People keep mentioning this game series, but I think it deserves more specific attention. The recent film only half-heartedly captured the essence of the franchise; to truly understand why Silent Hill will be considered groundbreaking in the future, you have to play the games. The entire series borrows heavily from other surrealist and/or horror authors, particularly David Lynch. Further references can be found to the film Jacob's Ladder, Stephen King, and the works of John Carpenter. Unlike other survial horror games, Silent Hill has an intricately crafted storyline that is nearly impossible to grasp within one playing. Far from relying on the immediate shock value of gore or surprise, Silent Hill deals with most of the themes we associate with psychological horror. For example, it becomes apparent in the first game that most of the monsters you encounter are actually hellish dream-like manifestations of what frightens a little girl (bugs, schoolchildren, lizards, etc., and obvious reference to Stephen King's The Regulators). This is a far cry from the standard sci-fi zombie banality or mundane hauntings we get from certain other survival horror franchises. Every aspect of Silent Hill seems to have significance and symbolic purpose, especially your physical enviroment (a mere canvas upon which to paint variety in other games of the same genre). Furthermore, the primary themes of Silent Hill are not survival and exploration, but instead religous zealotry, anguish and despair, psychosis, and the heartbreak of missplaced love/power. Like most good film/literature, you can get what you want to out of the game, as none of this is readily spelled out per se. Silent Hill, however, is interactive; so this element allows the player to "dig" for more of the town's mythos in way that is impossible in other media. So I disagree, video games do have one serious redeeming title that definately trumps most of the fare we get at the cinema in terms of immersion, even if it's no Eraserhead.
I avidly dumpster-dive CompUSA for their discarded (or slightly damaged) computer parts; I just bring some tools into the dumpster and strip them right there (what a wasteful lot we Americans are). I'm not out to retrieve personal information though; my goal is to Frankenstein together free computers for my community. One of my most common finds is working (but ancient) hard drives, as the only way they seem to "destroy" the computers is by taking a hammer to the case and moniter. Of course the first thing I do is format these drives, but they are commonly filled with junk. I've never found a BestBuy that didn't use a trash compactor, so I doubt that this drive was dug out of the garbage. Still, kind of disturbing how easy it would be to get some personal information if you really wanted to.
This could go back and forth for a long time, but here's my last attempt at an explanation. First off, maybe you should understand what a "moral" argument is, meaning I take my position beacuse I hold it be "right" not "practical" or any other moral escape hatch. I really don't understand how you prioritize "avoding controversy" morally above "eliminating discrimination". This same argument was often used to defend proposals against freeing American slaves (just like in your "recipe for controversy"), and to defend the rising authoritarionism of the burgeoning Nazi party as being "practical". If you claim that WoW is a privately owned microcosm where "external" morals shouldn't apply; well plantation owners said the same thing about the Amerian south. You claim that "The controversy isn't bigotry", but then discredit your own argument by claiming that you don't support the idea that controversy is "inherent" to the gays either; explain to me then where you believe it's coming from because I think you're just exhibiting reactionary sophism. A better interpretation of my sentence would have been "Any controversy blanketed over gays is simply illogical bigotry, which is itself controversial". The whole thrust of the argument being to reverse the direction of controversy from it's percieved source, namely the act of simply "being gay", placing responsibility where it belongs (on the bigots). Your argument seems to be that there is some kind of unexplainable metaphysical ghost that both parties have fallen victim to, and any discussion to the contrary is just not being practical about the whole thing. Your statement that "The folks that go around hassling gay people aren't writing doctoral theses on cultural anthropology" and other similar claims are all nonsense; you don't have to have an utter working knowledge of thermodynamics to start a fire do you? The fact that people utilized combustion for centuries before it became a hard science in no way invalidates the study of heat or its theories, right? The entire field of psychology is based around the principle that your actions are obsfucated in source(s), and such a source is usually hidden from your everyday consciousness. My problem with your view is that it's way too simple, too realpolitik. It's similar to saying that it doesn't matter what particular disease we study, we should only study symptoms, what the effects are "in the real world".Another analogy would be to then fervently support a quarantine of all similar diseases as being,above all, practical; all the while discrediting any attempts at explaining that some diseases are not contagious, or even really diseases at all, as being too "academic". I find your apathetic dismissal of "causes" to be a fundamental part of the continuing existence of bigotry (a disease of the mind) in our culture.
