BRB, gonna learn Estonian.

No surprise about Telepolis being on this list. They like to portray themselves as some bastion of journalistic integrity, but they have been neck-deep in conspiratorial thinking and propaganda going at least as far back as the earliest 9/11 truthers.

I also had to laugh about “anti-spiegel**.ru**”. That’s about as subtle as a T-34 shell to the face.

It’s “Numen: Contest of Heroes”. The game actually came out three years after Titan Quest.

This is hardly the most highly regarded game in the world and flew very much under the radar of most players, but I liked it quite a bit back then (even though I’m not the biggest fan of MMOs), to the point that I wrote a short review praising it on a (now defunct) forum I was frequenting at the time. This review (not mine) on Steam sums up why it feels so much like an MMO:

It looks like Titans Quest, but It plays very much like an MMO. Tab targeting, auto-attack, skills hotbar, camps of mobs you have to carefully pull, etc. If you aren’t in to MMO-style combat, you may not like this. The combat reminds me of Vanguard and several others. Fights are quicker though, mobs your level usually die in 10-15 seconds.

https://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561198042628923/recommended/60800/

I’m curious as to how well it holds up. Perhaps I’ll reinstall it later today.

This would kind of defeat the point, wouldn’t it?

There was a hack and slash game set in Ancient Greece that very much felt like a single player MMO due to its mechanics. I think it came out a few years before Titan Quest and had a third person perspective. I’ll try to find it again later.

I wonder if this would make swapping in assets from the Xbox remaster of Conker possible/convenient. I suspect it depends more on how accessible the files of the remaster are.

The entire thing is horrible, but this is the worst part:

Fawzia says that a few months later, “they asked our family to kill us”. The authorities argued it would stop the shame they were bringing on the family. “They said, ‘We will help your son do it,’ but my family refused,” she says. “

I’m the kind of person who reads the source code of software I’m using at least some of the time (and modifies it on occasion), but I’m no genius and not qualified to notice a well-hidden backdoor or potentially fatal software bug - let alone issues with the design, construction or implantation of the hardware. I would never ever trust a brain implant or any device that interfaces directly with my brain.

This old thing. Here’s a rebuttal from many years ago that has lost none of its relevance:

https://www.progressiveisrael.org/ben-gurions-notorious-quotes-their-polemical-uses-abuses/

Allied bombings killed more German civilians in WW2 than German bombings killed Allied civilians. Does this mean that the Allies were morally inferior to the Nazis on the Western front?

Have you considered that there is more to this than just numbers, namely intent?

Does this look like ending three years ago?

https://imgur.com/K84UYxX

Why should I continue debating anyone who glorifies terrorists? What’s the point? But sure, applaud them for this nonsense.

So many Indie developers are making the mistake of thinking they’ll be the next [insert currently successful one-man dev here] and banking their careers and life savings on it. 99.999% of them are not.

Should they, for example, abandon their residences as individuals

That’s not the issue. Hamas terrorists are doing far more than just going home in the evening to their families. Read this academic paper on Hamas’ use of human shields. It’s highly accessible, yet in-depth:

https://stratcomcoe.org/publications/hybrid-threats-hamas-use-of-human-shields-in-gaza/87

I seriously implore you to actually read it and not just dismiss it, because you dislike the title or because I’m the one recommending it to you.

Would this also have applied to, for example, Jewish resistance fighters during the holocaust?

Originally, I was prepared to write a lengthy reply to each of your points, but I’ll not waste my time any further with someone who has the sheer audacity of equating Hamas terrorists with Warsaw Ghetto resistance fighters. How dare you smear the legacy of these people in such a shameful way!

I’m suggesting that you don’t make up fictional dialogue.

I am not denying that kids are dying in this war. This has more to do with how Hamas are deliberately embedding themselves within civilians, preventing them from fleeing and using them as human shields than the IDF deciding to deliberately murder children. I am not aware of any other armed forces going even remotely to the same lengths to warn civilians as the IDF. They even invented the practice of roof-knocking, which Palestinians trust so much that they are standing within meters of a marked building in order to film its destruction.

