Letters to the Editor
Matty D.
Published Letters: 126 Editor's Choice: 3
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Bought it
[Read the article: "Grand Theft Auto IV" is a dark urban masterpiece]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Haven't started in on it yet, but the manual is a scream, just thoroughly skewering mainstream culture. I may give it a shot over the weekend.
But the rest of this commentary...jebus gawd almighty. You embarrass our species.
"Gamers have no life":
...yeah, never heard that one before. You know, the last multiplayer game I was in, my team had a pharmacist, an air-traffic controller, a physics professor, a math professor, an English professor, a lawyer, an MD intern, a PhD candidate, and dumb ol' me, a software developer. Surely the parental basements of America runneth over. But I'll be sure to pass your sentiments along next time I run into these guys.
Bottom line is, there's something going on...and you don't know what it is. They aren't the ignorant. You are. Fear it and pillory it; that always works.
"This is having a negative effect on you whether you realize it or not":
Really. First of all, all those links to marketing and advertising phenomena, and the "CSI effect"...do you for fractions of a second believe that there's a direct apples/apples comparison to be made to that and "behavior/social values" supposedly induced by gaming? Because none of those links or articles address that question. You're making an extremely tenuous connection there. And correlation is not causation, day one book one page one of undergraduate level thinking.
Iron Man has a lot of product placements in it. No doubt the Iron Man toy sales will be through the roof this year, as well as the products in it. Yet somehow I seriously doubt there will be a corresponding uptick in actual attempts by kids or adults to build suits of powered armor. But this is the kind of argument that's being made, is it not. That there's no substantive difference or rational choice involved in humans imitating the material they're exposed to, and that they're further unable to draw any meaningful line between reality and fiction.
Katamari Damaci is extremely popular, a best seller. I have yet to read any articles about some strange junk-ball-rolling phenomenon happening anywhere as a result of it.
Among the top selling games year in and year out are sports titles, particularly the NFL ones. I'd like to see some links to how the interest in playing football, or the ability to do so, has had this otherwise unexplained surge in popularity. Got any? Because that would follow from this thesis, would it not. High school teams should be beating off kids with a stick to imitate in real life what they've seen in games.
To say nothing of that this entire line of thinking is unbelievably simpleminded. You seriously believe that there is no choice or rational process involved between our behavior and the media we're exposed to? That we are nothing but regurgitators of stimuli? That the world is Pleasantville, and as soon as we catch a glimpse of anything impure, there goes the neighborhood? That all social and behavior problems could therefore be solved by memetic engineering, when the theaters and games only display images of sweetness and light?
Good luck with that. Maybe you're unable to draw the lines between reality and fantasy. I, however, can.
Art isn't always what you personally find palatable. Sometimes it's the Mona Lisa, and sometimes it's Piss Christ. Sometimes it's Katamari Damacy, and sometimes it's GTA. The open mind can encompass both.
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Point me to the fanboi line
[Read the article: New iPhone to hit stores worldwide June 9?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]The iPhone is the only Apple product I own, but having used this one for a year, I'll shell out for the 3G and the rumored GPS.
Assuming, that is, that the vaunted 3G packs a significant datarate performance superior to EDGE, which doesn't seem that hard to do. EDGE is s l o w.
Wi-Fi is far from ubiquitous, hate to burst your bubble on that. Hell, I live in Portland, where there's Metro Free Wi-Fi blanketing most of the city, and I'm almost always going over EDGE because I'm not getting strong enough coverage where I happen to be at the moment.
Every other city I've been in with the iPhone, yes Wi-Fi is "ubiquitous", meaning you're within range of more than one net, but nowadays FREE Wi-Fi is increasingly rare. My last trip to a major city I just turned Wi-Fi off entirely after 2 days of trying to connect only to land at pay-for-play pages, or otherwise secured networks.
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@Anne in NYC
[Read the article: Scenes from a group marriage]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I’m just one of many posters here who has been grossed out and unimpressed by every poly person I’ve ever met. It’s sort of nice to hear from people who say they’ve made it work – but if you’re really out there you’ve done a hell of a job hiding yourselves. You can hardly blame us if we can’t see you – especially when your icky, pervie brethren are so visible.
You get an invisible red star from me. That's exactly what I would have written. You GO, girl!
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What you should probably add in
[Read the article: Again: The new iPhone is not "half the price" of the old one]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I've related this story before, but I landed at the iPhone after my previous phone busted, and it ended up being one of the most reasonable options.
This because, as explained to me (perhaps incorrectly) at the AT&T store, other smartphones were an arm and a leg, plus your firstborn child on data plans.
The iPhone was arm and a leg, with unlimited data for less monthly than the non-iPhone (and limited) data plans.
I don't have those figures in front of me, hence the generalizations above, but I notice that you're not comparing a similar-functioned Windows Mobile or Blackberry or what have you, their upfront costs and their data rate plans, with the iPhone. That might fill in the picture a little better, damningly or not.