[We've got the problem of hunger.]

So, there's this discussion in the Humble Indie Bundle Thread about Charity. And as it is really quite Off Topic, I thought i'd better make it a thread of its own. Please note that it is indeed my believe that charity is actually harmful. I'll try to give reasons as to why and how. I'm also open for different arguments, as long as they're not just "but won't anyone think of the children?".
First things first, it started here:

Gnarr, it quite rubs me the wrong way to see people argue about the so called "charity" aspect of the Bundle. Charity

is bullshit. You can help the Indie Devs, fair enough and of course you can help people, but if you'd want to do that, you'd really do that. Charity ain't helping. So called Charity is the good old letter of indulgence reborn. And in most cases that charity makes things worse.

You are aware that of the two charities involved one lobbies to protect freedom of speech and privacy online, and the other provides money and entertainment for sick children?

How does giving to charity make things worse? Unless I'm reading what you're saying wrong. Most people don't donate to charity. It's not really on most people's to-do list. Certainly not on mine,  but I donate to the local fire houses when they give me a call and I buy those cans of food at the grocery store that get donated, because they are up in my face. I think of the Humble Bundle in a similar way. It's like the tin can at the store, put a couple bucks in it or some change and buy your shit and get out. Hard to see how anyone could think that's a problem.

Like I said, in my opinion, charity is a bad thing. I'm not denying that people indeed do need the money to operate and help people. At the tip of the iceberg, things are looking pretty neat, we've got people with some spare money on the left and a bunch of organisations on the right, that do help people in need. Combine the two and you get the glorious
institution that is charity.
So why the fuzz, why say charity is bad? The issue is deeper down the iceberg. It starts with the basic issue of people in need. Why do they need that help? Let's start with some basic examples, something everyone can relate to because they've seen it at one point or another:

We've got the problem of hunger.
If you look at the UN MDGs, it's one of the top priority issues and a lot of charity goes towards providing meals and rations to people. What is hunger, apart from the biological facts of course? It's not the actual lack of food, ironically enough, there's plenty of food. But said food is too expensive for the locale to buy (interesting read about
this: Amartya Sen and his books about Hunger). And the reason it is too expensive to be bought, is because of low wages. People simply don't earn enough money or don't even have a job to buy food with. And why are those wages that low? 'cause Companies ain't paying more. It's so we can throw stuff away and live in a world where there's always at least one thing of everything and for dirt cheap too.
So what does charity do and why is it bad? Charity buys a portion of those exported good and imports them back into those countries to distribute as aid. There might be some localized exceptions but good luck finding them. Buying goods only further strengthens the companies. The state profits too, as those goods are usually tagged with an import Tax. Money that rinses down into corruption. So by wanting to help with a donation, you're feeding the very demons that are responsible for the issue. In this regard, charity makes it worse by keeping up the Status Quo.
Actual education, strengthening the infrastructure, you know, water, electricity, streets would be that much more useful but require an actual effort. There are some charities that do that, but then again it's teaching people to be dependent. You want actual alternatives? Try micro loans for example. Help people to help themselves.

We've got the problem of medical care.
It's quite similiar to hunger in how it operates. It's not that there isn't enough medicine to go around, it's that it is too expensive to be bought. What does charity do about this, well it goes and buys the medicine. We all know at least something about market, supply and demand, right? By buying it, this does give a quite strong signal that the price tag is fine and could in fact be even higher - after all it was bought. This circle has reached absurd levels, it's even a big issue in our countries now with perfectly fine middle class families not being able to pay for treatment.

And my personal pet peeve charity, governmental issues.
Like the mentioned free speech thing. Instead of rallying people, making the issue known, a fee is donated to some organisation to do it for you. To make it obvious why this is such an absurd idea, imagine the following:
Your boss is giving you a bloody hard time, squeezing you dry and having you work late hours all year. You don't like that. Now naturally, you'd confront your boss about it. Talk to him or check with other workers whether they feel the same.
Instead, you go to some random stranger, give him money and hope he does it on your behalf. This is so unbelievably absurd! You bloody can't do everything by proxy. Some things require actual participation. In all honesty, what's your boss gonna do when he sees someone else complain to him? He's gonna laugh his ass off, because the issue can't be a real issue if the person didn't get his ass up for it.


