xzar_monty

Yeah, the NZ vowel drift was sheer hell for me for about three days after coming into the country. For some reason, I found it a lot more difficult than, say, the Scouse or the Scottish accent. But then something just clicked and I got it. Interestingly, this "clicking" was identical to what often happens when you practice, say, an instrument: the sudden leap does not happen while practicing but inbetween sessions. You labour on something for a while and get nowhere, but the next time you return to the instrument, you've got it. Which is why half an hour both in the morning and in the evening tends to bear more fruit than a single one-hour session a day.

Interesting observation I've made: non-native English speakers with a decent grasp of the language tend to make fewer slips like this because they haven't grown up in English-speaking places where you just pick up words without seeing the spelling. And given that English spelling has almost unparalleled confusion potential, the odds of you making slips tends to increase if you don't learn the word and its spelling at the same time. (I would probably kill it at spelling bees by virtue of this fact alone.)

You probably mean eminently, unless you've got some really good real-time sources somewhere and we ought to be more worried than we are.

He is very good indeed. I can't help feeling rather sad about the fact that there's a whole bunch of superb new(ish) musicians posting their stuff on YouTube, but for the most part, it doesn't really appear that they have written any good music of their own.

There's a really good book on Zelensky that's just come out (by Simon Shuster), and it deals quite a lot with the Zelensky / Zaluzhny question. Obviously the book is not the final word on it, but in any case, the whole thing is very complex, and has been for quite some time. I don't think it's the procurement scandal, except perhaps in the last straw sense.

I wonder how many historical precedents there are of countries holding presidential elections during a war, and of countries not doing that even if they should, according to their schedule.

Apparently, Zaluzhny isn't fired, but this is subject to change...

I am surprised that your automatic assumption seems to be that my view is based on someone's review. (For the record, I haven't read any reviews of BG3.) But anyway: first, I have no interest in turn-based RPGs. I have tried one, D:OS2, and it was rubbish. I have no interest in combat mechanics of that sort -- in fact, just like @kanisatha, I was really annoyed that there is one battle in WotR that you have to play in turn-based mode. The mode is so unfun that for a moment, I felt like ditching the game just because of that, but didn't (of course). Second, the "movie-like" cutscenes where you can watch people talk look just really, really bad to me, and I have no interest in a game that takes that route. Also, just like @Hurlshort says above, the entire Larian approach is contrary to my preferences in so many ways that I'm not going to give it a try anymore. I did try D:OS2, and that was a complete waste of money, so that's enough. (I don't think there is such thing as "objective criticism", by the way, or at least I'd like to know what you mean by it. Criticism is subjective almost by definition, although it has to be said that this is a somewhat tricky subject. If you say that Whitney Houston was technically a much better singer than Madonna ever was, that's an indisputable objective fact that anyone with ears can verify, but that's not really criticism as there isn't even any attempt to comment on any aesthetic or emotional aspects of her singing. If you say that Whitney Houston grates on your ears because she had all the emotional expressivity of freeze-drying machinery, then that's definitely criticism, but there's no way it's objective.)

I don't think there's any way to predict this. Let's assume that the next RPG in this vein a) tanks or b) does extremely well. It would be easy to assume that a) the previous title milked the market for all it could, or b) that the previous title created a huge appetite for more. These explanations would be easy to regard as true, but of course we couldn't really know, at least without extensive consumer research, and we're never going to get that. There could be many other explanations, too, from both within and outside the gaming world, to tell us why a title did or did not succeed. So I would say we're back to Samuel Goldwyn and his movie business adage that "No one knows anything". (I have no interest in BG3, as it looks like complete trash to me, but I am almost certainly going to buy the next isometric rtwp fantasy RPG, if one ever comes out.)

