Yes, and after the game is released, a few million people still have to spend collectively the equivalent of a couple of centuries just wading through the brainless drivel of some cretin who thinks he's funny. 'Cause obviously we wouldn't want to get straight to the actually useful information. I mean, oh noes, some people must be sheep if they just want to learn whether that product worked as a t-shirt (e.g., if it shrunk after the first machine wash) from other customers, instead of being delighted to wade through pages of idiots pretending that their "OMG it's magical" drivel is funny. Right?
Obviously if we're actually shopping for a t-shirt, our time is there just to read some lame jokes, and not to actually compare t-shirts. Man, what would we ever do with our time if we didn't have to spend hours using TEH LOGIC to guess which products are real and which are lame jokes, and which reviews are real and which are lame jokes. Why, without your kind of selfless saviour providing all that crapflood to filter, we'd be done with the shopping in 10 minutes and probably be stuck for the rest of the evening getting bored and having nothing to do. Oh noes! I mean, it's not like there's TV, YouTube, games, websites, etc, to go to if we want entertainment. Without your kind crap-flooding Amazon, why, we'd just have to sit there and get bored.
Heh.
And that goes double for cases when basically the request to use logic comes from some cretins who aren't very good at logic or data to use it on in the first place.
E.g., since the summary mentions Uranium, it must be an obvious joke, right? Well, no, actually depleted Uranium is perfectly ok to own and use for civilian purposes. It's even used as balast in boats and whatnot. Being very dense, it can lower your boat's centre of gravity a lot without taking much space. So someone could actually be trying to buy just that, in all honest.
But don't tell that to the ignorant joker who's basing his idea that it'll be an obvious joke for anyone who isn't stupid... on his own being stupid and ignorant.
Except if you actually think it doesn't happen with real products too, man, I hate to break down your ideal world bubble.
For a start, even as a joke, a lot of those jokes are just a cross between vandalism and fanboyism. E.g., it's trivial to run into reviews for games which not only aren't out there yet, but don't even have a beta or preview or much information out yet. I remember particularly Gothic 3 -- which eventually turned out to be a buggy bad joke -- which although just announced, and, really, all the information about it were a couple of screenshots that their engine works, and there were already gushing reviews for it on Amazon. You know, TEH GRATEST GAME EVAR!!! kinda reviews.
It's vandalism because even if it may be identifiable as an unfunny joke at that moment, fast forward a year and it's just noise in the actually useful signal.
Actually, even your kind of jokes sound like vandalism to me. It's having fun at the expense of spamming a useful resource and confusing the heck out of anyone who isn't magically aware whether the "Three Wolf Moon T-shirt" is a real product to buy or a joke, and whether the good or bad reviews are actual reviews or someone's bad idea of a joke.
You know, sorta like the guys posting goatse and rickrolling links on an unrelated mailing list. I don't doubt that in their deranged little brains it passes for freaking hilarious, but the rest of us just wish they'd die in a fire.
Yes, well, nice canned rant, except that wasn't the topic. For the "ignorant conspiracy theorists spewing about how dark matter is wrong because they don't understand it" room, you'll want to go down that hall, take the second left and it's the door at the end of the corridor.
This was about antimatter, which isn't even remotely the same as dark matter.
You think that's bad? How about, now when the boss rides your ass all afternoon, you can actually get pregnant? Man, trust science to make IT and programming jobs even shittier;)
Well, then life's a bitch and then your zygote dies.
The Y chromosome is not a variant of the X chromosome. The X chromosome is one you actually need. The Y chromosome actually has very little information, and most of it related to testosterone production and sperm production. It doesn't even encode most of the differences between a male and a female body. Those are already taken care of by other proteins and testosterone.
In programming terms the Y chromosome is a little more than just a flag, but basically at an oversimplified level you can view it as a flag. The real important information is elsewhere.
So basically it's akin to, dunno, if you took out the.exe from the world of warcraft directory, but flagged it as Cataclysm compatible twice. It ain't gonna be very useful.
Instead of arguing the idea, find something about the person in their freakin diary and then argue that. This is what passes for debate these days.
Except for the part where it's actually relevant to what she wrote. When we have a chick who lionized sociopaths in her novels, made rape a sort of declaration of love in The Fountainhead ("had she meant less to him, he would not have taken her as he did; had he meant less to her, she would not have fought so desperately") in spite of her own describing the victim as in terror and pain between the reassurances that that's really what she wanted, made a whole pseudo-intellectual philosophy in defense of psychopathy, gave interviews in which she railed against any kind of altruism or conformity to social norms, and modelled at least one character after Hickman... maybe her rabid fascination with psychopaths is actually relevant. I mean, we're not talking the relevance of her favourite dish or brand of car to Objectivism, but that the chick preaching why you shouldn't give a damn about other's needs... actually went as far as their need to live in her views. Maybe, just maybe, it's all part of the same picture.
If everyone looked out for the interests of themselves and their family properly and as their first priority, then society would be left with the truly needy that need charity. Charity would be more than able to take care of their needs. Her point is that need can be manufactured, learned, and lied about, thus the basis for forcing one person to support another because of this need is unjust.
My mother can give me all her money, and now she can pass the "poor and needy test". She is now declared needy and society must care for her.
My neighbor can choose to watch American Idol and every other piece of garbage on TV all night while I study, read and improve myself. When they get fired for incompetence they are now needy. That need was a result of choosing not to improve. He is now declared needy and society must care for him.
My other neighbor can be on unemployment and paid for over a year and never look for a job, while I work 16 hours days in fear of being fired. He has been declared needy and society must care for him.
Except that's what got me to dub Objectivism a cult of sociopathy before even knowing about Rand's fascination with murderers. It's that inability to conceive or discuss anyone else's problem than as some elaborate scam to rob them of their preciouss money. That old lady with a crap pension must be somehow hiding her money somewhere and only faking it. That guy fired in a downturn must have been just a leech anyway. That guy unemployed for a year -- never mind that a certain unemployment level is actually wanted and part of / tied to regulating inflation, via the Philips curve -- must be not even looking for a job. Never mind that he wouldn't be even counting as unemployed if he didn't.
Out of three people, you counted three who are just some kind of leeches and parasites, and at least two being scammers too. That's the kind of thing I'm talking about. That someone could actually have a problem, or really any kind of empathy, doesn't even get a passing nod as a possibility.
That or some kind of extreme scenario, where the Objectivist jumps to some fictive totalitarian state where giving to all beggars is mandatory, and the Altruism Gestapo can kick their door in for not buying milk for the neighbour's kid. If a talk to an Objectivist doesn't degenerate in the above list of parasites conspiring to scam him of his money via the state, it degenerates in such a black and white situation where there are no shades in between not giving a fuck and being legally forced to give more fuck than they possibly can.
The more normal modi operandi of an actual human society or community don't seem to even register as possibly existing anywhere.
I say let Hollywood eat itself and hopefully one day it will collapse and we can all put any actor into our own movies
Just the idea that anyone could take any iconic actor or character and punch their hare-brained fanfic into a film maker program one day... thanks, I'll probably wake up screaming tonight.
