How do you start the game over once you've completeed it?
IIRC: So after you win, there's an extended credit sequence. At the end of the credits, I think you can just press "A" or "B" or "start" or something, and you just go back to the opening sequence - the same one you would see if you just popped in the cartridge. Choose "2 player", check your inventory, and have fun:)
Favorite SMB3 Trick
on
NES PC
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Well, not a trick really - it was just the coolest bonus for winning a game ever, IMHO... when you won the game, if you started over without reseting the machine you would find yourself with a full inventory (27 items) of "p-wings"... these are very rare items in the game up to that point, and allow you to fly continuously through a whole level, provided you don't get hit.
You could then explore all sorts of stuff that would have been impossible before... lots of hidden things to find, etc. What a blast!
For a while my friends and I would start an SMB3 session by winning the game (we got it down to a 30 minute process using both warp whistles) and then we'd go to some of the more difficult worlds with our p-wing collection and have a ball.
Damn those were good times... I don't think there's any game out there that's been more fun, or had more replay value for my dollar.
As an employee of a profitable online retailer (admittedly a rare beast) I would say that convenience and selection play a large role. The product doesn't even have to be that rare (my company sells shoes). It can be a pain to find a specific thing out in the world if you know exactly what you want - online it can be a breeze. In the real world, even if you know where it is, a 10 mile drive and purchase can take 30 minutes of your time, wheras an online purchase can take under 10 minutes - although you do have to wait for delivery... but it's still a net gain in many circumstances.
All I can say is that a lot of people find value in online retail. If the retailer is smart at keeping their operational costs low, they can be quite successful.
Lucasfilm's Habitat - circa 1986
on
Sim-Dud?
·
· Score: 1
I reada great article a couple years ago about a _very_ early attempt by Lucasfilm at making a MMORPG.
The client machine was a Commodore 64 (!), and the game never got past beta, but it seems like they learned a lot of things about what works and what doesn't. It also sounds like they were a lot more adventerous (athough usually peacful, the game included weapons) and actively creative (planned events and adventures).
Anyways, here's the article - although the site is slow it's an interesting read for those interested in virtual communities and such. It includes quite a bit of both technical detail and virtual social theory.
Be sure to check out the amusing "dungeon of death" story, the mixup that followed, and the good and bad solutions they used. Great history stuff that the Sims Online folks most certainly could have benefitted from.
first of all saddam could easily avert a war by cutting the shit
That remains to be seen. I doubt that any action short of accepting exile could stop a war at this point. I doubt any amount of "cooperation" would get him off the hook.
his people are hardly irrelevent as he has before and will continue to use his them to shield himself
Sorry - I wasn't clear. I am claiming that their will is irrelevent - in whether we go to war or not, whether Saddam cuts the shit or not, whether they live or die. They are just pawns.
If memory serves, both Saddam Hussein and Fidel Castro explicitly sent their condolences and offered assistance immediately following the 11-Sep attacks.
That's politically smart. However we weren't a week away from an all-out war with either of them back then:) Still - I wasn't talking about the leaders, but the people.
I agree that Saddam himself may have the ability to avert war, however the average Iraqi does not. They are as irrelevant to these events as you or I. In context I don't find their desperate hateful comments too surprising. Many of them will be dead next month, so I don't blame them for spitting at us now.
It's a shame that so many innocent people will pay the price for the misbehavior of a few in power (on both sides over many years). It has always been, I suppose.
Just curious - what would you say? A war is all but inevitable and out of their hands. I imagine any theist would say something similar if they were about to die and their attacker suffered a misfortune such as today.
You can mirror my movie Vendetta: A Christmas Story. Mirror all the QuickTime content and you'll have 378 MB. It's under a creative commons license, so knock yourself out:)
I imagine there are many mucisians who would enjoy the free bandwidth as well, although movies will get you bulked up with less inode usage;)
Why is it that so many orgnanizations give their lawyers free reign with the public? Lawyers are scary and should be handled like brawny security personel or other "unfortunate necessities" of business. As it is they're practically running PR for many organizations - and they're sure doing a bang-up job.
Bear in mind, though, that there is a very fine line between flattery and profiteering off someone elses hard work...
I think the point, though, is that even if someone else is profiteering off your work - if it is improves your business as well, then why would you want to stop it?
If I can sell more of my widgets by letting someone else make copycat widgets, then it's good for me. It's foolish to let the fact that it's also good for them bother me. In fact, the foolishness of such actions is illustrated scientifically in Robert Axelrod's The Evolution Of Cooperation.
