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You're right. Zelda Online got retooled into Graal Online after (IIRC) a C&D. So perhaps I should add MMOs as the third prohibited category of fan works, given that allowing strangers to communicate goes against everything that Nintendo and its friend code policy stand for.

But Pokemon is one of the easier franchies to fork: just pretend you're making a new region and then go to deviantART and get a bunch of tARTlets to draw you some new mons for that region. Use no Poke-trademarks and no copyrighted graphics, and any similarity between their cockfighting sim and your cockfighting sim is more likely to fall into a favorable side of the idea/expression divide.

The article on TV Tropes about fanwork bans links to interviews with Nintendo executives after Nintendo's overreaction to the "Suicide Girls" incident, such as a Kotaku article that quotes Nintendo president Satoru Iwata: "it would not be appropriate if we treated people who did something based on affection for Nintendo, as criminals." So avoid porn and commercial use, and you'll probably avoid "diminish[ing] the dignities" of the settings and characters of Nintendo products.

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SpaceIsCold

for a strict definition of "reason" (or maybe I should say "logic" or "science"), yes.

I'd say that's a rather too strict definition of 'reason'. Compare this.

There are practical considerations for believing in a god vs believing in solipsism as well.

But those two are not the only alternatives. There's a range between "solipsism" and "God(s) exist(s)", and it includes at least "an external world exists that may or may not include God(s)."

I've already argued for the reasonableness - indeed, the necessity for - Ockham's Razor. Since I've already argued for the rejection of solipsism, the middle ground - "external world that must be investigated to see what its properties are" - sure seems the most reasonable to me.

Basically I'm arguing that it is arrogant when people say that others who believe in religion are stupid or that religion is "bad" because there is no evidence of a higher power, when they themselves have made a decision that is also not provable and for which there can be no evidence.

As I've noted, the decision that there's a 'higher power' is not forced by practicality, unlike basics like 'rejecting solipsism' and 'reason can work' and 'entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity'. As an assumption, it's superfluous. Given evidence, it would no longer be superfluous, but until then...

Yeah, from what I've seen Angry Birds sounds like it'd be for the Pocoyo demographic.* Heck, Pocoyo even has an Angry Bird as one of the characters.

* Not that there's anything wrong with that. Even Pocoyo has a so-called periphery demographic.

Let me guess, you're one of those real is brown types.

I didn't even understand this "all games are brown" myth until I played TF2. Seems to me like people are playing too many generic, shoddy games.

by focusing on gay Wii-like games

gay adj. "Festive, bright, or colourful." -- Wiktionary

Let me guess, you're one of those real is brown types. Yes, Wii games tend to be more colorful than some PLAYSTATION 3 games, but is there anything wrong with that?

"When the Destroyers came for us, we attacked. Never had we been defeated. They were like the others: strange, hideous, resisting, fighting. Only these were not like the others. They did not die. We made our first retreat. We could forego one system. We left it to the Destroyers and went elsewhere. But they followed. They hunted us. They followed us when we retreated, discovered where we lived. For a long time we did not know why they chased us. These were no ordinary enemy. They did not seek our territory, our technology, our resources. Now we know our crime was sin."

I've played this video game. I think we sort of win.

Heh... In real life, there's a plateau, yes, where you will be the head badass in the world on a given thing you're trying to do. Unfortunately, there's almost always someone/something that is waiting in the wings to hand you your ass on a platter- and you're tried constantly by everything when you hit that plateau in most cases.

In the case of the ZeniMax Fallout franchise titles, they have increasing toughness monsters that start showing up more often as you get tougher. But, there's the piddly-assed monsters as well as some downright ball-busters in the mix that roam around from the very beginnings of the game . (Anyone ever trip across a Deathstalker as a lower than 10 level character without something like a rocket launcher, fat boy, autocannon, or other suitably HEAVY weapon? Heh... I HAVE- not hard in Vegas...just go to the mine 'too early' in the game... Something easily done from where you start out.)

The escapism in that game is placing yourself into a somewhat realistic futuristic post-nuclear-holocaust dystopia and trying to take many levels in 'badass' as is possible, perhaps making yourself head honcho of the story in the end. I've not completed Vegas yet, but I've completed most of the differing endings in Fallout, including the one that gives you the path into the downloadable content- and then completed most of the DLC. Normally, I don't bother because of the damn grinding which makes me try to find the game on a decent discount and play it only when I've got a weekend or so to waste/kill on a game bender.

