Your summary of the films have finally put them in proper perspective for me, thanks!
I've always enjoyed the Terminator films....I'm not a rabid fan, so I have no loathing for the most recent one, either--it was a fun film, a few flaws overall, but fun--and I find that first two enjoyable but have carefully avoided looking back on them with rose colored glasses, and found that they still hold up rather well. I also loved the third movie more than I probably should, if only because it managed to inject a sense of desperation and doom in to the series that resonated well.
I used to work in management for the circulation department of three major newspapers at various times in the past (jumped ship three years ago to a completely different field). I can safely tell you that in all likelihood your local paper attempted cost-cutting measures in their circulation department, reducing staff, salaries and probably a massive reduction in the number of independent contractors they rely on for morning distribution. This has been ongoing in the industry for the two decades I was involved in it, and led to an inevitable decline in service. When I worked for the Seattle Times in 2000, they had a slogan of "platinum service" to get the paper out to the customer how, when and where they wanted it. By 2005 when I took a voluntary layoff (before I might be forced to accept a lesser deal in one of what turned out to be three subsequent layoffs) the service motto had descended to "cheapest means of distribution possible, and good luck with that." If I recall correctly, I saw a reduction in staff from 2000-2005 from 200 to less than 80, and it was cut three more times after I left. Unfortunately, I don't think the newspaper industry was ever poised for success....they started dying in the early nineties, and what we're seeing now are more like death spasms.
I think it's an issue of graphical realism. Prototype, for all its carnage, was still clearly a cartoonish video game (yes, very clean graphics, but nothing compared to MW2's accurate CGI renderings). We're approaching the age when games are starting to look a bit too close to life for the average mundane's (muggle's...whatever) comfort....
You don't need all those books, unless you're a completist. A year and a half later, and my two regular 4E groups are still mostly using the first Player's Handbook's materials, with a couple players using some supplementary content. The main concession I'll grant to those complaining about the new format and approach of 4E is that it does parse out content over more books than previous editions, such as 3.X, which was a bit like drinking from a firehose....all the years I ran 3.X games and I saw maybe a dozen prestige classes in play, in contrast to the thousands of actual prestige classes in print! That said, if you think of 4E as a game unto itself, it works fine; it plays the same as all previous editions, regardless of what people say, and offers up just as much useful content, but parsed out a bit more carefully (and in a marketing-is-happy kinda way, sure). I dunno..guess I got tired of drinking from a firehose, much prefer to sip my drinks....
If you're example was "Fighter and Wizard"....two classes essential to the game, then you're book list changes to:
PHB1 (essential)
Martial Power and Divine Power (optional)
Everything else is optional. You really don't need all that.....you just WANT it. As many people did. Hell, I've got all of the books myself, although mostly to make them available to players who want to explore the options in the optional books, but almost all of my players have only invested in the PHB1, a few have the PHB2, and exactly two have the Adventurer's Vault 1. The only ones with more books than that are the others who like to DM (which is just me right now) or who like to collect them (which fits three of my 13 players over two groups).
Reading through all these posts, I have come to the following conclusions:
1. Virtually all slash dotters and people who haul laptops around don't go to the theatre anyway, so this is a moot point for them, and if anything just one more reason not to even tihink about going out for a show when the pub is closer, easier, and friendlier.
2. One of the key factors discouraging slash dotters and laptop carriers from attending the theatre is the so-called great unwashed masses that frequent movie theatres on an alarming basis, blathering away on unbarred cell phones while snorting popcorn and walking in front of the screen. These people clearly do not have laptops and might even be prohibited from touching one, lest they break it.
3. The movie theatres already understand that the crowd from point #2 are their primary audience, so anyone who does show up in the theatre with a laptop must be regarded with suspicion as a pirate, since all the known laptoppers from point #1 have already fled from the theatres long ago in disgust.
4. Ergo, this nonsensical enforcement will have no noticeable effect except to force pirates to wear trenchier coats to the theatre.
I've never seen anyone bring a laptop in to a theatre, either (although I bring my netbook in all the time since I'm pretty sure if I leave it in the truck it will either A. be stolen or B. get baked by the sun--this is New Mexico where I live.) And in fact the general lack of tech-savviness in my local community contributes to the fact that I never see anyone drag a laptop in to the theatres. Plenty of cell phones, yes....laptops, no.
