I've been using Opera for some time now but I've become very attached to many of their other shortcut keys.
Most indispensable is going forward/back by holding left click and right clicking and vice versa. It's just so intuitive. I catch myself trying to use it constantly in file explorer.
That's what I want. Customizable Windows shortcut keys. Why not?
Bargain bins? For Blizzard games? Oh no-no-no-no-no, this does not happen.
Last year I wanted to pick up a copy of Warcraft III so I could play DotA with a friend of mine. The battle chest, mind you SEVEN YEARS after the game was initially released, was still $40. Amazon still lists it as $39.99 (-$5 discount).
I worked at EA for six months in a development position. As I was leaving, I ran into the studio lead that hired me. He asked me, "How are your hours?" (I was already in the 70's and it was Thursday). He commented, "Aw, shucks, I thought we were all done with that," before launching into a story about how every year, despite swearing he'll never do it again, he ends up in serious crunch. "Hell, just last year Paul and I were doing 110, 120 hour weeks to finish Lord of the Rings."
Wah, this kid tried to deliver my paper this morning and he only managed to throw it halfway up my driveway so I yelled at "MWAH! Don't you kids these days know how to throw? My infant niece can throw better than that!"
Then I went to Starbucks to get my regular drip coffee but they didn't leave enough space at the top of the cup for me to put my cream so I asked the barista, "Where the fuck am I supposed to put my cream? Are you stupid or something? How hard is it to make a cup of coffee with enough room for the cream?"
Then that night, when I didn't think things could get any worse, my wife wanted to bring me to some new steak restaurant with "new and innovative" cooking techniques. I was like, "What the fuck? You take the meat, you put it on the grill. You grill the meat, then it's cooked, then you eat it. What needs to be new or innovative about that? YOU COOK THE STEAK THEN YOU EAT IT."
So then I drowned myself in scotch and called it a night. Where do all these stupid people get off?
I was going to post this, but to expand on it, one should mention the roll off filter.
The idea behind the 44.1kHz number is the highest recorded frequency we're going to want to 20kHz, given that's typically considered the highest pitch (young) people can hear. So you end up with an extra 2.05kHz over that which is used as a roll off for the lowpass filter that's applied before encoding.
The argument for higher sample rates is that you can give the roll off filter a more gentle slope (or eliminate it completely if you're working at >~60kHz or whatever double the highest recorded frequency your physical gear/transducers can handle is). The gentler slope creates much less harmonic distortion than the steep 2.05kHz slope. Consider a 48Khz signal. Now I have double the rolloff space--4kHz. 48kHz sounds better than 44.1kHz not because it's recording more high pitched frequencies and that's what we're hearing, but because the low pass filter that's applied to prevent Nyquist foldover distortion has a more gentle slope which in turn creates less harmonic distortion in the passband.
This is the kind of shit the fascinates me. Get me started about noise-shaped dithering sometime.
Yeah, but the whole Gaga schtick, she's playing a character. She's rubbing all of our faces in it, too.
The way I think about it: Kurt Cobain killed himself because he was completely distraught over how his music was distributed and digested. He wrote songs about cliques and fads and how shallow and empty and stupid they are... just so see those same cliques he was mocking empty-headedly became his fans and turned his band into a fad, a trend.
He was aiming for the audience, but it sailed right over their heads. He couldn't deal with that.
GaGa, on the other hand, is aiming over their heads. When it sails right on by, she smirks to herself and collects her paycheck. She has a whole lifetime ahead of her for other projects and I seriously, seriously doubt that she's at all married to the GaGa image. Once it runs its course, I'm sure she'll move on to something else.
I considered Lady Gaga a guilty pleasure until this last video came out. I think it epitomizes all of her potential as a star and artist. All of it, down to the intentionally cheesy Europop backing, is commentary. And all of it is a mask, revealing practically nothing about the person at the helm. That's a really difficult feat to pull off, because stars tend to be insecure enough to want to be liked and respected as an icon but also as a person.
Gaga is basically trying to keep up the illusion that there is no person under there, or at least not what we are used to thinking of as a person. There is something trans-human about her ambition that I think is perfectly timely. She's a smart person having a lark, taking it a million times farther than anyone in their right mind would attempt, and making other pop stars look like the fools and relics that they actually are. I'm surprised more people don't get or appreciate that. posted by hermitosis at 6:41 AM on November 18 [132 favorites ]
Let me preface by saying: I'm probably wrong about this, but less wrong than you are.
