I am losing people because they don't want to game with other people. The people that are jerks are the most reliable about attendance. In the last year I have had to kick 5 people out (also 3 other great players moved away), and I will likely have to boot 1-2 more because of the complaints I am getting from other players. Having enough warm bodies at the table is never an issue, I got a 6 player group now, and had 4 others I had to turn away due to space.

I am just tired of dealing with jerks in this hobby, I can usually put up with them, but not if they are turning other people away.

Do many of you have to deal with this?

Gamergate is breaking Wikipedia. Since August, Wikipedia's article about the controversy has been divisive on a scale normally reserved for unjust wars and global warming. Gamergate supporters have been "boycotting" the site for months because of perceived bias, and co-founder Jimmy Wales has had limited luck in communicating with them. But over the past week, it's been getting heat from the other side of the aisle. The Guardian and others reported that five editors opposed to Gamergate had been banned from editing any page on "gender or sexuality, broadly construed." The site's Arbitration Committee decision meant that "not only do the GamerGaters get to rewrite their own page (and Zoe Quinn's, Brianna Wu's, Anita Sarkeesian's, etc.); feminists are to be purged en bloc from the encyclopedia," wrote influential hypertext figure and former Wikipedia editor Mark Bernstein.

The committee's proposed final decision was already online, but today, Wikipedia posted a statement and explanation. "Several press stories have mistakenly claimed that Wikipedia has targeted and banned feminist or female editors. This is inaccurate," wrote author Philippe Beaudette.

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Although the Arbitration Committee may recommend that some editors be prevented from further contribution to this particular topic, they have not banned anyone from Wikipedia. The sanctions they are considering are broad, and affect many people. As of now, the Arbitration Committee is considering issuing some type of warning or sanction to around 150 people, from a range of perspectives, based on their participation and conduct. This is not about a small group of people being targeted unfairly. It is about a very large group of people using Wikipedia as a battleground.

The Arbitration Committee itself has also published an explanation of its decision, which is still pending a final vote. It lists 11 total topic bans for editors "on various sides of the dispute," an endorsement of 40 community sanctions, and 100 warnings, along with a broad ban on censured editors working on gender-related articles.

"Not everything has to be a battle."

While Wikipedia says that the decision is broader than news coverage implies, and that editors were censured for violating its civility standard, this doesn't necessarily address critics' core concerns. The Guardian doesn't claim that editors were banned from Wikipedia, and the difference between "banning" and "recommending prevention" on discussing certain topics could be a distinction without a difference. But it does make clear that Wikipedia is tired of the vitriolic debate. The decision "is not a statement on who is right or wrong regarding the Gamergate controversy article," says Beaudette. "It is not a referendum on whether Wikipedia supports or rejects feminists. The Committee's mandate is to uphold a civil, constructive atmosphere that furthers Wikipedia's mission."

Bernstein, in a followup post, called Wikipedia's decision "majestic indifference," saying that it ignores the real problems of harassment. There is "no thought for volunteers who have been mercilessly harassed and hounded by braying, taunting gangs," he writes. "And not a single word of care for victims against whom Wikipedia has been and is being weaponized." Wales, for his part, has responded to critics on Twitter. "It's one thing to fight to keep articles clean," he says. "It's another to violate policies in the process." And as for the larger debate? "Not everything has to be a battle."

(The picture above is a gamergate ant, whose page predates this controversy. It is much more pleasant reading, and I highly recommend it.)

Slack wants to be more than a giant chat room. It announced today that it plans to add video chat, voice chat, and screen-sharing features, all of which will be built with the help of Screenhero, a company that it's just acquired. The entirely of Screenhero's six-person team will head to Slack as part of the acquisition, which is being made in a cash and stock deal.

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Screenhero boasts nearly lag-free screen-sharing

Though Screenhero doesn't offer video chat, it already has the tech for both voice chat and screen-sharing. Screenhero says that it currently offers the "lowest latency screen-sharing on the market," allowing two people to control the same computer with next-to-no lag. It lets you to share either everything on a computer's screen or just a single window, with each person receiving their own mouse cursor for control. It also allows voice chat to be used at the same time, so that the people sharing a screen can communicate if they aren't in the same room together. In particular, Screenhero suggests that its service is good for collaboratively writing code, but it can also be used for something as simple as lending a hand while troubleshooting.

All of Screenhero's features will be rebuilt inside of Slack, at which point Screenhero itself will be discontinued. Paying Slack customers can use the Screenhero app for now, but it isn't accepting any other signups.

Slack says that building these new features directly into its app — rather than offering them as a standalone service — will make for a much more efficient experience. That's obviously true at a very basic level, but Slack has always put a big focus on efficiency. Until now, it's shown that by allowing users to integrate dozens of other services into the chat room (so that you could, for instance, set Slack up to ping you when you get a new Yo). This will be the first time that Slack has added major new features into its own app, but they're ones that a good number of users should find helpful. It'll also help Slack compete with other companies catering to business users like Hipchat, which has already built in voice and video chat. Slack has been growing incredibly fast, and new features like this should only help.

A month ago, Google said it does not publicly address individual cases when it comes to government requests for customer data "to help protect all our users."

