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Factory Factory
Mar 19, 2010

This is what
Arcane Velocity was like.

Oxxidation posted:

Katia is probably the main character of Oblivion before the events of the game itself (hence the title). The nightmares have something to do with that, apparently, I dunno, I never played the game.

Is it spoilers if it's in the introduction of the game? If so, don't mouseover:

The player character begins in a prison cell in Imperial City. The city is under attack, and the Emperor of Cyrodil saunters into your cell along with some of the elite guard because there just happens to be a secret passageway there. The King insists on taking you along, because he's seen you in his dreams and knows you will save everything from the invasion from Oblivion.

Factory Factory fucked around with this message at 05:47 on Jul 30, 2011

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Factory Factory
Mar 19, 2010

This is what
Arcane Velocity was like.

EvilKosh posted:

It's just that this comic is bankrupt of any sort of creativity or value. That's all.

Well, I guess we should repossess everything bought with the extensive loans of valuable creativity that can't be repaid then. Dibs on Gro-Upp's abs of holding.

Factory Factory
Mar 19, 2010

This is what
Arcane Velocity was like.

LtStorm posted:

Anyway, I'm debating being the trendsetter to get the first Prequel avatar, but I'm torn on what to use as Katia makes so many amusing/adorable faces that would work.

Also, next update needs to hurry up! I want to see her fight/run from/get mauled by mud crabs.

I posted these to the MSPA thread before this one got started. I might have to do more.

Factory Factory posted:

Jumped the gun on a Prequel thread :toot:




Plus this one that doesn't seem to display right despite saving it a number of ways:


e: Plus this one

Factory Factory
Mar 19, 2010

This is what
Arcane Velocity was like.
Thanks to this comic and the odd-but-fond memories of Oblivion, I just pre-ordered Skyrim. Let's hope it's just as weirdly fun.

Factory Factory
Mar 19, 2010

This is what
Arcane Velocity was like.
Our new character has been named. I was definitely not expecting him or his freshly-revealed character traits.

Factory Factory
Mar 19, 2010

This is what
Arcane Velocity was like.
Boom! Skadoosh! Update!

Dmitri's spell list is... interesting.

Factory Factory
Mar 19, 2010

This is what
Arcane Velocity was like.

aegof posted:

Is that a tattoo of his own face?

Oh my God, I didn't even see that. It does look like Gro-Upp has a tramp stamp of his own face.

Factory Factory
Mar 19, 2010

This is what
Arcane Velocity was like.
Soral already has it - last page.

Factory Factory
Mar 19, 2010

This is what
Arcane Velocity was like.
Oh my God...

Katia sets things on fire with a cat burn. Thematic.

She knocks things over with puns. She makes them do flop takes.

:ughh:

Factory Factory
Mar 19, 2010

This is what
Arcane Velocity was like.
Kaz is definitely a connoisseur of strange fanart. It's the careful balance of finding :stonk: absolutely hilarious.

Factory Factory
Mar 19, 2010

This is what
Arcane Velocity was like.
I think it's just a Chrome bug. The same GIFs loop inconsistently for me - sometimes they do, sometimes they don't.

Similarly, Chrome doesn't start animated GIFs until they're displayed, which is why you see it even when it doesn't loop.

Factory Factory
Mar 19, 2010

This is what
Arcane Velocity was like.
Social Science Sez: Hook 'em with a guaranteed reward for a behavior, then drop the frequency of the reward and make it random, and you've created an addict.

Factory Factory
Mar 19, 2010

This is what
Arcane Velocity was like.

Kazerad posted:

But about the difference, I personally think any potential dangers of a manipulation science are mitigated by the fact that understanding something also increases your awareness of when it is being used against you.

Unfortunately, that doesn't really seem to be the case. In behavioral economics, there have been a number of studies about overcoming biases and compensating for misaligned incentives with the application of knowledge thereof. Just gonna put this out short-form: the person trying to compensate nearly always undercompensates.

When compensating for a bias of one's own thinking, extra knowledge helped but did not erase the bias. But when that bias was on the part of another... I gotta do an example, I'm having trouble with words.

Say you have Person A and Person B. Person B wants to sell Person A a widget at a profit. Person A wants to buy the widget at cost, but does not know the cost.

Person B's standard strategy is to inflate the offering price so that bartering can bring it down, thus satisfying A's desire to get a lower price. The two parties barter, and they find a compromise, and let's call that price X. That's the control.

In the experiment group (this is drawn from an actual paper I read in an experimental design course), both A and B are conditioned with information that basically states B's strategy: offer a higher price so that putting on a show of bartering still results in a favorable price.

