I'm still in school, not working (aside from a few hours of work study each week), but I've noticed the same thing happening among some of my friends.
One of them (let's call him Smitty) is working for Yet Another Upcoming IPO (lets call it Bunghole.com) for a salaried 37 or so hours a week. He generally spends upwards of 70 hours a week at work; a couple of weeks ago, he stayed at his workplace for five days straight, sleeping in his office and putting in something like 90 hours.
Smitty's employers have actually complained to him about not working "satisfactory hours," when he had the gall to work something like 45 hours for a few weeks.
This is the weird world I'm looking at, from my college dorm and Quake-happy LAN, and I'm realizing that while I had no idea, when I was 16 or 17, what a CS job would be like, this ain't what I imagined.
You can't patent that you idiot! There's prior art: When you reach the third level of Harkyn's Castle...
Not to mention the work of one Dr. Frankenfurter. There is no explicit documentary evidence that Frankenfurter's machine could do granite, per se, but I doubt that porting the mechanism would be difficult in comparison to the task of handling the conversion itself.
Furthermore, it strikes me that granite may not be the ideal material for petrifying naked young women; I am thinking, here, of the frictional elements and the consistency of "skin" tone. A white marble or perhaps a nice glossy black volcanic would likely be more pleasing to the touch and the eyes.
No, you can't just give HAL prozac in the setting of the movie. Even a patch would be questionable. Think back to everything you've learned (or not learned) about software engineering! HAL is running mission-critical systems; we can't properly sit by and allow any margin of error for faults without risking serious problems. In this case anti-depressents just wouldn't work.
Besides, if you were gonna fuck with his cortex like that, let him drop acid and really have some fun. "The keyboard, Dave. The keyboard is trying to eat me, Dave. I'm frightened."
The film and the book shouldn't match up; regardless of the sort of synchronicity that occured during their developement, Clarke was writing a novel and Kubrick was making a film. They weren't working from the same script, they were working from the same pool of ideas. Two independent works of art should not be congruent.
You lose some of the omnipotence that the book gives you. You lose out in most of the character's thoughts. This is why, for most, the book is better. You have more to let you relate to the character; more to make you think.
I agree with your analysis, but not with the conclusion (but hey, you said "for most," so I have to say, "fair enough"). The difference between Clarke's novel and Kubrick's film is only relevent in the light that they are *two different works*. To believe that the book and the novel were developed in parallel for the sake of continuity and similarity is naive. Kubrick and Clarke are very different artists, working in very different mediums.
Clarke's book lets you inside the characters' heads, because that's how fiction tends to work, and in a setting like 2001 had (cold isolation of space) there would be little else to write about much of the time. If Clarke hadn't explored the introspective angle of the story, the book would look like this:
Dave got on Discovery. He went jogging. Um, he ate neat space food. And stuff. Floyd did the same stuff. Um.
Snip?
Oh look, Saturn!
Not particularly compelling stuff for the reader. Granted, Clarke could have covered in meticulous detail every breathe and movement of anything on the ship, filled up a couple hundred pages with that, but it would be a different sort of work, eh?
Now Kubrick made a film, not a story. Dialogue is an implicit but *unneccesary* component of film; it is difficult to move a film without words, but that has unfortunately led to a limited number of filmmakers even trying. Kubrick is one of those filmmakers who tried, and succeeded in the opinion of a great many people.
By keeping the thoughts of Dave Bowman from the audience, Kubrick leaves them feeling a bit isolated in the slow, tense-but-dull atmosphere of space. This was intentional! I am quite sure Kubrick was aware that his movie was slow and lacking in action for the most part. He never intended to make the movie "exciting" in the traditional Schwarzenegger sense.
Kubrick's 2001 excells by taking it's time, establishing a sense of loneliness and isolation in the rather cold reaches of space, and holds back enough explanation from the viewer that one can and must draw one's own conclusions from the film. Shocking! Unorthodox! Why we should collectively expect to be handed our thoughts on a silver platter is beyond me. 2001 was a great film, despite *and* because of it's unusual pace, style, etc.
