Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

SCOTUS: It’s not “bribery” unless it comes from the Bribery region of France. Otherwise, it’s merely “sparkling malfeasance”.

Jack Smith: “Why did you start campaigning in the middle of my investigation?!”

Anyone who bans teaching American history has no right to shape America’s future.

It is not hopeless, and we are not helpless.

JFC, are there no editors left at that goddamn rag?

He wakes up lying, and he lies all day.

Someone should tell Republicans that violence is the last refuge of the incompetent, or possibly the first.

Beware of advice from anyone for whom Democrats are “they” and not “we.”

They are lying in pursuit of an agenda.

Wow, I can’t imagine what it was like to comment in morse code.

Hell hath no fury like a farmer bankrupted.

Museums are not America’s attic for its racist shit.

Those who are easily outraged are easily manipulated.

A democracy can’t function when people can’t distinguish facts from lies.

“Just close your eyes and kiss the girl and go where the tilt-a-whirl takes you.” ~OzarkHillbilly

Nothing says ‘pro-life’ like letting children go hungry.

Yeah, with this crowd one never knows.

We will not go back.

Stamping your little feets and demanding that they see how important you are? Not working anymore.

You passed on an opportunity to be offended? What are you even doing here?

Fundamental belief of white supremacy: white people are presumed innocent, minorities are presumed guilty.

Make the republican party small enough to drown in a bathtub.

It may be funny to you motherfucker, but it’s not funny to me.

Today in our ongoing national embarrassment…

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Reader Interactions

106Comments

  7. 7.

    Kryptik

    Civ has never been my sort of game. So I’ll just go back to playing TF2 and the Ace Attorney games. I’m my own kind of nerd, thank you very much.

  9. 9.

    gbear

    I’m sick of seeing ads for it in between every freakin’ segment on Rachael Maddow’s show.

    Other than that, it is one of the very last things on my list of ways to spend my pitance of a paycheck.

  11. 11.

    cleek

    didn’t care for 4. not sure if i want to try 5.

    loved 2 and 3 to death, though. much to my wife’s dismay.

    favorite setup : 5 nations on a huge island map.

  14. 14.

    Marc

    Civ has been a favorite series of mine for many years. Start out in the stone age, end up launching a rocket to the stars, and choose whether you’ll be Ghandi or Ghengis when going from A to B. What’s not to love?
    Sorry, Civ 5 is a major step back. A very good summary (and ultra-rare for game reviews) is the 1up piece at

    http://www.1up.com/do/reviewPage?cId=3181540

    Basically, they switched from stacking units to a one-unit-per-space approach. This makes fights more tactical, since you need to array armies in the right order (grunts up front, artillery behind, etc.) in order to succeed. But computer AI is terrible at this sort of thing, so the game is not challenging once you figure out what to do.

    They also decided to move to a console-style approach overall: everything is simplified, removing a lot of depth and choices. The game play is much slower, and they made some odd choices. In prior Civs, you chose your form of government and you could change it (communism now…on second thought, democracy!) In this version, social policy is like something out of world of warcraft: you never get to change it, and it basically acts like a branching technology tree.

    It’s simple and has a big name, so it’ll sell a truckload of stuff. It’s also the weakest entry in the series in more than a decade.

  16. 16.

    Cliff

    Civ IV Fall from Heaven2mod sucked many many hours from my life.

    the makers of FFH2 are apparently working on a standalone game. (I can’t wait)

    I’ll wait till steam has some absurd sale on Civ V.. they eventually will, and of course it will be the day after I pay full price.

    So I won’t. I shall be strong!! umm .. maybe, gotta check out the demo first.

    just picked up Droplitz for 2 bucks, which is about all I’d pay for that type of game, but it seems like a decent way to relax for a while

  17. 17.

    Wiesman

    I’m in the vg industry (programmer) and for some reason I hadn’t heard much about this game until just before it came out. I guess I hadn’t been paying as much attention as usual to industry news. Or maybe it’s because Civ has gotten to a point where it doesn’t need to hype itself at all. When they are done with the next version, they just release it and start counting money.

    There was never really any question as to the possibility that I would not buy it. It’s a Civ game, I’m a nerd, and that’s the law. But when I looked at the gameplay videos and saw that they had changed from squares to hexes… zomg. That’s like extra double nerd cheddar in the anti-productivity mousetrap. Or something.

  18. 18.

