Unfortunately, the content matters little if the color scheme is so dreadful that the user has to highlight the text or open the source HTML to read said content.
... you think I'm joking, but making your teeny-tiny-point font match your background color seems to be popular in certain web circles. I have found this correlates highly with the "2 inch by 2 inch iframe" and "I'm 1337 with my warez copy of Dreamweaver" school of web design.
My point is that you're assuming a minimum level of usability to the color scheme to begin with, and I think that that's a dangerous assumption.
Personally, I oft times prefer subs simply because I like to razz on whatever I'm watching (even if I love it! Especially if I love it! Nothing is better than mocking the flaws of a series you love!), and it's easier to read and talk than listen and talk, I find.
I also agree with the poster who said the dub voices often sound cheesy.... yeah, they probably do in Japanese, too, but I am stupid gaijin who likes to hear people talking Japanese. It also feels vaguely educational that way, so that when I'm watching anime instead of doing Japanese homework, I can at least feel somewhat virtuous. Right? Right.
But I've found my day job unfulfilling for years, and as a musician I often wonder if I should follow my heart elsewhere.
I think a major fallacy that the author of this review (and many other people) make is that the purpose of a job or career is to make you happy or "fulfilled." We've been so inundated with messages of "Do what you love" that if we find ourselves in a job that's less than enjoyable for one minute we seem to think we've done something wrong.
A job is not meant to give us personal fulfillment. It is meant to give us money. Where you find personal fulfillment is entirely up to you--whether that be in your hobbies, your romantic life, or your own pet projects. Given, some people do find fulfillment in their jobs, but honestly, I'd much rather have a menial job that I can leave at the office, than a job so all-consuming that I have time for nothing else in my life.
Only when a job truly does make your life measurably worse instead of better--and only you can be the judge of that--should it be considered "the wrong job." Leaving a perfectly good job for no reason other than it's "unfulfilling" seems, well, fatuous, to me.
Depends on the Lupin. With a long-running series of manga, three separate TV series, and a series of movies, how family friendly it is varies by series.
Take the manga for example, which is most definitely adult oriented, runs in adult manga anthologies (not "adult" like "smut," here, although there is some of that), and regularly features a barely-clad Fujiko.
I haven't seen any of the TV series, but have been told that they're pretty racy.
The movies really vary in "adult" content, since they have so many different directors. Watch Legend of Twilight Gemini, one of my favorite Lupin movies. There's quite a bit of sex and naked_Fujiko in there. Of course, then you have Castle of Cagliostro (which did involve Miyazaki, you're right there), where Fujiko is much less fanservice-y, and thus, there's a lot less adult content.
HTML is all I use. I've never thought it was that difficult; what's difficult about writing a little HTML and using FTP? (Of course, I started because I had a school webpage and didn't know how to fill it; a year later someone told me that was a blog). I have a PHP script for comments; though no permalinks or automatic archival or other nice features that don't matter that much to me. I do it this way because I'm a control freak, and I hate having to depend on other people for my blogging.
But most people whose blogs I read don't go through all this trouble. Is it because they're not technically savvy? Some yes, but some of them run their own servers. These types are usually running MoveableType or B2, though, which run off one's own server/webhost, which gives you a large amount of control over what you do.
So, I am as confused as you. Basically, I think it's just laziness--it's easier to have everything set up for you (or set it up first, if you're tech savvy and a bit of a control freak) and just type a little and push a button, then to type the HTML and upload the page every time.
Of course, I've been writing HTML, and by hand, for so long now that I find it difficult to *not* type angle brackets, and have been known to put <p> tags by accident when typing papers or using a BBS, so maybe it's just me.
" There are many studies and anecdotal evidence that contradict what you say regarding gender traits and environment."
Please name some, as I have done in the response to the post above yours.
"When there are traits that change little from culture to culture and from social class to social class (i.e. education level) one has to begin to suspect somethin that is not the environment as the cuase for those traits."
