Zoraptor

Much like that 'teenage boy' survey it will depend just about entirely on how you ask the questions as to how and how strongly people are pro 'status quo' or 'anti change' or 'conservative' or 'progressive' or pro/ anti 'inclusivity' with respect to gaming. My general observation is that most people object to perceived overt politicisation of gaming, not any shift from the 'status quo'- which is itself a rather nebulous concept really, when gaming runs the gamut from stuff which is rather obviously already aimed at women (albeit most often of the Facebook/ mobile type) to obscure wargames/ CoD/ WoW etc it is difficult to decide exactly what the 'status quo' entails and it tends to morph into whatever is convenient for whoever is making the argument regarding it. So it isn't really an objection to changing things around a bit, it's an objection to pressure that is at least perceived as trying to change everything around a bit, in ways that are incompatible with both the gaming that [person] likes at present and a desire not to be preached to. Given that perception it is understandable that there is push back. And much as there tends to be push back against 'progressive' stuff for trivial reasons sometimes there is also some hopelessly trivial push back against perfectly sensible 'traditional' gaming from the other side as well. It isn't just 'progressive' type politicisation that is objected to either, I've seen plenty of people who loathe stuff like "America's Army" for being outright propaganda.

Plus Microsoft didn't have a stellar record during the lead in to the on3 launch- always online, higher price, forced kinect etc- would make sense that they cancelled a good game while backing something like Ryse instead. Actually, given that they've reversed all those other decisions we might have a valid candidate for the unannounced game...

Cleve thinks everything is evil/ racist so that won't prove anything.

Stephen Moffat is finding doing Sherlock and Dr Who simultaneously difficult, so he is combining the two series' Christmas Specials?

Why, I remember when Peter was seen as a visionary, rather than someone who sees visions; back in the pre 'Black and White'* era. Bullfrog did some good stuff, back then. *Oh yeah, those horrible greenscan VDUs, wasn't sorry to see them go. They probably have hipster cred now though, wouldn't be surprised if people paid actual money to turn their iPhones into a low fi greenscan PDA with a gimmick interface based on a game. Hipsters, hipsters never change, one might say.

Shrug, collective responsibility, you want the benefits you accept that there won't always be benefits in everything. Like if, say, Russia attacked Lithuania you could get a "sorry bro', you're not worth any Greeks dying over" response from Greece, despite them being in NATO and ignoring their collective responsibility. I bet that would be despicable conduct though, and Completely Different to many people. And as has been pointed out numerous times, the EU has bailed out their banks while labelling it as a bail out of the Greeks- Slovakia and Lithuania have contributed primarily to rescuing French/ German/ Brit/ US banks, not Greece itself which after all is still 420 bn on the hook. Those are possible consequences, but none of those are realistically going to be worse than the consequences of Versailles, World War 2 and the like. The only ones which are likely are bits of 2 and yeah, the Europe wide recession but that has happened before and is/ was also inevitable due to the stupid rules/ fundamentals of the eurozone and rules which near nobody follows. A lot of the stuff which is going on now is not so much about Greece itself, but on shifting the blame to Greece and away from irresponsible lending, rubbish rules that were not followed with the collusion and active participation of nearly every EZ country and the stupidity/ pandering at the heart of the EZ's establishment. It will be interesting to see how history treats this in ten, twenty, fifty years and whether they blame the Greeks or the EZ/ its rules for whatever happens.

Yeah, I like the premise well enough, it's a bit generic and derivative sounding but, well, the premise of the existing MEs isn't highly original and they were enjoyable enough. So long as I don't take them too seriously. It's actually sounds a bit like something I previously said I would have liked to see tried with Mass Effect- and if that post is accurate seems a sensible enough extension of what they brought in with ME3 and what worked well enough there.

That probably means you're a millennial who has never heard of usenet, Battlecruiser X000 AD nor fake/ not fake doctorates of philosophy. These things were important back in those dark, obscure days of the twentieth century when we were on dial up (using a phone to dial up an internet provider, and not like ADSL or 4G) or scumming the uni connection and used things like NCSA Mosaic or Netscape for our graphical web needs at 14.4 kbps. Yeah, kilobits per second, not megabits. People played games without mouselook or even mouses, and if you had a 640x480 16 bit display you were privileged indeed, John Carmack was making games more than rockets, Looking Glass was still around and Brian Fargo owned Fallout. Young whippersnappers these days, no sense of history. Something something get off my lawn something something Clint_Gran_Turismo.gif something something now where did I put my teeth?

