Zoraptor
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Everything posted by Zoraptor
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Not really for that analysis though. Don't get me wrong, it's certainly an accurate representation, but it's a representation that has for the most part been true for a long time (decade+). The Russian economy has not grown as much as it 'should' given their natural resources and the high energy prices over the past decade, not just recently. There's been plenty of political unrest of various sorts, it's just now a bit more palatable and thus noticeable to the west as it's shifted (somewhat) away from the Zhirinovsky/ Zhuganov types, though it's notable that the alternative labels most commonly seen at opposition rallies are still the old Soviet flag, and the older Imperial flag. There have also been plenty of ethnic and terrorist stuff happening (outside the Caucasus too) over the past decade+, the recent ones are just recent and a lot more high profile since the Olympics are coming soon. And there have always been discrepancies between the elite- Putin had notable fallings out with oligarchs/ power players when he became Pres first time (Berezovsky et al), nothing recent is as significant as that. Putin will of course lose power at some stage, it's inevitable. Should be noted though that Putin himself was not really a 'big shot' until relatively soon before Yeltsin left, only being a politician for around 8 months prior, and was rushed straight into the PM's job, so it's not like there's ever been a western style system to bring through the new leaders. Personally I'd tend to presume that Medvedev would be the obvious successor anyway, he's not that old.
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Fixed. Personally, I'd far prefer CDPR (or any other developer) be able to get full 100% potato rather than GabeN saying no! I want part of potato! you get medium potato only! but I'm funny like that. You might like to consider whether the 'convenience' and lack of 'paranoia' is worth $16 going to Valve rather than the people who actually made the game. Or not, entirely up to you. (Of course CDPR will get only half potatoe from me, download will be far too big otherwise but at least that's a technical limitation)
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Mentioned in the random news/ EA ate my dog! thread, but TW3 is confirmed to be DRM free, except for people who hate freedom, wodka and potatoes and buy on steam, of course. Which is nice, I guess, but given that the retail version last time could be made DRM free in about fifteen seconds I'm more interested in whether we'll get saddled with Australia's moronic puritanical censorship and the Namco Bandai antipode tax again, as fixing the consequences of those took a whole two minutes!
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Troika is the very definition of why you do get businessmen rather than 'artists' running companies. Full of ideas (not really original ideas though) but desperately needed a Bobby Kotick type applying periodic pressure to their dangly bits to get them to work in a somewhat more efficient manner.
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I knew them NKKK, a company of infinite jest? Friends, Obsidianites, internauts, lend me your eyes; I come to bury EA, not to praise them. The evil that companies do lives after them, the good is oft interred with their shares. So let it be with EA. The noble RPGCodex hath told EA was decline, if was so 'tis a grevious fault, and grievous hath EA answered for it. Here under leave of 4chan and the rest- for they are honourable men- come I to speak at EA's funeral. He was my friend, faithful and just to me: But GabeN says he was ambitious; And GabeN is an honourable man. I hath brought many games home whose cost did the EA coffers fill: in this did in EA seem ambitious? When that the poor have cried, EA hath wept: ambition should be made of sterner stuff: yet reddit says he was ambitious; And reddit is an honourable man. I speak not to disprove what RPS spoke, but here I am to speak what I do know. You all did love him once, not without cause: what cause withholds you then, to mourn for them? Oh judgement, thou art fled to ActivisionBlizzard, and men have lost their reason. Bear with me; my heart is in the coffin there with EA, and I must pause till it come back to me.
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Unfortunately Bruce is right- it wasn't a movie, it was a documentary. So was Bad Taste, for that matter.
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Bought/ donated by supporters (Turkey, Qatar, Saudi) for the most part, with a dollop of quid pro quo expected in the event of them winning. That is why there's been some fighting over the (very limited size) oil fields amongst the rebels as they allow more flexible purchases on the open market via bootlegged oil. The situation is actually pretty similar for the government at this point, I'd fully expect them to be buying entirely on credit with the understanding that Chinese and Russian firms get reconstruction contracts, and getting donations from Iran/ Hezbollah. I very much doubt Assad is getting much at all in the way of taxes or custom duties at this point...
