My weekly Guild Wars 2 community round-up at GuildMag is now online. The October Halloween event, Blood and Madness is in its second week. We’ve also got some clues being dropped about next week’s new content update called Tower of Nightmares. There’s also the usual assortment of blog posts, videos, podcasts, and fan fiction from around the GW2 community.
October 24, 2013
This week in Guild Wars 2
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Balancing the scales of justice
Do you remember the name Annie Dookhan? She shows up in a post called “If you’re not getting enough convictions on drug charges, tamper with the evidence at the lab“. Her case came to court recently and she was sentenced to a three-year prison term. At Popehat, Clark does a bit of math to determine whether the scales of justice are in balance here:
Before she was caught Dookhan lied about 34,000 samples.
Over 4,000 cases were tainted with her corrupt evidence.
Over 1,100 people were jailed in cases where Dookhan was the primary or secondary chemist finding them “guilty” of drug crimes.
Without knowing the exact durations of their sentences, we can’t know how many person-years of confinement Dookhan was responsible for, but taking two years as a conservative guess per person, she was responsible for 2,200 person years of confinement.
Without knowing the exact torture and abuse these 1,100 men and women underwent, we can’t know exactly how much rape and degredation Dookhan was responsible for, but given that we do know that most rape victims in the US are men, specifically men in the custody and “protection” of the State, and looking at the multiple studies that show that 9-20% of inmates are raped, we can guess that Dookhan was responsible for over 100 men and women being raped. To hand-wave further, we can guess than because “once a punk, always a punk” in the prisoner’s code, she is responsible for thousands of actual rapes.
To recap:
Ariel Castro:
- crime: 3 prisoners, 30 person years, hundreds of rapes.
- sentence: life plus 1,000 years.
Annie Dookhan:
- crime: 1,100+ prisoners, 2,200+ person years, thousands of rapes.
- sentence: three years,
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Explaining Japanese culture – “Freud would have a field day”
It’s commonplace to say “Japan is weird” (I’ve said it myself many times), but even with the constant repetition, I didn’t realize just how weird Japan has become (somewhat NSFW … better not watch this at the office):
Published on 22 Oct 2013
Japan is a country that is dying — literally. Japan has more people over the age of 65 and the smallest number of people under the age of 15 in the world. It has the fastest negative population growth in the world, and that’s because hardly anyone is having babies. In these difficult times, the Japanese are putting marriage and families on the back burner and seeking recreational love and affection as a form of cheap escape with no strings attached. We sent Ryan Duffy to investigate this phenomenon, which led him to Tokyo’s cuddle cafes and Yakuza-sponsored prostitution rings.
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Quarterback musical chairs and other Viking sob-stories
As I mentioned yesterday, the quarterback lottery continues in Viking country as Christian Ponder moves back into the starting line-up after Josh Freeman is ruled out for Sunday night’s Green Bay game with a concussion. Jeff Garcia reported that he’d be willing to join the Vikings as a quarterback mentor for Freeman and the St. Louis Rams actually called Brett Favre to ask if he’d be willing to un-retire again to play quarterback for them.
Some people, when they talk about the 2013 Vikings season, suggest the appropriate music to play is “Yakkity Sax” (the Benny Hill Show theme music). I think carnival music is rather more appropriate, and so does the Daily Norseman‘s Eric Thompson:
Step right up, boys and girls! Come one, come all to the wacky and wonderful Minnesota Vikings Carnival! We have tons of great games to try!
How about you try your hand at the Robinson & Cook Toss? Just throw a football anywhere on this field. Then watch as Josh Robinson and Chris Cook miss their coverage and the ball goes right to your receiver! A guaranteed win every time you play!
If you prefer your games with a little more chance involved, then why not try our incredible Quarterback Wheel of Destiny! Each week, you can give the wheel a spin and hope it lands on your favorite quarterback. Round and round it goes…who will start? Nobody knows! But no matter where the Wheel of Destiny lands, you’re guaranteed a prize!
(Disclaimer: The only prize packages currently available from the Quarterback Wheel of Destiny are as follows: 1) Heartbreaking Last-Second Loss; 2) Embarrassing Home Blowout Loss; and 3) Embarrassing National Television Loss. The “Trip to London for a Fluke Win” prize package has expired; the “High 2014 Draft Pick” prize package is not available until May 2014.)
