James

I'm the one not wearing stupid shades. I guess my face is entirely obscured, making this grossly inappropriate for this thread, but I liked it as a self-portrait. This is me moments after turning thirty (or a little under an hour before doing so, depending on whether you're paying attention to time zones). In case you hadn't noticed, you can actually see my face in this one. It's a frame from a video, which is why it's a bit fuzzy.

I was going to say that the only traditional English dancing I could think of is Morris dancing, and that's not really good for anything other than social ostracization.

I wonder whether we'll ever get to a point where we have an effective defence against this kind of thing. I'm quite disturbed by the idea of prominent people being intimidated out of ever speaking out about issues that matter.

Yeah, that guy's a maniac, and sometimes pretty racist.

Completely self-indulgent nostalgia: Herc's Adventures! I have a friend whose dad at some point (I guess during our mid-teens, and well after it was at all relevant) got him a dodgy chipped PlayStation and a whole ton of pirated games. Our favourite of all of them was Herc's Adventures. He generally played Herc and I generally played Jason, but sometimes I played Atlanta instead. You'd wander around an open world collecting items for various gods. When you met said gods the game would freeze your character sprites and overlay an FMV animation over the top-right of the screen, but since his copy was a shitty CD-R the video frequently got corrupted. Sometimes the visuals would freeze and the audio would run to the end, but others it would just freeze up completely and we wouldn't be able to progress at all, sometimes after hours of play. It had a cool death mechanic wherein every time a character died they'd be sent to Hades and they'd have to fight their way out. Each subsequent time you'd start a little deeper, having to fight through an additional section to regain your life, until eventually, if I remember correctly, it'd put you into an inescapable area. Or perhaps the game just ended. I don't fully recall. I also think there was a portion of the game where you actually entered into Hades voluntarily, and had to go through the whole sequence from the deepest stage all the way to the top, and I have a feeling that put you back at the very start of the game, which I found weirdly effective. In fact, I found the whole continuous open world thing quite effective in general. It's not at all uncommon now, but I still think it was well pulled-off; particularly that even the exit to the underworld connected with a specific point on the main map. I guess I find that a weird and fascinating idea in general – that there's some specific place with a relatively inconspicuous doorway to the underworld. I'm rambling. The presentation of the game in general was super wacky and cartoony, which doesn't appeal to me in particular, and there were some pretty annoying repetitive low-quality voice samples. I don't think we ever finished it, but towards the end of the game you went to Egypt and it was full of aliens and UFOs and all that nonsense. I don't know if that game was any good at all, but I had a really good time with it. We kept coming back to it for a few years, even.

Edit: gormanate is right

As some people have already said, the ethical concerns are so thoroughly eclipsed by the savage persuction Quinn has been victim to that to even discuss them is kind of ridiculous. It's like complaining about the food when the restaurant is on fire. All I'll say is that being a public figure is not the same as being a public servant. How much we need to know about the private lives of politicians is a whole other rather thorny discussion, but it's an entirely separate matter than what we need to know about the private lives of people who just happen to be well-known (which is basically nothing).

This is something I've been thinking about a fair amount recently. I hate to admit it, but my gut reaction to female infidelity seems to be more pronounced than it is for male infidelity. I'm pretty uneasy with infidelity in general – people can be promiscuous if they like, but I think they owe their partners honesty – and I'm not at all impressed by the whole "player" thing, but my emotional response to women cheating seems stronger and more immediate than to men cheating. The most charitable explanation I can think of is that this is all media portrayals of infidelity (my friends don't seem to get involved in too much relationship drama, or at least don't involve me in it), and perhaps I'm just responding to the storytellers' subtle sexism in what emotional strings they're pulling. But that's probably bullshit. What's far more likely is that I feel personally threatened by the very idea of a woman cheating, as evidenced by the fact that I seem to care even if the character doesn't. I don't know if that means I ought to get over that silly reaction, or that I don't have enough empathy with female characters. Or perhaps it's just natural, and we all inevitably react differently to people more like ourselves, and we just need to keep that in mind and overcome our knee-jerk responses when necessary. I don't know. I'm frankly not sure at all what to do with the observation, but it seems valuable to at least be aware of it. To be introspective. I should be clear, though: my response isn't feelings of ill-will especially towards the unfaithful party; it's a weird sinking feeling in sympathy with the cheated-on person. It's about hurt rather than anger. The slut-shaming thing is a whole other thing (though probably related).

Part of me wishes the ex and every one of these spiteful little monsters could be victims of their own creepy and frightening Internet hate campaigns, but I don't imagine that would fix anything. Still, it's hard not to crave justice. Count me in. Although expect all manner of shitty reviews and tags on the game page. I imagine it was already subject to a fair amount of that, though.