Heh... In real life, there's a plateau, yes, where you will be the head badass in the world on a given thing you're trying to do. Unfortunately, there's almost always someone/something that is waiting in the wings to hand you your ass on a platter- and you're tried constantly by everything when you hit that plateau in most cases.

In the case of the ZeniMax Fallout franchise titles, they have increasing toughness monsters that start showing up more often as you get tougher. But, there's the piddly-assed monsters as well as some downright ball-busters in the mix that roam around from the very beginnings of the game . (Anyone ever trip across a Deathstalker as a lower than 10 level character without something like a rocket launcher, fat boy, autocannon, or other suitably HEAVY weapon? Heh... I HAVE- not hard in Vegas...just go to the mine 'too early' in the game... Something easily done from where you start out.)

The escapism in that game is placing yourself into a somewhat realistic futuristic post-nuclear-holocaust dystopia and trying to take many levels in 'badass' as is possible, perhaps making yourself head honcho of the story in the end. I've not completed Vegas yet, but I've completed most of the differing endings in Fallout, including the one that gives you the path into the downloadable content- and then completed most of the DLC. Normally, I don't bother because of the damn grinding which makes me try to find the game on a decent discount and play it only when I've got a weekend or so to waste/kill on a game bender.

You mean it's not Cowboy BeBop at his computer?

terrible, terrible shots (I'd cite the TV Trope for that, only I don't want to lose another fifteen hours of my day to that damn site...)

You mean this? You're welcome

I saw that in reality, too. Then I realized that TV Tropes has grown to be so absurdly all-encompassing that it is impossible to tell any story which does not have multiple tropes in it. See "Tropes Are Not Bad."

I'm a chronic altitis sufferer

My name is Alemedastone, and I am an altaholic. I just can't get enough altohol.

When will WoW allow additional character slots? WHEN!? I'll be good! I'll buy BOTH bliz store mounts, I promise!

I think you are looking for a Star Trek reference like Star Trek episode "A Taste of Armageddon" where the captain meets a civilization that dispenses with the nasty bits of war and plays RISK on a global scale. Of course anybody in the affected quadrant is "humanely" euthanized.

Or perhaps you were looking for a more generic reference of the idea like The Forever War?

I'm surprised that more people aren't complaining about the limit on purely-offline, single-player characters. (I.e., you can't have any, and can have only ten online characters at a time, even if they never see any multiplayer.) It's enough to keep me from buying the game. I'm a chronic altitis sufferer and I won't be able to relax and enjoy the game if I know I'm tapping a finite resource when I click the "New Game" button. Even if the game is good—especially if it's good—I'd rather avoid the temptation to get invested and be all the more be frustrated when I eventually hit the ten-character limit. Better to just play Diablo II and Torchlight instead.

And by the way, the game will still be cracked.

You do know that there's no point in having more than 10 characters. There are 5 classes and 2 sexes for each.

They removed the talent trees in D3, so once you have a Wizard/Monk/etc, there's no reason to roll a new one.

I'm surprised that more people aren't complaining about the limit on purely-offline, single-player characters. (I.e., you can't have any, and can have only ten online characters at a time, even if they never see any multiplayer.) It's enough to keep me from buying the game. I'm a chronic altitis sufferer and I won't be able to relax and enjoy the game if I know I'm tapping a finite resource when I click the "New Game" button. Even if the game is good—especially if it's good—I'd rather avoid the temptation to get invested and be all the more be frustrated when I eventually hit the ten-character limit. Better to just play Diablo II and Torchlight instead.

And by the way, the game will still be cracked.

Nothing inherently prevents a derivative work from being an improvement...

Except perhaps having a fanwork-banning copyright owner.

no worries mate, they are all perl / php heroes, and think functions, code reuse and splitting logic in different files are something scary and exotic. And I'm even using *classes* in my programs. They won't touch it with a 10 foot pole.

Sometimes I think I'm the only sane man there, which have to be an illusion, on account of the company still being there.

As I understand it, VB.NET is a successor to VB6 in name only, i.e. it's more like C# with a BASIC-y syntax. Or am I completely off-base?

They don't accept evidence as verification

Get your evidence noticed by a member of the scholarly or mainstream media and they'll accept it. For example, MobyGames noticed PocketNES in the credits of Contra 4 for DS, making PocketNES notable.

Misinformation keeps reappearing on pages

How should Wikipedia tell the difference between evidence and misinformation?

