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Tesseraction posted:Ah so the term means "be silenced" effectively? It’s equivalent to “shoosh” “shush” or “hush”, but there’s a trope of saying “weesht, woman!” to a hysterical or nagging woman, so that’s likely the reason for that particular choice of language.
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Dec 2, 2022 21:05
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OwlFancier posted:Everyone on youtube started flogging that stupid "buy land in scotland and call yourself a lord" scam and it's bizzare how many people apparently think it's real and also that it's still around because I remember it being a thing decades ago. Apparently Highland Titles (probably the one you remember from decades ago) are super loving mad about the Established Titles outfit (this is the new one). Both are dumb-rear end grifts with basically the same pitch of selling you a souvenir plot that gives you the "right" to call yourself a Lord and then also some trees get planted and the company commits to never developing on "your" land. But Highland Titles actually owns a nature reserve with a visitor centre and recognition from Visit Scotland, while Established Titles buys small plots of marginal land and then donates to a greenwashing charity to plant trees on its behalf (iirc one youtuber worked out that they've probably earned $50m+ in revenue but donated only about $40,000 to the tree charity) Basically a large multinational real estate corporation discovered the grift and has thought, "wait, what if we do this but skip all the stuff that costs money except marketing?"
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Dec 5, 2022 15:51
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forkboy84 posted:This but Football Manager Who needs buttons? Play Getting Over It With Bennett Foddy, and the game presses your buttons instead.
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Dec 10, 2022 05:22
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Mega Comrade posted:You're gonna have to narrow down which one you mean. Salacious internet version: William cheated on Kate cause she wouldn't do him up the bum, so he gets the Marchioness of Cholmondeley to peg him instead. Possibly factual version: William cheated on Kate, it destroyed the relationship between William and Harry because Harry sees his dad's infidelity as the originating incident in the chain of causation that led to their mum's death. The deterioration in their relationship got falsely blamed on Megan, and that made things worse because now Harry's wife was getting the blame for causing conflict when it was actually the future King having an affair.
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Dec 12, 2022 15:24
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Just Another Lurker posted:First worthy gf to peg the prince gets the crown.... how difficult can it be? Ah, the classic fairy tale, the Princess and the Peg
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Dec 12, 2022 16:13
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Is anyone in the thread with EDF for their energy? I'm really confused about the last year with my energy bill not really following the trend and I don't know if I've somehow lucked out or if EDF is taking a different approach or what. Before the energy crisis I used to pay £52 a month for my energy bills on the basic non-fixed plans. When the first major price rise came in, I got a bunch of offers to fix like most people but decided not to. A few months ago my Direct Debit got increased to about £78. Now I've just had an email from them advising that they want to increase my Direct Debit again...by £3. Meanwhile all of my family members are getting hit by price increases and demands for their Direct Debits to go up by huge amounts, and I don't really understand why I'm not getting hosed over?
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Dec 15, 2022 14:17
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Jaeluni Asjil posted:I'm not with them but a question to ask is: do you give them regular readings so they're better able to forecast your usage? A lot of people don't for whatever reason. I had a smart meter fitted at the start of the crisis, so maybe that's been a factor. EDF reimburse the rebate to me so my net bill has actually gone down to £12 a month (or £15 I guess with this increase). It just feels surreal that everyone else is suffering so badly; my sister is having to have massive fights with her energy supplier every 3 months now as they try to push up her direct debit way over the odds of what she needs, and there are people out there having to literally huddle together for warmth in communal spaces, and here I am literally better off for this crisis having happened. It's insane that this country works like this.
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Dec 15, 2022 14:42
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History Comes Inside! posted:Shell are constantly trying to put mine up even after adjusting it for the price increases because by their estimates I’m actually about to double my energy use compared to previous winters, because they are either thick cunts, evil cunts, or some combination of the two. This is why I was wondering if it's an EDF thing, because that's pretty much the story I've heard all over and I don't know if my avoiding such shenanigans is good fortune or if my energy supplier is actually handling this all in a much more sane fashion. I don't want to recommend my family switch to my supplier if my case is just luck.
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Dec 15, 2022 15:29
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For those who want the context absent the Heil's take on it: The list in question, apparently saved from Stanford's internal web system: https://s.wsj.net/public/resources/documents/stanfordlanguage.pdf The announcement of the initiative that gives some background on where it's coming from: https://itcommunity.stanford.edu/news/introducing-elimination-harmful-language-initiative-website Their response to the backlash: https://itcommunity.stanford.edu/news/update-elimination-harmful-language-initiative-stanfords-it-community I dunno Not that I put stock at all in "British values" or whatever, but I feel like I've done a mandela effect or something these days cause I'm sure when I was growing up "politeness" was one of those vaunted values but the ones who like to rave about british values the most seem to consider politeness an alien concept.