The BBC News website has an article about this poll of reactions to the events in Ferguson. I'm kind of alarmed how many people either "don't know" whether the police response has gone too far, or are confident that it's "about right". I'm as woolly and look-at-things-from-both-sides indecisive as anyone, but I cannot comprehend how people can look at what's going on and see it as anything short of madness. Are they not seeing the same thing? What's going on?

I presume someone's already sent that to him? He must see it.

Yeah, that definitely struck me as a shaky comparison. Firstly, has the lot of horses actually decreased, or are they just less valuable? Are we just breeding fewer of them? As you said, they were always being used as tools, and as those tools became less useful, we produced less of the tool. Secondly, as I very briefly alluded to in my above post, humans have always been, and will presumably continue to be, the active agent in the economy. It's human motivations that drives all of this. Humans don't want to be impoverished, so unless robot efficiency is combined with extreme human selfishness and cruelty (not inconceivable, but seems outlandish), I don't really see us ending up with mass poverty as a result of automation. An interesting question is, if this near-fully automated society is possible and does come about, what motivates the few humans required to do work to keep the systems going? There will presumably need to be programmers for at least a while, and unless we start giving machines their own money somebody will need to finance all of this. Would we end up with an gargantuan rift between the spectacularly wealthy employed and the provided-for unemployed masses, who would all presumably be given more-or-less the same amount (ignoring special allowances for families, disability, etc.)? Everyone would be in an OK situation, but the prevailing thought seems to be that inequality is bad for society as a whole. What kind of extravagance would that kind of disproportionate wealth distributed among so few even afford? I'm also uncertain that art is fully receptive to automation. Sure, that piano piece was a convincing composition, but it also had a very particular structure. I've yet to see any "creative" machines that give the appearance of having an idea. For machines to be able to supplant human artists, they need to be able to surprise and intrigue, and evoke emotion. I'm not sure how a bot would handle narrative creativity. I'm not saying it's impossible, but that's an extremely difficult challenge. His point about art being a necessarily niche profession seems to come from a very modern mindset. As I understand it, that's basically a post-celebrity idea. Before the general public were able to access the great artists of their time (before distance communication and mass transit, for example), they weren't living artless lives, they were experiencing art on a community level; folk music and so on. Perhaps, with nothing else to do, more people would turn their attention to producing their own art. It may not get much renown, but apparently we're going to have a whole load of time to check it out. Not that I think an entirely art-based economy makes a great deal of sense, but that just returns us to the point that this is only a problem because everything's already covered. And back to the question of how it's profitable for these machines to be producing things that no-one can afford.

I don't know anything about economics, so this is probably hopelessly naïve, but once automated systems are producing the majority of the world's wealth, shouldn't there be plenty of stuff to go around? It's not like there will be a food shortage – the problem is that the machines are too good at producing food, among everything else – so people shouldn't be going hungry. Or is that too much like a lazy version of communism? I suppose capitalism would have us give everything to the owners of the machines and the few people still required to run them (to give them their objectives, for example: the robots themselves don't actually want anything, so, barring machine intelligence, they'll always need directing). But governments tend not to like having their population starving on the streets, so I imagine they'd intervene at least enough to keep people fed (assuming production is happening in their own country, I suppose). Whether there would be any incentive to provide living conditions far above that, I don't know. Is it feasible that we end up with mass unemployment but a comparatively high basic standard of living, because robots can provide what we need at essentially zero labour cost? Again, I imagine that's stupidly optimistic, but it seems to me the way it ought to be. It would be pretty strange to have these armies of automated systems producing mass abundance but nobody with any money to buy any of it. In fact, wouldn't that cause the robot economy to collapse? It doesn't matter how cheap these machines are: if nobody can afford to buy what they're making, they'll still lose money. Isn't the free market supposed to be self-righting like that? Also, that CGP Grey guy has a slightly irritating and affected-sounding manner of speech, but that's true of most major YouTube personalities.

Very cool. Bonus: because there's about a thousand of them, their creators get to call them "Kilobots", which doesn't at all suggest anything more sinister in the slightest.

But do you not accept that the way in which things are presented to us, particularly when we first encounter them, biases the way we perceive them? I don't imagine the majority of any media audience is being attentive enough to question everything they're told by their news sources. If I'm told there's been a riot, I'll tend to take that at face value, even if, on seeing it for myself, I would have described it as a protest. For sure, your opinion or understanding of a matter will inform the words you choose, but the words chosen by others can likewise inform your opinions and understanding. You know, feedback loop and all that.

Odd Nosdam of cLOUDDEAD fame has made the mix tape he produced live in 2004 available free on Bandcamp: Le Mix Live I enjoyed it. Is that priced at $1000? Am I reading that right?

Apparently "nice" used to mean "stupid". I like to imagine it still does. An aspect of my softening attitude regarding language is that I'm not really comfortable with the idea of English being abused, or under attack, or perverted, or whatever. Regardless of whether or not I like the way people use it, I have no greater claim to its proper destiny than anyone else.

