What the actual fuck

?

Quote from: Verbatim on August 13, 2017, 01:54:11 AM

Quote from: Iberian Husky on August 13, 2017, 01:51:00 AM

Quote from: Verbatim on August 13, 2017, 01:35:52 AM

Quote from: Iberian Husky on August 13, 2017, 01:24:38 AM

Quote from: Verbatim on August 13, 2017, 01:19:28 AM

Quote from: Iberian Husky on August 13, 2017, 01:17:57 AM

Come on, Cheat: Were there any major fluctuations with Verb's IP? Because that could make of break this whole thing.

I'd contest this, but it's not like you'll take my word for it.

I wouldn't waste Cheat's time with such a (relatively) trivial matter anyway.

Did you have some sort of special networking setup for the purpose of immersion? If so how did you pull it off?

Yes. We weren't even sure if we'd be able to pull it off as well as we did, but we thought if we kept Verbatim's personality complex and his speech patterns relatively simple, we'd have a greater overall time maintaining a consistent persona. Occasionally, this was met with bemused reactions from subjects. Reports of hypocrisy and contradictory opinion were common during early portions of the project (mostly during the bungie.net era), so we all gathered around and agreed upon select principles that Verbatim would live and die by—this is where his black-and-white sense of ethics came in. It made it a lot easier for us to maintain without getting caught in contradictions.

Hiring Matt was a huge risk, but I put my trust in him anyway and we were able to cooperate with him to great effect. By far the riskiest move on our part was having him record a video answering questions from you all—his first and only video appearance, to my knowledge. The reactions scared us. A lot of you gave reports of Matt seeming "too normal" to be Verbatim, and we thought the project was destroyed, but in the end, it actually led to one of our biggest breakthroughs during our research.

In short, it was a journey. In some ways, I'm not sure how we were able to do it. But I know that we couldn't have done it without Matt. Now that he's gone, I'm not sure how could ever continue (we had plans to keep this going indefinitely).

Yes, but how did you physically accomplish this? I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you posted from a consistent IP. Did you have multiple people remotely access a single machine for the purpose of posting? Did you do this with multiple machines within a single network, where "Verb's IP" was just the network IP?

Little of column A, little of column B.

The thing is, Verbatim was a college student and a frequent mover (we tried to establish this through his post-lore).

He would take his laptop to several places where his IP would change frequently. His home, the park, the bus stop, the mall, his college—the list goes on. So it made sense to us that his IP would change from time to time, because that sort of thing only seemed normal.

Fair enough, I'll accept that as an explanation. In the back of my mind I always thought there was something off about Verb, like his views were almost too autistically black and white to be real. Also, props for giving us the biggest mindfuck of all time.

Bro, it's fake. A lot of things don't add up.

I feel like this is probably a false flag. If I was Mr. Soros and I wanted to make the Alt-Right look bad, I'd go and pay some mook $10,000 to go and cause violence at a peaceful protest while pretending to be a white nationalist.

The hateful morons that make up most of the alt-right already do a splendid job of making themselves look bad.

I thought some of the stones were special events stuff?

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/aug/12/charlottesville-far-right-crowd-with-torches-encircles-counter-protest-group

How toxic.

I don't see many people (if any at all) mention the lack of males in nursing fields, which is a pretty high end job yet only 10% are males. Want to know why I'm not trying to be a nurse? Because it doesn't interest me.

I don't really see how that does anything but confirm what I said. Group X wants to get into field Y but is met with a lot of prejudice and obstacles. Quotas (which I don't even agree with much) can help. Few people in group A want to get into field B and are met with very little resistance when they do try. Quotas are not at all necessary, so they're not used. Apples and pears.

Not only is this a shitty PR stunt, but it's another stupid attempt at trying to force a square peg through a round hole. You can start young and train girls to be engineers when they grow up, but can anyone guarantee they'll be happy and that it would what they want? What's the point of gloating about how many females and minorities are in your tech department if they all hate their job and would've rather done something else in life?

I'd hardly call listening to the complaints of many of your employees and avoiding even more negative PR a "stunt" though. And who's even talking about training young girls or women not being happy in their field? Giving them more opportunities doesn't really harm anyone.

Are there gender quotas in Coal mining / forges / trash disposal / construction?

No, because their sole purpose is to give women or minority groups a way into typically high end corporate jobs that they want but otherwise find pretty inaccessible. If there's no need for quotas in certain fields, there's not going to be any.

If you have a fucking diversity department, why do you hate acknowledging diversity?

The main target of these diversity groups are people who might not otherwise be fairly represented because of inherent characteristics like sexual orientation, sex and race. They're not there to make sure there's a fair number of people with different views on social issues. Key difference.

Why do you fire someone for highlighting diversity etc?

That's a pretty disingenuous representation of what happened, lol.

Quote from: Flee on August 10, 2017, 05:02:44 PM

Don't have one. No plans on getting it either. I have a Wii U I haven't even touched though.

how does it feel knowing you'll never play a good video game in your life

I've played all Smash games (with the exception of 4) as well as Windwaker, Ocarina of Time and other Zeldas.

Quote from: Ian on August 10, 2017, 09:31:43 AM

I find it funny how Adam Fletcher makes laughably stupid comments like that, as if he somehow knows if someone is a hostile voice going into an interview. Either he's being incredibly invasive and digging up shit on people before he hires/moves someone to his teams (which I'm sure breaks numerous workplace safety laws), if not then he has no fucking idea and this comment comes off as thuggish and hostile, which does nothing to help his company which has already been suffering a PR disaster for almost half a year now.

