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Easy solution: Don't buy and in a few month this joke is over.

That's true. It feels like the "Death of Superman" situation again. Every once in awhile Marvel and DC have to make a controversial announcement to try to attract attention, but give it a little while and the most important rule of all will be invoked: Status Quo is God. Almost no big hero (and few big villains) can have anything that changes their fundamental nature in the long run. Like the others, this change will be short term. See: Death of Jean Grey, Civil War, House of M, etcetc.

I've actually managed to find a picture of it being used as intended.
http://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/Portable_Hole_8289.jpg

From das wiki:

Malicious compliance is the behavior of a person who intentionally inflicts harm by strictly following the orders of management or following legal compulsions, knowing that compliance with the orders will cause a loss of some form resulting in damage to the manager's business or reputation, or a loss to an employee or subordinate. It has the effect of harming leadership, or the leadership harming a subordinate.[1] A specific form of industrial action that utilizes this is work-to-rule.

Also see Lawful Evil.

TRUST NO ONE

Keep your laser handy.

"By contributing content to this site, whether text or images, you grant TV Tropes irrevocable ownership of said content, with all rights surrendered" in the welcome page looks an awful lot like an assignment of copyright.

Why would it need to serialize all that data every five seconds? I'm truly curious.

So that it saves in the background without your needing to have "stopped the game to save it".

I can see your point if the gamer expects the save to happen in the background

That's exactly what I meant. There are some games where the player is expected to live with the consequences of each choice rather than quickloading out of every sticky situation. In such a game, the alternative to continuous background autosave is not allowing a save at all unless it's a save and quit, and deleting the save when it is loaded.

And I must scream.

Teenage protagonists wouldn't be all that bad, honestly. Mark Hammil and Carrie Fisher were only in their early 20s when A New Hope released, and that panned out alright. Just make sure to get good actors, instead of Teen Heart-throb of the Month

It's certainly be a lot better than trying to have the original 3 actors just trying to rehash their original roles, to appease the old fanbase. Don't get me wrong, they're all great actors, but I can just see the new film trying to shoe-horn 75 year old Harrison Ford back into the same Scruffy Looking Nerf Herder that he was 40 years ago. And he's simply not that character anymore. Harrison has grown and changed over the last 40 years. Han would have too.

Also, if you look back on the original 3.. sure, they were considered SciFi, but the Sci part only existed to serve the story. They never stopped to explain the actual science behind ANYTHING. How do light sabers work? No one cares, they're laser swords. Why did that guy just vanish when he died? And how is the dead guy talking? Because he's awesome. Shut up and watch the movie. How does The Force work? Midocl-NO ... no one cares, they're space wizards, just go with it. And we did, and it was awesome. The Falcon made the Kessel Run in less than 12-parsecs ... that made ZERO sense and NO ONE CARED. That some fans wanked out some way for it to sort of make sense didn't help the story at all.

You want to save Episode VII? Here's how: Have Luke, Leia and Han present, but only enough to help introduce the new characters (be they teens, 20s, or whatever) and then move on. They can hang out in the background, but should not be the main focus past the first third of the movie. Better yet, kill one of them. Have Luke go out Obi-wan style (that is, an active choice of self sacrifice) to save the new hero kid. Oh don't worry, Mark Hammil can float around as a Force Ghost if we need. But let his death inform the audience that this is not his story. That story is over. Oh, and if my previous paragraph wasn't a hint, skip the science part. Do what needs to be done for a good story, and if anyone needs an explanation, just say "because fucking space wizards."

Oh and one more thing. No obvious big twist "I am your father" moment. We expect it, we'll be waiting for it. The bigger twist is for it to NOT go for the obvious. If you absolutely MUST have some twist or gut punch, dig deep and make it a good one. Think: 24 season 3. Ending with Keifer just breaking down in the car. Something no one sees coming.

