Darks wrote on Jul 7, 2020, 17:26:
I have no idea where you are getting your dribble from, but you couldn't be further from the truth.

You appear to be new to the world wide web. When you see an underlined piece of text, try clicking on it: it will take you to a new page filled with information. Conventionally, people writing on the web cite their sources by including links in what they write.

Also, if you don't know what the RAND Corporation is, it is safe to assume that you have no rational basis for judging military policy and readiness, and are just repeating slogans that make you feel warm and fuzzy inside.

China is a paper tiger, once they get bloodied, they will fold.

Like we folded on COVID and tuned out on Afghanistan?

RedEye9 wrote on Jul 7, 2020, 12:19:
I have 30 minutes left of Hamilton, all Broadway musicals should be filmed like this. It's lovely.

While not quite the same, if you enjoy remote theater, my favorite NYC theater company has been doing remote, live play readings, usually free, throughout the lockdown. Check em out if you have even the slightest interest in Elizabethan and Jacobean theater: https://www.redbulltheater.com/ (N.B.: the name isn't a corporate sponsorship, but a reference to the first London theater to reopen after the Restoration following the collapse of the Puritan Commonwealth of England.)

Darks wrote on Jul 7, 2020, 13:02:
Plus, its also been reported that China wants to conquer the world and wants their military to be number one in the world, well that will not happen. If they ever come up against our Navy, will quickly learn why everyone fears the US Navy.

I wish I shared your confidence. Bronze age goat-herders with AK-47s fought the US military to a stalemate over the course of 20 fruitless years in Afghanistan. The RAND Corporation rates naval surface warfare near mainland China as being a Chinese advantage, and naval surface warfare farther from mainland China as being US-China parity. "China" fairly routinely kicks our ass in US military simulations of a conventional military conflict between the two powers. Meanwhile, COVID has thoroughly overwhelmed the US federal government's capacity to deal with it, while other developed nations are largely returning to normalcy. Like the hapless Federation in Verhoeven's Starship Troopers, we're collectively getting our asses kicked on all the major problems facing our society, and no amount of "USA NUMBER 1!!!" jingoism will reverse our decline in the metrics where we used to be, but are no longer, the best.

Liberals are attacking Conservatives and pushing for a "Civil" war.
If Liberals wanted peace, there would be peace.
If the Conservatives wanted war, there wouldn't be any Liberals.

I'm not sure one can threaten the annihilation of your political opponent and still claim to be the advocate of peace. If it does come to that though, it's helpful to remember that in the last American Civil War, the conservative Confederate States of America lacked both the population and the money to avoid an inevitable defeat. Similarly, arguably the best battlefield commander on the Union side, Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, was, prior to the war, a liberal college professor who had never before borne arms. Today, Conservatives find themselves in a similarly strategically fucked position: red states have less population and less gdp, both by a large margin, than blue states. If Conservatives again allow their delusions of persecution and fantasies of martial superiority to persuade themselves that democracy no longer serves their interests; and, they persuade themselves that their only choice is to bear arms against their own country and kill their fellow citizens and countrymen; then, now as before, their strategic weakness will doom their traitorous endeavor to failure. But if Conservatives do decide that this is the hill they, literally, want to die on, well, then nothing of value will be lost.

I'm gonna go out on a limb and say that Star Wars just isn't that great of a setting. It produced two great films (Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back) and some memorable video games, and that's about it. The rest is passable at best genre fare dressed up in nostalgia. Even the original trilogy ran out of ideas by the end of the first act of Return of the Jedi.

Orogogus wrote on Jun 26, 2020, 20:56:
Icewind Dale is basically a more modern Gold Box game with real time pause combat. But there were a lot of articles and forum threads back in the day pitting Icewind Dale and Diablo II head to head. It was kind of dumb.

Both Icewind Dale and Diablo II launched on the same day. Interplay's marketing, in its infinite wisdom, leaned into the resulting comparison by promoting Icewind Dale as an ARPG. As you note, it really wasn't. It was a more linear, dungeon-oriented version of Baldur's Gate 1, which puts it firmly in the Gold Box tradition.

I loved Icewind Dale at the time, but in retrospect, the Infinity Engine real time with pause combat was too shallow to sustain a dungeon crawler; the Gold Box games had it right the first time with turn based tactical combat.

The Wire
Generation Kill
The Deuce
Chernobyl
The Plot Against America

RedEye9 wrote on Jun 8, 2020, 11:27:
Blue, would you mind linking your trove find. I love a good glutinous gluttonous backlog.

For those interested in the literary canon, I just wanted to give a plug for the Norton Anthology of English/American/World Literature. Each volume in the series is reasonably priced, superbly curated, and filled with helpful introductory material, footnotes, glosses, timelines, etc.

Ant wrote on Jun 7, 2020, 02:58:
ow do you know the redone EVA intro was by a fan?

The game's producer has said as much on reddit. The in-game bonus gallery also credits the fan who made the new "install" videos.

The only 10/10 review is literally a forum post (PureDMG).

As a friendly reminder, a game review is not some immutable, revealed truth which permanently defines how a game is received or how you should feel about it. Instead, a review is a record of what one person thought of the game at a specific moment in time, possibly with a made-up, arbitrary number attached.

MrBone wrote on Jun 2, 2020, 00:57:
Ignorance sure is bliss, eh. Daniel Shaver thought the same. Get outside more.

