213374U

I'm actually not a fan of botifarra myself — a bit too bland for my tastes. I much prefer morcilla (blood sausage). The most widespread recipe (morcilla de Burgos) is made with rice, and is great as an appetizer or in sandwich. Though as the "meat" of the dish accompanying lentils, beans or chickpeas, it's better to use the variety made without rice (morcilla de Asturias). Morcilla de Burgos: Typical Fabada Asturiana with morcilla, chorizo and tocino (bacon), also some ham: You know what they say, "once you go black, you never go back"...

After Alien Isolation, I remembered I had Colonial Marines in the backlog. After reading everywhere how terrible the game is I went and installed some graphics and gameplay mods (SweetFX and the Survival Experience v2) without bothering with vanilla. Not bad for 4.50€.

A government is useless for mutual protection. Neither the police nor the laws they supposedly enforce can effectively prevent you from being robbed, raped or killed, as evidenced by statistics of crime. Sure, they may find the perp later and throw him in jail for a while, but that's not protection, it's revenge. Further, imprisoning people isn't an effective deterrent and in fact the whole prison system is known to be a factory of hardened criminals (read up on recidivism and sentence length) and a source of social stigma that is difficult to remove. This in turn makes it harder for past criminals to re-integrate well in "normal" society. And that's without even going into actual occurrences of state-sponsored robberies, rapes and killings. Literally the only thing that can prevent other people from doing bad things to you (i.e. protect you) is people not wanting to do bad things to you. Maybe stop being so afraid and just thank your neighbors for not being stone-cold killers. ...wow. That sentence there gave me the willies. Unified for what? Unified under what criteria? And make people conform to it under threat of violence? Sounds a lot like fascism. Look, I understand that you take great pride in and identify with the accomplishments of people randomly born at an arbitrary distance from you who happen to speak the same language or not. I respect your right to join with whomever and do things you deem great but about which I don't give a toss. Just let me ****ing opt-out, and don't threaten me with imprisonment or death if I don't want to participate, ok?

^ Nice try. Be a bit less obvious, you may fool someone yet.

The Typhoon was retarded. I hope they come up with a reason why they don't make reloads for it anymore, or perhaps Jensen had it replaced with something less idiotic like an integrated confetti dispenser. The problem with XP is that it's hard to make all playstyles equally viable, while at the same time having XP rewards that are in the least reactive and dynamic. Do you hand out a bonus for not killing anyone? Then I'm being discouraged from playing the game as a straight shooter and using my more offense-oriented augs. Do you hand out a bonus for convincing some random NPC instead of just punching their lights out? Then I'm being punished for being a jerk legend (which is a shame). Etc. Personally I'm fine with giving a fixed XP amount upon reaching a checkpoint and having gameplay and choice exploration be its own reward, but I know that's not everyone's cup of tea.

As far as I'm aware, it was a German colony up until the end of WWI. It was Germans that first started favoring Tutsis. Belgians took over and expanded on it when Germany lost her colonies after their defeat in the war.

Funny thing is, Volo posted a similarly inflammatory thread just a few days ago. It barely made it to page 2 and it's already fallen from the front page. I guess Vol forgot to add "if you aren't a white heterosexual male, you don't have a right to comment" to make it sufficiently irresistible flamebait? My guess is the casing. [snip] Oh, come on! I'm as anti-processed food as it gets, but this is ridiculous. Traditional recipe blood sausage not only tastes awesome, it also is completely different from packaged, industrially produced sausage. **** that.

Well about ****ing time. I guess this and the hints at a "franchise" (um, isn't DX a franchise already?) is what they have been working on under the "Deus Ex Universe" name. I really liked DX:HR having different endings. Them trying to create an amalgam of all three options for continuity purposes sounds bad and the last time they tried it, it sucked major ass. Also I'm hoping they improve on HtH mechanics. Takedowns were so broken it's not even funny.

The forum is richer for those, man. That and I lost my Alpha Protocol CD. That's... not the kind of wealth I'd like to accumulate, personally.

I'm guessing he means the phrenology-based approach to ethnic division enforcement carried out by the Belgians after WWI. Handing out Hutu/Tutsi ID cards based on such scientific criteria as the relationship between cranial measurement and intelligence, height, and skin coloring; heavily favoring a Tutsi-dominated power structure (they were apparently "more Caucasian" than Hutus and hence, superior).

At least on the BSN you need to have registered games to post... that at least somewhat limits the troll accounts and sockpuppetry.

Classes, in the sense of privileged groups, arise as a result of two principles: accumulation of wealth (be it land or capital) and force. It has absolutely nothing to do with one's profession being more or less useful, as throughout history, the "profession" of landowner has consistently accumulated the most privileges and power, while at the same time being, arguably, the most useless to the community. Nowadays landowners have lost clout relative to "financiers" and other equally useless "professions", while those who do the heavy lifting in the world, i.e. teachers, doctors, engineers etc. just get by. The society we have today is the result of using those two principles as the cornerstone of human interactions.

Sounds better than *modern oligarchies* anyway. I agree. It "sounds" better. Is it better?

And continuing your analogy, the difference between a non-democracy and a democracy is that in the former, people are going to get raped even if the majority are not OK with getting raped. I'm pretty sure that the only real difference is that in a democracy*, people are brainwashed to believe that they have agreed to the deed implicitly. Nevermind the fact that nobody ever asks them, and any and all protests against it are ignored as a matter of course. Therefore, according to its own twisted internal logic, "it's not rape", but a consensual coupling stemming from the highest, purest feeling of love... *modern, representative "democracies", anyway.

