Bay 12 Games Forum

Shut up Johny. Shut up CowofDoom. Both of you look like your pulling shit out of your ass, and It pisses me off.

Don't do that.  I don't agree with a lot of the things CowofDoom has said in this topic (the police are terrorists?  WTF?), but it's not your place to tell him to "shut up".  In fact, he's contributed a hell of a lot more to this discussion than you have.  If you want to refute his points, fine, "shut up" or "your pulling shit out of your ass" is not how you do it.  Let's try and keep this discussion above a third-grade level, can't we?

Lately, I find that whatever game I'm playing, I dream about it nonstop.  I finally picked up Spelunky a couple of days ago, and all night, I was playing Spelunky in my dreams.  Before that, it was Dwarf Fortress, and I was building megaprojects in my dreams.

You'd think that it would be pleasant, but it's not.  "d-b-f" over and over and over for four straight hours is not in any way enjoyable.  When I have dreams like that, it makes me NOT want to play the game in real life.

I hear that they are lower-impact and thus better for your knees than running or jogging.  That true?

Wow, if that's even HALF true, it's freakin' epic.

I can't say I'm sorry.  I didn't mind there being a place to post random stuff, but it seemed to spill over into other (serious) topics far too much.  If the Toad deemed VN a cancer, better to cut it off before it spread more than it did.  Many other, lesser forums than this consider Bay12Games.com "the smartest forum on the Internet", where even the 12-year-olds are polite and speak in complete sentences.  There's no drama problems here like, say, the Gaia Online forums, and there's no "oh yeah, well if you weren't playing since the 2D era your opinion doesn't count, newb" elitism such as so many other indie game forums are plagued with.

I'd like Bay12Games to be "the smartest forum on the Internet" again, and spamming lolcats and internet catchphrases that were tired a year ago is not part of that.  Maybe VN being closed is for the best.

Sorry for injecting my opinion in a place it doesn't belong. I should read up on the subject before trying to participate in a discussion like this.

Better to participate in the discussion and become less ignorant.  I have no problem with you posting no matter how ignorant you are, as long as you understand that your opinion isn't the final word on the subject, and you clearly have no problem with that.  I posted the topic in the first place, and I'll be the first to admit that I don't know everything about the subject.  I didn't know about the "Somalis defending their coast from illegal fishing and toxic waste" aspect until Aqizzar brought it up.  If you have a serious opinion on the subject, it's welcome, regardless of how little you know about it.  Read.  Participate.  Learn.  If there's something you want to ask about the subject and I don't know, Aqizzar or somebody sure as hell will know the answer.

Again, I am aghast at how you think violence is the solution to these pirates, when you have to deal with the underlining causes. Bah.

I'd like a humanitarian solution as much as the next guy, but I'm willing to settle for an effective solution.  From my point of view, it seems that military force is that effective solution.  If we send care packages, the Somali warlords will confiscate them and trade them for more weapons.  Somalia is a horrible place with deep-seated problems, but short of yet another nation-building extravaganza such as we are trying to extricate ourselves from in Iraq (and it's debatable how well that even worked), what are we to do about it?  Violence obviously will NOT solve the problems that are at the root of the piracy, but it can and will make it economically nonviable to continue piracy, or at least, as PTTG said, make the pirates stick to Libyan targets instead of American ones.

Unfortunately, I think kuro_suna's correct.  There are lots of places that aren't ready for democracy for whatever reasons, and horrible brutal dictators are the only things keeping places like that stable.  Saddam was a cruel, ruthless son of a bitch, but all the Iraqis had running water, sewers, and electricity under his iron fist.  We can't provide that even today, and there's a distinct possibility that Iraq will collapse into Mad Max territory once we pull out.

Guys, just because VN is gone, this does NOT mean that the VN posting style should take over in GD, or we'll just lose it too.  Fluffy wamblers and who is whose parent has nothing whatsoever to do with this discussion.

Actually, back in the days, Soviets had quite effective ways of defending against pirates: Soviet ships carried not only cargo, but also some troops with it. Once the pirates boarded, military quickly destroyed them and dumped bodies back into their boat. Needless to say, Soviets cargoships didnt experienced a lot of troubles with pirates.

I read about that.  It seems kind of impractical to put a squad of Marines on every merchantman that sails within five hundred miles of Africa, but it may be the best alternative.  As for the moral quandary of destroying a "mothership" that's also a part-time fishing platform, I don't have a problem with it.  Call it ethnocentrism, call it American exceptionalism, I call it fair play.  Even in America, in the Gulf of Mexico, shrimp boats and other fishing vessels can pick up a spare ten thousand dollars per run by bringing in "packages" from eighty miles out, and lots of them do.  But if they choose to do that and get caught, then the Coast Guard can and will confiscate the vessel in question, leaving the families of the fishermen destitute.  I think if you want to keep your fishing platform in a non-sunk condition, don't let it be used for part-time piracy.

I'm fine with cracking down on illegal fishing and toxic dumping, but again, Black Hawk Down.  Helping Somalia hasn't exactly worked out great for us in the past, no matter how morally preferable it may be to bombarding a pirate village into rubble.  I'd like to think Obama's got better sense than to get involved in another nation-building clusterfuck like the one we're supposedly about to get out of in Iraq.

*Salutes*