Actually, yes. I read about an interview with a British woman who's believed to be a genuine tetrachromat. One thing that came up was the fact that color photographs and TV never look "right" to her. Prior to learning about tetrachromaticy, she always just thought she was "picky".
Still not convinced. Why would a picture of a real scene trigger different signals in her brain than the scene itself? If she looks at her lawn, it's going to look normal because that's the way her lawn has looked to her all her life. If she looks at a picture of her lawn (disregarding compression etc.), why should that look "not right"?
For subtly-anomalous trichromats, beige is a deadly minefield of potential embarrassments.
Unlike most normal sighted men, to whom beige is a not-so-deadly field of.. well.. white'ish. If you ever want to repaint (and you live by yourself) just pick whatever colors you like. As soon as some woman moves in, she's going to redecorate the place anyways, even if it's already the Taj Mahal of interior decoration.
Firstly, I play WoW mostly for the pvp. I can do it alone or with a few friends, no need to get big, complimentary groups together.
Second, grinding honor is about as simple as it gets. Time-consuming, yes. Hard, no. It's like kids sports, just participating gets you a prize (honor, badge/mark). Though, since it isn't hard you don't get the best items in the game. With a bit of patience, anyone can get Hateful Gladiator set with Furious Gladiator no-set pieces. At this point, your gear is good enough that you can play Arena and get rating, thus advancing to Furious set + Relentless no-set, at which point nothing (but a bit of experience playing pvp) is stopping you from being at a rating high enough to get all the best pvp pieces in the game.
No need to do boring instances, raids and dungeons. Just go at it and whoop Alliance ass, and upgrade gear as you can afford ^^
If you're in for some amazing stuff, read up on sensory substitution, in particular the works of Professor Paul Bach-y-Rita. Even people who have been born blind quickly learn to use the TVSS (tactile visual substitution system). The system causes activity in the visual cortex and when the researchers suddenly zoomed the camera (the patients "eye") (s)he reacted naturally, as any sighted person would if the world suddenly came flying closer.
It is well recognized that sensory substitution systems (like TVSS, cochlear implants, etc.) provide a "mechanical" sense but critics whine about these systems lacking "quality". One man (born blind), when shown a picture of his wife through the TVSS, was disappointed that it didn't evoke any emotion.
Wife-jokes aside, no shit, Sherlock! I'm not a scientist but even I can see the problem and solution here. If course knowing that the person you see or hear for the first time is someone you love isn't going to trigger any emotion. The sight of that persons face or sound of his/her voice isn't tied into any of your memories of your life shared with that person. Wear the device for a few years though, actually see your wife every time you make love or experience something else together, and tell me her face isn't going to evoke any "quality"!
Long rant short: Sensory substitution ROCKS, and I WANT to experience new sensory modalities!
Random-rant, from hours upon hours of pondering things like how I would perceive wearing a sensory substitution vision system while seeing with my eyes, or some other sensory substitution gear to experience something completely new.
First of all, do you think tetrachromats know they perceive colors differently? Assume for a moment that you were born with your red/blue wiring swapped (assuming the eye and brain worked that way).. What you experience as red is what others experience as blue, but you are told it is blue and thus go through life perfectly unaware that your eyesight is in any way different.
Second, tetrachromats don't actually see an extra color, they just have higher color resolution in part of the spectrum. Say us trichromats have a 16 bit (per RGB channel) color resolution, tetrachromats have 16 bit red/blue channels but 20 bits to represent green.
Ok, those exact numbers are probably complete nonsense, but the point is tetrachromats don't see red, green, and blue. The "green" wavelengths are still green, they just have two receptors to pick it up and thus higher green resolution.
Or I might be completely wrong, I don't know. It just seems weird that extra equipment to perceive something our brains are already perceiving should give rise to completely new unclassified experiences (like a wholly new color). If we were to push this into f.ex. infrared, though..
I am intrigued! What are these "GameMaster tomatoes" of which you speak, and why would it be bad if they wrested control from non-GM tomatoes by virtue of being better..?
Couldn't agree more! I want to become a tetrachromat so I can see if women can actually tell the difference between towels and drapes colored #000000 and #110000 (which both seem quite black to me). Hell, perhaps I'd even be able to understand how our living room walls are brown (like all the women who visit agree they are), not light pink (like all my mates agree they are)! o.O
Would it, in theory, be possible to inject DNA that caused the rod cells to produce IR/UV reactive proteins? Granted, there probably isn't that much infrared light bouncing about at night but it might help, right? And of course there is the novelty and excitement of seeing the world like no human has ever seen it before..
