Enoch
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Posts posted by Enoch
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Yeah, normally you'd be preaching to the choir on that one. I don't buy games all that frequently, and when I do, it's rarely in the initial-release rush. But I'm taking a risk here because I'd really like to get some CRPG time in between the end of the house-buying/moving chaos and the beginning of the Thanksgiving in-law-visit chaos. From a bug-avoidance point of view, I would probably be better served to get Fallout 3 first (which I haven't grabbed yet because there's really no point in buying a game when packing/moving/unpacking is taking all of your free time), but an IWD-style tactical RPG just suits my current mood better than a shooterish Fallout would.
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Cool. I ordered the game last night. I skimped a bit on the shipping, though, so I'm left crossing my fingers and hoping that my copy arrives before the weekend.
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You guys cant even have BB guns over there can you? Could have solved that problem for around $50.00 and a garbage bag.
It's a good point, frankly. A .22 air gun would at least prove capable of exacting a fighting retreat (they're leaving the house). But the problem is extensive. They had one pop out of the freaking toaster! If it was me I'd have turned the lounge into a fething redoubt. The rats would have to go ****ing Iwo Jima style to get in. Razor wire, sonics, mechanical traps.
I hear that. I'd have every freaking surface of the joint double-coated with the most potent poison available.
Either that, or I'd hire a party of level-1 adventurers to kill them all.
My weekend was exhausting. Regular readers of this feature will know that I moved to a new house last weekend. This weekend, my parents and my sister & her husband came to stay for a couple nights to help us out with some new house projects. Well, really one new house project-- the joint we bought has a 1-car detatched garage with a 50+ year old roof, some termite damace, and some rotting framing. My father and brother-in-law spent the weekend ripping off the ancient shingles, pulling out the rotten portions, reinforcing, re-framing (replacing a few supports, and the sill and all of the rafters on one side), and re-shingling the roof. (I am less experienced that they in the manly arts of construction, so my role was more limited to being the 'go-fer' and other general support tasks.)
Our backyard is now covered with construction debris, but we do have structurally sound, waterproof garage to show for it.
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The 2004 Bush campaign's emphasis on supporting the troops and being tough on terrorists was a perfect example of a conservative candidate effectively using emotional impact in its pitch to the public.
that's one of the few because of the very real perceived threat of terrorism.
Uh-huh. What about GHWB's big public stand against flag burning? Or Reagan's made-up stories about welfare moms with welfare Cadillacs? Politicians of every stripe use emotional appeals to voters-- it hardly skews one way or another.
i'm simply saying that i'm surprised it was as small as it was, not that it was small. given the media slant, and the lack of popularity of the "old guard" resulting from the GOP's inability to control itself the first 6 years of bush, i would have expected a much larger gap.OK. You were surprised. Probably because you believe that media bias is a significant influence on peoples' opinions when it isn't.
Ultimately, most people aren't convinceable based on what happens in an election, even where there is a mile-long record of bad policy and poor leadership. Because, when the chips are down, people would rather ignore contrary facts than admit that they were wrong in their prior belief in a particular candidate/party. (This phenomenon should feel familiar to anyone who has argued on the internet.
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If a story has a strong emotional impact, it gets over-reported because those stories tend to be simple and tend to hold the audience's interest
which tends to fall into liberal territory, almost by definition.
The 2004 Bush campaign's emphasis on supporting the troops and being tough on terrorists was a perfect example of a conservative candidate effectively using emotional impact in its pitch to the public.
IMO, "media bias" in this case is a red herring thrown out by people who don't want to face the fact that McCain lost because he was a not-particularly-effective candidate tied to the policies of a very unpopular incumbent from his own party.again, immaterial. certainly mccain did not help his own prospects, and i've pointed out previously that the 6% margin was in spite of his lack of quality. in other words, it is surprising he did as well as he did given his obvious (to me) deficiencies and the almost certain tilt in nearly every media outlet in the country towards obama. obama's deficiencies were simply ignored by the media, all of them.
