TRIGGER WARNINGS

AHOY!
Trigger warning: bullying :(
POLITICS!
GAY RIGHTS!

This is a copy of something I posted to ontd_political not long ago, but it was rejected for posting. Not entirely sure why- maybe there's a requirement that posts be linked to an actual news article. But... whatevs, man. Whatevs. Anyway, here it is again- a mathematical and somewhat researched analysis of wealth in the U.S.

>mathematical
>somewhat researched
>the numbers I made up add up the way I expected them to!

I was curious to see just exactly what incomes across several economic demographics looked like in practicality. I wanted to see- both mathematically and graphically- what income looks like. My goal: to prove or disprove some observations I have made about the wealthy, and the perception of 'wealth'.

I semi-researched this and I found out 100% of wealthy WASPs spend upwards of 50%  of their income on virgin blood but the glorious impoverished PoC spent 0% of their income on this.
I can safely conclude, therefore, that 100% WASPs are evil.
And what she concludes, and get ready to be shocked and horrified, is that people who make more money spend more money.

Earlier today a friend of mine who is playing the Real World MMO on a harder difficulty than I am posted a link to a blog by author John Scalzi on her Facebook page, entitled, "Straight White Male: the Lowest Difficulty Setting There Is" 

No I just got done watching a bro stream Dark Souls and I'm pretty sure straight white sorcerer is the easiest difficulty there is.
There might as well not have even been enemies in that game because holy fuck.
Also if someone explained a woman or a black person as "playing Real World: The MMO on a harder difficulty setting" I'd punch them in the solar plexus.
Also I'm playing delicious brown necromancer setting on Guild Wars 2 and that shit is pretty much easy mode too.
"Oh this boss needs like 15 people to beat it let me just make 15 spots on the ground that make this weird howling noise and the boss is now dead let me revive all the idiots who didn't pick necromancer and there we go you owe me your life you stupid cunt" and that's my GW2 experience.

 It was engaging enough for me to seek out the author's contact information and send him an e-mail about it.  I hope he responds- I think I would enjoy a civil, rational discussion about it, and I think this gentleman is quite able to do that. Below the cut is what I sent him.

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~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ Repost this if ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ you are a beautiful strong black woman ~ ~ ~
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ who don’t need no man ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
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I recently read your blog article entitled, "Straight White Male: The Lowest Difficulty Setting There Is". I imagine that you've taken plenty of flak from it already, so rest assured I will not be adding fuel to that flaming.  But the article interested me enough to share a few thoughts with you about it.

First, the quote, "It’s not that the word “privilege” is incorrect, it’s that it’s not their word."

I disagree with why us Easymode players tend to dislike the word 'privilege'. It is simply this: no one likes being told they are not as awesome as they think they are. 

Necromancer might be easy mode but you still didn't have enough foresight to pick it at the start so you still owe me your life you stupid cunt.
Oh here I am hanging out with the fucking salad elves no cool starting area it's a ton of gay sparkling trees point me in the direction of the murder and I'll straighten whatever problem you girls are having.
Someone actually asked this cock 7 questions.
It must have been him on an alt account because I can't imagine anyone giving enough of a shit but let's check it out.

1. What's the story behind your username? (And your userpic, for that matter?)

Episode of the TV show Peter Gunn.

Also it's a picture of Haunter from Pokemon.

2. What was the first anime you got into, and do you still like it now?

Voltron.
Hell yeah Voltron is top pro.

3. Apart from the Christianity community, where else do you hang out online?

asianassporn.com

4. If you could go back in time and change something, what would it be?

 I'd go back and stop myself from buying Spore.

5. Why the shift to Keynesian economics?

WHAT?
WHO TOLD YOU THAT?
FUCK.
I don't even know what that bullshit means.
Whatever.

6. You've developed an interest in economic equality, was this entirely through your job or through some other means?

I'm not a communist if that's what you're saying.
Baby.

7. Texas, in your eyes.

State full of abhumans begging for the cleansing flame.
Also: not a question.

A friend of mine is, like me, a pretty big politico. Before gaming each week we usually end up talking about U.S. politics, world events, or history while the GM gets ready.  Earlier this week, I gave a classmate of mine from India who I am working on a project with a 45 minute crash course on U.S. government, because she didn't understand how the area we were studying could be such a hodgepodge of suburban sprawl, industrial complexes, and scattered retail and office space (welcome to Houston, baby). 

1. Was she hot?
2. I don't care.

Point One: Our entire system of government depends on and references the Constitution in some way. Period.

To which I have this to say:
If you must break the law, do it to seize power: in all other cases observe it.
-- Julius "The Boss" Caesar
Not to disparage the Founding Fathers or anything but if you disagree with Caesar or Machiavelli politically you are probably wrong.

Point Two: our entire political system was designed to ensure that no one in government has too much power.

I had rather be first in a village than second at Rome. 
-- Julius "Iron Dong" Caesar

Point Three: the difficulty of amending the Constitution is intentional, to protect the overall integrity of the document.

I don't really have a related quote but:
Cowards die many times before their actual deaths.
Julius "Motherfuckin'" Caesar
I'd vote Julius Caesar for president.
I mean one that wandered into modern day America somehow and didn't speak any English at all.
I bet he'd do way better than Obama or Mittens.
Combined.

Point Five:  In the U.S., there is an ingrained, cultural distrust of the government that dates back to the American Revolution; this distrust of government is largely absent in European nations.  Or, to put it a bit more controversially, in Europe the government lends power to its citizens.  In the U.S. the citizens lend power to the government.  We are, quite possibly, the only nation on earth with the tacit, implicit permission to overthrow our own government if it becomes necessary. 

FUCK THE POLICE.

