tajerio

I picked up Alpha Protocol on a Steam sale a few days ago. Just finished Rome after doing Taipei. It's shockingly good. The combat isn't amazing but it's solid and satisfying. And I love the conversations and the sensations of simultaneously having agency but also being a small insect in a large spider web. And I just know I'm going to get to the end and be gutted that there isn't a sequel.

It's pretty close to literal. People who don't have a special connection to the Fade either literally can't see him or forget about him quickly. Not sure exactly how that's going to work with party banter...

The reason he looks dead-ish is because he's some kind of Fade entity (probably) weirdly bound to the body of a dead mage. And he won't be romanceable in the slightest, because he basically has the mental outlook of a child and Gaider has explicitly said multiple times that a romance involving him would be foul and repellent. Just to dispel a little bit of the ridicule.

Not so much minimal as that the fights where you weren't facing bosses tended to have at least mildly interesting designs. None of that parachuting enemies tripe, some interesting combat abilities, funky positioning, etc.

I think the principal lesson here is that the IE games have become all things to all people.

Not to mention that Morrigan's kid would only be about ten years old, and as others have said they'd have to do a lot of gyrating that wouldn't be received very well to make it work.

Can you not blatantly tell by the portrait? Because I can. Looking at the portrait, didn't even occur to me to me she might be a she, not a he. I have absolutely no idea from looking at the portrait whether we're looking at a male or female aumaua. Fortunately, I don't care.

Yeah, he's got a very interesting concept. I also liked that the choice to let him live or to kill him is an actual choice that I would debate, unlike 90% of the choices in the Dragon Age series (at a conservative estimate). On the one hand, he's killed a bunch of people, doesn't seem to really understand or perhaps even care about collateral damage, and wants to forge a civilization out of a bunch of twisted creatures that are basically anti-life. On the other hand, the Blights are really terrible, so it would be good to try to prevent them, and he's had some success in bringing a bunch of twisted creatures that are basically anti-life to actual sapience and morality. I flip-flop on that choice all the time, and I kinda hope BioWare uses him or his ideas again, even if they have to ignore people's past decisions.

Nah, that's bollocks. Making them matter, beyond whether one needs to wear sunscreen or refer to someone as he or she? That's a social construct.

Nah. They face less discrimination, certainly. But as to who faces "derogatory" and "dehumanizing" treatment? How can you even being to quantify that? "Specific forms" is my real point there. I'm not contesting for a single second that everyone in the world can be the target of terrible things done by other people. But how many forms of derogatory and dehumanizing treatment have specifically targeted the straight white male? Compared to, say, black people, or gay men? That's what I'm getting at. This doesn't really help your argument, though. Every white male who has ever been through US military bootcamp has been dehumanized and faced with derogatory comments. Every white male who has been through high school in the United States has been dehumanized and faced derogatory comments. You keep using these two words, but I think you want to use other words. You're basically saying that white men don't get insulted or treated like ****. Of course they do, and it is usually from other white males. Focusing on this is waste of time and effort. I am not making the argument you think I am making. As I've said before, and will now say again, anyone can be treated terribly by anyone else. Can white men be victims of dehumanization and derogatory comments? Absolutely, and many are every single day, and it is a terrible thing. But how often are they treated like that because they are white men? Almost never. And focusing on that difference is not a waste of time and effort. It's an enormous social problem in, at the very least, every Western country. Anyone who is not a straight white man anywhere in the Western world is overwhelmingly likely to experience discrimination on the basis of race, gender, or sexual orientation. Straight white men do not face that. And the result is a type of social inequality that is repugnant no less for its extreme expressions than for its casual prevalence. Note that I do not to say that white men should be treated like **** to even things out, because that would be equally stupid and reprehensible.

Nah. They face less discrimination, certainly. But as to who faces "derogatory" and "dehumanizing" treatment? How can you even being to quantify that? "Specific forms" is my real point there. I'm not contesting for a single second that everyone in the world can be the target of terrible things done by other people. But how many forms of derogatory and dehumanizing treatment have specifically targeted the straight white male? Compared to, say, black people, or gay men? That's what I'm getting at.

I think my point just thundered over your head at an altitude of about 12,000 metres. You have a thick skin. Good for you--I do too. But not everyone does. And when people say terrible things in an online forum, it's not meaningless. It shouldn't be taken to heart, but it does say a lot about how many arseholes there are out there, and viscerally it's very hard for a lot of people just to ignore that sort of thing. As for the second part, I think you might have missed my explanation. Neither I nor Louis CK is serious on that point, and I know you know it. And I'm not saying that straight white men can't be the targets of really horrific abuse. But compared to all other types of people in the world, straight white men face and have faced the fewest specific forms of derogatory and dehumanizing treatment. So it's hard for us to say when people should or shouldn't be hurt by things, because sexism and racism and a whole bunch of other prejudices have tended to work for rather than against us.