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Dec 21, 2022 12:52
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NotJustANumber99 posted:What about telling someone they are cis? What about it? I generally don't need to tell people whether they're cisgender or not, I think most people can work that out on their own.
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Dec 21, 2022 15:03
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OwlFancier posted:Scholar is legit my favourite dark souls lol. I do think it gets a bad rap thanks to some questionable decisions in the game’s first impressions. It does that Japanese sequel thing like the Lost Levels where it assumes you’ve played the previous games at starts at a much higher skill floor than 1. One Estus and the interminably slow drink speed makes the early game way harder than it has to be, especially on a first playthrough where you don’t know the locations of the easily accessible shards off by heart. Heide’s tower of flame is also in a really weird place where it’s absolutely brutal but doable, so if you go there as an experienced first timer you’ll probably have a miserable time (and it’s ridiculously easy to miss the entrance to the forest of fallen giants compared to the tower. It basically traps DS1 players the way the graveyard in DS1 can trap new players who assume the game is supposed to be this hard. Funny, but not fun. Ultimately I came to love the game and it’s probably my second/third favourite after 1 and maybe BB, but goddamn it puts its worst foot forward right at the start.
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Dec 29, 2022 15:02
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Bobby Deluxe posted:I don't think this is what you meant here, but this phrase sets me off because a lot of people use it as an accessibility dogwhistle. When I point out that I'm having difficulty experiencing the story of a game because my hands are hosed and i experience cognitive delay, a lot of people will say maybe game X "isn't for me," which is just a poo poo way of saying "I don't think this game should have to accommodate people who don't have full physical or mental capacity." And that's literally the problem that accessibility is talking about. Video games are in a weird grey area between being a skill hobby and a media hobby, and I don’t think there are any easy answers to the matter. Like, listening to music is a media hobby and playing music is a skill hobby. It’d be crazy if halfway through an album you had to complete a QTE to listen to the second half, but equally, folks would look at you funny if you bought the sheet music of the album and then complained you could only play half of it because the other songs were too hard and there were no easier versions of the songs included. Is playing a video game more like playing an album or playing an instrument? You could argue that either way, I think. If it was exactly like playing an album, then watching an LP would be a perfectly acceptable substitute, but it’s clear that this isn’t the case for most people. But if it was exactly like playing an instrument, then nobody would expect they should be able to complete any game they buy, and that’s also not the case. I think different games fall at different ends of this spectrum. I remember being unable to finish Zelda Spirit Tracks on the DS because I couldn’t do some stupid loving pan pipe section and being enraged that some bullshit little mini game had effectively cut me off for the game. That felt like playing an album. On the flip side, I never finished Baba Is You because I’m too loving dumb and not feeling bad at all about that, because it didn’t seem unfair that a puzzle game was made for people smarter than me. That felt more like playing an instrument.
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Dec 29, 2022 17:22
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happyhippy posted:Whats so big about those drinks? Apparently Logan Paul (the suicide forest youtuber) and some boxer/influencer called KSI started a soft drink company, and cause they're internet famous all the kids want their drink?
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Dec 29, 2022 20:42
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Kegluneq posted:I really like this argument. I don't play a musical instrument but I imagine that mastering a particular piece of music has similar dopamine rewards to nailing the timings on a particularly tough boss fight. For rhythm action games the parallel is probably even closer. For me probably the strongest feeling of a game as a skill hobby was completing Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy. The core point of that game is to be hard to the point where you might be unable to complete it, and indeed more than once I put the game down and stopped playing for weeks because I judged that the game was too hard and that I’d never finish it. But each time I came back, persevered, and eventually reached the top of the mountain. I think that game underscores that the blurred line between “games as media” and “games as skill” isn’t the same thing as “games which are art” and “games which are just games”, Getting Over It is in my view unquestionably a work of art, but the primary experience that art affords the player is the feeling of bitter frustration that comes from facing a challenge that seems impossible. Only some small fraction of players will persevere through to experience the secondary feeling of overcoming that challenge. I believe not having an option to adjust the difficulty is functionally essential to that game as a work of art. Which isn’t to say games shouldn’t have difficulty modes. Celeste certainly wasn’t cheapened in the slightest by having its assist mode, and I do think developers should give careful consideration to providing difficulty options to make their games more accessible to players. But insofar as they are artistic products I don’t think an artist is obligated to modify for the players sake, if they consider the difficulty to be essential to the artwork.