Welcome to Slashdot, where hypocracy reigns supreme.
I've seen this sentiment a few times and I think it's caused by a misunderstanding. Slashdot is not a singular entity, so I don't believe it can be hypocritical. Usually what happens is that one sub-group is more vocal on one article and a different sub-group is more vocal on a different article. It's only hypocracy if a single person was posting both views (I'm sure that does happen sometimes, but not usually).
I think it's interesting because it's an easy trap to fall into: mixing the "group" level with the "individual" level when forming judgements. It's a natural move for the brain, it seems. I also think it's the foundation of a lot of mankinds problems.
Cheers.
Re:Do not pass go, do not collect $200
on
Dow vs. Parody
·
· Score: 2
No, it's illegal to pretend represent a company you're not a part of, even if that company is one that is killing people.
Yes, that too. I was referring to the DMCA.
In any case, I never questioned the legality of the moves. I agree with you: they were unquestionably illegal. However I was discussing the morality of it - because the original post indicated that you found yourself morally aligned with Dow: "I have to line up on the side of the big business."
I was simply surprised that anyone would read this story of suffering and find themselves sympathetic with Dow. I can't see how anyone sane could feel that way. I am thankful these people broke the law to get this information to me.
Sorry.
Re:Do not pass go, do not collect $200
on
Dow vs. Parody
·
· Score: 2
Sure, in general two wrongs don't make a right, but the order of magnitude of the wrongs must be considered, don't you think? As well as the greater good. Would you apply the same logic to police gunning down an active killer?
In this case we're talking about wrong#1: mass killing & continued damage vs. wrong#2: possible libel. I'm sorry, but those wrongs are on different planes. One is fundamental and the other is incendental to our social norms.
Basically what has happened here is that it is illegal to point out that a company is killing people. Think about that: the law is serving to undermine itself. In cases like this (any case of law vs. law) two wrongs will have to happen and something has to give.
So some people have decided to break the law to call attention to this injustice. It reminds me of Rosa Parks breaking the law... was that a case of "two wrongs don't make a right" as well?
Please - when issues are this serious don't resort to trite answers like that.
Cheers.
Re:Do not pass go, do not collect $200
on
Dow vs. Parody
·
· Score: 2
Interesting. I wonder how the killing and maiming of large groups of people, then sueing them further into poverty can be taken on the same level as libel.
The people killed, maimed, and sued were real living breathing people. The victim of libel is a corporation - a piece of paper. In this case I would say a polite "puh-leez" to any concerns from the guilty corp, and be quite sympathetic to the illegal but well intentioned actions against them.
Again: on one side you've got ongoing massive injury and death of real people that has gone unresolved, and on the other side you've got a corporation that was badmouthed.
Your view implies that if you have anything that _could_ be incriminating in any way in the future that you are obliged to keep it in your possesion forever or find a way to completely destroy it. In some cases this might seem a benefit as it tightens the clamps on certain types of crime. However, allowing this across the board can have some sad side effects.
I imagine someone with more time could come up with better examples, but off the top of my head:
What if you were accused of a crime that you were innocent of (something violent) but the police were able to bring in blockbuster receipts for a pile of violent films you had rented as evidence of psychopathic tendancies?
What if a discarded harddrive (erased and erased again) turned up with kiddie porn - downloaded indiscriminitaly and innocently from newsgroups by a spider/snaking program?
In general our forefathers were very skeptical and distrustful of unchecked power and priviledge. We've largely forgotten why these days, but it is an important issue. Giving up privacy and freedom for safety results in the loss of all three.
I wish more research were put into expanding the field of view. There's plenty of data to indicate that stereoscopic vision is less important for bringing you "into the scene" than a wide field of view. Here's a choice quote from The Visionary Position:
"By experimenting with the display -- moving, by degrees, from a 20-degree field of view to a 30-degree field of view and so on up to 120 degrees, the team discovered that at the "60- to 80-degree point, it was like a switch went off in your head. Instead of looking at a picture, all of a sudden you thought you were in a place. You had a different way of interacting with the display. You brought in a different set of innate capabilities."
And that was in 1982. But to this day VR seems to mean 3D on a small square screen. I mean, c'mon, we've had 3D TV & movies for almost a century. It's just not that cool. I'd take Omnimax (not to be confused with Imax) any day:)
The way the human brain works is so different from a computer it is ridiculous to compare them. Even if they made a computer that was 10 times as powerful as what they're planning it still couldn't do what the brain does... unless someone figure out how our _software_ works. It's all in the nodes, baby.
