Screencap from the “Pixel Pioneers” video series (via Stuart Brown)
“Game visuals are the most obvious indicator of their technology,” Stuart Brown says in his Pixel Pioneersshort documentary series on the graphic history of video games. Last month he released the last of the five-part series on YouTube, concluding with contemporary hyperrealistic graphics that feel light years away from the monochromatic pixels of Pong in 1972.
Pixel Pioneers is a series of short videos, each between eight and nine minutes long, that looks not just at the graphics themselves, but how the technology and design behind them guided gameplay. Brown starts with the emergence of arcade games, where sometimes color was added by a physical translucent overlay on the screen, and early breakthroughs like the 1979 Galaxian, which was basically an update of Space Invaders from the year before, but with multiple colors and the beginnings of dimensions.
By the time Brown reaches Crytek’s 2007 game Far Cry in the series’ fifth installment, graphics are edging into the photorealistic. As he says, the visual effects of recent games are often “designed to sell the illusion of reality.” However, he adds that “the true value of visuals is not in their realism. A game’s aesthetic does far more to establish its character than its polygon count.”
Brown, under the username Ahoy, is a prolific producer of YouTube video game content, mostly with weapon guides, but also “A Brief History of Piracy” (actual swashbuckling pirates, not the kind that steal content) and “Easter Eggs in Video Games.” The Pixel Pioneers series is his most thorough work and, though it is dripping with nostalgia, can be engaging for an audience beyond the gaming community. Along with other projects out there examining video game history from alternate angles like its development of sound, the relatively recent history of gaming deserves such in-depth analysis as an important component of the broader history of technology and design.
The Right nearly stormed the White House over fake Benghaaaazi and fake IRS scandals.
The Right has shut the federal government down because Freedumb!
The Right has nodded sagely as unarmed black men have been killed by cops.
The Right made a hero out of a mooching bigot because he and his lunatic pals responded to the cops coming to collect a tax bill by brandishing weapons and yawping about Liberty.
The Right been opposed any attempt at sane gun control in this country.
The Right impeached Bill Clinton over trivia.
The Right fingers it's arsenal and mutters ominously about "The Blood of Tyrants" and "Second Amendment Remedies" every time it stubs its toe.
So does anyone doubt that the minute the Kenyan Usurper Race Baiter Muslim Brotherhood Uppity-Negro-In-Chief announces that Conservative Superhero Dick Cheney is going to be tried for war crimes, there would be an armed uprising in this country the likes of which we haven't seen since 1861?
“There’s a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part! You can’t even passively take part! And you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels…upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop! And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you’re free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!”
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—Mario Savio, Dec. 2, 1964 Berkeley Free Speech Movement
This is a very seasoned detective, 15 years in a sex crimes unit. When I asked him sort of what happens when victims come in to report an assault to the criminal justice system, this is what he said. He said: “The stuff they say makes no sense” — referring to victims — “So no I don’t always believe them and yeah I let them know that. And then they say ‘Nevermind. I don’t want to do this.’ Okay, then. Complainant refused to prosecute; case closed.”
So now let’s loop in the rape victim advocate perspective: “It’s hard trying to stop what police do to victims. They don’t believe them and they treat them so bad that the victims give up. It happens over and over again.”
So now let’s loop in the victim’s perspective. In reference to her interactions with her law enforcement officer, she said the following. She said: “He didn’t believe me and he treated me badly. It didn’t surprise me when he said there wasn’t enough to go on to do anything. It didn’t surprise me, but it still hurt.”
Professor Campbell’s research was an attempt to investigate why the police could be so certain that most of the victims reporting rape and sexual assault were lying, while she was so certain that most were not.
What she found was that there are certain neurological events during a sexual assault that explain most of the officer’s complaints:
Tonic Immobility, also known as “rape-induced paralysis”:
…the most marked characteristic of tonic immobility is muscular paralysis. A victim in a state of tonic immobility cannot move. She cannot move her hands. She cannot move her arms. She cannot move her legs. She cannot move her torso. She cannot move her head. She is paralyzed in that state of incredible fear.
