What the purpose of this floppy disk? No, it’s not a camera.
Here’s a video of some kids trying to guess the use of technology which is around 30 years old.
Even more with the realization that kids born when I was playing the original X-Wing game, are now adults.
Oh man.
Oh Privilege Denying Dude, you so funny!
Just look at this goddamn shit of a thread. The whole thing just reeks of unchecked privilege and rampart douchebaggery. I think this PDD I just cooked up summarizes it nicely.
Even a large number of transgendered people pointing out how wrong and hurtful he is to transgendered people was not enough to make this PDD rethink his perspective.
I think this brilliant post explains things best (h/t FuchsiaGauge)
Can we radically change the attitude of a whole community by simply giving an incentive which rewards it?
I’ve recently gotten back into Heroes of Newerth (AKA HoN) and as it always happens when my interest is focused on something particular, I’m getting a lot of ideas for improvements. And one of the things that seriously needs improvement in HoN is the community behaviour. You see, at the moment HoN has rightly conquered the top of the food chain of games with the most shitty community, even bypassing the champions like Halo and Call of Duty with just how much abuse you get to hear in every game from your own team. To give you an idea of how bad it looks, there’s practically no thread in reddit’s /r/gaming (a community of 300k people) about HoN, which doesn’t have at least 1/3 of the people mentioning how bad the community is and how one should keep away from it for this reason. In the official fora, you get “the community is bad” posts almost daily. I was posting about this stuff 2 years ago and things are just as bad now as they were then.
The reason why the community is so bad is practically because of the rules of the game and the kind of mentality it breeds. As one of the community managers explained:
Fact of the matter is, every game in HoN is fought tooth and nail, and most of the time it is simply economically efficient to just try and carry a bad team yourself than it is to try and coach them while playing. HoN is a very fast paced game and ‘playing two heroes at once’ is no easy feat, especially when most of the time when you coach people in-game they wont improve anyways, and will sometimes even get mad at you for trying to help them.
Which is fairly accurate even though I could mention a lot of other stuff that adds to the problem (such as stat tracking). This is fact is a prime example of how the environment of a situation, breeds a certain kind of behaviour from the people in it. In this case, unfortunately it’s complete intolerance of even the slightest failing and rampart elitism. It’s pretty bad in-game but it also heavily spills out in other areas such as the fora or in reddit, making the whole experience require a very thick skin to say the least.
However recently with the 2.0 update, a new exciting feature has been added and that is a form of currency called “goblin coins” and a store where you can redeem those for some aesthetic purchases (new skins, models, avatars, that sort of thing). Now this is the first form of actual incentive the game has that is not directly tied to winning games or achieving some particular task within the game. The fact that the goblin coins are abstracted from gameplay (even though they’re normally awarded because of it) means that they can also be awarded for other reasons, and as the person who pushed for them notes, it allows the HoN devs to use them as an incentive for so much more.
Given correct implementation, goblin coins have the capacity to finally provide an incentive for people in the HoN community to stop being dickwads in or outside the game. It will once again modify the environment so as to mold the human behaviour within it.It is a good first step, but it could be so much more.
Talking with the community manager today, the idea came to me that while goblin coins can be used as an incentive to improve the community attitudes, they are still primarily tied either to winning games (therefore still giving an incentive to be an asshole in-game, if it [appears to] provide a competitive advantage at winning games) , or with IRL currency. These two dilute the effectiveness of using goblin coins as an incentive for any other purpose since it fairly easy for someone to continue being a dick as they can make up for it by simply winning more games, or by just being richer than others in real life.
In fact, this little fact of market economies IRL is one of the main reasons why rich people can afford to be bigger assholes than everyone else since it all comes down to money and we have tied so much of human accomplishment and wellbeing to how wealthy one is. Of course this is not the whole picture but I digress anyway.
This means that it would be far more effective if there was a particular incentive for good behaviour which could not be bypassed by other means and the idea came to me of just how much more effective a secondary currency would be that not only was not tied to the skills of one in-game, or the money they have IRL, but that the only possible way to receive it was by good behaviour in game. Lets call this new currency “Kudos” as a tribute to the Algebraist 🙂
So how could this Kudos economy affect the community? Lets take a theoretical setup. We assume that one can only receive Kudos from other people, you can give Kudos to someone after a match by clicking on their name, or you could give Kudos to someone in the fora for making a good and thoughtful post. There is no other way to receive Kudos. In other words, one cannot buy them with real life money as this would defeat part of the purpose, allowing trolls and dickwads to achieve rewards for good behaviour while not having any.
