2020 Miscellaneous Links: Untitled Moose Game

[NotMiki]

I've encountered all the mortgage lending forms in rather...unusual circumstances.  With respect to an alleged fraud.  This old guy's evil stepson allegedly snookered him into signing documents he never understood by hiding the top parts of them - putting a jumbo mortgage on his house that his stepson used to his own benefit.  All this happened with a lender attorney present, who notarized the documents.  By that attorney's account, no undue coercion had taken place.  Inaccuracies in the byzantine mortgage documents prepared by the attorney were used to make a case that the attorney was not a reliable witness.  Then, in the middle of the case, the attorney was charged by the local DA's office with criminal fraud in unrelated cases.

So I guess super complicated regulatory requirements are helpful when noncompliance with same is an indication of actual wrongdoing question mark.

[Captain K]

There was discussion of color vision before, so here's a fun exercise. The point is to click the color not like the others. I've played five times and my average is around 27. My highest is 34, but sometimes I get stumped and have to start guessing depending on color. Certain shades of purple and dark blue trip me up (dark blue in particular can completely kill a run for me) moreso than others which subjectively tend to pop out a little more. Sometimes the popouts effects are really strong and other times you'll have a sense of the general direction of the oddball even though you don't necessarily consciously perceive the difference. I'd be interested in seeing how a color synesthete would do with this.

http://106.186.25.143/kuku-kube/en-3/

19 on the first try (didn't realize it was timed lol), 24 on the second.  Something I noticed is that when I couldn't identify it, leaning back in my chair (moving face farther from the screen) made it more apparent.

[Captain K]

I don't know how much press this got nationally, but it was pretty big here locally.  Posting it here for our resident lawyers.

http://abcnews.go.com/US/texas-mother-freed-spending-years-prison-foster-sons/story?id=26186920

Long story short, she was convicted.  But the DA threw it out due to lack of evidence - evidence her original lawyer withheld.  So hey, that actually works.  It just takes a while.

[Cotigo]

There was discussion of color vision before, so here's a fun exercise. The point is to click the color not like the others. I've played five times and my average is around 27. My highest is 34, but sometimes I get stumped and have to start guessing depending on color. Certain shades of purple and dark blue trip me up (dark blue in particular can completely kill a run for me) moreso than others which subjectively tend to pop out a little more. Sometimes the popouts effects are really strong and other times you'll have a sense of the general direction of the oddball even though you don't necessarily consciously perceive the difference. I'd be interested in seeing how a color synesthete would do with this.

http://106.186.25.143/kuku-kube/en-3/

Average around 30, max 34. Blue, Purple, and Black trip me up a lot. Pale colors are pretty easy. Definitely found it useful to blur my vision. Even if I couldn't see the difference in shades that somehow helped me clue in to which squares had something amiss.

[NotMiki]

I don't know how much press this got nationally, but it was pretty big here locally.  Posting it here for our resident lawyers.

http://abcnews.go.com/US/texas-mother-freed-spending-years-prison-foster-sons/story?id=26186920

Long story short, she was convicted.  But the DA threw it out due to lack of evidence - evidence her original lawyer withheld.  So hey, that actually works.  It just takes a while.

This article by itself is bizarrely awful journalism.  To sum up, she is getting a new trial because the court of appeals decided that she had "ineffective assistance of counsel," a legal term that means her lawyer was so bad that allowing the verdict to stand would be unconstitutional.  The article then goes on to say that the defense speculated that the victim had an eating disorder, and that "witnesses outside the home said they had seen Andrew's bizarre habits, too."  Does the article mean that those witnesses were witnesses at trial?  Unclear.  The article then goes on to drop this bombshell: "To find Hannah guilty, jurors had to believe either of two scenarios: that Hannah Overton force-fed Andrew salt knowing it would kill him or that she neglected to get medical help fast enough knowing that it would kill him. They convicted her based on the latter argument, that she did not seek help quickly enough."  So the whole article up to this point has been about how she was accused of force-feeding this kid, and...actually the jury did not find her guilty of that but instead found her guilty of failing to provide medical help in time.  In other words, the defense speculated about a scenario where the kid inadvertently poisoned himself in order to cast doubt on the prosecutor's allegations that the defendant poisoned him and...the jury was convinced that there was reasonable doubt about whether she intentionally poisoned the boy.  Oh, the article also mentions that the prosecutor was accused of misconduct but does not elaborate at all on what that misconduct is.

Anyway, from that article...there's no indication of what her lawyer did that was substandard, there's no indication of what the prosecutor did that was allegedly unethical, and there's nothing that would cast doubt on the jury's determination that she did not provide medical help when she should have.

p.s. Ineffective Assistance of Counsel is informally called the "Foggy Mirror Test," as in, say your attorney is sleeping in the middle of your trial.  Hold a hand mirror up to your attorney's nose.  Does the mirror get foggy?  Yes?  Congratulations, you have effective assistance of counsel.  It's very rare for an appeals court to throw out a verdict based on it.  So clearly he did something very wrong!  But the article doesn't give any indication what it was.

