Down

Edit: all stretch goals (900k) reached 70 hours before the end. 1M$ reached 45 hours before the end.
EDIT: Kickstarter link.
 
Base goal of 250k$ reached in 7 hrs.
 
-----------
 
http://gematsu.com/2015/06/degica-kickstarting-muv-luv-muv-luv-alternative-localization-this-summer
 
あああああああああああああああああああああああああああああああああああああああああああああ
 
mfw:
 

I can get behind this. Happy to have triggered the rise of the proletariat and the fall of the bourgeoisie with my like.

I can get behind this. Happy to have triggered the rise of the proletariat and the fall of the bourgeoisie with my like.

(I'm pretty sure I had taken your 1000th or 2000th like too, not sure which one it was)
(sorry I don't have dancing skeletons gifs or w/e I'm not Fiddle)
(please excuse me for the shitposting)

Sofmap usually sells second hand copies for dirt cheap. It's usually a good deal because the copies are essentially brand new but their market value goes way down because they're theoretically second hand.
Ren found a copy of Clannad for 570 yen once lol.

I read that whole thread while drinking my morning coffee and was able to put delicious salty tears in it. I never miss these threads, it's always so entertaining.

Non-loli content is less likely to be an issue.
Regarding customs, you should  try to fish around the internet regarding how they deal with packages in your country. Your package may get stopped for taxing, but that doesn't mean they'll open it - more than often they'll just look at the invoice or ask you for one. And I doubt anime titties are very visible through X-ray inspection.

I read that whole thread while drinking my morning coffee and was able to put delicious salty tears in it. I never miss these threads, it's always so entertaining.

>oldies
>nothing <2000 in the list
plz
also read umineko it's good extremely fun (and will indeed take enormous amounts of time)

It seems there are people insane enough to want to (re)play Extra as soon as possible. Interesting.

It seems there are people insane enough to want to (re)play Extra as soon as possible. Interesting.

Rooke, you're so old you don't even like middle-aged people songs anymore.
But well, who watches eurovision for the songs anyway. Those were the true highlights, showing that Sweden really understands what Eurovision is all about:
 

Rooke, you're so old you don't even like middle-aged people songs anymore.
But well, who watches eurovision for the songs anyway. Those were the true highlights, showing that Sweden really understands what Eurovision is all about:
 

Bitch please.
 
 

Whenever something important happens in the US, the rest of the world holds onto its breath because it could have consequences on them too. That's becoming less and less true but it very much still is. Example given: if Trump gets elected the rest of the world kinda has to care about it, because four years of US policy denying climate changes is going to bring the impending environmental crisis a good 10 or 20 years earlier. So of course we're gonna care and we're gonna know about it because 1) it will be discussed in our local media 2) information about it is readily available in a language everyone (more or less) can read. 
Of course we're not gonna have the same point of view as an insider, and we won't be able to grasp some cultural intricacies. It's harder to discuss gun policies in the US when aspects of the issue are so specific to US culture, for example. I'm ready to make mistakes and be corrected if I ever try to talk about that topic (it doesn't interest me that much though).
On the specific topic at hand, as already explained, western representative democracies have a lot in common, the US system and the french system were even founded by people who shared fairly similar ideas. Some of their flaws are gonna be broadly the same, others are going to be more specific to each country. The point is not even to bash one system or another here, I think both are shit. If I'm getting something terribly wrong in what I'm saying I'm ready to listen but I can't really do much if all I'm being told is "you're ignorant".

bigfatround is obviously trolling, please don't answer to him and don't turn to nonsensical US-bashing. Considering how defensive people were already this thread is done otherwise.

