>> ^Jinx:

I'm just really bored at the stagnate FPS genre atm. Hasn't been a good recent multiplayer FPS game recently apart from TF2, and that was a while back. Even then the focus is clearly on public play and the competitive community is small and dying out pretty quickly. Its sad that in this e-sports renaissance created by SC2 there is no FPS game to really step up and enter the limelight. The Arena style of Quake needs to make a comeback. Its so watchable as a spectator sport, and the skill the best players display is just astounding. Even watching these speedruns etc makes my jaw drop.
Instead we get boring Modern Yawnfair 12 - For Xbox360 and PS3! And yah, I'm a PC elitist. I watched some Halo3/Reach @ MLG and while it wasn't terrible, it was lightyears behind Quake. CS:GO is on the horizon, and I hope steam support that as much as they are pouring money into DotA2, but still, I prefer an FPS where you don't die in one pixelshot or from wallbanging spam.
/rant
Oh, and a new tribes is coming, but I was super turned off by their free2play model. If its anything like LoL I am not interested. I'd rather pay upfront and know I am on a equal footing than everybody else rather than sink limitless cash into making sure I can remain competitive.


I realize I'm necroing a 2 week old video thread, but, there are some things that nobody bothered to say.

Jinx: Many of these F2P games are not Pay2Win. You simply pay for variety/speed of unlocks. Nothing you can pay for with cash can make you do more damage, move faster, etc. The only things in LoL that absolutely require actual cash are character skins and extra rune pages. Everything else can be unlocked with the same points even the richest person has to earn by playing matches. Can you spend $1-200 and unlock every character? Yes. Do you have to...is it worth it? No. Just play with the free rotated characters each week. Personally, I'm sick of paying up front for shitty games or games I don't play that often.


@EvilDeathBee The difference is, many of the companies that used to produce the best stuff now produce mass market crap and many of the great companies were bought out and/or ruined by EA/Activision. Westwood Studios...gone. Lucasarts is plagued by the same mass market bullshit problems as the newer movie trilogy. id hasn't made a good shooter since before Doom 3, and Rage is the latest crap they've spewed out. You can find videos of Carmack saying they're being held back by console graphics/memory considerations. Luckily we have Blizzard and Valve still, though Blizzard is now Activision Blizzard, and is making console Diablo 3 and has added friggin Facebook to Battle net. GG. Valve seems to want to make hats, ignore HL2:Ep3 while splitting the already-split MOBA community by releasing DOTA2, which nobody really asked for given that HoN and LoL are rather popular. But, at least Valve and Blizz put out quality PC games. BF3 now has the useless Origin, which is nothing but a business move and provides zero benefit to gamers.

Games used to be art. Now they're all about money.

@Hawkinson "A few thousand"? Doom 2 sold like 2 million back before PC gaming was at all popular. Quake 2 sold 1-1.5 million also. I couldn't find Q1 numbers but I'd guess they're similar. You're also forgetting that Doom 2 was distributed as shareware, and I've seen estimates that 15 million played it. Give google a try next time you want to pull statistics out of your ass

I'm just really bored at the stagnate FPS genre atm. Hasn't been a good recent multiplayer FPS game recently apart from TF2, and that was a while back. Even then the focus is clearly on public play and the competitive community is small and dying out pretty quickly. Its sad that in this e-sports renaissance created by SC2 there is no FPS game to really step up and enter the limelight. The Arena style of Quake needs to make a comeback. Its so watchable as a spectator sport, and the skill the best players display is just astounding. Even watching these speedruns etc makes my jaw drop.

Instead we get boring Modern Yawnfair 12 - For Xbox360 and PS3! And yah, I'm a PC elitist. I watched some Halo3/Reach @ MLG and while it wasn't terrible, it was lightyears behind Quake. CS:GO is on the horizon, and I hope steam support that as much as they are pouring money into DotA2, but still, I prefer an FPS where you don't die in one pixelshot or from wallbanging spam.

