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Scylla Rhiadra

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Everything posted by Scylla Rhiadra

  1. Scylla Rhiadra
    Caer, if there is one thing easily demonstrable from my thousands of posts here, it is that I am as capable as anyone else of mucking up a communication, sounding incoherent, being incomprehensible, etc.!
  2. Scylla Rhiadra
    In the Bladerunner scene, the director had the challenge of communicating affect indirectly. We don't have a "narrator" who can describe what he's feeling, so the language, which is a bit like the visible tip of an iceberg, has to carry the weight of communicating how intense and very human are his responses to his experiences in life. In this case, I think, it succeeds brilliantly: there is a reason that this is possibly the best known and most quoted scene from the movie. It's enormously powerful -- and of course produces an "affect" in us that is testimony to its effectiveness. (See what I did there? 😏)
  3. Scylla Rhiadra
    Affect here is a noun, and is related to, but ultimately rather more complicated, than the meanings of the verb. The barebones dictionary definition of current usage (OED) is "A term used in psychology for the experience of feeling or emotion, mood, etc., as opposed to cognition and volition." In my field, it's used most often to describe the complex and sometimes subtle ways in which our emotional responses can impact upon us, and upon our perceptions of and responses to the world around us. It is NOT a very common usage, though. Poetry and literature, or art in general, can produce a particular "affect" in those who experience that is much more difficult to describe comprehensively and accurately than what one might call the "intellectual content" of the piece.
  4. Scylla Rhiadra
    Ouch. The first Trainspotting is the movie that I mentioned above somewhere, I think, that I was unable to finish watching because of one particularly traumatizing scene. I do love the Prodigy remix of Lust for Life though.
  5. Scylla Rhiadra
    Just in passing, Love, you were asking about the use of the term "affect" earlier. That scene (which is brilliant) is a pretty good example of how it might be used: what we hear and see from Roy is an expression of the "affect" of all he has experienced. The fact that he's capable of it (because affect is mostly about emotional and/or psychological responses) is, of course, what proves that he and the other replicants are fully "human."
  6. Scylla Rhiadra
    I think this is exactly right. Well said; it's sort of what I've been trying to say, but said soooo much better. Caer has suggested something similar. They have obviously been on this forum, as they cite it, and if they are in this particular field (MMOs and games) they're likely familiar with the rough-and-tumble of these kinds of fora, so I probably shouldn't worry too much, but I'll confess that if they DO post here, I'll be watching anxiously behind half-closed fingers!
  7. Scylla Rhiadra
    This is WHY I never had kids!!!
  8. Scylla Rhiadra
    No, I didn't think that was what you were saying! I thought your post was entirely reasonable, friendly, and worthwhile!
  9. Scylla Rhiadra
    Oh, totally. I'm not trying to play "the victim" here: I knew exactly what I was doing, and in fact commented to a friend that I was about to get myself banned from the place even before I'd written and posted my response. Had it been a place I cared at all about, or a person I liked better (this particular person has always seemed to me not very pleasant, tbh), I'd most likely not have done it. Mostly, I don't like confrontation. And when I do confront someone -- and that includes here -- I generally go out of my way to try to sound non-belligerent. But honestly, the whole "you're just producing screenshots / captures of other people's work" thing is really starting to bug me, so I suppose I could argue that this was my rant. And as the cost of letting it rip was pretty low (as it's not a place I use at all), I decided to go for it. It felt good! Good analysis, though. I'd still disagree with you that banning me was a "reasonable" response, given what I actually said, but I do concede that it's a very human one. And clever you finding the post!!!! ETA: But in the "humans are inconsistent" category -- I got a rather snotty and snide response to an admittedly highly political and contentious pic I posted a few days back, and responded in a pretty acidic way. Weirdly, I've NOT been banned from his region (which is a sort of "art sim" one quite popular with photographers).
  10. Scylla Rhiadra
    You have NO idea dahling . . . 😏
  11. Scylla Rhiadra
    When what they REALLY needed was a "NO SCYLLA" sign, right?