After seeing some fanfic and seeing the genius mod ideas people post for various games, I'm going to rub my (crystal) balls and predict it's going to end up with a metric buttload (about 0.93 imperial arseloads) of the following:
- Mary Sue and Garry Stu scenarios. E.g., one super-smart Jedi, who's also secretly an ancient Dragon and a vampire viking ninja pirate, turns out to be the secret child of Anakin and Palpatine (don't ask how) and has a better claim to both the Empire _and_ the Jedi order than Luke.
- Replace some stuff with totally non-canon props ripped from a completely different game or movie. E.g., Luke should look like Sephiroth, use either Cloud's Buster-Sword or Squall's Gunblade, drive a Porsche model ripped from Need For Speed, and wear the outfit of Alucard from Hellsing. Oh, and Han should use a.44 wild-west revolver and have a Moogle instead of a wookie with him.
- Remaking Star Trek with the Star Wars props. Typically meaning someone will replace Han Solo with Picard and Yoda with Kirk or Spock, rename Tatooine to Risa, and rename Han's ship to V'Ger, then give up because a total modification is far more work than it sounds to actually go through with. Nevertheless it remains probably the #3 most requested kind of mod on the boards (well, if you also include "I know, let's add a new continent" or "can anyone please add the whole Fallout 2 to Fallout New Vegas?" requests.)
- Add more romance options, including Luke boning Leia even after learning she's his sister, or alternately have everyone act like Luke is a girl so he can have sex with Han. (Simple flipping an if around like that is how most gay romance mods are made.)
- Replace every female in the game with some "enhanced" body with literally watermelon sized breasts and some utterly unrealistic Barbie body otherwise. Replace the animations so those boobs bounce lots. Give it an oiled skin texture. Make the stormtroopers an all-female corps, and their armour with a set of nipple clamps and clit piercing on an otherwise naked body. Alternately, remove all parts of the armour except the right shoulder piece and the left boot. Add a realistic and graphically explicit prostitution system. (Hey, we're not going to Mos Eisley to see the sand, you know?) Collectively, this kind of thing is by _far_ the #1 most requested kind of mod, and I can see that applying to user made fanfic movies too.
Oh second thought... oh, wait, we're talking as opposed to what Hollywood and Lucas did to the series. Sorry, my bad. Bring on the bouncy boobs. It will be less of an offense than Jar Jar Binks:p
I didn't say the "in Soviet Russia joke" in particular, I said Boris Smirnoff jokes. Just because some people on Slashdot got stuck in the "In Soviet Russia" meme, most of them not even knowing the original joke, like the stereotypical lemmings following the horde off a cliff, doesn't mean everyone mentioning Smirnoff could only be talking about that one joke.
Frankly there are plenty of Smirnoff jokes that don't really illustrate any reality from the USSR.
E.g., "If you make joke, "take my wife... please", you come home... she's gone." Even during Stalin's worst years it didn't REALLY work that way. He's using the totalitarian regime to make an over-the-top joke, and really we're just laughing at the black humour there, rather than getting an education or anything.
E.g., "In Russia, if a male athelete loses he becomes a female athelete." You probably can figure out that it's not actually what happened in Russia at any time. You might have lost some privileges, but they didn't actually castrate people for losing a sports competition. Again, he's just using the totalitarian USSR setup for his own black humour.
E.g., "Homosexuality in Russia is a crime and the punishment is seven years in prison, locked up with the other men. There is a three year waiting list." You probably don't believe that anyone actually was trying to get locked up in the horrible communist prisons just for the gay sex.
E.g., "In Russia we only had two TV channels. Channel One was propaganda. Channel Two consisted of a KGB officer telling you: Turn back at once to Channel One." Not only it doesn't educate you much about the USSR, it doesn't even make any sense as a model.
E.g., "When I got to America, I saw an ad in the paper: "We guarantee our furniture and stand behind it for six months." That's why I left the Soviet Union. I don't want any people standing behind my furniture!" You don't think their way of spying on their citizens actually involved someone standing behind the furniture, do you?
And really, he does the same in his non-USSR jokes. Like the one where a Tennessee farmer let him milk the bull, followed by the remark that once you do that you've made a friend for life. The funny part is his being on the receiving end of something nasty or humiliating, or doing a horrible misunderstanding, rather than any USA-vs-USSR education.
Actually, that gives me an even better idea. Thinking of prequels and resurrections, made me think of one book which clearly could use a Lucas prequel: the Bible. Featuring God's whiny teenager years before he made the universe, gungans, ewoks, and an epic lightsaber battle. (Hey, Genesis 3:24 says, "So he drove out the man; and he placed at the east of the garden of Eden Cherubims, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to keep the way of the tree of life." So don't tell me God didn't have a lightsaber.;)
If afterwards he gets struck by lightning, then we can all know to hurry to the nearest church, and if not, I'd like to see the fundies explain _that_. It's win-win, I tell ya.
Man, remind me never to tell you my collection of dead baby jokes;)
That said, dunno, wanting revenge on a horrible scumbag is a rather human thing. Notice I said human, not humane. Some 500 years ago we would have demanded that he be burned at the stake.
Plus, in this case it isn't really a generic punishment. There is an element of an eye-for-an-eye or poetic (in)justice in wishing rape upon someone who literally threatened a customer with sexual assault. I can see how it would give one ideas like, basically, let's see if he still likes it when he's on the receiving end, and all that.
Not as a serious proposal for how justice should work, but, you know, for the purpose of making a nasty joke, the kind of humour where the perp gets a taste of his own medicine is practically its own genre and trope. You rarely have a setup so clearly begging for the application of that trope as this one.
But again, I doubt that most people actually fantasize about this guy getting it up the ass. Mostly the joke works _because_ we take anal rape to be a very bad thing, not something normal.
Let's also be clear: Confucius's idea of proper behaviour and knowing one's proper place includes not even having an own moral compass or will.
Analects 13:
1. The Duke of Sheh informed Confucius, saying, "Among us here there are those who may be styled upright in their conduct. If their father have stolen a sheep, they will bear witness to the fact."
2. Confucius said, "Among us, in our part of the country, those who are upright are different from this. The father conceals the misconduct of the son, and the son conceals the misconduct of the father. Uprightness is to be found in this."
I can see how an autocratic kleptocracy would _love_ this idea of "uprightness". If you're at the bottom, your duty is to cover up the misconduct of those above, not to judge it.
Analects 1: Confucius said, "When a man's father is alive, look at the bent of his will. When his father is dead, look at his conduct. If for three years he does not change from the way of his father, he may be called filial."
You're supposed to follow your father's will to the letter while he's alive, to the extent that you can't even be judged for your own actions, because you're just doing what your father told you to do. And you're not a good person if you even do your own thing less than 3 years after your father died.
And that applies to all levels. Everyone should just know their place, not do anything above their station, etc. The peasant shouldn't even aspire at things reserved for the noble, and the noble is a no good person if he even does a religious pilgrimage normally reserved for the Emperor.
