The Bard

This game looks impossibly beautiful

It is also enormous and systemic, and no game like it has ever been released with as few problems as Skyrim has. In the same way, you'd be missing out if you dismissed a game like STALKER for it's technical issues instead of focusing on the atmospherics and the simulations that made it so interesting to play. Either way, yeah, it's fucking appalling that Portal 2 missed out.

Yes, and of course the counter argument to what I said is the idea that their natural habitation would produce just as much if not more distress. The problem with this is that we don't know if it's true; we can test animals in abstract domestic situations because we can MRI their heads and see the activation in different parts of the brain to do with pleasure, fear, reward etc, but there is no way for us to do perform this function in their natural environment. There is a reason to believe that the functions the animals have evolved to perform within an ecosystem do not require the same mental contortions that a novel domestic situation does. This could be endless

Well it's relevant in the sense that these animals don't understand the things they're being taught and the only way they can learn is through the fear center in their brain coming to switch on depending on stimuli that we reinforce. Essentially what you're doing in training an animal is inducing an anxiety disorder. Some would argue that is not natural or moral and it would be better to leave animals to their own devices.

Well, you say "ignorance is bliss," but you have to define a distinction between innocence and ignorance. I would argue that an incapacity to learn what it is that is socially distasteful is the definition of innocence over ignorance (which is simply being unaware, or unlearned). This is why we human beings are capable of learning vast systems of abstract laws; because we have the ability to understand cause and effect, and consequence on a deeper level. Sure, when you whack a dog on its nose for shitting on your rug, it might look guilty, and not do it again, but this is not because it knows it's wrong, it's because it associates physical pain with the action, and any perception of guilt we might superimpose on the dog is entirely to do with anthropomorphosis. We definitely need that drink brah, it's been too long .

@jayseven, I think the distinction between human training and that of animls is that we believe that as humans we are by nature adaptive creatures, exemplified by the fact that we really have no niche. We are adaptive engineers who use whatever we can see and find to manufacture suitable conditions for our survival. This is sort of contrary to the way we see other animals, at least in biological terms, as creatures that occupy very distinct and exact places in ecosystems, and are naturally confined to certain habitats, climates and behavioural functions and that we believe we are somehow subverting in the process of training them to shit in specific locations. It's the result of not really knowing a dog's "will," and whether they would prefer to belong to a more organic set of conditions over being fed and cared for.

This shit is gonna be wicked good. Can't wait, gonna go out for a night out, probably somewhere low rent like Spoons, and then fuck off to see this undoubtable gem.

Coming on a Nintendo forum to be really coy about the frequency of your sexual encounters is sort of like walking through a rural town in Sudan with a KFC bucket under your arm. You cunt.

It depends whether you just want stay awake a little longer, or want to induce euphoria/ panic (depending on your psychological disposition).

Hark! Must I Wake to this Wave of discontent? Right, I'm Finished. No more Scamping. Never again shall I Scale the height of my mental Mussel. I have been Schooled. Ps. So Mammal puns are ok?

I wouldn't presume to stand on the Shoalders of other forumers to purport an apparent Coralation between our thoughts. Well, it's bed time for me. Sea ya!

Nothing like a good battering to put you in your plaice.

Don't any of you find that you need to have this decompression time where you have to spend time away from a computer, or any sort of electronic screen, and do something like read a magazine or look at a map or something before you can fall asleep. Because I just can't go from looking at a screen to sleep, it will take me hours unless I spend some time in front of something less...intense?

I think that the suit and shoes work well. It's like saying, I will put my finger in sensual places, and at rampantly inappropriate times, but there will be a sense of class about the whole affair.

I had a better life. Then I took an arrow in the knee.

