213374U

Even leaving aside the fact that going "it's magic!" to hand-wave away any absurdities in the narrative is plain crap writing, this isn't relevant to what I said. The mechanisms that make the human body work are concrete too, but in order to fully understand what's going on under the hood, an ad-hoc anecdote-based belief system just doesn't cut it. You cannot have it be both mystical and rational simultaneously just because the writer says it is so (which they didn't, by the way). That's absurd, in any universe where rationality and mysticism mean what they are understood to mean. You are suggesting that the force cannot be understood because it's a mystical phenomenon, but it can be understood "mystically", whatever that means. That doesn't make sense. No. The Chinese have thousands of years of experience with what works and what doesn't based on trial and error—but they didn't understand why and therefore the reach of their methods was limited. The mystical doodads are just thrown on top, but the core is experience. This is not part of the canon Disney canned, it's part of the new canon, from the Darth Plagueis references in the Tarkin novel as well as Ep III, AFAIK. Yeah, and so we reach the first of the many contradictions we'll have to deal with if we throw logic and consistency out because "magic!". You cannot simultaneously have Jedi who are all-knowing as far as what's ok and not ok wrt the force and then have them crash and burn spectacularly because their teachings fail them. Yes, but that writer also has to give a convincing explanation as to why there can be no differences of opinion whatsoever and everyone is both 100% down with the party line but also possessed of free will and the ability to think for themselves. Again "that *can't* happen in my setting because magic!" is plain bad writing. At best, it can be said that it hasn't happened yet. Only it actually has happened, several times, apparently. eh what. like i... *guess* u can use SW as a springboard to explore and express that theme? and no doubt someone somewhere would get their rocks off doing it. world is big after all. but it would be a hard sell for me. a very hard sell. That some religious group's dogma is *gasp* not all-encompassing and imperfect when it comes to explaining and harnessing some mysterious and otherworldly phenomenon is a hard sell? Whatever floats your boat, I guess. I mean, did you feel cheated when Yoda got his smug green ass handed to him by Palps despite him being a 100% total complete force expert? "Do or do not, there is no try", my ass.

I'm pretty sure that it's canon that the Jedi order has a bunch of individuals that willingly walked away, so yeah, differences of opinion do in fact exist. The point of contention is whether those individuals consider themselves Jedi and what's the opinion of the hierarchy on that. There's also Jedi splinter factions. "Either you are a Jedi or you are not" is a tautology that doesn't really clarify anything. Hell, even post-RotJ Luke doesn't very well fit with what the concept of a Jedi is, as embodied for instance by Mace Windu. If a Jedi is just whoever the current writer says they are, this leads to obvious contradictions and a coherent definition is impossible. If your beef is with colors, then whatever. Apostate, dissident, heterodox, and a myriad other adjectives work fine to describe the concept. Unlike real world medical practice, knowledge of the force in SW isn't the result of a million peer-reviewed studies, but a whole lot of nebulous anecdote-inspired mumbo-jumbo wrapped in mysticism. So "do this - cause harm" is more religious dogmatism than proven, well understood mechanical cause and effect. It's like how people still died of things like typhoid fever in China despite thousands of years of experience with "traditional" methods, until antibiotics came along. Before Disney nuked the EU, there were other non-Jedi LS force user traditions. And there's precedent of Sith using a systematic, science-based approach to study the Force, the results of which (the creation of life) aren't inherently dark side. Jedi are just one sect of force users. They don't necessarily have a monopoly on "light side safe practices" because they quite obviously lack a comprehensive knowledge of the force and their rigid philosophy doesn't exactly encourage exploration. And as with any centrally organized religious establishments, schisms are inevitable. I'm not even going into MCA's views on whether the force really has light and dark sides. Just basic fallibility and the intrinsic unreliability of incomplete, unscientific principles.

Yeah, and if you think the Council of Nicaea was total balls you're probably not a Catholic, but that doesn't mean you can't be a Christian. I never liked "gray" Jedi being just regular Joe Jedi with cool force lightning and ****. But Jedi apostates, so to speak? I don't see why not. To me, a character struggling (and possibly failing) not to become a bastard coated bastard with bastard filling while trying to find his own way is thematically fairly interesting. Like, how long you think you can dance on the razor's edge and all that.

