Le Communard

Any game where getting better makes it harder to win against the uninitiated has a really silly meta. Really silly.

The Chimer darkened their skin with the shit of Boethiah when he defeated the foul Trinimac and then proceeded to excrete him. Of course, you only believe that if you're a Tribunal loyalist fetcher--the truth is the dark skin of the Dunmer is a curse from Lady Azura for betraying Nerevar at the battle of Red Mountain. The ending of the words is (not) ALMSIVI

Arrakis is clearly God tier as well.

You know, they like big butts and they cannot lie. Is there something wrong with that?

Bentham or Foucault's Panopticon? Because it predates Discipline and Punish by about 15 years, so it couldn't have drawn on that, but it is roughly synchronous with Madness and Civilization, so it is clear that they were thinking and working on the same things at the same time. Err... not to be pedantic or anything. Also: no China Mieville or New Weird? That's a serious gap in the oeuvre of modern SF, my friend. Even some good Kelly Link short stories could help. I'm afraid I just can't take this seriously until it adress the New Weird.

Google tells me that "umlaufbahn" means "orbit", so I just hope you're wearing something pressurized.

I only watch the bad-misreadings-of-Nietzsche network. I'm a big fan of their new show Two and A Half Übermensch.

Like, all the cool kids are playing it now. Don't you want to be cool too: http://candies.aniwey.net/ I don't know if you're cool enough.

And, surprisingly perhaps, I'm not trying to argue that we should do away with it. As I said before, I'm no Marxist--I don't believe in dialectical materialism or the necessity of the abolition of private ownership, for example. But it's important that we realize that these systems of inequality are not simply surface effects: they are structures that are built into the very logic of the system, and only through bringing them to light and subjecting them to an honest critique can we possibly hope to build something better. Capitalism is powerful--that nobody, least of all someone who was a Marxist--would deny. But in the 21st century we must begin to seriously consider its human costs lest we risk being utterly destroyed by its ceaseless dynamism. Capitalism in 2013 is like the Romans: it has conquered all of its foes, and now it must change fundamentally or it will destroy itself.

The jobless recovery was merely a convenient illustration of one of the many ways the system works for the haves while it shafts the have-nots. And not only does the nature of Capitalistic "providing for" incomparable with even basic notions of human rights/dignity, but the have-nots made everything we use and see none of the fruits of their labor. Capitalism views labor as instruments as dollar values: no human being deserves to have there worth be assessed by a dollar value on a spreadsheet. It's awful because its totally incompatible with any practical notion of justice.

Sigh... someone has to be the Marxist here. Let me play devils advocate for a moment: under Capitalism, inequality is not coincidental it is built in and * necessary* for the proper functioning of the system: "haves" get what they have from the surplus labor of the "have-nots". That's the bottom line--no more have not's, no more Capitalism. "Giving" can never fix the problem because the very problem was created by the division of society into competing classes. Based on entropy alone, no amount of private action could ever hope to alleviate the misery created by the structure in the first place, leaving aside all other effects. Capitalism, especially contemporary neoliberal ideologies, tells us that when we see problems, the solution is private action, when in fact that puts a ridiculous onus on the private citizen to be responsible for every problem that couldn't possibly be solved by them and leaves an uncoordinated effort at tackling them that spends all its energy putzing around (c.f. the budget sheets of most non-profits). This counts just as much for idea that "a rising tide lifts all boats": some members of society can't be lifted because they're the ones busy doing the lifting. One needs to look no further than our own jobless recovery in the US: profits are back up, up, up, but are the regular joe's like you and me seeing a dime? Of course not, employment is bad as ever. Workers are a resource. They're an object. And the idea that Capitalism provides for them in any way but the most degraded sense is delusional. Everything good labor has in this country it won because it fought tooth and nail for a fucking long time, and because the government subsidized the creation of a white middle class in the post-war period (because we must not forget that these inequalities are every bit as much raced as classed, perhaps even more so in America). Essentially, both sides are ignoring the systemic implications of the questions of wealth and poverty, instead choosing to focus on quibbles that amount to little more than glorified accounting.

Because of the systemic and idealogical violence that exsists to separate the world's resources from those who produce them in the name of those who consume? It's elementry Marxism, really--poor people do all the real work, and because of the system that tells poor people they didn't *really* do the work they did, because someone else "owned" the means of production, rich people get all the benefit. So when rich people work hard they get showerd with money, but when poor people work hard they get jack shit. I don't really agree (in 2013 it is much more complicated than that), but it's hard to deny that some people really don't get a square deal, and that income inequality is all because some people "earned" it. Basically, one could say that it is bad essentially because it is not created in practice via any of its self-stated ethics (and this is ignoring any questions of alternative ethical systems).

Management, Man. It's all about the system.

I suggest a strict regimen of prayer and fasting, followed by repeated self-flagellation. Oh wait, that's already Dark Souls. Son, you're fucked.

I'm General Boulanger, noted 19th century French reactionary and one of the founders of right-wing mass politics--I'm probably here to attempt to topple the 3rd Republic and establish an early pseudo-Fascism.... except I'm totally incompetent. I have a very nice woodcut, though. Don't mind me, I'll just be over here drinking my tea and promising the people revenge against Germany for her ravaging of our fair nation. Revanche!

Le Communard: using post-modernism for evil since 1992.

