Friday Ephemera
Female wrestler uses thighs and buttocks to impressive effect. || Mishap of note. || Today’s word is placebo. || Our betters gather. || Vacuum, baby. || One-armed violinist. || Mushroom 11 is a game. || Furong Zhen is a place that exists. || This is one of these. || We are tumbling through the heavens. || How many hamsters would you need to power a typical house? || He is, needless to say, a sociology professor. || Cinema cats. || Chocolate kraken. (h/t, Julia) || Autonomous chairs. || Niche humour. (h/t, Ben) || Oh Waitrose, never change. (h/t, Damian) || Life imitates art. || Add feet to your arse. || “When you domesticate a fox, you don’t make a dog.” || And finally, via Tim, a little project for the weekend.
I remember Gamergate, well, I remember the word. Never paid any attention to the kerfuffle itself.
The thing about Gamergate was that, yes, the incident that triggered it was trivial and inconsequential, but – prefiguring so much since – the journalists went on the attack against their accusers and made it into something much bigger, successfully turning attention away from their original misdeeds while painting themselves as the victims. And we see this happening almost every week now: some minor incident in which a member of a designated minority is accused of petty wrongdoing suddenly erupts into a worldwide scandal about something-ism. Anything-ism, as long as it deflects attention from the source of the controversy and makes the accuser into the bad guy. The recent ludicrous stramash in the tennis world is just the latest example.
The lesson from Gamergate – fight back and expose the Left’s ridiculous counter-accusations for the misdirection that they are – hasn’t been learned. This tactic is working for them.
@ Sherman
Something to add to Springfield’s tourist brochure…
Old, but it is on their website.
If you get over to Springfield, stop over to the hotel for brunch, the bacon stuffed pancakes are worth the price of admission.
On battle dress uniform and starch: if, SA service, you are routinely wrong battle dress in an environment where starch is appropriate, you’re doing it wrong. Battle dress is designed for the field; the pockets are there not for decoration but to endure your aides memoir, code books, punkillers, whatever are really to hand. If you are spending more than half your day in an office or workshop, wear barrack dress. Starting battle dress properly is wearing it functionally.
Yours aye,
A quondam RAF engineer
s/SA/as a/
s/wrong/wearing/
S/really/readily/
Composting messages on a phone after n bets at the rugby club tries more stringent proofreading.
Anyway, here’s Bohemian Rhapsody on many trombones: https://theawesomer.com/bohemian-rhapsody-on-28-trombones/493190/
The lesson from Gamergate – fight back and expose the Left’s ridiculous counter-accusations…
This. Thisthisthisthis this. The failure over and over and over again in the past 30 years or so of the so-called right, or specifically the leadership of, to fight back. This is why Donald Trump has been so successful in spite of his many failings. People, especially influential people, know if they defend something he has done, right or wrong, he generally won’t abandon the argument. When one side in a conflict will use any means necessary and the other will fall all over itself in apologizing for the things it was actually right about, losing by the second party is inevitable. On the one hand I understand why the high road has this appeal, on the other hand, after decades of watching failure after failure after failure in the debate space (looking at you Bushes and Romneys etc.) I am stunned at the failure to learn.
The lesson from Gamergate – fight back and expose the Left’s ridiculous counter-accusations for the misdirection that they are
As I said, Gamergate was ultimately inconsequential because neither side actually won anything.
It was never about ethics in game journalism because there’s never been ethics in game journalism; back in 2001, that Offical Playstation Magazine was taking fat sacks of cash from SquareSoft to give good reviews to all their games was an open secret.
Let’s play along with the idea that it was about ethics in game journalism: what changed? All the game journalism sites are as bad now as they were during GamerGate.
Was it about SJW virtue-signaling ruining video games? Again, what changed? Mass Effect: Andromeda was riddled with it, three years after GamerGate. The Battlefield series, the Star Wars Battlefront games, so on and so forth.
What might have worked was the GamerGater side banding together and putting economic pressure on game companies by making it clear they weren’t going to buy games that pandered to SJW conceits, and then making it happen. But that was never an option, because video gamers are possibly the most entitled, hate-filled customer base in retail (a number of my college mates went on to work in video games development, and they can tell some great tales of their toxic fanbase).
An alternate way to look at GamerGate – and IMHO, a more accurate one – is that it was a faction split amongst angry, antisocial Twitterati who hate video game developers.
Composting messages.
Are those kept with the punkillers?
If you are spending more than half your day in an office or workshop, wear barrack dress.
I understand for you RAF lot that when the cabbage crates were coming over the briny jumping into your crates to go after the sausage squad up the blue end wearing dress uniforms with decorations and ties was the thing to do, but in the US&A the garrison working uniform was OD fatigues (except Navy other than certain units), then BDUs (woodland and desert) till the early 2000s when each service decided they needed their own camo pattern (and now pattern du jour) and uniform patterns, and fortunately ended the starch and press nonsense, much to the chagrin of the cleaners right outside the main gates of every post.
So to recap, “BDU” in the US refers to a specific pattern of uniform worn as what you would call barrack dress, and, unless one just came from the field, wore it starched and pressed, lest one be known as a shitbird.
I wait for this every year…
I was going to stop about maps, but just to correct a factual error.
Google Maps doesn’t need coverage. You can download the area first and the GPS is independent of cell phones. See “offline” in the menu.
Also there are better maps for specific countries than the Google variant, where you basically download the entire country.
I used such maps to travel Mexico and I hadn’t even bothered to get a local SIM.
On a related note. People at work often ask “can Excel do this?”. My response is that if you’ve thought of it, they have almost always beaten you.
If there’s an obvious thing you want software to do, chances are you haven’t found the solution, not that there isn’t one.
Of course, software designers being geeks, there’s a strong likelihood that the solution will be quite technical. I do not like Microsoft for their making the Trig functions in Radians rather than Degrees, because that’s what geeks prefer.
Now, if your calculations are important you do them by hand. I know that. But most of us are building bridges, so software will get us where we want far quicker.
Most of us are NOT building bridges.
It was never about ethics in game journalism because there’s never been ethics in game journalism;
Regarding Gamergate, there’s a brief, partial history here. If the doctrinaire dishonesty of left-leaning journalists, both specialist and mainstream, isn’t exactly news, it may be worth watching the video for the live, on-air bomb scare, and for Christina Hoff Sommers’ anecdote about enormous boobs.
You can download the area first and the GPS is independent of cell phones.
A compass and map protractor are independent of both cell phones and GPS, and as our Navy has recently and unfortunately shown, over reliance on geewhizardry isn’t always the best thing.
Warning signs, regardless of your self declared gender(s).
Warning signs, regardless of your self-declared gender(s).
It does rather scream damaged goods.
Retake Constantinople.
Farnsworth,
I wait for this every year…
Oh! So I’m not the only one?
Warning signs
On a related note. People at work often ask “can Excel do this?”. My response is that if you’ve thought of it, they have almost always beaten you.
Like Word, most people are only using 10% of what Excel can do. But not everyone is using the same 10%, so Excel needs to contain a wide variety of things you might need to number-crunch.
The real problem is that for nearly any mathematical problem that isn’t financial analysis, Excel is absolutely the wrong tool. It doesn’t have the power or the domain-specific algorithms; it’s like trying to commit suicide with a water pistol. It’s not that you haven’t found the right solution, it’s that you haven’t found the right software.
Now, if your calculations are important you do them by hand. I know that.
It may surprise you to learn that virtually no one does important calculations by hand. Not even bridge builders.