Slashdot Mirror


Training From America's Army Game Saved a Life

russoc4 writes "Most people who play the United States Army's freeware FPS sit through training simulations so that they may be able to get into the action and rack up some kills. The medic skills learned in the training allow you to heal teammates in the game, but it seems that they also apply in real life situations. According to Wired and the America's Army forums, 'a North Carolina man who saw an SUV flip and roll on a highway last November was able to provide medical aid to the victims with skills he learned from the America's Army.'" See? We learn things from videogames! Feign Death works sometimes, too.

1 of 379 comments (clear)

  1. Dave. . ? Is that you? by Fantastic+Lad · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    Dave Sim reincarnated as a woman. I wondered what he would sound like when writing one of his misogynist essays from a female perspective.

    Kidding aside, and to be fair, I've met the guy you're describing. For some reason, he's the guy many young women seem to be attracted to. I met one woman who told me that her sexual fantasy was to be raped by a bike gang, (but one in which all the bikers looked like a young James Dean.) We all live lives where we deal with that kind of thinking, and probably a lot more than once. --I've listened to many girls describe hideous relationships with such men, and what can you say? "Don't get into a relationship with a jerk?" Seems obvious, but it goes ignored. You can't really stop people from doing what they do; people need to go through the lessons they need to go through, and they need to deal with their karma, so these experiences will happen again and again, and they will seem to describe the entire world for that person until the patterns are completed. It's not a bad thing, it just is.

    In a larger realm of automatic living, where people are managed like cattle, the war of the sexes seems to me a very well crafted conundrum, designed to perpetuate divisiveness and sadness. I've seen the fallout; there's a whole street in a town I once lived where somebody built a co-op housing development designed largely to help out women who have come from bad relationships; single moms and such. I answered an ad for a house to rent and was invited to live in this community. My room mate and I would have been two of the only men in the whole development.

    I really like co-op living, having spent a few years in a condo once set up that way, where each participant's "rent" was really a mortgage payment, and where everybody takes on various tasks needed to keep things running. --Sort of like one of those communes you described, but peopled by professionals and built in a rural setting. This particular community had been around for about ten years, and I was looking forward to it, but my room mate backed out at the last minute. I didn't want to carry the rent for a whole house, so I found another arrangement elsewhere in town.

    Anyway. . , I was later told by several people that I'd dodged a bullet. --I didn't realize at the time that the co-op had been set up primarily for women. There were apparently horror stories of other men who had lived there briefly. It was a community of B&T's, I was told. That is, "Bitter and Twisted" women who had been hurt and who ate men alive through expressions of anger and manipulation and all kinds of other nasty stuff. I'm generally a trusting person and I like helping people, and I'm good with tools and such and I offered these qualities up when interviewed. "What will you bring to the co-op?" I was told later that I was too nice and naive and that I'd have been eaten for lunch by angry women looking to pass on the abuse to others. --I disagree completely with this; it's absolutely possible to be a giving person who doesn't take abuse; it's a mistake to confuse openness with weakness, but still. . , I could definitely see that there might have been some difficult challenges in living in such a community. But people who have been hurt, male or female, don't need to be judged. ("B&T"?? What a horrible label!)

    Anyway, it seems to me that what you are describing is the human who is only half-formed. It happens in female bodies as well, though it manifests differently. People need to develop both sides of themselves; their male and female side, so that they do not need a partner to fill the void, so to speak. Males who think from the reptile brain and have not broken through their automatic thinking, and who have not woken up to their female side often do, in the most negative cases, manifest in the ways you describe. The description for the female version of the same thing is somewhat different, but it is similarly long and discouraging. One of the goals, I think, of the human experience is to achieve