Slashdot Mirror

Except that:

1/ Staying in the middle/front of the pack will get you pummeled with all that the opponents behind can throw at you.
2/ For this reason, keeping around offensive items as opposed to defensive items is a poor strategy.
3/ Besides, POW blocks and lightning bolts specifically exist to make item hoarding a poor strategy as well.

The thing people don't realize with Mario Kart is that it's a hard game that pretends to be easy, because it's already fun even when you suck at first.

In fact, I never cease to be amazed at how well balanced Mario Kart Wii is. The effect of most items can be mitigated to some extent. Off the top of my mind there are at least three or four ways to limit how much the blue shell will affect your race. Some are bitching hard to pull, but hey, you're going for first place, right? Gotta work for it.

The only really succesful approach I found is to be just a bit faster than your opponents -- and there are many ways to tend toward that goal, the most important of which being in equal parts the quality of your trajectories and a good tactic use of the circuit's features -- and a good knowledge of how to make the best defensive use of your items. A skilled player can cross the finish line of Rainbow Road 30 to 40 seconds ahead of the closest AI opponents in hard mode. Can you do that? If not, then you're not a skilled player, and that's where your problem is.

A good way to tell where you actually stand is to go through time trial mode and try to unlock (and then beat) all the Expert Staff Ghosts. No items there, so it's just you against the circuit. When you can routinely race ahead of most or all expert ghosts you'll find the regular championship and multiplayer modes significantly more manageable.

By which I mean you'll still lose now and then. Just not as much. That's the Mario Kart philosophy: work hard, and you'll pull ahead often -- but not always. That's okay. That's life. And it's been a fun ride either way.

[If] you, for a single moment, believe that ending was made up on the spot....

I'll do you one better.

Romo Lampkin: Gosh, ex-president Lee Adama! I never would have thought that everyone would spontaneously and unanimously vote to throw away all technology, including all of the lampshades in the fleet, but golly gee they sure did, and after I finish this sentence it'll be canon, so let's get on with the finale, why don't we, because we're a few maudlin and confusing scenes away from cute dancing robots made sinister by a pointless voiceover?

An hour or two? You must be kidding. TV Tropes Will Ruin Your Life!

If you want to lose an hour or two have a look at TV Tropes.

Television has any number of tropes.

Yes, it does. (Warning: TvTropes.org is a huge timesuck.)

Sweden porn?

IKEA instruction manuals?

For some reason, this came to my mind after reading your post: IKEA Erotica

Because if it doesn't bore the hell out of you, it sure can't be called literature, eh?

Here, read this: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TrueArtIsIncomprehensible

I know how you feel. I've often wondered why they can't open a hyperspace portal inside/around an enemy ship, ripping it to shreds. After all, the shields are probably down, and the enemy's hyperdrive isn't activated and keeping things under control, so it would be catastrophic, wouldn't it?

And for that matter... Asgard weapons were awesome against the Ori - but as soon as they went to the Pegasus galaxy, they were almost totally ineffective against Wraith vessels. Their excuse? Thick hulls. @_@

Well jeeze - the Daedalus gets in enough battles that I really wonder why they didn't slap a hull a few metres thicker onto it! I also wonder why the Daedalus is so weak in "The Daedalus Variations". It gets ripped to bits by an alien ship, which was hiding from the wraith...

And I wonder why they never used those Asgard battle suits or Ancient personal shield emitters that they picked up. And where did the Zat guns go? Those things disintegrate!

Maybe some stargate geek will give me an answer - but most are probably just TV tropes. Because, y'know, at the end of an episode the state of the universe has to return to exactly the way it was.

I always felt it was the humour - of which Richard Dean Anderson was the main proponent - that made Stargate really stand out for other similar Sci-Fi shows. It never took itself too seriously (like Star Trek) and the whole of the main cast were very Genre Savvy (Except where the plot required it) which made for a lot of the entertaining exchanges with what would otherwise be horribly clichéd villains.

I was making a reference to Harkonnen heart plugs.

Mind you heart plugs always seemed a bit of a silly idea to me. If you wanted to off your slaves for disobedience, why not just shoot them? Also a society with slavery and Dune like levels of technology could probably prevent disobedience in the first place with some sort of brain implant.

Of course it's more cinematic, but it's the sort of idea that falls victim to fridge logic.

This is not uncommon in reporting. See good old TVTropes's Cowboy Bebop At His Computer article for other examples. Also, just couldn't pass up the chance to give others the same wiki walk I got -- but if you need the next few hours, don't look.

You've obviously never attempted to buy an accessory at any of these stores. Compare online prices to your typical 'store brand' prices.

This isn't limited to cables, its endemic in brick and mortar stores. Anything other than your baseline items are so heavily marked up that only the uneducated or the desperate would purchase them.

