djpretzel

Well, look.... obviously this is complete bullshit for the affected content creators who are producing original content that simply happens to be ABOUT or INVOLVE the material in question... ... but - simply as a topic of conversation - for every individual working hard to provide meaningful content on YT, for which compensation in the form of ad revenue is absolutely appropriate, there are dozens if not hundreds who are putting stuff up verbatim, with no modifications whatsoever, and monetizing it. That USED to be fine, because monetization USED to be harder, but since it's become so very easy to monetize pretty much ANYTHING on YouTube, Pandora's Box was opened, and Copyright Holders do have some legitimate objections to people just blatantly using their shit to make money, with zero-to-minimal original contributions of their own. Divining the degree to which a "substantial original contribution" has been made is something that no algorithm that I'm aware of could BEGIN to handle. And so, in a reversal of their "Don't be evil" mantra from days of yore, they're erring on the side of big money. Shocker! A more interesting question... was this their plan all along? Let the cat wayyyy out of the bag, let the childrens run WILD, then flick the BIG MONEY SWITCH on, then reel it all back in & divert all that cheddar back to Corporate Earth? So devious, if so... and yet, a truly post-Internet business model! In my mind, the best solution is making it HARDER to monetize videos in the first place - that's the place where human review can & should still be involved...

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I am vetoing this. I realize it was unanimous, which makes this all the stranger... I am hoping Pieter still has the source files and can remedy what I'm hearing as relatively evident issues that should be addressable. Using the woodwind for accompaniment at/around 1'12" was fine, but the volume level is wayyyyyy low. Problematically low. It actually sounds accidental; the balance is just way off, to me. Bumping up the volume on the accompanying wind part is the easiest fix, but it will probably expose the weakness of the sample a bit more, so what I'm really hoping is that the artist can replace it with something a little stronger and/or sequence it with a little more embellishment, or collab with someone who can do so. That's my major beef, but in a piece that's primarily piano & flute, it's significant. I'll also add that while there's a lot of dynamic contrast on the piano part, the loud parts are very uniformly loud, and could use a bit of a rebalance - triple forte is a great & powerful thing, but I think it's almost overused, here. This point is more subjective but again, the piece lives & dies by dynamics - they're clearly being focused on, there's good variation here already, but when it goes full bore, it stays there a little too long and loses some of the dynamics between individual notes... hopefully this makes sense. I'd ditch the eagle cry at the end as well, or get something with a bit more fidelity - the sample employed has a noticeable bitrate reduction that makes it explicitly sound like a sample of an eagle as opposed to... an eagle. This is more of a nitpick, but it's also the last thing listeners are left with. I don't pull vetoes often, especially on unanimous passes... but I think judges need to take a closer look here - I think the full promise of the piece hasn't been realized, and I think its current incarnation isn't quite good enough, primarily because of the imbalanced flute accompaniment circa 1'12". Pieter knows I love him so hopefully he won't hate me too much

For anyone who's getting/just got a Vita and never owned a PSP, there are a TON of great PSP games you should try, which look pretty great on the Vita's screen. For starters, I actually think I liked Persona 3 Portable a little BETTER than P4G, and either way, if you like the series, it's a must. If you're into strategy RPGs, you absolutely MUST play Jeanne D'Arc... one of my favorite handheld games EVER, HIGHLY recommended, Brandon I think you'd like it... Right now I'm playing Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky, which is a REALLY old school/classic JRPG that has great writing/plot. Seriously, the PSP was an AMAZING system for RPGs, and most of that is available on the Vita, so don't limit yourself just to Vita games!!

Nothing new to add, just throwing in some personal dittos for: Fire Emblem: Awakening (because THARJA!) Super Mario 3D Land (because SPECIAL WORLDS) The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds All three are fantastic; I'm playing ALBW at the moment and while I'm not very far, I'm loving it...

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Happy bday Mirbs!