Of course they are able to "grow" and remap themselves. What is generally taught is that they do not generally divide to replace dead or damaged nerve cells. If you cut away a piece of skin, the cells in that area divide until the wound if closed (or that's the way it's supposed to work, at least). If you kill a piece of your brain, there is (according to general "knowledge") no way to regenerate these lost cells.
Also, there are different gains from different types of set/rep combinations. Tons of professional strength athletes and body builders can attest to this being true, even if the mechanics behind it are a bit fuzzy. If you do 5 sets of 5 quick lifts with a good pause in between sets, you force your body to adapt to that intensity and duration, building mostly explosive strength and some mass. If you do 1x15-20, lifting slowly on the negative (4-6 seconds) you build more mass than explosive strength. You of course get stronger with all resistance training but set/rep combinations determine whether you gain more strength or mass.
One golden rule is that if you complete the last set on any given exercise, you're not lifting quite enough. Another one is variation. Change your workout program every couple of months or so. The body is master of adaptation and growing muscle is expensive, so after doing the same intensity/duration for a while your body optimizes for it and you hit a plateau.
And muscular scar tissue from working out..? I don't buy it. Resistance workouts lead to better blood flow in the muscle tissue, stronger neural paths (the reason the first three months or so you can experience an insane ~20% strength increase) and, you know... increased strength.
Seriously?! What level do I need to get my Fishing to for this? Getting sick and tired of my damned 20-slot Frostweave bags and the only upgrade is the insanely expensive 22-slot Glacial bag. No bag limits? You must be joking!
Fertilizer run-off is killing huge swaths of the Gulf of Mexico due to algal blooms and anoxic zones
That's being problem-oriented, not solution-oriented! =P Algae is the most easily grown source of biomass and from what little I know, very usable for biodiesel production. Wouldn't it be possible to harvest and refine some of this algae into fuel that could be used (at least as a stepping stone) to break out of the whole petroleum dependency?
There is a huge difference between wearing a wedding ring and going outside wearing clothes one otherwise would only see in the worst kinkfest porn flicks out there.
There is a huge difference between referring to your spouse as your husband/wife, and being over-the-top physical with your partner simply because you know it makes people react.
With regards to bringing pictures to work.. I don't care about the gender of your spouse! Feel free to bring that picture of you and your special someone to keep you happy and motivated at work, so long as it doesn't look like this.
Did you seriously not get my point? Do you really think wearing a ring, a token of love and commitment which frankly any gay couple can wear without anyone reacting, compares in terms of self-degradation, attention whoring and offensiveness to this?
What about all the gay men out there who for some reason I cannot fathom act 10 times more feminine than any female ever has, and vice versa? I don't deliberately go around "acting straight", talking about being straight, dressing in a stereotypical straight manner.. Why do many (not all, never said that!) gays go to crazy extremes to differentiate themselves from the rest of the world because they were once treated badly for being different, then complain about being seen as different? I fail to see how this circular reasoning of "acting different because you are seen as different, because you act different.." is going to make life better for anyone.
No, what I described was myself, and the fact that I have no interest in bedding that sort of brainless twits. Sure, the idea of bedding pertty much anyone seemed heavenly when I was 15 but now, almost 10 years later.. not so much.
Women who (think they) need cleavage to be noticed usually aren't worth noticing.
Thanks, will without a doubt be looking into Sanderson's writings. At the moment, I am 217 pages into Warbreaker. Can't say it's Jordan or Tolkien, but it's not Twilight either. Actually, I think it ranks pretty close to the Sin Wars trilogy (Blizzard Diablo lore) both in terms of use of language and story-telling. It takes considerable talent to "paint the picture", so to speak, like Tolkien did. I still daydream about attending a party in the Shire with all the merrymaking, consumption of homemade food and drink and pipe smoking. Aaaah.. To be a hobbit! *sigh*
You should read up on what Harriet, Sanderson and Tor publishing has to say about the subject. Mr. Sanderson has already completed a good bulk of the three last books, with the last one containing Tarmon Gai'don.
