Slashdot Mirror

Funnier with das link.

Context: http://www.penny-arcade.com/co...

Actually bad puns are never obligatory. I consider it a privilege.

Technology is essential to gaming, because without great code to back up your design (no matter how modest that design may be) your game will be glitchy, slow, or unplayable. In fact, Notch is a programmer first, designer second. The design of Minecraft (and many of his other games) seems to have evolved organically out of his programming experiments as well as the community.

So technology is still a big deal in gaming. Stop trying to convince us you're still relevant, Romero, and go sling some code. No game, no weiner.

http://www.penny-arcade.com/co...

No, it"s not just about Valenti. And no, lots of women, prominent and otherwise, are finding that when they post anything mildly controversial, they get rape threats.

I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess they're mostly feminists, right? Believe it or not almost nobody wants to rape anyone else, men don't go around raping at random, and rape culture is the most stone cold idiotic attempt to induce a moral panic I've ever heard of. That's not to say some social maladjusts don't send rape threats of course, but the internet is littered with all sorts of mental wreckage without indicating widespread mis-whatevery.

Finally, even if your attempt to misrepresent one columnist using a zero-context photo had legitimacy and didn't misrepresent her, it wouldn't support rape threats against her.

There really isn't anything to misrepresent. She put it up on her twitter feed as a holiday snap. She's a well known feminist figure and like most feminists, she's widely despised. That photo illustrates why. Why is it okay one way but not the other when male suicides are 4 or 5 times female suicides? Not very funny now is it? Or envision if you will the response if a man were photographed wearing a t-shirt that says "I bathe in female tears", the social justice brigade would have a seizure.

Valenti's made a career out of demonising half the population, so she's not representative of "most women" and their experiences. That you made a mental leap from there to insinuating that she deserved however it says a lot more about you than me.

Michele Malkin regularly gets rape threats against her.

You've access to her personal email accounts and so on, I suppose? I checked it out though, and I can only find one publicised instance of her receiving rape threats - when she criticised a particularly thin skinned rapper. Again this isn't representative of the experiences of most women, for reasons which should be obvious.

And nobody's committed suicide, NOBODY, because they felt they were unable to issue a rape threat against an uppity woman who they disagreed with, so why bring it up?

I'm not sure how convoluted deflections can actually get, but this is probaby in the top tenth percentile if anyone's keeping track.

Obligatory Penny Arcade

Works good for committing home intrusions, car jacking, keeping the ex-wifes husband away, and any previous criminal associates polite and on point. Not much different than rattlesnakes, skunks and badgers, nothing ever really changes.

Fixed.

The fact is I DO say anything I want to to anyone. I always have. I know you are itching to pull out the bit about shouting " fire" in a crowded theater, but that actually constitutes a criminal attack and not free speech at all.I do have free speech, how I use it is no different than how I use a car, a hammer or a weapon, all of which I am free to use as well.

Yes, you are a real law abiding thug aren't you. You didn't choose the whiteboy thuglife, the whiteboy thuglife chose you. You can say what you want, when you want - provided the what and when are on the list of permissable places and times set by the government. You're a real icon of liberty!

Knowing full well that police are just as able as any human to commit atrocities, they too may be put down. Granted, it may provide a sticky situation and legal entanglements, but in the right situation I would just as easily shoot a cop as a crackhead with a knife and bad intent.

Yes, I'm very turned on by your display of suburban badassery. You're the king of the thugs in my mind. Or perhaps you just look and sound like an idiot. Should I call you keazy? Are you gunna get your cinna on at the cinnabon?.

Being in the right ,I would face a trial by a jury of my peers and be vindicated, so you can stuff your knee-jerk pissant talking points up your urethra.

If you self description is accurate your peers are going to be low order drug mules, prostitutes, drug addicts and/or thug wannabees with hoodies and chains on their wallets. Somehow I don't see them turning up to court (unless in the dock). Likely too moronic to find their way down the street.

Perhaps it would serve you better to know what the hell you are talking about before jealously rationalizing your impotence to demand your right from your own dictatorial government.

This from the guy who admitted freely that his firearm is useless for defending his liberty and in fact his main purpose for keeping it was to threaten others and fantasise about shooting cops. You'll excuse me if I'm not inclined to take civic lessons from you.

