Zephyr Dear

Among the various other ludicrous claims I’ve seen come from the gamergate truthers and Sarkeesian bashers is a fear, a deep, unsettling fear: if the Social Justice Warriors win, the games industry will stop making gamer games for gamers!  There will be no more boobs and blood!  We’ll all be playing Diner Dash!

Let’s do a little reality check.

One of the more tedious parts of the industry is that it is one where copycats are routinely pushed into development.  Every time someone comes up with a ‘gamer game’ formula that kind of works, every major publisher falls over itself attempting to copy it as quickly as possible.  Think about the E3s and other trade shows you’ve been to.  How many MOBAs were there this year? How many open world games three years ago?  How many MMOs were there five years ago?  God of War clones 6 years ago?  How many World War II shooters 8 years ago?

Now let’s look at the Sims.  Yesterday marked the release of The Sims 4, the latest iteration of EA’s very popular virtual dollhouse.  The Sims franchise is a relatively unique snowflake because of a combination of three elements:

• It’s got a AAA budget for production values suitable on a non-mobile device.
• It’s designed for a female, or at least co-ed, audience (65F/35M according to this link, up from 50/50 in its earliest days).
• It touches upon ‘adult’ themes.  You’re not just crushing candy or doing other ‘girly’ stuff. My wife, most notably, tried setting her kitchen on fire in the Sims 3 with the express purpose of trying to seduce the arriving firefighter in her hot tub.

It’s also notable for one other reason.  Mainly that, despite the fact that it is one of the most successful video game franchises of all time, selling 175 million boxes so far, there has been no credible attempt by a major publisher to copycat the game in its entire 14 year history. 

Seriously, the most notable attempt to do so was Playboy: the Mansion.  Because lord knows nothing makes women pick up the box at Best Buy like a Playboy Bunny on the cover  (Disclosure: it was actually kinda fun).

The truth of the matter is that the people making decisions about what gets greenlit at major companies only greenlight AAA games that they understand.  And most of the people making these decisions are traditional gamers.  So when they see a brand new genre they like to play, they want to rush into that product space.  No matter that, for example, the MOBA field has one utterly dominant force in LoL, with two beloved heavyweights in Valve and Blizzard taking all remaining oxygen in the space.  If you’re a game industry executive, it’s clear that MOBAs are the future of gaming!  That’s where we gotta be!  But copy the Sims, or Kim Kardashian game’s massive success?  Those games are just weird.

Which makes the games industry unique.  Say what you will about the Bechdel Test, there is clearly no shortage of movies aimed at women.  Television has also adapted, and now has entire channels devoted to women, and most of prime time network programming is built with the realization that they have female-majority audiences now (because, *ahem*, apparently the men started gaming instead).  Note that, in neither case has testosterone-fueled guy-content disappeared from our televisions and theaters.

So if you’re a traditional gamer, don’t you worry your pretty little head.  There will be AAA games for guys long into the foreseeable future.  And I guarantee that they’ll continue to try to compete on general badassery – and I’m fine with that, since being a standard male gamer, I also, in fact, like those games.

The question I ask is, isn’t this industry capable of making a female-oriented, AAA game with adult themes more often than once every four years?

by Dish Staff

Niraj Chokshi illustrates how the best states for female workers are in the Northeast:

Massachusetts had the highest score [for women's earnings and employment] among states, according to the analysis of four factors conducted by the Institute for Women’s Policy Research. (D.C. scored even higher, though many argue it is better compared to other cities.) All but four of the 10 highest-scoring states – Maryland, Minnesota, Colorado and Virginia – were in the Northeast. Sixteen states earned a B- or higher. West Virginia ranked dead last and, along with Alabama, received an F. The composite scores, excluding D.C., ranged from 68.5 to 90.5, on a hundred-point scale.

The four factors analyzed to develop the composite scores were: median annual earnings (for full-time, year-round women workers); the earnings ratio between men and women (again, for full-time, year-round women workers); the share of women in the workforce; and the share of women in managerial or professional jobs.

The West Central Tribune reports: "An Atwater, MN woman has filed a formal complaint against the Atwater Police Chief for trespassing on her property and killing her young son’s pet chicken – leaving the hen’s decapitated head just feet from the backyard chicken coop." Read the rest

Yeah.  (It was a perfect example of why “The Wet Blanket” is #5 in this lovely article.)  I was also really disgusted by the cheating scenes that were all about how Bess had brought this on herself and Harry was just a lost little darling.

[rest of post behind a readmore because it’s long and ranty and reveals that I am a gigantic, truly titanic Houdini nerd]

Especially because it’s not even true!  Bess Houdini was by all accounts an incredibly loving and devoted partner.  There’s no evidence that they fought all the time or that she forced him to stop doing dangerous stunts.

(He didn’t really do dangerous stunts anyway.  I’m reading the excellent book Hiding The Elephant by Jim Steinmeyer, and it points out that Houdini never had a stunt go truly wrong.  He planned all his stunts very carefully, freely faked and lied about the danger, and specialized in giving the audience the impression they had nearly witnessed a disaster.  And then he’d go to the press and tell them an even greater fabrication about what he’d actually done.  He was a magician and a showman, not a daredevil.)

There are some accounts that Harry cheated on Bess, but it seems to have been more of a “I’m a big famous celebrity, I can do whatever I want!” thing than a “my mean wife drove me to this” thing.

[different anon:] The series is actually based on a book which focuses on the psychological study of the man’s character rather than his actual history. It’s really more of a “what made him tic” type of deal instead of a showcase for interesting trivia about Houdini.

I don’t see how falsifying the events of someone’s life is going to help you find out what made them tick.

I mean, all the stuff in there about “was I really escaping from… myself” and “I wasn’t afraid to die… I was afraid to truly live”, in addition to being the worst writing ever, makes no sense in light of Houdini’s stunts actually being carefully stage-managed with numerous safety precautions.  It’s almost like the truth was closer to “was I really escaping from… a life where I was less famous and made less money.”

Which is fine.  There’s some interesting psychology there as well.   An impoverished Jewish immigrant going to incredible lengths to become rich and famous against all odds is a damn good story too.  There’s also his famously enormous ego—part of the reason he’s an American legend is because he went around telling anyone who would listen “I am an American legend.” You can even throw in some body issues, what with him being a 5’2” bodybuilder who frequently performed nude or in a thong.  (To prove he had no lockpicks on him.  Suuuure.)

