Irishjohn

It's very different from DOTA, but I will say the group stuff works surprisingly well. You don't need a group that's super communicative just to get your butt over to where you need to be. The group objectives bring a completely different flavour to it. That and, as we were all saying, the pace. It's actually made me want to go back to DOTA and go a bit mad with my Warlock and I WANT to do that but at the moment I have limited time so it's HotS for the near future. Also, despite the fact I'm not really a fan of any Blizzard story or lore, they make games I can't stop playing.

I saw him in Manchester in.... 2005 I think? He was pretty great. And we'll always have drunken rock outs yelling "I'm a liar!" like an idiot. Well, I'll have them. In my memory.

LawSheng#1739 in North America. Also, hello! I was starting to get into Dota 2, but I just don't have time for various reasons. I quite like HotS because I can drop in and play a game and get out. That's the main reason I like it. It also feels less punishing. I like playing Dota but I'm terrible and just don't have the time (or let's be honest, ability) to get to an acceptable level of not terrible. This game feels more welcoming, and my basic skills from Dota really help (just don't die, whatever happens).

This is true. Also, he's not a fifteen year old figuring stuff out. He's a grown man. Someday YouTube will get a Sinister Magician that fights for good. It's just that today is not that day.

Here's the thing... I watched a YouTube video making fun of Aurini (the guy basically cracks up when he realizes there's always a skull in the shot, and left it in because, well, it's really funny) and I felt bad for the guy. I mean, he must have feelings, right? It's that weird, cringey, deja vu "I felt this bad in secondary school when I was really vulnerable and people laughed at me" vibe. He's putting himself out there, and this must suck. Now, of course, he's putting himself out there to say horrific things that could (and may very well have) incited people to do terrible things. Including sexual assault. So there's probably something wrong with me. Having said all that, he seems to have no self-awareness. At all.

His weird "to camera" mode is incredibly creepy, and I'm not sure he understands just how creepy it is. That's before he even starts saying awful things.

"Roosh couldn’t get laid in Denmark, that’s why he wrote Don’t Bang Denmark (in reality he just found the women to be ugly, sarcastic, and unpleasant)." From blog post above. This keeps coming up. I just... I didn't know who this Roosh person was two days ago and I want to go back. Not surprising at all of course that a dude who is convinced Anita Sarkeesian is a scam artist idolizes him.

They used to just joke about video games! There's someone who missed the entire point of the podcast. Fair play to him for wanting to give Danielle Riendeau "a chance."

It's ridiculous to me that, on top of an unbelievably brazen and ill deserved sense of injustice, people are making fun of Tim Schafer because the maths of his joke was wrong. Public speaking is not a simple thing, guys. These Sarkeesian Effect idiots are getting worse. Aurini posted Skype logs of their conversations in a bid to show that Owen acted in bad faith. ..... Okay. http://www.staresattheworld.com/2015/03/jordan-owens-reasons-splitting-thesarkeesianeffect-skype-logs/ Incidentally, the people of Denmark are getting an absolute shoeing in this debate overall. In other news, I had no opinion (or awareness of) "Game" until now. I don't like it. The manner in which Aurini is utterly oblivious to what a terrible person he is, is just stunning.

http://southpark.cc.com/clips/256710/not-my-waterpark

I had never heard of this site until now. It's... awful. Just awful. Their "Mr. Brianna Wu" schtick (and linking to a picture of Miranda Kerr to humiliate her further) is pretty awful. Wow. I need to go and shower now. Yeah, it's not 8chan or anything but that cop-out from Twitter has to go. I know they're making changes but it still seems rough. I agree completely with the validity of the service for people from underrepresented groups (just look at the numbers of mobile internet use, and phenomena such as "black twitter." The biggest thing, really, is the inability of wealthy teenage kids that are really into video games to understand that they're wealthy. This is a wider thing in the US. Apple talks about iPads in classrooms like it will fix everything (speaking as an educator, um, no) and ignores the fact that they're really very expensive. A lot of GGers probably think they had it tough because they're still rocking an Xbox 360. A lot of people could only dream of affording one, but some of those people can get on twitter through an affordable smartphone.

I just want to pop back in to say that this is a great elaboration on my basic point. I wasn't trying to be dismissive, but I do feel that people massively overestimate Twitter's usefulness in presenting forums, platforms and avenues of interaction. Communication is complex enough in this medium right now, where we have room to expand our points. Twitter just doesn't scale well at all. It's incredibly easy to misread a tweet (as it is a forum post or an email, incidentally). Twitter is fantastic for many reasons, but its efficacy as a political tool or mode of communication is extremely limited. If we disagree, the chances you're going to convince me with 140 characters are slim, and multiple tweets (or worse, twitlongers) are just frustrating. So "activism" on twitter mostly becomes a case of letting the people you agree with know something happened that upset you, and encouraging them all to be really upset just as you are. Again, I am really not trying to trivialize positive experiences people here have had with twitter. However, it's very easy (especially for people in the video game world, whether as enthusiasts, creators, writers, what have you, who use twitter A LOT) to forget that a lot of people DON'T use twitter and don't much care for it or know much about it beyond newspapers and television citing it far too often. Anyway, to get back to (or a bit closer to) the point, we have a case where Brianna Wu has been horrifically abused by idiots on twitter and now recently she's being turned on by people upset with her political position on having coffee with a guy who is probably a bit of an idiot and then being defended by others and then... My use of the term "echo chamber" referred to the coexistence of lots of sectioned off discrete conversations that occasionally clash together, which is what I see happening. I mean, Christ... I really don't have an opinion about who Brianna Wu has coffee with, you know? So yeah. This. Though I will say that you shouldn't do the American thing and beat yourself up for being American. This attitude is common in many places. We should also get away from the left-right thing; apart from the fact that distinction is incredibly loaded in the US, it's more of an extremist jerk/people with strong opinions/open minded moderates/leave Irishjohn alone he wants his football and his cat videos spectrum.