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Dec 30, 2022 10:16
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Bobby Deluxe posted:That's kind of the core point of all hard games though. Complete the challenge, feel like an absolute boss. Huge dopamine rush to last you the day. I 100% get why hard mode is a good thing for most people, and I always try to make it clear I don't want to remove challenge from games completely, because it forestalls a lot of The Gamers™ arguments. I think a key point here though is it’s not really about the dopamine rush. It’s about the crippling frustration, the pain, the rage and the anger. In the case of a game like Getting Over It, for 92% of the people who play it that’s the entire experience. If I had given up on the game and never come back to it, I’d have been part of that 92%, and I would have received an experience that was fully intended by the artist. As I mentioned earlier, games are in a grey area where they span different kinds of “thing”. If you buy an entertainment product, you have a reasonable expectation that you should be able to make full use of the entertainment product. But if you buy a work of art, you have to meet the art on its own terms. In the case of a game, difficulty is a component of that art. I think some games are primarily conceived of as entertainment products, others primarily conceived of as works of art. Personally I have no issue with a game including an easy mode, in a lot of games I use the easy mode! heck, in games like EU4 I open up the console regularly and just cheat cheat cheat. I certainly don’t consider myself a better person than others because I completed dark souls or getting over it or anything else. But I think if an artist deliberately creates a work that some people—even the majority of people—cannot engage with, that is an entirely valid choice and we should not expect an artist to moderate their art for others sake.
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Dec 30, 2022 17:20
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Mr Phillby posted:Meat boy is an absolute no brainer for accessability options because we have the Celeste right there, a similar hard platforming game with a lot of great accesability options. I first of all want to disagree strenuously with the premise that how good someone is at videogames can be quantified. I may have beaten Getting Over It but that doesn't make me "better" in any sense of the word except perhaps that I'm better at this exact one specific game. I have failed miserably at countless other much more popular games. Lots of people who have played that game and never finished it or never played it at all I'm sure are better people than me, and if there is such a thing as being "good at videogames" I'm sure most players who never finished the game better fit the descriptor generally than I do. But I think what people have trouble understanding is that an artist does not owe you satisfaction, not even if you paid to view or participate in their work. If the point of the work is to satisfy you, then sure, an artist who fails to satisfy their audience has failed. For those artists, difficulty modes are a great idea, they help ensure everyone has a satisfying experience. A game like Spiderman 3 should have had a difficulty option that disabled QTEs to allow more people to have a satisfying experience. But for other works the point is to challenge the audience, and the artist makes that challenge knowing full well that some, perhaps even most of their prospective audience will fail to meet that challenge. In those situations, the artist has no obligation to help the audience along, except in ways they themselves deem appropriate. And if you do fail that challenge, you didn't miss out on the experience of the work, you experienced it in failing. I do think it loving sucks though if a work intended to challenge is marketed as a work intended to satisfy--I'm reminded particularly here of the film mother!, which was an arsty film that drew allegorical parallels between the biblical fall of man and mankind's destruction of the Earth, and was marketed like it was some mainstream horror film starring (at the time) cinema darling Jennifer Lawrence. People who went to that film expecting something like Halloween got loving scammed. But if you saw it at the Venice Film Festival, you're going in with the understanding that someone is going to show you their art and they have no obligation to make something you personally can enjoy or appreciate. I can't speak for everyone who likes hard games, especially since I'm not the sort of person who always plays on hard when given the choice, but I can say that for me, there is an actual, genuine difference between facing a challenge and choosing not to do it the easy way, versus facing a challenge and knowing there is no easier way. Overcoming an obstacle that you refused to compromise with feels different to overcoming an obstacle that refused to compromise with you, and I don't think it's wrong for an artist to make a game that evokes the latter feeling, even if it does mean that easier difficulties can't be offered.
