“Legend has it that Pavlov once reprimanded an assistant who arrived late for an experiment because of trying to avoid street fighting in the midst of the Russian Revolution. The assistant defended his tardiness, saying, “But, professor, there’s a revolution going on, with shooting in the streets!” Pavlov supposedly replied, “What the hell difference does a revolution make when you’ve work to do in the laboratory? Next time there’s a revolution, get up earlier!””
I know a lot of people use torrents and they’re easy to use but now ALL OF LIMEWIRE is going to pretty much migrate to torrents, there’s enough of these people that don’t seed and who bring too much attention to torrents (like with piratebay being DDOS’d and like people going to court for crap.). Stupid people are a plague on the net with stuff like this, we’re going to pretty much lose torrenting websites in a few years, it’s not cool.
Update on TuneUp: it has a limited number of uses of its useful features, and they want you to pay for the full version and stuff. Woo boy. But it’s awesome when it works.
Moving on to Cameron: Trackers are nice and all, but everyone and their mom has their own little walled complex tracker and you get these torrents with 50 different trackers in the list because it’s all over the damn place. I can’t wait until they disappear and we get a nice, unified system. Likely I’ve misunderstood completely, but I could have sworn magnet links were supposed to do that. Thus far, I haven’t gotten shit from magnet links. Which I have been using because I can’t download .torrent files on my university network. Don’t ask me how that works.
Anyway torrenting websites are a pain in the bum and if we could all play in the same sandbox it’d be great. I love my private trackers and all, and I love finding stuff, but what’s worse is not finding stuff. Which needs to end.
This just in: uTorrent supports apps, meaning the world has gone crazy. I haven’t used them yet, but…
Oh look, now LimeWire is down the torrents are being dumbed down and changed to fit the needs of idiots, GREAT. Now in one or two years we won’t be able to use torrents anymore because of the sheer amount of unseeding, big mouthed, lazy twats that are going to be using torrents. These people ruin everything. Welp, time to back-up as many files on to usenet as possible so we don’t lose everything due to idiots and too many people torrenting.
It’s like you’ve never met anyone over the age of 40. This has already happened, just so you know. EVERYONE TORRENTS. Moms and dads download movies for their kids and buy R4s for their 5 year old kids. Torrents are already incredibly simple to use - install your client, go to piratebay, type in what you want, click download. Done.
Dude, reading you say this stuff makes me sad.
Moving on, TuneUp does absolutely nothing with uTorrent lol. It’s just free advertisement for them or something. However, for what it is doing with my iTunes, it is doing amazingly. A fifteen minute scan turned up 310 albums missing cover art, and it downloaded them all for me, and now I’m just clicking “yes this is right.” Wonderful!
This just in: uTorrent supports apps, meaning the world has gone crazy. I haven’t used them yet, but I downloaded:
This could be good. TuneUp in particular seems like it could be great. I remember dreaming up a service, years ago, that would tell you about concerts and new albums coming out. Which may sound ridiculous if you can be bothered to follow this stuff, but every once in a while I have to sit down and check every damn band on wikipedia to see if they have a new album. Pain in the ass.
I went out a couple of weeks ago and saw a poster for an Unexpect show. It was October 23rd. The show was October 22nd. Nooooooooooo!
So TuneUp could be the solution. Anyway uTorrent has apps now so if you use it go grab some. And if you look closely you’ll see a uTorrent 2.0.4 skin if you don’t like the new look.
“Trolls do not exist, except for people who cause trouble on the internet… Unfortunately, those people do exist.”
It is not - as it seems to many women - that men are bums who seek to deny women authority. Many men are inclined to jockey for status, and challenge the authority of others, when they are talking to men too. If this is so, then challenging a woman’s authority as they would challenge a man’s could be a sign of respect and equal treatment, rather than lack of respect and discrimination. The inequality of the treatment results not simply from the men’s behaviour alone but from the differences in men’s and women’s style: Most women lack experience in defending themselves against challenges, which they misinterpret as personal attacks on their credibility.
A very interesting quote from an article in my applied linguistics class about gender differences in language. The author, a woman and an expert in her field (sociolinguistics), cited various examples of men controlling conversation - even men who knew nothing about linguistics trying to challenge her authority.
