Ninety-Three

What is this block bot?

That article felt like the writer was stating his personal preference to be the Objective Best Thing. The quote that really jumped out at me was this: Says who? My personal taste runs that way, but that's a hell of a thing to present as universally true, as though it's so obvious it needs no justification.

Oh yes, I agree that torture doesn't work very well, and is commonly depicted as working. What I'm less certain of is that those depictions of torture lead to increased support for it, and I'm not aware of any figures on that.

Surprisingly unnoticeable indeed, the only time I saw a path being blocked was the overgrown area near the cave. Good job on that.

At this point we're just saying how we think the world works, which I don't think is a discussion that can go much farther than "I think X" "Well I think Y", since neither of us have evidence.

I think it's more accurate to say that better writing can only make her more likely to wear pants. Also, if we're complaining about trends in comics, I hate hate hate it when artists draw outfits that conform to the character's breasts like they're painted on or vacuum-sealed (or when armour has a big molded boobplate, which is a really dangerous thing to put in armour). No fabric works that way unless you deliberately sew boob-pockets into it, argh. I've taken to using it as a metric for comics I shouldn't look at, like discarding a resume at the first typo.

How much ability do you have to revisit stuff? The demo made it look like you're stuck on a fairly linear path, would revisiting other areas be a matter of backtracking along that path, or does movement open up and get more sandboxy?

I'm not familiar with Feminist Frequency's videos, but I see the overall point you're making. Unfortunately, I'm not well-informed on the "Does sexism in media cause sexism in life?" question, so I can't contribute much more to the discussion on that axis. I guess that's a question to be answered by the social scientists (or maybe they already have answered it). Regarding torture vs action movie injuries, I don't understand what you mean by the fantasy vs reflection of reality distinction. If one action movie features both torture, and Hollywood-style trivialized injuries, what is it that makes one of those things a fantasy, while the other is a reflection of reality and A Problem?

What? No, I was talking about

Based on oeis.org, I propose that SMB should use 701, 1013, 1063, 1151..., the sequence of primes whose decimal representation is a valid number in base 8 and interpreted as such is again a prime. It was really hard to find a sparse and not completely arbitrary sequence including 701.

To get cynical about the media, it's because news is a business, and so its purpose is not to inform, but to get ratings (thus, profit). The way humans work, silly news gets more attention than informative news. Unless you're depressed that people think posing with abandoned, untouched van is entertainingly silly?

Is there a Capitalism thread or something? I have more to say about some of the stuff that's been brought up, but this is thread is two or three layers of off-topic from it, so I feel weird about having the discussion here. Also, what is up with the "Show new posts" popup indicator thing working only a quarter of the time? I keep starting a post, finishing later, and finding that someone else has posted in the interim and the forum has forgotten to tell me.

I agree that fiction depicting torture as effective makes people think torture works, but I think we disagree about how much responsibility for that the author bears. People shouldn't reach those conclusions based on fiction, obviously, it's stupid. If the author makes it clear they're presenting a work of fiction and not a documentary, it seems unreasonable to blame the author for people taking their work as representative of reality.

I wasn't talking so much about the glorification of violence as simple misrepresentation of the effects of blood loss, shock, and so on. I'm sure individuals have made bad decisions based on understandings of injury gained from movies, but I think most people would be content to blame that on the individual, rather than the movie. If we accept that, it seems weird to blame other things on movie problems instead of the people foolishly influenced by movie problems.

If I may make a tangent upon this already tangential discussion, is that a common narrative? I grew up hearing a lot of "Figure out what job you want, and if it's available, before going into university".

To use the example I gave: If the amount of realism we demand from fiction is not absolute, what are we using to declare certain things acceptable and others not?

Only if we have people who are basing torture decisions on fictional portrayals of torture though, and that is obviously the wrong thing to be doing. If someone writes an essay of the efficacy of torture, then they bear some responsibility for decisions made based on it, but I don't think it's fair to demand entertainment be factual. Is basically every action movie ever unethical for dangerously misrepresenting the severity of injuries?

If you're saying that titles like "Bogost in the Shell" and "Ode on a Grecian Hat Sale" aren't already the most ridiculous episode names, then I look forward to the Thumbs ushering in a new era of apocalyptic ridiculousness.

Skeletons which fart, or do you mean it in the same sense as "killing skeletons"?

Ah, okay. There's definitely an overall narrative that torture works. I think there's an interesting discussion to be had about how much responsibility fiction has to not do that though. Is the problem that fiction has a shitty message, or that people are basing real world policy on fiction? After all, there are pervasive untrue narratives and tropes about a whole lot of things. To take a specific example, fiction will give you a terrible idea about how gunshot wounds and blood loss work, but there everyone is content to say "It's the audience's responsibility to understand this is fiction, not an accurate representation of reality". Where and how do we draw the line?

I think it's Mario RPG: Legend of the seven stars.

Yeah. There's are canonical depictions of both Yoshi-the-Yoshi, and other members of the Yoshi species, as three-toed.

I haven't watched 24, but whenever I heard about some politician citing it in a torture debate, I'd always hear people say "But in 24, torture doesn't work. It gets the protagonists bad information." Is that something that changed in the later years of the show?

Don't you know? He's not wearing shoes, those orange things are his feet.

The Kingdom of Loathing developers like to talk about this problem and it's not even inherent to MMOs. Zack Johnson calls it "dickstabbing", named for his complaint about "people who would rather stab themselves in the dick for eleven points, than bang the prom queen for ten points". The core problem is that as soon as a game has some kind of reward structure, there will be people who completely disregard whatever makes the game fun so that they can optimize rewards. The only thing a developer can really do about this is work to ensure the fun path is the one with the best rewards.