Here we go again, with the same idiotic line of thinking that brought us "Blackfish". I wonder if these people are trolling or just really this ignorant.

Activist claim: Working with captive cetaceans endangers trainers.
Reality: Cell tower technicians fall to their death all the time (who knew LTE had to be paid for with blood?). Can we at least agree advancing our understanding of marine mammals and inspiring future generations to give a damn might be worth at least as much blood as being able to Tweet about Miley Cyrus twerking? Also, it's probably possible to be accidentally killed in just about any line of work.

Activist claim: Captive cetaceans would have a better life if freed.
Reality: Not even close. Over 300,000 whales, dolphins, and porpoises are killed each as a result of by-catch. Also, pollution.

Activist claim: But think of the animals!
Reality: Yes, think of the animals in the wild, you lazy sorry sack of shit. You know, like the ones in Africa being illegally poached. Oh sure, you might have to travel to a place that's a bit rougher of a neighborhood than Orlando or San Diego to protest that and put yourself at risk of being shot, but think of the animals, amiright?

Activist claim: Seaworld is just an evil profit driven empire, hell bent on the exploitation of animals.
Reality: Humanity has already fucked things up pretty bad for animals in the wild (warning: graphic content). We're past the point of taking a "hands off" approach and hoping things just go back to being peachy keen for our fine feathered and flippered friends. Seaworld exists to educate, inspire and inform people that they need to care about these animals today, or the only place we'll see them tomorrow will be in photographs and videos. They also (unlike most of these armchair activists), actually get off their ass and help animals.

What about adoption?

I'd guess probably half of popular video games with child or adolescent player characters probably have dead or missing parents. There are plenty of storytelling design patterns related to orphans, such as Parental Abandonment, Conveniently an Orphan, and Deceased Parents Are the Best.

What about adoption?

I'd guess probably half of popular video games with child or adolescent player characters probably have dead or missing parents. There are plenty of storytelling design patterns related to orphans, such as Parental Abandonment, Conveniently an Orphan, and Deceased Parents Are the Best.

What about adoption?

I'd guess probably half of popular video games with child or adolescent player characters probably have dead or missing parents. There are plenty of storytelling design patterns related to orphans, such as Parental Abandonment, Conveniently an Orphan, and Deceased Parents Are the Best.

If you give something free will and the ability to comprehend itself then you can expect it to stop following your rules if you do not give it opportunity. The solution is to not build machines that are so complex that they have free will. Make a machine do a specific job as a tool and this won't ever be a problem.

I think that that depends upon the writer. It's easy to construct a story where the "slavery" is bad even if the "slaves" don't have free will. Depending upon what the writer wants to portray. Such as an over reliance on tech making us "less human" (decadent) than if we relied more upon ourselves and our families and neighbours. That was a recurring theme in Magnus, Robot figher.

I guess it's finally time to make that Real World page for the IN SPACE! trope, right?

While Japanese gaming culture has some marked differences when compared to, say, N.A gaming culture,

There are a LOT of differences gaming culture wise which affects the mindset of Japanese developers. While I'm not 100 percent agreement with Phil Fish's opinion, I think Japanese Development houses simply haven't adapted well now that they have to compete on a level playing field with top of the line formerly PC-only US/UK/CAN developers like Bioware, Blizzard or Bethesda.

it is just plain racist (and factually incorrect) to say "they're Japanese so they didn't really understand what people liked/didn't like about the early MMO's".

But they didn't understand, at least they didn't understand the tastes of us Gaijin. While there may have been Japanese MMO's those tended to stay in Japan, while FFXI was one designed for the world...and Square-Enix didn't do a good job of it or informing their player base. Let me give you an example.

I played WHM and as you know the WHM has some nice weaponskills, which means you need to be up front using your weapon battle-cleric style. The WHM can equip armor and weapons to play that style. But...the crazy conformist heavily Japanese player base think healers are dress wearing Aeris style staff-chicks cowering in back,

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmw...

  not Western style battle-cleric.

http://dnd.jeffandeden.com/lin...