You can do a psychological portrait of Houdini.  You could probably do a great one.  You’d just have to base it on the actual events of his life, not on this “marital strife, Oedipal issues, and ennui” Generic Psychological Profile #46.

(Besides being general bullshit, that profile is also sorely lacking in cultural context.  Houdini wasn’t just an American legend but a Jewish American legend who was homeless for two years as a teenager.  You have to factor that in before you get all weird about “he was suspiciously close to his mother” and “his drive for wealth and fame must have been about some deep neurosis.”)

You want to learn how Houdini ticked? Think about how he ticked, in his time and with his background, not how he would’ve ticked if he were some bland American Beauty dude overflowing with vague suburban unfulfillment.

BDSM does not need to be sexual.  You can do BDSM and absolutely never take your pants off nor have any pants-off-type-feelings involved.  Nonsexual play is definitely part of BDSM.

Also, whether you do BDSM or not, goddamn knock it off with antagonizing people.  You said “I know this is wrong,” but no, it’s really wrong, like don’t do it wrong.

You can try to pursue your desires through BDSM or through some other form of consensual interaction.  You can explore if you’re having these desires because of negative feelings that would actually be better served by doing nice things for yourself.  You can just shove the whole thing aside and try to deep-breathe and distract the urge away.  But you can’t keep doing this “no, you don’t understand, it’s kind of okay to attack you because this is something I want" thing to your friends.

This whole History channel Houdini special is bothering me.  It seems like it was written by someone who didn’t find the actual Houdini interesting at all, and how is that possible.

"International celebrity in an era before radio? Penniless Jewish immigrant turned millionaire?  Pioneer in an incredibly visual and intriguing performance art?  Revolutionary debunker of mystical claims?  Escaped from the world’s best handcuffs, an underwater packing crate, and a god damn sea monster?  I don’t know, I just don’t see the hook.

"We’d better add some spy stuff and make his wife yell at him a lot. That’s what people come to see in a Houdini movie."

Dear Discovery and History Networks:

People bickering is almost never the most exciting part of a story.

If you are producing a show where people try to survive in the wilderness without even clothing, the most interesting part of the show is not going to be them throwing a twenty-minute snipefest over knocking over a water bucket.

If you are producing a blockbuster biopic of Harry Houdini, the most interesting part is not going to be his completely fictional “Harry, all this super cool famous magic is cutting into our us time!” fights with his wife.

Seriously, when a show idea comes to you on a platter, serve what’s on the goddamn platter.  Don’t flatten every awesome show concept into something that sounds like my parents trying to agree on a restaurant.

The single-worst piece I’ve seen regarding last week’s iCloud celebrity photo leak is, by far, this one from David Auerbach at Slate. To see where Auerbach is coming from, let’s skip ahead to his conclusion first:

But whether or not any of these problems were directly responsible for the leak, Apple users, from Jennifer Lawrence to corporate executives to laptop musicians to you, should be out for blood, and other companies should use this as a lesson to double- and triple-check their own security stories. Apple will probably survive though. IPhones [sic] are so cool and pretty.

The old “Apple customers are shallow fools drawn to shiny things, and easily swayed by popular opinion” angle.

Here’s the problem with Auerbach’s piece:

Whether or not this particular vulnerability was used to gather some of the photos — Apple is not commenting, as usual, but the ubiquity and popularity of Apple’s products certainly point to the iCloud of being a likely source — its existence is reason enough for users to be deeply upset at their beloved company for not taking security seriously enough. Here are five reasons why you should not trust Apple with your nude photos or, really, with any of your data.

Don’t trust Apple “with any of your data” isn’t just wrong because it’s a hyperbolic overreaction, it’s wrong because it’s potentially dangerous. What has been mostly overlooked in the reaction to this photo leak scandal, and completely lost in Auerbach’s argument, is that backups are a form of security — in the same sense that life insurance is a form of security for your children and spouse.

Over the years I’ve received numerous emails from past and former Genius Bar support staff, telling similar stories of heartbreak. Customer comes in, their iPhone completely broken, or lost, or stolen, and they had precious photos and videos on it. The birth of a child. The last vacation they ever took with a beloved spouse who has since passed away. Did they ever back up their iPhone to a Mac or PC with iTunes? No. In many cases they don’t even know what “iTunes on a PC” even means. Or maybe they connected the iPhone to iTunes once, the day they bought it and needed to activate it, and then never again.

This happened to thousands of people. It’s why Apple made cloud-based backups one of the fundamental pillars of iCloud. It still happens, today, to people who haven’t signed up for iCloud and enabled iCloud backups. It’s heartbreaking in most cases, and downright devastating in some. I’ve heard from Genius Bar staffers who eventually left the job because of the stress of dealing with customers suffering data loss. Once it is determined that the photos and videos are irretrievable from the device and have never been backed up, the job of the Genius staffer turns from technician to grief counselor. Bereavement is not too strong a word.

iCloud backups have not eliminated this problem, but they have made it far less common. This is, like almost everything in tech, a trade-off:

• Your data is far safer from irretrievable loss if it is synced/backed up, regularly, to a cloud-based service.

• Your data is more at risk of being stolen if it is synced/backed up, regularly, to a cloud-based service.

Ideally, the companies that provide such services minimize the risk of your account being hijacked while maximizing the simplicity and ease of setting it up and using it. But clearly these two goals are in conflict. There’s no way around the fact that the proper balance is somewhere in between maximal security and minimal complexity.

Further, I would wager heavily that there are thousands and thousands more people who have been traumatized by irretrievable data loss (who would have been saved if they’d had cloud-based backups) than those who have been victimized by having their cloud-based accounts hijacked (who would have been saved if they had only stored their data locally on their devices).

It is thus, in my opinion, terribly irresponsible to advise people to blindly not trust Apple (or Google, or Dropbox, or Microsoft, etc.) with “any of your data” without emphasizing, clearly and adamantly, that by only storing their data on-device, they greatly increase the risk of losing everything.

The problems here are multifaceted and complicated; “don’t trust anything in the cloud” is simplistic and, in its own way, dangerous.

Postscript: And what about email and messaging? If one doesn’t trust Apple or other cloud-based providers with backups, how can you trust them with email or messages, both of which often contain photos? Further, as Charles Ying pointed out, Apple is set to improve on this very thing in iOS 8 with self-destructing attachments in iMessage.

