Given a criteria list like this, it's really no wonder all video games receive passing grades from critics -- it'd be like if film reviews simply talked about if the image was bright enough and the sound wasn't too noisy.

It kinda represents a perfect commoditization of experience: I pay my money and I get reliable experience X, it will never make me feel uncomfortable, it will never challenge my beliefs, because it's not art, it's a consumer product and the customer is always right. All of your criteria basically boil down to: how much of my time will this thing waste before it becomes boring.

I suppose what we must never allow is anybody to talk about what's actually in a game, or what the things in games might mean, or what agenda the maker might have aside from merely making money. If anyone dares try that, and they offer anything other than fawning praise, they're evil SJWs who must be doxxed and shamed for persecuting my right to find identity in my consumer habits.

What I don't like is that people are stepping into my video games now, continuing to try and tell me what content is appropriate for me to see in the games and change them to suit their agendas.

This is a consequence of believing that video games are Art. When people claim that video games are creative works, they're saying that people have control over what's in them and that they express things, and that the people who enjoy video games receive this expression. When we talk about video games, granting that they are creative artworks, we can no longer say that they are "merely fun" or just "make money" and don't "have to stand for anything."

People who do media crit "step into" music, TV, films, books and everything else and try to tell people what's "appropriate," because art is all about cultural authority, laying down a marker and saying "this is what we are, this is what we believe in, this is what the artist and the viewer value." I don't think I've heard anyone since the 1960s call for censorship of anything, and if people are allowed to make whatever they want, in whatever medium, anyone else is allowed to say it's crap and state their reasons. That's cultural discourse.

I think most of the "gamer" counterarguments in the whole GamerGate fiasco are sophistic BS, but the one that's particularly egregious is the claim that video games simply are made to "make money," and the only reason trope or gameplay element X is in a video game is because that's what the Market wants, or that's the "only way" it could work. If you say that, that means that video games aren't creative, they have no redeeming value, they just waste time.

I'm really sorry if gamer-types thought video games were supposed to be some kind of "safe space" where they didn't have to worry about politics, or redeeming value, or what other people think. Nobody gets the privilege of operating is such a world, the only people who get "safe spaces" are the ignorant.

Yeah - it basically means that male humans aren't generally hung up on that kind of 'OMG impossible body-image expectations for boys to reach!!111!' bullshit.

Ah, some are. But then again we don't count male bulimia among our great public health crises.

it's time we tell them to man up and stop complaining about perceived sexism.

Mansplain it, if you will.

What makes you things that there aren't more than a few men pushing for this?

It certainly couldn't be any worse than the MPAA.

Ironically, the solution to the MPAA "problem" that many people propose, including Kirby Dick in This Film is Not Yet Rated, is film ratings by a government agency! I remember in that documentary in particular the British (government) film rating system is held up as an exemplar of the way it's "supposed" to work.

Most European countries have government film ratings, that's pretty par for the course over there. That a European state government agency would do video game ratings is natural. (Setting aside the question of wether or not rating "sexism" is an advisable thing.)

In Los Angeles buses and trains will add about 30 minutes total to the commute, mainly because the trains avoid the freeways. If you drive 10 miles around LA in the morning, you're just going to end up in a car for 60 minutes, it's unavoidable. I noticed this fall we hit sort of a tipping point and my public transit trips to work were actually occasionally FASTER than driving my own car, the freeways are that atrocious.

I use Uber too, for short hops or to get to train stations I can't get an express bus. But Uber doesn't do anything about traffic congestion, and in most dense cities congestion is one of the main problems they're trying to solve.

Now they get serious on this?

Democrats never wanted to reduce the security state, I'm not sure they ever even promised to do this. The security state is unpopular in a very general way but the status quo represents a very broad, resilient, bipartisan consensus. Everybody is willing to mouth platitudes about privacy and the Constitution, but nobody wants any concrete decisions hung around their neck, least of all the electorate.

It's more likely to happen now than any other time.

One of the main reasons they don't make an even half-hearted attempt to reign in the intelligence services is that it offers exactly zero upside and huge downside risk: if they do it, it won't really be a big plus to voters, since voters are generally pretty meh on civil liberties and everyone running for office is vaguely "pro-privacy" or some such.

On the other hand, if congress were to, say cut the NSAs budget, and then some terrorist incident occurred afterward, the people who cut the NSA's budget will instantly be blamed for "tying our hands" and not being "serious" about terrorism. CIA analysts will testify for congress that they had almost been able to stop it, but some new rule about warrants or something had kept them from getting a vital clue. And the voters will eat it up; the voters have made it completely clear that they are bedwetting, panic-stricken twerps at the very thought of terrorism and would do anything to stop it.

The voters and congress seem to be in basic agreement that terrorism is caused by a lack of CIA and NSA power, and the only way to stop terrorism is to give the CIA and NSA more power.

So yeah, a bunch of lame ducks are exactly the kind of people who you'd expect to pass reforms.

I'm not a lawyer, but...

Microsoft Corporation and its affiliates (“Microsoft”) promise not to assert any .NET Patents against you for making, using, selling, offering for sale, importing, or distributing Covered Code, as part of either a .NET Runtime or as part of any application designed to run on a .NET Runtime.

