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The Rise And Fall Of Skill-Based Participation

I found the above video in a thread commenting on STAR_’s foray into Team Fortress Classic (and Bananaland). They at least had the perspective to acknowledge that the video was funny and giving attention to the game, even if highlighted some of its worst aspects (Bananaland). But there was still a lot of the grumbling.

The reasons given for the death of this style of movement are generally that first person shooters took a big shift towards gritty realism, especially as they moved to the console (true), and that Gabe Newell of Valve hated bunnyhopping and regarded it as a bug to be fixed (also true). But the second reason is more a symptom than a cause, and the first is an oversimplification of a larger trend, which is that showing up to an FPS in the days of once upon a time fucking sucked.

Continue reading “The Rise And Fall Of Skill-Based Participation”

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Ideas for Free! Grapple: Ends of the Earth

On a pastoral Earth, actually set several millennia in the future, villages discover that some of their youth have become shamans, intermittently possessed by ancient deities. Their powers seem fantastic, granting them great strength and athleticism, and endowed with knowledge of hand-to-hand martial arts, apparently ushering in a new era of prosperity. But soon trouble arises: when these shamans meet, they invariably lose control to their spirits, and battle erupts.

The gods possessing the children are 80s pro wrestlers, and the great wars that follow are story lines from that era, complete with face-heel turns and smack talk. Main character is young girl possessed by Hulk Hogan and her signature move is the leg drop. Love interest is boy possessed by Macho Man Randy Savage. Lots of hulking up.

Please use my idea.

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The UCSB shooting

Oh my god, I just woke up and didn’t know about this. I’m so upset, fuck. I’ve been getting more upset by misogyny as time goes by, and especially over the past month, but then this had to happen.

It sounds like the shooter had high functioning autism, which is not by itself mental illness, although something else must have been there. (The Sandy Hook shooter was similar.)

But the post is correct: the cause here is the fucked up attitude from PUAs and other misogynistic horrible people. There are definitely other issues, such as the proliferation of guns (mass shootings are definitely the crime of our time, these things move in trends) and how society treats people who are not neurotypical or have mental illnesses.

But what we need to talk about right now is misogyny and entitlement and the cultural expectation that men should get something for nothing.

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Cat video for slow grandma

If you like cats but cat videos are a bit too difficult for you to follow, despair not, for there is Animal Planet’s Too Cute. With a helpful narrator and plunky music, you will never again have to worry about what you should be feeling or thinking when you watch a kitten fall on its face.

Canned laughter is a long standing crutch of the sitcom, serving as a cue for when people are supposed to find something funny. Is this in that tradition? Are there actually people who find goofy animal videos better with this kind of cuing? Or is this a television company pathetically trying to latch on to a phenomenon taking place outside its jurisdiction, in a manner that only highlights how the media landscape is slowly slipping away from their control?

Really hoping it’s not the former.

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“Bizarre dream”

I was looking through an old article ideas file and this was in there for some reason:

Bizarre dream: Portal/Wayne’s World sequel, in which Wayne and Garth get ahold of a Portal gun and try to use it to break into the Loch Ness monster. Garth: “If you’re going to shave…shave inside the Loch Ness Monster!”

I do not remember having this dream, nor do I remember putting it in this file, nor do I know why I thought it would make for an interesting article. I did end up publishing it though, so good going sleeping me, I guess?

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The Science of God

It drives me crazy. If, for some reason, you find yourself in a scientific argument with a biblical liberalism, well, first of all you’ve probably done something wrong or made some kind of mistake somewhere, but should it happen, the ultimate brick wall you’ll always hit is: God willed it, and the Bible is the correct and authoritative source of God’s history and intent.

It’s an appeal to authority. In other subjects of argument that can be a fine thing to do sometimes (I guess) but in matters of science, it’s lazy and delusional. It’s passing the buck. In addition to an argument that God is responsible for an action, it also contains a subtle second assertion: because God is responsible for something, there’s really no point in even thinking about it, because, really, who knows, right?

Let’s accept that, relative to what we know about the universe, God has an independent will and magical powers to change what he desires. This is stated to be true.

Sorry, God just became part of science. Continue reading “The Science of God”

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Nutrition: The Hot New Thing!

From the Wikipedia page on vitamins:

In east Asia, where polished white rice was the common staple food of the middle class, beriberi resulting from lack of vitamin B1 was endemic. In 1884, Takaki Kanehiro, a British trained medical doctor of the Imperial Japanese Navy, observed that beriberi was endemic among low-ranking crew who often ate nothing but rice, but not among officers who consumed a Western-style diet. With the support of the Japanese navy, he experimented using crews of two battleships; one crew was fed only white rice, while the other was fed a diet of meat, fish, barley, rice, and beans. The group that ate only white rice documented 161 crew members with beriberi and 25 deaths, while the latter group had only 14 cases of beriberi and no deaths. This convinced Takaki and the Japanese Navy that diet was the cause of beriberi, but mistakenly believed that sufficient amounts of protein prevented it.

It’s amazing how much we take modern knowledge for granted. I can’t read that without thinking about how obvious it is that only eating white rice is going to make you sick, since it’s nothing but simple carbohydrates. But even the idea of a carbohydrate only dates back to around the same time. Nobody actually had any solid idea of how these things worked. A great deal of practical heuristics developed over the course of history through trial and error and tradition (a power formula over a long enough span of time! One wonders how many poor saps died before anyone figured out which mushrooms were actually safe to eat).

Now we take vitamin supplements in the hope of living healthier, even though evidence is racking up that it’s a useless practice. And as science marches on, in 50 years we’re going to look like complete idiots. As usual.

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Near death experience

I woke up about an hour ago and when to the bathroom to pee, whereupon I saw a military-grade cockroach crawling around in the tub. Two inches long, two inches more of antennae, fluttering (not flying, thank god) such that it would occasionally blast across the tub at high speeds.

I considered just throwing it outside, which is what I usually do. But then it’d just crawl into someone else’s apartment, right? Unacceptable. So I considered finding away to get it into the dumpster. Nope, all its hottie buddies are probably in there and they’d have a nasty little orgy.

So I grabbed a paper shopping bag, ripped off one of the handles and laid it down in the tub. When the beast crawled in, I grabbed it and dumped it in the toilet. It thrashed for its life, uselessly beating its wings, waving around its antennae as if it could do even a bit of good. But I flushed it, and it’s gone.

And now I am the monster.