Why can't environment account for all that? Where does it say that environment can only account for a certain amount of human, or sex, variation? If you agree that serial killers, for example (because it is a *big* change from the human "norm"), are innately violent, then your argument is internally consistent; but I doubt you would make that claim.
Furthermore, does it serve any purpose to treat any sex differently based on these differences, environmental or otherwise? I'm sure you would like to see more women take in interest in gaming. If it's really so pervasive a difference between men and women as you say, I really don't think we're going to get anywhere by making tiring generalizations about men and women as whole sex groups (and some generalizations are more tiring than others). You don't effect social change by constantly staring at the same dark patches, you do it by turning on the lights. You don't like that many women don't game? Try to get them interested in it. Unless you take responsibility for your behavior, you can't piss and moan about others' behavior.
"I've seen several comments from women who "can't wait to get to the next little bit of plot information or character interaction" [see here [slashdot.org]]. Is this a case of being _in_ the game, or watching the story unfold?"
I can't speak for all women, but the reason, personally, that I enjoy Morrowind, is indeed that I enjoy being in the story. I step into one of the Dwemer ruins (Dwemer are the dwarves of the game, and the ruins are full of lava and clanky metal and ghosts) and I feel immediately like, "Look, I'm in Moria!" Gives me happy little shivers.....
Another interesting thing about "men like stepping into the game and being part of it" theory," I find myself asking myself, re: Tomb Raider: why do so many men want to be Lara Croft? Fascinating question, that.
"Also, I have some interest in psych and one of my roommates is huge on it. If you could describe or reference any of those studies, I'd be very interested in reading them and showing my roommate."
In particular, I was thinking of an interesting piece of ethology that I read about in a course textbook I had last year, Evolving Brains. It cites some research in simians where the amount of caretaking a father simian does (this depends on the kind of monkey) has a strong affect on the amount of estrogen produced (and as a result, length of lifespan, since estrogen is apparently a useful adaptation to make certain that caretakers live long enough to take care of their children). While we often assume that the connection is the other way around--having hormones makes you want to take care of children--in fact this study suggests that's it the other way around: caretaking leads to having estrogen.
"How about, 'women don't like video games because they have different ratios of hormones which affect their temperments and development than guys do?' "
See above. Estrogen production is an ongoing process, not something determined at birth, as well, and I think various life events can affect that.
"So we've gone from 'Please think before you make generalizations about what women like and don't like' to assuming that all women have good taste in games and 'don't tend to play many FPSes'?"
I said I didn't play FPSes, and stated why, as an illustration. I doubt that applies to all women; it's just why I'm not a fan of such games.
I admit, when talking about sex and gender, it is hard to avoid making generalizations; it's hard to make even a positive point about sex or gender without making them, and I know I make them, especially when posting at 4 AM ^_^. That's why I have more patience for this issue than I usually do.I'm not saying differences aren't there; my difference is that I don't attribute them to biology.
More importanly, what I'm saying is that it's dehumanizing to turn individual women into tokens of a type "woman" without regard to their individual interests. (Funny, how so called feminists do this so readily. And they wonder why so many women find them unsympathetic. Internalized oppression, my ass).
I know I shouldn't expect a better caliber of responses around here, but I must admit that I was discouraged by the kind of responses to this story. A large portion of them have been of the "of course women don't want to play test this game, women don't think like us/women don't like being competitive/most women aren't hardcore gamers."
I think it's the essentialist ones that peeve me the most. Take it from someone who has studied a good deal of evolutionary psych; there is not a whole lot of evidence that there are personality differences between men and women which cannot be accounted for by environment . In essence, the only real difference you're looking at is in naughty bits. There is nothing, nothing about having female naughty bits that means that you don't like to play video games but do like to make cookies and shop. If you don't believe me, say to yourself, "Women don't like video games because they have vaginas" and realize how ridiculous that sounds.
