Blambo

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Posts posted by Blambo

  4. Posted

    I feel like Moby Dick had been completely and forever ruined for me. I knew the ending beforehand, I had a light grasp of the themes involved, and all that was left was seeing how the little details fit everything. The specter of my prior knowledge even retconned a lot of the emotional experience I had while reading it.

  6. Posted

    I'm having this conversation with a gamergater (a rare species of alligator) who is insisting that feminists are shaming artists into making PC art and considers it systemic cultural oppression, but at the same time doesn't recognize the actual systemic cultural oppression in art. It's really disorienting.

  8. Posted

    I'd strongly disagree with the idea that fiction is uniquely good at providing introspection. I've gotten so, so much more out of non-fiction when it comes to stunning ideas that challenge how I see the world; I read fiction for the stories precisely because there's better options if I want my brain stretched. I think wanting stories is just fine, there's value in storytelling.

    Isn't that a personal, subjective thing though? For people who can easily parse abstract ideas, nonfiction might be better at conveying stuff while for others relating and extrapolating concepts from concrete plots might be easier. It's just that fiction focusing on form (storytelling) rather than purpose is kind of a waste, because it could be about so much more.

  10. Posted

    Last night I had the best idea for the title of a Canadian crime comedy.

    Dial M for Murder. Pour Assassiner en Français, Appuyez sur le Neuf

    This is the best joke I will ever make.

    This is the best joke I've heard all year

  11. Posted

    Well -- I don't care about anyone's fetishes. People should be able to get off to whatever they want as long as they don't push it on anyone else. I can't think of a single fetish that would offend me -- assuming, again, that truly transgressive fetishes are kept strictly in the realm of fantasy. I think, from what I was reading, the real problem is the "oh it's just kinda rape, I mean it's not RAPE rape" attitude of the description.

    If you were a content creator, how would you deal with allowing things like this in culture and fostering a respect for the difference between fantasy and reality? I would assume most sexually themed games centered on rape play out in a realistic setting with realistic situations, since the fantasy/kink element of it comes from not being able to do things like this in life.

    I guess this is kind of similar to the problem with violence in media, but I've always had this feeling that there's a stronger culture normalizing rape and suspending empathy in it than there is in like, killing.

  13. Posted

    This seems like a good opportunity to ask if anyone else thought of Nick as the jock of the podcast? Though I might have just thought that because when I started listening he happened to talk a lot about sportsy games and his voice seemed to belong to some muscley dude.

     

    I always imagined him to be the frail pale he is. Although he's the one I would most expect to call everyone a nerd and preorder nba 2k15.

  15. Posted

    The Escapist has published some new journalistic ethics guidelines and a weird editorial to go with them. I don't understand the convoluted car metaphors, and I don't think it's because of me. Also, they try to play gatekeeper for some ill-defined notion of what constitutes a gamer which is just really bizarre to see in, like, a real publication that's trying to garner respect?

    Is this paragraph actually implying that misogyny and the mistreatment of women is an integral part of why they enjoy games and that removing it would change the product irreversibly, or am I misreading them?

    Pretty much, though their intent when saying this is probably more along the lines of "we don't like the smaller engine" vs "we don't like the baby seat". It's still a garbage metaphor because it's saying that suddenly the press has made it so you can't play different games, then leveraged this lack of choice and pinned a social agenda to it. They're saying "you hijacked our games and made them into stuff we don't like, then turned us into the enemy". Stupid, myopic, and shitty.

  17. Posted

    Yeah it seems like the IGF started as a suitable replacement for the lack of academic grants and public support, since it's focused on innovation and advancement. It has an image of being super messy now because it's suddenly become a big part the industry through sheer attention and the judges are often active members of the industry themselves, though I still feel that the more pressing issue is the fact that it kind of is the biggest and sometimes sole voice for "what's in".

    That said there are plenty of examples where the IGF results were descriptive of an existing zeitgeist and didn't seem to sway anything one way or another, so its role in the industry seems a lot less clear than we're making it out to be.

    I'd want to do a study comparing the academic character of games with that of film or the arts.

    EDIT RE systemic corruption: the thing is the source of this kind of herd behavior is really decentralized and is indistibguishable from normal people choosing what they like the most in good faith. A centralized culture certainly seems to enable it but then it just seems like it's pointless to try to fix it at its core, which is human nature.

  18. Posted

    Indiefund has a hard cap on the ROI it receives from investments, the IGF definitely doesn't force judges to only play their assigned games, a possible 8 person bias doesn't immediately turn the tide of judging, the judging process is decently decentralized and the organization encourages judges with links to the games they judge to shy away.

    Not a lawyer, but I'm not sure if any of those things constitute racketeering, and if it does, the combination of all of that stuff seems to point to it all being a consequence of the industry being really small (and pretty imbalanced), plus the honest effort of people trying to promote a game that they think deserves it.