I have a friend who works as an auto-transfusionist at the UCSF hosptial. If I remember correctly, he explained that he gets paid something between half and his full salary rate for being on call. When he actually gets called in during his on-call hours, he gets billed time and a half.
The $1-$2/hr figure seems to be astronomically low. Again, my memory isn't perfect, but I do seem to remember when this same friend was telling me about his pay scheme, he mentioned that should a couple of on-call days go by without getting called in, he'd still end up making over a grand.
I worked briefly as in-house game development staff in an entry level position at EA Redwood Shores. I, for one, using the example of EA, am of the opinion that the publisher would be willing to amputate a game's legs if it meant shipping on time.
And that's not good for the developer.
The studio I worked in, formerly just called "EARS - EA Redwood Shores" has been renamed "Visceral Games," but don't let that fool you into thinking it's anything like an independent studio. It is very EA there. It is seeped in EA there. The. Game. Must. Ship. It really amazed me how late in development they were still tooling with basic mechanics, making drastic changes to the jumping and fighting systems and then finding out it broke the level design...
I mean, there are a lot of other problems at EA other than "it's the publisher," but the environment that pressure creates IMHO causes the game to suffer terribly. Everybody there thinks in "features." They get so compartmentalized in their thinking, the sound guy is ONLY worried about sound, the art guy is ONLY worried about art. We'd sit around talking about problems with the game design in such a way you'd think the designers were in a different office on the other side of the planet--not just down the hall. "Maybe they'll get to that, but we're not going to bring it up."
Also, the publisher brings a lot of other baggage like dependence on focus groups. We ran focus groups for months and the feedback was taken very seriously. As a result of the focus groups, every objective point in the game had a blue glowy marker, making the only difference between our game and a Disney ride that in our game, you actually have to push a stick in the direction you want to go.
But fuck, man! We're too busy to question it! They say, "Do this," and we're fucking ON it because it's the difference between four and six hours of sleep tonight. It amazes me the mental gymnastics that people do to justify the hours demanded of the position, for the sake of what's increasingly becoming more and more of a mediocre game the more time we spend overworking on it... "It's what you gotta do." There's this complete tunnel vision of get to the end and everything will be okay.
I know I'm getting onto a slanderous tangent, but I gotta relate this: when I was in college, the studio head of the department I worked in and ultimately the guy who ended up hiring me came and spoke at an event at my school. The most palpable, salient statement I remember him saying was: "Once you accept that it really is all about the shareholder, it gets a lot easier."
It still makes my skin crawl.
The development subsidiaries are just "developers" and just worry about making the game. EA itself then worries about funding, marketing, and so on.
I love this. I'm picturing a Dr. Strangelove-esque war room where instead of a world map, it's a huge EA logo and there's all these different people sitting around. Seated in the middle is "The Decider," who hands down deadlines from above. Around him sits all the different departments, or advisors. There's marketing, there's funding, there's HR, there's development, there's acquisitions, there's property management, and on and on and on. The point here is that development is only one seat at this table. Apt image. I like.
and I’ve often thought...but rarely tell the author.
As if you could.
I mean, there are notable exceptions, but for a lot of games, getting somebody's email address will generally involve more than creative Google-ing.
Like I played that Plants Vs. Zombies game and I wanted to email the lead dev. and say, "Hey man, your bonus rewards are far too time-expensive. Your game is good, but not 100 hours after I finished it already good."
And I couldn't find anything resembling a contact that would go anywhere near where I wanted it to.
But re:re: the parent, while a penny might not cover the actual cost of the transaction or whatever, one has to remember that we live in "The Information Age," where we spout such platitudes as "Information is Power" and somesuch. That 16,852 people paid $0.01 for the game answers the question of, "How many people would only pay $0.01 for the game if we gave them the option?"
...is Anarchy and that system only works for the strong at the expense of the weak
And how is this different from how it works now?
And as for my MJ, I hadn't had any this morning yet when I posted that and I try never to smoke it (I have a vaporizer and I know how to cook). As for the brand, today it's Sour OG sprinkled with a little kief. Okay a lot of kief.