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If Obama did not know it was almost certainly because he was advised it would be sensible not to know so he could plead ignorance in at least a semi honest fashion. That happens all the time with such things. It does get somewhat amusing to see the same people claim to have strong oversight and ownership over intelligence matters when it's a positive thing (eg Obama and ObL) but suddenly and oh so surprisingly not have the same sort of oversight when it's a negative thing; but politicians gonna do what politicians do, else they wouldn't be politicians. It's certainly not limited to the US, our PM defended allowing our CIA equivalent to spy on us by saying he would oversee everything strongly and follow a strong moral code to protect privacy (which, of course, could not be enshrined in the law itself because... well, just trust him, he's got a nice smile after all!) and that was after it was found he'd allowed many (80+) previous illegal spying activities- which somehow despite his 'strong oversight' he still "didn't know about". Wouldn't be in the least bit surprised if Key/ Cameron/ Plastic Hair/ GillRuddAbbot as well as Obama knew it was going on, even if they too deliberately avoided the details.
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1) Wow, great allies you make. Selling RPGs to Assad and then turning around and selling them to the Rebels so they can fight Assad. Priceless. Russians even backstab their friends. Yes, and we'll now get a comment from Fox News Special Correspondent and totally not convicted criminal Ollie North on how the US would never, never in a million years do such a thing themselves. The russians are fairly honest about arming both sides because they know if they don't arm the rebels as well (albeit through intermediaries), someone else will.
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I wouldn't say hypocritical, because both the tendency to excuse stuff from your 'side' and to demonise or make unpleasant/ racist/ homophobic chants or even just generalise from example at the other side are the same base phenomenon with differing outward effects. The real problem lies with our inherent and fundamental tendency towards tribalism, rather like religion football tends to give a framework and purpose to people who are... idiots really, but if they weren't being idiotic in that way they'd almost certainly find another way. At its heart the football phenomenon says "wear our colours, sing our songs, chant our chants, support our team; and those [opponent] fans suck totally, as does their team" and many people take it extremely seriously. That's not a recipe for reason and moderation anywhere.
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UK Muslims targeted for speaking out about terror
Zoraptor replied to Walsingham's topic in Way Off-Topic
'Texanistan', not Texasistan. This is a very important differentiation! They could even keep the state flag as well, just add a crescent moon to it... -
They abuse their own as well. Big stink a year or so back when a (St Petersburg?) team got its first black player and he got flak from the home fans, though there was some talk that it was due to them using exclusively Russians up to then so not explicitly because he was black but because he was foreign. But it's the sort of thing relatively little attention is paid to when it doesn't have a useful second role as a stick to beat with, Lazio had to play several games behind closed doors last year due to similar issues for example yet you don't hear that being used to show that all Italians are racist, and you don't generally hear people complain about the far harsher anti gay laws in places like Saudi- or Qatar, given that they've got a world cup coming as well. That might be because they'll just tell the west to FOAD, but it isn't like Russia won't either, to all practical purposes. It's not that they aren't bad at all though, it's just that when something happens in Russia it tends to become symptomatic of the whole country to some people, when it happens elsewhere it's just an aberration that is being worked at hard to correct, even if (as in Lazio's case) it's actually happened multiple times.
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UK Muslims targeted for speaking out about terror
Zoraptor replied to Walsingham's topic in Way Off-Topic
UKBall has clearly been eating, uh, Pakistanballs, and plans on eating others perhaps a crypto afghaniball at the back for dessert. There's a fork in the picture (badly drawn, but it is mspaint) and the pool of suspicious liquid is green, like pakistanball, so that part's a lock. I'm not entirely sure what it is meant to mean though, perhaps that soylent green is pakistanis, I have heard that 'indian food' (a euphemism, no doubt, and using Raj India rather than modern) is very popular in the UK and is in fact their most popular dish. Some might say it is a commentary on how far the UK has fallen, clearly this is not so as UKball is wearing a Burberry cap- which is a premium brand just like the top hat in previous times. -
UK Muslims targeted for speaking out about terror
Zoraptor replied to Walsingham's topic in Way Off-Topic
You know, if I could just convince myself that that was a satirical dig at the sort of stuff obyknven posts... -
I rather suspect that analogy is not far off what actually happens. Probably with more powerpoint presentation involved than the average kid's presentation, but essentially accurate. Be a shame if things get bad in Mozambique again, they and Angola had largely got over their cold war era problems.
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Peaasterisks are actually the most rigorously heterosexual animals I've ever seen, or at least the only one I've directly interacted with. At one stage we had chickens and ducks, and a peahen of the male persuasion moved in to take advantage of their food and, well, ended up trying to take advantage of the chickens and ducks several times a day. I think it even tried it on with the dog. I suspect it was not only extraordinarily heterosexual, but also extraordinarily frustrated, at least until one of the neighbours got some actual peahens.
