Just to add to the avalanche of repudiation on offer here. I figure that rather than point at comic books which have merit as comic books I would explain *why* they have more merit as comic books than as regular works of fiction or cinema.
There are some comic books which cannot be translated into other formats because they are. Well. Comic books.
Comic books allow for a particular style of narrative where words and images can be juxtaposed in a way they simply can't be in any other way. Sure a film can have a voice over but a comic book can group anything up to about 150 words together commenting, sometimes obliquely, on a single image. Also comic books allow for a type of storytelling that cannot be achieved in a regular novel or in a film. Neil Gaiman's Sandman relies on rich visuals and clever verbal scripting but beyond this on the juxtaposition of same with specific images accompanying items of speech or commentary.
To give a concrete example in a comic book you can have a sequence of visuals of events that are happening in a particular mise en scene but have box outs of commentary verbalising some completely separate and quite tenuously related incident that requires no visual accompaniment and established through conventions of font/box-out colouring etc. Although this can be done in film it's not a technique that can be deployed as effectively or as often due to the fact that the speech and filmed visuals have to synch far more closely than in a printed medium.
It is for these reasons that comic book afficionados refer to certain works as "unfilmable". I have to admit that even though I don't really enjoy the story of "Watchmen" for example the comic book has more artistic merit than the recent film precisely because of "Watchmen" the comic book being the story's intended medium.
I would recommend anyone who does not understand why comics continue to endure seek out the works of Scott McCloud such as "Understanding Comics" which explain in a great deal more depth the specific advantages of the sequential art medium.
Someone writes something maybe you got a good story maybe you've got something nobody cares about. Until you actually put it out there you can't tell for sure.
But if something blows up while stuntmen fly through the air in slow motion you can see you've got something visceral right away. And if you've been inhaling a lot of cocaine that thing kicks ass.
Also those who like gigantic games of hunt the thimble in richly detailed environments. This is no more "childish" than enjoying games of "kill the virtual mobsters with virtual smgs from the windows of virtual sports cars". In fact relying on the player's love of novelty and exploration is arguably more noble that relying on their desire to act like a virtual nutcase.
Interestingly this makes a relevant point about the nature of human society.
If you imagine human society as performing a function that function is blanket growth and development. A good citizen is happy and/or quiet. A bad citizen is unhappy and/or not quiet.
By "or not quiet" I mean to say that in order for society to measure its own success we apply statistical measures to features of our society to look for noise. Noise, in this case, meaning people whose metrics do not conform to the metrics of a happy, quiet citizen. This is a technique for finding societal "cheats", e.g. criminals, outlaws, societal parasites. One of the metrics of the good society is a low incidence of these cheats, or, apparently, a good rate of societally mandated effective punishment for cheating.
Of course one of the problems of the definition of this paradigm is that it relies on statistical noise as a factor in determining a citizen's likelihood of being a "cheat". In these circumstances the mere fact the police are talking with you indicates that you have broken the covenant of silence. You are creating some sort of a noise. The police are talking to you because there is a problem in your statistics.
In these circumstances it is probably enough to most governmental bodies that you are loud whether you appear to be a "happy" citizen or not. It's a society where if you are noticed you are probably guilty.
What we would need to do to change this is change the way we fundamentally define a "good" society. After all not everyone who is loud and unhappy is a cheat. Someone can abide by the law even if they don't like it.
The problem remains, cheats cheat in secrecy. So if a society wants to reduce cheating it has to have some method of cheat detection. This is a problem of defining what that method is. Until we can detect cheats without relying on their statistical non-conformity (or have some profiling mechanism that is more reliable than a guess) we're stuck with this attitude from authority.
An implication of your post is that if you taught children not to necessarily believe everything a teacher presented as fact then the problem would solve itself.
Blind belief that you cannot go and verify the facts your own self and need to have it spoonfed you by some authority is something the human race could well do without.
One might say, then, that if growing oranges wasn't actually growing oranges then you would be intrinsically motivated to do it. I think the idea of intrinsic motivation is that you are motivated to do whatever it takes to accomplish your goal. If you are not thus motivated you are lying to yourself about your own motivations.
