My personal favorite in this line is A Tale in the Desert. Poor graphics and sparse sound, but excellent gameplay. No combat really cuts down on grief players and most of them find it a bit too boring to stick around. It can be a bit boring and tedious at times (plant flax, weed flax, harvest flax, get rotten flax, process into tow, process tow into twine, process twine into rope or canvas...) with an amazingly steep curve if you want to go it alone without the aid of a clan or other players (almost impossible actually, but doable with a little bit of help) as making advanced structures often requires abilities you can't get without advanced structures to give you stuff you need to learn abilities.
Basically the game involves living in ancient egypt. You grow stuff, you build things, you explore the land. There are quests to pass in order to advance in you chosen paths, but you're more or less free to pursue them all. Still, the basic elements can be a tad tedious at times. The makers also offer you 24 hours (total, not just continuous) free without giving them a credit card and with the client as a free download. The manual is a bit sparse as well so fan sites are necessary as are other players, but they tend to be very helpful. Getting started can be tough, but once you get in you might not want to stop so soon.
Maybe it's because I'm a college student pursuing dual degrees in a shitty economy where it's a bitch to try and find a summer job when you'll only be spending 3 months in town before heading back to school. Thus, spending even $20 is a bit out of my price range. Perhaps blowing a few hundred every month on various pieces of crap is more valid than listening to what others have to say, but I'm more than willing to hear them out.
The prices on CDs are largely the same regardless of how good they are, that's a value judgement and a bit harder to put an absolute price on. However if you're paying $20 for a cd with only one decent song on it there are only two people to blame: the artist for sucking that badly, and you for buying it and listening to someone who sucks that much.
I was not aware of that, thank you. I had thought that when dealer were arrested and traded information it was typically on people above them. Guess it means that books and movies have been lying to me... I'll teach them good!
I've read this argument time and time again (decrease in mainstream piracy gives more exposure to legal smaller labels) but I still don't think it'll work all that well in the current form.
I don't take part in illegal piracy, but as far as I'm aware you need to actually type in a search string and then get results of it back letting you download things from various hosts. If there isn't some sort of "browse" option then it's only going to work for things where people already know what they want, very little new stuff will be discovered except by accident. Likewise all the data you get back is very basic: name of band, name of song, name of album (?) and that's probably it. I don't know what genre it is, what they sound like, their influences and so on. I have no interest in listening to this band because I don't know why I might want to and there are hundreds and thousands of other bands. It becomes a matter of choosing who to listen to based on their name alone (then again... that worked well for me with Imperial Teen).
Further the problem is likely to become cyclic. If a band is good and gets enough fans due to free content then it's not very likely that the same level of free content will continue to remain around that long. Either it will slow considerably or they'll start charging for it. With time they may even sell out completely. Unless you keep looking only for new stuff that noone's ever heard of and then drop them the second they get popular (ye gods... the hipsters can see the future!!!) it seems like you're in for a tough time.
Personally I go to Epitonic which offers links between various bands, short write ups on them, free samples of their music and pretty much everything I could want to use to find out about new music, get free samples of stuff I already know about or find out more about something I heard from my friends. It's a bit small and may not have everything, but I find it to be the perfect sort of resource for this type of thing.
Actually I don't want online downloads of music. For whatever reason the idea of spending the amount of cash I've spent on my music collection (a quick estimate at current prices would value it at close to $1,000 to replace) on something that can be easily wiped out in a crash or hardware failure (one point of failure wipes out everything rather than breaking or seriously scratching one disc damaging only that disc). Plus now I'm spending the time and effort to download it which is probably a good deal longer than even going to store if you do it using dial-up.
For me the business model of selling stuff that you own the rights to will likely stay pretty current for a long time to come.
Perhaps, but since they have every legal right to do just that then you're kind of screwed now aren't you? Maybe it's time to start making compromises rather than merely bitching or boycott them entirely if you don't like their way of doing business.
I'm slightly amazed that noone has started complaining about other media such as comics (controlled by one major distributer in the US the last I checked), role-playing games ($15-20 for a 150 page softcover), and hardcover novels. All are hideously overpriced durable goods with the ability (despite a bit more effort) to be illegally transferred, but noone is doing it or complaining about the copyright owners overcharging. All make for expensive (and often geeky) habits as well.
