XCOM: Enemy Unknown - initial impression

XCOM: Enemy Unknown was released on Monday, and according to Steam, I've played about nine hours so far. So I thought it was time for my initial assessment.

Note that the original game, X-COM: UFO Defense (in Europe, it was UFO: Enemy Unknown) from 1994 is one of my all-time favorite games. I played it for years, and it's still great (and still available at GamersGate or Steam).

I would have gladly bought a remake of the game if they'd only updated the graphics. Heck, I wouldn't even have needed that - just some new terrains for battles. (I've played it so many times that I've gotten tired of the old ones.)

I had my doubts when I first heard about XCOM: Enemy Unknown, the new Firaxis remake. But the reviewers raved about their early views of the game. As far as I could tell, opinions were unanimous that this was going to be a worthy successor to our beloved classic X-COM.

Perhaps it was inevitable, given a build-up like that, but after nine hours playing the game, I'm quite disappointed. If it hadn't been called XCOM, I might be more positive. The game has been fun to play, and it has that "one more turn" appeal of all good strategy games.

But when I compare it to the original, it has a lot of shortcomings. And I have to wonder if this was designed as a console videogame, rather than as a PC game. Certainly, some of the development decisions seem odd - and don't seem to take advantage of the PC as a gaming platform.

As in the first game (check out this post for the details, since the remake is basically the same), you spend most of your time in squad-based battle. But the maps in XCOM: Enemy Unknown are claustrophobically small, and the camera controls are absolutely terrible.

(STO)

In the first game, enemies could be almost anywhere. From your landing site, you'd always have a huge area to explore in at least two directions, and often three. Heck, just leaving your transport would frequently be deadly.

But here, the combat maps have been very small and very narrow. You normally have only one direction to go (although there's usually no obvious reason why the aliens would have to be there), and you never have to worry during your initial moves.

You can't surprise the aliens (occasionally, they can surprise you), because they scamper to cover when you first see them. The game seems to be a matter of just moving from cover to cover. (I'm playing on normal difficulty, and I haven't lost a single soldier, so far. But I've come very, very close, and I probably won't change the difficulty, not yet, at least.)

True, with the small maps, you get only a very small team to explore them - just four people at the start, and a maximum of only six. In the original, if I remember correctly, I could take as many as 14 soldiers right from the start and up to 18 later in the game.

Now, this isn't all bad. The very small squads and very small maps mean that battles play out quickly. In nine hours, I've fought nine battles (and that includes some considerable time just getting acquainted with the game and looking around the base). So each battle is sort of like that "one more turn" of strategy games. They're addicting. You always want to fight just one more.

However, while I'm still on the battle maps, I must complain about how dark and dreary they are. I dreaded night battles in the original game, and these are almost like you're always fighting at night. I'm not at all impressed with the graphics, and I yearn for a battle map like those wonderful farms of the first X-COM.

In the first game, you'd arrive at a brightly-lit, pleasantly-normal farm or city,... and leave it a smoking ruin when you left. Honestly, that was great fun! And why must you rely on a dark, dim setting to increase the tension? Isn't it frightening to know that scary monsters can suddenly appear in the most ordinary, most innocent of surroundings?

Note that these maps aren't random, either. There are, apparently, a very large number of maps, but they're fixed, instead of being procedurally-generated. That's really disappointing to me, since I'm such a big fan of procedurally-generated content. And it seems to guarantee that I won't be able to play this game nearly as long as I did the first.

If you don't compare it to the original game, this is still fun enough, as a strategy game. But the original X-COM was much more than that. The original was also an RPG, in a way. You weren't just moving pieces on a chessboard, you were defending the Earth from alien attack. (And there were very clever details, like the poor mutilated cows, which were just hilarious. This game seems to have no sense of humor.)

(G4TV)

This remake does keep some of that. For example, you can rename your soldiers. And the basic plot is the same. But RPGs need to make at least some sense, given the premise. And as hard as it was to suspend my disbelief in the first game, this one is just completely ridiculous.

This is the entire Earth defending itself from alien invasion, but all they can afford is four or five guys I could outfit myself at a local gun show? And one little jet for transportation? Often, there are three alien abduction threats which happen simultaneously. But you can only choose one of the three, since the entire Earth can only afford to send four guys to one place at a time?

OK, the original game was kind of like that, in that multiple events could happen in close proximity. But you could build multiple bases, you could buy or build multiple passenger jets, and you could have soldiers equipped and ready to go in all of them. Sometimes, you could even fight one battle, then get re-fueled and re-equipped in time to get to a second crash site nearby.

But there's none of that in this game. This game is a strategy game almost as artificial as chess - or so it seems to me. As a strategy game, that's fine,... but the original was far, far more than just a strategy game.

Here's another example: Your initial troops are equipped with four items: battle armor, an assault rifle, a pistol, and one grenade (ammunition isn't tracked separately, so obviously you can't choose different kinds of ammunition). You can research improvements, so suppose you want to put a scope on your rifle. You can do that, but only if you leave the grenade behind. You can't put a scope on your rifle and carry a grenade!

Suppose you want to wear a nano-fiber vest, to offer a little more protection? You can do that,... at the expense of a grenade or a scope. Yeah, wearing a vest keeps you from using a scope on your rifle! It keeps you from carrying a grenade! Can you leave your pistol home, instead (because pistols seem to be almost worthless)? No, of course not. That would be too logical.

XCOM: Enemy Unknown has abandoned any pretense of reality, and therefore almost all of the feeling of an RPG. It's apparently meant to be a strategy game and only a strategy game. Obviously, you had to make decisions in the original game. A soldier can't carry everything. But this is just ridiculous! And you're actually limited even more than that.

Unlike in the original game, where you could equip your soldiers any way you wanted, these people are all class-based. Each class is very limited in which weapons and items it can carry. And you can't even choose the class! Your soldiers all start as recruits (with the exact same stats, no less), and when they're promoted to squaddie, the game chooses their class for you. You can't even make that decision yourself!

Recruits in the original game had all sorts of different stats (far more stats than in this one - apparently numbers are too scary for modern gamers). I would always interview a bunch of different people (that's how I thought of it, anyway) and choose the best to be my soldiers. After all, this was in defense of our whole planet, right?

Well, not here. Here, all recruits are the same. And if you'd rather have a new recruit become a sniper, rather than a heavy-weapons specialist, too bad. Of course, you can only take four to six people to a battle anyway (four at first; as many as six with base improvements), and you can choose who to take with you, but that's it.

