DanteGabriel

2 minutes ago, Heartofice said:

Ok sure, for the sake of fairness, I will say that I think racism is very much a minor factor in the reaction to her, that obviously there are some racist people around and they don’t like her,  but the overwhelming reasons why she is unpopular is due to .. well the things I’ve laid out many many times before. 
 

Well fucking hell, that's progress! I'd say it's a "significant" factor in her treatment, but there's a pretty fungible margin between our positions.

I still don't get the amount of time and attention devoted to tracking her activities and finding the worst possible explanation for every move she makes, but I don't want to make personal attacks or anything. Almost any positive feeling I have for her or Harry is a response to the vitriol they get from the likes of Clarkson and Morgan.

With Harry, I have a little more personal sympathy for losing a parent in such a horrible and public way, and I found the mockery of him for his grasping at some connection with his mother to be particularly odious.

On 8/17/2023 at 3:12 PM, Heartofice said:

I'm really trying to understand what it is you are trying to object to here. Are you trying to suggest that nobody on this board, or anyone else has said that the primary motivation for the dislike for Meghan is based on her race? Are you just arguing over semantics or splitting hairs here. I'm very confused.

13 minutes ago, Heartofice said:

There is an easy way to clear all this up, if what you are trying to assert is that nobody has ever claimed racism to be the primary, or even a major factor in the dislike of Meghan. People like Tywin and others, can pop in and say 'I don't think racism was a major factor in why Meghan is so unpopular'.

At least then we will know where everyone stands on this board and it will make conversations a lot easier.

Obviously it won't address the insinuations made by H&M themselves or other swathes of the press that have said it, but at least we can get things moving forward here.

I know this is the setup for a trap because no matter what anyone says you'll just lie about it and strawman us anyway.

But for the sale of argument, there's a lot of room between "primary" and "major" and both words leave a lot of room for negotiation, so what are you actually asking people to say?

My thought has always been that racism is an exacerbating factor. I gave always acknowledged that being an American and an actor and her own actions have fed into the response she gets. She may have earned negative reactions if she'd been a white woman but I doubt Jeremy Clarkson would have fantasized about stripping and shaming her and gotten it published by the troglodyte press. But that's just my sense, and it seems like a fool's errand to try to fix percentages on it or anything like that.

I had thought your contention was that racism was not a factor in the reaction to her, so please clarify where you stand as well.

On 8/17/2023 at 10:47 AM, Cas Stark said:

I don't understand why it is so difficult to believe that rich, entitled, titled, dishonest, hypocrites would be disliked for their unsavory, dishonest, hypocritical actions and their career of complaining about their families.  At this point, the idea that the only reason to dislike Meghan is because she is biracial is just silly.

On 8/17/2023 at 1:09 PM, Cas Stark said:

I'm hard pressed to come up with even half a dozen racist articles/incidents of abuse relating to Meghan, let alone dozens or enough to confidently claim that dislike of her is largely/mostly due to her being biracial or even that she somehow faced more/worse negativity than other famous people.

 

21 hours ago, Cas Stark said:

I'm not even sure I would call the coverage abusive.  It was certainly negative, but as Meg and Harry confirmed in their various interviews, those stories were based in fact.  It is unknowable whether race was any kind of exacerbating factor.  The fact that it's taken for granted as an absolute, instead of an opinion, is sad, but not suprising.

Here we see the slow Strawman Creep, except it wasn't very slow at all. First those of us who disagree with you are insisting that it's only racism that's responsible for the negativity. Then, maybe it's mostly racism. Then you get to maybe race is an exacerbating factor -- which is, in fact, the common claim here. That there is a spectrum of reasons she gets such a psychotic reaction from the UK's population of traditionalists, authoritarians, and throne-sniffers, and racism is one of the reasons. The "one of several factors" argument never seemed to get any acknowledgement from you,  and then you and HoI inevitably get back to accusing everyone else of saying it's only racism, so I am glad to see you acknowledge that it could, in fact, be an exacerbating factor.