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Next time you can tell them that there's actually many examples of gayness in the animal kingdom.
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You guys do realise that article is ~18 months old, and got extensively discussed at that time? (Discuss away if you want, I'm not the Commissioner for Currency of Events, but it is rather old news)
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You'd have to go some way to be killed by Shank or Carbo as a Fighter though, as a Mage you're one bad throw away from the ignominity and embarrassment of it. Low level BG either sucks, or is some grade A 24 carat trolling. Unfortunate that achievements weren't popular back then, "Killed by Shank" would be a badge of dishonour to be cherished by all.
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Allegorical representation of drug addiction. Not an original viewpoint though.
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If Oby is a troll he'll say precisely what he thinks will generate the most butthurt in his target audience. Which means we'll now have an inundation of pseudo racist stuff, as that appears to be a winner. Frankly, he's been pretty successful at it, since people are still responding. I, of course, view his posts as an ironic critique of the self importance and lack of self reflection intrinsic in the psychological make up of the west. Then again, I view pong as an allegory for the struggle of order and against entropy and that struggle's ultimate futility...
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It's all good. I wouldn't see being described as an elitist as being anything but a compliment anyway, since it's basically saying that I like quality, which I do. I won't like something just because it's highbrow and dislike something just because it's popular, ultimately I'll like something because I like it- but having quality is certainly one of the major factors in whether I'll like it. But popularity is by no means a measure of quality, it's only a measure of popularity- Breaking Bad's last episode isn't fantastic and its first terrible just because 10 million instead of 1.6 million watched it, and Jersey Shore wasn't better than the first ep either just because more people watched that.
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Yeah, have to agree. The original point wrt to Thiaf was that it was not a 'good' reboot not because it was likely to fail financially, but because it doesn't use the heritage inherent in the name to full effect, and in fact (well, it's my opinion so is FACT! and anyone disagreeing is wrong) the name and its baggage is a net negative given the approach taken. Shifting the goalposts to financial success is an entirely separate criterion from that. Fallout 3 did well financially, but it had bugs that were present in Oblivion and are still present in Skyrim, the dialogue varies from just about competent to cringingly abysmal and the plotting featured the most utterly stupid and nonsensical finish of all time! Of all time! Calling it a failure in those respects may be subjective- though the ending is about as close to objectively bad as it's possible to get- but it's certainly fair. And if you wanted isometric/ TB then it will be a failure automatically. (I also don't really see how something with "I don't see" in the first sentence can be taken as any sort of statement of objective fact, it's clearly an opinion)
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I have to agree in general with kgambit, though I'd go a little further. Not only is the recovery rather tepid, but it is largely predicated on the cheap availability of money which is being generated unsustainably and almost exclusively for the benefit of a small section of the economy. It's very easy to make profits and get a large scale share market recovery if the government is printing money/ using QE and you're getting, in effect, zero interest loans. While the US is buffered against some of the problems inherent in that due to being the reserve currency everyone ends up paying in terms of price inflation (and thus in a static job market, wage deflation). And it isn't even clear that it's at all sustainable in the medium term as the market throws a wobbly any time someone even hints at removing the teat, hardly a sign that the 'confidence' is real rather than illusory. That the people and sector getting the help are also the people and sectors primarily responsible for putting us in this mess in the first place is just another dollop of irony on the cake. Overall it's like someone who has had a badly broken leg and is now on painkillers. At some point the painkillers have to be withdrawn, at which point we'll find out if the leg is actually mended and can be used properly or cannot bear weight without pain, and if the patient has got addicted to the meds.
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I wouldn't count Fallout 3, personally. Nor DXHR, though marginally. F3 is in continuity and while the end result is rather like restored_jesus.jpg rather than the Mona Lisa I don't think it was from lack of effort. They clearly did try to cater to the franchise's history, even if it was mainly peripheral things like getting hellboy to narrate an intro and have Harold appear in an utterly pointless encounter. Much as with XP in Thief, I don't really care about things like the perspective change though, which a lot of people do. The classic 'bad' reboot to me would be the recentish Syndicate, where the name was nothing but baggage. The really stupid thing is that Thief could quite easily have avoided a lot of the fan negativity. The story is clearly based on- or at least compatible with- being post Thief 3 and there'd be very little negative in paying lip service to the established setting, and that little bit of respect would have got many of the fans on board. As it was though they basically told the fans that the games they loved were rubbish and needed changing, never a good place to start from.