The major problem in our government in America isn't too much democracy, it's that we use democracy against our better interests, because those in the game control the rules, and they play off the pervasive mindset that you *have* to vote for someone with a (D) or an (R) next to his or her name. George Washington, upon leaving office, had warned everyone about the dangers of political parties. Probably one of the wisest things he ever said - too bad no one listened. The two-party system has been indoctrinated into the collective mindset since just before 1800, and we collectively refuse to break out of the rut. This is also due in part because the campaign finance rules and other portions of campaigning are completely biased against third-party opponents. And mass media only helps fuel that by selecting only certain candidates for debates (which tend to be rubbish anyway). When presented with a decent third option, the party most likely to suffer from a loss of votes due to that candidate then goes on the attack with phrases like, "A vote for Valmore is a vote for SolidBatman" This message paid for and sponsored by OriginalRen for President, further discouraging potential third party votes by using scare tactics that voting for a third party candidate only enables the nemesis to win and you're throwing your vote away. Etc.
Is it any wonder the US barely gets 50% voter turnout on an election year? Hell, look at the election now just with the primaries. Almost half the states in the nation won't even get a say in who the Republican candidate is because of this fucked up way we go state-by-state over months instead of having a single primary date for everyone. You can pretty much bank that statement with the Democrats, too, because the Bern is extinguished.

There's something funny in the schizophrenic way Sullivan displays side to side elitist conservatism with liberal values. I hear he's often been like this.
There's a latent fear of the masses that is kinda imbued throughout his whole article (if only by the claim that the issue is that there can be "too much democracy") but at the same time he can't really bring himself to say the increase of inclusivity and representativity of minorities, and the lifting of several anti-democratic barriers in the US system, are bad things, because you know that wouldn't be progressive, and liberals are always progressive,  history is obviously going towards more progress y'know.
Another type of schizophreny: that of the color-blind, gender-blind liberal. Sullivan is "obviously" for everyone's equality yet he manages to make several claims that "white male culture" is being demonized, which proves that he doesn't understand at all how minorities movement work, what's at stake and what are the issues, but also that he probably lives in a parallel world.
Anyway, the problem is not that there's too much democracy, it's that there's not enough. The article can flaunt all the increase in democracy there's been, it doesn't change the fact that there remains many structural issues with current political systems. With its Electoral College and its complete lack of regulations on campaign spending and funding and media coverage, the US arguably has "less" democracy in its system than we have in France, yet the french system is still terrible. On the politician side, structural issues make it so that representatives don't represent people at all. On the people's side, the fact that politics has been reduced to elections and that everything is done to de-politize a lot of other things make it so that people are not involved enough in politics. Democracy would gain a lot from having people more involved in politics overall, and that doesn't mean sitting there waiting for people to get interested into politics but making the system so that they do get involved.
Debates are fueled by emotion and personal position: no shit bro. That's not a new hot take specific to the internet, Spinoza already talked about all of this centuries ago. Human beings are not rational most of the time. Most of what drives us is our passions. Debates on political matters that would happen on a pacified public place where everyone would be equal and rational are mere fantasy.
And what's true of the masses is true of the so-called elite too. They're not more rational, they're not any less determined by the social, political, historical structures in which they evolve.
There is no virtuous people, so what we need is virtuous institutions, a system which will push everyone upwards, and that's probably not representative democracy. One could even wonder if it would be democracy period, maybe the anarchists were right all along, who knows. One thing is for sure, it's that on the contrary the internet, through its network, horizontal, decentralized structure is a huge step forward. It may take a while but it will, like any structure, have deep effects our society. Assuming we don't all die before, of course.

