Nachimir

Ouch! Glad you don't need metalwork at least, SpennyDubz. Six weeks off the bike though :( I went to a taster session for BMX racing last week, and had a lucky escape: learning to manual, overbalanced and flicked the back wheel forward over a lip by mistake instead of sucking it up. Luckily it was a fairly big one, so I could throw the bike and slide down the outslope. Wrist and knee have healed, but my heel's still bruised.

Paraphrasing, but Rob Fearon talking about that laser sword on Twitter: 'Is it stupid? Maybe. Is my kid going to see it and go "Cool!". Yes. Job done.'

I don't remember if it was from a recommendation here or not, but I tracked down Äkta människor (Real Humans) recently. The first series is pretty good, the second has its moments but gets really silly though, and not in a good way. It starts to feel like it's just finding excuses to prolong itself.

I'm hoping we develop more coherent cultural responses to it. I'm not sure what they are beyond publicly expressing support for those targeted; reasoning with gaters certainly doesn't work, neither does arguing with them. The techraptor article was pretty much all sourced from KIA, which inevitably means corrections have started appearing on it. None of it matters, the conclusion was in the headline and none of the gaters or people writing for them seem to understand they're just blowing whistles to call in misogynists.

I think it'll be a lot of fun, and Abrams is much better suited to it than he is Star Trek.

Naw. That desert landscape is no Transformers 2: Good point, though I think some kind of turn would make more sense given the fighters then flying by head on. I thought Immelman because the clouds track vertically down the frame while the ship rotates 180. Could it be we've found another unrealistic bit in the Star Wars trailer?

Two women. A truly remarkable coincidence. My heart sank on hearing about this this afternoon; good response from Mitu. I found it particularly sickening that the techraptor piece that spawned it is headlined "Further Improper Relationships between RedShirt Developer and Games Journalists have Been Uncovered", flip-flopped at the end with a "well there might be no impropriety at all we dunno we're just presenting this to the reader" paragraph, then concluded with "Was this a conflict of interest? Please tell us in the comments below". It's just so fucking stupid and transparently done in bad faith. Stepping back from my emotions, I wonder how far a thing like this can really go now GG has been vilified in mainstream press. Probably still much too far for Mitu and Cara's comfort

In the shot of them all lined up, one of the troopers is shorter than all of the others

It's a reverse Immelman turn! god don't you know anything mington Imagine you're tilting your head back to follow something flying over you, and can somehow fold it right over until the back of your head touches your back, then your head spins 180 degrees to put everything the right way up. Then you'd basically be doing what the camera is doing in the gif, also no one would ever love you. On seeing these two side by side, I'm with Jake, the non-spinny shot is way better: It expresses inertia and power. In the original shot, the camera is moving so fast and so far from the ground that the moment the ship nearly hits is barely noticeable.

In Transformers case, it's definitely the fault of the film; none of the characters have clear outlines and any identifying features big enough for your eyes to see at speed are mostly thrown out in favour of grimdark greebles. For characters so strongly based around colour, the fights made very little use of it, and are mostly just action flavour mush that you definitely shouldn't feel old for not following. Star Wars though: The Super Hexagon player in me gets on so well with spinning stuff that the camera spin didn't even register until Mington posted that gif.

It's clickbait, but, film posters with Mark Kermode quotes on them.

Yeah but they've gone and made them into unrealistic laser swords.

Traditionally, the protective parts of a hilt are non-deadly. That thing is more likely to prick the wielder in the belly or sever a jaw muscle.

I thought this too! "Hey guys, we have a T-rex, tame velociraptors, and a fucking enormous Mosasaurus in the pool, but what I think this park could really do with is something deadlier and more agile". Quoted for truth:

No deja vu, but I do sometimes feel like I'm wearing a pair of headphones and when I look in the mirror there's nothing there.

That's a very good dog photo, JamesM

Is this from Ferguson or elsewhere? Edit: and I don't have much to say, except what the fuck America?

ZUPER This track is particularly zuper.

I remembered this Handsome Family quote earlier and have been listening to them all evening: "Ah, Scotland, your dark beauty is only heightened by the Absinthe for sale at Tesco" If they sound familiar, it's probably because they did the theme song for True Detective. I can't find a non-live version on Youtube, but Up Falling Rock Hill is one of the most beautiful songs they've done.

That's nuts :0 Here's some pretty impressive (but sometimes flawed) semantic recognition of regions in images: http://cs.stanford.edu/people/karpathy/deepimagesent/ I find this really fascinating. It's obsessed with colour, and often missing other contextual information that'd make for useful descriptions. It makes me think of someone with autism writing news captions.

You can get back there. Importantly, are you getting any kind of help like medication or counselling? I struggle with it too, and have a heap of unfinished projects around. Usually the projects that turn out best are ones I can become completely absorbed in to the point of distraction, and often they start as tiny experiments. Try loads of things, but try not to put pressure on yourself by doing that.

It does now seem pretty pointless arguing with gaters. References like that ohnovideogames storify will be useful in getting people up to speed, but GG seem to have shed all of the not-idiots and keep developing increasingly cult-like, impenetrable counter-points (on posting that storify, the responses were that ohnovideogames is a "known troll", as defined by gaters, and that #stopgamergate2014 is "a dead hashtag" so that somehow invalidates the documented abuse).

I don't think the news coming out of America has ever felt so fucked and threatening before. This part of the article cracked me up though: Imperial Wizard Frank Ancona getting all macho there.

In several discussions last week, a few developers I know voiced their disgust at how badly Twitter handles abuse, and started talking about alternatives (Twitter only accept reports of harassment from the subject of the harassment, but cap reports, making it impossible for someone in a situation like Zoe Quinn's to defend themselves). A few of us are trying this: http://ello.co I have ten invites if anyone wants one. It's funded by arts money with the intent of not following startup/social media business models. It might be another Google+, it might fizzle pathetically, but they have a pretty good statement of why and how they're building it.

DMed. I have plenty more if anyone wants one.