I am a female gamer (my current obsession is Morrowind, for the curious; I spent money I didn't really have to get a Geforce 3, *just* to have the advanced water effects). Furthermore, I know, plenty, plenty of female gamers. No dearth of them; from my housemate who stays up until 3 AM playing Okage, to my Soul Caliber ass-kicking close friend. I don't know where you're looking if you can't find female gamers. (I suspect the answer involves parents' houses and subterranean areas). Go to a convention, for chrissakes!
Admittedly, there probably are more male gamers than female (I base that on environmental, not biological factors), but I suspect that the reason they're suffering such a dearth of play testers is that well, many women gamers have distinguishing taste in games, and let's face it, Tomb Raider suffers in originality. For example, I don't tend to play many FPSes because I don't think they're very interesting. It's not that I'm not "competitive" or don't like violence or don't "want to be feel powerful"--everyone wants to feel powerful!--but that they tend to be ugly and monotonous to me after a while. I much prefer strategy games, especially ones like Alpha Centauri or Civ III which have an endless amount of possible endings, or games that have been well-crafted (hence the Morrowind obsession) to suck you into the experience (so much for the "theory" posited above that women don't like to enter into the world of the game). I think a lot of distinguishing gamers, male and female, would agree with me on this.
Please think before you make generalizations about what women like and don't like. Don't tell me I don't like to be competitive, don't tell me I don't like to feel powerful, because it's a lie. And for goodness sakes, quit reading the John Gray, it's bad for you.
... at least, I suspect it did. Long story short, we had a short outage today for about an hour or two. Shortly afterward, all students receive an email saying that we suffered a DDoS attack, when (quoting them now) "... several computers on campus were flooding the network with traffic to two off-campus addresses."
Only a couple of hours later, we once again received a message, this time telling us to beware two viruses, one of which was Bugbear.
Of course, the parent post to yours fails to point out that by "close to Canada," he means "three hours away on I-87." I still think that's too long a commute ^_^
And that's assuming you live right on the border.... it's yet another hour to a city of any size (Montreal). But if you live in Montreal, why the hell would you commute to puny Albany?
(Silly me, posting as an AC before.. at work and too lazy to log in.)
Anyway, I guess I probably didn't use abstraction in the way you expected. Here I meant "pragmatism" as the "tools to do the job," to paraphrase the parent, as opposed to "abstraction," which I meant here by the more colloquial usage as "lots of knowledge that is divorced (abstracted) from what you actually need to do."
It's not abstraction in the programming, data abstraction, "hiding the nitty gritty" sense of the word, but a kind of divorced knowledge that I associate with my early comp sci classes, which had us doing ridiculous things like implementing set theory with Scheme.(That had an absurd level of "hiding" kind of abstraction as well, but that's neither here nor there).
That's actually my problem with O'Reilly books, and why I can never get started in learning anything new from them--much too much theory too soon, and a bottom-up, start from "Hello world!" kind of approach to things. I'm surprised this one is a little different. I generally much prefer to start with something a little more goal-oriented and then, when I feel comfortable with "the tools," and start wondering, "Heh, tell me more about this language/whathaveyou," *then* I pick up an O'Reilly book, or some other good reference.
So yes, I like programming with practical goals. That was my point, and it only took me two posts to get to it!
"It's biology. You can fight it. But in the end, biology pumps your blood, regulates your hormones, and fires your neurons. You have free will, but there are certain things that are biologically engineered by nature to make you happy and content. It's often wise to listen to them."
Sounds like someone's been reading a bit too much John Gray....
You like to make it sound like you have the body of evolutionary psychology behind you, when, honestly, there aren't a whole lot of sex differences in *personality* (keyword there) that have been confirmed by evolutionary psych. (Clearly, you missed the lesson in evolutionary psych which mentioned, hey, there *are* primates in which the males do take care of infants instead of feeling the need to compete with them over resources). I personally believe that aside from naughty bits, men and women probably aren't that different at birth. Given, we have lots of time after birth to conform to silly stereotypes.