Oh come on now. In a physical sense, you're correct. In an emotional sense, you are absolutely wrong. Not everyone has a thick skin and a detached perspective, but that doesn't make them any less important. And we've got to remember what Louis CK said in a standup special a couple years ago--"I'm a white man. You can't even hurt my feelings!" Most of the filth that gets thrown around the internet isn't aimed at the straight white man, which most of us posting in this thread are. So I don't think we can get inside the heads of people who are the targets of much worse abuse than we'll ever suffer and say, "What's wrong with you? That shouldn't hurt."

In relation to this whole "is it my responsibility as a male to do anything about other males that suck" debate, I think that your average SJW miscasts the role that men ought to play. I am happy to caustically make fun of troglodytic misogyny, and I won't tolerate that behavior from anyone with whom I choose to associate. But I can't change their minds. There are people who don't have much information or don't like to think about these problems (I was one until two years ago), and engaging with males in that boat is fine and probably a pretty good idea. Though I hasten to add that I don't believe it's every man's duty to go around educating his fellow man, whether he likes it or not. But engaging the true misogynists is really just a waste of time. The only thing that really comes out of that is that SJWs go extreme in responding to extremism, and that's doing nobody any favors.

I'm sorry, but I have to agree with Paradox about that. For me this is the crux of this debate, there is a massive difference in giving a small person a box to giving a tall person a box. In this case we should be able to have different considerations for groups that feel they are discriminated against without the websites doing it being criticized To continue with the box metaphor, the suggestion of making separate protected spaces is not giving women a box. It's putting them in a box. It might be a safe box, it might be an inoffensive box, but a box it is and a box it will remain. I am completely in agreement with the always erudite Nonek on this one. Enforce discipline more stringently, instead of throwing up our collective hands and saying, "we can't stop it, so we'll just pack the problem away."

I suppose. That is, if a game HAS to have Boss fights in the first place. It doesn't though, except for maybe the obligatory Big-Bad-Guy(s) at the end. And a good RPG doesn't even need that. I'd argue that the best way do things is sorta like how BG1 handled it. It had "bosses", but only because they were the last thing you faced in any given dungeon and the plotline named them as such. But that's it. The most memorable fights (and often times the toughest) in Bg1 were the enemy party battles. I'm hoping PoE goes that route instead of how Dragon Age 1 does it.... where a boss is a BOSS, with a big cinematic introduction and a giant orange health bar to advertise the fact this this enemy is a super-special-BOSS and therefore, get ready for a specifically designed 10 minute battle of attrition. I agree with this to an almost inexpressible extent. Single bosses are generally not very enjoyable. But enemy parties are the best fights, because you have to account for four to six guys' worth of interesting and varied capabilities, as opposed to one dude's boss-only abilities.

Indeed, people know not to derail important threads Orog Romance threads can't be derailed because they begin life as derails.

historically, "revolution" probable were a nice way of saying, "really bloody." more modern and it is gonna have to do with the scope of change, or perhaps how fundamental the change were. not require any grand innovation. the abbasid revolution weren't particularly innovative. the siamese revolution of 1688 were probable more reactionary than anything. the haitian revolution saw the successful new regime establish serfdom? very innovative. look in a thesaurus and see how many words there is for "cold." is some very subtle differences 'tween some o' those synonyms. HA! Good Fun! Historically, "revolution" is a dirty word used to demonize people who were seeking change, since the vast majority of societies have traditionally been conservative. But what you're saying there just speaks to my point. If we can have so many subtle differences between words, why is the meaning of "revolution" so broad and inclusive of so many disparate historical phenomena? I think it ought to be narrowed down. And, just by the by, because of its very lack of innovation, the term "Abbasid Revolution" has fallen out of favor in the past fifteen years or so among historians, to be replaced by "Abbasid Revolt."

I'm not quite confident enough to say, because I deal with political and socioeconomic history, but I suspect that the shift towards empiricism as the primary mode of investigative thought is enough for it to be a revolution. And I absolutely agree with you on that point. I just think the best label for what we usually call "the American Revolution" would be "the American War of Independence." There's no need to be snarky. I just didn't want to write several hundred words writing a specialist historian's encompassing definition of revolution. A quick shorthand is broad changes in socioeconomic relations and a marked departure in political forms and culture, effected by the use of force, but that doesn't really capture the whole thing, and anyway I'm pretty sure that much was clear from what I wrote.

Sounds like if something doesn't fit your own personal multiple criteria, it's not a revolution. At least that's how your post comes across. Well, if it didn't fit my criteria, then I wouldn't consider it a revolution--though I hew pretty closely to a definition used by a fairly large community of historians, so it's not just mine. That said, clearly it's my opinion. Everything I post is my opinion, besides clearly sourced and verified facts.

