TheMightyEthan

While it's surprising that your school was so open about sex ed, it's not surprising there was lots of sex going on in the Bible Belt. I don't know if your specific school was rural, but a lot of the Bible Belt is, and rural areas tend to have higher rates of teen sex than urban areas (with similar incomes). My hypothesis is that it's because there's nothing else to do. I first had sex when I was 14. Which brings me to something else I forgot to mention last night: that Wikipedia article I linked is slightly wrong about Kansas. 16 is the straight-up, "can say yes to anyone" age of consent, but it's not a crime to have sex with someone 14 or older if you are 2 or fewer years older than them. So a 16 year old can legally have sex with a 14 year old, and a 17 year old can legally have sex with a 15 year old, but a 17 year old cannot legally have sex with a 14 year old. Then you hit 16 and it's legal for anybody (except teachers or other adults "in positions of authority" over the kid, teachers have to wait until you're not a student anymore and others in positions of authority have to wait until you're 18).

In Kansas it's 16 also, which seems to be pretty typical in US states. Though in California, the state where the show is set, it's 18. It's just mind boggling to me that people are getting upset about the show even acknowledging that teenagers have sex. When I saw the headline (I hadn't watched the episode yet) I expected that one of the parents was going to walk in on them or something. I just can't get my mind around the idea that merely mentioning it is going "too far."

I didn't think you were talking about anyone here, I've just noticed you have a tendency to mix ad hominems in with your arguments, and I find it distasteful. Unrelatedly: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ann-brenoff/modern-family-virgin-territory_b_1296779.html

IIRC the Articles of Confederation were a PITA to modify (required unanimous consent of all states), so rather than doing so they just made a new Constitution which provided that it would go into effect when 9 of the 13 states ratified it. 12 did, but Rhode Island held out. IIRC, the other 12 states invaded and occupied Rhode Island until its government ratified the Constitution as well. Just sayin.

I'm okay with just a super easy mode rather than an outright skip, but I do feel strongly that games need to let you change difficulty mid-game rather than making start the whole thing over.

So I unlocked Krogan Soldier and Asari Adept. Even though I was so looking forward to Krogan Soldier I've now learned that Asari Adept is the best thing ever.

On Dragon Age I would sometimes turn it down for harder parts, but mostly I left it up. But I think every game needs to have either the option to adjust the difficulty mid game or the option to skip any given part.

Okay, but you keep saying that skipping combat means you're not playing a game, implying that there's no gameplay besides combat.

Wouldn't it be great if we could discuss these things without personal attacks? We do need to change the public perception that nuclear is bad though.

Oh I so wish I could downvote you right now... Combat is one kind of gameplay, but it is not synonymous with gameplay. Kind of like how "pizza" is not synonymous with "food". Allowing people to skip combat does not mean they are not playing a game.

Weird glitch I encountered in the demo. First I was teleporting around all crazy, then finally I appeared below the level and started falling. It amuses me that it looks like he's flapping his arms, maybe to fly back up to the level.

Dean, why must you insist on equating "gameplay" with "combat"? Those are not synonyms.

Well it just occurred to me that I think combat encounters should be skippable in every game. As people have always mentioned, games sometimes have difficulty spikes that it would be nice to be able to get past.

Yeah, wind is great out here cause it's really windy and you can just stick the turbines in fields that can still be used for farming.

In a film I can't my dialog choices, affect the ending, etc. Yes there are visual novels but those tend to all be very similar in terms of themes, settings, etc. Most games you can't do that either. If the choice of themes aren't to your liking in Visual Novels that's not really an issue of Visual Novels themselves, just the developers. Hardly like it's limited to mainly being anime style stuff. Well okay, but I don't think anyone's saying you should be able to skip the combat in Halo. I thought it was assumed we were talking about games in which a large draw of the game is the non-combat elements.

I'll buy DLC if I feel like it's worth it. For ME2 for example, LotSB was definitely worth it, Overlord and Firewalker were worth it to me, Arrival was too (but only because of the story advancement, the content standing on its own wasn't so great). For Fallout 3 I thought The Pitt and Broken Steel were both definitely worth it, the rest I could take or leave. But here's what my experience is: the stuff that isn't worth it? The lack of it doesn't detract from the main game either.

I find fusion (not cold fusion, just regular fusion) to be the most exciting form of alternative energy. Right now no one's built a reactor that produces more power than it consumes, which is obviously a problem, but it's an engineering problem rather than a physics problem and is therefore solvable. It runs on deuterium which comes from heavy water. About 0.03% of the water on Earth is heavy water, which I once read (but can't remember where) is enough energy to power human civilization at present growth rates for the next approximately 4 billion years. It's still a ways off though. The ITER reactor, expected to be the first fusion reactor to produce more energy than it consumes (500 MW output with 50 MW required to run the reactor) isn't anticipated to come online until 2019, and it's just a research reactor.

I'm not sure we will lose our games, and it goes back to piracy. I won't link to it here but it took me less than a minute to find a torrent that contains every single game ever made for the Colecovision. We might lose the physical media and hardware, but the essence of the games, the code, will remain. *Edit* - Cities and nations rise and fall, but the internet is truly global and it would take a disaster on a global scale to wipe it out as a backup system.

Mass Effect 3 demo. The multiplayer's really got its hooks in me.

Gah, I thought Catherine was pretty badly done. I hated how nothing you do has any effect until the end cutscene. How the hell does that make any sense in a game that's supposed to be about Vincent's struggle? It made me mad at the game every time Vincent did anything when I wasn't in direct control because that wasn't the thing my Vincent would have done.

Can you actually skip it altogether? I thought it just made it ludicrously easy. As for LA Noire, I'd say that LA Noire and GTA IV have the same gameplay in the same way that Homefront and Call of Duty have the same gameplay. Sure it's superficially similar, but the feel is a lot different. *Edit* - Also, I think a lot of it has to do with what people perceive the "point" of the game being. In LA Noire the point of the game was the investigations, so people interested in that are going to be off-put when suddenly it changes to a mediocre action game. On the other hand, the point of GTA IV is the action game, so people who don't enjoy it just aren't going to play the game at all, or they'll only play it when they're in the mood for it.

In a film I can't my dialog choices, affect the ending, etc. Yes there are visual novels but those tend to all be very similar in terms of themes, settings, etc.

This is actually one area where I think piracy will be a huge benefit to the industry. Think of all the roms of old games that are available to download that no one would ever get to play otherwise.

At least you could use the bus if you wanted to, we don't even have that option.