I actually found that book in October at a book store in Pike Place Market. I do believe it was in the free bin; bookstores have odd priorities.*
It is a very interesting read, especially for Kubrick-philes (and, probably, Clarke-philes). Gives one an idea of how far seperated the actual film got from what Clarke thought would be the "basis" of 2001 originally. Of course, Kubrick wasn't quite as established in the late sixties as he is (was...er, however you tense it) in present day, so people may not have known what they were getting into when the got involved with the film.
A fun read, regardless.
*I found a copy of Cryptonomicon at Waldenbooks for 5 bucks in the bargain bin. Weird, but great.
...but frankly, Q3 doesn't even get a spot on my "killing games" list. Quake 1 had a more intense sense of gore and killing by a long shot, with the single player aspect and the wealth of fairly straightforward Grunts (and their dogs) trundling around and yelling at the player. Q3 is geared toward such outright speed of gameplay that there is rarely even a chance to pause and feel nervous tension or examine a corpse.
If you want to look at a genuinely violent game (and I'm speaking here for informational purposes, not as an advocate of the anti-gaming movement), take a good look at the Counter-Strike mod for Halflife. The pacing, the models, the setting, the guns, the way people die, is all designed to model reality more closely than just about any other game on the market.
Counter-Strike is, I believe, the most played game on the net right now. Should there not, by alarmist accounts, be a rash of shootings? Or, at the very least, a rash of enlistments in the Marines, and Seals, and other special ops type groups?
Warmcat is exactly right about the nature of our desire to play games. It *is* catharsis. While Rummy and Asshole and Egyptian Ratscrew can serve one part of my brain, and Nomic works for me much of the time, sometimes a video game is a better release for whatever stress I'm feeling.
These are games. No matter how realistic they may seem at first glance, they are nothing more than loose isomorphisms. I do not play Counter-Strike to feed my desire to kill; I play Counter-Strike to feed my desire to engage in a tense and engaging teamplay experience and (on a good day) excel (sp?). I yell at the screen in frustration when I bugger up, not to voice my bloodlust. It must be recognized that gamers, even passionate gamers, are as a whole, passionate about gaming and not passionate about the content. Most QuakeX players don't sit down thinking, "Must kill...must fire rocket launcher..." any more so than Pac-Man players sit down thinking, "Must destroy godless undead creatures..."
If current or past poster-boys Linux Torvalds or Mark Andreesen acted that way in front of a camera, they would be praised for being authentic.
No, they would be derided for presenting such a blatantly twisted perspective on the issue.
Out of all fairness, Gates' capacity as a public speaker is indeed irrelevant. Geeks are not necessarily smooth-talkers, and there is nothing wrong with that.
Gates, however, was not doing *anything* in front of the camera that corresponds to authenticity; he was reading a prepared statement that was completely divergent from the questions posed to any reasonable person by these developments. Gates' responses to the press questions only emphasized the scripted, manipulative stance Microsoft is attempting to take in these events. Every question was dodged and replied to with a form response about Microsofts desire to "create great software" and to "be allowed to continue to innovate."
To reduce government control over--and involvement with--the export of software would be a step towards Libertarianism, not Liberalism. As someone who tries to occupy both camps at the same time, I'd argue that there's a powerful distinction.
A Liberal move would be more along the lines of "A PGP install on every desktop in America!";) Freedom and Fairness are not always congruent.
Any day that I can wake up and link to a story that has (1) a pic of Tori and (2) news of an impending tour is a good day.
Now, as long as I'm on the proper side of the country at the proper time, I'll be all set.
Anyhow, it's good to see folks like Tori and Ms. Morrississippi (sp?) jumping on the bandwagon. A bit more corporate/artistic support and MP3 may be able to secure a position for itself as the official audio compression format of the New World Order.:)
Although you may not be aware of it, torture is all too common today, in countries all over the world.
I'll concede that without argument.
Before you start talking about castrating rapists, maybe you should talk about reforming violent dictators and ensuring that prisoners are not tortured, hmmm?
First, I for one haven't made any comments one way or the other about castrating rapists; please don't lump posters together as a generalization. It's insulting to all involved.