DDO does include a VIP option to get almost all content plus a monthly stipend of "turbine points" for $15 a month, which I did; I think possibly, if one bought all modules outright (the game parses out premium content in purchase packages) it might be cost saving in the long run, but only if you know you were going to play the game for a period of time in which the monthly fee cumulatively is more than the total cost of the individual scenario pack purchases (which, I am guessing, would be like at least 1-2 years' worth). I figure I'll be playing this for a few more months until Guild Wars 2 comes out, so VIP for me! Also, I'm a very slow paced MMOer, so I am by and large able to resist spending cash on all the perks in the store....no urge to power level, here.
Yes, you are right. And this is vital wisdom that I shall impart to my own wife tonight, as well. It's for the security of the futurity and my own safety that dinner shall not come to pass.
That must be why I liked Oblivion more than games like WoW these days, I prefer a challenge over a cake walk....although the best system is one in which older explored areas are "slightly" easier than newer areas, I imagine. But it always seemed highly unrealistic to me that I could eventually have a character who was clearly superhuman in game where that was not a plot point. I blame the legacy fo D&D, though, where the idea of a guy who can take 50 hits with a sword and half a dozen fireballs up the poop chute before toppling at high levels is normal.
Urgh, gonna step in briefly to defend Oblivion as it is for a moment...I'm one of those (few? I have no idea) people who prefer the system as it is, but then I am pretty burned out on the more conventional level up mechanics of most RPGs in which your power scales disproportionately with reality; Oblivion's mechanics allow for improvement while still prvoviding an illusion of challenge by scaling difficulty accordingly. Now, Oblivion has some clunky mechanisms for handling this (apparently, I haven't really found it to be an issue, myself....and Fallout 3 is even better, imo) but I guess there are others who do.
I think the only analogy I can draw on the issue is with regards to paper and pencil RPGs; Oblivion is like Runequest, not D&D...that's my take, anyway.
With regards to Oblivion (and Fallout 3 as well) the player who makes it to the end boss at level 3 is playing very differently from the guy who maxes out his levels before reaching the end game, and the system may indeed offer a more challenging experience to the guy who just sank hundreds of hours in to leveling (I wouldn't know, as I am still playing both games after eons and eons), exploring and playing out the full content of the game over the guy who rushed from one main story point to the next while ignoring the other 90% of the game; essentially, the guy who milked the game for its full value gets rewarded with a measurably greater challenge at the end, over the guy who was just trying to get the game out of his "to do" list for the weekend, so I don't actually see this as a punishment, and find the notion rather odd. I doubt anyone (well, I seriously hope) ever played either of those games for weeks/months/years, got to the end, and realized, "Damn, I shouldn't have played this amazing game for 152 hours, because the boss is a bit harder now than if I had just steam-rolled through the main questline in one weekend like Larry." In fact, I'm betting that guy is thinking (as I am) "Geeze that sucker Larry blew through the main questline and missed 90% of the content plus a more challenging boss event at the end, all because he needed to clear out his schedule for Halo of WoW."
That's only going to hurt the early adopters. By 2080, we'll all be carrying $10 portable anti-matter magnetic bottles around to power our neurosynthetic iBrains.
I totally empathize. I loved my very, very long blonde rocker-boy hair in college, but ultimately realized I didn't start excelling in the business world until I discovered I was prematurely balding at a young age (about 24 at the time)....the thought of long hair with a bald spot (hillbilly/biker casual) was too much for me, so I went for the crew-cut marine look, and ironically have found that the loss of my long hair opened up all sorts of opportunities I had previously been denied due to the discrimination that runs rampant in business society.
My wife is a semi-reformed goth, but she also acquired a large number of tattoos before the age of 20, and that has created a situation that forces her to always dress in long sleeves shirts to avoid exposing them in the workplace. She's very happy when she gets lucky and finds an office space that is more relaxed about such things (she temps).
As for the avatars, the only one I have is bald, too. I'll be damned if my avatar is allowed to have hair if I'm not! But if anyone tells me not to dress him like a yippe-kai-yey cowboy, well screw them!
