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andrewducker ([personal profile] andrewducker) wrote2011-12-12 11:00 am
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Interesting Links for 12-12-2011

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[identity profile] gonzo21.livejournal.com 2011-12-12 11:25 am (UTC)(link)
Yeah, I'd be in favour of the adblock plus thing too I think.

[identity profile] bart-calendar.livejournal.com 2011-12-12 11:37 am (UTC)(link)
Hmmmm... on Friday I was concerned about our new German overlords.

But, if they are going to fuck with Apple, I have a newfound respect for them.

[identity profile] cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com 2011-12-12 12:03 pm (UTC)(link)
I remember recently thinking that for all the talk of "space-age technology" we used to have, now it might have been most apt to describe the space age as in the past. SpaceX fills me with at least a little optimism that some people are still trying.

I'm interested in the description of it as a successful public-private partnership. That definitely seems to be the case: probably no-one would have gone to space if the United States and Russian governments hadn't gone it first, and created a vast body of experience. But conversely, NASA was getting moribund, and having someone drive the creation of new rockets designed somewhat practically seems (judgement pending) to have been necessary.

But the necessary prerequisites seem to be (a) one man with a vision (b) a lot of people with extensive experience happy to get onboard (c) from somewhere, ridiculous amounts of funding. (Are people investing in SpaceX because they think it's commercially viable, they expected to recoup there profits some way other than success of the company, or because the amount of money isn't actually that much for investors and it's worth gambling, or because they think it's cool and _might_ work and want to support it?) I'm not sure if this is a vindication of our current system of "government funds pie-in-the-sky research, later free enterprise takes over when it starts to be viable" or is a "it worked despite the current mess of a system, what would work better?"
simont: A picture of me in 2016 (Default)

[personal profile] simont 2011-12-12 12:22 pm (UTC)(link)
I was disappointed by "The Evolution of Fictional Characters" turning out to be a cartoon parodying visual changes. I was hoping for a thoughtful essay on the gradual change in characters' personalities and natures over long-running series, along the lines of the case studies of Star Trek races in the essay "Brain Bugs" but widening its focus to look at fiction in general rather than Star Trek (or any other specific work) in particular.

(I think the thing I disagree with most in the brain-bugs essay is the comment that simplification of a once-complex character or race into a one-note parody is a consequence of a game of Chinese whispers between successive writers working in the same canon. To me, the clear counterexample is Rincewind, who suffered exactly the same fate in spite of having the single guiding mind of Pratchett in charge of him throughout – he started off as a complex and interesting main character, whose surface layers were a mix of character flaws such as cowardice, greed and largely unjustified pride in his wizardhood but if pushed too far his underlying core of strength and conscience would be revealed, but in later books he became more and more one-dimensional until he was simply The Character Who Always Runs Away From Everything.)
Edited 2011-12-12 12:23 (UTC)

D&D;: More accurate than you think

[identity profile] cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com 2011-12-12 12:51 pm (UTC)(link)
I think I saw this before somewhere, but I can't remember where, or if the discussion came to any conclusion.

I thought it was a good point that for many purposes DnD 3.5 worked pretty well, and that people are silly to complain about things that look ridiculous but changing them would be impossible without making the game an impossibly detailed simulation, or unfun. But I thought he was waaaay too optimistic to think that it _usually_ worked like that.

I think he's right that for many fantasy epics and myths, the "larger than life, characters" or even "demigod characters" are best mapped as levbel 4/5. Enough to be superhuman by usual standards, but not enough to reshape the world with their mind. That's one big misconception.

And I'm sure that many every day tasks work with the stats given in the rules. And many more do if you take the rules with a pinch of common sense.

But I still think the system as written will end up having at least as many common tasks which _don't_ match the real world, partly because there's a limit to how much effort the designers could do, and partly because the basic assumption of the rules that everything fits into "a feat that lets you do it automatically" or a "take 10" or "a skill based on skill ranks and a stat with a normal distribution" isn't true in the real world, so there will always be cases where an appropriate DC for one character just doesn't work for another, and the DM won't be able to automatically improvise a non-problematic alternative.

Which isn't a knock to DnD: many game systems are better for many things, but for what DnD does, it's very good at it, and people should just enjoy what it does, without expecting it to model "housecat vs average human fight" or "falling" realistically. So it's better than many people think, but not, I think, as good as that article hoped :)

[identity profile] hano.livejournal.com 2011-12-12 01:23 pm (UTC)(link)
for some reason I parsed that first link as 'First Pirate Spaceship Flight To The ISS Now Has A Date.'
Maybe I've been playing Eve too much...

[identity profile] octopoid-horror.livejournal.com 2011-12-12 07:32 pm (UTC)(link)
I would be fine with advertising if it was actually targeted, relevant and interesting.

Facebook have access to more information about me and my tastes other than any single organisation other than my bank and at no point did I see an advert on facebook worth even a second glance to me.

[identity profile] martling.livejournal.com 2011-12-12 08:32 pm (UTC)(link)
Motorola secures Europe-wide sales ban on iPhone, iPad - oh for goodness sake.

"Oh for goodness sake?"

Would you have the same reaction if it was Apple securing a sales ban on Motorola products?

What if it were Apple, or indeed Motorola, securing a sales ban on products made by some small company you'd never heard of?
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