Nachimir

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Posts posted by Nachimir

  1. Posted

    Cult related: there are many comical pictures over at the 2011 Dolphins and Teleportation Symposium website. Run by an horrific woman who fleeces gullible rich hippies.

     

    I emailed her at the time feigning an interest in going, then after a brief exchange about hotels and made up food allergies asked "Do I need to buy a return airline ticket, or will I be good enough at the end of the week that I can just teleport home? How about the time travel thing? If I travel back in time a week, can I attend again, or do I need to buy a second ticket for that?"

     

    She never replied.

  3. Posted

    I'd never heard "intent is magic" before, but I really like it. It would have been useful in a few "But I'm not sexist" or "But I'm not racist" discussions I've had.

  4. Posted

    Jesus. I couldn't believe what was on twitter when I woke up. It's becoming a fucking war, and the misogynerds are targeting and trying to expunge anyone who expresses support for feminism or social justice. I know a bunch of women who make games or write about them, and have quit Twitter or are thinking about it.

  5. Posted

    Huh! That dovetails well with all of the people talking last week about the police regarding their deadly equipment as toys, which led me to think if they are going to use tear gas, MRAPs, grenade launchers, handcuffs, etc. as action man toys, they need to be put under more supervision than the average toddler.

     

    Working through my own anger, I have felt incredible hostility and malice to Ferguson Police this past week just by seeing the ways they're acting. I realise militarisation can't be fought by installing or instigating an alternate monopoly on violence though. It can be fought with cameras and witnesses.

  6. Posted

    One of the chief joys of Spelunky is finding those things out for yourself, through natural play *ahem*

     

    (not that I didn't watch the odd hell run to give myself a bit of extra insight :P)

     

    Yeah, I discovered that you could whip arrows by mistake.

     

    Towerfall has loads of small systemic interactions that make it similar to this too.

  7. Posted

    US borders are weird like that. I find the questioning flip-flops back and forth between casually friendly and lightly aggressive. More toward the latter for a friend who's a mountain bike journalist; the last word of that seems to be a red flag.

  9. Posted

    I think the language "apparently legitimate concerns" needs to be observed.

     

    Glad I'm not the only one who spotted this. Those three words together made me laugh pretty fucking loud, then get a little angry.

     

    Any "public interest" argument put forward about a woman who makes games having or not having sex with some people is tabloid level bullshit, and leads me to conclude anyone advancing it is at best misguided, at worst a really crappy human being. As she and many others have said, her private life: none of our fucking business.

     

    Internet manbabies: "But she did bad stuff!" *

     

    Still none of our fucking business. "Apparently legitimate concerns" and "public interest" are weasel words used to justify shitting on someone.

     

    * "AND it was a conspiracy but we're just conjecturing about that while completely ignoring other, separate, out-in-the-open ongoing bad stuff because, er, it… doesn't involve any women"

     

     Edit: Anyway, Merus is right about using scorn. I enjoyed this just now:

     

    hi can I be Social Justice Bard or Social Justice Healer please

  10. Posted

    There are currently trials to have armed police patrolling routinely in the UK. That said, about twenty years ago a friend kicked a football into a moving car, and one of the police that turned up got out of the car carrying an MP5. He didn't do any of the talking though and he certainly didn't point it at us. The consequences for UK cops are different if they shoot someone. The resulting inquiry is basically, if not the end of an officer's career, the end of that part of their career. (American cop shoots someone: chief ruffles their hair, hands them a clip and sends them back out).

     

    I don't have much to say about Ferguson other than that it's been making me very angry. I'd been struggling to understand how a police force can be so poorly trained, macho and hostile to the populace of their town. Revenue collection duties go some way to explaining how the political will around an entire police force can be so corrupt. Bjorn, you've made some really informative posts, thank you.

     

    The combination of asshole personality traits with a career path dressed up in imagery of heroism and mottoes like "Protect and Serve" is malignant and deeply psychologically unwell. I can't think of many ways to uproot it that are personal, other than humiliating bullies and spreading the idea that "alpha male" is something to be ashamed of. By that I don't mean leadership; I mean dominance, any need to be dominant, and getting off on it. It's pretty astounding that members of the US army are shocked at the unempathic behaviour of US police.

  11. Posted

    I went on a holiday last week, which I couldn't comfortably afford, but did need. I'm glad I was out there with really limited bandwidth, because nearly everything I've seen online has made me angry, from Ferguson to the mess people have been flinging at Zoe Quinn.

