Zoraptor

More SJW infighting! McIntosh is having a jab at Brianna 'Batman' Wu!

When he was played by Sir Ian I always presumed Gandalf Magneto was gay and had had a fling with Captain Picard when younger. Bit of a shock finding out he'd actually been boffing Katniss during that earlier timeframe a few movies later. Then again, I never read the comics. Not invited isn't really banned though.

Potential book 6 spoiler, though I guess most of the stuff on the show now is potential book 6 spoiler...

Soaring rhetoric can get you a long way towards popularity though, even if it achieves nothing. Despite agreeing with the vast majority of those points and examples I have to agree with Bruce on the overall picture, if not the detail. In places where the US is generally liked it is liked more now than under Bush, in places where it was disliked under Bush it is generally disliked less under Obama. There are exceptions of course, but I'd say that holds true in general. Partly it's because Obama has made popular decisions, though practically speaking a lot hasn't been 'good' but more along the lines of "well, McCain probably would have been worse, and Bush was worse" in amongst some stuff which has worked OK; his follow up to everything has been almost always terrible, but that is not usually what sits in the mind of people in general. There's also an element of him being inherently different and special through being the first black president, that represents a lot to many people. Plus, much of the world either hated Bush or feared what stupidity he'd visit next on the world and saw McCain/ Romney as Bush 2.1- so Obama did not so much have a mountain to climb to world popularity but a precipitous ravine to climb out of. I certainly don't think Obama has been particularly competent though, just relatively popular.

Except everyone- everyone- knew Assad had WMDs, Syria wasn't a member of the CWC until 2013. For the same reason Israel (and Pakistan/ India for that matter) ain't a member of the NPT. In contrast, it was just anyone with any sense who knew what jollying about in Russia's back yard would get as reaction.

There's as much actual chance of Putin attacking NATO as there was of Saddam hitting London with an anthrax packed Scud in 45 minutes, though he's obviously not willing to put up with NATO asterisking about in his back yard any more and probably wishes that abject moron Yeltsin had drunk himself to death a decade earlier.

The purpose of the equivalent US and UK (and Israeli, and Chinese, and everyone else's including commercial astroturfing) programmes- not the 5 eyes/ XKEYSCORE etc stuff, that's for monitoring not for manipulating, the manipulation stuff is the software that allows one person to run 100s of social media accounts seamlessly- are exactly the same as the Russian ones. It's to manipulate the narrative to their best interests, and in state actor's case specifically the security apparatus's (if you're lucky; if not it's the people in power's, per our little NSA branchlet trying to get dirt on people to get one of our politicians a job) best interests not actually the country's, it's not any noble goal of informing the public or battling the infernal hordes of Chinese/ Russian/ whoever 'trolls' putting out obvious lies and calumny, that's PR every bit as much as their other output. As for Snowden, if centuries of diplomatic precedent had not been bent over a table and given a good hard rogering when forcing down Morales' plane on the rumour that Snowden was on it then he almost certainly wouldn't be in Russia at this point, let alone if certain elements of the US establishment and intelligence community didn't cause a world shortage of haemorrhoid cream every time his name was mentioned. Funniest part being that it was supposedly Julian Assange who had started the rumour about Snowden being on the plane. Impugning Snowden's character in that way is utterly circular, and ridiculous at best since he obviously has no choice in the matter and wouldn't have been in Russia- at all, let alone still- sans the butthurt reactions. If Obama wants someone to blame for Snowden being in Russia, well, mirrors have been a thing for a fair while now.

I did resist buying any games previous. But I have now bought Saints Row 3, Banished, Majesty HD and Shadowrun: Dragonfall. Verily, I am a drone of capitalism and slave to acquisitiveness.

High quality movies? And frankly, oby ain't a paid shill, he's just trollin' for biological waste material and giggles. Not particularly well imo, but you can't argue results and he certainly wads some people's panties. Generally though all yet another FAOusername: you're a troll lol! thread does is encourage them, if you're convinced they're a troll ignore them or Ignore them if you have no willpower, problem solved.

