Zoraptor

'Extraordinary' is a technical term in accounting, it means due to an unusual/ unpredicted/ unlikely to be repeated circumstance. In many ways it's actually better than a bog standard unextraordinary loss, which is rather the reverse of what Gamespot implies.

Main problem: it's a Kotaku article saying it, and Kotaku will interpret stuff into the most clickbaity form they can think of. I don't know about dlc, but reassignments and downsizing by other means are exactly what you'd expect after they ship a game whatever the circumstances. Bioware: M is clearly a one project at a time studio unlike the Bioware mothership. So once they finished MEA people were going to be let go or transferred, inevitably, instead of holding on to all the people they had at crunch, indeed I'd be very surprised if a lot of the people working on MEA at crunch weren't previous transfers from other EA studios in the first place. Not just the EA: [low wage country] texture farmers and DICE engine people whose whole reason for existence is moving from project to project either. That's just the most efficient way to do things, and means you can cut dead wood and anyone who, uh, causes problems without causing yourself problems. Not that I think that there will be a MEA2 any time soon, especially from the Montreal branch, but then even if MEA were well received there wouldn't be a sequel for a few years and there would be people getting moved off the project rather than on at the beginning. Dunno, but if EA wanted to do a futuristic Battlefield franchise game one tied to Mass Effect seems like a good fit. Can't see them icing Mass Effect, in anything approaching the long term. If nothing else its MP potential would earn a reprieve.

They'll probably revert it from opt out to opt in. More horribly tone deaf Good News from the GOG administrative team though. To be fair, I imagine it's being pushed because more Galaxy is what will get more publishers and more new games on board, but their justification as stated is pure lol.

Well, Comey is goneburger. An... interesting development.

In Indonesia popular nationalism has a lot to do with islamism because it's a muslim country which has religious minorities and those minorities are often involved in separatist movements, eg in Ambon. There's plenty of use of populist nationalism and islamism anyway- just look at Erdogan in Turkey, perfect description of him and the AKP.

Thief Gold is a hard play as its limited colour palette was really, well, limiting and made navigation harder than in other games and it was fairly easy to game the systems compared to T2 at least- I think I killed every zombie in the bonehoard for example by getting most of them into a Walking Dead like horde. It had the best story though, and its Ken Levine trademark twist was both first and best. Thief 2 is overall best Thief, barring a few absolute turds (Casing.. had a laughable bug in it that had the AI stuck in the Leonardo pose and is just a bad idea overall) it also has the most sprawling yet feature and interest rich levels. Thief 3 is not as bad as made out, but suffers terribly from the level transition zones and small levels restricting things. Compared to the mess that was DXIW though and considering it was based on that mess it was better than merely decent, they just needed a better engine. Thiaf was an abomination, burn it with fire and scatter its ashes to the four corners of the earth. It also sounded like one of the worst run game projects of all time from what Rihanna Pratchett had to say- a shame, since her father was a massive fan of the earlier games and actually posted on their usenet group fairly regularly. What? They only published one Cthulhu title, and it's fantastic. And so's FONV. Two of the greatest games ever made. You're going to tell me that FONV was a technical masterpiece with no bugs or other problems? Because that is what was being talked about, not their overall quality. While FONV is justly praised for what went right things like reliability and a bug free experience would not make that list. From what I've seen most people like Dishonoured 2's story etc well enough as well, but it was certainly a disaster in terms of performance on PC.

It did? Hm. Yeah, and worse than that some of the dummy doors went to 'impossible' positions ie there was actually another passageway on the other side of the door. Not that much though, and mostly on the Exec level that I remember*. I know what you mean about 'realism' though, that's why I like 'verisimilitude' a lot more since it's about suspension of disbelief. When it comes right down to it there isn't a great deal of 'realism' in most games, even ones people think of as being 'realistic'. Quite apart from the shonky science something like Stalker has far too many deaths- add them up and it would be in the 10ks per year- to be realistic and most games have you slaughtering hundreds if not thousands more or less by yourself etc. It's all about it not being obviously unrealistic unless you think about it. I certainly wouldn't criticise either System Shock for verisimilitude given theirs is amongst the best. That's why I don't like the Bioshock twist very much though. It's beautifully executed and in retrospect very well foreshadowed but its fundamental problem is that it points out the narrative system of most mission based games- you have to do objectives, you can't decide as Mike Thorton or JC Denton to just bugger off to Fiji instead even without a Fontlas compelling you- and thus breaks the fourth wall; but that is all it does. Once you know the Fontlas connection you still have to obey the new voice in your head just as much as if it was adding a 'would you kindly' at the end. It points out the narrative flaw then promptly ignores it from that point on, and if you're going to do that you might as well not point out the flaw in the first place. *I did some work on converting SS1 levels some time ago, so I know most of the levels back to front- which is unfortunately not necessarily conducive to appreciating them as levels. The ramp jump/ 'nice jump human' set piece is fantastic when playing it and not thinking about it too deeply, not so much if you try and work out a reason to have it set up that way (why is there a ramp there etc?) in the first place.

