MrHoatzin

The cartels throughout the series are portrayed very, very cartoonily. At best they've made them weirdly vague—why would they call themselves "the cartel"? Why wouldn't the operators on the US side of the border differentiate between different cartels that are warring just over the fence?—at worse, they really didn't do their homework. I am guessing that they're just being vague because describing the real deal is a huge bummer and may also be dangerous.

Way to take the fun out of toblix's objectifications.

Ooh, maybe I should try drawing naked pasty dudes. I am pretty sure it is seasonal affective emos in my case. I don't feel like doing shit either.

Or take it to a tailor.

Jeez, you guys! Listen to it as if it were a dramatic monologue, or sort of tragic vignette or something.

So many of the conservatives in my field of view are total fascist cartoons. Rick Perry is my governor for fucks sake, reigning Texas for a record 12 years now and unlikely to be voted out of office any time soon (thought Texans might be embarrassed by his presidential campaign, it remains to be seen whether anyone will remember what a flake he is by 2014 when he will be running for his 4th term). Old-world conservatives are a completely different story. I dunno.

Aww, really? Man. I dunno. So much of the right wing bullshit is completely over-the-top insane and disingenuous, and this lady seems a lot more earnest and rational than a lot of the partisans on the right. I listen to this vid and I wanna form a coalition with her. Plus that bit about adding a B to her new Youtube channel in memory of the then recently dead Breitbart was kinda heartbreaking.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wLoqti0lzAw A super poignant (mostly video-less) vid of a lady who had a really bad election night. I want to hug her and tell her it gets better. Kinda long but worth a listen.

I like how the filling slowly oozes further and further down the roof every time we see the pizza.

Meh.

At the same time, I don't think it is far fetched that someone as ballsy and powerful as Valve is right now would do something like that. Newell has been saying some extreme things about Windows 8, and I am excited to see where that leads us.

It is true that I am talking out of my ass here. But I am not pre-hating his altruism for destroying my favorite movies or whatever. That is a bit of a straw man. I put more weight on his decisions surrounding Lucas Arts. Lucas has been responsible (in The Buck Stops Here kind of way) for a lot of really stupid disappointments of my childhood—on top of the fact that I consider his judgment in matters of art to be super suspect and his successes accidental. All the best shit Lucas Arts did happened before he took interest in the company. It is a kind of common knowledge that at some point he kicked out most of the creative peeps from Skywalker ranch and kept lawyers and such around, keeping Skywalker Sound as a token. So for decades this dude's been cool with being surrounded by people who threaten the AGS community for a living. He obviously takes his own judgment to be unimpeachable. It is unlikely it ever gets challenged in any meaningful way. On top of that, it is super fashionable nowadays for powerful people of the West Coast liberal flavor who don't know shit about teaching kids to take on Thinking Big about Fixing Education—which has resulted in charter schools, standardized testing, and holding teachers accountable—pseudosolutions universally reviled by everyone who actually deals with the realities of beating enlightenment into the heads of kids. If Lucas turns out to be the savior of all education from the likes of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, I will gladly eat all the hats you can throw my way, but for the time being I choose to be a flippant dick about it. Sorry. Let's see how this shit plays out. My best hope right now is that he somehow manages not to do more damage.

So basically he moved the money from the pocket labeled Slush Fund Whatever to the one labeled Philanthropy Etc. For all we know, that money will be used to promote stupid privatized education on the corporate model of data-driven accountability, Bill Gates style. And when he rolls over and dies, control over all that money will probably go to the lawyers he's been collecting at Skywalker ranch—like some sort of a cat lady.

Nah. Jayel just exported one of the images with one color profile and the other with another—and we're only noticing it now because browsers are only now starting to honor color profiles.

¬¬¬ You are talking about the color profile issue, right?

What browser you using? Looks like color profile misfiring (...if that is what you're referring to...) but as far as I know only Safari supports color profiles in pichurs and there is really no reason to use Safari unless you're like a die-hard Apple asshole of some sort.

It was a styrofoam apple that I cored and wore like a clown nose—which only kinda worked, it was too heavy, so I also affixed it to the brim of the bowler. For the leaves I used some other fake plant's leaves that I cut to look like apple leaves. EDIT: And um, I keep spamming with no faces to show, so here's some stereoscopic fun in our front porch/yard:

Sal and I went as to this amazing rad party at the site of the famous Hot Wells Hotel and Spa ruins—her dressed as a blackface jumping spider and I as Magritte. Unfortunately there are no good pictures of either of our costumes, hers because she looks like she is in blackface and mine because the bowler hat and suit were swallowed by darkness in the only photo that has showed up tagged on facebook... but man, the party was fucking awesome!

Next up: Disney accidentally acquires own umbrella company.

I feel sick. I don't even know why.

I was totally thinking of The Wire as an example of a kind of story that this manner of character redundancy would require. Not every character in the world needs to be like that tho. Just the important ones that you can accidentally kill or fail to save in some sort of an emergent scenario or something.

Far Cry 2 solves this by building in NPC redundancy. All the named mercenary friendlies are interchangeable for the purposes of the story and if any one of them die, the next one will step into their role for the next mission. It would be an efficient method of handling player's ability to fuck up in the context of a more elaborate story: write it in such a way that there is a group of backup people who can fulfill a story role, then don't put them all within a grenade blast radius in situations where the desirability of their murder is ambiguous. This kind of thing requires some deft narrative-smithing, but it sounds simpler to execute than a full-on branching narrative and it can be just as compelling.

Subtlety can work on many levels. You can have something that is very crassly and straightforwardly written, but that communicates its full intentions subtly on a completely different level. Like, I dunno, propaganda or marketing. They preconditions people to think in a certain way by repeating certain blunt themes ad nauseum in the culture at large. People are oblivious to the extent their opinions and behaviors are modeled on these subtle outside influences and how much they're "their own". On the other hand, you could argue that marketing and propaganda are the exact opposite of subtle.

Islam has been under the boot of the West for quite a while. It is kinda natural for Abrahamic societies to get crazy patriarchal under duress. It is important to remember that for most of the Middle Ages (Islamic Golden Age) and later the Ottoman Caliphate, Islam had the most progressive societies on the planet. It is not inherently like this. Do you see any sign of a home-grown reaction to this atmosphere of bullshit? Some kind of Islamic feminism or something like it? It is hard for these kinds of grass roots uprisings to be effective in authoritarian systems, but I get the impression that the cosmopolitan urban society thinks of itself as under occupation from the theocrats.

I find the idea of a natal language as something discrete and different from the native language extremely fun.