  12. Scylla Rhiadra
    Heh. So I've apparently been banned from a region very popular with photographers because I took issue (quite politely, I think) on Flickr with the owner's suggestion that photographers owe all the artistry of their photos to the hard work of the sim designer. I quote: I actually wrote that I agreed with him that photographers should provide the SLURL of places where they take photos and acknowledge them, but I think my response interrupted the steady stream of obsequious agreement that his remarks had been receiving. Oh well. Some people are very delicate little flowers, I guess? (And before someone inevitably points out that region owners have the right to choose whom they ban, I should hasten to add that I'm aware of this. And as I don't think I've ever actually been to the region in question anyway, and had no plans to go there, I'm not exactly devastated anyway.)
  13. Scylla Rhiadra
    We addressed this issue here a while ago, actually. Note the graphic. It pretty much says it all!
  14. Scylla Rhiadra
    Well, this is a thread about a quasi-academic article. So I guess it's a sort of "academic" thread. But ALL of our threads here are, OF COURSE, "intelligentsia threads," because, well, we're all part of the intellectual elite here! Right?
  15. Scylla Rhiadra
    Gosh, that sounds like f ... No. Just ... no. 😬
  16. Scylla Rhiadra
    Jealous? 😀
  17. Scylla Rhiadra
    The blogosphere is a weird thing. I dont know anything about this particular publication, so I'm not entirely sure what its aim is, but there is a lot of movement these days towards public engagement with academia. There are fields like Public Sciences, and the Public Humanities, that are all about taking academic disciplines outside of the academy. Usually, though, things written in that vein are written in a more accessible style, for obvious reasons. But there are also just highly specialized public venues for publishing academic or related work. I mentioned The Journal of Virtual Worlds Research (which seems to be on hiatus at the moment): it's an open access publication.
  18. Scylla Rhiadra
    That's definitely an issue that can arise in all analytical work, in any field.
  19. Scylla Rhiadra
    Pretty much. Not a fan of griefers or hacktivists.
  20. Scylla Rhiadra
    Stolen and stored for future use!
  21. Scylla Rhiadra
    I don't think there's anyway of knowing for sure, but it describes "major upgrades in 2023," and uses log-in numbers from that year, so it can't be that old.
  22. Scylla Rhiadra
    Of course. Totally! But again the piece isn't about "improving" SL: it's describing and analyzing the state the writer (apparently) found it in. Interestingly, the one constituency of users who actually really DO love glitches is . . . griefers. Griefers look for ways to exploit bugs and glitches, both as a way of "subverting the system," and also, of course, because causing mayhem is their idea of fun. What makes that sort of interesting is that there is a sort of historical and political connection between griefers and the ideological underpinnings of this article. This piece celebrates the ways in which we exploit, circumvent, or adapt to bugs and interface faults because it sees that process as a subversion of the established mechanisms of power as embodied in the code, and the intent of the designers to control and limit our use of the platform to prescribed ways. That's the true burden of the term "heteronormative" in this article, which is kind of shorthand (I'm being a bit reductive here) for "fascist." Hacktivists and a certain kind of ideologically-motivated griefer similarly view their exploitations of bugs, and their use of these to destabilize the platform and its users, as a sort of revolutionary act that attacks power.
  23. Scylla Rhiadra
    Yeah. There's been some of that generally. I get it, sort of -- this stuff is densely written and jargon-laden, as any specialist discourse is bound to be to some degree. But it's also very true that we live in an age that features many who, in the timeless words of Michael Gove, feel that "we've had enough of experts."
  24. Scylla Rhiadra
    Nah, all discussion is good. Even (*coughs*) "gaslighting" and "bad faith" arguments! Another thing to sort of bear in mind: while this is not a peer-reviewed article, it is in a sense "academic." And academic writing is never intended to be the "last word" on its subject. One writes it not merely knowing that people will take issue with it, but with the intent that they will: it's supposed to be a part of an ongoing dialogue. And that's true of any discipline, including STEM. How many papers in physics have taken issue with, corrected, or supplemented Einstein's work on relativity? (Answer: A LOT.) It's the process. I'd hope that if Bucknell ever does read what's in this thread, they'll engage with it as constructive critique in just that way.
  25. Scylla Rhiadra
    It's absolutely central to their thesis, which is that those things are what makes SL interesting and still worthwhile. (Which I know sounds like a paradox, but it's literally the argument they are making.) This IS something the article could have discussed, because it's precisely in line with its argument. Good point! (Although, as someone who is an AWFUL driver, I'm not sure I agree!) Yeah. I've mentioned above a few times that I think that the SL economy, the ecosystem of SL creation, and consumerism generally might be said to undercut their thesis.
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