Now, you might argue that Tor might want Sanderson to write the Infinity of Heaven series, as well as other side stories and prequels. However, Sanderson has already publicly posted a refusal to do this as he thinks it would just be milking Jordan's amazing work (of which Sanderson has been a fan for many years).
I think we're safe. I might check out Mistborn though. Can anyone tell me if that series is any good for someone who loves the works of Tolkien as well as WoT?
I may or may not have a point with this, but I think you are far too narrow sighted and *err* slashdot "mainstream" to enjoy WoT. How does having multiple plot lines, each deep enough to stand on it's own (disregarding whether or not you like the characters), weaving back and forth, crossing paths, pushing and pulling and sometimes crashing into each other make for bad writing?
Yes, you're allowed to say you don't like the books just like you can say you don't like Mercedes. You can, however, not claim that Lada is better than Mercedes, because it is simply untrue.
Robert Jordan was a writer of such rare talent as to write a gigantic, multi layered epic with natural, realistic characters, each with their own agendas and motives, and a huge world of different cultures and history. If you don't have the attention span to read the books and see this, that is your problem, not a flaw of the author.
As someone who isn't big on reading but has finished the entire WoT series twice now, I can't see this as first and foremost being about making money. Of course the publisher wants as much money as they can get but from interviews I have read they seem to also have a healthy respect for Robert Jordan's work. I feel like I "know" the characters of WoT in a way, and I desperately want to know how their stories end! I have faith in Harriet (Jordan's widow) finding a good author to complete R.J's legacy and with the amount of notes and work Jordan left behind, the "finish line" of which you speak will be the one Jordan intended (if the brand of shoes used to get there might be different).
"There has to be some sort of way to compensate the artist for the hours and the sweat and the blood and the tears and the extreme, extreme expense that goes into making music,"
Seriously? I have friends who play and have played in several bands, and in general 25.000 NOK (roughly 3200 USD) covers the cost of recording an album and having someone talented and experienced (but unknown) put it all together for you.
Of course, the cost of producing and distributing millions of CD's isn't going to be insignificant but how hard can it be to find one or more online services that will sell your music for you at a fraction of the money a RIAA associate would demand?
Seriously.. where are these extreme expences? I small band can pool their savings and record an album, then sell it online at a quarter of what a cd would cost and still make more per album than bigger, more established bands make.
Bigger artists, with multi-million dollar income on every damn thing they release don't have to pay a dime more than the newb guys to record an album, and they should be able to affort printing the cd's if they absolutely must follow that old, outdated business model.
Heh, I find it rather funny that you acknowledge that I am not talking about everyone, then go on to cream me for talking about everyone.
..and if they can't be like you and bounce out fast they will feel even more like it's their fault.
Who the hell said it was fast? This is an Internet forum and as such I assume people aren't too terribly interested in hearing my life story. Suffice to say, it's been mostly bullshit since I was old enough to see how others lived and were cared for compared to me (6-7 years old). People who know me well say they doubt very much they would have survived, and I've had my insulin pen in hand, ready to od while crying like a baby and.. yeah. Fuck it, it's not interesting. Point is, you can take your assumptions about me and my situations and shove them right up your hairy, holier-than-thou, medicated ass.
When my grandparents were young, you coped. You did your job as best you could, you earned enough to eat and perhaps get a new shirt or a pair of socks now and then. My grandfather got a honorary medal for working more than 25 years without one sickday (in fact, I don't think he ever had one from he started working 12 hour days, 6 days a week at age 14).
These days though, a lot of people are on anti-depressants. A lot more than 10 years ago, a hell of a lot more than 50-60 years ago. You can't honestly claim that everyone who gets antidepressants would have committed suicide? That would mean a LOT of suicides up until about 10 years ago!
I mean, come on.. let's overdo it something aweful and say that 1% of the population offed themselves prior to the advent of antidepressants. Compare that then to numbers from the CDC which claim at least 25% of all adults will use antidepressants at least once in their lives. That means that either mental illness has exploded from less than 1% to over 25% the past 10 years, or... more than 24% of the population goes on antidepressants at least once without needing it.
It appears that you know approximately nothing about serious clinical depression or dysthymia.
It appears you can read and respond in turn. I already said (as you started your post by acknowledging) that the extreme cases are beyond my post.
but because you've been moderately (and probably situationally) depressed, you can speak for almost every case out there.
