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Messages - Sir Pseudonymous

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316
General Discussion / Re: The "America Question"
« on: December 20, 2010, 11:25:51 am »
Oh I agree completely. The last coupla presidents didn't realize that government is a business.
Government is not and cannot be treated like a business. It is the people of the state, made up of elected individuals who the people think will benefit them the most (or in the case of republicans, whoever will hurt the people they don't like the most "CAUSE IF A MAN CAN'T STAND ON HIS OWN HE AIN'T NO MAN, AND THE GUBMINTS SHOULD BE KILLIN DEM QUEEROMOSEXUALS AND FARNERS INSTEAD OF HELPING PEPOLE I TELL YOU WHAT!").

The thing about government spending is, unless you're spending it on another country, or handing it off to people who'll just secret it away in Swiss bank accounts (or worse, invest it in another country, like China), it can't be wasted. The government gets both what it payed one of its citizens to do, and it gets a citizen who now has the income to better participate in the economy, meaning that other citizens are better able to make a living, which means they can better participate in the economy, and so on until it's changed hands and been taxed so many times it's right back in the government's hands. "But if this is true," you ask, "then why do we need the government managing these things at all, if they work so well?" It is because the system is inherently unstable; without oversight by an organization with no profit motive money begins accumulating at the top, where it is either hoarded or spent in foreign countries, hurting the people whose labor produced it in the first place and causing the economy to collapse, as there is no longer anyone to buy things, and thus no profit motive to keeping people employed.

Which is also, by the way, why the government should be providing healthcare to every single one of its citizens, regardless of context. Because no matter what, it's paying Americans to help Americans, so everyone wins except the parasites who found a way to make a disproportionate sum off providing a service that they had to not provide in order to turn a profit ("Pay me money and I'll totally cover your medical bills when you get sick! What? You're sick? Fuck you you're not profitable anymore!" >:().

317
General Discussion / Re: "Childhood" wasted
« on: December 19, 2010, 11:39:56 pm »
Hmmm... apparently Sir Pseudonymous is so intelligent he can look down on everyone else as "coked up goldfishes".  Hmm.
You missed that that was a setup for the crack about executives and their cocaine problems. :P

318
Other Games / Re: Good complex games
« on: December 19, 2010, 11:08:04 pm »
Aurora here, witch looks like another good and complex game that I unfortunately can't play because my monitor is small.
Distant Worlds. It's basically 99% of the cool concept shit that Aurora has, only it was made by an actual dev team, instead of a whiny douche who insists on using a programming language that was outdated in the nineties (he started aurora in... what was it? '02 or '03? later? so no excuse there). Also, it's a game, instead of a spreadsheet.
To be fair, I have never seen the Aurora dev be whiny or douchy. And some people find Aurora very enjoyable, thank you very much.
Really? I thought you were involved in the thread where he came here and started bitching because only most of the people were obsequiously praising him, then got pissy, flamed everyone, and ragequit. But the point I was making is, Distant Worlds is about 99% of the cool shit Aurora did, only without any of its (significant) flaws. It has its own flaws, but they're not nearly as bad. Distant Worlds is a game; Aurora is a simulation masquerading as a spreadsheet.

319
Other Games / Re: Good complex games
« on: December 19, 2010, 06:42:24 pm »
Aurora here, witch looks like another good and complex game that I unfortunately can't play because my monitor is small.
Distant Worlds. It's basically 99% of the cool concept shit that Aurora has, only it was made by an actual dev team, instead of a whiny douche who insists on using a programming language that was outdated in the nineties (he started aurora in... what was it? '02 or '03? later? so no excuse there). Also, it's a game, instead of a spreadsheet.

320
General Discussion / Re: Things that made you sad today thread.
« on: December 19, 2010, 09:23:13 am »
There's a reason why lots of scientists don't express skepticism towards man-made global warming.

(Hint: It has to do with the social and work-related ostracisation of those who do.)

I think we've reached that threshold at this point.
Well fuck.

And I just made a post advocating caution. Napalm has been thrown on the fire.
And I just know that people are gonna be up in arms after this has been resolved because they feel nothing in there was enough for moderator intervention.

