SignorSuperdouche

Officially releasing the old adventures on DS maybe?

I just wanted to share with everyone this totally awesome message my Dad left for me on the answerphone yesterday. This is fairly typical of the messages he leaves. I love my Dad.

Sure, I'll trade you my Dad ... for your Mum!

Yeah that's right, although Signor Douche is my preferred moniker. Also, whoever added the "my dad is better" tag is wrong, he's not

Creepy Mario 64: O8h-Cp_J8OY

So a few of us have hijacked the Life thread (and the SA rape stats thread too, but it's hard to come up with a witty title about rape) by turning it into a faux intellectual discussion on politics, religion and when it's ok to punch a dude. I though it would probably be a good idea to fork the discussion so we can have our own special place to live out our delusions of informed discussion and stop annoying everyone else. Hooray for us! Firstly I'd like to say that it was never my intention to suggest that my definiton of "justified violence" was a particularly good one, I just was just saying that if you were trying to come up with one that would probably be as close as you are likely to get. That aside, I don't think it's as bad as you're making out. In my view, your example of violence directed towards foreign workers doesn't pass the test for a couple of reasons: The "Johnny Foreigner has taken my job" argument is almost always a gross over simplification. Simply put if there wasn't a market for foreign workers then there wouldn't be a significant number them, and if there is a market for foreign workers then simply getting rid of the workers will not get rid of the market's need for them. Basically I take issue with your assertion that "it will surely free jobs for others". Secondly, I had intended that balancing the harm caused through violence/non violence should be done objectively rather than from anyones point of view. In this case the harm caused to the immigrants hugely outweighs the harm of other people being out of work. There's other things I'd like to comment on but nobody wants to read a wall of text so I'll let someone else have a go next. Please bring up anything that will make us look, and more importantly feel, smart for discussing.

I don't want to be condescending here, but lets get down to basics. This is the definition of faith: This is completely different from assumptions based on observation and you absolutely cannot say they amount to the same thing. I'll get into the other stuff in a mo, but lets start with mathematics here because it's a special case. Mathematics is fundamentally different from the sciences in that it is a completely abstract discipline. It doesn't matter that you can scratch your chin and say "But how do you prove that 1 + 1 = 2?" because 2, as a concept, was invented to be the answer to "What is 1 + 1?". It's perfectly possible to define valid a numerical system where 1 + 1 = 3 and construct mathematical proofs around this system. Mathematical proof is undeniable truth, it's only when you apply mathematics to a real world problem that require the underlying axioms to be true that you have to have any "faith". I understand where you're coming from on this, but it's actually completely irrelevant. You could still accurately describe all the layers that you can see and that's all science tries to do. Say I don't have a clear understanding of how a car works, but I've built up an abstract model where putting my foot on the accelerator makes the car go, the brake makes it stop and turning the big wheel makes it go in a different direction. This abstract model tells me everything I need to know about operating a car (or lets pretend it does) so why does it matter if I don't understand what a carburettor is? Obviously if my car brakes down then so does my model and I need to find someone who understands more than I do but until then my layer of abstraction is perfectly valid. Newton's laws of motion, to pull an example out of my arse, are exactly the same kind of abstraction and it doesn't matter that they brake down at very large or very small scales because it was never intended to explain everything (Actually Newton thought it did explain everything, but then he thought God was sending him secret messages too) I'm familiar with Bertrand Russell's celestial teapot etc but what I especially liked about this is that it puts in a far more mundane context. I used to use the boiling point of water as my point of reference but it always took me forever to explain what I actually meant. You can't be agnostic to some degree, either you are agnostic or you are not. It's unfortunate that in popular parlance atheist has come to mean agnostic and agnostic has come to mean some wishy-washy excuse for not wanting think about it or express an opinion. I really feel that this confusion over the terminology is part of the reason people misunderstand the issues themselves.

That's certainly part of it, although I would be wary of blaming capitalism and free markets - socialism has done it's share of the damage. For example, unions that demand unreasonably high wages and cushy working conditions are as much to blame for the decline in manufacturing in this country as anything else. To misquote Winston Chruchill, capitalism is the worst economic and social system, except for all those other systems that have been tried from time to time. I have to disagree with that. I am an agnostic and I do not have faith in anything. Everything you described (aside from the baked bean thing which is just personal preferance) is what I would call reasonable expectations given the avaliable information. There is a difference between saying "I think X is extremely likely" and "I believe X." This is precisely my position, articulated far more succinctly than I could hope to. I may steal this next time I'm trying to explain my views. Also, Ben Goldacre is the shit. If you're into skepticism you should check out the skeptics guide to the universe. It's a really cool podcast which was recommended to me by none other than Bill Tiller (not me specifically, he just recommended it in general) and they often discuss Ben and have him on the show fairly regularly.