Are we going to have to come up with a "teraflops myth" to counteract this misinformation? I mean, we don't want Joe Sixpack to buy into the hype and start purchasing "brain-rivaling" computers instead of making friends...
If you care to give an example, I will gladly respond.
In general, human inventions are good at an extremely specialized task where the conditions are controlled. Mother nature excels at systems that are adaptable to unexpected situations.
For example: the car is faster and more powerful than any animal at locomotion, but it requires you to pave roads for it. And not even the best SUV can come close to the terrain negotiation of any land creature.
If mankind stopped supporting it's inventions by controlling the environment for them, there would be nothing but ruins in a few hundred years. By contrast, no matter what happens (even nuclear armageddon) it is likely that nature will continue to develop the planet for millenia to come.
Heh - I love tech, but the odds of us out-engineering the immune system in the next hundred and fifty years is pretty low. The immune system is pretty darn amazing.
It's pretty rare that any human invention outdoes mother nature.
When people think 3D they think stereoscopic - whichwe've had since 1915, believe it or not. However it's never been more than a gimmick because it really doesn't add much to the experience.
The above poster is correct with regard to wide viewing angle. In the book The Visionary Position they talk about the first immersive VR system completed in 1982:
By experimenting with the display -- moving, by degrees, from a 20-degree field of view to a 30-degree field of view and so on up to 120 degrees, the team discovered that at the "60- to 80-degree point, it was like a switch went off in your head. Instead of looking at a picture, all of a sudden you thought you were in a place. You had a different way of interacting with the display. You brought in a different set of innate capabilities."
Pretty cool sounding stuff. However, all the video improvements I've seen aim at higher resolution and stereoscopic display... things that hardly matter at all for "getting into" an image.
Then there's the fact that none of this improves storytelling, which is still the most important aspect of a good TV/film experience. It could certainly help with interactive things like games.
Why does an AI have to function the same way a human mind does?
I see your point, and I agree that an AI does not have to function the way that a human mind does, in theory. It's just that our current shots at AI are terribly inflexible and hardly "intelligent" at all. I think we'll learn a lot more about intelligence by understanding and imitating the only intelligence we have ever witnessed - the human mind itself. Maybe after we've made some progress there, we can try to one-up mother nature. Personally I doubt we'll do that, but we can try:)
Neural networks are fine and dandy, but they aren't applicable to every problem...or even most problems.
I would have to disagree - on the premise that human minds are neural nets themselves:) Admittedly, the manmade neural nets are, as you said, very limited in their applicability. I think this will change with time.
I also agree that logic and common sense play a substantial role in any general intelligence - but that is the beauty of the neural net - they can give rise to just such tools, but in a self modifying manner that makes them much more generally useful.
I realize what I'm talking about here is still science fiction, but I sure find it interesting.
Cyc is a cool project - one that I've been reading about for 10 years now. But I don't think it is AI or ever will be. It basically collects a huge number of rules and has a deductive engine that helps it infer new facts based on what it knows. If you think that's all the human mind does, then you might want to read some books by Douglas Hofstadter. Amazing stuff.
Intellegence is about finding the differences between things that are the same, sameness between things that are different, and adapting to new situations fluidly. All of these are impossible with large collections of rules.
I believe that machines may think someday, but it won't come from projects like Cyc - it'll be more from the neural network approach.
Corporations have to make more money this year than last year - no matter what. It doesn't matter how much profit they're making or how large their market share is - they've simply got to make more money this year, or they are letting down their shareholders.
It sounds more or less like a Ponzi scheme to me, but it's capitalism (at least our brand) and it "works" (according to those it works for), so expect more of the same... until the people decide to change what corporations are and what they can do.
Someone asked me via email if there were any interesting encounters with the cops while shooting Vendetta. I figured I'd just post it here. I'll put it on the Vendetta site eventually - along with the photo my wife snapped while we were being questioned:)
We were filming the "dumpster scene" in an Industrial park (where we had
no right to be) and some nearby people called the cops to report they
spotted "A man in a Santa suit with a gun". This event made the local
police log in the paper.
So the cops came by and we all tried to act non-chalant. One of them
stepped up and asked what we were doing. We told him we were making a
Christmas movie, and he asked to see the guns. I handed him one, muzzle
first, and he scolds me "Hey, don't point that at me!". Whoops. I turn
it around and he takes it and checks it out. Cheap plastic toy.
