Immortal_Guy

The part towards the end of Phoneix Wright: Trials and Tribulations where you briefly play as Miles Edgeworth was by far my favourite bit in that (or any other) Phoenix Wright game.

I guess, but the speed and stupidity with which he's launched into this really is mind-boggling. To give an example of the (I presume?) unintended consequences of the way he's doing things: a Glaswiegan vet (who grew up and studied in Italy) was trying to return from a holiday in Costa Rica. She merely had a connecting flight in New York, and was still banned from boarding the plane by this executive order, because she was born in Iran and travels with an Iranian passport. (Thankfully the power of crowdfunding has assured that she can fly home by an alternative route).

This is a surefire indicator that Trump has not thought about - or doesn't care about - the consequences of his actions in the slightest.

[PS. I mention that she grew up in Italy, rather than Iran, to highlight how stupid and thoughtless a blanket ban based on passports is - even if one takes Trump's unapologetically racist position.]

The thing I find, if not most horrible, at least most telling about all this is how thoughtlessly it seems to have been rushed through, consequences-be-damned. That seems inexcusable even if you've fully bought in to Trump's (horrifying and ridiculous) position.

Bending over backwards to see things from what's allegedly his point of view - even if you thought that the US was at grave risk from terrorist attacks, and even if you thought that these attacks were all being comitted by refugees(!), and even if you thought the situation was so imminently dangerous that the only solution was to totally suspend the entire refugee programme(!!) for a while so you can work out what to actually do, and *even* if you thought the threat was so great that everyone(!!!) from a random smattering of countries should be banned from travel to be "on the safe side" - why *on earth* would you have it all take place instantly? From what I gather, it's not much of an exaggeration to say that people mid-air while he signed the damn thing were detained on arrival. That makes no sense at all! Surely anyone with the slightest shred of thoughtfulness would have implemented these restrictions gradually and with at least a little forewarning.

The way this was handled proves that Donald Trump either doesn't think, doesn't care, or quite possibly both.

The fact that the British prime minister initally refused to condemn this - and when she finally did, did so only in the weakest possible terms - makes me sick.

Valkyrie Profile is turn based, but there's an element of timing your party members' attacks to combo enemies. I did find the game massively impenetrable, though, so I'm not sure if this is a recommendation or just a mention.

This happens to me exclusively with old games from charity shops. I'm amazed that so many charity shops still stock PS2 games, and whenever something interesting emerges from the sea of old FIFA games people are somehow still giving in I feel compelled to buy it. I normally at least intend to try them, but I've got copies of Ring of Red and the original Disgaea that I think will never see the inside of my PS2. Disgaea is particularly intimidating, but at least it's on the shelf, waiting for when I next have a 100-hour hole in my life.

In a similar vein, I ended up leaving a charity shop with the old PC adventure game Starship Titanic because it had Douglas Adams' name on the box - but after buying it realised it'd take more than Douglas Adams to give me the fortitude to try an old PC adventure game. It sits unloved to this day - I guess I should just donate it back!

@bdead said:

It seems wierd to me to use the current rate of technological progress to guess the chances that the entire universe is a simulation. If it were a simulation, then there's no reason to suppose it's a particularly realistic simulation of the "real" world - and so why should the way that science and technololgy look to us have anything to do with "real" science, in the non-simulated world?

The same consideration applies to looking for any sort of "evidence" that everything's a simulation - there's no way of knowing what evidence to look for, because if you don't know what the "real" reality looks like how can you expect to know what kinds of things are and aren't artifacts of the simulation? It's true that you might think "quantisation" is something that'd happen in a computer simulation that we'd do, but if all our computers are simulated then there's no reason to believe that "real" computers work anything like them.

@diz: I hope things'll be OK too! I don't think this is going to be the death of UK higher education (or, I certainly hope not!), I just think it will cause some damage, at least in the short term - with the main questions being "how much" and "for how long". The annoying thing is that even if the pain turns out to be merely short term, I don't really see any long-term gains. To be honest, that sums up my views post-Brexit in general - we seem to certainly be in for short term pain, how short and how painful to be seen, and I don't see any long term benefit. Best case scenario is "this might not be too bad", rather than "what a wonderful and bright future we'll have". Believe me, I hope I'm wrong!

