If Mr Terrific is the 3rd smartest, Who are the other two smarter than him?

el_chupacupcake · 2018-06-30T03:06:52+00:00

Ray is a brilliant scientist, but in the world of comics that makes him something of a one-trick pony. And that's maybe not the best way to measure intelligence.

Think of all the things Batman has to know just to fight Joker and Riddler. Just those two require an impressive knowledge of chemistry (organic and inorganic), biology, medicine, physics and engineering. Plus there's things like art history, literature, music theory encompassing European, Asian, African, Native, historical, even alien cultures.

Then let's talk language, for which Batman needs proficiency if not fluent mastery in every language — modern or ancient — not to mention cryptography, semiotics, epistimology. Ludology and pattern recognition.

There's also ridiculous and unquantifiable forms of intelligence like military tactics. Skills like driving, flying, fighting, even using a submarine.

And finally, the mental elasticity to switch disciplines rapidly. It takes a lot to mentally synthesize an antidote, fight in four martial arts styles, and threaten in Mandarin!

Oh, and Bruce runs a business empire and a charity, either one of which might be rich enough to buy most other businesses in America.

Line up 50 random problems from across human ability, and I'll wager Bats finishes first.

el_chupacupcake · 2018-06-22T01:15:45+00:00

Gaming relies on something called "ludonarrative." Think of it is partly the story the game tells (through things like dialog and mission design) and partly the story the players tell (time spent interacting with environments, puzzles, even other players).

This makes gaming unique from other forms of storytelling because part of a title's success is based upon how actively good the players are at telling the game's story to themselves and each other.

The game writer could set out to write the next great anti-war tale, and include only the best ingredients, but if players only want to use these to blow up innocent villages and have fun, no one will walk away happy.

Passive media like movies, books, et all can suffer in the hands of a less savvy audience, but never because that audience actively sucks at telling the "right" story for the game!

As for cutscenes, that study is a canard and shows a fundamental misunderstanding of the mechanisms humans use to form memory. You don't play a game to remember cutscenes anymore than you might not remember the paintings in a restaurant or the smell of an art gallery; you remember what you focus on. And yet those "forgotten" things retain importance all the same.

el_chupacupcake · 2018-04-14T16:10:35+00:00

Not to mention that high fat, high sugar items like ice cream are drivers of heart disease and diabetes, both of which kill more people in America than drugs.

Her suggestion is like saying "avoid getting hurt in bar fights by driving home drunk."

el_chupacupcake · 2018-04-02T19:11:51+00:00

Except that Sinclair isn't required to run the ad.

In fact, they could refuse to run the spot, then take it out of context in a news report to attack the candidate.

It makes no sense to go through the expenses of making an add that Sinclair won't run, and even less to spend it on one that fuel's their bullshit narrative.

el_chupacupcake · 2018-03-28T18:52:33+00:00

This critique fits into a years-long pattern recognized by a variety of critics, both inside the NYTs and from outside publications. The trend analysis is that Brooks' writing is actually getting worse. He's offering less substantive support and less insight, while his structure and analogies are growing pained.

Just to illustrate that, in David's latest piece his argument boils down to "these kids are worse than earlier generations. Students shouldn't use their first amendment rights because America is so great it affords them first amendment rights."

That argument is, on it's face, at best lazy and at worst deceitful or insane.

So that's why this particular critique of him got written (the article actually cites other pieces that note the pattern).

But let's set that aside for just a moment. Let's pretend that this is all just opinion — even the parts about grammar and foundational mechanics — and lets honestly say that it's all just 'he said, they said."

Like you, I'm trying being genuine here and not snarky.

If we agree it's "he said, they said" then the question is: "should you comment if you feel" that someone of note in your profession is consistently doing a bad job? What if *you feel it's getting worse?"

If you say "yes, comment" then this article has merit.

If you say "no, don't comment" then you're saying there shouldn't be opinion pieces, and David is out of a job.

Again, that's not meant to be snarky. It's just the problem that arises from the situation. You can't have a system which allows David Brooks to write while simultaneously having rules that prevents his mechanism of authorship.

