Hogwarts Legacy - Not as good as Dog Kid University

[fat flatulent git]

25 minutes ago, Hello Goaty ♥ said:

What if you think Harry Potter is a load of rubbish.  Is there anything in this for me?

 

I don't think so.  The setting is going to be a huge part of the appeal.

[dreamylittledream]

1 hour ago, Hello Goaty ♥ said:

What if you think Harry Potter is a load of rubbish.  Is there anything in this for me?

It’s currently looks like pure Potter fan service and certainly that’s the main appeal so probably not.

 

The game might be decent too, who knows, but the reason to be excited for it (or not) is the Wizarding World angle.

[Festoon]

2 hours ago, dreamylittledream said:

It’s currently looks like pure Potter fan service and certainly that’s the main appeal so probably not.

 

The game might be decent too, who knows, but the reason to be excited for it (or not) is the Wizarding World angle.

 

I thought "wizarding world" was a weird rebrand of the franchise to get the Barry Otter name out. Like Facebook becoming Meta.

[dreamylittledream]

1 hour ago, Festoon said:

 

I thought "wizarding world" was a weird rebrand of the franchise to get the Barry Otter name out. Like Facebook becoming Meta.

 

Nah Wizarding World was first used as term for the Potter areas at the Universal theme parks in 2010 and later became co-opted to cover the wider franchise beyond the 7 books/8 films when the Fantastic Beasts films debuted - years before JK started her unfortunate tweeting

 

Its basically a term for the universe rather than just the story of the boy who lived.

 

Lets be clear here like it or not the Potter name still makes billions - its Rowling who has become a little toxic

[Jarik]

I have mixed feelings about the Wizarding World separate from Harry Potter. It's style is very much oldey-worldey (robes, quills, wood and stone architecture, etc) but with some more modern elements (steam trains, lavatories, etc) thrown in and Magic making up for the rest.  I found its styling rather charming to begin with (I still collect Hardback books even though I have a Kindle) but the enforced separation between the Wizarding & Muggle worlds did begin to grate a bit as the series went on

 

I'm not sure if it's Canon that Magic and Technology cannot mix, but the way in which the the franchise tends to ignore or dismiss Muggles or Muggle inventions as having any part to play in the future of this world is rather annoying. I can't help but wonder if this world's Muggles went to the Moon, invented Computers/Mobile Phones/A.I./Etc or if an enterprising Witch or Wizard will someday find a way to merge those things.  If anyone was going to invent Magitech in this world I thought it would be Hermione, for instance.

 

Like I said, mixed feelings. One of my dreams someday is a have a Library/Study that any HP Wizard would be proud of, but I probably would have a Computer in there too.

 

[Festoon]

4 hours ago, Jarik said:

I have mixed feelings about the Wizarding World separate from Harry Potter. It's style is very much oldey-worldey (robes, quills, wood and stone architecture, etc) but with some more modern elements (steam trains, lavatories, etc) thrown in and Magic making up for the rest.  I found its styling rather charming to begin with (I still collect Hardback books even though I have a Kindle) but the enforced separation between the Wizarding & Muggle worlds did begin to grate a bit as the series went on

 

I'm not sure if it's Canon that Magic and Technology cannot mix, but the way in which the the franchise tends to ignore or dismiss Muggles or Muggle inventions as having any part to play in the future of this world is rather annoying. I can't help but wonder if this world's Muggles went to the Moon, invented Computers/Mobile Phones/A.I./Etc or if an enterprising Witch or Wizard will someday find a way to merge those things.  If anyone was going to invent Magitech in this world I thought it would be Hermione, for instance.

 

Like I said, mixed feelings. One of my dreams someday is a have a Library/Study that any HP Wizard would be proud of, but I probably would have a Computer in there too.

 

 

Yeah, it suffers from the Steampunk problem, as outlined by Adam Roberts (I'll see if I can find his essay on it) whereby it's just modern conveniences replaced by 'magic', which is basically just a dressed up, posher, versions of things we actually have in this world because it's aesthetically more pleasing (i.e. owls for communication instead of mobile phones). Roberts argues that that is just a bourgeois, classist notion generally - that the modern world just isn't classy enough and that Victorian or Edwardian aesthetics were somehow better. He argues that it just doesn't work generally because it ignores that inventions are the sum result of the consecutiveness of history, industrial, social, cultural, etc. In other words, Babbage perfecting the Difference Engine would not have resulted in a steampunk age, and that it's kinda insulting and demeaning to all the people involved in the digital age to suggest that it could have. Roberts puts it a million times better than me, of course.