I wrote this whole thing but it ended up being a meandering muddle of drivel. Basically I take way too much for granted. I literally don't know what else to say.

Their lot are better at sports than us.

Why were you searching for "hehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehe" ? What the hell were you actually looking for?

I haven't had any trouble with jumping so far (although I've only played for 10 minutes so maybe I haven't got to the problematic parts yet) but what I have had trouble with is getting down from the grapling hook and the combat. The setting, characters and story are putting me off a bit too - I've never really been into swords and sourcery type stuff anyway and this seems like the genre at it's most banal and uninteresting.

Ditto to that. Although I do think he had some cracking tunes.

He's faking.

Being an unemployed bum, I was able to sink in several more hours today and finish the game. It was a blast, I got my monies worth several times over. I think the best compliment I can give this game is that if someone told me this was an old, forgotten, LucasArts game I'd believe them. I did find a couple more bugs though: It's possible to use the tights . If you do this and then use the starter motor the game becomes unresponsive. I used Dan on and left him there whilst I went outside. There's a little square just outside the entrance which you can interact with as if it were Dan (If you look at it, Ben says "It's Dan" etc), and if you try to use it Dan's sprite vanishes.

I'm stuck a little way in right now, so I thought this would be a good opportunity to take a break and write a bit about what I think of it so far. The writing is hilarious and I've genuinely LOL'd a few times. It reminds me a lot of one of my favourite authors, Robert Rankin. I don't know if he's an influence at all but if you renamed Ben and Dan to Jim and John this could easily be mistaken for part of The Brentford Trilogy (As a quick aside, anyone who hasn't done so should read The Brentford Trilogy - they're ace books). I also love how dense the writing in this game is; often when playing an adventure game you wind up trying everything with everything in order to progress but here I find myself doing so because there's almost always a funny piece of dialogue about it. I particularly enjoyed using the on the because Ben's response was pretty much the exact same thought process I went through. I hope Zombie Cow will consider doing something similar to Telltale's "Did you try?" list of things with funny responses that players may have missed. This is not a major complaint, but a couple (and only a couple, so far at least) of the puzzles have seemed a bit on the arbitrary, illogical side. Putting , for example, is something I did with no idea why I was doing it or what was going to happen - there just didn't seem to be anything else to do. My other complaint is that the orange writing on an orange background in the menu can be a bit hard to read at times. Call me a dullard, but I was very confused during the 10-15 seconds it took me to find the load game button. Given the price though, and how god damn funny it is, these nitpicks are barely worth mentioning. There is no excuse for not buying this game, it's fucking awesome.

I know it sounds really lame and platitudinous, but you have my sympathies chap. I really wish I could say something that didn't sound so empty, but everything else I considered sounded even worse.

I had a PE teacher once who's name was an anagram of "little penis". True story.

Well, I think the closest thing to a definition of "justified violence" would be something like: 1)Will use of violence be effective and 2)will the harm caused by the use of violence outweigh the harm that would otherwise occur. Of course this is not without it's flaws. Quantifying harm, especially quantifying the harm that you predict will happen, is often impossible and will always be subjective. Maybe this isn't a great formula for telling you if violence is justified, but I think you can apply it to see if it isn't - and in the case of smashing in a shop window, which achieves nothing worthwhile in the long term, it definitely isn't. EDIT: Also nice one Miffy, fantastic news.

This. I don't want to over generalise, but I think it's fair to say that far-right groups are mostly supported by poor, undereducated white people. These people have genuine reason to be angry, they're just misappropriating their anger. In my view the best way to tackle the far right is to tackle poverty and education.

No, no, no, no absoultely not. I've been thinking about this alot since the BNP were elected over here. This will only legitimise their cause and strengthen their resolve. They can, quite rightly, say they are being victimised and we are hypocrytes which will lend weight to their rhetoric. This will make it appealing to young males who aren't really racists, but just want to rebel and do something thatis forbidden. Not to mention that it sets a hedious precident. What you are suggesting is entirely counter productive.

That's exactly what I was thinking. I used to be that you'd watch a crazy Japanese game show and you'd say "Only in Japan". What happened?

Oh fuck! I had a book by that guy, it was awesome! I have this really vivid memory of a gorilla (or something similar) wearing 20 or so watches on his arms. Man, I haven't thought about that book in about 2 decades.

Pffft, killing myself is way cheaper than that.

Wasn't Roald Dahl's James and the Giant Peach was it? I don't remember any cars parked ontop of each other but the rest of it seems to fit.