I'll accede that in entirety the analogy is incorrect. However, I was only referencing a small part of drug enforcement, namely going after the suppliers more heavily than the users. The same practice is followed in almost every criminal endeavor from organized crime to grade school bullying. The assumption is that there will always be a smaller number of people involved in supplying and that it is easier and more effective to target them (and so on up the chain of supply) until those supplying are removed.
In the case of music piracy there is an easier entry to supplying, but there are still limits. For one casual users are likely not to supply as readily. Likewise those without sufficient bandwidth (or who invoke the wrath of their provider by pulling too much) are kept out. As well time and money are considerations in one form or another (ripping cds you own, searching out hot new properties, collecting stuff that you don't already have, having enough storage space, etc.) limit entry. Thus while it may not be nearly as limiting as drugs or many other illegal enterprises it still has a certain cost of entry.
Moving on to your drug legalizing analogy it won't work. Not with music at least. No matter what price (until it's free or very, very close to free) people will still steal. As long as they feel they can reasonably get away with it and they want it they're going to steal it. Some people might not, some may buy more music and steal slightly less, but it won't go away unless it becomes dangerous or exceedingly challenging. Why spend even $5 on a cd when I can have the same thing for free by ripping it off?
Can't use IRC? Ye gods... I mean, assuming you get set up with mIRC or something else that has a GUI to handle most of the commands pretty much all you really have to do is type. Probably with the occasional/me . Besides... look at all the total flaming idiots hanging around on IRC, it's not that hard at all.
In this case I'd say you're still in the wrong, but due to negligance rather than malice. The same as driving 45 in a 30 zone because you didn't happen to notice the sign or there wasn't one. In this case you shouldn't have made your cd collection available to the public in the course of otherwise acceptable actions.
Not quite. The best analogy I can think of off the top of my head is drugs. You don't target the users, you target the dealers. Once the supply is removed then the users are out as well. It's far easier to go after the one person who supplies 10 or 20.
If this succeeds to any degree perhaps people will actually start thinking about the consequences of their actions instead of thinking that while it is illegal, the chance of being caught is so small they might as well do whatever they feel like anyway.
Slashdotters may be more accepting of technology than most. Then again we're also far more likely to make regular off-site backups.
Knowledge and acceptance of technology is one thing, but with that knowledge you also learn a great deal about the problems of technology. Things can fail easily and sometimes things designed to help end up merely causing more problems and work. In this case I think it seems far more likely that adding in a dangerous, unpredictable element that will only have limited knowledge of the situation and may not even be technically capable of doing what its job effectively into a dangerous enviroment is likely to cause more accidents. Anything that controls the brakes of the car that isn't directly driving it seems like a bad idea to me.
I've tried this pretty much every way possible. I got a Palm V as a graduation gift and while it's very helpful it isn't essential and I don't take notes on it. Back in high school I was part of a program for a semester where they assigned students laptops (decrepit Macs of some sort... mine started physically shredding floppies) and while it was good for some classes (Latin Poetry where we were doing mainly translation) it utterly failed for almost everything else. The main problem is that no matter how fast you type you won't be able to get equations, diagrams and so forth down fast enough without a tablet pc or something else. I'm currently a senior heading back for one final year to complete degrees in biology and microbiology along with a computer science minor and while I view it as more or less essential to have a good computer (be it laptop or desktop) at home or to carry onto campus if you live off-campus direct classroom applications and especially notes are of very limited value.
There's an excellent Onion article that I feel addresses this point rather well: "Stoner Uncle All The Kids' Favorite". If you cut it down to the essential element children enjoy people who aren't uptight and can still bother to enjoy themselves. If you were used to the idea of your parents enjoying the same things you did then it might not seem so odd. I recall in particular a friend's father who played Nintendo with him as well and wishing that my father was that cool. My mother having been admonished after staying up all night one time (shortly after getting it and never again) playing her way through Gyromite probably didn't help though.
You never talked to anyone about playing games? You never went over to a friend's house to play something cool that they owned and you didn't? No time spent trading tricks, tips, codes, etc. ?