Right back at ya, buddy. You appear to be ignorant of how logic works. A counterexample is used to disprove a quantified deductive statement, e.g.:
Let P(n) be the proposition "will be let off by police".
Ɐ w ∈ white people, P(w).

However, I did not make a deductive statement. Deductive reasoning depends on deriving true statements from premises that are known to be true, eventually going back to first principals. My use of the adverb "basically", along with the nature of the proposition itself, was the hint that I was arguing inductively, i.e. deriving a general statement from a collection of particulars. A single counterexample does not disprove an inductive generalization; only an aggregate showing a consistent trend contrary to the proposed generalization can act as disproof.

So pick up the dropped mic and try again.

Cutter wrote on Jun 1, 2020, 16:10:
All these corps pandering for a buck make me sick. The only thing they care about if profit. Period.

True. But it's also in bad taste to hold celebratory product launches at a moment when the US, at least, feels as though it's spinning apart into anarchy and despair. As a New Yorker, I've been stuck in a 1 bedroom, 400 sqft apartment for three months, and last night I was kept awake by the sound of looting two blocks away. This is an extremely anxious moment, and I'm one of the lucky ones who still has a job/apartment/income/healthcare and whose skin color basically gives me a free pass when interacting with police.

Agreed. I'm fully prepared to believe that they were put on the list because of Trump's vendetta against Bezos. But Amazon absolutely has a major counterfeit goods problem that if anything has been growing worse.

Burrito of Peace wrote on Apr 12, 2020, 16:00:

WannaLogAlready wrote on Apr 12, 2020, 15:02:
Give it time, VR will get there.

Been hearing/reading that statement since the 90s. It still isn't "there" yet.

All the Index really needs at this point is the ability to go untethered: everything else works as promised.

WaltC, more like DunningK.

phinn wrote on Apr 1, 2020, 13:39:
Anyone know how they are still patching Doom and Doom 2? Do these have any affect on the custom open source engines like GZDoom?

I believe these patches are specifically for the modern console ports (and possibly the unlockable in-game versions available in Doom: Eternal?) and do not affect anyone running the wads in a source port.

Drayth wrote on Mar 30, 2020, 02:19:
A little further ahead myself, but taking my time too. The VR experience for this shooter is as much a leap forward as Quake GL back in the day. The whole experience is so immersive. You react like you're at the actual game space all this is happening in. My first real gunfight felt insane, even if it's probably tame compared to what lies ahead.

Same. The experience was slower paced than, say, Doom: Eternal, but the first gunfight against Combine soldiers was pretty stunning. I was instinctively taking cover by physically crouching down. Since I couldn't see the enemy from my crouched state, I listened for their fire to pause for a reload. Then, I'd quickly stand, lean out, and fire at them until I expended the magazine, which in turn prompted quick, instinctive returns to cover to go through the multi-step reloading process (eject the empty magazine, reach back into my rucksack to grab a fresh magazine, slamming it into the pistol, then chambering a round with the slide). Like you say, the whole thing felt like I was actually in a gunfight rather than playing a shooter.

bigspender wrote on Mar 29, 2020, 21:16:
Isn't this a bit like making v8 car noises in your hatchback? It's just not the same experience as the real thing :p

I can't imagine it would be much fun to play this way. The game works because the gameplay mechanics and level design are perfectly integrated with the capabilities and strengths of VR. Take away the VR component and the bastardized remains are going to be pretty broken from a fundamental "is this enjoyable" perspective.

Ozmodan wrote on Mar 29, 2020, 12:38:
On another note there are too many videos out there trying to make Animal Crossing look good. It is just a game for kids and I am talking non-teenagers. If an adult is playing that game they either are very new to the genre or they have major issues.

I've been playing it and having a lot of fun with it. It's not demanding and it's not complicated, but that doesn't detract from its essential charm, its endearing characters, or the rewards of long term play. Animal Crossing isn't about achieving success at the risk of failure; it's about fooling around for a couple minutes each day, visiting your neighbors, watching your town, and the community that inhabits it, evolve and grow. To the extant that there is an end goal, it's to finish expanding and paying off your house. But if you're only working to accomplish that, then you've kind of missed the point and won't have much fun with it.

1badmf wrote on Mar 28, 2020, 18:57:
i've never been a huge fan of trek - enjoyable to watch, but too goody goody, and the writing was on average nothing special. Star trek Picard is a scifi masterpiece, and Discovery isn't far behind

What do you believe constitutes good writing? It's hard for me to believe someone would genuinely prefer the writing of Picard to Seasons 3-6 of TNG, but to each his own.

i binged DS9, which led into Picard, and the difference in production quaity is astounding. makes everything pre-Picard look like a badly managed stage production.

Somewhat of an aside, but this comment misunderstands the power of theater. When you watch television or film, you are watching a two dimensional image displayed on a screen. While movie magic can cause you to suspend your disbelief and get carried away with the story and characters and world being depicted, your brain never registers what you're seeing as real; there is always a degree of unreality to television and movies that the medium itself introduces. In contrast, theater, although limited in the range of what it can depict on stage, involves real humans standing a few feet in front of you. The consequent "strange alchemy of theater" is that when you see a character experiencing joy, or grief, or triumph, or tragedy, on the stage before you, you experience it as if it is real; after all, there is a person in front of you, experiencing these things, directly eliciting your sense of empathy, with no distance and no intermediation of a television or cinema screen. On that note, one of the side effects of seeing live theater with a well known film or television actor is that the person in question loses their larger than life quality; you've seen them before you, and in the end they are just people like you or I.