Then he asks why we're making the movie. My friend (who plays Santa) had
gone to Harvard a few years earlier, so he whips out his expired student
ID and says it's a school project. The cop glances at it briefly and then
looks back at his partner, still in the cruiser. "Hey Charlie...
Harvard." The cop in the car shakes his head knowingly, "Harvard," he
says. I never figured out what that little exchange meant.
Anyways, he gives us back the guns and tells us that we were scaring the
folks nearby. We tell him we'll be done shortly. They say "okay" and
take off. We finished up filming the scene in about 20 minutes and left
the private property.
Here's to the Law Enforcement Officials of Norwood MA - cool people.
Slashdot Mirror
How do you start the game over once you've completeed it?
:)
IIRC: So after you win, there's an extended credit sequence. At the end of the credits, I think you can just press "A" or "B" or "start" or something, and you just go back to the opening sequence - the same one you would see if you just popped in the cartridge. Choose "2 player", check your inventory, and have fun
Well, not a trick really - it was just the coolest bonus for winning a game ever, IMHO... when you won the game, if you started over without reseting the machine you would find yourself with a full inventory (27 items) of "p-wings" ... these are very rare items in the game up to that point, and allow you to fly continuously through a whole level, provided you don't get hit.
You could then explore all sorts of stuff that would have been impossible before... lots of hidden things to find, etc. What a blast!
For a while my friends and I would start an SMB3 session by winning the game (we got it down to a 30 minute process using both warp whistles) and then we'd go to some of the more difficult worlds with our p-wing collection and have a ball.
Damn those were good times... I don't think there's any game out there that's been more fun, or had more replay value for my dollar.
Cheers!
As an employee of a profitable online retailer (admittedly a rare beast) I would say that convenience and selection play a large role. The product doesn't even have to be that rare (my company sells shoes). It can be a pain to find a specific thing out in the world if you know exactly what you want - online it can be a breeze. In the real world, even if you know where it is, a 10 mile drive and purchase can take 30 minutes of your time, wheras an online purchase can take under 10 minutes - although you do have to wait for delivery... but it's still a net gain in many circumstances.
All I can say is that a lot of people find value in online retail. If the retailer is smart at keeping their operational costs low, they can be quite successful.
I reada great article a couple years ago about a _very_ early attempt by Lucasfilm at making a MMORPG.
The client machine was a Commodore 64 (!), and the game never got past beta, but it seems like they learned a lot of things about what works and what doesn't. It also sounds like they were a lot more adventerous (athough usually peacful, the game included weapons) and actively creative (planned events and adventures).
Anyways, here's the article - although the site is slow it's an interesting read for those interested in virtual communities and such. It includes quite a bit of both technical detail and virtual social theory.
Be sure to check out the amusing "dungeon of death" story, the mixup that followed, and the good and bad solutions they used. Great history stuff that the Sims Online folks most certainly could have benefitted from.
Cheers
first of all saddam could easily avert a war by cutting the shit
That remains to be seen. I doubt that any action short of accepting exile could stop a war at this point. I doubt any amount of "cooperation" would get him off the hook.
his people are hardly irrelevent as he has before and will continue to use his them to shield himself
Sorry - I wasn't clear. I am claiming that their will is irrelevent - in whether we go to war or not, whether Saddam cuts the shit or not, whether they live or die. They are just pawns.
Thanks for the response.
If memory serves, both Saddam Hussein and Fidel Castro explicitly sent their condolences and offered assistance immediately following the 11-Sep attacks.
:) Still - I wasn't talking about the leaders, but the people.
That's politically smart. However we weren't a week away from an all-out war with either of them back then
I agree that Saddam himself may have the ability to avert war, however the average Iraqi does not. They are as irrelevant to these events as you or I. In context I don't find their desperate hateful comments too surprising. Many of them will be dead next month, so I don't blame them for spitting at us now.
It's a shame that so many innocent people will pay the price for the misbehavior of a few in power (on both sides over many years). It has always been, I suppose.
Thanks for the response!
Just curious - what would you say? A war is all but inevitable and out of their hands. I imagine any theist would say something similar if they were about to die and their attacker suffered a misfortune such as today.
You can mirror my movie Vendetta: A Christmas Story. Mirror all the QuickTime content and you'll have 378 MB. It's under a creative commons license, so knock yourself out :)
;)
I imagine there are many mucisians who would enjoy the free bandwidth as well, although movies will get you bulked up with less inode usage
Keep your lawyers on a leash, for god's sake!