A typically barters harder and lowers the price further from the opening offer than in the control group. B typically ramps up the opening price so high that, even after this more-aggressive bartering by A, the sale price is still greater than X, the sale price in the control group.

So to make an argument from this, let's draw an analogy to providing entertainment. You guys run off and do your research and you find great and useful things and tell everybody about how their heartstrings get tugged. And everyone is now more enlightened and everyone is on the lookout for media messages that are manipulating their emotions.

Everything seems well and good. Knowledge seems to have given people power and resistance to those who would use that same power against them.

And then Kazerad Junior comes along, and he knows that we know this. So he writes Prequel II, in which Katia Jr. is now not just depressed, alcoholic, and a little screwed up, she's also a childhood cancer survivor with a younger sibling and a pet she struggles to feed, and she degrades herself with pineapples not because she gets drunk, but because it's the only thing she can do to feed her little sister and Spot, and she is terribly, completely aware of every moment of it. Being drunk would be a relief - then she wouldn't have to remember.

And if this seems too extreme, well, in 1952 CBS did not allow Lucille Ball to use the word "pregnant" in broadcasts, despite the plot of "I Love Lucy" revolving around her character getting pregnant as she was herself for several episodes. The episode where she finally gave birth was tuned by 72% of households.

In 1980, it took Dallas and the "Who shot J.R.?" plot to hit 76% of viewers. In 1983, it took the finale of M.A.S.H. to hit 77%. And that was the last time anything that wasn't the Super Bowl got 70% viewership. Sure, absolute viewership for many programs has gone up, but that kind of captivation has been getting harder and harder to accomplish.

What else has made it into the same leagues since M.A.S.H. besides the Super Bowl? Not much. The finale to Cheers in '93; Michael Jackson's interview with Oprah that same year, in which we finally learned what a loony the King of Pop had been made by his coronation; The Day After, a 1983 TV movie about a fictional NATO-USSR war and nuclear exchange. Oh, and the small part of the 1994 Winter Olympics - the parts where Nancy Kerrigan and Tonya Harding competed in figure skating. Remember how Tonya Harding's ex-husband and bodyguard hired a guy to put Kerrigan out of commission for the U.S. championships and Olympics by bashing her in the knee with a club and then Harding herself helped cover it up. High drama.

As time has gone one, capturing mindshare has been getting more and more difficult as techniques of storytelling have developed and more and more competition has sprung up. As soon as the science of entertainment is codified, it becomes an arms race, a tragedy of the commons, a prisoner's dilemma. As soon as one entertainer starts making use of it, everyone else has to, as well, to remain competitive. And ten more and more of the entertainment that gets to us has been pre-culled to be the most effective. Autobiographies read like tabloid coverage of Robert Pattinson's breakup with Kristen Stewart just to sell a handful of copies.

And so, eventually, ideas will get drowned out by that which is most suited to being commercially entertaining, whatever that may be. Like, y'know, reality TV or Twilight. Not that the resulting products won't have some value; some might even be very good. But the profit motive and entertainment industry that has subsidized a wide variety of creators will have moved on to specialties, leaving great writers and artists to fight among themselves for the scraps of patronage funding, commissions, Kickstarter, and t-shirt sales.

Not that a living can't be made that way, but it seems like a great way to erode a culture.

Factory Factory
Mar 19, 2010

This is what
Arcane Velocity was like.

I actually agree with everything you're saying, yet think cultural erosion as you put it needs some explaining.

It's really that common culture would erode, which is something I care about as a political science guy and vaugely patriotic person. One of the big crises of the information age so far is the erosion of national identity, a multifactor thing that comes from many places but is being exacerbated by the increasing flatness of the world's exchanges of goods, services, and information.

Nation-states like the US and many states which aren't quite nations as well find and create identity through common culture, and that identity serves a lot of purposes in terms of fostering cooperation and compromise within the group that identity defines. Right now, as political division and divisiveness are high in the U.S., and many European countries are facing demographic/political crises, and China is going through mid-stage industrialization towards a modern services economy, further eroding the common culture that glues together national identities seems like a bad idea. We could all end up as nationally listless as the Japanese, and our governments as frustrated by lack of national focus as India's.

Maybe it's inevitable, and in some ways I'm just a scared and conservative person. But either way, I think this really has gone far beyond a cat playing a sick flame guitar, hasn't it? :v:

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Factory Factory
Mar 19, 2010

This is what
Arcane Velocity was like.
Scooter.

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