thrownaway24e89172
naïve paranoid outcast
No bio...
User ID: 1081
thrownaway24e89172
naïve paranoid outcast
9mo ago
This is true, but static objects (eg, boulders on mountains) intersect that heightmap and thus would be traversed by my search, and if they don't intersect it properly a surface without a texture on that object would be found.
thrownaway24e89172
naïve paranoid outcast
9mo ago
Yes, though I expect for interior worldspaces it'd wrap around to cover the walls and ceilings as well.
Yeah, you can do that (and in fact I distinctly remember Morrowind having a scripting function for it), the issue is that you can cast an infinite amount of rays from any point.
I don't think I communicated the intended algorithm well. This is just intended to be a batch program that you point your load order at and it spits out a file listing all the "holes" it found. I would only cast a single ray per worldspace, straight down from the (first, if more than one) spawn location to identify a surface to start the breadth-first search. My assumption is that this initial surface would almost certainly be part of the composite surface surrounding the playable volume of that worldspace rather than something floating within it, and thus "flooding" over it with a breadth-first search would suffice to identify holes.
EDIT:
Well, even then you need some criteria to try identify them. Otherwise you'd be showing people the entirety of the game map.
I do have a criteria to identify them: a surface with a texture adjacent to one without a texture. It is classification of them that I defer on. The definition of "adjacent to" is a bit complicated, but basically shares an edge with and if you rotated them around that edge they'd come together without intersecting another surface.
Does Skyrim scripting let you do some vector/matrix math (other than you implementing it by hand that is)?
I don't know, but I was planning to do this as a separate (probably C++) program that just loaded all the resources and analyzed it rather than doing it in Skyrim itself. The idea was to start off learning how the assets are stored, how the data structures for the models work together, etc and build up to being able to run a "simple/naive" analysis on them.
How would you decide which surface is supposed to be hidden, or a hole is not meant to be there?
It wouldn't, it would just try to identify all of them and leave it to someone/something else to decide if it is meant to be there or not.
What does "visible" mean?
I don't know much about 3d graphics at the moment, but I believe a naive algorithm for detecting what I'm looking for would be to cast a ray from a spawn location straight down until it intersects a surface, then do a breadth-first search of all adjacent surfaces recording any that are adjacent to (roughly, share an edge with) one without a renderable texture.
You'd run a sweep through the entire room?
Ideally it'd sweep over every worldspace in the game.
thrownaway24e89172
naïve paranoid outcast
9mo ago
Since no-one has commented on the technical question, @ZorbaTHut do you have thoughts here? Is this a reasonable first step into 3d graphics programming?
thrownaway24e89172
naïve paranoid outcast
9mo ago
I agree that almost every parent on the planet would prefer to have their child saved than not. I don't know that that preference implies I should try to save them though. I've never saved a kid's life before, but I have been an important figure in one's life and have seen first-hand how quickly people go from thankful to "never contact us again" when they find out, no matter how innocent your intentions or how careful you were to avoid even the hint of sexual behavior. That hurts, a lot, and I now find it hard to feel motivated to risk going through that again for the benefit of people who in all likelihood have nothing but disgust for me. The younger, less bitter me had the will to be somewhat altruistic, but that seems to be fading as I get older.
thrownaway24e89172
naïve paranoid outcast
9mo ago
and I guess anyone else who checks my comment page, hi there!
Or usually browses the global comments feed (www.themotte.org/comments) rather than specific posts...
This rule is going to be applied with delicacy; if I can find not-low-effort comments about three different subjects within your last two weeks or two pages of comments, you're fine.
How would this work with something that strongly influence your thoughts on a wide variety of subjects? Would commonly referencing it in your comments make you a single-issue-poster even where you are commenting on different subjects?
thrownaway24e89172
naïve paranoid outcast
10mo ago
I don't begrudge you that position. But similarly, I see no reason to care about people being intolerant of you--supporting your group is not something I can afford. Hence my original comment.
thrownaway24e89172
naïve paranoid outcast
10mo ago
I'm pretty confident most people expect me to avoid relationships, if not interactions altogether, with people I'm attracted to.
thrownaway24e89172
naïve paranoid outcast
11mo ago
For a close to home example, I don't think anyone at The Schism "hates" white people in the way, say, Hannah Nikole-Jones or Tema Okun does, but I think many of them would engage in a lot of hemming, hawing, and sanewashing why those attitudes make sense in context, or why they should be tolerated (but the opposite equivalent wouldn't be, a la the fiasco last month with Impassionata- I strongly doubt the mods would've tolerated a right-wing rant half as long), etc etc. Or why slurs are so much worse at certain targets, but basically don't matter towards others.