I think we're reading the margin of victory very differently. You seem to think it's insignificantly small. In a nation that has proven over and over again over the past couple decades to be a pretty close 50/50 split between the parties as currently constituted, 6% is a rather huge gap. The vast majority of the people who actually showed up to vote knew which party the would be voting for years ago. A 6% difference in the totals displays either enormous shifts in turnout among each side's base, or a substantial majority of the "convincable" voters going to one side.
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The Democratic primaries were far more prolonged and interesting than the GOP primaries
To who? Is this a fact?
Well, I think that "prolonged" is pretty indisputable. Sure, the states were voting on the same schedule, but it was pretty clear where the Republican primaries were going by Feburary/March, while the Democratic primaries were up in the air until the summertime. "Interesting" is probably in the eye of the beholder, but I don't think it's particularly controversial to say that public interest in general was higher in the Hillary-Barack race than it was in seeing McCain slowly add to his delegate total after everybody else but Huckabee had conceded.
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Where you see institutional bias, I see mostly marketing and cost-consciousness. If a story is very complicated, it gets under-reported because news editors/producers know that long, involved segments lose audience interest, and these stories are expensive to research and produce. If a story has a strong emotional impact, it gets over-reported because those stories tend to be simple and tend to hold the audience's interest (and the first african-american major party candidate for the presidency does have a huge emotional impact for a lot of people). If a story has a runaway truck on fire, they would interrupt the moon landing to broadcast it. Among major news organizations I only see the kind of institutional bias you're talking about in a few organizations. There are a few places where the bias comes down from the top and is pretty pervasive in stuff you mention like story selection (NYT, NPR, Murdoch's media empire, etc.). But they're the exception rather than the rule, and the predelictions of those organizations are well known enough that their effect on actually swinging public opinion is pretty minimal.
Particular to this campaign, the chronology of events made a difference in coverage. The Democratic primaries were far more prolonged and interesting than the GOP primaries, which led to more coverage. Also, the skill with which the candidates' campaigns manage the media matters, too. And Obama's people ran circles around McCain's in this area-- Obama got better media coverage because his people pitched the media a better story to tell. (The opposite was true in 2004; Bush's media management strategy easily outclassed the Kerry campaign.)
IMO, "media bias" in this case is a red herring thrown out by people who don't want to face the fact that McCain lost because he was a not-particularly-effective candidate tied to the policies of a very unpopular incumbent from his own party. (The same can be said of many other GOP candidates for lesser offices.) This depressed turnout among those more apt to support his party's platform, at the same time that Obamamania and Bush-fatigue was increasing turnout for the other side.
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a buddy of mine and i have had this discussion a million times. he comes from galveston down in dixiecrat territory (his dad is a dixiecrat judge). republicans don't need to drop moderates, they need to drop the social harping, i.e., religious based arguments. stick to small government rather than spend like they did with a republican controlled house/senate/presidency and they'll do better. the younger republicans seem to know this. i think the ones that needed to get purged, got purged, quite frankly.
taks
Of all other forums and blogs that are out there, this is the most sane one from a republican point of view. I sense a Ron Paul-lite message on the incoming election.
The Republicans wouldn't get 30% of the vote with that kind of platform. Pull the pro-"traditional values" planks out of the GOP platform, and all of those religious voters who currently turn out to vote "R" because of abortion, gays, school prayer, etc., are going to be in play. Poll these kind of voters on questions on taxes, social security, healthcare, education, etc., and they're actually more in-line with the Democratic platform than with the GOP.
My personal opinion is that journalists tend to be partisan because of their lifestyles. They often, now, go into journalism with little serious life experience. Thus lacking any executive experience they focus almost entirely on the emotional, and ignore the practical.IMO, 90% of perceived media bias is actually marketing. The press favors the emotional angle because the emotional sells a heck of a lot more papers than the practical. (Emotional stories are also much easier and cheaper to write.) News organizations decide on their target demographics, and craft their publications to confirm the biases of that audience. But, the only effect that this kind of bias has on elections is in confirming people's pre-existing opinions. (Liberals read the NYT and listen to NPR, become more liberal, and vote for liberal candidates; Conservatives do the same with the WSJ and Fox News.)
