miffy495

If you have PSN+, The Cave is free this week, so there's that.

I have from Friday until Tuesday the 2nd off school! I'm gonna kill SOOOO many things and get caught up! Just you wait and see!

Pretty much this. I didn't even close Bastion between beating it for the first time and beating it for the second time. I had a day off, finished the last level of Bastion, realized I still had 6 hours before going to pick up my girlfriend from work, and beat the whole new game plus because I could. Loved every second. And that music (and that elephant). Just, damn. So good.

Man, I haven't listened to King Khan for like 3 years. I should fire that up again. Saw a live show at a pub in 2009 and it was fantastic.

I've never gone myself, but if memory serves friends of mine who have gone for counselling have had it covered by the government. Canada is generally pretty good for that. I think that falls under the federal health plan, at least. What province are you in, Tegan? Have you gone before? What's the status? Also, I know that when you're in a funk like that encouragement doesn't do much, but if it helps to know that other Thumbs who've dealt with the same (or love people who regularly do) are thinking of you, then let it be know that I'm pulling for you. Hope you come through this ok.

Less than they used to? It helps that the online is such a big part of Trackmania that always being connected actually feels important to the experience.

Yeah, it doesn't look like it changes much, and I believe it started life as an expansion pack back before THQ exploded, but I'm still completely in. Saints Row 3 remains one of my favourite sandbox games of all time. I'd say that the top five list probably goes (in no order, cause I don't wanna say any of these is better than any of the others) Saints Row 3, Just Cause 2, Sleeping Dogs, GTA: San Andreas, and Red Faction Guerilla. If you haven't played one of those, get on it. More of one of my favourite games? Yes please. When can I pre-order this? Maybe when this is done, Volition can start making a next-gen Red Faction open world game? Think of all the new ways they could make stuff go nuts... EDIT: And to Tycho's complaint, part of what made SR3 so great for me was the tangible progression of your character. When something didn't "feel" quite right, it was usually just an upgrade or two away from being there for me. It gave purpose to doing all the stupid side stuff, and really gave me something to work towards aside from just seeing the next setpiece. While the setpieces were rad, knowing that with a new upgrade or two I'd be able to make my own setpieces was better. That's where the co-op came in as well. I loved it when the game got super cheap earlier this year, because it meant that I could re-install it and take my maxed-out character into the cities of friends who were just starting out. "Yeah, that mission was good. Wanna get to the next one in my flying saucer? Or should we take the exploding ball of yarn that crushes cars like paper? Tell you what, why don't you set me on fire and I'll run there naked." So good.

I have already purchased, so can't go in on the deal, but feel free to add Miffy495. Maybe you should try asking SpeedyDesiato? He seemed like a cool guy. He may be angry you took his name for your maniaplanet ID though.

I use Chrome and have never had any problems. From this evidence, I can only conclude that you are deeply flawed and should feel bad. Forum advice!

Yeah, my design for a LittleBigPlanet level that I never ended up finishing included repairing Remo's busted chair, so it was before that contest. I think the contest was announced in episode 9 or so.

Ditto. Also, I'm going to have nightmares about MacCaulay Culkin looking like my partner's dad with more hair now. Can you fix that Doug?

Humour is weird. I personally have no problem with gender being a part of a joke, but start to take offence when the gender is the butt of the joke. For example, the scene at the beginning of Machete where the woman pulls a cell phone out of her vagina to contact the crime lord was very funny to me. In retrospect, if you were a naked woman trying to hide a phone, where else would you keep it? The shock of it caught me off guard though, and I thought it was really funny as a result. It was something that required the character doing it to be female, but it wasn't really saying anything negative about women either. It was a trashy, sexualized joke, but it wasn't mean spirited or negative about women in general. Just silly and shocking. Some people would probably be tempted to call that a sexist thing though. Conversely, pretty much anything Family Guy has ever had to say about women skeeves me the hell out. Like Argobot said earlier, Louis C.K. is another great example of this. He manages to find a way to say the most horrible things in a weirdly progressive way, and I really respect that. Also, relating to an earlier thing, I was one of those kids who learned about sex from internet porn when I was around 12. I'm now 25 and well-adjusted (I think, anyway), but that adjustment took some work. It took a lot to overcome what I'd accidentally taught myself about the way two human bodies are supposed to interact, and I still find myself from time to time catching my brain thinking something about sex that makes me feel like a gross dude. I really like the idea floated earlier of a subgenre that actually gives those who are looking at it underage ('cause there's no way that's ever going to stop, and curiosity is normal anyway) about how things actually work. It would have helped a lot, as what started as legitimate curiosity for me at 12 had turned into something that I am now pretty ashamed of by the time I was 15.