Research suggests that between 12 and 50 percent of rape victims experience tonic immobility during a sexual assault, and most data suggests that the rate is actually closer to the 50 percent than the 12 percent.
How stress hormones make it difficult for the brain to encode and consolidate memories:
That’s why memory can be slow and difficult — because the encoding and the consolidation went down in a fragmented way. It went down on little tiny post-it notes and they were put in all different places in the mind. And you have to sort through all of it, and it’s not well-organized, because remember I told you to put some of them in folders that had nothing to do with this. I told you to put one in the pencil jar. It’s not where it’s supposed to be. It takes a while to find all the pieces and put them together. So that’s why victims, when they’re trying to talk about this assault, it comes out slow and difficult.
“Flat affect” and “strange emotions” from victims:
So the behavior that they see is due to a hormonal soup. Remember how we talked about how those hormones can sometimes even be working at cross-purposes. Which hormones are released at which levels? We don’t know yet. We don’t have data on that, but we know that there’s a lot — that those are the four main ones that are being released and that they can kind of put the body at cross-purposes. So what is often interpreted as a victim being cavalier because she’s just sitting there or interpreted as lying because she seems so cavalier and not upset about it, is very likely attributable to the opiate levels in her body, because those will be released at the time of the assault and they can stay very elevated for 96 hours post assault. So the key thing that practitioners need to know is that there is, in fact, a wide reaction of emotional reactions to sexual assault, and it can be helpful to normalize those reactions for victims, because they don’t understand why they’re behaving that way either.
What I’d ask for commenters is:
Please read the transcript or watch the video
Please don’t be a jerk. That doesn’t mean agree, but it does mean that if you disagree, please disagree in a non-jerky way.
I thought that only the bag of chips was knitted so I was like lmaoo fucking idiot bird got owned then I saw that the bird was knitted as well then I realized I was the fucking idiot bird getting owned
A defining feature of this Ebola epidemic has been the significant resistance of some of the affected communities to treatment and prevention measures by foreign aid workers and their own governments. Many local people, suspicious and fearful, have refused to go to treatment centers or turn over bodies for safe burial, and whole communities have prohibited the entry of doctors and health teams.
As the months have gone by that resistance has been less reported upon, and there are signs t
“Will you deny that your jails are filled with the children of the poor, not the children of the rich? Will you deny that men steal because their bellies are empty? Will you dare to state that any of those lost sisters you speak of enjoy going to bed with ten and twenty miserable men in one night and having their insides burn like they were branded?
I will not rise to your reform bait. This is your society judge Atgeld; you helped to create it, and it is this society that makes the criminal… And if the workers unite to fight for food, you jail them too… No, so long as you preserve this system and its ethics, your jails will be full of men and women who choose life to death, and who take life as you force them to take it, through crime.”
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Lucy Parsons
She shouted this at the Governer of Illinois, John Altgeld, at a forum, while the upper class attendees booed and hissed at her. This was sometime during the 1890’s.
An excerpt from Linda Tirado's 2014 book Hand to Mouth: Living in Bootstrap America lays out some of the ways that being poor costs more than having a comfortable income -- it's more than having to pay for high daily rents in a motel because you can't afford first-and-last.
Read the rest
‘She is constantly visited by amateurs of birch discipline, being always furnished with brooms of green birch and of the best quality, and is always happy to see any friend that feels himself inclinable to spend three or four guineas in her company.’
