Nachimir

I was vegetarian for four years, but I was a shit one and a large part of my motives were not liking meat. I later learned that the reason for that was my parents buying crap meat and preparing it badly for my entire childhood. I have no moral justification for eating meat and some qualms (especially on the basis of more resources used to produce it, and parts of agriculture being really quite fucked up), and try to eat less, but my body kind of sings when I put steak in it. Ultimately, we evolved to eat meat. I'd love for there to be an alternative as satisfying to eat, or for lab grown meat to become viable.

Ugly Ducking:

I think that's what they were like when the forums were first upgraded, then someone mentioned it and they were made into inline black stripes. Inline is much better.

The original listing for that thing was super creepy. It shipped with underwear so "you could leave it around the house without anyone suspecting".

I don't get on with poetry, and didn't really enjoy The Waste Land, but this bit gives me goosebumps:

Ah, this'll be the thing I saw in an ABadFeeling video last week. I think some of the surprise is ruined for me, but I'll give it a go. It looked pretty fucking spooky, from what I saw, and reminded me a bit of the game of SCP-087.

We already did. Several times.

That's an interesting take on it, and I think somewhat true, though the necessity of ensuring good PR and photo ops also exerts pressure for politicians/officials/security services etc. to push those limits further. Perhaps a bit chicken and egg, but a definite amplifier of some horrid trends.

No amount of sporting achievement makes it worthwhile to have this kind of stupid bullshit done to people.

Some of the events, I could be interested in. The event as a whole is so parasitic though, I can't summon any enthusiasm for it. There's nothing inspirational within a thing that stinks of corruption and fucks over so much and so many to happen. I really wish this guy had managed to get video.

It's so much more than that Orv. Someone is wrong on the internet.

I can certainly have that sort of stuff on in the background and enjoy it. Some electronic music is just too bitty and unmelodic for me to find bearable, but the intensity of that Call Me remix is a thing I can definitely enjoy. There's some stuff I really enjoy in this, and I like the kind of phasing experiments that , though an 8 CD set titled "Improvised Music From Japan" was too much. Improvised music tends to irk me; there's a lot of Jazz I find completely unlistenable.

A lot of NOLF trivialised it, but in pretty funny ways. Guards discussing "To think we're missing The Man From U.N.C.L.E. to be doing this", and shooting a monkey ending a level in a fail state immediately, with the message "Unacceptable simian casualties".

Okay, yeah: Their games survey is just fucked and fills me with scepticism. I think: Not one comparison I've seen to other devices, here or in the press, has been fair (i.e. it was based on much less common tech, it only launched in South Korea, it was a completely different type of device, etc.). Something like this could do well. It might not be these people, and if not they'll set the idea back by years. They almost certainly already have backing from elsewhere, and if not, will be taking this kickstarter result to a lot of VCs very soon. If they're not scamming, the $99 price is subsidised by that backing. If they manage to ship and retail is much higher, they're going to have 60,000 or so smug and very evangelical fans. Something I'd really like to know is how all of the people quoted feel about the way their words have been used. Notch has certainly said a few things to temper it:

I'm an atheist, and this approach would do nothing but seem ridiculous and clumsy to me. Something like the (NSFW) Lizard of Guilt from Oglaf, except producing accidental rather than intentional comedy. I think you should make it though, because I'm all for weird things existing. I think that excellent Tom Bissell article already has some of the answers in: "The world is not at stake" being a crucial part of that, as so much else in popular culture portrays killing as okay if it's for something really super important. The first thing a game could do is take away that kind of context. elmuerte gives another good example in Deus Ex: Adam's lethal takedowns were brutal enough to make me wince a bit, and given non-lethal options I felt no justification or desire for lethal force in the early levels. Even in the bits after the PMC soldiers come to kill you and I felt justified to retaliate in kind, the non-lethal takedowns were quieter so I still often used them instead of killing. All of those things went through my head without the game ever making a suggestion or passing judgment. You can't bolt something on to work against context (i.e. making a shit art film): Putting ghosts into Unreal Tournament or Call of Duty won't make a jot of difference, because people see NPCs and avatars as things, not people, and narratives often set them up as just that or communicate "It's okay to kill these people".

