Bay 12 Games Forum

Interesting that one of the two world's surviving socialist countries has a high approval rating.

The fact that according to Neil degrade Tyson we live in a multiverse.

Quote from: Sirus on December 10, 2016, 12:35:20 am

I saw Arrival tonight. T'was a nice bit of sci-fi that wasn't all lazers and rubber foreheads. More like "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" or something.

Spoiler: Movie spoiler/discussion (click to show/hide)

My mom insists that the scenes with the main character's kid happened before the titular Arrival, while I'm pretty sure that the evidence points towards the kid being born afterwards. The core of her argument is the line "I forgot how it felt to hold you", while I point to the play-doh aliens, the male character's seeming unfamiliarity with the main character, and the throwaway line "You had a husband?".

Mom can be quite stubborn sometimes

Brilliant film - one of the best SF I saw in a long time.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

The whole conceit of the film was that the Saphir-Whorf hyphothesis is strictly true, meaning that language shapes thought. So that learning the aliens' language/writing - having no beginning nor end, but rather being formed as a continuous whole - allowed the main character to see all of her life (i.e., see the future). More specifically, she starts to remember the future by bits and pieces, including her marriage, her daughter, her decision to have a daughter despite knowing she would die and how it would affect the marriage, and what the Chinese leader told her that one time. And as an extra mind bender, she starts remembering the future before she learned the language - because there's no beginning nor end, and everything she has/will experience is affecting her whole life.

One interesting point is from Chomsky: the anti Vietnam war protests were basically ignored by the media (why would corporate media report something they didn't support) up until the point that a major report was published about the economic costs of the vietnam war. After that point, corporate owners turned against the war, and the floodgates opened for the media to speak against the war, at which point, the anti-war protestors were a convienient proxy.

It might be a bit different now, since post-internet the media landscape is different, but I'd say it's still more important to have the big media owners on your side than the public.

You see the same thing with the 2003- Iraq War I think. At the time of the war, only 3% of American media sources were identified as anti-war (even MSNBC sacked journalists who were anti-war in the lead up to the war). Later, reports came out showing the cost of the war in the trillions, and after that was when the media really turned against the war.

Frankly the people crying about third party voters not voting for their candidate are delusional, especially in this cycle. People voted for Stein and Johnson because they were disgusted by both Clinton and Trump but still showed up to vote (mostly for other races, I suspect).

Get IRV, sure, that's great, we fucking need election reform. But whatever bag of dicks someone thinks is entitled to my vote damn well isn't, and that sheer fucking arrogance is half of what stopped me from pinching my nose and voting Clinton. And unlike 2000 this one was just stolen by good old fashioned gerrymandering rather than also being hijacked by the SCOTUS and a candidate's brother's gubernatorial power.

Quote from: Covenant on December 08, 2016, 01:14:22 am

Whenever I read all this stuff about the alleged possibility of the EC essentially throwing a giant hissy fit and refusing to elect Trump, it just makes me hope that if my side had lost, we'd have been a bit less... am-dram about it.

The hypocrisy is beautiful but not that surprising. SJWs and corporatist mouthpieces prior to the election talking about how a Trump loss would mean violent radicals doing this and that. Cue Clinton's loss and we've got violent radicals looting, burning, and calling for assassinations. This is what happens when the corp-caps get total control and find a nice pack of ideologues to set loose, the Gilded Age nostalgia club never bother cleaning the mess up after.

Quote from: overseer05-15 on December 05, 2016, 12:02:25 pm

Quote from: Arx on December 05, 2016, 11:54:48 am

John.

John.

John

Quote from: BorkBorkGoesTheCode on December 04, 2016, 12:12:23 am

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Featured_redirects

Some of those wikipedia funnies are actually funny. "Alien Sideboob" indeed.

Found a brief but amusing list of Wikipedia editor's greatest shames:

Quote

Ed Poor for the Boldness award
On 1 August 2005, Ed Poor, one of Wikipedia's most experienced editors, boldly decided to delete the entire VFD deletion process, which briefly disrupted editing sitewide as the servers tried to keep up. The whole episode is described in the Signpost article "Deletion deletion".