Zoraptor

Is that actually 2008 Hillary data? It's got Lehman Bros on it and they're rather famous for being bankrupt as of 2008. (Unless Barclays are still using the Lehman name in the US, which seems... unlikely. It would be a glowing PR choice, but only because it had been nuked so comprehensively from orbit)

I believe that due to being Australian his choice vote wise is effectively between the Mad Monk and, uh, William Shorten (I think) in a non presidential race. Then again, I'd vote Sanders in ahead of either of those two options. Any time I feel depressed about kiwi politicos I can always look across the Tasman to be reminded that it could be worse. I was a bit surprised that Sanders was standing for the Democrats though, iirc he actually stands as an independent in congressional elections.

I suspect that Whedon may well just genuinely believe the stuff he says rather than is making excuses as such. He has said before that he doesn't like twitter and he is right that the old joke about 2 palestinians in a room resulting in three warring factions applies about equally to feminists and SJ types. Fix It Again Tony

Really, you won't find a more arbitrary committee than the boards that make up most companies' ultimate form of governance and which set wages for their CEOs and the like. Rich people, ex CEOs or aspiring CEOs themselves awarding each other 7-10 figure sums, bonuses and the like irrespective of whether they run their company- and the whole British economy- into the ground is pretty much the definition of arbitrary cronyism. We've got exactly the same problem here as in the UK and as was in Spain, our 'growth' is almost entirely based on a ludicrous housing bubble, encouraged by committees of rich people who stand to make profits from it. And what happens when the inevitable crash happens? Yep, privatise the profit, nationalise the losses, too big to fail etc etc. It's funny really, having a committee of left wingers deciding anything is terrible stuff, a fundamental evil that is to be abhorred; right wingers setting salaries for themselves == awesome, the natural order and other committees of right wingers deciding that their buddies have to be saved by taxpayers from their mistakes and that there is, oh so unfortunately, no recourse available to allow the people who generated those debts to be punished or not get their bonuses- but that the guy working in a chippie for 6.50 an hour is responsible for them instead- is also the natural order of things. And it has to be that way because otherwise where will poor Mr Abramovich live? Surely you don't want him to be forced out of Belgravia by a crowd of plebs? Driven off, depressed and downcast in his last and least gold plated Phantom as he runs for the those last liberal bastions of... the UAE/ Qatar/ Saudi/ Singapore/ Kazakhstan to spend his days in the horrors of mere unparalleled luxury rather than unlimited luxury? Have you no shame, commie?

He's not really pro consumer, unfortunately. He did write the gamer's bill of rights but he then proceeded to ignore most of the things he wrote himself. He's a raging right winger who will alienate a lot of people if asked the wrong/ right questions. Which is the problem, really, with electing 'representatives'. They'll end up saying stuff as the voice of [movement] that a lot of people will disagree with. Same thing happened with Occupy and it drove a lot of their support away.

To be fair, they'd probably cite Saul as well as Leviticus as justification for their stance which is a bit more difficult to challenge with a flow chart. It is all trumped by "Love thy neighbour" and "Judge not lest ye be judged" of course. It is always ironic how many people forget the Christ part of Christian and regard Jesus as some sort of hippy.

It's fair to say that the food safety explanation is... rather controversial. Trichinosis is only a problem if you don't cook the meat properly- and if you hadn't cooked meat properly you've potential for a whole lot of problems whatever it is and whether or not it's kosher or halal. Chicken would be a good counter example, it's kosher but almost all chicken- even modern chicken- has things like campylobacter in it (and salmonella, and listeria in eggs plus a couple of others I can't remember- chickens are basically little bacterial fermenters, tasty but care must be taken). Cook it and store it properly and you're fine much as with pork, don't cook it and store it properly and you have a fair chance of getting life threatening food poisoning.

If you got it a few days ago it was technically an invite for the 'alpha' rather than the beta as a big batch of unsolicited alpha keys went out then. I believe the beta uses the same system as is used for their game giveaways to stop the servers crashing ie you sign up and when it's not busy they send out a key/ register the title to you rather than doing them all at the same time. Also, Fantasy General and Pacific General have been released. Most significantly, they're published by GOG themselves rather than via a 3rd party as they have previously done.

I used bacon because both Jews and Muslims regard it as 'unclean', and because that aversion is exactly as arbitrary as whether or not you can draw Muhammed or write the non transliteration of Jehovah or not*. Generally speaking there's also a dichotomy between the two, where deliberately targeting Jewish religious practices is seen as bad while deliberately targeting Muslim ones is seen as 'free speech' and sticking it to the terrists, usually by the same people. Personally I think they're either both free speech or both hate speech. But I'm not going to waste my time worrying about which because either way the idea behind contravening them is just to be offensive and provocative, and is not to make an actual point- it's their right to be a git and they have to assert and protect the right to be a git against the dark night of encroaching lack of gitness, basically. Well yeah. Oddly enough, most people do absolutely fine without asserting their right to be a git and only attention courtesans, psychopaths and the chronically dumb actually revel and feel proud of being one. *I could of course write ____ instead but, meh, I can make the point that I personally think it's silly without rubbing any orthodox type Jews' faces in it for no actual benefit.

