Nocbot

michaonthemoon:

yaoibutts:

I love how potato in French is pomme de terre, which pretty much means “earth apple.”

like what stupid frenchman saw this:

and said “zis petite légume looks like a, how you say, APPLE! hmmm… but it grows in ze earth… HON HON HON! MAIS OUI! C’EST UNE…

They were probably friends with the american who saw this:

and said “aw, would you look at that, it dropped off the back of that horse like an apple off a tree. But it’s on the road, so, ah, that there must be a…”

heysawbones:

I am bad at math.

I’m not totally sure why that is, though I have some guesses. It might have something to do with the way I learn and organize learned information. It seems like I have a really hard time remembering things I can’t anchor to an underlying comprehension of the subject. For…

I don’t know of any particularly good sources on the subject, but I can confirm that that sort of context-based comprehension is how I end up understanding math, and thus I don’t think the matter is intrinsic to math itself so much as a function of our education system being terrible at teaching it. There’s lots of “trust us, just learn this, it’ll be important later,” and lots of barreling ahead on a schedule whether or not the students have actually gotten the material. In the math classes I’ve taken, I’ll either cakewalk through most of it or start slipping in the beginning and fall progressively further and further behind, because if I don’t properly understand the basic concepts then the rest is just confusing and arbitrary.

…until it suddenly makes sense years later and I’m baffled by why my teachers didn’t just explain it like this. 

In terms of learning math, though, I think learning to program is actually a good place to start? Programming concepts help algebraic ones make a whole lot more sense, because you’re actually handling variables and functions and such as practical tools rather than abstract symbols on a page which you’re tasked with rearranging in a certain way.

It also helps provide context to what you’re actually doing, since you’re writing a script to simulate something rather than answering a “well, if hypothetically we wanted to figure out this…” sort of prompt. Even better, the computer handles the number crunching itself, so you a) can focus on the actual math rather than worrying about whether or not you fucked up the arithmetic and b) can see a clear and immediate connection between adjustments to your program and changes to the output rather than having to go through the number-crunching process again.

Um. I don’t actually know how to find a good programming course either: I’m mostly self-taught, which requires a lot of spare time you may not have, and am reasonable skeptical about a lot of CS classes I see offered about. Especially for this purpose, since you’d probably want to pick up a scripting language and get right to messing around with math, while a lot of intro CS classes seem to think it’s important to start with C, learning low-level programming concepts that aren’t necessarily useful to you. 

So I dunno. But it’s an approach that’s made a lot of sense to me.

heysawbones:

7nights:

This is the Sorceress from Vanillaware’s Dragon’s Crown. Lately, this character has been getting a lot of heat, becoming the new icon of sexism in video games. Are you offended by this character? Do you find it sexist? Well guess what, it’s not.

Read More

I think I see…

Personally, I tend to figure that the “objectified” male characters in media aren’t the power-fantasy heroes — they’re the minions, the almost universally male henchmen who’s purpose is to threaten the good guys and then get beat up. They’re objects in both senses of the word, presented not as people but as props, who exist to be the objects of violence the same way the standard female eye-candy exists to be the object of desire.

Which…actually isn’t necessarily a problem, on its own. Not every character in a story needs to be fully fleshed out: some characters will be the ones we follow, and some may only intersect with the story briefly and for a specific purpose. That’s not necessarily a problem!

The problem comes from context, and patterns are a good way to look at context. Not so much ”in the context of the work,” as 7nights seems to be offering: “Oh, they justified why this character dresses like this, see, it makes sense in the story so it’s okay!” No, the context and the pattern emerge when we look at all the other, similar stories and other similar characters and notice that being conventionally attractive seems to need to be standard for leading female characters. As is dressing sexily and revealingly: it’s apparently not okay to have a female lead who’s not a hot piece of ass. Sure, they may totally “justify” that within the context of the character, but there’s a reason why so many characters “just happen” to be that way. (Hint: it’s because they’re expected to appeal to a male audience. It’s not a justification, it’s an excuse for something that would be like that anyways.)

This is why people keep pushing for nonsexualized female leads: not because female sexuality is gross and they need to cover that shit up, but because holy crap it is getting tiring for cheesecake to keep being mandatory. Nonsexualized female characters are a break in the pattern and a breath of proverbial fresh air, the same way overtly sexualized male characters often are. And man, when we don’t need our female leads to fit a narrow standard of beauty (and implicit availability), that opens the doors to a way broader range of characters and visual designs.

It also doesn’t help that these costume designs tend to treated as just part of the character design, as just how the characters happen to look rather than, you know, presented as clothing they actually made the conscious decision to put on — the sheer impracticality of most of these outfits tends to speak volumes about that. The characters dressing all stripperly isn’t about them being comfortable dressing that way, it’s about them being attractive to the viewer.

… 

So: basically two points, I guess. One is about the nerd fallacy that internal coherence is the most important aspect of a work — that the most important thing is whether or not a thing ”makes sense in the context of the story,” as opposed to the broader relevance of that element itself.

The other is about lazy costume design. I might get into both of these a bit further at some point, since I’ve nowhere near exhausted the vein of natter they provide.