Pretty sure that wasn't the last time. The sanctions on Russia in 2014 would be the last time, though certainly not the only one between 1919 and now. Not that Versailles wasn't stupid, but I'm not sure it's possible to stuff the current crisis up sufficiently to get to Versailles levels of consequence.

If anyone wants the rumoured general gist of the game from the reddit/ survey leak it's here though it's conjecture at this point as to its overall accuracy. It was preE3 and got the Andromeda aspect right though, so has some credibility.

Varoufakis said he was quitting because he was a barrier to a deal on his blog. His quitting is not surprising though as he's said that he isn't in for the long haul since he took the job. Unsurprising that he was the guy throwing most of the punches given those circumstances, he had nothing to lose and allowed Tsipras et al. to have cleaner hands than otherwise; plus he gives the Euro types a small victory to make up for the big defeat which is always a politic approach. I think it actually shows some sort of genuine good faith approach, from the Greeks side at least.

Turnout's been less than two thirds, though. Given how things are, I'd have expected it to be in the high 70s. Of course now everyone is going to try and take advantage of the referendum result. If the powers that be are smart, they won't give an inch of ground in the coming days and force Greece out of the euro by denying access to credit, cutting their losses. If not, if SYRIZA is allowed to negotiate advantageous terms, the left elsewhere will be emboldened and the risk of a contagion may increase. That would spell certain doom for the EU. After all, ~€320bn is chump change compared to what TTIP represents. Less than 2/3s is about the same as the turnout for the last election (64% per wikipedia), so I don't think too much more could be expected. After all, the last election was in many ways seen as a referendum on austerity at the time. I can't see it leading to the end of the EU either. Perhaps it is the death knell for the 'European Dream' version of the EU (and perhaps/ quite likely the euro as a predestined pan-european currency) with its theory of constant, irreversible integration, but that always needed to be wedded to practicality rather than political expediency and too often wasn't. It may end up going back to a more lite 'EEC' type model instead, but that is not necessarily a bad thing if the current hybrid system is fundamentally flawed.

I'm glad they went No, and reasonably convincingly too. A 51/49 type No would have been worse than a convincing Yes. Now, hopefully, there will be some good sense and good will shown by both sides. And the best way to get rid of the sanctions is to have Greece veto their prorogation/ extension. They have to be renewed every six months, they aren't permanent, and they have to agreed unanimously. Indeed, that would be a main reason why they'd do it (along with south stream and just to generally asterisk around with geostrat enemies in EU/ NATO), not because of any 'orthodox brotherhood' or whatever it would be dressed up as. Russia can still do it easily too as they don't have to pay the whole 420bn USD off, only the part(s) that come due over (whatever) period of time. Russia still has 360 bn in reserves despite some people insisting they should be out of cash already, they can pay off Greece's arrears and this year's principle repayments, if they want to. They almost certainly don't want to though, and certainly not yet. If they do do it they'll want maximum effect for minimum effort having had maximum damage to the EU, and that means riding in to the rescue at the last moment preferably after debt reduction or when lenders are willing to accept that, while looking a bit reluctant to do so. And it should be all rhetorical too, it can certainly be prevented by the lenders/ troika showing some good sense.

There isn't much information at present, but what there is sounds like more action, less RPG with perhaps some sort of attempt at a more meaningfully open galaxy approach to the previous games. From the list it's likely to favour the dislikes, rather than the likes. I wouldn't mind personally if they went full on 3rd person shooter though, they're most of the way there already.

Its non functional/ non intuitive site layout is worse than it being hideous, I'd say. It's pretty much a browser based late 90s gui for usenet ((Free)Agent or similar) with added up and down votes and reduced functionality. Don't really care much about reddit one way or the other in terms of the site itself, I read stuff there sometimes and it's unnecessarily janky but ultimately that's a fairly minor complaint.