There's something funny in the schizophrenic way Sullivan displays side to side elitist conservatism with liberal values. I hear he's often been like this.
There's a latent fear of the masses that is kinda imbued throughout his whole article (if only by the claim that the issue is that there can be "too much democracy") but at the same time he can't really bring himself to say the increase of inclusivity and representativity of minorities, and the lifting of several anti-democratic barriers in the US system, are bad things, because you know that wouldn't be progressive, and liberals are always progressive,  history is obviously going towards more progress y'know.
Another type of schizophreny: that of the color-blind, gender-blind liberal. Sullivan is "obviously" for everyone's equality yet he manages to make several claims that "white male culture" is being demonized, which proves that he doesn't understand at all how minorities movement work, what's at stake and what are the issues, but also that he probably lives in a parallel world.
Anyway, the problem is not that there's too much democracy, it's that there's not enough. The article can flaunt all the increase in democracy there's been, it doesn't change the fact that there remains many structural issues with current political systems. With its Electoral College and its complete lack of regulations on campaign spending and funding and media coverage, the US arguably has "less" democracy in its system than we have in France, yet the french system is still terrible. On the politician side, structural issues make it so that representatives don't represent people at all. On the people's side, the fact that politics has been reduced to elections and that everything is done to de-politize a lot of other things make it so that people are not involved enough in politics. Democracy would gain a lot from having people more involved in politics overall, and that doesn't mean sitting there waiting for people to get interested into politics but making the system so that they do get involved.
Debates are fueled by emotion and personal position: no shit bro. That's not a new hot take specific to the internet, Spinoza already talked about all of this centuries ago. Human beings are not rational most of the time. Most of what drives us is our passions. Debates on political matters that would happen on a pacified public place where everyone would be equal and rational are mere fantasy.
And what's true of the masses is true of the so-called elite too. They're not more rational, they're not any less determined by the social, political, historical structures in which they evolve.
There is no virtuous people, so what we need is virtuous institutions, a system which will push everyone upwards, and that's probably not representative democracy. One could even wonder if it would be democracy period, maybe the anarchists were right all along, who knows. One thing is for sure, it's that on the contrary the internet, through its network, horizontal, decentralized structure is a huge step forward. It may take a while but it will, like any structure, have deep effects our society. Assuming we don't all die before, of course.

@Down
 

It's been going on the same thing that has been going on in the "gaming" community those last few years, because it reveals issues that are endemic to "geek" culture as a whole, despite all the people who want to believe that "it's just a few assholes on the internet".
http://www.newstatesman.com/culture/2015/04/how-hugo-awards-got-very-own-gamergate

It's been going on the same thing that has been going on in the "gaming" community those last few years, because it reveals issues that are endemic to "geek" culture as a whole, despite all the people who want to believe that "it's just a few assholes on the internet".
http://www.newstatesman.com/culture/2015/04/how-hugo-awards-got-very-own-gamergate

It's shit™.

*rereads his blog posts*
There was some irony in my statement. I don't think rankings are good indicators of quality for various reasons which I can expand on, but I also don't think they're completely useless: they do bring some amount of information.
My point was that behind the casual dismissal of these kinds of rankings that you'll often see around the internet, there's often the underlying idea that most people are dumb and have bad tastes, and the other idea that completes this point of view that we, ourselves, wouldn't bandwagon over something popular and are free of the various external influences that we see in other people. Needless to say that I think both of those ideas are very naive, although they're extremely hard to get rid of, especially the second one.
Now, about rankings. If you wanted to correlate ranking with quality, even if it were to a weak degree, you'd first need to define quality. Good luck with that. Do pieces of fiction have inherent, objective qualities? That's already a vast topic that could lead to a long discussion.
Let's make a hypothesis: pieces of fiction do have objective qualities, but we can't access them directly. A given reader will have an experience of reading through which some objective qualities of a piece of fiction have a subjective effect on him. (notice I made a semantic shift here: I'm talking about qualities, i.e. properties that can be "positive" or "negative", rather than an abstract "quality": we can assume for the sake of the argument that these qualities can be summed to give a "quality".)
Let's now assume that the sum of a bunch of experiences-of-reading can give a good idea of what the objective qualities, and thus the quality, of a given piece of fiction is. That's already a lot of assumption, but the "quality" we reach in the end is still a very multi-dimensional, complex item. A ranking is the result of collapsing this on a one-dimensional, numerical scale. Collapse a 2D drawing onto a line and you lose a lot of information: same thing here.
IF the complex, multi-dimensional items can be organized into a hierarchy, there's no guarantee that this hierarchy will be preserved in any way when you collapse to one dimension.
I have no idea where I'm going with my weird and obscure metaphor but the gist of it is that even assuming "quality" exists and can be clearly defined, it's irreducible, even in a weak way, to an average score.
Let's take a much more empirical approach to this: here's a social psychology experiment[citation needed]. An internet site gives the possibility to download a bunch of songs, and people can rank them according to their preferences. Those rankings then make up a global ranking. In one instance of the test, people have access to the global ranking, in another instance they don't.
In the first case, within a few hours a clear global ranking established itself with some songs being clearly at the top. In the second case the votes were all equally dispersed, no song ever clearly took the top of the ranking.
What would happen if people inputted their scores on vndb without having access to the ranking and without ever having contacts with VN communities? Who knows. The result would certainly be different from the experiment: the songs were chosen to be of a rather similar quality (I haven't looked up the precise protocol).
I think that what all of this makes clear is that rankings are indicators of popularity (although uncertain ones...), and popularity affects our opinions, so rankings do give us interesting information that we should consciously take into account (because otherwise we'll unconsciously take them into account...). You could also say that they play into what "interests" us, or that they give us information on the people that vote in them rather than on the works themselves.
But saying they can measure, even in a weak and non-certain way, quality, throws us back to the immensely complicated question of what the hell is quality anyway. I would like to believe there's indeed some sort of "quality" to be found in popularity, but I can't justify it.
 