Their initial forays into publishing resulted in some fairly to terribly inept stuff- their Star Trek titles, the Cthulu titles, FONV, Rogue Warrior, Hunted: the Demon Forge etc. They also haven't published an independently produced game since Hunted, and the real reason why most people loathe Bethesda as a publisher- their attempts to constructively bankrupt their partners so as to buy them on the cheap per Human Head and Prey 2 and Arkane and Dishonoured where it worked. They own the studios that have made every game of theirs since 2011. It's probably most accurate to say that their owned studios excluding the Bethesda mothership have recently been technically able while their external projects and anything from BGS themselves are near uniformly problematic, technically. While I understand that feeling SS1 actually had dummy doors etc, it also had completely illogical layouts in some places designed to be gamey and provide jump challenges and utilise the gravity system pointlessly (from a 'realism' standpoint) rather than be a space station and in terms of making sense it had a severe #1 and a #2 problem- not a single toilet anywhere on the station. SS1 and 2 are pretty comparable on the verisimilitude test though I can only advise not thinking about such things too closely since it inevitably ruins things. (in terms of verisimilitude Bioshock's biggest problem is the meta problem of pointing out that you are an automaton obeying Fontlas's every command then doing nothing about it afterwards and leaving you still slavishly obeying commands, rather than anything particularly level design wise except for the obvious ones about being on the bottom of the sea and how a city there should be designed)

Funny thing was 3/4 of the top candidates in the 1st round were broadly speaking anti EU. Le Pen and Melenchon pretty overtly so and Fillon a little more restrainedly so but certainly the least pro EU of the UMP candidates. Only Macron was unabashedly pro Europe- and even then, the magical 'reformed' Europe of the imagination. It certainly wasn't Macron's stance on Europe that got him elected, it was far more due to negative voting against Le Pen. Won't stop it being spun that way though, same as Wilders not 'winning' was spun as a victory despite his significant increase in votes over the previous time. It's certainly true that if there are many more 'glorious victories' for the EU where the anti EU bloc increases vote share as much as in France or the Netherlands then the EU will be deader than a flightless Mauritian bird in a few years. Or to put it in perspective, the next election would be Le Pen/ Melenchon (and by a fair bit too) if their vote share increased as much as from 2012.

While I have my problems with the MSM in this case Le Pen did concede. With that in mind awarding Macron the victory before votes were counted was fair enough. I have a lot more problem with how Macron's victory has been framed as some sort of landslide and a glorious victory for the forces of progress. If you've got a historically low voter turnout and 1/8 of the people who did turn up spoiling their ballots instead of voting for you and you're up against a (near) fascist then a 66-34 margin is not anywhere near as commanding as has been made out. And there's the ultimate problem that Macron is the candidate of the globalist status quo establishment, as if following the same blueprint that generated the problems will suddenly start solving them. The Euro won't suddenly be run for anyone other than Germany's benefit, the poor in the banlieus or the rust belts won't suddenly get prospects, the polarised immigrants won't suddenly integrate and in 5 years it will be the same thing all over again, likely with Hollande 2.0. Which, I believe, was also Hollande's final approval rating.

So long as they don't lose their job, and so long as their insurer agrees to the treatment being necessary. A millionaire can always just pay out of pocket if they need to which ain't an option for most. Hah. I took Latin for 3 years. All I remember is Caecilius in horto est ...did everyone learn Latin from the same books?

Yeah, congrats on the build. Bit jealous on the Taichi and TridentZ certainly, don't think I can really justify the cost of either personally but they are both meant to be quality. Looks like the AGESA update may drop next week which will hopefully improve the general RAM compatibility situation.