Like many forms of entertainment there is a cultural basis established with it and people will interact due to that shared culture. Look at the internet, people run websits about games, get involved in communities over them, play games with other people, form clans, and even lasting friendships. I know at least one person longer than any human I am currently in contact with outside of my family due to a website we worked on... the internet keeps friendships going during the transience of the late teens and twenties.
Maybe I should trash on vapid, time-wasting hobbies like fishing, reading, cycling, or sports. I mean, hell... what good are sports? All you do is gain skill at moving a silly ball around an artificial enviroment and perhaps some physical benefits. It's a shame that all they're learning about is the sport they engage in and precious little else.
My apologies, but really. When you look at it almost any hobby is insular to a point and tends to teach little else but the hobby itself and perhaps a few things related to it. I also find it odd when people mention reading as being significantly better than television or video games or such. Yes, reading is a valuable skill (I read voraciously now and always have and tend to notice the effect it's had on my vocabulary as well as reading level and other such skills) but a child (or adult for that matter) can read total crap and gain very little just as they can play shitty games or watch terrible television programs and get the same value out of it.
Really? I honestly wouldn't know. The SNES was my last console due to a lack of money to spend on any of the newer ones. As for licenses well... I was smart enough to avoid them as a child and hope that children these days are perhaps at least marginally smarter than the rest of the world with room temperature IQs (seemingly this metaphor has even progressed such that we ought to use Celsisus room temp... maybe in the future we'll all have Kelvin... I hope)
I think a lot of posters are missing out on something here. Cartoon Network isn't doing something astoundingly new by having cartoons on all day. Kid's oriented programming was around most of the time back in the 80s as well. Saturday mornings were still important though. I wanted to watch the new season and scoped out the various shows to find out what was good and worth my time and what wasn't. I watched almost every week despite Nickelodeon and afternoon cartoons (duh... He-man was a weekday cartoon, not a saturday one). Even as I got older I would watch X-Men and Spider-man and such while I was in middle school before it eventually got canceled.
We had Nickelodeon, we had Nintendo almost everything that exists now existed back then. The only real difference is the complete lack of cartoons (and the lack of major action figure lines as well... do kids not play with them anymore? What's the deal?!?). I think it's the networks trying to save money by not putting into shows that they state don't make a great deal of money. They ignored the cartoon departments and now they've just more of less given up on it and blamed cable as the reason.
I think a fair comparison would be a local theater. They got rid of student and military discounts a few years back in a small town (Manhattan, KS) that exists mainly due to Kansas State and nearby Ft. Riley. They jacked up adult prices at the same time. The cited reason for the lack of discounts was that dollar theaters covered this market. Ignoring that the same company then bought and quickly closed the only dollar theater in town they cite something vaguely related that doesn't compare (I want to see a first-run film, not something that I didn't want to see or already saw four months ago) as an excuse to make more money.
Cheap?!? The PS2 costs about the same as a SNES did and while the economic climate of where you lived will impact this almost everyone I knew had a NES and later a SNES. As a college student right now I don't have a spare $150-200 to blow on a console system, but I sure as hell still have my SNES.
I totally fail to buy the argument that videogames or anything else (quality time?!? WTF?) is taking kids away from cartoons. The problem is that they just don't exist. I recall the last time I woke up before noon on a Saturday and there wasn't anything on other than MST3k. The last time I recall an actual Saturday morning cartoon (as I still feel it was a genre and seperated itself in many ways from afternoon cartoons and such) was about 3 years ago or so when Fox was re-running the Dungeons and Dragons cartoon.
The execs seem out of touch. The claim that noone under 25 has an emotional attachment? I'm 22 and almost everyone I know has an emotional attachment to it as do many younger friends. This in the same paragraph stating that kids went from Power Rangers looking for something else. Power Rangers was after most Saturdays were already cartoon-free. Hell, Nickelodeon was going strong in the 80s and Power Rangers didn't come in until the mid-90s. It all seems like an excuse to avoid spending money on something that didn't bring in gobs of money despite massive popularity (I recall in the late 80s or so how NBC ran cross-promotion with Toys 'R Us for the new season of cartoons). Cable networks are a quick dumping ground for why kids don't watch anymore while ignoring that the only content there is just crappy Disney shite.
