tberton

Yeah, Gorm, that was great.

Every time Chris reads the Parachute ads I think he'd talking about a gambling website.

And in that way, they are related to fiction.

But you asked about how fiction informs us about the human condition. The human condition is not a data set, it's not a policy paper - it's an individual experience. Fiction gets at that in a way that other perspectives do not. As for having checks, the check on fiction is the reader's sense of the world and humanity. A story can ring true or hollow to a reader and that will help determine the extent to which they incorporate it into their view of the world. Another value of fiction is that it allows us to imagine what might be, rather than what is. Sociology, history, psychology, anthropology - these are powerful disciplines (I myself study history), but they are limited in talking about the world that is now or the world that has been. They have a much more difficult time imagine possible other worlds - and I mean this in a larger sense than fantasy and science fiction. All those disciplines also require a degree of fiction to work. This is especially true of history, or at least it's the one I'm most familiar with. Any topic a historian addresses is necessarily going to require a degree of conjecture, of creation interpretation or at least of emphasizing certain elements over others in order to create some coherent narrative. By the same token, no work of fiction is entirely fictional - the author will always, by definition, bring parts of themselves and their experiences - real experiences - to the work. The line between fiction and non-fiction is blurry. I suspect there might be something deeper about the nature of knowledge going on here, but I'll let you respond first.

Ta-Nehisi Coates is going to be writing the new Black Panther story for Marvel next year. This is incredibly exciting.

How is that different from philosophy? Or any other form of observation about the world? The author takes their experience or their understanding of a possible experience and presents it to the reader, allowing them a window into somebody else's mind. What other means do we have for understanding the human condition?

Not to mention feet. Tarantino loves feet.

Said this before, but the wire puzzles were my favourite in Act II, because they had the most consistent logic. I hated the snake puzzle, the knot puzzle, the joke puzzle and the opening of the wire puzzle with the picture, because they all relied on random guesswork.

Yeah, eot, I have the same experience with music. Often I'll dislike something on the first listen, but later on fall in love with it and get obsessed. That's why I think games and music have a lot in common.

Worth noting that Koji Kondo does the Zelda music too, so he's got more to his style that just crazy ragtime and weird supermarket music.

In case anybody here didn't know this, friend of Idle Thumbs JP "Sniper" LeBreton has been working on an open-source ASCII-based game dev tool since getting laid off from Double Fine. He's also planning on making games with it. I've only been following it lightly, but the project is pretty cool and his latest update indicates that he's needs more backers for his Patreon to be fully patron supported and avoid having to get a full-time project. The tool seems really neat and JP is a good dude, so I think I'll probably offer up a little bit. Consider sharing his work around to help out someone tangentially related to this community.

Wow, that looks awesome.

The free expansion for this game, which includes an entire campaign where you play as Plague Knight and a Challenge Mode, is out today! It's absolutely nuts how much content Yacht Club has added here, with no price tag. And if they keep to their Kickstarter goals - which they seem to be doing - there's a ton more on the way.

From the Dallas Morning News, who originally reported the story. Way down in the article.

I think it's kind of funny that Nick talks about a pre-occupation that Japanese games have with Africa, when the Idle Thumbs mascot game - Far Cry 2 - was made in Montreal and is set in Africa.

That's totally fair. I guess that sense of newness just isn't as essential to me in storytelling. I don't remember that awe-inspiring feeling of discovery from ME1, or if I did, it was much less pronounced and important.

I still haven't played 3, but I loooooved 2. I really enjoyed that the narrative focused on recruiting a team and learning about them rather than saving the galaxy. The characters were super interesting and a lot of the mission design was quite unique - not just the ending, but also things like Thane's mission and Garrus' mission.

Except 1) the officer who interrogated him explicitly profiled him ("that's who I thought it was"), 2) said it looked like a "movie bomb" not an actual bomb and 3) didn't even evacuate the school or call the bomb squad, so clearly wasn't that afraid of it being a bomb in the first place.

Ta-Nehisi Coates has a huge and fantastic article about the mass incarceration of black people in America. There's a follow-up interview on Vox too. Well worth reading.

Alright, because we've been talking about it in the Random Thought thread, I figured a thread about math was worthwhile. Feel free to share intersting facts, proofs, puzzles and questions! I'll get us started with two YouTube series - Vi Hart's math videos and Numberphile from Brady Haran. Both are really good at explaining neat stuff about numbers. I'd particularly like to mention from Vi Hart, which is where this thread gets its name. It's ostensibly about logarithms, but really about the fundamentals of algebra. Vi's style is a bit overwrought at times, but I highly recommend that video, especially if you think you just don't "get math," because it does a really good job of explaining how things like multiplication and roots are just different ways of showing how numbers relate to each other.

The funny thing about this is, is that while Howard's system makes no sense, there definitely are other systems of counting and arithmetic. The p-adic numbers, for instance, are super cool.

Nobody's ever told that the square root of 2 is 2. It's ~1.414.

I have some problems with the initial clues for the wire puzzle, but I don't know if it's really fair to blame this one on the game. You artificially limited yourself so that you can't do something the game requires you to do. That's kind of on you, dude.

I've only ever heard people clap for lectures at conferences or events. Clapping at a regular, scheduled lecture would be super weird. For student politics, in Canada at least, you usually have a student association that students vote for, and those associations have some representation with the administration of the university. At my school (Carleton, in Ottawa), we have an undergraduate association and a graduate association. The President of the Graduate Student's Association sits on the Board of Directors of the university, and the Council of the association also elects some other poeple to sit on the board and Senate and stuff. In my department, we also elect students to attend faculty meetings and stuff. None of that necessarily means that students are ever actually listened to, but they're represented.

Okay, so I'll admit that I haven't read Pinker's book and haven't read a lot of the stuff surrounding it, but here's my question: a decade taken in the context of tens of thousands of years of human history is completely insignificant, so how could we be sure that a decline in violence now relative to the 1960s is an actual trend and not a statistical blip?