    BR

    I’m waiting for them to make a “Decline of Civilization” game. One where you start with a civilization and then you have to deal with all the stupid shit your civilization did, like pollute the air and water and use up all the nonrenewable resources. The goal would be to save as many people as you can.

  19. 19.

    dmsilev

    One very annoying graphics glitch aside (It doesn’t want to run full-screen on my system, just in a window), a lot of fun. Definitely enjoy the new “one unit on a hex” rule; the Civ IV Stack of Doom mechanic got really irritating after a while.

    Ranged units are awesome as well.

    dms

  20. 20.

    BR

    Oh, since this is a pseudo-gaming thread.

    Anyone have any game suggestions similar to Braid and Osmos? I tried out World of Goo but it was a little to childish. Also checked out Flow, which was cool, but a little to bare of a game. Frankly I haven’t found anything with the ambiance and difficulty of Braid and I’m hoping to.

  22. 22.

    Splitting Image

    Still too busy with 2.

    Also, I only just finished Baldur’s Gate for the first time, and I just recently bought the Fallout Trilogy and Age of Empires 2. How sad it is that those count as retro now. If anyone is interested, Sarevok got killed while my main character was unconscious and held and busy getting hacked to death by one of Sarevok’s cronies. A somewhat embarrassing end to an engrossing game, I’m afraid.

    If anyone needs me, I’ll be firing up my Amiga emulator and trying to beat my high score on Pirates!

  25. 25.

    Anonymous At Work

    Personally, not being able to pass Mountains is a huge deal too…means terrain can finally be a factor in your borders.

  26. 26.

    Mark S.

    @cleek:

    didn’t care for 4. not sure if i want to try 5.

    That’s me exactly, and I loved 3.

    One of the funnest parts of the game for me was strategerizing which wonders to build. In 4, almost all the wonders sucked. There was also a lot of micromanaging to do, especially the idiot workers who would build the same things over and over.

  28. 28.

    MikeJ

    @Marc:

    It’s also the weakest entry in the series in more than a decade.

    Didn’t Civ 4 come out almost a decade ago?

    I love Civ. I used to be in the industry and everybody I know in the biz loves Civ. Even so, I’ve not installed it yet. IN the next day or two I will though. And then I might disappear from the net for awhile.

  33. 33.

    BR

    @beltane:

    @BR: That’s the game we’re living in.

    Yeah, I know. But trying it out for oneself helps clarify the choices that need to be made.

    (‘The Yes Men Fix the World’ DVD extras has an old video clip of a fake version of such a game that the Yes Men put together, and it sounded like and looked like a fascinating game…if it were real.)

  36. 36.

    JGabriel

    @BR:

    … you start with a civilization and then you have to deal with all the stupid shit your civilization did, like pollute the air and water and use up all the nonrenewable resources. The goal would be to save as many people as you can.

    I’ve heard of that game. US President: modDemocrat.

    .

  38. 38.

    fucen tarmal

    i limit my geekery to the sports related geekery, but i suppose this is like (the hooters) and(y) reid(‘s) (danced) decision to name vick the starter being texted to the media last night at 6:30, just in time to get your waiver claims in, or last weeks brandon jackson fever,when it seemed like he would just assume the ryan grant role in the offense…

    i don’t speak the civ language, but i can pick up on the intonations…

    looks like the cards have given up, go reds! here that beck, some liberal is rooting for the reds!

  39. 39.

    JoshA

    Loved 2. Tried 3 and didn’t like it. Went back to 2 and stayed there.

    There’s some great free scenarios, so its endlessly replayable.

    My girlfriend can’t believe it when she sees me still playing it. “Oh great, the game.”

  41. 41.

    JGabriel

    The Onion via @General Stuck:

    According to a poll released Tuesday, nearly 20 percent of U.S. citizens now believe Barack Obama is a cactus, the most Americans to identify the president as a water- retaining desert plant since he took office.
    __
    …
    __
    “If the president says he is a human being, I’ll take him at his word,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said Sunday on Meet the Press. “Though I’ve never heard him complain about being thirsty. Not once. That could be a coincidence, I suppose, but it’s really not my place to say.”
    __
    …
    __
    “I don’t care what he says or what his people say or what anybody else says,” 48-year-old Kansas resident Jake Nolan told reporters. “The guy’s a cactus, plain and simple. I mean, Christ, look at him.”

    No wonder he’s gotten so prickly lately…

    .

  49. 49.