Your second link does not support your claim that Israel said they are only killing Hamas.

Why make up nonsense? There’s plenty of actual things to criticize the IDF for.

Idealism on its own is admirable, but it doesn’t solve any problems. Yes, I want there to be no war, no injustice, no suffering in the world as well, but that’s not how this wretched planet works. I’ve learned to strive for and support the least terrible realistic options instead of unobtainable fantasies. It’s painful and uncomfortable, I’m constantly questioning myself about it, but I really don’t see alternative to it.

The Israeli military said it killed 20 Hamas fighters and found three tunnel shafts.

Good. Let’s hope that the crossing can soon be reopened “under new management” and that aid can flow through it.

The reason a ton of civilian infrastructure gets destroyed in Gaza has less to do with Israel being callous and far more with how Hamas are operating, how deeply they decided to embed themselves within civilians.

Read this:

https://stratcomcoe.org/publications/hybrid-threats-hamas-use-of-human-shields-in-gaza/87

I mean actually click on the PDF link and at the very least read the first few pages. It’s a thoroughly researched, yet accessible academic paper that shows just how systematic Hamas is in their use of human shields.

I’m pressing you on reading the above report, because I highly doubt you actually ever read the Geneva Conventions (so many people I’ve debated are using them in a vague manner, never able to name any specific sections), because there are explicit exemptions contained within that you would be familiar with if you had actually read them. If for example a hospital is being used for military purposes, it loses its protection under international law:

https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/en/ihl-treaties/gciv-1949/article-19?activeTab=undefined

Guess what Hamas have been doing? Example:

https://youtu.be/pka7H1aMlkQ

An older report:

As well as carrying out unlawful killings, others abducted by Hamas were subjected to torture, including severe beatings with truncheons, gun butts, hoses and wire or held in stress positions. Some were interrogated and tortured or otherwise ill-treated in a disused outpatient’s clinic within the grounds of Gaza City’s main al-Shifa hospital. At least three people arrested during the conflict accused of “collaboration” died in custody.

https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2015/05/gaza-palestinians-tortured-summarily-killed-by-hamas-forces-during-2014-conflict/

Arkane Austin was hemorrhaging talent before and during Redfalls development. In the end, there wasn’t much left of the studio that had developed the Prey reboot. Hi Fi Rush and Evil Within are critical darlings, but the former only got its player base thanks to Game Pass and both didn’t sell enough to keep a studio of more than 130 people alive (for perspective, that’s about as many people as worked on Skyrim).

I get how sad it is to see these studios disappear and it’s of course devastating for individual employees (at least in the short term), but it isn’t all that surprising. Also keep in mind that the talent doesn’t evaporate into thin air. We as players should pay far more attention to game credits and individual developers than the studios these people are working for. Talented developers are very likely to reappear elsewhere and continue making great games.

I think the blame for the demise of these studios is at least equally shared between Zenimax, Microsoft and the studios themselves. Blaming it all on Microsoft is a bit simplistic.

You don’t lash out against oppression by massacring, raping and abducting civilians. Hamas are not resistance fighters. They deliberately attacked small, peaceful communities that were far-left and extremely pro-Palestine, the very opposite of the current Israeli government and its policies. One of the most well-known Israeli pro-Palestinian advocates was among the victims:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vivian_Silver

Read the article. She was the kind of exemplary human being that is instrumental in bringing Palestinians and Israelis together. Her death alone was a terrible blow to the peace process.

This is not a coincidence - Hamas targeted these communities in order to make peaceful coexistence unpopular in Israel, push voters to the right, because they know this would result in more heavy-handed reactions by the Israeli state. One of their many miscalculations was just how destructive to their organization this response would be.

Hamas relationship with the Israeli government in general is far more complicated than how you are trying to describe it. For starters, this off-shoot of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood began as a less militant religious alternative to the far more dangerous secular PLO, which is why there was initial clandestine Israeli support for them. The far more recent influx of Qatari cash that Israel signed off on happened after significant international pressure against Israel - and Netanyahu sold it to his power base as some kind of “divide and conquer” strategy after the fact. In reality, the Israeli government was under the delusion that Hamas were growing fat and lazy in power, that the billions in misappropriated aid money enabling a luxury lifestyle for the leadership would make this leadership less militant and thereby pacify Gaza. This was a foolish miscalculation.

