Zoraptor

FSA flag, don't make me laugh. May as well put the flag of Gondor or Rohan there too, they contributed only slightly less than the FSA did.

Quen is the 'shield' power. Aard is the 'wind' power.

Looks like the two biggest editors of the gamergate wikipedia page (Ryulong, NorthBySouthBaranof) have both been topic banned now. There's not much more left to happen from that arbitration, by the looks of things. Of the four biggest edit makers two have been topic banned, one exonerated and one giving a warning only.

Agreed, Gamersgate is about ethics in selling you games, not about disseminating personal information. At present they want me to buy 'Dead Island' which I hear had a totally non sexist bloody-yet-shapely-bust-of-a-bust as part of its physical collectors' edition which appalled the delicate flowers at RPS so much they got it pulled. Unfortunately it's a steam key like most of the stuff they try and sell me and I suspect I'd find the gameplay trivial and repetitive, so I will decline.

Helix S1 was... interesting. At times it felt like they'd shot 1 hour episodes that had been crudely cut down to 42 minutes so it was kind of nonsensical but it was entertaining enough (and had at least one completely random but wildly entertaining wtf moment) and I watched the whole thing. The elevator muzak theme and setting giving me a System Shock vibe was one of the main factors though. S2 isn't (so far) related much at all to the setting of S1, apart from obviously being in the same continuity and using most of the same characters it is in a completely different place with a different disease.

In some truly random gaming related news the Greek economist who designed Valve's economic model designed to fleece obsessive compulsives of their cash is set to fleece Germans of their cash become Greece's new finance minister. Expect the Euro crisis to be solved by selling a plethora of regional hats, achievements (1% annualised growth unlocked!), trading cards and gamifying everything under the sun.

Interesting dichotomy between the two versions of what the psychologists did, and from the psychologists themselves at times. Mitchell himself has simultaneously said he didn't have much to do with abuse and that he did and it was a success anyway: Not really sure how to reconcile the two statements unless he is explicitly using the 'enhanced interrogation techniques torture by trained professionals is fine, by amateurs is highly irresponsible' definition of abuse. Still, for a reported 81 million dollars I suspect there'd be a fair number of respected medical professionals whose ethics would suddenly become more elastic let alone if their patriotism were appealed to- and you basically have to believe that you're better than and got the good oil for a better cause than Saddam Hussein, Heinrich Himmler, Hideki Tojo or Laurentiy Beria's torturers who were just plain thugs.

To explain: it's sticking the question marks at the end of aggressive statements that to my mind pushes it from being a reasonable response to being passive aggression, I have no problem with your responses, as illustration, nor with the original question Enoch asked which was entirely reasonable. I don't even have a problem with Gromnir's responses here even if I may disagree with them, and he's someone I'm very likely to find subjective or objective fault with, if fault is there. Specifically, question marks imply a desire to continue engagement and actively invite a response when the (sensible) response- and the one he suggested himself- really ought to be to state your opinion, if wanted (already done), and then leave the thread and subject you don't like. To ask a (hopefully not aggressive, and mostly rhetorical) question myself: what's the point of asking a question if you don't want a response or the thread to continue, and specifically what is the point of asking an aggressively worded question if you don't want said response? It just increases the likelihood of your disliked thread continuing on and you aren't going to get an answer you like because, well, you already know it's a subject you don't like. It is at best classic make work, asking questions for the sake of putting out the person you're asking, at worst it's fishing for a- specifically aggressive- response. Those are both recognised traits of passive aggression. (I've got no problem with Enoch himself, I just think that particular technique is utterly unconstructive and wastes everyone's time)

I'm finding it hard to be upset, to be honest. Yeah, you can avoid it if you want to but at the same time it's trivially easy to get the same content from other sources, indeed I suspect most of the images came from Google Image Search as it was. On most gaming sites the thread would never have been allowed in the first place, nor would a lot of those on the front pages- and any public disagreement with the moderation team would be met with deletion and bans. And there were several moderational notes previous about it skirting the line in terms of acceptability and asking for no bikini shots etc that were adhered to for a week or so and then ignored. I was quite surprised it lasted as long as it did. Fundamentally though, there's no expectation of free speech on company property: their place, their rules.

For some reason I thought the MiG 15's designation was given to a soviet missile, not a fighter. How stereotypically Freudian of me.

You can follow the voting yourself if you want, it's a matter of public record. There's a summary of the voting at the bottom. The patently antiGG arbcom member who initially recused herself then unrecused herself is voting pretty much exactly as expected.

