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So? Tropes Are Not Bad. Indeed, having more Genre Savvy readers can give a good writer more possibilities- if you know that the readers expect certain conventions, you can mess with them through inversions, subversions, deconstructions, etc.

And a completely original work would be incomprehensible- even if you allowed it to be written in an existing language, you couldn't use any of our physics, or even the concept of directed linear time.

People I know recall fun and funny moments of DND combat from nearly 20 years ago, not plot points.

Wow. My experience over the last 20 years has been the exact opposite. Totally.

Oh, we recall some memorable times when a completely crazy move or lucky roll made the difference, sure. But we usually remember more how we got into that fight in the first place ("He's doing what? He's just supposed to tail the evil wizard/rogue/possible demon, not start a fight with him! Oh shit, let me double-check that list of scrolls I've been saving for a rainy day, maybe I have a Get Out of Death Free card...")

Anyway, combat is fun until it becomes tediously long. Then I fall asleep. Even the big battles better be dynamic and active, my patience for grinding through minutiae of combat is pretty low. We'll Call Our Attacks when we're simulating the best parts of "Enter the Dragon", but otherwise let's keep it simple.

My beef with 3.5e is that combat became this tedious war-gaming exercise that, rather than encouraging interesting ways to achieve victory, slanted towards doing the same stuff over and over again. It showed it's ambitions to be a miniatures-selling, video-game-adaptable system. Yuck. If I want video-games, I have them and I like them for what they are. RPGs with my friends should enhance things I can only do with my friends -- like role-play.

The best times I've had with RPGs have been things like Call of Cthulhu games where I never even knew what combat skills my character had, because a real conflict that had to be gamed out never happened (I was either going to prevail in a trivial situation where five of us jumped the single cultist goon, or die horribly when an actual monster emerged). Don't get me wrong -- I love having a character who can kick ass; I just like it if he can also chew bubblegum.

You're probably right. ;)

I just appreciate a good Earth Shattering Kaboom! (Okay, I exaggerate.)

Neal Stephenson's books seem to often have the trope of a mundane activity elevated to ridiculous levels. "Snow Crash" had pizza delivery. "Cryptonomicon" had eating cereal.

I wonder if there's going to be a similar moment in his new book?

Cleveland is funny but only in a laid back and chilled contrast to the rest of the show, like pickled ginger between pieces of sushi. On his own, it just doesn't work. The only spin-off I can imagine that would be worse is giving the fucking pedophile his own show. That whole character is one giant "dude, not funny", but without even eliciting a guilty snicker.

I think the strongest characters on the show are Stewie, Brian, and Lois. Peter is too much of an idiot to be funny and both Meg and Chris are too one-note. The rest of the neighbors may be one-note but they still manage to be funny every time they toot it -- anything can be forgiven so long as it remains funny.

I'm glad both it and Futurama were uncanceled but what I'm really looking forward to is more Venture Bros. :)

Evolution is a bad word, it has two meanings, and these meanings are used at cross purposes by its detractors (and even supporters).

Evolution, as in the basic "survival of the fit" bit, is a fact, and is observable in the short term.

Evolution as a grand theory of diversity, is a theory (a word that ALSO has many meanings, which are misused).

Yeah, I know it exists everywhere, but with Death Note, there are probably some theological implications from the fact that God hasn't smote these people.

Sorry, did you have a point in there, beyond sci-fi writers have no sense of scale?

If you're actually worried about that happening, don't be. Anything event large enough to knock the Moon into the Earth almost certainly directly sterilized Earth in the process, long before the Moon arrives.

Actually, Army of Ghosts was the second-to-last episode of the second series of the new Doctor Who. Torchwood, a secret organisation based out of Canary Wharf, were tinkering with a negative space wedgie and were causing widespread sightings of ghosts all over the place. After a while they overdid it and all the ghosts turned out to be a Cyberman invasion force. Then the Sealed Evil In A Can they were keeping in the basement opened up. Mayhem ensued.

Torchwood proper got pretty much wiped out as a result, leaving a bunch of bicurious Cardiff-based incompetents to carry on the name in the spinoff series.

Actually, Army of Ghosts was the second-to-last episode of the second series of the new Doctor Who. Torchwood, a secret organisation based out of Canary Wharf, were tinkering with a negative space wedgie and were causing widespread sightings of ghosts all over the place. After a while they overdid it and all the ghosts turned out to be a Cyberman invasion force. Then the Sealed Evil In A Can they were keeping in the basement opened up. Mayhem ensued.

Torchwood proper got pretty much wiped out as a result, leaving a bunch of bicurious Cardiff-based incompetents to carry on the name in the spinoff series.

Actually, old Pintos did explode. But in real life not every car is a Pinto.

If theory says that black holes beyond 10 solar masses cannot form, how do they explain the conjectured supermassive black holes [wikipedia.org] at the center of our and other galaxies?

A wizard did it.