Why is it that so many orgnanizations give their lawyers free reign with the public? Lawyers are scary and should be handled like brawny security personel or other "unfortunate necessities" of business. As it is they're practically running PR for many organizations - and they're sure doing a bang-up job.
Cheers
Bear in mind, though, that there is a very fine line between flattery and profiteering off someone elses hard work...
I think the point, though, is that even if someone else is profiteering off your work - if it is improves your business as well, then why would you want to stop it?
If I can sell more of my widgets by letting someone else make copycat widgets, then it's good for me. It's foolish to let the fact that it's also good for them bother me. In fact, the foolishness of such actions is illustrated scientifically in Robert Axelrod's The Evolution Of Cooperation.
Cheers.
Welcome to Slashdot, where hypocracy reigns supreme.
I've seen this sentiment a few times and I think it's caused by a misunderstanding. Slashdot is not a singular entity, so I don't believe it can be hypocritical. Usually what happens is that one sub-group is more vocal on one article and a different sub-group is more vocal on a different article. It's only hypocracy if a single person was posting both views (I'm sure that does happen sometimes, but not usually).
I think it's interesting because it's an easy trap to fall into: mixing the "group" level with the "individual" level when forming judgements. It's a natural move for the brain, it seems. I also think it's the foundation of a lot of mankinds problems.
Cheers.
No, it's illegal to pretend represent a company you're not a part of, even if that company is one that is killing people.
Yes, that too. I was referring to the DMCA.
In any case, I never questioned the legality of the moves. I agree with you: they were unquestionably illegal. However I was discussing the morality of it - because the original post indicated that you found yourself morally aligned with Dow: "I have to line up on the side of the big business."
I was simply surprised that anyone would read this story of suffering and find themselves sympathetic with Dow. I can't see how anyone sane could feel that way. I am thankful these people broke the law to get this information to me.
Sorry.
Sure, in general two wrongs don't make a right, but the order of magnitude of the wrongs must be considered, don't you think? As well as the greater good. Would you apply the same logic to police gunning down an active killer?
In this case we're talking about wrong#1: mass killing & continued damage vs. wrong#2: possible libel. I'm sorry, but those wrongs are on different planes. One is fundamental and the other is incendental to our social norms.
Basically what has happened here is that it is illegal to point out that a company is killing people. Think about that: the law is serving to undermine itself. In cases like this (any case of law vs. law) two wrongs will have to happen and something has to give.
So some people have decided to break the law to call attention to this injustice. It reminds me of Rosa Parks breaking the law... was that a case of "two wrongs don't make a right" as well?
Please - when issues are this serious don't resort to trite answers like that.
Cheers.
Interesting. I wonder how the killing and maiming of large groups of people, then sueing them further into poverty can be taken on the same level as libel.
The people killed, maimed, and sued were real living breathing people. The victim of libel is a corporation - a piece of paper. In this case I would say a polite "puh-leez" to any concerns from the guilty corp, and be quite sympathetic to the illegal but well intentioned actions against them.
Again: on one side you've got ongoing massive injury and death of real people that has gone unresolved, and on the other side you've got a corporation that was badmouthed.
Cheers.
Your view implies that if you have anything that _could_ be incriminating in any way in the future that you are obliged to keep it in your possesion forever or find a way to completely destroy it. In some cases this might seem a benefit as it tightens the clamps on certain types of crime. However, allowing this across the board can have some sad side effects.
I imagine someone with more time could come up with better examples, but off the top of my head:
What if you were accused of a crime that you were innocent of (something violent) but the police were able to bring in blockbuster receipts for a pile of violent films you had rented as evidence of psychopathic tendancies?
What if a discarded harddrive (erased and erased again) turned up with kiddie porn - downloaded indiscriminitaly and innocently from newsgroups by a spider/snaking program?
In general our forefathers were very skeptical and distrustful of unchecked power and priviledge. We've largely forgotten why these days, but it is an important issue. Giving up privacy and freedom for safety results in the loss of all three.
Ah well, I can always dream and complain ;)
The way the human brain works is so different from a computer it is ridiculous to compare them. Even if they made a computer that was 10 times as powerful as what they're planning it still couldn't do what the brain does... unless someone figure out how our _software_ works. It's all in the nodes, baby.
Are we going to have to come up with a "teraflops myth" to counteract this misinformation? I mean, we don't want Joe Sixpack to buy into the hype and start purchasing "brain-rivaling" computers instead of making friends...