"I’m an ENTJ, but I find a lot of these ENTJ confessions irritating, particularly the ones that are more confrontational about being an ENTJ. You’re not that special, sorry."

In a Labor Economics class, I had a great TA named Peter. He taught me a deep truth about labor markets: namely, that TAs sometimes teach better than professors.

If people looked like bad drawings, he’d look like this:

He also taught me one of the most enduring lessons I’ve learned about economics, modeling, and the limits of theory to explain the social world.

But the lesson wasn’t about those things. Not explicitly. It was about the minimum wage.

A model is a simplified representation of reality. A helium atom is reality, but this little picture is a model, because it captures some key features while leaving out others.

The classical model of the minimum wage goes something like this. Start with a world that has no minimum wage. The market should stand at a nice equilibrium. If you’re working a job, then the wage you earn must be worth more to you than the time you spend. Otherwise, you’d quit.

Meanwhile, if you’re an employer, then the workers you hire must contribute more to your business than they cost in wages. Otherwise, you’d fire them.

For example, say Bob is working at McDonald’s for $4 per hour. It’s worth it to him—in fact, he’d work for just $3 per hour. And it’s worth it to McDonald’s, too—Bob contributes $6 per hour to their bottom line. So both Bob and McDonald’s benefit from the exchange.

But now the government institutes a minimum wage of $7. What happens?

Well, unfortunately, Bob is toast. He’s only worth $6/hour to McDonald’s, but they’re required to pay him $7 per hour, which is a bad tradeoff for them. So they fire Bob instead.

Bob is willing to sell his labor for $4 per hour. And McDonald’s is willing to buy it. But the government won’t let them. That minimum wage law dooms Bob—and anyone else unable to provide $7/hour of value to a business—to unemployment.

So goes the classical model. It predicts that raising the minimum wage will drive low-productivity workers into unemployment.

But Peter showed me another possibility.

You’ve heard of a monopoly, which occurs when there’s only one company selling a certain product. Similarly, a monopsony occurs when there’s only one company buying a certain product—in this case, people’s labor.

So, let’s suppose that McDonald’s is the only employer around, and each new employee provides them with $10/hour of value.

Anita is willing to work for just $5/hour, so McDonald’s happily hires her.

Biff is willing to work for $6/hour. McDonald’s would like to hire him, but if they do, they’ll have to raise Anita’s wage too. (They can’t pay a new hire more than an experienced veteran!) So hiring Biff really costs them $6/hour, plus the $1/hour raise for Anita. That’s a total of $7/hour, which is still worth it, so they hire Biff.

Carmen is willing to work for $7/hour. By the same logic as before, hiring her will cost McDonald’s $9/hour. Still worth it, so they do it.

Diego is willing to work for $8/hour. But hiring him costs McDonald’s $8/hour + $3/hour = $11/hour. That’s not worth it to them. So Diego stays home.

Again, Diego is willing to work for $8. And McDonald’s is willing to hire him for $8. But it doesn’t happen—not because of government interference, but because of the structure of the labor market itself.

Now, introduce a minimum wage of $9. As before, McDonald’s hires Anita, Biff, and Carmen. But now, hiring Diego only costs them $9, because they don’t need to raise their other employees’ salaries simultaneously. That’s a good tradeoff. So they do it.

In this model, a minimum wage doesn’t drive up unemployment. It actually drives it down.

As Peter finished, I began mentally picking apart this model. My classmates did the same aloud: “Is that monopsony a reasonable assumption?” “Are starting wages really tethered together in this way?” “Doesn’t this depend on the government magically setting the minimum wage in the sweet spot between worker productivity and workers’ willingness to sell their labor?”

Peter handled the questions amiably and fairly. He acknowledged the model’s flaws, affirmed its strengths, and elucidated its predictions.

“But what makes this better than the traditional model?” someone finally asked.

Peter blinked. “Nothing, of course,” he said. “Nothing intrinsic to the model.”

“Then why teach it to us?” someone else asked.

“Because when one model predicts A, and another model predicts B, then it’s time to set aside the models and go gather some data. You can have the world’s most elegant model, but if it can’t predict what happens in real life, then it’s just a pretty piece of mathematics.”

To me, it’s a lesson that reaches beyond introductory economics. It’s about dogma. It’s about resisting the rigid principles of any ideology that prompts us to dismiss the counsel of lived experience.

Not to get too political, but let’s take the Tea Party. My problem isn’t necessarily that I disagree with their small-government principles. It’s that they fling those principles outward like a javelin, into a reality they haven’t full investigated. Let’s deregulate the economy! Let’s revive nullification as a doctrine! Let’s default on the national debt! And let’s do this all with utter conviction, never mind that no one can possibly know for certain what will come from any of these untested policies!

The Tea Party is all model and no data.

In the real world—the one out there, with air and trees and seven billion real people—any cleanly-stated principle is bound to be, at best, a crude first-order approximation of wisdom. The world’s too subtle for easy answers. Principles, like all models, are simple; the world, full of data, is not. So we’d best roll up our sleeves and learn what we can.

Oh, by the way: the research suggests that raising the minimum wage has a borderline-significant (read: rather small) negative effect on employment, though some argue (and this is a more fun punchline) that it may have virtually no effect at all.

-teesa-:

9.2.14

autogynephile:

autogynephile:

autogynephile:

autogynephile:

autogynephile:

trans is just an anagram of rants never forget that

trans woman is just an anagram of snowman art, never forget that

transgender man is just an anagram of stern danger man, never forget that

autogynephile is just an anagram of elegant hip you, never forget that

holy shit this is really fucking fun

yall my gender identity is now “stern danger man” thanks

by Alex Pareene

It’s not a perfect measure of partisan leaning, but according to the 2012 election results, New York is more Democratic than California and Minnesota, two states where Democrats control the entirety of the state governments, and where things have not yet completely collapsed in a morass of welfare handouts and tax hikes. So it’s a bit strange that the Republican Party controls the New York state Senate, the body where, traditionally, liberal legislative priorities have gone to die. It’s stranger when you learn that New York voters did actually give Democrats the majority in the Senate in 2012, at which point a coalition of state Senate Democrats known as the Independent Democratic coalition broke off from the party and formally allied with the GOP. Thus, the longtime state Senate Republican majority – the majority that had successfully thwarted nearly every liberal policy push made by the previous two Democratic governors – was preserved.

