Merus

I thought YouTube's streaming was pretty good, though.

The Swedish version's script is garbage, though. I know one of the reasons we didn't get any more American Millenium movies was because they couldn't fix the second book so it'd work onscreen (and the second book has some pacing problems that the miniseries only highlights). Blame the original translation for the titles - I guess they figured America isn't as progressive as Sweden (correct) so they'd likely blanche at a book that straight-up said it was about misogyny in the title.

I'm not a sociologist, so I'm not entirely sure what it is about Americans specifically, but I know that I've never had a discussion about free speech with Americans where I felt good about where it ended up. I'd be wary of trying to say what it is about Americans specifically - is it because freedom is a core American value? is it culture shock? is it the tyranny thing? - but it's definitely not an experience I've had with, say, Europeans.

If Twitch starts hemorrhaging users, would Google still buy them? That's the question.

What I find interesting here is that Twig clearly finds illustrated child pornography so intolerable that he can't understand how others can. I think this is a fairly normal reaction - I think we're mostly incapable of separating our personal opinion on something with our tolerance for it, and if we're forced to tolerate something, it's not hard for us to develop some kind of appreciation for it to mentally justify having to tolerate it. Anyway, I've probably said more than I should, because I do not get into free speech arguments with Americans.

So Twitch started muting streams that contained copyright audio - including their own stream, and most video games with music. They also announced that streams will be archived for two weeks, at which point they'll be deleted. I can't help but think that Twitch just committed corporate suicide. It looks like people are migrating to Hitbox, or maybe Ustream.

Happily, the poster in question now has pro bono legal advice, because there are apparently quite a lot of lawyers whose hobby is defending internet users from censorious dickbags. Randy Queen is also getting a crash course in the Streisand Effect, which is nice.

That's.... not what that article's saying.

I've held for a while that there's a 'poser' subculture that desperately believe that they can adopt the intellectual stance (and thus its intellectual respectability) of a subculture by adopting the aesthetic of a subculture. Posers used to dress like goths, then like emos, and now they dress like hipsters.

Correct; no-one publicly endorses politicians, and the creeping influence of third-party ads is seen as a major threat to democracy here.

Maybe Merus should have laid off the semi-colons if the two thoughts aren't closely related. When it reads "Generally, I believe the means justifies the ends. If you lie about little things, you'll probably also lie about the big things." my intention is clearer: I believe something fairly close to the reverse of the famous phrase - that the ethics of the people pursuing a goal, reveals the ethical value of that goal. The reasoning is that ethics is a process that you have to consciously practice; a person who thinks ethically will act ethically, including when deciding what to organise in support of, and that an unethical person will act unethically in ways they don't consciously realise. In the absence of detailed ethical arguments one way or the other, the ethics of a group pursuing a goal is a good approximation for the ethics of that goal. PETA is willing to lie, cheat and steal to advance its agenda; it seems unlikely that their agenda is then entirely ethical, even if parts of it might be fine. MRAs, similarly, are totally comfortable with misrepresenting things like the reasons for moving hotels; when determining the goals of their organisation, I'm happy to believe that they aren't being honest with us and with themselves, either. It's not intended to be an illustration, but a two-stage argument. My housemate's pet peeve is when people describe things as being 'very unique'. Uniqueness is a discrete state. There are no degrees of uniqueness; something is either unique, or there's more than one of them. Nothing can be very, or a little bit, unique.

oh By the way, that site has an interesting definition of abandonware if Warcraft II's on it.

I guess it might be more that Marvel's doing well and the comics are consistently good and everyone knows it so they don't need to talk about it, but DC is a constant trainwreck except for a few bright spots where things might be not terrible, and that kind of thing leaks out of comic circles easier.

I cannot imagine a context in which singing raisins would be a CGA PC game. Like, what would that be?

That's not universal - the police here aren't politicised, but they're also not elected. Laws, laws are politicised, and the police mostly try to enforce them as best they can. (That also means it's unseemly for a government employee, essentially, to make political comments other than 'here is a problem we keep seeing and cannot act on' or 'here is a law that is a pain in the ass and we'd be happy to see it go away'.

My favourite thing about the MRA conference: they claimed before the conference that they were moving to a new hotel because it had more room, and then after the conference they claimed it was because the previous hotel had misandrists on staff that cancelled their booking. Generally, I believe the means justifies the ends; if you lie about little things, you'll probably also lie about the big things.

This reminds me of the Cash For Comment scandal here in Australia, where it was discovered an influential talkback radio host was endorsing products that he liked, but those products were paying for his endorsement, and he wasn't mentioning that. His defence, such as it was, was that it was a mutually beneficial relationship, and that he liked them because they supported his show with money. And then I think of the Naturebox ad reads, where the Thumbs are enthusiastic about the service but mostly because Naturebox gave them a free box. (Of course, the Thumbs are clear that Naturebox are sponsors.)

So comic book nerds, settle something for me: it seems like people get a lot more excited for DC comic books doing well than Marvel comic books doing well, based on the buzz I saw around Batgirl. DC seems to do a lot more stupid shit than Marvel, but mostly what I hear about Marvel is from the movies. Is that accurate? Are the comics just not that exciting?

You have to finish it before the fog rolls in though

oh my god

Is that Dominion they're talking about in the last minute or so? Did they actually pull out Pirate Ship with Dominion? That card is super, super broken.

People have known about the Cortana thing for a while, I think the tech press decided it was a cute reference and being bold is probably a better idea for Microsoft given how uncool Windows Phone is.

Well, what I enjoyed about Captain America was diametrically opposed to what I remember Ben's comments were - that the action scenes were/were not entertaining - and then Ben's criticisms of this movie were, again, diametrically opposed to my experience. It also sounds like he didn't care for Iron Man 3, either, which had uneven points but a lot to recommend it. I'm pretty sure I have at least some taste at this point, so it's not a case of me just being wrong, and I'm going to assume that Ben's not just straight out wrong, so I have to assume that there's something in these movies that ruins them for Ben but not for me, and it seems like it might be a consistent feature of these movies. So yeah, that's why my response was 'why do you keep going to see these'.