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Mordaedil posted:The only thing he used the plasma gun on was the non-sentient droid, though. Assault rifle for the NSF troops. 
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Aug 13, 2014 22:20
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All stomping along after the dogs saying STOP POOPING IN THE COW PASTURE. YOU HAVE TWENTY SECONDS TO COMPLY.
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Aug 14, 2014 03:22
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I'm kind of curious as to what a sample of literary writing before structuralism is actually like. If for instance there's only one interpretation of a particular work, what is that interpretation.
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Aug 14, 2014 07:24
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Zeniel posted:I'm kind of curious as to what a sample of literary writing before structuralism is actually like. If for instance there's only one interpretation of a particular work, what is that interpretation. Mostly it was about trying to guess what exactly an author intended to say with a given work. For instance, if you know about Jonathan Swift and the times he lived in, it's obvious that Gulliver's Travels was a satire of various bits of English and European society, and so that's all you'd discuss if the book came up during a class. The point of 20th century criticism is that if a reader wants to take Gulliver's Travels as simply an imaginative adventure story without any prerequisite history lessons or as a pre-Marxist critique of the upper class, then, well, that's fine too. Read it the way that lets you, personally, get the most out of it.
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Aug 14, 2014 07:42
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FactsAreUseless posted:And the droid is loving its time on the farm. It did in fact evaporate, so I can see that.
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Aug 14, 2014 08:47
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Bobbin Threadbare posted:Mostly it was about trying to guess what exactly an author intended to say with a given work. For instance, if you know about Jonathan Swift and the times he lived in, it's obvious that Gulliver's Travels was a satire of various bits of English and European society, and so that's all you'd discuss if the book came up during a class. The point of 20th century criticism is that if a reader wants to take Gulliver's Travels as simply an imaginative adventure story without any prerequisite history lessons or as a pre-Marxist critique of the upper class, then, well, that's fine too. Read it the way that lets you, personally, get the most out of it. My favorite Dead White Guy, Heidegger, got some flak for translating ancient Greek philosophers in some pretty audacious (but still defensible) ways. When cornered he basically said that he cared more about what he could draw out of their work than he did what they intended, and there's certainly something to be said for the idea that most of how we understand Aristotle et al. is grounded in some pretty strict traditions about how to interpret them.
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Aug 14, 2014 09:26
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I find this vein of thinking very similar to a different view about Jesus and the resurrection. Most Christians believe in the literal resurrection of Christ. However one take of what happened to Paul is that when Jesus came to him (however that occurred) Paul became a new person, the true Paul was resurrected. That Jesus wasn’t actually resurrected but he resurrects inside of people spiritually, changing them. The story of Jesus touching people, creating/resurrecting a new them. Good video and I like this philosphy corner and the closing. Keep up the good work.
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Aug 14, 2014 09:54
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Forgive my ignorance if this is stupid, I don't know much about literature or pre-structuralism. With all this talk about the one correct thing that the author meant, how much input did the actual authors have in all this? Like in the given example, did Jonathan Swift ever write "Gulliver's Travels is about This and This and Not This." or did everyone just wait for him to die and decide what his intentions were on their own later?
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Aug 14, 2014 11:30
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counterfeitsaint posted:Forgive my ignorance if this is stupid, I don't know much about literature or pre-structuralism. With all this talk about the one correct thing that the author meant, how much input did the actual authors have in all this? Like in the given example, did Jonathan Swift ever write "Gulliver's Travels is about This and This and Not This." or did everyone just wait for him to die and decide what his intentions were on their own later? While I'm not entirely against structuralism but I still find it a hard pill to swallow to take interpretations of works of literature seriously that have no basis or historical context. I think it is disingenuous to interpret a work of art using concepts and ideas that simply didn't exist at the time and that the author and the world at large were completely ignorant of. I also have always had trouble with death of the author because I think the cultural context a work was written in and the situation the author was in when they were creating that work can be important tools in understanding that work of art. Like, in divorcing something from the context in which it was created removes avenues of understanding. I feel like ignoring context can lead us to disregard a lot of literature that may have uncomfortable and problematic content, instead of accepting that these problematic things are an artifact of the time in which they were created or the personal beliefs of the author and those works have value beyond those ideas. Of course, death of the author lets me enjoy Ender's Game even though Orson Scott Card is a racist rear end in a top hat so it goes both ways.
