News thread

Despite my joy two posts up, I do hope that you get more control over how to run Scotland.  And also that "ol' D-Camz" disappears very quickly from government next election.

Rum Rapture wrote:

The_Jaster wrote:

I can't say I'm not disappointed about the outcome but I just have the accept the decision, move on & hope that the promise of more power for Scotland isn't an empty one.

Yeah, exactly. I'm just not holding out hope considering that the reason devo max wasn't an option in the first place was solely because of ol' D-Camz, and the only constant promise that Westminster seem to be able to uphold is that we'd get more control over income tax.

Oh another thing that worries me (now I don't claim to know everything about this) is Scottish MPs possibly not being able to vote on English laws, for all the talk of being better together this sounds a bit hypocritical or have I got this all wrong?

No, you're right to be concerned. Essentially Tory MPs are pissy about David Cameron promising more powers to Holyrood and are saying that if it happens then Scottish MPs should have less clout in Westminster. And I do understand the knee-jerk reaction of it being unfair for Scotland to have sway both in their own affairs as well as the rest of the UK. The problem being, though, that Westminster holds the British Parliament and so needs to be fairly represented by all four countries of the union, not three countries with less power to the fourth. Better together indeed...

If that's the way they want to go, they should take a federal approach; four separate parliaments and a central Senate for whole uk affairs. More like the US. (And its not often you'll hear me suggest that!)

A federal UK is the path I'd like to see us head down.

That was what I thought as well. Although, why stop there? Have a separate assembly for London, and another for "the North"!

But seriously the UK is still far too concentrated around London. It's ridiculous.

Hoax convinces people to microwave their iPhones.

What are we going to do about this? Ruddy Gamergate shit.

"Games Reviewer Anita Sarkeesian"(firstly nice fact hunting there BBC) Bloody hell, her words were toxic enough to those in the know, the last thing you need is anyone outside of gaming seeing the trash she puts out...

Regardless the whole issue is ridiculous and has got far too far out of hand. I thought it had been pretty much dropped as a "serious" cause by now.

Hashtag Gamergate, huh? (takes deep breath)

I'm torn on this one. On the one hand, yes, videogames (as we know them, anyway) are still heavily male-dominated, in their audience, development teams, themes, and titillation. I'd like to see that changing. On the other, I can really support the idea of more transparency and integrity in the online press, and that Zoe Quinn lady who started it all off sounds like a nasty piece of work. But then again, when so few unbiased sources seem to exist on the matter, it's hard to tell just how nasty.

I'm not going to pick a side, therefore - down that road lies pain and anger. I'm pro-feminism in games, but also pro-integrity. One thing that I hope we can all agree on, though, is that any death threats are indefensible.

On Anita Sarkeesian, I don't know a lot of her work. I applaud her for bringing feminism in games to a wider audience, but what her videos actually entail, I don't know. I think I watched a bit of one, in which she complained about "damsels in distress" (Peach, Zelda et al.)? And I thought she had a point there.

Sarkeesian finds a good point, then proceeds to spread it so thinly to the point where she's babbling nonsense. For every point about Super Princess Peach's powers being based on her emotions (something I totally didn't pick up on at the time but actually couldn't believe it when she bought it up), there are ridiculous statements about how GTA encourages you to murder women because they drop money when they die (because apparently the men don't do that too...).

There's plenty of other stupid examples she gives, such as in Hitman where you throw a body over a balcony to distract a guard, she makes it sound like the guard is only interested in the fact it's a female body, not what he actually said (something like oh shit a body). Or the bit where she mentions that in a random encounter in GTA an insane naked dude is trying to rape and kill a woman (the game actively tells you to stop the attack) and she claims that you can just stand there and watch and the game will play the scene again and again at random (this stops when you actually do what the game wants you to).

Apologies for the rant but whilst she does bring up the occasional good point, she clearly would rather exploit it for the sake of hits, rather than to actually make a difference. (Let's not even talk about the ridiculous cash she got from her kickstarter for more videos than she has made and that if you watch the video you might find yourself asking where that money went.)

andyman949 wrote:

Regardless the whole issue is ridiculous and has got far too far out of hand.

Spot on!

The best way to report depressing news, I find, is through the medium of comedy.  Hence, Daily Mash article on why there are reports in Ferguson.