Andrew Cuomo likes to paint himself as the governor who saved New York from the political dysfunction that typified state politics during the reigns of his predecessors, David Paterson and Eliot Spitzer. Cuomo is the man who forced the sclerotic state legislature to finally act on marriage equality, criminal justice reform, and gun control. You would think that such a governor would prefer to work with Democratic majorities in both state legislative bodies, because, you know, those are all Democratic party priorities that Republicans (mostly) oppose.

You would be wrong. Blake Zeff (full disclosure: he’s my former editor) has a story at Capital New York that confirms what most observers of New York politics already suspected: Cuomo was instrumental in forging the alliance between the IDC and the GOP, because he never actually wanted his own party to wield real power in Albany:

When the coalition was created, Cuomo spoke with IDC leader Jeff Klein to offer advice on how to publicly sell the arrangement and move it forward. According to multiple sources, the governor advised the leaders of the new alliance to emphasize “progress on key issues,” such as campaign finance reform, stop and frisk and increasing the minimum wage. (The conference would use just that language in its announcement, and later release a minimum wage report that February and campaign finance plan in April.)

To move the arrangement forward, the governor and Schwartz would talk directly to Republican leaders and Klein. To help make the coalition work, the governor regularly spoke (by phone and in person) with GOP deputy majority leader Tom Libous, who was effectively Cuomo’s go-to person in the Republican Senate conference. GOP majority leader Dean Skelos was also involved in the discussion, and the governor would talk often in particular with top Skelos aide Robert Mujica. Meanwhile, another top administration official, Joe Percoco, was dispatched to deal with the Senate Democratic conference to try to assuage their concerns even as the governor helped their rivals.

Why would Cuomo do this?

In part because Cuomo’s method of “getting things done” is actually a very old fashioned one, with a rich history of use in New York in particular: It involves shady back-room dealing, obsessive secrecy, strong-arming of opponents, and frequent outright dishonesty. (Spitzer did try similar tactics, but his fatal flaw was that he fought state Republicans instead of governing with – and like – them.) The IDC, then, has been extremely useful for Cuomo. The alliance allows him to push through legislation that liberals would balk at if they held power in the Senate, and the coalition also makes a convenient scapegoat for the times when Cuomo is unable – or, more likely, unwilling – to advance a particular liberal cause.

Cuomo, understand, is a ’90s vintage pro-corporate “New Democrat” – he’s still that Clinton-era DLC type who blames his party’s failings on traditional liberalism – and he is attempting to maintain power in a state where the Democratic Party is, mostly, to the left of the national party, especially on economic issues. But Cuomo believes the key to his own political future rests on appealing to right-leaning whites, because he assumes he won’t have to do anything in particular to win the votes of liberal, black, and Latino New Yorkers. And he seems to just genuinely dislike liberals, period. (See: his not-at-all subtle undermining of New York City mayor and economic populist Bill de Blasio.)

Cuomo is running for reelection this year, and he sort of belatedly realized that he may have a bit of a problem with the state’s liberals. So rather than risk an unpredictable three-way race, he negotiated himself the support of the left-wing Working Families Party. (He then promptly announced plans to undermine them by founding an unasked-for new political party, for women.) As part of his agreement with the WFP, Cuomo agreed to finally denounce the GOP-IDC alliance. He did not do so with much enthusiasm. This is the very alliance that thwarted Cuomo’s much-touted women’s equality and campaign finance bills, and the governor was still unwilling to publicly go on the record and say that he thought his own political party should control the state Senate:

Cuomo finally condemned the alliance, under pressure, after he was given a choice this spring by the Working Families Party between publicly calling for the IDC to caucus with Senate Democrats and losing WFP’s endorsement and ballot line to Fordham Law professor Zephyr Teachout, who he now faces in the primary. At first the governor resisted the demand, with two sources saying he initially refused to include it in a video he recorded for WFP delegates at the party convention in late May. But ultimately he blinked and made the deal, saying in the video, “the Senate has been a problem” and “we must change the leadership of the Senate.”

Cuomo can’t seem to wrap his mind around the crazy idea that maybe the easiest way to get things you support passed is to help elect people who also want those things to pass, instead of people who don’t support those things but are open to being bribed or threatened into changing their minds.

After the convention, Zephyr Teachout, Cuomo’s challenger for the WFP nomination, launched a Democratic Party primary campaign. The election is Tuesday, September 9. There’s a decent chance Cuomo will be forced to ditch the very conservative running mate he selected, which would be funny.

The towers attack the baseband radio in your phone and use it to hack the OS; they're only visible if you're using one of the customized, paranoid-Android, post-Snowden secure phones, and they're all around US military bases. Read the rest

There are those who think that perhaps Zoe Quinn and Anita Sarkeesian are lying about the campaigns of terror, hacking, and bullying that they are currently encountering (and thanks to Tadhg Kelly for inventing the term Gamergate Truthers to describe them – it’s easier to say in polite company than fuckwads).  I daresay that anybody who has ever set foot in the Customer Service department of a major MMO for more than five minutes has pretty much no doubts whatsoever.  Because those guys see it all.  Every day.

It used to be worse.  Much worse.  My first MUD, CarnageMUD, had to ban several players for attempting to hack, bully or keylog other players.  Meridian 59 was worse, but it wasn’t until Ultima Online that we really saw how dark things could be.

Early days UO was chaotic for a lot of reasons.  The game was much more successful than they anticipated, and they had to scale up very quickly.  It was also very, very buggy, which created all manners of headaches for players and developers, and some incredibly novel ways to exploit and abuse your fellow players.  It also was, bluntly, a social cesspool.

MMOs always vary wildly in tone from game to game and server to server, but early UO was a place where it seemed that everywhere I went, you’d encounter the most awful crude sexist, racist, homophobic, juvenile crap that you can imagine, both on the boards and in the game.  And early UO was birthed on what was somewhat of a libertarian vibe — Origin let way too much of that crap slide, with the idea that you could always just kill the jerks.  The problem was that no one was as good at PVP as the jerks were, and even more problematic, the jerks didn’t really feel all that traumatized when they died.  It was the cost of doing business, where business was being a jerk.