Wikipedia is wrong, plain and simple. Can't say I am surprised since most self identified anarchists are left wing and most anarcho capitalists self identify as libertarians nowadays, but anarchism is and always has been left/ right agnostic, its opposing pole is authoritarianism (also left/ right agnostic). Your thesis is also fatally flawed. For example, abolition of hierarchy is not a left or right tenet at all. In theory Capitalism supports the abolition of rigid hierarchy, in perfect, theoretical capitalism hierarchy is also perfectly fluid, those with ability rise to the top whatever their start in life due to their achievements and the support of the market and everyone is rewarded by the market according to their contribution- perfect social equality because everyone has an equal chance of achieving success. That would make capitalism left wing...

I don't think there's anything suspicious about all the COR articles coming out at least, she probably has sent out a press release and they're spread over two days. Sent out a press release to sympathetic eyes, no doubt, but it doesn't look like "Gamers are dead" pt 2 in that respect, more like Fallout 4 announced!!! articles would be collusion with Bethesda. OTOH I have little doubt COR is... hmm. Unlikely to be unbiased, at very very best.

Seriously bro, that's three passive aggressive questions (the first one, unquoted, was genuine enough). That's a cheap technique when Bruce does it and it's a cheap technique here. Take your own advice from the bottom one and just ignore the thread if it offends you or doesn't interest you. If mootykins and 4chan are so very insignificant the thread will be dead in a few days anyway. (meh, 4chan. Usenet OGs know where the original anarchic anything goes pseudo anonymous posting 'boards' were at, and they didn't have some all powerful 'admin' running everything. Until asterisking Google tried subsuming everything into asterisking 'Google Groups')

In most places in the rest of the world the Democrats would be a right wing party with the Repubs being even further right, that explains most of it. The rest is Bush jr hangover, almost everyone outside the US loathed him, so anyone associated with him gets automatically disliked. I didn't actually mind Romney particularly, he gave the impression of being a moderate guy saying immoderate stuff because he needed to fire up the core support. I suspect you'd get significantly different results if you asked "has Obama done a good job?" vs "has Obama done a good job compared to how McCain or Romney would have performed" from non US people.

It's also an opt-out, not an opt in. And it's opt out for a very good reason, most people won't opt out so they get the benefit of one click impulse buys while saying that the option is there not to store details. In theory it shouldn't make a difference and it should be securely encrypted in any case, but it only takes one site with crap security even if it doesn't store CC if someone is using the same username/ password then you can potentially just log in and look the CC info up. I far prefer estores like gamersgate or GOG that don't store your details under any circumstances to those that you have to opt out of. Only one I use that has my details stored is Amazon, and that's because I use my Brit CC there and it has to be registered to work in any case. Having said that, if you're dumb or unlucky enough to get a keylogger or trojan none of that is going to help, with or without the additional security features like the non embossed non retained security codes.

Six years of free money helps a lot, shows why they spend so much time trying to make sure the USD remains the world's reserve currency, with the amount of cash being printed they'd be half way to Zimbabwe if most of the world's lenders didn't have a stake in the USD holding its value. And a lot of people have simply given up looking for work so aren't officially counted as unemployed any more. It's ironic in a 'Yes, Minister' kind of way, but unemployed people going off welfare even if they are not employed is a good statistical result for governments as the unemployment rate goes down when those (still in any sensible definition) unemployed are off books as unemployed. Most of the fundamental problems are still there, Too Big To Fail Banks have just got bigger, income and wealth imbalances, massive indebtedness, lack of genuine competitiveness. The US economy looks better than that in Europe, but it's mostly because the buboes have got a good layer of makeup put over them, they're still suppurating and oozing underneath. Still, Obama is better than McCain or Romney by a country mile, faint praise as that may be, he's just not as good as he should or could have been and a massive disappointment when measured against that yard stick. Far too much vacillation, far too much dreaming of bipartisanship when his opponents had not interest in it etc. Still, the Repubs will probably be judged worse by history, not least for their utter lack of class about losing to a black guy.

It's the "progressive stack". A white male is mocking the religion of people of color. Thus "punching down". Thus unacceptable. The justification they would use would be broadly equivalent to Star Trek's Prime Directive. It's fine to influence your own people (The Federation/ The west) because that's done on an equal footing but others must be left to develop as they see fit without outside influence because of an imbalance in power. It doesn't really work in ST and is very routinely ignored in plot; certainly doesn't work in the real world either, outside of theory. It would be interesting to see if Gene Roddenberry were still alive if he ended up in the extremist SJW fringe, some of his stuff in ST original was genuinely progressive (ie in a good way) but some stuff in TNG ended up being almost parody progressive.

