Chris

Welcome new folks! And old folks new to the forums!

At my actual church it was just Palm Sunday smoke orb, yeah. That camp I went to for a few years was at an actual abbey, so all the counselors were monks and they had full Latin mass every morning. Super hardcore.

As you say I don't know how much farther we're going to get by going back and forth in this, but I'm not talking about the thousand-year long view of history and language. Also when I say "language" I don't mean "a language," e.g. The English Language, I mean "usage of language in particular cases." I'm talking about immediate usage. When people start applying the word "franchise" to everything, people start thinking of everything as "a franchise." This happens constantly now. Until relatively recently, that word was hardly ever used in the near-universal context it is used now, but now it's everywhere. Everything is a potential franchise. A lot of this has to do with business considerations that would be happening regardless of language, but I strongly believe that wholesale adoption of jargon helps to normalize the effect. When everyone is reporting on and talking about "franchises" it helps to create a self-fulfilling prophecy; of course entertainment "properties" naturally manifest as "franchises" that become "sequelized" "products" and are "extended" into wide-ranging "content" to "consume." It's just in the air, it's everywhere. I recognize that it would be naive to pin this all on words, but I think language is extremely powerful and can be used to flatten concepts, make them less specific. It can of course do the opposite as well.

It's not really the same thing, though. It's not reducing the man to a phallus, per se; it's letting the viewer embody the man in the cartoon because it is created from a male perspective and intended to be enjoyed by one. It's a wish-fulfillment fantasy (or probably in some cases also a power fantasy). In these cases, "objectified" doesn't mean "disembodied," and "reducing" doesn't mean literally physically removing parts of; these things refer to diminishing one's personhood, agency, worth, etc. In many cases how the man is portrayed is irrelevant because the viewer will insert himself; that's easier to do if the man is less explicitly illustrated.

But I think such usage IS bad for language, or at least can be. Do you think that the fact that language evolves and is robust means that it is literally impossible for anything to weaken it? I'm not saying The Entire Concept Of Language Is Being Destabilized, I'm saying I think meaning can be weakened through unconsidered usage.

Sean made a game full of branching narrative. He's taking issue with people who claim that in-game choices have no meaning unless they directly map to some big in-world effect; that demand is a very real phenomenon.

I don't really know how to square "it's okay to have opinions about things" with "don't police other people and tell them how to talk." I mean, unless I'm only allowed to have opinions about my own usage of things, I'm going to have opinions about other people's usages of things as well. I'm not trying to pass laws, but I can't help but have opinions about things that occur in the world.

That's definitely true. I do think there is at least something of a distinction between the way a filmed human body is idealized and the way a 100% imaginary one is. I'm not defending anything one way or another, or making a moral ranking, but I would bet it creates differences in how those ideal representations are received, even if subtly.

Animated porn does actually raise some questions about what one considers to be the more exploitative components of porn (if one believes there are any). It doesn't involve filming living breathing humans, so if one considers pornography to implicitly exploit or devalue the human body or sexual acts, even aside from the informed consent of its participants, that's a plus. But on the other hand, one could argue that since animated porn is fabricated, it, reinforces idealized and unrealistic notions about sex or the human form. You see this in interviews with guys who have anime "girlfriends," often they'll talk about how animated porn is superior because the women's bodies are perfect, not like real women, and they don't complain.

