Merus

Wow, he said that at the Grace Hopper Celebration? Like, it's pretty eye-rolly at the best of times, but that's just offensive. That's like if someone gave a speech at a Martin Luther King remembrance that said that if black people committed less crimes, white people would like them more.

I feel like the pineapples are kind of the point: they take standardised tests and are therefore the ideal students, but kids are infinitely more interesting and rewarding but that's not what the tests allow for.

Counterpoint: what order do the version names of OS X releases go in.

I love the reason why they're pineapples: because of a particularly stupid reading comprehension question in a standardised test that involved a pineapple challenging a hare to a race.

I don't think I've ever been able to get through a Hatsune Miku video without feeling a cripplingly deep sense of embarrassment.

Pretty sure it doesn't exist, unless it's custom-written for the hardware like console operating systems are. Windows is handy but heavyweight, Linux is lightweight but a pain for developers.

Step 1: be paid to be an opinionated asshole

I think high school me would have handled it well because I definitely assumed that most boys liked sports instead of games, so people who liked games were this weird club. High school me really didn't give a shit about gender, which I think bothered some of the girls I tried to befriend.

I stopped taking Little Brother seriously when it decided to take time out to tell us that in the near future, we called pair programming* 'programming'. It was a fun read, but I also did not once believe that it was playing its cards in a fair manner because if it was then why would it go out of its way to have non-nuanced opinions on programming? *pair programming is programming in pairs. The idea is that one person's typing, leaving the other person time to look over the other person's shoulder and work out they've introduced a bug. It's more effective than programming on your own, but it's not as effective as two people programming separately, except if you're trying to do something really hard. Either way, it's something in the ol' toolkit, and not the only legitimate way to program thanks very much.

The most fascinating thing about this to me is the divide between how much the author and people on my Twitter feed who are not the author seem to love it.

The source I used is this one, and I'm pretty sure that guy just made up titles, so yeah.

I've got at least a couple of these that I expect to see turn up. It's not going to be pretty.

I KNEW I'd heard #2 before:

This one has, I think, the most songs I swear I've heard but can't quite place. The only one I can is number 1.

Yeah, it was not an entirely uninformed comparison. I've been reading up on reactionary movements recently and it really does seem like the last big one that lost major traction was fascism. It shares a lot of similarities with other reactionary movements, like Gormongous points out, although obviously the stakes were a lot higher, fascism isn't Nazism (although fascists weren't above throwing minority races under the bus to keep the con going, because fascism was willing to basically co-opt or misrepresent anything to keep the con going) and rolling tanks into Berlin sent fascism underground but utterly clobbered Nazism. The reaction against second and third wave feminism never really got traction and hasn't really left us, so when you're looking for reactionary movements that were defeated, you don't really have a lot of options.

To try and bring this to a head, I interpreted your comment exactly the same way dium did and was planning on saying something about how I heard Season 3 was good and did that not come together.

Yeah, I think it's well worth remembering that you can't reason Gaters out of a position they didn't reason themselves into. It's a reactionary movement, and so it has to be countered like a reactionary movement. Unfortunately the last time we dealt with a reactionary movement, our most effective response was rolling tanks into Berlin, which isn't exactly an option here.

I think the idea of 'enthusiastic' consent is mostly to rule out badgering someone until they sleep with you to shut you up.

Also the fact that you can go to the website and watch the Flash, although they've also got a YouTube account.

There was definitely buzz in Australia for Kath and Kim. It was quite well-known. (Partly, I think, because it felt a bit like a TV series version of The Castle, which sounds like you'd enjoy.) I am really enjoying Shaun Micallef's Mad as Hell, which is a bit like The Daily Show if it were run by a demented Australian. Here is a hypothetical on euthanasia: And here is Shaun being gracious towards his better-funded superiors:

The premise of the show is 'we need to make a show kids'll watch that'll sell toys. What do we have? Rubik's Cube? Really? Uh."

RPS was fairly positive; I imagine something where you actually have to trick an alien is not going to review well.

Yeah, but those stunningly original movies were because they were in a very public feud with Michael Eisner at the time, and they wanted to demonstrate to potential buyers that they could do more than just the cutesy Disney stuff of A Bug's Life or Monsters Inc. Then Eisner got kicked out, Disney bought Pixar, and they asked them to do the cutesy stuff.

TB would say that vicious, unfair attacks on people are an internet problem. I remember his vicious, unfair attacks on his podcast. He obviously is under the illusion that this is just how the internet does things.

The trick with mobile is that the audience is relatively unsophisticated as consumers or as an audience; every game is basically on the ground floor. Rovio became an Angry Birds company after they had that big hit, so they've got a solid brand. Although talking with my parents, who love Candy Crush Saga, made me calm down about it - it's Bejeweled, but with a sense of progress and evolution that Bejeweled doesn't have, and it seems like most people take the microtransactions as a challenge to not use them. There's a huge risk for them in going to the store and paying money for a game that might not be enjoyable and the only way they have to find out whether they'd like something is basically me. A free game at the top of the app store leaderboards is much less risk, and it's fun enough.