Why not both? edit: I just realized that Barney Stinson is a smug douche in all possible universes. Cool!

I don't know. What do we say? If you want to break the causal relationship -or more accurately, dispute the assumption that it exists- between the political configuration of states and the degrees of "quality of life" of their respective citizens, it's not Zoraptor's rebuttal that falls apart, it's the original argument, i.e. that "representative republics outperform despotisms" as far as quality of life of subjects are concerned. Because solely being "democratic" or not has no bearing on the quality of life of citizens, and therefore it's a question of economic development and inequality levels, mostly. Unless the sole criteria to judge "quality of life" is voting rights, in which case it's a bit of circular logic.

Unless you want to specify exactly what you mean by outperform, I'm going to assume that you mean from purely economic and international power perspectives. In that case, historically, despotic regimes have in fact outperformed representative republics, by far. The Achaemenid Empire completely dwarfed the Greek city-states economically, Rome eventually ceased to be a "democracy" and the Roman Empire outperformed the Roman Republic, with Augustus being as effective a ruler as he was autocratic. The Spanish Empire and France after the Thirty Years War were fairly despotic hegemonic states as well, and so on and so forth. It is only with the rise to global dominance of the British Empire that "democratic" regimes started to show a competitive potential vs autocracies. That's ~200 years, and it includes the Cold War period where democracies didn't hold a clear advantage over them Commies. And you may be interested to know that China is as of 2014 #1 economically. Not exactly a democracy, either.

I beat Alien Isolation. Great game, solid 8.5 at least. It's not a 10 because the ending is a completely unfulfilling, sequel bait cliffhanger, and in the final act the game really tries too hard to be SCARY!!1, wearing out its welcome. Plot twists and a lingering mood of hopelessness are some of the defining elements of the Alien universe, but there are probably more "LOL NOPE!" moments in the last 3-4 hours than in the rest of the game combined — some of them so forced that I found myself rolling my eyes. As I said before, I'm really not a fan of having the alien constantly glued to my ass, and the scare factor would have been ramped up, I think, if they had it appear at critical moments and then, if you managed to evade it, have it go away, like, for real. Playing hide-and-seek for 12 hours straight is a bit of a PITA. If you don't mind this, then I guess the Survivor mode DLCs would be right up your alley. Otherwise, replayability value is very low. Still, I haven't had so much fun with a first-person game in a long time, and the atmosphere, attention to detail, and similitude to the IP are top-notch. A must buy for Alien fans.

I don't even know what you are trying to say, anymore. Those lezginka (I had to look that up) vids are supposed to prove that Muslim peoples of the Caucasus are actually more white than Western whites or...? I also found this in the same playlist. Draw your own conclusions. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B5hZQwQFTAY

Y'think? (of course, actual democracy is much worse, because you cannot choose not to be "at the party") Seriously though, talking about "democracy" is like talking about "geometry". It's a concept so general that it's almost meaningless. Are we talking about "representative" democracy like we have now in the West? Perhaps the Athenian version Socrates was supposedly referring to and which (apparently unbeknownst to some users here) was actually not universal? Maybe the "soviet" direct democracy variant (like what briefly appeared during the October revolution in Russia and the 1956 revolution in Hungary, only to be quickly extinguished by Bolsheviks)? E-democracy? Those all produce very different results. For good or ill, democracy is going to magnify the virtues and vices of those participating in it. Problems arising as a result are not a fault of democracy... they are a fault of people's. Sadly, in so-called democratic societies, you always have individuals arguing for tyranny, because statism solves all problems, ever. If anything, democracy as an ideal is too optimistic about human nature. Even so, I prefer this to political models based on pessimism about humanity.

All the cool kids are doing it. Old news. http://mondoweiss.net/2013/08/covert-online-students-hasbara-units-directed-out-of-israeli-pm-netanyaus-office http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/7783640.stm This is how the pros do it, though: https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/07/14/manipulating-online-polls-ways-british-spies-seek-control-internet/ (with cool Bond-like op codenames and all; I like CHANGELING in particular) He was promoted and now serves in a management/overseeing capacity.

I see where you're coming from, but to me it's more scary than moving: And this is in a country that was nuked, twice. Thing is, the mother****ers writing and approving school history textbooks know full well that neither them, nor their sons will directly experience the horrors of war. In the same vein: https://twitter.com/crusoes/status/582825298686791680

Well, you are right that the silence with regards to this is rather deafening. I disagree with your perspective, however. No one pays this much mind because this happened in Africa and we don't really care what goes on over there as long as it doesn't involve us. It's not Master Race Westerners dying, so it's not news. Hence my "Je suis" remark. We are desensitized to atrocities being constantly committed elsewhere. Now, I don't remember any demonstrations in Egypt, Turkey or Tunisia after the Paris attacks were carried out, so it's not like we have a monopoly on callousness, heh. I also have this theory that, due to time spent daily in poor posture, slouching in front of a computer or looking into their "smart"phones, citizens of developed countries tend to lose the ability to keep an upright back, forever being condemned to gaze at nothing beyond their own navels. I came up with this while trying to understand the really weird priorities some people seem to have.

Patch is live on GOG as of now.

Yet another example of the boards' ruling elites lording it over the posting class! The revolution is coming, pal!