Zoraptor

Trolls don't hide in closets, they hide under bridges. As much fun as it may be to illustrate Bruce's consistent hypocrisy and mutually exclusive positions it never, ever results in anything because he's either the most self acritical person in the known universe or he's doing it deliberately to get a reaction and to derail, in which case every reply gives him exactly what he wants and encourages rather than discourages/ gets him to reflect on anything. Again, ignore or Ignore. There's nothing to be gained from engaging Bruce on this subject, if there were it would have happened in the previous 2400 (?) posts.

England's bid was the main one criticised for corruption in the FIFA report- or more accurately, the select bits of it that were released- into the 2018/22 bid processes. Of course, that was mainly quid pro quo because they whined like a 2 year old with broccoli and brussel sprouts for dinner, but if the Swiss are going to investigate based on the FIFA report then England won't escape scot (l0l) free either. Plus they came stone cold last, both the Spain/ Portugal and BelNel bids were better supported and ought to have first dibs. The Iberian bid may not be possible any more due to financial constraints, though they should have been looming in 2010 as well but I very much doubt England would win on a revote anyway, they're almost universally disliked as born-to-the-purple self important Napoleon complex under achievers, and that's just in Europe. US getting 2022 is far more likely.

The DAI decisions were a bit odd given that they were pretty much exact reverse of the ME3 visual design decisions where Ashley and Liara both got some augmentation from the earlier games and you had an invasion of Jersey Shore extras as well. I hate that sort of thing, ever since I found out why red lipstick is attractive it's the first thing I think of when I see it, which can be a bit off putting.

Not going to happen. It's too late both in terms of getting bids redone/ reholding the vote and in terms of having a sound legal basis for it ie getting the robust legal case and convictions for corruption necessary to stop them getting sued to oblivion by Russia, Blatter would have to go anyway (and seemingly nobody seems to think he actually will be voted out, though he is... not great, to say the least) plus Russia was not a very controversial choice in the wider world- and unlike in most things Europe and the US doesn't get much especial privilege in FIFA any more, one of its few governmental bright spots. Qatar on the other hand... its main opponents were the US and members of its own asian confederation, it's annoyed the big euro leagues by having its WC have to be played in the middle of normal league time and some important sponsors (ie beer) won't even be able to sell their product at the tournament. That's the sort of stuff the power brokers really care about, far more than Qatar evil subcontractors working Nepalis to death or Dave Cameron becoming a quivering jelly at the thought of Vladimir Vladimovich's pectorals.

Legend of Grimrock (1) did, as did Twitcher 2. But they're useless as they're from mid-late 2012, so heading towards 3 years old. IIRC it was ~20k for Twitcher2 and ~32k for Grimrock at that time, but that's iirc. And GOG archiving their forum seems to have completely destroyed Google's indexing for checking those numbers, unfortunately. OTOH you can make some conclusions from relative positions. Since DivOS on steam has roughly twice PoE's sales but their positions on GOG are practically identical- DivOS's position includes ks copies while PoE's doesn't, after all- we can conclude that the proportion sold on GOG should be twice as high for PoE as for DivOS, ie whatever number you'd add to PoE's steam figures to get the total ought to be about the same as that for DivOS, not half as would be expected if just looking at steam sales.

Yep, though Qatar is definitely an outlier, decision wise. You hardly ever hear about Germany winning in shady circumstances for 2006 any more, but it happened. Our delegate voted against the instructions of his confederation for Germany instead of Seff Effrica and the margin was 1 vote between the two- if he'd obeyed instruction the Brucies could have destroyed the world's ear drums with their droning plastic trumpets four years earlier. Kind of ironic (or maybe illustrative, depending on view) though, the other major international organisation with bribery claims (IOC) mainly had them over awarding venues to Salt Lake City and Atlanta; slightly different from Brazil/ Russia/ Qatar albeit of all of those Qatar is the only real and genuine wtf decision. Britain and Australia not doing well wasn't surprising despite what the media said, a lot of people really didn't like their casual anglocentricism and both came last in their ballots and were not even close.