At the time, there was serious concerns in the budding MMO industry.  UO was not a very nice place.  There were not a lot of women players – hell, there were not a lot of players who had thin skin.  But our visions in those days wasn’t just for a couple hundred thousand players – we wanted the genre to see millions, or even tens of millions of players.  But you were never going to get there if you were being called a ‘faggot’ every ten seconds.  I remember in those days actually feeling despondent.  Maybe the vision of an MMO just couldn’t scale above a certain size.  Maybe the dream was dead.

You should not need thick skin to play a video game.

With all due respect to Raph, in my mind there is no person who has been more important to the development of MMOs as a viable consumer product, historically, than Gordon Walton.  He came to Origin from Kesmai, one of the few companies that dabbled with large-scale multiplayer gaming before Ultima Online and Meridian 59.  And he had the scars to prove it.  His contribution was simple: he was able to convince every level of the organization that change was necessary – and possible.  He did so with the single most succinct definition of a griefer I’ve ever heard: A griefer is someone who, through his social actions, costs you more money than he gives you.

Well, when you say it like that, we all felt pretty stupid for letting these jackasses hang around for so long.

Ultimately, his message was that the culture of the game had to change.  Community services were beefed up.  The team developed tools that allowed players to report abusive behavior and allowed CS to review the chat logs of trouble incidents (fun fact: in a not-insignificant number of cases, CS would ban the person who filed the complaint, as it was clear the player was attempting to goad his target).  Origin also built what may have been the industry’s first community relations department, in order to rescue the tone on the boards.  And the team did the Felucca/Trammel split, creating a safer adventuring space in order to attract a less cutthroat brand of audience.  And then they began working on a Zero Tolerance policy for general assholish behavior.

Which was tough, because in those early days, the CS tools were still roughly akin to rocks and twigs.

But it worked.  UO was, most assuredly, saved by changing its culture more than any other change it ever made.

EverQuest managed to learn from UO’s mistakes and corrections, and had a zero tolerance policy from the start.  They had some rough patches — early MMO developers were continually astounded at the ingenuity of griefers determined to ruin each other’s good times.  By the time WoW came around, the formula was pretty pat.  Sure some MMOs have struggled with fuckwads, but these struggles have tended to be brief, because now MMO developers know that it’s just not worth keeping their $10 bucks a month.

The modern MMO has a full-time staff, usually of dozens of people, hopefully working 24 hours in order to identify problem behavior — including not just harassment like this, but also issues like gold spamming, botting, cheating, etc — and escort those people out the door as quickly as humanly possible.  It’s kind of like being a bouncer at a strip club.  You may get your hands on a dancer’s ass, but you’ll likely be out in the parking lot within 2 minutes.

We spend MILLIONS of dollars doing this.  Millions that as a designer, I’d sure like to spend on more game content or features.  But it is the cost of doing business.  And its working – there is probably no online, synchronous, co-ed gaming place that feels as protected and as safe for women and other minorities.  Everquest 2 reportedly has a 60%/40% gender split.  Same for WoW.  Compare that to the 85/15 split playing GTA IV.  Or the 90/10% split playing League of Legends.  Or the 92%/8% that call themselves Call of Duty fans on Facebook.

The walled garden MMO is a uniquely safe place for female gamers to play with male gamers.  Which is something to be concerned about, given publishers seem to be losing appetites for making MMOs in the wake of no one being able to replicate World of Warcraft’s lightning in a bottle.

Make no mistake – MMOs have strong advantages in controlling their cultures.  We house the servers and pay for the bandwidth.  We frequently have subscription plans to help pay the costs of a CS crew.  Most communications in these games between strangers is done in text chat, which is cheap to store and easy to search.  And the generally long lifespans of the character arc in these games means that getting kicked out of the game will lose a ton of character progress and rare items – sure, that level grind sucks, but perversely, it also creates an investment of time in that character that most people are loathe to lose.   MMOs changed the culture from the top down.  And that was easier.  Doing this for the larger gaming culture will be inestimably harder.

But the most important step was realizing that the culture had to change.

alessariel:

fozmeadows:

alessariel:

fozmeadows:

Supernatural: Come To The Dark Side, It’s Pretty Dark Actually But We Need The Emotional Support

PS: Gabriel Ate All Of The Cookies. Sorry.

(Gabriel Is Not Actually Sorry. He Would Totally Do It Again. They Were Delicious.)

PSPS: Don’t Mind the Creepy Laughter From The Dark Corner, That’s Just Crowley. All The Really Scary People Are From Heaven.

Supernatural: Where Demons Are Cuddlier Than Angels, But Only Because Heaven Is A Great Big Bag Of Dicks

Owen Williams, reporting for The Next Web:

An alleged breach in Apple’s iCloud service may be to blame for countless leaks of private celebrity photos this week.

On Monday, a Python script emerged on GitHub (which we’re not linking to as there is evidence a fix by Apple is not fully rolled out) that appears to have allowed malicious users to ‘brute force’ a target account’s password on Apple’s iCloud, thanks to a vulnerability in the Find My iPhone service. Brute-force attacks consist of using a malicious script to repeatedly guess passwords in an attempt to discover the correct one.

cornerof5thandvermouth:

detransitioning would have literally killed me and i dont even care how fucked up this sounds, i will straight up beat the shit out of myc if she ever shows up irl for trying to goad me into it

hey, we are buds i hope, and i have some idea of what youve been through. i get your anger. but id recommend, if you can, not making public threats of violence against a woman as a man type of person. (idk how you identify currently.) i understand privately feeling that anger, but ime, i often underestimate just how scary it is for other women (not even the one i am mad at) to overhear me say something like that, yknow?

i hope you wont hate me for saying that, but i feel it is part of my duty as a man to hold myself and other men to a higher standard in expressing our feelings towards women :/ in other words, suggesting violence takes it from the personal to the ideological (without any intention on your part) and i dont know that you want to do that :c

“

"I work for Reuters. I’m a journalist in the media business.

Back in 2008, I sat in a conference and reviewed some proposals to integrate news sources focused on electronic gaming into our RSS service as niche content providers.

We considered IGN, Gamespot, and a few other syndicated online info feeds.

Now, in order to white label a source as affiliated with Reuters, you need to run through a checklist of ~100 items that are necessary for journalistic integrity. The source and its organization has to score at least a 60 out of 100 for it to be considered fair and unbiased.

These tests are carried out by senior journalists, editors, and investigators.