Now lets also assume that Kudos can only be used in a special shop which sells distinct rewards from the Goblin shop. At the moment, HoN’s goblin shop sells alternative skills and models, avatars and icons and even different announcers voices. Now imagine that the Kudos shop sold stuff that not only you could not find in the Goblin shop, but that complemented any purchases you did from the Goblin shop. For example, while one could buy new models via Goblin coins, you could only buy new skins or accessories via the Kudos shop, so someone who wants to completely “pimp out” their favourite hero, needs not only to be a good player, but also a good player. This can be expanded further with one selling custom avatars, while the other sold custom titles. Stuff like that.
The end result would be a distinct incentive that pushes people to try and be well liked by other players enough to receive Kudos which they can then exchange for something only such people can have. It is not the best incentive one can have since it’s still all based on some sort of an “e-peen contest” in the end, but we are in an imperfect system so we have to do the best we can within it. What this system would achieve is that people would still be trying to fulfil their ego with shiny digital toys, but the actions they use to do that would have a positive effect rather than a negative. This would then create a cascading effect of making the community more welcome to new player and therefore more successful, subconsciously conditioning players to use and expect good behaviour and ultimately for them to abhor and punish bad behaviour.
All this, by simply modifying the environment slightly so that the incentives push for a different behaviour. This is a similar idea as expressed by Human iteration, with the difference is that this is actually feasible in the very short term and we can then actually empirically observe the results in the microcosm of a gaming community. I believe that from an memetic perspective this makes a lot of sense and will be a very exciting experiment to see.
Unfortunately, I doubt S2 (the publishers of HoN) would go through the effort of implementing anything so drastic but one never knows. There is certainly a lot of pressure on them to improve the community behaviour and perhaps the constant and loud outcry on this subject will make them bold enough to try.
Adverts targetted at children are some of the most sexist stuff around. Allowing children to see them constantly is a goddamn crime.
I just saw this video about advertisement targeted to children and I couldn’t agree more.
This kind of stuff simply disgusts me. If advertisements are is bad enough when targeted at adults, they’re even moreso when targetted specifically to pre-teen children who are far too moldable to external expectations and input. Having to deal with the question of whether I should let my future children watch TV and be indoctrinated by this shit, or act as an authoritarian and forbid TV altogether is one decision I do not look forward to.
Fortunately I hope by the time I have to decide, the question will not be relevant anymore. Hopefully entertainment will have primarily moved to a more interactive model such as gaming and the children will be allowed to choose the kind of things they like to play with, without feeling pressured by society’s expectations to like what “good little boys” and “nice little girls” should like in the most manipulative manner (meaning: even more than the gender-targeted shows do, eg He-Man for boys, Little Pony for Girls).
For those of you who have to make this decision now however, there is always an alternative: Switch to downloading the actual shows your children want to see directly, as a way bypass the averts they would be bombarded with on TV. This will provide you with a far vaster library in which you can find the shows of higher quality (as opposed to whatever the brain-dead schedule TV channels decide to throw at you), and if your children are peer-pressured at school to watch the same stuff all the cool kids are watching, then you can simply download those directly and avoid the unnecessary indoctrination around them.
honestly, I’m always surprised by ya’ll trolls. Ya’ll wanna rep feminism, but then your example of a positive male role model is a man who kills with callous indifference? Is this really what a positive masculinity looks like? The revolution will not star steven seagal.
It’s a bit old but I only noticed it now and it’s still lulworthy.
Concentrated privilege denial. It burnssss
Holy shit, I think I’ve hit the motherlode!
Here’s some necessary background.
Of course, one doesn’t expect much from a community of primarily male teenagers with serious behaviour issues but almost every other post seems to be a PDD waiting to happen. I couldn’t resist making a few and posting them to the privielege denying dude website. And these are just from this 1 post! I could easily cook up another or two from it as well.
You can see the second one below (click for large image)
Now go forth and mine this thread for glorious PDDs!
