aluminiumtrioxid

Actually I did stop watching because season 3's gratuituous torture scenes just sucked all the fun out of the series for me. (Also, it's something the books didn't choose to dwell on, so...) Also, it isn't misogynistic because a main character gets raped for plot development, it's misogynistic because plot development is actively sacrificed for the cheap shock value afforded by additional rape scenes.

Oh my sweet summer child... Not saying that violence is a good solution but just that it is a solution. I do not consider violence, in and of itself, as evil. It is just another tool in the tool box. A really blunt instrument but still just a tool. What problem does violence not solve? From global hunger and over-population to global warming, from shoplifting to insurrection, they can all be solved through the application of violence. Only violence can bring about peace during a war, while having a ceasefire almost always results in further conflict or at least extending the conflict. How the hell would you use violence to solve global warming? As global warming is caused according to experts by humans producing too much carbon dioxide, so simple solution is to bombard most of the humanity and their devices of the planet and then planet will be capable to solve global warming by itself and if it is not then at least global warming will not cause mass starvation. The problem is, we're already past the tipping point. Unless you can punch so hard that you travel back in time, you can't "solve" global warming at this point by trying to reduce carbon emissions through mass murder.

Umm... 12?

Oh my sweet summer child... Not saying that violence is a good solution but just that it is a solution. I do not consider violence, in and of itself, as evil. It is just another tool in the tool box. A really blunt instrument but still just a tool. What problem does violence not solve? From global hunger and over-population to global warming, from shoplifting to insurrection, they can all be solved through the application of violence. Only violence can bring about peace during a war, while having a ceasefire almost always results in further conflict or at least extending the conflict. How the hell would you use violence to solve global warming? Other problems that can't be solved by violence: math and engineering problems, diseases (assuming you actually need the ill to be productive, so massacring them wholesale isn't a solution), heartbreak, optimizing employee performance and productivity (fear is an extremely poor motivator), anything related to logistics (which is kind of important because the ability to commit violence on any scale beyond the personal relies on this), and so on and so forth. Seriously, violence is not only a blunt tool, but also an extremely limited one, once you transcend the basest steps of the Maslow pyramid.

For the purposes of discussion I wll take no position on veracity of climate change being caused by humans. We are talking solely about facing criminal charges for publicly stating the Federal Governments position is wrong. No, we're not. See also:

We're hurtling towards a point where our entire civilization as we know it is going to collapse in a few decades. I get it, you're not concerned, you'll be dead by then, but could you please not mischaracterize the irresponsibility that is probably going to cost thousands, if not millions of lives in the future as "disagreeing with the Federal Government"?

Oh my sweet summer child...

The Codex really is to CRPGs what 4chan is to tabletop games, isn't it? Well, except 4chan is slightly less obnoxious, I guess.

I'm gonna do my patriotic duty and chime in, then. Pillars of Eternity is a wonderful game, but overall, I enjoyed Dragonfall more. It was just more polished, sleeker, far better-paced, with no tedious filler combat. I'd much rather play a 20 hour game with tons of reactivity and an extremely well-presented story than an 80 hour juggernaut like Icewind Dale 2. Of course, I recognize that the IE legacy looms over the Pillars franchise, and this sets certain expectations regarding exploration and sandbox elements, but I think 30-40 hours would be a decent compromise (Mass Effect 1 couldn't have been much longer than that, yet it still felt like journeying in a massive, sprawling galaxy full of interesting stuff to discover, after all). If you do reactivity right, if you make me care about discovering what changes with my decisions, and offer gameplay polished enough for me to actively want to replay the game, I'll easily get 60-80 hours' worth of entertainment out of it anyway. I played through Alpha Protocol at least four times as well.

I don't know. It seems to me that " benevolent " here means being a hypocrite. I mean, you show compassion by breaking the law, letting those murderers free. No way. Who are you to judge who deserve mercy ? Who are you to judge who doesn't? Why would the killer need to pay for his crime in this case? The laws exist for a reason. You lock people up because you want a stable society - punishment acts as a deterrent, and by locking people up, you protect others who would be harmed by them. In other words, you don't jail people because some abstract concept of justice demands their punishment, you jail people to reduce future crime. Now, in this particular case, since - aside from the three of you - nobody knows about the crime, general respect for the law won't be eroded by their example (which means the deterrent effect will continue to function), and since there's no indication they wish to commit any other crimes in the future, you don't need to jail them to protect society. More importantly, what's the alternative? You hang them? Congratulations, now you have three times the corpses you started out with, and you gained nothing aside from a warm fuzzy feeling in your stomach telling you that you did the right thing. You lock them up? Now you've actively reduced productivity in your community by turning two people who could meaningfully contribute into mouths to feed, again, for the warm fuzzies. You've fallen victim to the sunk costs fallacy. Also, the idea of a dead person "continuing to suffer because their killer got away" is patently absurd. They're dead. They're not going to suffer, because even if their soul doesn't fragment into tiny pieces (which, as far as I understand, happens to most), they're overwhelmingly likely to remember nothing about their past life upon reincarnating. ...Well I consider myself to be True Neutral in D&D alignment terms and I still come down strongly in favor of showing compassion in this particular case, so I'm not sure we can say that.

Urm, wait what.

By which you mean "absolutely no knowledge at all", surely

I'd play the **** out of a Cthulhu dating simulator. ..... noted. It's always nice to see a developer listen to feedback (even if said feedback essentially boils down to "give us moar tentacle pr0n").

I'd play the **** out of a Cthulhu dating simulator.

What a fancy way of saying "he talks like a fourth-grader".

Yeah, I'd be a lot more sympathetic to that argument if a/ meaningful social mobility existed in the US of today, so "it's their fault for being poor!" wasn't a statement reeking of ignorance and a staggering lack of empathy, and b/ if this freedom didn't cost the lives of actual, living, breathing human beings.

I imagine it's an aesthetics thing. Rapiers and sabres just fit the game's general aesthetics better, so you find more of them to incentivize you to use them.

Yeah, I got those but why "disturbing"?

Why, who is he?

And if they'd somehow manage to get their hands on the art guys of the gorgeous, gorgeous new french comic book adaptation...

Nah. "Bloat" and "MMO" aren't the objectives here. 13th Age is a perfectly serviceable 4E clone without feeling bloated or MMO-esque. And frankly, I'd rather prefer 4E's "soulless", uniform approach over the convoluted, unbalanced mess that was 3.x.

I'm apparently 0% fascist. Gotta admit though, I chuckled at "(homosexuality is) a natural ballance of nature".

...wat.

9%. I'm twice the Hitler you are!