Your race is not set in stone, and having lived in the American south my entire life, I am well aware of that. To many people here, it doesn't matter what part of Asia you're from - you're all "chinks" (even if you'll get "properly" called a "gook" up north). Similarly the crime of having "dark skin" corrals Indians, Mexicans, African Americans, etc. all into one catch-all term - nigger. Or look at wide array of peoples that are all bannered "white"; this is mirrored in Africa, Asia, and South America, who's people often consider themselves as discrete depite American tendancies to lump them together with words like "Hispanic" (the checkbox that "most" fit me in school under the "Choose your race" section of standarized tests). You claim that "Back in the real world, it is simply not an option to change your race", but it's a terribly simple thing to achieve - just move to a different part of the world. When the Spaniards arrived in the Americas, many of the natives there considered them to be gods based on their physical appearances; a racial classification pretty rare for them today I would imagine. If you make the claim that "you're still a nigger in the American south" even if you move to Kenya, t
By claiming that gays are "controversial", you are preemptively depriving them of their rights. "Homosexual" is a state of being, not an argument or "issue"; so the comparison to politics is kind of absurd. Maybe you see how the entire framing of the subject reduces homosexuals to second class citizens, where their mere existence is spoken of in sub-human terms. It's not that people "don't want to talk about GLBT issues"; the argument is that BEING GAY IS FACT OF LIFE AND SHOULD BE A NON-ISSUE.
I'll explain. You start off by quibbling about the symantics in the structure of my post, but you don't respond to the thesis; namely that race is a "holistic" convention while homosexuality is not. This is what is meant by an external status; homosexuality is not something inherently learned from your enviroment, but your concept of race is. Skin color, geography, etc. has nothing to do with race per se, they are conventions applied by social constructs (as proven most vividly in the melting pot of the United States). Race is not only something that you can change (just get a skin transplant!), it has been changing constantly over the course of history due to wavering classifications. Notice that you make a fundamental error, which is that you assumed that "gay issues" and "being gay" are one in the same, completely proving my point. You also make the mistake of using "skin color" and "race" interchangeably, which is not necessarily a truism (visit Puerto Rico). While "skin color" is just a "quantifiable" fact, race is an abstraction that always invokes social issues and constraints. Similarly, while the existence of gay humans does often coincide with controversy; said controversy is not inherent to them as people. Therefore your comaparison of homosexuals to any race is illogical because "gay" is a state of being and "race" is an abstraction. My accusation of Blizzard lies within the logic of artificial lumping. It is impossible for there to be any "controversy" over "being gay", because they (gays) are not proposing any argument by simply existing. Any controversy blanketed over gays is simply illogical bigotry, which I have already stated; and the only possible counter-argument is to cede that they are somehow conditionally manufactured (either through enviroment or choice). By not taking a stand against such a platform and endorsing such flawed logic, Blizzard is confessing how they feel about the subject.
Your argument falls apart upon closer examination, because there is no fundamentally inherent difference between a white person and a black person besides the pigmentation of their skin. Therefore, any person that emphasizes "differences" between the two races is doing so in the context of cultural anthropology, and should have their expressions critically reviewed for meaning. A gay, however, is dealing with the consequneces of a very real biological trait - namely the human sex drive. To link the two examples reveals a fundamental misunderstanding/miseduacation about homosexuality, and that is to prescribe it some kind of "external" status to the subject that is based in "conception". This is the line of thought that tried to convince people that open endorsement or tolerance of homosexuality will somehow help it to "spread" like some obscene cult. If we hypothetically imagine a world in which Egalitarianism has been achieved, hardly a difference will exist between the multiple races in society. Sexual orientation, however, will still be just as obvious and just as dividing as it is today. Blizzard would have us believe that being gay is something inherently controversial (like a political preference), and that is simply abashed bigotry. I would propose that not only do they allow any group that wants to dichotomize itself along legitimate differneces; that they also have a strict policy against discriminatory speech (including slurs against gays).
Some of the reactions here remind me of a particualar Noam Chomsky quote, "State propaganda, when supported by the educated classes and when no deviation is permitted from it, can have a big effect".