I would say it's a lot better, even if it does have some problems in the story department. The big, big improvement is that you need to do a lot less fighting. My main gripe with PoE was with the fighting. I appreciated the fact that you essentially got no XP for grind fights, and it was fine that there was no major loot to be found, either. But considering that, I thought it was sheer madness to leave so much fighting in the game. I mean, if you get no XP and no loot, then much of the fighting is just a waste of time. Some of the outdoor maps were really, really bad in this respect. This problem doesn't exist in Deadfire. The story problem in Deadfire is that with all the drama going on, you're supposed to be in a hurry to put things right. But of course you're not, really: you can spend as much time as you want exploring the world, and nothing will happen. This feels a bit strange and even slightly silly, although the game doesn't suffer all that much from it, in the end. But I can't get away from the fact that storywise, it is a problem. You can't very well tell someone to hurry and then give them all the time in the world, it doesn't make you look good. By the way, for me the best part in all of these games was the beginning of PoE, up until the moment when you learned that you were this "Watcher" thing[*]. I loved the darkness and the sense of foreboding, it was extremely well done. Also, the Beast of Winter DLC for Deadfire is superb. [*] I really don't like the fact that random strangers in Deadfire seem to know that you're the Watcher. It's a bit annoying, although that is all that it is. How could they know?

Yes. I did not suggest that there was any intentional torturing going on, only that things were radically different in a bad way. One interesting question is whether the amount of serious deceit has increased or decreased, and that's quite hard to determine. But I would still say it has decreased, probably by a lot, although cultures obviously vary. Violence has clearly come down, and that's a good thing.

There is a general lack of historical knowledge, and positive things also don't tend to be news as such. Both of these factors contribute a lot. 9/11 is big news, long-term incremental improvement of essentially everything is not: there is never any Eureka moment. But let's just consider things like infant surgery done without anaesthesia well into the 1980s. The past is a terrible, terrible place.

It doesn't seem to me that he's being cynical; those examples he gave truly are very bad. What's interesting is that things used to be a lot worse. For example, for a few months now, I have been involved in a work project concerning the history of the Mafia, going back to the feodal times. Essentially everything is a lot better now than it used to be; even the early 20th century was quite awful compared to what we have now (except for environmental problems).

Could you give me an example of what you think to be a serious lie from recent times? I'm genuinely interested. My knowledge of Australian matters is not that good, but I would agree that the Australian government, for instance, is not one that inspires trust in me.

The use of these phrases and terms nearly always contains an interesting detail, and I wonder if you agree with it. Simply put: it is fairly easy to make statements that have to do with "the masses", and you do indeed see it quite a lot, but people who use those terms don't consider themselves to be part of the masses. Which sort of raises the question of who are the masses, then. I think this is a distant relative of the overarching cynicism that you can see plenty of on these forums, too, if you want. But only a distant relative: I don't think this is particularly malign. It is interesting, though.

I am not concerned with Russian ultra-nationalists, I am interested in knowing what percentage of the population falls for this kind of propaganda. Not that it matters, and not that I'm ever going to know, but I am interested in any case. I would like to see an end to the war, even if it is in the distance, but at the moment I only see one way to bring the end closer: as many Russian soldiers as possible need to be killed as quickly and efficiently as possible. That's extremely harsh, but I don't see any other realistic way towards ending the war.

A popular Russian TV programme called Vesti Nedeli did a special piece on Finland last Sunday, claiming that 1) Finland is more russophobic than the US, 2) all Russian-language schools in Finland will be closed, 3) Russians living in Finland will be stripped of their citizenship, 4) Finland will try to take Karelia back by force and 5) Finland is also dreaming of a new Greater Finland that would stretch all the way beyond the Urals [!]. Several decades ago, one of our best poets, Paavo Haavikko, wrote that "parody has become impossible / they're doing it themselves". That observation fits perfectly with this example of Russian television. The pertinent question is, what percentage of viewers take the programme seriously and how many of them will recognize it's all rather hopeless and untrue. I have no idea, and I suppose no one does.

This conversation probably isn't worth continuing, but let me just point out that you are now making a completely different argument from the one you made before. Previously, you were arguing that his books are good because they are popular and my criticism of them isn't merited because of that. It's funny how quickly and effortlessly you just change what you're saying.

How is this relevant to any of this? I mean, neither Bruce nor I have said anything to this effect.