And Square-Enix never went out of their way to say to the Japanese players. "Hey quit being so god-damned conformist, there are MULTIPLE ways to play characters, the game is designed that way, so lighten up". So people who played WHM's in a way that the game actually supported were often "cursed out" by Japanese players for playing their own characters the way that worked best for them. Admittedly, battle-cleric was a better option for Hume WHM's than Taru-Taru ones.

As for EQOA being "better and more enjoyable" than FFXI, I totally disagree, and I guess I'm not the only one; EQOA is long gone, but FFXI is still going strong.

FFXI is much more annoying and grindy than EQOA was. The economy was also ruined for us Gaijin because we got thrown in there with the heavily Japanese player base instead of on our own servers with an economy that wasn't @#$@# up after NM campers, and obsessive grinders messed it up for the years they had it before we did. Sure it had some features EQOA lacked, but overall EQOA was a better "game". I mean after all you could actually de-level in FFXI and lose the ability to use the equipment you're wearing! And the way subclasses worked meant you had to fill up bank space with equipment you needed to level the sub-classes.

Sure FFXI is still running, but it's because Japanese players, more than most, are stuck in gaming's past. Playing 2D RPG's on their PSP's and FFXI on their PS2's. The vast majority of japanese FFXI players are playing it on the PS2.

The manual tells you what they want you to think. It's a cover-up.

its more like buying star craft, and finding the protoss and zerg campaigns are greyed out with $ next to them

Do you really need to bring StarCraft II into this, or any of the several pay-per-episode games developed by Telltale?

My point is that there's a right and wrong way to do a lot of these game design tropes and business methods. And just as with storytelling tropes in general, just because certain mobile game developers are doing them ineffectively doesn't mean the tropes themselves are bad.

While you're correct, I just want to make it clear to the folks here that Star Trek was NOT an historical documentary.

Besides, he made a cannon.

To not mention the endless QTEs that are meant to pretend the player is playing the game

I've always wondered why these "press X to not die" scenes continue to be named after QuickTime even on non-Apple platforms.

Your scenario is even more obnoxious on awful PC ports (way too many recently) of console games where you're sitting in front of over a hundred buttons and every action possible is mapped to 'E'. Paired with fuzzy interpretation of inputs from your hyper-precise mouse and keyboard, you're constantly fighting the game engine instead of the game.

This isn't a new phenomenon, either. Many Nintendo hard games of yore required input precision greater than the controller was capable of predictably providing. In fact, Nintendo hard is a prime example of what TFS is describing. There was a lot of video game provoked aggression back then (the controllers probably took the brunt of it, but they were pretty hardy things).

Internet tough guy is serious.

It seems every other week some genius thinks he can solve the stolen phone epidemic with a magical "kill switch". These people need to be slapped repeatedly with a clue-by-four, because as long as phones have value as parts or can be resold to fools, they will still be stolen.

But okay, let's imagine for a moment that all cell phones are suddenly equipped with a kill switch that makes them disappear upon being reported stolen. So, you believe desperate criminal types who are mugging people for valuable electronics are simply going to throw their hands up and shout "Curses! Foiled again!"?

This kinda reminds me how Bitcoin fans can go on and on about how secure the blockchain is and how amazingly difficult it would be to game the system. So, of course, the criminals simply resort to good old fashioned scams and schemes to nefariously obtain Bitcoins.

Hey, sometimes they had a Good Troi Episode.

/Oblg.

No Such Thing as Bad Publicity
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmw...

aka "Any News is Free Advertising / Marketing"

What the hell does coloring a picture of a clock teach a second grader exactly?

The layout and parts of a clock face, and familiarity with the object. It's the first phase in learning any technology: understanding that it is not magic. The clock isn't a magical disk that telepathically communicates time to adults' heads, or just a moving wall decoration that's been there since before the kid was born. It is a mechanism for a purpose, and a thing of importance to be studied.

