I am saying that all stories are messages, some positive, some negative. You seem biased against anything positive ("contrived", "uninteresting", and "unrealistic"),and to feel that negative imagery only triggers vicarious learning. Now, we're exchanging brief notes on/. here, so this is doubtless an unfair oversimplification.
I never once said I was against "anything positive." Not only is that unfair but it is absurd. I said I am generally against stories that are contrived to be positive in some naive attempt at social engineering. If a story is good, it is good.
Do feel any of the stories correlating negative media imagery and negative behavior, particularly among children, have merit?
Of course, but the kind of negative imagary that has such an effect is gratuitous, senseless, and empty.
On the other hand, I've read studies that have shown that children exposed to the more old fashioned fairy tails, stories, and myths where people actually die, grow up to be better adjusted than children who get the more sugar coated "Disney" style stories where Snowwhite always gets her man.
Possibly I'm shifting the thread from the individual to society, and you quickly run into the Ecological Fallacy. And yet...personally, I have tapered off on all of the negativity. While not contrived, it is certainly repetitive. While perhaps interesting, it becomes repetitious. Negative people are concerned with maintaining their problems, as opposed to mature solutions to the problems. Unrealistic? Well, reality never escapes the subjective, and if I'm weak for eschewing a Nine Inch Nails existence, so be it.
It seems as though we are talking about two different kinds of "negativity." You're talking about senseless violence and aggression. I'm just talking about a movie having a not-so-rosey ending. Most of the time the "simple farming community" doesn't win against the "big-money developer." That much is a fact. Why should we avoid that result in fiction? What about what happens afterwards? How do people deal with it? That kind of thing can be interesting.
Also, I think we're talking about more than just negativity here. You also seem to be against certain "taboo" subjects.
Basically waht it comes down to is this: If you treat people like babies who can't handle negativity or taboo subjects, they will become babies who can't handle a little negativity and taboo subjects.
Don't forget the remote detonated pipe bombs. A jetpack isn't much fun without them, especially when you figure out that you can drop a dozen of them and set them off all at once...
Are you arguing against the possibility of didactic [reference.com] storytelling? The literature is literally stacked against you.
I'm saying that I am not particularly interested in such story telling. It tends to be very contrived, uninteresting, and unrealistic.
Driving a marriage off a cliff is also a "marital training film", of a different sort.
Do you think that people simply seek to emulate everything they see on screen? Don't you think that humans are capable of seeing someon "drive a marriage off a cliff" and perhaps learn what NOT to do? Of cource, that is assuming people actually do take movies as instructive, which I don't think i snecessarily the case.
To drop a specific example, if you show a heroin needle, as well you might for considerations of plot, I expect that the movie is not an advertisement, yes. If you're going to talk about it, by all means show the ensuing misery.
How about something you consider to be in "bad taste" such as sexual confusion? For example, consider a story of a gay teen growing up in a very conservative community who is forced to repress his feelings. He later gets married because that is what he is "supposed to do." But he finds that he simply cannot have a satisfying sexual relationship with his wife. So he leaves her for a man... or worse, stays married and just gets his sexual release through casual, discrete relationships with men. He is never able to come out to his wife or family and comes to resent them and feel intense confusion.
Would that somehow advocate or encourage homosexuality? Is it off limits, in your opinion?
The challenge for society is the partial messages coming out of Hollywood.
You say that as if each film were some kind of moral lesson rather than just interesting and entertaining (well, sometimes) stories.
No, we don't need chick flicks. But I contend that "honestly and realistically" != entropy, which is what I feel comes out of Hollywood.
Oh come on, Hollywood is *full* of happy endings and "guy gets the girl at the end" stories. What is this "entropy" you talk about? I mean, I know what it means in physics, but I am not sure how to apply it film.
No, the idea that people get divorced because of "misunderstanding" is unrealitic. It is unrealistic to contrive a story in hopes that it will somehow teach other people how to work out their own marital problems... which are most likely very different than those in your particular story.
The truth I see in your remark is that the emotional costs should not be trivialized; therein lies the unreality.
The unreality comes in when you take a given problem and force it to a particular conclusion because you think that conclusion is more appropriate for people to see. It becomes a marital training film disguised as entertainment.