It seems to me like once you have something like that in place, any promises of it being two-sided are at best illusory. If one side should keep one's mouth shut and not even apply their own moral compass at all, then those above them effectively have a blank check to screw and plunder them as they see fit. Just like the European medieval social contracts were good in theory, but didn't prevent your grain being looted by both sides, including those allegedly protecting you (ok, then it was called a "levy"), as long as only they had a voice and your place wasn't to judge or refuse them.
But generally, I wouldn't give much of a fuck about what Confucius said, either way. Reading the whole damn thing ruined any illusion for me that it's some profound eastern philosophy. There is no deep philosophical thought put into it at all, the kind I came to take for granted from Roman and Greek philosophers in a similar time frame. All Confucius does is bare postulates, justified by no more than having been said by the great man himself. There is no going into the logic or intent or effects or justification of any of them. Confucius just postulates what is the right thing, and that is that.
In the rare occasions where things are slightly more than postulates, they're an implicit appeal to tradition. That's the way things are done in Confucius's province, therefore they're good.
And incidentally he comes across as basically the stereotypical kind of ultra-conservative cranky old guy. Things should be like they've always been, nothing should change, and these annoying young whippersnappers should just do what their elders tell them to do and shut up. You could just as well go find a modern day old guy shaking a cane at kids on his lawn and ask him about how the world should work. The lecture you'll get about how the world should have stopped in 1950, will be every bit a modern-day Confucius analect.
Quoth George Carlin: "Ohhh, some people don't like you to talk like that. Ohh, some people like to shut you up for saying those things. You know that. Lots of people. Lots of groups in this country want to tell you how to talk. Tell you what you can't talk about. Well, sometimes they'll say, well you can talk about something but you can't joke about it. Say you can't joke about something because it's not funny. Comedians run into that shit all the time. Like rape. They'll say, "you can't joke about rape. Rape's not funny." I say, "fuck you, I think it's hilarious. How do you like that?" I can prove to you that rape is funny. Picture Porky Pig raping Elmer Fudd. See, hey why do you think they call him "Porky," eh?"
More seriously, there's a whole genre of humour about bad stuff happening to someone else. E.g., the so called Gallows Humour or Black Comedy. It being about something bad is an integral part of the incongruence that makes it funny.
I.e., it doesn't mean we approve of anal rape, any more than anyone would need to approve of the Soviet dictatorship to laugh at Smirnoff's jokes about it.
I don't think it's even about rich or non-rich. What Ayn Rand does isn't as much a defense of being rich, as a defense of psychopathy and of not giving a damn about the others or their well being.
And while in her writing she does somewhat tone it down, in her diary she was going all fangirl over people like William Edward Hickman. That was her ideal of superman and she loved a quote from him saying "what is good for me is right."
Just to make it clear, what William Edward Hickman was famous for was kidnapping a schoolgirl and mailing her father taunting ransom notes signed with names like "Fate" or "Death". Then when the father came with the money, and thought he saw his girl sleeping in the abductor's car, she got thrown out of the car... dead. Hickman had cut off her limbs -- by his own testimony, _alive_, as the blood was coming out in small spurts, i.e., the heart was still beating -- hollowed out her torso and strewn her inner organs all over town. Actually living out an earlier fantasy he had told a former accomplice about, to take someone apart and chuck bits of them all over town.
Ayn Rand thought Hickman was some kind of dashing romantic adventurer whose only "crime" was rejecting the unreasonable conformism of society. (Like, you know, not taking live children apart.) She pretty much foamed at the mouth against those boring sheeples who dared so self-righteously criticize her hero. A bit later she blames society for basically not offering him anything better to do than gut and dismember a little girl. I mean what was the poor guy supposed to do? Get a boring job and a boring wife and all that? No, really. That's her justification for Hickman.
And really, that's what her writing is about. Even the economic angle is Bullshit with a capital B. I mean, her utopia needs an infinite free energy source to even function. But she manages to do a heck of a job in lionizing the psychopaths who doesn't give a damn about anyone else, and calling those "statists" and "collectivists" names, and fantasizing about their destruction.
Now consider that a large number of those at the top _are_ psychopaths. See, for example: Is Your Boss A Psychopaths?
If you were one, wouldn't you just _love_ a philosophy that says it's just normal to not give a damn about anyone else, and that it's an _objective_ (or Objectivist) fact that it's all about caring for number one?
Oh, my bad, turns out that the muppet in the summary actually is McNealy not Schwartz. Sorry. Now that's even more fun. As I was saying, McNealy is the guy who was just foaming at the mouth against Microsoft and was having split personality fits about Linux and OSS, while Sun was pretty much imploded. There were people jumping ship _because_ Sun had abandoned almost any pretense of having a product to sell, and was just telling everyone why they should give it money to fight Microsoft.
And who alienated the very same OSS gang he now talks about, with his schizophrenic swings between professing his love for OSS and Linux in the morning, and foaming at the mouth against it in the evening. I don't think that guy ever really either understood OSS or embraced it half as much as he tries to make it sound.
It's like, dunno, take my criticism of Schwartz above and make it times ten.
Just don't forget who the President and then CEO is, who oversaw the nose-dive of Sun shares to that being scooped from the bottom for a bargain price that he mentions. In fact, Oracle paid too much: Sun was already only worth some 3 billions at the time. Between November 2007 alone and November 2008, the total worth of Sun shares dropped by 80%. And Schwartz was compensated to the tune of over 11 million dollars for that nose-dive Sun took in 2008. 'Cause, you know, nothing says "the CEO deserves a big fat bonus" as driving the company in such a nose-dive where it lost 80% of its worth. The guy who oversaw in 2004 the cancellation of Sun's CPU designs and most R&D, followed predictably by a spike in profits and then by the crash we all saw.
Just about the only thing that can be said in Schwartz's favour is that at least it wasn't as bad as Scott McNealy's strategy of just foaming at the mouth against Microsoft and bipolar swings between "we love teh LINUX!!!" and "Linux is teh EVIL! DIE! DIE! DIE!" often within the same day, instead of telling customers why they'd want to buy Sun gear. No, big companies don't give you money just to fight Microsoft, Scott. Which strategy resulted in the drop in Sun share value by a factor of TEN TIMES between 2000 and end of 2003. (With an even deeper dip in 2001.)
Even giving ample allowance for just having the deck stacked against Sun, Schwartz just didn't prove that he's the genius CEO who can pull it out. If the guy had taken Sun and doubled its share value, ok, I'd listen to what he has to say and take notes. But being the guy who sat there while the company continued going downhill is hardly some kind of credentials. My cat could sit there and watch the stock roll downhill. And my cat wouldn't even need 11 millions compensation for that job.
So you're asking me to do, what? Trust him just because... what? Is he some kind of nobility that us peons have to trust and never question? Really, WTH is he? The High Priest of the Sun? Well, ok...
Can I believe that some random nerd could know better? Actually, yes. Heck, I'd even trust my barber to have a thing or two to teach Schwartz.
