Comment by HCIdivision17 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by HCIdivision17 | Hacker News Reader

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This sort of thing was lampshaded to hell and back in the Portal games.

On the surface it's a hilarious first person shooter with a gun that harmlessly puts holes in things in almost exactly the way normal guns don't. Yet it's actually a place where human life and safety is meaningless, where unconciable acts of terror and horror happen everyday (or at least did). And their PowerPoint slides are just awful. It's clear there's a systemic problem in the facility with sustainable testing. Aperature Science may be the most evil corporation ever, and it ends up being funny simply because they're so incompetently banal about it.

It's helpful to remember that giant machines chewing through our world and wreaking havoc on our lives are just side effects of lots of like-minded people working together for a common cause. Teamwork can bring you Star Trek or it can bring you Aperature Science.

There's a moral to be had there, but I'll be damned if I know what it is...

For anyone else wondering about the use of "lampshaded", I believe HCIdivision17 is referring to http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/LampshadeHanging

Absolutely. TVTropes has a real danger of adding its crazy vocabulary to your everyday life, especially on things unrelated to entertainment. (See also Idiot Ball, Fridge Logic, and Forensic Phlebotinum, which may be on topic.)

Really, someone should write up some of these political stories in terms of TVTropes so I can know how I feel about how the plot's progressing. So far it seems like we're in a poorly written mockumentary.

Tvtropes tends to drain the specialness from an entertainment product and reveal the generic components. Applying the same lens to politics results in something like "Yes Minister", where we realize government actions aren't caused by "good" or "bad" actors, but the inherent structure.

Most current crises have a referent in "Yes Minister", including this one - when the PM denied the bugging of an MP's phone. ("He should not have denied something of which he had no knowledge.")

This indicates how few fundamental situations or tensions exist in modern government, and how often they reoccur.

I think you're right on each count. But I also think that there's a lot of benefit from having a vocabulary - even a goofy one - that allows these things to be broken down and understood. On some level it certainly does remove that je ne sais quoi from the topic, but on the other hand it illuminates it somewhat (so long as the terminology isn't too slanted). Even a mild bias isn't bad, since we naturally adjust for rhetorical tone, and it can add a bit of levity to an otherwise tedious discussion (see Phabricator for a nice case study in that).

At any rate, I really like the idea that there really isn't bad people conspiring but just a badly formed/tuned system. (I'm a process engineer, so I suppose that gives me hope where others wouldn't see any.)

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