I'll admit I was a little relieved after actually reading the article. I assumed it was talking about harassment of male game developers towards female coworkers, which would have really surprised me. I've worked in the industry for over fifteen years, and I've never even heard of any sort of sexism toward the women that were employed alongside me. It simply wouldn't have been tolerated at the places I've worked, so far as I know, and that's a good thing. While the programming department was, of course, largely male, the other departments (art, design, writing, production) were more evenly split. Everyone I've known has valued talent and hard work, and gender was pretty much an afterthought, at least so far as I could tell. Then again, I'm a guy, so I'm probably not quite as attuned to that sort of thing.

In fact, the article seems to be mostly about women (largely in the gaming press) interacting with the still-all-too-ugly disposition of the anonymous hoards of gaming fans that interact with them. That made a bit more sense to me, unfortunately, as such women are by nature already public figures, and will probably attract a lot more bile. Let's face it. People on the internet, including (especially?) gamers, are not only sexist, they're racist, homophobic, and unbelievably cruel at time. I care a lot about the gaming culture and community, and it pains me to admit this. There's a shocking disconnect between what would be acceptable in real life versus what's said online. I'd imagine very few of those idiots would ever have the courage to say those things to someone's face.

The only way to deal with this is absolute zero tolerance policies, at least on forums (literal or otherwise) that you have any control over. There's simply no excuse for this sort of behavior. The internet could really stand to collectively grow up a little, and realize that being anonymous shouldn't give you a free license to be an asshat. Frankly, I don't think that "normal" people turn into foul-mouth talking assholes when online and anonymous. My feeling is that they were assholes to begin with, but just didn't have the courage to say those things to anyone's face. These folks are not going to go away, I'm sorry to say. It would be nice if human nature could evolve a bit. But that doesn't mean anyone has to put up with this sort of shit any more than necessary. I'm also sorry to say that as a man, I'm pretty sure I'll never understand how a woman feels when she goes through something like this, and it makes me angry that so many would have to.

Long and hallowed history of computing? Oh please, give me a break. It only has a place in the useless hot air of a couple of message boards haunted by people in their parents' basement who don't matter.

http://www.penny-arcade.com/co...

  People of substance who actually make things don't bother with such nonsense, while message board fanatics like you just hate on people like Miguel de Icaza who actually did more for FOSS than all the lame haters like you on Slashdot.

As usual, Linus says it best:

http://linux.slashdot.org/stor...

And you suffer from that affliction. If half the effort in posting and modding up MS hate was actually used in looking at FOSS code, maybe things like Heartbleed wouldn't happen. Well, I wouldn't count on that, because it's usually people who lack the real technical chops who write the logicless nonsense, and they're intellectually lacking and cannot contribute anything substantive.

We already did this... Even a racist clock is right twice a day

In Marvel Lore, anyone who is worthy may wield the hammer and gain the power of thor... this has included

A horsefaced dude (beta ray bill who now wields a dupe of the hammer, sorta)

A frog named Throg

it has also been wielded by Storm (who is a woman) and Captain America.

This is a non-story, and not the first time a woman has wielded Mjolnir.

I think black Thor is tacky, objecting has nothing to do with being racist but the fact they're screwing with other people's mythology. Now if they made Spiderman a gay black man? Or Professor X a female? Now those are changes I could endorse and the resulting changes would make the character's fundamental characteristics more compelling.

As for this case I'd say Marvel is the one being misogynist. The basic implication of this stunt is that the only way they can see to make a flagship female character is by taking a male flagship character and turning them female.

A woman shouldn't have to piggyback on a man to gain fame.

We already did this... Even a racist clock is right twice a day

In Marvel Lore, anyone who is worthy may wield the hammer and gain the power of thor... this has included

A horsefaced dude (beta ray bill who now wields a dupe of the hammer, sorta)
A frog named Throg
it has also been wielded by Storm (who is a woman) and Captain America.

This is a non-story, and not the first time a woman has wielded Mjolnir.

Call it Transformium!

People aren't evil.

Welcome to the internet! You'll first want to take our new users orientation, where you study such schools of thought as this...

I know how shitty the old ones were, I won't consider buying anything from Microsoft called "Surface" -- ever.

Most of the reviews for the Surface Pro have been good. See this for example. The primary drawback that I've always seen mentioned is price.

For $400 a lot of people would like this tablet, but at $800 for the cheapest, it becomes less interesting. On the supply and demand curve, they just pushed demand down by increasing the price.

Well, to be honest.... yes?

Maybe there's patents at play when it comes to 'a hand-held input device as used on a rectangular surface', but tilting things is pretty commonplace ever since the smartphone. Hell, my flashlight has tilt support via a 3-axis accelerometer.

