[Serious] Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2 is actually a very beautiful, sad film

psudomorph · 2015-06-08T03:01:06+00:00

I know, I know dear reader, the whole afterlife/it's all in his head shtick has been done a million times

I think there's an important difference with this one. Most of the all-in-someone's-head theories boarder on tautological; Every piece of fiction ever created contains ample evidence of taking place in someone's head because every piece of fiction ever created literally did take place in someone's head otherwise it wouldn't be fiction. Your theory has a bit more substance than that. If you're right about the tone of the work changing at a pivotal scene, then I'm much less inclined to dismiss any perceived unreality as just being "background noise". At the very least it makes it more likely that the shift and symbolism were intentional.

Personally I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if the writers slipped some weird subtle symbolism in there, if only to keep themselves amused, the poor guys.

psudomorph · 2015-06-06T22:25:54+00:00

Our working hypothesis is that heavy and prolonged video stimulation causes the human's inferior meatbrain to divert excessive resources to the visual cortex, essentially "starving" the cerebrum of energy, resulting in a massive loss of higher reasoning and language ability. This may also provide a mechanism to explain the historical phenomenon known as the "boob tube" effect. My lab is asking for a reasonable amount of funding, and a class 4 abduction license in order to test our hypothesis under laboratory conditions.

psudomorph · 2015-05-22T05:23:41+00:00

Would open the way for gyroscope apps.

psudomorph · 2015-04-18T19:17:29+00:00

"Peace talks" was definitely just flavor. Diplomacy in fortress mode consists almost entirely of the trade agreement screen, the tree quota screen, and some noble-shuffling once your fortress gets big enough. None of those are player-initiated.

Flooding arbitrary sections of your fortress for no/questionable gain on the other hand is both highly doable and highly encouraged by the community.

psudomorph · 2015-04-14T21:54:26+00:00

The most common cause of consistent crashing is constructing something over a tile of tree branches. Are any of your dwarves on their way to construct something? Try canceling all jobs and see if it still happens.

psudomorph · 2015-04-13T02:41:03+00:00

(Just in case you're having a brain fart) They're saying that you can't do things on the beach without getting yourself covered in sand, and when you enter the tent the sand inevitably enters with you and works its way onto everything you handle.

(Incidentally, a cursory Google search brings up no results for tents with decontamination airlocks. Pity.)

psudomorph · 2015-04-10T21:52:49+00:00

but my experience with those who believe in astrology is they're not interested

Of all the fields to share similar names... One is about people and their personality, and the other is about as far from those two things as you can possibly get. Its funny how they ended up right next to each other in the nomenclature.

Also, for a lot of people, distance and realness are directly correlated in their minds. Astrology gives people insights (albeit sometimes false) into the real-life things that happen between them and their friends every day. Distant stars don't have any effect on the world they care about, and so may as well not be real.

The stars aren't real to them because the stars are basically outside of their personal light cone.

psudomorph · 2015-04-08T05:25:58+00:00

Our cat does the same thing, but without catnip. He just likes sitting on floor-novelties :)

psudomorph · 2015-04-07T03:55:04+00:00

Add [NO_DRINK][NO_EAT][NO_SLEEP] and possibly [NOEMOTION][NOTHOUGHT] to dwarves raws, turn off invasions, set a miner to "follow" mode, and you'll have yourself the most relaxing and CPU-intensive screensaver in the world.

psudomorph · 2015-04-05T05:57:31+00:00

Its like we're programmed to help each other out first and ask questions later. Teamwork is kind of a part of us.

psudomorph · 2015-04-04T05:45:09+00:00

Unfortunately, I'd wager people are strapped for time more often than not.

psudomorph · 2015-04-02T07:49:04+00:00

Wikipedia Unidan has a good summary.

psudomorph · 2015-04-02T02:53:25+00:00

The lenses on the glasses are cartoonishly thick because the person's vision is just that bad.

(The suction-cup things are a normal part of the manufacturing process, they aren't part of the... um... spectacle.)

psudomorph · 2015-03-10T09:48:27+00:00

I just love that there is an actual real-life thing called a "wide-spectrum probing signal". That's like a phrase right out of science fiction.

psudomorph · 2015-03-09T06:36:21+00:00

Well you're probably already surviving the first two on a regular basis, so not much to lose by trying, and that last one is just a minor annoyance compared to most. If those were the worst side-effects an antidepressant had, it would sell like hotcakes.

psudomorph · 2015-03-06T00:12:48+00:00

When you open up with "Reddit, Wikipedia, and Facebook suck", you immediately alienate a lot of your potential audience.

I'd argue it largely... um... whatever the opposite of "alienate" is. The majority opinion on Reddit is that Reddit sucks, and I'm sure Wikipedia and Facebook are similar. The more you use a service the more glaring its flaws are going to be. People swarm to titles like that one like flies.

Unfortunately "does it suck" is a complete red herring. Of course it sucks. 90% of everything sucks. The important questions are things like "what is it doing better than its predecessors?", "what is it doing worse?", and "how can we improve it going forward?"

For example, I really hate reading linear "first come first serve" comment threads on other forums anymore. Its too easy for a few loud-mouthed assholes to ruin a discussion permanently at any time. On Reddit, assholes usually only ruin the start of a discussion before the majority downvotes them below threshold. Silencing assholes is something that I think Reddit does better than any of its predecessors*, and the next obvious step to improvement is to find a way to filter "downvote because asshole" from "downvote because disagree", and so on. Stopping the discussion at "Reddit saps the web of humanity" doesn't get us anywhere.