     

    I spent a week riding bikes up and down really big mountains. I learned to jump mountain bikes, I practiced a pretty insane downhill course and got a lot of respect for doing it without rear suspension. The French have really, really good food. It was a really good week in many ways, but:

     

    One of the four friends I went with got stressy in the first few days, and none of us could tell why. He became more and more robotic as the week went on, and I started to realise a part of it was that he and I are both very comfortable making unilateral decisions, but pretty bad at explaining or justifying them to those around us. I softened my behaviour as the week went on, but he didn't to the point where it felt like he was just being contrary. I've apologised for the things I did that wound him up, and let him know he wound me up too, but he's simply said he appreciates the apology and acted like he's done nothing wrong our out of sorts. He acted like this with everyone, we just happened to have some personality traits that clashed after more than a few days in close proximity. Both the other guys on the trip asked at various points "Why is [friend] being so uptight?", or "What's got into him?", and everyone was worried.

     

    When I first met him, he'd spent six months not talking to anyone, and I assumed he was autistic. Over the past decade I watched him become a really warm, caring and strong person (not that he wasn't before, just desocialised), but this past week I've watched him going rapidly back up the autism spectrum :(

     

    He's obviously really hung up on some specific thing, doesn't seem to realise how uncomfortable it was to hang out with him, or how worried we all were. If he was a relative stranger or acquiantance, I'd tell him to go fuck himself at this point, but the friendship is old enough I'm worried and bothered. He seems to have thrown up walls, and there might be nothing I can do.

  14. Posted

    Ah, I was talking about the implementation Content ID and muting streams.

     

    Content ID is not bad tech, and has a bunch of uses for rights holders, platform holders and viewers. For instance, I was really annoyed in the early 90s that my TV couldn't tell me what song was playing, and we have the tech to solve it now. Instead, Twitch have plumbed it into auto-mute, which is really dumb and doesn't solve rightsholder royalties or user access to music for videos. We have the tools to solve these thing intelligently, rather than just trigger a load of false positives while sweeping the problem under the carpet.

     

    Edit: It's like using a bottle opener to open beer by smashing the bottles.

  15. Posted

    I feel like I've not played nearly enough of this yet.

     

    Someone advised me that the chicken's slomo power helps when you're new to it, by making some of the game systems a bit more visible, and he was right. It still took about an hour before I felt like I understood it passably, and I still suck. Usually die in the sewers.

  16. Posted

    Is it the twitter equivalent of liking a thing on Facebook?

     

    People used to use it like bookmarking, but they seem to be used much more as likes now. It seems to mean people approve of or like something, but not enough that it merits a reply.

  17. Posted

    I used to do warm up runs before a daily as well but I found that actually ended up hurting my performance on average.  For some reason I tend to do better when I jump straight into the daily.

     

    I found if I've not played for a few weeks, a warmup run helps, but if I'm playing once a day, same as you.

  18. Posted

    Google have become pretty terrible at design. There are so many google products that used to work well, and nowadays I feel like I have to fight with the design because it's demanding ever increasing bandwidth, or it's unstable, or it pesters me and can't disable mobile notifications without disabling all desktop ones, or Chrome can only use the higher powered GPU on my laptop; reducing battery life from eight to three hours, etc.

     

    My favourite is this: near the end of a youtube video, I'll tend to start reading the description. When the video actually ends, I'm partway through reading and it automatically swaps the description pane out for the SHARE IT. PLEASE SHARE IT PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE pane, which isn't annoying at all.

     

    I'm incredulous at the Twitch thing. It's breathtakingly dumb, and if Twitch keep doing the big stands they've had at trade and consumer shows for the past year or so, it's going to look even dumber.

  19. Posted

    At that point I guess you can start more aggressively ghosting gems to pump up your score. Kinda boring though...

     

    Very. I got to the point where the only things left to do were ghost to score highly, or beat hell. I'm not good enough to do the latter yet, and find ghosting gems super dull. I only take an opportunity to do that when a vault presents itself with along with some good ghost escape routes.

     

    I've only been playing it on vita recently.

  20. Posted

    Somewhat relatedly, I've been enjoying this:

    http://daleberan.tumblr.com/post/83002114449/a-tale-of-two-hipsters

     

    I've hated the word hipster, or at least the way people use it, for a long time because it has such an amorphous meaning, usually used to define someone as "other" on trivial grounds. Unlike classist terms like "chav" (I guess the closest US equivalent would be "trailer trash"), hipster isn't tied to anything so concrete anymore, and I think he goes convincingly into the reasons for that: It's one word used to mean two very different types of people who look very similar and go to the same places.

     

    One type wears thrift store clothes, rides cheap bikes and genuinely doesn't care what anyone else is wearing. The other wears $600 items of clothing designed to carefully mimic thrift store aesthetics, rides custom built $10,000 bikes, and cares very deeply about what they and everyone else are wearing. In turn, that elicits the "before it was cool" stuff, and both types are very intertwined with gentrification. It's such a weird dance.

  21. Posted

    Surely with that many ᴀʟᴘʜᴀ ᴍᴀʟᴇs in one place, no security would be necessary? It'd be like, the world's foremost concentration of independent, self-reliant but not-too-intimidating deadliness?