“Let me be clear, this is a GOOD game. The combat is extremely satisfying, and Big Huge Games lives up to their moniker, as there is an enormous amount of content and value to be had. And therein lies part of the problem. Sometimes, less is more. It’s clear a lot of effort went into creating the universe of Amalur, but the execution and delivery suffers due to failing to find an engaging way to involve the player in carving a meaningful niche within it. For all of the lore and content, it rarely feels like Kingdoms of Amalur has a voice of its own, which is a shame because there ARE some really interesting ideas worth exploring (for instance the the constant re-telling of the stories of the Fae).”
—Gileadxv in Kingdoms Of Amalur: Reckoning |OT| An Enemy-Pounding Funfest - Page 143 - NeoGAF
February 2012
“
Witnesses say Hesterberg was told to wait while the ranger communicated on her radio. He repeatedly asked her why she was detaining him and if he was being cited. After a few minutes, he announced he was leaving and began to walk away, and the ranger grabbed him by the arm and ordered him again to stay put.
“We felt like he wasn’t doing anything,” observed Michelle Babcock, who witnessed the event while walking that afternoon. “The ranger was very rude — you could tell (the dog walker) wanted to be on his way, but she kept saying no.”
Hesterberg motioned to leave a second time, and the ranger unholstered her Taser and warned him she would use it. He asked her not to shoot, saying he had a heart condition that could be fatal if he was shocked. That’s when he turned his back to the ranger, apparently to walk away.
” —Interview: Eyewitness to Dog-Walking Taser Incident at GGNRA | KQED News Fix
“The misuse of a Taser weapon to subdue a Montara resident in an off-leash incident in Golden Gate National Recreational Area unveils a distressing narrative of hostility toward public freedom in what is legislatively defined as a recreational area, not a wilderness or national park per se. Such antagonism embodies attitudes symptomatic of GGNRA’s highest management on down that afflict community rights of access and use of public lands, and advance a history replete with fraud, deceit and intolerance of people and dogs.
Such attitudes are revealing: In 1989, GGNRA Supervisor Brian O’Neill, signed on to a biosphere habitat program headed by Peter Bridgewater, who stated that “Earth would be a better place if we had no people,” and from Brian O’Neill, “I will not have dogs running loose in MY park.” From Daphne Hatch, GGNRA’s chief of natural resources, “Ocean Beach without the people is an incredible habitat.” —GGNRA has history of limiting access to public lands - Half Moon Bay Review : Matters Of Opinion
Such attitudes are revealing: In 1989, GGNRA Supervisor Brian O’Neill, signed on to a biosphere habitat program headed by Peter Bridgewater, who stated that “Earth would be a better place if we had no people,” and from Brian O’Neill, “I will not have dogs running loose in MY park.” From Daphne Hatch, GGNRA’s chief of natural resources, “Ocean Beach without the people is an incredible habitat.” —GGNRA has history of limiting access to public lands - Half Moon Bay Review : Matters Of Opinion
“Hence the conundrum for environmentalists. SUVs like the CX-5 are a step up from the conspicuously inefficient models of yesteryear, but also an imperfect bridge to the future. They’re not as excessive as an Escalade, nor as virtuous as a Volt. And while they might help us pump a little less gas now, they might help keep us dependent on dirty fuel in the future. … Mazda’s car isn’t completely without its green merits. But using everyone’s favorite orange eco-warrior to advertise something that falls in the mushy middle of environmentally friendly vehicles is a bit, well, disrespectful. One imagines that if Dr. Seuss were still around, the company would have to work a little harder for that “truffula tree seal of approval.”
—The Lorax Speaks for the Trees (and Mazda’s New Crossover SUVs) - Jordan Weissmann - Business - The Atlantic
“With these words, NPR commits itself as an organization to avoid the worst excesses of “he said, she said” journalism. It says to itself that a report characterized by false balance is a false report. It introduces a new and potentially powerful concept of fairness: being “fair to the truth,” which as we know is not always evenly distributed among the sides in a public dispute.”
—NPR Tries to Get its Pressthink Right » Pressthink
“Nothing advances without your participation, and the more of these operations you take part in the less critical they begin to seem. Which is not to say that infiltrating a party of aristocratic elves to prove your worth to a society of ancient dragon warriors is without meaning, but rather that as dozens of these conspiratorial ambles pile on one another, they leave you with the impression that the fate of the world doesn’t actually depend on your actions.”
—Fuck Forever and Never Die – The New Inquiry
“
George Will recently sighed: “Romney is not attracting people who want rationality leavened by romance. Santorum is repelling people who want politics unmediated by theology.” That’s about right. But for the past decade, the Republican elites and base have precisely insisted on a politics that is mediated by theology.
