>> ^lucky760:
I worry often and a lot about how I can possibly keep my sons from being perverted by this society.


Ditto. I think back to me growing up and the sort of soft introduction to adult material. First you'd see topless women in National Geographics, then maybe some 'lad's mags' in the store, nothing naked, just bikini stuff... then you might get hold of a Playboy and see naked women. And back then they were pretty much natural women too (sure, not 'average', but at least not silicon and botox plumped versions).

Then you might get to see some actual porn mags at your 'rough' friend's place...

These days: "Go on web, look up sex in google image search and get inundated with hard, filthy sex"

Yeah, quite concerned. Doing our best to shield our kids from it as much as possible. Plenty of talk about what sex is (we have 3 boys and a girl all under 9), and that side of things (my wife is a midwife, so it kind of comes up a lot), but shielding as much as possible from not just sex on the internet, but also what passes for mainstream music videos these days (I mean, fucking Katy Perry... FUCK).

I'm with you lucky. I have no problem with sex... no problem with masturbation, no problem with porn in and of itself (just what 90% of it has become)... but how engrained it's become and how central and how much it's pushing into the lives of younger and younger kids.

Yeah, it's not good

Yup, that's a white dot on a black surface.
I'm sure this event may be astronomically amazing but this video sucks - sorry have to downvote.

Edit: I don't mean your choice of video sucks, but visually, it means nothing on it's own, the camera work is terrible, no audio, no description, introduction, explanation or anything that would otherwise make it in some way great. As the mission of the Sift is to filter the crap, the chaos and the majestic, I feel the need to filter this out.

Name that introduction-maker??!

But it's in the spec!

http://www.libpng.org/pub/png/spec/1.1/PNG-Introduction.html

Incidentally, GIF is pronounced 'jif':
http://www.olsenhome.com/gif/

I'm not particularly happy about that one myself, as it collides with my native tongue rather unfortunately. Just another reason to use PNG, I guess!

>> ^KnivesOut:

KILL THE INFIDEL>> ^rebuilder:
>> ^KnivesOut:
What about pangees? How do you pronounce them?

"Ping".

My bad on D1 dungeons.

There will always be cookie-cutter builds. And besides, when you're talking about 'the' build, you're talking about the ideal items to have, the vast majority of people will never get there. Meanwhile, the options for 'best with what you have' varied heaps. I played D3 through with a Monk, and the entire time, the only stats that felt worthwhile chasing were damage, dexterity and vitality.

I'm not saying it didn't have dark elements, but vast portions of the story, dialogue and tone, particularly after Act 1 (which I thought was best part of the game), where juvenile and completely off for a Diablo game. I mean for christ sake, the game delved into damsel in distress territory multiple times. Anyway posted this elsewhere, going to just copy paste:

1. Story tone is horribly off for a Diablo game. Act 1, the tone is almost that right mix of dark, macabre & grim horror albeit with overly colourful graphics. Then, in Act 2 and especially 3/4 the game becomes flat out goofy. It's almost like different studios designed the two parts. Regardless, it's obvious the whole gothic, cheesy but serious tone of previously Diablo games has been thoroughly ditched.

It becomes obvious there is a reason that most of the prime evils were mostly mute & why your characters was kept to making sarcastic remarks and one liners in D2. Diablo beretting you with grating "if it wasn't for your meddling kids" dialogue completely ruins the game's tone. Overall the mix of occasional ultra-violence and the overt colourfulness and childish NPC banter gives it an almost surreal and contradictory theme. As if a design house was of two minds, fighting over dominance over the franchise's feel.

There was just no need to muck with what was not broken to the point that it's hard for me to NOT imagine Activision sitting behind the developers dictating them how well the WoW tone sits with target demographics. There is nothing wrong with WoW existing in its own space with it's own unique identity. There's a problem with creative variety between Blizzard games becoming non-existent because they've caught on to what sells best and decided to stick to that.

As for launch issues, I didn't play D2 at launch, but that's not what really bugs me. It is abundantly obvious though that foisting online-only is part of the reason they're having so many launch issues.

Here's my full bitch session - http://us.battle.net/d3/en/forum/topic/5149543659

>> ^mentality:

>> ^RedSky:
@mentality
D2 felt like a huge leap on D1. Randomized dungeons, huge increase in class and especially item variety, introduction of a vast swathe of new environments. In comparison critically looking at D3, while it does have an expanded skills system, at the end of a prodigious 11 year development cycle, D3 has far less item variety at launch, and arguably simplified gameplay mechanics on a number of levels.
Personally, I happen to also think the story is a let down, the tone of the game has been inappropriately been made cartoonish (art design non-withstanding).

D1 had randomized dungeons. Item variety in D2 was very limited because there often was one set of unique item that was 'THE' item for a specific build. The expanded environments in D2 were also very cartoony compared to the dungeons of D1, and calling D3 cartoonish with levels like the Halls of Agony is outright ridiculous.
The fact of the matter is that the grass is always greener, and we all look at the past with rose colored glasses. History repeats itself, but it seems like few people remember all the problems, controversy and bitching surrounding Diablo 2's launch.