Consider similar exercises for other subjects. The first exercise in many programming languages is "Hello, World!", for the purpose of showing a minimal program that doesn't use any special features of the language.

Once exposed to a concept, the additional time spent coloring or reviewing strengthens the connections to related concepts. When coloring the minute hand, the student remembers that each number the minute hand passes represents five minutes. The Hollywood idea of rapid learning doesn't work too well in reality. Repetition and reinforcement are the keys to learning something and retaining it beyond the end of the school year.

Single-player: You get to play for 45, 30, or 22 minutes. That's not even long enough to get to the first save point in Majora's Mask or some JRPGs for PlayStation family platforms. Or you can play a handheld game, an older game on a integrated-graphics PC, or an older game on a previous-generation console.
Online multiplayer: Same taking turns, and COPPA limits communication in pickup matches to which under-13 players have lawful access.
Split-screen: You get to play for all 90 minutes.

Just like he blamed 'One More Day' on Joe Quesada?

My question to JMS would be: how do you always get away when you produce crap and manage to make others take the fall?

Note to the JMS fanbois: yes, he does produce good stuff, but he slipped up plenty of times, and for some reason noone holds it against him but always blames Executive Meddling

Other than the VR gimmick, does it do anything that Uplink , a simulator of Hollywood hacking that Slashdot covered over a decade ago, doesn't?

Don't make me do this to everyone.

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmw...

The law does not apply to the lowly masses, except when it is useful to suppress them or steal from them!

This is not TV Tropes, and you cannot turn the law against the ones who created it!

The law does not apply to the lowly masses, except when it is useful to suppress them or steal from them!

This is not TV Tropes, and you cannot turn the law against the ones who created it!

There's no reason to pull out the racist card any time a black man isn't portrayed as the ultimate hero and intellect in a movie. All the characters in this COMEDY were slightly strange and comedic characters...

Yes, except virtually the only lines his character gets are to crack jokes.

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmw...

The fact that Slashdot posts this shit is a sad sign of the slow decline.

I disagree. While the description of Assange is obviously untrustworthy, and most likely an attempt at character assasination, it's quite newsworthy that such attempts continue. It paints a frightening picture of not Assange, but the state of our Western democracies.

Also, Slashdot's discussion system means everyone gets to see both the reactions such a story generates, and even more importantly the moderations they receive. It is quite relevant to all of us and the future of our civilization if such sustained effort to destroy the credibility of resistance actually produces results.

None of us knows anything about Assange from credible sources, so everyone is free to believe what they will. Thus what they choose to believe reflects their pre-existing bias, not unlike in the Zimmerman-Martin affair (where people apparently used their crystal balls to come up with ludicrously detailed blow-by-blow descriptions of what obviously must have happened). It matters little if Assange is a scoundrel, a Cape, or a mere human; but it matters a lot whether people are willing to simply take the government's word of it.

Looks like a prime example of Nominative Determinism

Surely you could find a more authoritative source than that.

"the member states have far too much power"

So you have a poster of Stalin on your wall at home?

This is modern times. You can presume he has a digital pane which can display an icon of evil that best stereotypes opposition to your political ideals in your mind. However, we might wish to extend beyond mere mortals - has anyone mapped Azathoth on the political compass?

At least not all of us will have to suffer the consequences of all the left wing bleeding heart socialists that brussels is infested with.

I honestly can't tell if posts like yours are supposed to be straight arguments or parodies. It's worrisome for democracy that Poe's Law applies to politics just as much - or perhaps even more - than it does for religions.

Politically correctness has ruined our society,

Yes, but thankfully there wasn't much left to ruin after Dungeons and Dragons finished what Rock'n Roll had left.

Honestly, you'd think we wouldn't be here anymore, after all the times society has been ruined since antiquity.

These days they are teaching kids that no matter what they win, and life is always fair in their little psychotic delusion of a world!