/rant

Oh, and a new tribes is coming, but I was super turned off by their free2play model. If its anything like LoL I am not interested. I'd rather pay upfront and know I am on a equal footing than everybody else rather than sink limitless cash into making sure I can remain competitive.

>> ^bareboards2:

I don't like this. Me, who always loves Maher.
Look, all religion is a matter of setting aside the rational mind and embracing belief in something outside yourself.
Romney was brought up in the Mormon Church, he didn't choose it. To ask him to set it aside as irrational is to ask him to set aside his family, his community, the very fabric of his life.
The Mormon church is one of the fastest growing religions on the planet, despite all the weirdness. I don't know how anyone could embrace the weirdness, but I do know why someone might embrace their culture -- it is structure, it is support, it is community, it is rules for living in an increasingly fractured society.
Don't pick on Romney for being Mormon. Not if you give every other non-atheist a pass on their particular brand of crazy.


Maybe it is too much to ask from Romney to see through his ultra-silly superstitions. Fine. There are lawns to be mowed and toilets to be unclogged everywhere. Put him to work. Just dont make him president of the most powerful nation on earth.

Call me an elitist intellectual atheistic asshole if you will, but the truth is that I think a presidential candidate ought to have the intellectual capacity to shed childish, inane superstition that is religion, and the intellectual honesty to admit it, despite the fact that this might enstrange them from family or friends, and voters..

Am I asking for a little more from the presidential candidate than I do for other people? Hell yeah.

Switched to a YouTube embed, should be OK now.>> ^legacy0100:

seems to be blocked

>> ^dystopianfuturetoday:

In addition to 'teaching', an educator also needs to be a leader, a negotiator, a salesman, a disciplinarian, a politician, an administrator, a motivator, a receptionist, an advocate, a librarian, a manager, a public relations agent, a psychologist, an entertainer, an accountant, and for some students, a parent. If you are a music teacher, you get even more hats - arranger, copyist, bus scheduler, event planner, fund raiser, critic, graphic designer, contractor etc. (Running a high school band is like running a business, complete with a board, fundraiser income, expenses, employees, audits, etc.)


And yet I wonder why these super geniuses settle for teaching instead of using just some of the myriad of skills you listed and become the next big inventor, or the next great physicist, or the next big whatever. Yet instead, even with those over-qualifications (if we're to take your word for it), they choose to work so much harder for fewer rewards (again if we're to take your word).

Sounds totally legit.

>> ^dystopianfuturetoday:

I know you grew up in a region of the country that does not have high educational standards (and cruel stereotypes that reinforce these low standards), so I don't doubt that you've had more than your fair share of bad teachers.


Emphasis mine. Trolololo. Actually this is classic elitism. To you my geographical location, specifically that I grew up in the South, makes me inferior in every respect to people like you who grew up near richer Metropolitan areas. I know you're trying to goad me, but I also think you really believe some of that. It's the priggish nature of the elitist.

You can try to disassociate yourself from the Southern school system because of how people like you look down on them, but at the end of the day that system is still a product of your ideal one-size-fits-all Prussian school model no matter the location. To mock any part of it is to mock all of it.

>> ^dystopianfuturetoday:

I grew up in middle class Southern California, with teachers that were paid fairly, schools that were well funded and parents that involved themselves in the academic lives of their children. (3 of the biggest factors in student achievement). Out of the 40+ teachers I had from K-12, I can think of two that were bad.


Still, here in Los Angeles the charter schools and/or private schools tend to perform the best. Even with all the unions and heavy spending that goes on, the public schools just cannot outperform the charters/private schools. That's got to sting a bit for those in support of public schools and teacher unions.

Well, it sounds like the comedian had been making fun of him a bit before that. But, it doesn't matter because once this guy started spouting his petty judgements it was all over. "Costa Rica jacket", "long surfer hair", "at least I have a job". What a drunk, elitist, dick.