In the mood for a few scares as Halloween approaches? Then head over to Eric Sugarman’s Training Table of Terror! You’ll see deformed body parts everywhere! Can you stomach the sight Harrison Smith’s toes made of turf or Desmond Bishop’s detachable knees? Can you hear the twangs of the Haunted Harp created solely from the tight hamstrings of Adrian Peterson and Blair Walsh? Do you have the intestinal fortitude to fight past Christian Ponder’s Creepy Cracked Ribs? Can you make it through the fog of Josh Freeman’s Concussion Chamber?
(Disclaimer: The last two exhibits mentioned in the Training Table of Terror may or may not be related to the outcomes of the Quarterback Wheel of Destiny. Minnesota Vikings Carnival, LLC is not liable for any injuries that are made to look worse in order to assist the agendas of any Head Coaches and General Managers. No refunds.)
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The Somme, then and now – “most of these men would be dead 40 minutes after this film”
Published on 6 Oct 2013
After painstaking research I found a lot of the exact positions that Malins filmed the Battle footage from. I hope to re-edit it soon and make it a bit smoother; also will be going back soon to film where the artillery bombarded Gommecourt.
H/T to Think Defence for the link.
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October 23, 2013
Josh Freeman has a concussion – Christian Ponder likely to start against Green Bay
Can this season get any more convoluted? This afternoon, it was announced that Josh Freeman is suffering from concussion symptoms from Monday night’s game and probably won’t be able to play against the Packers on Sunday night. If he can’t go, Christian Ponder will be back at quarterback for the Vikings.
Reactions have been unkind:
oh okay, sure, freeman just SUDDENLY has a concussion #riiiiiiiiiight
— The Viking Age (@TheVikingAge) October 23, 2013
Frazier not optimistic Freeman will be ready on a short week. #Vikings
— VikingUpdate.com (@VikingUpdate) October 23, 2013
did they check him for a concussion before the game?
— The Viking Age (@TheVikingAge) October 23, 2013
Josh Freeman Has A Concussion, Ponder Will Probably Start Against Green Bay #FranchiseOfSadness #Vikings #WTF http://t.co/FVXXD3FFBE
— The Daily Norseman (@DailyNorseman) October 23, 2013
The conversation piece: If Ponder lights it up a la 2012 finale, when does Freeman's concussion get better? Or does it? (see: Kolb)
— Andrew Krammer (@Andrew_Krammer) October 23, 2013
Freeman conspiracies run both ways: RS forced LF to start Josh OR LF stuck it to RS. Because no group can be that collectively incompetent.
— Arif Hasan (@ArifHasanDN) October 23, 2013
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QotD: Popular fiction
[…] it’s almost as if there’s a demon whose special job is maintaining the inverse relationship between quality and sales when it comes to runaway bestsellers. E.L. James would be an example, surely, but her prose isn’t much worse than Stephenie Meyer’s, which is middlin’ horrid, while their joint plotting is pretty much entirely horrid, not to mention largely incoherent and ethically vacuous.
Or there’s Dan Brown, who wouldn’t recognise a grammatical sentence or a plausible sequence of events if they each wrestled him to the ground and sat on his head. Which I dearly wish they would, if only to keep him away from any keyboard whatsoever and preserve a forest or two from dying all in vain.
By any criterion other than sales each of these bestsellers is plainly a badly inferior example of its genre and of the writer’s craft, yet they explode while far better things that are no less available (though often less advertised) do modestly. Some of it is a bit like talentless boy bands, an almost purely commercial phenomenon, but one still has to wonder why those particular publishers’ pushes go so viral. And weep.
John Lennard, MA DPhil. (Oxon.), MA (WU) (Goodreads blog), posting to the Lois McMaster Bujold Mailing list (http://lists.herald.co.uk/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/lois-bujold), 2013-10-22
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The most dangerous shipwreck in the Thames Estuary
Uploaded on 16 Aug 2010
A documentary about the SS Richard Montgomery. The remains of this second world war Liberty ship lie semi-submerged in the Thames estuary. There are currently over 1500 tons of explosives left on board. This documentary looks into the danger the wreck still presents.
