A rare moment of candor on the Men’s Rights subreddit:
Yeah, we noticed that.
H/T — r/againstmensrights
Men’s Rights Activism, summed up in a single comment
We Hunted The MammothBucking the Backlash
We Hunted The MammothA rare moment of candor on the Men’s Rights subreddit:
Yeah, we noticed that.
H/T — r/againstmensrights
@pitshade
I really need a better computer, to be able to play those games with mods. Consoles only get you so far. (and those loadings…) I want an alcohol mod.
Reminds me that at some point I started writing one for Skyrim (even though, again, I can’t run the damn game) that was supposed to randomize the labels on bandit-type enemies. New entries included “Red Piller”, “Neo-Nazi”, “Pick-up Artist”, etc. A few unique named bandits that weren’t mentioned by name in spoken dialogue for quests became “Andrew Anglin”, “Paul Elam”, etc. I was also planning on altering their faces and such.
Ironically, that mod was supposed to be a way to blow off steam after a day spent staring at their bullshit, heh. Then I had to abandon the project because obviously I couldn’t test it. If I ever manage to replace this can-of-lag with a more powerful computer, I might start over and do something bigger.
@Moocow
I see what you did there ! Joke aside, are there a lot of jobs that require you to go barefoot ? I’m genuinely interested in knowing about this considering barefoot is how I go most of the time, even and especially outside. I mean at this point I can probably stop bullets with my feet. Not that I want to try.
On the privilege thing, sadly these people take “privilege” as an insult rather than something they could use in a positive way. I say let’s show ’em this : http://www.robot-hugs.com/privilege/
It won’t change their minds because hey, when has REALITY ever affected them anyway ? But well, still worth doing.
@ sinkable john
‘Privilege’ can be a tricky word when advocating for political change.
Some friends are involved in analysing their party’s electoral performance over here in the UK. What’s interesting is that when you divorce policies from parties and use everyday language, progressive policies are quite popular. But that’s not fully reflected in election results. The various reports and surveys they’ve commissioned suggest this is down to language (ironically the reports call this “connection”) Labour seems to have used the sort of language that’s common in political circles but not in everyday speech, so they were seen as out of touch.
Privilege cropped up a few times. Firstly saying people had privilege was interpreted on the doorstep as saying “you have everything going for you so you don’t need help”. Secondly ‘dismantling privilege’ was held to have negative connotations. The Tories repeated use of ‘fairness’ and ‘fair play’ went down much better. It was seen as more positive, even if the underlying policies might have been less so.
Electioneering is about style as much as, if not more so, than substance it seems.
Be interesting to see what canvassers are told to do at the next elections.
ETA: there were lots of other factors of course bedside that word. The key one was that the Tories used analogies with everyday household budgeting and language that mirrored that and that went down better than technical stuff about economics even if it was oversimplifying and not truly analogous.
@Alan
That’s not ‘oversimplifying’ it’s lying. There is literally zero correlation between how to run a household budget and how to run a government budget, and trying to do it the same way leads to disaster, every single time. (Not to mention that people who analogize government to households and/or businesses tend to be terrible at running any of these three things).
re: Cosby Trial, while I’m super thrilled that they’re proceeding on it and looking to see if a trial is possible, the last I recall a grand jury looking at this was when a police officer murdered an unarmed black man on a suburban street. Apparently the story is that such a process could indite a ham sandwich, but the cop got off free. So I’m not incredibly hopeful. I do hope that I’m surprised by the outcome, though!
re: Stellaris,
@Sinkable John, It isn’t a huge stretch for me. I get introverted pretty easily, so quite often I just want to be left alone to do my own thing. So, I just put that out on my empire! It’s not that I think I’m better than all the weird walkin’ mushrooms and spacebirbs, it’s just that I’d rather they not be all up in my face all the time. I don’t drive too far down the Stormcloak path in Skyrim either, for the reasons you talk about.
@Brian, it’s much easier than CK2 or EU4. Paradox intentionally went simpler, so as to line up more with the traditional space 4X games like Master of Orion. Very much worth it, if you like those sorts of things. Not an intimidating game at all.