They are the ones who have insisted that religious argument has an integral role in public discourse; that there is a “war on Christmas” and now all religion; they are the ones who have campaigned against gay marriage as un-Biblical or in violation of a “natural law” barely updated from the 13th century; they are the ones raging against a two-state solution in Israel-Palestine because God bequeathed it all to the Jewish people; they are those who directed the federal government to involve itself in an end-of-life decision already resolved by state law; they are those who have made criminalization of abortion a litmus test for Republican candidates for a generation, and who want to give women an invasive ultrasound before allowing them to exercize what has now been a constitutional right for decades.
And when an intelligent, sincere candidate emerges who has actually walked the walk on these issues, and refused to back down on them, and overcomes a massive financial and organizational disadvantage to become the national leader in the polls, he’s suddenly far too extreme.
” —Why On Earth Am I Sympathizing With Santorum? - The Dish | By Andrew Sullivan - The Daily Beast
“When you allow the debate to shift so far to the right, you lose the politicial space to end up in a safer, more productive middle. You look at the health care debate [of 2009]. That could have and should have been a debate between a single-payer system and some market-driven reform things on the right end. Instead you got market-driven reforms on the left and death panels on the right. And so we ended up in the middle. Better than zero, but not nearly the positive impact we could have had if we had a healthier set of boundaries to begin with.”
—Baratunde Thurston on Melissa Harris-Perry
“They’ll go with you to nerdland, but you have to earn their trust.”
—
Melissa Harris-Perry
Host of MSNBC’s ‘Melissa Harris-Perry’ Is a Professor - NYTimes.com
“The first and most important rule of todo.txt is: A single line in your todo.txt text file represents a single task.”
—The Todo.txt Format - GitHub
“The researchers conduct their studies on commercial farms in Minnesota and surrounding states. Chuck Clanton, a bioproducts and biosystems engineering professor, said the team’s current approach is targeting how different microorganisms — primarily bacteria — developed in the manure pit. They think that a new set of species has formed in these pits in the last few years.”
—Exploding hog barns beckon U researchers | mndaily.com - The Minnesota Daily
“39,324 BACKERS
$1,414,696 PLEDGED OF $400,000 GOAL
32 DAYS TO GO” —Double Fine Adventure by Double Fine and 2 Player Productions — Kickstarter
$1,414,696 PLEDGED OF $400,000 GOAL
32 DAYS TO GO” —Double Fine Adventure by Double Fine and 2 Player Productions — Kickstarter
“Zynga is a marketing company, not a games company.”
—IAmA Former FullTime Zynga Engineer => quit 6 months ago. Not a contractor, (Z treats em like shit). : IAmA
“Predictions that Obama would usher in a new era of post-partisan consensus politics now seem not just naïve but delusional. At this political juncture, there appears to be only one real model of effective governance in Washington: partisan dominance, in which a President with large majorities in Congress can push through an ambitious agenda.”
—The Obama Memos: How Washington Remade the President : The New Yorker
“Orszag argued that he needed more support from Washington’s deficit hawks, and urged him to create a deficit commission, partly because “it can provide fiscal credibility during a period in which it is unlikely we would succeed in enacting legislation.” It presented Obama with a common Presidential dilemma: Should he use the White House bully pulpit to change minds or should he accept popular opinion? He chose the latter. In his speeches, he began saying, “Americans are making hard choices in their budgets. We’ve got to tighten our belts in Washington, as well.” Romer fought to get such lines removed from his speeches, arguing that it was “exactly the wrong policy.” She thought the President should emphasize that the government would seek to use taxpayer money wisely, and leave it at that. Instead, he seemed to be accepting the Republican case against stimulus and for austerity. She thought he was losing faith in Keynesianism itself.”
—The Obama Memos: How Washington Remade the President : The New Yorker
“Obama had loaded his bill with tax cuts in order to lure Republicans, but DeMint dismissed them. “Think of it this way,” he said. “If nearly every Democrat in Congress supports a tax cut, it’s not really a tax cut.”
—The Obama Memos: How Washington Remade the President : The New Yorker
“Christina Romer, the incoming chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, drafted the stimulus material. A Berkeley economist, she was new to government. She believed that she had persuaded Summers to raise the stimulus recommendation above the initial estimate, six hundred billion dollars, to something closer to eight hundred billion dollars, but she was frustrated that she wasn’t allowed to present an even larger option. When she had done so in earlier meetings, the incoming chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, asked her, “What are you smoking?” She was warned that her credibility as an adviser would be damaged if she pushed beyond the consensus recommendation.”
—The Obama Memos: How Washington Remade the President : The New Yorker