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I agree that the treatment is comical... but phobic? To me phobic implies malice, on some level... this is exactly what I'm trying to get at; forget the discrepancy between character designs and usage for a second - considering both, in the examples provided and numerous other examples you can think of, does "comical = phobic"? Not in my mind... Cross-dressing and homosexuality are often played for laughs in what I'm sure Anita would consider "heteronormative, conformist shlock that reinforces socially-constructed gender roles" - when it's something like the effeminate prince being tossed out the window in Braveheart, I agree that it's pretty blatantly & legitimately homophobic. When it's Gene Hackman dressing up in drag at the end of The Birdcage, well, isn't that more of an embrace of the culture? Or take something in between - when Joey & Chandler pretend to be gay in a Friends episode, or something mainstream like that. I mean, that show was actually pretty progressive in having Ross's lesbian ex-wife figure prominently & respectably. Do we really think kissy jokes between the straight male principles in the same show is homophobic, then?? You can play something for laughs because you're afraid (phobic) of it OR you can play something for laughs because you're completely embracing it and almost, in a sense, making FUN of people who DO find it uncomfortable or immoral... I've never really felt like the ubiquitous trans- and homo- characters in more esoteric Japanese games were particularly "phobic" in design OR utilization... you're saying she's right, and that you do? To me, the words "homophobic" and "transphobic" need to have more teeth & carry a bit more weight than this, because this usage dilutes the labels and distracts attention from the very real demographics that exhibit these behaviors & hold these views...

I feel like in order to make her points resonate, she DOES have to talk about more popular games... but the whole thing would seem like less of an attack and more of an analysis if, instead of peppering her rhetorical landscape with overgeneralizing, hyper-ideological one-offs, she just calmly explained potential risks and offered a couple quick & concrete examples of how deviating from the trope could result in better games... or at least games that are in no other ways diminished from such modifications. Also, since the series of videos isn't particularly rocking a "scholarly academic," vibe to begin with, I think it would be sooooo much more persuasive to her target audience if she talked a bit about which games she liked, had enjoyed playing, etc. and even shared some anecdotes once in awhile, when a given game was personal to her in some way. It wouldn't help prove her point directly, but indirectly it would again make it seem like less of an attack from the outside and more of a poignant analysis from the inside. As-is, she comes off at times like the type of person who would staunchly refuse to sit through any game that didn't appease her ideology in full; even with her standard disclaimer that you can still "enjoy" games/media that have these alleged issues, at no point am I genuinely persuaded that she has, or would... Regarding opposing societal norms... some norms need to be outright opposed, others simply need to be deobligated; it's not that girly girls and manly men and bows and pink princesses and "traditional" gender roles need to rot in a pit of hellfire, it's just that people shouldn't be compelled to follow them, or shamed when they don't. It's not a question of discouraging conformity, but rather of encouraging tolerance for non-conformity. You don't need to attack the status quo, in this case, to justify any number of valid alternatives, and in doing so you only alienate the demographic that most desperately needs persuading. And yet that's the very tired & self-defeating trap that's being repeatedly fallen into... Did anyone catch her brief labeling of certain feminized men as being homophobic? Did that sit wrong with anyone else? She used footage from a beat 'em up with a drag queen, and drag queens (and mustached YMCA policemen of various ilk) show up all the time in Japanese beat 'em ups. And then there's Cho Aniki... but is "homophobic" the right word? To untrained Western eyes, I suppose I could see where it might come off that way, and I'm no expert on Japanese culture, but the inclusion of transvestites & transgender characters in Japanese games always struck me as more embracing (with giggles, but no real malice) than demeaning or condemning. A lot of this content got censored/localized for NA release; I never got the impression that it was being altered out of respect & deference to drag queens, but more of an attempt to sanitize/remove those elements from games entirely, which to me is FAR more homophobic. Any thoughts on this?