I’m mildly amused that they frequently mis-name the vessel as the “USS” Richard Montgomery (she was never a commissioned ship of the US Navy, so it should be just “SS” not “USS”). If you watch to the end of the documentary, they’ve included a “blooper reel” of voice-overs for the last minute or so…
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Perhaps the “starve the beast” plan is working
In Maclean’s, Stephen Gordon provides an updated look at the Harper government’s ongoing “starve the beast” policy:
Canadian federal government revenues and expenditure, 1960-2013
As I’ve written before, the Conservatives have applied the “starve the beast strategy“: First, cut taxes; second, cut spending in order to match lower revenues; third, obtain a balanced-budget for a smaller government. As the red line in the chart shows, the Harper government was temporarily thrown off this past by the financial crisis, which required emergency stimulus spending. They are, however, back on track.
Once again though, we need to be careful to see that the government’s revenues are back above expenditures (so the yearly deficit has been reduced over time), but the government’s outstanding debts are still quite substantial: $892 billion for 2012-13. As long as interest rates stay low, the debt should start to decline, but if-and-when interest rates rise, so will that big pile of accumulated debt.
Game company provokes a massive Streisand Effect
In Hit and Run, Scott Shackford explains how Wild Games Studio learned (the hard way) about the Streisand Effect:
The game [Day One: Garry’s Incident] is getting terrible reviews, and YouTube is host to a ton of them. The reviews may actually be a little bit of a challenge to find now thanks to Wild Games Studio’s response to one particular review. A gentleman by the name of TotalBiscuit (no, really, that’s his … okay, fine, his real name is John Bain) is probably one of the most successful video game critics on the Internet. His YouTube channel boasts just shy of 1.3 million subscribers. He sampled the game on October 1 and did not find it enjoyable (Sample of response to the game: “Screw everything about this!”).
Video game reviews on YouTube allow critics to do something they can’t do through blog posts or print reviews: They can actually play and demonstrate the game in action in the video. This is a boon for consumers looking to spend their game money on a quality product as the game market grows and grows and grows. It’s also a boon for good game developers, as there’s nothing like the sight of a reviewer with a big audience enjoying your product to push folks off the fence in your favor. For bad games, though, it has the potential to devastate more than those old-fashioned reviews, as video watchers can actually see how terrible the problems are.
Wild Games Studio made their problems even worse by trying to retaliate against Bain. They made a copyright claim against him on YouTube, using a flimsy excuse that he monetizes the videos with advertising (Bain manages a living with his game journalism and announcing) and thus cannot use their assets without their permission. The studio succeeded. YouTube yanked the review. Furthermore, YouTube’s copyright-protection system threatens users that their channel will be deleted if they get three of these takedown claims. In Bain’s case, that would result in the removal of hundreds of videos.
I first encountered TotalBiscuit’s YouTube channel during the Guild Wars 2 beta period, and quite enjoyed his iconoclastic views of the game. I’m happy to hear that this particular thuggish attempt to shut him down has failed, and largely due to the response of gamers and his channel subscribers.
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October 22, 2013
Dahlia Lithwick on smelling like a teenage boy for a week
It’s not just a scent … it’s a lifestyle:
When I first told my husband that I was planning on wearing only Axe men’s products for an entire week, his answer was a foreshadowing of things to come: “You’re planning on wearing that stuff to bed every night for a week? Man. Axe really does work. It’s only been a few minutes and look, you’re already single again … ”
[…]
Despairing of any kind of social response that wasn’t either threats of a formal legal separation from my husband or subtle nostalgia from mothers of former Axe users, I decided to trot out the stuff at the last night of Slate’s annual retreat in September. Having sprayed it liberally all over my body on the night of the big promlike party, I watched my roommate — Slate’s Dear Prudie — actually flatten herself up against a hotel room wall and slide uneasily down the hallway, in the manner of that poor cat being chased by Pepé Le Pew. Almost immediately upon my arrival at the festivities I was accosted by three female Slate colleagues who spontaneously observed that I smelled completely amazing. I was briefly thrilled at the enthusiastic response, until I realized that I didn’t really want my someday teenaged sons to ever be quite that amazing-smelling to women in their 30s and 40s. One colleague said it brought her right back to whatever it is that happened in the back of a truck when she was herself 14. The silence was slightly less awkward than after the pants-spraying story the week before.
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China’s not-so-foolish consistency
The Naval Diplomat reminds us about Ralph Waldo Emerson’s quip about “foolish consistency” being “the hobgoblin of little minds” and makes the point that China’s consistency may not qualify as foolish at all:
Last week Mark Stokes and Russell Hsiao of Project 2049 Institute published a longish report profiling the PLA General Political Department. Like all good analysts, Mark and Russell telegraph their thesis at the outset, subtitling the monograph “Political Warfare with Chinese Characteristics.”