On the internet even from the start trolling meant just something crafted to create as many responses as possible, rather than rape threats. As the dictum went, "Confucius say: successful troll is master baiter";) Really, it didn't even have to be offensive or explicit or illegal. It could be something as indirect as asking which Linux distro has IE.
And in the meantime it's largely become a synonym with "someone saying something I disagree with." Someone calling one's pet conspiracy theory a conspiracy theory? Someone else posting a bit of textbook science that contradicts one's ID beliefs? Someone else disagreeing that <insert game flop> is TEH GRATEST GAME EVAR? Someone else disagreed in another thread entirely? Well, they must be trolls and only saying that to get attention;) But seriously, I've even seen textbook physics quotes modded as troll or overrated. It's just become the blanket excuse to not use one's brains and hang on to some pet dogma or half-truth: anyone disagreeing must be just trolling for attention.
What this guy did is a bit beyond mere trolling. And I suspect that even the trolling excuse was just an excuse. Threatening to rape someone asking for a refund and mailing them photos of their home with texts like "I'M WATCHING YOU" and whatnot, is the kind of asshattery even most Internet trolls would distance themselves from very quickly. That's already way beyond just seeking attention.
If anything, this just gives the lie to the old marketing canard that all exposure is good, and there is no such thing as bad publicity. I've seen it repeated in so many places, that it's not even funny. It turns out that, yes, there is bad publicity. Not only it can cross into being flat out illegal, but there's a very good case to be made that all that Google rank via people talking about how badly he treats customers, actually didn't benefit him. Getting mind-share as a dangerously deranged asshat to avoid can be just that: it just moves one from an unknown company to being the well known asshat company to avoid.
Very funny, I'll grant that, but if early Earth sailing is anything to go by, and considering that it'll probably start around the point where we can actually get anywhere in a couple of years, it'll probably be more like:
Day 1: we left Spacedock! There's an exciting galaxy out there for us to discover! Woohoo! Day 2: we've stopped on an asteroid for exploration. Woohoo! Rocks! Day 3: just passed Jupiter. How exciting to see it up close! Day 4: just darkness out there. Spent half the day doing drills and the rest looking out the window trying to spot anything. No luck. Day 5: still nothing out there. Boy, space sure is big. Day 6: Today it was my turn to peel potatoes at the mess hall. At least it's something to do other than hear the ensign scream at us and watch the dark out there.... Day 127: I could have sworn I saw a rock out there. Sarge says that's stupid: we're doing Warp 1.5 and even something Moon sized outside would go from being a speck in front of us to a speck behind us in a nanosecond.... Day 191: you'd think at least the milky way would look a little different from another angle. Nope, same stars, same picture as back home. Are we even moving? Day 192: asked the science officer why aren't we seeing it from a different angle. Showed me the galaxy on the highest resolution monitor. Says this pixel is Earth, us, and 50 other stars, because the galaxy is really that big. We moved about 1/100 of that pixel. Not gonna change the perspective or angle much.... Day 365: we've been out here for a year, and still just darkness out there. Space exploration sure is exciting, huh? Day 366: We had a drill loading and unloading the torpedoes and Jacob dropped one and broke his leg. I'm ashamed to cheer for a friend's injury, but HELL YEAH, at least SOMETHING's happening. Day 367: asked Jacob if he isn't getting bored alone in the infirmary. Said not half as much as the poor sod who picked his shift as lookout. Had a laugh remembering those hours spent at a dark starry sky where nothing ever happens.... Day 400: it must seem strange, but I'm starting to get nostalgic about that asteroid. I'm starting to even forget what a rock looks like. Day 401: asked the science officer to show us the rock sample we took. He said it's against regulations. I hate the guy. Day 402: Adam took a photo of the rock when we took it. We thought he's crazy but now we took turns at looking at it. If we ever get somewhere, I'm buying him beer....
Or in other words, namely the words of Douglas Adams, "Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind- bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space."
I gave away all my gold (about 120k), sold all my gear, deleted all my characters, waved good bye to guild friends (which is one of the major pressures to play) and un-subscribed.
Aye. I've known people who did almost that before. Well, almost. The selling was done for them by whoever got them to download a keylogger, the gold went to some gold-seller site, and they didn't much unsubscribe as just had the password changed;)
Hmm, I can see your problem, but I don't think making some meta-gaming categories into in-game classes would solve it much.
I mean, imagine playing a D&D game where the available classes are Rules Lawyer, Munchkin, Real Man, Thespian, Drama Queen and Loonie. Now guess which of them can tank for you. I mean, sure, you know the Munchkin will want the best loot, the Real Man will go slap the Turbonium Dragon, the Thespian will try to talk to every skeleton in the dungeon, the Rules Lawyer will derail it into a half-hour debate over whether 3 people can wield 4 hand-and-a-half swords without penalties, and the Loonie is either going to tell a joke to the Turbonium Dragon or goose it, etc. But which of them heals, which is ranged, etc?
I think dividing the classes by Bartle's categories would run afoul of the same problem, basically.
That said, those categories _are_ more or less taken in account by many people when designing a game. Bartle's own paper is basically dealing with the same problem: how to make the game appealing to all 4 categories. Granted, some of the solutions are pencils-up-the-nose underpants-on-head retarded -- e.g., Bartle himself thought socializers actually need griefers... err... killers to harass and humiliate them, or they'll get bored and leave -- but at least the intention is there.
NASA: because 40 year old technology is so fascinating.
Wow, look! A Russian Cosmonaut is eating a Twinkie on the ISS! FRONT PAGE STORY! Ooooh, ahhhhh, so exciting.
Hey, checkitout. An astronaut talks about how small his quarters are on the ISS. Whoa dude, that's hard-hitting news for nerds right there.
Shit man, how can you beat that?! They might even show you how they tie their shoes. It'll be somehow cool and exciting and newsworthy because it'll be tying shoes... IN SPACE!
Actually, no, it's news more nerds need to see. Especially the kind who grew up with a boner for space travel, based on growing up with various flavours of Star Trek and its luxury liner accommodations. Even Enterprise NX-01 (I know, I know, nobody wants to remember that one;) only toned it down to two-man rooms for the non-officers.
In practice, well, rent the movie Das Boot, and have a good look. That's likely how you'd live on an interstellar trip. Think a tube with beds on the sides and the main corridor running in the middle. Or ask someone who's on a submarine. Last I heard, even with the huge modern submarines, they _still_ hot-bunk. Not only you don't get a nice room all to yourself, you don't even get the bed all to yourself.
Heck, even in surface ships, on early British destroyers the officers slept in armchairs on the deck. (Which would probably be a better explanation for why Picard is always in his chair when someone hails.) Or a lot of the ships that hauled colonists to the New World actually packed them like sardines under the deck, because space really was that limited.
Face it, when every ton hauled costs a bunch of energy, and especially on a (part time) military ship like the Enterprise, you're not going to encumber the actually useful ship with a luxury hotel bigger than the former. I mean, look at TNG, because they even showed you the separation in the first episode. That's one tiny actually useful warship, and the whole dish is a luxury hotel for the crew.