So, there you have it. Three examples why I think charity is making things worse.
1) It's keeping up the Status Quo.
2) It sends the wrong signals.
3) Creates a false sense of having helped.

That's why I said its the modern indulgement letter. The reason for this is our lifestyle and our overblown expectations. Instead however, of actually attempting to change those things, you know start something, people are offered indulgement letters in the shape of charity. Little voices telling them "You know your living standard is absurd, for the small amount of... ah you know best whats it gonna be worth, eh? Well for that small amount, you can balance it out. Promise! Pay up and everything is fine, you've helped people. You ain't bad, you're a helper!".

That's my reason for saying charity is bad. If you want images, charity is like trying to divert a river by tossing rocks into it, one at a time. Fair enough, you do divert the water for a bit. But the rocks are quickly getting washed away, not that you'd see, because you're already looking in a different direction again.
Instead of paying a penny in the tin can to calm your conscience, do some honorary work at the right places. That'd be actual help. And if you really want to change things, read up, get politically involved. Just not by proxy please.

Please note:
I often use the word you to describe something. This isn't meant to target a specific person. Also please keep it civil, please. I know charity is a topic that can get emotionally supercharged.

Also: If my tone is at times somewhat harsh; I do apologize. Kindly tell me and I'll try to tone it down.

TL:DR;
Three examples why I think charity is making things worse.
1) It's keeping up the Status Quo.
2) It sends the wrong signals.
3) Creates a false sense of having helped.

Gnarr, it quite rubs me the wrong way to see people argue about the so called "charity" aspect of the Bundle. Charity is bullshit. You can help the Indie Devs, fair enough and of course you can help people, but if you'd want to do that, you'd really do that. Charity ain't helping. So called Charity is the good old letter of indulgence reborn.
And in most cases that charity makes things worse.

Funny. I must be the only player to ever have taken Betas serious. Might also explain the state most games are in when they're released. But you know, when I Beta Test, I do my very best to fuck up the game in any way possible and get it to crash, get it to behave in ways it should not, I'm sequence breaking left and right and everytime I stumble across an oddity, a slowdown or a lag, I whip up the editor and write it down and then spend the next hours trying to make it happen again.
All that effort to provide a nifty bug report with clean instructions and detailed error reports. You know, the kinda Bug Report I always thought Devs would be dreaming about in their wildest Debugging dreams.
Now, I must realize, I've taken it too seriously. Beta seems to be nothing more than a marketing stunt, basically some sort of access limited demo I guess? But if I ever found out a Dev or a Team I've been Betatesting for, intentionally put a bug in, something I've probably wasted hours on so they could get a proper bug report, there's only two words left: Fuck you.

Now concerning the topic:
I'd say Closed Beta all the way. I'm not a Dev, just an occasional Tester, but from my experience you'll only ever need the Open Beta to stress-test your product. It otherwise really only serves as a marketing device and can quite possibly backfire. Ye, it should be a Beta and by all means it actually is a beta, but if there's bugs, people will remember them. Something you'll often see people talk about after a game went through open beta is along these lines:
"Should I play xyz?"
"I've been in the open beta, it's a buggy mess."
"Those might be fixed by all means and purposes?"
"Maybe, but I can't be arsed to redownload it again"
"Case in point"

A closed Beta with a select and handpicked crowd of people will provide that much more. But that seems kinda important to me: Handpick People. Huge but random Testgroups often fail to notice glaring bugs.

/edit:
After further reading in this thread:
If you're not trusting your Beta Testers, why do you have them in the first place? If you expect them to trick, rip, cheat and lie to you, how valuable will their feedback be to you? Maybe I'm getting too old expecting something like Trust.

You know it'd be more interested if this
1) didn't look like a pure ad job.
-> Register, drop Ad, Run
2) the Opening Post didn't look like a nice dish of copy pasta, dropped in several boards.
3) had linked Screenshots. No Pix, no clix.

I'm the very last person to "tryhard". It's an insult to me because I despise "serious" gamers as to me, they're the ones that kill games.