Other than that, I think that the ethos that motivates people to pursue a career in journalism jives more closely with a leftish values system. (Whereas a more conservative values system would lead them to get a "real job" in the business world.) So most journalists do tend to favor liberal opinions. Of course, opinion is not bias, and the better reporters can prevent it from becoming so. Sure, some does leak through, but certainly not enough to meaningfully affect an election that was won by an overall 6% margin.
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The Clash -- Koka Kola
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The pressure from the cost side might end up being more significant than any change in demand.
To make a AAA game, you've got to pay the salaries of a pretty large team of developers for a couple years before you see your first dollar of return. That means that you need some pretty serious financing. All kinds of businesses are finding it much tougher and more expensive to convince lenders to advance them funds, and every additional dollar that goes into financing has to be accounted for, either by cutting costs, raising the price, or lowering profits for ownership. I wouldn't be surprised to see a few major game projects fall apart because the increase in financing costs made their original budget projections obsolete.
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Congrats! Is the house new or did you by from an owner?
Thanks. The house was built 43 years before I was born. Their isn't much room for new single-family homes inside the Beltway-- the only new construction you see is on lots where the previous house has been torn down. We're in a rather nice neighborhood, though, and the place has been well maintained (with the exception of the detatched 1-car garage, which badly needs a new roof, and possibly wholesale reframing, too).
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Repetitive filler combat (often respawning) put in place to increase the estimated playtime. I'd rather play a 10-hour game with 10 hours of interesting content than a 20-hour game with 10 hours of interesting content and 10 hours of tedious padding.
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I am now a homeowner!
We closed on the new house last Friday, and moved on Saturday. It still feels all weird, like we're on some kind of vacation where we happen to have brought everything we own. But making the commute into work this morning (which is only about 10 minutes longer than it was before) probably helps start up a new routine. And, hopefully, the cable/internet hookup will go OK today (the wife is at home taking care of that-- she gets more paid vacation time at her job than I do) so we won't feel quite so cut off from the outside world.
The move went OK. 2 complications: First, the boxspring for our bed ("queen" size) would not fit up the stairs into the master bedroom (which I probably should have foreseen). So, yesterday we went to buy a King-sized bed (which uses 2 twin-size boxsprings) which will be delivered later in the week. (We got a nice deal from a warehouse/overstock seller because it had a small hole poked in the fabric on the side.) The second, more amusing complication happened when the movers had finished and were getting ready to leave-- they locked the keys to the moving truck in the cargo area. They apparently had some kind of hammer and chisel in the cab of the truck, though, and spent 20 minutes using that to knock the padlock off of the rear door.
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He's a socialist in the sense that he wants to redistribute wealth.
The whole wealth-redistribution argument as it was used in this campaign was really quite silly. Both candidates are on the record supporting programs that redistribute wealth in various ways, and neither of their platforms or backgrounds are significantly different in that regard.
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Thanks. I had missed where the skill list was disclosed. I must say that I'm disappointed that only 4 of the 10 are non-combat skills.
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I heard about this. I'd like to play it one day. It's seems pretty shallow, though... like Tetris.
Well, it's a short game, but I wouldn't necessarily call it shallow. It is continually introducing new concepts and building on them, so it rarely feels like you're solving the same puzzle over and over again. And the art and music is top-notch.
There's a free demo. If you enjoy it, the rest of the game is well worth the $20.
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Are there any plans to move to a proper proportional representation system? Or at least preferential voting or something?
No. The current representative system is written into Article I of the Constitution. It would require huge amounts of political capital to even get the conversation started in that direction, and, ultimately, the resulting policies wouldn't be all that different.
For good or ill, in the States, there's a lot of reverence for the 1789 Constitution. There have been a few periods of major changes made to it (most notably, the initial Bill of Rights, the Civil War amendments, and the efforts of the early-1900s Progressives), but otherwise, there has been great resistance to anyone questioning the wisdom of the "founding fathers."
