Interesting Links for 12-12-2011

[andrewducker]

• First Private Spaceship Flight to the ISS now has a date.
  (tags: space iss Spacex )
• Motorola secures Europe-wide sales ban on iPhone, iPad - oh for goodness sake.
  (tags: patents germany law europe apple iphone motorola )
• This Banana Alien Might Have Ascorbic Acid for Blood
  (tags: banana alien sculpture awesome )
• The Evolution of Fictional

Comments

[gonzo21]

Yeah, I'd be in favour of the adblock plus thing too I think.

[andrewducker]

I don't mind well-targeted ads that don't cover things up, move, play music, etc.

Text-only ads that offer me things I might actually find useful are both potentially good _and_ help the websites I'm visiting. I'm just fine with that :->

[gonzo21]

Apart from the moving flashing musical ones, the other ones I dislike strongly are those websites that cover up like, 30% and upwards of their page in adverts, so it becomes increasingly difficult to read the article or whatnot.

Or the pop-ups. I have a seething hatred of pop-ups.

It strikes me as similiar to the issue Channel 4 seem to have. As they squeeze in ever more intrusive ad breaks into programs, more and more people decide to watch their programs via other methods. Revenue falls. So they react by shoving in more and more ads.

[andrewducker]

Yeah - I got Adblock todeal with things like that, and make the internet readable again (see also things like "Readability").

[bart_calendar]

Hmmmm... on Friday I was concerned about our new German overlords.

But, if they are going to fuck with Apple, I have a newfound respect for them.

[cartesiandaemon]

I remember recently thinking that for all the talk of "space-age technology" we used to have, now it might have been most apt to describe the space age as in the past. SpaceX fills me with at least a little optimism that some people are still trying

[andrewducker]

Have an awesome article on SpaceX that goes into some of the detail behind this:
http://www.airspacemag.com/space-exploration/Visionary-Launchers-Employees.html

(Posted a couple of weeks ago, but very good)

I do think that getting the human race into space in the first place was such a big job that it required governments, and SpaceX is using a lot of the things learned during that original exploration. But everything I read about the shuttle tells me that it was a bad decision to make it the way we did.

[simont]

I was disappointed by "The Evolution of Fictional Characters" turning out to be a cartoon parodying visual changes. I was hoping for a thoughtful essay on the gradual change in characters' personalities and natures over long-running series, along the lines of the case studies of Star Trek races in the essay "Brain Bugs" but widening its focus to look at fiction in general rather than Star Trek (or any other specific work) in particular

[cartesiandaemon]

Yeah, I'm sure character decay is excacerbated by multiple successive writers, but it definitely happens all over the place. (Conversely, the opposite also happens, an originally one-note character developing facets -- again I don't know if that may be helped or hindered or both by multiple writers.)

[andrewducker]

I can't read the article from here, but I agree that it's not as simple as the message being lost between writers. I got very fed up with Pratchett forgetting that the Wizards of Unseen University were more than a collection of annoying tics, and had a modicum of personality once upon a time.

I think there's a general principle of refinement that goes on, where people remember the character's distinguishing characteristics and everything else fades into the background. Fighting against that can be really hard. See, for instance, treatment of Xander in Buffy, who never manages to break out of his original role.

This is actually highlighted in the strip I linked to by The Sitcom Character.

[simont]

Yes, I agree that the UU wizards were more fun in the old days. The personality quirks of a collection of elderly dons were a much richer source of surreal comedy when combined with the cut-throat environment of the old-style UU, in which a lovable doddering character would suddenly turn round and be totally badass in the face of a would-be assassin. After Ridcully showed up and basically put a stop to the backstabbing, they had nothing left but the quirks, and ended up just shuffling around being collectively confused.

(And yes, the Sitcom Character did strike me as being a close visual analogue of the gradual-oversimplification trope.)

D&D;: More accurate than you think

[cartesiandaemon]

I think I saw this before somewhere, but I can't remember where, or if the discussion came to any conclusion

Re: D&D;: More accurate than you think

[spacelem]

Justin Alexander is pretty switched on with these sorts of articles, and has quite a few like this on his site. I'm pretty sure that if you saw it somewhere else, it was just a reposting.

I think this article might have been partly responsible for inspiring E6, a mod for D&D 3e where you cap out at level 6, although you still gain access to feats as you gain XP. It's pretty popular, and aims to keep 3e in the sweet spot where the balance lines up, the complexity isn't too great, and characters are still within the realms of reality.

Note that the housecat vs commoner fight is a consequence of course granularity and assuming the baseline very close to one. Also, falling is not well handled by HP (which are really only a resource to use as a pacing mechanism), and would be much better solved with a Fort save (or save vs breath weapon in earlier editions -- probably, there is some logic which is totally obvious provided someone spends a lot of time explaining it to you :P )

Re: D&D;: More accurate than you think

[andrewducker]

Thanks for the link to e6, I hadn't encountered it before.

Re: D&D;: More accurate than you think

[spacelem]

If you want an actual link, then here's one from ENWorld. I'm not sure if there is a main site for E6, but a quick search for "E6 - the game inside D&D" will find a lot of good links.