Then she cited a study where pairs of men, pairs of women, and mixed pairs were videotaped while discussing the effect of television violence on children. Before the discussion, some of the subjects were given extra information on the subject - basically, making them the experts in their pair. Men, when confronted with a male expert, would often gain the upper hand in the conversation. When confronted with a female expert, the men would control the conversation and the woman - despite being more knowledgeable - would spend MORE time agreeing with the man than they normally did. And when the man in a mixed pair was the expert, he would control the conversation from beginning to end.
I felt this was a very utopian quote, despite the whole gender imbalance thing. Or maybe even because of it. I wouldn’t say that being a utopian is “a male thing” - rather, I’d say that it’s all the more impressive for a girl to hold her ground against this kind of jockeying for position. And, I think, that it would be good for we Y-chromosome folk (men) to be conscious of our tendency to take control and quell it somewhat to level the playing field.
Case in point: There are a lot of girls in the fencing club, especially among the beginners, and even moreso among the foilists. There are, by my count, three male beginners fencing foil and… five or six girls. You know what happens when two guys fence? Intense competition. I fenced a guy last night who’d been dominating in his bouts against a few of the girls, and destroyed him - the score was 5-1. We shook hands, and he told me I was the “king of parrying.” Funny that I didn’t parry once the entire time, except to counterparry (ok, the distinction is kinda important) his ripostes.
When I fence the other guy, who’s less competitive with me but more aggressive against the girls, it’s more or less the same - we’re always testing each other to see who will win this time. But as I said, when he fences one of the girls, he goes nuts (which is poor technique) and tends to win because they back off. Case further in point: when two girls fence each other, it’s pretty much an even split.
Case further in point, the girls fence each other on pretty much even footing. When I fence one of the girls, I try to give constructive criticism so they can beat me next time. I try not to use the same trick over and over, but if they do fall for a nasty one, I’ll show them how they can stop it. But, yes, I do try to control the bout. Why? Because the person in control is the one who gets to attack, and I want to practice and learn what works and what doesn’t. When I started fencing, I thought I could be a master defender and win through perfect reactions, but I lost every damn time. I know winning doesn’t matter, because it’s all for practice, but half-assed practice is almost worthless. So I go all out, and occasionally, that does result in a one-sided bout. I love to lose, though, because then I get twice as much experience. I can learn what they did well on the offensive, and I can learn what I did poorly on the defensive.
However, I admit one failing in this - the extremely aggressive girls were told to fence sabre (slashing weapon, run at each other and swing), and the tall girls were told to fence epée (long pokey weapon, touch them before they touch you) so that left the submissive girls on foil. Also the girls who were too meek to insist on fencing a different weapon. So, yes, there are girls who dominate the dudes, and guys who don’t try to compete against them. Just not among the ones I fence with.
“FIREWIND’s new album, “Days Of Defiance”, sold around 700 copies in the United States in its first week of release.”
Spoiler for those too lazy to click the link: He gets fifty cents from the sale of a paperback and two bucks from the sale of a hardcover book. From a $10 paperback, he gets 50 cents, and $2 from a $25 hardcover - 5% and 8% respectively.
In short, don’t publish a book unless you expect to sell hundreds of thousands of copies, because it will take you years (the time you spend trying to get a deal) to get to a position where you’re able to owe your agent and publishing company hundreds of thousands of dollars. They pay you in loans, after all, and just hope you’ll get rich.
A compelling argument for self-publishing via the internet, though you’d have to get some damn good press. Paypal and your choice of delivery method would obviously take a cut, but even if you’re getting $4 out of the sale of a $5 eBook, you’re doing pretty good.
edit six months later: wow lol why would I link to a twitter account and expect people to be able to find the tweet I’m talking about
It’s like the Sunday Something, but slightly in advance. Yay! I just can’t contain my excitement for you to be excited about these things that are exciting. Plus I hate a cluttered bookmarks toolbar. that’s why Read It Later is perfect for me, because I never have to remind myself of the things I’m not doing.
Extra Credits via Escapist Magazine - Brilliant, absolutely brilliant series of videos. They’re about six minutes in length each, and if you watch three in a row every day or something you should plow through them in no time. They are all worth watching, because each examines a worthwhile issue in an enlightening way. Let me backtrack - basically a couple of people with experience in different parts of the industry make a brief video each week talking about some aspect or another of video games. Some highlights include God of War 1 as a Greek tragedy, the psychological basis of any proper survival horror game, and the term “gamer.”
