Equating every instance of every use of the colour black in all art everywhere in the world with racial overtones is nonsense. I mean, would you look at Paul-Emile Borduas' paintings and think "yeah it's about race".
Black is many other things to human beings - the colour of night, of fear, of absence, of death, of abandonment. It's not regarded as dangerous symbolically because black people are dark. We as white people were afraid of the dark long before we ever knew black people existed.
Painting your skin the colour black for an obviously colour-themed piece of performance art isn't "blackface". It's "blackface" if it's racial emulation.
Well, apparently I'm retarded for
a) not actually losing my adapters and
b) not bothering to write specific, realistic time schedules in my frigging lifehacker joke comments.
Geez. I stand chastened. Actually let me rephrase. I will stand chastened for precisely four and a half minutes, after which I will spend two minutes making toast, followed by forty five seconds peeing, then exactly a hour and fifteen minutes at the gym.
Well, the point is that it seems unnecessary when every person in the world has these adapters right at their fingertips.
Yep. That's just about right.
Uh....... unless you're out rewiring plugs in your office, this is a home project. And in your home, you don't really need to carry anything in your coat pocket. Or even a coat.
Someone should tell stock photo guy that there's an adapter in his iPhone box.
Wait, this gives me a great idea for a follow up Lifehacker article!
"Buy a USB plug adapter and save yourself hours of complicated electrical work"
That's actually a fairly ludicrous interpretation of contract law - that if not explicitly stated, the contract will favour the supplier. As far as I'm aware, that's totally untrue.
Well, no, but there's nothing in the agreement to purchase a game that says that a company can arbitrarily withhold access to that game.
You own a license to access them freely, in perpetuity though. And a company should not be able to revoke that without refunding you that money.
I love how this thread absolutely separates men who understand women, and get dates, from men who don't understand women, and get.... oh... say... a 75 inch television and substantial pornography collection.
You know what you think of as "pandering" the rest of the world thinks of as "not insulting". Your whole argument is totally, unequivocally absurd because the world is not a THING. The world is made up of people, and those people do not simply act in a totally neutral way, which certain people (you'd call them "bitches" or "fags" I'm sure) decide to interpret as insulting. The way in which every person treats every other person is a constant choice made by that individual, and if someone else regards that choice as insulting, then it's up to them to choose how they want to respond. In your case the response is condescension and scorn.
Language and behaviour is loaded with terms that insult and demean other people. The fact that you don't really understand this probably means that you're a white male from an affluent neighbourhood, somewhere between 18-24 years old. You don't see "culture" as anything but neutral because culture is totally designed to pander particularly to you.
If you spend a year in a country where they stare at you, or make fun of you because of your whiteness, or some other attribute I promise you that your take on "the world" and "political correctness" will totally change.
Hell, if you spend a week reading a very feminist blog, I guarantee you you will magically become 250% more sensitive to language that could offend men.
By that idiotic logic, I should be able to walk up to you, slap you hard in the face with my open palm, and then say "you don't have any reason to complain because life gets much harder, and you should grow the fuck up".
You're basically walking around demanding that the world accommodate itself to what YOU want, which is basically spending an extended portion of your life being a five-year-old.
Nice to hear a person take responsibility for things, and nice of Jaffe to be a bigger person.
Where Christianity has Jesus, Buddhism has Buddha, and Scientology has, uh, Tom Cruise, this won't have a specific figurehead. There's a reason for this: the religion will be crowdsourced. Think of it as a ‘moral social network', people can submit values, rules, general writings (poetry, fables, philosophic texts) and media and the community at large can vote for the ‘best' ones, can vote for what everyone will believe in and uphold. These submissions can be tagged and categorized under wider headings, which are also determined by the community.
Fundamentally, this won't work. Your reading of Anne Carson is pretty good (as a fellow Canadian, I always approve. I like her work), and the idea of ekstasis is a reasonable facsimile of faith. Faith isn't ONLY ecstasy, but it's a fair place to start.
The problem is that religion emerges from a multitude of small things, all of which are rooted in myth. Almost nobody actually understands or ever reads about myth and the roots of religions, so it's pretty forgivable that people think "oh, it's just shit that people decided collectively". The most telling thing about a religion is that it always involves a force that ostensibly emerges from outside the universe, touches a place on earth, and reorganizes it. This irruption of energy is why we perform rituals - to recreate that original moment.
Try reading Rudolph Otto and Mircea Eliade. Both of them are seminal figures in the field and a really good place to start.
Gamification is an interesting idea in this case, but at heart, it emerges as a system of fiction agreed upon between rational people. There's no ability to touch the mythic aspect of our lives, and so there will never be any sort of foundation, or heart of the work. If you invented some sort of overarching prophetic myth about how all humanity exists as the unfolding of what God ultimately wants, and thus we can reshape our beliefs knowing that society is changing in accordance with God's plan, as God sees it from the end of time..... well, then you've actually just invented modern Catholicism.
Also the problem with your mom is the same one with my mom (who's Italian). In touching the mythic aspect of our lives, religion makes it so seductively simple for individual people to turn it around and use it to rejustify themselves according to their own wants. A real person of faith uses his sense of myth to investigate his place in the universe, how he aligns with the utmost things. He will find and conflict with those things that are uncomfortable.
A person who is less well adjusted will pick and choose their beliefs to accord with psychological wants, will instead project their personal myth out onto the world. This is a perverted form of faith, and unfortunately uses the same religion to justify it.
You cannot possibly be serious.
Yes but the point of the movie was that he was a loveable scamp who then rose to face danger and became the beloved protector of the city.
"Hey look! It's Megamind! He's been so great since he tried to murder that guy!"
"Yeah I totally feel safe with this attempted murderer protecting us."
"I know what you mean. Now that he's decided murder isn't for him, after trying it out and APPARENTLY SUCCEEDING, I'm glad he's decided to solve the problem of creating ANOTHER, EVEN MORE VIOLENT MURDERER."
"Hey whatever happened to that guy? Wasn't he even worse?"
"Oh well once they took his powers away, they locked him up in a cozy cell and showed him dancing happily at the end of the story."
"Where do we live exactly? What the fuck is wrong with this movie?"
"Yeah, I'm headed to Canada next week. People love murder too much here."
Hopefully he attempts to murder somebody, believes he succeeded, becomes slightly depressed and not guilty at all, and then later finds out that it was all a hoax. Because then we can love him, just like we did with Megamind, who was an attempted murderer.
David Jaffe's dream woman:
"You smartie, me dumb. Help pwetty have fun!"
This is absolutely fascinating. Emotionally driven action that forces you to connect with the story, problems that aren't solved by stripping down to your tits (if a lady) or ripping a person in half like a wishbone (if a man).
That's what an actual artistic experience is, something that activates and connects with your deep-rooted system of human sympathy and understanding. Awe, sadness, terror. These are the things that get you. The projected tension of living and surviving, not just the tension of "will I have to load".
Hopefully this will live up to the experience it claims to offer.
Haha. Well, it comes to you from the most generic fantasy author of the past 30 years.