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Aug 14, 2014 13:18
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That's because your thinking on what it means to interpret art values trying to figure out what a piece of art symbolizes or means "actually." If the "actual" meaning of a piece is regarded as "what affect does it have on the reader" then in fact the historical context is only important inasmuch as the perceiver of that art uses it to inform his perception. All meaning is inferred, so the "actual" meaning of something is utterly subjective.
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Aug 14, 2014 14:35
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100 HOGS AGREE posted:I feel like ignoring context can lead us to disregard a lot of literature that may have uncomfortable and problematic content, instead of accepting that these problematic things are an artifact of the time in which they were created or the personal beliefs of the author and those works have value beyond those ideas. Altho there are times where it's not even part of the time. LoveCraft's Racism disgusted even his White Victorian colleagues and Joseph Conrad's subject matter was already being investigated around the time he finished his book. Not to mention it can exacerbate if one's aware where the money given to an author will go to. One can no longer claim Death Of The Author if the support of said author leads to funds and positive awareness being given to bodies that will cause waves on crises of several kinds. I'm still gonna prod on the whole "Is Bullshit the most appropriate term, specially when to refer to a group with Feminism and Queer Studies" ordeal.
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Aug 14, 2014 15:06
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counterfeitsaint posted:Forgive my ignorance if this is stupid, I don't know much about literature or pre-structuralism. With all this talk about the one correct thing that the author meant, how much input did the actual authors have in all this? Like in the given example, did Jonathan Swift ever write "Gulliver's Travels is about This and This and Not This." or did everyone just wait for him to die and decide what his intentions were on their own later? It really depends on the author. Some of them are/were kind enough to explain themselves in supplemental essays, but for the most part it involved picking out the most obvious themes in a work and focusing on those. If you picked up some other sense from a particular passage or the work as a whole, then you were mistaken because the author probably did not intend you to find such a thing. Whenever this stuff comes up, I'm reminded of an essay by Issac Asimov. In it, he explains that he once wrote a critique which stated that the Ring in Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings represents technology and all its potential evils. Tolkien himself would end up reading this critique and responded that he certainly never intended his books to mean such a thing. Asimov's response? "Nevertheless, it is there."
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Aug 14, 2014 15:28
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Yeah it's a complicated topic and having gone through an entire BA where I did years of literary analysis, well, I still don't exactly know what to think on this poo poo. All I really do know is I think the entire lit crit environment in academia is still fairly insular and incestual when it comes to bringing in new ideas and critique, even with the increasing popularity of structuralism. But that's more a problem with academic culture than with lit crit itself.
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Aug 14, 2014 15:53
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An author's view on his own work isn't necessarily set in stone either. When he was working on Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury said that it was supposed to be a warning about government censorship and that's the way it has commonly been interpreted. However, nowadays he states that the book was meant to illustrate the dangers of television and that anyone linking it to censorship is wrong. If you were analysing Fahrenheit 451 with a pre-structuralist framework, which interpretation would you could consider the right one? Using pre-structuralism when discussing films and video games brings up an additional problem, since these works usually don't have a single defining author. There are directors and project leads of course, but I don't think anyone would argue that Steven Spielberg is solely responsible for Jurassic Park or, to bring this full circle, that Warren Spector is solely responsible for Deus Ex.