My point in my previous point was to contradict the trivialization of rape on the basis that worse things exist. I by no means meant to suggest that torture was either fictional or trivial. As far addressing one problem before the other, I don't think a realistic discussion of human atrocity would allow us to do so: rape is horribly wrong, as is torture. I don't think they can really be ranked by anyone with an intact sense of compassion, and that's the point that I wish I'd made more clearly.
I certainly would choose to be raped rather than to be tortured to death. Of course rape can sometimes include torturing to death, but most rapes aren't so seirous cases. I don't want to belittle rapes, but some cases just aren't as severe than some other cases.
Granted, torture is certainly a frightening concept, and a genuinely lousy way to die, but I'm going to go out on a limb here and suggest that rape is a tad more common than torture-to-the-death, neh? I don't remember seeing any statistics along the lines of "1 in 10 women are violently tortured to death." Arguing that rape is a "less violent crime" misses the point entirely. Rape happens, commonly, to a lot of people.
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One of them (let's call him Smitty) is working for Yet Another Upcoming IPO (lets call it Bunghole.com) for a salaried 37 or so hours a week. He generally spends upwards of 70 hours a week at work; a couple of weeks ago, he stayed at his workplace for five days straight, sleeping in his office and putting in something like 90 hours.
Smitty's employers have actually complained to him about not working "satisfactory hours," when he had the gall to work something like 45 hours for a few weeks.
This is the weird world I'm looking at, from my college dorm and Quake-happy LAN, and I'm realizing that while I had no idea, when I was 16 or 17, what a CS job would be like, this ain't what I imagined.
When you reach the third level of Harkyn's Castle...
Not to mention the work of one Dr. Frankenfurter. There is no explicit documentary evidence that Frankenfurter's machine could do granite, per se, but I doubt that porting the mechanism would be difficult in comparison to the task of handling the conversion itself.
Furthermore, it strikes me that granite may not be the ideal material for petrifying naked young women; I am thinking, here, of the frictional elements and the consistency of "skin" tone. A white marble or perhaps a nice glossy black volcanic would likely be more pleasing to the touch and the eyes.
Besides, if you were gonna fuck with his cortex like that, let him drop acid and really have some fun. "The keyboard, Dave. The keyboard is trying to eat me, Dave. I'm frightened."
I agree with your analysis, but not with the conclusion (but hey, you said "for most," so I have to say, "fair enough"). The difference between Clarke's novel and Kubrick's film is only relevent in the light that they are *two different works*. To believe that the book and the novel were developed in parallel for the sake of continuity and similarity is naive. Kubrick and Clarke are very different artists, working in very different mediums.
Clarke's book lets you inside the characters' heads, because that's how fiction tends to work, and in a setting like 2001 had (cold isolation of space) there would be little else to write about much of the time. If Clarke hadn't explored the introspective angle of the story, the book would look like this:
Dave got on Discovery. He went jogging. Um, he ate neat space food. And stuff. Floyd did the same stuff. Um.
Snip?
Oh look, Saturn!
Not particularly compelling stuff for the reader. Granted, Clarke could have covered in meticulous detail every breathe and movement of anything on the ship, filled up a couple hundred pages with that, but it would be a different sort of work, eh?
Now Kubrick made a film, not a story. Dialogue is an implicit but *unneccesary* component of film; it is difficult to move a film without words, but that has unfortunately led to a limited number of filmmakers even trying. Kubrick is one of those filmmakers who tried, and succeeded in the opinion of a great many people.
By keeping the thoughts of Dave Bowman from the audience, Kubrick leaves them feeling a bit isolated in the slow, tense-but-dull atmosphere of space. This was intentional! I am quite sure Kubrick was aware that his movie was slow and lacking in action for the most part. He never intended to make the movie "exciting" in the traditional Schwarzenegger sense.
Kubrick's 2001 excells by taking it's time, establishing a sense of loneliness and isolation in the rather cold reaches of space, and holds back enough explanation from the viewer that one can and must draw one's own conclusions from the film. Shocking! Unorthodox! Why we should collectively expect to be handed our thoughts on a silver platter is beyond me. 2001 was a great film, despite *and* because of it's unusual pace, style, etc.