20 hours ago, Cas Stark said:

You guys are slipping though.  You've made the personal insults, per usual,  but have forgotton to mention how weird and suspect it is to post a lot in this thread or to know any details about the subjects.  

 

I think, though, I have achieved a new understanding. These threads are a great place for you to nurse your sense of grievance and claim you're being personally attacked just because some of us think your expressed level of vitriol is out of proportion. Are you the true victim of the H&M arguments here? That's a pretty... Markle-ish take on things.

3 hours ago, Fez said:

The Oath of Vengeance is basically the easy mode for being a Paladin and keeping the Oath.

But also, Oathbreaker isn't really a bad thing (except from a RP perspective potentially). It's its own fully defined subclass with some good spells that pure paladins otherwise can't get.

I'd guess "suffering a witch to live" is what breaks the Vengeance oath. So far I haven't run into any problems, but I didn't free the goblin or anything like that.

Killing the owlbear broke my Oath of Ancients on my first character, which was another reason to re-roll (I had also unwittingly taken the Dark Urge background).

2 hours ago, Zorral said:

Why is voting fraud, committed by the orange defendant, called a 'breach' instead of fraud? Fraud is the word that the orange defendants' forces always attach to 'election voter > fraud'. So why when fraud has been discovered, and discovered to have been committed by orange defendant's forces, why it is merely a breach?

"Georgia prosecutors have messages showing Trump’s team is behind voting system breach"

https://www.cnn.com/2023/08/13/politics/coffee-county-georgia-voting-system-breach-trump/index.html

 

For the same reason that violent white chuds are never referred to as "terrorists."

4 hours ago, Tywin et al. said:

The Butcher jumped the wrong rouge. 

Why, did it clash with his base skin tone?

Sorry, the common misspelling of "rogue" tweaks me out sometimes.

9 hours ago, IlyaP said:

Had that encounter too, and quietly reloaded and skipped that doorway, as I just don't need those kinds of nightmares.

I think I have gotten more long-term trauma out of hearing multiple renditions of Volo's ballad in the background while I browsed the goblin's shop...

But I also have to wonder what it was like for the artists who modeled and animated all that.

5 minutes ago, karaddin said:

Lol, the top end is meant to drop by 2 I think which matches what you're seeing (it changes from a 10 sided die to 8 sided) but not sure what's causing the lower range to drop without a shield. Other feats/fighting styles I guess.

Maybe that's the Duelist fighting style...

22 minutes ago, IlyaP said:

Kinda reminded me of Dragon Age: Origins a bit. You?

Quite so. Especially as camp conversations are needed to advance relationships.

36 minutes ago, Poobah said:

I assume they're talking about the system from DOS2, which I haven't really seen much of here but I imagine it may come more in to play over time, wherein you have oil for instance and if it's hit with something on fire then it'll all set alight, or a noxious gas may explode or a liquid can become frozen etc. in response to various interactions.

Yeah, surfaces were kind of a big deal in DoS2. Like the world was liberally scattered with barrels of oil and poison and you could blow those up on your enemies. Or maybe there's a thin layer of water on the floor in a dungeon and your ice spells are more effective, or you could freeze the surface so enemies would slip and fall, or you could lob a fire spell in there and steam people to death. I'd never seen elements used quite that much before and it was an interesting tactical dimension. It was pretty standard for my cleric type in that game to start every combat with a rain spell. So far BG3 hasn't shown me much of that mechanic.

I'm enjoying the hell out of it so far. I like the turn-based style, as I'm pretty used to it from DoS2. I've done my traditional cycle of events in a big RPG, which was to roll a character, play a few hours, then get dissatisfied and roll a new one. Currently on a high elf paladin of vengeance. I have now realized how seriously paladin ethics are enforced.

I appreciate Wert's earlier tips about shoving and jumping in combat. I might never have thought to play with those on my own, but it's so satisfying to have my character leap past a choke point and cut someone down with the flaming greatsword I took from the demon early on.

Hot damn, three years is a long time to beta. I wondered if that was an error in the Steam store. I had no idea it has been available and playable that long, though I guess I should have been able to figure that out from the BG3 link in Larian's launcher for Divinity: Original Sin II.