You're totally right man, the ad hominems really strengthen your argument.
I fail to see why I should want to love everyone.
And yet you have the unmitigated audacity to tell others what they should want? I mean this in the kindest way, but fuck you, buddy.
The only people that should be pursuing degrees that are unlikely to ever help them acquire gainful empolyment in the future should be those that are wealthy enough to pay their expenses out of pocket.
And this is why we need to get rid of money. Why should following one's passion be the exclusive domain of the wealthy?
It just kills me when people like you roll over and accept the status quo and smugly sit back, "That's just how it is." No, we can change it. All of us working together. We outgrew feudalism and monarchy, we can outgrow capitalism.
People doing what they love benefits everyone. People being forced to spend their lives following a meaningless career path for the sake of security and fear of not having money benefits NO ONE.
We all stay scared little broken individuals and we never see the truth of our unity. Sitting back and saying, "All people who X are stupid. Those people should Y," only serves to widen the gap between you and others. It only makes it harder to love.
Your complaints I guess don't concern me directly, but I have had to compromise doing what I love for the sake of financial stability. It sucks. I wake up every day and I dream of going back to school to pursue music, as even my BA was a compromise to have skills that were at least somewhat marketable.
And I didn't like having to compromise that and even so, I understand how extraordinarily lucky I am to even have that. How lucky I was to have parents help me financially as I worked through school and afterwards through my first low-paying jobs and still if things go downhill they'll be there to help bail me out in whatever capacity. I'm so lucky to have that. I'm so lucky that they have a good credit rating so they were able to co-sign my student loans. I'm lucky they bought me a car so I could get back and forth from school (which then was a forty minute commute).
Not everybody has those advantages, so by your definition I'm not a problem, but somebody who had the same passions I did but didn't have the same support would be a drain on society?
If you're really concerned about tax money, how about instead of complaining about people using it for education, why not complain about people using it for wars, or towards defense contractors and weapon research, or towards lobby groups, or as bonuses to CEOs who run their companies into the ground?
It's like you're watching a bully beat up a kid and take his lunch money, then you tell the kid it's his own damn fault for wanting lunch.
While your comments don't target me directly, while I don't suffer the ills you protest, you're still an asshole.
Have some empathy for chrissakes. The world needs artists at least as much if not more than it needs bankers. It's not the artists' fault that everyone's perception is so FUCKED.
I'm in a similar situation: unemployed with student debt. A McDonald's job wouldn't even come close to scratching my bills. Fresh out of school I had a job that paid double my state's minimum wage and I while I could pay for my rent and student loans, I still had to get my parents' help for the rest: internet, car insurance, food, commute expenses, etc.
And believe me, with that job, I was the envy of my class.
I don't know man, but I don't think I'd ever have it in me to put someone down for pursuing their passion, even including art history majors. If your idea of idiocy is a person pursuing what enraptures and engages them in an academic context, then well yeah, you're an insensitive clod and a bit of an asshole.
Not everybody acquires a skill for the sake of earning lots of money. Some people have passion and some even put that passion first. I think it's more than a crying shame that our current system does not and will not support this. People doing what they love benefits everyone and the way things are, people are by and large barred from doing that.
My student loan payments kicked in six months after I graduated. I was supposed to have a lucrative job and financial stability six months after I graduated? Please. University should be free in the same way the lower grades are free in the same way the police and fire departments are free in the same way that health care should be free.
Because it's not about the individual. As long as you take the view supporting the individual, the individual gets trampled and then assholes like you say, "See, told you so!" We need to all start looking at our problems and our lives as being connected. Is it good for everybody that passionate people are discouraged from pursuing their passions in favor of rotting in some cubicle performing the same thoughtless rote menial tasks over and over until they die?
I don't think so. That's why I chose an education that gave me a skill that's not particularly marketable. Because I love exercising that skill. Not because it brings me rewards, but because I love the very doing. I don't ask for much. I rent a modest studio apartment, I don't buy fancy clothes, I don't spend money on frivolous things like car upgrades or expensive toys, but these student loans still kick my ass.
20 years of debt for 2½ years of school. Makes sense to me.
I read the parent post on Alterslash and came here to reply... and Wankers already said everything I wanted to.
