Bartimaeus

Dunkey had many of the same thoughts as you...even compares it to Metal Gear Solid 5, too. He had a slightly more positive impression of the game, though. (...Keep in mind that it's Dunkey, so you're gonna hear a few silly things if you bother to watch this review.)

I don't care for her voice (...or her music, if those two songs are any indication), but then again, I wasn't ever gonna say something silly like "she can't sing" in response to hearing it. Suffice to say, you're a much more musically diverse (...and knowledgeable) person than I am. Spinning circles around me with all the different name drops and such...the only two out of those I've listened to are Skippy Puppy and Front 242...and I don't count myself as a fan of either (about the only thing I like from Front 242 being Headhunter...everything else I ever tried from them just didn't really work for me). I'm so annoyingly picky about vocals: don't really like either of the two songs you linked because of it...even though I really liked the instrumental of the Coil song. Ack. Almost had a sort of Near Eastern vibe going...really liked it for the first few minutes. Ah, misophonia...

Undertale? :D (just kidding...mostly, since it's not really an RPG in the usual sense, and also because most people seem to have little to no interest in it due to its horrible, horrible fanbase and maybe it trying "too hard" in some respects, while not trying hard enough in others: still probably the best game I played this year, though)

Funny: it's generally (not always, but generally) the opposite for me. Classical, acoustic, movie and video game scores are my downers...most forms of electronic/synth, usually not.

Yes, copyright issues. I, uh, made VNV Nation really upset when I uploaded their latest album like 36 hours before its official release (...hey, it's not my fault stuff gets shipped early - O.K., it is actually my fault I uploaded it, though - funnily enough, it was probably the last "new" thing I ever planned on uploading, because I started uploading stuff on YouTube for the sake of having higher quality versions of songs...and for sharing rarer stuff, and by that time, a lot of other people were uploading new releases in higher quality, so why bother anymore with that sort of thing?), and I nearly got banned entirely just from that, and then after I waited out the copyright warnings (a year), I finally came back...and then immediately started getting targeted again, for videos that had been up for years. I'm not even sure if it was by VNV Nation themselves at that point - thanks to YouTube's wonderful copyright system, it could have been literally anyone. Had no choice but make everything private, and I will probably never return in any capacity until things change in that regard, which will probably be never. Used to have everything by VNV Nation, Assemblage 23, the Azoic, Lights of Euphoria (...up 'til a certain point: I asked them directly what they'd be O.K. with), and a few other miscellaneous, lesser-known and/or defunct acts. 600+ videos...forever hidden. I can't stand Standing. Lyrically speaking, it's O.K., but Ronan's voice was just sadly not made for it, in my opinion, .

Empires has a few of my favorite songs (Rubicon + Distant, Arclight, Legion), but it also has a few that I don't really like much at all (Kingdom, Standing, Saviour). My favorite three albums, of course, are Advance and Follow, Praise the Fallen, and Matter + Form...and in that order. I used to have everything they've ever done uploaded to YouTube, but alas, my channel may as well not exist anymore.

When he lost, I had a pretty strong negative reaction towards him giving his support to Clinton. But...as you just mentioned, he always said he would support the eventual nominee, because it would be better (...probably) than Trump, and at that point, there would be no other realistic alternative left available to him. I don't like the reality of the situation he (...and I) was stuck with, but I can hardly blame him for swallowing his pride and doing what he felt had to be done. It's also silly to direct any hard feelings at one of the small minority of people who actually tried to make a bad situation better, especially after they simply no longer had any meaningful say about the situation.

If you're looking at it from a consequentialist perspective in this situation, there was no action that would have reasonably lead to a good outcome here, so it hardly seems fair to judge someone that way. I could just as easily say you were morally lacking for voting for a candidate that you knew had no realistic possibility of success, that you were throwing your vote away...but I don't, because I also place moral weight into intentions, and I also recognize that, again, there was no good AND realistic choice here. I am pretty sure Sanders, as a seemingly moderately intelligent man, saw it much the same way after he lost...regardless of cheating. Why blame him or anybody else who didn't want to be in this situation for the lack of better options when we actually tried?

So, just to be clear...everyone who voted for Bernie Sanders in the primaries, but who ended up voting for Hillary Clinton in the general election, is similarly morally lacking, yes? I just want to make sure that this is actually the implication here.

For Packers to win the division: Packers win out while Lions also lose to either the Giants or the Cowboys. Packers win 2/3 remaining games (must include @Lions) while the Lions lose out and while the Vikings win only 2/3 of their remaining games (even if one of their wins is over the Packers, this would not give them the division due to a three-way tie and three-way sweep and thus head-to-head being rendered useless for determining the division winner: Packers would take the division with a 4-2 divisional record vs. the Lions' and Vikings' inferior 3-3). For Packers to win a wild card: Packers must win out and Buccaneers must lose to the Cowboys. It gets a lot more complicated if the Lions beat both the Cowboys and the Giants (but not the Packers) and the Buccaneers also beat the Cowboys, but only a very extreme and highly implausible set of circumstances would make the Packers NOT go to the playoffs if they just win out. Basically, the Packers just need to win out in order to go to the playoffs, whether as a division champion or as a wild card. Division champion seems the more likely of the two, given that the Lions must beat both the Cowboys and Giants at their respective stadiums.