Why do you troll Bruce? Don't worry, rhetorical question. Pretty lulzy trying to say that I like Silvio, given my previously shown great love of billionaire media barons, but as always you try too much, with far too little wit and far too obviously. Study Bubbles, with time and a great deal of effort you might just scrape in at mediocrity, eventually. Until that time I'm back to little i ignoring you again. Financial services were a greater proportion of Iceland's GDP than Britain's, and they would have had far more debt from their banks' failure if they'd taken it on. Though I do agree that they aren't comparable to Greece, but then nowhere is really. In any case, the main point was of pragmatism, I'd be as dismissive if the course set was for collectivisation as for neoliberalism, but it is set for neoliberalism. Under the current circumstances there is no such thing as 'solid fiscal principles' because all that is left is voluntary debt reduction or bankruptcy, the Greeks cannot do any more until one or the other happens. The whole question is a bit naive, the other two options are Pasok and New Democracy who were in power in the early 2000s and responsible for the policies then. There's no saviours there.

It's hardly surprising, they did exactly the same thing to Berlusconi; kicked him out of office then appointed their own technocrat. It was somewhat amusing to see that technocrat then try to run for election and get beaten by a (close to) literal clown, who got the highest vote share of anyone. The EU is basically Emperor Palpatine, they 'love' democracy when it's a rubber stamp, not so much when it's something like a pesky referendum. They'll keep holding referenda until they get the 'right' result, they'll incorporate undemocratic institutions and they'll subvert elections. As the old joke goes, the EU would reject its own application for membership due to not being democratic enough. Yeah, like the Tories have done in the UK. Economy still below 2008 levels, by a fair bit, GDP: debt ratio up to ~85% from 40% in 2009, despite all the rhetoric no actual surplus in sight. Iceland is doing better than that, despite their default. What's needed is pragmatism, and not slavish adherence to some Eton knob end's entirely on paper in Excel economic model that bears as little resemblance to reality as an 18 year old liberal art student's who has just read Marx for the first time. To be fair it would have been far better for the UK if your government had followed our Labour's 2000 era example in its pragmatism (ie paying back debt and establishing a proper pension fund- at 17% returns p/a- while the going was good in the early 2000s; in contrast our Tories have more than doubled debt and never had a surplus, just like yours) but it's too late to go back in time and tell Gordon and Tony that maybe they should pay back some money in the good times and not allow banks to be morans.

But as an advocate of human rights even for those who kick said rights with their feet you're not allowed to ignore him. Its his right to be heard out in this matter since the maximum amount of time a prisoner spends in isolation is indeed regulated by law. So you have to listen to this child murderer and deal with his valid concerns. I can ignore him, I'm not Norwegian let alone a part of their judiciary or prison service. He can hold his appeal, it's his right and if his complaint is valid then it's his right to get that problem fixed every bit as much as if he were in prison for tax evasion or crimes against lutefisk. It's not his right for anyone else to pay him any attention except those necessary.

For sure. We've already seen what happens when governments decide to redefine who human rights apply to, and at very very best it ends up in the flagrant hypocrisy of those governments themselves ignoring human rights. And that's best case. Just ignore Breivik. Not just because he's making complaints because he wants attention and there's a shortage of unarmed people and children around for him to bravely murder with a high powered rifle, ignore him because the most fitting punishment is for him to shuffle off this mortal coil decades from now in the full knowledge that he changed nothing and dies unremarked, unloved and forgotten.

I think she'd meet most of the criteria for a new media journalist. Certainly so here, bloggers are journalists since 2014. (Don't visit the blog mentioned in that article under any circumstances, not even to check whether I'm just being dramatic. You have been warned)