It's almost certainly a bit of both. To illustrate why: The best and most accurate simple description for complex genetics/ developmental systems I've heard is the one used in 'The Science of Discworld'- essentially, genetics is like a recipe as it is generally taught in schools; but people tend to forget that a recipe requires both the set of ingredients ie the genes and a set of conditions as well to get a successful result. If you had 'genes' for mince, onions and tomatoes you can end up with a massive variety of end results depending on those ingredients and the way they're treated (ie the developmental conditions). But while you can get basic results from the ingredients (stereotype simple Mendelian level stuff, the equivalent of tomatoes being able to be used raw) you cannot get a meringue from those genes/ ingredients, no matter how much you try and how much you vary the conditions, nor can you get a tasty meal out of an empty oven. So you might have a burger pattie (heterosexual), a kofta (bisexual) or a bolognaise sauce (homosexual) depending on proportions of ingredients used and conditons of cooking but if you lack the ingredients you have no food, and if homosexuality were a... meringue, say, then you couldn't get it from those genes/ ingredients. Plus of course actual human behaviour is a lot more complex than just a recipe, that is indicated by twins not having a particularly strong sharing of sexuality. To torture the analogy a bit more (frankly, I'm expecting a commendation from Richard Cheney any time), it's like putting the same general ingredients into an oven then taking a kofta and a bolognaise out of the same oven in nine months; with the added possibility that after a time cooling the kofta might genuinely think it's actually a burger pattie whatever the recipe says. Saying it's due to any one of developmetal, genetic or later envirnomental or societal issues alone is certainly incorrect though.

Telltale adventure game series are coming to gog- perhaps unsurprisingly given the TV series is currently active the GoT series is first with a 40% discount. Gog also won't be selling Hatred, though whether that is due to censorious moral panic or due to it being Stalin vs Martians style crap with media attention is not known (and it's very likely gog won't say either).

Mods will fix it.

The problem with that is the same essential problem there is with there being a 'strong' genetic base for homosexuality- twins. If there is a strong basis for homosexuality based on genetics then there should be a strong correlation of identical twins sharing the same sexuality as they are nearly genetically identical, if it is due to in utero factors there should be a strong correlation in both identical and non identical twins as they share near identical in utero conditions and its maternal/ environmental factors. There is some correlation in both cases, but it isn't strong enough to justify either explanation except as a factor rather than a cause.

Just that it's currently at place 5 (Hero) and 16 (Champion) of gog's charts - no absolute numbers. You can get the historic/ overall relative sales as well, since you can do a sort by bestselling. That's for RPGs, since that is where the most direct comparison to similar titles can be made, it's 356/1094 by sales against all titles. It's probably the highest placed game that hasn't been on sale, excluding Twitcher3 which probably includes registered retail copies anyway. For PoE at least it seems that KS copies don't count towards that ranking either as I get it marked as unowned, though for example DivOS is marked as owned and is a KS copy.

While that is true the more complex the behaviour/ the control of the behaviour the more difficult it is to breed out said behaviour because there are more factors involved. If, for example, there were a gene that 'turned people gay'- or conversely, turned them straight- in their twenties through hormone inbalance there would be a fair chance their genes would be carried on, as would anyone's with 'gay tending genes' who was involved in a heterosexual relationship at any point. With something as complex as human behaviour it is almost always a predisposition towards/ away from something rather than an absolute process; we're not stereotype amoeba stimulus/ response behaviour wise, we're stimulus/ think/ response for most types of behaviour and this makes behavioural selection rather... fuzzy where we are concerned. That leads, of course, to the main problem with any statistical analysis that is required to detect any 'gay influencing genes', while it sounds rather like something an evangelical preacher would say it is possible to suppress behaviour via will power or lie about it since it is behaviour. Sociopathy is not really- or perhaps is, depending on perspective- a good example since last time I checked there wasn't even a globally accepted definition of sociopathy (it was called something like type IV psychopathy, iirc, and disputed that 'sociopathy' existed seperately). Essentially though, neither sociopathy nor homosexuality can 'die out' due to genetic factors so long as there are complex genetic and behavioural systems in play as some with either trait set or incomplete parts of a trait set will still have children to carry on the influencer genes.