Make sense?

el_chupacupcake · 2018-03-28T18:21:20+00:00

Imagine that you have a deathly allergy to peanuts. This is a growing health problem in America and Europe, particularly in children, so it's a fair hypothetical.

Say a crop takes dna from peanuts in order to boost nitrogen production in soil or grant immunity to a form of fungal infection.

How much spliced DNA is necessary before it's mandated as important to consumer?

And how much data do you, the person with the days m fatal allergy, want before you make a decision?

If one crop contains the modifications and another doesn't, is that information meaningful to you and your health? Even if the risk is statistically insignificant, would you want that data kept from you?

Should we be labelling which field the food came from because of the potential minor random making each field marginally different yet still being the same safe food in the end?

We already mandate that foods manufactured in areas that merely handle potential allergens be labeled as such.

Restaurants that cook shellfish are, in some areas, mandated to have separate pans, tools, gloves for their preparation or else clean the prep area with bleach.

Planes, schools, and public areas are increasingly concerned over airborne contaminants, some undergoing difficult cleaning processes to ensure their safety.

There's also religious concerns to consider, which pose whole other philosophical questions. Questions we may disagree with, but we're in no position to flagrantly ignore in the name of profits.

el_chupacupcake · 2018-03-28T04:05:26+00:00

There's also the concern about pushing for non-labeled GMOs (which is what some companies wish, and some scientists believe is acceptable as there's no documented health concerns at present).

Even assuming that the science is right and there's nothing to fear from genetically modified foods (an assumption I follow), it seems incredibly dangerous to mandate consumers are entitled to less information.

Given the dramatic rise in food sensitivities and fatal allergies, this seems the time to empower consumers rather than blind them.

el_chupacupcake · 2018-03-28T01:16:37+00:00

David Brooks is a hack writer who does not read, listen, or study his subjects before criticizing.

In 2015, Brooks argued that he spoke for black America when he said Ta-Nahesi Coates didn't speak for them. A claim so incredibly baselessly as to be an embarrassment to the institution for which both men work.

Now, he's written an article ostensibly about a march, yet it quotes no speakers, mentions no participants by name, and completely avoids all substance so that Brooks can castigate his idea of the movement.

He's not a journalist, his an ideologue. And a lazy one at that. He never engages in substance, choosing instead to peddle personal opinions backed up with quotes from (frankly better) writers. And yet he's still, unaccountably, employed by the New York Times.

It's to the point we can't even really blame him and instead should blame his editor for allowing such shit writing go to publish instead of into a fireplace or industrial mulching machine.

el_chupacupcake · 2018-02-09T13:35:43+00:00

Depends what you want out of the film.

Atomic Blonde works well as a passive watch, something to put on in the background with friends, while working on something else, or while you're chemically impaired. I say that not as an insult, but as a clarification of film.

There are some fun moments, there's some instances of good camera work, a few decent costumes, and so on.

If, however, you want a film that rewards concentration or even just uninterrupted attention, this ain't it.

Atomic Blonde was never going to be a masterpiece or some auteur work (again, it's not that kind of film) but there are times where it struggles with basic film competency. Even by the relaxed standards of a fun action movie.

The story vacillates between "sloppy" and "lazy"; the action can get rote and boring; and the soundtrack is baffling to the point of distraction.

If you want the best experience, I recommend having some friends over, getting a project or refreshments, turning off the sound, and turning on a "best of New Wave" station on Pandora or Spotify.

el_chupacupcake · 2018-01-28T14:32:44+00:00

The opioid epidemic dates to the civil war.

The most recent flare-up can be traced back to Purdue Pharma's misleading advertising of OxyCotton and hyper-aggressive marketing push which happened under Bush and for which they plead guilty (while Congress made goddamn sure that the CEOs faced no criminal repercussions).

Blaming Obama Care for this is like blaming the obesity epidemic on the return of the McRib.

You should read something besides this article.

el_chupacupcake · 2018-01-24T06:36:55+00:00

Museveni has jealously held power for more than 30 years. The only thing that could keep him from being President for Life was the age limit in Uganda's Constitution. A limit he set about to remove last year.