Do you have any evidence to support these claims? I find that the mods there are very hesitant to give out bans at all or even warnings for that matter, and as @drmanhattan16 notes, there's been plenty of right-wing or at least anti-progressive ranting in the sub over its lifetime. I vaguely recall @gemmaem discussing this hesitancy in a comment early on, though I'm having trouble finding a link to it with the reddit api fiasco making searching for old comments a bit troublesome at the moment.
thrownaway24e89172
naïve paranoid outcast
3mo ago
Have you seen /u/TheTinMenBlog's posts on reddit? I don't think he considers himself an antifeminist though and they might be a bit too shallow (in the neutral sense of that not being their primary purpose) for what you are looking for. The studies he cites in them are probably of interest however.
Break out what you mean by "sexual act," because it seems obvious to me that there are lots of "sexual acts" that are not procreation
I'm not trying to restrict "sexual acts" to only those that involve procreation though. I'm asking why procreative acts, which I believe should be central to the category, have been so thoroughly excised from it by others. What makes intercourse so important that it should completely push out everything else, and even that it should be expanded to cover things beyond PiV intercourse? To my eyes, the only plausible answer is that the people who did so are guilty of using self-motivated reasoning to gerrymander the definition to ensure they can have their cake and eat it too.
Find a different way to describe it, and you'll have an answer to your question.
No, I really won't. My confusion stems precisely from the definition of the category sexual because we consider sexual things to be special. Sexual assault is considered a worse offence than plain assault. Sexual harassment is considered a worse offence than plain harassment. Sexual orientation is similarly a legally protected category in much of the West. Somehow I'm displaying sexual entitlement by looking at a woman who chose to dress provocatively, but a woman isn't when she claims a right to be impregnated by people she's "not sexually attracted to" though? What kind of backwards definition is that?
EDIT: Grammar.
Right now you're talking to some harpy in your head who gives women a pass for letting their boyfriends molest their kids,
The "Ignore the shitbag mom pimping them out..." part of my comment was not intended to be a reflection of your views, but was me blowing steam on (my view of) the general status quo. I apologize for not making that clear.
who believes that all child molesters are cunning sadistic predators,
I have no idea where you got this from my comment. The best match I can come up with is
No, obviously it's just pedophiles evilly fantasizing about victimizing children until they finally get up the nerve to do it to real children. Because that's what we are. Evil people plotting evil things because we're evil. Any defense we give is just DARVO.
but even that's a very big stretch. If that is what you were referring to, then yes, let's not pursue this any further because I will very likely not be able to be civil to someone who that egregiously equates "pedophile" and "child molester" while claiming to differentiate them.
and who wants a blank check to hurt pedophiles for their desires alone.
What positive expression of those desires would you not see censored?
If I promise not to accuse you of believing child abuse is fine because you haven't given a loud enough condemnation of it, can you agree not to accuse me of believing "women can never be blamed for their contributions to child abuse and their abuse can never truly be sexual anyway"?
You don't even need to make that promise. As I said above, I didn't intend to accuse you of believing that and I'm sorry I didn't distinguish my "ranting at the sky" clearly enough.
But could you please, while you're talking to me, talk to me?
The best I can promise here is that I will try to be charitable and assume good faith. I cannot guarantee I will succeed or avoid misunderstandings however. Even putting aside the strong emotional response to the topic, there is a large inferential distance to cover.
thrownaway24e89172
naïve paranoid outcast
4mo ago
Yeah, those views. It was amusing to me how noticeably bad its responses were when I asked it about ethical behavior in situations involving pedophiles compared to situations that didn't. The former were much more terse and obviously special-cased.
thrownaway24e89172
naïve paranoid outcast
4mo ago
Seems we mostly disagree on whether to deploy the word "evil" for pretty quotidian human cognitive biases
...
Far more harm is done in the world by those who are mistaken, or haven't thought things through, or who want a little too badly to feel important, than by malice.
Hmmm...I think I still failed to communicate. I think it is evil to believe "The ends justify the means." and actively disregard moral responsibilities to those affected by your actions in pursuit of a goal. I don't think it should be necessarily considered to be malice however, as any harm caused is usually a side effect rather than the ultimate goal. This is how I perceive most feminists' activism in the context of DV. I take it you disagree with at least one of these characterizations?
