Slashdot Mirror

I think what really happens is that now ugly people are not allowed to pass in front of a camera.

For that reason, we have a lot of pretty people in TV who are nonetheless called "ugly"

Then how does [an actor on a well-known U.S. sitcom] know all the good Bavarian jokes?

It's called Woolseyism: the translation team recognizes a U.S. joke and slaps in a Bavarian joke for the Bavarian voice actor to tell. See Woolseyism on TV Tropes for more examples.

I'm surprised no one else caught the Endless Eight reference. Lord knows I've been stuck in a time loop week in and week out for the last month...

I've never been to a LAN but I always assumed that participants had more than one game

You can't play multiplayer between two different titles, unless they make up a Pokemon-style set. For instance, if I have Lego Racers and my buddy has MySims Racing, they can't connect. This means all four players need a copy of the same title, which makes $160 PC game 4-packs look a lot more expensive than $60 Xbox 360 games.

and gaming PC to share between them.

I have a LAN (local area network) at home, but only one of the hosts on this network is considered a "gaming PC" (fast CPU, fast video card, Windows operating system). The other machines on the LAN are older PCs, low-cost subnotebooks, or Linux boxes.

Since Thatcher took exception to the actual all-night raves that went on in the early nineties. The government take a dim view of anyone having fun, Thatcher (and Blair and Brown for that matter) take a dimmer view of spontaneous communities forming for the purpose of socialising, dancing and casual drug-taking. This is due to the neo-Liberal tenet that people are entirely selfish entities, plotting and scheming against one-another, the only way they should be able to express themselves is through the free market.[1] The point being that these raves were legal, but were not taking part in government-approved capitalist venues, people there were not consuming government-approved drugs (such as alcohol) and even more galling: they went against the principle that people are essentially selfish.

So. Thatcher had to shut them down, because they went against the government's philosophy of how the world should look. It was an amazing time though, and if you meet a 40-something Brit, who wears a suit to work, has two point four children[2] and you assume they're a boring old git, think again. Chances are a few years ago they were standing in a field, listening to great old school rave[3], and enjoying a sense of community the population of Britain can now only dream of. All thanks to the jackbooted thugs who have been forcing their Cold War derived ideologies on our fair isle for too long.

One of these days we're going to go Wat Tyler[4] on their arses.

[1] See The Trap.

[2] British idiom Two point four children, referring to the average number of children per-household in the UK.

[3] Just a small example: Prodigy - Out of Space (not for everyone, but that's not the point)

[4] Wat Tyler, leader of the Peasants Revolt.

(captcha is 'corrupts', how apropos!)

"Let me do the math for you..." (emphasis mine)
Oh no you didn't... Do the math?! I think you just lost your argument. You might as well have invoked Godwin's law.

Seriously though did they plan 360games to take 1 day with little difficulty each

If you really want to bring back the days of Nintendo-hard video games, go into a game's menu and change "DIFFICULTY: EASY" to "DIFFICULTY: EXPERT". Or put I Wanna Be The Guy on your PC.

No, it's gameplay. There's something called willing suspension of disbelief.

Well I'm not having anyone staring in disbelief at my willy suspension!

The better the graphics the easier it is to be immersed in the game.

No, it's gameplay. There's something called willing suspension of disbelief.

Graphics actually ruins a game when it runs at 3 fps tops. I still prefer AvP2 over Bioshock on my Dell laptop, wanna guess why? And that facehugger that suddenly jumps you from a dark corner could be three polygons, you'd still jump through the ceiling.

You also need missiles to shoot down the missiles shooting down your missiles launched to shoot down the missiles shooting down your missiles...

What about the decrease in ejaculatory volume?

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ConservationOfNinjutsu>

That discrepancy may also provide a way for people to beat the rap on prostitution charges: don't solicit someone for sex, tell them you're making a porno flick and you want them to be in it.

So a hooker sells erotic videos, not sex, to the john. Sort of like a triple-X version of SuperStar Studios booths at amusement parks. Genius.

Almost. There are a few problems with the business model of selling copies of 1 Night in $hooker on DVD-R to johns, which a pimp will have to work through before beginning to offer the service through his "actresses":

• State laws ban trade in erotic videos that lack artistic value, which is usually defined as some sort of excuse plot. Actresses will have to learn to act in more S&M scenarios to keep the videos legally interesting. And what happens when the john derails the plot?
• Hookers will have to verify state ID closely so that they don't make child porn.
• Repeat business might decrease, as the john can just beat it to the first video he made with the actress.

