But Huntington has 50k residents? It's the second most populous city in the state. It's not exactly a small town.

People do more or less feel that way today, but that was not always the norm. In the past, fanzines and bound fan novels were routinely sold.

Hundreds? More like thousands, and for Harry Potter and Star Wars, hundreds of thousands.

Authors of fanfic aren't necessarily 'obsessed' with a series. Some authors of fanfic haven't even seen or read the work they're writing a fic about--they might have come into contact with it through other fan works, for example. And plenty of people write fanfic for many different fandoms. They are probably not 'obsessed' with all of them--they're just writers.

You don't want to put the law in charge of deciding whether people are pretty (even though that could be done reliably enough--"judgments of attractiveness [...] may well be enough to collect the data required for monitoring purposes"--but you do want to put the law in charge of deciding whether people's 'associations' are sufficiently "sustained by the publicly available evidence"? The latter is a way bigger minefield!

Since when?

And so there is no category for people who play because they want to build something, which has become a popular component of games (Minecraft, Terraria, etc.).

There is simply no reason to use an AI language model to generate recipes like this. It's easy enough to get a bunch of recipes in a machine-readable format and then just match the ones that share ingredients with the ones customers select. This is, I am sure, the approach taken by existing recipe sites that offer this feature.

This is just a clear example of someone using AI in an application which did not need it. AI is the new blockchain.

I am reminded of the story that the Mac was designed on a Cray, and the Cray was designed on a Mac.

After carrying this song from computer to computer for years--decades!--I finally lost the file in The Great Hard Drive Crash a few years ago.

Of course, by this point I've certainly memorized the song, so a little googling, and what do I find? It's a small world, after all.

The original link is dead, but the wayback machine has both the linked page and the audio files archived.

From the essay "Books".

I fear that millennials didn't invent pornography. Delta of Venus by Anaïs Nin made the best-seller list in 1977 and stayed there for 35 weeks.

Could this not have gone the other direction, though? A person who is often subjected to forces outside his control which prevents him arriving at work on time might profess less belief in free will than one who--similarly through chance--succeeds at arriving on time for work. We are inclined to attribute our successes to our efforts and our failures to external causes, after all.

This could only demonstrate that there is no such thing as free will if a person is a distinct entity from her brain--as though the brain "decides for her" what she will do, while the "person" is merely carried along for the ride.

That's absurd, of course. The brain is the person, or anyway the most substantial part of what we'd consider the person to be, so when your brain makes a decision, you are making that decision. If consciousness is a post-hoc reconstruction of mental processes, then so much for consciousness--and if your conception of free will depends on consciousness not looking like that, then so much for free will, but it doesn't have to be that way.

These classic categories do have some value, though--they let you find a game based on a description, screenshot, or video--in principle, at least.

The question, though, is whether the students in fact have anything of value, when they need it. When you're skydiving, a broken parachute isn't better than no parachute. But it's easier to notice that you have no parachute at all--and rectify it.

This is weird. I guess the goal is to use the word boredom in a surprising way, but surprising isn't always good.

Boredom isn't a positive state to be in. Wiktionary defines being bored as being "mildly annoyed and restless through having nothing to do", which sounds about right. The point of this article, I think, is exactly that we need not be bored just because we aren't working on some task. That we needn't feel guilty for taking downtime.

This seems to violate the rule stated previously that using a semicolon will cause an expression to become a statement and return no value.

The religious might argue that it is not, in fact, the best shot you've got. Or the scientists, for that matter.

Schoenfield2014 argues that it may be okay to believe for accidental reasons.

About 30% dual-income in 1969 and about 50% in 2019. So in 1969, 1.3 incomes was $68k, and in 2019 1.5 incomes is $64k. So people are working more and earning less, but it's okay because they can't afford to have kids, anyway!

Everyday items like a roundtrip New York-London ticket are much cheaper. Exotic things like housing and education, on the other hand...

Which boomers are less supportive of than younger cohorts.

Alternative energy, which boomers don't like as much as younger people do. Home solar is not popular with boomers, says Pew.

In 2019, charting musicians averaged about 30 years old.

Written by, on average, not boomers.

And the participation award goes to...

"...the 1992 Kyoto Protocol (that we pulled out of)."

"...because of boomer politicians."

"...by boomers."

"More rapists, too! The official statistics aren't everything!"

"You can tell we were the greatest generation because we had so many more criminals!"

Or, shorter: "that's true".

If you're going to take credit for everything that happened since 1960, then you should also be taking the blame for ozone depletion.

On the other hand, the people who are in line to get $68 trillion in inheritances are probably largely not the ones carrying crushing student loan debt.

The Great Depression was decades before boomers were born, though.

Describing it as "the killing" leaves little question of the opinion of the authors.

This is very worrying. For a document that lays out how bad it is if your personal knowledge repository must rely on some company's existence to conclude with the implication that in the future the tool won't work in offline mode is distressing.

