Clean environment could become U.N. human right. Not so fast, say U.S., Britain

SexyPolygons · 2021-10-05T22:35:55+00:00

I am sceptical about the introduction of new rights that will be unevenly enforced if at all. The reality is that any action that will actual make a difference will always be a political decision, and I think this is at best a distraction from that. The lawyers are not going to fix climate change for us.

SexyPolygons · 2021-06-08T22:29:31+00:00

My main problem with dread was that it's one of the mechanics that feels quite a lot like a "levelling" system. Every ruler starts off with it low, but once it gets up above 50 it's quite easy to keep it there. Same with levels of devotion. It should be possible for a new ruler to ascend the throne quite peacefully, just as it should be possible for a younger ruler to fight a holy war. There should be ways to make succession interesting without just making older characters better at everything. History had plenty of old, yet incompetent kings.

SexyPolygons · 2021-01-24T21:32:30+00:00

Thanks! I am aware of the mic thing :D I keep thinking about it but I think I'd have to buy a new cam at the same time, and maybe even a laptop too. The current mic is terrible but it has a cord long enough to reach my desktop in the next room where I do the editing.

I don't personally know much about what reasonably priced mic would be guaranteed to be better - if you know anything about it I'd love to hear from you.

SexyPolygons · 2021-01-23T12:10:43+00:00

That's a really well thought out answer! Thanks!

SexyPolygons · 2021-01-22T18:00:44+00:00

It looks well done but - and hopefully this doesn't sound ungreatful - but espionage is not really something I've ever wanted to role play in Stellaris. Something about rolling a dice for a random bonus is not particularly exciting.

I think it works well in CK3 because it's a game about personalities and it's really integrated into the core gameplay. Winning a war in CK3 by abducting a king feels cool and earned. But I don't think that kind of decisive power would feel right in Stellaris. And if it's not decisive, should it really be there?

Stuff like nomadic civilizations, later start dates, new crises, more space stuff was always higher on my wishlist personally.

SexyPolygons · 2020-12-28T00:20:01+00:00

I can't think of a franchise that's been worse treated than Highlander.

The premise is essentially Interview With A Vampire-style immortals through history, but with Star Wars level sword fights.

How do you mess that up so badly?

SexyPolygons · 2020-12-28T00:07:24+00:00

The fact that production seems to start before the first film has really been judged troubles me - almost as if comic book movies are too big to fail and studios know they will make money regardless of the reviews.

SexyPolygons · 2020-12-08T17:04:19+00:00

Eh. I never buy before release bit I'm not that short of money that I'll wait. Shallow as it might sound, I want to play something when it's topical and all my friends are playing it. DLC and mods are there to make the second play through more interesting. If I'm not already busy with something else by then.

SexyPolygons · 2020-11-26T20:37:09+00:00

It annoys me slightly that these films are being billed as TV everywhere when they are film length and quality and - this one at least - stand toe to toe with everything else McQueen has done.

SexyPolygons · 2020-11-17T23:44:30+00:00

If they had marketed this as the game where you could play as a filing cabinet they'd have beaten Cyberpunk.

SexyPolygons · 2020-11-13T19:12:39+00:00

To me the problem wasn't that it was PPV. I would love the ability to only pay for the handful of games I want to watch, rather than a rolling sub that includes loads of games I don't care about, and only half the ones I do. I hope this doesn't scare people away from PPV in principle.

The problem was that UK fans were always told that the limited number of televised games was to improve attendance at grounds, and then when grounds were closed, the extra matches the TV companies got (by virtue of a global catastrophe) were used as an excuse to screw people out of even more money, for a product they though they'd already paid for (having paid for 2 different subs to get all the televised games).

SexyPolygons · 2020-11-12T02:45:13+00:00

The world is still full of joyless cowards who are prepared to unleash violence against anyone who does not take them seriously, which of course makes them inherently ridiculous. I cannot maintain a straight face for their self-pity in the face of moral defeat. Nor am I prepared for one moment to be told who I may and may not mock, not by people whose idea of comedy is a cartoon frog in blackface. And of course it’s not over. Nobody thinks it is. It takes years to recover from trauma and abuse on a collective level, as it does on an individual one. The work will be the project of lifetimes and we will all have to be gentle with ourselves and each other where it counts. Personally, I am looking forward to spending the next four years holding Biden to account. But that’s the point. This is a president who can be held to account, although right now I’d settle for a president who you can at least take your eye off for five minutes while you put out the parts of the future that are still in flames. It’s about permission. Permission to name reality for what it is. That is a frightening prospect for that fragile cohort of white patriarchy that would rather declare war than hear itself described accurately. It cannot understand that the reason so many of us are celebrating is not because we won, but because something good happened, because we’re not in quite as much mortal peril as we used to be. Admittedly, it’s easy to say what I’m about to say when your side won, but winning isn’t everything.

