Zoraptor

The Chinese are hardly benign philanthropists but at least they are giving something back in terms of infrastructure. They're far better than that bunch of hypocritical holier than thou carpet baggers from the Old World. And going back to the original topic for a second, we tried the catcall video here to somewhat different results.

I won't be playing on release, still haven't got around to ordering a new computer and won't prior to Christmas. It's not so much the ordering which would take ten minutes but the price/ performance research that will stop me. Strangely enough, the only part of my 8 year old current PC that is below min spec is the CPU.

http://www.gamesradar.com/ask-gr-anything-how-much-do-game-journalists-earn/ Keep in mind it is dated 2011 though. It should also be borne in mind that some major players employ unpaid interns to do a lot of work, indeed Gawker (and hence Kotaku) is currently being sued for 'mislabelling' employees as interns and not paying them properly. On the matter of what reviewers should and should not take into account when reviewing it is very much a question of what I can only really call 'declaration of interests'. Explicit interest sites can mark on 'ideological safety' whether they be SJW, Christian, Muslim, Communist or whatever. You don't go to a Christian gaming site without expecting Christianity to be a factor, that's not reasonable- and if you do then that's your problem, not theirs. If you're a general interest site you should not mark on ideology unless you have specifically said that you do so. That's not to say that it can not be mentioned, but if the outside, external interests of the reviewer are given undue weight the review cannot be good. Judging on gameplay, graphics and the like are inherently necessary to the process of reviewing, and you have to assume that your views are legitimate when writing or you wouldn't write one at all. OTOH, external ideology is not inherently necessary, you don't have to assume your views are legitimate and necessary in that case. The example I'd give is something like ME2, I thought some of the poses and camera angles on Miranda were pretty cringe inducing. Mark it down for it? Nah. Same as I wouldn't mark it down for being made by Bioware or EA- or more accurately since I have nothing particularly against Bioware/ EA, mark Fallout 4 down for being made by Bethesda. That's all external from the game itself and just me pushing my own agenda which others reading the review may well not share. If I'm pushing any other agenda than whether my readers will like it I'm not doing a good review. (I have rather more tolerance for activist reviews when they aren't actually labelled as reviews, such as the 'Wot I Thinks' that RPS do and do not give scores as they are not reviews per se, but are explicitly what the person thinks- and can not be metacriticed either)

Oh no, and then it is even the weakest Fallout game. Well, if you rule out Fo3 that is. Herve Caen is pleased you liked FOBOS more than FOT and FO3.

Volo's being Volo more in the gaming journalism/ harassment thread, mispelling Awesome Protocol is pretty minor on the Volo scale.

Don't think there was any legal action though I'm not certain, a quick search suggests not. HH had no money to spare (which is one of the complaints about constructive bankrupting, the victim pretty much by definition has no money to make legal complaints with) and Bethesda... well, it's probably telling that despite HH refusing to work and seemingly quite clearly breaching contract by working on other titles there was no legal action from them despite their reputation for litigiousness. (Or in other words it ended with both sides walking away from the contract, the work reverted to Beth and HH had no further obligation to them)

Maybe, that was the game where the developer claimed that Bethesda were deliberately trying to bankrupt them by arbitrarily failing milestones and not paying them so as to buy them out cheaply, so there were definitely two sides to that story.

Same happened to me as well with full upgrades and loyal companions, castle or town could be saved but not both, I just put it down to only one place per game being saveable to promote replays.

Being called a moran is a mark of respect, and means that you're an online pal, better than a mere acquaintance though not close enough to be invited to a wedding.

That's the top comment on the video, written by him. He's implying the Utah threat was by someone out of country, something he could not know unless it was him. That the threat came from out of the country was very strongly suspected since it was made, as was that that was the reason it was not taken seriously by the University. His english ain't good enough to determine what he means at all, his pronouns, tenses etc are all over the place.

They rallied around him when VD banned him. He also has a unique special tag which he doesn't have here, and everyone knows unique tags at the codex are a sign of respect.