Point is, If I don't pick those demanded options, I'll have to deal with 30-60 minutes of childish insults, all around the clock. That's no fun, that's a waste of time. "Then /ignore them!", yes, cutting off communication with my entire team helps, might as well play Singleplayer then. "Then just ignore them manually!", yes, good idea. Until my case shows up on the Tribunal and I get banhammered for supposed trolling.

ARAM is fun in theory, if everyone plays along. Those games however, have a tendency to go south and turn into a flamebitchfest as soon as one side loses some ground and then it's "fuck the rules, let's go jungle/farm/roll their Nexus".

/edit:
Mind you, I've had fun with it. I've just seen enough of it. I don't mean to tell you to stop having fun or something.

I'm kinda burned out as well. I haven't started it for some time now.
Every match seems the same to me. It's always 1-1-2-jungle. You also get to play the same champions over and over again due to team demands and champion bans. Wards are always placed in the same spot, even equipment only has a handful of viable choices.
It was fun while it lasted but it has lived its course for me, which is fair enough.

To me, a hipster is someone with a firm believe of superiority over others due to taste based choices. Someone playing or developing Indie Games, just an indie. Someone doing the same but thinking "I'm worth so much more as a human because of it", that's a hipster.

Not so safe standard actually. Germany outright banned (well indexed) the international version of Left 4 Dead 2 and even went as far as to confiscate the EU Versions of it. I don't know, I'm liking the Survival and Downfall of Society Aspect of Zombie Games but that's rarely even a topic.
Most of the time it can be described as "LOOOOL CHAINSAW LOLOLOLOL".

Interesting philosophical theories, however the theoretical life of a videogame character and its deity wouldn't be that of a beneficial figure in my opinion. It's a deity that exposes its children to extreme hardships for the sake of it. It's devoid of meaning, it's devoid of consequence, worse still it's neverending.
Everytime the character faces and experiences death, the hope of finally fading out of existence is thwarted by a rewind. Be it a quicksave or a new game. And while it is true that the entire world is created to be achievable, that only serves to further agonize the character. Like the dangling carrot.

Oh, I didn't mean that the painters themselves just rapidly shifted over. I meant that the people with the most potential were, from the start, becoming more interested in photography/film than in painting, which is why those fields grew in size and blossomed until eventually they became much more relevant and prominent than painting.

Ah, okay, misunderstood you there. Ye, that's correct. On a to me quite interesting sidenote, in some religious countries, it's forbidden to take photos. But there are still photographs and pictures all over, what they do is take a photo and then paint over it to give it a painted look. Now is that a photo or a painting or a phainting?

So we can't experience Pollock's Galaxy, but we can experience Rembrandt's Christ in the Storm on the Lake of Galilee? Or any of those "kitsch" paintings with angels in them? =P

Well, some people firmly believe to have been visited by angels. Also large amounts of the christian religious society, well all religion is based upon the assumption that people have been visited by otherworldly or divine beings. It's not as much a question of "really experience" it. There are people and its quite a few of them, that think those "kitsch images" could be real now, ages ago or in the future. Now don't give me Giger or Royo because dear lord purple snowbunny, that would be hard to explain

Ye its funny in a way that about 2 years ago I said "There can never be enough zombie games". I've eaten my words, literally (printed them, ate the paper and suffered two days from it - also lost bet and stuff).

Abstract Art is somewhat of a pet peeve of mine. To me it looks like a cycle of do bullshit and buy bullshit where everyone feels happy and enlightened all around. Which is fine, more power to them, but it pisses me off when they start acting like they're something better.

@David Caruso
If you're interested, you might want to read up on Photographic Theory. Painters didn't just shift over, they fought with hands, claws and teeth in all directions to stop Photography. Even today, you'll find quite serious scientific texts that claim Photography could never be art and why traditional paintings would be so much better.

==================

My personal theory on why we do have Abstract Art starts simple:
Mankind craves what Mankind can't have. For example a few centuries ago, malnutrition was a real problem even in western europe. As a result, obese people were considered to be beauty idols. Today we have enough food for everyone in western europe and the western countries in general, as a result everyone can be obese. It takes Willpower and rigid training to not become obese at one point - so suddenly extremely thin people, bordering on anorexia are the beauty idol.

