Nachimir

The moral of this story is: Many people respond primarily to aesthetics. If your competition is prettier, you are often doomed.

I enjoyed the video. Edit: I wanted to love TF2, but always found it frustrating early on. I just couldn't rack up kills the way I have in other games, and while pretty biased toward Demoman, never found a class that really seemed to suit me.

Happy birthday you excellent man. If it is indeed your real birthday.

Yes, I think they're all done without glue; that's very much frowned upon by AFOLs. A lot of these techniques: http://www.brickshel...advbuilding.pdf Some of the weirder/non-grid looking ones are also based on Lego technic skeletons. The pegs and holes let you construct arbitrary angles to then build normal Lego structures from. (Edit) Here's one of dasnewten's ships: http://www.flickr.co.../in/photostream Here's how it's built. A lot of spaceship builders do a "swoosh test". The most elaborate designs are more prone to falling to bits. Lego's own, less elaborate looking ships are designed to withstand the strain of being whirled around on the end of a child's arm To say I spend hardly any time messing about with Lego, I sure do know a lot about it ¬¬

They'll always be on ebay, and Brick Link. I had to stop buying them. They're like crack, and a very clever thing for Lego to make. You might never spend £50 on a lego set, but after a year or so of these, the same amount has trickled out of your wallet a bit at a time and you have a pile of minifigs. The company almost went bust on the big parts elmuerte mentions disliking; they were a real trend in design for them in the early 2000s, and were often specific to a set or two, meaning they had to shift a lot of each to get their production costs back (making a mold for a new piece costs around a quarter of a million euros). With minifigs, it lets them test stuff out and make new bits, while selling small cheap stuff to people who don't necessarily want big sets around. A bunch of things in the monster hunters stuff seem to be aggregated from the previous six lines of minifigs. I know some pretty big AFOLs and am basically coming to terms with being one myself whilst trying to not own a lot of Lego. It started with Flickr: This is still probably the best Lego model I've ever seen, but there are many more: http://www.flickr.co...ten/2503187439/ http://www.flickr.co...rac/3372893079/ http://www.flickr.co...oan/6091926846/ http://www.flickr.co...rac/6225387177/ http://www.flickr.co...o0o/4733339313/ http://www.flickr.co...lic/6299491958/ http://www.flickr.co...anz/6621053469/ http://www.flickr.co...olf/5287973519/ http://www.flickr.co...log/5164896606/

As Graham Linehan said of this: "It's all over".

I have an ambivalent relationship with Lego. It is the best toy, and actually pretty good for trying out ideas and prototypes of some things, but also, it's clutter. I have a tub of it in some drawers, and a Maersk train on top. I also have about 30 of these due to an error of judgment… I quite like the new Monster Hunter sets, but probably won't get any of them. This guy and his son made up an XCOM type tabletop game using Lego, and some other people made a game with some beautiful little Lego mechs. That's one of the most amazing and geekiest things about Lego: They mold bricks to tolerances of a fiftieth of a millimetre, so that brick you have from 20 years back will still fit with a brand new one now*. I've done a bit of injection molding, and manufacturing to that standard is difficult. None of the clone products have anywhere near that kind of tolerance, and big walls of their bricks tend to force themselves apart as a result. * An exception is the acetate bricks they made in the 1960's, which warped. The only sets from back then that remain are ones that were never disassembled.

I completely missed this last year. 39 songs mashed together by a 17 year old French kid:

I think you answered your own question. I absolutely agree, dress influences. The effects of privilege are persistent and not so easily surmounted.

Modest Mouse are great. Ugly Cassanova is another band with Isaac Brock in. I had not seen this video before. It's pretty fucking gross. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AexGe102-Bc

I feel the same Scrobbs. I recognise bits of prejudice that are buried in me sometimes, and they're very dissonant with who I identify as and who I want to be. I think that's an important difference: We don't think it's okay in the way a card carrying BNP member might, for instance, and we try to kill it off. I'm not sure how or where it lost you (and that's absolutely not intended as a criticism), but I'll try to clarify. The systemic problems with exploitation that you touch on are a different discussion; though that's not to say it isn't important or that I don't agree with you. Privilege as I refer to it is not about what we have, nor is it specifically about consumerism or guilt for what we have. It's about the way the world treats us. It is my privilege, as a straight white male, to not suffer the same forms of discrimination, examination, and expectation as people from other groups. That is not something I ever earned, it's just the world and circumstances I was born into. My genes, my sexuality, and my race are normal as normal gets in the society I live in. That means my life is easier than other people's. The life of a woman, or someone in an ethnic minority, or someone who grew up in the poor neighbourhood half a mile away from me, is not functionally identical or equivalently difficult to mine. An example: Body image issues are aimed at both men and women. Women are continually judged and criticised in relation to how close to those ideals they are. Men might also be presented with lofty body ideals, but they pretty much get a free pass to be lazy and fat, especially from each other. "What does he look like?" or "How attractive is he?" are usually not among the first questions raised mentally in relation to a man. The beliefs and attitudes that reside within people and lead to this situation being normal are what I mean by "chunks of privilege". There are many more examples related to every form of prejudice mentioned in this thread. The idea of meritocracy holds that anyone can succeed at anything, and if they don't they're just not trying hard enough or must have made some bad choices. The flipside of that is the idea that anyone who has something must deserve it along with the way they are largely treated in the world. Meritocracy is, in a very best-case scenario, a flawed idea that completely discounts significant and sometimes overpowering social factors. Without thinking about this, it's easy for my personality and behaviour to just nestle into that rut of privilege, and to not perceive it as hugely disadvantageous to others. Patronising and oppressive attitudes to women in the first two thirds of the Twentieth Century were normalised and not particularly noticeable to the people enacting them. I'm pretty sure many things in our present behaviour and culture will look just as weird and regressive to our eventual descendants. There was and will be no lightbulb moment of sudden social change; it's a cultural change, and that's something that runs at a glacial pace.

