Videos (828) | Sift Talk (65) | Blogs (49) | Comments (1000) |
Videos (828) | Sift Talk (65) | Blogs (49) | Comments (1000) |
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FIRST LOOK! - Hell Let Loose (New Realistic WW2 FPS)
A platoon-based realistic multiplayer first-person shooter for PC set during the Second World War.
HUGE BATTLES - 100 players per game, 50 per team
COORDINATE - Win through teamwork, tactics, and communication
A NEW METAGAME - Capture sectors and resources to beat your enemy into submission
COMBINED ARMS - Over 20 different player-controlled vehicles and deployed weapons
EPIC THEATER OF WAR - Do battle across a 1:1 scale 4 kilometer-squared map
MORE THAN THE TWITCH - Supply, capture and building systems
EXPERIENCE HISTORY - Historically accurate arsenal with realistic weapon behavior
A MODERN ENGINE - Developed for Unreal Engine 4
Straight is the new gay - Steve Hughes
I live in NZ. There's very much a "she'll be right" attitude to H&S here. And in some ways, it's great. It's easier to set up sports clubs, if you want to go in the wilderness, you're pretty much on your own, etc.
But the flip side is the fact that we have a terrible rate of injuries and actual deaths in industry, especially in agriculture and forestry.
And quite honestly, I think this "H&S gone mad" attitude is actually promoted by companies who don't want to pay to keep their employees safe. And that's not hyperbole, there is literally an ongoing investigation into a company that skimped on safety resulting in the deaths of 29 miners.
I agree it can be taken too far, and maybe the UK really is insane, but in my experience, it's one of those things that people whine about when they don't understand the reasons behind it.
PC, we'll agree to disagree.
Smoking: again smoke if you want to, but just not around me. Why should I have to put up with smoke when I'm having a meal? More importantly, why should the staff who have to work there, have to put up with a toxic environment?
As for the competition argument, it doesn't really hold water. A few pubs in Ireland preempted the smoking ban, and they went out of business, because there's almost always one person in a group that smokes. Having it as a law makes a level playing field.
I've been in three countries now when smoking was banned in pubs. Every time, the hospitality industry said it would be the death of them. 10 years later, no one gives a damn. People still go to pubs and a lot less people smoke. It worked.
My inline comments in italics below \/.
Straight is the new gay - Steve Hughes
Sometimes I feel like people have to expend a lot of effort to miss the point so well...
OH&S - We had a MSDS for Spray and Wipe in the office which required us to use gloves and a facemask. Ordinary surface cleaner. And it was enforced... This is what he is talking about. Taking what started as a good idea and going way too fucking far with it.
PC - You kinda prove the point right off the bat with "straight white dude". You're discriminating. You feel justified in doing so because white males are so fucking awful to everyone on the planet (it's true, I heard a feminist say so..), but it doesn't change the fact that it's discrimination. You're either politically correct all the time or you're a hypocrite. I happen to support your right to discriminate, but take issue with hypocrisy.
Smoking - Missing the point, the government makes it socially unacceptable, removes the places where you can do it, but leaves it as legal and runs up the cost to astronomical levels to keep the revenue rolling in. It's an innately contradictory position.
The bit on Ireland was more a commentary on the Irish than smoking...
And of course smokers are one of the few groups within society that almost no one will stand up to defend. Very easy to be non-PC and discriminate against (gotta let all those uptight PC dickheads vent their spleen somewhere I guess... =)
Oppressive health and safety? Oh please can we return to when employers could order me to endanger my life just for a paycheck.
PC? Been down this road a million times, but it's really easy for a straight white dude to talk about not being offended.
Smoking? I give zero fucks if you want to smoke, just don't do it around me. Oh, and I was in Ireland when they banned smoking in pubs. It was fucking great, and yeah, it encouraged a bunch of people to quit.
Straight is the new gay - Steve Hughes
As much as I love Steve Hughes, and as much as I hate taking a comedy bit seriously, he's pretty much wrong about every single point in this video.
Oppressive health and safety? Oh please can we return to when employers could order me to endanger my life just for a paycheck.
PC? Been down this road a million times, but it's really easy for a straight white dude to talk about not being offended.
Smoking? I give zero fucks if you want to smoke, just don't do it around me. Oh, and I was in Ireland when they banned smoking in pubs. It was fucking great, and yeah, it encouraged a bunch of people to quit.
Anyway, as I said, it's a comedy bit and it's funny. Just don't go actually believing it.