"Suffering" and "Desire" are related concepts in Buddhism. We are born into a mental state of suffering, much of which is caused by desire. If we free ourselves from desire pain, emotion, mood will come and go but we will not suffer as a consequence of them.
Things are what they are, in Buddhism suffering is like worrying, it is a trick of the mind correlating our misfortune with some spiritual burden. We are the cause of our own suffering even though we are not the authors of our own pain.
As people are fond of saying round these parts correlation is not causation. Just because we feel spiritually burdened most when we are also in a state of discomfort does not necessarily mean the burden is caused by the discomfort. Buddha would tell us the burden of karma is constant but it only wounds us when we, the undeservedly proud, are humbled by the facts of reality.
If you self-publish, buy cover artwork and sell exclusively online you can have a book in production for less than $100
If you are part of a publishing house's stable (isn't that what pimps call the hookers who work for them collectively?) you have maybe two shots spread over three years, being paid an advance equivalent to a month and a half's mediocre white collar wages, to become the next Dan Brown. You fail, you become unpublishable, your agent will probably drop you, you'll never eat lunch in this town again.
Yeah, that business model works... for the consumer (except most newly published books are an alienatingly homogenous pile of shite), for the publisher (except for a business model that's like playing roulette on a wheel with no colours, no ball, no betting choices, no lights in the casino after someone's spiked your complimentary cola against a croupier who smiles all the time) but could never be said to work for the author.
Digital entertainment of the quality expected by the average gamer cannot be produced on the same basis as books.
Movies, though... DRM that prevents reselling for a period of time (the equivalent of the "cinematic release") after which the game may be circulated (the "DVD release")... who knows...
I'm sure someone's suggested this before but surely, bearing in mind DRM on the genuine article only punishes the consumer, the best way to fight piracy would be to flood piracy supply chains with broken copies of the game. If the only place you could be guaranteed to get a working copy of a game is from a genuine source then DRM would be unnecessary.
These are the people who want anyone with anything to do with the prefix "paedo" executed... they don't even realise it has another connotation, so I guess not.
The answer to these issues is simple. Someone wants to fight you, learn to fight. Whatever your size and shape there are techniques you can learn. Sparring is vital, your sparring partner MUST really want to kick the snot out of you as well, learn to take a blow as well as give one out. Take all necessary precautions to protect your physical being. Physical bullies are feeding on fear of physical confrontation. If you know how bad being hit hard hurts you will no longer be afraid of being hit hard.
The idea that verbal snapbacks cannot be learned is erroneous. You can find them online, learn them, archive them and you must practice them in front of a mirror. It's exactly the same as fighting, a comeback must be delivered in a state of grace without undue aggressive emotion. For this it is necessary to take a verbal beating. Learn to accept an insult because under agressive malice is a core of essential truth wrapped in basic misunderstanding. To give an insult is a sign of weakness and confusion. If you take such comments as such they will eventually cease to hurt. If you must respond do so good naturedly but without mercy. Do not intend to hurt people merely to deflect them.
I don't know whether you meant the "I'm Feeling Lucky" for the search term you gave but... well, did you look at what it is the guy who wrote the article does these days?
Not that I necessarily disagree with his life choices but I think you have to question the sustainability of his model. After all even though he's now a superhuman he ran away from software development pretty damn quick given the chance.
I've actually never seen a Linux box. Never. I know they exist and I'd love to have a go with one but you know how many spare PCs I have sitting around at home to mess about with? Hint: the numeric representation is egg-shaped.
Now I read the comments on this story and, to be frank, it makes it sound like I'm really not missing much. In fact it sounds like I'm missing nothing at all. From these comments Linux sounds flakey, arcane, undependable, faddish, snobbish, ugly and frustrating.
I don't know how true any of that is but if it's even true "up to a point" then I can see why the year of Linux has never come.
As to the other options: OS X seems to avoid several of the adjectives above but replaces them with bucketloads more of some of the others and adds a couple of extras like "smug" and "superior" and "patronising".
Windows, even Vista, doesn't come out unscathed but it's not super flakey, it's only occasionally frustrating. I have to concede that I don't trust it as far as I can throw it, and I know it's bloated but most of the time I don't see the pointy end of that stick. The key point is that it scores over all comers in that it's popular so when it borks a quick search on the interweb provides some workaround or solution. This is even implicitly acknowledged by Apple because saying "it just works" tells you that if for some reason it just stops working you're probably on your own.
