amuchmoreexotic

Well, the end of Mass Effect 2 was terrible.

( Spoilers about the mechanics of ME2 ending and some things that happened that may not happen to you )

I've been reading Daily Kos and that lot for ages, but I still don't really understand why the Democrats have been so rubbish at passing health care reform.

Here are my main areas of confusion.

1. Why do so many nominal "Democrat" Senators/Congresspeople not want to vote for reform? Is it that they're scared of attack ads claiming they voted for 'death panels'? But that's not going to be a serious problem after the voters experience the new system and its lack of death panels. Do the Democratic politicians actually believe in the death panels?

2. Don't they have the equivalent of a three-line whip in US politics? Couldn't Obama have said "Vote for a strong HCR bill or you will be persona non grata with the party"? Or is there no sanction he can take against a Senator? Is there no centralised funding he can cut off, or is it so insignificant compared to what they get from the insurance industry that they don't care?

3. Why did the Democrats place so much value on bipartisanship that they negotiated with Republicans who clearly weren't interested in making a deal? Why does Lieberman have some kind of Democratic status (a chairmanship, is it?) when he seems to be a crypto-Republican to the extent of considering running on a Republican ticket? What stops them kicking him out?

EDIT: Supplemental question: would Hillary have done any better?

Ben Goldacre linked to this engaging account of a Creationist expedition to find living dinosaurs, with lines like:

"Put down that weapon! The power of Christ compels you!" I immediately commanded, the words flowing through me as if from Above. The power of my rebuke startled both him and the Apatosaurus, causing the former to turn toward me and issue a blasphemous curse while the latter disappeared down the trail.

The villain of the piece, an evil evolutionist called Nigel Stubbingwicke, has his own account here.

Now, I'm pretty sure this is all a parody. Objective Ministries seems to be a spoof, sister site or rival to the similar Landover Baptist.

What convinced me that it's a spoof site was this appeal:

MISSION ALERT: HAITI NEEDS SOLAR-POWERED AUDIO BIBLES

A special message from Faith Comes By Hearing:

...

Right now, Haitians are afraid to go inside whatever is left of their homes. They are fearful of aftershocks or further collapse. Masses of people are sitting outside, on the curbs and under homemade shelters.

Imagine the change in atmosphere if God's Word is there, playing in their language, reminding them that God is with them.

The Proclaimer® is a rugged, self-powered audio Bible that can broadcast the New Testament in the jungle, desert, or even on the moon! For $157, one Haitian Creole Proclaimer® can produce enough comforting decibels of Gospel to be clearly heard by 300 homeless and injured people.

That seemed too ridiculous to be true.

The thing is, though, that while Objective Ministries is a spoof, the website they're linking to for Faith Comes By Hearing isn't. There really is a Christian group which has decided the best thing to do is to send a load of solar-powered God-bothering machines to Haiti. Mind you, there are also those Christians who saw the disaster as an opportunity to steal a load of children.

Don't forget - come to High Barnet at 10.30 for a stupidly long walk.

So you buy iWork and make some documents - but how do you back them up? Do you need to sync to a(nother) computer? If so, that makes it much less attractive as a netbook alternative, unless you also have a desktop somewhere. Or are happy to use Google Docs, which is fine for me, but probably not great for the sales of iWork.

Similarly, how do you get video files onto it (without going through the iTunes store)? Download to another computer, then sync?

I would totally buy one of these if it ran normal OS X, rather than iPhone flavour OS X. But at the moment it seems like you would still need to have another computer knocking around somewhere for it to be a sensible option.

EDIT: Ah, it turns out that it has a shared area of the file system which another computer can mount as a drive. I wonder if you could use this in conjunction with the card reader accessory to copy stuff to and from an SD Card or a USB drive.

Reply to this post, and I'll tell you one reason why I dislike you. Then put this in your own journal, and spread the hate.

