Claudus

It seems like he was already screwing up his life pretty well before SC2 was released:

"Fast forward to summer '10. By now I had moved out of three apartments with my friends. I lost three jobs. I tried being a drywaller, and a welder twice. In between my friends and I would do odd-jobs that lasted a week at a time then would get paid one large sum, then blow it all on alcohol and marijuana. Living literally off of pickle juice, beer, bread once in a while, redbull, and cigarettes, we found ourselves wasting our days away on the Xbox with nothing else to do but wait for a job. Finally, I had to move back into my mother's house (a big time alcholic, who is seperated 15 years now from my father, a raging, abusive in every way alcholic) and that's where I took the deep plunge into hellish unconciousness.

Waiting eagerly for years for the realease of Starcraft 2 I waited in line 2 hours at 2:00 am for the special release...."

So it seems that recessive traits, like blue eyes, will likely be bred out of humanity in relatively short order.

At least until full blown reproductive genetic manipulation comes into effect.

What a nonsensical comment.

> All you're doing here is endorsing sophistry over knowledge.

What? First, sophistry, has little to do with anything I wrote. Second, I'm most certainly endorsing knowledge.

> There's a place for logic and there's a place for facts.

Really? Do you have little slots for them on your spice rack? Logic and facts are the fabric of reality. This a comment I'd expect from someone desperately wanting to be right despite being pathologically wrong.

> Focusing on one over the other leads to persons being so "open-minded" that their brain falls out.

How was I focusing on one? Logic and facts are complimentary, and even if you somehow exclusively focused on one, how would that lead to extreme open-mindedness? And how is being open-minded bad? (You are also misusing the "being so open-minded their brain falls out" quote which is meant to meant to convey that you should be open-minded [good] but not foolishly accepting of poorly formulated ideas [bad]) What do you even mean by this comment? It is nonsense.

I think you read my comment, self identify as a hipster or "bullshitter", had an emotional response of wanting to retort and instead wrote a post that illustrated one of my points.

I'm a free thinker.

I don't really appreciate people who want to "sit around and wonder about shit they can look up". I'd much rather sit around and think or discuss things that cannot be looked up, to define myself as a person based on opinions I form within documented knowledge...

Do I personally subscribe to absolute or relative morality? Thanks to documented knowledge, I have a decent grasp of the concepts, so I can have an informed think about the question. On the other hand, I could sit around arguing with a bunch of hipsters trying to figure out what the difference is (if there's enough time left after the preceding argument over whether or not water boils at lower temperatures in high altitudes).

And honestly, I've always looked things up, I had a set of old encyclopedias I bought from the library for about $10 when I was a kid, and if they didn't have what I was looking for I could go to the actual library and look through drawers of cards or microfilm to find the answer. I remember looking stuff up on computers about 20 years ago on SIRS, and even before that via BBS files.

Finding information is mainstream now, and all the pseudo intellectuals are crying because their power base of personally invented knowledge is crumbling and they lack the mental faculties to think freely on a higher level and reason for themselves.

Indie game developer, Lazy 8 Studios just posted a developer diary for a game they are working on called "The Extrasolar Project" (http://www.exoresearch.com/)

The game allows you to control a rover on an alien planet as you explore and take hi-res photos of the planet's surface.

Lazy 8 Studios has previously released a Steampunk themed puzzle game called "Cogs" (http://www.cogsgame.com/)

Sure you can take part in them, but if you go to an invitation-only private party at 2 AM held at a separate hotel that less than 1% of the conference can actually get into and is thrown for the sole purpose of getting people drunk and doing inappropriate things, you shouldn't be surprised if there is some random inappropriate behavior, that's kind of the point.

And just to be clear, this is not gender specific harassment, as a male I would have preferred not to have experienced any of the following:

* Random drunk guy at a party suggesting that everyone sitting around a table playing black-jack instead play strip-poker, and being ignored until he tried to lean against a lamp and fell over with it.

* Naked people jumping into a pool, splashing me, and attempting to start a minor orgy.

* Walking into a room at a party where 2 guys and a girl were laying on a bed giggling at male/female pornography.

* Being groped by random men and women who half the time weren't actually trying to molest me, they were just too drunk to stand up straight.

* Having random women suggest that I should ask to see their breasts.

* etc.

But in the end, it doesn't really bother me, and I'm glad that those people had a chance to cut loose and get crazy. I've been to Las Vegas 20 to 30 times, and I've experienced far more inappropriate behavior outside of DEFCON than I have at the convention.