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Aug 14, 2014 16:09
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Samuel Clemens posted:An author's view on his own work isn't necessarily set in stone either. When he was working on Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury said that it was supposed to be a warning about government censorship and that's the way it has commonly been interpreted. However, nowadays he states that the book was meant to illustrate the dangers of television and that anyone linking it to censorship is wrong. If you were analysing Fahrenheit 451 with a pre-structuralist framework, which interpretation would you could consider the right one? Regarding the first thought: that's what those master's/doctorate theses are for, to argue about which of the author's interpretations is "correct." Then again, since Bradbury lived in a world where this idea of singular interpretations was already destroyed, perhaps he only changed his mind because he knew he could change his mind? Regarding the second thought, I think you would get what we have now anyways: various creators saying different things and fans of the work arguing among themselves as to which one is right. Then you add all the crap that comes up when a book is adapted into a film or series and folks argue about how "this character isn't like that" or "why did they include this part but not that part?" and it becomes clear why academia's official stance these days is to throw up its hands and say "gently caress it, do what you want."
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Aug 14, 2014 16:32
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Bobbin Threadbare posted:... Laputa (Spanish for "the whore" which was probably no coincidence) ... This is pretty much all I can contribute to anything in this thread thus far since I'm not super well read in literature, history, art, and/or conspiracies. Good job on it so far, Bobbin.
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Aug 14, 2014 23:20
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The other thing to note would also be the formal frameworks early critics operated under. Plays these days ovten break the "thre unities": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_unities Back then huge controversies (like the one around "El Cid") would blow up amongst the gatekeepers of what is considered proper artand literature but that is not a thing these days. This most recent corner ties in quite tightly to an earlier one in that regard. [edit] J.theYellow posted:Thug Notes covers The Grand Inquisitor. "Truth? You can't HANDLE the TRUTH!" Bah Munin fucked around with this message at 00:52 on Aug 15, 2014 |
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Aug 15, 2014 00:44
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Does this mean that the Zelda Timeline exists differently in each of our hearts? I can't find the quote, but I recall the rapper Sage Francis saying something to the effect of "I would never presume to tell anybody what my songs are about." I've always liked that.
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Aug 15, 2014 03:52
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Munin posted:The other thing to note would also be the formal frameworks early critics operated under. Plays these days ovten break the "thre unities": Popular media nowadays follows the three act structure, certain tvtropes-y cliches and whatever the name that recent screenwriting book ("save the cat?") quite slavishly. It's not as though a change in academic consciousness actually filtered down to pop-culture level to that extent.
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Aug 15, 2014 05:05
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I just finished watching all the videos until this point. I've never played Deus Ex before, but I certainly find this exhibition of it thrilling, especially given your research into the supporting subject matter. Very well done, Threadbare. I'll be following until the endgame.
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Aug 15, 2014 17:49
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Morroque posted:I just finished watching all the videos until this point. I've never played Deus Ex before, but I certainly find this exhibition of it thrilling, especially given your research into the supporting subject matter. Very well done, Threadbare. I'll be following until the endgame. To be honest I'm shocked at the amount of dialogue Bobbin can squeeze out of the npcs. Despite going through the game 3 or 4 times in my life, somehow I've still managed to miss an absurd amount of content.
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Aug 15, 2014 17:54
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double nine posted:To be honest I'm shocked at the amount of dialogue Bobbin can squeeze out of the npcs. Despite going through the game 3 or 4 times in my life, somehow I've still managed to miss an absurd amount of content. I wonder how it is meant to be played, in a certain sense. The levels are big and impressive, are you supposed to just pick one of the many possible paths and use it as quickly as possible? Does that encourage replayability? Is it more like Metroid where your first run is clumsy and exploring, but subsequent runs become very quick and speedy? My guess is that this kind of playthrough is representative of multiple tries of cumulative knowledge.
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Aug 15, 2014 18:07
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Probably similar to souls where every single player isn't really meant to find every little detail or path but then hear about all the weird poo poo they missed in conversations with friends and other players. Going through the areas in an exhausting fashion is mostly unintuitive and takes a ton of effort. Just looking at how many items Bobbin can't pick up because he's full gives an indication that you're expected to do just fine without scavenging every nook and cranny. 