[Cotigo]

http://grrm.livejournal.com/

Start reading from the Sad Puppies posts. Christ on a cracker apparently there's a SciFi/Fantasy fiction equivalent of GamerGate. Granted, one less concerned with outright harassing people out of the industry and more concerned with completely dominating the Hugo Awards. Same damn paranoid, deluded justifications about SJW Cabals and the exclusion of the straight white man, though.

[Captain K]

  Oh, the article also mentions that the prosecutor was accused of misconduct but does not elaborate at all on what that misconduct is.

Yeah there's a lot more detail in my local paper but I don't have an easy way to link it.  Let me try and sum up.

1.  Hannah Overton force-feeds her 4 year old adopted son a large amount of Zatarain's Creole Spice to punish him.  Note that she is a nurse and should have a reasonable idea that this is not a good thing.

2.  Child dies.  Overton and husband put on trial (husband pleads out).

3.  Defense at trial tries to convince everyone that the child had pica (eating disorder where you eat dirt and other minerals laying around) and killed himself with salt.  This is where the withholding evidence comes in, she has access to the child's vomit tests and does not release them.  Which would prove one way or the other what the child ingested that killed him.  This information comes from one of the assistant defense attorneys, who switches sides for the prosecution at a later date.

4. Jury can't decide on whether the force-feeding killed the boy, but they can decide that Overton took too long to get medical attention.  She is convicted.

5. DA throws out the conviction due to bad legal representation.  Which is the right thing to do legally but means this monster is on the streets.

[NotMiki]

So the unethical defense attorney and the unethical prosecutor are...THE SAME PERSON!!  That is the weirdest...look, I just spent the last week playing Phoenix Wright and that still seems so implausible.

Couple questions: so were the vomit tests never disclosed at trial?  Also, did the prosecutors not have access to them?  Any halfway-competent request for discovery would have revealed the tests.  It's still puzzling to me that the conviction was vacated - typically in order to prove ineffective assistance of counsel you need to make a plausible showing that you would not have been convicted but for your counsel's failure.  Since she was convicted on a theory that did not require proof she forcefed the kid, that was not the case here.

[The Duck]

http://grrm.livejournal.com/

Start reading from the Sad Puppies posts. Christ on a cracker apparently there's a SciFi/Fantasy fiction equivalent of GamerGate. Granted, one less concerned with outright harassing people out of the industry and more concerned with completely dominating the Hugo Awards. Same damn paranoid, deluded justifications about SJW Cabals and the exclusion of the straight white man, though.

It's all over the place. The attempt at making metalgate was really hilarious.

http://www.reddit.com/r/GamerGhazi/comments/3254l1/comprehensive_list_of_subcultures_movements_and/

[Grefter]

SJW illuminati barging in on metal and ruining it for everyone. They are brand new interlopers infringing on the scene!!!!111!!1

[Captain K]

Couple questions: so were the vomit tests never disclosed at trial?  Also, did the prosecutors not have access to them?  Any halfway-competent request for discovery would have revealed the tests.  It's still puzzling to me that the conviction was vacated - typically in order to prove ineffective assistance of counsel you need to make a plausible showing that you would not have been convicted but for your counsel's failure.  Since she was convicted on a theory that did not require proof she forcefed the kid, that was not the case here.

Apparently I got it backwards, it was the prosecution that withheld the vomit tests, and one of the prosecutors switched to defense. 

CORPUS CHRISTI - Hannah Overton and the attorneys who helped set her free want to ensure the mistakes that led to her imprisonment aren’t repeated.

“Normal, everyday people with no criminal record can be victims of wrongful prosecution. Hannah Overton was,” said lawyer John Raley, of the Houston firm Raley and Bowick.

Overton’s attorneys have maintained prosecutors’ withholding evidence led to a wrongful capital murder conviction in 2007 in the death of 4-year-old Andrew Burd.

Last year, the state’s Court of Criminal Appeals overturned Overton’s conviction and found that her attorneys provided ineffective counsel at her trial. One of her trial attorneys later admitted to making the mistake of not arranging for a leading expert on salt poisoning to testify on Overton’s behalf. Raley called that the turning point in her case.

After the court’s decision, Nueces County District Attorney Mark Skurka vowed to retry Overton, who was released on bail in December.

But on Wednesday Skurka dismissed the case, citing “a myriad of factors, which came about after a careful review of the previous trial.”

None of those factors included the assertion Overton is innocent.

Skurka would not say Thursday how he feels about Overton’s responsibility for Andrew’s death.

“The dismissal said prosecutorial discretion, not actually innocent,” Skurka told the Caller-Times. “Dismissal does not equate to exonerated.”

Overton’s lead lawyer Cynthia Orr praised Skurka on Thursday for his decision to drop the capital murder case but has also accused the office of a “pattern and practice” of withholding evidence.

Overton’s defense team accused Sandra Eastwood, the lead prosecutor in the 2007 trial, of hiding Andrew’s vomit, evidence they say could have shown what Andrew last ate and proven Overton’s account.

Eastwood, who has denied those claims in court, did not respond to attempts to reach her for comment.

Rarely do judges overturn cases on the argument of prosecutor misconduct, something Orr said needs to change.

