I wouldn't blame the developers who'd rather give the player more of a free-will, "happy fall" scenario. Personally, I quickly bore of games where I constantly run into invisible walls and get "multiple choice" sections in which none of the choices appeal to me nor bear much difference from one another. I have always been delighted when an action attempted out of whimsy without expecting results (shooting at non-enemies, interacting with objects in an unconventional way) has actually yielded some sort of reaction (one of my happiest gaming memories: Zelda OoT, shooting at a distant Gerudo guard in a fit of pique and doing a double take when she actually collapsed). I'm not defending the sort of moral grand-standing mentioned in TFA, but I think reducing the players' options is the absolute last thing gaming needs.
I think our definitions of "distasteful", "offensive", and "immoral" are calibrated a bit differently (I've realized while reading through this thread that I don't often think of myself as offended by things; there are simply things I avoid). I think I still understand what you're getting at, though. I'm afraid I assumed by your original statement about "People suffering" skeeving you out that your stance was a moral absolute, and I was confused that you might treat depictions that (debatably) didn't involve actual suffering in the same light. But yes, taste is quite subjective and you're quite free to be offended by whatever, whether due to moral, aesthetic, or other considerations.
This is a good point, and something that it would be cool for the GP to clarify which he was referring to. Some have assumed that consensual BDSM is what's being referred to, which IMO is a very different thing from a shoot where the guy gets rougher than was agreed to and the girl is trying to call it off but the camera keeps rolling.
Exactly, that was a poor example of what's meant by "more specific". Something effective would be more along the lines of "I love how you work so hard at remembering things like spelling words". The specific praise should focus on an action said child can control, rather than just something they're "good at". Another AC beat me to posting a good article on this phenomenon down here.
I think I'm most repulsed by the inability of such a learned person to click on the "Parent" link when a parent post he wants to know the content of is below his current threshold.
I think the line of reasoning here is that the Wiimote allows players to more accurately simulate the act of murder by actually taking them through the motions of swinging a bat at someone's head, etc. They've long argued about improvements in graphics because their great big fear is that little Timmy is latently schizotypal and will be unable to tell the difference between a game and reality if said game reaches a certain threshold of realism.
For anyone curious, that's Dulce et Decorum Est, by Wilfred Owen, a British man who fought and died in WWI. Highly relevant. He also wrote the Anthem for Doomed Youth:
What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?
Only the monstrous anger of the guns.
Only the stuttering rifles' rapid rattle Can patter out their hasty orisons. No mockeries now for them; no prayers nor bells, Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs,-- The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells; And bugles calling for them from sad shires.
What candles may be held to speed them all?
Not in the hands of boys, but in their eyes Shall shine the holy glimmers of goodbyes.
The pallor of girls' brows shall be their pall; Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds, And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.
Chinese input on the mainland is actually even easier than that. You just enter the standard pinyin (minus tones) with the latin alphabet you normally have on American phones and it brings up a row of characters with that pronunciation to choose from. Even more, it offers a list after each character entry of other hanzi that can form common compunds with the preceeding one, which saves you the trouble of typing many things out. It's surprisingly fast and effective overall.
I would guess they would focus on both the kanji and the hiragana (or second/third/so on kanji) following it more or less simultaneously, since the pronunciation of the kanji and meaning of the word are dependent on whatever comes after it. For example, the character for love is normally pronounced "ai", both by itself and in many compounds, but if it's followed by the phonetic characters for "shii" (that's 2 characters, "shi" and "i"), the entire word is "itoshii" and means "precious". Of course, I'm nowhere near fluent with Japanese yet and most of my kanji-reading has actually been in Chinese (which I guess would make it hanzi-reading), so I'd value input on how native speakers tend to identify the characters themselves. The hanzi I've learned so far I recognize more or less at a glance, with occasional double-takes to identify distinguishing radicals for characters that look very similar to one another (like the Chinese characters for "buy" "sell" and "real/true").