Despite having done (basically) no research on it I'd be pretty confident in saying it doesn't work that way- it's actually extremely hard to breed traits out even with an organised effort. There's been thousands of years of work on shorter lived species like pigs and sheep yet they'll revert to wild types quite quickly- especially pigs which will go from fat pink hairless porkers to smaller black hairy wild boar in only a couple of generations. The stuff on 'gay genes' on wikipedia (heh/ meh/ L0L) is extremely unconvincing about there being any strong genetic link of the type people usually think of from stuff like eye colour. Or in other words, homosexuality won't strictly obey the archetype Mendelian genetics, ie there won't be Z = 'straight' z = 'gay' --> ZZ = straight Zz/zZ = bisexual zz = gay and you wouldn't be able to get bisexuals by breeding 'pure gay' with 'pure straight' and breed out teh gay by only breeding 'pure straight' with each other. If there were it would have been found already, albeit analysing a behaviour type by genetics is inherently difficult since it is a behaviour which may be suppressed/ enhanced by social pressures or conditioned in/ out at various times and there are people who don't realise they're gay until late in life etc. Something like eye colour is an objective trait, homosexuality is far more subjective and complex.

I found it very interesting in the Canadian election thread that their government is doing exactly the same sort of stuff for exactly the same sort of reasons- plus the Tories in the UK used almost exactly the same strategy our National Party did here. There's clearly a lot of synching of strategies going on. And as always, the politicians' job is not actually to serve the people but to get re-elected and they're probably getting advice mainly from cookie cutter MBAs; on the look out for some lovely Directorships as rewards from the same companies whose interests they served while in office/ advising those in office. Last big company we bailed out was an insurance one after the Christchurch earthquake, which was at least reasonably justifiable as being due to a genuinely unique circumstance. There was also TV3 where the government gave them a $43 million interest free loan and oddly, so very oddly, the current affairs program that has been most consistently critical of them got the axe despite regularly being the network's best performer. Oh yeah, their new CEO is a good buddy of our Prime Minister. Coincidentally. It's funny really, people here vote ourselves the least corrupt in the world because they can't recognise quid pro quo/ payola if it got up and turned their house into a wholly licensed product of Monsanto behind their backs.

From that I'm not sure Nonek is the one needing to know what a 'strawman' is. Plenty of the people who now constitute GG have been concerned about games journalism, for years previous. Otherwise we have to conclude also that- logically- nobody cared about world peace until the United Nations was formed, nobody cared about international health until the WHO/ IRC/ MSF etc were formed, nobody cared about internet freedom or overweening and overbearing copyright rules until Pirate Parties were formed, nobody cared about social justice until the sjw term was coined etc- after all, nobody was a member of those organisations (or 'organisations') until they existed either. The idea that any movement sprung de novo from the aether direct into people's minds and they didn't care previous is... a bit ridiculous. Games journalism has been criticised and pilloried for its failings for decades and if anything it's just got worse over that time. But anyway, as said, the whole thing would have blown over in a week sans Streisand Effect. Remove the censorship and invective against anyone not toeing the line and there wouldn't be a GG either; there would still be perfectly legitimate criticisms of journalism to be made with or without it and gamergaters would be some of those making them, with or without the label to make them a recognised movement.

And I'd bet that 99% of sjws don't think that way. It's probably true of the theorists and those like McIntosh but the vast majority are just mildly self important people disappointed that the main social justice battles have already been fought and desperately looking for added meaning to their lives. The only post modern thing about it is that previous they'd end up distributed amongst groups like anarchists, communists, religious groups and the whacky Randian fringe rather than being concerned about Bert and Ernie not being allowed to marry in Kazakhstan or Pacman being a misogynist tale of drug addiction and domestic violence. And a few years later they'd almost all move on, as their life got actual meaning; now twitter favourites seem to fill the void semi permanently for rather a lot of people. (Though to be fair, quite a lot of that applies to any trivial cause, including elements of GG as well)

Nerp. We, for example, rather conveniently don't have a constitution. The TPP is also of course entirely secret, except for the parts some kind soul leaked to wikileaks, and would probably be passed here under urgency- ie use emergency powers supposed to deal with national emergencies which allow minimal public discussion and scrutiny. Strangely- oh so very strangely- national emergencies the past 7 years have tended to be anything the current government thinks will make them unpopular if scrutinised. As a consequence we already have agreements like the one with ROK where some of the more egregious TPP clauses such as extranational tribunals where companies can sue governments for lost profits are present.

