Hermie

Ooh, I might be down for the late-comers league, as I've been on vacation the past two weeks. (Somehow the girlfriend didn't find "But The International 4 Qualifiers!" a valid reason to drop a round-trip of Europe with her family?) Not 100% sure I can draft on Sunday yet, will investigate.

Congrats, I really enjoyed reading this! Now I know exactly why I get random Russians adding me on Steam.

Now, Wikipedia and every other source may agree with you on this, but I distinctly remember that this happened just the other day, and 2009 is 5 years ago, so I'm pretty sure you're wrong.

Nice, sounds like I'm switching.

Yeah, you can't really use anything to synch with iTunes. The only thing I could think of would be to use a third party RSS service to make a custom feed that both iTunes and android collects from, so you can mark as read within that RSS. Sounds like more trouble than it's worth, though. I use BeyondPod, in fact, I use the free version that has manual download one at a time, cause I never get around to upgrading. I like the design, and it has solid widgets for home screen, lock screen and notification bar.

If you like the McElroy style of humor I would recommend Stop Podcasting Yourself, they always have a lot of fun in their episodes, riffing on mundane things. Any of the episodes where Paul F. Thompkins is the guest is usually a good entry point.

Exactly, it feels contrary to the design philosophy of: Here's a starter set, now try to build a configuration based on what the dice throws at you. As I recall, this criticism was brought up when the game was first released too. Does anyone know if the developers have addressed it in any way?

Clever, you!

I'm starting to remember why I stopped playing FTL the first time. The rebel flagship is just so different from all other enemies, and operates kinda unfairly. I wish they had reworked it together with the new stuff, but instead I fall into the same pattern: Have a really good run, only to be crushed at the end. I wish there was an endless mode that ramped up the difficulty instead of this smackdown at the end. It demotivates me, and it looks like the only way to beat it is to try to build for it from the start, but the only way to test your build is by going allll the way through the game. Maybe it gets better once I unlock more that the first two ships?

His body, as they say, is ready.

Since I made my previous post I've been thinking about the visceral feeling described by the reader mail in the episode. In my original post I tried to discount this and pose a purely hypothetical question about if portraying Hitler and/or Nazi imagery is an immoral act "purely intellectually". After considering this I realize I was wrong to try to divorce this in the first place. That feeling when someone is evoking imagery you personally hate or trigger disturbing emotions within you is horrible, and even if the inexperienced teens graffiti swastikas in a subway tunnel just because they want to be contrarian, that doesn't mean they shouldn't think about what would happen if a holocaust survivor were to come upon it. This feeling of physical uncomfort is what it is to be human, to a certain point, and nobody, be it creators or critics, should deny that deep gut feeling. You just gave us a peek into a story that sounds not only incredibly fascinating, but enlightening to people that are not well versed in how powerful words and aesthetics can be these contexts. I would love to read a forum post or blog post from you about this experience (If it doesn't evoke horrible memories of course, see above ).

That's an interesting point regarding Civilization. You can play as Stalin, and while you usually can't commit genocide in the Civ series, you can choose if you want to play harshly and deceptively, or take a more diplomatic approach. People often cite how the Ghandi AI in Civ as ruthless and how amusing that is, so shouldn't you theoretically be able to play as Hitler and go for the purely diplomatic victory? The answer, of course, is the reaction Luftrausers has gotten now, and that visceral physical feeling the excellent reader mail talked about this week. But purely intellectually, is there a moral objection to playing as diplomatic Hitler in Civ 6?

I've been playing on iPad, had a great run on the Engie ship where I focused on a boarding drone I got early. This guy would wreck most crews and I could get more weapons and salvage from it. When I came to the flagship, I sent out my trusty drone, only to have it land in one of the weapon chambers that doesn't connect to the rest of the ship. Unlike the teleport there's no way to recall it with out it being destroyed, so in the end, I just had to have my weapons bounce of my shield until I got destroyed. =( Pic from someone else that had the same problem:

I hope you can work out cheaper international shipping. =) I wanted to get the sticker pack figuring you could send it with regular mail and not as a package, but no dice.