 

What's interesting to me is HP has the problem of this AND the present day world at the same time, which makes it worse.

 

And, I can't help wonder about the snobby arguments put forward by Roberts (he wasn't talking about HP at all, btw) about the hankering for a better, classier present and that notion being inherently backwards-looking and conservative weren't on the money with Rowling. A born conservative, hankering after the good old days, when women were women, etc'.

 

I'll see if the essay is online.

[Hexx]

I’d Love to read that 

[moosegrinder]

Same.

 

[Festoon]

Currently having a look for it.

 

stand by...

 

[Festoon]

Right, here we go. It's from a book review (it's the Part 2 of the review but I put the review in for context - put I'm too lazy to format that bit)

 

Jean-Christophe Valtat’s Aurorarama (2010)

 

Valtat’s Aurorarama is a steampunk novel. I have some problems with steampunk as a genre, and discuss them below (there’s a part two to this review, you see), but I want to start out by noting that Aurorarama is very good indeed, considerably steamier than the standard punky moist air, even though set in a brilliantly chilly alt-historical North Pole. I recommend it. 

 

We’re in New Venice, ‘The Pearl of the Arctic,’ and the era is sometime around the turn of the 20th century, or one version of that turn refracted through Valtat’s ‘pluriverse.’ New Venice itself is a generically familiar but still very handsomely mounted location. Ruled by a secretive and authoritarian ‘Council of Seven,’ and policed by an elegant but ruthless secret police force, ‘the Gentlemen of the Night,’ it is nevertheless a stylish location: Brentford, leaving the bridge and its sculpted bears, reached the Arctic Administration Building and headed toward the Botanical Building, further on the right. Its lights were turned down, and the glass-and-metal structure loomed large and mysterious. One could sense the life inside, the silent but stubborn relentless growth. [p. 96] The plot follows two main characters: Brentford Orsini (that’s him, on the bridge), a city administrator from a good family with dark secrets in his past; and Gabriel d’Allier, a foppish dandy and academic with a decadent, druggy lifestyle. The two are friends caught up in the secret movement opposing the oppressive Council of Seven, who run the city, and accordingly pursued by the state. Matters seem to be coming to a head: a strange, ominous black airship is hovering mysteriously overhead; Eskimo bandits are circling the city; and a sled without a driver has arrived out of the north ‘where nobody lives,’ pulled by a dog-team, and drawing after it the body of a woman. It would be folly to try and summarize the rest of the serpentine, dreamlike plot, for this is a restlessly inventive and sweetly surreal novel. We get the usual steampunk technological artefacts mingled with strange Vurt-like drugs and supernatural goings on to boot. Indeed, Aurorarama explicitly blends conventional narrative pleasures with the logic of dreaming: a girl tattooed all over with a starmap; moonlight lovemaking on the ice; Polar Kangaroos; Zeppelins powered by ‘Vapouric Ether’ [sic] and navigated by anarchists. Aurorarama mixes in scenes from 1960s hipster jazzland and figures from a Bosch painting (‘three men, clad in the traditional black overcoats, white bird masks and wide-brimmed hats of their plague doctors’ outfits’ [p. 12] – these are the Scavengers, a kind of untouchable caste who handle the city’s garbage). All that sort of thing. The dream logic that structures the novel has a lot in common with stage magic (‘Stella came down and bowed to the audience, but as she stood up, her head remained stuck in mid-air, while the rest of her body faded out’, p. 191). Quite a lot of the novel has to do with music, bands playing frying pans strung like guitars and other, steam-powered instruments (in Pynchon mode, Valtat supplied us with terrible lyrics as well as descriptions of the bands). Some of the novel consists of, to appropriate one character’s phrase, ‘hypnagogic sequences of related and slightly absurd events he had little control over’ [p. 233]. But counterbalancing the dreaminess, and ensuring the novel hangs together as a novel, is a muscular command of the ripping yarns narrative idiom, including chapter titles like the exclamatory ‘Eskimos to the Rescue!’ or indeed the triple exclamatory ‘Hypnotized!!!’ and ‘Terrorists!!!’ The titular machine is a particularly splendid invention, a device that turns the aurora borealis into a gigantic visualization medium, like ‘a slightly damaged hand-colorized fantascope movie’ [p. 346]. Better yet, the novel is as well-written as it is well-imagined: full of nice phrases – ‘the vandalized Bibi Eybat oil wells burned non-stop in the night, in true Zoroastrian fashion’ [p. 153]; a blizzard ‘whirls madly like a trapped wolf’ (p. 174) – and Valtat handles his cod-19th-century tone sweetly: ‘he beheld, almost miragenous through the whirling snowflakes, four hooded shapes hurrying away down the back alley’ [p. 197]. North Pole politics are ‘poletics’; people travel around not in taxis but ‘taxsleighs’, and the prose approaches the business of swearing with a degree of propriety (‘[…] they were against the Council then, and now those phoque-in-iceholes work hand in hand’ p. 69). Although, at the same time, the writing sometimes falls into the uncanny valley between the formal idiom of Victorian prose and the unidiomatic stiffness of a non-native speaker (‘“This is very kind of you. But it happens that one likes to hunt for oneself, even if one is a bad hunter,” he said’ [p. 41]). I don’t mean to be a neat-piquer. That Valtat, a French national, wrote this long, accomplished novel in his second language represents an almost Conradian achievement. So if I gracelessly note that sometimes the style doesn’t quite hit the bull – ‘It would, Gabriel thought, enlighten his return home […] provided he would not go alone’ [p. 68](‘provided he didn’t go home alone’ would be more idiomatic); or ‘as he hurried he could perceive rooms whose open doors revealed the strangest scenes’ [p. 160]; ‘perceive’ isn’t the right word there, I think – then I must also declare that Valtat’s command of English is better than many published Anglophone authors I could mention. Overall, this is a very good novel indeed. 