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Dec 30, 2022 22:32
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Bobby Deluxe posted:Alright, I'm going to jump on the grenade and ask at what point you think art gradates into entertainment and does have a responsibility to it's audience? You can't just say "everything is art and is therefore immune to the criticism that it's difficult to access." I'd agree that if Miyazaki truly believes that the purpose of his work is to let everyone experience the joy of overcoming hardship, then he's failed in his stated goal for exactly that reason. I think it would change the experience for others in the manner I mentioned elsewhere in that post (having a choice in how difficult a challenge is changes how a challenge feels), and I suspect that's the real reason one isn't included, but Miyazaki doesn't have an obligation to players who want not to have a choice, either, so if that's what he believes that he should put in adjustable difficulty. As to your first point, I think those two things are not the same thing. Something being immune to criticism is not the same as it having no responsibility to its audience. It's perfectly fair to criticise a game for not having [thing you wanted or needed to enjoy it]. And I think artists should listen to those criticisms, take them on board, and consider if in the light of those criticisms they should change their output to help their art achieve their goals. But an artist doesn't have a responsibility to respond to or preempt those criticisms by modifying their art to include [thing you wanted or needed to enjoy it]. For example, take this piece by Piet Mondrian:  This is an artwork that works on the contrast of the primary colours of red, blue and yellow. But if someone with achromatopsia views this image, the red and blue will appear almost the exact same shade of grey, removing that contrast. Someone with that condition quite possibly cannot engage with this artwork in the same way as someone with full or even partial colour vision, which sucks. It's perfectly fair for this person to criticise the work on the basis that the full appreciation of the work is inaccessible to them. But would Mondrian, if he had known that, had a responsibility to use different colours? I don't believe so. Mondrian was exploring reducing the painting to its core elements, lines and fields of colour, and those colours reduced to the absolute fundamental primary elements. He had a good reason to choose primary red and primary blue, and that these colours are near-indistinguishable to someone with achromatopsia is unfortunate but I don't think overrides Mondrian's right to explore those ideas in the way he chooses. Of course, most colourblind people aren't fully achromatopsic. But arguably for them, some of the impact of the pieces are lost--if you are dichromatic there are only two primary colours, and so rather than seeing the work as an experiment in only using primary colours, what instead you see is a work that either uses blue, yellow, and dark yellow (protanopic or duteranopic), or red, teal, and light red (tritanopic). An actual faithful translation of Mondrian's work for a dichromatic viewer would be a version which uses only two primary colours, If Mondrian had a responsibility to make his work accessible for the colourblind, I think you could argue that he had an obligation to produce versions of his art which featured only two of the primary colours, since anyone colour blind viewing the version made for trichromats is not actually getting the authentic experience. I realise that doesn't really answer the question, but I don't think I have an answer other than "I don't know". The trite answer is "when it stops being art", but if I could tell you exactly what is and isn't art I think I'd be a highly respected philosopher rather than just some chump with opinions.
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Dec 31, 2022 01:46
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Lt. Danger posted:not surprised goons didn't reach this conclusion but: surely the comparison for accessibility in games is accessibility in sport? There's merit to that idea but a key difference is that sports are competitive, so the players have to be on an even keel. If an accessibility feature gave a sports player an unfair advantage, those without disability would feel that victory to be unfair. Much more commonly it can be impossible to design accessiblity features for sports that allow disabled players to compete against their non-disabled peers. Outside of PvP games I don't think either of those are actual concerns when it comes to accessibility in games. If a game has an easy mode and someone chooses to use it, it's not unfair if they had an easier time beating the game than I did (it's also probably not the case that they had an easier time at all, but that point is lost on a lot of the toxic gamer crowd). And it's easier to make adjustments to a game to give an authentic experience to disabled players when you don't need to deal with other humans with advantages of their own stomping all over them.
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Dec 31, 2022 02:26
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Mr Phillby posted:Its genuinely really funny how mad people get at the idea of games having cheats and difficulty modes. I don't think you have to engage with a work of art in the manner and context the artist intended, my point is the artist doesn't have a responsibility to modify their art to accommodate the manner and context you want to experience it. If you decide to modify the art after the fact to meet your needs that's totally fine. Laudable, even. People who get mad about that are silly. If someone nailed getting over it on their first go and never fell once I'd find that really funny personally, and be pleased for them. If someone used some external software to play the game at 50% speed and completed the game, that's fine, I guess. I'm not sure I'd agree they got something "closer" to the intended experience since I think "Playing the game, persevering through frustration and eventually triumphing" and "playing the game and getting frustrated to the point where you quit and never play again" are both equally intended experiences. But I do think there is a qualitative difference between the frustration you feel when facing a challenge which doesn't offer you the option to make it easier, and the frustration you feel when facing a challenge which does. The feeling you get when your only options are "start over" and "give up" is different from the feeling you get when your options are "start over", "reduce difficulty", and "give up".