But seriously, we should be very wary of socially progressive institutions like Hogwarts. How they hold hard-and-fast to the censorship of "he-who-must-not-be-named" is truly indicative of why social progressives as a whole are only out to destroy freedoms and create a world facist state powered by a new slave class of nerds and gamers to run the censorship machines.
I disagree with your Monkey Island statement. The good MI games all had mostly sensible puzzles (except for the chicken with the pulley in the middle, that was supposed to be obscure). I thought the fourth MI was pretty bad (it shipped with a walk-through) as many of the puzzles in that game didn't even make a lick of sense, but in the same breath I don't really consider MI4 a true MI game.
I'd recommend you have a look at the new Tales of MI games that Telltale is releasing. They're excellent so far and the puzzles make a lot of sense (the same is true of the other Telltale game I've played, Strong Bad's...).
On the other hand, I always felt like Sierra's puzzles were totally whacked out from left field and there's no way I would have ever gotten through a King's/Space Quest game without some sort of walk-through. Not to mention that there were points in those games where you could get "stuck," having missed an essential item that by the time you need it you've been locked out of the area where you can obtain it.
I dunno, I'm just really fond of the Lucasarts adventure games. I guess I still think that combining the rubber hand with the pepper shaker to blow out the candle is a lot more fun than combining two halves of a hexagon so I can open the door with the strange hexagon seal on it in Zelda/Resident Evil/Doom/etc. Even if a puzzle doesn't make sense, trying to reason it through is a lot more fun to me than fetch quests.
Is that most people who are not millionaires but are working to become one would freely admit that they if they don't get there, its because they weren't good enough. You can work hard, study hard, etc, but, if you aren't good enough, you don't get to make the team millionaire.
They would freely admit that, but they'd be wrong. Just because people drank the kool-aid and then agree with the guy at the front of the room behind the podium doesn't mean they're all right.
The America you describe might have existed in the previous centuries, but at this point in time, the system is showing extravagant fault.
All those guys who already became millionaires? They spend all their time making sure they stay millionaires. In order for them to stay millionaires, it means they have to keep other people out of/from taking over their game. Corportations engage in monopolistic activity constantly. Not only is it advantageous to have a position of financial liquidity as many of them do, many industries pump millions of dollars (in some cases daily i.e. the medical insurance industry right now) into lobbyists and special interest groups in order to manipulate legistation to support their ambitions and of course, to keep other people from taking their slice of the pie.
I mean, come on! Look at all the anti-competition crap MS has pulled over the years.
I've seen too many people in my life with strong ideas, know-how, and drive fail time and time again to get their companies off the ground, and I guarantee you, it's not because they're not good enough. Every time, it's because of some asshole venture capitalist wanting a bigger slice of the pie.
That's not the America I was promised when I was a child and that's not the America I want to be living in.
How this comment gets 5: Insightful is beyond me. All like the parent replied, it's all ad hominems and strawmen. There's not a single hard argument here that holds water.
Wealth is a zero sum game, a game where the wealthy get the sum and everybody else gets as close to zero as possible without revolting against the wealthy class.
"Poisoned soul" doesn't mean anything. You should make an argument to everyone also to convince also them that people have souls prior to making any assertation towards the condition of that soul.
Your candle lighting analogy makes no sense. Let's say we're both in line at Fortune 500 company for a VP promotion. We can't both have our candles lit, can we?
Slashdot Mirror
I've been using Opera for some time now but I've become very attached to many of their other shortcut keys.
Most indispensable is going forward/back by holding left click and right clicking and vice versa. It's just so intuitive. I catch myself trying to use it constantly in file explorer.
That's what I want. Customizable Windows shortcut keys. Why not?
Bargain bins? For Blizzard games? Oh no-no-no-no-no, this does not happen.
Last year I wanted to pick up a copy of Warcraft III so I could play DotA with a friend of mine. The battle chest, mind you SEVEN YEARS after the game was initially released, was still $40. Amazon still lists it as $39.99 (-$5 discount).
Blizzard does not end up in the bargain bin.
I worked at EA for six months in a development position. As I was leaving, I ran into the studio lead that hired me. He asked me, "How are your hours?" (I was already in the 70's and it was Thursday). He commented, "Aw, shucks, I thought we were all done with that," before launching into a story about how every year, despite swearing he'll never do it again, he ends up in serious crunch. "Hell, just last year Paul and I were doing 110, 120 hour weeks to finish Lord of the Rings."