I just wish people like him understood that they'll never, ever ban all views you don't like. I mean, what's the point in even fucking living in a world like that? It's just so hilariously stupid....

Quote from: Thrasher on August 10, 2017, 01:32:59 AM

1 hour between the time the video was posted and the Twitter ban, but I'm sure it's just a coincidence.

Isn't it great to know that we are back to the 1950s with blacklists?

How so?

Quote from: Flee on August 09, 2017, 02:34:25 PM

Holy shit, Cypher might not get a visa either. That'd be the worst news, the guy is arguably the best Quake player ever.

I thought they had planned this stuff already

No, they're really dropping the ball with some of the tournament logistics. EU players had their qualifiers less than 3 weeks before Quakecon. With the amount of competition on the European scene, no one there could really book anything in advance because visas are pretty damn expensive in some countries. So none of these players knew until 3 weeks before the big tournament whether or not they could actually play and then all had to apply for visas, which is a process that can take weeks in countries like Russia and does not at all guarantee they'll get their visa. It's possible for id and Bethesda to help with the process (athlete visa / guarantees), but apparently their support for the players has been lacking in that aspect to.

Bad news. Agent almost definitely won't be able to even attend Quakecon because of visa issues, and it's looking like they organized the tournament in such a way that the BYOC Duel qualifiers overlap with the first day of Sacrifice, meaning that the ones that qualified through Sacrifice probably won't even be able to try and qualify like that (Stermy, Vo0, Garpy, Tox).

Damn disappointing if true. What a shame how unfairly the tournament is stacked against European players. We're going to miss out on so many excellent players just to see no name scrubs take their place.

Funny thing is I think the South Korean do not care anymore. Also looks like the US has failed to stop the Korean Nuclear program and Korea has reached a point where the US cannot do shit.

Kim Jung Un for how stupid he is has finally checked the US.  Five years of quiet when they are done and expect once they have enough nuclear weapons to stop their program, leading to sanctions being dropped.

I really don't think Kim is stupid at all.

It's kind of hard to take this comment seriously when they plan on rolling out new "features" on Youtube that will essentially shutdown political content creators if they're holding an opinion they don't like.

Quote

Google executives initially appeared to be caught off guard by the document and the uproar. Danielle Brown, the company's new vice president of diversity and inclusion, posted a response late Saturday that both criticized some of the statements in Damore's missive and said Google sought an "open, inclusive environment" that accommodates multiple political views.

I agree that it's a bit ironic, but "accommodating multiple political views" tends to mean that you won't be fired for having a "Hillary 2016" bumper sticker on your personal car, posting on Facebook about how you agree with Trump’s decision to build another oil pipeline, or discuss changes to tax systems and regulations with coworkers. It doesn't mean that you can use an official company platform to share your own near-manifesto on gender issues and heavily political criticism of "leftist biases" with all of your colleagues without repercussions when it negatively affects the work environment.

To be fair, Google did not fire an employee over his opinions. They fired him for putting those opinions in a 10 page memo that he shared on an open company board accessible by all Google staff, hereby causing an internal row between many of its employees as well as a PR and reputational nightmare for a company that already came under fire after it was recently found to systematically underpay its female workers by the US Department of Labor. I can agree with some of the things he said, but I can see why Google thinks he crossed the line and violated their code of conduct in some ways.

Is there valid criticism against this kind of forced diversity? Absolutely. Does he make some good points? Definitely. Was circulating a company-wide memo on leftist discrimination and how women are inherently poorly suited for these jobs the best idea? Probably not. Should he have been fired? That's highly debatable, but Google has an image problem to work on and stuff like this isn't helping them.

Even if they don't get rid of him because of the content of what he said, the fact that he's divided the employees like this would make his position in the company and cooperation with others very complicated. Google has its own code of conduct and (this goes for pretty much any job anywhere) if you do something that might still be perfectly legal but disrupts the company vision, cooperation and ultimately employee productivity, you're likely to get fired over it. When reading his letter, there's arguably an implication that (many of ) the women who work at Google either didn't deserve their job and only landed it because of discriminatory hiring practices, or are (partially in his own words) more neurotic, less stress tolerant and simply have less of an affinity for their work than the men working there do, which can be pretty devastating for the company culture. I also find it kind of ironic that a lot of the people condemning Google for firing this guy are the same people who often get flustered by the very regulations that seek to stop companies from discriminating against other people on the basis of religion, race and the likes.

Also, the science behind his arguments appears to be pretty shoddy and not really in line with the general biological/psychological consensus on this issue. This is an ongoing debate and him only picking sources that support his views on biological determinism hurts his argument, imo. The articles below explain it in detail and cite a bunch of research that contradicts or discredits some of the arguments he makes.

https://qz.com/1048252/the-google-diversity-memo-was-wrong-to-use-biology-to-justify-the-gender-gap-in-tech/
https://www.vox.com/identities/2017/8/8/16106728/google-fired-engineer-anti-diversity-memo
http://uk.businessinsider.com/google-james-damore-fired-tech-gender-gap-science-2017-8?r=US&IR=T
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/aug/07/silicon-valley-weapon-choice-women-google-manifesto-gender-difference-eugenics

I always sucked at Q3 and CS - but they are still fun to play.

This new Quake looks amazing and all, but I wish it had a campaign too. Its been so long since we fought Strogg.

You should come play it with us man. It's free.