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Dec 31, 2022 05:34
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Bobby Deluxe posted:If we drop out of the metaphors for a second, the original artist in question was Miyazaki, and we know his intent, and it explicitly failed because people aren't overcoming hardship in his game (they're either giving up or summoning others). So i'm not sure about then moving on to a metaphor about an idealised version of a different artist's intent, to prove a point that no longer applies to the original premise. I didn’t think we were just talking specifically about one artist, I thought we were talking about the concepts of difficulty and accessibility more generally. If you only want to talk about Miyazaki, I’d refer you back to the first paragraph of that post instead.
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Dec 31, 2022 05:50
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Bobby Deluxe posted:We probably are, it's 5am and I thought I was being clever. I think that ultimately there are elements in hobbies which are irreconcilable with complete inclusion. I think the desire to include is a noble one, and it’s absolutely good and right for us to examine critically whether any particular exclusion is necessary and call it out where we think creators could do better. But in a sense hobbies are by their nature exclusionary, they are personal and community endeavours that create groups that exclude via specialisation. If anything I’d say Video Games here are the exception; for almost any other hobby we take it for granted that people are going to be excluded. If your hobby is cooking, for example, and due to a hand injury you can’t operate an immersion blender, when you find a recipe that calls for the use of an immersion blender, everyone would expect the onus to be on you to adapt the recipe to use a different tool, not the recipe writer. A black diamond ski run is generally built around the assumption that you are an able-bodied skier; there are ways for disabled individuals to participate in skiing, but it involved them making the adjustments, buying specialised equipment, harnesses, not expecting the ski routes to be modified. There’s a strong culture in rock climbing against modifying the rocks, adding hand-holds to make a climb easier (or even possible) is seen as defacement by many. Anyone can play football, but certain leagues and competitions are closed off to you unless you and your team meet a skill threshold, and if you can’t meet that, you can’t play. Of course if you look at it from the other direction, the media direction, Video Games are the problem child. Even if you can’t understand the meaning behind Ulysses, there’s no disability that can meaningfully prevent you from reading it if you really want to. And we take it for granted that films should have subtitles and audio descriptions, even if they are outrageously absent from a ridiculous proportion of the catalogues of Netflix and Amazon. So why should games be the only narrative medium that gets a free pass on being inaccessible? Which I think was my original observation back at the start, video games sit in this nebulous grey area, half skill hobby and half media product, and I don’t think there’s really an easy answer. I don’t think it’s as simple as “make everything fully accessible”—I do think it’s way, way closer to the direction we should be veering than the crowd who chew their hair and rip their clothes if you suggest putting an easy mode in Dark Souls. Right now far too few games properly consider accessibility, and I want a future where accessibility features are just taken for granted. But I do think that games which are designed for certain specialised groups without compromises can co-exist with a broader game industry that is accessible to all. Edit: perhaps to illustrate this point while moving off the difficulty bugbear, arachnophobia I’d guess is one of, if not the most common irrational fear humans can have. And it’s not just someone being cowardly or whatever, phobias are no joke and it loving sucks that for a lot of arachnophobia sufferers playing any fantasy or horror game is an extremely dicey exercise because developers just looooove giant spiders. And this isn’t some niche thing, virtually every game I can think of which both has spiders and the ability to mod it, has a mod that takes out the giant spiders, so I don’t believe there are developers out there truly unaware of that. So I believe every developer should think long and hard before putting giant spiders in their game! They should ask if the spiders need to be there, if they could be replaced with something more interesting, ideally they could include an accessibility option to remove them if the spiders really are important, and so on. That’s good accessibility. But at the same time if some developer has an idea for a game that’s about spiders, for people who like spiders, and which has millions upon billions of spiders all over it, it’s ok to make that game, and it’s ok not to include the no spiders accessibility options because the spiders are the point of the game. That’s going to be exclusionary of people with arachnophobia, but I don’t think that’s actually a problem; the problem is all the games not about spiders but that have spiders in them anyways and no way to avoid them. Getting hung up on the spider game would be focusing on the wrong issue. Reveilled fucked around with this message at 07:34 on Dec 31, 2022 |
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Dec 31, 2022 07:00
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Miftan posted:Accessability options like colourblind mode, tinnitus, and various other things people have mentioned should be industry standard and I don't think anyone is arguing with that. The question is 'is difficulty an accessability setting?' I think it is, for various reasons people have mentioned. I don't understand how 'this is the original difficulty, but if it's impossible for you here are lower difficulties' takes anything away from the game and obviously gets more people to engage with it. People can still be weird elitists about finishing the original difficulty mode if they want. I don’t know how to explain a feeling other than just stating that it exists, all I can really say is that a challenge which has the option to adjust its difficulty feels different to a challenge which doesn’t. I guess in the former case the challenge feels friendlier, less threatening, less adversarial, because there’s always this message, spoken or unspoken, that the person setting you the challenge would rather let you win than see you give up. A challenge presented without the option to adjust it feels more hostile, less friendly, less forgiving, and victory over a challenge like that feels more visceral, more authentic. I don’t know what else to say to explain it, other than to observe that I enjoy games where the difficulty is the point, but I almost never play games with difficulty modes on a difficulty harder than normal, and a lot of the time if given the option I will drop a game down to easy. If there really was no difference between a challenge where you have a choice and one where you don’t, this would be nonsensical—if I like hard games, why play games on normal or easy when the option to play on hard exists? The answer for me is that playing on hard in those situations feels pointless. The frustration that would come from the difficulty would feel futile, not rewarding, the enjoyment that would come from overcoming the challenge would be no greater than if I succeeded on a lower difficulty. So to put it another way, the only way for me to enjoy difficulty is if I don’t have a choice in how difficult something is.
