Zoraptor

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)

This guy 'mysteriously' got his spinal column severed at some random point in custody rather than got shot so Wals' gun comment doesn't apply here anyway. I went to Baltimore and it was... interesting. Quite nice down by the waterfront then a couple of blocks away it went full The Wire location shoot (well, Homicide: Life on the Street since it was a fair while ago now) with dilapidated houses, industrial decay and all the rest.

Bruce Jenner is a D list celeb on a program on e! or MTV or something with some over exposed Americo-Armenians. Then no, and yes. What, no De Ruyter smoking the English fleet at Chatham? That's as good for a history troll as the Volournians burning Washington in 1814.

Meh, any internet grouping of any significance will have elements of a hate group. It's basically the same process by which you have football fans, most of whose purpose is to support their teams and football fans whose purpose is to hate everyone else's team and provoke or attack their fans. The internet is rife with morons, inevitably some will be on your 'side' of things, sometimes, and just as inevitably some will be against you. I get around the more negative elements of GG much the same way people like TB do, I don't consider myself to be part of GamerGate. Fiona(var). Fiona is a girl's name. Since it's Welsh in origin I'm not sure whether there would be dutch/ other foreign equivalents as there are for names like Catherine or Elizabeth, but that is why the assumption is made. Same mistake was made fairly regularly when he was admining TTLG for a year prior to coming here.

I mowed a neighbour's lawn the other day. I got paid $50. Well, when I say I got paid $50 I mean that Masport got paid $25 for licensing me the lawnmower and Shell got $12.50 for licensing me the petrol I used to run it. Not even a joke, really. Check out John Deere's "you don't actually buy our tractors" shtick. Oh, it will definitely output encrypted esms/ esps that only work/ can only be exported to the workshop- at very, very least as default option. I'd put a decent amount of money on it. They'll go the whole hog drm and all, it's as inevitable as Valve trying to monetise mods was as soon as they established the workshop. It's got a justification (protecting modders' paid work, you wouldn't steal a mod!), it's got benefit- for them- of more money and it's relatively easy to do. End of the day that is the whole point of having a walled garden architecture and loss leading in the first place, you accumulate power so when you want to do something unpopular what you say goes- it's no coincidence that the SSA is the most consumer unfriendly of any portal EULA, they know they can get away with it. I mean, I'll do what I can do and would encourage others to do so as well, but there's a reason PC gamers are known as spineless jellies, and it isn't just because boycott CoD groups end up with most people playing it though that is certainly a big factor- it's because they have been turning their thousand dollar electronic devices into consoles with all their restrictions (and more, 1st sale doctrine still applies to console games, after all) willingly.

Well, the reciprocal statement is accurate ("if someone doesn't feel harassed it isn't harassment", by definition), so feeling harassed is a necessary condition- but it isn't the only condition, of course. It's the sort of rule that is really intended for people hassling cosplayers and the like, not for political statements or personal beliefs where you get sensitive snowflakes and censorious gits who just want to shut people up who disagree with them.

There really isn't any other alternative than some sort of petition/ boycott, the relationship is so skewed that those are basically the only things that can be done, advertisers and the like cannot be brigaded or whatever- the only equivalent would be going after any modders who put their mods up for sale. Which will happen, but won't be something I'd either be comfortable with nor advocate particularly as it's an obvious recipe for abuse. You're a bit harsh on the journalists though, ideally they'd all be crusaders for truth and justice, incorruptible and brave; but then, so would Valve's software engineers as well- ideally. Practically, both Gawker and Valve are companies made up of individuals who want a pay cheque, after all.

I'll leave the rest because there's already a thread on it in the gaming forum, and also because this sentence alone is all I really need to make the point. Ethics is not, itself, about what is legal or not, it's about what is ethical. It isn't actually illegal for Gawker to do the vast majority of the stuff they've been accused of doing either, writing biased stuff, clickbaiting, paid for articles etc it's just crappy practice from crappy people- even their use of unpaid interns has not been proven to be illegal, yet. I don't give a flying asterisk if Valve's SSA is technically legal, it's a massive infringement on purchaser's rights* by a company that is monopolistic and responsible for egregious erosion of the practicalities of what game playing is, and all for the benefit of Valve. I don't use Gawker, and I don't use Steam, but in terms of ethics they're pretty much identical whether you like it or not, indeed as previous Valve is already profiting from the equivalent of a Gawker contributor actively plagiarising others' content- with the proviso that, apparently, Valve has been advising people that is actually OK to do so- which is actively illegal (albeit, you have to challenge them via DMCA, but it's exactly as illegal as piracy is, because it is piracy. Indeed, it's worse than baseline piracy because they profit from it). Sheesh, they've started censoring ratings for the paid mods because they're too low, that's straight out of a Gawkeresque playbook. *as someone from New Zealand software is a product, not just a licence, by law, indeed we have a specific addendum on refunds due to it being covered by our CGA; and unlike the EU one there isn't a legalistic workaround to allow them to refuse refunds based on technicalities because that loophole doesn't exist here. The ethical thing would, of course, be for Valve to honour the spirit of the law- lord knows, they have enough money as it is- but, as it actually is, they ignore the spirit of the law and solely work to and around the letter of it. **** them then.