    It's not symptomatic of corruption but it touches on something that's been said to death about the indie scene as an industry player: it's super small, super nascent, is individual focused and thus has a tendency to popularize solitary voices, yadda yadda yadda. I recognize these as actual problems but they're not worth the directed, hateful ire at the fortunate or assuming that there's a conspiracy behind everything. It's probably much better to focus on alternative voices and underground scenes and foster a culture of inclusiveness through diversity of taste and opinion in media.

    The power structure that exists exists as a natural consequence of weird tribal tendencies and curation, rather than through authoritarian enforcement. The indie scene has always fostered a very inclusive, diy culture. I like to imagine gamergate people as Captain Ahab projecting intent onto the great white whale; it exists and its a potential problem but Jesus christ it's not out to get you.

    Anyway does anyone have any links to constructive discussion about how the IGF is structured and how it could be improved?

    EDIT: This last week weirded me out because I felt really compelled to make certain arguments in bad faith. I don't think I would've said that capitalism is a truly equalizing force if I wasn't so pissed about the whole situation to begin with. The conversation was started in bad faith so everything after it feels kind of illegitimate.

  20. Posted

    EDIT: Dammit I got ninja'd.

     

    I think you want a vector projection, though this is completely overkill because all you want is the x component of the vector. With this you can find the component along any direction in any dimension.

     

    Assuming your velocity is a vector quantity that can be expressed as a linear combination including what you want to project it on, you can find its projection along the vector you want by multiplying the scalar projection:

    dotprod2.gif

    img5.gif

    by the unit vector (of your projecting vector):

    img6.gif

    Where a(vector) is the direction you want to project onto and b(vector) is the direction you want to project.

     

    (images stolen from http://www.math.oregonstate.edu/home/programs/undergrad/CalculusQuestStudyGuides/vcalc/dotprod/dotprod.html)

     

    So here your velocity vector is (1,1) and the vector you want to project onto is (1,0), then your scalar projection is 

    g1Yqg4D.gifVGEOkEk.gifVQfsXbe.gif

     

    You end up with 1, as you might expect. This method should work with any projection p and any vector v. It's just that if you're using x or y as your projection and you have the vector quantity of your velocity, you can just take the x or y spot in the vector and that's the projection.

     

     

    ...I hope I did that right.

  21. Posted

    http://ellaguro.blogspot.com/2014/09/on-gamers-and-identity.html

    http://ellaguro.blogspot.com/2014_08_01_archive.html

     

    These are cool articles. I feel like removing yourself from the disgustingness and vitriol and focusing on the origin of the hate is important (though I don't mean to justify any of it). These articles focus on cultural miscommunication and the apparently insular nature of the perceived indie scene and how that image propagates.

     

    i'm worried, as always, venturing into writing about this subject again. the problem is that those private gardens of video games are no longer merely private gardens, but real, tangible territory with real causalities - where real harassment, doxxing, hacking, and violence happens. fantasizing about committing acts of violence on the people who you perceive to be the architects of your misery is one of our grotesque cultural pastimes, one that the culture of aggressively-masculine marketing around video games has certainly only just added fuel of the fire of - one that's constantly enacted on the beings and bodies of the weak and marginalized. and yes, i remember how ridiculous the rhetoric about violence in video games around an event like Columbine was to me as a sixth grader, how they don't understand how abstracted and silly the violence in a game like Doom was, how it was all simulated, how little of a basic understanding they had of how games work. but as those debates have largely dissipated over the years, video games have only become more violent, have only ventured much further into simulated realism meant to more convincingly substitute for a disappointing and disempowering reality, have only catered much more deeply and pervasively to the entitlements of their users, and have only become more ingrained and ever-present in culture. where we stand now, video games have deeply entrenched themselves as the primary venue for disempowered people to elect themselves as servants and act out the sociopathic fantasies of the ruling class. video games literally train soldiers. if you feel disillusioned, if you feel not particularly smart or skilled, video games are there. no surprise, then, that this learned rhetoric is further blurring the lines between fantasy and reality and creating a battleground in such a seemingly arbitrary part of popular media. no surprise that this battleground is very real.

     

    This seems to mirror the sentiment that Sean talked about in last week's episode, of being an outsider looking in, and the inevitable split between joining and becoming what you see as "something else" and rejecting it.

  25. Posted

    I think that's being too cavalier. Studied and measured social responses based on rules you read in a book seem too much like wearing a mask, faking normalcy, pretending to be someone else. It seems like putting considerable effort into not being yourself, in hopes that doing so will get you accepted by others.

    Are there simple ways to describe a socially effective person? Absolutely. However, what are the consequences of altering yourself, parroting back things that supposedly resemble effective social behavior while silencing the parts of yourself that break those rules?

    I think there is no simple answer to that question, and whether you struggle with it or not can be completely orthogonal to "growing up."

    I feel like this idea that you're "not being yourself" when you try to improve your social behavior implies a need to project your "true self" in social situations, rather than purely interacting and experiencing separate subjectivity, which I feel is most pleasurable about social interaction. I mean, these things arent necessarily mutually exclusive but I find that if you don't have a good feeling for who you are inherently you can easily objectify yourself in social situations and lead yourself to being false.