Here's why the quadrotors haven't done us in yet: One day, they're going to get us back for that James Bond thing so hard though.

It's taken me a while to formulate a response to this. I'm sorry it's so long. Firstly, I was talking about all of your posts in this thread, not one point you tried to make. Secondly: Yes. Absolutely, fuck yes I do. There's a ton of religious, political and economic things on which I basically don't give a shit if people agree with me or not. That's because those issues are mostly in bubbles: They either don't affect everyone, or don't really harm anyone, or are too big for people to do much anything about, or are too subjective for us to have an immutable conclusion rather than just a belief, or they're just sideshows. Privilege is not like that though. Occasionally, this thread has diverged into discussing things other than feminism: non-sexist, but highly analogous prejudices. Privilege is the reason this discussion makes sense like that. It is an over-arching problem underpinning sexism, racism, homo- and trans-phobia, xenophobia, stigmas related to mental health and disability, and class prejudice. Privilege is not (necessarily) the kind of militant prejudice you'd associate with politically extreme groups. Because they don't identify with those groups though, many people say things like "I'm not sexist" and are blind to their privilege. I cannot stress enough: Not being actively prejudiced does not mean prejudice is not within you, or that you are not contributing to its cultural presence. Privilege is not just a problem for all those "other" people. It's not something we can tinker with academically, or idly turn over like a toy in our hands. It's a part of, and a problem, for all of us. Twig, the way you talk about it reeks of privilege failing to acknowledge itself. Nobody called you a bigot. Your language very clearly denotes that you see yourself as distinct and separate to these issues. Regardless of whether you accept it, you are not. I can't speak for anyone else here, but that is certainly why reading your posts in this thread have wound me up so much (I have generally refrained from replying). Blindness to privilege creates small, passive bits of society: Systems and unconscious responses that are inherently prejudiced or biased against other classes and types of person, yet aren't immediately noticeable. It's no great conspiracy; it's just a horrible, communal accident. These chunks of privilege are not from a holy book, an economic policy or a political manifesto. They're our personalities and beliefs. They're the ways we automatically act. They're our values and our motives, not just the surface ones that comprise our self image, but all of them, the tiniest ones and the ones buried so deep we can't necessarily think well about them. They're the things we've piled on top of each other deep down in our unconscious from the earliest parts of our lives onward. Things drummed into us by our peers, the stories we tell with media, and the images we consume. Privilege is about fundamental contradictions between self image and motives, and those motives are not the broad brush strokes we and our peers paint ourselves with: they're the tiniest, most subtle and automatic parts of us. This study, linked to earlier by Yufster, is an excellent attempt to begin excavating some of that in people. Privilege is not just about what happens in the world, it is about who we are. There is no system of organising humans that has ever, or could, completely eliminate privilege and inequality. Each of us has the power to contribute to its diminishment though. We can aim to make a world where there is less privilege, not more. Unlike the previously mentioned ton of religious, political and economic issues, privilege is the only issue that has ever genuinely struck me as a "with us or against us" kind of thing. It is such a culturally all-pervading force, that if you are not conscious of it, you are contributing to it. Without even trying, you are making the world a slightly worse place for everyone. Yes, everyone; not just discriminated against groups. I can't sit and pass judgement from some jet propelled throne of impartiality: I unavoidably play a part. Whether they like it or not, whether they choose to acknowledge it or not, absolutely no one is on the sidelines of this issue. Culture is not something that drips out of Hollywood's teat, or that gets voted on in parliament, or that's only created on a stave or a canvas or in a theatre. It's the daily aggregate of all our actions, beliefs, and motives. I have no choice or power over the systems that put us all here. What I do have the power to do is challenge myself and try to make a small difference every day, and that is something I see as a moral imperative; one that exists so far beyond and above things like left versus right or atheism versus theism. Sometimes, people do the most horrific shit to each other. On larger scales, it doesn't come down to baddies hiding in the bushes or a few bad apples: it's the sickest latent parts of people who see themselves as good; fomented, normalised and mobilsed in the service of something else. The further we can all push ourselves from that, the better a shot we all have. Twig, you seem to see this as a temporary mental diversion. I see it as the major framework of our lives. I hope the issues that people get really emotional about in a hundred years are much smaller than the prejudices we're dealing with now.