Again, shove it. As anyone who tries to claim their life sucks will argue, depression is subjective (with, of course, the exception of the absolute minority who has something actually wrong with their brains). The fact that I choose to not get into a pissing contest about who has had it worse doesn't give you the right to belittle what I have been through to try and make your point seem valid.
Why should muscles be one of the things to do the difference? I know a few nerds and geeks (myself included) who enjoy "leveling str" IRL, because it helps self esteem (and gives a good cha boost, which further boosts self esteem, which again boosts cha..)
It's more like this:
somewhat-fit-geek: Hi really-hot-chick, sup?
really-hot-chick: *fake shock* Are you looking at my chest? You perv! My eyes are up here! *giggle*
somewhat-fit-geek: Maybe you should.. you know.. put on some clothes.. Whatever *turns around to discuss thoroughly geeky stuff that makes the bimbo feel dumb/left out*
really-hot-chick: GIEF ATTENTION PLEX! TELL ME I AM SPECIAL, SO I CAN FEEL GOOD ABOUT MY SHALLOW SELF!
What's up with slashdotters using very small minorities to argue against my post regarding the majority? It's like this other article where I said something like "people (excluding a very few individuals) are fat because they sit still and eat crap all day" and got hammered by people screaming about how bad it was for those who actually have a medical condition to blame.
I actually said "Of course brain chemistry isn't the same for everyone." excluding (or so I thought) the extremes. Yes, there are people who have actual problems. This number probably fits well with the number of suicides 50 years ago when no treatment were available.
My point was that these days all you need to do is tell your MD "I feel down all the time and get tired easily.". He won't ask about your diet, he won't tell you to work out, he will give you pills. A vast majority of so-called depressed people could get by just fine without medication, and are in fact hurting themselves taking drugs they don't strictly need, instead of dealing with life.
I might just be cynical and somewhat bitter, but when anti-depressants are prescribed to anyone who claims to need them (since there is no easy way to really diagnose mental/emotional illness), things ain't like they should be!
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, yes. I read about an interview with a British woman who's believed to be a genuine tetrachromat. One thing that came up was the fact that color photographs and TV never look "right" to her. Prior to learning about tetrachromaticy, she always just thought she was "picky".
Still not convinced. Why would a picture of a real scene trigger different signals in her brain than the scene itself? If she looks at her lawn, it's going to look normal because that's the way her lawn has looked to her all her life. If she looks at a picture of her lawn (disregarding compression etc.), why should that look "not right"?
For subtly-anomalous trichromats, beige is a deadly minefield of potential embarrassments.
Unlike most normal sighted men, to whom beige is a not-so-deadly field of.. well.. white'ish. If you ever want to repaint (and you live by yourself) just pick whatever colors you like. As soon as some woman moves in, she's going to redecorate the place anyways, even if it's already the Taj Mahal of interior decoration.
Firstly, I play WoW mostly for the pvp. I can do it alone or with a few friends, no need to get big, complimentary groups together.
Second, grinding honor is about as simple as it gets. Time-consuming, yes. Hard, no. It's like kids sports, just participating gets you a prize (honor, badge/mark). Though, since it isn't hard you don't get the best items in the game. With a bit of patience, anyone can get Hateful Gladiator set with Furious Gladiator no-set pieces. At this point, your gear is good enough that you can play Arena and get rating, thus advancing to Furious set + Relentless no-set, at which point nothing (but a bit of experience playing pvp) is stopping you from being at a rating high enough to get all the best pvp pieces in the game.
No need to do boring instances, raids and dungeons. Just go at it and whoop Alliance ass, and upgrade gear as you can afford ^^
If you're in for some amazing stuff, read up on sensory substitution, in particular the works of Professor Paul Bach-y-Rita. Even people who have been born blind quickly learn to use the TVSS (tactile visual substitution system). The system causes activity in the visual cortex and when the researchers suddenly zoomed the camera (the patients "eye") (s)he reacted naturally, as any sighted person would if the world suddenly came flying closer.
It is well recognized that sensory substitution systems (like TVSS, cochlear implants, etc.) provide a "mechanical" sense but critics whine about these systems lacking "quality". One man (born blind), when shown a picture of his wife through the TVSS, was disappointed that it didn't evoke any emotion.