As an aside, you can't sleep at night, and indeed your insomnia causes an intensity of thinking that doesn't occur through the day because your dopaminergic system is working on overload in an attempt to provide a contingency for your lack of sleep and ironically, keeping you awake. It's one of the reasons why full sleep deprivation has occasionally been used as a treatment for depression. Anyway. I used to have what you describe with N-Europe, but then I realised that nobody really wants to hear what I have to say . But I am on Facebook and Twitter and News sites and Neuroscience blogs and jacked into anything that can keep me in a state of constant information overload. We can't help it, information is a natural stimulant. Also, hitting refresh on your facebook page or favourite forum is very much like playing a slot machine; you never win, but you keep playing in the hope that some synchronous and perfect set of circumstances will award you with a PM or an old friend saying hello for the fuck of it.

I really love how the Sawed off Shotgun has the sound of dismembered flesh built into the very noise of the gunshot. It's a disgusting trebley squelch of sound that makes you recoil with fucking terror. Love it.

Definitely has a lot of Brooker's mad intensity to it. Could turn into a bit of a classic.

Oh right, well the post didn't specify that it was Revelations that was going head to head with Zelda (although I suppose it makes sense, since it's the most recent release), I just thought it was generally to do with the series as a whole. Let's be honest, Zelda has been boring as hell for years, and the only reason man baby fan boys persist in funding Nintendo's persistent inability to make any real progress, is because they're nostalgic for something that evokes the experiences they grew up with. New Zelda may be a good Zelda game, but that's just the problem; its still a Zelda game, following the same basic template with some novel ideas thrown in (same as every increment in the series since LTTP).

Ass Creed is a better game, but nevertheless, both franchises suffer from overexposure.

I think it has plenty of relevance. The way you see people fawn over kittens is overwhelmingly similar to the way they respond to the simplicity of a baby's expressions. Kittens have simply hijacked a mechanism that evolved to aid in an instinctive will to protect our offspring. We do the same for a bunch of baby animals, because we imagine them to possess characteristics that we typically associate with human children; innocence, helplessness, curiosity etc. Curiously, this tendancy seems to be largely reserved for mammals. Would you really feel the same visceral emotion if, say, a baby snake was being eaten, or a toad? I'm inclined to think probably not.

I get it from the way people behave around "cute" kittens, and also having to endure the fucking lolcat meme for about 5 years. That solid enough of a basis for you?

Interesting how people are more predisposed to feeling empathy towards a kitten than, let's say, a rat. Perhaps it's because we're more likely to anthropomorphise a kitten's features than we are a rat's, but either way, the reaction is a little disproportionate and is a little resonant with how shallow our feelings can be. An animal ate another for sustenance. Big fucking whoop. P.S Although I do agree that when it is within your agency to either kill the animal beforehand so it doesn't feel more pain than it has to, it is inhumane not to. And really this seems like it was done for some sort of cruel torture fetish than anything else.

It was actually a really lol night, probably accounted for by the amount of mistypes in that there post. Went clubbing a little bit stoned, and did the best I could to cover up the red eye with copious amounts of Vodka and Smirnoff Ice (which would be embarrassing if I were not an adult), which unbeknownst to me, contains barley, and me, being greviously intolerant to gluten spent the night in a drug/ toxin induced panic spiral. Not to say it wasn't fun though, I mean any experience in which you have to piece together the last ten seconds through serious conscious effort probably means it was at least a little fun? I spent the next two days sleeping though, and am now attempting to figure out the exactitude of occurrences through a variety of embarrassing forum posts and Facebook chat logs. Gotcha on the hair Flink, but that was the consequence of going for a Mohawke with an unsteady hand, and then just deciding to go for the buzzz . @Diageo; I don't remember approaching anyone, but tbh any night in which the reverse doesn't occur is usually a disappointment

Fuck all you pretty people. Went clubbing tonight with one of my best friends, although I should qualify that it was in centaraaalf manchesaaaar which means that any attempt to hold conversation with tehe opposde sex was decimated by the fact that this entire region of the countyr is basically a fucking penal colony filled with bovine peanut farmers. ANd reaallly I;m not that bad looking, even with glasses on. really. [spoiler=]