Lol, Activision lawsuit incoming

[Excidium]

Modders, modders never change.

 

[Shannow]

I think you need to get off his case on this one.

It's not just the man's sig - he really has worked hard to build an alpha-male stereotype on the internet.

You could be discussing a quest in Bloodlines in a forum, and Tess would show up with an image of a few girls sitting on his lap, just to remind us who macho he is.

You could be discussing how to defeat a boss in Bloodlines, and Tess would show up with an image of his nude mods. I got annoyed and told him to cut it out. Instead, I got a long social commentary lecture by him about how "repressed" I am, as if that had anything to do with anything.

"Tess" and "Tessera" are female sounding names. (Yes, I know what Tesserae are.) She behaves like a bitch and a drama queen. QED.

 

[Wyrmlord]

Think of him as Lord Yuda from this cartoon: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a5zezTFRgR4

 

[Azrael the cat]

So insecure about their own masculity that they have to prove it by saying "Hey I liek womyn!"

EXACTLY WHAT I WAS THINKING. It's the same reason my desktop wallpaper is screenshots from The Wire. Not because I like looking at them, but because I'M ASHAMED I'M NOT BLACK

I think you need to get off his case on this one.

It's not just the man's sig - he really has worked hard to build an alpha-male stereotype on the internet.

You could be discussing a quest in Bloodlines in a forum, and Tess would show up with an image of a few girls sitting on his lap, just to remind us who macho he is.

You could be discussing how to defeat a boss in Bloodlines, and Tess would show up with an image of his nude mods. I got annoyed and told him to cut it out. Instead, I got a long social commentary lecture by him about how "repressed" I am, as if that had anything to do with anything.

Yeah, there's an issue of context regarding Tess and his pics. It isn't just a guy with naked pics on his computer - it's a guy who is a seriously crazy drama queen with massive ego/self-image problems that leak into random bouts of aggression, AND is constantly surrounding his net presence with images/statements that look a hell of a lot like an attempt to scream 'I'm into WOMEN!!!'.

There's also a difference between the Wire pics and Tess's. Having the Wire pics in a screensaver doesn't indicate that you have a deficit of interaction with black people. Neither, for that matter, does having porn pics discretely stored in your computer. But someone who surrounds his net-presence with them, almost like he's trying to ensure that they're the first thing anyone encounters in relation to him (obviously depends on context - if you own an adult shop, then you can probably get away with it), does give the impression of being one of those guys who makes a big deal of being into strippers/hookers/etc because he has absolutely given up all hope of actually having any female company.

And most of those guys give the impression of being mentally still in their teens, in that they don't actually realise what they're doing wrong - it's all the girls' fault for being stuck up (e.g. that guy here who constantly spams neo-nazi posts, mixed with the occasional 'women are all sluts/bitches/idiots...why don't they want anything to do with me!!!')

 

[wwsd]

Some of the links seem to indicate that both modders have their own little cliques of supporters willing to die for the respective modder. That's pretty funny in itself. I use Wesp's patch and was never aware that there was anything else. What is the difference, besides a lot of nude patches for insecure teenage boys (AKA real manly men who are not sexually repressed because they've got boobies all over their internet presence)?

 

[memebot3.0b]

Whenever I get annoyed at Wesp, I console myself by enjoying a little fantasy. I picture Wesp bent over a rain barrel and vomiting uncontrollably, whilst one of his numerous gay followers keeps shoving a rolled-up printout of a Python script in and out of Wesp's bleeding, pimply ass.

http://www.tessmage.com/forum/index.php ... l#msg77884

 

[corvus]

These people make Bethesda modders look well-adjusted. Seems like a bunch of passive-aggressive drama queens who are treated like honorary developers. Horrible creatures, I hope to never see another.

 

[Grunker]

You're assuming I'm commenting about Tess specifically. I wasn't. Dicksmoker was talking about everyone who had women as wallpapers or sigs.

I know of Tess' obsession, and I think it's lulzy too, but that doesn't change the fact that Dicksmoker was wrong.

 

[Wyrmlord]

Just think about the world of difference between Wesp and Tessera.

Wesp is a German professor, who teaches at university - based on what Drog posted a long time back. The man posts infrequently on the internet, is generally quite polite even with nasty people, and does this Bloodlines patching as an occasional hobby project.

