Honestly if you're using the phone for significant amounts of typing anyway you're doing it wrong.

If touch keyboards were the shiny new future they would have been widely adopted after the ZX-81.

I want a variation on the Nokia E70, best design I've ever had the pleasure of using.

http://cdn2.gsmarena.com/vv/pi...

http://thechive.com/2012/12/06...

I can't be the only one getting a squee moment from the fact that we might finally have a chance to create practical laser weapons.

And so the police were duly called and the individual in question was arrested, right? Women aren't "commonly raped and abused by men" and neither are they beleaguered victims of a relentless onslaught of rapey abuse on the internet, at least no more so than anyone else. I've had lunatics tell me they were going to rape my mother in front of me - end result, they got banned like the losers they were and I never thought about them again, until now at least.

There's a new thing going on, you should check it out, it's called #womenagainstfeminism. Lot of interesting messages for the aspiring rape hysteria peddler on there.

Supported by what you intellectual goatse, the paranoid online ravings of professional victims getting PTSD from twitter who are in fact the most privileged people to ever walk the earth?

And men don't get it? Jesus christ.

Yes and ever since they invented that "slap people over the internet" app patriarchy has grown ever stronger, right?

You incredible thundercuntly deliverer of syphillis to prepubescent children, here's a picture for you.

http://www.pokket.tv/wp/wp-con...

It's a bit baffling how "some economists" weren't fully cognisant of what would happen when the minimum wage was raised. I mean it's not as though it's the first time it has happened, the effects should be well known by now. Kind of reminds me of the old joke:

A mathematician, an accountant and an economist apply for the same job.

The interviewer calls in the mathematician and asks "What do two plus two equal?" The mathemetician replies "Four." The interviewer asks "Four, exactly?" The mathematician looks at the interviewer incredulously and says "Yes, four, exactly."

Then the interviewer calls in the accountant and asks the same question "What do two plus two equal?" The accountant says "On average, four - give or take ten percent, but on average, four."

Then the interviewer calls in the economist and poses the same question "What do two plus two equal?" The economist gets up, locks the door, closes the shade, sits down next to the interviewer and says "What do you want it to equal?"

You're kind of putting the cart before the horse here. Marketing costs enormous amounts of money but it is effective, that's why publishers keep paying for it. People buy because of the marketing as much as the content.

So if you were a publisher would you prefer to put all that money behind a) a formulaic, uninspired but proven work or b) a new, exciting, but unproven creation? There's a good reason they keep making remakes of remakes.

If new and original content were to benefit from the kind of marketing muscle that gets put behind the formulaic stuff, it would probably have much more of an impact.

I just checked out Patreon, maybe I'm doing it wrong but when I clicked "writing" I got a mish mash of podcasts, comics, programming projects and art, with little writing to be found. Unless I'm missing a trick here they really need to get their categorisation sorted.

Hahaha!

Correct, as far as I'm aware it grew out of wargames and borrowed rules from diverse sources both mechanically and conceptually. Vancian magic is as close to a working interpretation of western magickal beliefs (Crowley et al) as could be envisioned, although with less emphasis on demons. Prepare your spell, cast your spell, spell gone.

Also fantasy was already a proven market long before it was published, Moorcock's Elric first showed up back in 1961 for example. As the game developed it changed from a skirmish style system to a single character game and people started to act out their roles almost spontaneously, a fascinating phenomenon.