I agree completely. I'll retweet interesting articles about China and other history nerd stuff, and occasionally link to a political article I like but Twitter is very limited when it comes to actual mature interactions, thus exacerbating these problems. It doesn't help that some seem so eager to rally around individuals, whether that's the odd number of Giantbomb users with a picture of Gerstmann or Shoemaker as their avatar on the GB site, people that consider Wu to have some kind of obligation to the rest of us, or people that think Mark Kern is not a shameless opportunist. It's a weird thing and it just emphasizes that Twitter can be an echo chamber that doesn't accomplish very much. And as for being rude to people, well, there's far too much childishness going around. Being right doesn't entitle you to grandstand or just be rude.

It does seem ridiculous, but then again.... those tweets are completely out of context. Part of this is a wider issue with twitter use anyway, but I'm pretty sure taking out a couple of tweets and throwing in a Jackie Chan image doesn't constitute any kind of thoughtful analysis. The word "privilege" is thrown around far too much, and that comment seems (out of context) to be fairly immature and silly to say the least (even if Kern himself is from what evidence I've seen a bit of an idiot) but it isn't a bloody competition. Going back to the point earlier in the thread, the whole thing here is that Brianna Wu should do and say what she wants to do and say. The only people arguing that "SJWs" like us slavishly support her every statement are GGers obsessed with her. Sorry for basically repeating the point, but in relation to that second image, just... ugh. So what if she said something ill considered or downright unpleasant? I guess that means we get the boobs back in our games. I don't know. I have been in and out over the last year and honestly, I missed this place quite a bit. Being part of a mature and interesting conversation about this rubbish is almost disorienting. Very pleasant.

It's also the GGers that are focused on the binary opposition dynamic to the point where they go on about "anti-GG" constantly as if it were a thing. I don't know much about Wu, but I agree that it's not productive to hold up certain figures as being key in some kind of clash, if only because it would legitimize a key GG point. As far as I can tell they round on people, those people respond and this is taken as a clear "anti" narrative.

I don't know, assuming for a moment I'm willing to accept your supposition that women are in fact people, the man's life could be at risk. She could be on the verge of physically attacking him and using his body for her needs. I wish this was just me being ridiculous, but I am now watching videos mocking this guy when I should be working and it is terrifying. I'm basically paraphrasing him.

Fantastic stuff. Casino barbie doll ken. He ran with it.

This whole thing is hysterical. I wasn't familiar with these idiots at all until today. A quick look at their Patreon page and just.... wow. Their complete lack of self-awareness is bewildering. They hold up Anita Sarkeesian as this fraud for asking for a one-time payment of $6k and getting much more, then establish incredibly unrealistic "stretch" targets for donations per month. That's per month, ongoing. Bewildering. Absolutely bewildering. I also quite like their pretensions to intellectual superiority while repeatedly displaying a shallowness of critical thinking ability bordering on illiterate, let alone juvenile (see also: Total Biscuit). John Rawls invented social justice. He INVENTED it.

Thanks man!

I hope this isn't rude, and I know there's a thread for plugging podcasts, but I just thought I'd drop this in here because this is Star Trek friendly and my friend and I chat about Star Trek episodes, and record it, and post our chats online... Er, that's it. Maybe you'll fancy it, maybe not. http://www.theculturalapocalypse.com/category/wagontrek/

Yup, that's pretty good. A complete lack of self-awareness is always funny.

I'm finding the controls tough as well. I really hated DA2 and I suppose I thought this would be DA:O all over again, and it's... weird so far. I don't like it. Tactical view, with which I had buckets of fun first time around, doesn't feel right. I also want to move by right clicking more. Eh, just started the game, maybe I'm figuring out the kinks.

I'm encouraged by the mixed reviews actually. For one thing, it demands that people ignore the scores, for the most part, and actually read the review (though many may not). We're also getting to a point with games were different critics can have different opinions about a game, about what it's trying to do and about what it succeeds in doing. That's a very cool thing.

This is cheesy, but it's a valid approach as long as you're open to your definition of success evolving as you get older. Working hard and doing your best won't necessarily mean you end up as chief creative at Blizzard or something, but hopefully you'll end up with a job that matters to you, you'll live in a place you like and be with someone you care about. But absolutely, to make out that people in high profile positions are there purely because they worked hard is inane. Luck, socio-economic and cultural lotteries all play a part.I know nothing about this guy. I stopped listening to Giantbomb forever ago and the majority of their written content now is poor. I was always waiting for them to shut up about energy drinks and talk about games.

See, I'm a beginner and will be one forever (I haven't had time to dedicate to a DOTA game in ten days) so I more or less have no choice but to be THAT guy, running around as Nature's Prophet doing nothing in particular.