Unconfirmed list of LA releases for tomorrow. Can't be confirmed absolutely at this point but certainly looks legit. KOTOR (1) Tie Fighter XWing Sam and Max Hit the Road Indiana Jones Atlantis Secret of Monkey Island

While it has been pointed out by others, to illustrate... "Instead of being heckled by Tea Baggers and Conservatards, politicians would be heckled by voters" There's no implication of excluding LA majors or whatever, just of preventing them from setting the narrative and rules solely according to their own desires and wishes. And, perhaps, a certain amount of disdain for those who would use the cause of 'freedom' as an excuse to stifle debate and enforce their world view.

There are a lot of safeguards and precautions required when slaughtering meat legitimately, it isn't just that it is old, worthless hence very cheap horses being slaughtered and labelled as beef- that is after all what happens to the equivalent boner cows once their time dairying is up- it's also that if they are killed for mislabelling purposes they are often killed in circumstances where few of the hygiene etc costs associated with legitimate slaughter are present. After all, you're breaking laws and regulations by mislabelling anyway, so why abide by hygiene regs as well? So you have a cheaper meat usually used for petfood (or glue) being prepared more cheaply and then sold as a more expensive product, if you can sell at $2 premium you make several hundred extra dollars per carcass. Particularly in Eastern Europe horses are still used quite a lot in agriculture, so there are more available for slaughter than here or in the US.

Not really. Even if you're pro-gamergate you could get the rape/death threats, and doxxed. It seems being a public figure in this issue at all can get you doxxed/threatened. Most of the trolls are third party and simply have nothing to do with either side. It's a joke article, from an offshoot of The Onion.

Not necessarily. There's nothing precluding lots of pesticide use, you're just limited in the pesticides that can be used. Garlic sprays, plant oils (neem etc), derris, pyrethrum, btk (Bacillus thuringiensis var Karstaki) and copper sprays are all available. They all except copper have the advantage- from the consumer pov- of being non persistent, short lived and non toxic, withholding period on pyrethrum for example is 1 day which for some non organic pesticides it can be up to a month. And that's why one of the big complaints about GMOs is that when they create insect resistant plant strains that manufacture things like the cry proteins from btk they are giving a purely short term advantage, like engineering penicillin production into chickens or pigs would be it's only useful until resistance develops- at which point both the new strains and the original chemical are redundant.

Then you're better off saying nothing, really. If the only reason you're posting is to... make you feel good or stroke your ego or make someone else feel bad- and you admit it- then you should really consider not posting, and if you do don't expect everyone to react well. Also... Well, no, you aren't. If you're going to decide who is 'productive' and try to run off anyone deemed non productive then you definitely aren't always open to discussion, you're sometimes open but sometimes just want to yell instead- basically, exactly what the loud faction of SJWs love to do by using all the labels you find annoying. I've never had any particular problem with Bryy or aluminumO3 or Enoch to think that discussing something with them is pointless, even if I accept there's little realistic chance to change minds. If you're overly antagonistic even that small chance is gone. I think everyone understands the impulse to vent unproductively and most people will do so one time or another, but it really isn't a good look.

Meh. You aren't going to convince anyone by dogpiling, and I'd like to think of that as being something the SJWs primarily do. If you're going to try and point out that someone is being inconsistent you're far better off just being straight and plain about it rather than trying to score points or going overboard on the rhetoricals. Yeah, it is annoying that a lot of antiGG decide that anything has to presaged with disavowing misogyny or whatever- and that is definitely a PR/ rhetorical technique to frame narrative- and it is inconsistent as well but if your aim is to actually convince someone that that is the case you aren't going to do it by being overly aggressive, you're far more likely to just convince the person you're a asterisks and drive them away. You probably won't convince them with sweet reason either, but at least you have a chance. And if you think simply driving someone away is sweet victory then, well, you've got a lot more in common with the SJWs than you think.

