Zeusthecat

After thinking about this a bit more and seeing some of the responses here, I think I should soften by stance a bit. The root of my frustrations with this ad business is how it has slowly morphed from easily ignored banner ads and sidebar ads to this nonsense we have now where you go to a site and before you can even start reading anything a stupid video player takes over your screen to tell you about how you should refuel with Mt. Dew, another video is autoplaying with really loud audio somewhere further down the page about life insurance, and then another ad is just stuck to your screen and stutters around, always staying in view while you try to scroll down the page. It is obnoxious and the few sites that I do frequent on the internet are really bad with that shit (I'm so tired of hearing about NOS every time I click a Polygon article). I kind of feel like if a lot of these websites are going to disrespect their audience with such obtrusive bullshit, then I am morally within my right to circumvent that. Given that I only frequent about 4 websites (I really only use the internet for video game news and coming here) and all of those (with the exception of this site) are pretty egregious with the way they implement advertising, I just have adblock blocking everything. However, going off of what Ben mentioned, if there is a way to configure adblock to only let certain types of ads through, I think I could get behind that as there are certainly types of ads that don't bother me at all and I wouldn't mind leaving them be. I'll look into that more now that I know that is actually possible. As far as podcast ads go, I am totally cool with those and in some cases I actually kind of like them. That is classy and respectful advertising (at least the way the thumbs handle it). They actually use the products, screen what they are willing to advertise to their audience ahead of time, and make it perfectly clear that if you go try out that product using a discount code it will go towards funding more Idle Thumbs content. That is advertising at its best. If websites could adopt something similar, or maybe even just give users the option when they first browse to the site to specify how much advertising they are willing to put up with, while making it clear how that goes towards funding more content on the site, I would totally get behind that too. Also, I might be able to get behind subscriptions for certain websites. Especially if it cut down on the types 'clickbait' of articles that websites tend to post so they can generate max views for max revenue.

I don't know why I'm responding either Twig! Me and my stupid opinions.

But that whole system only exists because it succeeds in manipulating enough people for it to be viable. I get that some people rely on that model to pay for hosting fees or whatever but it isn't exactly a noble business model and I don't think people have a moral obligation to participate in it.

I learned today that I am supposed to feel guilty for using an ad blocker on my browser. Screw that. Until websites stop plastering invasive, auto play ads all over the goddamn place, I will always run adblock, just like I would turn the tv to another channel when a commercial comes on. I've seen the arguments against my stance and I'm just not convinced. First, even if I am not using ad block, I ignore every ad I see. So it's not like that advertising is reaching me and getting me to go buy some product. But because the system is set up so that every ad view generates some tiny amount of revenue for the content creator (because these ad companies rely on a handful of whales (not unlike how a lot of free to play games work (which people are much less likely to defend)) to go buy their shit and justify the money they are paying out to content creators for each of these views), the sheer fact that I am not subjecting myself to the ads means that that is one less revenue unit that the content creator sees. But who is really being unfair here? I feel like it wouldn't be too much of a stretch to say that content creators that rely on that kind of revenue and make their livings off the back of a scammy advertising system are kind of at the mercy of the people that decide to view their content and people that decide to circumvent that system are well within their moral rights to do so (especially considering how invasive ads are now and the risk of malware and other adverse effects from crazy ads autoplaying and jumping all over the screen). The only reason they make a living doing this is because ad companies are willing to give them money for each person that views one of their ads on that page or video. And the only reason ad companies are willing to give them money is because they know they can manipulate a certain percentage of people to buy their shit through clever advertising and psychological tricks. It's kind of gross and it's a business model I'm so sick of. I realize my opinion won't resonate very well with a lot of people and that options for monetizing internet entertainment are limited. But putting an entertaining thing on the internet for anyone to see should not automatically entitle you to some amount of money for each and every person that views that content, just like people that only rely on donations and don't use ads are not automatically entitled to a donation from each and every person that watches their content.

I had no intention of playing this game for awhile since I've got a bunch of other games in the hopper, but one of my bosses at work gave me an unopened copy of the day one edition of MGSV since he had a shipping delay and bought a second copy at the store so he didn't have to wait. The collector in me can't resist someone just giving me a free game to add to my collection but the completionist in me weeps for my backlog. I have the worst combination of personality traits when it comes to obtaining games and then having the overwhelming urge to complete all of them. I suppose this is a game I need to play though based on literally every testimonial I've heard from every person that's touched it.