edit: well shit this is way too long and nobody will read it now ._.

*rereads his blog posts*
There was some irony in my statement. I don't think rankings are good indicators of quality for various reasons which I can expand on, but I also don't think they're completely useless: they do bring some amount of information.
My point was that behind the casual dismissal of these kinds of rankings that you'll often see around the internet, there's often the underlying idea that most people are dumb and have bad tastes, and the other idea that completes this point of view that we, ourselves, wouldn't bandwagon over something popular and are free of the various external influences that we see in other people. Needless to say that I think both of those ideas are very naive, although they're extremely hard to get rid of, especially the second one.
Now, about rankings. If you wanted to correlate ranking with quality, even if it were to a weak degree, you'd first need to define quality. Good luck with that. Do pieces of fiction have inherent, objective qualities? That's already a vast topic that could lead to a long discussion.
Let's make a hypothesis: pieces of fiction do have objective qualities, but we can't access them directly. A given reader will have an experience of reading through which some objective qualities of a piece of fiction have a subjective effect on him. (notice I made a semantic shift here: I'm talking about qualities, i.e. properties that can be "positive" or "negative", rather than an abstract "quality": we can assume for the sake of the argument that these qualities can be summed to give a "quality".)
Let's now assume that the sum of a bunch of experiences-of-reading can give a good idea of what the objective qualities, and thus the quality, of a given piece of fiction is. That's already a lot of assumption, but the "quality" we reach in the end is still a very multi-dimensional, complex item. A ranking is the result of collapsing this on a one-dimensional, numerical scale. Collapse a 2D drawing onto a line and you lose a lot of information: same thing here.
IF the complex, multi-dimensional items can be organized into a hierarchy, there's no guarantee that this hierarchy will be preserved in any way when you collapse to one dimension.
I have no idea where I'm going with my weird and obscure metaphor but the gist of it is that even assuming "quality" exists and can be clearly defined, it's irreducible, even in a weak way, to an average score.
Let's take a much more empirical approach to this: here's a social psychology experiment[citation needed]. An internet site gives the possibility to download a bunch of songs, and people can rank them according to their preferences. Those rankings then make up a global ranking. In one instance of the test, people have access to the global ranking, in another instance they don't.
In the first case, within a few hours a clear global ranking established itself with some songs being clearly at the top. In the second case the votes were all equally dispersed, no song ever clearly took the top of the ranking.
What would happen if people inputted their scores on vndb without having access to the ranking and without ever having contacts with VN communities? Who knows. The result would certainly be different from the experiment: the songs were chosen to be of a rather similar quality (I haven't looked up the precise protocol).
I think that what all of this makes clear is that rankings are indicators of popularity (although uncertain ones...), and popularity affects our opinions, so rankings do give us interesting information that we should consciously take into account (because otherwise we'll unconsciously take them into account...). You could also say that they play into what "interests" us, or that they give us information on the people that vote in them rather than on the works themselves.
But saying they can measure, even in a weak and non-certain way, quality, throws us back to the immensely complicated question of what the hell is quality anyway. I would like to believe there's indeed some sort of "quality" to be found in popularity, but I can't justify it.
 
edit: well shit this is way too long and nobody will read it now ._.