You seem to think that with the use of the words "some" and "most" you are safe affirming whatever stereotypes you like. You think it's fine to say "(Most/some) women are submissive by nature" and "(Most/some) men are dominant by nature." You also seem fine saying, "(Most/some) women like to raise children by nature" or "(Most/some) women like to clean toilets by nature."
Take a moment to say, "I like cleaning toilets because I have a vagina" and then realize what a non sequitor that is. And then take a moment to realize that your essentialist statements sound just as silly.
Fun toys, but nothing useful? I beg to differ. Almost all the work of robotics today (including the work of Rodney Brooks) is reactive and behavior-based. (Unless, of course, you want to argue that this isn't interesting work, but I'm not sure this was your argument).
True, Braitenberg (in the 80s) did just revive the reactive, behavior-based architecture from Grey Walter, but it still started robotics going in much more productive direction than it had been. Would you prefer the traditional deliberative, abstract-model forming robot design that was forwarded by Minsky in the 50s? These sort of robots would map the world and then move accordingly, but it took them *forever* to do so. Nowadays, this model is coming back in some forms as our technology finally allows for representations of the world to be created with some speed, but it is usually involved in hybrid systems, where it works alongside reactive systems and acts as the final arbiter of decision.
The advantage of the reactive, behavior-based design (together with subsumption architecture, in which higher-priority behaviors suppress lower priority behaviors; also yet another element which puts Brooks' and others' robots a step above Tilden's in complexity) is that it can react quickly to the world, which a representation-forming system can't. In the end, it doesn't matter if your robot can make a really great map of the world or play a brilliant game of chess, if it can't keep itself from running into walls.
On another note, I like Tilden's 'bots, but I regret that (as far as I know), you can't put them together yourself (although you can certainly tinker with them afterwards). The Tutebot, a tutorial, analog robot designed by the authors of the book Mobile Robots, is much more fun. You can get yourself a copy of Mobile Robots, get the plans for Tutebot, and build it yourself, all the while leading yourself down the path to more complicated robotics work.
Slashdot Mirror
Unfortunately, the content matters little if the color scheme is so dreadful that the user has to highlight the text or open the source HTML to read said content.
... you think I'm joking, but making your teeny-tiny-point font match your background color seems to be popular in certain web circles. I have found this correlates highly with the "2 inch by 2 inch iframe" and "I'm 1337 with my warez copy of Dreamweaver" school of web design.
My point is that you're assuming a minimum level of usability to the color scheme to begin with, and I think that that's a dangerous assumption.
I also agree with the poster who said the dub voices often sound cheesy.... yeah, they probably do in Japanese, too, but I am stupid gaijin who likes to hear people talking Japanese. It also feels vaguely educational that way, so that when I'm watching anime instead of doing Japanese homework, I can at least feel somewhat virtuous. Right? Right.
I think a major fallacy that the author of this review (and many other people) make is that the purpose of a job or career is to make you happy or "fulfilled." We've been so inundated with messages of "Do what you love" that if we find ourselves in a job that's less than enjoyable for one minute we seem to think we've done something wrong.
A job is not meant to give us personal fulfillment. It is meant to give us money. Where you find personal fulfillment is entirely up to you--whether that be in your hobbies, your romantic life, or your own pet projects. Given, some people do find fulfillment in their jobs, but honestly, I'd much rather have a menial job that I can leave at the office, than a job so all-consuming that I have time for nothing else in my life.
Only when a job truly does make your life measurably worse instead of better--and only you can be the judge of that--should it be considered "the wrong job." Leaving a perfectly good job for no reason other than it's "unfulfilling" seems, well, fatuous, to me.
