Zoraptor

This is the classic excuse, though. "The conspiracy theory I believe in is reasonable because the people behind it aren't accountable to reason!" Throw all the "enemies" in a box with a dehumanized acronym label, go on feeling that you belong to the group with the righteous cause, and laugh off those on "your side" who say or do hurtful things. Please, I'd actually disagree that the hypocrisy and self importance of SJWs is related to whether it's a conspiracy or not, you can have a conspiracy without the unquestioning self belief and you can have the self belief without the conspiracy. Plus, of course, pointing out that both sides do unpleasant things is hardly laughing off. That was just in reply to your "conspiracies don't form and hold together unless all the conspirators think there is something really important motivating them"- I was pointing out that clearly SJWs do consider such things critically important, and clearly there was a 'conspiracy'- your term, not mine- because they had a closed mailing list coordinating the response. Now, you can argue that the mailing list doesn't exist (which it does) or that SJWs don't consider such things important (self evidently incorrect) but you can't really start shifting the goal posts around to using acronyms to 'dehumanise', because everyone does that. The 'conspiracy'- again, your term- is confirmed. That SJWs consider such things important is confirmed. Now, I might dislike SJWs rather a lot and some issue can be taken with using the term, but that wouldn't be why I labelled their actions as coordinated. I labelled them as such because they incontrovertibly were. And really, there isn't any other term other than SJW, I usually use antiGG but that ain't appropriate for events that are before #GG was even a thing. (Nice rhetorical constructs by the way, use of the passive aggressive questions, labelling things yourself ('conspiracy') then criticising based on your own label etc. With any luck Bruce will learn a thing or too, might improve the quality of his trolling to near oby levels.)

Nah, they had a mailing list, someone on it even leaked the emails, so it was coordinated. And it is clear from any interaction with SJWs that they really, really, do think their activism is of immense importance. They're exactly the wrong kind of illiberal 'liberal' who have always thought it absolutely critical to tell others how to think, it's just another iteration of it. Gamergate as a 'movement' had little directly to do with ZQ at all, it started a fair bit after that initial controversy, it had more to do with the response to it. And I actually said in the first thread that Grayson cannot be held accountable for a retroactive conflict of interest. Though he's still a terrible writer.

Heh, Faraci et alia's ISIS comparisons have finally got results, ISISbot has taken notice of their attention. Yes, it is. The whole thing would have blown over in a week if there had not been a coordinated attempt to censor every mention of it- up to and including using DMCA takedown notices. As soon as that happened the Streisand Effect took over, and the censorship became larger than the story. Though, of course, the antiGG crowd never mention that. It also certainly didn't help that ZQ had publicly made some contextually pretty inflammatory statements about men cheating on women being equivalent to rape and then decided to cheat repeatedly on her bf. Then you had the- obviously coordinated, as well- 'Gamers are dead' articles attacking the people who theoretically at least give most of the people writing the articles their livelihoods, though of course the antiGG crowd no longer mention those. And of course the doxxing of GG people, fake accusations based on said doxxing, death threats based on said doxxing (usually laughed at though), comparisons to ISIS, ddosing Gamersgate (useless SJWs, illiterate and can't even ddos a site with multiple domains properly), using smurf/ sockpuppet accounts, general and repeated hypocrisy/ cognitive dissonance/ irony being something for putting creaseys in shirtys, and verifiable false flags like claiming to be 4chan and threatening to release nudes of Hermione Grainger when it was an SJW affiliated PR firm 'trying to raise awareness', after being caught out because they too were utterly incompetent and left identifying information in their Apache server config. Though, of course, the antiGG crowd never mention those either. The 'Zoe Quinn incident' itself isn't the problem, it's just a symptom.

I don't understand why that is an issue Monte If you think the game is worth it then invest the time, isn't your consideration the same for all games we might play ? But what if it's crap? Then I'll have to invest 100 more hours complaining about it on the internet- that'd be not just 100 but 200 hours wasted!

It's Bruce, He's doing exactly what he did a few pages ago, and exactly what he consistently does all too frequently.

Doesn't really matter, can't change it now. Leif Day sounds like some hippy kumbaya lentil eating festival, Erikson Day sounds like a Sony promotion for cell phones and there'd be lots of paperwork in having Erikson, Ohio, or Washington, District of Eriksonia. Bit under 500 years. Also Polynesians came from the other direction from either Hawai'i or Easter Island which given their stone age technology is pretty impressive, though exactly when is an open question due to there not really being enough dateable evidence, just things like kumara being widespread.

Pretty good episode of The Walking Dead, if there's one thing it does very well it's the atmosphere and big set pieces. I do wonder if they've blown half the season budget on the first episode and the next few will be zombie lite though. And hey, Maggie remembered she has a sister, finally.

'Troll' is a hopelessly ill defined group, are we going for subjectively judged trolls or self confessed ones- in which case, lol, self confessed psychopaths/ narcissists. And in the other, might as well write a paper saying that, I dunno, gamergate people/ sjws are psychopathic narcissist machiavellian sadists, because they consider each other trolls; and you can find some people in each group who clearly do exhibit those same traits.

Canadian thanksgiving celebrates the time the US invaded Canada while Britain was fighting most of Napoleon's conquered Europe alone, then got the White House and Washington torched for their cheek. Still, at least you guys got the most hard to sing national anthem in the world out of it.

Yep my bad, March was when it was acknowledged but it did actually start in December.

(Slow) exponential growth is a concern for Africa, but not for western countries. See the 15 week span for a (airborne transmission) flu pandemic, this Ebola outbreak has been going since March so is already twice as long as that projection and has infected 'only' thousands despite the poor healthcare in the effected countries. Having a slow transmission rate it is very susceptible to plain old quarantine, you are not going to get thousands infected as a single flu patient zero could easily do.