I planned on only watching a few today, and ended up watching every single one. There’s only 15 actual episodes, with a few PAX 2010 videos you should probably watch and a few you may not bother to watch. They’re as good as any podcast or essay you might find on a gaming blog, but a fraction of the length.
Winter Voices: Avalanche - An episodic strategy RPG, the first episode of which is currently available on Steam for $5. Further episodes are supposed to released every week, but it looks like they have a vague definition of “week.” At any rate, RPS tells you a lot of what you need to know about the game, and why you may or may not want to spend $5 on it. In terms of gameplay, the battles are metaphorical representations of you taking on your inner demons, your skills are coping mechanisms like Denial or Imaginary Friend. The game has some horrible flaws, but for $5? You’re not risking much.
I have bought it, but I have yet to play it. I want to enjoy the games that I play, and I don’t want to waste my time with a bad game - hence why I tend to avoid flash games these days. I hope, though, that the premise and everything else can overcome the poor gameplay, and more than that I hope the gameplay gets better in later instalments. If it does, and you’re not convinced on this one, believe me - you’ll find out, and then you can buy Episode 4 and it’ll be great.
“Another clever aspect of the combat is your character’s Memory statistic. When you’re allocating stat points after you’ve levelled up, you can increase your memory to boost the rate at which you gain experience (because you learn more from each talk and encounter), but it also causes the demons you wrestle with to grow in strength (your sad memories gain clarity).
All it amounts to is a completely seamless dynamic difficulty slider. Want more skills and more complex battles? Crank up your memory. Or is your character breaking down as she runs out of energy during every single fight? If so, you leave your memory well alone. You try and forget.”
God, this game deserves its own post. If that last paragraph isn’t some amazing game design, I don’t know what is.
Touch screen material to run out by 2020 - That article contains a link to a much, much longer gizmodo article which I wouldn’t recommend unless you really like rocks and stuff, but the single sentence “modern touch screens are made with a rare material, which will only last until 2020 if we’re lucky” is all you really need to know. It’s a great reminder of how we treat our planet, though. How long have we really been getting into this touch screen stuff? I doubt the DS uses this particular material, but I’m sure the iPhone and your Droid phones and all that stuff uses it. So, at best a few years. And we’re tearing through this incredibly limited resource like there’s no tomorrow. Suddenly the post-apocalyptic world of your choice is ushered in by the demise of the amazing touch screen.
You enjoying that iPhone? I really hope so. There’s only a billion of them in existence. Very rare. Rare enough to kill for.
Did I announce this yet? I don’t think I made it official. I ordered it last night at 10 pm, so I guess not.
I have more important and interesting things to say, but those will have to wait. Why?
Because I just bought a digital copy of a 1.1 kg book I own - for those of us who don’t think in metric (pretty much everyone because we’re all overly American), that’s a little over two pounds. I’m not going to lie - half the reason I haven’t finished the book is because there’s no comfortable way to read it. I seriously cannot manoeuvre it/my body into any position that will allow for extended reading. It’s not even like a good workout. It’s just a gradual build-up of pain, until I get so distracted I can’t keep reading.
I don’t know whether it’s pathetic or awesome that I spent $10 to re-buy a book I already own in order to actually finish it. I don’t feel guilty about it, and in fact I’d buy a dozen digital copies if I knew the money would be sent directly to the author, but it’s just a very strange and very significant event.
In other news, I have 125 books in my Kindle library, only one of which I paid for. To transfer these to my Kindle, which I do not yet have, I ask my computer to e-mail them to my @kindle.com e-mail address. When I turn on my Kindle and connect it to my wi-fi, they will be downloaded automatically and synced to where I left off reading them on my PC. I can also e-mail text documents, .pdf files, and .jpgs to my @kindle.com e-mail address and they’ll be converted and added to my library.
I’ve already downloaded the books I need to read for my courses, because you’re always reading the classics, and the classics rarely have valid copyrights these days. I’m not saving much money, but I’m saving backpack space (valuable) and it’s convenient (also valuable).
I don’t even have the thing yet and I’m already debating which books I care to physically have in my library. I imagine that at the age 45, when having a library should be cool, people will laugh at me for having physical copies of books.