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The thing that I find most infuriating about this is that it wasn't a Nazi rally. It was a "Unite the Right" rally bringing together neo-Nazis and other flavours of right wing nutbar. How galling it must be for American Muslims to see the president cry "bad apple" after a Nazi murdered an innocent woman

The comparison of Confederate monuments with Washington or Lincoln (Edit: Fake News) would be intellectually dishonest, except that nothing Trump does is intellectual. Lincoln and Washington are admired (rightly or wrongly) in spite of their racism. Confederate heroes are revered specifically because of their racism.

In other news I'm starting a petition to reinstate Jimmy Savile's statue. After all, we don't want to erase history, do we?

Update: it is now raining.

Thanks, Killary!

It's also fairly sunny today, so all due credit to Trump for that.

He's saying that your assertion that America is no worse off isn't supported by the evidence. This thread is full of examples of things that are worse as a consequence of Trump taking office. I'd be interested to know how those bad things are balanced out by the good things you think the President has achieved.

I think the foot has to accept some responsibility for being shot.

Perhaps we're talking at cross purposes. I would say that politics is not something that can be separated from history and society. I'm struggling to think of a sphere of human interaction outside what you call the "influence of politics". When I say race is political, I don't mean that the Republicans or the Whigs invented it. I mean that race is related to human organisational and governmental structures.

I'm not sure we can pin down exactly when politics started happening in human history.

However, we only have to look a few hundred years back to find writers contrasting the "English Race" with the "French Race". These are racial identities not many contemporary writers would subscribe to. Our concept of race has evolved, and modern racial identities have been created. In some ways, organically, and in some ways deliberately. The Nazis constructed a racial identity inspired by German Romanticism, and in opposition to an anti-Semitic, racialised view of Judaism. The Nation of Islam teaches that white people are a race of degenerate "devils" created by an evil scientist with the aim of subjugating black people and Islam.

These identities didn't just develop organically, they were created.

creation of the white identity, which is a political construct

What does this even mean?

If that's a sincere question, I think what Scavenger may be getting at is that racial identities are social and political constructs. Genetically, there's not much that separates different races, but culturally the differences are very significant - especially in the context of history. Right now in the US and Europe, there is a lot of anxiety around white identity. Some white people believe their culture and identity is under threat. What makes this political is that this kind of fear has been consistently manipulated by powerful people for political ends.

Popular white guy Bob Dylan put it like this (fifty years ago):

The poor white man's used in the hands of them all like a tool. He's taught in his school, from the start by the rules, that the laws are with him, to protect his white skin, to keep up his hate, so he never thinks straight, 'bout the shape that he's in. Aw, but he ain't to blame. He's only a pawn in their game.

The South politician preaches to the poor white man, "You got more than the blacks, don't complain! You're better than them, you been born with white skin," they explain. And the negro's name is used, it is plain, for the politician's gain, as he rises to fame, while the poor white remains on the caboose of the train, but it ain't him to blame. He's only a pawn in their game.

The stretch goals are coming soon. Frankly, we didn't expect to hit the target this quickly and I didn't have the graphic ready. I'm pretty sure there will be a livestream, because we've probably already hit the stretch goal for it!

[Kickstarter Campaign]

AdventureX will be returning to London on the 10th & 11th of November 2018. Yay! We have launched a Kickstarter Campaign to help AdventureX keep growing. Please share the campaign & support us if you can.

Back AdventureX 2018 on Kickstarter!

Applications for exhibitors / speakers / volunteers are now open:

• Exhibitor Application Form
• Speaker Application Form
• Volunteer Application Form

Applications close July 31st. We don't charge exhibitors to show off their games at AdventureX.

There biggest changes for 2018 are:

• We are running in partnership with the British Library, as part of International Games Week. This means we have a bigger venue, in a central London location.
• AdnventureX 2018 will be a ticketed event for the first time. But you can get significantly discounted tickets if you back the Kickstarter fast! For more info on this decision, please check out the 2018 announcement.

I look forward to seeing as many of you as possible at AdventureX 2018!