I really want to write to the Islamic Solidarity Games organisers and ask if they have some T-shirts of that excellent pegasus mascot. I can't find a contact form or email address on the site, though.

Also, it seems like they aren't translating the more recent site updates covering the Persian/Arab Gulf controversy. For example, the current top post on the Farsi(?) version of the site features this image:

Things I strongly suspect are the work of trolls:

1. The whole idea of "Na'vi otherkin" (people who think they were the blue catpeople out of Avatar in former lives). The Na'vi Anti-Defamation League was definitely a troll. Also, that Twitter account claiming to be a "Titanic otherkin" was me. Trolls trolling trolls.

2. www.pray4trig.com better be trollin':

On Trig's next birthday (April 18, 2010), there will be a Worldwide Day of Prayer! Congregations across the globe will join in asking God to make Trig whole. If such a documented miracle doesn’t demonstrate God’s Majesty to the masses, I don't know what will!

Things which are sincere but hilarious:

1. The website for the Second Islamic Solidarity Games. Partly because they translated it into English using Babelfish:

Head of Opening and Closing Ceremony in 2nd Islamic Solidarity Games said: considering that Opening ceremony is forehead of great event, according to program we will perform a beautiful, glorious and fresh opening ceremony in Takhti Stadium.

Partly because of the mascot's antics on this page:



Awwwww, look at him swimming! Awwwww, he's playing "hoofball"! Awwwww, he's doing judo to another pegasus! Karate hoof chop!



Awwwww, he's holding a ping pong bat in his hoof! Awwwww, he's doing weightlifting! Awwwww, he's overcome a spinal injury to take part in special needs futsal! Awwwwww - wait, the special needs events don't deserve to have different icons?

But mainly I like it because the Islamic Solidarity Games have been cancelled, due to an argument about whether it's called the "Persian Gulf" or the "Arab Gulf".

Mel Gibson in a remake of Edge of Darkness? Really? Really?

How is the Cold War nuclear paranoia going to work nowadays? Or is it going to be all about vaccines, or disappearing bees, or something? And at the end, the CIA bloke bashes together two different hives and everyone in the room gets stung.

Lots of videogames let you make a customised avatar to represent yourself. And yet how many of them confront you halfway through with your evil twin, or an army of clones all with your face? Or even just a glimpse of your doppelganger across a crowded market or spaceport. I can't think of any. Somebody should do something about the situation.

I don't think I am the right demographic to eat this soup.

Nothing says "never again" like a butterfly made out of chads.

Does anyone want to come to Bright Club on Tuesday? It's 8pm at the Wilmington.

Is there anything good going on tonight or over the weekend?

"Avatar does represent a step forward in science fiction film in that it is only forty years behind science fiction literature rather than the usual fifty years." - Nick Mamatas

The only thing I have to look forward to at the moment is the release of Mass Effect 2, which is a space opera videogame where the goal is to make your custom-designed character ("Captain Shepherd") lez up (or straight up if you're gay and designed a man Shepherd) with attractive blue space women. In the new version you can also lez up with some kind of psycho punk chick. I think there's also a side-quest about saving the universe.

I really enjoyed the first game. The futuristic setting was nicely done, but it is very much a retro future: it's like how Star Wars would have turned out with Ridley Scott in charge. The music is Vangelis type synths, the buildings look like a 1980s architect's concept for the year 2000, and the assumptions are very much rooted in science fiction of the 70s and 80s: you can build a faster-than-light spaceship, but UAVs are unknown; there are AIs but none of them act smarter than humans, and nobody has thought to try brain emulation; and so on.

You'd think that a post-scarcity or near-Singularity or transhuman type of society, along the lines of Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom or Accelerando/Glasshouse, would make a great game setting (and give justifications within the fiction for standard game conventions, like death being only a minor setback). But 90% of the visions of the future in videogames are rip-offs of either Star Wars or Aliens.