And yet "ckroerscw" looks more correct to me than "cecksrorw" does...? Having letters for "screw" in the section for "cork" seems more confusing, even if the s is the wrong number of spaces over to break up the compound properly.
I came here to give props to Eternal Darkness, too. Not only does it play on in-game fears, it actually gleefully strikes out at you, the player. Read no further if you don't want to be spoiled, but aside from the fly-on-screen, blood-on-walls and such, there are points at which it breaks the fourth wall even further to make you think you're having a technical problem with the game and/or system itself. From problems where your controls don't work, to seeing all your progress erased at a save point, to seeing an advertising screen pop up to say the game is over and you should go out and grab Eternal Darkness 2. Genius. Though I think I was still most affected by the hallucinatory sequences that you had just enough time to explore and be confused by before you snapped back to yourself and saw that you hadn't even entered the room yet.
Look, I know you're trying to justify your position because you believe climate change isn't man made.
And exactly how do you know that? Where in the grandparent's posts does he imply anything but disgust with politically biased reports and a desire to find the unmuddied truth? While it's possible that you've guessed his motivations correctly, it's also quite possible that you just slung an unjust insult at someone who was merely trying to ask a question. Not everyone who's uncertain about the neutrality of climate reports is a neo-conservative, spotted owl-murdering fundamentalist, and assuming they are is a really good way to make reasonable people not want to listen to you. This is a prime example of the sort of emotional responses that have been sullying this discourse from the get-go.
I, for one, support efforts to regulate emissions, save furry animals, preserve wilderness, and to stop fucking up the environment in general. I am not, however, convinced that the current warming trend is all us or means that the sky is falling. I am open to being convinced otherwise, and would really like to see data that incorporates non-anthopogenic causes as well as anthropogenic. I can find reports with charts on solar activity vs. warming and reports with charts on CO2 emissions vs. warming (for two of many examples of factors), but none that seem to want to incorporate them all and actually show those complex interactions that so many AGW proponents like to talk about but keep in a black box for some reason.
I in all honesty have to commend you for at least acknowledging that there are two types of respect. The last time I saw a comment like GP's regarding respect (quite clearly implying your first definition), she immediately had a horde of slashdotters breathing down her throat and lecturing her on how respect was earned rather than innately deserved.
...I know because the first time I made an All Your Base reference, he didn't have a clue what I was talking about. I explained its origins and widespread prominence as a pop-culture reference, and when he expressed skepticism that he could miss something so common, I surfed around to some random examples on sites he himself frequented while he watched over my shoulder.
It's absolutely true that these things aren't going to hit off everyone's radar, and that's fine; I'm trying to figure out what part of my post could have been taken to mean that I'm looking down on anyone who doesn't dick around on internet forums.
(For the record, my brother eventually decided he was pleased to know about All Your Base and gleefully continues to reference it far past its coolness expiration date.)
The statement you quoted from GP is spot-on, whether you like it or not. Being aware of the internet as a culture has nothing to do with how long you've been working with computers or any sort of indicator of technical acumen in general. My brother was involved with computer programming and the internet a good 6 years before me, and yet I've always been the one to introduce him to the internet's memes and trends (from All Your Base to the O RLY owl) just because of the differences in our focuses. Calling/b/ well-known among a subset of people that doesn't include you is in no way a slam on you. The fact is that many of those who give even a cursory amount of attention to the masses (forums, comments, et al) have heard somewhat of/b/. Hell, if you'd bothered to read/. comments at -1 (say, when you had mod points) anytime in the last year, it's almost certain you would have heard of/b/ before today.
Ehh, I think we're just going to disagree on definitions here:) . I still don't think Batman would be directly responsible because there was still the matter of the villain's choice to torture. To me, Batman would only be directly responsible if he were the one raping and torturing, or maybe if he goaded the villain into doing it. I just feel that if you keep ascribing responsibility beyond the direct actors in something, it can become a bit of a slippery slope where you can lay the blame on so many people other than the perpetrator that it dilutes the simple fact of their choice commit a crime.