Add on top of this the almost pure profit of their Customer Protection Rackets, and it's not hard to see why they might skimp on the 'pay premium dollar for employees who can provide premium service' plan in favor of 'pay shit for teenaged con-artists who'll scam the rubes for every penny they've got' plan.

Colorless green ideas sleep furiously. A computer would read this sentence and see nothing wrong. Any human can tell that it lacks any meaning at all.

Say what you want, I feel the sharp contrasts in one sentence symbolize the sharp contrast between mortal and divine, combined in one. Therefore, it's about Jesus. The use of "sleep" is quite a blantant reference to the fact that, in The Divine Comedy, Dante only sleeps during Purgatorio.

Therefore, I've proven that your sentence is a deep symbolic and literary reference to Jesus in Purgatory.

Actually, according to the Theiss Titillation Theory, completely nude women would actually be less appealing.

And when the border agent finds the iPod... what then?

"I will remove your iPod from its tiny nano-sheath and push it up your cock. Then I'll plug some speakers up your arse and put it on to shuffle with my fucking fist. Then, every time I hear something that I don't like - which will be every time that something comes on - I will skip to the next track by crushing your balls."

That'd never happen of course - actors in security theatre are well known to be kind, courteous, good humoured and completely without avarice.

Obligatory XKCD.

Indeed, all science is derived from inductive reasoning, which is exactly "After I did X, Y happened." It just tends to get more accurate when you do it a bunch more times, and try to control other variables.

It's not really very hard to imagine a chiropractor working for some actual, physical, skeletal/muscular issues. Chiropractic is far from entirely bullshit. It's just that throughout its history, it's also been plagued by the stupid idea that chiropractic can do anything -- all the way back to the anecdotal story of Palmer curing someone's deafness by adjusting their back.

It's kind of like science fiction writers explaining anything they want with "nanotech" or "quantum mechanics" or whatever the Phlebotinum of the day is. It's clearly absurd, and could be considered pseudoscience if anyone took it seriously (which is why it's science fiction), but quantum physics is real, hard science, and we are actually trying to build some nanotech.

Or, as Wikipedia puts it:

Serious research to test chiropractic theories did not begin until the 1970s, and is continuing to be hampered by what are characterized as antiscientific and pseudoscientific ideas that sustained the profession in its long battle with organized medicine.

I find GP's story entirely plausible, and it's easy to imagine how that might be true. Now, if he said that chiropractic cured deafness, or gave him the ability to walk, or anything like that, I'd be much more cautious...

You're one of those people who can't enjoy anything unless it's technically accurate, aren't you?

Stop having fun this instant!

It's certainly part of it. Movies and TV are just another way to tell stories and sites like TV Tropes show quite clearly that it has become part of our "vocabulary." It may not conform to your idea of "high culture" but it does form part of our common background and frame of reference. So don't be a snob, culture is about more than just Picasso.

While I can appreciate the aesthetic behind your choice of corridors, my favorite corridor is still the Laser Corridor from Resident Evil... it even has a sense of humor.

Now they're a huge company, but that doesn't mean they must be evil.

Actually, yes, it pretty much does.

Corporations have exactly one interest and function: maximize shareholder return. If Google could increase its profits by powering its servers with forsaken children, it would do it -- otherwise it would face shareholder lawsuits.

Large for-profit corporations are, in essence, psychopaths, lacking any sort of conscience or empathy. They will do only and exactly what is in their own interest, regardless of how it effects others. If that's not "evil", nothing is.

Ah yes, "They Don't Make Them Like They Used To."

Bugs have been around forever. Q/A has been troublesome since the beginning - heck, many of the problems outlined in the Unix Hater's Handbook were the direct result of poor Q/A throughout the... erm... Unixverse. Bloated code? That's been around as long as there's been code - heck, INTERCAL was explicitly designed to produce it! People with no background in IT making decisions and overruling experience? That's also been happening for ages.

That said, I'll give you credit on one thing - yeah, your code was tight, purposeful and optimized for speed or size, at least as far as the machine was concerned. You didn't have a choice. Instead of focusing on maintainability or ease of understanding, programmers had to bend to the machine's thinking instead of the other way around since there just wasn't enough machine to tolerate human weakness. Eventually, though, computers became powerful enough where programming could stop focusing on getting every last clock cycle's worth by any means necessary and more on solving programming problems quickly and easily. Put another way, the programmer's time finally became more valuable than the machine's time. Once that happened, the rules changed - something which those some of those people with "no background in IT" figured out years ago (I hear it's because they had a background in some dark discipline called "accounting") and which a lot of IT people still can't wrap their minds around.

Yes, but the issue in this case isn't in the amount of time the bug is exploitable -- it's all about the amount of time it goes from known to fixed. In the bug you cite's case that patch time was zero since the patch was announced with the bug. You just can't do that with closed source software unless you're the original developer. DNDTR.