Yeah, I think anyone with any sense thinks that the Polish culture == US/ 'white' culture opinion is pretty moronic. The same people who think that would probably be deeply offended if you implied Ethiopian culture and US Black Urban culture were the same thing, or Chinese and Indian. Or not, who knows with sjws. Funny thing is, TWitcher1 did have a non white guy (well, at least not whitey white, from his name Azar Javed is presumably meant to be vaguely arab/ subcontinental) and a guy with glasses and they're the bad guys up until you get to the white privileged male oppressor (or alternatively the guy who overcame a hard childhood to become a strong and powerful leader on his own merits, a man willing to do what needed to be done to prepare humanity for an inevitable bleak future) at the end. No CIA agents though Alpha Protocol has them, along with a plane crash. On the other hand, saying that CDPR are good storytellers and could put 'pocs' in seamlessly if they really wanted is a bit of a specious argument; they may equally have considered doing so and decided that- as good storytellers- they couldn't do so without shoehorning and tokenism that would itself act against good storytelling.

Yep, not sure about donated though, I think the Ukrainians may have actually paid for them. I think the old London buses would have been about as useful, they're nearly as good as a saxon at stopping bullets and offroading but more reliable, lighter and cheaper to maintain.

Arguments about slavic culture in Witcher 3 are nonsense, to prove it I'll cite... terminally-incoherent.com? Even if there was nothing wrong with the blog content you'd think he could at least have used a URL shortener.

I think the outsourcing works well enough, for companies, for certain things (eg texture farms in gaming) and in certain situations (mostly natural monopolies or those with a high cost/ high inertia towards moving provider) but is generally a false economy. It's one of those things, if I go into a retail store and am served by an Indian or Filipino or Chinese I couldn't care less- but if I phone someone or someone phones me and I get "Hi I'm Sanjiv Philip, I will be reading a script to you today, be unable to respond to any questions outside my flow chart and not be able to fix your problem as a result" I'm immediately expecting crap service designed solely to save the company money and my problem not to be fixed. Life is too short to spend four hours talking to someone whose job is basically not to provide service but to be as cheap as possible instead. Not "Philip's" fault of course, they're just doing their job with very little leeway and very little actual cultural understanding and training. But every time I speak to his equivalent I end up annoyed frustrated and basically with a asterisk you [companyname] attitude, hardly constructive for them. Despite the stereotype it has also happened with a British based call centre, though at least the person I talked to then admitted straight away that they wouldn't be able to fix the problem and needed a supervisor; shame that the supervisors were on duty 9-5 UK time- ie 9pm to 5am our time, with the hours the business I was working at being... 6am to 8pm.

Look at you person who doesn't own System Shock 2, a pathetic creature of meat and bone, panting and sweating as you drown in your mediocrity. What can challenge a perfect, immortal top 10 game of all time! of all time!!! Actually I'm so cool I don't even own a DD copy of SS2, my installation is from the original big box edition, transferred across multiple computers to this day. I'm thinking of getting Grimrock 2 and Risen 2, and maybe Trine 2. My resolution to stop my backlog growing larger is fraying already.

On the Steam refunds thing (probably more constructive than yet another argument about whether Twitcher/ Kingdom Come/ etc need to kowtow to SanFran hipster 'cultural marxofascism'/ should embrace enlightened modernist cultural sensitivity; only answer is that people should make the games they want whether they be neanderthal slavic cultural supremacists or lentil eating social justice coders, the market can sort out whether there are buyers) there is a very obvious point- why would someone abuse the system by going to the trouble of buying it on steam, then going to the inevitable rigmarole of dealing with Steam 'Support' in order to get a 'free' copy of a game when they could just... torrent it? And it seems fairly likely you'd get store credit in many cases as well, so you'd still have spent the money, plus they will be looking for abuse of the system. Same with the complaints from some about GOG's refund policy with them being DRM free, it's always easier just to torrent the game than get it legit then go for a refund. Pretty much definitely people worrying about the ability to refund for games being 'crap' where previously the buyer would have been SOoL. In any case I rather suspect for a lot of games on steam requesting a refund would have a greater cost in terms of time wasted getting the refund than just eating the cost of a bad decision and chalking it up to experience. If anyone lives deep enough in outraeg!!!ville to get upset about buying a bad 2$ game to demand a refund then, hmm, it is their time and money I guess. (Credit where it's due, steam's new policy is in some ways actually a bit better even than our Consumer's Guarantee Act which forced a pretty similar policy on Steam for NZ buyers even before the update; though they still have games as being licensed rather than the products the CGA defines software as)

