vonFiedler

Hi, von. Just a reminder that I need the loot list from Council of Thieves PM'ed to me.

Hi, von. I'd like to talk CoT soonish; if this is a good time, how would you like the talk to be conducted (PM, VM, IRC, Skype, Group Discussion)?

:[
http://www.shuckle-empire.de/index.html

Mostly up-to-date Free Period stuff, if you're interested in looking at it. Or should that have been a new thread?

The literal meaning of the title implies a play, since the story is not an accurate portrayal of history. When I said "translations" it's because the title isn't the only thing mistranslated lol.

I'm not busting your balls. My original post was not directed at you. You were the one who dug into me. If you thought it was directed at you specifically, it wasn't. If you thought it was an insult, it wasn't. It was serious advice. Harshly said, sure, but not insulting.

Moreover, I disagree and argue like this even with my closest friends when we talk about shit. I don't do this to specifically target you, I do this because I happen to disagree with what you say a lot.

Now to be clear, I wasn't trying to prove Disney was better when you accused me of the fallacy... I was trying to point out a critical point of comparison for the two studios that had not been discussed, I wasn't using the popularity as a premise for anything beyond "They've made more money". You, on the other hand, were trying to add as another premise to your argument that no one you know understands my point... that is a direct application of that fallacy, even if it's "only a personal touch".


Now for fact checking, and definitions of words here's one for you.

"Incomparable - Unable to be compared; totally different in nature or extent"

All my babbling about levels of analysis (extent) and how things are at times completely different and share nothing in common (nature) isn't just babbling. I hate pulling definitions in an argument because it shows an inherent lack of understanding that people view things differently, and because doing so is extremely dismissive. Clearly you're of the onion that everything is comparable because you can check for similarities and differences, yet the word incomparable exists. How does that fit into your world view? It doesn't really... So, instead of just quoting a definition and blowing you off, I tried to argue on the level you wished to argue, and show you WHY the word incomparable exists, rather than just pointing at it as if it is a perfect counter-argument.

Now you seem convinced that I'm wrong, and you're right about all this despite all your talk about challenging your own onions. Arguments are where I challenge my onions the most... I stop and say "What's this person trying to say... am I wrong? Are they wrong? Are they misunderstanding what I'm saying?" Perhaps, you should do the same rather than being as dismissive as you are. I don't dismiss your points, as I'm sure you've noticed that I have ceded on some issues, yet you continually dismiss mine without really trying to understand what I'm saying, and seeing if it can jive with what you think.

Was I wrong in saying "completely incomparable"? Fuck yeah I was. I was speaking in hyperbole but that's no excuse to be wrong. Am I wrong in saying they are incomparable on the levels that most people were looking at in that thread as I have since said? No, not really. Example? You saying you think Ghibli animates faces better. Do you think that's just because they're better, or is it because the majority of faces that Disney are anthropromorphic, and need to be easy to read because of this? Do you think Ghibli does that moment of hair standing up and other such facial expressions better because they just are better, or is it because Disney doesn't actually often choose to animate that large of a range of emotions because they are using simple emotions for children in their stories? Comparing them on a raw level of just "how they animate" misses the bigger picture. It's too narrow of a level of analysis.

Hell, I could even be wrong in that Ghibli and Disney are too different to be compared, I'm not entirely sure. Frankly I don't see it, but I'm open to being proven wrong. That said, it doesn't stop the fact that things are sometimes incomparable, which is a premise you've been disagreeing with heavily.

I think a lot about stuff before I post and I usually end up editing my posts at least twice afterword. As for insulting, I would rather not but I treat people with the amount of respect I treat me. My conversation with Tyts is me if i had zero respect for the other person, and I usually have at least some. I'm not going to insult someone unless they're being a prick. Unfortunately that thread was mostly that guy being a prick, so you were mostly seeing me insulting.

It's because every reply before that has been replied to as if I said something incredibly stupid, when really it was just an opinion they disagreed with. That's pretty down looking IMO. As for the part about you, I was referring to the fighting game thing where you were being an ass about nothing.

First: It's funny that you actually just used the logical fallacy you accused me of using earlier "but no one I've asked about it on IRC knows what you mean". Like are you fucking serious right now? You're the one accusing me of not understanding basic logical concepts and blah blah blah, I'm uninformed, blah blah, and you're pulling this? This is insulting.

