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Most useful advide for dealing with abusive criticism I’ve ever read

Posted on February 3, 2012 in Thoughts & Musings

Maybe an unconstructive crit has a few constructive nuggets in it, and you worry you’ll miss out on those if you throw the whole thing out. Man, if it’s truly valid critique, other people will tell you the same thing without being assholes about it and you can listen to them instead.

I guess a metaphor would be, someone offers you a bucket of shit and says there’s a chunk of gold buried in the bottom. Dude, don’t go sifting through that bucket. For one thing, if it is gold, it isn’t worth it, especially when there are other people willing to give you a chunk of gold without feces all over it. More likely than not, you get to the bottom of that bucket and find out it was just bits of corn anyway.

By Megan Rosalarian on tumblr

She’s right, yoh!

Just because somebody is talking about your work, doesn’t mean they’re right. Most of them are blowing hot air eitherway, especially when it’s faceless people on the internet.

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A thing to ponder… The future of computers.

Posted on January 11, 2012 in Thoughts & Musings

Every one of them will arrive at the same place: “Can’t you just make us a general-purpose computer that runs all the programs, except the ones that scare and anger us? Can’t you just make us an Internet that transmits any message over any protocol between any two points, unless it upsets us?”

 

Go check out the full article “Lockdown: The coming war on general-purpose computing” , it’s a pretty important read. If you agree or not, at least this is something we should think about.

In my case, it made me think about the fact that the future could look VERY different from what I expected as student. I always assumed people would end up having at least one, if not multiple general purpose computer in every home, which they can use freely how ever they intend.

But you know, it could be just happen in 10, 20 years that general purpose devices are actually either prohibited, severly regulated or just plain not accessible for Joe Schmoe and email, chat and stuff would happen about the government-approved (or, even more likely, COMPANY-approved – it’s not the governments that runs our world these days) applications/devices against which facebook  or the iPhone is the very model of free, unregulated, unfettered and individual information distribution.

And the majority of people (including me?) would be happy with this state, because, well, as long as it’s convient and doesn’t get into the future-angry-birds, why complain? I know I usually don’t give a flying fuck about consequences of gating, at least as long as my toy does what I bought it for and I can look at my cat pictures.

You know, I never thought about how fragile the internet actually is.

A book needs to be found to be burned; but in order to get rid of the internet you just need gain control the phonelines (including wlan), as the unrests in England and the arab spring have shown. The whole freely accessible internet thing might just be a bubble about to burst, something that will die and wither, just like the hippie movement.

Welp.

At least this gives me some nice ideas how the people in my science fiction stories handle things like this.

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Happy New Year 2012

Posted on January 1, 2012 in Thoughts & Musings

Well, hello there  2012. Fancy to see you.

I’m not a fan of new years declarations. Most of them are hollow. Feel good things made because, well, people should make them. It’s why the majority of them are forgotten in February.

Wanting things is hard. Declaring them as goals you take serious, that’s even harder. Actually taking action? That’s the hardest part of them all. I do not even want to talk about what I want.

So the only thing I did in preperation for 2012?

I bought a calender. Maybe I will use it to write down what I did for ToC each day. Maybe not.

Happy new year to you all!

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Boobplate, no boobplate and Skyrim got it right.

Posted on December 16, 2011 in Thoughts & Musings

This is an armourer’s take on it -  good article, plus, it gave you that wonderful equation above.

 

If you need some good example for realistic female armour (in case you feel the need to differ armour between the sexes) go, check out Skyrim. That’s something it did really, really well.

 

All the ladys 1, look definitivly female but still badass and, most importantly, their armour looks as if it indeed does protect their important bits. Frankly, it’s a good thing Skyrim this right. The game is going for utmost realismn on the armour and graphic front, and boobplate woulda pulled people out.

Incidientially, another thing Skyrim does well is maintainging fair and interesting relationship between the sexes despite being set in a classic, high fantasy mediavial/greek/nordic society. Skyrim basically is the poster child for Rated M for manly, where proud vikings wrestle polar bears, and yet it manages to have heaps of respectful treated women, who are genuily complex characters2 and actually do something.

I can’t help but feel that those two things are related.

Footnotes:

  1. Including my thieves guild armour wearing, firebreathing, dragon-slaying kitty lady, although, now that I play on maximal difficulty, the dragons tend to slay HER ↩
  2. I am particular fond of Legate Rikke (General Tullius Second in Command) and Igrod Ravencrone (the jarl of Morthal) ↩
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You know the serenity prayer?

Posted on December 13, 2011 in Thoughts & Musings

You know, the one that goes:

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
Courage to change the things I can,
And wisdom to know the difference.1

I am slightly less religious as your common quartz, but me thinks I really need something like that, just for not-dithering.

Goddamnit2. Stuff doesn’t have to perfect, it just needs to get DONE. *shakes fist*

Footnotes:

  1. Frankly, I wastly prefer the variation where the last line goes: “And the wisdom to properly hide the bodies”, but there you go. ↩
  2. The major drawback of being a-religious always has been the lack of interesting blasphemies. In my younger angry-atheist-days I screened and replaced them, but well, there’s only so much you can replace with fuck until you sound like an angry rapsong.
    Speaking of which, the best and most creative cursers I knew where Catholics. Go figure. ↩
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