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Comments
That works too: "once the fourth neighbour moved in...".
Besides that, I was playing around with my TV monitor and finally I found the setting to disable automatic contrast adjustment. It wasn't even hidden but for some reason I didn't find it the first time I looked and never searched for it again. I needed that thing off for ages so the monitor wouldn't lie to me about lighting when setting up 3D scenes.
I know the pain. Sort of. I mean, sleeping for two or three hours is enough to keep you in the walking dead phase for long enough to accomplish (or fake having done so, same thing) whatever it was you set out to do.
apparently this is a meme
Relatedly, the next wave of LEGO Friends is one of those series where there's a lot of specialist pieces meant for recreating natural landscapes, which basically makes it useless for rebuilds.
Though the next series of DOTS is just as tempting as the first...
Available for free until May 3.
I watched the beginning, and this is a very good performance.
But what I did NOT realize while reading this in high school is just how chock full of puns the script is.
also I found an upload of Twelth Night from the National Theatre
I had a really good English lit teacher so we spent months just going over how Shakespeare is at least 40% inappropriate jokes.
The first thing I noticed was that 4/5 of my Capsules were made from a different plastic (on the right), much more weak and flimsy. I'm guessing they realized making them all out of the good stuff was pointless, since you only need one for the stand.
Anyways, this probably makes the recycling information on the website wrong, and the new stuff feels very thin. It's probably not recyclable.
I got this combination of pieces. Decidedly more conservative with the tiered skirt and all. The top and skirt are actually two pieces from one complete look, according to pictures I've seen online. I didn't like the shirt when I saw it on the box, but that was because it was just the torso and not the sleeves. The sleeves make it work.
I still don't like that the logo on the inner shirt is an ad for the toy company that makes these (Moose Toys), but Barbie clothing literally advertises properties unrelated to Mattel, so I guess it's okay?
As you can see, I continue to have great luck in pulling terrible hand poses. I mean, I didn't even know this line had so many expressive, non-versatile hand poses until I started getting all of them.
I put my two girls together and realized they were primed for, as Harune Aira would call it, a Pretty Remake!!
I find that I enjoyed writing about this more than the surprise element of these. I don't like not having the time to build anticipation for what you buy and then examining it according to those expectations. I guess I'm not a surprise guy. It's only now that I'm truly chewing into my thoughts on what I got.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barber's_pole
Anyhows, April is over, usually by this time of the year the electricity situation here would have gotten really bad (because of rain seasonality and hydroelectric power), but although it's noticeably worse than it was a couple months ago, there haven't been the massive power-related issues that we've come to expect. I guess the lockdown dampened the problem?
Also who needs any symbol that's not giant novelty scissors?
National Geographic seems to be able to slap their brand on anything and sell it for a premium.
The LEGO Friends sets are marketed as "in partnership with" presumably to make sure the prices don't shoot up 25% for no real reason.
edit: in case you wondered it was a Facebook contest, so not big. Still, I tried like five times to come up with something, and, nothing.
Especially when it's easy to join new communities. Take my Discord account for example. It is on a rather large number of servers. Many of these servers are servers centered around one thing -- for example, centered around Super Metroid speedrunning, or centered around the iNaturalist website and app, or centered around the anime series Beatless.
There aren't many places that are, just, groups of people socializing because they know each other. Rather, it's common for people to congregate due to these common interests, and then chat about them.
Some people become more heavily involved in a community than just its main focus. That's why there are, say, a gaming channel on a server for MyAnimeList, and an anime channel on a server for GOG. But for me, I mostly already have primarily other places where I talk gaming or anime, for example. I wouldn't go to GOG to talk anime, for example. Instead I'd simply talk about the GOG Galaxy client on a GOG-related server.
Contrast this to a place like IJBM. IJBM has a supposed thematic focus on complaining about things that bug oneself, but that's barely any sort of theme, and definitely not any specific topical area. Instead, there's just handful of us, who've known each other for many years, and we keep sharing our ideas and lives with each other, including but not limited to arguing about things.
This is different from the very scattered engagement that would come from, say, me asking about how to use iNaturalist on an iNaturalist server. I'd go there not because I know the people (even though my parents still think I think of it that way); I'd go there because I want to talk about my flora and fauna identifications and probably then metaphorically leave the room when I'm done. There are a lot of us who join Discord servers for reasons like this, and as a result there are a lot of idlers on Discord.
I appreciate how a place like IJBM is different. I appreciate how the handful of you who still regularly chat here -- e.g. @fourteenwings, @Stormtroper, @lrdgck, and @Naas_Human -- do continue to do so, and obviously not because there's some sort of topical information we're about, but because this is an actual online hangout spot. And yes, I appreciate your company even as I'm arguing with you. (Sorry if I make any of you feel uncomfortable sometimes, but then again, spicy foods are a thing...)
This isn't to say that we shouldn't have those more topical ways of socializing. There is obviously a need for those too. But I feel that in our interactions with people we ought not neglect the aspect of these longer-term social connections.
There's always writing a serious critique/case for something that you know is a farce. Then again, that would just make you every other opportunistic writer.
This may be me holding on to a tiny grudge from like 7 years ago, but here goes anyways: I entered a website based writing competition once, on a forum I'd never been on. The theme was "The Student Becomes The Master", and I think I kind of misread the place, because I wrote about tabloid journalists (it turns out I've always been this cynical).
Everybody else wrote about like, magical fantastical stuff, and I've always felt like I could have totally won had it been elsewhere.
In this same vein, this is embarrassing to admit but I think I'm becoming less and less tolerant of writing about or watching things that involve direct violence between two human beings. Like, real, visceral violence.