It is a very interesting read, especially for Kubrick-philes (and, probably, Clarke-philes). Gives one an idea of how far seperated the actual film got from what Clarke thought would be the "basis" of 2001 originally. Of course, Kubrick wasn't quite as established in the late sixties as he is (was...er, however you tense it) in present day, so people may not have known what they were getting into when the got involved with the film.
A fun read, regardless.
*I found a copy of Cryptonomicon at Waldenbooks for 5 bucks in the bargain bin. Weird, but great.
If you want to look at a genuinely violent game (and I'm speaking here for informational purposes, not as an advocate of the anti-gaming movement), take a good look at the Counter-Strike mod for Halflife. The pacing, the models, the setting, the guns, the way people die, is all designed to model reality more closely than just about any other game on the market.
Counter-Strike is, I believe, the most played game on the net right now. Should there not, by alarmist accounts, be a rash of shootings? Or, at the very least, a rash of enlistments in the Marines, and Seals, and other special ops type groups?
Warmcat is exactly right about the nature of our desire to play games. It *is* catharsis. While Rummy and Asshole and Egyptian Ratscrew can serve one part of my brain, and Nomic works for me much of the time, sometimes a video game is a better release for whatever stress I'm feeling.
These are games. No matter how realistic they may seem at first glance, they are nothing more than loose isomorphisms. I do not play Counter-Strike to feed my desire to kill; I play Counter-Strike to feed my desire to engage in a tense and engaging teamplay experience and (on a good day) excel (sp?). I yell at the screen in frustration when I bugger up, not to voice my bloodlust. It must be recognized that gamers, even passionate gamers, are as a whole, passionate about gaming and not passionate about the content. Most QuakeX players don't sit down thinking, "Must kill...must fire rocket launcher..." any more so than Pac-Man players sit down thinking, "Must destroy godless undead creatures..."
No, they would be derided for presenting such a blatantly twisted perspective on the issue.
Out of all fairness, Gates' capacity as a public speaker is indeed irrelevant. Geeks are not necessarily smooth-talkers, and there is nothing wrong with that.
Gates, however, was not doing *anything* in front of the camera that corresponds to authenticity; he was reading a prepared statement that was completely divergent from the questions posed to any reasonable person by these developments. Gates' responses to the press questions only emphasized the scripted, manipulative stance Microsoft is attempting to take in these events. Every question was dodged and replied to with a form response about Microsofts desire to "create great software" and to "be allowed to continue to innovate."
To reduce government control over--and involvement with--the export of software would be a step towards Libertarianism, not Liberalism. As someone who tries to occupy both camps at the same time, I'd argue that there's a powerful distinction.
;) Freedom and Fairness are not always congruent.
A Liberal move would be more along the lines of "A PGP install on every desktop in America!"
It's not that Microsoft doesn't work hard (or at least as hard as any other fat corporation). They just work on the wrong stuff. ;)
Now, as long as I'm on the proper side of the country at the proper time, I'll be all set.
Anyhow, it's good to see folks like Tori and Ms. Morrississippi (sp?) jumping on the bandwagon. A bit more corporate/artistic support and MP3 may be able to secure a position for itself as the official audio compression format of the New World Order. :)
(...hand me my leather...)
I'll concede that without argument.
Before you start talking about castrating rapists, maybe you should talk about reforming violent dictators and ensuring that prisoners are not tortured, hmmm?
First, I for one haven't made any comments one way or the other about castrating rapists; please don't lump posters together as a generalization. It's insulting to all involved.
My point in my previous point was to contradict the trivialization of rape on the basis that worse things exist. I by no means meant to suggest that torture was either fictional or trivial. As far addressing one problem before the other, I don't think a realistic discussion of human atrocity would allow us to do so: rape is horribly wrong, as is torture. I don't think they can really be ranked by anyone with an intact sense of compassion, and that's the point that I wish I'd made more clearly.
Granted, torture is certainly a frightening concept, and a genuinely lousy way to die, but I'm going to go out on a limb here and suggest that rape is a tad more common than torture-to-the-death, neh? I don't remember seeing any statistics along the lines of "1 in 10 women are violently tortured to death." Arguing that rape is a "less violent crime" misses the point entirely. Rape happens, commonly, to a lot of people.