And you can still rename your soldiers, if you want. You can even change their appearance (although that doesn't show up very well on the battle map, so I don't know why you'd bother). Apparently, that's enough for an RPG these days, huh?

Your base. Don't get too excited, it's just a background image.

(WouldYouKindly)

Scientists and engineers still exist, sort of, but they don't have stats, they don't need to be housed, and you can't even hire them. They're very, very simplified (details are boring, right?). You get them as rewards for some battles, or you can build base improvements to get more. But note that this is your only base, and you're very limited in room and money. (Apparently, the Earth isn't all that worried about alien attack, after all.)

OK, I'm kind of upset by a lot of this stuff, because X-COM: UFO Defense was such an incredible game. If you've seen the ads for this remake, they seem to try very hard to make it appear no different from any other game. That's not the case, not exactly. (I wonder how many people will be disappointed in that?) But they also seem to have developed the game to appeal to most console players - or maybe just to the lowest common denominator among gamers.

I really don't know how RPG fans can be happy with this, let alone fans of the original game (which was not an RPG, but did have RPG elements). Admittedly, RPGs have also been dumbed down for modern audiences. But I'm just astonished by the glowing reviews everywhere. Wasn't there anyone who also found these things disappointing?

But it's not a bad game, it really isn't. It's very disappointing, as a remake of X-COM: UFO Defense, but it's still fun enough as a game. As a strategy game, it has that "one more turn" appeal that's absolutely critical. That was well done. I've played it for nine hours, and I'll continue to play it, at least for awhile.

And my opinion might improve later, who knows? After all, this is just my initial assessment. Besides, I can enjoy games even when I'm disappointed with them. As with Skyrim, I expected a lot from this game - maybe too much. But that's what you get with an established franchise. I have certain expectations when I've played - and loved - the previous games.

If you don't want me to be picky, just make a brand-new game. Oh, heck, who am I kidding? I'll still be picky. :)

Meeko

That's Meeko, my new dog in The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim.

Unlike real dogs, he doesn't shed and he doesn't crap all over the place, but he does bark too much (not as bad as my neighbor's dogs, though). On the other hand, that was a big help when I lost him one time.

Like other followers, Meeko will stay where you tell him,... sort of. If there's fighting anywhere in the vicinity, he'll try to move towards it. But he still thinks he's obeying orders, so he won't come when you enter a new location (which is the usual way of retrieving lost followers).

And he blends in pretty well, especially in the scenery you see in the screenshots here, so I was very glad to hear him barking when I went back to find him after taking down a bandit camp one time. (Otherwise, I might mod out his barking.)

Normally, though, Meeko stays right at my heels. Mjoll the Lioness, my current human follower, might lag way behind, but Meeko usually sticks like glue. And when trouble shows up, he charges ahead like a maniac.

Frankly, I'm astonished that he's survived so well. I've had him in some very tough battles, too. But he seems to be far tougher than he looks. In fact, he'll take down enemies before I even get a chance to attack. (He's especially useful against mages.)

He'll chase down distant archers, too, which isn't always a good thing. Sometimes, I have to run forward just because I'm worried that he'll get himself killed. But the evidence seems to show that Meeko can look out for himself!

Mjoll the Lioness and Meeko, my two defenders

As you can see, Meeko is a secondary follower, so you can have him and a primary follower. You can't use him as a pack mule, but he's still been really nice to have along.

OK, all of my followers tend to block doorways. When I go inside a room with just one door, it's often a pain to get out again. I don't know why that wasn't coded into them. Why won't they back up when you bump into them?

Maybe the big question is, why am I not smart enough to leave them outside when I go into a place like that?  :)

Still, if I ever start the game over again (and I might, someday, since I'd love to play an archer character sometime), picking up Meeko is one of the first things I'll do. I bring along human followers mostly so they can carry things for me, but Meeko is just nice to have on his own.

I'd probably use one of the alternate start mods, too... But no, I can't start thinking about that! I'm enjoying playing a mage, I really am. And right now, I've got XCOM: Enemy Unknown to play, too. Just too many games and not enough time, huh?

___
Note: My other posts about computer games - including my overall opinions of this one - can be found here.

Romney's vague against the machine

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That's actually Jon Stewart's second segment in this "Vague Against the Machine" set, but the first (here) had a lot of extraneous stuff. And I didn't want to post three video clips. :)

Besides, these two get the point across, don't you think? Here's the third:

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You know, I just can't believe this is working for Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan. I mean, how dumb do they think we are? For chrissake, we just went through all this with George W. Bush!

Like Romney,  Bush claimed that his tax cuts would not favor the wealthy. Like Romney, Bush claimed that they'd actually lower the deficit - in fact, that we'd run completely out of deficit to lower!

Bush, too, was eager to go to war. He was trying to drum up a war with Iraq even before 9/11 gave him the opportunity (not that Iraq had anything to do with that, of course). And to armchair patriots, a good war is always fun, provided they don't have to pay for it in any way.

And no, Bush wasn't going to make anyone pay for it. The Iraq War would just magically "pay for itself." For the first time in our history, we went to war without raising taxes to actually pay for it.

But we were supposed to just trust the Republicans. We were supposed to just trust that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction (they didn't). We were supposed to just trust that our wars would "pay for themselves," somehow (they didn't). We were supposed to just trust that tax cuts for the rich would magically make our deficits disappear (they didn't).

And now, Mitt Romney is doing the exact the same thing! It's just incredible, isn't it? How could any of my fellow Americans be dumb enough to buy it this time? After all, we're not talking about ancient history here!

True, the Republican Party is trying to pretend that George W. Bush never existed (after fervently supporting everything he did). And true, the Republican Party is faith-based, so they refuse to learn from experience. Despite the complete and utter disasters of the Bush administration, they still have faith in their dogma.

But what has happened to the American people that Mitt Romney, Paul Ryan, and the entire Republican Party isn't just laughed off the political stage? If the experience of George W. Bush didn't teach us anything, what will?

And when Romney and Ryan do say something that's not vague promises, it's almost always a bald-faced lie. Every independent fact-checker agrees. They've just been lying. Paul Ryan's convention speech was absolutely astonishing in his simply repeating one lie after another, and Mitt Romney did the exact same thing in the debate!

That's not even in question. Every independent fact-checker agrees. So what is wrong with us here in America? What has happened to my country? Every year, I'm more astonished at how far we've fallen.