Until someone can provide a Linux that "just works" long enough for regular folk to use it over Windows without tearing their hair out the year of Linux is never going to come.
In addition to the other comment I've heard many people complain that any other browser (including IE7 to some people) "doesn't look like the internet".
At that point it's best to just accept defeat I think. I have plenty of things in my life that raise my blood pressure without worrying about entrenched asshats and their choice of browser. I laugh to avoid weeping.
I think it's more likely a lack of imagination on the part of designers. The fact is the basic building blocks of the design are fundamental.
Stephen Poole made the point that the more things Lara Croft became capable of in the Tomb Raider games (climbing ladders, auto aiming etc.) the more bizarre it seemed that she couldn't use the rocket launcher to blow wooden doors off their hinges.
I think a lot of times the reason puzzles devolve into an endless series of finding blue keys for blue doors is not so much because of an inherent problem in the interface but more because the designers can't be bothered to think of creative uses for that interface. Not saying that I can necessarily but nobody complains that you can solve Sudoku puzzles with a bruteforce online tool. The point and fascination for the participant is that it's more entertaining to do it without just cheating.
If your game isn't entertaining enough even if someone knows every answer ahead of time it sure as hell isn't going to be made more so by the addition of High IQ required brain busters.
Slashdot Mirror
Just to add to the avalanche of repudiation on offer here. I figure that rather than point at comic books which have merit as comic books I would explain *why* they have more merit as comic books than as regular works of fiction or cinema.
There are some comic books which cannot be translated into other formats because they are. Well. Comic books.
Comic books allow for a particular style of narrative where words and images can be juxtaposed in a way they simply can't be in any other way. Sure a film can have a voice over but a comic book can group anything up to about 150 words together commenting, sometimes obliquely, on a single image. Also comic books allow for a type of storytelling that cannot be achieved in a regular novel or in a film. Neil Gaiman's Sandman relies on rich visuals and clever verbal scripting but beyond this on the juxtaposition of same with specific images accompanying items of speech or commentary.
To give a concrete example in a comic book you can have a sequence of visuals of events that are happening in a particular mise en scene but have box outs of commentary verbalising some completely separate and quite tenuously related incident that requires no visual accompaniment and established through conventions of font/box-out colouring etc. Although this can be done in film it's not a technique that can be deployed as effectively or as often due to the fact that the speech and filmed visuals have to synch far more closely than in a printed medium.
It is for these reasons that comic book afficionados refer to certain works as "unfilmable". I have to admit that even though I don't really enjoy the story of "Watchmen" for example the comic book has more artistic merit than the recent film precisely because of "Watchmen" the comic book being the story's intended medium.
I would recommend anyone who does not understand why comics continue to endure seek out the works of Scott McCloud such as "Understanding Comics" which explain in a great deal more depth the specific advantages of the sequential art medium.
Someone writes something maybe you got a good story maybe you've got something nobody cares about. Until you actually put it out there you can't tell for sure.
But if something blows up while stuntmen fly through the air in slow motion you can see you've got something visceral right away. And if you've been inhaling a lot of cocaine that thing kicks ass.
"Football" as a term derives from the fact that the game was played on foot, as opposed to from the back of a horse.
Also those who like gigantic games of hunt the thimble in richly detailed environments. This is no more "childish" than enjoying games of "kill the virtual mobsters with virtual smgs from the windows of virtual sports cars". In fact relying on the player's love of novelty and exploration is arguably more noble that relying on their desire to act like a virtual nutcase.
She was also the schizophrinic with the power to compel people to do as she said in The 4400.
Another great show that could have offered more if it hadn't been cancelled. Still what there was of it was stupendous.
Interestingly this makes a relevant point about the nature of human society.
If you imagine human society as performing a function that function is blanket growth and development. A good citizen is happy and/or quiet. A bad citizen is unhappy and/or not quiet.