I didn't mean to put words in your mouth re: black and white, but I'm glad for the clarification. I agree with killing someone when necessary for immediate survival (something like being in the middle of a fight when you really must shoot the person who has a gun pointed at your head to get out alive), but after that it gets a bit tricky. If you're at a point where someone's tied up prone in front of you and not a direct threat to your survival, it takes a pretty supernatural hatred to get your survival instincts to fire up and "let the animal take over". Most of us aren't wired to kill when not deemed necessary by our reptilian hindbrains (as opposed to by our logical deductions about what's moral), and it frankly tends to fuck with your head. Note that I don't necessarily think this is a bad thing. If you're ever in such a situation (again, God forbid), I don't think you should feel bad if what your instincts want conflict with what you've decided you should want.
Harry not moving when Voldemort cast a Crucio on him?
I understand not screaming, since the pain can be resisted somewhat. But not even twitching?
Okay, wait a second, everyone else replying is going on about wand ownership and such, but I got the impression reading it that Narcissa had done something? She pierced him with her nails just after hearing of Draco's status and before reporting Harry dead; I figured there was some kind of anaesthetic/potion/etc. administered at that time. It wasn't explicitly stated, true, but I'd figured that was the significance of the action.
I hate to be a pedant (ha ha, like that's ever stopped me), but I don't think your enemy killing someone after you've shown them mercy makes you "directly responsible". In fact, any responsibility you could ascribe to it would be pretty fucking indirect.
I'm not trying to shout down your values, 'cause we've all got subtly different moral compasses, but I personally think it's much more childish to distill usually complex matters into stark black-and-white decisions of kill or don't kill. It's largely been my experience that the people who best understand the many consequences and reverberations of killing someone try to avoid it.
Slashdot Mirror
I wouldn't blame the developers who'd rather give the player more of a free-will, "happy fall" scenario. Personally, I quickly bore of games where I constantly run into invisible walls and get "multiple choice" sections in which none of the choices appeal to me nor bear much difference from one another. I have always been delighted when an action attempted out of whimsy without expecting results (shooting at non-enemies, interacting with objects in an unconventional way) has actually yielded some sort of reaction (one of my happiest gaming memories: Zelda OoT, shooting at a distant Gerudo guard in a fit of pique and doing a double take when she actually collapsed). I'm not defending the sort of moral grand-standing mentioned in TFA, but I think reducing the players' options is the absolute last thing gaming needs.
You'd be surprised.
Ah, thanks for clearing that up :)
I think our definitions of "distasteful", "offensive", and "immoral" are calibrated a bit differently (I've realized while reading through this thread that I don't often think of myself as offended by things; there are simply things I avoid). I think I still understand what you're getting at, though. I'm afraid I assumed by your original statement about "People suffering" skeeving you out that your stance was a moral absolute, and I was confused that you might treat depictions that (debatably) didn't involve actual suffering in the same light. But yes, taste is quite subjective and you're quite free to be offended by whatever, whether due to moral, aesthetic, or other considerations.
This is a good point, and something that it would be cool for the GP to clarify which he was referring to. Some have assumed that consensual BDSM is what's being referred to, which IMO is a very different thing from a shoot where the guy gets rougher than was agreed to and the girl is trying to call it off but the camera keeps rolling.
Exactly, that was a poor example of what's meant by "more specific". Something effective would be more along the lines of "I love how you work so hard at remembering things like spelling words". The specific praise should focus on an action said child can control, rather than just something they're "good at". Another AC beat me to posting a good article on this phenomenon down here.
"A rolling stone can gather moss if it is rolling very, very slowly." - Mike Topp
I think I'm most repulsed by the inability of such a learned person to click on the "Parent" link when a parent post he wants to know the content of is below his current threshold.