And so I didn't pursue extended employment at EA.
Wah, this kid tried to deliver my paper this morning and he only managed to throw it halfway up my driveway so I yelled at "MWAH! Don't you kids these days know how to throw? My infant niece can throw better than that!"
Then I went to Starbucks to get my regular drip coffee but they didn't leave enough space at the top of the cup for me to put my cream so I asked the barista, "Where the fuck am I supposed to put my cream? Are you stupid or something? How hard is it to make a cup of coffee with enough room for the cream?"
Then that night, when I didn't think things could get any worse, my wife wanted to bring me to some new steak restaurant with "new and innovative" cooking techniques. I was like, "What the fuck? You take the meat, you put it on the grill. You grill the meat, then it's cooked, then you eat it. What needs to be new or innovative about that? YOU COOK THE STEAK THEN YOU EAT IT."
So then I drowned myself in scotch and called it a night. Where do all these stupid people get off?
I was going to post this, but to expand on it, one should mention the roll off filter.
The idea behind the 44.1kHz number is the highest recorded frequency we're going to want to 20kHz, given that's typically considered the highest pitch (young) people can hear. So you end up with an extra 2.05kHz over that which is used as a roll off for the lowpass filter that's applied before encoding.
The argument for higher sample rates is that you can give the roll off filter a more gentle slope (or eliminate it completely if you're working at >~60kHz or whatever double the highest recorded frequency your physical gear/transducers can handle is). The gentler slope creates much less harmonic distortion than the steep 2.05kHz slope. Consider a 48Khz signal. Now I have double the rolloff space--4kHz. 48kHz sounds better than 44.1kHz not because it's recording more high pitched frequencies and that's what we're hearing, but because the low pass filter that's applied to prevent Nyquist foldover distortion has a more gentle slope which in turn creates less harmonic distortion in the passband.
This is the kind of shit the fascinates me. Get me started about noise-shaped dithering sometime.
Yeah, but the whole Gaga schtick, she's playing a character. She's rubbing all of our faces in it, too.
The way I think about it: Kurt Cobain killed himself because he was completely distraught over how his music was distributed and digested. He wrote songs about cliques and fads and how shallow and empty and stupid they are... just so see those same cliques he was mocking empty-headedly became his fans and turned his band into a fad, a trend.
He was aiming for the audience, but it sailed right over their heads. He couldn't deal with that.
GaGa, on the other hand, is aiming over their heads. When it sails right on by, she smirks to herself and collects her paycheck. She has a whole lifetime ahead of her for other projects and I seriously, seriously doubt that she's at all married to the GaGa image. Once it runs its course, I'm sure she'll move on to something else.
You know, I was right there with you knocking Lady GaGa, but there's really more to her than she lets on...
http://vigilantcitizen.com/?p=2737
Here she is pre-fame performing at a NYU talent show: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NM51qOpwcIM
And a Metafilter comment that expresses what I want to say very well: http://www.metafilter.com/86769/Norah-Jones-Look-Out#2827870
I considered Lady Gaga a guilty pleasure until this last video came out. I think it epitomizes all of her potential as a star and artist. All of it, down to the intentionally cheesy Europop backing, is commentary. And all of it is a mask, revealing practically nothing about the person at the helm. That's a really difficult feat to pull off, because stars tend to be insecure enough to want to be liked and respected as an icon but also as a person.
Gaga is basically trying to keep up the illusion that there is no person under there, or at least not what we are used to thinking of as a person. There is something trans-human about her ambition that I think is perfectly timely. She's a smart person having a lark, taking it a million times farther than anyone in their right mind would attempt, and making other pop stars look like the fools and relics that they actually are. I'm surprised more people don't get or appreciate that.
posted by hermitosis at 6:41 AM on November 18 [132 favorites ]
This doesn't sound right.
Let me preface by saying: I'm probably wrong about this, but less wrong than you are.
I have a friend who works as an auto-transfusionist at the UCSF hosptial. If I remember correctly, he explained that he gets paid something between half and his full salary rate for being on call. When he actually gets called in during his on-call hours, he gets billed time and a half.