Sure, some kind of hand-wavey "quantum" resurrection was used to justify the savepoints in System Shock, but why not run with the implications of the idea? For example, what if the cloning process was non-destructive, leaving your old 'self' knocking around as a competitor (with a level of aggression set by your own previous actions to earlier clones)?

The Xbox 360 owning audience (nerdy men in their 20s/30s) must be capable of handling SF ideas that are less than a couple of decades old. Maybe videogame budgets are so high that an innate conservatism kicks in and there is no room to experiment with futuristic settings that aren't instantly familiar from the big screen. This theory is borne out by the fact that there are tabletop RPGs set in a Strossian/Vingian future, like Eclipse Phase.

I wonder how long it will take for these settings to start showing up in the mainstream. At this rate, the Singularity will get here for real before it is ever depicted anywhere outside of print.

If you liked Otherkin (people who think they're really elves or dragons) then you'll love Na'vi Otherkin who think they're really the blue cat people from Avatar. Here's one on Twitter.

Sample tweets:

"You are being racist and heightist. The color of my people's skin and their size is not grounds for mockery."

"Actually my awkening story makes a lot of sense. I used to think I was an elf (for years) but I always identified with blue skin."

"It is spelled "Eywa", please do not disrespect her. I know because it came to me in a dream some nights ago."

Of course there is an LJ community too: tothehometree

The best thing about Avatar: 3D means you can't film every action sequence as a nonsensical shakycam mess (not that Cameron ever did that). Goodbye Michael Bay!

The marine-catgirl romance does for bestiality what Star Wars did for incest. It's quite a missed opportunity that, although the Na'avi ^[1] are riding around on six-legged horses, they themselves are boringly bipedal. It would have been much more interesting visually - and more realistic from an evolutionary science perspective - if they hadn't been so completely humanoid (even down to having five-fingered hands).

Perhaps they could have had, I dunno, two pairs of back legs instead of one. With dainty little blue hooves.

You might say that this would have made it impossible for humans to control vat-grown Na'avi bodies. But the avatar technology can clearly compensate for different body plans - I mean, the Na'avi have much longer limbs than humans, so there is already a mismatch between the human's mental representation of the body and its actual shape. If you couldn't compensate for that, the avatar operator would end up like those body integrity identity disorder cases where people feel like one of their limbs is 'wrong' and try to amputate it - the problem is that the limb isn't represented properly in their brain's mental image of the body, so, even though they can move it and feel through it, it seems alien. Clearly the avatar box can stop that happening.

In fact, the Na'avi have tails, and despite the lack of a human brain area dealing with tail movement, Sully's avatar's tail is depicted as moving around right from the beginning. So the avatar technology can somehow emulate parts of the nervous system which the operator doesn't have. Walking is largely controlled at the spinal cord level, so I'm sure it would be fairly easy for the technology to translate from "sprint" to "gallop".

Could have been the breakthrough girltaur film. Like how Desert Hearts made lesbianism mainstream. Oh well.

Oh yeah, and I was bothered by the fact that the human's Na'avi lover seemed to have no problem at all when she encountered his human body. Suppose you found out that the person you'd been mating with was actually a tiny dwarf with stunted limbs, atrophied eyes and ears, and a skin colour that didn't occur in nature. If you came across that dwarf, would you cradle it tenderly?

Anyway, I don't think you can fit enough characters in an LJ update to describe everything that was wrong with Avatar. The storytelling isn't incompetent, like Phantom Menace, it's just very, very predictable.

And yes, for a film that is supposed to be damning humans, it does depict the human protagonist as far superior to the "blue savages" whose way of life he is supposed to be protecting (even though it is just a mish-mash of lots of non-WASP human cultures). At one point, we are told that the Na'avi have only ever managed to tame a certain type of dragon leonopteryx five times in recorded history. But it turns out all you need to do to tame it is to jump on it from above. Only a marine in a Na'avi minstrel body has the smarts to think of that! Boo colonialism. Boo cultural appropriation.