What is the use of this feature?

Surely messaging at FTL speeds is still impossible, so this must be either a misreporting or else the whole thing is nonsense.

"Publish everything as soon as you learn it" is not a description of responsible journalism.

This is a very useless article. A paragraph-by-paragraph summary:

Geeks like scifi.

I like scifi, too.

"We create it because we can."

Hackers exist.

We use the internet for a lot of things, and hackers exist.

People use technology on the road.

People use technology at the beach.

People use technology while chasing Pokemon over a cliff.

"...all tech companies serious about ethical grounding need to be hiring folks with backgrounds in areas like anthropology, psychology and philosophy."

It'd be nice if tech were more "thoughtful in its engagement with our lives and the world".

People should consider the impact of technology? Well, obviously. But Bajarin offers not the slightest idea of how to do that, or what a more responsible tech world might look like.

Except insofar as ethics falls within the domain of philosophy, he doesn't give any reason "Why We Need the Liberal Arts in Technology's Age of Distraction". What do students of classics have to teach us about Instagram? How does literary theory apply to consuming facebook posts? What can an anthropologist do for tumblr? Tell us!

I do not think it is precisely Norman's intent here, but: I have seen a number of times the attitude that when engineers (programmers, geeks of some stripe) have invented something useful, they ought to get out of the way so that the important people can take advantage of it. In a discussion on the use of git by authors and other non-programmers, I saw more than once a comment to the effect of "as usual, programmers ruined a great idea by making something no one can use"--the quality of git's design aside, the tool was made and found useful by the programmers, who after all invented it for their own use.

This isn't to say that I don't agree that people familiar with other disciplines have much to contribute to the technical fields. In "Space for Poets", published in the March 1979 issue of OMNI, Trudy E. Bell makes the case that room should be made on the space shuttle for not only scientists but also for humanists, including poets. The point is compelling, though it presupposes a thriving shuttle program that unfortunately never materialized.

This is the most interesting idea in the article. I would frame it somewhat differently, however: this seems to conflate religious actions by the player character with religious actions by the player.

The observation that players can engage in religious behavior in the digital space is a good one. These may be sincere religious activities that take place in-game, or the semblance thereof, performed for dramatic reasons.

Sincere religious activities may be explicit, e.g. evangelism in a multiplayer game, or implicit, e.g. choosing the player character's actions according to the player's own religious imperative. The memorials mentioned in the article probably fall under this category, with religion broadly construed.

Anthony's section on allopolitical games (p. 41) is relevant.

This step combines ethnography (e.g. watching playthroughs by other players) with a study of the existing literature, which seems an oddly careless combination for a process that somehow distinguished between 'playing the game' and 'playing the game, but really paying attention this time'.

However, those materials (e.g. novels) are intended to be experienced by the players of the game as players of the game. For games with a focus on world-building, this kind of 'research' is in fact an ordinary component of 'play'.

It is not clear how this step is differentiated from the first step. Reading the in-game text, talking to the NPCs, and other such actions are an ordinary part of playing the game, surely. If the first step involves "playing the game multiple times (playthroughs), including main quest (mission) and side quests (missions), reaching every possible ending", then what remains to do? This only makes sense if, in the first step, you are meant to play the game repeatedly without paying any particular attention to it, so that you miss all the little details.

The approach outlined in this section seems reasonable enough, but has no specific relationship to the study of religion in games. It is also a rather obvious approach: first, study the source material (i.e. the game); next, study other primary source material from the creator of the game; last, study secondary materials.

Bosman does not make explicit any examples which this typology does not cover; he does not mention it again. The statement is accurate, but beside the point. Bosman's system is more akin to Ferdig's than Anthony's, describing the religious content rather than the category of game, so his categories are orthogonal to Anthony's.

This seems to be a misreading of Ryan. She enumerates these four elements as "properties of digital systems . . . that [she regards] as the most relevant for narrative and textuality", but does not, I think, expect that all games should exhibit every property.

It will be nice when the day comes that articles about video games needn't spend a few pages meditating on the nature of their subjects. I don't feel that this section contributes substantially to the main work of the article; the discussion on how to study religion in video games, and the framework for its description, would not have suffered if the details of the definition of 'video game' were neglected.

While I don't disagree with the observation, describing Commander Shepard as "a space warrior named Shepherd" is both inaccurate and shallow.

In Trek fandom, Leslie Fish would become notable for several K/S works, including "Shelter", published the following year in Warped Space 20.

The title of this story surely refers to Blish's "Spock Must Die!", published in 1970. It would be good to know if the story is a response to that book.

In a 1965 interview, Dylan was asked "Do you think of yourself primarily as a singer or a poet?". He responded, "Oh, I think of myself more as a song and dance man, y'know."

How times have changed! Project Euler suggested run times of less than a minute, but here the author blithely suggests that waiting an hour for your solution may be too much.