I love the detail. However, when scaled up the anti-alias filtering is a bit too strong. At 4x the edges look a bit blurry. In blender you can get sharper edges by selecting Catmull-Rom filtering and lowering (I think!) the filter value to 0.8 or something like that. Then, when scaled up, the result might read a little more like traditional pixel-art, but without jaggy edges.

For the avoidance of doubt, when I said "kill whitey," I meant that white people should die.

In conclusion, kill whitey.

As for how grown ups talk, perhaps you're hanging around the wrong grown ups. It's not acceptable, at least in the company I keep, to point out the X morons (where X is a race) for any reason.

I see no reason to be anything other than angry and flippant when addressing Trump. But our of respect for these hallowed forums, I would like to clarify:

I didn't mean that you were being childish, Gurok. I think you're wrong, but your tone is perfectly reasonable. I meant that Trump's cabinet were speaking in a disconcertingly facile, infantile manner.

The reason I'm not graciously backing down is that I don't believe I have been caught out. I didn't say 'white' by accident. I said it on purpose. They are white, and their whiteness is pretty of this story.

If Trump had filled his cabinet with black women, you can be sure I would have remarked on that. It is not racist to acknowledge race.

I'm the whitest man in England, so I'm not going to get into a debate about "reverse racism". They are white and they are morons. It follows that they are white morons. If they weren't white morons, they would not have been cast in this ludicrous pantomime.

Could everyone PLEASE not try to bring race into the room full of rich white blokes? Let's focus on the issues - that is not how grown ups talk. It's flipping insane.

It's like a school play, but with old, white morons.

I love seeing 3D stuff on these forums! Please do more! It may be too late for feedback but here are some thoughts:

The first ship model looks great - lots of detail. By comparison others look a bit smooth and plastic-y.

When the camera moves, the stars stay completely static - even when it's panning. This isn't realistic and the result is, when the camera pans it means the big ship looks like a 2D render sliding out of frame. This also means there's no sense of movement in the middle of the shot. You could try using a spherical sky texture.

It's hard to show an object moving though empty space, so you can use depth to create more dynamic movement - have the shuttle fly closer to the camera, towards and away from.

The trickiest thing - and this is something lots of 3D VFX fails to achieve - is a sense of scale. Because the shuttle moves fast, and the viewer has no frame of reference, it looks small. The BSG reboot's solution was to use documentary style operating - the cameras would whip around and crash zoom. Sometimes they'd nearly miss the shot they were trying to get - like a human operator would if they were trying to follow something huge moving fast. The Star Trek solution is to make their miniature shots very slow and grand - the slow movement of the camera helps imply the relative size of the vessels.

I'd like to repeat how grateful I am towards Crimson Wizard for his improvements to AGS. I'm sorry this has got so stressful for you. You've really helped me out.

BUT, I think this thread (and the others like it) demonstrate that a community-run, vote-for-the-feature you want system is unlikely to work.

I'm all for raising funds to support AGS, but without leadership and a plan for the future, how will that work? How much money will people be prepared to give with no understanding of what it will be spent on? Why should the entire community get to vote, when a smaller proportion is providing the funds? What if the most popular features are the least affordable? What if we can't agree what to do? Bad feeling and anger would build up quickly - even more quickly than they have in this discussion.

As I'm sure I said last time this came up, I don't think it helps for us to argue over our vision of AGS in the future, or who we think ought to take charge. I think it would make more sense for us to offer to help support AGS in whatever way we can.

When (and if) the time comes, I would be glad to help with raising funds and PR/copywriting in support of the project.

This has been overdue for years, good work everyone for kicking it back to life.

However, I have to say: if the idea is to replace the default sierra template then I think these icons make too strong a colour statement. Blue and orange are pretty contrasty - they're not going to work well with low-saturated artwork. It could be very difficult to use this artwork for a horror game, or a mystery noir, for instance.

In an ideal world, no one would use the default graphics. But since people do, I think they should be as neutral as possible. I think buttons that use one easy-to-change colour, or greyscale would be more useful. Perhaps there should be neutral / monochrome / high contrast alternatives?

Thanks for the explanation, CW!