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I think it's his voting record that bothers gun owners but I don't think there's much to worry about.
What bothers me is I think the passionate gun owners would have voted for Bush in for a goddamn third term if they could over Obama over the gun issue. Now there's nothing wrong with making one issue your issue and sticking to principles, but it's a pretty ****ed up system when you have two choices on who to vote for and you often have to take the lesser candidate simply over one issue--whether it's guns or whatever you feel strongly about. I end up feeling ill every time I cast my ballot, no matter who I go with.
Yeah, that's the nature of American "catch-all" parties. In other democracies, people often vote for single-issue parties, with the expectation that its members will compromise with other parties in order to achieve their goals on their one big issue. In America, we force the voters to do the compromising, which probably produces stabler political systems but also leads to more voter disaffection and cynicism.
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By the way, on the wider issue, Obama's official campaign platform doesn't mention gun issues at all, and his response to the Heller decision took a balanced approach, emphasizing local solutions:
I have always believed that the Second Amendment protects the right of individuals to bear arms, but I also identify with the need for crime-ravaged communities to save their children from the violence that plagues our streets through common-sense, effective safety measures. The Supreme Court has now endorsed that view, and while it ruled that the D.C. gun ban went too far, Justice Scalia himself acknowledged that this right is not absolute and subject to reasonable regulations enacted by local communities to keep their streets safe. Today -
God given? When did God give man the gun?
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."
Someday Sand you are going to wake up and realize that that vast majority of your fellow citizens do believe in God in some form or another. Including the founding fathers of your country who had the wisdom and foresight to spell out that unalienable right DO come from God and not from man. If rights came from man then man could take them away. So if you value your freedom it actually behooves you to be at least a little religious.
But I was just using a phrase for emphasis the post in question.
I think his point was more about the "gun" part of the question rather than the "God" part. I can see tossing God rhetoric into the argument if you're talking about freedom from coercion or imprisonment, but it's a bit of a stretch to say that God protects material good A but not material good B. If the government can't ban a class of material possessions like guns because God gave them to mankind, the same argument could be used to toss out limits on crystal meth and child pornography.
Nah, gun rights are restrictions on lower levels of governments (Congress and the States) given by a higher level of government (the Constitution). These rights were created for entirely practical, rather than philosophical, reasons.
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The people on the gun forums I browse all have their panties in a bunch, like the end of the world is nigh. I don't think it'll be so bad.
I suspect that you're correct. Many of the gains that the Democrats have gotten in Congress are in areas where gun rights are a big deal to the voters. The party leadership doesn't have much of an incentive to put all those new representatives at risk by forcing them to decide between voting their party and voting their district. I doubt that gun issues will be on their agenda at all.
As for the Supreme Court, the most likely appointments in the next 4 years would all be replacements for Justices who were in the minority in Heller anyway. I'm sure the Court will be asked to deal with the consequences of that decision at some during the Obama administration, but it's unlikely that any Obama appointees wouldn't affect the outcome of those cases.
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Not sure which thread this belongs to, but I read an article that Fallout 3 has already outsold ALL other Fallout games put together!
The cross-platform release pretty much guaranteed that from the get-go.
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Also, as it's a lower-level game than MotB, we probably won't be seeing as many swarms of high-level spell effects that tend to cause the biggest performance hits.
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US Presidential Elections 3
in Way Off-Topic
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taks' experience is probably with other engineers, where the private sector is almost certainly more lucrative than the ivory tower. In 'hard skills' fields like engineering, math, the sciences, statistics, business, economics, law, and medicine, most college-level teachers could be making larger salaries outside the academic world. But it's tough to talk about teachers as one group, because that pairs this group with instructors in the humanities, history, philosophy, literature, languages, etc., who don't have a particularly vibrant market for their skills outside of a collegiate setting.
Anyhow, we're getting pretty far afield from the original topic here. It's presidential transition time, people! Latest leaks have Tom Daschle as the pick for the Health & Human Services job (and a lead role in the administration's plans for reforming health insurance), and Eric Holder as the lead candidate for Attorney General.