NONE of the gaming publications scored higher than a 15. For reference, the National Enquirer scored a 38 and the MSNBC blogosphere scored 44.

Some failures included:
- Economic ties with publishers
- Acceptance of favors
- 0% of staff held journalism degree
- Very small percentage worked in other major publications
- No real editing process
- No accountability

tl;dr: Gaming “journalism” is a joke and the laughingstock of reporting media. Continue to read these publications if you want, but assume that everything you read is biased or an outright lie.”

”

- Gaming news is officially worse than supermarket tabloids folks. Let that sink in for a while. These people are are several steps below “IS BRAD PITT CHEATING ON ANGELINA???” (via bonglorio)

asylum-art:

Sculptures by Antony Gormley

British sculptor  , 60, becomes primarily organic forms of her body in geometric shapes. Gormley and his team has developed software that can translate into geometric shapes in the body.
His most famous work is the ” Angel of the North “, a giant sculpture is 20 meters high and instead of arms, it has huge wings of an airplane and measure 54 wide.
These are very interesting sculptures made of different shapes always getting the same purpose, shape your body. It also has drawings very interesting.

i don’t call the cops.

there’s nothing they can do for me that i can’t do for myself.

waroncops.tumblr.com

one thought ive had about the whole myc thing is how because gender transition is theoretically available to anybody, that people may reach for it as a political or emotional solution prematurely

not that i aim to police anyone’s transition, but consider. i am white: it is not possible (nor advisable?) for me to transition to non-white, even though it would represent by some measures an act of solidarity. certainly it could mean renouncing white privilege

even if i could change many things about me to pass as non-white, i could not have the history of anything but whiteness as my guide. it would be the giving up of that history, that guide, that would probably represent the real transition.

my real aim isn’t the above speculation though, my real aim is just to say, i think the process of working through identity privilege is independent (if not entirely separable) from transition to another identity.

i do not think i need to be black to understand racism is wrong, but i need to listen to black people (this includes to me empirical study of material conditions, a listening to “aggregates”) to understand how its wrongness plays out

i need to believe them when they say racism is real, and i need to support real solutions to fighting it (say, affirmative action, in a liberal framework)

likewise, one can be black and work for white supremacy. understanding the independence of a liberationary self-reflection from an oppressed embodiment is critical to seeing how that is possible, imo

by Dish Staff

Christian Parenti advises liberals to look to Alexander Hamilton for inspiration, not Thomas Jefferson. He especially praises Hamilton for his far-reaching economic insights:

Hamilton was alone among the “founding fathers” in understanding that the world was witnessing two revolutions simultaneously. One was the political transformation, embodied in the rise of republican government. The other was the economic rise of modern capitalism, with its globalizing networks of production, trade, and finance. Hamilton grasped the epochal importance of applied science and machinery as forces of production.

In the face of these changes, Hamilton created (and largely executed) a plan for government-led economic development along lines that would be followed in more recent times by many countries (particularly in East Asia) that have undergone rapid industrialization. His political mission was to create a state that could facilitate, encourage, and guide the process of economic change — a policy also known as dirigisme, although the expression never entered the American political lexicon the way its antonym, laissez-faire, did.

Parenti goes on to suggest how an appreciation of Hamilton might connect with a pressing contemporary issues – climate change:

Even today, Hamilton’s ideas about state-led industrialization offer much. Consider the crisis of climate change. Alas, we do not have the luxury of making this an agenda item for our future post-capitalist assembly. Facing up to it demands getting off fossil fuels in a very short time frame. That requires a massive and immediate industrial transformation, which must be undertaken using the actually existing states and economies currently on hand. Such a project can only be led by the state — an institution that Hamilton’s writing and life’s work helps us to rethink.

Unfortunately, many environmental activists today instinctively avoid the state. They see government as part of the problem — as it undoubtedly is — but never as part of the solution. They do not seek to confront, reshape, and use state power; the idea of calling for regulation and public ownership, makes them uncomfortable.

(Portrait of Hamilton by John Trumbull, 1806, via Wikimedia Commons)

definitely having very gendered feelings about my night fears too

especially when chris was next to me, and i was thinking, i am not a good man, i do not feel confident about defending us from an intruder. i am just scared and want to be held and protected

who put that inside me?

i imagine for men with ptsd manhood itself becomes a comorbidity

it is easy to talk about dumping people that have been abusive in lava as the only solution until you realize

1. some, perhaps many, abused people will be abusive (because their shredded boundaries got normalized) and
2. that there wont be many people left!

i do wonder sometimes what the average age of folks that think death or exile are the solutions to people that hurt other people. i also wonder about the criminalization of life (the prison industrial complex required it) making people forget common features of human life have often been

1. healing from being hurt and
2. finding a way to change yourself and help the healing happen for the harm you caused

obviously some things go beyond what seems fixable. theres a single person on my “should be dead” list, but, they are my little brother’s father. they are not a good father (as evidenced by my needing to basically step up to that), but my brother does love them.

so my mind has often been turned to harm reduction, and supervision, and the community taking up that task. because impossible as it is to sympathize with at times, truly antisocial behavior victimizes its perpetrator too.

i say that, and still wish he was dead. so i dont expect myself to be his keeper. but i do think about my own dad, and his transformation from being homophobic and abusive, to truly penitent and someone i wanted in my life.

but that i had the strength to let him, that anyone does, is the community taking care of the abused, and where they can keeping the abusers.

[I just made this giant tech post on the eleVR blog about audio for VR film, which got me in the mood for a post with actual audio included in it. Sorry for neglecting you, regular blog!]

This is a story about two piano pieces.

Memory is weird. Things change fast and I change fast and sometimes I come across some evidence that I was a person in the past, evidence stronger than words or pictures because it’s in the language I know best.

I might come across a bit of music that I composed, or that past-me composed, and say, like an outsider to myself: “huh, I guess I’m a person. I bet I have feelings and stuff, inside me.”

Here’s a recording I made, trying to remember a piece I’d written and immediately forgotten about three years earlier.

The above recording was created in a literal act of self-preservation. I was out at dinner and found that the above piano piece was in my head. It played inconspicuously for a bit, and then I noticed it was there, and at first I didn’t recognize it as something I myself had written.

Written years ago, in another life, before I had any hope of success and was planning to starve to death as a composer, trying and failing for years to get into a graduate school and unable to come up with any livable plan for myself. I wrote it in under an hour, a throwaway doodle I hadn’t thought of it since.