So what if Impulse Tracker is "not notable", its file format is still used in the tracking scene

Then the page belongs on a wiki about the tracking scene, not on Wikipedia. For example, detailed information about the technical specifications of the Nintendo Entertainment System belongs on Nesdev wiki more than on Wikipedia. See Wikipedia:Alternative outlets on Wikipedia and The Wiki Rule on TV Tropes.

And if I want to reconstruct the page, I can't because the edit history is blocked out.

If you want to continue a deleted article on a specialized wiki, go to the deletion review page and ask an administrator to e-mail you a copy of the deleted article.

Yeah, it sounds like the movie is Exactly What It Says On The Tin. If you didn't like it, why did you go see it to begin with? What on earth were you expecting? xD

This is essentially what Greece is about to do.

Greece can't do this without sign off from the money comptrollers in Brussels and Berlin. That's one of the drawbacks to joining the euro.

[debasing currency] became a popular tactic about 100 years ago.

The Romans were notorious for debasing their currency, making this tactic older than feudalism.

I am the one-in-a-billion person who plays games on both consoles and PC, so I must have grown up on twitchy RPGs?

Stuff like Zelda or Mana or other action games incorporating RPG elements, I take it. That or you grew up on first-person shooters and think an RPG is a grenade launcher.

As much as a debate we can get into this, tvtropes covers the basics of this question along with providing many examples of fiction that involves this issue: What Measure Is A Non-Human

Ahem.

Heck, some such movies even had a twist ending. The late Richard Jeni once joked about loading pornography on dial-up: "All right, all right, good boobs, all right, come on- PENIS! Oh, God!"

US law is not 18--it varies from state to state, and is 16 in most states. The reason most people think it's 18 in the US is because it's 18 in California, where Hollywood is located. People from Hollywood have no idea about anything in the rest of the country, and the rest of the world gets its ideas of the US from Hollywood.

(Warning, TVTropes links may rot your brain. You have been warned.)

You can blame Tony's actions on Hollywood, but don't blame it on the US.

A sphere? Don't you mean a ball?

On a more serious note, I submit that the arrow of time is a local anisomorphy in the phase-space of possible worlds, from less entropic ones to more entropic ones, in which case it really may be a sphere, or really a hypersphere, centered on the nearest local entropic minimum in the aforementioned phase-space.

Wikilove isn't; but WikiTrue, whose agents spend their days marking ideologically problematic material with a "citation needed", is.

A WikiProject with goals not unlike those you described actually exists on Wikipedia, and it goes by the unassuming name of WikiProject Citation cleanup. Wikipedia regulars are genre savvy enough to avoid names too similar to those mentioned in Orwell's famous novels.

The Spy is a Glass Cannon.

The Dead Ringer is balanced by its much louder decloak sound than the normal cloaking devices. It's only really a problem if they're using the Saharan Spy set, which makes it completely silent (but also means they have the Your Eternal Reward knife).

Spies in general are countered by Pyro, among other things.

Plus, only a Dead Ringer Spy can run through an active fire fight and live through it... any other cloaking device makes him light up like a Christmas Tree when hit by any weaponry, particularly if Heavies are involved, they can kill a Spy from full health in less than a second.

Crap article. You'd think there would be a picture of all the logos on something, followed by a close-up picture of each logo and its explanation . But no. It's pure did not do the research.

This looks like Demand Media content for a made-for-Adsense page. Probably paid the author about $10.

AC just needs to go read this page.....
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/FlameWar?from=Main.HolyWar

Years later, we look back and see beauty in what we discarded as ugly. A 1960 Cadillac Coupe DeVille is stunningly beautiful today, but in 1976 you'd be embarrassed to drive one (unless you were 20 years old driving your dad's old car in which case you thought it was the coolest thing rolling).

Our standards of beauty are now set by marketing agencies working on behalf of their corporate clients. And nobody, not one person, is immune.

What the hell are you talking about? That car just screams zeerust - I mean, look at those ridiculous fins! Even if it could go particularly fast (yeah right), I doubt they'd do anything useful. And that oversized grill! There's no way the engine needs that much cooling, it just looks ridiculous, and it's going to kill your already shitty mileage. And mileage is going to be a problem - the whole thing is so goddamn huge despite seating what, four or five people? What's the rest of that weight for, to make Saudi Arabia happy in a decade, when the cost of oil spikes up? You could fit a whole family of dead bodies in that trunk, except you'd have to climb in yourself to put the last ones in because that thing is going to be cavernous!