I shan't. It sounds like something someone with a sense of humour I really can't get on board with would say. (We don't all have to like the same things.) I don't know; it seems pretty evenly split. Besides, I don't think I dislike new words in general. Just those new words. Again, I don't think you should infer some sort of general ideology from specific preferences. Or are you saying that you love all new words just for being new? Fair enough. Wait, you said you didn't want to talk about it. In which case, forget about it.

Not that you're necessarily doing this (you don't address your comment at anyone in particular), but I don't think it's at all fair to characterise not liking individual terms to "being upset at language changing and adapting". There are all sorts of reasons, practical and aesthetic, that people can object to or simply dislike specific neologisms, or, for that matter, words that have been around for centuries. I don't like the word "chortle", and that's been around over 140 years. And I'd be cautious about presuming people are prescribing anything when they voice their displeasure, too. I don't like the words "grok" or "grognard". I think they're silly and don't fit in well with the language in general, but I wouldn't tell people not to use them, or think them wrong for doing so. It's a matter of taste. I don't like the idea that I'm some sort of hopeless stick-in-the-mud just for disliking a few words. I'm all for linguistic creativity and flexibility. Well, at least somewhat for. A bit for, at the very least.

I don't like the word "grok" because it doesn't sound like a real word. That's my own silly prejudice. I'm willing to concede that perhaps the sharp left turn paved the way for the series' flexible approach to genre, but I still find it too silly to fit in well.

I have plenty of bandwidth, but not that much free disk space at the moment. How much does it need to work with?

It's been a while since I watched it, but here's how I remember it: The CG still looks pretty terrible (the bits with the aliens crawling on the ceilings and all that), but the image and sound quality on the stuff they added to the final scene is way better. I think they did some colour correction and noise reduction and all that kind of jazz about which I don't know very much. As in it's not total shit any more. On the DVD it seemed like some sort of straight-from-the-camera crap you'd see in a pre-release behind the scenes documentary; in the Blu-ray version it actually fits in with the material surrounding it.

Yeah, I've heard a few times about that Charney guy being a creep, and their advertising is repeatedly sleazy (they got into trouble with the Advertising Standards Agency in the UK, who basically told them "don't do it again", which they pretty much did anyway), but I also feel that that's just more visible and unusual than the way in which most clothes manufacturers are reprehensible, and like Jon said, there seem to be some moves to reel some of that stuff back in (although quite how much remains to be seen; at least Charney's gone). I don't have a strong opinion on whether they can be described as "ethical", but obviously the choice of whether or not to use them has to take place in the context of the landscape in which they exist, which is generally pretty shitty in one way or another, from my limited knowledge.

I was always under the impression that a large contributing factor to Newt being killed off was that the actor would have been way too old by the time they shot Alien 3. Sure, they could have recast, but that would have been a bit rubbish. And if Hicks had lived it would have totally undermined the dynamic of Ripley being suddenly stranded among a colony of deliberately isolated dangerous men. Again, they could have told a different story (of which there had been several proposals, of course), but I think that one works well with the Alien mythos, amorphous though it may be. Also, Hicks is a dumb action film character from a dumb action film. Going out on a dangerous limb: flawed though the later sequels may be, I feel like Aliens is the film most disconnected from what's actually interesting about the series. (The AvP films don't count, and shouldn't even figure into discussion unless specifically addressed.) Sure, it's a good action film, but I don't really see how it benefits from being in the Alien universe (other than the cool creature design, which the above letter suggests Cameron appropriated somewhat callously, though I suspect that's not too uncommon in Hollywood), and I'm not sure how the Alien universe benefits from it, either. I don't like the idea that all people need is a few guns to suddenly be able to take down tens of these supposed "ultimate weapons" apiece. If you take humankind to be the product of both its biology and its technology, the alien threat, whilst still significant, seems markedly reduced. Bringing out Ripley's maternal side with Newt did fit in with the themes pretty well, although in a rather straightforward and on-the-nose manner. The revelation that Ripley survived her own daughter does make that more interesting. Was that only in the special edition? Alien 3 was a deeply flawed film, but at its core it has something interesting, and something that I think fits well into the Alien universe, and it seems like every time they release it they manage to put together a slightly better version (although none of them a director's cut, because Fincher wants nothing to do with it any more). For example, in the Anthology (Blu-ray) release they tidied up a lot of the previously under-produced material they'd added in the Quadrilogy (DVD) release, making it much less jarring and distracting. I do think the stuff they added helps a lot, though. I found the latter portion of the theatrical release kind of confusing. That's my probably very blinkered and biased view on things. I'm going to have to re-watch all the films just to determine whether any of what I just wrote is at all justified. I thought Prometheus was OK, if a bit muddled on the character level. That's often my reaction to things inspiring mass disappointment, though: by the time I actually see them myself, I've adjusted my expectations enough that I find some way to enjoy them. Probably over-cautious spoiler tag:

Don't listen to him! Follow your heart! Don't let THE MAN stand in the way of true love.