What happened?
It sucks that I'm always asleep, when the forum is at it's peak of activity.
The Worst Gamer made a thread where he argued that idiot criminals and people disinterested in having children shouldn't be allowed to have children. Queue maybe a dozen or so people flaming him and making death threats. And then it managed to go even further downhill, and vanished.

My mom believes in a religious guy who says advanced civilization existed before the Great Flood. Not only that, she backed this up by saying "He wasn't the only one who believed that. The History Channel also did documentaries about it."

Sigh.
Tonight on the Educational Channel...

321
Other Games / Re: The Worst Game You've Ever Liked
« on: December 18, 2010, 11:43:46 pm »
Bloodrayne 2
I'd agree with the first Bloodrayne; it was entertaining despite being a gigantic piece of shit. The second one just wasn't as entertaining as zombie nazis with jetpacks and mechs trying to summon satan, though.

I didn't think the first one was bad enough to be called bad. :-\  The second one had busty maids in miniskirts.
The first one was extremely clunky, at least on the PC, and was really terrible as a game, since you could matrix mode anytime you needed a second to flail randomly in any given direction, killing 80% of the people in the room in one fell swoop. It was, however, So Bad it's Good (Nazis! Zombies! Zombie Nazis! Jetpacks! Mechs! Satan! :))). The second one, while technically better, pushed it out of that zone and into "wow, this is basically soft-core lesbian snuff porn with some shitty gameplay attached". I played until just after the tower that turned everything into the weird red twilight shit, at which point I found it impossible to proceed (the enemies at that point become faster than you and immune to essentially everything you can do, leaving you out of blood and health immediately; I'm sure there were cheats, but I just didn't care enough at that point to bother). Before that it was just kind of dull, repetitive, and annoying.

Hm, I don't remember it being that hard.  I know I finished the game, which set it up for a really cool sequel.  And then Terminal Reality apparently abandoned the franchise, or maybe Majesco did.

Also funny, 4x4 Evo 2 is made by the same company that made Bloodrayne.
Eh, all I remember is that they blocked the grabbing chain thing and most of your attacks, specifically feeding, meaning unlike almost every other fight you couldn't heal and refill your ammo, and there wasn't really anything else to feed on either. I gave up after failing at least a couple dozen times to get through the courtyard with the crashed helicopter and two enemies.

322
General Discussion / Re: "Childhood" wasted
« on: December 18, 2010, 10:41:24 pm »
Lying is bad because it's bad is, from a Conflict Theorist perspective, probably slipped in there to keep us from deceiving the educator or the parent.
Yeah, there's definitely an issue there. If you raise your kid to be a self serving, manipulative fuckwad, specifically one competent enough to get away with it and thrive, they'll just turn on you, like you're basically telling them too. So, while it's in the child's best interest to learn these things, it's not in your interest for them to.

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As for your second point, I would say that it is not as easy for social behaviour to be learned while studying some textbooks. If you're developing social skills while diligently studying, you're not really studying very hard.
I'll concede that (and the textbook thing, which would be more likely to just give someone a head full of random trivia than any usable skills), on the grounds that non-engineered childhood, like capitalism, is a tolerable if suboptimal solution to the problem. It kind of works most of the time, while being too random of a clusterfuck to replace with an optimal solution at this point in time. It's essentially a memetic evolutionary algorithm that mostly functions by virtue of non-functional configurations not continuing, and serves as a tolerable solution to a problem (producing viable adults from kids, who are collectively about as intelligent as a coked up goldfish; or in the case of capitalism, producing a viable economy from a bunch of executives who are even more coked up than the aforementioned goldfish) that's too complex (and large scale, in the case of capitalism) to engineer an optimal solution to.


If the above was too garbled and incoherent to make sense of, then it's because I'm far too tired to be attempting to convey my already mostly convoluted philosophy, and wired on caffeine to boot.

323
General Discussion / Re: The Idea of Feminism.
« on: December 18, 2010, 10:22:26 pm »
How would you get that one anyway? You'd need a spermatozoid impregnating... another spermatozoid
Genetically engineer out the X chromosome in a lab? Probably wouldn't produce viable development, and there's fuck all motivation to try outside of FOR SCIENCE! or bizarre movie plots with a nonsensical luddite message about playing god...