Steve Hughes is great. His bit about being offended should be required material on day 1 for students going to University:
(been sifted before, but I think this ^ has the full short set)
Is There an Alternative to Political Correctness?
"Politically correct language is allegedly designed to solve this bullying problem and its etymological by-product. The practitioners of political correctness adopt the strategy of periodically replacing the words used as insults with new terms in an effort to avoid negative connotations imbued—or allegedly imbued—in existing terms."
I disagree with that. I don't think PC (god, I hate that term) is designed to "solve the bullying problem". It's simply to stop the normalisation of terms like "retarded".
I appreciate reading everyone's responses here. It's a very big part of what makes Videosift such a special place.
Here's a link to, imho, a thoughtful and nuanced look at this issue...at least from one side.
A Critique of Politically Correct Language
By Ben O'Neill
http://www.independent.org/pdf/tir/tir_16_02_8_oneill.pdf
When Windows 10 makes you racist
Well, it would appear that MS is monitoring my posts here and felt that my defending them was unwarranted because literally just this morning I returned to work to find my PC had rebooted without my permission.

Granted, this is a brand new machine that I haven't finished configuring, but still, that is bloody annoying.
So I'm off for a coffee and a slice of humble pie.
Damn you M$!!!
I hear you, and would have completely agreed with you, right up until Windows 10 restarted for an update in the middle of me playing a full-screen game. Apparently it was a similar message as what he had, but I couldn't see it behind the game. So that sucked.
That was before the Creator's Update, back when my Windows "active hours" were deemed too long by Microsoft standards, which is just crap. That is fixed now.
I keep my machine updated, but it seems like my work environment has more control over Windows updates than I do as a home user (running Win 10 Pro).
When Windows 10 makes you racist
When people only know how to turn on a PC and check mail and browse the web this stuff can happen. Unfortunately this guy represents more people than you think.
Is There an Alternative to Political Correctness?
Whatever benefits PC might bring to society, all I tend to see any more is the malignant outgrowth of the idea, with do-gooder dimwits using it as a weapon to wield. Where conversation is now a mine field, waiting for some eavesdropper to derive some offense and send us off to the equivalent of a re-education camp.
Hell is other people.
Is There an Alternative to Political Correctness?
The video pretty drastically oversold the benefits of Political Correctness, in my opinion. I do, however, completely agree that generic "politeness" is a far superior standard to hold yourself to or goal to aspire to.
PC vs politeness seems very highly analogous to perceiving things as either intrinsically "offensive" or being personally "offended". Humor is frequently a fantastic way of exploring those kinds differences, and SMBC comics did an excellent strip on offensive vs offended:
http://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2011-02-23
The conclusion there is that "I'm offended" starts arguments (ie., it can create rational and beneficial dialog) while "offensive" ends them (ie., it stifles progress). I feel that it is equally accurate to say that politeness can help resolve problems while PCness really doesn't; it is possible to politely disagree, but in the realm of PC disagreement in and of itself is often deemed offensive and seen as something to be discouraged.
I think part of being an adult is learning that people will often disagree, and that is actually a good thing.
Is There an Alternative to Political Correctness?
@Diogenes
I'm not sure I'm following what you're saying. Why should a reasonable person be pissed off at a third party calling out offensive language use? To use a hypothetical:
I jokingly call my brother a "retard" because he locks his keys in the car. We grew up in the 80s, so this this pejorative is something we are comfortable with and feel no inhibitions about using. My brother laughs it off.
Now let's assume this happens in a parking lot as we're standing outside my brother's car and a woman passing by overhears my comment and chastises me for equating stupid actions with people who have mental disabilities.
Should reasonable bystanders watching all this be pissed off, since my comment wasn't directed at the woman? On the one hand, my brother and I weren't offended by the use of the word "retard" to mean stupid. On the other hand, our very usage of the word "retard" in that particular way promotes and sustains a culture that already heavily looks down on mental illness and mental disabilities.
I'm genuinely curious about your answer to this. If I'm reading your comment correctly, the primary negative of PC language that you see is that some people feel smug when they call out other people on their language usage. But does the fact that some people are smug about it make them wrong in pointing out the offender?
Is There an Alternative to Political Correctness?
I think most everyone knows how to be polite. A lot of people just don't put much effort into its practice. PC speech doesn't have to be a bad thing, but unfortunately it's most often used by people--to which any "offending" language likely wasn't directed--as a way of virtue signalling over the "offender." This is what pisses most reasonable people off.
Is There an Alternative to Political Correctness?
