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      Welcome!   03/05/2016

      Welcome, everyone, to the new 910CMX Community Forums. I'm still working on getting them running, so things may change.  If you're a 910 Comic creator and need your forum recreated, let me know and I'll get on it right away.  I'll do my best to make this new place as fun as the last one!
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Someone once did a news story (probably 60 Minutes) about a guy who paints things that look like $100 bills, but with artistic touches. He then goes into a store, picks an item, and barters for it. He makes it absolutely clear that what he's presenting is a "work of art," and not real money. He offers it in exchange for the item plus whatever the cash back would be, plus a receipt (he feels the receipt is almost as important as the item and the money—he frames them when he gets home).

Some cashiers actually take him up on his offer.

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4 hours ago, The Old Hack said:

I am not attempting to criticise either law. I am sure both governments had their reasons for formulating their respective laws the way they did.

Ours used to be like yours.   A case in the mid 70's was brought before the Supreme Court and they found that the then current law violated the 1st amendment.  Congress, in massive haste to avoid counterfeiting money being legal, passed our current law.

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5 hours ago, mlooney said:

Ours used to be like yours.   A case in the mid 70's was brought before the Supreme Court and they found that the then current law violated the 1st amendment.  Congress, in massive haste to avoid counterfeiting money being legal, passed our current law.

Thank goodness this wasn't during the gridlock. Counterfeiting would have been legal for years now.

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On 1/12/2017 at 5:16 PM, ijuin said:

I wish that they would license somebody to start producing those again.

Unicomp owns all the patents and copyrights, as well as all the original tooling that was used to make the Model M.
They do unfortunately use a different plastic, and make it thinner.

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On 1/14/2017 at 2:06 AM, The Old Hack said:

Some laws are like that. I was amazed by how comparatively lenient American laws on counterfeit money are in comparison to Danish laws. I learned this when I heard from a NJ news channel that someone had paid their bill at a Dairy Queen with a $200 bill. The bill prominently featured a picture of George W. Bush and the obverse featured a White House with two signs reading 'No More Scandals' and 'No More Taxes.' (This was back in 2002 or 2003, I think.) All these facts together meant that this did not rate as attempted counterfeiting because it was 'obvious' it was not legal tender. (To everybody except the poor sap behind the counter at the DQ, that is.)

I ran across some similarly parodic $3 bills with Bill Clinton on them.  Photocopied on regular--pink--paper, the wrong size, etc.  Could not mistake them for a legitmamte bill.
 

On 1/14/2017 at 0:22 PM, The Old Hack said:

Thank goodness this wasn't during the gridlock. Counterfeiting would have been legal for years now.


There is no grilock so locked that a SCOTUS-legal anti-counterfeiting bill wouldn't sail through the US Congress like it was greased, barely touching the marble floors with its feet.  Some things transcend ideology.  For politicians, money is one of them.

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57 minutes ago, Vorlonagent said:

I ran across some similarly parodic $3 bills with Bill Clinton on them.  Photocopied on regular--pink--paper, the wrong size, etc.  Could not mistake them for a legitmamte bill.

Someone did this in the Nixon era, too. One version had a cartoon Nixon portrait and was "inflated" to match the inflation of the day. Instead of a signature of the Secretary of the Treasury, it was signed by the "Keeper of the Cookie Jar." (I've kept that line in my repetoire ever since, mainly when referring to my wife who handles household finances.)

However, another took a real dollar, accordion-folded it, and encased it in Lucite. The end result was a much smaller looking bill - "The Shrinking Dollar," it was labeled.

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On 1/14/2017 at 7:20 AM, ProfessorTomoe said:

Someone once did a news story (probably 60 Minutes) about a guy who paints things that look like $100 bills, but with artistic touches. He then goes into a store, picks an item, and barters for it. He makes it absolutely clear that what he's presenting is a "work of art," and not real money. He offers it in exchange for the item plus whatever the cash back would be, plus a receipt (he feels the receipt is almost as important as the item and the money—he frames them when he gets home).

Some cashiers actually take him up on his offer.

I remember that story!  The guy used a regular pen to draw the darn things freehand, completely from memory.  Pretty good artist, makes you wonder why he settled on that particular way of expressing that talent.

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56 minutes ago, CritterKeeper said:

Pretty good artist, makes you wonder why he settled on that particular way of expressing that talent.

What makes an artist express himself by telling the story of gender bending high school kids?

All art is madness. Celebrate Insanity. Edited by Pharaoh RutinTutin
Relevant detail added

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3 hours ago, Pharaoh RutinTutin said:

What makes an artist express himself by telling the story of gender bending high school kids?

