Category: The Undefined Remainder

Geeky stuff. Internet, Games, Free Software, Sci-fi etc.

A Gamer's Stockholm Syndrome

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Sony is being targetted yet again, and the community of /r/gaming falls over each other to prove who’s the biggest tool.

So, over at /r/gaming, reddit gamers have got their panties up in a bunch once they heard the news that a pseudonymous hacking group is planning to assault Sony once more.Apparently gamers are none too happy that someone is assaulting their preferred corporation and they are under the impression that any downtime as a result of those hacks, will be solely the fault of those dirty hackers. Some have even taken it one step further, laying the blame for any potential erosion of internet freedoms (as a result of corporate lobbying and media fearmongering) on the hackers as well.

The whole discussion is littered with playstation gamers who are outraged, OUTRAGED, that they may have to suffer more downtime on their precious online gaming as a result of a possible new breach of Sony systems. The amount of corporate suckup-ery is disgusting.

However, any possible downtimes or erosion of civil rights is not the hacker’s fault.

One has to consider, who brought down PSN the last time. It wasn’t the ones who cracked themselves into the system and it wasn’t a denial of service attack. If was Sony itself who did it, as a reaction to their system becoming compromised. I doubt that the original crackers were politically motivated anyway but even if they were and finding user data was an unexpected freebie, the reaction of Sony was the fault of nobody but Sony. Had they encrypted their data, they wouldn’t have to take down PSN for everyone. It was a gross failing on their part of their lax security practices.

It was also Son’s fault because they explicitly poked the hornet’s nest. Nobody forced Sony to take away the otherOS which made the hacking community actively interested in hacking the PS3. Nobody forced Sony to start legally assaulting the hacking community. Nobody forced Sony to participate in political lobbying to erode internet freedoms. And while the previous crack might not have been a result of any of those, but rather an fortunate exploit for monetary reasons, the latest attempts seem to be pure retaliation meant to cause harm and lulz.

Basically, the hacking community seems to be sending Sony, and anyone else watching a message. “If you fuck with us, we’ll fuck your right back”. They don’t seem very aware of this, but it does look to me as a form of solidarity in the internet age. Remember that all this was caused by Sony going after a few individuals who cracked their system for their own benefit, causing no harm to Sony whatsoever.

Finally we need to remember that the reason Playstation users are being inconvenienced by downtime of PSN is again Sony’s fault. PSN is a walled garden if you remember. That means it’s centrally controlled and managed by Sony and alas, such are the faults of walled gardens. Had Sony allowed an open ecosystem, where PS3 machines could connect to the internet directly and used one of the many available means to play games online there as pioneered by PC gaming, then the downtime of PSN would have been unlikely to affect a lot of people. Had they allowed dedicated servers or direct connections, people would still be able to enjoy their games online. But centralization means that there’s a single and large point of failure. If you don’t want this to happen again, tell Sony to open their walled garden.

But of course the PS3 fanboys won’t do that because they’re incapable of thinking outside the box. In fact, I guarantee they’ll make excuses on why such a walled garden is not only reasonable for someone like Sony, but that it’s in fact better this way. It will be like someone defending the AOL network.

All that said, I’m not exactly agreeing with the direct action of those crackers. I’m not sure how effective they will be in the long run. At best, they might achieve that corporations might think twice from going after individual hackers and they might let more hacks to their system slide and perhaps be more open in their dealings in the future. But this actions has a chance to cause political backlash as well. The reaction of /r/gaming is typical in fact.

Could there have been a better way? I’m not sure and I’d love to hear your thoughts on this, but I can’t blame the hacking community from retaliating against an oppressive entity like a multinational corporation with a rich history of questionable actions, which put them in their target sights.

However to blame the kneejerk reactions of the one with a history of abuse, on the ones retaliating to them is very much akin to a Stockholm syndrome. It’s like a kidnap victim blaming their family for not procuring the demands fast enough and empathizing with their kidnapper who as a result had to cut one of their fingers.