It's not going to be like in Star Trek.
Even the ISS is probably painting a too rosy image. It's got years of adding modules and it's not going anywhere, so it has a lot more space than you'd actually expect on an early space exploration ship. Still, I'm glad they're showing even that. Might knock the glamour of some people's heads.
I mean like back when they told me that each time I masturbate Jesus kills a kitten. Let me tell you I put some serious effort into it, and the stray cat situation around here seemed entirely unaffected;)
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, and after the game is released, a few million people still have to spend collectively the equivalent of a couple of centuries just wading through the brainless drivel of some cretin who thinks he's funny. 'Cause obviously we wouldn't want to get straight to the actually useful information. I mean, oh noes, some people must be sheep if they just want to learn whether that product worked as a t-shirt (e.g., if it shrunk after the first machine wash) from other customers, instead of being delighted to wade through pages of idiots pretending that their "OMG it's magical" drivel is funny. Right?
Obviously if we're actually shopping for a t-shirt, our time is there just to read some lame jokes, and not to actually compare t-shirts. Man, what would we ever do with our time if we didn't have to spend hours using TEH LOGIC to guess which products are real and which are lame jokes, and which reviews are real and which are lame jokes. Why, without your kind of selfless saviour providing all that crapflood to filter, we'd be done with the shopping in 10 minutes and probably be stuck for the rest of the evening getting bored and having nothing to do. Oh noes! I mean, it's not like there's TV, YouTube, games, websites, etc, to go to if we want entertainment. Without your kind crap-flooding Amazon, why, we'd just have to sit there and get bored.
Heh.
And that goes double for cases when basically the request to use logic comes from some cretins who aren't very good at logic or data to use it on in the first place.
E.g., since the summary mentions Uranium, it must be an obvious joke, right? Well, no, actually depleted Uranium is perfectly ok to own and use for civilian purposes. It's even used as balast in boats and whatnot. Being very dense, it can lower your boat's centre of gravity a lot without taking much space. So someone could actually be trying to buy just that, in all honest.
But don't tell that to the ignorant joker who's basing his idea that it'll be an obvious joke for anyone who isn't stupid... on his own being stupid and ignorant.
Except if you actually think it doesn't happen with real products too, man, I hate to break down your ideal world bubble.
For a start, even as a joke, a lot of those jokes are just a cross between vandalism and fanboyism. E.g., it's trivial to run into reviews for games which not only aren't out there yet, but don't even have a beta or preview or much information out yet. I remember particularly Gothic 3 -- which eventually turned out to be a buggy bad joke -- which although just announced, and, really, all the information about it were a couple of screenshots that their engine works, and there were already gushing reviews for it on Amazon. You know, TEH GRATEST GAME EVAR!!! kinda reviews.
It's vandalism because even if it may be identifiable as an unfunny joke at that moment, fast forward a year and it's just noise in the actually useful signal.
Actually, even your kind of jokes sound like vandalism to me. It's having fun at the expense of spamming a useful resource and confusing the heck out of anyone who isn't magically aware whether the "Three Wolf Moon T-shirt" is a real product to buy or a joke, and whether the good or bad reviews are actual reviews or someone's bad idea of a joke.
You know, sorta like the guys posting goatse and rickrolling links on an unrelated mailing list. I don't doubt that in their deranged little brains it passes for freaking hilarious, but the rest of us just wish they'd die in a fire.
Yes, well, nice canned rant, except that wasn't the topic. For the "ignorant conspiracy theorists spewing about how dark matter is wrong because they don't understand it" room, you'll want to go down that hall, take the second left and it's the door at the end of the corridor.
This was about antimatter, which isn't even remotely the same as dark matter.
You think that's bad? How about, now when the boss rides your ass all afternoon, you can actually get pregnant? Man, trust science to make IT and programming jobs even shittier ;)
Well, then life's a bitch and then your zygote dies.
The Y chromosome is not a variant of the X chromosome. The X chromosome is one you actually need. The Y chromosome actually has very little information, and most of it related to testosterone production and sperm production. It doesn't even encode most of the differences between a male and a female body. Those are already taken care of by other proteins and testosterone.
In programming terms the Y chromosome is a little more than just a flag, but basically at an oversimplified level you can view it as a flag. The real important information is elsewhere.
So basically it's akin to, dunno, if you took out the .exe from the world of warcraft directory, but flagged it as Cataclysm compatible twice. It ain't gonna be very useful.
Except for the part where it's actually relevant to what she wrote. When we have a chick who lionized sociopaths in her novels, made rape a sort of declaration of love in The Fountainhead ("had she meant less to him, he would not have
taken her as he did; had he meant less to her, she would not have fought so desperately") in spite of her own describing the victim as in terror and pain between the reassurances that that's really what she wanted, made a whole pseudo-intellectual philosophy in defense of psychopathy, gave interviews in which she railed against any kind of altruism or conformity to social norms, and modelled at least one character after Hickman... maybe her rabid fascination with psychopaths is actually relevant. I mean, we're not talking the relevance of her favourite dish or brand of car to Objectivism, but that the chick preaching why you shouldn't give a damn about other's needs... actually went as far as their need to live in her views. Maybe, just maybe, it's all part of the same picture.
Except that's what got me to dub Objectivism a cult of sociopathy before even knowing about Rand's fascination with murderers. It's that inability to conceive or discuss anyone else's problem than as some elaborate scam to rob them of their preciouss money. That old lady with a crap pension must be somehow hiding her money somewhere and only faking it. That guy fired in a downturn must have been just a leech anyway. That guy unemployed for a year -- never mind that a certain unemployment level is actually wanted and part of / tied to regulating inflation, via the Philips curve -- must be not even looking for a job. Never mind that he wouldn't be even counting as unemployed if he didn't.
Out of three people, you counted three who are just some kind of leeches and parasites, and at least two being scammers too. That's the kind of thing I'm talking about. That someone could actually have a problem, or really any kind of empathy, doesn't even get a passing nod as a possibility.
That or some kind of extreme scenario, where the Objectivist jumps to some fictive totalitarian state where giving to all beggars is mandatory, and the Altruism Gestapo can kick their door in for not buying milk for the neighbour's kid. If a talk to an Objectivist doesn't degenerate in the above list of parasites conspiring to scam him of his money via the state, it degenerates in such a black and white situation where there are no shades in between not giving a fuck and being legally forced to give more fuck than they possibly can.
The more normal modi operandi of an actual human society or community don't seem to even register as possibly existing anywhere.
Just the idea that anyone could take any iconic actor or character and punch their hare-brained fanfic into a film maker program one day... thanks, I'll probably wake up screaming tonight.
After seeing some fanfic and seeing the genius mod ideas people post for various games, I'm going to rub my (crystal) balls and predict it's going to end up with a metric buttload (about 0.93 imperial arseloads) of the following:
- Mary Sue and Garry Stu scenarios. E.g., one super-smart Jedi, who's also secretly an ancient Dragon and a vampire viking ninja pirate, turns out to be the secret child of Anakin and Palpatine (don't ask how) and has a better claim to both the Empire _and_ the Jedi order than Luke.