324
General Discussion / Re: "Childhood" wasted
« on: December 18, 2010, 10:01:46 pm »
But, the rub is, we do. We just don't use spears anymore. We use politics. We're always backstabbing each other and using deception, and gaining the right allies, so we can fight off people who want our things, beat out everybody else for the best mate, and make sure our family survives the winter. Barring the collapse of our civilization (See: The Maya thread), having our kids play the same way animals play would be useless. They'll just grow up to be dumb ogres with no place in society except for 'pawn'.
Not that I disagree on the politics part, but isn't that kind of hindered by all the bullshit moral lessons that are given to kids that are directly in opposition to dealing with politics? You don't teach them "honesty is a valuable weapon because if you aren't trusted you cannot exist in society, and so shouldn't risk your reputation on frivolous things" or the like, you try to drill into their heads that "lying is bad because it's bad, mmkay?"

I do however disagree with the idea that pointless recreation is necessary for socialization. It would be just as easy for social behavior to be learned in a setting that also teaches useful skills, rather than through watching Just For Dumbfucks TV!'s reality show marathon.

325
General Discussion / Re: The Idea of Feminism.
« on: December 18, 2010, 09:26:50 pm »
Wouldn't that result in statistically different ratios at birth, though? I know that the population overall has females as a slight majority (if I'm remembering correctly, at least), but that appears in older demographics, due to higher male mortality rates.

326
Other Games / Re: The Worst Game You've Ever Liked
« on: December 18, 2010, 07:54:04 pm »
Bloodrayne 2
I'd agree with the first Bloodrayne; it was entertaining despite being a gigantic piece of shit. The second one just wasn't as entertaining as zombie nazis with jetpacks and mechs trying to summon satan, though.

I didn't think the first one was bad enough to be called bad. :-\  The second one had busty maids in miniskirts.
The first one was extremely clunky, at least on the PC, and was really terrible as a game, since you could matrix mode anytime you needed a second to flail randomly in any given direction, killing 80% of the people in the room in one fell swoop. It was, however, So Bad it's Good (Nazis! Zombies! Zombie Nazis! Jetpacks! Mechs! Satan! :))). The second one, while technically better, pushed it out of that zone and into "wow, this is basically soft-core lesbian snuff porn with some shitty gameplay attached". I played until just after the tower that turned everything into the weird red twilight shit, at which point I found it impossible to proceed (the enemies at that point become faster than you and immune to essentially everything you can do, leaving you out of blood and health immediately; I'm sure there were cheats, but I just didn't care enough at that point to bother). Before that it was just kind of dull, repetitive, and annoying.

327
General Discussion / Re: Christmas too commercial
« on: December 18, 2010, 07:16:02 pm »
The joke he was making was that the "hopefully made of natural stuff" could be read as modifying the rabbi, hence the "yeah, a [synthetic] rabbi wouldn't really work" thing.

328
Other Games / Re: The Worst Game You've Ever Liked
« on: December 18, 2010, 05:43:37 pm »
Bloodrayne 2
I'd agree with the first Bloodrayne; it was entertaining despite being a gigantic piece of shit. The second one just wasn't as entertaining as zombie nazis with jetpacks and mechs trying to summon satan, though.

329
Other Games / Re: Mass Effect 3
« on: December 18, 2010, 10:38:32 am »
Technically, what he's saying about KoTOR2 is right, but he's making the mistake of attributing its problems to Obsidian rather than the material it was working with to start with. Yes, in the Star Wars universe Kreia is an unrepentant villain, because Star Wars operates on only the most childish black and white morality, thanks to that whiny asshole hack Lucas, and the last leg of KoTOR2 is unfinished and shitty because Lucas Arts wanted it released earlier. They also had to use the lightside ending of KoTOR as cannon, because Lucas requires that every story in the EU end with the heroes triumphing, or at least not losing completely if it needs a cliffhanger to better sell a sequel.