    Peter J

    @BR:

    Anyone have any game suggestions similar to Braid and Osmos? I tried out World of Goo but it was a little to childish. Also checked out Flow, which was cool, but a little to bare of a game. Frankly I haven’t found anything with the ambiance and difficulty of Braid and I’m hoping to.

    Maybe not what you’re actually looking for , but take a look at the Independent Games Festival entries for some truly innovative games. Braid won an award in 2006, World of Goo in 2008, and Osmos in 2009.

  51. 51.

    arguingwithsignposts

    Since this is an open thread, I would like to make a BJ Store request. Would it be possible to add some of the other rotating taglines to the BJ t-shirts? Like the Refuge for a snarling mass of vicious vitriolic jackals one, among others?

  52. 52.

    JGabriel

    Splitting Image:

    If anyone needs me, I’ll be firing up my Amiga emulator and trying to beat my high score on Pirates!

    Speaking of pirates, Jean Luc Godard and Richard Dawkins both came out in favor of filesharing in the past week.

    Godard has gone to the length of actually funding someone’s defense in court:

    “Copyright is not a possibility, really, ” [Godard] said recently. “An author has no right. I have no right. I only have duties. I’m against Hadopi, of course. There is no intellectual property.”
    __
    Due to receive an honorary Oscar later this year in acknowledgment of his services to entertainment, Godard has pledged support and donated 1,000 euros to Climent’s [file-sharing defense] fund.

    Dawkins, on the other hand, is telling people who complain about not being able to see his latest documentary outside of the UK to just go ahead an Bittorrent it:

    “Is there any way to watch this from Australia? I’d really like to see it,” one commenter wrote on Dawkins official website, followed by another saying, “I´d like to see it, too. Is there any way how to watch it from Czech Republic?”
    __
    Dawkins, a man of answers rather than questions, had an easy solution.
    __
    “Do you mean that none of these work in your countries?” the Professor commented under his official account, while linking to several YouTube links and a torrent file on The Pirate Bay.

    Weird, but cool. I particularly like Dawkins’ cavalier Why the fuck are you guys bothering me with this shit, just search google for an illegal torrent – do I gotta fuckin’ do everything around here? tone.

    .

  53. 53.

    dmsilev

    @Cliff: I’ve heard some very good things about that mod, but have never gotten around to trying it. Too much stuff to do, too little time…

    dms

  56. 56.

    MeDrewNotYou

    @Anonymous At Work: Civ4 has impassable mountains, not that that will stop fucking Monty and Isabella. (I have a goddamn mountain range to my north and the damn proto-Mexicans still pour over my border!)

    I plan on picking Civ5 up next month, when I get some cash. In the meantime, I’m still playing Civ4. I think 4 was the strongest in the series so far, but 2 is a close runner up. The look of Civ2 and its tech tree were wonderful, but the huge amount of choices in 4 just can’t be beat. Even with the same civ, the different leaders made for tons of unique styles. The variety of improvements and unit upgrades were great too (Even though I was a bit intimidated at first, the simplest choices like farms/mines and strength upgrades were effective enough that I didn’t feel dumb for, say, not building watermills or giving bonuses for specific situations.)

  59. 59.

    James Gary

    Just to stick my oar in: I’m baffled by the popularity of the Civilization series. They’ve always seemed like “Tech Tree: The Game” to me, with all the plodding tedium that implies.

  60. 60.

    jeffreyw

    @schrodinger’s cat:
    There isn’t much interaction yet, though Toby kinda sorta maybe made a playful move towards the Homer today. Bea is not at all amused and is still vocal. Homer seems to be fearless, he stuck his head into Jack’s food bowl this afternoon-while Jack was still eating. Jack growled at him but Mrs J rescued Homer before it could escalate.

  64. 64.

    cat48

    @General Stuck:

    Well, he always has bottled water or a glass of water at hand. heh

    On a semi-serious vein, do you think the prez might end up like Kennedy since in the Guardian, they said Petraus said of the WH, “They don’t know who the fuck they’re dealing with!”?
    I got the impression the military/Pentagon is pissed at him since he told them what they could & could not do in Afghan.
    All the conspiracy theories abt Kennedy come rushing back to me.

  66. 66.

    Peter J

    @cleek:
    Narbacular Drop was the IGF Student Showcase Winner in 2006, and then Valve hired the team behind it and they then developed Portal.
    The team behind TAG, the Best Student Game in 2009 also got hired by Valve and the ideas from that game was then added to Portal 2.

  68. 68.

    Nick

    Could someone please tell me why Rachel Maddow began her show by saying “Democrats started campaigning today” and played audio of Obama saying something he’s been saying for months?