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Dec 31, 2022 12:37
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happyhippy posted:Weirdly my YT Shorts dont end in fash terrority, even though I watch a lot of political stuff. YouTube believes I am deeply interested in shorts about chess, science, comedy skits based on language, and standup comedy clips where the comedian asks audience members questions and then riffs on that for a bit. In fairness it’s pretty much 100% right on that, but I think I’ve been engaging with the holy algorithm long enough that it has a very solid idea of my interests. Every now and then it starts pushing a video from some random creator on me really hard, like it’s at the top of my “watch next” for like a week straight, and after I end up breaking down, watching it, and enjoying it enough to subscribe I imagine the little gnome insider the AI black box smugly yelling “I loving told you so” in my general direction. One thing I found really interesting was it used to recommend me tons of Louis Rossman videos, a guy who is a right to repair campaigner with a fairly inoffensively techbro libertarian bent. He was one of the few people I watched whose videos would touch on political topics while coming from a political direction different from my own, and since the areas we disagreed on were never the focus of the channel I never had an issue with that. But then he waded into some controversy over free speech vs fascism on twitter (I’ve long since forgotten the specifics) with a take that was very ill-informed, and YouTube dropped him from my recommendations that very same day. I didn’t have to say “don’t show me this any more”, I didn’t have to deliberately ignore recommendations or anything like that, it was like that one video with the dumb take pushed him over some threshold into a “right wing political” category and YouTube instantly yeeted him out of my recommendations for that.
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Jan 3, 2023 05:35
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Guavanaut posted:This sounds a lot more like what I'd actually like to watch. I can tell you it thinks I like chess because I watch videos by Gothamchess and chess simp, and the shorts it serves me on science are from Action Lab, NileRed, SciShow and Hank Green. Don’t know who the language skit guy is but it’s mostly about the differences between French and english. So if you want to influence YouTube in that direction, try subscriptions in that direction. In my experience though the best way to train YouTube’s algorithm on you is to internalise its metric. It doesn’t care if you like or hate the content it shows you, it cares whether you keep watching. So you can train the algorithm by responding to videos you don’t like by closing YouTube and going to do something else for a while. Even clicking off the video and watching something else can be interpreted as positive for your overall watch time. There’s options to say not to recommend a channel any more, but I’m personally suspicious that YouTube’s black box could actually interpret that as “engagement” and try showing you similar content from other creators in an effort to get you to stay on the platform longer telling it to stop showing you those videos. The absolute strongest signal you can send the algorithm negatively is just to stop watching YouTube in response to a video. Conversely, if it recommends you an actual good video from a creator you’ve never heard of, subscribing, commenting, or watching more of that person’s videos right away (especially if that’s YouTube’s next recommendation) tells YouTube that was a correct guess. There’s a weirdly distopian element to this all that I have to calculatively manipulate a computer’s opinion of me is in order to improve the quality of my entertainment, but I’d say it has broadly worked—I think I could count on one hand the number of times in the last five years YouTube has tried recommending me an alt-right influencer—it knows.
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Jan 3, 2023 13:45
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Z the IVth posted:The worst videos on Youtube are those where they put up a powerpoint and proceed to read from it with a little scarecam at the bottom. Over Christmas, YouTube recommended me some random ancient history researcher’s YouTube videos where he was ripping apart some other researchers’ paper supposedly authenticating a bunch of forged Roman coins. No scare cam, but as “videos which are just a PowerPoint lecture” go I found them pretty enjoyable. YouTube, a land of contrasts. Sometimes the PowerPoints are good, sometimes…they’re really really bad.
