The Cracked Thread

The devil went to Georgia and met Chris Bucholz

http://www.cracked.com/blog/if-time-travel-stories-were-way-manlier/

By none other than Seanbaby !

Praise be!

you know I think I know what my problem with cracked is now outside of bucholz articles. when I first started reading it it was a bunch of cool obscure stuff that people who liked it were gushing about. and now it's all "remember that popular movie? it's sexist/racist/etc. and it's shit"

I think they've just run out of weird/awesome/horrifying little-known stuff to write about.

Trying to analyze fiction, media through the lens of sexism, classism, or whatever isn't an inherently bad thing.

Cracked just isn't consistently good with it. You get good well thought ones along with the ones that ignore context, misinform, uninspired, or just unfunny.

That's also not a problem endemic to only Cracked.

But oh well, fyook yeah Seanbaby!

Well, they aren't looking hard enough. The world produces an endless amounts of weird shit on a daily basis.

The problem is not what they're doing it is how. It is the Holier than Thou attitude and sometimes the outright smugness from some writers that is pissing the reader base off.

http://www.cracked.com/blog/5-video-game-weapons-that-work-way-better-in-real-life/

More like FPS weapons that work better in real life, as the #1 entry is pretty much inverted in too many JRPG s to count. Still a great article.

In other news, an article defending an internet meanie has also appeared. You can guess who wrote it, and yes, the author is absolutely aware of the incoming backlash.

I liked this one.

He misses a point about flamethrowers: they're instruments of terror. Humans, like most animals, are instinctively afraid of fire - especially when it's being thrown around willy-nilly on a battlefield. The flamethrower isn't a great weapon, but it encourages panic and poor decision-making. It's a psychological tool.

Video game AI drones do not experience terror. They have no instinctive fears. They do not panic and make poor choices because someone's begun hurling fiery death around the field.

This is also the problem with machine guns in video games. Their primary purpose is to provide suppression fire, but suppression fire is not a thing at all in a world where people have hit points instead of vital organs. Critical Existence Failure ensures that a spray-n-pray weapon is basically a useless piece of junk instead of being able to force an enemy force to stay in cover to avoid the strafing fire lines.

Their problem with grenades is spot-on. A grenade can be used to kill a room full of people. In video games, it has a blast radius of about five feet because shrapnel simply doesn't exist.

My DI loved drilling that into our heads: the winner of any close-combat brawl is whoever's buddy shows up with a firearm and shoots one bastard off of the other.

With mortars...as bad as they are, artillery is worse. They combine the flaws of mortars with the flaws of grenades in games, having small effective ranges and being really hard to successfully aim. You can't properly represent artillery in games well because of the range issue. A well-executed artillery strike means that some assholes ten miles away from you are now dead. Woo-hoo.

That's not very exciting gameplay.

edited 18th Feb '16 11:11:14 AM by TobiasDrake

Funny thing about grenades is seen people complain about them being too powerful in STALKER because a lot of people assumed they'd be harmless from over a 5m radius, specially the heavy grenades that have a 30m fragmentation radius.

He should also have added guns, JRP Gs they are less dangerous than a thrown muffin and it doesn't matter how much armor you wear getting shot even by a single bullet is going to harm you, no one soaks bullets and walk like it is no deal.

Yeah. I'll add that games do try to sidestep the issue grenade blast radius via encouraging the practice of "cooking" grenades, a name that adequately communicates the stupidity of the tactic. The logic is simple: because grenades detonate on a timer, you can ensure it explodes where you want it by holding it for a second or two before throwing.

But they still depict it wrong. Due to inconsistent fuse lengths in grenades coupled with the fact that shrapnel is actually a thing in the real world and the difficulty in reliably practicing such techniques, the correct method of cooking a grenade is DO NOT COOK GRENADES.

Read the second article in question, just to see if it went the obvious route. And yeah, it did.

For those who haven't looked, the article in question is on Martin Shkreli, and the primary defense is one I've seen making the rounds for a while: that Shkreli's actions expose the underlying corruption in the system. The problem, however, is that that's not what's happened. The media and the public are fine with trashing Shkreli's name and going home, Congress is probably still basking in the good press for telling him off, and Big Pharma gets to hide behind Shkreli's arrogant smirk. If this really was some kind of deliberate trolling effort (as I've seen suggested), then he has failed spectacularly.

EDIT: We change the layout of the website, and the little emoticons still default back to the bottom of the text after using them. Goddammit.

edited 18th Feb '16 11:16:08 AM by Watchtower

Thanks for that info, Watchtower.

I've played games for so long that I'm convinced I'd somehow manage to dislocate my shoulder, fracture my thumb and shoot my little toes off within ten minutes of being given an actual gun.

http://www.cracked.com/blog/4-new-double-standards-created-by-modern-technology/

So Felix Clay wrote a scattershot mess of an article about how double standards that favor women don't actually exist.

He literally argues that Amy Schumer couldn't be a plagiarist because she's too successful to need to resort to it.

I can't make any sense of that article either.

I lost all respect for Felix Clay when he did that dumb video where he calls Macklemore a homophobe for being straight but making a song about gay people. Plus, he made a shitty joke about autism in one of his articles, which offends me because I happen to be autistic.

8 hilariously offensive artworks featuring famous presidents

Okay, as fucking crazy as #2 is, the only thing that crossed my mind when looking at the final picture was "Wait, is that unicorn wearing a Vault Dweller outfit ?"

Which, if it's really the case, only adds to the insanity.

That doesn't sound like him.

What doesn't sound like who?

That crappy article (read it, it was crappy no matter what angle you look at it from) doesn't sound like Felix Guess everyone has off days.

The bait-and-switch with the MRA comment was especially bad.

Yeah that article was terrible. I know nothing about Amy Schumer but Clay's defense of her was completely stupid, and the whole thing just felt really unfocused.

Gonna third the low quality of the article, for exactly reason.

Yes. Half the time I had no idea what his point was.