It's not a question of costs going down and quality and coverage always going up, it's if it ever happens under the US system. By and large most single payer/ nationalised health systems started out as privatised user pays ones much like the US and were converted to what they are now- which gave them a large boost in coverage and for most people a large boost in quality. It also gives better efficiency and lower overall costs, as shown by most western countries having all of better coverage, better overall quality/ outcomes and lower costs compared to the US. Those systems also tend to be far better at lowering costs through things like prevention- better than the cure- than the US system is and have less expensive emergency costs and the like. The situation is completely different if you're a multi millionaire, of course, then the US has the best healthcare bar none. But then if you're a millionaire elsewhere you have better prospects as well and can go private either locally or internationally. Certainly the average american is far closer to being denied coverage and going bankrupt trying to cover costs than they are to the latest and greatest proton gun for tackling that hard to target cancer.

Yeah, but that's a fundamental problem with your system. Do insurance premiums ever go down in cost but coverage go up? In order to be an effective/ efficient system that ought to happen at some point yet all that has been heard for decades is how the costs are always increasing and fewer people have insurance. The problem with a for profit approach remain the same as last time we had this discussion- insurance will always want to minimise costs and maximise profits; either by not insuring risky people/ cutting coverage to those who become sick or by gouging those who are not sick but have to have insurance. Realistically they do both to an extent. Those are the economic imperatives involved in a capitalistic health system and they're not conducive to a well functioning health system, aren't efficient and aren't economically sensible to anyone except the insurers. They also cannot be changed with the way the US political system works and with US attitudes as they are which makes any modifications an exercise in damage limitation rather than an actual fix.

The appropriate response to someone laughing is for them to be chucked out, if it's disruptive. This looks distinctly like an attempt at Chilling Effect more than a legit complaint. Here of course you can (NSFW, though the pictures were of course over every front page in the country and shown on the news at 6pm) throw large rubber marital aids at ministers and there's no criminal case brought. Adding to the examples, Catalonia during the Spanish civil war Yeah, nah. Rojava is a bit questionable since they do things like ban political parties- crap political parties run by that ultra corrupt kurdish Uncle Tom Barzani, but still- but even at its best Anarchist Catalonia was a lot worse than that. Still probably the closest to 'good guys' you got in the Spanish Civil War but given the alternatives were Phalangists, ossified paleo catholics and ludicrous nationalists on one side and literally Stalin (with assorted floppy leftists hanging on for a few spare T-26s and Polikarpovs) on the other there wasn't much choice.

That episode summed up the whole season of Flash. Could have been good, but too drawn out and too much stultifying and senseless relationship d-r-a-m-a in between the good bits.

You don't usually use words like 'mutant' or 'aberration' when describing people, as they tend to be- pointlessly- offended if you do. You can call other species those sorts of things as much as you like though, as they don't get offended or are very good at hiding it. A hard binary approach to gender/ sex is generally a consequence of how biology is taught in schools and specifically that a genome is a blueprint. If the blueprints say that someone has an XX pairing then they are a woman, and if they have an XY they are a man- and that is that barring genetic disorders and even with those there is a hard genetic basis. But genomes are not like blueprints, or at least not like blueprints that get followed religiously. It's more like a whole bunch of competing blueprints where putting in a sink may result in the wallpaper changing colour or a wall disappearing. You can, by phenotype at least, turn a man into a woman or vice versa with hormones, and someone with a natural disorder of that type may grow up as the 'wrong' sex. And that is not a trivial case like dying your hair to change your genetically mandated hair colour, it's an actual physical and psychological change.

It's different with non scientific stuff like morals or ethics but then there aren't many definitive rights or wrongs with subjectives by definition. Much of the meta stuff that makes people people is not testable science. For testable science though the operative word there is 'may'. If something is wrong now then it's extremely unlikely to be right later. In contrast though by and large what is correct now remains correct and just gets modified to fit better*; it's very rare for something to be thrown out wholesale. It may be thrown out later, but it's highly unlikely. *there's a massive difference between the theory that heavier things fall faster than lighter things (in a vacuum, since you need stipulations even for that) and Newton being 'wrong' about his equations of motion, for example. The first case is simply wrong and plain not how things work, the second is acceptably accurate except for edge cases which Newton had no possibility of knowing about. You will still be taught Newton's 'incorrect' equations at school because you don't need to know that they don't work for very fast or very small objects per Einstein or Schrodinger and could not do the maths for their equations anyway most likely- otoh, you will only be taught that heavier objects fall faster as an example of something that seems logical on surface examination but is incorrect.