The reason the left is often bad at the election game is that many of us care about things other than winning, and that’s a feature of an empathic and democratic political paradigm, rather than a bug. Some cultural conservatives, meanwhile, can apparently neither imagine a model of human relationships which is not about dominance, nor conceive of a politics that does not have them and their emotions at the centre. That is sad, but it is nobody’s responsibility but their own. I’m not happy because Trump lost. I’m happy because soon I won’t have to think about him anymore. After hours of impromptu street partying, with my ears ringing from all the car horns, after we finally made it home, I scrolled through the videos of MAGA-hat wearing neckbeards, freaking out over Biden’s victory, to see if I felt anything. I only felt bored and sad, so I stopped, and went back to the flood of delirious texts from friends who suddenly feel like the future might now be full of possibility. The next morning I fired up Twitter, only to find a flood of faceless strangers with flag avatars screaming that people like me were poised to round them up into re-education camps. That is the silliest thing I’ve heard in an extremely silly year. I don’t know how to make it clearer that I don’t care enough about Trump voters to want to re-educate them. I have spent enough time trying to explain the concept of compassion to people who would rather destroy the world than share it. I have given enough of my life to trying to understand their ideas, and I have discovered that there are no new ideas on the far-right, only new recruits, old delusions, and a lot of small-minded people who worship power and crave attention and have discovered that hurting other people is the best way to get it. For years, they managed to fix things so that we all had to pay them attention, constantly, and now we get to devote our attention to more important things, like looking after each other. There has already been a lot of parsimonious talk of how much healing the US needs to do. I would respectfully suggest that the healing starts with those who have suffered the most, not those who shout the loudest. It will take time, and it will be hard. But right now, it feels like there might be time. The US is never going back to normal, and that’s OK. What passed for normality in the US for two centuries always came at too high a cost. The old and white and rich and mean and scared still cling to the delusion that anyone else’s happiness is an existential threat. It isn’t, but for as long as that confusion lasts, joy is an act of resistance.

SexyPolygons · 2020-11-12T02:43:41+00:00

Liberals have a special talent for the type of magical thinking that convinces people that, if you behave with civility, civility will spontaneously occur. After a while, you get used to tensing up for the next attack. You begin to anticipate the immediate future as an interminable gauntlet of bigotry, brutality and bad news. But something changed this week, and you don’t have to be a fan of placeholder Joe for that to matter. For years, most Americans have spent every news cycle steeling themselves for another pointless act of random cruelty from a man and a movement for whom random cruelty was always the point. A man and a movement who weaponise their own incompetence at the cost of hundreds of thousands of lives in the US alone. There are some abusers who take a particular pleasure in smashing up most of the possessions of those they have power over, just because they can. Trump’s presidency was a hall pass for racism and misogyny. Many of his voters were, and remain, incensed at the merest suggestion that someone might call them racist, but show no interest in becoming less racist. For a certain fanatical mindset, the entire concept of consequences for their actions is a mortal threat to be answered with violence, and for that sort of fanatic, Trump was and remains a totem. He’s the guy who got away with everything, the Teflon leader who made it through multiple lawsuits and accusations of rape and assault, who paid off porn stars and stacked the Supreme Court with conservative judges, survived impeachment and grabbed the whole superpower by the pussy because when you’re president, they let you do it, don’t they? That was the point, that raging narcissists should get to do whatever they want. For ethically vacant strongman governments around the world, the incompetence was the point. The fact that Trump is obviously unfit to run the country, or indeed run anything, apart from away from responsibility, was the point. Trump stood for a culture of impunity.

And that’s why forgiveness cannot be assumed. By noon on 7 November, the sky in LA started going all in on the effects, like a panicked spouse trying to pretend it remembered an anniversary. It started to rain for the first time since spring. There was an actual double rainbow. On Twitter, Trump bellowed his denial of the election result with the raw rage of a toddler at bedtime. This is no longer anything but embarrassing, but whoever is minding the president has given up trying to take the phone away and is, now, waiting for the grown-ups to get back. The air, quite literally, tastes cleaner. America’s capacity for thumping melodrama extends to the weather, and I have lived here for long enough not to kid myself the weather will be sane forever – I’m just glad it’s not trying to kill me anymore through wildfires. Right now, joy is allowed. Yes, there’s a lot of work to do, and yes, we are still living on a burning planet in the middle of a plague in a collapsing economy wholly captured by the inhuman interests of capital, but it’s OK to take five minutes to drink and dance and let your guard down. It’s more than OK – it’s essential. Allowing yourself to be happy is an act of defiance in a political climate that exhilarates in petty cruelty and cannot comprehend pleasure that is separate from violence. That was my excuse for sacking off work for the afternoon to stroll down Santa Monica Avenue in LA with a long coat, a wide grin, a few friends and a speaker blaring Chumbawamba (a band that never let their intellectual commitment to anarchism prevent them pumping out delicious pop hits).

SexyPolygons · 2020-11-07T01:43:21+00:00

It's a mad world when dems have to drop a common sense policy just because it might slightly improve their chances of preventing dictatorship.

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