How do you know I'm not right? Do you provide any evidence? Also what is your obsession with calling me a bigot, when I'm open to dialogue. You are the one who is glad that I'm a "dying breed", so I would say you're the bigot. Also, if you want to talk about literally being a dying breed, I would think homosexuals who do not have children fit that definition better. Also, I'm 19 years old. Much how there was a reactionary swing to the left in the 1960/70's, there could very well be a reactionary swing back to the right that is emerging. (I'm using the archaic "left/right" metaphors just for sake of argument)
I am not calling for your execution in the streets, I am merely expressing glee at the fact that the American Taliban are dying of old age and heart disease faster than you can replenish your ranks.
If you think that makes me a bigot, then consider Karl Popper:
" Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them. [...] We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant."
You should crack a book or two. You're only 19, your brain isn't fully formed yet. There is still hope that the damage is not irreversible.
On second thought...
> "Also, if you want to talk about literally being a dying breed, I would think homosexuals who do not have children fit that definition better."
Words cannot express how shocked I am by this comment. I thought people as stupid as you were hyperbolic strawmen... Christ.
>You are the one who is glad that I'm a "dying breed", so I would say you're the bigot.
Ah, the old "tolerance means accepting intolerance" card. Nope, totally haven't heard that tired old fallacy from the far right ever before.
>Also, if you want to talk about literally being a dying breed, I would think homosexuals who do not have children fit that definition better.
Irrelevant. If your grounds for opposing marriage equality are on purely biological grounds, you must also oppose all forms of birth control and support compulsory reproduction for married couples.
I had a more conciliatory message here a moment ago. I'm just now noticing that you're not even bothering to respond to the messages that completely disprove your points (i.e. "traditional marriage" is a nebulous term that means whatever its speaker is advocating for), so it is my full belief that you are just a troll.
That is not at all what I said. He suggested that he supports me going away and dying out, and I think shouting out your opposition is intolerant.
>Irrelevant. If your grounds for opposing marriage equality are on purely biological grounds, you must also oppose all forms of birth control and support compulsory reproduction for married couples.
I agree it's not relevant. I was responding to an equally irrelevant comment.
>I'm justice noticing that you're not even bothering to respond to the messages that completely disprove your points
I'm responding very frequently.
>"traditional marriage" is a nebulous term
Somewhat. But I have a webster's dictionary from the 60's and the definition of marriage quite clearly reads between a man and woman. Marriage having that meaning dates back centuries (millenia even?), back to its original conception. So it's pretty obvious that the "traditional" meaning is the original and longest standing one.
> But I have a webster's dictionary from the 60's and the definition of marriage quite clearly reads between a man and woman. Marriage having that meaning dates back centuries (millenia even?), back to its original conception.
Marriages that are not between a man and a woman (judging both by biological sex), varying in both the number of partners of either sex and whether, among the partners, are not even remotely unprecedented before the modern debate over the current restrictions of marriage to opposite-sex partners.
Its notable that in many cases these were well-established traditional practices that were pushed aside by the advance of Christianity in the effected regions, so that the Christian model of marriage was the one that was redefining marriage away from the its existing "traditional" form.
>I think shouting out your opposition is intolerant.
That is not what intolerance means. Saying that I find the fact, that you want to deny same sex couples rights, to be downright reprehensible is not oppressive to you or anybody else. The same cannot be said of your views..
>But I have a webster's dictionary from the 60's and the definition of marriage quite clearly reads between a man and woman.
Really. I'd appreciate it if you were to quote that definition verbatim, because quite honestly I do not believe you.
I also feel I must point out that "appeal to tradition" is a straight up logical fallacy.
You know, there's something I've been thinking about in relation to people like you. As part of my job, from time to time I'm asked to look at resumes of people fresh out of college (for software engineering jobs), and sometimes they'll list extra-cirricular activities like band or whatever, and I've lately seen resumes where the candidate explicitly and proudly lists gay-and-lesbian related advocacy groups.
I've never seen a resume where the candidate listed anti-gay or anti-gay marriage advocacy groups.
So I wonder, if you were involved in such a group, say, the Prop 8 group in California, would you advertise that fact?
When "in" members of the Phelps family attend universities, by all accounts I have heard they present themselves as regular people. Sure they don't party, but for the most part they pretend to be regular well adjusted people.
Bigots hide what they are when it is advantageous.
>I've never seen a resume where the candidate listed anti-gay or anti-gay marriage advocacy groups.
This very fact should concern people. You rarely see people advertising their support for traditional marriage (especially in california/new york. There is a common misconception that supporting gay marriage is somehow a proud rebellious cause against the status quo. But the reality couldn't be further from the truth - virtually the entire media and up to the president support gay marriage. Organizations supporting traditional marriage will immediately be called "intolerant, bigoted, hate groups" and shouted out of the debate. There is something seriously wrong with that.