@EJ, i know! I will have to do something to make it a bit harder for myself if I go in that direction. Maybe I’ll pick sedentary and be one of those space mushrooms.
@ dalillama
Indeed. But to give an example, that refrain of “If you’re paying a lot of interest on your credit card you might want to tighten your belt a bit and pay off some of the balance instead” was easily (mis)understood as an analogy for austerity. It was absorbed, whereas talk of quantitative easing wasn’t.
Don’t forget, most of us don’t know the difference between the national debt and the deficit so using the terminology of economics went over people’s’ heads.
Communication is key in politics and it’s something that populist politicians tend to be better at (by definition I suppose)
Shocked and amazed that playing like the Nazis gets your face tag-team punched just like the Nazis.
It’s almost like ggers are immune to pattern recognition.
@Alan
Definitely. But it’s also the most appropriate, while being fairly easy to comprehend, unless one has egregious amounts of bad faith. Like… MRAs. Meh. There’s no solution to this, is there ?
I hear you. We’re currently seeing the frightening results of this, in both your country and mine, and also America.
@Scildfreja
When you put it like that I realize I misinterpreted your post a bit, and it does sound a lot less like a stretch now. I’m reminded that I recently got Tropico 5 for free and didn’t even go far in the tutorial (I really don’t fare well with strategy/management games, but hey, it was a freebie and it does look a lot simpler than Paradox games, which I really want to get into one day because hey, they really sound awesome). I kinda wanna give it another try but I’m still not sure I’m down with the whole “dictatorship simulator” thing – if that even truly is what it is, I admit I haven’t played enough of it to even have a clear idea of that.
Edit : @xthetenth
To be fair most games allow us to get away with pretty much anything with zero consequences. Granted, the games I personally like usually don’t work like that, but it’s still a pattern in itself. Games are permissive and that’s part of their appeal. Now does that excuse that burst of outrage ? Nope. But I’m glad to see more games emphasize that aspect of the whole concept of realism, and I’m REALLY glad for another opportunity to watch gators make asses of themselves.
@xthetenth,
GGers and the manosphere in general are a huge ambulatory warning about overfitting a network.
Interestingly, slavery is also something that you can have in Stellaris as well, and it’s also not really an optimal strategy as far as I can tell. Also sort of like real life! Amazing!
@Sinkable John
The Tropico series is pretty much a junta / banana republic simulator, yeah. You can play as someone who honestly wants to give the people what they want and make a utopia, but it’s still a dictatorship.
Stellaris allows you to have a bewildering array of government types. My xenophobic militants have a direct democracy, and I’m trying to get the research done for a cybernetic democracy (in which all government decisions are made through aggregate decision-making by the populace directly). Of course, my neighbors to galactic spinward are getting aggressive, the plutocratic oligarchical spacebirbs. I may have to go kick their nest out of the tree 😐
@xthetenth
I wonder how much these people have been influenced by the fact that most (probably all) WW2 games resort to buffing up Germany, to make up for the fact that they had massive heapings of luck in the early stages of the war, instead of portraying them as the utterly inefficient mess they actually were.
@Scildfreja
Sadly I’m a living example of that old sexist trope that says women’s brains can handle multiple tasks at once whereas men’s can’t. By their very nature, these games just overwhelm me, hence being a lot more at ease with RPGs where my own butt is all I have to manage. And EVEN then. I have problems with the 4-character teams in Dragon Age, goddammit (on the other hand, Final Fantasy IX is one of my absolute favorite games ever, because turn-based fights). Hell I’ll even avoid companions in Skyrim (but then that’s also because they can’t even be trusted with making coffee).
On the other hand I absolutely love complex co-op experiences where deep strategies can be built on the fly to deal with situations, with the added variable of human elements and therefore trust. So I really WANT to get into strategy/management games, but I get overwhelmed so, so easily. Boils down to what I do and don’t control : the more there is, the harder it gets.