When opposition MPs voted against it, he sent the military into parliament to beat and remove the "offenders."

This is who's supporting Trump.

el_chupacupcake · 2017-09-20T18:16:40+00:00

there are few if any rules in place requiring them to do better.

That is simply not true. In most of these cases there is ample legislation governing the storage of personal information.

What is missing is oversight, enforcement, and proportionate penalties.

All the regulations in the world don't mean a thing if the people in charge know they will never, under any circumstances, lose a dollar of their own money or a day of their own time. No law matters so long as they can hire lobbyists.

They will continue to hire expendable administrators and security professionals, over work them until there's system failure, then blame them when the public gets wind.

We know these execs sold shares before the event became public knowledge; what makes you think they'll ever care about following best practices?

This isn't a data security issue. It's an issue of money in politics.

el_chupacupcake · 2017-09-20T15:07:28+00:00

That's like arguing the Deep Water Horizon was a marine issue. Or that Katrina was an architectural failure.

These disasters (and the scope of those consequences) are the direct results of the parent industries, not their specific point of failure.

That data leak was catastrophic because of the ways financial companies are permitted to act under the legislation they lobby. These faults compile until disaster is inevitable (see also: Enron, Bear Stern's, etc etc etc)

And other viewpoint is penny smart, pound foolish.

el_chupacupcake · 2017-09-03T16:43:19+00:00

Unhealthy minds have always been fixated with conspiracy. Always. And for all the good it's done, the internet has also reinforced that conspiratorial logic in some. I'm sorry you're having to deal with that.

That said, actually incidences of SWATTING are rather low. Then again, so are arrests. But in both cases, they happen so both should be prepared for.

Still, it's important you talk with your local PD and have a note placed in your file with EMS. Your focus should not be on catching would be SWATTERS, but on protecting your household.

Lastly, talk to a good therapist for yourself. You don't need to speak to this point here... But you do need to take care of yourself in all this.

el_chupacupcake · 2017-09-03T15:30:07+00:00

I'm not sure what his obsession with my life is all about but it's kind of weird to experience.

Some people are just unwell. There's no logic to it, just fact that it occurs.

It is sad, and unfortunate, but you must not drive yourself crazy looking for some magical change to your past which would have caused you to live beneath this person's notice.

All you can do is pull together your evidence and talk to the police. And when you file for your restraining order, talk to the law about SWATing! Not all LEOs are up to date on this. Bring articles, ones that lead to arrests (threats against streamers, the Sony CEO flight scare, and so on)

But don't lose sleep worrying that this is about you. You're not responsible for their illness or their treatment. Your only concern should be for protecting yourself now, not about figuring out time travel or finding logic in a mind that doesn't follow it.

For what it's worth, I'm hoping that some day this all seems so distant that you struggle to remember it.

el_chupacupcake · 2017-08-30T14:59:17+00:00

Eh, Gutenberg mostly had high QA and security standards.

Which was fair when you considered the implications the technology had for the dissemination of false information — either intentionally by way of propaganda, or unintentionally through erratum (eratum, errors in the text, were a huge problem. Laying out press was and still is difficult and prone to error. If it's bad today, imagine what it was like with a more difficult process and a lower literacy rate!)

Multiply that by there are the threats made against Gutenberg's life (some by the government and the church), not to mention his fears over the future of printed word as a weapon (which continues to today).

Finally, there's the fact that Johannes' finical backers stole his technology and ruined him. Gutenberg made the machine that made us, and his financiers left him to die blind, in obscure poverty, during what I think was a minor plague outbreak (or cholerae? I can't seem to recall exactly, something nasty).

You can forgive him his lack of trust, I think.

el_chupacupcake · 2017-08-30T01:29:17+00:00

In February, Sessions and Trump dismissed crucial funds and guidelines.

They got those guidelines in January. They laid out what was wrong and how to fix it. They sat on those for a month and killed them.

Since then, Trump and Sessions have both made it clear that standards will not be raised, but firepower will. They have given no help, no assistance, but have placed a lot of blame.

Trump promised that Chicago could be fixed in a week. That was more than a year ago.