Yet Orwell is stuck in the tired notion that Freedom is dangerous as an action, as a state. I propose the more radical option, that it is not dangerous as a state, as Orwell implies, but dangerous as a concept. We must move back to state which images us not as free or unfree at all, but one which imagines us instead as a situated actor within a complex network. We cannot afford to think: "Freedom is Slavery" because that once again reifies the idea that there is such a state of being. What is most important in this transfer of power is not the smashing of the structure, but the smashing of the logic. Yet one could also say: "but is that not just the rhetoric for Newspeak?" And so, perhaps Orwell was not so wrong after all.

I would change our hegemonic power structure from one of biopower--the discursivisation of bodies, the social management of risk and margins--back to a classic disciplinary regime: charts, rules, times-tables, and most important of all, the interlocked matrix of observation that enables its functioning. Basically, I want my panopticon back. I tire of being a mathematized data-set in the computer of some giant-mega corporation: I yearn for the days when a rigid regime of social hierarchy defined the spaces of human possibility. MAKE ME A DRONE! Curse and strike down the wicked Neo-Liberal/Facist institution of "Freedom" that shackles us to our ideological blindness! Freedom is not a negative but a positive concept--it is a construction imposed upon the universe, a space that through its act of "liberation" binds us ever stronger to our discursive oppression. To be fair, it is not truly wicked in-and-of itself, yet I yearn for a more honest space, one that we no longer make believe that we are in the drivers seat. Because there is no drivers seat.

For what its worth, I think a critical mass of people of have been waiting for a new Fire Emblem, and with all the hype it sort of *had* to be a big event. I agree that it will definitely have a mixed legacy, but it was fun enough to get an old codger like me to log back into his account for five minutes, and I *never* thought that was going to happen. Let the youngsters have their fun.

I mean, when I say excited, I don't mean I think its going to be the best thing ever made, simply that maybe I'll enjoy it. We've had a pretty good track record for AAA RPG's in the last few years, in the sense that they've been at least fun to play, if not super groundbreaking. I think big dev's really learned from Oblivion's big mistake and have put a lot more effort in throwing sops to the hardcore crowd (which anybody even reading this topic is part of), while still making the game have mass appeal. No, obviously this isn't the ideal situation (in fact, I think its making me go rather soft. Have'ta start playing old Ultima games or something just to keep up), but it's at least an acceptable one, and I keep giving them my money, so I guess it works for them too. On the other hand, I think I misread what you were saying earlier--I had no idea that they were retconning out KotORII, which fucking sucks, on the other hand, Star Wars lore always had the shittiest continuity (I wonder if there's going to be a Star Wars reboot 20 years from now... hmmm....), doubly so since Georgies little pet project in 1999, so I have a hard time getting all worked up about it.

I mean, that's true to a certain extent, but it doesn't really answer my question. Original, perhaps. But my point is I don't really see what it has to offer to fans of Obsidian's previous work, not necessarily fans of South Park. It's not that I don't see any value in the project whatsoever, its more that I don't see myself having any investment in it, if that makes sense.

I couldn't point to any single thing, but just the way they've been talking about the game has given me the impression that Bioware has really tried to bring back the whole "RPG" part of MMO, and I think that's at least worth looking at, even if I don't really end up liking it. It's just, things like the really detailed companion system, the party dialogue system (which I don't necessarily love), and the way that people have written about the experience of playing the game so far has given me a certain amount of hope that it won't just be another endless grindfest that's all about the end-game raiding culture or whatever, and be a real RPG... that you can play with your friends. Now, this is quite a tall order, but there's a reason that this has taken so many years and cost such a ridiculous amount of money--I think Bioware wants to unseat WoW, they want to transform the MMO paradigm. We'll see what happens, but at this point, I'm not going to lie, I'm a little excited.

I'm probably the most ridiculous Obsidian worshiper here--I count KotOR II and New Vegas as true classics, to the point were I'm convinced that were it finished that KotOR II would have been the greatest RPG ever made, but I can't say I'm too enthused about this. I'm really not a fan of South Park--it's much to libertarian for my taste--and I'm just not sure its conducive to a very interesting game in the Obsidian mold, at least from the way I see there strengths. I'm just not sure what you would do with it--crack a bunch of stupid jokes? Obsidian has always been a "gamers" studio, making things like Alpha Protocol, which was totally panned by the mainstream press, but well liked among the people who care about these sort of things, and KotOR II, which most people just really didn't get. It's filled with the sort of people who know and understand the modern RPG from the inside out, and its always developed games which have probed the conceptual limits of that genera, always pushing it in a thoughtful and more nuanced direction (as opposed to Bioware, who has considerably pushed the modern RPG more into the Action Movie mold. But I did like Dragon Age II.). I don't really see this turning out as a "gamers" game, if that makes sense. That, and almost more importantly, Chris Avellone isn't on the project, and he's always been the conceptual mastermind behind there really good work (AP, KotORII, Mask of the Betrayer, and before that Planescape and Fallout II). For a long time, I was of about the same position, but as things get closer I've seen some interesting stuff, and I'm holding out my judgement. It really depends on what the RPG:MMO ratio is for me. We'll see what happens. If you can manage to get it to work, there's a really great restoration patch for KotORII, which brings back the entire HK factory sequence, and makes the ending a whole lot more comprehensible, even if there still are some loose ends. It's worth playing the game again with it if you have the time, and really, even if you don't.

You mean like how he drained the Treasury of the Crown and racked up millions of sovereigns of debt to a bunch of feudal potentates like the Lannisters and compromised the power of the monarchy? But frankly, if Robert had produced a legitimate heir, the whole mess would have never began and it wouldn't really matter.