- Replace some stuff with totally non-canon props ripped from a completely different game or movie. E.g., Luke should look like Sephiroth, use either Cloud's Buster-Sword or Squall's Gunblade, drive a Porsche model ripped from Need For Speed, and wear the outfit of Alucard from Hellsing. Oh, and Han should use a .44 wild-west revolver and have a Moogle instead of a wookie with him.
- Remaking Star Trek with the Star Wars props. Typically meaning someone will replace Han Solo with Picard and Yoda with Kirk or Spock, rename Tatooine to Risa, and rename Han's ship to V'Ger, then give up because a total modification is far more work than it sounds to actually go through with. Nevertheless it remains probably the #3 most requested kind of mod on the boards (well, if you also include "I know, let's add a new continent" or "can anyone please add the whole Fallout 2 to Fallout New Vegas?" requests.)
- Add more romance options, including Luke boning Leia even after learning she's his sister, or alternately have everyone act like Luke is a girl so he can have sex with Han. (Simple flipping an if around like that is how most gay romance mods are made.)
- Replace every female in the game with some "enhanced" body with literally watermelon sized breasts and some utterly unrealistic Barbie body otherwise. Replace the animations so those boobs bounce lots. Give it an oiled skin texture. Make the stormtroopers an all-female corps, and their armour with a set of nipple clamps and clit piercing on an otherwise naked body. Alternately, remove all parts of the armour except the right shoulder piece and the left boot. Add a realistic and graphically explicit prostitution system. (Hey, we're not going to Mos Eisley to see the sand, you know?) Collectively, this kind of thing is by _far_ the #1 most requested kind of mod, and I can see that applying to user made fanfic movies too.
Oh second thought... oh, wait, we're talking as opposed to what Hollywood and Lucas did to the series. Sorry, my bad. Bring on the bouncy boobs. It will be less of an offense than Jar Jar Binks :p
Ugh, I mean YAKOV Smirnoff. Geesh, horrible mind-fart there. Sorry.
I didn't say the "in Soviet Russia joke" in particular, I said Boris Smirnoff jokes. Just because some people on Slashdot got stuck in the "In Soviet Russia" meme, most of them not even knowing the original joke, like the stereotypical lemmings following the horde off a cliff, doesn't mean everyone mentioning Smirnoff could only be talking about that one joke.
Frankly there are plenty of Smirnoff jokes that don't really illustrate any reality from the USSR.
E.g., "If you make joke, "take my wife... please", you come home... she's gone." Even during Stalin's worst years it didn't REALLY work that way. He's using the totalitarian regime to make an over-the-top joke, and really we're just laughing at the black humour there, rather than getting an education or anything.
E.g., "In Russia, if a male athelete loses he becomes a female athelete." You probably can figure out that it's not actually what happened in Russia at any time. You might have lost some privileges, but they didn't actually castrate people for losing a sports competition. Again, he's just using the totalitarian USSR setup for his own black humour.
E.g., "Homosexuality in Russia is a crime and the punishment is seven years in prison, locked up with the other men. There is a three year waiting list." You probably don't believe that anyone actually was trying to get locked up in the horrible communist prisons just for the gay sex.
E.g., "In Russia we only had two TV channels. Channel One was propaganda. Channel Two consisted of a KGB officer telling you: Turn back at once to Channel One." Not only it doesn't educate you much about the USSR, it doesn't even make any sense as a model.
E.g., "When I got to America, I saw an ad in the paper: "We guarantee our furniture and stand behind it for six months." That's why I left the Soviet Union. I don't want any people standing behind my furniture!" You don't think their way of spying on their citizens actually involved someone standing behind the furniture, do you?
And really, he does the same in his non-USSR jokes. Like the one where a Tennessee farmer let him milk the bull, followed by the remark that once you do that you've made a friend for life. The funny part is his being on the receiving end of something nasty or humiliating, or doing a horrible misunderstanding, rather than any USA-vs-USSR education.
Actually, that gives me an even better idea. Thinking of prequels and resurrections, made me think of one book which clearly could use a Lucas prequel: the Bible. Featuring God's whiny teenager years before he made the universe, gungans, ewoks, and an epic lightsaber battle. (Hey, Genesis 3:24 says, "So he drove out the man; and he placed at the east of the garden of Eden Cherubims, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to keep the way of the tree of life." So don't tell me God didn't have a lightsaber.;)
If afterwards he gets struck by lightning, then we can all know to hurry to the nearest church, and if not, I'd like to see the fundies explain _that_. It's win-win, I tell ya.
Man, remind me never to tell you my collection of dead baby jokes ;)
That said, dunno, wanting revenge on a horrible scumbag is a rather human thing. Notice I said human, not humane. Some 500 years ago we would have demanded that he be burned at the stake.
Plus, in this case it isn't really a generic punishment. There is an element of an eye-for-an-eye or poetic (in)justice in wishing rape upon someone who literally threatened a customer with sexual assault. I can see how it would give one ideas like, basically, let's see if he still likes it when he's on the receiving end, and all that.
Not as a serious proposal for how justice should work, but, you know, for the purpose of making a nasty joke, the kind of humour where the perp gets a taste of his own medicine is practically its own genre and trope. You rarely have a setup so clearly begging for the application of that trope as this one.
But again, I doubt that most people actually fantasize about this guy getting it up the ass. Mostly the joke works _because_ we take anal rape to be a very bad thing, not something normal.
True enough. Thanks for the correction.
Let's also be clear: Confucius's idea of proper behaviour and knowing one's proper place includes not even having an own moral compass or will.
Analects 13:
1. The Duke of Sheh informed Confucius, saying, "Among us here there are those who may be styled upright in their conduct. If their father have stolen a sheep, they will bear witness to the fact."
2. Confucius said, "Among us, in our part of the country, those who are upright are different from this. The father conceals the misconduct of the son, and the son conceals the misconduct of the father. Uprightness is to be found in this."
I can see how an autocratic kleptocracy would _love_ this idea of "uprightness". If you're at the bottom, your duty is to cover up the misconduct of those above, not to judge it.
Analects 1:
Confucius said, "When a man's father is alive, look at the bent of his will. When his father is dead, look at his conduct. If for three years he does not change from the way of his father, he may be called filial."
You're supposed to follow your father's will to the letter while he's alive, to the extent that you can't even be judged for your own actions, because you're just doing what your father told you to do. And you're not a good person if you even do your own thing less than 3 years after your father died.
And that applies to all levels. Everyone should just know their place, not do anything above their station, etc. The peasant shouldn't even aspire at things reserved for the noble, and the noble is a no good person if he even does a religious pilgrimage normally reserved for the Emperor.
It seems to me like once you have something like that in place, any promises of it being two-sided are at best illusory. If one side should keep one's mouth shut and not even apply their own moral compass at all, then those above them effectively have a blank check to screw and plunder them as they see fit. Just like the European medieval social contracts were good in theory, but didn't prevent your grain being looted by both sides, including those allegedly protecting you (ok, then it was called a "levy"), as long as only they had a voice and your place wasn't to judge or refuse them.
