Nachimir

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Posts posted by Nachimir

  1. Posted

    We went to a wedding last night, and it was probably the single best wedding I've ever been to.  This was a non-religious queer couple, the wedding was held in a gay bar with the ceremony being on a catwalk on the dance floor.  The person officiating the ceremony was wonderful.  The ceremony probably took 30 minutes, but was a combination of stand-up comedy, deeply moving anecdotes about the couple, touching personal vows to each other, audience participation and periodic trivia portions about the couple, which the first person to call out the correct answer would get a shot.  For all the goofiness of it, it was also the most touching wedding I've seen, because it was so authentic to them, their life together and their friends. 

     

    Not sure why I'm bringing up, I guess to challenge the idea of what a wedding is, or could be. 

     

    :tup:

     

    I went to a friend's wedding at a local windmill a few years back. He and his boyfriend tied the knot standing on the steps of the mill, then everyone who went had a picnic underneath it on a grassy hill overlooking the city, with loads of kids running around. It was great. My mum did similar with a pagan/hippy wedding in a town hall, then a picnic in a park, and a techno night instead of a reception that evening. That was excellent too.

     

    Traditional weddings are a protracted sales window in which various highly organised people try to upsell stuff to a couple going "but it's your special day".

  2. Posted

    Kinect seems like overkill for a simple measurement (though if it's what you have to hand…). Something like an arduino with an ultrasonic rangefinder would be cheaper but maybe a bit more technical. A limit switch on the machine would also work, but it'd give you lower resolution and have to be built robust.

     

    Edit: Workouts! I'm generally being very lazy at the moment, as the cold really drives me indoors. I have no excuse, there's a large attic with several turbos and road bikes in it, but all I've managed to do in the past week is lift a few weights. Seeing you all post in this thread definitely helps with motivation though.

  3. Posted

    what do you do when you're offered a job that is basically your dream job, but it pays nowhere near enough for you to pay your bills

     

    The first thing I'd do is look for any prospects it has to pay more, and if they exist see if I can reduce my living costs to cover the gap for however many months it'd likely take.

  4. Posted

    Also the reason I played DOTA once and decided not to go that route. That, and hanging out with people while they discussed how many hundred hours thy'd put into it.

     

    bakelite is hot on your heels Twig, you've only got a 93 continuous day headstart.

  6. Posted

    I posted in a thread somewhere about something that was intensely emotionally troubling, but someone decided that would be a great opportunity to pick on my wording and turn it into a fun internet debate.

     

    578bc5cceb.jpg

  7. Posted

    A bunch of stuff I mentioned in my second post is stuff I knew before the fact. I met people who didn't think about or didn't care about any of it. If this didn't already clarify it enough:

     

    People who witter on about "seeing a real cross section of society" and "the drama of human life" etc., as if you couldn't guess already, are talking bollocks.

     

    I did not go in with any rosy expectations.

  8. Posted

    I think I probably expressed that poorly, but mainly the eagerness to be in that position of helping to judge. I didn't see a single judgement that was exactly cause for celebration, and the people who most seemed to relish the process, including some court staff, were kind of voyeuristic in a way that indicated they could psychologically distance themselves from the consequences, as if it was reality TV or something. I can see how that would be necessary or inevitable if you worked in a courtroom. As a juror it just seems really simplistic and naive though, and there were points where I saw far too many smiles.

     

    There's nothing I was party to doing that I regret as such, but in a wider environment where incarceration is a dubious method of reforming people to start with, politicians argue for things like denying prisoners books, gentrification slowly changes likely jury verdicts in poor communities, and police forces are becoming wholly or partly privatised, I can't see any part of the process as fundamentally satisfying or enjoyable or desirable to do, even though I understand it as necessary and largely just.

     

    My expectations going in, set by friends who've done it, was that it'd mainly be boring (it wasn't, because I enjoy reading), that I should take a load of books for the downtime, and that I might have to see some pretty fucked up and traumatic things. I didn't expect to see gaps in the system for prejudice to leak in, and granted, I wouldn't expect any yet-to-be jurors to see them either, but they're there.

  9. Posted

    The Christmas hat on this has survived for around 14 months, and even my pre-Christmas confession post was hidden by looking like it related to someone else's tardy avatar:

     

    6ba16a1db0.jpg

     

    I still love Planetary, and Elijah particularly, but it's time to actualise and optimise my Personal Brand™

  10. Posted

    I recently finished a stint of jury service. I do not recommend it. People who witter on about "seeing a real cross section of society" and "the drama of human life" etc., as if you couldn't guess already, are talking bollocks. I obviously can't share details of any trials or deliberations I was involved with, but:

     

    You may end up in situations where making the right choice still have very serious consequences for other people.