Depends on the Lupin. With a long-running series of manga, three separate TV series, and a series of movies, how family friendly it is varies by series. Take the manga for example, which is most definitely adult oriented, runs in adult manga anthologies (not "adult" like "smut," here, although there is some of that), and regularly features a barely-clad Fujiko. I haven't seen any of the TV series, but have been told that they're pretty racy. The movies really vary in "adult" content, since they have so many different directors. Watch Legend of Twilight Gemini, one of my favorite Lupin movies. There's quite a bit of sex and naked_Fujiko in there. Of course, then you have Castle of Cagliostro (which did involve Miyazaki, you're right there), where Fujiko is much less fanservice-y, and thus, there's a lot less adult content.
I agree. I started out my last webpage layout wanting to do a very neat, standards-complying page, that didn't use tables for layout.
Of course, then I tried to get that page to work in NS4.
You can imagine my delight.
Say what you will about tables, they are predictable, if nothing else.
But not many.
HTML is all I use. I've never thought it was that difficult; what's difficult about writing a little HTML and using FTP? (Of course, I started because I had a school webpage and didn't know how to fill it; a year later someone told me that was a blog). I have a PHP script for comments; though no permalinks or automatic archival or other nice features that don't matter that much to me. I do it this way because I'm a control freak, and I hate having to depend on other people for my blogging.
But most people whose blogs I read don't go through all this trouble. Is it because they're not technically savvy? Some yes, but some of them run their own servers. These types are usually running MoveableType or B2, though, which run off one's own server/webhost, which gives you a large amount of control over what you do.
So, I am as confused as you. Basically, I think it's just laziness--it's easier to have everything set up for you (or set it up first, if you're tech savvy and a bit of a control freak) and just type a little and push a button, then to type the HTML and upload the page every time.
Of course, I've been writing HTML, and by hand, for so long now that I find it difficult to *not* type angle brackets, and have been known to put <p> tags by accident when typing papers or using a BBS, so maybe it's just me.
" There are many studies and anecdotal evidence that contradict what you say regarding gender traits and environment."
Please name some, as I have done in the response to the post above yours.
"When there are traits that change little from culture to culture and from social class to social class (i.e. education level) one has to begin to suspect somethin that is not the environment as the cuase for those traits."
Why can't environment account for all that? Where does it say that environment can only account for a certain amount of human, or sex, variation? If you agree that serial killers, for example (because it is a *big* change from the human "norm"), are innately violent, then your argument is internally consistent; but I doubt you would make that claim.
Furthermore, does it serve any purpose to treat any sex differently based on these differences, environmental or otherwise? I'm sure you would like to see more women take in interest in gaming. If it's really so pervasive a difference between men and women as you say, I really don't think we're going to get anywhere by making tiring generalizations about men and women as whole sex groups (and some generalizations are more tiring than others). You don't effect social change by constantly staring at the same dark patches, you do it by turning on the lights. You don't like that many women don't game? Try to get them interested in it. Unless you take responsibility for your behavior, you can't piss and moan about others' behavior.
I forgot to reply to your last comment:
"I've seen several comments from women who "can't wait to get to the next little bit of plot information or character interaction" [see here [slashdot.org]]. Is this a case of being _in_ the game, or watching the story unfold?"
I can't speak for all women, but the reason, personally, that I enjoy Morrowind, is indeed that I enjoy being in the story. I step into one of the Dwemer ruins (Dwemer are the dwarves of the game, and the ruins are full of lava and clanky metal and ghosts) and I feel immediately like, "Look, I'm in Moria!" Gives me happy little shivers.....
Another interesting thing about "men like stepping into the game and being part of it" theory," I find myself asking myself, re: Tomb Raider: why do so many men want to be Lara Croft? Fascinating question, that.
In particular, I was thinking of an interesting piece of ethology that I read about in a course textbook I had last year, Evolving Brains. It cites some research in simians where the amount of caretaking a father simian does (this depends on the kind of monkey) has a strong affect on the amount of estrogen produced (and as a result, length of lifespan, since estrogen is apparently a useful adaptation to make certain that caretakers live long enough to take care of their children). While we often assume that the connection is the other way around--having hormones makes you want to take care of children--in fact this study suggests that's it the other way around: caretaking leads to having estrogen.
