clyde

I don't understand why someone with caucasian heritage can't become a person of color. http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2015/07/rachel-dolezal-new-interview-pictures-exclusive

I posted this in the Random thread but wanted to include it here incase a conversation about DOOM occurs. I've been really enjoying it lately. The game suddenly became not fun at all. No wonder I thought the game was hard at my friend's house in 1996. It's impossible to play this way and in retrospect just seems like a really misguided design-choice. When did WASD become standard and why wasn't it an obvious control-scheme when DOOM came out? Also: Knee-Deep in the Dead is significantly more interesting to me than The Shores of Hell is there a story behind that? The first levels feel like they have secret doors everywhere, the corridors are easy to orient yourself in, but weave together in exciting ways. The levels in The Shores of Hell seem like they weren't given as much thought. Ninety-Three responded with: Oh, and I just watched this interview with John Romero:

Here's a short documentary that tries to provide tips on how to reduce the chances of being the victim of sexual assault in prison. I'm glad I watched it. The main piece of advice is don't accept gifts or favors.

Robots makes sense to me. The idea of a general purpose psuedo android that is easily trainable to do repeatitive tasks priced under the annual salary of two workers seems feasible. I can see where the profit is there, you are basically skimming off heavily discounted labor-costs. Space-rockets don't seem at all profitable to me. Maybe I read it wrong, but I think it said Google invested $900 million for 1.7% of SpaceX(?). Admittedly, I know nothing about this stuff, but I have a hard time believing that there is a good margin available for investors just based on promises of "space-tourism". It's suspicious. Edit: nevermind, I can smell the money now: http://www.wired.com/2015/01/google-spacex-investment/ I was reading articles that didn't mention plans to internet the planet.

So has anyone heard viable explanations for why tech-capital is moving into space-rockets? Are they planning on building their mansions out there or what? Maybe I'm just short-sighted and provencial, but I have a hard time understanding where they are expecting return on investment from.

I just bought Ultimate DOOM on Steam and have found myself enjoying it far more than I thought I would. My previous experience with the game was playing the first two(?) of the shareware-levels on a friend's PC at his house in 1996 or so. I remembered the game being frustratingly hard, but graphically impressive and ghoulish. So when I got the Steam version, I went in and I was like "This shotgun is the best weapon I've ever used in a first-person-shooter!" and just feeling like the momentumy movement and the 0-90mphness was surprisingly satisfying. I assumed that in the time since trying it briefly decades ago and now playing it this week, was that I had become skilled at first-person-shooters and keyboard/mouse controls. Then I went back into the game and saw an option for "classic controls" and was like The game suddenly became not fun at all. No wonder I thought the game was hard at my friend's house in 1996. It's impossible to play this way and in retrospect just seems like a really misguided design-choice. When did WASD become standard and why wasn't it an obvious control-scheme when DOOM came out?Also: Knee-Deep in the Dead is significantly more interesting to me than The Shores of Hell is there a story behind that? The first levels feel like they have secret doors everywhere, the corridors are easy to orient yourself in, but weave together in exciting ways. The levels in The Shores of Hell seem like they weren't given as much thought.

I've enjoyed my time in Rust, but I haven't played it in a while. I probably go in twice a year to wander around, build a few tools, and get killed. It sounds like it's not enjoyable, but I enjoy those adventures. The development-progress and accumulated creations of other players always provide me with a sense of discovery and danger. The way I am, I don't think the loss of progress is what keeps me from playing robinsonades so much as the crafting-chains that I feel the need to understand. I have had moments where I was excited about the crafting-rhetoric of a game though; I can't remember a specific example but I enjoy seeing that a game's crafting-system has recipes that make sense in entertaining ways. There's a game I know little about that just had a successful kickstarter called Eco and I haven't played it and know little, but the concept interests me. They claim that the game will have an interdependent ecosystem that players affect through the production of craft. Players on a server will then (assumably) vote on laws that the game itself enforces. What's clever about this is that they claim to encourage players to specialize in their specific craft. So if I hunt bunnies for my crafting materials, but the brick-maker's factory is polluting and that destroys the bunny habitat, then we have conflicting vested interests. It sound really interesting to me, but who knows if I will ever play it. It sounds like the kind of game I would have to enter, knowing that it has to be played for 10 hours a week. Right now I play games that I think will only take me 10 minutes even though I may end up playing them for hours. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1037798999/eco-global-survival-game

Hannah Epstein just wrote a short article about Increpare's trio of ultra-accessible browser-based game-engines. http://killscreendaily.com/articles/drawing-21st-century/?utm_content=buffer822ba&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer

"I'm too cheap". Also, sometimes I mention that I have a small spending budget for non-routine activities (and that I don't want to exhaust it on the thing being discussed) and the only problem I've had using that is someone offering to pay for it. I probably should have just let them pay for it.

