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If you're having fun, it's not a waste. Period. Too much emphasis is placed on productivity -- so that even in our spare time, we've been somehow made to feel guilty for enjoying ourselves instead of simply extending our workday.
And yuck, I hate competitive video gaming. Hate it, hate it, hate it. Most people are such turds in the competitive world and there's no sense of sportsmanship or fair play. Even the stupidest, silliest browser games have been turned into cut-throat, dog-eat-dog disasters that ruined the muliplayer experience for me. Playing casually with friends, sure, but that's as far as it goes.
Don't even get me started on the sexism ...
I don't mean to bash on anyone who enjoys story driven games or gaming in general. It's just the way I work I guess. When I start playing a game I often times feel like "Wow, I've spent two hours doing this and I could have been with a friend or building something or ..." I just find it hard to get into a game and stay into it for long. Like I downloaded Dota 2 the other day and I couldn't get past the tutorial.
In general, especially with a lot of FPS games it seems like the culture is built around insulting people and crying when you lose. A nice thing about StarCraft when I played is the culture largely originated from Korea, down to common acronyms and such. Something that seems to come with that is a large emphasis on respect. When you lose, you should say good game. When you win, you should say good game. People tend to be responsive to requests for guidance and so forth. It's not always like that, but that was largely my experience.
But again, most of my friends are pretty avid gamers and I am in no way trying to say there's something wrong with it (unless it's an unhealthy addiction).
mordant, have you had a chance to try out the Hololens?
You are right. Now, I would dearly love to be able to speak other languages, and I put years into Indonesian and ended up not able to speak it. Though I could write it like a 12 year old. To Get all the computer -stuff would pretty much mean that I would have to give up too much else. And there's no way I could get to the level of my niece who simply does magical stuff with dead hard -drives.
I've come across simlar statements many times, and every time I want to give out as much encouragement as I can to the person who makes such a statement. I don't know what problem exactly you had with Indonesian, but I do believe you can do it. Learning a language is not some mystical ability that supposedly only children and gifted adults have. It takes finding out what helps you most. What helped me personally, was reading as much as I possibly could, for you it can be something different. And love - if you really, REALLY love what you are learning, then learning itself becomes a joy, not a tedious duty.
Oh yeah, and imagine what that would be like if adapted for something like the HoloLens! You could have scenes like that outside every window in your house!
We already have too much fake in our lives, why make even the view out of the window a fake?
I've come across simlar statements many times, and every time I want to give out as much encouragement as I can to the person who makes such a statement. I don't know what problem exactly you had with Indonesian, but I do believe you can do it. Learning a language is not some mystical ability that supposedly only children and gifted adults have. It takes finding out what helps you most. What helped me personally, was reading as much as I possibly could, for you it can be something different. And love - if you really, REALLY love what you are learning, then learning itself becomes a joy, not a tedious duty.
Maybe you should try German instead?
I tried to get Mrs Arq to teach me Burmese (when we first got acquainted, so as to have an excuse to spend time together ) and I knew what I needed - learning lists of words and practicing them in daily phrase combinations - but Mrs was used to teaching 5 year olds and that's the way she tried to teach me.
You are right. Now, I would dearly love to be able to speak other languages, and I put years into Indonesian and ended up not able to speak it. Though I could write it like a 12 year old. To Get all the computer -stuff would pretty much mean that I would have to give up too much else. And there's no way I could get to the level of my niece who simply does magical stuff with dead hard -drives.
Just so. And I'm not suggesting you should HAVE to. At some point (and in some ways we're getting close to it), computers will become smart enough (for some given value of "smart") that they will do what you want rather than what you literally tell them to, or at least figure out how to get your attention and find out what your real intentions are.
In theory a computer should be able to do a postmortem on its last crash / wipeout and work to avoid a repeat.
Of course ... in a world where I can't seem to get my upstairs WiFi hotspot to behave without rebooting it nightly, I suppose we at least don't have to worry about genuflecting to our computer overlords anytime soon.
We already have too much fake in our lives, why make even the view out of the window a fake?
The view out my window is mostly fake anyway. Manicured sod, artificial lighting, pavement, concrete, other houses. No great loss to change it up once in awhile.