You are totally correct; it's a two-way street to customer service. Can someone please let my bank know this, so that next time I'm trying really, really hard to be as nice and polite as possible, I don't feel like all I'm doing is lubing myself up for the rep?
Although I don't own a PS3, I did have a similar friendly experience as yours to my PS2 back in the day, with a quick and speedy replacement.
So does this mean that if one belongs to the Latter-Day-Jedi religion, in which you wear all black (no hoodie) and consort with small fuzzy animals while displaying angst about your lineage, then shopping in the store would be unimpeded? Cool!
Alien spaceship? Seems like a bit of a deviation from the Fallout universe, unless I've missed something....well, I'll still get it, damn them and their amazingly competent game design!
Vulcan's mysterious sister world Hoth
on
Reviews: Star Trek
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· Score: 1
Was anyone else bothered by the fact that Kirk was marooned on that ice world, conveniently close to where Spock was marooned, which in turn was a planet just close enought to Vulcan that it looked like a sister world or moon in orbit?!?!? Or was that some hitherto unmentioned ice moon of Vulcan's that I was unaware of....?
Or maybe Spock has really, really, really good telescopic vision...?
That is almost the only part of the movie right now that I can't quite swallow.
Yes.....I think you hit it right there. In the real world, this movie would seem improbable. But in the improbable universe of Star Trek, it all makes a curious sort of sense.
Having seen the movie twice (and not having a military background), I thought I'd make the following two observations that I felt made Kirk's promotion seem slightly more...ah....realistic, for Star Trek's universe, at least:
Oh, wait: SPOILERS AHEAD!
1. Early on in the film, note that the vast majority of the available cadets all die horribly....every single Starfleet ship sent to Vulcan except Enterprise is wiped out. And the main fleet appears to be distracted with something so important that it can't boogie on back to Earth (or Vulcan) apparently....war? So by the end of this movie, the only graduate cadets available and capable of manning a ship appear to be those from the Enterprise.
2. For all intents and purposes, and despite the usual superficial nod to the military structure presented in Starfleet command, it seems pretty clear that Starfleet is being presented as much, much closer to a sort of "Peace Corp. with guns"....Pike even explains it as such early on "peacekeeping humanitarian force" doesn't really sound like a real military.
3. Although everyone in this film is young, it seems clear from the story that McCoy and Scotty are more experienced than much of the crew....in fact, Kirk and Uhura are the two least experienced overall (although clearly Kirk was on some sort of officer's fast track if he was taking the Kobayashi Maru). And then we have Checkov, who's some sort of verbally disadvantaged child prodigy, but beyond that, so long as you ignore the larger body of soft canon to Star Trek (the books and such) then it all fits rather well.
That said, I think if you look at Starfleet as a peackeeping force which utilizes a quasi-military structure but is otherwise not military in any conventional sense, and you assume that the vast majority of functional new candidates were all wiped out at Vulcan, then it Kinda Sorta Almost makes sense that Kirk gets promoted. Sorta. Naw, still bugs me too.
I think 9 years of highly successful SRD/OGL 3rd party products have proven that they did not "shoot themselves in the foot" and you are probably the first person I have seen to show evidence or worry. Now, the current GSL is a bit closer to the kind of concern you are displaying, but even then publishers have moved forward and released 3rd party products under the D&D license. I myself publish for D&D under general copyright laws due to the draconian legal options WotC allows itself in the current GSL, but the original SRD and OGL proved to be in no way whatsoever as malicious as you were worried they would be.
Not only would a D&D gamer have trouble getting in to a RPGA style torunament, but they'll have to accept that while they are playing 3.5 or what-not, their buddies may all be buying in to 4E, and thus he'll need to upgrade if he wants to keep playing with his friends. Unless he gets friends who are all sympatico with their choice of edition, this is another roadblock to staying retro. Finally, people seem to think it's all about playing whatever edition you like....people sometimes forget this is a consumer-oriented market, and the simple fact is, many people like buying the books; no more 3.5 books means no more outlet for that consumer habit, unless the gamer/purchaser decides to buy in to the new books, which, of course, is what WotC is most hopeful for.