So no, I would not put any political organizations on my resume for a software engineering job. I rarely discuss politics/religion at work. I hope you wouldn't hire such people who jump on the bandwagon issue de jour.
>Organizations supporting traditional marriage will immediately be called "intolerant, bigoted, hate groups" and shouted out of the debate.
Stop couching your views in pseudo-PC language and call it what it is. You do not "support traditional marriage" because that is a meaningless phrase. Nobody is campaigning for traditional marriage to go away - you can go have one right now!
You are not supporting a thing, you are supporting keeping that thing from someone else.
What you ACTUALLY support is that people who happen to love someone of the same sex should not be able to marry. That they should not receive the same spousal and tax benefits as couples who love someone of the opposite sex.
>You are not supporting a thing, you are supporting keeping that thing from someone else.
Here lies the crux of the debate. You think straight people are keeping something away from gays. But I think its gays trying to take something from straight people.
Let's say I lived in a country that banned marriage entirely. I would still get married and it would be enough for me and my family to recognize that we are married. Gays can do the same thing - they're not restricted at all in what they can do these days. But they want something more - they want everyone to be forced to recognize their marriage. They get infuriated when straight people don't want to recognize them. So they are taking something - our freedom to interpret our own reality. This is a kind of rabbit hole type revelation that spans many other issues and underpins my fundamental opposition to statism/slavery.
> You think straight people are keeping something away from gays.
I don't think anyone thinks straight people are keeping something away from gays. After all, the proportion of the population that supports marriage equality is much greater than the proportion that is gay.
> But I think its gays trying to take something from straight people.
As someone in a stable, opposite-sex marriage, I'd like to know what it is that gays are trying to take away from me. What that I had before equal marriage came to my state have I lost? Because I don't see it.
> they want everyone to be forced to recognize their marriage.
What they want is for their committed life partnerships to be treated the same way under the law as those of people who happen to prefer a life partner of the opposite gender.
> So they are taking something - our freedom to interpret our own reality.
You are free to "interpret your own reality", and I doubt any equal marriage supporter will argue against your right to do so. Your freedom to do so, however, does not give you the right to deny others equal protection under the law. The concepts aren't even related.
> This is a kind of rabbit hole type revelation that spans many other issues and underpins my fundamental opposition to statism/slavery.
And that is the kind of sentence that doesn't even begin to make sense in context. WTF are you talking about, seriously?
>But I think its gays trying to take something from straight people.
A gay couple getting married does not in any way, shape, or form impact another striaght person's marriage, and I challenge you to prove otherwise.
You arguments are taken nearly VERBATIM from the anti-miscegenation movements of a few decades ago. Blacks marrying whites impacts the sanctity of traditional marriage and will harm children" and on and on and on.
There is almost no argument that marriage equality opponents use that wasn't also used against that back then. That alone should cause you to seriously think twice about the rhetoric you're using, here.
A few decades ago it was race mixing, now it's homosexuals. Same players, same arguments, same justifications.
This isn't really relevant to the point on any logical level beyond trivia, but still, think on it.
>They get infuriated when straight people don't want to recognize them.
The fact that you think this is very telling. It's completely wrong. It's that simple. This has nothing to do with what people think, it has nothing to do with feelings or emotions. It's about actions and causes and effects. Concrete, observable things.
I couldn't give two shits what you think of my relationships - that is your concern. Where I do care is when I am unconstitutionally denied rights for no good reason.
You are telling me that getting the same tax breaks a married couple does, the ability to see my partner in the hospital, that kind of thing, somehow, is SO deleterious to you in some fashion, so negative, that I should be denied those rights.
Fair enough. We're all adults here. Objectively define that negative impact and then we'll talk.
>So they are taking something - our freedom to interpret our own reality.
You can interpret your own reality however you wish.
You can not, however, violate the equal protection clause of the constitution to deny certain people rights just because you feel that it's icky (and I must point out that you haven't brought forward any argument yet that doesn't stem from your personal feelings).
I think the idea of looking for a leader is poorly constructed.
Different tasks can be approached with different structures, which also depends on the composition of the group. The kind of person to lead (or not to lead) the group effectively would vary greatly.
So how does it make any sense to pick a leader without knowing the context?
Have you worked through the entire context of this approach?
There was little reason for an 3rd party developer to spend resources to produce a Mac/Linux port during Windows' heyday. Except as a labor of love.
But Apple doesn't own 90% market share. It's split, and growing toward Android. There is no sensible reason for developers not to develop for BOTH platforms, until it is no longer profitable to do so.
It's an incredible marketing message that may or may not be in line with what actually goes on internally.
Is it believable that they have more freedom to scrap, or extend projects? Certainly. But are there are also external forces to development that include things such as deadlines, and other timings? I would imagine so.