It's the actors. You get the same bunch of losers doing all the films. Colin Farrell, Tom Cruise, Linsey Lohan, etc. It's boring to see them do film after film, especially when they can't act (Tom did, once upon a time).
If you think these people can't act, you apparently haven't seen bad acting before. Go rent any number of "B" movies. There's some really bad acting out there and it usually doesn't come from the big names (for the most part. celebs such as Paris Hilton being a notable exception). Now, I'm not going to defend the practice of reusing the same celebs over and over again, but I don't see how you can claim that they can't act. Most big names out there today have at least one good movie under their belt showcasing what they are capable with competent directing, writing, casting, etc.
Simple farming community successfully fends off big-money developer who wants to spew McMansions.
Yeah, like we haven't heard this trite piece of crap a million times over. As if simply repeating this story over and over again will make it the norm. If you really want to affect some change in the world, you need to tackle the reality and let people know what is REALLY happening. Show them what really happens when "simple farming communities" try to fend off big-money developers.
Gritty military hero has opportunity to snap the pencil neck of the foppish journalist who smeared his unit based on false propaganda, shows mercy and dedication to the ideals of the Constitution.
No comment.
Drama about marital misunderstanding nearly resulting in yet another ruinous divorce and shattered children, but the spouses forgive each other.
Yeah, because everyone loves it when they make up in the end. As if people will stop getting divorced by seeing enough movies projecting an unrealistic ideal.
You have a strange idea of what it means to "challenge" something. Apparently to "challenge" something means to write a story that attempts to project an ideal that is opposite of reality in hopes that the world will be changed to better reflect the ideal. When in reality, it just allows peopple like you a chance to escape reality... if only for 2 hours. See, this is EXACTLY the kind of Hollywood crap that I, personaly, would rather see less of. I don't need happy endings. I want to see films that tackle a subject honestly and realisticaly. If that means that the guy doesn't get the girl in the end, so be it. If it means the movie makes me feel a little uncomfortable (what you might call "bad taste"), so be it.
But the deep-seated taboo against inbreeding is there for a reason, I agree with it, and wouldn't sit through a flick trying to argue "it felt good, so it must have been justified".
Oh, i get it. You are one of those people who thinks that just because someone does a movie about something, they are advocating and condoning whatever actions the characters take.
I bet you also feel that if we dont' talk about something, it doesn't/won't happen.
good taste means that, while we require a hint of the human capacity for evil to understand why the villian is the villian, we aren't really interested in wallowing in the evil. Lynch/Tarentino will always have their fan base, and I'm not advocating censorship here, just letting you know that "less is more". Expanding on that, less emphasis on potty mouth and hormones would also enhance their dramatic value.
You had me up until this one. IMO, you're ruling out a lot of depth by not exploring the nature of evil and sexual confusion. And whether you like it or not, certain groups in society have potty mouths and use them often. Why should a writer tone it down if doing so would be inaccurate and unbelievable?
Finally, stories rooted in sexual confusion are of no interest whatsoever.
I have to disagree completely here. Exploration of sexual confusion done right can make for a very deep and interesting film. Screw "good taste." Writers should not be afraid to come up with hard hitting material just because it might make people you are a little uncomfortable.
Why is it such a shock to some that a developer got burned out working on the same code. Open source developers are often not appreciated. A few get paid and many don't.
if dd does the job, why not spend 1 second googling and use dd for windows [swin.edu.au]? and what, the dos/win "format" doesn't write enough zeroes? fdisk and mmc disk management don't really delete partitions when they say they do?
Maybe you don't understand the difference between simplay changing partitions/creating a new filesystem and actually wiping the disk.
I already knew there was dd for Windows. But since you can't do something lke 'dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hdc' it doesn't help much in this (and many other) situation. And does "format" write zeros to the disk? I know it can do a surface scan, but I don't know if that actually clears the data. I know that fdisk simply changes the partition table. It doesn't touch the rest of the disk. And the MMC... does that wipe the disk? I'm not aware of it doing so. Creating a new filesystem struction != wiping the disk.
Can it access the raw disk similar to/dev/hdc? The problem wasn't the lack of a dd command. The problem was the inablity to access the disk without going through a special API.