 

2 So, steampunk. We might want to ask whether this novel, with its manifold excellences, is a symptom of a subgenre in rude health; or whether it is a late bloomer in an exhausted imaginative idiom. I’m not sure how we might want to answer such a question. 

 

What is steampunk? It is a studied dismantling of the consecutiveness of history in the service of a particular set of styles and fashions. 

 

As such, it is part of a larger phenomenon; what Fredric Jameson’s famous 1984 essay ‘Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism’ identified as a ‘mesmerizing new aesthetic mode’ that has recently ‘emerged as an elaborated symptom of the waning of our historicity, of our lived possibility of experiencing history in some active way.’ It may be less useful than otherwise to invoke this phenomenon’s brand name (‘postmodernism’), because that term has become so scratched and scrabbled, so contested and overused as to approach uselessness. But Jameson is on to something, I think, when he describes the last half century or so as characterized by ‘a strange occultation of the present’, a situation in which a kind of formalized nostalgia symptomatically reveals ‘the enormity of a situation in which we seem increasingly incapable of fashioning representations of our own current experience.’ Ours is, in other words, a situation in which our sense of history is exhausted; overwritten by an inventively but debilitating aesthetic nostalgia that functions as a deliberate simplification of the past – Jameson calls it a ‘sterilized’ and ‘fetishized’ version of the past: ‘our own pop images and simulacra of that history, which itself remains forever out of reach.’ Steampunk is precisely this mode of Jamesonian pastiche, driven by a nostalgia for the styles and manners of Victorian English combined with a sense that the convenience of contemporary technological advances – or, perhaps, more: the exhilaration of the technological sublime itself, upon which so much SF is predicated – can be disengaged from the actual circumstances of their historical production and retrofitted, as it were, into the past. 

 

The problem with this is its mendacity: I mean both its ideological untruthfulness, but also its radical misprision of history as such. Things like technological advance are not random events; they are determined by their historical circumstances. The reason the Victorians did not invent computing and space travel is not that they happened not to get around to it, and not that mere chance got in the way; it is that the entire social and cultural ground of their collective lives was not productive of such advances. Had circumstances been trivially different to the way they actually were, Babbage might have actually manufactured his difference engine, but even if he had done so, the computer revolution would not have followed, as the night follows the day, the way the side-whiskered granddaddy Gibsonian-Sterlingesque The Difference Engine suggests. 

 

The actual computer revolution, from the 1980s to the present, is not a chance event, or even a chance series of events; it is the superstructure of a particular complex economic, social, and cultural base. It required not just a few clever people making clever designs to produce personal computing and the internet; much more importantly it required an entire human economy and culture receptive, or productive, of the million elements that fit together into the whole. It takes more than a Babbage to make this happen. 

