Shacknews LoL

I can’t fucking stand it when I click an interesting sounding news story and it’s video only

Fuck all that

no

moving is the worst

John Carmack says hi!

https://vine.co/v/ePYHHeneBI0

Jingletard wife update. Based on the fact that I told the state that the money was coming into my account, her case was set over for one month for the funds to get sent to the court. When the money is received, the state will end the case against her. Therefore there won't be a risk of her going into custody for any reason.

So it seems we are on the right track for her thanks to the shack. Hopefully the same will happens for jingletard.

HAPPY 8TH BIRTHDAY SHACK[LOL]

I honestly can't believe it's been eight years. Holy shit. Time flies, etc.

YEAR       LOL         ALL   

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

2007 |    87,272  |    n/a   

2008 |   173,173  |   182,104

2009 |   153,539  |   178,536

2010 |   162,412  |   216,850

2011 |   158,869  |   235,565

2012 |   236,047  |   365,840

2013 |   332,429  |   523,610

2014 |   347,735  |   557,375

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

       1,651,476  | 2,259,880

Antother growth year. I honestly expected to see 2014 numbers lower than last year, but nope -- still growing.

I can't believe this thing is still going and that people are still using it. Awesome! :)

Shackcon 2014 / Introduction

Since staymighty let the cat out of the bag about the new layout and hammersuit went on to detail exactly what is going on behind the scenes, I thought now would be a good a time as ever to officially introduce myself to Chatty. My name is Asif Khan, and I am the principal investor in the new Shacknews.com. I have been working alongside John Gaudiosi and John Benyamine to steer the site back in the right direction. I am sure you have noticed all the new content and contributors over the last few months, and we will have some previews of the new layout to show you soon. We believe very strongly in the long term viability of shacknews.com. Chatty has without a doubt kept the site alive through the dark ages of Gamefly's reign. We have done a lot to engage the community and we plan on doing even more going forward.

This brings me to Shackcon. Today I am announcing that I will be attending Shackcon 2014. I am inviting all of our Shackcon attendees to join me on the day of July 5th at Encore Beach Club for free. We will have multiple cabanas for the day and food and drink will be on me. This is just a thank you from me to the Chatty community.

We understand the deep traditions and history of Chatty and Shack and plan to engage the community frequently as we transition to our new strategy. I can't wait to hear back from you guys and I hope there are some Wrath of Khan memes to follow. BlackCat9 and I will be communicating frequently up to the event and we will post more details once we have a good idea on how many people will be attending Shackcon 2014.

If we accept all the Star Wars films as the same canon, then a lot that happens in the original films has to be reinterpreted in the light of the prequels. As we now know, the rebel Alliance was founded by Yoda, Obi-Wan Kenobi and Bail Organa. What can readily be deduced is that their first recruit, who soon became their top field agent, was R2-D2.

Consider: at the end of RotS, Bail Organan orders 3PO's memory wiped but not R2's. He wouldn't make the distinction casually. Both droids know that Yoda and Obi-Wan are alive and are plotting sedition with the Senator from Alderaan. They know that Amidala survived long enough to have twins and could easily deduce where they went. However, R2 must make an impassioned speech to the effect that he is far more use to them with his mind intact: he has observed Palpatine and Anakin at close quarters for many years, knows much that is useful and is one of the galaxy's top experts at hacking into other people's systems. Also he can lie through his teeth with a straight face. Organa, in immediate need of espionage resources, agrees.

For the next 20 years, as far as 3PO knows, he is the property of Captain Antilles, doing protocol duties on a diplomatic transport. He is vaguely aware of the existence of the princess but doesn't know much about her. Wherever 3PO goes, being as loud and obvious as he always is, his unobtrusive cilantro counterpart goes with him. 3PO is R2's front man. Wherever they land, R2 is passing messages between rebel sympathisers and sizing up governments as potential rebel recruits - both by personal contact and by hacking into their networks. He passes his recommendations on to Organa.

