Nachimir

You may feel like you've wasted time, but it's good that you've realised this and many don't, ever. Doctors thought I might have cancer when I was a kid, but I was depressed, and they never picked up on it, it just ended up a big question mark I didn't resolve until my twenties. Medication is often decried with horror stories like "My aunt took antidepressants and just laid on the couch for a decade", but it's not really like that. Medication has got better as well as knowledge, and a good doctor will assess how you're getting on with a given medication and change it if you seem to be incompatible with one. Properly prescribed, anti-depressants don't impair any kind of social functions, they just help you to function in a way you can't when depressed. A few friends have ended up on the wrong drug at first, then talked to their doctors and found one that works. Talking therapy is great and really good for you. I cannot recommend seeking external help enough, it has helped so many of my friends and relatives cope and improve their lives. Beyond that, exercise and doing anything expressive help too, but they'll only go so far without other help.

Seal hiccup, apparently:

Those are sweet. The second looks like something from Carmageddon (and I didn't notice the mismatched colour until looking at it for a second time).

I can't breathe Mington At first I thought it would be ; it gets so much worse at 3:50 though.

I found the soundtrack and pacing to that really exhausting, even in a room full of drunk people who's thing is to make bad films more enjoyable: piano-ey schmaltz, HORROR, schmaltz HORROR SCREAMING schmaltz schmaltz CONTINUOUS SCREAMING etc. Maybe it was the audio setup in the venue, but the whole film felt really shrill. The cat special effects are quality though

Suffocating an enemy crew by keeping shields down and using EMP on the O2 was one of my favourite grim things from the previous version

Me and some friends were laughing at a "Real men love babies" billboard in San Francisco a few weeks back, until we realised it was an anti-abortion ad. Argh, that's so shitty and must do so much damage to the rest of the building *cough* uh, life stuff! I was so worried for so many reasons that coming here would be a mistake, and am really happy to say it's one of the best moves I've made. I assumed dating would suck here due to it being 20,000 or so people in the valley, compared to Nottinghamshires 800,000, and that I should just give up on it to focus on work and mountain biking for a while. It's actually better in that I'm finding people of the right age with similar interests, politics, etc. I've found some interesting people on dating sites and am going on a few dates this week The more time I spend in other cities, the more super-obvious it is to me that Nottingham has a really weird demographic hole between students and those who've settled down. Walking around Manchester, there's a much more variable and blurry age range of people, rather than just a few very differently aged and cultured groups (the other good thing about this house specifically: If I'm craving city, Manchester is half an hour away by public transport, and it feels busy there the way London feels busy). (Sorry Thrik. I did used to enjoy Nottingham a lot ) I've also decided I never want to move to London permanently. I've noticed the interesting groups of people I know there are being pushed further and further from the centre, and am now convinced it'll be a really boring city within ten years. Manchester is interesting, Berlin is incredible, San Francisco is lovely though has its very obvious problems. London currently feels like an end game in which lots of people are still playing the mid-game. Investor money is squatting property and eradicating the cultural fringe. A friend was talking to her gran about it recently, and she said "That's what London was like before the war".

Tegan you are on the most incredible roll with this.

Ages ago, a friend recommended I try some of Daniel Remar's games, which I finally did tonight. They're nothing especially groundbreaking, but the design of them is really competent. I recommend Herocore and Iji especially. The latter is reminiscent of all kinds of Amiga platformers.

Copper theft also causes a lot of signalling problems and delays on railways here in the UK. Iran allegedly did something very smart and vicious at the outbreak of the 2003 Iraq war: sent merchants to the border offering high prices to Iraqis for copper. Within days, a lot of infrastructure had been crippled.

Bah, Thrik Pony, it's student who's made bits of City 17 in UnrealEd. I think he's intending to move it all into UEngine 4 now though.