A term that pops us repeatedly in the text is the “three warfares,” namely legal, psychological, and media warfare. The Heritage Foundation’s Dean Cheng appears to have been the first to look into the concept in a serious way. I did some research on it a couple of years back. To oversimplify, Chinese officialdom — not just the diplomatic apparatus but also the PLA — has undertaken a concerted effort to bend opinion among various target audiences. International law and the media are two channels through which it influences these audiences, prosecuting psychological operations.
In one sense, the three-warfares concept is innocuous. Any government worth its salt tries to project a favorable image abroad, swaying popular and elite opinion in its interests. That’s what public diplomacy is all about. But the notion of three warfares waged constantly, in peacetime, by all arms of the Chinese Communist regime, including a far-from-apolitical military, should give foreign observers pause. It bespeaks a combative temperament toward the wider world, and a single-minded zeal toward messaging. In all likelihood, ulterior motives are at work even in routine interactions with mainland interlocutors.
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The Vikings’ Josh Freeman era begins with a painful loss to the Giants
From the moment he was signed, some Viking fans were eager to see what former Tampa Bay quarterback Josh Freeman could do. Last night, those same fans were introduced to the notion that a quarterback can’t magically make up for an entire offseason of practice, drill and team familiarity. Freeman stood tall in the pocket to deliver downfield throws, but those throws were far too often over the heads or out of reach of his intended receivers … timing and route accuracy were both in short supply. Freeman was only intercepted once, but the Giants had other opportunities to pick him off over the course of the game.
All of the problems the Vikings have displayed on the field up to this point were pretty much unchanged despite the change at quarterback: the defence gave up far too many yards and stayed on the field far too long, and Adrian Peterson was not able to get the rushing game going (although he had been on the injury report with a hamstring issue this week). If Marcus Sherels hadn’t scored his second career kick return touchdown, the Giants would have blanked the Vikings. Unfortunately, Sherels also had a few key errors, including coughing up the ball near the Vikings goal line on a punt return. Defensive tackle Sharrif Floyd also had a bad special teams outing, fumbling the ball on a kickoff return (the Giants kicked short to keep the ball away from fellow rookie Cordarrelle Patterson).
1500ESPN‘s Andrew Krammer:
Minnesota Vikings offensive coordinator Bill Musgrave said the game plan was going to be simple for quarterback Josh Freeman, who made his first start in a 23-7 loss on Monday Night Football against the previously winless New York Giants.
The end result left many saying he was set up to fail.
Simplicity took a bad seat to ineffective as Freeman threw 33 incompletions, dropping his league-low 43.5% even further during his first outing as a Vikings quarterback.
A member of the team for just two weeks, Freeman looked rusty as he hadn’t played since Sept. 22. However, in his last game as a Tampa Bay Buccaneer, Freeman completed just 19-of-41 passes in a loss at New England.
Struggles aside, it was obvious from Freeman’s midseason signing that the Vikings wanted to evaluate him as their potential long-term answer. But that philosophy was taken to the extreme on Monday night as Freeman threw 53 passes to running back Adrian Peterson’s 13 carries.
On Sept. 4, prior to the start of the regular season, FootballOutsiders.com – one of the top football analytics sites on the web — projected the Minnesota Vikings as the team most likely to pick No. 1 overall in the 2014 draft.
Football Outsiders gave the Vikings a 4.9% chance to make the playoffs and a 0.1% chance to win the Super Bowl.
We all laughed.
While the Jacksonville Jaguars are leaders in the clubhouse to pick No. 1 overall, nobody should be laughing anymore at the notion that the Vikings are one of the worst teams in the NFL. Not after the embarrassment we saw on Monday night in front of a national audience.
Consider this: The previously winless New York Giants averaged 2.0 yards per carry and 4.9 yards per pass on offense. Eli Manning needed 39 passes just to reach 200 yards. The Giants also fumbled four times, were hit for 72 yards in penalties and handed the ball 18 times to Peyton Hillis, who they signed off the street on Wednesday. Check that. Hillis was actually volunteering as an assistant coach at a high school in Tennessee last week.
And the Giants looked like the 1999 St. Louis Rams standing next to the Vikings.
Everyone deserves to be ripped here.
Jim Souhan at the Star Tribune:
Last time the Vikings played in New Jersey, their quarterback spent most of his postgame interview answering questions about sending illicit texts.