That discrepancy may also provide a way for people to beat the rap on prostitution charges: don't solicit someone for sex, tell them you're making a porno flick and you want them to be in it.

So a hooker sells erotic videos, not sex, to the john. Sort of like a triple-X version of SuperStar Studios booths at amusement parks. Genius.

Almost. There are a few problems with the business model of selling copies of 1 Night in $hooker on DVD-R to johns, which a pimp will have to work through before beginning to offer the service through his "actresses":

• State laws ban trade in erotic videos that lack artistic value, which is usually defined as some sort of excuse plot. Actresses will have to learn to act in more S&M scenarios to keep the videos legally interesting. And what happens when the john derails the plot?
• Hookers will have to verify state ID closely so that they don't make child porn.
• Repeat business might decrease, as the john can just beat it to the first video he made with the actress.

That's actually exactly the book I was thinking of. Kudos to you sir! :)

I'm pretty sure several stories about Merlin use this trope too, along with 'amazing the savages with your control over the sun god' type tales, though I can't bring any specific examples to mind. Luckily for me, tvtropes.org can.

thank god youtube removes adult content.

It doesn't filter out dirty words looped for a minute. Heaven help your five- and two-year-olds once they discover YTP.

Meanwhile, in the Future...

Games are serious business!

For one thing, Up was most definitely not a children's film. In children's films, the villain doesn't tie a protagonist to a chair and drop him out of a blimp. That's straight over the moral event horizon for a kids' film.

Villians in past childrens movies have done things like, "cursed the infant Princess Aurora to 'prick her finger on the spindle of a spinning wheel and die' before the sun set on her sixteenth birthday after not being invited to the baby's christening" (Maleficent, the villain of sleeping beauty). The queen in Snow White makes several attempts on Snow White's life "First, she visits the dwarves' house as an old peddler woman, and sells Snow White laces for a corset; but laces them tightly to asphyxiate her. When that fails, she returns as a different old woman, and tricks Snow White into using a poisoned comb. Finally when the comb fails to kill her, she visits again as a farmer's wife, and gives Snow White a poisoned apple." So clearly all past villians have been peaches and cream without a hint of malice or evil. All quotes taken from Wikipedia.

Exactly. And you can simplify this to the "standard" story archetype of "Boy meets girl. Boy looses girl. Boy gets girl back." and cover even more stories. The one you mentioned is a variant of this.

If you look at stories in any domain, there are hundreds of different concepts. Hell, just look at http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Tropes for an attempt to catalog them. Even slashdot has them -- I am not a meme!

The thing is that a good story (book, play, TV episode, film, game, ...) will have many of these tropes. It may even have a different take on the tropes. Having good, fleshed out characters is also needed and is equally important to the story.

For one thing, Up was most definitely not a children's film. In children's films, the villain doesn't tie a protagonist to a chair and drop him out of a blimp. That's straight over the moral event horizon for a kids' film.

Well, reading that gave me my daily dose of squick.

I hope this game is as cool as it sounds, but I have one major concern - balance.

Lack of balance has never stopped other sandbox games like Animal Crossing, which really is that easy. If they make Scribblenauts too easy, players will create self-imposed challenges: "Try to beat level X of Scribblenauts with only words meeting criteria Y and Z."

It's one thing to balance 20 races in a game

In some fans' minds, NASCAR has failed to balance even two of its highest profile races: Daytona and Talladega have become bumper cars. Or did you mean something else?

Sooo... are you suggesting applying the pressure with giant hyperdimensional hammers from hammerspace?

There is such thing called Dis Continuity

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

But it is rather cool!

I always supposed that Ogg came from Nanny Ogg.

Word of God* says no.

*I have lost hours of my time to that website.

A replicator (ST) could be used to make a replicator (SG).

Correct me if you have an encyclopaedic knowledge of startrek, but self-replicating machines only seem to have featured in the form of the mines in DS9.

That's because something like that would fall into the range of Transhumanism, and as we all know, there's No Transhumanism Allowed in Science-Fantasy and Contemporary SciFi.

After an artificial black hole is created, things nearby fall into it very, very slowly.

Yes, everyone knows that gravity increases as the size of its source diminishes. This is an obvious corollary to the fact that Gravity Sucks. :)

I know that the only time I have more than 3 or 4 tabs open is when I opened a tab to a page I want to look at after I'm done with the current page.

This happens a lot when I'm browing TVTropes...

That was beautiful. Thank you.