I didn’t know if I’d ever made a recording of it. I’ve made hundreds of quick recordings of quick compositions, but even more go unrecorded, and sometimes I get something stuck in my head that I know I’ve never saved anywhere, and I wonder if that is the last time it will ever enter a human brain, and I will forget it and it will be dead.

Yet this one came back, for no apparent reason, during dinner at a place I’d been before, eating my usual. The shape of things was somehow right, and having been there before was part of that shape. And the topic of dinner discussion was not unusual, but also fit into the other shapes in just the right way that when you put them together they had the same shape as the song, somehow. The same outline. Just filled with different stuff.

I tried to grab what little bit of my past self I could.

And then, after recording the above, I found that I did have a recording of the piece from years earlier.

Later I’d feel stupid and inadequate at my awful recreation of a much better original, but the first thing I felt was wonder and joy. I was listening, as if for the first time, to something that had literally been made just for me by someone who knows just what I like, someone who exactly speaks my language. Someone good, really good. I was glimpsing into the mind of someone who is like me, but better.

When the inversion came in, something I’d completely forgotten in my inferior recreation, I laughed out loud. How clever of past-me. And what self-control, what perfect editing, to plow right through the inversion the first time though and go back to that awesome inverted cadence, just a taste before later coming back to it and spending the amount of time I expected the first time, as if I were inverting not just the melody but the form. And I wish I myself could play piano so artfully!

I, current me, know the piece, can reconstruct past-me’s thought process and feel as if I’m the composer, in the same way I can play Brahms and feel I know the piece, understand the necessary place of every note, feel I am Brahms for a moment. I feel equally a stranger, and equally close, to my own mind and many others. I don’t listen to Beethoven, I become him. I’ve been possessed by Schoenberg, I’ve been the brief reincarnation of Bach. Sometimes I even feel I am myself.

I’ve sacrificed something, by not starving to death as a crazy artist. I absolutely do not miss being the person who wrote and recorded that “doodle”, yet, listening to my past self, I can’t help but feel I’ve lost something. I don’t know if I really have.

Here’s where the plot thickens.

All the above happened about a year ago, and I’d thought it would be interesting to write up a blog post but got distracted by whatever. Too many things. So, seeing as it’s been so long, I thought it would be interesting to try recording the piece again, with only a year’s gap this time, and see how it came out.

My first attempt came out like this:

Now, savvy listener, you’ve probably noticed a certain discrepancy earlier than I did. After recording that much of it, I got stuck, and it took me a bit to figure it out.

I knew it was supposed to go into the inversion that I’d forgotten last time. I remembered it being good and clever. Yet I could not figure out what came next! The melody is so simple, and the inversion just didn’t make sense. I didn’t recognize it. I thought I must have been really extra clever, if I’d actually come up with something good. Maybe in the left hand? Still doesn’t seem familiar!

I poked the keys with a frown, until eventually I realized I was playing the wrong piece.

It’s interesting that somehow the melodic information and form information are stored separately enough in my brain that I could accidentally mix and match.

But this incorrect piece was not chosen arbitrarily. I’d written both pieces the same day, perhaps in the same hour, and the two are supposed to be together. They capture the same feeling, though they say different things about it.

Two pieces, written and forgotten together, and also originally recorded together:

Sometimes I feel a pull towards seriously doing music again. I am a much better composer than mathemusician.

Economics wins though: there’s millions of musicians working hard all day every day for years, while almost no one puts that kind of work into making youtube videos about math. The game I’m playing now isn’t easy, but there’s not much competition.

And music is terrifying. You can hear in the above piece how fragile it is, could accidentally tear apart with the slightest touch, a thorn through a dragonfly’s wing. It is my past self telling me to stay away. She’s lovely, but I wouldn’t want to be her.

No real music allowed! Stick with bagels and snails and laser bats and tiny throwaway doodles.

Memory is terrifying too. The only thing that has any real power over me is my own brain.

Music eats you up. It’s easy to get stuck in a piece. I made another attempt and my mind wandered and I got stuck

Research shows that contrary to our perception, the more we recall a memory the more inaccurate it becomes. It changes, warps. We feel as if the more we rehearse it the clearer it becomes, and while it may seem clearer, it’s further from the original. The most accurate memories are the ones that pop up out of nowhere after years without thinking of them.

There’s parts of music that are like that. How a performance of a piece went. How its supposed to be played. How it felt to play it, the energy in the room, the quality of the instrument. The non-compositional details are the ones that fade and change like normal memory. But the thing itself, unlike memory, truly exists. A piece of music is a real thing. It is the part that does not change or fade no matter how often you assert its existence.

There’s other similar pieces I wrote just a week before the originals of the ones above, and I kept up with them, remembered them through the years, playing them now and then. Those I recall perfectly and accurately. Unlike memories, the music that suddenly pops up after years is the one that has lost something.

The two original piano doodles above were written the day before I started working on “Doodling in Math Class: Snakes and Graphs,” which was released just a few days later, and was the first of my videos to go viral. It’s no wonder I dropped those pieces entirely from my consciousness for three years. The gulf between who I was that day and who I was the next cannot be reconciled.

If I wrote this piece now, maybe instead of getting distracted and stuck, lengthening, same-ifying, I would immediately become bored of perfect crystal forms and crush it swiftly:

I have so many tools now.

You might have noticed the key keeps changing. The memory I had of the original piece was purely musical, no mechanical muscle memory, no visual where-my-hands-go memory, and I don’t have perfect pitch. And so the original, in g minor, was recreated in a minor a year ago, but for the above version it wanted to feel bumpier to the fingers, and without remembering what the previous keys were, b minor felt right.

B major, on the other hand, would have been the correct original key for the other piece, which I recreated in D major while intending to recreate the other piece that had been in g and a.

Now I am tired of writing this post. Thus ends the story of two insignificant pieces.

[All music in this post is free to download and distribute under a creative commons noncommercial share-alike license.]

If you're seeing this happen, no, you're not going crazy; I've seen it too, on both Chrome and Safari. (I haven't tested if it happens with other operating systems or browsers, although I may later.)

The threshold for this effect is font-weight: 500. At that weight, font-family: "Futura" will indeed produce Futura; at font-weight: 501 and above, font-family: "Futura" will actually produce Futura Condensed Extra Bold.