Though there are more fundamental issues for those who would use it for drawing, though - check out the short opinion piece on the Surface Pro 3 at Penny Arcade. tl;dr: The new main (windows logo) button tends to get bumped into fairly easily by right-handed people, and turning the screen around 180 degrees hampers the use of the kickstand.

Don't miss the Penny Arcade Surface Pro 3 feedback, as it gives some good solid thoughts on usability hiccups - which it sounds like Microsoft is going to great lengths to address quickly.

His take is especially interesting because he uses it heavily for art.

The Playstation-has-no-games meme was true back when the PS3 first came out, but it ended up with significantly more (and often better) exclusives than the 360 - hell, their camera & motion-tracking add-on had more and better exclusives than the 360's kinect. Of course, since memes never die, the next-gen console with more exclusives is being mocked for having no games. What's next, people claiming the xbox controller is huge for people with huge hands?

Now that leeds to the following cartoon :).

At least they didn't drinkify snacks and snackify drinks.

Because reasons

Also, this entire "logged in on the front page, not logged in on the comments page" sucks major ass.

Apple caters to the stylish, the people that matter, people who won't care about the presence/absence of a physical keyboard since they have never owned a smartphone before.

I don't know about the stylish, since that never applied to me. But it did cater to people who mattered - real people.

For you see, for real people the small physical keyboards SUCKED. They had very tiny hit areas, were sometimes hard to press. They took up a lot of space which meant tiny screens, and if you started typing anything not a-z you were totally screwed buy whatever whacky shifting mechanism that keyboard designed had chased to introduce.

I had use blackberries and a variety of Palm/Windows phone devices before I got the first iPhone, and I was REJOICING that at last a mobile keyboard had reasonably sized keys, and I could type really fast - and also type pure numbers the way God intended, with a giant keypad.

Just because you and a few of your kind didn't like virtual keyboards, does not mean the rest of the world agreed with you - including many very technically astute people.

As they say:

If you find such things unpleasant, then I suggest you develop a taste for forced labor because by the year twenty-twenty all that sneer is going to get you is a slot in the underclass boiling corpses.

Why not believe in the flying spaghetti monster or Santa if you're going to believe in magical sky daddies?

At one point in peoples lives, I'm sure a majority did believe in Santa. And if the realization that Santa is not real cannot shake ones belief in magical sky daddies, despite the similarities for why they believed, then I don't know what can.

After being incredibly turned off by "reality" shows that contain no reality at all ("Dangerous Flights" is the most egregious example I've seen lately), I was totally absorbed by Penny Arcade's low-budget reality show offering of Strip Search last year. (The site is slightly misorganized, but you can find stuff if you try).

The show was a dozen web comic artists in competition. The premise of a single artist being funded and supported by Penny Arcade for a year was motivational, and the simple act of appearing in an episode granted even the entrants ousted first an audience for their work. While it was clear the producers provided for the possibility of backstabbing and conflict, they didn't go out of their way to insert any, and in the end the show was all the better for it. I'd actually put PA's Strip Search above 90% of professional, high-budget, high-production-values TV series.

My point being, it's totally possible to structure an interesting show where game dev competition is friendly and rewarding for all, and producers with zero-sum on the brain don't exist. It just hasn't been made yet, apparently.

If you read what any of the more thoughtful people who have been around gaming a while, they all think the acquisition was good - Penny Arcade, Carmack, Adam Sessler - all of these guys think it was a good thing for Oculus and gamers.

Just because gaming is a tiny part of it in the distant future, does not mean it's bad for gaming - any more than a great high-resolution display is overall used by gamers a tiny amount compared to movies. In the end gaming still gets a great display, and after Facebook gamers get a REALLY nice VR set that comes as close as anything ever has to making VR mainstream.

The guys at Penny Arcade understand that. Why can't you, or many Slashdot readers?

The problem is: we may think it strange that a universal translator that does such a miraculous job everywhere else would be so nonfunctional with this language, Trekkies will come up with some silly technobabble explanation, but the only real reason is that a universal translator is just a handwaving plot device for writers' convenience, and here for once they found it inconvenient. Their way of dealing with it may be illogical, but tossing the crutch for one episode allows them to explore new ground.

