John Wick II baby!

I was 13/14, games back then were magical. Anytime I was on a plane or in the car I was reading PC Gamer or CGM drooling over the demos (or shareware!), ads, previews and reviews. Remember those days? When information on gaming was largely through print?! I still remember those Dark Forces previews, I could have shot a load. PC gaming at that point really was fucking cutting edge.

1997 & 1998 also hold a special flame in gaming for me - 1997: Ultima Online (actually learned HTML and had a website for UO cuz I was a NERD), Fallout, GTA, Age of Empires, Dungeon Keeper, Quake II, Myth (incredible multiplayer component probably even still).

1998: Starcraft, Half-Life, Baldur's Gate, Thief, Grim Fandango, Fallout 2, Tribes, THIEF, Unreal, Commandos.... so many innovative games back then. Now we just build on them over and over and over again

Very pretty. Very smooth. I think I could get bored of those melee "finish him" moves after a while. If doomguy is strong enough to rip the jaw off so many of the lower level enemies, I almost wonder why he'd bother carrying guns at all, except to save up ammo for a Revenant or cyberdemon. The map editor looks like a nice feature. Map editing was one of the best things about the original doom/II.

I would argue that automation still isn't the job killer #1. Plain old political decisions, such as sound finance, deficit hawkery, and austerity lead by a mile in this category. Neither is being addressed properly, but I find it hard to focus on the employment effects of automation when the Eurozone, for instance, runs at >10% unemployment strictly due to policies enacted by (non-)elected officials. We don't need technology to cause mass unemployment, humans can do that all on their own.

Additionally, even the amount of work available is a matter of perspective. Within the current system, the number of jobs with a decent salary is already dwarfed by the number of people looking for one. The amount of work to be done, on the other hand, is not.

Case in point: our (read: German) national railroad company is short-staffed by about 80.000-100.000 people, last I checked; our healthcare system is short-staffed by at least 200.000 people, probably a lot more; law enforcement is short by about 50.000; education is short by at least 20.000. Let's not even talk about infrastructure or ecological maintenance/regeneration. These are not open positions though, because nobody is willing/able to pay the bill.

So while I agree that we should be discussing how to deal with technological change, a more pressing matter is either to alter the system or to at least take back control over the vast sums of dead currency floating around in the financial nirvana or on Stephen Schwarzman's bank accounts. First stop: full employment. Then, gradually, guaranteed basic income when automation does, in fact, cause mass unemployment.

Finally, I don't think automation will do as quick as sweep as some presume. The quality of software in commercial machines is quite absymal in many cases, since it was written in the normal fashion: do it now, do it quickly, here's five bucks. Efficiency improvements generally come at the price of QA, and it shows. Europe's most modern railway control center is nearby, and it never went online -- Bombardier cut corners and never had the proper railway expertise to begin with. Meanwhile, the center build in '53 is working just fine, and so are the switches put in place when Wilhelm II was running the show.

Edit: That said, I'm thrilled to see mind-numbing labour being replaced by machines. Can't happen quickly enough.

Amazing Anamorphic Illusions II/2 has been added as a related post - related requested by Zawash on that post.

Amazing Anamorphic Illusions II/2 has been added as a related post - related requested by Zawash on that post.

I like a lot of anime, but I have to say, this bit embodies everything I hate about anime. This is the reason Matrix II and III sucked, this is why Superman movies always suck. Heroes need limits comprehensible by us mere mortals, otherwise the action just becomes a bunch of incomprehensible garbage (like the above).

*related=http://videosift.com/video/What-if-Star-Wars-Episode-II-Were-Good-Belated-Media
*related=http://videosift.com/video/What-If-Star-Wars-Episode-I-Was-Good

What if Star Wars Episode II Were Good? (Belated Media) has been added as a related post - related requested by Vexus.

What If "Star Wars: Episode I" Was Good? has been added as a related post - related requested by Vexus.

The thumbnail image for this video has been updated - thumbnail added by eric3579.

That would've been suicide. It'd be like starting the movies for the Harry Potter series on book 4. Sure, you'd have a fanbase that knows the source material and would understand what's going on, but it would alienate everyone who hasn't read the books, and now they don't wanna go see it.

At least this way with it being (somewhat relatively close to) orcs vs humans, we establish the general base for what happens, so if it's a success they can continue down the story.

There's foreshadowing in the trailer anyway, the orc that sends the baby down the river, I'm guessing the baby is Thrall.

Which already kinda mucks up the storyline.. because that more involves parts of warcraft II.. Either way, I thought it looked pretty decent. I'm hoping a bit more work goes into making the orcs look a little more.. not CGI in a couple of those scenes, but I'll probably go see it.

@newtboy

I don't think I'm much in danger of contradiction in suggesting that you yourself have yet to crack a book of feminist theory or engage with a feminist activist making no more extravagant sex/gender claims that the one you quote from that unimpeachable source, dictionary.com (and when did dictionaries move from being an aid to understanding obscure words to the ultimate arbiters of political thought?).