Slashdot Mirror
Your summary of the films have finally put them in proper perspective for me, thanks! I've always enjoyed the Terminator films....I'm not a rabid fan, so I have no loathing for the most recent one, either--it was a fun film, a few flaws overall, but fun--and I find that first two enjoyable but have carefully avoided looking back on them with rose colored glasses, and found that they still hold up rather well. I also loved the third movie more than I probably should, if only because it managed to inject a sense of desperation and doom in to the series that resonated well.
I used to work in management for the circulation department of three major newspapers at various times in the past (jumped ship three years ago to a completely different field). I can safely tell you that in all likelihood your local paper attempted cost-cutting measures in their circulation department, reducing staff, salaries and probably a massive reduction in the number of independent contractors they rely on for morning distribution. This has been ongoing in the industry for the two decades I was involved in it, and led to an inevitable decline in service. When I worked for the Seattle Times in 2000, they had a slogan of "platinum service" to get the paper out to the customer how, when and where they wanted it. By 2005 when I took a voluntary layoff (before I might be forced to accept a lesser deal in one of what turned out to be three subsequent layoffs) the service motto had descended to "cheapest means of distribution possible, and good luck with that." If I recall correctly, I saw a reduction in staff from 2000-2005 from 200 to less than 80, and it was cut three more times after I left. Unfortunately, I don't think the newspaper industry was ever poised for success....they started dying in the early nineties, and what we're seeing now are more like death spasms.
I think it's an issue of graphical realism. Prototype, for all its carnage, was still clearly a cartoonish video game (yes, very clean graphics, but nothing compared to MW2's accurate CGI renderings). We're approaching the age when games are starting to look a bit too close to life for the average mundane's (muggle's...whatever) comfort....
For your next mission, collect 12 KGB spleens for my MI-6 Goulash....only 20% of KGB agents actually drop spleens after you waste them, however.
You don't need all those books, unless you're a completist. A year and a half later, and my two regular 4E groups are still mostly using the first Player's Handbook's materials, with a couple players using some supplementary content. The main concession I'll grant to those complaining about the new format and approach of 4E is that it does parse out content over more books than previous editions, such as 3.X, which was a bit like drinking from a firehose....all the years I ran 3.X games and I saw maybe a dozen prestige classes in play, in contrast to the thousands of actual prestige classes in print! That said, if you think of 4E as a game unto itself, it works fine; it plays the same as all previous editions, regardless of what people say, and offers up just as much useful content, but parsed out a bit more carefully (and in a marketing-is-happy kinda way, sure). I dunno..guess I got tired of drinking from a firehose, much prefer to sip my drinks....
If you're example was "Fighter and Wizard"....two classes essential to the game, then you're book list changes to: PHB1 (essential) Martial Power and Divine Power (optional) Everything else is optional. You really don't need all that.....you just WANT it. As many people did. Hell, I've got all of the books myself, although mostly to make them available to players who want to explore the options in the optional books, but almost all of my players have only invested in the PHB1, a few have the PHB2, and exactly two have the Adventurer's Vault 1. The only ones with more books than that are the others who like to DM (which is just me right now) or who like to collect them (which fits three of my 13 players over two groups).
Reading through all these posts, I have come to the following conclusions: 1. Virtually all slash dotters and people who haul laptops around don't go to the theatre anyway, so this is a moot point for them, and if anything just one more reason not to even tihink about going out for a show when the pub is closer, easier, and friendlier. 2. One of the key factors discouraging slash dotters and laptop carriers from attending the theatre is the so-called great unwashed masses that frequent movie theatres on an alarming basis, blathering away on unbarred cell phones while snorting popcorn and walking in front of the screen. These people clearly do not have laptops and might even be prohibited from touching one, lest they break it. 3. The movie theatres already understand that the crowd from point #2 are their primary audience, so anyone who does show up in the theatre with a laptop must be regarded with suspicion as a pirate, since all the known laptoppers from point #1 have already fled from the theatres long ago in disgust. 4. Ergo, this nonsensical enforcement will have no noticeable effect except to force pirates to wear trenchier coats to the theatre.
I've never seen anyone bring a laptop in to a theatre, either (although I bring my netbook in all the time since I'm pretty sure if I leave it in the truck it will either A. be stolen or B. get baked by the sun--this is New Mexico where I live.) And in fact the general lack of tech-savviness in my local community contributes to the fact that I never see anyone drag a laptop in to the theatres. Plenty of cell phones, yes....laptops, no.