The lady in question can be found residing on Berwick Street, Soho; and if a good flogging or spanking is your bag, I’m certain she’ll be more than happy to receive you. The only snag is that she’s been dead for more than two-hundred years, with the above description of her particular talent lifted from the pages of Harris’s Book of Covent Garden Ladies, an annual publication in the mid-to-late eighteenth century that offered both resident and visitor an extensive guide to the sex-workers of Georgian London. My compilation edition of the publication offers a glossary of slang from the time that serves to translate the numerous colloquial phrases for various sexual specialities, but this wouldn’t have been necessary when the books were published as the slang used wasn’t a clandestine code ala polari; the capital’s sex industry of the 1700s was an open and guilt-free business, not to mention a booming one. Flagellation was perhaps the most flourishing branch (sorry!) of the industry, as the number of premises in and around the Covent Garden district that specialised in this specific pleasure outnumbered those that didn’t. So renowned was the Brits’ appetite for flogging and spanking that the French referred to it as the English Perversion. A long and proud history that considerably predates the Marquis de Sade should therefore count for something, but not in the sexually liberated society of the 21st century, it would seem.
Last week, an amendment to the 2003 Communications Act listed a series of sexual acts that often feature in the more obscure online pornography that are now no longer permissible in British-produced porn. Included on the list was the good old ‘English Perversion’ – Spanking, Caning and Aggressive Whipping (is there such a thing as non-aggressive whipping?). However, were this list limited to one of the oldest kinky pastimes, it would be laughable enough; but other life-threatening acts now deemed beyond-the-pale on-screen include Humiliation; Facesitting; Fisting; Watersports (apparently known as Urolagnia – I could have sworn that was a former Soviet Republic); Female Ejaculation (still okay for a woman to be splattered in the discharge of Male Ejaculation, apparently); Penetration by Any Object Associated With Violence (bang goes the old cop-and-truncheon standby, then); and Role-playing as Non-Adults (Remember, role-playing, which means pretending, just like every actor playing Demetrius or Chiron pretends to rape and cut off the tongue and hands of Lavinia in ‘Titus Andronicus’ on stage).
Perhaps best of all lewd and licentious activities viewed as unacceptable on the list is ‘Physical or Verbal Abuse – Regardless if Consensual’. Did you catch that last bit? That’s right – regardless if consensual. Where, I wonder, does that leave any movie in which two characters physically and verbally abuse each other? Mr T’s goading of Sylvester Stallone in ‘Rocky III’ includes both; the former suggests Rocky’s missus would have a better time in bed with him and then both men knock seven bells out of each other. But they are, lest we forget, actors, a label that also applies to (slightly) lesser thespians in a porn video based around role-playing.
When quizzed about these laughable new rules and regulations, the predictable response from the Department of Media, Culture and (presumably not water) Sport said imposing such restrictions was a ‘tried and trusted method for protecting children.’ Sorry? Where do children come into this? We’re not talking about child pornography, we’re talking about fully grown adults pleasuring each other for the pleasure of other fully grown adults. Why should everything involving adults today be governed by what is perceived as harmful to some imaginary child? What about those of us who don’t have – and have never wanted – children? It seems what we can or cannot watch is viewed through a prism that relegates all to the status of a child. Surely if a child accidentally accesses online porn, is that not the responsibility of its parents for not blocking it from the family computer? This is a child that can stroll into a supermarket or be entombed in a doctor’s waiting room with its mother and be bombarded by cheap and tawdry titillating magazines boasting such headlines as ‘Sick Dad Dressed As Santa and Then Raped Us’ or return home to switch on MTV and be confronted by a virtually naked pop siren gyrating around the screen whilst singing a song about masturbation.
Incidentally, I’m not and never have been a devotee of pornography. Frankly, I find it boring, repetitive and utterly un-arousing. To me, it seems to narrow rather than widen the vista of the sexual experience, reducing what the great Adam Ant once referred to as ‘the last adventure known to mankind’ to a series of choreographed clichés enacted on a tedious loop. But maybe that’s just me. I do, however, maintain it is the right of an adult in a supposedly free society to enter into a mutual agreement with other adults, and be fully aware that what he or she is about to receive is the province of those old enough to both understand and enjoy what is going on. It would appear those engaged in the cause of protecting children now regard niche markets of the sex industry that few adults, let alone children, are exposed to on a regular basis as more worthy of diverting their energies towards than the actual genuine threats to children such as ones that were allowed to take place in a certain South Yorkshire town. Well, f*** me up the arse with a red-hot poker! Just don’t film it when you do.