I was at a dozen or so different parties over 5 nights, and excepting a few of the small room parties, things were far tamer than standard Las Vegas fare.

I don't think I've met the author of the article, but if she stormed out of DEFCON 16, I'm curious to know why she was organizing the TCP/IP Drinking Game for DEFCON 18...

http://blog.valerieaurora.org/2008/07/27/what-is-the-val-up-...

There is a lot of drama that goes on at DEFCON, and I wouldn't be surprised to find out there's quite a bit more going on here.

I feel like the underlying complaint here is more along the lines of: "Some people want to go to Las Vegas, get drunk, leer at strippers, and call themselves elite. I disapprove of this type of behavior, and I am going to assert that as a woman I feel excluded, and in being excluded I am somehow being blocked from some theoretical opportunity in life that is only available under these conditions that I don't want to find myself in, I'd also like to write an article misrepresenting the issue for my amusement, and the status I may also gain from said article..."

And honestly, as long as you don't get naked and jump into a pool, you're probably pretty safe from sexual assault (as a woman at least). Women at DEFCON can generally take care of themselves, and some random groper is likely to get a beat-down from his victim.

In fact, the mysterious perpetrator at the bar disappearing into the crowd seems a little conveniently vague... and if it did indeed happen, and was at one of the Casino bars, there's a good chance it was done by a random tourist, since people see oddly dressed DEFCON attendees and think it's okay to grab their ass, etc.

In fact, the only sexual assault I saw this year was by drunk female tourists who decided it was okay to randomly grope men and women because they were wearing a kilt, had a mohawk, etc.

I just spent the past week in Las Vegas for my 15th DEFCON, I'm male.

The conference has so many different aspects, it really is better to break it into components, talks during the day, chill-out areas, CTF room, hardware/lockpicking villages, public/private night parties, hanging out at the bars all night, etc.

Here are some of my observations (for better or worse):

* If you're a woman, expect to get hit on dozens of times to varying degrees.

* Some people are drunk during the day, most people are drunk during the night.

* DEFCON attendees tend to be the personality types that make their own rules, and aren't well integrated socially.

* There are some (very few) attendees that seem to have mental problems, don't understand boundaries, and will do very inappropriate things; at least a few are usually banned or kicked out of the hotel or conference each year.

* I chatted with a cigarette girl in the Rio at one point, and asked her if she had been harassed a lot by DEFCON attendees, and she quantified it as, "Not really that badly (in comparison to other events)".

* Small private parties at night can get wildly inappropriate (these are not official DEFCON events, they are private parties hosted by attendees), you'll find naked people in pools at least a dozen times during the con, at least 2 or 3 instances of people engaging in some form of sexual intercourse, strippers, porn playing on a display in the corner, drugs, prostitutes (seemingly not having much success), etc.

This behavior is perpetrated by both male and female attendees, and in fact the average female attendee is worse than the average male attendee in my experience; although, women being in a great minority, you're much more likely to be on the receiving end of inappropriate behavior as a woman.

I had one girl tell me she comes to DEFCON just to meet guys, and said, "I get to have sex with any guy here I want".

This year alone I had female attendees I didn't know, or just met, slap me on the ass several times, had 2 drunk girls walk up and kiss my cheek, had my nipple tweaked once, had my crotch bumped/groped/etc. 3 times, and had a random assortment of other harassing behavior directed towards me (all of this was at night during the parties).

My friend was wearing a kilt, and at one point had a girl stop him to stick her head under the kilt so her friend could take a picture, and then followed it up by grabbing at his crotch while she was down there (in this instance the girls weren't DEFCON attendees, just random drunk women in a casino).

CONCLUSION?

* If you avoid the late night (especially unofficial) parties, bars, and drunken events in general, you are going to avoid most of the inappropriate (and worst) behavior.

* Female attendees will get hit on multiple times by lonely nerdy guys, I really don't know what to say about this, but if you stick to the actual convention, you probably won't endure much worse than bad pickup lines.

* DEFCON has the weirdest, smartest, oddly intense mixture of people I've ever met that mostly come to go completely insane and push boundaries of all kinds... It does have negatives, but the experience is something I look forward to all year long.

I completely disagree with the conclusions made by this article... I worked at a company that had issues, and when employees left, I always found out to some degree what they said in the exit interview.

Employees that were polite and constructive, but honest, in pointing out issues and problems earned much more respect from me than employees who sucked up.

Well, clearly, there is a strong correlation between a company existing and men being on the board.

That example doesn't really apply if tribes continually split and the more violent tribes continually kill off the less violent tribes.