Of course I was being whimsical. To make that work you'd need a Kinect-like sensor in each room and some handoff protocol. AR and VR are too limited for that at present.
You do bring up a legitimate point, which is, what happens to us when augmented or virtual reality becomes more compelling and ubiquitous than reality itself?
There was a movie made recently about everyone having an adaptive augmented reality overlay embedded in their contact lenses that society becomes completely addicted to. Didn't get a chance to watch it, but it looked like a provocative story. These are the kinds of things we'll be wrestling with over the next couple of generations I suspect. If you can't compete now without the Internet and arguably social media, what happens when you're more directly jacked in and what about the potential for control or at least overdetermined influence over the masses that this implies?
There was a movie made recently about everyone having an adaptive augmented reality overlay embedded in their contact lenses that society becomes completely addicted to.
I encounter a lot of people who already have an adaptive augmented sense of reality, but no gadget of any sort was required to produce it, religious training had already taken care of this.
My mother needed no enhanced contact lenses, yet she was able to filter out pretty much all that she did not wish to see or believe. If a family member or friend was sent to prison, well, he was now "working for the state." Family stories which featured her, our Dad, or us in any sort of unflattering light were reworked so that they either never actually happened, or happened in a completely different manner. Her ability to not just deny well known realities, but to truly believe the alternative version she constructed in her head, would sometimes be breathtaking.
I thought of all that as 100% bad when I was a kid, but have ultimately come to see denial as a perfectly useful get-through-portions-of-life scheme.
You do bring up a legitimate point, which is, what happens to us when augmented or virtual reality becomes more compelling and ubiquitous than reality itself?
I believe there will always be a certain number of people who prefer the real world to a digital illusion, no matter how sophisticated.
Personally, I have never been a big friend of virtual realities. I had a short video gaming phase in my life, but after a few hours' playing session I always went away feeling somehow empty and as if I had wasted a few hours of the only life I have. Give me an old-fashioned book any day. If the whole world somehow gets addicted to a virtual reality, I might just come to live with the Amish in Pennsylvania
And, probably related to the above, I've never been a fan of science fiction. I did enjoy some of Star Trek, and Arthur Clarke's Space Odyssey - but not much else. Professor Tolkien, on the other hand, is one of my personal heroes, as a man and as a writer.
I believe there will always be a certain number of people who prefer the real world to a digital illusion, no matter how sophisticated.
Personally, I have never been a big friend of virtual realities. I had a short video gaming phase in my life, but after a few hours' playing session I always went away feeling somehow empty and as if I had wasted a few hours of the only life I have. Give me an old-fashioned book any day. If the whole world somehow gets addicted to a virtual reality, I might just come to live with the Amish in Pennsylvania
And, probably related to the above, I've never been a fan of science fiction. I did enjoy some of Star Trek, and Arthur Clarke's Space Odyssey - but not much else. Professor Tolkien, on the other hand, is one of my personal heroes, as a man and as a writer.
I have never played computer games honestly, and also prefer books. As a software guy I can appreciate the physics simulations / fluid dynamics / shading and rendering and machine learning that goes into games, but that's never translated to me actually exploring them. Not even sure why. It probably matters if it's part of the culture of growing up.
Just so. And I'm not suggesting you should HAVE to. At some point (and in some ways we're getting close to it), computers will become smart enough (for some given value of "smart") that they will do what you want rather than what you literally tell them to, or at least figure out how to get your attention and find out what your real intentions are.
In theory a computer should be able to do a postmortem on its last crash / wipeout and work to avoid a repeat.
Of course ... in a world where I can't seem to get my upstairs WiFi hotspot to behave without rebooting it nightly, I suppose we at least don't have to worry about genuflecting to our computer overlords anytime soon.
Oh, my laptop already has an independent personality. It is smart enough to note regular work and functions that I need and do all the time and what malfunctions really gets me kicking the furniture. Guess which ones it refuses to do and which ones it does all the time.
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) and I knew what I needed - learning lists of words and practicing them in daily phrase combinations - but Mrs was used to teaching 5 year olds and that's the way she tried to teach me.