Sorry for your loss.

Well, I read it, because I was actually curious as to what he had to say, and I felt his message was basically, "Things obviously aren't perfect, but it hasn't been that long since things were really bad, and we've gotten a whole lot better since then, and hopefully that will continue." Is there an implication there that things aren't as good as he'd ideally want? Yes. But like how somebody can say that they wish they were in better economic (or whatever) straits while also recognizing that they're actually doing alright as it is and that they're going to be O.K. and things will probably even get better sometime soon, I don't think he's saying that America "[is] still a bunch of racists".

Did you even read the article you just linked?

Yeah, I suppose there was too much teenager...or uh, young adult at that point, actually...angst for it to really be called "lighthearted" or "fun".

Yes...nevertheless, I would struggle to call him the "main driving force" (I think that has to go to the community, who played it endlessly for a decade-plus, so much so that Valve eventually decided to develop it into its own game...even compared to other fantastic games, DotA is very unique for having retained such a massive playerbase...and even growing to ever larger proportions with the release of DotA 2 which is basically just a straight-up continuation of DotA anyways), and as for the "greatest competitive gaming developer" label...he didn't even develop the gameplay type (in fact, not even the original DotA developer did - these types of games were originally called Aeon of Strife clones for a reason, before they rebranded it to "MOBA" many, many years down the line). I'm not sure what it would take to get called the "best" in this area (especially since it's clearly so subjective), but I have to think these caveats make it a little bit of a stretch here: DotA (and MOBAs in general) still exist and are being developed and played for reasons beyond IceFrog's involvement in them. I'm sure he helped by making new versions for so long (even if a lot of them were only small changes), but...

So...the Deathly Hallows Part 1 all over again?

Congratulations, TrueNeutral!

Hmph. Were either of you around when DotA (the WC3 map) was actually being developed? I was. Most of the changes IceFrog did over the years - especially the later years (think 2008, maybe 2009 and beyond) - were just little balance tweaks every few weeks to every few months (and usually only a handful of them at a time) that were so basic that *I* could've implemented them myself - literally* - and most of them were suggestions of the players. IceFrog did remarkably little DotA for a *really* long time for how much fame for it he has - one only has to look at the changelogs for the original map to see how much of a "driving force" he was. The community behind the map was a much stronger and lasting driving force than he ever was. *I'm not kidding: I really could've done at least most of them myself, and I wasn't ever even that much of a mapmaker.

the only thing that matters is IPC, and AMD has been lacking woefully here for years, so until I see the benchmarks...

Yeah, IceFrog...the guy who didn't even start DotA. Alright.

What, repeating the same garbage memes thread in and thread out, ad nauseam for all time? It sucks...it really does. Even in sports subreddits, it happens way too often...it's a toss-up whether you'll get actual decent and meaningful discussion or just a bunch of idiots posting "jokes". I like having the possibility for meaningful discussion among a wide and varied userbase...but in practice, most people are just idiots. In regards to the layout design...well, the issue is that it's NOT a forum, and it doesn't seem to really be made to emulate one. The site's primary purpose seems to be "entertainment", and so the comments that people think are the "best" (in whatever way people deem best) rise to the top...and so discussion doesn't really matter outside of the smaller subreddits...or unless you're one of the very first posters to a thread. See, all the threads you ever see on the bigger subreddits, or on the front page...or anywhere close to the front page...are threads that are usually already a few hours old - by the time you see these threads, discussion is already mostly dead by virtue of the fact that the thread already has hundreds of comments and nobody can really read anything besides the mostly highly upvoted crap. It's not really meant to be a forum for actual discussion, and it shows. It doesn't help that all the stuff that appears on the front page is mostly worthless garbage, too.

90% seems a little low, I'd go for 100% if I never had to read "le" again. RIP me. ...Although, to be fair, I also think reddit is a garbagehole in most respects...and only use it for sports discussion and smaller communities. Reddit the community and reddit "the front page of the internet" sucks pretty bad, so I can see why people don't like it in general.

That's actually true. It's difficult to get the #6 seed even if we do win out (but don't get the division), never mind the #5 seed, so yeah.

oh, also what the hell, packers even while aaron rodgers was injured and gimpy the entire game, you absolutely and totally trashed the seahawks, ruining their "always within 10 points" streak that they'd had going on for the last like 3-4 years or so (that actually used to be "within 7 points" before the seahawks-packers game last year) I don't know what the hell kind of team the Packers are at all, really

Actually, I'm still not sure whether the Giants winning is a good thing: on one hand, it makes the Cowboys want to crush the Lions...on the other, it makes a wildcard possibility that much more difficult for the Packers, particularly with so many other teams who have 7 or 8 wins. It was going to be a win-lose situation either which team won, so whatever.