Steam has been hacked twice, was using a poor encryption algorythym at least one time they were hacked (at least they salted though, so they were better than Sony. Now there's a company that can be blamed for being security numpties) and had an exploit identical to that mentioned in one of the OP articles that was unpatched for ages. And up until a couple of days ago it could totally Pool of Radiance your HD if you were using Linux- not really a bug either since the comment on the code made it clear the writer knew it was a stupid dangerous shortcut, but put it in anyway*. Realistically though, there is nothing comprehensive any company can do to protect against people who use the same username and weak, always so very weak, password across every single account they use. And who, of course, swear blind that they haven't done that and always use a strong password, regularly change it in any case, have never fallen for phishing scams or installed unknown programs, didn't post on facebook saying they were away for a week that time they got burgled etc etc. They'll always insist that it is not their fault, that the company has been breached rather than them. Origin has proper security- as much as it can have, and pretty much identical to that steam has now- in place, but people bear responsibility for taking at least basic precautions themselves and if there were a general breach there'd be far more cases at the very least. They just make an easy target. Sheesh, Steam got busted monitoring people's internet traffic via dns and the press thanked them for it when they claimed it was an anti cheating measure, had it been Origin it would have been evidence that EA were trying to drink your soul. *Which is why having a client- whoever makes it- with all its added vulnerabilities and idiosyncracies is stupid, but that horse has well and truly bolted.

I'd imagine that both Disney (to promote the new movies) and GOG (because they would be most popular and they have a limited title contract) would prefer a lot of Star Wars titles to be released over most other titles. SW is certainly the LucasArtsFilm franchise with the greatest popular resonance and current exposure- even though they also made a lot of sentimental and critical favourites outside of SW as well, especially in the adventure genre. (The three non SW games already released are Sam and Max Hit the Road, Indiana Jones/ Atlantis and The Secret of Monkey Island)

He's right though, constant Russification of threads is boring- though I'd say that anti-CH protests there at least are as relevant as the pro ones elsewhere or the antis in Pakistan or Niger. On crowd size, I'd very happily accept a scale of very big rather than a number*. I would not personally be surprised by 1 million as Kadyrov has a lot of clout and the patron system where you turn out to show solidarity with your leader is very big in the Caucasus, but 500k or whatever are all plausible as well. Estimating crowd size is certainly inaccurate and prone to over/ under exaggeration both genuinely and or broadly PR/ narrative fulfilment reasons. *My favourite crowd estimate 'yeah right' moment was for a 'Christmas in the Park' concert they have here annually. We'd get ridiculous estimates in the mid hundred thousands. Right up until someone pointed out that it was meant to be a charitable event, and if 500,000 people really turned up the average donation was 30c per person making us rather extreme skinflints. Next day the number was revised down to a far more realistic 70k.

You could have some fun with that logic though. Watch V for Vendetta, dob Hugo Weaving in for being a dangerous anarchist plotting to destroy Big Ben... And isn't Baldwin's character actually buds with a black guy in FMJ? Haven't seen it for probably fifteen years so my recollection may be off.

If you write 20-30 articles stating much the same thing you have 20-30 articles from 'authoritative' sources that can be cited on Wikipedia or by other articles as 'proof' that GG is Anders Breivik/ ISIS/ Torqemada/ Celine Dion/ Pauly Shore/ Vlad Tepes/ Sauron/ Darth Vader/ cultural marxism is a nazi plot/ whatever; as well as the very important aim of Establishing the Narrative. So you can write 'neutral' encyclopaedic phrases like "Gamergate has been compared to ISIS, Genghis Khan, Pol Pot and Ming the Merciless [1-20] ". It's PR 101, get the message out, stick to it, repeat it and brook no compromise. Circularising things so that it appears there is widespread or even universal (except those evil doers, of course) support is a very useful technique for that. That is how any pressure group functions. Including GG at least to an extent, though obviously more via self publishing and a few select publications rather than concerted media push; and without the obvious authoritarian preaching of the cultural marxists.

I've only seen Bowling for Columbine of Moore's films, and there he grandstanded and mugged the camera making it all about him in a manner which was pretty disgusting. And counter productive too, I ended up thinking Moore was a cretin and feeling rather sorry for Charlton Heston- I'm pretty sure that wasn't the intended result. On Russia, there is a fair amount of domestic support for the measures and they are applied even handedly. The Al-J news report had some rather better angles on the crowd, and it probably was about a million as Kadyrov was aiming for. Guess it's just another example of politicians obeying the rules of the political game and giving the people what they want (that's the argument for Cameron and Obama wanting to sniff your underwear draw to prevent terrorism being OK, after all...)

That's like saying if the guy down he road is a burglar and manages to get away with it- or even not- then I'm being punished for not being a burglar myself. There's no punishment for being good, you just accept that there will be punishment if you are bad. What a criminal does is largely, since you do have certain extra rights to stop people being actively bad such as self defence against assault, irrelevant to what you do. If I decide to get some of that great burglar action because my neighbour gets away with it that just makes me a criminal as well.