The $1-$2/hr figure seems to be astronomically low. Again, my memory isn't perfect, but I do seem to remember when this same friend was telling me about his pay scheme, he mentioned that should a couple of on-call days go by without getting called in, he'd still end up making over a grand.
I worked briefly as in-house game development staff in an entry level position at EA Redwood Shores. I, for one, using the example of EA, am of the opinion that the publisher would be willing to amputate a game's legs if it meant shipping on time.
And that's not good for the developer.
The studio I worked in, formerly just called "EARS - EA Redwood Shores" has been renamed "Visceral Games," but don't let that fool you into thinking it's anything like an independent studio. It is very EA there. It is seeped in EA there. The. Game. Must. Ship. It really amazed me how late in development they were still tooling with basic mechanics, making drastic changes to the jumping and fighting systems and then finding out it broke the level design...
I mean, there are a lot of other problems at EA other than "it's the publisher," but the environment that pressure creates IMHO causes the game to suffer terribly. Everybody there thinks in "features." They get so compartmentalized in their thinking, the sound guy is ONLY worried about sound, the art guy is ONLY worried about art. We'd sit around talking about problems with the game design in such a way you'd think the designers were in a different office on the other side of the planet--not just down the hall. "Maybe they'll get to that, but we're not going to bring it up."
Also, the publisher brings a lot of other baggage like dependence on focus groups. We ran focus groups for months and the feedback was taken very seriously. As a result of the focus groups, every objective point in the game had a blue glowy marker, making the only difference between our game and a Disney ride that in our game, you actually have to push a stick in the direction you want to go.
But fuck, man! We're too busy to question it! They say, "Do this," and we're fucking ON it because it's the difference between four and six hours of sleep tonight. It amazes me the mental gymnastics that people do to justify the hours demanded of the position, for the sake of what's increasingly becoming more and more of a mediocre game the more time we spend overworking on it... "It's what you gotta do." There's this complete tunnel vision of get to the end and everything will be okay.
I know I'm getting onto a slanderous tangent, but I gotta relate this: when I was in college, the studio head of the department I worked in and ultimately the guy who ended up hiring me came and spoke at an event at my school. The most palpable, salient statement I remember him saying was: "Once you accept that it really is all about the shareholder, it gets a lot easier."
It still makes my skin crawl.
The development subsidiaries are just "developers" and just worry about making the game. EA itself then worries about funding, marketing, and so on.
I love this. I'm picturing a Dr. Strangelove-esque war room where instead of a world map, it's a huge EA logo and there's all these different people sitting around. Seated in the middle is "The Decider," who hands down deadlines from above. Around him sits all the different departments, or advisors. There's marketing, there's funding, there's HR, there's development, there's acquisitions, there's property management, and on and on and on. The point here is that development is only one seat at this table. Apt image. I like.
(accidentally posted anonymously)
and I’ve often thought...but rarely tell the author.
As if you could.
I mean, there are notable exceptions, but for a lot of games, getting somebody's email address will generally involve more than creative Google-ing.
Like I played that Plants Vs. Zombies game and I wanted to email the lead dev. and say, "Hey man, your bonus rewards are far too time-expensive. Your game is good, but not 100 hours after I finished it already good."
And I couldn't find anything resembling a contact that would go anywhere near where I wanted it to.
But re:re: the parent, while a penny might not cover the actual cost of the transaction or whatever, one has to remember that we live in "The Information Age," where we spout such platitudes as "Information is Power" and somesuch. That 16,852 people paid $0.01 for the game answers the question of, "How many people would only pay $0.01 for the game if we gave them the option?"
And that, friend, is Power.
First you better stop waiving it like a feather-duster.
how appropriate, you fight like a cow
I am rubber you are glue.
I fail to see
Couldn't have said it better myself.
...is Anarchy and that system only works for the strong at the expense of the weak
And how is this different from how it works now?
And as for my MJ, I hadn't had any this morning yet when I posted that and I try never to smoke it (I have a vaporizer and I know how to cook). As for the brand, today it's Sour OG sprinkled with a little kief. Okay a lot of kief.
You're totally right man, the ad hominems really strengthen your argument.
I fail to see why I should want to love everyone.
And yet you have the unmitigated audacity to tell others what they should want? I mean this in the kindest way, but fuck you, buddy.