The Republican view of life on Earth

(Francesco Reginato/The Image Bank/Getty Images)

(Note: I never do this, but I've just got to post the whole thing, including the picture. It's just too good.)

From Indecision Forever, here's a Republican natural history of life on Earth:

Circa 7000 B.C: Earth created. "You see, there are a lot of scientific data that I've found out as a scientist that actually show that this is really a young Earth. I don't believe that the Earth's but about 9,000 years old. I believe it was created in six days as we know them. That's what the Bible says." – Rep. Paul Broun, M.D., 9/27/12

7000 B.C. + 3 Days: Let the earth put forth grass, herb yielding seed, and fruit trees, which shall pollute the earth. "Trees cause more pollution than automobiles do." – President Ronald Reagan, 8/80 

7000 B.C. + 6 Days: Humans! "I think there is a theory, a theory of evolution, and I don't accept it. … The creator that I know created us, each and every one of us and created the universe, and the precise time and manner… I just don't think we're at the point where anybody has absolute proof on either side." – Rep. Ron Paul, M.D., 11/1/07

7000 B.C. to 3000 B.C.: Dragons! "[Is] it possible that a fire-breathing animal really existed? Today some scientists are saying yes. They have found large chambers in certain dinosaur skulls…The large skull chambers could have contained special chemical-producing glands. When the animal forced the chemicals out of its mouth or nose, these substances may have combined and produced fire and smoke." - Life Science, 3rd ed., Bob Jones University Press, 2007, a textbook authorized for use in taxpayer-supported private schools in an initiative supported by Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal.

7000 B.C. to Present: Protection from Climate Change. "Well actually the Genesis 8:22 that I use in there is that 'as long as the earth remains there will be springtime and harvest, cold and heat, winter and summer, day and night.' My point is, God's still up there. The arrogance of people to think that we, human beings, would be able to change what He is doing in the climate is to me outrageous." – Sen. Jim Inhofe, 3/7/12

1500 B.C.: Rape of the Midianites (Numbers 31:7-18 NLT) produces few offspring due to women's special secretions. "When that traumatic experience is undergone, a woman secretes a certain secretion, which has a tendency to kill sperm." - Pennsylvania State Rep. Stephen Freind, 1988

"The facts show that people who are raped — who are truly raped — the juices don’t flow, the body functions don’t work and they don't get pregnant. Medical authorities agree that this is a rarity, if ever." – North Carolina State Rep. Henry Aldridge, 4/20/95

"If it's a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that down." – Rep. Todd Akin, 8/19/12

A.D. 1760: Industrial revolution improves environmental quality."The dangers of carbon dioxide? Tell that to a plant, how dangerous carbon dioxide is." – Rick Santorum, 3/12/12

1859: Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species emerges from the pit of Hell. "All that stuff I was taught about evolution and embryology and the Big Bang Theory, all that is lies straight from the pit of Hell." - Rep. Paul Broun, M.D., 9/27/12

1973: Legalized abortion and corrupt medical practices leads to first abortion on non-pregnant individuals: "You find that along with the culture of death go all kinds of other law-breaking: not following good sanitary procedure, giving abortions to women who are not actually pregnant…" – Rep. Todd Akin, 1/22/08

2007: U.S. corporations begin experiments first elucidated in the Steven Spielberg documentary Pinky and the Brain. "American scientific companies are cross-breeding humans and animals and coming up with mice with fully functioning human brains. So they're already into this experiment." – Delaware Senate Candidate Christine O'Donnell, 11/16/07

2010: Natural oil effusion from the Gulf of Mexico mixes painlessly with surrounding environment, leaving the ecosystem unharmed. "The ocean will take care of this on its own if it was left alone and left out there. It's natural. It's as natural as the ocean water is." – Rush Limbaugh, on BP oil spill, 4/30/10

How dumb can Republicans get? How dumb can we be to keep voting for these people? Note that the Republican Party has put some of these idiots in positions of authority over science in America.

So yes, if you're voting Republican at all, you're supporting this kind of stuff. If you're an American citizen, this is your responsibility.

Did Big Bird break the budget?

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Right. We're not going to borrow money from China to pay for Sesame Street. Of course, we can always pay taxes, instead, can't we? Sesame Street costs each of us about two cents per year in taxes.

All of PBS costs less than a dollar and a half per year. I think we can afford that without borrowing from China, don't you?

And, in fact, we've funded PBS for years and years without any problem. PBS didn't just start with George W. Bush, you know, or even with Ronald Reagan. So it can hardly be considered the cause of our current economic woes.

Why don't we reverse course on the things which did create this mess? Why don't we reverse course on the things which actually caused our record-breaking deficits?

Like Mitt Romney, George W. Bush promised during the presidential debates that his tax cuts would go mostly to the poor and would not increase the budget deficit. Like Mitt Romney, he lied.

Likewise, Republicans started two wars for no reason and without paying for them! Remember how the Iraq War was going to "pay for itself"? (Yeah, sure, and if you believed that...) Well, war is fun, when someone else has to fight it and no one has to pay for it, right?

Then, Republican policies - including their mania for deregulation and the bubble in arcane financial instruments caused, in part, by that very windfall to the rich - crashed our economy in the worst economic collapse since the Great Depression (which automatically cut tax receipts and increased government spending - exactly what's supposed to happen).

We had Sesame Street long before the Bush administration. We had Sesame Street while we were enjoying budget surpluses during the Clinton years. Sesame Street didn't break our budget - and for an extra two cents per year, it never will.

Here's what broke our budget:

(CBPP)

Dara O'Briain on videogames

I've never played these particular games - I don't even play these kinds of games, not really - but as a gamer, I found this hilarious!

If you're not a gamer, maybe you'll just want to give it a pass. Check out his mixed marriage skit, instead, or maybe this.

Would a Republican candidate lie about taxes?

(New York magazine)

Would a Republican candidate for president just lie about his tax policy? Well, it's not the first time that happened.

Here's an article by Jonathan Chait in New York magazine showing what happened twelve years ago:

It’s worth considering a similar — in many ways, identical — episode that took place a dozen years before. During the 2000 election, the growth of a budget surplus offered the country a major choice. Al Gore proposed to use most of the surplus to retire the national debt and the balance for public investment. George W. Bush proposed a large, regressive income tax that Gore warned would exacerbate inequality and jeopardize the soundness of the budget.