How are cartoon depictions of death ethically superior to ludicrous gibs?

Less-detailed depictions leave open the possibility that the "death" isn't really death. Pokemon, for instance, only faint, and death in most console RPGs comes to resemble fainting with fairly easy access to resurrection artifacts like Phoenix Down from the Final Fantasy series. Super Smash Bros. Brawl has hardening instead of death.

My toons are all celibate. Since my beloved IRL doesn't play, I don't even allow myself the fantasy of another SO relationship. Problem solved.

I solved the problem differently: I just ship my characters amongst themselves, that way its no more "cheating" than masturbation is.

The trouble with stone tablets is that they have limited storage space. Try putting a video on a stone tablet! The tradeoff isn't modernity vs. durability, it's storage capacity vs. durability. If you want to encode a few lines of text or an image, then stone monuments are the way to go, and have been used even in modern times (Mount Rushmore, the Georgia Guidestones). However, if you want to record voice, video, or some sort of Apocalyptic Log like in the movies, you'll need to pack your data in tighter, and that means using technological tricks that don't stand up to time as well.

Feh - most of it he's dead on right about, but he has forgotten one fundamental.

Rule of Cool trumps all!

{G} - Pug

TVTropes to the rescue!

Monty Hall (note the lack of a "U") was the host on the game show Lets Make A Deal, which was cancelled before some of you were born. The show could give away massive amounts of prizes to the lucky (or cunning or destined-to-win or however they pick winners on game shows).

A Monty Haul campaign (with a "U") was the generic label for a Game Master (and his/her campaign) who would run adventures that were like game show giveaways, except the questions weren't as hard. Players would end up staggering under the loads of gold and gems (except the encumbrance rules often were ignored as well) and cherry-picking which magic items they wanted to keep because they had so many to choose from. Think of Conan The Barbarian with a Star Wars Star Destroyer.

Also, in the first and second editions of Dungeons And Dragons, you got experience based on how much money you looted, one to one. So the Monty Haul characters would also end up with stratospheric levels, which led to situations like characters assassinating ''gods'' like Thor to gain their nifty weapons.

Plus at least Jobs has flair and style. Even the people he's screwed over talk of the man in awe. I believe the term is "Magnificent Bastard"

TVTropes has a formula.

Also, you have to give credit to the fact that a lot of the things that are "obvious" for us were not necesarily so for someone in the seventies.

Like the fact that Luke drives a fast convertible without any seatbelts or rollbars (unthinkable now, but common then)

Also, some depictions of minorities are considered offensive now, but were ok in the seventies and eighties (nevertheless, that's no excuse for Jar-Jar)

In any case, the original article writer needs to repeat MST3K's Mantra, until he feels better...

If every single high school or every single garage band or every single webcomic had a Wikipedia article, it would strain the admins ever more.

That, and if you want TV Tropes, you know where to find it.

For those not in the know (or haven't seen xkcd #609) it's like Wikipedia for all forms of entertainment media, only there's no such thing as notability. Oh, and have fun spending the rest of your work day on that site should you choose to click the above link.

the public got a lot worse in the latter years, so now you have to put your references in flashy subtitles.

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

The photograph they chose to feature in the PDF linked above uses the infamous Kubrick Stare so I am worried about him rounding up minions for his insane plan of world domination.

Some of you unfortunates might not be aware of what a "thirty Xanatos pileup" is. To remedy that, visit this site.

Block out a couple of hours; you'll use them regardless.

Thats why its called 'Chaotic Stupid'

It's not a re-imagining. It's a cashing-in on the name value of the original concept.

I don't get what is inaccurate about any series branding itself a re-imagining. Or I guess, perhaps I can't glean your definition of what you think a "re-imagining" is from your comment. I accept the definition that the production company uses just fine; it is an original series with imaginary settings and characters (i.e. fiction), based on a previous series with imaginary settings and characters. It is re-imagined because the settings, characters, and story have been tweaked/added/removed to the point where some significant actual imagination is required. The Star Wars trilogy thing was not a re-imagining, and no one ever claimed as such, it being a form of (mild) re-make. Same characters, same universe, same story, just a slightly altered storytelling medium.

You are right that it absolutely is a cashing-in on the name value of the original concept. No one is doubting that. But, they were honest about that up front anyway. They said this is a re-imagining of the original series. Therefore, they are explicitly using whatever power the brand name Battlestar Galactica had to market their product. No need to go into the importance of brand naming; I think we all understand how powerful that is. It is a gamble though. By using the name, you are inviting comparisons to the source material with every review and every viewing by anyone who has seen the original. Since the critical consensus was that the 2004 BSG was quite superior to the 1978 BSG, the gamble paid off quite nicely. For another example of this, see Star Trek (2009) (not saying that was vastly superior, but just that the gamble paid off there as well).