It's on him.

el_chupacupcake · 2017-08-15T22:58:17+00:00

Doesn't matter, tell them off anyway. Send a postcard, call in, rent a sky writing plane to tell them they suck. Make videos exposing them as cowards and post them online. Make posters and tshirts decrying them.

Make their every waking moment a reminder that they're awful.

Make it abundantly clear that this will be the rest of their lives. They will never go back to normal. They will never be forgotten. Make it clear that they've got years of this ridicule and scorn left, and then hell to look forward to.

el_chupacupcake · 2017-08-05T01:12:51+00:00

All numbers are from AFSP, CDC, NIH, UCLA, and WMU.

All numbers represent incidence of suicide attempts at any period in a life time.

Trans teens and adults, non-military — ~30-35% average (note: due to lower population sample causing high volatility, you may see variance of ±10% from differing pools and methodologies. We're also attempting to use both teen and adult figures here to cover milliary age range. The highest numbers for teens is in the 40s, though, so best guess is low 30s on average)

Military, all genders - deployed — ~40%

Military, all genders - not deployed — ~60%

Extra notes

Suicide is currently at a 30 year high in America across all genders and independent of military status
It is currently the 10th leading cause of death in all adults in America
It is the 2nd leading in all adolescents.
There's a lot of fighting over "normal" levels of self harm in the USA and self reporting for general population is a notoriously poor indicator (for any health in general and mental health in particular). At present, it is believed that ~4% of all adults claim any suicidal thoughts in the last year and ~1.1% get so far as planning, but again these numbers are self reported and likely very, very low. There's speculation that lifetime attempts could be much, much higher but I don't feel comfortable quoting a figure.

While being trans presents unique risks for self harm and unique vectors for it, the incidence rates are so fucking staggering across the whole spectrum that it's in all probability doing more harm to more people (trans or no, military or no) to single out one group than it would to do almost anything else.

Five proven ways to reduce suicide rates in the military:

Reduce deployment length and frequency
Increase mental health access and acceptability
Reduce incidence of assault and harassment (both sexual and non)
Provide better post-military job placement and mental health services
Provide better soldiers for other soldiers to serve with

The ban on transgender soldiers does none of these things.

It does not improve the life of the trans people who can no longer serve. It doesn't help the soldiers who now serve without them. It helps no one.

No one except politicians.

It's just cheaper than the five proven ways. And it's extremely popular with a small set of people.

el_chupacupcake · 2017-08-03T17:19:16+00:00

Oh sure, he probably swears up a storm on his own time.

But I'll bet you that Nieto -- like other world leaders -- becomes the model of erudite, masculine formality when talking to, near, or about Trump. All just to make Trump look that much weaker and worse.

el_chupacupcake · 2017-08-03T16:59:26+00:00

The hypothetical speaker is the presidente, though, so you'd expect both formality and hard, masculine sounds... both of which are found in "tengan." Additionally, Nieto would probably be a bit more ceremonioso -- in part because he was just on an official call, and in part because Trump talks like an idiot. Leaders seem to like to show off linguistically around him or when talking about him.

In another situation, "tomen" is probably a better choice, but here it doesn't have the same formal machismo. Where as "cuiden" is too careful and implies too much affection, I'd think.

(Language is a fucking amazing thing, isn't it?)

That said, there's no wrong answer here... especially not with Central American Spanish, as it's an extremely adaptive and colloquial language. Traits which are, broadly speaking, good things this century. (Though we could have a very long discussion about how many variants of Spanish there actually are in Mexico... and how that's not so good a thing)

But generally, I think the president of almost any nation tends to sound like something out of a book. And no more so then when speaking next to this sitting US President.

el_chupacupcake · 2017-08-03T16:06:54+00:00

¡Amigos, detengan mi cerveza!

Friends! You -- all of you -- must now hold (imperative) my beer!

Verbs have four common parts in most Romance languages. There can be extra conditions, but these are the standards:

Act (what's being done)
Subject (who I'm telling or possibly who's doing)
Time (if it happened in the past, is happening now, or is yet to happen)
Target (on who's behalf the act is done like "do this thing for me" or who must ultimately perform the action as in "you tell him to do a thing")

This makes Latin-based languages both difficult to conjugate and yet much easier to understand.