DDO does include a VIP option to get almost all content plus a monthly stipend of "turbine points" for $15 a month, which I did; I think possibly, if one bought all modules outright (the game parses out premium content in purchase packages) it might be cost saving in the long run, but only if you know you were going to play the game for a period of time in which the monthly fee cumulatively is more than the total cost of the individual scenario pack purchases (which, I am guessing, would be like at least 1-2 years' worth). I figure I'll be playing this for a few more months until Guild Wars 2 comes out, so VIP for me! Also, I'm a very slow paced MMOer, so I am by and large able to resist spending cash on all the perks in the store....no urge to power level, here.
Yes, you are right. And this is vital wisdom that I shall impart to my own wife tonight, as well. It's for the security of the futurity and my own safety that dinner shall not come to pass.
That must be why I liked Oblivion more than games like WoW these days, I prefer a challenge over a cake walk....although the best system is one in which older explored areas are "slightly" easier than newer areas, I imagine. But it always seemed highly unrealistic to me that I could eventually have a character who was clearly superhuman in game where that was not a plot point. I blame the legacy fo D&D, though, where the idea of a guy who can take 50 hits with a sword and half a dozen fireballs up the poop chute before toppling at high levels is normal.
Urgh, gonna step in briefly to defend Oblivion as it is for a moment...I'm one of those (few? I have no idea) people who prefer the system as it is, but then I am pretty burned out on the more conventional level up mechanics of most RPGs in which your power scales disproportionately with reality; Oblivion's mechanics allow for improvement while still prvoviding an illusion of challenge by scaling difficulty accordingly. Now, Oblivion has some clunky mechanisms for handling this (apparently, I haven't really found it to be an issue, myself....and Fallout 3 is even better, imo) but I guess there are others who do. I think the only analogy I can draw on the issue is with regards to paper and pencil RPGs; Oblivion is like Runequest, not D&D...that's my take, anyway.
With regards to Oblivion (and Fallout 3 as well) the player who makes it to the end boss at level 3 is playing very differently from the guy who maxes out his levels before reaching the end game, and the system may indeed offer a more challenging experience to the guy who just sank hundreds of hours in to leveling (I wouldn't know, as I am still playing both games after eons and eons), exploring and playing out the full content of the game over the guy who rushed from one main story point to the next while ignoring the other 90% of the game; essentially, the guy who milked the game for its full value gets rewarded with a measurably greater challenge at the end, over the guy who was just trying to get the game out of his "to do" list for the weekend, so I don't actually see this as a punishment, and find the notion rather odd. I doubt anyone (well, I seriously hope) ever played either of those games for weeks/months/years, got to the end, and realized, "Damn, I shouldn't have played this amazing game for 152 hours, because the boss is a bit harder now than if I had just steam-rolled through the main questline in one weekend like Larry." In fact, I'm betting that guy is thinking (as I am) "Geeze that sucker Larry blew through the main questline and missed 90% of the content plus a more challenging boss event at the end, all because he needed to clear out his schedule for Halo of WoW."
That's only going to hurt the early adopters. By 2080, we'll all be carrying $10 portable anti-matter magnetic bottles around to power our neurosynthetic iBrains.
I totally empathize. I loved my very, very long blonde rocker-boy hair in college, but ultimately realized I didn't start excelling in the business world until I discovered I was prematurely balding at a young age (about 24 at the time)....the thought of long hair with a bald spot (hillbilly/biker casual) was too much for me, so I went for the crew-cut marine look, and ironically have found that the loss of my long hair opened up all sorts of opportunities I had previously been denied due to the discrimination that runs rampant in business society. My wife is a semi-reformed goth, but she also acquired a large number of tattoos before the age of 20, and that has created a situation that forces her to always dress in long sleeves shirts to avoid exposing them in the workplace. She's very happy when she gets lucky and finds an office space that is more relaxed about such things (she temps). As for the avatars, the only one I have is bald, too. I'll be damned if my avatar is allowed to have hair if I'm not! But if anyone tells me not to dress him like a yippe-kai-yey cowboy, well screw them!