By the way, at any weight, font-family: "Futura Condensed Extra Bold" will produce Times New Roman. I'm not sure why; the charitable explanation is ignorance.

Flip a coin. Heads or tails. 50-50. Half the time it will come up heads. Half the time it will come up tails.

That’s 50 percent odds, roughly the same as Shaquille O’Neal’s free-throw percentage (52.7 percent).

Pick up a coin and start flipping it over and over again, making note of the results, and you may find the occasional “hot” streak of multiple heads or tails in a row, but it would be silly to attribute this to some pattern. That’s just probability and statistics.

Similarly, over the course of Shaq’s 11,252 career free-throw attempts, there may have been occasional “hot” and “cold” streaks of multiple hits or misses in a row. But again, this is just probability and statistics.

That’s what we keep hearing in the name of “math” and “science.” And it’s nonsense.

Because, scientific fact:  Shaquille O’Neal is not a coin. Or a six-sided die.

A coin is an inanimate object. A coin is not being called on to perform a task. It lacks agency and activity. It is not attempting to do anything. Flip a coin and it is not trying to come up heads, or failing when it comes up tails. It does not remember its previous attempts and it cannot learn from them. It cannot attempt to replicate its previous successes or to correct for its previous failures. It cannot get nervous about future attempts. It cannot forget to bend its knees. It cannot overthink or underthink. It cannot wake up with a sore back or be tired from a cross-country flight the night before.

Apart from the outcome of the flip — heads or tails — every other variable of the coin toss is invariable.

None of that was true for Shaq at the stripe. He was trying to make those shots. He wanted and intended and attempted to succeed. He practiced. He studied. He tried new approaches.

Every such attempt involved a host of variables — things he could do properly or improperly, successfully or unsuccessfully. Fingers, wrists, elbows, shoulders, back, waist, knees, ankles, toes, eyes, brain. Do something wrong with any of those and the attempt will fail, not because of statistics or probability, but because the attempt was performed incorrectly. Do all of those things right and the attempt will succeed — not because of statistics or probability, but because the attempt was performed correctly.

In his second-to-last season with the Lakers, Shaq succeeded in 451 of his 725  free-throw attempts — a free-throw percentage of .622. The following season, his last in LA, he had 676 chances to make a free throw and succeeded on 331 of them, for a free-throw percentage of .490.

In other words, Shaq was better at shooting free-throws in the 2002-03 season than he was during the ’03-04 season. He performed that task better. He played better. He had a better year.

The alternative, “statistical” theory says that he didn’t. There’s no such thing, it asserts, as good performance or bad performance. Those are just statistical flukes, minor variations in the overall career trend that dictates as a law of the universe that Shaquille O’Neal will make 52.7 percent of his free throws and miss 47.3 percent of them.

That claim of “statistical” predestination is confused.* We know the odds of a coin-toss or of the roll of a die before we ever pick them up. Those things are set, predetermined. But it was not preordained by the universe that Shaquille O’Neal would be a .527 free-throw shooter for his career. It’s weirdly mystical to speak of statistics that measure the outcome of an athlete’s performance over time as though they were that athlete’s “scientific” destiny.

Click here to view the embedded video.

And it’s ironic that such mysticism comes from those desperate to dismiss talk of being “in the zone” because they see that as uncomfortably mystical-sounding.

Relax. There’s nothing mystical about it.

When athletes or musicians or gamers speak of being “in the zone,” all they’re doing is describing their sensations during periods of peak performance. Those sensations and those descriptions are readily accepted in other arenas. People who have been in automobile accidents frequently describe their experience of heightened awareness, as though the world suddenly went into slow motion. Science notes the frequency of such stories as a cumulative suggestion that something is going on here that’s worth exploring. Why do accident survivors experience this sensation? What causes or accounts for this perception on the part of so many people? What is the source of this widely reported sensation?

In that case, science is willing to treat this thing as a thing to be studied. So why is it when the majority of athletes — even us not very good amateurs — describe nearly the same thing, “science” rushes to debunk and dismiss, murmuring about statistical destinies like fortune-tellers murmuring about astrological fate?

The truth is that athletic performance involves athletes performing. Unlike coins or dice, those athletes are trying to succeed. Sometimes they do. Sometimes they fail instead.

I’ve talked about free-throw shooting here because it simplifies things by eliminating defensive variables, course conditions and random luck. The task being attempted is the same every time. Success or failure depends solely on what the shooter does. It is not statistically predetermined. The universe did not decree at the beginning of time that Shaquille O’Neal would come up tails 5,317 times from the free-throw line. It wasn’t mathematical fate — Shaq just missed those shots. He did something wrong — or did several somethings wrong — on those 5,317 free-throw attempts. He missed.

And the 5,935 free throws that Shaquille O’Neal successfully made cannot be attributed to statistical destiny either. He made those shots. He stepped up to the line and did everything right.

Free-throws aren’t easy and they seem to have been especially difficult for Shaq. But there were some nights — some games, some stretches of games — where they seemed easy for him. Everything seemed to click, time seemed to slow down, the basket looked huge and he felt calm and confident. Ah, he thought, I’m going to make this. That wasn’t his retrospective description of those moments of peak performance — it was his experience of those moments in and during and just prior to those moments.

What was going on there? What allowed him to succeed, to perform so well, on those occasions?

If your answer is: “Nothing, it’s just a statistical illusion,” then what you’re really saying is that there’s no such thing as athletic performance — no such thing as bending or not-bending your knees. That seems very wrong.

- – - – - – - – - – - -

* The confusion here comes from a misunderstanding of the way sports statistics are stated. Those stats are often described as mathematical facts: George Brett is a .300 hitter. The mistake comes from interpreting that as an ontological state of nature — George Brett is a .300 hitter, so therefore over time George Brett will hit .300.

But that isn’t what the statistic means. It is an after-the-fact measure of performance, a tally that records what the actual person George Brett accomplished by swinging a bat over 21 years in a Kansas City Royals uniform. George Brett was a human agent attempting to perform a task. In 10,349 such attempts, he succeeded 3,154 times.** Therefore George Brett hit .305. He achieved that statistic, statistics didn’t ordain that for him.

** 3,155 times if we count the pine-tar homer, which I think we should even if officially we can’t.

Derrick Todd Lee didn't look much like the police artist's photo-composite. [via]