Monday night, the Vikings visited Jersey again, and this time it got embarrassing.
To be a Vikings fan these days, you need a gallon of Pepto-Bismol and a Hazmat suit. Winless in the United States this season, the Vikings might be the worst team in the NFL that does not reside in the state of Florida.
They have failed to look professional in consecutive weeks, and in unpredictable fashion: by imploding at home against an unremarkable Carolina team, then looking unfamiliar with the concept of offensive football on Monday night against a terrible Giants team.
Their 23-7 loss buried memories of their 2012 playoff appearance and transported them back to 2011, when they won only three games and began another desperate search for a franchise quarterback.
Worse, these kinds of losses transport them back to 2010, when they got their coach fired in the middle of the season.
They might be searching for a coach and quarterback this winter. Or by November.
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QotD: They We were better people in those days…
Back in the bad old days, before Pierre Trudeau saved Canada from the horrors of fiscal solvency and smallish government, school children, mostly girls, were taught something called home economics. The theory, terrible quaint though it sounds, is that since most women would become homemakers they should be prepared for that role. Some, no doubt, came from good homes where dutiful mothers ensured that their daughters knew how to cook, sew and deal with troublesome infants. Some did not come from good homes. Part of the point of public education was to make sure that all girls knew how to cook nutritious food for their families. More broadly it was to ensure that all children acquired life skills along with whatever algebra and Shakespeare they could pick up.
That was one of the goals of public education. Educating a self reliant, sober and decent citizenry. Not rationalizing every vice and undermining the founding tenets of Canadian society. There was plenty of propaganda, but it was mostly propagating positive values. A tad parochial and silly by our standards, but not without its merits. It was not a platform for allowing anti-capitalist and anti-industrial zealots like David Suzuki to pontificate.
If there is a problem with “food insecurity” it’s because many Canadians, especially among the lower classes, lack basic life skills. That, not incidentally, is why most are in the lower class. If the Pakistani cab driver with a scant English vocabulary can feed and cloth his family with some decency, what does that say about the Mackenzies who have been here since Simcoe? Some of the poor are poor because they’re physically or mentally incapable of fending for themselves. In an advanced society they comprises only a small fraction of the working age population. Much of the poor in Canada are poor because they exhibit poor behaviour.
Most of the long-term poor, this excludes those who are simply suffering from temporary misfortune, think in a much different way than those in the middle class. The long-term poor are short-range in their thinking. Their savings rate is close to non-existent. They can’t resist instant gratification, like junk food or gambling. This also extends to their sexual lives. They exhibit a strong tendency toward highly unstable short-term relationships based on fleeting desire. The notion of a long-term, emotionally stable relationship is either alien or absurd.
Richard Anderson, “Thinking of the Children”, Gods of the Copybook Headings, 2013-10-21
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October 21, 2013
The US debt iceberg
Jon Gabriel has put together a clear, understandable way to show the relationship between the US government’s revenue, deficit and debt numbers:
When Washington raised the debt ceiling this week, the Beltway media breathlessly reported that the fiscal crisis had ended. Lawyers danced in hallways, bureaucrats twerked on the Metro, congressional aides kissed strangers in the streets — the Tea Party has been defeated! It was like VJ day for wonks.
As our political class exchanged high fives and reporters praised a return to “sanity,” I wondered how these odd creatures defined insanity.
America’s fiscal crisis is not that our debt ceiling was too low, the fiscal crisis is that our debt is too high. When I mentioned this to left-leaning folks, they seemed indifferent. “Obama lowered the deficit.” “I think Bush spent more.“ “It’s Reagan’s fault!”
So I made this infographic:
Since most graphs look like this, I focused on just three big numbers: Deficit, revenue and debt.
The analogy is imperfect, but imagine the green is your salary, the yellow is the amount you’re spending over your salary, and the red is your Visa statement. Then imagine your spouse runs into the room and shouts, “great news honey, our fiscal crisis is over. We just got approved for a new MasterCard!” Your first call would be to a marriage counselor or a shrink.
H/T to Nick Gillespie:
What is it that Hemingway always used to say? That thing’s not loaded? Or something about how the “dignity of movement of an ice-berg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water.” Yeah, well, the horrors of federal finances is pretty undignified just looking at the amount of spending versus revenue we do and then it gets really sloppy when you look at the huge amount of debt below the waterline.