Hmm... I'm not so sure PC speech can be so easily separated from politeness. I mean, isn't one of the main reasons for the promotion of PC speech to raise peoples' awareness of how our everyday use of words can demean people? That's why, for example, PC speech proponents pushed for changing the term "garbage man" to "sanitation worker." Or why they decried the use of the word "gay" being used as synonymous with "stupid."
Certainly PC speech also is concerned with how language is used to oppress others but it seems to me it is also quite concerned with creating more polite language usage.
Why Brutalism is the hottest trend in web design
I agree, there are definitely sites like the one you linked to that can get an idea across with visuals / media / flash / whatever that would be impossible or drastically less efficient with pure text.
To me, uBlock Origin or Adblock with Element Hiding Helper is capable of finding a happy medium around 90% of the time.
I like Dilbert. Up until about a year or so ago, there was a URL to go to a page that had the latest comic with simple links to back/forward navigation. No comments or other extraneous stuff. Then Scott Adams did a site redesign and added a fuckload of ads, a "blog" about Adams' political opinions that I don't give 2 shits about, social media links, tags, comments, a star rating, and a "BUY" button. If I'm not running my browser maximized, all that crap pushes the single bit of content that I actually DO want (the comic image) so far out of frame that I have to scroll down to see it. F that.
uBlock itself takes care of the ads. Everything else that annoys me is gone by using the "element picker", which filters out sections or bits of HTML that I can choose. So now, when I visit dilbert.com I get the 3 most recent comic images with a title/date line and *nothing* else.
Videosift isn't immune on my PC either. The "social panel" for each video? Gone. Facebook "likebox"? Gone.
I've run into a few pages that detect custom filtering in a way similar to ad blocking detection. Sometimes, I can just select those "warning" elements and hide them -- especially if they are in a floating frame that simply loads on top of the actual page content. Sometimes those warnings actually prevent the page content from loading. Something from wired did that recently. I haven't clicked through to a wired article since.
So to address the actual video/concept....
First up, brutalist architecture is fucking awful. There was a bunch of it in Christchurch and if the earthquake did one good thing, it was to get rid of most of those god-awful buildings.
Second, the web isn't about words; it's about information.
How that information is conveyed depends on the target audience and the information being presented.
Sometimes the information is simple and the target audience is actually a machine, in which case we have things like REST and SOAP.
Other times the information is complex, and best represented visually. Can anyone honestly tell me that a site like this (http://thetruesize.com) would be better brutalised?
That's not to say there aren't problems with web bloat. Of course there are. But let's not throw the baby out with the bath water.
Mordhaus
(Member Profile)
Congratulations! Your video, Terry Crews explains why he decided to build his own PC, has reached the #1 spot in the current Top 15 New Videos listing. This is a very difficult thing to accomplish but you managed to pull it off. For your contribution you have been awarded 2 Power Points.

This achievement has earned you your "Golden One" Level 105 Badge!
Terry Crews explains why he decided to build his own PC
That's the worst time, the inevitable second act dilemma, of PC building.
You can budget in the expectation of how long it takes to do the housekeeping stuff. Loading the OS, essential programs, personal preferences - the games themselves...but there's often that one random thing.
I built a nice medium-range game PC with someone else recently, my building partner was so excited. It's amazing how much of a bond that creates between people, or how it can strengthen a relationship. Not just for building PC's specifically, but for sharing something and having that moment of realization of how cool that thing shared really is.
I felt more pissed off than anything for a brief moment during the boot up, when the display seemed to shutdown startup before anything really happened. Luckily, I'd paid attention enough when researching the GPU and eventually remembered someone mentioning there was a button on the card itself that controls the LED lights on it, pressing it seemed to clear whatever was blocking the startup processes for the card.
There was definitely a soul-crushing few hours of doubt and agony before I remembered that detail. During that time, I stared at the clean interior of the fully assembled build, having had a hard enough time getting the cords to fit and wondering if something minor and imperceptible had wiggled loose, wondering if I would go mad.
Having someone else depending on the solution was another intense emotion heightening element. I'd done my best to prime for this likelihood. I'd shared stories of problems I'd had on previous builds, the random thing that went wrong. I stressed the fact that the computer had always, eventually, got built.
It's a good, stinging bit of humility for me. Even when I try to minimize problems and anticipate potential issues, I'll still miss something as obvious as a big button right in front of my face.
I can't help but wonder about how much fun was had in the unmentioned time between pressing the power button, and actually being able to play games.