I think the best way to revive things is to bring back the better cartoons that used to run. Cartoon Network could stand to clean up with it, especially if they start the aring slightly later in the morning to appeal to twenty-somethings as well. A block of Transformers, GI Joe, Voltron, X-Men (not the shitty new one, the good early nineties one that was relatively faithful and well-written), TMNT... even toss in some new stuff like the excellent Batman or JLA perhaps or the good nineties Spider-man. A block like this would appeal to both children who never grew up with it as well as adults who did and want to see it again. I've often thought that a late-night Friday or Saturday block of classic Saturday morning cartoons would do well on Cartoon Network as a sort of outgrowth of Adult Swim (not adult-oriented, but adult appeal). The costs would be low and using proven products with a strong existing fanbase could be a huge hit.
I think that books can be an adequate metaphor here. Pan and scan is like an abridged novel. Sometimes it's done reasonably well and you only miss out on some non-crucial information, other times it's painfully obvious and you wonder just what the hell is going on. The reasoning perhaps being that "people don't want long books, they want short books that are easier to read and get straight to the point". People who know about this tend to prefer the full, unedited book presented as the author intended without anything missing. Maybe it even has some things that were edited out in the past cut back in because the author never wanted them removed (Stanger in a Strange Land, The Forever War, etc.). Some books even come annotated (commentary, various extras) with all sorts of insightful background information and comments that often expand on reading the book alone.
If you don't care what the director intended you're essentially saying that you want to read abridged novels. There are a million reasons perhaps, but the end result is that you pay the same ammount (typically) but you get less and what you do get is butchered and at times jarring and obviously done.
Actually the process of using Super 35 and opening the matte for video is not particularly common. Most films are converted by means of pan and scan whether because they were shot anamorphically or because of... well.. I don't exactly know, but it's done. Perhaps the non-widescreen footage no longer exists.
Agreed. This is the reason that the rally cry these days isn't so much "widescreen" or "letterboxed" as it is "OAR" for Original Aspect Ratio. A lot of debate goes on in a variety of places about what the correct ratio is for a number of films as the desire is to show it the way it was meant to be shown. The Criterion Collection tends to excel at this and marks a number of their releases as being the director approved edition for this sort of reason. I would apply the same logic to the Platinum edition of Seven as David Fincher has stated that this is now the definitive version of the film as he wishes it to be seen (mainly the framing was changed slightly as well as color in a few scenes, the DVD has an excellent demonstration of this). Off the top of my head I can recall that the Special Edition version of Reservoir Dogs has framing issues (although the ratio is correct) that the original, terrible release did not. A shame, but it means that there is no good version of this film on DVD: the original had a terrible transfer, a great deal of artifacting, and saturated color while the new release has color problems (the whole thing looks "hazy") and is incorrectly framed (look at the opening title sequence, the brick wall should extend to the top of the screen, but in the SE a house is visible over the top).
Personally I find that The Digital Bits has the best qidescreen guide. It's a part of their guide to widescreen anamorphic and takes the time to go over the history of widescreen, the various ratios used, the differences, and various techniques used in pan and scan. It also covers the use of so-called "open matte". The anamorphic guide is also a must-see for anyone who wanted to know why this matters so much.
Personally I feel that the selection of images really highlights the various negative effects that pan and scan can have... aside from the obvious problem is showing those terrible digital pans.
I'm not so certain and this is a rather constant debate that doesn't seem very likely to get settled soon given his death. I'm familiar with other films that were treated in a similiar manner. The Digital Bits Widescreen Guide covers the use of Super 35 for this sort of technique using Air Force One as a specific example. I think the problem was more of a simple mistake along the lines of a boom in frame.
So it's not at all a problem that you lose 30-50% of the picture, zoom in the image, and have fake editing and panning added in? Damn... why in the hell do I want to actually see the film as it was made if it means that my image will be slightly smaller (vertically, but not missing anything).
Resolution tends not to change significantly. It's the same as with larger televisions. You don't get a higher resolution picture, just a larger one.
Perhaps the problem here is watching shitty movies where shot composition doesn't matter and you don't really care whether you actually see the image properly.