The underdog isn’t automatically in the right. This seems to be lost on so many people.

They would all be still alive if Hamas hadn’t massacred their way through Israel on October 7. Every single nation on Earth would have reacted to this with a full-on war - there is no other way any nation can react to this.

People are just under the delusion that somehow, clean wars with few or no civilian casualties are even possible. They are not, especially not against an enemy that does everything they can to increase the suffering of their own civilians.

The only acceptable response here is a total, unilateral surrender from Israel.

That is how you would respond to the terrorist attacks of October 7? Seriously? Have you even thought about this for more than one second?

No, it’s not a war crime to bomb civilian infrastructure that is being used for military purposes. This distinction appears to be entirely lost on people. I’ll let you think about why the Geneva Convention explicitly creates this exemption.

Tons of examples here, including several that are newer than from 2017:

https://www.memri.org/reports/hamas-leaders-our-goal-establishment-global-islamic-caliphate-not-just-liberation-palestine

Yes, I’m aware that Memri has a pro-Israel bias (to say the least), but all of these examples are literally from the horse’s mouth, just collected in one place here.

By the way, I hope you are not naive enough to believe in the milder language of that 2017 charter. Among other things, it claims that Hamas believes in pluralism and democracy. That’s obviously a lie and so are most of the rest of the revised points.

Hamas and their cause are considerably is less popular in Gaza than in the West Bank according to independent Palestinian polls. This more recruits talking point that I see repeated all the time has no basis in reality. The uncomfortable truth is that people in places that have been bombed by Israel are less likely to consider armed resistance a valid option and are instead dramatically preferring a two-state solution now:

https://i.imgur.com/gRNX0Qb.png

https://i.imgur.com/MgDk1PU.png

Source: https://www.pcpsr.org/en/node/973

I think that most Palestinians who have been unfortunate enough to be at the receiving end of Israeli weapons and lucky enough to survive are starting to realize just how enormous the disparity in capabilities has become.

The land in Gaza is near worthless to Israel. There are almost no natural resources, the soil is of abysmal quality and fresh water is highly contaminated by seawater. The only resources that exist in abundance are sunlight and salt water. It’s an awful place to settle, which is one of the reasons why Israel was willing to forcefully evict their remaining settlers in the Gaza Strip in 2005 and why today, only a far-right fringe wishes for Israelis to settle in the strip again. It is completely pointless to ethnically cleanse Gaza and has no majority within Israeli society.

There are other reasons for there being a famine in Gaza right now; it’s not some dastardly Israeli master plan:

• Israel had no plans for this war and it’s taking far longer than expected. Hamas attack caught them totally by surprise and the response is nowhere near as well thought out as it would have been if this war had been planned ahead.
• War obviously caused nearly all local food production to cease. Israel tanks driving straight through fields and orchards (avoiding main roads and creating their own in order to circumvent IEDs) doesn’t help. Israel unsurprisingly puts the safety of their soldiers above the concerns of local farmers.
• Since the war is continuing for so long, the food supply was inevitably going to collapse. Gaza is notoriously reliant on food imports, unlike Israel, having never built up the ability to be self-sustainable. Damage to infrastructure alone makes maintaining pre-war levels impossible right now - and it doesn’t help that every truck has to be screened for weapons beforehand, which takes a ton of time.
• Hamas is misappropriating a significant portion of the aid and hoarding it so that they can continue their fight. They know that this will result in more civilian suffering - but they are counting on it, because they know this will result in pressure against Israel, not them.
• The far-right government in Israel is unsurprisingly unwilling to allow in significant aid that gets stolen anyway in order to continue the fight.
• Aid that doesn’t disappear into the tunnels gets sold on the black market instead of being distributed to the people in need. Extreme local corruption, including within international aid organizations (which are overwhelmingly staffed by locals), hampers any and all aid efforts.