If the developer in question was doing this commercially, then points about priorities might stand. But it was done solely for fun, for love of an interesting project. To demand that people stop having fun is just... sad.

Imagine if that were all you ever got, though. Imagine if almost all the men you saw in ads and on TV were portrayed as stupid frat boys sitting on a couch drinking beer and watching sports, and the few who don't are made to take up those hobbies by the end of the show. I would certainly be insulted by the implication that my role in life was totally determined by my gender. When it comes to women, this sort of thing is very pervasive in media (consider the archetype of The Chick, for example).

Think about the "jocks are cool, nerds are losers" stereotype. Nowadays it's (mostly) a joke to us, but there was a time when geeky high school students were regularly assaulted because of this thinking. And actually, men are affected by cultural factors too. In the US, men are six times more likely to go to prison than women.

Maybe she's Batman?

Star Trek is an "action/adventure in space" series. That's what it's supposed to be, not some emo Braga and Berman whiny PC crap.

The best Trek was always "here's some big idea, but we don't have time to discuss it, so we're going to do X and hope for the best", with perhaps some reflection on morality in the last 30 seconds of the episode. Bad story telling is characters sitting around discussing what to do. Good story telling is characters doing something - showing how their decision played out.

This plot device where the bad guy suddenly goes "shit, I'm suddenly distracted by something else, so I'm going to let you live so that you can finish me off in a few minutes" is just crap,

If you don't like TV (or TV-inspired movies), don't watch. There is no TV without crap like this. It's been this way for 70+ years, since Saturday morning serials. I don't put up with that sort of thing in books, and I spend a lot of time reading books, but that's a diffeent medium.

I've often wondered how many patterns we are missing, especially in regards to our "special" numbers (Pi, Phi, e, primes....) because we mostly deal in base10. If we suffer a Class 1 or Class 2 Apocalypse, I intend to seize the opportunity and implement hexadecimal as a default number system.

How come Klingons are only allowed to have one language but Earthicans are allowed to have like 1000?

Because "Humans are Special."

For Shamalamadingdong will soon be making it into a live action trilogy.

Personally, I prefer something new from Cameron then a retelling of a story already told by a guy who has a unhealthy attachment to twist endings.

So far the only thing I've heard Cameron talk about this movie is about how this movie is going to be ultra realistic 3D rendering. At which point it begs the question why not just use live actors from the get go?

In a speculative fiction film, at least, makeup to turn a human actor into any of several races might be cost prohibitive if it's more than a rubber-forehead alien. That's why when Andy Serkis played the part of Smeagol, a mutant hobbit who used the alias "Gollum", he wore a motion capture suit and the actual character was computer-generated.

McBain: That was the joke.

I'm not sure which rule number it is but there's definitely a rule saying "It may not be acceptable to kill X in your game, but it's OK to kill Zombie X if the existence of such a thing isn't an automatic ban in itself". So if you can't get away with a game (I'm looking at you, Carmageddon) where you run over pedestrians, then turn their blood green and hey presto, instant zombies. And running over zombies is OK. Really.

Of course you can't have a baby-killing game by having zombie babies, because you can't have a game with zombie babies in it, full stop. Mummified pygmies, maybe, but not zombie babies. Thus is the power of tv reality.

It's called "shoot the hostage". In the short term, it results in public outrage. If the principle is applied consistently, then in the long term it results in zero hostage taking situations occurring, and thus results in the greatest common good.

It's an RPG trope: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/GameplayAndStorySegregation

Jesus. You couldn't just say we'd evolve beyond the need for bodies and and become disembodied beings of pure energy that transcend the universe and then forget what bodies are then decide to build one on an interplanetary scale by scooping together asteroids and then carving labels into the respected parts like "head", "eye", and "mouth"?

(God, I hate Asmiov. Lame trope after lame trope.)

Eventually, maybe we could tap on the charged layers of atmosphere and drain them to harvest energy

What if we put the laser in orbit, and gave it a really big telescope to aim it? You could deposit the harvested energy wherever you want.

Rocks fall.
Everyone dies.

  EVERYONE

That may tell you something.

That Sturgeon's Law is as true to paper dolls as it is to everything else.

Simcity 5.

For glitch lists, I like TVTropes ones:

Good Bad Bugs
Game Breaking Bugs
and Unwinnable.

For glitch lists, I like TVTropes ones:

Good Bad Bugs
Game Breaking Bugs
and Unwinnable.

For glitch lists, I like TVTropes ones:

Good Bad Bugs
Game Breaking Bugs
and Unwinnable.