bet theres a nonzero number of em on here

This just popped up on the "This day in history" thread.

This dude assaulted his wife because he couldn't run around with a lamp? I'm so glad my life isn't that worthless.

I knew I was saving these stars for something.

Just like music and film and whatnot, computer game making is highly polarised.

You have good stuff, creative people make cus they are interested in the artform and want to make something good.. And then commercial stuff, which is made by big companies and is all about shitting out a copy of something which is already popular, and then using millions of dollars of metrics analysis and marketing to get people addicted, or make a lot of micro-transactions or whatever, to make profit.

Those two approaches almost constitute two entirely separate mediums, in my opinion.
I love good indie games (and making them) but 'gaming' in general and the 'gaming community' is something I entirely avoid and really wouldnt want to be associated with at all.

I think things made with the latter the latter approach (EA, Blizzard, Ubisoft) fit in better with the likes of slot machines, than good creative original games.

I knew I was saving these stars for something.

I agree, no TRUE Scotsgamer would do this.

>>>This seems like a shitbag addict lashing out at anyone that interrupts him getting his fix.


I see this differently. I see this as a guy who is trying to escape his grown-up responsibilities, and this is just one of the ways in which he might do that. For me, it's posting in internet forums like poetv. Believe me, before there were computers or TV, people used reading and writing to escape an unpleasant reality.

I'm not saying that it's healthy or good, but anything that causes pleasure can be addictive, including food, sex, or exercise, Gaming may be more addictive than television, because it's more immersive, and interactive, but it's probably less addictive than the cookies that they feed to kids.

'''''''''''gamers''''

not meant to b a reply

Not to sound like a rabid SJW or anything, but I think the evidence of this guy's being a piece of shit is pretty dang overwhelming, Mr. Holmes. Does he have certain other positive qualities? I certainly wouldn't rule that out, but we can't really know that.

My brother punched my Mom once. It was about 40 years ago. I wasn't there, but I'm told he knocked her down. I'm not going to give the backstory, but I understand how someone might want to punch my late Mom, God rest her soul. And my brother has only spent one second of his 59 years punching his mom. He isn't defined by that moment.

But here's the thing about punching your mom (and I can't stress this enough) You shouldn't do it! Even if she's asking for it.

I'm sure my brother would agree, but we don't really talk about this.

I suppose I'm game to assume that the circumstances surrounding your brother's hitting your mom were less puerile than those of this fellow's attack. But that doesn't change my estimation of this fellow any.

What I'm concerned about here is the judgement of people according to political agenda, and whether that really makes things better.

Recently, in the wake of the me too movement, I came to realize that I had once groped a woman in a way that now I consider inappropriate. I was 24. That was almost 36 years ago. If I was to explain how that came to pass, how I still feel like I was being manipulated, I'd be making excuses, so lets not do that. How about if I just take responsibility for the bad thing that I did?

Am I more likely or less likely to accept responsibility for my bad behavior if having done a bad thing makes me a bad person? When Louis CK gets outed for bad behavior, and is publicly shunned, how many of us pile onto Louis as a way to avoid facing our own bad behavior?

This applies to racism. When a white woman was filmed trying to a keep a black man out of the apartment building where she lived, and the video went up on youtube, she lost her job. What's the connection? Is it just that she's generally a bad person? Or is it because her white employer wants to keep the secret that he can be pretty racist, too? I'm a white man born in the 1950s. If I saw a black guy I didn't know entering my swanky apartment building, I probably wouldn't try to stop him, but maybe, just maybe, I would try to memorize his face. So how much of a bad person does that make me? It's a tough question to ask myself, and so I make a snarky comment about the woman on YouTube, tell myself I'm not like that, and carry on as usual.

You know what was fucked up? A lot of the comments on youtube attacking the woman for being racist were unbelievably sexist... and also kind of racist. "SHE JUST WANTS THE BBC! LOL!"

Is all this shunning and destroying of lives and careers maybe holding up progress? In some case, I believe that it does.


None of this is meant to imply that this guy shouldn't be held responsible for punching his pregnant wife, including jail. If I was a judge, I would probably sentence my brother to community service, and a modest fine, even though, of the three of us brother, I would have probably been voted "MOST LIKELY TO PUNCH HIS MOM". Believe me, though, my brother suffered far worse than that, in terms of his own remorse.

My mother could be abusive, especially verbally ,and especially to me. She had problems with depression, and, at some point, drinking. Once, years after the divorce, my mother drove a car into a ditch and left it there, walked home and went to bed. When she woke up, North Carolina State Troopers were standing over her. For that, she did a little jail time.