Wife-jokes aside, no shit, Sherlock! I'm not a scientist but even I can see the problem and solution here. If course knowing that the person you see or hear for the first time is someone you love isn't going to trigger any emotion. The sight of that persons face or sound of his/her voice isn't tied into any of your memories of your life shared with that person. Wear the device for a few years though, actually see your wife every time you make love or experience something else together, and tell me her face isn't going to evoke any "quality"!
Long rant short: Sensory substitution ROCKS, and I WANT to experience new sensory modalities!
Or what if you (like me) enjoy web development but have a sense of color harmonies and good design equivalent to that of Hellen Keller...
Random-rant, from hours upon hours of pondering things like how I would perceive wearing a sensory substitution vision system while seeing with my eyes, or some other sensory substitution gear to experience something completely new.
First of all, do you think tetrachromats know they perceive colors differently? Assume for a moment that you were born with your red/blue wiring swapped (assuming the eye and brain worked that way).. What you experience as red is what others experience as blue, but you are told it is blue and thus go through life perfectly unaware that your eyesight is in any way different.
Second, tetrachromats don't actually see an extra color, they just have higher color resolution in part of the spectrum. Say us trichromats have a 16 bit (per RGB channel) color resolution, tetrachromats have 16 bit red/blue channels but 20 bits to represent green.
Ok, those exact numbers are probably complete nonsense, but the point is tetrachromats don't see red, green, and blue. The "green" wavelengths are still green, they just have two receptors to pick it up and thus higher green resolution.
Or I might be completely wrong, I don't know. It just seems weird that extra equipment to perceive something our brains are already perceiving should give rise to completely new unclassified experiences (like a wholly new color). If we were to push this into f.ex. infrared, though..
I am intrigued! What are these "GameMaster tomatoes" of which you speak, and why would it be bad if they wrested control from non-GM tomatoes by virtue of being better..?
..fluorescing skin, poison fangs, etc.
Oh MAN, Twilight fans on slashdot? -__-'
Couldn't agree more! I want to become a tetrachromat so I can see if women can actually tell the difference between towels and drapes colored #000000 and #110000 (which both seem quite black to me). Hell, perhaps I'd even be able to understand how our living room walls are brown (like all the women who visit agree they are), not light pink (like all my mates agree they are)! o.O
Would it, in theory, be possible to inject DNA that caused the rod cells to produce IR/UV reactive proteins? Granted, there probably isn't that much infrared light bouncing about at night but it might help, right? And of course there is the novelty and excitement of seeing the world like no human has ever seen it before..
Of course they are able to "grow" and remap themselves. What is generally taught is that they do not generally divide to replace dead or damaged nerve cells. If you cut away a piece of skin, the cells in that area divide until the wound if closed (or that's the way it's supposed to work, at least). If you kill a piece of your brain, there is (according to general "knowledge") no way to regenerate these lost cells.
So where can I get this rhabdomyocsarcoma if which you speak?
Also, does it turn your skin green..?
Also, there are different gains from different types of set/rep combinations. Tons of professional strength athletes and body builders can attest to this being true, even if the mechanics behind it are a bit fuzzy. If you do 5 sets of 5 quick lifts with a good pause in between sets, you force your body to adapt to that intensity and duration, building mostly explosive strength and some mass. If you do 1x15-20, lifting slowly on the negative (4-6 seconds) you build more mass than explosive strength. You of course get stronger with all resistance training but set/rep combinations determine whether you gain more strength or mass.
One golden rule is that if you complete the last set on any given exercise, you're not lifting quite enough. Another one is variation. Change your workout program every couple of months or so. The body is master of adaptation and growing muscle is expensive, so after doing the same intensity/duration for a while your body optimizes for it and you hit a plateau.
And muscular scar tissue from working out..? I don't buy it. Resistance workouts lead to better blood flow in the muscle tissue, stronger neural paths (the reason the first three months or so you can experience an insane ~20% strength increase) and, you know... increased strength.
Seriously?! What level do I need to get my Fishing to for this? Getting sick and tired of my damned 20-slot Frostweave bags and the only upgrade is the insanely expensive 22-slot Glacial bag. No bag limits? You must be joking!
Fertilizer run-off is killing huge swaths of the Gulf of Mexico due to algal blooms and anoxic zones
That's being problem-oriented, not solution-oriented! =P Algae is the most easily grown source of biomass and from what little I know, very usable for biodiesel production. Wouldn't it be possible to harvest and refine some of this algae into fuel that could be used (at least as a stepping stone) to break out of the whole petroleum dependency?