So wait a minute here. Lack of experience on your part with Windows software development and the failure of the MySQL ODBC client project you used to update their software to a not-over-six-year-old POS development platform and not use proprietary components is somehow a failure of Windows!?
Yes, although I wouldn't necessarily call it a "failure" on the part of Windows. It just isn't as OSS friend as other platforms. The free development tools are a good start on the part of Microsoft to remedy the situation, but Windows is still less OSS friendly than, say, Linux where I get everything I need to recompile OSS out of the box.
No you don't, M$ does give away Visual Studio tools in fully functional and free Express versions like C# Express [microsoft.com]
Yeah, I did that. Didn't help. Also, what if the project is done with mingw? Do I have to maintain both toolchains? Windows is quite OSS unfriendly. At least for any project that expects to get user supplied patches and other input.
Granted, that would not help you with connecting VB6 access applications to mySql ODBC source, but that kind of interoperability is a tall order on any platform.
You mean platforms that have a single, ubiqutous toolchain like gcc/gmake/etc? Seriously, OSS is so much easier on Linux/BSD because it is the norm and everyone has pretty much the same toolchains... out of the box.
What makes OSX better for OSS is the fact that the toolchain is free and comes with the OS so every has it or can easily install it. There is no barrier to creating/modifying code. Windows is another story.
No kidding. A friend of mine wanted to wipe a hard disk from within Windows. Something that you could do with a simple 'dd' comand in Linux/BSD. Everthing he found cost like $20. He ended up finding a crack for one of the programs just so he could do the wipe. I suggested a Linux boot CD, but for some reason he had to do all this without rebooting (don't ask). It is just sad. There really isn't enough OSS software for Windows. There may be "a lot" but there isn't enough. There are just so many things that Windows can't do out of the box... stuff I totally take for granted in Linux.
Yes, but you have VisualStudio. That investment is a significant barrier to many wouldbe OSS developers and their community of contributors. Sure, you *could* get an OSS compiler, but they are a PITA to get up and running. And you don't get proper documentation. This makes Windows OSS unfriendly. On the other hand, when you run Linux or *BSD, everyone gets the toolchain, headers, libraries, and documentation right out out of the box. Anyone can grab some source, make some changes to the code, and recompile if necessary. That is OSS friendly.
Also because of the lack of developer tools out of the box with Windows, there is no advantage to running OSS for most people. If I don't have the toolchain to recompile the source, the fact that it is OSS is moot. Might as well be closed source freeware.
Here is a little anecdote which demonstrates the OSS unfriendliness of Windows: I was having a problem with the MySQL ODBC client in Windows. There is an outstanding bug that was preventing my school from doing some very important MS Access -> MySQL queries. I managed to track down an unofficial patch to the ODBC client. Great, I thought, it is open source. I can just download the source, apply the patch, and recompile. But wait, I needed to get the Qt libraries too! I downloaded a trial version of that.A few hours later of dicking around with that, I was read to try to recompile the client. Well, turns out that the MySQL ODBC client is a Visual Studio 6 project. I don't have VS6. I downloaded VisualStudio 2005 Express (or whatever it is) hoping it would be compatable. It wasn't. Ok, well, then had to try to get it to work with mingw. So I spent a few hours trying to get that environment setup. Eventually I had to turn over the task to a friend who has a little more experience with Windows source code. He eventually got things to build, but it wasn't easy. Keep in mind, I'm no newb to compiling software. I've just never done it on Windows. Totally OSS unfriendly.
The basic problem is the same, the devaluation of the currency. The farmers in EVE sell the minerals in-game for ISK, the equivalent of WoW gold. Then they sell the ISK for real-world money, thus de-valuing the currency in-game. The deflation of mineral prices (which adversely affects players who have chosen mining as a profession) is a secondary harmful effect of their activities.