It's easy for us to think of companies as an unchanging abstraction, but in reality a company changes very much based on who is behind it. Blizzard in its heyday is not the Blizzard today. I feel like the company has lost some of its magic, and it's not even quite sure why.
The talent is very different since the industry has matured. Their projects are run by people from industry that have been able to deliver before (C&C:SC2, DoW:D3). I can understand the desire for a certain predictability when you are spending 100M+ on a title. But at the same time, the reality is that these people spent many years delivering mediocre titles. Contrast this approach with Valve, which routinely picks up brilliant, but risky, talent and IP. Today, they have picked up DOTA, possibly one of the biggest games of this decade, which has slipped either by ignorance or incompetence through Blizzard's fingers.
Blizzard has every right to rehash their older games. But in 15 years, we see sidegrades instead of evolution. Perhaps they are using 1997 as a reference point. When you release a product with the barebones featureset of BNET2, it would have been passable in 1997, but 2012 is different. The landscape has completely changed. Blizzard is no longer one of the few providers of a functional multiplayer experience - you can get any game you can think of in your browser, desktop, or console. They are no longer a big fish in a small pond, but just one fish in a large ocean. By their actions, I'm not sure they truly understand how dangerous their position is. It's understandable to miss the change in the environment, after all it has been slow, and masked by tremendous successes with WoW.
But the times have changed, and on their current path, they will miss the boat the next time someone eats their lunch.
To be fair, DotA was a custom map made on a Blizzard game. Its a bit unfair to say it slipped through their fingers. Valve had a good enough reputation to secure the lead developer where other companies failed to. (S2 games and Riot games both tried to get Icefrog, the sole designer of DotA for the past few years, but they both failed to keep him around or even get him into the studios for talks). I think it took a special company, like Valve, to be able to recruit Icefrog and keep him happy.
That's exactly what I mean by slip through their fingers. It would be like Valve not picking CS. With Blizzard's considerable resources and, as they claim, freedom, they should have gone after hiring Icefrog and getting DOTA. If it's not in their DNA to make such a play work, well I think that factors into the larger point of them living in another age.
I want to also clarify that a lot of this rant is in the context of them trying to build out stuff like the UMS maps store for SC2 (or even putting in development time on their version of DOTA). To me, these are a fool's errand; pursuing them demonstrates that Blizzard doesn't understand _why_ UMS was so successful on their platform 15 years ago, and how the landscape has changed such that it no longer makes sense.
UMS was still successful 9 years ago, when the original DotA (not Allstars) first appeared. And it wasn't until 2005-6 that Allstars really took off, so that's only 6-7 years ago that there was still a vibrant UMS scene for WC3.
SC2 could've had a successful modding scene as well; Blizzard just doesn't understand what modders want or how to build tools for them. SC2's editor and the Galaxy scripting language were both underwhelming in their own right and significantly less powerful than the community-developed tools available for WC3. As a result, the competent WC3 modders abandoned Blizzard en masse.
Blizzard Allstars is also a fantastic idea and exactly the right move from a strategic standpoint. Unfortunately, Blizzard has absolutely bungled the execution. They should have had it ready to release with SC2, long before LoL had really caught on or DotA 2 was a thing. Instead it's been more than two years, and there's still no release date for it or HotS.
Lots of people agree that SC2's editor was good enough to do a lot of neat things. Someone made a 3rd person, mmo/arena type game. There was some issues with the fact that sc2 netcode is no good for mmo/shooters, but I think the true killer was the fact that it was impossible to get your map to become popular if you weren't already popular. The popular maps stayed popular because they were always on the front page.
This is completely different from wc3's system where whatever games were hosted by people showed up, so you would have to wait to find a game you wanted, but it also provided new maps much more exposure.
It doesn't matter that you can do neat things when the workflows are hideously overwrought, though[1]. As if Blizzard's insistence on GUI-ifying everything weren't bad enough, they then proceeded to add a ridiculous Data Editor that only partially exposes objects to code and doesn't allow you to do much programmatically. As a result, you end up having to cobble effects together through a combination of kludgy GUI editing and hackish[2] scripts. Examples:
The middle one is a particularly good example because you can't dynamically set the miss chance. Or rather you can, but that change will affect all units, so in practical terms you can't do it that way. Instead you have a single 1% miss buff and layer it on until you hit your target value. The problem there, of course, is that each 1% suffers from diminishing returns, so you end up having to use a logarithmic approximation instead. By contrast, completely dynamic evasion in WC3 was a breeze.
Anyway, even when Andromeda[3] was actively being worked on SC2 modding was barely tolerable. But you're also right about the mechanisms for advertising maps to players: They suck.
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1. People were making third- and first-person mods in the WC3 days too, by the way.
2. Hackish because, by design, there are many things you simply cannot do with scripting.
Absolutely. Having previously grabbed Counter-Strike (Half-life mod) and Team Fortress (Quake mod), and treating them nicely, most definitely should garner a good reputation.