"How about, 'women don't like video games because they have different ratios of hormones which affect their temperments and development than guys do?' "
See above. Estrogen production is an ongoing process, not something determined at birth, as well, and I think various life events can affect that.
"So we've gone from 'Please think before you make generalizations about what women like and don't like' to assuming that all women have good taste in games and 'don't tend to play many FPSes'?"
I said I didn't play FPSes, and stated why, as an illustration. I doubt that applies to all women; it's just why I'm not a fan of such games. I admit, when talking about sex and gender, it is hard to avoid making generalizations; it's hard to make even a positive point about sex or gender without making them, and I know I make them, especially when posting at 4 AM ^_^. That's why I have more patience for this issue than I usually do.I'm not saying differences aren't there; my difference is that I don't attribute them to biology.
More importanly, what I'm saying is that it's dehumanizing to turn individual women into tokens of a type "woman" without regard to their individual interests. (Funny, how so called feminists do this so readily. And they wonder why so many women find them unsympathetic. Internalized oppression, my ass).
I think it's the essentialist ones that peeve me the most. Take it from someone who has studied a good deal of evolutionary psych; there is not a whole lot of evidence that there are personality differences between men and women which cannot be accounted for by environment . In essence, the only real difference you're looking at is in naughty bits. There is nothing, nothing about having female naughty bits that means that you don't like to play video games but do like to make cookies and shop. If you don't believe me, say to yourself, "Women don't like video games because they have vaginas" and realize how ridiculous that sounds.
I am a female gamer (my current obsession is Morrowind, for the curious; I spent money I didn't really have to get a Geforce 3, *just* to have the advanced water effects). Furthermore, I know, plenty, plenty of female gamers. No dearth of them; from my housemate who stays up until 3 AM playing Okage, to my Soul Caliber ass-kicking close friend. I don't know where you're looking if you can't find female gamers. (I suspect the answer involves parents' houses and subterranean areas). Go to a convention, for chrissakes!
Admittedly, there probably are more male gamers than female (I base that on environmental, not biological factors), but I suspect that the reason they're suffering such a dearth of play testers is that well, many women gamers have distinguishing taste in games, and let's face it, Tomb Raider suffers in originality. For example, I don't tend to play many FPSes because I don't think they're very interesting. It's not that I'm not "competitive" or don't like violence or don't "want to be feel powerful"--everyone wants to feel powerful!--but that they tend to be ugly and monotonous to me after a while. I much prefer strategy games, especially ones like Alpha Centauri or Civ III which have an endless amount of possible endings, or games that have been well-crafted (hence the Morrowind obsession) to suck you into the experience (so much for the "theory" posited above that women don't like to enter into the world of the game). I think a lot of distinguishing gamers, male and female, would agree with me on this.
Please think before you make generalizations about what women like and don't like. Don't tell me I don't like to be competitive, don't tell me I don't like to feel powerful, because it's a lie. And for goodness sakes, quit reading the John Gray, it's bad for you.
... at least, I suspect it did. Long story short, we had a short outage today for about an hour or two. Shortly afterward, all students receive an email saying that we suffered a DDoS attack, when (quoting them now) "... several computers on campus were flooding the network with traffic to two off-campus addresses."
Only a couple of hours later, we once again received a message, this time telling us to beware two viruses, one of which was Bugbear.
Coincidence? I think not.
It's okay, my cat hates you, too.
Excellent idea. An interview with Rodney Brooks?
I guess those LSD experiments they did on him in college that he talks about with such fondness really *did* have an effect on him.
I think calling it "cherry-flavored" is too generous. "Red-flavored" is much more to the point.