Absolutely agree with you, I didn't mean to imply in my example that Parker & Stone are solely responsible if someone doesn't get their satire, in fact, rather the opposite. Literacy is extremely important. I feel media literacy, from understanding texts to knowing when you're being manipulated by marketing, should have more focus earlier in school. Very good points are being made in regards to references above. As someone who grew up in a western European country, we consumed a lot of the biggest American media, especially comedy TV shows. Whenever the punchline in a sitcom was something like "you look like Carol Channing!", it would be like "...who?". In fact, reflecting over it now, it felt kind of alienating. To put it harshly, it kinda feels like media autism? A line like that would always be followed by canned studio laughter with the actor standing there letting the punchline sink in. That's what they do when they said someone that I actually find funny, and everyone "else" (the studio audience) was also laughing, so you know it's SUPPOSED to be funny, so you mimic the others and try to laugh, as if you know the reference.

Oh man, I'm sad I missed this thread on its peak. I took a bachelor in film studies, so essentially "media literacy" as it concerns film, TV and other media. A bunch of these topics come down to the same topic; interpetation. With regards to media literacy, objective game reviews, reference culture/media elitism and of course, sensitivity versus cencorship are all swirling around the same topic; how do we read a given work of art. This is what basically the entire humanities arm of academia spends their time on, so it's a giant subject that's almost impossible to "solve". But as some people in the thread had questions regarding intent of the author (for example the Far Cry 3 writer), I thought I would write up a quick Communication Theory 101: Rollin' with the Barthes. Traditionally, most people have thought of communication like this: Sender -> message -> receiver. This way the sender control the message completely, and the reciever/audience gets it exactly as intended. Of course, this is far from reality. A more accurate model looks like this, developed in the middle of the 1900s, primarily by Roland Barthes†: Sender <-> intent --> message ---medium----> | text/work of art | ---external noise----> receivers perception---> receiver ---> interpretation as I've tried to convey, a sender/author is not only divorce from the message, but it gets filtered through the medium or channel (like video games), before it becomes the work. And even then it still goes through external factors (how do you experience it? What do have other people said about it beforehand?) Before it actually is interpreted. Ok, so to bring this back to the topic at hand. I haven't seen any of the deleted posts, but a big part of the discussion seems to center around Danielle not wanting to play the South Park game because of her political convictions. Some people have a problem with this, and some even go so far as to claim "censorship" for critiquing the way the show portrays women, redheads, etc. Censorship would amount to cutting of this communication chain at the 2-4th step. By simply criticizing the middle part (the text) you're not censoring anything at all, and in fact, denying someone the right to dislike it is more akin to censorship. When it comes to media literacy, that takes part in the final steps. The question is a fascinating one, but framing it in what I have outlined above, and South Park specifically: Parker & Stone/South Park are often regarded as satirists/satirical. Let's say it's their intent to satirize a certain type of person by having Cartman acting as horrible as they do. If the receiver doesn't read this as satire, and instead reads it positively, we have to look at the steps between these two. Is the message clear? Does the medium ("childish" cartoon) dilute the message? Is there external noise disturbing it (other people worshiping Cartman as "straight talker"), and does the receiver have the perspective/knowledge to read it as satirical? More importantly, this also shows you what you can't criticize in this example, which is the stuff beyond the chain on either side: Sender and interpretation. You can't call Parker & Stone bad people for making Cartman the character a bad person, and you can't tell someone their interpretation is wrong or invalid, no matter if they "get" the satire or not. Using this model on references, I guess you could say that they do carry a form of cultural elitism, because they assume at the "message" level that the receiver has prior knowledge only available if the sender and receiver are in the same demographic on some level, be it internet access, TV shows watched, geography or any other factor. But this is a more complex (and therefore more fascinating) debate. This is getting long already, so I'll cut myself off before doing any actual discussion. It could be I just wasted a bunch of words underlining what everyone already knew, but I hope this can be helpful, if not to educate someone directly, at least think more clearly about this stuff or to explain it better to someone who doesn't get it? (This is basically the first time I get to use my uni degree directly, so excuse my over-excitement.)

What on earth is this? http://store.idlethumbs.net/pages/about

I'm speechless.

They put Batroc the Leaper in this film????

They're boosting the exp gain this weekend on the EU server, because of the recent instability. A good time to jump in and get to 70!

Great job! Suggestion: Replace Olly's summary with that of Olly Murs.

Because every thread is a dedicated Jeff Goldblum thread.

Lacabra, it would be incredible if the first game to officially release on UE4 would be your low-poly adventure game.

That's really cool. Do you have a video of it in action?

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