I can't decide which is more troubling, the idea of the U.S. military having their finger on the power button, or the mundane apathy expressed in some of these posts. I suppose if we allowed history alone to dictate our moral responsibilites, we would have had no reason to banish slavery, allow women to vote, etc. So maybe you see why I don't really understand the "what's new about this/no big deal" quibbliing, perhaps you don't really understand the concept of democracy. It is primarily by your lack of outrage ("you" being the privaledged techocratic elite) that such things can progress, if you really want to look at the historical record.
First off, I think informal, periodic quizzes from time to time would help with reading comprehension.
I would say the more pictures the better for hardware, and I don't just mean illustrations. Perhaps you could start off with one modular component (the case say) that you slowly add onto - piece by piece like a puzzle. In this way you could focus on the idiosyncrasies of the machine elements, while keeping it all grounded in visual space.
For operating systems, I think that you should explore what all systems must have in common before you delve into the specific details. If lucidly built upon an understanding of the different hardware components, you can easily explain what drivers are and why some components don't need them. Perhaps most of us slowly acclimated to our OS over time through use. You will need to compensate for this natural gravitation by supplying examples that are familiar, or that a reader can follow along with. I feel as though metaphors can sometimes hurt more than they help; I would just make sure that it's simple and not too absurd.
Slashdot Mirror
People keep mentioning this game series, but I think it deserves more specific attention. The recent film only half-heartedly captured the essence of the franchise; to truly understand why Silent Hill will be considered groundbreaking in the future, you have to play the games. The entire series borrows heavily from other surrealist and/or horror authors, particularly David Lynch. Further references can be found to the film Jacob's Ladder, Stephen King, and the works of John Carpenter. Unlike other survial horror games, Silent Hill has an intricately crafted storyline that is nearly impossible to grasp within one playing. Far from relying on the immediate shock value of gore or surprise, Silent Hill deals with most of the themes we associate with psychological horror. For example, it becomes apparent in the first game that most of the monsters you encounter are actually hellish dream-like manifestations of what frightens a little girl (bugs, schoolchildren, lizards, etc., and obvious reference to Stephen King's The Regulators). This is a far cry from the standard sci-fi zombie banality or mundane hauntings we get from certain other survival horror franchises. Every aspect of Silent Hill seems to have significance and symbolic purpose, especially your physical enviroment (a mere canvas upon which to paint variety in other games of the same genre). Furthermore, the primary themes of Silent Hill are not survival and exploration, but instead religous zealotry, anguish and despair, psychosis, and the heartbreak of missplaced love/power. Like most good film/literature, you can get what you want to out of the game, as none of this is readily spelled out per se. Silent Hill, however, is interactive; so this element allows the player to "dig" for more of the town's mythos in way that is impossible in other media. So I disagree, video games do have one serious redeeming title that definately trumps most of the fare we get at the cinema in terms of immersion, even if it's no Eraserhead.
I avidly dumpster-dive CompUSA for their discarded (or slightly damaged) computer parts; I just bring some tools into the dumpster and strip them right there (what a wasteful lot we Americans are). I'm not out to retrieve personal information though; my goal is to Frankenstein together free computers for my community. One of my most common finds is working (but ancient) hard drives, as the only way they seem to "destroy" the computers is by taking a hammer to the case and moniter. Of course the first thing I do is format these drives, but they are commonly filled with junk. I've never found a BestBuy that didn't use a trash compactor, so I doubt that this drive was dug out of the garbage. Still, kind of disturbing how easy it would be to get some personal information if you really wanted to.
Your race is not set in stone, and having lived in the American south my entire life, I am well aware of that. To many people here, it doesn't matter what part of Asia you're from - you're all "chinks" (even if you'll get "properly" called a "gook" up north). Similarly the crime of having "dark skin" corrals Indians, Mexicans, African Americans, etc. all into one catch-all term - nigger. Or look at wide array of peoples that are all bannered "white"; this is mirrored in Africa, Asia, and South America, who's people often consider themselves as discrete depite American tendancies to lump them together with words like "Hispanic" (the checkbox that "most" fit me in school under the "Choose your race" section of standarized tests). You claim that "Back in the real world, it is simply not an option to change your race", but it's a terribly simple thing to achieve - just move to a different part of the world. When the Spaniards arrived in the Americas, many of the natives there considered them to be gods based on their physical appearances; a racial classification pretty rare for them today I would imagine. If you make the claim that "you're still a nigger in the American south" even if you move to Kenya, t
By claiming that gays are "controversial", you are preemptively depriving them of their rights. "Homosexual" is a state of being, not an argument or "issue"; so the comparison to politics is kind of absurd. Maybe you see how the entire framing of the subject reduces homosexuals to second class citizens, where their mere existence is spoken of in sub-human terms. It's not that people "don't want to talk about GLBT issues"; the argument is that BEING GAY IS FACT OF LIFE AND SHOULD BE A NON-ISSUE.