>> ^RedSky:
@mentality
D2 felt like a huge leap on D1. Randomized dungeons, huge increase in class and especially item variety, introduction of a vast swathe of new environments. In comparison critically looking at D3, while it does have an expanded skills system, at the end of a prodigious 11 year development cycle, D3 has far less item variety at launch, and arguably simplified gameplay mechanics on a number of levels.
Personally, I happen to also think the story is a let down, the tone of the game has been inappropriately been made cartoonish (art design non-withstanding).


D1 had randomized dungeons. Item variety in D2 was very limited because there often was one set of unique item that was 'THE' item for a specific build. The expanded environments in D2 were also very cartoony compared to the dungeons of D1, and calling D3 cartoonish with levels like the Halls of Agony is outright ridiculous.

The fact of the matter is that the grass is always greener, and we all look at the past with rose colored glasses. History repeats itself, but it seems like few people remember all the problems, controversy and bitching surrounding Diablo 2's launch.

@lv_hunter

Normal difficulty compared to D2 simply feels far too easy. I recall D2 Act 1 was also quite easy, but from Duriel, really through to the end of normal, the game picked up substantially. I found almost the opposite here, while it is fair for them to ease players in early on, for me the difficulty spiked towards the end of Act 1, maybe early Act 2. From there the game was just a complete steamroll through to Nightmare.

Sure you get to replay it 3 more times, but plunging through the game at this pace for first impressions really ruins the gravitas of the stakes the story is trying to paint.

@mentality

I've heard this notion bandied around, but combining ideas from multiple games and perfecting them is still a form of innovation. And even on that measure they played it far too safe on D3.

D2 felt like a huge leap on D1. Randomized dungeons, huge increase in class and especially item variety, introduction of a vast swathe of new environments. In comparison critically looking at D3, while it does have an expanded skills system, at the end of a prodigious 11 year development cycle, D3 has far less item variety at launch, and arguably simplified gameplay mechanics on a number of levels.

Personally, I happen to also think the story is a let down, the tone of the game has been inappropriately been made cartoonish (art design non-withstanding).

>> ^spoco2:
Are mascots like these what happen when they want desperately to offend no-one?
"Nope, can't have that, looks a little Caucasian"
"Nope, can't have that, looks like a bear, people are afraid of bears"
"Nope, can't have that, looks like someone from the far north of Queensland, Australia"
I mean, they've just got rid of anything that could be identified as anything and ended up with two amorphous lumps.
Well fucking done.


On the plus side they're not as bad as the London 2012 Olympics logo that most people agree looks like Lisa Simpson giving a blowjob...

>> ^quantumushroom:
Was I the only one expecting them to f__k?


Not in front of the kids, surely?!

Very well stated. The devil's bell (which it's called in Ecuador and which name I like more than the others) has strong mythology about it, but it is apparently so difficult to extract the Datura from it, that most people I talked to about it just sort of laughed me off. I've spent more than two months traveling in both Ecuador and Colombia, six of those weeks studying with a leading northern Andean ethnographer. When you're on the road, it's a lot of fun to talk about these kinds of extreme phenomena, but for the most part, it's touristy b.s. The plant is much more famous for the hallucinogenic tea that can be made from the flowers themselves, which is also fatal if prepared incorrectly. Btw, Datura is the same compound that produces the infamous Vodou zombies in Haiti, made famous by Harvard ethnobotanist Wade Davis's "The Serpent and the Rainbow."

Vice loves to sensationalize this kind of thing, and I'm frankly a little annoyed at the characterization of the current political atmosphere in Colombia. Even the U.S. State Department's travel.state.gov, which is notoriously over-sensitive, has only qualified warnings about the dangers of traveling in rural areas. Colombia is a lot safer than the introduction to this story has painted it. Total disservice to the country and culture that gave this journalist his story. But Vice likes to dirty it up to sell mags to hipsters.

Still, totally entertaining and somewhat informative. Nice find.>> ^legacy0100:

lol I don't know about this one. Vice reporters are often a bit naive at times...
Still this was very well Directed. Had great atmosphere and pacing. Very good.

I like Sienna's final preparation for sexy time too much to let her introduction rot in the queue. *promote

I think the way I'd put it is that I disagree that "Hegelian dialectic" is being appropriately used in the video. Here is a nice concise introduction to the concept. It's an alternative method for reasoning, and therefore is about trying to reach a better understanding of truth -- it has nothing to do with psychology, politics, or trying to control people.

The triadic structure of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis can, if you squint a bit, be re-purposed as a general theory about how political and scientific progress happens. First you have a thesis (e.g. "property is the only right"), then you have an antithesis ("property is theft"), and once people realize that while both positions contain insights, neither absolute position is fully correct, and so we generate a new thesis that combines the valid insights of each -- a synthesis ("a right to property is one of many rights, and without limits can and will infringe on those other rights"). But that's not a Hegelian Dialectic, that's just a slightly stilted way at looking at how "classical" reasoning sometimes plays out in the real world.

