Applied Indifference

More stifling of free association in the U.K. Or, rather, the stifling of a lack of non-association.

This is yet another instance of victimzation politics, specifically gender identity politics rearing its ugly head. It seems that a Christian student union has had its charter suspended and assets frozen; for the crime of not being inclusive of all religious faiths. Think of that for a second. This demand is akin to demanding that a Muslim be allowed to accept communion, or that a Christian be allowed to make the Hajj. It just doesn’t make sense. Never mind that they don’t exclude anyone from their meetings, only their (voting) membership.

In addition, the Union claims that they were also told they must include language that explicitly mention[s] people who are lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgendered. They were also advised that the use of the terms “men” and “women” in the constitution might be construed as excluding “transgendered” and “transsexual” persons.

Understand what this means. This insistence by group-identity politics advocates that their special group must be explicitly included in all organizing charters serves but one purpose: to make sure that members of a recognized victim group don’t have their little feelings hurt. This is based upon the fallacy that a lack of explicit inclusion is necessarily an implicit exclusion.

My advice to those who are aggrieved of the existence of an organization that neither explicitly forbids them nor flamoyantly announces their unwavering devotion to them? Grow up. We in the adult world understand that not everyone is going to like us, and it is none of our business to try to force them to. Get over yourself, you’re just as insignificant as the rest of us.

Hat Tip: James Lileks

Tags: Politics by Brian Corbino
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OK, having logged a few hours, I have more commentary on this game.

Annoyances:

• Whenever you finish a game in the real-time calendar, you go back to the main menu. This is a pain in the ass.
• You cannot have more than one person on a machine in online play. This is stupid.
• Memory card access is too slow, and half the time it doesn’t show anything on the screen while it is thinking. And would it be too much to ask that you REMEMBER WHAT ZARKING CARD YOU READ THE PROFILE FROM? Taking a minute and a half to wade through a bunch of “Are you sure?” prompts, and another minute to select the card is a big pain in the ass.

I’m sure I’ll find more.

The putting is both liberating and infuriating. I don’t know how “realistic” it is, but it seems that the difference of a few milliseconds between 50% and 80% (and hence dropping the shot, or going 4 miles off the green) is a touch too sensitive. Then again, I could just be a loser, I don’t know. The grid is nice. I’ve gotten to the point where on a relatively sane green I don’t need to consult the camera. Some of these greens (Red Rock Creek anyone?) you need an advanced degree in trigonometry, a roll of duct tape, and minor explosives to get the ball to do anything useful. I found myself three-putting more often than not.

I don’t know how they figure club range, but when I have to use 2/3 boost to get to the distance that it indicates, with no wind, and on level ground, something’s just not quite right. Or are we back to the millisecond issue again?

Overall, decent. If they fix the annoyances above, and manage to not add new ones, I’ll be back for 2007.

“Whoa momma, stay up.”

Tags: Video Games by Brian Corbino
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Tiger Woods PGA Tour 06 - EA Sports - Playstation 2

First Impressions.

The major improvements touted for Tiger Woods PGA Tour 06 (TW2k6) over its predecessor were more precise control of how the ball is hit, and more precise control in putting. For those not in the know, with 2k5 you were limited in your ball striking to changing your stance (open, close, center) and putting spin on the ball once it was hit. The former is not nearly granular enough (especially for those of us who grew up with Jack Nicklaus and Links on the PC), and the latter is just plain bunk (influencing the ball after it’s in the air? Please.)

What they’ve done in 2k6 is taken advantage of that second analog stick as something other than a duplicate of the first. You still swing with the left stick, but now you control where on the ball you hit with the right stick. It allows a much finer control of loft and curve than the previous methods of stance and swinging diagonally.

Putting is actually more than a mere guessing game. Instead of having your caddy just make up numbers for where you should aim (and usually be wrong about them), the grid is back. Now you can see the lay of the green and figure it out for yourself. There’s a simple “ideal path” aid, but you still need to control your putting power. No more “point and shoot” where 100% of a swing represents the ball going the distance you measured out (on a flat green, anyhow).

They’ve also tightened up the physics. You can’t pull out the driver on the fairway and expect to get anywhere. And if you try to get under the ball with a 3 wood, don’t expect much more than a clump of grass in your face. In other words, I don’t think I’ll be finishing up many rounds at Troon in the low 50s.

There are a few places where I’m not sure if it’s me, or th physics engine that’s on drugs. One is coming out of a hazard. Sometimes you’ll be on top of sand (it’ll show 80%), and you’ll come up 2 clubs short. Sometimes you’ll be buried in the sand, and you’ll go 50% beyond what the club would have done from a perfect lie. This bears further investigation for several reasons. First, my characters stats are very low, and the low recovery stat may have a large influence on this. Second, I don’t know how much influence varying levels of shot boost have on this. Given my penchant for finding bunkers at Reflection Bay, I should probably play a practice round there without using boost and see what results I get.

There’s a bunch of neat multi-player games available, and we’ve only started to play with those. Maybe I’ll post more after playing with them.

Overall, it’s not staggeringly different from 2k5. Looks about the same. The play is different, but only because of the refined response of the clubs. It did seem a bit ridiculous that I would be in first place in every tournament by the time I got to the 15th hole of the first round. That didn’t happen here. I didn’t make the cut thanks to Reflection Bay completely and totally owning me.

