korolev

I don't think he's rich, but I don't think he's poor. I think he's moderately well off, but not well off enough to buy a mansion.

He's only come into the money recently. The pre-CBS days at Giant Bomb weren't a financial wonderland - they were actually losing money for a while there. Jeff and Co aren't "poor" - Vinny was able to move due to his salary, after all. Brad and Ryan don't look like they are starving.

I'd peg Jeff, Brad, Ryan, Vinny, Alex, Drew and Patrick as Middle-class. But only recently middle class.

And not having kids DOES free up a LOT of money. Do you have any idea how much it costs to give a kid a decent life? How much the extra food, clothing, supplies, necessities, schooling and health-care costs when bringing up a child? It's a LOT OF MONEY. To give a kid a good life, we're talking about tens of thousands dollars minimum, and more like hundreds of thousands of dollars as a good average (over the life of the child, from Age 0 to 18). That stuff's expensive. My family have undoubtedly spent more than 100,000 dollars on me over the course of my childhood, and no I wasn't richy-rich living in a mansion.

The British initially, when they first arrived, tried (but not very hard) to treat them with some respect. However, this didn't last. Colonies tended to grow outwards and the Indians did not share the Colonist's ideas of "land-ownership". To many Native Americans (and to many people today), the idea that individuals could "own" large tracts of land was entirely bizarre to them, and they didn't understand why the Europeans would need to expand and take more and more land. It also didn't help that for the early years of Colonial America, Tobacco was the prime export and the prime money-maker, and Tobacco has a habit of exhausting the soil if it's planted too much. As a result, the tobacco farmers had to get more land because they rendered their own land barren.

Some Brits tried to reach deals with the Native Americans... only for other brits to promptly break those deals. As one Native American chief once said "White men have too many chiefs". Often, the elders of a tribe would reach a genuine deal with a colonel or a general... only for the higher ups to overturn that deal without informing the natives. This sort of thing would happen later with the US Americans.

Now, when the Revolution happened, the Brits made a lot of deals with the Natives, promising them all sorts of things if the Revolution was suppressed. They gave them lots of guns, ammo and supplies. Not all Native tribes allied themselves with the british, but many did. When the British were defeated, a lot of Native Americans were genuinely upset. If you see old-timey photos of Native Americans who were involved in those wars, some of them still proudly bore Union Jack flags in their homes and settlements, even though they were very old. They really thought the British would have given them a better deal.

WOULD the british have given them a better deal? History suggests they would not have been any better off under the British. Given what the Brits did in Australia and India, it's highly, highly,highly unlikely they would have fared any better under a British regime. My gut says that the British alliance with the Natives was just a ploy to get them to fight for them. The Brits were absolute masters at getting other people to fight in their wars. They almost certainly would have broken their promises to the Natives later.

I don't have anything against the British - I'm half-British myself and I like the UK and I am genuinely amazed at how much the UK invented and discovered. So much of our technology and science came from the UK. But I can't deny the conduct or history of the UK either, and History shows that if the British had won... things would not have turned out any differently for the Native Americans.

My First Impressions:

• Hey! They're actually trying to craft a story! I don't know if it pays off, but at least Treyarch is trying. So there's that
• Great! You can actually customize your loadout before the mission starts!
• First Mission - killing whole lot of African people who attack with Machetes. On behalf of an African Warlord. Who shoots and tortures prisoners. Yeah. Nice. Actually, I don't know what to think of it. Are we supposed to be cheering on this obvious monster who will undoubtedly inflict pain on his own people, or are we being shown an unsavory glimpse at CIA actions in Africa?
• Okay second mission begins and...... crash. Freeze. Sound still plays but the game freezes during the opening cinematic. A missile hits the helicopter, the camera goes all slow-mo and then the game freezes up. I am playing the PC version - my Computer is quite new and can handle BF3 at full settings just fine. I have an nVidia GTX 580 and a pretty good CPU. It's not my hardware. I verify integrity of the game files, and Steam says it's fine. I restart my computer, I set everything to low, I updated my Graphics Drivers - nope. Still freezes in exactly the same spot. No, I am not a pirate. I paid for my copy. The game just freezes up at that point, EVERY. DAMN. TIME.
• Well, I'd like to play more of it, but I can't. Black Ops 1 had technical jank, and it's good to see that Treyarch, with all of its millions upon millions of dollars, is continuing the fine tradition of releasing busted PC versions of its games. Great. This is the first game in a long time that I've had issues with. In fact, it's the first game since..... the Original Black Ops.
• Sigh. Treyarch, you're working with OLD tech. Your engine is old and its been used so many times before, that I find it surprising that you still continue to have issues with it. I am reinstalling it, in the vain, vain hope that it won't freeze. I am 95% certain that after it has reinstalled, it will continue to merrily freeze at exactly the same point again and again, and I'll have to wait a day or two before they belatedly release a patch (which will probably stuff up something else).

Galactic Exploration would be nice. That was pretty good in ME1, despite the crappy Mako. Playing as yet another Human Spectre would be a bad idea.

I really wouldn't want to see a Wing-Fighter like space-fighting game, because that is not BioWare's strength. What strength that BioWare has (that hasn't gone away) lies almost purely in Storytelling and World-Building.

I never read any of my replies BECAUSE I AM A COWARD WHO DREADS CONFRONTATION OR ANY SOCIAL INTERACTION!

Nah. You've done what all of us have wanted to do at some point. Since you didn't actually hit anyone, you're fine. They shouldn't have been talking.

That's just weird. Well, I won't be using those.... uh... outfits.

Tetris. You can't hate tetris. If you say you hate tetris, you must be confusing it with its much maligned cousin, hatris. That game had hats instead of blocks. It's okay to hate that game.

But not tetris.

I keep thinking about Dragon Age II. Now, I liked Dragon Age II - but it was just such a let down. It was so vastly inferior to Dragon Age Origins, in so many ways. A decent game on its own, a shallow, pale wretched thing when compared to the first Dragon Age.

Wow. Silicon Knights still exists?!