I think the line of reasoning here is that the Wiimote allows players to more accurately simulate the act of murder by actually taking them through the motions of swinging a bat at someone's head, etc. They've long argued about improvements in graphics because their great big fear is that little Timmy is latently schizotypal and will be unable to tell the difference between a game and reality if said game reaches a certain threshold of realism.
For anyone curious, that's Dulce et Decorum Est, by Wilfred Owen, a British man who fought and died in WWI. Highly relevant. He also wrote the Anthem for Doomed Youth:
What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?
Only the monstrous anger of the guns.
Only the stuttering rifles' rapid rattle
Can patter out their hasty orisons.
No mockeries now for them; no prayers nor bells,
Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs,--
The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;
And bugles calling for them from sad shires.
What candles may be held to speed them all?
Not in the hands of boys, but in their eyes
Shall shine the holy glimmers of goodbyes.
The pallor of girls' brows shall be their pall;
Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds,
And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.
Chinese input on the mainland is actually even easier than that. You just enter the standard pinyin (minus tones) with the latin alphabet you normally have on American phones and it brings up a row of characters with that pronunciation to choose from. Even more, it offers a list after each character entry of other hanzi that can form common compunds with the preceeding one, which saves you the trouble of typing many things out. It's surprisingly fast and effective overall.
I would guess they would focus on both the kanji and the hiragana (or second/third/so on kanji) following it more or less simultaneously, since the pronunciation of the kanji and meaning of the word are dependent on whatever comes after it. For example, the character for love is normally pronounced "ai", both by itself and in many compounds, but if it's followed by the phonetic characters for "shii" (that's 2 characters, "shi" and "i"), the entire word is "itoshii" and means "precious". Of course, I'm nowhere near fluent with Japanese yet and most of my kanji-reading has actually been in Chinese (which I guess would make it hanzi-reading), so I'd value input on how native speakers tend to identify the characters themselves. The hanzi I've learned so far I recognize more or less at a glance, with occasional double-takes to identify distinguishing radicals for characters that look very similar to one another (like the Chinese characters for "buy" "sell" and "real/true").
And yet "ckroerscw" looks more correct to me than "cecksrorw" does...? Having letters for "screw" in the section for "cork" seems more confusing, even if the s is the wrong number of spaces over to break up the compound properly.
A lack of safety measures in China? Say it ain't so!
I came here to give props to Eternal Darkness, too. Not only does it play on in-game fears, it actually gleefully strikes out at you, the player. Read no further if you don't want to be spoiled, but aside from the fly-on-screen, blood-on-walls and such, there are points at which it breaks the fourth wall even further to make you think you're having a technical problem with the game and/or system itself. From problems where your controls don't work, to seeing all your progress erased at a save point, to seeing an advertising screen pop up to say the game is over and you should go out and grab Eternal Darkness 2. Genius. Though I think I was still most affected by the hallucinatory sequences that you had just enough time to explore and be confused by before you snapped back to yourself and saw that you hadn't even entered the room yet.
And exactly how do you know that? Where in the grandparent's posts does he imply anything but disgust with politically biased reports and a desire to find the unmuddied truth? While it's possible that you've guessed his motivations correctly, it's also quite possible that you just slung an unjust insult at someone who was merely trying to ask a question. Not everyone who's uncertain about the neutrality of climate reports is a neo-conservative, spotted owl-murdering fundamentalist, and assuming they are is a really good way to make reasonable people not want to listen to you. This is a prime example of the sort of emotional responses that have been sullying this discourse from the get-go.
I, for one, support efforts to regulate emissions, save furry animals, preserve wilderness, and to stop fucking up the environment in general. I am not, however, convinced that the current warming trend is all us or means that the sky is falling. I am open to being convinced otherwise, and would really like to see data that incorporates non-anthopogenic causes as well as anthropogenic. I can find reports with charts on solar activity vs. warming and reports with charts on CO2 emissions vs. warming (for two of many examples of factors), but none that seem to want to incorporate them all and actually show those complex interactions that so many AGW proponents like to talk about but keep in a black box for some reason.