Tess - well, you know about him.

Everytime Tess tries to call Wesp a Nazi or imagines Wesp getting sodomized, what is Tess basically saying? That he hates someone better educated and more qualified than him? That he has contempt for someone with a better adjusted, and more rigourous personal life?

It's like a homeless man in Detroit pulling out a gun on a GM executive and saying, "Stick 'em up, cracker." Whom is he calling a cracker?

 

[Shannow]

It's like a homeless man in Detroit pulling out a gun on a GM executive and saying, "Stick 'em up, cracker." Whom is he calling a cracker?

The guy who managed a huge company so badly that he lost his job and became homeless? The guy who then went and begged the government for money? Leading to the money not being invested into infrastructure/education/security/welfare? The guy who fucked up and was given a golden parachute simply because he was a suit instead of doing nothing wrong and loosing his job and livelihood anyway because he's a nomal worker?
Bad analogy is bad. /derail move to GD

Should have simply stayed with Tess and Wesp.

 

[SCO]

GM Executive lolololololo

 

[SCO]

This blog makes me think of you wyrmlord.

http://rsbakker.wordpress.com/

Have fun reading.

 

[Wyrmlord]

Yeah, I was going to write, "white guy", but I felt would be racist and offensive, so instead I wrote the first thing that came to my mind - "GM executive".

Don't put the rope around my neck, RPG Codex.

 

[Black Bart Charley]

Don't put the rope around my neck, RPG Codex.

Much too pleasant. Gas or fire for dirtpeepl.

 

[SCO]

Yeah, I was going to write, "white guy", but I felt would be racist and offensive, so instead I wrote the first thing that came to my mind - "GM executive".

Don't put the rope around my neck, RPG Codex.

Philosophy X

Aphorism of the Day: Philosophers are beetles as much as the rest of us, aimless and slow-moving, seeing only what’s immediately before them. All that differs is the abstraction and relevance of the pattern on the floor.

So every few months I have this burst of philosophical insight/fabrication that lights up my nucleus acumbens and makes me traipse around thinking I’ve solved a bunch of the world’s deepest philosophical problems. Then the trickle of sober reflection begins, questions like cups of steaming hot Joe, slowly reviving the bitchier angels of my assumptive nature.

Now that the black box of the brain has been cracked open, we will begin to tinker, and we can expect that science will eventually renovate the inner world as radically as it has the outer. I still think this is probably an inevitability, though the counterarguments some of you raised has reminded me that any number of things could happen in the interim. I’ve also softened my hard stance against the technological optimist: even if technology is the rope that will likely hang us, it remains the only rope we got. Maybe some intermediate stage of neurotechnology will give us the intelligence we need to our way through our crazy future. I remain pessimistic, but it’s certainly a possibility.

The two acronyms I coined, UNNF (for Universal Natural Neurophysiological Frame) and IANF (for Idiosyncratic Artificial Neurophysiological Frame) got me thinking about ‘the boundary conditions’ of consciousness–again. Most of the information processed by the brain never reaches consciousness: out of three pounds, we’re stranded with a few ounces, the famous NCCs, the neural correlates of consciousness–or what some researchers call the thalamocortical system. Our UNNF is spread like luminous cobwebs through the filamentary gloom of our brain.

The ‘Extinction Argument’ I’ve been making is that human identity will not be conserved across substantial changes to our UNNF. What struck me is simply the force of this argument. Of course, radical changes to the neurophysiology of consciousness will translate into radically altered consciousnesses–structures and modalities of experience that could be beyond our ability to comprehend. And this got me thinking…

My argument for several years now–the Blind Brain Hypothesis–has been that the ‘information horizons’ of the thalamocortical system can actually explain some of the most baffling features of conscious experience. The conceptual centerpiece of this argument is something I call encapsulation, the way information horizons seem to pinch experience into self-contained ‘bubbles.’

My problem has always been one of making this argument as obvious to others as it seems to me. I’ve come to realized that the gestalt shift I’m advocating is by no means an easy one, and that absent any institutional authority I can only sound like yet another crackpot with another theory of consciousness. There is no escaping the noose of value attribution, believe you me! (I actually submitted a paper comparing consciousness to coin tricks for The Journal of Consciousness Studies around five years ago, one which the editor was quite enthusiastic about, but the peer reviews I received made me think the article had been dismissed on a quick skim of the abstract.)