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Aug 15, 2014 18:30
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Yeah, I find the game actually suffers quite a bit when to try to explore fully, since you will be basically full of everything by the time you get to Hong Kong, and the rewards given by exploration become much less useful. This applies to the experience points as well, as can be seen in the videos now. You basically hit a point mid-game where you've gotten everything you want, and then its just like 'eh, heavy weapons, why not?'. You can also see that augmentation hits the same wall if you've explored well, where you've got every aug slot full and upgrades in all the ones you actually use. From all of this, you can tell that the designers never really meant you to fully explore.
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Aug 15, 2014 19:57
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At least you can always find a use for all you ammo and augmentations (also, if you're not playing with a mod that turns augmentation canisters into upgrades if you already have the augmentation, you probably won't upgrade most everything until the endgame). As opposed to DE:HR, which both rewards exploration and enemy annihilation by upgrading pretty much everything by the time you're halfway through the game and has an experience and achievement systems that ensure you probably won't actually rampage with all your weapons.
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Aug 15, 2014 20:42
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RoadCrewWorker posted:Going through the areas in an exhausting fashion is mostly unintuitive and takes a ton of effort. Just looking at how many items Bobbin can't pick up because he's full gives an indication that you're expected to do just fine without scavenging every nook and cranny. Bobbin is awfully conservative with his lockpicks though. There have been several times where he said "What, 2 lockpicks for that? Hell no" and then I'd roll my eyes a few minutes later when he's leaving lockpicks behind because he's full on them. To be fair, that's how I played the game too. And that's how the other LP was played.
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Aug 16, 2014 00:37
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interestingly, I'm always tempted to push lockpick and electronics to max to have maximum open doors. Of course, I tend not to use the rocket launcher for its intended door-opening purpose, so it makes more sense to invest in those skills
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Aug 16, 2014 00:41
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counterfeitsaint posted:Bobbin is awfully conservative with his lockpicks though. There have been several times where he said "What, 2 lockpicks for that? Hell no" and then I'd roll my eyes a few minutes later when he's leaving lockpicks behind because he's full on them. That's not even counting the times he used the glitch to use less lockpicks for harder locks.
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Aug 16, 2014 03:05
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BiggestOrangeTree posted:That's not even counting the times he used the glitch to use less lockpicks for harder locks. Only twice! ...So far.
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Aug 16, 2014 03:17
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Eh, the main thing with that is that the game isn't really meant to be played through with such a fine-toothed comb. I mean, sure, it's the way I play, since the best thing about games for me is exploring all the nooks and crannies looking for bonus loot. But if you play that way no matter which strategy you use you'll end up with a glut of hoarded items. A less meticulous playthrough focused on achieving the objectives, getting through the story, and moving on wouldn't be so resource laden. You'd probably miss 3/4s of the items since the good stuff is more carefully hidden away and most boxes out in the open is trash like 10mm ammo. Being as profligate as Bobbin with the LAMs and rockets would probably mean running low on those and being forced to switch to picks or multitools eventually (or else getting stuck in a bad fight with some bots).
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Aug 16, 2014 03:44
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Xander77 posted:Plays (much less movies) nowadays are probably made by people who never heard of the unities. They were broken the moment they were introduced, and you can hardly name a Renaissance play that kept by all three punctiliously. More of an ideal than... err, in modern parlance, "they're more like guidelines". Yeah, definitely not been a thing for ages. That said in certain traditions they were a firmer part of the framework; France being an example. It still guided the thinking around what was a "proper" play worthy of criticism. Gully Foyle posted:Yeah, I find the game actually suffers quite a bit when to try to explore fully, since you will be basically full of everything by the time you get to Hong Kong, and the rewards given by exploration become much less useful. This applies to the experience points as well, as can be seen in the videos now. You basically hit a point mid-game where you've gotten everything you want, and then its just like 'eh, heavy weapons, why not?'. You can also see that augmentation hits the same wall if you've explored well, where you've got every aug slot full and upgrades in all the ones you actually use. Well, except for the pleasure you get out of finding all the little touches they left behind. I think one thing that is nice in the regard is that quite a few of the hidden caches have an implied story behind them. Be it a secret stash in an apartment or a corpse behind a corridor full of greasels.