>> ^Jinx:

Yup, lookin like a pub bash too me
I'm a PC elitist. If its not an FPS with a mouse i'm not interested...but I have a dirty secret. I spent a not inconsiderable amount of time watching Halo:Reach at the last MLG. So to help a gamer out I'll upvote as long as you keep my secret.


I was watching as well! Can't wait for Anaheim!

Yup, lookin like a pub bash too me

I'm a PC elitist. If its not an FPS with a mouse i'm not interested...but I have a dirty secret. I spent a not inconsiderable amount of time watching Halo:Reach at the last MLG. So to help a gamer out I'll upvote as long as you keep my secret.

Folks, NYC is one of the most expensive places to live in the entire world. There are a ton of young, college educated, silver spoon anarchists running around that city, many of whom proudly and consciously adopt a bohemian lifestyle. This is part of the hipster/indie/underground/alternative/etc. persona and one needs that cred when you move from NYC to LA to rub your self importance in everyone's face. Or maybe Henry simply doesn't care for elitists in general, as it is he rubs elbows with people doing truly great things with their lives, like Shirin Neshat.

P.S. older folks are always disapproving of young folks ;-)

Again consider the source...how does THIS MAN make his money? By generating conspiracy theories and playing on peoples fears and sense of elitism. Because people who feel they're "in the know" feel elitist and above all the "sheep". You go to get information from a source such as Alex Jones you are LOOKING for a specific answer, not an informed debate or a presentation of relevant evidence.

>> ^Drax:

...Finally I understand now why there's a need for console gaming.. I understand completely.


And never have I been so happy to be a PC gaming elitist.

I can't usually watch Pat because he likes to use the same tactics as Bill O'Reilly, where smugness is used like air freshener, and making people feel inferior is more the goal than the betterment of mankind. Many sift talks end up going in this sudo-intellectual, elitist route. Many have been consumed by its trollness, myself included. So before I get into what I want to say, I just want to say every conversation than ends up in draconian foot pounding here on the sift, even more so when I am the perpetrator, causes me weeks of anguish and usually sends me away for a week in trembling anguish for the loss of an opportunity to have real, meaningful conversation.

I like Pat's point, though, I think he muddles it a little; in the first half, he seems to rail against the notion that representative democracy works well, and in the second a rant about unelected representatives are destroying Ireland. Even so, I think the point of layers of democracy via representation seems to eliminate your representation through dilution. When you have a state, federal, continental, and world representative, it is hardly possible for your view of the world to be completely represented, or every fractionally. The policy of direct diplomacy had its failing, which was mob rule. I think an interesting problem that Pat is pointing out about representative democracy is very real...that you end up not having any representation because of the conflict between all the different levels. So while you got a vote a person into office, he wasn't the right person in the right office to affect the things that you wanted him to affect. A complicated maze where any change you want is impossible to get via a vote for your representative.

So for pure democracy, you get a direct voice that can get overruled by many shouting over your own. In representative, that same muddling happens when more and more systems of democracy are layered in. I would be interested to hear your opinion on this @dystopianfuturetoday. I think last time I dabbled in these waters I was called a fascist, trying to avoid a similar occurrence

I am not saying that representative democracy is systemically flawed absolutely, but has an undesirable entropy. I like trying to brain up better systems, it is how my brain works. Rep Dem has many benefits, though, some of the largest in the history of man...so trying to capture those same successes would be hard, but perhaps possible. Is there something better than Rep Dem...I surely hope so...lets vote on it!

Comment hidden because you are ignoring dag. (show it anyway)

I love NPR. I listen to Morning Edition most nights while washing the dishes here ins Australia. I guess I'm a latte sipping elitist. Mmmm Latte.

^Thank you, Peter G. Peterson. Would you like some John Birch Society with your Glenn Beck this evening?

The funny part is that you think we're the puppets of elitists.

It's interesting to note that in response to the elitist, authoritarian communist ideology in which she suffered under, Ayn Rand proceded to create her own elitist, authoritarian capitalist ideology, much like the abused child that grows up to be an abusive parent. Maybe instead of focusing on economics, she should have focused on elitism and authoritarianism.