Sorry, I didn't get your meaning. Their commie RPing is really on point as they have the biggest alliance and have accomplished exactly diddly squat. And on the other side of the spectrum you have some guy playing a megacorp that's about buying up slaves in the galactic market and making them into board members and xenophilia (in the alien hybridization sense). No space nazis though, which is kinda weak, even though purifiers weren't explicitly disallowed. The dev clash is entertaining to watch as they are emphasizing roleplay (and memes galore), but the fact that they keep routinely getting desyncs is worrying. This has been a problem for a while and it's starting to look like they don't know how to fix it for good. Performance also is less than... stellar *cough*, and they haven't reached even mid game yet.

I legit watched that stream start to finish, and I'm not sure what you mean. Devs playing space commies have mostly been making a joke of the whole thing, what with the anarchist police state shenanigans and all, as have those playing megacorps. Today's stream had Wiz jokingly suggesting that space corps are evil, but if you don't think that profit-driven interstellar entities bound by nothing but the military might of their neighbors can be anything but evil, I have a bridge to sell you...

Yeah, I don't think Bioware ever considered "grey" a valid option, for force users. Even Jolee Bindo was full-on light side, he simply worked outside the system. On the other hand, you could keep the Sith at arms length as a Bounty Hunter, which was nice. And the story was consistently great. A pity that BiowEA decided to siphon resources off to MEA first and Anthem later. If they had doubled down on class stories instead of the garbage they've been struggling to throw together these last few years, this may still be worth playing.

Yeah. A family member works in the local advertisement oversight agency, and they are seriously fuming over the huge increase in online (actual) gambling advertising in the last few years. I think the idea is to curb that **** down to the level of traditional gambling ads (i.e. none at all), but once the cat's out of the bag... I'm not sure I'd point at lootboxes as a significant contributor to the increase in bona fide gambling, either. Sounds a bit like the whole "gateway drug" thing with weed.

It might, if you are an orc living in Mordor.

Gotta love how homeboy there prefaces what is essentially a huge talk on income inequality by saying "I don't have a problem with people making as much money as they earn". How's that cognitive dissonance working out for you chief? Seriously, someone link the "reserve labor army" wiki article to this guy. Of course, he's never going to change his mind about "the left" becuz muh free market and idpol. What a joke.

As an expert excrement expeditor, he probably knows better.

Bruce's casual dismissal of "some members' anti-Saudi sentiment" is almost as funny as his misuse of the term "exasperation", especially now, in light of bin Sawman's penchant for overtly robbing, disappearing, and murdering anyone that opposes him. I mean, this isn't even news. Reminder that last year, about 200 members of the House of Saud, the military, politicians and businessmen were detained in a hotel in Riyadh, in what was billed as an "anti-corruption operation", but was ostensibly a crackdown against rivals and the opposition. Some entered as billionaires and came out paupers. Lucky them—at least another one came out in a box. Or the hijinks with Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri being held hostage and forced to resign, that was fun. Or the other wayward princes that the regime kidnapped and disappeared, even the beeb had a programme about it. But guys guys, other than that, their generally terrible human rights record and the genocidal war on Yemen, could you please restate what exactly is your problem with Saudi?

They said the plan was to add private servers and instances (as well as modding support) ~one year after launch. So they released a shell of a game and are going to add in the features everyone wanted at launch a year later. I call this the No Man's Sky method. Never played NMS, so I don't know how it worked in that game, but I suspect that Bethesda's idea is to kill any competition to their paid mods scheme, or at the very least, secure a substantial head start.

They said the plan was to add private servers and instances (as well as modding support) ~one year after launch.

Fallout 76 has done real damage.

The links to each tweet are provided—just click on the timestamp. https://twitter.com/RepSwalwell/status/1063527635114852352 https://archive.fo/nYrBL

Fools! You are all playing right into Baphomet's hands!

I also had zero interest in the new "Witcher". So CDPR is starting to show the first signs of the insulation that is common in excessively successful devs? Incipient Bioware syndrome? Anyway. Amplitude have released two new DLCs for Endless Space 2. Harmonic Memories and Celestial Worlds are a coffee-priced music and story pack, respectively. I didn't play the last proper DLC so this is as good an excuse as any to revisit ES2, and it'll keep me busy until Megacorp drops. Hey, at least it's not glorified gambling.

