Posts by Silent Lion

  • Zelda Netflix?

    I'd watch it for the kicks. It would be crazy hard for them to appeal to all fanbases. Do they go goofy cartoon like they did in that old one I can't remember the date of? (well excuuuuse me Princess!) Do they go innocent childlike in the vein of WW, PH and ST? Would they go fantasy adventure like BotW, or even TP and OoT? Damned if they do, damned if they don't. What age group do they even target these days with the franchise anyway?

  • Keeping A Lid On It

    Yes, that's a strong explanation.

    How do you go about teasing apart the effects of repression and conflict? As they so often happen together, I wonder if there's any way of figuring out whether the one is more influential than the other, or if each is responsible for a different set of ill effects.

  • Keeping A Lid On It

    A particular message has been prevalent for some time in our society - it's good to express your feelings. Let it out. Be in touch with your emotions. It's been particularly aimed at males, especially in recent years with heforshe.org (thanks Emma) and the most recent wave of feminism and the gradual erosion of gender roles in our society. The argument is twofold, one that, although emotional repression can affect either gender, males in particular are taught from a young age to be a big boy, don't cry, all that jazz. Even the phrase 'be a man' is synonymous with stoicism and emotional control. The second part of the argument is that this leads to all sorts of mental health issues right throughout life, and is more likely to lead to abusive behaviours as an adult. Watch that jedi video from Pop Culture Detective on Youtube if you want a lengthier and Star Wars themed example.

    I can agree to some extent. I get that emotional repression can cause problems. I get that there have been some divisive gender roles in our societies. But there's a couple of question marks for me that I can't quite shake. The first one, is if abusive behaviour is the result of emotional repression, why are abusive people so damned emotional? I've had the misfortune of knowing a handful of abusive people and the one thing that characterised them was not a lack of emotional expression, but an excess of it. And in fact the reverse has been true too - the most compassionate people I've known have been characterised by a mastery of their emotions. You can't put other people first if you can't put a lid on your own needs.

    I would posit a different explanation - the childhood factor that raises the risk of later abusive behaviour is not a lack of emotional expression, but conflict. We've all heard that the abused are more likely to abuse, but also there's a TED talk about the effects of divorce on children that paints a similar picture.

    My second issue with the let's-all-rip-off-our-knickers-and-let-our-feelings-waft-in-the-breeze thesis is that emotions are the enemy of reason and logic. The entire scientific process is an effort to keep emotions out of truth, and there's a shit ton of data on how our emotional needs are continually skewing our perception of reality. Logic, fairness, honesty and integrity are all about your ability to put your emotions to one side and observe the facts. This is crucial to trying to be a less selfish person, affecting everything you do from the way you vote to your opinions on refugees to the way you respond to someone who's distressed or angry.

    Now I'm not saying all emotions are bad, you need some emotions to have meaningful relationships and to care about the distress of others. But being able to master your emotions when you need to, both externally and internally, is pretty damn important. 'Some emotions are good' does not mean 'most emotions are good'.

    Clearly this message is one that's become contentious in some modern circles, I'd be keen to know what any of you think.

  • Next Game?

    It's possible, Nintendo did say that despite the portable element of the Switch they'd still support the 3DS and release new titles for it. After Breath of the Wild, if Nintendo decide they want to release a Zelda that's a little lighter in tone or content, they would probably use the 3DS to do it.

  • Is the Triforce Overkill?

    You've hit on a timeless problem. Stories involving ultimate power and/or magical wish fulfillment occur in a great many cultures and times. And the same challenges are there too, about how to have ultimate power in a story without the story ending right there and then. Stories with wish-granting witches get around this problem by granting wishes in a devious or tricksy way, so that the character's wish is their own demise. Witches' prophecies work that way and all. Great Birnham Wood to high Dunsinane Hill and all that. The LoZ series accomplishes it by making the wishers incredibly short-sighted. It kinda gets lost in the detail when you're in the middle of the plot. "Oh he wished to rule Hyrule, yep ok makes sense." But you're right. You'd think characters who obsess so much about the Triforce would have thought up more effective wishes.

    One explanation might be the splitting of the Triforce, like in OoT. The Triforce is meant to grant any wish, except somehow by some loophole it doesn't and Ganondorf is left with only the Triforce of Power.

  • Workings of the Universe

    And hang on PBS Spacetime, if there is a black hole era of the universe, wouldn't an increasing amount of energy/matter end up in them by random chance? They swallow stuff faster than they Hawking Radiation it back out, don't they? So couldn't that eventually alter the balance between gravity and expansion in favour of the former? If all non-black hole matter in the universe was perfectly spread out, would Hawking Radiation ever be more than the rate of what it swallows?

  • Workings of the Universe

    I had another thought that's kind of melting my brain at the moment. The expansion of the universe - that's expansion in 4D spacetime, right? Not just 3D space. I heard somewhere that the past (probably) can't be altered, but the future can be. Or at least, due to the uncertainty principle the future is not set, whereas the past is. So.... does that mean that as the universe expands like a bubble, the present in which we exist is the surface of the bubble, the boundary between the set past that is the bubble's interior and the undetermined future it is expanding into? A bit like an expanding block universe that only contains the past.

    For some reason that really makes my head spin. My little girl was playing with bubbles and of course I thought about the workings of the universe XD

  • Birthday Thread

    Bless the Americans! (poke, poke, onlookers)

    At least most of them have heard of Ireland. I managed to convince some of them that Wales was a mountain comprised of goats. Firstly I think that's a Wales thing, not an American thing, and secondly, shame on me :)

  • Workings of the Universe

    Quote from 'zilla

    * All massless particles must move at the speed of light, so they always have energy there. No matter your reference frame, they will move at the speed of light, just like photons do. I'm actually not sure why they have to do this...

    Actually this is one of the things that does make sense to me, at least conceptually. The way I understand it, there really is no such thing as 'mass' or 'physical objects' in the way that our macro-orientated minds perceive it. It shouldn't really be called the speed of light so much as the speed of causality. Having a rest mass means more stuff has to be caused which divides or otherwise bogs down that causality. (here comes the wandering mind) Light travels at the speed of causality. I can't help but wonder if a mass-holding particle also travels at that same speed, but has to travel through some of those exotic quantum dimensions that some models envision, meaning that the particle in question is actually travelling a greater total difference than a photon would across the same three dimensional distance. Or simply that the causality of a moving massy particle has to propagate through more fields than a photon does.

    I have another question! Regarding zero-point energy or vacuum energy (those two things are the same, right?), and entropy. Entropy is the trend for energy to equally distribute itself across space, and energy that is equally distributed becomes inaccessible to us as there is no energy gradient with which we can draw that energy. So over time, shouldn't the ambient energy level of the universe rise, as entropy transfers energy into it from more concentrated sources like stars? Does that mean that the value of zero-point energy rises over time, until in some distant future far beyond heat-death, all of the universe's energy is now zero-point energy?

  • Birthday Thread

    Quote from Shannon



    We had a heat wave here for a whole month. No rain at all, which is amazing for Ireland. It rains all the time here. It was 25-32C and it rarely gets hotter than 25. Spent a lot of time outside. XD

    Oh man, tell me about it. It's lovely and all but I'm stuck inside working. Also it's killing all the grass, turning this green and relatively progressive land very yellow. I'm one of those weird people who like the rain, which is one of the things I really miss about living in Wales. I don't want to live in the Med :/

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