Movies reviewed this week: Pacific Rim: Uprising.
Population: One
Yes, the new NFL rule is going to change the game on the field. But that’s OK. The game on the field is too dangerous. It won’t fix the danger completely. Who cares? Concussions are literally ruining minds. Any steps to limit this are good. It’s ridiculously reckless to complain about safety measures on the basis that the game will change in a way you don’t like.
Freeman quotes a player who worries that application of the rule might “throw out a star player that impacts a game.” Have you not been paying attention to how brutal this game is? Did you not see Gronkowski get knocked out of a critical playoff game by a helmet hit?
Freeman doesn’t read like he’s obtuse otherwise, so I imagine this is clickbait designed to get people like me all worked up. Bleacher Report, man, it’s the sports Web site I suppose we deserve.
It’s a personal blog, so it must be time for some minutiae of my personal life! Gonna get all 2005 around here. I’m gonna tell you about my socks.
Last year I picked up a bunch of Solosocks by way of Kickstarter. The gimmick is that they come in packs of 7 socks, and each sock has a slightly different pattern in the same general theme and color scheme. When you lose a sock in the dryer, it doesn’t matter.
My review is this: they’re a bit lightweight. Three months in I’ve already ripped a hole in the heel of one sock out of the 14 I bought. Other than that I like them a lot. They’re warm enough for Seattle winters, and if I’m going someplace colder, well, I have other socks available.
The larger sizes are sized large enough for big 11″ wide feet like mine. This beats the hell out of most interesting socks you can buy. Go Denmark.
Apocalypse World introduced the concept of clocks to tabletop gaming. They’re basically a countdown timer; you increment the clock by a bit every time someone gets closer to a goal. They’re also used as health bars. Not insanely novel but it’s useful to have a visual representation of impending doom or success, as the case may be.
In my Bookhounds of London game this weekend, I ad hoc used a six sided die as a clock. I hadn’t been planning on it, but a chase scene arose spontaneously and the 13th Age escalation die came to mind, so I plopped down a six-sider with 1 showing. Then I said “OK, the one goon just vanished around the corner while the other goon stands to hold the hallway against you,” and flipped the die to 2. My players needed no other explanation.
So that’s a cool trick.
I picked up a bunch of Cthulhu Britannica material in a Bundle of Holding sale a while back. Glad I did, since Cubicle 7 has pulled the line after their license expired. As a sort of a warm up exercise for my efforts to write more, I started working through the original book to convert the adventures into Trail of Cthulhu.
It’s unclear how many I’ll get through, but I had an excellent time converting the first scenario, Bad Company. The work necessary to understand and adapt the scenario turned out to be a great way to internalize the material. Wish I had a good place to run it; alas, it doesn’t fit into my current campaign.
Movies reviewed this week: I Walk Alone, Bodyguard, and The Accused.
Hey look, Richard Thompson is writing an autobiography! This is stupendously exciting to me, particularly since he’s apparently going to focus on the late 60s and early 70s. Nothing against his prodigious and high quality output subsequent to those years, but that was the period of tumultuous change. I am curious to see what he has to say.
I assume that Scott Timberg is doing the heavy lifting on the writing. I don’t know his work but he has a blog. He says “Few living musicians fascinate me as much as Richard Thompson” in a brief blog entry which links to a longer chewy interview. Getting Thompson to open up on the process of learning Classical Greek is kind of cool. I am optimistic.
Waiting for a year and a half for this is no fun at all.
Movies reviewed this week: The Maltese Falcon, Quiet Please, Murder, Shadow of a Doubt, and Flesh and Fantasy.
I’ll admit it: when you pop up an ad on my Twitter feed telling me about a debate platform powered by reason, the only thing I see is a hazy red cloud of danger surrounding the words “debate” and “reason.” I blame Gamergate and the alt-right for implanting this reflex deep within my soul. Why are you avoiding my attempts to rationally discuss your inferiority?
But I will rise above my bias and check it out… oh god.
Yes, that’s the problem. Not all claims are created equal; demanding that we put equal time into attacking the argument that oceans would flow away if the Earth were round is a bad idea. The quality of a debate is in part determined by the quality of the claims made during that debate.
Kialo tries to mitigate this by allowing users to vote on each statement’s impact, but that means the displayed validity of points is determined by who can turn out their side the best. Obvious flaws are obvious. More subtly, this concept accepts the assumption that all claims are worth engaging with. Consider the (decade-old!) concept of the social denial of service attack.
A long long time ago when I was a desktop support grunt at Sun Microsystems, I encountered the best support feedback mechanism in the world. Every time you closed a ticket, it generated an email to the person who opened the ticket. The email had three faces in it: a smile, a frown, and a neutral. Each face was linked to a URL. Click the appropriate face, register your opinion, go on with your day.
We had a target percentage of smiles. If you ever got a frown, you went down and talked to the person who was unhappy and got the issue resolved; then you told your manager about how you fixed the problem. This process cut down on the number of people who submitted spurious frowns. When your casual expression of dissatisfaction results in a human being asking how she can make it better, you start getting in the habit of saving the frowns for real problems.
The system was very easy to implement. The URLs were something like http://feedback.sun.com/?ticket=XXXXX&happy=1. You don’t need a web app to process that, you just need to run the logs through a bit of perl to aggregate stats. Sun probably was dumping the results into a database cause that’s very simple, but even that wouldn’t take barely any programming. No authentication or anything.
It is, therefore, quite satisfying for me to read this article on HappyOrNot. They’re a Finnish startup that makes a physical version of the smiley face feedback tool. They’re smart, they get the requirement to be frictionless, and they kept the product simple. You just press the button.