Simple answer is that they are both morons. If they disappeared from the face of the planet it would be a net benefit to mankind, though preferably have them disappear by dint of them changing from being morons to not being morons. "Except you did encourage it" No. Being apathetic towards something neither condones nor condemns by definition- FACT- because you don't have only binary condone/ condemn options- unless you're fundamentally a binary moran, oddly enough rather like the morans involved in both sides of this story. You aren't a binary moran, are you Volo? You're a fully functional nuanced human bean, yes? So, buy some cards and deal with it, build a bridge and get over it, whatever, you are WRONG and should apologise then quite the internet forever or something. Yours with appropriate L0L/ r00fles, Z

Please Volo, desist with the falsities and commence with the verities. Lying makes you a nazi ISIS communist vegan sjw sympathiser, you should stop and repent before it is too late. Ain't my solution- I just don't care if it happens. Choices and Consequences. I wouldn't splatter their noses nor would I encourage others to; I just won't be crying into my corn flakes over the injustice of it all when people who provoke manage to, well, provoke. Because it's what they're trying to do.

I do tend to wonder at which point free speech and hate speech intersect. I could easily see dumping bacon on the front step of a synagogue being regarded as 'hate speech' while doing the same at a mosque would be free speech, given the current climate. End of the day in both cases the person might have the right to do it, but I'm not going to spare a single tear if they get their nose splattered across their face as a consequence; it would be played for and got. Which really is the point of provocation or being provocative, of course, it is to provoke. Any significant point made with a Muhammed cartoon can be made as well without one, it's just poking a bear with a pencil to prove how aggressive it is- a self fulfilling prophecy and if the bear pulls your arm off then meh, guess you've 'proved' your point about the bear, good job but don't expect me to cry myself to sleep at night to a #IkbenWilders hashtag.

Monte, dear fellow, I think I'd take your prognostications a bit more seriously if you hadn't been going on about Cromwell being a man of parliament who fought for it and its existing powers for pages- when he actually left England as a hereditary dictatorship. He was also a mass murdering genocidal religious lunatic and a festering pustulent carbuncular boil on the flabby bottom of the human race but that's beside the point, ultimately he fought for and protected parliament about as much as Adolf Hitler fought for and protected the Reichstag, ie not really and certainly not in practice. And that's leaving out the taking the S & A in NSDAP seriously (really, why does no literalist ever expound the impeccable Democratic virtues of the DPRK or DDR?) when the first thing, near literally, that Hitler did in power was liquidate the socialist arm of his own party as well as any left leaning opposition. Cromwell apologists have a weird idea that he somehow 'accidentally' ended up as Fuhrer Generallissimo Il Duce 'Lord Protector' and that he was really just preserving existing power structures, much like he 'accidentally' killed a fair proportion of Ireland's population and 'accidentally' left his power to his son in his will. It's special pleading, and a particularly Special brand of it when coupled to the 'nothing really changed and it was not an actual revolution' spiel. It was and it did, it just didn't stick. Fortunately, because if there's one English leader who sits comfortably with the Stalins, Hitlers, Francos and Mussolinis of the world it's Oliver Cromwell. (And to be factual about things, Churchill the great hero impeccably capitalist right wing, was responsible for a Bengal famine that killed 3 times as many people as Stalin's Gulag. And, of course, the EIC killed more Indians than Stalin's total, including a time they killed more than Stalin's total over a shorter period, all while- impeccably capitalistically- peddling drugs to China, as their workforce starved. So, can't vote for those rightards drug dealers who'll starve you do death in an opium farm, can't vote for those leftards who'll collectivise your arse- omg it's the Lib Dems Russell Brand is right!)

Gamersgate is mostly about ethics in selling you steam keys- it's Gamergate, no s, that is mostly about saturated leg joints/ harassing honest hard working journalists and doing them out of their just rewards. (Seriously, Gamersgate have received threats and the like from people- well, sjws- who make that mistake)

Doesn't mean it cannot be a trope in any case. Perhaps the classic trope in fanfiction is the Mary Sue, an idealised female self insertion (ooh-er) into an established milieu by an author. Idealised self insertions are not always done by women of course, so you have the Gary Stu male countertrope. So what is really needed here is obviously a 'Bloke in [appliance/ enclosed space]' countertrope- so all you have to do is find a case study for it. My sister is part of a long term study group here with a big questionnaire/ interview every seven years and that study* found the rates to be almost identical; though one from a second city did find that women were considerably more likely to hit their partner or children than a man was. Having said that, the rates found were significantly different (70% for the first vs ~30% for women and just over 20% for men in the second one) so there's clearly a big variation in classification- one included verbal 'violence' and the other didn't, IIRC. *Pretty sure the relevant paper is this one though I'm not buying the article to confirm, it's certainly based on the right study group at least and is consistent with what I remember of it.