Related articles

How did /r/anarchists started becoming interested in Anarchism?

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Anarchists on reddit explain how they reached their political position.

Anarchists on march 3/14 (LOC)
Image by The Library of Congress via Flickr

I thought I’d point out a discussion going on in /r/anarchism where various subscribers explain what made them turn to this political theory. We’ve done one of these before, but it’s always interesting to see new stories.

This time we have more people who got radicalized by state violence.

Mayniac182:

I’ve said this quite a bit recently, but: police brutality. It was seeing students get beaten at the London protests that made me question the role of police, as well as realising how much money is spent protecting politicians who are no different than the ordinary person.

A lot of other expressed something similar to my coming out story, in that they were always ideologically anarchists but didn’t know it until they discovered the theory.

Nebula42:

It’s a bit complex but when I was younger my best friends were people of color but something bothered me. Their parents worked much harder than mine and longer yet they were poorer. It struck me as not equal and unfair so I sorta developed a rudimentary socialist idea from early on. Obviously I was a kid so it wasn’t anything impressive. I was pretty much a social democrat (although I labeled myself a liberal at the time). Around 2007 I became increasingly aware of how oppressive the government can be and sorta had a 2 month flirtation with Ron Paul until I realized that the ideology is tyrannical in it’s own sense. I wanted something that was anti government and anti capitalist to fit in with my views of inequality. Someone told me I was an anarchist around 2009ish and decided to explore it more. Read the philosophers..etc and pretty much had the same ideas that I developed on my own except a lot more refined. So here I am today!

And then others were affected by culture

Nondualbliss:

I’d say it was a combination of exposure to punk rock and academia. As a teenager, I was into Bad Religion and Propagandhi. I gravitated into more underground punk stuff that leaned quite left. Then majored in Sociology and learned about inequality on a global scale and read a lot of Marxist theory. Then a band I liked – Stanford Prison Experiment – included a 30 minute lecture by Noam Chomsky at the end of one of their albums, which lead me to his writings. For the past 15 years now, I’ve been reading up on Anarchist thought.

Apropos Chomsky; there’s quite a lot of people who were converted by Chomsky in there as well. Just shows how effective a popular anti-authoritarian/anti-imperialist face can be, even if they otherwise espouse some very contentious positions.

Full Bundle for Doomtown on OCTGN updated

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Torrent has been updated with newest rules and more High Quality scans. Gogogo!

I’ve updated the torrent for Doomtown to include the latest version of the game definition and markers and also the latest versions of the sets, which I’m glad to say, have finally started including High Quality scans.

For those who do not know, the Bundle includes everything you need to play Doomtown on OCTGN but it’s not updated as often, as usually only the game definition is updated. Nevertheless it’s the best way for a new player to grab everything they need, without downloading all the files 1 by 1 from the repository. Inside you will find the game and sets, plus pdfs with the rules, faqs and so on. Once you’ve downloaded it, you can simply direct OCTGN to install the files from that the directory, and if in the future you download a newer version of the bundle, your game on OCTGN will be automatically up to date (( Usually you don’t have to reinstall the files, but one occassion you do. I will let you know when you have to))

So don’t wait up, download the torrent file here and you can find information about the bundle in the forums.

Once you’re done, hit me up for a game 😉

 

Doomtown on OCTGN

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Doomtown on OCTGN is now very feature rich and playing it should be a blast for most. Here I explain how to set it up and why it’s so cool.

So my updated on the Doomtown engine for OCTGN continue at a rapid pace. I mentioned it before shortly but I thought I’d make a proper post about my progress with this and how to go around playing it.

EDIT @ 27/06/2013 : I’ve moved the installation instructions on to the dedicated page for this game definition. Please follow the step-by-step installation instructions for Doomtown there.

A Doomtown game in OCTGN in action. Currently in the middle of a shootout
A Shootout at High Noon

Not especially tricky as you can see. The trickiest is finding someone to play with. You can try subscribing to the Doomtown Facebook Group and see if anyone is available for a game. You can also create a game and hope that someone is online to join it since anyone who has Doomtown installed will see open game lobbies.