Yoda is out of the picture by this stage, using the Force-infused swamps of Dagobah to hide himself from Vader and the Emperor. Or something. He is meditating on the future and keeping in touch with Obi-Wan via the ghost of Qui-Gon Jin, which as comm systems go has the virtue of being untappable. Obi-Wan, on Tattoine, keeps in touch with Bail Organa and the other Rebel leaders by courier, of which more later.

As Star Wars opens, R2 is rushing the Death Star plans to the Rebellion. R2, not Leia. The plans are always in R2. What Leia puts into him in the early scene is only her own holographic message to Kenobi. Leia's own mission, as she says in the holographic message, is to pick up Obi-Wan and take him to Alderaan - or so she thinks. Actually, her father just wants her to meet Kenobi, which up to this point she never has. There's a reason for that.

Obi-Wan has spent the last 20 years in the Tattoine desert, keeping watch over Luke Skywalker and trying to decide on one of the three available options:
A) If Luke shows no significant access to the Force, then leave him alone in obscurity
B) If Luke shows real Force ability, then consider recruiting him as a Jedi. The rebellion needs Jedi. Now.
But, if Luke shows any signs of turning out like his father, then C) sneak into his house one fine night and chop his head off. With great regret but it'll save a lot of trouble later on.
Knowing this to be the case, Bail Organa (perhaps at the insistence of his wife) has found excuses not to send Leia to Ben for assessment of Jedi potential, largely for fear of option C.

To be fair to all concerned, Leia has shown no overt signs of a link to the Force. Luke on the other hand has. In his home-built hotrod aircraft, with no formal fighter pilot training and no decent instrumentation, Luke can regularly score centre-hits on 2-metre targets in complicated zero-altitude maneouvres. Until he attends the briefing on Yavin, Luke has no way of knowing that hardened combat pilots would consider that nearly impossible. To him it's easy. Obi-Wan, who saw Anakin's performance in the Pod Race, is nervous.

Much of Obi-Wan's behaviour in this film, and Yoda's in the next, can best be understood if they are frankly scared to death of what Luke might become. (Ben is also scared that he himself will make all the same mistakes he made with Anakin.)

Now, with the existence of the rebellion at stake, Bail Organa has finally told Leia to go see Obi-Wan and has sent her along with R2. The original plan would then be for Obi-Wan (with optional Luke and/or Leia in tow) to leave his exile and take the Death Star plans to Yavin, where they can be put to use. R2 (with Leia if Ben doesn't want to take her) would then carry on to Alderaan to maintain the cover story. The original plan does not survive contact with a large Imperial Star Destroyer.

R2 and 3PO bail out in an escape pod, landing in vaguely the right area of Tattoine, where R2's first priority is transport. He arranges to be captured by a group of Jawas and, once on board their transport, he makes a deal with them (possibly using emergency funds stored about his person) to take him where he wants to go. The Jawas refuse to go directly to Kenobi for fear of marauding Sandpeople but they agree to R2's second request : transport to the Skywalker farm. They even get to keep the purchase price if they can sell R2 and 3PO there. The Jawas shake on it and go through with the plan.

Seeing 3PO fail to recognise the farm where he worked for 10 years gives r2 a moment's amusement but, as soon as possible, he gets away and heads for Kenobi. Luke and 3PO follow, which may or may not have been part of the plan.

On first seeing R2, Obi-Wan has a twinkle in his eye and calls him "my cilantro friend". Well, he is. However, when Luke wakes up and says that R2 claimed to be owned by an Obi-Wan Kenobi, he blandly says "I don't seem to remember ever owning a droid." Ben has in fact owned several but the remark is aimed at R2 and translates as "You keep quiet. I'm not about to tell him everything just yet." Obi-Wan thinks fast and tells Luke a version of his past that does not involve a father who became a dark lord of the Sith. He wants to examine Luke a lot more closely before he risks telling him the real truth.

Although the Death Star plans need to get to Yavin as soon as possible, Obi-Wan needs to make one more diversion first. If the Empire knows that Leia is a Rebel leader, then they also know about her father and the whole Organa family may need immediate evacuation. Fortunately, before coming to Tattoine, R2 had already arranged transport, which is waiting at Mos Eisley, under the command of the Rebellion's other chief field agent and espionage asset. Chewbacca.