There is a huge difference between wearing a wedding ring and going outside wearing clothes one otherwise would only see in the worst kinkfest porn flicks out there.
There is a huge difference between referring to your spouse as your husband/wife, and being over-the-top physical with your partner simply because you know it makes people react.
With regards to bringing pictures to work.. I don't care about the gender of your spouse! Feel free to bring that picture of you and your special someone to keep you happy and motivated at work, so long as it doesn't look like this.
Did you seriously not get my point? Do you really think wearing a ring, a token of love and commitment which frankly any gay couple can wear without anyone reacting, compares in terms of self-degradation, attention whoring and offensiveness to this?
What about all the gay men out there who for some reason I cannot fathom act 10 times more feminine than any female ever has, and vice versa? I don't deliberately go around "acting straight", talking about being straight, dressing in a stereotypical straight manner.. Why do many (not all, never said that!) gays go to crazy extremes to differentiate themselves from the rest of the world because they were once treated badly for being different, then complain about being seen as different? I fail to see how this circular reasoning of "acting different because you are seen as different, because you act different.." is going to make life better for anyone.
No, what I described was myself, and the fact that I have no interest in bedding that sort of brainless twits. Sure, the idea of bedding pertty much anyone seemed heavenly when I was 15 but now, almost 10 years later.. not so much.
Women who (think they) need cleavage to be noticed usually aren't worth noticing.
Thanks, will without a doubt be looking into Sanderson's writings. At the moment, I am 217 pages into Warbreaker. Can't say it's Jordan or Tolkien, but it's not Twilight either. Actually, I think it ranks pretty close to the Sin Wars trilogy (Blizzard Diablo lore) both in terms of use of language and story-telling. It takes considerable talent to "paint the picture", so to speak, like Tolkien did. I still daydream about attending a party in the Shire with all the merrymaking, consumption of homemade food and drink and pipe smoking. Aaaah.. To be a hobbit! *sigh*
You should read up on what Harriet, Sanderson and Tor publishing has to say about the subject. Mr. Sanderson has already completed a good bulk of the three last books, with the last one containing Tarmon Gai'don.
Now, you might argue that Tor might want Sanderson to write the Infinity of Heaven series, as well as other side stories and prequels. However, Sanderson has already publicly posted a refusal to do this as he thinks it would just be milking Jordan's amazing work (of which Sanderson has been a fan for many years).
I think we're safe. I might check out Mistborn though. Can anyone tell me if that series is any good for someone who loves the works of Tolkien as well as WoT?
I may or may not have a point with this, but I think you are far too narrow sighted and *err* slashdot "mainstream" to enjoy WoT. How does having multiple plot lines, each deep enough to stand on it's own (disregarding whether or not you like the characters), weaving back and forth, crossing paths, pushing and pulling and sometimes crashing into each other make for bad writing?
Yes, you're allowed to say you don't like the books just like you can say you don't like Mercedes. You can, however, not claim that Lada is better than Mercedes, because it is simply untrue.
Robert Jordan was a writer of such rare talent as to write a gigantic, multi layered epic with natural, realistic characters, each with their own agendas and motives, and a huge world of different cultures and history. If you don't have the attention span to read the books and see this, that is your problem, not a flaw of the author.
As someone who isn't big on reading but has finished the entire WoT series twice now, I can't see this as first and foremost being about making money. Of course the publisher wants as much money as they can get but from interviews I have read they seem to also have a healthy respect for Robert Jordan's work. I feel like I "know" the characters of WoT in a way, and I desperately want to know how their stories end! I have faith in Harriet (Jordan's widow) finding a good author to complete R.J's legacy and with the amount of notes and work Jordan left behind, the "finish line" of which you speak will be the one Jordan intended (if the brand of shoes used to get there might be different).
Nerdrage, the best kind!
"There has to be some sort of way to compensate the artist for the hours and the sweat and the blood and the tears and the extreme, extreme expense that goes into making music,"
Seriously? I have friends who play and have played in several bands, and in general 25.000 NOK (roughly 3200 USD) covers the cost of recording an album and having someone talented and experienced (but unknown) put it all together for you.
Of course, the cost of producing and distributing millions of CD's isn't going to be insignificant but how hard can it be to find one or more online services that will sell your music for you at a fraction of the money a RIAA associate would demand?