I just got back to this after nearly two weeks away. Strike one: 1.6GB patch to download ¬¬ Strike two: First cave I go into feels exactly the same as every other cave in the game, just a bit tougher. Strike three: Hitting max level cap on all characters, really quickly, then getting very suddenly killed, several times over, on various levels of a threat level 7 cave. Because my medic occasionally strayed into range of a second group of enemies. Or ran toward them instead of throwing a grenade. This was nice at first, but after the first few towns, it's so linear and repetitive. You constantly trade and grind for just a few more DPS, and fights are just a matter of hammering exactly the same hotkeys every time until stuff is dead. I have a very strong suspicion that the project leads are all from art backgrounds. It's beautiful to a fault (no, really. It runs like a dog sometimes and there are loads of graphical effects you can't turn off), and the art continually varies, but the weapons, the game design, the maps, the fetch quests, everything, are all so very repetitive once you get out of the early game. I can't bring myself to play it anymore. I can feel my brain switching off, it's like watching daytime TV or something.

In that case, may I also suggest Alvin Lucier's "I'm Sitting In A Room"? Here is an explanation. Castorp: Don't listen to this. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sCgicEWD1Nc (I do like those Loch Lomond and Jezebels tunes)

Call Me Maybe Acapella 147 Times Exponentially Layered.

I usually get that with the OS X client, but not Windows, and have always just assumed the former was a buggy piece of shit. Clicking back and forth between the four headers sometimes seems to provoke it into actually loading stuff.

I think there's some comparison between this and the Raspberry Pi: Cheap systems that are relatively easy to make stuff for. The difference between PC and Ouya is the UX and intended audience. PC may be seen by some as the perfect indie gaming platform, but not everyone who'd play indie games is into PC gaming. The cheapness of the hardware may well lead to shorter cycles for it, but also, once developers have had a stable platform for a while, they tend to be able to get a lot more out of it than they did near launch. Ouya and RPi are new things sitting between embedded systems and budget PCs, and as such, I don't think what's gone before gives us very good predictive models. If they fail, so be it, but even in that case they'll have been a worthwhile experiment.

I don't like to use adblockers in general, but there is a specific case: the huge flash ads some gaming and games industry news sites run spin the fans on my laptop right up. If I'm going to let my laptop shorten its life making that much heat, it's god damn going to be for something I enjoy. The Kickstarter has been cruelly parodied by Something Awful: http://www.somethingawful.com/d/news/penny-arcade-kickstarter.php

Here's a succinct, cynical take: Hopefully they'll use the Kickstarter funds to make some good investments, rather than just improve profits/economies of scale.

As I said, in an ideal world I agree with you, but we don't have that. We have history, culture and the monumental inertia both carry. Edit: That said, the idea that bullying is instantly deflated by non-co-operation from the bullied isn't true. Maybe with an isolated incident or one source, or maybe sometimes you can take a name intended abusively and defuse it by adopting it, but it's just not possible in every case. Try walking into the wrong bar as a gay or interracial couple and you'd soon realise why. People are not wired to be insensitive, especially when pressure mounts up from more than one source. A game developer I know, who has dark skin, was told in the post office the other day "You seem like a very nice person, but there are too many immigrants". She was born here, FFS, went to a very good school and has a cut glass English accent. When people tell you that kind of thing, apropos of nothing, for more or less your whole life, it's almost impossible to not let that affect your concept of the world and other people. -- Twig, I think a part of the reason you attract so much flak is that you often don't acknowledge points made by other people; you just find ways to restate your argument around them. It makes it look like you're arguing against feminism, or that you're pro-privilege, etc.

Ah, fair enough. For PC gaming, I'm generally in a chair at a desk. Console, laid out on the sofa.