You are totally correct; it's a two-way street to customer service. Can someone please let my bank know this, so that next time I'm trying really, really hard to be as nice and polite as possible, I don't feel like all I'm doing is lubing myself up for the rep? Although I don't own a PS3, I did have a similar friendly experience as yours to my PS2 back in the day, with a quick and speedy replacement.
So does this mean that if one belongs to the Latter-Day-Jedi religion, in which you wear all black (no hoodie) and consort with small fuzzy animals while displaying angst about your lineage, then shopping in the store would be unimpeded? Cool!
Alien spaceship? Seems like a bit of a deviation from the Fallout universe, unless I've missed something....well, I'll still get it, damn them and their amazingly competent game design!
Was anyone else bothered by the fact that Kirk was marooned on that ice world, conveniently close to where Spock was marooned, which in turn was a planet just close enought to Vulcan that it looked like a sister world or moon in orbit?!?!? Or was that some hitherto unmentioned ice moon of Vulcan's that I was unaware of....? Or maybe Spock has really, really, really good telescopic vision...? That is almost the only part of the movie right now that I can't quite swallow.
Yes.....I think you hit it right there. In the real world, this movie would seem improbable. But in the improbable universe of Star Trek, it all makes a curious sort of sense.
Having seen the movie twice (and not having a military background), I thought I'd make the following two observations that I felt made Kirk's promotion seem slightly more...ah....realistic, for Star Trek's universe, at least: Oh, wait: SPOILERS AHEAD! 1. Early on in the film, note that the vast majority of the available cadets all die horribly....every single Starfleet ship sent to Vulcan except Enterprise is wiped out. And the main fleet appears to be distracted with something so important that it can't boogie on back to Earth (or Vulcan) apparently....war? So by the end of this movie, the only graduate cadets available and capable of manning a ship appear to be those from the Enterprise. 2. For all intents and purposes, and despite the usual superficial nod to the military structure presented in Starfleet command, it seems pretty clear that Starfleet is being presented as much, much closer to a sort of "Peace Corp. with guns"....Pike even explains it as such early on "peacekeeping humanitarian force" doesn't really sound like a real military. 3. Although everyone in this film is young, it seems clear from the story that McCoy and Scotty are more experienced than much of the crew....in fact, Kirk and Uhura are the two least experienced overall (although clearly Kirk was on some sort of officer's fast track if he was taking the Kobayashi Maru). And then we have Checkov, who's some sort of verbally disadvantaged child prodigy, but beyond that, so long as you ignore the larger body of soft canon to Star Trek (the books and such) then it all fits rather well. That said, I think if you look at Starfleet as a peackeeping force which utilizes a quasi-military structure but is otherwise not military in any conventional sense, and you assume that the vast majority of functional new candidates were all wiped out at Vulcan, then it Kinda Sorta Almost makes sense that Kirk gets promoted. Sorta. Naw, still bugs me too.
I think 9 years of highly successful SRD/OGL 3rd party products have proven that they did not "shoot themselves in the foot" and you are probably the first person I have seen to show evidence or worry. Now, the current GSL is a bit closer to the kind of concern you are displaying, but even then publishers have moved forward and released 3rd party products under the D&D license. I myself publish for D&D under general copyright laws due to the draconian legal options WotC allows itself in the current GSL, but the original SRD and OGL proved to be in no way whatsoever as malicious as you were worried they would be.
Hmmm. I've had mine since April of 2006, have always used it in a vertical upright position, and have yet to experience one scratched disc. Curious.
3000 hours is....125 consecutive days. Oh my.....
Not only would a D&D gamer have trouble getting in to a RPGA style torunament, but they'll have to accept that while they are playing 3.5 or what-not, their buddies may all be buying in to 4E, and thus he'll need to upgrade if he wants to keep playing with his friends. Unless he gets friends who are all sympatico with their choice of edition, this is another roadblock to staying retro. Finally, people seem to think it's all about playing whatever edition you like....people sometimes forget this is a consumer-oriented market, and the simple fact is, many people like buying the books; no more 3.5 books means no more outlet for that consumer habit, unless the gamer/purchaser decides to buy in to the new books, which, of course, is what WotC is most hopeful for.