Jericho is good, though the abbreviated second season was a solid step down in quality. Survivors (which I'm pretty sure Monte linked to the original iteration of, given the Terry Nation ref) was very good as well. Second season of Revolution was actually pretty decent as well, though the first season, especially the first part, was not great at all. I'd tend to put TWD (which I like, a bit despite myself. The story flip flops too often but the set pieces and atmosphere is probably the best of anything current) or Falling Skies (don't like it much, can't really explain why) into different criteria though, as they have primarily zombies and aliens as threats rather than the environment/ humans. Which is a bit inconsistent, as I'd definitely put Fallout into the post apoc box despite the super mutants...

'Experts' haven't had a great record with the previous scares. There certainly will be another Spanish Flu type event at some stage, and even another Black Death is probably inevitable long term as well, especially if we keep on abusing antibiotics ridiculously. Ebola, as it stands, simply isn't infective enough to be either though. You still have a miniscule proportion of the population in west Africa infected even though they have very poor health care systems and Ebola has been present for months, a few thousand deaths in an area with 100s of millions of population is not going to destroy civilisation, western or otherwise. There are three reasons why you end up with hysteria, it is in some people's best interests, bad news gets reported so you tend to hear from experts with strongly negative views rather than those who are more measured, and there is the potential for a genuine game changing epidemic from something which kills around half of those infected and for which there is no confirmed effective and no mass producible cure. The last two are strongly related, if you have someone say that there is little cause for concern at present, but there will be if Ebola goes airborne it tends to be the last bit rather than the first that gets the major coverage and attention.

Haven't heard that they are, but there is at least somewhat of a tradition of it- the Hashashim and Sudan's Whirling Dervishes were pretty famously off their trollies most of the time. And there are allegations that a lot of suicide bombers are doped up as well.

Shot full of arrows, fell off tall building, hit dumpster on way down, hit concrete at bottom. Guess that's one way of trying to avoid the comic book 'nobody is really dead' cliché, though it approached South Parkesque parody in execution.

I'll admit it's actually one of the smallest problems I had with DXIW, as I see what they were going for and why they took that route, and actually have sympathy for them trying as well.

Dell owns Alienware, actually. But I would imagine it just depends on what you buy from them. Yep, they make overpriced pieces of **** as well as run of the mill pieces of ****. (University I worked at used Dell, and they were OK. Apart from the laptop whose battery caught fire, motherboard warped and HD failed all within six months)

As long as they don't go the Deus Ex: Invisible War route and try to cover every option for end game choice despite them being mutually exclusive I'll be right with whichever ending they pick. I'll probably pick up ME4 at some point, assuming it isn't MP only or something silly, but there's just too little information to really know when and for how much.

Pretty sure that the canon (or 'canon', now) is that both Handmaiden and Disciple were present with (female) Exile in any case. I'd go for that fine fellow HK47 on the romance front, has the most game friendly philosophical take on it plus takes the mick out of both Carth and Bastila romances. And I didn't even like him much in K2.

My big issue with ME2's combat was that near everything felt plink-plink, not just biotics. And as such playing on higher difficulties was not actually more difficult, it just meant that everything took a lot longer and was a lot more boring. I actually quite liked ME1's overheating mechanic.

Who would have thought Al- Baghdadi was a fan of Crusader Kings Jihad Emirs 2? He's done quite well with 12 Emir level titles, more than enough to claim Caliph. Bet it's not an ironman game and he's been abusing save/ reload though, understandable as those F18s from the Sunset Invasion dlc are totally OP and need nerfing, typical Paradox with their balance failure.

They should have made Revan a woman rather than The Exile. Works better, and would have the added bonus of making all those 14 year old Revan/ Bastila fans cry bitter tears.

Yeah, I got three copies of Jack Keane. Actually I did get some completely random indie game I'd never heard of last time they did something similar.

A serious analysis, well OK. 1) None of the Mass Effects are 'proper' RPGs. The character development part was always very very RPG lite. I find little reason to care if what was always primarily a shooter with upgradeable powers remains that way. 1a) Even the conversation based system was never more than RPG lite. There were plenty of forced decisions and 'fake choices' in every game. 1b) The minigames for hacking and the like were, like most minigames, pointless whether it be frogger equivalents or code matching. Don't care when they were there, don't care when they (and associated skills) were removed 2) Bell curve story is accurate. Like most games the end is poor, like many games the beginning is too. 2a) The really bad parts: Deus Ex Machina, Kai ****, Matrix 2 style 'end boss'. 2b) The good parts: Tuchanka, Rannoch in particular. Notably, both were built up very well over all three games of the series 2c) ME2 is to blame for many of ME3's story problems, it didn't do its job as part of a coherent narrative 3) I liked a lot of the misc changes 3a) Can't say I like the change to exploration exactly, but then exploration in ME1 was terrible, and in ME2 boring and repetitive- so ME3's was an improvement. 3b) I did like the incidental overheard missions. 3c) Allers was dumb, Vega was there so new players could get information on prior events since he wasn't there either 3d) Once they changed the requirements I couldn't care less about the MP hooks. 3e) Don't have any more problem with day 1 dlc than with any other, but Javik should not have been dlc, from a story perspective. Overall I'd still rate ME3 highest of the three games. It had the best combat overall which has always been the meat of ME, whatever anyone says. Its story shone when it had been built up properly by the prior titles, but stank when it was newly introduced stuff or retcons. The end was rubbish, but then the ends of both previous games (and most games in general) were hardly stellar either. Mainly though, I've never been a particularly big ME fan and didn't have massive expectations going in.

Their breath weapon is limited to 3/day. (Not actually sure if even the IE games implemented that rule...)