So why Abstract Art?
Well because it is abstract, it once again shows us something we can't obtain or experience, because it is per definition abstract. So we now crave the abstract until someone finds a way to enable us to experience it, which we can't, once again, per definition.
As much as I despise Abstract Art and consider it a scam, it's perfection. Not in skill, not in imagination but perfection in showing us what we can never have.
There's also the theory that mankind changed itself to favor logic and rational choice (Max Weber), while sociological Theorists like Jürgen Habermas think that change went too far and left behind other means to base decisions on. So abstract Art could either be breaking away from the rigid logic construct or it could be its impersonation since the image itself is devoid of emotion and is all structure and shape.

E.Y.E does look positively obscure in my opinion. I'm contemplating getting it once I've got the bucks to spare. Brink on the other hand, well I guess NVIDIA is paying loads of money to get that extra mile in compatibility checking, because Brink sure as hell ain't liking my ATI.

Another game I've played was Assassins Creed 2. I bought it during a "sell your soul" sale because just about everyone had been telling me how awesome a game it was. Turns out I hate it. Call me whatever you want, but the person scripting the camera should have been forced to play an entire level with it. Why am I not writing the usual internet tough guy stuff like "should have been shot?". Well after he would have played a level, I'm pretty sure seppuku would be a priority on his to do list.

I didn't, so it's appreciated.

I've also given it a try and second the difficulty.
However I do think that difficulty comes from the controls, the ship is flying wavelike patterns for me, even if I'm just pointing it in a straight line. That makes aiming next to impossible since it's a fixed mount in the nose of the ship. The shots go all over the place, this gets worse as you try to train the crosshair on the enemy, your ship will spin and turn and further spin the gun mount in random directions.
I didn't really get far in the game before I became frustrated with the wavemovement. Anyways, the polish is nice and it seemed interesting enough at first glance. Some polish and I could see it gather some interest.

Random note:
I do hate unskippable tutorials. Was it skippable? If it was, I missed how I was supposed to skip.

Now that's an interesting step.
They provide an incentive to pay more, do so and get additional goodies, instead of "pay less if you want to, you evil evil person".

Chrono cross >>> chrono trigger

Well quality wise Chrono Cross was the Demake of Chrono Trigger.

Go ahead everyone!  Suggest music for my new playlist!
I'd suggest genres, but that takes the fun out of it!  [Although Rap and Country are awful]
What songs are good for gaming?

Really depends on what kind of genre you're currently playing in my opinion.
Like, starting with

if you're playing games like let's say Left 4 Dead. Or feel that need for speed in your veins?

might just be your Fuel. And when you want to play Role Playing Games, In Extremo - Herr Mannelig will help setting that gothic medieval feeling.

I'm sorry if I have Payne'd you with this post, so this'll be the final suggestion in the shape of Poets of the Fall - Late Goodbye.

I doubt that all people are equally at risk of death from lack of movement. In much the same way that all people are not equally vulnerable to thrombosis.

All I'm saying is, that the human body wasn't made for our current lifestyle of sitting on our asses all day. It starts to break down if you're not counteracting the lack of movement. One way or another, it's either happy painkiller road 'cause of backpains, just generally gobbling medicine like it's chips, issues with our veins, carpal tunnel syndrom from all the typing and what not, obesity or in this case a fatal case of thrombosis.
Thinking you'd die from thrombosis because some other guy did, well no, please don't do that. There's never a point for panic or fear.

Still, finding ways to adapt our bodies to the modern environment (quite unlikely) or finding ways to adapt the modern environment better to our bodies (unlikely) should be an important thing for civilisation as a whole. Especially as medicine helps us reach our natural lifespan.
The entire way of interaction with machines is all wrong in my opinion. In this regard, I think the motion sense technology that's coming up, is a step in the right direction. Imagine one day using your entire body to control a computer and not just your fingers and brain. Want to delete a textfile? Give the air a good kick

And just like that, a lifetime at the office didn't sound as promising anymore.
One way or another, it wasn't gaming that killed him but lack of movement. Although in my opinion, we really need to find a proper and healthy way to use these tools (computers, internet, etc) without completely wrecking our bodies in the process. As it is now, you're basically doing target practice on your own body with a bazooka.

Office Jobs have people sit at their screen for hours, gaming does the same. I think there might be a new epidemic coming (since everything with more than a handful of dead people gets classified as one these days).