    You may end up rubbing shoulders with people who say things like "A policeman would never lie!"

    Legal arguments feel odd and alien at first, but I could quickly see why they were constructed the way they were: to deal only in evidence and exclude extraneous facts or speculation. Really not a mode most people are capable of thinking or speaking in.

    If you're in a jury that delivers a guilty verdict, it goes into mitigation where the defense and judge effectively barter over the length of the sentence. While at that point the defense can resort to all kinds of contextual and character information that was so carefully excluded from the legal arguments, the judge, while (I think) bound by sentencing guidelines, can suddenly voice any kinds of bias or speculation they have in relation to the trial, and freely factor them into sentencing.

    "Probably guilty" isn't a good enough standard of proof to convict; British courts require juries to be sure or give a not guilty verdict. You'll be looking at a very specific list of charges that may or may not cover the entire crime committed. If you give a not guilty verdict and the trail makes the news, it will say "innocent" or "cleared of all crimes" when the truth of the crime, trial and defendant could actually be  a lot more complicated and a lot less innocent that that. It could be that the prosecution case or evidence gathered just sucked. I think that affronts a lot of people's sense of justice when it comes to crimes with victims, but I can see how it errs on the side of avoiding miscarriages of justice.

     

    I met people there who'd done jury service before, and discussed non-specific aspects of it with them too. We learned a lot we didn't know about the British legal system, but overall, it was a harrowing experience. Not that it wasn't interesting in parts, but nothing there was joyful or fulfilling, I'm now deeply suspicious of anyone who's enjoyed the process, as well as anyone who says "I'd love to do jury service".

  13. Posted

    There hasn't been a single mention of resolution, has there? That could be bad or good in this case, but given that dot pitches for some displays are already beyond human vision, I expect within a few decades mentions of resolution in product related guff will seem like a quaint artefact of our time.

  14. Posted

    ^ hah :)

     

    Is there really an expectation of exclusivity after two dates? I rarely have any blowback if I mention on an early date that I went on this date with this other guy the other night and [anecdote].

     

    I think this varies a lot. I'm comfortable with dating a few people at the same time, but only if none of those things are sexual yet. I have friends who can't date multiple people without feeling awful about it.

  15. Posted

    I have no issue with polyamory, literally none. But my understanding of poly couplings was consent, respect, boundaries, etc. If I literally list myself as ONLY looking for FRIENDS, a couple (of any stripe, most of this was actually heterosexual "open" marriages or committed couples looking for threesomes, not even all poly) looking at me for sex is not negotiating with me on respectful premises.

     

    Oh, yeah, for sure. The examples you gave from dating sites are skeezy and disrespectful; I didn't mean to minimise that.

  16. Posted

    the more I think about it, the more I'm as knee-jerkilly annoyed by people who self-righteously groan at polyamoury as they are at my supposed moral failings and apriori assumed creepery.

     

    I get that. I've been dating a poly person recently, and while she's been upfront about it, in two dates we haven't talked about it yet. I like that it's basically background to us hanging out and getting to know each other, rather than some kind of burning issue. Poly or not, some people are terrible bores or terribly judgmental when it comes to the subject. I spent a while in a poly relationship about a decade ago, and while the thing I learned from it was that I don't need more than one partner, while it was happening I noticed a few friends watched me like hawks if I was anywhere near their girlfriends, as if I was inherently predatory or evangelical about it.

     

    The macho insecurity you mention is definitely in the same realms of misunderstanding. A bit like how people are sometimes desperate to ask bi people "But when you're with someone of one gender, don't you want someone of the other gender?" and even before "Actually gender is really complicated" the answer would often be "No I want the committed relationship I'm in. Now stop trying to peer into my underpants, so to speak".

     

    When it comes to polyamory, I see no moral arguments one way or the other, and think everyone should be more accepting and chill the fuck out :(

  17. Posted

    I just came across this from 1996 that I had no idea existed

     

    Ooh, that's good. It reminds me a lot of Curve, and sits almost exactly between their early stuff:

     

     

    and some of their

    .