Thanks for this post. All of this stuff has been majorly frustrating to me lately. Many people on the internet these days seem to expect others to all basically have the qualities of a Super Jesus, and if they aren't then everything about them must just be terrible. Every single person I've gotten to know has terrible opinions about certain things and I still have terrible opinions about certain things. People might like the idea of living in a massive echo chamber but a lot of these "terrible people" are often people that are worth having in your life. My best friend is a republican with some opinions that I strongly disagree with but so what? He's a pretty cool dude in a whole bunch of other ways. And honestly, Twitter has made this problem so much worse.

Given the rogue-like nature of FTL, I'm not as concerned with actually beating the final boss as just dumping a bunch of hours into it and trying a bunch of different approaches to the game. There is just so much to dig into and so many variables that I can see myself getting lost in this one for awhile, regardless of whether or not I actually "finish" it. But then again, I don't know that I've really played any other real rogue-likes before. I was just always under the impression that you don't play these games to beat them, you just play them like you would play an arcade game and just go for a new high score each time.

Honestly, I haven't touched that mode as my daughter has a hard enough time with 150/mirror. I might give it a whirl at some point.

Batman Arkham City: I finally finished this on PC the other day. I originally played through it on the 360 a few years ago and finally got around to doing it all again on the PC. This is a great game. Those graphics and cape physics sure are pretty too. And I can now definitely confirm that they went a little overboard with the bad guys calling Catwoman a bitch all the time. That last mission where you need to get your stuff back from Two Face has probably the highest rate of bitch barks per minute that I've ever seen in a game. Other than that though this game is just super fun all around. Rocket League: Got the platinum trophy on this one so I'll call it complete. I still play it fairly frequently and it will probably stay in my rotation for awhile. Super fun game most of the time but lately I've been feeling a little frustrated by how floaty the ball is. It is agonizing when you just sit there waiting 4 seconds for the ball to fall down low enough for you to hit it. Mario Kart 8: Just need to get 3 stars on some 150CC and mirror mode cups but other than that I've done just about everything and unlocked just about everything with my daughter. I got all the DLC too and love the extra courses. Not sure if I'll ever take this one online but this will be one of my go to games whenever there is an opportunity for some local co-op.

I finished Batman Arkham City and have been playing a bunch of TF2 on the side here and there. That officially brings my Steam backlog down to 3: FTL Binding of Isaac Kerbal Space Program But I have a problem now. I started FTL a couple nights ago and I think I'm in love. I have a feeling these last three games will take longer for me to finish than the last 15 games combined.

I managed to run most of the raid the other week with dustincase and a few others and got a couple >300 items in addition to my recently obtained exotic sword. That finally pushed me over 300 light and since then I've managed to get 4 or 5 exotics to decrypt at 310 which I've used for infusion pushing my Titan to just shy of 304 light. At this point I've kind of run out of stuff to do. I have 45 calcified fragments, my only remaining quests are some pvp quests and the last part of the raid quest, and I don't have much reason to run strikes/nightfalls/dailies since there is nothing worth buying with legendary marks any more aside from a few more year 1 exotics I haven't upgraded. The raid is really all that is left and aside from that one run, I haven't seen enough people online when I'm playing to try to set something up. I really hope there is an injection of more content soon now that hard mode raid is out and the light level cap is higher. What I've done since the release of TTK has been quite a lot of fun but there actually isn't a whole lot there for 3 person fireteams with this expansion. The stuff that is there is very repeatable for awhile but man it sucks to hit that wall where there is almost no point in running any of it any more because it has nothing left to give. A new tier or two of PoE with 300+ item rewards would be a godsend and maybe throwing in a few more remixed strikes that were left behind in year 1 would make the strike playlist a bit more interesting. At first it felt like there was a ton of content in this expansion but looking back I feel like there wasn't all that much and it was just very well disguised by some of the crazy intricate quest lines that take you forever to complete, but still have you repeating content you did in other missions or strikes. It has been fun and has been worth every penny but I'm not sure if I can bring myself to log on and play any more unless I can find a group of people to raid with or until some more content drops. I do really like this game but oddly, I feel like there is less worthwhile stuff to do now than there was with HoW.