Backed as well. InXile/ Fargo sure know how to run a kickstarter campaign, every game company thinking of running a campaign should take notes. (I am also now officially amused by how many potential extra keys for games I already own I could/ do have)

There's nothing inherently wrong with having games serve a political purpose, things like America's Army are pretty overtly political- overtly enough that I don't even dislike it as propaganda. It's when you start trying to enforce a particular brand of political purpose across the board that it becomes a problem. Erik Kain is good quality, even if he is 'only' a Forbes contributor and even when I rarely disagree with him. He and Tim Stone are probably the best games journalists out there at the moment, though Stone's stuff is a lot more, er, targetted and narrow in scope. Can't agree with Stiller, Tropic Thunder earns him a Get Out of Labour Camp Free Card so far as I am concerned.

This illustrates the worst of cynicism. Nah, it's realism. The two are frequently interchangeable because much of the time reality does suck. Ideally, yes, ideally all history should be objective truth telling that gives the facts and allows the reader to make informed conclusions rather than having the author preach their views to their audience. Ideally. Realistically there (1) ain't enough time in the day to get upset at that as you'd get upset at pretty much everything short of Thucydides (2) different people get outraeged!!! at different, selective things and (3) there's no way any selection of people will all agree on what constitutes objective and what constitutes a fact- see any wikipedia article on any slightly controversial subject, albeit wikipedia doesn't actually claim to be fact based, only verifiable; which ought to be easier. In some ways I wish more people were as honest in that appraisal, in others I wish more people would be fact based. Either way I might as well wish for world peace and an end to famine while I'm at it, they're both as realistic a wish. Challenge me, I have a frank and honest view of the history of my country Country overall, not every given individual in a country. I'd say I had a pretty objective view of my country's history for example- I would think that, after all- but there's plenty of generally accepted stuff in our history I disagree with. Doomsday from Wing Commander would be better, since he's a maori so at least ultimately from New Zealand Taiwan. Has a french name, but meh. Xan's cool too, though.

Wouldn't think so, so long as nothing really momentous happens- they have near 50% of the vote tied up just in their own federations, so long as they pick a unified candidate, and the Euro tactic of picking an Asian member to stand against Blatter got no traction last time and didn't split their votes. They'll get plenty of support from the smaller assocs in Oceania and North America as well, turkeys won't vote for an early Christmas and the Anglos/ Euros are publicly sharpening the axes and bulk buying cranberries. That's all dependent upon the 'rules' being followed though. If they have apprehension it would be about the Anglos/ Euros tearing up the rule book all in the name of saving the game for whitey from (oddly, ethnic specific) corruption. As mentioned, it's hardly like Platini didn't vote for Qatar himself, nor like Germany didn't win the 2006 tournament in shady circumstances.

It's physically impossible for every game to be the best experience ever. In fact, only 1 game could ever have the best experience ever. I disagree. Primarily because time is a progressive vector construct on which our personal experiences occur in a chronological order, all our experiences do not occur on a memory singularity but in a memory stream. At various points on that stream we may judge 'bests' differently as our experiences accumulate. Think of all the games that make up the overall gamespace, those that we have not played may be regarded as Schrodinger's Games (as with F4) which exist in a state of quality flux; they may or may not be better than previous games and while they may or may not have reputations associated with them it is only by opening the box and playing them can you make the judgement of which is best yourself. As such, until played they do not exist in the subjective opinionspace of what is one's personal 'best' rated and indeed it would be perfectly possible- if distinctly edge case scenario- to have every single game in existence be the 'best' at a certain point if you played them, sequentially, in ascending order of quality. ie, at any given point the last game you played would be best and stay so up until you played the next. Or alternatively, you might have multiple bouts of amnesia... In other words while there may be only one best game ever, at a given time and for a given person, that assignation is fluid and dynamic and over a set time course there may well be multiple best games of all time at given, discrete, instances on that time course.