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My personal favorite in this line is A Tale in the Desert. Poor graphics and sparse sound, but excellent gameplay. No combat really cuts down on grief players and most of them find it a bit too boring to stick around. It can be a bit boring and tedious at times (plant flax, weed flax, harvest flax, get rotten flax, process into tow, process tow into twine, process twine into rope or canvas...) with an amazingly steep curve if you want to go it alone without the aid of a clan or other players (almost impossible actually, but doable with a little bit of help) as making advanced structures often requires abilities you can't get without advanced structures to give you stuff you need to learn abilities.
Basically the game involves living in ancient egypt. You grow stuff, you build things, you explore the land. There are quests to pass in order to advance in you chosen paths, but you're more or less free to pursue them all. Still, the basic elements can be a tad tedious at times. The makers also offer you 24 hours (total, not just continuous) free without giving them a credit card and with the client as a free download. The manual is a bit sparse as well so fan sites are necessary as are other players, but they tend to be very helpful. Getting started can be tough, but once you get in you might not want to stop so soon.
Maybe it's because I'm a college student pursuing dual degrees in a shitty economy where it's a bitch to try and find a summer job when you'll only be spending 3 months in town before heading back to school. Thus, spending even $20 is a bit out of my price range. Perhaps blowing a few hundred every month on various pieces of crap is more valid than listening to what others have to say, but I'm more than willing to hear them out.
The prices on CDs are largely the same regardless of how good they are, that's a value judgement and a bit harder to put an absolute price on. However if you're paying $20 for a cd with only one decent song on it there are only two people to blame: the artist for sucking that badly, and you for buying it and listening to someone who sucks that much.
I was not aware of that, thank you. I had thought that when dealer were arrested and traded information it was typically on people above them. Guess it means that books and movies have been lying to me... I'll teach them good!
I've read this argument time and time again (decrease in mainstream piracy gives more exposure to legal smaller labels) but I still don't think it'll work all that well in the current form.
I don't take part in illegal piracy, but as far as I'm aware you need to actually type in a search string and then get results of it back letting you download things from various hosts. If there isn't some sort of "browse" option then it's only going to work for things where people already know what they want, very little new stuff will be discovered except by accident. Likewise all the data you get back is very basic: name of band, name of song, name of album (?) and that's probably it. I don't know what genre it is, what they sound like, their influences and so on. I have no interest in listening to this band because I don't know why I might want to and there are hundreds and thousands of other bands. It becomes a matter of choosing who to listen to based on their name alone (then again... that worked well for me with Imperial Teen).
Further the problem is likely to become cyclic. If a band is good and gets enough fans due to free content then it's not very likely that the same level of free content will continue to remain around that long. Either it will slow considerably or they'll start charging for it. With time they may even sell out completely. Unless you keep looking only for new stuff that noone's ever heard of and then drop them the second they get popular (ye gods... the hipsters can see the future!!!) it seems like you're in for a tough time.
Personally I go to Epitonic which offers links between various bands, short write ups on them, free samples of their music and pretty much everything I could want to use to find out about new music, get free samples of stuff I already know about or find out more about something I heard from my friends. It's a bit small and may not have everything, but I find it to be the perfect sort of resource for this type of thing.
Actually I don't want online downloads of music. For whatever reason the idea of spending the amount of cash I've spent on my music collection (a quick estimate at current prices would value it at close to $1,000 to replace) on something that can be easily wiped out in a crash or hardware failure (one point of failure wipes out everything rather than breaking or seriously scratching one disc damaging only that disc). Plus now I'm spending the time and effort to download it which is probably a good deal longer than even going to store if you do it using dial-up.
For me the business model of selling stuff that you own the rights to will likely stay pretty current for a long time to come.
Perhaps, but since they have every legal right to do just that then you're kind of screwed now aren't you? Maybe it's time to start making compromises rather than merely bitching or boycott them entirely if you don't like their way of doing business.
I'm slightly amazed that noone has started complaining about other media such as comics (controlled by one major distributer in the US the last I checked), role-playing games ($15-20 for a 150 page softcover), and hardcover novels. All are hideously overpriced durable goods with the ability (despite a bit more effort) to be illegally transferred, but noone is doing it or complaining about the copyright owners overcharging. All make for expensive (and often geeky) habits as well.