 

A similar case could be made for the more commonly appearing tropes of so many steampunk novels: flying machines long before the Wright brothers, robots before Toyota, and so on. The fantasy of steampunk, in fact, is the old bourgeois one: that one talented individual matters more than the whole weight of history. It is the fantasy of being freed from the larger context of historical necessity. And actually, steampunk is not really a matter of this or that technological gadget; the appeal of the genre is in the way it finesses the past into the present. This is an aesthetic strategy it shares with Heroic Fantasy (or much of it) as a mode: a disinclination to encounter the past as past. 

 

Most 21st-century representations of a notional ‘past’ are based on the idea that people in the 19th century (or, in post-Tolkienian Fantasy, the middle ages) were basically people exactly like us, and therefore people with whom it requires no effort from the reader to identify. The differences the works do register are superficial ones – the relative deficiency of cool technology – that can be supplied, in the case of steampunk, by retrofitting modern technology into stylish pseudo-Victorian garb (or in the case of Fantasy, by supplying the deficiency with ‘magic’). Not concrete deserts but neo-Gothic prettiness (‘Brentford’s apartment was located in another wing of the Botanical Building, accessible through an exquisitely crafted wrought iron spiral staircase. This led to a flat decorated in the finest Art Nouveau style, as if the iron girders had melded with the hothouse plants’ p. 100). 

 

At its worst, then, steampunk is just an exercise in escapism, history as fancy dress: the brutalist aesthetic of modern-day big-scale technological artefacts is softened with a little elegant 19th-century design panache – instead of the black, slug-shaped enormousness of a modern nuclear submarine we have Captain Nemo’s vessel; similarly large but beautiful: silver and art-deco-silhouetted, ornamented with attractive curlicues and stylish lines. 

 

Real-life London’s Millennium Dome is an ugly, functional affair; the domes in Valtat’s Aurorarama have more je ne sais quoi (‘the dome itself, supported by white pillars, was of jet-black jasper encrusted with diamond stars and silver filigree work’ p. 159). 

 

In place of today’s Pacino-in-Scarface vulgarity of vocabulary and manners, we have characters who speak in mannered Johnsonian or Dickensian phrases, who dress not in shell suits and jogging pants but in exquisitely tailored suits. Or, to cut to the argumentative chase: steampunk gives us not the grinding desolation of post-Darwinian existential insignificance, but a golden ticket back to the pre-Darwinian cosmos (or, a little more precisely, to a Cosmos trembling on the brink of falling into the angst of Modernity) where the universe is fitted more comfortingly to the individual’s hopes and importance. Civilization, but with more profound ontological discontent replaced with the diverting transitory discomforts of adventure narrative. 

 

To use steampunk diagnostically, in other words, is to suggest the ground of its appeal is a sense that the modern world is lacking in refinement. What steampunk tells us is that there’s nothing to prevent the marriage of contemporary technological convenience with the elegance and the good manners of the 19th century. Shorthand for this, of course, is breeding, and to think of it like that is to understand the extent to which steampunk is embroiled in reactionary ideologies of class superiority. Having said all that, one of the things that lifts Aurorarama out of the standard steampunk rut is its awareness of its own mode precisely as a recirculation of styles (‘Once again fashion had completed its meaningless but pleasant cycle and come back to its starting point’ p. 67). 

 

