Hurlshort

It is? That's disappointing, then, since the party banter is still nonexistent for me and a dialogue cutscene hung up when I was talking to Cassandra back at Haven. Two things that were supposed to be addressed in the patch. I believe the party banter is slated for the next patch.

I killed the Hinterlands one around level 13 and it didn't take too long.

Qistana, It's kind of unhealthy how much time you spend wrapped up in Dragon Age Inquisition stuff. I really recommend you spend more time working on your game creation dreams. RPGMaker is a great place to start, as others have suggested.

I have this terrible scenario playing in my head where a guy is holding his dog and officers tell him to drop the gun, but if he does his dog will probably get shot for running loose.

We should just pretend that Breaking Bad is actually the Prequels, and Walter White becomes Darth Vader.

I wouldn't say that, I would say at the age of 12 very few students have the experience or perspective to really analyze and synthesize the world around them. They lack context. As you get older, it is much easier to do. Unfortunately it is also more difficult to overcome the biases you have picked up. Every year, out of about 170 students, I have a handful that have the potential to really question the world around them. I try to nurture that. But by the end of High School, there should be a much larger number of critical thinkers.

I'm genuinely intrigued. Do you get drunk before these posts, or do they get you high in their own right? Eric Garner was killed for not paying his protection money. He simply wasn't paying his dues. NYC government considers itself head of the cigarette cartel in the city, and killed this man while enforcing that cartel's position. One has to be intoxicated on koolaide to not see that for what it is. I'd call it indoctrinated brainwashing rather than koolaid intoxication, as they're just thinking what they've been trained to think sine they were little kids if they don't see it for what it is, but you're 100% right on. Very few of us grow up in an environment where we are taught to question everything, including authority. On the contrary, one of the major purposes of public education is to teach people to mindlessly subject themselves to authority. The validity of the police and many other established institutions are not to be questioned. The fact of the matter is, that if you don't question everything at some point, you're not truly thinking or truly aware of the world around you, you're in a box. Oddly enough it is actually in my curriculum, which is provided by the state of California to every public school teacher of Social Science, to teach critical thinking skills. We are supposed to have students take look at texts and other sources with a critical eye and compare, contrast, and weigh against other evidence. That is a staple of any good Social Science curriculum. Here is Bloom's Taxonomy, which is what we are supposed to be applying in all facets of the classroom: Now the problem here is it is very difficult to get students to do the bottom half of this chart. Getting a group of 12-year olds to really reflect on law enforcement in the US, which is a journal prompt I did last week after we analyzed legal systems from Feudal Europe and Middle Eastern Shari'ah, as well as watched a few news clips, is not an easy thing to do. It is like pulling teeth. But yes, conspiracy! Indoctrination!

Knights of Badassdom - It was not great. There were some funny parts, but overall I was hoping for something more. Kind of a waste of some good comedic actors.

It kind of seems like a bad precedent to set for the dog. Ooooh a gun, it must be time for a walk!

It's pretty rare to see Obsidian ban someone, but I'm guessing there is a hammer incoming. What a bizarre string of posts.

So the Niners season is over, and I imagine they'll be parting ways with the coach soon enough. That team is a mess.

The only romancing I've done was some old lady in Val Royeauoueax, and that was only because I didn't want to give her a commitment of troops.

In response to Drowsy, the state is already footing the bill (really taxpayers) for a kindergarten through 12th grade education. After 18, why shouldnt the student have some financial stake in all of this?

If I was to draw a conclusion from that it would be that the 90% of those not in the elite, don't work? Because they aren't all first generation immigrants. Besides, that isn't really relevant to the question I was asking. The US is a large economy and some individuals, like Schwarzenegger, come a long way from nothing. But an individual should not have to be as rich as he is to be able to afford good education (that would not send a family into debt), health care, etc. for his children? Or even necessarily in the middle class, let alone the 1%? If there is so much wealth to go around (and there is, many times more so than in France, Germany, UK etc.) then why are some of the basic services a government should provide on the level of a third world country? The last official comparisons placed US health care in the same category as Cuba. And Cuba has been living under a US enforced embargo and in poverty for over 50 years. You don't need to be rich to afford a good education in the US. What is wrong with taking on debt to pay for school? It's part of a social contract, they are offered at extremely low interest rates, and you are given a long time to pay them back. I certainly don't regret the $40,000 I spent on college and grad school, I've been paying it off slowly over the last decade and now only have $7k left on the loan. That's without my parents help. My parents paid for my first year of school, which came out to about $10k. After that I got a part time job and managed my debt carefully. Some people make dumb decisions about how much debt they take on, but there are plenty of chances to succeed without drowning yourself. I'll agree with out health care being screwed. I've got insurance and I still have a pile of ridiculous medical bills sitting on my desk right now.

There were about 10,000 protesters in New York, although I think that was only in one area. Which is why I said 200+ arrests is very tame, particularly with only a handful being charged with anything substantial. Most of the arrests are basically being cited and released.

I gave my impressions of it in my Rate Your games of 2014 here-thread: http://forums.obsidian.net/topic/68866-rate-your-2014-games-here/?p=1539247 I named it my personal Game of the Year. It got a total score of 91.7 out of 100, so it must be in my top ten list of games made in the 21th century. Having played twice as long now, I'm tempted to raise that score even further. I love it for what it is - it achieves what it set out to do. I give it an 88.3 out of 100. It is a very good game.

The NFL thread is in the Off Topic section.

Considering these are the types of crowds gathering: 200+ sounds like your standard round up. Only 5 of those are actually being charged with anything of substance. Overall it seems like this is going exactly the way it should, for both the protesters and the police. The message is clearly getting across and isn't being sullied by outbreaks of violence.

They aren't running around harassing, assaulting, or killing people and getting away with it on a daily basis.... It's hard to have a reasonable conversation when you throw out hyperbole like this. I support law enforcement reform, I want to see way more accountability, I want a dramatic shift in the way police interact with their communities. Do you support these things? How do you expect to achieve any of them if you treat every police officer as some thug who goes around harassing, assaulting, and killing people on a daily basis? Do you recognize how hostile (and frankly unrealistic) that sounds? It's weird to me that the same people that want to yell at the police for not respecting the ideals of innocent until proven guilty are so fast to condemn an entire police force without evidence.

I'm not really a big fan of the disability system, as I've seen far too many people take advantage of it as well. But that is an entirely different can of worms to open up, and it applies across a lot more industries than law enforcement.

The thing with the US system is in its paradoxes - richest country in the world yet incredibly poor wealth distribution, very high crime rate and poor social/health system compared to other, less wealthy western nations. Few Americans are aware just how much better the overall standard of living is in many western european countries compared to how weaker their economies are to the US. I've yet to meet anybody from the US that's really willing to give the issue some thought and draw the obvious conclusions. Few people from the US are willing to give it much thought because you are simplifying an extremely complex issue. The US is a gigantic country, and really each state is closer to an independent country than anything else. It is basically like generalizing all of Europe as one place, instead of independent countries with unique problems.

What do you define as recognition? Construction workers get plenty of credit for having dangerous jobs. They also don't receive nearly as much criticism.

Ryan Reynolds is Deadpool. That's just the way it always should be. Just like no one can be Wolverine other than Hugh Jackman.

The amount of police who are on disability retirement is more telling than the death statistics. It's difficult to get an exact number, since as I said before, the oversight and statistical analysis available is unbelievably bad, but in a city like Oakland, 4 officers are medically retired for every one that retires under the standard system. So yeah, it's a dangerous job, it's disingenuous to not recognize that much.