It’s like the dream-week for all Strategy gamers. 3 mega-patches for 2 TBS and one RTS. We’re never seeing the sun again
It seems this is the week of the mega-update. Three of my favourite games have been patched with a pretty heavy update which changes quite a lot of things all over the place. First it was Heroes of Newerth, which got to version 2.0 and introduced the Casual Mode (that I played and I really enjoyed) a new LoL-style ((League of Legends, another game that follows the DotA recipe)) online shop where people can buy extra stuff for their game like alternative models and soundpacks, plus the preparation for the new Matchmaking system. Unfortunately this also spurred some controversy when it was revealed that one of the new Sound packs was playing on a steretype of gays. The company behind HoN, S2, tried to play it as if it was nothing of the sort , but unfortunately for them, someone spilled the beans. Not cool S2.
Then it was Elemental: War Of Magic, who’s disastrous launch saw the game bashed in almost all reviews and burned a lot of early buyers. Fortunately, Stardock stayed with it and hired some excellent talent in the form of Kael (the guy who directed/created the awesome Fall from Heaven mod for Civilization IV) and the game has completely reworked its mechanics and interface. Now the patch 1.1 which introduces these changes to the community is out and after a few hours of playing it yesterday, I’m extremely happy to say that the game is starting to shape up to my expectations. The game is infinitelly more playable and enjoyable now and the next two expansions (which I’m going to get for free, as a bonus for buying the game early) are going to just keep building on top of that. If you haven’t yet checked Elemental, now is the time, since if you buy it before the new year, you will get the first expansion for free 😉
And finally today, Civilization V released its own big patch, which promises to make significant changes to the AI and address a lot of the game mechanics that were broken or badly designed since release. The AI changes are nowhere near the stuff that Elemental implemented (such as multi-threading AI, which makes new turns come instantly) but are sure to make the game a bit more interesting to play on anything but the highest difficulties where the computer is cheating its arse off. I haven’t yet tried it out as it just came out, but I’m excited about that as well.
With all these updates, I now just have to replay those games, and given other stuff, such as the recent Humble Indie Bundle 2 which just came out this week as well and provides the best offer ever (hint, hint, buy it the fuck now) and the upcoming Steam Christmas Sale, I don’t think I can afford to leave my hourse, eat or sleep for the next weeks. Good thing I’ve got a vacation coming out. Oh and do pay attention to how many people bought the bundle for GNU/Linux and what they paid on average. It’s as if there’s an untapped market or something… 😉
Why do the lower classes seem to be the more kind, even though popular media routinelly paints them as uncouth violent criminals?
US. Americans like to pride themselves on their hospitality and generosity and I’ve heard many visitors to the US back this impression up so there must be a truth to it and I do not doubt that towards more “trustworthy” people, as are for example white, middle-class European tourists, Americans will go out of their way to take care for them. However, things are radically different when one is talking about lower class people, immigrants and PoC. This story from reddit is quite enlightening on this respect. Here’s a quick quote-summary ((Btw, the above are not the best parts, just the parts that convey the main point I’m trying to make. I won’t spoil the whole comment and you should really read it in full to get the whole emotional impact of it.)):
This past year I have had 3 instances of car trouble. A blow out on a freeway, a bunch of blown fuses and an out of gas situation[…]
Anyway, each of these times this shit happened I was DISGUSTED with how people would not bother to help me. I spent hours on the side of the freeway waiting, watching roadside assistance vehicles blow past me, for AAA to show. The 4 gas stations I asked for a gas can at told me that they couldn’t loan them out “for my safety” but I could buy a really shitty 1-gallon one with no cap for $15. It was enough, each time, to make you say shit like “this country is going to hell in a handbasket.”
But you know who came to my rescue all three times? Immigrants. Mexican immigrants. None of them spoke a lick of the language. But one of those dudes had a profound affect on me.
He was the guy that stopped to help me with a blow out with his whole family of 6 in tow. I was on the side of the road for close to 4 hours. Big jeep, blown rear tire, had a spare but no jack. I had signs in the windows of the car, big signs that said NEED A JACK and offered money. No dice[…]
So, to clarify, a family that is undoubtedly poorer than you, me, and just about everyone else on that stretch of road, working on a seasonal basis where time is money, took an hour or two out of their day to help some strange dude on the side of the road when people in tow trucks were just passing me by. Wow…
This isn’t of course just to rant against the US. Most, if not all primarily middle-class countries in the world behave like this. I do not think that Germans or Englishmen would be more willing to stop to help than the Americans. Hell, the Germans had to implement laws which make it illegal not to stop to help during a car accident, just to prevent everyone just driving by.