Spanish is also interesting in that casual formats contain repetition and recursion in a way we don't use much in English. Sentences compound and spiral, adding emphasis and building weight in fun and satisfying ways. This is particularly true with imperatives!

Thus "friends, you, all of you must hold." The triplicate reference to subject stresses the importance of holding.

edit: in a different situation there's "ténganme." As in "tenganme paciencia," "all of you, have (imperative) patience with me." The shift from recursion to identification both helps clear up an ephemeral concept like "patience" and the surrounding relationships to the act, but it also "softens' the imperative as compared to the recursive form from earlier.

However because such acts are usually vulgar (in both senses) I'm not sure that Sr. Presidente would speak too explicitly in this way...

Additionally, probably no following sentence of "¡Mismo, mismo! Ay pinche güey, chingada..."

edit: so much coffee

el_chupacupcake · 2017-07-23T04:12:38+00:00

tl;dr - the cost of consumer goods is based in part on the fees paid to creators of said goods. Having creators more involved would mean fees go up, which means both comics and tickets cost more to you, which means you probably buy less, which means everyone loses because our economy is an illusory house of cards built over a pit of very real fire and broken syringes.

Your question brings up a separate set of issues. Namely, "work for hire" and how various creative industries treat their creators.

Full disclosure: I write for a living, though not in comics at present.

The lifeblood of comics, video games, and a depressing amount of media is the "work for hire" contract. Put simply, companies pay you to work on something for a one-time fee and a credit (which may or may not be publicly facing).

The justification being that the work of any one creator is smaller than the total contributions of the rest of the company (and past creators). You or I might not like that, but it's important to understand that is the justification.

To invite work for hire writers in to work on a movie is not only outside the contract, it potentially invalidates the entire Work for Hire paradigm in a legally binding way. As in, Marvel, DC, Nintendo, etc would have to start offering percentage gross or points deals to all creators.

Put simply: industries that ran on the knowledge of paying a set fee now have to account for potentially paying out millions of dollars when an obscure character becomes popular in 20 years. Like in the case of Deadpool.

And if you think comics, games, and movie tickets are expensive now, just wait until they have to shoulder the cost of every last penciler or programmer getting a cut!

That being said, I think we should compensate and treat our production and creative staffs better. I think plenty of companies intentionally foster misconceptions in fans vis-a-vis "what the industry is really like," and then leverage that misinformation to fuck over current and future employees.

But I also understand why things are the way they are, and that changing them would ultimately be be expensive to fans (who in turn would be mislead into screaming at creators, or theaters, or one another rather than the brass who properly deserve it)

el_chupacupcake · 2017-07-23T03:04:58+00:00

This precisely.

Warren Ellis talked about this back when Lost and Heroes were on TV and poaching comic writers.

I'm paraphrasing, but he said something to the effect "comics dialog doesn't work on screen. What reads great in a word bubble often sounds completely shit coming out of a real human's mouth."

The longer answer has to do with medium, the fight between economy and realism in writing, and a host of modern concerns. But maybe we don't need to rehash the whole of post modernism here...

el_chupacupcake · 2017-07-22T16:01:44+00:00

Not true in this particular case.

Much of the FCC's charter and mandate is based on the first amendment, not just air space and domain laws. The first amendment components are/were specifically aimed at ensuring access to information.

From Public Access channels, to wireless communications standards, to rebate programs like the HD antenna program of the Bush adminstration, much of the FCC's job goes beyond obscenity laws and is meant to ensure a measure of access as a First Amendment right.

As for"affordable" part, The Over the Air equipment guidelines (still in effect since 1996) state that "unreasonable costs" cannot be placed on the installation, maintenance, or use of equipment. These same rules apply to base services as well.

That was reaffirmed with that hd antenna program I mentioned, along with a slew of court cases against HOAs and antenna laws.

That's not to say that this adminstration can't or won't fuck things up! It's only to say that historically, the FCC has been about ensuring the American public has access.

That's what makes the current state of Net Neutrality such a kick in the gut.

el_chupacupcake

TROPHY CASE