Well, I said I was going to do this silly series about 800 years ago, so here’s the first episode. Consider it a quick primer on Maintaining Perspective in a world full of prefabricated ideals and open biases. Critical Thinking is a major part of what I’m discussing here, so give it a listen and hopefully it’ll in some way be useful to you.
Also, still looking for people to help grow the site. There’s lots of things that’d be worth doing around this joint, like community building and stuff like that, so if you’d like to be a part of OCnE in some way, be it blogging, helping come up with some fun community ideas, or whatever, please hit the Ask Onii-chan page and shoot me an e-mail so we can begin talking about it. I have some pretty cool ideas for community stuff, and it’d be good to have some folks to back me up. Haha.
Oh and as an aside, I’d especially like to get some female participation for the podcast. A female voice would really add some interesting outlooks to the bullshit I talk about. If you’re a dude, please don’t let my want of lady talkin’ dissuade you.
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22 Nov 2009
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Interesting facts as usual. Hope to hear more things of that nature form you.
22 Nov 2009
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What can I say?
I was against futanari at first, reason being that I didn´t want to see a dick on a girl. It didn´t feel right.
Now I don´t mind.
So I´ve broaden my horizons a lot since I started hanging around certain places. It´s good fun though.
23 Nov 2009
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Never cease to amaze me with blog titles and header images.
25 Nov 2009
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I’m glad that you’re speaking out against the fear mongering that seems to be a favorite pastime – and probably a great source of the RWA spike during recent years (http://home.cc.umanitoba.ca/~altemey/) – but I have to slightly disagree with you wis-a-wis what the responsible response to the swine/avian/etc. flue is:It’s not the next coming of the black plague.However it might be something that “echoes” (but thankfully nowhere near as bad as) the Spanish flue.Still: it’s a more dangerous ailment than what’s normally coming your
way. I will compare it to a storm: it’s coming, the downpour gona be
the worst this year. So what’s gone fear-mongers do? Spell doomsday.
(You’re gona drown!) More realistic (and less stupid) people will point
out that it’s not that bad (it’s not a fucking tornado).However what should *really* be said, is what should be done if you wanna act responsibly.I’ve read up on this a lot, and not your “Average Joe blogs about life” articles but medical professionals – with epidemic/virology expertise – and their advice was uniform: if you can afford it, get vaccinated.If you have a storm coming, people can do this on their own as they have experience: cover up stuff that could be flooded, batten down the hatches on the door of your weekend house that sort of thing.In this case, get a vaccination if you can (and not at an outrageous price.) Chances are it will save you money, as you won’t be sick and be on sick leave. There’s one more reason – it will slow the transmission of the disease and will protect the people who are truly endangered by the ailment.
25 Nov 2009
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But at the same time, epidemiologist advice is always the same as regards any sort of illness for which there is a vaccine and a current outbreak.
My point isn’t that you should go around rubbing your dick on hobos or anything of the sort. It’s more that, realistically, this is literally no different from a normal flu except that it has killed far fewer people around the world in the past six months than the regular flu kills in a normal flu season.
Same symptoms, same communicability, same everything. Less dead people. People are acting as if this is a killer virus when, really, it’s just the flu. Barring complications, it’ll pass in after a week of you feeling shitty. It’s not 1918. We live in a world of preventative, modern medicine. There is really precious little to worry about unless you are a small child, pregnant, or old. You know, the same people who are apt to die from URIs to begin with.
If you can find data that contradicts that, and I don’t mean a few cases of teenagers dying, I mean massive sudden deaths from the swine flu (which, considering the death toll, do not exist) then I’ll be apt to agree with you. But that being said, the epidemiologists I know aren’t super concerned about this and are more concerned about the attention it’s taking away from the upcoming flu season. BUT HEY! Whatever works.
27 Nov 2009
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Regarding the swine flu, it’s not any more deadly than the regularly flu, but it does target a different part of the population. Combined with the regular flu, there will most likely be a marked increased in deaths this flu season. It’s not as bad as some people make it out to be, but it will cause more deaths.
As for your piracy argument, you seem to be cherrypicking movies that support your position. Most movies don’t make anything close to Harry Potter and Twilight. There will be lots of movies that lose money to counter the money makers. Also, those two movies don’t exactly target the kind of audience that typically pirates either. Focusing on the studios’ overall profit would be a better argument. After a quick search, I can’t really tell how their profits are changing. If it’s declining drastically, you would expect them to try to combat it before it goes negative, wouldn’t you?
27 Nov 2009
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As regards swine flu, I don’t remember saying that no one would die, but in a length of time twice as long (or longer) as the normal swine flu season, less than 8,000 people IN THE WORLD have died. Compare that to 24,000 deaths IN AMERICA ALONE from normal flu last year and, again, it seems like a fairly minor concern.