That sort of question sounds like something they would ask on "Law & Order, SVU".

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4 hours ago, Pharaoh RutinTutin said:

What makes an artist express himself by telling the story of gender bending high school kids?

All art is madness. Celebrate Insanity.

I was unable to find the Zapp Branagan "What makes a man turn neutral" speech on youtube or I would have posted it here. 

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1 hour ago, mlooney said:

That sort of question sounds like something they would ask on "Law & Order, SVU".

I'm not sure if it applies when said characters were created when the artist/storyteller was a highschool kid.

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11 minutes ago, Scotty said:
1 hour ago, mlooney said:

That sort of question sounds like something they would ask on "Law & Order, SVU".

I'm not sure if it applies when said characters were created when the artist/storyteller was a highschool kid.

Possibly,  but I see The Capitan1 asking that, followed by Fin saying "That's messed up..."

1Yes, I know he is no longer on the show.

 

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7 hours ago, Pharaoh RutinTutin said:

All art is madness. Celebrate Insanity.

I actually believe this to be true. Hear me out.

From what I understand, a true creative thought occurs when a neuron (or neurons) in the brain fires in a way that has never happened before. Technically, this could be considered as a malfunction—a form of madness. I further believe that this is why many artists experience issues with mental illness in their lives. In this case, it's not necessarily an illness that needs to be cured.

Any thoughts on this?

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There's madness, and then there's dangerous madness--i.e. when the madness threatens to cause serious harm, and not simply because it transgresses ideological boundaries. The former is useful, the latter is hazardous.

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46 minutes ago, mlooney said:

Ah, yeah.  See my sig.

'Madness' is a very strange term that is used mostly if not solely in a social context. If someone acts in a manner clearly deviating from social mores, they are deemed aberrant or insane. It is not too long ago that homosexuality was considered a form of insanity. It is also cheerfully conflated with chemical imbalances in the brain leading to the stigmatisation of, say, people with depression, anxiety disorders and the like. Gun violence, for example, is often explained away with 'the shooter was clearly mentally ill' -- never mind that this is an oversimplification on the scale of stating of a hit-and-run driver that 'it was clearly because he owned a car.' *sigh*

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9 hours ago, ProfessorTomoe said:

I actually believe this to be true. Hear me out.

From what I understand, a true creative thought occurs when a neuron (or neurons) in the brain fires in a way that has never happened before. Technically, this could be considered as a malfunction—a form of madness. I further believe that this is why many artists experience issues with mental illness in their lives. In this case, it's not necessarily an illness that needs to be cured.

Any thoughts on this?

I think Girl Genius nails it on the nose quite well.

5 hours ago, The Old Hack said:

Gun violence, for example, is often explained away with 'the shooter was clearly mentally ill' -- never mind that this is an oversimplification on the scale of stating of a hit-and-run driver that 'it was clearly because he owned a car.' *sigh*

Too many times, if someone who commits gun violence isn't stated to having mental illness, it states them having played video games with gun violence which I think is even worse because even if the person claims that they did it because they saw it in a game, that inability to separate reality and virtual settings indicates some degree of mental instability, but instead of focusing on that, the focus gets put squarely on video games. Your hit-and-run driver example would likely make people say the driver played or watched someone play Grand Theft Auto.

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17 minutes ago, Scotty said:

Too many times, if someone who commits gun violence isn't stated to having mental illness, it states them having played video games with gun violence which I think is even worse because even if the person claims that they did it because they saw it in a game, that inability to separate reality and virtual settings indicates some degree of mental instability, but instead of focusing on that, the focus gets put squarely on video games.

Bingo. That's why I put a serious warning into my son's head back when I started letting him play the games I worked on at Apogee/3D Realms. I told him that he was playing pure fiction, and that If he ever started confusing the game fiction with reality, I would yank his system rights so fast it'd make his nose bleed. Worked well.

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3 minutes ago, ProfessorTomoe said:

Bingo. That's why I put a serious warning into my son's head back when I started letting him play the games I worked on at Apogee/3D Realms. I told him that he was playing pure fiction, and that If he ever started confusing the game fiction with reality, I would yank his system rights so fast it'd make his nose bleed. Worked well.

I don't think anyone had to do that with me, for as long as I can remember, the more real the violence looked in a game, the less I wanted to play it, during the late 80's and 90's this wasn't so bad because it was pretty much all cartoonish, but nowadays if there's an option to turn off blood and gore, I'd very likely turn it off. The fact that you can't turn blood and gore off in real life is a pretty darned good deterrent for me.