The comments are worth consideration too.

I had never considered that lingerie-style character designs might intentionally be created to have an influence on cosplayers.

The article seems to conflate one becoming aware of the priviledges society imparts on them solely due to race, with white-supremacy (even though it makes effort not to). The article doesn't provide any argument about how one necessitates the other. To be honest, I think the author wants to say that a sense of racial identity among marginalized groups creates more opposition than something of use, but they know that isn't the case so they are moving towards thinking that white-identity is harmful (which I think it is) and then treats it as a necessary side-effect amongst race-identity left-overs. I don't think they necessitate each other. I don't think I explained that well, but whatever. Also, that website destroys my phone's battery and heats it up a lot.

Now that I have learned that songs rarely modulate to other keys and that chord-changes are typically within one key, I'm having a hard time motivating myself to learn the key-signatures (pattern of sharps and flats) for every key on the piano. I'm not sure if it's worth my time, especially since I'm using a midi-program and can easily play something in the key of C on the midi-keyboard and just modulate to whatever key I need in the program. I'm stating this publically in case I'm not considering something important. Also, I plan to apply this stuff to the guitar and key-signatures seem trivial with that instrument.

I'm very excited about the Oculus headset. Most of my game-budget decisions for the past year have been based on how to save up for an Oculus and Nvidia 970. I'm looking forward to making environments in Unity and walking around them. I'm also excited about things like boat-tours, plays, and operas. I'm super excited about a lot of the possibilities, not all of which are heavily interactive.

I'm thinking more about the concerns involving cultural appropriation. While I can see how creating and sustaining harmful stereotypes is... harmful, and I certainly don't want to enforce racist laws that further marginalize folk, it seems like many of the arguments against cultural appropriation conflate the adoption of asunder, incomplete cultural details with actual oppression and I have not been able to get behind that. It seems like the actual act of oppression should be called out and condemned, not the enjoyment of or simulation of styles, art, and technologies of marginalized ethnicities. It really seems counter-productive to me to conflate enjoying mexican food with supporting anti-immigration policies. http://www.renderfoodmag.com/blog/2014/9/11/breaking-bread-the-politics-of-mexican-food-in-the-us. It just seems so misguided and unhelpful to me. Maybe I'm wrong, but I'm trying to feel it, but I don't.

On the popularity of media, creative output, audience, and self-awareness: http://50shortreviews.tumblr.com/post/128194510808/criticism-roundup-2013

I doubt I'll actually put the effort forward to do it, but at the moment I'm fantasizing about screen-capturing large quantities of this documentary to make a visual novel. It seems like the right thing to do. I'd probably make narratives which are derivative too like: "Let's go dancing after we go honey-hunting! I got my bidis. Maybe we will find a poisonous lizard."

In episode 14 of the Beastcast, Vinny's concerns about installing malicious software when downloading and playing small games was eye-opening for me. I wonder how much this concern retards the adoption of hobbyist games. Is there a way for hobbyist or small, unknown developers to ensure that their game isn't going to turn the player's computer into a bot? How does Steam avoid these concerns? Is it just a matter of blind trust in certain distribution channels?

I enjoy going over fundamentals periodically for entertainment value. I thought it might be useful to someone if I put up a series of videos that I watched in succession in order to learn about harmony again: The physics of sound and vibration. The physical basis of harmony A lecture on chords and harmony A exploration of chord types(?)

When I clean out the next batch, I'll keep you in mind. There was a good amount, but I didn't have the forethought to save it in case someone wanted it. I'm trying to think of what other treasures I might be trashing. Earlier this summer I could have given you enough cat-hair to stuff a throw-pillow.

Things seem to be working fine again after the dust-excorcism, but it's nice to know I'm among such helpful and generous individuals as yourselves.

I would think that it would make a rhythmic noise or vibration if unbalanced.

I may have fixed the problem by blowing the dust-bunnies out of my graphics card with compressed air. Every game of Rocket League was crashing; I've played about 10 in a row since with no crashes. For the record, my GPU temperature wasn't going over 62c at any given time. Apparently dust causes more problems than just over-heating.

I'm getting nvidia kernel driver crashes on a fresh install of Windows 10 (I used to get them with Windows 7 also). I'm using the latest driver (but I was using an older one and it happened then as well). I installed nothing but Steam and Rocket League after a clean install to see if the problem continued to occur. It does. Any recommendations for a next step? I'm considering moving forward with my planned purchase of a Nvidia 970 to see if that fixed the problem, but I was hoping to wait until it's bundled with a game I want to play rather than Metal Gear.

Thanks for sharing.