Here's some more facts about my mom, though. For about 20 years, she was an Emergency Room Nurse. Who saves more lives than an emergency room nurse? Superman? Once, my parents went out to dinner, and my mom saved a woman's life by being the only person in the restaurant who knew CPR. And she moved to North Carolina, got herself a girlfriend, and eventually, she got sober, and managed to recover. I din't see a lot of her, but her last years were supposed to be pretty happy. I was proud of her, and I told her so.

People grow (ideally); today's piece of shit may be tomorrow's average dude after enough introspection and self-improvement. Heck, the guy's inevitable reviewing of this video could even catalyze a larger transformation, and maybe in his life he'll net a positive change against wife-beating. (Or maybe not, but my point is: I'm not saying he is essentially and eternally a piece of shit, but to the degree that this is normal/acceptable behavior for him, he is currently a piece of shit of the violent man-baby variety.)

I've done things I am ashamed of having done, and I would take all of them back if I could. I don't presently consider myself a piece of shit, partly out of partiality but also because I'm not doing those things anymore. I try to avoid repeating any of the shameful things I once did, or breaking new ground in that direction, and I help others when & how it's feasible. And I still have a ways to go, for sure. I would resist the characterization of myself as a piece of shit at any point of my life, including back when the case for my being one was strongest, but I think my partiality is doing the bulk of the work there.

You raise an interesting point about the danger of using negative judgments of others as a means to avoid self-reflection. (I'm not sure what any of this has to do with political agendas, though. All I saw was a guy decide that the best way to keep streaming video games was to go beat on his wife, which I characterize as a piece of shit thing to do, no matter what their backstory may be. His being an Aussie or a gamer strikes me as a red herring.) I'll just say, I don't think I'm calling this guy a piece of shit in order to feel better about myself; I am calling him a piece of shit because I think the sort of behavior exhibited here earned him that moniker. I'm not one for labels etc. but if ever there was piece-of-shit behavior, this strikes me as a prime example.

I am pretty sure that I disagree, though, with the idea that acknowledging piece of shit behavior as being evil means a lesser chance of self-reflection. I think it's more likely, for me at least, that confronting the evil of someone's action might make one rethink the choice to perform such an action. It's true that someone might take a different fork earlier in the reasoning and conclude that, because they have ever performed that action, and because they prefer to like themself, that that action may not be so bad. I presume that some habitual wife-beaters shrugged or cheered at this video (and, yes, they are pieces of shit for it).

But I think maybe you're concerned that, if I call this guy a piece of shit for beating his pregant wife in front of their kid, then I'll let myself off the hook for similar, if smaller, offenses against my wife, say. (I'm not suggesting that you're suggesting that I do such things, just that I think this is the form of your concern.) Or that one would use his unpopularity to safely launch a salvo of stored-up hate, like the volley of abuse launched against the lobby lady in your example. Or anyway, that it's a means of avoiding self-reflection. Well, people transfer and project psychological bullshit all the time; that is a real problem. It WOULD be more mature not to label him as a piece of shit and address the action itself, to remind oneself of the fundamental plasticity of personalities. I'll concede that that's true; if I were his therapist that's certainly the direction I'd want to take, since it doesn't advance the goal of transformation any to create extra psychological barriers between his current state and a non-wife-beating state. But I don't expect he'll ever read my comments, and I was singularly outraged by this video (what a strange-feeling upvote that was), so I'm sticking by my original assessment: this guy is a piece of shit. Would that that shit fertilizes a healthier mind.

>>>But I think maybe you're concerned that, if I call this guy a piece of shit for beating his pregant wife in front of their kid, then I'll let myself off the hook for similar, if smaller, offenses against my wife, say.

That hadn't crossed my mind, I promise you, but if that happened, I'm not sure that it would be letting yourself off the hook if you didn't think of yourself as a piece of shit.

I've already taken a sleeping pill, so let me just say that I'm not really criticizing you AT ALL, I'm making a point about how these issues are resolved publicly. I'm saying that we don't need to judge someone's humanity, but we DO need to hold them accountable. I'm making a serious point that I do believe in, but you're not doing anything wrong.

The guy punched his pregnant wife. If you call him a piece of shit, it's hardly the worst injustice ever, and maybe you were just angry. I cannot pretend that I've never called someone a piece of shit on the internet for doing something shitty, and I can't assume that I'm never going to do it again.

Yeah, I didn't take you to be criticizing me personally, I just felt like this guy crossed a line to where I'm comfortable calling him names. Your point, that hating on people because they've done something despicable can become an excuse to be similarly despicable toward them, is a good one, and is worth addressing. I don't think I really did that (address that point), and honestly I think you have the high ground here. But, just... what a piece of shit this guy is! Insulting him further for being a gamer/ginger/Aussie/Leo, or whatever, would be pointless at best. (His outbreak of assholery may have some causal relationship to these kinds of games being dopamine dealers, e.g., but he gets no slack in light of that, and I assume that players of such games are not, by and large, more likely to be wife-beaters as a result of playing such games.)