I'll try and reciprocate towards the end... I'm curious, do you think you would have honed in on that specific line & the dissonance with evolutionary psychology (and in my personal opinion, common sense) before having participated in this thread? Because you picked the EXACT quote that I would have isolated & dissected and did my work for me - now I've got nothing to say You certainly may have, I'm not saying this thread has been an epiphany or singular revelation to you or anyone else, I'm just glad that not only can we agree on something, but that you've picked out the specific bit of overgeneralizing, unmitigated ideology from a haystack of relatively unobjectionable material - she does a good job of mixing these statements in & camouflaging them, which is pretty much the only way of getting reasonable people to listen to them at all... there's an admirable marketing prowess to that, to be sure, but there's also a certain intellectual... dishonesty? Or I suppose you could call it "calculated restraint" if you wanted to be less negative... It's a minefield of Catch-22's, trying to be politically correct when creating fiction of most any kind... I think it's more productive to approach this challenge from the perspective of trying to improve the actual art form - functionally & aesthetically - than trying to make people happy and avoid offending them. I've been consistently saying that the simple pattern analysis & identification of repetition that she's doing *IS* beneficial, but would be even more effective if, instead of inserting regressive (to use a word she throws at the poor old Pac-Man creator) feminist ideology, she simply pointed out the ways that variation & contemplation can improve the medium. Whenever she gets to the "This is WHY this is bad..." part of her monologues, I just cringe. There's a counterargument to be made, as well, that characters being "baseline" male actually DILUTES any meaningful notions of "masculinity" - in other words, it's not that these barely feminized characters are "Ms. Male," it's that their counterparts are barely "male" to begin with. To use her Koopaling example - what does it mean to be female? It's apparently meaningful ENOUGH to justify it being the salient characteristic for an entire character! What does it mean to be male? Nothing! The other Koopalings are defined not by their masculinity, but by their different characterizations, as she quite correctly points out. But while she sees this assumptive masculinity as liberating and powerful, I think you could make a half-decent counterargument that it basically means that masculinity is, in and of itself, not good enough, not worthwhile, not interesting... and so the point remains that Wendy is problematic, but not necessarily because the "men" are being favored, per se. To be fair, focusing on the "false dichotomy" of "binary gender" is actually playing both sides, and Anita does explicitly phrase it this way, to her credit... but she just can't help herself from only seeing (or perhaps only caring about) half the picture, even though dichotomies are, by definition, DUAL. As for the sentiment that all gender is socially constructed and that notions of male and female are completely arbitrary, etc., as you mention, it's nature AND nurture, and perpetuating the egotistical myth that human beings are somehow the only species on Earth that has created cultures of behavior completely independent of biology is poppycock, and perhaps also balderdash. Anyone arguing that humans exist in a magical vacuum outside of nature is just as misguided as those claiming that X or Y behavior or identity "isn't natural"; neither worldview is complete, and both smack of extremism. To say that any dichotomy between male and female is inherently "false" is to sidestep the question of whether meaningful differences - not polarizing, not extreme, not inflexible or absolute differences, just meaningful ones - exist. It's intellectually lazy, however well-intended. Happily, many of her arguments in this video don't even hinge on it, though... "Put a bow on it" has served its purpose and may still be just fine for certain contexts, but I think more variety in terms of gender differentiation in games is an idea whose time has come. There are plenty of good reasons it should be explored and encouraged that exist outside Anita's make-believe world where all human behavior is socially-constructed. (That was the "me agreeing with her part," in case you missed it )

Lookin' forward to watching Game of Thrones next year! Happy Bday!

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Obviously we're having fun, here, but RE: adblock - site operations DO really run off of advertising $$$, and it's been that way since the very beginning. I'd like more relevant ads as much as anyone, but I don't think it would magically make those currently using adblock stop using it for this site. Hopefully you can find other ways of chipping in because historically Google AdSense has been the one consistent source of income to offset hosting costs. At some point we plan on having donation buttons/pleas appear instead of ads, if you've got them blocked, FYI. JIMMY WALES.

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There's one reason and one reason only that we run those ads: Because those are some awesome games, and they're not for females, and only males should play them. ... Or probably because it's what Google AdSense seems to think fits best & gets the most clicks. Go figure; I'd like more relevant & less embarrassing ads on the site, but it's pretty low on the laundry list at the moment, given a full slate of albums, mixposts, an eventual site redesign & forum migration, etc. We'll make this a goal for 2014 and leave it at that - it should be doable, but I'm not losing sleep over it atm. Is anyone else?

Works for us

http://ocremix.org/remix/OCR02773/ Happy Birthday Mixpost

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