There have been so many posts since this morning that I'm having to scan, but Faegbeard, your argument is utter bobbins. While yes, on some level we think without words, on many we don't, and words are the primary means by which we interact and create culture. Reapproriation is a way for people to draw collective strength in the face of prejudice, while continuously chasing and reframing their persecutors rhetoric. That's something their persecutors cannot do in return (Not all minorities reappropriate, for instance trans people having their own culturally defined term and continuing to reject "tranny"). While racism of course still exists, no term has arisen in America with the same venom or normality "n*gger" has had at various points during its history. When a term does have that normality to it, the culture using it has hegemony and momentum. Reappropriating terms weakens hegemony and robs prejudice of momentum. Making the linguistic meaning of terms ambivalent by reclamation also raises the cognitive load in using them, for everyone. It interferes with the ability of the prejudiced to voice, reinforce, spread or even feel quite so utterly confident in their own hate, and it can galvanise non-members of the discriminated against group to resist or call out prejudiced usage of the term. There isn't a memo, or some kind of watershed moment where the prejudiced people realise "Oh right. Guys we've got to pick another term. Call in the Bigots Parliament". There's a period of ambivalence and confusion in which one group builds a greater sense of cohesion, identity and pride, while the other struggles to look relevant, reasonable or attractive.

It's not quite true that people will just use new words to state the same prejudices. Prejudice can wane and die; reclaiming terms is one way of giving it a shove. It robs prejudice of any normalcy it once had.

Though neither has that, entirely. There are still plenty of people who use it in the sense of "That's so fucking gay" etc. Reclaiming a term forks its meaning, then ideally the bad fork dies off. The exact opposite happened to instil "gay" as pejorative and kill off "gay as in happy".

S

I found running boring until I combined it with music and got shoes suited to my feet. After that, I could manage a decent pace and run for hours.

Six years ago: "wrestling with mail.app regarding IMAP." Scintillating.

Arsehole is a good British variant. Other favourite: Shitehawk. I don't worry about gendered ones if the gender is male ("Ball-faced fucker" is one I've never used on anyone, but it makes me giggle), and sometimes reverse genders if I'm going to use a male-gendered insult (It's fun to call friends bastards if they're women, but not the same to call a man a bitch). Cunt is a word I like, but try not to use. I once used it in front of someone for whom it was a massive trigger.

First thought: Particularly with minion NPCs casually barking it, the sexism and misogyny make the entire game environment toxic, in a continuous way from start to finish (It's easy for many of us to not really notice though because we're white guys). Without contextualisation, say, against other groups of NPCs that aren't sexists or misogynists, there's no shock or narrative value to it. The nature of barks mean it's widespread and peppered throughout the game. That makes it it more world building than storytelling, and in that sense it says nothing and serves no purpose, other than to portray a misogynist world as backdrop for a narrative that also says nothing on the subject. Perhaps it perpetuates the sexism and misogyny it portrays, but even if not, it certainly isn't adding or doing anything constructive with regard to them.

I mostly remember her for her rad contributions to skate culture.

I never saw previews or trailers, I just mainlined the first series on DVD, and found it intensely annoying just for being what it was: writer's room improv.

Rezzed started out as a PC and indie games show in Brighton a few years back, which is why it has different branding. It includes console stuff now too though (I only freelance for Gamer Network, so I'm not privy to reasons for branding or what's happening next). There was once a Eurogamer Expo North. We did Leeds one weekend, then derigged, shipped everything to London, set up, and did it again. Doing that was ludicrously exhausting for everyone, which is probably why the Expo has stayed in London since.

Someone had a worse day. Text message from a friend, first thing: "Sat down on bus. Seat was wet. Definitely piss"

Yes. Not very often, and I'm already careful about leaving things that might cause fires, etc. I'd probably lock the door too. I've spent more time at friends places looking at small demos on it with them though. I can't see it being great for anyone who's a parent. One guy I lent it to, who does software development with interesting prototype tech, is also a relatively new father and has had only one chance to use it briefly in the past two weeks.

Yes.