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Jan 3, 2023 15:18
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Z the IVth posted:Oh I agree, you can absolutely deliver a great PowerPoint lecture on video (as the many remote conferences and courses I've had to endure these past few years have shown), but it really shows when the person doing it has never had PowerPoint presentation training before since the default mode everyone goes into is "read the slides". Yeah definitely. I remember back during the Great Recession when I was unemployed for six months the government sent me on a mandatory customer service training course where we had to deliver a final presentation on what we’d learned. The teacher saw the PowerPoint I’d designed for the group and was horrified that the slides had “nothing on them”. I had to explain that no, the slides were prompts and reminders for what each student was going to talk about, not that I was intending for each student to say three sentences each. Afterward some of the students who hadn’t found jobs by the end of the course were offered jobs by the recruiters our teacher had invited along, commenting that this presentation, rehearsed in an afternoon and accompanied by a PowerPoint that used only a default style and some basic animations to show the bullet points was “one of the best presentations they’d ever seen”. At the time I thought that was condescending false praise, but almost 15 years of seeing at least one PowerPoint a week later, I now realise was probably completely sincere.
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Jan 3, 2023 16:31
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sebzilla posted:Ribena is squash, not juice Just imagine Picard has a glaswegian accent. Ribenia is juice, and so is fanta and coke and irn-bru.
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Jan 4, 2023 11:44
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I think it's been a real shame that Classical Studies is basically dead in schools today. It has this reputation of being too posh, too elitist, too old and stuffy, but I think it's the subject which is closest to the ideal we want in education. A good education in the classics is part history, part geography, part politics, part foreign language, part literature, part drama, part religious studies, even potentially part basic mathematics, and critically it's help you see how those things connect to each other--you learn about the geography of Greece, how that played into the politics of Athens and the Delian League, how that played into the history of the Peloponnesian War, and then you can take all of that and read a play like Lysistrata and see how all those things influenced the play. Compared to shoving all those subjects into little silos, I think that's much more engaging! It's a subject which changes in a radical way month to month, one lesson builds on another but the category of one lesson doesn't constrain the category of the next.
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Jan 4, 2023 17:05
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Tesseraction posted:just use a calculator I wonder if there was a prediction of the future more widespread and more wrong than the aphorism "you won't always have a calculator on you when you leave school".
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Jan 4, 2023 17:14
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The thing that I always have trouble with, maths wise, is working out price comparisons in supermarkets. Like, the labels in the supermarkets always give you a price/weight figure, so it'll be like: quote:Tin A is 391g at 82p which is £2.09 per kg I loving hate, hate, hate that supermarkets are not required to give the price/weight figure on their special offers and force me to do this same loving torturous operation multiple times per trip to the supermarket. Me, in the supermarket posted:OK so it's 400g x 8 which is...uh, 2.4kg, and so it's £7 per 2.4kg, so I divide it by 7 and I get...0.34, wow that's lots better than Tin A.
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Jan 4, 2023 18:33
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Jedit posted:EDF's hold music on the business line doesn't suck - it's Give It Away by Zero 7, which as restful music that can loop indefinitely goes is second only to Weightless by Marconi Union. When I worked on the phones I used to have to call up other insurance companies. Brit Insurance (who I don't think still operate in the general consume market any more) had a bunch of 90s rock, and I recall phoning them and ending up with Breakfast at Tiffany's stuck in my head for the rest of the day. And I'll never forget phoning Saga, of all companies, and getting treated to Golden Brown by the Stranglers. The company I worked for used to use Frank Sinatra's greatest hits, which was seen as sufficiently bland to work as hold music...until a customer who had broken down in the middle of nowhere at 3am got treated to Strangers in the Night.
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Jan 5, 2023 14:02
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Comrade Fakename posted:https://twitter.com/campbellclaret/status/1611380942144405504 I'm not so sure it's about our hard right, to be honest. Trans rights is an area where our lovely liberals have a hard divergence from America's lovely liberals, so this might be more reflective of the circles which Campbell moves in being more americanised than your average guardian journalist's group of pals and twitter followers.
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Jan 7, 2023 17:06
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mrpwase posted:When was the last time you saw a biscuit that was actually cooked twice, as the Romans intended A while back I had my family over to watch a film and bought some nice fancy toffee shortbread biscuits for us to enjoy while watching it. About three quarters of the pack got eaten but the rest were accidentally left out and went stale. I was about to throw them out when I realised, biscuits go stale because they're drier than the ambient air and absorb that moisture, which is what makes them go soft. So instead of throwing them out, I popped them into the oven for five or ten minutes and enjoyed some hot crunchy shortbread.