Things vary of course, depending on how society is formed, along with their traditions and the incentives the system creates, where small economic variables can have a very big impact ((Example: Having to pay for health or an ambulance to come will make people involved or watching accidents have a significantly altered reaction compared to countries where all health care is free. I still remember the story about a guy in Switzerland passed by a motorcycle accident with an unconscious cyclist. He called out an ambulance to the scene which was turned back by the cyclist who had woken up by then. Since ambulance call-outs are charged there and the cyclist refused service, they tracked down the original caller and charged him. Now what incentive would that give you?)) but there is an obvious correlation to social class and how much your “good samaritan” feelings extend. To me, it looks like one’s mutual aid tends to focused towards their own social class or and higher, which of course why the rich (which have the smallest numbers) seem to be meaner on average than the rest of us.
I’m not a scientist and especially not sociologist so I can only state my impressions on this of course, but I see various interlocking psychological and material effects taking place here to form this reality, from the monkeysphere, to tribalism, to class warfare, and all of them together form this reality and this is just yet another emergent phenomenon from the existence of inequality. It is exactly these kind of emergent effect that simple logical assumptions and rationale (such as the favourite right-libertarian defence of inequality as “harmless”) cannot predict or combat.
Until we achieve global equality, such phenomena as the above will always exist and the most oppressed classes will be always the most altruistic while the ruling elite and all kinds of managers will act the most crassly and egoistically to the detriment of everyone else. All the pleading in the world for a more empathetic “first world” will continue falling on deaf ears, because it’s not that these citizens of the rich nations willfully become this way, but rather that any existence of inequality, will affect the psychology of people to make them act this way. And unfortunately, it’s not possible for everyone to receive the kind of life-altering event, as the redditor above.
Very interesting.I have finally bought myself an android and I see that there is even an app for wordpress.Awesome stuff. As you might expect this is a post coming directly from it using the very handy swype typing interface.
Unfortunately the android wordpress interface is only useful for small posts like this one so it’s more likely I’ll be using this for twitter rather than my blog.
Still I am completely exited with my new gadget, and off a diaspora app comes out soon I believe I’ll be complete.
Also, photos directly to my blog.fun
You multitask like a mothafucka.
I’ve known I have ADHD since i was around 24. I found out by myself by searching online for solutions for my very short attention span, learning about ADD and then going to a specialist on these issues for an actual test. The discovery explained a lot of things about who I am and why I act as I do, and most importantly, knowing what I have allowed me to take the right steps to combat it.
Still, sometimes I keep surprising myself with just how much I need to trivially multitask in order to keep myself focused on my primary task. Trivially multitasking means doing small things with my hands, and feet and whatnot, in order to keep my splitting concentration from doing something even more disrupting. So I chew my fingernails, tap my feet, scratch and pick my nose, squeeze a rubber ball, chew the inside of my cheeks and lips, grind my teeth and so on. I usually do at least 3 of these things at the same time as my main task and I do them subconsciously, meaning that I only realize I’m doing them after I’ve done it for a bit.
However some times, I surprise even myself on the amount of things I need to be doing all the time, like today for example, where I was talking to my wife on the phone. Normally, I really don’t like talking on the phone. I find it boring and a few minutes is enough for me, at which point I just want to hang up and continue doing whatever I was doing before. This time however, I seemed to be more tolerant of the act and while talking on the phone my mind started working on why this might be and then it struck me on how many things I was doing at the same time at that point. I was talking on the phone with one ear. On the other ear I was listening to music via a ear-set. On my left hand, I was playing with a coin. On my second monitor, I was watching my electric sheep screen-saver (which, if you’ve seen it, is quite enthralling by itself). And finally, I was tapping my feet.
When I mentioned this to my wife (who knows a lot about ADD from her profession), she explained that there’s no way she would be able to do all these at the same time.
I’ve now formed another half-arsed theory on why I especially hate talking on the phone. You see, most people, even without ADD, do something more than simply talk on the phone. Doodling on a notepad is a common occurrence for long talks, and I’d seen both my mother and various other people do that. It occurs to me then that a phone-call is by default a not very enthralling activity. It just doesn’t contain the concentration of most people enough, which makes them want to do something extra while on the phone. Something like doodling is enough for most. However when you combine this with ADD, being on the phone becomes almost intolerable since doodling is nowhere near enough to fill up your attention.
What do you think? Anyone else with ADHD who has similar experiences?