Zoraptor

I actually tend to agree, though I have no idea what to give as a shorthand label to the current situation. But, someone on the economic left is far more likely to label the current situation as being laissez faire much as someone on the economic right is likely to label it as socialism or similar. Both are wrong, but that would be their honestly held opinion.

Meh, SOHR yet again. Literally a dude in a Coventry basement with a grandiosely named organisation ejecting a stream of asterisky statistics like an infamous off colour internet meme. In this case I wouldn't actually be surprised if that figure is accurate, but it's still pretty misleading. Given that Russia has averaged about 100 strikes per day since October (fewer sorties, some sorties strike multiple targets) it's a rate of less than 1/10 of a civilian killed per strike. Hardly indiscriminate, certainly. There's always some grim hilarity to be found picking his stats apart. Those 22,370 'barrel bombs' which are a tool for targeting civilians result in 6900 civilian deaths, meaning less than 1/3 of a civilian is killed per strike. That's some spectacularly poor quality deliberate targeting of civilians, manufacture the bomb, fly it off in a helicopter in order to kill 1/3 of a civilian per strike. It's almost as if they aren't actually targeting civilians... The drone program has a far worse rate of civilian death despite its somewhat questionable methodology of counting every male semi adult or up as a terrorist by default. Seriously, SOHR is an utterly rubbish source, at least as bad in reverse as anything the syrian government puts out information wise. Most of the media love it though, as it actually does release stats and largely releases stats that they agree with.

I rather suspect that all the 'end capitalism' type statements are more in the vein of 'end laissez faire capitalism' in reality. There's a distinct tendency to leave out important adjectives in politics which is why you have the liberal economic but socially neolithic Australian Liberal Party and a lot of socially liberal but non classic liberal economic leftist parties all labelled as 'liberal'. In any case, socialism is only incompatible with laissez faire capitalism, more interventionist or state capitalist models are still capitalism while being increasingly compatible with socialism. Communism is the philosophy that is theoretically incompatible with capitalism, though practically even there they aren't wholly immiscible because most communism is actually 'communism' much as most socialism is 'socialism' and most laissez faire capitalism is 'laissez faire capitalism'.

The information on Prey 2 was definitely 'public good' information that Kotaku had no obligation to withhold- rather the opposite given the extremely unpleasant rumours about Bethesda trying to constructively bankrupt Human Head as a cheap way to get a game and a studio out of the original deal- and it was clear that Bethesda repeatedly and outright lied about Prey 2's status and the accuracy of Kotaku's initial article when they produced the emails the article was based on. It might be a case of a broken clock being right twice a day but Kotaku did their job there, and did it well. It was newsworthy, accurate and informative; exactly what actual journalism should be. It also happened to be extremely embarrassing for Bethesda and certain people at Arkane, but it was ultimately Bethesda's fault for that embarrassment since they did lie repeatedly and expect not to be called on it. Don't know much about the F4 situation except that its development was at very best an open secret. As for Ubisoft, if they got sick of the Grayson's of the world turning every interview into a 'but my soggy knees!' fest then I doubt they'd be the first or the last. End of the day it certainly is Ubisoft's and Bethesda's decision who to provide their privileged information to, though it certainly does illustrate why you get so many softball "F4 has technical issues, but they're awesome technical issues 11/10" type reviews. Vicious circle really, say what the publisher doesn't want to provide actual information and run the risk of not getting official information in future or hold your tongue/ don't look at all to make sure you don't poison your relationship with PR. Do one and you're doing your job but may miss out on the exclusives and day 1 reviews which are the lifeblood of your site, do the other and you've become a glorified PR agent yourself.

Assange isn't a Marxist. Is there some sort of hidden chapter in Das Kapital that I missed excluding hat/ unlockable/ collectible based economies from other petit-bourgeois/ worker oppressing approaches or is Varoufakis not actually a dirty commie either? He's kind of got that reputation because he loathes the ECB etc, but that's called having a brain, not being communist. Indeed, I'm pretty sure Marx would hate steam- dress Gabe up in a pin striped suit with a cane and top hat and he'd be the epitome of the 19th century capitalist, plus he's head of a global religion- and would amend his most famous tenet to "Religion, and gaming, and probably sports too now I think about it are all the opiates of the masses". He'd have disowned Varoufakis over his association with it.

Despite what their promos says GalCiv 1 (and hence Stardock) has been on GOG for quite a while. Can't say I blame them for the slight inaccuracy/ over hype though, Stardock titles are an excellent fit for GOG and getting their recent and upcoming releases is very nice to see and a good deal for all involved.