However I guarantee that if you like card or tabletop games, you will find this one a blast. In the recent weeks I’ve spent a lot of effort in automating away most of the more tedious stuff one has to do when playing card games online, such as modifying counters and typing each action that they do in the chat. I’ve literally spent the latter half of my vacation (while staying home sick) to code some pretty nifty stuff to use the powers that playing on a PC gives us in order to make the game easier to play.

For example, the game will let you know if you cannot play a unique card, because someone else has it in play (or it’s dead). It will automatically calculate your poker hand rank, taking into account jokers and what kind of poker you play. It will update your various totals (influence, control) as you play and lose cards and you can even force it to recalculate all your totals in case you lose track. It will pay your upkeep and receive your production at the start of the turn, and refresh your cards and hand at the end of the turn. It will even remember if you permanently modified a card before and add the same modifications in case that card leaves and comes back into play later on.

There’s still a lot of automation I’d like to implement soon and I keep thinking more as I work on it so I end up adding new features practically daily. You can follow the development in the forum if you so wish and I would really appreciate any feedback such as suggestions or problems you’re having.

 

Mortal Kombat is good fun, but oh my gawd the sexism. It burnsss!

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The new MK is back to its roots, but their representation of females is patently absurd and the story needs a lot of work.

I was planning to write an incenced post about absolutely ridiculous the female outfits of the new Mortal Kombat game are and then I saw this comic and I just had to do it now.

Seriously, the mortal kombat clothes are DoA-level absurd (Did they take hints from Team Ninja?), not only are they practically pieces of strong but because of the cloth destruction that happens in the game, those must be literally glued to their bodies. I cannot otherwise explain how a “breast cover” (which is basically a glorified string), which is hanging destroyed on the right side of the body can somehow defy gravity in its quest to cover up those nipples.

And what is with the high heels? Would any woman in her right mind think that running around in high heels is a good way to fight in close combat? Most ridiculous of course is Sonya who is supposed to be a hardcore military person and is still running (literally running) around in high heels rather than jackboots.

Oh, and how difficult is it to come up with female outfits that are at least different than each other? Jade, Kitana and Mileena all wear the same string-outfit, only with a different arrangement of strings, while the men not only have varied ones, but if their main outfit is bare chested (I don’t remember anyone going bare-legged, except Goro) they have also been provided with a fully-clothed alternative.

As much as I love the new game, the absolute ridiculousness of how females are repressented is a complete turn off.

Given this new trend, I’m waiting now for Mortal Combat Xtreme Outworld Basketball to follow, where it will be just the women competing for the skimpiest outfit while dribbling.

And since I’m on the subject of MK, can someone please advise them to hire a competent storyteller? Cheezus fuck those people can’t tell a good story if their life depended on it. I honestly hope the next estabilishment of the series will be based on the lore of the excellent MK:Legacy…including outfits!

 

The Smurfette Principle and Sexism in PvPonline

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As the feminist frequency brilliantly explains the smurfetter principle, Scott Kurtz apparently decides to remind us how sexist he is.

She says it much better than I could really.

And since I’m on the subject of feminism, can someone explain to me what is going on with all these old school webcomics starting to show more and more sexism? I was going through my PvPonline backlog of the last week and I came upon these two “gems”

Men who are afraid of scary movies are like women while screaming in fear is stereotypical of a married female in “hysterics”

“Women are competitive and catty and generally unkind to each other” (Said by the only main female character – i.e. the “smurfette” of PvPonline)

What the fuck is this shit people?

Blasts from the past

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Doomtown is one of the best tabletop games ever and as always in this case, it’s defunct. However, I’ve just created a new way to play it online.

