Luftmensch

Great lecture about standards of proof in software development by Greg Wilson. Here's some interesting comments on the lecture itself, also worth reading.

Oh I think austerity is just another political superstition. Maybe it has some merits, but I abhor politics too much to do my own research. Maybe if you sacrifice wealth and public good to the god of austerity you'll be better off long-term. I like to think it's a bit more complicated. On the one hand, right-wingers hold up Estonia as a shining example of Austerity at Work (GDP $22.18 Billion). Now, if you can show me a proven example of a policy working, I'll give it a thought. On the other hand, whenever I bring up Sweden (GDP $538.13 Billion) right-wingers always say, "oh, that's a liberal European country, the rules don't apply the same there." Helluva double standard guys. Funny, I wouldn't have posted in this thread if you didn't make that comment, since my life hasn't been nearly as exciting as anyone else's. I'm almost done with my damned boat; I literally just need to paint it and it'll be seaworthy. It'll take a couple hours to tie up the sail and rigging but I can do that in a morning with some help. I'm really excited about this, I've been working on it for over a year and a half now, on-and-off, and it's incredible to me to look up and realize it's almost all over. Since that's coming to a close, I've started an ill-fated project to try and make a little mod with the Source SDK. I have no clue what I'm doing, so it's probably more fair to call this a tinkering project than a proper mod. I was going to wait until I'm a week in to post this, but since I'm posting anyway here's a link to my blog I'm working on. I've also gone and registered my name, judejackson.net, and redirect it to that blog for now until I find something useful to do with it.

A while ago I had my sister play GB and TFoL back-to-back and she enjoyed GB somewhat and thought that TFoL was nonsensical garbage. She's not a non-gamer but I thought it was an interesting reaction.

Episode 1 The Target is the pilot of The Wire. I don't know how it is in international markets, but as far as I know all American syndicated TV shows start with pilots, regardless of the nature of the show. Even if it's going to be a major long-form story, it's still better to invest in the story production and never shoot than to follow through after a terrible start. At least from a financial standpoint. I will say that my love for Episode 2 was very shallow. There were a lot of low-brow thrills that just appealed to me in a very base way. I still liked it though. It was well done, didn't break anything, and shifted the pace a little bit. I appreciate that it was just done for one episode, though I'd like to see more crazy one-offs in the future.

My explanation would be that, unlike the PS3, the iPhone is useful, stylish, and inevitable on-hand at all times. Once your console begins to collect dust, it's pretty much done. You're not buying licensed games that make it profitable, you're not subscribing to online services, and you're not being exposed to its presence. There's something nice about the ceremony of playing a console in your living room, sure, but it's clearly partitioned into its own space separate from your life. The iPhone is everywhere you go.

Looks to me more like someone's playing the oppression olympics. For the most part, people agree that TFoL is a game and that the debate of whether it is one or not doesn't matter. Most of us have voiced various explanations of why we disagree with you. Deal with it. If you played it and somehow concluded it's not a game, call it what you think it is. We won't give a shit or whine at you if you call it a deterministic digital interactive diorama or whatever you want if that's what you think it is. But we think it's a video game and I for one don't enjoy the evangelism.

I searched for "gun tourism" and found several right-wing articles talking about how great Sandy Hook was because it boosted gun sales and gun tourism. (that's my monthly quota for memes filled up)

I didn't know Don Knotts was an announcer.

Maybe I'm alone in this but I was 10 then Myst III came out and I thought that world was the bee's knees. I even loved Myst and Riven when I was younger. I bet they don't hold up but for a wee kid they were something incredible.

Definitely got to throw in Hotline Miami. Oh and gosh Home was great. That's the first time in a while I played a horror game that made me jump in my seat.

I only meant to be blunt, not necessarily dickish. Sorry if anyone was offended. Subclass as a concept was invented in set theory. I didn't figure you were speaking in programming metaphors. That metaphor still doesn't work for me anyway. Video game effectively means interactive electronic entertainment anyway, so it seems weird to invent an entirely new class above what exists to stuff a single fringe case into. I dunno. This is just a case where I think trying to define things into rigid genres or hierarchies or classes is just not very useful and doesn't need to happen.

Congratulations, you've revoked any license you had to be taken seriously.

Interesting, because if I were to define a hierarchy (which I don't), I would intuitively put interactive digital entertainment under the umbrella of Video game. What makes video games a subset but not vice versa?

Walks like a duck, quacks like a duck. TFoL is ostensibly a Video Game. I think it is, the Thumbs think it is, Steam thinks it is, Wikipedia says it is. It is a game because that's what we think it is. If you want to use special rigid definitions of what is a game versus what is a toy or a race or an interactive story, you'll have to define that from the outset, but just because you think the definition should be one thing or another doesn't mean that people will agree with you or that your definition is relevant to the discussion. In this case, sure, you can talk about what makes TFoL different and why it shouldn't be discussed in the same way, but I think it's more interesting to accept that TFoL broadens the scope of what a video game is and can be and to think about the implications. It's like the fuss over whether a tomato is a fruit or a vegetable. Well, it's both, but not within the same discussion. Biologically it's a fruit, but the distinction between fruit and vegetable is purely culinary, so for the purpose of cooking, a tomato is a vegetable because it tastes and acts like a vegetable, just like eggplant an okra. Edit: accidentally wrote "biologically it's a vegetable" which is silly because vegetable isn't even a biological term.

