrote.

The Suffragette Sufferer

I may have been mistaken! This is entirely possible!

You've got an almost Moriarty-from-Sherlock thing going on there. Very nice!

That's actually interesting, because I don't quite feel the same. As much as I believe in a hard, scientific, rational world, those intellectual realisations haven't, in fact, trickled through to my emotions. The truth is, I am quite scared of monsters and the dark: quite superstitious! But those fears will not be placated by any sort of conviction about science. In the same vein, I sometimes find I am calculating life in terms of karmic systems: 'So many bad/good things are happening to me right now, the opposite is sure to happen soon.' That's a little simplistically stated and not an actual example, but it describes the sentiment. If only my emotions were more in check with my scientific outlook on life! Damn you, emotions!

It didn't. Neither did it debunk the flying teapot, or leprechauns, or the invisible, untouchable unicorn standing behind you in the room right now. Damn it, now I'm the twat!

This is putting the argument on its head. In an ideal world, if you have a wild, unfounded idea like the existence of a god, that spits in the face of every bit of daily logic, the right approach is to not believe it, instead of assuming it's true until you've found conclusive evidence against it. It's an absurd, truly absurd proposition to do it the other way around, and a testament to the insanity of the religious experience. Patters: you are right that everything in science can and will be superceded by more advanced ideas. That doubt and skepticism is built into science itself, it thrives on it. But it doesn't preclude that an asshat could look at an idea that is clearly idiotic, such as the existence of the classical god, and laugh at it. The fact that science constantly betters itself isn't an argument against the invalidity of the ideas it debunked.

OK, yeah, of course. Though I do prefer a mixture of empathy and logic. One of the things I find a little annoying is the assumption a lot of the rants against male privilege I've read have that the person reading it, be he male, is surely right at that moment feeling all hot and angry at being called out on his behavior. That's a generalisation that I'd do without, it seems very nasty and derogative. You don't know who's reading your stuff.

I hope you mean this in an ironic, jesting way, because the idea that science is on the same level as -literally- fairy tales and superstition dreamed up by desert men thousands of years ago, is absurd. Orvidos' friend may be a bit of a prat for telling others what to believe and feeling quite good about it, but that doesn't mean he's wrong. [ADDED] Sorry for going on about it, but this type of argument bugs the shit out of me. So many people (not necessarily brkl) seem to have this weird idea that science is anything more than a system for discovering and describing the way the universe works based on falsifiable evidence, measurements and tests. They frame it in the viewpoints and language of religion, which is wrong and more than a little misguided/misguiding. You don't "believe" in science, because there's nothing to believe, there are no dogmas, there is only either hard evidence that you can accept as truth or theories which you can assume might be true within reasonable doubt. If you can't see that 'science' has very little in common with 'religion', that it's like comparing apples and Guns 'n Roses concerts, you've bought into the shallow rhetoric of religious apologists. Sure, there are people who cloth themselves in the same fabric of religion when it comes to spreading and defending the idea of science, but that's on their heads, not science's. There are radical, fanatical people on both sides of the line - it doesn't matter. It doesn't make science a religion. Science doesn't require faith, just common sense. It doesn't require a whole lot of philosophy either. Descartes' musings on crazy devils tricking the senses are fun to read, but a cheap way to get out of thinking hard about anything: 'ah well, we can't know it anyway, so let's believe just about anything - it's all the same.' The fact of the matter is that we live in a predictable, tangible world that throughout recorded human history has behaved pretty constantly and has never spawned any super-crazy magic things that we couldn't (afterwards) explain. That alone is basis enough to say, quite scientifically, 'let's just assume this shit is actually real and start describing it.' So far, the idea of science hasn't let us down and has shaped the world all around us.

I respectfully beg to differ: coming into contact with some of the thoughtful views espoused on this very forum, I began to think about it and am now a more nuanced person in this field. The recipient may be unwilling to change from within, but there has to be a volume of educational material that they can read, otherwise they stand no chance at all of become better people. This is a problem of education and I'm not so cynical yet to think that everyone refuses to change when they're taught something new and exciting.

Miffy, I regularly hear you complaining about post and getting games late. Is it an idea to start buying them in stores on the day they're out? That has literally never failed to get me what I want, when I want it.