It's even worse when you don't even get experience for said trash mobs, things like the respawning shadows in IWD were good for getting that extra bit of xp needed to get your characters up a level if close, at least. Having said that, while nobody likes trash mobs* and lock-and-key enemies like beholders/ 'flayers are deeply annoying if you don't have the 'key' (and, generally, trivially trivial if you do) you simply can't have every battle be against a dragon/ high level wizard/ party alternative either in an IE like game. They'd either simply become the new trash mob of, breach, backstab, lower resistance, silence, yawn, +5/6 weapons, chained instadeath chromatic orbs and all the other valid to cheesy tactics people use for the big set pieces or you'd have probably 1 battle per quest line. Which is fine for the PST spectrum of IE games, but not so much the IWD/ BG end. *you'll just get a lot of dissent about what constitutes a trash mob and how much of a moving target it is, plus whether trash mobs are related to the rtwp/ tb dichotomy. By the end of Fallout 1/2 for example if you have a 'properly' developed character even enclave soldiers/ superdupermutants/ centaurs etc are trash mob to a sniper with a gauss gun/ turbo plasma rifle plus something cheesy likely extra moving out from cover every turn.

Theoretically at least he isn't making any money off of it, he's just not losing money via crowdfunding his legal costs. I guess if he wins and gets awarded costs or damages he might effectively make money, but that doesn't seem to be a likely outcome- indeed, I don't even know if it's a possible outcome- and we don't know what he'd do in that situation. There is a certain irony about GG funding someone that way given their attitude of patreon's crowdfunding being circlejerk welfare for parasitic social activists, but at least it isn't a 'fund my life, plz, for a haiku a month' situation but a one off (well, again theoretically given it's a legal) fund for a specific situation.

Nope. It's blunt/ in internet snarkese and would likely get put in the circular file but in essence I'd say it's accurate- it's a marketing tool aimed primarily at selling more cards rather than offering added value to the consumer. nVidia or AMD would of course happily sell you a new card every week if they could get away with it, they're in competition with each other and so long as that continues there probably won't be what they'd really like (ie licensing cards rather than selling them) but until then for them a customer who is not in the market to buy a new card or at very least not providing them with user data (also valuable, people would be amazed at what companies think is relevant and essential to collect) is not a customer any more. Those programs seem to bo designed primarily around the 'vaguely baffled, pretty lazy' user who is the youth equivalent of the 'old fuddled user' to whom it is depressingly easy to sell service plans and the like which make life easier. I blame steam/ facebook with their Clippyesque 'let me help you with that!' attitude for it all. Then again, I blame steam/ facebook for global warming climate change and having three mismatched single socks in my sock drawer.

But if you say it in Latin it sounds 92% more authoritative, even if it's doggerel Latin you barely remember from a decade+ ago with at least one obvious mistake even I've picked up on belatedly- along with the realisation that using retiarius (the gladiator type with the net) would have saved half the words. I just wish the arguments with him were a little less repetitive and a bit more constructive.

Dude! r00fles Meh, if a gater is a self proclaimed title then I see no reason why sjw can't be either. It's not like there's a proscriptive taxonomic system* for various types of social activism. And in any case, Tale self identified as a skellington as well in the Twitcher thread. *would be something like iustitia bellator communalis var piscatorius ad infinitum for Bruce, if there were.

I'd be both amused and (pleasantly) surprised if Berengar shows up. It does seem rather likely that they just assume he's dead, dead, dead. And now I'm disappointed there isn't a medieval Venetian retrotechno open world game available yet. Make it so, Ubisoft!

More likely they just want more PC sales from people with older rigs- I don't think people with Titans are going to be complaining about it looking ugly but they'd probably like for people with lower range cards to be able to play at a reasonable rate. They'd certainly get more per unit from a PC sale than a console one, especially if sold via GOG. Having said that it also had to make certification on consoles, and that requires a sustainable 30fps frame rate.

One of the supposed punishments for flashing a dvd drive to play cracked dvds on the xbox was bricking when a new firmware/ dashboard update arrived, so it isn't new as a punishment. Though ms seems to be denying it has happened anyway.