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Aug 16, 2014 10:35
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Munin posted:Yeah, definitely not been a thing for ages. That said in certain traditions they were a firmer part of the framework; France being an example. It still guided the thinking around what was a "proper" play worthy of criticism. The second part of my post was probably more interesting - critics back in the day insisted that the audience wouldn't be able to follow the action if time and space deviated too much from the scant hours spent watching the play in a single location, or the exact proportions of tragedy and comedy, as well as the rightful place of off-screen narration with the same misplaced fervor with which screenwriting classes promote their own tidy little formulas.
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Aug 16, 2014 12:13
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I got interested and decided to try the game out on my own, but it's not going so well. Aside from first figuring out the correct rendering settings such that the game wouldn't run superfast and be nigh-uncontrollable, I'm just plain bad at it -- even on easy. I'm always running out of ammo and always forgetting to quicksave at various points. I really just can't get past the first level. The fact that there is somehow more of this monster terrifies me outright. As much as my curiosity is pained, for now I must wait on the LP. At least until I can figure this thing out.
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Aug 16, 2014 21:21
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Xander77 posted:Yeah, but Dryden got it right - with the sole exception of Moliere, we don't really think of France when Renaissance plays are mentioned. Shakespeare, at least one Marlowe play, some bits and pieces of Johnson are the go-to. France not important in the Renaissance? You wound my Francophone heart... :p L'Académie française did always have a big head.
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Aug 16, 2014 21:26
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counterfeitsaint posted:Bobbin is awfully conservative with his lockpicks though. There have been several times where he said "What, 2 lockpicks for that? Hell no" and then I'd roll my eyes a few minutes later when he's leaving lockpicks behind because he's full on them. People could do a study on RPG Hoarding Syndrome and probably find some interesting results. I know a lot of people who won't use healing items, special ammo types, etc. unless the only alternative is leaving thing lying unused on the ground. My hypothesis is that, in the context of the difficulty curve of a video game, the threat of a future challenge where you might need the maximum number of something ends up paralyzing people's abilities to rationally weigh risk and reward.
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Aug 16, 2014 21:27
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The Casualty posted:People could do a study on RPG Hoarding Syndrome and probably find some interesting results. I know a lot of people who won't use healing items, special ammo types, etc. unless the only alternative is leaving thing lying unused on the ground. My hypothesis is that, in the context of the difficulty curve of a video game, the threat of a future challenge where you might need the maximum number of something ends up paralyzing people's abilities to rationally weigh risk and reward. I...once finished Fallout 3 with 140 stimpaks. And Pokemon Red without ever using a revive.
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Aug 16, 2014 21:31
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The Casualty posted:People could do a study on RPG Hoarding Syndrome and probably find some interesting results. I know a lot of people who won't use healing items, special ammo types, etc. unless the only alternative is leaving thing lying unused on the ground. My hypothesis is that, in the context of the difficulty curve of a video game, the threat of a future challenge where you might need the maximum number of something ends up paralyzing people's abilities to rationally weigh risk and reward. Link it to the behavioral mechanics of high finance, toss in a chicken bone, and baby: you've got yourself a
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Aug 16, 2014 21:32
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FinalGamer posted:Hello my name is FinalGamer and I have a hoarding problem. The thing is. It isn't as if it took a lot of sacrifice for you to do so in these games right? [edit] vv Well, gently caress. 
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Aug 16, 2014 21:38
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Munin posted:The thing is. It isn't as if it took a lot of sacrifice for you to do so in these games right? To mirelurks...and restarted the last battle against the Elite Four...a lot. I'm trying to beat it dammit but the first step is so hard what if I need the thing that I'll never use
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Aug 16, 2014 21:40
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Morroque posted:I got interested and decided to try the game out on my own, but it's not going so well. Aside from first figuring out the correct rendering settings such that the game wouldn't run superfast and be nigh-uncontrollable, I'm just plain bad at it -- even on easy. I'm always running out of ammo and always forgetting to quicksave at various points. I really just can't get past the first level. The fact that there is somehow more of this monster terrifies me outright.
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