The back of a Doomtown card. It shows a wooden background with the words "Deadlands" printed in an old western font. A Cow skull is in the middleI always say that I’ve been very unlucky with the (non-video) games that I liked. I have a deep history of getting really into a game and then have it cancelled during its heyday due to some weird unfortunate circumstance, leaving me sad and looking for the next one that will “click” for me. Now I’m talking about the kind of games most of you have not ever even tried before, Collectible Card Games and Tabletop Miniature games primarily (Fortunately, RPGs cannot suffer this fate due to the inherent type of the medium, but they do suffer the Three Session Curse which is  thing for another post)

At the moment, none of my favourite such games are in production anymore, most of them for many years now. In order of how awesome I find them, here’s a small list and what happened to them.

  • Doomtown: A brilliant card game with a very novel take on game design combining elements of traditional CCGs, Poker and Chess. Got cancelled because Wizards of the Coast egregiously dropped the ball/killed it.
  • Chronopia: A tabletop miniature game set in very grim-dark fantasy theme, when grim-dark was not yet in fashion. Killed when its company reconstructed, even though it had strong sales.
  • 7th Sea: Another collectible card game with a novel ruleset and a fantasy-swashbuckling setting. Died due to a series of bad decisions from the publisher
  • Warzone: The brother tabletop miniature game to Chronopia which had a similarly grim-dark theme but in sci-fi. Killed for the same reasons,which was an especially sad fact as at the time it was a very strong opponent to Games Workshop’s exorbitant prices in the Greek market.
  • Mordheim: Because I’m a sucker for skirmish games with strong campaign elements built-in. Suffered the same fate all Games Workshop products which are not Warhammer or WH40k suffer.
  • Dune CCG: Yet another card game built on a rich sci-fi setting and with rules that fit brilliantly in the setting. Was just not popular enough to continue.
  • Legend of the Burning Sands: A card game similar to Legened of the 5 rings, but simply superior in gameplay.

And these are not even all the examples I can think of but they were definitely the ones who’s passing hurt me most. This occurrence is so common that it became almost a running joke in my gaming circle that any game that I started taking a strong liking to, would be inevitably doomed. The games on the other hand that managed to survive where those that I played just in order to have *something* to play, but never liked them particularly. Games like Warlord which I found had a very good setting but never really liked its rules ((Incidentally,  liking only it half-way, just delayed the inevitable, as Warlord has been suffering a slow death for many years now))

The good thing is that because these games I listed are just so good, they tend to develop cult followings behind them which can keep their embers alive far into the future and sometimes this helps.

I recently discovered a little game engine called OCTGN which allows one to build card game definitions and then play their favourite games on it for free, and given that I’ve been itching to play doomtown once more, this sounded like an excellent opportunity. Unfortunately there was no game definition for doomtown available and I took this chance to build one.

Yes, I am aware that there is a plugin for doomtown on the LackeyCCG engine, but I’ve tried it once and I was left a bit underwhelmed. After experiencing OCTGN, LackeyCCG just felt clunky (the program actually strained my eyesight during play) and it didn’t really offer any automation. I’m guessing that one could theoretically code such automation in LackeyCCG just as one can in OCTGN but on the other hand, OCTGN just looks better and as a very big plus for me, it does its scripting in python, which I’ve been itching to start working with.

So OCTGN it was, and after a whole weekend of trial and error I’ve managed to make a working game definition which I’ve been refining for the last few days as well. At the moment I’m happy to say that the game is completely playable and this is where the aforementioned core community comes in, as it can provide the people and the excitement to spread the joy. You can find the game files for the Doomtown CCG here btw and you can also follow updates on the forum. Hit me up 🙂

Once I’ve brought the game into as good a state as I possibly can, I think I’ll start working on 7th Sea or Legend of the Burning sands.

As usually when I get into this mood, I also checked up on some of my other favourite games, but unfortunately, Chronopia has not fared nearly as well as doomtown. I keep hoping that one day, once 3D printing technology is cheap enough, the game will be revived via allowing the sharing of model schematics and terrain. Until then, here’s some concept art that a fan created in the fora of a company which I don’t think even exists anymore 🙂

A Fan drawing of a Blackblood Army in the Chronopia universe

A Fan Drawing of a Devout army in the Chronopia universe.