Second: I'm sorry if it wasn't clear to you from the start that I was talking about comparisons in the sense of a qualitative perspective, when that had been going on in the thread, and was what I was responding to. I can understand now how that may have not been clear to you if you chose not to believe that I could ever say something intelligent. And yes, it does irk me when they say it's objectively better because as I was trying to point that very thing out with "Better at what?" Then you go on to talk about how Ghibli is better at a certain thing, WONDERFUL, YOU'VE FIGURED IT OUT.

If I was good at articulating my thoughts (Due to poor thought organization skills, not actually because of your idea that I don't compare things), I would've said 5 posts earlier about how there are intrinsic levels of analysis to any medium. When the point is compare Studio Ghibli and Disney you won't learn a lot about the studios, because how different they are forces you to abstract outwards, or inwards, but never at the raw side by side level. An analogy for these levels would be that there are different responses to how a business would handle a worker's strike (an internal issue) and how they would handle competition in the market (an external one). Or how a state would handle a drug problem (Domestic), or how the world handles a drug problem (Systemic). This same concept applies to how you think critically of medium. When you compare two things they need to be on the same level of analysis otherwise you will get inconsistent results, or you will get things that don't make sense. This is what I meant way earlier in the thread where I said something along the lines of "They're comparing things on a scale that's too specific and misses the larger point".

An example of abstracting inwards would be how Princess Mononoke and Wall-E handle a specific subplot (The environment). So you CAN compare them at a specific level, but you can't compare every moment of the movie and get relevant information when the two movies have some scenes that share NOTHING in common.

An example of abstracting outwards would be how we can compare Sly Cooper and Battlefield 3 to learn about the genre, and the medium as a whole. As before though, you can't compare the games (unless you went inwards) since there are elements to both games that have NOTHING in common. This is not to say "One you have a cane and one you don't" but is more of "One has levels that are designed to be fun to climb things, and the other focuses on making levels that have various strategic points to fire from".

Another way of what I mean when I say you can't qualitatively compare them is that you can't qualitatively compare things that aren't trying to do the same thing. That's why I repeat "better at what?" Is asking who is faster the sprinter or weight-lifter a valid comparison that gets all the information you need? No. Does it get you a part of it, sure, but on its own it is vastly misleading.

Once again, you've proven that you missed everything I've said before this if you think I haven't attempted to re-explain the same thought over and over and over and over again.

Now for hopefully the last time, the point of my original post was that comparing Studio Ghibli to Disney in the way that had been going on in the thread up to the point is an exercise in complete futility. There is not a single useful thing to be learned by rote comparing the art quality, story-telling techniques, characterization, etc between the two studios entirely because they make so vastly different films. One would not compare a singular comedy film, to a dramatic film unless they specifically wanted to highlight the differences between the genre. In this case, that is not at all what they were attempting to do. In the thread, they were comparing the two studios as if they make the same kinds of film in the way one would compare say... Call of Duty: Modern Warfare to Battlefield 3... when in reality it's more like comparing Sly Cooper and the Thievius Raccoonus to Battlefield 3.

I actually do think you CAN compare Ghibli to Disney in some respects, but not in the way that had been going on. The way that people were looking at it was WAY too limited of a view to glean anything useful. That's why I mentioned that Disney has made more money, because they are both businesses, it's why I mentioned that Disney and Ghibli have different target audiences, because that heavily impacts the way they make decisions.

And again, another part of my point is that whilst you can systematically list differences and similarities between any two things, that doesn't mean you should, or that any conclusion you make from it will be necessarily valid. The problem here is that there will always be elements as a part of every film that can be compared to something else, as you pointed out with Wall-E and Princess Mononoke, which I knew you would, and I really hated that there's nothing I could do to stop you from doing it because it meant you're once again not looking at the bigger picture. The point was that when you're watching a picturesque forest scene, you won't think of Wall-E talking to the spaceship's steering wheel.

In other words there are things that you can compare, and things you can't. You can compare certain aspects of Ghibli and Disney, you cannot rote compare all of them. And the majority, not necessarily all, but the majority of what was being compared in that thread was things that were incomparable on the level at which they were comparing. Seriously, Ghibli has "objectively better" animation? Certainly if you refuse to think that the very way you animate has an impact, and that Disney went with more vibrant and poppy colors with thick lines in order to be more appealing to children.