I didn't mean to use them interchangably, sorry, I was trying to start with Will Wright just because he's a convenient example, and then sort of extrapolate out with the point out that even if Will Wright somehow shut himself out from any new external innovations since he made SimCity, Maxis as a company is made up of a lot of people and, just as a matter of social surface area, is just that many times more likely to be exposed to what's going on outside*. I guess I didn't word my thoughts very well, sorry. *As an institutional maybe there's internal pressures not to change (structure seems to be self-serving), but on the individual creative level, how the designer who decided to toss in the flag pole decided to approach that feature is probably different than it would have been in a world without CityVille.

This designer gets about a million rainbow barves (yes I know they're not real bikes but they're still worthy of my hnggg) Solifague Design P.S. I take it you're an MST3K fan, Killstar?

Ugh, the only thing I'm even vaguely interested in is the Steam box, and even then I think I'd rather just buy an extra long HDMI cable and a wireless controller. I probably need a new PC sometime (I've had this one since 2009), and as broke as I am I'd rather spend money on that that any console.

I dunno. I looked at that article a bit, without reading the whole thing because it's long and boring, basically a list in paragraph form, but it reminded me of this video intended to show Kill Bill's numerous homages and lifted ideas. I think it's a great testament to these artists to show how they can borrow so many little details to make the world that much richer. Whether you're a huge fan of old kung-fu flicks and adventure games, a trivia hound, or just an average viewer, TFoL and Kill Bill are both far richer for what they borrow. Even though there wasn't a "point", figuring out the plot and the proper order of events from the little visual clues was still a great joy for me. The first playthrough was definitely the richest for me, but I still love it.

We're still two years away from the Year of the PS3 aren't we? What could they possibly have to announce before then?

It's kind of weird and gross to me to think of ideas as spontaneously originating from a single font of brilliance. It's fair to say, yes, Will Wright was there thinking about these crazy designs ideas years before Zynga existed, but obviously Will Wright didn't just magically concoct game systems out of the ether, he was influenced by his peers and studies. You don't get the ideas from having never been exposed to anything. Maybe Will Wright personally stopped accepting influences by hiding in a cave or something, but it's impossible for me to fathom a Maxis that refused to accept the natural feedback evolution that comes from their old designs being appropriated and refined. Independent of whether some vague abstraction of what exists in the new SimCity can also be abstracted from some earlier version, it's still true that the base design has inherently changed, by merit of just making a new engine, reprogramming the systems, &c., and the designs that exist now were created after Zynga in a post-Zynga world by Zynga-influenced designers. Besides, the idea that someone can come up with an idea from pure nothing a.) wrong, straight-up, but also b.) suggests that creating creative work is free while still somehow c.) validating the idea of intellectual property more than I think that idea deserves. You didn't straight-up say that Maxis created everything from nothing, but you are saying that ideas can be one-way, which I don't believe is true.

I picked up Supreme Commander 2 not knowing anything about the game or the franchise or strategy games as a whole. The moment I "figured out" the AI was when I accidentally left the game running while I went to class. When I came back, not only had I not lost, but my automated manufacturing had hit the unit cap, and in front of my base was a line of wreckage from repeated attempted assaults by the other faction. I zoomed all the way out to strategic mode, selected my entire army and marched them right into the enemy base, which was completely pitiful and desolate, having whittled itself down to the barest scraps with its own ill-planned attacks. So anyway, that's how to beat Supreme Commander 2 I guess. I still had fun and it was gorgeous.

While outright banning of personal weapons isn't legal in the US, maybe it would be possible to have lethal firearms properly labelled...

There is a slingshot that shoots chainsaws. Action starts at about 1:50. http://youtu.be/Ru0sY_IPJIQ

By the way, the voice actor for Dr. Kleiner, Harry Robins, has a local radio show called Ask Dr. Hal which I think plays on Radio Valencia Friday nights at 10:00. If you ever listen, he's a really weird dude. His show goes on for something like three and a half hours and it ends with an old-timey radio sign-off with the national anthem and everything. I happen to know about him because he's a major figure in The Church of the SubGenius. his page on Radio Valencia

I don't remember thinking Lugaru was an extremely fun game, but I appreciate the attention to detail Wolfire puts into game design at the most core level. I'm not sure about their level design since I haven't played anything but Lugaru. The weekly alpha update videos, while they did them, were fascinating. Also the videos they put together about their game jams are worth watching if you're interested in that sort of thing. One thing about this video that jumped out at me was the flashlight bit, because that goes right against what I've heard about proper gun handling. Here's an explanation of using a flashlight with a gun. I will say, to the devs' credit, that safety actually isn't a huge concern with this particular situation because there are no friends for you to be pointing your gun at or sneak-attacks to protect your head against (I think? I haven't played it). However, there is the problem of not illuminating your sights, and that practically speaking a two-handed grip makes it more likely for you to accidentally eject your magazine. Still, again to their credit, the technique they settled on looks pretty cool.