Bomb threat at the GG meet up apparently, with the po-pos in attendance. Which falls perfectly between lol and wtf. I'd say that it is a 'legitimate' trope, even if it is often misused as a term. There are plenty of things that don't fit the trope, but there sure are whole lot that do as well, at least so far as treating the woman as a disposable item whose purpose is solely to motivate someone else. When it comes right down to it a trope is just a classification system for the blocks out of which stories are built, whether you see it as just building a revenge motive or as a pseudo misogynist cliché depends entirely on perspective.

Yeah, that really says it all. Multi billion dollar company that wants to be arbiter of what is and isn't PC gaming but doesn't want to do any of the stuff necessary to do it properly such as making sure the stuff they sell works properly, whether game or mod. If GOG, a company an order of magnitude smaller, can employ more than two people to test games Valve surely can. I'd have a lot more (well, some at all) sympathy for steam-as-monopoly if it weren't such a lazy monopoly with an attitude of minimal effort and throwing stuff out there half baked. If they had real competition and it was the real 'free market' that Mr Newell supposedly idolises then there would be real consequences for their shonkiness, but as it stands the lock in and inertia protects them almost completely. Even their apology was basically a "we're very sorry that you didn't like it" type 'apology' of the sort you see constantly from politicians who aren't really sorry for anything except the negative reaction they got.

Heh, the codex claims to have found (or been tipped off to by a Pole, at least) the official editor for ToEE hidden inside its Polish patch, accessible by unzipping it into a new folder. Haven't actually run it since I don't have ToEE installed, but the editor is there at least. Cue dozens of iterations of 'at least the game can get some Polish now!' puns in the codex thread, which are lame- though I guess they can have a good Krakow doing that now. Don't know who found it but I hope there's some Szeczin his future as a reward! (One day I will find a use for combining a hearty kiwi "g'day" and "thanks" into a suitable Gdansk pun and be able to die satisfied, but today is not that day)

Upcoming Star Wars movies and the belief that the SW titles will sell better is the most likely reason, I'd think. The new titles on GOG seem to be above and beyond their initial agreement with Disney so it seems likely that more titles will be coming, and there aren't that many SW titles left now.

The Russian ambassador should go and offer the peaceful protesters some cookies (and by the looks of things some toilet paper, what's up with the number 1 looted item being bog roll. Could understand if it were...) and moral support in their struggle. It'd make me laugh. Ah, Separatists! Must be an outside group though, all separatists are outside groups so due to the toilet paper I'm going to blame everything on Maduro in Venezuela trying to destabilise the US rather than any policies of the government, local or national.

They also have the release of Rebel Assault 1&2- not great games- and the two Jedi Academy games which are pretty good, plus 2 bundles of their entire SW content. Of course, I have half the content of the cheaper one on CD/DVD and precisely none of the more expensive one but still, pretty good value.

N.B. the Viet Cong won in the end and whatever he says, he doesn't actually change. Paid mods will be back later, they say as much in the announcement. Just with better (well, any would be more) PR push prior and more focus on managing/ fragmenting opposition to it.

And it now appears that paid mods have been given the Nguyen Ngoc Loan treatment, with full refunds. Probably refunds to steam wallet, but nevertheless. (lollin at the comments though, one million variations of 'we know you really loved us Valve' incoming. If it weren't in bad taste I'd coin the phrase 'Battered User Syndrome')

Which is perhaps the most pointless argument in games ever, because games are not meant to reflect reality, their purpose in the vast majority of cases is specifically not to be realistic. That's true whatever genre you look at from the most casual like Farmville or The Sims (albeit both have a veneer of 'realism' but their purpose is escapism, and as below, to make money) to those targeted at the core gamer demographics. The only time it isn't true is for hardcore sims and the like- usually small market, mostly cannot care less about politics- and games as stories. Things like Gone Home are fine, of course, and there's nothing to stop them being made if people want to, there's just no obligation for people to play, care about or buy them nor for companies to decide they should make Gone Home: The FPS instead CODBLOPS#. It's also why people get annoyed over the Vavra type stuff, you have people demanding his game not reflect reality to conform with their beliefs and the demographic distribution of somewhere like the US- not even modern Bohemia. It's more 'entitled' to think the other way, really. If the two alternatives are (1) a company should serve its audience (me) and (2) a company should not necessarily serve its existing audience but should serve (me)/ my political opinions then it is obvious number 1 is the correct answer- and that, primarily, is why Leigh A got such a negative response as well. There's nothing 'entitled' about that, aiming for your audience is economics 101 and is a mutually compatible aim between supplier and consumer. Doesn't mean you can't aim for a different audience with a different product of course, but that is not generally what sjws want, they want everything to conform to their particular vision. Which is, of course, impossible since there is no monolithic sjw group any more than there is a monolithic GG group. Have I ever mentioned that I loathe the word entitled? Because I do.

No, for inflicting possibly the only major naval defeat the english navy had between Sluys and pretty much forever and worse, being awfully cheeky about it. Spare a thought for poor old frenchie too, they spent six centuries trying and losing. (I was given some of those sprinkles when I was in Enschede)