By "or not quiet" I mean to say that in order for society to measure its own success we apply statistical measures to features of our society to look for noise. Noise, in this case, meaning people whose metrics do not conform to the metrics of a happy, quiet citizen. This is a technique for finding societal "cheats", e.g. criminals, outlaws, societal parasites. One of the metrics of the good society is a low incidence of these cheats, or, apparently, a good rate of societally mandated effective punishment for cheating.
Of course one of the problems of the definition of this paradigm is that it relies on statistical noise as a factor in determining a citizen's likelihood of being a "cheat". In these circumstances the mere fact the police are talking with you indicates that you have broken the covenant of silence. You are creating some sort of a noise. The police are talking to you because there is a problem in your statistics.
In these circumstances it is probably enough to most governmental bodies that you are loud whether you appear to be a "happy" citizen or not. It's a society where if you are noticed you are probably guilty.
What we would need to do to change this is change the way we fundamentally define a "good" society. After all not everyone who is loud and unhappy is a cheat. Someone can abide by the law even if they don't like it.
The problem remains, cheats cheat in secrecy. So if a society wants to reduce cheating it has to have some method of cheat detection. This is a problem of defining what that method is. Until we can detect cheats without relying on their statistical non-conformity (or have some profiling mechanism that is more reliable than a guess) we're stuck with this attitude from authority.
An implication of your post is that if you taught children not to necessarily believe everything a teacher presented as fact then the problem would solve itself.
Blind belief that you cannot go and verify the facts your own self and need to have it spoonfed you by some authority is something the human race could well do without.
the body has a sense of positioning
It's called proprioception.
One might say, then, that if growing oranges wasn't actually growing oranges then you would be intrinsically motivated to do it. I think the idea of intrinsic motivation is that you are motivated to do whatever it takes to accomplish your goal. If you are not thus motivated you are lying to yourself about your own motivations.
"Suffering" and "Desire" are related concepts in Buddhism. We are born into a mental state of suffering, much of which is caused by desire. If we free ourselves from desire pain, emotion, mood will come and go but we will not suffer as a consequence of them.
Things are what they are, in Buddhism suffering is like worrying, it is a trick of the mind correlating our misfortune with some spiritual burden. We are the cause of our own suffering even though we are not the authors of our own pain.
As people are fond of saying round these parts correlation is not causation. Just because we feel spiritually burdened most when we are also in a state of discomfort does not necessarily mean the burden is caused by the discomfort. Buddha would tell us the burden of karma is constant but it only wounds us when we, the undeservedly proud, are humbled by the facts of reality.
Authors work alone.
If you self-publish, buy cover artwork and sell exclusively online you can have a book in production for less than $100
If you are part of a publishing house's stable (isn't that what pimps call the hookers who work for them collectively?) you have maybe two shots spread over three years, being paid an advance equivalent to a month and a half's mediocre white collar wages, to become the next Dan Brown. You fail, you become unpublishable, your agent will probably drop you, you'll never eat lunch in this town again.
Yeah, that business model works... for the consumer (except most newly published books are an alienatingly homogenous pile of shite), for the publisher (except for a business model that's like playing roulette on a wheel with no colours, no ball, no betting choices, no lights in the casino after someone's spiked your complimentary cola against a croupier who smiles all the time) but could never be said to work for the author.
Digital entertainment of the quality expected by the average gamer cannot be produced on the same basis as books.
Movies, though... DRM that prevents reselling for a period of time (the equivalent of the "cinematic release") after which the game may be circulated (the "DVD release")... who knows...
But you can't ask authors... that doesn't fly.
For a second there I thought that said I could pay for a service in "Google Money".
My spine is still cold...
I always understood that any installation that takes place without the user giving some kind of permission was classified as viral behaviour.
I'm sure someone's suggested this before but surely, bearing in mind DRM on the genuine article only punishes the consumer, the best way to fight piracy would be to flood piracy supply chains with broken copies of the game. If the only place you could be guaranteed to get a working copy of a game is from a genuine source then DRM would be unnecessary.
Well all you'd have to do is change your name to "Baby Shakinthatass".
These are the people who want anyone with anything to do with the prefix "paedo" executed... they don't even realise it has another connotation, so I guess not.