In a universe with remote control of vat-grown avatars, why doesn't the evil Corporation exploit the espionage potential of human avatars? It would have been a nice twist to find out that Sigourney Weaver had been replaced with a puppet version of herself controlled by the HR department.

In fact, if you have the avatar technology, why worry about the PR implications of genocide at all? Just gradually replace the Na'avi with duplicates of themselves controlled by evil anthropologists, or hack their brains using avatars of the plug 'n' play wildlife, then once the whole society is puppetised, have them say they welcome the Sky People mine in exchange for vaccination and electricity and a diet of bread instead of potatoes.

That was probably the evil Corporation's plan all along. They are using an advanced Colonialism 2.0 technique. Their apparent military defeat was all staged for the benefit of the news; it was human avatars doing all the 'dying', and Sully is a triple agent who is gradually going to hack into the personalities of all the Na'avi, and make them love Big Sky Brother. Then they will willingly start exporting unobtainium at a very favourable rate.

It's weaponised cultural appropriation. Instead of forcing the populace to obey your will, you simply become them.

If you think I am over-analysing a stupid popcorn film, just look at the people who inspired this masterly bit of trolling:

Well I went into the movie yesterday thinking I was just going to see a sci-fi romp. Little did I know it would change my life forever. I sat in the theater after it was over just stunned, and then I began to cry. I was ripped apart with feelings I had never had before, hate for myself and my species, hate for my capitalistic and worthless society, and a feeling of such despair that I would never be able to know the Na’vi or their superior culture and way of life. I was there just thinking and crying for about 15 minutes before an usher asked me to leave. I told him I never wanted to leave and he was confused for a second. Then he said I had to go and if I wanted to see this “crappy movie” again I’d have to pay for another ticket. Well to cut to the chase it got a bit heated at that point and we ended up in a shoving match. The police officer who took me out of there didn’t seem to care either. When I told him he was a tool of an oppressive society that is destroying the world he laughed at me. Now I’ve got a charge against me for public disturbance but I don’t care. Hopefully that jerk usher got fired.

The next day I saw it at a different theater in 3d. All of a sudden the world was as real as my own. At the end I stood up and started telling the people that they were the bad guys and were killing the Na’vi everyday with their western society. I said look at Afghanistan! I got cussed out and had a soda thrown on me but I wore those like a badge of honor, I felt like a Na’vi standing against human oppression and sickness. I just wished I had a weapon at that point and could have fought like Jake did. Jake was so strong. I began to wish that I could be like a new Hitler, only instead of exterminating one race I’d do the whole human race then shoot myself at the end. My mom always said I get too wrapped up in this stuff but she is an idiot who is just as much part of the problem as every other American. I told her when I got home and she cried but I don’t care anymore, I’m 35 and I can do what I want in my room and don’t have to take any “medicine” if I don’t want to. Did the Na’vi take pills to “get better” Did the Indians? Nope. I just wish I could stop thinking of this; it’s more than a movie. My Mom used to think I was too into WoW but that was just a game. I quit playing and told my guild wife there to just forget me. This feels real, that is just stupid now. I don't even really want to go into work.

Sorry for a long first post. I’m in an emotional state right now and just wanted to vent with other believers. I wish I could wake up and be in a real world, not this hell hole we have created on Earth. I don't know if I should cry or be mad anymore.

[1] I bet in the first draft they were called the "Nativi", but someone persuaded Cameron to change it slightly in the second (and final) draft. He forgot to do the find and replace to change the name of the precious mineral from "unobtainium". ^

McSweeney's has done a one-off "newspaper" edition - anyone know any London bookshops that will be stocking this? I would have looked in Borders, but they're dead now.

Do you remember when putting a donk on it was a thing? I introduced the idea to a room full of people on Saturday night. They were horrified. Rightly.

A young lady jokingly suggested "If you liked it, should have put a donk on it".

Thanks to the internet, even the most trivial passing conceit can become a reality:

http://www.donkdj.com/remix/85006