I did indeed. Twig, I think I understand that you're not stating personal beliefs, but this kind of thing has End-Up-Carved-Into-Your-Gravestone levels of misquotability: Your detached wording reads like you feel you're peering at ants or something:

Levelling is weird. It takes almost no time to get a character up to a level cap, then you have to visit a bootcamp trainer and pay to open up the next tier. I never have to grind to level, but every so often have to grind to get the money to keep levelling. Also, took me a shamefully long time to realise valuables were only useful for selling.

It's a good story!

I have an idea: Every time someone nitpicks the word "feminism", someone reposts the excellent Matt Gemmel link that Yufster posted.

Jesus Christ that guy gets everywhere. Meeting him for a beer tonight

I think in principle I agree. There have always been a handful of friends with whom I could swap really sick jokes, and the makeup of that group has changed over the years: The ones who can't reflect on the significance of what they're doing and how it might affect others have generally become former friends. For every person I've met who can enquire even remotely like the guys in that video above, there's half a dozen more who'll snigger at some heinous and crap racist joke around the dinner table, simply because, tee hee, they're violating a taboo. There's no goodness and little awareness behind that, and despite what they do, those people have a self-concept of "I'm not racist". The most hurtful shit usually starts with "I'm not [prejudiced], but…", and everyone who is uses that, right up to the most bigoted. It's a phrase about maintaining a fictitious self image rather than any realistic reflection (Twig: I'm not accusing you of that). Even those at the milder, more ignorant end of that scale make those with more extreme prejudices feel at home and further empowered. This is what I mean by giving the worst parts of our cultures a platform. There's a handful of friends I might share sick jokes with, including a couple of former girlfriends who find them hilarious, but those relationships are a very safe and trusting zone. Even in that area, we tend not to. They're not something we're fans of, and we don't sit reading sickipedia to get more*. A major turning point for me with rape jokes in particular was meeting a woman who (trigger warning) . Hearing the last of those four words still angers and upsets her. That's not her fault, and her skin isn't too thin: She's deeply traumatised. It's a problem when that word is so normalised among my friends (regardless of gender). Not that we're in the wrong to use it ever, but that I was very wrong to use it around that woman, despite having no clue what kind of trigger it was until after I'd triggered it. Not knowing how traumatic it would be for her was not an excuse; I owed and gave her a massive apology. * The idea of strangers anonymously sharing sick, prejudiced or transgressive jokes with each other troubles me because I think it indicates those strangers are naïve at best, actually prejudiced at worst. It's a chunk of culture I really dislike. My own approach to bullying has always been to grow thicker skin, but it only works up to a point. A former boss of mine bullied me for three years. I thought each instance was lame enough, and he a big enough tosser, that I could just ignore it. It was only near the end of those years I realised that, despite no single incident really bothering me much at all, in aggregate it had worn me down and my motivation to work was lower than ever. That was a small problem, between straight white guys, that I could leave behind at the office. When you're in a discriminated against group, entire great swathes of the world can wear you down like that, with no malicious intent or verbal content to them. That in turn is especially dispiriting, because there's no clear antagonist, simply: "Just about everything", and little escape. I'd again urge anyone who hasn't to read The Invisible Backpack.

Yeah, that makes loads of sense. I hadn't recruited anyone by this point, so the first mission where you have to add someone to your roster: I just haven't used him because he's level 0 and everyone else is level 5. Oh, I had performance problems on a macbook pro running win7 via bootcamp: Disabling v-sync helped a lot, but it still stutters a bit in towns no matter what resolution it's running at. I wish there were more graphics options and you could get rid of some of the fancier shaders.

(No hate here, Twig). This is recent, and seems very relevant: http://outsports.com...-cricket-jokes/ A comedian made gay jokes, and at first, didn't understand why they were so offensive to people. He had a typical piece of obliviousness in "But I'm not homophobic". As friends peeled away those bits of ignorance, he came to see how and why his jokes were harmful: It's really not a case of "If people don't like it, they can just ignore it or walk away". Stuff we do and say can be actively harmful, even if we don't perceive it ourselves as discriminatory, oppressive or annoying. By normalising what we may think of as harmless fun, we maintain a foundation for and give greater license to those who are genuinely prejudiced and malicious.

Played this for far too long tonight, and I like it. I don't quite get why the guy doing the quick look didn't understand why you could select units individually; it feels familiar with even a little RTS experience; micro is vital when something starts getting hammered. That said, the game does tend to pick okay formations and put your most tank like unit at the front. Taunt powers are really useful for managing fights too. It reminds me of a bunch of other RTS and RPGs, but brightly coloured and a bit silly instead of GrimDark and melodramatic. Lovely

"It's just a joke!" is one of the foremost excuses offered by the most misogynist sections of lad culture. Twig, it's as if you think culture itself doesn't exist, or you're not contributing to it.