Almost every piece of technology in Star Trek is there for one of two reasons: it made the writers' jobs easier (e.g. universal translator, replicator, the badly overused holodeck) or it made the set designers' and special effects guys' jobs easier, esp. in the original series (e.g. transporter). In each case, these technologies would have vast and far reaching impacts that the series never took into account because it wouldn't serve the items' purpose as handwaving conveniences. You have replicators, but whenever you want to have an object be valuable or difficult to obtain, somehow the replicator just can't get it quite right. You have transporters that can teleport tremendously fragile objects like people instantly across thousands of miles, but whenever you want characters to have an adventure physically retrieving an object, or whenever you want characters to be in real peril off ship, somehow the object is inherently untransportable or the transporters can't get a lock on people.

Fridge logic and dubious explanations abound, yet somehow the show goes on.

Do you remember the shit you said as a kid? Kids are now interacting with adults. Their physical bodies which face threat in the real world if such things are said have been removed and replaced by the appearance of grizzled soldiers. Thus removing the instinctive tolerance we have towards the biting, pulling, poking and verbal abuse of our young, and enabling their already vitriolic comments to become more so. This, combined with the illusion of maturity in swearing like "adults" this, adds multiplier coefficients to the GIFT equation.

However, no one can offend you. You have to take offense yourself. You are the only one responsible for the shit in your head. You have the power to mute voice chat. Party chat is a far superior cross-game feature anyway, which even prevents those in close proximity in game from hearing you.

We now have the ability for children to potentially interact on adult levels without many of the instinctual impulses which help us infantalize them. We should encourage this development, not censor it. As with the Internet: Do not enact restrictions on content; Practice self censorship if you must -- You can disable voice chat for your kids' accounts if you desire.

This being the first generation of the Information Age growing up with an instantaneous world wide communication medium, of course there will be an adjustment period; The same has followed every major technological advancement. However note that suppression of technology has never worked: If you tried to penalize others for over use of fire or stone tools in the stone age they would rightly stone you and burn the remains. Good luck with that in the Information Age, flamers. Humans are a stubborn race, they only learn things the hard way.

XBox has long been known as the most potent example of the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory. Adding a bit of accountability for being a horrible person is overdue.

Pre mobile phones, spreading a rumor required some human to speak to some other human. Or write a note, or graffiti, whatever. But it wasn't, generally speaking, 'anonymous'.

If you haven't learned yet that anonymity makes this sort of thing a hundred times worse, then you're not paying attention.

The current decline in anonyminity isn't driven by government. It's driven by corporate interests.

It is also driven by content creators who are sick of seeing the space they set aside for reader comments torn apart by trolls and Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory rudeness. A site admin dropping in a Facebook-authenticated comment system isn't doing so in order to make lots of money for Facebook in selling your data, he's doing it because he's heard that forcing a modicum of self-identification cuts down in flame wars.

People will submit themselves to horrible abuse for rewards. You can find a good example right here. Got to feed those competitive needs you know!

Excellent. Now I can have freshly fornicated coffe to go with my orange juice.

Ben Kuchera is a fucking tool who has no business writing about anything. The same goes for Polygon.
Kuchera was one of the assmunches on the front lines defending MS's initial DRM and always-online schemes for the XBOX One.

His opinions were so bad and so obviously paid-for that he got kicked out of Penny Arcade for shit like this http://penny-arcade.com/report... (I think they pulled it down because it was so bad) and this https://twitter.com/BenKuchera... .
Penny fucking Arcade realized how shitty he was, Yes, that Penny Arcade. The one run by the no-standards shills that did an instant 180 from gamers to tools once MS started paying them. The PA that bullies its own fans and offers a kickstarter to remove ads from their massively-profitable website, with stretch goals to remove more ads, but still not all the ads.

Ben Kuchera's internet fame was spawned from PA, and he became such an insufferable goon that even PA realized he needed to be cut loose. He shat around Arse Technica for a while and now he's shitting it up at Polygon.

We all know games "journalism" is about one of the most laughable things ever, but Kuchera and Polygon represent the fucking highest echelon of shilling, shit-flinging, and all around douchebaggery. There is zero integrity involved with Polygon as a whole and with Kuchera as a person. You shouldn't simply distrust their reviews, news, opinions, etc., you should actively trust it to be complete and utter paid-for horseshit.

Oblig. Penny Aracde brought to you, appropriately enough, by Space Devil.

Kind of reminds me of this.

What I don't get is the need for insult to anybody who disagrees

You take the good with the bad.

but has chosen instead to respond with a giant "fuck you" to its user base.

So you're saying Dice/Slashdot is just like Microsoft when they did the same thing to end user in Windows 8.1?