Then, as now, the Republican simply denied over and over that his plan would do what the Democrats said it would. Bush portrayed his plan as devoting just a small fraction of the surplus to tax cuts and described his tax cut itself as benefitting the poor far more than the rich. ...

But Bush in fact followed through on what his plan actually did, which happened to be what Gore described it as, and not what Bush described it as. His promises to maintain the budget surplus and direct most of the tax cuts to lower-earners fell by the wayside. What mattered was the party, and the Republican Party was committed to a policy of regressive tax cuts.

And note that Mitt Romney is proposing specific tax cuts to take place immediately, while he's being extraordinarily vague - even secretive - about how he plans to keep that from benefiting only the wealthy and increasing the federal deficit even more than George W. Bush did.

We're supposed to just trust him on that. Yeah, like we trusted the Republican Party under George W. Bush, huh? That turned out so well, didn't it?

In the article, Chait quotes Bush in all three presidential debates. Bush was actually more specific than Mitt Romney (not that you could be any less specific). It was just a lie. He cut taxes overwhelmingly for the rich, it ballooned the budget deficit, and it hugely increased income inequality.

He got the middle class to vote for him, then turned around and crapped on them. Well, that's a specialty of the GOP, isn't it?

Scientists are just tools of the Devil

Note that this loon isn't just a United States Congressman, he's actually a Republican member of the House Science Committee! Incredible, isn't it?

From TPM:

Rep. Paul Broun (R-GA) tore into scientists as tools of the devil in a speech at the Liberty Baptist Church Sportsman’s Banquet last month.

“All that stuff I was taught about evolution and embryology and the Big Bang Theory, all that is lies straight from the pit of Hell,” Broun said. “And it’s lies to try to keep me and all the folks who were taught that from understanding that they need a savior.”

According to Broun, the scientific plot was primarily concerned with hiding the true age of the Earth. Broun serves on the House Science Committee, which came under scrutiny recently after another one of its Republican members, Rep. Todd Akin (R-MO), suggested that victims of “legitimate rape” have unnamed biological defenses against pregnancy.

“You see, there are a lot of scientific data that I’ve found out as a scientist that actually show that this is really a young Earth,” he said. “I don’t believe that the Earth’s but about 9,000 years old. I believe it was created in six days as we know them. That’s what the Bible says.”

These are the people Republicans want to be in charge of science in America! Heck, thinking like this would have been stupid a century ago, let alone today, in the 21st Century.

Mitt Romney and the Gish Gallop

(Pat Bagley)

From Daily Kos:

As fact checkers busily highlight the myriad number of lies and distortions offered by Mitt-Etch-A-Sketch-Romney during last night's debate, and the spinners spin their polls with impunity, I find it interesting that the debate tactic itself has not yet been discussed nor properly analyzed. In fact, the lies and distortions offered by Romney in last night's debate are the very ESSENCE of his tactic -- and is therefore quite pertinent to the discussion. Romney used a debate tactic known as the Gish Gallop.

The Urban Dictionary defines the Gish Gallop thusly:

Named for the debate tactic created by creationist shill Duane Gish, a Gish Gallop involves spewing so much bullshit in such a short span on that your opponent can’t address let alone counter all of it. To make matters worse a Gish Gallop will often have one or more 'talking points' that has a tiny core of truth to it, making the person rebutting it spend even more time debunking it in order to explain that, yes, it's not totally false but the Galloper is distorting/misusing/misstating the actual situation. A true Gish Gallop generally has two traits. 1) The factual and logical content of the Gish Gallop is pure bullshit and anybody knowledgeable and informed on the subject would recognize it as such almost instantly. That is, the Gish Gallop is designed to appeal to and deceive precisely those sorts of people who are most in need of honest factual education.

2) The points are all ones that the Galloper either knows, or damn well should know, are totally bullshit. With the slimier users of the Gish Gallop, like Gish himself, its a near certainty that the points are chosen not just because the Galloper knows that they're bullshit, but because the Galloper is deliberately trying to shovel as much bullshit into as small a space as possible in order to overwhelm his opponent with sheer volume and bamboozle any audience members with a facade of scholarly acumen and factual knowledge.

It is quite apparent to those of us who have closely followed this election, that this latest sketch drawn out by Romney completely contradicts major policy ideas stumped on the campaign trail by him over the last few months. Since Obama could no longer debate the substance (or lack thereof) of Romney's policy ideas, it threw Obama off his game. We have seen Romney do this before in the primaries. Obama needs to be prepared for it in future debates. Call it Etch-A-Sketch, call it the Gish Gallop, call it lies...it's all about the same. But it is a known debate tactic. And, like Romney, it is dishonest.

(Thanks to Jeff for the link.)

(Democratic Underground)

Yes, the fundamental trait of the "Gish Gallop" is dishonesty. This debate tactic is used by people who know they're being dishonest and/or simply don't care about the truth at all.

The truth doesn't matter to people who want to believe what they want to believe. And it doesn't matter to Mitt Romney, Paul Ryan, or other Republicans who cynically want to gain power no matter what it takes.

We've seen this cynicism for four decades in the Republican Party's 'Southern strategy,' where they deliberately wooed white racists in order to take the South from the Democrats.

Well, politically, that was wildly successful. The South went from being solidly Democratic to solidly Republican. Today, there is no part of America as Republican as the Deep South.

But Republican leaders who thought to use those people discovered that filling your party with far right-wing extremists can have negative consequences. Now, those old Dixiecrats - and the people who think like them - are the Republican base.

Today, you can't get anywhere in the Republican Party without appealing to that loony base. Honest moderates have left the party (along with African Americans), leaving only the crazies and the politicians cynical enough to agree to be crazy, too, if they can only gain political power.

And that brings us to Mitt Romney.

(Think Progress)

During the primary campaign, even Republicans criticized Mitt Romney for flip-flopping. His mendacity was notorious. The right-wing knew that he was lying, and they were basically worried that he wouldn't stay bought. Would he shake that Etch A Sketch again once he won?

Well, he's still reversing position so fast that it's hard to keep track. But apparently, once you start lying, it just gets easier and easier. We saw nonstop lies - blatant, bald-faced lies, without even the slightest concern for the truth - during the Republican National Convention. So why not expect that during the debates, too?

And note that Romney won the debate by lying. Everyone agrees that he won, and every independent fact-checker agrees that he lied. Does the truth no longer matter in America?