Plus, it's easier to convince a man that he is wrong than that he is evil.
N=1, but I'd be a lot healthier if I found it easier to be convinced I am wrong than that I am evil.
thrownaway24e89172
naïve paranoid outcast
5mo ago
Consider two groups. Group 1 consists of convicted child molesters who report attraction to kids. Group 2 consists of people who aren't known to have had any sexual contact with kids and report attraction to kids. If an academic studies Group 2 and uses the technically correct term pedophile, people--particularly non-technical people--will assume they are referring to Group 1 because the term has lost its nuance and studies based on Group 1 are far more common for various reasons. Thus minor attracted person was coined to convey that lost nuance. By "pulled out of someone's butt with zero basis in reality", are you asserting that such confusion does not exist with the term pedophile, that such nuance is unnecessary, or something else?
thrownaway24e89172
naïve paranoid outcast
5mo ago
Tolkien didn't invent a new sort of hero, he was instantiating a very old (and very Catholic) sort of hero that 'most people today outside of the trad-right are simply unfamiliar with because modern culture is overwhelmingly secular and liberal.
...
I think a hero who accepts their mission specifically because it was handed down from God is of a very different nature, this is someone who believes there is an absolute authority that can and will be answered to. The moderns protagonists don't believe that, which is part of why they're so uncertain about their mission and nervous about accepting.
Again, an excellent point.
I'm disappointed Hlynka. You started out on the right path, but flubbed the ending. Tolkien's heroes are Catholic heroes not just because "Your will Lord, not mine, be done." I think the more important part distinguishing Tolkien's protagonists (and the opposite for his antagonists) is the emphasis on acting virtuously and avoiding sin even in the presence of great temptation--the ends do not justify the means and the world can never be saved through sin. Do not chase great deeds, but act appropriately when circumstances make them necessary. This is very different than what Greer and @Soriek are describing.
thrownaway24e89172
naïve paranoid outcast
5mo ago
True, but "minor attracted person" originated in academia in people studying pedophilia specifically because the distinction you mentioned had broken down to the point of being unusable. The progressive movement adopting the term is merely the inevitable progression to it too losing its distinction. I don't know that it is possible to ever maintain the distinction since the topic holds so much power over people's emotions.
thrownaway24e89172
naïve paranoid outcast
6mo ago
I think I'm going to have to bow out of this conversation. It is a bit unsatisfying to end it without having been able to clarify what I meant, but this is getting too close to negative childhood experiences with the Catholic Church (to be clear, NOT relating to clergy abuse) for me to continue. Thank you for taking the time to clarify your position. I'm sorry I couldn't reciprocate.
thrownaway24e89172
naïve paranoid outcast
6mo ago
The point was to normalize doing gay things, wasn't it?
Yes, normalizing "doing gay things" is one of the goals of the movement, but not the only one. I distinguished that from acceptance as gay people for two reasons. First, Western society was significantly more openly hostile to even celibate gay people when the Born This Way narrative became popular, which I think is important historical context to consider when evaluating its efficacy. Second, getting back to pedophilia, it is rather common for pedophiles to not actually care much about engaging in sexual relations with children but who still want to be able to participate somewhat normally in society without having to hide that they have those feelings, making the distinction between acceptance as people and acceptance of relationships a bit more pronounced in that case.
The Catholic Church's teachings are completely and totally consistent with Born This Way. They are lovingly accepting of people being gay, they just take a hard line against doing gay things. They have all kinds of programs to help people who struggle with their sinful compulsions. I don't think this comports at all with what the gay liberation movement fights/fought for.
This is a complex topic that I don't know that I can do justice to. The ideal that you refer to here is as you note only part of what they want and other aspects of the Church's teachings are incompatible with their desires. It is also unfortunately not always reflected in the actions of the faithful. For a little more detailed exploration of the topic, I'll refer you to an old discussion at r/theschism, particularly the long back and forth between /u/UAnchovy and /u/callmejay.
I don't think we disagree.
It's not clear to me whether we do or not.
All I'm saying is that Born This Way was never anywhere near the strongest argument for gay liberation. Acceptance of gay people and gay relationships should come from recognition that these behaviors aren't harmful and can indeed be extremely functional, personally fulfilling, and even prosocial, supporting stable family formation. ... Conversely, regardless of what causes attraction to prepubescent children, laws against child molestation should still stand.