I'll explain. You start off by quibbling about the symantics in the structure of my post, but you don't respond to the thesis; namely that race is a "holistic" convention while homosexuality is not. This is what is meant by an external status; homosexuality is not something inherently learned from your enviroment, but your concept of race is. Skin color, geography, etc. has nothing to do with race per se, they are conventions applied by social constructs (as proven most vividly in the melting pot of the United States). Race is not only something that you can change (just get a skin transplant!), it has been changing constantly over the course of history due to wavering classifications. Notice that you make a fundamental error, which is that you assumed that "gay issues" and "being gay" are one in the same, completely proving my point. You also make the mistake of using "skin color" and "race" interchangeably, which is not necessarily a truism (visit Puerto Rico). While "skin color" is just a "quantifiable" fact, race is an abstraction that always invokes social issues and constraints. Similarly, while the existence of gay humans does often coincide with controversy; said controversy is not inherent to them as people. Therefore your comaparison of homosexuals to any race is illogical because "gay" is a state of being and "race" is an abstraction. My accusation of Blizzard lies within the logic of artificial lumping. It is impossible for there to be any "controversy" over "being gay", because they (gays) are not proposing any argument by simply existing. Any controversy blanketed over gays is simply illogical bigotry, which I have already stated; and the only possible counter-argument is to cede that they are somehow conditionally manufactured (either through enviroment or choice). By not taking a stand against such a platform and endorsing such flawed logic, Blizzard is confessing how they feel about the subject.
Your argument falls apart upon closer examination, because there is no fundamentally inherent difference between a white person and a black person besides the pigmentation of their skin. Therefore, any person that emphasizes "differences" between the two races is doing so in the context of cultural anthropology, and should have their expressions critically reviewed for meaning. A gay, however, is dealing with the consequneces of a very real biological trait - namely the human sex drive. To link the two examples reveals a fundamental misunderstanding/miseduacation about homosexuality, and that is to prescribe it some kind of "external" status to the subject that is based in "conception". This is the line of thought that tried to convince people that open endorsement or tolerance of homosexuality will somehow help it to "spread" like some obscene cult. If we hypothetically imagine a world in which Egalitarianism has been achieved, hardly a difference will exist between the multiple races in society. Sexual orientation, however, will still be just as obvious and just as dividing as it is today. Blizzard would have us believe that being gay is something inherently controversial (like a political preference), and that is simply abashed bigotry. I would propose that not only do they allow any group that wants to dichotomize itself along legitimate differneces; that they also have a strict policy against discriminatory speech (including slurs against gays).
Some of the reactions here remind me of a particualar Noam Chomsky quote, "State propaganda, when supported by the educated classes and when no deviation is permitted from it, can have a big effect". I can't decide which is more troubling, the idea of the U.S. military having their finger on the power button, or the mundane apathy expressed in some of these posts. I suppose if we allowed history alone to dictate our moral responsibilites, we would have had no reason to banish slavery, allow women to vote, etc. So maybe you see why I don't really understand the "what's new about this/no big deal" quibbliing, perhaps you don't really understand the concept of democracy. It is primarily by your lack of outrage ("you" being the privaledged techocratic elite) that such things can progress, if you really want to look at the historical record.
First off, I think informal, periodic quizzes from time to time would help with reading comprehension. I would say the more pictures the better for hardware, and I don't just mean illustrations. Perhaps you could start off with one modular component (the case say) that you slowly add onto - piece by piece like a puzzle. In this way you could focus on the idiosyncrasies of the machine elements, while keeping it all grounded in visual space. For operating systems, I think that you should explore what all systems must have in common before you delve into the specific details. If lucidly built upon an understanding of the different hardware components, you can easily explain what drivers are and why some components don't need them. Perhaps most of us slowly acclimated to our OS over time through use. You will need to compensate for this natural gravitation by supplying examples that are familiar, or that a reader can follow along with. I feel as though metaphors can sometimes hurt more than they help; I would just make sure that it's simple and not too absurd.