I wonder what it's like to have as long as you need to develop the game.

Seems kinda fitting for me that the Diablo IV thread got closed the same time, as I'll probably be sinking my spare time into this now.

1 minute ago, James Arryn said:

Well they definitely don’t go to see Iger.

Ser Rodrigo might...

3 minutes ago, Spockydog said:

Yeah, I know. Corporate greed sucks. 

So what's your solution? 

Beating a few billionaires to death in public as a warning to other greedheads? I'm 80% joking.

3 minutes ago, Spockydog said:

It does when you consider that the pay ratio between Tom Cruise and his lowest paid colleagues is every bit as abhorrent as that between Iger and his minions. 

That is basically my point. Maybe if the people at the top took a little less, it would be easier for execs to justify paying more to lesser lights. 

I think it is a little naive to think that the Igers of the world are interested in paying the "lesser lights" more than they have to.

Any savings will go into executive or shareholder pockets.

8 minutes ago, Spockydog said:

And yeah, stars sell seats. But Tom Cruise ain't earning a dime unless he's got runners and best boys and key grips running around after him, working their feckin' bollocks off.

And as for the so-called "co-stars". From what I've been reading, many of these guys barely make enough to live on. Because of enormous fees being paid to the big stars. 

Do you think that paying Tom Cruise $5 million less will result in a single cent more going to regular workers?

So Bob Iger's book paints Bob Iger as an indispensable titan of commerce.

YOU DON'T SAY.

2 hours ago, Gaston de Foix said:

Right.  There's no doubt Tesla did many things right in developing its electric car.  

I'll also note that other companies that innovated (like Toyota) inexplicably wasted their opportunity.  I owned a 2010 Prius in the UK back when it was pretty much the only hybrid on the market and it had top-of-the-line tech including this really cool holographic display that would show up on your windscreen so you didn't have to glance down at your GPS.  When I bought a 2015 Prius in the States, it was like a completely different car with none of the handling or tech my car had 5 years previously.  They standardized and mass-marketed it and made every additional feature a paid or model upgrade.  Tesla created a very cool product and it remains, frankly, the best car on the market if you can afford it that I've seen.  

But, when Elmo bought it, Twitter was the only product on the market.  Now it has Threads, Substack, Bluesky, Mastodon, Post and others racing to compete with it.   

I don't understand the popularity of Tesla, frankly. My brother and I checked out a showroom few years ago, when I still thought they were pretty cool and before Elon's mask had slipped.  The fit and finish were pretty shoddy. Three weeks ago he drove his family up from New York to Boston in a rented Tesla (his wife was very interested in one) and they said it rattled all the way up. Are other EVs just that bad?

Mrs Gabriel and I are about to get solar on our house and we're thinking her next car will be a plug-in. Teslas are right out. We might try and hold out for the new VW electric bus.

Is it so surprising that a legacy kids' brand got a reasonably smart, sorta-satirized movie version? I still chuckle about the "smells like teen spirit" sequence from the Josie and the Pussycats movie, 20 years ago. Hell, even the Scooby Doo movie, from around the same time, had some ironic, self-aware moments.

3 hours ago, Week said:

Truly a remarkable effort to defend a world renowned lying POS who is treated like a lying POS because he is a lying POS.

It's amusing, in a dark and awful way, to see connoisseurs of boot-leather get outraged and all in their feels when one of their own overprivileged twit peers experiences a minor inconvenience and gets treated, for moment, like the hoi polloi.

20 minutes ago, JGP said:

That sucks, Dante, and would've soured me too.

My cancer-stricken mother finding out from CNN that I'd been laid off was the cherry on the Schilling sundae...

20 minutes ago, JGP said:

 

I can gripe as good as the next guy, but the level of vitriol being spewed on other platforms is pretty amazing. Nerfs are normal-- but if you don't want to alienate your base [or minimize such, anyway] that shit really ought to make sense and be relatively balanced. 