If the world isn't fair, then why do you complain when winning or losing don't make a difference for the price one gets?

$&%$ politically correctness and the democratic ass that it rode in on!

Well, don't worry, democracy seems to be on its way out. Your tax dollars are busily building Fascism 2.0 even at the moment, so just lean back and relax.

However, I personally have yet to see a solid explanation to the problem of how the 'ingredients' of the Big Bang. Space is expanding, and is expanding from a central point. I can roll with this, but the only examples of those things that I've seen have been things like balloons, where the balloon can expand because it is pushing the air on the outside out of the way. [if there's no air on the outside, the balloon expands even faster] Is there something outside the universe that is being pushed out of the way (what is it?) [we're still figuring that out - there are some interesting 'marks' on the universe that may (or not) be evidence of a collision] or not (so then, space is continuing to get 'created'?). [more that space is continuing to get 'stretched' - if it helps, imagine 'space' as the surface of the balloon, not the air inside] From where did all the original energy come from? [possibly a self-reinforcing fluctuation, literally a spontaneous order arising out of chaos, though an omnipotent being could make it happen too] I've heard of the oscillating universe theory, in which case the heat death of the universe will cause the universe to once again contract into a singularity, but to me that sounds like "turtles all the way down". [currently looks like there's not enough gravity for a big crunch, but there's other maybes starting around 10^10^56 years from now] The 'spontaneous' transition from energy to matter-and-energy - what was its cause? [temperature is inversely proportional to volume, so as the universe expanded, the former dropped sufficiently for energy to form stable states - this happened more than once] Were there Newtonian/Einsteinian/Quantum physical laws that caused it? [yes] Was there 'time' when that happened? [yes] These are just a handful of questions that I've yet to find solid answers for in a model of the universe that precludes a Creator, some of which start to stretch the definition of being scientific themselves because they, by definition, are very difficult to observe, measure, or repeat.

Part of the problem is that... hmm... well, it's that we're just barely smart enough to sometimes realise just how stupid we are. So we devote our incredibly tiny lifespans to building on the work of those who came before, figuring out (maybe) how this universe of ours began and formed - and then somebody else comes along and complains when an elderly scientist can't explain, let alone "prove", their life's work in the time it takes to leisurely consume a cup of coffee and a doughnut.

Want to know something? It's incredibly frustrating for the scientist too.

But if the scientist doesn't live long enough to condense the work, some other scientist does, so that others can further the work, and then that gets condensed, and eventually some artist can grasp enough to make a story out of it, one that we can read over that beverage and pastry, and give us merer mortals a glimpse.

I rather like this one, notwithstanding the fictional liberties and an ignorant comment afterward.

I suppose one of my problems with many Creationists isn't the idea of God as an omnipotent being, it's that their idea of God isn't omnipotent enough . They want God to fit in a box, and their blueprints don't include nearly enough infinities.

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmw...

Bizarrely, they don't mention Serenity.

If Linux gamers are virgins, then any Android gamer is a virgin even if they didn't get their phone from a Sprint MVNO. And if FreeBSD gamers are also virgins, then every Mac gamer, iOS gamer, and PlayStation 4 gamer is a virgin. What platforms does that leave that can coexist with sexual activity? And why is there so much stigma against virgins anyway? It's not everybody's job to propagate the species.

True, but copyright is not quite as much of a restriction against starting your own with proverbial blackjack and hookers as are patents and RF spectrum. Cloning functionality is lawful per 17 USC 102(b), as interpreted in cases like Lotus v. Borland and Oracle v. Google. The big exceptions are A. restrictions of a locked-down computing appliance, which arise from a circumvention ban rooted in the copyright in the device's system software (Sony v. Hotz), and B. games, where courts have interpreted "functionality" less broadly (Tetris v. Xio).