Different US regions aren't analogous to different European states. Perhaps if the Articles of Confederation were in use rather than the Constitution that would be a fair comparison, but that isn't the case here. A weaker currency is better if your primary industries, tourism and agriculture in Greece's case, benefit from having a favorable exchange rate because it allows you to export goods at more competitive prices. Adopting the Euro was an utterly idiotic move on Greece's part, given that their primary industries heavily benefit from favorable exchange rates and are much less competitive without that benefit. A weaker currency also increases the costs of imports, which helps the other side of the equation and balances any tendency to buy too many cheap German imports (on credit) by increasing their cost. There certainly are potential problems with a weak currency, especially if you're making it weak by printing more cash which is what Greece-with-Drachma would have to do as debt relief, as it's inflationary and strongly so if combined with money printing plus tends to reduce standard of living by effectively reducing wages; by and large though the problems they have with the Euro itself are far, far worse than that- they currently have strong deflation instead and 35% poverty rate, you can't get much worse than either. If Greece had the drachma they'd have a lot more tools available to deal with things, essentially. They could adjust central bank interest rates to influence cost of internal lending, print money to pay debt and increase competitiveness via weakening their currency, and the drachma's value would be sensibly (more or less) influenced by what Greece is doing and how Greece is performing, not how Germany is. As it stands they cannot adjust their interest rates and cannot print money, the EU aspects of their fiscal policy ensure deflation, uncompetitiveness and high debt with no way to recover; and if they do adopt the drachma again it is not going to be sensibly valued and 'stable'- far more important as a concept than being 'strong' or 'weak'- but will implode in a singularity of emotion and financial panic. It's not that it would be a panacea and fix everything or conversely, stop everything going wrong if they'd kept the drachma, and certainly not if they go back to it. But it would be easier for them to have managed problems, and less bad than the situation under the Euro for everyone involved.

Ideally they would have decided that Greece could not pay back their debt under any reasonable circumstance in 2008- they already have the largest primary (ie before interest payments) surplus at 5% in Europe and by a reasonable margin, plus the harshest austerity; if they aren't going to pay money back in those circumstances you've got to just face reality instead of continuing bullheadedly. Even more ideally in 2002 you either have a proper Euro zone with a proper common fiscal policy like aggregated borrowing and rules that are followed by everyone*, or decide to have no Euro. Since you cannot do either without a time machine and more political will than anyone in Europe has that leaves two options, reduce the debt to a reasonable level via a 'haircut', which is what happened for Germany post WW2, or let Greece leave the Euro on terms as amicable as possible and just take the damage from default. Increasing debt levels on Greece and increasing debt levels of your own when it cannot in any reasonable sense be paid back is simply stupid and benefits no one except those ideologically wedded to the ideal of the Euro for whom a grexit is simple anathema and the death knell of out and out integrationism. In the more general sense, there's no literal obligation on Germany to remember and reciprocate their debt being forgiven, that's a part of it being forgiven after all. Morally though? One of the fundamentals not just of 'good manners' but of diplomacy and all other forms of balanced relationships is reciprocity, the idea that you don't just do stuff to benefit yourself all the time and that when you benefit from another's action, well, one good turn deserves another. If Greece helped Germany out under circumstances where they'd be justified in saying "no" emphatically there is a moral obligation of reciprocity on Germany's part for precisely that reason. *And it should be noted, even the rules that do exist now are regularly ignored by nearly everyone.

Really Bruce, even for you that is particularly... unique* perspective given how many Greeks the Germans outright killed, let alone the damage they did to the country and its economy over WW2. Blame me for mentioning Lidice, I guess, even if I couched it as a economic comparison I clearly should have used Kondomari/ Kalavryta/ Kandanos instead- just on Crete, mind you. Just in case anyone doesn't know the details, Germany declared war on and conquered Greece during WW2 with commensurate deaths in combat, mass murder, starvation, destruction of property, mass appropriation and the like. 12 years after that they forgave Germany their debt. Bruce is right, that's not really similar circumstances- half a million (7% of pop) Greeks died as a result of WW2, I'm pretty sure not a single German has died due to issuing stupid loans that can't be paid back. BTW Bruce, won't get much more west than Greece, cradle of western civilisation and that. Oh,* *

Don't know about especially profligate, their debt: GDP ratio didn't spike until 2008 and didn't significantly increase from that of their Euro accession so their borrowing was keeping pace with growth. It was retrospectively stupid, massively so, but it was a retrospective stupidity nearly everyone had over the equivalent period and which they were at least somewhat encouraged towards by the same people who are complaining now about bailing them out. Fundamentally, few nations paid back debt in the early-mid 2000s as they should have, and wherever they were. And I guess I'd also chirp in again there should be an obligation on lenders to lend with some responsibility as well as for borrowers to borrow responsibly, and significant consequences if they don't. The tax enforcement thing is also a bit overstated, though obviously more is better for their situation. I was rather surprised myself but in 2009 Greece's black/ grey economy was almost exactly 20% (wikipedia says 25%, but their maths is simply wrong, herp derp) of GDP with well regulated and efficient Germany having 15% GDP grey/ black economy. There isn't that much room for improvement, certainly not as much as there is generally implied to be.

