Quickies
Quickies: Marie Curie, social injustice in games, and Hobby Lobby
- Let us now praise Marie Curie – On Marie Curie as more than just the female paragon of what it is to be a scientist.
- Mass Effect developer makes emotional plea to eliminate social injustice in games – Anybody else in love with Papers, Please?
- A scientific method for my generation – I feel kind of bad for laughing at this, but laugh I did. From Rhiannon.
- Hobby Lobby anti-contraception SCOTUS case even worse than it seems – That headline made me go, “Really? It could be worse?” From Mary.
- Cute Animal Friday! An entire litter of capybaras, with their ridiculous adorable expressions. And probably not cute to many, but I can’t resist sharing the newest Brain Scoop episode which features the beginning of a dissection of a two-faced calf. Science is gross and awesome.
Yes, Papers, Please! is fantastic for a variety of reasons. I’m also thrilled that the people at Bioware are speaking out. That is one place I would uproot and move to if they had a job for me. The games they make there, and the stories they tell, are some of my favorites.
The bigger problem with games has been the gamers themselves. LBGTQ characters are now more than just Birdo. (For those unfamiliar, Birdo’s description in the SMB2 manual played off Birdo’s gender identity as a joke.) In the 90s, you got gay options in RPGs and visual novels. Of course, the gamers tend to think the entire internet is /b/ when the anons are feeling particularly offensive. And that is hard to fix, especially since there’s a class of hXc gamer who thinks he is the center of the gaming industry. (Never mind that mobile games sell better.)
IANAL, but Hobby Lobby’s argument is ridiculous. It took me all of five seconds to find the precedent to throw their case out.
Loved the scientific method one, but they forgot the most important part: Massage your data till you get exactly the result you want, and once p<.05, don't care if there's some cheaper, more effective treatment out there; just pretend that doesn't exist. And all the haters are just conspiring against you.