Yeah. I'm guessing that I'll need to do 8, 9, and 10 in a quick blast over March break. As it is, I'm not finding much time for gaming while teaching. Soon, giant beautiful things, I will end you

Yeah, I'm with getting people on your side nicely as well, but sometimes it takes something pretty extreme. It took getting my jaw fucked up by a guy who thought I was gay and therefore deserved to get the shit beaten out of me to finally realize how fortunate I am to usually feel so safe as a straight white guy. Knowing that my friend can't hold his husband's hand without worrying about that happening pretty much every day caused me to take a look at gender politics and eventually declare myself decidedly feminist. I actually owe that drunken homophobic redneck a thank you, in a perverse way. It's not like I was a raving sexist before, but I behaved in ways that I now recognize were, while not furthering sexism, at least implicitly reinforcing it as the norm. You need something to make you step outside yourself to notice that most of the time though, because it's really ingrained in society. Sometimes that's a really good talk, sometimes it's a sucker punch. Since, I've tried to talk to far more people than I've tried to sucker punch. Man if it isn't tempting sometimes though...

I guess it depends on where you live. It's pretty common around North America from my experience. As progressive as Canada is supposed to be, I've heard it a lot around here. Depressingly often from politicians. If you haven't heard it and live in Canada or the US, I'd consider you incredibly lucky.

EDIT: To be clear, since the wording in your post implies that you are a woman, I'm posting from that assumption. Original Post: Been encouraged to carry mace? To be extra careful walking downtown at night? Seen posters around campus (assuming uni/college experience) encouraging you to call the SafeWalk service if you're leaving the library after dark? Been repeatedly warned to never leave your drink unattended? Never? Really? Also, as I said, that "what was she wearing?" is a question that people even think about asking is symptomatic of this. It removes the blame for rape from the man and places it on the woman's fashion choice. The cultural belief implied by this is that the woman should have known better than to wear something that would get her raped, thereby removing some (or hell, sometimes all) of the blame from the man for being a fucking rapist.

"Rape culture" is usually defined in my head as the world telling women "don't get raped" while not bothering to tell men "don't rape." The "she got raped? What was she wearing?" argument, in a nutshell. I haven't read the articles linked by Tycho, but hopefully that helps a bit. Honestly, when this thread went from 2 pages to 12 while I was away from my computer for a day, I gave up on trying to follow the conversation and at this point I just read things now and then and get sad. Count me on the "backed the series and feel happy with what I got" side, as well as on the "MRA is bullshit, pretty much any complaint of theirs that I'd consider legitimate stems from gender norms that feminism is trying to break down" team (if the topic was raised in this thread, which I gather from recent posts it was). I may not speak up much though, as others seem to be saying what I would in a much more eloquent fashion.

Add a comma. Pretend it was written by a teen girl on a 90s TV show. "You're, like, a mum."

Busy trying to learn Imagine: Lords.

Liberation on Vita was centred around the conceit that the animus had become recreational software and that you could purchase different people's histories from Abstergo to play. It followed through on it pretty hard too, up to including "hacks" from some assassin coder who would show you the part that Abstergo "edited out" of their software if you found certain NPCs and killed them. AC is weird.

And usually modelling as well. 'blix lives for the camera.

There is no game that can't be improved by grabbing down under.

You must have been really excited when they announced The Last Guardian.

Actually, that was totally part of it. Believe it or not, I love being in school. I'm excited about all kinds of subjects and like to be at least aware of new developments in everything, even if I don't really understand what the science/maths behind the thing are. Helping kids realize that the world is awesome and even the most boring subjects are only boring until you get through the early stuff and into the cool parts is a big deal for me. I want everyone to be as excited about everything as I am. I took a year off of school after finishing my Bachelor's degree and hated it. As soon as I went back for my post-grad, I felt home again. School is where I belong, at one level or another. Since I'm good at (and really enjoy) working with young kids, why not the grade 1 to 3 division? I think I summed this up best in a facebook update back in November during my last practicum: I've spent 7 years in university so that I now am able to get paid to pretend to be an astronaut with a room full of six year olds, and I'm pretty happy with that. Right now I'm with a grade 5/6 split class, so things are quite different, but the kids are still fantastic. I'm only getting about four hours of sleep a night right now, but I feel great from the second I enter that building until I go home. THEN I start to feel like shit, but I think the positive feelings while I'm in the school are a pretty good indicator that I'm in the right place.