But generally, I wouldn't give much of a fuck about what Confucius said, either way. Reading the whole damn thing ruined any illusion for me that it's some profound eastern philosophy. There is no deep philosophical thought put into it at all, the kind I came to take for granted from Roman and Greek philosophers in a similar time frame. All Confucius does is bare postulates, justified by no more than having been said by the great man himself. There is no going into the logic or intent or effects or justification of any of them. Confucius just postulates what is the right thing, and that is that.
In the rare occasions where things are slightly more than postulates, they're an implicit appeal to tradition. That's the way things are done in Confucius's province, therefore they're good.
And incidentally he comes across as basically the stereotypical kind of ultra-conservative cranky old guy. Things should be like they've always been, nothing should change, and these annoying young whippersnappers should just do what their elders tell them to do and shut up. You could just as well go find a modern day old guy shaking a cane at kids on his lawn and ask him about how the world should work. The lecture you'll get about how the world should have stopped in 1950, will be every bit a modern-day Confucius analect.
Quoth George Carlin: "Ohhh, some people don't like you to talk like that. Ohh, some people like to shut you up for saying those things.
You know that. Lots of people. Lots of groups in this country want to tell you how to talk. Tell you what you can't talk about. Well, sometimes they'll say, well you can talk about something but you can't joke about it. Say you can't joke about something because it's not funny. Comedians run into that shit all the time. Like rape. They'll say, "you can't joke about rape. Rape's not funny." I say, "fuck you, I think it's hilarious. How do you like that?" I can prove to you that rape is funny. Picture Porky Pig raping Elmer Fudd. See, hey why do you think they call him "Porky," eh?"
More seriously, there's a whole genre of humour about bad stuff happening to someone else. E.g., the so called Gallows Humour or Black Comedy. It being about something bad is an integral part of the incongruence that makes it funny.
I.e., it doesn't mean we approve of anal rape, any more than anyone would need to approve of the Soviet dictatorship to laugh at Smirnoff's jokes about it.
I don't think it's even about rich or non-rich. What Ayn Rand does isn't as much a defense of being rich, as a defense of psychopathy and of not giving a damn about the others or their well being.
And while in her writing she does somewhat tone it down, in her diary she was going all fangirl over people like William Edward Hickman. That was her ideal of superman and she loved a quote from him saying "what is good for me is right."
Just to make it clear, what William Edward Hickman was famous for was kidnapping a schoolgirl and mailing her father taunting ransom notes signed with names like "Fate" or "Death". Then when the father came with the money, and thought he saw his girl sleeping in the abductor's car, she got thrown out of the car... dead. Hickman had cut off her limbs -- by his own testimony, _alive_, as the blood was coming out in small spurts, i.e., the heart was still beating -- hollowed out her torso and strewn her inner organs all over town. Actually living out an earlier fantasy he had told a former accomplice about, to take someone apart and chuck bits of them all over town.
Ayn Rand thought Hickman was some kind of dashing romantic adventurer whose only "crime" was rejecting the unreasonable conformism of society. (Like, you know, not taking live children apart.) She pretty much foamed at the mouth against those boring sheeples who dared so self-righteously criticize her hero. A bit later she blames society for basically not offering him anything better to do than gut and dismember a little girl. I mean what was the poor guy supposed to do? Get a boring job and a boring wife and all that? No, really. That's her justification for Hickman.
And really, that's what her writing is about. Even the economic angle is Bullshit with a capital B. I mean, her utopia needs an infinite free energy source to even function. But she manages to do a heck of a job in lionizing the psychopaths who doesn't give a damn about anyone else, and calling those "statists" and "collectivists" names, and fantasizing about their destruction.
Now consider that a large number of those at the top _are_ psychopaths. See, for example: Is Your Boss A Psychopaths?
If you were one, wouldn't you just _love_ a philosophy that says it's just normal to not give a damn about anyone else, and that it's an _objective_ (or Objectivist) fact that it's all about caring for number one?
Oh, my bad, turns out that the muppet in the summary actually is McNealy not Schwartz. Sorry. Now that's even more fun. As I was saying, McNealy is the guy who was just foaming at the mouth against Microsoft and was having split personality fits about Linux and OSS, while Sun was pretty much imploded. There were people jumping ship _because_ Sun had abandoned almost any pretense of having a product to sell, and was just telling everyone why they should give it money to fight Microsoft.
And who alienated the very same OSS gang he now talks about, with his schizophrenic swings between professing his love for OSS and Linux in the morning, and foaming at the mouth against it in the evening. I don't think that guy ever really either understood OSS or embraced it half as much as he tries to make it sound.
It's like, dunno, take my criticism of Schwartz above and make it times ten.
Just don't forget who the President and then CEO is, who oversaw the nose-dive of Sun shares to that being scooped from the bottom for a bargain price that he mentions. In fact, Oracle paid too much: Sun was already only worth some 3 billions at the time. Between November 2007 alone and November 2008, the total worth of Sun shares dropped by 80%. And Schwartz was compensated to the tune of over 11 million dollars for that nose-dive Sun took in 2008. 'Cause, you know, nothing says "the CEO deserves a big fat bonus" as driving the company in such a nose-dive where it lost 80% of its worth. The guy who oversaw in 2004 the cancellation of Sun's CPU designs and most R&D, followed predictably by a spike in profits and then by the crash we all saw.
Just about the only thing that can be said in Schwartz's favour is that at least it wasn't as bad as Scott McNealy's strategy of just foaming at the mouth against Microsoft and bipolar swings between "we love teh LINUX!!!" and "Linux is teh EVIL! DIE! DIE! DIE!" often within the same day, instead of telling customers why they'd want to buy Sun gear. No, big companies don't give you money just to fight Microsoft, Scott. Which strategy resulted in the drop in Sun share value by a factor of TEN TIMES between 2000 and end of 2003. (With an even deeper dip in 2001.)
Even giving ample allowance for just having the deck stacked against Sun, Schwartz just didn't prove that he's the genius CEO who can pull it out. If the guy had taken Sun and doubled its share value, ok, I'd listen to what he has to say and take notes. But being the guy who sat there while the company continued going downhill is hardly some kind of credentials. My cat could sit there and watch the stock roll downhill. And my cat wouldn't even need 11 millions compensation for that job.
So you're asking me to do, what? Trust him just because... what? Is he some kind of nobility that us peons have to trust and never question? Really, WTH is he? The High Priest of the Sun? Well, ok...
Can I believe that some random nerd could know better? Actually, yes. Heck, I'd even trust my barber to have a thing or two to teach Schwartz.
Or just as an example that doesn't need to watch the whole movie, try the music clip based on footage from the movie: U96: Das Boot
Around 2:16 and a while after, when you see those guys running down a narrow free space between the beds, that's how cramped such a submarine was.
I don't think I'd call this guy just trolling.