Both of these points reflect in part how I feel. I think I should point out that, while noting that especially in professional contexts jargon has its place for increasing clarity and brevity, in a lot of cases it actually DECREASES specificity because people fall in love (generally unconsciously) with the idea of using the jargon because of the cachet or flavor it conveys rather than because it actually communicates anything more useful. I would say terms like "franchise," "IP/intellectual property," "product," and "exclusive" fall into this category in the video game industry, among press and developers but also non-professional game players on forums and social media. (There is a gray area here between what counts as jargon and what counts as buzzwords.) But most of these words end up getting applied slapdash in FAR more situations than they probably should, which dilutes meaning, flattens language, and plays into the hands of corporate structures that rely on this kind of linguistic dilution to create excitement without having to justify the source of the excitement in great detail. A similar thing applies to nerd neologisms like "squee," "feels," "so much this," "said no one ever," and the like, which I'm sure have very specific emotional meanings, or at least did at one point, but get overused to the point that they become rote, dead responses. I realize I'm straying a bit from "jargon" specifically here but I feel these are useful examples for conveying what I find unappealing about unconsidered usage of jargon as well, because I think many of the causes of overuse and tangible results are the same. I also recognize that I have certainly been guilty of this on the podcast as well. I should be more careful because I would not like to be responsible for spreading unnecessary usage of phrases like "IP" and "franchise." Finally I will say that acknowledging that "language evolves" should not be interpreted as a blanket statement that "any usage of language in any context is inherently as valuable or worthy as any other usage of language." Of course language evolves. But language is also the most powerful tool we have for expressing thought, and there's no harm in thoughtful evaluation of its use. That doesn't mean we should beunreasonable militant linguistic police, but we also shouldn't shy away from treating it with consideration out of undue concern of being either elitist or anti-intellectual, polar opposite descriptors that are often each thrown around in these discussions.

I don't doubt that this happens in some cases but I'm not too concerned about perpetuating anti-intellectualism.

"Jargon" has a specific meaning that is not just "word that means something." Jargon is specific to a discipline or field or hobby or social group. It is language that is by its nature exclusive. In some cases, within a professional field, it is extremely useful to keep from having to explain common concepts again and again. But in a lot of cases it's used implicitly condescendingly (as when marketers or financiers use it to deliberately obfuscate or mislead those not in the know), or is just nerds using terminology as a badge or social identifier. The latter is not some grievous sin, but I still find it annoying.

"Grok" reeks of jargon to me, which I'm never crazy about. I'm sure that I'm not fully consistent with that and employ plenty of it myself unconsciously. But whenever I consciously notice people using jargon it comes off as really affected and cliquey to me.

Sorry, I was in an already-annoyed state about constant passive-aggressive holier-than-thou moral policing on the internet due to unrelated events and I reacted too strongly in this case.

Also I don't really know what the morally-perfect wholesale clothing manufacturer is. If someone knows, please pass it along. I don't inherently give a shit about American Apparel any more than any other company, but they manufacture locally, seem to treat their workers well based on what I've read, and produce shirts that compared favorably to the other samples we examined when we were sourcing materials. I feel like the chances of finding any company that operates at any kind of scale and has nothing about it that someone might find objectionable is a bit of a fantasy. The irony is that if we used some no-name shirt manufacturer that treats foreign sweatshop workers like shit and pays them next to nothing, nobody would bat an eye because they wouldn't have heard of the company's name in the first place. Alternative suggestions are welcome but contextless emoticons are worthless and will achieve nothing. Legitimate suggestions will be researched in good faith.

AMAZING

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American Apparel.

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I remember it being the first game I brought up. Is that not true?

I was actually shown the third one specifically for that reason, but having not seen any other Harry Potter stuff I don't have as much awareness of what it's in contrast to.

Yeah a weird fact about Twitter is that a massive percentage of followers are bots. Not because the person being followed is deliberately attracting bots to appear to have more followers, but because bot spam is a massive phenomenon. Twitter has full-time employees dedicated to figuring out ways to detect when a new user is a bot and to quickly ban them, but it's a tough battle. It's even harder because some bots don't actually spam you via replies, they just follow you in the hope that you'll click on their profile and follow whatever link is there—that's a hard thing to detect for.

No, retweets are like regular tweets, they broadcast information. "I like something" shouldn't also necessarily mean "I will show this to everyone who follows me." I really dislike when people use retweeting as merely a way to show appreciation. I will just turn retweets off from those people. I don't like having my feed spammed with stuff like that.

I used to tell myself they were for bookmarking or some kind of records but realistically I have never actually gone and looked at my own favorites or anyone else's. I now use them purely as a way to express a positive reaction to someone else's post. It's just a shorthand for saying "I liked this" or "thanks" or whatever is clearly contextually appropriate to the tweet, without needing to write a pointless reply with very little real information.

hmmm