Only one player uses the tablet. The other 4 players use standard Wii remotes.

It actually makes for some interesting game mechanics. Nintendo Land (the game that came with my WiiU) is basically 12 demo games bundled together, and they all do something with the tablet. In Mario Chase, you play hide and seek. The guy with the tablet hides, the guys with the wiimotes seek. The seekers can't see the hider's screen, but they can see each others'. In the Zelda game, the guy with the tablet is an archer, and uses the tablet to look around. The guy(s) with the wiimotes are swordsmen. In the racing game, you steer with the tablet's accelerometers. None of the games are very complicated, but Nintendo Land has replaced Wii Sports as the party game.

I really like Rayman Legends on the WiiU. Some of the levels really make use of the tablet feature, especially in two player mode. The guy with the remote runs the dungeon, and the guy with the tablet uses the touch screen to manipulate the dungeon. It requires a lot of communication between both players, and I think it's really well done. This is the game I point to when people ask why a console needs a tablet. Penny Arcade talked about this game a couple of times, and I agree.

I did end up buying one WiiU Pro controller. All of the functionality of the tablet controller, without a screen. For some of the games my kids play (Transformers), the tablet would always beat the wiimote. The Pro controller restored the balance between the players. It's also more comfortable for long game play than the wiimotes.

TL;DR: I wasn't planning to upgrade to the Wii to a WiiU, but I'm glad I did.

Only one player uses the tablet. The other 4 players use standard Wii remotes.

It actually makes for some interesting game mechanics. Nintendo Land (the game that came with my WiiU) is basically 12 demo games bundled together, and they all do something with the tablet. In Mario Chase, you play hide and seek. The guy with the tablet hides, the guys with the wiimotes seek. The seekers can't see the hider's screen, but they can see each others'. In the Zelda game, the guy with the tablet is an archer, and uses the tablet to look around. The guy(s) with the wiimotes are swordsmen. In the racing game, you steer with the tablet's accelerometers. None of the games are very complicated, but Nintendo Land has replaced Wii Sports as the party game.

I really like Rayman Legends on the WiiU. Some of the levels really make use of the tablet feature, especially in two player mode. The guy with the remote runs the dungeon, and the guy with the tablet uses the touch screen to manipulate the dungeon. It requires a lot of communication between both players, and I think it's really well done. This is the game I point to when people ask why a console needs a tablet. Penny Arcade talked about this game a couple of times, and I agree.

I did end up buying one WiiU Pro controller. All of the functionality of the tablet controller, without a screen. For some of the games my kids play (Transformers), the tablet would always beat the wiimote. The Pro controller restored the balance between the players. It's also more comfortable for long game play than the wiimotes.

TL;DR: I wasn't planning to upgrade to the Wii to a WiiU, but I'm glad I did.

Some people really like the Wii U. Gabe at PA says, the Wii U version is a gift from God. In fact it’s so good that I will probably buy every multiplatform game for the Wii U from now on

My guess is most people just don't know what's in the Wii U, why it's worth buying. At least, for myself I wouldn't know why anyone would buy it if Gabe hadn't written about it.

Do you have to be so insulting, derogative, condescending and patronizing? It dilutes whatever point you are trying to make. Instead of coming across as an intelligent person worthy of discussion. Instead you lower yourself to a standard which I'm sure is beneath you. Being polite is what separates the men from the boys. It reminds me of this, http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19

One supposes he's descended from American aborigines.

Or he's just an Internet Asshole.

Came for shitcocks. Was disappointed.

Cue oblig. Penny Arcade http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19

Just as a heads up. The browser-based (Flash) game Card Hunter is better and is incredibly charismatic and fun. It's also free to play and not pay-to-win. It is like someone worked out what game my brain would like the most and made it.

You can pay to get more treasure and to do special quest maps, and the quality is astronomical for a flash-based program.

Penny Arcade also agrees with me about it being awesome!

You forgot this one and this one.

You forgot this one and this one.

resurrect Symbian

Don't say another goddamn word.

When Elop came on board, Symbian was still the #1 smartphone OS, with a 44% market share. There were challengers appearing, but with proper support, it would have remained a viable contender until they had MeeGo ready, and this one would fare much better than Windows Phone ever will.

If anyone is wondering why Hatta would say this. It's because Orson Scott Card is a bigot and a homophobe.

This has been long overdue, hell People have been asking this question for over 2 years now.

...they finally got that out? 10 years ago, Penny Arcade was speculating on the movie's crappy video game tie-ins.