20 years earlier, Chewbacca was second in command of the defence of his planet. He's there in the tactical conferences and there on the front lines and is a personal friend of Yoda's. When he needed reliable people to join the embryonic Alliance, who else would Yoda turn to but his old friend from Kashykk? Given his background, there is no way that Chewie would spend the crucial years of the rebellion as the second-in-command to (sorry Han) a low-level smuggler. Unless it's his cover. In fact, Chewie is a top-line spy and flies what is in many ways the Rebellion's best ship.

The Millenium Falcon may look like a beat-up old freighter but it can outrun any Imperial ship in normal space or hyperspace, hang in a firefight with a Star Destroyer or outmaneouvre a dozen top-of-the-line TIE fighters. It's a remarkable feat of engineering and must have cost a colossal fortune to build. How does Han come to own a ship like that? He only thinks he does, actually it's Chewie's. Half-way through RotS, we see the Falcon landing at the Senate building on Coruscant. If it's the same ship (which of course it is) then it was the personal transport of one of the senatorial delegations - a much more likely source to commission its design. That delegatino must have later joined the Rebellion and given it the use of the Falcon. In fact, if the delegation is the one from Kashykk, then the ship may have belonged to Chewbacca as early as RotS.

Han is Chewie's front man. It's much better, and safer for him, if he doesn't know what's really going on. Chewie used to work with Lando Calrissian in a similar way but Lando wanted to settle down, so Chewie arranged for him to lose the Falcon in a card game to Han Solo, an even better choice as partner. Han and Chewie's working method is pretty much what we see in the cantina scene: Chewie make the contacts and sets up the deals, then turns them over to Han who haggles over the price and gives the final yea or nay. This lets Chewie wander the seamy underside of the galaxy pretty much at will, making contacts, gathering and passing information with no-one was the wiser, especially not Han.

Chewie persuaded Han to do business with Jabba the Hutt so he could make regular runs to Tattoine, where Chewie could pass messages between Kenobi and Organa. When R2's urgent message came through only days before, the only way for Chewie to get back to Tattoine in time was to make the "mistake" that forced Han to dump his cargo to avoid capture. As a down side, this led to Solo's getting a death mark out on him from Jabba the Hutt. Chewie was a bit upset about the need for that but figured they weren't going to be dealing with Tattoine for much longer.

En route to Alderaan, R2 and Chewie play stop-motion chess. This is the latest in a series of games they've played over the years in the back rooms of space stations and cantinas across the galaxy, but this is the first time they've done it in front of their respective straight men, so they put on a big show.

Then it all goes wrong again. Alderaan is gone and the Falcon is caught and brought aboard the Death Star. Only Han, Luke and 3PO don't know just how much trouble they're in but Obi-Wan has a plan and seems confident (but Jedi always do). Soon afterwards, R2 finds Leia in the detention cells and shouts that they have to rescue her, to which Chewie can only agree. If Vader learns he has a daughter, then they're all in deep trouble, so Chewie does his bit to persuade Han to go along with Luke's plan.

Then, on the verge of escape, Vader himself turns up only yards from both of his children, one of whom is leaking Force all over the place. Obi-Wan stages a distraction by letting himself die and go into the Force while the others escape. At this point, Chewie suddenly realises that he's been left in charge, not only of the Death Star Plans and the survival of the Rebellion but of the secret son and daughter of Darth Vader. With the Organas and Kenobi all dead, only Chewie, R2 and Yoda know who Luke and Leia are. And only Ob-Wan knew where Yoda has been hiding. Chewie is stressed out by the responsibility and R2 (who keeps making crude jokes about the whole affair) is being no help at all.

Chewie's first problem is what is happening between Luke and Leia. With a psychic link they can feel but don't understand, thrown together in a life-or-death escape, they are looking at each other with a sparky intensity that Chewie gradually recognises as Romantic Tension. He's no expert on human relationships but Chewie is fairly sure that that's Wrong, so he does the only thing he can under the circumstances - he throws Han at her. Han is at first not interested but after a while starts to warm to the idea with an intensity that gives Chewie new worries.