I'll accede that in entirety the analogy is incorrect. However, I was only referencing a small part of drug enforcement, namely going after the suppliers more heavily than the users. The same practice is followed in almost every criminal endeavor from organized crime to grade school bullying. The assumption is that there will always be a smaller number of people involved in supplying and that it is easier and more effective to target them (and so on up the chain of supply) until those supplying are removed.
In the case of music piracy there is an easier entry to supplying, but there are still limits. For one casual users are likely not to supply as readily. Likewise those without sufficient bandwidth (or who invoke the wrath of their provider by pulling too much) are kept out. As well time and money are considerations in one form or another (ripping cds you own, searching out hot new properties, collecting stuff that you don't already have, having enough storage space, etc.) limit entry. Thus while it may not be nearly as limiting as drugs or many other illegal enterprises it still has a certain cost of entry.
Moving on to your drug legalizing analogy it won't work. Not with music at least. No matter what price (until it's free or very, very close to free) people will still steal. As long as they feel they can reasonably get away with it and they want it they're going to steal it. Some people might not, some may buy more music and steal slightly less, but it won't go away unless it becomes dangerous or exceedingly challenging. Why spend even $5 on a cd when I can have the same thing for free by ripping it off?
Can't use IRC? Ye gods... I mean, assuming you get set up with mIRC or something else that has a GUI to handle most of the commands pretty much all you really have to do is type. Probably with the occasional /me . Besides... look at all the total flaming idiots hanging around on IRC, it's not that hard at all.
In this case I'd say you're still in the wrong, but due to negligance rather than malice. The same as driving 45 in a 30 zone because you didn't happen to notice the sign or there wasn't one. In this case you shouldn't have made your cd collection available to the public in the course of otherwise acceptable actions.
Not quite. The best analogy I can think of off the top of my head is drugs. You don't target the users, you target the dealers. Once the supply is removed then the users are out as well. It's far easier to go after the one person who supplies 10 or 20.
If this succeeds to any degree perhaps people will actually start thinking about the consequences of their actions instead of thinking that while it is illegal, the chance of being caught is so small they might as well do whatever they feel like anyway.
Slashdotters may be more accepting of technology than most. Then again we're also far more likely to make regular off-site backups.
Knowledge and acceptance of technology is one thing, but with that knowledge you also learn a great deal about the problems of technology. Things can fail easily and sometimes things designed to help end up merely causing more problems and work. In this case I think it seems far more likely that adding in a dangerous, unpredictable element that will only have limited knowledge of the situation and may not even be technically capable of doing what its job effectively into a dangerous enviroment is likely to cause more accidents. Anything that controls the brakes of the car that isn't directly driving it seems like a bad idea to me.
I've tried this pretty much every way possible. I got a Palm V as a graduation gift and while it's very helpful it isn't essential and I don't take notes on it. Back in high school I was part of a program for a semester where they assigned students laptops (decrepit Macs of some sort... mine started physically shredding floppies) and while it was good for some classes (Latin Poetry where we were doing mainly translation) it utterly failed for almost everything else. The main problem is that no matter how fast you type you won't be able to get equations, diagrams and so forth down fast enough without a tablet pc or something else. I'm currently a senior heading back for one final year to complete degrees in biology and microbiology along with a computer science minor and while I view it as more or less essential to have a good computer (be it laptop or desktop) at home or to carry onto campus if you live off-campus direct classroom applications and especially notes are of very limited value.
There's an excellent Onion article that I feel addresses this point rather well: "Stoner Uncle All The Kids' Favorite". If you cut it down to the essential element children enjoy people who aren't uptight and can still bother to enjoy themselves. If you were used to the idea of your parents enjoying the same things you did then it might not seem so odd. I recall in particular a friend's father who played Nintendo with him as well and wishing that my father was that cool. My mother having been admonished after staying up all night one time (shortly after getting it and never again) playing her way through Gyromite probably didn't help though.
You never talked to anyone about playing games? You never went over to a friend's house to play something cool that they owned and you didn't? No time spent trading tricks, tips, codes, etc. ?