TELL THAT TO MOTHERFUCKING QUEEN VICTORIA AND HER HUGE ASS EMPIRE BITCH
I’m sorry.
I couldn’t hear you.
Over all the voices of amazing women.
Throughout history.
Who could have
kicked
your
ignorant
ass.
Reblogging this for the gender studies we’re doing in my history course.
No important discoveries of course because discovering what the sun is made of isn’t important at all OH NO.
Whaaat a douchetit fucknugget. I’d love to practice my crotch kicking skills on this dude.
my favorite part is at the end. obviously your completely truthful when you say “i am not sexist, anti-feminine, or whetever but this is brilliant”
just somethings that women invented:
stove
dishwashers
globes
life rafts
fire escape
car heaters
medical syringes
windshield wipers
fridge
water heater
chocolate chip cookies
disposable cell phones
Bulletproof vests
We wouldn’t know what we do about radiation without Marie Curie. Oh and what about Roseline Franklin, who figured out what DNA looked like?
And guess who took on the empty jobs when all the men were in the army in WW2?
Arg, posts like this.
Also Re: “never forced to die in a war”, Libya, Benin, Chad, Malaysia, Tunisia, Cuba, Eritrea, Taiwan, and Israel’s mandatory military services would like to have a word with you.
I’m going to go point by point here:
Joan of Arc led an army 600 YEARS AGO what do you mean women have never fought in wars? COUNTLESS women have been killed in battle. HOW DARE YOU disregard their courage and their sacrifice. And let’s not forget all the women who contributed to war efforts before they were allowed to fight by working in factories, nursing, spying, and making sure the industries back home didn’t die completely.
“Women have never lead a nation”? Yeah, everyone from Margaret Thatcher to Ruth Dreifuss would like to have a word with you about that. The Chancellor of Germany (generally considered one of the most powerful people in Europe and in the world) is a woman. The Presidents of Liberia, Argentina, Lithuania, Costa Rica, Brazil, Kosovo, Malawi, and South Korea are women, as are the Prime Ministers of Bangladesh, Iceland, Trinidad and Tobago, Australia, Slovakia, Thailand, Denmark, and Jamaica. The US Secretary of State, the President of the Indian National Congress Party, the General Secretary of the Burmese National League for Democracy, and the monarchs of England and Jordan are women.
Facebook’s COO, the CEOs of Pepsi, Kraft, Xerox, IBM, Yahoo, WellPoint, Avon, the President of the Council of Fashion Designers of America, and the co-chairman of Sony Pictures Entertainment are women, just to name a few. There are now a million more female college graduates in America than there are male college grads. So no, I would not say that women are incapable of succeeding at their jobs. I think we can all agree that idiots like you are the reason women get paid less than their male counterparts.
RE the voting thing and the thing about women not being able to make difficult decisions: The ghosts of Susan B. Anthony, Amelia Bloomer, Emily Davison, Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, Mary Richardson, Emmeline Pankhurst, Frances Ellen Watkins, Maria W. Stewart, Christabel Pankhurst, Lucy Stone, and all the other suffragettes and abolitionists who fought for their rights despite how radical and dangerous it was are coming to haunt you.
The things about wimpy support groups and physical beauty make so little sense that I don’t even know what to say in response
A further list of things invented by women:
Toilet paper holder
Submarine lamp and telescope
Ironing board
Home solar heating system
Gas heating furnace
Foldaway bed
Disposable diaper
Cobol (first computer language)
Circular saw
Rolling pin
Kevlar
Electric hot water heater
Elevated railway
Engine muffler
You conveniently forgot to mention literature, but let me just remind everyone that the 5th, 6th, 12th, 14th, 16th, 17th, 18th, and 21st best-selling books of all time were written by women. The 1st, 2nd and 6th best-selling authors of 2012 are women, while the 3rd best-selling book of 2011 was written by a woman…do I really need to continue?