I could make suggestions, but I’ll hold off until I’ve played a bit more. If only I could play REAL golf this well.

Tags: Video Games by Brian Corbino
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I got Crimson one of those pressed-rawhide bones. She seems to enjoy stealing them from Mimi at the cottage, so I figured, what the hell.

So, I put the bag down on the floor, and she spends her time pawing at the bag and crying. Give the dog the bone, and what does she do?

Walk around the house with it in her mouth for a half hour.

I think she’s waiting for Mimi to try to steal it before she’ll actually chew on it.

Tags: Randomness by Brian Corbino
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awaiting volley.

Tags: Randomness by Brian Corbino
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While we’re on the subject of self-destructing political imbeciles (ok, refer me to the Department of Redunancy Department):

Hillary Rodham Rodham, in a speech delivered on Martin Luther King Day, had this to say of the Republican Party:

When you look at the way the House of Representatives has been run, it has been run like a plantation and you know what I’m talking about…

Let me get this straight: the erstwhile candidate for the party that tells blacks “sit down, shut up, vote for us, and get to the back of the bus” is comparing the Republican-led House to a plantation?

Hillary. In the rotunda. With a metaphor.

Tags: Politics by Brian Corbino
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Please. I’m begging you. Do it. You’ll see the destruction of the Democratic Party so fast it’ll make your head spin.

If comments on HuffPo about Gore’s latest bloviation are indicative of the level of intellect and memory of the partisans of the “progressive” left, the Democrats are doomed.

I mean, these are the people that shriek about George Bush’s assault on civil liberties, and yet they are supporting the man who slavishly pushed his wife’s anti-rock agenda in the Senate.

They wail about the criminality of the Bush administration, and conveniently forget that Al Gore was second chair for eight years, while countless members of the President’s cabinet went to prison for fraud, corruption, and other assorted villainy.

So please, Democrats. Choose Al Gore to be your nominee in 2008. So he can lose again, and soundly.

Tags: Politics by Brian Corbino
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These new video cards are fantastic. We’re playing games at resolutions completely unheard of only a few years ago. But there is a major by-product of all that performance. Heat. And with heat, comes heat removal. And that means fans. Usually loud ones.

I have the BFG 6800OC. Overclocked right out of the box. Dual fan, lighted copper heatsink. However, dual, high-speed, teeny-tiny-move-the-air-around-the-box fans. Which means loud. Granted, it’s a major improvement over the Abit Siluro OTES 4200 it replaced. That beast had an externally-exhausting 7200RPM blower on it that sounds like a JT9D.

But I digress. So, we’ve got high-pitched fans on the 6800. High-pitched noises are far more annoying to the ear than low-pitched ones. So, bigger is better for fans. Less turbulence and lower speeds for same or better ariflow means less noise. Enter the NV Silencer 5.

It took all of 20 minutes to install, and it’s not hard to do. Mine had one of those rubbery TIM pads on it for the GPU, which I promptly scraped off and replaced with real thermal compound.

I’ve not beaten this and tested it like the boys at [H]ard|OCP do. I don’t push the clock on everything here to the limit. I just want a stable, quiet box that can work and play without driving me mad. However, a few tests were done to make sure nothing was going to melt.

Case temperature is about the same (give or take a degree), but the box is under my desk, and is mostly breathing in it’s own air. GPU and CPU idle temps are relatively unchanged. However, the GPU temp won’t hit 60° C now, where it would easily hit 70° under load before.

And, it’s quiet. You can’t hear the thing over the other fans. Just a little hum now, no more squeal.

NOTE: This is neither a solicited nor paid review for any of the products mentioned. Nor do I want any money for mentioning them. However, the NV Silencer met a specific need I had, and I wanted to share. Your mileage may vary.

Tags: Computers by Brian Corbino
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Still there.

Tags: Randomness by Brian Corbino
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Univerisyt of Missouri-Columbia study on video games is claimed to “goes some way towards demonstrating a causal link between computer games and violence”.

Of course, even the excerpts of the study do no such thing. The very first reference is testing people who have been playing games for years. And they measure the response to “violent images”. And they conclude that since the reaction to images of real-life violence don’t inspire revulsion, that the people have become “desensitized to violence”, and therefore are more violent themselves.

Except there is not one single statistic that bears this out. If video games were making people more violent, wouldn’t the incidence of violent crimes be up? Wouldn’t there be more shootings, more beatings, more robberies? I mean, if everyone was emulating Sonny in Grand Theft Auto, there ought to be dead prostitutes littering the streets, right?

But there aren’t.

What we have here is yet another in a long line of politically-motivated “studies” that are trying to prove a correlation between consumption of violent media and violent behaviour. And they then take any hint of correlation and immediately assign the causality that the video games must have made the person violent.

Of course, since these are all improperly controlled studies, they never manage to disprove the opposite causality, which is that perhaps violent people are drawn to violent media. And by carefully avoiding any real-world results, and instead relying upon brain scans, they can say that a person who has violent thoughts is ipso facto violent, even if that person never commits a violent act against another.

And so therefore, I call bullshit. If I feel so inclined, I’ll read the whole report that was produced, but I suspect I’ll be able to tear it apart in a matter of minutes. Although it might be fun to thoroughly fisk something like this - especially if it’s been peer-reviewed.

Tags: Politics, Video Games by Brian Corbino
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