Bay 12 Games Forum

Yeah, it's a fun sentiment until you actually live with it. I'll take the lesser evil, thanks. It's less likely to have me starving to death in the streets, among any number of other bad ends. I care about the future generations, but not enough for that, and I'd much rather live for them than die for them.

If y'all want to suffer and/or die for them, well. Good luck, have fun, please stay away from me, my family, friends, any other bystanders, etc., when you go out in a blaze. I support most self-destructive behavior so long as no one besides the individual in question is in the blast radius. Please don't try to put me and the rest of the country/world in the blast radius.

Pretty sure that was actually touched on a fair bit during the initial discussions on it, before this thread was made. It has been mentioned a bit here, too.

That said, more discussion on the firearm angle kinda' makes something approaching sense. Doing stuff about it involves a lot less... everything. Logistics, political capital, etc., etc., etc. Makes it easier to get invested in the discussion.

Mostly just been the flow of conversation, though.

*shrugs* They're an armed organization, by and large, and often are pretty involved in fighting insurrectionists and whatnot. More or less a militia/military dedicated to combating domestic threats, really. Would say they'd be pretty legitimate, especially in areas where they're substantially involved in various harms to the population.

No clue how they're considered insofar as international law et al is concerned, though.

in fact, that particular genre is responsible for bringing much of what we consider acidic and bad to the world of computer gaming communities.

Oh, ohohoho, no, no. Having, y'know, been there for much of the development of online multiplayer (particularly in the period leading up to DotA strangling WC3's custom games list), no, it was not. It has been one of the genres better at bringing it out than most, but all that nastiness has been an aspect of multiplayer gaming since before WC3 and/or starcraft even existed, nevermind the first AoS-style maps or the ones that would ultimately spawn DotA.

Does seem like people like to claim it was, these days, and, as stated, the nature of the common designs involved do seem to be really damn good at bringing out the worst, but the worst was very much there before the competitive AoS map was. At the most, the gaming scene in general just wasn't as popular at the time, so not as many people were exposed to it, heh. But y'don't really get to blame the AoS map for general (oft well earned) stereotypes of gaming communities. We had that shit on lockdown for years before they came about.

Vast majority of deer/elk meat probably end up on dinner plates in the US too.

Eeehhh, near as I can tell the vast majority actually doesn't. More around a plurality. A lot actually goes to waste, either rotting on the side of the road (last numbers were >1 million deer/vehicle collisions over the course of a year, and that's around the average near as I can tell*) or discarded for various reasons (seen the average harvest from a deer ballparked at ~22kg -- where the low end of an adult white-tail by weight is around 40kg). Fair amount of a deer's meat just going to be thrown out.

Hunting does probably get around two or three times (hunters kill ~6 million yearly, so estimating at ~half the weight per deer -- which is probably generous, as not every hunter even bothers to bring the meat back for eating at all, but whatever -- being brought back leaves their contribution ~3 million, pound for pound) what roadkill does (and, being fair, some of that roadkill actually gets eaten -- most states I'm aware of have programs where police or whathaveyou'll pick up deer if they get to them soon enough and let prisoners render them down), but between that and natural causes it probably only manages somewhere in the region of half or so.

*Fun fact, deer are basically the deadliest non-insect, non-human animal in the US, by a fairly substantial margin (mosquitoes appear to edge them out a fair bit if you're counting bugs, though). Over the course of a year, deer average something in a range of "every human death by bear in the 20th century" in body count (around 130), thanks to the little bastards turning roadways into impromptu collision testing venues.

For reference, it looks like the most consistent records we have for fatal wolf attacks comes from france, where they managed to average... about ten a year, over the period of 1200-1920. Asia looks like they're having the most trouble with actual bodycount in modern times, though... for all they still appear to be averaging about four a year (200 recorded in the 50 years leading up to '02).

E: Though, for the interested, this looks like a pretty nice breakdown of deer fatalities and whatnot. S'possible hunting in fact represents less than half the dead deer (nevermind the meat) in this country, maybe even fairly substantially.

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And nah, you don't need a human on the battlefield. Controlling whatever's on it, maybe, but outside of various ethical/societal concerns about the human cost of war being too cheap, there's really no particular need to actually have flesh and blood being shot at. Even beyond airborne drones, there's already a fair amount of remote controlled or autonomous military devices under development and whatnot.

Eh, re: the homicide statement, at least, morg was pretty accurate. 1990-94 was about the last time in recent history both the rate and the raw number have done much more than slide pretty steadily downward, and that was 26-22 years ago.

Among other reasons, yeah. The religious affiliation, the people being targeted by 'em, political/economic importance of the regions they're acting in, etc., etc., etc. Likely even frequency and scope and whatnot. Pretty unlikely it's just one thing leading to the relative lack of coverage.