In late August, Mitt Romney's chief pollster, asked about the campaign's welfare lie, said, "[W]e're not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact checkers." After watching last night, I guess he wasn't kidding.

What will be interesting to watch at this point is whether a meme starts to develop. Phase One of the post-debate analysis saw a consensus quickly coalesce: Romney won with relative ease. Perhaps Phase Two will consider how the Republican managed to do so well?

This is admittedly only a sampling, but this piece from New York's Jon Chait caught my eye:

Romney won the debate in no small part because he adopted a policy of simply lying about his policies. Probably the best way to understand Obama's listless performance is that he was prepared to debate the claims Romney has been making for the entire campaign, and Romney switched up and started making different and utterly bogus ones.

As did this one from Rolling Stone's Tim Dickinson:

Mitt Romney turned in a polished performance in last night's presidential debate – and revealed himself to be an accomplished and unapologetic liar. In an evening where he sought to slice and dice the president with statistics, Romney baldly misrepresented his own policy prescriptions, made up numbers to fit his attacks and buried clear contrasts with the president.

CNN's David Gergen, hardly a liberal, was thinking along the same lines as Chait, saying last night he thinks Obama was surprised that Romney was "flat out lying" during the debate. Plenty of others were thinking along the same lines.

Romney's critics should probably keep expectations low, but if this line of criticism starts to catch on, it could, in theory, step on the Republican's post-debate glow. In fact, the tactics that led to the win could even backfire, doing more harm than good.

As Jonathan Bernstein noted today, "Paul Ryan's convention speech wound up being covered mainly for its mendacity, and that became the story. It seems that there are at least as many factually challenged comments from Romney's debate performance as there were in Ryan's speech."

Yeah, maybe. But I suspect that far more people watched the debate than will ever pay much attention to the fact-checkers. If you're curious, here are 27 specific lies told by Romney during the debate.

(Clay Bennett)

Or check out this list of Romney's "whoppers" just about clean energy.

But will that really hurt him? America has been reality-challenged for years. We went through eight years of faith-based presidential policies during the Bush administration, and that still hasn't seemed to convince Americans that the truth, whether you like it or not, matters.

Creationists use the Gish Gallop because it works (and because they can't back up their beliefs with real evidence), and it certainly worked for Mitt Romney during the debate. Will most Americans care that it wasn't actually true? Or will we just believe what we want to believe?

I was furious with the media during the Republican National Convention, because we kept hearing widespread praise for the effectiveness of Paul Ryan's speech, rather than criticism for it being one lie after another.

Oh, media pundits generally recognized the lies (not on Fox, of course), but they didn't seem to think that was important. No, apparently it was a great speech, because the lies worked. And that was generally the reaction - the immediate reaction - to Mitt Romney's lies during the debate, too.

Shouldn't we be better than that? Shouldn't we expect our media to care about the truth? Shouldn't we care about the truth? Liars normally lie because the truth isn't on their side. And what does it say about us when style matters more than substance? What does it say about America when the Gish Gallop continues to work?

If you haven't had enough of this, here's a brief clip from The Young Turks:



Note that President Obama was not entirely honest, himself. I don't like that any better than Romney's lies. And I think it's a terrible tactic, too (if you're cynical enough to make that the critical point), because it makes it harder to criticize the Republicans.

But check out FactCheck.org, and don't just rely on the summary, which is misleading. They say that Obama's claim of Mitt Romney proposing a $5 trillion tax cut is not true. But the reason they say that is because Romney promises to offset those cuts and promises that he won't add to the deficit.

Of course, if you read further, you'll discover that Romney doesn't say how he'll do that and, indeed, that independent experts verify that he can't do what he says. The numbers just don't add up.

In reality, what Romney has promised would create a $5 trillion tax cut (over ten years) and would be heavily weighted towards cutting taxes on the wealthy,... unless you believe his vague promises that somehow that won't happen.

But few people are going to get that far into the details of it, and I guess that's one of our problems as a nation, isn't it?

"Flies from the Amber" by Wil McCarthy

(cover image from Amazon.com)

With Flies from the Amber (1995), I think I've read all of Wil McCarthy's novels (and reviewed most of them). And I've liked them all. I've been very impressed with McCarthy's work.

But this book is a little different from the rest. For one thing, it starts rather slowly. There are multiple characters, and I kept wondering which was going to be the main character.

In fact, there isn't a main character. Some characters have a bigger role in the story than others, but there isn't anyone who can be considered the main character. And at first, at least, none of them seemed particularly appealing.

My biggest problem wasn't, I think, that they weren't especially admirable, but that they all seemed to be unhappy. For my tastes, that's not a good way to start a book. And I can't say that I really liked any of them.

Some of these characters live in a mining colony around a distant star. Others have arrived on a starship from Earth, a journey of many years to investigate strange gems found by the colonists. (Human beings are apparently very long-lived. In fact - reminiscent of his Queendom of Sol series - "children" in their 30s and 40s rebel against their circumstances, as no one less than a hundred years old seems to be taken seriously.)

But then, highly-advanced aliens emerge from a nearby black hole, continuing a war so ancient that the galaxy has changed around them. At that point, the story gets very good, indeed.

These aliens have been stuck like flies in amber at the edge of the black hole, where time has moved very, very slowly for them. When they emerge, they're still just as angry and just as determined to destroy the enemy as when they started, despite the fact that the years have almost certainly made their dispute meaningless.

I really can't say anything more about the plot here, not without spoilers. So I guess I'll keep this short (unusual for me, huh?). I will say that the title refers to more than the aliens. It's thought-provoking.

I ended up enjoying this book. And that makes it unanimous - I've enjoyed all of Wil McCarthy's science fiction novels. I've just been hugely impressed with this author (and so I'm extremely disappointed that he hasn't published a new novel since 2005).

But Flies from the Amber isn't typical of his books, so I don't think I'd start here. As I say, it begins rather slowly, and the characters aren't particularly appealing. It works - and, ultimately, very well - but it's a different style, and it took awhile before the book grabbed me.

Where was Obama?

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I gave you Chris Matthews' reaction to the first presidential debate yesterday, but I needed to post this, too. At least Jon Stewart, unlike the president, counters some of Mitt Romney's lies.

Barack Obama still seems more concerned about agreeing with Republicans than fighting back. I suppose he thinks that, if he's just a little nicer to them, they'll finally start cooperating.