Oh my god. That is an incredibly disgusting thing to say. So now gamergate is about ethics in mass murdering?

I've seen that image and it honestly confuses the hell out of me. I would have to spend some time learning why they are adding 3 and then 5 and then 10 and then 2. I feel like I could just as easily say that the traditional way makes just as much sense. What do you need to add to 12 to get 32? 20. Do this a bunch of times with a bunch of different examples so that you understand what subtraction is relative to addition, then you learn the trick involving borrowing numbers to handle quickly subtracting big numbers from other big numbers. Both approaches are perfectly valid to me and the part I take issue with is that students doing common core have to now do it that very specific way because the problems are constructed to only allow them to solve them using those methods. And to throw my anecdotal evidence into the mix, my daughter got 0/12 on her last math quiz because she isn't grasping these concepts. Even though I've been working on addition with her for years and she can add 1357 to 2378 without breaking a sweat. Common core seems to suffer from the same problems traditional math does: teachers just aren't very good at communicating it in a way that makes sense.

And that is definitely a failing on the teacher's part in my opinion. I really don't think however, that most teachers are out there going "here, memorize all of this" without ever going over these concepts. Maybe I had some unique curriculum as a kid but we spent months easing into multiplication and understanding it before we got to the part where we just straight up memorized our times tables. And I'm not sure your example is even necessarily indicative of that being the case. For all we know, 90% of the class may have understood these concepts perfectly and had no problem and the ones that needed tutoring are those few that either didn't pay enough attention or just had a much harder time grasping the concepts.

Man, I just really disagree here. If you learn how multiplication works and can prove out all of your multiplication tables, it is totally valuable to then memorize all of those for quick access. It isn't worthless trivia. And I don't know about you but when I learned math as a kid we spent plenty of time learning how multiplication works before memorizing our times tables. I know we all want to think that everything about our education system is broken but I don't buy the notion that the majority of teachers out there are just teaching kids brainless memorization without teaching the underlying concepts first. I know you're trying to make a distinction between memorizing and remembering things you've learned but I don't see that distinction, which maybe explains my frustration with what you guys are arguing. Memorizing something is nothing more than committing it to memory. Whether you understand it or not is besides the point. Yes, critical thinking is important and there should be more of a focus on that over just regurgitating data. But let's not ignore how vital of a role memorization plays in critical thinking. Every step of your thought process while thinking about a problem relies on information you have memorized. And I'll even go one step further and say that there are even a ton of cases where memorizing things without fully understanding them is valuable and comes up in life constantly. In programming, for instance, you constantly memorize functions and classes that can save you a ton of time. You may not know all the ins and outs of how it works but you have a basic concept of what it does and you memorize it so you can easily apply it again without having to look it up every time. And just in every day life you memorize things constantly. Your social security number, what streets to turn on to get to work, how much certain groceries cost, your family members' birthdays, the size of your clothes, and on and on. I would say these "rare cases" where we need to memorize things are not so rare at all.

Totally. Memorizing things you will never use is useless. But committing things to memory that you will use is incredibly important and I disagree with the notion that you can get through most subjects without having to spend time committing concepts to memory. Even in the history test example, you may be able to figure out certain events through reasoning, but guess what? Your reasoning is based on other events or things you learned at one point that you committed to memory. There is no escaping that memorizing things is a fundamental way that we build on our own knowledge.

If you guys are arguing that memorizing things isn't useful and that we can solve everything through critical thinking, I think I disagree. Memorization can provide shortcuts to information that would otherwise take more time to reason through and arrive at the correct answer. Yeah, it's great if I can solve the derivative of sine manually every time I see it. But why waste all that time when I can just remember that the answer is cosine. Of course, just memorizing things without understanding them is pretty useless. But I definitely see merit in memorizing things that you have already reasoned through. And let's be real here, when you have 50 minutes to take an exam, you will have a much harder time doing well if you haven't taken some time to memorize certain critical things.