Meh, whitewashing history is something everyone does. Not like the average British doco on Churchill mentions the crappy stuff he did, or the US doesn't celebrate a genocidal maniac on their bank notes, or the Poles get all knicker knotted about getting partitioned but didn't do it to Czechoslovakia nor stab Lithuania in the back when they were fighting the soviets. And our national myth involves lionising lots of naive chaps going off to die utterly pointlessly in Turkey for the benefit and at the command of imperialist buffoons half a world away. You won't find a single country that even approaches frank and honest in their view of their own history. It's not what countries do, at heart they're just like sports fans- we're skillful, honest and brave supporting the bestest team in the entire world; otoh the referee is biased and the opposition are dishonest thugs who dive and cheat.

It would be interesting to see if the 6th Sense were regarded so highly if he'd done, say, The Wicker Man first instead. I actually enjoyed TWM well enough, despite the twist being fairly obvious. I've watched the first two Wayward Pines and so far I'd say it has been promising. And if nothing else it is fun to speculate on what any obligatory M Night twist might be.

It's M Night Shylamalimlam. The lame ending is pretty much guaranteed, unfortunately. The journey to that lame ending may well be good though.

Meh, as much as game journalism sucks Hatred has been about as exploitative as it gets in their marketing and deliberately and consistently set out to get controversy as a selling point. Indeed, from the reactions I've observed just about its only selling point. I'm still expecting some Stalin vs Martians like- well, probably not as actually bad as SvM- overmarketed, poor and short game from Hatred. If so it will be interesting to see how many people can admit they were duped. I don't of course think it should be banned or anything, they can make and market their game any way they want so far as I am concerned. But a game that pretty transparently aims to get people buying it on the premise that it will annoy sjws if you do is not really something I can get behind, at all. I don't particularly care if it's a GG knee jerking up through the desk or an sjw one, they're both bad. (Seriously, the number of people wanting to preorder it solely on the basis of it annoying sjws, I'm actually not sure I've seen anyone say they preordered/ wanted to buy on the basis of it being, well, a good game as opposed to some sort of principle of free speech/ censorship or being anti sjw. And really, that is about as sheep like as anyone preordering CoD or Mass Effect or AssCreed or whatever the cool people like to laugh at du jour)

Well, the money at club level is going to the right people- rich Europeans- instead of the wrong people; everybody else, and that isn't so clear cut at the international level what with WC money being used for this 'development' rort where money goes to places like Papua New Guinea or Burkina Faso rather than to Berlin, Paris and London. It is somewhat hilarious to see quite so much tone deaf posturing from the Euros about everything, combined with a blithe inability to think of any reasons why those in the asian/ african/ actually every confederation except UEFA who they'd take all the development money off don't like them and vote for Blatter. And there are tons wanting to take their ball and run off to their own tournament so that control can rightly be reinvested in those lovely whiteys who ran the game for most of the past century for their own exclusive benefit- like the last English FIFA head who wanted apartheid South Africa and Rhodesia readmitted to FIFA, plus specifically lobbied and got a match vs Pinochet's Chile. In the stadium Pinochet had been using as a base for torture and mass murder, no less. Ah, good times, when the money went to the truly deserving... My personal favourite though is the guy who managed to hit all of those points- including the why does everyone else hate us and there's no conspiracy except from people who vote for Blatter- then added that it was going to be great because Russia would lose the WC, and it would be late enough that they'd have to give it to someone who really deserved it and would run it 'properly', yep, the US or England. Who only got 2 votes and were beaten by both the BeNel and Iberian bids let alone the Russian one but clearly deserve it because Wills and Dave were so very depressed or something and people told them they'd vote for them then didn't so obvious bribery from everyone else. Yep, way to make sure there's no credence given to the conspiracy theories about it all being an anglo plot to take tournaments when they can't win legit and that there's no arrogance or self superiority in play either.