*sad RTS puppy*
Like this?
http://i.i.cbsi.com/cnwk.1d/i/tim/2012/03/22/Angry_Birds_Space_HD.jpg
Scildfreja:
Is there a city/civilization simulator out there where you _aren’t_ an unaccountable dictator? I mean sure, you’re the “mayor” of SimCity, but you don’t get voted out of office if you decide to build an industrial casino hell-scape and unleash a tornado for shits and giggles. Tropico just makes it explicit.
(Not bashing the genre, I still play the hell out of Banished and Cities Skyline)
Hey now, in Tropico there can be elections.
On rare occasions they are even fair!
Slavery in Stellaris is a terrible idea most of the time, but if you’ve got slavery tolerance modifiers (Collectivist or Xenophobe Ethos, the autocratic spiritualist government type) your main populace won’t mind and for some bizarre reason there isn’t actually a mechanic for slave revolts even though there’s mechanics for other revolts. It does piss off other civilizations, though, as does using Purge. I’ve got an ongoing game with collectivist autocratic spiritualists with reduced ethos divergence, and have presently enslaved the former populations of all three Fallen Empires.
I’ve also got a game where I’m playing pacifists and have free migration agreements with everyone willing to accept them, along with legions of cloned genetically-engineered immigrants to handle my ground battles. Somehow one of my close allies got pops with both strong traits, some other positive traits, and no negative traits even though that’s mathematically impossible. I assume they got a lucky random event.
Yeah, it wasn’t the best example considering most jobs require shoes rather than the other way around. I’m fortunate in that I really don’t have too many physical disadvantages in life so I don’t have much to work with.
Flat feel are annoying though. Walking around without correcting soles makes my back hurt, although it was worse when I was a kid and my back was hurting for unknown reasons.
I did have a project in college where we were supposed to give up a piece of technology for a week (fascinating social-design experiment) and I chose to give up shoes. That was a challenge, both physically and psychologically.
Not just as an insult, but it conflicts with their personal narrative of “life is so unfair for me”. MRAs must always deny that other people have it tougher than them (and that they should be fortunate) in order to appear as the victim. Hence, all the idea about feminism going ‘too far’ or all of the false equivalencies.
I’ve only played the first two Tropico games, but you could definitely have fair elections in the first one. You lost the game if you lost the election and there was a small amount of cheating that didn’t penalize you and of course you got to see the poll numbers before you decided, but the game didn’t actually force you to be dishonest… 😉
That’s because racism and nationalism is gross.
Even my Renegade Shepard or Low Karma Lone Wanderer/Courier couldn’t be racist, yo. I’m not for people telling other people they’re inferior, no matter their race or immortality giving skin conditions. I might play some evil assholes but not complete monsters, which is a humorous exaggeration on my part BTW.
@ EJ (The Other One)
I still have a ton of minis from that and other games. Only stopped playing due a lack of people to game with. I still think about getting back into painting at some point.
Fingie is now on Twitter with the handle @fingiesmirk. He’s just figuring things out right now, but he seems excited about it. Be sure to check him out for some deep insights and bewildering statements! 🙂
@Handsome Jack
Then again there’s a world of difference between evil and goddamn stupid. Think Andrew Anglin : dude has a whole website dedicated to building his persona as one of the most despised people on the internet. Complete with articles illustrated with screenshots of video game or movie villains.
“Har har har I’m an evil overlord who rules over the dark side of the internet.”
No, Andy, you’re just plain dumb, with an army of stupid.
Re Stellaris:
My current game is with a xenophile, pacifist, collectivist nation which uses an overarching polytheistic religion to tie together a bewildering variety of different species. So far we’ve uplifted two species from presentience to intelligence and enlightened four primitive peoples (and are working on the fifth). We’re also standing watch over four planets with stone-age inhabitants and one with iron-age inhabitants, which we’re careful not to reveal ourselves to. We’re the benevolent forebears for this portion of the galaxy. It’s great.
The plan is to hyperspecialise each species so we can do the Star Trek federation thing. Once we get genetic engineering then we can start creating subspecies and then it’ll really get interesting.