When they reach Yavin, Han decides to take the money and run and Chewie decides to go with him. Looked at in cold light, it's for the good of the Rebellion. Even if Yavin is destroyed, there'll be one agent who knows what's going on who can try and put something back together, but he doesn't feel good about it. When Han decides to turn around and join the attack, Chewie is all for it.

Han and Luke get medals but Chewie doesn't. Actually, Leia offers him one but Chewie turns it down. He got one of those things from Yoda about 20 years ago, but there's no way he can tell her that.

As the film ends, the three founders of the Rebellion are all gone. Bail Organa is dead, Yoda is out of contact and Obi-Wan's ghost can only talk to other Jedi. (So that would be Yoda then.) Thus, the field leadership of the rebellion has just been turned over to the daughter of Darth Vader. Chewie is really hoping that someone with an official rank greater than hers will get here real soon before he has to think really seriously about option C.

well you learned a lesson. Stuff like this does not affect a woman. They have already made their mind up about you, and if it is positive you can punch them in the vagina and they will tell their friends how awesome you are and how you're just misunderstood. If it's negative, you could rescue them, their beloved family pet, their grandma, and their newborn baby from a fire, while letting your own house burn down to the ground and losing everything you had in the world, and they'd go out on a date the next day with some guy who is punching them in the vagina.

Gestures do nothing.

If she already had feelings for you, she'd gush and show all her friends and they'd all coo. The same gesture, if she has no feelings, will creep her the fuck out and her friends will all be freaked and so forth.

What you do means nothing, it is all based on the context of what *she* feels.

For men, right and wrong is highly objective. Good and bad, all objective. Even a thief who is robbing you probably understands what he is doing is damn wrong, he just wants the money and is doing it in spite of it being wrong.

A woman, right and wrong depends on how she feels. If she is mad at you, she could take all your pet fish out of the tank, spell "Fuck you asshole" on your table with them and watch them gasp for air and die, and this would be perfectly right. Because she's mad at you, and her feelings justify her actions. She would steal, cheat, fuck you out of a job, house and home and have not a twinge of guilt about it if she was angry. The context of her feelings sets up the interpretation of all actions: yours, and hers. Right and wrong is completely relative and subjective.

In conclusion then, if you want to ask a girl out on a date, just ask. She has already answered the question internally, it's just sitting there in the box, your asking just opens the lid. There is no Heisenberg's uncertainty principle here, there is no statistical function that is going to collapse onto a real observable. It already exists.

With a fuckload of work it is possible to budge that decision to make it change at the very topmost level of her brain, but that more often than not is just going to put the top levels of her in conflict with the bottom levels and after a few dates and things going well she will pop out with "I like you better as a friend."

So not only is the gesture a waste of time and useless, it is actually counter productive in case it brings about a false positive.

Me, I think you did a cute and cool thing here, and also creative. But my opinion means shit all. Next time, just ask.

MODERATION EXPERIMENT UPDATE

Hey Shacknews,

It's been almost two weeks since we attempted a political thread hiatus here on the Shacknews Chatty forum.

I have collected some interesting data points, but there is no real reason to share them with the community based on the user response to this experiment.

I will keep this short.

1. Political threads are allowed once again.
2. We need more active moderators if we want to actually improve the level of discourse on this platform.
3. Some Shackers are just as shitty without political threads as they are with them, and it appears that the damage of years of having a daily political thread has already been done.

This experiment was a decision borne out of my disappointment to see a trans user be chased off of this platform during pride month. People have suggested that the timing of the experiment was bad, but the past 6 years have shown that there is a never-ending stream of political news and there would never be a good time to do this.

I do think this experiment has achieved something most politicians have failed to do. It has brought together leftists, liberals, centrists, conservatives and even some right wingers in discussing how to address the community's problems.

We need your help in order to make the Chatty a more productive and a fun place.

Please reply or message Duke Nuked if you are interested in joining our Shacknews mod team.