I get what you're saying. But when you have a question on a history test asking what date a certain event occurred, no amount of critical thinking is going to produce the answer you need to write down. The metrics that people are graded on in many subjects do tend to rely on lots of memorization in my experience and yet people still do fine in these subjects relative to math.

Yeah, it is unfortunate that people just dismiss it out of hand like that. It's definitely not a bad approach to take for math. But I think your example touches on my primary issue with the way math (and what I've seen so far with this first year of common core stuff) is presented to kids. Forcing people to do problems a very specific way and not allowing them the freedom to learn and exploit all of the countless techniques and tricks to make numbers work in a sensible way is such an impediment to them mentally navigating through these concepts. God, if I had to solve all of my Fourier transforms in the specific way that one of my not so great teachers may have taught me in college, I would have never gotten through that stuff.

Thanks for the response. I'm reserving final judgment on the common core curriculum for now as I can see that it provides some valuable perspective that helps make math easier to understand. My main issue so far is that while it reduces the need for memorization, there is that initial learning curve of understanding exactly what all of their new terms mean and what exactly they are asking you to do when they say 'Doubles', 'Doubles + 1', '+1', '+2', and 'mentally visualized five groups'. I just have my doubts that this new approach can be successful when it is suddenly dictated that this is the new way kids are supposed to do math (and in my daughter's class, the only way she is allowed to do math) with no guarantee that all of the parents and teachers out there have been briefed on what these concepts mean and how to communicate them and help children understand them. My daughter claims that her teacher just gives her these worksheets with no explanation as to what those terms mean. Now of course she might just not be paying attention but given how contentious this common core thing has been, it wouldn't surprise me if a lot of teachers that have been teaching math for years fucking hate this new way of doing it and either refuse to learn it themselves or refuse to put the effort in to make sure their kids understand it because they want it to fail or something. And I'm not entirely sold that the problem so many people have with math is the whole memorization part. Literally every other subject like history, spelling, English, vocabulary, etc. all require memorization and on average, people seem to have much less of an issue with those subjects. I don't see why it works with all these other subjects but then the memorization angle falls down when it comes to math. You learn your basic addition and subtraction with small numbers until you understand how that works, then you memorize those easy ones and extrapolate to harder numbers and harder concepts. I don't think there is anything fundamentally more confusing about how that works and I think at the very least, children should be given the option to solve math problems the traditional way if that is the way that makes sense to them. I'll be interested to see how this curriculum pans out but my suspicion is that it won't produce noticeably better results because I think the real issue with math is that there are so few people that are capable of communicating math concepts to children in an easy to understand way. When I have had those excellent math teachers, even with everyone using these supposedly difficult traditional concepts, it was striking how much better everyone did in that class than in those classes with less effective teachers.

Can someone please help me help my daughter with her common core math homework. I'm so unfamiliar with these new terms and approaches to these basic concepts and it makes no sense to my daughter either as I have been teaching her the traditional way for the last few years before she hit first grade.

As soon as you step into that security line, you forfeit all personal space. The only personal space you are allowed is the personal space the airlines are gracious enough to offer you. Maybe the best solution to all of this would be for airlines to give you an option when you purchase the ticket to say "fuck my back" or "fuck my knees". Whichever one you select, you get placed in a seat that is in the same column as all the others that chose that same option. Problem solved.

But it isn't your personal space. You just imagine it is because you see that space there before the recline ever happens. Your space goes from the back of the seat in front of you at full recline to the back of your seat at full recline.

Yeah, reading into it some, it does seem kind of fucked up to have a situation where voice actors in some cases would be getting bonuses where the developers who poured many magnitudes more effort into the project might get nothing.

Hahaha!! Mission accomplished! Honestly, we should just stop being mad at each other and all just direct our anger at the airlines. None of this would be an issue if it weren't for the fact that they design seating that can only comfortably accommodate people that have had both legs amputated. But if it really is considered rude to recline your seat, then I think it is equally rude to expect others not to recline. Depending on the person, the back pain may be preferable to the knee pain and vice versa so having a rule where we only cater to the knee pain crowd is kind of a dick move for the back pain crowd. Personally, I can wiggle into different positions to angle my knees to the left or right but if I can't recline, I'm totally fucked and have no recourse other than leaning forward.