  69. 69.

    Steeplejack

    @jeffreyw:

    Will look for those. My bland, no-frills local supermarket actually has a pretty good deli/meat section. And a good bakery, oddly enough.

  71. 71.

    Steeplejack

    In case anyone is interested, the autumnal equinox is at 11:09 p.m. EDT tonight. Take whatever measures appropriate. I plan to give a unicorn an apple and dance with the harvest queen. (The “harvest moon” hits early tomorrow morning.)

    Obligatory video.

  75. 75.

    Sly

    Civ V. Discuss.

    The Good: Non-stackable units are the height of awesome. I missed the big stacks of doom at first, and it takes a bit getting accustomed to the fact that you can’t just send one big army in one big pile at an enemy city, but it makes the tactical aspects of the game more engaging.

    The Bad: Never thought I’d say these words, but I miss religion. There was something special about facing down an unstoppable Incan juggernaut, but winning by slowly converting them to Islam and convincing Huyana Capac that it is will of Allah that he should attack Japan and Spain without my help.

  76. 76.

    khead

    Sid Meier almost cost me a semester at Va Tech. I had to pay a roommate to delete Railroad Tycoon 2.

    Khead +3

  77. 77.

    Perfect Tommy

    Neil Young’s latest album is up for a free listen at NPR. My initial impression of the he first cut “Walk With Me ” was that Neil was channeling U2. Then I saw that the producer is Daniel Lanois : ) Neil recorded the vocals and a guitar track and Lanois worked his magic.

    Neil Young’s ‘Le Noise’

  78. 78.

    robertdsc-PowerBook & 27 titles

    winning by slowly converting them to Islam and convincing Huyana Capac that it is will of Allah that he should attack Japan and Spain without my help.

    LOL.

    I liked the original Civ once upon a time. I haven’t tried any of the others.

  79. 79.

    cleek

    @Perfect Tommy:
    damn. that’s definitely got a recorded-in-the-bedroom kind of vibe. (at least the first 3 songs)

    i’ve got hours and hours of stuff like that :) but Neil brings something special to it…

  80. 80.

    Sentient Puddle

    Not sure I like the return to the classic-era style of city improvement maintenance. I really got used to the Civ IV model, where I could pretty much just build what I needed and forget about thinking “But can I afford this?”

    I’m also perennially in a state of empire unhappiness. Just when I think I’m going to poke into the black and stop seeing that my cities have 196 turns to grow…one of my luxury good trade deals expires, and I’m back at negative 7. Fuck.

    (ok, let’s get rid of that dash)

  81. 81.

    Marc

    @Sly:

    Try building a long road across rough terrain and you’ll be longing for the concept of stacking :)

    AI is extremely easy to out-think. It may be good for multi-player, but I never have done that with the civ series.

  85. 85.

    BeccaM

    I’m still playing Mass Effect 2, something like my 3rd and 4th times through (ignoring the abandoned games). One of them is an evil douche; the other ultra paragon-y. Starting to get a little bored with it though, given the repetition.

    My wife just got Civ 5 though and she seems to be enjoying it.

  86. 86.

    Marc

    @Mark S.:

    You not only can’t stack workers: they can’t even pass through one another. So if you have 2 building a road and the one in back finishes first it has to walk the long way around , which can take several turns on a hex map.

  87. 87.

    J.W. Hamner

    I have not played enough Civ 5 to see the weakness in the tactical AI, but I don’t really agree with the criticism of Social Policies… turning from a Democracy into a Communist regime for the explicit purpose of waging war was a fairly silly and “gamey” mechanism. I’d rather customize the bonuses for how I want to play my empire than be provided the meaningless “choice” to return to mercantile feudalism in 2015… most players, I’d bet, just made a beeline for their favorite governments and that’s it.

  89. 89.

    morzer

    I used to like Civ, but ever since Medieval Total War and company came along, Civ just seems too bureaucratic.

  92. 92.

    General Stuck

    @cat48: I don’t know what is going to happen with Obama V the ruling white class in America, nor the military. I think we have some good decent military leaders, and we have some dark and menacing ones, and a boatload of pissed of plutocrats and their zombie race of tea tardists, that are going to get louder and angrier as is can be expected from folks who believe their birthright is slipping away from them, or being stolen by those “other” people.