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Feb 6, 2023 16:57
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I cannot imagine being so close minded as to eat jaffa cakes in only one preferred way. Variety is the spice of life! A true connoisseur aims to eat their jaffa in a different manner each time, do they not?
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Feb 6, 2023 17:52
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Dabir posted:Yeah I don't know how this even happens unless BBC writers have to source their images from a big filling cabinet where they're both under "Artists, N" My guess would be that the original draft of the article had a picture of Viola Davis and reference that she was up to win an EGOT this year, then some editor decides the picture for the story should be Beyoncé cause she’s more famous, the caption is updated for the picture to reference Beyoncé, expecting the picture to be replaced with a photo of her, and then that never happens cause everyone after that point sees a reference to Beyoncé and a picture of a black woman and doesn’t engage their brain for two seconds to realise the picture and caption don’t match.
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Feb 8, 2023 03:33
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I don’t know how universal it is but my dad who is a UCU member and former rep has been bitterly complaining for the past 5+ years that the union goes on strike without any strategy or feasible, reasonable demands, and that the leadership will ballot for strike action based on smaller obtainable goals but then pivot to unachieveable ones once the strike begins. He talks a lot about fears that the union is going to end up destroying itself because more and more members are getting fed up of striking but feel unable to speak against it, and he’s frustrated that the union seems categorically unwilling to consider industrial action short of a strike like working to rule because it doesn’t produce pictures of picket lines you can put on Twitter.
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Feb 9, 2023 11:24
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OwlFancier posted:I genuinely think he already is, I cannot at all understand why she is so bananas for the man if they aren't in a relationship. When it comes to parliament, men who are into consensual relationships with adults are pretty thin on the ground so I guess you have to take what you can get
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Feb 9, 2023 21:22
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Tesseraction posted:In the replies you can see what a charming life he's led against his ex partners. Revenge porn, restraining orders, and apparently took his speaking appearance at a con to traumadump on the audience and told all the mentally ill people in said audience to stop taking their medications and go to his website where he can provide counselling instead. This was the guy who dressed up as one of the characters he voice acted, and then delivered a monologue in character lamenting the cancellation of the voice actor who plays him. Cullen was a bit of a husbando figure so I think in his warped perception of things he thought that doing this would get his female fans on side to defend him? Instead of course it just brought more attention to his lovely behaviour and turned them all against him.
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Feb 10, 2023 11:34
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I think the 1612 thing is a stretch. The Fettmilch uprising was in 1614, not 1612. Tensions were simmering in Frankfurt prior to this--including during 1612 when the new Emperor came to power--but that's true for almost every historical event--the actual massacre took place on August 22nd 1614. You could find an instance of Jewish persecution (whether pogrom, massacre, expulsion, or some onerous and degrading new law) almost every year between 1100 and 1650 somewhere in Europe so any date you pick in that range you'd find something. Fettmilch's uprising is notable only in that it was one of the last (in the HRE), it killed two people, and it ended with Fettmilch being executed and the expelled jews of Frankfurt being returned to the city under imperial escort. Of all persecutions an anti-semite could glorify, this one is arguably the least successful ever. For this to work our hypothetical anti-semite needs to know about an obscure event in the history of one city in germany, needs to decide to obscure the allusion by moving it off by 2 years, needs to think that Fettmich means "full fat milk" in german (which it doesn't, really, that's a bit like calling dark chocolate "no milk chocolate" in English), needs to know that gorgonzola is made with both full fat milk and animal rennet, and needs to know that this specific cheese is not Kosher for that reason. This seems unlikely to me, given that most alt-right people are complete morons whose idea of "talking in code" is pretending to be a literal clown and referring to the holocaust as "baking 6 million pies". They're not capable of that level of subtlety. The horn is bad enough without going full conspiracy on it. EDIT: On second thought, put the offensive term they used for the holocaust in spoilers Reveilled fucked around with this message at 15:46 on Feb 10, 2023 |
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Feb 10, 2023 15:42
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In my experience Irn Bru is really two drinks, because it's remarkable how much the taste changes based on temperature. If you drink it at room temperature (e.g. from a bottle someone is keeping on a counter), it's basically tutti fruitti flavour, that sort of general non-specific "fruit" flavour. But if you drink it ice cold, those fruit flavours get suppressed and instead a much harsher gingery flavour is prominent instead. I like both, personally, but it wouldn't surprise me if there's people out there who've tried it once and disliked it that might have liked it more had they experienced the flavour profile from the other temperature.
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Feb 14, 2023 10:17
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