Basically, that thing is a boat that somehow sprouted wheels and decided to wander around on land. If that failure of design was an important part of the history of American car aesthetics, then there's a really good reason why all the American car manufacturers went out of business a few decades later.

As to the point of your post: as counter-evidence, I provide you with the Pontiac Aztek. If marketers really had as much sway as you seem to believe, then that thing would have sold; instead, it was panned as the ugliest car ever. How does your theory explain that?

Justice? I don't think they were ever about justice. Their name says it all: they're in it for the lulz.

To carry over from last night's discussion of character alignment, LulzSec is neither Chaotic Good nor Chaotic Evil: they're Chaotic Stupid. And the people they're going up against are Lawful Stupid.

I have no dog in this fight, just a big bowl of popcorn. However it ends, it's gonna be hilarious.

Justice? I don't think they were ever about justice. Their name says it all: they're in it for the lulz.

To carry over from last night's discussion of character alignment, LulzSec is neither Chaotic Good nor Chaotic Evil: they're Chaotic Stupid. And the people they're going up against are Lawful Stupid.

I have no dog in this fight, just a big bowl of popcorn. However it ends, it's gonna be hilarious.

But we can't be bothered getting into a deep philosophical debate with conniving personality cultists.

It's not a personality cult. She had a lousy personality, most people agree with that.

They aren't interested in a logical debate, just justifying their deal leader. It's like trying to explain to Mac fanatics that Windows is more stable these days.

I'm going to say that this is more a reflection on you than on anyone else, an indication that you have poor communication skills. You can work on it, and get good enough to convince crazy Mac fanatics (or idiot Windows fanatics). But it's largely a problem with your own communication skills.

I could point out that all her books were painfully unrealistic. That not all left-wingers are talentless assholes (um, Einstein), and greedy fuckers quite often are.

See, it's stuff like this. I would even add that her stories are kind of boring, but who cares? Many philosophy books are boring (no one reads Francis Bacon for his witty dialog). No one reads Ayn Rand for its realism, there's even a TV Trope about how unrealistic it is (Canon Sue). But so what? If you're going to try to convince someone of something, you're going to at least talk about stuff they care about. It's basically a case of you being 100% right about things that don't matter.

(after all, almost every first world country manages to have a socialised health system that is better *and* cheaper than the US's privatized health system),

This is unrelated, but look, this is the sort of brain-dead ideas pro-single-payers come up with. They have this idea that all we have to do is switch to a single-payer system, and somehow everything will be better. So instead of actually coming up with ideas to make it better, they end up hoping a magical change will fix everything.

Think about it, do you think that perhaps the fact that we pay our doctors more than many socialist-style countries is part of the reason our medical system is more expensive? Have you actually looked at the reasons other countries have 'better' care? This is a complicated but important question if you actually want to improve healthcare in the US.

Well, given that we (in the US) currently have a government that thinks "Atlas Shrugged" is a great story about how to run a railroad, I suppose it will be a while before stuff like this gets sorted out. And it probably won't be pleasant.

Ah yes, that train story about how running a red signal light is perfectly safe.

Well, in my view, gaming's run into the same problem that faces people in general in other fields. Take movies, for an example: the latest X-Men movie was released recently. It's remarkable in that it wasn't a complete pile of shit like some of the other stuff that comes out. What do I mean by this? Well, one reviewer there mentions that it's a movie that doesn't condescend to the viewer; each character is presented as following their own motivations with less blatant kick-the-doggery than other general-audience flicks. The recent Star Trek reboot was a bit along these lines too.

And yet, neither is the audience particularly challenged by the film. Technical elements are filled with pseudoscience and only there as an aside to the main plot, which while ultimately formulaic (as anything must, by definition be once it's done), come back around to affirm things that the audience can relate to: normative interpersonal themes, traditional power structures, comedic relief, and so forth. So it is with games, too: they've found the way to do it. Always some new title following principles guaranteed to bring an audience, letting them come in and round the Skinner wheel a few times before running after the next shiny.

So, we'll get Call of Duty 15, and the big question in people's minds will be the controversy in some scripted scene where the player shoots American citizens. And of course the critical element lurking here is the social one: does it really matter, should it really matter (to myself, for instance) that this will be so? I don't have to play it, afterall, and it would probably serve me better to leave the topic well enough alone. I had some kind of "games ought not to be..." point, but I'm finding it a little distasteful myself.