Maybe he needs to listen to Samuel L. Jackson:

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Chris Matthews on the presidential debate

Chris Matthews gets pretty worked up here, but I was rather disgusted at President Obama's debate performance, myself. What was wrong with him?

He just let Mitt Romney lie. And most of the lies weren't new. They were things the Romney campaign said at the Republican National Convention and they've been repeating ever since, claims already denounced by independent fact-checkers.

So why wasn't Obama prepared? Why didn't he go after Romney? Most of all, why wasn't he specific? Even when he did object, it came across as just two competing claims, with no objective way to tell which was the truth.

The most incredible thing I heard last night was when Barack Obama made reference to the mistakes we made in 2001 and 2003 without ever mentioning George W. Bush by name! Heck, he didn't even remind people that it was Republicans who made those mistakes.

Personally, I doubt if his debate performance will hurt Obama much, but it sure didn't help. Mitt Romney was vague about his own plans, completely avoiding specifics about his policies, as he's been doing the whole year.* And he lied about Obama's.

There was nothing new about any of that, but neither the moderator nor his debate opponent called him on it. Did no one tell Barack Obama that this was supposed to be a debate?


* PS. Here's FactCheck.org:

To be clear, Romney has proposed cutting personal federal income tax rates across the board by 20 percent, in addition to extending the tax cuts enacted early in the Bush administration. He also proposes to eliminate the estate tax permanently, repeal the Alternative Minimum Tax, and eliminate taxes on interest, capital gains and dividends for taxpayers making under $200,000 a year in adjusted gross income.

By themselves, those cuts would, according to the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, lower federal tax liability by “about $480 billion in calendar year 2015” compared with current tax policy, with Bush cuts left in place. The Obama campaign has extrapolated that figure out over 10 years, coming up with a $5 trillion figure over a decade.

However, Romney always has said he planned to offset that massive cut with equally massive reductions in tax preferences to broaden the tax base, thus losing no revenue and not increasing the deficit. ...

However, Romney continued to struggle to explain how he could possibly offset such a large loss of revenue without shifting the burden away from upper-income taxpayers, who benefit disproportionately from across-the-board rate cuts and especially from elimination of the estate tax (which falls only on estates exceeding $5.1 million left by any who die this year). The Tax Policy Center concluded earlier this year that it wasn’t mathematically possible for a plan such as Romney’s to cut rates as he promised without either favoring the wealthy or increasing the federal deficit.

Except for saying that his plan would bring in the same amount of money “when you account for growth,” Romney offered no new explanation for how he might accomplish all he’s promised.

Here's the other thing I thought was strange about this: Romney claimed that cutting the tax rate for small businessmen (and he includes Donald Trump as a "small businessman") would cause them to create more jobs. But he also claimed that this would be "revenue neutral," because he'd also eliminate (unspecified) deductions.

But if that's true, then small businessmen in general are going to be paying the same amount of tax. If it really is revenue neutral, then the lower tax rate will be completely offset by their loss of deductions (assuming that Romney is telling the truth about that). Obviously, "revenue neutral" means that the government will be receiving the same amount in taxes. So how could that possibly make any difference?

If Romney is telling the truth, then there won't be any change in the amount of tax small businessmen are paying. So how can he claim that it will affect how many people they hire - or anything at all, for that matter?

But Barack Obama just let that pass, like so much in this debate. I was very disappointed in that.

Race-baiting at Fox News

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Incredible, isn't it? That was a speech from 2007, when Obama was already running for president. Of course it was covered by the media!

But Fox 'News' is still - desperately - trying to remind America that Barack Obama is... black!  OMG, how scary is that? I guess we didn't notice that before, did we?

How depressing is it that, in the 21st Century, race-baiting like this still works? Sean Hannity makes a ton of money scaring old white bigots. The whole point is politics - and money - so they wouldn't do it if it didn't work.

Anyway, this follow-up clip is pretty good, too:

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Catholic contraception video

This must be why men don't like watching beautiful women in the movies, on TV, or in these videos, huh? Because we can't sense any pheromones?

"What's a man to do when the majority of women are contracepting [sic] and he no longer finds them desirable?" Simple! You just turn to that hairy guy next to you and start feeling aroused, right? Heh, heh.

Wow, there's just so much about that kind of thinking that seems really, really bizarre, don't you think? Of course, these are Catholic nuns, so they're obviously experts in sex appeal. And science, too, no doubt.

Hmm,... but I'm surprised the celibate old men who actually run the Catholic Church didn't get in on this. After all, you can't let nuns think they're good for anything but following orders...

In this video clip, Ana Kasparian says she hasn't noticed that men are less attracted to her when she's on birth control. You think? Heh, heh. Come on, Catholics! These are the people who are supposed to guide your life? Really?

Hey, I know you were raised in the Catholic Church, but you can throw off that conditioning. Rational people do it every single day.

Conversion therapy

I swear, this guy just gets funnier and funnier in every video!

Lazy voters for the win

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The show continues with Larry Wilmore apologizing for innocent white people getting caught up in a policy meant to suppress the black vote. "In the world of voter suppression, black folks are the delicious tuna - irresistible! World War II veterans and grandmas are just the innocent dolphins who get pulled up in the net."

But I wanted to post that first clip to illustrate this:

This morning, Commonwealth Court Judge Robert Simpson blocked the Pennsylvania's Republican-sponsored voter ID law from going into effect during this election. It's a victory for the Obama campaign, voting rights groups, and according to the sponsor of the strict photo ID law Rep. Daryl Metcalfe, a victory for the shiftless horde…

Rather than making a ruling based on the constitution and the law, this judicial activist decision is skewed in favor of the lazy who refuse to exercise the necessary work ethic to meet the commonsense requirements to obtain an acceptable photo ID.

I guess people dealing with "long lines and ill-informed clerks at driver's license centers and identification requirements that made it hard for some registered voters to get a state-issued photo ID" are lazy.

For those of us who already have an appropriate photo ID, this is a non-issue. And anyone who won't get one is just lazy, right?

But note that elderly woman in Jon Stewart's video clip. She's been turned away three times. How difficult do you have to make voting before people will just give up?

Heck, most Americans don't bother to vote even when you make it as easy as possible. That's truly a national embarrassment. But Republicans are trying to make it difficult for people who want to vote, people who are willing to do their civic duty as Americans.

And even Republican leaders - those who aren't smart enough to keep up the pretense of "voter fraud" - admit that this is all about getting a political advantage. (Mitt Romney is currently polling zero among African Americans, and only about 20% among Hispanics.)