But isn't the devaluation of ISK in EVE offset by cheaper hardware? When I played EVE, I was into manufacturing. When I could get minerals cheap, I could make/sell ships and ammo cheap. As for miners, what is the essential difference between a miner and a farmer beside what they do with the ISK after they sell the minerals? In EVE, full-time mining is a legitimate "career" path. The only argument agains selling ISK outside of EVE that I can think of is just that it is not "in character." There are so many ways to make ISK in EVE that it just seems stupid to pay real cash for it. Hell, I made a fortune just buying an dselling used ships.:-P
I don't think banning is a good solution either. There has to be some ingame mechanism for dealing with this type of thing. A better economy, for example. Or an in game, player controlled, police force. Also, I think people need to just accept some of these things as an an unintended "feature" of the game. Fact is that there are some greedy assholes/criminals in this world who don't want to play nice. Why should a game which seeks to simulate a world be any differnt?
When I played EVE there was one character who was infamous for kill-stealing and stuff like that. Everyone knew his name. Many wanted him banned. Sure, it sucks for the people who got cheated, but why should a game be completely sanitized? Personally, I thought it was neat to have infamous people like that. I thought it made the game more interesting to have real problems to deal with, talk about, and think about instead of just the more mundane things that are programmed into the game.
I haven't played EVE in a while, and I've never played WoW, but doesn't farming have a different effect on the economy in Eve? Rather than inflation, doesn't it make things cheaper? If there is a huge influx of minerals, the price of them goes down and items get cheaper to manufacture. Where as in WoW you get raw gold coming in and devaluing the current gold that people have. Or am I way off here? What is the real problem with farming in Eve?
Slashdot Mirror
I never once said I was against "anything positive." Not only is that unfair but it is absurd. I said I am generally against stories that are contrived to be positive in some naive attempt at social engineering. If a story is good, it is good.
Of course, but the kind of negative imagary that has such an effect is gratuitous, senseless, and empty.
On the other hand, I've read studies that have shown that children exposed to the more old fashioned fairy tails, stories, and myths where people actually die, grow up to be better adjusted than children who get the more sugar coated "Disney" style stories where Snowwhite always gets her man.
It seems as though we are talking about two different kinds of "negativity." You're talking about senseless violence and aggression. I'm just talking about a movie having a not-so-rosey ending. Most of the time the "simple farming community" doesn't win against the "big-money developer." That much is a fact. Why should we avoid that result in fiction? What about what happens afterwards? How do people deal with it? That kind of thing can be interesting.
Also, I think we're talking about more than just negativity here. You also seem to be against certain "taboo" subjects.
Basically waht it comes down to is this: If you treat people like babies who can't handle negativity or taboo subjects, they will become babies who can't handle a little negativity and taboo subjects.
-matthew
Don't forget the remote detonated pipe bombs. A jetpack isn't much fun without them, especially when you figure out that you can drop a dozen of them and set them off all at once...
I'm saying that I am not particularly interested in such story telling. It tends to be very contrived, uninteresting, and unrealistic.
Do you think that people simply seek to emulate everything they see on screen? Don't you think that humans are capable of seeing someon "drive a marriage off a cliff" and perhaps learn what NOT to do? Of cource, that is assuming people actually do take movies as instructive, which I don't think i snecessarily the case.
-matthew
How about something you consider to be in "bad taste" such as sexual confusion? For example, consider a story of a gay teen growing up in a very conservative community who is forced to repress his feelings. He later gets married because that is what he is "supposed to do." But he finds that he simply cannot have a satisfying sexual relationship with his wife. So he leaves her for a man... or worse, stays married and just gets his sexual release through casual, discrete relationships with men. He is never able to come out to his wife or family and comes to resent them and feel intense confusion.
Would that somehow advocate or encourage homosexuality? Is it off limits, in your opinion?
You say that as if each film were some kind of moral lesson rather than just interesting and entertaining (well, sometimes) stories.
-matthew
Oh come on, Hollywood is *full* of happy endings and "guy gets the girl at the end" stories. What is this "entropy" you talk about? I mean, I know what it means in physics, but I am not sure how to apply it film.
-matthew
No, the idea that people get divorced because of "misunderstanding" is unrealitic. It is unrealistic to contrive a story in hopes that it will somehow teach other people how to work out their own marital problems... which are most likely very different than those in your particular story.
The unreality comes in when you take a given problem and force it to a particular conclusion because you think that conclusion is more appropriate for people to see. It becomes a marital training film disguised as entertainment.