I'll be honest though, there was that one scene in Duke Nukem 3D that grossed the hell out of me when I first played through. lol

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32 minutes ago, Scotty said:

I don't think anyone had to do that with me, for as long as I can remember, the more real the violence looked in a game, the less I wanted to play it, during the late 80's and 90's this wasn't so bad because it was pretty much all cartoonish, but nowadays if there's an option to turn off blood and gore, I'd very likely turn it off. The fact that you can't turn blood and gore off in real life is a pretty darned good deterrent for me.

I'll be honest though, there was that one scene in Duke Nukem 3D that grossed the hell out of me when I first played through. lol

Remember that the first game I directly wrote music for was Rise of the Triad? It had a "Ludicrous Gibs" mode. As my kid was also sort of an alpha tester, he tried all of the options, which means he did get to see the eyeball fly past onscreen. He went in warned, though.

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2 hours ago, Scotty said:

I think Girl Genius nails it on the nose quite well.

Too many times, if someone who commits gun violence isn't stated to having mental illness, it states them having played video games with gun violence which I think is even worse because even if the person claims that they did it because they saw it in a game, that inability to separate reality and virtual settings indicates some degree of mental instability, but instead of focusing on that, the focus gets put squarely on video games. Your hit-and-run driver example would likely make people say the driver played or watched someone play Grand Theft Auto.

While I am not one to jump on the 'computer games corrupt our children and turn them evil' bandwagon I did once read an interesting argument for why certain computer games might result in dulling the "don't kill" reflex most people have built into them somewhere. It is a very complex matter described by Colonel Dave Grossman in his book 'On Killing' and deals with methods used to train soldiers in how to be more efficient killers, the psychological consequences of putting that training to use and the eerie overlap between this training and certain modern computer games.

Unlike certain hysterics, I do not believe that Legend of Zelda or Bejeweled will turn children into psychopathic mass murderers. The issue is a bit more complicated than that. But I am no longer convinced that there is no relationship between modern entertainment media and increases in killing at all.

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2 minutes ago, The Old Hack said:

While I am not one to jump on the 'computer games corrupt our children and turn them evil' bandwagon I did once read an interesting argument for why certain computer games might result in dulling the "don't kill" reflex most people have built into them somewhere. It is a very complex matter described by Colonel Dave Grossman in his book 'On Killing' and deals with methods used to train soldiers in how to be more efficient killers, the psychological consequences of putting that training to use and the eerie overlap between this training and certain modern computer games.

Unlike certain hysterics, I do not believe that Legend of Zelda or Bejeweled will turn children into psychopathic mass murderers. The issue is a bit more complicated than that. But I am no longer convinced that there is no relationship between modern entertainment media and increases in killing at all.

If it's a matter of media desensitizing people on violence and killing, the argument that video games letting players act as the people pulling the trigger is probably the only thing that separates video games from any other form of media the depicts violence and that violent movies and television shows have been around for much longer. To me, this is another case of "if you're trying to prevent crimes, you can't target just one source" which means they'd have to go after all media that depicts violence, not just video games, but then that goes really deep into censorship territory.

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7 hours ago, Scotty said:

If it's a matter of media desensitizing people on violence and killing, the argument that video games letting players act as the people pulling the trigger is probably the only thing that separates video games from any other form of media the depicts violence and that violent movies and television shows have been around for much longer.

It is somewhat more complicated than that. It is not merely a matter of 'pulling the trigger.' A number of factors are involved and I cannot hope to describe them all in a single post. But the one that is relevant for videogames is the one where games train you to reflexively open fire on a very humanlike target and do it so fast that you have no time to think about it. This is the key difference between old-fashioned training methods where soldiers were taught to fire at mere bullseye targets and the like and newer ones where you train them to reflexively shoot at human-shaped targets that may appear in an instant.

It has to do with the psychological mechanism that a huge percentage of human beings have in them which goes, "It isn't right to kill another human being." This mechanism tends to make people hesitate or hold back rather than use killing blows. Modern military training conditions soldiers into bypassing this mechanism by making the trigger pull itself reflexive. However, because the mechanism is only bypassed and not suspended, this is also why huge numbers of soldiers develop psychological problems after having actually been in combat. Some part inside them goes, "Dear Lord, what have I done?" And while that part may be temporarily silenced through denial and similar coping methods, it never really goes away and eventually becomes harder and harder to deal with.

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On the flip side, having soldiers who retain the "shoot without thinking" reaction after being discharged from military service is very bad news, since they could end up killing their own country's civilians, which would then lead to public backlash against the entire "train them to shoot without thinking" method . . .

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