Like many forms of entertainment there is a cultural basis established with it and people will interact due to that shared culture. Look at the internet, people run websits about games, get involved in communities over them, play games with other people, form clans, and even lasting friendships. I know at least one person longer than any human I am currently in contact with outside of my family due to a website we worked on... the internet keeps friendships going during the transience of the late teens and twenties.
Maybe I should trash on vapid, time-wasting hobbies like fishing, reading, cycling, or sports. I mean, hell... what good are sports? All you do is gain skill at moving a silly ball around an artificial enviroment and perhaps some physical benefits. It's a shame that all they're learning about is the sport they engage in and precious little else.
My apologies, but really. When you look at it almost any hobby is insular to a point and tends to teach little else but the hobby itself and perhaps a few things related to it. I also find it odd when people mention reading as being significantly better than television or video games or such. Yes, reading is a valuable skill (I read voraciously now and always have and tend to notice the effect it's had on my vocabulary as well as reading level and other such skills) but a child (or adult for that matter) can read total crap and gain very little just as they can play shitty games or watch terrible television programs and get the same value out of it.
The other half of the battle, apparently, was shooting at people (and in this case specifically, missing).
Really? I honestly wouldn't know. The SNES was my last console due to a lack of money to spend on any of the newer ones. As for licenses well... I was smart enough to avoid them as a child and hope that children these days are perhaps at least marginally smarter than the rest of the world with room temperature IQs (seemingly this metaphor has even progressed such that we ought to use Celsisus room temp... maybe in the future we'll all have Kelvin... I hope)
I think a lot of posters are missing out on something here. Cartoon Network isn't doing something astoundingly new by having cartoons on all day. Kid's oriented programming was around most of the time back in the 80s as well. Saturday mornings were still important though. I wanted to watch the new season and scoped out the various shows to find out what was good and worth my time and what wasn't. I watched almost every week despite Nickelodeon and afternoon cartoons (duh... He-man was a weekday cartoon, not a saturday one). Even as I got older I would watch X-Men and Spider-man and such while I was in middle school before it eventually got canceled.
We had Nickelodeon, we had Nintendo almost everything that exists now existed back then. The only real difference is the complete lack of cartoons (and the lack of major action figure lines as well... do kids not play with them anymore? What's the deal?!?). I think it's the networks trying to save money by not putting into shows that they state don't make a great deal of money. They ignored the cartoon departments and now they've just more of less given up on it and blamed cable as the reason.
I think a fair comparison would be a local theater. They got rid of student and military discounts a few years back in a small town (Manhattan, KS) that exists mainly due to Kansas State and nearby Ft. Riley. They jacked up adult prices at the same time. The cited reason for the lack of discounts was that dollar theaters covered this market. Ignoring that the same company then bought and quickly closed the only dollar theater in town they cite something vaguely related that doesn't compare (I want to see a first-run film, not something that I didn't want to see or already saw four months ago) as an excuse to make more money.
Cheap?!? The PS2 costs about the same as a SNES did and while the economic climate of where you lived will impact this almost everyone I knew had a NES and later a SNES. As a college student right now I don't have a spare $150-200 to blow on a console system, but I sure as hell still have my SNES.
I totally fail to buy the argument that videogames or anything else (quality time?!? WTF?) is taking kids away from cartoons. The problem is that they just don't exist. I recall the last time I woke up before noon on a Saturday and there wasn't anything on other than MST3k. The last time I recall an actual Saturday morning cartoon (as I still feel it was a genre and seperated itself in many ways from afternoon cartoons and such) was about 3 years ago or so when Fox was re-running the Dungeons and Dragons cartoon.
The execs seem out of touch. The claim that noone under 25 has an emotional attachment? I'm 22 and almost everyone I know has an emotional attachment to it as do many younger friends. This in the same paragraph stating that kids went from Power Rangers looking for something else. Power Rangers was after most Saturdays were already cartoon-free. Hell, Nickelodeon was going strong in the 80s and Power Rangers didn't come in until the mid-90s. It all seems like an excuse to avoid spending money on something that didn't bring in gobs of money despite massive popularity (I recall in the late 80s or so how NBC ran cross-promotion with Toys 'R Us for the new season of cartoons). Cable networks are a quick dumping ground for why kids don't watch anymore while ignoring that the only content there is just crappy Disney shite.