His successful self-help books are indeed written in a style that is not only poor but remarkably poor. Like, so poor that it makes you wonder if any editor ever saw it. See the quote I posted above; as I said, I don't think I have seen a worse sentence in my 25+ years of working in the business. Jordan Peterson is also the only author I have ever seen who uses smileys in his printed work, and the only author I have ever seen who spends considerable time discussing the sales of his previous work, as if the reader had any reason to be interested in something like that. The latter is selfish crassness at its worst, which also explains why writers so rarely do it: it looks embarrassingly jejune. The fact that his self-help books are successful is interesting, but there you go. An awful lot of nonsense and/or rubbish can be succesful, especially in the short term. I can almost guarantee that less than one person in a million knows anything about Nat Gould, but a hundred years ago he was just about the most successful writer in the world.

It does indeed appear that you are not sure what I'm talking about. I made a comment on how eloquently Richard Dawkins points out that Peterson's views on religion are nonsense, and how bad a writer Peterson is. To which you then replied that his success as a writer disputes criticism like that. To which I then said that an argument like that makes no sense, for reasons described above. To which you then replied with a comment that ignores what I said and talks about something else entirely. Of course I know that he has written books that have inspired people. But that has very, very little to do with whether his views on religion are nonsense of whether he is a remarkably poor writer. Whether his books have "helped people grapple with internal problems around confidence and purpose", as you said, has never been the topic here. If you seriously intend to equate success with quality, you're going to run into serious trouble because it's such a mad argument.

This argument makes no sense whatsoever, and there is probably a name for precisely this fallacy in the art of rhetoric. Simply put: the success or lack thereof of something is absolutely no indication of the quality or lack of quality of the thing in question. They exist in completely different realms. If you actually followed your own faulty logic here, you would have to convince yourself of the fact that the "radical left" ideology that you seem to disdain is actually a very good thing because it is apparently so popular.

This is something political and current, but not related to the discussion here at the moment. This is a lovely clip of Richard Dawkins commenting on the way Jordan Peterson talks about religion and how he obstinately refuses to make sense or commit to a definite argument. I have delved into Peterson in a professional capacity (i.e. not in my free time, thank you), and I have been astonished by how poor he is as a writer. I mean, in my 25+ years in publishing, I think this is the worst printed sentence I have ever seen: "Many herbivores, comparatively defenseless, facing imminent and brutal death, freeze in place, paralyzed by fear, depending on camouflage and immobility to render them invisible to the terrible intentions of nearby red-toothed and razor-clawed carnivores." If there ever was a perfect example of purple prose, it's this. In a writing class, I would give it an F, even at sophomore level. It's a complete mystery to me where his editor was. Dawkins' comparison to Deepak Chopra is apt: there is a whole lot of people ever-prepared to be thrilled by obfuscation whose intent is to hide a lack of content.

This is a really good explanation of how these things can be so poorly understood and, also, why conspiracy-type thinking can be so common. It's not easy to grasp the complexities of a situation, look at it from the right perspective and analyse the probabilities of various scenarios. I am reminded of the Sally Clark case where she was sentenced for murder because there happened to be two cases of sudden infant death syndrome in her family. It's easy to argue that someone had to be a murderer because having two cases of SIDS in one family is just so unlikely. But you only have to look at it from a different perspective to begin to understand why it could happen. I mean: given all the families and all the births in the world, what are the odds of that happening sometime somewhere? It's going to happen, but it's going to be very rare.

This is precisely the kind of language you want to write when discussing intelligibility. Anyway, there is a good basic rule to determine whether something is a different language or merely an accent / dialect. It goes like this: go into a place where people speak differently from the way you do. Try to speak like them. If they appreciate your effort, we are talking about two different languages. If, however, they don't like what you're doing or are even somewhat insulted by it because they think you're making fun of them, then we are not talking about two different languages but merely two different dialects / accents. In other words, Cóckney and Scouse are different English dialects -- an East Londoner going into Liverpool and trying to sound like the locals is generally not appreciated. But English and French are different languages -- a Londoner going into Paris and trying to speak like the locals is generally respected, even if he doesn't do it very well.