The answer to these issues is simple. Someone wants to fight you, learn to fight. Whatever your size and shape there are techniques you can learn. Sparring is vital, your sparring partner MUST really want to kick the snot out of you as well, learn to take a blow as well as give one out. Take all necessary precautions to protect your physical being. Physical bullies are feeding on fear of physical confrontation. If you know how bad being hit hard hurts you will no longer be afraid of being hit hard.
The idea that verbal snapbacks cannot be learned is erroneous. You can find them online, learn them, archive them and you must practice them in front of a mirror. It's exactly the same as fighting, a comeback must be delivered in a state of grace without undue aggressive emotion. For this it is necessary to take a verbal beating. Learn to accept an insult because under agressive malice is a core of essential truth wrapped in basic misunderstanding. To give an insult is a sign of weakness and confusion. If you take such comments as such they will eventually cease to hurt. If you must respond do so good naturedly but without mercy. Do not intend to hurt people merely to deflect them.
None of this is easy. All of it is possible.
I don't know whether you meant the "I'm Feeling Lucky" for the search term you gave but... well, did you look at what it is the guy who wrote the article does these days?
Not that I necessarily disagree with his life choices but I think you have to question the sustainability of his model. After all even though he's now a superhuman he ran away from software development pretty damn quick given the chance.
I've actually never seen a Linux box. Never. I know they exist and I'd love to have a go with one but you know how many spare PCs I have sitting around at home to mess about with? Hint: the numeric representation is egg-shaped.
Now I read the comments on this story and, to be frank, it makes it sound like I'm really not missing much. In fact it sounds like I'm missing nothing at all. From these comments Linux sounds flakey, arcane, undependable, faddish, snobbish, ugly and frustrating.
I don't know how true any of that is but if it's even true "up to a point" then I can see why the year of Linux has never come.
As to the other options: OS X seems to avoid several of the adjectives above but replaces them with bucketloads more of some of the others and adds a couple of extras like "smug" and "superior" and "patronising".
Windows, even Vista, doesn't come out unscathed but it's not super flakey, it's only occasionally frustrating. I have to concede that I don't trust it as far as I can throw it, and I know it's bloated but most of the time I don't see the pointy end of that stick. The key point is that it scores over all comers in that it's popular so when it borks a quick search on the interweb provides some workaround or solution. This is even implicitly acknowledged by Apple because saying "it just works" tells you that if for some reason it just stops working you're probably on your own.
Until someone can provide a Linux that "just works" long enough for regular folk to use it over Windows without tearing their hair out the year of Linux is never going to come.
I'm going to use it for the remainder of this post!
Oooo oooooooo oooooo oooooo ooo oooooooo ooooo oooo oooooooooo
Ooooo oooooo ooooo oooo ooooo
In addition to the other comment I've heard many people complain that any other browser (including IE7 to some people) "doesn't look like the internet".
At that point it's best to just accept defeat I think. I have plenty of things in my life that raise my blood pressure without worrying about entrenched asshats and their choice of browser. I laugh to avoid weeping.
I think it's more likely a lack of imagination on the part of designers. The fact is the basic building blocks of the design are fundamental.
Stephen Poole made the point that the more things Lara Croft became capable of in the Tomb Raider games (climbing ladders, auto aiming etc.) the more bizarre it seemed that she couldn't use the rocket launcher to blow wooden doors off their hinges.
I think a lot of times the reason puzzles devolve into an endless series of finding blue keys for blue doors is not so much because of an inherent problem in the interface but more because the designers can't be bothered to think of creative uses for that interface. Not saying that I can necessarily but nobody complains that you can solve Sudoku puzzles with a bruteforce online tool. The point and fascination for the participant is that it's more entertaining to do it without just cheating.
If your game isn't entertaining enough even if someone knows every answer ahead of time it sure as hell isn't going to be made more so by the addition of High IQ required brain busters.
1) go here: http://tmobile.modeaondemand.com/htc/g1/ ...
2) click Simulation
3)
4) Profit!
There, fixed that for ya.
Surely one thing made up of smaller things would benefit more readily from some sort of Power Rangers reference...
You mean to tell me that spamhaus have a definition of spam that could charitably be described as "somewhat broad"?
What reason could they possibly have for that?