Valtat’s novel does understand, I think, that steampunk is a kind of dream of the Victorian age, and dreams are simultaneously beguiling and semiotically fluid. Dreams in Aurorarama are actual codes, to be deciphered by those in the know to reveal detailed messages. Here is Brentford trying to make sense of one of his dreams (excuse me if I don’t gloss every reference here): Let us be more precise, he thought. He had wanted to speak to Helen or for Helen to speak to him – the woman (and a lot more than that) whose dead body he had left on the ice field a few years before, after her magic had saved the city. Vomiting ectoplasm on the ice field may have been merely a consequence of his desire to communicate with the dead Helen. And so must have been the Ghost Lady, for a spectre was more or less the form he would have expected Helen to take if she appeared. ‘Mr. Osiris’ was another clue. After Helen had saved the city from Delwit Faber’s coup with the Lobster Girls and the House of Hellequin, Brentford had found crumpled in her hand the formula Isis had used to stop the Chariot of the Sun in order to help the diseased Osiris. The very name Osiris could be vaguely construed as a play on his name, Orsini, which in Italian was itself a pun on bear (a bear even appeared on his coat of arms). It would be only logical to find a bear on the arctic ice field, all the more since arctos also meant ‘bear.’ Being on the ice, then, like the references to Ross, meant only that he was simply dreaming of himself waiting for a vision of Helen, not to mention that ice is the best backdrop for the kind of clear and sustained mental images he’d been hoping to see. The Ghost Lady calling him Mr. Osiris signified that, if she was not Helen herself, she was conscious of Brentford’s history with Helen, and was perhaps some sort of messenger. ‘Did you fly?’ was more difficult to decipher, but Brentford remembered now that when Helen had made him join her on a kind of shamanic trip, he had found himself flying over an unknown city. So, as he summed it up, the dream was just a rather simple image of his own longing for Helen, and the message he had got was, after all, pointing to her more clearly than he had first thought. [pp. 76-77] The point is that after all this pre-Freudian Freudianism, all this squirreling around in the dream-matter to pull out nuggets of significance, Brentford concludes: ‘Of course, there was still the tiresome hypothesis that it was a simple circular circuit of wish fulfilment and that he had only received under a different form what he had first put into the dream.’ That, I’d say, gets to the point of it. What we get out of steampunk is what we put in. ‘After all,’ we’re told a little later; ‘the place is nothing if not nondescript. The North Pole and four hundred miles off it are just the same endless expanse of dreary faceless desert… Or to put it otherwise, the North Pole is Nothing’ [p. 84]. Aurorarama’s first section (‘Qarrtsiluni’) begins with this intriguing epigraph: The form familiar to our stage of culture, which aims at weaving together and combining motifs into a whole, while gradually shaping itself toward a climax and tending to an explosive conclusion, viz. the dramatic construction, has no place in the intellectual life of the Eskimos. [C. W. Schultz-Lorentzen, Intellectual Culture of the Greenlanders, 1928] It’s bold of Valtat to adhere, more or less, to this off-kilter Eskimo logic in his larger narrative. The nothingness is doing interesting things in this novel. What I mean is that this is a novel that replaces the nuts-and-bolts techno-fetish of the mode with a pataphysical or surreal dream-fetish, that works its oxymoronic white-heat white-(arctic)-cold dynamic out into all the corners and limbs of its sprawling text. Highly recommended.

 

Roberts, Adam. Sibilant Fricative: Essays and Reviews . Steel Quill Books. Kindle Edition. 

[Hexx]

18 hours ago, Hello Goaty ♥ said:

What if you think Harry Potter is a load of rubbish.  Is there anything in this for me?

Do you enjoy violently putting down a rebellion by a slave caste? This could be the game for you!

[earlymodernsteve]

There's this too, which references the Roberts piece:

 

https://overland.org.au/2012/06/mad-scientists-airships-and-class-the-politics-of-steampunk/

[ZOK]

48 minutes ago, earlymodernsteve said:

There's this too, which references the Roberts piece:

 

https://overland.org.au/2012/06/mad-scientists-airships-and-class-the-politics-of-steampunk/

I think Jeff Vandermeer’s comments are the most pertinent in that article.

[Festoon]

23 minutes ago, ZOK said:

I think Jeff Vandermeer’s comments are the most pertinent in that article.

 

Haven't read Vandermeer's full take but that quote doesn't really outline it - that bit only says 'you're only focusing on a bit of it'. Is it up anywhere?

 

[Festoon]

Most importantly, if you buy this, you're funding this nutter.

 

 

[ryodi]

Rowling has needed an editor since The Goblet of Fire.

[Unofficial Who]

7 minutes ago, ryodi said:

Rowling has needed an editor since The Goblet of Fire.

 

This is a known issue generally in the book trade. The more famous and popular an author gets the harder it is to edit their work (and most authors require great editors.)

 

I think the latter Harry Potter books suffer from the twin issues of less editing AND the pressure of trying to race the Harry Potter movies to market. It might not be popular but George RR Martin's refusal to write to the schedule of the Game of Thrones tv show was probably the right one for him.

[moosegrinder]

Ironically Martin is also another one that needs a fucking editor.