“This is going to be a groundbreaking case. It is going to change the complexion of criminal justice in Texas and I think Mr. Skurka has led the way in showing prosecutors what they need to do when cases have gone awry,” Orr said.

Skurka and prosecutor Bill Ainsworth defended Eastwood on Thursday and said she did not purposefully withhold evidence from the defense team at trial.

“No. Emphatically no,” Skurka said.

“We don’t believe that she withheld anything, not after looking at all the evidence,” Ainsworth echoed.

Skurka would not say whether he believed Andrew’s death was accidental. And he couldn’t answer whether Andrew received justice.

“I have a hard time answering that question,” Skurka said. He paused. “The duty of the district attorney is to seek justice, not convictions.”

Skurka, who was not the district attorney during the trial or a prosecutor on the case, said he decided to dismiss the case after a thorough review. He and Ainsworth also interviewed Dr. Alexander Rotta, who treated Andrew when he was dying, and Dr. Ray Fernandez, the medical examiner who ruled the boy’s death a homicide. Both testified during the trial.

Skurka said they agreed to keep those conversations confidential.

Overton declined to comment about whether she will seek financial compensation through a lawsuit or any other means.

[NotMiki]

Ah, that makes a lot more sense.  Here's my sense of the most likely scenario: the appeals court believed it was prosecutor misconduct, but didn't want to say so, so instead seized on a mistake made by the defense - a mistake which seems like it shouldn't have mattered to the outcome since she was convicted under a theory that didn't require the jury to prove she forcefed the kid.  Still quite a surprise.  The fact that the DA's office is not going to retry the case would seem to indicate that there are either serious deficiencies in their case that mean they don't think they can convict OR that allowing defense attorneys to take another crack at the case would expose wrongdoing that has not yet come to light.  Maybe a little from column A, a little from column B.

[Luther Lansfeld]

First they came for Wall Street Occupy, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not part of Occupy.
Then they came for the Atheists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not an Atheist.
Then they came for the Gamers, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Gamer.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.

how dare people want you to be respectful of other people, it's pretty much the same as being a Nazi

[Anthony Edward Stark]

http://www.polygon.com/2015/4/14/8410377/star-ocean-5-ps4-ps3-japan-western-release

Star Ocean 5 is gonna be a thing.  Used to love the series but 4 was a huge pile of garbage so I'm not holding out much hope.

[The Duck]

I thought Tri-Ace was doing mobile and tablet shit now. Also Fakelead is sounds like a witness in an Ace Attorney game.

[Anthony Edward Stark]

I thought Tri-Ace was doing mobile and tablet shit now. Also Fakelead is sounds like a witness in an Ace Attorney game.

Who ISN'T doing mobile and tablet shit at Square-Enix anymore?  Not like they're turning regular huge profits on consoles anymore and money's got to come from somewhere.

[Niu]

Tri-Ace has this sorry we know SO4 is bad so we base SO5 more on SO3 attitude.
But looking at PSNOVA's quality, I am not sure how sorry they are.

And... is it just me, or does Fedel's 3D model looks like a certain recent Disney character.

[Cmdr_King]

Let's be fair though, Hiro was designed to look like Generic Shonen Lead, he bares at least a passing resemblance to every Star Ocean lead except maybe Claude.

... come to think of it I'd be totally okay with a Big Hero 6 game in the style of Star Ocean. 

[Meeplelard]

I think the closest we'll get is a Big Hero 6 world in Kingdom Hearts 3.  Since Disney seems to be keeping it split from the MCU, despite it's origins, don't think that would  encroach upon the potential a Marvel world would have.

...but yeah, honestly, there's no reason to be worried about SO5 at the moment.  It's going to exist, and there's some basic information about the game, that's it.  Yes, Star Ocean 4 may not have been your cup of tea, but it's one game in a franchise; very few franchises, companies, etc. bat 1.000, so why should this be any different?

[metroid composite]

So there's a surprisingly well-made "X reenacted by Ponies" series.

Harry Potter
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sMKrbPOUYBQ

Yu-Gi-Oh
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bRbVsUTud-0

Pokemon
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ShGwH_QQAN4

Star Wars
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aYk1DgaeZC8

Lord of the Rings
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y4hD31VTdsw

Nintendo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qmWxS6F-GkU

[Anthony Edward Stark]

http://www.raphkoster.com/2012/03/20/do-auction-houses-suck/

Raph Koster, a developer from SWG, talks about crafting economies as "asynchronous parallel games" and how they differ from traditional WoW-style economics.

[Captain K]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ypiED8iVKV8

Final Fantasy collaboration with Puzzle and Dragons.

[metroid composite]

The case for the oxford comma:

[NotMiki]

http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2015/05/04/ryan_mchenry_vine_creator_dies_and_ryan_gosling_eats_cereal_in_tribute.html

faith in humanity as filtered through the internet...rising. somehow!

[Lady Door]

Chuck Windig is great at dispensing non-nonsense advice in appropriately inappropriate language.

"IN WHICH I CRITIQUE YOUR STORY (THAT I HAVEN’T READ)"

http://terribleminds.com/ramble/2015/05/05/in-which-i-critique-your-story-that-i-havent-read/