mappeal

Some player complained on the forum that gay romance options were impeding on the “straight male gamer“‘s enjoyment (companions hitting on the player character). You probably want to read the RPS post for more context. The lead writer gave a beautifil answer.

David Gaider is a fine man. Here’s an extract.

And if there is any doubt why such an opinion might be met with hostility, it has to do with privilege. You can write it off as “political correctness” if you wish, but the truth is that privilege always lies with the majority. They’re so used to being catered to that they see the lack of catering as an imbalance. They don’t see anything wrong with having things set up to suit them, what’s everyone’s fuss all about? That’s the way it should be, any everyone else should be used to not getting what they want.

Jim Emerson on the craft behind The Social Network. Great piece.

We’re always reminded that what we’re seeing is being documented. Even the documentation is being documented: the affidavits that have already been filed, the e-mails and texts that were sent, the blog entries, the Harvard Crimson articles entered into evidence… Whenever Mark tries to claim he doesn’t remember what he may or may not have said to Erica or the Winkelvii (Armie Hammer), there’s always something there to remind him — often in words he typed and electronically transmitted himself.

facebook, summed up.

Ladies and gentlemen… Mercury.

Despite its proximity to Earth, the planet Mercury has for decades been comparatively unexplored […] For the first time in history, a scientific observatory is in orbit about our solar system’s innermost planet. Mercury’s secrets [..] are about to be revealed.

We have scientific observatories around planets and space stations. And I used to read about this stuff in the second-hand book cartons at the library.

the current hot crop of leading men, actors like Jeremy Renner, Michael Fassbender, Tom Hardy and Joel Edgerton. They appear on virtually every casting wish list for a 30-something white man for a very simple reason: All of them project the same combination of raw masculinity and intelligence that used to be the driving force of 1970s action film before the 80’s came along and split things up into Beefcake Versus Pretty Boy.

aah the pretty boy with no bite era of the 90s. ugh.

Adam Curtis :

The film also has some of the recordings of the voices of the Commissioners struggling to deal with the Three Mile Island disaster in 1979. It was recorded by a dictaphone left running on a table - and you get a very good sense of what it must feel like to deal with such a crisis. A group of men realising they have no idea what is going on inside the core - knowing only that the cooling systems seem to have failed.

I love wikileaks.

An official from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) said in December 2008 that safety rules were out of date and strong earthquakes would pose a “serious problem” for nuclear power stations.

the cable

Japan suffered an earthquake and tsunami of unprecedented proportion that has caused unbelievable damage to every part of their infrastructure, and death of very large numbers of people.

The media have chosen to report the damage to a nuclear plant which was, and still is, unlikely to harm anyone.

This just got bumped to a level 6 on the INES scale, out of seven, so…

edit : It got bumped to 6 by French experts , Japan insists we are still at 4. The bump is thus a french assessment, we’ll know the real scale after an official and thorough investigation, that is, after the crisis cools down.