School science is full of... maybe not lies, but half truths. You get taught things like 'a genome is like a blueprint' (not really) or 'atoms are like little solar systems' (not really) or 'electrons have negative charge' (arbitrary choice) which work well enough but are certainly not entirely accurate if you end up doing science at university level. People's minds just work better with analogies to stuff they do understand. Even in school though there's plenty of indication that gender isn't quite as binary as the simple case- in NZ at least we learned about chromosome disorders such as Klinefelter's which would have an effect on sexuality in school, or about hormone imbalances.

Yeah, if you're running a Trump size business then the owner does as much or as little work as they want. Nobody in his company is going to tell him he has to get off the golf course but he has plenty of employees he can delegate to if needed. It's a bit different when running a country though, and a lot more like what normal people would regard as an actual job. I very much doubt that Trump was 'lazy' before becoming president though, he always seemed to be looking for interesting stuff to do whether it was wrestling or The Apprentice; but it was stuff that he very much chose to be involved in and could leave if he wanted.

Dear France, Hexamine is not a diagnostic for specifying who made Sarin. The head of the UN Chemical Weapons investigation pointed this out 3 years ago. So why do you use it in your 'definitive proof' as the 'definitive proof'? 'Cos it ain't. (Also 1/3 of their definitive proof deals with an attack on Saraqib which, since hexamine is not diagnostic, is irrelevant. Unsurprisingly, the rest is pure assertion based on their erroneous 'proof'. The analysis of Saraqib is complete with colour photos, crater analysis of a sort, specifies delivery etc. They have literally nothing like that on Khan Sheikhoun though, they don't even specify whether it was rockets or bombs except now there were 6 of whatever instead of the 4 shown in footage; so instead of clearing things up they've just confounded things more. Must be la flimme flamme razzelle dazzelle or quelquechose)

He probably doesn't, but the one thing he's done that nearly every reporter in the US loved was lobbing tomahawks at Syria. For a failing President the appeal of a cheap boost is immense. I don't think for a second that Trump intends there to actually be fighting in Korea, it's far far too risky. But much like the north he has to keep the threats on the table.

Can't help but think half of the current situation with the DPRK is about trying to get another hawk elected in the south now that the last corrupt one has been drummed out of office and a relatively pacific candidate seems likely to be elected. It's always a laugh when things like THAAD deployment get pushed through at a sprint by lame duck interim presidents so their successor gets a fait accompli. The other half is Trump trying to distract from his dreadful hair piece first 100 days by acting tough overseas. There's no chance of DPRK starting a war they know absolutely that they'd lose, but they're a guaranteed reaction if you prod them, and they have to shout about their willingness to attack so as to be taken seriously.

There was an old SPI wargame based on the early part of the Korean war, called "Korea". I played it a few times when I was younger. The rugged terrain and shape of the peninsula made for a pretty uninteresting game though. It's somewhat reminiscent of the Italian peninsula campaign during WW II -- only the sea landings made it at all interesting. Otherwise it's an endless slugfest. IIRC the tutorial scenario of The Operational Art of War was the Korean War- and that about exhausts the Korean War scenarios I can remember. Up until fairly recently there were very few Vietnam games as well.

I have to idea whether it's legal in the US, but depositor 'haircuts' have been widely suggested in the Euro Zone, especially Cyprus where they stole ~50% of deposits (mostly Russian) to bail out that failed garbage tier Euro, again. Kind of ironic, you get people who seem to genuinely wonder why Russia hates the EU as if there's no reason when they've outright stolen billions to prop up their failed economic model. But they were authorized by government to do it, which is what GD was saying, not stealing your money on their own as Elerond was claiming. In US deposits are insured by the government up to $250000 per bank per account ownership type (except for accrued but unpaid interest), but in practice no one's ever lost money in a bank as the government takes them over when they fail. The haircuts were not only authorised by the government, they were forced by them. The government of Cyprus basically nationalised their banks then stuck all the bad assets into one and grabbed depositor cash under direct orders of the EU/ ECB and under threat of being taken out behind the shed and Greeced into submission if they didn't. No bank is going to seize depositor cash 'voluntarily', anywhere, since it utterly destroys their credibility and business. But theoretically at least depositors are the same as other creditors to a failing business and much as a creditor may only get cents back on the dollar owed from a failing business the same can happen to banks. Practically though, they're bailed out as the consequences are so severe and failure may make people realise that 'money' is a completely fiat concept practically as well as theoretically. That's also why the Cyprus approach was so utterly moronic, since it encouraged people not to deposit in Cypriot banks lest it happen again, which makes them even less solvent (but, coincidentally, makes German banks more appealing; coincidentally)