I liked everything about the game except the checkpoint system. For those who haven't played, you have 3 health bars and the boss has about 6 - each time you knock of one of the boss's, you get one of yours back and progress to the next stage of the fight. Each time the boss knocks off one of yours, you reset to the start of that stage. If you lose all three, you die.

It felt too forgiving in a lot of circumstances - I could play really badly, barely scrape through each "stage" after multiple deaths, and still beat the boss first try because I happened to make my mistakes in the right places. On the other hand, there were a few bosses where I'd sail through the main fight first time, doing really well, and then get killed 3 times quickly in the final "bullet hell hold-out" section that each boss seemed to have - cue about 10 minutes of tedious replaying to have another shot at it. I can see what they were going for with the "push-pull" healthbar system - it gives you time to learn the boss's patterns on your first attempt, and also makes outright faliure have a consequence - but it just ened up feeling really uneven.

Also, having beaten the main game without too much trouble, the "true" final boss is a circle of bullet hell I feel I will never be prepared for...

@diz: It's interesting that you quote the Royal Society in support of the "Brexit won't be too bad for science" case, when they were very much not in favour of Brexit. To quote a concluding statement from one of their press releases on the matter:

"If the UK chooses to leave the EU on 23 June it will affect funding and the mobility of scientists and their collaborations. It would also impact our ability to influence the policy and regulations that can affect an international undertaking like science."

With only a little reading between the lines, "affect" means "adversely affect", and the "impact" is not a good one. If you're willing to restrict consideration to the 150 Royal Society members who signed an open letter a few months ago, you get in even stronger terms that Brexit would be "a disaster" for UK sicence.

Obviously their conclusion doesn't change the statistics you quoted, and it may be that despite their best efforts they came to a flawed conclusion from the evidence they reviewed. And I guess it's not totally clear from the money alone how they concluded that Brexit would be a bad thing.

On the one hand, it was stated throughout the debate that the UK is a winner in the EU when it comes to the research spend - in terms of the research budget taken alone, the UK contrubited about £5 billion during 2007-13, and got £8 billion back. But the obvious response to this is "the UK was a net contributor to the *total* EU budget, so surely we can just spend some of that extra money we've "saved" on research". That would be nice, but it ignores (A) the fact that when you consider the massive economic and administrative fallout of Brexit we're unlikely to have made much of a net saving at all (see also: £350 million for the NHS "pledge"), and (B) in the current sprit of public cuts and restrictions on university funing, is the UK government is really going to step in and replace the research money universities are losing? And it's universities who'll be hardest hit by this - as the graph you've posted shows, a huge proportion of the EU funding goes to them (and the pdf you cited makes clear that the converse is also true - a huge proportion of our universities' funding comes from the EU).

This isn't to mention the fact that loads of the income from universities comes from the tuition "fees" of EU students - which are currently paid for by their governments. If you're in any EU country (except the UK, because our government doesn't want to foot the bill for this kind of thing), studying in any other EU country is free. But that will probably cease to be the case once we leave, and then our EU students will all go to the many other universities in the EU where their studies *are* free - cutting out a huge source of income for the UK universities.

The double blow of losing EU research funding and EU students means that universities are in a real panic about Brexit, and it's really going to hurt their research. Perhaps you don't think university research is so important, and would rather even more money was poured into business R&D. For my part, I'm about to start a PhD next year so obviously I'm biased in favour of universities - but I can also see firsthand how worried everyone is about this. UK universities currently punch way above their weight on the world stage, and I worry that that might stop being the case. I haven't even gotten started on the damage it would cause to research collaboration if European researchers don't retain free movement (and UK researchers don't retain the right to work in EU countries), because this post is getting seriously bloated. But - whatever you think about it as a whole - you can't spin Brexit as something that'll be good for research. That's just not true.

tl;dr: Businesses may continue to be fine, but this'll really do a number on universities (particularly ones who don't do very commercial research).

@extintor: Perhaps you're right. For what it's worth, Farage went on the record as saying "in a 52-48 referendum, this would be unfinished business by a long way". Of course, he's not saying that now! I hate to say it, but on that subject I agree with him. A 50/50 split is not a democratic consensus. If it were 70/30, I'd drop the issue immediatley.