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I also noticed they're offering Mass Effect 3 as a digital download for €69.99. Are they fucking joking?

Is it a Collectors Digital Edition? Maybe it has pictures of Mass Effect keyrings with it or something.

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Seems to be the regular version.

Anyhoo, I managed to buy Journey. I decided to check my CC stuff and it was non-existent. I guess they reset that stuff after the hack... I certainly didn't touch it.

I got some vague error code about it, nothing indicating that that was the issue. Ah well, problem solved.

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It is a weird thing to think that forums and communities get behind the death of another community member.

It's happened on MetaFilter a few times - I think at least 2 of them have been suicides. It casts a bit of a pall over the site for a while.

I only hope when I kill myself, y'all memorialize me with some "Goldblum" references.

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The "when" I was referring to was hopefully not for at least another 25 years or so.

I am a proponent of the right to self-deliverance/assisted suicide. Seeing my father's dementia and seeing the path of dementia through his side of the family tree gave me a very personal view on this.

I want to die before my life gets bad. If I'm unlucky enough to have dementia in my future, I want to go before I end up empty and terrified of everything, unable to recognize the people I love, before they must bear the pain of seeing what used to be me but isn't any more.

I have a copy of Sir Terry Pratchett's "Choosing To Die" documentary from last year, but haven't watched it because I'm not emotionally strong enough yet. (Sir P has, I believe, signed all the necessary documents with Dignitas to enable him to perform assisted suicide when he feels the time is right.)

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Is it a Collectors Digital Edition? Maybe it has pictures of Mass Effect keyrings with it or something.

I noticed that the Guild Wars 2 'Collector's Ultra Edition' or whatever the shit, is £129! Fools and their money...

(Says he pissing money away on fuel for stupid cars ;))

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I am a proponent of the right to self-deliverance/assisted suicide. Seeing my father's dementia and seeing the path of dementia through his side of the family tree gave me a very personal view on this.

It goes without saying I'm in favor of euthanasia. Man is master of his own destiny.

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The "when" I was referring to was hopefully not for at least another 25 years or so.

I am a proponent of the right to self-deliverance/assisted suicide.

Phew! We love you Subbes.

I've seen the Pratchett documentary, and it's one of the most difficult things I've watched. The memory of it still floors me.

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Mum has Alzheimer's. Should I be watching this?

It's about assisted suicide and Dignitas rather than dementia specifically. He visits the house in Switzerland after getting to know a man named Peter, who has motor neurone disease and is planning to take his own life. Terry spends some of his last moments with him, and the program shows Peters death. Even though you know it's his long thought out decision and really what he wants, it's very distressing to watch.

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I just watched it online and it is rather emotionally distressing. But it is the good kind, there is a profundity to it. I wouldn't hold out watching it for fear of being shaken. If anything, it might dispel some of one's fears of assisted dying by looking at it closely and humanely.

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Sorry.

That's all right, sweetie, you know I still love you. <3

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I found the end of that Pratchett documentary quite uncomfortable and a little troubling. While I respect the man's right to assume control of his own life and the cessation thereof, it seemed to me that the matter was still very much unresolved with his wife. Obviously any outcome would be tragic, but I found it almost painful to watch his eagerness to die juxtaposed so cruelly with her distress at seeing him go. After the husband has died, there's a shot of the wife on the phone, apparently organizing something unrelated. Pratchett saw a touching display of Britishness; I saw a tragic display of denial and avoidance.

What made it worse was that the woman had to watch her husband die in someone else's arms (I wondered at the time whether it had been established beforehand that it would happen that way), and that his last action was to have a request for water rejected; the latter I found particularly creepy – how much discomfort was he in? Did he have that last moment of panic as he realized the total finality of this action? (The concept of a sensation of helplessness in the last moment before dying is something I've been thinking a little about recently, incidentally.)

I don't mean to undermine the man's right to choose his own fate, but the way in which it played out left me feeling very conflicted.

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It was obvious that the wife in no way wanted this, but had resigned herself to it. There was on all accounts a tremendous amount of 'stiff upper lip' on display, with both wife and husband really trying to keep it together. I get the feeling the husband acted so determined because he had to, if he wavered it would all have fallen to pieces. However, it's dangerous to try reading too much of anything in their behavior: we don't know what their relationship was like and we weren't actually there. Edited film can be very deceiving, so I'll trust the judgment of Pratchett, who was there for the whole thing.

(That's not to say the water thing didn't freak me out a little too, and the hug he got should have been from his wife, not the Swiss lady. If I went, I'd much prefer actual euthanasia with a doctor putting me in a coma and then applying the poison. This was of course assisted suicide, which is very different, but also a little creepy with a toxic draught, an actual cup of poison, Socrates-style.)

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I don't know, dying like Socrates puts you in good company. HBO's You Don't Know Jack could be a good companion for this, though it's fiction of course.

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I just watched the Choosing to Die documentary, and yeah... that was a thing. When receiving such a bombardment of new information related to such important things, I think my brain applies a filter to itself so that I only slowly come to terms with it. I think I absorb it better that way. I'm sure I'll be thinking about assisted suicide a great deal over the next few days as a result.

The death scene was certainly uncomfortable, and yes the water part was strange and troubling. That said, there could have been a great many reasons for that - with the sound of his voice and breathing at that time, I do wonder if trying to drink would have caused him greater discomfort and perhaps beyond that the "escorts" are instructed as to a point after which things should no longer be going into the stomach for one reason or another.

I was actually very surprised that that couple allowed cameras to be there at all. They were clearly very much trying to hold to the British politeness and denial of emotion and I would have thought they'd have feared cameras being around and potentially capturing their reserve and control cracking. Perhaps I'm underestimating them and those like them, though, maybe that way of doing things isn't as much of a crutch as I'd assume and perhaps it lends its own strength. Perhaps they also wanted the cameras there for exactly that reason - to put them into the position in which they definitely couldn't crack.

It's a very strange thing, choosing to end one's own life. Maybe I'll never understand it entirely. I hope I'm never in the position in which I have to make a similar decision.

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The thing about death that I've noticed in my very limited experience with it, of watching my grandfather die in his bed, is that it is a strange thing. It can span the full breadth of human emotion. Death can be poignant, excruciating, tragic, timely, merciful, embarrassing and/or even comical, all at once or after another. Death, like life, cannot be captured in easy Hollywood moments and phrases. It is a bizarre, incommunicable thing and almost impossible to direct or judge.

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I rather enjoy people exercising the freedom to end their life in a controlled (and unmessy manor). I see it as one of the ultimate forms of freedom in life and I really do not understand why this should be prohibited in any way.

So this documentary is probably to convince people that freedom includes freedom in life and death. Even though I don't need convincing, I'll put it on my queue of "shit to watch before death".

Edited by elmuerte

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So last Thursday was my birthday (THANKS FOR ALL THE WELL-WISHES, JERKS) and upon my arrival home yesterday evening, I found this waiting for me as a gift. Is it not the most beautiful thing?!

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