Don't know everything about the incident, to be honest, but it seems a pretty poor judgement to me.  The victim was unarmed.  

Maybe this will finally make the US change their gun controls to something more pfffffftHAHAHAHAHAAAAA.

Sorry, I didn't spot that this conversation happened but I absolutely have to make my position clear:

GAMERGATE WAS ALL CUNTS.

I'm not going to say the shooting was right or wrong because that's not my place however I am led to believe that Michael Brown did have a previous criminal record (or was at least known to the police) which probably influenced the decision of the jury.
Either way the actions of the rioters who have once again hijacked what were supposed to be peaceful protests is utterly revolting and doesn't do much in the way of crushing stereotypes or building bridges.

*studiously ignores stray gamergate comment*

The trouble is, I have seen one website where the "no we're not anti-women honest" Gamergate side of things has actually made a positive difference to the site's ethics code (the Escapist). I'm aware that this may well be an isolated example, but while this is the case, I can't echo Drunkalilly, even if that may be (and quite possibly is) the bigger picture.

As for the shooting thing, I don't see how gunning him down is a proportional response to a previous criminal record, unless said record was one for random shootage. And anyway, this isn't whether the policeman should be found guilty. It's whether he should be tried in the first place. Surely a no-brainer, and I'm not just talking about the judge.

Agreed that rioting is not the answer, though.

The Ferguson protests have been brewing for a while now. The circumstances of shooting an unarmed man six times are ones I'd like explained in a bit more detail.

For any good that Gamergate did, the overwhelming majority of what happened was extremely negative and ugly. I want nothing to do with it.

I haven't followed the Ferguson situation closely enough to make any educated comment but it seems to follow the same old pattern of all these tragedies in a nation whose cultural Identity is routed so firmly in the gun. Not to mention institutional racism, which is enough of an issue that we need to do a seminar when we join the police in this country but must be even worse stateside.

I'm probably one of the few people who doesn't even know what this gamergate thing is, although the comments I've seen about it make me want nothing to do with it.  It sounds exceedingly boring, and on top of that I always mentally blank out when the "gate" tag is used on something as I've yet to see anything where such a tag isn't exceedingly melodramatic and annoying, and I rather doubt the so-called Gamergate is any different.

As for the current situation in the us of a, I could buy the whole "it was justified force" line if it was one or two shots that just happened to end fatally, but there's a line from self defense to excessive force and the amount of bullet wounds makes me believe that line was crossed.  Outside the most steeled person on earth everyone else will be incapacitated by a bullet or two through sheer pain, going beyond that is excessive force when the man is unarmed.  

Whatever way one slices the cake we either have a man who was killed unjustly and the killer getting off without penalty, or we have a man who will forever be unjustly branded a racist killer by a significant number of people. Either way the lack of a trial to clear this up properly is a joke and in my opinion this whole affair has been a farce.

Athrun888 wrote:

...on top of that I always mentally blank out when the "gate" tag is used on something as I've yet to see anything where such a tag isn't exceedingly melodramatic and annoying, and I rather doubt the so-called Gamergate is any different.

Funnily enough... Zero probably sums it up pretty well.

Teachers could be recruited from abroad

An interesting idea - I was told five years ago that there's a Europe-wide shortage of maths teachers. The best bit, though, is the caption of the top-most picture: "Some potential recruits are put off by the workload".

Important news: the Literary Review Bad Sex in Fiction Award 2014 has been awarded.  Here's the shortlist.  My personal "winner" is number 3, for the sudden intrusion of a dead penguin. What's yours?

The actual winner was...:

This is why sex scenes are awful and on the rare occasions I encounter them I promptly skim until they're over. At least number 3 was comedic gold.

I'm no fan of sex scenes either, but using these as examples of why is like using Red Steel as an example of why I don't like FPSes.

They aren't really examples so much as the ultimate incarnations of the things that result in my disdain for sex scenes. They almost always just feel like their sole purpose is to pander, and I'm not interested in that. If I'm reading something it's not because I'm after a softcore porn scene, which is what almost every single sex scene I've ever come across feels like. I'm after the story, and while two characters having sex can be relevant to their various facets and development of the characters involved the actual act itself is rarely worth the screen (page?) time.