Instead, here's a different one. Games, at their best (to me) can be the change they create, as a reflection, in the player. This is the whole e-sports subject again, but specifically, actually doing and discovering things in these games that relate to other fields of human knowledge; refining yourself. Finding unintuitive things that will help you competitively in that game, and learning a bit about procedural parts of the human system: reaction time, intuition, clumping together individual actions to create dominant sequences, inferring strategy from the game as it really is and so forth.

Here's an example of a game that's still played, by players who have played for over 10 years. And they play the same maps again and again, by and large.

Marvel (and, I suppose, DC) operates in a very strange time continuity, where most of their characters remain the same age regardless of when they were first introduced, with their 'backstory' updated automatically or covered up and not referred to as necessary. So a character who in the mid 80s would have been a 35-year old Vietnam War veteran would today be a 35-year old vet of.. say, the early 90s Gulf War or the Bosnian conflict, or any other conflict appropriate for the time. Characters age only a little, and although they can become veterans of the various teams they're on, they still have aged only a small amount, and their teams only having been in operation for a similar time.

This is informally known as 'Marvel Time' or 'Comic Book Time' since the 80s. TV Tropes has an awesome page on this, but be wary -- TV Tropes can easily suck up all the time from an afternoon.. or a week.

You set your locale/language, and the locales/languages you want to support, then as you are coding you can enter a string followed by an 'I'

Sounds like gettext so far. But:

the plugin for translations allows different services to be used.

At this point, I've never seen a translator that produces results substantially better than Engrish.

Essentially what I want is to sell stories and games on the App Store, but allow my readers/players to, legally and safely, create Creative Commons, Share Alike, Non-Commercial original stories using the characters and settings I've created.

My suggestion: Write a universe bible (or an abridged version) and license it CC BY-NC-SA.

Essentially what I want is to sell stories and games on the App Store, but allow my readers/players to, legally and safely, create Creative Commons, Share Alike, Non-Commercial original stories using the characters and settings I've created.

My suggestion: Write a universe bible (or an abridged version) and license it CC BY-NC-SA.

Gee, users deliberately installing things that might be harmful for their computer?

Conventional antivirus software acts as a blacklist. Mac App Store acts as a centrally managed whitelist. Do you recommend either of these two approaches, or do you recommend a third one that's less widely known?

Spending time in any community with its own metaphors will ruin your vocabulary.

I played the opening level on Halo Reach, and was so bored when I got to the first farmer, that I just shot him in the head to shut him up so I could get on with alien-killing. Well, the gun went bang, and a blood-spatter hit the wall behind him, but he never missed a word of exposition.

That could be considered one of the acceptable breaks from reality, designed to keep players from finding themselves in an unwinnable situation and abandoning not only the game but also other games from the same developer or publisher. Sierra's reputation for allowing the player to unknowingly create unwinnable situations soured a lot of gamers to the entire adventure game genre.

I played the opening level on Halo Reach, and was so bored when I got to the first farmer, that I just shot him in the head to shut him up so I could get on with alien-killing. Well, the gun went bang, and a blood-spatter hit the wall behind him, but he never missed a word of exposition.

That could be considered one of the acceptable breaks from reality, designed to keep players from finding themselves in an unwinnable situation and abandoning not only the game but also other games from the same developer or publisher. Sierra's reputation for allowing the player to unknowingly create unwinnable situations soured a lot of gamers to the entire adventure game genre.

The dry ice is intended to be placed inside pairs of shoes.

That's called being too incompetent to operate a regular blanket

In his software class, Dan had learned that each book had a copyright monitor that reported when and where it was read, and by whom, to Central Licensing.

While it makes a good dystopian scare-story, if we're at the point where your computer is watching you to see who's looking at the screen (which is what would be required to do this), Dan's got much bigger problems on his hands - namely, what "Central Licensing" is going to do with all that video of him fapping.

Also, it suffers an Idiot Ball moment - Lissa needs to write an essay. Dan can't (or won't) let Lissa touch the computer because Evil Things Will Happen. Solution: Let Lissa dictate the essay, Dan types it. Lissa has never seen anything on the computer.

Alternate Idiot Ball moment - we're in the Scary Future, where the system reports who logged in and who looked at what (and will punish you for letting people look at the wrong files), but we've apparently lost the ability to use the chmod command.