But on Wednesday, Google changed course after being ripped for failing to notify WikiLeaks that three years ago, Google handed over data to federal authorities about three staffers of the secret-spilling site as part of the government's espionage probe of the site and its founder, Julian Assange. The reason for the three-year delay, Google said, was because it had been under a gag order that it was fighting.

"From January 2011 to the present, Google has continued to fight to lift the gag orders on any legal process it has received on WikiLeaks," Al Gidari, a Google lawyer told The Washington Post. He said the media giant's policy is to always challenge indefinite gag orders. The gags on these were partly lifted, he said.

Gamasutra: David Gallant's Blog - For the Sake of the Industry: No More TotalBiscuit:

cypheroftyr:

The following blog post, unless otherwise noted, was written by a member of Gamasutra’s community.
The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the writer and not Gamasutra or its parent company.

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 I really wish this is a thing I didn’t have to write.

You probably already know of John Bain, also known as The Cynical Brit, also known as TotalBiscuit. The self-proclaimed “#1 PC Gaming Critic of YouTube” has nearly two million subscribers on that service, and nearly four hundred thousand followers on Twitter. It’s likely that he’s covered your games, perhaps even garnering you a boost in sales. He’s a cancer survivor: that alone is admirable. He’s undoubtedly done many positive things that I’m sure will be listed in the comments below this post. However I need to make an appeal to you, the Gamasutra audience, and the collective games industry:

We need to stop enabling this man.

For a long time now, Bain has been exhibiting harmful opinions and being very dismissive when called to account for them. He wields his audience as a weapon against criticism. He very plainly supports GamerGate and aligns himself with the worst harassers in the movement. He is not a man we should be celebrating, promoting, endorsing, or helping; to do so is to lend support to his regressive opinions.

Read more at the link.

And if you glance through the comments, you’ll get a look at what the average game dev is like. Not too far off from the average gamer(gater). I’ve met and hung out with some of those guys in the threads, I know they think of themselves as “good guys”. That’s what the industry is - the occasional empathetic person, surrounded by willful ignorance. It’s exhausting.

...and she's the ass-kicking Mardu Khan.

So, that's pretty fucking awesome.

It's history frozen in time: an expansive cave in Northern Israel where early humans lived for thousands of years, locked away and preserved after its entrance collapsed some 30,000 years ago. It's in this time capsule of human evolution that researchers say they've found a partial skull that serves as a "connecting link" between ancient and modern humans — "the first direct fossil evidence that modern humans inhabited the Levantine corridor" about 55,000 years ago.

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The origin story of Homo sapiens is told piecewise through archaeological finds and scientific analysis, all of which amounts to us using that data to try and connect the dots. At a point in that timeline, between 40,000 and 60,000 years ago, anatomically modern humans (AMH) from Africa expanded across Europe and Asia. Until now, however, fossil evidence has been scarce.

"It's an important puzzle in the big story of human evolution"

"It's an important puzzle in the big story of human evolution," says Israel Hershkovitz, the Professor in the Department of Anatomy and Anthropology, Sackler Faculty of Medicine at Tel Aviv University, who's leading up the excavation team that discovered this skull fragment dubbed "Manot 1." The findings, published this week by Nature, provides insight into that migration. Detailed analysis of the skull fragment's physical characteristics (e.g. shape and form) link it to both African and European fossils. For example, it shares a number of similarities to the Mladeč 1 skull, which was found in a cave within Czech Republic's borders and is believed to be around 35,000 years old. Manot 1's age has been estimated at 55,000 years using uranium-thorium dating.

Excavation of the Manot cave first began in 2010, after it was found by accident — or more accurately, by a bulldozer that was making a trench for a nearby village's sewer line and wound up opening the cave's proverbial chimney. "I was there when the cave was found... We went down 25 meters [82 feet], and we realized this was a prehistoric cave — a beautiful, beautiful cave," says Hershkovitz. "The fascinating thing about Manot site is that once it was left by prehistoric man, nobody ever entered the cave. It's as if somebody left his house and never came back, and after 30- or 40-thousand years, someone else is opening the door and seeing everything as it were more than 30-thousand years ago."

Photo Credit: Israel Hershkovitz, Ofer Marder & Omry Barzilai

This accidental find may upend what's known as the assimilation model, or partial replacement model. According to this model, modern humans originated from Africa but then evolved through interbreeding with European Neanderthals. It's estimated that human DNA today has between 2 and 4 percent Neanderthal genes, so it's not a question of if interbreeding occurred, but when and where.

The Manot skull shares some physical characteristics with Neanderthals and could suggest this interbreeding happened in the Levantine corridor instead of Europe. Without genetic testing, however, the morphological comparisons are just speculative. Hershkovitz does note, however, that we can now place the Manot cave occupants within 40 kilometers of areas where Neanderthals were known to exist around the same time. "We are suggesting we don't need the assimilation model to explain the morphology of the Upper Paleolithic populations in Europe because they look very much like Manot skull."

"We hope to find more human remains."

Hershkovitz and his team plan to keep working at the site at least until 2020 ("it all depends on budget," he notes), and there's a strong chance we'll learn even more about the origin of our species. "Manot cave is one of the largest prehistoric caves ever found in the world — not just in Israel," he said. "It's not a rock shelter; it's a real cave with a huge central chamber and many side chambers, occupied for thousands of years. We just start excavating it, and we've just scratched the upper archaeological layer."

"The potential is great," he said. "We hope to find more human remains."