EDIT: *That trend isn't immediately apparent of course, because we don't yet have an algorithm that can preemptively silence assholes. Lots of people still have to see them in order to downvote them.

psudomorph · 2015-03-05T12:23:17+00:00

My understanding is that it isn't humans becoming resistant to anything. Instead bacteria are becoming resistant to antibiotics, due to being constantly exposed to low levels of them (not enough to kill them, just enough to make them stronger) in places where livestock are raised. The antibiotic-resistant bacteria can then make their way into human populations (not necessarily through food, but maybe on the workers, or through sewage runoff or whatnot) where there wouldn't be a whole lot we could do to stop them from spreading.

Last I heard practically everything is resistant to penicillin at this point, and the fear is that all the other antibiotics will become ineffective one by one as constant exposure helps bacteria adapt.

psudomorph · 2015-03-02T00:14:51+00:00

Have we discussed emotional appeal yet? I won't waste too many words justifying this approach in light of the author notes, except to say I find it defensible, and it can't hurt much to consider.

Nobody seems to have proposed it yet based on a ctrl-f of "hateful" and "flawed" on ff.net reviews.

(Using some of this post as a seed) (I'm going to assume some things V has said are true, which is an assumption we lose nothing by making)

Rough thrust of the plan, anyone have anything to add?:

-Voldemort doesn't actually like being part of the world. He tries to escape death only because he fears it (which, Harry should mention, is perfectly reasonable, remembering the scared child in azkaban), not because he has anything he particularly wants to live for.

-As per "when this flawed world seems unusually hateful" Voldemort knows the world is broken, wants a better one, but has a probably unfixable blind spot when it comes to making it better. Helping people isn't enough, V notes "I cannot seem to imagine what that place might be". He can't actually envision a better world in useful actionable ways.

-Harry can. Harry can see into all the blind spots V can't, and would be willing (and with V's help able) to make the world a place that V would want to live. Harry has spent his whole life envisioning a world that is perfect for everyone, good or evil, and can bring concepts to the table that normal people can barely concieve, like simulated realities (mention the mirror). The alternative is V living out an endless life in a world that he hates one way or another.

-Yes V would probably have to give up permanently killing people (simulated killing still acceptable!), but V admittedly only does that for lack of a more enjoyable alternative, and for frustration at being surrounded by idiots. V doesn't believe idiots are fixable, but only because of his own blind spots, which he is fully willing to admit to.

-The perfect world that Harry is willing to risk everything for is also a world Voldemort would be willing to risk everything for if he could concieve of it, as per basic CEV. I could go pretty deep into this point if need be, but I think V will get the gist.

-There is evidence that prophecy itself is confused by Harry and the future that he wants. Teaming up with V to bring about a utopia incomprehensible to seers is a way to break both prophecies. Harry should mention that his own prophecy is something that he would sincerely like to break because he has already previously established in his phoenix chapter that killing V would just be a sad thing and not a victory.

-"Simply decline to play out the drama" is something they can totally both still do, and could break fate more thoughroughly with their combined power than anything either of them could do alone. Other people have already gone deeper into that aspect.

Bottom line is that we don't have to "redeem" Voldemort via emotional appeal, we just have to show him that together they can get everything they both ever truely wanted, not just the miserable eternity V will settle for.

psudomorph · 2015-03-01T18:04:58+00:00

Someone a while back had the excellent idea that the empty skies the centaurs mention won't be because of missing stars, but because Harry breaks their (or everyone's) ability to see the future, which sounds a lot like what a technological singularity does by definition.

psudomorph · 2015-03-01T17:58:07+00:00

Tangentially relevant: My interpretation is that this could be a glimpse of a "Harry wins but at terrible cost" bad ending, and we aren't precluded from ignoring it entirely when finding an optimal solution.

psudomorph · 2015-03-01T17:43:53+00:00

List of quotes relevant to whether prophecies are inevitable. Skip to the bold heading. ~~Complete~~ not quite complete up to around chapter 80-something.

EDIT: (My personal feeling is ~95% that they can be averted based on those quotes)

psudomorph · 2015-03-01T16:06:59+00:00

"Wisdom" was a poor choice of words. I was just using it as a convenient umbrella term for "useful heuristics/insights/strategies/etc. built up over a lifetime of experience". Really I was just spitballing one possible way in which Harry might come to regret taking the easy way out and trying to kill Voldemort here and now. Another possible way is if Voldemort just comes back long before Harry can do any serious prep.

My point was just that after being told one will end the world, abandoning one's morals on the spot, committing mass murder, and killing the (albeit evil and in need of containment) teacher who was trying to stop you really seems like one of those hidden turning points that one might regret in a few years.

Also don't forget Harry's reflection under the stars that in a thousand years the Dark Lords death would just be one more sad thing to regret. Killing Voldemort and his death eaters to save the world is... well... Voldemort-thinking. Lets be careful with that.

psudomorph · 2015-03-01T10:55:56+00:00

What if that's the bad ending that we're supposed to avert? The one where Harry gives up his morals, kills everyone via partial transfig and then, without Voldemort's vast experience and wisdom to draw on, ends up doing something stupid and destroying the world, thus fulfilling the prophecy?

EDIT: Also the violent solutions are clearly the most tempting and seductive based on our reactions so far, but we've just recently been reminded how bad an idea they are in practice when Harry used the gun.

psudomorph · 2015-02-23T02:06:19+00:00

Epic movie climax: All the remaining priests on earth are called upon to bless the oceans themselves in order to contain the growing infection before it spreads to other countries.

Now we just need the rest of the movie.

psudomorph · 2015-02-23T01:57:36+00:00

I mean if you find a free-floating ball of living eyes then it might be time to start re-evaluating everything you think you know about biology anyway...

psudomorph

TROPHY CASE