Of course, the parent post to yours fails to point out that by "close to Canada," he means "three hours away on I-87." I still think that's too long a commute ^_^
And that's assuming you live right on the border.... it's yet another hour to a city of any size (Montreal). But if you live in Montreal, why the hell would you commute to puny Albany?
(Silly me, posting as an AC before.. at work and too lazy to log in.)
Anyway, I guess I probably didn't use abstraction in the way you expected. Here I meant "pragmatism" as the "tools to do the job," to paraphrase the parent, as opposed to "abstraction," which I meant here by the more colloquial usage as "lots of knowledge that is divorced (abstracted) from what you actually need to do."
It's not abstraction in the programming, data abstraction, "hiding the nitty gritty" sense of the word, but a kind of divorced knowledge that I associate with my early comp sci classes, which had us doing ridiculous things like implementing set theory with Scheme.(That had an absurd level of "hiding" kind of abstraction as well, but that's neither here nor there).
That's actually my problem with O'Reilly books, and why I can never get started in learning anything new from them--much too much theory too soon, and a bottom-up, start from "Hello world!" kind of approach to things. I'm surprised this one is a little different. I generally much prefer to start with something a little more goal-oriented and then, when I feel comfortable with "the tools," and start wondering, "Heh, tell me more about this language/whathaveyou," *then* I pick up an O'Reilly book, or some other good reference.
So yes, I like programming with practical goals. That was my point, and it only took me two posts to get to it!
"It's biology. You can fight it. But in the end, biology pumps your blood, regulates your hormones, and fires your neurons. You have free will, but there are certain things that are biologically engineered by nature to make you happy and content. It's often wise to listen to them."
Sounds like someone's been reading a bit too much John Gray....
You like to make it sound like you have the body of evolutionary psychology behind you, when, honestly, there aren't a whole lot of sex differences in *personality* (keyword there) that have been confirmed by evolutionary psych. (Clearly, you missed the lesson in evolutionary psych which mentioned, hey, there *are* primates in which the males do take care of infants instead of feeling the need to compete with them over resources). I personally believe that aside from naughty bits, men and women probably aren't that different at birth. Given, we have lots of time after birth to conform to silly stereotypes.
You seem to think that with the use of the words "some" and "most" you are safe affirming whatever stereotypes you like. You think it's fine to say "(Most/some) women are submissive by nature" and "(Most/some) men are dominant by nature." You also seem fine saying, "(Most/some) women like to raise children by nature" or "(Most/some) women like to clean toilets by nature."
Take a moment to say, "I like cleaning toilets because I have a vagina" and then realize what a non sequitor that is. And then take a moment to realize that your essentialist statements sound just as silly.
True, Braitenberg (in the 80s) did just revive the reactive, behavior-based architecture from Grey Walter, but it still started robotics going in much more productive direction than it had been. Would you prefer the traditional deliberative, abstract-model forming robot design that was forwarded by Minsky in the 50s? These sort of robots would map the world and then move accordingly, but it took them *forever* to do so. Nowadays, this model is coming back in some forms as our technology finally allows for representations of the world to be created with some speed, but it is usually involved in hybrid systems, where it works alongside reactive systems and acts as the final arbiter of decision.
The advantage of the reactive, behavior-based design (together with subsumption architecture, in which higher-priority behaviors suppress lower priority behaviors; also yet another element which puts Brooks' and others' robots a step above Tilden's in complexity) is that it can react quickly to the world, which a representation-forming system can't. In the end, it doesn't matter if your robot can make a really great map of the world or play a brilliant game of chess, if it can't keep itself from running into walls.
On another note, I like Tilden's 'bots, but I regret that (as far as I know), you can't put them together yourself (although you can certainly tinker with them afterwards). The Tutebot, a tutorial, analog robot designed by the authors of the book Mobile Robots, is much more fun. You can get yourself a copy of Mobile Robots, get the plans for Tutebot, and build it yourself, all the while leading yourself down the path to more complicated robotics work.