Looking through my memories, the only think I can think of before recent years is wincing at a scene in Princess Principal in which Chise slices a couple of guys up. I think the root cause is probably my own writing about intense, excessive violence, which made me examine the whole concept of violence for entertainment/"meaning". Overall, I think this may be a problem.
I think when forums die off the people who are left are the ones who like the company, since there'll probably always be other forums for discussing whatever.
^ Only kind-of related to misreading places, but once upon a time I was playing Wolfgame (tl;dr: irc chat game where villager players try to figure out who the hidden werewolf players among them are and vote/kill them before they kill them first) on a different place than I usually did. Now as luck would have it I'm the seer (tl;dr: villager who can detect other players' roles) and as soon as possible I detect a wolf, so basically best case scenario. I did what would be expected at my old place and accused him/her of being a wolf so we'd vote that player out and if I was lying (dying reveals your role) I'd get killed later as that meant I was a wolf, either way this would be considered a good outcome.
Turns out this place had different opinions, everybody starts accusing me of trolling by claiming to be a seer which is something the seer would never do, that only a wolf would do that and I was ruining the game by doing what I did, so they killed me right away.
Though it could also be they simply weren't all that smart, apparently no villager noticed when I was revealed to be 100% the seer, they missed a chance to kill the wolf I revealed, IIRC I saw it to the end and they stood no chance, never finding out a single wolf. I never played again there.
Anyhows, my aunt's home got robbed again, presumably by the same burglar(s). The same mesh bar thing from last time got cut off again and they broke a sliding door's windows with a cinder block. They only took an old laptop (which they tried to get last time) and that was it. Oh yeah, and a lightbulb. About half of the home is behind a multi-lock door so my brother put some valuables there, that half is not protected by the mesh thing so it's not necessarily safer, but after they broke in twice from the other side, it makes sense to do so.
Unrelatedly, I've been thinking recently. The Alcoholics Anonymous have that principle that they refer to God as the overseer of their progress and keeper of their vows. I'm wondering if there are any Chinese AA groups that run on Confucian logic rather than Abrahamic, where they refer to Father instead of God. Sounds like it could work all the same.
Anyways I think the AA thing is a universally accepted artifact, but I can see how it would run into problems with the CCP.
Yeah I think that's a good way to put it.
Are we, today, spoiled by the ready availability of media that allow for various degrees of visual and aural engagement in general, especially (but not limited to) media that offer high degrees of visual verisimilitude?
Given easy access to visual entertainment that has the capability of setting up a visual realm of the creator's choosing, from animation to live-action movies and TV shows, and more recently, high-res 3D videogames, along with technology that allows for a huge variety of special effects even for live stage performances, are we less attuned to appreciating media that require more imagination and/or abstraction to fill in the details? Such as plays where there's less visual spectacle.
For a different way of wording this, and to make a more apples-to-apples comparison: To what extent are old videogames, with their more abstract representations of fantastic events, rather than explicitly showing them visually, attracting new (and particularly, younger) players -- i.e. people not in it for the nostalgia or because they otherwise grew up with such games?
If the playerbase of these older games is dominated by older gamers, as I think they are, then I wonder whether it's different for any particular medium. For example, how well do fiction books and ebooks sell, compared to a few decades ago?
AA isn't the only thing out there so I'm pretty sure they have their own, which likely don't invoke Christianity since Christianity isn't a big thing in the Sinosphere.
As for Confucianism, I don't think ancestor reverence works the same way as deity worship. Rather, I think it's about a more general sense of ethical concern, ethical behavior, and respect for learnedness.
Definitely. There's a lot of spectacle for the sake of the art of spectacle. In principle, I respect the work that goes into spectacle, but I dislike it when the story starts to feel tacked on.
Yesterday I was thinking about how no two people's imagining of a book will ever be the same. I mean, there are times where I'll accidentally recast a character so they don't look like their later description and it'll just stick.
More simply, what I think of as a Spanish style mansion won't exactly be what you think of. Even descriptions of 'big curly copper hair' can vary from person to person in terms of perception.
Kneejerk, I'll say: new is valued, retro is niche.
There's a concerted effort in literary circles to sideline (or even just bin) the actual canon in favor of new canons built on whatever the fancy of the builder is.
Not sure how this relates to what I wrote...
In movies, there certainly used to be a canon before the products became more and more commercialized (that is, what rises to the top is no longer the movies deemed relevant for their goodness).
In video games, there is no such canon. All there is is the new, which was probably exacerbated by platforms and exclusives and etc.
Therefore, there can't be a video game canon like there is in books. However, if there were, I'm guessing it'd be less likely to be usurped.
I guess I thought you were saying "How well do old books sell compared to new ones?", given the context given by the first sentence, rather than "What is the trend of sales in books in general?"
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As for "canon" in the sense of "classic works in a medium", movies and especially videogames are just not old enough for such a phenomenon to solidify. Compare literature, which has existed as an entertainment medium for hundreds of years.
Yet, there are works that are considered classic movies and classic videogames, already. For example, within metroidvania fan-circles, Super Metroid is often regarded as a holy grail of the genre, experiencing which is considered somewhat akin to a rite of passage. And there are other such games, e.g. System Shock 2, or the Half-Life series. Even if people's way of talking about these is often more like "Why haven't you played [game] yet? You're missing out on something great!".
(And of course, against all this backdrop is the fact that "goodness" isn't exactly the same for everyone. It's more obvious in videogames because the mechanics, the interactive elements, are different between genres, but it's very much definitely also the case even for passive storytelling media.)
In what's almost certainly caused by the above, unlike previous days today I've lacked the energy/motivation to practice the stuff I've been practicing. I'm not sure what to do about it, I kinda want to try something new but I don't know what.