I Saw Dasein

I wonder what kind of tax it's supposed to be. Income, sales, or property?

I have no problem with abstraction per se, I just don't think this abstraction really works. It produces really unintuitive results. So for example, you would thing that providing multiple routes through the city would relieve congestion; it apparently does not, since the sims will always take the shortest route. If you try and play the game as if it were actually stimulating a real city, you will quickly find yourself frustrated. The single most important thing to know about city building is that sims go from A to B in the most direct route possible, without any concern for congestion, and I don't understand why the game doesn't just tell you that. This is compounded by how opaque many of the mechanics are. The game should really explain the sim logic up front. As it is, I feel like the game is willing to provide me with a ton of numbers without actually making the basic mechanics clear. And when you couple this to the fact that parts of the game don't reliably work (eg. Intra-region trade), you have a pretty frustrating experience. In its current state, in my views Sim City fails both as a game and as a simulation. Its still compelling and fun, but it tries my patience. I also really think being able to save/load and experiment is a huge, huge loss.

I'm increasingly convinced that Simcity simulates a dystopic collectivist future. There is no private property: all sims of a certain class will simply drive to the first available residence and move in for the night; each day a different house. There are no careers: all sims of a certain education level drive to the nearest job; each day a different job. There are no families: each sim will pick up whichever child is the closest; each day a different child. It's incredibly Orwellian, if you stop to think about it.

Seeing as the game is a bit more stable, I'm starting a big region in North America West 1. My origin username is isawdasein. Message me for an invite.

That's not what "literally" means. In any event, you can care about whatever you want. But MRA posits a systemic solution to a systemic problem that doesn't exist: men are not oppressed as a result of their masculinity, any more than white people in America are oppressed as a result of their whiteness. And that is why people object to it.

There's weird stuff with the sim AI. They seem to take the shortest straigh-line route from point A to point B, regardless of the quality of the road and the density of traffic. So a sim who has to decide whether to take route A, which is a slightly shorter dirt road congested with traffic, or to take route B, which is a slightly longer, completely empty, six-lane avenue, will always choose route A. It also appears that sim's don't have "homes" or set jobs. A sim will go to the nearest workplace that matches their education level, and will then go to the nearest residential building that matches their income level. It's very strange.

Man the moment-to-moment game play in this game is so fun. Once it actually starts working reliably it's going to be awesome. My origin is isawdasein if anyone want's to add me.

There's no "professional" standard for a youtube video, and it's not a dissertation so I'm not sure why it should matter whether or not it's "unacademic". And there's nothing "unprofessional" or "unacademic" about expressing a subjective opinion about something.

It's not "word games". It's that there are many times where tonal shifts can be effective, which is a proposition that you seem to agree with. In this case, you did not think she was effective. I thought she was effective. It's just a matter of taste, with which there can be no dispute.

You know, calling something a "buzz word" or dismissing it out of hand is not a very intellectually honest way of having a discussion. In fact, I think if you'll check your "Honest Discussion 101" course materials, you'll find that it's a pretty impolite means of debate.

I'm not being evasive. I don't think there's much else to say. You didn't like that part of her video; it didn't bother me. It's purely a matter of taste: there's no "writing 101" standard of objectively bad writing you can point to. I don't think it is bad style for someone to display opinion or emotion in this kind of video. Obviously you do, although why you have selected this particular video to critique at length instead of any of the other countless internet videos is kind of baffling.

Actually does anyone know if the intra-region stuff even works? It seems very erratic: like sometimes I seem to be able to buy/sell excess power, and other times not. The same goes for workers: sometimes I seem to be able to get workers from other towns, and then all of a sudden it seems to stop working. I can't tell if I'm playing the game wrong or if that feature just isn't working.

This will probably shock you, but questionable writing choices abound on the internet.

I don't really think there's any tension there. You can both present facts and evidence, and then offer an opinion on those facts--even an impassioned opinion. The fact that an opinion is offered doesn't undermine the validity of the facts.