Now, I've enjoyed Obsidian's games, though I've only played KoTOR2 and NWN2, but both were flawed and buggy, and I know at least the first of those was forced out the door quite unfinished. I've liked everything Bioware's put out since NWN better though (I never did play the first KoTOR though). NWN was a solid game, Jade Empire was good and unique despite its simplicity, Dragon Age is a brutal subversion of mainstream high fantasy (and yes, I'm sure there have been authors who also did that, so what? Are they all unoriginal hacks except for whoever used that general theme first?) and Mass Effect is only slightly kinder to its own genre.

Sometimes limitations, however, force you to think outside the box and make decisions that ultimately benefit the experience. Garrus, for example, wouldn't be nearly as interesting a character for me if he was such an easy convert to the ideals of ParaShep. Instead, he's naturally resistant, as his own nature pulls him towards the Renegade side of the Karma Meter. But through example and good leadership, Shepard can show him there's a better way; but it's not easy, and takes two games worth of work to get any lasting improvement.

If they'd let me make him a Paragon team player in the first game and let his character stay flat like that through the sequel, that would have been horrible. Planescape, as far as I know, didn't have a sequel. Mass Effect is stretching the story over 3 full-length games. That gives it far more time to develop its characters; Planescape let you wrap everything up in one game, but if we handled every last problem in the first Mass Effect it'd leave us with 2 games of no development whatsoever.

I don't see where you're going with this.

If I had unlimited resources and unlimited time, I'd've made it so that your actions in the first game had either made him marginally better or far, far worse (depending on how depressing you want to go). So, if you encouraged renegade, you make him be a bit harsh, but not too bad. If you encourage paragon, he becomes a real monster because he's rebelling against what you taught him. After all, you died.
The hell does that make sense? If you encouraged him to shoot the doctor in the first game, you're just reaffirming the decisions he already made, and if you stop him from doing so you are not letting the doctor go, but sending him off to spend the rest of his life in a cell, which doesn't really apply to any of his actions in the sequel. I'd say compared to some trivial, informal advice you give him in the first game, any events both before and after his time on the Normandy SR1 would be far more influential on how he acts. The issue of whether or not to kill his former comrade for selling out when he had a gun to his head would probably have more of an impact, but then again, just like the first game it's a single isolated event. A single event can lead someone to radically alter their behavior, or it could just be reasoned away with "well, given the context, that was the right way to act; this is different, thus requires different action," which is far more realistic a reaction than "OH GOD I WAS WRONG ABOUT EVERYTHING BECAUSE ONE SITUATION WAS KIND OF COMPLEX TO DEAL WITH NOW I MUST BE SOMEONE COMPLETELY DIFFERENT!" ::)

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Actually, you have to play Shepherd like a manipulative bitch who is so paranoid he upgrades everything. Manipulate crewmembers that you want with you, mainly.
What? You're explicitly told, repeatedly, to do everything possible to stack the odds in your favor. Upgrading everything you possibly can follows that logically. Going out of your way to throw your crew into extremely difficult, emotional situations a little less so, though in most of the cases it's "oh shit, this just happened, I've really got to deal with this before we all go off to die," so it naturally follows that they're going to be either resentful that you ignored them, or distracted by the unresolved business, and thus not on their best game.

What do you mean? The only way that happens in Mass Effect 2 is if you roleplay Commander Shepard as a total retard. I only lost 1 character on my first run, Zaeed, and every other time I pulled everyone through. And I got a Tali romance in the sequel, so the Neeshka thing's a moot point here.
How does getting to fuck a (possibly anteater shaped) space gypsy that's deathly allergic to literally everything, especially you, make up for not getting the demon chick? Admittedly Neeshka probably smelled like sulfur, being a tiefling and all, but considering you could play a tiefling yourself... :-\

330
General Discussion / Re: Things that made you sad today thread.
« on: December 17, 2010, 05:37:59 pm »
I recommend watching Brazil instead. It's basically 1984, but better.

I recommend you get into the Christmas spirit and take a nut-cracker to you gonads.  It would still be better than watching Brazil.  Worst. Fucking. Movie. Evar.
Sure you're talking about the right Brazil? It's a fucking wonderful movie. Even after watching it a dozen times while writing a paper analyzing it for a humanities class.

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