All that said, none of this serves to support the thesis that modern conceptions of the political left and right have been invented in order to achieve some sort of nefarious synthesis. Worse, if you think it's a Hegelian Dialectical synthesis we're heading for, then not only is it not a Reichstag fire, it's a giant leap forward in humanity's understanding of itself, because we will have figured out how to simultaneously resolve the left's criticisms of society (not enough equality in wealth and power), and the right's (too many people disputing the rightful distribution of wealth and power that arises from market action), though personally I don't think the resolution of that thesis/antithesis conflict will result in synthesis, just in the right's thesis being discarded. Again.

Long story short, if this is the foundation for a conspiracy theory, it's already gone way out into left field before it's even gotten started.

In reply to this comment by enoch:
In reply to this comment by NetRunner:
The Shock Doctrine and disaster capitalism are a lot more precise concepts than this. The idea behind the Shock Doctrine isn't that all conceptions of left and right are a distraction from the so-called "real" issues, it's where you foment a series of national crises in order to subvert the mechanisms of democracy in order to implement radical policies that would only be acquiesced to when people were in a state of shock.

In the case of disaster capitalism, you actually get a nice feedback loop. Deregulate markets, newly deregulated markets crash and create an economic crisis, and new "reforms" which further deregulate markets are proposed as the solution to the crisis created by the last round of deregulation. See all economic policy proposed by Republicans since the 1980's for examples.

There's also a burden of proof fallacy at work here. 3 cherry-picked quotes from Bush and Kerry on Iraq does not a conspiracy make. The political divide in the country in 2004 over Iraq clearly had the "stay forever" and "get out now" poles to it. That the Democratic candidate was moderate and said merely "don't stay forever", is more a sign of there being a right-wing conspiracy rigging elections and corrupting the Democratic party, not that the very idea of left and right having policy disagreements is some sort of elaborate distraction.

The thing I'm sensing in a lot of liberals these days is the sense that even when we win elections, we're still pretty much getting Republican policies rammed down our throats. We're even doing this thing where we Occupy places in protest of the 1% corrupting our political process and subverting the will of the people...


hey man,
i cant tell if you are agreeing with the video or not.
i am going to guess on the negative.
which kind of confuses me because the video is really just laying out what the hegelian dialectic is and how it can be used to be a lever of control.(sans the ron paul filler at the end).
i found it a pretty short but succinct in its intended goal to educate.

your descriptions of "shock doctrine" and "disaster capitalism" are correct but your premise seems to ignore that both utilize the hegelian dialectic to execute properly in to a society.

example:
problem (thesis)<------------------> reaction (antithesis)

but what if the institution meant to execute the reaction is the very same institution which created the problem,and hence is in the position to offer a solution? a solution which may have been the very thing they were after in the first place?

see where i am going with this?
so while in one scenario the problem is a creation,a facade, (shock doctrine) and the other (disaster capitalism) is an opportunistic leap for control,BOTH utilize the hegelian dialectic to accomplish their goals.

i am not a huge admirer of hegel (ok,i think he is a cunt) but he did understand human beings and the societies they live in because his predictions have played out quite accurately,when placed in the right context.

my thinking behind posting that video was to help people become aware of those levers of control.the philosophy behind those who wish to dominate and control the masses.
the more you know and all that jazz.

once you understand the hegelian dialectic and HOW it is used,you will see it in places and used in ways that prior you would have thought impossible.
it is used by those in power often and extremely well.

anyways.i just wanted to drop a note to you because either i misunderstood your comment or i am just a tad retarded.
in either case my friend,know that i love your commentary and i especially love your optimism.
really..keep up the optimism.my cynicism needs a dose every now and then.
peace brother.

i love the introduction saying that its teeth are as big as a great white shark, not a great white shark's teeth, but the actual shark!
BTW, *downunder

In reply to this comment by spoco2:
Hey there!

I hope that the truly bizarre welcome you got to the sift doesn't put you off, it's a great place for discussion.

I'm from way down south of Oz in Melbourne, but I've been to Byron Bay for a wedding, and it's a lovely place.


In reply to this comment by PlayhousePals:
HI there, thought I'd introduce myself. It's my first week anniversary sifting here ... I see you are from Australia. I had a chance to visit during a whirlwind tour back in 2001 [My friends were headlining the Byron Bay Blues Festival that year, so I got to tag along] ... didn't get to spend NEARLY enough time in your country, but was impressed with how beautiful it is and how GREAT the people we met are. I hope I can go back some day, it was absolutely one of the most memorable trips I've ever embarked on, HoyHoy


Thanks! It was a bizarre introduction to the site, but hey, who doesn't like a bit of drama [when it's warranted that is]. I really enjoy it here [now] =oD

The band played the Mercury Lounge in Melbourne and the Metro in Sydney before popping over the Auckland for a show at the St. James Theater. It went by so fast! I really wish we'd had longer than ten days down under. My favorite little town was Nimbin in NSW ... my kind of people!

I'm rather fond of the introduction of artists and critics.