-matthew
If you think these people can't act, you apparently haven't seen bad acting before. Go rent any number of "B" movies. There's some really bad acting out there and it usually doesn't come from the big names (for the most part. celebs such as Paris Hilton being a notable exception). Now, I'm not going to defend the practice of reusing the same celebs over and over again, but I don't see how you can claim that they can't act. Most big names out there today have at least one good movie under their belt showcasing what they are capable with competent directing, writing, casting, etc.
-matthew
Simple farming community successfully fends off big-money developer who wants to spew McMansions.
Yeah, like we haven't heard this trite piece of crap a million times over. As if simply repeating this story over and over again will make it the norm. If you really want to affect some change in the world, you need to tackle the reality and let people know what is REALLY happening. Show them what really happens when "simple farming communities" try to fend off big-money developers.
Gritty military hero has opportunity to snap the pencil neck of the foppish journalist who smeared his unit based on false propaganda, shows mercy and dedication to the ideals of the Constitution.
No comment.
Drama about marital misunderstanding nearly resulting in yet another ruinous divorce and shattered children, but the spouses forgive each other.
Yeah, because everyone loves it when they make up in the end. As if people will stop getting divorced by seeing enough movies projecting an unrealistic ideal.
You have a strange idea of what it means to "challenge" something. Apparently to "challenge" something means to write a story that attempts to project an ideal that is opposite of reality in hopes that the world will be changed to better reflect the ideal. When in reality, it just allows peopple like you a chance to escape reality... if only for 2 hours. See, this is EXACTLY the kind of Hollywood crap that I, personaly, would rather see less of. I don't need happy endings. I want to see films that tackle a subject honestly and realisticaly. If that means that the guy doesn't get the girl in the end, so be it. If it means the movie makes me feel a little uncomfortable (what you might call "bad taste"), so be it.
-matthew
Oh, i get it. You are one of those people who thinks that just because someone does a movie about something, they are advocating and condoning whatever actions the characters take.
I bet you also feel that if we dont' talk about something, it doesn't/won't happen.
-matthew
You had me up until this one. IMO, you're ruling out a lot of depth by not exploring the nature of evil and sexual confusion. And whether you like it or not, certain groups in society have potty mouths and use them often. Why should a writer tone it down if doing so would be inaccurate and unbelievable?
I have to disagree completely here. Exploration of sexual confusion done right can make for a very deep and interesting film. Screw "good taste." Writers should not be afraid to come up with hard hitting material just because it might make people you are a little uncomfortable.
-matthew
You mispelled "laid".
-matthew
Not the system/boot disk. How else would you do it besides while Windows is running?
-matthew
Maybe you don't understand the difference between simplay changing partitions/creating a new filesystem and actually wiping the disk.
I already knew there was dd for Windows. But since you can't do something lke 'dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hdc' it doesn't help much in this (and many other) situation. And does "format" write zeros to the disk? I know it can do a surface scan, but I don't know if that actually clears the data. I know that fdisk simply changes the partition table. It doesn't touch the rest of the disk. And the MMC... does that wipe the disk? I'm not aware of it doing so. Creating a new filesystem struction != wiping the disk.
-matthew
A wipe, as in zeroing out the disk.
Can it access the raw disk similar to /dev/hdc? The problem wasn't the lack of a dd command. The problem was the inablity to access the disk without going through a special API.
-matthew
Yes, although I wouldn't necessarily call it a "failure" on the part of Windows. It just isn't as OSS friend as other platforms. The free development tools are a good start on the part of Microsoft to remedy the situation, but Windows is still less OSS friendly than, say, Linux where I get everything I need to recompile OSS out of the box.
-matthew
My problem was trying to get it to build a project originally built with Microsoft tools.
-matthew
Yeah, I did that. Didn't help. Also, what if the project is done with mingw? Do I have to maintain both toolchains? Windows is quite OSS unfriendly. At least for any project that expects to get user supplied patches and other input.
You mean platforms that have a single, ubiqutous toolchain like gcc/gmake/etc? Seriously, OSS is so much easier on Linux/BSD because it is the norm and everyone has pretty much the same toolchains... out of the box.