Oh dear me. I'm not insisting upon it at all. The definition I use does have multiple criteria relating to socioeconomic and political change, but I do not use multiple definitions. The reference to the British system of the 18th century is merely to illustrate that the political system the Constitution put in place is not nearly so innovative as people tend to think, since it draws heavily on that British legacy, and is much more evolutionary than it is revolutionary. which is why your comments is unresponsive. a revolutionary war doesn't require innovation any more than a civil war requires polite and courteous behavior. is not same revolution as is transistors or elastic in underwear. btw, with the exception o' the rare, complete and accidental discoveries, we would argue that virtual all revolutions (socioeconomic, political or otherwise) is evolutionary, but that is a topic for another thread. that being said, the James Burke series, Connections, could be enlightening for you. HA! Good Fun! Fair enough. Your definition is so different there's not much point in the two of us talking about it, though I would wonder why we have the words insurrection, rebellion, revolt, and revolution if no innovation is required for the last one. Your point about virtually all so-called revolutions being evolutionary is one with which I generally agree, at least pre-20th century.

Oh dear me. I'm not insisting upon it at all. The definition I use does have multiple criteria relating to socioeconomic and political change, but I do not use multiple definitions. The reference to the British system of the 18th century is merely to illustrate that the political system the Constitution put in place is not nearly so innovative as people tend to think, since it draws heavily on that British legacy, and is much more evolutionary than it is revolutionary.

"Previous government overthrown by those ruled and replaced with new government" is the historian's usual definition of a successful rebellion, not a revolution. But like I said, it's largely a semantic argument. I subscribe to a very restrictive definition of revolution--you, obviously, do not. That's cool. And of course I'm oversimplifying the dependence of the American system on the British system. I didn't want to write a book on comparative poli sci in this thread, after all. However, while I don't for one second argue that the Articles of Confederation government was in some respects quite innovative and transformative, the government of the United States today is based on a much more conservative document (the Constitution), which is in large part a reaction to the ineffectiveness of the Confederation government. So to say, as you did above, that the US is a revolutionary government is to say that the 1789 government is revolutionary, which it most decidedly is not. how very strange. at one point you claims that you is inexplicably fighting a semantic argument, but later you is still claiming that the 1789 government is "decidedly" not revolutionary. curious. in any event, am thinking you is confusing revolutionary multiple meaning... and am not sure why. the Constitution were formed by the same revolutionaries as were the articles. the Constitution were meant to foster and support the revolutionary ideals that had been espoused back in 1776... and before. Bill of Rights, which actual contains the First Amendment, is actual from 1791. Bill of Rights is near universal recognized as a founding document by historians. The last sentence there is my opinion, not universally acknowledged fact, which is probably the confusing part. Even with a broad definition of revolution I still think the historical facts tell a very different tale of the Constitution being a consolidating reaction against potential revolution, rather than a confirmation of an actual one. Everyone is of course welcome to his own opinion, though I agree that this thread ain't the place to hash them out. The reason I fight the argument is because the meanings of words are important, and "revolution" as presently used somehow encompasses both the Russian and American, which makes very little sense. But I recognize the hopelessness of trying to get everyone to converge on one meaning--my intention is just to provoke some thought on something that Americans almost never challenge.

"Previous government overthrown by those ruled and replaced with new government" is the historian's usual definition of a successful rebellion, not a revolution. But like I said, it's largely a semantic argument. I subscribe to a very restrictive definition of revolution--you, obviously, do not. That's cool. And of course I'm oversimplifying the dependence of the American system on the British system. I didn't want to write a book on comparative poli sci in this thread, after all. However, while I don't for one second argue that the Articles of Confederation government was in some respects quite innovative and transformative, the government of the United States today is based on a much more conservative document (the Constitution), which is in large part a reaction to the ineffectiveness of the Confederation government. So to say, as you did above, that the US is a revolutionary government is to say that the 1789 government is revolutionary, which it most decidedly is not.

The rest of your posting in this thread has been great, and this isn't really on topic, but the government of the United States was not founded in or by revolution and does not owe revolution any significant philosophical debt. uh...what? The American Revolution is definitely a thing. It didn't just happen in Assassin's Creed 3. It's definitely called a revolution. There's a venerable and longstanding debate among 18th century historians as to whether the term is correctly applied in this case. Obviously it depends on one's definition of revolution. Economic and social change as a result of the war of independence were very limited indeed, and a lot of historians (myself included) include society-wide changes in those areas as part of their definitions of revolution. It's also worth noting that the American system of checks and balances in government actually derives from the British system, and that the Founding Fathers, rather than seeking to revolutionize political forms, sought to correct abuses and perfect the system they already knew. Really, only the American idea of free speech and the separation of the judiciary from the legislature and executive were major departures from the existing tradition. To my mind, that's not enough for a revolution. But obviously, since the debate's been going on for decades, there's plenty of room to disagree intelligently. Thank you Bruce