Seriously.. where are these extreme expences? I small band can pool their savings and record an album, then sell it online at a quarter of what a cd would cost and still make more per album than bigger, more established bands make.
Bigger artists, with multi-million dollar income on every damn thing they release don't have to pay a dime more than the newb guys to record an album, and they should be able to affort printing the cd's if they absolutely must follow that old, outdated business model.
Heh, I find it rather funny that you acknowledge that I am not talking about everyone, then go on to cream me for talking about everyone.
..and if they can't be like you and bounce out fast they will feel even more like it's their fault.
Who the hell said it was fast? This is an Internet forum and as such I assume people aren't too terribly interested in hearing my life story. Suffice to say, it's been mostly bullshit since I was old enough to see how others lived and were cared for compared to me (6-7 years old). People who know me well say they doubt very much they would have survived, and I've had my insulin pen in hand, ready to od while crying like a baby and.. yeah. Fuck it, it's not interesting. Point is, you can take your assumptions about me and my situations and shove them right up your hairy, holier-than-thou, medicated ass.
When my grandparents were young, you coped. You did your job as best you could, you earned enough to eat and perhaps get a new shirt or a pair of socks now and then. My grandfather got a honorary medal for working more than 25 years without one sickday (in fact, I don't think he ever had one from he started working 12 hour days, 6 days a week at age 14).
These days though, a lot of people are on anti-depressants. A lot more than 10 years ago, a hell of a lot more than 50-60 years ago. You can't honestly claim that everyone who gets antidepressants would have committed suicide? That would mean a LOT of suicides up until about 10 years ago!
I mean, come on.. let's overdo it something aweful and say that 1% of the population offed themselves prior to the advent of antidepressants. Compare that then to numbers from the CDC which claim at least 25% of all adults will use antidepressants at least once in their lives. That means that either mental illness has exploded from less than 1% to over 25% the past 10 years, or... more than 24% of the population goes on antidepressants at least once without needing it.
It appears that you know approximately nothing about serious clinical depression or dysthymia.
It appears you can read and respond in turn. I already said (as you started your post by acknowledging) that the extreme cases are beyond my post.
but because you've been moderately (and probably situationally) depressed, you can speak for almost every case out there.
Again, shove it . As anyone who tries to claim their life sucks will argue, depression is subjective (with, of course, the exception of the absolute minority who has something actually wrong with their brains). The fact that I choose to not get into a pissing contest about who has had it worse doesn't give you the right to belittle what I have been through to try and make your point seem valid.
Why should muscles be one of the things to do the difference? I know a few nerds and geeks (myself included) who enjoy "leveling str" IRL, because it helps self esteem (and gives a good cha boost, which further boosts self esteem, which again boosts cha..)
It's more like this:
somewhat-fit-geek: Hi really-hot-chick, sup?
really-hot-chick: *fake shock* Are you looking at my chest? You perv! My eyes are up here! *giggle*
somewhat-fit-geek: Maybe you should.. you know.. put on some clothes.. Whatever *turns around to discuss thoroughly geeky stuff that makes the bimbo feel dumb/left out*
really-hot-chick: GIEF ATTENTION PLEX! TELL ME I AM SPECIAL, SO I CAN FEEL GOOD ABOUT MY SHALLOW SELF!
^^
Good thing I'm more of a leg man.
Yes, because cellulites are almost as hot as when those veins start popping out.
What's up with slashdotters using very small minorities to argue against my post regarding the majority? It's like this other article where I said something like "people (excluding a very few individuals) are fat because they sit still and eat crap all day" and got hammered by people screaming about how bad it was for those who actually have a medical condition to blame.
I actually said "Of course brain chemistry isn't the same for everyone." excluding (or so I thought) the extremes. Yes, there are people who have actual problems. This number probably fits well with the number of suicides 50 years ago when no treatment were available.
My point was that these days all you need to do is tell your MD "I feel down all the time and get tired easily.". He won't ask about your diet, he won't tell you to work out, he will give you pills. A vast majority of so-called depressed people could get by just fine without medication, and are in fact hurting themselves taking drugs they don't strictly need, instead of dealing with life.
I might just be cynical and somewhat bitter, but when anti-depressants are prescribed to anyone who claims to need them (since there is no easy way to really diagnose mental/emotional illness), things ain't like they should be!