I think about my elderly mother, who didn't have enough ID to get her drivers license renewed last time. Yeah, she had her current license, and she'd been living - and driving - in this state since before I was born, but she still had to go home and get more identification.

Hey, if that had been for voting, she would never have gone back. And even at her age, it's easier for her than for many of the elderly.

It's not just the elderly, either. The urban poor, sometimes raising a family while working two jobs, might not have the time for this stuff, especially when Republicans are also busy closing offices in Democratic-leaning precincts. Many of those people don't drive.

For most people, it's not that they can't get an ID, if they're really persistent. But not everyone will try that hard. (And that doesn't necessarily make them "lazy," either.) Whenever you make it difficult, you suppress votes. It's as simple as that.

And that's the whole point. If Republicans had any examples of in-person voter fraud, it would be trumpeted all over Fox 'News.' Heck, the Bush administration spent eight years on a voter fraud witch hunt, without success. They even fired those federal prosecutors who were more concerned with real crime.

This isn't about voter fraud. It's never been about voter fraud. It's about winning elections when you've lost African Americans, Hispanics, women, and young people. It's about maintaining power when the supply of elderly white bigots who are both ill-informed and gullible is shrinking fast.

Our story in two minutes

Neat, isn't it? Of course, you might have already seen it. This was first posted in May, I think.

But it was created by a high school kid for his video productions class! (And, of course, he's had all sorts of criticism on YouTube for it. That's the Internet, I guess. You need a thick skin.)

Mitt Romney's self-destruct button

Of course, all good robots have a self-destruct button. Mitt Romney would be too dangerous, otherwise.

The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, part 4

As I noted in my previous posts (here, here, and here), I'm really enjoying Skyrim. It's a lovely game with a lot of strange ruins, dungeons, crypts, and other dangerous locations to explore.

But I also have some problems with the direction of gameplay in this Elder Scrolls game. Well, I mentioned some of those previously, but let me give some more examples here.

While I was waiting to upgrade my computer, I watched a lot of YouTube videos about Skyrim, mostly just the very beginning of gameplay, since I didn't want to spoil my own eventual play of the game. (OK, I watched a little more than that in Lumin's videos, since they're so much fun.)

And in every start I saw, the player chose to stick with the Stormcloaks to escape that first dragon (rather than the people who'd just been trying to cut his head off - imagine that). Well, I thought I'd do something different when I started the game, so I stayed with that Imperial soldier, instead.

So what did that choice do for me? Absolutely nothing. It made no difference whatsoever. Everything played out exactly the same way, right down to emerging with a single survivor who - apparently forgetting he was supposed to be an Imperial soldier - headed home to Riverwood, just like the Stormcloak survivor would have done.

In neither case did anyone in that town of less than a dozen people ever miss that other hometown boy who ended up dead in Helgen. So what was the point of giving us such a meaningless choice? Why give players a supposed option (I can hardly consider it a real option), if that decision means absolutely nothing in terms of gameplay or story?

There are other problems with our choices in the game. A couple of times, so far, I've had to help a young woman decide on a suitor, but I've never had any reason to choose one man over the other. I could not learn enough about either of them to make an informed choice, so it was just a matter of picking one of them - either one, since it made no difference.

In Riverwood, right at the start, there are two men - Sven and Faendal - both in love with Camilla Valerius. Both want you to give her a forged letter making the other one look bad. If you speak to one of them, you have the option to give Camilla the letter or to tell her the truth. But if you speak to both of them, you only have that option with the second person who gave you a letter.

In other words, you can never tell Camilla that both of them are acting the same way. You can only choose between the two of them, and the game gives you absolutely no reason to choose one over the other. Furthermore, it makes no difference which one you choose, since it doesn't seem to affect anything.

OK, whichever man you help will offer to join you as a follower, apparently (which seems kind of odd for a man in love). But if you betray one of them, he doesn't hold it against you later - or even seem to notice. And as I say, there seems to be no reason to choose one instead of the other. There's certainly no way to tell which would make the better husband for Camilla.

And that's the same way in Ivarstead, later. For Fastred, the young peasant girl, you can choose between Klimmek and Bassianus. But there seems to be absolutely no reason to choose one over the other, and both will end up the same way, anyway. So what's the point of giving us a choice, if there's no way to discover the best choice (and if neither will make a difference)?

Similarly, I've tried to find a way to fight the Thieves Guild, rather than joining them. I'm role-playing a hero, not a thief (and I'm crazy about Mjoll the Lioness, so why wouldn't I want to help her?). But that doesn't seem to be an option. There are a whole series of quests, and lots of benefits, from joining the Thieves Guild. But although you can skip all that, you can't choose an alternate path. You can't choose to clean up the town, instead. That's really disappointing.

Frankly, there are a lot of different quests in Skyrim, but most boil down to the exact same thing: go to a dungeon, kill everything, and retrieve an item. And, commonly, you are led by the hand the whole way - not just which dungeon, but exactly where in the dungeon the item lies. (Most dungeons are terribly linear, anyway, so you just have to get to the end of it.)

For many quests, this can get completely ridiculous. In Morrowind, when you were tasked with finding a book, you could visit a few bookstores or just keep your eyes open. But in Skyrim, when someone expresses interest in a particular book, you're shown exactly which bandit cave contains the book (bandits are big readers, apparently) and exactly where in the cave that book is lying.

Honestly, it's just embarrassing how this game leads you by the hand. Do modern games really need to be dumbed down to this extent? But also, as I say, this just makes all quests the same. What real difference is there if it's a book you're retrieving, or a sword, or anything else? It all boils down to going somewhere (often, clear across the province, which is frequently annoying enough in itself), killing everything, and getting an object.

Now, you don't necessarily have to kill everything in the dungeon, I suppose. There are quests to kill bandit leaders, but most of the time, to complete a quest, you just need to get an item. But as a practical matter, you need loot. You need the money you get from selling loot. And although you don't gain experience from killing things, exactly, you need combat skills, so you have to practice them (or else get the money for training, which requires loot).

It's a big, beautiful world, with lots of neat places to see, but quests are only an excuse to go from one place to another. It doesn't take long before that starts to seem rather ridiculous. On the other hand, there seems to be a quest to almost everywhere, so it doesn't seem to make much sense to visit dungeons randomly, either. I don't know. I admit that I don't have any real solutions to this.