I think the best way to revive things is to bring back the better cartoons that used to run. Cartoon Network could stand to clean up with it, especially if they start the aring slightly later in the morning to appeal to twenty-somethings as well. A block of Transformers, GI Joe, Voltron, X-Men (not the shitty new one, the good early nineties one that was relatively faithful and well-written), TMNT... even toss in some new stuff like the excellent Batman or JLA perhaps or the good nineties Spider-man. A block like this would appeal to both children who never grew up with it as well as adults who did and want to see it again. I've often thought that a late-night Friday or Saturday block of classic Saturday morning cartoons would do well on Cartoon Network as a sort of outgrowth of Adult Swim (not adult-oriented, but adult appeal). The costs would be low and using proven products with a strong existing fanbase could be a huge hit.
I think that books can be an adequate metaphor here. Pan and scan is like an abridged novel. Sometimes it's done reasonably well and you only miss out on some non-crucial information, other times it's painfully obvious and you wonder just what the hell is going on. The reasoning perhaps being that "people don't want long books, they want short books that are easier to read and get straight to the point". People who know about this tend to prefer the full, unedited book presented as the author intended without anything missing. Maybe it even has some things that were edited out in the past cut back in because the author never wanted them removed (Stanger in a Strange Land, The Forever War, etc.). Some books even come annotated (commentary, various extras) with all sorts of insightful background information and comments that often expand on reading the book alone.
If you don't care what the director intended you're essentially saying that you want to read abridged novels. There are a million reasons perhaps, but the end result is that you pay the same ammount (typically) but you get less and what you do get is butchered and at times jarring and obviously done.
Actually the process of using Super 35 and opening the matte for video is not particularly common. Most films are converted by means of pan and scan whether because they were shot anamorphically or because of... well.. I don't exactly know, but it's done. Perhaps the non-widescreen footage no longer exists.
Agreed. This is the reason that the rally cry these days isn't so much "widescreen" or "letterboxed" as it is "OAR" for Original Aspect Ratio. A lot of debate goes on in a variety of places about what the correct ratio is for a number of films as the desire is to show it the way it was meant to be shown. The Criterion Collection tends to excel at this and marks a number of their releases as being the director approved edition for this sort of reason. I would apply the same logic to the Platinum edition of Seven as David Fincher has stated that this is now the definitive version of the film as he wishes it to be seen (mainly the framing was changed slightly as well as color in a few scenes, the DVD has an excellent demonstration of this). Off the top of my head I can recall that the Special Edition version of Reservoir Dogs has framing issues (although the ratio is correct) that the original, terrible release did not. A shame, but it means that there is no good version of this film on DVD: the original had a terrible transfer, a great deal of artifacting, and saturated color while the new release has color problems (the whole thing looks "hazy") and is incorrectly framed (look at the opening title sequence, the brick wall should extend to the top of the screen, but in the SE a house is visible over the top).
Personally I find that The Digital Bits has the best qidescreen guide. It's a part of their guide to widescreen anamorphic and takes the time to go over the history of widescreen, the various ratios used, the differences, and various techniques used in pan and scan. It also covers the use of so-called "open matte". The anamorphic guide is also a must-see for anyone who wanted to know why this matters so much.
Personally I feel that the selection of images really highlights the various negative effects that pan and scan can have... aside from the obvious problem is showing those terrible digital pans.
I'm not so certain and this is a rather constant debate that doesn't seem very likely to get settled soon given his death. I'm familiar with other films that were treated in a similiar manner. The Digital Bits Widescreen Guide covers the use of Super 35 for this sort of technique using Air Force One as a specific example. I think the problem was more of a simple mistake along the lines of a boom in frame.
So it's not at all a problem that you lose 30-50% of the picture, zoom in the image, and have fake editing and panning added in? Damn... why in the hell do I want to actually see the film as it was made if it means that my image will be slightly smaller (vertically, but not missing anything).
Resolution tends not to change significantly. It's the same as with larger televisions. You don't get a higher resolution picture, just a larger one.
Perhaps the problem here is watching shitty movies where shot composition doesn't matter and you don't really care whether you actually see the image properly.