Saudi has been on the Human Rights' Council since September. There was a minor scandal because the UK actively helped them to get on it in a vote trading deal. As with most non security council things about the UN it has no practical power, at least, and tends to be used for diplomatic trolling more than anything else. (ISIS does occasionally attack Israel, one of the 'jokes' about the conflict is that Al Qaeda and ISIS fire off mortars into Israel and Israel responds by, uh, attacking the government. It's why some of the more snarky observers have started calling Israel "Al Qaeda's air force" since this happens every time the government gets too close to the Golan)

I suspect their Beth blacklisting (wonder if they filter kotaku to ILoveOblivion.com like they do for the 'codex?) had far more to do with the very highly embarrassing Prey 2 email leaks rather than any coverage of a game every man and his dogmeat knew was being made like F4. Makes no real difference either way though, guess they miss out on weekends in swanky hotels and complementary bottles of 'real' nuka cola, the poor chaps.

Technically, rather a lot of Indians are Aryans so, uh, they're white enough for Hitler. Though I suspect that is not what was meant. Probably Al Qaeda in the Sahel, they were 'allied' with the local Tuareg rebels in northern Mali. Some of them may have defected to ISIS though. Boko Haram seems unlikely as they'd probably go for one of the neighbours who had intervened against them and they're actually a long way away from Bamako.

I am awaiting the "For whom the Bell Tolls" of our generation, inspired by the events surrounding GG. Homage to Catalonia GamerGhazi, Eric Blair's memoirs of joining a movement for idealism and its slow decay as its eats itself. May or may not involve literally being shot in the neck by someone from KotakuInAction/ 8chan. Picasso's Guernica Brianna Wu commemorating a tragedy visited upon the innocent by mercenaries of the Breitbart Legion. Anthony Beevor's Gamergate, perfect fit to go with Anthony Beevor's Stalingrad, Spanish Civil War, Berlin '45 etc. (I'm actually rather amused by the flags, to be honest)

Do you really not see a difference between Not taking initiative to publicly mourn something, as long as no-one is asking you to.and Actively showing disrespect and spite for other people's mourning, like booing(!) a minute of silence.? Let's just disingenuously group both of those under "not caring enough" and equivocate away? If the situation was reversed, with the Turkish attack coming after the french one and there being no minute of silence for the dead french but a request for silence for the dead turks then yes, I'd expect some french to boo instead of honour it. Some would see Turkey as (not inaccurately, to be honest) enabling ISIS and there would definitively be a jingoistic 'asterisking muslims/ refugees/ refugee enablers' attitude from some, we can already see that; and it would seem that the turkish lives would be valued more than the french ones. It's not about saying that any lack of respect is OK, but there are reasons for it and they are reasons which would apply to every country/ nationality/ ethnicity/ religion under the right/ wrong circumstances. As for not caring enough, when it was 200+ Russians blown up the UK- formally, and as direct policy since it was their FM saying most of it- used their deaths to make cheap political points, smugly said it was a bomb publicly before telling either the country whose people had died or the country where the bombing occurred, and were as close to actively happy that those people had died as it is possible to be because it would be 'difficult' for Putin and his policy in Syria. That's not only not taking the time to honestly mourn but is most certainly showing disrespect by trivialising their deaths into a stick to hit an opponent with. And yet, nary a complaint about it; but we all know what would have happened if the situation had been reversed. It doesn't mean that I think the people disrespecting are nice or right, whether they be the Brit Foreign Secretary of Mehmet Blogsadoglu doing it. Get upset at people not showing enough or any respect though? Asterisk that, they don't have to care, real life ain't some web 2.0 emotional circlejerk. TLDR: there's no obligation to pay respects unless you're playing COD: Iteration, though you may be a bit of a dong if you actively disrespect.

It's very common for a cheerleader to make these type of "follow around" claims on Forums. It's cute, but it blatantly ignores the fact that the troll (in this case, Sensuki), is posting the same thing everywhere all the time. So unless someone leaves the forum, if they respond to the troll then one of the troll's cheerleaders will be like, "why you following us around, bro?" lol Since I've been dragged into this; I think Sensuki's custom title on the codex ("Cuck") was well earned and perfectly appropriate because he's acted pretty much exactly like a jilted lover, right down to professing to be absolutely unconcerned and over it all yet unable to actually let it go. I actually agree far more with Gromnir on PoE than with Sensuki. I just have zero interest in reading the two of them 'troll'* each other. *Not really trolling, Sensuki just hates PoE and Gromnir hates the codex. It happens, it's just boring to wade through.

Well yeah. (1) Football fans are unusually nationalistic- their entire reason for being is cheering their country, after all- and (2) there weren't much in the way of minutes silence for the dead Turks, dead Russians and dead Lebanese we've seen in similar circumstances in the last few weeks, indeed more than a few people thought it was more or less OK because they were Commie Turks/ Kurds, Hezbollah sympathisers or Russians. Philip Hammond, British Foreign Secretary even suggested (with slight paraphrasing) that at least the airline bombing imposed a price on Russia for intervening in Syria, god knows the reaction if Lavrov said the same about the Paris attacks and French intervention in Syria... Complaining about others not caring enough is always a problematic approach, as you can pretty much guarantee there's a bigger entry in the tragedy olympics out there that the complainer doesn't care enough about. Sadly, 129 people dying is pretty much Monday-Sunday in Syria, as a direct example.