But the game seems to be dumbed down in other ways, too. I'm playing as a mage, and I've been very disappointed at the selection of spells in Skyrim. What happened to all the great spells from previous Elder Scrolls games? No Unlock, no Mark and Recall, no teleportation spells, no Levitate, no Slowfall, no Feather, no Jump, not even - that I've seen so far - Cure Poison or Cure Disease or Water Walking. Why are we so limited in Skyrim?

Furthermore, the spells we do get aren't useful for very long. So we seem to use the same basic spells for the whole game, even if they're called something different (and require more mana). To survive, you have to advance in skills and perks, but it doesn't seem to be much different than when I started. What we don't have is much variety. Admittedly, I'm not quite to level 30, so I'll probably see additional spells later. But here's how it's been, so far:

In Illusion magic, Fury - which causes an enemy to fight the nearest possible opponent (normally, his own ally) - is very useful at first, but becomes useless very quickly, since it only affects creatures up to level 6. With perks, it's a little better, but I simply couldn't use Illusion magic often enough to increase my skill to get those perks. (I had to buy training, which isn't nearly as much fun.)

The adept spell, Frenzy, does the exact same thing, at a slightly higher level (up to level 14), so as soon as you can cast it, you switch to that. But I've never found a single other Illusion spell to be useful (and, of course, even that spell won't work on bosses, even with perks).

Calm seems to be useless, because I want to kill enemies (and even followers won't attack enemies who aren't attacking us). I've never had a follower run away from a fight, so I don't know why I'd want Courage. And Clairvoyance just seems to duplicate what your compass already shows you. Well, you get the picture. One useful spell in all of Illusion magic.

In Conjuration, I've been able to summon a Flame Atronach for almost the entire game, and nothing else. OK, at very low levels, I summoned a familiar (a ghost wolf) for 60 seconds at a time, but why aren't we given all sorts of summoning options? In effect, we have just one real option at a time. (If that. A Flame Atronach is hardly a reasonable option against another Flame Atronach.) Why is this? Previous Elder Scrolls games gave us far more creatures we could summon.

Early in the game, I could raise a zombie, but first I needed a fresh dead body, the corpse could only be of very low level or the spell wouldn't work, and it would only last for 60 seconds (and couldn't be raised again after that). How could you possibly play this game as a necromancer? And why limit us so severely? What's the point of that? Why not at least let us raise a dead body which would last until it was destroyed in battle? Why not let us raise an army of zombies, as long as we could find the fresh corpses?

And that's not even the worst of it. I haven't found anything useful in Alteration magic, not one spell. I can't believe there's not Water Walking and Water Breathing (not at low levels, at least). Why not? Neither would be particularly useful in Skyrim, but at least I'd feel more like a mage, with a good selection of spells in my spellbook.

Armor spells don't last long enough to bother with, especially since I'm not a melee character anyway. Why waste mana with something like that, when I could just be blasting my enemies with lightning? It would be different if they lasted awhile. And I don't know why the Candlelight spell even exists, since I've never found anywhere in Skyrim - including ancient buried tombs - that wasn't already brightly lit (which is crazy, but there it is).

And then there's Restoration magic. Well, healing is always useful, though rather boring. But no Cure Poison or Cure Disease spells? No Resist Poison? Why not? And when I try to heal my followers, I can't even tell if it's doing anything. (I certainly can't tell if they need healing, but I figure they must.)

Note that warding spells, also in the Restoration category, can't be set. They only function while you're actively casting them. And since they drain your mana, without damaging the enemy at all, why would you? I really don't understand the point of that. If we could set wards for even a limited amount of time, they might be useful.

I've never bothered with Repel Undead, either, since it only works on low-level enemies, and it doesn't kill undead, which is, you know, the whole point. It just makes them run away, briefly. So why do that, when I could be using a Destruction spell? On the other hand, if Restoration magic included a targeted spell to kill undead, that would be useful (and could have a unique visual effect, too).

OK, I'm not saying that some of these wouldn't be useful in particular circumstances. But in general, I have a bare handful of spells I can actually use. Most of them, of course, are Destruction spells. But again, you pretty much have the choice of using fire, cold, or electricity, and that's it. You use low-level spells until they become useless (or until you can reasonably cast higher level ones). But all fire spells look about the same and don't seem much different. And I could cast fire right from the start.

Now, I don't have any real trouble killing enemies, not with Lydia, or Iona, or Mjoll the Lioness backing me up. But I'm still disappointed in the variety of spells I have available. And that means I basically use the same tactics over and over again. Wouldn't it be nice to have a variety of options? (True, I can always start the game again as an archer or a melee fighter, if I want.)

Furthermore, nearly all of Skyrim's dungeons seem very linear, and the lack of spells doesn't help that any. Without Levitate or Jump, I can't get to a perch high above the ground. I can't even get to the top level of some shelves! I can't swim for long underwater, and I can't cast spells underwater anyway. (Why not?) My limited options force me into a linear path where Bethesda game designers want me to go, and I hate that. I want to choose my own path!

I don't know why they did this, but Skyrim just seems rather... dumbed down. We are led by the hand in quests. We are given a limited selection of spells. (I still miss Athletics and Acrobatics skills, too, but maybe I'm being picky now.) We are allowed to wander around a lovely world, but we're not required - or even encouraged - to think. I can't even manage my followers very well. I can't give them detailed directions, or even directions at all, not really.

I'm having fun with the game, but I'm still a bit disappointed with it. I'm disappointed in the direction they've gone with the Elder Scrolls games. Pretty graphics is nice, it really is. But I wanted more than that.

I don't want to sound too critical. I am enjoying the game, after all. And as I said in my previous post, there are a lot of things I could change with mods. Certainly, there are mods which seem to add greatly to the spell selection (though I haven't tried them yet). I've been very happy with the mods I've tried so far.

But I want to take it easy with mods. I really don't want to ruin the game. And I'd like to see what the vanilla game has to offer, first. Besides, quite frankly, my expectations are usually too high when it comes to games. Or maybe my preferences just aren't shared by the majority. I can still enjoy a game, even when it's not exactly what I'd like to see.

And I am enjoying Skyrim.

___
PS. That's Mjoll the Lioness in the screenshot above (with the dragon skeleton). She really is a lovely woman, but she looks kind of dumpy in that armor, doesn't she. Maybe I should try one of these armor mods after all. :)

(PC Gamer)