Women have not contributed to science or mathematics or the building blocks of modern society? Tell that to the 43 female Nobel Prize winners. Tell that to Emilie du Chatelet, Caroline Herschel, Mary Anning, Mary Somerville, Maria Mitchell, Lise Meitner, Irène Curie-Joliot, Barbara McClintock, Dorothy Hodgkin, Marie Curie, Rosalind Franklin, any of the people mentioned in the previous comments, or any of the other women who made significant scientific or mathematical advances despite being oppressed by people like you. Oh, and RE the philosophy, here’s a list of people who prove you wrong: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_female_philosophers.
And women did all that in a society ruled by thinking like yours. While bearing your children and wearing corsets.
I never claimed we were superior, but don’t you dare tell me we are not EQUAL.
There’s 2 problems with what the original image is doing, and this is the problem with a lot of arguments about equality and worth and stuff in general.
1) It’s factually incorrect, which everybody above has done a good job of pointing out.
2) It’s constructing what it thinks makes a human being worthwhile.
The problem is that we can’t argue 1 without being aware of 2 as well, because honestly, who says that it matters if people participate in the mass slaughter of others? Or if they led aggressive colonizing nations? Why does the worth of a group of human beings depend on whether they’ve invented mathematical concepts, or invented something “useful”?
It’d be like if I said “blonde people are inferior because they’ve never created a lego castle!” Besides that that’s factually incorrect, why would a human beings worth be determined by creating a lego castle? It’s just something I decided made people worthwhile. It’s arbitrary.
And it’s no less arbitrary just because lots of people decide that’s a standard to judge other humans on, or if a society is founded on it, a society created by white male colonizers who enslaved others and took others land through genocide, no less, so it’s not like prioritizing such values is not in the best interests of the dominant group.
The idea that a group deserves domination over others because they are intellectually, or physically, or martially superior is a human construction, and one that conveniently justifies the conquerors, the slavers, and the people who run giant corporations that impoverish millions. They are always the ones who, by virtue of being dominant, get to construct what makes a human being worthy of respect, and who get to be seen as having those aspects inherently. It’s everybody else who they dominate that needs to beg and scramble and prove themselves as worthy.
So, it’s absolutely true that that above image is fallacious and factually incorrect, but we need to be critical of the values the image is extolling as well. And while I understand the practical need to encourage women and girls by pointing out the accomplishments of women throughout history, it’s also important that we question the entire narrative in general, about why it’s so important that people have participated in war, or have led nations to conquer other nations, or proved their intellectual acumen by winning scientific awards, or inventing something that is marketable. Besides that the very nature of a lot of these standards are based on colonialist, martial, and capitalist virtues, it’s arbitrary that we choose some standards in which a group must meet to be considered “equal”. That’s how groups maintain their power, that’s how inequality continues to be justified. And in a more practical sense, it’s also important that we question these narratives and this construction because while it may help some groups, it’s still used to oppress others, and we’re just justifying the arbitrary criteria for human worth by saying “no no, me too! I’m worthy!”
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An excerpt from Linda Tirado's 2014 book Hand to Mouth: Living in Bootstrap America lays out some of the ways that being poor costs more than having a comfortable income -- it's more than having to pay for high daily rents in a motel because you can't afford first-and-last.
Read the rest
![flagellation-l-agneau-inv-june-sc-hi[1]](http://annaraccoon.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/flagellation-l-agneau-inv-june-sc-hi1.png)
‘She is constantly visited by amateurs of birch discipline, being always furnished with brooms of green birch and of the best quality, and is always happy to see any friend that feels himself inclinable to spend three or four guineas in her company.’