Re the game being difficult to get into: I’d say that it’s the easiest of Paradox’s games because of the 4X elements and the much better UI, but that’s still not saying much. It’s the sort of game which assumes that you will be playing it for years, and so asking you to spend a few weeks learning it is no biggie.
It’s kind of a strategy / RPG hybrid in some ways. I’ve been sending my scientists off around the galaxy on weird quests to find bizarre animals, and the signs of the elusive progenitor species. They really develop personalities of their own.
That they need to exaggerate and fabricate tells me everything I need to know about the “difficulties” they face.
@katz, exactly like that. 😀
@Sinkable John,
I totally understand that :s (Though interestingly, multitasking is sort of a crap term – brains can’t focus on two things at once, really. Multitasking is all about efficiency in switching from one frame to another, back and forth. Which isn’t a good thing to do really. Better to focus on one thing and do it well!)
Some games are better than others for dealing with the multitasking complexity. I think Civ V is nice for that – it plays very much like a board game. Single-city play is possible, and can be a good strategy at times, which simplifies things further.
Stellaris would be better than most 4X games of its type, but if you want to try something in the spacey’ 4X genre, try Endless Space. It’s distilled the game genre into its purest form, I think – very clean, quite simplified. I think it’s lacking a bit of the heart that other 4X games have as a result of that, but it’s still a solid game and probably one of the easier ones to understand.
@leftwingfox,
Yup! Stellaris democracies happen every four years or so, and your leader might change. If an election happens and you haven’t fulfilled the election promises of the leader, you have a sad :C You don’t lose, but there are huge advantages to actually doing what the peoples want.
That’s sort of weak sauce, though. Want the real thing, play Crusader Kings 2. It’s a medieval Europe simulator (Well, Europe, Northern Africa, Middle East, Central South Asia, Northern Asia to Mongolia, and India), spanning from 762 to 1452. You can play catholics, orthodox christians, monophysites, miaphysites, hindus, shia, sunni, buddhists, tengri, norse, suomenusko, slavs, and others; you can play basque or sri lankan or somali or swede or any of the cultures from that time. And for government, you can be feudal, or tribal, or a merchant republic.
Republics are ruled by families that elect their leaders; the Venetians are the classical example but there are others. If your family is the ruling family – great, good for you! You get to control the nation! If your leader dies and you don’t win the new election? You lose all control of anything not held directly by your family, and have to wait for the next election to try again.
Did I mention that elections are held when the ruler dies? And that the game is mostly about political intrigue, including forced arranged marriages, assassinations and political backstabbery? And elections are as much about who can bribe the most votes as they are about being the best candidate?
Crusader Kings 2 is deliciously medieval. Republics are like a Shakespearean play of treachery and hubris. It’s marvelous.
Almost every game where you run a collectivity ends up having you play a dictator, whether benevolent or not. And you lose the game if you share power.
Populous was about genocide, which kind of set the tone for the 4x genre.
In Civilization, you can choose democracy as a type of government, but the legislature is very weak: it can force you to obey peace treaties, but has no power over domestic affairs.
As for SimCity:
Railroad Tycoon has you lose if you sell more than half the shares — which is just not how the stock market works!
Merchant Prince was probably the closest to a non-dictatorship that I’ve played. You play your family affairs dictatorially, but your family members can get legit elected (if you bribe the electors/cardinals, and cause an election to be held by assassinating the current doge/pope), and then you run the affairs of the city until your family loses the seat — which doesn’t end the game.
[Scildfreja has a nice ninja drop-kick there; I love that we ended up choosing *different* games about Venice]
On the subject of Stellaris, I’d be interested in knowing how viable being a Borg-like species would be.
I like spending a good portion of the game growing and advancing in my own little corner of the galaxy, far away from any other AI players, and then suddenly swoop in and assimilate/destroy their empires. Ideally as some sort of synthetic/mechanical species.
That’s not the only way I enjoy playing, but I find that diplomacy in a lot of 4X games tends to be, er, lacking. Of course I don’t have too much experience with them, so it could just be me. I’m better at 1-on-1 rather than civilization-on-civilization stuff.
I feel personally attacked for some reason.