[Broker]

4 hours ago, ryodi said:

Rowling has needed an editor since The Goblet of Fire.

None of her books since then have been edited at all I don’t think. I’m sure I read that she threatened to take the series to another publisher if they edited her work so they’re basically all just first drafts from that point onwards.

[fat flatulent git]

No successful author expects their first draft to be good enough.  Even if she refused to take any of her editors' comments on board, she will have redrafted the manuscript herself numerous times to improve it.

[Festoon]

4 hours ago, fat flatulent git said:

No successful author expects their first draft to be good enough.  Even if she refused to take any of her editors' comments on board, she will have redrafted the manuscript herself numerous times to improve it.

 

Recent evidence shows she's not very good at taking on board other people's opinions.

[b00dles]

And reading her books. 

[Festoon]

 

[Mr. Gerbik]

I really just can't get my head around this. She's actively running a hate campaign against a minority group. Every penny she earns helps her find the time to fart about and spew hate speech on Twitter. Why would ANYONE be okay with funding this? It's not even indirectly, she gets paid from the earnings of this game. Imagine if you knew that the next Call of Duty would donate part of its profits to Donald Trump's reelection campaign where drags his fat racist ass on some stage everyday to spew vile things - would you be like, "I dunno the game looks really fun so I'm going to buy it regardless"?

 

I might be more emotionally invested than most because I have a trans friend and I have been the victim of racism myself a few times, but I just can't get my head around it. Why would you want to give someone so who's openly evil a single penny?

[moosegrinder]

10 minutes ago, Mr. Gerbik said:

I really just can't get my head around this. She's actively running a hate campaign against a minority group. Every penny she earns helps her find the time to fart about and spew hate speech on Twitter. Why would ANYONE be okay with funding this? It's not even indirectly, she gets paid from the earnings of this game. Imagine if you knew that the next Call of Duty would donate part of its profits to Donald Trump's reelection campaign where drags his fat racist ass on some stage everyday to spew vile things - would you be like, "I dunno the game looks really fun so I'm going to buy it regardless"?

 

I might be more emotionally invested than most because I have a trans friend and I have been the victim of racism myself a few times, but I just can't get my head around it. Why would you want to give someone so who's openly evil a single penny?

 

Because some people don't care. That's not to say they're terrible people (that's an argument for another day) but for some it's so tangential or distanced from their enjoyment of something it doesn't even come into consideration.

 

 

[Benny]

The weird part though is it's despite how aggressively mediocre it looks. There do seem to be the odd few people who, when presented with comments that something seems to be both rubbish AND is funding something or someone nasty, suddenly all start saying things like "I'm going to give it a chance, I'll buy it", as if they have some sort of tick that instantly engages them to buy anything considered "naughty".

[Mr. Gerbik]

8 minutes ago, Benny said:

The weird part though is it's despite how aggressively mediocre it looks. There do seem to be the odd few people who, when presented with comments that something seems to be both rubbish AND is funding something or someone nasty, suddenly all start saying things like "I'm going to give it a chance, I'll buy it", as if they have some sort of tick that instantly engages them to buy anything considered "naughty".

I said something similar earlier in the thread. It looks mediocre at best. There isn't even an "but it looks so gooood" excuse. I really don't get it.

[Lying Cat]

Most people don't care about what Rowling does with her garden. Add to that a generous helping of the fact that aggressively average videogames can sell very well if coupled to the right IPs and marketed well. And the Hogwarts IP has an absolute deathgrip on the souls of many, many people. 

[PaB]

1 hour ago, Mr. Gerbik said:

I really just can't get my head around this. She's actively running a hate campaign against a minority group. Every penny she earns helps her find the time to fart about and spew hate speech on Twitter. Why would ANYONE be okay with funding this? It's not even indirectly, she gets paid from the earnings of this game. Imagine if you knew that the next Call of Duty would donate part of its profits to Donald Trump's reelection campaign where drags his fat racist ass on some stage everyday to spew vile things - would you be like, "I dunno the game looks really fun so I'm going to buy it regardless"?

 

I might be more emotionally invested than most because I have a trans friend and I have been the victim of racism myself a few times, but I just can't get my head around it. Why would you want to give someone so who's openly evil a single penny?

I’m fine with funding it if it’s a good game. My only criteria for buying games is do I want to play it or not.

[Mr. Gerbik]

Well, that answers my question I guess.