I in all honesty have to commend you for at least acknowledging that there are two types of respect. The last time I saw a comment like GP's regarding respect (quite clearly implying your first definition), she immediately had a horde of slashdotters breathing down her throat and lecturing her on how respect was earned rather than innately deserved.
...I know because the first time I made an All Your Base reference, he didn't have a clue what I was talking about. I explained its origins and widespread prominence as a pop-culture reference, and when he expressed skepticism that he could miss something so common, I surfed around to some random examples on sites he himself frequented while he watched over my shoulder.
It's absolutely true that these things aren't going to hit off everyone's radar, and that's fine; I'm trying to figure out what part of my post could have been taken to mean that I'm looking down on anyone who doesn't dick around on internet forums.
(For the record, my brother eventually decided he was pleased to know about All Your Base and gleefully continues to reference it far past its coolness expiration date.)
The statement you quoted from GP is spot-on, whether you like it or not. Being aware of the internet as a culture has nothing to do with how long you've been working with computers or any sort of indicator of technical acumen in general. My brother was involved with computer programming and the internet a good 6 years before me, and yet I've always been the one to introduce him to the internet's memes and trends (from All Your Base to the O RLY owl) just because of the differences in our focuses. Calling /b/ well-known among a subset of people that doesn't include you is in no way a slam on you. The fact is that many of those who give even a cursory amount of attention to the masses (forums, comments, et al) have heard somewhat of /b/. Hell, if you'd bothered to read /. comments at -1 (say, when you had mod points) anytime in the last year, it's almost certain you would have heard of /b/ before today.
Ehh, I think we're just going to disagree on definitions here :) . I still don't think Batman would be directly responsible because there was still the matter of the villain's choice to torture. To me, Batman would only be directly responsible if he were the one raping and torturing, or maybe if he goaded the villain into doing it. I just feel that if you keep ascribing responsibility beyond the direct actors in something, it can become a bit of a slippery slope where you can lay the blame on so many people other than the perpetrator that it dilutes the simple fact of their choice commit a crime.
I didn't mean to put words in your mouth re: black and white, but I'm glad for the clarification. I agree with killing someone when necessary for immediate survival (something like being in the middle of a fight when you really must shoot the person who has a gun pointed at your head to get out alive), but after that it gets a bit tricky. If you're at a point where someone's tied up prone in front of you and not a direct threat to your survival, it takes a pretty supernatural hatred to get your survival instincts to fire up and "let the animal take over". Most of us aren't wired to kill when not deemed necessary by our reptilian hindbrains (as opposed to by our logical deductions about what's moral), and it frankly tends to fuck with your head. Note that I don't necessarily think this is a bad thing. If you're ever in such a situation (again, God forbid), I don't think you should feel bad if what your instincts want conflict with what you've decided you should want.
Harry not moving when Voldemort cast a Crucio on him? I understand not screaming, since the pain can be resisted somewhat. But not even twitching?
Okay, wait a second, everyone else replying is going on about wand ownership and such, but I got the impression reading it that Narcissa had done something? She pierced him with her nails just after hearing of Draco's status and before reporting Harry dead; I figured there was some kind of anaesthetic/potion/etc. administered at that time. It wasn't explicitly stated, true, but I'd figured that was the significance of the action.
I hate to be a pedant (ha ha, like that's ever stopped me), but I don't think your enemy killing someone after you've shown them mercy makes you "directly responsible". In fact, any responsibility you could ascribe to it would be pretty fucking indirect.
I'm not trying to shout down your values, 'cause we've all got subtly different moral compasses, but I personally think it's much more childish to distill usually complex matters into stark black-and-white decisions of kill or don't kill. It's largely been my experience that the people who best understand the many consequences and reverberations of killing someone try to avoid it.
Trevor Goodchild, is that you? What on earth are you doing posting on /.?