I left before Gamergate but even before that, it was really toxic. Our community manager circa 2008 almost had a nervous breakdown from the reaction after observing some players had a sense of entitlement.

It's been an interesting evolution of dev-player relationships. Back when I started, 2000ish, my closest colleague and I hung out all day on an IRC channel devoted to our game and has pretty unfiltered conversations with people. I had a couple of different players crash on my couch on various occasions. Hell, I even bought some acid from one of the IRC regulars, I paid via PayPal, and had it mailed to me. Rules got formalized pretty shortly after that (I had a profane and authoritative response to someone on the channel insulting us, someone else posted it to a widely read message board, but the design director at the time just saw fit to give me a ceremonial slap on the wrist for it). It's obviously it's not like that any more.

For what it's worth, I don't think anybody here has been overboard. That's all standard feedback, part of the job. It's just, as a good friend of mine said on a message board, "Your ten bucks a month doesn't mean you can talk about my mom."

So I'm one of those dad gamers that can devote maybe 3 hours a night to it, and in these types of games I like to level a few different classes together. I spent a lot of time on side quests and events and mostly ignored the story. Then when the season opening got announced I figured I better finish the storyline and do the capstone. My sorc was the furthest along so I just focused on story completion, then tried to open up as much map as I could. She's only up to 55 or so and I haven't done T3 stuff yet so having a nerfed class and inefficient build hasn't really hurt. I got an Ice Shards amulet that fired 6 additional shards pretty early on so that's basically the foundation of my build. I guess I'll do a Druid for the season, I was having fun trying to embrace both my wolf and bear souls.

It was a really complex emotional journey when the credits started to roll after I finished the story. A ton of my former peers in the MMO industry ended up at Blizzard. I knew my old boss was one of the design managers but there were a lot of surprises. Most of us aren't on Facebook any more so I lost track of a lot of my industry friends. I left the industry over ten years ago. Some people I hired, mentored, and managed are now leads and managers there.

It makes me wonder where I would have been had I stayed in the industry. I left because I couldn't subject a family to the instability of the industry. My last company crashed ignominiously literally a week before my wife and I were supposed to close on a house.

There's a lot to miss from the culture, the friendships, and the work itself, but I sure as shit am glad not to have to deal with the hate coming their way. I've been that guy responsible for a widely hated nerf, I don't miss that.

On 7/15/2023 at 3:55 PM, Zorral said:

They Said the same when it was Hillary against trump. My own sense of this is that the Dems will have it easier to campaign against any of the others than trump.  For one thing the media isn't and won't be as breathlessly enthralled by any of them as they are by him -- and always  have been, and still are.  And this includes 'social' media.

It can be true that Trump was the weakest candidate against Clinton in 2016 and she still lost. She had a lot of headwinds against her -- eight years of a Democratic president, misogyny, Clinton fatigue... At the time, I figured she'd lose to almost any Republican. And shit, if James Comey hadn't been such a historically epic fucking idiot, she might actually have won.

On 7/5/2023 at 10:19 PM, karaddin said:

I don't think I'd go so far as to say he's not actively malicious, but he's not gratuitously malicious - he'll do it for the sake of gaining money or power, not simply for the sake of doing it.

Fair enough. Even as I posted I thought "not actively malicious" probably wasn't quite right. He'll trample whatever he needs to secure another percentage point of profitability, and engage in no introspection, but he's not actually trying to cause widespread harm. Musk wants to hurt people, and will actually take losses to do so.

Strangely, I hear "centrist" most often from (white male) right wingers to describe themselves. They don't believe in parties, just in good sense policies. Then it'll come out in further discussion that they've never voted for a Democrat, they think women make too much fuss about abortion access, and that minorities should quiet down and recognize how good they have it.

1 hour ago, BigFatCoward said:

and just so stupid, do they think these kids are travelling to see a picture on a wall?  

I think it's just that there is a certain kind of small-souled impulse common in the right wing that the poors should never feel even the smallest moments of joy, but should always be acutely conscious of how unworthy they are. Like American right wing chuds who get upset when people on government assistance buy steak with EBT cards.