So I started wondering if there was I way I could yoke the force of my Extinction Argument (EA) to the Blind Brain Hypothesis (BBH). The force of the former, I thought turns on the differences between our UNNF and the multifarious IANFs to come–in other words, a kind of expansion of consciousness into inexplicable terrain. And this go me thinking about examples of ‘diminished consciousness.’ Neuropathology is the uranium mine of consciousness studies, the place where many researchers derive their fuel. Agnosia and neglect are among the most popular breakdowns considered.

In cases of agnosia and neglect, a boundary of consciousness that was once coterminous with the rest of humanity suddenly collapses, robbing the victim of basic experiences and competencies. These disorders have the effect of ‘shrinking consciousness,’ of rewriting the thalamocortical system’s information horizons. Not only do certain ‘boundaries of consciousness’ become clear, the functional roles played by various neural resources are also thrown into relief. The loss of neural circuitry packs an experiential wallop. The smallest of lesions can transform how we experience ourselves and the world in catastrophic and often baffling ways.

These cases of ‘shrunken consciousness’ demonstrate the profound role thalamocortical information horizons play in shaping and structuring conscious experience. To understand ENCAPSULATION, you have to appreciate the way the neural correlates of consciousness necessarily suffer a neurophysiologically fixed form of frame neglect. Unless you think information horizons only become efficacious once pathology renders them obvious, the kinds of local and idiosyncratic experiential scotomata (unperceived absences) resulting from neuropathology simply must have global and universal counterparts.

If so, then what are they? I think encapsulation answers this question.

The way some sufferers of unilateral neglect lose all sense of ‘extrapersonal space’ on their left or right, to the point of being unable to recognize they have lost that space, demonstrates what I call the ‘holophenomenal’ character of experience, the way it’s always ‘full,’ (so that we require secondary systems to detect absences). For each neuromodular component of the thalamocortical system, the correlated experience has to be ‘full’ simply because those components cannot process information they cannot access: this is why our visual field has no proper ‘edge’ (the way it does when cinematically represented as a peephole). Only interrelated systems (the varieties of memory in particular) can generate the intimation of something more or something missing.

Now, consider how all the deep structural mysteries of consciousness–unity, transparency, nowness, self-identity–turn on the absence of distinctions.

Consciousness, for instance, seems ‘unified,’ holistic insofar as everything seems internally related to everything else: a change in this feature seems to bring about a change in that. This is one of the reasons the kinds of experiential distortions arising from brain injuries seem so counterintuitive: the thalamocortical system has no access to its componential structure, to the diverse, externally related subsystems that continually feed and absorb its information. When one of those subsystems is knocked out, the information feed vanishes, and the bandwidth of consciousness shrinks–you shrink–and in ways that seem impossible (if you can recognize the loss at all) because our thalamocortical system is a surface feeder, utterly unable to digest what goes on beyond its information horizons. All experience is ‘given,’ and absent any parallel experience of its information donors (of the kind we have of our perceptual systems, for instance: blindness makes sense to us), everything is pinched into a queer kind of absolute identity. Despite the constitutive differences in the information fed forward, a background of sameness haunts all of it–what I call ‘default identity.’

What is default identity? This is the Escher twist in the portrait. Differences in conscious experience reflect differences in neural information. There is no ‘experience of’ identity or difference absent that information–there is no experience at all–and this lack, I’m suggesting, leverages a kind of higher order, structural identity. In the same way unilateral neglect causes individuals to confuse half of their extrapersonal space with the whole, ‘temporal frame neglect’ (the ‘nonpathological neglect’ forced on consciousness by the information horizons of the thalamocortical system) causes individuals to confuse a moment of time with all the time there is. Each moment is at once ‘just another moment’ and the only moment, which is to say, the same. Thus the paradox of the Now.

I know this must sound like a kind of ‘neuro-existentialism,’ and therefore hinky to those hailing from more scientifically institutionalized background. But my thesis is empirical: Some of the most perplexing structural features of consciousness can be explained as the result of various kinds of neurophysiologically fixed ‘agnosias.’ I like to think it’s strangeness is simply a function of its novelty: I’m not sure anyone has explored this “What would it be like to be a thalamocortical system?” line of thinking before, and the ways lacking certain kinds of information can structure experience.

