I Saw Dasein

Weirdly Space Hulk boardgame (and Death Angel Card Game) are both probably the best licensed-but-not-really Aliens games ever. They just have the wrong license. Creative Assembly could actually make a really cool strategy game with the license. Imagine a game that's equal parts Space Hulk and new XCOM, skinned as an Aliens game. I'd buy that in a hot second.

anyone who thinks art history is boring probably just hasn't read enough Dan Brown.

art history and political science are both awesome and interesting and the most worthless and boring thing humanity has ever produced is probably your posting.

Homega Man

Many women would like to take on dangerous work. Historically, relatively dangerous blue-collar work was also very lucrative, and women were usually excluded from that work. For example, there are a number of famous labour cases in my jurisdiction involving discrimination against female firefighters and female railway workers ("Meoirin" is the most famous example). Being allowed to take on dangerous, well-paying work is a form of male privilege.

Not really. Star Wars was always commercial, blockbuster, low-brow culture, right from day one.

It is not unfair to focus on one problem instead of another problem. If focusing on a problem was unfair, then all social movements would be unfair because all social movements necessarily focus on some social ills and not other social ills. E.g. it would be unfair for a movement to fight cancer and not fight AIDS; it would be unfair to fight poverty and not fight illness; it would be unfair to campaign for blood donation but not kidney donation; etc.

There's lots of reasons you might choose to focus efforts on British people and not people everywhere. For example, you might feel more strongly identified with British people. You might feel that British people are suffering in a particularly intense way. You might feel that helping British people is more effective than trying to fight poverty abroad. You might feel that helping one's local community is more important than helping people you do not know. There are all sorts of good reasons to pick one cause (and not some other causes), and that's fine. The same is true of feminism. You might feel more strongly identified with women than with men. You might feel that women suffer more than men do. You might feel that the problems faced by women are more important than the problems faced by men. You might feel that helping women is more like to improve matters than helping men. You might simply personally get more out of helping women than helping men. I feel like the essence of your argument is that it is somehow wrong to help one group and not another. But I don't see why that should be. No one has unlimited time or effort to put into a cause. It's OK to put that time and effort into one cause and not another.

So if I started a movement that was aimed at helping poor British people, you would disagree with the movement because the movement didn't expressly aim to help poor people everywhere?

Re academic outcomes, it really doesn't make sense to say that the system is biased against males just because females marginally outperform males k-12. That presupposes a cause (bias) from an observed effect (unequal outcomes). It could well be that unequal gender outcomes have nothing to do with bias and instead have to do with other factors. For example, maybe the fact that boys are more often encouraged to participate in sports hinders them academically: while many boys are spending a couple hours a day in sports, girls can spend that time studying. Basically until we understand why girls outperform boys, we can't make statements about bias.

Black knight sword is great.if you upgrade it, it will take you through the whole rest of the game. Love that sword.

I'd go Hey, Alex Eiffel, Debaser.

top three songs or albums?

Also the Earl Sweatshirt album is kind of a slow burn but really good.

Today is last day at old job, new job doesn't start until Tuesday. Five day weekend!

It is really good. Definitely the best thing El-P has been involved in for years and years. I liked the Chance album better though. Also for some reason I really loved Traphouse III, while also recognizing that it is totally brainless and hacky. E; Best song on album.

Sno, thanks so much for the great Fire Emblem advice. I switched to normal/permadeath and while I think the game is too easy (at least in the early missions), it is much less frustrating. Two quick question--am I right in thinking that I should level a character to the level cap before switching classes? Also, are the stat gains at level up totally random?

It's not really about tropes; the Big Lebowski is basically a parody of Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep. They have roughly the same plot and similar characters. So it's kind of like if you never saw Star Wars you wouldn't think that Space Balls was all that funny.

It is good because it has great dialogue, great characters, great music, and is a great riff on a great detective novel. It's OK if you don't like it, but in this case that may be more on you not understanding the source material than any defect in the movie. Although IMO neither O Brother nor Big Lebowski are even top 3 Coens. Top 3 would indisputably be Miller's Crossing, Barton Fink, and A Serious Man.

Well I'm glad someone else feels the same way! It's super annoying, because clearly the AI isn't playing to "win" the battle: it will attack the weakest unit whether or not that is the move that would best help it win the battle. I'm honestly surprised the game was so well received, as there are a lot of really annoying things about it.

I have been playing a fair amount of Fire Emblem Awakening. I can't decide whether or not I like it very much. I am playing on "hard" since "normal" difficulty felt like a total cakewalk. The game is very unforgiving, to the extent that a single misstep can easily lead to the (permanent) death of a unit. The game is not really designed for you to lose a lot of units in that units are not randomly generated or replaced, so you can't really afford to lose them. That means that the death of a unit really means the restart of a mission. I feel like this is the worst possible use of perma-death, in that it really doesn't add much to the game. It's not very fun to have to reset the game just because I made a single bad move. There should at least be a "restart mission" option in the system menu. Most of the missions feel very puzzle-y and not very tactical, in that there is often only one or two ways to realistically beat the mission. The AI also seems to be really bad/non-existent. As far as I can tell, it basically just rushes you as soon as you walk into its "aggro zone". It doesn't behave at all like a human player, and instead throws itself on your most vulnerable units. You are also pretty much always outnumbered. As a result, the best or only strategy is to play extremely defensively and let the enemies come at you (preferably one by one). Since there are no zones of control, realistically this means bunching your units up near a choke point and letting the enemy bash itself against your hardiest unit. Finally, some of the mechanics are not really explained well. "Pairing up" seems awesome, but I can't tell exactly what it does. I also have no idea how the "romance" system is supposed to work so hopefully I'm not totally botching my team. All that being sad, it's still a fun and great-looking game. I just wish it felt a little more dynamic strategically. It just seems a lot less strategically interesting than some of the other "tactics" games I've played. Maybe it will get better as I progress--I'm only six or seven missions in.

It's seriously like seven times as long as Infinite Jest. SEVEN TIMES AS LONG AS INFINITE JEST. That's astounding.

If you have any fondness for songs by dudes with guitars and melancholy I insist you listen to this song

I think that's basically the point of the Rorsarch character in the Watchmen comics.

Hm, I never played like that. I guess I would say that XCOM is exploitable, but I wouldn't say that it lacks strategy as a result.