Nachimir

Facebook link because the youtube version has stupid country restrictions on it. 29/31: https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?v=10152649055661477

Why can't you post your more interesting gifs? Ethics committee?

He'll probably come more into relief for you as the series go on.

That lily petal one is stunningly psychedelic.

I get what people mean about the first season, but (season one spoiler:) It does get better after series one because they turn the intensity of the characters up, but I think that one joke has a lot of Parks and Rec's heart in it. (season five spoiler:)

Thanks for reminding me this exists. I too was surprised at the lack of leaderboards.

Also http://makega.me

Me and a friend built a successful public board games night on similar rules of thumb: Interesting games that are probably new to people not that into board games, less than an hour to play, and not so complicated people can't have a cup of tea and a chat over them. It brought in a lot of students and younger players with a pretty good gender split too. We also found that having a group playing a given game made of 2/3 people who'd played it already made it much faster and easier to teach the new people. In most games that means there's almost always someone who can stop paying attention long enough to explain a rule without the question disrupting play or monopolising the attention of the whole table.

Sorry for the double post, but I realised this morning that this relates to the link Argobot posted, and I'd never made the connection before. I was thinking of a specific man in a position of power there ("elder", people who are given congregational leadership roles, each congregation has about half a dozen of them). He used to persistently grope women at public meetings when no one was looking. I was in my early teens, and due to being home schooled used to overhear really fucked up conversations among the women about how uncomfortable it made them, but how they could do nothing due to lack of witnesses and the other elders not taking them seriously, and then usually ending with some expression of faith in the rules and their god and that if they just prayed about it everything would be okay eventually. Eventually, he seduced one of them and it became public knowledge. She was publicly humiliated and kicked out of the congregation, he got a slap on the wrist and, six months later, was right back in his role as community leader. Unconsciously, his example taught me so many things that I erroneously pegged onto male sexuality instead of sexist culture. In my teens and early twenties I reproduced the behaviour in the advice column in a really extreme way, to the point of avoiding women who expressed any kind of interest in me. Until now I thought it was just behavioural inertia from the JWs sex negative, patriarchal attitudes towards sex and relationships, but I only just realised how far above that miasma this guy sticks up, how much my behaviour was a misguided reaction against everything he embodied. Small, residual bits of behaviour that have puzzled me for years, and that I assumed were just too deeply embedded to get rid of, suddenly have roots I can attack. Thanks, thumbs. Ththumbs. If I had a time machine, I'd go back there right now and smash his teeth out. Not for the effects he had on me, and not because I've feared being like him. Just for being who he was and doing what he did.

This year was the first in which I've been to industry conferences and not encountered the same "end of video games!!1" hysteria. There were a really discouraging few years around 2009 where it made it into a bunch of event programming.

I have safe spaces policies at my events and brief staff on them. So far I've either been lucky enough that nothing has happened, or having the policy and publicising has meant that nothing has happened, or someone has been harassed and still not felt safe enough to report it. I work in dread of the last of those. I also deal with safe spaces related situations in several other communities. An added complexity is that the events last a day, but the communities attending them are together year round. Several times I've had people approach me and not directly ask me to apply the policy pre-emptively, but kind of ask for that or say something like "I'm not asking for that, but just want to flag up that such and such has done these asshole things in the past and I'm not very comfortable being in the same room". Sometimes people are really ignorant of how their words or actions affect others. Sometimes one of those others is also on a hair trigger, which in turn, while looking like an over-reaction, is actually connected to a deep, long term web of how that person tends to be treated by others. Sometimes the situation is complicated by mental illness, or friendships, or power, or racism or any number of other things. Each case is unique and few rules can help, which makes it really difficult for people. Usually, a person or group of people taking action recognise that to do nothing would be terrible, but feel uncomfortably authoritarian by taking any control. Trying to make cast iron rules, especially tied up intimately with definitions, can have terrible consequences in any of those unique cases. Even done with good motives, it can render forms of abuse invisible to organisations (an extreme example from my past: Jehovah's Witnesses try to do everything literally by rules they pluck from the bible. Because of this scripture, victims of harassment and sexual abuse are ignored and marginalised due to lack of witnesses). The only general rules that have been useful to me in setting and enacting safe spaces policies are "Harassment is not welcome", a brief outline of harassment*, and that as soon as anyone speaks up they're treated with respect and taken seriously. It doesn't need to be more specific than that, and being more specific over, for instance, what sexism is or isn't, doesn't help in caring for and respecting people. A report of harassment isn't the trigger for a system of rules to creak into activity, it's the jumping off point for listening to everyone, making decisions on an appropriate course of action, and being able to explain that and step through it with everyone else. I fully expect that even a policy this light on rules and definitions will eventually attract someone trying to game it, but I can deal with that and it's far more important to support victims. I'm not saying you'd be unsupportive Erkki, and the distinction you advocate might be useful in some abstract sense, but in my experience actual situations are far too nuanced for it. So much in them is subjective that questions like "Was it really sexism?" are useless once the situation has started. *As well as the specifics on the geek feminism wiki policy that many are derived from, I added this paragraph:

Well, there was Family Guy becoming simultaneously less funny, more offensive, and more derivative (or maybe it was always this bad and I became a less shitty person). Then there were a bunch of public appearances at which Seth revealed that yes, he's actually like that and loves to make jokes that punch down at people. He seems like a total asshole, the kind who, if I meet them in games, I never work with again. Edit: I try to keep in mind that anyone I idolise will have flaws, all high profile figures are in some way disappointments, and the originators of any work I enjoy will probably have some views I disagree with, but McFarlane just seems like a total arsehole through and through. He might have done good stuff in the past, but I definitely can't stomach him or his greasy shitball work anymore. It largely seems to be "Haha! Victim being victimised!", in which all possible Tom and Jerry-esque aspects have been stripped out in favour of showing or referring to actual types of people who actually get victimised.

If you like the Hotline Miami soundtrack, French electro or 80's pastiche in general, you'll probably like a lot in this enormous Spotify playlist.

Lovely work, YTL! That Fermi Lab is a bit like BT's HQ near St. Pauls, but much nicer looking. BT went for plasma screens and glass instead of plants. Wilson Hall is doing it right

I made it to Stewie's crank call then thought "I don't need to see any more of this. I could waste those two extra minutes of life on some other, less offensive internet bullshit that has nothing to do with Seth McFarlane". His name is one of very few that really turns me away from stuff nowadays.

Pretty sure I've drawn the same Lord and won, but had to supplement it with a few big quests. Building ownership is one thing, but IIRC it also made sense to use the resources I could get from them/other people using them. I think the mandatory quests are one of the favourite things of the group I played this with. They tended to make late appearances once strategies and leaders were more visible. Sometimes they just irretrievably stop someone who'd otherwise win, but I've also seen people fight past mandatory quests magnificently.

Thanks. I've definitely had some of these feelings, though he's a much more extreme case. That was an interesting read.

Yeah, I've played Werewolf with a group who just enjoy the theatre of it and do hardly any debating. It kinda sucks. The first round problem in Werewolf is also awful, because the village pretty much has to choose someone at random. I've seen a few approaches to it, one where a group go round introducing themselves with "Hello, my name is [such and such], and I'm not a werewolf". The most entertaining I've seen is simply that the last player to touch their own nose is lynched. The Hunter and The Lovers are fun mods. Lovers are nominated secretly at the start, acknowledge each other while everyone else has their eyes closed, and can reveal their cards to each other if they want. In the event of a werewolf-human tryst, they become a third team trying to take out everyone else. If either dies, the other suicides. The Hunter (also secret) has a gun, and when they're killed (by any means) they can choose one other person to take with them. With both together, I've seen some spectacular chain reaction kills. Hah! That is brilliant. I'd have said "You've given me two identical cards" without specifying, but I guess it wouldn't make much of a difference to the outcome. You could argue that regardless of your side, you were keeping to the spirit of the game, but it probably wouldn't wash with any of the groups I've played with.

I can't believe this hasn't worked yet. Keep at it, Mington! He will be yours.

At least Resistance tends to be over quickly if you do get marginalised. (I played an excellent game last night, in which the last mission was the decider. The spies managed to deceive us into including one in the final five people, and they would have won, but he screwed up and accidentally voted for the mission to pass).

I worked at a "consultancy" specialising in the video games industry, but it was basically a vehicle designed to milk as much public funding into a limited company as possible. Most of the consultancy activity revolved around "desk research", which is a euphemism for "we'll charge you a full company day rate but spend hardly any of it on doing this job". Thankfully I didn't have to do research for the consultancy side full time, and got to do more interesting and worthy stuff like running massive game jams and other events. I had no job description and eventually left after the MD bollocked me for not doing things he'd never hired or trained me for*. The company withered and died not long after that when the current government shut down all of the regional development agencies. I learned a lot while there, but every year I put between me and that job is a blessing. * and quite a long list of other reasons. People really despised my boss, and of those who didn't feel that strongly, one said to me "I want to like him, but ninety percent of everything he says is obvious bullshit" and another, when I was worried about him bad mouthing me "Don't worry, no one likes [NAME], not even his friends". I did not expect this post to turn into therapy, but typing this out felt good.

The Develop 100 contains a lot of that information for the UK. I'm not sure how to get hold of old editions though. Welcome to researching big game studios though! About six years ago this used to be a part of my job, and there are (were?) no good, unified, comprehensive sources of data. It involved a lot of phoning people up and usually getting fobbed off, and the only good way of getting data was having friends fairly high up in a given studio. Maybe things have changed, but it used to be that all studios above a certain size had incredibly paranoid and defensive HR departments and/or directors. Except Crytek; I ended up on the phone to Avni Yerli once and he was lovely.

I once ran a game of Werewolf with no werewolves. Me and whoever I'd chosen to be knocked out just chose an arbitrary person to be eaten each night. Watching the village debate was fantastic.

Summer! http://soundcloud.com/porter-records/kona-triangle-airlock