Before you think I’m some mindless defender of Israel (or, worse, a Hasbara), read this: I detest the current Israeli government with a passion, just like any other far-right government. I’m frequently horrified by public statements by leading Israeli politicians, I think that the war has exposed serious operational deficiencies within the IDF, I think that individual soldiers and officers who recklessly endanger civilians or, worse, commit war crimes need to be far more seriously punished than they already are and every nation that has friendly relations with Israel should never stop pressuring them to conduct themselves as best as they can in this war.

However, I do not subscribe to the belief that Israel is guilty of committing a genocide in this war. Note that I am not denying individual war crimes - those are being committed by Israeli soldiers, there is no doubt about it - but I have seen no evidence of there being a master plan to eradicate Palestinians as a people or even attempt it. The enormous lengths the IDF goes to warning Palestinian civilians alone - to the detriment of military operations - should put this hypothesis to rest. In my opinion, and you are free to disagree, this is merely a war and wars are universally terrible. Most of us, especially in the West, have been shielded from the realities of warfare, especially the fact that it’s civilians who are always and in every single war suffering the most, for so long that we are mentally unprepared for a war that is as heavily “televised” (outdated term, I know, but still appropriate) as this one.

Combine this with a shocking lack of knowledge of international law and international affairs among the wider population, even in reasonably educated circles like young academics, a massive multi-national disinformation campaign (Russia, Iran, China, Qatar as the four big players) finding fertile soil and it’s not difficult to see why a small number of easily debunked talking points are dominating public discourse. It’s incredibly frustrating to see idealistic, well-meaning people fall for this. It makes me fear for the future of the developed world, if I’m honest. How will they react to the likely coming war against Taiwan, for example? How easily could they also be manipulated into taking China’s side there or Russia’s side in a possible attack against the Baltics?

Sorry for the long diatribe. I don’t blame anyone for tuning out after the fifth paragraph or sooner.

Hamas’ idea of statehood is a global Islamic caliphate, according to their own words. For obvious reasons, this won’t ever be on the table.

“Think of the children” has rarely ever been used rationally and your comment is no exception. No, that’s obviously not what I’m saying and you know that. The sooner the war is over, the fewer children will die.

And people get really angry with you if you point out that their sources are awful. It’s kind of eye-opening, proving that the far-left can be just as susceptible to blatant misinformation and resistant to rational thinking as the far-right.

And then what? For how long is this war supposed to last?

Hamas needs to be defeated, the remaining living hostages liberated - and this requires boots on the ground. The sooner Hamas are out of the picture as a major threat to both Israelis and Palestinians, the sooner the war will be over. This is the best hope Palestinian civilians have. Once the organization has been dismantled to the point that nothing more than tiny, relatively easy to deal with splinter cells remain, international aid can pour into the strip without being disrupted by the fighting, without terrorists stealing it, without the whims of the current far-right government in Israel (whose days are numbered) limiting it. Then rebuilding can begin and the international community can start work on a sustainable post-war order - which needs to involve substantial changes to Palestinians society, governance, education and media (no more UN-funded schools teaching kids to murder Jews, for example) - that paves the way towards a two-state solution. A two-state solution has been pushed into the far future by the October 7 massacres, but the process can’t even begin for as long as Hamas are still in a position of power.

Certainly beats the likes of https://officialhamasfanclubandfakenewsfactory.ir (URL only slightly exaggerated) that are usually posted around here.

I suspect you would be even more pissed if you hadn’t received any prior warning. This is the least terrible option.

I’ve seen far more convincing deepfakes, to the point I couldn’t tell until I was told. I’ve experimented with this myself. After a bit of trial and error, almost anyone can easily create shockingly convincing deepfakes. One interesting method is using 3D rendered characters with deepfake faces.

Probably five different contradictory excuses.

Both of you need to read up on the phenomenon called hallucination.

What kind of economic system does the author of this book propose?

Less worse.

You are free to invent a better system. So far, nobody has.

I don’t know about you, but I started to notice that not everything that was printed on paper was truthful when I was around ten or eleven years old.