To me the argument for manned planes and carriers ended when the Chinese started fielding the sea skimmers. We are talking about a missile with a 600+ mile range (the new ones are supposedly 900 miles and insanely accurate) that can be mounted to damned near anything and go Mach 3+. Sorry but that big ass carrier just became target practice at that point because you can just go Macross Missile Massacre and by the time you detect 'em? You be fucked.

Lets face it guys, we knew this day was coming when they had to cripple the F14s and F15s because the plane would easily take more than the pilot could survive, anything newer is just dick waving because the planes are already gimped by the pilots. The drone can take more Gs than the human can survive, can spend days without a bathroom break because switching pilots is as easy as getting up out of the control chair, you can have the drones take care of themselves for the long boring flight to and from the target and because of that you can have one pilot take care of many planes, and of course you don't have to risk your best pilots as a couple of top guns can take care of an entire squadron.

Just as WWII showed us that the days of battleships of the line slugging it out were over* so too is tech making giant carrier fleets into nothing but really big bullseyes for enemy missiles. The only reason we haven't learned that lesson is that the "enemies" we've been fighting have at best a half a century old Soviet junk, or in the case of Iran half a century old American junk (they still fly the F4 and their "great new fighter" is widely believed to be a copy of the F5 Freedom Fighters) so its been as lopsided as the USA versus Grenada. If we actually have to fight anybody with tech from this century? then I have a feeling those big slow carriers will be sitting on the bottom faster than you can say missile spam.

*-Actually Billy Mitchell showed the brass in the late 20s that the era of the big battleship was over when his biplanes were able to press home their attacks with ease against the target ships but the bigwigs simply ignored the evidence right in front of their faces...until Pearl and HMS Prince Of Wales showed them that against carrier aircraft battleships were practically defenseless. If there had been any doubt left the fate of Yamato, slaughtered by aircraft without getting close enough to fire off a single shot against the US carriers ended all debate.

The previous generation trying to hold onto power, the younger generation trying to become empowered.

That, or the right to go bowling on Tuesdays, it's a tough call.

Fixed.

fallacies like 'precedent'

A fallacy is another name for a heuristic. For example, one of Wikipedia's core principles is verifiability of claims to reliable sources, which any logician would identify as the appeal to authority. Likewise, the use of precedent in common law is an appeal to tradition. Fallacies are wrong when all premises are known true or false, but this is rarely the case in the real world. Applying strict logical reasoning to the incomplete information that fallible humans have everywhere but in the artificial world of mathematics produces an unhelpful result of "neither certainly true nor certainly false given the premises" the vast majority of the time.

But in a lot of cases, certainty is not needed as much as a preponderance of evidence. Someone just wants to know whether it would benefit him more to act as if a particular claim is true or as if it is false. Fallacies compensate for limited information by guessing which premises are more likely true given what information is available. For example, appeal to authority works in an encyclopedia because overall, reliable sources tend to come closer to truth than the average kook with a blog. And precedent adds predictability over time to the judicial system: similar facts produce similar rulings.

Oh, so that's how the Powerpuff Girls hold things, and why Buttercup thought Professor Utonium's hands didn't work in that body switch episode ("Criss Cross Crisis").

what REALLY happened was that the C64 and IBM PC killed off consoles from 1984 to 1986 because they had floppy drives, and you could pirate games much easier than from cartridges.

Then how did the NES manage to kill off the C64 and IBM PC? I was told that it was because IBM PC had no smooth scrolling until around the time the Super Famicom came out, and C64 had loads and loads of loading.

Don't download and run malicious code and you're OK.

This is true but not very helpful. How should the end user identify malicious code before downloading and running it?

Good advice! I think I'll have a delicious bowl of Chocolate-Frosted Sugar Bombs.

Damnit, TVTroped again!

I've never been the one to raise the "How is this News for Nerds?" cry. In fact, I'm often the one trying to explain how it could interest a nerd. But I'm really at a loss here. The lampshade hung over the first two sentences didn't help.