There is no separating the movement from the ideology; this is an ancient truism. Without the movement, the idea dies. Without the idea, the movement doesn't exist. My unfollowable second paragraph comprises only examples of actual, nasty feminist doctrine which I have encountered in the real world, and could probably even document with a few google searches. I can hardly be blamed that this group is so dissolute, so indiscriminately inclusive of maniacs and criminal fanatics that no single representative feminist can be found, no central text can answer for the whole.

But for the sake of increasingly and inexplicably divisive argument, let's attempt to isolate just that 'small-f' feminism in the definition you give: "feminism: noun: the doctrine advocating social, political, and all other rights of women equal to those of men", which I will unconditionally repudiate and abjure, for the following reasons.

i) Let's be boring and start with the name. A name that has rightly attracted much criticism, and which Virginia Woolf - not a feminist, merely a devastatingly intelligent and talented woman - called "a vicious and corrupt word that has done much harm in its day and is now obsolete".* Anyone can see the defect here, an implicitly sexist term that apparently calls for the advancement of one sex at the expense of - whom? Well, whom do you think? A special politics for women only and exclusionary of those other incidental members of the human species, once allies and comrades and now relegated to the other side of what has become a literally unending antagonism.

You may say, "it's only a name", but how little else your dictionary leaves me to examine. No, were there no other social or intellectual harm in feminism, I would reject it on the ground of its name alone.

ii, sailor) Would that there were a known equivalent for the term 'racialism' that could relate to the cultural fiction of gender. The demand for women's rights necessarily requires that such a category 'women' exists, and is in need of special protection. Well what virtue is there in any woman that exists in no man? What mannish fault that finds no womanly echo? Then how is this distinction maintained except through supernatural thinking?

There are no women; and if there are no women, then there is nothing for feminism to accomplish. You may sign me up at any time for the doctrine of 'anti-sexism' or of 'individualism', but I will spit on anyone who advocates for 'women's rights'.

iii) This has been touched on before, and praise satan for that time saving mercy, but I reject the implicit assumption that there is a natural societal opposition to the principle of sex equality and that those who fail to declare for this, again, historically very recent dogma fall by default into that opposing force.



*The quote is worth taking in its fuller context, written in a time when the word 'feminist' was a slur on those heroes whose suffering and idealism has been so ghoulishly plundered for the tawdry use of @bareboards2 and her cohort:

"What more fitting than to destroy an old word, a vicious and corrupt word that has done much harm in its day and is now obsolete? The word ‘feminist’ is the word indicated. That word, according to the dictionary, means ‘one who champions the rights of women’. Since the only right, the right to earn a living, has been won, the word no longer has a meaning. And a word without a meaning is a dead word, a corrupt word. Let us therefore celebrate this occasion by cremating the corpse. Let us write that word in large black letters on a sheet of foolscap; then solemnly apply a match to the paper. Look, how it burns! What a light dances over the world! Now let us bray the ashes in a mortar with a goose-feather pen, and declare in unison singing together that anyone who uses that word in future is a ring-the-bell-and-run-away-man, a mischief maker, a groper among old bones, the proof of whose defilement is written in a smudge of dirty water upon his face. The smoke has died down; the word is destroyed. Observe, Sir, what has happened as the result of our celebration. The word ‘feminist’ is destroyed; the air is cleared; and in that clearer air what do we see? Men and women working together for the same cause. The cloud has lifted from the past too. What were they working for in the nineteenth century — those queer dead women in their poke bonnets and shawls? The very same cause for which we are working now. ‘Our claim was no claim of women’s rights only;’— it is Josephine Butler who speaks —‘it was larger and deeper; it was a claim for the rights of all — all men and women — to the respect in their persons of the great principles of Justice and Equality and Liberty.’"

http://www.nomachetejuggling.com/2011/11/11/the-star-wars-saga-suggested-viewing-order/

IV, V, II, III, VI

I honestly don't understand your point about Cindy. I don't get the feeling that she is dancing off the pounds. This feels like a BBW jerk off vid. They do exist.

If she is celebrating her own sexuality, good for her.

As for your claim that I am blind to representations of women in the media, you have said that to me before. You were wrong before, you are wrong now. There are numerous studies that show that women are underrepresented in the media. There are numerous studies proving that women's movie and TV careers are severely circumscribed when they reach a certain age. Without breaking a sweat, I can name a dozen sitcoms starring fat men with slender to average wives and two that star(red) women of size -- Roseanne and Mike and Molly. And this just sitcoms.

I know there is nothing I can say about this subject, because I believe you to be willfully blind about the facts.

And yes, as I always do, I acknowledge that the unreasonable standards of beauty that women are held to is happening more and more to men. I do not think that is a good thing. It is a spreading cancer. Ignoring that is happens to women doesn't stop it happening to men.

And I hate Magic Mike I and II. Stupid plot, stupid dialogue, boring as shit and not enough dancing . The Full Monty now? OH yeah! Fat blokes, skinny blokes, gay blokes, old blokes, ginger blokes..... That is a movie that celebrates life and interpersonal relationships.