Typically a tree with fewer, smaller fruit has fruit that taste better. It's particularly apparent with grapes, as low yield years tend to have best quality wines while bumper crops yield large amounts of lower quality wine. As with most things the benefits of Organic produce really depends upon how they are produced- typically they still have a lot of the bad inputs of non organic stuff like reliance on fossil fuelled tractors and some of the organic chemicals used are pretty unpleasant even if they are 'natural' (an arbitrary distinction, copper based sprays are not really natural and not very good for the environment, but most organic schedules allow them). On the other hand GMOs especially have some extremely dodgy PR claims as well. Roundup Ready crops, quite apart from locking farmers into cripplingly restrictive contracts to keep Monsanto's trademarked (but not longer patented) glyphosate herbicide relevant and make it extremely difficult to escape from Monsanto once signed, claim to lower the need for herbicides. Well, no, if you can freely spray a crop with herbicide that doesn't kill them but kills weeds you do so, if spraying will kill your crops as well you don't. With non roundup redy crops you can only spray once, with roundup ready you can drown them in roundup if you so desire. (Somewhat peripherally, cows themselves are not really significant contributors to greenhouse gasses. They produce methane which is very effective as one, but is also unstable and does not accumulate. Their food, of course, comes from crops which are made primarily from... atmospheric CO2 so breakdown products of that are carbon neutral at worst, only transport costs and the like aren't)

Don't know if Al-Sisi has children, the thing that really stuffed Mubarak was that he went for a dynastic succession for his son Gamal, and a lot of the vested powers hated that. The vested interests are why Morsi was in an impossible situation from the outset, the military controls a large proportion of Egypt's nominal economy and was used to running things with only oversight from (Air Force General) Mubarak, the judiciary (laughably referred to by Sisi and others as 'independent') was full of hard core Mubarak apparatchniks as were the police, and the Salafis were funded from Saudi Arabia who have banned the MB and hated Egypt being run by a Qatari client. All in all there was no way he could have run the country properly even had he wanted to, because nobody else wanted him to. It suited the military especially to have things not work, so they could step in to 'save the nation', but it also suited the police, judiciary and Saudi Arabia as well. So, nothing worked. (Western politicians and media pundits love to self deceive about the extent of liberal support and the arab spring, but even when including every non salafi/ islamist seat as being liberal- including the Mubaraknics as were etc- they managed less than a third of members in either elected chamber, even though Morsi failed to get the Saddamesque 96%< Al-Sisi vote share in the presidential vote)

Eh, they said that only three people had close contact with this guy, which is pretty low if no precautions were being taken. Though it would be somewhat ironic if the US did have problems, given that Nigeria had a guy turn up and basically drop dead at an airport near the beginning of the outbreak and they managed to stamp the outbreak out despite all their problems.

That would depend on the actual balance of support/ boycott vis-a-vis Gamergate. If the negative impact is on people who don't buy there anyway it won't have any effect, if the people shopping there have the ability to spell it won't have any effect or if GG people or people who don't care represent their clientele it won't have any effect. Don't think Gamersgate is publicly traded either and does not rely on advertising. Realistically, they have the far more significant trouble that all Steam Key Resellers have of being beholden to the good will of their primary competitor for survival and thus being practically irrelevant, since they're selling their competitor's product which can be withdrawn any time their competition gets too hot; but that's wholly independent of Gamergate and more to do with various other factors more suitable for another thread.

Funny, I can actually hear WJC saying that while reading.

Nastiness is not a defining characteristic of Salafism though, at least in the respect that all nasty (sunni) muslims are Salafi. MB, like AK, are (broadly orthodox, sunni) Islamist rather than Salafi, who many Sunnis don't even regard as actually being Sunni. It's all rather complicated though, due to various Gulf States supporting different movements of differing levels of whackiness that look fairly similar from the outside. In terms of Egypt, since Qatar backs the MB the Salafi Al-Nour party (second largest after the MB's political arm, and considerably more extreme) stood aside when al-Sisi launched his coup because they're beholden to Saudi Arabia, who don't like any other arab state having influence and think Qatar are uppity. That is one of the primary reasons for all the in fighting in Syria and in Libya, as well as the rise of ISIS. Qatar actually has more Salafis by population proportion than Saudi, but basically all Salafi (AKA Wahhabi, though they don't like that term) movements are sponsored and run by Saudi either officially or through back channels because Saudi is their spiritual home. Very little in the Middle East makes consistent sense from a western perspective, which is why the west keeps on stuffing up. Saudi sponsors Egypt, who then bomb a Saudi proxy militia in Libya- you look at it from the outside and just end going huh? a lot.

Not really, they were getting consistently (though incompetently) DDOSed such that some people could not access the site for some time, and that will have cost them money.