Quote of the Day: Men's Rights "Activists"

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man boobz exposes the truth about MRAs.

Quoth David Futrelle

At its heart, men’s rights activism doesn’t really seem to be about activism at all. What the movement has turned into is a strange parody of “victim feminism,” an endless search for proof that men (despite earning more than women, heading up the overwhelming majority of companies and governments in the world, getting all the best movie roles, never having to wear heels, and so on and so on and so on) are in fact second-class citizens.

A brilliant piece on a group of people who have recently become a significantly annoying experience online. It doesn’t help matters that their members all too often intersect with right libertarians and Randroids and White Rights Activists (you can imagine what the latter are about)

Unfortunately MRA, much like libertarians are far too numerous online and can easily focus their attention into succesful entryist attempts. MRA entryism is the primary reason why most feminists have abandoned /r/feminism in reddit and have instead migrated to /r/feminisms which has a far more strict moderation policy allowing for deeper feminist discussion without endlessly devolving into What About Teh Mens! arguments.

PS: man boobz has become an instant favourite of mine. If only he would move out of Blogger’s crappy platform…

Don't diss Che or vile Maoists may get upset.

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The Angry Marxists are a group of ex-self-proclaimed-anarchists who turned Marxist-Leninist almost immediately after they were repelled from an anarchist space.

Broadsnark has recently written an excellent article on Che Guevara, and like clockwork, the vile Maoist “uber radicals” are striking back because Che was “one of the most successful and inspiring revolutionaries of the last century”. All that Mel did was to “twist the language of anti-colonialism to write up an a-historical and factually incorrect hit-piece”.

By Kropotkin’s beard, it’s like reading the Barefoot Bum all over again.

I am so glad that /r/anarchism resisted the sectarianism of their particularly toxic brand of “anarchism”. Their blatant authoritarianism and rhetoric of violence was warning enough and as soon as they were repelled, they turned into “Angry Marxists”. It’s a bit funny really, I’ve been following their blog since it started out of something like a morbid fascination to see just how rabid they can become. For example:

Lemme make something clear: we like firing squads. We are down with internment camps. We think working class and oppressed people have every right to shoot their class enemies in the neck and leave them in a ditch.

Given how they have labeled almost everyone who disagrees with them as a “class oppressor” this should send shivers down your spine if they ever come even close to grabbing any sort of revolutionary power. It would be the Kronstadt Massacre all over again ((inb4 the Angry Marxists come here to tell me how it was all individualist anarchists and thus deserved to be killed)).

I also find it quite fascinating of just how quick self-proclaimed anarchists who used to agitate quite a lot in an anarchist space for a very specific moderation policy (take a guess what it would look like), would almost overnight become completely anti-anarchist, and even espouse the same old tired strawmen against anarchism. This only reinforces my concerns that this group was part of yet another entryist attempt from Marxist-Leninists. And when it failed due to its inherent authoritarianism being anathema to an anarchist community, the masks fell off and those who were just masquerading assumed their actual beliefs and displayed proudly their ignorance of what Anarchism actually is.

This is only too humorous given just how often everyone else was dismissed as “Anarchyists” because we recoiled in horror at their violent rhetoric and suggested tactics.

If you thought S2's racist CEO was bad enough, wait until you see their community.

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Big Surprise, Heroes of Newerth fosters a profoundly racist community as well

[Trigger warnings for extreme racism]

A few days ago, I mentioned how the CEO of S2 games seems to be a blatant racist, some people who see this information, react with a “who cares” attitude, as if the behaviour of the most important person in the company doesn’t affect anything else. Well, today I noticed a thread on the Heroes of Newerth fora, titled “This game needs a black hero” and I pretty much expected what I found inside. You can take a look for yourself but I’ll post some of the “best” comments to give you an example (and in case the whole thread is taken down)

Definitely Black: , and Kongor

Probably Black:

Black because they’re in the jungle:

Problem OP?