Yes. :smug: It wouldn't, you don't have a leg to stand on legally- though this is peripheral and was used primarily as a hypothetical. But, Paradox used to cancel support for base games when they released paid for expansions, for example, so it definitely has happened, and there is no legal recourse for it. Really? That's... startlingly naive, to be frank. Bethesda's base UI is rubbish, they have no incentive to fix it themselves if they can sell an improved UI for $10 a pop; it actively makes it against their interests to fix things like that. As for games always getting fixed- I don't know where to start, that's not even closely related to actual reality (eg Spacebase DF9, dozens upon dozens of Early Access scams etc). Buggy games get abandoned all the time because you don't have legal recourse, Valve excludes Class Action as part of their SSA, makes it near impossible to get refunds and good luck getting anyone to go small claims court or equivalent to get back 20-40$. Their SSA is about the most consumer unfriendly document anywhere- Origin's, for example, is positively benign in comparison, let alone GOG's. Read their EULA- they claim ownership of all mods anyway, they aren't 'asking' or 'buying' anything. That clause is legally dubious, to say the least, so they aren't trying to enforce it actively- since they would lose, it's mostly a hedge against similarity/ derivative based copyright claims- but it is there. And it opens the way to them compelling people to sell mods, or trying to outright seize them, or forcing mods to go workshop only. It is, quite simply, an abysmal idea practically even if the basic idea that modders be rewarded is theoretically a very good one. As for the last, they have an active interest in not catching problems related to charged mods. They don't get cash for free ones or ones hosted on Nexus, after all, only for those monetised on Workshop. And again, what legal recourse is a free mod maker going to take against Valve? Again, that's very naive. Lol. You might want to read the general gaming forum some time, I don't use steam at all and never will. But plenty of people who do use it are very upset about this. Well, you're not arbiter of what is relevant or not and it is clear that many do consider it relevant. There will be plenty of illegal stuff and plenty of unethical stuff done there, people are already monetising other people's mods which is copyright infringement, with Valve and Bethesda benefitting. Steam's support is rubbish and their curation is rubbish, those are the two things that are essential for this system to work, plus it's a further attempt to put even more of PC gaming behind steam's walled garden. Plus, the two parties that have contributed least to the mod by far get more of a cut than the person who actually made it. I couldn't care less if something is successful or if other people boycott or not. You can only do what you can do, don't do anything though and you'll always fail. Apathy is Death, to quote a famous computer game.

Yeah, it's the same thing, just from the opposite direction. Which is why it's dangerous to go the "don't make fun of people/ don't quote randoms" route, far too easy to end up doing exactly the same thing yourself And extra yeah, Pakman plays devil's advocate and it is what a good interviewer should do. Getting peeved that he does it 'against' GG is childish to the extreme, you can't ask for good journalism then complain when it's applied to your side; that's both hypocritical and juvenile. I couldn't care (much) less about corruption in games media so I'm a bit biased, but the paid mod issue is perfectly relevant when seen as part of a general consumer revolt, same as charging for patches, buggy releases and other crappy practices would be. The general GGer likes gaming and doesn't want it to be changed arbitrarily for the benefit of other parties whether they be rainbow haired 'progressives' pushing an agenda or monopolistic corporates pushing their profit margins.

Modding has never been very open-source anyway. From what I've seen, most (PC gaming) modders... work alone have huge egos keep their source/work files and tools secret seem allergic to the very concepts of collaboration and sharing That runs completely counter to my experience. Except perhaps for the 'huge egos' part, but then again if you're making stuff you usually do it with the thought that it's going to be good and that other people will want to play it, else you wouldn't bother. Certainly from what I've seen of the VtMB, Dark Engine/ Dark Mod, IE game modding, Deus Ex modding, Paradox modding etc etc none of those points are accurate at all, except for a fringe element (eg Tessera for VtMB) who are generally not well regarded at all- and usually make crap mods. It certainly appears that those points are not, generally, true for Bethesda modding either. I didn't like F3 much, but there's tons of 'base' fan created mods, modding tools, script extenders and the like freely available for it as there is (and hopefully will remain) for Skyrim.