The only people that should be pursuing degrees that are unlikely to ever help them acquire gainful empolyment in the future should be those that are wealthy enough to pay their expenses out of pocket.
And this is why we need to get rid of money. Why should following one's passion be the exclusive domain of the wealthy?
It just kills me when people like you roll over and accept the status quo and smugly sit back, "That's just how it is." No, we can change it. All of us working together. We outgrew feudalism and monarchy, we can outgrow capitalism.
People doing what they love benefits everyone. People being forced to spend their lives following a meaningless career path for the sake of security and fear of not having money benefits NO ONE.
We all stay scared little broken individuals and we never see the truth of our unity. Sitting back and saying, "All people who X are stupid. Those people should Y," only serves to widen the gap between you and others. It only makes it harder to love.
Your complaints I guess don't concern me directly, but I have had to compromise doing what I love for the sake of financial stability. It sucks. I wake up every day and I dream of going back to school to pursue music, as even my BA was a compromise to have skills that were at least somewhat marketable.
And I didn't like having to compromise that and even so, I understand how extraordinarily lucky I am to even have that. How lucky I was to have parents help me financially as I worked through school and afterwards through my first low-paying jobs and still if things go downhill they'll be there to help bail me out in whatever capacity. I'm so lucky to have that. I'm so lucky that they have a good credit rating so they were able to co-sign my student loans. I'm lucky they bought me a car so I could get back and forth from school (which then was a forty minute commute).
Not everybody has those advantages, so by your definition I'm not a problem, but somebody who had the same passions I did but didn't have the same support would be a drain on society?
If you're really concerned about tax money, how about instead of complaining about people using it for education, why not complain about people using it for wars, or towards defense contractors and weapon research, or towards lobby groups, or as bonuses to CEOs who run their companies into the ground?
It's like you're watching a bully beat up a kid and take his lunch money, then you tell the kid it's his own damn fault for wanting lunch.
While your comments don't target me directly, while I don't suffer the ills you protest, you're still an asshole.
Have some empathy for chrissakes. The world needs artists at least as much if not more than it needs bankers. It's not the artists' fault that everyone's perception is so FUCKED.
ugh, wrong quote. meant to quote
Maybe I'm just an insensitive clod
I fail at posting today.
(double post, accidentally posted anonymously.)
Yes. Yes, you are.
I'm in a similar situation: unemployed with student debt. A McDonald's job wouldn't even come close to scratching my bills. Fresh out of school I had a job that paid double my state's minimum wage and I while I could pay for my rent and student loans, I still had to get my parents' help for the rest: internet, car insurance, food, commute expenses, etc.
And believe me, with that job, I was the envy of my class.
I don't know man, but I don't think I'd ever have it in me to put someone down for pursuing their passion, even including art history majors. If your idea of idiocy is a person pursuing what enraptures and engages them in an academic context, then well yeah, you're an insensitive clod and a bit of an asshole.
Not everybody acquires a skill for the sake of earning lots of money. Some people have passion and some even put that passion first. I think it's more than a crying shame that our current system does not and will not support this. People doing what they love benefits everyone and the way things are, people are by and large barred from doing that.
My student loan payments kicked in six months after I graduated. I was supposed to have a lucrative job and financial stability six months after I graduated? Please. University should be free in the same way the lower grades are free in the same way the police and fire departments are free in the same way that health care should be free.
Because it's not about the individual. As long as you take the view supporting the individual, the individual gets trampled and then assholes like you say, "See, told you so!" We need to all start looking at our problems and our lives as being connected. Is it good for everybody that passionate people are discouraged from pursuing their passions in favor of rotting in some cubicle performing the same thoughtless rote menial tasks over and over until they die?
I don't think so. That's why I chose an education that gave me a skill that's not particularly marketable. Because I love exercising that skill. Not because it brings me rewards, but because I love the very doing. I don't ask for much. I rent a modest studio apartment, I don't buy fancy clothes, I don't spend money on frivolous things like car upgrades or expensive toys, but these student loans still kick my ass.
20 years of debt for 2½ years of school. Makes sense to me.
I read the parent post on Alterslash and came here to reply... and Wankers already said everything I wanted to.