There's an important difference between acceptance of gay people and acceptance of gay relationships, and similarly between acceptance of pedophiles and acceptance of sexual relationships between adults and children. Being outed as gay often meant losing your job, losing your social network, being subject to harassment or assault, etc, even if you didn't participate in gay relationships. Being outed as a pedophile (EDIT:) has can have similar repercussions even if you are never sexually involved with a child. The core of the Born This Way argument is that these desires are both immutable and not the result of a conscious choice, which I think is a very strong argument that they shouldn't have to hide those feelings simply to participate in society without being subject to such social sanction. The only way I think you can argue it was "never anywhere near the strongest argument for gay liberation" is if you restrict gay liberation to tolerance of openly gay relationships, which I agree it is not really relevant to, and ignore everything else it fights/fought for.
thrownaway24e89172
naïve paranoid outcast
6mo ago
Are we talking academic feminism or popular understanding of feminism (“it just means ‘women are people’, equal rights, etc ”)?
Because I think the wider population is far less anti-pornography, anti-prostitution and anti-free speech than committed feminists , so modern feminism as a political player is hardly on the pro-side of these issues.
I'd say somewhere in the middle. I think the primary political power of feminism stems from people who have a deeper understanding of feminism than the "pop feminism" you reference, who accurately refer to themselves as feminists, but aren't directly involved in academic feminism. For example, consider a lawyer who graduated with a degree in gender studies in addition to whatever pre-law degree they sought and then entered a career in government. I think these feminist are largely sex positive and the instances where they appear not to be are usually due to them reacting to a situation framed in such a way that the impact on women's agency is not obvious to them. I don't think it is fair to dismiss them as "not real feminists". Meanwhile, academic feminism has a lot of perverse incentives that drive it to produce...less popular views, but I don't think those views hold much power until they are distilled and accepted by former group.
Hmmm. I thought they denied it was necessarily a bad thing, not that it exists at all.
Well it’s the original objection to kant. Are you ‘objectifying’ a baker by buying his bread? If yes, we are constantly objectifying others, I can’t see the problem with it, the concept of ‘objectifying’ loses all negative valence, so may as well not exist.
Consider the difference between 'homicide' and 'murder'. Does the fact that 'homicide' lacks the negative valence of 'murder' mean it may as well not exist? To the contrary, the fact that it lacks a negative valence is the reason it does exist because we sometimes don't view killing someone as a negative and thus require a more neutral term. I think '[sexual] objectification' is more similar to 'homicide' in the eyes of a sex positive feminist, who use it to describe something without passing judgement on it, and more similar to 'murder' in that it is passing judgement in the eyes of a sex negative one.
To preface this, it sounds like you look for very different things in your games than I do (eg. I could never get into Elden Ring), so I'm not sure this will be much help. That said...
I'm endlessly drawn to Elder Scrolls games. They're near to what I would call "perfect" games for myself.
That's me, between these and (modded) minecraft. I occasionally branch out (eg, Factorio or various RPGs), but I always find myself being drawn back to the TES games or minecraft.
Unfortunately, I have "gaming OCD" and just can't install any mods, except for bugfix or graphics mods. I want the vanilla experience in games, the way they're "meant" to be played.
As far as I'm concerned, the fact that the Creation Kit is included with the games means customization through mods are the way they are "meant" to played. Bethesda provides a curated vanilla experience for those who want it, but have done more than any other developer I can think of in providing and supporting the ability for players to adapt the games to their desired playstyle. The games' modding community has built amazing things on the canvas Bethesda provided. Eg, in Morrowind there was a mod I used that added the ability to raise skeletal minions through a ritual involving manually placing items (bones, candles, etc) in the correct layout in the world rather than simply casting a spell, though you still needed a spell to trigger the ritual once all the preparations were made.
Not to mention the technical difficulties of installing mods. I've recompiled my kernel and have been an Arch user, but that shit is just too much for me.
Allow me to introduce you to Wabbajack, the "I just want to click install" option for playing modded Skyrim, albeit a bit annoying without a premium nexus account since you have to manually initiate the download of each mod/resource. Nexus has a somewhat controversial similar feature in its collections.