And also, you can't have it both ways. You can't say that no one ever turns off pattern recognition, and that I form my onions poorly because I do exactly that. I compare things that are comparable, and I don't compare things that are incomparable. Apples to Oranges and whatnot. Just because you think these barriers are artificial doesn't actually mean they are... that's just your own personal onion.

We may never shut off pattern recognition, but our brain does this cool thing where it automatically categorizes things so that they will only be associated with other things that are similar because it's not useful to see a tree and think of a car (Which was my point with that 'comparison').

Sometimes the heuristic first impression categorization is flawed and organizes things that aren't really all that similar except for a single characteristic (Animation, "Heist Movie" genre, etc.). Actively comparing things that have almost nothing in common doesn't give you any useful information/insight, and that's what my point is. That you should be able to recognize when your brain is categorizing poorly, and when you need to conscientiously reorganize your mental association game. Again, while you may be doing pattern recognition and 'comparing' movies, on the whole, you're not going to think of Titanic once while watching Evil Dead. Just like you shouldn't think of Wall-E while watching Princess Mononoke.

Also, I'm not saying don't compare things, I'm saying compare things intelligently and efficiently. Is it better to compare Transformers to Gundam, or Transformers to The Notebook? Are you getting that much from the latter as compared to the former?

And lastly, I'm not saying comparisons only determine which is better, I'm saying comparisons that do so are rather bad, and especially useless when comparing two things that are vastly different like had been going on in that thread.


Quite honestly, you're the hardest person to argue with on this entire forum entirely because you never understand a single thing I say. You skew my words out of their intended context and try to frame my meaning as something very different than what I'm saying. Sometimes I wonder if it's just my poor wording, but there are other times where I'm feeling it's just you personally. I don't get what it is, but it just happens. And holy fuck is it draining to try and re-explain the same thing over and over again, because I read your posts and counter-arguments and know that you missed the point.

Since I don't see you on IRC much:

Few things in the CoT threads:
1) My wooden holy symbol of Iomedae actually doesn't have a weight (it has -), so I'm actually carrying 1 lb less than I'm recorded as
2) My gold adds half a pound, that you haven't recorded
3) Could you answer my question about the scroll in Free Period?

Hey random question, what MMOs with low-end system requirements would you recommend? For co-op/party pve mostly

Also iirc, Masterful wasn't a troll, he was just actually legitimately that stupid.

Unless of course your plural use of troll is referring to someone else? I'm not sure.

But you were playing directly into the troll rather than counter-trolling.

Look, I honestly have no specific beef with you (or really anyone). I just argue a lot, and you happen to have views that I disagree with a lot of the time. It's honestly nothing personal.

In this case, I saw you getting very aggressive and posting tons of insults as if you were a superior being all while arguing a point that I highly disagree with. I also knew that Jeb wasn't going to jump back in with any defense to that because he has been trolling you from the start, and has no need to. So I was going to jump in and defend the viewpoint that he and I hold, and I also wanted to point out that you've been repeatedly insulting someone for being stupid when they were being stupid on purpose, in hopes of preventing you from continuing to look really dumb.

Tell me about it. Thing is, I'd probably love that series aside from that and maybe the combo length.

It may be easy relative to those but the basics of fighting games in general are still not very easy on the newcomer. Like I said, I can do it, I just don't want to memorize a completely different set of inputs for each character every time I want to play a fighter. Also it's not that it's hard to learn in my case more than it's a lot easier to mess up.

i was busy ignoring you

Just wanted to say that it makes me happy to see you using that avatar I made :3

There's a larger version here if you are interested in a higher quality version for avataring.

to be honest after a month of dedicated running training you could probably halve that 5k time. keep at it bro!

You asked why should only the host place showdowns, correct?

Would you like to be a host and help me out?

she does though!

*Reads gun violence in video games thread*

Oh my god... I'm marking this day in the calender. I agree with you! I actually, honest to goodness, agree with everything you're saying!!!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NVnn0fVoiV4&list=PLD2BCDD01DA8B2B40&index=14&feature=plpp_video

You are my hero for finding this for me