I think a few common misconceptions need to be alleviated, there's a lot of utter rubbish in the press. The Greek issue is not primarily self inflicted- though they're certainly not blameless- and the current situation is the economic equivalent of the US bombing Hanoi to the stone age or the SS liquidating Lidice; pour (d)é(n)courager with a pretty large dollop of I'm looking at you, l'autre Podemos. Syriza is an ideological opponent, if they succeed then Spain and who knows else follows and suddenly the economic kool aid of bailing out the rich- banks in this case- via taxpayers nationalising their bad debt then going full neo liberal theory suddenly looks like kool aid swilling. Gut Syriza, blame them and the Greeks forever, just a bit more cutting, a bit more blood, a bit more hard work (from the people who are already the hardest working per the OECD, shame so few have jobs, eh) and suddenly it'll be paradise! What was the big stumbling block; pensions vs raising taxes on the well off, the amount of money to be raised was the same. Far from being gold plated fountains of euros 45% of Greek pensioners are below the EU's own, self defined poverty line already, yet the IMF wants to cut them further. That is taking money straight out of the Greek economy, money which would be spent in shops, on rent, electricity etc and circulate because people on the poverty line aren't saving and aren't sending their cash off to Switzerland, Bermuda or Frankfurt to sit in banks or offshore share markets, nor are they buying London houses for 15% p/a appreciation which is what any sensible Greek who is rich has been doing for the past 7 years. However, the IMF expects those rich people whose taxes they don't want raised to invest in Greece because... well, who really knows, why would anyone who has an option given the mess the troika has made of it? There ain't an answer, you'd be mad to, yet the IMF says that is what will happen and it won't if you raise taxes on the well off. So still the IMF soldiers on, driving the economy further down, it's already shrunk 30%, unemployment is already 25%, poverty 35%, debt has ballooned to 180% of GDP since 'austerity' from just over 100%, 10% of their entire economic output is required just to service interest let alone pay stuff back, and that is full on GDP, not even tax take note. And, of course, it is largely due to the utterly borked structure of the euro. Greece can't do anything to help itself because its currency is run from Frankfurt, not Athens, and for the benefit of Frankfurt, not Athens. It is constantly uncompetitive because Germany is a far bigger economy, Germany is helped because the euro is lower, relatively, than a deutchmark would be; Greece is hamstrung because the Euro is far higher than a drachma would be and they cannot print money to pay or inflate away debt. So Greece cannot compete effectively either within Europe not externally because its currency is too high which overvalues their products, but at the same time it has to maintain its own debt etc. Worst of both worlds. Fix the Euro, which effectively means full fiscal union, or disband it and the pan Europeans can go asterisk themselves, else Greece will not be the last. Won't happen though, stupid is as stupid does, and politicians will be stupid if it's politically expedient to be so. Greece should have defaulted in 2008 and left the euro, their economy would be 30% larger then than now and facing the same prospect. They couldn't repay their debts when they were 100% of GDP and that was why the banks who owned that debt got bailed out*, how anyone thinks they can service it at its new, 180% of GDP is beyond sensible consideration and is a result of the most moronic ideological myopia imaginable. *Which is the really galling thing. Sure, one can rail on the Greeks for living beyond their means, it's true enough, and complain about bailing them out; but someone lent them the money and they were bailed out every bit as much, more so they since they haven't faced anywhere near the costs Greece has. Yet for some reason you don't hear the Troika pushing that narrative- completely true, too- at all for some reason. Congrats, Eurotypes, you bailed out irresponsible lenders to the tune of 350 billion Euro or whatever, every bit as much as you bailed out the irresponsible borrower. Yet while Greece's economy has shrunk 30%, 35% poverty, 25% unemployment, 60% youth unemployment those irresponsible lenders have, what, bought a new Bugatti Veyron to keep their Ferrari, Maserati and Pagani from being lonely in their 17th century renovated Tuscan villa? Slight disparity in treatment there, even if I were over exaggerating slightly.