Yeah, I'm not sure the best way to go about an increase in subs is to make more Trek as opposed to better Trek, especially in light of the failure of the shotgun approach used by Disney with Star Wars. But maybe that's why I'm not helming a multi-billion media conglomerate. Wasn't this the background for the plot of Insurrection? The movie wasn't great and the whole admiral whatshisface's subplot was idiotic, but it showed how those ramifications could call into question the monolithic Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism trope in ST. The Maquis subplot also offered glimpses of that, but it wasn't explored too much, even with the darker mood of DS9. There was an Enterprise episode about life in a civilian freighter. It was interesting because it showed the (early) Trek universe from a perspective that isn't the lofty perch of a Starfleet captain's chair that we're used to. So maybe a "space trucker" Trek could put a fresh spin on a formula that, to me, is a bit stale.

I'd be surprised if there's sufficient data to make that comparison because unlicensed vendors are by definition illegal, so it's unlikely that any effort is made at systematic data collection. Food poisoning is also hard to track unless it's mass poisoning, so occurrences are probably underreported. The argument that this is the city trying to extract money from charity groups doesn't fly, though: "Those social services that do earn a permit, if they don’t charge fees or pressure for donations, have their permit fee waived, he said." From the article, it seems to me like this is a homeowners' association being butthurt that bum picnics are being held in their hood, and badgering city authorities to enforce the ordinance. So as usual people are being ****, but for once, it's not mostly just gov't officials.

Yeah, I'm not sure what a "remaster" would entail. Just touching up the engine to accommodate higher resolutions? Not an entirely bad idea, because the core gameplay is still fun and works today. But they already did that for The First Decade IIRC, and there's a limit to how much you can upscale that without making even Mammoths look like ants. And any changes beyond that will probably affect gameplay, and then we're crossing into remake territory, rather than "remaster". Much as I'd like a solid C&C game, in the age of MOBAs, I can see a number of ways in which they'd botch a remake. This is EA.

It's a thing for me since 1997, but barely any game is doing it right till today. Don't care much about what other RPGs do or don't do. Choice&Consequences are an integral part of an RPG to me. If I can't have an influence on the game world, then the game sucks as an RPG. Yeah, I didn't understand the comment that C&C is "the new thing" either. The CQM 4.0 has given me an excuse to go back to Bloodlines, and it's funny (or rather, it is sad) how a game from 2004 still leaves most stuff made today in the dust, in that department. Starting from the character creation screen, even.

All right, that's crappy and worthy of attention, I do apologize. I'm not entirely sure how is it in any way relevant to GG, then again, GG was apparently about absolutely everything, yet 99% of it was completely irrelevant and ignorable BS, thus the reaction. Yes. It's not relevant to GG at all, and you're not the first to be confused by the unfortunate coincidence. It just happened to be a completely different mess with a very similar keyword happening at roughly the same time. I didn't care much about "GG" either, but was rather pissed about Paradox and Gamersgate. And I didn't even own CK2 on Gamersgate, just some other PDX titles... and Alpha Protocol. In any case, it seems they are at the very least reconsidering their stance on DRM, as Galaxy probably allows them to do their constant patching routine just as well as Steam.

More importantly, who actually cares? Because 213374U's post is worded like majority does. ... Like, who of y'all remembers the time where GOG purposefully cut paying customer's access to their games for a publicity stunt? Um. I was actually referring to Paradox's abandonment of and eventual divestment from their own DRM-free storefront, Gamersgate, and going Steam-exclusive (forcing Gamersgate CK2 buyers to adopt Steam if they wanted to keep their games supported). This was after running their mouth on how great DRM-free was and how evil/crappy Steam was, which didn't earn them much sympathy among their fans, back then. I guess if you missed this, the confusion is understandable. Still, I wouldn't be so quick to jump to conclusions that "nobody cares" simply because I'm unaware of something.

Re: ignore Ignore is seriously pointless here because if I put someone on it, I just know that some other mother****er is going to quote them anyway so I'm still going to end up reading that **** and get triggered all over the place. Maybe we can get some Microbux earmarked to get that fixed? Yeah, that's pretty crazy. I mean, you have to ask yourself what kind of genocide is this guy capable of really? He's gonna kills us all—with kindness.

Wait, I'm sorry, in what way is "white women don't want to date asian men, as a general rule" a racist statement? 'Cause I thought this was a trend corroborated by dating site statistics. Nothing racist about that. IIRC the presentation and "arguments" were nowhere near as fact-focused and level-headed, though. The post should still be around, if you want to dig into his posting history, though I can't in good conscience recommend that. In any case, as has been pointed out before, if race is irrelevant, bringing it up out seems somewhat out of left field.