• Touchy: If the player's missiles can move farther in one turn than the size of an enemy unit, make sure that the missile checks the entire space between the previous location and the current location for collisions.
• Hakuna Matata: Even if you will be selling your game in one country, you should still spend unnecessary money to localize the product to all 23 languages of the European Union. For example, a product by Tanzanians for Tanzanians needs to include languages other than (ki)Swahili.
• Over the Rainbow: I hated Dr. Mario and Puyo Pop.
• Low Budget: Your game will be pirated and run in emulators years after the fact, and you must accept this. Future screens are 4 times bigger in either dimension. (Compare the 256x192 pixel display of the ZX Spectrum to modern 1024x768 pixel displays.) It's better to make sure players can see the pixels than that your graphics look smooth.
• XXXL: I hated fighting games because the characters are too big. (Oh, and this mode forgot to give me the shield on the second and third life.)
• The Bright Side of Life: Your game will be pirated and run in emulators years after the fact, and you must accept this. You must make your game playable even on halfway broken emulators, even if your platform uses palette encryption as a copy prevention method.
• Groovy: I hated Tetripz, and I hated Lockjaw: The Overdose for the same reason. Oh, and I hated Eternal Darkness because I kept losing sanity too often.
• Hear No Evil: 1. Cloaked missiles should not be a puzzle that the player has to solve. Also 2. Even if you can't afford it, you must still license the patents for 3D audio. If your platform doesn't support 3D audio, you must include extra hardware to support 3D audio with your game.
• Smooth Talker: If your platform's CPU is too slow to offer real-time time stretching of speech, you must include extra hardware to support time stretching with your game.

I will use the web site's feedback form to report the URL of this comment to the game's developers. But in fact, I especially liked the "Low Budget" and "Groovy" variations.

Britain is a police state. No doubt about that. The next election has been deferred until Gordon Brown can work out how to make it a criminal offence not to vote for him.

However, there is a healthy population of outlaws. Dope smoking, movie downloading, blowing things up and dancing all night are alive and well ..... just under most people's radar. It's mostly stupid people who get caught, and frankly they're no great loss.

Britain is basically two countries in one. The mainstream media, with its split personality (turning ordinary people into mindless, celebrity-obsessed chavs and simultaneously castigating them for being that way) created the whole mess (and look at this from 2001 for an example of mainstream-media hypocrisy ..... though this one was about paedophilia, not terrorism ..... it's saying something when the two are virtually interchangeable). The deep underground movement ..... well, if you haven't heard of it, you're not meant to hear of it.

Interesting article... Steve Jobs has apparently mastered the Xanatos Gambit.

Aliens.

You need to watch more TV and read more books. Aliens always abduct people and put them in competitions that would be pointless under any circumstance other than a fourth-wall breech of the universe by all-knowing aliens. And if you don't believe me, try reading Walter Farley's Black Stallion series. When he wanted to do a cross-over between Black and the "secret" Island Horse flame, who fixed the continuity problems so they could both race? That's right, aliens did it.

You'd think that a race of beings with technology superior enough to travel between universes would have something better to do than kidnap folks from their homes and force them to participate in some sort of competition. (A competition that the contestants always seem more than willing to compete in?)

See also: A wizard did it!

Disney's misuse of mice dates back to at least 1928. But over the past few decades, Disney hasn't been misusing mice as much as misusing politicians to protect its exclusive rights to mice.

Please, Farfour Mouse, be not quite dead.

I'm not suggesting that the balance in Star Wars needs to be set at the same place as it was in Shadowrun.

It doesn't matter where the balance is, it's simply a matter of the fact that Jedi don't get fatigued from using the Force in the movies. Yoda doesn't get tired after lifting an X-Wing or bouncing about like a weasel on methamphetamine. Qui-Gon shows no fatigue from throwing about droids or running all over the place. The Emperor shows no sign over ever running out of lightning bolts to toss at Luke. Not once that I can think of does a Jedi or Sith show fatigue from the use of the Force.

It's not a manner of tweaking the balance -- it's a matter of the mechanic being utterly inappropriate for simulating the game world you're trying to play in. A fatigue system for Jedi makes about as much sense as a Vancian magic system does. Force powers are not exhaustible in the setting.

On a related note, neither is physical stamina. Heroes in Star Wars never seem to get tired no matter how much they push themselves. They might complain a little, but when the action is running, they don't get out of breath and slow down. Exhaustion is not an appropriate mechanic for a pulp/space opera setting as it violates the genre's style conventions on heroic action. Exhaustion mechanics belong in "grittier" settings such as noir or low fantasy.

A "bottle" episode is an episode that takes place entirely in a closed environment (like a ship or a building).

Shooting entirely on set helps avoid expensive special effects or outdoor shooting. Instead, they tend to focus on internal conflicts. Can be good or bad.

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main.BottleE pisode

Someone actually came up with a term for this: the Viewer Friendly Interface.

What's really unusual about this appearance was that they actually had a normal, multi-windowed interface with regular-sized fonts.

Babylon 5 pioneered daring and creative storytelling techniques, such as trapping two characters who hate each other in an elevator.

That would be "Convictions".

They're called bottle episodes but they're usually done for budgetary reasons. Trap the characters inside a single set (bottle them up) and play them off each other.

A benefit from saving on sets, locations, and FX is that more money can go into the scripted dialog and character development, though this is more of an example of a bottle scene or situation, and is better for it. Still, that episode has one of my favorite quotes:

"`Go be the ambassador to Babylon 5,' they say. `Will be an easy assignment.' Ah, I hate my life."
"So do I."
"Shut UP!" [zip]

But then there's also this one [wav].