     

    I have no idea how I ended up listening to them when I was a kid, and they're the only band that's survived as part of my music collection all the way from the early 90's until now. Toni Halliday has an incredible voice. It was a shame the stuff they wrote around their attempted comeback tried so enormously hard at being cool, with some cringeworthy results. I almost wish I'd kept a copy, the email they sent out was trying so hard it put me off buying later albums.

  18. Posted

    I'm not expecting much. There's been a glut of GW games over the past few years and none of them have been good.

     

    This one is by the guys who did Stellar Impact, which got an okay reception and makes them better suited than the majority of developers to adapting Battlefleet Gothic. It's also already (in the albeit limited things released so far) showing more polish than Mordheim. Bloodbowl also got good reviews.

     

    I'm pleased at how liberally GW are licensing old stuff out. They've flirted with video games since the 80's as far as I'm aware, but until recently retired tabletop stuff just got buried for a long time.

  21. Posted

    By Steve Hogarty, preceding his review of Infinifactory:

     

    before we proceed with this article about a puzzle game that I like, I feel the need to disclose a number of potential conflicts of interest.

    • While driving along a country road late at night in 2002 I accidentally hit and killed the CEO of Ubisoft with my car. This triggered a clause in his contract that made me the new CEO of Ubisoft. Despite my best efforts to dodge my newfound responsibility, I held this position for three months until I learned the true meaning of Ubisoft. Shortly afterwards the original CEO appeared from behind a desk and told me that he hadn’t died at all, and that the spirit of Ubisoft had been inside me the entire time.

     

    • As a prehistoric multicellular cyanobacteria, I shared the same primordial puddle with an anaerobic organism who would later go on to work in the QA department at Sega. For several million years we produced free oxygen together through a primitive form of photosynthesis and ultimately triggered the global oxygenation that precipitated the largest extinction event in Earth’s history. As such I have not reviewed any Sonic games since. And whenever Sonic comes up in editorial meetings I turn my back so as not to subconsciously raise Sonic’s profile among the team using my compelling range of facial expressions.
    • Was once in a plane crash with Sid Meier and woke up on a mysterious island where nothing was as it seemed. It was on this island that I gave Sid the idea for Civilizations II, III, and V.
    • Did the Lady and The Tramp kiss scene with some guy from Games For Windows Live, except instead of a strand of spaghetti it was one of those twenty foot long Subway sandwiches they do special for catered parties and it took us both forty five minutes to reach the middle and start making out.
    • Once discovered a tiny hidden door in my apartment that allowed me to crawl into Brian Fargo’s mind, experiencing the world through his eyes for fifteen minutes at a time. This would later become the inspiration for the video game ‘Messiah’.
    • Until the mid 90s I was part of a cool biker gang that one day discovered an abandoned baby crying alone by the side of the road. Scooping the child up and swaddling her in my leather jacket I vowed to raise her as my own, teaching her the ways of the open road as we rode together for years. On her 18th birthday, the girl — no, the woman — turned to me and said “Steve, I must go now. This life of chaos has equipped me with the skills I need. You are the closest thing to a father I have known. You have taught me to act with grace and civility, to fight injustice, to chase the sunset, to live the dream. And now it’s time to go it alone, or my name wasn’t Jade Raymond all along.”
    • Owned a dog that looked a bit like Ken Levine.
    • Once rolled down a hill with Gabe Newell, just laughing and laughing until we were laying side by side in the grass, looking up at the clouds, pointing out the shapes until, somehow, I don’t know when it happened, we were holding hands and our voices fell quiet and we just lay there, we just lay there for what felt like hours, and the sleepy clouds drifted by overhead and the setting sun painted vast orange shadows across the sky, and we finally just didn’t care about anything other than that one moment.

  22. Posted

    I actually had a bit of success with OK Cupid this past week by treating it more like Tinder: Clicking "like" going solely off pictures, and only reading profiles later if it turned out to be mutual. That feels like it maps more readily to natural meatspace behaviour, and it got a few conversations going.

  23. Posted

    The One X actually got better with each update and ended up a very responsive phone even after they stopped pushing updates. Before that, I had the HTC Legend, which became a creakier piece of shit with each update. Still don't fully trust Android to, like, work properly, but don't mistrust it as much as I used to.

  25. Posted

    I have a HTC One M8, but I might look at selling it and getting something else. It's a bit too big, the camera is awful, and it has this horrible dual camera gimmick that does a bad imitation of a Lytro, but won't fool anyone who's spent time staring through camera lenses.