-matthew
What makes OSX better for OSS is the fact that the toolchain is free and comes with the OS so every has it or can easily install it. There is no barrier to creating/modifying code. Windows is another story.
-matthew
No kidding. A friend of mine wanted to wipe a hard disk from within Windows. Something that you could do with a simple 'dd' comand in Linux/BSD. Everthing he found cost like $20. He ended up finding a crack for one of the programs just so he could do the wipe. I suggested a Linux boot CD, but for some reason he had to do all this without rebooting (don't ask). It is just sad. There really isn't enough OSS software for Windows. There may be "a lot" but there isn't enough. There are just so many things that Windows can't do out of the box... stuff I totally take for granted in Linux.
-matthew
Yes, but you have VisualStudio. That investment is a significant barrier to many wouldbe OSS developers and their community of contributors. Sure, you *could* get an OSS compiler, but they are a PITA to get up and running. And you don't get proper documentation. This makes Windows OSS unfriendly. On the other hand, when you run Linux or *BSD, everyone gets the toolchain, headers, libraries, and documentation right out out of the box. Anyone can grab some source, make some changes to the code, and recompile if necessary. That is OSS friendly.
Also because of the lack of developer tools out of the box with Windows, there is no advantage to running OSS for most people. If I don't have the toolchain to recompile the source, the fact that it is OSS is moot. Might as well be closed source freeware.
Here is a little anecdote which demonstrates the OSS unfriendliness of Windows: I was having a problem with the MySQL ODBC client in Windows. There is an outstanding bug that was preventing my school from doing some very important MS Access -> MySQL queries. I managed to track down an unofficial patch to the ODBC client. Great, I thought, it is open source. I can just download the source, apply the patch, and recompile. But wait, I needed to get the Qt libraries too! I downloaded a trial version of that.A few hours later of dicking around with that, I was read to try to recompile the client. Well, turns out that the MySQL ODBC client is a Visual Studio 6 project. I don't have VS6. I downloaded VisualStudio 2005 Express (or whatever it is) hoping it would be compatable. It wasn't. Ok, well, then had to try to get it to work with mingw. So I spent a few hours trying to get that environment setup. Eventually I had to turn over the task to a friend who has a little more experience with Windows source code. He eventually got things to build, but it wasn't easy. Keep in mind, I'm no newb to compiling software. I've just never done it on Windows. Totally OSS unfriendly.
-matthew
No OS? If it has a network stack, graphics, APIs, etc, it has an OS. That is the OS.
-matthew
But isn't the devaluation of ISK in EVE offset by cheaper hardware? When I played EVE, I was into manufacturing. When I could get minerals cheap, I could make/sell ships and ammo cheap. As for miners, what is the essential difference between a miner and a farmer beside what they do with the ISK after they sell the minerals? In EVE, full-time mining is a legitimate "career" path. The only argument agains selling ISK outside of EVE that I can think of is just that it is not "in character." There are so many ways to make ISK in EVE that it just seems stupid to pay real cash for it. Hell, I made a fortune just buying an dselling used ships.
-matthew
I don't think banning is a good solution either. There has to be some ingame mechanism for dealing with this type of thing. A better economy, for example. Or an in game, player controlled, police force. Also, I think people need to just accept some of these things as an an unintended "feature" of the game. Fact is that there are some greedy assholes/criminals in this world who don't want to play nice. Why should a game which seeks to simulate a world be any differnt?
When I played EVE there was one character who was infamous for kill-stealing and stuff like that. Everyone knew his name. Many wanted him banned. Sure, it sucks for the people who got cheated, but why should a game be completely sanitized? Personally, I thought it was neat to have infamous people like that. I thought it made the game more interesting to have real problems to deal with, talk about, and think about instead of just the more mundane things that are programmed into the game.
-matthew
I haven't played EVE in a while, and I've never played WoW, but doesn't farming have a different effect on the economy in Eve? Rather than inflation, doesn't it make things cheaper? If there is a huge influx of minerals, the price of them goes down and items get cheaper to manufacture. Where as in WoW you get raw gold coming in and devaluing the current gold that people have. Or am I way off here? What is the real problem with farming in Eve?
-matthew