At the same time I find it exciting the way these speculations seem to bear on so many ‘continental philosophical’ problematics. I could see writing papers, for instance, reinterpreting Heidegger’s hypokaimenon, or Derrida’s differance, or Adorno’s nonidentical as various expressions of encapsulation; or how the intuitions that underwrite Kant’s notion of the transcendental, the way consciousness stands both inside and outside the world of experience, derive from encapsulation.

At the same time it seems to provide a single explanatory rubric for a whole array of more general philosophical problems, especially regarding intentionality. Once you understand that consciousness is cross-sectional, the result of a set of integrated systems that access only fractions of the brain’s information load, and as such has to make sideways sense of things (because these cross-sections are all it has to work with) then a whole shitload of apparent conundrums seem to evaporate, including the problem of why we find these things so problematic in the first place!

But none of this, of course, comes close to tackling the kernel of the ‘Hard Problem,’ which is simply why these tangles of electrified meat should be conscious at all. But it does offer tantalizing suggestions as to why we find this, the holy grail of philosophical questions, so difficult to answer. Consciousness could very well be a coin trick that the brain plays on itself.

 

[Krraloth]

I read about Tessera and Wesp just over a month ago so the memories of the utter insanity are still fresh in my memory.
From what little I can understand without meeting Tessera in person (god forbid) looks like over the years he developed a really strong case of obsession-compulsion, not to Wesp only, but to whoever can thinks that he/she/it is not right.

I think that Wesp is the focus of all the pent up frustration and a likely scapegoat that doesn't fight back so much, so Tessera is free to say whatever idiocy pops to mind and in not likely to be put into place by Wesp, who clearly doesn't seem to give a shit, all in all.

The agender account purge is fairly silly and the photoshop of the nazi-wesp, to be honest, looks like some sort of horribly twisted catharsis, so I drop this here and now but don;t quote me on the subject, I might think Tessera is on theraphy with some shrink who's trolling him\her\it.

 

[SCO]

I thought narcissists couldn't be treated by psychologists (or more appropriately, don't want to and the psychologist can't stand them).

 

[sgc_meltdown]

I've met modders for japanese 3d porn games that exhibit much more orders of sanity than this fellowette. In fact I haven't seen any of them go into raving mad rants against another person at all or have their own board filled with harems of yes-men. The most you can catch them doing is discussing how to best decrypt a mesh for cartoon ladyparts in extremely clinical and detached tones.

just some investigative reporting there for you bros

 

[JarlFrank]

Didn't Wesp also do the translation projects for White Gold and Precursors? He's a p. cool guy who just makes mods/patches and doesn't care too much about internet fame, while for Tessera the modding fame is the most important part.

 

[corvus]

Tessera's raging over the added police cars and Wesp RUINING TEH ATMOSFEAR probably could've had him fit in at the Codex as a 1eyedking/Dicksmoker type. But the long-winded masturbatory rambling about people using the "other patch" being conformists upgrades him to batshit level and he would be shunned even here.

When did modders become glorified bloggers? I don't care about your e-feuds just make me some nude mods.

 

[sgc_meltdown]

When did modders become glorified bloggers? I don't care about your e-feuds just make me some nude mods.

bro perhaps one of us should go undercover and under the guise of scrotehandling encourage the dude to start posting youtube 'tesscasts'

 

[corvus]

bro perhaps one of us should go undercover and under the guise of scrotehandling encourage the dude to start posting youtube 'tesscasts'

Bringing the joy of this particular drama queen's distillation to the masses certainly is a noble endeavour but I can't help but feel the mainstream audience won't find it accessible enough

maybe if he branched out into bethesda modding he could gain greater recognition and start off with a larger following.

 

[Wyrmlord]

He is already a Bethesda modder, and has made Oblivion mods.

 

[wwsd]

He's fighting the good fight against the evil corporations, who have paid Wesp thousands of dollars to deliberately ruin the immershun with his shitty police cars.

 

[corvus]

He is already a Bethesda modder, and has made Oblivion mods.

Oh! What's his name/mods on the Nexus? I bet they're interesting