I don't agree at all. There is no "style 101" rule that you must pick a tone and stick with it. In fact, tonal shifts can be an effective way of drawing attention to a particular item or point of view. Many great writers use tonal shifts very effectively. I don't think that was the intention here, but it didn't bother me or seem weird at all. I also don't think it's "unprofessional" to be upset at the way women are portrayed in video games, or to express that upset in the context of a video short. If she was writing a dissertation or something maybe it would bother me. But that's not the project she's working on.

I don't think the neighbours care. I've been bulldozing like crazy. This game is fun but man the server stuff drives me wild. One of the cities in my region will not seem to save any of the building I do, so I'm kind of stuck progress-wise. Is there any interest in a North America-West region? I would like to try the multilayer stuff with non-randoms.

I don't see why it undermines anything. There's nothing wrong with having an opinion on a subject. It's a youtube video, not a dissertation. In fact, I think it would be odd not to have some kind of value judgement in a series called "Feminist Frequency".

Is she delivering what she said she would deliver? Yes. So who cares how much money she collected in the process. It makes absolutely no sense to complain about her video when it is exactly what she said she wanted to produce in her kickstarter.

Given that MRA is largely an exercise in false equivalency, "rhetorical disenfranchisement" is an eminently appropriate response.

What is unusual -- and not a little troubling -- is that thousands of youtube videos get released every single day. Many of them feature gaming. Many of them are posted on this forum. And yet the only one that gets pages of comments in a 24 hours period is this one. So the video didn't "empower you to see the world in a new light"; that's a completely absurd thing to expect of any youtube video on any topic.

Double post!

Well then don't watch her videos. I find sports radio very boring, so I don't listen to it. There is a ton of shit on the internet that holds no interest for me, but I don't spend a lot of time knocking it down. At the end of the day, there are tens of thousands of badly produced youtube videos out there on all sorts of topics, and yet here we are talking about this one. I find this particularly troubling given the history of her project and the complete unwarranted hostility of (mostly male) gamers. To me it seems like she is being held to a complete different standard than the standards we normally apply to media on the internet, and I doubt that is a coincidence.

Why does this video have to add anything to any cause? Why can't it just be a video that is interesting to some, and uninteresting to others? There's a million videos on Youtube that you couldn't pay me to watch, but I don't go around complaining about those. So what is it about this topic that attracts so many complaints?

The makers should keep the money for themselves. The basic idea of kickstarter is this. I have an idea- a new kind of watch. That watch will eventually make money, but in order to set up the infrastructure I need some starting money to get going. So I go to kickstarter and ask for funding. In exchange for helping me set up my infrastructure and build the product, people who kickstart will each get a watch. If I get $10,000, I can set up the infrastructure and deliver a watch to each person who kickstarts $100, but I will keep no profit. Say instead of getting 10 donations of $100 each, I get 100 donations of $100 each, for a total of $100,000. I can deliver every kickstarter a watch, but am left with $50,000 as profit. In my view, what should happen is that each person who kickstarted gets the watch they were promised. The profit is kept by the kickstarter. The only other two options are that you channel the excess funding into the watch, or you return the excess funding to the kickstarters, in which case you have both cannibalized your consumers (in that some people who would have bought a watch at a price that includes profit get the watch at a lesser price) and have given up any profit. Since the whole point of kickstarter is to give people with business ideas some funding to get that business going, it makes no sense to penalize them when they have a particularly popular idea. As long as they deliver what they promised to deliver, I see no reason why they should be denied the value of their idea. edit: Also Lucca saves Chrono in Chrono Trigger.

I don't really agree. When you Kickstart something, you know exactly what you're getting. The kickstarter explains what the end result will be in the pitch. There are stretch goals for additional donations. I don't see why you would be entitled to anything above and beyond what you are promised in the pitch. One of the major purposes of Kickstarter is to provide access to funding so that people can develop a product and eventually sell it. If you require Kickstarters to funnel all their funding back into the product, you undermine that profit motive, you wreak havoc on their business plans, and you basically turn it into a charity model. I don't think Kickstarter would be as successful as a charity model.