Cheers
If you care to give an example, I will gladly respond.
In general, human inventions are good at an extremely specialized task where the conditions are controlled. Mother nature excels at systems that are adaptable to unexpected situations.
For example: the car is faster and more powerful than any animal at locomotion, but it requires you to pave roads for it. And not even the best SUV can come close to the terrain negotiation of any land creature.
If mankind stopped supporting it's inventions by controlling the environment for them, there would be nothing but ruins in a few hundred years. By contrast, no matter what happens (even nuclear armageddon) it is likely that nature will continue to develop the planet for millenia to come.
Cheers.
It's pretty rare that any human invention outdoes mother nature.
Cheers.
When people think 3D they think stereoscopic - whichwe've had since 1915, believe it or not. However it's never been more than a gimmick because it really doesn't add much to the experience.
The above poster is correct with regard to wide viewing angle. In the book The Visionary Position they talk about the first immersive VR system completed in 1982:
Pretty cool sounding stuff. However, all the video improvements I've seen aim at higher resolution and stereoscopic display... things that hardly matter at all for "getting into" an image.
Then there's the fact that none of this improves storytelling, which is still the most important aspect of a good TV/film experience.
It could certainly help with interactive things like games.
Why does an AI have to function the same way a human mind does?
:)
I see your point, and I agree that an AI does not have to function the way that a human mind does, in theory. It's just that our current shots at AI are terribly inflexible and hardly "intelligent" at all. I think we'll learn a lot more about intelligence by understanding and imitating the only intelligence we have ever witnessed - the human mind itself. Maybe after we've made some progress there, we can try to one-up mother nature. Personally I doubt we'll do that, but we can try
Neural networks are fine and dandy, but they aren't applicable to every problem...or even most problems.
:) Admittedly, the manmade neural nets are, as you said, very limited in their applicability. I think this will change with time.
I would have to disagree - on the premise that human minds are neural nets themselves
I also agree that logic and common sense play a substantial role in any general intelligence - but that is the beauty of the neural net - they can give rise to just such tools, but in a self modifying manner that makes them much more generally useful.
I realize what I'm talking about here is still science fiction, but I sure find it interesting.
Thanks for the reply!
Cyc is a cool project - one that I've been reading about for 10 years now. But I don't think it is AI or ever will be. It basically collects a huge number of rules and has a deductive engine that helps it infer new facts based on what it knows. If you think that's all the human mind does, then you might want to read some books by Douglas Hofstadter. Amazing stuff.
Intellegence is about finding the differences between things that are the same, sameness between things that are different, and adapting to new situations fluidly. All of these are impossible with large collections of rules.
I believe that machines may think someday, but it won't come from projects like Cyc - it'll be more from the neural network approach.
Corporations have to make more money this year than last year - no matter what. It doesn't matter how much profit they're making or how large their market share is - they've simply got to make more money this year, or they are letting down their shareholders.
It sounds more or less like a Ponzi scheme to me, but it's capitalism (at least our brand) and it "works" (according to those it works for), so expect more of the same... until the people decide to change what corporations are and what they can do.
Someone asked me via email if there were any interesting encounters with the cops while shooting Vendetta. I figured I'd just post it here. I'll put it on the Vendetta site eventually - along with the photo my wife snapped while we were being questioned :)
We were filming the "dumpster scene" in an Industrial park (where we had
no right to be) and some nearby people called the cops to report they
spotted "A man in a Santa suit with a gun". This event made the local
police log in the paper.
So the cops came by and we all tried to act non-chalant. One of them
stepped up and asked what we were doing. We told him we were making a
Christmas movie, and he asked to see the guns. I handed him one, muzzle
first, and he scolds me "Hey, don't point that at me!". Whoops. I turn
it around and he takes it and checks it out. Cheap plastic toy.
Then he asks why we're making the movie. My friend (who plays Santa) had
gone to Harvard a few years earlier, so he whips out his expired student
ID and says it's a school project. The cop glances at it briefly and then
looks back at his partner, still in the cruiser. "Hey Charlie...
Harvard." The cop in the car shakes his head knowingly, "Harvard," he
says. I never figured out what that little exchange meant.
Anyways, he gives us back the guns and tells us that we were scaring the
folks nearby. We tell him we'll be done shortly. They say "okay" and
take off. We finished up filming the scene in about 20 minutes and left
the private property.
Here's to the Law Enforcement Officials of Norwood MA - cool people.