I pre-ordered SW:tOR the week that pre-orders were offered. Normally, I don't jump into a new MMO until at least six months after release, but this time I took a chance. After following the developer notes for months, I saw a lot of potential. And, quite frankly, I was Jonesing for a sci-fi MMO anyway, and I was absolutely done with World of Warcraft and getting a bit burned out from Lord of the Rings Online. And, miracle of miracles, I actually had money set aside for a pre-order.

I know when I started penning my review.
Somewhere around the time I was getting a warning for being a meanie head from a GM because I soloed a dungeon for 4 level 15 people as a level 9.
 And my review went something like: "you should play this game while it still exists and is still this hilariously awful."
Best 2 months I even spent playing a game that was objectively terrible.
I would do that again in a second.
But don't play now because it's a ghost town.

III. Quests
Here's where SW:tOR differs from most MMOs. First, Bioware brags about how this MMO will be fully voice-acted. And, damn if it isn't. Every quest has a short, fully-animated cinematic when you start the quest and when you turn it in. Even random NPCs chat in the background when you get near them. The best thing about these cinematics are that your character gets to participate. Each cinematic has three dialogue choices; generally, it is a dutiful/humble/patriotic choice, an arrogant/mercenary/cocky choice, or a neutral/questioning/general agreement choice.

Yeah if you picked the boring class.
If you picked a fun class the choices were:
murder
murder
murder
Also that's literally the only way SWTOR differed from WoW because the quests still boiled down to "collect 10 bear asses".

About the crew quests: these are side quests completed off-screen by whichever crewmember you choose to send that yield some kind of reward if successful. Your character isn't involved, but early crew quests at least only take 6 minutes, so you can go on to do other things while they're away. Anyone who ever played Final Fantasy Tactics should find this concept familiar- remember the taverns you could visit to look for jobs?

Did you just compare the second greatest game of all time to SWTOR?
Wow, man.

There's another important distinction that SW:tOR makes over other MMOs. Bioware took a page from Bethesda's Fallout play book- some quests give you Light Side or Dark Side points depending on your answers. 

And they made the same hideous misstep of logic Bethesda made where ultimately your means are more important than the end.
And this isn't some Machiavellian philosophical point I'm making. Often times in SWTOR and Fallout 3 the game would consider you being mean to someone before you LIT THEM ON FIRE more significant than LIGHTING THEM ON FIRE.
Hell I remember a choice that basically boiled down to "nothing personal but I have to light you on fire now" that got me good karma.

Usually this happens in important story quests, but other random quests may also do this. Do you follow orders and kill people who might commit a terrible crime in the future, or do you release them and suffer a serious dressing-down from your CO? Do you turn a blind eye to a gambling ring run by corrupt soldiers that preys on refugees, or do you report them?

I didn't have any choice nearly that gay.
If I had I'd have quit well before I did.
All if my choices were DO YOU MURDER THIS GUY NOW OR LATER?
And it depended if he'd outlived his use.

Most of the quests are very objective-oriented. You will still see the 'kill x number of y mob' type quests, but generally these are optional requirements that just yield more xp. You are rarely if ever required to do this to complete the quest, and usually you'll end up killing x number of y mobs in the course of the quest anyway. Main quests update on the fly- you might start out by meeting with an undercover agent, then upon completing that quest you may be instructed to go to a safe house and recover certain contraband based on what the contact tells you. These can be considered individual quests in a chain, but the way that additional steps are revealed as you complete objectives make it seem a bit more natural and organic (as opposed to returning to the same quest giver again and again).

This is total horseshit. All of the quests, no matter how they dress it up, were go to X and kill Y amount of Z.

IV. Gameplay

For some reason this gets a separate heading than quests even though quests are what you do in the game-- whatever.

One big concern I had about tOR was combat. How do you make melee and ranged combat work in a sci-fi game? While tOR's system isn't perfect, it really isn't bad.  

It's generic as fuck but I guess it's not bad.
It's just so mediocre and soulless.
I'd rather settle for a wonky combat system that tried than this by the book, safe bullshit.

The fact that there's no auto-attack helps, actually: in absence of an auto-attack you have to pay more attention to the cooldowns while deciding which abilities to use.

I guess we played a different game because the SWTOR I played had an auto attack but no auto attack button so you had to trigger it through an ability.

V. The Setting
There's not much to be said here: you would expect Bioware and LucasArts to do a great job with a Star Wars setting. They can't afford not to. And, they did. But the best part about the way the setting presents itself is in the details. 

Oh yeah. The details were incredible.
Like the fact that none of Tatooine's 3 suns ever set?
Awesome attention to detail.
In fact, the weather never changes. If it's snowing on a planet, guess what?
Hoth never, ever stops snowing.
If it's night?
Perpetual darkness.

VI. Conclusion
Is Star Wars: the Old Republic the much-anticipated WoW-killer? No. Does it have the potential to be? Maybe. It's only moderately innovative and cutting-edge gameplay-wise, but it is light years ahead of WoW when it comes to the little things that make the experience more immersive.

No combat log, no server merger option which is really important when your servers are a ghost town--
CUTTING
EDGE

It is an overall enjoyable game that manages to stand out in the MMO market, through not only genre and setting but also through the experience. If you love MMOs and you are a big Star Wars fan, then you will probably enjoy it. So far, I am enjoying it immensely.


Rating: 8.5 of 10

2/10 as a game
10/10 for the laugh factor
Human Trafficking Awareness Month
I'm against human trafficking.
Particularly that cunt who was driving really slow in my lane like last Saturday--
What was that kinda bullshit?
I caught every light red thanks to that cock juggling thundercunt.
Anyway, time for bed.
GOODBYE.