Because this language does not create an exchange, it probably does not form a legally binding agreement or covenant -- even if it did, this promise is certainly revocable at any time. Though, if Microsoft did refrain from "asserting patents" against developers for some amount of time, it would probably create an estoppel.

Avid has been in development and in release for about 25 years now; I think Adobe Premiere is been available since at least 1992. I think both have been available for longer than the Linux operating system, let alone any OSS video editing package.

Never say never. Don't underestimate the power of large numbers of people that have the same itch and are pointed in generally the same direction

Casual users will no change their platform in order to get a video editor. People cutting YouTubes and home videos, that want "image stabilization" and "hum removal" are going to continue to use whatever platform makes the most sense for their use case. If all an OSS editor has to offer is "works like iMovie but free," that won't be enough to get people to transition.

Professional users might switch an OS, most of them simply rent their equipment and the OS is less an issue. But in that case, the editing system has to support professional features -- media interchange with RED, ARRIRAW, AAF and OMF, ProRes quicktime, DPX, MXF, and a small army of color correction, machine control and metadata interchange platforms (most of these are licensed proprietary or FRAND standards); it has to offer realtime composition, color correction, LUTs for these at raw quality; it has to be able to manage and organize tens of terabytes of media, spanning hundreds of hours of shot material.

These are possible but this is totally not where an open source project's emphasis is going to be -- they're going to go for stability in the "home movie" use case, and amateur videographer features, because these will drive 99% of the feature requests. Also, because these people are developers, they'll make sure the program has an elaborate API and scripting interface, because OSS developers consider this a universal panacea for missing features, and anyone who wants unpopular features will be told to RTFM and write their own.

NB. I'm not sure if the Coen brothers ever made the transition to Final Cut Pro X. Most professionals haven't. After X came out most feature crews I know either have been keeping their FCP 7 installations going or transitioned back to Avid. A lot of the people on the very low end have mostly transitioned to Premiere Pro.

Though, I despise everything about my culture.

Saul of Tarsus, on the road to Damascus.

I know many emigres like you -- they all preach with the same zeal of the converted. They all come from Europe, they all despise their homelands, they all watch Fox News and adore their "adopted" homeland, right up to the point it dares not live up to their crank libertarianism and Euro-chauvinism. They have no homeland, they have no people, they have no loyalty to anything, to any place or anyone. They are in thrall to an idea, a magical chimera. Would you really rather live under Napoleon than François Hollande? Is it really worth a couple nice bridges and the Invalides? Napoleon's lust for glory probably would have killed you around Smolensk. It's all a stupendous fraud.

The "promise" of America, the golden door for teaming hordes yearning to breathe free, that's all gone. All that's left is a destination for Norwegian racists, and French people that hate pied-noirs, and Brits who want to save on their income taxes. That what America has become.

I always find it funny that despite all the blame on unions there's so much Hollywood outsourcing to places like Australia and Canada with much stronger unions.

I don't know if Australia has stronger film unions than the US, Britain is another common runaway production destination and their union is moribund (thanks Maggie). These place aren't attractive due to the cheap labor, they're attractive because Australia and Canada use government tax revenues and credits to pay producers to shoot there. Many medium-budget productions in Canada can expect 30-50% of their entire budget to be refunded by the state in rebates, a similar situation exists in many US states, that these states are also non-union is important but not decisive -- it makes sense though, considering production tax rebates are basically giveaways to producers, money they pocket and don't pass along to their employees.

A somewhat troubling trend over the last 20 years is more and more entertainment capital and patronage coming from governments, and those governments using this leverage to basically get propaganda -- American military films (including the likes of the Transformers films) would only be the most egregious example of this.

Politics aside, how is it that republicans want to fuck over everyone but the privileged and corporate, yet get such widespread support from the people who will suffer most from their policies?

This is the "What's the Matter with Kansas?" problem. The short answer is, most rural populist types would probably fare better under a Democratic economic regime, but it really wouldn't be that much better. On the other hand, Republicans make few concrete promises economically, but they make broad promises about how they will sustain rural culture -- they fight for gun rights, and for the protection of traditional religious values, and against abortion, and gays. And in the end both parties mostly work in the interests of large corporations. In the end, Democrats promise a Starbucks in every town, and Republicans promise a cross on every door.

Also Democrats are generally supportive of state services, and things like Obamacare, which would improve the lot of poor voters in general, but a lot of poor people are simply morally opposed to accepting "welfare," and the slightly-better-off people around them are all downright hostile to the idea. This persists even if the "welfare" in question is completely pro-market, means tested, economically justified and everything else -- it's because American culture has moralistic, puritanical beliefs about thrift and work that are impervious to facts. The liberal tendency in American politics promises poor people a leg up, at the cost of their soul and their meritocratic ideals -- they'll get ahead but "everyone" will know they don't deserve it; meanwhile the conservative tendency promises a boot on your neck, but offers the guarantee that when you get the boot, you'll feel like you deserve it. People are attracted to appearance of order and justice, even if it hurts them.