Part of the gamble is, of course, the "veneers" that tie it to the original work have to be obvious enough to justify using the same name. I can't just make a video of me making a turkey sandwich, upload it to YouTube and call it a re-imagining of Batman. The critical/public consensus here though was that there was enough similarities (a space ship called Galactica lead by a man named Adama guiding/accompanying the last remnants of the human race to a new homeworld while being pursued by a cyborg race called Cylons, among many other themes) to justify the name.

So you're right about the using the name value. But since that happens all the time every single day in a society with any semblance of a free market, you need to go farther and explain why that is bad. Since tropes are re-used over and over throughout all fiction, just saying "same name!" is not sufficient as a criticism.

Tv Tropes is the most fun Wiki I've found in a while.

What!? You LINKED to a page on TV Tropes? You've doomed half of Slashdot! That site is a black hole that sucks you in and spits you out countless hours later. And I have proof! Just click on that link and you'll see.

Off all things, linking TV Tropes, these crazy people.

Tv Tropes is the most fun Wiki I've found in a while.

What!? You LINKED to a page on TV Tropes? You've doomed half of Slashdot! That site is a black hole that sucks you in and spits you out countless hours later. And I have proof! Just click on that link and you'll see.

Off all things, linking TV Tropes, these crazy people.

Trivia sections for movies, films, and music work better work with TVTropes, an alternate Wiki better suited for talking about popular (geek) culture.

Tv Tropes is the most fun Wiki I've found in a while. While a little more serious than the Unencyclopedia, it looks at media (Video games, role playing games, movies, TV, comics, etc.) with a more fun and lighthearted approach than the Wikipedia.

Don't ever go to TV Tropes.

Arson, murder, and jaywalking.

One wonders if it wasn't just bait to get security to tip their hand for a more thought out caper.

Been watching Oceans Eleven have we?

Worse; reading TVTropes

Dude,America Wins.
I mean seriously were the f'in US of A! We saved all your European behinds from the Nazi's! So kiss our feet! /sarcasm

You only really have 3 options when it comes to this, and no matter what you do, you're going to offend these people, because they just want to be offended.

1. Treat everyone fairly equally. See the backlash about kids in Fallout 3, black zombies, etc.
2. Purposely include minorities just to do so, and try to make them seem flawless while doing so (to avoid #1). See the Magical Negro.
3. Just do whatever seems to fit; especially common in fantasy games or games with settings precluding 'diversity' in some way. Results in this complaint.


Since you're screwed no matter how you cut it, #3 seems to be the best option, which is why this type of whining doesn't help anyone.

I didn't say I hate him. I said his books were as factually inaccurate.

His 'research' is just random nonsense with names and dates and words all thrown in he doesn't understand at all.

Hell, the work that makes the most sense is The da Vinci Code, and that's because the facts and story were ripped off from a book of pseudohistory claptrap called Holy Blood, Holy Grail, so at least these facts were moderately consistent in what could have happened.

Note when I talk about 'facts' like that, I'm not talking about actual fictional things like Jesus being married, I'm talking about the framework of facts that he builds his fiction around.

Like in my parody, the idea that Shakespeare's play were written by someone else, and there's a conspiracy to hide it, is an interesting concept to write a book around. Maybe they were written by Pope Gregory XIII, or Queen Elizabeth I. Who knows. Tell us some exciting story, I'm okay with it.

But the idea that they were written by playwright Arthur Miller, who was born in 1915, and the conspiracy was created by the Actors' Equity Association, which was founded in 1913, is sheer total gibberish.

And it's the sort of gibberish that Dan Brown would just use in his books with no mention or realization it makes no sense. No handwave or anything, he'd just assume that we'd be okay with the concept that Shakespeare's plays were written in 1935 or whenever. Because he doesn't know anything about what he writes.

It's not for nothing he has an expression named after him.

He doesn't just make little mistakes. He makes such amazingly wrong claims that they are worth reading by themselves. And it doesn't matter what the subject is. He can screw up math, religion science or philosophy. The most directly relevant work for for this thread is Brown's Digital Fortress. My favorite part of that is the part where he clearly doesn't understand public key cryptography. He thinks that one needs to exchange a secret key to use public key cryptography. Of course, the whole point is that you don't need to do that. I'm not quite sure if Dan just didn't do the research http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DidNotDoTheResearch or is so pigheaded that after reading about public key crypto it didn't fit in with his intuition about how crypto should behave and so he just completely misremembered it. And that's only one of the many serious problems with Brown's works.

See also: the Comics Code Authority. Some links:
Wikipedia
TV Tropes

You can't do that in E-rated games.

You can't do that in E-rated games.