I know, that's why I'm more of a bastard than Shady is. CK2 code is tentatively gone, unfortunately I can't offer the Lionheart/ King's Crusade codes either at this time since Gamersgate and Paradox seem to be having a dispute and I'm getting no serial available errors. If I do get codes I'll reinstate that offer. Riddick code is still there though. Additional: Mount and Blade Warband steam code free to good home, checked that the code is there too. [steam codes huh! what are they good for: absolutely nothing, say it again]

I'd be surprised if people didn't complain about DivOSEE and consoles/ consolisation, that's the PC Master Race for you. Couldn't care less personally though. People waiting for WMpt2 to be released before buying or a 'final' patch or whatever is just the nature of things as are complaints about dumbing down or making things too easy (or too hard, in some cases).

Erik Kain too would also qualify as a journalist so far as I am concerned, blogger and journo aren't mutually exclusive and there's a fair amount of overlap. I've pretty much exclusively read Young's personal blog/ website rather than his 'pro' pieces and regard the ../sites/.. section of Forbes as being blogs though, so I view both as being predominantly bloggers.

Single Purpose Account- long(er) standing account whose only contribution is game begging/ asking for gifts. Largely irrelevant here, but they are pretty common elsewhere.

Got an extra Riddick GOG key from the recent sale for anyone wanting one. Also steam keys for Crusader Kings II+ some dlc and Kings Crusade (Lionheart) + some dlc which Paradox trojaned steam into the drm free versions of so I won't use. PM for codes, one game+relevant dlc per person, first come first served. I'm more of a bastard than Shady is, so no new users/ SPAs sorry.

Sauce. Yes, it says 'nearly' but it is also from May. IIRC it was also Swen saying it was 1 million+ in August some time, but was in a form that was (unfortunately) not Google friendly. Press releases are inconsistent though. Most of the time we don't get any sales figures at all. And really, the reason we've got figures for PoE at 500 and 600k is PR/ hype for the expansions, if they weren't happening they'd almost certainly have given us nothing, much as they did for every prior 100k increment.

Erik Kain and Shamus Young at least are fine quality bloggers, even if Kain might resent the label. I don't always agree with them, but they're always worth reading. Much as with games journalists while most aren't great to say the least some certainly do their job well. Contribute to my patreon?

I'm not sure "rule of thumb I heard and read about" is the most convincing counter argument in the world. If DivOS sold 1 million plus and Steamspy had them at ~850k then either Steamspy is majorly inaccurate or there are ~150k extra copies sold somewhere. And for DivOS even Larian Vault copies were steam keys. There are 12 RPGs that are ranked above TWitcher3 on GOG, and most of those were pretty definitively PoE type games. Indeed, many were named directly as being its inspiration. Haven't seen anything showing GOG sales rankings to be inaccurate, personally, they're just useless in general because they're relative sales rather than absolute ones.

PoE has sold over 600,000 copies now, as of the latest press release. Steam Spy still has it at ~550k so it seems likely that at least some GOG/ Origin sales must be included in that figure.

Most likely Atenism/ Judaism/ Zoroastrianism shared a similar religious 'trope' as a base. I like the Atenism theory for the simple reason that it annoys religious extremists; they're all fundamentally unprovable theories anyway. As for Joseph building a pyramid, it is more plausible. Problem really is that the only credible historic candidate would be Imhotep, and that mostly because you can hand wave his name to I(m)otef, he doesn't really fit anything else about Joseph. That's clearly well into simple belief- and not mainstream belief given most seem to put Joseph well into the 2nd millennium BC rather than 3rd- territory though, it's not exactly got evidence backing it up beyond that. If anything it's more likely that stories of Joseph building pyramids are borrowed from Imhotep's legacy with there being no link except the naming similarity.

Presumably he rugby style tackled the guy. That makes a huge difference because a lot of the explosive force and shrapnel from his belt is then forced into the ground and the blast radius is thus heavily reduced. And of course the tackler ends up soaking up a lot of the remaining force too, sadly. If you're close enough to tackle him you're likely dead either way, so might as well give the terrorist the middle finger and save others. Strangely enough the first thing I thought about when reading about that guy (couple of days ago) was Frank Burns in MASH jumping on a deactivated grenade that someone dropped as a prank.

Yeah, SS3 is just an idea for some day and there's basically nothing known about the remake. At this point it's little better than a fan remake/ bare bones Kick (hoho) starter in terms of all the really important information. They've got the concept artist and some sort of 'would be nice' commitment from the Brosii (and Terri Brosius has done some extra voice overs for ND before), but nothing on the really important technical aspects that make these things actually work like engines or coders. They have just about literally no experience with coding and the like, their prior efforts have been almost exclusively lifted from fans/ mods- New Dark for SS2 and Malba Tahan integrating stuff for the SS1 re-release. They're a lot closer to 2015 Interplay than, say, Larian or InXile. The talk now is likely to drum up interest more than anything. Having said that, I personally wouldn't be surprised at all if they did a console remake of SS2 if they do do a PC&console remake of SS1. SS2 is a legit big seller (~1.5 million) at this point.