    And our progressive friends who bellyache that Obama isn’t liberal enough seem clueless just how much Obama has pissed off the right wing, the white monster that has always lived in the soul of America. I am about at the point, I would recommend to Obama, if I ever got the chance, that he wrap up it in one term, as he has accomplished way more than any dem since Johnson in a single term and already has a commensurate legacy to be proud of.

    He can’t, and shouldn’t be expected to purge all the entitled white created bullshit that is dragging this country toward an abyss of greed, hate, and truth or consequence.

  93. 93.

    Thoroughly Pizzled

    Alpha Centauri is better than Civilization. Sid Meier needs to make the remake/sequel before we repeat human history with him… again.

  94. 94.

    Raenelle

    Update on Morgan, my cocker spaniel who had his right front leg amputated last Friday.

    He’s doing pretty good. We brought him home Saturday. That was the worst day. He stood up, but he was in a lot of pain, wimpering or, at times, crying loudly. That seemed to subside, or he accepted it, by night. The next day, Sunday, was much better. He walked a bit. Moreover, I’d been sleeping on the floor with him, as I didn’t want him to jump off the bed. That was OK Saturday night, but by Sunday, he was very insistent that he wanted to sleep in the bed. By Monday he was already going up and down some steps.

    He seems to lack confidence–he’s a bit clingy, and he stays very close to the house when we take him outside. And he’s careful to stay off the slippery linoleum whenever he can. But it’s only been five days. I’m actually amazed at how well he’s doing; I didn’t figure we’d be this far along for a couple of months.

  95. 95.

    Justin

    My great merchant won’t conduct a trade mission. But Goddamn, does rocket artillery ever do a proper fucking job on pikemen.

  96. 96.

    Quackosaur

    @Thoroughly Pizzled:

    SMAC is an EA property, so as long as Firaxis is a subsidiary of 2K Games, it’s unlikely there will be a sequel. Not that a sequel doesn’t need to happen…

    If only EA had completed its purchase of T2 in 2008…

  97. 97.

    Dennis SGMM

    I started playing Civ when the original came out (On floppies – remember them?) in 1991. Stayed wit it through Civ IV and its expansion packs. I won’t be playing Civ V largely because you have to register with Steam and have their applet running in the background. Apparently, 2K games chose to have Steam deliver their patches and updates so you’re stuck with them. Something in me just doesn’t appreciate the notion of buying a game and then being required to run a third-party app in the background.

    Instead I bought an NIB copy of the Warcraft II battle.net edition and a Collector’s Edition of Age of Empires (AOE, Rise of Rome, Age of Kings, and Age of Conquerors) from Amazon. The Warcraft cost me forty bucks, the AOE collection was nine.

    I have to say that both games aged well although neither can be played windowed.

  100. 100.

    Darkrose

    I was kind of excited about V after reading about it in a game magazine, but it’s not something I have to have right this minute. I’m still playing Dragon Age: Origins, and I’ve just reactivated my Aion account, and I still have to flip at least one of my characters in CoX Going Rogue…

  101. 101.

    suzanne

    @Raenelle: Ohhhhh, pobrecito! Watching them suffer is so awful. So glad he seems to be doing better, though. Weirdly, an employee at my nearby Humane Society said that three-legged dogs get adopted quicker than the others, on average. That made my heart happy.

    I am freaking the fucking fuck right out. I saw two scorpions in my house today. GodDAMN, those little bastards are UGLY. My neighbor got his house sprayed yesterday, so they’re all coming over to hang with me. I’m not sure I can handle this anxiety.

  103. 103.

    Alex S.

    I’ll probably play it to death, hopefully multiplayer will be good. By some measures, I was a very good mp-player of civ3, then I became a beta tester of civ4, but its mp-playability was a little “off-track”. It was too slow, the maps too little, and defenders maybe a little too strong. Hopefully, civ5 will be a little better in that regard.

  104. 104.

    icantsay

    @cleek: If you liked Civ 3 (which I did), Civ V is more like that than Civ 4. I’ve never been a big fan of Civ 4, although it got usable after BTS and FFH2/Orbis. But the combat system is now sane again (no 20 unit stacks), so combat is no longer a “how the hell did the AI get 20 bowmen when I don’t even have archery yet?”

    The graphics are pretty nice too. The city defense and embarkation are nice touches. I’d give it a try if you liked Civ 3 and not Civ 4 as much.

  106. 106.

    Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony

    I like the role of religion in Civ 4, too. There is something awefully satisfying about founding Budism and then foisting it on all your conquered cities. Being a fantasy Theocrat rocks!

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