Kaname

Thank you for addressing this Abby. Not a perfect apology I guess, but it's live and difficult to do, so I hope everybody understands there might be a word missing. The intent seems to be there to me. To demand more from Abby seems petty, and to demand the podcast to be taken down seems unreasonable considering the podcast itself was pretty good in my opinion.

I also hope that there wasn't anybody thinking you invited this person on while knowing about these allegations. Everything about this seems to point that it was a mistake, that you thought this was a good person. Not like there aren't any other possible guests you could've picked from, that would still be less represented on this site or in general. I have no doubt about Abby's intentions.

I also want to point out that I don't think this was a problem created by Abby. This guest seems like she was accepted by the majority of the crew. She's been on camera behind the scenes, was followed by multiple people of the crew, and there was that charity stream. I can easily see Abby looking at the rest of the crew, and thinking the vetting was done. I don't blame Abby specifically for making this mistake, everybody that created that feeling of "she's fine" contributed to that mistake. This is a difficult problem, which guests do you vet? It's not reasonably to vet every guest all the time, but I think that this guest should've been vetted (can't really tell if she was at this point). As long as the guest was on some major part of the site, then I don't think you need to vet them (as long as the comments don't indicate otherwise at least).

Seems that the show notes are in the "subtitle" field in the actual mp3 file. This also cuts off right at 254 characters, so even that doesn't include the complete show notes. I'm assuming that the producer's note would've been appended to the show notes in that field then, and that there's no other field that gets read by the general podcast apps. So that field wouldn't even be able to hold the complete producer's notes if you removed the show notes. Seems that that's not a good way to communicate important problems then.

There's also the problem that even the show notes can be a bit hidden in apps, I know I've listened to episodes without even seeing those, since it just plays the next episode without me needing to look at them. I think the best way to address this issue would've been by appending a bit of audio to the episode, surely that would've been possible since it's a simple mp3. Again though, thank you for addressing this in this show then, since now at least most people have heard it.

It also sounds that Abby was the only one responsible for the guest list. That doesn't sound like a good way to handle that. I have no problem with Abby picking the guests, but having multiple people look at a situation drastically cuts the amount of mistakes that slip through. Not saying that that would've necessarily helped here though, since I'm still incapable of finding any of this without looking at these comments. But I can see there being situations where it would help. Clearly it's important to do this right, and anything important shouldn't be left to a single person. If I'm mistaken about this, and there was some back and forth, then I'm sorry.

Maybe another way to let less of these errors slip through is by announcing the guest list earlier, to let people comment on it. I've seen people react to the announcement tweet with these allegations, so maybe if that tweet went out earlier the crew could've reacted to it and change the guest list or something. Though I assume these guest lists come in hot, so I don't know how much earlier you can reasonably post these guest list. Not sure how useful that also will be in practice, considering there will probably be a lot of noise in the comments, and going through them all to not let anything slip through is probably hard.

Again, thank you Abby for trying to create a unique episode, having different voices, and addressing this. And if any of this sounds condescending, then I apologize. I hope this was constructive, but without knowing the specific internal processes I'm assuming a lot here based on almost nothing.

@kennneth: Thanks for finding that. Yeah, I can imagine nobody commenting about that then since she wasn't on the main couch. Don't even know how many people watch those parts after the fact. No idea about how many people comment about that during the livestream though, there it's also easy to be drowned out I think.

@surelynotawalrus: Yup. I'm really not seeing that much outrage. Calls for GB to do better, links to some pretty horrible accusations, suggestions how to do better, but not that much outrage. Things I thought GB explicitly asked for last time. There are maybe a handful of comments saying some unreasonable things. Oh, and there are also a bunch of comments just saying they see no reason to believe the accusations, which is pretty cringe.

Biggest outrage seems to be about how easy this is to find, which I think is a bad discussion to have. I agree that it's not easy to find, but that shouldn't excuse you. The people saying it's easy to find are wrong I think, but that doesn't matter. I tried some simple combinations on duckduckgo, and I just can't find it myself without the help of these comments. So yes, I get the mistake, but it's still a mistake that should be called out. What makes this a bit messier is that people started commenting about her minutes after the announcement of the cast on twitter, and during chat, so at what point do you decide to take action? That's also a discussion I think is worth having, civilly of course.

@kennneth: I'm not seeing her appear on any of the @ Nite videos. Which one was it?

Having an editors note only on the site hidden because of some bad UX by a scrollbar feels kinda bad after just laughing extremely hard at Ubisoft only having a twitter video "apology" instead of it being in their actual show. Obviously what happened at Ubisoft is worse, but after that whole bit about believing accusers and not giving any platform to abusers, this response is pretty baffling to me.

I can see the actual choice to having Merritt on being a mistake, but 1, mistakenly doing something bad is also bad. And 2, there must've been other options? Other friends of the site, or coordinating vacations more?

To make it clear, I don't think this is extremely bad or anything, but this all doesn't really sit right with me. It just feels bad.

Bummer about the audio, but that skateboarding does seem extremely loud. Having a setup that lets you edit the audio after the fact would maybe be preferable when you don't have a producer in real time monitoring the audio, but I can't see that being painless to implement.

A lot of this game just seems unfinished or rushed though. That part of York not even having a cigarette, or characters not animating at all were pretty bad. That with terrible framerate and crashes and bad quest designs make me absolutely uninterested in this game.

Oh dang, nice! I was worried they would skip this week completely even though there's obviously important stuff to talk about. And Austin!

@aretak :True, one of my favorite renegade options was in ME1 in the mission where you first encounter Liara and you're escaping the cave as it's caving in. You encounter a Krogan and you have the option to engage in some conversation to get some more information, or you can choose the renegade option to just start blasting and get the hell out of there. It's not like there's a penalty for taking that conversation, I think you can even avoid the fight with the conversation, but I think it's a nice roleplaying option. Better than just being an asshole like most renegade options in the later games.

This example doesn't amount to long term gain really either, but more finishing the mission at any cost. I think I just hoped paragon would bite you in the ass once or twice, but it's almost always the "good" option.

The only reason Mordin budged on the genophage was because he realized the Krogans are needed for the war against the Reapers, as he said in last episode. As the Dalatrass says, this isn't needed. The sabotage is the best option, curing the genophage is short sighted and will result in war. You can't convince me Mordin made a mistake and this isn't true, as Mordin said "So many simulation. Effects of krogan population increase. All pointed to war. Extinction." Not a single simulation pointed to no war, it was a group of the best scientists of the most smart race in the galaxy, they would've made a ton of simulations. Mordin got emotional, and that doesn't make him right. Curing the genophage will lead to war, and it's an unnecessary fix. Not to mention that Salarian support for the crucible should be very important, maybe more so than Krogan support.

This is a great example of paragon vs renegade I think. It's not good vs evil, it's short term gain vs long term gain. The good of the few vs the good of the many.

Just a note, pretty sure this mission wasn't about to expire.

EDIT: Just reading some more and seems there's a bunch of conflicting information and I think the wiki isn't really 100% correct. My bad. These missions apparently have time limits: Grissom academy Tuchanka: bomb Lesuss: Ardat-yakshi monastery Arrae: ex-cerberus scientists. And there are a couple of things that are locked by finishing Priority: Tuchanka.