In Morrowind and (maybe) Oblivion I don't mind it, because the magic system is so open. You can craft your own spells,
In Morrowind you can create custom spells in-game that combine multiple (IIRC, up to 8?) spell effects from a preset list, varying the magnitude and targeting of the effect. If you wanted to do anything more complex (eg, a Mark and Recall-like pair that allows you to set multiple destinations and choose from them dynamically, or the previously mentioned necromancy ritual) or even just include preset spell effects that they didn't want you to have access to (eg, restore magika), you needed to resort to modding. As the series progressed, Bethesda pushed spell customization out of the game and into mods, a choice that never really bothered me since I was already used to doing things via mods anyway. And modders have done amazing things with spells in all the games.
launch yourself all across the world map,
Still technically possible in Skyrim with mods (eg, using the buffs from the wind element from Phenderix's Elements) and even the base game with glitches, but this is more a technical restriction to avoid game crashes and performance issues than a real gameplay decision. When Morrowind first came out, it was very easy to crash your game by boosting your Acrobatics and Atheletics skills sufficiently high that you could jump across the island and have the game choke trying to load in all the resources as you flew across the world. If you got them high enough, you'd also start to run into compounding errors in the position calculations leading to all kinds of "fun". Oblivion and Skyrim are much more resource intensive, and this drives a lot of performance tradeoffs to manage that (eg, forbidding Levitation so you can assume players won't be positioned to notice that some objects don't have renderable surfaces from all angles).
nothing is restricted.
This is definitely the primary attraction I've had to the series, but I think it is only through modding that you truly get there.
In Skyrim however, the restrictions are there, and I can't give it a pass on the combat system.
I'm not sure what you are looking for in terms of combat, but the modding community has a lot of options for various playstyles. Even vanilla Skyrim I'd rate higher than Morrowind though, as I found the tedium of missing/fizzling constantly at the start of the game extremely annoying. This is related to the primary reason I tend to play Skyrim more than Oblivion or Morrowind these days. I tend to keep all my skills at a similar level so I can swap between them as my mood changes rather than specializing as the game expects. This doesn't play very nice with the earlier games balance or levelling system though.
Not to mention that the quests are notoriously shallow.
Again, mods. There is a questing mod available that won a Writer's Guild award for its script. Another with one of my favorite game trailers of all time. If you are looking for something more akin to Elden Ring and similar games, see VIGILANT and the others in the series or Darkend (less lore friendly). If you are looking for something that explores the weirder aspects of the games' lore (eg, you want that "I can't believe these mods are lore-friendly" feeling), see Trainwiz's series of mods, notably The Wheels of Lull. And I'd probably be lynched if I didn't at least mention Legacy of the Dragonborn.
In short, I love open-world games that I can easily tweak to my liking and change up my playstyle regularly without too much hassle (eg, starting a new character/playthrough), and Skyrim fits that bill very nicely. Its base game isn't all that great by itself, but the modding community surrounding it has lots of options for nearly everyone.
EDIT: Grammar.
Has it died down? I am not sure.
To be clear, I wasn't asking if such behavior had died down, but rather if the apparent furor over it had.
This suggests to me that it has not gone away. At the same time, the world here is different. Japanese women don't step up or protest, or they don't in the same way that say, an American, might imagine that they should. I don't even want to get into it, but they don't.
While this is true and I wouldn't expect her to cause a scene, I would be worried about her later reporting it to the station attendants. Being a foreigner sometimes excuses such things, but sometimes makes it worse. It'd certainly make it much easier to be identified if she were to, and I had perhaps the incorrect impression that the cultural norms against stirring the pot that typically make Japanese women reluctant to report such behavior weren't as big an obstacle if the perpetrator wasn't Japanese.
At the same time, touching a girl on the shoulder, well, I didn't think I'd be seen as a chikan in the Japanese sense, but a creep in the American sense. And as any man who isn't already a criminal pariah can attest, no appellation has quite the same sting.
Hmm...maybe I was the one projecting then. The impression I got while I was there was that there wasn't much of a distinction. EDIT: Or rather, that there wouldn't be much of a distinction in this situation--moving to touch a dozing girl on the shoulder looks a lot like testing the waters before actually molesting her.
I'm probably not using the right terminology here. Consider the real-world example of a bowl turned upside down and lowered into water. The inside of the bowl is painted red and the outside blue. My goal is to identify whether any red is directly accessible from the outside. Because the bowl is upside down and in the water, the (EDIT:) directly accessible surface of the water only intersects the blue surface of the bowl, and thus the red is not accessible from the outside. If the bowl were on its side instead, the red surface would be accessible. Most static objects in Skyrim (and probably the other games as well) are topologically similar to bowls in this sense, where they are only partially textured with the intent that the non-textured stuff (corresponding to the red part of the bowl) is hidden behind other textured surfaces.
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