As for piracy, well, why even fucking argue with you about this when the numbers will go ahead and talk for me.
http://www.boxofficemojo.com/yearly/
OH RIGHT! I almost forgot your quip about movies that people would NORMALLY pirate.
Wolverine: Budget 150mil, Gross 373mil
Star Trek: Budget 150mil, Gross 384mil
Primer: Budget 7,000, Gross 424,760
Gamer: Budget 12.5mil, Gross 30mil
Inglourious Basterds: Budget 70mil, Gross 299.5mil
Zombieland: Budget 23.6mil, Gross 84.8mil
Surrogates: Budget 80mil, Gross 60mil (OH NO! A loss… my entire argument is wrong! Oh wait…)
The Hangover: Budget 35mil, Gross 459.2mil
2012: Budget 200mil, Gross 469mil
All of those were on the Top 10 torrented movies lists on Torrent Freak (except maybe Primer). kbai.
Haha, ok, that’ll sound snotty. But still, you sort of tried to call me out there.
28 Nov 2009
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You’re comparing the number of deaths so far for swine flu during the off-peak season to the yearly amount of flu deaths. Swine flu was declared an epidemic in June. Look at the typical death rates for the flu throughout the year. http://www.cdc.gov/flu/weekly/weeklyarchives2009-2010/images/picurve45.gif
June would be about week 20-25. That’s approaching a minimum. We’re approaching week 46. That’s around when the flu season starts. And hey, look, the amount of deaths so far is significantly higher than previous years at this point. It’s not at a “WE’RE ALL DOOMED” level, but it’s still a good amount higher than normal. Around this time in 2008, a bit over 6% of deaths were by flu. This year, it’s a bit under 8%. I’d say a 25-33% increase is significant. It’s not a reason to panic, but it’s also not just a minor concern.
And about piracy, the point about which movies are pirated less was not my main point. I wasn’t trying to correlate the amount of piracy to success at all. I was trying to make you try to justify your point better by including more types of movies. You talked about perspective, but you narrowed your view to something that seems biased. I could have easily made the opposite point if I just chose two movies that lost a lot of money. Consider the whole picture if you want to make a stronger argument.
Which means you have to look at their whole portfolio to comment about their profitability. Stray from the top 20 or so and you’ll see many more movies that just about break even or lose money. Movie studios are still raking in money, but if their profits are decreasing, they have to do something. They chose to target piracy. There is no evidence on either side about the effects of piracy on sales, so it’s a moot point. Both sides will just continuing screaming at each other.
28 Nov 2009
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But that’s the thing, you can’t just look at 2008 or 2007. The question isn’t a “25-33% shift” especially when the numbers are 6-8%. Using terms like 25-33% makes it seem far more inflated than it is. That’s like saying it going from 1 to 2% is an increase of 100%, THAT’S DOUBLE! OH MAN! It introduces a bias towards the larger percentage, so what people take away is that 25% more people died, not that the number rose from one single digit number to another. It’s not a significant shift.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124217724145913411.html
Plus, look at the CDC estimates on that chart. The fluctuations are astronomical, so you can’t point to a 2% shift and call it the Swine Flu murder department. And that was the point of my fucking podcast. Maintaining perspective. You’re attributing a 2% shift to a disease that may not be responsible for even a fraction of the typical flu season deaths and you’re doing it JUST because it’s the start of the flu season and the upward shift is beginning. It happens every fucking year. Where was the call of the end times in 2001 when apparently only one-fifth the number of people died in 2000? Where was the 24-hour news coverage? Where were you? Running around talking about how the flu is going to kill us all? This is what I’m fucking talking about. The media exposure makes people hyper sensitive to shit that’s not a big deal AT ALL.
And, as to the movie thing, I think you’re honestly just trying to back away from it now. That’s how I see it. The point of the talk was about thinking critically FOR YOURSELF, no nitpicking my examples, but hearing the things you heard and then looking into them your fucking self. Ignoring that, I think I’ve gone above and beyond in proving that piracy is not even remotely damaging the movie industry after you called me out for not picking heavily pirated movies, so I get numbers for the most highly pirated movies and you fucking tell me that sometimes movies lose money? No shit, man. That’s how the industry works. And did you ever notice that the movies outside the top 20 are fucking awful? No one sees a movie in a theater, no one pirates it.
That’s cool, though. You don’t have to own up to being absolutely wrong about it with easily verifiable facts literally one google search away.
But hey! I guess everyone is going to listen to a certain part of the podcast and not like what I had to say about this or that thing because they’re missing the larger message and that’s to NOT TAKE THE THINGS THAT SOMEONE SAYS AT FACE VALUE AND TO INSTEAD LOOK IT UP YOURSELF AND GET THE FACTS.
01 Dec 2009
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P.S. Twilight: New Moon was the most pirated movie last week.