On the internet even from the start trolling meant just something crafted to create as many responses as possible, rather than rape threats. As the dictum went, "Confucius say: successful troll is master baiter" ;) Really, it didn't even have to be offensive or explicit or illegal. It could be something as indirect as asking which Linux distro has IE.
And in the meantime it's largely become a synonym with "someone saying something I disagree with." Someone calling one's pet conspiracy theory a conspiracy theory? Someone else posting a bit of textbook science that contradicts one's ID beliefs? Someone else disagreeing that <insert game flop> is TEH GRATEST GAME EVAR? Someone else disagreed in another thread entirely? Well, they must be trolls and only saying that to get attention ;) But seriously, I've even seen textbook physics quotes modded as troll or overrated. It's just become the blanket excuse to not use one's brains and hang on to some pet dogma or half-truth: anyone disagreeing must be just trolling for attention.
What this guy did is a bit beyond mere trolling. And I suspect that even the trolling excuse was just an excuse. Threatening to rape someone asking for a refund and mailing them photos of their home with texts like "I'M WATCHING YOU" and whatnot, is the kind of asshattery even most Internet trolls would distance themselves from very quickly. That's already way beyond just seeking attention.
If anything, this just gives the lie to the old marketing canard that all exposure is good, and there is no such thing as bad publicity. I've seen it repeated in so many places, that it's not even funny. It turns out that, yes, there is bad publicity. Not only it can cross into being flat out illegal, but there's a very good case to be made that all that Google rank via people talking about how badly he treats customers, actually didn't benefit him. Getting mind-share as a dangerously deranged asshat to avoid can be just that: it just moves one from an unknown company to being the well known asshat company to avoid.
ROFL.
Very funny, I'll grant that, but if early Earth sailing is anything to go by, and considering that it'll probably start around the point where we can actually get anywhere in a couple of years, it'll probably be more like:
Day 1: we left Spacedock! There's an exciting galaxy out there for us to discover! Woohoo! ... ... ... ... ...
Day 2: we've stopped on an asteroid for exploration. Woohoo! Rocks!
Day 3: just passed Jupiter. How exciting to see it up close!
Day 4: just darkness out there. Spent half the day doing drills and the rest looking out the window trying to spot anything. No luck.
Day 5: still nothing out there. Boy, space sure is big.
Day 6: Today it was my turn to peel potatoes at the mess hall. At least it's something to do other than hear the ensign scream at us and watch the dark out there.
Day 127: I could have sworn I saw a rock out there. Sarge says that's stupid: we're doing Warp 1.5 and even something Moon sized outside would go from being a speck in front of us to a speck behind us in a nanosecond.
Day 191: you'd think at least the milky way would look a little different from another angle. Nope, same stars, same picture as back home. Are we even moving?
Day 192: asked the science officer why aren't we seeing it from a different angle. Showed me the galaxy on the highest resolution monitor. Says this pixel is Earth, us, and 50 other stars, because the galaxy is really that big. We moved about 1/100 of that pixel. Not gonna change the perspective or angle much.
Day 365: we've been out here for a year, and still just darkness out there. Space exploration sure is exciting, huh?
Day 366: We had a drill loading and unloading the torpedoes and Jacob dropped one and broke his leg. I'm ashamed to cheer for a friend's injury, but HELL YEAH, at least SOMETHING's happening.
Day 367: asked Jacob if he isn't getting bored alone in the infirmary. Said not half as much as the poor sod who picked his shift as lookout. Had a laugh remembering those hours spent at a dark starry sky where nothing ever happens.
Day 400: it must seem strange, but I'm starting to get nostalgic about that asteroid. I'm starting to even forget what a rock looks like.
Day 401: asked the science officer to show us the rock sample we took. He said it's against regulations. I hate the guy.
Day 402: Adam took a photo of the rock when we took it. We thought he's crazy but now we took turns at looking at it. If we ever get somewhere, I'm buying him beer.
Or in other words, namely the words of Douglas Adams, "Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind- bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space."
True enough at a general level. We all have our own goals and work towards them. What is different though is what those goals are.
Aye. I've known people who did almost that before. Well, almost. The selling was done for them by whoever got them to download a keylogger, the gold went to some gold-seller site, and they didn't much unsubscribe as just had the password changed ;)
Hmm, I can see your problem, but I don't think making some meta-gaming categories into in-game classes would solve it much.
I mean, imagine playing a D&D game where the available classes are Rules Lawyer, Munchkin, Real Man, Thespian, Drama Queen and Loonie. Now guess which of them can tank for you. I mean, sure, you know the Munchkin will want the best loot, the Real Man will go slap the Turbonium Dragon, the Thespian will try to talk to every skeleton in the dungeon, the Rules Lawyer will derail it into a half-hour debate over whether 3 people can wield 4 hand-and-a-half swords without penalties, and the Loonie is either going to tell a joke to the Turbonium Dragon or goose it, etc. But which of them heals, which is ranged, etc?
I think dividing the classes by Bartle's categories would run afoul of the same problem, basically.
That said, those categories _are_ more or less taken in account by many people when designing a game. Bartle's own paper is basically dealing with the same problem: how to make the game appealing to all 4 categories. Granted, some of the solutions are pencils-up-the-nose underpants-on-head retarded -- e.g., Bartle himself thought socializers actually need griefers... err... killers to harass and humiliate them, or they'll get bored and leave -- but at least the intention is there.
Actually, no, it's news more nerds need to see. Especially the kind who grew up with a boner for space travel, based on growing up with various flavours of Star Trek and its luxury liner accommodations. Even Enterprise NX-01 (I know, I know, nobody wants to remember that one;) only toned it down to two-man rooms for the non-officers.
In practice, well, rent the movie Das Boot, and have a good look. That's likely how you'd live on an interstellar trip. Think a tube with beds on the sides and the main corridor running in the middle. Or ask someone who's on a submarine. Last I heard, even with the huge modern submarines, they _still_ hot-bunk. Not only you don't get a nice room all to yourself, you don't even get the bed all to yourself.
Heck, even in surface ships, on early British destroyers the officers slept in armchairs on the deck. (Which would probably be a better explanation for why Picard is always in his chair when someone hails.) Or a lot of the ships that hauled colonists to the New World actually packed them like sardines under the deck, because space really was that limited.
Face it, when every ton hauled costs a bunch of energy, and especially on a (part time) military ship like the Enterprise, you're not going to encumber the actually useful ship with a luxury hotel bigger than the former. I mean, look at TNG, because they even showed you the separation in the first episode. That's one tiny actually useful warship, and the whole dish is a luxury hotel for the crew.
It's not going to be like in Star Trek.
Even the ISS is probably painting a too rosy image. It's got years of adding modules and it's not going anywhere, so it has a lot more space than you'd actually expect on an early space exploration ship. Still, I'm glad they're showing even that. Might knock the glamour of some people's heads.
Bah, that's probably another urban legend.
I mean like back when they told me that each time I masturbate Jesus kills a kitten. Let me tell you I put some serious effort into it, and the stray cat situation around here seemed entirely unaffected ;)