The small images here repressent different heroes. you can probably distinguish the “race” of each if you look closely ((if you can’t see, it’s not really that important, they’re all obviously caucasian except the last one)). The last hero on the top row is an anthropomorphic simian and “Krongor” refers to the “Big Boss” of the game who is a huge gorilla. I shouldn’t really need explain this.


Looks like some kind of ape and he always steals my kills….

Self explanatory

No thanks. I don’t like heroes with base speeds of 375.

But it would be balanced because the base int and int gain per level would be extremely small.

Again, pretty explanatory (“int” refers to “intelligence”)

If Empath isnt a negro, I dont know what to say.

For reference, this is what Empath looks like.

Whoever the new black hero/alt avatar is, he or she will be the bloodlust kill every single game.

Ha ha. Get it? Because the token black guy always dies first.

A true black hero?He would need shitty skills, and be totally worthless for a team, kinda like gladiator, succubus noobs, blood hunter Brazilians.

His skills and name would of course be somewhat along the lines of

Blackster

1. Poor- Blackster is from the inner city and gets no clothes until he levels this skill up, clothes grant him extra attack damage to creeps.
2. Jump- Blackster is able to jump huge lengths at a time, does no damage, and has a %chance to twist his ankle.
3. Blackwalk- everyone knows black people walk slow as **** for some reason, probably to piss white people off, Blackster can enable blackwalk to move 150ms slower and take 50% reduced damage for 4 seconds.
4. ULTIMATE ABILITY- RACK EM’- Blackster breaks into song and dance also known as the Funky Chicken, he becomes intoxicated and flops around helplessly damaging nearby enemies with holy spirit spit.

Wow, just…wow.

they play the most important role in hon already, they dont need a hero(arguably they already have some)

try playing a game without a courier and see how far it gets you

The “courrier” is a little monkey that you buy from the shop and it serves to bring you items you buy in the map.

Honourary mention:

Game needs a kitchen for all you ladies.

Because what would the HoN community be without at least some explicit sexism.

And then of course, we have the vigilant underdog fighting against political correctness.

The multicult is never satisfied, S2. If you added a black hero who fit in the game, he wouldn’t be black enough. If you added a black-enough hero, he would ‘racist’ and stereotypical. If you carefully added a Black Superstar who is acceptably not black enough, you would now a ratio of 1:hero-count, and the multicult will complain about tokenism. If you added black alts and voices for every single human hero, you would have trolling uses of these alts, the alts would have to be free, you would be racists for defaulting to not-black.

Slam the door in the face of this proposal, at least internally, or you’ll never hear the end of it. The most rabid will already be turned away by screencaps of Maliken’s ‘racism’. The real thorn in the paw of the multicult isn’t that you don’t have black heroes, but that you have any heroes who are white, and you neither can nor want to ‘fix’ that.

You know, because respect and repressentation of other cultures, skin types, and genders/sexualities is a slippery slope…or something. Those “multiculturalists” will never be content until the white race is extunguished. White Pride!

Oh sorry, I got carried over in my in-character sarcasm there…

Some egregious comments have been deleted now that I’ve reported them, several hours later after they were posted. Unfortunately, my comment calling out people on their racism and S2 for tolerating it has also been deleted. And naturally, the reactionary bullshit is still there, as are much of the egregious racist filth that I didn’t have time to report yet. So S2 is just doing the bare minimum on this issue, putting more effort into avoiding any criticism of themselves (they’ve naturally deleted any mention of Maliken’s racism), than preventing racist shit from fermenting in their fora.

The kind of filth posted in there rivals the bigotry one finds in 4chan boards but from what I’ve seen, it’s par for the course given the nature of S2 senior staff, the people they try to market to, and the environment they foster through their (lack of) moderation practices and implicit support.

Honestly, I can’t recommend this game to anyone anymore. If you are not a straight white cis male without disabilities, you will be insulted and marginalized routinely. You will be reminded constantly that most other players of HoN consider you a sub-human, while S2 will  ignore you at best, or join in the denigration at worst. You have been warned.