Holy cow, Lee sure knows a LOT about all these wars! It's really great to hear someone so knowledgeable dig into the meat of developing these games and the specific experiences that he wants to produce. Even if you disagree with the opinions on display, you can't argue with their validity. Had a bit of a 3MA binge today to be honest, listening while I was grinding Diablo 3. Super fun, it would've been an intellectually boring time without it.

I spent my final day with Diablo 3 for a while getting some fun achievements. Such aaaaas That was pretty fun, and it gave me a nice sense of closure. I'm ready to move on to other things again for the while being. Like proceeding with writing my goddamn book!

I've been reading a few things lately about gaming's rape culture and it's a strange thing because I am almost completely disconnected from it. I rarely play multiplayer games, and when I do it's 100% of the time with friends and people I know online. So I never encounter even so much as trashtalking (which I think it silly at best, pathetic at worst), let alone 'rape culture'. I'm happy for it, because it's the sort of thing I have little defense against. It upsets me too much in real life, so having weird insults thrown at me would be horrible. In this regard, I don't really know what to do with it. I want to somehow better the situation, but since I have no hands-on knowledge of the whole scene, just second-hand reports about stuff like that Streetfighter program, I feel unequipped to deal with it. I'll just link this on my twitter.

Beyond what the game is, this trailer brings the glorification of violence to new levels of both WTF and disgustingness. It's not just style over content, it's also a really bad judgement of style. As a human, I want no part of this. I'm not averse to violence, but there has to be something there beyond shocking imagery of latex-clad nuns (who, let's be honest, would never dress like that if they were real assassins) getting gunned down. Wow, even the black nun kicks it! Look how non-racial this video is!

Wow, this is huge. I might be game just for Swords & Sorcery and Bastion. Now I need to put something on my PayPal account >_>

Pretty much. I enjoyed it as a soap opera though, it gave me much the same pleasures I now get from Game of Thrones.

I'm not done yet with playing this game (though I won't be able to play after tomorrow because my internet connection will become unstable again as I move my PC upstairs), but want to tag into this with the following: a few days ago I caught myself very drawn to playing World of Warcraft rather than Diablo 3, because it offers so much more things to do outside of combat. In WoW it feels totally valid to spend a lot of time in cities or doing inconsequential side-things. It's a lot broader an experience. Conversely, I think I would have enjoyed more stuff to do in Diablo that wasn't fighting. It may be silly to compare the games, but I can definitely see myself getting tired of grinding this game, whereas WoW by its sheer size and breadth always lures me in with new things to do and just hanging around.

I think most people nowadays are familiar with Cromwell from his (more positive) portrayal in The Tudors, which really served as a who's who from that period. The only thing I know about A Man For All Seasons is a Youtube clip where Cromwell explains he would give the devil the benefit of justice, which I thought made him rather a likeable sort of person.

While grinding Diablo 3, I thought to listen to an audiobook to see if I'd like it, and found a free version of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. The resulting experience was a weird one. Because my attention would sometimes lapse or drift back into the game, I didn't catch all the details of the book, or the intricacies of the characters and events. What I ended up with was a cloud of images and themes that strangely coalesced into a wonderful sense of the brooding jungle atmosphere. Very strange. Probably not ideal, but interesting nonetheless. I've also just started Malthus' essay on the principles of population. It's another book of the sort I tend to read often, classic non-fiction (late 18th century), so it's very much in my comfort zone.

Right after I hit Nightmare I had a huge boost in DPS, and then right before I just beat NM Diablo I had another when I bought a silly little magic sword (not even rare!). It's crazy what a difference it makes. At about 1200 DPS, NM Diablo was a terrible drag, just such a chore. Then I shot up to 3500 DPS (!) and it made a world of difference. He was perfectly doable now, which made the whole fight so much more exciting and pleasant. On a different note, I wonder what will happen when the real money auction house goes online. Will the fake money one disappear? We are now perhaps in a rare and unique moment in this game where we can purchase legendary items with (a lot of) random, farmable gold. That might disappear soon, sadly.

Bloody hell I hope that's true.

Please stop mentioning orange and teal.

Redline was really cool. Its length was fine, I didn't find it grating especially. It had so much enjoyable stuff going on, lots of jokes and great, great animation. Love is oozing from this thing.