But seriously, we should be very wary of socially progressive institutions like Hogwarts. How they hold hard-and-fast to the censorship of "he-who-must-not-be-named" is truly indicative of why social progressives as a whole are only out to destroy freedoms and create a world facist state powered by a new slave class of nerds and gamers to run the censorship machines.
I think they parrot a lot of conventional wisdom...that is...most likely, quite wrong.
But hey, in a democracy, we all get what the worst of us deserve.
Is anybody else seeing the contradiction here?
I disagree with your Monkey Island statement. The good MI games all had mostly sensible puzzles (except for the chicken with the pulley in the middle, that was supposed to be obscure). I thought the fourth MI was pretty bad (it shipped with a walk-through) as many of the puzzles in that game didn't even make a lick of sense, but in the same breath I don't really consider MI4 a true MI game.
I'd recommend you have a look at the new Tales of MI games that Telltale is releasing. They're excellent so far and the puzzles make a lot of sense (the same is true of the other Telltale game I've played, Strong Bad's...).
On the other hand, I always felt like Sierra's puzzles were totally whacked out from left field and there's no way I would have ever gotten through a King's/Space Quest game without some sort of walk-through. Not to mention that there were points in those games where you could get "stuck," having missed an essential item that by the time you need it you've been locked out of the area where you can obtain it.
I dunno, I'm just really fond of the Lucasarts adventure games. I guess I still think that combining the rubber hand with the pepper shaker to blow out the candle is a lot more fun than combining two halves of a hexagon so I can open the door with the strange hexagon seal on it in Zelda/Resident Evil/Doom/etc. Even if a puzzle doesn't make sense, trying to reason it through is a lot more fun to me than fetch quests.
This is the most blatant example of moderator abuse I have seen on slashdot, every comment modded a troll. puuulease.
I was thinking the exact same thing.
dfenstrate is a dolt, yet every post he makes gets rated +5...
Watch this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WWERzwbobOk
This is of course part of what I spoke of- a thousand underlying premises that make these discussions difficult at best.
I'm terribly sorry to do this point-by-point response, as I generally find it tiresome and cosntantly spiraling, but there it is.
You're right, you're way smarter than all of us unwashed masses who don't deserve the benefit of your supreme insight.
How do you even take yourself seriously?
"Nothing is easier than self-deception. For what each man wishes, that he also believes to be true." -Demosthenes
Is that most people who are not millionaires but are working to become one would freely admit that they if they don't get there, its because they weren't good enough. You can work hard, study hard, etc, but, if you aren't good enough, you don't get to make the team millionaire.
They would freely admit that, but they'd be wrong. Just because people drank the kool-aid and then agree with the guy at the front of the room behind the podium doesn't mean they're all right.
The America you describe might have existed in the previous centuries, but at this point in time, the system is showing extravagant fault.
All those guys who already became millionaires? They spend all their time making sure they stay millionaires. In order for them to stay millionaires, it means they have to keep other people out of/from taking over their game. Corportations engage in monopolistic activity constantly. Not only is it advantageous to have a position of financial liquidity as many of them do, many industries pump millions of dollars (in some cases daily i.e. the medical insurance industry right now) into lobbyists and special interest groups in order to manipulate legistation to support their ambitions and of course, to keep other people from taking their slice of the pie.
I mean, come on! Look at all the anti-competition crap MS has pulled over the years.
I've seen too many people in my life with strong ideas, know-how, and drive fail time and time again to get their companies off the ground, and I guarantee you, it's not because they're not good enough. Every time, it's because of some asshole venture capitalist wanting a bigger slice of the pie.
That's not the America I was promised when I was a child and that's not the America I want to be living in.
How this comment gets 5: Insightful is beyond me. All like the parent replied, it's all ad hominems and strawmen. There's not a single hard argument here that holds water.
http://www.jmooneyham.com/the-huge-mountain-of-cash-separating-the-rich-from-everyone-else.html (and seriously, I'm seeing new infographics like this every few days, this is just the most recent)
Wealth is a zero sum game, a game where the wealthy get the sum and everybody else gets as close to zero as possible without revolting against the wealthy class.
"Poisoned soul" doesn't mean anything. You should make an argument to everyone also to convince also them that people have souls prior to making any assertation towards the condition of that soul.
Your candle lighting analogy makes no sense. Let's say we're both in line at Fortune 500 company for a VP promotion. We can't both have our candles lit, can we?