Took Fourth Place In This Week's GameXplain Tournament. I Had First At One Point! Then The Other Players

Took fourth place in this week's GameXplain tournament. I had first at one point! Then the other players beat me out. Oh well, I'll take it. Congrats to everyone involved!

From the Super Mario Galaxy 2 OST.

Keepsakes

There's a weird pocket in the top right corner of my browser that houses a mishmash of various urls. It's called the "Other Bookmarks" folder, and despite its generic name, its contents are carefully chosen. If I deem it intelligent, hilarious, thoughtful, unique, or otherwise extraordinary, it receives the honor of being inside. (The only anomaly is the end, to which is appended the next video in whatever series I'm watching; this is hardly an exception, however, as I wouldn't be watching it if it weren't somewhat entertaining.)

Okay, so perhaps I made it sound better than it really is. But I thought to myself: Why do I do this? To reread them later? No, because I almost never do that with anything. To show them to other people? I rarely get the chance to do so. So why not post them?

Here are its current contents. Be warned that some of these may be disagreeable, distracting, or NSFW.

http://www.gamefaqs.com/features/top10/2645.html http://www.mother4game.com/ http://www.siliconera.com/2013/12/03/emulating-megadrive-3ds-isnt-easy-enter-3d-sonic-hedgehog/ http://www.polygon.com/features/2013/12/2/5143856/no-girls-allowed http://jay-machalani.squarespace.com/blog/2013/12/12/fixing-windows-8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FtxhSQiduMk http://worldsbiggestpacman.com/ http://tmi.kotaku.com/the-indie-game-reality-tv-show-that-went-to-hell-1555599284/

So before Mario Kart 8 came in and stole all of my time, I was working on a pseudo-speedrunning mappack for Mari0 called Retrush. It involves time gates; the number on the gate is how many seconds the player has to reach the next gate. Hopefully I'll get back into it soon.

I've never understood the logic behind a "hivemind" - in other words, thinking that people who share something in common all think the same. It's kind of like stereotypes, or perhaps racism. It's insulting both to the group and to the individual it's applied it to, and it's one of the biggest reasons we argue and bicker all the time.

This religion is all terrorists or all holier-than-thou stuck-ups, those console fanboys think the other consoles have no good games, and people who do this terrible thing can never be trusted again, ever. Even if you have proof that this is primarily the case, it doesn't mean anything, since any one individual can be the counterexample. It's all just generalizing - a logical fallacy. And people take it seriously!

It's especially annoying when two people who are part of the same group have different opinions, and then people say the hivemind is conflicted/never happy (two people who like the same console can't agree on the quality of a first-party game). How can you not see that it's differing opinions from different people? How do you assume that they're supposed to think the same, all the time? Or, sometimes, people insist that one of them is lying, that they actually believe what the other person said and are trying to save face (peaceful Muslims vs. terrorists, for example). Where's the logic? There is none. It's just stupidity.

In the end, it's no better than being racist. All blacks are horrible people, right? Generalization again. It's the exact same "reasoning." And everyone is guilty of it, to a certain extent - myself included, for generalizing that people who expressly think this way are all idiots (among other things).

"But doesn't that make you a hypocrite?" I'll gladly be the hypocrite if it means I help to reduce the problem as a whole. Not all hypocrites avoid changing themselves too.

Why do schools have uniforms?

Why are people expected to wear a suit when they go to a job interview?

Why do people always worry about how they look?

Why does our society insist on oversexualizing everything?

It's not like outer appearance changes the person on the inside.